Foucault: October notes

Wishing to search out some information which could help me understand what formed Foucault's background and what drove his work, I went in search of his personal story, finding Gary Gutting's proposal that any of several "versions" could identify him.  He might be proclaimed ,"the son of a prominent family, a brilliant student whose writings on crime and sex made him a major figure in every humanistic and social scientific discipline," ....  a brilliant but emotionally son of an authoritarian physician, (who) hated French society, and despite intellectual success spent his life seeking extreme sensations (limit-experiences, as he called them,).... a fiercely independent person, committed from the beginning to his own and others' freedom, a hero of the anti-psychiatry movement, of prison reform, of gay liberation" (Gutting, Foucault:  A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2005).  What I found revealing about this "exercise" that Gutting performed in the "Short Introduction" is that he concludes his remarks about the many things that Foucault might have been by saying this:  "None of these stories is false, but their mutual truth keeps us from forming any definitive picture of Foucault's life, which is just what he wanted" (4).  Gutting goes on to suggest that Foucault's "interest in and sympathy for those excluded by mainstream standards" may help to explain his comment shortly before his death - "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning" (6).   //  While it seemed that he might have decided to write to "escape from any fixed identity, to continually become someone else," (10) it was in so doing (becoming a writer) that he "achieved quite a distinctive identity" (10)  //  In his essay,  "What Is an Author?"  (reprinted in Rethinking Popular Culture, Mukerji and Schudson, eds.) Foucault seems (to me) almost to play with the concept... arguing that if the one whose name appears on a text turns out to be someone else - what does it matter?  Or, if we were to find that someone else wrote both the work of Bacon and Shakespeare - what does it matter? (451).  It seems in this essay that he is proposing the theory that the question "who is the author" does not really matter.  He writes, "We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author.  Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity" (462).  //  Maybe this is part of the enigma that is the person of Foucault - a desire to be known - a desire not to be identified.   //  In The Archaelogy of Knowledge, Foucault admonished his would-be critics in this way:  "Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.  Leave it to our bureaucrats and police to see that our papers are in order" (240, cited by David Ingram in Chapter Nine, "Foucault and Habermas"  of  The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, second edition, Gutting, ed., Cambridge Press, 2005).

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In my initial reading of Discipline and  Punish,  I was intrigued by his concept of 'space.'  As I read his thoughts on surveillance, I thought about the architectural concepts (in schools and in other institutions) where "central viewing" can take place.  Watching.

His comments about viewing of punishment as an entertainment reminded me of the many works of literature which deal with this topic...Scarlet Letter, The Lottery, numerous French and British works... the scaffold rituals, the public viewing of chain gangs, public torture and execution.  And these scenes and reminders caused me to reminisce about the way the educational institutions have used discipline as "entertainment."   //  Foucault's comments about the history of punishment (how torture of the body gives way to torture of the soul/heart/mind) gave me a great deal to think about in the evolution of discipline in the school setting.   I am dissatisfied with modern methods of discipline in high schools today, but I don't think those remarks have much (if anything) to do with Foucault!

Foucault's comments about "vagabondage" (how the criminals who live in society without being part of it are the worst criminals ... and need to be hunted out by the rest of society) did remind me of Bauman's concept of the vagabond and the tourist, but I am not sure how far that comparison can extend.   I hope we discuss that.  Foucault's words did, however, require me to think about how the "culprits" in the classroom are handled.  //  I think that we all too often forget how many people leave "school" with uncomfortable memories of power misused.  

How do we punish and rid outselves of the "non-conformists"?  Do we abandon them to special programs or alternative schools?

Do we ask members of the "school society" to shun and condemn the enemy, the ones who disrupt?  How do we abuse power?  How do we rehabilitate?

In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, (second edition, Gutting, ed., Cambridge Press, 2005,) Joseph Rouse writes in Chapter Four, "Power/Knowledge,"  Surveillance was often built into the physical structures of institutions that were organized to enhance visibility within them;  here especially there was a new architecture of power....Surveillance was also manifest in the creation or extension of rituals, such as the proliferating practices of examination:  scholastic tests but also medical or psychiatric examinations and histories, eployment interviews, prison musters, and military reviews....These practices of surveillance, elicitation, and documentation constrain behavior precisely by making it more thoroughly knowable or known.  But these new forms of knowledge also presuppose new kinds of constraint, which make people's actions visible and constrain them to speak.  It is in this sense primarily that Foucault spoke of 'power/knowledge.' A more extensive and finer-grained knowledge enables a more continuous and pervasive control of what people do, which in turn offers further possibilities for more intrusive inquiry and disclosure.  Foucault saw these techniques of power and knowledge as undergoing a two-stage development.  They were instituted initially as means of control or neutralization of dangerous social elements and evolved into techniques for enhancing the utility and productivity of those subjected to them.  They were initially cultivated within isoloated institutions (most notably prisons, ospitals, army camps, schools, and factories)" (99-100). 

Finally, for now, I will note that I was happy to come across the July-August 2008 issue of Educational Studies, (which I shared with others in the class one evening.)  This edition is devoted to "Interdisciplinary approaches to Educational Reform within a Foucaultian Framework."  I hope to possibly find an article or two which will spark some ideas for a paper!