STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France

Spring Semester 2011

*Feb. 15 Society Must Be Defended, 1-140, Hyunkyoung Cho

[Fig 1] Memorial / Isolation (Installation, Fiona Davies, http://www.fionadavies.com.au/default4.asp)

This is an installation in 2007 at Maitland Hospital. An isolation ward and a home for the nurse's who worked in the isolation ward was built at this hospital in the early 1900's. The two buildings were tucked out of the way in a corner of the grounds of the hospital. Two old hospital beds were located in the foyer of the administration section of the hospital. One bed was covered with a sheet embroidered with the architectural details of the buildings while the other held a paper mould of a mortuary slab. The work also refers to the context of contemporary uses of physical isolation of patients and staff as a means of controlling infection.

Power-Network; The Connection of Power– War – Politics

Power is war.

Politics sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war.

The final decision can come only war.

The historico-political discourse as the strategic model for the analysis of power relations

The historico-political discourse is the strategic model for the analysis of power relations. It is an attempt to escape the philosophico-juridical discourse that underlines the power-relation in the regime of representation; it emphasizes the historical analysis and finds another form (the regime of presentation) that does not depend on the juridical system.

As a new way breaking through the conceptual impasse (another system of formulation/analysis of power/alternative ways of analyzing power), it articulates a mode of thought that analyzes power relations in terms of the model of the war.

The discourse as strategic games (as a battle, a place, a weapon, struggle)

The historico-political discourse realizes ‘the form of strategic intelligibility.’ The form of strategic intelligibility is the nonlinguistic level of the analysis of discourse; it allows us to see how one can do nonlinguistic analysis of statement. Treat statement in their functioning.

What is at stake in the discourse (the key for the nonlinguistic analysis) is the performativity as the performative characteristic of discourse; the concept of the performative was coined from J. L. Austin; it notes that ‘to say something is to do’; it focuses on the coinciding (the presenting/ the simultaneous/the real-time)

Insomuch as the discourse involves with the performative, it becomes a strategic game; the description of statement is not complete when one have defined the linguistic structure of the statement, that the analysis of discourse can not be reduced to the combination of elements according to linguistic rules, that therefore “discourse is something that necessarily extends beyond language.” The reason why the discourse should be examined at the two levels of their tactical productivity and of their strategic integration.

A weapon to reveal the power, War as Repression

The historico-political discourse of war functions as a weapon to reveal a perspectival character of truth (knowledge). Because there is a war and truth (knowledge) is the effect of war.

The war is the continuation organized in the multiplicity of power-relations (unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, tense force-relations).[1] It follows the mechanism of power as a basic and essential repression; Power is essentially that which represses. Power is that which represses nature, instincts, a class, or individuals. Power is basically and essentially repression.

At this point, we can understand Foucault’s insight (as the inverted version of Clausewitz’s proposition) that “Power is war, the continuation of war by other means.” The perspective designate that the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals. It spells out that the politics sanctions and reproduces the disequilibrium of forces manifested in war. Therefore, the final decision can come only war; the last battle would put an end to politics.

Power-Network

1. The connection of two hypotheses to analyze power

1) The mechanism of power is repression. (Reich’s hypothesis). 2)The basis of the power-relationship lies in a warlike clash between forces. (Nietzsche’s hypothesis). Here, the crucial point is that the two hypotheses are not irreconcilable. There is a logical connection between the two. It implies that the power should be analyzed in the concept (or the perspectival character) of network.

2. The war-repression schema

Two schemata for the analysis of power: the contract-oppression schema is the juridical schema, and the war-repression schema or domination-repression schema

The power-network proposes the war-repression schema. It is not the pertinent opposition, the previous schema (the contract-oppression schema), that between the legitimate and the illegitimate. It is that between struggle and submission.

In the classical theory of political right, the power has been analyzed in terms of the contract-oppression schema. The oppression is constituted by the power overstepping the limits of the contract, rather the transgression of the limit. (when the power that has been so constituted oversteps the limit, or oversteps the limits of the contract, there is a danger that it will be oppression. Power-contract, with oppression as the limit, or rather the transgression of the limit.)

It means that we can have the other system, the war-repression schemata (the domination-repression), since the repression is not what oppression is in relation to the contract, namely an abuse (the result of the abuse of sovereignty), but, on the contrary simply the effect and the continuation of a relationship of domination. Repression is no more than the implementation, within a pseudopeace that is being undermined by a continuous war, of a perpetual relationship of force.

3. Subject / individual (the political subject) in the power-network

Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.

It is a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom or some multiple, insert matter to which power is applied, or which is struck by a power that subordinates or destroys individuals. In actual fact, one of the first effects of power is that it allows bodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identified and constituted as something individual. The individual is one of power’s first effects. The individual is in fact a power-effect, and at the same time, and to the extent that he is a power-effect, the individual is a relay: power passes through the individuals it has constituted.

Power is exercised, circulated, and forms networks.

4. Power-network performs (functions).

What the power-network (the strategic model analyzing power relations, the war as analyzer revealing the power-network) means is;

There is no such thing as a neutral subject. In the power-network, we are all inevitably someone’s adversary. The theory of sovereignty presupposes the subject; its goal is to establish the essential unitary power, and it is always deployed within the preexisitng element of the law. It therefore assumes the existence of three “primitive’s elements; a subject who has to be subjectified, the unitary power that has to be founded, and the legitimacy that has to be respected.”

The irony of Hobbes’s the primitive war; the war of every man against every man? Reversely, it reveals a truth that “Difference leads to peace.” Insofar as the absence of natural difference creates uncertainties, risks, hazards and therefore, the will to fight on both sides, there is no battles in Hobbes’s primitive war. Rather, there are representation, manifestation, signs, emphatic expression; there are traps, intentions disguised as their opposite, and worries disguised as certainties. We are is theater where presentations are exchanged, in a relationship of fear in which there are no time limits; we are not really involved in a war.

Where there is power, there is always resistance and the two things coexist; as soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensured by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy. The field in which power is deployed is therefore not that of a doleful and stable domination.

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[1] Clausewitz’s proposition says that politics is the continuation of war by other means.

STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France
Spring Semester 2011


*Feb. 8 Abnormal, 167-321, Hyunkyoung Cho


[Fig 1] “Tool’s Life,” Interactive Artwork constituted by the collaborative action of technology and human

The Abnormal Condition of The Abnormal: The Problematic of Generalization of Psychiatry

The problematization of childhood as the condition of abnormality (as the object of psychiatry) The condition of psychiatrization as the mode of production of psychiatric knowledge-power.

1. The condition of the abnormal

The object of psychiatry is the abnormal individual and the domain of abnormalities.
In the regime of psychiatry, the abnormal involves the mixed figure of three characters; the monster, the masturbator, and the individual who have to be corrected.
It depends on the historical condition as the mode of psychiatrization; the mode of (re) production of psychiatric power; the way in which the mixed figure of the abnormal individual is psychiatrized.

The condition is the abnormal basis upon which illnesses become possible. It means that the condition of the abnormal is not the progress (or background) but the fixed (focalized) point. It is no less than the illness (its absolute, its brand, and its name), insomuch as it is a permanent stigma (the discrimination) that brands the individual structurally.

The condition of the abnormal is not the virtuality but the real. There is the difference between the notion of condition and the old traditional notion of predisposition. The predisposition notes “first of all a simple virtuality that did not mean that the individual was not normal”; it was possible to be normal and predisposed to an illness. Second, the predisposition indicates that someone is predisposed to a particular type of illness and not another.

2. The abnormal condition; abnormality of condition

What is stake in the notion of condition is that it is not found in normal individuals. In other words, the individual who suffers from the condition, who has the condition, is not a normal individual. It implies that the condition has an absolute, total etiological value; it can produce absolutely anything, at any time, and in any order; moreover, both physical illness and psychological illnesses can be linked with a condition.
In this sense, we can day that the absolute of condition, the formidable capacity (panoply) of notion of condition reveal the abnormality of condition itself.

Since the condition can be broadly defined by a general disturbance in the play of excitations and inhibitions, by the discontinuous and unpredictable release of what should be inhabited, integrated and controlled, by the absence of a dynamic unity. The notion of condition’s formidable capacity makes and allows “the body behind the abnormal body.” “The background-body” produces a condition that definitely marks the whole of an individual’s body.

3. The childhood as the historical condition of the abnormal

The childhood is a historical stage of development and a general form of behavior becomes the principal instrument of psychiatrization: the childhood has been the principle of the generalization of psychiatry; by taking childhood as the target of psychiatrization, the psychiatry succeeds in being generalized.

It means that the childhood or infantilism becomes one of the historical conditions, a target of the generalization of psychiatric knowledge and power. Insofar as it becomes the filter for analyzing behavior, it is no longer necessary to insert it within an illness, to situate it within a coherent and recognized symptomatology.

4. The problematic of generalization of childhood as condition of the abnormal
The effect of generalization that the problematization of childhood introduces into the psychiatric field (the way in which the problematization of childhood makes possible the generalization of psychiatry).

1) Reproduction (mirror/correlation not imitation)
-Insomuch as it is capable of fixing, blocking, and halting adult conduct and of being reproduced within it, all of the child’s conduct is in principle subject to psychiatric inspection. Conversely, all adult conduct can be psychiatrized insomuch as it can be linked to the child’s conduct in one way or another, whether through resemblance, analogy, or a causal relationship. Consequently, all of the child’s conduct is thoroughly scoured since it may contain an adult fixation within it. Conversely, adult conduct is scrutinized for any possible trace of infantilism.

2) Integration
-(Classical) The psychiatry’s failure to find a way of hitching together pleasure and instinct; It accepted the presence of desire in delirium. However, instinct must be free from pleasure if it is to function as a pathological mechanism because instinct ceases to be automatic if there is pleasure. An individual will necessarily recognize as instinct that is accompanied by pleasure and will register it as liable to induce a pleasure. Therefore, because an instinct accompanied by pleasure naturally figures in a calculation, it cannot be regarded as pathological no matter how violent its movement. Pathologization through instinct excludes pleasure.

-Integrating three elements or three characters; pleasure and its economy, instinct and its mechanism, imbecility (backwardness/retardation)/ the little masturbator, the great monster, and then the individual who rejects all disciplines; Henceforth, instinct may well be a pathological element as well as bringing pleasure; The sexual instinct is pathologized at the level of their appearance without the disconnection between pleasure and instinct that instinctual monomania required. It is enough to show that the process, the mechanism of instinct, and the pleasures that it gives, belongs to an infantile level and are marked by infantilism. Pleasure-instinct-backwardness, pleasure-instinct-retardation now constitutes a unified configuration in which these three characters are brought together.

3) Connection (with neurology, general biology)
-When the major and privileged form of individuals who can be psychiatrized is defined by childhood, psychiatry is able to connect with neurology, on the one hand, and general biology on the other. Psychiatry can function as scientific knowledge and as medical knowledge.

4) Unbalance of condition (the system of reference of psychiatry); authority for the analysis of conduct
-The generalization of psychiatry (the childhood and infantilism of conduct) offers a certain unbalanced condition, that it to say, a condition whose elements do not function pathologically and that is not the basis of disease, but a condition that is nonetheless not normal. The system of reference of psychiatry, or at least the domain of objects that it tries to divide up and control, now comprises the emergence of an instinct that is not ill in itself, that is healthy in itself, but which it is abnormal to see appearing here and now, so early or so late and with so little control; the appearance of a type of conduct that is not pathological in itself but that should not normally appear within the constellation in which it figures. It is a hitch or a scramble in the structures that contrasts with normal development and constitutes the general object of psychiatry. Illness appears only secondarily, as a sort of epiphenomenona, with regard to this condition that is fundamentally a condition of abnormality. Therefore, the psychiatry becomes the science of normal and abnormal behavior by becoming a science of behavioral and structural infantimism. The upside down of image, the unbalance of condition can be called as an inversion produced by effect of generalization of psychiatry.

STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France

Spring Semester 2011

*Feb. 1 Abnormal, 1-166, Hyunkyoung Cho

[Fig 1] “Symbiosis,” Interactive Artwork constituted by the collaborative action of technology and human

The Redoubling (reproduction) of Abnormality by the Abnormalization of the Normal

From the History of Philosophical Thought to the History of Systems of Thought

1. What is the system of thought?

: Actor-Network performed by the inter-acting between actants.

In general, system indicates a composition having several parts or members. If we borrow Bruno Latour’s theory, the concept of system in Foucauldian insight can be understood as Actor-Network performed by the inter-acting between actants; the characteristic of actant is that one actant acts only if another actant reacts. It means that the system emphasizes the performance of relationship as the integrated whole that can be also be stated in terms of an act-network embodying relationships of actants.

2. What is the problem of system of thought?

: The production of Abnormality

The lecture, “Abnormal (1974-1975),” its announced topic is ‘the emergence of the abnormal individual in the nineteenth century.’ It is to overcome the binary system, the dual frame; Beyond the distinction between abnormal and normal, through the historical reflection on the reality of the soul; Production and reproduction of the abnormality of the abnormal individual by the abnormalization of the normal individual. It implies the emergence of new method of production of psychiatric power; the abnormalization of the normal in the correlation with the power (of techniques) of normalization, through the psychiatric expert opinion (uttering/utterance).

3. So, why doctor? Answer: Because he knows.

1) The system of thought is the historical reality of the soul.

“Foucault’s “soul” is very real.” It is endowed with not the metaphysical and transcendental reality, but with a historical reality that is the correlative of a certain technology of power on the body (and of the procedures of knowledge that arise from and reinforce these relations of power).

2) The historical reality of the soul is productive (performative).

Its existence can be understood as the evolution of technology of power as productive.

In the correlation with the technology of power, it takes on the form of the psyche or personality, with its gradation from normal to abnormal, where everyone becomes a psychiatric object, an object that can be psychiatrized. In this sense, we can say that the technology of power as productive creates the dangerous individual, through the technique of normalization situated by the authority responsible for the control of abnormal individual.

To put it differently, 3) the psychiatric power produces the abnormal/dangerous individual; madness/madman; monstrosity/monster. The redoubling of abnormality by the abnormalization of normality: As the functioning of power of normalization, the psychiatric expert opinion guarantees the power to separate between the normal and the abnormal, and controls the abnormal individual in the name of the public enemy. In this process, the individual is replaced with the dangerous individual, the psychiatric object that must to be normalized, since he/she is the monster, the undisciplined, or onanist.