Foucault and Post Modernist Power Structures

No offence, but I think your thesis is stated very badly. Society has not created any sort of ideal person. Nature creates individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. Foucault focused on the idea that 'specialst knowledge' grants power to an individual. Well, that's true. Or is it....anything anyone can communicate with some sense of authority will be accepted as 'truth' by somebody. Personally, I believe that working together with other's strengths will get us closer to a 'perfect' world, a concept I do not really believe possible, than accepting others faults. That is, however, the same thing, really. As for our current situation regarding institualizing or imprisoning people, the underlying philosophy there is clearly 'for the greater good of the people'. Flawed sometimes, but logical.

Why would it be better if everyone were the same? What good do suicidal tendencies do, if they shouldn't be considered marks of mental illness? When someone's body ceases to work it it's best interests, we call it sick. Same for someone's mind.

Societal forces have little to do with the will to survive, and "deviant" people are not sent to mental institutions in any case.

Depends on the deviance there, rufio. However, something about xifar's idea of a 'perfect world' is eerily reminiscent of "The Stepford Wives."

Well, he's using "deviants" to mean anyone who isn't part of the power structure, on some societal level or other. If that were the case, how could rebellions take place? Everyone who is part of a rebellion is deviating from the power structure....

cav - I realize that I didn't do a great job of explainig all of this at length, but I tried to sum it all up pretty quickly. Anything I missed, feel free to point out and explain yourself. I did present a simplified version, and if it came out a bit skewed, that was not my intent.



I'm not talking about physical traits here, I'm talking mental and personality traits. Phychistrists decide who is sane and who is not. The diagnose ADD, PTSD, and Depression all the time. They are the ones who create and treat the diseases. Nature has little to do with it in my opinion.

You are dead on with your specialist knowledge point; that is exactly what Foucault says. But society is the people who embrace these power structures and support them. We buy into a culture of quick fix drugs and mental disorders, and we lock our doors and cheer the imprisonment of people who don't follow the law. We buy into them, because we don't want to bother ourselves with the deviants. We like to think that, "Well, my life could be worse, at least I'm not retarded." We like to think that we are normal, and to support that thought, we must create and separate ourselves from the abnormal.



You bring up a very interesting point. This makes me think back to a book I read about psychiatrists in Hitler's regime. People who were mentally retarded were labeled mentally defective. People who had opposing political views to Hitler were labeled as having "masked" mental defects.

At one point, psychiatrists created the disease of "mass psychosis of hostility towards psychiatry," which basically meant that they were insane if they opposed psychiatry.

Rebellions occur because the system is not foolproof, but the people who create these power structures are certainly trying.

Luckily, functioning societies are neither facist dictatorships nor run by arrogant psychiatrists.

True, but Foucault applies the same sort of logic to the State, Educational facilities, medical facilities, and religious organizations. His overall argument is to end the control of one human over another. This can happen in almost every society.

If we don't have some way of controlling each other or dealing with each other on our own terms at least, society falls apart. This is what some like to call "interdependance" or just "capitalism".

xifar, on your second post, I concur, and I DO believe that we live in a completely over-medicated society. However, it's not all coming from the psychiatrists. A LOT of it is 'self-medication.' As for Foucault's thesis, I would suggest that he was talking about learning to not FEEL controlled by another person. Interdependence and control, or the rule of law, as rufio stated, are absolutely necessary to maintain a society. What I think Foucault is getting at is our power of choice, as human beings. We can choose to 'buy in' or not.