I think a major theme we've focused on in this seminar has been to question why we believe, what we believe is what it is. For example, what is art and what is not art? What is humor, what is absolute truth, what is music, what is life? I think it's definitely made us think about things that we just accepted. It also, quite frankly, confused me and i doubted my reasoning at times.
I thought one of the most interesting chapters in the Foucault book was what was Madness and Civilization (which starts on page 29). What Foucailt did, questioning the categores of "madness" and "reasonable" was intriguing. Essentially, he hypothesized that "madness has something to do with excluding some people form society, especially by confining them, locking them up." In the 17th century madness became a subcategory of the unemployed.
What determines who is good, who should be chained. It's truly subjective, and almost frightening. There is the normal and the abnormal. Foucault shows that "the definitions of madness, illness, criminality and sexuality vary greatly over time" and that a "powerful minority" are able to with physical/mental force, impose their idea of the right, or the true, on the majority. So essentially we're all a product of someone's manipulation.
Honestly, are followers of the Church of Scientology crazy? Scientology believes that psychology and psychiatry are bad and that it should not be practiced. It was created by a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard. They believe that people are immortal spiritual beings, called thetans, that have lived for trillions of years. Scientology live to merely survive. They believe thetans lived amongst "extraterrestrial cultures" before being trapped in bodies on earth and they were brainwashed by these extraterrestrial cultures as a means of population control.
It goes on and on like something out a bizarre sci-fi movie and people believe in this, but are the followers crazy or reasonable? Ultimately, Foucault makes my head hurt.
Posted by Neelu Pathiyil on December 10, 2008
Tags: Michel Foucault
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