Butler: Epistemology & Ontology in Undoing Gender
My thesis for my senior seminar involves a theory by Judith Butler called performativity. In her book, where she explains performativity, she also touched on fantasy and the concept of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowing. It asks "what can be known?" and "how do we know?". Butler speaks on social organization and what is true and what is reality. She says that what is considered real or true is a question of knowledge (which I immediately saw the definition and exploration of epistemology right there!). I was so excited to be able to apply philosophy to my gender and social constructionalism studies. Butler also says that what is real or true is delegated through power and can only be explained by power dynamics. Foucault, another one of my favorite theorists that I'm using in my thesis, deals with the notion of power within society. Foucault talks about how society often disciplines and punishes through power in order to maintain the status quo. So an exploration of power relates to epistemology. This, coincidentally, also relates to ontology. Ontology is the study of being and asks "what is real?" So, in our social world constructed by "the powers that be" (whomever holds the highest power in the society) Butler and Foucault explore what reality really is. If our perceptions and actions are so greatly influenced by whomever holds the highest power then how do we know what is real? Between coercion and persuasion in society how can we really know that what we know is real? It is in the theories from Foucault and Butler alongside this question that we encounter the limits of knowledge. Ideas are regulated so much by society. How do we know that what we know isn't exactly what society wants us to know? This is no new concept. Hitler had many many books burned -- sources of knowledge -- that went against his teachings (and he is just one example of many who did this). Books all over the world are edited and reviewed for approval before they are published. The news is regulated, not by the producers, but by those who are the mega ceo's of the companies. These ceo's are on boards of other committees and they all collaborate with each other to regulate what is promoted through media and what should be shown as a negative in media. Even the catholic church regulated which books were brought into the Bible. Galileo is another perfect example. He said the sun didn't revolve around the earth and we we're not the center of the universe. This new knowledge was delegated by the society he lived in. He was, in Foucault's words and theory, punished and disciplined,by society because he went outside of the norms. Then to top it of the catholic church that punished and disciplined him made sure for quite some time that no one knew of his true knowledge -- what was real was hidden. So, again, with our social constructions and regulations of power institutions, how do we know what we know is real? This shows the innate power of discourse.
"Nothing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on the one hand, it...does not conform to a set of rules and constraints characteristic, for example, of a given type of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc." --Foucault
Butler uses the above quote to show that knowledge and power are not separable "but work together to establish a set of subtle and explicit criteria for thing the world." Butler further expands with this quote from Foucault, "It is therefore not a matter of describing what knowledge is and what power is and how one would repress the other or how the other would abuse the one, but rather, a nexus of knowledge-power has to be described so that we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system..." What this is saying is that a person looks "both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted and for the limits of those conditions."
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