Foucault

Hi all, I have a lesson next week on Foucault and I was wondering if anyone had any tips or bit of advice for me that they could share?

The lesson is more of a skimming of his work regarding madness and civilisation.

Thanks

Gary

His website will give you the basics on him but re madness - I've taken the below from a worksheet I have - but dont know where from -

 Madness and Civilisation 1 

· Late 1950s - the history of madness and psychiatry.

· Examines the emergence of the modern rational subject

· We assume that madness/insanity - pre-existed psychiatric knowledge.

· For Foucault -madness has a recent history- tied to the construction of the rational subject.

Madness and Civilisation 2 

· Modern rational subjectivity created was by locking away all of those people who displayed ways of thinking and forms of behaviour which did not accord with the notions of rational subjectivity which were developing in the 17th and 18th century.

· The Great Confinement.

· Modern subjectivity was created by material things done to people.

· By 1656 1 in every 100 Parisians was confined.

The Great Fear 

· The Great Fear.

· A double fear.

· A fear of irrationality ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the self.

· Collective anxiety- has an affective dimension.

· The consequence of The Great Fear- demands for order, regulation, categorisation and segregation, for regimes of cure and control.

Consequences. 

· Creation of outsiders - in particular criminals and the insane.

· Creation of discourse, categories, treatments, regimes, expertise and experts of psychiatry.

· Expert regimes to order, understand, categorise, analyse, discipline, record, experiment upon –

· Irrationality and deviance made visible and no longer scary.

· Projects of objectification all fed into of criminology, psychiatry and medicine, pedagogy, anthropology.

Knowledge as a new form of power. 

· Knowledge, for Foucault, doesn’t develop in a vacuum.

· Inextricably linked to emergence of institutions.

· Knowledges involve doing things with bodies.

· They invade the self-determination of the individual body.

· Power of rational expert invades/ moulds/ shapes the individual body

Governmentality 
 

· Governmentality (in The Foucault Effect edited by Burchill et al)

· Power of the rational expert also invades the social body.

· Prior to mid 17th century (same time as Great Confinement) unusual to find people talking or writing about government or governing.

· In Hobbes & Machievelli – imposing and maintaining sovereignty- the sheer imposition of power. - little concern with the governing of a population of people - for their own good .

· By end of the 17th century political philosophy has changed.

· Now about governing populations.

· Concept of population in this form quite new.

· Governmentality - the process of objectification and rationalisation - applied to the whole of the population.

Governmentality, Science, Knowledge and Power. 

· Statistics - make it possible to think in an entirely new way .

· Government impossible without statistics.

· Counting, classifying and recording of people

· People and populations a new object of analysis and manipulation.

· Sociology can be conceived of as part of this tradition.

· For Foucault the state is not a thing - a single centre of power- it is the accumulation of many centres of governmental expertise.

Sexuality  

· Sexuality is produced within discourse.

· It has a worrying relationship to reason.

· Therefore it had to be understood, quantified, examined and controlled.

· A whole disciplinary principle is developed out of this.

The “confession” and the “gaze”.  

· The two organising principles of modern discipline and self-discipline.

· The discourse of induces us into self-examination and confession.

· So that we might be normalised yet again.

· Psychoanalysis an example of the modern confessional discipline.

· Sexuality as a series of categories was invented by human beings.

· Heterosexual, homosexual, sexual pervert - invented in the 19th century.

· The idea of sexual identity- invented by psychiatrists, doctors, and sexologists in the 19th century.

· For Foucault even 20th Century sexuality subject to processes of normalisation.

Technologies of the Self. 

· Normalisation through sexuality -one aspect of a wider process that Foucault calls the development of “technologies of the self”.

· Great projects of objectification, knowledge and normalisation turned inwards into a project of self mastery, self discipline and self control.

· A “technology of the self”.

An historical shift in the nature of social identities. 

· Pre-modern identities emphasise membership of collectivities

· Modern forms of identity emphasise the importance of the subjects ability to articulate and reflect upon private experience.

Discipline and Punish 

· Examines the birth of the modern prison

· Links to disciplinary regimes in modern societies

· Panoptican model applied to whole of society

The Panoptican 

· Model for ideal prison

· Central watchtower

· Posted on 26th February 2010 at 09:34

Hi Hannah,

That's super, thank you very much!

Gary