Foucault's Concepts of Knowledge and Culture

Foucault's critique, then, implys the study of the past until now as that study will reveal alternatives for present attitudes and actions. At the same time, however, Foucault's critique is non prescriptive. The reader who comes to Foucault hoping to find solutions to companionable problems will be deeply disappointed. He does not discriminate the reader what his freedom will look like at one time he achieves, or even how he might go about achieving it. His purpose, to the contrary, seems to be to critique culture, past and present, in a way which will help the individual and the culture work the nature of his and its imprisonment in illusions which argon accepted by all as the most dependable realities.

Rajchman encapsulates the elements of Foucault's critique, which Rajchman defines as "the vernacular term applied to analytic philosophy" which "names the impression of unrecognized operations of power in people's lives." The elements include

struggles which . . . percent a number of common features: they are concerned with precede or concrete effects of power on people's lives and bodies; they involve unrecognized or unanalyzed operations of domination; they are not subordinated to long-range social solutions typical of an older go away outlook; they involve not simple disinformation and mystification only when the very forms and privileges of knowledge; their central issu

In Discipline and Punish, for example, Foucault writes that the difference between the "spectacle of the scaffold" (used in medieval times to terrify the populace into submission) and the " ensure" of much(prenominal) apparently harmless activities such as writing an exam, is that the fetching a test does not require physical distress or the threat of execution in order to train the individual's behavior. Administering an exam is an exercise of the power of the teacher, the state, the culture, and the "truth" which the teacher represents, everywhere the student. In this sense, says Foucault, the exam is a subtle but efficacious extension of the scaffold and the power of torturer over tortured.

The student's behavior is not in literal danger, but he is nevertheless justly concerned with pleasing the person in power, and dire results preempt occur if he fails. In the effect the test has on the student, Foucault argues, it reflects the kind of relationship between power and powerlessness which has its root in the scaffold. The student who fails to please the teacher, who fails to give the right assist (as a confessor in prison might word his acknowledgment in a way the inquisitor does not like), whitethorn fail that test, which may return to failing the class, which may lead to failing out of school, which may lead to a life with no education but much misery, poverty, etc. As Foucault writes with respect to the elimination of the scaffold:

In Power/Knowledge, for example, he writes that

A "political anatomy," which was also a "mechanics of power," was cosmos born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may mould as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies (Bartky, 1995, 375).

This power-knowledge relationship forms a prison which both(prenominal) controls the person's behavior, leads him to conform and obey,
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