This blog will briefly examine and discuss the merits and differences of Foucault’s ‘Middle’ and ‘Later’ works.
Foucault’s middle phase (as represented in Discipline and Punish) is characterized by a focus on the physical body and the various dispositifs that exert a power over a physical body. To this end there were detailed analyses of the transition from the Bloody Code of the 18th Century to the increasingly ‘scientistic’ microscopic control of the body in the Victorian Era. Although Foucault says much on the nature of the reinscription into society of what constitutes punishment in this phase from the Bloody Code to the Scientific code, underlying all of this there is the hard thought put into how these theoretical constructs actually manifest themselves in the training and manipulation of physical bodies in a physical space.
One example of this is the Panopticon in which the prisoners are constantly visible to a central guard tower, of which a light shines out, thereby blinding the prisoners from viewing who is inside the guard tower. Now although Foucault speaks of this system as exerting power in such a way as to force the inmates to internalize the codes and moralities of the institution itself, what Foucault hopes to highlight is the physicality inherent within thought itself, and that the mind can be controlled via the exertion of power onto the physical body, a bodily training that he sees as evolving from the French military.
However this phase was eclipsed by his later phase and his turn to a concept known as Biopower. The concept of Biopower is characterized by its ‘master signifier’ nature and its overarching, epochal nature, as opposed to Foucault’s earlier works which examined specific examples of power. Some theorists have found this change from specific dispositifs to overarching conceptualization problematic, both for Foucault’s work and for Foucault himself. Manuel DeLanda raises such criticism when he states that he does not understand what Biopower really means. DeLanda believes that Foucault’s middle phase was characterized by strong, forceful accounts of physical actualities, whereas he finds ‘Biopower’ as a term vague, weak and slightly lazy. This blog wants to ask whether DeLanda’s criticism is a valid one? Does the turn to an ontological ‘Biopolitics’ clarify analysis, or does it highlight a turn to fashionable, conceptually vague terminology? Is DeLanda highlighting an important shallow-thought in Foucault’s work, or is DeLanda succumbing to One-Dimensional Thinking? At the moment all this entry can suggest is that this may be nothing more than the difference between idealists and materialists.
Thoughts?
DeLanda, M: Materialism, Experience and Philosophy (Lecture at EGS, 2008, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX2GcqFn3cI&feature=channel))
Foucault, M: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon Books: New York, 1977)
Foucault, M: The History Of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction (Pantheon Books, New York, 1978)
Toscano, Alberto: Always Already Only Now, Negri and the Biopolitical (Pluto Press: London & Ann Arbor MI, 2007) The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Revolution in Theory pg. 109-127
Dominic Teflise
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Thanks Dom. Really good post and a model of clarity. My response is going to be a bit lengthy since I would like to take the opportunity to try and explain bio-power some more.
ReplyDeleteWell. I think substantially I would be inclined to agree for the most part with Delanda on this one. Bio-power always remained somewhat of a nebulous term for Foucault. Not least because of its unfinished and undeveloped nature. Indeed, recent Foucauldian scholarship could even be said to split along the lines of traditional Foucault and the exegesis of biopower, a lot of which revolves around issues of precisely trying to figure out what Foucault means by bio-power and bio-politics; Foucault’s seminars The Birth of Biopolitics remain somewhat circumspect on this. So in this response what I would like to do is try to present a consistent version of what bio-power might be. Firstly, bio-power is a transmutation of on a most basic level of sovereign power (i.e. the executioner was literally a manifestation of the kings’ arm). The concentration of sovereign power was the power of life over death, or the power to decide life. Foucault’s claim is that there has been a historical shift in how this power has been configured. Through the overturning of the sovereign and its concomitant dispersion of power, power has now become multiplied. The question is how precisely we can think this to be manifested in particular loci of power. With the multiplication of power we have more instances of power. This means that to order power demands ever newer systemic configurations to cope with this intensifying dispersion. Hence, biopower finds its historical destiny in the transformations and systemic organizations of institutions in the narrow localised sense towards broader senses of population control. Rather than being just basic disciplinary power, biopower concerns itself with the transmutation of disciplinary power into two principles poles: 1. Yes the administering and calculating bodies as in the Panopticon. 2. Combined with an intensification of the calculative, or politics as the dispensing the calculative growth of life, hence bio-power. Sovereign power therefore moves to the political organization of populations in things like populations control, statistical knowledge of birth and death and concomitant political decision-making.
In many ways, bio-power is our contemporary historical condition. Politics is no longer concerned with the traditional philosophical questions of what is the good, and what is the just; it is now precisely a question of administration. Politics has now become now more than the instrumental administration of the health of the populace. In this sense politics has become hollowed out. I think that the most prescient example of this is the culture of ‘policy.’ Thus we have things like the idea of ‘work-life balance’ where policy administers a minor adjustment rather than radical reform in order to generate a healthy culture of compliance. Now in this sense I do think Foucault was onto something here, but sadly it does remain somewhat underdetermined. Policy is rule by protocol and where the health of the population is decreed and moved towards a rational end i.e. a happier more productive workforce. While populations and their dynamics grow ever more numerous and complex, concomitantly, the systemic efforts to control and arrange these more complex systems must generate new apparatuses to cope with this increase in the complexity of power.
ReplyDeleteAlthough think that Delanda is right in questioning Foucault on the vagueness of the term, I think he overstates the ‘master-signifier’ nature of bio-power. Moreover, I think it is intended to be thoroughly historical. In the same way that the discourse of discipline and power are utterly heterogeneous, bio-politics addresses the mutation from local instantiations of power to a global level. I think this might be where Delanda’s criticism springs from, since the move out of local sites of power to the global could be understood as understanding bio-power in a universal since. I think this is probably slightly unfair on Foucault since the move to the global intensification of power announces the global ordering of life and populations, but which at one and the same time remains founded on the dynamics of power and resistance. While disciplinary power remained in the barracks, prison and other institutions, bio-power only names the effort to categorize and classify systemically on as global level. It does not suggest that bio-power is the ground of all the particular local instances of power. In the same sense that power is not a thing but manifested in the effects of production and resistance, I don’t think we can say that bio-power is an ahistorical phenomenon. It is not a single thing from which all local instances of power are derived which transcends particular historical configurations. Bio-power is only the newest manifestation of power operating. This is not a top down model, bio-power is only the name for the efforts to control and order power in a global sense.
ReplyDeleteIn some very crude way the ‘dialectic’ of systems which generates anomalies, which in turn generates further systems and anomalies and so on, has moved into age of bio-power. What bio-power establishes domination and control over relates to innumerable forms of the administration of life such as the instrumental prediction of birth and death rates, the quantification of mass sexual habits, trends in social demography, the effects of smoking on populations, increases and decreases in family planning, global geo-politics, internal and external migration habits. Politics has thus become bio-politics it is only administration of human life in order to attain specific political outcomes, no more than tinkering and minor adjustment in order to deliver certain political outcomes more probable. While bio-politics can never control these ultimately, its apparatuses do attempt to provide the most optimum rational outcomes for social control. Now while this is all well and good, where I do agree with Delanda is that the dots are just not joined up enough. Foucault sadly has not developed this concept enough I think to ground all the various apparatus of bio-power, from statistical prediction, to genocide, to health campaigns, to global vaccination policy etc. and how they specifically manifest themselves as symptomatic of the latest trend in global nihilism. Which is a real shame since he was beginning I think to provide a very philosophical and contemporary answer to Aristotle’s very biological idea that “man is a political animal.”
Bergson- brain and consciousness
ReplyDeleteI am particularly interested in Bergson’s thoughts, regarding consciousness and the brain. Bergson had strong opinions about what consciousness consisted of, and they correspond with the definition of the word consciousness; even though he chose not to formally declare it. Bergson states that consciousness coincides with a ‘being’ having a brain of some shape or sort. So therefore, what he could be suggesting here, is- the brain cannot exist alone without consciousness and neither can consciousness exist without the brain? I agree with Bergson in the fact that it would be an extremely rare situation where consciousness would be present in a being without a brain, because as he implies- the two are dependent on one another; we could say that the two work in harmony together? Whilst our consciousness helps us to think, the brain is like a tool which facilitates and reinforces information. Furthermore, the states of consciousness for Bergson, never separate or become isolated; instead they are unified as one.
A qualitative state is something that self organises and structures. This idea similarly reflects his thoughts on how we should view the world. It is commonly thought by most human beings that we look at the world as if it is fragmented and broken up and so nothing is connected to any thing else. Bergson on the other hand, believes that is continuous. To demonstrate the notion of time, he uses an example of a pendulum of a clock which moves consistently from side to side- oscillating. The temptation is there, in order to break consciousness up but it never does.
Concerning the features of consciousness that the ‘conscious being’ always has a brain is true, because logic and common sense tell us that if the human being is alive and breathing, then they will be using their brain to engage in thought-processing and other activities.
Bergson states: “Consciousness retains the past and anticipates the future, it is probably because it is called on to make a choice” We can challenge this notion from his essay book- Mind energy and ponder- where and whether a person’s dreams fit into this. Surely when we are asleep or lose consciousness, then our consciousness is not in tuned to anything that’s going on around us (we lose all orientation, spatial awareness etc) Also, is it possible to have a true sense of time when we are sleeping? Berson suggests that out consciousness is a reliable source for making choices and recollecting information. So for Bergson dreams fall into the idea of duration and they reveal what the real self stucture is: they’re not linear but they lie outside reality. Can consciousness honestly “make a choice” when a person has consumed a considerable amount of alcohol or has taken drugs? I would have thought not because their minds and thoughts would have been distorted; consequently because of the alcohol. (Sorry probably have gone way off track here!)
Any thoughts?
Thanks Emily. This is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of Bergson, the relationship between the physical brain and spirit or duration, much of which is at issue in Matter and Memory.
ReplyDeleteI think I will respond to your topic in reverse. Firstly, I think you did really well to pinpoint the relationship between the brain and spiritualism. The brain, or the body is made of actual matter, he does not deny this, he just says it is not primary. This means that the mind is not wholly made of matter. The reason for this is elementary enough, it would not make sense to say that the mind is only brain, it is always brain along with much more for Bergson so the brain functions as a filter, for real duration. This brings me on to your points about sleep. It is counter intuitive you are right, but remember that Bergson always suggests the reason for us forgetting things, or falling asleep, is that it is spatialized. We have an image of something now, then it slips away. In dreams we have no distinct edges to our images, they all link into each other intensively, without any real distinctions. Sleep would for Bergson be an instance of spatial representation between the hours of 11 and 7 etc. whereas dreams reveal the true pathology of our consciousness. There is a nice reversal there which typifies a lot of the paths that Bergson offers, sleep is in some way derived from what the structure of what dreams reveals rather than, as we normally assume, that we need to sleep to dream. He does that!