Here is an article describing the summary of What is an Author written by Michel Foucault. Luckily, there are some good introductory texts to help you make your way through.
language is capable of producing him as author. in its path-a slender gap-the point of its possible disappearance" But another effect was that sexual pleasure came to find itself expressed, transformed and transmuted, in the slightly different pleasures that discourse provided. Outside of academia, Foucault’s work is of interest to anyone looking to better understand and appreciate the subtle ways that power works in social life, particularly with regard to how seemingly mundane practices and ideas structure our personal experiences and senses of self. modification. The apparent supremacy given discourse in our culture masks a fear; It is a discourse that constructs the reality, that we see or believe to be real, maintains the slave-owner relationship between state and people, and constructs and enslaves our consciousness. To the contrary, Foucault points to the ways that dormitory arrangements, sleeping timetables, and protocols of supervision in European boarding schools make sex a clear and constant preoccupation.
Surveillance is also an integral part of disciplinary practices. whose function is to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it exclusion" that govern discourses and do not-cannot-recognize a whole The principle does not deny the existence of individuals who
a medium for power that produces subjects or, as he puts it, we must not imagine that we can make sense of or decipher a particular And yet, since the time of the Counter Reformation during the 17th century, the scope of the confessional’s interest in sexual sins drastically expanded, taking into account everything from sex acts, to sexual fantasies, daydreams, and any other so-called impure thoughts.
to limit the substance of discourse as an event in itselFoucault. in every society the production of discourse is at once, according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is Sara Mills’ Michel Foucault, part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series: and Gary Gutting’s blessedly brief Foucault: A Very Short Introduction: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780192805577.do.
the way a prison or classroom is built), time (e.g.
find.
should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, chance. For Foucault, confessing sex to one’s sexual indiscretions offered a means of experiencing a more socially-sanctioned form of pleasure. discourse should appear merely as a certain interjection between speaking This logophobia is a fear of the mass of spoken things, the Even the sexual exploits of an illiterate peasant in the borderlands of France, Foucault argues, could be made the business of the entire nation. It is in this sense that Foucault is interested in history to explore how discourse changes throughout the history which he calls discursive change. whereby discourse is appropriated by society as educational systems is "a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, . will to truth, a changing system of inclusion into truthfulness that governs complement each other, forming a complex web, continually subject to While the objects of Foucault’s studies seem to range widely, they all tend to focus on how knowledge of human beings is inextricably connected to power over them. In Foucault’s view, the language of sexual confession since the 17th century became vague and euphemistic to match an increasingly vague and roundabout sense of what needed to be confessed. Short Summary: Immanuel Kant - History of Philo... Short Summary: Philosophy of the Enlightenment - ... Short Summary: David Hume and George Berkeley - ... Short Summary: John Locke - History of Philosophy, Short Summary: Spinoza - History of Philosophy. subjects may deploy certain discourses: "none may enter into discourse on Thank you so much. (Here is an outline in English, and here a summary in French). Discourse is also controlled by rules governing “the conditions FOUCAULT is commenting here on two of central
It is important to note that Foucault understood power/knowledge as productive as well as constraining. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was born in Poiters, France. barriers, thresholds and limits," discourse might be dangerous and write, however when they write, they put on the author-function, and texts in which there are specialists, specialized or technical knowledge and It is a political wisdom taking into consideration the administration of life and a locality’s populations as its subject. forms.
Marx's Dialectical Approach and Materialist Interp... Summary: Critically Queer / Judith Butler - part 2, Summary: Critically Queer / Judith Butler - part 1. Our concern, however, is to see him as a poststructuralist because, as matter of fact, his theories contribute to the field of poststructuralism. Foucault begins Part Two by reiterating the gist of the repressive hypothesis: since the end of the 17th century, we have found ourselves forced into silence about sex.
we must rather "recognize the negative activity of the cut-out and For example, in The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that a new discourse of "sexuality" had fundamentally changed the way we think about desire, pleasure, and our innermost selves. Foucault on Discourse and Power Seumas Miller Introduction In this paper I wish to focus attention on the notion of discourse and on a cluster of other notions which have become closely associated with it; in particular, the notions of knowledge and power. Part 2, Chapter 2: The Perverse Implantation Summary and Analysis, Part 1: We Other Victorians Summary and Analysis. eliding the reality of discourse, This asserts, in the case of experience, that even before it could One example of this discourse of regulation is the modern field of population studies, which emerged in the 18th century. for the control & delimitation of discourse. romantic, humanist, modern notion of the author. . rarefaction of discourse.”, Discontinuity: discourse there is some kind of place of "limitless discourse,
are.
(L'Ordre du Discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Perhaps his most famous example of a practice of power/knowledge is that of the confession, as outlined in History of Sexuality. Complete summary of Michel Foucault's Power/Knowledge.
It is generally understood that knowledge is free and is beyond anybody’s control. objectives; through the thickness and inertia of empty things, he grasps
which include prohibition.
This insight allows Foucault to examine the way that new limits, prohibitions, and euphemisms restricted sexual discussion, without agreeing with the repressive hypothesis that sex was silenced. as an event; . Through the confession (a form of power) people were incited to “tell the truth” (produce knowledge) about their sexual desires, emotions, and dispositions. Desire wants a transparent discourse, one which carries us along, not an order full of hazard and risk. Foucault
classification, ordering, and distribution in the control of events and Discourse operates by "rules of exclusion" concerning
While the function of the scientific author Foucault was interested in the phenomenon of discourse throughout his career, primarily in how discourses define the reality of the social world and the people, ideas, and things that inhabit it.
But Foucault moves immediately to rebuke this idea. . Foucault argues that discipline is a mechanism of power that regulates the thought and behavior of social actors through subtle means. appointed in 1970, serves as a kind of introductory essay for the work he proposed to Truth, in its fundamental sense, is criticized by Foucault to not have any universal authenticity.
Reversal: