Foucault (pronounced foo-co) was a famous French intellectual who wrote onphilosophy, history, psychology, sociology, medicine, gender studies, andliterary or cultural criticism. What held together his wide field of studywas an interest in Power and Knowledge and how they work together. Youmight say he started with the truism "KNOWLEDGE IS POWER", took it apart,analysed it, and put it back together. He was particularly interested inKnowledge of human beings, and Power that acts on human beings.
Suppose we start with the statement "KNOWLEDGE IS POWER" but doubt that wehave any knowledge of absolute truth. If you take away the idea of absolutetruth, what does knowledge mean? Maybe knowledge would be just what a groupof people get together and decide is true. According to Foucault, the mightof "MIGHT MAKES RIGHT" may not be all that different from the power in"KNOWLEDGE IS POWER".
In one case physical force, in the other mental force, is exerted by apowerful minority who are thus able to impose their idea of the right, orthe true, on the majority. When we're talking about knowledge of humanbeings, the social sciences, or, as Foucault called them, "the humansciences", then the people deciding what is true (constructing Truth) aredeciding matters that define humanity, and affect people in general. Ifthey can get enough people to believe what they have decided, then that maybe more important than some unknowable truth.
How do some people get the rest of us to accept their ideas of who we are?That involves some power to create belief. And these same people who decidewhat is knowledge in the first place can easily claim to be the mostknowledgeable - to know more about us than we do ourselves. But how doesknowledge/power get its work done? Often knowledge/power and physical forceare allied, as when a child is spanked to teach her a lesson. But primarilyknowledge/power works through language. At a basic level, when a childlearns to speak, she picks up the basic knowledge and rules of her cultureat the same time. As when a father says to a daughter "Take good care ofyour Mother, Father's off to work", the knowledge and rules conveyed of thatspoken language are "Daddy work, Mummy stay home".
On a more specialised level, all the human sciences (psychology, sociology,economics, linguistics, even medicine) define human beings at the same timeas they describe them, and work together with such institutions as mentalhospitals, prisons, factories, schools, and law courts to have specific andserious effects on people. Foucault focuses throughout his work on acentral mechanisms of the social sciences - the categorisation of peopleinto NORMAL & ABNORMAL. His books study different forms of abnormality:madness, criminality, perverted sexuality, and illness.
We would naturally tend to define ABNORMAL as everything which differssignificantly from the NORMAL. Normal is the basic term, and what is normalshould be perfectly obvious - it's all around us. We might also assume thatthe difference is easy to tell, and tends to remain the same over time. Butby looking at a wide variety of historical documents, Foucault challengesall of these assumptions. He shows that definitions of madness, illness,criminality, and perverted sexuality vary greatly over time. Behaviour thatgot people locked up or put in hospitals at one time was glorified inanother.
Societies, knowledge/power, and the human sciences have since the 18thcentury carefully defined the difference between normal and abnormal, andthen used these definitions all the time to regulate behaviour.Distinguishing between the two may appear to be easy, but is in factextremely difficult - there is always a hazy and highly contestedborderline.
Our society has increasingly locked up, excluded, and hidden abnormalpeople, while nevertheless watching, examining, questioning them carefully.It has not always been this way. In earlier times madmen were an acceptedpart of the community; sick people were treated at home; no one expecteddisabled or disfigured people to stay out of sight; and criminals werepunished as publicly as possible. This exclusion of abnormal people doesnot make these people unimportant to the culture. The normal is not definedfirst, with the abnormal established in contrast! We actually define thenormal through the abnormal; only through abnormality do we know what normalis. Therefore, although abnormality is excluded and supposedly hidden, theremaining people, normal people, study and question it incessantly,obsessively.
The study of abnormality is one of the main ways that power relations areestablished in society. When as abnormality and its corresponding norm aredefined, somehow it is always the normal person who has power over theabnormal. The psychologist tells us about the madmen, the physician aboutthe patients, the criminologist (or the legal theorist, or the politician)talks about the criminals, but we never expect to hear the latter talk aboutthe former - what they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant,because by definition they have no knowledge (but that is code for notwanting them to have any power).
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