Power Relations Exposed in Truth and Power :: Truth and Power Essays

major power Relations Exposed in Truth and Power In Truth and Power Michel Foucault revisits the major hypothetical trends and questions of his c atomic number 18er. He is a thinker who knows no bounds of subject or field. His ideas stretch from literature to intelligence, from psychology to labor. He deals in a bullion that is accepted everywhere truth and power. Foucault spends very much of his career tracing the wander of truth and power as they intertwine with the history of human experience. He especially loves to study asylums and prisons because they are close to an encapsulated power structure. Using techniques culled from psychology, governing, anthropology, sociology, and archaeology, Foucault presents a highly politicized analysis of the flow of power and power relations. Truth and Power is an excerpted version of an interview with Alesandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino that initially appeared as Intervista a Miche Foucault in Microfiseca del Poetere in 1977. The i nterviewers first ask Foucault to revisit rough of his earlier ideas and trace the mode of his career. Foucault began looking at asylums, and tried to create his theories with an eye toward French politics of the Left. He soon turned to evaluating other sciences such as biology, semipolitical economy, and medicine, and came up with the concept of discontinuity It apprehendmed to me that ... the rhythm of transformation doesnt follow the smooth, continuist schemas of development which are normally accepted. The idea of discontinuity became a tag which other critics and thinkers applied to him, much to his dismay. Foucault wanted only to show the susceptibility of the sciences and scientific statements to the pressures of power At this level its not so much a matter of designed what external power imposes itself on science, as of what effects of power put across among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at authorit ative moments that regime undergoes a global modification. This idea echoes Thomas Kuhns ideas about epitome shifts in a science, and even reverberates back to Drydens statements about every ages universal genius. Dryden stated that in every generation there is a planetary inclination of thought that affects all disciplines. Kuhn proliferated the idea that major revolutions in science are due to major paradigm shifts. The discussion then moves to structuralism, where Foucault makes some major statements about the structure of history. Foucault is ardent in asserting, I dont see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself.