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Psychiatric Power
... For this research, we drew on Michel Foucault's work on the disciplinary and social control mechanisms at play in psychiatric settings. Foucault (Foucault 2006;Gros 2010) was particularly interested in the concept of 'coercive power' in the psychiatric context, referring to the work of sociologist Erving Goffman to study coercive institutions in our contemporary societies (Foucault 2006;Hacking 2004). Foucault observed vestiges of 'punitive societies' (Foucault 2015) in contemporary society, particularly in the prison system and, to some extent, in psychiatric institutions. ...
... For this research, we drew on Michel Foucault's work on the disciplinary and social control mechanisms at play in psychiatric settings. Foucault (Foucault 2006;Gros 2010) was particularly interested in the concept of 'coercive power' in the psychiatric context, referring to the work of sociologist Erving Goffman to study coercive institutions in our contemporary societies (Foucault 2006;Hacking 2004). Foucault observed vestiges of 'punitive societies' (Foucault 2015) in contemporary society, particularly in the prison system and, to some extent, in psychiatric institutions. ...
... It seems that this paternalistic and coercive culture is part of the contemporary psychiatric system, or what Foucault (2006) describes as the psychiatric apparatus. According to Frederic Gros-a French philosopher who draws on Foucault's work-'coercive institutions' such as hospitals operate on a model of constant surveillance of individuals, with a view to normalising behaviours in their best 'clinical' interest. ...
Introduction
Coercive measures are increasingly used in psychiatric settings, especially in forensic settings. Coercive measures such as seclusion, restraints and involuntary care cause negative outcomes for both people living with mental illness and nurses.
Aim
The aim of this paper is to compare the perspectives of nurses who experience the use of coercive measures in forensic and general psychiatric care.
Method
Grounded theory was used as a qualitative methodology. We used the constant comparative method to analyse the data. Individual interviews were conducted with nurses from general psychiatry (n = 9) and forensic psychiatry (n = 9).
Results
Four categories were determined: (1) Towards a contextual understanding of coercion; (2) Justifications for the use of coercion; (3) Maintaining a relationship of trust; and (4) Influence of the culture of control.
Discussion
Nurses providing care in a coercive context—whether in general psychiatric or forensic settings—face important ethical dilemmas. Several factors can influence the application of coercion, including a paternalistic culture of risk management.
Implications for Practice
A considerate and empathetic approach, grounded in a posture of advocacy, helps to prevent the use of coercion.
... So the emergence of rankings concerns a certain genealogical movement in the history of power modalities. For some decades now we have been living the crisis of disciplinary rationality (Foucault 1991a(Foucault , 1994(Foucault , 2006, along with its various institutional 'armatures' like the prison, schoolroom, barracks, asylum, and factory. This crisis is manifest in a genealogical shift in emphasis toward a governmental rationality (Foucault 2007(Foucault , 2010, whose techniques and modulations contributed to what Deleuze famously called 'societies of control ' (1992), and which now constitutes the 'problem-space' of neoliberal government (Burchell 1996, p. 28;Gordon 1991, p. 16). ...
... Maurizio Lazzarato develops a dialectical space in neoliberal capitalism, a space between 'social subjection' and 'machinic enslavement', from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of de-territorialisation/re-territorialisation and the molecularisation/ reconstitution of categories of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 1983. He assumes capitalism's need to re-territorialise 'individuals' through techniques of subjection, so as to produce objects of political and social control familiar from the modality of disciplinary power (Foucault 1991a(Foucault , 2006, and contrasts this to capitalism's other simultaneous tendency to de-territorialise disintegrated 'dividuals' (See also Strathern 1988;Toscano 2010), so as to liquidate and revolutionise social relations of production. Semiotic and enunciative, Lazzarato presents this dialectic, respectively, through what he terms 'semiologies of signification' and 'asignifying semiotics'. ...
By positioning academic rankings as the telos of audit culture, the paper tries to demonstrate the transformative political reason that is immanent to the emergence of rankings. Given the imperatives in historical capitalism both to govern and to accumulate, rankings are analysed as an apparatus of social transformation for the production of more governable subjectivities for capital. The paper presents how rankings operate as one of the material-semiotic-affective apparatuses of capitalist governmentality, and how that apparatus both is constituted as a system of objects and in turn constitutes subjects of control. Perhaps most significantly, by understanding rankings simultaneously as ‘semiologies of signification’ and ‘asignifying semiotics’, a dialectical space of struggle over subjectivity production can be realised and a praxis of counter-conduct and resistance be conceived.
... Foucault (1995) argued that in modern educational institutions, power is primarily effected through disciplinary technologies. In his later work (e.g., Foucault, 2006), he conceptualized these mainly as technologies for the government of the self, where individuals conduct their own conducts through self-reflection and self-regulation in turn associated to the gradual acquisition of moral, behavioral, and cognitive attributes. Foucault further characterized these technologies of the self within educational institutions as forms of ascesis: ...
Drawing on autobiographical essays written by master’s students in mathematics preparing to become teachers, we investigate what mathematical identity these students articulate and how. By means of a discursive thematic analysis centered on the notion of ascesis, we show that the participants’ identity revolves around a characterization of mathematics as a challenging, useful, and comforting activity or knowledge, which is however regarded negatively by others. Indeed, mathematics is described as a uniquely challenging activity which requires an increasingly demanding self-discipline. Moreover, mathematics is depicted as a variously useful form of knowledge which is additionally capable to offer comfort to those who engage with it. However, the participants often remark that other people regard mathematics negatively, a fact explained by stressing others’ inability or unwillingness to understand or appreciate mathematics’ inherent positive features. This sets the boundary of an ideal club of math enthusiasts whose elitist membership is regulated in terms of acceptance or refusal of its constitutive values. Belonging to the club as well as proselytizing in order to recruit new members appears to be central to the participants’ mathematical identity.
... In our practice we encounter phenomena which are hard to understand if keep them in the narrow framework of health sciences. It is not accidental that in 1926 Freud wrote the following about the training of analysts: "Analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: The history of civ-tifiable neurobiological aspects (every mental process has), but presenting this aspect as the "essence" or the most important parts of the pathologies seem to be a part of "medicalization", the questionable extension of medical discourse [31]. Medicalization and psychiatrization of human complex conditions is only partially successful; the regular qualitative and quantitative changes of the DSM-systems throughout the years show that even the identification of the disorders is highly problematic, and a significant part of these categories are mere constructions [32]. ...
Psychobiography is a qualitative, idiographic research method; it is the explicit and systematic application of psychological theories and models in writing biographies and analyzing the life history, activity and personality of historically significant persons. This method has been used in the investigation of eminent creativity for more than a hundred years from now. It was originally created by Sigmund Freud; he and his followers made it popular among psychoanalysts in the first half of the 20 th century, meanwhile American personality psychologists like GW Allport, HA Murray or Erik H Erikson also contributed to its development. Due to the hegemony of quantitative-positivist research in the 1960s and the 1970s this method was not favored, but-owing to the success of narrative psychology-from the 1990s we can perceive the renaissance of life history approach and psy-chobiography in personality psychology. In this article I will try to demonstrate that the application of psychobiography in the training of psychologists could have countless beneficial effects. The most important reason for it that using psy-chobiography in training could alleviate some major intellectual contradictions between university training and clinical practice, and it could also contribute to the development of psychology as a "rigorous science". In order to understand the importance of this question first I have to analyze the scientific differences between clinical practice and academic research on ontological and epistemological levels.
... For example, in a summary of his lectures at College de France from 1973 and 1974, published under the name Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006), Foucault remarks that the power the doctor exercises over the patient -visible in the right to separate him from his family and friends and consign him to an isolated place -is associated with what is true. The doctor (in this case the psychiatrist) is someone entitled to produce the truth about illness. ...
This paper argues that there is continuity in Foucault’s thought, as opposed
to the common division of his work into three phases, each marking a
distinct field of research - discourse, power, subject. The idea is that
there are no radical turns in his work that justify this division; rather,
there is a shift of focus: all crucial concepts are present (more or less
[in]explicitly) in all periods of his thought and in all of his undoubtedly
differently-toned and oriented works. This is shown through examining the
characteristics of archaeology and genealogy, their relation, as well as the
relation of discursive practices and strategies of power to knowledge. The
retrospective and (re)interpretation intend to shed light on the constant
interplay between concepts that demonstrate continuity in Foucault’s
thought. The viewpoint, based in the integrity of Foucault’s work, offers a
better starting point for understanding certain aspects of his theories. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 179049: Politics of Social Memory and National Identity: Regional and European Context]
... In our practice we encounter phenomena which are hard to understand if keep them in the narrow framework of health sciences. It is not accidental that in 1926 Freud wrote the following about the training of analysts: "Analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: The history of civ-tifiable neurobiological aspects (every mental process has), but presenting this aspect as the "essence" or the most important parts of the pathologies seem to be a part of "medicalization", the questionable extension of medical discourse [31]. Medicalization and psychiatrization of human complex conditions is only partially successful; the regular qualitative and quantitative changes of the DSM-systems throughout the years show that even the identification of the disorders is highly problematic, and a significant part of these categories are mere constructions [32]. ...
... For those who have studied the genealogy of the psychiatric apparatus, 1 the notion that psychiatric power could be central to statefunded social control efforts is hardly surprising (Castel et al., 1982;Foucault, 2006;Smith, 1978;Szasz, 1965). Neither is it surprising to see this power expressed in a highly coercive manner. 2 Most agents acting under the guise of medicine and therapy (orderlies, nurses, security officers, physicians, and psychiatrists, to name a few) will at some point use physical or symbolic violence, degradation, infantilization (or some combination thereof) to control how people 3 1 We use the terms 'psychiatric apparatus' and 'psy-complex' to make it clear to readers that our critique extends to the related disciplines and governing institutions that, in some way, tend to draw on, reinforce, or enforce the ideas and practices of psychiatry (i.e., psychology, social work, nursing, counselling, care, and so on). ...
In response to the disappointments of the anarcho/critical/anti-psychiatry movements, we propose the development of a new understanding of political engagement in the context of psychiatric power, governance, resistance, and abolition. Psychiatric post-anarchism, we argue, is a praxical approach meant to shift the focus for social change in mental health from macro projects concerning institutions, stakeholders, and governing agents to the micro-political realms. Following Saul Newman (2011, 2016), we imagine the ways in which a focus on praxis and the 'here and now' shapes our conceptions of radical politics and emancipatory endeavours. Rather than succumb to what we see as failures in classical anarchist thought and some critical/anti-psychiatry movements that position people as sovereign actors against the state, we argue that contemporary Mad Movements must be willing to constantly challenge their own ontological presuppositions when critiquing the social forces that render some forms of understanding as mad. Our ambition is that this praxis will help Mad Movement activists and scholars see the potential in destabilizing the everyday power relations between psychiatric agents and survivors, without institutional destruction as the necessary and impending goal.
The contemporary psychiatric landscape's overreliance on diagnostic classifications and the reliance of psychodynamic approaches on kinship caricatures to treat mental illnesses neglect lived realities and relational experiences of trauma. This makes it necessary to return to the anthropological critique of 20th century psychoanalysis as anthropologists pushed to consider the plurality of ways in which people experience the reverberations of traumas in wider kinship networks. These engagements played a central role in making the case for the “de‐familiarization” of the family by throwing light on lateral kinship formations and fragmentation beyond the nuclear family. Given the rise in biological theories and psychoanalytic explanations for transgenerational trauma, returning to anthropological engagement with early 20th century psychoanalytic theory can enable psychiatrists and mental health professionals to become more aware of the relational experiences of kinship structures and the psychological impacts of their assimilation or fragmentation, without entirely biologizing trauma, nor relying on caricatures of what interpersonal relations ought to be like for psychological well‐being.
This chapter explores the intersections of madness, neurodivergence, and disability within social justice movements. It examines the rise of positive mental health narratives and advocacy aimed at challenging negative perceptions and promoting dignity. Key movements discussed include Mad Pride, Disability Rights and Justice, and the Neurodiversity/Neurodivergence movement, each addressing depathologization and disability justice in distinct ways.
The historical shift from mystical and moral interpretations of madness to a medicalized view is outlined, along with the critical perspectives emerging from the 1960s and the growth of Mad Pride, which emphasizes empowerment and challenges traditional medical models.
The chapter also explores the Neurodiversity movement’s call for acceptance of neurological variations and the Disability Pride movement’s goals of combating institutionalization and advocating for rights. It critiques the social model of disability and the impact of classificatory looping and argues for a radical social constructionist view of disability. The chapter concludes by proposing collective efforts to reform systems perpetuating the construction of disability, madness, and neurodivergence.
New arrangements of power are emerging in response to the turbulence generated by the quest to improve life and render it productive. This paper specifies such arrangements by developing the concept of metabolic politics: an apparatus that shifts from discipline to power regulating material, bodily, and environmental transformations. The dominant function of metabolic politics is to render the transformative capacities of living bodies and the circulatory dynamics of materials into object‐targets of governance. Through a comparative analysis of regulating pollution from industrial poultry units in Britain and India, the paper identifies logics of a metabolic politics and distinguishes these from the biopolitics of populations. Metabolic politics entails interventions targeting a milieu rather than deviant populations; its actions are directed at transformative capacities of bodies in addition to improving their productivity; its modes of governance operates via regulation and not just discipline; and its techniques of operation proceed through modulation instead of enclosure. Metabolic politics is a transversal form of power. It is situated and historically contingent, rather than uniform and universal. As a response to crises generated by the industrialisation and cheapening of life, metabolic politics furnishes vital insights into the administration and governance of the contemporary living and material world.
One major factor in AAS development was the Covid pandemic. This chapter outlines the impact of the lockdowns on children, families and their mental health, as well as wider social aspects. It considers the proposition that Covid represented a watershed or paradigm change, in attitudes, quoting early policy interventions by DfE (Actions for schools during the coronavirus outbreak. Guidance for full opening https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak/guidance-for-full-opening-schools, 2020) and associated academic literature around the ‘Recovery Curriculum’ (Carpenter & Carpenter, A Recovery Curriculum: Loss and Life for Our Children and Schools Post Pandemic. https://www.evidenceforlearning.net/recoverycurriculum/#mentalhealth, 2000). It discusses the tensions at policy level between those advocating ‘business as usual’ and those calling for a greater emphasis on emotional wellbeing. This reflects the general ebb and flow which can be discerned in policy-making in this area from 2010 onwards. A further Covid-related issue has been highlighting the social inequalities in significant issues of health and wellbeing (e.g. Marmot et al., Build Back Fairer: The COVID-19 Marmot Review. The Pandemic, Socioeconomic and Health Inequalities in England. Institute of Health Equity, 2020), and the importance of concepts such as intersectionality, gender and race. These were discussed by a number of respondents in the research in terms of their impact on schools and need to understand attachment and trauma in this broader context. Finally, the chapter discusses the extent to which the impact of policy changes since Covid has led to increased teacher agency in this area.
There is a rich literature on attachment theory per se but a more limited discussion of its application in schools. There is a wider literature on associated elements such as trauma, mental health and wellbeing, emotions and relationships, as well as specific work on behaviour, learning, engagement and exclusion. These latter elements can be seen as relating to broader issues such as disadvantage, empowerment and agency, as well as the position of attachment theory in policy-making and the overall structure of social relationships in neoliberal society. These can also be related to the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ approaches to education identified by Dewey (Experience and education. Simon and Shuster, 1938/1997). This chapter describes the ways in which the development of the English education system alongside the wider social polity has reflected these issues, from its philosophical origins in the work of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan (C. B. Macpherson, Ed.). Penguin, 1651/1968) to the progressive elements of the Plowden (Children and Their Primary Schools: A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England). HMSO, 1967) and Warnock (1978) reports, as well as in contemporary political controversies and policy developments. Taking AAS as a model, it asks whether apparently ‘progressive’ or left-leaning policy initiatives do support more transformational approaches in schools, or if they are merely another form of neoliberal control.
Nurses working in outreach capacities frequently encounter disaffiliated or 'hard to reach' populations, such as those experiencing homelessness, those who use substances, and those with mental health concerns. Despite best efforts, nurses regularly fail to find meaningful engagement with these populations. Mobilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will critically examine conventional outreach nursing practices as rooted in the royal science of psychiatry, which many 'survivors' of psychiatric interventions reject. The field of Mad Studies offers an understanding of patient resistance to outreach nursing interventions. Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of packs and sorcerers provide a framework to envision alternative nursing practices as a form of resistance and creativity, where new alliances may be formed outside the coercive confines of traditional practices. In response to patient resistance, outreach nurses themselves must assemble packs and engage in acts of sorcery.
The involvement of people living with mental illness in the judicial process, whether in civil or criminal justice system, is a growing phenomenon that can be defined as judiciarization. Such over-representation of people with mental illness in the justice system is related to several issues, including stigma, experienced coercion, loss of autonomy and social isolation. To explore this understudied phenomenon in nursing research, we conducted a study to better understand how judiciarization affects people living with mental illness. The specific objectives were: 1) to understand how insertion into a judicial process affects people living with mental illness; 2) to explore the perception of these people and their lived experience within the judicial trajectory. For the methodology, grounded theory was used as a research model. The theoretical framework of the total institution, proposed by Erwin Goffman, was used conceptually. Participants were recruited from a university-affiliated hospital. Hospitalized persons who had been involved in the justice system were interviewed (n = 10). Three conceptualizing categories were identified through the analyzed data: 1) Diversity of Judicial Trajectories; 2) Involuntary Psychiatric Admission Process; 3) Judiciarization Lived as a Complex Experience. The results of this research can be used to better inform nurses, clinicians, and policy makers about the impacts of the judiciarization of mental illness, and how clinical practices can be better adapted to populations with very complex health needs.
Care and coercion are held together in everyday clinical practice, in a combination that is not unproblematic for the actors involved: the adoption of coercive means can pose ethical issues debated within the professional teams, as well as produce negative personal feelings and threats to professional identity as carers. This chapter presents how the coercive dimension of psychiatric practice, when acknowledged as such—either because it seems evident in interventions implying the use of force, or made explicit in the discussion, such as during interviews—is dealt with by mental healthcare workers and practically made compatible with the provision of good care.
This article analyses Ricardo Talesnik’s play and film (directed by Fernando Ayala) La fiaca [Idleness] and its critique of the notion of work. Talesnik denounces how modern disciplinary institutions form the workforce and a way-of-life-to-work. He questions the work-system by critiquing the commodity-form, standardised time represented in the money-form, worker subjectivity as a national citizen, and Schuld (debt/guilt). Talesnik’s critique is developed when the play’s main character performs a “Duchamp-like” strike by refusing to go to work. When analysed with Marx’s and Foucault’s theories of production and power, La fiaca could be read as a play that supports the abolition of work to question modern life under late capitalism. Therefore, what this play effectively critiques is the commodification of everyday life, which leaves no option but to create another way of life by interrupting the process of capitalist production of value and questioning the primacy of labour. Talesnik’s play shows the coercive forces of the capitalist mode of production, but also the institutional framework built to correct anyone who dares to challenge it. This makes La fiaca a crucial intervention that helps us understand current post-work criticism and the present tension between work and social reproduction in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This chapter analyzes specific empirical instances within the garment factories, where new realities for garment kormi are actualized. The chapter provides snapshots of the garment workers and the work process in the industries, as such reflects the perspectives of the garment workers concerning how capitalism operates, producing an order both inside and outside the factories. However, there is no established order of capitalism; instead, it is argued that the order itself unfolds and refolds in the process of becoming. The ongoing and changing empirical configurations of the garment workers and the ordering of capitalism, highlight dynamic and manifold aspects of ‘garment kormi’ and ‘capitalism’ that do not remain static. Hence, it is contended that capitalism (and its order) emerges and transforms itself in its relationship with the non-capitalistic domains of the social.
The well‐known metaphor of ‘panopticon’, derived from Bentham's project and popularized by Foucault, has long informed scholarly conversations in management and organization studies (MOS). Herein, we question the power of this emblematic metaphor. Through an in‐depth literature review specifying its form, principle and goal, coupled to an investigation of Bentham's original writings, we identify two readings of the panopticon. First, we disentangle the uses of this concept in MOS literature and highlight a rather uniform and negative interpretation of the panopticon as a mechanism of social control and surveillance (first reading). Beyond this dominant interpretation, we contend that the panopticon is a richer concept than MOS literature acknowledges. Going back to Bentham's initial project, entailing not only one but plural types of panopticons, we propose a more comprehensive conceptualization of the panopticon (second reading) as: (1) a rewarding functional dispositive based on freedom and autonomy (form); (2) relying on information sharing, transparency and visibility (principle); and (3) striving for harmony and efficiency as ultimate ends (goal). In doing so, we generate a new way of seeing the panopticon in MOS research. We also reveal an inherent tension between both readings, interpreted as dystopia and utopia, and show that their combination allows grasping the ambivalence of panopticism in practice in ways that can inform further research on liberal management. As a practice of freedom, panopticism in practice might indeed turn into an instrument furthering control. To conclude, we highlight some analytical paths to help MOS scholars disentangle such ambivalence.
Bu makalenin amacı, kültürün her alanına yayılmış olan histerik kadının görsel imgesinin tarihsel kökenlerini ve direngenliğinin nedenlerini ortaya çıkarmaktır. Bu doğrultuda Michel Foucault’nun soykütük yöntemi kullanılacaktır. Kökeni Hipokratik metinlere dayanan histeri tanımının, görsel bir imge olarak yaygın kullanıma girmesi 19. yüzyıl tıbbi pratikleri içinde fotoğrafın kullanılmasıyla başlamıştır. Fotoğrafı gerçeğin dolaysız bir kopyası olarak gören pozitivist yaklaşımı benimseyen psikiyatristler ve nörologlar, bedenin yüzeyine ilişkin izlenimci değerleri kullanıma sokmuşlar ve görünmez bir patoloji olarak ele aldıkları histeriye kanıt oluşturmak için fotoğrafı kullanmışlardır. Bu yaklaşımın en tipik örneğiyle Jean Martin Charcot’nun (1825-1893) yönetimindeki Salpêtrière Hastanesi’nde üretilen fotoğraflarda karşılaşırız. Paris’teki Salpêtrière Hastanesi’nde fotoğraf makinesinin bilimsel araştırma adına kullanılmasıyla, Foucault’nun kavramlarıyla söylersek, 19. yüzyıl klinik dispositifi içinde histeriye ilişkin güçlü bir bilgi alanı ve söylemsel çerçeve oluşturulmuştur. Bu makalede söz konusu çerçevenin diğer bir kurucu unsurunun fotoğraflarla eş zamanlı dolaşımda olan veya onları önceleyen sanatsal imgeler olduğu iddia edilmiştir. Bu nedenle makalede, Théodore Géricault’nun deli kadın portreleri, John Everett Millais’nin Ophelia (1851-1852) tablosu, Tony Robert-Fleury’nin Pinel à la Salpêtrière (1876) tablosu, André Brouillet’nin Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887) tablosu ile Charcot ve Richer’in Les Démoniaques dans l’art (1887) kitaplarında yer verdikleri içine “şeytan giren kadın” ya da “cadı kadın” imgeleri Salpêtrière’de üretilen fotoğraflarla ilişkisi içinde ele alınacaktır.
Technology has been lauded as a solution to range of challenges presented by ageing population internationally. While the lion‐share of scholarship has focussed on high‐fi, digital technologies, there has been a recent shift to exploring the contributions mundane, low‐fi technologies make to older people's daily lives and our understandings of health, illness and care more broadly. Drawing from serial narrative interview data collected with 19 married couples aged 70 and over living in the U.K., this article explores the way one medical technology—the dosette box—was taken‐up and deployed in their end‐of‐life caring process. Informed by actor–network theory and critical feminist scholarship, this article considers how the dosette box played an active role in structuring relationships, scheduling daily care activities and enforcing medical compliance. In doing so, we suggest that the dosette box provided an unexpected companion and ‘weapon of the weak’ for older partner's attempting to assert their expertise and power while caring. We also explore how the dosette box demanded an even higher level of regular, vital care from older partner's once introduced into the home, thus entrenching the physical and emotional demands of dispensing care.
Since the era of deinstitutionalisation, many clinical approaches have emerged to enable the care and treatment of people suffering from mental illness. In recent years, the use of coercive approaches in the community (e.g., outpatient commitment or community treatment orders) has also increased internationally. Although nurses' role regarding these coercive approaches is central and significant, few empirical and theoretical writings have tackled this controversial nursing practice. The purpose of this paper is to analyse coercive nursing care through the lens of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of ‘societies of control’. Taking up Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary power, Deleuze explores how the move from the striated spaces of closed institutions to the smooth spaces of societies of control took place since the middle of the 20th century. According to Deleuze, the overall objective of ‘societies of control’ is no longer simply to govern deviant behaviour in closed environments (e.g., psychiatric hospitals and prisons) but to ensure a regime of unrelentless surveillance in the open spaces of our communities.
This paper examines how the servant Mopsa in Anna Weamys’ A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia provides a negative answer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question whether the subaltern can speak. In accordance with Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power and resistance, it intends to reveal that the subaltern, contrary to what Spivak proposes, is able to raise voice and demonstrate resistance. Mopsa has not been given the chance to speak among the royals in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, but Weamys deconstructs Sidney’s version and provides Mopsa the opportunity to transcend subalternity as she asserts her action and voice. Within this framework, Anna Weamys’ romance can be read, in the context of Foucault’s theory on power, as a challenge against Spivak’s assumption which contends that the subaltern is not recognizable.
Geleneksel Ortadoğu siyaset üslubunun yüzlerce yıl kabul gören ayırıcı yönü, halkın mustarip bulunduğu bir konu hakkında gerek bireysel gerekse çoğul biçimde şikâyetlerini yönetim katına ulaştırabilmesi olmuştur. Böylece, bir yandan padişah ve çevresindekiler halkın yakınmalarını göz önünde bulundurabilmişler, diğer yandan da halk gerektiğinde küçük bir pusula kaleme alarak yetkililere teslim etmek suretiyle derdini padişaha aktarabilmiştir. Dahası, Osmanlı’daki temel devlet kurumlarından biri olarak hizmet veren Divân-ı Hümâyûn’un aslî görevi halktan gelen şikâyet ve önerileri doğrudan padişahın huzurunda tartışmaya açmaktı. Osmanlı şikâyet mekanizmasının en fonksiyonel taraflarından biri ise Cuma Selamlığı idi. Burada, halk arz-ı hâl veya rik\=a‘, ruk‘a, mahzar, kâğıt ve son dönemlerde bazen arîza adı verilen maruzat pusulalarıyla padişahtan beklentilerini dile getirirdi. Bu, padişahın reaya üzerindeki otoritesini pekiştirmenin de bir yoluydu. Zira bu dilekçelerin sık sık toplanması bir padişahın halkıyla ne kadar ilgilendiğinin, onları ne kadar önemsediğinin de sembolü oluyordu. Arz-ı hâller hem en başından beri aracı bir bürokrasinin padişah-halk ilişkisinin nabzını tutmasına zemin hazırlamış hem de politik gücün aşındırılması ve sürekli olarak yeniden üretilmesi anlamında halkı iktidarın zenginliği ve gözetimine bir kertede ortak etmiştir. Bu çalışma, II. Abdülhamid (1876-1908) döneminde halk tarafından padişaha sunulan maruzatları ve bu arzların idarî sistem açısından önemiyle bir iktidar pratiği olarak nasıl işlevselleştiğini göstermeyi amaçlamaktadır.
This chapter proposes to elaborate the concept of documentality through a protracted case study of the formation of a database of documentaries about mental health in the first postwar decade. It explores more fully the relationship of documentality to modernity. The links between documentary and governmentality may be explored through an analysis of the production of a data set within the larger database concerned with the modern subject's mental health. In order to more fully explore the relationship between documentary and modernity, it makes sense to return to the postwar moment when film played a key role in the articulation of psy‐disciplines and citizenship. The psychotic patient must, through a series of treatments, ultimately renounce his or her false reality in favor of the reality being maintained by the doctor. The theory of mental mechanisms presumed childhood causes for adult emotional struggles and saw the psyche as a dynamic machine for avoiding painful feelings.
According to the literature, the family is now considered to be the most important resource for the care and support of a sick family member. Families are being increasingly invited and trained to play a utilitarian role, not just as family caregivers, but as healthcare agents. Healthcare institutions, based on neoliberal health policies, are encouraging them to perform increasingly complex and professionalized tasks. The burden associated with this expanded healthcare function, however, is significant (fatigue, emotional distress and exhaustion). The aim of this article was to present French sociologist Jacques Donzelot's theoretical perspective on governing through the family. According to Donzelot, such a government is exercised through various power techniques, including the instrumentalization of the family role and the transfer to families of the responsibility for health care. This author describes how healthcare institutions call on the family to perform hospital and biomedical practices within the home. A spin-off of neoliberalism, the practices of governing through families specifically target women, who are considered to be the pillar of the family. Donzelot's perspective is very relevant to nursing, but is still rarely mobilized in the discipline. His critical perspective allows for a re-reading of relations of power and mechanisms of surveillance and control of families, issues that are often overlooked in nursing research.
The focus of this paper is on UK Code compliance and the contests and confusions that have surrounded its principle of ‘comply or explain’. In contrast to many agency theory‐informed studies, the paper suggests that visible compliance with the Code cannot itself be taken as a reliable proxy for board effectiveness. Instead, drawing upon Foucault's account of governance as subjection, we argue that, as a form of board accountability, visible compliance can only support the Code's primary objective of establishing norms which shape the conduct of directors within boards. The contests and confusions as to the meaning of comply or explain are then explored in terms of the challenge regulators have faced, throughout the subsequent life of the Code, in respecting the freedom of action of directors, whilst nevertheless seeking to influence how this is exercised. The paper first explores three key moments in the evolution of the UK Code: the initial Cadbury committee two‐page ‘Code of Best Practice’ in 1992, the more prescriptive 2003 post‐Enron changes to the UK Combined Code following the Higgs review, and the retreat from such prescription in the 2010 changes to the Code. This is complemented by drawing on qualitative empirical research to describe three very different ‘subject positions’—refusal, cynical distance, and willing embrace—which directors have come to adopt in response to the Code. The paper concludes by pointing to the very different consequences for actual board effectiveness implied by these contrasting, but largely invisible, responses to the Code.
The chapter opens with discussion of Foucault’s inaugural address to the Collège de France, the “Discourse on Language,” which dealt more so with questions of power than with questions of meaning, how power and knowing find their locale. Spatiality continues to be central to Foucault’s concerns in the crucial role he gives to the notion of dispositif or assemblage. The chapter takes up the work of a series of urban planners and analysts who engage this notion developed by Foucault. Emphasis on power’s productive force in disciplinary mechanisms is further developed by Foucault in the later 1970s, and much of this chapter brings close analysis to his lecture course, Security Territory Population (1977-78), that introduces, via analyses of urban conditions at the end of the eighteenth century, the notions of governmentality and apparatuses of security, which eclipse without annulling, disciplinary mechanisms and sovereign power.
The rise of computer and digitalDigital imaging technology in the late twentieth century has transformed how we see and know the wuxia bodyBody in martial arts cinema. The wuxia bodyBody, once largely built on the notion of corporeality, as coded in the corresponding literary tradition, is now subjected to digitalDigital reproduction, simulation, and manipulation, revealing a different visual and epistemological logic in the current epoch. Peter Chan’s (2011) Chinese martial arts epic Wu XiaWu Xia is well known for its innovative use of digitalDigital effects which allows viewers to “look through” the bodyBody, engaging with an alternative vision to the wuxia physicality. Where traditional wuxia films generally emphasize the overt choreographic performance, Wu XiaWu Xia “modernizes” the genre by exposing the interior of the human bodyBody enabled by simulationist effects. This chapter argues that the digitalDigital rendition becomes a kind of disciplinary practice to regulate the wuxia bodyBody by making it transparent and visible to the viewers.
Though there exists a wealth of scholarship dedicated to exploring the history and discourses of masturbation, a number of topics remain that still require ample academic attention and investigation. For example, only a handful of studies have engaged with exploring the concept of masturbation in the records of psychiatric facilities, and the history of masturbation in South Africa is still in its infancy. In this article, I seek to contribute to the scholarship of the aforementioned topics by exploring the discourses of masturbation in the casebooks of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, from 1890 to 1907. The exploration is a micro-study of masturbation that is delimited to a sample of men who were white, single and young. In doing so, I forgo offering a comparative analysis of the discourses of masturbation from different demographic groups, and instead aim to offer an in-depth exploration of the nuances, transformations and complexities in the discourse in only the aforementioned patient sample.
In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against (unmasking) genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force.
Starting from an analysis of the public discourse, identitarian representations, and practices, this chapter aims to show that stereotypical and essentialist representations can sometimes be changed, challenged, adapted, and politically activated by the subaltern in order to make specific claims and can also often be reversed. In particular, this chapter analyzes the objectivation strategies put in place by the “outsiders” (those who do not live in the slums), in line with their role (journalists, politicians, strangers, or the citizens of Messina), and the tactics used by the slum residents to resist, subvert, or exploit such stereotypical representations according to their needs and the political framework in a given time.
The aim of this work is to address the shaping processes of subjectivation through the exploration of spaces, times, technologies and subjectivities involved in the Futura event, organized by MIUR to promote the National Plan for Digital School (PNSD) policy in January 2018. We look at it as a "policy event": a «micro-dispositif of power» strongly connected to the PNSD as a «macro-formation of policy». In the contribution, we articulate the thick description of the event-gathered through observation in notes and ethnographic materials (especially visual materials)-starting from four epistemological dimensions: spaces, times, technologies and subjectivities. These dimensions are further detailed in specific sub-dimensions: social connoted / technological connoted spaces; orientation / value of times; technological practice / speech; and subjectified / autonomous subjectivities. In conclusion, we argue that the observation and analysis of the Futura micro-dispositif allows us to shed light on some aspects of the PNSD macro-formation and, in particular, on its effects on the subjectivation of the school professionals, on the role of technologies in their practices and in the processes of endogenous privatization of the Italian educational system.
The main hypothesis of this paper is that spaces of incarceration are dispositives of the historical and social appearance of the ?dangerous individual?. We assume that spaces of incarceration historically precede the appearance of medicalization and other social technologies of power/knowledge. These spaces geoepistemology in which space is a dispositive for articulation of the technologies and practices of power/knowledge through medicalization, pathologization, psychiatrization, criminalization, hospitalization or sexualization of the ?dangerous individual?. Geoepistemology as the analytics of space, relies heavily on the works of Michel Foucault, from whom came the impulse towards the research of the spaces for incarceration of Others - ?dangerous individuals?. Along with the interpretations of Foucault?s heterotopias, we consider Gofman?s notion of total institutions as the complementary concept. We conclude that spaces of incarceration were not just physical conditions, barriers or the background scenery, but the key dispositives for the genesis and development of the social technologies of power/knowledge - in the first instance medical and corrective.
This paper reassesses the history of psychiatry in Japan through application of the theory of disciplinary power by Michel Foucault. The society of the early Meiji era (1868-1912) is defined as a disciplinary society within the scope of discourses on punishment and general social reforms. By focussing on a close reading of both canonical and marginalised fragments of psychiatric texts, this analysis reveals their constitutive character for the establishment of psychiatric discourses. These texts, rooted in biological psychiatry, are shown to stress the hazard that mental illness presented to the nation. Recourse to juridical problems, which derive from enacting a European model of law, provides an explanation for the necessity of psychiatry as a social institution. The key point is to identify a discursive break between two major legal acts dealing with the confinement of the mentally ill: the Mental Patients Custody Act of 1900 and the Mental Hospital Act of 1919. The first deals mainly with administrative issues, while the latter was formed under the influence of an emerging psychiatric power. The Mental Hospital Act refines the disciplinary network operating in the social space, while blurring the discursive fissure between traditional care and psychiatric techniques.
We introduce what we mean by discursive research and discursive therapies, highlighting key discursive concepts and methodological similarities, cutting across the relatively recent fields of discursive therapy and discursive research. Highlighting our aim, to promote closer dialogue between discursive researchers and discursive therapies, we examine their shared social constructionist premises through macro- as well as micro-influences on meaningful interaction. By focusing on the critically reflective and generative potentials of discursive therapists and discursive researchers, we suggest possibilities for constructive collaboration. We conclude by introducing the chapters and authors who have contributed to this volume.
The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze frequently gave rise to a practice of philosophy as a form of critical problematization. Critical problematization both resonates between their thought and is also generative for contemporary philosophy in their wake. To examine critical problematization in each, a shared theme of inquiry provides a useful focal point. Foucault and Deleuze each deployed critical problematization in the context of studies of sexuality, a site of excited contestation that remains as crucial for us today as it was for them four decades ago. Foucault’s well-known History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Deleuze’s little-discussed text Coldness and Cruelty thus provide us with exemplary instances of the critical problematization of sexuality. An examination of these two texts, and their broader resonance, illuminates the potential of Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzian symptomatology as methods for critical problematization today. It is argued that they provide compelling alternatives to modern critical moods that would want to interpret sexuality through a series of oppositions.
Qualität als Konzept wird im pädagogischen Feld diskursiv eine zunehmende Relevanz zugewiesen und gewinnt auch im Hochschulbereich vermehrt an Bedeutung (vgl. Heiner 2013). Schmidt (2010a) verweist in diesem Kontext „auf die wachsende Bedeutung der Evaluation, später der Akkreditierung und jüngst des Qualitätsmanagements im Bereich Studium und Lehre“ (ebd., S. 17) und verortet den Ursprung dieses Diskurses zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre (vgl. dazu auch Wildt 2013, zu den Anfängen der hochschulbezogenen Evaluation Webler 2010).
In the 20th century, the boundaries of psychosis emerged as an area in which psychiatric judgement faced numerous and profound uncertainties. Between obvious neuroses and personality and reactive disorders on the one hand, and unquestionable psychoses on the other, psychiatrists faced a world of suspected cases of schizophrenia, doubtful personality disorder diagnoses or probable cases of psychosis constituting a garden of equivocal clinical presentations in which both individual psychiatrists and the discipline as a whole were confronted with the limits of their knowledge. This article examines how psychiatrists from two German university clinics managed the multiple uncertainties involved in diagnosing cases of early psychosis between 1950 and 1980. Based on the analysis of a sample of records, we propose a pragmatic interpretation of the ways in which these uncertainties were recorded by psychiatrists. How were uncertainties and doubts expressed in the records and managed by clinicians? What means were used to dispel doubt? What were the consequences for patients of these diagnostic uncertainties? The article defines an uncertainty diagnosis as a diagnosis expressed with reservations by its author and recorded as such in a medical file. Depending on the nature of the uncertainty, the types of evidence used by the professionals and how this evidence was dealt with, we have identified three types of uncertainty diagnoses: suspicion, plausibility and probability diagnoses. The article then reflects on the role of the patients themselves in shaping these uncertain situations.
One of the reasons why it is ‘hard to explain’ the lack of attention to boys in discourses in sexualisation is that approached head-on, it appears that the focus on girls has no logic and is merely accidental. One might point to the research that is beginning to emerge on the increased visibility of the male body in visual cultures (e.g. Gill, 2009) and to boys’ fashion and embodiment (e.g. Vandenbosch and Eggermont, 2013). However, we propose that the tendency towards a problematisation of girls’ fashion and deportment and the invisibility of boys within policy and media discourses on ‘sexualisation’ is a systemic effect of constructions of gender and sexual subjectivity. In our society, we argue, signifiers of feminine purity operate as a form of symbolic capital, a construction that is not attributed to boys and which is integral scaffolding for the depiction of a subject as threatened by sexualisation. To illustrate our theorising regarding the ‘sexualisation of boys’, we shall examine an apparent exception to the rule: the Papadopoulos Review (2010), which explicitly attends to the sexualisation of boys and ends up re-emphasising rather than analysing the gendered and classed discourses of sexualisation. The Papadopolous Review indicates a moment at which a problematisation of the sexualisation of boys could have been triggered – since attention to both boys and girls was specifically part of the remit of the review – but was not, for specific sociological reasons to do with which subjects are assessed against the criterion of innocence.
We present a theoretical review of notions of autonomy to show how they organize discourses within social sciences around the biological reality of ideal self-regulating individuals. First, we reconstruct key meanings of autonomy in biological theory, focusing on theories of autopoietic systems and their connections to constructivist epistemologies in the social sciences. Second, we discuss developmental and neuropsychological theories of self-regulation, demonstrating conceptual links with biological and systems theory. Third, we discuss the implications for education, using the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as an example on how the construction of the biological, as the natural foundation of individuality, is intensified by the ideal integration of individuals as self-regulated agents. We argue that autonomy, theoretically rooted in modern philosophy, and expanded through system theory to biological and social sciences, has become a biopolitical project contributing to contemporary biological rationalities that produce the educated subject.
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