GRAMMAR AND POWER IN WITTGENSTEIN AND FOUCAULT

Foucault criticizes modern discourses on power such as Marxism, Freudianism, and
liberalism in which power is understood as a repressive negative force that radiates
from modern political institutions to the whole society from above. For him, modern
power, with the involvement of the discourses of the humanities, sustains and
maintains itself by producing subjectivities and the modern subject is simultaneously
an object of knowledge and of domination. There are philosophically significant
similarities between the ways Wittgenstein describes language games and grammar as
formative elements of our sociality and Foucault’s understanding of power as a
productive and dynamic grid of strategic formative relations. From this perspective,
Peter Winch’s and David Bloor’s accounts of social constructive interpretations of
Wittgenstein are analyzed and criticized, then a Wittgensteinian interpretation of the
concepts of the crime and the criminal is presented on the basis of Arnold I.
Davidson’s and Ian Hacking’s arguments on historical ontology.