Customer Reviews

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't get me wrong - Foucault is an absolutely brilliant thinker and modern philosopher. His methods of utilizing classical thought and analysis in the study of modern problems (at least up to the mid-20th century) are fascinating and hugely insightful. He knows the causes and effects of power in all its manifestations, and he applies this knowledge to all manner of intriguing contemporary issues such as struggles against the state, the prison system, health care, sexuality, and geopolitics. (I would be especially interested in Foucault's take on the modern American prison-industrial-political complex.)

The problem with this book is in the presentation. I don't agree with other reviewers who state that this is a good summary or compendium of Foucault's works, because of its very fragmentary nature. Each of the chapters here can be considered distillations of Foucault's thoughts on key subjects. Most of the chapters are structured as interviews or dialogues but with no surrounding context. We have no explanation of who the interviewers are or from which angle they have approached Foucault's works. The chapters begin abruptly, often with the feel of an interview in progress, with no introductory explanations of the context for that portion of Foucault's efforts. Similarly, the chapters end abruptly with no wrapping up or conclusive explanations of the matter at hand. One chapter consists of two "lectures" given at different times, with zero explanation of the purpose of Foucault's visit to wherever the lecture was delivered, who the audience was, or the environment in which Foucault's presence was utilized.

Therefore this book is not a good summary because it only leaves you with fragmentary details of far more vast philosophical masterpieces, with no surrounding context or supplementary information. You can get a passable introduction to Foucault's general ideas here, but for true knowledge you will have to tackle his proper dissertations. The best examples with relevance for contemporary thought are "Madness and Civilisation," "Archeology of Knowledge," and others. [~doomsdayer520~]

Power/Knowledge is an excellent introduction to and distillation of the thought of Michel Foucault. It's much more functional than The Foucault Reader, which offers a few key essays ("What Is Enlightenment?", "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History", etc.) mixed with book excerpts, and may be more gentle to the first-time reader than diving into one of Foucault's full-length works.

This book offers the colloquial Foucault, as it is mostly interviews where "The Fox" is asked to explain and expand upon his concepts and theories. Sprinkled in are the occasional lecture ("Two Lectures" is a fragment of the recently released "Society Must Be Defended") and debate, such as the book's opening salvo of Foucault and the Maoists, where we see the somewhat rare portrait of Foucault in direct political engagement. You even get a glimpse of Foucault's sense of humor at the end of "The Confession of the Flesh".

These fragments are useful for understanding Foucault's key concerns, such as the diffuse and productive nature of power and the Nietzschean historical contingency in universal truth claims. However, this book should not serve as the last word on Foucault: from here the reader is advised to make their way into his oeuvre. It's not a bad idea to begin with Foucault's most famous works, such "hard" studies of historical practices as Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. From there one can move into the more challenging works such as The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge. The sky's the limit.

So Power/Knowledge is a solid point of departure for those interested in Foucault - but don't get lulled into thinking it's all you need. Remember: the map is not the terrain.

Excellent preliminary introduction to the thought of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was situated at the forefront of French post-modernity and post-structuralism during the 1960's, grouped with other intellectuals such as Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, and Delueze.

For Foucault, (as it exists in modern societies) power is not an entity to be acquired, it is an instrument that is continually exercised. Power operates as knowledge through discourse, confession, observation, surveillance, etc. "Power for Foucault is not an omnipotent causal principle, or shaping spirit but a perspective concept" (245). Power is used and applied, not obtained.

This volume serves as a useful compendium to the ideas outlined in Foucault's major works, (i.e. Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, the Order of Things, Archeology of Knowledge, Birth of the Clinic, etc.). It is mostly a gathering of lectures and interviews with various scholars in the field of the history of systems of thought. The first essay (On Popular Justice) is a discussion with a Maoist organization about the applicability of people's courts and the use and relativity of the concept of justice. One gets the impression that Foucault is not entirely at home with this material. The second essay (Prison Talk) is an explication of the major ideas posited in Discipline and Punish, particularly the development of Bentham's Panopticon and the transmission of power as surveillance. A fascinating read, and one of Foucault's great breakthroughs in the social sciences. The third essay (Body/Power) provides further information about Discipline and Punish. The fourth essay (Questions of Geography) is very interesting as Foucualt is backed into a corner by the interviewer for failing to address questions of space in his analysis of power in the age or reason. It is fun to watch Foucault's thinking shift here throughout the course of the interview; initially he is quite hostile to the idea of examining geographical material as a means to access power relations, but he finishes with tremendous enthusiasm for the idea. The fifth essay (Two lectures) is a lecture course primarily concerned with Marxism and the social sciences more broadly. The sixth essay (Truth/Power) is another interview about power and the dissemination of knowledge and information and the dynamics of power as transmitted via discourse. The seventh essay (Power and Strategies) basically outlines the workings of power in totalitarian communist societies (esp. the USSR), and the usage of the gulags as a means of inducing docility and subordination. The eighth essay (The Eye of Power) is another explication of power as a mode of surveillance. The ninth essay (The Politics of Health in the 19th century) is not particularly interesting; in it, Foucault analyses the power relations implicit in public hospitals and medical treatment (further elaborated in Birth of the Clinic). The tenth essay is a very helpful summary of the major ideas posited in the History of Sexuality, an extraordinarily difficult and important text. Additionally, the eleventh essay (the Confession of the Flesh) provides further explication into the subsequent volumes of Foucault's massive history (which he sadly failed to complete).

Naturally, any serious student of Foucault should turn to his original texts in order to fully grasp his philosophical outlook, yet this collection should serve as a useful conduit for new readers to his rich and complex body of work.

The relationship between knowledge, truth and power are critical elements in cross-cultural sociological study. Foucault details the relationship between these elements. The relationship between these elements relates directly to global media. If media is predominately produced in one geographic region and exported to another, power in terms of the right to representation, is automatically usurped by the production of truth, by the production of culture, production nationalistic images, by the production of media. Foucault's writings on the Archaeology of Knowledge and it's relationship to geography have a direct relation to geo-political structures and their interdependency with media forms and media audiences. Institutions, such as universities, which reinforce their own forms of knowledge, are likewise either undermined or reinforced by media forms. The relationship between these social components is never neutral, according to Foucault.
"Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power." Power is much more abstract, by Foucault's definitions than any previous theorists described it. It is not necessarily a conscious, intentional application of force. Power can be the relationships between components of a society or the relationship between societies. This very subtly makes the analysis of power, more complex and yet more engaging.
Media continues the construction of knowledge. Universities and other such institutions begin the process and sanction it -- provide it "an expert system" by which it is validated. However, the media reinforces this validation by replicating it in mass quantity. The media can, likewise, have the opposite effect, depending on its representation. If a given BBC program highlights the academic excellence of Harvard University, but bemoans the loss of academic excellence in al Azhar, for example. Then the media is undermining the construction of knowledge and the institution of al Azhar while simultaneously reinforcing the disequilibrium of political and economic structures surrounding al Azhar. Foucault's Power/Knowledge provides the platform from which to analyze these transformations.

This was the first book I read on Foucault. It won't be the last. I read the other reviews and yes, parts did feel like I was missing the context or background for what was being discussed. Never the less the man is brilliant.

Good:

The book definitely makes me want to read more of his work.
It was slow reading. Why slow? Because I would read a page, my brain would have a moment of new understanding, and I would have to stop and think about what he just said. An example would be why I know believe healthcare of any quality will ever be available in the USA without major sociopolitical change.

Bad:

This isn't beach reading. It was work to read.
Some of it I didn't understand, or I found myself wishing I had taken this in a classroom with a professor and classmates to bounce questions and ideas off of.
I still have no idea, despite Google, of what "no-so politics" is.

Read it. Feed your brain.

The collection of interviews contained in this volume is a great guide to anyone interested in examining the work of Michel Foucault, whose work broke new ground through his sustained examination of the interplay between the forces of pwer and the production of knowledges. For those who have previously read works such as The History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish, this volume is sure to have many jewels that both clarifies and compliments the ideas presented in those works.

Spanning an important period in Foucault's development the interviews included here deal with essential themes for anyone interested in the trajectory of Foucault's work and social concern, French philosophy or literary theory in general. Themes expanded upon includes discussions of the discrusive role of discourse(s) in shaping the parameters of power and the concommitant boundries of knowledge that such a relationship implies; the symbolic, metaphoric and noumenal implications of the body as both flesh and as a site for the inscription of various repessive regimes; or the nature and evolution of the influence of panoptical surveillance in all of its varied formulations.

Part and parcel to Foucault's thinking in this area is the necessary representation of the body as both a dynamic physicality and at the same time a living palimpest onto which the ideologies of culture and society are written--sometimes forcibly, but more often through self-reproduction and latent self-repession. For those who want to know these ideologies are promulgated in panaoptical society, this book will provide many provocative answers as well as an indispensible aide to untangling the complex web of ideas that Foucault used to explicate the structure of modern society.

This particular work covers a broad range of Foucault's writings and is ideal for someone who hoping to get a general understanding of his work before delving in further. What's wonderful about Foucault is that his works are approachable even to non-academics. There's not an egregious over-use of italicized jargon. He's trying to get his point across, not impress the reader with his superior intelligence.

While I think the dialogue of power has evolved since Foucault's first writings, I would say that in the context of what came before him, his work is quite amazing. It has had important implications in a variety of veins of academic thought.

His unique ability to identify what seems normal but is actually absurd and couched in a wealth of rationalization makes him truly brilliant. His essays on the prison system, sexuality, and health are enlightening in this fashion.

For my research, I was more interested in his work showing power as a far more pervasive/invasive instrument. Several essays elucidate the dialog surrounding the power and influence ascribed to process. His concept that power is NOT localized in the State and that the mechanics of society must also be addressed is quite brilliantly articulated.

The only reason to remove one star (if there were 1/2 stars, I would have only removed 1/2 a star) is because of the format of a couple of the articles. The use of dialogue goes back to Socrates and yet, no one seems to get it quite right when they write a dialogue. There are times where it is perfectly fine and flows well in the book. There are other times where I wish he'd just stick with prose.

Still, one should definitely read this book if they are interested in modern political or philosophical thought. (show less)

Some serious food for thought here. Not only is the power to define madness, criminality, and sexuality addressed, but also the active use of criminals, and sex, to suppress and subjugate the populace. Somewhat more difficult to wade through but similar to Norman Cousins, it helped provoke my thinking on how top-down unilateral command based on secrets is inevitably going to give way to bottom-up multicultural decision-making by the people based on open sources evenly shared across networks. This is really very heavy stuff, and it helps call into question the "rationality" of both the Washington-based national security policymaking process, and the "rationality" of spending $30 billion a year on secrets in contrast to what that $30 billion a year might buy in terms of openly-available insights and overt information peacekeeping.

I don't know how to rate most of Foucault's work because quite frankly I don't understand most of it. I read some of his primary material and didn't get it. I read some secondary material and I still didn't completely get it. A friend then introduced me to some philosophy comic books. He had the whole series including Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to name a few. I now understand the objective and nature of his works yet still can't grasp the nuance of it. Perhaps I'm grasping for greater meaning that doesn't exist, but chances are that I'm just too dumb.

His work is incredibly hard to understand, more tedious to read then Dickens and Dostoevsky combined, and very incoherent. None the less, I'm afraid to give it poor marks out of fear that the intellectuals will brand me a mental midget. On the same line, I'm afraid to engage anyone in conversation about Foucault out of fear that my shallow-comic-book-level understanding of his text will be exposed.

Ultimately, I think this really takes away from his work. He has a lot of insightful things to write. But if you can't communicate them what is the purpose? Read the text and get the comic books. Study your signs and make sure you obey traffic laws.