Foucault, Michel, & Gordon, Colin. (1980). Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (1st American ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Two Lectures:
He begins by outlining some of his research projects, and moves to identifying an “increasing vulnerability to criticism of things” (80). “So, the main point to be gleaned from these events of the last fifteen years, their predominant feature, is the local character of criticism” (81).
Foucault also identifies a “return to knowledge”, that he defines at, “a fact that we have repeatedly encountered…an entire thematic to the effect that it is not theory but life that matters not knowledge but reality, not books but money…there is something else to which we are witness, and which we might describe as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (81). These subjugated knowledges (both erudite knowledge and popular knowledge) all deal with, “historical knowledge of struggles” (83).
This leads to the emergence of a genealogical approach to research. “Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make sue of this knowledge tactically today” (83). “It is not therefore via an empiricism that the genealogical project unfolds…What it really does it to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchies and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a more careful or exact form of science. They are pre3cisely anti-sciences” (83). “…a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse” (85). “If we were to characterize it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be there tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play” (85). “What is at stake in all these genealogies is the nature of this power which has surged into view in all its violence, aggression and absurdity in the course of the last forty years, contemporaneously, that is, with the collapse of Fascism and the decline of Stalinism” (87).
Remaining in the first lecture, there is an extended discussion of the nature of power. Power is examined as a construct of economy, and asked whether or not this is not constraining. Power is not simply modeled on the commodity (89), but Foucault wonders how one can conduct a non-economic study of power. Power has been historically seen as a tool of repression, “…repression no longer occupies the place that oppression occupies in relation to the contract, that is, it is not abuse, but is, on the contrary, the mere effect of the continuation of a relation of domination” (92).
In the second lecture, Foucault begins by examine the relations of power, truth and right in the relation to one another like a triangle. “My problem is…: What rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? (93). “There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association” (93).
Foucault then moves onto the concept of sovereignty. “When we say that sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies, what we mean basically is that the essential function of the discourse and techniques of right has been to efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present that latter at the level of appearance under two different aspects: on the one hand, as the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other, as the legal obligation to obey it” (95).
He then promotes five different methodological precautions to his study, which he summarizes as follows: “I would say that we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty…but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of their localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses” (102).
Foucault then goes on to talk about the rupture in the ways in which power has been enforced. It is through surveillance (104), it is the greatest invention of bourgeois society (105), it is crucial for the development of capitalism (105) and it involves the creation of a “society of normalization” (107).
