Which One of the Following Theories Is Not a Theory of Art Criticism and Evaluation?
Key Theories of Michel Foucault
Over three decades after his death, Michel Foucault's (1920–1984) legacy continues to impact upon the humanities. Key phrases and concepts drawn from Foucault'south historical piece of work at present class role of the everyday linguistic communication of criticism and assay. Foucault'southward texts continue to resonate with contemporary readers, and this resonance can exist misunderstood in a chronological survey of his key ideas and works, since the man who rejected notions of historical progress – preferring to piece of work with the notion of what he called the epistemic break – produced works that cannot be neatly fitted into a condensed and orderly summary that appears to motion smoothly from i text to another. In other words, it is of import when reading whatsoever summary of Foucault'south life and work, to think of his theories as forming a critical constellation, rather than a developmental, logical system. Born in Poitiers, France, Foucault studied at school with the corking commentator on Hegel,
Madness and Civilization (1961) was a huge tome in its manuscript form, published in French at over six hundred pages, and in much abbreviated course in its English translation; regardless of which version is read, it is a powerful and moving business relationship of unlike historical perspectives on defining and confining 'madness'. Foucault's key thesis is that of epochal shifts, or alignments, between those subjects deemed mad, and those who are office of the 'unreason' of the human world: the subjects who accept transgressive and excessive sexualities, ideas and modes of behaviour. In charting these alignments throughout history, Foucault arrives at the birth of the asylum, the constitution of the 'insane' subject, placed in confinement and under scientific surveillance. Rather than seeing this as progress, Foucault projects such a process every bit being repressive and punishing. Foucault'southward companion text to this report was his next book, Naissance de la clinique: Une Archéologie du regard medical (1963) translated in 1973 as The Birth of the Dispensary: An Archeology of Medical Perception. While the leading semiotician Roland Barthes praised Madness and Civilisation as 'a cathartic question asked about madness', information technology was Jacques Derrida's critique – 'Cogito and the History of Madness' – that received the about explosive respond from Foucault, in the form of an angry essay published ix years later every bit 'My Torso, This Paper, This Fire'. Foucault would receive a much more than widespread response from the public to his third major historical report Les Mots et les choses: Une Archéologie des sciences humaines (1966) translated in 1970 as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Man Sciences.
The 'archaeological' method utilized by Foucault owed a great debt to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: where historians had in one case looked for connections and developmental continuity through time, Foucault, following Nietzsche, now looked for historical breaks and ruptures. In The Gild of Things, he sketches out the a priori discourses that constitute cognition of the world and of being, discourses that create the 'episteme' of whatever particular menses. For example, in what Foucault calls 'Classical' idea, metaphysics is possible considering of the concept of human finitude (in relation to forces that transcend humanity); for Foucault, an epistemic shift occurs when human finitude is measured non in relation to something else (say, God), but when it is measured in its ain terms (say, physiology or the sciences of the body). In other words, modernity is constituted past the epistemic break whereby metaphysics is replaced with self-reflexive knowledge of actual man beingness (the human sciences, the humanities, etc.). Only modernity, in plow, gives way to another trigger-happy epistemic break: that of the period in which Foucault ends his book (the late 1960s), with its political and intellectual upheavals in France, and the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist idea. Now the a priori or paradigm of existence becomes, for Foucault, language – the rise of the language philosophies, communication models, Saussurian linguistics, semiotics, and so on. These are what constitute 'the subject' and in the procedure thereby begin to erase and efface prior notions of cocky-centred subjectivity, humanity and that historically located entity known every bit 'man'. Foucault's controversial thesis in The Order of Things triggered much enthusiastic debate, but in hindsight it is intriguing to note how in an interview Foucault called this enthusiasm a 'passion for concepts and for what I volition call "organization" '.6 The Order of Things was, for Foucault, more than only another way of doing history: information technology was a revolution in thought. To explain his methodology and its total implications, Foucault went to work on a highly abstract piece of work called L'Archéologie du savoir (1969), translated in 1972 as The Archaeology of Knowledge. The
poststructuralist theorist Gilles Deleuze sketches Foucault's approach:
there is nothing prior to noesis, because knowledge, in Foucault's new concept of it, is defined past the combinations of visible and articulable that are unique to each stratum or historical formulation. Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a 'mechanism' of statements and visibilities.
The other important statement that needs to exist added here is that the diverse permutations of noesis practice not proceed towards some final grand goal; thus Foucault'southward archaeological method is resistant to Hegelian thought:
one tin can see to what extent information technology has freed itself from what constituted, not then long ago, the philosophy of history, and from the questions that it posed (on the rationality or teleology of historical development (devenir), on the relativity of historical knowledge, and on the possibility of discovering or constituting a meaning in the inertia of the past and in the unfinished totality of the present).
Apart from beingness an attack upon a generalized notion of more than traditional historical studies, this is an implicit critique of Hegel'due south Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus, Foucault says that in the traditional approach, past making the history of idea the 'locus of uninterrupted continuities', the subject is synthetic in advance in a highly abstract manner, simultaneously providing 'a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness'. Such an analysis suggests that the philosophy of history invests in the discontinuous only to gain a secure return: the discontinuous is thereby placed in a serial controlled by the forces of a progressive development/development. Foucault's focus on a methodological level of analysis is an attempt to question generalized teleological categories and 'totalizations', exemplified past Hegel's 'Absolute Spirit', as well equally beingness an attempt at providing a non-discipline-centred account of the intersecting fields of study that surround and construct the sciences of the subject.
In the shift away from what Foucault calls the 'unities' of discourse exemplified past classical notions of: the book; the oeuvre; authorial intention; the recovery of self-presence and the render to origins, all of these humanist notions are rejected with a consequent re-focus abroad from interpretation to functional description. Thus, as critic Gary Gutting notes, the 'archaeological' method formulated in the Archaeology is 'a historical method of inquiry, concerned non with structural possibilities but with actual occurences and their effects'. Foucault delimitates what he calls the discursive formation which has four bones elements. Equally Gutting notes, these are: the objects its statements are about, the kinds of cognitive stature and authority they accept [enunciative modality], the concepts in terms of which they are formulated, and the themes or theoretical viewpoints they develop. Gutting stresses that the same discursive formation may be used equally
a vehicle for discourse about different systems of objects, categorized in terms of different conceptual frameworks, and its statements will have a variety of enunciative modalities and may develop very various theoretical viewpoints . . . Foucault does not regard a discursive formation as distinguished by unity (of, east.m., objects, concepts, method) provided by its elements. Rather, a discursive formation is a 'system of dispersion' for its elements: Information technology defines a field within which a variety of dissimilar, even alien, sets of elements can be deployed.
The 'unity' of whatever particular discursive formation is defined by the rules of its operation. Foucault argues there are four 'types' of rules governing the germination: (one) rules for the formation of objects; (2) rules for the formation of concepts; (3) rules specifying various procedures of intervention; (4) rules governing the germination of strategies. At that place is a certain degree of post-theorizing here, in that Foucault is rearticulating the methodology of his earlier works, thus there is more stress on the 'unity' of the earlier discursive formations, than upon their status every bit systems of dispersion. This can also be seen in the extent that certain 'rules' are given priority over others. However, Deleuze regards this as Foucault laying 'the foundations for a new pragmatics', in that the 'rules' define ways in which the elements of the system operate in relation to one another; there is no transcendental set of rules that rises higher up the discursive germination to order and describe all others.
While all of Foucault's texts speedily impacted upon the worlds of literary theory and other methodologies within the humanities – especially one time he started to visit the The states in the early 1970s – it is mayhap his Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), translated in 1977 as Subject area and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, that has continued to inspire literary critics. This is not so much for the subject affair of the book, merely for the metaphor of internalized surveillance, embodied most memorably in Jeremy Bentham's prison design chosen the panopticon. Foucault's concept of the 'microphysics of power' suggests that modernistic disciplinary methods are internalized and produce subjects that are constituted via a network of relations. The traditional 'superlative down' notion of power is thus replaced with one that is horizontal, not vertical. The panopticon, a prison where the prisoners believe themselves to exist nether total surveillance, functions as a metaphor explaining how and why subjects thereby change their ain behaviour. Applied to countless literary texts, the panopticon lives on in myriad works of literary theory. Self-regulation is explored from another perspective in Foucault'due south last works, a series of studies called A History of Sexuality. In many respects, this apparent shift of focus, from disciplinary discourses and institutions that have radically transformed and reinvented themselves, to that of the body and sexualities, may indeed be the major continuity in Foucault's work, since bodily regimes have e'er been a subtext, be they overt or covert, textual or autobiographical, in his approach; Foucault'southward bear on remains high as the contemporary humanities follows the trajectories of his idea, and the discontinuous, but traceable, contours of his map of knowledge product and beingness.
Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Philosophy, Postmodernism
Source: https://literariness.org/2017/03/28/key-theories-of-michel-foucault/
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