Rick Roderick on Foucault - The Disappearance of the Human [full length]

in our last lecture we discussed Harbor moss and I think that we left out at least one thing I need to begin with before I proceed with Foucault that's a Harbor mosses view of the self as a thoroughly social being that is the interaction of the natural world the social world and the inner world of human as it were suffering sympathy subject entwined in desire those are the three dimensions to subjectivity that Harbor Maas discusses and he sees each one has challenged in the late 20th century and so I wanted to add that to maintain our subject under siege theme Harbor mosses account that I that I've just finished is as it were one of the more optimistic accounts if you will use a word that simple it's one of the more optimistic accounts but it still does not relieve the subject of the incredible pressure to construct meaning and conditions for communication under conditions that are very unfavorable for that to occur I mean that's still a part of his account we will now move on to a thinker who in at least a couple of respects is like Harbor moss and that is a magnificent of I it's hard to characterize him as a philosopher and no one knows exactly where to put his books we don't know whether he's a historian philosopher or sociologists in fact that's almost the mark of late 20th century thinkers it certainly is the case with Harbor moss that we don't know where to stack his books and so that's similarly with Foucault they move across disciplines and I think that's very important so that is one thing they have they share in common it's difficult to know the disciplines they're in another thing they share in common is an interest in emancipation in other words we're again talking about in this case not as not as in the case of Habra mas a left-liberal style thinker to use an American phrase here we're talking about a very radical thinker his politics like the politics of Noam Chomsky who the last time I checked was an American no I like Noam Chomsky's politics this is a person who is what I would call a principled anarchist now this he has a difference though he does not in a way have his politics intervene in his writing nearly as much in his writings what he tries to do is to develop a fundamental critique of what I might call our dominant ideologies which are sort of centrist a little liberal this and a little conservative that but he tries to develop a powerful critique of what you might call the dominant paradigm within which we do our politics within which we run our educational institutions within which we operate our prison systems within which we operate various psychiatric disciplines and so on and he does this in a different way unlike Harbor moss whose account is very abstract if you noticed Foucault enters his topics through the avenue of what might be called histories but they cannot be understood as history and the traditional use of that word and so I'll start by giving a brief account of some of the jarring things about Foucault one is that Foucault is infamously known for holding the view that there are no facts apart from interpretations so for Foucault there are no bare facts in history those aren't just little facts you run across separate from the interpretations within which the facts are embedded so this makes history look like a kind of battleground in other words you've got your story and I've got mine it's a matter of actual historical practice when you read historians I don't think this is a bad description of the way they actually work I don't know why certain neoconservatives like William Bennett find this to be relativism when I see it is just a good description of the way historians actually practice their craft and it's not a simple-minded thing like everyone has an axe to grind it's not like you don't get surprised even based on your own interpretation and it's also not the case that as you work through your interpretation you do not change it radically and change your mind and your prejudices in fact when you do that that's when you are doing your best work usually so I don't see this as outrageous as many other people do now the word history itself is avoided by Foucault because he thinks that the word history within the West within Western civilization is necessarily a kind of continuous narrative about progress so Foucault prefers to the term history terms like archaeology's and genealogies you may notice that this is a sum of the influence of Nietzsche on Foucault Nietzsche wrote a wonderful history of moral life as it had arisen in the West we didn't call it a history called it a genealogy so what is the difference between genealogies and histories and at least these following conditions are ones I've been able to pick out in fucose work one of the methods that's different in a genealogy and a history is what might be called the reversal of perspective now this is one he takes from some of the better historical work I in the tradition of Marxism and that's where and I mean Marx is famous for this but so are some people that you should know about like EP Thompson who wrote the making of the English working class and CLR James a wonderful African are not Caribbean intellectual who wrote the black Jacobins this is reversal of perspective is where you don't write history from the standpoint of Henry Kissinger but from the standpoint of the mass is of humans that do the masses of things that they do in order to produce large and significant movements that change formations social formations and this is really to take sort of a reversal of perspective you take what in a way is left out of the official histories and use that as your clue to write a history of a suspicion that something's been left out on history like that of the American Revolution would be fascinating and I know at least one person Larry Goodwin it at Duke is working on such a project where a reversal seems to be a method of genealogy another is one connected to it and that's marginality you don't just pay attention to what the leaders said are the men said or whoever the dominant group is you look for the marginal discourses that do two things they both make clear that there was a marginal discourse and they also show more clearly what the assumptions of the dominant history or discourse was so marginality is another feature of what might be called a genealogy or archaeological method and the other the third one seems to me just a a very practical principle it's a principle of discontinuity and that means write your history without the assumption that history is continuous without the assumption that it will end up being a rational story without the assumption that it has a beginning a middle and an end but rather accept history in what is called its materiality yeah in other words along with all of its contingencies its moments of lock the strange and bizarre things that happen I mean even Marx does this when he writes the history of the rise of capitalism it just turns out to be fortuitous that gold is found in the new world which then can be sent back to Europe to build merchants capital well if over here they had found cow chips only or Buffalo chips then that contingency would have affected history and that seems to me to just be not something that could have been predicted by a rational narrative they happen to find gold so don't assume that there will be as it were a Tilos and this is deeply embedded Telos means gold I mean it's our purpose and this is deeply embedded in the way that Westerners think because I think in a way because of narratives like The Odyssey where there's a beginning of middle and an end narratives in particular like the biblical narrative where you have an absolute original beginning you have a redemptive middle and then you know a final and glorious in and this mode of thinking has affected historians for years Fuko true does his best as it were try to bracket or to stop those assumptions from interfering with the way he wants to write history or I should say the way he wants to construct his genealogies okay now here's the claim I think that is the most outrageous of fuko's and about which a lot of the debate that you hear today about about deconstruction even though Foucault is not a deconstruction person a lot of the debate you hear today about the universities hinges on this important claim by Foucault and I'll start with it and I will defend it and then I'll give you an example of a powerful work in which he makes use of this claim the claim is as follows knowledge is controlled in every society through mechanisms of power anywhere you find knowledge there also you will find power they're linked they are conditions for the possibility of one another knowledge is a regime of powers the way he sometimes says it today in using the distinction I've used in in these lectures I might want to replace the word knowledge with information and and and it wouldn't hurt fucose argument if I did given that I think that's what the university systems and other systems produce that's a better term now for it but in any case the idea here is that cuts deeply agree against a lot of our humanistic sentiments we would like to believe based on the long Platonic tradition that knowledge is what can be accepted by all rational beings and the standard model for that in philosophy is mathematics you know one plus one is two and you don't vote on it and it doesn't matter what you think and you know that's probably right about one plus one is two but it's a far different matter about whether it's right about the structure within which we learn systems like mathematics and that's what Foucault is concerned with our whole genealogical slices of time within which we learn certain practices and how to obey them now when I have my students argue with me about this thesis that where you find knowledge or information there you also find power if they keep arguing with me I threatened to give them a C and then they agree with me and that is what I call a demonstration by direction or West Texas phrase for it would be hitting a mule upside the head to get his attention that will get a student's attention when they realize that your power is connected to your knowledge and vice versa by the way if they happen to be the son or daughter of a three or four million dollar donor to Duke then their power is connected to how their knowledge may have to be treated by someone although I generally ignored that kind of thing in fact I always ignored it alright now that that's the thesis that's considered as hard as it may be to believe because I think I presented it your common in school white this is the thesis that seems to have outraged a whole group of people at universities as though this doesn't speak to the experience of and of course it does this is why they so she ate it with political correctness because this is always spoke to the experience of those who've just entered such systems women when they first came to the university african-americans Chicanos and so they've always experienced the knowledge that they were to receive as a form of power and this certainly was true of the working-class kids that entered the university system in the 60s you know as I said thanks to a lot of student loans that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for which I'll give him credit for since his friend John Connally recently kicked off in any case this distance seemed to me to be obvious but it's caused a furor a real real ruckus it's as though someone has sort of given away the secret I mean I don't think there are that many people in serious quiet conversation that don't recognize this relationship but it's not one that we like to talk about publicly and that's that even a graduate student we have in physics that we take a particular dislike to and who comes up with with equations and views about Newtonian dynamics that that are they at odds with various more more contemporary views relating to chaos 3 we can call him a old-fashioned and kick him out or if the reverse is the case we can say he's a kook and his work is too too flighty and too bizarre and kick him out I mean clearly there's a relation it seems to me between knowledge and power it is a mechanism that has operated I think in every society the issue is whether there is any way and this is going to be the the happy issue will be whether there's a way to uncouple knowledge in power I'll leave that aside for a moment as I move through this thesis knowledge is comprised of not only institutions and I'll be naming them later of institutional rules and so on but of discourses and this is where we get back to harbor Mawson relating to communication knowledge is knowledge or information is comprised of discourses communications that function through rules of exclusion not inclusion through rules of exclusion in other words institutional communications function through rules that determine who may speak about what they may speak for how long they may speak in what setting they may speak and so on and again this is not an invidious thing all societies have had this you may notice if you watch the Congress that there are rules for how long people may speak there are rules for who may speak if you're a freshman member it's not advisable to try to hog a lot of the clock this is not an advisable thing to do and I don't want to make it appear as invidious in every case but also we need to see these rules of exclusion as leaving out of what some sort of liberal theorists like Richard Rorty call and I mean I can't believe that they ever called it this Richard Rorty once described philosophy as the conversation of mankind borrowing a phrase from Michael Oakshott well that's very nice except certain people didn't get to talk in the history of Western civilization they were excluded from the conversation the deviant were excluded and I'm naming some now that have been studied by Foucault deviance criminals the MIAD and of course the more normal exclusions up until very recently women the young the old Ian firm so on excluded in a certain way from this conversation and I'm not afraid to say along with Marx that we really don't notice many working-class our lower-class people in the early great literature of the West in the in all the works of Homer only one common foot soldier appears and he has one line basically says to to Nestor the wise old general the plan you know basically sucks and he walks out of the book and that's it of course they it does and so it's kind of a little joke I think Homer was aware that certain people weren't getting to talk so when we when we talk about Athenian democracy we need to remember that just like early American democracy it excluded a lot of people in fact according to Foucault the exclusions were a condition for the possibility of that being a form of knowledge and discourse in other words it wasn't as it were by accident that these groups were picked out they were picked out because their marginal discourses would allow the main discourse to be even more in place in control and so on and this seems to me at least to cut very strongly against harbormaster's communication theory because if it is the case that wherever we find information communication and so on we are power that controls the ways in which it flows who may talk when and how long if there's no way to uncouple that then harbor masses argument will fail Foucault does not say it will fail in fact Foucault himself because he holds a radical anarchist position is caught in what I would call the critics paradox the more powerfully the critic paints the ills of the society and the fragility of the self and the struggle it undergoes to be a human the more powerful our account is the more hopeless the people feel who could do anything about it on the other hand if we don't paint the account in such a powerful way then people tend to underestimate what they're up against so you've got a critics dilemma Fuko clearly has picked the path where he doesn't care if you feel powerless or not that's your problem you've got to do something about it so he draws out all the mechanisms of control and to the maximum so that you understand them okay he wrote a series of books I'm going to use one as an example of his thesis that knowledge and power intertwined and the effects it has and I will pick up here his most one of his most famous but let me quickly give you a set of the of the books that he worked on he wrote a book called madness and civilization in which he pointed out the long history of how the discourse of Reason had excluded from it the mad now this history changes as you know in the medieval period the mad are considered the way they are how do the mad appear in Shakespeare's plays the fools the my ad will they appear as the people who bring the most important wisdom into the plays they have the mad in Greek society were considered as touched by the gods and their words were looked at almost as the words of Oracle's but with the increasing as it were with the increasing rationalization word I've used a lot and a word I use yesterday rationalization of the world the mad began to be shut away in asylums at first this was a brutal process and later it became humanized this is a word that Foucault does not like in fact he doesn't like humanism or the talk about humans he's afraid every time he hears it that it is not a word of inclusion but of exclusion based on the history of the use of that word I think african-americans can particularly relate to that since only within the lifetime of a couple of generations have they become more than three-fifths human they can understand what it means for it to be a term of exclusion in any case the great reformers of madness the ones who wanted as it were to cure them created what Foucault calls a whole new disciplinary matrix around madness but what that means is that the curing of them did not liberate them it did not give them the value that they had at one time no it set up a whole series of processes within which they could be observed drugged analyzed reanalyzed and of course I've joked about this process I don't want to use the strong word madness here but when we look at the expansion of this therapeutic zone on into the late 20th century we now find out that very few of us don't belong in it I mean if you're not on a 12-step program today you're out of fashion I mean who would have guessed that the discourse of madness would eventually cover the whole social field and until what perhaps the last growth industry we have other than making movies about sex and violence is psychiatry and in running 12-step programs this is a growth industry this is one industry where you can you know retrain yourself in midlife since you don't need a degree to do this actually and set up a 12-step program so for Foucault this is not some great new humanistic advance in medicine that has liberalized the treatment of madness it is a new form of control that's based on a new language about the mad for example we no longer call them morons and idiots we call them the differently-abled the and so on but for Foucault this new discourse is even more totalitarian because behind it hides the same mechanisms of power not the same but behind it hides mechanisms power which keep these people in their sway I think one of the greatest examples of this for me is the discourse concerning body weight and women bulimia anorexia and so on it's as though our male dominant society was able in the Middle Ages to you know put a chastity belt on a woman to put you know to like keep food away from her and starve or if she misbehaved but today we accomplished the same feat through images that are constantly bombarded into the conscious into the unconscious of women and they perform the wonderfully humanistic task of starving themselves to death while male therapists teach them how to get on 12-step programs to eat see for Foucault this is why it's not humanism this kind of malady is a cultural malady that strikes at the very heart of life once something like eating is death then you've struck at the very heart of life the enemy of the older radical theories may have been the ruling class but today the stakes of whether we will reform ourselves into a new kind of human being a new kind of society whether we will find selves worth being the stakes of it are simply life itself and that makes it quite dramatic actually so food that's an example of fucose account that not from for him I made that word up Foucault uh died of AIDS he's not still alive unfortunately so he didn't get a chance to write that one on fat and skinny B wrote many others uh on the normal and the deviant he was in the process of writing a long book on the history of sexuality and then ironically before he could complete it he died of AIDS ah so the book I've decided to use is his famous work and I'll show it to you and suggest that you all read it discipline and punish the birth of the prison and I intend to through the argument in some detail because it it would be very much against the spirit of Foucault to give you all the abstractions about his position but not give you the really important points where he works out in detail how these interlocking systems of knowledge and power actually function in his genealogies if he that's the real meat of the story for him so I'm going to go through this in some detail at least the detail that the constraints of time allow me discipline and punish begins with a very short chapter called the body of the condemned and this is a this is in the period of like 17th 18th century period the king is the king and at this period in the history basically takes place in France but similar practices were also taking place in England and in other of the countries that were on their way from merchants capital to an advancing capitalism but still this is pre-revolutionary France so you still have a king and France is run by the red and the black you know the the red of the church and the black of the army it's famous novel by Stendhal for you people who still read novels the red and the black it's worth reading but in any case the body of the condemned begins with the famous and hideous passage which if I read in this tape will probably be censored and it's about the way they killed people who committed horrible crimes now today when people commit horrible crimes they're on a Current Affair for three or four nights right two or three books are written about them they make a movie about them like Silence of the Lambs and then they're locked away somewhere that's that's where we're moving as that's where we move to but let's start from where how we got there ah the prisoner that he begins by discussing is drawn and quartered and torn apart by horses I'll make this brief lava is sort of our sulphur is poured into his wounds and set on fire and I don't need to go into detail here you understand these tarp these medieval tortures they're they're well known the condemned man must as it were the the priest comes up and the condemned man must make his honorable uh announcement before God that he understands the justice of the punishment and of course after the punishments begun this is not a hard thing to get him to do and so the book begins with him kissing the cross and making his honourable amends would be an English way to say it and then they continue to torture him and it becomes and literally on his body is written the power of the King in the church their words it's literally written on his body by the way if you want to another for me to suggest another literary way to look backward at that form of punishment remember the penal colony by Franz Kafka where the Machine writes literally on the body of the victims of course Kafka has lived to see modernity so the Machine ends up eating its own judge riding on the judge be just which I find among Kafka's many hilarious stories I mean I find them funny I'm sorry I'm that sick but I found that another funny one in any case starts with the body of the condemned and the next chapter is about the spectacle of the scaffold and all of the ritual that goes along with these kind of ceremonies when they're going to do this you can imagine the streets of Paris they're all abuzz there's the spectacle the scaffold there are via their vendors there are people that write little pamphlets about the ex cuted I mean we have an American analogy to that that's like you know the little Billy the Kid pamphlets that were printed up in the early West about our great criminals and so on so go ask this very interesting question what was it that fueled the interest in the criminal why was the criminal the star of this production the scaffold the spectacle the scaffold he's the star well the crowds became unruly because in many cases the courage of the criminal would become the legend of the spectacle the courage the tenacity and the bravery of the criminal would become the story well reformers decided that this was not a healthy mode of punishment Foucault cynically decides that perhaps it was not considered healthy because the wrong people were the stars of the show not because it was too barbaric and I think that that's not only a cynical guess but he gives some evidence that that's the case in any in any event we know that this early history of punishment from the Middle Ages at least from the early sort of pre capitalist days this interest in criminals has continued on into the present I mean they still haven't found a way to discipline and punish that they've totally drained us of our interest in criminals as you know from watching any television even if you hate it you've got to know this I mean I think that time life now is going to put out a series of books I'm not denouncing them for it on criminals but this is nothing new right these are these are these these are things that excite us as the normal because they break up the regime of normalcy and show it in a way for what it is in other words just as when the king wrote his punishment on the body of the condemned the mute body of the prisoner even if he said nothing spoke volumes about the institutional rules that would put that practice in place it would put that practice in place well anyway that practice was abandoned it's been a while since we've drawn and quartered anyone although when you listen to some of the latest rhetoric about law and order I don't know how much longer it will be before we'll be drawing and quartering people again but anyway that practice for at least the present has been abandoned and it's replaced according to Foucault by what he calls generalized punishment it's very interesting the the French word might lead us to believe that this is a sort of double word it's not only punishment it's potential punishment and it's also a kind of the word discipline that would be a kind of surveillance so what happens is the change in if you wanted to look at it what Foucault is writing in this book is a history of criminology in a certain way the change here is that we move from the body of the condemned as a singular individual Billy the Kid you know to use the American example to a generalized social body criminals now appear not with names but as public enemy number one I mean anybody could be that you know it's it's a general abstract role it's across the whole of what I want to be called the social body and in fact we now see punishment and of course I don't want to I want to make this just as cynical as it is it's the great reformers that are responsible for this it this is the work of the Liberals I mean the Conservatives wanted to continue to draw in corner people but no let's reform the great utilitarians like Bentham which I'll mention whom I shall mention again later our among the reformers that that I led the way in some of these areas ah the when punishment becomes generalized across the social body across the whole of society what happens is that punishment becomes something like Public Works you know this is you do a small crime and you go out and you do works for the public but like sweeping up can't be as heroic as being having the Kings name written on your body in fact it's rather degrading it's not supposed to be something about which one can write a dime novel prisons become more like schools and less like these festivals of atonement they become places where people are to be renormalized injected back into the social body if possible what the Reformers have done according to Foucault however is not to abolish power in favor of more humanistic treatment what they have done is to institute a microphysics of power that has control over what Foucault calls docile bodies power hasn't has lost its awesome grandeur its splendor the power now in institutions like prisons is a micro power it's the power of observation of being able to control movements of being able to force prisoners into get-well programs and lie to their parole board's after having lied to therapists after having lied to all the various people they have to lie to in order to get out and for people who think that prisoners are being let out right and left watch a little court TV and see how many people actually win parole then some states where they've stopped building prisons because they are tired of tax-and-spend some prisoners could get out but by and large it's hard to get to a parole board what this parole board represents to Foucault is a kind of training a kind of disciplining of the body so that it no longer has to be written on in these grand spectacular letters but in which the prisoner himself accepts being a docile member of the social body who goes to prison and simply accepts as a fait accompli the very rules of this humanistic institution let me give you an example and again this is not exactly a prison but this is a great example and I hope you've seen the movie I like using examples from movies and if not there's a great novel by the same name before the movie that's 1 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest written by Ken Kesey the movie stars Jack Nicholson there is a great reformer in the movie she's a wonderful woman and she's there to help the patients it's nurse ratchet nurse ratchet just demands docile bodies Randall Patrick McMurphy is doomed is that he cannot become a docile body he's an anarchist he's doomed he's excluded he's excluded but not really actually he's helped I mean he's loved you know the lobotomy calms him down it makes him normal docile like most of us of course if you've seen the film or read the book you might begin to understand what Foucault is driving at if McMurphy had been born 200 years ago he would have lived the ground destiny that maybe Billy the Kid did billy the kid' being probably in real life of psychotic teenagers the sad story about him is that I'm sure the eastern writers way overdid it but then that's part of crime isn't it I mean by this fascination with it has not ceased simply because power is reconfigured it that's what that's one example uh but I don't want to leave it with that example at all because we get in the great reformer some clues as to what they're up to that are magnificent and some of them relate to architecture and that's very important if you were to understand the point Foucault is driving at which is not simply about prisons although they're his prisons and criminology or the focus of his study he's trying to point out that we have a society that is an entire carceral body a social prison within which each one of us have certain safe walks and certain excluded walks and all of them are surveilled and our behavior is surveilled you know this you've walked in malls and the dummy is now you know that the clothing dummies frequently have these little cameras for eyes so that they watch you while you shop I mean this is I don't want them watching me when I'm I'm so overweight when I'm trying on a new pair of pants I don't want to be have some anonymous person in the boots watching me did put try on money by just but surveillance isn't like that and I have not yet achieved the status of docile body myself but anyway let me let me bring in Bentham again Jeremy Bentham was not only one of the great utilitarians about whom you will hear in the course of the great minds he was also an architect and he has some drawings of a building called the Pan opteka which as he says could function as a prison but also could be made to function as a university or a school or a hospital because it has this odd feature sort of a circular building within which the administrators can see down through every cell but all the people in the various cells of the institution can see is that most the person across from them and usually not that it is not the building itself today I'm so interested in just like Foucault says I'm not interested in the building itself but the principle Japan optic principle what he calls Pan Optus ISM it is a hierarchical principle that allows the guy is to be directed unilaterally I like to call it the cie feeling even though I think that the sea is now largely obsolete it's the CIA feeling it's that they're looking at me but I how do I know what I'm looking at them that's pan Optus ism and this is not just a feature of prisons this is what Foucault points out in fact it's very it's hilarious many of the same architects that built our prisons in North Carolina and elsewhere also built our what our schools our hospitals all of the places in which we want to keep contain and control docile bodies docile social bodies for this reason Foucault extends as a generalized critique of our society that it is in fact a prison it is a carceral gulag I think that's strong talk that's strong talk but if you think about my example of bulimia and anorexia there's no prison that could lock a woman into more terror than that experience there's no prison and no medieval torture that that brings to mind this sort of slow death of the soul by degrees that a docile body suffers as it walks through all these routine and laid out paths of life being constantly observed and the current fascination with criminals I view in the context of fucose work is not it's not that current I mean in the 30s they love gangster movies too but this fascination with criminals is the compensation the media culture pays to us because of our secret attraction to crime not because of our fear of it the attraction of crime is the attraction of someone who says he'll no I won't play that way anymore and I meant that at one level we're afraid of criminals we want to be hard people don't want to be heard I'm not arguing that that's not that's it the arguments at a whole other level of institutional rules and expectations in our society in the United States these rules include many rules of ethnicity that they wouldn't included other societies although they're they have their own ethnic problems but it is not accidental that it Duke and other universities lock it african-american males on campus get arrested with some frequency at least detained and it can sometimes be embarrassing when they turn out to be one of our new power forwards follow me they go oh we were always for power forward let him on his life no it is that there aren't walkways through an institution like Duke where certain kinds of people are expected to move dasu Lee and others are not these are the exclusions that I'm talking about are you find this in malls it used to be that a mall was just a damn place to go to shop now not everybody can get in the mall you know if you're wearing a big baggy sweater and you've got an X hat you may not be able to get in the mall not that I want in one I'm a person who suffers from mall fever mall fever maybe the last symptom preceding the death of what Foucault would call the docile body well anyway thank you very much and that's as far as we could get with Foucault thank you you

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 235,443

Keywords: michel, foucault, Michel Foucault, Human, philosophy, philosopher, partially, examined, life

Id: hP79SfCfRzo

Length: 45min 45sec (2745 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2012

Reddit Comments

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For anybody who hasn't seen the series of lectures by rick roderick on YouTube (both the postmodern series and the others on Nietzsche and the history of philosophy) I can't recommend them enough. They were life changing for me in a really positive way

[u/Neoredditalism]

Published on Jan 25, 2012

This video is 6th in the 8-part video lecture series, The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1993).

Lecture notes:

I. Foucault is a strong anti-humanist who believes that "man" is a relatively recent construction of a particular historical paradigm. Such paradigms structure discourse and action, as well as institutions and belief systems. They are, at the same time, systems of knowledge that are always interconnected with systems of power. Anywhere you find knowledge, there too you find a regime of power.

II. Knowledge is comprised of discourses that function through rules of exclusion. These determine who may speak, about what, for how long, and in what setting or contexts.

III. Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" shows how the paradigm of punishment and the law shift from one period to another. In the feudal period, we have "the body of the condemned" as a singular figure and "the spectacle of the scaffold" which expresses the criminal as a transgressor and our interest in him.

IV. In the modern period, we move to a paradigm of generalized punishment; from the body of the condemned to the entire social body (public works, school and prison reform). The reformers in many areas institute a micro-physics of power over the "docile bodies: of the "trained" and "socialized".

V. Foucault's method of writing his "histories" rests on the postulate that there are no bare "facts", just interpretations and these are themselves only made possible by the currently existing regime of power/knowledge. Particular to his method are the following:

a. reversal, that the perspective of the standard history and reverse it;

b. marginality, takes the focus off what has traditionally been thought to be central and look at the excluded;

c. discontinuity, drop the idea of necessary progress and look for breaks and catastrophes;

d. materially, look at practices more than at ideologies; and

e. specificity, take single instances to illuminate larger points.

VI. Foucault wants to reclaim a kind of radical critique in the interest of people rendered inhuman by what he sees as the very discourse of the "human".

VII. Foucault can be read as a novelist, a historian, a radical critic of society, and many other things. Most importantly, he has changed our discourse from Marx and the "factory" to Foucault and the "prison". He has carried forward at least a part of the task of freeing a new kind of self from the barbarism of what is still called the past.