Michel Foucault’s concept of Power / Knowledge
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Here I share my assignment on Michel Foucault’s concept of Power / Knowledge so read my blog and do comments and suggestions.
Name: Malek Hina Ibrahimbhai
Roll No. : 7 (seven)
Batch: 2019-21
Email Id: hinamalek21@gmail.com
Unique ID: 2069 1084 2020 0026
Paper No. : 8 Cultural studies
Topic: Michel Foucault’s concept of Power / Knowledge
Submitted to: STM. S. B. Gardi Department of English
Question:1 Michel Foucault’s concept of Power / Knowledge.
†Introduction:
Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality) that these reorganizations of knowledge were also intertwined with new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often yielded contradictory responses from readers.
His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory biopower have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.
Michel Foucault is best known for giving postmodernism a distinctive characteristic. He is also a poststructuralist, and postmodernist. He gives importance to the economy and other social institutions. To him social structure is micro-politics of power. This is his deviation from Karl Marx. Knowledge-power relationship is Foucault’s major contribution to postmodernism. Power and knowledge entail one another. Knowledge ceases to be liberation and becomes enslavement.
†Michel Foucault and Power/Knowledge:
Foucault was interested in the way power structures depend upon structures of knowledge (arts, science, medicine, demographie and how, once they acquire knowledge, create subject to be controlled. Foucault's methodology seeks to understand how some sectie of the population have been classified as criminals or instant. The is, he is interested in understanding the processes of classification that helped exclude some people from society. Foucault argues that certain authorities who possess power in society produce knowded about those who lack power. Such a system of knowledge is called 'discourse'. The arts, religion, science and the law are discourses that produce' particular subjects. Let us look at a concept-map of designations of deviance and their remedies in history as produced by specific 'authorities.
The last column, 'corrective' marks the actual enforcement of power or process/act, where the 'authorities' ensure that the deviance is rectified according to what they think is right.
Discourse and knowledge produce certain categories of 'subjects' (people) who are then treated in particular ways: the immoral are remedied by priests, criminals are jailed by the law, the sick are treated by doctors, and the insane shut away in asylums by psychiatrists. What happens, therefore, is that the production of knowledge about those who lack power leads to very effective practices of the part of the authorities. Knowledge and classification systems such as medicine, the law or religion are therefore modes of social power on control.
Power and knowledge help identify and classify individual subjects as mad or ill. The task is to analyse the working of power and knowledge within a social set-up. These can be at the level of the family unit or at the level of the nation-state. There is, therefore, no such thing as neutral or objective knowledge because knowledge is always used to serve the interests of the dominant groups.
Now, after Foucault we know that discourses produce particular subjects, who are subject to control. People who lack the power to determine their lives and futures are said to lack agency. They are called subalterns'. Every social formation (contexts such as class, nation) has its own subalterns. The dominant groups in social structures that construct subalterns also use particular modes to ensure that the subalterns remain powerless. One such means of keeping the power relation in favour of the dominant category is ideology.
Ideology is a system of beliefs and ideas that permeates social formations. Ideology justifies oppression and social inequalities by suggesting that the lower classes have always been inferior and persuades them of the validity of this belief. That is, ideology circulates as a system of representation and images that 'naturalizes' oppression and creates the illusion that oppression is natural.
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 accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.
Foucault incorporates this inevitable mutuality into his neologism power-knowledge, the most important part of which is the hyphen that links the two aspects of the integrated concept together (and alludes to their inherent inextricably).
It is helpful noting that Foucault has a textual understanding of both power and knowledge. Both power and knowledge are to be seen as de-centralised, relativistic, ubiquitous, and unstable systemic phenomena. Thus Foucault's concept of power draws on micro-relations without falling into reductionism because it does not neglect, but emphasizes, the systemic aspect of the phenomenon. However, he does not actually define knowledge.
†I conclude with two brief critical reflections:
The first concerns Foucault's frequent appeal to images of war, conflict, and resistance. I argued above that he explicitly proposed this martial imagery to emphasize the dynamics and non systematicity of power and knowledge. Yet feminist theorists have often reminded us of the epistemological and political dangers of building militarism and violence into our very tools of theoretical analysis and political criticism. So one important question to be raised about Foucault's work is to what extent his sense of the dynamics of power and knowledge remains tied to his Nietzschean imagery of war and the related notions of strategy and tactics.
A second question concerns the scope of Foucault's argument. He repeatedly insisted that his arguments were of quite restricted generality, both historically and epistemologically. He wrote exten- sively about the interconnected disciplines of psychiatry, criminology, pedagogy, and clinical medicine, but was reluctant to extend his arguments beyond what he once called these "dubious" disciplines. Yet his more general remarks about power and knowledge are more difficult to constrain in this fashion. I have argued elsewhere that the natural sciences offer important analogues to detailed aspects of Foucault's historical studies of power and knowledge. Whether or not these analogies can be sustained, however, Foucault's insistence that power and knowledge be understood as dynamic re- lationships rather than things possessed must have more general import. There are undoubtedly important structural differences in the ways that alignments of power and of knowledge are organized and deployed in different fields and historical periods. Nor would one expect always to find the same patterns of interaction between knowledge and other kinds of relationship among us and the world. But if I am right in attributing to Foucault an account of the dynam- ics of knowledge, this should have important consequences still to be worked out for epistemology and the philosophy of science.
†DISCIPLINES AND NORMS:
Foucault had been writing about the history of knowledge in the human sciences long before he ever explicitly raised questions about power. What had interested Foucault was not the specific bodies of knowledge compiled through disciplined investigation at various times. Instead, Foucault had written about the epistemic context within which those bodies of knowledge became intelligible and authoritative.
†POWER (AND KNOWLEDGE) WITHOUT SOVEREIGNTY:
Foucault did not often explicitly address the relation between his discussions of power/knowledge and more traditional ways of conceptualizing knowledge. He had more to say about how his understanding of power differs from its treatment in mainstream political theories. Foucault repeatedly situated his own reflections as an attempt to break free of the orientation of political thought toward questions of sovereign power and its legitimacy: "At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king".
†THE DYNAMICS OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE:
There is nevertheless something unsatisfying about these criticisms. Rorty's and Taylor's criticisms (and others' as well) depend upon crucial disjunctions: either a critique of power in the name of legitimacy, or an acceptance that power makes right; either the validation of one's claims from a standpoint of science/epistemic sovereignty, or an acceptance that all claims to truth are of equivalent standing. Yet these disjunctions themselves presuppose a standpoint of epistemic sovereignty, and to invoke them may beg the question. Even the positions that in the end are attributed to Foucault (epistemological relativism and/or a reduction of truth to domination and legitimacy to forced acceptance) are positions that claim sovereignty by standing outside epistemic and political conflicts to adjudicate the claims competing parties can legitimately make upon us.
†Conclusion:
According to this 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. One example of the implications of power-knowledge is Google’s monopoly of knowledge, its PageRank algorithm, and it's inevitable commercial and cultural biases around the world, which are based on the volume and control principles.
†Works Cited:
Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Viva Books Private Limited, 2019.
Foucault, Michel. Power and Knowledge. Hamburg: Vintage, 1980.
Rouse, Joseph, "Power/Knowledge" (2005). Division I Faculty Publications. 34.
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