him to understand how we reinforce social codes.

In such a way as to limit, increasingly limit the possibilities we have.

For alternative ways of life, alternative pleasures for, or even one might say, for

the experience intensity. Intensity is pushed to the side, or

intensity is diminished in favor of normality.

That's, that's the Foucauldian light motif, I think, in much of his work.

Here's another quotation from the prison work excuse me, [LAUGH] from the asylum

work. Madness escaped from the arbitrary only

in order to enter a kind of endless trial for which the asylum furnished

simultaneously police, magistrates, and torturers.

Madness will be punished in the asylum, even if it is innocent outside of it.

For a long time to come, Foucault writes, a madness is, becomes part of a moral

world. And our moral world, Foucault thinks, is

a world of of social conformity, reinforced social conformity.

And Foucault, really delighted in showing how the pursuit of anti-conformity

[LAUGH] often lead to more conformity. Because you concretize or make too stable

some alternatives, you make them into identity markers that then become their

own forces of conformity. So, for example Foucault in his History

of Sexuality wanted to show how the fluidity of sexuality gets increasingly

controlled over time, especially in the modern period.

Especially when people think they're pursuing sexual freedom, they create new

categories for how you should pursue sexual freedom.

New forms of identity to which you should conform even if that identity is is

liberatory, is outside of the main stream.

But you create a new mode of, of being that you then have to conform to.

This is Foucault's great subject. How we, in a way, police ourselves.

How we dominate ourselves by saying, oh, I am going to be a radical.

I'm going to be a radical. And now, I have to act like the radicals

act. In other words, you conform to the image

of radicalization. Some might you say, well, I am not a

diseased person because I like to have sex with people of my own gender.

No, no, I am not that. I am free, I am gay, or I'm a homosexual,

or I'm a lesbian. I am free.

And Foucault says, yeah, you're free. But now, notice how we start to have to

conform to being gay, being lesbian. What it, why do we need always to find a

new mode of conformity? a label for our freedom that comes then

to repress us. That his subject.

I mean, the repressive hypothesis is the core of psychoanalysis.

You know, the, the reason I keep walking around is because I'm repressing what I

really want to do. The reason my shoulder keeps going up is

because I'm, I'm repressing something else.

And so, if I repress something, something else, the repressed impulse comes out in

another form. And Foucault thought this was very

deceptive mode of thinking. And, and thought it, it deceived us about

the nature of pleasure and desire. it convinced us that, for example, if I

just lie down on the couch here and tell you about what I'm really thinking, that

somehow I would be liberated to, and that's kind of nice actually.

>> [LAUGH] >> to, I'd be liberated to, to, to tell you

what what I really want, why I really like Foucault.

What really is going on, I [UNKNOWN]. because I'm sitting up now.

>> [LAUGH] >> But if I were [SOUND] lying down and free

associating, I would be able somehow to access my true feelings and get them

beyond repression. Foucault then say, that's a big mistake.

More than that, it's a productive mistake produces the following.

It produces lots of talk around sexuality.

How repressed we are, how many vines, how many vines of freight talking about how

repressed we are. How many volumes of that Repertorium

Literature in society talk about how much they didn't talk about sex?

In other words, there' nothing better than talk, their repressive hypothesis

for talking about sex. And so, the idea that some of you feel

liberated by talking is what Foucault would call wrong.

What happens, as you might expect right now with Foucault, you keep talking about

things you learned to talk in the same way.

You learn to desire the same things. You reduce heterogeneity and you increase

conformity, that's the path. Whether he does it in the, the book, the

books on prison, these very popular books.

discipline and punish where he shows that we used to torture prisoners in, in very

public ways. And we used to be barbaric towards them.

And now, now we think we have to rehabilitate them.

We think prisoners should be given a moral treatment that brings them back

into the fold, if you will. But Foucault was very suspicious of this

effort at rehabilitation. He says, what happens instead is that we

take the forces that used to go into torture and policing, and we put them

into policing ourselves all the time. The schools themselves become the engines

of conformity. Schools become like prisons.

All our institutions start resembling prisons because all of our institutions

start pushing a model of identity from which they cannot escape.

The last reading we had from, from Foucault, and I'm going to have to just

call it up on my screen here so I can give you correct cor, cor, correct

quotations. is about enlightenment echoing Kant's

essay we read in the very first week. What is enlightenment?

Foucault writes that Kant was not seeking to understand the present on the basis of

a totality or of a future achievement. Kant was looking for a difference.

With, what a difference does today, sorry.

Kant was looking for a difference. What difference does today introduce with

respect to yesterday? What difference does today introduce with

respect to yesterday? Kant, Foucault says, is interested in how

enlightenment marks a possibility, a change, a difference.

And for Foucault, that creates a what he calls an attitude of modernity.

An attitude of modernity. And for Foucault, and this is a less

pessimistic side of Foucault that sees in a modernity, especially modernity that

he, that Foucault associates with Baudelaire.

modernity is a a time when you can invent possibilities rather than conform to

alternatives. Here is Foucault, a mar an attitude of

modernity. a section of the essay, What is

Enlightenment? For the attitude of modernity, the high

value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it,

to imagine it otherwise than it is. This, and this is really the key

Foucauldian phrase, to imagine, to imagine modernity otherwise than it is.

That, that's what Foucault is always looking for.

to, to think about reality that could be otherwise than it is.

He gets this from the surrealists and, and it becomes a key part of his

thinking. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise,

Foucault writes, in which extreme attention is extreme, sorry.

Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real

is confronted with the practice of a freedom that simultaneously respects this

reality and violates it. For Baudelaire, Foucault says, that you

paid great attention to the world around you.

You don't want to just close your eyes and imagine another society.

No, you pay attention to the world around you.

Extreme attention. But you pay that attention in the service

of imagining an alternative to the reality that's around you.

Violates the reality, alright? Violate the reality around you.

you don't want to just try to discover something else in the status quo.

You want to invent something else. You want to create something else.

This is Foucault and Baudelaire. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the

man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his inner truth, he is the

man who tries to invent himself. This is the core message of our, our week

for Foucault, our, our section of Foucault.

Modern man is he who tries to invent himself, not discover himself.

Not find the true essence, or the foundation, or the telos, the goal, but

to invent yourself. This modernity does not liberate man in

his being, Foucault writes. It compels man to face the task of

producing himself. Produce yourself, don't find yourself.

Because then, you have the possibilities of liberation that is new rather than

liberation that is conforming to another, somebody else's model of what it means to

be free. And this is what Foucault's critical

practice is all about. How do we expand the possibilities of

invention that changed the world around us, without succumbing to new modes of

conformity, new models of oppression. Foucault talks about this as practical

critique. The critical question today has to be

turned back into a positive one. The point in brief is to transform the

critique conducted in the form of a necessary limitation into a practical

critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.

Here, he's actually criticizing, if I can use that word here, the fact that school

people, the Horkheimer and Adorno's model of say, showing how limited everything

is. Showing how we're, we're caged in.

And Foucault says, what we need is a critique that opens up possibilities of

transgression. Just like Baudelaire did in, remember in

The Bad Glazier poem where he just threw something at this guy to shouting at him

make life beautiful. It was transgressive, it wasn't moral, it

didn't conform to anything else. But, it opened a space.

That's what Baudelaire was trying to do with his poems, and that's what Foucault

is trying to do with his histories. Open a space of possibility where

something new might happen. What is at stake, Foucault writes then,

is this. How can the growth of capabilities be

disconnected from the intensification of power relations?

How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensificication

of power relations? Can we create possibilities that are not

just going to be subsumed into new modes of repression?

That was Foucault's, that was from Foucault's work.

The, the, the, exploration of possibility without those explorations becoming new

forms of repression. And Foucault sought that out in his

personal life, he sought that out in his teaching.

He sought that out in in his books and essays and, and in, in the arts that he

thought about and wrote about. I had the the privilege as a young

historian to, to work with Foucault in, in Paris.

And I was working on the kinds of things that Foucault really didn't like at all,

frankly. I was working on Hegelian things, you

know? And my, and my dissertation was on

Hegelianism in France. And Foucault was the great enemy of

Hegelianism in France. And, but I, I he was very kind and

generous with me and, and helped me connect to people that I needed to know

to do my research. And I was really struck by his of course,

his, his charisma, his powers as a thinker, as a teacher.

But also, by his generosity. Because I think part of his generosity

was the creation of possibilities from even people who disagreed with him.

Creation of possibilities in a world that increasingly closed off things for us and

to us. He was a thinker who wanted to open up

things for us and to us. and he did that with gusto with with

generosity and with a piercing intelligence.

We'll come back to some people in that Foucauldian tradition next time.

and when we, when we go on into the postmodernism as we approach the present.

Thanks.