"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.