Michel Foucault’s “The Birth of the Clinic” (Part 2/2)

[@Vgallo]

As someone that’s been suffering constantly for 4 years with an illness that was until recently unknown and was constantly gaslight by drs that were bewildered by my symptoms, stumbling across this text and your video to help digest it, has really helped me understand why drs are so goddamn clueless and thoroughly incapable of discovering things outside of what they already know.

[@aizakku8399]

Their sense of medical perception is primitive and their profession is preached to the point of fetishism.

[@danielnitzsche5757]

Thank you for these videos. They really helped me better comprehend the text.

[@reviveramesh]

Thanks for this.

[@qu2324]

Very interesting video! I'm having some trouble understanding when Foucault says p.196 "It was also necessary to open up language to a whole new domain: that of a perpetual and objectively based correlation of the visible and the expressible" of the conclusion, what domain exactly is Foucault referring to here?

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

He's referring to a domain in which there is a direct relationship between a symptom and the doctor's description of that syndrome. How does that happen, though? How does a symptom actually lend itself to language--a decidedly human construct? The answer is that it doesn't. In this domain, the world is imbued with language to the point that nothing escapes the descriptive capacity of language. No stone is left unturned and everything can be explained within this domain that is mandated and controlled by a regime of knowledge (in this case, the medico-scientific institution). Hope I've helped!

[@cheri238]

​@TheoryPindeed. hilosophy 💯 you have.

[@Zing_art]

This was my first Foucault and the text is very difficult to follow which is why I came here. A lot is comprehensible now. Thank you for the hard work. But even while reading the text , I could feel Foucault has been pretty much repetitive. I didn’t understand why he had to introduce the term ‘glance’ vis-a-vis the ‘gaze’ more so when he doesn’t return to it again. How has the clinic and the medical gaze evolved in the last 100 years? A lot of the text remains relevant as the dialog between the medical practitioners and the patient is being continually obscured. With insurance companies also forming a nexus with the hospitals wherein they appear to be keeping rigorous records of the subject’s health history, the panopticon seems to have only strengthened. If you could please deliberate a bit on this...

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Hahaha you seem to already know about it--probably more so than me!

[@zarahoopstra]

Interesting points. One thing I find interesting is the “medical gaze“ of race. It’s probably a bit much to go into here but in relation to his “abnormal“ lectures and the still outdated and peculiar way medicine is keeping the “biological” officiality of it, I think it will be an important topic in a few decades.

[@cheri238]

Indeed.😊

[@efrainhidalgo4741]

I made my video on how people began to think/ how language started. No one understands what I'm trying to say and it's kind of sad and irritating. Could you look at it and give feedback on the idea. I dunno who else would listen and understand

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

I'll take a gander. No promise that I'll understand tho haha

[@efrainhidalgo4741]

@@TheoryPhilosophy how was it

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

It all seemed correct to me.

[@efrainhidalgo4741]

@@TheoryPhilosophy okay thank you.

[@billthompson7072]

And in this part you miss points about metaphenominalism, so ignore vitalist narcissism and omnipotence #125

[@JAMAICADOCK]

Foucault like Nietzsche took faux altruism at face value. Don't really think prisons, asylums, schools were ever designed to make things better. They were always social dumping grounds under the guise of altruism. So his libertine insistence that the more we try to make things better, the worse they get - was always on shaky ground.

[@Firmus777]

Do you really think things would have gone differently if people had good intentions? To believe they would is to advocate a pretty naive idealism.

[@JAMAICADOCK]

@@Firmus777 The point is, Nietzsche and Foucault were naive, taking Victorian altruism at face value. Like today when some reactionaries take the good intentions of welfare at face value, or the liberal embrace of migrants as being humanitarian. They never see the ulterior motives behind 'bleeding heart' liberalism. As for genuine good intentions, they can and do often lead to better outcomes. And more often than not it isn't about doing good, it's just about what's scientifically sound. Not shitting where you eat might be a good intention, but it also makes scientific sense. But if good intentions pave the road to hell, there's usually something duplicitous underpinning the morality. Such as the second Iraq war, which outwardly was about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, but the realpolitik was oil and gas, and taking down a.non-aligned socialist remnant from the cold war. However, some reactionaries still maintain the war demonstrated a failure of US foreign policy, that is in supporting democracy. That Saddam should have been replaced by a king or a dictator, Taking at face value the Bush administration's ostensible good intentions.

[@Firmus777]

@@JAMAICADOCK They were not naive, it should be taken at face value. You are acting the exact same way as right wingers who always see some malicious intent behind left wing ideology. The truth is, even if some set of ideas starts as being planted by a manipulative force, it catches on and starts to be believed by enough people to perpetuate certain practices. So sooner or later you will be responding to people actually genuinely believing those ideas and there's no need for evil boogeymen manipulating things behind the scenes or ulterior motives, the system perpetuates itself. You are the naive one, because you think that intentions translate to reality. "People don't want there to be suffering, yet they cause suffering, so they must be lying about not wanting there to be suffering." That's not how reality works. The truth is that we are controlled by forces out of our control and very often people's actions produce things they don't want. You are trying to separate a system from its ideology, the base from its superstructure. You say you are opposed to Bush yet you adopt the very same values he used to maintain himself in power. So why do you expect a different result? Altruism will not come from valuing freedom and equality which serve as the basis of all oppression and inequality, it will come as a result of material necessity and the working class fighting selfishly for their own interests at the expense of the interests of the bourgeoisie. With your comment you are just making reactionaries look good. We would treat each other a lot better if we treated each other worse. Pacifism causes wars while class war will cause peace. Free market makes people unfree, regulations will free them. Education perpetuates ruling class ideology, irrationalism moves us closer to the truth. Remember: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

[@JAMAICADOCK]

@@Firmus777 So you coming at this from Marxist position, which is odd considering Marx savaged the faux altruism of liberal bourgeois society. Unlike Nietzsche he never took Victorian liberal hand-wringing at face value. For instance, Marx saw Irish immigration as a way of clearing a resistant colony while using Irish cheap labour to undermine the trade union movement in Britain. The ostensible humanitarian mission just so much window dressing. Marx saw bourgeois idealism, or rather bourgeois revolutions as progressive but ultimately self serving, Whenever liberals act morally, there's usually a large vested interest to protect or to gain. Opposed to Marxist true idealism, that often acts selflessly with nothing to gain but the liberation of the working class.

[@Firmus777]

@@JAMAICADOCK All of this is in no way incompatible with what I said. Someone's intentions can be genuine and disgenuine, true and false. If this weren't so there would be no contradictions and no problems to deal with. And of course you have to accept a position as true in order to show it's inconsistencies. You have to accept a preposition to be true to show it to be false, even in mathematical problems. Marx doesn't go against this in any way (except in being trapped in a modern rationalist context). He accepts people like Smith. Then he takes a historical point of view, similar to Foucault, he points out how things weren't always how they are now. And then unlike Foucault he tries to examine present conditions and predict future development of social and economic forces.