Michel Foucault

David Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754628200
• eBook ISBN: 9781351917834
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

Michel Foucault was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers whose work has unsettled and transformed the field of social philosophy and the social sciences. The essays and articles selected for this volume are written by many of the most important of Foucault's interpreters and interlocutors and show the range of Foucault's influence and the debates it has provoked about Foucault's own approaches and in relation to substantive areas of social philosophy and social science such as power, critique, enlightenment, law, governance, ethics and truthfulness. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, the development of Foucault's thought and demonstrates its enduring significance on our understanding of how we have become what we are.

Part I

Methodology

[1]

Michel Foucault’s Immature Science

IAN HACKING

Most philosophers who write about systematic knowledge have come to restrict themselves to what they call “mature science,” although they display a certain uneasiness. Thus Putnam says, “physics surely counts as a ‘mature science’ if any science does.” ([11]:21.) What, we wonder, if nothing counts as mature? I suspect that the distinction between mature and immature is, although not ill founded, at least ill understood. Putnam needs it because he wants the more established sciences to be about something, to refer. He sensibly thinks that most early speculation got things wrong. Similarly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn’s many-faceted word “paradigm” almost implied “maturity,” because an individual or group achievement (one sense of the term “paradigm”) had to set the standards to which a “normal science” would conform. He owned that he could not tell whether sociology, economics, or psychology had paradigms. Likewise Putnam counts some and perhaps all of these among the immature sciences. Neither Putnam nor Kuhn has much to tell us about immaturity.

Alongside Putnam’s and Kuhn’s analyses of systematic knowledge we have a quite different enterprise: epistemology. It is, roughly speaking, Erkenntnistheorie as opposed to Wissenschaftslehre. It is a theory of the facts and events with which we are acquainted, the theory of sense perception, belief, grounds for belief, and the analysis of “I know that p.” An ethnographer studying American philosophers would have to suppose that the electron and Jones’ Ford are almost the only objects of knowledge hereabouts.

Today I shall consider whether there may be anything of a theoretical sort to say about the vast domain of speculative and common knowledge that falls between electrons and furniture. Our doctors treat us, our bankers house us, our magistrates judge us and our bureaucrats arrange us according to such systems of knowledge; even on the side of pure speculation far more of it resembles sociobiology than quantum mechanics.

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is all about some immature sciences—chiefly those whose foci are “life, labor, and language” ([4]).¹ He writes of the biology, economics and philosophy of one era, and of the natural history, analysis of wealth or general grammar that preceded them. He has a new critique of our contemporary human sciences. The book is important at all sorts of levels. There is a radically challenging reorganization of the way we think about these disciplines. There is a dazzling but instructive plethora of newly chosen facts that give content to this reorganization. (He also cheats, or at least cuts corners on some of the facts). The book is philosophical because life, labor, language and “Man” are among the topics of philosophy. It is also philosophical because it exemplifies a theory of knowledge, in both the theoretical and practical terms. His archaeology, as he calls it, is a way of investigating the groundwork of bodies of knowledge. The book is also a polemic about the kinds of enquiry that are appropriate for our time.

The Order of Things is incredibly rich both in historical detail and speculative suggestion. There is nothing like it in English. But that is no reason not to bring it down to (our) earth. I shall imagine that I am answering an examination question: “Compare and contrast Foucault’s archaeology to current American theory of knowledge.” This forces me to proceed in a manner that is both pedestrian and abstract. I shall set out certain hypotheses with which Foucault starts his enterprise. These range in status from proposals which he would be willing to modify to assumptions that he would never give up. They are starting points for enquiry. The first hypothesis is simply this: systems of thought in the immature sciences exhibit quite definite laws and regularities. Where Kuhn had been inclined to throw up his hands and call Bacon’s natural histories a disorderly “morass,” ([9]: 16) Foucault finds an organization, although one different in kind from anything that Kuhn was looking for. General grammar of the seventeenth century, or nineteenth century labor theory of value provide examples, but so do altogether inchoate domains such as what we now call iatrochemistry (which has been succeeded by real knowledge) or phrenology (which hasn’t).

Such examples are misleading because they make us think of some specific theory and then model that on mature science with well articulated postulates that lead, almost deductively, to a rich display of testable hypotheses. On the contrary it is Foucault’s second conjecture that we are concerned not with a corpus of theses but with systems of possibility. Certain questions arise in general grammar, and are met by a batch of competing answers. These questions and answers appear to have been quite inconceivable in Renaissance thought, nor do they occur in subsequent philology. It is Foucault’s hypothesis that what it is possible to say in a body of discourse such as general grammar is vastly more rule-governed than we have commonly imagined.

By “what it is possible to say” I do not just mean actual doctrines, such as propositions about the copula or about labor. It is part of this second hypothesis that what counts as reason, argument or evidence may itself be part of a system of thought, so that modes of “rationality” are topical and dated. That offends our sensibilities that have been so firmly fixed by Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, who took as their models the mature or maturing sciences of their day. It is wise to ease the pain of the idea that “what counts as a reason” may be temporal and not timeless, by attributing it to “immaturity.” Current philosophy makes the hypothetico-deductive style of reasoning the essence of science, adulterated at most by some admixture of induction. Not all the historicizing of Kuhn and Lakatos has dislodged this opinion one whit: perhaps they are the fiercest hypothetico-deductionists of all. Despite occasional programmatic remarks that one reads from time to time, the early chapters of my own Emergence of Probability are perhaps the only detailed study in English of a changing style of rationality ([8]). Those chapters learned much from The Order of Things.

Allow me to re-emphasize that the systems of thought to which Foucault addresses himself are not constituted by a unified set of beliefs advanced by a person or a school. Indeed he has a teasing device that I call Foucault’s fork, which surprises us by stating that competing bodies of belief have the same underlying rules of formation. Once there was a memorable contrast between the taxonomic System of Linnaeus and the Method of Adanos. We now have little difficulty in supposing that these antagonistic enterprises are part of the same web of possible alternatives, but some of us are more startled to read that positivism and phenomenology are equally constituted by a common underlying organization.² Evidently neither overt hypotheses nor written out deductions are critical to the systems of thought that Foucault proposes to analyze.

The examples of Linnaean taxonomy or Comteian positivism are misleading in another way: they focus on proper names and famous philosophies. Foucault’s third hypothesis is that systems of thought are both anonymous and autonomous. They are not to be studied by reading the final reports of the heros of science, but rather by surveying a vast terrain of discourse that includes tentative starts, wordy pro-logomena, brief flysheets, and occasional journalism. We should think about institutional ordinances and the plans of zoological gardens, astrolabes or penitentiaries; we must read referees’ reports and examine the botanical display cases of the delletanti. Many of these examples of things to read and examine are quite literally anonymous. Foucault believes that even the great positive achievements within a system of thought characteristically merely fill or elaborate certain pre-established uniformities. A typical phrase will convey how he uses historical personalities, “The figure whom we call Hume.” The familiar proper name serves as a ready reference to a text, but we are not trying to analyse his oeuvre. Foucault suspects all concepts that focus on the consciousness and intent of an individual. Much literary criticism, especially in France, shares this theme. Foucault himself has done his best to obviate even the concept of “literature” and “author.”

A fourth hypothesis is that the regularities that determine a system of thought are not a conscious part of that thought and perhaps cannot even be articulated in that thought. Foucault has variously used words such as episteme, savoir and archive in this connection. I once translated savoir as “depth knowledge” and connaissance as “surface knowledge,” with an obvious allusion to Chomsky. ([7]: 166–70.) In the Archaeology Foucault uses connaissance to refer to particular bits of belief wittingly accepted. Savoir denotes his conjectured unconscious underlying structure that sets out the possibilities through which connaissance may run its course. The allusion to Chomsky is to be taken lightly, for grammar obviously is rule-governed and an hypothesis of depth grammar is immediately plausible. The immature sciences are not manifestly regular, and the supposition of “rules” is mere conjecture. Yet after twenty years of eager research we are not more in possession of a widely applicable “depth grammar” than of clearly stated episteme. Levy-Strauss’s structure of kinship relations is perhaps the only proposal of this sort that has come near to delivering the goods. Further detailed comparison of Foucault and structuralism are empty; they would lump us with “those mimes and tumblers who debate whether I am structuralist.”

A more insightful comparison is made by Georges Canguilhem, the distinguished historian of science. In an essay that is better than anything else written about The Order of Things, he concludes with well-documented allusions to Kant ([3]). Foucault has half-jokingly accepted that he has a notion of an “historical a priori.” Where Kant had taught that there is a fixed body of synthetic a priori knowledge that determines the bounds of possibility of coherent thought, Foucault has instead an “historical a priori.” The savoir of a time, a place, a subject matter and a community of speakers determines what may be said, there and then.

What is the “surface” of which the archive is the “depth”? Foucault’s fifth hypothesis is that the surface is all that is actually said, and (with qualifications) nothing else. It is not what is meant, intended, or even thought, but what is said. Systems of thought have a surface that is discourse. He gropes about for a definition of enoncé that is not quite sentence nor statement nor speech act nor inscription nor proposition. It is not an atomistic idea, for enunciations are not isolated sentences that add up to a whole, but entities whose role is understood holistically by a set of inter-relations with other bits of discourse. The same “sentence” about the bone structure of human hands and birds’ talons is not the same enunciation in a Renaissance text as it is in a post-Darwinian comparative anatomy. Nor is the enoncé restricted to sentences: it will include tables, maps, diagrams. It includes more than even inscriptions, not just because Foucault is often more concerned with specific types rather than concrete tokens, but also because it takes in some tableaux, displays, carvings and decorated windows. But having made such qualifications the word “sentence” remains the best one to denote the elements of discourse. It reminds us that Foucault’s discourse is constituted by fairly tangible or audible or legible human productions, and not by what these artifacts mean.

Much recent French writing shares and indeed antedates Quine’s hostility to meanings. The objects of a reading are texts: both “reading” and “text” are code words that show one is ideologically pure, and writes only of relations between inscriptions and never of a meaning beneath the words. With such an audience, and with no French word that means “meaning” anyway, Foucault has no need to argue that sentences are the object of study. His notion of discourse and Quine’s “fabric of sentences” are cognate ideas. But the resemblance soon falters. One reason is just that Quine is ahistorical. His image of revising a conceptual scheme is Neurath’s: it is like rebuilding a ship at sea, plank by plank. Foucault’s intricate histories provide one more lesson that change is not like that. It is not just that Kuhnian revolutions intervene, but also that in the most normal of science the free wheeling formulation of models and conjectures has none of the character of a tidy ship’s carpenter.

A more fundamental difference is that Quine’s fabric of sentences is different in kind from Foucault’s discourse. Quine’s is a body of beliefs, a “lore,” partly theoretical, partly practical, but such as could be entertained as a pretty consistent whole by a single informant. Foucault’s discourses are what is said by a lot of people talking, writing and arguing; it includes the pro and the con and a great many incompatible connaissances.

Moreover Quine’s “conceptual scheme” is thoroughly impregnated by the hypothetico-deductive model. There is a “core” and a “periphery.” The logical consequences of the “core” pervade the peripheral “fabric” which is more localized in its ramifications. A “recalcitrant experience” is one that is reported by a sentence inconsistent with the total “corpus.” Recalcitrance demands revision. Revision, we are told, must conform to logic, but revisions are chosen not by the demands of logic but a desire for simplicity. Now if we examine the immature sciences we shall find nothing like this at all. One is led to an image quite different from Neurath’s: it is as if these bodies of discourse exist in a conceptual space of possibilities, and as if the discourse is a play upon these possibilities.

Since the word ‘hermeneutics’ is now showing signs, in some quarters, of having an attraction for analytical philosophy, let me say that despite our concern with “reading” and “texts,” Foucault’s archaeology is the very opposite of hermeneutics. To recall an etymology, Hermes is the winged messenger of the gods, and hermeneutics is the art of interpreting what Hermes brought. Hermen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I METHODOLOGY
• PART II FREEDOM AND POWER
• PART III CRITIQUE AND NORMATIVITY: THE FOUCAULT–HABERMAS DEBATE
• PART IV ON ENLIGHTENMENT
• PART V ON POLITICAL REASON
• PART VI ON LAW
• PART VII ON ETHICS, THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE AND PARRHESIA
• Name Index