Foucault_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  Foucault, born 21 years after Sartre, did not experience the war as a politically awakened adult but as a confused adolescent. Coming to maturity in the political instability and ambiguity of post-war France, he was sceptical of Sartre’s ethical and political absolutes and questioned the pretensions of what he came to call, with Sartre clearly in mind, the ‘universal intellectual’, a free spirit, ‘the spokesman of the universal’, ‘speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice’ (‘Truth and Power’, EW III, 126). This was no doubt once a worthy calling, but today, according to Foucault, universal systems of morality no longer provide effective responses to social and political problems. We need detailed responses formulated by those concretely involved in the problems. This, Foucault maintains, is the domain of the ‘specific intellectual’, for example the teacher, engineer, doctor, or consultant who ‘has at his disposal, whether in the service of the State or against it, powers which can benefit or irrevocably destroy life’ (EW III, 129) – not Sartre but Oppenheimer.

  It is sometimes suggested that Foucault saw himself as a specific intellectual, but (apart from his early work in psychiatric hospitals), he did not generally have that sort of particular responsibility in the social system. Call him rather – though he himself does not use the term – a ‘critical intellectual’, someone who does not speak with the authority of universal principles or of specific social or political responsibilities but simply on the basis of his historical erudition and analytical skills. Neither ‘the rhapsodist of the eternal’ nor ‘the strategist of life and death’ (EW III, 129), the critical intellectual provides the intellectual tools – awarenesses of strategic and tactical possibilities – those in the political trenches need to fight their battles.

  Foucault’s most obvious political separation from Sartre appears in his attitude toward Marxism and the Communist Party that was its primary representative. Early on, Foucault did feel the tug of the Marxist viewpoint. ‘I belong’, he told an interviewer, ‘to that generation who as students had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism’ (RR, interview, 174). (The influence of existential phenomenology – especially of the early Heidegger – on Foucault is most apparent in his long introduction to the French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay Traum und Existenz.) Particularly because of the influence at the École Normale of Louis Althusser, who was the leading theoretician of the French Communist Party, Foucault’s early intellectual attachment to Marxism was strong. In his first book, Maladie mentale et personnalité, he characterized non-Marxist approaches, including the existential, as providing only ‘mythical explanations’, and maintained that mental illnesses arise ultimately from ‘contradictions’ determined by ‘present economic conditions in the form of conflict, exploitation, imperialist wars, and class struggle’ (86). In one sense, Foucault went even further than Sartre, and was for a time a member of the French Communist Party. But he was very soon disillusioned with both the theory and the practice of Marxism. He quit the Party after only ‘a few months or a little more’ (‘Michel Foucault répond à Sartre’, DE I, 666) – in fact, it was closer to a year – and, in a 1962 second edition of his book on mental illness (retitled Maladie mentale et psychologie) covered his tracks. He eliminated almost all Marxist elements, including his entire concluding chapter, which had argued that Pavlov’s theory of the reflex was the key to understanding mental illness, and added an entirely new historical dimension based on his just-published doctoral thesis, The History of Madness.

  Foucault’s subsequent attitude toward Marxism was complexly ambivalent. The Order of Things, for example, made the shocking claim that Marx’s economic thought was not at root original or revolutionary, that the controversies it occasioned ‘are no more than storms in a children’s wading pool’ (OT, 262). But when pressed on this point in a later interview, he explained that he was speaking only of Marx’s significance for the specific domain of economics, not of his unquestionably major role in social theory (‘Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire’, interview with Raymond Bellour, DE I, 587). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, throughout his writings, Foucault took Marxism quite seriously but was quite happy to tweak the pretentious sensibilities of contemporary French Marxists, for whose sake he would introduce teasing remarks into his writings and interviews. So, for example, he says, to the reproach that he doesn’t cite the text of Marx in places where this would be appropriate, that of course he does refer quite obviously to Marx on many occasions, but doesn’t bother to give explicit footnotes to guide those who don’t know their Marx well enough to pick up the reference (P/K, ‘Prison Talk’, 52). On the other hand, Foucault is quite explicit in acknowledging in Discipline and Punish the importance of the Marxist work of Rusche and Kirchheimer for his history of the prison.

  Foucault’s most direct statement of his attitude toward Marxism occurs in an interview with Paul Rabinow about a month before his death: ‘I am neither an adversary nor a partisan of Marxism; I question it about what it has to say about experiences that ask questions of it’ (‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’, EW I, 115). Here Foucault is treating Marxism as an example of what, in this interview, he calls ‘politics’, by which he seems to mean a general, theoretically informed framework for discussing current political issues. His point is that such frameworks should never be simply assumed as an adequate basis for political decisions, but should be regarded merely as resources that may (or may not) suggest viable approaches to problems we face. Here he cites the paradigm example of the 1968 student revolt, which, he insists, involved asking a set of questions – ‘about women, about relations between the sexes, about medicine, about the environment, about minorities, about delinquency’ – that were not traditionally treated by established political viewpoints such as Marxism. At the same time, he notes, the student activists seemed to assume that Marxism was the proper vehicle for discussing these questions: ‘there was a desire to rewrite all these problems in the vocabulary of a theory that was derived more or less directly from Marxism’. But, he concludes, Marxism was inadequate to the task: there was ‘a more and more manifest powerlessness on the part of Marxism to confront these problems’. On the positive side, he concludes, we had learned that serious political questions could be raised independently of accepted political doctrines (‘politics’) so that, as a result, ‘now there was a plurality of questions posed to politics rather than the reinscription of the act of questioning in the framework of a political doctrine’ (EW I, 115).

  Foucault generalizes his point in a political distinction between polemics and problematizations. Polemics comes to political issues with a general doctrinal framework it accepts as the only adequate basis for discussion. Anyone who does not accept the framework is treated as an enemy who must be refuted, not as a partner in the search for a solution. Like parallel enterprises in religion (the eradication of heresy) and the judiciary (criminal prosecution), polemics ‘defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated’ (EW I, 112). (It is hard not to recall Sartre’s pledge of allegiance to the Communist cause: ‘an anticommunist is a rat … I swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would only die with me’, ‘Merleau-Ponty’, in Situations, 198.) Foucault rejects polemics as ‘sterilizing’: ‘Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic?’ Moreover, ‘it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to truth by such paths and thus to validate, even if merely in a symbolic form, the real political practices that could be warranted by it’. Ordinarily, Foucault says, the worst consequences of the polemical attitude ‘remain suspended’, presumably because there is no decisive victor among the warring viewpoints. But, he says, we know what happens when one side is able to triumph: ‘one has only to look at what happened during the debates in the USSR over lin
guistics or genetics not long ago’ (EW I, 113).

  Problematization does not ignore the doctrinal frameworks of polemical disputes – which are after all a primary source for our thinking about political questions. But it begins with questions that arise not necessarily from the frameworks themselves but from our ‘lived experiences’ in society. We can and should put these questions not only to the doctrinal frameworks (to ‘politics’), but also to a variety of frameworks and with no assumption that all or any of them will offer adequate answers. Political discussions should be driven by the concrete problems that raise our questions, not by the established theories that claim to be able to answer them.

  Foucault also makes his point in Richard Rorty’s pragmatic language of the ‘we’ (group consensus) – and at the same time responds to an important challenge to his approach to politics. Rorty, Foucault notes, has pointed out that Foucault’s political analyses ‘do not appeal to any “we” – to any of those “wes” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought’ (EW I, 114). Rorty’s worry was that, by not beginning from any consensus, Foucault was confusing the private and public domains of discourse and seeking a public endorsement of values (for example, the pursuit of intense limit-experiences) that are appropriate only as part of an individual’s self-creation, not as the norms of a liberal society. Foucault’s response is, in effect, that the ‘we’ is essential, but as an outcome not a presupposition of political discussion: ‘it seems to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question, it can only be the result – and the necessarily temporary result – of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it’ (EW I, 114–15).

  5. Foucault at a protest meeting in Berlin, January 1978

  This is an effective response but one that implicitly concedes a key point of Rorty’s challenge. The questions that precede and generate political consensus must, of course, themselves be ones that can be formulated in the mundane vocabularies of everyday discourse; otherwise they would not even be candidates for subsequently agreed-upon answers. But this means that ‘inexpressible’ limit-experiences, whatever their role in private lives, can have no place in the public forum of political discussion. Foucault can deny Rorty’s assumption that political discussion must begin from substantial agreement (say on the liberal political creed), but he must also admit that Rorty is right about the political irrelevance of the irreducibly private values on which Foucault placed so much emphasis in his early aesthetic writings.

  If political debate is not grounded in theoretical frameworks, it is fair to ask to what authority it does appeal. Often, of course, we can get along without raising questions about the ultimate justification of values; the factual questions of how to achieve certain goals are foregrounded against the backdrop of implicit shared commitments. In such cases, we might say, the issues are ones of pragmatic reform rather than fundamental revolution. Foucault, however, rejected the separability of questions of reform (transformation), working within an established system, and the revolutionary critique of the system. Discussing with Didier Eribon the election of François Mitterrand’s socialist government in 1981, Foucault resisted Eribon’s suggestion that his sympathy with the opening moves of the new regime meant that he thought it would be ‘possible to work with this government’ (‘So Is It Important to Think?’, EW III, 455). He rejected ‘the dilemma of being either for or against’ and went on to argue that even reformist projects (within a system) require ‘criticism (and radical criticism)’, since any reform worthy of the name requires questioning modes of thought that say it is impossible. Accordingly, we cannot chose between ‘an inaccessible radicality’ and ‘the necessary concessions to reality’. Rather, ‘the work of deep transformation [reform] can be done in the open and always turbulent atmosphere of a continuous [revolutionary] criticism’ (EW III, 457).

  But this position makes all the more insistent the question of what grounds fundamental criticisms of existing regimes, since for Foucault such criticism should be a constant of political life, not just of special moments of revolutionary upheaval. We can get a sense of Foucault’s response to this question by examining his controversial discussion of the Iranian revolution, with which he expressed an early sympathy that disconcerted many. But Foucault’s sympathy was with the basic act of revolt: ‘the impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, “I will no longer obey,” and throws the risk of their life in the face of an authority they consider unjust’ (‘Useless to Revolt?’, EW III, 449). Such an act, he says, is ‘irreducible’ and even an ‘escape’ from ‘history, and its long chains of reasons’. The decision ‘to prefer the risk of death to the certainty of having to obey’ is the ‘last anchor point’ for any assertions of rights, ‘one more solid and closer to experience than “natural rights”’ (EW III, 449).

  But, the philosopher in us will ask, what is the status of this will to revolt? No doubt there is a kind of authenticity in the acceptance of death as the possible price of freedom, but, as Foucault puts it, ‘Is one right to revolt, or not?’. At least in this discussion, he avoids answering: ‘Let us leave the question open. People do revolt; that is a fact … A question of ethics? Perhaps. A question of reality, without a doubt’. All he is willing to say is that it is only through such revolt that ‘subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history’ (EW III, 452), making human lives not just a matter of biological evolution but genuinely historical, and that his commitment as an intellectual is ‘to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal’ (EW III, 453).

  Not a very satisfactory response, we might say, especially when we recall that the revolution in question is one that led directly to a tyranny of stonings and severed hands. Foucault admits that the Iranian revolution contained, from the beginning, seeds of its own atrocities: ‘the formidable hope of making Islam into a great civilization once again, and forms of virulent xenophobia’. He insists, however, that ‘the spirituality which had meaning for those who went to their deaths has no common measure with the bloody government of an integrist clergy’ (EW III, 451). But wasn’t the spirit of revolt equally in those who died and those who lived to tyrannize? And isn’t there every reason to think that a reversal of fates would have turned the martyrs into clerical tyrants? How can we be ‘respectful’ of revolts that we have every reason to think will lead to a new tyranny? Foucault says there is no inconsistency ‘when today one is against severed hands, having yesterday been against the tortures of the Savak’ (EW III, 452). But why respect a movement opposing the Savak when you know that it will lead to equal outrages?

  In other places, Foucault employs the category of the ‘intolerable’ to characterize practices or situations that are the legitimate objects of resistance or revolt. This has the advantage of allowing us to differentiate some instances of revolt as morally appropriate (because they oppose what is intolerable) and others as not. Foucault’s ‘respect’ for the Iranian revolution may reflect his reluctance to judge a case of obviously sincere commitment that he could not know from the inside. Presumably, he would act differently regarding movements within his own culture, where he would be in a position to judge whether or not what they opposed was intolerable. But there is no doubt that he would see such a judgement as itself an irreducible given, not the outcome of the application of the theoretical categories of a political or other ethical framework. In the end, there can be no authority other than the judgement of those who directly experience a situation.

  Chapter 4

  Archaeology

  I am not a professional historian; nobody is perfect.

  Foucault is often treated as a philosopher, social theorist, or cultural critic, but in fact almost all of his books were histories, from The History of Madness to the History of Sexuality; and when the Collège de France asked for a title for his chair, his choice was ‘Professor of the History of S
ystems of Thought’. Nonetheless, he saw his historical work as quite different from standard work in history of ideas and characterized it in distinctive terms, first as the ‘archaeology’ of thought and later as ‘genealogy’.

  Foucault’s idea of an archaeology of thought is closely linked to the modernist literary idea that language is a source of thought in its own right, not merely an instrument for expressing the ideas of those who use it. Here, however, the project is not to open up, through transgression or withdrawal, a field for language itself to ‘speak’. Rather, Foucault begins with the fact that, at any given period in a given domain, there are substantial constraints on how people are able to think. Of course, there are always the formal constraints of grammar and logic, which exclude certain formulations as gibberish (meaningless) or illogical (self-contradictory). But what the archaeologist of thought is interested in is a further set of constraints that, for example, make it ‘unthinkable’ for centuries that heavenly bodies could move other than in circles or be made of earthly material. Such constraints seem foolish to us: why couldn’t they see that such things are at least possible? But Foucault’s idea is that every mode of thinking involves implicit rules (maybe not even formulable by those following them) that materially restrict the range of thought. If we can uncover these rules, we will be able to see how an apparently arbitrary constraint actually makes total sense in the framework defined by those rules. Moreover, he suggests that our own thinking too is governed by such rules, so that from the vantage point of the future it will look quite as arbitrary as the past does to us.