something about "The Birth of the Clinic" by Michel Foucault

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault mines late 18th and early 19th century changes in medical practice (this, significantly, is around the time of the American and French Revolutions, following on the heels of the Enlightenment). These changes shaped modern medicine.

The discourse on human rights inspired by these revolutions led to an overall concern with society and health; and the move toward egalitarianism pushed physicians (and teaching physicians) out of the the aristocracy and reassigned them to general society.

The new imaginings of hard science dictated that we let truths reveal themselves to us. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault feels out what he calls the medical gaze--a way of seeing in which the physician allows the disease to reveal its own truth. The human body gives off signs, and the physician uses his knowledge and observations of the body to translate the reality of the disease.

The physician talks to the patient, observes him, examines him, orders tests and whatnot. Mysticism is abandoned for a discussion of the body; the physician relies less on bookish medical wisdom and instead reads the body. The physician's eye sees in space symptoms and physical signs.

The physician’s observations affect the gaze; the gaze affects the physician. Doctors systematically describe diseases using medical jargon. The physician's power is now his experience rather than his status. The gaze has scientific credibility. And we've successfully achieved truth in spite of the doctor's status, not because of it. (So we think.)

about "The Courage of Truth" by Michel Foucault

This is another installment in the newly published series of lectures (and lecture notes) given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. This one, however, was the last one he gave there before dying. These lectures were recorded during February and March, 1984. He died June 25, 1984.

This book is subtitled "The Government of Self and Others II" because it picks up where his previous string of lectures, "The Government of Self and Others" (published in this same series by Picador), left off. So we begin again with the concept of parrhesia: free-spokeness, or, defined more emphatically, truth-telling. A few high-profile truth-tellers, just to give you an idea, might include Americans Mark Twain or Will Rogers (more recently, some people might include Jon Stewart). But rather than seeing parrhesia in merely the presence of a few pop culture figures, Foucault drills the concept of parrhesia to mine for its broader, deeper significance and implications.

In Foucault's late lectures, he is imparting an ontology of true discourses. First, "The Government of Self and Others" established parrhesia as originally a political notion. But here, through Foucault's reading of Plato (on Socrates) and his study of Cynicism, it expands into philosophy.

Foucault established parrhesia as a necessary component in effective democracies; the best political system will be the one run by virtuous men. In "The Courage of Truth," parrhesia differentiates the man, the leader, from the masses. A leader's truth-telling not only shows his moral/ethical worth, it also is part of the speaker's self conception. So, as established in ancient philosophy, the best political system is run by virtuous men who can uncork the discourse of truth. In this analysis, Foucault is running the technologies of power (and government), knowledge, and subject formation through the gauntlet. These things are intertwined in ancient philosophy, and so they are in most of Foucault's texts.

This lecture's opening focuses on Plato's "Apology," the story of Socrates death, and "Leches," a work exploring courage. With these works, we first find that parrhesia and indeed all of ancient ethics revolve around the care of the self (i.e., self development, self government, self discipline, etc.). Furthermore, parrhesia is bound up in one's existence and formation of self. The latter portions of "The Courage of Truth" examine the Cynics--a people who denied themselves even basic comforts to strip away any artifice that might stand in the way of Truth. This drastic lifestyle eventually showed people that there was another life: an other life, or, the other life (varies by interpreted experience).

Christianity blended the Platonic concept of care of self--the work of purifying the soul ahead of its eventually authentic existence in another world--with the Cynics' quest to defy "temporal customs" in search of basic values.

So you take the two parts of "The Courage of Truth"--the way truth-telling separates the speaker from the masses and the philsophic introduction of the possibility of the other (better) life promised by the Cynics and their successors--and you find that, since the dawn of Western philosophy with the Ancients, the hallmark of the True is Otherness: that which makes a difference and opens the possibility of another reality. This, according to Michael Foucault, is what philosophy is, what it does. There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life.

This is a poignant book; the editor's notes go to lengths to drive this home; Foucault, knowing death would come soon, like Socrates, practiced philosophy and kept his eye on Truth until the end.

Psychology for clicks

This Vanity Fair article, "The Lonely Guy," makes the case that President Obama's strong inward-directedness underpins his political failures. The diagnosis:

Self-containment is not simply Obama’s political default mode. Self-possession is the core of his being, and a central part of the secret of his success. It is Obama’s unwavering discipline to keep his cool when others are losing theirs, and it seems likely that no black man who behaved otherwise could ever have won the presidency.

But this quality, perhaps Obama’s greatest strength in gaining office, is his greatest weakness in conducting it.

Obama’s self-evident isolation has another effect: It tends to insulate him from engagement in the management of his own administration. The latest round of “what did the president know and when did he know it” on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare and the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone raised troubling questions: Were Obama’s aides too afraid to tell him?

The author would have us believe that Obama's self is the issue here. The matter is not poor leadership, carelessness, incompetence, bad delegation practices, or the simple fact that every presidency has some major failures. No, in Obama's case we find a complication of self.

The article then relates a few quotes from Obama's peers who say the man is aloof. Gradually the author shifts his thesis away from Obama's selfhood and toward his character, essentially saying the President is not a team player. "He has quietly purged from his inner circle those most likely to stand up to him." The fix? "Obama has always insisted that he is playing a long game. The problem is that when everyone else in Washington is still playing a short game, the president sometimes has to play on their board." This unsupported claim applies to the reader, too. The article's author renders a judgment that time can't bear out and the reader is supposed to click through.

something about Michel Foucault, "The Government of Self and Others"

These lectures, delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982 and 1983, meditate on the concept of truth-telling known as parresia. The bulk of these lectures have Foucault tracing the use, exercise, and implications of parresia through ancient Greek texts.

Foucault starts, however, in the Enlightenment.

What is Enlightenment? Kant asked, and Foucault restates the question: What is this present?* Foucault finds here not only the beginning of contemporary philosophy but the seed of his own brand of inquiry: a discursive practice of philosophy that collides with its own present reality. The speaker--first, Kant, now, Foucault--is no longer speaking as a member of a philosophical tradition or community, but as a part of the present. And, ever since, philosophy has continued questioning its own present reality.

In his reflections on the Enlightenment, Kant speculated that the human race was making progress. He figured that popular support abroad for the ideals propelling the French Revolution symbolized this progress. Man was leaving an era in which he was unwilling to use his reason. Now, he would reason; and, once free to exercise his reason, he could be obedient. More freedom of thought, more obedience. And this obedience requires a kind of self-governance that Foucault interrogates in much of his work.

After a brief visit with the Enlightenment, Foucault starts to dwell in the ancient texts, starting with the myth of Ion and rounding the final corner with Plato's Phaedrus. In these stories he identifies the roles and implications of courage, politics, rhetoric, and philsosophy in the practice and concept of truth-telling known as parresia.

To my mind, this was so far the least compelling of these newly published Foucault lectures. But my mind is somewhere else now, maybe.

Notes:
* Prior to the Enlightenment, people spoke of the present in terms of periods of prosperity or decadence.

about "Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France" by Michel Foucault

Abnormal is largely about the concept and perception of the abnormal person--the pervert or rapist or peeping Tom, for example--from the 19th century to present. In this lecture, Foucault begins by saying that, when an individual has power, he often becomes an object of ridicule (i.e., kings were often portrayed as fools by the peasants, at times). Foucault then explains how psychiatric opinions delivered in court conjure the character of a delinquent alongside the accused--a delinquent doppelganger to the author of the crime. So, it follows, the respected expert psychiatrist on the witness stand is also an oaf because he assesses and prescribes moral instruction as if he were a child, and he describes danger as if he himself was irrationally afraid.

Foucault then embarks on an overview of how power works in this discussion, referring to the phenomenon of how plague patients were partitioned off within society to be watched and studied (as opposed to lepers banished from society). But instead of plague victims, it is the abnormal who are watched and studied. The result of this partitioning and watching is the individualization of people--which is not to be confused with exclusion. All this is done for the preservation and productivity of society's healthy individuals, those whose potential is maximized.

Now, Foucault explains that, until the 16th and 17th century, a crime was conceived of as an offense against the sovereign, and punishment for the crime had to be bigger than the crime because it had to supersede the crime. But, later, crime in general was imagined as having a nature, a criminality, which leads to the question, What is the nature of a criminal? In a penal system that favors this question, the criminal's motive must be matched and nullified by the judicial system, and the medical community took it upon themselves to diagnose motives. Psychology supplies motives for motiveless crimes, and otherwise labels criminals as insane, thereby releasing the penal system from its obligation to punish.

A major development in criminology and psychology was the recognition and exploration of the concept of instinct. "Instinct" allowed for a power mechanism--the penal system with its need for knowledge--to engage with knowledge a mechanism--psychiatry and its need for power. The notion of human instinct helps make motiveless crimes intelligible; it also allows for the medical transformation of motiveless acts into pathological acts.

The notion of instinct came to dominate psychiatry, and allowed the field to expand its domain. Psychiatry soon became a form of family intervention; familial relations were pathologized such that antagonistic relations are deemed pathological. After 1850, a political dimension is introduced; much as history became a tool to politicize the past and present, psychiatry came to help distinguish riots from good revolutions by looking at the minds and motives of the leaders of movements. Madness opposed order, opposed family and personal relationships, and opposed stability; it was a characteristic of social immobility. Healthy behaviors and mentalities had to be conventional and voluntary; deviant behaviors and mentalities consisted of automatic and instinctual responses. All conduct was judged along a contimuum of voluntary vs. involuntary, all relative to the norm. Here, psychology grows beyond madness; psychology could now question all behavior, all people.

About the time that the state formalized support of marriage through policy incentives, homes started being built partitioned, with different rooms for each family member, separating families within a single home, separating kids from parents. This distribution of bodies helps dissuade the development of pathological, antagonistic, and/or incestuous relationships between family members. Foucault discusses the prototypes of the abnormal individual, the monster and the masturbator, and explains how the masturbator enabled psychology to become an authority on family, and link sexuality with illness in terms of masturbation or any other realization of the sexual impulse deemed immoral. Psychology's linking of sexuality with instinct opened a field that allows for masturbators and motiveless murderers to exist in the same conceptual space. Here, the sexual instinct is imagined as fragile, capable of becoming distorted and the cause of degeneracy.

Foucault discusses a rape case set in the 1860's that was referred to psychiatry for explanation. The controversial field outlined the offender's physical traits, and linked these to his deficiencies. He was described as having arrested development, rather than an exaggerated instinct or drive; likewise, his morality was arrested, according to the psychiatric experts.

In the early psychiatric conception of criminality, a patient's development goes wrong, and then the person becomes a criminal. But later psychiatry posits that the seeds of criminality are sown in the person's childhood. Psychiatry faced a dilemma when patients became depathologized because the practice no longer had the backing of medicine, and patients were no longer an suffering illness, per say. Psychiatry identified collections of eccentricities and behaviors and called them "conditions" or "syndromes". These collections of traits were previously considered predispositions, and a person could have a predisposition and still be normal (to the extent such a conception existed). But conditions and syndromes came to describe the abnormal, and any physical or mental illness can be associated with any condition or syndrome. Conditions refer to health but are not illness; they are non-health. Conditions are typically a case of arrested (moral) development or regression.

Foucault explains that a condition's causal background is the patient's heredity. In examining a patient's heredity, anything can cause anything. For example, Your uncle was a drunk? That explains your degeneracy today. Similarly--and this is the lecture's main point--a person's use of the sexual instinct for non-reproductive purposes, a person's having sex or masturbating for pleasure, is thought to point to a condition. This diagnosis is moralizing cloaked in medicine. Degeneracy grew increasingly medicalized. Furthermore, if conditions are a result of heredity, then the idea of finding a cure means nothing in psychiatry. So, this reveals that the field is not so much about the health of the patient, but rather about the protection of society from the effects of degeneracy. The heredity-based form of racism that sprang up at the end of the 19th century and reached its nadir with Nazism stems from psychiatry's social defense aspect.

This is a rich, winding lecture that recalls and elaborates on many of Foucault's major themes. Thoroughly enjoyable read.

about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.

"Society Must Be Defended", lectures by Michel Foucault

(longer post)

I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. He sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores the concept of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation state and its population's identity.

That Foucault adopts a new concept of power after having written his early works does not devalue them. Foucault's project has not changed: generally, he engages in an archaeological exploration of Western man's conceptual relation to himself and others; specifically, he analyzes how some people engineer and/or assume apparatuses of power used on other people, focusing on the post-Middle Ages emergence of kinds of knowledge and systems of disciplinary power.

In Society Must Be Defended, he begins by asserting that, circa 1600, Europeans began assessing their own history in terms of race and war, whereas previously they self-identified in the person and bloodline of the sovereign and spoke of the Roman history in which they lived. So, what were once mere hiccups within the Roman Empire now signified the coming of the Franks, Gauls, Celts, and so on. The key for Foucault here is not the races or inter-European racism to come, but the idea of (potential) revolution and the political historization of the peopled nation state that emerges and casts itself as the rightful inheritor of sovereignty and greatness, with the distressed and disenfranchised newly identifying themselves as people on the losing end of a historical injustice.

The change in historical perspective is initiated by a shift at the top: the nobility assume power over the education of the monarchy, a role previously held by judges and (accounting) clerks appointed by the sovereign. This education, which centers on history, organizes the past--and, therefore, the present--around "society" rather than royal lineages. And, so it goes, with the nation no longer identified in the body of the king, a new focus on society yields limited concepts of nationalism, race, and class. Of course, society was being narrowly defined around the culture of the previously distressed and disenfranchised nobles (the bourgeoisie, presumably).

Then, yet another shift occurs: a culture with arts, agriculture, trade, and industry becomes a precondition for nationhood. A nation's legitimization is complete once it has a legislature and law. Society no longer just constitutes the nation--it runs it (or, rather, the bourgeoisie runs it, presumably). Finally, with the recognition of society as the bellwether of the nation state, we find institutions of power concerning themselves with the biological phenomena of the social body, thereby giving birth to what Foucault famously calls biopower. Very nice.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault gives a history of Western Europe, recounting legends told from the Middle Ages on and narrating this shift in discourses on power, history, and the State. This narration does get bogged down in details (and more than a little confused), so this lecture series is a difficult read unless you're especially interested.

Notes:

• This shift to a politicized historical discourse coincides with a larger movement re-organizing and, eventually, licensing knowledges.

• Foucault's work usually involves describing some major shift in focus and narrative that followed the Middle Ages. When reading him, I'm often a little disappointed he doesn't spend more time describing the systems being displaced or forgotten. And, as a rule, I'm always a little skeptical when someone argues that something major has changed or some new age is dawning, etc., so this can make Foucault's work hard to square when I find myself needing more information.

about "Society Must Be Defended", lectures by Michel Foucault

I've been reading this Michel Foucault lecture series. In them, he reminds the audience that his concept of power has changed since he debuted with his seminal works on madness and punishment. Now he sees power not so much as represented in instances of repression, but rather as a flow or current between actors, a concept better represented as two actors engaged in battle. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explores this concept of battle, of war and its historical relation to the role of the nation State and its population's identity.

That Foucault adopts a new concept of power after having written his early works does not devalue them. Foucault's project has not changed: generally, he engages in an archaeological exploration of Western man's relation to himself; specifically, he analyzes how some people engineer and/or assume apparatuses of power used on other people.

about "Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-1974" by Michel Foucault

In these lectures, Foucault defines psychiatric power as "that supplement of power by which the real is imposed on madness in the name of a truth possessed once and for all by this power in the name of medical science, of psychiatry". This definition hints at the areas Foucault explores: reality and truth, systems of power, and the disciplines of science and the human sciences. The lectures serve as an important follow up and, in some key respects, an amendment to his early work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Reading this and staying engaged was a struggle. The reason for that is largely a matter of context: the practice of psychiatry (and administration of asylums) and the schools of thought therein have a complicated and rich history in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. Foucault digs into and entrenches himself in that history, but, as a student, there is no required preliminary reading to reference. Nevertheless, Foucault does impart many insightful points of brilliance:

• The appropriation and use of reality as a form of power

• The medicalization of children, and the creation and expansion of the concept of development as it pertains to rationality and moralizing, retardation, madness, and defining the normal and abnormal

• Foucault's redefining the abnormal, the retarded, etc, as individuals who act on instinct

• How psychiatry changed from a practice that confined, controlled, and sometimes corrected madness to a power that defines, controls, and sometimes corrects the abnormal, thereby expanding its power into the domain of normality

• The role of psychiatry and asylum administration in capitalism and maintenance of the workforce

• How medical science provides justification and grounds for power, but does not inform psychiatric practice

• The history of the concept of truth, and truth's development and role in science

This is not be a good starting read for people interested in Foucault. And people interested in pschiatry (or anti-psychiatry) should probably also not read this without some background in Foucault.

Note

• The edition I have does offer some good historical context on psychiatry.

about "The Birth of Biopolitics", lectures by Michel Foucault

The lectures transcribed in The Birth of Biopolitics are the sequel to those in Security, Territory, and Population, a book I read in March. Neither book title really describes the content of the lectures, and this is especially true of the sequel. But Foucault acknowledges this; the mishap is apparently owed to poor planning.

Now, the lectures' original subject, biopolitics, is the governance of phenomenon related to life and population--families, birth rates, disease, hygiene, etc.--and this is with an understanding that governance takes many forms, that population is a kind of construct, that multiple powers are in play, and so on (Foucault qualifies almost compulsively). However, Liberalism provides the frame of reference for understanding biopolitics, so we first need to understand Liberalism. Hence, The Birth of Biopolitics actually explores Liberalism's philosophy and development in terms of tensions which Foucault calls relations of power (Liberalism here being understood as the limiting of government for maximum (economic) effect given the natural phenomenon of the market).

Reading, I was interested but still found the content dry. The Birth of Biopolitics doesn't have the kind of insights I normally look for and value with Foucault. This is more of a history and articulation of a political philosophy than anything else. Mostly, I enjoyed some early sections tracing the movements from governance under a wise sovereign guided by truths to the invocation of a market place and population policed by the state to the limiting of modern government in response to the police state. But, in all, the most lively section for me was Foucault's explication of Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand" metaphor.

Notes:

• I re-read Security, Territory, and Population before starting this one and it was worth it.

James Holmes, madman

The New York Times article "Before Gunfire, Hints of ‘Bad News’" unfolds for us the life of James Holmes leading up the massacre. It pins him down, makes him a subject of analysis, takes us down a path that runs parallel to his even while he diverges from his own. We learn how witnesses remember him, forming a cohesive picture of the subject we can use as a collective memory from which we draw out the identity of James Holmes, an identity through which we can say, "That was something James would do" or "That was not like James," until we know when the madman appeared. So it goes: James was normal when he was quiet and shy, attending school, and, at times, acting goofy and awkward; but then he became a loner and, more troubling, unconcerned with school, which is abnormal. Normal James worked, was willing to work, assumed a career, a productive life. And so his divergence was here--not in the movie theater.

On July 20, 2012, James is said to have killed 12 people and wounded 58 at a midnight screening of "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises". The movie depicts the saga of a crime fighter, Batman, and James allegedly referred to himself as The Joker, Batman's nemesis, a powerful and enigmatic villain, a clever perpetrator of crimes. But James likely will not be judged to have committed a crime, and therefore not be labeled a criminal. He will exist outside the binary of law. The judicial system shines a light on the accused, and they are judged innocent or guilty. James performed his violence in the dark, and his mind just may remain beyond the light. His peers and the experts may decide that James was a madman before he entered the theater. A sane man doesn't just shirk off his ambitions, lose all interest and sympathy for civil society, and abandon his social pretensions. Lock him up. Society must be defended.

About Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 by Michel Foucault

Foucault lectured at the Collège de France for several semesters. This opportunity allowed him to continue and share his research, his hypotheses and conclusions. In this lecture series, Foucault traces the origin and evolution of the modern concept of government and the assemblage of techniques, collectively called security, it uses in managing the population. Foucault shows that the question of how the sovereign should rule the territory and its inhabitants became a question of what technique of leadership would do given the new phenomenon called "population.

I first read this in March 2012 but am returning to it now to take notes while I read. This edition (and others in the series) is awesome because the editors include valuable additions of their own, Foucault's notes, and material from the Collège.