SPCM 201 1st Edition Lecture 27Michel Foucault: Rhetoric, Disclosure, and Postmodernism Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Widely influential French, postmodern intellectual Known for work on madness, sexuality, the history of ideas, and power Not a rhetorician, but VERY interested in DISCLOUSRE  Died of AIDS in 1984  Work is still being published today  Postmodernism: What does it mean? MODERNITY  1500-1970s Common Features:- Agency and Democracy - Capitalism, Industrialization, and the Division of Labor- Secularization - Nation States and Realpolitik POST-MODERNITY  Mid-1900 and Onward- Still happening; still unclear Common Features:- Skeptical of Individual Agency - Skeptical of “grand narratives” - Reality as Constructions- Distrust Late Capitalism - Co-construction of Power/Knowledge- Moves beyond the human as focus  Comparing the modern and postmodern… Architecture  Civic Duty  Super Heroes (the “good guys”) So What Does A Post-Modern Rhetoric Look Like? (Via Foucault)  First, not rhetoric but discourse  Discourse: Most simply: information or conversations - Includes speech/rhetoric, but is more- Also includes: maps, signs, images, family trees, etc. More complex:- Conscious and unconscious ways of constituting knowledge, each attached to complex systems of power relations  Second, rhetoric is not controlled by individual agents Modernity put stock in FREE SPEECH Foucault calls that into question Discourse is always controlled  “If discourse may sometimes have some powers, nevertheless it is from [the institution] and us alone that it gets it”  Discourse is POWER (Power/Knowledge) Therefore, it must always be managed and controlled  What forms do these controls take?  Procedures of Exclusion  (1) Prohibitions (“forbidden speech”) - Any person cant say anything they want in any circumstance - Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre - Particularly regarding Sexuality and Politics  What might these topics looks like?  (2) Division/Rejection (“division of madness”)- Disclosure gets divided up between valid forms of speech and invalid forms of speech  The speech of the “madman” No one even bothered to record it or listen to it until the 18th century - Foucault warns that even if this is no longer true madness, we still make these divisions The role of the critics here?  (3) Truth and False (“the will to truth”)- Like Nietzche, Foucault claims there is no truth, but a truth function It dictates how we assess, measure, and organize knowledge and words It also limits what can be said- Foucault asks us to consider how much the meaning of truth has changed through time (Who has it? What is its source? Etc.) This suggests a strong connection to POWER  Internal Procedures Forms of control that dictate the organization of discourse from the inside, organizes them, and gives them an artificial structure  (1) Commentary: regulates what is and is not acceptable discourse (rewards/punishes) (2) The Author (Function): provides an artificial category to organize discourse(the oeuvre)  (3) The Disciplines: applies Truths to asses and structure discourses (again artificial)  Procedures of Speaking Subject  Who is given the credentials, access, and authority to speak (and be heard)?- “none shall enter the order of discourse if he does not satisfy certain requirments or if he is not, from the outset, qualified to do so.” Various ways of determining who qualifies as a speaking subject- If this is true, is freedom of speech enough if your voice doesn’t matter?  Postmodernism takes us back… …to the Sophists Have we questioned how speech and discourse controls us, order us, arrange us Foucault is boubtful… We live in language… Therefore, we can never really get outside of it and its controls  Indeed, underneath our society’s love of language (logophilia) is a deep fear of unordered discourse  Could we ever again just let discourse bubble up, unfettered, and run free? Maybe, but to do so, we need to reject TRUTH, “restore discourse as an event,” and “throw off the sovereignty of the