Customer Reviews

Foucault for Beginners (Writers and Readers Documentary Comic Books: 62)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Somehow in college you don't get around to studying all the things you want to. After you gradaute you can't seem to pick up a 60 pound volume of someone's intellectual achievement, sit down infront a warm fire and pour over every paragraph- let alone do you find the time to just sit! The answer to those still desiring to learn more than the required number of credits in college is the "for Beginners" series. Condensing a subject's concepts to a user-friendly, entertaining and thought-provoking illustrated book is not easy. But this is as good as it gets! Although Foucault would proably have not approved of the "simplified" commentary of this book, it sure helps everyone else understand his contribution to French intellectualism.

I picked up this book to help me prepare for a short presentation I had to give on Foucault. Since I had very little time to do reasearch (only 2 weeks), reading through a book such as Discipline and Punish or even the Foucault Reader was out of the question. This was a great introduction to Foucault's general theories, and it included brief synopses of specific works. The writing style is quick-to-the-point and full of light humor, and the comic book style added to this feeling. I especially enjoyed the way this book used certain stories and situations to put some of Foucault's points into "lamens terms". It also tells you which of Foucault's books make the best starting points, for anyone who wants to read "the real thing".

I will agree with some of the other reviewers that some of the explanations were a little TOO brief, but that's to be expected with such a short book. Despite this minor imperfection, I was able to walk away completely understanding the major points of Foucault's study. Not to be counted on as a single source, this book is best used as an introduction, or a companion, to the works of Foucault.

The current wave of French intellectuals being given to obscure language, these introductory volumes are welcome. I especially enjoyed Fillingham's explication of the way that power and knowledge are inseperable, for Foucault. Having waded through The History of Sexuality in grad school, I now wish I had had this book to give me an overview of the work before I had plunged into it. I have read DERRIDA FOR BEGINNERS, and would have enjoyed hearing from Fillingham how Foucault's thought differs from Derrida's.

As a beginner, the book presents Foucault as a documenter - discussing and disecting the history of power and professional relations. He covers knowledge and power, sexuality, prisons, mental health.... The span is enormous, highlighting Foucault's multidisciplinary reputation.

The downside of the book (indeed a limit of the Manga-like series) is it spends too much time on Foucault's role as as a chronicler of data, and leaves the reader on their own for much of his conclusions. An example: the book talks of Foucault's description of the medical clinic and doctor's "Gaze" but the book doesn't share if Foucault thought this was good or bad. Given Foucault's well deserved reputation as a complicated writer, this beginner could use the help.

This is by far the best intro to Foucault I've read. Thinking like Foucault use lots of complex language and have really complex ideas, but this book explains those ideas in a very easy-to-understand way. It's short, so you'll be finished quickly, but you will get a really good (introductory) sense of Foucault's entire project. That sense will stick with you pretty well, too, because every page is illustrated. This is an important thinker, and I can't imagine a better introduction. Read it.

Beginners books sets out to simplify Foucaults work and essentially does so. Sometimes almost too simple. I enjoyed the material, as I had no clue what Foucault was about previous to reading, however, I also felt the writing was a little too sparse. The pictures are nice, which makes this series attractive, yet, they filled the page often with splash words and large fonts which sometimes seemed unnecessary or only to fill a page. Regardless, the text is good and informative and reccomended for anyone who is interested in reading Foucault for the first time but does not know where to begin.

A good introduction to beginning an understanding of a philosopher that has a complex and insightful approach to power relations, and ways of viewing human history. However, this is a basic introduction - and one shouldn't hope for a thorough review of the works of Foucault. I think this is a book that invites anyone interested to pick up a further book on Foucault to follow on and learn more.

Sometimes flamboyant, sometimes astute, this book tours the reader through the strange and gutsy world of Foucault and his ideas. I really enjoyed it.

This book was incredibly helpful. As a graduate student I am often thrown straight into reading very difficult theory without any context, and books like this help build that context and make theory more understandable. Much more useful than Foucault himself.

This gentle introduction to Foucault hits on and clarifies most of the high points of his theories and approach; namely, it is an exploration into the unfair divisions between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms. Foucault's main thesis is that: defining what is normal and abnormal are acts of "cultural construction," rather than revelations of deep epistemological truths. They are thus based on "social knowledge and truth" rather than on "abstract knowledge or epistemological truth." As in the case of war or international politics, social knowledge and truths are the result of "social constructions," very much a product of the power to engage in such constructions. Or put more simply, they are a clear case of the adage: "might makes right." Or said differently, they are as much a product of the power that wields them, as of epistemology.

Since there are no social absolutes, those who wield the most social power (and can get enough people to believe in their constructions), get to define what is socially abnormal. In relief, normal then becomes the complementary or default universal category. For instance, since there is no absolute definition of what it means to be "insane." If enough powerful (spelled "authoritative") people decide that someone is "insane," for all intents and purposes, that person IS "insane." What remains, the residual, is considered the normal and the universal. The truth then is that such a definition is more about the ways in which social power is wielded than about the pursuit of knowledge, per se.

How do some people get the power to create beliefs about us and then get the rest of us to accept their ideas of who we are? The short answer is that knowledge and power are incestuous allies. Like hand and glove, they work together transparently in the background through the medium of language and culture. The long answer is that it is done through the process of enculturation. Human beings are defined at the same time they are described. When a child learns to speak, he also "picks up" the basic knowledge and rules of the culture. Those who do the defining get to make up the categories involved in the definitions. Categories and language carry the weight of cultural knowledge. Yet even cultural knowledge (mostly categories, definitions and rules of behavior) is not immutable. It too changes over time. And there is always a large "gray" area between categories and definitions, and what is considered normal and abnormal. Definitions of what is considered insane, criminal, and perverted change over time and such definitions always overlap with "normal." What at one time would get a person jailed is considered "chic" in other times.

During the Middle Ages, abnormalities were not hidden or excluded, but were accepted as an ordinary part of culture. And in those days, abnormalities were used to define what was normal rather than the other way around. In today's world, normal is "posited" in the abstract as an ideal and "desirable" type; and then abnormal (the undesirable type), is defined in juxtaposition to it -- that is, in terms of its "distance" from our arbitrarily defined standard of normality. The whole subjective process makes definitions both softer and more uncertain.

And since we can never be certain about our social definitions and categories anyway, we are required to placed those who might be excluded by them under constant and close scrutiny. Not so much to certify to their exclusionary properties, as to better tie-down and confirm our own uncertainties about our own self-defined category of normal. Watching, examining, and carefully questioning those to be excluded, is as much a part of the definitional process as the actual assignment of people to a given excluded category. And in recent years this form of scrutiny has become deadly serious if not a necessary cultural blood sport of "distancing." The "uncertain distance" between "normal" and "abnormal" must be made more concrete and reliable: better tied down to provide a strong sense of integrity to the default category "normal. if "normal" is to have the desired meaning and remain an inviolable category, this imaginary distance must be seen as robust. Put simply, normal people have a heavier investment in the integrity of their own self-defined normality than they do in its powers to exclude.

But these definitional aspects of societal process are only the beginning of Foucault's analysis. His deeper analysis reveals that just because we use cultural definitions and categories to exclude people from society, does not mean that they are unimportant to society. Foucault crowning point is that defining and studying abnormality is the main way that power relationships are established and maintained in society. The ultimate power in society is the power to define what is abnormal. For no matter how it is rationalized, it is always the normal people who have power over the abnormal people. We never hear what the criminal has to say about the non-criminal, or what the insane have to say about the sane. By definition those who are excluded, or who are defined as abnormal, have no knowledge, no say-so, and no societal narrative. In the end, this tableau of the societal process, of the normal defining who is both normal and abnormal, is just a behavioral code for: they (the abnormal) have no power.

Thus in his main treatise on madness, Foucault discovered that the category madness is more about a societal need to exclude than it is about anything else. He came to this conclusion because, in a previous era for instance, those with leprosy, who were not only physically ill but also contagious (as well as disturbing to look at), first were locked away not only for these reasons but also because they were considered to be mad. After leprosy was cured, the holding colonies were empty and needed to be refilled. A new category of madness thus had to be invented. From the 14th Century on, this indeed was done. If a dog barked at a beggar, and we dislike him because his clothes are tattered and he has body odor, then the beggar must be mad. Any one who deviates from the ideal of "normal" comes under immediate suspicion as a potential prospect for being abnormal. That is why careful examination and scrutiny of the individual in question is required to make this determination.

At the turn of the 19th Century, when the industrial revolution was coming into full swing, anyone who did not wish to work was deemed a vagrant, a potential criminal incorrigible and subject to a lengthy jail term. If in addition he was disheveled and unkempt, he was declared and certified as being mad and placed in an insane asylum. Madness, thus became a subcategory of unemployed and unkempt. Even today, poverty is considered not just an economic problem but also a moral one, and thus is something to be ashamed of. An unwillingness to work, to help make a corporate tycoon rich, is considered a character flaw, a moral incompetent: one small step away from normal and one giant step along the road to being defined as abnormal and then mad.

For my needs, certainly five Stars