Christopher Pollard, writing for 'the Conversation', explains the ideas of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was one of the most famous thinkers of the late 20th century, achieving celebrity-like status before his untimely death in 1984.
He continued to have unprotected sex in bath-houses even after the danger posed by AIDS became known. He literally 'died of ignorance'- as the slogan of the period put it.
His academic career culminated in a 1970 appointment as “professor of history of systems of thought” at France’s most prestigious university – the College de France.
The French had been exporting their stupidity to American Campuses. There was a Cold War aspect to this. The hope was that crazy Professors like Foucault would help split the Communist Party in France or, at the very least, confuse the fuck out of its ideologues.
This unusual title was created because of the distinctive nature of Foucault’s work, which straddled disciplines such as philosophy, history, and politics.
He was impartially ignorant of all three.
Foucault was interested in power and social change.
Both are related to raising general purpose productivity. They are wholly unrelated to the activities of pedants or pedagogues.
In particular, he studied how these played out as France shifted from a monarchy to democracy via the French revolution.
But France quickly shifted back to Emperors and Kings till there were three different pretenders to the Throne in a dysfunctional Third Republic. America's revolution was more successful.
He believed that we have tended to oversimplify this transition by viewing it as an ongoing and inevitable attainment of “freedom” and “reason”.
Though political freedom had in fact increased and science did in fact displace religion and customary practices.
This, he said, had caused us to misunderstand the way that power operates in modern societies.
The exercise of power uses up scarce resources. Either power is exercised in a manner which raises factor productivity or else, at the margin, it is lost.
For instance, even though the new form of government no longer relied on torture,
sure it did- it just didn't publicize it.
and public hangings as punishments,
the last public beheading in France took place in 1939. About 10,000 collaborators were hanged in 1945. Capital punishment was only abolished in 1981.
it still sought to control people’s bodies — by focusing on their minds.
Foucault was a sado-masochist. He didn't understand that very few people want to 'control bodies' or torture people by shoving pineapples up their bums. Governments sought to steer the population into productive activities so as to be able to raise resources through taxation.
In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.
These were not new institutions. The Bastille had existed since the fourteenth century. Schools and almshouses and prisons and workshops had existed even in Roman times.
No society does not have some type of 'discipline' and 'surveillance'- i.e. a police force to catch and beat criminals and watchmen and spies and so forth.
These institutions produced obedient citizens who comply with social norms, not simply under threat of corporal punishment, but as a result of their behaviour being constantly sculpted to ensure they fully internalise the dominant beliefs and values.
This may have been true of Stalinist Russia. It wasn't true of France in any period.
In Foucault’s view, new “disciplinary” sciences (for instance, criminology, psychiatry, education) aimed to make all “deviance” visible, and thus correctable, in a way that was impossible in the previous social order.
The guy was paranoid. He was lucky to have a very good psychiatrist- a pioneer in the use of lithium salts. Still, we can understand his appeal to stoned hippies on campus who thought Mummy & teechur & the pigs were trying to get them to stop taking drugs and go work for IBM.
He used English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 Panopticon as a metaphor to illustrate his point.
Why not just use the open plan office? Bentham's panopticon was never built.
This was a circular prison designed to lay each inmate open to the scrutiny of a central watchtower, which was positioned so that individual prisoners could never know when they are being watched.
They would masturbate more if they thought they were being watched. It makes sense for a factory supervisor to be positioned above the workers so that he can check they are busy at work. You can fire a lazy worker. What can you do to a lazy prisoner or one who masturbates incessantly? By the time Foucault published his silly book, CCTVs had been around for two decades.
The prisoners therefore always had to act as though they were being watched.
Some might do because they wanted to be released early for good behaviour. Others were too crazy or impulsive.
In the wider world, he argued, this resulted in docile people who could fit into the discipline of factories, mental institutions, and the dominant sexual morality.
What makes people docile is the need to earn money to buy food. Human beings are a self-domesticated species.
Foucault argued that people with “mental illnesses” (formerly known as madness) were controlled by relentless efforts at correction to a scientifically determined “norm”.
He was angry that his Mummy and his Teachers and his Doctors discouraged him from eating his own shit.
His 1976 History of Sexuality Volume 1 argued that, rather than talking about deviant acts, scientists talked about deviant types, such as “the pervert” or “the homosexual”, who were in need of concerted efforts of medical intervention and correction.
The American Psychiatric Association had stopped labelling homosexuality a psychiatric illness three years previously. The French had decriminalized it after the Revolution.
Foucault argued that knowledge and power are intimately bound up.
They aren't. People with money can hire people with knowledge. Those with power may be able to conscript them.
So much so, that that he coined the term “power/knowledge” to point out that one is not separate from the other.
Yet they were completely separate.
Every exercise of power depends on a scaffold of knowledge that supports it.
None does. Hitler had little in the way of knowledge. He had plenty of power.
And claims to knowledge advance the interests and power of certain groups while marginalising others.
No. Anybody at all can claim any old shit. Nobody gets marginalized just because someone says mean things about them.
In practice, this often legitimises the mistreatment of these others in the name of correcting and helping them.
The law makes certain actions legitimate. Even if you claim to be correcting and helping a person by shoving a pineapple up his ass, the law considers your action illegitimate. This made Foucault very sad.
What has made Foucault so appealing to such a broad range of scholars
is that he published stupid, paranoid, shit and yet was considered a great intellectual. But the result of idolizing Foucault, Derrida, Delueze etc. was that those Academic Departments which did so became adversely selective of stupid shitheads.
is that he didn’t just look at abstract theories of philosophy or of historical change.
because he was too stupid.
Rather, he analysed what was actually said.
But he didn't understand what was said. He was too crazy.
In his most important works, this included an analysis of texts, images and buildings in order to map how forms of knowledge change.
He failed. The plain fact is that forms of knowledge change as its application become more or less productive. There can also be knowledge transfer or mimetic effects. However, if these are not economically 'reinforced'- if if their applications don't 'pay for themselves'- they wither on the vine.
For example, he argued that sexuality was not simply repressed in the 19th century.
It was in some places but not others.
Rather, it was widely discussed in an expanding new scientific literature
which only existed where productivity was rising thanks to the application of new scientific ideas and technologies.
where patients were encouraged to talk about sexual experiences in clinical settings.
as opposed to brothel settings.
With the recent explosion in surveillance cameras as well the role of “big data” we have now well and truly entered the surveillance society.
Which is why people have become docile and have given up masturbation, sodomy and saying mean things about Neo-Liberalism.
Foucault’s insights on this topic continue to be explored by scholars across the social sciences and humanities.
i.e. the shitty parts of the University which ought to be defunded.
He has also had a substantial influence on contemporary work in sexuality and gender,
e.g. calling JK Rowling a Fascist TERF.
sociological studies of mental health institutions and of the medical profession;
which are a waste of time. Still, it is a damning indictment of Neo-Liberalism that my proctologist gets to put his finger up my asshole but refuses to let me do the same to him. Is it coz I iz bleck?
and in history, politics, cultural studies, and beyond.
i.e. the sort of stuff in which getting a PhD qualifies you to be a barrista.
An important feature of his theory is that where there is power there is also always resistance.
Unless the resistance is crushed.
So there are always “sites of resistance”: spaces that hold out the promise for a reconfiguring of power relations in a way that might redress oppressive institutions and practices.
There are 'safe spaces' where mentally retarded people can claim that they are resisting Fascism, Nazism or the Spanish Inquisition.
For example, homosexuality has historically been reinterpreted as a “sin”, a “medical pathology”, and now a legitimate “sexuality”, showing how change is possible.
In some places this has happened. But, sadly, not in other. My impression is that it was the new mathematical evolutionary theory which showed why every population was bound to have a certain percentage of homosexuals. The thing was as natural as left-handedness.
But it is only through a deepened understanding of the origin and structure of our present social order that we will be able to grasp and seize future possibilities for social change.
No. Societies exist to solve collective action problems. But those problems change for economic and geopolitical reasons. While nutters on campuses are resisting imaginary evils, the country may go off a fiscal cliff. It may be invaded, the way Ukraine has been invaded. Actual resistance is what Zelensky's people are doing. It isn't some stupid shit a cheese-eating surrender monkey pulled out of his arse.
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