Background Summary Theory III: from Cultural History and Perspectives on History
Week 1: Critical Thinking and Theory & Week 2: Laws and Intentions
Week 3: Language and Games
Michael Foucault
Michael Foucault (1926-1984) was born into a family of doctors and had developed, from a very
early age, an interest in what society considered “healthy” or “unhealthy”. His interest in
normative frameworks within the medical world was undoubtedly reinforced by his discovery as
a young student that he was gay. Because homosexuality was not widely accepted in the early
1950s in Western culture, this discovery led to a severe psychological crisis for Foucault.
Michael Foucault did not study the mundane in the way the historians in the tradition of the
History of Mentalities did; instead, he focused on the mirror image of the mundane. One
example is the attitude of society with respect to a psychiatric institution where people who do
not conform to everyday routines and codes of practice are incarcerated. Foucault wanted to
show how the principle of segregation in history had led to the increase in the number of
institutions and protocols. Western culture has systematically precluded non-conformity, which
led to the rise of prisons, hospitals and institutions. As a result, social outcasts were returned to a
system, often in a heavy-handed manner, via carefully constructed protocols.
Foucault’s focus was on analysing common coding of knowledge by which the world is formed;
he called these codes discourse. It is the coded way of speaking about culture within a society.
Within this coded way of speaking, power structures are constructed, sometimes without us even
realizing it. He explained that this encoded knowledge (“discourses”) was an oral expression of
mental structures (“words and things”). Using words that are assigned to things as signifiers, we
structure activities and sort out the world.
At first glance, Foucault’s discourse appears similar to Febvre’s outillage mental. Yet there is an
important difference, and this difference shows how much Foucault’s emphasis was on language.
While Febvre wanted to point out the historically intellectual capabilities of a culture by means of
his mental toolbox, Foucault was interested in the countless variations in possibilities that a
discourse could develop in the history of a culture. For Foucault, there was no essential relation
between discourse and meaning, which was precisely what the Annales historians argued.
Foucault saw man as the designer of his own mental world. The way something was talked
about (the words used to describe a phenomenon such as hysteria) was more important than that
which is being referred to. Words and things should therefore not be studied for what they
represent but for what they mean in themselves and for themselves.
Archaeology and épistème
The emergence of the psychiatric institution and the prison as a place of segregation in society,
and the way we talk about sexuality as a form of a personal confession, are two examples of
1
,Foucault’s oeuvre. According to Foucault, the principle of segregation – actively isolating people
in a society – originated with the emergence of certain diseases in the Middle Ages. This is when
lepers were isolated in separate homes in order to prevent the spread of this contagious disease.
In the sixteenth century, the leprosy home was converted into an “institution”, albeit with a
completely different purpose – for madness is not contagious. As society became more
specialised, institutions increasingly became a space where all kinds of deviant behaviour were
hidden from the public domain, with shelters being created for the homeless, the mentally
disabled, psychiatric patients, criminals, abortion homes for women and asylum seekers. It was
Foucault’s intention to show that shelters took the form of discourses within a culture. What
Foucault, Febvre and Elias have in common is that they are interested in how customs are
adopted, adapted and changed within a culture.
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical
problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what
words actually mean in everyday use. “Such ‘philosophical’ uses of language, on this view, create
the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve.” Ordinary language philosophy is a
branch of linguistic philosophy closely related to logical positivism.
This approach typically involves eschewing philosophical “theories” in favour of close attention to
the details of the use of everyday “ordinary” language. It is sometimes associated with the later
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a number of mid-20th century philosophers that can be split
into two main groups, neither of which could be described as an organized “school”.
The later Wittgenstein held that the meanings of words reside in their ordinary uses and that this
is why philosophers trip over words taken in abstraction. From this came the idea that philosophy
had gotten into trouble by trying to use words outside of the context of their use in ordinary
language. For example, “understanding” is what you mean when you say “I understand”.
“Knowledge” is what you mean when you say “I know that”. The point is, you already know what
“understanding” or “knowledge” are, at least implicitly. Philosophers are ill-advised to construct
efinition, and the argument may
new definitions for these terms, because this is necessarily a red
unravel into self-referential nonsense. Rather, philosophers must explore the definitions that
these terms already have, without forcing a convenient redefinition onto them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophers, Wittgenstein believed, had been misled into thinking that their subject was a kind
of science, a search for theoretical explanations of the things that puzzled them: the nature of
meaning,truth, mind, time, justice, and so on. But philosophical problems are not amenable to
this kind of treatment, he claimed. What is required is not a correct doctrine but a clear view, one
that dispels the confusion that gives rise to the problem. Many of these problems arise through
an inflexible view of language that insists that if a word has a meaning there must be some kind
of object corresponding to it. Thus, for example, we use the word mind without any difficulty until
we ask ourselves “What is the mind?” We then imagine that this question has to be answered by
2
, identifying some “thing” that is the mind. If we remind ourselves that language has many uses
and that words can be used quite meaningfully without corresponding to things, the problem
disappears.
Philosophical Investigations begins not with an extract from a work of theoretical philosophy but
with a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400), in which Augustine explains how he
learned to speak. Augustine describes how his elders pointed to objects in order to teach him
their names. This description perfectly illustrates the kind of inflexible view of language that
Wittgenstein found to underlie most philosophical confusions. In this description, he says, there
lies “a particular picture of the essence of human language,” and “in this picture of language we
find the roots of the following idea: every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with
the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”
To combat this picture, Wittgenstein developed a method of describing and imagining what he
called “language games.” Language games, for Wittgenstein, are concrete social activities that
crucially involve the use of specific forms of language. By describing the countless variety of
language games—the countless ways in which language is actually used in human
interaction—Wittgenstein meant to show that “the speaking of a language is part of an activity,
or of a form of life.” The meaning of a word, then, is not the object to which it corresponds but
rather the use that is made of it in “the stream of life.”
Related to this point is Wittgenstein’s insistence that, with regard to language, the public is
logically prior to the private. The Western philosophical tradition, going back at least to
Descartes’ famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), has tended to regard the
contents of one’s own mind as being foundational, the rock upon which all other knowledge is
built. In a section of Philosophical Investigations that has become known as the private language
argument, Wittgenstein sought to reverse this priority by reminding us that we can talk about the
contents of our own minds only once we have learned a language and that we can learn a
language only by taking part in the practices of a community. The starting point for philosophical
reflection, therefore, is not our own consciousness but our participation in communal activities:
“An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.”
Linguistic Turn
A purely social e xplanation for changes in culture, with a strict focus on material evidence,
gradually became less accepted. This paradigm shift, in which the status of language served as a
starting point, made frequent use of anthropology. Because of the emphasis on language, this
movement in the 1980s has also been called the linguistic turn, with strong roots in structuralism
and post-structuralism. Structuralists searched for building blocks within language, for example
in linguistics or by using myths that make it possible to create to create some semblance of order
and thus to create a cultural identity.
Structuralism
3
Week 1: Critical Thinking and Theory & Week 2: Laws and Intentions
Week 3: Language and Games
Michael Foucault
Michael Foucault (1926-1984) was born into a family of doctors and had developed, from a very
early age, an interest in what society considered “healthy” or “unhealthy”. His interest in
normative frameworks within the medical world was undoubtedly reinforced by his discovery as
a young student that he was gay. Because homosexuality was not widely accepted in the early
1950s in Western culture, this discovery led to a severe psychological crisis for Foucault.
Michael Foucault did not study the mundane in the way the historians in the tradition of the
History of Mentalities did; instead, he focused on the mirror image of the mundane. One
example is the attitude of society with respect to a psychiatric institution where people who do
not conform to everyday routines and codes of practice are incarcerated. Foucault wanted to
show how the principle of segregation in history had led to the increase in the number of
institutions and protocols. Western culture has systematically precluded non-conformity, which
led to the rise of prisons, hospitals and institutions. As a result, social outcasts were returned to a
system, often in a heavy-handed manner, via carefully constructed protocols.
Foucault’s focus was on analysing common coding of knowledge by which the world is formed;
he called these codes discourse. It is the coded way of speaking about culture within a society.
Within this coded way of speaking, power structures are constructed, sometimes without us even
realizing it. He explained that this encoded knowledge (“discourses”) was an oral expression of
mental structures (“words and things”). Using words that are assigned to things as signifiers, we
structure activities and sort out the world.
At first glance, Foucault’s discourse appears similar to Febvre’s outillage mental. Yet there is an
important difference, and this difference shows how much Foucault’s emphasis was on language.
While Febvre wanted to point out the historically intellectual capabilities of a culture by means of
his mental toolbox, Foucault was interested in the countless variations in possibilities that a
discourse could develop in the history of a culture. For Foucault, there was no essential relation
between discourse and meaning, which was precisely what the Annales historians argued.
Foucault saw man as the designer of his own mental world. The way something was talked
about (the words used to describe a phenomenon such as hysteria) was more important than that
which is being referred to. Words and things should therefore not be studied for what they
represent but for what they mean in themselves and for themselves.
Archaeology and épistème
The emergence of the psychiatric institution and the prison as a place of segregation in society,
and the way we talk about sexuality as a form of a personal confession, are two examples of
1
,Foucault’s oeuvre. According to Foucault, the principle of segregation – actively isolating people
in a society – originated with the emergence of certain diseases in the Middle Ages. This is when
lepers were isolated in separate homes in order to prevent the spread of this contagious disease.
In the sixteenth century, the leprosy home was converted into an “institution”, albeit with a
completely different purpose – for madness is not contagious. As society became more
specialised, institutions increasingly became a space where all kinds of deviant behaviour were
hidden from the public domain, with shelters being created for the homeless, the mentally
disabled, psychiatric patients, criminals, abortion homes for women and asylum seekers. It was
Foucault’s intention to show that shelters took the form of discourses within a culture. What
Foucault, Febvre and Elias have in common is that they are interested in how customs are
adopted, adapted and changed within a culture.
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical
problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what
words actually mean in everyday use. “Such ‘philosophical’ uses of language, on this view, create
the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve.” Ordinary language philosophy is a
branch of linguistic philosophy closely related to logical positivism.
This approach typically involves eschewing philosophical “theories” in favour of close attention to
the details of the use of everyday “ordinary” language. It is sometimes associated with the later
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a number of mid-20th century philosophers that can be split
into two main groups, neither of which could be described as an organized “school”.
The later Wittgenstein held that the meanings of words reside in their ordinary uses and that this
is why philosophers trip over words taken in abstraction. From this came the idea that philosophy
had gotten into trouble by trying to use words outside of the context of their use in ordinary
language. For example, “understanding” is what you mean when you say “I understand”.
“Knowledge” is what you mean when you say “I know that”. The point is, you already know what
“understanding” or “knowledge” are, at least implicitly. Philosophers are ill-advised to construct
efinition, and the argument may
new definitions for these terms, because this is necessarily a red
unravel into self-referential nonsense. Rather, philosophers must explore the definitions that
these terms already have, without forcing a convenient redefinition onto them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophers, Wittgenstein believed, had been misled into thinking that their subject was a kind
of science, a search for theoretical explanations of the things that puzzled them: the nature of
meaning,truth, mind, time, justice, and so on. But philosophical problems are not amenable to
this kind of treatment, he claimed. What is required is not a correct doctrine but a clear view, one
that dispels the confusion that gives rise to the problem. Many of these problems arise through
an inflexible view of language that insists that if a word has a meaning there must be some kind
of object corresponding to it. Thus, for example, we use the word mind without any difficulty until
we ask ourselves “What is the mind?” We then imagine that this question has to be answered by
2
, identifying some “thing” that is the mind. If we remind ourselves that language has many uses
and that words can be used quite meaningfully without corresponding to things, the problem
disappears.
Philosophical Investigations begins not with an extract from a work of theoretical philosophy but
with a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400), in which Augustine explains how he
learned to speak. Augustine describes how his elders pointed to objects in order to teach him
their names. This description perfectly illustrates the kind of inflexible view of language that
Wittgenstein found to underlie most philosophical confusions. In this description, he says, there
lies “a particular picture of the essence of human language,” and “in this picture of language we
find the roots of the following idea: every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with
the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”
To combat this picture, Wittgenstein developed a method of describing and imagining what he
called “language games.” Language games, for Wittgenstein, are concrete social activities that
crucially involve the use of specific forms of language. By describing the countless variety of
language games—the countless ways in which language is actually used in human
interaction—Wittgenstein meant to show that “the speaking of a language is part of an activity,
or of a form of life.” The meaning of a word, then, is not the object to which it corresponds but
rather the use that is made of it in “the stream of life.”
Related to this point is Wittgenstein’s insistence that, with regard to language, the public is
logically prior to the private. The Western philosophical tradition, going back at least to
Descartes’ famous dictum “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), has tended to regard the
contents of one’s own mind as being foundational, the rock upon which all other knowledge is
built. In a section of Philosophical Investigations that has become known as the private language
argument, Wittgenstein sought to reverse this priority by reminding us that we can talk about the
contents of our own minds only once we have learned a language and that we can learn a
language only by taking part in the practices of a community. The starting point for philosophical
reflection, therefore, is not our own consciousness but our participation in communal activities:
“An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.”
Linguistic Turn
A purely social e xplanation for changes in culture, with a strict focus on material evidence,
gradually became less accepted. This paradigm shift, in which the status of language served as a
starting point, made frequent use of anthropology. Because of the emphasis on language, this
movement in the 1980s has also been called the linguistic turn, with strong roots in structuralism
and post-structuralism. Structuralists searched for building blocks within language, for example
in linguistics or by using myths that make it possible to create to create some semblance of order
and thus to create a cultural identity.
Structuralism
3
