Background - Grew up in occupied France
- Communism again (belief in material influence)
- Pan-European and international (interested in America)
- Less monolithic notion of history (multiple “general histories” instead of a single “total history”)
- Didn’t really separate oppression and freedom: saw them as a aspects of power
- Interested in the development of institutions (medical, social, penal, etc.) and how systems become paradigmatic (so ingrained that they become natural—simply the way things are rather than subjects)
- Contends that once reason took hold in Western culture anything that countered it was excluded as irrelevant and vilified (echoes of Grassi appeal to Humanism as an alternative to scientific rationality)
- Big three topics (which are interrelated): Knowledge, Power, Ethics
- Different methods: archaeology, genealogy, problematization
Knowledge - How do things become objects of study?
- Discourse or rhetoric plays an important role. They are what things can actually be spoken about within a community (echoes of Habermas’s regulative—what statements are actually possible and valid in a scenario?)
- Discursive formations (akin to Weaver’s tyrannizing image?) are collections of cultural codes that govern the language, perceptions, values, and practices of a group
- Only one discursive formation can dominate for a historically-situated group
- Discursive formations may be observed through the governing rules that implicitly establish what can be validly uttered
- These governing rules dictate:
- What’s a subject of discourse
- Who has authority to speak about and define subjects
- What forms of discourse are permissible in particular scenarios
- What kind of presentation is expected of different speakers
- What gets to count as knowledge
- Foucault’s take on knowledge invokes the stance that there isn’t objective truth; truth exists, but it’s discursively constructed through institutions
Power - Knowledge and power are linked processes. Foucault states that "the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information" (Perspectives 354).
- Power is not a thing to accumulate; power is relationships. It is connections among points in a system.
- As such, power isn't something some individuals have and others don't; we are exercise it and are subject to it.
- Power also is productive, not just repressive or prohibitive
- We can see in the history of sexuality a move from the sovereign's overt repressive power over death to the social generative power to order aspects of life.
- In this case, there are two forms of power over life:
- norming the body through discipline (learning what you should be in school, church, military service, etc.)
- conditioning the social body through metrics (birth rates, the number of "defects" in the population, its output, etc.)
- Sexuality is where these forms of power meet. The overt control over dispensing or withholding death becomes the cultivation of a control mode of life and living.
- The ability to resist power is a common critique of Foucault's structure. If power is operating everywhere at the level of systems, what can be done to change things? Must we just bear the implications of current power arrangements?
- Foucault says that there's no way of liberating or freeing the individual from power, but we can change its structures and effects.
- So, we can't ever "break out," but we can make things more like we would prefer them to be.
- However, this is complicated by the indeterminacy of a discursive formation's effects. We can't say with certainty that new governing rules will cause less damage.
- This means that we can't make things objectively more perfect, but we can make them different, particularly when they are particular current situations.
Ethics - For Foucault, ethics isn't implicit or explicit conduct codes; it is an investigation of how human beings define themselves as such.
- Foucault articulates a three-part morality. Ethics is a component of this, and it is subdivided into four parts.
- moral code: the permitted or forbidden acts
- activity: the real behavior in response to the moral code (for example, everyone speeds even though it is illegal)
- ethics: the determination of how the individual is supposed to view himself as a moral subject
- ethical substance: the part of the self that is relevant to moral conduct (ex: intentions, desires, feelings)
- mode of subjection: how moral obligations are enforced (ex: divine law, reason, convention)
- asceticism: the process of bringing an individual into line with moral obligations (confession, monitoring, punishments)
- telos: the ideal image of what one is struggling to obtain (ex: religious models, people who seem to have it all)
- the telos has possible connections to Weaver's tyrannizing image
Methods - archaeology: describing an archive of produced discourses to determine the rules that govern it and explicate the various relations among statements.
- genealogy: summarizing the power relations in a society and their manifestations in behaviors, codes, goals, values, etc.
- problematization: examining the practices that render something an object of thought.
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