MICHEL FOUCAULT “TW O LECTURES” (1976)

“Two Lectures.” Pow er / Know ledge: Selected Interview s and Other W ritings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. 78-108.

Lecture One, January 7, 1976

W hile Foucault notes the “increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices, discourses” (80), he is wary of “global, totalitarian theories” (80) which have in fact proved a hindrance to research. Hence, his sense that social criticism over the last few years has been local and less theoretical than reality-oriented. In addition, Foucault argues that we have been w itness to the “insurrection of subjugated know ledges” (81), that is, of the “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functional coherence or form al systematisation” (81). By subjugated know ledges, Foucault m eans those “naive know ledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required levels of cognitio n a nd scientificity” (82). It is through the reappearance of such know ledges that criticism of the sort which he offers perform s its work. He is of the view , for exam ple, that it is a sem iology of the life of the asylum or a sociology of delinquency which w ould have prevented an effective “criticism ” (81) of the asylum of the sort w hich he him self offered in works like Madness and Civilisation.
For Foucault, it is a s m uch in the “specialised areas of erudition (83) as in w hat he characterises disqualified, popular know ledge” (83) tha t there lies the “mem ory of hostile encounters . . . confined to the m argins of know ledge” (83). It is precisely such m arginalised m em ories that his approach to social criticism , w hat he cam e to describe with the Nietzschean term genealogy, is concerned to uncover. Genea lo gy “allows us to establish a historical know ledge of struggles and to m ake use of this know ledge tactically today” (83) by entertaining the claim s of illeg itim a te know ledges versus the claim s of that”unitary body of theory w hich w ould filter, hierarchise and order them in the nam e of som e true know ledge and som e arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects” (83). There is no question here, however, of a naive return to “direct cognition” (84) or “imm ediate experience” (84). There is, rather, a concern with the insurrection of know ledges opposed to the “effects of the centralising pow ers w hich are linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse within a society such as ours” (84). Genealogy reactivates local know ledges against the scientific hierarchisation of know ledges and the effects intrinsic to their pow er” (85). W here the activity w hich he term s archaeology (and to w hich m ost of his early works were devoted) refers to the “m ethodology of this analysis of local discursivities” (85) (that is, the analysis of the particular discourses which constitute the human sciences such as psychiatry), genealogy refers to the “tactics whereby, on the basis of the d escriptions of these local discursivities” (85), such subjected know ledges could be located in opposition to the forces of centralisation and hierarchisation.
Foucault’s objection against M arxism is located precisely in the claim to m ake a science out of it. F or F oucault, it is vital to “question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of pow er that is presum ed to accom pany such a science” (84). He asks:
W hat types of know ledge do you want to disqualify. . . . W hich speaking, discoursing subjects w hich subjects of experience and know ledge do you then w ant to dim inish? . . . W hich theoretical-political avant-garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous form s of know ledge that circulate about it? (85)
M oreover, Foucault’s concern is that once hitherto unvalorised know ledges are brought to light and put into circulation, they “run the risk of re-codification, re-colonisation” (86), annexed and taken back into the fold, as it w ere. Indeed, he w arns that the silence w ith w hich unitary,

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