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Recommended: Power in foucault
Is Michel Foucault a historian or not? At the beginning of the analysis on Foucault’s historical analysis, what should be acknowledged is that none of Foucault’s works refer to his previous ones and every work is based upon a new construction of theory and method which shakes the standard norms of history writing and put his methods under suspicion by some historians. On the other hand, many others favor his work; because of Foucault’s specific approach, Gutting calls him as an ‘intellectual artisan’ who was an expert of producing intellectual equivalents of material objects and especially three kinds of them which are history, theory and myth. (Gutting 1996, 3-6) Thomas Flynn answers this question by claiming that Foucault’s all major works are histories of a …show more content…
(Flynn 1996, 28) One important aspect of his analysis that distinguishes him from the predecessors is about power. According to Foucault, power is not one-centered, and one-sided which refers to a top to bottom imposition caused by political hierarchy. On the contrary, power is diffusive, which is assumed to be operate in micro-physics, should not be taken as a pejorative sense; contrarily it is a positive one as ‘every exercise of power is accompanied by or gives rise to resistance opens a space for possibility and freedom in any content’. (Flynn 1996, 35) Moreover, Foucault does not describe the power relation as one between the oppressor or the oppressed, rather he says that these power relations are interchangeable in different discourses. These power relations are infinite; therefore we cannot claim that there is an absolute oppressor or an absolute oppressed in these power relations.
Orientalism, which became famous as a term after Edward Said’s book written in 1978, explains a power relation between the Orient and the Occident inspiring from the Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and
Orientalism is the misconception by Westerners of foreign people from the “Orient.” It focuses on the differences between the East and the West, and it serves as a justification for imperialism because the West is depicted as superior to the East. Argo, a movie about the Iran-American conflict of 1979, is primarily set in the Middle East where all the inhabitants are wrongly depicted as full of mindless rage, screaming, irrational, and reasonless mobs. In 1891, French economist and journalist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, stated about the colonies of the Orient “a great part of the world is inhabited by barbarian tribes or savages, some given over to wars without end and to brutal customs, and others knowing so little of the arts and being so little accustomed to work and to invention that they do not know how to exploit their land and its natural riches. They live in little groups, impoverished and scattered.” Argo having strikingly similar depictions of Eastern people over a hundred years later raises the question “has the Western perspective of the East changed?” ...
Foucault capitalizes that power and knowledge contribute to the discourse of sex; he discusses how people in power controlled this discourse to repress sex entirely. Foucault talks about the repressive hypothesis in his book. The repressive hypothesis states that whoever holds the power, also controls the discourse on sexuality. Specifically, those in power, according to the repressive hypothesis, exercise to repress the discussion of sex. In addition, Foucault comments that knowledge represents power. Whoever has the power can dictate the language of the population, thus this causes powerful people to also regulate the knowledge of the population. Although Foucault does not agree with every aspect that the repressive hypothesis exclaims, he agrees about the timing of when people started to repress sex. With rise of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century, a rise in tighter control about sex also took place. Foucault stated that the discourse of sex remained
In this essay I argue that it is Michel Foucault Cynic parrhesia that is more adept or able to create an atmosphere where we are only forced to ask ourselves to reexamine our political responsibility within our society. In Foucault’s Freedom of Speech given at the University of California he discusses this topic of parrhesia in great length describing what it meant to the Greeks and how they interpreted it using examples from them when used in such little texts. After describing this in detail with examples Foucault later describes that it can lead to more than just that that we can see two forms of parrhesia in Cynic and Socratic the second coming from excerpts in Socrates however it is the Cynic for me that is more interesting and riskier form that can help us understand this further.
“A picture is a poem without words” – Horace, the purpose of art is to reveal the sensations of life but also allows humans to express their emotions and views on certain aspects. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter throughout the 1980’s who was known for his style. He was African American artist and musician that was part of the SAMO. The SAMO was a graffiti group that wrote epigrams. While growing up, one of Basquiat inspirations that encouraged him to paint was his diverse cultural heritage. Basquiat was a creative self-taught artist who thought outside of the box when it came to painting. Most of the pieces he made were a collaboration of different ideas and constructed them together into a collage. During the 1980’s Basquiat’s art used the human figure to portray Minimalism and Conceptualism. His target market that were in many of his pieces was on suggestive dichotomies that focused on the lower class versus the higher class. Even though Basquiat work was remarkable, he was criticized and faced some challenges among his journey because of the symbols and words that were used his paintings. Despite the criticism,
With a close reading of his piece along with that Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History and Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History this text will briefly explore whether, as contented by Dubois, the Haitian Revolution indeed presents an important case for the history of human
...easily controls and manipulates the way individuals behave. Although there are no true discourses about what is normal or abnormal to do in society, people understand and believe these discourses to be true or false, and that way they are manipulated by powers. This sexual science is a form of disciplinary control that imprisons and keeps society under surveillance. It makes people feel someone is looking at them and internally become subjective to the rules and power of society. This is really the problem of living in modern society. In conclusion, people live in a society, which has created fear on people of society, that makes people feel and be responsible for their acts. Discourses are really a form in which power is exercised to discipline societies. Foucault’s argument claims discourses are a form of subjection, but this occurs externally not internally.
Golder, B. 2009. Foucault, anti-humanism and human rights. Published online by the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Underdale, SA, 2009.
...lidated or simply rational or simply generally accepted” (61). This maintains that something known by one may not be considered knowledge if it does not follow the conventions of the knowledge of the time, those in power, or if the thing known does not coerce people into believing it, it may not be considered knowledge at all. This drives home the point that all knowledge is subjective to a time, power, person, or place. Foucault expresses, again, that this is not necessarily troubling because “nothing can function as a mechanism of power if it is not deployed according to procedures, instruments, mean and objectives” and that means that all knowledge would be meaningless if it did not have power. Knowledge has to have power to exist as it does in the same way that critique must exist with our current means of governing in order for governing and critique to exist.
Problems with Foucault: Historical accuracy (empiricism vs. Structuralism)-- Thought and discourse as reality? Can we derive intentions from the consequences of behavior? Is a society without social control possible?
He argues that world history should not be viewed as separate, unconnected cultures of east and west, but rather that they were all connected in multitudes of ways and must be studied as such. Pointing out the inadequate ideal of separating the world into two sections which are not equal in geography, culture, population, or history itself, he instead poses a solution to the world history viewpoint: Studying the world through its interrelations between cultures and geographical locations. Hodgson’s proposed view of large scale history not only makes sense theoretically, but logically as it proves through the pages that the history or the world cannot simply be divided, but must be studied as a whole to be truly
Theory: Michel Foucault argues a number of points in relation to power and offers definitions that are directly opposed to more traditional liberal and Marxist theories of power. Foucault believed that power is never in any one person's hands, it does not show itself in any obvious manner but rather as something that works its way into our imaginations and serves to constrain how we act.... ... middle of paper ... ... Giddons, A. (2007). The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'.
Sarah Snyder Professor Feola Gov’t 416: Critical Theory Assignment #2 On Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” Michel Foucault may be regarded as the most influential twentieth-century philosopher on the history of systems of thought. His theories focus on the relationship between power and knowledge, and how such may be used as a form of social control through institutions in society. In “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Foucault addresses the development of the nineteenth-century penal regime, which completely transformed the operation of the traditional penal justice system.
“Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse compartments may be realized.” (Foucault)
At this point we can determine the purpose of Foucault’s question, “what is critique”? Foucault’s definition of critique provides a tool to find cracks in power-knowledge relationships by analyzing the genealogy of a power knowledge relationship. Foucault states “we have to deal with something whose stability, deep rootedness and foundation is never such that we cannot in one way or another envisage, if not its disappearance, then at least identifying by what and from what its disappearance is possible” (65). Foucault believes that using his method of critique a power and knowledge relationship is not permanent. Questioning and knowledge can be used to remove the leash from authority.
This essay will analyze and critique Michel Foucault’s (1984) essay The Use of Pleasure in order to reveal certain internal weaknesses it contains and propose modifications that would strengthen his reading of sexuality as a domain of moral self-formation. In order to do so, it will present a threefold critique of his work. Firstly, it will argue that that his focus on solely the metric of pleasure divorced from its political manifestations underemphasizes state power as a structuring principle of sexuality. Secondly, it will posit that his attention to classical morality privileges written works by male elites and fails to account for the subtexts that would demonstrate other forms of morality. Finally, it will argue that the nature of actors’ resistance to moral codes, explicated through Butler’s concept of iterability and signification, is an important factor that should also be considered. As a result of this critique, this essay