Foucault is
interested in language and discourse and discourse’s relationship to knowledge
and power
- Foucault’s interest in language was in large measure a reflection of his interest in “the central problem of power.”
- Power was not, for Foucault, a fixed and predictable element in social structures.
- Nor was it principally something imposed from above through social structures and hierarchies.
- Rather, power was a fluid concept closely connected to the strategies of discourse—with the ways we talk, and the systems of talk in which we participate.
- Foucault was particularly concerned with the systems of talk within the limits of various disciplines such as medicine or law or business.
- Such discourse systems, he maintained, control how we think and how we know.
- Power, for Foucault, is a matter of how discourse constrains what we can know.
"episteme"
in Foucault's theory
·
Foucault believed that
discursive texts, understanding the term very broadly, could be
treated as archaeological artifacts, and that what they
revealed was what he termed an
archaeology of knowledge.
·
Foucault's archaeological
study was pursued in the search for the episteme of an age, that is, the
totality of discursive practices of a society at a particular point in
time.
·
As Foucault moved through
the various historical strata, he sought to reveal the conditions that allowed
people at a particular time to manage the relationship between knowledge and
discourse.
·
Foucault sought the history
of rational possibilities; he wished to understand the underlying
potentialities that made certain thoughts possible at a given time in human
history.
·
An episteme is a way of
organizing knowledge by regulating discourse, but it is more.
·
It is an underlying and probably largely
subconscious set of assumptions and operating hypothesis that make thought and
social life possible.
·
Foucault was interested in
the discursive practices within a culture which provided the framework for
knowledge, meaning, and power.
“archaeology of knowledge”
·
Foucault described his work
as exploring archives, which he defined as the rules which, at a particular
time and in a given society “define the limits and forms of the sayable.”
·
He understood this work as
similar to that of the archaeologist digging through the strata revealing the
physical or material life of earlier societies.
·
Foucault sought the
symbolic or linguistic lives of earlier societies.
More about Foucault:
Foucault - "Of Other Spaces" - summary
Michel Foucault: Panopticism - Summary
Foucault's Panopticism explained
Michel Foucault and Marxism
Foucault, Structuralism and post-structuralism
Michel Foucault: Panopticism - Summary
Foucault's Panopticism explained
Michel Foucault and Marxism
Foucault, Structuralism and post-structuralism
Recommended books by and on Foucault:
