Foucault's
Critiques of Historical Reason
Since its beginnings with Socrates, philosophy has typically involved the
project of questioning the accepted knowledge of the day. Later, Locke, Hume, and
especially, Kant developed a distinctively modern idea of philosophy as the
critique of knowledge. Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain
that the same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could
also reveal necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed
just contingent features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and
temporal character of its objects) turn out to be necessary truths.
Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than
asking what, in the apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests
asking what, in the apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his
questioning is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These
purport to offer universal scientific truths about
human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political
commitments of a particular society. Foucault's “critical philosophy”
undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are just the outcome of
contingent historical forces, and are not
scientifically grounded truths.
The most striking example of this mode of Foucault's thought is his first
major work, The History of Madness in the Classical Age (1961). This book
originated in Foucault's academic study of psychology (a licence de psychologie in 1949 and a diplome
de psycho-pathologie in 1952) and his work in a
Parisian mental hospital, but it was mainly written during his post-graduate Wanderjahren (1955-59) through a succession of
diplomatic/educational posts in
Foucault's next history, The Birth of the Clinic (1963) can
similarly be read as a critique of modern clinical medicine. But the
socio-ethical critique is muted (except for a few vehement passages),
presumably because there is a substantial core of objective truth in medicine
(as opposed to psychiatry) and so less basis for critique. As a result The
Birth of the Clinic is much closer to a standard history of science, in the
tradition of Canguilhem's history of concepts. The
same is true of The Order of Things, which was controversial much more
for its philosophical attacks on phenomenology (and Marxism) than for its
complex and nuanced critique of the human sciences. But Foucault returns with
full force to social critique in Discipline and Punish.
Discipline and Punish marks the transition to what
commentators generally characterize as Foucault's “genealogical” period, in
contrast to the preceding “archaeological” period. In 1969, he published The
Archaeology of Knowledge, a methodological treatise that explicitly
formulates what he took to be the implicit historical approach (“archaeology”)
he deployed in The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic,
and The Order of Things. The premise of the archaeological method is
that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or
discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond
those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of
individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that
determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. So, for
example, The History of Madness should, Foucault maintained, be read as
an intellectual excavation of the radically different discursive formations
that governed talk and thought about madness from the 17th through
the 19th centuries. (Admittedly, his archaeological method was only
adumbrated in this early work, but it was fully developed in The Order of
Things.)
Archaeology was an essential method for Foucault because it supported a
historiography that did not rest on the primacy of the consciousness of
individual subjects; it allowed the historian of thought to operate at an
unconscious level that displaced the primacy of the subject found in both
phenomenology and in traditional historiography. However, archaeology's
critical force was restricted to the comparison of the different discursive
formations of different periods. Such comparisons could suggest the contingency
of a given way of thinking by showing that previous ages had thought very
differently (and, apparently, with as much effectiveness). But mere
archaeological analysis could say nothing about the causes of the transition
from one way of thinking to another and so had to ignore perhaps the most
forceful case for the contingency of entrenched contemporary positions.
Genealogy, the new method deployed in Discipline and Punish, was
intended to remedy this deficiency.
Foucault intended the term “genealogy” to evoke Nietzsche's genealogy of
morals, particularly with its suggestion of complex, mundane, inglorious
origins — in no way part of any grand scheme of progressive history. The point
of a genealogical analysis is to show that a given system of thought (itself
uncovered in its essential structures by archaeology, which therefore remains
part of Foucault's historiography) was the result of contingent turns of
history, not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends.
Discipline and Punish (1975)is
a genealogical study of the development of the “gentler” modern way of
imprisoning criminals rather than torturing or killing them. While recognizing
the element of genuinely enlightened reform, Foucault particularly emphasizes
how such reform also becomes a vehicle of more effective control: “to punish
less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better”. He further argues that the new
mode of punishment becomes the model for control of an entire society, with
factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the
modern prison. We should not, however, think that the deployment of this model
was due to the explicit decisions of some central controlling agency. In
typically genealogical fashion, Foucault's analysis shows how techniques and
institutions, developed for different and often quite innocuous purposes,
converged to create the modern system of disciplinary power.
At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are
three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing
judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power)
can be achieved merely by observing them. So, for example, the tiered rows of seats in a stadium not only makes it easy for
spectators to see but also for guards or security cameras to scan the audience.
A perfect system of observation would allow one “guard” to see everything (a
situation approximated, as we shall see, in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon). But since this is not usually possible, there
is a need for “relays” of observers, hierarchically ordered, through whom
observed data passes from lower to higher levels.
A distinctive feature of modern power (disciplinary control) is its concern
with what people have not done (nonobservence), with,
that is, a person's failure to reach required standards. This concern
illustrates the primary function of modern disciplinary systems: to correct
deviant behavior. The goal is not revenge (as in the
case of the tortures of premodern punishment) but
reform, where, of course, reform means coming to live by society's standards or
norms. Discipline through imposing precise norms (“normalization”) is quite
different from the older system of judicial punishment, which merely judges
each action as allowed by the law or not allowed by the law and does not say that
those judged are “normal” or “abnormal”. This idea of normalization is
pervasive in our society: e.g., national standards for educational programs,
for medical practice, for industrial processes and products.
The examination (for example, of students in schools, of patients in
hospitals) is a method of control that combines hierarchical observation with
normalizing judgment. It is a prime example of what Foucault calls
power/knowledge, since it combines into a unified whole “the deployment of
force and the establishment of truth” (184). It both elicits the truth about
those who undergo the examination (tells what they know or what is the state of
their health) and controls their behavior (by forcing
them to study or directing them to a course of treatment).
On Foucault's account, the relation of power and knowledge is far closer
than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for
which “knowledge is power” means that knowledge is an instrument of power,
although the two exist quite independently. Foucault's point is rather than, at
least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of
knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we
know.
The examination
also situates individuals in a “field of documentation”. The results of exams are recorded in documents that provide detailed
information about the individuals examined and allow power systems to
control them (e.g., absentee records for schools, patients' charts in hospitals). On the basis of these
records, those in control can formulate
categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for
knowledge. The examination turns the individual into a “case”—in both senses of the term: a scientific
example and an object of care; caring is always
also an opportunity
for control.
Bentham's Panopticon
is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a design
for a prison, built so that each
inmate is separated from and invisible to all the
others (in separate “cells”) and each inmate is always
visible to a monitor situated
in a central tower. Monitors
will not in fact always see
each inmate; the point is
that they could at any time. Since inmates never
know whether they are being observed, they must act as if
they are always objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring
of those controlled than by heavy physical
constraints.
The principle
of the Panopticon can be applied not
only to prisons
but to any
system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never
able to build
it, its principle
has come to pervade every aspect of modern society. It is the
instrument through which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation.
Foucault's history
of sexuality was originally projected as a fairly straightforward extension of the genealogical approach of Discipline
and Punish to the topic of sexuality.
Foucault's idea is that the various
modern bodies of knowledge about sexuality (various “sciences of sexuality”, including psychoanalysis) have an intimate
association with the power structures
of modern society and so
are prime candidates for genealogical analysis. The first volume
of this project, published in 1976, was intended as the introduction to a series of studies on particular aspects of modern sexuality (children, women, “perverts”, population, etc.) It outlined the project
of the overall history, explaining the basic viewpoint
and the methods to be used.
On Foucault's
account, modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an
object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects. However, it becomes
apparent that there is a further
dimension in the power associated with the sciences
of sexuality. Not only is there
control exercised via others' knowledge of individuals; there is also control via individuals' knowledge of themselves. Individuals internalize the norms laid
down by the
sciences of sexuality and
monitor themselves in an effort to conform
to these norms. Thus, they
are controlled not only as objects of
disciplines but also as self-scrutinizing and self-forming
subjects.
For all their interest and importance, Foucault's critiques
are not so much philosophy in the traditional sense as they are a matter of achieving a traditional philosophical goal — the critique of contemporary claims to knowledge
— by new (historical) means. There are, however, also aspects
of his work that directly engage
standard philosophical topics, particular those tied to the
central epistemological issue
of representation. In particular, he offers, in The Order of Things, a detailed analysis of the question of representation from Descartes through Kant. This is, far and away,
his most sustained piece of traditionally philosophical analysis and as such deserves our close
attention.
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