Lecture 3 - Foucault Flashcards
Post-structuralism
expose and follow how our modern rationality (through structures such as language) operates to deny difference
Institutions as social freedom (collective self-actualization) by other thinkers
Hegel: reason unfolds in historical process by recreating universal ethical institutions at every stage, this is how individuals design meaningful life
Honneth: members of society must agree that leading meaningful, successful life together is only possible if they orient themselves according to principles they can all understand as rational ends for self-actualization
Foucault’s critique of this: institutions are historically contingent products of knowledge systems and power relations disciplining (can become exploitative if institutions are not rational end of what we do anyway)
The objective: deconstruct their workings
Action - structure relationship
Actions are imbedded in structures that determine the possibility of our actions.
French critical theorist agree about this: structures determine us partly
Foucaults critical theory: two dimensions
Dimension 1 (History of the present):
- Showing the contingency of practices and institutions, for example:
- Civilization and madness
- Discipline and punish
- History of sexuality
Dimension 2: progression of the method of ‘histories of the present’
Progression of a method (archeology):
- Thought takes place in space with structure defined by system of rules
- Presenting structures of this space gives fundamental understanding of history of thought
- Digging through sedimented layers (episteme) of discourse
- Individual thinkers are not important, they are a product of their time.
Historical analysis of episteme:
- = Reveals a positive unconscious of knowledge: eludes consciousness of scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse (how can we know era we are in)
- Pre-classical period (15th-16th century): episteme constituted by objectivity of things; language as expression of material
- Classical period (17th-18th century): episteme constituted by representation of objects by thought creation of objective and subjective realm. Knowing = ordering of representations in tables (structure)
- Modern period (19th century): episteme constituted by the transcendental subject, knowing = the problem of relation between subject and object
- Post-modern: death of subject, return of language (prison house; language as restricting)
Problems of archeology
- Problem of change: can change be understood without reduction to episteme
- Problem of causality: difficulty assessing what caused change
- Problem of the subject: what about the scientist?
Progression of a method: genealogy:
- = Questioning the necessity of dominant categories and procedures
- Archeology still stands, genealogy as addition
- Present is a result of contingent turns of history, not outcome of rationally inevitable trends
Knowing = form of power-truth:
- Against the idea of progressive humanization of punishment, but continuing project of subjection
- Birth of dome prison and other ‘disciplining’ institutions, with elements of disciplinary power: hierarchical, observation, normalizing judgment, examination
- Transformation of sovereign power (power of life) into productive power (internalized, allows us to do, almost invisible) as exerted by institutions such as prisons, schools, hospitals and workplaces
- Aim Foucault: making visible the disciplining technologies and mechanisms
Critical theory and enlightenment – what is enlightenment:
- Kant: human beings are rational entities equipped with capacity to determine their lives by reason, yet human is immature, enlightenment = process out of self-incurred immaturity
- Habermas: will to reason = will to emancipate, to reach maturity
- Foucault: enlightenment = will to transgress the limits that the present imposes upon us
Foucault building on Baudelaire:
- Eagerness to value the present and to transform by grasping what it is
- Relationship with self: to take oneself as object of complex elaboration, oneself as a work of art
- Not only discovering yourself, but creating yourself
- Baudelaire: only in art – Foucault: in life
Ethos of permanent critique of our historical era – negative:
- You are not for or against enlightenment, but analysis of ourselves as beings historically determined by enlightenment
- Enlightenment is not humanism: not merely set of theme, values resurfacing over time, inconsistent axis of reflection
Ethos of permanent critique of our historical era – positive:
- Limit-attitude: ‘” the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them”
- Critique is not transcendental: not inherent to our thinking universally
- Historical investigation: genealogical in its design and archeological in its method
