ABSTRACT
Many of Foucault's writings are concerned with how it is that we know something, and the processes whereby something becomes established as a fact. As we saw in the last chapter on discourse, Foucault is interested in the processes of exclusion which lead to the production of certain discourses rather than others. He is interested in the same processes of exclusion in relation to knowledge and, in the collection of essays entitled Power/Knowledge (1980), Foucault explores the way that, in order for something to be established as a fact or as true, other equally valid statements have to be discredited and denied. Thus, rather than focusing on the individual thinkers who developed certain ideas or theories, in works such as The Order of Things (1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault wants to focus on the more abstract institutional processes at work which establish something as a fact or as knowledge.
