t tell the reader what his freedom will look like once he achieves, or even how he might go about achieving it. His purpose, to the contrary, seems to be to critique culture, past and present, in a way which will help the individual and the culture realize the nature of his and its imprisonment in illusions which are accepted by all as the most dependable realities.
Rajchman encapsulates the elements of Foucault's critique, which Rajchman defines as "the usual term applied to analytic philosophy" which "names the exposure of unrecognized operations of power in people's lives." The elements include
struggles which . . . share a number of common features: they are concerned with direct or concrete effects of power on people's lives and bodies; they involve unrecognized or unanalyzed operations of domination; they are not subordinated to long-range social solutions typical of an older left outlook; they involve not simple disinformation and mystification but the very forms and privileges of knowledge; their central issue is subjectivity (Rajchman, 1985, 77).
Foucault's contributions, then, focus on a clear understanding of the pervasiveness of social and cultural power, the awakening of individuals to the fact of that pervasive power, and the discussion of individuals' creation of themselves and their freedom despite that power. Knowledge is intimately related to power in this sociocultural grid. As Allan Megill writes in Prophets of Extremity, Foucault's contribution to the understanding of knowledge is unique because of his inextricably connecting knowledge with cultural power, and because he separates himself from Marxism which holds, unlike Foucault, that scientific inquiry is objective. To Foucault, "every 'science' is in fact an 'ideology' . . . in the sense that it is irremediably caught up within relations of power" (Megill, 1985, 249).
Foucault here explains the oppressive nature of this power-knowledge grid, and,...