Philosophy #2 Introduction to Foucault
Part 1 of this series on Foucault:
https://steemit.com/foucault/@liketheboys/philosophy-1-introduction-to-foucault
As a true millennial, my concentration levels are pathetic. I buzz around big thoughts about all the things I want to do, essentially achieving nothing. In an effort move forward through the swamp of my own laziness, these posts will end whenever the ability to hold my attention does too. This is likely to be a collection of a lot of quotes and notes. Just collecting my thoughts really….
This post will start to look at little more at an overview of the works of Michel Foucault. Christopher Chitty, writing for The New Inquiry, categorises Foucault's career into three parts:
- The early phase is book-ended by, “Order of Things” and “Birth of the Clinic”. Chitty says this is, “mostly concerned with establishing the epistemological breaks between successive systems of knowledge, the impassable gaps between them.”
- His middle phase concerns the period of the books “Discipline and Punish” and “History of Sexuality I”, this is defined by Chitty as, “concerned with the more explicitly political theme of how power transformed systems of knowledge, focusing on figures such as criminal delinquents and sexual deviants.”
- Finally, Foucault’s later period, “is said to have retreated from these political commitments to the ethical thematic of ‘care of the self’”, and is made of the work of the second and third volumes of “History of Sexuality”.
In The New York Times article, “The Order of Things”(1971) George Steiner summarised, “[Foucault] has produced mono-graphic studies of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness from the 17th to the 19th centuries. These books took for their pivot the conception that mental health and illness are variables, conditioned by history and the model on which a given society operates. Sanity and madness determine each other in a constant dialectical reciprocity.”
“Order of Things” as explained by Steiner, “sets out to provide ‘an archaeology of the human sciences,’ or more simply, an account of how the organising models of human perception and knowledge have altered between the Renaissance and the end of the 19th century.” Foucault explores this by focusing on biology, linguistics and economics. These are selected because of a relationship between the organic and the man-made. Steiner says, “Understand their idiom, […] and you will obtain systematic insights into the ways in which Western culture has structured both its image of the personal self and of reality.”
Foucault’s Theory of The Episteme
Wikipedia (lol thanks) defines Foucault’s use of “The Episteme” as used, “in a specialised sense in his work ‘The Order of Things’ to mean the historical, but non-temporal, a priori which grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch.”
“In Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things he describes episteme as: 'However, if in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.'”
In later works he would acknowledge that several episteme may exist and interact with each other.
On the “Theory & Philosophy” channel on YouTube there is a video called “Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things” (Part 1). Here is a transcript I found interesting.
Speaker 1: “He says in the preface how man is a contemporary mentioner, it’s a new invention. That’s how he opens the book. […]
Speaker 2: That’s the real hook I think that when he was writing this, he was like, ‘this is what’s gonna move books.’ Is saying that man’s a recent invention. Which is kind of what the books about. But—
Speaker 1: -- Yeah, takes on like a thousand other things as well.
Speaker 2: It’s a bit theatrical to state it like that… That’s only part of what he’s talking about in the book.
In this YouTube video they discuss the chapter “Las Meninas”, mentioning that it was originally titled “Les Suivants”, meaning “The Following”, (could also be translated as “The Next”) which was then changed to the Spanish “Las meninas” “maids-in-waiting”.
It’s interesting to note these changes in translation, “The Order of Things” in French is, “Les Mots et les Choses” – “Words and Things”.
Reading list:
https://thenewinquiry.com/foucaults-addendum/
https://www.nytimes.com/1971/02/28/archives/the-order-of-things-an-archaeology-of-the-human-sciences-by-michel.html