Birth of the Clinic, Ch. 2: 10/15 meeting

 

First, there were questions:

1. How does an anthropology work into medicine at this point in Foucault’s work? What is truth? He mentions truth a lot in this chapter in terms of its origins and so on. What does it mean in this context?  

2. What does Foucault mean by generalized medical consciousness? (31) How do we understand this term especially in light of his criticisms of other forms of the history of ideas--e.g. commentary--which he outlines in the preface.

3. What do we make of what F says about the connection between the state (and policing and the police) and the emergence of medicine as a positive project?  (positive in the sense of normalizing---the production of normalized subjects etc.)

4. Let’s talk about how Foucault addresses epidemics (especially in the first part of the chapter), Information, the Normal/ Healthy (especially in the latter parts of the chapter). There is a philosophy of science context in the background of the normal and pathological distinction (Canguilhem) that we might talk a bit about.

5. Thinking about non-medical approaches to health in this context: Can there be an approach to medicine that is non-normalizing? That is not based in these Christian ideas that MF is talking about? That perhaps takes something from ancient ethics? Is that even possible?

6. F talks about three transformations, two of which are 1) medical gaze (30-1) and 2) medical space. What do we make of these transformations and their links with the emergence of a certain kind of medicine? (note the emergence of the royal society of medicine in 1776)

7. What is the causal relation between the transformation of styles of info as well as forms of totalization, and broader changes in medicine. What is the relationship here?

8. The two styles of ch 1 an ch 2 seem very different. Ch2 seems concerned with epistemic structures and ch 2 has very different feel i.e.  normal and abnormal pairing as opposed to looking at epistemes. How do we see the relation between these two chapters?

 

Then, there was discussion:

When F says “international” (28) is this one of the few places where he addresses something other than mainland Europe? Is talking about French colonies? Perhaps we need to read the discussion of clergy & medical practices alongside the development of medicine in the colonies. What do we do with omissions in Foucault’s work such as his lack of consideration of the French colonial context?

What is Foucault’s approach to science and to medicine? Some people do read him as an anti-modern, anti-science thinker. Even if you do not read him like that, it is difficult to understand how medicine can be saved from its own problems.

There seem to be continuities between this text and Discipline and Punish as well as the History of Sexuality volumes. These are links people are interested in tracing further through the text.

Foucault as a reader of “discontinuities” and ruptures, and Foucault as emphasizing continuities. He seems to point to some interesting continuities between Christianity (the clergy figure) and medicine (the doctor). The discussion of medical clergy also seems to specifically be raised in the context of the French revolution—to what extent does what F addresses here link up with discussions and debates reformers where having at the time?

It seems that the “tertiary space” Foucault describes is a kind of space of information.

Is Foucault positing an anthropology or is he indicating a moment when a particular model of “man” emerges?

Is F tracking a transformation that is internal to medicine or something that is more socially diffuse?

Page 26. The medicine of epidemics as opposed at every point to a medicine of classes. Yet in the final analysis it seems like he is saying that there is almost this fight or competition between these two kinds of medicine. At the end of the day it is a political battle.

Page 19 (in the preface). Foucault describing what an analysis of depth epistemology looks like. Though at times through BoC this analysis is a bit ambiguous. It seems to be epistemological but at other times it looks at the social.

Foucault takes depth analysis one step further. You cannot take the social as itself the thing that explains why it is because the social itself also has depths. In BoC the stuff about normalization seems much more about the social and yet at other points it seems to be much more about dispositifs.

Is MF tracking P/K before it is in his methodology? Power/knowledge concept emerges in 70-1 (7 years after this book).

Foucault’s depth analysis of power knowledge is why he is so important!