The multiple practices of control in which the social actor is both immersed and enacted have been analyzed by the celebrated French philosopher, sociologist, and intellectual Michel Foucault . The deconstruction of the forms of power that determine the subject and object of the capillary superstructure into which the human being is panoptically catapulted is the core of Foucault's arguments.
Foucault: the link between body and political power
Corporeal practices, surveillance, normality/deviance, and discursive analyses dedicated to the deconstruction of the " genealogies of power/knowledge ," together with the frantic search for relationships inherent in the identity-building practices of the developing subject; as well as the " will to truth" of the enduring and metahistorical discursive formations of academic disciplines, rhetorically defined as " scientific "; have allowed the scholar to investigate the intimate and reticular dimension of the most disparate processes of subjectivization of the self.
Central to the philosopher's analysis is the essential link between the body and political power , health and illness, sex and gender stereotyping, media and political power, literature and structures to be deconstructed. The early Foucault, devoted to the structuralist paradigm, proposed an investigation of the " epistemes" in the varied social and political forms in which the actor becomes producer and consumer.
The paradigmatic shift, which occurred with the arrival of post-structuralism, led Foucault to a critical renewal and to a deconstructive and contingent, as well as metahistorical, approach to the phenomena he investigated.
Discursive formations
It is well known that Foucault had a predilection for the discursive formations of any social reality. From the concept of biopolitics to discourse analysis , in the second half of the twentieth century, the philosopher demonstrated a new perspective on social actors. Politics and power, according to Foucault, are pervasive and present at both the micro and macro levels of society.
The pervasiveness of power, in fact, can be found in everyday practices and in the highest forms of social control. This Orwellian vision echoes Rousseau's idea of the apparent state of liberation from power, in which man becomes the protagonist.
A geopolitics of bodies and representations of reality , lead the philosopher to adhere to a post-linguistic, holistic and non-linear conception of time and history.
The institutions
Institutions, Foucault said, determine a system of social control that determines who is normal and who has the right to modify their commentary in a work , highlighting the capillarity of the disciplinary control implemented by canonical literature; inserting literary arguments within those regimes that claim a " will to truth ":
The will to truth, like other systems of exclusion, rests on an institutional support: it is reinforced, and at the same time reaffirmed, by a whole range of practices such as pedagogy, of course, the system of books, publishing, and libraries, the scholarly articles of the past, and the laboratories of today. But it is also reaffirmed by the way knowledge is implemented in a society, by the way it is valued, distributed, and apportioned, and in a certain sense attributed. […] The will to truth tends to exert a sort of pressure and almost a power of constraint on other discourses (L'ordine del discorso, Piccola Bibiloteca Einaudi, 2004, Turin, p. 9).
Foucault: Power and the Institutionalization of Madness
Man is subject to power, but not for this reason submissive or non-agentic, the philosopher will later say; but among the multiple forms of power/knowledge there are also the technologies and arguments of certain schools of thought, which have a monadic and solipsistic conception of reality and the individual.
A political philosopher – of avowedly Nietzschean inspiration (see the author's concept of death) – and devoted to the paradigm according to which the identity of a subject is plural and in continuous evolution and not static and naturally determined, Foucault was an absolute pioneer of Western critical philosophical and intellectual thought.
Among the processes of subjectivization of the Other, Foucault includes the practices of institutionalizing madness . In the famous text, an archetype of the ideological counter-narrative of the time: " A History of Madness in the Classical Age ," according to the philosopher, the processes of interdiction of the subject pass through practices, initially religious and ideological (Catholicism-confession), and, later, through scientific discourses. Investigating and deconstructing the processes of identity reconfiguration implemented by psychiatry are the object of the philosophical examination mentioned above.
Who decides what madness is? Ersamos of Rotterdam comes to mind, but also modern disquisitions regarding the power of those ostentatious and deterministic Sciences of a certain impervious and irrefutable objectivity.
Power is present everywhere
The social and political dimension permeates every discourse or social practice, Foucault asserted in his free and accessible speeches at the Collége de France , along with the panoptic conception of reality, derived from the thought of J. Bentham. Everything controls us, everything manipulates us, everything is power and politics.
A far-sighted thought for the postmodern philosopher , one that will determine the fate of a new political philosophy, embraced by many contemporary philosophical scholars and academics, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and humanists in general. But who are today's "subjects in power"? How relevant is Foucault's disquisition in today's context?
Ukrainians, victims of a long-running and particularly bellicose struggle for power, which veers between politics of conquest and structural nostalgia for an anachronistic era, evocative of bygone, metahistorical government regimes and territorial borders; the elderly placed in nursing homes, treated for trivial symptoms; homosexuals, the apolitical, and authors of texts bent to the political will of the time; the naive who ignore the political nature of social phenomena.
Generation Z, who mock millennials/boomers for their linguistic puritanism and a "Foucaultian" conception of technology; as well as the icons of the entertainment world, who believe they are role models, but are merely a reflection of this social construct; finally, the keyboard warriors who bully others, believing they are advancing a good cause and destroy the esteem of those less responsive to practices of social control ; last but not least, the followers of celebrities, who adhere to models of ostentatious consumption and increasingly ephemeral and fluid digital identities. If power is present everywhere, to paraphrase Foucault, it is best to critically shape our gaze and decentralize it from the multiple scopic regimes in which it is immersed.
Valeria Salanitro
