"Psychiatric Power" Lecture 7 & 8

The group began with questions... (1) What is the relation between simulation and psychiatric power? (PP 136). (2) What is their simulation and how does that play in the struggle between patients and doctors? (PP 191-2). (3) Could we read the game of order and obedience (“forces every patient to react against the irregularity of his tendencies by submitting to the general law” – PP 152) described by Foucault as a genealogy of deontology (or a genealogy of Kantian morality)? (4) When Foucault speaks about “an imbalance of power” or an “asymmetry” (PP 146), doesn’t that map to sovereign power and not disciplinary power? (5) Is the asylum tautology the foundation of psychiatric power? Do all forms of power rely on (a) tautology? (PP 165-6; 175) (6) What does Foucault mean by “reality”? (Lectures 7 & 8) (7) What is the relation between language and truth? (PP 151) There is a realism in two senses: there is a reality of the content of the utterance of the mad person but also the reality of the utterance as an event that also has effects in others. We might see Foucault being a nominalist about the first sense of reality, while a full-fledged realist about the second one. Would it be useful to understand the relation of power and reality with Aristotle? Power as something that is actual (actuality), also has a non-actual (potentiality) which could be seen as counter-power. In this sense, madness (as potentiality) is a resistance to reality (as actuality). Although this would place Foucault in a metaphysical framework that he would resist. This relates to the issue of simulation. What is the patient simulating? Symptoms. As soon as the doctor catches on to the problem of simulation, disciplinary power comes in to eliminate the possibility of simulation and the imposition of reality by a surplus power. One of the forms of resisting psychiatric power is by simulating madness. It is a way to resist the enforcement of the real. What should we make of the example Foucault provide about the woman who refuses to have an identity? A scheme (Below) to try to explain the relation between reality (or, maybe, “the ordinary”) and the asylum as a simulation of that reality in which, through techniques and practices of discipline, reality is reinforced (surplus power). Explanation of the scheme: Reality 1 (The Ordinary) Madness/the mad person is the “will in revolt” that refuses to accept the normativity of the real. The mad says he is the king, Napoleon, the ultimate sovereign (“the omnipotence of madness”). By simulating Reality 1 in the asylum, psychiatric power tries to reintroduce the patient into the rules of reality, to come back into relation with others via language and practice, and into a relation to oneself via the acceptance of a biography that counters the narrative of madness. The “cure” would be a successful reinforcement of reality and incorporation by the patient, who can now return back to Reality 1 because he has accepted its normativity. One important aspect is that psychiatric power must eliminate the pleasure of madness, which might point into why Foucault identifies pleasure as resistance in The History of Sexuality.

Foucault mentions an “asymmetry of power” and he says that this is the logic of sovereign power (PP 42). Why does this asymmetry appear within a discussion of disciplinary power? Does this mean that what we have in the asylum is also a relation of domination? Or in relations of domination, you do have a side where a group or side has a greater ability to do, i.e. can “enact” more power than the other, and this is an imbalance. Can disciplinary power have an imbalance? Or is that something that only happens in sovereign power? This might be a way to understand the critiques of Angela Davis and Joy James to Foucualt: in some sense, there is a way in which the prison is disciplinary (or has disciplinary elements) but it is, pace Foucault, a primarily sovereign power apparatus. Amy Allen = when you have “enablement” you cannot unlink it from the network of oppression or domination. She assumes, as a Foucauldian, that disciplinary power has an asymmetry. We could say that sovereign power has an imbalance and disciplinary power also has an imbalance so that their difference is not about imbalance/asymmetry but about supremacy or totalization. Sovereign power holds supremacy or has total control, whereas disciplinary power is diffuse and therefore empowers/produces and not solely dominates. In that sense, both are imbalanced but the distinction relies on concentration/totalization/supremacy.

"Psychiatric Power" Lecture 5 & 6

The group began with questions… 1. What is the methodological significance of the Nietzschean question? (109) 2. Is there a difference between the power operations in the family vs. other sites? (110) 3. Why is the individual excluded/expelled from the family (96) but then subjected to the family model in the asylum? 4. Relationship between normalization/abnormalities/illegalisms/irregularities—how does this relate to what Foucault calls “homeostatic apparatuses” (106)? 5. Considering capitalist concepts such as “reserve army? (111) and surplus, should we read this account as a “infrastructural” (infra-power) genealogy of capital? Foucault is mapping all the spaces of power and the circuit of profit— (138) Explains an epistemological break How is Foucault understanding simulation? (135; 138) Here he is contrasting two different forms of inquiry— (1) Why did it take place? What happened in this period? What is the basis of all this? (2) Who is speaking? Who actually formulates this idea? Where do we find it? (“Nietzsche’s question”) —The questions in the first account are of a more traditional historical conception whereas the second more genealogical in method. —The second set of questions also provides us with two answers (for example, power and counter-power). Are we convinced by the distinction between sovereign power and disciplinary power (esp. as we see it in the family and in psychiatric power)? —It is useful for psychiatry to dissolve the sovereign power of the family (does this make psychiatric power between sovereign power?) Tracking some of the distinctions between sovereign power and disciplinary power in PP Sovereign Power —Vertical power (individualized only at the top) —Fragmented hold —Asymmetrical —Scandalous/Loud —Domination —Concrete Disciplinary Power —Discreet/Distributed (has a continual total hold) —Abstract (Intra-judicial) —Isotopic —Silent and anonymous (pale and colorless) —Regulative —Omnivisibility —Network —Individual as subject-function

"Psychiatric Power" Lecture 2 & 3

Questions 1. (p. 55) Somatic Singularity as body? Why or why not? 2. (p. 49, 75) What does Foucault mean by "schema"? Kantian sense? What is its function? 3. (p. 42) Asymmetry of (sovereign) power? 1. Feminist political power and inequality of power relations 2. Disciplinary power as diffused ergo non-symmetric? 4. (p. 42, 52) Commensurability of disciplined individual invokes asymmetricity? 5. (p. 76-77) How should we understand the game of invisibility? Why is this not constitutive of the family? 1. Function considerations 6. (p. 68) Three types of disciplinary "colonization". To what extent does the analysis that follows after he introduces colonization (#2) actually allow us to grasp the particularities of colonial discipline? 7. (p. 81) Family as hinge of practices of power. Does this analysis of the family push us to see a history of sexuality as a prerequisite to an analytics of power? 1. Engagement with French feminists? 8. (p. 3) How much is the panoptic gaze like dispersal of semen? Conversation Family - (p. 81) "The best proof of this is that when an individual is rejected as abnormal from a disciplinary system, where is he sent? To his family. When a number of disciplinary systems successively reject him as inassimilable, incapable of being disciplined, or uneducable, he is sent back to the family, and the family’s role at this point is to reject him in turn as incapable of being fixed to any disciplinary system, and to get rid of him either by consigning him to pathology, or by abandoning him to delinquency, etcetera ...The family, therefore, has this double role of pinning individuals to disciplinary systems, and of linking up disciplinary systems and circulating individuals from one to the other. To that extent I think we can say that the family is indispensable to the functioning of disciplinary systems because it is a cell of sovereignty, just as the king’s body, the multiplicity of the king’s bodies, was necessary for the mutual adjustment of heterotopic sovereignties in the game of societies of sovereignty." - How much does this actually represent the family? Family is engendered in a heteronormative binary way. - He is not careful with the family like he is with the asylum - The start would be to not treat the family as a model. - (p. 80) "I do not think it is true that the family served as the model for the asylum, school, barracks, or workshop." - Can the schema only come from the world to the family, or can it come from the family out? - The state (sovereignty) vs family structure is interesting Schema - Does not seem to be a mistake that he uses the Kantian term "Schema" - Schema has lost its metaphysical sense, and is more methodological. Somatic Singularity - Why does he not simply use "body"? - (p. 54) "I think all this can be summarized by saying that the major effect of disciplinary power is what could be called the reorganization in depth of the relations between somatic singularity, the subject, and the individual." - Somatic singularity is found more in disciplinary power than in sovereign - Does sovereign power work on bodies? - Bodies don't exist. There are subjects, but not body-subjects, or bodies in the proper sense. - Somatic singularity is the conception of the body that disciplinary power uses - (p. 44) "So you can see that the relationship of sovereignty is a relationship in which the subject-element is not so much, and we can even say it is almost never, an individual, an individual body. The relationship of sovereignty applies not to a somatic singularity but to multiplicities—like families, users—which in a way are situated above physical individuality, or, on the contrary, it applies to fragments or aspects of individuality, of somatic singularity. It is insofar as one is the son of X, a bourgeois of this town, etcetera, that one will be held in a relationship of sovereignty, that one will be sovereign or, alternatively, subject, and one may be both subject and sovereign in different aspects, so that these relationships can never be wholly plotted and laid out according to the terms of a single table." - It is the rise of capitalism that needed the body. Capitalism needs that individualization to work. - The move to disciplinary power is when we see a move to bodies. - (p. 55) "Discipline is that technique of power by which the subject-function is exactly super-imposed and fastened on the somatic singularity." - How does animality figure into somatic singularity? Asymmetry - (p. 43) "The third feature of relationships of sovereignty is that they are not isotopic. By this I mean that they are intertwined and tangled up with each other in such a way that we cannot establish a system of exhaustive and planned hierarchy between them. In other words, relationships of sovereignty are indeed perpetual relationships of differentiation, but they are not relationships of classification; they do not constitute a unitary hierarchical table with subordinate and superordinate elements. Not being isotopic means first of all that they are heterogeneous and have no common measure." - "no common measure" = incommensurable - Does disciplinary power diffuse the asymmetry of this hierarchical power? - The underside of democracy is discipline. The people rule, but through discipline - "Isotopic" means it is the same power from one situation to another. Colonization - Should we read the history (genealogy?) of colonization with the history (genealogy?) of psychiatry? - Does this represent colonization - He is not making a theory of colonization, but pointing to specific instances. - He is using two types of colonization, which could be problematic. 1. Colonization of disciplinary power 2. Specific events of colonizing people.

Foucault, "Psychiatric Power" Lecture 1 & 2

Michel Foucault – Psychiatric Power, Lec. 1 & 2 Questions 1. What can be countenanced by a method that analyzes a microphysics of power (vs. representationalism, institutionalism, etc.)? • Disruption of institutions as processes, fluid things, o Sovereignty as a petrified, coalesced thing o Foucault wants to make it move again • Is this methodological or ontological? o A methodological difference between Psychiatric Power and History of Madness  He holds reason stable in HoM o Politics of 1968 may be at play in this shift • Dissatisfaction with earlier method on (p. 13) – not tracking madness/reason as stable thing to be tracked through history • The Order of Things – how can representations be possible; but here its naked power before the institution and the knowledge come in • Is he agreeing with Derrida’s critique of HoM? o Maybe genealogy is response to Derrida? • The move here gives agency to the mad o Those who are objects of knowledge are subjects of knowledge o “mad person who is to be brought under control” (p. 7) • Move from psycho-sociological vocabulary to military vocabulary (p. 16) • Apparatus of power as dispositif is less a kind of state apparatus (see translator note) • More against Lacan than against Derrida • Method feels anti-psychiatry, anti-phenomenological; body and its interactions over experience • Constant appeal to struggle and war o But this might be best to not be read in a normative sense 2. (p. 21) Relationship between silence anonymity and power? • Between people and institutions; not phenomenological (individualism), not Marxist (too institutional, structural) • Isn’t there more to everything than just power, conquest? – defense of phenomenology • Power not people • “All power is physical, and there is a direct connection between the body and political power” (p. 14) 3. (p. 32) In a history of X, why pick out one history over others? 4. What do we make of the concept of “naked power” (p. 26) and the “game of truth” (p. 35)? • Games have rules vs. naked power • BUT can we change the rules as we are playing along • Can institutions be read in this way? o Foucault seems to think so o (see Rawls on Wittgenstein) • What is truth? o What are the conditions for the possibility of stating truth claims? o Is truth tied to the cure? Wanting the cure? (p. 25) o Game of truth as confrontational o Madness tied to error (p. 7) o “How can this deployment of power, these tactics and strategies of power, give rise to assertions, negations, experiments, and theories, in short to a game of truth?” (p. 13)  The battles produce the game of truth  The game of truth undergirds system of belief o What makes Foucault’s method/statements valid compared to other claims?  Tied to archive/evidence/materially manifest things  Does he have an ahistorical notion of truth?  What is the criterion which he uses?  Books are bombs... so not really about the truth o Is this an issue for genealogy? 5. (p. 15) What is the relationship between individuals, institutions, and groups? What are the “rules which govern them as given” (p. 15)? Is the term “tactics” too methodologically diffuse? • The microphysics of power as the constant? 6. What roles do we see hysterical simulation playing within Foucault’s story? (p. 7. What is the connection between the move from the “representational core” to the “apparatus (dispositif) of power” (p. 13) and the move from “sovereign power” to “disciplinary power?”

Table of Methodologies

Tentative Table of Historiographical Methodologies

	Historical Empirical Sources	Historical Objects of Inquiry	Actors under Inquiry	Categories for Inquiry (ways of making sense of the objects of inquiry)
Gould, chs. 5-6	Binet, Goddard, Terman, &c. (ch.5); Spearman and Burt (chs. 6)	Tests/Techniques for Testing; Data Analytic Methods; Ideas	Technicians & Scientists of Intelligence	“Fallacies of Thought” (p. 56)
Darby/Ruhr, chs. 1-4, etc.	Kant/Hume (ch. 2); Cooper, Du Bois (ch. 4)	Ideas, Discourses; School Practices (later chs.)	Theorists and Intellectuals;  School Administrators	Ideologies
Malabou, chs. 1-2	Galton, Binet, Terman (ch.1); IBM, Human Genome Project, Makram [Blue Brain Project], True North, Kurzweil &c. (ch.2)	Discourses (about brains), and their Concepts; Technological Artifacts; Institutional Projects	Technicians & Engineers of Intelligence	“Metamorphoses” (Paradigms, Stages)   “Mediations” (xvii)   Scientific Concepts

Malabou, Morphing Intelligence, third selection (Ch. 3 + Conclusion)

Group’s Questions

Can the argument that CM draws through JD be threaded through the following conceptual chain?  Habit-action-Intelligence-sociality-communication-education.  Are there other concepts in the sequence?  Is that the right chain?

 

How does one make sense of the analysis of JD in terms of “automation”?  How would we square this with the existing secondary literature on Dewey?

 

How does the Bourdieu quote (98) orient the inquiry of the chapter?  Does this lead to a post-disciplinary conception?

 

Gap between unintelligent/reactive and intelligent/exploratory inquiry? (102)

What is the relationship between inquiry and reflexivity for CM?

 

Is the idea of “a fair and emancipatory political vision of a cybernetic being-together” (123) to be understood in terms of an idea of “the commons?”  Is it possible that this political vision lets technology and democracy off the hook too easily?  For instance, in the context of colonial tendencies of technology and democracy?  Can these be on the hook without a technophobic impetus driving them?

 

 

 

Group’s Responses

On automation, Malabou’s conception here involves “a double valency of mechanical constraint and freedom” (100).  This connects to Dewey’s notion of habit (and also connects to Foucault on conduct and counter-conduct we think).  “Rendering the indeterminate determinate,” is central in Dewey (103).  For Malabou, this is to be understood in the context of the practical (rather than the theoretical/intellectual) (101).

 

After discussion, here is the chain for Dewey on CM’s reading (filling in a few missing details):

·         [Automation] – action – habit – experience – inquiry – intelligence – democracy – sociality – communication – education

·         The chain is one of successive clarification and enrichment (a dialectical chain)

 

So what this clarifies for us is that automation for CM is a mediation concept, not a domination concept.  Automation is a dialectical concept.  Automation without guarantees.

 

“The same plasticity can be called upon to contradict any predestination, all hierarchization in the aesthetic and cognitive response to forms,” (137).

 

The project of the book works to move away from technophobia, and without falling into techno-optimism.  But does the negation of technophobia offer a positive politics of technology?