Michel Foucault

Sara Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134541416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

It is impossible to imagine contemporary critical theory without the work of Michel Foucault. His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Aimed at students approaching Foucault's texts for the first time, this volume offers:
* an examination of Foucault's contexts
* a guide to his key ideas
* an overview of responses to his work
* practical hints on 'using Foucault'
* an annotated guide to his most influential works
* suggestions for further reading.
Challenging not just what we think but how we think, Foucault's work remains the subject of heated debate. Sara Mills' Michel Foucault offers an introduction to both the ideas and the debate, fully equipping student readers for an encounter with this most influential of thinkers.

Key Ideas

1 Foucault’s intellectual and political development

DOI: 10.4324/9780203380437-2

This chapter sets Foucault’s intellectual and political development in the context of the wider developments in France during the early part of Foucault’s career, since there is an interesting dialectical relationship between his ideas and the political and intellectual climate: the events of 1968 had a crucial defining impact on Foucault’s thinking and Foucault played a major role in events and in the focus of theoretical work of the time. However, I imagine that taking the text of Foucault’s life or the text of a history of the events of 1968 and bringing them to bear in the task of making sense of his theoretical texts would have seemed to Foucault to be a laughable endeavour. In his essay ‘What is an author?’, Foucault argues that: ‘the task of criticism is not to bring out the work’s relationship with the author, but rather to analyse the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships’ (Foucault 1986: 102). However, Foucault himself commented on the way that he focused on particular subjects, not simply because they were theoretically interesting to him, but because these subjects resonated with something from his personal experience: ‘Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work, it has been on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking place around me. It is because I thought I could recognise in the things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctioning … that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few fragments of autobiography’ (Foucault, cited in Eribon 1991: 28–29). Therefore, in drawing on biographical material about Foucault, I do not wish to construct a solid figure of Michel Foucault and attribute to him ‘a “deep” motive, a “creative power” or a “design” ’, almost as if he were a fully rounded character in a novel (Foucault 1986: 110). I recognise that in focusing on the details of his life as they have been reconstructed by others, ‘these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologising terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognise, or the exclusions that we practice’ (Foucault 1986: 110). Nevertheless, there are instances where, for pedagogic and explanatory reasons, using certain biographical details and details of social history can help to make Foucault’s work accessible and can help us to understand his work better, without reifying this collection of events which we have labelled ‘the life of Michel Foucault’. I, therefore, endeavour in this section to avoid imposing a simple cause-and-effect relationship on events in Foucault’s life and the emphases of certain of his texts but, rather, I try to present Foucault’s works as emerging from a relationship with, and reaction to, a complex series of tendencies and conflicts in intellectual and political life in France at this period. For those studying Foucault who are not familiar with the events of 1968, there are elements within his work which may seem troubling or difficult to understand, (for example, his relation to Marxism, his own political position and his relation to his own homosexuality). By examining the social context of intellectuals in Paris at this time, it is possible to understand what was ‘available’ to Foucault as possible forms of behaviour and possible forms of thinking with which he could negotiate and which he could also challenge. But first it is useful to bear in mind a brief outline of Foucault’s career from the outset.

He was born in Poitiers, France in 1926. Although most of his academic training was in philosophy, after his first degree he trained for a higher degree in psychology and a diploma in pathological psychology. He was employed as a university lecturer in philosophy and in psychology and also as a teacher of French literature and language when he worked overseas. He worked at universities and cultural centres in Uppsala, Sweden (1954); in Warsaw, Poland (1958) and in Hamburg, Germany (1959). In the same year he became the head of philosophy at Clermont-Ferrand University, France. He completed his doctorat-d’état (PhD) on madness and reason and published it as Madness and Civilisation in 1961. In the following year, he published a book on the work of the poet Raymond Roussel, and in 1963 he published The Birth of the Clinic. In 1966, he moved to Tunisia to teach, returning to France to become the head of philosophy at Vincennes University. In 1969 he published The Archaeology of Knowledge and in 1970 he became chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. In 1975 he published Discipline and Punish and in 1976 be began the publication of the three-volume History of Sexuality; he died in 1984. As can be seen from the wide-ranging subjects which Foucault analysed, his work is not easy to pin down. His work reflects the background of intellectual and political activism against which it developed, but it also played a significant part in the process of transformation.

The 1960s and 1970s was a crucial period for Foucault and other radical intellectuals in France and Europe as a whole. It is therefore necessary to describe the events which took place at this time and throughout the 1970s to set Foucault’s thought and his political activities in context. It is also important to consider the context of Foucault’s ideas in order to see that, in many cases, Foucault acted as a conduit for anti-authoritarian and radical ideas. The Marxist historian, Chris Harman, stresses that 1968 was not, as is often thought, simply the year in which a series of student demonstrations took place in Paris, nor was 1968 simply a year when ‘hippie’ fashions and ways of living and thinking became especially prominent; instead:

1968 was a year in which revolt shook at least three major governments and produced a wave of hope among young people living under many others. It was the year the peasant guerrillas of one of the world’s smaller nations stood up to the mightiest power in human history. It was the year the black ghettos of the United States rose in revolt to protest at the murder of the leader of non-violence, Martin Luther King. It was the year the city of Berlin suddenly became the international focus for a student movement that challenged the power blocs which divided it. It was the year teargas and billy clubs were used to make sure the US Democratic Party convention would select a presidential candidate who had been rejected by voters in every primary. It was the year Russian tanks rolled into Prague to displace a ‘Communist’ government that had made concessions to popular pressure. It was the year that the Mexican government massacred more than 100 demonstrators in order to ensure that the Olympic Games would take place under ‘peaceful’ conditions. It was the year that protests against discrimination in Derry and Belfast lit the fuse on the sectarian powder keg of Northern Ireland. It was, above all, the year that the biggest general strike ever paralysed France and caused its government to panic.

(Harman 1998: vii)

In many other countries, Chile, India, Brazil and Palestine, the events which took place in France had a profound effect in political terms in the following years. Although this characterisation of 1968 may be seen by some as overly Marxist and internationalist, it does reflect the real impact of the events on political thinking and activity globally.

During the early 1960s, there was an anti-authoritarian tendency in much political thinking of the time among those who found themselves opposed to the status quo or to the current political regimes, and these ideas gained currency among a wider group of people and began to be drawn on in a general critique of American neo-imperial policy abroad and profound racism in Europe and America. This critique also made its presence felt in terms of the analysis of the more mundane, but perhaps equally important, events of everyday life, such as who lectures to whom in universities and who does the washing up at home, where the personal becomes the political. Foucault sees this shift towards a widening of the definition of politics as significant and he states in 1969 in an interview: ‘The boundary of politics has changed, and subjects like psychiatry, confinement and the medicalisation of a population have become political problems’ (Foucault, cited in Macey 1994: 217). All of those who protested, even in a minor way, against repression of political activism in the French universities were categorised as being part of this sub-culture or counter-culture which the beatniks and hippies represented with their open rejection of bourgeois values and materialism. There were many anti-war protests, most notably against the American presence in Vietnam. It is against this background of intellectual questioning and political activism that Foucault’s work developed, informed by the same radical thinking about common-sense categories, values, policies and forms of behaviour. Foucault’s works were bought by large numbers of students and academics, since they seemed to articulate this radical thinking, taking issue with all established ways of thinking and behaving and they provided a framework for thinking about questions of power which were the focus of this larger scale political interrogation.

One of the questions which often dogs critics is about Foucault’s political position, partly because Foucault’s writings on the subject are so contradictory. Foucault joined the French Communist Party in 1950, like many intellectuals at the time. However, he left the party soon after, along with many others who were disillusioned by the party’s doctrinaire stance and also by its support for the Soviet regime after its invasion of Hungary in 1956. The Party also condemned homosexuality as a bourgeois vice. From the moment he left the Party, Foucault became violently anti-Communist.

Foucault’s relation to Marxism is complex and should be disentangled from his largely antagonistic and critical relations with the French Communist Party. Indeed, what Foucault argues for is ‘an unburdening and liberation of Marx in relation to party dogma which has constrained it’ (Foucault 1988c: 45). At many times, Foucault acknowledges his debt to Marxist thought and there are many elements within his work which suggest the profound influence of Marxist analyses of power relations and the role of economic inequality in determining social structures. But equally, just as strong is the sense of Foucault reacting against much Marxist thought. Fundamentally, it is the purely economic and State-centred focus which Foucault distanced himself from, stressing that power needs to be reconceptualised and the role of the State, and the function of the economic, need a radical revisioning. He should, perhaps, best be seen as negotiating with a Marxist framework of analysis which could no longer be applied in any simple way to the more complex social structures of France in the 1960s and 1970s; as he said: ‘Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else’ (Foucault 1970: 274).

There has been a great deal of discussion among theorists about the nature and extent of Foucault’s political engagement. He himself does not seem to have felt it necessary to have a fully worked-out political position, since in some ways it was precisely this sense of having to hold to a party line which he was reacting against: ‘I think I have, in fact, been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, etc.… It’s true, I prefer not to identify myself and that I’m amused by the diversity of the ways I’ve been judged and classified’ (Foucault, cited in Macey 1994: xix). Such a sceptical apolitical stance is easily criticised on the grounds that it is simply radicalism pushed to the extreme of nihilism: Walzer has categorised Foucault’s political activity as that of ‘infantile leftism … that is less an endorsement than an outrunning of the most radical argument in any political struggle’ (Walzer 1986: 51). Bartky also criticises Foucault for the essentially negative critical position which he adopts, which she suggests comes close to pessimism (Bartky, cited in Sawicki 1998: 97). However, in a journal article in 1968, Foucault describes his notion of a progressive politics in contradistinction to other forms of politics (such as, one might assume, Marxism):

A progressive politics is a politics which recognises the historical and specified conditions of a practice, whereas other politics recognise only ideal necessities, univocal determinations and the free interplay of individual initiatives. A progressive politics is a politics which defines, within a practice, possibilities for transformation and the play of dependencies between those transformations, whereas other politics rely upon the uniform abstraction of change or the thaumaturgic presence of genius.

(Foucault, cited in Macey 1994: 195)

Thus, rather than seeing a politics as being centred around individual great leaders who have utopian visions of the future, which entail the adoption of a set of beliefs by their followers, Foucault is more concerned to develop and describe a politics which takes account of the transformative possibilities within the present.

It is clear from this attempt to formulate a progressive politics that he is not apolitical but simply committed to seeing politics from a broader perspective than that which sees politics as solely concerned with party politics. Indeed, the nature of a progressive politics is something which exercised Foucault greatly; he asks:

Is progressive politics tied … to the themes of meaning, origin, the constituent subject, in short to all the themes which guarantee in history the inexhaustible presence of a Logos, the sovereignty of a pure subject, the deep teleology of a primeval destination? Is progressive politics tied to such a form of analysis – rather than to one which questions it? And is such politics bound to all the dynamic, biological, evolutionist metaphors that serve to mask the difficult problem of historical change – or on the contrary, to their meticulous destruction? And further: is there some necessary kinship between progressive politics and refusing to recognise discourse as anything more than a shallow transparency which shimmers for a moment at the margins of things and of thoughts, and then vanishes?

(Foucault 1991a: 64–65)

Here, Foucault seems to be trying to establish a basis for produtive political activity without necessarily having to agree with a whole range of problematic assumptions about progress and the role of individuals in bringing about political change. It could be argued that a theorist who is interested in the analysis of the anonymous discontinuities in historical and political change is effectively downplaying the role of individuals in transforming society. However, Foucault should not be seen as completely negating the role of the individual in political change; all that he is trying to stress is that humans are not ‘the universal operator of all transformations’ (Foucault 1991a: 70).

What Foucault is attempting to do in his analysis of the political is to move away from abstract notions of the political and to ground the political more in local acts and interactions. However, this move does make the analysis of the operation of power relations more complex: ‘To say that “everything is political” is to recognise [the] omnipresence of relations of force and their immanence to a political field; but it is to set oneself the barely sketched task of unravelling this indefinite tangled skein’ (Foucault 1979c: 72). In a sense, what he is urging us to analyse is what we mean by the political; within his reconceptualisation of what constitutes the political ‘one can no longer accept the conquest of power as the aim of political struggle; it is rather a question of the transformation of the economy of power (and truth) itself’ (Patton 1979: 143).

While many have criticised Foucault for undermining the possibility of a grounded political position in his theoretical work, they acknowledge that during the 1960s and 1970s he was politically active (although some of them call into question the nature and effectiveness of his political interventions). At the end of 1968 he was appointed head of philosophy at the new experimental University of Vincennes, which became a hotbed of student political activity. Foucault seems to have taken a rather active role in the unrest; his biographer, Didier Eribon, states: ‘he had been seen with an iron rod in his hands, ready to do battle with militant Communists; he had been seen throwing rocks at the police’ (Eribon 1991: 209). By 1970, the teaching in the philosophy department was criticised by the Minister of Education, since many of the titles of ...