Name: From Critical Theory to Postmodernism, part 4 of 4
Uploaded: 2014-10-04T08:40:25.000Z
Duration: 13 min 58 s
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So, Foucault's History of Madness is one where madness comes to be the vehicle for

him to understand how we reinforce social codes.

Adverbs of manner

In such a way as to limit, increasingly limit the possibilities we have.

For alternative ways of life, alternative pleasures for, or even one might say, for

the experience intensity. Intensity is pushed to the side, or

intensity is diminished in favor of normality.

That's, that's the Foucauldian light motif, I think, in much of his work.

Here's another quotation from the prison work excuse me, [LAUGH] from the asylum

work. Madness escaped from the arbitrary only

in order to enter a kind of endless trial for which the asylum furnished

simultaneously police, magistrates, and torturers.

Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside of it.

For a long time to come, Foucault writes, a madness is, becomes part of a moral

world. And our moral world, Foucault thinks, is

a world of of social conformity, reinforced social conformity.

And Foucault, really delighted in showing how the pursuit of anti-conformity

[LAUGH] often lead to more conformity. Because you concretize or make too stable

some alternatives, you make them into identity markers that then become their

own forces of conformity. So, for example Foucault in his History

of Sexuality wanted to show how the fluidity of sexuality gets increasingly

controlled over time, especially in the modern period.

Especially when people think they're pursuing sexual freedom, they create new

categories for how you should pursue sexual freedom.

New forms of identity to which you should conform even if that identity is is

liberatory, is outside of the main stream.

But you create a new mode of, of being that you then have to conform to.

This is Foucault's great subject. How we, in a way, police ourselves.

How we dominate ourselves by saying, oh, I am going to be a radical.

I'm going to be a radical. And now, I have to act like the radicals

act. In other words, you conform to the image

of radicalization. Some might you say, well, I am not a

diseased person because I like to have sex with people of my own gender.

No, no, I am not that. I am free, I am gay, or I'm a homosexual,

And Foucault says, yeah, you're free. But now, notice how we start to have to

conform to being gay, being lesbian. What it, why do we need always to find a

new mode of conformity? a label for our freedom that comes then

I mean, the repressive hypothesis is the core of psychoanalysis.

You know, the, the reason I keep walking around is because I'm repressing what I

really want to do. The reason my shoulder keeps going up is

because I'm, I'm repressing something else.

And so, if I repress something, something else, the repressed impulse comes out in

another form. And Foucault thought this was very

deceptive mode of thinking. And, and thought it, it deceived us about

the nature of pleasure and desire. it convinced us that, for example, if I

just lie down on the couch here and tell you about what I'm really thinking, that

somehow I would be liberated to, and that's kind of nice actually.

>> [LAUGH] >> to, I'd be liberated to, to, to tell you

what what I really want, why I really like Foucault.

What really is going on, I [UNKNOWN]. because I'm sitting up now.

>> [LAUGH] >> But if I were [SOUND] lying down and free

associating, I would be able somehow to access my true feelings and get them

beyond repression. Foucault then say, that's a big mistake.

More than that, it's a productive mistake produces the following.

It produces lots of talk around sexuality.

How repressed we are, how many vines, how many vines of freight talking about how

repressed we are. How many volumes of that Repertorium

Literature in society talk about how much they didn't talk about sex?

In other words, there' nothing better than talk, their repressive hypothesis

for talking about sex. And so, the idea that some of you feel

liberated by talking is what Foucault would call wrong.

What happens, as you might expect right now with Foucault, you keep talking about

things you learned to talk in the same way.

You learn to desire the same things. You reduce heterogeneity and you increase

conformity, that's the path. Whether he does it in the, the book, the

books on prison, these very popular books.

discipline and punish where he shows that we used to torture prisoners in, in very

public ways. And we used to be barbaric towards them.

And now, now we think we have to rehabilitate them.

We think prisoners should be given a moral treatment that brings them back

into the fold, if you will. But Foucault was very suspicious of this

effort at rehabilitation. He says, what happens instead is that we

take the forces that used to go into torture and policing, and we put them

into policing ourselves all the time. The schools themselves become the engines

of conformity. Schools become like prisons.

All our institutions start resembling prisons because all of our institutions

start pushing a model of identity from which they cannot escape.

The last reading we had from, from Foucault, and I'm going to have to just

call it up on my screen here so I can give you correct cor, cor, correct

quotations. is about enlightenment echoing Kant's

essay we read in the very first week. What is enlightenment?

Foucault writes that Kant was not seeking to understand the present on the basis of

a totality or of a future achievement. Kant was looking for a difference.

With, what a difference does today, sorry.

Kant was looking for a difference. What difference does today introduce with

respect to yesterday? What difference does today introduce with

respect to yesterday? Kant, Foucault says, is interested in how

enlightenment marks a possibility, a change, a difference.

And for Foucault, that creates a what he calls an attitude of modernity.

An attitude of modernity. And for Foucault, and this is a less

pessimistic side of Foucault that sees in a modernity, especially modernity that

he, that Foucault associates with Baudelaire.

modernity is a a time when you can invent possibilities rather than conform to

alternatives. Here is Foucault, a mar an attitude of

modernity. a section of the essay, What is

Enlightenment? For the attitude of modernity, the high

value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it,

to imagine it otherwise than it is. This, and this is really the key

Foucauldian phrase, to imagine, to imagine modernity otherwise than it is.

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From Critical Theory to Postmodernism, part 4 of 4

reality

attention

extreme

identity