Lecture 9: Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

1.             Towards the end of my discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno I emphasized the theoretical and political cul de sac into which they were led by their final version of critical theory. Having maligned reason as a contaminated instrument of civilisatory barbarism, they are forced to abandon positive knowledge in favour of art and negative critique which, nevertheless, as the self-criticism of reason cannot escape the domain of conceptuality all together. At the same time, the idea of the "totally administered society" and the "end of the individual" is a totalising and oversimplified vision. The result is the practical impasse of their work: an audience reduced to the isolated survivors and an unspecified future. Now we shall turn to Michel Foucault who, although he offers an equally radical and unrelenting critique of modernity, does so from a very different standpoint. I said earlier that the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity from the perspective of the missed revolution. "Revolution" is also a vital theme for Foucault. However, for him the problem has been drastically transformed. His question is how are we to think “revolution” after the demise of revolutionary Marxist politics and its emancipatory view of history. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, Foucault marshals radical historical scepticism. He announces not the "end of the individual" but the "death of man": this slogan proclaims Foucault's determination to avoid humanist values and expose their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination. However, in terms of revolutionary hopes and prospects he suggests that today is no better nor worse than any other time. In place of what he will call the “empty shell of universal revolutionism”, he prefers the project of experimentation on limits: “to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take”, (W is E?, Pol of Truth) p114.

2.             Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. In retrospect, Foucault speaks of Heidegger and Nietzsche as his major influences but we should also add the major figures of French philosophy of science, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and his teacher at the Ecole Normale, Louis Althusser. As a young man he experienced difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. After early training in psychology during the mid 50’s, he left France to lecture at the University of Uppsala in Sweden for several years and spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while completing his dissertation. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties in 1968 he also took a position lecturing at the University of Tunisia. He eventually returned to France to become a Professor at the new university of Vincennes before being elected to the College de France in 1971 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France). In the early seventies he help found and was heavily involved in the GUP (Prisoner’s Information Group), a group of Maoist inspired intellectual activist committed to improving the lot of the prison populations in France and elsewhere. From the seventies Foucault became an international figure. He was active in a series of other radical social and political causes around anti-psychiatry and human rights. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed. Although he was not in Paris at this time, these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist. From seventies, his growing international profile saw him invited to give lectures in the US and elsewhere and provide a gradually increasing series of interviews. At the time he also came out publicly as a gay man. He was teaching in California when the AIDS epidemic first appeared but he resisted the idea of having his HIV status checked. He died suddenly after a short illness in 1984 of AIDS.

2. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography He personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. This training, which included some first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, engendered his distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism regarding the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psycho-analysis, and the human sciences more generally. What distinguishes Foucault's accounts from the more orthodox historians of science was two things: his interest in discontinuity (his assertion to scientific advance was not a matter of smooth progress but of disjunction and new paradigms) and his fascination with the dark side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of progress and sees behind a white coat of “objectivity” domination, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this unacknowledged oppression. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason".

3. We have seen how the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity, of the “totally administered society” from the perspective of the missed revolution. For Foucault "Revolution" is also a vital theme. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, Foucault marshals radical historical scepticism. His slogan the "death of man" proclaims the view that the idea of man was a cultural/scientific construct of the recent past (the post classical period, from 1800) that is now in crisis and that humanist values need to be treated skeptically and their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination exposed.

4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to focus on his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen that for the Frankfurt School with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern bourgeois subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by skeptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” slogan signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing it as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. These traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant: as we have seen with the Enlightenment, it becomes the essential origin and final court of legitimisation for all knowledge claims and values-both of rationality and morality. Foucault wants to explore the “otherness” that he views as being both internal and foreign to the subject, that determine “their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them”. (OTxiv) He argued that philosophy had to begin from things that positively exist, what the empirical sciences reveal about life, labour and language. The subject has to be placed within this context and the emphasis will be focused on how the subject is determined by outside elements. (F&IR.p188) Because he believes that discourse and its practices is such a complex reality with numerous levels, he rejects the phenomenological approach that gives absolute priority to the knowing or observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity, which…leads to a transcendent consciousness”. (OTxiv)

5. For Foucault, the Enlightenment idea of the subject as universal and unified, as the subject of law, as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge and bearer of moral autonomy is an illusion. This mode of subjectivity is a specific historico-cultural construct, of historically changing practices and discourses and there is no coherent or constant human being or condition that could sustain such a notion. Furthermore, this form of subjectivity is an instrument of social repression and subjugation. At least for the early Foucault, subjectification is a process aimed at generating obedient subjects, principally characterised by their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. The Enlightenment version is especially oppressive because it coincides with the new more pervasive regime of rationalisation and the disciplinary modalities of power.

6. This is not to say that Foucault is simply a critic of the enlightenment: far from it. Although he believes we need to escape from the illusions tied to the above idea of a universal foundational subject, he also views Enlightenment as the basis for a new understanding of the task of philosophy. For him, this ambiguity is already at the very centre of the Kantian project. Kant is the founder of two great traditions in modern philosophy. The first associated the three critiques, concerns the exploration of modern scientific rationality and especially the conditions under which true knowledge is possible. It is this project that developed the idea of the transcendental subject as the abstract, logical foundation for all knowledge and morality. The transcendental model is the one that Foucault now rejects. However, in some of Kant’s more occasional essays, he offered another philosophical project that was primarily concerned with the immediate present, which was concerned with the question of our actuality, with modernity. (PT, 94) This second version of the task of modern philosophy comes to the centre in the late Foucault as the basis of his own final understanding of philosophy and of his interpretation of critique.

7. One of Foucault's principal aims is to peel away the historically imposed, fictive forms of individualisation, stripping subjectivity of everything that limits it. The source of this anti-subjectivist rhetoric is what I shall call Foucault’s experimental emancipatory project. He understands this project as the elimination of all limitations on human possibility. Foucault has abandoned not just all holist strategies of total transformation but also all historically created emancipatory values as complicit in oppressive regimes. He favours multiple experimental transgressions that test the limits of our historically created, but apparently necessary, conditions and forms. When critique reveals these all to be a contingent historical construct-- even our received forms of subjectivity -then, Foucault tells us, it becomes clear that almost nothing has to be the way it is. Identity may be nothing more than a received straitjacket that constrains the individual by imposing selected characteristics, desires and gestures. When it is recognised that such identity is contingent, contemporary social struggles can more uninhibitedly assert the excluded claims of difference. Clearly the sources of Foucault's suspicions against modern subjectivity lie in his continued sympathy and empathy of the insane and marginalized (prisoners, patients, gays, oppressed Third World peoples), his early experience of modern psychiatry both as a student and as a patient, his own marginalisation as a homosexual before the era of gay liberation. First-hand experience of the violence and coercion involved in modern socialization and institutional practice leads him to profoundly question this society and the constellation of values that perpetrates this continuous violence, repression and marginalisation. This leads us to the heart of the negative image of modernity that characterises Foucault's middle work --what I will call the carceral society.

8. We have seen that in one decisive respect Foucault goes much further than Weber or Horkheimer and Adorno in his critique of modernity. Despite the Frankfurt School misgivings about the self-preservative instrumental core of modern subjectivity, they could still uphold the ideal of the autonomous modern subject as an everywhere endangered critical standard and a potential ally in the struggle against the increasingly rationalised, administered totalitarian society. Foucault by comparison can see here only another shape of oppression. In fact, he argues that this depth of oppressive control is intimately connected to the pervasive character of modernity, to the unique reach, sophistication, and intensity of its disciplinary regime of normalization that reaches into the core and shapes the very sense of the modern subject. Despite his general hostility to the notion of totality as it presents itself in revolutionary rhetoric and philosophy of history, the description of modernity in his major works often has a totalising character. For example, in one interview, Foucault says “ industrial capitalism…is the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’ (Dialogue with Bequir Parham’ F&IR, p.183).

9. For him, like Weber, modern western society is a unique historical constellation that has achieved an accidental yet ominous success in constituting itself as an interlocking system of requirements, norms, techniques, strategies, knowledges and practices of power. The early critique of the deformed rationality of the human sciences that remained an undertone in his histories of madness and the clinic take center stage in the works of his middle period. This now becomes a critique of the once peripheral institutions of correction and internment, their technologies and disciplines that have now moved to the center of a whole network of institutions that shape and correct individuality in modern society. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by asserting that he is not merely writing academic history of the past but the "history of the present". His portrayal of the evolution of disciplinary techniques, juridical judgements, criminology, psychiatry and penal institutions from the end of the classical age (18th century) through into the 19th century--a supposedly descriptive but implicitly critical narrative -- expands into a comprehensive condemnation of the modern disciplinary society. Foucault wants us to look at the major institutions of modern society and of the values they have advances in a new more critical way. Foucault maintains that the rapidly expanding network of disciplinary institutions of the 19th century provided the answer to the problem of organisation, administration, surveillance and control of large populations that emerged at this time with massive populations increase and the lift-off of the bourgeois economic system.

10. These were the problems becoming constitutive for modern politics. In Foucault's mind the "carceral network" is a microcosm prefiguring the whole range of new techniques, instruments, attitudes, powers and institutions that now dominate modern society. This network has both temporal (stages of life) and spatial dimensions (variety of institutional locations and types) and manifests a range of micro-technologies of coercion. The experts, technocrats, administrators, managers and social workers preside over a comprehensive and closed system of supervision and control that is really not essentially different from the institutions of correction:

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. It might be said that nothing really distinguishes them any more except the singularly "dangerous" character of the delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating.

 11. The birth of the prison ushers in a new age where the economy and society require a new form of individual subordination. The systemic demands of this new dynamic social ensemble geared to order and productivity engendered a whole range of disciplinary mechanisms and professionals whose principal task it was to ensure the normality of the population. The imperatives of the new political economy required productive service from individuals in the interstices of their concrete lives. The regime has to gain access to the bodies of individuals and exercise control over attitudes and acts; to be most productive power had to be internalised. This degree of control was obtainable only when the teacher, the social worker and the factory manager complemented the network of penal institutions. These are all agents of an overarching, yet de-centred and anonymous, system of normalizing power that was able to supervise and judge the individual from the cradle to the grave, shaping body, gestures, aptitudes and behaviour to become “orthopaedists of individuality”. Modern society is a complex, de-centred matrix of many mechanisms that somehow interlock without any designer or controller. The nascent human sciences prove indispensable at this junction by conjuring a whole arsenal of theories, therapies and techniques especially crafted to assist in the production of the required new shape of subjectivity. In conjunction with the subjecting disciplinary practices, these new sciences objectify this subject in a whole range of scientific discourses (cases, management files, reports, investigations, knowledges) that become indispensable organs of a new social power whose domination is infinitely productive, de-centred and inescapable. In this new regime, the position of the professional and the administrator may be enhanced but they do not control the workings of the whole. The judges of normality are, nevertheless, ubiquitous. They are like tentacles of a normalising power, all the more effective as a result of its radical dispersion.

12. While both the Frankfurt School and Foucault paint uncompromisingly
harrowing portraits of the extent and depth of modern domination, neither entirely relinquishes the possibility of resistance. I have already underscored the weaknesses of Horkheimer and Adorno's emancipatory outlook. Nevertheless, while they see no sociologically significant addressee for their revamped negative critical theory, their message itself implies the possibility of resistance. Secondly, at various points in their exposé of the history of instrumental rationality, they indicate that there have been opportunities to reverse the march of domination. Domination is thus a contingent fact of history not its necessary and irreversible meaning. Finally, the theories of non-identity and mimesis hint at a residue of nature that remains non-compliant to the requirements of domination. Here is another minimal platform for resistance.

13. Foucault builds resistance into his account of modernity at a more fundamental theoretical level. While his description of the “carceral” creates the impression of a pervasive discipline infiltrating every pore and crevice, resistance remains a vital element of his novel theory of power. He says in Discipline and Punish ‘this does not mean that it (the prison system) cannot be altered, nor that it is once and for all indispensable in our kind of society’ (D&P, p.305). His works presuppose and articulate the resistance in modernity of those marginalised groups like the mentally ill, the deviant and prisoners. He conceives “resistance” itself as dispersed in accord with the multiple struggles that characterises the post-68 political terrain. Yet, Foucault provides this empirical resistance with a theoretical supplementation. He renews the Nietzschean inspired assertion that all social life is constituted by struggle and that all discourses carry a hidden power and derive from the practices of power.

14. This renewed interest in power required a rethinking of its available understandings. Foucault wants to depict and analyse the forms and techniques of a modality of power that is uniquely modern. At first glance he pursues a line of argument not unlike Marx. Marx views the democratic and legal forms of bourgeois society as a veneer that both masked and facilitated the oppression of workers. So the core categories of civil society--law, rights, autonomy, personhood, plurality, publicity, and parliament--rather than articulating the limits of domination instead support it. The classic example here is the labour contract: ostensibly a reciprocal exchange of equivalents amongst autonomous agents, in reality it encodes and conceals the asymmetrical power relations that exist in the economic sphere resulting from unequal control of the means of production. Foucault universalises this critique to the social contract in general and argues that bourgeois rights and forms obscure a deeper level of asymmetrical relations, deeper control and oppression associated with the disciplines. But he wants to radicalise this critique by revisiting the mechanisms of oppression involved and linking them to the new power relations that now pervade social life. It was not the 19th century bourgeoisie that invented and imposed relations of domination. The relations of production signify a complex level of reality that is only relatively independent. The power relations inscribed in them were inherited from the disciplinary technology of earlier times and simply modified and intensifying for their own purposes. These power relations do not emanate from a single source like the new economy and its labour relations. Rather the extension of disciplinary technology and norms make it possible to organise labour in a way the facilitates capitalist efficiency and domination.

15. This brings Foucault to a more fundamental challenge to what he calls the juridical model of power. The legal edifice of Western societies operates with a discourse of sovereign power. Even after the challenge to monarchical rule, legal right was that of sovereign power. Sovereignty is defined in juridical terms. When it is lawfully constituted, power is viewed as the legitimate right or possession of the sovereign. Legality also allows power to be put in question and see its prerogatives challenged when it is not the legitimate expression of that unified will. This juridical model articulates a specific conception of the way power is exercised. It effaces the domination intrinsic to power by legitimising it: sovereign power is the rightful expression of a lawful form of violence. Foucault argues that while the judicial model has not been completely superseded, it lacks the flexibility to capture the new modalities of power. It may have corresponded to the way power functioned under absolutist monarchies but it is now outdated. Foucault views it as merely repressive; it has only one force, the force of denial, it is the power of negation and limits. This power is a blunt instrument: expensive, poor in resources and methods, monotonous in tactics, unproductive.

16. Foucault's thesis is that a new type of power began to emerge in the late 18th century that becomes global and perfected in the 19th and 20th centuries. Unlike many thinkers who helped to construct the liberal or left narrative of emancipatory struggle, he refuses to equate this new type of power with the democratic struggles against absolutism and limited suffrage. Liberal political theory established the contractarian illusion that power issues from discreet primitive elements like individual subjects; that it can be made visible, localised and restricted to the political state whose authority is delimited and regulated by the free social community. Here Foucault's radical skepticism regarding enlightenment and its values of rationality and progress is clearly evident. He suggests that the idea that democracy, reformist humanitarianism and human rights have restricted power, made it the servant and the instrument of a genuinely common will is an illusion produced by entrapment within the juridical model of power. The new forms of power cannot be comprehended in juridical concepts as relations between sovereigns and subjects or in terms of the opposition between state and society. In fact, they predate these relations and oppositions and were absolutely integral to their emergence. Before personhood was the disciplinary technology and normalising processes that shaped the modern subject as such a bearer of bourgeois right. For Foucault, the state is not sole or even primary source of these relations. They emerged beneath the visible struggles over sovereignty in the revolutions of the bourgeois period within the grid of disciplinary institutions (convent, army, the clinic, the school, hospital, the factory and the prison). Because these institutions emerged almost silently within the womb of the old society, their essential shape is not constrained by the new forms of state legitimacy and the sphere of bourgeois publicity. They remained largely outside the specific projects of liberalisation and democratisation. One of Foucault's major points is that the public, impersonal, rule-bound character of the administrative power of state bureaucracies and agencies does nothing to restrict or limit the reach or scope of disciplinary power. Foucault even refers to this as “counter-law”.What he means is that the lawyer and the bureaucrat legitimate a whole other tier of power that then has the scope and the warrant to work on the bodies of those in their charge: the teacher, doctor, social worker, the prison guard, the psychiatrist who operate those multiple processes of discipline and normalisation. Simultaneously, the very idea of punishment is softened, rendered not only just, but also more humane and rehabilitatory, more constructive.