Monday, March 06, 2006

Power/Knowledge

"I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class. What needs to be done is something quite different. One needs to investigate historically, and beginning from the lowest level, how mechanisms of power have been able to function. In regard to the confinement of the insane, for example, or the repression and interdiction of sexuality, we need to see the manner in which, at the effective level of the family, of the immediate environment, of the cells and most basic units of society, these phenomena of repression or exclusion possessed their instruments and their logic, in response to a certain number of needs. We need to identify the agents responsible for them, their real agents (those which constituted the immediate social entourage, the family, parents, doctors etc.), and not be content to lump them under the formula of a generalised bourgeoisie."
aaaaacontent to lump aajjaaaaMichel Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge p100-101.

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