Foucauldian discourse analysis

moore was focused on schizophrenia which was the subject of her phd and the development of the teenage sense of self this was not blake moore's first time at edge in 2012 she had presented a conversation entitled the adolescent brain alongside psychologist simon baron cohen a relative of sasha baron cohen of ali g fame She had covered many of the same topics in the 2012 conversation.

However, one of the most interesting points she made in 2014 is Foucauldian in nature.

One interesting theory of adolescence back in the 50s by Peter Elkind was this idea that teenagers have an imaginary audience.

They think they're being watched and judged by other people much more than they are.

right

You know, and basically, you know, having a liberal Foucauldian critique of Marxism and Marxism's support for third world nationalism.

Right.

You know, and so, but instead it's like, oh, it's something else.

And so he shows how at that time there was not only kind of reorganization at the institutional level, but an organization in the way we perceive illness and we classify illness.

So epistemology of disease begins to trans- uh, to, to change, um, the role of the doctor, the training of the doctor, all of that comes together in the kind of that Foucauldian storyline, uh, about the clinic.

And that was kind of originally what also I was interested in, in the, in the, in the, in Ungovernable Life, because I was interested to say, okay, well, how do we really look at this kind of post-- o- of, of the, of this story of the birth of the clinic from, from these other places? You know, how do we look th- at, at, at the bir- at the clinic in context, not necessarily as this universal category? So, so one of the things that, uh, a- a- and, and, and the idea of the clinic in the Foucauldian sense, or at least in the modern narrative, is that, you know, medicine is gonna always progress, is always gonna be improving on itself, it's gonna be always, uh, getting better.

So that's the kind of the idea of modern medicine, is always the promise of a better system, of a better diagnosis.

We're gonna see things better because we're gonna have better technologies to detect things.

For

many years, we were working on the Foucauldian biopolitical framework, but this isn't really about bios because the question of what is living and nonliving becomes very complex with generative AI, generative machine learning.

And so it's a kind of new form of power.

That's the argument.

It's just a mechanism society has decided to evolve in order to control people it doesn't like.

That's the Foucauldian idea here.

Okay, so in Enlightenment philosophy, especially common sense Enlightenment philosophy, but this extends into the German and French Enlightenments as well, which are their own special kinds of problems, which, by the way, Foucault himself is a direct descendant of the French Enlightenment, just to be very clear, that's been tainted very heavily by the German Enlightenment, and very much not the American or Scottish Enlightenment.

These enlightenment lines of thought, and notice that I said that in the plural.

Yeah.

No, and I realized as I was saying it, it's like, yeah, because I also believe from a kind of Thomas Sazian or a Foucauldian line that we also create criminals by how we define people's behavior.

So I think some of it is...

You know, if you don't have opportunities, you're going to get into trouble.

Um, but where this sort of research track really began for me, um, was thinking about the synergies and the emergences of not just sound technologies around, you know, the turn of the 20th century, especially around the 1860s, 18 to 1880s, but thinking about how these sound technologies emerged around the same time as the emergence of sexology, right? So thinking about not just the ways in which sound technologies at the time began to restrict and think about our senses in a very particular way, thinking about the body in a very particular way, in which, um, sound gets almost extracted as this, um, acousmatic, uh, force.

We also have this medicalization of the body, which allows for certain forms of study around the body and sexuality, but again, in this sort of Foucauldian way, [chuckles] um, very much thinks about the- Acts of certain sexualities, um, starts to form into a certain type of identity, um, as opposed to just an, an act.

So thinking about these emerging technologies at the same time, I began wondering, well, these can't be the only ways in which we imagine sexuality and sound.

Um, how does the literary texts that are emerging around the same time or shortly after this period begin to register sound through its particular engagements with aesthetics, through the poetics of sound? There's this really wonderful phrase that is always coming to mind for me.

In terms of their connection, um, for me, it really has began as a, a temporal, um, a temporal thing, them emerging sort of at a similar time.

Um, but also the ways in which sound technologies, there's a wonderful book by Jonathan Sterne called The Audible Past.

I was thinking about the ways in which, um, in a very Foucauldian way, thinking about the ways in which, um, sound technologies begin to record and understand, um, human identity [chuckles] or, or rather forms of human expression through these sort of medicalized lenses, um, that are, I think, very akin to the ways in which, um, the body within sexology is also being sort of understood at the same time.

And so thinking of them both as technologies but also as recording practices, um, and thinking about the ways in which, yeah, they're emerging at the same time in working together to create a sort of understanding of the human that orients us towards whiteness or, um, middle-classness, these certain values of, of cisheteronormativity in particular.