What did Foucault mean by an Archaeology of knowledge?

archive. This is a technical term Foucault uses in The Archaeology of Knowledge. It designates the collection of all material traces left behind by a particular historical period and culture.

What does Michel Foucault mean by power knowledge?’ Is this a real thing explain?

According to Foucault’s understanding, power is based on knowledge and makes use of knowledge; on the other hand, power reproduces knowledge by shaping it in accordance with its anonymous intentions. Power (re-) creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge.

What should I read before Foucault?

In order to gain an understanding of Foucault, you would need to read this in conjunction with the introduction to “The Foucault Reader” by Paul Rabinow, the excellent introduction by Colin Gordon to “The Foucault Effect”, as well as the introductions to the “The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984” three-part …

Which book of Foucault should I read first?

The Foucault Reader is a decent place to start. It will give you some smaller essays and snippets of his major book length works. If you want to start with a book length work, I would start with Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison.

What does Foucault say about knowledge?

Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.

What is Foucault’s archeology of knowledge?

The Archeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s attempt, after the fact, to describe theoretically the method he used in his first three books of history ( Madness and Civilization,The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things ).

What are the four issues of foucault’s method?

For the four issues of originality, contradiction, comparison, and change, Foucault shows that his method replaces broad continuities and generalizations with specific, describable relations that preserve the differences and irregularities of discourse.

What happens at the end of the last chapter of Foucault’s analysis?

The last chapter in this part, ‘Science and Knowledge,’ deals with the reasons that archeological analysis has focused on the history of the sciences, and with the details of how this focus is carried out. Foucault concludes with an intriguing, often poetic, dialogue between himself and a hypothetical critic of his method.

What is Foucault’s discursive field in Part 3?

In Part III, ‘The Statement and the Archive,’ Foucault takes a step back from the level of discursive unities and attempts to describe the discursive field from its smallest elements to its most general totality.