John N. Abletis Prof. Laura L.

Samson
MA Sociology Student Popular Culture (Socio 243)
2009-79293 UPD-CSSP-Dep’t. of Sociology
March 2, 2011
Poststructuralism 1

PART 1
Structuralism vs. Postructuralism
Poststructuralism can be defined as “a school of thought that builds upon... but seeks to distance
itself from, the structuralism associated with thinkers like Ferdinand Saussure, Roland Barthes
[his early works on semiology], Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser... existentialism,
phenomenology, Freudian theory (as well as Marxism).”2

The conventional route, however, in discussing Postructuralism is its effort to distance itself
from Linguistic (French) Structuralism which is, in its turn, distancing itself from Humanism.

I. Liberal Humanist tradition in Literary Criticism

The HUMANIST model presupposed: 3
• That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds.

• That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world.

• That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we
determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus expresses
the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique
individual "self").

• The SELF--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent the idea of a self in
language, by saying I, which is the subject of a sentence--or the individual (or the mind or
the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and
truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual
experiences and need for individual expression.

II. Structuralism
• By the mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories of human existence. In
the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
suggested that meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather
than in the analysis of individual words. For Marxists, the truth of human existence could
be understood by an analysis of economic structures. Psychoanalysts attempted to describe
the structure of the psyche in terms of an unconscious.4

1 The following are excerpts from selected references listed under the Bibliography of this written report. Phrases
were copied verbatim, except for some occasional editing as indicated by ellipses and brackets. Emphases (in bold
letters) are mine.
2 Ritzer, 1997, p. 32
3 http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html
4 http://www.philosopher.org.uk/poststr.htm
1
 • In the 1960's, the structuralist movement, based in France, attempted to synthesise the
ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each
man is what he makes himself. For the structuralist the individual is shaped by
sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he/she has no control, but
which could be uncovered by using their methods of investigation.5

• [Structuralists basically argue that] Human culture may be understood as a series of signs
or symbols.6

• [It] is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC

objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely
subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating
"parole" to "langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a
system in the abstract [--Ferdinand de Saussure]... [That it is] language [that] speaks us;
that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of
oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language.7

• Langue is the formal, grammatical system of language. It is a system of phonic elements

whose relationships are governed... by determinate laws... The existence of langue
makes parole possible. Parole is actual speech, the way that speakers on a day-to-day
basis use language to express themselves.8

• To Saussure, language is a ‘closed system in which all parts are interrelated...’ [He
developed a theory of synchronic language, how language works in the present. He
argued that the relationship between the spoken word (signifier) and object (signified)
is arbitrary and that meaning comes through the relationship between signs]9
Especially important... are relations of difference, including binary oppositions...
Meanings, the mind, and ultimately the social world are shaped by the structure of
language. Thus, instead of an existential world of people shaping their surroundings, we
have here a world in which people, as well as other aspects of the social world, are being
shaped by the structure of language and its code, or the arbitrary rules for combining
words. 10

• In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns,

systems, and structures. Some structuralists… propose that ALL narratives can be
charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns. [In short, rather] than
seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE STRUCTURE at
the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual
self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say "I"
because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the
first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.11

5 Ibid
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
7 http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html
8 Ritzer, 1996, p. 594; Ritzer, 1997, p. 29
9 McBride (n.d.)
10 Ibid
11 Ibid

2
 • In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a
function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic humanist model holds that the
author is the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the starting point or progenitor of
the text. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no
origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable
them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the idea that
"language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We don't originate language; we
inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we (mis)perceive as our originality is
simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every
text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written."12

• By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out

history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless.
Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example,
in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's
production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it.13

• Saussure and others later extended this concern for language to all sign systems. Roland
Barthes was an important figure for this, as his Semiotics “aims to take in any system of
signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and
the complex associations of all of these, which form the content of ritual, convention or
public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of
signification.”14 Semiotics [is] the study of signs and the various ways in which signs
signify or “mean”… [it] is a method of… “reading” and “diagnosing” the
productions of culture… A semiotic approach to a narrative, filmic, or televisual text
would see the text as a proliferation of signs requiring, first, apprehension as a structure
of meaning. Second, each individual sign within the larger structure needs to make
sense in relation to that totality. Thus, if, as Saussure suggests, the signs may be
ambivalent in itself, the larger structure of meaning is less so.15

• French Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss extended Saussure’s work on language to

anthropological issues thereby making a wide array of social phenomena amenable to
structural analyses i.e. especially when “he argued that both phonemic systems and
kinship systems are products of the structures of the mind,” logical structures that are
unconscious16 [and neither kinship terms nor the phonemes have meanings in themselves.
Instead, both acquire meaning only when they are integral parts of a larger system.]17
Levi-Strauss also contended that moiety systems [and cooking i.e. distinction between the
raw and the cook] reflect the human mind’s predisposition to think and behave in terms of
binary oppositions.18

12 Ibid
13 Ibid
14 Roland Barthes in Elements of Semiology, p. 9, Quoted in Ritzer, 1997, p. 30
15 Gedalof, Boulter, Faflak, & McFarlane, 2005, p. 16
16 Ritzer, 1997, pp. 30-31
17 Ritzer, 1996, p. 595
18 Ember & Ember, 1997, p. 217

3
 • The works and influence of Saussure, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss account for the shift of
focus in the social sciences from social structures to linguistic structures and more
generally “to signs of various sorts”—now known as the linguistic turn.19

• According to Maurice Godelier, both Marxists and Structuralists reject empiricism

because “As for Marx and Lévi-Strauss a structure is not a reality that is directly visible,
and so directly observable, but a level of reality that exists beyond the visible relations
between men, and the functioning of which constitutes the underlying logic of the system,
the subjacent order by which the apparent order is to be explained.”20

It is especially to this kind of structuralism that Jacques Derrida, the progenitor of

deconstructionism, and other poststructuralists would sooner criticize.

II. The uninvited birth of a “terrifying form of monstrosity”

"Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation,
gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I
admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing— but also with a glance toward
those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when
faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is
necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the
formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."
-Derrida in Writing and Difference, p. 29321

In 1968, Barthes published “The Death of the Author” in which he announced a

metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given
text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was
not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes
maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of
the text.22

“...For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things,
institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was
crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid,
and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and
the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also
revealing something... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have
seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”
– Foucault in Society Must be Defended, 7th January 197623

III. The context

• [The] foundational experience of the French intellectual during the
[Nazi] occupation was the underground resistance movement. This was
in contrast to the Americans who thought of themselves as heroic
19 Ibid, p. 29
20 Maurice Godelier in Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, Quoted in Ritzer, 1997, p. 31
21 Quoted in Dumont, 2008, p. 3
22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
23 Ibid

4
 conquerors of evil and the German intellectuals who were forced to quit
their native society for England or the United States. The French
experience thus explained the starkly different, and rival, schools of
French social thought in the postwar era. On one side, structuralisms,
such as the cultural theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss (who suffered the
war in exile), were attempts to rethink the structural whole of culture
with respect to its hidden members. On the other side,
existentialisms, such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre (whose war
experience was shaped by the Resistance), emphasized a radical
consideration of the moral choices made in the flux of historical action.24

• During and immediately after World War II, French intellectual life was dominated by
Marxian theory. However, as many intellectuals began to grow disillusioned with Soviet-
style communism, they became attracted to Sartre’s existentialism, especially the promise
of individual fulfillment in the modern world. But Sarte’s ideas began to lose favor
because he continued to support the communists despite a growing recognition of the
repressiveness of the Soviet Union. In their search for alternative theoretical perspective,
some scholars were drawn to structuralism, which permitted them to remain socialists
while giving their work a non-Marxist theoretical underpinning. Structuralism also
appealed to those who wanted to develop a science of human subjects.25

• In the late 1960s (i.e. 1968), students and workers rebelled against the state in France. Its
impetus was the criminal charges against the "Movement 22 of March' at the University of
Paris at Nanterre; Groups were against class discrimination, modern consumer and
technical society; they promoted workers' rights, and embraced positions that were critical
of authoritarianism and Western capitalism; President Charles de Gaulle called for new
parliamentary elections on June 23, 1968; protests subsided, workers went back to work
after a series of deceptions by the Confederation Generale du Travail (the leftist union
federation) and the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais; French Communist Party); May
1968 a political failure for the protesters but its impact was a major shift from
conservative moral ideal (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) to a more liberal
moral ideal (sexual liberation).26

• French Communist Party’s support for the oppressive policies of the USSR contributed to
popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. As a result, there was increased interest
in alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, western Marxism, anarchism,
phenomenology, and nihilism.27

• [Feelings of disillusionment] increased in the next few decades as communism

progressively unraveled and then collapsed completely in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
In France, the election of a socialist president, Franḉois Mitterand, failed to bring with it
the promised reforms. The social democracies throughout Europe that had instituted a
variety of well-funded welfare programs began to discover that they could not longer
afford such programs. All these failures brought with them the sense that the old hopes for
24 Lemert, 2005, p. 285
25 Ritzer, 1997, p. 34
26 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968_in_France
27 Ibid

5
 a grand solution had been illusory. In fact, as the excesses of the Soviet Union came to
light, they pointed, as had the Nazi Holocaust, to the fact that such grand solutions could
just as easily bring terror as hope.28

• Led by the feminists, a variety of new social movements arose, and many new voices were
being heard within France and throughout the world. These groups were clamoring for
greater power over their lives as well as in the societies in which they lived.29

• A scant generation [after the war], the name “poststructuralism” came

to be affixed to those, such as Foucault, for whom the war had faded as
a defining experience. They sought to reconstruct both society and
social thought, which led them to develop a theoretical position that
was at once structural and existential, without being either objectivist
or subjectivist.30 [They] offered a means of justifying [criticisms led by social
movements], by exposing the underlying assumptions of many Western norms.31

• The map of the world was being redrawn as colonial empires were dismantled,
decolonialism proceeded apace, and many new and independent came into existence.32

• The economies of the advanced nations, including France, were growing, but poverty and
other social ills showed no signs of disappearing. Furthermore, those economies were
changing with many industries both retrenching and restructuring... [The] economy was
moving from the dominance of Fordist production jobs to post-Fordist service-type
occupations. Furthermore, the emphasis seemed to be less on production and more on
consumption; were are witnessing the emergence of the “consumer society.”33

• Key to the consumer society was the growing importance of the mass media, especially
television. The latter not only serves to advertise all of the allures of the consumer society,
but it bombards people with a wide array of images that have dramatically altered their
lives. Television brought with it an explosion of information, albeit often in the form of
infotainment. More generally, information technologies grew and then exploded with the
wide-scale availability of home computers.34

IV. What is Poststructuralism?

• Post-structuralism is not a theory but a set of theoretical positions, which have at their
core a self-reflexive discourse which is aware of the tentativeness, the slipperiness, the
ambiguity and the complex interrelations of texts and meanings.35
• It is most often associated with the work of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Roland
Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas
Khun, Edward Said, Luce Irigay, Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva.

28 Ritzer, 1997, p. 34
29 Ibid
30 Lemert, 2005, p. 285
31 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
32 Ritzer, 1997, p. 34
33 Ibid
34 Ibid
35 http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.php
6
 Lifetime Nationality Profession
Jacques Marie 1901-1981 French Psychoanalyst
Émile Lacan and Psychiatrist

➢ He took Saussure's ideas and applied them to psychoanalysis, arguing

that the unconscious is structured like a language, that is, the
unconscious is a semiotic system signs stand arbitrarily for particular
meanings. Lacan also postulated that every human being goes through
the mirror stage in which we construct our sense of coherent selfhood by
seeing ourselves in a mirror (real or imaginary; other people can also
mirror us back to ourselves). But that self and its coherence are based
on méconnaissance or misrecognition, because the mirror image shows
us to be more unified and separate than we actually are. As in Saussure's
linguistic theory, here the self has no ontology but is rather a construct, a
sign, created through relationship and difference.36
Roland Barthes 1915-1980 French French literary
theorist,
Philosopher,
Critic, and
Semiotician

Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996 Philosopher

➢ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) [argues that] science is not
an evolutionary, progressive march towards greater and greater
truth but rather "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by
intellectually violent revolutions" (Foucault's "ruptures") in which one
point of view is replaced by another… So science's claim to truth is
highly questionable and even ephemeral; since the truths of past science
have passed away, we can be certain that what science claims today will
itself one day be superseded by the claims of a new paradigm, which will
itself one day be superseded…37
Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995 French Philosopher

Michel Paul 1926-1984 French Philosopher,

Foucault Historian of
Systems of Ideas,
Psychologist, and
Political activist

36 McBribe, (n.d.)
37 McBribe, (n.d.)

7
 Edward Said 1935-2003 Palestinian- Literary theorist,
American Literary critic,
Political activist
➢ He used poststructuralist ideas to analyze Orientalism, the study of the
Orient by academics of the West. He showed how the academics and
their disciplines constructed an object of study that had very little to do
with the East (which is East, of course, only in relationship to the West, a
binary relationship in which one terms has more value than the other).38
Jacques Derrida 1930-2004 French-Jewish Philosopher
➢ Derrida bases his thinking on Saussure’s work on speech at the same time
that he critiques Saussure for subordinating and excluding that which was
to be become of central concern to Derrida—writing. This led Derrida to
the creation of a field, “grammatology,” or the theoretical science of
writing.39
Luce Irigaray b. 1932 Belgian Feminist,
Philosopher,
Linguist,
Pyschoanalyst,
Sociologist, and
Cultural theorist

Helene Cixous b. 1937 French Feminist writer,

Poet, Playwright,
Philosopher,
Literary critic,
and Rhetorician

Julia Kristeva b. 1941 Bulgarian- Philosopher,

French Literary critic,
Psychoanalyst,
Sociologist,
Feminist, and
Novelist

• [It aims] to go beyond the structuralism of theories that imply a rigid inner logic to
relationships that describe any aspect of social reality, whether in language (Ferdinand
de Saussure or, more recently, Noam Chomsky) or in economics (orthodox Marxism,
neoclassicalism, or Keynesianism). Marx and Freud have, alternatively, been described as
structuralists (creators of deterministic grand narratives) and as post-structuralists

38 McBride, (n.d.)
39 Ritzer, 1997, p. 33

8
 (breaking with the enterprise of creating deterministic grand narratives) in their
theoretical innovations and inventions.40

• It rejects structuralism because of the inefficiency of structures of language, especially

binary opposition, in understanding human culture. 41

• It is antihumanist; it rejects the enlightenment subject, and of existential phenomenology;

and it rejects claims of absolute truths (metaphysics, metanarratives, logocentrism)42

• Contends that all significations are a form of writing… emphasizing the ambivalence of
language and impossibility of essential meaning.43

• Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and classify

structuralism as descriptive. This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's
distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive
(synchronic)reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often
emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts
have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same
concepts are understood by readers in the present. Structuralists also seek to
understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on
understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time,
rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.44

• [Jacques] Derrida insists that every text is undecidable in the sense that it conceals
conflicts within it between different authorial voices--sometimes termed the text and
subtext(s). Every text is contested terrain in the sense that what it appears to "say"
on the surface cannot be understood without reference to the concealments and
contextualizations of meaning going on simultaneously to make the text's
significance (e.g. the use of specialized jargon). These concealments and
contextualizations might be viewed as the assumptions that every text makes in
presuming that it will be understood. But these assumptions are suppressed, and thus
the reader's attention is diverted from them.45

• Derrida's notion of undecidability rests on his notions of difference and differance.

Essentially, he argues that it is in the nature of language to produce meaning only with
reference to other meanings against which it takes on its own significance... meaning is a
result of the differential significance that we attach to words... Derrida plays on the
French word differance to show that one cannot hope to arrive at a fixed or
transparent meaning as long as one uses a necessarily deferring as well as differing
language: Every definition and clarification needs to be defined and clarified in turn;
meaning always lies elusively in the future.46
40 http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/post_structuralism.htm; also Hooker & Murphy, 2005, pp. 189-190
41 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
42 Ibid
43 Hooker & Murphy, 2005, pp. 189-190
44 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism
45 Agger, 1991
46 Ibid

9
 • Post-structuralism recognizes that the power of discourse to shape reality (both
perceptions of reality and the concrete reality that is perceived). Discourse (theory) can
produce SIGHT of FICTIVE objects, such as race (as in white race), or deny SIGHT of
REAL social relationships/objects, such as class (as in feudal class relationships). In other
words, at any given moment and theoretical understanding, we experience only
limited aspects of the world and some of what we experience is based on falsehoods
embedded in some of the discourses we have learned (falsehoods in the sense of not
existing separately from the theoretical constructs, not even satisfying the coherence of
defined objects within that discourse, as subject to investigation on the basis of the
internal rules of coherence and fact of the discourse (e.g. the genetic notion of race fails
upon inspection of the correlation between those physical features ascribed to races and
the genetic make-up of those so grouped)). 47

• As an ontology, overdetermination implies that existence is comprised of mutually

constitutive processes. This overdetermined existence/BEING is complex and not
conducive to the rigidity of the grand narrative which seeks to find a singular
explicable Truth about reality. In this complexity, all processes are continuously in a
state of transformation and Processes are continuousmovement/change/happening.48

• As Heraclitus said, "You can never step in the same river twice."

• "Logocentrism is a term that describes the tendency of Western thinkers to privilege one
term in a binary opposition over the other term, thus creating a hierarchy that organizes
thought (e.g., speech over writing, male over female, reason over superstition). This
hierarchy then appears to be a stable and natural one that has its roots in a stable system
of language and its elements. Derrida aims to upset these hierarchical relationships by
showing that binary oppositions are rarely exhaustive and mutually exclusive, and are
often contradictory, rendering the binary useless for any descriptive or epistemological
purposes. In addition, the two terms of a binary opposition define themselves against
each other (which he calls supplementarity), and any hierarchy is therefore merely
arbitrary" (p. 591). [Logocentrism is also the search for a universal system of though]49
—deconstruction of logocentrism, involves breaking down the ways in which
logocentrism operates in order to dismantle its hegemony in Western society.50

• Deconstruction involves demystifying a text, tearing it apart to reveal its internal,

arbitrary hierarchies and its presuppositions.51

• A deconstructive approach examines what is left out of a text, what is unnamed, what is
excluded, and what is concealed. But the goal is to do more than overturn oppositions,
for this would permit new hierarchies to be reappropriated (Derrida, 1981, p. 59)
Deconstruction is not designed to merely unmask "error," for this would assume that truth
exists (Vattimo, 1988). Deconstruction, rather, aims to transpose a text—transforming
it, re-defining it—all the while simultaneously operating within the deconstructed
47 http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/post_structuralism.htm
48 Ibid
49 Ritzer, p. 1996, p. 597
50 Murphy, 2005, p. 591
51 Rosenau, 1992, p. 120

10
 text itself… Following Nietzche, "deconstruction deconstruct itself, and at the same
time creates another labyrinthine fiction whose authority is undermined by its own
creation" (Miller, 1981, p. 261)52

• Below are the guidelines on the strategies of the deconstructive method.53

1. Find an exception to a generalization in the text and push it to the limit so that this
generalization appears absurd; in other words, use the exception to undermine the
principle.
1. Interpret the arguments in a text being deconstructed in there most extreme form.
1. Avoid absolute statements in deconstructing a text, but cultivate a sense of
intellectual excitement by making statements that are both startling and sensational.
1. Deny the legitimacy of all dichotomies because there are always a few exceptions to
any generalization based on bipolar terms, and these can be used to undermine
them.
1. Nothing is to be accepted; nothing is to be rejected. It is extremely difficult to
criticize a deconstructive argument if not clear viewpoint is expressed.
1. Write so as to permit the greatest number of interpretations possible; ambiguity and
ambivalence re not to be shunned but rather cultivated. Obscurity may "protect
from serious scrutiny" (Ellis, 1989, p. 148). The idea is "to create a text without
finality or completion, one with which the reader can never be finished" (Wellberg,
1985, p. 234).
1. Employ new and unusual terminology in order that "familiar positions may not
seem too familiar and otherwise obviously relevant scholarship may not seem so
obviously relevant" (Ellis, 1989, p. 142).
1. "Never consent to a change of terminology and always insist that the wording of the
deconstructive argument is sacrosanct." More familiar formulations undermine any
sense that the deconstructive position is unique and distinctive (Ellis, 1989, p. 145).

•
• Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a separate, singular, and coherent
entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual comprises tensions between
conflicting knowledge claims (e.g. gender, race, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to
properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is related to his or her own
personal concept of self.54

• The author's intended meaning, such as it is (for the author's identity as a stable "self"
with a single, discernible "intent" is also a fictional construct), is secondary to the
meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text
having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every
individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a
given text.55

• Emphasis [is given to] a destabilized meaning. In the post-structuralist approach

to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry.
52 Ibid
53 Ibid, p. 121
54 Ibid
55 Ibid

11
 This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the
author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the
author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural
norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative, and
promise no consistency.56

• A post-structuralist critic must be able to use a variety of perspectives to create a

multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one
another. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation
to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.57

56 Ibid
57 Ibid

12
 PART 2
Michel Paul Foucault
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same... More than one person,
doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face”
—Michel Foucault58

I. Biography
A. Reminder:

“I do not understand what kind of problem is common to the people we call post-
modern or post-structuralist”
—Michel Foucault59

• In reading the work of a particular analyst it is necessary to be aware of the tendency

to invoke “the author as the unifying principle in a particular group of writings or
statements” –Foucault in Orders of Discourse, p. 1460

• Foucault comments on the way in which in literature the author function seems to have
become even more important—authors are required to “answer for the unity of the
works published in their names;... [to] reveal, or at least display the hidden sense
pervading their work;... [and] to reveal their personal lives, to account for their
experiences and the real story that gave birth to their writings” (Foucault in Order of
Discourse, p. 14)61

• “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same... More than one person,
doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face” (Foucault, cited in J. Miller, 1993,
p. 19)62

• [However, far] from becoming a matter of indifference, the author function remains
significant and Foucault’s tendency to reinterpret his analyses serves as confirmation
that the writing subject has not disappeared...63

• Foucault... led an extremely interesting life, and the themes that characterized his life
tended to define his work as well. In fact, it could be argued that through his work
Foucault was seeking to better understand himself and the forces that led him to lead
the life that he did.64

A. Significant events in Foucault’s life

58 Foucault cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 19. Quoted in Ritzer, 1996, p. 605

59 Smart, 2005, p. 222
60 Quoted in Smart, 2005, p. 208
61 Ibid
62 Quoted in Ritzer, 1996, p. 605
63 Smart, 2005, p. 209
64 Ritzer, 1996, p. 604

13
 • Foucault was born to a bourgeois family in provincial Poitiers.65

• His early schoolwork was undistinguished. Eventually, his intellect began to flourish
under the care of priests in a local Catholic school. Thereupon he was sent to Paris, as
are many of provincial France's most brilliant young people. Foucault completed his
secondary education at the prestigious Lycee Henri IV…66

• Thereafter, from 1946-1950, he studies at the École Normale Supérieure, France's elite
school of higher education in the arts and sciences.67 Foucault described his time at the
ENS as "sometimes intolerable," and accounts of his arguments with fellow students,
his attempt at suicide, and his difficulty coming in terms with his homosexuality
provide an insight into the difficulties with which he had to cope while pursuing his
interests in psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, and reading the works of
Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski on "transgression" or the "limit experience." The
intellectual environment in which Foucault studied was dominated by phenomenology.
However, for the students who attended ENS with Foucault in the years 1946-50 it
was the philosophy of Hegel, not Sartre, that was of central importance, and only after
Hegel, and writing a dissertation on his phenomenology, did Foucault move on the
works of Marx, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Reflecting on this period in an interview
conducted in 1984, Foucault explains the "philosophical shock" of reading Heidegger
and subsequently the work of Nietzsche, "the two authors I have read the most"
(Foucault in Michel Foucault—Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other
Writings 1977-1984, p. 250).68

• Foucault enjoyed an excellent formation during the school days in Paris, where he
encountered firsthand the teachings of Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, and Georges
Canguilhem, all of whom encouraged his gift for rethinking the terms of classical
social thought.69

• Existentialism and phenomenology represented only one part of the intellectual

context in which Foucault’s thinking initially developed; Marxism also exerted a
powerful presence. Indeed, in the early 1950s Foucault was a member of the
Communist Party, and he is reported to have said that at this time “Marxism as a
doctrine made good sense to me” (Eribon, 1992, p. 52). Notwithstanding the influence
exerted by Louis Althusser over Foucault, his relationship to Marxism was always
somewhat marginal and indirect. When called upon to discuss his intellectual
formation in general, and his relationship to Marxism and communism in particular,
Foucault remarks that it was through Nietzche and Bataille, rather than Hegelian
philosophy, that he found communism—“Thus it was that without knowing Marx very
well, refusing Hegelianism, and feeling dissatisfied with the limitations of
existentialism, I decided to join the French Communist Party. That was in 1950. A
Nietzschean Communist!” (Foucault in Remarks on Marx—Conversations with
Duccio Trombadori, p. 58). Within a very few years Foucault’s “feeling of discomfort

65 Lemert, 2005, p. 284

66 Ibid
67 Ibid
68 Smart, 2003, p. 219
69 Lemert, 2005, p. 284

14
 and uneasiness” with Communist Party political practices caused him to leave the
party and immerse himself to his studies...70

• Still, after an initial failure in 1951, Foucault passed France's most competitive and
distinguishing postsecondary examination, the agrégation de philosophie, an
achievement that virtually assures career success, especially for intellectual.71

• On receiving the agrégation in 1951 Foucault left the ENS for the Fondation Theirs,
where he spent a year doing research before going on to teach at the University of
Lille in 1952. In Lille Foucault wrote a book, Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954),
and a long introductory essay to Ludwig Binswanger's Le Rêve et l'existence (1954).72

• In 1955, he turned to government service as a cultural attaché to French foreign

missions in Uppsala,73[Sweden, to escape the constraints of French social and cultural
life and to try to find greater personal freedom].74

• [At the University of Uppsala, where he worked as a French instructor in the

Department of Romance Studies],75 he began the archival research for… Folie et
déraison: Historie de la folie á l' âge classique (partially translated into English as
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965). [He
later left the University because of intellectual and personal disappointment. From
Sweden, Foucault moved in 1958 to the University of Warsaw and then to the Institut
Français in Hamburg, before returning to France in 1960]76 The years abroad gave
Foucault the freedom to deepen his understanding of psychology, to begin his research
career, and to enjoy the pleasures and risks of gay sexual life.77

• Foucault remained mobile, moving from the University of Clermont-Ferrand, where

he taught psychology and philosophy (1961-6), to a philosophy post at the University
of Tunis (1966-8), on very briefly, literally a matter of weeks, to the University of
Nanterre, and from there to the University of Vincennes, to a tenured professorship in
philosophy (1968-70), finally being appointed in 1970 to a chair in the History of
Systems of Thought at the most prestigious institution in France, the Collège de
France in Paris, where he remained until his death in 1984.78

• In 1961, Folie et déraison was published, and the year following, it was presented and
defended as his thesis for the doctorat d' étati, France's highest postgraduate degree.79

70 Smart, 2003, p. 221

71 Lemert, 2005, p. 284
72 Smart, 2003, p. 220
73 Lemert, 2005, p. 284
74 Smart, 2003, p. 220
75 Ibid
76 Ibid
77 Lemert, 2005, p. 284
78 Smart, 2003, p. 220
79 Lemert, 2005, p. 284

15
 • Immediately, Foucault’s reputation grew as more and more of his writings appeared:
Maladie mentale et psychologie (1962), Raymond Roussel (1963), Naissance de la
clinique (1963), Les mots et les choses (1966), and L’archaeologie du savoir (1969).80

• Foucault returned to France in the wake of May 1968.81 [He] did not participate in the
political struggles which took place on the university campuses and in the streets of
France during May 1968, as he was working at the University of Tunis at the time, but
he has acknowledged that the transformations induced in the intellectual and political
climate had a decisive influence upon his work—“it is certain... that without May of
’68, I would never have done the things I’m doing today: such investigations as those
on the prison, sexuality, etc., would be unthinkable’ (Foucault in Remarks on Marx—
Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, p. 140). As well as making possible the study
of particular practices and institutions, the events of May 1968 contributed to
Foucault’s thoughts on the changing status of the intellectual, and the possibility of
“reaching a new kind of relationship, a new kind of collaboration between
‘intellectuals’ and ‘non-intellectuals’ that would be completely different from the past
(ibid, p. 142).82

• In the aftermath of 1968, the French government created a new experimental

university, Paris VIII, at Vincennes and appointed Foucault the first head of its
philosophy department in December of that year. Foucault appointed mostly young
leftist academics… whose radicalism provoked the Ministry of Education, who
objected to the fact that many of the course titles contained the phrase "Marxist-
Leninist," and who decreed that students from Vincennes would not be eligible to
become secondary school teachers. Foucault notoriously also joined students in
occupying administration buildings and fighting with police.83

• Foucault's tenure at Vincennes was short-lived, as in 1970 he was elected to France's

most prestigious academic body, the Collège de France, as Professor of the History of
Systems of Thought. His political involvement increased, and his partner Defert joined
the ultra-Maoist Gauche Proletarienne (GP). Foucault helped found the Prison
Information Group (French: Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons or GIP) to provide a
way for prisoners to voice their concerns. This coincided with Foucault's turn to the
study of disciplinary institutions, with a book, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and
Punish), which "narrates" the micro-power structures that developed in Western
societies since the 18th century, with a special focus on prisons and schools.84

• Translations of [his] books established Foucault’s international reputation as a

revolutionary social thinker and historian: Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception (1973), The Order of Things (1970), and The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1972).85

80 Ibid
81 Smart, 2003, p. 220
82 Ibid, p. 222
83 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
84 Ibid
85 Lemert, 2005, p. 284

16
 • For Foucault, the regular visits [to the US in the 1970s], especially to the University of
California at Berkeley, were a relief from the pressures at home and a free space to
explore his own personal politics—to both creative and tragic ends.86

• Moi, Pierre Rievière ayant égorge ma mere, ma soeur et mon frère [Moi, Pierre
Rievière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother] (1973) was
published.

• Surveiller et puner: Naissance de la prison [Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

Prison] (1975) was published.

• Foucault had… a "limit experience” (where people [including himself] purposely

push their minds and bodies to the breaking point)… at Zabriskie Point in Death
Valley in the spring of 1975. There Foucault tried LSD for the first time, and the drug
pushed his mind to the limit: "The sky has exploded… and the stars are raining down
upon me. I know this is not true, but it is the Truth" (cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 250).
With tears streaming down his face, Foucault said, "I am very happy… Tonight I have
achieved a fresh perspective on myself… I now understand my sexuality… We must
go home [to the self] again" (cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 251).87

• La volonté de savoir [The History of Sexuality: An Introduction] (1976) was

published.

• After the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in 1976, there was a long wait for
Foucault's next books. He was, in these years, as productive as ever as an essayist,
activist, teacher, and researcher. The demands on him in France had grown to a degree
that lesser men would have found them unbearable. He spent more and more time at
Berkeley. San Francisco drew him not only for the pleasure of the intellectual
company at the university but also for the sexual pleasures of the gay community, in
the days before AIDS was known to be what it has become.88

• Foucault appears to have been drawn to the impersonal sex that flourished in the
infamous bathhouses of that time [in San Francisco]. His interest and participation in
these settings and activities were part of a lifelong interest in "the overwhelming, the
unspeakable, the creepy, the stupefying, the ecstatic" (citied in J. Miller, 1993, p. 27).
In other words, in his life (and his work) Foucault was deeply interested in "limit
experiences" (where people [including himself] purposely push their minds and
bodies to the breaking point) like the impersonal sadomasochistic activities that took
place in and around bathhouses… As he put it, "I think S/M is much more than that;
it's the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about
previously" (Foucault, cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 27).89

• Thus, sex was related to limit experiences, and both, in turn, were related in his view
to death: "I think the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so

86 Ibid
87 Ritzer, 1996, p. 605
88 Lemert, 2005, p. 288
89 Ritzer, 1996, p. 604

17
 deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it… Complete total
pleasure… for me, it's related to death" (Foucault, cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 27).90

• Herculin Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth century

French Hermaphrodite (1980) was published.

• When back in France, Foucault made the time to research the history of sexuality.
Then, he worked mostly in the archives of the Catholic traditional and turned ever
more back to the Greeks...91

• Even in the fall of 1983, when he was well aware of AIDS and the fact that
homosexuals were disproportionately likely to contract the disease, he plunged back
into the impersonal sex of the bathhouses of San Francisco…According to Foucault's
longtime companion, "He took AIDS very seriously… When he went to San Francisco
for the last time, he took it as a 'limit-experience'" (cited in J. Miller, 1993, p. 380).92

• The second and third volumes of the sexuality project, L’usage des plaisirs, 1984 (The
Uses of Pleasure, 1985) and Le souci de soi, 1984 (The Care of the Self, 1986) were
published.

• Foucault died of AIDS on June 25, 1984 [at 57 years of age],93 just as his books on the
care of the pleasuring self appeared.94

II. Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language (1969, 1971/1976)

• Foucault is more interested in the “micro-politics of power”

• [The] reader can appreciate that though books such as Archaeology of Knowledge are
intensely theoretical (and to some impenetrable), Foucault's theoretical position was
forged on strict empirical grounds. [In] contrast to many widely read and productive
historians, Foucault is known to have done the archival work himself… To work on a
daily basis with fragile pages of letters or court documents (or poor facsimiles thereof)
is to experience the strange effect of the past on the researcher. One digs through the
layers to find documents as real as any one finds today. But always the question is: In
what does the truth or reality of the text subsist? It is never, for example, possible
to fact-check an ancient text by asking its authors what they meant. Archives of the
historical past are, strictly speaking, unguarded by the voice of an author. In other
words, they are pure discourse, outside the sphere wherein anyone can second-guess
the meanings. In contrast, even, to literary texts, where one is tempted to imagine what
the poet meant, it is nearly impossible to attribute meanings to the archival texts.
Most of the time, the author or authors are unknown. When they are known, usually
(as in the case of private letters) the texts convey meanings outside and often at odds
with the exterior record of their public lives.95

90 Ibid, pp. 604-605

91 Lemert, 2005, p. 288
92 Ritzer, 1996, p. 605
93 Ritzer, 1996, p. 604
94 Lemert, 2005, p. 288
95 Ibid, p. 286

18
 • The interpretation of texts without authors is closer, thereby, to natural history and
astronomy than to survey research or ethnography. It is, in short, to use the word
Foucault made famous, closest of all to the work of the archaeological digs of the
physical anthropologist… The story of the first man is a story without an author.
Foucault chose his terms prudently when he described his method, first, as an
"archaeology" and later as "genealogy."96

• Archaeology' is the term Foucault used during the 1960s to describe his approach to
writing history. Archaeology is about examining the discursive traces and orders
left by the past in order to write a 'history of the present'. In other words
archaeology is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that
have led to what we are today.97

• In Foucault's method, the truth of the archival past is a truth that survives on the
wings of the descriptive presentation of the facts, that is, on the descriptive work
permitted in a given historical time by the predominant community of discourse.
Whether in science or practical life, certain things cannot be said, however true they
may be… The prevailing norms do not always allow the ancient truths to be told.
Hence, madness was not originally a disease, even a disorder; and punishment was a
cruel public spectacle without the least consideration of rehabilitating the interior
attitude of the criminal. Likewise, medicine before the modern era was a kind of
epidemiological study (often of humors or fluids, only later of germs) in a world in
which, remarkable, the body was not a significant etiological site due to moral
restrictions on the physical examination of bodies. In a similar fashion, what we today
call the "social sciences" were, in the classical era, the formal classification of
naturally occurring forms that corresponded to abstract types, as opposed to the
empirical examination of variances as they occur in the evidentiary record. When one
works in archives, the labor is so time-consuming that as much as one would like to it
is impossible to go to ancient court records looking for some preconcieved form. One
can only read, and take notes, and read, then (as Max Weber one said) wait for
the idea to occur to you.98

• The unity of such statements, the way that they come to form a science or a
discipline, does not come from the human subject or the author… but rather
from basic discursive rules and practices extant at a given time and place (Flynn,
1978). More specifically, Foucault is interested in the basic discursive practices that
formed the base of scientific discourse, particularly in the human sciences.99

• To Foucault, archaeology is concerned with objects, things without context, articles

left from the past, silent moments... In focusing on objects, he wants to move away
from the sovereignty of the subject [humanism] that has reigned, in his view, since
the nineteenth century... Thus, [he] takes as his goal the creation of “a method of
analysis purged of all anthropologism”; his position is anti-humanistic (Panden,
1987).100
96 Ibid
97 O’Farrell, 2007
98 Lemert, 2005, p. 286
99 Ritzer, 1997, p. 38
100 Ritzer, 1997, pp. 38-39

19
 • Instead of focusing on people and what they say, Foucault (1978) focuses on
discourse as practice.[... He] is interested in getting, at least initially, at the
regularities that exist within discourse [not the traditional unities such as
psychopathology]. He traces those regularities to [major fields] of relationships—
relations between statements, between groups of statements, and the “relations
between statements and groups of statements and [more sociologically] events of a
quite different kind (technical, economic, social, political)” (Foucault in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 29).101[...] Specifically, he is interested in discursive
formations where a system of dispersion exists among the statements where there is
regularity among elements such as “objects, types of statements, concepts, or thematic
choices” (Ibid, p. 38)... Alan Sheridan contends that Foucault’s archaeology of
knowledge involves a search for “a set of rules of formation that determine the
conditions of possibility of all that can be said within the particular discourse at
any given time” (1980, p. 48). Foucault admits that this is an blank , uncharted,
indifferent space , but he is prepared to focus on it rather than the foci of most of his
predecessors—authors, oeuvres (bodies of work), the origin of ideas , influences,
traditions, and most generally the history of ideas.102

• Foucault outlines a five-step process for the analysis of a field of discursive events:103

○ Grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence

○ Determine its conditions of existence
○ Fix at least its limits
○ Establish its correlates with other statements that may be connected with it
○ Show what other forms of statement it excludes

• “The rules of formation of... concepts “operate not only in the mind or consciousness
of individuals, but in discourse itself, they operate... on all individuals who undertake
to speak in this discursive field” (Foucault, 1969, p. 40). He looks at the three major
fields mentioned above and is interested in both the similarities and differences among
concepts (as well as other elements of discourse) in these fields.104

• Foucault’s unit of analysis in such comparative studies is the statement... [which was]
thought of as functions than structures... As functions, statements “cuts across a
domain of structures and possible unities, and... reveals them, with concrete contents,
in time and space” (Foucault, 1969, p. 87). In these terms, a discourse (or a discursive
formation) can be defined as the “group of statements that belong to a single system
of formation” (Foucault, Ibid, p. 107).

• One way to look at this is to recognize a system of discourse as a system of exclusion

or constraint. It is a set of boundaries as to what can be said and what cannot be
said; accordingly, if something cannot be said, it cannot even be thought about.

101 Ritzer, 1997, p. 39

102 Ibid, p. 40
103 Ibid, p. 39
104 Ibid, p. 40

20
 Foucault suggests there are three great forms of exclusion: the division between
madness and reason; prohibited words; and the will to truth.105

• Foucault articulates four principles that distinguish the archaeology of knowledge

from the history of ideas[which is concerned with the genesis of ideas, their continuity
over time, as well as totalizations such as the spirit of an age]:106

○ Archaeology does not focus on the “thoughts, representations, images, themes,

preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses.” Rather, it is
concerned with “those discourses themselves... as practices obeying a certain
rules.” To put it another way, archaeology does not treat “discourse as document,
as a sign of something else,” but is rather concerned with discourse itself “as a
monument.” Archaeology “is not an interpretive discipline: it does not seek
another, better-hidden discourse” [or underlying structures] (Foucault, 1969, p.
139)
○ Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the linear and gradual slope that
characterizes discourses and their relationship to the other discourses that precede,
surround, and succeed them. Rather, the goal “is to define discourses in their
specificity... a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse” (Ibid).
○ Archaeology is not concerned with individual bodies at work, or oeuvres.
Rather it is concerned with the “types of rules for discursive practices that
run though individual oeuvres”; rules that govern them in whole or in part. It
therefore involves a rejection of a focus on the author of the oeuvre and does not
see the author as the basis of the unity of that work (Ibid).
○ Finally, archaeology does not involve a search for the origins of discourse, but
rather “it is the systematic description of a discourse-object” (Ibid).

• Foucault is very interested in contradictions... To [him...] a contradiction is “the very

law of its [discourses] existence: it is on the basis of such a contradiction that
discourse emerges... contradiction is ceaselessly reborn through discourse...
Contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of its
historicity.” The goal is not to “uncover” contradictions but to describe them in
themselves; they are objects to be described in themselves; they are objects to be
described through archaeological analysis. Rather than seeking to eliminate
contradictions as does the history of ideas, “archaeology describes the different spaces
of dissension” (Foucault, 1969, p. 152).107

• The goal is to compare contradictions; indeed archaeology is inherently

comparative... [It] is always plural looking at two or more discourses
simultaneously... [It looks for] the tangle of contradictions and analogies that make up
one discourse in contrast to others.108

• “The archaeological description of discourses is deployed in the dimensions of a

general history; it seeks to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic

105 Collins, 1998, p. 262

106 Ritzer, 1997, p. 41
107 Ibid
108 Ibid, p. 42

21
 processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated”
(Foucault, 1969, p. 164)109

• While it was written prior to The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Order of Things can
be seen as an effort to apply at least an earlier conception of archaeology to a specific
set of intellectual issues. [i.e. his historical studies of the human science—the natural
science of biology (“naturalist”), economics, and linguistics (“grammarians”):110

Unknown to themselves, the naturalist, economists, and grammarians employed

the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their
concepts, to build their theories. It is these rules of formation [discourses] which
were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely
differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by
isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily
perhaps, archaeological. Taking as an example the period covered in this book, i
have tried to determine the basis or archaeological system common to a whole
series of scientific “representations” or “products” dispersed throughout natural
history, economics, and philosophy [or linguistics] of the Classical period.
-Foucault in The Order of Things, pp. xi-xii

• To put it succinctly and in terms of the title of his work, Foucault is seeking to
describe archaeologically the order among (discursive) things in the fields of biology,
economics, and linguistics.111

• [Foucault is pointing that transitions in episteme do] not necessarily represent

progress but merely a change in the way things are ordered [and conceived].112

Epistemic changes113
16th century
characterized by the
view that the
empirical world is
composed of “a
complex of kinships,
resemblances, and
affinities” (Foucault
in The Archaeology of
Knowledge, p. 54)
109 Ibid
110 Ibid
111 Ibid, p. 43
112 Ibid. Episteme is the body of ideas that determine the knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular
time (from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/episteme)
113 Ritzer, 1997, pp. 43-45
17th century
Representations
replace resemblance:
“It is through
resemblance that
representations can be
known, that is,
compared with other
representations that
may be similar to it,
analysed into
elements (elements
common to it and
other representations),
18th century, [mid 20th century]
[19th century]
Representation has Linguistic turn. Focus
been displaced, and has shifted from
knowledge has “now human beings to
escaped from the language.
space of the table”
(Ibid, p. 239). The
new basis of
knowledge is the
“transcendental field
of subjectivity” (Ibid,
p. 250). More
specifically, “what
matters is no longer

22
 combined with those identities, distinctive
representations that characters, permanent
may present partial tables with all their
identities, and finally possible paths and
laid out into an routes, but great
ordered table” (ibid, hidden forces
p. 68)… “The developed on the
fundamental task of basis of their
Classical ‘discourse’ primitive and
is to ascribe a name inaccessible nucleus,
to name things, and in origin, causality, and
that name to name history” (Ibid, p. 251)
their being.” (Ibid, p. … Thus, in the
141) Modern Age, the
human being is born
and replaces the table
as the center of our
systems of
knowledge.

• Foucault’s early archaeological analysis of discourse was later abandoned for an even
more poststructuralist approach because Foucault came to realize that is archaeology
was silent on the issue of power as well as on the link between knowledge and power.
Foucault’s genealogy [of power] focuses on the origins (in concrete historical
conditions) and the (largely discontinuous) development of power/knowledge
regimes. The most important source [of this thinking] is his 1971 lecture and essay,
“The Discourse on Language.”114

I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once

controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of
procedures whose role is to avert its powers and dangers, to cope with chance
events, to evade its ponderous awesome materiality.
—Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge, p. 216

• Foucault's remarks on the difference between archaeology and genealogy are generally
rather vague and confusing. The tools Foucault uses to practice both methods are to all
intents and purposes the same. But, if archaeology addresses a level at which
differences and similarities are determined, a level where things are simply
organized to produce manageable forms of knowledge, the stakes are much
higher for genealogy. Genealogy deals with precisely the same substrata of
knowledge and culture, but Foucault now describes it as a level where the
grounds of the true and the false come to be distinguished via mechanisms of
power.115

• Foucault identifies four domains in which discourse is considered to be particularly

dangerous: politics (or power), sexuality (or desire), madness, and most generally,
what is considered to be true or false. Foucault, following Nietzsche, identifies the
114 Ibid, p. 45
115 O’Farrell, 2007

23
 latter area as the “will to truth” or “the will to power.” In linking these, Foucault (like
Nietzsche) is linking knowledge to power; the idea that knowledge is pursued for its
own sake, and not to gain power, is rejected by Foucault.116

• Foucault (in The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 220) differentiates between systems of

exclusion… and “internal rules, where discourse exercise its own control; rules
concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution.” That is,
disciplines have their own rules that serve to control what is said in them.117

• Thus, Foucault sees himself as undertaking two often (but not always) interrelated
tasks. The first is the critical task of dealing with “forms of exclusion, limitation and
appropriation… how they are formed, in answer to which needs, how they are
modified and displaced, which constraints they have effectively exercised, to what
extent they have been worked on” (Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, p.
231). The second, or genealogical, task is to examine “how series of discourse are
formed, through, in spite of, or with the aid of these systems of constraint: what were
the specific norms for each, and what were the conditions of appearance, growth, and
variation” (Ibid, p. 232).118

• Overall, Foucault is concerned with how people regulate themselves and others
through the production and control of knowledge. Among other things, he sees
knowledge generating power by constituting people as subjects and knowledge being
used to govern the subjects.119

• Although he sees links between knowledge and power, Foucault does not see a
conspiracy by elite members of society. Such a conspiracy would imply conscious
actors, whereas Foucault is more inclined to see structural relationships, especially
between knowledge and power…[Further] Foucault believes that knowledge-power is
always contested; there is always ongoing resistance to it.120

III. Madness and Civilization (1961)

• Foucault is doing… an archaeology of knowledge… of psychiatric knowledge.121

• [Foucault] begins with the Renaissance, when madness and reason were not separated,
when there was an incessant dialogue between madness and reason, when they both
spoke the same language. However, in the Classical Age (between 1650 and 1800),
distance between them was established, the dialogue began to be silenced, they began
to speak different languages, and ultimately, reason came to subjugate madness. In
other words, one form of knowledge came to exert power over another (madness).
Foucault is describing “a broken dialogue” between reason and madness (Foucault,
1961, p. x), one with the following end result:122

116 Ibid
117 Ibid, p. 46
118 Ibid
119 Ibid
120 Ibid, p. 47
121 Ibid
122 Ibid

24
 Here reason reigned in the pure state, in a triumph arranged for it in advance over
a frenzied unreason. Madness was thus torn from that imaginary freedom which
still allowed it to flourish on the Renaissance horizon. Not so long ago, it had
floundered about in broad daylight, in King Leari, in Don Quixote. But in less
than half-century, it had been sequestered and, in the fortress of confinement,
bound to Reason, to the rules of morality and to their monotonous nights.
—Foucault in Madness and Civilization, p. 64

• Foucault does not see what has happened to the mad as an isolated process. The same
kind of thing was happening to others, including the poor, the unemployed, and
prisoners. Thus, the Renaissance is the period of the founding of houses of
confinement—madhouses, workhouses, and prisons… [They] are not to Foucault what
they purport to be but rather part of a broad system in place during the Renaissance to
judge and to oppress people.123

• While this system may not have succeeded in terms of its original purposes [of
forestalling agitation and uprising by putting people to work and by confining others
who could not work in places like hospitals, prisons, and mental institutions during the
economic crises in the 17th & 18th century], it did serve to define the lack of work, that
is, idleness… as an ethical and moral problem. And from the beginning the mad
were linked to the poor and the idle. For the first time in history, institutions of
morality were formed combining moral obligation and civil law. More generally,
things like morality, virtue, and goodness became concerns of the state.124

• The scientific psychology and psychiatry of the nineteenth century eventually arose
out the separation of the made from the sane, the “invention of madness, in the
eighteenth century… psychiatry [was described by Foucault] as a “monologue of
reason about madness” (Foucault, 1961, p. xi). At first, medicine was in charge of the
physical and moral treatment of the mad, but later scientific psychological medicine
took over the moral treatment. It was the definition of madness as a moral problem
that made psychology possible… Thus, for Foucault, psychology (and psychiatry) is a
moral enterprise, not a scientific behavior, aimed against the mad who are
progressively unable to protect themselves from this “help.” He sees the mad as being
sentenced by so-called scientific advancement to a “gigantic moral imprisonment.”125

• Unreason had emerged from confinement in the eighteenth century because of a fear
that mental disease was spreading in the houses of confinement. It was as if
“maleficent vapors” were pervading the institutions. While this new fear was put in
medical terms, it was “animated, basically, by a moral myth” (Foucault, 1961, p. 202).
In any case, “unreason was once more present; but marked now by an imaginary
stigma of disease, which added its powers of terror” (Ibid, p. 205)… It was this, more
than improved knowledge, that led medicine to deal with mental illness.126
123 Ibid, p. 48
124 Ibid. Until the seventeenth century, what was considered to be evil was dealt with in public. The 17th century
witnessed the beginnings of the rise of confinement for those who were considered “evil.” By the eighteenth
century the process had reached such an extreme that it was believed that only oblivion, like that associated with
confinement, could suppress evil. Shame had come to be associated with that which was inhuman (Ibid).
125 Ibid, p. 49
126 Ibid, pp.49-50

25
 • One example of such an “advance” was the great reform movement of the second half
of the eighteenth century in which houses of confinement were more completely
isolated so that they could be surrounded by purer air. Such isolation was also
designed to allow “evil” to vegetate in the asylums without spreading to the larger
community. This served to eliminate, in the view of the day, the risk of contagion
while at the same time retaining the asylum, and the mad contained in it as an example
for the spectators. It remained “a spectacle conclusively proving the drawbacks of
immorality” (Foucault in Madness and Civilization, p. 207)127

• Needless to say, Foucault rejects the idea that over the years we have seen scientific,
medical, and humanitarian advances in the treatment of the mad. What he sees,
instead, are increases in the ability of the sane and their agents (physicians,
psychologists, psychiatrists) to oppress and repress the mad who, we should not
forget, had been on equal footing with the sane before the Renaissance. More recently,
the mad have come to be less judged by these external agents and more by
themselves; “madness is ceaselessly called upon to judge itself” (Foucault in
Madness and Civilization, p. 265)… [Madmen were made] to be aware of, to feel
guilty about, their own madness. Madmen were sentenced to a lifetime of anguish of
responsibility and conscience. As a result, the mad were forever vulnerable to
punishment not only by others but also by themselves. 128

• [The] inmate is “imprisoned in a moral world” (Foucault, 1961, p. 269)129

IV. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963)

• It is a historical shift in the gaze of medicine that is the focus of Foucault’s
archaeology.

• In the eighteenth century, medicine was largely a classificatory science [of diseases]…
As yet there was not clinical structure in medicine. However, in the nineteenth
century the gaze of the medical practitioner shifted from the classificatory
system, from the “table [of classification],” to the patient and the patient’s body.
The key was the development of the clinic where patients were observed in bed
(Long, 1992). Here the gaze of the physician on the body “was at the same time
knowledge” (Foucault, 1963, p. 81)130

• The ability to see and touch sick people [and to examine, gaze upon, dead bodies
in autopsies] was a crucial change in medicine and an important source of
knowledge (and ultimately power)… [The] ability to study the dead illuminated
many things about health, disease, and death… Because of the autopsy and its focus
on things like diseased organs, the “being,’ and the “essence,” of diseases disappears.
We are left with the realization that all that exists is a series of diseases caused by “a
certain complex movement of tissues in reaction to an irritating cause” (Foucault,
1963, p. 189). In addition to the deromantization of human life (and death), with

127 Ibid, p. 50
128 Ibid
129 Ibid, p. 51
130 Ibid, p. 53

26
 this, the medicine of diseases ends and the medicine of pathological reactions
begins.131

• Foucault sees the anatomo-clinical gaze as the “great break” in Western medicine.
Thus, there is no gradual evolution of knowledge leading up to the gaze. Rather,
anatomo-clinical gaze represented a fundamental epistemic change… After the
change in the gaze, doctors were no longer playing the same game; it was a
different game with different rules. In the new game, people (patients), and not the
disease as part of a broader classification system, had become the object of scientific
knowledge and practice.132

• [A] radical change in medical knowledge took place: “A way of teaching and saying
became a way of learning and seeing” (Foucault, 1963, p. 64)… Seeing replaced
dogmatic language as a way of learning the truth.133

• “The science of man… was medically… based” (Foucault, 1963, p. 36)… prior to the
nineteenth century… medicine was a classificatory science, and the focus was on a
clearly ordered system of diseases. But in the nineteenth century, medicine came to
focus on diseases as they existed in individuals and the larger society (epidemics).
Medicine came to be extended to healthy people (preventive care), and it adopted a
normative posture distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy and, later, normal and
pathological state.134

It is understandable, then, that medicine should have had such importance in the
constitution of the sciences of man—an importance that is not only
methodological, but ontological, in that it concerns man’s being an object of
positive knowledge”
—Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic, p. 197

V. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975/1979)

• [The] genealogy of power takes more of center stage, and much less attention is
devoted to the archaeology of knowledge, structuralism, [and] discourse…135

[Power] and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power
relations without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power
relations.”
—Foucault in Discipline and Punish, p. 27136

• The focus shifts away from those who created, or were subjected to, the power-
knowledge nexus and toward that nexus itself: “it is not the activity of the subject of
knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but
131 Ibid
132 Ibid
133 Ibid, pp. 53-54
134 Ibid, p. 54
135 Ibid, pp. 54-55
136 Ibid, p. 55

27
 power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made
up, that determine the forms and possible domains of knowledge” (Foucault,
1975/1979, p. 28).137

• Discipline and Punish is concerned with the period between 1757 and the 1830s, a
period during which the torture of prisoners was replaced by control over them by
prison rules.138

• The prisoner’s body [is the subject of punishment and] the object of officials [in the
period]. [Its state after punishment and the] public ceremonies involved in such
torture [judicial and political rituals] demonstrate both that a crime has taken place [,
the accused was found guilty,] and that power is being manifest in an effort to control
it… Executions and torture not only showed the operation of power but also revealed
the “truth” of that power.139

• However [public torture and execution of prisoners] was “a bad economy of power”
because… it tended to incite unrest among the viewers of the spectacle (Foucault,
1975/1979, p.79). Spectacles like execution also tended to lead to “centres of
illegality” (Ibid, p. 63). The taverns were full, stones were thrown at executioners,
fights erupted, and spectators grabbed at the victims. Furthermore, overtime, protests
against public executions increased. For all these reasons officials needed to end
public confrontations with the condemned.140

• Within less than a century a new system of punishment was in place. Torture
disappeared as a public spectacle. Punishment became less physical and much
more subtle. The body ceased to be the major target of punishment. Instead of
imposing “unbearable sensations” on prisoners, the focus was on things like
suspending their rights. Punishment came to be rationalized and bureaucratized.
Bureaucratic restraint and control was reflected in the fact that “a whole army of
technicians took over for the executioner…: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists,
psychologists, educationalists” (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 11).141

• The criminal, and what is done to him, is a source of knowledge and information for
the larger public. As Foucault (1975/1979, p. 112) puts it, the punishment of the
criminal is “a living lesson in the museum of order.” Thus, the new forms of
punishment were less ceremonies and spectacles and more schools for the larger
population… While in an earlier time there were huge ceremonies involving torture
and execution, in the modern world we have instead “hundreds of tiny theatres of
punishment” (Ibid, p. 113). More generally, the prison had replaced the scaffold, and
this signified, among other things, that power was inscribed into the very heart of the
state since the penal system was run by the state.142

137 Ibid
138 Ibid
139 Ibid
140 Ibid
141 Ibid, p. 56
142 Ibid, pp. 56-57

28
 • [This shift in the forms of punishment relates] to the broader development of…
disciplines, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became the general
mechanism for exercising domination. The disciplines involve a series of exercises
designed to exert meticulous control over the body… The disciplines not only
occurred in prisons but also in public education…, hospitals, the workplace…, and the
military. Discipline involves the distribution of individuals in space including the
enclosure and partitioning of individuals and the development of functional sites and
ranks.143

• Discipline is a mechanism of power which regulates the behaviour of individuals

in the social body. This is done by regulating the organisation of space (architecture
etc.), of time (timetables) and people's activity and behaviour (drills, posture,
movement). It is enforced with the aid of complex systems of surveillance. Foucault
emphasizes that power is not discipline, rather discipline is simply one way in
which power can be exercised.144

• Foucault identifies three instruments of [the new technology of] disciplinary power,
derived in large part from the military model. First is hierarchical observation, or the
ability of officials to oversee all they control with a single gaze… The goal is
observation that is discreet, largely silent, and permanent. Second is the ability to
make normalizing judgments and to punish those who violate the norms… Such
normalizing judgments serve to compare, differentiate, hierarchicalize, homogenize,
and where necessary, exclude people. Third is the use of examination to observe
subjects and to make normalizing judgments about them (Meadmore, 1993)… An
examination is a wonderful example of the power-knowledge linkage; those who have
the power to give examinations gain additional knowledge and thereby more power
through the imposition of examinations on subjects… While we usually associate the
examination with schools, it is also manifest in psychiatry, medicine, personnel
administration, and so on.145

• Foucault offers several other important generalizations about the examination:146

○ It “transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (Foucault,
1975/1979, p. 187)
○ It “introduces individuality into the field of documentation” (Ibid, p. 189)
○ “the examination, surrounded by all documentary techniques, makes each
individual a ‘case’” (Ibid, p. 191). As a case, the individual becomes both an
object of knowledge and an object of control…

• Foucault does not simply adopt a negative view toward the growth of the disciplinary
society; he recognizes that it has positive consequences as well. For example, he sees
discipline as functioning well within the military and industrial factories. However,
Foucault communicates a genuine fear of the spread of discipline, especially as it
moves into the state-police network for which the entire society becomes a field of
perception and an object of discipline.147
143 Ibid, p. 57
144 O’Farrell, 2007
145 Ibid, pp. 57-58
146 Ibid, p. 58
147 Ibid

29
 • Foucault does not see discipline sweeping uniformly through society. Instead, he
sees elements of it “swarming” through society and affecting bits and pieces of
society as it goes. Eventually, however, most major institutions are affected. Foucault
asks rhetorically, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks,
hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (1975/1979, p. 228). In the end, Foucault sees
the development of a carceral archipelago in which discipline is transported “from the
penal institution to the entire social body” (Ibid, p. 298).148

• The transition from torture to prison rules constituted a switch in the object of
punishment from the body to the soul or the will. This, in turn, brought with it
considerations of normality and morality. Judgment came to be passed “on the
passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments… agressivity…
perversions… drives and desires” (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 18). Even the subject’s will
came to be judged. Science entered the process, and this helped give officials greater
control over not only offensive acts but over people, “not only on what they do, but
also on what they are, will be, may be” (Ibid).149

• Those in power took to “judging something other than crimes, namely the ‘soul’
of the criminal” (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 19). Things like insanity and madness came
to be associated with crime with the result that officials were now in the position to
judge “normality” as well as to prescribe actions that would help bring about the
normalization of those who were judged to be abnormal… The power and ability to
judge, especially normality and abnormality, has been generalized [and extend to
other “small-scale judges”] and is no longer restricted to the penal system. Out of
this emerged new bodies of scientific penal knowledge, and these served as the base of
the modern “scientific-legal complex.”150

• Human beings became the objects of punishment and of scientific discourse.

Scientific knowledge helped make the body a political field and gave birth to
political technologies [i.e. Panopticons] designed to control the body. However,
these technologies, and control more generally, were not centralized in the state or
in any other structure or institution. Rather, they were diffused in bits and pieces, in a
series of tools and methods, throughout society…. [In effect] innumerable micro-
centers of power do not lend themselves easily to destruction in a single stroke by a
massive revolution.151

• A Panopticon is a structure that allows officials the possibility of complete

observation of criminals; in other words, it permits a certain kind of gaze… Constant
visibility traps the subjects in “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each
actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible” (Foucault, 1975/1979,
p. 200). In fact, officials need not always be present in the Panopticon; the mere
existence of the structure (and the mere possibility that officials might be there)
constrains criminals. Power functions in the Panopticon nearly automatically. Power
148 Ibid
149 Ibid, pp. 58-59
150 Ibid, p. 59
151 Ibid, pp. 59-60. [Foucault] is willing to admit that there are occasional radical ruptures, but it is the small-scale
eruptions that are much more common and likely (ibid, p. 67).

30
 here is visible, but it is also unverifiable in that the subjects never know at any given
moment whether or not they are actually being observed by officials… Thus the power
lies more in the structure, and in the system of which it is part, than in the person who
designs or occupies it.152

• The Panopticon helps to perfect the exercise of power. It reduces the number of
people needed to exercise power, while at the same time it increases the number
of people over whom power is exercised. Constant pressure is exerted on those
observed, even before an act is committed, and officials have the ability to intervene at
any point in the process. The Panopticon itself is noiseless and unobtrusive…153

• [Foucault sees] the Panopticon as a kind of laboratory (a laboratory of power) for

the gathering of information about people. It was the forerunner of the social-
scientific laboratory and other social-science techniques for gathering information
about people.154

• Foucault [also] sees the Panopticon, or the panoptic principle, as the base of… the
disciplinary society, a society based on surveillance.155

• Discipline may be found in such a wide array of settings because it “may be identified
neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for
its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels
of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”
(Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 215). Thus, the disciplinary system does not supplant
existing systems; rather it infiltrates all of them. The disciplines involve a series of
minute technical mechanisms that help to create micro-mechanism of power in
whatever setting they infiltrate.156

• The prison is Foucault’s paradigm for what is happening throughout society. The
prison is an “exhaustive disciplinary apparatus,” on which all other systems are
modeled to one degree or another (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 235). The prison is a
carceral system that sets the stage for society as a whole to become such a system.
Processes begun in the prison, and more generally in the judicial system, spread
throughout society producing a “carceral net” or a “carceral archipelago” that came to
encompass the “entire social body” (Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 298).157

VI. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction (1978/1980)

• His major objective is to “define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that
sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world’ (Foucault,
1978/1980, p. 11).158

152 Ibid, pp. 60-61

153 Ibid, p. 60
154 Ibid
155 Ibid
156 Ibid
157 Ibid, pp. 61-62
158 Ibid, p. 63

31
 • Foucault argues that “since the end of sixteenth century, the ‘putting into discourse of
sex,’ far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected
to a mechanism of increasing incitement” (1978/1980, p. 12).159

• Foucault (1978/1980, p. 24) argues that following the advent of Victorianism those in
power devoted “a steady gaze to these [sexual] objects.” Not only did those in
power seek to analyze and study sex, they also sought to gain control over sex and
sexual discourse by making it something to be administered, something to be policed.

• [Those] in power were faced with a series of economic and political problems caused
by population growth. At the heart of these problems was sex, specifically things like
the birth rate, age of marriage, legitimacy, and contraception.160

• Dominant powers, whether the capitalist class in the modern era or the priestly
class in the Middle Ages, had no choice but to regulate sexual practices, because
sex is necessarily central to their need to regulate the growth of populations,
whether of workers or adherents. Pure repression, thus, is impossible. Without sex,
no babies; the population dies off, and the system collapses.161 In became clear to those
in power that the future of society depended on the sexuality of individuals and the
ability of the powerful to control it. There resulted studies of, and efforts to intervene
in, population growth. Sex became a public issue.162

• Those in power concentrated more and more of their gaze on sex. However, it wasn’t
suppression that resulted from the increased gaze but rather the intertwining of
power and sexual pleasure… A dialectic emerged between power and pleasure:
“Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it
uncovered… [It is a] “pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions,
monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other
hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it,
or travesty it” (Foucault, 1978/1980, p. 45).163

• Also involved in the morality of sexuality is religion, especially Western Christianity,

the confession (a kind of discourse), and the need for the subject to tell the truth,
especially about sexuality.164

• The confessional was thus the precursor to the nineteenth-century factory school and
the diffusion of self-help and therapeutic practices in the twentieth century. Power
regulates sex (hence: reproduction) by forming subjects who willingly subject
themselves to the prevailing regime of power. How is this done? The only way it
can be done: by inducing the subjects to talk about sex, to talk in ways that
adjust sexual behaviors to the needed level of fertility. This explains the French title
of the book, La volonté de savoir: The Will to Knowledge. This play on Nietzsche’s
idea of the Will to Power… suggest that power/knowledge was at work well before
159 Ibid
160 Ibid, p. 64
161 Lemert, 2005, p. 288
162 Ritzer, 1997, p. 64
163 Ibid, p. 65
164 Ibid

32
 the industrial system was to assert that the modern world worked according to a
virtually universal requirement of social power.165

• Confession about sex, and most other things, has found its way into medicine,
education, family relationships, love relationships, and so on. Power flows to those
who are in a position to receive the information divulged in a confession,
specifically to receive knowledge about individual sexuality. To Foucault, the wide-
scale use of the confession comes down to the extortion of sexual knowledge from
people. This was made possible in the Occident because science became implicated
in the sexual confession; those who received confessions were often scientists…
Because the dangers posed by sex were so ubiquitous and because they were generally
hidden, they had to be hunted down ruthlessly and tirelessly through such mechanisms
as the confession. Further, those who listened to the confessions were supposed to
be peculiarly endowed with the ability to interpret them. Therefore it was the
listener who “was the master of truth” (Foucault, 1978/1980, p. 67).166

• Since it was deemed to be the possessor of the truth, science was in a position to
determine what was normal and what was pathological sexuality. The sources of
the pathologies were hidden, and they needed to be ferreted out by the scientist
(especially psychoanalyst) empowered to listen to sexual confessions. Once the
sources of the sexual pathologies were uncovered, they were to be treated
therapeutically by those very same scientists.167

• [Power is] the “multiplicity of force relations imminent in the sphere in which they
operate” (Foucault, 1978/1980, p. 92). Thus… power is not an institution, a structure,
a superstructure, or even a strength that people are endowed with. Power is
omnipresent

not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible
unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point,
or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere;
not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
—Foucault in The History of Sexuality, p. 93

• Starting in the seventeenth century, the power over life took two basic forms. The first,
the anatomo-politics of the human body, involved the discipline of the body to
optimize its capabilities and increase its use and its docility. The second, the bio-
politics of population, involved the regulation of the population as a whole and
utilized controls to regulate births, mortality, level of health, and so on (Hewitt, 1983).
These two forms of control, taken together, represented a major change in that the
sovereign powers switched from control through death (and the threat of it) to control
through life.168

• Is there any hope of emancipation?169

165 Lemert, 2005, p. 288
166 Ritzer, 1997, pp. 65-66
167 Ritzer, 1997, p. 66
168 Ibid, p. 67
169 Ibid

33
 In is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a
tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of
power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity
and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and
pleasures.
—Foucault in The History of Sexuality, p. 157

VII. The Use of Pleasure (1984/1985) and The Care of the Self (1984/1986)
• Substantially, Foucault shifted from the modern West to Greco-Roman culture
between the fourth B.C. and the second century A.D. Theoretically, Foucault
(1984/1985, p. 12) moved from a genealogy of power to a genealogy of self-
awareness, self-control, self-practices—as he puts it, a “genealogy of desiring man.”170

• Foucault describes his shift:

I insisted maybe too much… on techniques of domination… other techniques [are
important]… techniques which permit individuals to effect a certain number of
operation on their own bodies, on their souls, on their own thoughts, on their own
conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves,
or to act in a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural
power, and so on.
—Foucault (in Miller, 1993, pp. 321-322)171

• [Foucault] takes as the key question in this research, “why is sexual conduct, why are
the activities and pleasures that attach it, an object of moral solicitude?” (Foucault,
1984/1985, p. 10). To put it another way, why has sexuality become a “moral
problematic”?172

• The problematization of sexuality is related to what Foucault calls the “arts of

existence,” or the “techniques of the self”:

those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves
rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in
their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain
aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. These “arts of existence,”
these “techniques of the self,” no doubt lost some of their importance and
autonomy when they were assimilated into the exercise of priestly power in early
Christianity, and later into educative, medical and psychological types of practice.
—Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, pp. 10-11

• To Foucault, morality has two basic elements… The first are codes of behavior in
which those in authority enforce the dictates of the code. The second are forms of
subjectivation, or practices of the self. It is the latter that is focal in the classical world
and of focal concern to Foucault. “Here the emphasis is on the forms of relations with
the self, in the methods and techniques by which he works them out, on the exercise
170 Ibid, p. 68
171 Ibid
172 Ibid, p. 69

34
 by which he makes of himself an object to be known, and on the practice that enable
him to transform his own mode of being” (Foucault, 1884/1985, p. 30)173

• Foucault identifies four central domains, four major areas of experience: the
relationship to one’s body, one’s wife or marriage, boys, and the truth. Four types of
“stylization” are related to each of these focal concerns: body-dietetics, marriage-
economics, boys-erotics, truth-philosophy. More generally, Foucault (1984/1985,
p.91) is concerned with aphrodisiac, or “acts intended by nature, associated by nature
with intense pleasure, and naturally motivated by a force that was always liable to
excess and rebellion.”174

• Two major variables are associated with aphrodisiac in the classical world. First, there
is a quantitative emphasis on things like moderation and excess and not a qualitative
focus on the nature of the act. The issue was extent of involvement and not whether an
act was good or bad. Excess was identified as a problem, and it was traced to a lack of
self-restraint. Second, there is focus on role-polarity, especially active-passive,
subject-objects. The passive and object poles, identified with women, boys, and slaves,
were more likely to be defined as problems. Men who were prone to excess and
passivity were seen as immoral.175

• Three issues were central in reflecting on the use of pleasure. The first was the
individual’s need. However, since individual needs vary, it was impossible to come
up with a code or a law that applied to everyone, everywhere. Rather than being
amenable to codification, moderation required “an art, a practice of pleasures that was
capable of self-limitation” (Foucault, 1984/1985, p. 73). The second was timeliness,
practices that took place at the right time and involved the right amount. The third was
status; the proper use of pleasure varied with the user’s social status. Again, it is clear
that no code could be developed to handle dimensions with such a high degree of
variation.176

• Instead of the code, the focus in classical society was on one’s attitude, especially the
“domination of oneself by oneself” (Foucault, 1984/1985, p. 65)… [by one’s ability
to] “care of the self,” meaning the ability “to attend effectively to the self, and to
exercise and transform oneself.” This self-mastery was not only important to the
individual but also the state.177

• Foucault offers a succinct contrast between classical and modern society. In the
classical world , the control of aphrodisiac was178

not defined by a universal legislation determining permitted and forbidden acts,

but rather by a savoir-faire, an art that prescribed the modalities of a use that
depended on different variables (need, time, status)… In the Christian morality of

173 Ibid
174 Ibid
175 Ibid, p. 70
176 Ibid
177 Ibid
178 Ibid, pp. 70-71

35
 sexual behavior… Subjection was to take the form not of savoir-faire, but of a
recognition of the law and an obedience to pastoral authority.
—Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, pp. 91-92

• The way in which the classical Greeks handled dietetics (another aphrodisiac) is
closely tied to the way they dealt with sexuality. Especially important is the
development of a diet, a regimen that ultimately led to “a whole art of living”
(Foucault, 1984/1985, p. 101)… Moderation was the key to regiment, and sex acts
eventually came to be seen as a proper domain for a regimen and moderation.179

• [Reasons and anxieties] behind the vigilance associated with sexuality:180

1. Concern over deleterious effects of excess on the body
2. Concern about the well-being of the progeny
3. The form of the [sexual] act… could be a problem
4. Concern about cost, especially the expenditure of bodily fluids
5. [Sex act was associated] with death, at least as contrasted to the life giving of
procreation

• [Anxiety] existed not because sex was seen as evil,181

but because it disturbed and threatened the individual’s relationship with himself
and his integrity as an ethical subject in the making; [if] it was not properly
measured and distributed [managed?], it carried the threat of a breaking forth of
involuntary forces, a lessening of energy, and death without honourable
descendants.
—Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, p. 137

• Foucault (1984/1985, p. 153) also related this [diet, self-mastery, moderation] to

economics, which he defines as “the practice of commanding.” The economic art was
practice not only in business but also in managing city, the household, and even one’s
marriage. Self-mastery was demonstrated, perhaps most elegantly, in having sexual
relations only with one’s wife. This kind of self-mastery was seen as a moral
precondition for managing others.182

• In his discussion of erotics, defined as the “purposeful art of love,” Foucault

(1984/1985, p. 229) focuses on relations with boys (with men), relations that in the
Classical Age were not seen as the opposite of heterosexual relations. Thus, the moral
issue was excess, whether it involved homosexual or heterosexual relationships. Self-
control involves the ability to abstain from either homosexual or heterosexual
relations.183

• [In the classical period] homosexuality was accepted, but it certainly was not a matter
of indifference. The concern that existed was for the object of pleasure, the boys. This

179 Ibid, p. 71
180 Ibid
181 Ibid
182 Ibid
183 Ibid, pp. 71-72

36
 was to stand in contrast to Christian society where the concern would focus on the
subject and the question: How could a man desire a boy or another man?184

• [In The Care of the Self (1984/1986)] while there were changes [in the first two
centuries of A.D.], they did not represent a dramatic shift to focus on interdictions, or a
tightening of the code, but rather “an intensification of the relation to oneself by which
one constituted oneself as the subject of one’s acts” (Foucault, 1984/1986, p. 41). This,
in turn, was to have a wide-ranging series of effects:185

It also took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior; it became instilled in

ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices and formulas that people
reflected on, developed, perfected and taught. It thus came to constitute a social
practice giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and
communications, and at times even institutions. And it gave rise, finally, to a
certain mode of knowledge and to elaboration of a science.
—Foucault in The Use of Pleasure, p. 45

• Force is now required to deal with sexual pleasure, but it is in this epoch a force that
comes from within, through self-mastery, rather than from without. A new art of living
is required. And this requires a greater importance be placed on self-knowledge:

The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series

of clearly defined exercise, makes the question of truth—the truth concerning
what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing— central to the
formation of the ethical subject. Lastly, the end result of this elaboration is still
and always defined by the rule of the individual over himself. But his rule
broadens into an experience in which the relation to self takes the form not only
of a domination but also of an enjoyment without desire and without disturbance.
—Foucault in The Care of the Self, p. 68

• Instead of increasing prohibitions, what marked this early era was increased self-
preoccupation. Foucault closes with a view of what is to come in the modern Christian
world:186
Those moral systems will define our modalities of the relation to self: a
characterization of the ethical substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a
mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same
time the will of a persona god; a type of work on oneself that implies a
decipherment of the soul and a purificatory hermeneutics of the desires; and a
mode of ethical fulfillment that tend toward self-renunciation… a profoundly
altered ethics and… a different way of constituting oneself as the ethical subject
of one’s sexual behavior.
—Foucault in The Care of the Self, pp. 239-240

VIII. [The Role of the Intellectual, an Ethic for the intellectual]

• Foucault argues that the notion of the intellectual as a representative consciousness, as
able to speak for others- "to place himself 'somewhat ahead and to the side' in order to
184 Ibid, p. 72
185 Ibid
186 Ibid, p. 75

37
 express the stifled truth of the collectivity"—could no longer be convincingly
sustained. In contrast, the appropriate task for the intellectual identified by
Foucault is "to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its
object and instrument in the sphere of 'knowledge', 'truth', 'consciousness', and
'discourse' (Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p. 207-8). In
consequence, the responsibility of the intellectual is no longer assumed to be the
provision of knowledge for others, for they are already considered the to "know
perfectly well, without illusion" (Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An
Introduction, p. 207); rather, the central objective is to challenge the prevailing
regime of the production of truth which disqualifies local forms of knowledge as
illegitimate (Foucault in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977).187

• In Foucault's work it is not solutions or programmatic statements that one finds, but
the identification of problems, literally "how and why certain things (behavior,
phenomena, processes) became a problem" (Foucault in On Problematization, p.
16).188

• [Questions to ponder] The theories inspired by Saussure's linguistic theory have

influenced every academic discipline because they all bear on epistemology or what
can be known. If knowledge is relationship, a product of societies, the medium of
power, then academic endeavor is not about the discovery of truth but rather its
construction. Furthermore, the methodologies we employ in our various academic
endeavors are undermined by the insights of poststructuralism. What is the
relationship between the academic and the object of study? In what way can we know
that object; is it available to us at all? What can we know about the past? What does it
mean to interpret or analyze a work of literature? How do we choose what works to
study? What is the role of the aesthetic in either art history or literary study? How is
the canon of literature or art produced? How do we decide what is "good" or
"beautiful"? Can there be any absolute standards of value at all if meaning is a product
of arbitrary relationship and difference?189

• Poststructuralism has also influenced materialist theory or Marxism by providing a

way of understanding ideology and showing how important it is to the maintenance of
any economic system. The union of poststructuralist and materialist theory
produced cultural theories and cultural studies, including, in literature, new
historicism and cultural materialism, in which the goal is to understand cultures as
both material and discursive. In such theories, everything can be a text (a semitic
system), everything can be "read." But no one kind of text is privileged over another.
All texts are literary in a sense, as they are all produced in what we might call a self-
conscious manner. On the other hand, no self produces any text; there is no authorial
intention; language speaks through all of us, even the most "intentional" author.190

• The influence of Poststructuralism, particularly in its union with materialism, is what

has produced the "cultural turn" in the social sciences and humanities. And cultural
187 Smart, 2003, p. 222
188 Ibid, pp. 222-223
189 McBride (n.d.)
190 Ibid

38
 criticism tends to be interdisciplinary, as the questions it asks cannot be answered from
within the old disciplinary boundaries. Anyway, disciplines themselves have been
called into question by the foucauldian critique of discourses. We understand them
as social constructs rather than as taxonomies that arise from the nature of things.191

IX. Difference between Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

• Postmodernism importantly seeks to identify a contemporary state of the world, the
period that is following the modernist period. Postmodernism seeks to identify a
certain juncture, and to work within the new period. Post-structuralism, on the
other hand, can be seen as a more explicitly critical view, aiming to deconstruct ideas
of essentialism in various disciplines to allow for a more accurate discourse.192

• [The] major difference is one of emphasis more than substance: Post-modernists are
more oriented to ward cultural critique while the post-structuralists emphasize
method and epistemological matters. For example, post-structuralists concentrate on
deconstruction, language, discourse, meaning, and symbols while post-modernists cast
a broader net.193

• Poststructuralism is the most important theoretical source of postmodern social

theory… Postructuralism tends to be more abstract, more philosophical, and less
political, than postmodernism.194

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