Enlightenment begins in and returns to myth throughout its development: promises of freedom, happiness and knowledge remain unredeemed. Enlightenment was disenchantment - it wanted to dispel myths and overthrow fantasy with knowledge.
Disenchantment comes from Weber.
Modernity is the age of disenchantment - God retires from Earth, he does not take part in its secular events anymore. Something about the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism - disenchantment as part of the protestant faith.
Enlightenment just puts a different kind of enchantment into the world instead. Capitalism creates new social distortions, important to keep in mind the reasons. Self and world-relations are only considered in terms of their use-value, everything is a means to an end, the end of accumulation of capital, maximizing shareholder value.
Things under capitalism are commodities, they are reducible to a certain price, the worth of everything can be calculated in money.
This is bad (‽‽‽‽‽)
For Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion. Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence (through money).
Before Galileo and Descartes nobody believed that the laws of the world could be expressed mathematically (or at all perhaps).
Galileo apparently says that math is the language of God’s creation, rather than words as they were in the Bible or whatnot
After Enlightenment, the globalized market starts to penetrate all spheres of life. This is the starting point of Marx’s philosophy, in a capitalist/bourgeois society there is no escape from capitalization/capitalism/our perspective of things as commodities, including relationships.
Enlightenment leads to a reckless maximization of gains.
Zweckrational thinking is independent from subjectivity. Thinking is a mere “ritual,” there is no critical dimension to it, they just do it mechanically.
People who behave like this will become progressively incapable of seeing reason’s destructive tendencies.
This is where a new ideology starts, according to the authors. The ideology lies in a blind calculation. We can conceptualize “100” without thinking about the individual composition of those 100 “things.” What Brentano called “symbolic” thinking. We indicate full-fledged things with extensions (not sure if this is the right word to use) simply by their reference, this is basically a form of shorthand.
“Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. […] Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought.”
ein gesselschaftlicher Verblendungszusammenhang
I’m going to ape my machine.
Foucault
Foucault was apparently gay. He was very depressed because he was gay (gay and depressed lmao). Experienced personally the repression of queer people, tried to commit suicide in uni.
He was thinking through social and psychological norms in European society a lot. Was a critical thinker, and because of his homo position he couldn’t find a position at any university in France. After his philosophy studies he went to Germany, Prague where he had different functions (with coleslaw). Ultimately came back to Paris where he got the chair of the “history of systems of thought” in the College de France.
Foucault was an active participant in the 1968 revolt in France. And it was dangerous to make him an actual professor because “he could do something with the students” (lol).
Mostly concerned with the critical inquiry into the origin of “human sciences:“
education, psychology, anthropology, ethnology, economics, sociology, psychiatry, theology, law etc.
He goes back to the 19th century to understand the origins of the society contemporary to him.
This is his “archeology.” The episteme defines how a certain scientific practice refers to the things it examines, and how it determines the objects of itself.
The episteme is the mediative space between the scientist and their objects.
Psychiatry, for instance, is the science of madness. Its episteme is the meta-configuration that allows the scientist to identify the object of its inquiry - namely, madness. According to Foucault, the episteme is not an entity that has existed for all of humanity’s existence, but takes shape in the 19th century.
It changes throughout time, and as a result the science of madness of today and ancient Greece are completely different.
His Archeology, thus, divides the history of Western society on epistemic configurations that succeed each other.
Foucault then comes to “genealogy,” a virulent critique of modern that emerged as a consequence of his archeological project. This is also what we will be studying.
Discipline and punish
Surveiller et punir!!
Foucault wants to make visible the power practices that work in accordance with the rationally ordered apparatus of ideas [science]
The notion of a person is a legal notion (Hobbes, Locke) under which even the King is subjected in a constitutional monarchy. We are only people insofar as we are protected by the system of rights.
Althusser said “Foucault and I were the two mad guys in France, and one of us was cured.” Because Foucault was gay he got cured, and Althusser killed his wife (also somewhat gay ig?).
Discipline exists in the techniques through which the body is controlled, it is a kind of physics because it molds the psycho-physical configuration of the human body, it’s an anatomy because it must understand the physiology of the human body in relation to the mind.
Discipline will not destroy its subject, it will enhance their power.
micro-physics of discipline teehee