1. Media Studies: Week 7: Discourse “Plague Doctor” 1656 - Paul Furst
Handmaid’s Tale Trailer:
“Plague Doctor” Paul Furst

4. Michel Foucault - Discourse
Studied the conditions that govern what can be said or thought authoritatively and meaningfully in any specific historical period.
In books such The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things, he articulated the ways in which the establishment of “truth” depends on the historical, discursive and practical means of truth production within various disciplines of knowledge (mental health, biological sciences, sexuality, systems of public discipline and punishment).
So mental illness, for example, is not a timeless and objective fact. It is historically constituted through the discourse of specific disciplines of knowledge: medical, psychiatric, religious, legal.

5. Rembrandt - The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632)
For example: the shift from 16th century science based on surface appearance and similarity of forms to 17th century science based on dissection, anatomy, and the functions of biological parts and organs

6. Michel Foucault - Discourse
Attempted to analysis the hidden role of power in the way we speak or write about the world (meaning and power are intertwined).
Foucault analyzed “relations of force, strategic developments and tactics” within the production of knowledge (quote from Stuart Hall).
So the study of discourse according to Foucault is not only about language, it is concerned with the rules and practices that produce meaningful statements and regulate discourse.
Discourse defines the topics that are worth discussing and who is permitted to speak about them with authority (it rules some people in and rules others out).

7. Michel Foucault - Discourse
Discourse is never located in one text, it is found across a range of texts or statements, forms of conduct and institutional sites (discursive formations).
Knowledge is “put to work” through particular “regimes of truth.”
Discursive formations are related to the “meaning maps” and “coding systems” (Stuart Hall) we’ve discussed previously.

8. Foucault - “Panopticism”
Chapter from Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
In which Foucault tries to understand the historical shift from a system of spectacular public punishment to the modern prison system of incarceration.
Prior to the 19th century the system of punishment is based on Sovereign power (all crimes are crimes against the King or Queen) and involves public displays of punishment (such as being placed in the stocks, branded a criminal, or public hanging).
Public Punishment - The Stocks

14. Jeremy Bentham at UCL

15. Foucault - “Panopticism”
Jeremy Bentham ( ) was an English philosopher, jurist and legal and social reformer.
He proposed a system of incarceration called the “Panopticon” in which prisoners are held in “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible” (p. 200).
Prisoners, each in their own cell, could be under constant surveillance from a guard tower in the center of the prison.
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

17. Michel Foucault - “Panopticism”
Prisoners in this system became “the object of information, never a subject in communication” (p.200)
They could be monitored, analyzed, tested…
One of the key elements of Bentham’s system is that the exercise of power and surveillance is “visible and unverifiable” (p.201), the prisoners know that they could be watched at any time, but they never know if they are in fact being watched at any one time.
Foucault claims that as a result power and surveillance becomes permanent and automatic…
The prisoner begins to monitor him or herself.

18. Michel Foucault - “Panopticism”
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (p.202-3).
The relations of power, according to Foucault, become internalized in the subjects themselves.
Another important change is that power in this system becomes “disindividualized” - it doesn’t matter who is exercising this power.
Power no longer resides in a person (the sovereign) but in a system or arrangement of institutions, mechanisms, bureaucracy…

19. Michel Foucault - “Panopticism”
Importantly, power in this system is not simply repressive (preventing unlawful actions or dominating subjects) it is productive (increases the forces of society, produces “better” citizens).
Discourse, Foucault argues, produces subjects. Prison and legal discourse produces criminals; medical discourse produces patients; psychiatric discourse produces “mad men.”
The panopticon then becomes a model of power or a “figure of political technology” (p.205) which can be applied to a whole range of institutions in the 19th century: schools, hospitals, asylums, military barracks…

20. Michel Foucault - “Panopticism”
All of which incorporate these techniques of surveillance and productive power in order to make “useful individuals” (p.211).
The “disciplinary society” is one marked by “subtle coercion” and “generalized surveillance” (p.209) - unlike the plague city which is a temporary measure, discipline is being exercised constantly.
The mechanisms of power become diffused throughout the social body and are internalized by individuals.
The “disciplinary society” therefore represents a “whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal” (p.199).

21. Michel Foucault
Foucault was himself very politically active and was a participant in a number of campaigns and organizations including: defense of “sans papier” immigrants in France, the founding of the Prisoner Information Group, and the promotion of gay rights.
Michel Foucault

26. Anne Balsamo - “Public Pregnancies”
Analyses the discursive formation conditioning contemporary social ideas concerning pregnancy by looking at medical documents, technologies and institutions, mass media representations and literature.
Reveals how power relations are exercised on the pregnant female body.
The pregnant woman is “divested of ownership of her body” (p.263) - she is in the service of a greater social good.
The female body becomes an object of observation and analysis (by the largely male medical establishment).

27. Anne Balsamo - “Public Pregnancies”
Pregnant women are positioned within this discourse as unreliable or even criminal subjects that require surveillance.
“…we witness the process whereby women are interpolated into a very convoluted narrative that defines wombs as unruly, childbirth as inherently pathological, and women of childbearing age as unreliable and possibly dangerous” (p.110).
“New reproductive technologies…are implicated in the production of a new set of possibilities, wherein the rights of the pregnant woman are set against the ‘rights’ of other people either to intervene in her pregnancy or to act on behalf of the unborn fetus” (p.98).