LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 23:6 June 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
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         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
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Foucault, Discourse, Knowledge, Culture and Archeology

Prashant Kumar Gaurav

Abstract

The paper will mainly focus on Foucault’s discussion on his notion of ‘discourse’ and his dynamic conceptualization of knowledge, which has such an enormous influence in cultural analysis. He refutes the ‘fons et origo’ of discourse and calls for treating it as and when it occurs. He says that forms of continuity and unity are just the result of a construction following the rules with its own justification. He suggests that there is no ‘human essence’ but what a given society understands human beings to be at any given point is a product of the kind of discourses that it produces about itself. This can be seen as an anti-essentialist claim. This notion of man is also not in the line with humanism. It marks a break with humanism inasmuch as it de-centres the individual as the prior agent in creating the social world, rejecting subjectivity as something essential, and prior to discourse, which power acts against. What will be further discussed is his dynamic conceptualization of knowledge and his attention to thresholds of knowledge.

Keywords: Foucault, Discourse, Knowledge, Archeology, Epistemic break.

Epistemic Break, Criticism and Modern Thought

Foucault’s major work Order of Things talks about the radical break between Classical and modern thought which occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. Further in his work Discipline and Punish, he talks about how the norms of discourses helped in the operation of disciplinary power. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault says that modern medicine emerged in the form of a clinical science which offered a plentitude of new experience of disease. This new experience of disease made it possible to have a historical and critical understanding of the old experience. It made it possible to have a new and different understanding of the madness in the light of new experience, helping remove the Classical treatment of mad people and thus the rational methods to which the mad people were subjected in the Classical age. Thus the medical rationality has now the access to the copious amount of perception, which enabled one to get to the very grain of things offering the first glimpse of truth. So, now to perceive is no longer just the matter of just seeing. This inseparability or the oneness of to see and to perceive was what was preached by rationalist philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Prashant Kumar Gaurav
Centre for Linguistics, Sll & CS, JNU, New Delhi
Address: Room No. 234, Chandrabhaga Hostel, JNU, New Delhi
Email: pkgaurav.123@gmail.com, Mobile no. 9910449972
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