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Michel Foucaultby Andrew Roberts
Foucault appears to recognise some truth in the story of psychiatry and criminology as movements towards greater humanity, and in the story that sexual expressions were repressed and then liberated. But he invites us to consider important questions about how these stories may distort the truth.
When we have understood the stories he criticises, the questions he asks,
and the new stories he suggests, we cannot rest. Foucault's search for
truth is in the questioning, but the answers lead to more questions.
Foucault says:
Patterns of power and concepts of self
Foucault's work explores patterns of
power within a society, and how power relates
to
the self.
Foucault's approach is usually historical,
attempting to show that
everyday ideas about reality, like
reason and
madness,
punishment, and
sex
change in the course
of history.
History is not simply about the past for Foucault, it
penetrates our everyday lives.
Foucault created new concepts for understanding
many things as
power relations, including not only prisons and the police,
but also the
care of the mentally ill and welfare. When he turned his attention to
explaining power and sex, he challenged the adequacy of the main concepts
of power that we have and suggested others.
Looking back on his work, in a
May 1982 interview, Foucault said that he had been
exploring the
relation between reason, knowledge, truth and power. His
thesis might be
stated as knowledge gives power, although it is not the same
as power.
Born
15.10.1926 in Poitiers
History penetrates Foucault's childhood
It is something very far from us now. Very few people remember the murder of Dollfuss. I remember very well that I was very scared by that. I think it was my first strong fright about death.
Students write about
power and psychiatry
We could regard Madness and Civilisation as Foucault's contrast and comparison of the modern 19th century lunatic asylum (beginning with the Tuke's Retreat) with what had gone before and Discipline and Punish as Foucault's contrast and comparison of the modern 19th century prison (beginning with Bentham's Panopticon idea) with what had gone before
Foucault on one (reform) version of history
The Description of the Retreat was written in 1813 by Samuel Tuke, and focuses on the humanitarian care of the insane within the York Retreat.
The Description of the Retreat outlines a new approach to insanity; one which was based on the idea that reason exists within the insane individual. It is perverted rather than absent.
The Description of the Retreat provided a model (ideal) for asylums
during the period of
therapeutic
optimism
The chapter on Medical Treatment says that it is to be used a little as possible in the Retreat. When it is practised, it must be done with a degree of moderation and carried out by only the most experienced of superintendents. "Medicine, as yet, possesses very inadequate means to relieve the most grievous of human diseases." (Tuke, S. 1813, p.111)"... "But the remedy, in such cases ought to be applied with great judgement: and its application should always be witnessed by the master or mistress of the family." (Tuke, S. 1813, p114).
Later, non- Quakers applied this idea to large asylums. See, for example, Harriet Martineau's description of the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in June 1834 In the chapter Moral Management, it is proposed that this is the best and most appropriate approach to dealing with those of diseased minds. Moral Management was a system of treating insanity by the institutional regime of the asylum, rather than by medicines or physical treatments.
"Whatever theory we maintain in regard to the remote causes of insanity, we must consider moral treatment, or management, of very high importance."... "Much may be done towards the cure and alleviation of insanity, by judicious modes of management, and moral treatment." (Tuke, S. 1813, p131- 2). Tuke argues that if the right type of establishment is created, and with the correct exercising of moral guidelines then the patient could adopt a 'healthy mind'. Tuke thought that fear and a natural desire for self esteem were elements which existed within those who were regarded as insane, and proposed that manipulating these in the desired way could lead the patient into developing 'self restraint' and 'self control' over their state of mind. Moral treatment is not just effective through a specific type of treatment but also exists within the layout and structure of the Retreat. The Retreat is designed in a way that allows the mad man to know he is being watched and that bad behaviour will be recognised. Moral management was not only embedded within the psychological treatment of the patient but also within the actual structure of the establishment. Space was an important feature. The building was purpose built to assist the restoration of the patients to reason, and not as a place of secure confinement.
See
functions of architecture in the therapeutic period of asylums
With particular reference to the Retreat
The Tukes were one of the first to exercise moral management as the primary mode of treatment for the insane. They paid little attention to medical forms of treatment; placing most emphasis on a therapeutic and benevolent style of treatment.
Asylum as segregation Foucault says that although "Tuke's gesture... is regarded as an act of liberation. The truth was quite different... The Retreat would serve as an instrument of segregation: a moral and religious segregation which sought to reconstruct around madness a milieu as much as possible like that of the community of Quakers." He quotes Samuel Tuke: "... there has also been particular occasion to observe the great loss, which individuals of our society have sustained, by being put under the care of those who are not only strangers to our principles, but by whom they are frequently mixed with other patients, who may indulge themselves in ill language, and other exceptionable practices. This often seems to leave an unprofitable effect upon the patients' minds after they are restored to the use of their reason, alienating them from those religious attachments which they had before experienced; and sometimes, even corrupting them with vicious habits to which they had been strangers." Fear centred treatment Foucault quotes Tuke on fear:
"The principle of fear, which is rarely decreased by insanity, is considered of great importance in the management of the patients." This passage continues (not quoted by Foucault): "But it is not allowed to be excited, beyond that degree which naturally arises from the necessary regulations of the family. Neither chains nor corporal punishment are tolerated, on any pretext, in this establishment". A further quote on fear, not quoted by Foucault is:
"In an early part of this chapter, it is stated, that the patients are considered capable of rational and honourable inducement; and though we allowed fear a considerable place in the production of that restraint, which the patient generally exerts on his entrance into the new situation; yet the desire of esteem is considered, at the Retreat, as operating, in general, still more powerfully" The construction of self-restraint Foucault argues that "at the Retreat the partial suppression of physical constraint was part of a system whose essential element was the construction of a "self-restraint" in which the patient's freedom, engaged by work and the observation of others, was ceaselessly threatened by the recognition of guilt. Instead of submitting to a simple negative operation that loosened bonds and delivered one's deepest nature from madness, it must be recognised that one was in the grip of a positive operation that confined madness in a system of rewards and punishments, and included it in the movement of moral consciousness. A passage from a world of Censure to a universe of Judgement. But thereby a psychology of madness becomes possible... The science of mental disease
The science of mental disease, as it would develop in the asylum, would
always be only of the order of observation and classification. It would not
be a dialogue. It could not be that until psychoanalysis had exorcised this
phenomenon of observation, essential to the nineteenth-century asylum, and
substituted for its silent magic the powers of language.
No longer repression, but authority
Surveillance and Judgment: already the outline appears of a new personage
who will be essential in the nineteenth century asylum. Tuke himself
suggests this personage, when he tells the story of a maniac subject to
seizures of irrepressible violence. One day while he was walking in the
garden of the asylum with the keeper, this patient suddenly entered a phase
of excitation, moved several steps away, picked up a large stone, and made
the gesture of throwing it at his companion. The keeper stopped, looked the
patient in the eyes; then advanced several steps towards him and
Something had been born, which was no longer repression, but authority.
1.7.1967 Idiosyncratic structuralist?
In the cartoon, Foucault explains his ideas to three other structuralists.
Levi-Strauss is distracted, Lacan psycho-analyses him and Roland Barthes
looks friendly, but unconvinced.
Foucault was a philosopher and historian of systems of
thought. I have seen
him identified with
structuralism or
post-modernism and post-structuralism.
But, reading between the lines, his ideas and concepts suggest
to me that
he would not have enjoyed being labelled, or put into boxes.
To have put
himself into a certain box, in academic terms, would have
meant going
against his own ideas or thoughts. He thought that if you
become wrapped
into a set of 'truths' of a specific knowledge or theory, you
cease to
learn - as you think you know the answers. Then you have
imprisoned
yourself by taking these ideas as true or common knowledge.
I sense if he was to let himself be portrayed under a certain
terminology
he would also then be caught up into a discourse of a certain
set of
language that is unified by common assumptions or beliefs
within an
academic context
(Foucault, M. 1980 Power & Knowledge, Chapter 6).
November 1971: Foucault carries on explaining himself. This time
to
Noam Chomsky
""I admit to not being able to define, nor for stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific and technological society. On the other hand, one of the most urgent tasks, before everything else, is that we are used to consider, at least in our European society, that power is in the hands of the government and is exerted by some particular institutions such as local government, the police and the army, These institutions transmit the orders, apply them and punish people who do not obey.
Michel Foucault was a campaigner against prison secrecy. 8.2.1971 (France) Manifesto of the Le Groupe d'information sur les prisons signed by Jean-Marie Domenach, Michel Foucault et Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Images of knowledge, observation, struggle and power run through the issues that are discussed below. Le Groupe d'information sur les prisons was a radical alliance of left wing political activists in local cells who linked with nearby prisons to secure information about what was happening inside them. Jean Paul Sartre was one of the people who published the information in his newspapers. This new technique of political struggle used information from below. Foucault's book Surveiller et Punir considers information gathered from above people. It is about information that can only be seen by people who gather it, not by those it is gathered about.
Le supplice [torment - torture] de Damiens le régicide [king- killer] - illustration from Foucault
1791 The Principle of the Panopticon or Inspection House by Jeremy Bentham Panopticon is derived from Greek, and the best I can do in translating is all-seeing. It had been used (1768) for a kind of telescope. Bentham used it in his letters of 1787 (published 1791) for his plan for a circular institution in which all the inmates cells could be seen from the centre, where the inmates knew anything they did could be seen, but could not see if they were being seen. Inspection House (see below) conveys the meaning in English. The word inspect was translated into French by Foucault as surveiller, which now means to supervise or have authority over, but comes from a word (veiller) for staying awake to keep guard whilst others sleep. In 1794, Parliament backed this scheme, as a prison plan. The foundations were laid. But, in January 1803, Bentham was told the Government could not find the funds
Bentham thought that the same plan could be used for schools, orphanages, workhouses and many other institutions. Read Bentham on the Panopticon Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated instruction diffused - public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in Architecture! - Thus much I ventured to say on laying down the pen - and thus much I should perhaps have said on taking it up, if at that early period I had seen the whole of the way before me. A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse. - Such is the engine: such the work that may be done with it. How far the expectations thus held out have been fulfilled, the reader will decide. Read Foucault on the Panopticon
"Let penalties be regulated and proportional to the offenses, let the death sentence be passed only on those convicted of murder, and let tortures that revolt humanity be abolished." Thus, in 1789, the chancellery summed up the general position of the petitions addressed to the authorities concerning tortures and executions Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode:
The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time... the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms... All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition Read Louise Warriar and others on Surveillance Moderated surveillance is a feature of modern government. Modern because it relates to the development of the bureaucratic state and industrial (as distinct from agricultural) economies - Moderated because the camera watching the streets is limited by laws (unlike the total surveillance described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty Four) - Government by surveillance because the subject is controlled by the knowledge that the subject is watched. Technology makes surveillance possible, but our social theory provides the framework that makes it meaningful and limits it. To look at this social theory, we will first analyse the work of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), then look at the analysis of Michel Foucault (1926- 1984), and proceed, in the light of this, to discuss surveillance by closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras.
Sexual repression and incomplete liberation - a two-part story The sexual repression story
Thomas Bowdler, 11.7.1754 - 24.2.1825
Has given his name to the practice of removing or altering material
considered improper or offensive - Bowdlerisation.
The Times,
10.10.1819 page 4.
As written, Iago in Shakespeare's Othello (1604) says "I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs." [having sex]. Bowdler altered to "I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are together." Bowdler says "I wish it were in my power to say of indecency as I have said of profaneness, that the examples of it are not very numerous. Unfortunately the reverse is the case. Those persons whose acquaintance with Shakspeare depends on theatrical representations, in which great alterations are made in the plays, can have little idea of the frequent recurrence in the original text, of expressions, which, however they might be tolerated in the sixteenth century, are by no means admissible in the nineteenth."
Foucault continues:
Foucault's doubts about the repressive hypothesis
"The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hypothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century.
Charles Joseph Jouy (born about 1827) and the construction of
knowledge
Il faut jouir de la vie - One must enjoy life
jouir "to experience sexual spasm, to have an orgasm, to 'come'"
(Harrap's French-English Dictionary of Slamg and Colloquialisms
Repression is part of the construction of a discourse (field of
knowledge) about sex
Consider the construction of our knowledge or discourse about
paedophilia
Charles-Joseph Jouy was about forty years old in 1867. Sophie Adams appears to have been under eleven years old. Jouy was an illegitimate child whose mother had died when he was young. Foucault describes him as simple minded and "more or less the village idiot". He was poorly educated, took whatever badly paid work he could find, lived a solitary life and tended to get a bit drunk.
The picture of domestic violence is from a woodcut in "Jack and Jill and Old Dame Gill", a sheet published by J. Kendrew in York about 1820.
A pure object of knowledge
"The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge - an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mareville, but also one to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. Foucault is making the point that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the incidents that led up to his confinement (*), Charles-Joseph Jouy, village idiot aged 40, has now become a lifetime object of science for the new psychiatry. From the lives of many such as him, a new system of knowledge, a new way of seeing things, is being created.
Foucault is considering how three types of abnormal (not normal) individuals were conceptually constructed by science. He calls these the "monster" - the "little masturbator" and the "individual who cannot be integrated within the normative system of education". Jouy considered as a paedophile (a term not then in use) seems to fit each category. By today's standards, he was a monster:
The 2013 monster:
A man was murdered and had his body set on fire following false rumours he
was a paedophile
Joseph (below) is a weaver, aged 55 (about 1857). Morel describes him as having a deeply corrugated face with a characteristic expression that denotes ordinary intelligence. He is not someone who drinks excessive alcohol. He is the father of "cretins" and so Morel says that we must look in his ancestry and in his features for the evidence of hereditary transmission. Apparently, his father and grandfather were semi-cretins, and their [other?] children have successively died young. Cretinism is associated with goitre - an enlargement of the thyroid gland.
Solemn discourse "overlays" everyday theatre
Foucault argues that the repression of familiar discussion of sex,
enforcing a polite, sanitised attitude in which children did not "talk
about all these things aloud"
(the sexual repression story), as happened in the period we call
Victorian, was necessary for "institutions of knowledge and power" to
establish the scientific discourse as the overlying one.
At the same time as Jouy was becoming an object of scientific study,
Foucault says:
So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to
take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely
furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children (*), a
whole
machinery for speechifying, analysing, and investigating."
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Index and contents
Patterns of power and concepts of self
Born
Madness and Psychiatry
Penology, Criminology and Sociology
History of sex
Foucault's doubts about the repressive hypothesis Jouy and the construction of knowledge Solemn discourse "overlays" everyday theatre
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