Continental
Foucault continued
Bases his text on a fight for the rights of prisoners.
The book is mainly about prison structure. Is about the disciplinary society generally, though uses prisons as a most basic example.
Was engaged in various political struggles, eg. homosexual rights, prison rights, algerian independence, Iranian freedom etc.
One of the most political french thinkers of the post-structuralist wave.
During his seminars at the college du France, there were agents from the CIA who observed what he taught in order to see that he teaches things that are okay.
He is not saying where to act revolutionarily, and as such is not really making marxist teachings, but was clearly Marxist in action.
Many other French thinkers were politically active privately, but their theory was entirely inapplicable to anything like action.
Many french theorists were maoists, though Althusser and Deleuze were not maoists, they criticised forms of domination that exists in every type of political system, and their philosophy amounts to becoming anarchistic.
Discipline is not primarily a restriction of the individual’s freedom, but its production as a social agent. Here takes place the production of ’workers’, ’students’, ’soldiers’, ’citizens’
In discipline agents are produced to fit into certain segments of society.
The modernity society needs all these different types of individuals, because it is so different at different points and so needs different kinds of citizens who can deal out very different types of work. You even need citizens who are able to speak and act in public life, we need to teach the ”leading”-class to be as such.
It is not entirely bad. Educate people, give them possibilities to particiapte in collective forms of decisionmaking, but it means they need to be shaped to fit into that role, not everyone can get into it.
”The Enligthenment discovered the liberties, and also invented the disciplines.”
You cannot grant liberties to anyone, you need to make sure that an individual can behave well in a certain situation.
Modern subjectivity, the idea of mankind, etc. are all products of disciplinary power. They are not mental constructs or ideas, but are materially produced social prototypes, obtained by bodily and mental training. All ideas have to have material ground, a Marxist idea that Foucault endorses.
”And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born.”
Humanism is the ideological result of material transformations of power in the 17:th and 18:th century. Foucault is heavily an anti-humanist thinker. He questions what it is, what it claims etc.
This has been a shared idea between the 60s French thinkers.
This contrasts Sartre, who was also heavily engaged in political struggles all over the world, who believed heavily in humanism.
The growth of European societies required ”citizens”, ie. Docile political agents.
Beginning of capitalist & industrial production which requires workers.
As such some strata of the population are conditioned throughout their lives to be able to deal with being a worker in a factory. The worker has to transform his body and movements in order to adapt to the machine.
Disciplines solves 2 problems here: the production of an efficient worker & production of a reasonable citizen.
”Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ’political’ force at the least cost and maximised as a useful force.
In Foucault’s methodology of micro-physics of power, he thereby rejects certain methodological categories like macro-methodologies: ie. The state, capitalism and so on.
He analyses power on the small scale rather than the large scale.
He distinguishes himself from critical theory and marxism which talks about huge compounds of individuals. These categories are not really valid any more in Foucault’s theory. [If there is something common among French thinkers at this time, it is that they analyse on the micro-level]
For Foucault we cannot understand anything about the novelty of modernity if we focus on the macro-level. But there is something intrinsically new in how it dominates its individuals, and this is something that escapes the categories of big narratives. Foucault is focusing on how these structures are concretely implented in the lives of these individuals. Events on the large political scale have to be bound back by the micrological level.
Two technics of the ’micro-physics of disciplinary power’
Static control: A kind of list wherein everything has its place. We can think of it like an excel table, where we can spatially distribute people to do things at certain places and certain times. ”In the eighteenth century, the table was both as a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge”
Tables also have a geneaological side to them; they are used to control individuals in the way that tables have to be put in a place that make sense.
”The first of the great operations of discipline is, therefore, the constitution of ’tableaux vivants’ which tansform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities.”
Outside of Versailles there is a huge lake that is conceived according to very exact geometrical plans, solidified in the classic age.
eg. Enclosure: exclusion & confinement (eg. for lepers, residential schools, military brracks, mad houses). The locking-away technique.
eg. Partitioning: ”each individual has its own place; and each place has its individual”, we conceive architectonically a site with different cells that has to be inhabitated by different individuals.
eg. Creation of Functional sites: spatial distribution of individuals for their efficient control (eg. a panopticon prison).
eg. Hierarchical ranking, or serialisation: ”Each pupil, according to his age, his performance, his behaviour, occupies sometimes another; he moves constantly fvoer a series of compartments – some of these are ’ideal’ compartments, making a hierarchy of knowledge or ability, others express the distribution of values or merits in material terms in the space of the college or classromm.”
Dynamic control:
Temporal organisation of movements & bodies
eg. the medieval monastary organisation of the day, praying at one time etc.
In the factory, each movement is disciplined by the movement of the machine.
Tempralisation of gestures; soldier’s parades.
Holistical shaping of the body; like sports.
Biopolitics:
This transforms the modern understanding of discipline.
eg. in History of Sexuality. [Which he couldn’t finished because he died rapidly of AIDS…]
”You Americans always invent new disesase, and now you invent a disease that will kill gay people, well done.”
He didn’t believe in AIDS.
Biopolitics is a form of control that takes into account the biological life of the citizens.
Through birth & mortality rates, general health insureance, hospitals.
Classification of expectancy and longevity.
The way in which we have things like health insurance plays a role in how we are controlled by eg the state.
Power in relationship to life & death. It takes into account the bios of us, the phsyiological animal life of our bodies.
”One might say that the ancient right to tkae life let live was replaced bu a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”
The new power seeks to foster and preserve life, or eventually to take away the security that individuals benefit from. If someone is put into prison, their social security is taken away, they are put to death by retrieving the security that other individuals benefit from. It is not an execution purely and simply, but it is taking away what they need to survive on a long-term basis.
So bio power manifest throgh the control of life and the regulation it imposes on birth, aging, childhood, public health. No one is put to death still.
Through this lens of analysis, different forms of power are visible in history.
Foucault’s biopolitics sheds a new light on the history of mankind in an understandable inner transformation of power, in households.
In the roman age: Patria postestas; power of the father. The father alone has absolute power and no state can intervene in it. He can do as he wishes with his things.
This changes in modernity, where power is now related to sovereignty. Power is now legally bound, and as such not an absolute privilege. Power has to be bound to a constitution. The monarch cannot decide to execute certain segments of society, but rather relies on them. The power of life and death is only acceptable when the sovereign faces vital danger. The monarch has to justify their decisions on the basis of the constitution.
Before the classic age, power intervenes mainly through negative acts. The classic age is a moment of transititon where republics and legal state apparatuses are invented.
In the classic age, deduction and substracting becomes only one of multiple forms of interventions; positive and preserving interventions are added.
[Strenght a kind of power more related to brute force; if someone attacks the king you take their arm and put it into boiling water, in order to show that the monarch strikes back through example. What is important here is that there is a kind of quasi-divine equilibrium of strength. If someone acts against the system, the monarch has to fight back with the same amount of strength.]
”Deduction has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise, and organise the forces under it: a power ben on generating forces, making them grown and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”
It is no longer discipline alone, but discipline together with biopower.
Disciplines (An anatomo-poltiics of the human body) & regulatory controls ( a biopolitics of the population).
Species. Biopower acts as a determination of the entire species. This is what he wants to say when he wants to say that it controls the life of the individuals.
The understanding of myself as a unique individual is a pre-determined form that everyone is put into; we are meant to learn to see ourselves as individuals.
Biopower focuses on the species.
”focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life”
”The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the orgranisation of power over life was deployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar technology – anatomic and biological, individualising and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life – chracterised a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.”
Foucault wrote his doctoral thesis on Kant’s anthropology which he also translated and added an introduction. Kant is also important in Les Mots et Les Choses.
Foucault thinks of Hermaphrodites as an example of a border-case of a sex that can or cannot take on common genders.
The entry of life into history: life now becomes a part of human history. It is theorised as something that is worth gaining our attention. Life enters into the general form of power. It enters our horison.
For Foucault, the state eists and is interested in and for efficiency. They are interested in that because there are spiritual demans in society that the state does not want to go against.
Lyotard:
”is a good dude”
professor doesn’t like Lyotard.
Was a professor at Paris dix, and Paris 8.
Was born in 1924.
He was a marxist. A socialist and part of an important group called socialisme ou barbari.
From the 50s onward they criticised strongly Marxism as being a form of state capitalism. They thought this went against socialism. Were anarchistic.
Only in 53 Stalin died, and from this time onwards, news about the gulags were published. This is the moment where most French intellectuals left the stalinist party in France, critiquing state communism.
Lyotard didn’t write important things.
”The object of this study is the condition kf knowledge in the most highly developed societies.”
information society = postmodern society
Lyotard wrote a book for the canadian government, a kind of study about what knowledge is in our society. The canadian government wanted to ask what the new trends were, so they asked fucking lyotard of all people.
”Postmodern” also means ”postindustrial”; ie. The biggest part of the industry has been moved outside of the west.
This does not mean that our society does not need industry, but that the wealth of these societies is mainly developed by something else than industry. This changes the kind of workers under these societies.
”postindustrial society bluntly said is a society of computers, information, scientific knowledge and so on”.
Postmodern society compared to modern is a twofold transformation.
Material and social, concering the mode of production and communication
& epistemological, concering the meaning and structure of knowledge.
Postmodernity to Lyotard is not necessarily anti-humanist as in Foucault, but it focuses on something else. It focuses on how information and identity is construed and made prevalent in society.
”And it is fair to say that for the last forty years the leading sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, compuers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data baks, telematics and the perfection of intelligent terminals, paradoxology.”
In postmodernity, language is made central, especially as code, both for society and science. The linguistic structuralist paradigm has already been implemented in a large scale in all human sciences. But also outside of them.
The structuralist dream of Levi-Strauss, was to give a new paradigm to the human sciences that would instill a similar revolution as the mathematical revolution of Newton. It was about making the human sciences rigorous, as a semantically closed system of code, in which one can do a kind of calculation, where the meaning emerges through the positioning of the thing in the system. Unfortunately unredeemed. ”Who still makes a phd in structuralism? NO ONE”.
Language is especially important in a postmodern society.
In the postmodern age, scientific knowledge becomes a kind of discourse. Same as in Adorno & Horkheimer.
”that the observable social bond is composed of langugage ’moves’”.
The notion of language ’moves’ refers to the later Wittgenstein and related to ordinary language theory with Austin. It is an implicit nudge to Wittgensteins Philosophical investigations. Everything can be reduced to language, a very structuralist idea, as in Levi-Strauss and Saussure.
The idea that every thing in society can be reduced to language, to how language operates, is something that Lyotard wants to add into his analysis.
Lyotard reduces society & sciences to language: language is their common feature.
A society based on linguistic structures ”language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist: even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course. Or more simply still, the question of the social bond, insofar as it is a question, is itself a language game.”
There is a social structure that precedes the baby’s birth, and since the baby already has a name before it is born, it already has a place in the system to fulfill. The functional site of the subject, the baby, is already there, and as such what the subject can unfold into is already pre-determined by the structure that precedes the baby.
What Wittgenstein understands as a language game, is that language should be understood how we understand a game. Here the game has already started. There are so many games, like poker, throwing balls at random and so on. And what is the common denominator? There isn’t one feature which all games have in common. If languages are like games, then they are multiply different with their own grammar and their own structure, and there is an infinite amount of different languages. This is why they are games. We constantly transit between different language games. These language games are the expression of the multi-layeredness of social structures, and also related to hierarchies. They are the expression of social structures, and maybe even the ontological support of the society itself. Society exists in these language games, and the multi-layered structure of society exists within them.
Languages are games, and all society can be understood as one. There is not one functioning to all different languages, but languages are what they are in relationship to the context in which they are used, this also means the practical context.
Games have a family resemblance. Much like a picture of a family photo.
Lyotard is inspired by Austin’s speech act theory
Words do not primarily vocalise a meaning and express an abstract signification
But words manipulate reality into a certain purposeful way.
Words don’t signify one static thing. The same name does not guarantee a sameness of meaning. The meaning only emerges in the specific context. They literally manipulate reality.
They are ways in which we configure and shape reality, words are a kind of doing.
For Austin, declarations are important, they literally change relations in the word.
Social positions are ’enacted’ by speech acts. By combining speech act theory to structuralism, he creates a kind of movement to the structures. People are not blindly subsumed by the structure in which they are placed – perhaps there are speech acts which displaces the structure. As such we are in a post-structuralist paradigm. We make the structure oscillate. We give it a certain dynamism.
If language is a form of doing, it can impossibly be monolithic and completely homogenous.
”This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics”.
To speak is to fight.
By new institutional utterances that have a long lasting effect on the structure, with all the players being adversaries, they try to convey certain transformations of a structure that is beneficial for them and bad for their enemies. The game of society is not necessarily entirely agonistic, but is fundamentally heterogenous with incompatible players and games. Society is fragmentary. The game of society is itself full of a multitude of games.
They all wanna fight for power or something.
[Art pieces invent their mode of interpretation].
”Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
Metanarratives have become obsolete.
”The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispered in clouds of narrative language elements”.
Macro-theries for Foucault are still part of a very modern way of analysing processes in society, similarly to Lyotard.
These categories become obsolete simply because people stop caring about them.
People don’t identify with being prole or bourgois.
”Society frees itself from totalising, systematising, overarching and all-encompassing reason”
Totalising in philosophy means a striving towards a closed system. What is total, is something that can be closed in itself. Things are not this in postmodernity, they are open and heterogenous.
In postmodernity is fragmented, dispersed, liquidated, multiple, diverse, different form itself, permeated by alterity etc etc.