lists and definitions Foucault

Question 1

Repressive hypothesis:

Answer 1

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; productivity and reproduction: create a protestant work ethics, can’t have pleasure in sex; distracts us from our labor, and takes away life force, don’t want to have pleasure in organism; get free from governance, liberation in sex

Question 2

Ars erotica

Answer 2

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 3

Scientia sexualis

Answer 3

knowledge-power on the truth of sex – gained from OTHERS’ ACCOUNTS

Question 4

Melancholia

Answer 4

symptoms were “delirious ideas an individual can form about himself.” Eventually, this shifted to emphasizing the qualities causing melancholia, and then to qualitative data used to diagnose, like sadness, immobility, etc.

Question 5

Hysteria and hypochondria

Answer 5

at first, these were not like melancholia and mania, but by the 18 and 19c became seen as mental diseases. Some thought they were diseases of the nerves, others thought diseases of the mind. They were associated with unreason and blindness

Question 6

Tuke:

Answer 6

Was in charge of the Retreat, which tried to reconstruct a segregated space. The intent of putting people in the Retreat was to surround with a moral element where one has to debate with the self- to live in a constant anxiety and threat of Law and Transgression. Thus, the madman isn’t guilty of being crazy; but, he is morally responsible for all in him that is a disturbance to society. The asylum organizes this guilt, making the madman a vulnerable object of punishment

Question 7

Pinel:

Answer 7

Doesn’t advocate religious segregation. Religion is not the moral center of life in the asylum, but only a medical object and tool. It’s clear, Pinel thought, that religion creates madness! So, the asylum has to be free from iconographic connections to religion. Pinel used three principal means to restore inmates: silence, recognition by mirror, perpetual judgment.

Question 8

2 different kinds of medicine 18th century:

Answer 8

1. forms (tables), medicine of space (space of inflammation)
   
   2. political awareness consciousness.
      2 kinds of medicine exist side-by-side; nosological table and organized medicine of space and time (bodies vs. body politic)

Question 9

New medicine: 3 things come together:

Answer 9

1. Gaze is that of a doctor, with authority of an institution, not limited to narrow grid of forms; now a calculating gaze 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. A new space of the doctor opens up and only he gets to solely determine truth.
   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 10

surfaces of emergence:

Answer 10

are the fields in which an object emerges. Fields could be things like family, art, sexuality, or the workplace. They are normative and define negatively (by what is rejected)

Question 11

authorities of delimitation:

Answer 11

are those who had the authority to define, name, delimit objects (for example, the object of madness) and how those authorities judged these limits.

Question 12

grids of specification:

Answer 12

are the systems by which an object comes to be defined and classified.

Question 13

A discourse:

Answer 13

is made up of many overlapping objects, it is the formation of the dispersed field of objects

Question 14

Forms of succession:

Answer 14

concepts emerge and then follow each other and depend on each other. Concepts emerge in fields of presence (what is accepted in a given discourse at a given time), concomitance (statements outside the discourse which inform it through analogy), and memory (statements that are now rejected but remembered).

Question 15

Changes in episteme 16-18th century:

Answer 15

1. 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
   
   2. 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

Question 16

4 Major Changes in the ordering of knowledge in late 18th century:

Answer 16

1. Work: Smith and Marx: labor is now a day’s worth of living, then able to talk about what labor wage should be, shift from classical to modern
   
   2. biology: no longer surface things, have to go internal, open them up and look, compare non-surface things, now we classify by genome, things you can’t see
   3. Language: rather than words relating to things, series of relationships of the words to themselves; things get caught in the play of words, like life get caught up in the system of nomenclature, things get dissolved into the value of the currency; things relating to system of knowledge that we have created
   4. Philosophy: with Kant: things are no longer really accessible; my perception is mediated by my apparatus, things are now outside of that which represents them, outside of even my experience

Question 17

Genealogy:

Answer 17

A concept that Foucault originally borrowed from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, but made his own. A genealogy is an attempt to consider the origins of systems of knowledge, and to analyze discourses. It attempts to reveal the discontinuities and breaks in a discourse, to focus on the specific rather than on the general. In doing so, it aims to show that there have been other ways of thinking and acting, and that modern discourses are not any truer than those in the past. Most importantly, it aims to show that many modern ideas are not self- evidently “true”, but the product of the workings of power. Foucault’s genealogies aim to allow individuals trapped or excluded by such systems of knowledge to speak out; one of the aims of Discipline and Punish is to give modern prisoners, who are categorized as abnormal, examined and analyzed by criminologists and prison warders, a voice. The genealogy is somewhat similar to Foucault’s idea of “Archaeology”, found in The Order of Things, which emphasizes discontinuity to a greater extent.

Question 18

Shifts in Punishment:

Answer 18

1. Right of the king: punishment was ceremonial and directed at prisoner’s body. Public execution reestablished the authority of the king
   
   2. Disciplinary Power: Bentham’s panopticon - aims to reform the prisoner, body fades away. No more torture or spectacle. Penalties address the soul
   3. Penitentiary: combines prison worskshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaces the prisoner with the delinquent, to control popular behavior.

Question 19

Docile Bodies:

Answer 19

The docile body is subjected, used, transformed and improved

Question 20

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon:

Answer 20

a building with a tower at the center from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner or schoolboy is incarcerated. Visibility is a trap. Each individual is seen but cannot communicate with the warders or other prisoners

Question 21

3 Kinds of Power

Answer 21

1. Economism: power is taken as a right, which one can possess as a commodity
   
   2. Power as exercised (a verb): power is a force that mainly represses
   3. Power as war: power as the hostile engagement of forces (peace is merely the result of war)