Introduction to Social Analysis Week 6

1
Introduction to Social Analysis Week 6

• Foucault, discourse and discipline

2
How to make sense of madness?

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vmQIAT4Hh7Jc Bedlam
  boys. Old Blind Dogs

3
Half Way Summary

• Course concentrates on how to theorise.
• Teaches this by examining questions posed by
  sociologists and how they have sought to theorise
  social phenomena.
• Each lecture taken examples of studies the method
  the authors have used to make sense of their
  topic.
• Urban life, work, disability, biography,
  interaction
• Introduced on the way concepts like urbanism,
  functionalism, actor perspectives, symbolic
  interaction, and generalised other

4
How to make sense of madness?

• What broader social insights can we can from
  understanding madness and mental institutions?
• 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.

5
Reading

• Seidman, Steven, (2004) Contested Knowledge 3rd
  Ed. Oxford Blackwell. Chapter 12 Michel
  Foucaults Disciplinary Society.
• Good account of Foucaults 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 Foucaults ideas

6
AsylumsGoffman, 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,
  childrens homes, boarding schools, ships, etc.

7
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.

8
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.

9
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

10
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 Goffmans 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.

Exeter Asylum Digby
11
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)

12
Michel Foucault

• French, studied in the U.S. became influential in
  1970s and 80s, 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.

13
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 2003125)

14
the genealogical method

• 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

15
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.

16
Clinical gaze and surveillance

• Hence Foucaults 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?

17
Clinical gaze and surveillance

• 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 discourses 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 2003126-7

18
Medicalisation of madness

• One of Foucaults 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 2003130)

19
Panoptican

• a discourse always has its experts to enforce
  normality and punish deviance. However, one of
  Foucaults key points is that because, as humans,
  we constantly assess 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.

20
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. (Foucault 1977201)

21

• 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
  1980155)

22
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 2004188)

23
Power

• 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 behaviour by imposing
  norms of normality, health, intelligence, and
  fitness. (Seidman 2004189)

24
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 centre or unifying dynamic,
  such as capitalism or the idea of progress.
• He imagined modern societies as fractured,
  lacking a social centre that gives to them a
  unity and telos. Neither the state nor the
  economy is the social centre, 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, nor 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 2004188)
• End of grand theory and meta-narratives

25
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 doesnt seek to
  choose between them.

26
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