So, Foucault's History of Madness is one where madness comes to be the vehicle for
him to understand how we reinforce social codes.
In such a way as to limit, increasingly limit the possibilities we have.
For alternative ways of life, alternative pleasures for, or even one might say, for
the experience intensity. Intensity is pushed to the side, or
intensity is diminished in favor of normality.
That's, that's the Foucauldian light motif, I think, in much of his work.
Here's another quotation from the prison work excuse me, [LAUGH] from the asylum
work. Madness escaped from the arbitrary only
in order to enter a kind of endless trial for which the asylum furnished
simultaneously police, magistrates, and torturers.
Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside of it.
For a long time to come, Foucault writes, a madness is, becomes part of a moral
world. And our moral world, Foucault thinks, is
a world of of social conformity, reinforced social conformity.
And Foucault, really delighted in showing how the pursuit of anti-conformity
[LAUGH] often lead to more conformity. Because you concretize or make too stable
some alternatives, you make them into identity markers that then become their
own forces of conformity. So, for example Foucault in his History
of Sexuality wanted to show how the fluidity of sexuality gets increasingly
controlled over time, especially in the modern period.
Especially when people think they're pursuing sexual freedom, they create new
categories for how you should pursue sexual freedom.
New forms of identity to which you should conform even if that identity is is
liberatory, is outside of the main stream.
But you create a new mode of, of being that you then have to conform to.
This is Foucault's great subject. How we, in a way, police ourselves.
How we dominate ourselves by saying, oh, I am going to be a radical.
I'm going to be a radical. And now, I have to act like the radicals
act. In other words, you conform to the image
of radicalization. Some might you say, well, I am not a
diseased person because I like to have sex with people of my own gender.
No, no, I am not that. I am free, I am gay, or I'm a homosexual,
or I'm a lesbian. I am free.
And Foucault says, yeah, you're free. But now, notice how we start to have to
conform to being gay, being lesbian. What it, why do we need always to find a
new mode of conformity? a label for our freedom that comes then
to repress us. That his subject.
I mean, the repressive hypothesis is the core of psychoanalysis.
You know, the, the reason I keep walking around is because I'm repressing what I
really want to do. The reason my shoulder keeps going up is
because I'm, I'm repressing something else.
And so, if I repress something, something else, the repressed impulse comes out in
another form. And Foucault thought this was very
deceptive mode of thinking. And, and thought it, it deceived us about
the nature of pleasure and desire. it convinced us that, for example, if I
just lie down on the couch here and tell you about what I'm really thinking, that
somehow I would be liberated to, and that's kind of nice actually.
>> [LAUGH] >> to, I'd be liberated to, to, to tell you
what what I really want, why I really like Foucault.
What really is going on, I [UNKNOWN]. because I'm sitting up now.
>> [LAUGH] >> But if I were [SOUND] lying down and free
associating, I would be able somehow to access my true feelings and get them
beyond repression. Foucault then say, that's a big mistake.
More than that, it's a productive mistake produces the following.
It produces lots of talk around sexuality.
How repressed we are, how many vines, how many vines of freight talking about how
repressed we are. How many volumes of that Repertorium
Literature in society talk about how much they didn't talk about sex?
In other words, there' nothing better than talk, their repressive hypothesis
for talking about sex. And so, the idea that some of you feel
liberated by talking is what Foucault would call wrong.
What happens, as you might expect right now with Foucault, you keep talking about
things you learned to talk in the same way.
You learn to desire the same things. You reduce heterogeneity and you increase
conformity, that's the path. Whether he does it in the, the book, the
books on prison, these very popular books.
discipline and punish where he shows that we used to torture prisoners in, in very
public ways. And we used to be barbaric towards them.
And now, now we think we have to rehabilitate them.
We think prisoners should be given a moral treatment that brings them back
into the fold, if you will. But Foucault was very suspicious of this
effort at rehabilitation. He says, what happens instead is that we
take the forces that used to go into torture and policing, and we put them
into policing ourselves all the time. The schools themselves become the engines
of conformity. Schools become like prisons.
All our institutions start resembling prisons because all of our institutions
start pushing a model of identity from which they cannot escape.
The last reading we had from, from Foucault, and I'm going to have to just
call it up on my screen here so I can give you correct cor, cor, correct
quotations. is about enlightenment echoing Kant's
essay we read in the very first week. What is enlightenment?
Foucault writes that Kant was not seeking to understand the present on the basis of
a totality or of a future achievement. Kant was looking for a difference.
With, what a difference does today, sorry.
Kant was looking for a difference. What difference does today introduce with
respect to yesterday? What difference does today introduce with
respect to yesterday? Kant, Foucault says, is interested in how
enlightenment marks a possibility, a change, a difference.
And for Foucault, that creates a what he calls an attitude of modernity.
An attitude of modernity. And for Foucault, and this is a less
pessimistic side of Foucault that sees in a modernity, especially modernity that
he, that Foucault associates with Baudelaire.
modernity is a a time when you can invent possibilities rather than conform to
alternatives. Here is Foucault, a mar an attitude of
modernity. a section of the essay, What is
Enlightenment? For the attitude of modernity, the high
value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it,
to imagine it otherwise than it is. This, and this is really the key
Foucauldian phrase, to imagine, to imagine modernity otherwise than it is.
That, that's what Foucault is always looking for.
to, to think about reality that could be otherwise than it is.
He gets this from the surrealists and, and it becomes a key part of his
thinking. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise,
Foucault writes, in which extreme attention is extreme, sorry.
Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real
is confronted with the practice of a freedom that simultaneously respects this
reality and violates it. For Baudelaire, Foucault says, that you
paid great attention to the world around you.
You don't want to just close your eyes and imagine another society.
No, you pay attention to the world around you.
Extreme attention. But you pay that attention in the service
of imagining an alternative to the reality that's around you.
Violates the reality, alright? Violate the reality around you.
you don't want to just try to discover something else in the status quo.
You want to invent something else. You want to create something else.
This is Foucault and Baudelaire. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the
man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his inner truth, he is the
man who tries to invent himself. This is the core message of our, our week
for Foucault, our, our section of Foucault.
Modern man is he who tries to invent himself, not discover himself.
Not find the true essence, or the foundation, or the telos, the goal, but
to invent yourself. This modernity does not liberate man in
his being, Foucault writes. It compels man to face the task of
producing himself. Produce yourself, don't find yourself.
Because then, you have the possibilities of liberation that is new rather than
liberation that is conforming to another, somebody else's model of what it means to
be free. And this is what Foucault's critical
practice is all about. How do we expand the possibilities of
invention that changed the world around us, without succumbing to new modes of
conformity, new models of oppression. Foucault talks about this as practical
critique. The critical question today has to be
turned back into a positive one. The point in brief is to transform the
critique conducted in the form of a necessary limitation into a practical
critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.
Here, he's actually criticizing, if I can use that word here, the fact that school
people, the Horkheimer and Adorno's model of say, showing how limited everything
is. Showing how we're, we're caged in.
And Foucault says, what we need is a critique that opens up possibilities of
transgression. Just like Baudelaire did in, remember in
The Bad Glazier poem where he just threw something at this guy to shouting at him
make life beautiful. It was transgressive, it wasn't moral, it
didn't conform to anything else. But, it opened a space.
That's what Baudelaire was trying to do with his poems, and that's what Foucault
is trying to do with his histories. Open a space of possibility where
something new might happen. What is at stake, Foucault writes then,
is this. How can the growth of capabilities be
disconnected from the intensification of power relations?
How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensificication
of power relations? Can we create possibilities that are not
just going to be subsumed into new modes of repression?
That was Foucault's, that was from Foucault's work.
The, the, the, exploration of possibility without those explorations becoming new
forms of repression. And Foucault sought that out in his
personal life, he sought that out in his teaching.
He sought that out in in his books and essays and, and in, in the arts that he
thought about and wrote about. I had the the privilege as a young
historian to, to work with Foucault in, in Paris.
And I was working on the kinds of things that Foucault really didn't like at all,
frankly. I was working on Hegelian things, you
know? And my, and my dissertation was on
Hegelianism in France. And Foucault was the great enemy of
Hegelianism in France. And, but I, I he was very kind and
generous with me and, and helped me connect to people that I needed to know
to do my research. And I was really struck by his of course,
his, his charisma, his powers as a thinker, as a teacher.
But also, by his generosity. Because I think part of his generosity
was the creation of possibilities from even people who disagreed with him.
Creation of possibilities in a world that increasingly closed off things for us and
to us. He was a thinker who wanted to open up
things for us and to us. and he did that with gusto with with
generosity and with a piercing intelligence.
We'll come back to some people in that Foucauldian tradition next time.
and when we, when we go on into the postmodernism as we approach the present.
Thanks.