notes from foucault

Epistemology (truth/power, etc)

Where religion asked for sacrifice of bodies, knowledge calls for the experimentation on ourselves, We are sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.

Foucault refuses to separate knowledge from power in "the genealogy of the modern subject."

"I wish to create a history of the different modes by which in our culture, human beings are made subjects":

1. The subject is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from others (eg social minorities, mental illnesses) This combines the mediation of a science and the principle of exclusion
2. Scientific classification: objectivization of the productive subject, e.g. In analysis of wealth and econ, or being alive in biology

"Ni roi, ni loi." The growth and spread of disciplinary mechanisms of knowledge and power precedes and enables the growth of capitalism as its prerequisite. Foucault uses Bentham's panopticon to explain the subject and power. Even if there is no guardian present, the power apparatus still operates effectively since the inmate cannot see whether the guardian is in the tower. This machine is one in which everyone is caught, those who exercise this power as well as those who are subjected to it. This "spatial ordering" leading to the automatic functioning of power.

With the development of human sciences and economics:

• The power of the state is to produce an increasingly totalizing web of control is intertwined with and dependent on its ability to produce an increasing specification of individuality,
• Solution? "Maybe the target is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are" in order to liberate us from the state and from the type of the individualizations linked to the state. Individuality is imposed on us.

With regards of the location of author/role of intellectual

• Philosophers, political scientists as the universal intellectual whose task is to speak the truth
• Scientists, mathematicians are specific intellectuals, their voices have an authority and their work is intertwined with our specific fates
• In science, the trend of the author has began with ethos because of the name, but moves towards the "anonymousness" of truth after a formalization of the scientific method, after discovering population as an object of scientific investigation
• In literature the opposite is true: in the Middle Ages anonymity in literature and theories of analysis are the norm, whereas today literature is associated with specific authors.
• Founders of discursivity provide a paradigmatic set of terms/images and concepts which organize thinking and experience in a way which surpasses the specific claims they put forth. For example, a reexamination of Marx would modify Marxism. To be an intellectual meant being the consciousness/conscience of us all. The intellectual is the bearer of this universality.

On being labeled a dilettante of discontinuity:

• Foucault's question is : 'How it's it that at certain moments in certain orders of knowledge, there are sudden take-offs and transformations that does not correspond to the calm, continuing image that is normally accredited?'

On events:

• The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning
• History has no 'meaning', but it is intelligible.
• Foucault dismisses the Dialectic (logic of contradictions) as reductionist towards Hegel and the semiotic (the structure of communications) as reduced to platonic form that, apparently, is too calm for him.

On power and knowledge:

• The problem of power was only posed in terms of constitution and sovereignty on the right, and state apparatus on the left.
• Genealogy, the form of history that accounts for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events (necessarily outside of it? Or is it without experiencing change?) or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.
• "Isn't power a sort of generalized war?"

On ideology and repression:

• Ideology stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth, and it refers to the order of a subject: ideology stands secondarily, relative to something that functions as its infrastructure.
• "If power were never anything but repressive, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?"
• What makes power good is that it produces things, induces pleasure, forms knowledge and invites discourse. It is a productive network.
• There is a new "economy" of power that is "individualized" throughout the entire social body.

On politics and the state:

• Sovereign, law and prohibitions are a system of representation of power (instead of power itself, etc.)
• Relations of power necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state The state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. It is super structural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, tech, etc
• The networks are in a conditioning-conditioned relationship to a kind of meta power"
• Thus the state is a codification of power relations which I renders its functioning possible, but revolution is a different type of codification of the same relations.

On truth:

• Truth is a thing of the world. It is produced by multiple forms of constraint, induces regular effects of power.

• Each society has its own regime of truth, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true

• The problem is changing the regime of the production of truth, thus truth is the political question.

• (on ancient philosophy) I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period… It is not anything to get back to.

• Remarks on the need of secular ethics concerned with immediate being and our relationship to others within today's society

• Art becomes something which is specialized which is done by experts/artists. But why couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?

Let's take a detour and see Sartre through Foucault's eyes:

• The self is not something that is given to us
• But through moral authenticity, Sartre says that we have to be ourselves, to be truly our true self
• Foucault thinks that the only consequences of this is to creativity instead of authenticity
• Since the self is not given to us, we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
• Sartre says that the work of creation has authenticity through the relation to oneself, but Foucault disagrees: the relation to oneself sound instead be related to a creative activity. (A more Nietzchean view)