With regard to Foucault’s idea, I found that it was pretty difficult to grasp his whole idea by simply looking at these 2 articles, that are, the excerptions from The Order of Things of 1966 and Power/Knowledge of 1976, but from observing the ideas across within these 10 years, it became clear to see what Foucault was trying to establish, namely the genealogies of knowledges by conducting an archaeological methods in order to elaborate upon the relationship between power and knowledge.
Speaking of the human sciences which Foucault tried to analyse in The Order of Things, we can see Foucault’s interest in observing how episteme, the way he defines for knowledges of sciences, being the strategic apparatus permitting which are acceptable within a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. According to him, the episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of ‘what may’ from ‘what may not’ be characterised as scientific. In The Order of Things he describes episteme as: in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. This will be further elaborated from the aspect of the relationship between power and knowledge.
Prior to going through The Order of Things, which was attempting to conduct an archaeological research upon the human sciences, I’d like to briefly introduce what the human sciences are. Human science is the study and interpretation of the experiences, activities, constructions, and artefacts associated with human beings. In short, the study of the human sciences is to expand and enlighten the human being’s knowledge of their existence, and its interrelationship with other species and systems. It is the study of human phenomena. The study of the human experience is historical and current in nature. It requires the evaluation and interpretation of the historic human experience and the analysis of current human activity to gain an understanding of human phenomena and to project the outlines of human evolution. Thus, it refers to the investigation of human life and activities via a phenomenological methodology that acknowledges the validity of both sensory and psychological experience.
Developing in the modern age as Foucault defined, he is concerned with how it became to replace the position that positivism had occupied in the epistemological field. Back to the outset of this book, Foucault first pointed out a main theme about the classifications of similitude and differences, in which there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical than the process of establishing an order among things. He then submitted that a ‘system of elements’ is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. The elements include: a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold to determine whether there is a difference or a similitude.
In terms of an order of things, between the fundamental code of a culture and those scientific theories or philosophical interpretations, he further offered an intermediary domain that he held as “a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, free itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones.” Foucault, that is to say, was arguing that the conditions of discourse may have changed age by age, from one period’s episteme to another, linking to space and time a culture is located in.
Here, I would like to mention another thing, that is, many critics against Foucault for notion of episteme can only be applied to the West. However, in my opinion, Foucault had made it clear at the first place that any study conducted through a genealogical method can be constrained by the conditions of time and space. In fact, there should not be a generality as Foucault had always done for those which are marginalized in a society upon one period of time. That is, Foucault’s notion of episteme means the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch.
With respect to the methodology he attempted to describe, Foucault demonstrates parallels in the development of 3 fields, linguistics, biology, and economics, since the Classical age in 17th century. In subsequent writings, he made it clear that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time, being parts of various power-knowledge systems. Here, defining archaeology as “an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted,” Foucault put it in this way that the episteme in which knowledge grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility.
On the archaeological level, Foucault see that the system of positivities was transformed in a wholesale fashion at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. “Not because ‘reason’ made any progress, it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding was profoundly altered.” Foucault denied the saying that perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, and ideas transforms themselves and actively modifies one another, because historians have never yet explained upon this. In contrast, archaeology attempts to define systems of simultaneity and the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity, by addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, its configurations, and the mode of being of the things.
Observing from the entire change in ideology of all the knowledges from the Classical age to the 19th century onward, Foucault made a comment on ‘human sciences’, somehow ironically and pessimistically, in my view: “Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet 2 centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form;” as he described how a culture experiences the similitude of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered, in short, ‘a history of resemblance’.
Comparing this with his previous studies on madness in 1964, we can see that Foucault had a tendency to distinguishing the Other from the Same, namely the distinction from the similitude, namely the so-called ‘the order of things’. Quoted from him, “From the limit-experience of the Other to the constituent forms of medical knowledge, and from the latter to the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge, or rather the threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our modernity. It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.”
Speaking of the human sciences which Foucault tried to analyse in The Order of Things, we can see Foucault’s interest in observing how episteme, the way he defines for knowledges of sciences, being the strategic apparatus permitting which are acceptable within a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. According to him, the episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of ‘what may’ from ‘what may not’ be characterised as scientific. In The Order of Things he describes episteme as: in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. This will be further elaborated from the aspect of the relationship between power and knowledge.
Prior to going through The Order of Things, which was attempting to conduct an archaeological research upon the human sciences, I’d like to briefly introduce what the human sciences are. Human science is the study and interpretation of the experiences, activities, constructions, and artefacts associated with human beings. In short, the study of the human sciences is to expand and enlighten the human being’s knowledge of their existence, and its interrelationship with other species and systems. It is the study of human phenomena. The study of the human experience is historical and current in nature. It requires the evaluation and interpretation of the historic human experience and the analysis of current human activity to gain an understanding of human phenomena and to project the outlines of human evolution. Thus, it refers to the investigation of human life and activities via a phenomenological methodology that acknowledges the validity of both sensory and psychological experience.
Developing in the modern age as Foucault defined, he is concerned with how it became to replace the position that positivism had occupied in the epistemological field. Back to the outset of this book, Foucault first pointed out a main theme about the classifications of similitude and differences, in which there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical than the process of establishing an order among things. He then submitted that a ‘system of elements’ is indispensable for the establishment of even the simplest form of order. The elements include: a definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be affected, and, lastly, the threshold to determine whether there is a difference or a similitude.
In terms of an order of things, between the fundamental code of a culture and those scientific theories or philosophical interpretations, he further offered an intermediary domain that he held as “a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, free itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones.” Foucault, that is to say, was arguing that the conditions of discourse may have changed age by age, from one period’s episteme to another, linking to space and time a culture is located in.
Here, I would like to mention another thing, that is, many critics against Foucault for notion of episteme can only be applied to the West. However, in my opinion, Foucault had made it clear at the first place that any study conducted through a genealogical method can be constrained by the conditions of time and space. In fact, there should not be a generality as Foucault had always done for those which are marginalized in a society upon one period of time. That is, Foucault’s notion of episteme means the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch.
With respect to the methodology he attempted to describe, Foucault demonstrates parallels in the development of 3 fields, linguistics, biology, and economics, since the Classical age in 17th century. In subsequent writings, he made it clear that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time, being parts of various power-knowledge systems. Here, defining archaeology as “an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge was constituted,” Foucault put it in this way that the episteme in which knowledge grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility.
On the archaeological level, Foucault see that the system of positivities was transformed in a wholesale fashion at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. “Not because ‘reason’ made any progress, it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding was profoundly altered.” Foucault denied the saying that perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, and ideas transforms themselves and actively modifies one another, because historians have never yet explained upon this. In contrast, archaeology attempts to define systems of simultaneity and the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity, by addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, its configurations, and the mode of being of the things.
Observing from the entire change in ideology of all the knowledges from the Classical age to the 19th century onward, Foucault made a comment on ‘human sciences’, somehow ironically and pessimistically, in my view: “Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet 2 centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form;” as he described how a culture experiences the similitude of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered, in short, ‘a history of resemblance’.
Comparing this with his previous studies on madness in 1964, we can see that Foucault had a tendency to distinguishing the Other from the Same, namely the distinction from the similitude, namely the so-called ‘the order of things’. Quoted from him, “From the limit-experience of the Other to the constituent forms of medical knowledge, and from the latter to the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge, or rather the threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our modernity. It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.”
全站熱搜
留言列表
