Any foucaultfag here? I'm reading stuff unrelated and these horrible scholars just can't stop using his terminology...

Any foucaultfag here? I'm reading stuff unrelated and these horrible scholars just can't stop using his terminology. Can someone explain clearly the difference between "discursive formation/practice" & "episteme"? I don't want to read this bald fuck

Haven't read much Foucault, but it sounds like some kind of discourse - paradigm distinction where the first is the concrete discourse while the other is the overall framework in which the discourse fits.

I'm only guessing though, like I said, as I'm not that familiar with Foucault.

foucault is just a jordan peterson for plebs

Did a quick Google search and it turns out I'm not far off:

The French philosopher Michel Foucault used the term épistème in a highly specialized sense in his work The Order of Things to mean the historical a priori that grounds knowledge and its discourses and thus represents the condition of their possibility within a particular epoch. In subsequent writings, he made it clear that several epistemes may co-exist and interact at the same time, being parts of various power-knowledge systems. But he did not discard the concept:

I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.[1]

Yet in Foucault's The Order of Things he describes Episteme as:

However, if in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. (Foucault, 168)

Foucault's use of episteme has been asserted as being similar to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, as for example by Jean Piaget.

( continued )

[2] However, there are decisive differences. Whereas Kuhn's paradigm is an all-encompassing collection of beliefs and assumptions that result in the organization of scientific worldviews and practices, Foucault's episteme is not merely confined to science but to a wider range of discourse (all of science itself would fall under the episteme of the epoch). While Kuhn's paradigm shifts are a consequence of a series of conscious decisions made by scientists to pursue a neglected set of questions, Foucault's epistemes are something like the 'epistemological unconscious' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it. Moreover, Kuhn's concept seems to correspond to what Foucault calls theme or theory of a science, but Foucault analysed how opposing theories and themes could co-exist within a science.[3] Kuhn doesn't search for the conditions of possibility of opposing discourses within a science, but simply for the (relatively) invariant dominant paradigm governing scientific research (supposing that one paradigm always is pervading, except under paradigmatic transition). In contrast, Foucault attempts to demonstrate the constitutive limits of discourse, and in particular, the rules enabling their productivity; however, Foucault maintained that though ideology may infiltrate and form science, it need not do so: it must be demonstrated how ideology actually forms the science in question; contradictions and lack of objectivity is not an indicator of ideology.[4] Kuhn's and Foucault's notions are both influenced by the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard's notion of an "epistemological rupture", as indeed was Althusser.[citation needed] In 1997, Judith Butler used the concept of episteme in her book Excitable Speech, examining the use of speech-act theory for political purposes.[citation needed]

"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true"[5][6]

Veeky Forums is just reddit for shitposting

Yes that's what I've also found, but I don't really see the difference with the discursive practice, which is "the historically and culturally specific set of rules for organizing and producing different forms of knowledge". Then the episteme would be the assumptions and the discursive practices the rules? Also the discursive formation seems like a mix between a scientific discipline and an ideology, so it would be the result of the first two? I'm a brainlet when it comes to philosophy, I really need examples

jordan peterson is entry-level, low-key philosophy substitute for plebs

Sounds about right.

The thing to keep in mind is that structuralists and poststructuralists (and Foucault and Lacan, among others, move between the two) tend to emphasize the unconscious a lot so many concepts relate to one or the other or the interaction between the two or the emergence of new things from the interaction.

As for science and ideology, poststructuralists tend to talk about politics (or micropolitics rather) as being all over the place: politics related to science (competing for grants, jobs, social status, etc.), politics within science (dominant approaches, especially when there's no clear winner based on concrete external conditions) and the way in which science and knowledge fits into society overall (power structures, etc.). Philosophy tends to be an in-between explaining all of this at once using a limited number of concepts which capture as much as possible from every field trying to find what's most fundamental (because the distinctions are initially pragmatic rather than ontological, they're useful but not real so to speak: for example scientific determinism could influence the legal system, even if we're not there yet).

It can be difficult at first, but once you get used to the style and see what the authors of that period are after (since they interacted with each other constantly both in person and in texts) it becomes a bit easier.

> The thing to keep in mind is that structuralists and poststructuralists (and Foucault and Lacan, among others, move between the two) tend to emphasize the unconscious a lot so many concepts relate to one or the other or the interaction between the two or the emergence of new things from the interaction.

I meant to say many concepts relate to the interactions between conscious and unconscious dat.

>Jordan Peterson
>For plebs
>Implying he's not the quintessential pleb

So apparently writing serious essays for academia is for plebs while going on h3h3 and Rogan podcasts is patrician?

apparently

Ok I think I understand what you mean, thanks for the insight. The thing is I didn't even wanted to understand these dudes in the first place, my bibliography is forcing me. Academia is no fun

Artur Dan'ko
Ebolay Samolnikov
Egor Gaidar
Vasily Pupin

Foucault isn't that interesting on his own, at least as far as I can tell, but taken together with the others (Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Ranciere, especially Deleuze & Guattari) it can become very useful not just for understanding society, but for understanding yourself and everything you do. Deleuze in particular always insisted that you should take from every author what you can find useful and make it work for you instead of keeping it as abstract data.

Point being that academia can be fun at times.

Aha yes I know, I just find research to be this kind of weird rollercoaster of high hopes, enthusiasm and despair, so it's fun ultimately but not every time. For Deleuze & Guattari, unfortunately I'll never be able to read them. I've known Guattari's grandson for a long time and he's such an obnoxious little bitch, I'll have this mental block with the grandfather all my life I guess

Guattari himself probably wasn't the best example of a human being, having been a notorious womanizer who ultimately married a junkie and died depressed due to a series of untreated illnesses. Can't say much about his own work (psychiatry or writing), but his cooperation with Deleuze was quite fruitful.

He's done good things in institutional psychiatry as well. But yeah the whole family is a wreck. His son also, he owns a factory of protein powder for muscular dudes and is a failed musician. People in psychiatry are the worst with their families

Anything Foucault said, Nietzsche said better and with more style.

That's more or less true for most poststructuralists if you force it enough.

Interesting. I wonder what the families of the other Parisian intellectuals are up to. Deleuze's daughter is writing about cinema (not sure about his son), some of Lacan's children are probably psychoanalysts. Not sure about the rest, but your post got me curious.

FOUCAULT WAS A KANTIAN

kantbot when are you going to get off your ass and work on AM again

> episteme - The set of relations between discursive positivity, knowledge, and science that archeological analysis examines at the threshold of epistemologization (see above) is the episteme. The episteme is not itself a form of knowledge, and it has no general content in and of itself; it is not a world- view or 'a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge' in a given period. The term refers only to a level of relations involving knowledge and science as they emerge within a discursive positivity; these relations are various and shifting, even for a single period.

> discourse - Discourse is the object of Foucault's history. It is extremely wide-ranging and variable, tending to cross over almost every traditional historical unity (from the book to the spirit of an age); but it does so only because it has a very specific level of existence that has never before been analyzed in and of itself. This level is defined in a way similar to that of the statement (the basic element of discourse) and that of the enunciative function (the function by which discourse operates), as an aspect of language that captures its emergence and transformation in the active world. The analysis of discourse rigorously ignores any fundamental dependence on anything outside of discourse itself; discourse is never taken as a record of historical events, an articulation of meaningful content, or the expression of an individual or collective psychology. Instead, it is analyzed strictly at the level of 'things said,' the level at which statements have their 'conditions of possibility' and their conditions of relation to one another. Thus, discourse is not just a set of articulated propositions, nor is it the trace of an otherwise hidden psychology, spirit, or encompassing historical idea; it is the set of relations within which all of these other factors gain their sense (their conditions of possibility).

tldr: They are the same fucking thing and Foucault is trying to hamfistedly combine Heidegger's world-disclosure, terrible idiotic French structuralism, and his own aversion to what he thinks is "phenomenology" but he's actually wrong because he's a dumbass Frenchman. That's it. He's reifying the synchronic "moment" of the structure, the moment at which a given set of relations between discourses determines a certain set of conditions of possibility. Which makes no fucking sense and is much better said using phenomenology and Heidegger.

There's a reason he abandoned this bullshit. He comes to the same basic conclusions as Heidegger in The Order of Things, but all of the interesting bits are in the GENERAL idea of anti-realism which he shares with Heidegger (and probably cribbed from him), not specifically in his "archaeological" method. The Archaeology of Knowledge sucks dick. He was writing when it was cool to write like a fucking computer technician in the human sciences, as if making your language machinic enough would make it intrinsically sciencey.

>Foucault's epistemes are something like the 'epistemological unconscious' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it
>the AIDS-faggot was illiterate to the point of needing to reinvent the 'zeitgeist'

Foucault is the ultimate dud. The idea that whole disciplines are based off his "work" is fucking ridiculous.