Michel Foucault: A New Archivist in the Age of AI (Online Course)
8 Sessions, 20 January 2027 – 10 March 2027
Wednesdays
7:00pm – 9:00pm GMT (UK Time)
The London School of Continental Philosophy
Teacher: Dr. Daniel Weizman
Price: £240
About
Michel Foucault helped create the intellectual world we inhabit today. His concepts changed what we notice in a hospital, a school or a claim to expertise, and his vocabulary still circulates through political debate and everyday conversation. Words such as “discourse”, “normalisation” and “power” have become so familiar that we can easily assume we already know what he meant by them. Yet their widespread use often obscures the questions he developed them to ask. What makes his thought so powerful, and what can it help us understand about the changes taking place around us?
This eight-week online course returns to Foucault’s early work to explore questions that technology and AI make urgent: how knowledge is organised, how authority is established and challenged, and what place human beings occupy within the systems through which they are known. Our main text will be The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), read alongside selected passages from Madness and Civilisation, The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things.
Foucault approaches these questions through concrete historical transformations. In Madness and Civilisation, he examines the changing boundaries between madness and reason, and psychiatry’s claim to speak for the people it treats. In The Birth of the Clinic, hospitals, case records, examinations and autopsies become part of a new organisation of medical knowledge.
The Archaeology of Knowledge asks how we can investigate transformations like these. How does a pattern of behaviour become a symptom? What allows a personal history to function as medical evidence? How do people become qualified to classify others and make decisions about their lives? Foucault examines the practices through which these relationships take shape.
We will use Foucault’s approach to examine contemporary changes in knowledge. When a bank uses an AI assessment to refuse a loan, a prediction about someone’s future becomes a decision that helps shape it. The applicant may struggle to discover why they were classified as a risk, while the adviser can report the result without explaining how it was reached. What makes the assessment credible? Where does responsibility lie? And what would allow someone to challenge the judgement or the categories on which it rests?
In his book The Order of Things, Foucault provokes us by claiming that “Man” is a recent invention, and one that may disappear. He means a particular historical arrangement in which human beings are both objects of investigation and the basis for explaining how knowledge is possible. We will ask how AI might transform this arrangement, changing the concepts through which we understand thought, language and intelligence, and the place human beings occupy within knowledge.
The course offers a close, accessible reading of a challenging book, with contemporary examples and discussion of problems that concern all of us today. No previous knowledge of Foucault is required.
What will we cover?
- An introduction to early Foucault through his investigations of madness, medicine and the emergence of the modern human sciences.
- How archaeological analysis works, using examples to explore statements, discourses and archives.
- How technology and AI may change the questions institutions ask, the evidence they accept and the expertise they recognise.
- Foucault’s claim that “man” could disappear, and what changes in the organisation of knowledge might mean for our understanding of ourselves.
Requirements
This course is designed for anyone with an interest in Foucault and contemporary thought, and assumes no prior knowledge.
