Foucault_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  Foucault’s idea is that this level of analysis, of what is outside the control of the individuals who actually do the thinking in a given period, is the key to understanding the constraints within which people think. So the ‘history of ideas’ – where this means what is consciously going on in the minds of scientists, philosophers, et al. – is less important than the underlying structures that form the context for their thinking. We will not be so much interested in, say, Hume or Darwin as in what made Hume or Darwin possible. This is the root of Foucault’s famous ‘marginalization of the subject’. It is not that he denies the reality or even the supreme ethical importance of the individual consciousness. But he thinks that individuals operate in a conceptual environment that determines and limits them in ways of which they cannot be aware.

  There are, besides archaeology, two other plausible metaphors for Foucault’s new intellectual enterprise: geology and psychoanalysis. Sartre suggested the geological analogy, and Foucault himself employs it when he speaks of the ‘sedimentary strata’ (AK, 3) uncovered by the kind of historical approach he proposes. But this metaphor misleadingly suggests that we can, like the geologist, actually reach and ‘see for ourselves’ the underlying structures of thought, whereas all we actually have access to are the surface effects (specific uses of language) from which we must somehow infer what lies beneath. The psychoanalytic metaphor, which Foucault himself emphasizes, rightly presents the underlying structures as part of an unconscious and as discovered only through analysis of linguistic events of which we are aware. But, unlike psychoanalysis, Foucault’s history is not hermeneutic; that is, it does not try to interpret what we hear and read in order to recover its deeper meaning. It deals with texts but treats them not as documents but, in the manner of an archaeologist, as monuments (AK, 7). Archaeologists of knowledge, in other words, do not ask what Descartes’ Meditations mean (that is, what ideas Descartes was trying to express in them). Rather, they use what Descartes – and many other writers, famous or not, of the same period – wrote as clues to the general structure of the system in which they thought and wrote. The interest, to invoke the archaeological analogy once more, is not in the particular object (text) studied but in the overall configuration of the site from which it was excavated.

  Just as the modernist avant-garde aimed at writing without the author, so Foucault’s archaeology aims at history without the individual subject. Contrary to what is often suggested, this does not mean the total exclusion of the subject from history; Foucault is, after all, talking about our history. But archaeology emphasizes that the stage on which we enact our history – as well as much of the script – is established independently of our thoughts and actions. This separates it from conventional history, which tells of individual subjects moving through time. Standard history of ideas, in particular, tells how philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers developed and transmitted to their successors key concepts and theories. Foucault does not exclude such ‘subject-centred’ accounts, but he points out that they are prone to characteristic distortions. They treat history as a story, a narrative, which, since it is told from the standpoint of one or more person’s experiences, assumes the continuity and goal-directedness of consciousness. History thus becomes a novel, with a plot unified by the concerns of human beings and leading to a humanly meaningful conclusion. Such narration has a superficial validity, but it ignores the extent to which the apparent continuity and purposiveness of history may be due to the false assumption that human history is primarily driven by the experiences and projects of the consciousnesses that live it. Archaeology introduces factors outside consciousness that may belie the continuity and direction that we read into our lives.

  To illustrate Foucault’s point, consider the much abused ‘Whiggish’ interpretations of history, which tell a tale of gradual progress toward our glorious present. (The term ‘Whiggish’ refers to the ideology of the Whig Party, which permeates Lord Macaulay’s famous History of England.) While 20th-century historians denigrate the naiveté of assuming that the past should be read as a continual progress toward ourselves as its manifest purpose, their alternative has typically been to tell the story of a past time in terms of its own conceptions and concerns – a narrative of ‘how-it-then-seemed-to-them’. But why, for example, should the Elizabethans’ perspective on their history be privileged over Lord Macaulay’s, and why should either be privileged over, say, that of the biological, meteorological, or geographic factors that may well have had far more influence on their history than anything the Elizabethans thought? This, indeed, was the approach that proved so fruitful for the French Annales school of historiography (named after its journal), which Foucault cites very positively at the opening of The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he reflects on his own effort to extend the Annales methodology to the history of thought.

  We may object that such an extension is incoherent, since, obviously, what the Elizabethans thought was decisive for the history of their thought. Foucault, however, is precisely questioning the alleged truism. The archaeologist suggests that much of ‘what the Elizabethans thought’ – in the normal sense of ‘what ideas they were consciously aware of’ – may have been the rather distant outcome of factors quite outside their consciousness. On the other hand, Foucault is not pursuing the project of explaining ideas by external social or economic forces, in the manner of Marxism or other forms of historical materialism. His project is rather to offer an internal account of human thinking, without assuming a privileged status for the conscious content of that thought – thought without a privileged role for the thinker, parallel to writing without a privileged role for the writer. And, as in the case of modernist literature, the key to this project is language, conceived as a structure independent of those whose use it. This suggests yet another analogy helpful for understanding Foucault’s project – it is like Chomsky’s linguistics, which tries to uncover the ‘deep structure’ of our language. Foucault, however, is not concerned with formal (syntactic or semantic) structures but those that constrain the material content of what is said and thought.

  This notion of ‘constraining’ thought suggests one final disciplinary analogy for the archaeology of thought: the effort, characteristic of so much philosophy since Kant, to determine the ‘conditions of possibility’ of our concepts and experience. Kant called these conditions ‘transcendental’ because they are neither empirical (that is, due to the contingent history of human life) nor transcendent (that is, due to necessary constraints imposed on us from outside). Rather, they are conditions necessary, given our situation as finite knowers, for our being able to have any experience at all of a world. On Kant’s view, the transcendental conditions on the possibility of experience require, for example, that we experience objects as existing in space and time and as substances subject to causal laws. Since such conditions are prior to experience, Kant called them ‘a priori’ (as opposed to the ‘a posteriori’ truths that are derived from our experience).

  Foucault sometimes characterized his archaeological project in Kantian language, saying that it sought the ‘conditions of possibility’ for thought in a given period (OT, xxii). For Kant, however, such conditions were universally applicable, necessary constraints on all possible experiences, whereas for Foucault they are contingent on the particular historical situation and vary over times and domains of knowledge. The concept of invariant species was a necessary condition for the knowledge of life in the 18th century but not the 20th. Consequently, Foucault says that archaeology leads to only relativized ‘historical a prioris’, not the atemporal, absolute a priori truths that Kant claimed to have discovered. This difference is deep, since Kant’s claims of universal necessity required his transcendental project to invoke methods beyond those of empirical studies such as natural science and history; they required a distinctively philosophical a priori method of transcendental argument. Foucault may employ Kant’s terminology, but his project seeks no truths beyond those available to the empirical method
s of historiography.

  Foucault’s archaeology leads to some striking challenges to received ideas in the history of science. It is, for example, commonly held that Lamarck anticipated Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, whereas Cuvier was solidly opposed to the thought of species emerging through gradual changes over a long period. In The Order of Things, Foucault agrees that Lamarck speaks of species changing over time (through the inheritance of acquired characteristics), whereas Cuvier’s theory posits species that are fixed once and for all. But he maintains that these conflicting opinions cover up a more fundamental division. Lamarck works within a general archaeological framework (an ‘episteme’ in Foucault’s terminology) associated with the ‘Classical Age’ (roughly, Europe – and especially France – from 1650 to 1800). According to Foucault’s analysis, the Classical episteme allows no essential role for time in its view of nature. All the possible kinds of living things are predetermined in total independence of historical developments and can be expressed entirely in atemporal tables of genera and species. The actualization of genera and species in time need not realize all the possibilities simultaneously, but the order of their appearance would have to be strictly in accord with the atemporal relations specified by the tables of genera and species. Lamarck postulated such a process of successive realization, but had (and could have) no idea of there being historical causes that produced the differences in species that came to exist at different times.

  6. Georges Cuvier examining animal fossils, after an original painting by Chartran

  Cuvier, admittedly, claimed that in fact all species had existed from the beginning and so were not produced by historical causes. But, unlike Lamarck, he worked in the modern episteme (dominant from around 1800), which, in sharp contrast to the Classical episteme, regarded life forms as essentially historical entities and so allowed the possibility of their formation through historical, evolutionary causes. Cuvier, therefore, contradicts Darwin only on the superficial level of what in fact actually happened. Lamarck, although he subscribes to verbal formulas similar to Darwin’s, disagrees at a deeper level about what it means to be a species. Between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, there occurred a fundamental break in the European conception of living things; Lamarck was on one side of this division, Cuvier and Darwin on the other. Standard history of ideas misses this key point because it attends only to the theories of individual thinkers and ignores the underlying archaeological frameworks necessary to grasp their ultimate significance.

  Foucault provides a detailed formulation of archaeology as an historiographic method in The Archaeology of Knowledge, but the method was gradually developed earlier in three histories written in the 1960s: The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. Since it was forged in efforts to treat particular historical problems, it is better evaluated by its historical results than by its persuasiveness as a general epistemological theory. And there have been quite severe assessments by academic historians. Andrew Scull, for example, endorses what he rightly says is ‘the verdict of most Anglo-American specialists: that [The History of Madness] is a provocative and dazzlingly written prose poem, but one resting on the shakiest of scholarly foundations and riddled with errors of fact and interpretation’.

  To illustrate the problems historians have had with Foucault’s archaeology, let us take a look at one of his key claims in The History of Madness: that, in the middle of the 17th century, the practice of confinement (isolating the mad from the general population in special houses of internment) took on a central significance and was essentially connected with the Classical Age’s fundamental view of madness as a rejection of reason that left no place for the mad in rational society. Roy Porter, until his death in 2002 the leading historian of insanity in the English-speaking world, has noted that studies of the treatment of the mad in particular regions of England show ‘that lunatics typically remained at large, the responsibility of their family under the eye of the parish’. Although some of the mad were confined, the numbers were quite small: perhaps as few as 5,000 and surely no more than 10,000 by the early 19th century. Confinement, Porter suggests, was much more a 19th-century phenomenon; during the Classical Age, ‘the growth in the practice of excluding the mad was gradual, localized, and piecemeal’ (‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’, 48).

  But notice that Porter’s critique is based on just the sort of individual beliefs and actions that are precisely not the primary concern of Foucault’s archaeology. Foucault is not making empirical generalizations about what people in various countries thought or did; he is trying to construct the general mode of thinking (episteme) that lay behind what was no doubt a very diverse range of beliefs and practices. An episteme must, admittedly, be reflected in the factual beliefs and actions of those whose thought is constrained by it. But there is no simple correspondence between a general structure of thought and specific beliefs and actions. When my psychoanalyst tells me that I unconsciously hate women, she is not refuted by my truthful claim that I call my mother every week and never forget my wedding anniversary. It may still be true that I have a deep animus toward women that comes out in certain paradigm cases of my behaviour.

  Similarly, confinement – whatever the details about its extent in different regions at different times – may represent a distinctive Classical way of thinking about madness. This is not to say that Foucault’s claim in unfalsifiable. But it needs to be tested as a general interpretative hypothesis; that is, evaluated by its fruitfulness in making overall sense of a large body of data and suggesting new lines of inquiry. It should not be judged as an empirical generalization – like ‘all crows are black’ – that can be refuted by a single counter-example.

  We may, finally, wonder whether archaeology has any connection with the political orientation of Foucault’s work, which we discussed in the preceding chapter. It might seem that archaeology, with its emphasis on abstract linguistic structures, could have little to do with the realities of political power, which, admittedly, becomes an explicit theme in Foucault’s work only in the 1970s, when he develops his genealogical method. But archaeology is not without its own political (and ethical) potency. This potency arises from its ability to present us with alternative modes of thinking that challenge the necessity that we find in our own modes of thought. Here it is important that Foucault’s archaeological analyses are never of cultures radically foreign to ours. He begins The Order of Things with the famous quotation from Borges of a categorization, from a mythical ‘Chinese encyclopedia’, of the types of animals (‘belonging to the Emperor’, ‘embalmed’, … ‘stray dogs’, ‘included in the present classification’, …, ‘innumerable’, … ‘that from a long way off look like flies’). This quotation well represents our reaction when archaeology presents us with a sharply different fundamental mode of thinking: ‘the stark impossibility of thinking that’ (OT, xv). But, while Foucault’s archaeologies do exhibit such impossibilities, these are drawn not from the inaccessible distance of a China but from the relatively recent past of our own Western culture: the Europe of the 16th through 18th centuries.

  Archaeology, then, shows us apparently ‘impossible’ modes of thought that were, nonetheless, quite possible for our not so distant intellectual ancestors. We believe, for example, that there is no rational alternative to thinking of madness as ‘mental illness’, but Foucault’s archaeology shows that little more than 200 years ago people such as Descartes and Leibniz – the ‘fathers’ of our modern scientific world – thought of madness in an entirely different way. Such an exhibition has an implicitly destabilizing effect, suggesting that the framework underlying our concepts and beliefs may not have the inevitability we casually assign it. When these concepts are ones at the basis of ethically and politically charged practices (such as our treatment of the insane, our system of medical practice, our modern social sciences – the subjects, respectively, of Foucault’s three archaeological studies), then clearly archaeology is n
ot just a neutral description of linguistic abstractions.

  Chapter 5

  Genealogy

  I am simply Nietzschean.

  Since in Foucault’s use the term genealogy proclaims his connection to Nietzsche, we should from the first be aware of what Foucault meant by being ‘Nietzschean’:

  I am tired of people studying [Nietzsche] only to produce the same kind of commentaries that are written on Hegel or Mallarmé. For myself, I prefer to utilise the writers I like. The only valid tribute to a thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no importance.