"If you say something often enough, it becomes the reality."
No, Foucault didn't say this, though Foucault really meant this.
I was admitted to USP as a Science student. Had I not been talking to people, I wouldn't have known of this programme's existence from that part of the world that I came from. In class, I was presented "Power/Knowledge" as my first reading. I learnt about the Panopticon and Foucault's "Power of the Gaze". I read that paper more than ten times, and felt demoralised that I still couldn't really understand everything.
Now that I'm in my Fourth Year, I was presented, yet again, Foucault. Such a brilliant man, I assumed. I heard much about him. Into Foucault's work I jumped, "The History of Madness".
Can "Madness" have a history? Isn't it a condition, a mental/psychological condition? Isn't it a sickness of sorts? How can a person write a History of Madness (or Happiness, or Loneliness)?
His way of writing history is, to say the least, weird. Brilliantly weird. As a deconstructionist, he attempts to move away from "chronology". There isn't any teleology, no past, no future, lots of present looking into the past, and bits and pieces of the past that are haphazardly stitched together. But nonetheless, brilliant.
Madness, to my understanding of him (because no one can truly understand him, I think), is a form of the powerful subjugating those who are too liberal, those who do not follow norms. What do we call madness? Why is madness a medical condition? Why confine mad men and alienate them so much, to the extent one keeps thinking "the mad man may hurt me!"? Why confine them like a prisoner? If they can't restrain themselves like how criminals can't, do we lump the two together? They seem to be punished in the same manner (at least in the beginning of that history).
He mentioned, that physical sickness suddenly became a private affair and madness a public affair. It is true. Leprosy was a disease that was "deserving" of confinement for as long as Christiandom was hegemonic.
He writes in power/knowledge that power creates knowledge, which is a notch above "knowledge is power".
I then went back to the Discipline/Punish ( where the Benthamite Panopticon was situated). Discipline doesn't make one conform, he says. Discipline separates, distinguishes, and sieves out. Punish those who are different from others.
No, Foucault didn't say this, though Foucault really meant this.
I was admitted to USP as a Science student. Had I not been talking to people, I wouldn't have known of this programme's existence from that part of the world that I came from. In class, I was presented "Power/Knowledge" as my first reading. I learnt about the Panopticon and Foucault's "Power of the Gaze". I read that paper more than ten times, and felt demoralised that I still couldn't really understand everything.
Now that I'm in my Fourth Year, I was presented, yet again, Foucault. Such a brilliant man, I assumed. I heard much about him. Into Foucault's work I jumped, "The History of Madness".
Can "Madness" have a history? Isn't it a condition, a mental/psychological condition? Isn't it a sickness of sorts? How can a person write a History of Madness (or Happiness, or Loneliness)?
His way of writing history is, to say the least, weird. Brilliantly weird. As a deconstructionist, he attempts to move away from "chronology". There isn't any teleology, no past, no future, lots of present looking into the past, and bits and pieces of the past that are haphazardly stitched together. But nonetheless, brilliant.
Madness, to my understanding of him (because no one can truly understand him, I think), is a form of the powerful subjugating those who are too liberal, those who do not follow norms. What do we call madness? Why is madness a medical condition? Why confine mad men and alienate them so much, to the extent one keeps thinking "the mad man may hurt me!"? Why confine them like a prisoner? If they can't restrain themselves like how criminals can't, do we lump the two together? They seem to be punished in the same manner (at least in the beginning of that history).
He mentioned, that physical sickness suddenly became a private affair and madness a public affair. It is true. Leprosy was a disease that was "deserving" of confinement for as long as Christiandom was hegemonic.
He writes in power/knowledge that power creates knowledge, which is a notch above "knowledge is power".
I then went back to the Discipline/Punish ( where the Benthamite Panopticon was situated). Discipline doesn't make one conform, he says. Discipline separates, distinguishes, and sieves out. Punish those who are different from others.
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