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?”