Page 140 - Cultural Theory

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••• Foucault: Interpretive Analysis and the Social •••

the human sciences which, in their turn, are derived from, yet provide, a range
of methods and techniques for regulating and ordering the social domain.
(Smart, 1983)

Classification practices

Foucault’s (1980) main concern was to show that the ‘truth’ status of a knowledge
derives from the field in which it, as a discourse, is employed and not from the inter-
pretation of a subject’s thoughts or intentions. Discourses are powerful in that they
operate as a set of rules informing thought and practice and the operation of these
decides who or what is constituted as an object of knowledge. The relationship
between the subject and truth should be viewed as an effect of knowledge itself.
Quite simply, the subject is not the source of truth. As Foucault put it: ‘what if under-
standing the relation of the subject to the truth, were just an effect of knowledge?
What if understanding were a complex, multiple, non-individual formation, not
“subjected to the subject”, which produced effects of truth?’ (Foucault, in Elders,
1974: 149).
Knowledge is not separate from the realm of ‘practice’. Knowledge is a practice that
constitutes particular objects – non-theoretical elements – that are part of practice
itself. Knowledge and the subject of knowledge are fused as part of the relationship
between knowledge and power that is socially constructed:

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking
in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further
study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor
the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. 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. Each society has its regime of truth, its
`general politics’ of truth.
(Foucault, 1980: 131)

Foucault is deliberately questioning the individual subject’s will to construct as he
sets about exploring the relationship between ‘discourse’ and ‘subjectivity’. What
emerges is a grounded understanding of power/knowledge construction and recon-
struction as discourses transform people into types of subjects – as classifying prac-
tices. Through these techniques of knowing, human attributes are studied, defined,
organized and codified in accordance with the meta-categories of what is ‘normal’.
Classifying practices and techniques of normalization designate both the objects
to be known and the subjects who have the power to speak about them. Discourses
thus encompass both the objective and subjective conditions of human relations
(1973: 232) and these emerging forms of social regulation, characterized by notions
of discipline, surveillance and normalization, are core to his theoretical studies
(Foucault, 1977).

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