Un escrito sobre Foucault

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FOUCAULT

“Anyway, my personal life is not at all interesting. If somebody thinks that my work cannot be understood without reference to such and such a part of my life, I accept to consider the question. I am ready to answer if I agree. As far as my personal life is uninteresting, it is not worthwhile making a secret of it. By the same token, it may not be worthwhile publicizing it.”
Michel Foucault, an Interview with Stephen Riggins, Toronto, 1982.

This text was first written by Foucault as a retrospective view about his work for the introduction to his book "History of Sexuality", it was then given by Foucault, under the pseudonym "Maurice Florence" as the article for the entry "Foucault" in "Dictionnaire des philosophes" 1984, pp 942-944.

To the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History of Thought. This should not be taken to mean a history of ideas that would be at the same time an analysis of errors that might be gauged after the fact; or a decipherment of the misinterpretations linked to them and on which what we think today might depend. If what is meant by thought is the act that posits a subject and an object, along with their possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge [savoir].It is not a matter of defining the formal conditions of a relationship to the object; nor is it a matter of isolating the empirical conditions that may, at a given moment, have enabled the subject in general to become acquainted with an object already given in reality. The problem is to determine what the subject must be, to what condition he is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge [connaissance]. In short, it is a matter of determining its mode of "subjectivation", for the latter is obviously not the same, according to whether the knowledge involved has the form of an exegesis of a sacred text, a natural history observation, or the analysis of a mental patient's behavior. But it is also and at the same time a question of determining under what conditions something can become an object for a possible knowledge [connaissance], how it may have been problematized as an object to be known, to what selective procedure it may have been subjected, the part of it that is regarded as pertinent. So it is a matter of determining its mode of objectivation, which is not the same either, depending on the type of knowledge [savoir] that is involved.

This objectivation and this subjectivation are not independent of each other. From their mutual development and their interconnection, what could be called the "games of truth" come into being-that is, not the discovery of true things but the rules according to which what a subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and false. In sum, the critical history of thought is neither a history of acquisitions nor a history of concealments of truth; it is the history of "veridictions", understood as the forms according to which discourses capable of being declared true or false are articulated concerning a domain of things. What the conditions of this emergence were, the price that was paid for it, so to speak, its effect on reality and the way in which, linking a certain type of object to certain modalities of the subject, it constituted the historical a priori of a possible experience for a period of time, an area and for given individuals.

Now, Michel Foucault did not pose this question-or this series of questions, which are those of an "archaeology of knowledge"-and does not wish to pose it concerning just any game of truth, but concerning only those in which the subject himself is posited as an object for possible knowledge: What are the processes of subjectivation and objectivation that made it possible for the subject qua subject to become an object of knowledge [connaissance], as a subject ? Of course it is a matter not of ascertaining how a "psychological knowledge" was constituted in the course of history but of discovering how various truth games were formed through which the subject became an object of knowledge. Michel Foucault attempted to conduct his analysis in two ways. First, in connection with the appearance and insertion of the question of the speaking, labouring, and living subject, in domains and according to the form of a scientific type of knowledge. This had to do with the formation of certain "human sciences", studied in reference to the practice of the empirical sciences, and of their characteristic discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (The order of Things). Foucault also tried to analyse the formation of the subject as he may appear on the other side of a normative division, becoming an object of knowledge-as a madman, a patient or a delinquent, through practices such as those of psychiatry, clinical medicine and penality (Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish).

Foucault has now undertaken, still within the same general project, to study the constitution of the subject as an object for himself: the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short, this concerns the history of "subjectivity", if what is meant by the term is the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself. The question of sex and sexuality appeared in Foucault's view, to constitute not the only possible example, certainly, but at least a rather privileged case. Indeed, it was in this connection that through the whole of Christianity and perhaps beyond, individuals were all called on to recognize themselves as subjects of pleasure, of desire, of lust, of temptation and were urged to deploy, by various means (self-examination, spiritual exercises, admission, confession), the game of true and false in regard to themselves and what constitutes the most secret, the most individual part of their subjectivity.
In sum, this history of sexuality is meant to constitute a third segment, added to the analyses of relations between the subject and truth or, to be exact, to the study of the modes according to which the subject was able to be inserted as an object in the games of truth.

Taking the question of relations between the subject and truth as the guiding thread for all these analyses implies certain choices of method. First, a systematic skepticism toward all anthropological universals-which does not mean rejecting them all from the start, outright and once and for all, but that nothing of that order must be accepted that is not strictly indispensable. In regard to human nature or the categories that may be applied to the subject, everything in our knowledge which is suggested to us as being universally valid must be tested and analysed. Refusing the universal of "madness", "delinquency", or "sexuality" does not imply that what these notions refer to is nothing, or that they are only chimeras invented for the sake of a dubious cause. Something more is involved, however, than the simple observation that their content varies with time and circumstances: It means that one must investigate the conditions that enable people, according to the rules of true and false statements, to recognize a subject as mentally ill or to arrange that a subject recognize the most essential part of himself in the modality of his sexual desire. So the first rule of method in for this kind of work is this: insofar as possible, circumvent the anthropological universals (and, of course, those of a humanism that would assert the rights, the privileges, and the nature of a human being as an immediate and timeless truth of the subject) in order to examine them as historical constructs. One must also reverse the philosophical way of proceeding upward to the constituent subject which is asked to account of every possible object of knowledge in general. On the contrary, it is a matter of proceeding back down to the study of the concrete practices by which the subject is constituted in the immanence of a domain of knowledge. There too, one must be careful: refusing the philosophical recourse to a constituent subject does not amount of acting as if the subject did not exist, making an abstraction of it on behalf of a pure objectivity. This refusal has the aim of eliciting the processes that are peculiar to an experience in which the subject and the object "are formed and transformed" in relation to and in terms of one another. The discourses of mental illness, delinquency, or sexuality say what the subject is only in a certain, quite particular game of truth; but these games are not imposed on the subject from the outside according to a necessary causality or structural determination. They open up a field of experience in which the subject and the object are both constituted only under certain simultaneous conditions, but in which they are constantly modified in relation to each other, and so they modify this field of experience itself.

Hence a third principle of method: address "practices" as a domain of analysis, approach the study from the angle of what "was done". For example, what was done with madmen, delinquents, or sick people? Of course, one can try to infer the institutions in which they were placed and the treatments to which they were subjected from the ideas that people had about them, or knowledge that people believed they had about them. One can also look for the form of "true" mental illnesses and the modalities of real delinquency in a given period in order to explain what was thought about them at the time. Michel Foucault approaches things in an altogether different way. He first studies the ensemble of more or less regulated, more or less deliberate, more or less finalized ways of doing things, through which can be seen both what was constituted as real for those who sought to think it and manage it and the way in which the latter constituted themselves as subject capable of knowing, analysing, and ultimately altering reality. These are the "practices", understood as a way of acting and thinking at once, that provide the intelligibility key for the correlative constitution of the subject and the object.

Now, since it is a matter of studying the different modes of objectivation of the subject that appear through these practices, one understand how important it is to analyze power relations. But it is essential to clearly define what such an analysis can be and can hope to accomplish. Obviously, it is a matter not of examining "power" with regards to its origin, its principles, or its legitimate limits, but of studying the methods and techniques used in different institutional contexts to act upon the behavior of individuals taken separately or in a group, so as to shape, direct, modify their way of conducting themselves, to impose ends on their inaction or fit it into overall strategies, these being multiple consequently, in their forms and their place of exercise; diverse, too, in the procedures and techniques they bring into play. These power relations characterize the manner in which men are "governed" by one another; and their analysis shows how, through certain forms of "government", of madmen, sick people, criminals and so on, the mad, the sick, the delinquent subject is objectified. So an analysis of this kind implies not that the abuse of this or that power has created madmen, sick people, or criminals where there was nothing, but that the various and particular forms of "government" of individuals were determinant in the different modes of objectivation of the subject.

One sees how the theme of a "history of sexuality" can fit within Michel Foucault's general project. It is a matter of analysing "sexuality" as a historically singular mode of experience in which the subject is objectified for himself and for others through certain specific procedures of "government".

Concepto de Genealogía

Este concepto de genealogía es necesario entenderlo pues Foucault se deja llevar mucho por este. Fue influencia de Nietzsche, pero Foucault lo amplio.

Foucault propuso una contra-historia de la posicion del sujeto con respecto al desarrollo de las personas y las sociedades. Su genealogía de cuentas el tema de la constitución de saberes, discursos, dominios de objetos, etc, sin tener que hacer referencia a un tema que es trascendental en relación con el ámbito de los acontecimientos o se vacía en su mismidad, a lo largo del curso de la historia.

Estos creían que las verdades absolutas no existían, sino que todas las creencias eran atravesadas por los discursos de las sociedades a traves de la historia, especialmente por las luchas de poderes e intereses que se dan en una sociedad. Por esto, la genealogía no desea encontrar una linea historica del desarrollo ni el origen de estos, si no, buscar los pasados prulares y contradictorios que revelan como el poder influye en la 'verdad' que se dan por sentadas en las sociedades.

Foucault y la sexualidad

Otro de los temas que Foucault trabajo fue el de la sexualidad y el poder sobre nuestros cuerpos. En este texto que consta de tres volumenes (los ultimos dos fueron publicados despues de su muerte). Aqui les pondre un link con un pequeño resumen sobre este texto y les pondre tambien un link en donde pueden leer el primer capitulo del libro.

Creo que esta lectura, aunque no he tenido el placer de leerme los tres tomos completos, incluso con solo el primer tomo te abre las puertas hacia otra vision de la sexualidad que no habia contemplado, al menos no de esta manera. Creo que esta lectura es de gran necesidad en el mundo de hoy donde todavia la sexualidad es vista como un tabu y donde se discrimina a otras personas por su sexualidad.

MICHEL FOUCAULT
The History of Sexuality

Background Info:

From Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, 1991

Foucault rejects the equation of reason, emancipation, and progress of modern theory and argues that an interface between modern forms of power and knowledge has served to create new forms of domination. His project is to write a ''critique of our historical era,'' to write about subjects that seem natural but that are contingent on sociohistorical constructs of power and domination. Systematizing methods of study produce reductive social and historical analyses; knowledge is perspectival in nature, requiring multiple viewpoints to interpret a heterogeneous reality. Modern theories see knowledge as neutral and objective (positivism) or emancipatory (Marxism), but Foucault emphasizes that knowledge is indissociable from regimes of power. Power is ''a multiple and mobile field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination are produced.'' It is plural, fragmentary, differentiated, indeterminate, and historically and spatially specific. He rejects the idea that power is anchored in macrostructures or ruling classes and is repressive in nature. Power is dispersed, indeterminate, heteromorphous, subjectless, and productive, constituting individuals' bodies and identities. It operates through the hegemony of norms, political technologies, and the shaping of the body and soul. In this book, Foucault argues that power operates not through the repression of sex, but through he discursive production of sexuality and subjects who have a ''sexual nature.''

Part I: We ''Other Victorians''

Repression is a sentence to disappear, an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such subjects. Repression has been seen as the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age and nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required to free ourselves from it. If sex is repressed, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.

It has been argued that repression coincides with the development of capitalism. Sex is repressed because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. However, according to Foucault, the essential thing is not the economic factor, but the existence of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, and the promise of a new felicity are linked together. Foucault's objective is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality.

Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis
Chapter 1: The Incitement to Discourse

The 17th C was an ''age of repression.'' But since that time there has been a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex. Christianity played a large role in this by emphasizing the importance of confession and of verbalizing sexual matters. In the 18th C, sex became a ''police'' matter, not in the repression of disorder, but in an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces. It was deemed necessary to regulate sex through useful and public discourses. These discourses on sex did not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as a means of its exercise. Mechanisms in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice incited, extracted, distributed, and institutionalized sexual discourse. A wide dispersion of devices were invented for speaking about it, for having it spoken about, for inducing itself to speak, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it. Rather than massive censorship, there has been a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse.

Chapter 2: The Perverse Implantation

Has increased discourse been aimed at constituting a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative? Foucault doesn't know if this is the ultimate objective. But reduction has not been the means employed for achieving it. The 19th and 20th C have been an age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of ''perversions.'' the discursive explosion of the 18th and 19th C led to an emphasis on heterosexual monogamy and a scrutiny of ''unnatural'' forms of sexual behavior. These polymorphous conducts were drawn out, revealed, isolated, and incorporated by multifarious power devices. The growth of perversions is the product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.

Part III: Scientia Sexualis

While there has been a proliferation of discourse on sex and an increase of awareness of a multiplication of sexual conducts, it nonetheless seems that by speaking of it so much, one was simply trying to conceal it: a screen discourse, a dispersion-avoidance. One also claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied and neutral viewpoint of science, a science subordinated to the imperative of a morality whose division it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm.

Throughout the 19th C sex has been incorporated into two distinct order of knowledge: a biology of reproduction and a medicine of sex. There was no real exchange between them, no reciprocal structuration. This disparity indicates that there was no aim to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence.

Historically there have been two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. Many societies endowed themselves with ars erotica (erotic art), whereby truth is drawn from pleasure itself. Western society, however, has scientia sexualis, procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power found in confession. In confession, the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks, but in the one who questions and listens.

How did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual confession come to be constituted in scientific terms?
through a clinical codification of the inducement to speak
through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality
through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality
through the method of interpretation
through the medicalization of the effects of confession

Thus, 19th C society did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. It set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. It created a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure.

*** A hypothesis of a power of repression exerted by our society on sex for economic reasons is inadequate for explaining the proliferation of discourse, the solidification of the sexual mosaic, and the production of confessions and an establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality
Chapter 1: Objective

The aim of this inquiry is to move less toward a ''theory'' of power than toward an ''analytics'' of power, i.e., toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. This analytics can be constituted only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation of power called ''juridico-discursive.'' This power is characterized by the negative relations between power and sex, the insistence of the rule, the cycle of prohibition, the logic of censorship, and the uniformity of the apparatus. Foucault wants to get rid of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. Instead he wants to advance toward a different conception of power through a closer examination of an entire historical material - the history of sexuality.

Chapter 2: Method

The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. Power must be understood as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization. Power's condition of possibility is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.

Propositions of Power:
Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relationships of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic, knowledge, sexual), but are immanent in the latter. They re not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, whenever they come into play. Power comes from below (I'm not quite sure what he means by this); i.e., there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations. Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. They re imbued with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. Where there is power, there is resistance and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.

One must analyze the mechanisms of power in the sphere of force relations. As far as sex is concerned, the important question, then, is: In a specific type of discourse on sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing historically and in specific places, what were the most immediate, the most local power relations at work? We must immerse the expanding of production of discourses on sex in the field of multiple and mobile power relations. There are four rules to follow in order to carry this out: Rule of immanence: one cannot assume that there exists only a certain sphere in sexuality to be studies. instead, one must start an inquiry with the ''local centers'' of power-knowledge. Rule of continual variation: Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are ''matrices of transformations.''

Rule of double conditioning: No ''local center'' or ''pattern of transformation'' could function if it did not eventually enter into an overall strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if it did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving as its prop and anchor point. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses: There exists a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a point of resistance, and a starting point for an opposing strategy.

Chapter 3: Domain

Sexuality is a dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young and old, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, and an administration and population. Since the 18th C there have developed four strategic unities which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge-power centering on sex:
a hysterization of women's bodies
a pedagogization of children's sex
a socialization of procreative behavior
a psychiatrization of perverse behavior

These strategies led to the production of sexuality. Relations of sex thus gave rise to two systems: the deployment of alliance (marriage, kinship, etc.) and the deployment of sexuality. The deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power. The deployment of alliance aims to produce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control. The deployment of sexuality was constructed on the basis of a deployment of alliance. The family is the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality, and it conveys the economics of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance. Because of this interchange, the family became a major factor of sexualizatio

Chapter 4: Periodization

The chronology of the techniques relating to sex (i.e., in the fields of medicine, pedagogy, and demography) do not coincide with the hypothesis of a great repressive phase of sexuality in the 17th century. Rather there was a perpetual inventiveness, a steady growth of methods and procedures. In addition, it seems that the deployment of sexuality was not established as a principle of limitation of the pleasures of others by the ruling classes. Rather the first deployment of sexuality occurred within these upper classes. This is because the primary concern was not repression of the sexuality of the classes to be exploited, but rather the vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ruled. It was a question of techniques for maximizing life. What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through the enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self. Sexuality then is originally, historically bourgeois, and in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects.

Part V: Right of Death and Power Over Life

Over time the ancient right to take life or let life was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. Starting in the 17th C, the power over live evolved in two basic forms: an anatomo-politics of the human body (the body as a machine) and a bio-politics of the population (regulatory controls on the species body). Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. The politics of sex revolved around the fours issues outlined in chapter 3 because they were at the juncture of the ''body'' and the ''population.'' Thus sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death. The blood relation long remained an important element in the mechanism of power; but slowly the symbolics of blood have been replaced with an analytics of sexuality. The mechanisms of power are addressed to the body and to life.

El nacimiento de la prisión

En el libro Vigilar y Castigar, Foucault hace un estudio sobre el desarrollo de la prisión y de esta manera hablar sobre las relaciones de poder en las sociedades y como estas "pueden penetrar materialmente en el espesor mismo de los cuerpos".

Aqui les dejo dos links. El primero es de un site que encontre donde podran leer el primer y tercer capítulo del libro, y el segundo link es sobre una entrevista hecha a Foucault luego de la publicación de este, son en ingles todos:

Primero capitulo del libro:
http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.torture.en.html

El tercer capítulo que se llama panoptísmo, un concepto muy interesante sobre la vigilancia y el control social:

http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html

Por ultimo la entrevista:
http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm

Biografia de Foucault

Michel Foucault nacio en Francia el 15 de octubre de 1926. Estudio fiolosofía en École Normale Supérieure de París. Llego a ser conocido como filósofo, historiador, sociólogo y psicólogo. Pero él se concideraba a sí mismo como arqueólogo. Su trabajo y pensamiento esta influenciado por Nietzche, Freud y él ha su vez ha sido de gran influencia en otros sociólogos y filósofos del siglo XX.

Durante el año 1951 es profesor de Psicología en la Escuela Normal Superior, siendo su alumno entre otros Derrida. También llego a dar clases en la Universidad de Upsala en Suecia.

Foucault crítica el proyecto de las ciencias humanas modernas demostrando que sus demandas de objetividad son imposibles en un dominio en el cual la verdad en sí misma siempre sea una construcción divagadora. Cualquier período histórico dado comparte las formaciones inconscientes que definen la manera apropiada de pensar la verdad.

Desde esta perspectiva comienza su gran cantidad de escritos sobre las relaciones entre el saber y el poder, la sexualidad y el sujeto, entre otras teorías.

Entre sus obras mas conocidas se encuentran: Historia de la locura en la época clásica (1961), El nacimiento de la clínica (1963), Las palabras y las cosas: una arqueología de las ciencias humanas (1966), El pensamiento del afuera (1966), La arqueología del saber (1969), El orden del discurso (1970), Vigilar y Castigar (1975), Genealogía del Racismo (1976), Microfísica del poder (1979), La verdad y las formas jurídicas (1980), Historia de la sexualidad, Tomo 1: La voluntad de saber (1976), Historia de la sexualidad, Tomo 2: El uso de los placeres (1984) y Historia de la sexualidad, Tomo 3: La inquietud de sí (1984).