Foucault
Aug 15 2006 23:36
Now remember this is introductory thought before you reply guys.
I haven't read Foucault, probably will do but I had a very big argument with a friend of mineabout power. We could agree that power was the exercise of control, but she insisted that control was punishment. She reckons Foucault justifies this. I find this hard to believe as control is the exercise of the will, and therefore a constraint like that removes agency from the person doing the punishment.
Any thoughts?
Aug 15 2006 23:57
#2
To be honest I'm not sure if all Power is control, infact i'd say that power is actually an excess that always stretches beyond control, and hence Power continues into resistance. This however maybe just my attempt to find an empasse from Foucaults high structuralism.
The way i've interpreted it is that Power is a given, it is a potential that can be constitutive and destructive and that in fact construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin . For example,the body of a weight lifter is constructed through fitness, weight gain and strengthening of muscles, but it is also destructive in that the training tears away old muscle and creates stronger muscles in it's place (waits for JDMF to point out he is talking shite). They body is controlled and restrained through training and fitness regimes, and through this very control, power reconstitutes itself in another form ie the ability to lift heavier shite.
So power is a given, it gets harnessed into control vis a vis a disciplinary regime, these forms of control are constructive but also destructive, this control constitutes the "subject", but a subject that contains an excess that produces a resistance, this resistance feedbacks into the disciplinary regime and transforms it, this sparks off the cycle again.
This could be just completely fisting Foucault with three volumes of Capital, but it's the only way I can make sense of the grinning chimp.
I'd like to hear what the button has to say though, as i really shouldn't be stepping on his turf so brazenly.
Aug 16 2006 00:16
#3
revol68 wrote:
The way i've interpreted it is that Power is a given, it is a potential that can be constitutive and destructive and that in fact construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin . For example,the body of a weight lifter is constructed through fitness, weight gain and strengthening of muscles, but it is also destructive in that the training tears away old muscle and creates stronger muscles in it's place (waits for JDMF to point out he is talking shite). They body is controlled and restrained through training and fitness regimes, and through this very control, power reconstitutes itself in another form ie the ability to lift heavier shite.So power is a given, it gets harnessed into control vis a vis a disciplinary regime, these forms of control are constructive but also destructive, this control constitutes the "subject", but a subject that contains an excess that produces a resistance, this resistance feedbacks into the disciplinary regime and transforms it, this sparks off the cycle again.
almost word for word from foucault's body/power interview.
Aug 16 2006 00:38
#4
ha, i've never read fuck all of that or infact anything beyond a few pages of Foucault. Infact i've always felt i've been bluffing my way in conversations about Foucault
god i'm great!
I want double me!
*Sits nervously awaiting the arrival of the button to wipe the smug grin off his face* 
Aug 16 2006 01:47
#5
jef costello wrote:
Now remember this is introductory thought before you reply guys.I haven't read Foucault, probably will do but I had a very big argument with a friend of mineabout power. We could agree that power was the exercise of control, but she insisted that control was punishment. She reckons Foucault justifies this. I find this hard to believe as control is the exercise of the will, and therefore a constraint like that removes agency from the person doing the punishment.
Any thoughts?
Foucualt argues almost the exact opposite, that power is far more than simply punishment.
Aug 16 2006 02:50
#6
Jef
Just to say that you will LOVE Foucalt!! I am really surprised you haven't read him before - in the original French of course!! I am happy for you that you have him yet to come!!! Obv. by the sounds Button is the "main man" on this subject. Just to say you may wanna start with "The History of Sexuality"?? It is good stuff.
Love
LW X
Aug 16 2006 02:57
#7
meh, I find Foucault as profound as a fart in a sulphur mine.
And his mannerisms in the Chomsky discussion made me want to hit the ignorant cunt! Don't bite your fucking nails and stare into space you bald bastard!
*blows raspberry at the button*
Aug 16 2006 03:00
#8
revol68 wrote:
meh, I find Foucault as profound as a fart in a sulphur mine.
And his mannerisms in the Chomsky discussion made me want to hit the ignorant cunt! Don't bite your fucking nails and stare into space you bald bastard!
*blows raspberry at the button*
autonomist marxism with the class taken out.
Aug 16 2006 03:06
#9
pretty much.
Or almost the the restablishment of bourgeois sum of it's part sociology, whereby each social relationship must be understood in it's own power dynamic and can not be reduced, previleged or made secondary to any other relationship, especially not something as crude as class or the state.
*seriously pushing his luck*
Aug 16 2006 07:17
#10
i think the understanding that power is immanent to life, and is 'of the same world' as domination is important for libertarians, if a little common-sensical. In other words power is not something to be overcome and abolished once and for all so we can live happily ever after, thats crude anarchism. Instead, the very acts of resistance, abolition etc are acts of power - this is important because such emancipatory acts can become acts of domination, even 'after the revolution'. We can all think of examples.
Or like the way an articulate person can dominate a conversation, domination is perhaps best understood as an excess or inbalance of power in a given circumstance.
Obviously if you abstract all this from class you're left with a sort of Nietzschean self-improvement (self-help?) program that overlooks the possibilities of collective action, particularly in forming subjectivities and excercising power in a diffuse way. That and Saul Newman's 'post-anarchism' where revolution is impossible because 'power is everywhere' - i would have thought that is what makes revolution possible, but hey (though to be fair the revolution newman says is impossible is the charicatured classical anarchist or even anabaptist 'final overcoming' after which everything is fine and dandy happily ever after).
Aug 16 2006 08:21
#11
jef costello wrote:
she insisted that control was punishment. She reckons Foucault justifies this. I find this hard to believe as control is the exercise of the will, and therefore a constraint like that removes agency from the person doing the punishment.Any thoughts?
For Foucault at least, power enables as well as constrains. This means that a power relationship is not necessarily one of domination or oppression. As I'm sure emo-boy has pointed out, there's a parallel between the Foucauldian notion of power, and the autonomist reading of Marx which foregrounds capital as a social relation that is being constantly worked and reworked. For Foucault, there is no "outside" to power from which resistance can start. However, that doesn't mean that resistance is impossible (contra certain hilarious misinterpretations of his work).
As far as control being punishment, that sounds like the Nietzchean strand of Foucault as others have said. The key text here is from book 2, (and it's either) section 11 or 13 of Genealogy of morals. Nietzche's question is, what are the conditions of possibility for a creature that can make promises (i.e. human beings). He talks about self-consciousness as arising from "an animal soul turned in on itself." I.e. interiority is a result of a kind of internalisation of aggressive insticts, with the proviso that the interiority does not pre-exist the turning-in, but is created in and through that interiorisation in a sort of hollowing out of the self. Thus sekf-awareness and self-control are not neutral acts, but are a kind of agressive turning against the self, which (again) is created and consolidated in and through that turn.
Christ, I can talk a lot of bollocks sometimes.
Aug 16 2006 08:44
#12
the button wrote:
Christ, I can talk a lot of bollocks sometimes.
unfortunately christ doesn't post here, cos that would be a great tagline for Him 
the button, does what i say make sense? i've only read a couple of foucault's books (more on the list 
) ...
Aug 16 2006 08:42
#13
from what i've gathered from foucault, it seems that in terms of resistance and domination, resistance, due to the sort of flux that power is in, can't be a sort of opposite pole. so in a way resistance, in structuralist terms, can't actually exist. it has to be an alternative source of power with its own trajectory.
so, for example (and admittedly a bit of a dodgy one), you've got ya basta playiing with the whole idea of body power as an alternative configuration of power to that which capital produces. so it is a sort of resistance, but one that can never quite fight head-on with whatever it is aimed at.
Aug 16 2006 08:53
#14
Joseph K. wrote:
does what i say make sense? i've only read a couple of foucault's books (more on the list
It works for me, particularly the first para. of your post just above mine. That's one of the reasons I think old baldy (not me) is important.
Aug 16 2006 11:19
#15
as opposed to someone defining themselves against a strawman Marxism, reformulating Marx's concept of labour into power and hey presto you can have your own "ground breaking theory" simply by restating Marx's analysis of how labour is set against us in capital, yet labour itself can never be totally dominated by capital. Now purge the class struggle and replace with assorted campaigns for bummers and nutters and haven't we just got the perfect "sociology" for "post modern", post ideological world.
Aug 16 2006 11:29
#16
revol68 wrote:
as opposed to someone defining themselves against a strawman Marxism.
Which is, of course, exactly what Foucault does.
Oh no, wait....
Foucault wrote:
I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someonewho doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein?
Aug 16 2006 11:33
#17
revol68 wrote:
as opposed to someone defining themselves against a strawman Marxism, reformulating Marx's concept of labour into power and hey presto you can have your own "ground breaking theory" simply by restating Marx's analysis of how labour is set against us in capital, yet labour itself can never be totally dominated by capital. Now purge the class struggle and replace with assorted campaigns for bummers and nutters
revol68 wrote:
Infact i've always felt i've been bluffing my way in conversations about Foucault
hmmm Or is that second quote a bluff?
Foucalt interests me primarily as a philsophical historian (or should that be philisophico-historico narrator? ) - 'discipline and punish' etc, he also developed, with Deleuze, the concept of philosophy as a toolbox for praxis, which is perhaps' Marx's famous '...the point is to change it' rehashed (i haven't read the whole thing yet).
So where i think Foucalt is more a historian, in terms of applicability to the present, Deleuze & Guattari take up his project with notions like 'apparatus of capture' (recuperation remixed ) and the rhizome (which, to be fair they concieved pre-internet). But D&G are often incomprehensible, so basically there is no moral to this story
Aug 16 2006 13:17
#18
the button wrote:
revol68 wrote:
as opposed to someone defining themselves against a strawman Marxism.Which is, of course, exactly what Foucault does.
Oh no, wait....
Foucault wrote:
I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someonewho doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein?
Well as I said *I was pushing my luck*, but yes perhaps it would be fairer of me to aimed that attack at Foucault's legion of fan boy's rather than the bald barb of the bio political.
But I'm interested in what you think of him refused to give primacy to any discourses and power dynamics over any other, and his epistme breaks, which seems to me to be the reinvention of "great men" history, but with "men" being replaced with decentred nodes and networks of discourse.
I mean maybe I'm being simplistic but we can't understand the relationship between a prisoner in for theft and the prison system without placed this "within" and I would argue under, the relationship between the proletariat and capital (containing the proletariat of course), property rights etc. On a basic level most prison guards do not wish to spend 40 hours of their week in prison, in brutalising and brutalised condition for the craic, they do it for a wage.
Aug 16 2006 13:34
#19
revol68 wrote:
But I'm interested in what you think of him refused to give primacy to any discourses and power dynamics over any other, and his epistme breaks, which seems to me to be the reinvention of "great men" history, but with "men" being replaced with decentred nodes and networks of discourse.
I don't think he does refuse to do that. Rather, his project is to establish and investigate the conditions under which some discourses (psychoanalytic, criminological, etc) could become primary.
As for the positing of rigid breaks between epistemes (or regimes of power/knowledge), I don't think he does that, either. For instance, he recognised the persistance of torture in a regime of disciplinary power as being a limiting case for his analysis. Foucault's alleged positing of epistemic breaks is the basis of Agamben's critique of him in Homo sacer, reference fans. One more recent writer who has investigated the persistance & re-eruption of sovereign power is Judith Butler in Precarious life: the power of mourning & violence, which is (for me at least) a far more rounded take on Foucault and (for Butler) quite readable.
Aug 16 2006 14:05
#20
wasn't the positing of epistemic breaks in early foucault, 'the order of things' i think (haven't read it). His thesis been compared to Thomas Kuhn's paradigm, perhaps by idiots, who knows
Aug 16 2006 14:15
#21
That is what a simple provincial lad like myself was brought up to think.
Me know little of these fancy city ways.
Aug 16 2006 14:40
#22
Quote:
I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.
That's Foucault looking back on the episteme from the vantage point of his later work. So not quite a paradigm, but close enough for the carrot-crunchers.
Aug 16 2006 16:56
#23
am slowly working through "the order of things" at the moment (well within the last 24 hours).
episteme / paradigm - same ballpark, different ball?
one of the problems in discussing "Foucault" is that he isn't singular intellectually, ie there are several "Foucaults". he continually refined, critiqued and invented new ways of working / thinking. Might be better to discuss a particular text so that we have a common frame of reference. (might help if people actually read the text first mind you.)
the Foucault industry shows no sign of abating either. Dead 20 years and he keeps on putting out new books!! The series of lectures in book form and the essential mixes are the latest ones.
Aug 16 2006 16:58
#24
MalFunction wrote:
the Foucault industry shows no sign of abating either. Dead 20 years and he keeps on putting out new books!!
Mixed by Lisa Lashes and Judge Jules?
Aug 16 2006 17:14
#25
no, judge john deed
Aug 16 2006 18:39
#26
Actually, not as ridiculous as you might think. Some house tracks DO sample bits of imp. speechs..I could prob. work up a Foucalt/hard house number if there was gonna be a call for it...but..er...I doubt it somehow...maybe Ian B?? He is into weird dance/punk mixes...it could be done! 
Love
LW X
Aug 16 2006 22:00
#27
I would recommend History of Madness at this point, but it costs £35. In it he argues against any idea of progress, using Psychiatry as an example. I'm enjoying it a lot more than his other books. He seems to be seeing the mad as occupying the position of opposition he excluded from possibility in the rest of his oeuvre. :?
Aug 17 2006 01:34
#28
Hi
Post 19:
If one examines cultural neopatriarchialist theory, one is faced with a choice: either accept Foucaultist power relations or conclude that discourse must come from the masses. Thus, the premise of pretextual Marxism states that the purpose of the reader is social comment, given that Derrida’s model of Foucaultist power relations is valid.
Any number of theories concerning pretextual Marxism may be found. However, in 8 1/2, Fellini reiterates cultural nihilism; in Satyricon he analyses Foucaultist power relations.
The subject is contextualised into a pretextual Marxism that includes truth as a totality. In a sense, Marx promotes the use of structural nationalism to modify language.
Love
LR
Aug 17 2006 01:36
#29
oh how funny.
That joke was soo two years ago.
Aug 17 2006 06:02
#30
Lazy Riser wrote:
If one examines cultural neopatriarchialist theory (snip)
the problem with the postmodernism generator is that it is quite obviously nonsensical to anyone with a vaguley critical eye, as indeed is some post-theory, but by no means all of it. Its not like Hegel or Kant are easy reading.
control as a form of self-punishment