Name : Avni J Dave
Semester : 2
Roll no : 03
Paper no : 8 Cultural study
Topic : Michel Foucault - Power and knowledge
Email ID : avni.dave1998@gmail.com
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of the English
Michel Foucault - Power and Knowledge
Paul-Michell Foucault ( 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), genrally known as Michell Foucault, was a Frens filosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.
Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Focultlt rejected these labels, preferig to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in comunication studies, sosiolgy, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activityt groups have also found his theorys compeling.
Born in Poitier's., France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influense of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned digrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Midness (1961). After obtaining work bitween 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Oder of Things (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archioology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foccult lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new expiremental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was
admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also becomee active in a number of left-wing groups involved in champaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later pablished Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methads which emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris of nurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert faunded the AIDES charity in his memory.
Power-knowledge :-
Power-nolege is a concept coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Definition
According to Foucault's understanding of power, power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordanse with its anonymous intension. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.
Foucault incorporates this inevitable mutuality into his niologism power-knowledge, the most important part of which is the hyfan that links the two aspects of the integrated concept together (and alludes to their inherent inextricability).
It is helpful noting that Foucault was a textual understanding of both power and knowledge. Both power and knowledge and to be seen as de-centralised, relativistic, ubiquitous, and unstable (dynamic) systemic phenomena. Thus Foucault's concept of power draws in micro-relations without falling into reductionism because it did not neglect, but emphasizes, the systemic (or structural) aspect of the phenomenon.
However, he did not actually define knowledge.
Implicasion
Acording to their understanding, knowledge is never neutral, as it determines force relations. The notion of power-knowledge is therefore likely to be employed in critical, normative contexts.
History of the term
In her later works, Foucault suggests that power-knowledge was later replaced in the modern world, with the term governmentality which points to a specific mentality of governance.
=) summarize of power and knowledge
Foucault notions about Power/Knowledge appear throughout her writings and the summary there relies in his discussion of it in The History of Sexuality)
Power according to Foucault is a multipllisity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they oparatete and which constitute their own organization.
Here, Foucault is not referring to a group of institutions that ensure the subservience of citizens of a state, a mode of subjugation as a set of rules, or a system of domination in which there are rulers and the ruled.
According to Foucault, power is omnipresent, not because it embraces everything uniformly, but because it comes from everywhere.
Foucault’s propositions on power:
- Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations
- Relations of power are immanent in other types of relations
- Power comes from below – there is no binary opposition between the ruled and the ruler.
- Where there is poverr, there was always resistanse. Resistanse was never exterior to power.
- One is always inside power. There is a plurality in resistances which exist on the field of power relations.
- Discourses can be an affect and instrument of power. But they my also be a point of resistanse. .
- Discorse transmits and produces power, but it also undermines or exposes it.
“Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power and raiced up against it, ani more then silences are. We must make allowanse for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing stratagy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes that possible to thwart it.”
From Power/Knowledge:
According to Foucault, riet-wing social scientists always precive power on terms of sovereignty and low. And Marxists see power in terms of the state apparatus.
Foucault, on the other hand, was interested on how power is exercised and what its techniques and tactics were.
With this concerns, he studied psychiatry and penal institutions (prison system). Although this may seem unimportant, for him, psychiatry and penal institutions are essential to the general functioning of the whils of power.
Foucault’s criticism of too concepts makes clear his understanding of power: the Marxist concept of “ideology” and the Freudian consept of “repression.”
He opposeas ideology because this concept always stands against something that is supposed to count as truth. Ideology always refers to Subject. It was always secondary to an infrastructure; a material, economic determinant. In Marxism, “base determines superstructure,” that was, the relations of production determine the ideas. As Marx said, “in everi epoch, the ideas are the ideas of the rulings class.” Marx and Marxist thaught siks to unravel that ideological stratum to get down to truth, which is the conflictual relationship bitween the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The Subject who is capable of knowing this trooth is the working class-in-itself.
Foucault says that, rather than ideologies, he is interested in how “effects of truth” are produse within discourses – which .is neither falce nor true.
She opposes the concept of repression because this concept is only about the effect of power as repression, that was, “power that says no,” that prohibits. It is a juridiscal conception of power.
For Foucault, repression is a negative conception in power. And as such, it is incomplete.
*What makes power hold good, what makes people accept it, is that it produse things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.
According to his analyses, the “productivity of power” increased after the 18th century on Europe. A new “economy of power” emerged. Proceger that allowed effects of power to circulate in a continuous, uninterrupted manner emerged.
Example: In The History of Sexuality, Foucault was concerned with emerging discourses about infant (children’s) sexuality and homosexuality, amang other things. It is often considered that the emerging bourgeois society of the 18th and 19th century Western Europe repressed children sexuality and homosexuality as undesirable, sick, abnormal, etc., but Foucault rejects that view.
For him, by constantly writing about infant sexuality or homosexuality as a diasis, as abnormal, etc., in fact, the medical discourse created an infant sexual identity, it sexualized the parent-child relationship, and also, it created a homosexual identity (as well as a heterosexual one). It would be stressed that until the 19th sensury, homosexuality is considered to be an act that a person might engaje in the course of his/her life. Although it was condemned, homosexuality was not considered to be an identity. But the medical discourse created a homosexual identity. This opened the way for the creation of a subjectivity around homosexuality, of homosexual dezire, etc. Later, in the second half of the 20th century, homosexual identity became the starting point for “resistance,” namely, the gay rights movement in the wast.
Quotes :
=) authority and despotism.
As the archiology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
In its function, the power to punish is not essensially different from that of curing or educating.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive movement of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it did on itself and on its institutions.
=) Not all power relations are relations of “domination”
“The analysis of power relations is an extremely complex area: one sometimes encounters what may be called situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen. When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political or military means, one is phaced with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it was certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited.“Of course, states of domination do indeed exist. In a great many cases power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually assimetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom. To take what is undoubtedly a very simplified example, one cannot say that it was only men who wielded power in the conventional marital structure of the 18th and 19th senturies; women had quite a few options: they could deceive their husbands, pilfer many from this, refuse them sex. Yet they were still in a state of domination insofar as these options were ultimately only stratagems that never succeeded in reversing the situation".
Semester : 2
Roll no : 03
Paper no : 8 Cultural study
Topic : Michel Foucault - Power and knowledge
Email ID : avni.dave1998@gmail.com
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of the English
Michel Foucault - Power and Knowledge
Paul-Michell Foucault ( 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984), genrally known as Michell Foucault, was a Frens filosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic.
Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Focultlt rejected these labels, preferig to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in comunication studies, sosiolgy, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, and critical theory. Activityt groups have also found his theorys compeling.
Born in Poitier's., France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influense of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he earned digrees in philosophy and psychology. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Midness (1961). After obtaining work bitween 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Oder of Things (1966), publications which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified a historiographical technique Foucault was developing called "archioology".
From 1966 to 1968, Foccult lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new expiremental university of Paris VIII. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was
admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also becomee active in a number of left-wing groups involved in champaigns against racism and human rights abuses and for penal reform. Foucault later pablished Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methads which emphasized the role that power plays in society.
Foucault died in Paris of nurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he became the first public figure in France to die from the disease. His partner Daniel Defert faunded the AIDES charity in his memory.
Power-knowledge :-
Power-nolege is a concept coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Definition
According to Foucault's understanding of power, power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordanse with its anonymous intension. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.
Foucault incorporates this inevitable mutuality into his niologism power-knowledge, the most important part of which is the hyfan that links the two aspects of the integrated concept together (and alludes to their inherent inextricability).
It is helpful noting that Foucault was a textual understanding of both power and knowledge. Both power and knowledge and to be seen as de-centralised, relativistic, ubiquitous, and unstable (dynamic) systemic phenomena. Thus Foucault's concept of power draws in micro-relations without falling into reductionism because it did not neglect, but emphasizes, the systemic (or structural) aspect of the phenomenon.
However, he did not actually define knowledge.
Implicasion
Acording to their understanding, knowledge is never neutral, as it determines force relations. The notion of power-knowledge is therefore likely to be employed in critical, normative contexts.
History of the term
In her later works, Foucault suggests that power-knowledge was later replaced in the modern world, with the term governmentality which points to a specific mentality of governance.
=) summarize of power and knowledge
Foucault notions about Power/Knowledge appear throughout her writings and the summary there relies in his discussion of it in The History of Sexuality)
Power according to Foucault is a multipllisity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they oparatete and which constitute their own organization.
Here, Foucault is not referring to a group of institutions that ensure the subservience of citizens of a state, a mode of subjugation as a set of rules, or a system of domination in which there are rulers and the ruled.
According to Foucault, power is omnipresent, not because it embraces everything uniformly, but because it comes from everywhere.
Foucault’s propositions on power:
- Power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations
- Relations of power are immanent in other types of relations
- Power comes from below – there is no binary opposition between the ruled and the ruler.
- Where there is poverr, there was always resistanse. Resistanse was never exterior to power.
- One is always inside power. There is a plurality in resistances which exist on the field of power relations.
- Discourses can be an affect and instrument of power. But they my also be a point of resistanse. .
- Discorse transmits and produces power, but it also undermines or exposes it.
“Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power and raiced up against it, ani more then silences are. We must make allowanse for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing stratagy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes that possible to thwart it.”
From Power/Knowledge:
According to Foucault, riet-wing social scientists always precive power on terms of sovereignty and low. And Marxists see power in terms of the state apparatus.
Foucault, on the other hand, was interested on how power is exercised and what its techniques and tactics were.
With this concerns, he studied psychiatry and penal institutions (prison system). Although this may seem unimportant, for him, psychiatry and penal institutions are essential to the general functioning of the whils of power.
Foucault’s criticism of too concepts makes clear his understanding of power: the Marxist concept of “ideology” and the Freudian consept of “repression.”
He opposeas ideology because this concept always stands against something that is supposed to count as truth. Ideology always refers to Subject. It was always secondary to an infrastructure; a material, economic determinant. In Marxism, “base determines superstructure,” that was, the relations of production determine the ideas. As Marx said, “in everi epoch, the ideas are the ideas of the rulings class.” Marx and Marxist thaught siks to unravel that ideological stratum to get down to truth, which is the conflictual relationship bitween the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The Subject who is capable of knowing this trooth is the working class-in-itself.
Foucault says that, rather than ideologies, he is interested in how “effects of truth” are produse within discourses – which .is neither falce nor true.
She opposes the concept of repression because this concept is only about the effect of power as repression, that was, “power that says no,” that prohibits. It is a juridiscal conception of power.
For Foucault, repression is a negative conception in power. And as such, it is incomplete.
*What makes power hold good, what makes people accept it, is that it produse things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.
According to his analyses, the “productivity of power” increased after the 18th century on Europe. A new “economy of power” emerged. Proceger that allowed effects of power to circulate in a continuous, uninterrupted manner emerged.
Example: In The History of Sexuality, Foucault was concerned with emerging discourses about infant (children’s) sexuality and homosexuality, amang other things. It is often considered that the emerging bourgeois society of the 18th and 19th century Western Europe repressed children sexuality and homosexuality as undesirable, sick, abnormal, etc., but Foucault rejects that view.
For him, by constantly writing about infant sexuality or homosexuality as a diasis, as abnormal, etc., in fact, the medical discourse created an infant sexual identity, it sexualized the parent-child relationship, and also, it created a homosexual identity (as well as a heterosexual one). It would be stressed that until the 19th sensury, homosexuality is considered to be an act that a person might engaje in the course of his/her life. Although it was condemned, homosexuality was not considered to be an identity. But the medical discourse created a homosexual identity. This opened the way for the creation of a subjectivity around homosexuality, of homosexual dezire, etc. Later, in the second half of the 20th century, homosexual identity became the starting point for “resistance,” namely, the gay rights movement in the wast.
Quotes :
=) authority and despotism.
As the archiology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
In its function, the power to punish is not essensially different from that of curing or educating.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive movement of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it did on itself and on its institutions.
=) Not all power relations are relations of “domination”
“The analysis of power relations is an extremely complex area: one sometimes encounters what may be called situations or states of domination in which the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen. When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political or military means, one is phaced with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it was certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited.“Of course, states of domination do indeed exist. In a great many cases power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually assimetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom. To take what is undoubtedly a very simplified example, one cannot say that it was only men who wielded power in the conventional marital structure of the 18th and 19th senturies; women had quite a few options: they could deceive their husbands, pilfer many from this, refuse them sex. Yet they were still in a state of domination insofar as these options were ultimately only stratagems that never succeeded in reversing the situation".
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