Review

1
Review

• representation? reflective, intentional
  constructionist
• ? process of meaning production
• Language composed of?
• ? Sign conceptual framework (system of
  meanings)
• ? sign signifier signifier

2
Review

• Signification denotation ? connotation,
  first-order ? second order
• Signifier can be emptied and empty? floating
  signifier
• ? A process of différance (What is an Author p.
  104)

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Review
Truth effects
-- selected -- distorted or erased -- encoded as
binaries or in a hierarchy -- combined
Historical fact Word Dress Food Color
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Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984)

• Discourse, Power and Subjectivity

Image source
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Outline

• Power
• Discipline Punish
• Subject and Subject Position
• examples

• Starting Questions
• General Ideas
• Discourse
• Definition
• What is an Author?
• From Language to Discourse
• Next week Power and Knowledge (Truth)

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Starting Questions 1 Discourse, Truth Power

• What is discourse and how is an individual (such
  as an author or a reader) related to a discourse?
  (WR 44 VM 142)
• Do you agree with Foucaults argument that
  --"nothing has any meaning outside of discourse?

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Starting Questions 1 Discourse, Truth Power

• What discourse, or its the regime of truth,
  makes the following statements valid?
• Madness is a mental illness.
• Masturbation causes sexual impotence.
• sodomy gay homosexual queer ??
• next week What are the examples of societys
  carceral system? How does it function?
• next week Do we question disciplinary powers
  such those of the teachers, judges and
  doctors? Or to what extent should they be
  questioned?

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Foucault General Ideas

• Two periods
• Archaeology of knowledge-- rules and strategies
  for formation of subject-positions, knowledge and
  episteme.
• (e.g. Man as a product of modernity.)
• What is an Author 1969 transitional article
• 2) Genealogy of power/knowledge extends his
  discussions to a variety of institutions and
  non-discursive practices mutual support of power
  and knowledge.
• e.g. Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality.
  

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Central concerns

• The "other"
• historical fragments, accidents interruptions
  (vs. official history)
• madness (vs. reason),
• sickness (vs. health),
• crime (vs. law)
• abnormal sex (vs. normal sex).

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Central concerns (2)

• subjectification/objectification of individuals
  
• -- production of those bodies of knowledge
  which appear to be sciences (e.g. the speaking
  subject in linguistics the authors in
  literature)
• -- differentiation those practices which
  install a division of subjects of differing
  qualities (e.g.the sane vs. the mad)
• -- discipline knowledge and techniques by means
  of which individuals turns themselves into
  subjects. (e.g. sexualized subjects)

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Discourse Definition

• Discourse is "a group of statements which provide
  a language for talking about ...a particular
  topic at a particular historical moment."
• Three major procedures
• Definition Prohibition ? defining statements
  Rules about the sayable and thinkable
• Division and rejection ? subject positions
  exclusion of other statements
• Opposition between false and true ?
  Authority/Power of knowledge (Truth)
• discursive practices within institutions
  discursive formation over time.

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What is an Author?

• I.  False signs of displacing the author
  (104-105)
• -- from interiority to exteriority, the signs
• -- writing and death
• the author disappear
• ecriture
• ? Still privileging the author (writing)
• II. Locate the space left empty by authors
  disappearance ?authors name author function
  (105-)

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Authors Name

• P. 107 groups together a certain number of
  texts, defines them and differentiates them.
• characterizes a certain discourse (e.g. Shavian
  play, Wordsworthian discourse)
• indicates its status (e.g. ???, the ??? comic
  drawing with a Japanese comic writers name)

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The 'author functionproduction of a discourse

• pp.108-
• 1.  Discourses as objects of appropriation
• 2.  The author function has historical
  differences
• 3.  Not spontaneous development, but result of
  complex operation
• 4.  Some constants in author function
• a. Value, b. Coherence,
• c. Stylistic unity, d. Historical figure
• 5.  Internal references to several selves
• (summary on 113)

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What is an Author?

• III. Transdiscursive authors 113
• 'founders of discursivity'
• IV. Conclusion why is this important?
• Introduction to historical analysis of discourse
• Re-examine privileges of subject
• Discourses can unfold in a pervasive anonymity
  or the murmur of indifference ? ask the right
  questions (p. 119-120)

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Literary Discourse implications

• No fixed boundaries between literature and other
  social practices
• The author is not the creator of his work. He
  serves as a label to put on a group of works
  related to him. (e.g. Wordsworth discourse)
• Defining some subject positions (of the author,
  the reader, etc.)

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From Language to Discourse

• Saussure Barthes Derrida Foucault

Language Or Langue/ Parole Semiotics-wider fields of languages Textual Play, Open text, Meaning undecidable and fluid History Social practices texts discourse
Meaning and Signification Scientific (text, but not subject) Meaning and Signification Scientific (text, but not subject) Signification traces Knowledge power Subject position
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From Language to Discourse

Structuralism Focuses on language and fixed structure Foucault Language (statements) as well as social practices
Marxism Materialist view of history and society -- scientific Foucault p. 48 --not limited to class --every knowledge is contingent.
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Power and Knowledge/Truth

• power
• both repressive, controlling and productive
• -- not just top-down it circulates, working in
  multiple direction like capillary movement.
• e.g. the operation of power in a hospital
  exertion of power through spatial arrangement,
  the doctors examination, the posters, pamphlets,
  the different examination room, registration
  system, pharmacy, insurance co., etc.
• -- producing Truth with a discursive
  formation sustaining a regime of truth.

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Discipline and Punish

• Main purpose -- not so much the birth of the
  prison as disciplinary technology
• Three major images
• A. The carceral forms of discipline which
  exercise over individual a perpetual series of
  observation and modes of control of conduct

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Discipline and Punish (2) B. Penopticon

A circular building with the central control
tower ? control internalized.
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Discipline and Punish (3) C. Disciplinary Society

• C. Carceral power opens up the entire fabric of
  society to a normalizing regulation. (Miller
  200-01)

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Discipline and Punish

• 4 Parts
• Torture
• -- soul born out of methods of punishment,
  supervision and constraint the prison of the
  body (29-30)
• -- torture -- part of truth-production mechanism
  (35-37)

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Discipline and Punish

• 4 Parts
• 2. Punishment -- gentler forms public works and
  incarceration
• 3. Discipline
• Docile Bodies (135-69)
• -- The aim of disciplinary technology is to forge
  a docile body that may be subjected, used,
  transformed and improved (136)

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Discipline and Punish

• 3. Discipline
• 2. The Means of Correct Training (170-194)
• --Discipline makes individuals it is the
  specific technique of a power that regards
  individuals both as objects and as instrument of
  its exercise (170)
• 3. Panopticism (195-228)

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Part Four Prison

• 3. The Carceral 293-308
• XLI.Mettray discplinary model at the extreme
  1637/292-96
• A.all the coercive technologies of behavior
  292-93
• B.technicians of behavior 294-95
• C.specificity of Mettray training 295

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The Carceral(2)

• XLII."carceral archipelago" 1640/297-
• A.discipline inside and outside the prison
• B.results of this spread
• 1.continuity of offense/deviation from norm1640
• 2.recruitment of disciplinary "careers1641 ?
  there is no outside 1642
• 3.making the power natural and legitimate,
  lowering threshold of penality 301-03

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The Carceral(3) Power knowledge

• XLII."carceral archipelago" 1640/297-
• B.results of this spread
• 4.the norm 1644/304 a mixture of legality and
  nature, the prescription and constitution.
• p. 256 power sciences of man -- The
  delinquent makes it possible to join moral and
  political monsters and juridical subjects and to
  constitute under the authority of medicine,
  psychology or criminology, an individual in whom
  the offender of the law and the object of
  scientific technique are superimposed.

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The Carceral(3) Power knowledge

• How does it function? P. 272
• . . . Not to eliminate offenses, but to
  distinguish them, to distribute them, to use
  them that it is not so much that they render
  docile those who are liable to transgress, but
  that they they tend to assimilate the
  transgression of the laws in a general tactic of
  subjection.

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Carceral system of society

• 5.The carceral texture of society ? capture of
  the body and its perpetual observation
  1645/304-5
• 6."extreme solidity" of the prison 305-06

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Subject and Subject Position

• Representation p. 55 56
• Two ideas of subject 1. Conscious autonomous
  subject
• 2. Subject to someone elses control.
• Foucault 1. Constituted by a discourse to
  represent it (hysteric woman) 2. Subject
  positions.

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Subject and Subject Position Victorian
Women--Hysteria
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Subject and Subject Position Victorian
Women--Hysteria

• portrait of Augustine  Amorous supplication

Showalter in Representation 73-74
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Elizabeth Siddal

• Beata Beatrix

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Las Meninas by Velaquez
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More Examples

• Jan Van Eyck Arnolfini Wedding Portrait
• http//artchronicler.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/jan-
  van-eyck-and-the-arnolfini-wedding-portrait-3/
• Myths of Sexuality Representations of Women in
  Victorian Britain

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Neads study of prostitutes in the Victorian Age
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III. Jane Morris

• III. Jane Morris cast as Pandora, Prosperine and
  the poor Pia.

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References

• Miller, Peter. Domination Power. Routledge
  12/01/1987.
• Representation Cultural Representations and
  Signifying Practices.  Ed. Stuart Hall.  London
  Sage, 1997
• Nead, L. (1988) Myths of Sexuality
  Representations of Women in Victorian Britain.
  Oxford Basil ...