Foucault

Ladelle McWhorter

Michel Foucault (1926–1984 ce) was born in Poiters, France, the second child of Anne Malapert and Paul
Foucault. It was expected that he, like his father, would study and practice medicine. The Second World War
disrupted education in France, however, and both the war and the occupation had tremendous effects on
Foucault. As he stated years later, “I think that boys and girls of this generation had their childhood formed
by these great historical events. The menace of war was our background, our framework of existence. . . .
Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience
and those events of which we are a part” (Eribon, 1991, p. 10). Foucault left Poitiers for Paris in 1945 and
entered the École Normale Supérieure the following year, finishing in 1951.

Instead of pursuing an academic career, Foucault took a series of cultural diplomatic posts abroad. His
biographer suggests that, as a homosexual, Foucault felt stifled by French customs and culture (Eribon,
1991); whatever the reasons, Foucault had no love for France, asserting that tourists “come to France as
painters went to Italy in the seventeenth century, to see a dying civilization” (Foucault, 1997, p. 123). But
after the 1968 riots, Foucault returned to France to take a post in the newly created university at Vincennes.
He remained there until he was called to the Collège de France in 1970, where he became Professor of the
History of Systems of Thought. In 1971, with his life-partner Daniel Defert and several friends, he founded
the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. Thus began Foucault’s involvement in politics. Through the rest of
his life his concerns included prison conditions, refugee resettlement, and gay rights.

Scholars usually divide Foucault’s books into two groups, major works and minor works. Minor works
include Mental Illness and Psychology; Death and the Labyrinth (on Roussel’s novels); Dream and
Existence; This is Not a Pipe (on the painter Magritte); and two “casebooks,” compilations of historical
material that Foucault gathered while working on the histories of punishment and sexuality: I, Pierre Riviere,
having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother and Herculine Barbin: being the recently
discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite. These works, while important, are
usually not considered crucial to the development of Foucault’s philosophical views. Major works include
Madness and Civilization (1961); The Birth of the Clinic (1963); The Order of Things, which catapulted
Foucault to fame in 1966; The Archeology of Knowledge (1969); Disciple and Punish (1975); The History of
Sexuality, volume 1 (1976); and The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1984), volumes 2 and 3 of the
History of Sexuality series.

Scholars frequently divide the major works into two groups as well. Those published before 1970 are labeled
“archeological” works, or works that exemplify or elaborate upon Foucault’s archeological method of
historical and textual analysis, while those published after 1970 are labeled “genealogical” works, or works
that exemplify the method of analysis that Foucault adapted from Friedrich Nietzsche (which he describes in
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”). Foucault’s central concept in his “archeological” works is that of the
“episteme,” a broad system of rules for knowledge formation that are immanent, he claims, in all or most of
the disciplinary fields of a given historical period. As epistemes shift or break up, it becomes possible to
know the world in new ways and impossible to take older ways of conceiving and analyzing the world
seriously. Genealogical works, by contrast, do not employ the concept of the “episteme” and do not posit
general conditions for all regions of knowledge within one historical epoch. Those works classed as
“genealogical” focus on relationships between specific regions of knowledge, institutions, and power. As a
result, the genealogical works are less sweeping in their historical and epistemological claims.

Foucault himself does not draw a distinction between “archeology” and “genealogy.” In an interview in
1983, he offers a different framework altogether for understanding his writings. Referring to all his major
works as “genealogies,” Foucault asserts that he has always been interested in subjectivity. He classifies his
books in relation to three questions. How do people understand themselves as knowers? How are people
subjected in power relations? How do people establish themselves as moral agents? (Foucault, 1997). Each
book, Foucault says, takes up one or more of these questions in the context of a particular region of thought,
such as psychiatry or medicine.
Foucault never assumes that any of our concepts or ways of understanding the world, including ourselves,
are universal or perfectly stable through time. Investigation reveals that even the most basic features of our
ways of thinking are historically formed, that there was a time before our particular way of thinking existed.
We may believe, for example, that disease has always been conceived as an invasion of the body or that
sexuality has always been held to be basic to the personality, but Foucault demonstrates otherwise. Still,
opponents might say, there are basic features of the world that we apprehend more or less directly – such as
the materiality of our own bodies – that inform our thinking and are common across cultures and ages.
Foucault disagrees. “Nothing in man, not even his body, is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for
selfrecognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault, 1977, p. 153). Foucault’s work on madness,
medicine, the formation of social sciences, and sexuality are designed to show that what we take for granted
as simple truths about the nature of human bodies, minds, and societies are embedded in complex and
historically contingent systems of perception; furthermore, though transformations in the ways people
understand themselves can be traced through time, in widely separated epochs the worlds that people
experience are vastly different and discontinuous.

Some philosophers have held that, though the world changes drastically through history, the laws of
historical change are constant, and they create some kind of progress, a tendency toward greater order or
human perfection. Foucault offers no such theory. So-called “laws of history,” he contends, are just
postulates, which, like all ways of perceiving the world, are subject to change. There is no reason to assume
that either society or individuals are on a path of continuous or even intermittent improvement. Changes
occur because of shifts in power arrangements, and while these are understandable in retrospect, they are not
scientifically predictable.

Critics argue that Foucault undercuts himself when he says there are no constants in thought and experience.
They contend that this renders all knowledge-claims relative to history and power, including Foucault’s own
knowledge-claims about knowledge-claims. Defenders answer that Foucault’s general statements (such as
the assertion cited above: “nothing . . . is sufficiently stable”) may be epistemologically problematic, but the
genealogical works themselves are not. When Foucault claims that sex as we conceive of it today is not a
constant feature of human experience, that neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a concept comparable to
our notion of sexuality, his claim is specific enough to avoid any problem of self-referentiality. By
demonstrating the historicity of so many of our assumptions about ourselves, though, Foucault’s works do
support the supposition that there are no universals or constants in human experience.

Foucault is best known for his “analytics of power.” He holds that a thorough understanding of power in our
society requires abandoning analytical frameworks – e.g. Liberalism or Marxism – that locate power in state
institutions. Power is everywhere, he asserts. To understand subjection as well as resistance and change, we
must examine power at the micro-level – relations between boss and worker, therapist and client, teacher and
pupil, husband and wife. It is at this level that systems of “power/knowledge” are produced and reproduced
and are sometimes disrupted and overthrown. Power is not something that one person or group holds while
others lack it; power exists only in relation, only in “exercise.” Power relations must be constantly repeated
if institutionalized dominations are to be maintained. Thus power relations are always reversible or alterable,
which means that the institutions and dominations they support are always vulnerable. Freedom, Foucault
insists, is an ever-present feature of power relations.

Since the mid-eighteenth century, Foucault warns us, however, power relations have intensified. This is the
result of innovations in technologies of power through the nineteenth century, the most far-reaching of which
Foucault calls “normalization.” As populations grew, functionaries needed techniques for managing large
groups of people – workers, soldiers, schoolchildren, etc. At the same time, with industrialization and the
invention of the rifle, the tasks these groups of people had to perform became more complex. Gradually the
new techniques that various administrators invented came together at a theoretical level in the idea of
development. Individuals develop (skills, physical features, etc.) along a continuum in response to set stimuli
at measurable rates. This notion gave rise to the idea of norms of development, statistically significant
degrees of accomplishment in relation to given tasks. Norms in turn made possible the notion of deviance,
statistically measurable differences between people engaged in acquiring a skill or a characteristic. This
process of measuring and describing people according to developmental norms created administrative
classification systems that interpret variations as deviations and render deviating individuals subject to
disciplinary action, therapy, or other forms of forceful intervention. Even those institutions most clearly
associated with the state and the law (such as the judiciary, police, and prison system) are not fully explicable
apart from this concept of normalization, Foucault maintains. Normalization is the most basic and ubiquitous
form that power takes in the modern world.

In his last works, Foucault takes up the question of how people constitute themselves as ethical beings. His
focus in these works is sexuality and sensual pleasure. He argues that the current belief that sexuality is a
fundamental and inescapable aspect of a human life and that mental and physical health require that one’s
sexuality be carefully analyzed, classified, and managed is the product of a series of shifts in relations of
power that occurred over the last three centuries. Sexual identities (heterosexual and homosexual, for
example) are not natural kinds but are, rather, social phenomena constructed in response to shifts in power
arrangements in the nineteenth century. The fact that sexual identities and other important features of our
existence are historically contingent does not mean, however, that we can change them at will. Historically
constructed objects of knowledge are not illusions. They are reality, since reality itself is historically
emergent. But as we come to understand various aspects of ourselves and our societies as historically
contingent, the power that our current way of thinking exercises over our lives will lessen somewhat, perhaps
making it possible to think differently. Foucault, therefore, is interested in what he calls an “aesthetics of
existence,” self-overcoming (as Nietzsche would term it) or self-creation as a way of life. He advocates a
perpetual openness toward the future, toward possibilities and differences as one styles one’s existence in
accordance with the values and practices one defines at a given moment as beautiful or best. This self-
stylization he regards as a kind of self-discipline, which he calls a “practice of freedom.” It can counter
disciplines imposed upon us by the forces of normalization that pervade our society.

Bibliography

Writings Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (New York: Vintage, 1965).

The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970).

The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973).

Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977).

Nietzsche, genealogy, history, In D. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1977).

The History of Sexuality, three volumes, trans. R. Hurley; volume 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage,
1978); volume 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985); volume 3, The Care of the Self (New
York: Pantheon, 1986).

Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997).

Further reading

Eribon, D.: Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Copied from The World’s Great Philosophers Edited by Robert L. Arrington