|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
foucault-a-gogo
all you ever wanted to know about Foucault
Michel Foucault
Born: Paul-Michel Foucault, Oct. 15 1926 in Poitiers, France
Died: June 2, 1984.
...1.
Foucault's METHOD: he deconstructs, or takes apart, systems (e.g., psychology and sociology) and asks how these disciplines have imposed their own needs on how we look at the world; he says it's better to look at the little pieces rather than the big picture (i.e., look at one prison instead of society as a whole).2.
His theory of discourse holds that everything can be thought, said, and felt is regulated by the world in which we live, and forms the rules by which our knowledge is produced, organized and validated in any historical context.3.
Foucault broadly follows an Institutional approach to language and culture, placing language in a framework of power, institutions, and systems of politics and economics. This approach, which owes something to political economy, nevertheless presents individuals "as simultaneous makers and consumers of culture, participating in that culture according to their place in economic and political structures. This area emphasizes the role of institutions -- governments, churches, states -- in making culture." (John Boylan, MA, University of Washington, 1992). Other advocates include Raymond Williams, Gaye Tuchman, and Stuart Hall.
4.
Foucault and power relations:
1) Foucault also looked at madness and power relations as concepts, and he examined institutions such as hospitals, asylums, prisons. The dominant metaphor of his work is incarceration. He saw society as imprisoned, both physically and metaphorically.2) Foucault's first book -- Madness and Civilization (1961):
a) Examines conceptions of madness in the 17th/18th century and how madness was placed within overall human discourse i.e. how people understand madness.i) For example, leprosy used to have unclean, negative connotations; in later days, madness replaced leprosy as a social stigma.
ii) In the Middle Ages, mad people were far more tolerated and this benign view of madness remained until circa 1650s.b) From late 17th century, increased state power meant that mad people were put into institutions; the debate changed from whether mad people were "magical" to whether they were criminal.
c) Mad people's behavior started to be territorialized into a "discipline"; i.e., madness began to be seen as a medical problem to be treated.
d) the term discipline (as in academic discipline) is very important to Foucault; he argued that people who subscribed to a discipline (eg. Sociology, Psychology, Penology) are themselves imprisoned or "disciplined" by that discipline, i.e., they conform strictly to the tenets of that discipline.
Furthermore ...
Power, Foucault, And The Asylum.
a) What he believes:
Foucault took the asylum as a metaphor for the way the modern state incarcerates us and inflicts surveillance and control over us. The mechanisms of power that exist in modern institutions (asylums, barrcks, schools, prisons, hospitals, universities) could be applied to society as a whole; they are all ways in which power can replicate itself.b) What he rejects:
i) Foucault denies Marxian notion of power but does not deny that power exists.
ii) He is interested in institutional power (schools, hospitals, prisons).
iii) He rejects the idea that power is generated by the state over lower classes or even by men over women or race over race.
iv) He denies all these grand schemes and says power is found only in discourse itself.
v) He also dispenses with ideology; the language of ideology is deceptive to help fool you (e.g., debate over crime is a battle of discourses: conservatives v. liberals, etc.)
c) Foucault, the panopticon, and power (from Discipline and Punish):
i) The Panopticon was an influential 19th century prison design, by Jeremy Bentham in England, where people feel they are being watched at all times.
ii) Foucault used the panopticon as a metaphor to describe the way people police themselves because they feel they are always being watched and therefore have to act properly to prevent punishment -- but watched by whom? Not the state, says Foucault - that's a Marxist argument; Foucault is a poststructuralist thinker.
iii) So who's opressing whom? Where's the power? Foucault argues that people exercise power over other people; everyone has a little power; "power networks" form which control everybody.
iv) This unsatisfactory answer infuriated Marxists and most other thinkers.
5.
Foucault and poststructuralism:
Foucault initially seemed to be looking for some sort of large structure although he always claimed that he wasn't really looking for a large catagorizing system (although there are elements of structuralism in his work in the 1960s). BUT By the 1970s, Foucault's work was more poststructuralist. Why?a) He doesn't believe in "truth".
b) He's a relativist (doesn't believe in absolutes).
c) He's a textualist, i.e., (i) he studied history as a text because history is, in a sense, a series of "fictions" not real accounts of what happened (similar to Baudrillard); (ii) since there is no absolute truth in history, Foucault preferred to examine how people how to came think about things the way they do.
d) He dismisses the Enlightenment idea of progress towards a definable goal.Because he believed the above four things, Foucault saw a society which is defined by themes of incarceration, imprisonment, control, punishment, surveillance. He thinks that we've started to control ourselves, because we're so used to having others control us (see also the Panopticon).
NB: Foucault has also had a strong influence on American cultural criticism and the "new historicism," an interdisciplinary form of historical criticism whose evolution has often paralleled that of cultural criticism.
6.
Problems with Foucault?
Well, of course there are a few. Here are some:
1) Maybe Foucault's (and Derrida's) philosophy is outmoded -- it simply belongs to the 1960s. (Or maybe not -- Sherry Turkle might disagree.)
2) Maybe some of the theories are just crap; although he does say some useful things.
3) Again, who's opressing whom?
4) Why does he argue that the state doesn't oppress people when it seems obvious that is does.
CT. Special Topics: foucault-a-gogo
| home | index | core | topics | beyond
Last
Updated: mar 3 2001