Home
Neil McPherson's Library tagged → View Popular
G. Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect
-
In his "Questions of Method," Foucault makes some remarkable methodological
additions to his archaeological/genealogical project. His analysis of "regimes
of practices," reveals both the possibilities of action and knowledge,
the matrix between the epistemological and ontological. His theory of "eventalization"
aims to reveal how certain strategies always support the apparent self-evidence
and universality of a practice. Pasquale Pasquino, in his genealogy of the
criminal, shows the emergence of the criminal not in terms of an act transgressing
penal law (that code instituted to mark a boundary between socially accepted
behaviour and its breach) but as a type, a homo criminalis; as an
anthropological rather than a merely juridical definition, the criminal
is no longer the subject who "breaks" the law, but one constituting
a type, a species who is, by nature, evil. "The criminal," Pasquino
writes, "cannot be a homo penalis because he is not a Man"
(240). The discourse on the criminal (or any other social "type")
categorizes the being who commits an act as a species of being to be studied,
controlled, incarcerated, a type to be excluded from the centrality of social
life by an internal exile into the most safeguarded institution of enclosure.
Methodology Chapter - Genealogy
In a clearly written article, entitled Identity, Genealogy, History (Hall and Du Gay, 1996, p128-150), Nikolas Rose sets the scene for his own ‘history of the person’ or ‘genealogy of subjectification’ (ibid, 128). He problematises the prevailing modern understanding of what it is to be human, and searches for the emergence of this person in the relations human beings have established with themselves through history. These have been characterised, according to Rose, by ‘a whole variety of more or less rationalised schemes, which have sought to shape our ways of understanding and enacting our existence as human beings in the name of certain objectives – manliness, femininity………….’ (ibid, 130). Schools, families, streets, workplaces, courtrooms etc. may be the outward forms taken by these ‘regimes of the person’ (ibid, 131), whose aim is to render norm-offending behaviour both intelligible and manageable. As such, they are ‘technologies’, understood as ‘any assemblage structured by a practical rationality governed by a more or less conscious goal’ (ibid, 132). Underpinning them are certain ‘models’ of how people should be (ibid, 133). Because these could either enable or inhibit, it is worth asking: Who has the authority to speak ‘truthfully’ about the person? What institution or group confers that authority? Is the authority recognizing a claim to real knowledge or experience? Is the authority regulated? What is its relationship with those under it? (These concrete questions avoid vague talk of ‘power’.) For Rose, ethics is an example of a relatively benign technology when understood as ‘the domain of practical advice as to how one should concern oneself with oneself, make oneself the subject of solicitude and attention, conduct oneself in the world of one’s everyday existence’ (ibid, 135). However, ‘techniques of relating to oneself as a subject of unique capacities worthy of respect run up against practices of relating to oneself as the target of discipline, duty and docility’ (ibid, 141). Even ap
Michel Foucault
A genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to
emancipate historical knowledges from that
subjection, to render them ... capable of opposition
and struggle against the coercion of a theoretical,
unitary, formal and scientific discourse.
Michel Foucault: Truth and Power
-
'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and
sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of
truth.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in foucault
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo