Foucault at Work

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes NOTES 1. The other volumes published by Palgrave Macmillan, by the same translator and editor as Psychiatric Power, are: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975 (2004); Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976 (2003); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (2008); Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, January-April 1978 (2007); The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982 (2005). 2. Michel Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 3. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 4. Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir, 44-53. Unless otherwise noted English translations of the French are my own. Thanks to my colleagues Darlene Lanfranconi and Mary Ann Gosser-Esquilín for their very helpful assistance in proofing and correcting the French text and translation. 5. Gregory Bateson, "Cybernetic Explanation," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1987), 405-6. 6. As Zbigniew Kotowitz points out, "In some important respects, Laing's thinking follows the arguments of the Palo Alto Group [as the leading researcher of which Bateson developed the double bind theory of schizophrenia] in full. His concept of different modes of experience does not differ in any significant respect from the idea of different modes of communication in Bateson, particularly as Laing is concerned with the communicability of experiences.... when [Laing] says that "a closely related error of category is to confuse the modality of experience" [The Self and Others (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 38], he is basically repeating Bateson's thesis" (Zbigniew Kotowitz, R. D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry [New York: Routledge, 1997], 38). Also see Bateson, "Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 244-70. 7. Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power, lecture of 23 January 1974, 264 n. 48; Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973-1974, 264. 8. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 254. 9. Foucault said, "May '68 was extremely important, without any doubt. It's certain that without May '68 I wouldn't have afterward done the work I did in regard to prison, delinquency, and sexuality. In the pre-1968 climate, that wasn't possible.... Problems that in the past had not found any echo, with the exception of antipsychiatry, became current issues." "Interview with Michel Foucault," in vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. J. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 282. 10. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique: Folie et déraison (Paris: Plon, 1961). 11. Probably the most thorough and sophisticated analysis of the convergence of French Poststructuralism and Anglo-American cybernetics is in the works of Anthony Wilden, who was Jacques Lacan's translator and Gregory Bateson's student. See especially System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2d ed. (London: Tavistock, 1980; rpt., London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), and Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 12. In his "Translator's Note" Graham Burchell points out the various shades of meaning and possible translations of dispositif: "On the one hand, in relation to 'psychiatric power' the term picks out a sort of strategic game plan for the staging of real 'battles' and 'confrontations' that involve specific 'tactics,' 'manipulations,' 'maneuvers,' and the overall 'tactical disposition' or 'deployment' of elements and forces in an organized 'battlefield' space. On the other hand, it also refers to a more or less stable 'system' of 'techniques,' 'mechanisms,' and 'devices'; 'a sort of apparatus or machinery.'" He chooses to translate the term as "apparatus" throughout but notes the redundancy with Foucault's parallel term, appareil, which he also translates as "apparatus" (Psychiatric Power, xxiii-xxiv). 13. "There is no pre- and post -archaeology or -genealogy in Foucault" (emphasis in original), Hubert L. Dryfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 104; see chaps. 4-5 for a detailed study of Foucault's methodological transition. 14. Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); excerpts online http://foucault.50webs.com/books/1971_OD.htm; "The Discourse on Language," trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215-37. 15. Foucault, Discourse on Language, 234; modified translation. Ainsi doivent alterner, prendre appui les unes sur les autres et se compléter les descriptions critiques et les descriptions généalogiques. La part critique de l'analyse s'attache aux systèmes d'enveloppement du discours; elle essaie de repérer, de cerner ces principes d'ordonnancement, d'exclusion, de rareté du discours. Disons, pour jouer sur les mots, qu'elle pratique une désinvolture appliquée. La part généalogique de l'analyse s'attache en revanche aux séries de la formation effective du discours: elle essaie de le saisir dans son pouvoir d'affirmation, et j'entends par là non pas un pouvoir qui s'opposerait à celui de nier, mais le pouvoir de constituer des domaines d'objets, à propos desquels on pourra affirmer ou nier des propositions vraies ou fausses. Appelons positivités ces domaines d'objets; et disons, pour jouer une seconde fois sur les mots, que si le style critique, c'est celui de la désinvolture studieuse, l'humeur généalogique sera celle d'un positivisme heureux (L'ordre du discours, 71-72). 16. Fredrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882). Online. http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/dfw.htm. Accessed 21.6.2008. 17. As Althusser defines these concepts, "the forms of order (forms of proof in scientific discourse) are the 'diachrony' of a basic 'synchrony'. I am using these terms... as the concepts of the two forms of existence of the object of knowledge, and hence as two forms of existing purely inside knowledge. Synchrony represents the organizational structure of the concepts in the thought-totality or system (or, as Marx put it, 'synthesis'), diachrony the movement of the succession of concepts in the ordered discourse of the proof. The forms of the order of the discourse of the proof are simply the development of the 'Gliederung', of the hierarchized combination of the concepts in the system itself," Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1979), 67-68. Althusser's language is closer to communicative systems theory than Foucault's, though the distinction between a hypostatized synchronic analysis and a dynamic diachronic one is clear in both. For a rigorous study of diachrony and synchrony in information systems, see Wilden, "Ecosystem and Metasystem: A Morphogenic Model of Emergence in Open Systems," in System and Structure, chap. 12, 350-94). 18. Yiramiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14; David Own, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7-16; "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosoph, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11-22; for the "Kingdom of Ends," see "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," Practical Philosophy, part 3, 37-108; for Kant's arguments about the causality of freedom versus natural causality, which underlie what Yovel calls the "historical antinomy," see Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Alan Wood, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), secs. A 444/B472 and A 445/B473; for the "moral law" underlying the Kingdom of Ends, the achievement of happiness (as Kant subsumes Aristotle's eudaimonia), and the achievement of the "highest good" or "final end" of life for rational beings, see Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), sec. 87, 314-15. 19. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 253, translation modified; Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985; rpt. 1988), 297-98. 20. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, vol. 2 of Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 380-81. 21. "Isn't discourse," Foucault asks rhetorically, "in its most profound determination, a 'trace'?" (Le discours, en sa determination la plus profonde, ne serait pas "trace"?), L'archéologie, 274. 22. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1977), 26-27; Surveiller et punir, 34-36. 23. Habermas, "Philosophical Discourse," 253; Der philosophische Diskurs, 297-98. 24. "Ce sont tous ces phénomènes de rapport entre les sciences ou entre les différents discours dans les divers secteurs scientifiques qui constituent ce que j'appelle épistémè d'une époque." Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 405. 25. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 191 (Sheridan Smith's translation); compare Althusser's description of synchrony discussed above. He later refines his definition: "If you like, 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 yet be characterized as scientific" (Louis Althusser, "Confessions of the Flesh, " in Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon et al., 197). 26. I use the adjective "mature" in an echo of Kant's above-cited text, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" where Kant defines his titular idea in the opening line: "Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its own self-imposed immaturity" (Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit). Was ist Aufklärung? Project Gutenberg. Online. http://pge.rastko.net/etext/100048. Accessed 24 June 2008. I discuss Foucault's version of the same essay below. 27. Foucault (Interview), "Le jeu de Michel Foucault," Dits et Écrits II (1976-1988), ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques LaGrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 299; English translation modified from, Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon et al., 195. 28. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumarbeit, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 212. 29. Norbert Wiener's originary treatise, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, was produced at MIT, like Alan Turing's work at Whitehall, in the attempt to develop technologies to help the Allies win WW2. For a very different perspective on the same discipline, see Raymond Ruyer, La Cybernetique et l'Origine de l'Information (Paris: Flammarion, 1954). On the topic of surdétermination, Ruyer points to "la différence entre une action causale isolée, et la 'pluri-causalité' connectée, ou le 'canevas de causes' avec 'amboception.'" As a result of overdetermination, he continues, 'On sait que les équilibres dans l'organisme ne sont pas, en general, des équilibres statiques, mais des équilbres homéostatiques" (50-51). 30. Ferdinand de Saussure, Écrits de linguistique générale (edition prepared by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler) (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). English translation: Writings in General Linguistics, ed. and trans. Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 31. Althusser, Reading Capital, 106. 32. I intend this metaphor as a reference to Suzanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), whose theory of symbolic forms like that of her predecessor Ernst Cassirer, opened yet another dimension for rethinking the arts and sciences in terms of language and communication. 33. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 13. 34. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 35. "Je ne sais s'il faut dire aujourd'hui que le travail critique implique encore la foi dans les Lumières; il nécessite, je pense, toujours le travail sur nos limites, c'est-à-dire un labeur patient qui donne forme à l'impatience de la liberté." Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?" Dits et Écrits II, 1397; English translation: "What is Enlightenment?" trans. Catherine Porter (modified), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 50

Michel foucault · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices

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