Power/Knowledge

The chapter on Power/Knowledge starts with Foucault explaining how criticism has made many people and things vulnerable in the past years. He talks about how totalitarian theories anything useful for research and can actually be a barrier for research. He mentions that lately its “not theory but life that matters, not knowledge but reality, not books but money etc.”, He then describes an idea called subjugated knowledges, which from my understanding would mean certain knowledges that were suppressed in some way.

Foucault says that subjugated knowledges means two things: first, those blocs of knowledge that were present but suppressed and which could only be exposed with criticism. Secondly, it is knowledge that is unable to do its task and therein disqualified. Foucault talks about a “historical knowledge of struggles”. “What emerges out of this is something one might call a genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflict”. He later goes on to describe genealogy as combining knowledge learned from books and local memories to learn about historical struggles and being able to apply that knowledge “tactically”.

In the middle of page 75, I seem to lose a sense of what Foucault is trying to express. He talks about genealogies being anti-scientist. Genealogies apparently wouldn’t ask if Marxism or psychoanalysis is a science, but rather, what is the power you’re hoping would come out of it if such things were labeled as a science.

The goal of the genealogist, from what I gathered of the text on page 76 is to make sure historical knowledges are not suppressed and to “reactivate local knowledges”. This of course would go against scientific hierarchy of the order of knowledge.

The last paragraph of page 76 to the end of page 77 gets quite cloudy for me. He’s talking about a new power, but I’ve re-read it a few times and still feel I’m grasping at straws. He mentions the new power being an invention of the bourgeois and then talks about the theory of sovereignty for a few paragraphs. This is something I hope to bring up in class to get clarification on.

The last two pages of the chapter seem a bit clearer. He talks about modern society (that is the nineteenth century to his present time) as having to balance between legislation based on “public rights” and a “closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of the same social body”. It’s basically sovereignty on the left and a discipline mechanism on the right. He also mentions that in his present day, it seems like people want to object to the discipline side and feel entitled to the more sovereign side of things.