Re: [Foucault-L] savoir - connaissance

I might be wrong, but as I remember it from 1966 onwards (i.e., after The Order of Things appeared) Foucault, much like Althusser in the same period, intervened against the structuralist tendencies/readings of his own work, a tendency/reading which only seems to be strengthened (against the materialist tendency in Foucault's work) by understanding the savoir/connaissance distinction as analogous to langue/parole in Saussure or structure/agency in Weberian thought.

Savoir as I understand it is "know-how", that is, that it has an intrinsic theoretico-normative relationship to subjection, in that it always implies "I can", "I should", etc. Connaissance is related to this but not reducible to it, so it's not clear that it is either a dualism or a couplet, but rather specifies a relation, in the same way that power-knowledge specifies a relation (and not an equivalence).

Regards,
David



On 17/04/2006, at 11:34 PM, Kevin Turner wrote:

as Machiel noted, the answer to your question is history:

both langue and structure are ahistorical - parole and agency being empirical instances of langue and structure. this is to say, that the dualism of these forms is that of the empirico-transcendental doublet that Foucault talked about at lenght in The Oder of Things. In addition, the ahistorical of both langue and structure tends to be the universal subject of history: it is man as universal substance that allows for knowldege of man as empirical instance.

For Foucault both savoir and connaissance are historically constituted - moreover, savoir is not the cause of connaissance, rather connaissance is an effect of savoir; and savoir is the historical apriori of subjects (and objects) - it is what gives subject to connaissance.

thus, savoir/connaissance is ontologically different from either langue/parole or structure.agency. and therefore i do not think of savoir/connaissance as a dualism, but as a couplet.

regards - kevin.

-----Original Message-----
From: alexandre_beliaev@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sun, 16 Apr 2006 10:02:34 -0700 (PDT)
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] savoir - connaissance

Machiel, Kevin:

Here's another question with respect to the
distinction between savoir and connaissance:

I feel that the distinction between
savoir/connaissance is quite similar to a distinction
between langue/parole (in linguistics) and
structure/practice (in soc. sciences). Do you agree /
disagree? And, if you agree, isn't this parallelism -
which suggests a particular kind of a dualistic
tension between savoir and connaissance - problematic,
given Foucault's distrust of dualistic thinking
(which, for me, is very strongly articulated in
'History of Sexuality')?

With thanks for your time,

Alex.

--- machiel karskens <mkarskens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In L'archéologie du savoir on page 236 'savoir is
called : "l'état des
connaissances" at a given moment; so "connaissance"
is positive knowledge on
a given topic or in a given discipline; "savoir" is
the field of knowledge
or discursive formation at that moment, which makes
this positive knowledge
possible.

yours
machiel karskens

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Turner" <kevin.turner@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Foucault List" <foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2006 3:12 PM
Subject: [Foucault-L] savoir - connaissance

In "The Archaeology of Knowledge" Sheridan Smith

makes the following
observation on the relation between savoir and
connaissance:

'Connaissance refers...to a particular corpus of

knowledge, a particular
discipline â?? biology or economics, for example.
Savoir, which is usually
defined as knowledge in general, to totality of
connaissance, is used by
Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall,
way. He has himself
offered the following comment on his usage of these
terms: â??By connaissance
I mean the relation of the subject to the object and
the formal rules that
govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are
necessary in a
particular period for this or that type of object to
be given to
connaissance and for this or that type of
enunciation to be formulatedâ??'(AK:
15n2).

The problem is, Sheridan Smith does not give a

reference for Foucault's
comments: does anybody know where Foucault
originally made this statement?

Regards - Kevin.

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