Miʃɛl Fuko (Part One)
Interesting Fact: At over five pages, Michel Foucault’s biography in the book is one of the longest on record!
Second Interesting Fact: It’s easier to copy the phonetic version of someone’s name (such as “Miʃɛl Fuko”) then it is to find the right symbols in WordPress’s “Insert Custom Character” interface.
Main Text: Today I’m going to be talking about Michel Foucault’s essay “Truth and Power,” which starts on page 1667 in our class textbook. According to the book, he’s “arguably the most influential European writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century” (1615). There goes my vote for Dr. Seuss for that position. In any case, the book includes no less than four (excerpted) essays by Foucault, with his “What is an Author,” “Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison,” “The History of Sexuality,” and “Truth and Power.” I’ve at least skimmed all of them and I must say, he’s a pretty sharp cookie.
The point of “Discipline and Punishment,” and by extension, a lot of his work, is pretty simple. We build prisons. Building prisons means we need to justify the cost of the prisons, as well as the pay for wardens, guards, and janitorial staff, as well as for the judicial system that puts criminals there. In order to justify this, we need to arrest more criminals to fill the prison. Once it gets full, we need more prisons. Endless cycle. Pretty sharp.
But this isn’t just limited to prisons. According to Foucault, it gets bigger… much bigger. In a way, words are like the prisons in that they’re how we define reality. Without the color orange, we’d divide things between yellow and red. Without having a word for a homosexual, we’d still just think of them as “confirmed bachelors” (yes, that’s a mix of “The History of Sexuality” and “America: The Book” by the writers of “The Daily Show).
So, according to Foucault, words shape our language. I’ll get into this and, more specifically, “Truth and Power,” next time I blog, which should be tomorrow or Thursday. See you back here then, at AndrewTheory.
