Who is Michel Foucault? ( 1926 – 1984 )

1. Who is Michel Foucault?(1926 – 1984)

3. Philosopher(?) • Historian(?) • Psychologist(?) • Critical theorist(?) • Social theorist (?)

4. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had wide influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines.

5. It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers. • For more information: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

6. Why is he an important figure?

7. His ideas on;

8. Language: • not seeing language simply expressive, • as a vehicle of communication But; • as a system with its own determining effect on the way that individuals think & express themselves

9. Discourse: • ‘practice that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ • ‘produces something which exists in and on itself and which can be analyzed in isolation’

10. Three types/meanings of discourse for Foucault: • Diccourse as the general domain of all statements • As an individualizable group of statements (a discourse) • As a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements (discourses)

11. He states that; ‘As history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle’ (Foucault , 1981:52-53)

12. What does “discourse” constitude for him?

14. “ ...Discourse transmits and produces power; is reinforces it, but also undermines it and expose it, renders it fragile amd makes it possible to thward it

15. Ideology: • All knowledge is determined by a combination of social, institutional and discursive pressures, and theoritical knowledge is no exception.

16. State: Against the“repressive hypotesis”: Unlike many of the Marxist theorists/ philosophers Foucault thinks that state is; • represssive • productive

17. “ I don’t want to say that the State isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power ... necessarily extend beyond limits of the State” Foucault (1979)

18. For him, ‘power is dispersed throughout social relations, that is produces possible forms of behaviour as well as restricting it’. SO,

19. POWER, is a key term/element in the theory of discourse...

20. Power: • He thinks that ‘power circulates through a society rather than being owned by one group’.

21. “Foucault’s study begins the immense task of dismantling the theme that knowledge is an expression of (people’s) ideas.” (Macdonell, 1986:86)

22. Knowledge • For Foucauolt, knowledge is something which is societies have to work to produce, rather than something which appears in a transcendental way. • All the knowledge we have is the result of the effects of power struggles...

23. Subject/individual “ The individual is not to be conceived of as a sort of elementary nucleus...on which power comes to fasten... In fact, it is one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals.”

24. History: • He thinks that history is not a wholly process and; yesterday does’t determine today... • He tried to examine historical process without relaying on the notion of subject..