Understanding Foucault

A critical introduction

Tony Schirato, Geoff Danaher, Jen Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000247367
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

'An outstandingly good introduction to Foucault's work: lucid, measured, well organised, and covering this complex and in many ways heterogeneous body of work with remarkable thoroughness and ease.' - Professor John Frow, University of Melbourne

Michel Foucault is now regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He is known for his sensibility of critique and his commitment to movements for social change. His analysis of the ways our notions of truth, meaning, knowledge and reason are shaped by historical forces continues to influence thinkers around the world.

Understanding Foucault offers a comprehensive introduction to Foucault's work. The authors examine Foucault's thinking in the context of the philosophies he engaged with during his career, and the events he participated in, including the student protests of 1968. A unique feature of the book is its consideration of the recently published lectures and minor works, and the authors show how these illuminate and extend our understanding of Foucault's major books.

Understanding Foucault provides an accessible entree to the world of this extraordinary and challenging philosopher.

1
Questions of method

Introduction

This book provides a detailed and exemplified account of Foucault’s methods and theories, while also showing how his work on power, discourse, subjectivity, disciplinarity, surveillance and normativity can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary world and its practices. We begin by considering Foucault’s methodology as it applied to historical research, exploring how it differs in significant ways from conventional historicism. We then devote five chapters to what we consider to be the most significant theoretical issues covered by his oeuvre: the power–knowledge nexus, governance and the reason of state, liberalism and neo-liberalism, subjectivity and technologies of the self, and critique and ethics.

While Foucault traces concepts such as madness, punishment and sexuality across different historical eras, in a sense he can be identified as a historian of the present. This is because he would take a matter of concern or problematic relation from the time in which he lived and worked (such as prison reform in the 1970s in France) and then trace the historical forces that had shaped that problem. This means that the different historical periods and actors with which Foucault is concerned are, in a sense, inventions of our own time: we progressively reconstruct the past in order to serve the interests of the present. In this sense, the nineteenth century did not occur between 1801 and 1900, but rather is an ongoing invention that has been subject to revisions and reconstructions through each subsequent era. So, rather than thinking of history as a single, fixed entity, Foucault postulates multiple overlapping and contesting histories.

It is worth considering the ways in which Foucault’s approach differs from other ways of making sense of history. History writing (that is, historiography) in its modern form can be dated from the early nineteenth century, when GF Hegel developed a theory of dialectics. This conceived of history in terms of the clash of opposite forces (or thesis and antithesis) that would be resolved by the development of a synthesis between these opposing forces, culminating in a higher state of human development. Karl Marx applied Hegel’s dialectic theory to the material conditions of society—the distribution of economic resources. According to Marx’s dialectic materialism, the clash over material economic resources between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (factory workers) would be resolved through revolution. This dialectic struggle would lead to a new synthesis, a communist utopia in which the fruits of labour would be distributed to all according to their needs. Curiously, the collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s prompted the US writer Francis Fukuyama (1991) to talk of a new synthesis represented by the triumph of western-style democracies. The US president George Bush took up this idea when he spoke of a ‘new world order’ in the lead-up to the first Gulf War in 1991. And in the 2000s, the so-called war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were justified in the west by characterising those actions as a defence of civilisation and democratic freedoms against the threats posed by a barbaric and ‘feudal’ Islam.

Foucault identifies a number of problems with dialectical and progressive views of history. First, they both tend to postulate the clash of an advanced civilised west with a backward and uncivilised rest of the world (both Hegel and Marx were supporters of colonial practice). Second, they tend to conceive of the forces of history largely in terms of the great ideological belief systems that emerged during and after the Enlightenment: liberalism, capitalism, socialism, communism and so forth. As we will discuss further in this and later chapters, Foucault is interested in how disciplinary and other forces and power relations developed alongside and within these Enlightenment discourses and ideologies. So, for example, while the ideology of liberalism preaches the values of individual freedom of expression and belief, disciplinary power was working through sites such as schools and workshops to quietly coerce people into forms of behaviour and attitudes of mind amenable to the interests of these disciplinary institutions, and the more general social practices they helped constitute.

A third problem Foucault has with the dialectical and progressive accounts of history is that they are based on a grand or totalising vision. That is, they suggest that we can fit the various events that take place over time into a pattern, according to certain laws of historical development. Against this synthetic view of history (the idea that different events can be synthesised to form a coherent whole), Foucault conceives of history in terms of plurality—a multiple number of events that are as often as much in conflict with one another as they can be held together. For Foucault, history is conceived of in terms of discontinuity and disjuncture as well as continuity and conjuncture. Rather than seeing historical time unfolding in an orderly, continuous, linear manner in which various historical events can be conjoined or fitted together to form regular patterns, Foucault thinks of history as an ongoing struggle between different forces and forms of power. His historical research reconstructs the conditions for the appearance of a phenomenon—such as the birth of the prison—on the basis of multiple determining elements, from which it arises as an effect.

Foucault argues that not only is there disjuncture and discontinuity between different historical events, there is also a disjuncture and discontinuity between historians and the historical events they seek to describe. The historian and history speak from different places. The historian speaks from an authorised position within a public institution such as a museum, archive or university. The historian may engage in fieldwork and archival search, but it is the protocols and procedures of the institution that will shape how the history will be written, and how the different historical events will be fitted together to form a coherent vision. This process covers over certain gaps in the record—the historical material that has been lost or has not been collected. The oral histories of indigenous peoples and the folk tales of peasants find no place within the written historical records, but they continue to assert a presence through their absence, thus potentially opening up gaps within the historiographical enterprise.

In challenging the authority of the historian, Foucault draws attention to another problem with conventional historiography—the presumption that it begins with the unified subject. This view of history is that historical events occurred as a consequence of the various motivations of different historical actors. Accordingly, it is the duty of historiography to work through these motivations and recreate the thought patterns and sensibilities of significant historical figures. This approach belongs to the ‘great men of history’ school that focuses on the lives of powerful and successful monarchs, explorers, generals and politicians, such as Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler. For Foucault, this approach misses the point that subjects, actions and meanings are shaped by the discursive and non-discursive forces that flow through the positions occupied by these figures. What discourses was Hitler drawing on or speaking through in order to be able to depict Jewish people not as human beings but as entirely different forms of life? What disciplinary forces and movements shaped his bodily actions during the Nuremberg rallies, such that they had a profound impact on the behaviours and attitudes of others? Indeed, the ‘founding subject’ or ‘great men’ conception of history is complicit with liberal humanist discourses and ideologies that emerged from the European Enlightenment; these were associated with Cartesian philosophy, which asserts that human reason and rationality are germane to historical change.

A further problem associated with such a conception of history is that it silences whole categories of people. Women, as well as indigenous and colonised peoples, have traditionally been marginalised within such historiography. As Michel de Certeau points out (1988), this kind of historiography is complicit with the practices of colonialism. It divides people into subjects and objects, active and passive; on the one hand there are the colonising people who make history and develop forms of knowledge, and on the other the colonised people who are made the object of such history and knowledge.

We can articulate Foucault’s understanding of historical forces (including the construction of historical knowledge) with his interest in power relations. He developed this concern with practices of power through the research methods he called archaeology and genealogy (which we discuss in detail later in this and subsequent chapters). Basically, both methods work to uncover the discursive formations and practices of different historical periods; however, genealogy has a greater focus on the ways in which discursive power works on bodies. Power shows itself on a subject’s body because various events or happenings are ‘written’ on the body—they shape the ways in which we perform, or act out, our bodily selves.

Beyond historicism

At the beginning of the Collège de France lecture series published in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), Foucault is talking about the content of the course, which is intended to both retrace and continue on from the previous year’s series on the art of government (Foucault 2007a). After a few introductory remarks, he raises the issue of methodology, and quickly and explicitly differentiates his method from those forms of sociological, historical and political analysis that presume ‘real government practices’ originate from, and are articulated through and by, ‘already given objects’ (2008: 2)—by which he means concepts-as-phenomena such as the state, the people and civil society. Foucault proposes to do:

exactly the opposite … I would like to start with … concrete practices and … pass these universals through the grid of these practices … I start from the theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying … How can you write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and subjects … So what I would like to deploy here is exactly the opposite of historicism: not, then, questioning universals by using history as a critical method, but starting from the decision that universals do not exist, asking what kind of history we can do (2008: 2–3).

In these two sets of lectures (2007a, 2008), Foucault provides a genealogy of the processes and mechanisms whereby particular forms, logics, programs and values of governance are universalised, and effectively placed outside history. By way of example, Foucault argues that it is not the state that gives rise to the set of procedures, imperatives, institutions, categories, discourses and practices that developed in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries as the reason of state. On the contrary, for Foucault the reason of state ‘is precisely a practice, or rather the rationalisation of a practice, which places itself between a state presented as a given and a state presented as having to be constructed and built’ (2008: 4). In other words, the interests of the amalgam of forces and procedures that constitute the reason of state require a particular kind of state, for two related reasons. First, the state as an a priori point of origin authorises and guarantees the validity of the reason of state. Second, the idea of the state as something that is an end in itself, but that also requires constant renewal, reinforcement and maintenance, legitimises and facilitates the activities and logics of the reason of state. This includes the transformation of people into a population, the extension of disciplinary and normative mechanisms, and various interventions in areas such as health, education, crime and punishment, architecture, town planning, commerce, transport, the family and the military.

Foucault attempts to explain and negotiate the amalgam and interrelation of forces, discourses, institutions, fields, technologies, actions and contexts that work to produce and naturalise things-as-sense—the state, the world as historically explicable narrative—via the notion of the apparatus, or dispositif. Giorgio Agamben refers to an apparatus as:

literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confessions, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular phones and … language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses (Agamben 2009: 14).

The relation between these elements, and the significances, dispositions, orientations and activities that are consequences of them, can be understood as a relation between power and its effects, but with an important and radical intervention on Foucault’s part. Power for Foucault is not a possession (the king holds power), the result of a primary cause (God bestows power) or a thing in itself (power selects those who would best carry out its designs). Nor is it something that is willed, in the Nietzschean sense. Rather, power is always relational, and the rhythms and flows of power are both arbitrary (in the sense that any configuration of ideas, technologies and contexts is an accident, subject to the dislocations of time and place) and motivated (what is naturalised as powerful always seeks to arrest that situation, for its own benefit).

Genealogy is one of the two main forms of methodology—the other being archaeology—utilised by Foucault in an attempt to identify the traces, trajectories and flows of power; we will deal with these in some detail later in this chapter. Both methodologies can be char-acterised as constituting a reaction to, a rejection of and an attempt to move beyond conventional historicism, to which Foucault attributes two main problematical tendencies. The first of these, to do with the question of origins, has already been touched on, but it requires some elaboration. The notion of a point of origin from which all other events, ideas and categories are derived has always played a significant role in history and historiography, although this function has differed from one period to another. Foucault refers, for instance, to those histories written in the Middle Ages that ‘spoke of the antiquity of kingdoms, brought great ancestors back to life, and rediscovered the heroes who founded empires and dynasties’ (2003b: 66). So the establishment of a line of continuity linking a kingdom to a fabled place and time of origin (say, involving Rome, or even further back to Troy) meant that the glories of the past (royal families, legendary battles, journeys and other events) worked to ‘guarantee the value of the present, and transform its pettiness and mundanity into something equally heroic and equally legitimate’ (2003b: 66). Foucault contrasts this with modern history and its search for, and discovery of, the founding moment that gives rise to yet escapes history. This is a historicity that:

in its very fabric, makes possible the necessity of an origin which must both be internal and foreign to it: like the virtual tip of a cone in which all differences, all dispersions, all discontinuities would be knitted together so as to form no more than a single point of identity, the impalpable figure of the Same (1973: 329–30).

The examples Foucault has in mind here are ‘the two types of historical interpretation developed in the nineteenth century’ (2003b: 272): one is class struggle, the other race and biological determinism. The former is associated with the Marxist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of theoretical terms
• 1 Questions of method
• 2 Power and knowledge
• 3 Governmentality
• 4 Liberalism and neo-liberalism
• 5 Subjectivity and technologies of the self
• 6 Critique and ethics
• Bibliography
• Index