![]() He discusses theories of madness and the languange people used to talk about it. As an example, Foucault wrote a book titled History of Madness. ![]() Instead, he looks at many different sources of information, not least of which is relevant social structures. Foucault doesn’t take the perspective of any particular person. Our conceptual frameworks are universals, generally shared across our society. In the usual course we’d be hard-pressed to state any part of it clearly.įoucault thinks that because so much of our thinking lies below our conscious control, we can study these frameworks without considering any particular person. We use it because it makes our world predictable. We rarely question this knowledge because it almost always works. This describes the cultural knowledge and expectations that guide our everyday interactions, it is the set of preconceptions we use to get along in the world. I think this is close to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, habitus, which I discuss in detail here. The key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. That gives me a completely different understanding of the scale of the universe. Suddenly ti turned out that practically all those stars are galaxies, and that there are billions more not visible to the naked eye. That gives one idea of the size of the universe. When I was a kid, we looked at the night sky and saw a lot of stars. Word choices frame our discourse on every subject, and to a large extent govern the range of our thinking. The connotation of the latter is condemning. The connotation of the former is trivial offense. I might use the word thief, possibly with adjectives. As an example, defenders might use a word like scofflaw to describe Donald Trump’s misappropriation of government documents. The words we use when we think are themselves imprecise. The notion of ourselves as subjects is a construct, a framework, a formulation of a perspective and much more. Zalta (ed.),Ĭonceptual frameworks aren’t facts, like the dates of the Civil War. My source for this is an essay by Gary Guttig and Johanna Oksala, “Michel Foucault”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. ![]() He isn’t talking about the history of the Civil War as a series of battles, or speeches of leaders.įoucault’s history project begins with his idea of the archaeology of ideas, and moves to a genealogy of ideas. He’s not talking about a history in the high school sense of a sequence of events and ideas, dated, arranged, and conveying an implicit sense of linear progress. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. Maybe that will help us figure out how to implement a better future.Īt the beginning of the essay, Foucault explains his project. Surely that’s reason enough to study the book.įoucault gives us tools to examine the power relations that underlie our social development right up to today. I think it performs a valuable service by painting a different picture of the development of human societies, and thus enables us to imagine a different future. I don’t think we can find the answer in The Dawn Of Everything. Their wealth translates into power in our stuck social structure, and problems aren’t being solved. That tiny number of people don’t want us to carry out the solutions because it will reduce their wealth, and their control over their wealth. Normal people know that we have critical problems, and that we generally know how to solve them. I won’t try to define that set, but one of the central characteristics is that the preferences of a very small number of people are enforced on the rest of us. Graeber and Wengrow are trying to understand how we got stuck in this current nearly universal set of social relationships. In this sense, power is central to all human social activity. Foucault calls that an exercise of power. One of the things humans do is try to influence the actions of others. I think it’s true, as David Graeber and David Wengrow say in a section heading, that as soon as we were humans we started doing human things. I think that’s wrong in a fundamental way. They think our ancestors were made decisions communally, as if by a town meeting in Old New England. The motivation is my general sense that T he Dawn Of Everything has a pollyannaish take on decision-making in the societies they describe. In this series I will discuss The Subject And Power by Michel Foucault, Critical Inquiry, Vol.
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