Two different philosophical traditions, both concerned with the grounds for knowledge (epistemology)

• Kuhn: positivism and Anglo-American philosophy of science. Some major assumptions:
  • Knowledge in scientific communities is a system of professional institutions and consensus-models of knowledge.
  • The state of knowledge represented by a "paradigm" reflects a consensus with institutional buy-in.
  • "Paradigm shifts" require consensual and institutional change and occur when models for knowledge, explanation, and interpretation fail (e.g., the Copernican revolution).
• Foucault: European and French post-structuralism, post-Freudian, post-Marxian philosophies of knowledge. Some major assumptions:
  • Knowledge is produced, that is, constructed, through disciplines, which are themselves institutionally grounded bodies of discourse that constitute what can become objects of knowledge and who has authority to speak about them.
  • Knowledge is what is representable in sanctioned discourses.
  • It makes no sense to talk about knowledge or the objects of knowledge outside discursive practices, since what can appear as "knowledge" to us is only knowable or made visible through the practices we inhabit, use, know with.
  • The discursive practices also constitute our identities as "knowing subjects" and the subjectivities of being the positions of insiders or outsiders of the knowledge and truth regimes.
  • Modern societies create ways of policing and controlling the disciplines, and creating authority structures for truth and knowledge.

Common issues:

• how models of knowledge are generated in social, historical, and intellectual contexts and take on authority and power in institutions.

Foucault merges the concerns of:

• epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge)
• history (how we represent the past)
• language and semiotics (how the world is mediated and meaning is constructed)
• and ideology (the bases and social structure of power, the distribution of and perpetuation of power in discourse and symbolic systems)
• working at the intersections of Marxian, Freudian, structuralist, and European philosophical traditions

Intellectual and social history in Foucault's traditions: main theories

• History of thought and disciplines as a history of models, prescriptions, and prohibitions: ways of conceiving things, representing in language, using discourse.
• History of society as histories of control and the circulation of power.
• History of sexuality: sex as continually (re)constructed in social discourse, not a stable "natural" reality.
  • The problem of sexuality in history and social representation is not repression, but finding and putting sex into discourse, since even repressive regimes presuppose what is repressed by strategies of exclusion.
• Discourse and power work to create subjectivities--social and multiple identity positions in which people find themselves subject to authority/authorizations and power/control as well as subjects of kinds of discourse or identities in a social sphere.

The Legacy of Kant and Hegel: Foucault as "Post-Kantian"

The Discourse on Language

• Main issues: the laws of discourse, rules of inclusion/exclusion, power.
• A generative model of disciplines (compare Kuhn's paradigm and Chomsky's generative grammar or syntax):
  • " In a discipline… what is supposed at the point of departure… is that which is required for the construction of new statements. For a discipline to exist, there must be the possibility of formulating--and of doing so ad infinitum--fresh propositions."
• Hits upon the idea of general rules of formation for disciplinary/scientific statements, statements that are rule-governed, learned, collective, and encode power/authority for those using the statements within a disciplinary system.
• But discourses have their power only as embedded in institutions:
  • "But this will to truth, like others systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support: it is both reinforced and accompanied by whole strata of practices such as pedagogy--naturally--the book-stystem, publishing, libraries, such as the learned societies in the past, and laboratories today."

The Archaeology of Knowledge

• Provides a model for looking at the uses and effects of discourse in its social contexts.
• A model for the history of ideas and theory itself.
• Discourse and objects: Compare metalanguage and object language
• Discourse is constitutive of knowledge, not simply the neutral expression or representation of something outside language or representation, not the reference to things that preexist statements about them.
• Foucault says discourse systematically forms the objects of which it speaks, constitutes objects of knowledge per se. (Examples)
• Compare two-tiered language structures:

Discourse and ideology

• Institutional sites of discourse
  • Institutions regulate, control, authorize discourse, not individuals
  • Discourse tied to sites of power and authority (e.g., classroom)
• Discourse: who speaks (identity, position) from what institutional base? about what? (discursive system and its objects)
• Discourse also constitutes "subjects" (individual persons who find their identities, their voices, the social positions as speakers or hearer, writers or readers, of certain kinds of discourse)
• Discourse tells us who we are, who can speak and who can't
• Ideology is therefore a function of discourse

Truth and Power

• Excerpt from an interview in Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (NY: Pantheon, 1980), Foucault's statement of the social and political operation of the "regime of truth" in disciplines and sciences.
  
  
• "Truth" is a function of disciplinary regimes, institutionally authoritative bodies of discourse (compare Kuhn):

At this level it's not so much a matter of knowing what external power imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification.

• Echoing Nietzsche and Marx, Foucault sees scientific battles and competition among disciplines for defining knowledge and truth as conflicts of power, not intellectual debate:

Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.

• Modern societies create regimes of truth that are enforced by power structures or the truth-generating apparatuses of society (schools, disciplines, professions, laws):

  The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power … truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it includes regular effects of power.

  'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.

  'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth. (133)