The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault

Mark G.E. Kelly

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415991919
• eBook ISBN: 9781135851705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

This book is the first to systematically reconstruct Michel Foucault's political and philosophical thought across his career. It argues, in the areas of epistemology, power, subjectivity, resistance, politics, and ethics, that Foucault's work represents the articulation of a consistent and progressive philosophical and political viewpoint. The work is thus an important intervention into the field of Foucault studies, where many continue to claim that Foucault's work is contradictory, nonsensical, or nihilistic.

1
Epistemology

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

–Spinoza (1997)

In this first chapter, we look at the background to Foucault’s development of a radically new understanding of politico-social power. This background comprises Foucault’s work up to the point where he turns his attention towards power. This work happens not only to provide the background in a chronological sense, however, but also grounds Foucault’s later work by furnishing its epistemological and methodological foundations. Insofar as Foucault did epistemological/methodological work later in his life, this is also dealt with here, at the end of the chapter, despite being out of the generally chronological order of our study.

The purpose of detailing Foucault’s epistemology in relation to the theme of the book may not be immediately clear, but it is twofold. Firstly, it serves as a defence against those who question Foucault’s political thought by attacking its supposed lack of epistemological or philosophical basis. Secondly, it grounds Foucault’s notion of critique, which we deal with in Chapter 6. While this is necessary to a philosophically complete account of Foucault’s political thought, those readers who are interested primarily in particular themes of that thought might however do better to use their discretion and skip in the first instance to the chapter that corresponds to their primary interest.

THE BIRTH OF ARCHAEOLOGY

I shall begin by bracketing Foucault’s earliest works, namely: the lengthy introduction to his 1954 translation into French of Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (Traum und Existenz); his first monograph, Mental Illness and Psychology, which originally appeared the same year; and the two parts of his 1961 doctoral thesis, one a commentary on and translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the other, much better-known, his History of Madness (Histoire de la folie)—best known in the English-speaking world via an abridged version published as Madness and Civilization. This exclusion is necessary and, though doubtless not entirely justifiable, it is nonetheless not arbitrary. The exclusion of the first two works is justified on three counts: they are juvenilia, which Foucault never himself emphasised—indeed he actively sought to suppress Mental Illness and Psychology; they are not particularly relevant to our purposes, not being explicitly political; and they do not yet represent a distinctly Foucaultian perspective, rather sharing with much contemporaneous French intellectual discourse the threefold influences of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and Marxism with which Foucault would later break to a considerable extent.

The History of Madness is a different matter, however. It is clearly both an original work and one with immediate political import, detailing the “great confinement” of the mad and indigent in Europe at a particular historical moment. It moreover thus clearly sets the pattern for many of Foucault’s later books: Birth of the Clinic (Naissance de la clinique), The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir) and The Will to Knowledge (La volonté du savoir)¹ all follow the same pattern of diagnosing certain revolutionary changes at more or less the same juncture in the modern era. However, while there is a distinctively Foucaultian pattern to this work, it is theoretically undeveloped. Since this pattern is so repeated, and indeed refined, we do not need to study this element of the History of Madness. Rather, the later repetitions are more interesting for our purposes, displaying greater theoretical depth. Foucault’s 1974 lectures at the Collège de France, Psychiatric Power (Le Pouvoir psychiatrique), indeed take up where the History of Madness left off historically, studying the same area but with a different methodology (PP 12); the earlier work, Foucault says (PP 13), was based in the perceptions of madness that he found in the contemporary literature, “which inevitably refers to a history of mentalities, of thought.” That approach was heavily infl uenced by the phenomenological philosophy then dominant in France. This phenomenological infl uence diminishes as Foucault develops a methodology of his own he labels “archaeology” during the 1960s. This methodology itself is superseded in turn in the 1970s (although he would make clear that he never stopped using either this method or the one that followed it [Foucault 1983]):² by the time of Psychiatric Power, Foucault (PP 13) is contrasting archaeology with a new kind of analysis, based on power—this shift will be dealt later in this chapter.

Foucault’s first use of the term “archaeology” is in the preface precisely of the first two editions of the History of Madness, in which Foucault (2002, 2) describes the study in hand as not so much “the history of that language” used to speak about madness, as “the archaeology of that silence” today imposed on the mad. There is no explicitly formulated project of archaeology in the History of Madness yet, however. Its formulation is found only in Foucault’s next book, The Birth of the Clinic, the original French-edition subtitle of which was “An archaeology of medical gaze.” The introduction to the first edition of The Birth of the Clinic (which is the version used for the English translation) outlines a clear methodology, proposing a structural analysis of signifiers without reference to the signified, which is to say, of words without attention to the things to which they refer, clearly based in the method of the grand old man of French “structuralism,” Ferdinand de Saussure, who was interested not in the way signifiers relate to signifieds, so much as in the way signifiers relate to one another to form language (BC xix). Foucault announces his intention to conduct a “structural analysis of discourses.”

The Birth of the Clinic does indeed analyse changes in medical discourse at the level of signifiers, but Foucault does not constrain himself to commenting on discursive matters, despite the intentions stated in his introduction. Rather, he explicitly connects his analysis of discourse up to structures of a different kind, namely the institutional structures of modern medicine. In doing so, Foucault does not, strictly speaking, breach his undertaking to refrain from a commentary which compares signifier to signified, since the signified of medical signifiers is not the medical system in which the signifiers occur, but rather diseases and symptoms themselves, and Foucault indeed passes no judgement on these or their relations to their signifiers. However, the institutional armature of medicine is not part of medical discourse either, and so the book ultimately, like its predecessor, the History of Madness, ranges over multiple levels and issues, despite a lack of a methodology that would justify this range. This is perhaps one reason that Foucault saw fit to substantially alter the introduction in later editions, removing the structuralist language.

THE STRUCTURE OF THINGS

In Foucault’s next few works, however, he does concentrate purely on discourse itself, dropping the study of institutions, thus following the direction he had formulated in the original introduction to Birth of the Clinic. Foucault’s next book was a shorter work of literary criticism, 1963’s Raymond Roussel (published in English under the title Death and the Labyrinth). Thereafter, he produced two substantial works of a more theoretical nature, 1966’s The Order of Things and 1969’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du savoir). Foucault in these two abandons concrete considerations; he would remark in a 1972 interview by way of explanation that

The Order of Things situates itself at a purely descriptive level which leaves all the analysis of relations of power which subtend and render possible the appearance of a type of discourse entirely to one side…. I wrote that book … after two others, one concerning the history of madness, the other the history of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, precisely because, in the first two books in a somewhat confused and anarchic manner, I had tried to treat all the problems together. (DE1 1277)

The Order of Things describes shifts in the intellectual culture of the West, in which what Foucault calls the episteme is replaced by a new one. The episteme is for Foucault the historical order that governs the production of knowledge across disciplines in a particular historical epoch by governing what counts as proper knowledge within scientific discourse (which is to say that the episteme does not necessarily apply to everyday discourses).³ Foucault tracks three domains of discourse, those which evolved into the modern disciplines of economics, linguistics and biology. Foucault’s point is to show how changes in the episteme meant changes in all of these areas of knowledge simultaneously, and to tease out what the common governing principle for the production of discourse is across all these areas of scholarly discourse in each disjointed period. Foucault’s analysis remains resolutely at this level, and does not ask how or why these changes occurred, rather exploring only what has happened at the level of discourse itself.

The Order of Things was a surprise bestseller, while also attracting considerable controversy. Foucault was accused of idealism by Marxists for looking at discourse without examining the class relations that, supposedly, underlie it. Foucault would later indignantly point out, “I wrote The History of Madness also in order that it be known that I don’t ignore the problem” of “the constitution of a knowledge from a social practice” (RM 102–3).

One can see how a perspective that sees no need to refer the history of ideas to anything outside of the ideas themselves could be viewed as idealist, though it is nevertheless an unfair accusation, since this analysis does not claim that the discursive is self-sufficient, only that it can be described without reference to the material. Foucault does in the preface to The Order of Things clearly expound an ontology of the discursive, moreover, arguing that “there exists, below the level of [culture’s] spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order” (OT xx–xxi). One might argue that this is not unambiguously non-idealist, that the “things” capable of being ordered are mere subjective experiences or perceptions, things in a phenomenological sense no less, rather than physical objects as they exist in themselves. More insight into Foucault’s thinking about this extra-linguistic reality can, however, be gleaned from an extraordinary and as-yet untranslated interview with Foucault, given shortly after he wrote The Order of Things.⁴ Here, Foucault clearly distinguishes himself from those who studied the structures of perception, the phenomenologists of the previous generation of French philosophy, proclaiming his contrasting interest in the underlying structures of reality. Foucault does not speak of “structures” per se here, but rather of “systems,” yet this is the very word Saussure himself employed. Foucault takes as his model DNA, the hidden, material code which determines what unfolds at the explicit level (DE1 543). He explicitly sees a number of contemporary scholars—Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Dumézil, and himself—as engaged in the project of uncovering these hidden systems. These four were commonly grouped together contemporaneously under the label of “structuralism,”⁵ though Foucault does not use that word itself here. Foucault never unambiguously accepts the label of “structuralist” to describe himself: he rejects it as a simple description (EW2 437; OT xiv; RC 89; DE1 1164; Foucault 2005, 130), and, although he accepts that it might apply to him in the sense that it is applied to others among his French contemporaries (AK 234), he ultimately denies that the term “structuralist” properly applies to any French thinker, including therefore also those who explicitly described themselves as such, preferring to reserve the term “structuralism” for the Eastern European movement that influenced French “structuralism” (DE2 884).

Whatever one calls it, the project that Foucault thought he and others were engaged in was “to show that our thought, our life, our manner of being, even our most everyday manner of being, is part of the same systematic organisation and therefore depends on the same categories as the scientific and technical world” (DE1 546), against the “abstract” “humanism” which is “cut off from the scientific and technical world which is the real world” (DE1 545; cf. EW2 433).

Clare O’Farrell (1989, 132) rightly points out that “Foucault is perhaps being a little extreme here,” and it is indeed his most scientistic moment. Still, there is nothing Foucault says here that is actively contradicted by what he does later. As Hubert Dreyfus (1987, xi) points out, Foucault in his work criticises the truth claims of the human sciences only, and thus not those of the natural sciences, though he is interested in understanding the “ritual” implicit in natural science (PP 238). Foucault remains interested in the notion of an underlying order, which he in a 1968 talk links explicitly to Saussurean linguistics, as providing an alternative paradigm for relations of things to one another in the social sciences, namely the paradigm of logical relations, rather than the causal paradigm of the natural sciences (DE1 849–52).

TOWARDS A MATERIALISM OF THE INCORPOREAL

Foucault’s follow-up to The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, is his least concrete work, being a meditation, with a rather Cartesian format, on language itself. It can thus be seen as the epitome of Foucault’s archaeological project, as its definitively archaeological title might be taken to indicate. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault attempts to understand language in its specificity as language, and not merely as the token of the subjects behind it: “Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs” (AK ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Epistemology
• 2 Power I
• 3 Power II
• 4 Subjectivity
• 5 Resistance
• 6 Critique
• 7 Ethics
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index