Instructions for Foucault Papers
Foucault said he did not want to tell people what to think or do. Instead, the point of his books was that you could not experience a topic in the same way after you closed the book, as you had experienced when you opened it. Your task in this paper is to articulate how Foucault’s text can transform your experience – it could be your experience of medicine, of sickness, of death or life, of knowledge, of technology, of the body, of your interior, of literature. The topic – the particular experience in question — is up to you. Your task is to write what is INTELLECTUALLY interesting in your chosen text. You can use your experience (and write in the first person if you like), but you need to be using your experience to explore a claim or an argument that is not idiosyncratic to you alone. Some good questions to ask yourself: What move is Foucault making? What is he trying to get us to see or sense? What taken for granted assumptions is he trying to get us to see are not nearly as obvious as we tend to think?
A caution and a consolation: you earn your grade by the degree of your engagement with Foucault’s text. Because that text is difficult and sweeping in scope, your task in this paper is NOT to summarize all Foucault’s major points. Nor is your task to get Foucault – your task is sincere engagement. Rather than having answers, your paper might be more about questions (educated questions, not questions that come from not doing the reading). My goal for this paper is for you to practice learning how to allow a difficult text, which you do not understand fully, teach you to see something about your world. This is not a research paper, and you need not use sources other than those from class (although you may).
Recommended length is 2-3 pages (but you may go over if you need), 12 point font, standard margins. Use in text citations. No bibliography necessary if you are using class readings. If you use additional sources, please provide a works cited so that I verify them.
THE PAPER:
LINK PAPER: This is a good genre for people who are struggling with how abstract Foucault’s text and language are because your task is to use an example to help you make Foucault’s concepts more concrete. ONE: TYPE out the quote you selected. TWO: EXPLAIN one way that this text tries to transform or problematize our/an experience. I.e., EXPLAIN what is INTELLECTUALLY interesting about that quote. A.k.a: PUZZLE at what the hell he is getting at!! THREE: USE this move to help you analyze a particular example. This example could come from your life or the life of someone you know. But it does not have to be personal. The example could come from one of our other readings. Or the example could come from popular culture, a novel or film. The key thing is the LINK between what you explain in step two and the example: that is, you need to do more than answer step two and then in step three describe a situation from a film. If you leave it to me to make the link, I get the points!!
The quote you are using:
“Clinical experience – that opening up of the concrete individual, for the first time in Western history, to the language of rationality, that major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to things – was soon taken as a simple, unconceptualized confrontation of a gaze and a face, or a glance and a silent body … ‘In order to be able to offer each of our patients a course of treatment perfectly adapted to his illness and to himself, we try to obtain a complete, objective idea of his case; we “observe” him in the same way that we observe the stars or a laboratory experiment’ {Foucault citing Sournia]’ Miracles are not so easy to come by [says Foucault sarcastically] …” (xiv-xv).
THE TEXTBOOK:
Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic (philosophy)