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284———Foucault, Michel

and Georges Canguilhem, all of whom encouraged his gift


FOUCAULT, MICHEL for rethinking the terms of classical social thought. Though
he remained faithful in spirit to his teachers, Foucault
Michel Paul Foucault (1926–1984), social historian, always fashioned his own, hard-to-define positions, based
philosopher, psychologist, and political activist, was one of on prodigious reading and an incautious willingness to
the most original of the post–World War II French social engage the political and social experiences of his time: the
theorists. Though Foucault is commonly considered a post- decolonizing war in Algeria, the events of 1968, prison
modern or poststructuralist, he was an independent thinker, reform, and, above all, the queer revolution (which must be
whose writings cannot be easily classified. He was, for understood as having to do with much more than sex, or
example, indifferent to the term postmodern. If there is jus- even sexualities).
tification for such a label, it is because Foucault’s thinking has Michel Foucault began his university teaching at Lille in
been fundamental to the reassessment of modernity’s most 1952, but in 1955, he turned to government service as a cul-
cherished principles. His 15 books and hundreds of essays tural attaché to French foreign missions in Uppsala, Warsaw,
and interviews contribute significantly to such familiar, if dis- and Hamburg. In Uppsala, he began the archival research for
turbing, trends as the critique of the Subject as a foundation of the first of his enduringly great works of social history, Folie
epistemology and moral philosophy; the transformation of et déraison: Historie de la folie à l’âge classique (partially
historical method toward a postpositivist method of genealog- translated into English as Madness and Civilization: A
ical research; the early development of what came to be called History of Insanity in the Age of Reason 1965). The years
“queer theory” as a radical suspension of doubt as to the insta- abroad gave Foucault the freedom to deepen his understand-
bility of analytic categories; as well as the rethinking of ing of psychology, to begin his research career, and to enjoy
modern political and cultural sociology. the pleasures and risks of gay sexual life. In 1960, he
If a label must be used, then poststructuralism is slightly returned to France to assume a teaching post in philosophy
more accurate. Foucault was associated with the famous and psychology at Clermont-Ferrand. In 1961, Folie et
1968 Théorie d’ensemble manifesto, which included déraison was published, and the year following, it was pre-
among its contributors Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, sented and defended as his thesis for the doctorat d’état,
and Jacques Lacan, among others, who proposed a radical France’s highest postgraduate degree.
departure from then-dominant schools of thought in Immediately, Foucault’s reputation grew as more and
France: structuralism and existentialism. Thereafter, post- more of his writings appeared: Maladie mentale et psy-
structuralism came to embrace efforts to work beyond the chologie (1962), Raymond Roussel (1963), Naissance de la
famous objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy in social thought. clinique (1963), Les mots et les choses (1966), and
On balance, however, it is recommended that readers think L’archaeologie du savoir (1969). Translations of the latter
of Foucault as sui generis: a social theorist of multiple three of these books established Foucault’s international
interests who made varied contributions to social theory, reputation as a revolutionary social thinker and historian:
none of them suitable to any one category. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
Foucault was born to a bourgeois family in provincial (1973), The Order of Things (1970), and The Archaeology
Poitiers. His early schoolwork was undistinguished. of Knowledge (1972). By the end of the decade, Foucault’s
Eventually, his intellect began to flourish under the care of stature in France led to his election in 1969 to the most
priests in a local Catholic school. Thereupon, he was sent to important academic post in France, the Collège de France.
Paris, as are many of provincial France’s most brilliant His inaugural lecture on December 2, 1970, “L’ordre du
young people. Foucault completed his secondary education discours” (translated with Archaeology of Knowledge as
at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, in the heart of Paris. “The Order of Language,” 1972), brought to an end
Thereafter, from 1946 to 1950, he studied at the École Foucault’s early, more formalistic period.
Normale Supérieure, France’s elite school of higher educa- Social theorists are tempted to turn to Archaeology of
tion in the arts and sciences. In this period, he suffered Knowledge as a guide to Foucault’s method. Though the
episodes of poor mental health and was frequently at social book is as rich in brilliant insight as it is elegantly difficult
odds with fellow students. Still, after an initial failure, in in literary style, it is not the best access to Foucault’s devel-
1951, Foucault passed France’s most competitive and dis- oping social theory. A much better source is his book of
tinguishing postsecondary examination, the agrégation de 1975, Surveillir et punir: Naissance de la prison (translated
philosophie, an achievement that virtually assures career as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977).
success, especially for intellectuals. Foucault’s history of the early modern prison as an institu-
The French traditionally refer to the years of schooling tional setting designed to provide constant moral surveil-
as one’s “formation.” Foucault enjoyed an excellent forma- lance of the prisoner was at once the culmination of earlier
tion during the school days in Paris, where he encountered thinking and the first step to the important later histories of
firsthand the teachings of Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, sexualities.
Foucault, Michel———285

One might describe the important early works as the first after World War II that the social-scientific ideal that pure,
fruits of the mentors of his schooldays, Canguilhem and uncorrupted social knowledge could perfect society was put
Althusser, who were, respectively, preoccupied by the into play.
history of the sciences and the political workings of knowl- One can readily see why a thinker like Foucault might
edge and ideology. Foucault’s early studies of madness only have arisen in France in the generation after Nazi
(Folie et déraison), the hospital (Birth of the Clinic), the occupation. In a sense, the foundational experience of the
social sciences (The Order of Things), and the prison French intellectual during the occupation was the under-
(Discipline and Punish) were, if taken together, a system- ground resistance movement. This was in contrast to the
atic recalibration of the social history of the early modern Americans who thought of themselves as heroic conquerors
culture and political economy. In them, Foucault more or of evil and the German intellectuals who were forced to
less intentionally set about to answer the question that since quit their native society for England or the United States.
Karl Marx’s German Ideology (1848) had troubled critical The French experience thus explained the starkly different,
theorists of the industrial order. If, as Marx said in his and rival, schools of French social thought in the postwar
famous inversion of Hegel’s method, ideas and knowledge era. On one side, structuralisms, such as the cultural theories
generally are but the reverse image of the actual power rela- of Claude Lévi-Strauss (who suffered the war in exile),
tions in society, then how is one to account for the apparent were attempts to rethink the structural whole of culture with
fact that on the surface, the modern world claims to be more respect to its hidden members. On the other side, existen-
reasonable and fair, while underneath, it is just brutal as any tialisms, such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre (whose war expe-
other? Foucault’s answer turned on the key word discipline. rience was shaped by the Resistance), emphasized a radical
The modern factory system, for example, required laborers consideration of the moral choices made in the flux of
disciplined to the conditions of factory work. The first gen- historical action. A scant generation later, the name
erations of industrial laborers were largely recruited from “poststructuralism” came to be affixed to those, such as
the countryside, where work is scheduled more according Foucault, for whom the war had faded as a defining experi-
to daily and seasonal cycles of rural life. Industrial life, by ence. They sought to reconstruct both society and social
contrast, moves relentlessly to supply the demands of an thought, which led them to develop a theoretical position
abstract, timeless market. As a result, the modern world had that was at once structural and existential, without being
to retrain its workers and the population as a whole. either objectivist or subjectivist.
Foucault held that the so-called human (or social) Foucault’s early emphasis on discipline as the principal
sciences were crucial to the task of redisciplining the desideratum in the study of modern social life was therefore
cohorts of workers new to the modern system. This meant, a topic poised between the two extremes. He chose not to
most fundamentally, disciplining how they thought of the study either the structures of power or the contents of
means of controlling their laboring bodies: hence the knowledge, but to investigate the history of modern power’s
unique importance of the hospital and the prison. Where relation to knowledge. The effect of Foucault’s work
medical practices (and what today we call the “health care through Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) was to move the
system”) monitored the levels of health and well-being in human sciences to the center of social theory without
the population, the prison controlled the bodies of those falling into the trap of writing either a mere history of ideas
deviant to the emerging norms of the socially disciplined (in effect, a sociology of knowledge) or a social history of
life. Thus, more broadly, one can see that Foucault’s choice the social sciences (a kind of sociology of social sciences).
of topics in the early work—mental health, the hospital, the Rather, he took the emergence of the social and human
human sciences, and the prison—was far from accidental. sciences (in the broadest possible senses of the terms) to be
By these studies, Foucault was working through a compre- a (if not the) watershed change by which modern society
hensive solution to the first-and-foremost question of any came into being (in its broadest possible sense).
social science of the modern world. Where Marx put the If the central issue in the social study of the industrial
query in the classical terms of the relations between ideal society was how to discipline workers, then the institutional
and material factors in society, by Foucault’s day, the ques- spheres in which this took place had to be the disciplines.
tion had long been transposed into one of the relations How were workers disciplined through disciplinary knowl-
between power and knowledge (or ideology). The question edge? (And note that the knowledge in question is savoir,
itself had two variants, one being: How does power use the practical knowledges of daily life.) Of course, the disci-
knowledge? This, of course, is the question provoked by the plines to which Foucault referred were at once the formal
Nazi reign of terror across Europe (and was the central academic ones (such as ethnography and political econ-
question of the German school of critical theory). The sec- omy) and the applied professional ones (such as medicine)
ond variation on the theme was: How can knowledge be lib- and the quasi-professional ones (such as what Americans
erated from the distorting effects of power? This was, to a call, oxymoronically, “administration of justice”). Here,
degree, the American variant, for it was in the United States one sees the irony in Foucault’s method: To collapse discipline,
286———Foucault, Michel

in the sense of the application of power to behaviors, into story without an author. Foucault chose his terms prudently
the practical work of the disciplines is to collapse power when he described his method, first, as an “archaeology”
into knowledge in a way that permits rigorous (if untradi- and later as “genealogy.” Both terms owe to the influences
tional) empirical examination. Thus, compounding irony of the Annales school of historiography (of which the great
upon irony, the clever methodological shift also marks the French historian Fernand Braudel is the acknowledged
beginning of what many came to call a “postdisciplinary” founder, and today, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems
approach to knowledge that refuses to accept either artifi- analysis is the intentional successor). The latter term,
cial lines drawn among the officially sanctioned academic genealogy, captures a bit more of the influence of Friedrich
fields or the line customarily drawn between the academic Nietzsche. In the background, however, one can discern the
sciences (connaissances) and practical knowledges traces of Marx’s historical method and Freud’s psycho-
(savoirs). analysis, both of which reconstruct a practical knowledge
Thus, the reader can appreciate that though books such of hidden pasts by digging through the layers of dirt (bour-
as Archaeology of Knowledge are intensely theoretical (and geois deceptions and mental repressions) under which they
to some impenetrable), Foucault’s theoretical position was are buried. The method, however, is not to be confused with
forged on strict empirical grounds. Plus, in contrast to many German hermeneutics, wherein the effort is to uncover by
widely read and productive historians, Foucault is known to intersubjective decipherment the original truths. Archival
have done the archival work himself, which itself led to archaeology is dirty work, done without instructions.
striking discoveries, such as the eerie historical tales of the In Foucault’s method, the truth of the archival past is a
hermaphrodite, Herculin Barbin (1982), and of the parri- truth that survives on the wings of the descriptive presenta-
cide in Moi, Pierre Rievière ayant égorge ma mere, ma tion of the facts, that is, on the descriptive work permitted
soeur et mon frère . . . (1973), both published separately in a given historical time by the predominant community of
with Foucault’s comments. The surprises that come to the discourse. Whether in sciences or practical life, certain
archivist come in part to relieve the boredom. Archival things cannot be said, however true they may be. Thus also,
work is hard, slow, and tiring, but it has its own distinctive the strangely brilliant quality in all of Foucault’s methods:
methodological benefits. The prevailing norms do not always allow the ancient truths
Work in historical archives requires a special type of to be told. Hence, madness was not originally a disease, even
mental alertness: realizing that one is traveling through a disorder; and punishment was a cruel public spectacle with-
layer upon layer of historical time, back to events reported out the least consideration of rehabilitating the interior atti-
in archival texts of the near or distant past. To work on a tude of the criminal. Likewise, medicine before the modern
daily basis with fragile pages of letters or court documents era was a kind of epidemiological study (often of humors or
(or poor facsimiles thereof) is to experience the strange fluids, only later of germs) in a world in which, remarkably,
effect of the past on the researcher. One digs through the the body was not a significant etiological site due to moral
layers to find documents as real as any one finds today. But restrictions on the physical examination of bodies. In a simi-
always the question is: In what does the truth or reality of lar fashion, what we today call the “social sciences” were, in
the text subsist? It is never, for example, possible to fact- the classical era, the formal classification of naturally occur-
check an ancient text by asking its authors what they meant. ring forms that corresponded to abstract types, as opposed to
Archives of the historical past are, strictly speaking, the empirical examination of variances as they occur in the
unguarded by the voice of an author. In other words, they evidentiary record. When one works in archives, the labor is
are pure discourse, outside the sphere wherein anyone can so time-consuming that as much as one would like to, it is
second-guess the meanings. In contrast, even, to literary impossible to go to ancient court records looking for some
texts, where one is tempted to imagine what the poet meant, preconceived form. One can only read, and take notes, and
it is nearly impossible to attribute meanings to the archival read, then (as Max Weber once said) wait for the idea to
texts. Most of the time, the author or authors are unknown. occur to you. This is what allowed Foucault to discover what
When they are known, usually (as in the case of private others overlooked. His archaeological method was thus a
letters) the texts convey meanings outside and often at odds very modern, if late-modern, empirical method—one by
with the exterior record of their public lives. which the evidence, being hidden below the layers of records
The interpretation of texts without authors is closer, stacked upon each other (often literally), is to be interpreted
thereby, to natural history and astronomy than to survey only when the researcher awaits the surprise.
research or ethnography. It is, in short, to use the word Thus, all of Foucault’s historical books begin with a sur-
Foucault made famous, closest of all to the work of the prise story, each meant to call the reader into the lower
archaeological digs of the physical anthropologist, wherein strata of the historical evidence he then recounts. Discipline
the story of unknown and unknowable ancients is told by and Punish, for example, starts off immediately with the
the cracks and fissures in the dry bones, shards of pottery, shocking story of the torture on March 2, 1757, of the
broken tools, and weapons. The story of the first man is a regicide Damiens. The account of the murderer’s flesh being
Foucault, Michel———287

torn with pinchers and worse excites the reader with terror who had been culturally or politically revolutionary in the
and pain. But soon after, quiet is restored as Foucault 1960s, the 1970s were a time of stock taking. With the elec-
calmly recites the rules for the care of prisoners according tion of Richard M. Nixon to the American presidency in
to Leon Faucher. In the space of three pages, time shifts to 1968, the United States began a long period of conservative
1837, precisely 80 years after Damiens’s torture. The new withdrawal from the progressive dreams of the 1960s. The
punitive rules are more those of a monastery than of the axis of hope had rotated from America to Europe. For
public torture. In the 80-year interim (which included, of American intellectuals, the prefix post had a special appeal.
course, the American and French Revolutions), the modern It was a time when ideals had to be assessed; hence the turn
world had settled uncertainly into place. The power to to European social thinkers who were in recovery from the
punish had been transposed into a faith that the body is the effects of the war.
mere surface upon which control does its disciplinary work What the so-called poststructuralism movement offered
without bloodletting. The new faith is a social science of was exactly what it intended to offer: a new way of thinking
sorts. It is, in Foucault’s most famous concept, the work of in robustly structural terms that also permitted access to the
power/knowledge, in which the dichotomous terms are personal or subjective elements in social life. One should
joined, if not quite fused, in one operation. Methodologi- note that chief among the slogans of the new social move-
cally, the shift could not be predicted on the basis of ments of the 1970s were phrases such as “personal politics”
abstract theories or principles. It surfaces only when one and “participatory democracy.” Of all the social theorists that
traces the layers of the archival record back through years came to their fame in France in the time, Foucault’s writings
until one comes upon the irregularities when, in the were in many ways the more accessible to American sensi-
example, punishment as a public display of power gradu- bilities (not to mention British philosophical tastes that, even
ally receded behind the prison walls and (at least originally) by the early 1970s, were a bit trapped in analytic methods
the criminal was subjected to the surveillance of those with and cautious about Continental cultures). One direct conse-
the moral knowledge to correct his moral attitude and to quence for Foucault, as for Derrida and others, is that they
discipline the misbehaving body. were drawn more and more into American university life. For
In the years after his election to the Collège de France, in Foucault, the regular visits, especially to the University of
1969, Foucault’s work held true to the general principles of California at Berkeley, were a relief from the pressures at
the early period but changed discernibly as to subject matter home and a free space to explore his own personal politics—
and even method. The changes, though necessary to note, to both creative and tragic ends.
were not anything of the kind his teacher, Louis Althusser, When Surveiller et punir appeared in 1975, Foucault had
attributed to Marx (in Pour Marx, 1965) from a youthful less than a decade to live. The AIDS virus that killed him
humanist to a mature scientist. Foucault was far too insis- was unknown at the time. He was, like many others, drawn
tently original to allow his life, much less his work, to be sub- into a new kind of politics in which the struggle was to over-
divided. Yet he was a man of the world, and the events into come the subjugation of subjecthood that Foucault consid-
which he was more and more drawn had their effect. By the ered the fundamental evil of modern culture. One of the
early 1970s, Foucault had become one of France’s most most frequently cited passages in his study of prisons is the
celebrated public intellectuals and the proper successor to interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, that decep-
Jean-Paul Sartre—and in France, the public intellectual is a tively intrusive early form of prison architecture in which
role that invites serious political responsibilities. At the same the prison population was exposed to the continuous gaze of
time, in the decade after the revolutionary 1960s, French the powers, an arrangement that allowed power “to
social thought came more and more into the international induce . . . a state of consciousness and permanent visibility
spotlight, especially in the United States. Translations of that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault
Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and later Pierre Bourdieu 1977:201). Hence is given another of Foucault’s famously
soon appeared in English within months of original publica- duplicitous ideas: that in the modern world, subjects are cre-
tion in French. This was the period when the term poststruc- ated by subjugation. The observing prison was also a figure
turalism assumed its notoriety in the English-reading world. for the working of power throughout the modern society.
Though French social theory was poorly understood, espe- From this adumbration of his concept of power/knowledge,
cially in the United States, there was a good reason that Foucault stepped off toward the work of his last years.
young academics took it to heart as they sought to rebuild In 1976, La volonté de savoir (translated as The History
their adult lives after the political failures of their youth. The of Sexuality: An Introduction, 1978) announced Foucault’s
1960s had been, for Americans in particular, their time of plan of teaching and research. This book became, at once,
revolutionary pathos, a time that marked the lives of a later the locus classicus of queer theory and of the theory of the
generation of young Americans to much the same degree as instability of analytic categories. In effect, by arguing that
World War II and the wars of decolonization had influenced knowledge is behind (even) the power of sex in the social
an earlier generation of Europeans. Above all, for Americans whole, Foucault showed that queering, in addition to being
288———Foucault, Michel

a sexual practice, was also an undermining of the idea that about sex, to talk in ways that adjust sexual behaviors to the
analytic differences (including that between truth and needed level of fertility. This explains the French title of the
power) could be kept separate and pure. book, La volonté de savoir: The Will to Knowledge. This
Just as important, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, play on Nietzsche’s idea of the Will to Power served to rev-
was also Foucault’s most explicit and powerful theory of olutionize the sociology of power, even to suggest that
sociology’s most urgent question: How does power work? power/knowledge was at work well before the industrial
After the revolutions of the 1960s, social and political system was to assert that the modern world worked accord-
theorists were forced to explain the obvious weakness of the ing to a virtually universal requirement of social power.
classic top-down concept of power. Both Marx and Weber After the first volume of The History of Sexuality, 1976,
were responsible for the idea that power is domination and there was a long wait for Foucault’s next books. He was, in
thus that it is a conscious, intended, and downward exertion these years, as productive as ever as an essayist, activist,
of force upon those in the weaker power positions. What the teacher, and researcher. The demands on him in France had
new social movements did, however, was to invoke the fact grown to a degree that lesser men would have found them
that women, homosexuals, workers, racial minorities, and unbearable. He spent more and more time at Berkeley. San
colonial subjects rebelled late in the history of their oppres- Francisco drew him not only for the pleasure of the intel-
sions because in some fashion, they had colluded with those lectual company at the university but also for the sexual
who controlled their destinies. Power thus had to be as pleasures of the gay community, in the days before AIDS
much from the bottom up as from the top down. This led to was known to be what it has become.
Foucault’s completely original dismissal of the so-called When back in France, Foucault made the time to
repressive hypothesis on power. research the history of sexuality. Then, he worked mostly in
The surprise at the beginning of La volonté de savoir is the archives of the Catholic traditional and turned ever
the subversion of the idea that the Victorian Age was repres- more back to the Greeks. Slowly, the concept power/knowl-
sive. On the contrary, talk about sex was everywhere in the edge was transposed into governmentality. Foucault meant
nineteenth century, as it had been through the ages. But to make the workings of power in the formation of subject-
Foucault’s most striking example is that of the medieval hood ever more concrete. In a sense, governmentality is a
Christian church’s confessional, which served to encourage term that drops the irony and wordplay in favor of a specific
people to talk about sex as the subtly powerful method for historical claim. The governing of a people depends on the
regulating sexual behavior. In this, Foucault breaks with his way people govern themselves. The second and third
earlier method by reaching back before even the classical volumes of the sexuality project, L’usage des plaisirs, 1984
era, to the medieval church and, eventually, to the Greeks. (The Uses of Pleasure, 1985) and Le souci de soi, 1984
Dominant powers, whether the capitalist class in the modern (The Care of the Self, 1986), ended up quite different in
era or the priestly class in the Middle Ages, had no choice subject and nuance from the original plan. Foucault’s
but to regulate sexual practices, because sex is necessarily history of sexuality had become, in effect, a history of the
central to their need to regulate the growth of populations, Self as the simultaneous object and subject of power. “Short
whether of workers or adherents. Pure repression, thus, is of being the prince himself, one exercises power within a
impossible. Without sex, no babies; the population dies off, network in which one occupies a key position” (Foucault
and the system collapses. 1986:87). Power, then, is more explicitly the work of gov-
Power cannot easily regulate intimate behavior, even by erning—still a work that entails knowledge and discourse,
the most repressive measures. The bedroom is beyond but a work that issues in an ethic of care for the self, an ethic
explicit top-down force. Controlling sex requires coopera- that assures the possibilities of sexual pleasures.
tion of the subjects of the realm. Hence, Foucault’s (1978) Those pleasures, in the end, killed Foucault. He died of
stunning announcement that the modern subject—so AIDS on June 25, 1984, just as his books on the care of the
proudly advertised as the new, liberated man—was, in fact, pleasuring self appeared.
still a subject in the medieval sense: “An immense labor, to
— Charles Lemert
which the West has submitted generations in order to pro-
duce—while other forms of work ensured the accumulation See also Body; Discourse; Genealogy; Governmentality; Power;
of capital—men’s subjection: their constitution as subjects Queer Theory; Social Constructionism; Surveillance
in both senses of the word” (p. 60). The confessional was
thus the precursor to the nineteenth-century factory school
FURTHER READINGS AND REFERENCES
and the diffusion of self-help and therapeutic practices in
the twentieth century. Power regulates sex (hence: reproduc- Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization. New York:
tion) by forming subjects who willingly subject themselves Pantheon. Translation (abridged) by Richard Howard.
to the prevailing regime of power. How is this done? The Originally published as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à
only way it can be done: by inducing the subjects to talk l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961).

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