Birth of Clinic, Ch. 3: 10/22 meeting

 

The meeting began with questions.

[1] MF’s terminology takes up the vocabulary of dialectic and ideology in the last passages of the chapter. How should we understand this critical theory-type language?

[2] Pp. 51: There seems to be a notion of inevitability operating in the first full paragraph. How is MF thinking about the change here?

[3] How do social aspects factor into MF’s discussion in this chapter (continuing our discussion from last week)? Why does the focus on knowledge seem to be downplayed?

[4] What is MF referring to when he uses the term ‘ideology’? Is this a descriptive reference to De Tracy and the French theorists after the revolution (or is he using the term analytically)? Can we use MF’s notion of problematization to make sense of the emergence of the clinic at the end of the chapter? This two-year period in the French Revolution presupposes a lot of background knowledge (it would be worth discussing this context). Isn’t this the case?

[5] pp. 52: “the medical gaze had not been given its technological structure”: what does “technological structure” involve here? Is this a kind of non-discursive conditioning?

[6] MF seems to be tracking a continuity: a transformation in the technical structure does not occur (despite theoretical changes). What is that structure? What does he mean by medical technology?

[7] MF characterizes the hospital (space of obscurity that needs to be done away with; but also anachronistic solution). Why is it anachronistic?

[8] pp. 51 MF argues that the technological/pedagogical reorganization foundered on a lack of unity. In what sense was a unity lacking when it came to the medicine of species?

Then there was a discussion.

PP. 50: MF notes that given the fact that questions of policy, pedagogy, etc., had been discussed for so long, it is surprising that they remained difficulties.

He points to a lacuna: Missing structure; Absence of a model, Technological structure.

What is the relationship between the gaze and medical knowledge? What does MF mean by technological structure?

Perhaps this is an anticipatory concept of an episteme (dispositif)? The structure which would give unity is his attempt to theorize the depth knowledge?

Where does this gap come from? Given there was conceptual mastery/ solutions? It wasn’t until there was a technological apparatus that these various problems (i.e., pedagogy, medical funding) could be unified.

Is MF calling attention to the dark side of the enlightenment? Is MF calling attention to the myth of the free gaze. But he is also tracking the “light” sides or the stabilization of the myth. What’s mythical is not the thought that it exists, but that it presents itself as self-standing or philosophically correct (and not historically generated). The interplay between the family and nation seems important. We can still recognize many of these debates within our own social context.

If this is a historical account of the emergence of empiricist epistemology, how is he inquiring into the emergence of this epistemology?

Perhaps MF’s intervention is a direct response to the “Encyclopedic” school (Diderot, Lambert) of scientific knowledge, in order to show that these structures are historical?

The translation of “technological structure” is misleading (pp. 52). (Fr. “Condition of exercise”)

We can read this chapter is a historical account of the emergence of the myth of the free gaze—underwriting the birth of the hospital/clinic (i.e., the system of clinical medicine as a site for the production of knowledge). In other words: this “free gaze” epistemology underlies clinical practices.

What is the relationship between what MF calls generalized medical knowledge and the free gaze?

Finally, we raised questions for next week:

[1] How is MF understanding the Free Gaze? Is this understood from the doctor’s perspective? What about how the patient is mediated through the gaze?

[2] Does MF continue to discuss liberalism in further chapters? What about economic liberalism?

[3] What does “condition of exercise” do in the remaining chapters? What is he talking about here?