Foucault

One of the readings for Thursday is titled “The History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault. She focuses on the notion of the truth and knowledge regarding sex. One quote to describe what she is trying to do in this essay is when she says “There was no deficiency, but rather an excess, a redoubling, too much rather than not enough discourse, in any case an interference between two modes of production of truth: procedures of confession, and scientific discursivity” (Foucault, 102). She is saying that there is an interference with between talking about sex and the scientific aspects of sex. She means that there is too much discourse to come up with one truth about sex. Another quote that explains this more relates to the ideology of sex when she writes “The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth” (Foucault, 104). She is saying that we cannot look at the ideology to discover a truth but we have to look at the functional requirements. In the 19^th century they were trying to find out what was hidden about sex and Foucault was trying to find the truth behind the discourse of sex.

On my honor I have not given nor received nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this blog.

Pre-Post Discipline and Punish

This reading by Michel Foucault hooked me from the beginning. The description of what occurred during the Plague was enthralling and gave off a suffocating tone. The model of the disciplinary mechanism was well explained- everything has a specific order of how it occurs and there is no room for mistakes. There is also a social order where the individuals in the town are at the bottom, the syndics maintain surveillance, the intendants observe their actions, and surveillance is then reported to the magistrates or mayor. These different levels of power are exercised in a chain of order to repress the civilians. This reminds me of Karl Marx in that there is a notion of a higher class and lower class and the upper class is the one with the ability to repress the latter and exert control through power. Life is determined not by the individual but by the person who succeeds him/her in the social ladder.

This notion of surveillance reminds me of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. In the book, government uses pervasive surveillance and mind control in order to manipulate and control society. Even those who try to escape this model of discipline and order cannot. Through this, ideology is maintained much like during the Plague. This also relates to Louis Althusser in that the Repressive State Apparatus in the novel would be the Government and in Foucault’s example, the magistrates or Mayor. All of these systems are structured in a way that is punitive. The civilians are passive while the magistrates are active and maintain hegemonic power through their dominant ideas.

Foucault also brings up how binary division is replaced by “multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.” (96) Foucault goes past Althusser’s notion of binary oppositions and shows how it is even more evident that we see discrimination occurring through these harsh differences.

Foucault

Michel Foucault’s article from Discipline and Punish relates very well with Louis Althusser’s and Karl Marx’s concepts of ideology. Both Althusser and Marx believe there is ‘ruling class’ or bourgeoisie. These theorists introduce the idea of a culture’s populace being controlled by certain ideas and values that are created by few, yet rule the many. These cultural ideas and norms are identified as the society’s ideology. The primary relation between Althusser’s ideology and Foucault’s essay is the notion of control or ruling. Foucault talks about the architectural concept of Panopticon. Panopticon was created as a form of jail, in which prisoners could always be watched. In mates were monitored, even if they did not know it. This allows the guards to maintain power at all times. In a sense, the guards of these prisons are acting as an ideology. They are enforcing the rules and norms of the prison, even when the prisoners themselves are unaware of their presence.
Foucault relates the prison architecture to cultures and societies by comparing this overlooking concept to schools, hospitals, and other institutions. This again relates to Althusser and his terminology ISA and RSA. The ISA and RSA institutions enforce ideologies within a culture on an everyday basis. Foucault believes these institutions act as the guards of our culture. Ever watching, enforcing, and reiterating the ideologies without the knowledge of the general populace. These groups break the culture up, allowing it to be easier to control and enforce rules throughout the entire society. It is more effective for a government or culture to maintain dominance by evading everyday life, then it would be to try and control a mass amount of people from one isolated area.
Althussser speaks of Ideology and Foucault speaks of dominance, but in the end both examine how popular ideals obtain and maintain control over societies.

Foucault Pre-Post 11/18

This week as we came across Michel Foucault’s readings I felt oddly refreshed. In addition to the reading titled, “Discipline and Punishment” “The History of Sexuality” was also a reading that explored topics that seem near impossible to escape in society. Coincidentally, when I look at the titles side by side I see something interesting in regards to how society based on the dominant narrative perceives these topics. We are supposed to have discipline when it comes to sexuality, and many people believe if you aren’t disciplined with your sexuality and sexual feelings you should be punished. So what does this mean in regards to Michel Foucault? I’m not sure but I was very intrigued by this and it really got me thinking. However, when it came to the two readings, I was definitely drawn toward “The History of Sexuality” probably because I feel it is so relevant in every aspect of life. “Sex Sells” in every form whether it is in the media or in a relationship it is something people are constantly controlled by. As Michel Foucault states in the end of this passage, “The most important elements of erotic art is linked to our knowledge about sexuality are not to be sought in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream complete and flourishing sexuality, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex.” (Foucault 106) When I initially read this I was unsure how to unpack it, but then the more times I read it the more I understood. What is the truth about sex? Through the media we produce false notions and believe them but we don’t really know anything is real. It is possible that this production of sex has some truth to it, but the question is there really any way of separating our fantasies of the fake with the real? This brings us back to many of our other theorists, but what is the truth?

Foucault and Discipline

Reading through Michele Foucault, I keep coming back to this idea of discipline. Perhaps it is because we just have our test last week and I have Louis Althusser on my mine, but I keep running through the idea of ideology and repressive and state apparatuses. Our entire lives are controlled by this idea of punishment, but Foucault notes early on “discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus” (100). In my mind, that eliminates the majority of options. There goes the government and military as well as police force and court system. However, then Foucault continues to say that “it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, [and] targets.”

In an attempt to unpack this commanding idea, I am thinking that perhaps it is not that the police, military, or courts do not relevance, but rather their ‘disciplinary’ techniques fall within a very particular and distinguished group. Punishment which I immediately associate with apparatuses is the ‘infliction of a penalty for an offence.” Seems simple enough and there is not much there to dispute with. Yet, ‘discipline’ which at first seems like a synonym is “the practice of training people to obey codes of behavior” and I truly believe that this is what Foucault is trying to get at. Perhaps it is just a difference in language, which our talk yesterday proved is significant, but perhaps it is something more. There is certain connotation to discipline when it is seen through a lens of taught codes of behavior. It is not just what keeps us down or gives strong authority to our live, but rather the codes in which we think and we act. It gives us direction and is one of those inescapable things in this world that we will forever be absorbed. I could be hitting in the dark here, but I do think the Foucault is trying to show us that discipline is a power trip that once learned, crosses into these repressive apparatuses. However, alone, it has the strength to stand just as strong.

Foucault- Pre Class

In Michel Foucault’s writing from Discipline and Punish, he discusses the concept of Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is an architectural structure that holds its prisoners in a way that they can all be seen from a central tower. The central tower makes it so fewer individuals are needed to exert power over many prisoners. The prisoners are unable to see each other but the central tower is able to see every one of them. Without the prisoners being able to see each other, that eliminates any possibilities of plotting to escape. The key to the concept is that the prisoners are unable to see if anyone is in the central tower or if they are being looked at. Foucault says, “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” (98). In this way power is maintained without any violence, but through the notion that you are potentially being watched at all times.

Foucault links the concept of the Panopticon to schools, hospitals and the workplace. He says, “If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are school children, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents” (98). He says that this takes the crowd and breaks it down into manageable individuals that can be supervised. He believes that our society is very concerned with the notion of surveillance.

Video about surveillance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVTKHI5ovyc

post class, november 16th

November 16^th, 2010

In class today, I was very interested in the topic of journalists and the censorship; as a citizen much of the information I receive, I know to be altered and at times lacking substance or reality in a way and this is something that directly affects society and the functionality of social constructs.

“Journalists want nothing so much as to be part of the intellectual crowd. No doubt, this structural inferiority goes a long way to explain their tendency toward anti-intellectualism.”(330)

The term anti intellectualism can be defined as being “Hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible. Alternately, self-described intellectuals who are alleged to fail to adhere to strict standards of rigorous scholarship may be described as anti-intellectuals”.

“The effect is censorship, which journalists practice without even being aware of it. They retain only the things capable of interesting them and ‘keeping their attention,’ and they reject as insignificant or remain indifferent to symbolic expressions that ought to reach the population as a whole.” (330)

Journalists are interested in ways to advance themselves. At times they censor, which may happen at the level of the ideological state. Journalists may experience self censorship or censorship at the hands of Government. Unconsciously, these individuals may withhold information, which we as the public attain; we must be aware that censorship over the information we receive is and does take place in our media. Journalists are in pursuit of advancing in the world of journalism and reaching a larger public and being a source of information that the public desires. At times, revealing the whole truth or the reality of actual events and what is really happening throughout the world, can pose as a threat to a journalist. The government censors the information we receive which at large is due to keeping the ideological perspective in tact in society. Providing too much information can create a shift in how we are as consumers and citizens in control by our government. Another reason censorship of information occurs is due to journalists lacking protection from harm in the pursuit to reveal real disasters and transgression. An article I came across titled State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet In Mexico, I found to be insightful on journalists in relation to attaining important information:

New York City—At least eight journalists have been murdered in Mexico in 2010 alone, and many more have been kidnapped, threatened, or disappeared. As violence soars around the country, press workers in Mexico are regularly attacked by drug traffickers, targeted by corrupt local leaders, and harassed by federal forces. Their persecutors are seldom brought to justice. Still, in towns and cities throughout the country, journalists are daily defying Mexico’s “censorship by bullet” to expose critical truths.

Some of the key terms in this image consist of Consume, Celebrity, Sensationalism, Scandal, and Sex Tapes. There are many different types of journalists, there are journalists who in pursuit of fame or power, they attain and convey favorable stories which are consumer friendly and attempt to grab there attention through scandal and sensationalism. Another type of journalist is one who at all cost tries to inform the public of real issues, which do affect us. Many times, whether by governmental force or other, as consumers we accept and trust the information we are given. There is however much information that we are withheld not with concern for our own well being but for the well being of our government and its place of power and control over us. These two forms of journalism I believe one to be ethical while the other is unethical.

General forms of journalism with ethics aside consist of fashion, news, celebrity, investigative, sport, citizen, environmental, and business & finance journalism. Majority of these forms are purely for entertainment value while news journalism can be debated on whether or not it also is for this purpose. One issue with news journalism is the availability of media bias. The main purpose of this is to create social change or to give a voice to the oppressed yet this is not always the case with news journalism.