Foucault Flashcards
The repressive hypothesis
Foucault
questions “the repressive hypothesis”, which suggests that sexuality was repressed and restricted by the rise of capitalism – channeled either into socially acceptable, family-oriented reproduction or into monetarized deviance (brothels and sanitariums).
Sex was not repressed in this era, but regulated “through useful and public discourses” (25) both religious (the transformation of physical acts into mental ones via the process of confession and the deep examination of pleasure) and scientific (the quantitative analysis of sex through formal studies of population, the education and monitoring of adolescent sexuality)
The codification of perversions and the attempts to uncover, monitor, and eradicate them served to link power and pleasure – both the pleasure of exerting power over others and the pleasure of evading such power.
The science of sexuality
Our society has worked to produce “the truth of sex” via confession – first through the
religious rite and then later by translating that practice into scientific terms. This
practice brings to light the complex relationship between power and knowledge.
Power - Foucault
Power is “the multiplicity of force relations”
Power is everywhere” and “comes from everywhere” Power relations are “immanent in” all relationships.
“Power comes from below” – power relations established in families and workplaces form a pattern that supports and sustains larger institutional power
Power is deployed with intentionality, but from a diffuse set of phenomena, not from a singular locus.
“Where there is power, there is resistance.” – “irreducible opposite” and, like power, is deployed from innumerable points and only gains mass force/becomes revolution through “strategic codification of these points.” (96)
Rules for discussing sex and power
Immanence: “[T]echniques of knowledge and strategies of power” do not exist
independent of each other but “are linked together” each with “specific roles” to
create “power-knowledge.” (98)
Continual variations: Relations of power-knowledge are constantly changing,
existing in “matrices of transformations.” (99)
Double conditioning: Foucault sees the linkage of micro and global macro power
structures not as existing on two levels but as flat and cyclical so that all “local centers” of power are parts of larger strategies, and all larger strategies rely on local centers of power, but one does not emulate the other.
Tactical polyvalence of discourses: Discourse is what joins knowledge to power, and like power itself, discourse works in all sorts of different ways.
According to Foucault, why are sex and sexuality useful points for discussing power
Sexuality is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” and thus
“endowed with the greatest instrumentality” for the deployment of a variety of
strategies of power which, in their deployment, produce sexuality itself.
How did the idea of sexuality develop according to Foucault?
Foucault proposes to analyze the deployment of sexuality: how it was formed through “the Christian notion of the flesh” and developed through four strategies (“the sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, the specification of the perverted, and the regulation of populations”) which focused on the family as nurturing the development of sexuality.
The history of sexuality is not one of repression but of class dominance. The bourgeoisie deployed sexuality to differentiate themselves from the proletariat by their ‘breeding’ – their health and lineage – which in turn justified and extended their power and influence.
What is biopower?
Foucault developed the concept of biopower to explain an historical change in how power was used to govern people. This shift was marked by a transition from
governmental power being primarily concerned with death to being primarily concerned with life.
Biopower exists across two poles of a continuum: anatamo-politics, or a concern with what an individual body can produce and how it can be optimized, and biopolitics, which focuses on understanding and regulating populations.
Biopower allowed for the development of capitalism both by providing health workers and by providing the structures needed to develop and maintain that population.
The rise of biopower had three major consequences: a shift in scientific discourse and academic thought, a shift towards norms rather than laws as the primary means of regulating and correcting human behavior, and a shift towards the right to explore individual potential as the locus of political struggle.
What is nosology?
The classifiation of diseases – bounded disease into provided categories
What are “conditions of possibility”?
Foucualt
Popularized by Kant, this talks about the framework necessary for the possible
appearance of an entity or entities.
“Every mode of thinking involves some implicit rules that restrict the range of possible discourses within a certain time and place … Foucault argues against seeing the objects of our (scientific) knowledges as natural or
necessary – that is, as the logical endpoint of (scientific) progress – but rather as constituted by historically contingent discursive practices.”
“… the conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse,
the historical conditions required if one is to ‘say anything’ about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions
necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with
them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, difference,
transformation – as we see, these conditions are many and imposing.
Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy
to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay
attention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly lo light up and emerge
out of the ground.”
d. “New scientific objects… are already tacit in the knowledges on which they
finally find their manifest form.”
How do you define the clinical gaze?
Foucault traces the emergence of the clinical gaze, more often referred to as the
medical gaze in modern parlance, as an embodiment of philosophical ideas.
Specifically, of the philosophy of Condillac, Cabanis, and linguistic changes.
Empiricism fostered a medical gaze that was able to identify and articulate
different symptoms—both those immediately visible to the eye of the doctor
and those which the patient could describe. To Foucault, this new gaze allowed
disease to emerge organically, freed from the limits of the classification system
of nosology.
How does Foucault think about language? What is the purpose and results of language?
“one now sees the visible only because one knows the language; things are
offered to he who has penetrated the close world of words; and if these words
communicate with things, it is because they obey a rule that is intrinsic to their
grammar.”
What is a ‘medicine of epidemics’?
“In the years immediately preceding and during the French Revolution, according
to Foucault, men began to assign to medicine a central role in the reconstitution
of society. A growing interest in epidemics and their prevention had focused
attention on the connection between health and social conditions, giving rise to the hope that the Société Royale de Médicine, chartered in, 1778 and charged, among other things, with the study of epidemics, would diffuse throughout
society a generalized medical consciousness.”
It is a medicine still reliant on categorical approval from governmental sources
–“the definition of a political status for medicine and the constitution at the
state level of a medical consciousness whose constant task would be to provide
information, supervision, and constraint, all of which ’relate as much to the policys as to the field of medicine proper.’
what is the ‘positive reformulation of death?’
Foucault
the shift from the notion of treating the disease to the mission of sustaining the patient’s health.
