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M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity. Introduction
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M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • Introduction • ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ by John Fowles: story, characters and alternate endings (“True piety is acting on what we know’) --- but ‘what we know’ is only possible through the cultural representations available to us at a particular point in time (thus Victorian gentleman vs. (female) outcast, fossils’ classification tables vs. enigma; evolutionary/predictable vs. the unpredictable/ spontaneous. • F’s is a discursive theory of history. • Discourses as bounded bodies of knowledge in history are often discontinuous in their development, but F’s concern is not on this history as such, but the history of the present, i.e., what are the historical conditions (that lead to) of the discursive systems in modern society.
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • Discourse is knowledge, and in the emergence of modern society, such knowledge is increasingly dominated by the human sciences: thus, the threshold of modern society is where man (and not God, kings, tradition) rationally takes charge of his affairs, and where his attention is drawn to himself as an object of (scientific) study. • Knowledge, especially knowledge of man and his society, is not neutral, innocent or innocuous; knowledge is power, and power is knowledge; one is implied or necessitated or imbricated by the other. • It is this kind of knowledge/power that F focuses on; it is through this that he rethinks the historical path of modern society, the exigencies/requirements of modern capitalism, and the nature (and room for) of political resistance
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • F’s main concerns and his methodology • Unlike the classical thinkers, F is not interested in arriving at a grand schema/theory (Marx’s logic of capitalism, Weber’s iron cage…) that explained the ‘whence (where it comes from) and whither (where it will lead to), and, of course, the ‘why’ of modern society. • History is much more discontinuous, and each form of society is a specific historical configuration that has its concrete conditions of existence. It is these conditions, and not the primary motor of change (capitalism, or great men, or evolution), that concern him. Indeed, F is interested in specific fields of such historical configurations, although these fields share the similarity that they are all about the body (broad sense), viz. life, death, health, sexuality, punishment…
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • F is more interested in ‘how we live’ than ‘what we are’: instead of focusing on our ‘inherent’ nature, attention is on the props of life/existence (language, knowledge/self-knowledge, ideas, concepts): ontology of the present. • F’s methodology I: archaeology and genealogy • There is no self-evident area of enquiry in the history of ideas (systems of ideas and their changes); thus no ‘constituent subject’ like madness or criminality; there are different conceptions of sanity in different periods, and one conception in the 17th century may not be intelligible to one in the 19th century (discontinuities are more frequent than continuities); • Within a historical framework, one finds different trajectories, levels, techniques and tactics, operations, practices that are related to bodies of thought/ideas;
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • Methodology I, cont’d • the findings of these ideas and practices may not be regarded as proper or legitimate or scientific, because in different periods, society may have a different hierarchy of ‘science’ or ‘truth’ (the proper, positive codes for us to speak, write and understand things, including ourselves); • in each society, thus, there could be knowledge that is marginalized and fragmented; it is this subjugated knowledge that F wanted to uncover; to F, the terrain of ‘history of ideas’ in human society is not governed by a main trend, the inevitable victory of positive science (whether that trend evolves from man’s intentions, or that trend serves some important functions); • the historical changes in the ways (codes, concepts, categories) we represent and understand ourselves are like shifting relations between the thought-strata (some privileged and some subjugated); the method is to trace the ways they intersect, come together, and form a relational pattern (regardless of the original intentions and functions);
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity Methodology I, cont’d • this is the meaning of genealogy: to trace links, to give names, with each part of the genealogical tree being a ‘pattern/structure into itself’; • doing genealogies is the tactic; the overall method is to map out these sites of fragmented, discontinuous genealogies; mapping out means attending to these sites as local discursive structures/patterns; excavating them and reveal them in broad day light: this is the meaning of archaeology of knowledge; • Methodology II: Documents vs. Monuments • in attending to the different thought-patterns of different periods, F made the distinction between documents and monuments;
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity Methodology II, cont’d • Documents: when using documents to study the prevailing thought-patterns of a period, one is drawn to the intentions of the author; one is interested also in the origins of the product, and the consequences (example: an official document in colonial Hong Kong); • Monuments: F suggested that one should treat it as a monument, i.e. what it symbolizes, and, more important, what underlying rules, perceptions, codes enter in the way the monument is ‘written’ (thus document in colonial Hong Kong is a product/site where, e.g., Foreign Office thought-pattern, ‘colonial rule in a Chinese society’, ‘Hong Kong in the teeth of communist China’, ‘Chinese cultural traditions’, etc. come together; the monument is one where all these thought/ideas/knowledge/concepts/codes (i.e. discursive practices) are inscribed;
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity Methodology II, cont’d • F’s interests is in these fundamental codes that define or delimit the limits and forms of what are expressed • the set of rules that define the limits for any given period is the archive; an archive is a collection of statements, and statements are the elementary units of discourse (bodies of thought as social practice); • two important reminders before moving on to substantive issues and F’s insights-------
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • F is not interested in history per se (what happened in the past, and even so, he has a distinct philosophy of history); he is always concerned about the predicament of the present, i.e. what are the historical conditions of the present (or crudely, if our 20th century sexuality --- its knowledge and its practices --- is unintelligible to 17th century people (as there are different discourses/knowledge systems in the two periods), and vice versa, are we now happier?); • F takes seriously the fact that we could only understand reality in terms of the concepts, etc., we find prevalent in that reality; but he also reverses the relation: in each historical period, bodies of knowledge produce a particular kind of social subject; he then builds his theory of power on this basis
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • Discourse, Knowledge and Power • Elements or levels of discourse: • Discourse is language; it uses signs to denote things, uses concepts to create representations; but discourse is more than just denoting thing; • Discourse as social practice: it is the means by which one expresses oneself or accomplishes something; ‘speaking’ (with its rules and criteria) is creating; by ‘speaking’, new social space/positions and new subjects can be created; • Discourse as bounded bodies of knowledge: the idea of discipline (sociology as a discipline and disciplinary practices such as school, prison, clinic, etc.); F’s use of discourse is to trace the relations between discourse/discipline as knowledge and discourse/discipline as practices; • Discourse as part of ‘social technologies’: e.g., writer and reader share something that makes writing and reading possible; what is shared and used in uttering, exchanging, etc. (example: Chinese mandarin and colonial mandarin)
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • F’s analysis of discourse in operation • how do we order things (illustration: from the imaginary, alien pattern of categorization to the traditional Chinese notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ to the modern man’s train schedule); the borders we set for our thinking reveal episteme: thought system characteristic of a period, of a society; • Renaissance thought system: people think in terms of similitudes (resembling, contiguous, analogous, and ‘sympathy’ (cosmic conception of man and nature…); sympathy and antipathy (yin and yang in Chinese culture?), or the cosmic meanings of the four elements; • Knowing in that system is not about observing and documenting and demonstrating, but more about interpreting (divination as interpretation, as one could find resemblances in most diverse objects); the orientation in knowing is thus not objectifying all things, but of finding signs
M. Foucault: History, Knowledge/Power, and Modernity • Classical period (from the 17th century): a new episteme replaced the old one; the orientation in knowing is to establish separate identities for things (not drawing them together, finding resemblances among them); thus analysis, and representations • this is an objectifying trend, and is reflected/illustrated in three empirical domains: life, labour and language; • life as natural history: all living things are categorized, catalogued and classified in tables; labour is more about the exchange of goods; language is about classification in terms of use; • in all three domains, the discourse F found there does not place Man at the centre • it is only with the emergence of modern society (and modern human sciences) in the 19th century that Man occupies the limelight of attention
