a pencil

a pencil

Michel Foucault

Monday, June 23, 2008

The Repressive Hypothesis

"The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses." -- Albert Einstein

“Without even having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence: Censorship” (301)—where desire was changed into discourse, where one could talk about sex, where sex was policed, where sex was located. Discourse traces the meeting line of the body and the soul, following its movements: beneath the surface of sins. All the censorships of vocabulary are secondary devices compared to ways of rendering it morally acceptable and technically useful. Boundaries of what one could say about sex were enlarged, discourse was connected to sex. Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex emerged. Sex was not something to be judged, it was something to be administered. Sex became something to be “policed,” not the repression of disorder, but a maximized collective and individual force—a policing of sex, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. It was at the heart of this economic and political problem of population that one finds sex—moral and religious exhortations, fiscal measures tried to transform the sexual conduct of individuals into a concerted economic and political behavior. Silence itself is less the absolute limit of discourse than it is an element that “functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies” (309). Sex was hardly ever spoken about, yet it was a constant preoccupation, a public problem. It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else, but we are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions. Around sex, a whole network of coercive transpositions have been changed into discourse

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The Birth of the Asylum

"The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum." -- Havelock Ellis

With the advent of change in mental asylums (chains were removed, patients were allowed to roam free), the asylum no longer punished the madman’s guilt, it aided in his therapeutic rebirth—while stilkl remaing a “stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason” (166). Instead, it organized that guilt as a consciousness of himself, and in a relation to his keeper. It “organized it for the man of reason as an awareness of the other, a therapeutic intervention in the madman’s existence” (146). The asylum reduces differences, represses vice, eliminates irregularities. It opposes everything that goes against the virtues of society. The asylum is an instrument of moral uniformity. Pinel organized his asylum by three means: first, silence; second, recognition by mirror; and third, perpetual judgement. There exists a complement to the old rites of Order, Authority and Punishment, demystified by Freud. In addition, Freud abolished “silence and observation; he eliminated madmen’s recognition of itself in the mirror; he silenced the instances of condemnation; he exploited the structure that envelop the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing it for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status” (165). Nonetheless, psychiatry remains a “stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason” (166).

Friday, June 13, 2008

What is an Author?

"To be authentic literally means to be your own author." -- Dan
Millman

The coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences” (101). First of all, writing has freed itself from expression. It is an interplay of signs arranged according to the nature of the signifier. It is thus that the writer is reduced to nothing more than the “singularity of his absence” (102 ). It is the task of the critic to analyze a work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. The very notion of writing has prevented us from taking full measure of the author’s disappearance. The notion of writing transposes the characteristics of the author into a “transcendental anonymity” (104). The problem of the author’s name is discussed: it is not simply an element in a discourse, rather it performs a role with regard to narrative discourse, allowing one to group together a certain number of texts, differentiating them from others. Limiting remarks to the author of a book, three different characteristics arise: first, discourses are objects of appropriation; second, the author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way; third, it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individidual. The author provides the “basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications” (111). The author is the principle of a “unity of writing, linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the uninverse of discourses; it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer; it does not refer purely and simply to a true individual” (113). An analysis made in the direction laid out by Foucault might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse: “The author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; he does not precede his works; he is a functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses” (119).

Thursday, June 12, 2008

What is Enlightenment?

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightnment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -- Henry Louis Mencken

For Foucault¸ Enlightenment is defined by a “modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority and the uses of reason” (35), a phenomenon, an ongoing process. Modernity is then an attitude—or a way of relating to contemporary reality, tied to an inidispensable asceticism He seeks to emphasize the extent to which a “type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject—is rooted in the Enlightenment” (42). But it is the thread of permanent reactivation of that activation that connects us with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment can either be accepted or criticized in a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible, oriented toward the “contemporary limits of the necessary” (43). We need to free ourselves from the “blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment” (45). We must take a limit attitude, one in which there is not only theory, doctrine, or a permanent body of knowledge but an ethos where such limits can move beyond them, into a direct inquiry.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

NIetzche, Genealogy, History

"False history gets made all day, any day -- the truth of the new is never on the news." -- A. Rich

Nietzsche’s text can be defined as an examination of the origin of moral preconceptions. It retraces his personal involvement with such origins: he recalls the period when he “calligraphied” philosophy, when he questioned if God must be held accountable for the origin of Evil. Nietzsche attempts to capture the essence of things because this search assumes the existence of “immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (78). Disparity is found at the historical beginnings of things—the origin always precedes the fall. Genealogy seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection, As Nietzsche demonstates in his analysis of good and evil, “it is a “non-place” which indicates that the adversaries do not belong in a common space” (85).Domination leads to a differentiation of values where the law is a calculated pleasure. He links historical sense to the historian’s history—both share a similar beginning and the same sign where symptoms of sickness can be recognized. Historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the three Platonic modalities of history: the first is parodic, directed against reality; the second is dissociative, directed against identity; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth. Nietzsche reproaches critical history for detaching us from every real source and for sacrificing the very movement of life to the exclusive concern for truth.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Polemics, Politics and Problemizations

"It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction." -- Mikhail Gorbachev

In the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of every person are in some ways immanent in discussion. For the person asking the questions, “exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself—by the logic of his own discourse he is tied to what he said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue is tied to what he has said earlier” (381)--a question therefore of what creates the relations of different experiences to politics. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult. The polemicist proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. We can recognize today in polemics, three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. It is on the order of problemization, or the development of a domain of acts, practices and thoughts that pose problems for politics—it is a question then, of thinking about the relations of these different experiences to politics. The problem, precisely, is that to decide if it is “actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles and the values one accepts” (385)—because it seems that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result. On the one-hand, an effort widely asserted—is to ask politics a whole series of questions that were not traditionally a part of its statutory domain. It becomes a matter of determining the role of politics and ethics. “It then appears that any new solution that might be added to the others would arise from current problemization, modifying only several of the postulates or principles on which one bases the responses that one gives” (390).