lOMoARcPSD|50333952

L7 - Lecture notes 7

Introduction to Social Theory (Bournemouth University)

Scan to open on Studocu

Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university

Downloaded by Baseeji Zainab (baseejizainab@gmail.com)
 lOMoARcPSD|50333952

Postmodernism and Foucault

Modernism
 Postmodernism= after modernism
 Derived from Latin for ‘of today’
 The former supported the authority if religion and the classical past
 The latter the progress of the present and future
 Moderns wished to gain freedom and progress through rationality
 French revolution- liberte, egalite et fraternite- not just free but comfortable
 Rationality -> science -> technology
 Printing press (communication); firearms (power); compass (global travel)
 Progress has been far from even
 Rational technology built the gas chambers, the nuclear bomb, the ICBM, napalm etc.
 Major modernist social thinkers were all ambivalent (having mixed feelings or contradictory
ideas about something or someone)

Durkheim
 Mechanical solidarity’s replacement by organic solidarity challenges social cohesion
 Because collectively held values are less important
 Morality of individualism- individual is more important than social group
 Need new form of social regulation

Marx
 ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify, All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy profained (Marx and Engles, 1967)

Weber
 In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, saw capitalism as emerging from the hard
work and thrift of puritans, the puritans thought that ‘the care for eternal goods should only
lie on the shoulders of the “saint like light coat, which can be thrown aside at any moment”.
But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage...’
 Material goods have pained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men
as at no previous period in history. Today, the spirit of religious asceticism...has escaped from
the iron cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations needs its
help no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment seems also o be
irretrievably fading For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly
said: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; the nullity imagines that it has
attained a level of civilisation never before achieved” (1930)

Postmodernism
 Modernism has not delivered on its promises of progress
 Postmodernists reject the notion of progress on the grounds that it is an unrealizable dream
 But more than that, they argue that pursuit of progress always leads to pain
 Trying to squeeze humanity in all its diversity into the confines of an overarching model (or
metanarrative as J, F Lyotard calls it) inevitably leads to the subjugation of those who do not
fit with the model
 Enlightenment attempts to overcome the divisions between social groups through the
promotion of universal bonds should be abandoned

Downloaded by Baseeji Zainab (baseejizainab@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|50333952

 Society is characterised by difference rather than totality

 Attempts to impose totality lead to terror
 For postmodernists, the rise of Stalin was not a tragic warping of the ideals of Marxism, but
part of the logic of Marxism which led to violent subjugation in the name of proletarian
progress
 Jean Francois Lyotard- The 19th and 20th centuries have given us as much terror as we can
take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the
reconciliation of the concept and the sensible... the answer is : let us wage war on totality;
let us activate the differences (1993)

Postmodernism and Knowledge

 “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity to metanarratives” (Lyotard
1984)
 All knowledge claims become suspect
 Not just a matter of debunking science in the way that Husserl did, accusing it of failing to
recognise active human consciousness
 Husserl’s claim to be able to discover the authentic self is also seen as a dangerous fiction
 Different people interpret the world in different ways
 Any attempt to get them to interpret the world in the same way warps their interpretations
 Postmodernism accepts that there are many ways of looking at the world and there are no
standards to judge which way is better than another- this is known as relativism

Michel Foucault
 More of a poststructuralist than a postmodernist (emphasises how discourse shapes our
world) but shares postmodernists relativist worldviews
 He challenges modernist assumptions about knowledge
Discourses
 Rejects the notion that knowledge can be judged in its own terms- that we can decide if it is
true or false through observation of reality combined with rational explanation
 We assume that the ways we go about understanding the world is the ‘natural’ way of doing
it, but Foucault argues that there is nothing natural about it- behind our knowledge lie
unrecognised common assumptions, which he calls ‘discourses’
 Rather than approaching statements of fact by attempting to judge their truth, Foucault asks
‘how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?’ (1974)
 What conditions make certain kinds of knowledge possible?
 Rejects the correspondence theory of truth, with its close relationship between words and
things
 Instead, he argues that knowledge actively orders reality on the basis of the assumption that
make up the ‘discursive formation’ in which the knower is located
 Discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault
1974)
 Thus, knowledge and reality are disconnected
Progress
 Rejects modernist assumption that over time our knowledge of reality had become more
accurate, particularly by means of rational scientific progress
 Rather than seeing science as a steady march of incremental findings towards a truer grasp
of reality, he sees such claims as justifications for ‘totalising discourses’
 Foucault sees the history of ideas as one of discontinuity which results from radical shifts in
the underlying discursive formations rather than improvements in knowledge
 If knowledge and reality are not related, we have no grounds for judging whether one set of
beliefs are more valid than another

Downloaded by Baseeji Zainab (baseejizainab@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|50333952

 ‘”Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constraints. Nothing in
man- not even his body- is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for
understanding other men’ (Foucault 1991)
 In short, he supports historical relativism- it is not just there are differences in perception in
time, it is that there is no way of deciding which perception is better
Reality
 Such is the influence of discourses, reality is in danger of fading from the picture
altogether
 The truth about reality can never be found no matter how deep we dig because ‘there is
“something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless essential secret, but the
secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal
fashion from alien forms (Foucault, 1991)
Power
 These alien forms are the result of discourse, which in turn are the expression of power
relations:
 ‘Power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (1977)
 ‘There is no power relation without a correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’
(1977)

Madness and Civilisation

 Foucault’s first major text examines the abruptly changing discourses about madness from
the Renaissance 16th to the 20th century
Renaissance- Reason and Unreason
 The attitude to madness was ambivalent in that, while it was regarded as problematic, it was
also seen to embody a form of ironical reason that exposed the nonsense and pretentions of
the world
 The Ship of Fools symbolised this attitude- on the one hand, they were a method of expelling
the mad- on the other hand, they were pilgrim boats in search of reason
Classical Era- Reason and Madness
 In the C17, madness came to be regarded as a dangerous deviance
 In the Great Confinement, the mad, along with the poor, the criminal and the lay, were
locked away from society
 They were seen as social, rather than medical problems
Modern Era- Sanity vs. Insanity
 C18/19 Madness came to be seen as an illness, amendable to medical treatment
 The mad were separated from the poor and the criminal- division of the problem

Downloaded by Baseeji Zainab (baseejizainab@gmail.com)