Transcript Lecture six slides

Introduction to Social Analysis
Week 6
Foucault, discourse and
discipline
1
How to make sense of madness?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQIAT4Hh7Jc
Bedlam boys. Old Blind Dogs
2
Half Way Summary
• Course concentrates on how to theorise.
• Teaches this by examining questions posed by
sociologists and how they have sought to
theorise social phenomena.
• Each lecture taken examples of studies the
method the authors have used to make sense of
their topic.
• Urban life, work, disability, biography, interaction
• Introduced on the way concepts like urbanism,
functionalism, actor perspectives, symbolic
interaction, and generalised other…
3
How to make sense of madness?
• What broader social insights can we can from
understanding madness and mental institutions?
• What can we understand from the historical
examination of the development of dominant
ways of thinking and classifying people.
• Start with Goffman and move on to Foucault
using the contrasts between them to look at
“total institutions” and to illuminate their ideas.
4
Reading:
• Seidman, Steven, (2004) Contested
Knowledge 3rd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Chapter 12 ‘ Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary
Society’.
• Good account of Foucault’s ideas and relates
them to those of other theorists. Uses the
example of sexuality. In this lecture I use the
example of madness and medicalisation.
• Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory.
Polity Press, Chap. 7 Michel Foucault and
Body-centeredness of Modernity.
• Easy to read account of Foucault’s ideas
5
Asylums
Goffman, Erving. 1968 Asylums : essays on the
social situation of mental patients and other
inmates Harmondsworth : Penguin. 362.2 GOF
• Idea of “total institutions”;
batch living, all aspects of
life in one organisation.
Includes prisons,
barracks, hospitals,
convents, children’s
homes, boarding schools,
ships, etc.
6
Symbolic interactionist perspective
• Characterised by two
contrasting roles: staff
and inmates, no
social mobility
between them.
• Different strategies of
interaction to achieve
the objects of the
institution and of the
individual members of
staff and inmates.
7
Staff strategies
• To obtain compliance of
inmates – for the smooth
running of institution (getting
everyone fed on time), for their
own good (taking the
medication), to shape
desirable characteristics.
• How to get them into role?
Role stripping, taking away
previous roles, induction rituals
• “Mortification of self” removal
of resources for opposition, for
adopting other roles than
inmate, for adopting a different
moral order.
8
Inmate strategies
• Primary v Secondary adjustments; formal rules v
coping strategies – in practice not as clear cut.
• Private spaces and things – a stash, secret
hiding places, illicit personal things
• “outs” – activities, pleasurable or distracting,
which enable the person to mentally leave the
institution, move to another realm
• Rituals of resistance, inmate solidarity,[ v.
colonisation]
9
Impact of the book
• Very influential, not only within
sociology by within psychiatry
and social welfare, led on to
“care in the community”.
• But taken for granted in
Goffman’s frame of reference
were the medical rationale for
the asylums, the power of the
staff, and the nature of mental
illness.
• However, Goffman did show
that behaviour which was seen
as validating a diagnosis of
‘mentally ill’ could be seen as
an anticipatable consequence
of the social situation in a ‘total
institution’.
Exeter Asylum Digby
10
Michel Foucault
• Foucault has written on
prisons and asylums as part of
wider body of work which
focuses on the importance of
the body in modern society,
and a history of how particular
ways of understanding the
world come to dominate.
• “He is particularly interested in
how and why, in modern
societies, the body needs to be
managed and regulated in
ways not necessary in premodernity.” (Jones 2003: 124)
11
Michel Foucault
• French, studied in the U.S.
became influential in
1970’s and 80’s, labelled a
post-modernist, and most
of his work is a particular
kind of historical sociology
but one in which very
specific studies have much
wider importance.
12
Discourses
• “Foucault is interested in the way in which different forms
of knowledge – different versions of what is true and
false, right and wrong – produce different ways of life.
He uses the term discourse to refer to a knowledgebased way of thinking and acting.
• Just as a child has no choice about the language(s) it
has to learn as it grows, so we have no choice about the
particular knowledge about the world we have to acquire.
To put it this another way, for Foucault, it is through the
discourses that dominate a time in history and place in
the world that people acquire their mind-set, or worldview.” (Jones 2003:125)
13
the genealogical method
• If you want to know why particular discourse
came to power, be a social archaeologist: trace
the origins of a way of knowing by
deconstructing it and examining the foundations
on which its rise to power rested.
• [This is also called the genealogical method, but
rather than kinship systems it is knowledge
systems which are seen to have origins and
development and social consequences]
14
Bedlam
•
•
•
William Hogarth (1697 - 1764).
This painting shows the
Bethleham Royal Hospital,
London. The first asylum for the
insane in England. The word
bedlam is derived from the name
of the hospital and became a
generic term for all asylums and
colloquially to mean random
disorder or chaos.
Bedlam was infamous for its ill
treatment of the inmates, and this
picture shows visitors, a man
being shackled by the attendants
(early nurses?) and the
overcrowding and squalor of the
hospital during the mid 1700s.
15
Clinical gaze and surveillance
• Hence Foucault’s approach to places where
people are incarcerated and to mental illness
directs him to precisely the areas Goffman took
for granted.
• What are the origins of the discourses which
enable psychiatrists and criminologists to design
and populate such institutions?
• What is the nature of the power which gives
some the opportunity to discipline others?
16
Clinical gaze and surveillance
• “According to Foucault, the power of notions of health
and illness in our lives is analogous to the power of
notions of good and evil in the lives of pre-modern
humans. Foucault characterises the exercise of a
discourse’s power as a form of surveillance to ensure the
conformity of a population to particular notions of truth
and falsehood, good and bad. …the idea of gaze of a
discourse and its enforcers [is used] to represent this.
Thus he describes the shift from the dominance of
religion in pre-modernity to the dominance of medicine in
modernity as the emergence of the Medical gaze or the
Clinical gaze.” Jones 2003:126-7
17
Medicalisation of madness
• One of Foucault’s earliest works looks at the
medicalisation of madness
• “Unhappiness, hopelessness, distress, fear,
social estrangement and social
marginalisation are all inevitable aspects of
the human condition and all human worlds
deal with them in some way of another. But
only in modernity is madness medicalised –
defined as mental illness and therefore
subject to medical intervention, regulation and
control. As a society modernizes, psychiatry
and psychiatrists emerge to define, police and
manage this kind of illness with their ultimate
power residing as their ability to confine and
control mad bodies in mental hospitals and
other places of surveillance.” (Jones
2003:130)
18
Panoptican
• “a discourse always has its experts to
enforce normality and punish deviance.
However, one of Foucault’s key points
is that because, as humans, we
constantly assess what we should and
should not do in relation to the cultural
knowledge we have acquired –
because we police ourselves – that the
delivery of a discursively directed order
is ensured.”
• He compares the life of a human being
in a discourse-directed world – and
there can be no other kind – to the life
of a prisoner in a panoptican. The
panoptican was a prison designed by
Jeremy Bentham in 1843.
• Open cells, in circular block, viewed
from central tower into which the
inmates could not see.
19
Panopticism
• “Hence the major effect of the
Panopticon: to induce in the
inmate a state of conscious
and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic
functioning of power. So to
arrange things that the
surveillance is permanent in its
effects, even if it is
discontinuous in its action; that
the perfection of power should
tend to render its actual
exercise unnecessary; that this
architectural apparatus should
be a machine for creating and
sustaining a power relation
independent of the person who
exercises it.
• In short, that the inmates
should be caught up in a
power situation of which they
are themselves the bearers.”
(Foucault 1977:201)
20
• “Just a gaze, an inspecting gaze which
each individual under its weight will end by
exteriorizing to the point that he is his own
overseer, each individual this exercising
this surveillance over and against himself”
(Foucault 1980:155)
21
The disciplines
• Foucault disagreed with the Enlightenment account of criminal
reform this view described the march of the humanitarian spirit
sweeping away barbaric practices of torture in favour of a
humanistic program of rehabilitation. In Discipline and Punish,
Foucault interpreted the prison reform movement as establishing a
new more efficient, system of control. Contrary to its ideology of
rehabilitation, its chief aim is to depoliticize social discontent by
incarcerating non-conforming individuals and regulating them by an
apparatus of surveillance and psychological management.
• Foucault was no less critical view of that psychiatry marks the
beginnings of the humane treatment of the insane. Substituting
treatment and therapy for banishment or imprisonment, the new
sciences of the mind are said to epitomize the humanitarian spirit of
the Enlightenment. On the contrary, Foucault underscored the
growing authority of mental health experts whose therapeutic
discourses and practices create new psychological subjects – e.g.
the neurotic, the narcissist, hysteric, schizophrenic, the analcompulsive, the frigid personality – who are objects of psychiatric
and state social control. (Seidman 2004:188)
22
Power
• Foucault did not deny the social importance of the
repressive power of the state or ruling social strata (e.g.
an economic elite or the power of men).
• He insisted, however, that the disciplinary-based
production of social order in prisons, hospitals, factories,
the military and schools is central to contemporary
Western societies. It is not the power to enforce
obedience that make possible these social structures;
rather, social order is produced by a series of disciplining
strategies – from confinement to systems of
examinations – whose aim is to regulate behaviour by
imposing norms of normality, health, intelligence, and
fitness. (Seidman 2004:189)
23
The dangers of an Enlightenment
view of progress
• Foucault departed from liberal and Marxist images of modern society
as an organic whole or social system that has a centre or unifying
dynamic, such as capitalism or the idea of progress.
• He imagined modern societies as fractured, lacking a social centre that
gives to them a unity and telos. Neither the state nor the economy is
the social centre, no one drama or social conflict, not class conflict nor
gender, sexual, ethnic, or religious conflict, carries any obvious social
or political primacy. No social group or ideology rules society, nor is
society organized around the logic of capitalism, patriarchy,
bureaucracy, secularization, postindustrialization, or democratisation.
• In short, Foucault rejects the image of society as an organism or
system that has been endorsed by both the liberal and Marxist
traditions. Foucault viewed the social field as consisting of
heterogenous forces, institutional orders, processes and conflicts.
(Seidman 2004:188)
• End of grand theory and meta-narratives
24
Multiple voices
• According to Foucault, no discourse however
dominant gets away without opposition from
competing forms of knowledge forever.
• The modern globalised world, sees alternative
knowledge systems, readily available and able
to confront one another.
• Post-modernism values a multitude of voices
with their versions of the truth and doesn’t seek
to choose between them.
25
Studies:
• Foucault, M. “The birth of the Asylum” pp.141-167 in
Paul Rabinow The Foucault Reader.Penguin Books,
1984.
• Foucault, Michel. 1979 Discipline and punish : the birth
of the prison Harmondsworth: Penguin. 364.60944 FOU
• Foucault, Michel. 2005 History of madness London:
Routledge,. 610.9 FOU
• Hacking, Ian 2004 “Between Michel Foucault
and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the
abstract and face-to-face interaction” Economy
and Society 33(3):277-302
26