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Introduction to Social Analysis Week 6

Foucault, discourse and discipline

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How to make sense of madness?

• What broader social insights can we can from understanding institutional life? What can we understand from the historical examination of the development of dominant ways of thinking and classifying people.

• Start with Goffman and move on to Foucault using the contrasts between them to look at “total institutions” and to illuminate their ideas.

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Reading:

• Seidman, Steven, (2004) Contested Knowledge 3rd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapter 12 ‘ Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary Society’.

• Good account of Foucault’s ideas and relates them to those of other theorists. Uses the example of sexuality. In this lecture I use the example of madness and medicalisation.

• Pip Jones 2003 Introducing Social Theory. Polity Press, Chap. 7 Michel Foucault and Body-centeredness of Modernity.

• Easy to read account of Foucault’s ideas

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Asylums

• Goffman, Erving. 1968 Asylums : essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates Harmondsworth : Penguin.  362.2 GOF

• Idea of “total institutions”; batch living, all aspects of life in one organisation. Includes prisons, barracks, hospitals, convents, children’s homes, boarding schools, ships, etc.

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Symbolic interactionist perspective

• Characterised by two contrasting roles: staff and inmates, no social mobility between them.

• Different strategies of interaction to achieve the objects of the institution and of the individual members of staff and inmates.

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Staff strategies

• To obtain compliance of inmates – for the smooth running of institution (getting everyone fed on time), for their own good (taking the medication), to shape desirable characteristics.

• How to get them into role? Role stripping, taking away previous roles, induction rituals

• “Mortification of self” removal of resources for opposition, for adopting other roles than inmate, for adopting a different moral order.

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Inmate strategies

• Primary v Secondary adjustments; formal rules v coping strategies – in practice not as clear cut.

• Private spaces and things – a stash, secret hiding places, illicit personal things

• “outs” – activities, pleasurable or distracting, which enable the person to mentally leave the institution, move to another realm

• Rituals of resistance, inmate solidarity,[ v. colonisation]

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Impact of the book

• Very influential, not only within sociology by within psychiatry and social welfare, led on to “care in the community”.

• But taken for granted in Goffman’s frame of reference were the medical rationale for the asylums, the power of the staff, and the nature of mental illness.

• However, Goffman did show that behaviour which was seen as validating a diagnosis of ‘mentally ill’ could be seen as an anticipatable consequence of the social situation in a ‘total institution’.

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• Exeter Asylum Digby

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Michel Foucault

• Foucault has written on prisons and asylums as part of wider body of work which focuses on the importance of the body in modern society, and a history of how particular ways of understanding the world come to dominate.

• “He is particularly interested in how and why, in modern societies, the body needs to be managed and regulated in ways not necessary in pre-modernity.” (Jones 2003: 124)

• French, studied in the U.S. became influential in 1970’s and 80’s, labelled a post-modernist, and most of his work is a particular kind of historical sociology but one in which very specific studies have much wider importance.

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Discourses• “Foucault is interested in the way in which different forms of

knowledge – different versions of what is true and false, right and wrong – produce different ways of life. He uses the term discourse to refer to a knowledge-based way of thinking and acting.

• Just as a child has no choice about the language(s) it has to learn as it grows, so we have no choice about the particular knowledge about the world we have to acquire. To put it this another way, for Foucault, it is through the discourses that dominate a time in history and place in the world that people acquire their mind-set, or world-view.” (Jones 2003:125)

• If you want to know why particular discourse came to power, be a social archaeologist: trace the origins of a way of knowing by deconstructing it and examining the foundations on which its rise to power rested. [This is also called the genealogical method, but rather than kinship systems it is knowledge systems which are seen to have origins and development and social consequences]

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Clinical gaze and surveillance• Hence Foucault’s approach to places where people are incarcerated

and to mental illness directs him to precisely the areas Goffman took for granted. What are the origins of the discourses which enable psychiatrists and criminologists to design and populate such institutions? What is the nature of the power which gives some the opportunity to discipline others?

• “According to Foucault, the power of notions of health and illness in our lives is analogous to the power of notions of good and evil in the lives of pre-modern humans. Foucault characterises the exercise of a discourse’s power as a form of surveillance to ensure the conformity of a population to particular notions of truth and falsehood, good and bad. …the idea of gaze of a discourse and its enforcers [is used] to represent this. Thus he describes the shift from the dominance of religion in pre-modernity to the dominance of medicine in modernity as the emergence of the Medical gaze or the Clinical gaze.” Jones 2003:126-7

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Bedlam

• William Hogarth (1697 - 1764). • This painting shows the

Bethleham Royal Hospital, London. The first asylum for the insane in England. The word bedlam is derived from the name of the hospital and became a generic term for all asylums and colloquially to mean random disorder or chaos.

• Bedlam was infamous for its ill treatment of the inmates, and this picture shows visitors, a man being shackled by the attendants (early nurses?) and the overcrowding and squalor of the hospital during the mid 1700s.

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Medicalisation of madness

• One of Foucault’s earliest works looks at the medicalisation of madness

• “Unhappiness, hopelessness, distress, fear, social estrangement and social marginalisation are all inevitable aspects of the human condition and all human worlds deal with them in some way of another. But only in modernity is madness medicalised – defined as mental illness and therefore subject to medical intervention, regulation and control. As a society modernizes, psychiatry and psychiatrists emerge to define, police and manage this kind of illness with their ultimate power residing as their ability to confine and control mad bodies in mental hospitals and other places of surveillance.” (Jones 2003:130) [c.f. parliamentary debates about restraining orders]

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• “a discourse always has its experts to enforce normality and punish deviance. However, one of Foucault’s key points is that because, as humans, we constantly asses what we should and should not do in relation to the cultural knowledge we have acquired – because we police ourselves – that the delivery of a discursively directed order is ensured.”

• He compares the life of a human being in a discourse-directed world – and there can be no other kind – to the life of a prisoner in a panoptican. The panoptican was a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1843.

• Open cells, in circular block, viewed from central tower into which the inmates could not see.

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Panopticon

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Panopticism

• “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it. In short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” (Foucualt 1977:201)

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• “Just a gaze, an inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by exteriorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual this exercising this surveillance over and against himself” (Foucault 1980:155)

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The disciplines• Foucault disagreed with the Enlightenment account of criminal

reform this view described the march of the humanitarian spirit sweeping away barbaric practices of torture in favour of a humanistic program of rehabilitation. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault interpreted the prison reform movement as establishing a new more efficient, system of control. Contrary to its ideology of rehabilitation, its chief aim is to depoliticize social discontent by incarcerating non-conforming individuals and regulating them by an apparatus of surveillance and psychological management.

• Foucault was no less critical view of that psychiatry marks the beginnings of the humane treatment of the insane. Substituting treatment and therapy for banishment or imprisonment, the new sciences of the mind are said to epitomize the humanitarian spirit of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, Foucault underscored the growing authority of mental health experts whose therapeutic discourses and practices create new psychological subjects – e.g. the neurotic, the narcissist, hysteric, schizophrenic, the anal-compulsive, the frigid personality – who are objects of psychiatric and state social control. (Seidman 2004:188)

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• Foucault did not deny the social importance of the repressive power of the state or ruling social strata (e.g. an economic elite or the power of men).

• He insisted, however, that the disciplinary-based production of social order in prisons, hospitals, factories, the military and schools is central to contemporary Western societies. It is not the power to enforce obedience that make possible these social structures; rather, social order is produced by a series of disciplining strategies – from confinement to systems of examinations – whose aim is to regulate behavior by imposing norms of normality, health, intelligence, and fitness. (Seidman 2004:189)

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The dangers of an Enlightenment view of progress

• Foucault departed from liberal and Marxist images of modern society as an organic whole or social system that has a center or unifying dynamic, such as capitalism or the idea of progress.

• He imagined modern societies as fractured, lacking a social center that gives to them a unity and telos. Neither the state nor the economy is the social center, no one drama or social conflict, not class conflict nor gender, sexual, ethnic, or religious conflict, carries any obvious social or political primacy. No social group or ideology rules society, not is society organized around the logic of capitalism, patriarchy, bureaucracy, secularization, postindustrialization, or democratisation.

• In short, Foucault rejects the image of society as an organism or system that has been endorsed by both the liberal and Marxist traditions. Foucault viewed the social field as consisting of heterogenous forces, institutional orders, processes and conflicts. (Seidman 2004:188)

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Multiple voices

• According to Foucault, no discourse however dominant gets away without opposition from competing forms of knowledge forever.

• The modern globalised world, sees alternative knowledge systems, readily available and able to confront one another.

• Post-modernism values a multitude of voices with their versions of the truth and doesn’t seek to choose between them.

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Studies:

• Foucault, M. “The birth of the Asylum” pp.141-167 in Paul Rabinow The Foucault Reader.Penguin Books, 1984.

• Foucault, Michel. 1979 Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison Harmondsworth: Penguin. 364.60944 FOU

• Foucault, Michel. 2005 History of madness London: Routledge,.  610.9 FOU 

• Hacking, Ian 2004 “Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction” Economy and Society 33(3):277-302