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about Michel Foucault

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about Michel Foucault key concepts books internet
Critical social thinker Archaeology

Classification

Discipline

Discourse

Identity and Power

Sex

Surveillance (Panopticon)


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Foucault on Classification

veryard projects > people > foucault > classification

Standards and classifications are a central part of our lives, and establish a social and moral order of which we are largely unaware.

Language can be used to classify people (sometimes permanently) with some socially charged label: criminals, subversives, terrorists, communists, or whatever.

As an example, Foucault shows how the discourse on homosexuality shifted from describing a practice to describing a person or state, and explores the social consequences of this shift in language.  (“The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” Foucault citing Carl Westphal, 1870)
 
 
more Sorting Things Out
Do you have a secret past?


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Foucault on Discipline

veryard projects > people > foucault > discipline

Foucault has a great deal to say about the way people in various settings are dominated and controlled by standard modes of thinking and doing.  This is relevant to various aspects of organizational management, including management information and process improvement, which sometimes carry hidden political intentions which may subvert the official agenda of "efficiency" and "effectiveness". Resistance to change is often generated by assumptions (which may not always be true) about the hidden political agenda.

The main source for Foucault's ideas on this subject is his book Discipline and Punish.
 
Manoeuvre A part of a process, involving a standard interaction between a person and a thing, to perform a given task. Training and disciplined practice produces close alignment (tight coupling) between the person and the thing.
Foucault: Discipline and Punish, p 153.
Surveillance A process of supervision that imposes discipline. Foucault's archetype of surveillance is based on Bentham's Panopticon.
more Monitoring as Surveillance


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Foucault on Discourse

veryard projects > people > foucault > discourse


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Foucault on Identity and Power

veryard projects > people > foucault > identity and power


Foucault draws interesting conclusions about identity and power from the modern ways of talking about sex.

We can draw similar conclusions from the modern ways of talking about technology.
 
more Psychoanalysis and Technology


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Foucault on Sex and Sexuality

veryard projects > people > foucault > sex


Foucault published several volumes of a History of Sexuality.

One reason for his interest in this topic and the modern discourses relating to it, is that it allows him to draw some interesting conclusions about identity and power.


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Foucault on Technologies of the Self

veryard projects > people > foucault > self

Michel Foucault et al, Technologies of the Self  (London: Tavistock, 1988)
 
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This page last updated on December 5th, 2003
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