By popular demand

This is the last stop on my tour of French sociologists, sadly, as Bourdieu, Latour and Hennion are the only ones I really tackled in any depth. But one guy who is impossible to avoid if you go to Goldsmiths is Michel Foucault.

I can only offer crumbs, half-remembered fragments. Pretend that we're in the pub.

1. His books are impenetrable, but his published lectures are lively and readable. His lectures on neoliberalism and governmentality from the College de France - I think 1979? - are a decent starting point. He admitted to an interviewer that he made his books impenetrable because it's the done thing in France.

2. A particularly famous book of his is Discipline and Punish, which opens with a graphic scene of a condemned man being quartered. It then considers Bentham's Panopticon prison. He argues that the notion of sovereignty shifted at some point in the 18th and 19th century from the sovereign king with the power of life and death, to this sort of, um, governmentality thing with the power of life. Government measuring mortality, economic statistics etc, probing and weighing the populace, figuring out the "right" level of this and that (e.g. pathologizing madness, he did a whole other book on that), and then inclucating those "right" levels or norms in us so that we, like Bentham's prisoners, discipline ourselves and our families, friends etc.

3. This shaping and discipling is very much of the body as well as the mind, he says. This notion basically underwrites a huge tranche of queer theory, with Judith Butler being the main thinker who adapted Foucault to contemporary American identity politics.

4. The notion of "governmentality", meanwhile, became a mainstay of critiques of neoliberalism - the notion that, in place of people telling us what to do, the system just sort of moulds us into atomistic entrepreneurs of the self who see everything in terms of markets - and thus provides no real tangible point of resistance, no obvious pricks to kick against. Particularly relevant to marketisation of public services - being an NHS "customer" rather than someone being cared for by the state.

5. That's all I've got time for, and pretty much all I remember. Again, not necessarily worth reading a lot of, but worth a Wikipedia because Foucault is such a big influence on the contemporary Left, i.e. there are a people on the Left whose whole mode of thought is based around Foucauldian concepts, and there are fundamental gaps between Left/Right (or particularly, Left/Liberal) arguments because of these incompatible worldviews, that I don't think gets picked up on very much.