1. Lecture 2, Term II
(2018/2019)
Episteme, Discourses, Discipline and Docile Bodies
Dr Claudia Stein

2. Linguistic Turn (def.):
Recap
Linguistic Turn (def.):
Analytical turn upon (or problematisation of) words/language used in a given field of study.
Term is first used by the American analytical philosopher Richard Rorty in his The Linguistic Turn (1967)
Aim: to critique Enlightenment beliefs in human reason and rationality as ways to produce ‘truthful’ and universal knowledge.

3. Consequences of such claims for the relationship between language and reality?
Reality is NOT representable in any form of human culture (whether written, spoken, visual or dramatic)
No authoritative account can exists of anything. Nobody can know a universal truth, and there is never one single authority on a given subject of knowledge

4. Michel Foucault

5. “Do not ask who I am and certainly do not ask me to remain the same …
“I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after the other and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentious or disguised Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so forth…None of these description is important by itself: taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit I rather like what they mean.”

6. Foucault, an ‘intellectual engage’
Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre at a political manifestation
Prison reform movement (Discipline and Punish)
Anti-psychiatry movement (History of Madness)

7. Foucault’s life-long interest is the history of the human subject and the self
‘… the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself (or herself); I am interested in the technologies of the self and a history of the subject.’

8. ‘I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political checkerboard, one after the other and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostensible or disguised Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, and so forth…None of these description is important by itself: taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit I rather like what they mean.’
Any classification for Foucault is an exercise of power; any
classification ‘silences’ the classified and allows multiple
Power mechanisms ‘to work’ on him/her/it

9. Foucault’s overarching interest:
‘… the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself (or herself); I am interested in the technologies of the self and a history of the subject.’

10. Philosophical traditions dealing with the question of the subject important at the time Foucault studies:
Phenomenology: study of structures of experience, or consciousness (e.g. Husserl). In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments, perceptions, and emotions.
Existenialism: based on the assumption that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual (‘existence precedes essence’; existential attitude; Jean-Paul Satre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus
these ideas are combined with Marxism

11. Some of the leading thinkers of these
traditions
Jean-Paul Satre
(existentialism,
Marxism)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(phenomenology)
Simone de Beauvoir
(existentialism)

12. Phenomenology and Existentialism have in common in regard to the question of what is the human subject:
Take the human subject for granted
In the production of philosophical knowledge, the subject is central; the human subject itself is not the questioned
Ergo: they take individual experiences for granted and universal and as the starting point of philosophical investigation

13. Foucault begins to critique and questions these traditions which take the subject
His inspirations:
Linguistic structuralism – we talked about it last week –Saussure (see last week’s slides/lecture)
Philosophical thinking of the 19th-century German Friedrich Nietzsche

14. Nietzsche’s interest in ‘historising’ philosophical values and the human subject
Genealogy of Morals (1887)
“[W]e need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values grew up, developed, and changed…” (GM, p. 253)
values are not universal but ‘made/invented’ by a particular group to reach specific power aims (e.g. Christianity/Greek traditions is one of Nietzsche’s key focus)
Friedrich Nietzsche ( )

15. Nietzsche’s inspiration for Foucault:
There is no universal ‘subject’ or ‘self’ to be ‘discovered’ but we need to study how it is historically ‘made’ through specific power relations and techniques

16. Two methodologies which Foucault develops over time to investigate the question of how the human subject is ‘made’
I. Method of Archaeology
Investigation of the rules of
Language at a given moment
in time

17. Method of Archaeology
is concerned with the analysis of language as a system of the possibility of expression; it is synchronic – at one moment in time -- and does never try to explain historical change or the origin or distribution of power.
Inspired by structuralism, Foucault’s idea is that every mode of thinking involves implicit rules (maybe not even consciously formulated by those following them) that materially restrict the range of possible thoughts individuals can have.
This is the case for the past as it is for the present: you can only speak what the current ‘episteme’ allows you to think!
ERGO:
THERE IS NO FREE SPEECH!
The human subject is not in control of what he/she is saying

18. Episteme
‘In any given culture and at any given moment there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.’
Renaissance Episteme ( )
Classical Episteme ( )
Modern Episteme ( )
Postmodern Episteme (late1960s -?)
Where are we now? Post-Postmodern Episteme?

19. The historian as an archeaologist
and the episteme
An historian-archeologist uncovers the underlying rules (maybe not even formulated by those following them) that materially restrict the range of possible thoughts (it goes beyond a mere analysis of language systems suggested by Saussure)

20. The archaeologist-historian uses ‘discourse analysis’ to uncover
the invisible rules that organize what we can say and not say
‘Discourse’ and ‘discourse’ analysis aims to overcome the
problems of traditional history writing
What makes thought possible at a particular moment in time? How do people speak about it? Analysis of the rules of what is possible to say.
Later on in his work he ‘adds’ practices/material culture to his under
Standing of ‘discourse’

21. Use of this method in the following books:
Examination of the evolving meaning of madness in European culture, law, politics, philosophy and medicine from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, and a critique of historical method and the idea of history and its ideas of tracing origins
Excavates the origins of the human sciences, which have their root in "life, labour, and language", that is: biology, economics, and linguistics; puts forward the idea of ‘epistemes’
Developing the themes explored in his previous work, Madness and Civilisation, Foucault traces the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the Clinique; the rise of the modern ‘medical gaze’ in the eighteenth century

22. His critique of traditional history writing:
Takes the human subject for granted; ‘ahistorical’ (outside history; humans ‘make’ history but they are ‘not made’
by it)
Search for origins of ideas/practices
Focus on ‘discoveries’ and ‘break throughs’ by individuals
Linear development of history from origins to now; history offers ‘lessons’

23. Moves on his thinking after his archeological work because....
Realisation: It is not language and speech (thinking) that make people act but also everyday practises and their engagement with the material world (e.g. Bourdieu is onto the same ideas here)
And he is dissatisfied with traditional explanations for historical change in history writing at this time:
‘The traditional explanations as the spirit of the time, technology, social cultural influences struck me for the most part as being more than magical effective’.
To investigates this he invents a new method which is deeply inspired by Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy’

24. 2. Method of Genealogy
A historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and corporeal (it focusses on the human body).
It is concerned with the analysis of historical ‘emergence’ – not search for ‘origins’
It is conceptualised not as a ‘discovery’, the culmination of events, or as the end of a process of development but rather as a particular momentary manifestation of chances or as a struggle between forces of power.

25. Geneology is a ‘history of the present’:
The subject matter of this kind of history is the origins of present rules, practices or institutions that claim authority over us. It starts from an investigation of the present.
What claims authority over us now? What makes us think that certain ideas, practices, institutions in the present are ‘normal’)
The aim is not to understand the past for its own sake, but to understand and evaluate the present, particularly with a view to discrediting unjustified claims of authority and power (see slide on Nietzsche)

26. His first history of the present
Aim of all power struggles is:
The human body
Question:
Why do we think we are more ‘human’ today when it comes to punishment?
Analysis of disciplinary power which emerges since the late 17th century

27. Foucault’s ideas about power:
“It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization;
as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another;
and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (Foucault, 1990, pp ).

28. Thus….
‘Discipline’ (or disciplinary power) may be defined neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of applications, targets.’
Aim: Discipline produces ‘docile’ bodies. Bodies which act without being told to act in a particular way