Foucault and Shakespeare’s pedants, dotards and drunks

J Gouws

doi:10.4102/lit.v11i3.811

Abstract

Foucault’s claim that the Renaissance organised knowledge in terms of the episteme of resemblance can be challenged in principle and on empirical grounds. I argue that the empirical challenge can be delivered, first, by pointing to three Shakespeare scenes in which the use of analogy as a means of presenting knowledge is repudiated; and, second, by pointing to alternative ways of organising knowledge: classical authority, logic and rhetoric. The “theoretical” challenge must be delivered by questioning Foucault’s presuppositions.

Highlights

The Renaissance accepted the notion that the world as we know it is a manifestation or expression of the thoughts of God. This sets the framework for the theories of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, what one would call the semiological ontologies, which pictured the world as a meaningful order, or a text
Jonathan Dollimore (1985: 5) objects to Tillyard’s attem pt “falsely to unify history and social process in the nam e of ‘the collective mind of the people’ For Dollimore, “Tillyard’s world picture, to the extent that it did still exist, was not shared by all; it was an ideological legitimation of an existing social order, one rendered more necessary by the apparent instability, actual and imagined, of that order”
This he does by proceeding as if discourse is entirely independent of discoursers.’ Such as strategy may appear to be innocuous, but what happens if we deal with people who do not have the same assumption that there is a fundamental divide between the subjective and objective, people who have not been initiated into the post-Cartesian notion of knowledge as “the view from nowhere” (to use Thom as Nagel’s (1986) expression), the compromising implications of which Foucault has not managed to liberate himself from?

Summary

Introduction

In 'o th er words, the most he has shown is that the particular use of certain analogies or correspondences were questioned, not that many people in Renaissance England did not organise their thoughts in term s of analogy. In the first place, to find evidence of the notions of analogy or correspondence as architectonical principles being questioned or undermined; and, in the second place, to show that there were ways of organising knowledge other than those of correspondence and analogy.

Results

Conclusion