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LANGUAGE IS A CENTRAL COMPONENT OF SOCIETY
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- UNDERSTANDING THE PAST DOES NOT PROVIDE OBJECTIVE TRUTH
- Answering Foucault
- Foucault’s Basics
LANGUAGE IS A CENTRAL COMPONENT OF SOCIETY1. DISCOURSE AT CENTER OF REALITY Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p. 48-49. I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact or confrontation between a reality and a language (langue), the interaction of lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects.
Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p. 55. Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed. I showed earlier that it was neither by words nor by things that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similarly, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject not by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined. 3. DISCOURSE ORDERS AND DESIGNATES MEANING Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p. 49. A task that consists of not--of no longer--treating discourses as a groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.
1. HISTORY LACKS APPEAL TO TOTALITIES Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p. 7.
To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to memorize the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. 2. HISTORY IS DISCONTINUOUS Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p.4. At about the same time, in the disciplines that we call the history of ideas, the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of thought and the history of literature (we can ignore their specificity for the moment, in those disciplines which, despite their names, evade very largely the work and methods of the historian, attention has been turned on the contrary, away from vast unities like periods or centuries to the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity. 3. HISTORY IS INVOLVED WITH DIVISIONS RATHER THAN UNITIES Michel Foucault, Former Chair-College of France, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, 1972, p. 5. And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumption’s, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to the conclusion that is never given--the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.
Introduction Michael Foucault is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, radically reconceptualizing society, the creation of identity, and even Truth itself. Foucault is a fairly contemporary French thinker (he died in 1984) who is fairly difficult to categorize; he rejected labels like poststructuralist or postmodernist that many tried to place upon him. He is part historian, part social critic, and part philosopher, and yet he tried to turn all of those fields and more on their heads. To be able to address Foucaldian arguments in a debate, first his essential hypotheses need to be covered. Then, this article will examine some of the gaps and inconsistencies in Foucault’s thinking, as well as the political implications of those gaps. Finally, two major critiques of Foucault will be covered: that from post-Marxist feminism, and that from Judith Butler. Foucault’s BasicsPerhaps the most fundamental insight underpinning most of Foucault’s work has to do with the connection between knowledge and power. Knowledge as seen in the Enlightenment style of thinking is a series of empirical observations about the world that can be objectively verified. Anything that passes these standards is considered “true” and is added to the ever-growing canon of Western knowledge. Foucault critiques such a conception of Truth by examining how networks of power influence people’s acceptance of knowledge. He does not claim that power is what creates Truth, but instead that power is what causes knowledge to be accepted as Truth. For a striking example of this, one need to look only at the practice of authors adding their qualifications to works that they write. Independent of explanations given within the writing, the qualification is an appeal to authority that reassures the reader that this should be accepted since it is coming from someone “in the know.” This same phenomenon occurs at all different sorts of levels, argues Foucault, and that is what constitutes a societal body of knowledge. So while power contributes to the formation and belief in knowledge, so does knowledge enact power on and through people. Pure knowledge cannot do this on its own, of course - it requires people accepting and acting upon it in certain ways. Foucault is most interested in how a system of knowledge that is recognized by many can come to exert influence upon and even create individuals. Such a system is essentially what Foucault means by the term “discourse,” which plays a prominent role in his description of power at play in society. A discourse is much more that mere language; the term includes a host of practices and symbols that have a communicable meaning. Since discourses are imbued with normative power, they end up influencing how people think and act. In Foucault’s works he studies the power of discourse in a variety of institutions. One of his more prominent studies occurred in the famous work Discipline and Punish, which dealt with the history of the penal system and its effects both on prisoners and the guards themselves. The institution of the prison has a certain set of practices - discourse(s) - that enframe what it means to be imprisoned, physically inscribing those traits onto the prisoner. As an establishment that is designed to correct and punish for “deviant” actions, the prisoner’s identity is recast in such a way that this image begins to shape her/his behavior. Foucault wants to move away from a linear conception of power, where it is applied by some autonomous force onto others in some sort of deliberate plot. Discourses that prop up the power and legitimacy of the nation-state are not necessarily coming from the state by any means. Instead Foucault views power as if it were a center less matrix that encompasses everyone. This wreaks havoc with the traditional view of how resistance works, for so-called “liberation movements” are supposedly a reaction to an external power that will overthrow its oppressive shackles. Foucault is exceedingly wary of such liberation rhetoric, however, since he believes that even resistance to power is itself dictated by the operating discourse or technology of power. Thus, completely escaping oppressive regimes of power becomes a pipe-dream. Foucault’s strategy is instead to critique all totalizing theories - even those that profess to counteract other more “oppressive” ones - on the grounds that all totalizing theory is totalitarian. Only by exposing the influence of power upon various ways of thinking does Foucault believe the influence of discourses be lessened (if not abolished). He calls such investigations “genealogies” because they trace the creation of discourses and how power influenced their role in society. While Foucault’s thought extends to a myriad of areas that this article does not have the room to go into, his core thesis has been examined sufficiently, if not all of its many implications. 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