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 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.

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.

Teaching the controversy

We have two theories being proposed to addressed unemployment.

The first is Job Creationism. This theory holds that a motivated elite creates jobs: low taxes motivate the elite to start businesses that will need employees. Jobs come from above.

The second is Job Evolution. This theory says that when conditions are right and the raw materials are there, jobs come: invest in education, infrastructure, and environment-friendly technologies, and jobs will emerge and evolve from within.

The Higgs, part 2

Back in July when the apparent Higgs Boson discovery was news, I posted here

The physics almost-news about the Higgs boson is simultaneously the most interesting and most boring thing going right now. Maybe this narrative conflict will resolve itself in a nice anti-climax.

This GQ article, "The Higgs Boson: Steaming Particle of Bull$#!%", seems to offer me exacting validation. Is it true that this is the thing that explains the existence of all things? No, "It just isn't true."

Humanities

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky was given the prompt, "In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable." He replied,

That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

The ones who say what is

Scientists recently gave the octopus consciousness. What a nice thing to do. Also, they mistook perceived patterns of central nervous system matter for a thing called consciousness, and themselves for the only ones qualified to say what they see.

information

When I pass through, without fail I catch her engaged in conversations so dull you could trust a depressed, slight-wristed teenaged girl to leave them alone. Remote facts input via phones plugged into NPR or some trivia podcast, briefly unbothered in her database mind, at the first opportunity, and often before that, find a second life output as one of many banalities confidently shared for everyone's sake.

The Higgs

The physics almost-news about the Higgs boson is simultaneously the most interesting and most boring thing going right now. Maybe this narrative conflict will resolve itself in a nice anti-climax.

A thing about "Conquest of Abundance" by Paul Feyerabend

In the posthumously released Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend conceptually explores reality. This might be a poor introduction to Feyerabend because the tract veers from his usual writing style and was unfinished when he died. Maybe because it was unfinished, the man's thoughts didn't often process readily on the page despite its sequentially numbered points and other organizational strategies. Still, putting in the effort to read was worth it.

Feyerabend promotes relativism and the importance of worldviews and perspectives; he says animism, objective realism, etc., are all just different ways of understanding the World. He is, though, softly critical of the kind of objectivism found in "hard" sciences which, characteristic of the Modern Age, have minimized interpretive possibility (and, possibly, ability) via extensive categorization, modeling limited sets of alternatives, and narrowing any given subject to either this or that.

But Feyerabend isn't longing for the ancient past--at least, not openly. I enjoyed it enough to look into him more later on. Someday.

On the helpfulness of health news

The New York Times article "Journals Asked To Cut Details Of Flu Studies" reports that

a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

At first I read this as the story of an unserious government response to a serious problem: the threat of bioterrorism. But more likely it's just bad reporting--unhelpful and uninformative at best, borderline alarmist at worst. The reason is that by emphasizing this one advisory board request, the reporting (similarly appearing in other publications) de-emphasizes other government-coordinated efforts at preventing and monitoring bioterror threats. As a result, the reader comes away thinking that the editors of a few scientific journals play a larger role in the drama of national security than they actually do, and that bioterror is a more imminent threat than it actually is.

Science, society, and responsibility

The Time magazine editorial "Was Jared Loughner In Control of His Actions?" interests me because it addresses the issue without dumbing it down too much. The author, psychology professor Michael Gazzaniga, answers his question with both a Yes and No, but probably thinks the better answer is Yes.

Gazzaniga refers to emerging cognitive science-related research that says we are not as in control and not as rational as we like to think we are. Framed as a re-evaluation of our decision making, this conclusion has been gaining media traction, highlighted right now in discussions with and/or about economist Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. I see this discussion as a resurrection of Descartes' mind-body problem, but using the language of science instead of philosophy. The knowledge holders now preface their statements with something like "The research tells us ..." when really they are interpreting research, disavowing assumptions, then they're telling us.

Nevertheless, returning to the editorial, Gazzaniga tenderly leaves the recognition of responsibility to society, not science.

Alienation to alienated

When reading Madness & Civilization, know that a lot of people considered normal today would have been diagnosed mad in previous centuries. For example, Foucault spends a great deal of time discussing melancholics, known today as people suffering from depression.

Anyway, finished reading Madness & Civilization. The closing of chapter IX, "The Birth of the Asylum", includes this wonderful sentence--the parentheticals are mine:

He (Freud) did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his "liberators" had alienated him; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its (the asylum's) powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor's hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short-circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject.1

Here, I think Foucault is saying something like this: The structures and practices of the asylum gave doctors moral authority over the mad; doctors objectified the mad in those asylums, thereby alienating them, making them outsiders in the real world of reason. But once patient care fell to psychiatry--most notably with Sigmund Freud--doctors' authority transferred from those structures to the personage of the doctor. The doctor then exercised his authority in the psychiatrist's office. There, the alienation that was, in the asylum, only a side effect of being the anomaly became itself a neurosis to be studied and speculated on.

Pure rad.

His arguments probably don't play well when taken in pieces like this, but one can see how rich the content of his writing is. I could spend three days unpacking this one sentence and still not feel the thing fully fleshed out.

I think the prevailing opinion is that Foucault was not much of a writer. I disagree, although I have only translations to judge by.

1"Madness & Civilization" by Michel Foucault