Quote for the Week (Foucault)
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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I’m feeling in an anti-authoritarian mood today, so, just for all you fans of quality assurance and the value-for-money approach to life, here’s something from Foucault. See what you can make of it.
“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements.”
Discipline and Punish, p304.
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Foucault eh! Oh how I loved reading Foucault when I was an undergraduate. It seemed to offer an entrance into a Nietzchean transgressive world. Marx was not the’opium of the intellectuals , it was Foucault , who else could make you see the World sideways and indeed write a book ‘Discipline and Punish’ that made you feel queasy reading the first 50 pages. But after staggering through the ‘Power/Knowledge regimes’ and the Panopticon as a metaphor for Modernity I realised that he wasn’t serious. He wouldn’t answer the most important question , as Lenin put it ‘What is to be done?’. Lenin got the wrong answer but he asked the right question. So I enjoyed and agreed with Habermas’s wonderful description of Foucault as ‘a young Conservative’!
Posted by on 10/29 at 06:52 AM
