User:IZY1992

Michel Foucault

Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French theorist who contemplated and created thought on various philosophical issues, often looking at past philosophic conditions made by Kant and Nietzsche in particular. Foucault taught and lectured at various institutes in France, Sweden, Germany and America. Many of his writings were about how people are controlled by different institutions in society and the way this effects how the world was and would be.

Foucault was concerned with changing society, or at least creating awareness to enable a change, especially in the areas where power and control were asserted. This meant looking at mental institutions and the view of mentality being an illness, the prison system and how power is gained through the disciplining of society as a whole in the same way criminals are disciplined and the relation between asserting a view on people and people being controlled.

Foucault looks at identity through the perception that people strive to be what they believe is an aesthetic by following a certain law based on their own memory or history, what they have taken in during their lifetime, largely based on Nietzsche's take on morality and an inner law. As Foucault states (1992, p.10-11), Reflective and voluntary practices by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make of their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.

The expression of ones identity through creativity is an outward show of this. This point is further made in an interview with Michel Foucault in 1987 where Foucault states, (1987, p182) [Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

I believe Foucault would have applied this to anything created, and perhaps to how people express their identity through clothing.

Foucault is most famous for his writings on power. Foucault believed that power was dispensed through different institutions using different techniques but mostly the power of a watchful eye and controlling of people's time. Foucault did not believe that this use of power was always a bad thing and that sometimes good could come out of it. It was also a firm belief of his that throughout all hierarchies of the social system power was used and manipulated, the use of power is not inclusive to just one class but all levels and corners of society power is being used to control. Therefore, the foundations of society are based on the use of power. Without the power relations in society, society as we know it would not exist, and perhaps people would not co-exist. Foucault explained this by stating,(History of Sexuality, p.93) “Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”

An interesting point made by Foucault (1984, p.350), “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.” It could be argued that this is untrue, especially with the conceptual art of Tracey Emin which seems to be focused on the individual and life, her piece in 1998 named “my bed” is described (Saatchi website, 2003-2011) as, “Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions.” It could perhaps be Foucault arguing that art is related to objects by the viewer and they can make of this what they want instead of through knowing the person through language, writing or thought but all of these are only objects in themselves to express. Michel Foucault pursues this point (1992, p282) We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

It seems the main objective of Foucault is to persuade people to think for themselves, not to get caught up in others expressing their own identity and therefore power but to look at these, sum them up, look at history and then pursue new ideas, learning new things all the time instead of becoming stagnated in an ideal. Foucault (1982 interview, 2002, p126) encompasses this with the sentence, "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning."

References

Foucault (1992) [1984]. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: Volume Two. Tr. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp. 10-11.

Michel Foucault (1987) 'An interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Ruas'. In Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Tr. C. Ruas. London: The Athlone Press, p.182.

Michel Foucault. (1991) [1984]. 'On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress'. In Paul Rabinow, (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, p. 350. http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htmr Tracey Emin. The Saatchi Gallery. 23/02/11-2003/2011

As quoted in Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, as translated by Betsy Wind, Harvard University Press, p. 282

David Gauntlett. Media, Gender and Identity',' London: Routledge, 2002. (p126)

Bibliography

Tracey Emin. The Saatchi Gallery. 23/02/11-2003/2011 http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/tracey_emin_my_bed.htmr

Didier Eribon, as translated by Betsy Wind, Michel Foucault (1991), Harvard University Press

Claire O'Farrell. 29 October 2010. key concepts http://www.michel-foucault.com/quote/2000q.html.

David Gauntlett. Media, Gender and Identity',' London: Routledge, 2002.

Gary Gutting. 2008. Michel Foucault http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/.

Tr. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth (1992) [1984]. The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: Volume Two., Middlesex: Penguin

Foucault, Michel, and P. Rabinow (ed.). 1984. The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. London: Penguin.

In Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Tr. C. Ruas. London: The Athlone Press

Michel Foucault (1987) 'An interview with Michel Foucault by Charles Ruas'. In Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Tr. C. Ruas. London: The Athlone Press

trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Critique of Pure Reason [1781], (N.Y.: St. Martins, 1965), A 51/B 75

Diarmuid Costello, Jonathan Vickery .Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers [Paperback], BERG,2010

Kendall, Gavin and Wickham, Gary .using foucaults methods .1951

Wikipedia. 23 February 2011. Michel foucault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault.