Notes on Foucault

from...
Wikipedia n.d., 'Michel Foucault', http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault, viewed 5 April 2011.

My own thoughts are in brackets and Courier.

• Influenced by Kant and Nietzsche
• Irrationalities

The History of Madness

• In the 18th Century madness seen as the reverse of Reason;
• the 19th, mental illness

( ...the 'hysterical' woman...)

"...madness was silenced by Reason, losing its power to signify the limits of social order and to point to the truth."

• the rise of Science

The Order of Things

• underlying conditions of truth; discourses; episteme (change over time)

(...What are the 'underlying conditions of truth' for Network Culture? How does these relate to the hypertextual language of the Network?...)

Foucault: "man is only a recent invention"; the "end of man" is at hand.

(...In relation to the Enlightenment? Discovery that Man cannot be all knowing, that Reason is not the only avenue for Truth? Or, that humanism is potentially catastrophic to the individual(particularly a Networked liberal humanism)?...)

• Gaston Bachelard's 'epistemological rupture': where an unconscious obstacle (unthought / unconscious structures) to scientific thought is ruptured.

The Archaeology of Reason

• events: 'statements' appearing in time.

Discipline and Punish

• visibility

(...the individual is made more visible as a result of the new materialism (?) of Network Culture?...)

The History of Sexuality

• against theories of repressed sexuality...
• power-knowledge.

(...ideas of that which is repressed, invisible etc...)