Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Post-structuralism

[Music] michelle foucault is one of the most controversial and enigmatic of contemporary thinkers and there's more than one reason for the controversy surrounding foucault he died in 1984 of aids and his death was quite conspicuous various rumors floated around about the circumstances of his death and it got him a considerable amount of publicity which his writings might not otherwise have obtained because they are difficult some of them are quite impenetrable and although they've been very influential in intellectual circles for the most part his influence hasn't gotten too far beyond that political activism to some extent but for the most part michelle foucault is a a product of and a creature of the academic intellectual world uh he was a fascinating sort of byronic or promethean figure in some respects he's a figure like dionysus something out of the tradition of french romanticism someone that emphasizes powerful sentiments strong emotions uh a very vivid and deep interiority but the cost of this is a sort of well a dark side a sort of affiliation with death a fixation with death an interest in power almost to the point of an obsession and a powerful critical intelligence which tended to dissolve and undermine whatever claims were made to substantiate or legitimize whatever field of thought michelle foucault applied himself to inquire into the result of his inquiries the result of his intellectual work was an anti-humanism a sort of inverted pantheism in which he takes nietzsche's idea of the will to power as far as it can possibly be taken he says that there is no legitimizing meta discourse for our moral judgments for our political judgments for our estimations of self and society rather there is merely power there is merely desire there is merely our relationship to the completely contingent to the utterly arbitrary in some respects i would say that michel foucault's intellectual project is very much like the stance towards being that we find in the novels of william burrows if any of you read something like naked lunch or any of the work if you're familiar with the work of william burroughs there's a similarity a sort of resonance of their outlook which will make foucault somewhat more accessible to those who know burroughs or vice versa make burrows more accessible to those who know foucault the key fact is that both of them are outsiders foucault and burroughs are both homosexuals in a society that's dominated by people who are not homosexual they were outsiders in the sense that they were politically resistant they were politically antagonistic towards the powers that be and they tended to see under the veneer of politeness of legitimacy of humanitarianism a disguised coercive tendency in other words foucault's big message is that the only way to extend the domain of human freedom is a ruthless analysis of power which seeks out all coercion imposed by one person on another and tries to eliminate that in some ways you could say that it's a sort of nihilistic philosophy of resistance another way of describing it would be a postmodern articulation of the connection between power and knowledge foucault has had considerable influence in his analysis of things like sexuality a powerful element in human desire previously ignored by many theorists also madness which is a remarkable topic for just for a history of ideas and in addition to madness he's also interested in the idea of the criminal the category of the criminal and penology the history of prisons so if you can notice in foucault's analysis or foucault's career a tendency to to fixate on those topics which are ignored by the society at large which mainstream historians and philosophers tend to ignore and in addition what we see in foucault's life work is a sort of macabre or morbid emphasis on the negative foucault's personal history is most is most remarkable uh some people particularly contemporaries that knew him thought that he had a powerful fixation on death particularly because uh one at one point in his life he had a near-death experience he had been smoking opium and he was run over by a car and just as he lost consciousness and came back into consciousness he believed that he had some sort of mystical experience mystical anticipation of death and he decided and told those who would listen to him that death was not something to be feared so there is a powerful nihilistic a powerful dark sort of morbid tendency here and the downside of it is is that it's very off-putting but the affirmative side of it is that it has increased and heightened his powers of critical awareness so that he is capable of asking questions and making inquiries which most people might have shrunk from he describes these the results of these inquiries in very lucid sometimes quite poetic prose one of the statements that he made which was most moving and most thoughtful was that the soul is the prison of the body isn't that a lovely sort of turn of phrase and it does exactly what one would not anticipate yes foucault wants to liberate the body by liberating us from the soul now his early background serves as some sort of foundational context for our inquiry into foucault he's a product of jesuit catholicism he was remarkable for his brilliance early on he was an outstanding student he had in early adolescence powerful psychological problems apparently he was sent by his family to a psychotherapist and that must have been one of the truly humorous psychotherapeutic interactions of the post-world war ii era the psychoanalyst diagnosed vuco's problem is homosexuality foucault diagnosed the psychoanalyst problem as psychoanalysis between them there must have been a prodigy of resistance and there must have been no communication going on with the exception that both of them may have learned a lesson about who and under what circumstances to deploy what arguments in 1953 joined the communist party like most french intellectuals he is on the left he's part of the whole tradition of resistance to the powers that be that's so popular in french intellectual circles and most importantly in 1968 the apotheosis of the student movement the height of left-wing radicalism in paris and in the rest of the industrialized world foucault gives up on communism and moves towards anarchism he moves from the red flag to the black and there's something about the idea of foucault operating under the black flag of anarchism which seems highly appropriate to his radical reading of nietzsche to his very pointed interrogation of contemporary society and to his idea of philosophy or his i it stands towards being as a refusal to be governed uh foucault mentions in more than one context and states in more than one particular way that his stance towards being is a simple refusal to be governed that is what freedom is for foucault a refusal to accept any of the ready-made coercive mechanisms characteristic of the cultural tradition into which you are born it is a philosophy of resistance based upon the idea of extending the domain of human freedom and we maximize our extension of the domain of human freedom by undermining the structures in society which mark off the transgressive from the morally praiseworthy or the morally acceptable so foucault's philosophy is to undermine and to interrogate and to delegitimize all prevailing moral and political codes and epistemological codes as well the point of that is to call into question the whole category of the insane to call into question the category of the criminal to call into question the category of the transgressive as a whole because he thinks that anything that limits our our absolute freedom anything that marks off the transgressive from the morally praiseworthy is in fact a self-imposed limitation and foucault's philosophy declares war on these self-imposed limitations so there is a tendency towards intellectual as well as political anarchism here and if you read foucault as the son of nietzsche almost a something like a distilled essence of nietzsche without the great protein variety of nietzsche's uh poetic excursions you'll have some idea of the general tenor of his mind now it's also worth looking into foucault's intellectual influences apart from his personal history because of so much of his work is derivative and so much of it borrows from other thinkers that uh it's worth knowing how to situate yourself with reference to earlier thought so that foucault doesn't seem to pop onto the intellectual scene out of a vacuum in the first case you have to i mean although it's not usually made referenced to in books on foucault it seems very clear that hobbs conception of man human beings as desiring animals as automata pursuing desire and power becoming the main focus of a politic of a political philosophy there are obvious connections between hobbes and foucault there's a lot more complexity there's a lot more baggage being brought into this discussion with foucault but they hobbes and fuco have many fundamental similarities in their conception of human nature and their conception of the of the political of the project of political philosophy a second influence is kant not of course because he wants to recreate khan's kind of intellectual structure this elaborate rationalistic structure but rather he adopts with krant with kant a critical stance towards knowledge and he wants to take that content criticism to the point where it delegitimizes all the grand narratives that have led up to the contemporary age in other words foucault believes that what was characteristic of the earlier period of intellectual life that moved from about 1800 to about 1950 is that it's all caught up with the idea of grand narratives one big story which religio which legitimizes all our claims towards knowledge and our claims towards political legitimacy and our claims towards valid moral judgment what he says is no all these grand meta narratives have disappeared they are no longer plausible and for that reason we will have to eliminate that his conception of critique then means criticizing things as marx once wrote a piece called towards a ruthless critique of everything existing well you might want to say that that's what foucault's position is he wants a ruthless critique of everything existing i would also connect foucault of the marquis de sade for a couple of reasons first of all that the enlightenment particularly a critical rationality without optimism and without a some sense of moral or political obligation tends to make one concentrate exclusively on the self imprisons you within the domain of the body and particularly along with saad he's interested in limit experiences he wants to take things right to the end he has what i would call the spiritual stance of the romantic if you think of romantic poets and romantic authors they take powerful emotions leaving rationality aside for the most part they take feeling as far as one can possibly go it seems clear that's true of the marquis de sade it also seems true that that's clear of foucault of course nietzsche was of great influence on foucault and beyond good and evil he says that in the future or that the future of european high culture for the next several centuries will be nihilism and foucault takes that up in spades trying to drive european culture beyond good and evil so he's absorbing a tremendous number of pre-20th century influences and then taking the whole gamut of 20th century french culture and picking and choosing trying to pull it all together it's amazing how much ground he covers in trying to in the course of making his inquiries he certainly brings in sorel sorel is not much red nowadays but he made a defense in the early part of the 20th century of violence and terrorism and it's not so much that that foucault is interested in violence and terrorism i don't think he would approve of it i don't think he would disapprove but i don't think he thinks it's all that interesting rather what he's interested in borrowing from sorel is the idea of volunteerism the idea of arbitrary willing towards some political goal without the need without the possibility of any legitimizing principle that's one of the key problems with sorel and foucault and of course heidegger as is the case for all contemporary thinkers high degree is of great importance and his borrowing from heidegger is most remarkable heidegger was an anti-humanist and he explicitly tried to construct a philosophy which would get beyond the modern ideals of the human and the humane towards some new conception of the subject some new conception of interiority and foucault borrowed that in other words foucault is explicitly and repeatedly anti-humanistic in his outlook foucault once said that humanism is everything that restricts the desire for for power well you must then decide whether you wish to pursue powers exclusively and develop a sort of an uh ni-chan anti-humanism or whether you mean to go back to the moral and political organ organizing principles of the enlightenment like we get with habermas in which case we're willing to accept some rational restriction on our desire for power the final important idea for foucault or far source of his ideas is structuralism and what's important about foucault's borrowings from structuralism is that the structuralism tends towards the abolition of human agency in other words in structuralist histories and there aren't very many of them thank god but in attempts to create structuralist theories of history like we get with say altaser the result is that we that it turns the historical process into a vast blind ateleological machine where agency is deprived from individual human individuals but agency is also removed from nations from classes from political or moral or social tendencies in other words there is no agency involved there's no self there's no freedom there's no point or sight of moral responsibility it just is what it is so foucault has borrowed that idea from structuralism the idea of abolishing agency and that hooks up with very nicely with his idea of abolishing uh not only modernity but abolishing the modern conception of man the modern idea of humanism as well now it's worth having a detailed look at some of his major works because many of these themes which are in abstract so hard to comprehend make a little more sense when you put them in context now there's something very ironic and playful and perverse about foucault and you have to kind of like that in his work his first piece of major book madness and civilization was a study of madness in the age of reason and there's something bitingly ironic about the idea because of course the age of reason is the you know the age of kant the age of descartes the age of the great rationalist thinker spinoza and what does foucault want to look at not the advent of rationality not the increase of reason or the development of natural science or anything that we could plausibly attribute progressive development to instead what he wants to look at is madness and particularly this is important he wants to look at the social and linguistic construction of madness here's what's important there was in trying to extend the domain of human freedom wanted to remove as many as the legitimacy of as many possible restrictions on human freedom as possible some of these restrictions on human freedom will be outmoded moral codes will be old-fashioned political coercion but also there will be a tendency to in foucault's work to denounce nature itself to try and fly from nature because the limitations imposed upon human freedom by physical natural reality are just one more thing that foucault objects to in other words he wishes to extend the whole domain of human freedom the way to do that is to remove and delegitimize any discourse which claims to situate itself in nature it's a powerful and very important intellectual gambit in other words if someone claims that the inequality of wealth in advanced capitalist society is natural what you do is you inquire into the historical development of advanced capitalism and the differential distribution of wealth and you show that no in fact this did not come out of nature whatever that is but rather it is socially constructed it is constructed in the process of contingent historical reality so now let's think about this and go back to the idea of madness what foucault says is that in the age of reason this age of rational humanitarianism this age of enlightened freedom and the extension of the domain of human capacity what was really going on during the enlightenment what was really going on when we created the origins of this idea of madness what we were doing is coercing the previously free so in other words although the history of ideas frequently treats the history of insane asylums and the history of the psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of madness as being a progressive thing as being a humane thing as being a morally desirable thing foucault says no what you did when we can when we constructed the idea of madness socially constructed it linguistically constructed it what we did was we imposed a certain kind of coercion we imposed a certain element of the will will to power of a certain element of society on another element of society and we invented this bogus discourse called madness and the discourse of madness and the discourse which legitimizes putting people in mad houses foucault historically looking at it says prior to the advent of the enlightenment prior to the age of uh or forever to say i don't know say 1650 to 1800 when the enlightenment really is in full bloom prior to that we had what he called a a toleration from madness even a like of madness he goes back and look at renaissance text and he's right about this if you go back and look at erasmus or you go back and look and say moore's utopia you will find that the mad or the insane are treated as sport the subject of jess perhaps but they are not treated in an undignified way madness is a common human peril perhaps but there is not a special discourse which legitimizes locking these people up on the basis of social utility and taxing all of us on that ground in other words we don't have uh we have not in the time of the renaissance constructed an interest in stigmatizing and marginalizing the mad that is a product of the enlightenment and what foucault is driving at here is that the enlightenment is hidden coercion what is described as the advent of reason the increase in human freedom the progressive development of humanity and justice and kindness is in fact a stalking horse for the will to power so what foucault is saying is that we have artificially and socially constructed this idea of madness and we use it to coerce certain kinds of people for certain sorts of reason now clearly i think foucault is looking back to his own early experiences right can you mention foucault and his analyst and foucault is doubtless a great deal more intelligent than his analyst but their inability to communicate and focus experience of someone trying to coerce him doubtless helped him formulate his stance towards being his principled refusal to be governed so it is a courageous and thoughtful philosophy for all its perversity and for all its morbid elements now this has been a very influential and very important text this uh book you wrote called madness and civilization and the birth of the clinic as well did two things first of all it gives birth to what's called the anti-psychiatry movement those of you who are familiar with the work of rd lang or thomas zazz who have both produced very important work and who i think have been very very fertile in their reconceptualizations of psychiatry um the source the inspiration for their work is that of foucault at least his early texts so um he has been very fruitful and very influential within academic circles in other words he he proposes questions which intellectuals for them for some time for some reason seem to gravitate towards find very fertile and fruitful and useful and the results of this is has been that he's cross-fertilized various fields where you wouldn't have expected him to show up in addition in practice the movement towards the de-institutionalization of the people who were stigmatized as mad that's gone over that's happened for the last 10 or 15 or 20 years oh it's a great deal of its impulse of its impetus to foucault's writing and to the writings that he'd spawned and generated along these lines now after spending some time discussing madness discussing the clinic discussing the coercive elements in psychiatry fuku then in 1966 produces his greatest work it's called the order of things in french it's called words and things and what foucault is doing in this text it's a very deep and difficult text if you are in encountering foucault for the first time i do not recommend that you go first to the order of things read some of the stuff like mad like the uh the birth of the clinic which is a little more accessible makes a little more sense for the beginner but in the order of things foucault treats the history of western thought from oh about i guess 1500 or so to the present breaks it into four general periodizations and talks about specifically the soft sciences the human sciences and the way they changed over time what he does is he looks for patterns in the changes that we find in economics the patterns of changes that we find in biology and the patterns of changes that we find in linguistics so what foucault does is break is analyze the writings that are being produced the thinking that's being produced in these various fields and then try and discuss how we socially construct and reconstruct these fields over time and to see if there is any simultaneity or connectedness between the way in which these transformations occur what he finds is something like this last 500 years or so the west has been under the aegis of four basic epistemes now what he means by episteme is in some respects analogous to what hegel meant when he talked about phases of the geist right different phases different stances towards looking at the world another way of thinking about foucault's idea of epistemes would be something like a a grammar or a way of or a grammar of interpretation or a conceptual grid analogous to thomas kuhn's idea of paradigms so one paradigm of knowledge reigns supreme at any given time there may be variances within knowledge it may not be completely monolithic but it will cover the greater part of the domain and what foucault says that there are four of these epistemes and like kuhn he says that the breaks between epistemes are not generated by any logical transformative structure in other words here's another one of his breaks from structuralism structuralism demands that we have rules for the transformation of one structure into another what foucault says is that no history isn't well enough organized to do that instead these changes the alteration from one episteme to another is just plain discontinuous there are no rules for the structural transformation of one episteme into another and what this means is that we almost get a parody of hegel's phenomenology of geist where hegel tries to convince us all that the change from one outlook to another is necessary and the thesis regenerates its antithesis and then they get synthesized and then we continue the process again what we get with foucault is very much the opposite not only is the transformation from one episteme to another arbitrary and unpredictable but there is no necessary logical correlation between the two so in other words not only does the change over historical time of human thought not form a progressive whole it is in principle unpredictable it is in prediction in principle arbitrarily or randomly transformed if you can imagine looking into a kaleidoscope and then twisting the kaleidoscope slightly and then arbitrarily changing the organization of the pattern you see that is something like foucault's idea of historical change he emphasizes discontinuity he emphasizes disjunction he calls these things epistemological breaks and he says that epistemological breaks are simple facts of life and there is no way which we can formalize formulate or formalize the way in which they work now the four epistemes that foucault inquires into break down this way there's the renaissance episteme which goes until about 1650 and what he says is the key thing in that episteme or that paradigm is the idea of analogy all of renaissance thinking works off the idea of analogy works off making connections between qualities in two different things finding that sameness connecting the two it's a simple relatively primitive move and for its purposes at the time it is a satisfactory intellectual organizing principle but once we get to the enlightenment we get a change in that organizing principle but not for any good reason in other words what i guess someone like hegel would want us to believe is that the reason we move from the age of the renaissance in uh foucault's view which is centered around the idea of analogy to the age of the enlightenment which in foucault's view is centered around the idea of analysis hegew wants to believe there's some necessary logical reason why we move from one to the other what foucault is telling us is no there may be contingent historical reasons but none of those make this necessary or predictable none of this make this any kind of intellectual advance it's just what comes next so what we get then is a sort of series of progressive changes in the mental outlook of the west but they don't have internal telos they don't have anything that holds them together now after the enlightenment which pretty much is gone by the time of the french revolution certainly by 1800 the age of analysis is over and what he we get then between say 1800 and 1950 and no timing foucault is just coming to his intellectual i mean becoming intellectually uh prominent or he's he's getting to the point where he reaches intellectual maturity well apparently the world has changed in 1950 or so when foucault is just forming the first generation of post-modern thinkers and what happens in the modern age between 1800 and 1950 is that knowledge is legitimized politics is legitimized ethical judgment is legitimized by reference to what's called a totalizing meta-narrative some giant discourse which subsumes all our other little discourses let me give you examples of totalizing meta-narratives something like class conflict as the str as the motive force in all of history that would be the modernist marxist totalizing meta-narrative whenever marxist wants to explain why he has one particular political opinion or moral opinion or aesthetic opinion or historical opinion he refers that back to the totalizing meta-narrative that he understands history and that it is all part of class conflict a similar kind of totalizing meta-narrative emerges in something like freudian psychoanalysis the totalizing meta-narrative there will be the hydraulic system of the mind right and all the judgments that a psychoanalyst makes about aesthetics or ethics or politics or what have you will have reference back to that totalizing meta-narrative which subsumes and legitimizes all the other narratives this model not not psychoanalysis by per se or marxism per se but rather the idea that we need some big archetectonic meta-narrative to legitimize our local and particular discourses is what foucault thinks is characteristic of the modern world and he thinks the modern world ended about eisenhower right by 1950 modernity is over and then we are beginning a new phase this new phase is well i mean let's not call it the age of foucault that might be a little too much but let's call it post-modernity that's what he calls it and what post-modernity entails is the idea that we have given up we have forsaken these grand meta narratives these legitimizing which refers back to something that no one any longer believes into believes in and for that reason what foucault says is we can no longer legitimize our moral or aesthetic or political judgments the way we used to as a matter of fact within the framework of a modernist outlook we can no longer legitimize our moral or aesthetic or political judgments at all because since what the modernist thinks legitimation is is reference to a meta-narrative once there's no more possibility of a meta-narrative we lose the possibility of legitimation in the modernist sense we are as nietzsche said beyond good and evil now what foucault has done here in showing the the epistemological breaks these jumps between incommensurable ways of organizing knowledge and thinking about knowledge is that what he's got is something like kant's a priority categories of human cognition in other words remember that kant thinks that there's certain categories built right into the human mind and they are fixed and eternal and everyone has them the same way things like causality and space and time and such like things what foucault has done which is actually quite an interesting gambit here is he has taken those a priority categories and historicized them he says they're not a priori in fact they are historically contingent within a given episteme yes you have certain conceptual structures imposed on you but that those conceptual structures are historically determined are historically contingent and are socially constructed and we could socially unconstruct them we could socially deconstruct them and we could continually move towards something else so he's saying that there are certain rules we all play by but unlike kant the rules don't stay the same that's characteristic that mobility that renunciation of final certainty is very characteristic of the post-modern stance in general and foucault is an excellent epitome of that now at the end of this work and it's a very very disturbing work on the order of things the end he talks about the end of man he says and you have to think about it this way the modern conception of man requires a certain dualism built into the idea of human beings on the one hand we have empirical contingency we're living in this place in this time we have these particular possibilities and these particular constraints upon us and at the same time we're also assuming that there's some sort of transcendental relationship between the knower and the known that my experience of the world and my knowledge of the world well that there has to be some sort of legitimizing connection between the two um i may have true knowledge about the world or false knowledge about the world there's some way to judge that that is not entirely contingent that is not entirely arbitrary or relative so we think both simultaneously at least that's what the modernist thinks what foucault is saying is something along these lines he's saying modernism is over and with modernism goes their conception of knowledge goes their foundational project and their idea of legitimate politics legitimate ethics that kind of thing in its place what we get is a breakup of that cons that model of knowledge and the result of it is that we lose the characteristic conception of human being the conception of man that had been characteristic of modernity certainly between 1800 and 1950 well when we give up on these epistemological and moral and political projects our idea of man is shown to be contingent it's something new and we could just as easily get rid of it at the end of his work he says that it is entirely possible that we are witnessing the abolition of man it's something like not quite a goddard damaron but a manor demeron it's the twilight of the human beings once we give up on the idea of foundationalism once we give up on the idea of of rational legitimate uh reasonably legitimated ethics when we give up on the idea of rational consensus in politics we must give up on the conception of human being which under girded and underlay all of those so what foucault is doing then is sort of lobbying for the abolition of human being in the sense that it is currently or generally accepted to exist now from here he publishes a book on the archaeology of knowledge which extends many of the ideas that he develops in the order of things and what he does here is he focuses on the discontinuities in discursive practices and he explains and elaborates the method which he used in his earlier work so it's a sort of methodological work which also looks at the structure of knowledge as well it's an epistemological work primarily now after he spends i guess it's about 10 years working on these epistemological problems he lies fallow for a while he's teaching i believe at berkeley in the 70s and he moves on towards his next and perhaps was second to last great work and that's discipline and punish an inquiry into the history of penology and prisons and the ideal of the social construction of marginality now in many respects the basic stance that he's taking towards crime is similar to his stance towards madness and if you understand how he deals with one you understand how he deals with the other crime like madness is a socially constructed category it doesn't refer to anything real in the sense of a metaphysical reality the mind in the mind of god or anything like that instead what it refers to as certain social practices and these certain these social practices are coercive even though they are apparently humanitarian and he particularly looks at bentham's idea uh benton was the great utilitarian philosopher in the first part of the 19th century who organized the idea of the panopticon a new and allegedly more humane sort of a prison where prisoners could be forced to get habits of diligence regularity thrift order discipline by being constantly under the surveillance of some of the jailer all right so it's a special architecture for the jail and a special architecture of knowledge and architecture of or conception of society that corresponds to that what foucault does is criticize bentham's panopticon criticized his conception of informed or enlightened penology on the grounds of the fact that it limits human freedom unjustifiably foucault was against the whole category of criminality i know this may sound slightly mad and perhaps it is but there's a nice vignette which is described in one of the biographies of foucault someone in france tried to get foucault to sign on up to a petition a general movement to abolish the death penalty and he said yeah i'll abolish the death penalty i think it's a great idea let's extend human freedom he said incidentally also wrote a letter to the editor i believe in some newspaper advocating the abolition of the death penalty and also the abolition of all punishment altogether in other words that we should just open prisons up now this may sound like a joke but he's i think quite serious i don't see how he can as in nichian make any other argument he seriously believes that all moral judgment and all political coercion behind it is in fact the arbitrary will to power of some subset of society he says there's no possible legitimizing discourse for that now this is slightly loony and of course the people that were involved in this anti-death penalty movement did their best to dissociate themselves from him but the point with foucault is that he's not afraid to say what other people will with some justice regard is outrageous the reason why is that he's taking this project of human freedom this idea of questioning and undermining the category of transgression the mad or the criminal altogether he wants to abolish it he literally intends to get beyond good and evil so it's hard to imagine a more radical reading of nietzsche it is hard to imagine a man who manages to unify his beliefs with his practice and at least for that you have to admire the degree to which he gets that unity of theory and practice at least once in a while now he goes into all the details of what's involved in this perfect regimen of penology and the idea that involves spatial distribution and control of activity repetitive exercise a precise hierarchy the internalization of normative judgments the gist of it all though is that this is a way for for capitalist society to create a docile labor force in other words it's a mechanism of social control prior to this perhaps we had thought there was some more real moral undergirding to this process of putting people in prisons in fact it's just a mechanism of social control and of course all mechanisms of social control like all legitimizing projects in this post-modern age are well no longer taken seriously no longer a serious part of our intellectual culture so what we find with foucault then is that he's willing to take his criticism of the outside world his criticism of power and his demand for the extension of human freedom about as far as it is possible to go and his final work the history of sexuality three volumes is a remarkable move in that direction because he wishes to call into question the categories sexual and psychological and otherwise that inform our understanding of sexuality also in some ways he is going where other intellectuals have refused to tread in other words who has previously written a history particularly from a philosophical standpoint of something so personal and internal as sexuality i guess freud comes close but it's a very difficult thing to write about in a kind of academic form what he does is something like this he looks at the do at the social construction of sexuality because you got to remember that since foucault is committed to the idea that so the society constructs marginality and that sexuality is going to be a big issue in this construction of marginality well then society will construct sexuality construct society will construct criminality madness he tries to take the idea of social constructivism as far as it can go and the reason why is because this allows him every increase in our ideas of society and its power to construct the world decreases the domain of nature and when we decrease the domain of nature nature can't push us around anymore my feeling is that what he's trying to do in this history of sexuality is argue for the social construction of nature in other words i think he wants to abolish the limitations imposed upon us by the physical outside world and the way in which we do that is by go back and is by moving in the direction of questioning the categories that we use to construct our conception of nature and to ask where that conception of nature comes from for example in his history of sexuality in the first volume he looks at homosexuality because it's a great concern of his he's a homosexual i mean flamboyantly so but also he's involved in the saddle masochistic homosexual subculture so he in particular is willing to take these transgressive ideas and transgressive issues as far as they can go and one almost wonders if foucault found subtle masochistic sexuality attractive or he just thought the idea of transgressing in that way was attractive it's quite hard to tell he is such a creature of his own construction that you don't it's very hard to tell what his internal inclinations are like well in his history of sexuality he does a couple of things first of all he decides that the homosexual was invented in the 19th century it's a modern idea prior to that there were no homosexuals now this may conflict with your understanding of history but foucault's point and it's an interesting idea is that there was plenty of same-sex sexual activity prior to prior to the modern age prior to 1800 but then it was just subsumed under a different set of categories and thought about differently then there was just the pleasures of the flesh and they may take a variety of forms but they're all one lump the homosexual and homosexuality as a category is a construct of 19th century europe so he thinks that literally although same-sex individuals used to have sex prior to 1900 or 1800 prior to the construction of the category of the homosexual there's nothing that corresponds to it why well if you think back to his insistent repetitious emphasis on social construction well what he's trying to do is say that not only is homosexuality socially constructive but so is heterosexuality as a matter of fact all of sexuality is socially constructed and what he's doing is chipping away at the domain of what we used to call nature in other words i'd be inclined to say that foucault's work like so much of french contemporary thought like so much of post-modernism and post-structuralism is a hopeless attempt to evade nature in other words think about it this way foucault finishes i mean just before he dies of aids foucault finishes his second and third volumes of the history of sexuality and they changed from the program that he had given us in the first volume and one of the changes that i thought was apparent to everyone is that this in the three volumes on the history of sexuality there's almost no mention of women at all and you wouldn't think that possible in other words women are half the world perhaps not for foucault but they are half the world in an empirical sense and anyone who wish to actually write a history of sexuality particularly the social and historical construction of sexuality we'll have to pay attention to well what we might call its biological origins it's biological basis and that means we'll end up going back to an even more even more archaic strata of history than he inquires into he pretty pretty much limits himself to classical antiquity greece and rome but if we were to go back further than that we may end up finding out that sexuality is not entirely socially constructed that to some degree it might be but my feeling is that foucault is sort of forced to limit the domain of his inquiry and when a a great and protean mind like foucault artificially limits the domain of his inquiry when there's certain things he doesn't want to talk about or think about well may i suggest like the freudian that resistance is always indicative of a bad conscience here and that might i think that the problem he ran into is not just last lack of time because he was dying towards the end of his of uh these books but in addition he couldn't find any satisfactory way of dealing with the problem of woman he can't cope with woman he can't cope with nature so he gives us an entirely or almost exclusively male treatment of sexuality and an almost exclusively social treatment of sexuality the consequences of this is that when it gets a very skewed and perhaps very inadequate perhaps the prolagomena to a history of sexuality that will be written by someone else in another generation now i haven't got much time and i want to cover a couple of the criticisms of foucault because there are many first criticism that seems most obvious is that this tends towards a real powerful nihilism if nothing can be legitimized well then it would seem that both liberation and coercion would be equally acceptable in other words and habermas actually was the one who called foucault on this there was a a very unpleasant encounter between habermas and foucault in paris just before he died harbaugh had given a lecture foucault given a lecture and they were talking about politics and habermas just asked him the point blank the sort of deadly question from the enlightenment he said professor foucault since you are advocating various kinds of potent political reforms reevaluating our conception of madness and criminality and sexuality and transgression and stuff like that how is it that you can that you can affirm propositions in public policy and affirm political philosophy philosophical ideas and yet make no affirmation or negation of any moral judgment how do you do that how do you have a politics that doesn't claim to legitimize itself but does claim to legitimize other things what would that look like and foucault raged but said nothing he later on to among his friends he said that was enlightenment blackmail but what it really was is a perfectly fair question from someone that spend much too much of his time being indulged and tolerated even when he is passing the balance of both evidence and logic a second problem that we're going to that's going to emerge out of this is this radical historicism this social constructivism i see the advantage of it in the sense that it leads to an extension of human freedom but the difficulty with it is that it leads us to the belief either that nature is entirely independent of our or is entirely dependent upon our wills or the wills of society society has to construct it for it to be there and like dr johnson i will say well i refute it thus i don't have to talk about the podium to kick it so i'm not convinced that the podium and the other elements of nature are socially constructed and second of all or and finally the big problem that we we come away with here is that what foucault has done is construct a sort of peronic skepticism which dissolves all claims to authority or obligation and what he does in that process is sort of mime the heroic style of nietzsche and i would be willing to say that because of the fact that foucault actually lived this extreme and how can i put it a dangerous sort of philosophy that i would be willing to to allow for him to have the true niche and heroism but his epigones those who have tried to use this as a way of delegitimizing other discourses and at the same time legitimizing their own have in fact turned this from a sort of heroic nihilism to a sort of metooism where we try and delegitimize the discourse of others without proposing or inquiring in a satisfactory way into the foundations or lack of foundations for the discourse which we ourselves construct

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 273,117

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Foucalt, Power Knowledge and Post-structuralism

Id: KY9LwCeP7Ug

Length: 46min 13sec (2773 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021