- Get link
- Other Apps
- Get link
- Other Apps
Marxism by Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
In France, Paul-Michel Foucault was born. He created the "Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons" in 1971 along with his life partner Daniel Defert and a few acquaintances. Foucault's participation in politics started at this point. His issues continued throughout the rest of his life and included LGBT rights, the resettlement of refugees, and jail conditions. He was also a French philosopher and historian who was regarded as one of the most important and contentious thinkers of the post-World War II era.
The key works are typically split into two groups by scholars. The works that were published prior to 1970 are referred to as "archaeological" works, or works that illustrate or expand upon Foucault's archaeological method of historical and textual analysis, while the works that were published following 1970 are referred to as "genealogical" works, or works that demonstrate the method of analysis that Foucault adapted from Friedrich Nietzsche (which he describes in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History").
Foucault, who is
most known for his "analytics of power," maintains that in order to
fully comprehend power in modern society, analytical frameworks, such as
liberalism or marxism, that place power in state institutions, must be
abandoned. He claims, however, that Power exists everywhere. We must look at
power at the micro-level, including relationships between employers and
employees, therapists and clients, teachers and students, and husbands and
wives, in order to understand submission as well as resistance and reform.
Power doesn't belong to one individual or group while being absent from others;
it only exists in relationships and via "exercise."
Book- ‘Power and knowledge’
Power
is not centralized in one area or in the possession of specific people, according
to Michel Foucault. However, power is present in all social interactions and is
not only used by the government. Knowledge is closely related to power. Power
and knowledge are thus mutually reinforcing. In order to gather more data,
exercise more control over its citizens, and produce new sorts of knowledge,
the state must have power. Discourse development is required for this.
Contrarily, Foucault only perceives power as acting when people have some
degree of freedom; he does not just think of power in terms of coercion.
Book-
‘Discipline and Punish’
He
studied how the nature and intent of punishments changed throughout the
eighteenth century. By the 19th century, the focus of punishment shifted from
the body to the soul, with the goal of reform. Instead of focusing on what they
had done, people were judged for who they were. The motive for the crime
started to come into consideration.
In
order to make discourses powerful, specialists were introduced into power
relations, according to Foucault. He asserts that power is not owned but rather
used. There is always a degree of uncertainty when attempts are made to exert
power. He thinks that sometimes, power can be reversed. One might challenge the
accuracy of a psychiatrist's diagnosis, for instance.
He
compares the state to a Panopticon, suggesting methods of surveillance
that promote self-control. Considering the notion that people may alter their
souls and the government's efforts to create "Docile Bodies"
(obedient).
Michel
Foucault: Political Thought
The study of politics has been impacted by Michel Foucault's writings. This impact is based on historical studies that have been used as analytical tools; the two most notable of these are "governmentality" and "biopower."
More broadly, Foucault created a new
understanding of social power that saw people as active participants in games
of power who adopt strategies that embody their own purposes. As a result,
Foucault had a fundamentally different approach to political issues, one that
was centred on new explanations of power and subjectivity.
From an objective standpoint, Foucault's
political works appear to share two characteristics: (1) a historical
perspective, which studies social phenomena in historical contexts and focuses on
how they have changed over time; and (2) a discursive methodology, which uses
the study of texts, especially academic texts, as the starting point for his
inquiries.
Archaeology
The History of Madness, his
PhD dissertation from 1961, was Foucault's debut significant work. He provides
a historical description of what he terms the "constitution of an
experience of madness" throughout Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth
century, which is briefly replicated in the 1962 version of Mental Illness and
Psychology. To comprehend how madness was constituted as a phenomenon, this
includes a correlative study of institutional and discursive changes in the
treatment of the insane. The History of Madness, which is by far Foucault's
longest book, has a plethora of information that he develops in various ways in
most of the work he does over the course of the next two decades. Its
historical analysis of how institutions and discourses interact set the tone
for his political writings in the 1970s.
In the time period under
consideration, the way that madness was treated underwent three significant
changes, according to Foucault. The first witnessed growing regard for crazy
with the Renaissance. Madness was once regarded as an alien entity that needed
to be driven out, but today it is considered a sign of insight. With the start
of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, this abruptly changed. Now, the reason was given top priority, and its antithesis, insanity, was utterly
disregarded. Congenitally unreasonable persons were forcibly removed from
society and housed in asylums, while the unreasonable were prohibited from the conversation. This persisted up until the 18th century's close when a fresh
movement aimed at "liberating" the insane emerged. However, for
Foucault, this wasn't really liberation; rather, it was the endeavour of
Enlightenment logic to eventually negate crazy by fully comprehending it and
treating it with medication.
Thus, the relationship
between philosophical discourse and political actuality is taken seriously in
The History of Madness. Ideas about reason are not just seen as abstract
issues, but as having very significant societal repercussions that touch every
aspect of the lives of tens of thousands of people who were labelled as insane
and, in fact, change the social structure. Such an approach signifies a shift
from Foucault's earlier Marxism. It would appear that cultural change is being
held accountable for the development of society in this instance rather than
making an effort to anchor experience in actual realities. In other words, it
could appear that Foucault had accepted idealism, the view that ideas are the
driving force behind history and the antithesis of Marxism. But this would be a
wrong reading. The History of Madness makes no claims regarding the causal
precedence of the institutional over the cultural transformation or the other
way around. Without making any etiological assumptions, it merely notices the coincidental
transition. Furthermore, although Foucault did not analyse the political
factors at play in the history of madness in this work, it is obvious that it
is a political book because it explores the political stakes of philosophy and
medicine.
But later developments in
Foucault's thinking led many to believe that he was an idealist. Following The
History of Madness, Foucault shifted his attention to the discursive, largely
ignoring political issues. The foreword of his subsequent book, The Birth of
the Clinic, served as the first and most obvious indication of this. The
preface is a manifesto for a new methodology that will pay only attention to
discourses themselves, to the language that is uttered, rather than the
institutional context, even though the book itself essentially extends The
History of Madness chronologically and thematically by examining the birth of
institutional medicine from the end of the eighteenth century. The Birth of the
Clinic itself did not fulfil this aim; rather, the book that came after it in
the series, The Order of Things, did (1966). The Order of Things represented an
abstract history of thought that largely ignored anything outside the
discursive, in contrast to Foucault's historical investigations in The History
of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic, which were relatively balanced between
studying traditional historical events, institutional change, and the history
of ideas. Although Foucault was never fond of the term's use, this approach was
in fact "structuralism" at the time in France. His exact claims—that
knowledge is ordered by an episteme that determines what kinds of propositions
may be accepted as true—were in fact extremely original in the history of
academic discourses. The Order of Things traces numerous epistemic changes in
respect to the human sciences across time.
These assertions brought
Foucault and French Marxism into conflict. Given that Foucault openly accuses
Marxism in the book of being an outmoded product of the nineteenth century,
this cannot have been wholly unintentional on his part. Finally, he declared
that "man" (the gendered "man" here alludes to a concept
that in English we have come to increasingly refer to as the "human")
as such was probably on the verge of becoming obsolete. He did this to express
his hostility to humanism. In this instance, Foucault was contesting a specific
conception of the human being as a sovereign subject capable of understanding
oneself. This humanism, which was supported by the leading philosopher of the
time, Jean-Paul Sartre, and supported by the French Communist Party's central
committee specifically against Althusser just one month before The Order of
Things was published, was at the time the orthodoxy in French Marxism and
philosophy (DE1 36). Marxism positioned itself as a movement for the
individual's full fulfilment in its humanist guise. In contrast, Foucault
considered the idea of the individual to be a recent and bizarre concept.
Additionally, Marxists believed that his fundamental assumption to analyse and
criticise discourses without taking into account the social and economic
structure that created them represented a significant analytical step backwards.
The book does appear to be politically neutral because it declines to adopt a
normative view of truth and places no value on anything outside of academic,
abstract discourses. Despite being a protracted, ponderous, academic book, The
Order of Things proved to be so contentious and its claims to be so compelling
that it became a best-seller in France.
However, Foucault's
viewpoint is not as anti-political as previously
thought. Marx's economic philosophy was the subject of the book's explicit
critique of Marxism, which amounts to the assertion that this economics is
essentially a variation of nineteenth-century political economy. Thus, it does
not represent a complete rejection of Marxism or the significance of economics.
His anti-humanist stance was not inherently anti-Marxist because Althusser held
a similar view inside a Marxist framework, albeit one that tended to question
some of the fundamental principles of Marxism and was disapproved by the
Marxist establishment. This demonstrates how political criticism of the
"man" category can be used effectively. Finally, the goal of
Foucault's "archaeological" approach to research—looking at discourse
transformations in their own terms without reference to the
extra-discursive—does not inherently imply that discursive transformations can
be explained without reference to anything non-discursive; rather, it merely
implies that they can be mapped without such a reference. Thus, Foucault
displays a lack of interest in politics but does not overtly discount their
significance.
During this period, Foucault was
primarily focused on the study of language. This cannot be taken as politically
neutral in and of itself. During the 1960s, there was a pervasive intellectual
trend in France to place more importance on avant-garde literature than on
working-class politics as the primary repository for radical hopes. During this
time, Foucault published numerous works on literature and art, including a book
on the little-known French poet Raymond Roussel that came out on the same day
as The Birth of the Clinic. This was not too far from Roussel's observations on
literature in The History of Madness, given his quirkiness. Modern literature
and art are fundamentally subversive, according to Foucault. The theme of
transgression appears frequently in Foucault's writings from the 1960s; for
him, the transgressions of lunacy and literary modernism are intimately
connected to the threat to the dominant episteme that he perceives as rising.
What Represents an Author? possibly Foucault's best-known essay in this regard,
is the culmination of his literary interest. ", which questions the idea
of the human "author" of a work in any genre by fusing some of the
topics from his final book of the 1960s, The Archaeology of Knowledge, with
thoughts on contemporary literature. No matter how abstract, each of these
works has political and cultural implications for Foucault. Given the
significance he gave to discourses during this time, it may be said that
challenging "man's" suzerainty was his political project. The History
of Madness demonstrates the relevance of these questions in real-world situations.
However, Foucault finally
found fault with this strategy. In the final chapter of The Archaeology of
Knowledge, which is a reflective analysis of the methodology of archaeology as
a whole, Foucault engages in an exceptional self-critical conversation in which
he addresses hypothetical criticisms of this approach.
Genealogy
The Archaeology of Knowledge was written by
Foucault while he was residing in Tunisia, where he had accepted a three-year
university job in 1966. The world around him altered as he was finishing the
novel. Many of his students participated in protests against the government as
Tunisia experienced a political revolution. He was persecuted as a result of
being persuaded to support them. Soon later, in May 1968, there were much
larger, more significant student demonstrations in Paris. Due to his location
in Tunis, Foucault largely missed these, but he closely followed news of them.
In 1969, he moved permanently back to France.
He was appointed the head of Vincennes' brand-new university's philosophy
department. In stark contrast to the rather unpoliticized nation he had left
behind three years earlier, the milieu he returned to in France was itself very
politicised. His partner Daniel Defert, as well as the majority of the peers he
had employed for his department, were among his peers who had become devoted militants. He immediately plunged himself into activism, which would
come to define his life moving forward.
It didn't take long for his thoughts to take on
a new course to match. This was initially made clear in his 1970 inaugural
speech for a second new position, his second in as many years as a professor at
the Collège de France, France's top academic institution. The Order of
Discourse, a book based on this speech, was released in France (which is one of
the multiple titles under which it has been translated in English). Foucault
lays out an explicit strategy for analysing institutions alongside discourse for
the first time. Much of "The Order of Discourse" effectively
recapitulate Foucault's thinking up to that point, the considerations of the
history of madness and the regimes of truth that have governed scientific
discourse, leading to a sketch of a mode of discourse analysis similar to that
of The Archeology of Knowledge. He had done this in the early 1960s, but now he
proposed it as a deliberate method, which he called "genealogy."
However, in the closing chapters, Foucault declares that he would now conduct
studies in two separate directions: "genealogical" and
"critical," where "genealogical" refers to the study of the
historical development of exclusionary systems. This is unmistakably a return
to The History of Madness's ideas.
Although the term "genealogical" does
reflect a debt to one who came before him, namely Friedrich Nietzsche, the
genealogical orientation is more original – not only within Foucault's work but
in Western philosophy generally. The question raised by the genealogy
investigation concerns the interdependence between discourse construction and
exclusionary mechanisms. The main idea here is that excluded discourses do not
necessarily suffer exclusion. Instead, discourses are only ever produced within
and as a result of exclusionary institutions, with the negative moment of
exclusion existing alongside the positive moment of discourse formation. For
Foucault, discourse is now a political issue in the truest sense of the word
because it is linked to issues of power.
In this text, Foucault hardly even refers to
"power" by that name, yet it develops into the key idea of his work
during the 1970s. Two significant books, eight annual lecture series he
delivered at the Collège de France, and a profusion of lesser writings and
interviews make up this body of work. Foucault now sees power and knowledge as
indissolubly connected, so that one never has either one without the other, and
neither has causal suzerainty over the other. His concept of
"power-knowledge" is his distinctive idea, merging the new focus on
power with the earlier one on discourse.
Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, the title of his first lecture series at the Collège de France, expands on the themes of "The Order of Discourse" by focusing on the creation of knowledge. The following two lecture series, which both focused on the prison system and were given between 1971 and 1973, contained more overtly political material. These lectures were a prelude to Foucault's 1975 book Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, which was his first comprehensive genealogy.
Discipline
Activism inspired the start of this prison
research. Following May 1968, the French government outlawed a number of
radical leftist organisations, leading to the imprisonment of thousands of
their members. While imprisoned, these individuals started to demand political
rights for themselves before moving on to demand rights for all prisoners after
becoming familiar with the issues faced by regular inmates. The Groupe
d'informations sur les prisons, which was essentially born out of this
struggle, was organised outside the prison by Foucault (the GIP – the Prisons
Information Group). By sending surveys to prisoners and compiling their
responses, this group, which was primarily made up of intellectuals, merely aimed
to enable prisoners to recount their experiences in their own words.
Alongside this endeavour, Foucault studied the
history of the prisons in an effort to learn what the inmates themselves were
unable to do: how the prison system came to be and what function it served in
society at large. His history of the prisons turns out to be a history of a
form of authority that Foucault refers to as "disciplinary," which is
similar to but much broader than the modern prison system. Thus, there are two
main historical theses that are discipline and punishment. One, specifically
relating to the prison system, is that this system frequently produces a layer
of skilled criminal recidivists, an effect that is well-known from empirical
research. For Foucault, this is merely what prisons do in an objective manner.
The common justification for imprisonment, that prisons are there to deter
crime by punishing and rehabilitating inmates, is undermined by bringing this
up. Foucault considers the obvious counterargument to this, namely that better
psychological management of rehabilitation is necessary and that prisons only
have these effects because they have historically been run ineffectively. He
responds by pointing out that such discourses of prison reform have accompanied
the prison system ever since it was first established and are therefore a
necessary component of its functioning, in fact, supporting it despite its
flaws by constantly offering a justification for why it can be made to function
differently.
Discipline and Punish's overarching thesis are
that we live in a disciplinary society, with prisons serving as merely one
stark illustration. Prior to the establishment of professional armies, which
required dressage, and the instruction of individual soldiers in their movements so they could precisely coordinate with one another, discipline had its roots not in prisons but in monastic institutions. From there, it spread
throughout society. It was crucial to creating "docile bodies," which
Foucault refers to as the fundamental building block of disciplinary power. The
prison is just one of a raft of broadly similar disciplinary institutions that
come into existence later. Schools, hospitals, and factories all combine
similar methods to prisons for arranging bodies regularly in space, down to
their minute movements. All combine moreover comparable duties. They all have
components related to education, economic productivity, and health care, just
like a prison. Which aspect takes precedence determines how these institutions
differ from one another.
For Foucault, all disciplinary institutions
also perform another quite novel action: they create a "soul" based
on the body in order to confine the body. This bizarre formulation by Foucault
aims to capture how disciplinary power has become more and more
personal to individuals. With the execution of a man in 1757 who had attempted
to kill the King of France, Discipline and Punish paints a vivid picture of an
earlier form of power in France. As was customary, the most severe punishment
was meted out for this most heinous of crimes in a political system centred on
the person of the king: the offender was publicly tortured to death. Foucault
contrasts this with the routinized imprisonment that became the primary form of
punishing criminals in the 19th century. From a form of power that was punished by
extraordinary and exemplary physical harm against a few transgressors, Western
societies adopted a form of power that attempted to capture all individual
behaviour. This is illustrated by a particular example that has become one of
the best-known images from Foucault’s work, the influential scheme of
nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham called the “Panopticon,” a prison
in which every action of the inmates would be visible. This serves as something
of a paradigm for the disciplinary imperative, though it was never realised
completely in practice.
Systems of monitoring and control nevertheless spread through all social institutions: schools, workplaces, and the family. While criminals had in a sense already been punished individually, they were not treated as individuals in the full sense that now developed. Disciplinary institutions such as prisons seek to develop detailed individual psychological profiles of people and seek to alter their behaviour at the same level. Where previously most people had been part of a relatively undifferentiated mass, individuality being the preserve of a prominent or notorious few, and even then, a relatively thin individuality, a society of individuals now developed, where everyone is supposed to have their own individual life story. This constitutes the soul Foucault refers to.
Sexuality
His next book, the first of his History of
Sexuality's three volumes, continues the theme of individualization. The Will
to Knowledge is the name he assigned to this book. It debuted a mere 12 months
after Discipline and Punish. Nevertheless, between his lectures on penitential and the book on sexuality, three courses at the Collège de France
are in between. The first, Psychiatric Power, applies Foucault's genealogical
method to the history of psychiatry and picks up chronologically where The
History of Madness had left off. The next year, in 1975, Foucault offered a series
of lectures entitled Abnormal. Through a study of the category of the abnormal,
to which criminals, the insane, and sexual "perverts" were all put,
these studies integrate prison research with studies on psychiatry and the
issue of sexuality. The Will to Knowledge does in fact effectively reuses
several of these lectures.
The Will to Knowledge, like Discipline and
Punish, provides both broad and detailed conclusions. The repressive
hypothesis, which Foucault refers to as a debunking of particular received
wisdom in relation to the history of sexuality, is the idea that while our
sexuality has historically been repressed, particularly in the nineteenth
century, it has gradually been liberated throughout the twentieth century and
that we now need to get rid of any remaining stigmas about sex by speaking
openly and candidly about it. Although Foucault accepts the fundamental
historical claim that there has been sexual repression, he believes that this
has no bearing on the development of sexuality. Much more significant, in his
opinion, is a prohibition against discussing our sexuality that has
consistently been in place even during the years of repression and is currently
being strengthened, presumably in an effort to lift our repression. Once more,
Foucault observes a form of punishment in action: confession. This started in
the Catholic confessional, and in the early modern era, the Church propagated
the confessional urge with respect to sex throughout society. According to
Foucault, this impulse has subsequently become secular, especially with the
help of institutional psychiatry, resulting in widespread pressure on people, to be honest about themselves, with their sexuality as a specific focus. In
Foucault's view, there is no sex outside of this urge. That is to say,
sexuality itself has been created and forced rather than being something we
naturally possess.
His genealogy of sexuality has the connotation that "sex" as we currently understand it is a modern "device" (dispositif) of sexuality. This encompasses both the notion of "sex" in the gendered sense, as implied by Foucault in his introduction to the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite who lived in the nineteenth century, and the category of the sexual, which includes specific organs and activities. The recent "third wave" of feminist thought has been greatly influenced by Foucault's ideas, particularly his work on sexuality. There is a separate article in this encyclopaedia that talks specifically about the relationship between Foucault and feminism.
Power
The Will to Knowledge's central thesis, as well
as Foucault's entire political philosophy, is his response to the question of
the origins of social constructs like sex and discipline. Who or thing is in
charge of encouraging criminal behaviour through incarceration? The answer
provided by Foucault can be summed up in one word: "power." This
means that no one, in particular, is responsible for creating these things;
rather, they are the results of the interaction of power relations, which
result in intentions of their own that are not always shared by individuals or
institutions. The conclusion of The Will to Knowledge that covers the most
ground is Foucault's explanation of power. The Will to Knowledge is his most
in-depth analysis of power, even if similar observations on it can be found in
Discipline and Punish as well as in lectures and interviews from the same time
period.
When people interact in society, wherever power
relations exist, "strategies" are created as a result of the
concatenation of these power relations, according to Foucault. These relations
are a question of people acting on one another to cause other people to act in
turn, as he argues in a later essay, "The Subject and Power," which
basically concludes the description of power provided in The Will to Knowledge.
This is power whenever we try to persuade others. But rarely do our attempts to
sway others go as planned, and even when they succeed, we are rarely aware of
the wider implications of our influence on others. In this way, the social
consequences of our efforts to influence others are mostly beyond our
comprehension or control. It creates techniques that almost have a life of
their own. Therefore, despite the fact that no one in the prison system,
including the inmates, the guards, or the politicians, wants jails to generate
a particular class of criminals, this is what is happening as a result of
everyone's activities.
The debate over Foucault's political beliefs
has centred on his revised understanding of power. However, criticisms of him
on this issue consistently miss the mark or ask the question in opposition to
it by merely restating the viewpoints he has rejected. According to certain
interpretations, he believed that power was an enigmatic, autonomous force that
existed without any human interference and was so all-pervasive as to prohibit
any opposition. Although it is obviously somewhat challenging to understand his
perspective, Foucault makes it plain in The Will to Knowledge that this is not
the case, precisely that resistance to power is not external power. For
Foucault, the key idea is not that resistance is pointless, but rather that
power is so pervasive that it does not, by itself, stand in the way of
resistance. Only specific forms of power can be resisted, and even then, only
very hard due to the propensity of methods to include seemingly opposing
inclinations. But power is never seen by Foucault as being monolithic or
autonomous; rather, he sees it as the result of relationships that appear
stable on the surface but are actually continually moving as a result of
ongoing human conflict. For Foucault, apparently peaceful and civilised social
arrangements are supported by people locked in a struggle for supremacy, which
is eternally susceptible to change, via the force of that struggle itself.
Foucault explains this in terms of the inversion of Clausewitz's dictum that
war is diplomacy by other means into the claim that "politics is war by
other means."
However, many liberal observers have criticised
Foucault for his relativism, or lack of any normative distinction between power
and resistance. He continuously avoids adopting any overtly normative attitude
in his reasoning; therefore, this criticism is well-founded. Thus, he does not
normatively justify resistance, but it is not immediately apparent that non-normative resistance involves any intrinsic contradiction. Although it is
obvious that people who hold the widely held view in political philosophy that
it is impossible to have non-normative political thought will reject him on the
basis of this, his argument is coherent. For his part, he makes no
recommendations as to what is right or wrong, merely evaluations that he
believes will be helpful to people facing difficulties in specific
circumstances.
The most well-known German philosopher currently alive, Jürgen Habermas, made one final charge that deserves special attention. The charge is that Foucault's analysis of power is "functionalist," which in sociology refers to viewing society as a functional whole and reading each component as serving a unique purpose. The issue with this perspective is that society was not intentionally created, thus a lot of it is redundant or happened by mistake. Although Foucault occasionally uses the word "function" to describe how power works, he does not adhere to or even acknowledge functionalism as a school of thought. In any event, he does not believe that society is a whole or whole because of any need; rather, he believes that strategies evolve organically from below and that any element's functions are flexible.
Biopower
Foucault's view on resistance is that one must
start cautiously in order to avoid merely aiding a strategy of authority while
believing oneself to be rebellious, rather than that one is defeated before one
even begins. For him, the repressive hypothesis' effects on sexuality are
summarised in this way. Despite our efforts to free ourselves from sexual
repression, we actually support a power play that we are unaware of. The goal
of this tactic is for everyone to identify as "'subjects' in both meanings
of the word," a practice that Foucault calls "subjection"
(assujettissement). Here, we have passive and active senses. On the one hand,
we are subjected to this process; for instance, medical personnel may turn us
into passive research subjects. On the other hand, we are the ones who must
deliberately disclose our sexual tendencies and, in the course of doing so,
create an identity based on this admitted sexuality. Therefore, power functions
in both blatantly repressive and more constructive ways.
For Foucault, sexuality plays an
extraordinarily significant role in the current system of power relations.
Foucault describes how sexuality had its beginnings as a preoccupation of the
newly dominant bourgeois class, who were obsessed with physical and
reproductive health, and their own pleasure. It has come to be seen as the
essence of our personal identity, and sex has come to be seen as "worth
dying for." Although it is clear that it would have been forced onto women
and children in that class regardless of their choices, this class did produce
sexuality in a positive way. According to Foucault, the device of sexuality has
four recurrent strategies: pathologizing the sexuality of women and children,
concurrently medicalizing the sexually deviant "pervert," and
creating sexuality as a topic of public interest. Foucault believes that public
health organisations have been pushing sexuality more bluntly on the rest of
the population since its inception in the bourgeoisie, completely without their
will.
Why did this occur? The fundamental
justification offered by Foucault is how sexuality links together many
"technologies of power," including discipline on the one hand and a
more recent technology he refers to as "bio-politics" on the other.
Foucault refers to this fusion of discipline and bio-politics as
"bio-power" in The Will to Knowledge, but confusingly he also appears
to employ the terms interchangeably elsewhere, most notably in his 1976 lecture
series, Society Must Be Defended. He also uses these words without hyphens in
other places, as we shall do throughout the remainder of this article.
A technology of power that developed from
disciplinary power is biopolitics. In contrast to discipline, which focuses on controlling
individual bodies, biopolitics focuses on controlling entire communities. In
contrast to discipline, which established people as such, biopolitics
establishes people as such. Before the development of biopolitics, governments
only made sporadic, violent interventions to quell uprisings or impose taxes,
making no meaningful endeavour to control the inhabitants of a territory.
Similar to discipline, the Church was the organisation that kept track of
births, and deaths, and provided aid to the needy and ill during the Middle Ages.
This makes the Church the primary antecedent of biopolitics. Governments began
to believe during the modern era that interfering in people's daily lives would
have positive effects on the state, preventing depopulation, maintaining a
steady and expanding tax base, and supplying a steady stream of soldiers for
the military. As a result, they became involved in people's daily lives.
Institutions, most notably perhaps medical ones that allowed the state to
monitor and support the population's health, and discipline mechanisms allowed
the state to accomplish this. Because any intervention in the population via the
management of individual bodies had to basically be about reproduction and
because sex is one of the main vectors of disease transmission, sex was the
most intensive point at which discipline and biopolitics interacted. In order
to bring the population under control, sex had to be managed, regulated, and
watched over.
However, there is another technology of power
at work, one that is older than discipline, namely "sovereign power,"
a technology that operates primarily through aggression and taking, as opposed
to constructively promoting and producing, as both discipline and biopolitics
do. Historically, governments dealt with both small groups of individuals and
large populations using this sort of power. Although discipline and biopower
have taken its position in these two functions, it still has a place at the
biopower's upper bounds. The state continues to fall back on hard force as a
last resort when order and population regulation break down. Furthermore, the
state still uses brute force—or the fear of it—to deal with matters that arise
beyond its borders.
In Foucault's view, biopolitics and sovereign
power are mutually incompatible. In fact, he occasionally refers to government
as "thanatopolitics," the politics of death, as opposed to the
politics of life in biopolitics. Instead of murdering you or, at best, allowing
you to live, thanatopolitics operates by assisting in your survival. Despite a
potential clash between various states or state agencies, it seems impossible
for somebody to be held in both kinds of power at once. There must be a line
drawn between the two, between those who must be "made to live," in Foucault's
words, and those who must be put to death or left to live their lives
indifferently. The border that separates a territory's residents from its
outsiders is the most evident dividing line, but the "biopolitical
border," as it has been dubbed by modern scholars, is distinct from the
territorial border. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault proposes a mechanism
he terms "state racism" that plays a variety of roles in determining
who would gain from biopolitics and who will be exposed to the risk of death.
Although Foucault does not use this phrase in any of the writings, he self-published, he did indicate in The Will to Knowledge that biopolitics and racism are closely related. In the eighteenth century, scientific racism discourses proposed a connection between an individual's sexual "degeneracy" and the general hygiene of the population. Early in the 20th century, nearly all industrialised nations adopted some form of eugenics, the pseudoscience that aims to increase population viability through selective breeding. Of course, Nazi Germany was where it manifested itself most fully. However, Foucault makes it very evident that attempts to connect the ancient notion of "blood" to contemporary concerns with population health are inherently paradoxical. Since there must be a boundary drawn in modern biopolitical governments between what is part of the population and what is not, this is racist in a broad sense, rather than necessarily having a connection to what we may typically interpret as racism in its literal sense.
Governmentality
Following The Will to Knowledge's release,
Foucault took a year off from giving lectures at the Collège de France. He made
a comeback in 1978 with a set of lectures that logically followed those from
1976 but displayed a major change in conceptual vocabulary. The term
"biopolitics" is seldom ever mentioned. In its place,
"governmentality" is a fresh idea. Despite the rather misleading
title of the latter in this regard, the lecture series from 1978 and 1979,
Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics, centres on this
idea.
Governmentality is the logic by which a
polity is governed; the word "governmentality" is a portmanteau
created from the phrase "governmental rationality." However,
according to Foucault's genealogy approach (which he still maintains), this
logic is not only ideal but rather embraces institutions, behaviours, and
ideas. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault defined governmentality as
allowing for a complex type of power that "has the population as its goal,
political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security
as its essential technological instrument" (pp. 107–8). Confusingly,
however, Foucault also identifies additional senses in which he will use the term
"governmentality," including the broader tendency in Western history
that has led to it and the precise process in the early modern period by which
modern governmentality was produced.
The term "governmentality" is so
ambiguous. Nevertheless, it is a crucial one. Governmentality seems to have
replaced biopolitics in Foucault's thinking because it appears to be roughly
contemporaneous and functionally isomorphic. However, unlike biopolitics, it
never appears in any of his significant publications; instead, he only
consented to the publication of one key lecture from Security, Territory, and
Population under the heading "Governmentality" in an Italian journal.
This idea was introduced to English speakers through the article's English
translation; in fact, Foucault's one piece served as the foundation for an
entire school of sociological analysis.
So, what
does this ambiguous term mean? Biopower is never rejected by Foucault. He
reiterates his interest in biopower as a subject of study throughout these
lectures, even in 1983, the year before he passed away. The purpose of the idea
of "governmentality" is to place biopower in a broader historical
context, one that goes further back in time and includes additional components,
including economic discourses and economic regulation.
The two key stages in the emergence of governmentality are described by Foucault. The primary focus of Security, Territory, and Population is what he refers to as raison d'État, which is French for "reason of state." This governmentality gave way by the eighteenth century to a new form of governmentality, what will become 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. It correlates the technology of discipline, as an attempt to regulate society to the fullest extent, with what was contemporaneously called "police." We find freedom of the individual and population control delicately entwined with this governmentality, which for Foucault is broadly the governmentality that has persisted to the present day and is the subject of study in The Birth of Biopolitics.
Ethics
In terms of the discourses, he pays attention
to and the terminology he employs, Foucault's work underwent a considerable
change in the 1980s. The concepts of "subjectivity" and
"ethics," in particular, are heavily used from this point forward.
While none of these aspects is wholly new to his work, they take on fresh
significance and combination at this point. He concentrates mostly on ancient
literature from Greece and Rome.
The ethics of Foucault are covered in another
article in this encyclopaedia. What significance do these ethics have for
politics in particular? It is frequently believed that the goal of Foucault's
ethics is to abandon his former political projects and his earlier political
ideas, moving away from politics and toward individual action. Such claims
contain a tiny bit of truth, but only a tiny bit. While it is undeniable that
Foucault's shift to the consideration of ethics marks a departure from an
explicitly political engagement, there is no renunciation or contradiction of
his earlier views—only the provision of subjectivity and ethics account that
can improve these.
Like his earlier turn towards power, Foucault is now turning towards subjectivity to give his accounts
and method more depth. As in the case of power, he accomplishes this by
creating a new approach rather than adopting an existing one: Foucault's own
account of subjectivity is unique and very dissimilar from the existing
accounts of subjectivity he previously criticised in his earlier work.
According to Foucault, subjectivity has to do with a person's capacity to
control their own behaviour. His explanation ties up with his earlier writing
on government in that subjectivity is a question of self-management. As a
result, it is strongly related to his political philosophy because it concerns
the power that permeates a person's interior.
These definitions also include
"ethics." In the same way that the term "political
philosophy" is commonly used to refer to normative politics, Foucault
does not produce "ethics" in the sense that the term is used today
to denote normative morality. For Foucault, the term "ethics" is
better understood etymologically in the context of Ancient Greek reflection on
the ethike, or character. What Foucault refers to as the "care of the
self"—basically a technique of fashioning the self—marked ancient Greek
ethics. Although he is clear that no truly ethical practices exist now and that
it is by no means certain that they can be re-established, Foucault finds in
such practices a potential basis for resistance to power. Contrarily,
Christianity's masticatory approach toward the self has abnegated ethics. The
Government of the Self and Others, The Courage of the Truth, and The
Hermeneutics of the Subject, which is the last three lecture series Foucault
gave at the Collège de France, are the main sources for this view of ethics.
For More Articles Check This...
Comments
Post a Comment