Michel Foucault

Question 1

What is Michel Foucault’s Lifespan?

Answer 1

1926-1984

Question 2

What book did Michel Foucault write, and when?

Answer 2

The Birth of Biopolitcs

Lectures spanning from 1978-1979

Question 3

What is Foucault’s legacy?

Answer 3

He was one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period.

Question 4

How is Focuault’s work Relevant?

Answer 4

This notwithstanding, biopolitics and biopower continue to hold significant purchase in and for discussions on modern forms of governance and modes of subjectification.

Question 5

What is biopolitics?

Answer 5

The style of government that regulates populations through “biopower” (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life).

It examines how human life processes are managed under authority

The main explanation is how sexuality ties together multiple “technologies of power”,

Question 6

What is biopower?

Answer 6

Foucault argues that biopower is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. It incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power.

If disciplinary power is about training the actions of bodies, biopower is about managing the births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population.

Question 7

What type of theorist is Michel Foucault?

Answer 7

Foucaultbegan briefly as aMarxist

The question of Foucault’s overall political stance remains hotly contested. But it’s thought to be a reaction to Marxism

Question 8

What is Foucault’s view on the state?

Answer 8

x

Question 9

What is Foucault’s view on liberalism?

Answer 9

x

Question 10

What was Michel Foucault’s main political viewpoints?

Answer 10

Foucault is particularly concerned with the relations between political power and the body, and describes various historical ways of training the body to make it socially productive.

The body is an element to be managed in relation to strategies of the economic and social management of populations.

Question 11

What does Foucault mean by Pastoral Power?

Answer 11

The modern State, Foucault argues, consists of the convergence of a very particular set of techniques, rationalities and practices designed to govern or guide people’s conduct as individual members of a population and also to organize them as a political and civil collective in the same way as a shepherd who cares for his flock from birth to death. This idea of politically organizing the day to day conduct of the population is borrowed from the metaphor of the care of a shepherd for his flock and originated in Egyptian, Assyrian, Mesopotamian and Hebrew cultures.

Question 12

What does Foucault mean by Governmentality?

Answer 12

Delete card, put 5

Question 13

How does Foucault view Marxism?

Answer 13

Foucault is well known for his controversial statements in 1966 that ‘Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else’ and that it was a mere ‘storm … in a children’s paddling pool’ (The Order of Things,, Tavistock, 1970, p. 262). For a brief period after 1968 Foucault’s comments on Marxism as a form of political activity became more favourable. He subsequently returned to his earlier views on the historical specificity of Marxism and to criticisms of the inflated claims made by Marxists in relation to Marx’s work.

Question 14

What is life’s impact of governing, according to Foucault?

Answer 14

“life denotes neither the basis nor the object of politics. Instead, it presents a border to politics- a border that should be simultaneously respected and overcome, one that seems to be both natural and given but also artificial and transformable”

Question 15

What did Foucault believe was central to processes such as punishment, and sex and discipline?

Answer 15

Power.

No one is producing these things, they are effects generated by the interaction of power relations. They are not necessarily shared by individuals or institutions

Question 16

What are the effects of power relations, according to Foucault?

Answer 16

Whenever we try to influence others, this is power. However, our attempts to influence others rarely turn out the way we expect.

This applies to both personal and societal relationships.

This relation is basically - we know what we do, but we don’t know the effects of what we do.

Question 17

Does Foucault believe power us autonomous?

Answer 17

No

It is rather a matter of superficially stable structures, emerging on constantly shifting relations underneath

This shift is caused by the unending struggle between people.

Question 18

Why is Foucault criticised by liberal thinkers?

Answer 18

Foucault is condemned by many liberal commentators for his failure to make any normative distinction between power and resistance, that is, for his relativism.

Question 19

How does Foucault view resistance?

Answer 19

Foucault doesn’t believe that that one is defeated before one begins

He believes that one must proceed with caution to avoid simply supporting a strategy of power while thinking oneself rebellious.

Question 20

According to Foucault, what happens when we get to free ourselves from sexual repression?

Answer 20

Though we try to liberate ourselves from sexual repression, we in fact play into a strategy of power which we do not realize exists.

This strategy is for everyone to constitute themselves as “‘subjects’

Question 21

How are we passive subjects of sexual repression?

Answer 21

we are subjected in this process, made into passive subjects of study by medical professionals, for example.

Question 22

How are we active subjects of sexual repression?

Answer 22

having to actively confess our sexual proclivities and indeed in the process develop an identity based on this confessed sexuality

Question 23

In what way does Foucault say power operates in society?

What example does he use?

Answer 23

So, power operates in ways that are both overtly oppressive and more positive

In society, we are subjects of sexual repression

Question 24

What does Foucault say plays a big part in power relations?

Answer 24

Sexuality for Foucault has a quite extraordinary importance in the contemporary network of power relations.

Question 25

How is sex important in our lives?

Answer 25

It has become the essence of our personal identity, and sex has come to be seen as “worth dying for.”

Question 26

How was sexuality like in the beginning?

Answer 26

It dominated the bourgeoisie, as were obsessed with physical and reproductive health, and their own pleasure.

The class viewed it as positive; although women & children may not have had much freedom w it

Question 27

What were the 3 consistent srategies of the device of sexuality?

Answer 27

the pathologisation of the sexuality of women and children,

the concomitant medicalization of the sexually abnormal “pervert,” and

The constitution of sexuality as an object of public concern

Question 28

What I’d the Difference between Discipline and Biopolitics?

Answer 28

Where discipline is about the control of individual bodies, biopolitics is about the control of entire populations.

Question 29

Why would the state take interest in observing life?

Answer 29

This intervention of life benefits the state

Via preventing depopulation, ensuring a stable and growing tax base, and providing a regular supply of manpower for the military.

Question 30

What was sex like in biopolitics?

Answer 30

Sex was the most intense site at which discipline and biopolitics intersected

Sex had to be controlled, regulated, and monitored if the population was to be brought under control

Question 31

What type of power was replaced by discipline and biopolitics?

Answer 31

Sovereign power

Governments dealt both with individual bodies and with masses of people, through violence and by taking.

This differs from positively encouraging and producing, as both discipline and biopolitics do.

Question 32

When does Foucault say sovereign power is used?

Answer 32

When discipline breaks down, when the regulation of the population breaks down, the state continues to rely on brute force as a last resort.

Question 33

How does Foucault talk about sovereign power Vs biopolitics?

Answer 33

Indeed, he sometimes refers to sovereign power as “thanatopolitics,” the politics of death, in contrast to biopolitics’s politics of life.

Biopolitics is a form of power that works by helping you to live, thanatopolitics by killing you, or at best allowing you to live

Question 34

How does Foucault talk about racism?

Answer 34

Eugenics, the pseudo-science of improving the vitality of a population through selective breeding, was implemented to some extent in almost all industrialized countries.

It was found its fullest expression in Nazi Germany.

There is something quite paradoxical about such attempts to link the old theme of “blood” to modern concerns with population health.

Question 35

What is Governmentality?

Answer 35

Government rationality

Logic by which a polity is governed.

Question 36

How does Foucault encapture governmentality?

Answer 36

Governmentality isn’t ideal, but rather encompasses institutions, practices and ideas

It is a complex form of “power
which has the population as its target,
political economy as its major form of knowledge, and
apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument”

Question 37

What are the two main phases in the development of governmentality?

Answer 37

Raison d’etat: correlates with discipline, as an attempt to regulate society to the fullest extent, with what was contemporaneously called “police.”

Political liberalism: which reacts against the failures of governmental regulation with the idea that society should be left to regulate itself naturally, with the power of police applied only negatively in extremis

Question 38

What does neoliberalism and a raison d’etat do?

Answer 38

With this governmentality, we see freedom of the individual and regulation of the population subtly intertwined.