Michel Foucault and Social Theory
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This study will examine the contributions of Michel Foucault to social theory, focusing on the concepts of knowledge and culture and the theory and critique of ideology. Foucault's theory, in its simplest form, is twofold. First, the network of social power/knowledge which controls the life of the individual is so pervasive that it is, in fact, everywhere. Second, because there is nothing outside of the individual to which he can refer for definition of reality in this web of power, the individual must create himself, like a piece of unique art. The ideas of Foucault which will be discussed in this study will touch in one way or another on these basic principles of his social philosophy. Foucault's aim in critiquing history, or society, or social relationships, or culture, or ideology, is to increase the individual's awareness of the web of power in which he is caught, and to increase his freedom as a result of that awareness. The prisoner, in other words, will never free himself unless he comes to realize that he is, in fact, imprisoned. As John Rajchman writes in the aptly named Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, The point of Foucault's history of our categories of the criminal personality or of our practices of incarceration is thus neither to explain the past nor to learn moral lessons from it. Foucault does not show our situation to be a lawlike outcome of previous [situations], or to have been necessitated by the latest historical "conjuncture." On the con
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a way the inquisitor does not like), may fail that test, which may lead to failing the class, which may lead to failing out of school, which may lead to a life with no education but much misery, poverty, etc. As Foucault writes with respect to the elimination of the scaffold:
Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process [and] . . . leaves the domain of . . . everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime (Foucault, 1995, 9).
In this context, the "crime" involved in the test is giving the wrong answer, not acceding to the approved "truth," failing the exam, failing school, and "the horrifying spectacle of public punishment" becomes not torture on the scaffold but living life as a homeless person on the streets.
To Foucault, then, the examination is a cultural means of judgment whereby the student becomes heir to the man on the scaffold. In the examination "are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishm
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Approximate Word count = 2604
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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