Midterm #3 Flashcards
(45 cards)
The Subject & Power
Foucault
The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge
Lyotard
Situated Knowledges
Donna Haraway
What does Foucault say about Marxism?
- it is outdated and only describes the 19th c.
- it is the philosophy of an “occupying force”
- yes: studying labor/worker/poor, examine HOW power relations operate
- no: whole pyramid/structure/dialectics
What does Foucault say about psychoanalysis?
- it medicalizes the human subject and is a police science
- it relies on moral prejudices & oppression (cure/not, normal/not, trauma/not)
- Lacan is pretentious and Freud is an omnipotent and divine model
- madness lives through art and philosophy, so thus psychology needs to further justify itself
- no: dreams are just dreams, a mode of human existence
What does Foucault say about Derrida?
- it reduces discursive practices to textual traces
- if nothing is outside the text, it becomes a pedagogy (academic discipline)
- it makes the author a masterful voice with limitless sovereignty
- it allows itself to restate text identifinitely
What is Foucault’s quote on his identity?
“Do not ask me who I am & do not ask me to remain the same; leave it to our bureaucrats & police to see our papers are in order.”
What is Foucault’s quote on bodies?
“We are our bodies – and something else. We are difference. We are what has been said.”
- body exists in & through a political system
What does Foucault say about Modernity?
unlike the Western Philosophical tradition believing the “body is a prison of the soul”, Foucault argues “the soul becomes the prison of the body”
What is Foucault’s final iteration of power?
Power as a persistent interaction between the margins & the center at all levels of society, both repressive & productive
What forms of struggle does Foucault support ?
- ones which question the status of the individual through 1. assert and underline true individualisms 2. attack everything which separates the individual and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way
- ones which attack FORM OF POWER (techniques in every day) rather than institution/group/elite/class of power
What form of analysis does Foucault work from?
Genealogy: seeing the past to explain/analyse positions in the present
What is subjectification?
- a form of power wherein individuals are both subjugated to someone else and subjugate their own identity to themselves
- a way of acting upon an acting subject by virtue of their being capable of action
What struggle does Foucault center?
individual v. Government of individualization, wherein subjection forms through tying the individual to themself
What is Foucault’s definition of a subject?
- individuals are both subjugated to someone else
- subjugate their own identity to themselves
What is Foucault’s panopticon?
- appropriation of Bentham’s prison institution to describe modern techniques of power, with totalizing power & individualization
- based not on exclusion, but inclusion inside a modern subjectifying system of constant surveillance
- everyone is linked to their own identity
What is Foucault’s questioning of Mark’s examination of how the the ideology of consumerism oppresses us?
- how did individual come to be the subject of a capitalist gaze?
- what kinds of knowledges make this possible?
- how does the capitalist gaze scrutinize individuals for a particular identity defined by institutions or classification systems?
What did “The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge” do?
introduce the term “postmodern” into philosophical discourse, “I define postmodernism as an incredulity toward meta-narratives”
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in subject?
Modernism: object, the self, humanity
Post-modernism: image, symbol, decentered subject, post-human
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in knowledge?
M: objective truth, representation
PM: socially constructed truth, truth-value, signification
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in objects of analysis?
M: economy, production, capitalism, science/technology, society as a structure
PM: culture, consumption, late capitalism, media/social media, society as a spectacle
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in politics?
M: eurocentricism, phallocentricism, orientalism, colonialism
PM: globalization, feminism, genderism, sexuality, multiculturalism, heterogeneity
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in values?
M: originality, authenticity, sincerity
PM: copies, irony, appropriation
Where do modernism & post-modernism differ in trademarks?
M: TM as products, or protection & organization of an image
PM: trade dress as experiences, or corporate possession of abstract things
