In a methodologically typical fashion, Foucault avoids the abstract question: Does human nature exist?, and asks instead: how has the concept of human nature functioned in our society? 4
“It seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.” [Foucault] 6
Foucault’s most general aim is to “discover the point at which these practices became coherent reflective techniques with definite goals, the point at which a particular discourse emerged from these techniques and came to be seen as true, the point at which they are linked with the obligation of searching for the truth and telling the truth.” 7
“My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” [Foucault] 7
Essentially “dividing practices” are modes of manipulation that combine the mediation of a science (or pseudo-science) and the practice of exclusion—usually in a spatial sense, but always in a social one. 8
In this dense and erudite study [The Order of Things], Foucault shows how the discourses of life, labor, and language were structured into disciplines; how in this manner they achieved a high degree of internal autonomy and coherence; and how these disciplines of life, labor, and language—which we tend to view as dealing with universals of human social life and as therefore progressing logically and refining themselves in the course of history (as in the natural sciences)—changed abruptly at several junctures, displaying a conceptual discontinuity from the disciplines that had immediately preceded them. 9
But the two dimensions—dividing practices and scientific classification—are not the same thing; nor are they orchestrated together by some unseen actor. Foucault offers no casual explanations for these changes, leaving his readers somewhat at sea with regard to how he evaluates the interplay of intentional action, socioeconomic changes, particular interests, and accidents. 10-11
Foucault’s third mode of objectification represents his most original contribution. Let us call it “subjectification.” It concerns the “way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject.” 10-11
In these analyses, Foucault is primarily concerned with isolating those techniques through which the person initiates an active self-formation. 11
It is important to stress that Foucault did not see himself as a practitioner of these human sciences. They were his object of study. 12
Rather, once again, it was the effective operation of these disciplines—how and around what concepts they formed, how they were used, where they developed—that was Foucault’s prey. 12
Foucault is resolutely and consistently anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist in this area. The search for a general theory of history is not on his agenda. In fact, it is, in Foucault’s diagnosis, part of the problem. 13
His is a constant pluralizing and decapitalizing of all the great concepts, first principles, and fundamental grounds that our tradition has produced. 14
His more recent work has thematicized power in a new way. 14
In fact, it was only slightly later, in the seventeenth century, that detailed knowledge of the disposability of the things available—the different “elements, dimensions and factors of the state’s power’’—was christened “statistics”: the science of the state. The art of government and empirical knowledge of the state’s resources and condition—its statistics—together formed the major components of a new political rationality. A rationality, Foucault assures us, from which we have not yet emerged. 16
As the fostering of life and the growth and care of population becomes a central concern of the state, articulated in the art of government, a new regime of power takes hold. Foucault calls this regime “bio-power.” He explains that bio-power “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of the transformation of human life….Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.” 17
The aim of disciplinary technology, whatever its institutional form—and it arose in a large number of different settings, such as workshops, schools, prisons, and hospitals—is to forge a “docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.” 17
Disciplinary technologies, in other words, preceded modern capitalism. In Foucault’s argument, they are among its preconditions. Without the availability of techniques for subjecting individuals to discipline, including the spatial arrangements necessary and appropriate to the task, the new demands of capitalism would have been stymied. 18
The panopticon offers a particularly vivid instance of how political technologies of the body function. It is “a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men….[I]t is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form…it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” It is also a particular organization of space and human beings, a visual order that clarifies the mechanisms of power which are being deployed. 18
This new power is continuous and anonymous. Anyone could operate the architectural mechanisms as long as he was in the correct position, and anyone could be subjected to it. The surveillant could as easily be observing a criminal, a schoolboy, or a wife (Bentham suggests, apparently without humor, that the panopticon would be an extremely effective arrangement for a harem, since it would cut down the number of eunuchs necessary to watch the women in the cells). 19
As the final step in the architectural and technological perfection, the panopticon includes a system for observing and controlling the controllers. Those who occupy the central position in the panopticon are themselves thoroughly enmeshed in a localization and ordering of their own behavior. “Such is perhaps the most diabolical aspect of the idea and of all the applications it brought about,” Foucault comments. “In this form of management, power is not totally entrusted to someone who would exercise it alone, over others, in an absolute fashion; rather, this machine is one in which everyone is caught, those who exercise this power as well as those who are subjected to it.” 19
Foucault, however, points to an additional rationality built into the project of the panopticon. It offered a logic not only of efficiency but also of normalization. By “normalization,” Foucault means a system of finely gradated and measurable intervals in which individuals can be distributed around a norm—a norm which both organizes and is the result of this controlled distribution. A system of normalization is opposed to a system of law or a system of personal power. There are no fixed pivot points from which to make judgments, to impose will. 20
The entry of medicine, psychiatry, and some social sciences into legal deliberations in the nineteenth century led in the direction of what Foucault calls a systematic “normalization” of the law—that is, toward an increasing appeal to statistical measures and judgments about what is normal and what is not in a given population, rather than adherence to absolute measure of right and wrong. 21
A vast documentary apparatus becomes an essential part of normalizing technologies. Precise dossiers enable the authorities to fix individuals in a web of objective codification. More precise and more statistically accurate knowledge of individuals leads to finer and more encompassing criteria for normalization. This accumulation of documentation makes possible “the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population.’” The power of the state to produce an increasingly totalizing web of control is intertwined with an dependent on its ability to produce an increasing specification of individuality. 22
“The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.” [Foucault] 22
But Foucault is not a biologist or a physicist, a man of science, either. Such scientists occupy the key positions of the “specific intellectual” (Foucault’s term for those sectorial specialists on whom our future depends and who must speak to us from their laboratories. Their voices are given an authority because their work and our fate are intertwined, not because they have any special claim to represent reason. The specific intellectual is “he who, along with a handful of others, has at his disposal, whether in the service of the state or against it, powers which can either benefit or irrevocably destroy life. He is no longer the rhapsodist of the eternal, but the strategist of life and death.” 23
He points out that in the West, until the seventeenth century, the scientific text was the one more closely associated with and legitimated by the celebrity and authority of the author: “Those texts that we now would call scientific—those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography—were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as ‘true’ only when marked with the name of their author.” This situation has obviously changed today. Once these disciplines crossed the scientific threshold of ‘formalization’ and succeeded in developing procedures of concept formation, evidence, verification, etc., then the name of the author was no longer central to the authority of the text. Truth became more anonymous. 24
In literature, schematizing broadly, we find the opposite trajectory. During the Middle Ages, “the texts that we today call ‘literary’ (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status.” Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, literature with a capital L has emerged as an autonomous and highly valued activity, with a place for itself on the intellectual scene (see Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero). And the authority of the author has continued to grow in literary productions. The identification and evaluation of a literary work are intimately linked to the fame, standing, and reputation of its author, and from the intellectual world that gravitates toward those in power. 24-25
Foucault then briefly alludes to a third type of authorial location. These are the rare figures, social thinkers it seems, whom he calls ‘founders of discursivity.’ Specifically, he mentions Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. What Foucault describes are figures who provide a paradigmatic set of terms, images, and concepts which organize thinking and experience about the past, present, and future of society, doing so in a way which enigmatically surpasses the specific claims they put forth. This status is particular to the human sciences. Whereas in the biological or physical sciences the original texts, say James Clerk Maxwell’s equations or those of Albert Einstein, are fully absorbed and surpassed by the scientific work that follows them, this is not he case in the human sciences. 25
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