Lydia A. Fillingham. Foucault for Beginners. London and New York: Writers and Readers,1993.
Intro
Madness and Civilization
The Birth of the Clinic
The Order of Things
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality
Subsequent to Sartre, contemporary of Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes. Interested in Power and Knowledge and how they work together. The construction of Truth in human sciences are deciding matters that define humanity.On a more specialised level, all the human sciences (psycology, sociology, economics, linguistics, even medicine) define human beings at the same time as they describe them, and work together with such institutions as mental hospitals, prisions factories, schools, and law courts to have secific and serious effects on people.
Foucault studies the categorisation of people into normality and abnormality: Madness, Criminality, Peverted Sexuality, Illness. And he challenges these historical assumptions. Behaviours that got people locked up in hospital at one time was glorified in another. 18th century social sciences tried to regulate behavious by defining normal and abnormal conduct. In earlier times madmen were an accepted part of the community, sick people were treatred at home, disabled or disfigured people were not expected to stay out of sight and criminals were punished as publicly as possible.
Normality is defined in contrast with abnormality. The study of abnormality is one of the main ways power relations are established in society. Institutional power is like a mental police deciding what should and what shouldn't be allowed in society.
Fascination with Madness, Erasmus (Moriae Encomium, 1509) and King Lear (1605) both focus on the dangerous insights a madman may have. Including unemployed people, who you might think were victims of an economic problem, were going to jail in the 17th century as creators of a moral problem.
After the French Revolution, Madness was started to be seen as your own fault, your responsibility, and because other people were watching you, you learned to watch yourself. What good can someonetrained in medicine do to those who are no physically ill? Dissecation of the body comes into play. Death and disease change from purely negative ideas to crucial elements in the process of life.
In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses) Foulcault starts by quoting a passage from JL Borges " a certain Chinese encyclopaedia divides the animals into ..." . The impossible collection of kinds of animals is so funny that it violates the sense of order. By means of the fable the exotic charm of another system of thought points to the limitation of ours. Foucault claimed man was a recent invention and that he might die.
In Discipline and Punish he moves away from Archaeology of Knowledge's structuralism. His interest in prision becomes an inquiry into the origins of prision as a form of punishment. In general his focus will now be the power relations, and how the seeming abstractions of discourse have very concrete material effects on people's bodies. Discipline, spatialisation, Minute control activity, Repetitive Exercises, Detailed Hierarchies, Normalising Judgements. The PANOPTICON (Jeremy Bentham) - the idea is that every person is isolated in a smal room, where they all may be observed at all times by a single person in the centre tower.
Foucault's abstract idea of power is objected by many scholars, particularly some historians. They insist we have to look for a localised 'agency' of power, who is exercising the power? where is the system of power? why are they doing it? However, historian seem to boil down to individual people doing things.
Foucault is not interested in indvidual power ot indvidual will. He would say that our society became an nomalising society, and individual rights becomes the alibi of power. For him there is no resistence outside the system, individual efforts to complain are seem as 'uncooperative behaviour' rather than political resistance.
Critics of Foucault mantain that his analysis of power is simply a dead end that disallows any possibility of political action. But Foucault insisted that political resistance was just not possible, but a necessary part of the equation. "You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations, because it would be simply a matter of obedience. So resistance comes first and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process, power relations are obliged to change with resistance."
