A New Generation of Thinkers.
From: O'Farrell, C.
(1989) Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan. pp.1-19
In
1966, the year that Michel Foucault first became a star on the French philosophical
scene, he remarked that he and the generation who were under 20 during the war:
'very suddenly and apparently without reason noticed that we were very very far
from the preceding generation; Sartre's and Merleau-Ponty's generation.'
It
is well known that structuralism and other related forms of thought popular
during the 1960s and early 1970s were a reaction to the forms of
'nineteenth-century, where you are banished in order to be discredited', as
Jean-François Revel wrote caustically in 1971. Much of Foucault's philosophical
and historiographical reflection can in fact be seen as an effort to provide an
alternative to this 'nineteenth-century' legacy. However, before examining
Foucault's own works and period, it might be useful to cast a brief glance over
the political, social and intellectual conjuncture from which he and others of
his generation emerged and which they rebelled against. There have already been
several excellent articles and books written about the social and political
prehistory of structuralism in France, so it is not necessary to give more than
a flavour of the period here. If there is a certain emphasis on the Marxist
intellectual experience during the 1950s in the following discussion, it is
because as François Furet remarks, structuralism developed in the same
intellectual circles that had been Marxist after the war.
At
the end of the Second World War, the Right emerged totally discredited by the
Vichy experience. Few intellectuals of note were tempted to think within its
confines any longer. As Furet suggests, 'ideological elaboration became a
quasi-monopoly of the Left.' On the other hand, the French Communist Party, the
'Party of the Resistance', emerged with flying colours, even if these colours
had been delicately retouched: it was conveniently forgotten, for example, that
the PCF had in fact been pro-German in 1939 and 1940. However, this worried a
few people at the time and a large number of intellectuals found the Communist
Party the answer to their desire to become politically engaged, in a society
which seemed to have lost its direction, and its sense of values. Even
Jean-Paul Sartre, the dominating intellectual figure of the time, who had made
his opposition to Marxism quite clear before the war in his existentialist work
L'Etre et le Néant, changed his mind. He began to declare his wholehearted, but
by no means always appreciated, support for the Communist Party. This sudden
need amongst intellectuals for political 'engagement' after the war can also be
explained by a certain sense of guilt about having been born into the
bourgeoisie and not the working class. Political activity seemed a suitable act
of penance to make up for this and Sartre, perhaps more than any other
intellectual, was tortured by this sense of guilt to the point of obsession.
His case is representative of the itinerary of many other intellectuals during
this period. Simone de Beauvoir in the third volume of her Mémoires says that
it was Sartre's experience in the Resistance and as a prisoner of war that
helped him understand the meaning of history and action. As a result of this
experience, he became interested in the Communist Party towards the end of the
war. She explains that although it was true that until then he had always
considered the proletariat as the 'universal class', he had thought it possible
to reach the absolute through literary creation and had thus considered his
relations with fellow human beings (his 'being for others') or politics as
secondary. She continues:
With
his historicity, he had discovered his dependence; no more eternity, no more
absolute; the universality to which he aspired as an intellectual, could only
be conferred by those men who were its incarnation on earth. He already thought
what he was to express later: the real point of view is that of the most
disinherited It was through the eyes of the exploited that Sartre would learn
what he was: if they rejected him, he would find himself imprisoned in his
petit-bourgeois individuality.
The
Cold War was also another factor in contributing towards the increase of the
Communist Party's influence. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie mentions that although
immediately after the war, Communists were not much in evidence at the famous
Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d' Ulm, the new 'Post-Resistance' Cold War
generation of 1948 to 1949 were much more open to Stalinist doctrine. During
this period we find, for example, Foucault as a card-carrying member of the
Communist Party, 'ghost-writing' in the Communist journal La Nouvelle Critique
for authors such as the well-known Party prop Jean Kanapa. However, Foucault
(never an excessively zealous Stalinist) left the Party in 1950, somewhat
earlier than most, when a number of Jewish doctors were tried in Russia for
alleged treason.
But
Marxism and Communism were by no means the sole refuges of postwar
intellectuals, although this school of thought (or dogmatism) was by far the
most significant. If Sartre attempted an uneasy marriage between Marxism and
existentialism, there were also the important currents of Catholic
existentialism and personalism as well as Camus' non-Marxist and atheist
version of existentialism. There was also a number of dedicated Gaullists such
as the writer François Mauriac (who was to transfer his allegiance to the Left
during the Algerian war). In addition, one must not forget the school of
phenomenologists inspired by the ontological of German philosophers such as
Jaspers, Heidegger and Husserl.
Nonetheless,
it was almost impossible to be an intellectual worthy of respect without a
political commitment. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writing in 1961 comments: 'One
thing is certain, that there was a political mania amongst philosophers which
produced neither good politics, nor good philosophy.' It was from politics that
the solutions were supposed to come. 'Every political anger became a holy
anger, and reading the newspaper every morning the philosophical morning
prayer.' Althusser makes some similar observations about the 'philosophers
without works that we were turning every work into politics, and slicing the
world, arts, literature, philosophy and sciences, with a single blade - the
pitiless division of classes'. This reverence for the political could extend to
the most banal and everyday level. Le Roy Ladurie recounts that a militant
organising a meeting with some young people dealt with a complaint about the
lack of chairs by replying 'Comrades, if you want these chairs politically, I
am certain that you will succeed in finding them.' One of the early opponents
of this dogmatism, Claude Lefort, although still a Marxist, describes the
'ideological terror' which the Communist Party exercised over the Left and the
massive adhesion of progressive writers to Stalinism. Le Roy Ladurie also
mentions that 'intellectual terrorism' was not only exercised against anyone
who dared criticise Stalinism, but also within the Party itself.
Fortunately,
in 1956, this state of affairs began to change, and indeed the years 1956-60
were to mark the end of one way of thinking and the beginning of another. With
the close links of philosophy, the humanities and even scientific thought with
politics, it was in fact a number of political events which precipitated this
transformation of ideas, producing a move away from politics and existentialism
and humanist philosophies.
In
January 1956, a Centre-left government was voted into power. In March, this
government decided to step up 'pacification' measures in the colony of Algeria
which had been coming more and more restless since 1954 under French administration.
These measures meant not only increasing the length of military service, but
sending 400 000 French soldiers into Algeria at the end of April. Amongst the
455 deputies who voted in favour of this policy were the Communists, and the
fact that the Communist Party could pronounce in favour of the suppression of a
colony caused enormous moral problems for some Communists intellectuals.
Sartre, in an indignant article, attacked Guy Mollet's government, accusing it
of betraying its allies, its electors and in general all French people.
In
June, Le Monde published a translation of the Khrushchev report which had been
delivered in February. This report, which condemned Stalin's, produced two
distinct reactions; disbelief and shattering disillusion. L' Humanité, the
official organ of the French Communist Party, referred to the report as
'attributed' to Khrushchev, and quite a number of Communists simply did not
believe the reports of atrocities, although for many others it came as a brutal
disillusion. However, this was by no means the first news that had filtered
through of the excesses of Stalin's regime. Arthur Koestler had already written
on the subject, as had Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and other
Trotskyists in their journal Socialisme ou barbarie. But, on the whole, French
Communists simply remained deaf to anything remotely resembling a criticism of
Stalin's regime. Le Roy Ladurie reports, for example, that Jacques Le Goff,
then a pupil at the Ens in the Rue d'Ulm, after a visit to Prague in 1948 and
1949 returned with stories of police repression in the universities, but 'the
Communist students received his word, and remained deaf to his arguments.
"They have ears and they do not hear"'. Even if the reports of
concentration camps and purges were believed, they were explained away as being
necessary for the progress of socialism: reactionary of ignorant elements had
to be re-educated for their own good. In any case, all in all, the USSR was
definitely in the forefront of the struggle against exploitation. In 1977,
Cornelius Castoriadis reports Sartre's rather surprising persistence in his
'error', saying that Sartre 'wrote recently that Socialisme ou barbarie was
right at the time but wrong to say so (thus, Sartre was right to be wrong). The
walls haven't collapsed, and paper will bear anything'.
If
the Khrushchev report was not sufficient to disillusion a number of Communists,
the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956 produced a further
exodus from the Party in France, especially as the leadership of the PCF
insisted that this revolution was nothing more than a fascist uprising and not
the legitimate struggle of workers against Russian tyranny, as many Communists
in France had believed it to be. Probably many felt as did Le Roy Ladurie an
hearing the news of the entry of Soviet tanks into Budapest: 'I had read and
believed the newspapers of the Perty with too much faith when they said
"white" to swallow their new lie whole, when without warning, they
suddenly decided to say "black".
Out
of the fiasco came a new anti-dogmatic PCF, but still Marxist journal,
Arguments, founded by François Chítelet, Henri Lefebvre, Kostos Axelos, and
Pierre Fougeyrolles. Although the dream of the USSR as the embodiment of
socialism was destroyed, it still did not occur to the intellectuals involved
in the journals Socialism ou barbarie and Arguments, so critical of the way
Marxism was put into practice, to criticise the theory of Marxism; to ask, for
example, was Stalinist tyranny made possible by something in Marxism itself?
The socialist dream was gradually transferred to the Third World: Cuba (where
Fidel Castro arrived to organise the guerilla network in December 1956), China
and Africa.
In
1958, the process of destalinisation was given an additional push, as De
Gaulle's accession to power contributed further to depoliticising
intellectuals. The Communist cell of philosophy students at the Sorbonne was
also dissolved as the chiefs of the PCF considered it far too critical of the
Party line. As a result, there was a general exodus from politics towards
research. Many young intellectuals turned away from literature and the
humanities, which had been until then the preferred mediums of philosophical
and social reflection with the ascendancy of Sartre and Camus. More 'exotic' or
'scientific' subjects, apparently free from ideological overtones, such as
epistemology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, linguistics and the human sciences in
general, began to find flavour. 'The end of dogmatism produced real liberty of
research', remarks Althusser. Disenchanted and bored with the endless and
increasingly sterile humanist and political litany, intellectuals at the end of
the 1950s became interested in 'things' and 'systems' rather than 'Man' and the
problem of the 'subject'. They also abandoned the grand continuities and
progress of History for 'anti-historical' studies such as ethnology. François
Furet, writing in 1967, suggests that this historical disillusionment may have
been partly occasioned by the intellectuals' feeling that France had lost its
historical mission: 'This France, expelled from history, found it all the more
acceptable to expel history', he says. However it was probably more a case of
reculer pour mieux sauter.
Another
factor contributing to this transfer of interest was the tremendous advances
being made in the human sciences and in technology. In October 1957, the first
Sputnik was sent into space and television began to appear in some households.
The first primitive computers had appeared and there seemed to be little that
science could not promise, or could not explain. The economy was expanding, as
was bureaucracy, and the consumer age was just coming into its own. The era of
'the end of ideologies', of 'structuralism' was ushered in. The new generation
of thinkers vigorously defended their ideas against the combined forces of
existentialism, Marxism and humanism and in an interview which one critic
described as ringing 'like the manifesto of a new school', one of the most
famous of these new thinkers, Michel Foucault, met the challenge head-on.
Humanism, he announced, 'pretends to resolve problems it cannot pose!',
problems such as happiness, artistic creation, reality and the relation of man
to his world, and 'all those obsessions which are absolutely unworthy of being
theoretical problems'. 'Our system' he proclaimed enthusiastically, would have
nothing to do with these unworthy obsessions: 'it is the "human
heart" which is abstract, and it is our research which wants to link man
to his science, to his discoveries, to his world, which is concrete'.
Michel
Foucault began his career in the mid-1950s and his first book, Maladie mentale
et personnalité, was published in 1954 and appeared in a revised and retitled
edition in 1959 as Maladie mentale et psychologie. But it was his second book,
Folie et dé raison: Histoire de la folie l'áge classique, that distinguished
him, quietly at first, as one of the new generation of thinkers. This book (and
Maladie mentale et psychologie, which is similar in content) constitutes a
philosophical and historical treatment of madness and the problem of the
'Other' in Western civilisation. There are two versions of Histoire de las
folie, the original of almost 600 finely printed pages, and an extensively
abridged pocket version of 300 pages. Unfortunately the translation available
in English is that of the shorter version with a few additions from the
unabridged work. In the second edition of 1972, the original preface is also
suppressed and replaced by another shorter and less illuminating preface,
consisting mainly of rather abstruse remarks on commentary (indirect references
to the reception of the first edition) and ending on a rather flippant note
about the shortness of the new preface. Later, in 1981, Foucault declared
himself willing to reinstate the first preface, saying that he had in fact
returned to some of his earliest preoccupations.
Although
Histoire de la folie is now to be found in the bibliographies of most works on
the subject of the history of madness or psychology, when it was first
published it did not attract much widespread attention. In later years Foucault
complained about and even exaggerated this lack of interest. Nonetheless,
Georges Canguilhem, the noted historian of science, helped in its presentation
for a doctorat d'etat and Philippe Ariés, whose own brand of history was
considered marginal at the time , managed against considerable opposition to
get Foucault's text published in the collection which he was directing at Plon.
Michel Serres, Roland Barthes and the novelist Maurice Blanchot gave it
enthusiastic reviews and Fernand Braudel praised it in Annales: économies,
societés, civilisations. Across the Channel, a sympathetic review by Richard
Howard, the future translator of the book, appeared in The Times Literary
Supplement. But it was not until after the enormous success of Les Mots et la
choses in 1966 that it began to sell well. Indeed, such was the subsequent
increase in sales after five years of initial obscurity that the editor of
Payot editions, Jean-Luc Pidoux, uses the example of the career of this book to
condemn current trends in France which obstruct the publication of young
unknown authors.
It
was not only the success of Les Mots et la choses that contributed to the interest
in Foucault's earlier work, but the growth of the anti-psychiatric movement,
which particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, fastened on to (and distorted)
some of Foucault's theses to provide support for its cause. The English
translation, Madness and Civilization, was published in Britain in a collection
edited by the noted anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing, with a controversial and
somewhat inaccurate preface by David Cooper that annexed Foucault's book to the
anti-psychiatry movement. In actual fact, Foucault's critique of the science of
psychiatry was undertaken from an angle that diverged widely from that of the
anti-psychiatrists, even if he did identify himself with their activities
during his 'political' phase in the 1970s. Later, in 1984, Foucault also
remarked that he had shared 'no community' with Laing, Cooper and Basaglia when
he wrote Histoire de la folie, even if all their work was to later form the
basis of a 'community of action'. In France his work also attracted a
tremendous amount of attention from the psychiatrists. In 1969, much to
Foucault's dismay, a group of eminent psychiatrists met to discuss and
criticise his work. Another psychiatrist seems to have taken Foucault's remarks
on the nineteenth-century reformer Pinel as a personal insult and after a
disagreement with Foucault on the radio on the occasion of Pinel's centenary,
launched a series of attacks on Foucault as the 'incompetent' 'father of
anti-psychiatry in France'.
But
there was yet another reason for the sudden increase in popularity of Histoire
de la folie, and that was the growth of a tremendous and widespread interest in
all kinds of social 'margins' after 1968. The subject of Foucault's book, its
historical analysis of the origins of the division between the normal and the pathological,
made it of eminent topicality. So much so, that Foucault was to complaining in
1977 that he was embarrassed and even distressed by the fact that after all
those years of difficult and lonely work carried out by himself and a few
others, interest in notions concerning madness, delinquency, children and sex
was nothing more for some people than 'a sign of belonging', being on 'the good
side', the side of madness and so on - a cheap way of buying a social
conscience. Quite apart from all this, Histoire de la folie is a quite
fascinating blend of history, philosophy, social comment and indignation at the
plight of madmen, written in a beautiful, often difficult and idiosyncratic
poetic style. It reads like a subtle and gripping Gothic drama, mazed with
intricate subplots and arcane details. Small wonder its readers have been
alternatively fascinated, bewildered, frustrated and even enraged by it.
Foucault's
next book, Naissance de la clinique, published in 1963, was a historical and
epistemological study of the foundations of French clinical medicine at the end
of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In
1972, at about the same time that Foucault deleted the first preface of
Histoire de la folie, he revised Naissance de la clinique, a revision which
consisted of the elimination of some of its 'structuralist' terminology. The
word 'discourse' was substituted for 'language' in some places, and phrases
such as the 'structured analysis of the signified' were rewritten as 'the
analysis of a type of discourse'. In spite of this, 'language' and 'structure'
remain frequently-used words in the text, leading many critics to describe it
as Foucault's most 'structuralist' book. Although the history of medicine has
not acquired the public appeal that questions relating to madness have acquired
in the past twenty years, Naissance de la clinique has become something of a
classic in its own right. In a collection on the history of medicine published
in 1982, for example, most articles include references to Foucault.
In
1963, Foucault also published a rather obscure book on the even more obscure
French surrealist writer Raymond Roussel. An anonymous reviewer in The Times
Literary Supplement remarked that the book 'seems addressed to an audience of
cognoscenti, which must be exceedingly small in France and can hardly number
more than two or three here.' However, the book did not go unnoticed by the new
novelists in France, and Alain Robbe-Grillet saw Foucault's 'fascinating essay'
as one of the signs of a growing interest in Roussel, but it remained an
interest that was not widely spread beyond certain circles. In the period
between 1960 to 1965, Foucault also published a number of articles of literary
criticism, essays on language and prefaces to an assortment of books, and
translated texts from German. Much of this work, like Raymond Roussel, is
poetic and obscure and not always easy to understand on first reading.
In
1966, Foucault published the book that was to become an instant bestseller: Les
Mots et les choses. This was a 'history' of the origins of the human sciences:
economics, linguistics and biology, and became notorious for its declarations
concerning the death of Man and the end of humanism. With this book, Foucault
was dubbed one of the 'gang of four' of the new 'structuralist' movement and a
famous cartoon drawn by Maurice Henry depicted Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss
and Barthes sitting in a jungle dressed in grass skirts. A tremendous amount
has already been written about structuralism, both for and against, and the
issue of whether Foucault is or was a structuralist, and what relationship his
work bears to this disparate movement is still being discussed. Unfortunately
for the English-language critics, the preface to the English translation of Les
Mots et la choses put them in somewhat of a quandary, since in this preface
Foucault insisted on depriving them of this useful label to fit his work. As a
result, there was a division into two schools of opinion: one which argued that
Foucault's views on the matter were irrelevant, and that some, if not all, of
his work was manifestly structuralist, and one which accepted Foucault's
rejection of the label with an almost religious faith. 'With customary
perversity', argues one critic, 'Foucault insists that he is not a
structuralist, but the label persists, justifiably, in sticking.' Later
English-speaking critics eagerly defended Foucault from any charge of
structuralism, and for many of them, as Colin Gordon points out about two particular
writers, 'the very activity of "structuralist" thinking constitute[d]
a moral error.' On the other hand, French commentators in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, before structuralism went out of fashion in Paris, were more
concerned with describing first and foremost their own views on what
structuralism was, than with seeing how far Foucault's work could be
accommodated under this label.
In
the final analysis, perhaps, 'structuralism' is simply a convenient label which
describes a diverse series of researches often performed quite independently,
bur having a certain number of traits in common. For the sake of simplicity,
let us characterise the so-called 'structuralists' as representing the
antithesis of the postwar philosophies. First of all, they espoused a rigorous
anti-humanism and anti-'subjectivism'. In ethnology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, often
seen as the 'father' of the structuralist movement, argued that 'in a certain
way myths think amongst themselves' without being consciously formulated by individual
subjects. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan decentred the subject the subject in
the unconscious ('la parle'). Louis Althusser renovated Marxist epistemology,
declaring that history was 'a process without a subject a process which has no
real subject or goal(s)' and that Marx was definitely a antihumanist. Roland
Barthes declared the death of the author in literary criticism: 'it is language
that speaks not he author'. At the same time the new novelists such as Nathalie
Sarrate, Phillipe Sollers and Alain Robbe-Grillet dissolved the subject and the
narrative form in literature.
It
was also a style of thought which emphasised every form of 'break' and
discontinuity. Structural linguistics provided the methodological model, and
epistemology, the history of the sciences and the human sciences were the
preferred areas of enquiry; and of course the words 'structure' and 'system'
appeared everywhere with monotonous regularity. It was a mode of thought which,
to use the linguistic terminology of the time, favoured synchrony over
diachrony. Anti-historicism was the order of the day, which many mistakenly saw
as an attempt to 'kill history'.
This
was the intellectual climate in which Foucault's book appeared. As the
synthesis of many of these themes and with its provocative and stylish
statements on humanism, Marx, the human sciences and epistemes, it created a
stir. In the first week after its publication 3000 copies were sold and more
than 50 000 were sold in the months that followed. A copy of Les Mots et les choses
on the coffee table, as Michel de Certeau commented in 1967, had a certain snob
value, even if, like Jean-Luc Godard - who poured scorn on the fashion for this
book in his film La Chinoise - the owner had only to read the first chapter.
The amount of discussion around this book was tremendous as can be seen by
glancing at Michael Clark's annotated bibliography of Foucault. It was both
extravagantly praised and extravagantly damned. Jean-Paul Sartre in particular,
attacked Foucault's views on history, saying that he had replaced 'cinema by
the magic lantern, movement by a succession of immobilities', adding that this
attack on history was, 'of course', an attack on Marxism. In fact, what
Foucault was really trying to do, according to Sartre, was to constitute 'a new
ideology, the last rampart that the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.'
Of course, Sartre's pronouncements caused considerable comment, since Foucault
was generally seen to be the most likely candidate to succeed him as the star
philosopher in France. The irony was, as Foucault himself pointed out, that it
was not so long ago that Sartre had himself been defined by the Communists as
the 'last rampart of bourgeois imperialism'. This did not prevent a host of
critics (especially Marxist critics) from rushing forward to repeat Sartre's
remarks in order to give the weight of authority to their own arguments.
Finally, in a masterful summing up of Foucault's crimes one critic indignantly
remarked that not only did Foucault 'totally reject Marxism' but also
'proclaim[ed] the death of man and the end of history.
In
fact, three distinct groups of French writing on Foucault began to emerge in
the late 1960s after the success of Les Mots et les choses. The first group
consisted of the writings of 'star' intellectuals such as Sartre, Raymond Aron,
and Roland Barthes, or other leading intellectuals such as Michel Serres,
Georges Canguilhem, or François Chítelet and leading journalists. The second
group of writings consisted of violently polemical reactions to Foucault's
work: this group included the writings of many Marxists, an important voice in
French intellectual life, the existentialists (both atheist and Christian), and
establishment psychiatrists. The third group was made up of the writings of those
'secondary' intellectuals, including journalists, who enthusiastically seize
upon and follow whatever the latest Parisian fashion happens to be. This last
group included what could only be described as intellectual 'gossip columnists'
who keep the reader up to date with all the latest fads and scandals amongst
the Parisian intelligentsia.
In
all three groups, writers used Foucault as a starting point for their own
discussion and reflections, in such a way that it is difficult to know where
Foucault ends and the commentary begins. This practice of using other writers'
work as a forum for one's own opinions is a common one in French writing, as
opposed to the usual Anglo-Saxon practice of a 'neutral' exposition followed by
the author's comments. There are numerous and complex reasons for this state of
affairs. Some of them relate to the smallness of the Parisian intellectual
'village' and the role of the media in diffusing their works. The Parisian
intellectual is expected to have read the most recent works of his colleagues
in his own field as well as in other fields. And since everybody knows
everybody else in the Parisian intellectual milieu, this is good public
relations if nothing else. The newspapers, journals, radio and television
provide a forum for discussion of these works as well as diffusing information
about the latest publications and fashions (which they also help to create).
The tendency is to carve out one's own domain in reference to all this. Hence
the wealth of what appears to the English-speaking reader to be obscure
allusions and excessive polemicising in French intellectual work. Not only does
the writer assume his readers are aware of what he is talking about, but he may
not wish to offend an opponent he will be seeing on the Parisian circuit by
naming him too directly. In addition, he wants to make sure his own individual
position is quite clearly distinguished (even if infinitely) from the rest of
the field. This system has its drawbacks, mainly the creation of intellectual
'tyrannies'. 'One does not reflect on an interpretation, one rallies to an
argument' remarks Jean François Revel. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also
comments at length on the terrorism of fashion in Paris which reduces people
who do not conform in the eyes of their judges to the right way of being and
doing things, 'to ridicule, indignity, shame and silence'. The dogmatic hold of
Stalinism in the 1950s is perhaps an extreme example of this kind of
intellectual tyranny. Similarly, older systems are condemned to oblivion by the
philosophy of the moment: 'structuralism wrenches the limelight away from
existentialism, Lévi-Strauss banishes Sartre to the museum; because the bad
habit has caught on, one does not discuss, one occupies the whole stage.
"To think is to terrorise".' Or, as Revel remarks,
To
entirely renew the basic themes of thought, to be the author of an intellectual
revolution these are fundamental philosophical necessities, at least in the
presentation. No philosopher could present himself as a candidate for
historical existence simply as a continuer.
Another
consequence of the close involvement of the media with the intelligentsia, as
well as of the celebrity status of intellectuals (much envied by their Anglo-Saxon
counterparts) is the frequency with which intellectuals are interviewed in the
written, spoken and visual media. In particular, the written interview is a
form far more commonly found in France than in English-speaking countries.
These interviews serve a useful purpose in encouraging intellectuals such as
Foucault, whose works are often quite difficult, to clarify their ideas and
make them more accessible to readers of widely circulated journals such as Le
Nouvel Observateur and La Quinzaine Litéraire. These interviews also provide a
forum for public discussion between the author and his readers. In the months
that followed the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Foucault was
interviewed in several magazines and journals. As in subsequent interviews, he
explained quite clearly what could only be read between the lines in his books.
Foucault also used interviews to state his current position: 'my problem is',
'the task of philosophy today' are two phrases that constantly recur in these
interviews.
In
1969, in response to numerous enquiries about his method, Foucault published
L'Archéologie du savoir. This book set out a historiographical methodology
which claimed to do away with some of the disadvantages of the traditional
discipline of the history of ideas. It did not entirely explain what had been
done in previous books, although it had much to say on what Foucault was not
doing and what he thought he ought to have done. So much so, in fact, that
Jean-François Revel suggested that L'Archéologie could be described as the
negative of Kierkegaard's book Either or and would have been more suitably
titled Neither nor. Other critics found it excessively arid and difficult to
read. However, for those who appreciate intricate formal geometric structures
in thought and method, it is a compelling book. It offers many useful
methodological hints to the historian who wants to avoid historicism, and has
in fact been extensively used to this end. Nonetheless the rarefied abstraction
of this work did not lend itself to a place on the bestseller lists.
Foucault's
next book was L'Ordre du discours, the text of his inauguration speech
delivered at the Collàge de France in 1970. It introduced the concepts of
'truth' and 'power' which he was to develop and discuss at length in his work
until 1982. At the same time his analysis of theses notions during this period
created an exponential growth industry in the secondary literature,
particularly in America. The beginnings of this industry can be seen in the
early 1970s, when a small but growing number of English-speaking critics and
intellectuals began to become aware of Foucault's work. Les Mots et les choses
was published in translation in 1970 and L'Archéologie du savoir and Naissance
du la clinique in 1972 and 1973 at about the same time that some of the more
radical francophiles began to abandon 'existentialism' for 'structuralism'.
English-language writing on Foucault at this time (and in the 1960s) was fairly
evenly divided between a popular journalism, aimed at explaining a 'French
phenomenon', and serious essays in specialised reviews. These critics could be
divided into camps for and against. Those against were usually advocating sound
Anglo-Saxon empiricism against airy French nonsense, whereas those in favour often
as not completely misunderstood the content and context of Foucault's ideas and
praised them for quite the wrong reasons, although there were, of course,
exceptions to this general rule. But for most, whether for and against,
Foucault's works taken out of context and judged by the standards of a
different intellectual tradition were mysterious and bizarre objects indeed.
During
the early 1970s, Foucault went into the temporary alliance with the Maoists,
adopting a rather extreme form of 'revolutionary' rhetoric in some interviews
and articles. At the same time he actively participated in committees with
other intellectuals against racism (le Comite Djellaly), and for the rights of
patients and new forms of institutional relations in the area of health (le
Groupe Information Santé). The best known of the committees in which Foucault
participated as a founding member was the famous Groupe d'Information sur les
prisons, whose aim was to provide the forum for prisoners to speak and act at a
time of great unrest in the prisons. According to some, Foucault and the GIP
played a major role in engineering the prison riots at Toul in 1972.
Also
in 1972, a discussion between Foucault and Deleuze on intellectuals and power,
which has since attracted much comment, was published. Foucault also produced
two small books on the artists Magritte (1973) and Fromanger (1975). The former
is a most amusing text, although it is difficult to judge whether this is
intentional or not. In 1973, Foucault, in collaboration with Blandine
Barret-Kriegel and others, published the confessions of a nineteenth-century
parricide, Pierre Riviére, a text which attracted the attention of many
historians and sociologists. A film was made of this book in which Foucault
played a small part as a judge. At the same time, Foucault continued to deliver
his courses at the Colláge de France from January to March every year.
Attendance at these lectures which dealt with power and prisons, was de rigueur
amongst a certain 'intellectual-mondain' set, and they became quite an event. A
journalist offers a colourful, but fairly accurate description of the
atmosphere at these courses:
As
for a Gala performance, there was a crush outside the doors some two hours in
advance. Inside emissaries reserved places and it was a fight to the death to
find a perch on the edge of a quarter of a folding seat. Women from the most
exclusive neighbourhoods of Paris came decked out in their best designer
clothes. And on stage, right in the middle of an interminable waxed desk, his
uneven skull shining under the subdued lighting, surrounded by a thousand
microphones, antennae attached to as many tape recorders, and with a flock of
ecstatic young men wrapped around his feet, Foucault spoke.
In
1975, Foucault published Surveiller et punir, a history of the prison and
punishment and the growth of the 'disciplinary society' covering the period
from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. In this book,
the notions of 'power' and 'discipline came to occupy a central position in
Foucault's thought. It was a book that immediately created great interest
amongst criminologists, an interest that quickly spread to sociologists and
historians. La Volonté de savoir, the first volume in a Histoire de la
sexualité, appeared the following year in 1976. In this methodological
introduction to a proposed six-volume study, Foucault argued that far from
repressing sexuality, Western culture has done nothing but produce endless
discourses on sexuality since the nineteenth century. The critical reception of
this book was less enthusiastic than for Surveiller et punir, as not only was
it slight in volume and in empirical content, but lacked on the whole those
brilliant and unusual insights that distinguished his earlier books.
In
1977, France and the world suddenly became aware of the 'new philosophers'.
Time magazine gave them front-page coverage with the slogan 'Marx is dead', and
in Russia the literary journal Litteraturnaia Gazieta condemned this 'lost
generation of 1968'. Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan were the
'maitres penser' or the 'gurus' of this new movement. Maurice Clavel, dubbed
the 'uncle of the new philosophers', in prophetic tones heralded Foucault as
the 'new Kant', and based his somewhat apocalyptic Christian philosophy on
Foucault's formulation on the 'death of man'. Clavel's books (especially Ce que
je crois) were immensely popular and introduced Foucault to an audience who
might not otherwise have become familiar with his ideas. In these books Clavel
displayed a seemingly endless capacity for repetition and self-quotation as
well as 'prophetic' exaggeration. When he died in 1979, Foucault, a friend with
whom he had engaged in many militant activities since the 1960s, wrote an
obituary in Le Nouvel Observateur. The younger 'new philosophers', the
ex-Maoists Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy, adapted Foucault's theories
on power to fit their pessimistic conceptions of a modern all-powerful
repressive Gulag-State. Although initially Foucault supported the efforts of
André Glucksmann, he did not pursue this line as it became increasingly
apparent that the intellectual quality and the political implications of the
works of the so-called 'new philosophers' left much to be desired. Their work
stirred up a tremendous amount of controversy and was almost universally
condemned by the intellectual establishment, who claimed that it did not even
satisfy the minimum standards of intellectual scholarship and led to a
right-wing if not 'fascist' politics.
At
about the same time , the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world began to take more
notice of the work of Foucault. Up until 1977, Foucault had remained the
property of a fairly exclusive coterie, but with the translation of Surveiller
et punir in 1977 and La Volonté de savoir in 1978, the steady trickle of
writings turned into a flood. These books appeared at a time when a number of
problems had become apparent in American prisons and when an interest in
margins and relations of power within bureaucratic societies obsessed many
people. Two more groups of writings on Foucault came into evidence in
English-speaking criticism. The first was ardently francophile: either
structuralist - or when this ceased to be respectable - interested in power or
a 'non-totalising' approach to theory. For this school, Foucault could do no
wrong, and every word that flowed from his pen was treated as though from an
oracle. Early on in 1968, a French critic had already foreseen the danger that
would be posed by '"foucauldians" if ever there are any' and a little
later in 1974, George Huppert noted the risk of some of Foucault's theses 'more
or less vaguely understood becoming articles of faith among intellectuals'.
Indeed, in their enthusiasm, the new school of 'foucauldians' erected what they
saw as Foucault's lack of theory into a full-blown theory. Writers in this
group vied with each other to be more imposingly obscure than the next, and
direct transliterations from the French and enormous sentences following the
French stylistic practice, were a feature of their style. In addition, nothing
was ever explained, and only those 'in the know' and with a good knowledge of
French language and culture could hope to decipher these daunting texts. The
second group of new writings, although these were already beginning to come
into evidence in the 1960s, particularly in relation to the anti-psychiatry
movement, were scholarly articles of academic research which had either used
Foucault's methodology, one or two of his ideas and concepts, or alternatively
used his work as a historical source. Of course, these earlier camps continued
their activity, but their self-confidence was seriously undermined and some
critics previously outraged by Foucault became quite favourably disposed
towards his writing. The amount of clear, useful and accurate writings on
Foucault began to increase as well. Translated collections of Foucault's
shorter writings began to appear in the late 1970s to cater for this growing
audience.
Greatly
affected by the poor reception of La Volonté de savoir, Foucault took a year of
sabbatical leave from the Colláge de France to travel to America. He then
lapsed into a prolonged 'silence', although interviews, articles, comments on
political events and edited collections of obscure documents continued to
appear. The quality of this work is variable. It includes endless divagations
on the themes of truth and power and much highly rhetorical writing on
intellectual and political events, many of which have long since faded from
public memory. As a new book still did not appear, references to Foucault's
'silence' and apparent unwillingness to commit himself to new ideas began to
appear in literature. Pariscope remarked dryly in 1983: 'Each year now for the
past seven years, it has been announced that he is going to break his historic
silence. Does he have anything to say?'
But
in 1981and 1982 a noticeable change began to take place in Foucault's thought.
His course at the Colláge de France in early 1982 was titled L'Herméneutique du
sujet and abandoned his favourite Classical Age for the Ancient Greek and the
early Christian period. The word 'power' all but disappeared and it became a
question of Socrates' 'concern for the self' and 'philosophies of
spirituality', then 'subjectivity'. At last in June 1984, just before the final
silence of death overtook Michel Foucault, two new volumes of his Histoire de
la sexualité appeared: Volume 2, L'Usage des plaisirs, and Volume 3, Le Souci
de soi. In the introduction to L'Usage des plaisirs, Foucault explains both his
long silence and why he had abandoned the original project outlined in La
Volonté de savoir, saying he had been forced to change his whole way of
thinking. These two new volumes, which constitute a radical change in style,
content and form of Foucault's thought, examine the history of sexuality in
Antiquity and during the early Christian period. Foucault, after reassessing
his past work, asks why sexual behaviour has become the moral preoccupation in
history, and at the same time examines the various historical techniques of
self-constitution.
It
is a testimony to the remarkable extent of Foucault's influence that his death
was reported in newspapers around the world. In France itself, the Prime
Minister and the Minister for Culture expressed their regret at his passing.
His death was front-page news in Le Monde and Le Figaro, which also devoted
several short articles to him by well-known intellectuals. The now prestigious
left-wing newspaper Liberation, which counted Foucault as one of its founding
members in 1972, devoted ten pages to him. Since his death, his influence has
not ceased to grow, as was more than amply demonstrated by a three-day
international conference on his work held in Paris in 1988. On this occasion, a
star-studded collection of intellectuals from all over the globe and from a
wide range of disciplines packed into a theatre on the Champs-Elysses, to
discuss his work in an atmosphere of suitably dramatic controversy. The
liveliness and the variety of discussion were quite sufficient to indicate that
Foucault's work will continue to make an impact for some time to come.
© Clare O'Farrell