Naxos
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03:01:04 am on enero 10, 2012 |
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Thanks for your reply. I want to emphasize that my previous comment was more like indicating the problem of reification when we refer to ‘power’, that’s why I brought the importance of knowledge in Foucault’s work. I think that Foucault’s work should be considered retrospectively, say like implying the genealogical view -the one he implied himself to his own work-. So the first Foucault is fundamental, from the History of madness to his Nietzsche, Genealogy and History, including of course his other master pieces, mostly The Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Order of Discourse. In all this period, which endured more than 10 years, the idea of knowledge is his prime concern: these 5 oeuvres are Foucault’s vertebral column and show its own consistency and continuity. Though it was somehow a latent topic, it was not but until The History of Sexuality I (the will to knowledge), that he would theorize about power. But the things he actually did with the notion of knowledge are the base of all this further theorization.
What he did with the notion, methodologically and epistemologically speaking, is a bit more than what you have referred, so my present comment would try to complement and recall the importance of this aspect in that respect. In the Order of things, for instance, it is just admirable how he extracts the notion of ‘episteme’ by tracing a transversal line between linguistics, economy and biology, constituting the ‘knowledge of the epoch’ that he analyses etc. In this sense, the notion of ‘episteme’ means knowledge as a sedimentation in history, or in other words, a stratification. In Archeology of knowledge he extends all this implication in terms of discourse and the importance of enunciation, where ‘truth’ is just a vector allowed by the sedimented knowledge of determined epoch (the episteme) etc. In the Order of discourse he synthesizes systematically all these historical implications of knowledge etc, but it is until Surveiller et punir that he makes the analytical passage from ‘knowledge’ to ‘power’ -as he focus his research in the disciplinary mechanisms (institutional) that form and mold the bodies etc. It is not a discontinuity at all that his take on sexuality would imply power in a more specific way than knowledge, but then again, for him ‘knowledge is power’ (or to better put in terms of sexuality, ‘knowing’ is power’ etc). So, the notion of knowledge is the magma with which Foucault worked until the end of his days: is not the care of the self implying the knowledge of ourselves, the exercise of courage and frankness?
All this roughly put, of course, but with this regard, I truly think that the least we can do while we want to refer to ‘power’ in terms of Foucault, is to background it admittedly to all what he did with the notion of knowledge (and to have clear in which sense they are related or mutually implied): a notion which is not a bad parameter to account the trajectory of his thought within all his consistencies, continuities, fractures and crises: a measure that would avoid the reification of the word ‘power’ in our own politics-related theorizations.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Power: Breaking the Liberal Domination-Resistance Paradigm
- 10 January 2012 at 1:58 am
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