Michel Foucault
French philosopher and historian
in full Paul-Michel Foucault
born October 15, 1926, Poitiers, France
died June 25, 1984, Paris
Main
French philosopher and historian, one of the most
influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War
II period.
Education and career
The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was
born to a solidly bourgeois family. He resisted what he
regarded as the provincialism of his upbringing and his
native country, and his career was marked by frequent
sojourns abroad. A distinguished but sometimes erratic
student, Foucault gained entry at the age of 20 to the École
Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 1946. There he studied
psychology and philosophy, embraced and then abandoned
communism, and established a reputation as a sedulous,
brilliant, and eccentric student.
After graduating in 1952, Foucault began a career marked
by constant movement, both professional and intellectual. He
first taught at the University of Lille, then spent five
years (1955–60) as a cultural attaché in Uppsala, Sweden;
Warsaw, Poland; and Hamburg, West Germany (now Germany).
Foucault defended his doctoral dissertation at the ENS in
1961. Circulated under the title Folie et déraison: histoire
de la folie à l’âge classique (“Madness and Unreason: A
History of Madness in the Classical Age”), it won critical
praise but a limited audience. (An abridged version was
translated into English and published in 1965 as Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.)
His other early monographs, written while he taught at the
University of Clermont-Ferrand in France (1960–66), had much
the same fate. Not until the appearance of Les Mots et les
choses (“Words and Things”; Eng. trans. The Order of Things)
in 1966 did Foucault begin to attract wide notice as one of
the most original and controversial thinkers of his day. He
chose to watch his reputation grow from a distance—at the
University of Tunis in Tunisia (1966–68)—and was still in
Tunis when student riots erupted in Paris in the spring of
1968. In 1969 he published L’Archéologie du savoir (The
Archaeology of Knowledge). In 1970, after a brief tenure as
director of the philosophy department at the University of
Paris, Vincennes, he was awarded a chair in the history of
systems of thought at the Collège de France, France’s most
prestigious postsecondary institution. The appointment gave
Foucault the opportunity to conduct intensive research.
Between 1971 and 1984 Foucault wrote several works,
including Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1975;
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), a monograph
on the emergence of the modern prison; three volumes of a
history of Western sexuality; and numerous essays. Foucault
continued to travel widely, and as his reputation grew he
spent extended periods in Brazil, Japan, Italy, Canada, and
the United States. He became particularly attached to
Berkeley, California, and the San Francisco Bay area and was
a visiting lecturer at the University of California at
Berkeley for several years. Foucault died of a septicemia
typical of AIDS in 1984, the fourth volume of his history of
sexuality still incomplete.
Foucault’s ideas
What types of human beings are there? What is their essence?
What is the essence of human history? Of humankind? Contrary
to so many of his intellectual predecessors, Foucault sought
not to answer these traditional and seemingly
straightforward questions but to critically examine them and
the responses they had inspired. He directed his most
sustained skepticism toward those responses—among them,
race, the unity of reason or the psyche, progress, and
liberation—that had become commonplaces in Europe and the
United States in the 19th century. He argued that such
commonplaces informed both Hegelian phenomenology and
Marxist materialism. He argued that they also informed the
evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, clinical
medicine, psychology, sociology, and criminology of the same
period. The latter three disciplines are part of what came
to be called in French les sciences humaines, or “the human
sciences.”
Several of the philosophers of the Anglo-American
positivist tradition, among them Carl Hempel, had faulted
the human sciences for failing to achieve the conceptual and
methodological rigour of mathematics or physics. Foucault
found fault with them as well, but he decisively rejected
the positivist tenet that the methods of the pure or natural
sciences provided an exclusive standard for arriving at
genuine or legitimate knowledge. His critique concentrated
instead upon the fundamental point of reference that had
grounded and guided inquiry in the human sciences: the
concept of “man.” The man of this inquiry was a creature
purported, like many preceding conceptions, to have a
constant essence—indeed, a double essence. On one hand, man
was an object, like any other object in the natural world,
obedient to the indiscriminate dictates of physical laws. On
the other hand, man was a subject, an agent uniquely capable
of comprehending and altering his worldly condition in order
to become more fully, more essentially, himself. Foucault
reviewed the historical record for evidence that such a
creature actually had ever existed, but to no avail. Looking
for objects, he found only a plurality of subjects whose
features varied dramatically with shifts of place and time.
The historical record aside, would the dual “man” of the
human sciences perhaps make its appearance at some point in
the future? In The Order of Things and elsewhere, Foucault
suggested that, to the contrary, a creature somehow fully
determined and fully free was little short of a paradox, a
contradiction in terms. Not only had it never existed in
fact, it could not exist, even in principle.
Foucault understood the very possibility of his own
critique to be evidence that the concept of man was
beginning to loosen its grip on Western thought. Yet a
further puzzle remained: How could such an erroneous, such
an impossible, figure have been so completely taken for
granted for so long? Foucault’s solution emphasized that in
the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18th-century Europe,
“man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of
social institutions and practices that were then necessary
to maintain an optimally productive citizenry. With the
advent of “man,” the notion that human character and
experience were immutable gradually gave way to the notion
that both body and soul could be manipulated and reformed.
The latter notion lent the technologies of modern policing
their enduring rationale. For Foucault, the epitome of the
institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that
sought to render each instance of “deviance” utterly
visible, whether in the name of prevention or
rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison
designed in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer
Jeremy Bentham, which laid each inmate open to the scrutiny
of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among contemporary
instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be
counted one of the most representative.
Although this discipline operated on individuals, it was
paired with a current of reformism that took not individuals
but various human populations as its basic object. The
prevailing sensibility of its greatest champions was
markedly medical. They scrutinized everything from sexual
behaviour to social organization for relative pathology or
health. They also sought out the “deviant,” but less in
order to eradicate it than to keep it in acceptable check.
This “biopolitics” of the reformers, according to Foucault,
contained the basic principles of the modern welfare state.
A thinker more inclined to strict materialism might have
added that in both discipline and biopolitics the human
sciences served an ideological function, cloaking the
apparatuses of arbitrary domination with the sober aura of
objectivity. Foucault, however, opposed the materialist
tendency to construe science—even the most dubious
science—as the simple handmaiden of power. He opposed any
identification of knowledge—even the most mistaken
knowledge—with power. Rather, he called for an appreciation
of the ways in which knowledge and power are always
entangled with each other in historically specific
circumstances, forming complex dynamics of what he termed
pouvoir-savoir, or “power-knowledge.”
For Foucault, domination was not the only outcome of
these dynamics. Another was “subjectivation,” the
historically specific classification and shaping of
individual human beings into “subjects” of various
kinds—including heroic and ordinary, “normal” and “deviant.”
The distinction between the two came somewhat late to
Foucault, but once he made and refined it he was able to
clarify the status of some of his earliest observations and
to identify a theme that had been present in all his
writings. His understanding of subjectivation, however,
changed significantly over the course of two decades, as did
the methods he applied to its analysis. Intent on devising a
properly specific history of subjects, he initially pressed
the analogy between the corpus of statements about subjects
produced and presumed true at any given historical moment
and the artifacts of some archaeological site or complex. He
was thus able to flesh out the sense of his frequent
allusions not simply to “discourses” but also to their more
inclusive cousins, épistémès. He was able to reveal the
inherently local qualities of past conceptions of being
human and able further to reveal the frequent abruptness of
their coming into being and passing away. This “archaeology
of knowledge” nevertheless had its shortcomings. Among other
things, its consideration of both power and power-knowledge
was at best partial, if not oblique.
By 1971 Foucault had already demoted “archaeology” in
favour of “genealogy,” a method that traced the ensemble of
historical contingencies, accidents, and illicit relations
that made up the ancestry of one or another currently
accepted theory or concept in the human sciences. With
genealogy, Foucault set out to unearth the artificiality of
the dividing line between the putatively illegitimate and
its putatively normal and natural opposite. Discipline and
Punish was his genealogical exposé of the artifices of
power-knowledge that had resulted in the naturalization of
the “criminal character,” and the first volume of Histoire
de la sexualité (1976; The History of Sexuality) was his
exposé of the Frankensteinian machinations that had resulted
in the naturalization of the dividing line between the
“homosexual” and the “heterosexual.” Yet even in these
luminous “histories of the present” something still remained
out of view: human freedom. In order to bring it into focus,
Foucault turned his attention to “governmentality,” the
array of political arrangements, past and present, within
which individuals have not simply been dominated subjects
but have been able in some measure to govern, to be, and to
create themselves. He expanded the scope (and lessened the
bite) of genealogy. No longer focused exclusively on the
dynamics of power-knowledge, it came to encompass the
broader dynamics of human reflection, of the posing of
questions and the seeking of answers, of “problematization.”
It could thus chart the possibilities, past and present, of
ethics—the “reflective practice of freedom”—a domain in
which human beings could exercise their power to conceive
and test the modes of domination and subjectivation under
which they happened to live.
Foucault’s increasing concern with ethics led him to a
far-reaching revision of the design of the subsequent
volumes of The History of Sexuality. Originally conceived as
a study of the social construction of the “female hysteric”
in the 19th century, the second volume was released after
much delay as a study of carnal pleasure in ancient Greece;
the third volume dealt with the “care of the self” in later
antiquity. In later work, a concern with ethics led Foucault
to study how people care for one another in social relations
such as friendship. It led him finally to an elegant
meditation, unpublished at his death, on the conduct of
modern philosophy, the title of which is that decidedly
open-ended question to which Immanuel Kant and Moses
Mendelssohn had been asked to respond some 200 years before:
“What Is Enlightenment?”
Foucault appropriately placed himself in the critical
tradition of philosophical inquiry stemming from Kant, but
his thought matured through the multiplicity of its
engagements. He rejected both Hegelianism and Marxism but
took both quite seriously. The work of the French modernist
writers Raymond Roussel, Georges Bataille, and Maurice
Blanchot galvanized his conviction that neither a proper
epistemology nor a proper metaphysics could be founded on a
general and ahistorical conception of the “subject.” The
writings of Friedrich Nietzsche directed him to the history
of the body and of the collusion between power and
knowledge. It also offered him the prototypes for both
archaeology and genealogy. In the work of the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze he discerned elements of a
general epistemology of problem formation. His conversations
with the American scholars Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow
stimulated his turn toward ethics and the genealogy of
problematization. Special mention must finally be made of
his teacher and mentor, Georges Canguilhem. In Canguilhem, a
historian of the life sciences, Foucault found an
intellectual example independent of the phenomenological and
materialist camps that dominated French universities after
World War II, a sponsor for his dissertation, and a
supporter of his larger investigative project. Owing less to
Nietzsche than to Canguilhem, Foucault came to regard human
life as an often discontinuous, often disruptive and clumsy,
and sometimes despotic quest to come to terms with an
ever-recalcitrant environment. A history of systems of human
thought would thus have to be a persistently local history.
It would have to recognize that all ideas are normative, no
matter what their content. It could be a history of truth,
but it also would have to be a long—and in its own way
tragic—history of error.
Foucault’s influence
Foucault has been widely read and discussed in his own
right. He has galvanized an army of detractors, the less
attentive of whom have misread his critique of “man” as
radically antihumanist, his critique of power-knowledge as
radically relativist, and his ethics as radically
aestheticist. They have not, however, prevented him from
inspiring increasingly important alternatives to established
practices of cultural and intellectual history. In France
and the Americas, Foucault’s unraveling of Marxist
universalism has continued both to vex and to inspire
activists of the left. The antipsychiatry movement of the
1970s and ’80s owed much to Foucault, though he did not
consider himself one of its members. His critique of the
human sciences provoked much soul-searching within
anthropology and its allied fields, even as it helped a new
generation of scholars to embark upon a cross-cultural
dialogue on the themes and variations of domination and
subjectivation. Foucault’s elucidation of the dense and
minute dimensions of discipline and biopolitics likewise has
had a noticeable impact on recent studies of colonialism,
law, technology, gender, and race. The first volume of The
History of Sexuality has become canonical for both gay and
lesbian studies and “queer” theory, a multidisciplinary
study aimed at critical examinations of traditional
conceptions of sexual and gender identity. The terms
discourse, genealogy, and power-knowledge have become deeply
entrenched in the lexicon of virtually all contemporary
social and cultural research.
Foucault has attracted several biographers, some of whom
have been happy to flout his opposition to the practice of
seeking the key to an oeuvre in the psychology or
personality of its author. Yet, in their favour, it must be
admitted that Foucault’s personal life is a worthy subject
of attention. He regularly made the issues that most
troubled him personally—emotional suffering, exclusion,
sexuality—the topics of his research. His critiques were
often both theoretical and practical; he did not merely
write about prisons, for example, but also organized
protests against them. In 1975, while in Spain to protest
the impending executions of two members of ETA, the Basque
separatist movement, by the government of Francisco Franco,
Foucault confronted police officers who had come to seize
the protest leaflets he had prepared. He also publicly
attacked Jean-Paul Sartre at a time when Sartre was still
the demigod of Parisian intellectuals.
Although he despised the label “homosexual,” he was
openly gay and occasionally praised the pleasures of
sadomasochism and the bathhouse. He was something of a
dandy, preferring to shave his head and dress in black and
white. He declared that he had experimented with drugs. Even
more scandalously (at least to the French), he declared that
his favourite meal was “a good club sandwich with a Coke.”
Foucault cultivated his celebrity as “an all-purpose
subversive,” but neither his thought nor his life contain
the substantive principles of an activist program. Foucault
was skeptical of conventional wisdom and conventional
moralism—but not without exception. He was an ironist—but
not without restraint. He could be subversive and could
admire subversion—but he was not a revolutionary. He
dismissed even the possibility of providing an answer to
Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s great, abstract question “What is to
be done?” Rather, he insisted upon asking, more concretely
and more locally, “What, in a given situation, might be done
to increase human capacities without simultaneously
increasing oppression?” He was not confident that an answer
would always be forthcoming. But whether the situation at
hand was common or simply his own, he sought in all his
endeavours to remove himself to a vista distant enough that
the question might at least be intelligently posed.
James Faubion
