Social Sciences
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and social theorist known for his influential work on power, knowledge, and the relationship between them. He critiqued traditional views of power and emphasized its pervasive nature in social institutions and practices. Foucault's ideas have had a significant impact on fields such as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
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12 Key excerpts on "Michel Foucault"
eBook - PDFSocial Theory and Modernity
Critique, Dissent, and Revolution
- Timothy W. Luke(Author)
- 1990(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
9 Foucault and the Discourses of Power: Developing a Genealogy of the Political Culture Concept Michel Foucault is recognized widely for influencing many fields of inquiry, ranging from criminology to architecture to literary criticism. His impact on political science, however, has been fairly limited. On one level, Foucault's lack of acceptance is doubly strange given his interest in such themes as power, knowledge, and truth. Yet, on another level, his implication of the naturalistically grounded social sciences in the admin-istrative domination of modern society undoubtedly encourages many political scientists to dismiss his work almost entirely. While Foucault's project obviously works at cross-purposes with much of Marxian/Marxist thinking, in this chapter I aim at possibly broadening his appeal by con-tinuing the critique of modernization and development theory from Chap-ter 8. And, in contrast to Cabral's notions of political culture and revolu-tionary activity, I explore how the problematic concepts of political culture and individual subjectivity, as they emerged in the techniques of American empirical political analysis after 1945, might be understood more critically in light of Foucault's style of interpretative analysis. Foucault's Theoretical Project In terms of his own categories, Michel Foucault can be seen as a founder of discursivity in the social sciences. That is, his work provides 241 242 POWER, DISCOURSE, AND CULTURE a paradigmatic set of terms, images and concepts which organize think-ing and experience about the past, present, and future of society. His images and concepts can reveal much about the modern discourses of political culture and political socialization. Here, Foucault's work can be made more relevant to modern political science, and it also can show hidden tendencies in the conceptual workings of this human science as it has operated in the present generation.
eBook - PDFCritical Theory for Library and Information Science
Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines
- Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman, Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, John E. Buschman(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Libraries Unlimited(Publisher)
6 Michel Foucault: Discourse, Power/ Knowledge, and the Battle for Truth Michael R. Olsson University of Technology, Sydney, Australia INTRODUCTION The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has been described as „the central figure in the most noteworthy flowering of oppositional intellectual life in the twenti- eth century West‰ (Said in Radford 1992, 416). His work been highly influential across a broad range of disciplines, from history and sociology to gender studies and literary criticism, and for some years he has been the most highly cited author in the humanities and social sciences. A Google search on his name reveals an impressive 5,200,000 hits! Foucault is widely regarded as central figure in the development of postmodernism, although this was a label he himself rejected. Ironically, this is an excellent example of one of FoucaultÊs own key ideas·„death of the author.‰ Despite this prominence · and despite some use of his work by authors in the field as long ago as the early 1990s · Foucault remains a largely unfamiliar and underutil- ised figure in contemporary library and information science (LIS) research. Even today, LIS can be seen as a discipline largely dominated by American and, to a lesser extent, British voices, leading, as a number of critics have pointed out (e.g., Frohmann 1994; Talja 1997; Olsson 1999, 2004), to a focus on the searching behaviour and mental pro- cesses of the individual information seeker to the virtual exclusion of social factors. This research paradigm, with its positivist tendencies, is very far removed from the Conti- nental, post-Marxian tradition in which FoucaultÊs work developed. One consequence of this is that the focus, language use, assumed knowledge, and so on of FoucaultÊs work are unfamiliar to most LIS researchers and practitioners, and consequently Foucault is difficult to interpret and appreciate within LIS.
eBook - PDF- Richard Giulianotti(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Biographer James Miller (1993) claims that at the time of his death, Foucault was “perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world” (p. 13). Indeed, his work has crossed over and influenced the disciplines of communications, history, literary criticism, political science, sociology, and a large subset of interdisciplinary studies. Given Foucault’s intellectual project and his incalculable influence, our aim is quite modest. After providing a brief introduction to Foucault, we begin the work of drawing together Foucault’s theoretical contributions and sport scholarship, offering through sport-related examples a discussion of Foucault’s conceptualization of modern power. More specifically, we have organized the sections around the key terms that help explain the operations of modern power: panopticism/discipline (liberalism, liberal individual, surveillance, micro-physics of power, subjection, technology, automatic docility, docile bodies, normalization, dividing practices, self/other, cor- poreal identities, visible/invisible, violences, prison, soul) and bio-power/ governmentality (repressive hypothesis, truth, bio-politics, power over life, sexuality, racism, population, biological self-betterment, incitement to discourse, conduct of conduct, neo-liberalism, citizenship). We conclude with a brief summary and suggestions for future Foucauldian sport-studies. C.L. Cole et al. 209 Situating Foucault My objective . . . has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. (Foucault, 1982, p. 208) Paul-Michel Foucault was born in Poiters in 1926. Although he endured early periods of academic failure and disappointed his father by not following in the family’s professional footsteps – his father and both of his grandfathers were surgeons – the young Paul-Michel ultimately excelled at school, placing fourth in the nationwide university entrance exam for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
eBook - PDFAlternative Narratives in Early Childhood
An Introduction for Students and Practitioners
- Peter Moss(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist and literary critic. He undertook specific studies of madness, health, crime, sexuality, knowledge and identity, but not of education – though there are references to education and the school throughout his work. So why include him in a book on early childhood education? Because of his ideas or perspectives on power, and its relationship to knowl-edge and truth, and indeed to subjectivity – our identity, who we think we are. These perspectives have attracted increasing interest among those work-ing in early childhood education, in particular for the insights they offer into the governing of both children and adults through processes of steering and shaping thought, talk, action and subjectivity. And though his analyses of power reveal its pervasive and insidious nature, a prospect that may leave the reader at times feeling disheartened, his work also considers how power may be contested, offering hope of resistance and change if we can bring critical thought to bear. I shall end the chapter with two exemplars, one from Australia, the other from Sweden, of people working with Foucauldian concepts and ideas in early childhood education. The Australian exemplar is one of several such accounts contained in a book in the Contesting Early Childhood series by Glenda MacNaughton, whose title speaks to the relevance of Michel Foucault to early childhood education – Doing Foucault in Early Childhood Studies: Applying Poststructural Ideas (MacNaughton, 2005). I shall draw extensively on Glenda’s work in this chapter, since she provides ample evidence of the relevance of Foucault to early childhood education and to the early childhood students whom she has taught. Power, knowledge and truth The focus of Foucault’s thinking about power is relationships, and more specifically on the ubiquitous and inescapable presence of power relations.
- John Mingers, Leslie P. Willcocks, John Mingers, Leslie P. Willcocks(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
In practice, his massive cross-disciplinary influence in revitalizing the sorts of questions asked and methods adopted in, for example, urban planning, criminology, education, mental health, management studies, architecture, social work and public policy belies this interpretation. At the same time, he constantly stressed that power relations were not merely negative but productive as well. However, though in sympathy with those at the mar- gins of normalized society—as illustrated by his political and gay activism—Foucault’s own intellectual edifices of disciplinary soci- ety, bio-power and governmentality did in fact create a Weberian ‘iron cage’ effect, in which the human subject seemed surprisingly passive, given the sort of independent, transgressive thinker that Foucault himself was. As we shall see, following a crisis, this led to Foucault’s final focus on an ethic for and care of the self. One must also take Foucault’s own, late assessment into account: that the direction his work took was always towards where the present danger lies to individual and society. In this sense his Foucault, Power/Knowledge and Information Systems 241 major works were attempts to understand ‘the history of the present’ (Foucault, 1984), to point out that what is accepted as nor- mal, natural and true in fact arises from historical contingency, from power relations, from constructed social and intellectual regimes, historical narratives and political ideologies that determine what knowledges, truths and actions are possible. In one of his late essays, with a reinforced focus on what it is to be a subject, Foucault (1983a) put it like this: Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. . . we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. This is the sort of individuality, Foucault argues, that, as subjectifi- cation, sees us policing ourselves.
eBook - PDF- Willie Thompson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Knowledge and power To devise and implement social programmes of the sort that the remainder of the text examines requires scientific understanding, and Foucault’s basic argument is that the social and medical sciences of the modern era are above all mechanisms of authoritarian control, of the exercise of power. Moreover the actual nature of the knowledge they produce reflects the power agenda in which they are conceived, hence the striking phrase which Foucault uses to characterise the human sciences – ‘regimes of truth’. 43 They do not arrive at truth, but at truths which enhance the exercise of power. No doubt a similar point could be made regarding History, both academic and otherwise. ‘Power in modern societies is portrayed as essentially orien-tated towards the production of regimented, isolated and self-policing subjects.’ 44 The mechanism through which this power operates is termed ‘discourse’, ‘a collec-tion of ideas and practices with a common object and mode of discussion’ – roughly speaking, the forms and rules of communication which define and direct particular 82 Postmodernism and History segments of the social order. One could, for example, speak of the discourse of politics or the discourse of medicine; the latter would establish, for instance, what sort of questions it was legitimate of a patient to ask of a doctor, as distinct from, say, the forms of medical discussion that doctors conduct among themselves – examples could be multiplied ad infinitum . It is not difficult to perceive how questions of representation also surround this discussion and in fact are raised in a two-tiered fashion. The project of investigating social or human reality has to be carried out via representations (though in medicine at least these are tested by material results) and Foucault’s historical exploration of how these sciences have worked is again a matter of representation and could not be anything else.
eBook - PDF- Beverly Irby, Genevieve H. Brown, Rafael Lara-Aiecio(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
C ONCLUDING T HOUGHTS Foucault’s decentered perspectives of power, knowl-edge and the subject lend themselves to examination of the forms and practices of schooling—the rules, stan-dards, and categories that regulate, control and nor-malize the experiences and effects of schooling. His works also enable analyses of how educational knowl-edge and educational practices give meaning to terms such as student, teacher or parent. Schooling not only provides knowledge for children to acquire, it positions them as particular kinds of subjects, divided within and among themselves. While the main subject position of schooling is that of student, children also learn to see themselves through categories such as bright, smart, slow or learning disabled, or as a C or A student. Work-ing with Foucault’s forms of analysis, we can investi-gate the historical formation and effects of the terms we use to identify ourselves, and we can recognize that they are effects of power. The scholarship of Michel Foucault is notoriously difficult to pin down: his intellectual interests ranged over several areas, he developed and used different strategies in his research, writing, lectures and inter-views, and he engaged in political polemics with his contemporaries that may seem paradoxical from the perspective of our present. As I hope to have shown in this paper, it is useful to organize his extensive contri-butions into three broad areas. First, he was concerned to rethink what he called the “history of systems of thought” and particularly to examine knowledge and discourse in terms of the conditions, rules and proce-dures of their formation, dissemination and effects. We may call this the “archaeological Foucault.” Second, his work offers important approaches to studies of power, expanding the study of power beyond the law, the state and its institutions, while attending to the ways every-day existence is regulated, normalized and disciplined.
eBook - PDFFoucault in an Age of Terror
Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society
- S. Morton, S. Bygrave, S. Morton, S. Bygrave(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Consequently, like so much of his work, this lecture series is a summation, a leave-taking, an attempt to gather what has been useful from a period of research, and to move on to new, more fruitful areas. In the final lecture of the series we encounter, for example, 88 Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biology 89 one of Foucault’s first allusions to biopower, and in a subsequent lecture series Foucault focused more and more on the analysis of what he called governmentality. As for the immediate socio-political context within which Foucault delivered these lectures, it has been claimed that they express, in coded and indirect ways, an ambivalent relation with the French Left at that point in the mid-1970s. 3 Colin Gordon, for example, makes the claim that 1976 is the pivotal year when Foucault begins to distance himself from the ‘militant ideal’. 4 In this chapter, after some preliminary analy- sis of the reassessment of the model of war that Foucault is undertaking in the lectures, I want to concentrate in particular on the significance of the themes of biology and population. In modifying the struggle- repression schema Foucault does not entirely abandon the model of war; rather, he gives it an important biological inflection. It will be argued that the emergence of the concept of population enables Foucault both to move on in his work and also to reconnect with, and make sense of, earlier biological themes. In conclusion, I will consider the utility of Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality in the light of the ongoing genetic revolution. The lectures As indicated above, the Society Must Be Defended lectures trace the geneal- ogy of the historical and sociological method of which Foucault himself is an inheritor; that is to say, the mode of analysis that draws out the material reality of the permanent war which underpins the frequently complacent and self-satisfied accounts with which the state provides itself.
eBook - PDF- Timothy O'Leary, Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary, Christopher Falzon(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
New York: Vintage Press, 1993, pp. 364–77. Foucault, M. (1997) Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 , vol. 1, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2000) Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984 , vol. 3, ed. J. Faubion. New York: The New Press. Foucault, M. (2003) Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France: 1974–1975 . London: Verso. Gearhart, S. (1995) “Foucault’s Response to Freud: Sado-Masochism and the Aestheticization of Power.” Style 29: 389–403. Halperin, D. M. (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halperin, D. M. (2002) How to Do the History of Homosexuality . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rajchman, J. (1991) Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics . New York: Routledge Press. Shattuck, R. (2000) “Second Thoughts on a Wooden Horse: Michel Foucault.” In Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts . New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Warner, M., ed. (1993) “Introduction.” In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. One of the features of Foucault’s work that most confuses readers is his par-ticular combination of descriptive and normative concerns. On the one hand, he consistently avoids questions of legitimation and justification in favor of a resolutely descriptive approach to the techniques, strategies, and forms of rationality of power. On the other, he makes frequent and explicit normative recommendations, especially in interviews and occasional texts in support of particular causes. 1 His concern to avoid what he described as the classical juridico-discursive way of posing the question of political power is most famously expressed in the recommendation that, in political theory, “we need to cut off the king’s head” (1978: 88–9).
- Alan D. Schrift(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 169.17 . Foucault was, no doubt, influenced here by his teacher Althusser, who had developed the idea, originally introduced by Bachelard in the 1930s, of the importance of epistemological breaks in the history of scientific thought and method. Bachelard’s formulation of this idea was also a strong influence on the work of Thomas Kuhn.18 . Foucault himself, however, always disputed this characterization of his work. While at one stage he recognizes that his work may have “exaggerated, for pedagogical purposes,” the strength of historical discontinuities, he insists that his aim was to pose the problem of discontinuity in order to “resolve” or “dissolve” it. See Michel Foucault, “On Power,” Alan Sheridan (trans.), in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Kritzman (ed.), 100.19 . Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 142–8. The concept of the “historical a priori” is closely related to the concept of the epistēmē that Foucault introduced in The Order of Things. In both cases, Foucault is indicating a set of rules and formations that determine which statements will be accepted as falling within a particular field of scientificity: in other words, as being potentially true or false.20 . The idea of a prediscursive madness is clearly suggested in the original preface to History of Madness, but this was toned down in the second French edition. However, both versions are included in the latest English translation.21 . The essay “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre” (1964) is reprinted as Appendix I in History of Madness; see esp. 541.22 . Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), 422.23 . Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction
eBook - PDF- Adam Kotsko, Carlo Salzani(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
51 4 Michel Foucault VANESSA LEMM Michel Foucault begins to play a major role in Giorgio Agamben’s work starting with his book Homo Sacer. Agamben’s thinking about biopolitics, sovereignty, governmentality and form-of-life is deeply influenced by the work of Foucault, as evidenced by his sustained engagement with Foucault’s texts throughout the entire Homo Sacer series. One commentator notes that the trajectory of Agamben’s work since the mid-1990s ‘makes evident that it is proceeding by an ongoing interpretation of the thought of Michel Foucault’. 1 But Agamben’s debt to Foucault does not end here. With The Signature of All Things, Agamben also shows that his research methods arise from reflections on Foucault’s use of archaeology and genealogy in his studies of discourse formation. As Agamben remarked in an interview from 2004, ‘I see my work as closer to no one than to Foucault.’ 2 It is therefore not surprising that Foucault has been referred to as the ‘single most decisive influence on Agamben’s later works’. 3 HOMO SACER : BIOPOLITICS AND SOVEREIGNTY Without doubt the most important concept Agamben takes from Foucault is that of biopolitics. Foucault scholars would agree that there is no one single meaning of the term in Foucault’s work, but at least three different ones. 4 Late in his career, Foucault discovered a major paradigm shift in the conception of power at the turn of the seventeenth/eighteenth century, reflected in the rise of a new episteme characterised by an unprecedented interrelation between the new science of biology and the human sciences. When Foucault first employs the term biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he uses it to identify a new kind of power reflected in technologies and dis- courses of security that take the life of populations as their object, and Not for distribution or resale. For personal use only. 52 Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage play a central role in the emergence of modern state racism.
eBook - PDF- Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk, Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, Indermohan Virk(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
226 Michel Foucault This is the background that enables us to understand the importance assumed by sex as a political issue. It was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity. It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body. But it gave rise as well to comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth century sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences; it was tracked down in behavior, pursued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood; it became the stamp of individuality – at the same time what enabled one to analyze the latter and what made it possible to master it. But one also sees it becoming the theme of political operations, economic interventions (through incitements to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was put forward as the index of a society’s strength, revealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor.
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