A Foucault Primer

Discourse, Power And The Subject

Alec McHoul, Wendy Grace

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136996870
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse", "power", and " the subject".; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present". His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects.

1
Foucault’s Counter-history of Ideas

General background: discourse, power and knowledge

Of the three main Foucauldian concepts introduced in this book—discourse, power and the subject—the last is probably the most complex. As an orientation to Foucault’s overall rethinking of his field—the history of ideas, or ‘the history of systems of thought’, as he preferred to call it—we will concentrate in this chapter only on the first two: discourse and power. But we must add to this a more direct consideration of the history of ideas itself and its own central concept, knowledge.

For the sake of exposition, we can say that Foucault’s contribution to the history of ideas involves a rethinking of three central concepts: discourse (which had traditionally been the province of structural linguistics); power (particularly as it was analysed in Marxist philosophy in France); and knowledge (as the main focal point of the history of ideas). This multi-conceptual rethinking can be summarised by turning to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s (1982) description of Foucault’s overall project: to go ‘beyond structuralism and hermeneutics’, which were arguably the dominant methods of Foucault’s own times.

Structuralism, for example in the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, attempted to find the ‘deep’ or ‘hidden’ structures (taxonomies and hierarchies) at the very base of myths (such as the Oedipus myth). It tried to discover, by means of a reductive analysis, the objective and universal constituents of all human thought. In a structuralist analysis, there is no room for local or distinctive interpretations of a myth. The particular mythic text, collected ‘in the field’ by the anthropologist, is useful only as ‘data’ to confirm or disconfirm the supposedly underlying mythic structure.

Hermeneutics, by contrast, used a more interpretive method derived from phenomenology. Phenomenologists believe that the objective world described and analysed by structuralists is in fact a product of human consciousness and its interpretive processes. Therefore hermeneutics (named after Hermes, the messenger of the gods) allowed for differences of interpretations. In place of structuralism’s objective structures, it turned instead to those acts of consciousness which produce local, and often highly specific, readings of texts.

Unlike the structuralists, Foucault does not hold that any essential or ‘real’ structure underpins particular ‘events’ or historical materials (such as myths and texts). The local and the particular, he argues, are always inserting their differences. But this insistence on the singularity of events is not the same as that which we find in hermeneutics. Foucault does not rush from structuralism to the phenomenological extreme and argue that ‘reality’ is constructed out of human consciousness and its ability to perform interpretations. In this way he avoids the seriously ‘apolitical’ defects of both traditions of thought. For Foucault, ‘ideas’ are neither mere effects of ‘real’ structures nor the ‘baseline’ from which reality is constructed.

Going ‘beyond’ structuralism and hermeneutics, Foucault rejects phenomenology outright. In the Foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things (1970:xiv), he suggests that whereas the genesis of structuralism is something his counter-history must at least account for (rather than rely on), at the same time, ‘if there is one approach that I do reject … it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject’.

In traditional philosophical terms, Foucault steers away from—rather than between—the Scylla of (structuralist) realism and the Charybdis of (phenomenological) idealism.

How then does Foucault ‘go outside’ these forms of thinking, which could be said to have dominated his times? One way to answer this question is to look at the emergence of his rethinking of power, knowledge and discourse. And this means examining the central disciplines in which these three concepts were traditionally thought, namely Marxism, traditional history of ideas and structural linguistics, respectively. In the 1960s and 1970s, severe problems were emerging in all three of these critical discourses. Internal as well as external, these problems could be called, though the term is too dramatic, a ‘crisis’. But if, by ‘crisis’, we mean a gradual and uneven splitting of the complex network of ideas formed by these critical disciplines, then the term will suffice. Foucault’s work can then be read as an exploitation of the ‘crisis’, a moment in which to shift the very terrain of social and political critique itself. Rather than repair the breaks and tears opened up by the crisis (by providing continuity to the flows of Marxism, history of ideas and structuralism) Foucault sought new ways of thinking outside them.

For, by the mid-1960s, the very notion of continuous progress in both the human and the natural sciences, and between scientific ‘stages’, was itself in jeopardy. Furthermore, scientific change was no longer thought of as something brought about by a special creative subject or scientific ‘hero’ (an Einstein or a Freud, for example) who could be called upon to effect a theoretical revolution. The very notions of ‘creative subject’ and ‘historical agent’ were themselves ‘in crisis’. Because they were part of the gap to be dealt with, they could not be enlisted as part of the solution.

Consequently, Foucault’s counter-history of ideas had to be worked out so as to avoid giving primacy to the ideas of ‘the individual’ and of ‘subjectivity’. Instead, Foucault thought of the human subject itself as an effect of, to some extent, subjection. ‘Subjection’ refers to particular, historically located, disciplinary processes and concepts which enable us to consider ourselves as individual subjects and which constrain us from thinking otherwise. These processes and concepts (or ‘techniques’) are what allow the subject to ‘tell the truth about itself (Foucault, 1990:38). Therefore they come before any views we might have about ‘what we are’. In a phrase: changes of public ideas precede changes in private individuals, not vice versa.

In response to a further condition that the ‘crisis’ demanded, Foucault’s counter-history also had to conceive of bodies of knowledge (discourses) as potentially ¿//¿continuous across history rather than necessarily progressive and cumulative. This is a major theme in Foucault’s work generally, and has often led him to be called a (or even ‘the’) philosopher of discontinuity. Foucault’s analysis of scientific change as discontinuous shows that it is not seamless and rational; that it does not progress from stage to stage, getting closer and closer to the truth; that it is not guided by any underlying principle which remains essential and fixed while all around it changes. This ‘thesis’ of discontinuity is indeed a key element in his analysis and critique of ‘official’ or ‘dominant’ knowledges. It also enters into his investigations of those forms of knowledge which are much less official, such as the knowledges which medical and psychiatric patients, criminals and sexual perverts, for example, have of themselves. But it is only one element among others. As we show in Chapter 2, Foucault’s idea of ‘discontinuity’ is far from being just another essential principle behind all historical change.

The discourses of Marxism, history of ideas and structural linguistics (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, literary studies and psychoanalysis) were the main ‘broken strands’ in the network of ideas which faced Foucault in the mid to late 1960s. His first main theoretical texts—The Order of Things (1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)—attempted to account for their emergence under the general rubric of ‘the human sciences’. In what follows, we will take each strand separately, although parallels and congruences between all three disciplinary areas will be evident.

Marxism

By the late 1960s, the stock-in-trade concepts of mainstream Marxist political economy were increasingly seen as too mechanistic and deterministic to account for the plurality, diversity and fragmentation of late capitalism. Two such concepts were those of ‘economic base’ and ‘ideological superstructure’. In classical Marxism, the ‘real’ economic conditions in a given period (especially the means of producing commodities and the question of which social classes own them) were known as the ‘base’. This ‘base’ was believed to ‘give off the less tangible aspects of society: its laws, its beliefs, its ideology, its culture and so on. Hence a base-superstructure model is one in which material conditions (economic ‘realities’) determine ideas (types of consciousness).

This base-superstructure model and the economic determinism it implied were at risk in a number of respects. Science and technology had changed so much that the continued material existence of the world was itself in jeopardy. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, revealed the dependence of ‘economic’ factors on even more basic technological phenomena. Yet at the same time there was a growing awareness that nuclear technologies were themselves the product of scientific ideas. It began to look as if the domain of ideas (the superstructure) was not quite so irrelevant to an understanding of the most crucial foundations and uncertainties of twentieth-century life as earlier Marxists had thought.

Furthermore, the classical Marxist model seemed unable to cope with the new kinds of struggle emerging in so-called postindustrial societies. These struggles centred as much on race, gender and ecology as on purely economic considerations such as class (ownership or non-ownership of the means of production). The ‘classical’ class struggle of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries became diversified, and not just because of an increasingly complex division of labour and a breakdown in strict class identifications. Class-based struggles were now related to ‘other’ struggles, such as those of blacks, women, environmental groups and gays.

In addition, the industrial ‘base’ of capitalism itself was beginning to shift away from its traditional sector, the ‘heavy’ industries, and towards ideas- or knowledge-based forms of production (such as computing, education, cinema, and information systems). The ‘mode of production’ was thus under threat from the ‘mode of information’ as the prevailing form of social existence (Poster, 1984). What was to count as industrial base (production) and what as superstructure (ideas, information) was now much less clear than it had been even a generation earlier (Smart, 1983; Williams, 1973). Moreover, Marxist analysts continued to argue that, despite such vast and sweeping changes, ‘bourgeois domination’ appeared to be surviving. There was no sign of that impending ‘degeneracy’ which had been predicted by the classical model. In fact, capitalism became arguably stronger and more entrenched as the critical discourses suffered their own various crises. Capital itself never really seemed to suffer from the so-called ‘crisis of capitalism’. To this extent, it was now quite obvious that the forms of critical analysis which had suited nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalist formations had no place in either advanced industrial or post-industrial society. No less important to this political fragmentation were the failures of ‘official’ bureaucratic Marxism: the gulag, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and so on.

Looking back from a vantage point of some fifteen years on the late 1960s (and particularly the student movements formed around the events of 1968), Foucault saw the situation like this:

It is a case of movements which, very often, have endowed themselves with a strong reference to Marxism and which, at the same time, have insisted on a violent critique vis-à-vis the dogmatic Marxism of parties and institutions. Indeed, the range of interplay between a certain kind of non-Marxist thinking and these Marxist references was the space in which the student movements developed—movements that sometimes carried revolutionary Marxist discourse to the height of exaggeration, but which were often inspired at the same time by an anti-dogmatic violence that ran counter to this type of discourse. (1990:19)

The paradoxes of this situation (‘exasperated dogmatism’) are evident enough. A new type of critical analysis was needed which could account not only for new kinds of social fragmentation (different social types or ‘subject positions’) but also the absence of both a singular and unique basis of social existence (the production of material commodities) and a single central contradiction in society (class struggle). This form of critique would have to be sensitive to diverse, local and specific—even marginal or ‘deviant’—practices and their effects. While critical social theory had to retain something equivalent to a theory of domination, it had to jettison Marxism’s supposedly necessary connection between ‘power’ and economy. Even the much more flexible idea of determination in the ‘last instance’ (Althusser, 1970) had to be dropped as an explanatory necessity.

In addition, the necessary centrality of a particular class (classically, the proletariat) to the struggle against ‘domination’ had to be critically rethought. A class could no longer be seen to act as a ‘subject in history’—and yet neither could it be a purely determined economic effect. To this extent the stress on class analysis itself had to be dropped or at least restricted or supplemented. It needed to be replaced by a theory of constraint (or ‘structure’) and enablement (or ‘agency’), locked into a broader conception of society than economistic models had allowed. Such a theory would need to think of the ‘wielders’ of power as being just as inextricably caught in its webs as the supposedly powerless. It would have to see power in terms of relations built consistently into the flows and practices of everyday life, rather than as some thing imposed from the top down. In short, the predicament of Marxism showed the limitations of mechanistic determinism, and the need for a more subtly historical and detailed analysis of the local and specific effects of power. This, among other things, is what Foucault was to provide.

History of ideas

In the field known as ‘history of ideas’, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a growing series of problems at least equal to those in Marxism. Indeed Marxism itself had been a main contributor to the history of ideas wherever a critical reading was required. Naturally enough, it had tended to argue that ideas were merely ‘superstructural’ effects of ‘real’ economic forces: as modes of production had progressed from feudalism through capitalism to socialism, so too had the various ‘knowledges’ which went with them. Marxism always appeared to provide a critical alternative to ‘mainstream’ approaches. What were these?

In France, the field called ‘history of ideas’ has always been very diverse, and has taken on a number of different titles: history of reason, history of science, history of knowledge(s), history of rationalities, and—with Foucault—history of systems of thought. But prior to Foucault, the two mainstream philosophies derived by and large from Hegel and Husserl respectively. The Hegelian tradition entered France in the 1930s via the ideas of Jean Wahl, Henri Lefebvre, Alexandre Koyre and especially Jean Hippolyte (Foucault’s teacher and, later, colleague). Indeed, Hegelian philosophy was well established by the time Foucault came to study the subject in high school (Eribon, 1992:15-23). Its basic tenet was that a form of universal reason existed behind the ‘surface’ forms of human knowledge. Thus the ‘progress of reason’ could be discerned working its way through history as an immaterial but ever-present Geist or spirit. It was therefore profoundly continuist: each ‘stage’ of history was marked for its continuity in terms of the progress of universal reason, rather than for its distinctiveness and difference. Hegelianism was therefore a major theoretical influence on Marxist thinking at this time, since it provided the basis of dialectical thought: a general principle of historical change, which postulated that any form of thought would eventually transform, not into its negation, but into a synthesis of itself with its negation.

While Hegel’s position is sometimes referred to as ‘phenomenological’ (largely because his Phenomenology of Spirit [1807] had most impact on French philosophy), it should not be easily confused with the phenomenological tradition which stems from the work of Husserl. The uptake of Husserl, in France, was largely the province of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and of the existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre. According to the existential interpretation of Husserl, the basic principle underlying historical change and transformation was not an abstract spirit but the irremediable freedom of individuals to create anew out of the ‘raw material’ from which they had been created. On this (idealist) interpretation, human thought or consciousness is supreme, and capable of transcending any apparently fixed, given or determining conditions. In analysing the history of thought, the phenomenological/existentialist school sought evidence of the human imagination triumphing over fixed traditions. Needless to say, existentialism tended to think of itself as being in this category. Yet existentialism also had an impact on Marxism, especially the so-called ‘humanistic’ or ‘cultural’ Marxisms of the 1970s. Sartre, for example, argued in the preface to his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1963, 1982) that fundamental existential freedom is compatible with a Marxist analysis of prevailing economic conditions.

However, the work of Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and others was beginning to suggest—in different ways—that progressivist and continuist views of science—whether based in an abstract spirit or in fundamental liberty—were problematic. In particular, Canguilhem’s (1968) meticulously detailed research on the history of biology showed that it could not easily be made subject to a universal theory of historical or ‘ideological’ change. With Canguilhem in mind, Foucault documents the shift away from continuism, saying that it ‘was a question of isolating the form of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others’ (1990:27).

Since they are Foucault’s main stalking-horses ...