HST287, Reading Notes, 14-Oct-2004
Danaher, G., and Schirato, T., Webb, J. Understanding Foucault. (London:
Sage Publications, 2000).
Postmodernist theories challenged the assumptions that knowledge
produced by academics presumed: it explains an authentic truth and is
part of an ongoing process of civilizing, with no political
considerations. Postmodernism posits that truth is determined by the
winners and that our knowledge is not evolutionary, just different.
The book attempts to provide an introduction to Foucault's work,
correct misunderstandings about it and explore thre themes: knowledge,
power, and subjectivity. (And by choosing these three in the year 2000,
the authors are doing their own "truth selecting.")
Foucault reacts to these. He is more interested in historicizing, more
interested in process and context. What people know is informed and
limited by their contexts and 'the truth' is ever-changing. His
problems with structuralism include lack of belief that it could
describe everything, and that it did not account for change and
discontinuity. His objection to psychoanalysis is that it insists in
dealing in 'truth.'
- Marxism: bring about the inevitable future through effort
- Phenomenology: meaning is created by our perception of the truth
- Structuralism: meaning is relational, not eddential
- Psychoanalysis: human beings are products of their psyche
- Nietzsche: History is not a rational procession. It is organized,
by winner, in hindsight. There is no single way (lions/hunters; social
- Legacy of Enlightenment: the idea of a process of critique,
looking for the elephant in the corner
Questions of Knowledge
Foucault, reacting to the Borges story of the taxonomy of animals,
realised that "people in another time and place may have understood
things altogether differently from us...; they made sense of the world
in ways we couldn;t possibly imagine." (p. 15)
Epistemes: the unconscious grounds upon which we base our ideas, our
presuppositions, which in turn become organizing principles for our
Foucault does not see this as Kuhn's "paradigm shifts" in that he does
not see a rational progression from one episteme to the next. There is
continuity and sameness but it is not always apparent. ex: language,
words remain the same but meanings change.
Discursive formations: organizing pronciples, producing 'objects of
knowledge' ex: madness and the discipline of medicine. (Python: 'she's
Genealogy: just what is the historical origin of those ideas and
institutions that claim to be or are assumed to be eternal?
We see ourselves as heir to a "long tradition of ideas, values,
principles and practices" which we like to trace in order to legitimize
our present understanding. Knowledge and truth are produced by epitemes
and hold epistemes together.
Discourses and institutions
Can people be in control of their history and destiny?
Discourse: the language of our presuppositions, the means through which
the field 'speaks' of itself to itself (Presidents, a President) When
particular words enter the discursive cloud they signify that meaning
has been attached to the idea of that word (El Nino) In a sense, things
don't exist until they are named.
Discourses can be analysed from micro to macro to make sense of the
Discourses "are associated with 'games of truth', working within fields
such as science and government to authorise what can be judged as true
or untrue." (p. 45)
Discipline and Instruction
The development of prisons gave rise to disciplinary forces of 'quiet
coercsions' and the monitoring gaze. "All these disciplinary
procedures, and the panoptic gaze, emerged at an historic moment when
it had become necessary to produce a pliable, healthy and sober
workforce to service the factories of the Industrial Revolution." (p.
Discipline (verb and noun) how we behave and see the world.
They say "the form of surveillance based on the panopticon prison model
disposed people to monitor themselves." (p. 62) Chicken/egg?
Relations of Power
Power is more effective when it is hidden from view. Foucault sees
power as a "ubiquitous and ever-changing flow." After the Renaissance
the notion of power embodied in an individual is replaced by biopwer.
The focus on 'man' means a focus on human sciences, on bodies and
behaviors. This gives rise to "institutions and administrative
techniques for measuring, regulating and controlling people and
behavior in order to ensure that states got the most out of their human
resources." (p. 80)
But there is not complete regulation. With so many competing ideas, and
no single authority, biopower produces compliance AND resistance. By
defining normal you define abnormal. By defining both you invite
self-identification with one or the other.
Governmentality and Liberalism
Many of Foucault's concepts derive from his theories of gevernmentality
and liberalism. He traces western movement from sovereignity to the
'technologies of gevernmentality.' This is not Marxism, rather he
sees liberalism as arising out of the relationship between
governemtal, legal and economic contexts. Important because 1) it
marks the chaneg from "state as regulator" to state as civic
partnership, and 2) in describing and analysing this change he shows
how power is fluid.
"In other words, rather than suggesting that power completely dominates
people and societies, Foucault shows, through the example of the rise
of the 'attitude' of liberalism, how power always creates its own
'other', its own opposition." (p. 95) hunh?
History and Geopolitics
So Collingwood cannot achieve re-enactment...in so doing he is only
Views of history: teleological - a progression (positive) through time.
Hegel: dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis
Marx: dialectic materialismbourgeosie - proletariat =
Foucault sees 2 problems with dialectics:
History is not continuum and conjuncture but discontinuity and
disjuncture. (p. 100)
- too colonialist in that the dialectics are colonial/barbarian
- history is a result of idealogical forces
Historians are the hunters, people the lions: too often they don't get
to write the history.
Carceral continuum: punitive techniques of the prison gradually gain
circulation throughout society
Heterotopia: which world am I in? "the way in which different spaces
can come into contact with other spaces that seem to bear no relation
to them." (p.113) (ex: Puka sahibs in India, Lion King)
The Ethical Subject
Who or what is the subject?
Nietzsche said: subject is dead: lives are scripted by social
Determining who the subject is is important for determining how the
subject should act and be treated. (p. 118)
the western paradox: nature/nurture
- Graeco-Roman: perfect the self, and only those striving to do so
have access to truth and rationality
- Classical (post-16th): genus human
- Descartes et al (17th): human is both site and founder of
knowledge and reason
- Kant (1724-1804): categorical imperative: free to choose but
should choose reason, the only right choice (yeah right)
Foucault: the death of the subject.
"For Foucault, our notion of the human being is not inevitable, it is
historical." (p. 123) It is created by networks of discourses,
institutions and relations and liable to change.
Biopolitics: how the subject, the body, is managed. How our ideas of
self are formed, how the standards are determined.
Naming: determines who we are and who we are not (Abbie Normal!)
Technoloies of the self: "a series of techniques that allow individuals
to work on themselves by regulating their bodies, their thoughts and
their conduct. "Know thyself" first. To determine?
"All three emphasise the need to verbalise our thoughts as a way of
examining and knowing the self." (p. 129) However, "we can't know the
truth about ourselves, because there is no truth to know, simply a
series of practices that make up the self. Nor can we escape the
regulatory institutions and discourses in which we are produced. But we
can identify them...and from this basis of knowledge, formulate tactics
by which we can live in the world." (p. 131)
- Senecan: how do our thoughts tie in with society
- Christian hermeneutics: understanding the relations between our
inner thoughts and our inner imourity
- Cartesian: how do our thoughts correspond with reality
The Sexual Subject
"So, for Foucault, sex is less about bodies, erotics and desire than it
is about technologies of government and technologies of self. And this
intimate association with technologies, and hence with the networks of
power and knowledge, that organise societies, is the reason" he
considers it interesting.
How do we define normal and deviant? How do those definitions change
(ex: by age)?
"the aim of abstinence... was not to eliminate desire but to balance
one's physical desires with the good of the 'soul,' and the reward was
not just personal perfection, but the good of the whole community. The
ideas was that if everyone was rational and responsible, society would
be based on reason rather than passion, and its members would respect
one another and their mutual obligations. (p. 138)
(Which is a theme/trope that comes up in various guises across history,
isn't it? If only people would do/be X than we could all get along and
life would be grand--too much focus is on eth hows and whys of doing or
not doing X instead of on exploring this human need (?is it?) that we
need to all get along...)
18th cent: sex is changed from something physical to something
discursive: an area of knowledge to be studied, hence an area to be
analysed and policed.
"Using people's sexuality to classify their subjectivity is an
important move, because it focuses attention on the person, rather than
the act, and it establishes the grounds for people to be understood and
explained as a particular types of being...(p. 140)
Arts of the Self
Wherein Foucault shifts from early focus on power relations to later
focus on the "ways in which human beings become subjects." (p. 150)
Self-actualization of the individual who can challenge and resist power
The subject is a form, hence crafted. So "The subject is social and
historical, rather than innate. And, second, the differences in what
constitutes a subject--and the possibility of change, despite social
and historical limits--demonstrates the exercise of freedom." (p. 151)
Thus, we are who we choose to be.
The author is dead, yet the 'author function' is needed to len
legitimacy to certain works. Some authors refuse to die.
The usual artistic timlines...
"Art is associated with ethics...and with the telling of 'truths' about
society and its members. Because of this, arts policy is both a
technology for managing and normalising populations (by producing
authorised ways of representing 'us'), and a way of producing ethical
subjects (by ensuring that we develop 'good' taste)." (p. 161)
People complain that Foucault's view is self-indulgent.
So, we end with the most difficult aspect of Foucaultian theory - that
point at which it migrates into practice beyond theory.
1) Endo-colonial and exo-colonial: "The nation-states that emerged in
western Europe during the ninteenth century, having colonised their own
people and territory, were equipped with the technologies, techniques
and will power to colonise other peoples and territories, resulting in
the great period of colonial expansion. At the same time the task of
pacifying, organising and regulating peoples and territories in the
colonies provided colonial administrators and organisations with
invaluable information and experience which they 'put to work' back
home in Europe." (p. 107) Does the thesis behind Ecological Imperialism
effect this view? Or doesn't it matter? Is that which allowed or at
least helped enable colonialism unimportant once colonialism has
2) Surveillance/self-surveillance: Foucault (the authors) suggest that
this developed out of/along with that which produced the
panopticon/prison model. But surely the self-monitoring gaze and the
interest in making bodies conform to certain notions of "correct"
3) "The book attempts to provide an introduction to Foucault's
work, correct misunderstandings about it and explore thre themes:
knowledge, power, and subjectivity." By choosing these three in the
year 2000, the authors are doing their own "truth selecting." Is this a
reasonably representative selection? (That's more of a personal opinion
question--but I suppose I should assume that since you chose the book
the answer is yes!)
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