International Political Theory and the Refugee Problem by Natasha Saunders

Author:Natasha Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781315304137
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Foucault’s individual archaeologies revealed that the ‘knowledge’ of any given discipline in the human and social sciences was not the “sum of what was thought to be true, but the whole set of practices, singularities, and deviations of which one could speak” in that particular discourse (Foucault, AK: 201).

Foucault’s earliest study of mental illness had led him to the conclusion that there was no discourse-independent object ‘madness’, the truth of which psychiatry and psychology could claim to have any privileged access to (Gutting, 1989: 55–61). The objects of discourse for investigation in the human and social sciences are not already existing and awaiting the advent of scientific investigation to discover them in their true form – as the traditional view of scientific progress suggests (Foucault, AK: 49). Rather, they are the result of the interplay of sets of rules governing what Foucault calls “surfaces of emergence”, “authorities of delimitation” and “grids of specification”. Those rules governing “surfaces of emergence” derive from the social norms which separate objects characterised in a certain way from a social context and transfer them to the domain of the discursive formation (what Foucault would later designate as a “dividing practice”). For example, the family, the immediate social group, and the religious community all had thresholds of acceptable behaviour beyond which the term ‘madness’ would have been applied, confinement of the ‘mad person’ been demanded, and responsibility for explanation and treatment placed on the medical profession (Sheridan, 2005: 96). Those to whom society gives the authority of deciding what objects belong to a discursive formation are “authorities of delimitation”. In the nineteenth century, medicine – as an institution possessing its own rules, a group of individuals constituting the medical profession, a body of knowledge and practice, and a public authority recognised by law and practice – became the major authority in society that delimited, designated, named and established madness as an object of examination (Foucault, AK: 46). “Grids of specification” are systems according to which different kinds of objects are divided, contrasted, related, regrouped, and classified as objects of discourse. A person may merit classification as ‘mad’ not only in relation to social customs and by authoritative judgement, but also by virtue of where (s)he stands in relation to the behaviour of others – where one stands in relation to a ‘norm’ (Gutting, 1989: 234). What we ‘know’, then – about mental illness and ‘the insane’, or about recidivism and ‘the delinquent’, or about migration and ‘the refugee’ – is a function of practices, sites from which statements emerge, and concepts and their modes of integration, rather than a collection of things judged to be ‘true’. Or, to put it another way, these things are judged to be true because they are a function of these practices, sites, and concepts. Foucault’s ‘archaeologies’, of madness, medicine, and the human sciences, revealed that there were important shifts in what counted as serious discussions of madness, disease, wealth, and so on, but he came to the realisation that the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.