Michel Foucault - French philosopher, ideas, social, philologist and critic.

Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, ideas, social, philologist and critic. Histheories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they areused as a form of social control through societal institutions.Born in Poitiers, France to an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educatedat the Lycée Henri-IV and then the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, The History of Madness. After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he produced two more significant publications, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things, which displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories were examples of a historiographical technique Foucault was developing he called archaeology which he would later give a comprehensive account of in The

Archaeology of Knowledge. From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis, Tunisia before returning to France, where he became head of the philosophy department at the new experimental university of Paris VIII. In 1970 he was admitted to the Collège de France, membership of which he retained till his death. He also became active in a number of left-wing groups involved in anti-racist campaigns, anti-human rights abuses movements, and the struggle for penal reform. He went on to publish ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’, Discipline and Punish, and ‘The History of Sexuality’, his so-called genealogies which emphasized the role power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease, with his

partner Daniel Defert founding the AIDES charity in his memory. Foucault rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.

The Archaeology of Knowledge

The Archaeology of Knowledge is a 1969 book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.It is a methodological and historiographical treatise promoting what Foucault calls "archaeology" or the "archaeological method", an analytical method he implicitly used in his previous works Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It is Foucault's only explicitly methodological work. The premise of the book is that systems of thought and knowledge ("epistemes" or "discursive formations") are governed by rules (beyond those of grammar and logic) which operate in the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. Most prominently in its Introduction and Conclusion, the book also becomes a philosophical treatment and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic structural readings of history and philosophy, portraying continuous narratives as naïve ways of projecting our own consciousness onto the past, thus being exclusive and excluding. Characteristically, Foucault demonstrates his political motivations, personal projects and preoccupations, and, explicitly and implicitly, the many influences that inform the discourse of the time. Theory Foucault argues that the contemporary study of the history of ideas, although it targets moments of transition between historical worldviews, is ultimately dependent on continuities that break down under close inspection. The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes of knowledge, but the assumption that those modes exist as wholes fails to do justice to the complexities of discourse. Foucault argues that "discourses" emerge and transform not according to a developing series of narticulated, common worldviews, but according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships, which are defined as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified themes.

Foucault's defines a "discourse" as a 'way of speaking'. Thus, his method studies

only the set of 'things said' in their emergences and transformations, without any

speculation about the overall, collective meaning of those statements, and carries his

insistence on discourse-in-itself down to the most basic unit of things said: the

statement (énoncé). During most of Archaeology, Foucault argues for and against

various notions of what are inherent aspects of a statement, without arriving at a

comprehensive definition. He does, however, argue that a statement is the rules which

render an expression (that is, a phrase, a proposition, or a speech act) discursively

meaningful. This concept of meaning differs from the concept of signification: Though an

expression is signifying, for instance "The gold mountain is in California"; it may

nevertheless be discursively meaningless and therefore have no existence within a

certain discourse. For this reason, the "statement" is an existence function for discursive

meaning. Being rules, the "statement" has a special meaning in the Archaeology: it

is not the expression itself, but the rules which make an expression discursively

meaningful. These rules are not the syntax and semantics that makes an expression

signifying. It is additional rules. In contrast to structuralists, Foucault demonstrates

that the semantic and syntactic structures do not suffice to determine the discursive

meaning of an expression. Depending on whether or not it complies with these rules of

discursive meaning, a grammatically correct phrase may lack discursive meaning or,

inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence may be discursively meaningful - even

meaningless letters (e.g. "QWERTY") may have discursive meaning. Thus, the meaning

of expressions depends on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field

of discourse; the discursive meaning of an expression is reliant on the succession of

statements that precede and follow it. In short, the "statements" Foucault analysed are

not propositions, phrases, or speech acts. Rather, "statements" constitute a network of

rules establishing which expressions are discursively meaningful, and these rules are

the preconditions for signifying propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have

discursive meaning. However, "statements" are also 'events', because, like other rules,

they appear (or disappear) at some time.

Foucault's analysis then turns towards the organized dispersion of statements,

which he calls discursive formations. Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining

is only one possible procedure, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of

analysing discourse or render them as invalid.

Foucault concludes Archaeology with responses to criticisms from a hypothetical

critic (which he anticipates will occur after his book is read).Gilles Deleuze describes it

as, "the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities."