"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.