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Posts tagged ‘Foucault’

Jan 8

How Ideas Circulate. Online. In Philosophy: Remarks and Suggestions for the APA Blog Session

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general polities’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. –Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power / Knowledge, 131

Any conversation about the circulation of ideas online has to understand the material power at work in how ideas circulate, whose ideas circulate without obstacles and whose ideas encounter obstacles. Moreover, this conversation has to recognize that the circulation of ideas involves material questions about who holds what positions where and who is able to set the agenda for what areas of philosophy should be covered in departments and who should be considered worthy for filling those lines, who should be read, who should be cited, who should be appointed editor of prestigious journals, which journals should be considered prestigious, and so on.

A little more than five years ago there was a robust conversation online about how the philosoblogosphere had influenced the material circumstances of what is considered good philosophy in the United States. Ben Alpers the historian of ideas gathers some of the reflections on the sociology of philosophy, concentrating on the way that online voices and rankings amplified particular views of what philosophy is in a way that influenced what kind of philosophy was considered more or less rigorous. In particular, I’m thinking about how continental philosophy programs were excluded from early rankings and how those rankings centered analytic philosophy and analytic approaches to the history of philosophy, but also the way that feminist philosophies and post-colonial philosophies and critical philosophies of race were sidelined.

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Jan 29

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Day 29: Why We Think Women are Their Bodies and Men Are Not

I’m coming to the end of my 31 days of blogging and I’ve been thinking about how this practice has changed my habits.  Like blogging when I travel, I think blogging every day for a month has made me pay more attention to the thoughts that flit in and out of my head.  They’ve also made me think about whether I want to develop something I’ve already written about a bit or if it matters enough to me.  At the end of last year, I was recognizing a reticence in myself to write whatever insight or thought I had in a way that it looked to me that many people–mostly men–on social media did not have.  I felt like I would circle around the idea four or five times and wonder whether it was worth putting in the world, which I talked about in my mid-month reflection on blogging.

Naming that problem has not necessarily changed it.  Right now, I’m having one of those moments.  I don’t know if my thought is worth sharing — I felt a little like this about yesterday’s post too — or if everyone already knows this except me.  But I decided in these moments that the blog was just as much for me as for the world, and if it was important to me, it was worth sharing.  Blogging about it gave me the opportunity to work through and clarify an idea that was percolating.  I also tried to get out of my head the idea that my audience was other philosophers.  In fact, I think this might be one thing that keeps philosophers from effectively engaging in public philosophy: we’re so tough on each other, we end up being more concerned with crafting the argument to be unassailable and original that either we just don’t write or we write to an audience that already is our audience!

The thought I had this morning was about the notion that women are more associated with their bodies than men that I discussed yesterday.  I had always thought that the reason for this is that women bear children and so their work is literally in their body.  But this morning I was thinking that is not sufficient.  After a week of discussing Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work, it occurs to me that we think of men as less involved in reproduction because of our views of women as more their bodies and men less so, not the other way around.   Read more

Jan 27

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Day 27: Foucault at the Doctor’s Office

I just got back from the doctor.  Every time I go to the doctor I am amazed at how right Foucault is about the disciplinary power of the medical establishment.  Foucault explains that a number of institutions are put to work beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries to take control over–to discipline–bodies.  Sovereign power forms in order to protect life, and this protection of life, and this right to take it, becomes integral to the work of the sovereign.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, Foucault argues in the last lecture of Society Must be Defended, “techniques of power”… “were essentially centered on the body, on the individual body.”  These techniques organized, arranged and surveilled bodies in an effort to increase their (re)productivity.  Foucault writes:

They were also techniques for rationalizing and strictly economizing on a power that had to be used in the least costly way possible, thanks to a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports–all the technology that can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor.

This is how going to the doctor feels to me.  Tests are done, questions are asked, personal histories are taken.  I have had this same conversation with my doctor about my personal history over and over again.  But she still asks the same things.  Apparently nonjudgmental questions that are loaded with judgment are asked: questions about your sex life, your alcohol consumption, drug use, cigarette use, whatever.  It doesn’t matter if you are doing something wrong or not, you feel like you are.  In fact, the being in the doctor’s office, like being stopped by a police officer, creates the feeling that you are somehow in violation, you need to be better disciplined.  They don’t even have to say it.  You feel it.   Read more