A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject

Perfect introduction to the complex philosophy of Foucault and to the complex and unique mind of the man...Discourse, power and the subject. I like his quote "The main interest in life and work is to become something else that you were not in the beginning".

This is great for anyone who reads Foucault and wishes they were back in school so a professor could help explain what it all means.

More than any other writer, perhaps, Foucault is the poster-child of postmodernism. What little of him I knew I thought was accurate: his emphasis on the concept of power, for instance, I had mistakenly held to mean the dialectic of the powerless and disenfranchised against the rich and powerful. This book helped me to discover that this simplistic view of power is a serious misconception. Foucault's version is much more complex and profound. And I would go so far to say that until you have encountered his important ideas on this subject, you will be at a serious disadvantage in understanding the present age. This book at first blush looks like an easy read, but rest assured it is not. The first page has a striking sentence, which I kept coming back to: "We do not believe that F provides a definitive theory of anything in the sense of a set of unambiguous answers to time-worn questions." I finally interpreted this to mean that the authors do not consider F to be a philosopher per se but rather a social theorist. Without doubt, the most difficult chapter in this little book is the second, "Discourse." Discourse is a nebulous term, not only referring to an academic field of study such as history or psychology, but also, in F's sense of the word, to "a set of conditions which enables and constrains the socially productive imagination." Such discourses "can come into contention and struggle. This struggle is no more clearly seen than in the social sciences . . . where what Kuhn calls paradigms may compete for dominance in a particular field." The authors gradually relate discourse to what passes for truth at a particular historical period, and thence to politics and the subject of power. Chapter three, "Power", is unquestionably the most rewarding. In brutally short terms, F writes: "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes"; it "represses"; it "censors"; it "abstracts"; it "masks"; it "conceals". In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." F's conception of power provides "a far more complex picture of modern society than Marxism allows". And: "He does not ask who is in power? He asks how power installs ITSELF and produces real material effects, where one such effect might be a particular kind of subject who will in turn act as a channel for the flow of power itself." Thus F sees the rich and powerful as channels, subject to the same unpredictable flows of power as are the powerless. The book as a whole is a little on the dry side. And if you are looking for philosophy per se, you will find yourself disappointed; this is more about the analysis of society. But it is an unquestionably valuable resource, and a very challenging read. If you don't have the patience to read through F's works but want to get a non-trivial grasp of F's main ideas, there is no better place to look.

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