In the spirit of weber 257 tive theories of knowledge: that is, the notion that language mirrors a material reality; that words and things correspond. So the critique of reflective theories of knowledge is highly relevant here.'^^ This critique argues that there is no correspondence between what is said and the mental image it appears to represent, only a infinite regress of “representations”. Language is no longer unproblematical but the site of multiple meanings and slippages. In Foucault’s work, this critique is directed at wide claims to universal “truths” or understandings.'^^ For Foucault these are merely the cloaks for power and they warrant our scepticism. By looking at the importance of words - as opposed to things - Foucault shifts attention to the constitution of consciousness, the categories of thought - and the ways the “real world” is constructed and perceived through these categories. The question of “who we are?” requires that greater attention is afforded the constitutive role of law and other languages. Law, language and knowledge become a mode of objectification through which individuals are made or transformed intc) subjectsboth in the sense of categorising individuals and as the subjects of a particular “discipline” or field such as sexuality, policing, punishment and illness. In contrast to Weber, Foucault argues that: “What we have to do is analyse specific rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalisation in general ... I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand howwe have been trapped in our own historv.”'^'' “Modernity”, “Western Enlightenment”, “Rationalism” and the other “big facts” of generalisations are made rather than given; they are neither innocent nor absolute. Moreover, the tend to reify the verv things they seek to describe and explain. 179 See. generally, F de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Duckworth, 1983) discussed inJ. Culler’s, excellent introduction. Saussure, (London: Fontana, 1976).; R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); J.-F. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition (Minneapolis: Universit\' of Minnessta Press, 1983); J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, (London: Routledge and Kegan P.aul, 1975), and On Deconstruction, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). See M. Foucault, The Order of Things, (NewYork: Vintage Books, 1973), The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Tavistock, 1977); Discipline and Punish (Fdarmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) and Foucault, op. cit., passim. See, also, the useful collection edited by Colin Gordon: M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, (Brighton: Harvester, 1980); H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Michel Foucault, (Brighton: Harvester, 1982); and P. Dews, “Power and Subjectivity in Foucault”, New Left Review, No. 144, 1984, pp. 31-62. Cf. M. Carrithers, M.S. Collins and S. Lukes, The Category of the Person, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). M. F'ocault, The Subject and the Power”, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, op. , cit., p. 211. F Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), and The Word, the Text and the Critic, (London: Allen Lane, 1980). 178 179
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