Madness and Civilization
Main article: Madness and Civilization
The English edition of Madness and Civilization is an abridged version
of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, originally published
in 1961. (A full translation titled
The History of Madness has since been published by Routledge) This was Foucault's first major book, written
while he was the Director of the Maison de France in Sweden. It examines ideas, practices,
institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history.
Foucault begins his history in the Middle Ages, noting the social and
physical exclusion of lepers. He argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy,
madness came to occupy this excluded position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is
a literary version of one such exclusionary practice, namely that of sending
mad people away in ships. In 17th century Europe, in
a movement which Foucault famously describes as the Great Confinement, "unreasonable"
members of the population were locked away and institutionalised. In the eighteenth century, madness came
to be seen as the reverse of Reason, and, finally, in the nineteenth century as
mental illness.
Foucault also argues
that madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to signify the limits of
social order and to point to the truth. He examines the
rise of scientific and
"humanitarian" treatments
of the insane, notably at the hands of Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke. He claims that these new treatments were
in fact no less controlling than previous method. Pinel's
treatment of the mad
amounted to an extended aversion therapy, including such
treatments as freezing showers and use of a straitjacket. In Foucault's view,
this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and
punishment was internalized by the patient. Anti-psychiatry advocates such as R. D. Laing have attempted to
portray Foucault as sympathetic to their movement on the basis of Madness
and Civilization.
Main article: The Birth of the Clinic
Foucault's second major book, The
Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology
of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique:
une archéologie du regard médical) was published in 1963 in France, and translated to English in
1973. Picking up from Madness and Civilization,
The Birth of the Clinic traces the development of the medical profession,
and specifically the institution of the clinique (translated as
"clinic", but here largely referring
to teaching hospitals). Its motif is the concept of the medical regard
(translated by Alan Sheridan as "medical gaze"), traditionally
limited to small, specialized institutions such as hospitals and prisons, but
which Foucault examines as subjecting wider social spaces, governing the
population en masse.
Main article: The Order of Things
Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines was published
in 1966. It was translated into English and published by Pantheon Books in 1970 under the title
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Foucault had preferred L'Ordre
des Choses for the original French title, but changed the title as there
was already another book of this title. The book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez's painting
Las Meninas and its
complex arrangement of sight-lines, hiddenness and appearance. Then it develops its central claim: that all
periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that
constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault
argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and
relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another. Foucault's Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment values in Les mots et les choses has been very influential to cultural history,
It is here Foucault's infamous claims that "man is only a recent
invention" and that the "end of man" is at hand appear. and the book made Foucault a prominent intellectual figure
in France.
Main article: The Archaeology of Knowledge
Published in 1969, this volume was Foucault's main excursion into methodology, written as an appendix of sorts to Les Mots et les choses. It makes
references to Anglo-American analytical philosophy, particularly speech act theory.
Foucault directs his analysis
toward the "statement" (énoncé), the basic unit
of discourse. "Statement" has a very special meaning in the Archaeology:
it denotes that which makes propositions, utterances, or speech acts meaningful. In contrast to classic
structuralists, Foucault does not believe
that the meaning of semantic elements is determined
prior to their articulation. In this understanding, statements themselves are
not propositions, utterances, or speech acts.
Rather, statements constitute a network of rules establishing what is meaningful,
and these rules are the preconditions for propositions, utterances, or speech
acts. to have meaning. However, statements are also 'events', because, like other rules, they
appear at some time. Depending on whether or not it complies with these rules
of meaning, a grammatically correct sentence may still lack meaning and,
inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence may still be meaningful.
Statements depend on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field of discourse; the
meaning of a statement is reliant on the succession of statements that precede
and follow it. Foucault aims his
analysis towards a huge organised dispersion of statements, called discursive formations. Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is
only one possible procedure, and that he is not
seeking to displace other ways of analysing
discourse or render them as invalid.
According to Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault not only brackets out
issues of truth (cf. Husserl), he also brackets out
issues of meaning. Rather than looking for a deeper meaning underneath discourse or looking
for the source of meaning in some transcendental subject, Foucault analyzes the
discursive and practical conditions of the existence for truth and meaning. In
order to show the principles of meaning and truth production in various
discursive formations he details how truth claims emerge during various epochs
on the basis of what was actually said and written during these periods of
time. He particularly describes the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and the 20th century. He strives to avoid all
interpretation and to depart from the goals of hermeneutics. This does not mean
that Foucault denounces truth and meaning, but just that truth and meaning depend on the historical
discursive and practical means of truth and meaning production. For instance,
although they were radically different during Enlightenment as opposed to
Modernity, there were indeed meaning, truth and correct treatment of madness
during both epochs (Madness and Civilization). This posture allows
Foucault to move away from an anthropological standpoint, denouncing a
priori concepts of the nature of the human subject, and focus on the role
of discursive practices in constituting subjectivity.
Dispensing with finding
a deeper meaning behind discourse appears to lead Foucault toward structuralism. However,
whereas structuralists search for homogeneity
in a discursive entity, Foucault focuses on differences. Instead of asking what constitutes the
specificity of European thought he asks what constitutes the differences
developed within it and over time. Therefore, as a historical method, he
refuses to examine statements outside of their historical context: the
discursive formation. The meaning
of a statement depends on the general rules that characterises the discursive formation to which
it belongs. A discursive
formation continually generates new statements, and some of these usher in
changes in the discursive formation that may or may not be adopted. Therefore,
to describe a discursive formation, Foucault also focuses on expelled and
forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive formation.
Their difference to the dominant discourse also describe it. In this way one
can describe specific systems that determine which types of statements emerge.
In his Foucault (1986), Deleuze describes The Archaeology
of Knowledge as "the most decisive step yet
taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities."
Main article: Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison was translated into English in 1977, from the French Surveiller
et punir: Naissance de la prison,
published in 1975.
The book opens with a
graphic description of the brutal public execution in 1757 of Robert-François Damiens, who
attempted to kill Louis XV. Against this it juxtaposes a colourless prison timetable from just over 80 years
later. Foucault then inquires how such a change in French society's punishment
of convicts could have developed in such a short time. These are snapshots of
two contrasting types of Foucault's "Technologies of Punishment". The
first type, "Monarchical Punishment", involves the repression of the
populace through brutal public displays of executions and torture. The second,
"Disciplinary Punishment," is what Foucault says is practiced in the
modern era. Disciplinary punishment
gives "professionals"
(psychologists, programme facilitators, parole officers, etc.) power over the prisoner, most notably in
that the prisoner's length of stay depends on the professionals' judgment.
Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon
Main
article: The
History of Sexuality
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