PS390 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Panopticon, Discourse Analysis
Document Summary
Demonstrated that the history of mental illness, definition of normality, division b/w reason and unreason, and identification of social and medical practices did not follow a rational process of knowledge accumulation but rather a practice of exclusion. Demonstrated that during middle ages and renaissance, madness was accepted fact of daily life and did not elicit scholarly interest. Understood society"s exclusion of madness and subsequent rise of psychiatry in context of 1600s rationalist philosophy, whereby reason needed madness for its own definition. Foucault stands in stark contrast to enlightenment belief that knowledge is abstract (position that both human-science and natural-science proponents took) Conceived of society as a prison but on a more subtle and internalized level. Drew on nietzsche and analyzed power"s positive function in the administration of life and power"s connection to the production of knowledge in the human sciences. Power is an all-encompassing reality in which everyone is caught and participated.
