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Historyish Podcast Profile of Foucault

February 1, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 6 Comments

Historyish FoucaultIn looking for Foucault supplementary audio, I ran across a fairly new podcast, "Historyish," which appears to be run by people involved with the University of Warwick and the Postgraduate Forum for the History of Medicine.

Their October 2011 episode on Foucault can be found here; the page itself includes some of the biographical information read on the episode.

The first 20 min of the episode are not about Foucault, but instead a "this day in history" segment, sharing fun facts. From this, I had hoped that we'd get some clarity re. how accurate a historian Foucault was (a topic which we decided on our Foucault episode was rather beside the point for our purposes). Instead, you get a decent overview of Foucault's life and work, which made a few points that I hadn't really considered:

First, the term episteme, which I've since seen in Derrida but don't think entered into Discipline and Punish, is characterized on the podcast as a more generalized version of Thomas Kuhn's notion of a scientific paradigm: whereas a paradigm is a "world view" for the purposes of a particular science, establishing what counts as legitimate inquiry, the episteme covers the whole intellectual culture of a particular society; this is very much relevant to Katie's question on our episode about how we can, from within a given society, question the practices of that society, if society supposedly dictates the terms in which we can even raise the critique. (Personally, I think this problem much overstated, but I'll save that rant for our upcoming semiotics and structuralism episode.)

Second, the Historyish folks put Discipline and Punish in the context of Foucault's earlier inquiries into health practices and the notion of madness: some of the habits that society can inculcate in us include practices like hand washing. I recall this also from the History of Sexuality:the use of economic measures to keep society running smoothly is not limited to keeping us from violence, to keeping things hygienic and running smoothly. For example, from an economic point of view, you have to channel sexual energy so you don't just have people rutting in the streets all the time and keeping anything from getting done.

Regarding madness,the Historyish folks stress that the panoptic gaze includes classifying us all with regard to some norm. As a personally unorthodox individual, they say, Foucault was very concerned with this idea of what society considers "normal" and how this gets enforced. The connection to an "episteme" should be obvious here: the norm is reinforced by the very vocabulary we set up, by what's in the list of legitimate (i.e. normal) jobs, acceptable topics of conversation, etc.

This is all in line with Foucault's self-ascribed title of Professor of the History of Systems of Thought, though we need to read more into "system" there than would likely come out of an intellectual history course. There's some discussion of Foucault's debt to Saussure among others.

I'm interested overall to hear more of the podcast (there are episodes on Marx and Max Weber). The whole thing is done with good humor, though the fast-talking-with-British-accents make me sympathize with non-Americans who listen to us, and I don't feel like I'm in on all the jokes. Also, really, it's OK to make edits in a discussion recording without putting in a little musical segue; that gets old fast.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts Tagged With: History, Michel Foucault, philosophy blog

Comments

  1. dmf says

    February 1, 2012 at 11:50 am

    another interesting series to thank you for, I think that without having some sense of folks like Canguilhem or Bachelard you won’t really have a understanding of where Foucault is coming from. I brought up Kuhn somewhere in these discussions partly b/c of the parallel to Foucault but also because this marked a turning point out of the armchair and into the ethnographic field in areas like philo of technology and science.

    Reply
  2. dmf says

    February 1, 2012 at 1:05 pm

    the woman on this podcast probably gets to the heart of the matter when she notes that Foucault is “reading between the lines” which is a part of a long line of continental thought which seeks to make explicit the supposedly implicit, even hidden, genius or spirit of a philosopher, text, or time, later this morphs into “ideology” talk. I don’t have much tolerance/interest for these accounts as such, but interpret them, after Rorty, as uses rather than unearthings/recoveries/revivals/etc.
    we should probably add Bourdieu to the list of amplifications of ideas relating to Foucault.

    Reply
  3. Thomas says

    February 2, 2012 at 8:02 pm

    I listened to the Historyish podcast yesterday (coincidentally before reading this post), or rather tried to listen to it. I got 15 minutes into it and turned it off because it was so boring, the humor was lame, and the loud laughing was tiresome.

    Reply
  4. Gareth says

    February 8, 2012 at 10:10 am

    Thanks for the feedback, guys. Appreciated.

    Re #3 – Thomas, I agree with you. At times we spend to long amusing ourselves and not enough time getting to the meat of the topic. That’s something we will definitely work on in the next series.

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      February 8, 2012 at 10:43 am

      I find worrying about this during the edit is easier than trying to rush the conversation. It’s time consuming, but I edit a lot in the middle of people’s sentences: I project my own impatience for people to get on with it onto the listener. In the case of this episode, I did find the “today in history” part at the beginning a bit long for me. However, as a listener, it’s easy enough to jump forward a bit and/or (at least on my device) listen on double speed. (Actually, I couldn’t do that with this one because the accents and audio quality made it too hard to make out what was going on if I did so, but it’s my standard podcast/lecture listening strategy.)

      Reply
  5. kambiz says

    September 26, 2013 at 11:48 pm

    Nice Web first of all, I was wondering around search for something related to Weber as well , something about both of them. If you want something about Weber I can help… If you know somethings between please help me

    Reply

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