Foucault, Key Concepts

Foucault: Key Concepts

Discourse: an authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading.

Power/Knowledge: a term Foucault uses to highlight the fact that every description also regulates what it describes. It is not only that every description is somewhat "biased, " but also that the very terms used to describe something reflect power relations. Discourses promote specific kinds of power relations, usually favoring the "neutral" person or professional using the discourse (the lawyer, psychiatrist, professor, doctor, etc.). In other words, to know is to participate in complicated webs of power.

1
The identities, feelings, and dilemmas we read about and take for granted have histories, and these histories are related to specific discourses.

2
Because novels and poetry occur in relation to the discourses of their time, they participate in this process of defining and regulating. Or, to be more precise, regulating by defining. For example, if a novel describes a character who is mad, it will further refine and regulate the culture's definition of madness. It is no coincidence, for instance, that many nineteenth Century novels have a "madwoman in the attic." Other examples would be the increasing importance of lyric poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lyric poetry describes and individual's interior feelings. A Foucaultian would point out that this also made the individual's feelings available for surveillance by others, and even made the feelings available to be had. "You can't feel what you can't describe," the argument might run, "and you can't describe feelings without being influenced by the terms that various discourses make available to you.

3
We cannot escape coming to understand ourselves under the influence of various discourses, but we can come to understand their histories. Foucault called this process of researching discourse or idea's history genealogy. Take, for instance, the idea that understanding yourself is valuable and important. If we wanted to do a genealogy of this idea, we might start with the notion of self-esteem promoted by psychologists in the 1960s. Then we could look into ways that the notion of self-esteem was related to the increased sense of an individual's importance that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as capitalism developed and individual consumers became more important, especially the notion that people differentiate themselves by the things that they buy. Looking back further, we might notice the increased emphasis on the individual's salvation that Protestantism encouraged. (Note how this is different than Marxism. What counts are institutions and discourses, not simply economic structures).

4
Foucault's contribution to literary studies has been to encourage us to think about how no writer's description or categorization is simply neutral. Instead we can think about how writers further, complicate, or challenge the discourses of their time.

Foucault: Key Concepts
Discourse: an authoritative way of describing. Discourses are propagated by specific institutions and divide up the world in specific ways. For example, we can talk of medical, legal, and psychological discourses. Literary criticism is also a discourse, as is the terminology associated with grading. Power/Knowledge: a term Foucault uses to highlight the fact that every description also regulates what it describes. It is not only that every description is somewhat "biased, " but also that the very terms used to describe something reflect power relations. Discourses promote specific kinds of power relations, usually favoring the "neutral" person or professional using the discourse (the lawyer, psychiatrist, professor, doctor, etc.). In other words, to know is to participate in complicated webs of power.
1	The identities, feelings, and dilemmas we read about and take for granted have histories, and these histories are related to specific discourses.
2	Because novels and poetry occur in relation to the discourses of their time, they participate in this process of defining and regulating. Or, to be more precise, regulating by defining. For example, if a novel describes a character who is mad, it will further refine and regulate the culture's definition of madness. It is no coincidence, for instance, that many nineteenth Century novels have a "madwoman in the attic." Other examples would be the increasing importance of lyric poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lyric poetry describes and individual's interior feelings. A Foucaultian would point out that this also made the individual's feelings available for surveillance by others, and even made the feelings available to be had. "You can't feel what you can't describe," the argument might run, "and you can't describe feelings without being influenced by the terms that various discourses make available to you.
3	We cannot escape coming to understand ourselves under the influence of various discourses, but we can come to understand their histories. Foucault called this process of researching discourse or idea's history genealogy. Take, for instance, the idea that understanding yourself is valuable and important. If we wanted to do a genealogy of this idea, we might start with the notion of self-esteem promoted by psychologists in the 1960s. Then we could look into ways that the notion of self-esteem was related to the increased sense of an individual's importance that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as capitalism developed and individual consumers became more important, especially the notion that people differentiate themselves by the things that they buy. Looking back further, we might notice the increased emphasis on the individual's salvation that Protestantism encouraged. (Note how this is different than Marxism. What counts are institutions and discourses, not simply economic structures).
4	Foucault's contribution to literary studies has been to encourage us to think about how no writer's description or categorization is simply neutral. Instead we can think about how writers further, complicate, or challenge the discourses of their time.