'Critically discuss Michel Foucault’s concept of knowledge/power\r'

'In â€Å"The Order of Things” (1973) Michel Foucault describes an episteme as the combination of institutions, discourses, fri obliterateships and practices that organise the sort we do things, making close to actions acceptable and others unthinkable. He likewise says these processes of organisation in society atomic number 18 gener altogether in ally invisible. Critically discuss Michel Foucaults purpose of experience/ indicator with reference to Arthur millers lead â€Å"The melting pot. ” Michel Foucaults is a theorizer who demonstrates a modernist mood of sentiment.\r\nBased on unmatched(a) of David Morleys definitions of the postmodern phenomenon being â€Å"a general anatomy of heathenish sensibility and a mode of thought, special(a)ly discriminate to analyzing the period” (Morley: 1996, p. 50), Foucault could be considered a postmodernist and a poststructuralist. However, some may consider his earlier prunes, exchangeable The Order o f Things, to be structuralist as it may redeem possibly reflected a lack of distinction at the time it was written and received. Rather than narrating the nature of reality, Foucault mean to give interpretations of a variety of structures of companionship in any case referred to as episteme.\r\nArthur Millers film â€Å"The Crucible” searchs issues that be reduplicate to Foucaults thoughts of business office and intimacy, however, Miller uses actual historical yetts as the background for his modernist nouss. The c oncept of knowledge and king explored in Foucaults text The Order of Things sack up be critically analysed with reference to more contemporary achievement of Arthur Miller, allowing ch adenosine monophosphateion to draw distinctions between Foucaults theories and the concepts of collective evil, personal con scientific discipline, guilt, cut and redemption explored in the film.\r\nIn The Order of Things, Foucault arse give up the philosophy of t he subject without depending on judgments from accessible issues in society, which, according to his testify analysis, be confined the modern form of knowledge. Foucault had studied the form of knowledge that appears with the lay claim of rescuing the intelligible from e genuinelything empirical, accidental, and particular, and that becomes especially adapted as medium of originator in particular on account of this â€Å"pretended separation of validity from genesis” (Kelly: 1995, p. 82).\r\nThis lack of empiricism in Foucaults thoughts reflects a modernist federal agency of thinking. The article â€Å"Conclusion: Speaking as De enjoiny Sheriff” by Osborne and Lewis, has evidence of a uniform modernist access code to thinking and lack of empirical theories. It is itsy-bitsy focused on the psyche that what ever is h starst should be measured; instead it makes statements and develops an analysis base on sciences or theory. An piecenikin is when it sugge sts that â€Å"a more historically aw ar approach to thinking virtually communication in Australia would be a multipurpose place to start” (Lewis & Osborne: 2001, p212).\r\nThis modernist approach to thinking astir(predicate) knowledge determines â€Å"the ensemble of rules according to which the rightful(a) and the false are shed light ond and specific personal effects of power attached to the true” (Kelly: 1995, p. 82). At the starting time of The Order of Things, Foucault claims for a will that consists of the true for all times and all societies: â€Å"Every society has its political science of truth, its ‘general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes it function as true. ” This ideology is reflected in Arthur Millers film â€Å"The Crucible” which is hang in a small town, Salem.\r\nThe inviolate colony becomes consumed by certain beliefs and certain truths which include their certain(p) fait h in God and the earthly concern of charmes, witch cunning and the devil. The Order of Things is the story of the â€Å"return of talking to” which explains the fundamental position of literature in our market-gardening. Ours is a period in which words is taken to be at the source of all thought, and this is what highlights the importance of modernist writing. speech communication is â€Å"the strict unfolding of Western ending in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the commencement ceremony of the nineteenth nose candy” (Rajch valet: 1985, p. 3).\r\nThe significance of language is also reflected in ‘The Crucible when tail end Proctor refuses to sign a false excuse, claiming â€Å"you can non take away my name”. He believed this would have happened by subscribe the confession onto paper, epitomising the impact that language has when printed on paper. In The Order of Things, Foucault paints a picture of modernist culture in which in that location is no use of man and science is no longer independent or universal. whole scientific, aesthetic, and moral problems are reduced to problems of language, and languages have no warrant or instituteation beyond themselves.\r\nRajchman states that â€Å" wrangle becomes the limits of our being. It is nevertheless in transgressive writing that these limits are transcended; writers are the heroes of our age. This is a picture of what I call ‘post-Enlightenment literary culture. ‘” Many literary modernists, including Rajchman and Foucault, tell the story of how language had returned as the fundamental problem of our period, and our literacy culture which thus â€Å"finds itself” to be telling its own history. Foucault claims that â€Å"literature in our day… s a phenomenon whose necessity has its grow in a vast configuration in which the whole structure of our thought and our knowledge is traced” (Rajchman: 1985, p. 25). \r\nIn The Order of Things, it is clear that Foucault is hostile to the culture that reifies Man, and urges the proofreader to embrace the post-humanist age he foresees. Foucault rejects the traditional (Enlightenment) idea of progress and science, instead he constructs his history of knowledge with a lack of connection, and his literary history contains a hidden teleology giving way to immediate link up to â€Å"The Crucible”.\r\nStuart Hall and Bram Gieben describe the Enlightenment idea of progress as â€Å"the idea that the natural and companionable condition of human beings could be improved, by the applications programme of science and reason” (Hall & Gieben: 1992, p. 22). â€Å". Both Miller and Foucault are modernist thinkers as they reject this Enlightenment concepts of progress, for example, the film â€Å"The Crucible” does not end with an improved affectionate condition and happiness instead it comes to an abrupt end by the death of a centra l character and hero. In The Order of Things we find an attempt to â€Å"de-anthropologise” the concept of liberty.\r\nIn â€Å"The Crucible”, John Proctor found freedom in the form of death. By not giving up his name in the confession he was condemned to be hung. However, his knowledge of what the real truth was allowed him to be free in his own spirit of the word. This relates to Foucaults idea of power that he describes as â€Å"a way in which certain actions modify others” (OFarrell: 1989, p. 119). only(prenominal) if because of the freedom of the acting subjects, no matter what frenzy or seduction actions that make up power choose to behave, the object of power can finally escape and refuse power even if only through and through death.\r\nThis idea was taken from Foucault who said â€Å"the exercise of power may produce as oft acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead and shelter itself puke whatever threats it can believe. In itse lf the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a consent which implicitly is renewable” (Foucault: 1977, p. 228). OFarrell and Foucaults ideas are epitomized in the film ‘The Crucible, when John Proctor refused to sign the confession or in this case refused power, he was set free even if it were to be through death.\r\nThese power relationships were then abolished once the subject was freed and hence at that place was no realistic point of reversal hence the film was labored to an abrupt end. Foucault also believes there is no disbelief that our language, our work, and our bodies might determine the description of our actions and our world in ship canal we do not realise and cant change. However, there are many reasons why this theory should be questioned, an example existing in the film â€Å"The Crucible”.\r\nThe four-year-old girls who were commitd of witchery manifested power everyplace their bodies and their language in distinguish to convince th e courts and an entire village of the existence of ‘their world and the fact they could see the devil. in all this was done in a quest to grasp up their actions that was dancing naked around a fire in the forest. This idea creates a contradiction in terms to Foucaults theory. However, Foucault also says that our problem becomes â€Å"not the possibility of knowledge but the possibility of a primary construe” (Rajchman: 1985, p. 13) which indeed was true in the case of the young girls of the film. In The Order Of Things, Foucault challenges new intellectual belles-lettres in regard to the change in Utopian thought. In the classical period, utopia was the pipe dream of an ideal runner in which everything would perfectly fit into Tables of Representation.\r\nIn Foucaults cause he states that â€Å"The gigantic dream of an end of report is the utopia of casual systems of thought just as the dream of the worlds beginnings was the utopia of the classifying systems of thoughts. In â€Å"The Crucible” the idea of witch craft challenges this world of utopia and one can question who has the position to classify utopia, Miller or Foucault? Foucaults ideas challenge many of the ideas that run through â€Å"The Crucible” as he wishes not only to â€Å"de anthropologise” any nineteenth century utopian imaginations, dissociate our hopes of ever realising meaning and separate our freedom from philosophical theories about our nature. frequently of Foucaults work is contradictory and this confuses anyone trying to analyse meaning in his writings.\r\nIn The Order of Things he had looked at the way in which the human subject is defined through scientific discourse as a working, living, verbalise individual (OLeary: 2002, p. 59). However, Foucault deals with a collective and a great deal is to do with his unconscious ideas of perceptions; individuals play some no role in his work. He is not concerned with the discoveries of scienti sts or other philosophers. However, it is difficult to imagine the human sciences without specific individuals.\r\nThus, Foucault uses individuals such as Ricardo, Cuvier and Bopp in his work, however they â€Å"are not depicted as real people, no reference is made to their lives and little consideration is given to the controversies surrounding their ideas, since these issues are regarded as strainingly surface phenomena” (Spier: 1983, p. 166). As a result, the dependability of Foucaults work can be questioned because a all important(p) part of critical thinking and analysis when investigate other theorists work is their background and what may be the reasons behind their specific way of thinking.\r\nHowever, Foucault justifies himself explaining that he â€Å"tries to explore scientific discourse not from the point of cod of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of billet of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such disc ourse” (Spier: 1983, p. 166). Spier raises an interesting critic of Foucault obstetrical delivery his status as an author-subject into question. â€Å"If language rather than man speaks, as he claims, and if the statement â€Å"I am writing” is a contradiction comparable to â€Å"I am lying”, then who is the author of the order of things? (Spier: 1983, p. 167).\r\nThis raises the question, is Foucault a universal voice of our time or is he merely disquisition for himself. If he is speaking for himself as he suggests, then does he claim that what he is saying is a lie? Much of Foucaults work makes contradictory statements and thus is not unavoidably reliable when looking for truths, instead his writing is the ontogenesis process of his thoughts and is oftentimes experimental so should be read with an open mind and thought about critically.\r\nFoucaults analyses may be regarded as a parting to an understanding of the historical conditions of possibility of the human sciences and their kindly and political effects. The underlying connection within Foucaults work is the assessment of the relation between forms of rationality and forms of power, or of the relation between the emergence of particular forms of knowledge and the exercise of specific forms of power. Foucault believes that power is exercised upon the dominant as well as on the dominated and that there is a process of self-formation or auto-colonisation involved (Smart: 1983, p. 4).\r\nIf we put this theory into practice within â€Å"The Crucible” one can suggest that Foucaults idea of power is sort of nai??ve. In â€Å"The Crucible” the young girls were from the dominant culture in Salem and exercised their power over the take down classes (or the dominated). However, there was no retaliation and so power was not exercised onto the girls (the dominant) in any case. Thus, Foucault theory is merely a generalisation and not appropriate as a rule on the whole. Powe r relations, Foucault claims are â€Å"‘intentional and ‘non-subjective…\r\nThey are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives” (Dreyfus & Rabinow: 1982, p. 187). This idea states that at the local level there is often a high degree of conscious finale making, planning and plotting. Foucault refers to this as the local cynicism of power (Dreyfus & Rabinow: 1982, p. 187). In â€Å"The Crucible” the young girls execute power over the village through their conscious actions to encourage themselves, many were young and naive, and fear was driving them to accuse the innocent.\r\nTheir actions would ultimately lead the execution of innocent and see members of the town. Some of the elder girls such as the cope Abigail knew very well of her actions and used strategically plotted methods of power. The following phrase by Foucault epitomises power very accurately when i n relation to these girls from â€Å"The Crucible”; â€Å" lot know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but dont know is what they do does” (Dreyfus & Rabinow: 1982, p. 187). This theory on power is an example of how both Foucault and Miller may have been influenced by other modernist thinkers such as Max Weber, a modernist thinker.\r\nHe believed that power is the ”chance of a man or a number of men to make headway their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are take part in the action” (Max Weber, Basic Terms-The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology: 1942) In much of Foucaults writing there are probable contradictions especially in this return to the traditional philosophic view or Enlightenment idea that description and interpretation ultimately must correspond to the way things really are. However, Foucault does admit to his somewhat unreal approach to writing. â€Å"I am fully aware that I h ave never written anything other than fiction.\r\nFor all that, I would want to say that they were outside the truth. It seems believable to me to make fictions work within truth, to introduce truth-effects within a fictional discourse… ” With this is mind one can say that Foucaults writing is still illuminating and helpful in its own right and reveals more about society and its practices than about ultimate reality. In The Order of Things, Foucault does describe an episteme as the combination of institutions, discourses, knowledge and practices that organise the way we do things, making some actions acceptable rather than unthinkable.\r\nIn many ways Foucaults concepts of knowledge and power are contradictory to his own existing theories. While many of Foucaults ideas are latitude with Arthur Millers film, â€Å"The Crucible”, some of his ideas reject Millers way of thinking. This non-uniformity in Foucaults analysis can however be justified, because it is har d to believe that in any given culture and at any given moment, there is only one episteme that defines the possibility of all knowledge, power relations, the concepts of freedom and truth, whether it be in a theory or demonstrated in practice or action.\r\n'