Foucault Questions

Question 1

How goes the progression from Kant to Nietzsche to Foucault?

Answer 1

Kant: late 18th century, is a Cartesian rationalist until he reads Hume, then decides that we are not capable of knowing anything by reason. We have 2 a priori modes of knowing, space and time, can’t experience them but they shape our experience, they are transcendental conditions. We cannot really know ourselves, Foucault calls this the transcendento empirical doubling. You can only experience something as an empirical subject experiencing an empirical object. There is mediation between the two things (the subject and object). Kant begins the death of things, self, and God. We are only free morally if we choose to step out of culture and appeal to the a priori (categorical imperatives)
(Hegel adds history as a a priori, the development of historical epochs, spirit of the age is moving toward a great telos; everything will move toward reason)
Nietzsche: Drops the subject and teleology; reason is mask for the will to power. There is no Kantian subject, no ego, no agent, no freedom or agency, all there is is power.
(Heidegger, drops space keeps time, we are beings toward death; Husseral tries to save science and knowledge from Nietzsche’s power, if you attune to experience and in an act of the mind you can work backward; Structuralists want to get rid of spirt, subject, we humans are the products of what creates us)
Foucault: says, contra-Kant, that we cannot be free, there are too many forces creating me. There is no transcendence, only transgression. True freedom in aesthetical, ancient Greek style.

Question 2

What are the three formulations of the categorical imperative?

Answer 2

1. Formula of Universal Law: “I ought never act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”
   
   2. Formula of Humanity: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”
   3. Autonomy and the kingdom of ends: as rational beings we make and legislate the law. We are bound to obey these laws because they are our own laws. “Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.”

Question 3

What is Enlightenment?

Answer 3

Kant defines the Enlightenment as “a way out” It releases us from a state of immaturity. There are two essential conditions for man to reach maturity: 1. Obedience and the use of reason 2. Reason must be free in public (as member of reasoning humanity) but submissive in private (reason for reason’s sake).
Foucault: you cannot transcend the Enlightenment, because you if you attempt to refuse every authority you will refuse the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Post-modernity is really just hypermodernity. To know who we are (critical ontology) we must do historical analysis of the limits imposed on us (archaeology and genealogy)

Question 4

How does Foucault see his work applying to everyday struggles?

Answer 4

Foucault thinks his method is more in tune with local problems. The specific intellectual has political responsibilities that concern the masses.

Question 5

What is the difference between a genealogist and a metaphysician?

Answer 5

Genealogists do not do metaphysics, but history, they are not concerned with origins but of systems of subjection and domination. Instead of looking at things from a great distance, it looks at them very closely, in a historical sense.

Question 6

What is the significance of the statement, “What does it matter who is speaking?”

Answer 6

Traditionally we think that the author has all the power and authority. The writing is more about the person writing than the work. With postmodernism we ignore the author and look at the work, but we still do this with the writer in mind. Foucault thinks we are moving to a point when we will stop asking whether someone really wrote something, but rather about the modes of existence of discourse. We will look to how discourse circulates.

Question 7

Foucault’s method? How does he trace madness?

Answer 7

Madness and Civilization is an archeology. He traces the concept of ‘madness’ and how it has changed over time. (13th-19th cenutry)

Question 8

How is truth related to power for Foucault?

Answer 8

Power has two points of reference: the rules of right (that provide formal delimitation of power) and the effects of truth (that power produces and transmits) What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. Power is not just juridical and negative but also technical and positive. Truth is a thing of this world, it is a system of ordered procedures and statements. Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it. A ‘regime’ of truth.

Question 9

How is medicine involved in the relations of truth and power?

Answer 9

Medicine helps tell us the truth of the body. The power over medicine is given to doctors and public health officials.

Question 10

How are bodies related to truth and power?

Answer 10

Those who have the power over truth get to tell others how to control their bodies and their reproduction. The great invention of the bourgeois society was to move “sovereign power” onto the bodies of everyone, to mandate a system of normalization that does not appear as coercive but is just as disciplinary.

Question 11

What is power? What is truth?

Answer 11

Power is truth. Those in power get to set the discourse, and the discourse helps to establish power relations. Power functions like a capillary system, from below and above at the same time.

Question 12

What does Foucault mean by an apparatus of power?

Answer 12

The apparatus: discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, propositions

Question 13

What is the gaze and how does it work in the physician-pt encounter?

Answer 13

In new medicine: 3 things come together:

1. gaze is that of a doctor, with authority of an institution, not limited to narrow grid of forms; now a calculating gaze (pg 90) taking into consideration risks, not that we discovered disease, but saw it in a particular time and place that it comes into relief as an object
2. in 18th century, symptoms were signs of disease; no longer is that relationship, now symptom is subjective nature of what I say and the sign is the truth that the doctor sees; no longer related to time, but to perspective (still true) New space of the doctor, gets to solely determine truth the sign is how you know about disease, not symptoms
3. Rise of Statistics
   - creates a science of individuals; Aristotle says you can’t do this, has to be general; medicine would not have been considered science to Aristotle; science of 1

Question 14

What are the categories of medicine Foucault discusses? How do they relate to the political strife at the time?

Answer 14

Rise of political democracy, power diffused from any locus; medicine of forms is like having a king, we need citizens a democracy of medicine; these two kinds of medicine go to war with each other. The doctor becomes enforcer of health codes; traditional forms of government disbanded in the French Revolution. Turn to study the ‘healthy man’ because revolution will create utopia and there will be no disease. Like civilizations, hospitals are artificial places, diseases must be placed in their natural place, thus the patient is better kept in family for diagnosis and treatment; rallying against the idea that diseases should be in hospitals led to France emptying all the hospitals. The universities were seen as places of tradition and so they too were closed. Hospitalists were lesser doctors. New medicine taught you needed to be politically aware and train all over the countryside.

Question 15

What myth about dissection does Foucault discuss?

Answer 15

Yet another medicine, anatomic pathology is happening. Truth is in the space of the body, body finally gets its depth. The myth evolves that in the late 1700s that against the church we opened up a few corpses (no actual prohibitions for doing anatomic dissection, hundreds of places where this is being done). Death becomes the stable point on which you can stand (not moving like life and disease) it is the failure of medicine and its ultimate truth; only stable things can be known.

Question 16

What does Foucault mean by archaeology and in which of his books does he use this method?

Answer 16

The archaeologist sees many points in time in one space, uses positivities to tell the story. Archeology is an excavation of modes of knowing. In the Order of Things, archeology is used to get at how the human sciences evolved. The Order of Things is an attempt at a tour de force: the conditions of possibility of modern knowledge (science and philosophy) all in one book

Question 17

How do archaeology and genealogy differ?

Answer 17

A genealogy (Discipline and Punish, history of sexuality) is an attempt to consider the origins of systems of knowledge, and to analyze discourses.  Looks for discontinuous discourses 
	An Archeology (Order of things, Madness and civilization) is most interested in space, more of a discontinuous look

Question 18

How did modes of knowing change from the renaissance (models) classical (18th Descartes, Kant) (representation in ideas representing objects) modern eras? (language)

Answer 18

1. Renaissance: The episteme of the 16th century was founded on similitude. All phenomena and designative modes were based on a manifold mirroring and interplay of analogies and affinities. The Renaissance world was a kind of weave, folding upon itself, forming a chain of vital resemblances through which alone individual facts or objects could find a meaningful location. Mode of knowing was resemblance between signs.
   
   2. Classical The episteme of the 17th-18th century Classical period is radically different. It involved “an immense reorganization of culture,” a literal re-orientation of the space in which Western consciousness perceived subject and object, reality and dream. The old kinships between knowledge and divination, the mirroring reciprocities of language and fact, break off. Now, instead of similitude, the crucial instrumentality is representation. Foucault seems to mean by this that words are now entirely transparent and arbitrary counters. Thus, to say things, to name them, is to put them in a kind of necessary order. The “necessity” seems to derive from the fact that Classical man now sees objects in a logical space or framework. The language of the Classical age is caught in the grid of thought, woven into the very fabric of its unrolling. It is not an exterior effect of thought, but thought itself.” In other terms, knowing and speaking are interwoven.
   3. Modern: As to the future: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” The mode of individuation and “outside reality” which has dominated the past centuries of our civilization, especially in the West, may yield soon to new spaces of perception. If I understand Foucault, he is saying that “man” himself is a symbolic product of the ways in which certain men have, over a very short period of history, thought about themselves and human knowledge. Rather than words relating to things, language is a series of the words relating to themselves. We get the birth of man. Man is now the measure of all things.

Question 19

How does a conceptual funnel work?

Answer 19

1. Have a good conceptual definition of what you want to say
   
   2. Develop and operational definition
   3. Test the definition
   4. Modify the definition

Question 20

What is the repressive hypothesis and what does Foucault think of it?

Answer 20

Victorian bourgeoisie: Sexuality confined into the home, to the conjugal family for reproduction. The parents’ bedroom was the only social acknowledgement of the otherwise silent topic of sex. Otherwise, it was improper to touch other bodies; speech was ‘sanitized.’ Anything that overstepped the bounds of silence was made to disappear. Pleasurable activities are looked down upon. Sex is a private, and it is repressed except in marriage. Outside marriage, sex is unspeakable and unthinkable.
The hypothesis goes on that the 20c is really not much different.We’re led to believe power is always repressive and one-sided, evident in law, resulting in obedience. And, we have a vested interest in the one-sided repressiveness of power. It acts on us; we’re not part of power, we can resist it. If power existed also in our resistence, then we couldn’t see ourselves as free.

Question 21

What are the two different ways of studying sex?

Answer 21

1. Scientia Sexualis - procedures for developing knowledge-power on the truth of sex – gained from OTHERS’ ACCOUNTS (in confession) Sexuality is pathologized
   
   2. Ars erotica - Truth is drawn from pleasure itself. Sex is first considered not by absolute law/utility, but in relation to itself; to sex experienced as pleasure – gained by EXPERIENCE

Question 22

How the discourse about sex move into the family?

Answer 22

1. The Mother: the feminine body was analyzed as thoroughly sexual, integrated into the sphere of medicine/pathology, and then placed in communication with the social body/family/life of kids as the nervous mother
   
   2. Children - all kids indulge/are prone to indulge in sex; this sex was individually and collectively dangerous bc kids are only ‘preliminary sexual being’ a socialization of procreative behavior
   3. Economic- economic socialization where fiscal measures bear on fertility; also, political and medical socialization
   4. The abnormal - within the family…the new personages appeared (nervous mother, young homosexual, perverse husband, etc) – these personages are an alliance gone bad; abnormalities. Rise of psychoanalysis

Question 23

What is biopower?

Answer 23

What brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life

Question 24

What is sex for Foucault?

Answer 24

It’s just a construct. We developed the word to talk about sexuality..to link the physical body with knowledge and political factors. This word sex, is central to identity, a source of knowledge and power.