Power
and Discourse: Michel Foucault and his Theories
Provider:
Wanli Liu
1998/12/10
Reading Materials
I. Introduction and background:
Thesis:
Foucault's constant
emphasis on power and on discourse provides a unifying
core on his work. In his view comp(
Üdifferential power relationships
extend to every aspect of our social, cultural and political lives,
involving all manner of (often contradictory) 'subject-positions',
and securing out assent not so much by the threat of punitive sanctions
as by persuading us to internalize the norms and values that prevail
within the social order.
I. Introduction
and background:
A.
Foucault's view of history:
- Foucault's works are
based on a vision of history derived from Nietzsche. He expressed
his indebtedness to Nietzsche for having outlined a conception of
history called genealogy. The method of genealogy involves
a painstaking rediscovery of struggles, an attack on the tyranny
of what he calls' totalizing discourses' and a rediscovery
of fragmented, subjugated, local and specific knowledge. It is directed
against great truths and grand theories.”]p.80”^
(”° vs. Lyotard's grand
narrative/small narrative)
Foucault rejects the Hegelian
teleological model, in favour of Nietzschean tactic of critique through
the presentation of difference. The gap between the
past and the present underlines the principle of difference at
the heart of Foucault's historiography.
- Foucault often uses
the term Genealogy to refer to the union of erudite knowledge and
local memories which allow us to establish a historical knowledge
of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.
Genealogy focus on local, discontinuous, disqualifies, illegitimate
knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory.
B.
Foucault's Work in Different
Stages:
 Reason and unreason :
Foucault's early work is mainly
concerned with the growth of those disciplines which are collectively
known as the social or human sciences. As an answer to the question of
how the human sciences are historically possible and what the consequences
of their existence are. In his first book, Madness and Civilization,
Foucault describes how madness comes in the 17th.c to be perceived
as a social problem. The 'madship' was replaced by the 'madhouse'; instead
of embarkation there was confinement.
Madness during the 19th
c. began to be categorized as social failure. The asylum of the age
of positivism was not a free realm of observation, diagnosis and therapeutics,
it became a juridical space where one was accused, judged and condemned”Xan
instrument of moral uniformity. The birth of the asylum can be
seen as an allegory in the constitution of subjectivity.
Is subtitled ”„An Archaeology
of Medical Perception”¦; this perception of ;gaze; is formed by the new,
untrammelled type of observation, condense a general historical argument
into a tracing of the emergence of specific institutions.
-
The
Order of Things & The
Archaeology of Knowledge
Deal largely with the structure
of scientific discourses. There is a whole new 'regime'?of discourse which
makes possible the separation of what may be characterized as scientific
from what may bot be characterized as scientific.
- Looking back on his
early work, Foucault conceded that what was missing was a consideration
of the effects of power.
- In his later work, where
Foucault is concerned with power and knowledge, and talk about 'apparatus'
which is a structure of heterogeneous elements such as discourses,
laws, institutions. The apparatus contains strategies of relations
of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge.
A struggle over meaning
- I, Pierre Riviere”K
A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century
One of the main themes of this
dossier is the problematic division between the innocence of unreason
and the guilt of crime. This work is truly interdisciplinary in that one
can approach it from the point of view of history, politics, literature,
psychiatry, or the law. This book gives us an idea of how a particular
kind of knowledge such as medicine or psychiatry is formed. It also exemplifies
one of Foucault”¦s main preoccupations: the attempt to rediscover the interaction
of discourses as weapons of attack and defence in the relations of power
and knowledge.
Disciplinary Power
Foucault argues that knowledge
is a power over others, the power to define others. In his view knowledge
ceases to be a liberation and becomes a mode of surveillance, regulation,
discipline.
Focuses on the moment when it
become understood that it was more efficient and profitable to place people
under surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty. This
transition in the 18th century corresponds to the formation
of a new mode of exercise of power. So that punishment takes the form
of a ritual intended not to 'reform' the offender but to express and restore
the sanctity of the law which has been broken.
In contrast to monarchial
power, there is disciplinary power, a system of surveillance
which is interiorized to the point that each person is his or
her overseer.
The transformation of Western
societies from monarchical power to disciplinary power is epitomized
in Foucault's description of the Panopticon, an architectural
device advocated by Jeremy Bentham towards the end of 18thc.
According to Foucault. The Panopticon is a machine in which everyone
is caught and which no one knows.
Technical rationality
Weber, following Nietzsche,
argued that scientific rationality focused on means but not on
ends. Instrumental reason cannot tell us anything about how to
live our lives. Foucault reiterates the fears of (Nietzsche and) Weber:
science uncovers the mythology in the world, but science itself is a myth
which has to be superseded.
- It closes to the theories
of 'critical theorists' of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno
& Max Horkheimer.
Sexuality and power
- The
History of Sexuality; Volume one: An Introduction
One of the main points of the
book is that sexuality is far more a positive product than power was ever
repression of sexuality. Foucault”¦s work shows how in the 18th
c. processes of training and regulation of human bodies emerged in a wide
range of specific institutional locations: in factories, prisons and schools.
And then, at the beginning of 20th
c., the discourse on sex
became a matter of science. Foucault's main example of a modern discourse
on sexuality is psychoanalysis.
The fundamental thesis of
the book is that sexuality is not a natural reality but the product
of a system of discourses and practices which form part of the intensifying
surveillance and control of the individual.
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III.
Power
and Knowledge
- The individual subject
was an empty entity, an intersection of discourses.
- Modern power operates
through the construction of 'new' capacities and modes of activity
rather than through the limitation of pre-existing ones.
- The relations of power
do not emanate from a sovereign or a state; nor should power be conceptualized
as the property of an individual or class.
- The exercise of power
itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge.
- A relationship of power
is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately
on others. It acts upon their actions: an action upon an action.(p.427)
- At the very heart of the
power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance
of the will and the intransigence of freedom.
- The analysis, elaboration
and bringing into question of power relations and the 'agonism' between
power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political
task inherent in all social existence.
- Every power relationship
implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle.
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III. Foucault and Althusser
1.the similarities
of Foucault and Althusser
Foucault and Althusser regard
humanism as an error; anti-humanists argue that unconditional emancipation
is a fantasy, and that fantasy are dangerous.
- Both emphasize the necessity
of applying certain anti-humanist theories to the reading of texts
- Both produced work that
raises problems rather tan provides solutions.
2.the differences of
Foucault and Althusser
- Foucault is often depicted
as some sort of freewheeling relativist in contrast to Althusser.
- Foucault argues that the
character of the knowledge of the human sciences is different from
that of the natural sciences. But Althusser thinks that science produces
its own objects and that is itself the product of social practices.
- Foucault rejects the concept
of ideology.
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IV. Foucault's critique of Marxism
- Power is not located in
the state apparatus; it passes through much finer channels and is
much amore ambiguous, since each individual has at his or her disposal
at least some power.
- It should be remembered
that the reproduction of the relations of production is not the only
function served by power. The system so f domination and the circuits
of exploitation certainly interact, intersect and support each other,
but they do not coincide.
- Foucault is deeply antagonistic
to the Marxist concept of ideology, the reasons is as below:
- Firstly, it always stands
in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count
as truth.
- Secondly, analyses which
prioritize ideology trouble him because they always presuppose a human
subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy.
- Thirdly, ideology stands
in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its
base, as its material economic determinant.
- Foucault therefore stresses
the importance of local, specific struggles and believes that they
can have effects and implications which are not simply professional
or sectoral.
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IV. Questions:
- What's the relationship
of Nietzsche's theories of power with Hegel's dialectic theories and
their influences to post-structuralists ?
- Is there any familiar
tendency of Lyotard's narrative theories with Foucault's genealogy?
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Reading materials:
1.Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism
and Postmodernism, "Foucault and the Social Sciences"
2.Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power." Ed. Brian
Wallis. Art Aafter Modernism : Rethinking Representation.”@New
York : David R. Godine Publisher, 1984.
(external)
Literary
Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space;
Postmodern Theories and Texts;
Cultural
Studies;
Foucault
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