Critical And Effective Histories

Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology

Mitchell Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134921300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

First Published in 2004. This work places Foucault's methodologies against social theory and philosophy in order to provide a guide to social sciences, particularly historical sociology. Written to clarify Foucault's contribution for professional and non-professional readers, the text demonstrates the originality and usefulness of Foucault's work and embodies a conviction that Foucault's approaches could transform sociology into an effective, multi-focused, relevant discipline. Finally, the book illustrates that his methods provide the necessary condition for any state-of-the-art social research today, addressing his methodological position and establishing its relationship to Nietzsche, Kant, Weber, Elias, Habermas, Giddens, and the Annales and Frankfurt Schools.

Chapter 1

Sociology, Foucault, and the uses of history

The relations between sociology and history are indeed problematic. Since its post-Enlightenment beginnings, the development of what is today regarded as sociological thought has been intertwined with historical analyses and schemas for interpreting, understanding, and explaining, history. The focus of this relationship has been the attempt by sociologists and social theorists to comprehend what Karl Polanyi (1944) called ‘the great transformation’, the broad historical movement that led to the characteristic social relations of what is today named ‘modernity’.

The features of this modernity are in principle inexhaustible. In different theories, the core of the great transformation is identified as one or a combination of any of the following: industrial technology, capitalism or generalised commodity production, bureaucratic modes of administration, urbanism, the liberal-democratic state, affective individualism, the public/ private dichotomy, and so on. These accounts then give rise to the host of process terms which circumscribe different features of this great transformation: modernisation, industrialisation, rationalisation, urbanisation, secularisation, bureaucratisation, etc. It is apparent that sociology has had a degree of success in generating terms that describe and define the contours of modernity. This is perhaps why one influential view proposes that sociology ‘focuses particularly upon the “advanced” or modern societies’ (Giddens 1984:viii).

In many ways, then, the fundamental claim of sociology is to have captured the historical movement embodied in the great transformation in its essential processes and elements, and in doing so, to have erased both the troublesome particularities revealed by historical analyses and the necessity to revisit the other side of this transformation. It is also to claim the effective unity of all trajectories of transformation and so free sociology from worrisome concerns about the nature of historical time. Sociology thus can present itself as a generalising or ‘nomothetic’ discipline, one which formulates theories to be applied across a range of phenomena, while it attributes to history the ‘idiographic’ description of the unique and the singular (Goldthorpe 1991). Sociology, and in this it is like Marxism, can therefore claim to be a science of history that has, paradoxically, dispensed with the necessity of concrete historical analysis. Having captured the historical movement in which the present is caught, it can avoid the difficulties of the singular and the unique, and of differential rhythms and times, and get on with the business of the synchronic analyses of social totalities and their future directions. Historical analysis, in so far as it is regarded as dealing with the understanding of contingent events, different cycles and temporalities, and diverse and irreducible diachronic processes, stands at the margins of this science of historical movement.

Posed in this way the relationship of sociology to history has remained an unresolved one. In many respects sociological theory has been made by ignoring or at least bracketing-out the difficulties and complexities that effective historical analysis must pose for explanatory generalisation. This was certainly true of mid-twentieth century sociological theory, whether in the ahistorical typologies of ‘pattern variables’ of structural functionalism, or the plethora of sociologies of everyday life. Postwar Western Marxism exhibited a distaste for the problems of historical analysis, preferring either a humanist philosophy of history or a fundamentally ahistorical science of historical materialism. Even the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, despite its closeness to the tragedies of the mid-twentieth century, added little that was new to the historical sense of sociology and social theory. For the three decades prior to the 1980s, historical study was at best a preliminary to the comprehension of contemporary social reality or something that could be reduced to a set of rarely examined, self-explanatory, categories, whether of modernisation and theories of development, the advance of instrumental rationality and its irrational effects, or the transition to industrial capitalism.

Since that time it has become increasingly rare to find a form of sociology able to dispense with history and historical analysis as a core component. If earlier students had been prevented from examining the implications of careful historical analysis for taken-for-granted theoretical schemas, the next generation would have found reworkings of history to be indispensable to a whole range of areas. This was especially true in the sociologies of medicine and psychiatry, of sexuality, of deviance and social control, of the modern world system, and of the political sociology of the modern state.¹ There has been the widespread recognition of a hybrid activity called ‘historical sociology’, at least within sociology.

The empirical richness of this activity has not been matched, however, by the attempts to provide a theoretical rationale. Indeed such attempts to provide a justification have tended to be merely syncretic. They have taken conventional grounds for distinguishing between the disciplines—i.e. the oppositions, general/particular, synchronic/diachronic, nomothetic/idiographic, present/past, theoretical/empirical, etc.—and turned these into tendencies internal to the new hybrid. This is especially the case where the problem of the relations between sociology and history are posed in terms of agency and structure. In an influential paper, Philip Abrams wrote of what he called the ‘problematic of structuring’ in which sociology and history are together involved in the same enterprise:

Both seek to understand the puzzle of human agency and both seek to do so in terms of the process of social structuring. Both are impelled to conceive of those processes both chronologically and logically, as both empirical sequence and abstract form…Sociology must be concerned with eventuation because that is how structuring happens. History must be theoretical because that is how structuring is apprehended. History has no privileged access to the empirical evidence relevant to the common explanatory project. And sociology has no privileged theoretical access.

(Abrams 1980:5)

The puzzle of human agency in question pervades a certain type of sociological theory: how do actions of human subjects constitute a social world that in turn constitutes the conditions of possibility of the actions of those subjects? For Abrams’ theory of structuring, as for Giddens’ better-known theory of structuration, the separation of sociology and history has no rational justification. For these thinkers, history and sociology become methodologically indistinguishable because the dualism between agency and structure cannot be sustained. There are, however, major problems with this view. Before reviewing them, it is worth noticing that if history and sociology are methodologically indistinguishable, then it makes little sense to restrict sociology to the domain of modernity.

Such attempts at combining and overcoming the problems of this dualism of agency and structure are inherently unstable. Above all, their conception of social agency is reductive. Social agency becomes identified with the human subject and its capacities and attributes. Other forms of social agency, including various forms of collective or corporate agency, are either written out of these accounts, or themselves conceived as composed of and reducible to human agents. Secondly, a further untenable conflation is made between human agents and the actions of individuals or persons. Since Mauss’ seminal essays (1979), sociologists have known that categories of the person, self, and individual are dependent upon particular cultural and historical practices and techniques. These categories cannot therefore be used as universal data of human existence and experience as they are in attempts to found a general sociological theory upon them. Attempts to grasp the properties of social relations and social systems from such categories of agency cannot be sustained. When such categories are combined in basic sociological concepts themselves, such as in the famous ‘duality of structure’, they form an unstable amalgam sliding between a structure whose effectivity knows no limits and a form of agency that knows no determination.

Attempts of this type cannot therefore provide the basis for a meeting of sociology with history. Just as their central concepts replicate the dualism they seek to overcome within themselves, so any project for an historical sociology grounded on such concepts replicates the principal grounds for distinguishing between the disciplines within a new inter-disciplinary project itself. Historical sociology now becomes the study of both the structure-forming practices of human actors, and the enabling/constraining effects of those structures upon their actions. The dichotomies, event/process, past/ present, diachrony/ synchrony, agent/structure, idiographic/nomothetic, and so on, no longer form the basis of a distinction between two disciplines, but are reproduced as tendencies within the new interdisciplinary field. Such manoeuvres may provide the basis for reorganising academic life but they do little to overcome what seem to be conceptual inadequacies endemic to these disciplines. These dichotomies simply may be the conditions of possibility of the human and social sciences generally (Smart 1982).

I want to argue with Abrams in favour of historical-socioligical studies, but without relying on his arguments that sociological explanation is necessarily historical and that historical sociology ‘is of the essence of the discipline’ (Abrams 1982:2). I suggest there are reasons for undertaking historical sociologies other than conceiving history in an ontological sense as the ‘nexus of action and structure’ (ibid. 14). If something like an historical sociology is now to be found at the intellectual core of sociology, it may be for reasons that are less theoretical than strategic. Indeed, its strategic location may be marked out by the rejection of older uses of history in sociology that functioned to oppose forms of historical analysis rather than embrace them, to deny the contingency and singularity of events and processes, and to repress what Braudel (1980:49) has called the ‘violence’ of historical time. This is certainly the case when one considers the broad teleological processes, evolutionary schemas, and generalising typologies which sought to explain historical development in the last half century of sociology. While laying claim to englobing explanatory schemas for historical process, both structural functionalism and Marxism could effect what Norbert Elias (1987b) dubbed ‘the retreat of sociologists into the present’.

If more recently there has been something of a slowing of that retreat, it is undoubtedly less to do with a recognition of the historical ontology of social forms than with the loosening of the purchase of global theoretical schemas. A new form of intellectual practice, then, rather than a theoretical transcendence of the action/structure dichotomy, is at the root of the recent return to historical studies in sociology. Instead of a union of two disciplines, historical sociology has become a project internal to the transformation of sociology itself. Sociology’s most recent historical turn is neither new nor a rediscovery of a classic vocation. Rather, it is a strategic reformation of the complex relations between sociology and history that are the conditions of existence of sociology as a discipline. What has occurred is a realignment or, rather, a multiplicity of interconnected realignments, only indistinctly glimpsed in the debates over modernity and postmodernity, of the place of historical analysis and historical time in sociology, and the relations between past, present, and future.

Why has this occurred, and what can we learn from it? The historical dimension of sociology may have moved from a position of supporting its central theoretical schemas to one of qualifying, opposing, or even seeking to undermine them. Theda Skocpol (1982:12–17) perceptively notes that many of the practitioners of historical sociology situate themselves within the frame of reference of Marxism or structural functionalism while seeking to offer critical analyses of the presuppositions of functionalism, economism, and evolutionism. If a critical historical sociology is largely an enterprise within sociology, this is perhaps because it is this discipline which has been most profoundly subject to the legacy of what Skocpol calls ‘transhistorical generalisations and teleological schemas’ (1982:2), of grand social theories and the metanarratives of modernisation, development and increasing affluence, or of the crisis-ridden tendencies of the capitalist mode of production.

It might be said that the historical return in sociology is a part of the resolution of what Gouldner (1971) diagnosed as the coming crisis of Western sociology. It is not necessary to participate in this prophetic mode of intellectual activity to note that sociology has manifest the features of such a crisis, if by that is meant a conjuncture which prefigures either metamorphosis or catastrophe. In any case, sociology has become a form of study without a unifying theoretical edifice, or even consensual norms of validity and meaning, a polycentric, chaotic, even if critical undertaking (cf. Smart 1990). In keeping with this, historical sociology, or what might be better described as critical historical studies, perhaps forms less a unified discipline, or even a new interdisciplinary field, than a transdisciplinary, critical, contestatory, erudite, intellectual activity. Indeed, this activity could be said to encompass an anti-sociology in so far as it represents so many multiple lines of flight from grand social theory, and from the object ‘society’ as a global entity, critically examining theoretical claims against those of historical learning and specific social and political analysis. The rise of historical-sociological studies might be said to constitute a series of multiple ruptures, a ‘de-formalisation’ of the discipline from within that prepares a transformation of sociology into an engaged but learned practice. Such a practice would privilege analytical sophistication over theoretical system, conceptual productivity over fidelity to established models, and plural and diverse intellectual adventures rather than the search for foundations. The reversal of the retreat of sociologists into the present would not lead to an end of sociology but to its metamorphosis into a new kind of critical historical-sociological practice with a diversity of theoretical trajectories. Indeed, the renewed interest in hitherto neglected or marginalised historical-sociological thinkers, such as Karl Polanyi and Norbert Elias, the far more serious reflection on the historical writings of Max Weber, the concern to draw upon other versions of history, such as that of the Annales School and, indeed, the historical writings of Michel Foucault and others in the history of knowledge and science, may all attest to the imminence of such a metamorphosis.

However, beyond the transformation of sociology lies a far more serious issue. In displacing, from within and without, the claims of grand social theory, this historical turn seems to imply a particular form of the ‘politics of truth’, a contestation of the way in which statements are validated within a particular practice of knowledge. Conventional social theory took a hyper-rationalist path. Whether Durkheimian, functionalist, or Marxist, it established a hierarchy of discursive objects in which those with the greatest levels of generality and abstraction held the strongest explanatory force. The characteristics of social systems, divisions of social labour, or modes of production, or the nature of modernity, capitalism, and industrialisation, had to be invoked in order to understand anything held to be within their purview. One does not have to oppose hyper-rationalism to a hyper-empiricism to notice that little room existed for a form of analysis which sought to maximise the intelligibility of regional domains such as those of sexuality, madness, delinquency, poverty, and so on, and particular forms of practice and rationality, those of governing, curing, punishing, confining, etc. Certainly, existing schemas could provide some intelligibility. Yet the encounter of the historical contents revealed by meticulous analysis with grand social-theoretical schematas was one that was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of theoretical and hierarchising knowledges.

It is certainly true that not all historical sociologies involve the contestation of the regime of grand theory and its claims to scientificity. Yet the existence of such projects suggests that the narratives and typologies deployed by such theories are in some ways problematic. At a minimum, the emergence of historical sociologies attests to the need of global theories for a new empirical validation to establish themselves as active research programmes. It may be, however, that the existence of these renewed critical historical studies may also suggest that these theories have become epistemological obstacles (to invoke loosely Gaston Bachelard’s famous term²) to effective knowledge and analysis of historical trajectories. If historical sociologies are an effect of the resolution, or attempted resolution, of the crisis of sociology struggling with the legacy of grand social theory, then there is little reason to seek a renewed theoretical container for them. To do so would not only undermine the potential for greater intelligibility they possess, but would also be inimical to the kind of politics of truth they represent.

This is of course a conjectural version of the changing historical sense of sociology and to what it might lead. I want now to introduce some leading themes of the one major recent thinker who has perhaps devoted most effort to considering questions of historical sense and what constitutes what we might call a ‘critical and effective history’, Michel Foucault. Far from making Foucault into a sociologist in disguise, I want here to reflect on his historical sense and what it might offer the new historical sense in sociology. In the following chapters, we follow that historical sense through its various aspects, attempting to specify the relationship between genealogy and archaeology, his principal methodological approaches, his understanding of a critical history of rationality, and his notion of a ‘history of the present’. The rest of this chapter is devoted to an introduction to some of the key terms necessary to understanding Foucault’s specific contribution.

FOUCAULT’S TIMELY MEDITATIONS

Michel Foucault has been called the ‘greatest modern philosophical historian’ (Murray 1990:viii), the ‘historian in a pure state’ (Veyne, qutoed by Habermas 1987a:275), the inventor of a ‘properly philosophical form of interrogation which is itself new and which revives History’ (Deleuze 1988:49). It would be inexcusable to remake him a social theorist or to regard him as a sociologist in disguise. To do so is to risk exposing these flowerings between philosophy and history to the arid climate of theoretical systems and the brutal search for ultimate foundations. To do so is to deny the specificity subtly caught in the title of the chair he held at the College de France, Histoire des systèmes de pensée (History of Systems of Thought), and to turn away from the real achievements of his critical excursions into the history of reason. For our purposes, Foucault is approached as he was, as somewhere ‘in between’ and ‘across’ established boundaries of knowledge. As such we might mobilise his achievements for an enterprise that is also between and across established disciplines and modes of thought.

This philosophical historian’s (or historical philosopher’s) studies, first termed ‘archaeologies’ and later ‘genealogies’, as well as his writings on the use and practice of history, particularly The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and the essay on Nietzsche (1977b), offer a point of reflection on our changing historical sense. They suggest a form of critical historical study that leaves behind the methods and objectives of conventional, empiricist historiography without recourse to sterile theoretical schemas. They raise again the problem of the uses and pertinence of historical study, and of the practice of history that is linked but not subservient to present theoretical, political, and ethical issues.

It is a quite senseless task to be faithful to a form of thought which itself seems designed to put the most loyal follower off track. This is a thought that, despite an internal consistency, never felt the need to be faithful to itself. It does not lend itself to a systematic theoretical elaboration. Rather, ‘theory’ is here embedded within substantive analyses. Its statement and restatement takes less the form of a progress toward increasing clarity than a vertiginous and prolix recreation, a continual renewal of itself, one which refuses to stand still, to be the same. As a consequence, I feel compelled to take an instrumental attitude toward Foucault’s work and to admit that what follows is a use of his work for particular objectives concerning the historical-sociological study sketched above. It is my general hypothesis that Foucault’s contribution to this historical sociology can be best understood as a delineation of a form of history which is both critical and effective and which displaces the invasion of historical analysis by what I shall call the philosophy of history. These are terms which must be approached with care. They are the nub of the following discussion.

Despite a concern with discourses as rule-governed systems for the production of thought, Foucault never sought to apply a particular system or to allow his own heuristics to congeal into a fixed, formal method. Every statement of method, ostensibly committed to the same overall framework, reveals subtle, and sometimes gross, shifts and reconfigurations. Indeed, Foucault engaged in the task of methodological formalisation in the Archaeology only after he had completed his ‘empirical’ studies, and almost immediately set off on a new path in which this approach was subsumed under another, quite different one, that of genealogy. Moreover, he left us no extended methodological statement of this genealogy. There are a series of essays, lectures, introductions, interviews, and other fragments, in which genealogical historiography is discussed but none of these settle on a fixed language and style of presentation. The one text that discusses genealogy in considerable detail is in fact a commentary on Nietzschean genealogy. No matter how much affinity there is between Foucault and Nietzsche the assumption of an identity between commentary and methodological approa...