Michel Foucault and Queer Theory

Michel Foucault is the most important public intellectual in recent times. Although he died in 1984 of AIDS, the first public figure in France to do so, and was a highly influential figure in his time, his influence grew almost exponentially thereafter. It is the 'queering' influence of academic discourse by writers such as Foucault and Judith Butler who have also bequeathed to us the previously novel idea of gender identity.

What this lecture seeks to do is to discuss the broad issues related to language and power that Foucault's writing highlights. While I will find myself in agreement with the problems bequeathed to us by Enlightenment notions of humanity that Foucault catalogues in his voluminous scholarship, I will also question whether in the name of emancipation and empowerment the performance of writers like Foucault have in fact enslaved us in an entirely arbitrary and powerless experience of human nature. Our understanding of life has been 'queered.'

[onepartyroule]

I don't "identify" as a woman any more than I identify as being 5'5". I'm a woman because i'm female, which is an empirically verifiable reality.

[UkieMTMP]

This lesson provides a solid foundation for understanding the fundamentals of Queer Theory /and the ramifications of its influence for humanity. Many thanks.

[robertyoung]

The arts are the place where people express themselves. That’s why it is important that the arts are uncensored.
Painting and drawing are very direct activities. Music can be made without any technology by singing and clapping.
Censorship is the only threat to people expressing themselves via the arts.

[ThatOneGuyRAR]

Tl;dr, this video contains several significant misrepresentations of Foucault’s philosophy that really bothered me.

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t watch this entire video before commenting this, so I’m not sure if some of this stuff does get corrected later. However, I feel like there are a lot of misrepresentations of some of Foucault’s ideas about the functions of power here, at least, what they were in their final form, as his ideas developed significantly over the course of his life (if you try to understand all of Foucault based off of Discipline and Punish (I’m not sure if you did but it kinda feels like it), you’re missing a lot of important stuff). At 23:43, you say that Foucault calls the Panopticon “an oppressive way of controlling and disciplining, ” but I feel like this couldn’t be further from the truth of his philosophy. Foucault’s ideas heavily center around the positive effects of power, the reasons why it comes into creation. His entire first volume of the History of Sexuality is dedicated to disproving what he calls the “repressive hypothesis, ” the idea that sexuality is completely repressed in modern society (the 1970’s for him, keep in mind) and that nobody is allowed to speak about it whatsoever. He says that in reality, these systems of power were dedicated to the production of knowledge and the strengthening of bodily health and population health, not simply a sort of totalitarian oppression on the human body. His discussion of hospitals and their changing structures frequently talks about how the outsourcing of much medical practice to the homes and the enforcing of it through panoptic systems was massively efficient and great for public health, rather than as simply oppressive by a totalitarian state. One of his repeating ideas throughout the collection of his writings and interviews in Power/Knowledge is that power is very specifically not just repressive, because if it were, there would be no obligation to obey it. In chapter 6, he states:

“The notion of repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carry in the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power one which is curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.”

Next, you say that Foucault says that power dominates over knowledge, that it controls what is allowed to be considered knowledge and science. While this is an idea that he does bring up, it’s only half of his full story. Again, in Power/Knowledge, in the second lecture in chapter 5, he introduces the idea of a triangle formed between the right to power, knowledge, and power. While systems of power do largely control what is considered to be knowledge, knowledge can control what has the right to power, and the right to power (naturally) can help control what has power. The relationship isn’t simply power dominating over knowledge, knowledge can be used to fight back against power. In the History of Sexuality Volume 1 (I believe it’s in part 4 but I don’t want to find the chapter, this is a youtube comment not a paper smh), he talks about how discourse is never a unified force, there’s a multiplicity of discourses and counter-discourses that work to shift relationships of knowledge and power. With power, there is always rebellion against power, it’s almost never something just directly accepted.

Finally, you mention something about how the panopticon puts power in the hands of the elites (ngl I’m getting much less rigorous about how I’m responding because I don’t actually care that much and I don’t want to find a timestamp). But Foucault’s analyses of power specifically talk about how everyone feels the effects of power and everyone has an amount of power, and while it is not necessarily evenly distributed, he is fairly adamantly opposed (at least in his later works) to the marxist analysis of power in which there is an oppressive bourgeois class and an oppressed class, because he thinks this doesn’t tell the whole truth of power. Again, in the second lecture in Chapter 5 of Power/Knowledge, he says “Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation.”

While I understand that this response might not be entirely fair, seeing as I have not watched the full video and you may correct these things later on (I realize now that it isn’t the content I was looking for anyways so I don’t really want to watch it anyways), these multiple small but significant misrepresentations of Foucault’s philosophy are alarming enough to me that I don’t think I would benefit from the content of the rest of the video that may talk about philosophers I am less familiar with.

[WickedMo]

What were Foucaults thoughts on the age of consent? lol don't look it up, unless you think there should be none down to the age of infants

[SeanMurphy-du]

Will the damage from Michel Foucault ever be undone?

[CrudballianArchitecture]

I’m left handed, can you believe the systemic hand discrimination I face every day?

[claudette]

I cannot understand why Foucault and Butler’s theories have been so enthusiastically taken on by academia. They could have just been ignored or kept on the sidelines but instead have found fertile ground in which grow and flourish.

[pintoloyce]

Firstly thank you so much for this. I wanted to know if you could provide me a link for Peter Sandlin's book?

[johnbarlow]

👍 one question, you mentioned the Victorians having non Christian morals, what is this based on? In my mind and comparing them to the regency period they were substantially more moral, and there were various religious revivalist movements.

[octavioavila]

43:01 Come on professor. Given the subject matter that you are covering, you and I both know that wasn’t just “an observation.” There is no such thing as a neutral observation. You knew exactly what you were doing when you were bringing up Focault’s sexual activities. You are trying to make the case that Focault is arguing against sexual nature in favor of gender identity as a way to justify his excessive homosexual promiscuity. You insinuate that it is excessive by casually mentioning the “objective” fact that he died of AIDS. Thereby proving Focault’s point that there is no such thing as a neutral observation. There is always a biased assertion being made behind every seemingly passive observation which is what you just did.

[canadiandrumer]

Thank you for giving the kiddie diddler a platform