Foucault on the invention of manWhatis ‘man’?Accordingto Michel Foucault (b. 1926), ‘man’ is an inve

Foucault on the invention of manWhatis ‘man’?Accordingto Michel Foucault (b. 1926), ‘man’ is an invention, one which is liable tochange.‘Man’here doesn’t signify a gendered being; rather, it shares meaning with notionslike ‘humankind’ and ‘human nature’.Ourknowledge of these ‘truths’, says Foucault, is socially constructed and constituted under conditions of power (‘power’ represents an‘archaeology’ which continually produces new ‘truths’, not a metaphorical gunto the head). We build our ‘truths’ in workplaces, schools, and prisons, whose overarchinginfrastructure shapes our ‘docile bodies’ into acceptance.‘[T]he discovery of truth is really acertain modality of the production of truth; putting what is given as the truthof observation or demonstration back on the basis of rituals, of thequalifications of the knowing individual, of the truth-event system, is what Iwould call the archaeology of knowledge.’ — Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power:Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974Thusthe supposed truth of ‘man’ is an idea embedded into us. We are vehicles of a‘truth-event system’, by which ‘man’ is ‘historically determined and situatedwithin our culture’—atbest, temporarily. Our societies follow unconscious rules, born out ofeverchanging historical conditions, which determine ‘man’.‘It is comforting, however, and a sourceof profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure notyet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he willdisappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.’ — Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: AnArchaeology of the Human SciencesWeonly have to trace a genealogy, beginning in the 19th century, to unearththe history of ‘man’ in one instant. For example, ‘man’ apparently has afundamental set of interests in virtue of biologically evolved traits(Darwinism); ‘man’ possesses self-authenticity belonging to inner subjectivity(Sartre’s existentialism). However, each view is mistaken, writes Foucault. For‘man’ is an invention whose properties will be erased again in the future—perhapseventually to the point of no return.‘[A]s the archaeology of our thoughteasily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing itsend. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared … as theground of classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then onecan certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at theedge of the sea.’— MichelFoucault, The Order of Things: AnArchaeology of the Human Sciences‘Godis dead,’ declared Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Man’ now walks lonelily on thinlyconstructed meanings. These ‘glittering surfaces’ are crumbling, says Foucault.Already technology is eroding the boundaries of what ‘man’is supposed to be. -- source link
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