Using Foucault′s Methods

Gavin Kendall, Gary Wickham

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761957171, 9780761957164
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

`As a companion to Foucault?s original texts, carefully showing what he?s done and why - and how that could be applied elsewhere - it?s outstanding? - www.theory.org.uk

`Very much a `hands-on? tool kit of a book, scholarly but accessible.... a very useful textbook which approaches its subject in an original way? - Sociological Research Online

`At last, a student-friendly guide that answers the question: "Yes, but how do you do Foucault?" Kendall and Wickham address the thorny question of how-to-Foucault in a clear, distinctive manner that stands out in the secondary literature on this important thinker? - Toby Miller, New York University

This book provides a clear, straightforward guide to those who want to apply the work of Foucault to their own field of interest. The authors employ an accessible style to encourage readers to engage with Foucault?s work by tackling the issues that students most often raise.

The book is organized around the following themes: history, archaeology, genealogy and discourse as the cornerstones of Foucault?s methods; and science and culture as important objects of analysis for those using Foucault?s methods. The book enables the reader to understand how Foucault?s contribution to social thought can be applied and opens up possibilities for researchers to use Foucault rather than merely discuss him.

Part I

HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY, GENEALOGY AND DISCOURSE AS THE CORNERSTONES OF FOUCAULT’S METHODS

1

‘I’m interested in Foucault, but why should I be interested in history?’

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CONTENTS

Look for contingencies instead of causes

Exercise 1.1

Be as sceptical as possible in regard to all political arguments

Suspending second-order judgements

Another example

Exercise 1.2

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‘Foucault helps us see that sex isn’t what nineteenth-century reform fanatics thought it was’, Inzammam tells his class-mates during a presentation.

‘Reading Madness and Civilization makes it clear to me that women are constructed as mentally ill by a patriarchal system of health management,’ Jenny contributes on her first evening at the ‘recent French theory’ reading group her friends have been raving about.

Zeeha, trying to explain to her father why he’s wrong to see corporal punishment as a solution to the rising crime rate in their town, tells him she’s learned from a book she’s just read as part of her Criminology course that punishment is part of a larger system of discipline for societies, not a response to crime.

Inzammam, Jenny and Zeeha are all good students with a new-found passion for Foucault. Let’s follow them, at least some of the way, through their student careers to see how their passion for Foucault develops and try to help them over the obstacles which so often pop up in the paths of those who seek to use Foucault.

The first thing to be said is to reassure these three good students that they should not feel embarrassed about bumping into obstacles in seeking to use Foucault’s methods. Foucault’s methods are not easy to follow. Even though we can sensibly regard The Archaeology of Knowledge, ‘The a Order of Discourse’ and ‘Questions of Method’ (Foucault 1972, 1981a, 1981b) as methodological in tone, they do not add up to a coherent statement of his methodology and they hardly constitute a user-friendly ‘how to’ guide to Foucaultian scholarship. Inzammam, Jenny and Zeeha are keeping the company of more experienced scholars in stumbling at some methodological hurdles.

The first trap they have fallen into is to place limits on the use of history involved in Foucaultian scholarship. Helping them avoid this trap is the work of the remainder of this chapter. Inzammam, Jenny and Zeeha are right to see that Foucault uses history as his main technique to make his points about sexuality, madness, punishment, the self, the body, and so forth. However, they are wrong to try to limit this move such that they are free to make ahistorical political points about the present and/or the future.

Yes, Foucault does problematise simplistic categorisations of nineteenth-century attitudes to sex, the use of madness as a fixed diagnostic category, and the portrayal of punishment as no more than a component in a means–ends equation. But his problematisations never stop, his histories never stop. Inzammam speaks of sexuality as if we enlightened twentieth-century folk have overcome the hang-ups of our forebears; Jenny and Zeeha speak of madness and punishment respectively as if some ‘progress’ has been or might be made, or conversely as if modern life is ‘worse’ than the past.

The Foucaultian method’s use of history is not a turn to teleology, that is, it does not involve assumptions of progress (or regress). This is why we say it involves histories that never stop: they cannot be said to stop because they cannot be said to be going anywhere. To use history in the Foucaultian manner is to use it to help us see that the present is just as strange as the past, not to help us see that a sensible or desirable present has emerged (Inzammam’s error) or might emerge (Jenny’s and Zeeha’s error). Sometimes the Foucaultian approach to history is referred to as ‘history of the present’. Hopefully our discussion here helps make this term clear: Foucaultian histories are histories of the present not because understanding an ideal or complete present is the spur to investigation (this is sometimes called ‘whig history’). Foucaultians are not seeking to find out how the present has emerged from the past. Rather, the point is to use history as a way of diagnosing the present (on this point, see Rose 1990).

When we use history, if we are to gain the maximum benefit from the Foucaultian method, we must ensure that we do not allow this history to stop, do not allow it to settle on a patch of imagined sensibleness in the field of strangeness; as Foucault himself says, albeit in a different context, we should seek ‘to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest’ (1980a: 54). History should be used not to make ourselves comfortable, but rather to disturb the taken-for-granted. Inzammam should be aware that late twentieth-century attitudes to sex are as much part of the complex of power and knowledge around the idea of sexuality as were nineteenth-century attitudes. Jenny and Zeeha should be aware that feminist objections to current psychiatric arrangements and liberal objections to certain regimes of punishment are caught up with the complexes of power and knowledge around madness and punishment as much as are the arrangements and regime they would like to see changed.

We suggest two effective techniques to keep oneself aware of this pitfall:

1 Look for contingencies instead of causes.

2 Be as sceptical as possible in regard to all political arguments.

Look for contingencies instead of causes

Looking for contingencies instead of causes is not quite as difficult as it might sound. Imagine yourself at the centre of a site of one of your investigations – let’s take punishment as an example. First, imagine yourself as an administrator of a new prison in 1870. You attempt to carry out instructions from central government to the effect that prisoners are to be treated humanely but, in line with new penological thinking, not encouraged to speak to one another. You have to balance this demand with the difficulty of disciplining the prison’s guards, who are used to more direct methods, often violent but nonetheless based on regular interaction between prisoners. As well, you feel hamstrung by the fact that other administrators at the prison have not received the same classics-based university education that you have received, but have secured their positions by means of family connections; they see no logic in the government’s directive and side readily with the guards in the ‘tried and true’ way of going about things.

Now, quickly transport yourself to the twelfth century. You are the dispenser of justice in a blood-feud system. One man has stolen a pig from another. The system of justice in which you are a major player is restitutive rather than punitive. This means that when a person is wronged the wrong-doer must restore something to the person wronged; punishment is not a direct consideration. In line with common practice you are present to oversee the pig owner taking the arm of the pig stealer, for this is considered proper restitution. Things go somewhat awry when the pig owner, feeling particularly aggrieved because it was his best pig and not just any old pig, tries to take an eye as well as the agreed arm. In other words, he feels the need to punish, not just to restore. You have to respond.

We will offer another example later in this chapter, as part of Exercise 1.1.

Both these imaginary situations contains more contingencies than you can poke a stick at; that is, they are littered with developments sensibly seen as accidents of history. When we describe an historical event as contingent, what we mean is that the emergence of that event was not necessary, but was one possible result of a whole series of complex relations between other events. It takes far more intellectual effort to see these developments in terms of causes and effects than it does to accept them as contingencies. This is why we say the technique of looking for contingencies instead of causes is not as difficult as it sounds. The problem is, most of us get into the habit of looking for causes. We need to break this habit in favour of the easier move of accepting them as contingencies.

In the first example the idea of imprisonment as a punishment is a contingency. The position of administrator as a separate career position is a contingency – while such positions were common enough in Ancient Greece and Rome, they disappeared as a common feature of European life for quite some time, returning only in the wake of other contingencies like the development of printing and of large-scale government budgets based on new taxation methods. So, the idea of a central government powerful enough to issue instructions about various matters and have them treated with any degree of seriousness away from the direct influence of the immediate personnel of that government is itself also a contingency. Still another is the idea of treating prisoners humanely yet not allowing them regular speaking contact with one another, which seems to our late twentieth-century way of thinking a contradiction – it is a contingency of the development of penological knowledge, itself a contingency as well. It is also a contingency that the prison’s guards are more comfortable with more direct methods of controlling prisoners. It is a contingency that some administrators receive a university education while others do not. It is a contingency that classics was the discipline base of an administrator’s university education in the nineteenth century; today it is much more likely to be economics or some other social science. It is a contingency that family connections were a more common route to government jobs in nineteenth-century Europe than they are today, or than they were then in, say, China, where a long tradition of public examinations had dominated as a means of deciding such matters. It is a contingency that governmental logic is more widespread at some times than at others.

Now, when we say that these events are contingent, this is not the same thing as saying that anything could have happened or did happen. Of course, there were definite pressures at work which meant that punishment started to become ‘humane’, for example. The point that Foucault regularly makes, however, is that so often our much-cherished advances are the quite accidental result of some apparently unrelated change. Of course Foucault is not the only social theorist who has made this point. Max Weber, for example, spoke of the ‘unintended consequences’ of history; for example, how certain puritan theological concerns could lead to some rather surprising turns – like the inventions of tarmac or chocolate.

Our group of budding Foucaultian scholars should not despair at this jumble of contingencies from just one small example. As we suggested, seeing contingencies instead of causes is a habit that is easy to acquire. It is more a question of not taking the steps to introduce causes into the equation than it is of doing something extra. To draw up a list of contingencies such as that presented above certainly involves historical investigation – a knowledge of some facts, to put it bluntly – but it does not require an exercise in artificially designating some items on the list to be primary and others secondary, or even tertiary, or designating those on the list to be in some subordinate relation to an item not on the list but which one is supposed to know as the primary source for details which make up such lists. To the Foucaultian way of thinking, such exercises in causal logic are futile. For Foucaultians, there is no reason to suppose, in considering this small historical example, that the training of prison administrators is in a relation of subordination to the dominance of classics as a discipline base, or the other way around, or that the distribution of positions based on family connections is in a relation of subordination to the development of governmental logic, or the other way around, and so on. And certainly the Foucaultian way of approaching history can have no truck with the idea that any one of the contingencies listed, say the imperative to keep prisoners from speaking to one another, is in a relation of subordination to the unspoken, unseen development of capitalism and its need for a quiescent workforce.

It might help you to learn this technique if, each time you deal with an historical example, you make use of a device sometimes employed by historians – the diagram with arrows. Of course you will have to completely invert its standard format to have it help you learn Foucaultian modes of scholarship, but this could well be a boost to its educative value: where the historians concerned draw the arrows in the diagram to demonstrate causal flows from subordinate to superordinate components, by always making the arrows double-ended and by drawing them such that they connect every component to every other component, and /or by leaving the arrows out of the diagram altogether, you will actually demonstrate the absence of causal flows, you will show how components have only contingent relations with one another, that, to put it bluntly, they may be connected in any pattern or they may not be connected at all.

It almost goes without saying that this will leave your diagram looking either bare and bereft of pattern or order, or alternatively looking like a mass of jumbled lines, again with no pattern or order. Now you’re starting to catch on. A couple of French scholars quite close to Foucault – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – suggested in a famous essay (1988) that patterns of knowledge should be seen as analogous not to a tree with its unidirectional pattern of growth from roots up to branches and leaves via a solid trunk, but to a rhizome – a collection of root-like tentacles with no pattern to their growth, a set of tentacles which grow in unpredictable ways, even growing back into each other. You may find this contrast of analogies helpful in thinking through this aspect of Foucault’s methods.

Let’s work quickly through the second of the examples we constructed above together and we can then leave you to handle the third example on your own as the first exercise of this chapter.

The very idea of a blood-feud system of justice is the first contingency you bump into in this example. Straight away the skills of contingency spotting you are fast acquiring will be tested to the limit, for it is all too easy in a case like this one to assume that the intervening eight hundred years have been filled with that mysterious substance called progress and that the system of justice which prevails in your modern setting is vastly superior to that featured in this example. Foucaultian contingency spotting will soon teach you simply to see a blood-feud system as one system and the modern system you’re used to as another and teach you to leave it at that. In this spirit you will recognise restitutive justice as another contingency and accept as part of this that when a person is wronged the wrong-doer must restore something to the person wronged without consideration of punishment. This step will not prove too difficult if you bear in mind the modern distinction between criminal and civil law. Remember that once O.J. Simpson was found innocent of murder and hence relieved of the danger of punishment, he still had to face a civil trial in which the outcome concerned whether he had to restore something to the immediate families of the murder victims, and if so, how much. This is a legacy of the restitutive systems of justice which only moments ago may have seemed so alien to you.

It is a contingency that the system of justice in question equates loss of an arm with loss of a pig. Again you must guard against false progressivism. Certainly it seems strange to us that body parts should be equated with the loss of livelihood-producing animals, but it helps to realise that it would almost certainly seem strange to the participants in this example that our system sometimes involves the equation of something as abstract as sums of money and confinement with the loss of the lives of loved ones. Recognising strangeness in all social arrangements is an important part of using Foucault’s methods.

As well, we should identify contingencies: in the attempt to occasion revenge and punish beyond the prevailing justice arrangements (don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is a universal, eternal reaction to such a situation – it happens at some times and in some circumstances and we must treat it as such; this of course is at the heart of the meaning of the term ‘contingency’); in the choice of an eye as the ‘o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I History, Archaeology, Genealogy And Discourse As The Cornerstones Of Foucault’s Methods
• Part II Science And Culture As Important Objects Of Analysis For Those Using Foucault’s Methods
• Part III Conclusion
• Guide to further reading
• References
• Index