Robert Groven Augsburg College

Minnesota Debate Advocacy Workshop (MDAW)

“GETTING TO KNOW, MONSIEUR

FOUCAULT!”

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF

MICHEL FOUCAULTFOR THE 2015 POLICY DEBATE

SURVEILLANCE TOPIC

This session will be: Highly IncompleteHighly oversimplifiedInclude some controversial materialTeaching both what Foucault says, and how to read his writings

Mostly Foucault Focused, Not Directly Debate Focused- as we’ll see many debate problems arise with the use of Foucault’s work

CAVEAT DISCIPULUS

Michele Foucault (1926-1984)

Preeminent French philosopher of his age

Professor, Collège de France & University of Paris Also engaged in political activism and social reform to improve prisons, mental health facilities, and GLBT recognition,

Born to wealthy, conservative family: father a surgeon, mother from a prominent local family

Awareness of his homosexual attractions in teen years created conflict within himself, his family &

Experienced academic difficulties through early high school, but then exceled at the highest levels in late high school and at university.

Historical research with theory extracted

Archeology of Knowledge (early method): understanding historical periods through and within their own discursive norms (borrowing from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals)

Genealogy of Knowledge (later method): understanding historical periods through their own discursive norms from a present day perspective and discourse.

Key Concept: There is no bad guy! No Illuminati! No grand conspiracy! In fact, that’s the point! It is “a story with no author, a system with no subject.” No Intentionality (most of the time): collective social forces

created most of the systems Foucault describes that no person or group of people created with deliberate, conscious understanding of the system they participated in or built.

FOUCAULT’S RESEARCH METHOD

Damiens the Regicide

Punishment as Public Spectacle

Focuses on sovereign power & the body as material property and exterior objects

Focus on the monarch as highly visible source of power

Power is zero sum: Individuals are deprived of power by the monarch and therefore want to “destroy” the monarch’s power or “steal” it for themselves

Public spectacles of torture and terror are required entertainment to draw attention to the monarch’s power and control

Focus of punishment is on pain and suff ering, and very little attention to the proportionality of punishment to crime

JURIDICAL POWER“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”

The Rise (and Fall) of the Guillotine Causes for shift:

Increasing populations in cities, declining family or tribal ties

Mixing of cultural traditions of law and punishment

Enlightenment era ideas about justice, individual rights and neutral judicial process

More effi cient and effective with larger populations

Results of Shift One punishment for all bodies of

all sorts, which reinforces values of uniformity and equality

Discursive focus shifts from the power/fear of the monarch to the principles and laws violated by the individual criminal

Minimizes spectacle Minimizes shame More effi cient Creates the image of a distant &

neutral justice system, rather than a personal and vengeful monarch

DISCIPLINARY

POWER

GroupDiscussionActivity

DAMIENS THE REGICIDE1) READ THE EXCERPT FROM DISCIPLINE & PUNISH

2)WHY DOES FOUCAULT INCLUDE SO MUCH DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF DAMIEN’S EXECUTION?

3) WHAT DOES THE LINE, “THE BODY AS THE MAJOR TARGET OF PENAL REPRESSION DISAPPEARED” MEAN?

4) WHAT DOES THE LINE, “THE BODY NOW SERVES AS AN INSTRUMENT OR INTERMEDIARY” MEAN?

5) WHY IS AN “ARMY OF TECHNICIANS” NEEDED TO FOR THIS NEW FORM OF PUNISHMENT?

6) DO YOU AGREE WITH THE LAST LINE, “THE MODERN RITUALS OF EXECUTION ATTEST TO THIS DOUBLE PROCESS: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SPECTACLE AND THE ELIMINATION OF PAIN?”

The Rise of Prisons

Causes of Shift*Growing heterogeneous, urban populations*Industrial Revolution model: factories, warehouses, productiveness, speed, fungible products*Economic, political and social efficiency *Political shift to government as impersonal and neutral*Extends technologies of control developed by schools & military in the mid-1600’s

Results of Shift*Prison and fines becomes the universal “currency” of punishment *Torture ceases to be punishment and becomes only judicial tool *Focus reforming of the criminal*More humane approach: reduces pain and public shame *Far more effective at reducing “crime,” *Far more economically efficient, preserves larger, mobile workforce*Conceptual shift: power isn’t personal, and isn’t bad. Power is a positive, productive force to maintain order and advance society’s goals*Although punishments become less painful and less public, the state imprisons more people and gains broader compliance

Prison design by Jeremy Bentham to increase control with a minimum of staff

Foucault used the panopticon as historical evidence and metaphor of modern surveillance

Surveillance: visibility as trap: the body as visible object

Optics as power & surveillance

Uncertainty hifts locus to interior self-control

THE PRINCIPLED PANOPTICON

The Doobopticon!How many cameras are in your school?Is that bad or good?

CURRENT PANOPTICONS?

Counter-critique:Foucault’s a Fool! Feminist & Queer Kritical Response:

The private is public; the private is political! (feminist consciousness raising mantra)

Domestic abuse & sexual assault

Invisibility as trap: lack of visible identifier creates lack of solidarity and isolation (Queer Kritical)

Visibility as vulnerability: women and security

GROUP DISCUSSION

Police Body CamerasCreate a Foucaultian critique of the use of cameras worn by police officers on duty and in their vehicles.

Are they a panopticon effect?

Do they increase or decrease surveillance of the police?

On balance: are they a good policy or bad? Or something else?

GROUP ACTIVITY

MICRO-KRITIKS

Use Bentham & Foucault’s panopticon concepts to create a micro-critique:

GROUP ACTIVITY

MICRO-KRITIKS

From the “madness of the other” to “the care of the self” Causes of shift: Responses to the Plague Enlightenment rational approaches(impersonal, objective), Successes of the scientifi c method

Medicine & Psychiatry Create Madness Defi ning madness as creating madness Optics of power reloaded: the scientifi c gaze Seeing inside the body: the body as mind

Normalization as a posit ive, productive “technology of control” Descriptive “normal”- statistics & the bell curve Evaluative “normal”- labels and false binary oppositions Continuous operation of control, not only with violations Administrative-Medical process:

Defi ne social objectives by using normative criteria Observe, count and measure Appraise, evaluate, and diagnose Label, categorize, and divide using binary oppositions “Hierarchize,” organize, arrange, and distribute to create “geographies of power” &

“polygons” of control Automate continuous systems and institutions

MADNESS & CIVILIZATION, AND THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC

MADNESS & CIVILIZATION, AND THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC

Group Discussion Activity

Micro-Critique: how might Foucault’s concept of categorization & optimization be represented in this distribution data?

MADNESS & CIVILIZATION, AND THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC

Categorization of bodies by exterior optics: race, gender to a lesser extent religion become criteria for systematically determining which bodies should be “optimized” and which will be “neglected” or “subtracted.” Group Discussion

Activity

Micro-Critique: how might Foucault’s concept of categorization & optimization be represented in this distribution data?

MADNESS & CIVILIZATION, AND THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC

Categorization of bodies by exterior optics: race, gender to a lesser extent religion become criteria for systematically determining which bodies should be “optimized” and which will be “neglected” or “subtracted.” Group Discussion

Activity

Micro-Critique: how might Foucault’s concept of categorization & optimization be represented in this distribution data?

HISTORY OF SEXUALITY (MOSTLY FROM VOLUME I)

1) Inverting the “Repressive Hypothesis” of Victorian Sexuality2) Normalizing & Medicalizing Sexuality3) Fully Developed Concept of Bio-power

A. “Administration of life”B. Shift from Sovereign power to Disciplinary control, and finally, to Bio-power, but all three are used to varying degreesC. Micro-physics of positive, productive control: continuous, invisible, automatic, interior, self-enforcingD. Self-confession as control: the body as identity

4) Basic process/mechanism of Bio-powerA. Surveillance- cool, dispassionate gaze of science collects

informationB. Normalization – provides both positive rewards for conformity

and negative punishments for deviance in small continuous increments

C. Examination- confession, analysis, established narratives, accepted labels

and categories create interior self-complianceD. Control – even minor deviance consistently receives a response, the external response invokes an internal response that reinforces the control process.

What’s the Alternative?

Foucault’s Big Problem:

Resistance, Political Action, Ethical Choices, and a Possible Practical Critique

The Final Problem: Foucault’s Prison or the Ironist’s Cage

1) Ethics & Dispassionate Gaze: see no evil, see no solutions2) Resistance is futile: The paradox of dominant culture theory – you can’t destroy power, it simple flows somewhere else. 3) You’ll only make things worse:

“What’s at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?”

Ethics for the Concern of the Self and the Practice of Freedom, 1984 (289).

4) Political action without advocates or policy: Individual action when the individual is irrelevant

What’s the Alternative?

Foucault’s Big Problem:

Resistance, Political Action, Ethical Choices, and a Possible Practical Critique

Possible Solutions1) First answer: escape is unthinkable, literallyFrom 1977 Interview:

“My position is that it is not up to us to propose [ideas for reform]. As soon as

one proposes, one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have the effects of domination.“

2) Next answer: the struggle will provide- “unmasking” the invisible forces of control in society, especially those that appear neutral, will cause effective resistance to arise…somehow.

From 1981 Interview: “It is simply in the struggle itself and through it that

positive conditions emerge.”

What’s the Alternative?

Foucault’s Big Problem:

Resistance, Political Action, Ethical Choices, and a Possible Practical Critique

Possible Solutions

Later answer: possible alternative – the subversive critique or a “disruptive parody” of history:

“I do not think that a society can exist without power relations…[So the goal] is not to try to dissolve them in a utopia of completely transparent communication…but to acquire the rules, norms, etc., which allow us to play these games with as little domination as possible.” From 1984 Interview by Bibilio

What’s the Alternative?

Foucault’s Big Problem:

Resistance, Political Action, Ethical Choices, and a Possible Practical Critique

Possible Solutions

1) Late Attempt & Clear Desire for Policy Action: From, Ethics for the Concern of the Self and the Practice of Freedom, 1984 (289): “The critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one. The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.”

2) Posthumous possible alternative, with a little help from Judith Butler: “the practical critique.”

From Butler’s Gender Troubles (185), “Subversive resistance” Individuals were not created by the norms, the norms were created by the many, many individuals acting out the norms in many repetitions. Therefore, resistance can occur by varying individual repetitions of the norms, in a process Bulter calls, “subversive repetition.”