Showing papers by "Bryan S. Turner published in 1982"

The Discourse of Diet

Abstract: The recent work of Michel Foucault has brought the question of the discipline of the body and the rise of scientific knowledge to the centre of sociological theory. White it is difficult to summarise Foucault’s social philosophy, one central theme of his treatment of knowledge is that the growth of systematic knowledge coincides with the extension of power-relations, especially with the exercise of social control over bodies in social space. This theme can be illustrated by his study of the development of penology and criminology which facilitated a more precise, detailed and rigorous control of the criminal body within the scientificially managed social space of the penitentiary (Foucault 1979a). Bentham’s panoptican scheme provided a systematic control and surveillance of the inmate world and established a model of docility for schools, factories and hospitals. Similarly, the rise of clinical medicine (Foucault 1973) and scientific psychiatry (Foucault 1975) coincided with institutional developments in hospital architecture, work-houses and asylums within which unruly bodies were exposed to detailed control. It can also be argued that the emergence of the separate disciplines of demography, geography, moral statistics and sociology were manifestations of an increasing social control of bodies within urban space. While conventional histories of science regard such developments as rational and progressive, Foucault, by contrast, claims that scientific advances do not liberate the body from external control, but rather intensify the means of social regulation. Blunt and primitive systems of physical control and punishment the mad-hut, the scaffold and the torture chamber give way to more precise, rigorous disciplines of the penitentiary, lunatic asylum and classroom. In the treatment of madness, the reforms of Tuke and Pinel replaced chains by the inner discipline of private conscience operating within the regimented space of the modern asylum.

Nietzsche, Weber and the Devaluation of Politics: the Problem of State Legitimacy

Abstract: L'influence de Nietzsche sur la sociologie politique de Weber. Opposition du developpement de l'individu et de l'ordre social| legitimite du droit et de l'Etat capitalistes| principe de rationalisation, ordre bureaucratique et coercition.

Book Reviews : Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth. Century French Hemaphrodite edited and introduced by Michel Foucault, London; Harvester, 1980, £7.95 & £4.50:

Abstract: The work of Michel Foucault has become increasingly influential in British sociology over the last five years to some extent replacing the popularity enjoyed by Althusserian Marxists and something approaching a settled interpretation of Foucauldian thought has begun to emerge among discerning commentators. This interpretative consensus can be summarised under two statements. First, Foucault’s views on geneology and archaeology closely follow Nietzsche (Foucault 1977b, pp 139-64) In showing that history has no teleological significance, no rational progress and no continuity. History is a collection of discontinuous bursts in both knowledge and practice. For example, modern psychiatry does not involve any conceptual or therapeutic advance over earlier knowledges of madness (Foucault 1967); penology is not a humane advancement in relation to previous punishments of the body (Foucault, 1977a); medicine does not evolve or improve, since its history is one of ruptured discourses (Foucault 1973). Foucault’s project alms at a ’defamillarlsation’ of history, not at making the unfamiliar commonplace or at domesticating the strange, but at a radical relativism of historical phenomena. The ’refamillarisation’ of history Involves showing that, in the final analysis, the bizarre practices of other times and places are conformable to our notions of reason, and history thus demonstrates the universality of the human essence behind the diversity of cultural appearances. Both Nietzsche and Foucault have rejected any such perspectivism in historical analysis. Geneology, by contrast, ’corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes separates, and disperses (and which is) capable of shattering the unit of man’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past’ (Foucault 1977b, p 153). The unfamiliar is unfamiliar and history is not the consoling march of reason, but the whirlpool of chance.