Charles Lemert. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.
Michel Paul Foucault (1926-1984), social historian, philosopher, psychologist, and political activist, was one of the most original of the post-World War II French social theorists. Though Foucault is commonly considered a postmodern or poststructuralist, he was an independent thinker, whose writings cannot be easily classified. He was, for example, indifferent to the term postmodern. If there is justification for such a label, it is because Foucault’s thinking has been fundamental to the reassessment of modernity’s most cherished principles. His 15 books and hundreds of essays and interviews contribute significantly to such familiar, if disturbing, trends as the critique of the Subject as a foundation of epistemology and moral philosophy; the transformation of historical method toward a post-positivist method of genealogical research; the early development of what came to be called “queer theory” as a radical suspension of doubt as to the instability of analytic categories; as well as the rethinking of modern political and cultural sociology.
If a label must be used, then poststructuralism is slightly more accurate. Foucault was associated with the famous 1968 Théorie d’ensemble manifesto, which included among its contributors Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, among others, who proposed a radical departure from then-dominant schools of thought in France: structuralism and existentialism. Thereafter, poststructuralism came to embrace efforts to work beyond the famous objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy in social thought. On balance, however, it is recommended that readers think of Foucault as sui generis: a social theorist of multiple interests who made varied contributions to social theory, none of them suitable to any one category.
Foucault was born to a bourgeois family in provincial Poitiers. His early schoolwork was undistinguished. Eventually, his intellect began to flourish under the care of priests in a local Catholic school. Thereupon, he was sent to Paris, as are many of provincial France’s most brilliant young people. Foucault completed his secondary education at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, in the heart of Paris. Thereafter, from 1946 to 1950, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, France’s elite school of higher education in the arts and sciences. In this period, he suffered episodes of poor mental health and was frequently at social odds with fellow students. Still, after an initial failure, in 1951, Foucault passed France’s most competitive and distinguishing postsecondary examination, the agrégation de philosophie, an achievement that virtually assures career success, especially for intellectuals.
The French traditionally refer to the years of schooling as one’s “formation.” Foucault enjoyed an excellent formation during the school days in Paris, where he encountered firsthand the teachings of Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, and Georges Canguilhem, all of whom encouraged his gift for rethinking the terms of classical social thought. Though he remained faithful in spirit to his teachers, Foucault always fashioned his own, hard-to-define positions, based on prodigious reading and an incautious willingness to engage the political and social experiences of his time: the decolonizing war in Algeria, the events of 1968, prison reform, and, above all, the queer revolution (which must be understood as having to do with much more than sex, or even sexualities).
Michel Foucault began his university teaching at Lille in 1952, but in 1955, he turned to government service as a cultural attaché to French foreign missions in Uppsala, Warsaw, and Hamburg. In Uppsala, he began the archival research for the first of his enduringly great works of social history, Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l’âge classique (partially translated into English as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason 1965). The years abroad gave Foucault the freedom to deepen his understanding of psychology, to begin his research career, and to enjoy the pleasures and risks of gay sexual life. In 1960, he returned to France to assume a teaching post in philosophy and psychology at Clermont-Ferrand. In 1961, Folie et déraison was published, and the year following, it was presented and defended as his thesis for the doctorat d’état, France’s highest postgraduate degree.
Immediately, Foucault’s reputation grew as more and more of his writings appeared: Maladie mentale et psychologie (1962), Raymond Roussel (1963), Naissance de la clinique (1963), Les mots et les choses (1966), and L’archaeologie du savoir (1969). Translations of the latter three of these books established Foucault’s international reputation as a revolutionary social thinker and historian: Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973), The Order of Things (1970), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). By the end of the decade, Foucault’s stature in France led to his election in 1969 to the most important academic post in France, the Collège de France. His inaugural lecture on December 2, 1970, “L’ordre du discours” (translated with Archaeology of Knowledge as “The Order of Language,” 1972), brought to an end Foucault’s early, more formalistic period.
Social theorists are tempted to turn to Archaeology of Knowledge as a guide to Foucault’s method. Though the book is as rich in brilliant insight as it is elegantly difficult in literary style, it is not the best access to Foucault’s developing social theory. A much better source is his book of 1975, Surveillir et punir: Naissance de la prison (translated as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977). Foucault’s history of the early modern prison as an institutional setting designed to provide constant moral surveillance of the prisoner was at once the culmination of earlier thinking and the first step to the important later histories of sexualities.
One might describe the important early works as the first fruits of the mentors of his schooldays, Canguilhem and Althusser, who were, respectively, preoccupied by the history of the sciences and the political workings of knowledge and ideology. Foucault’s early studies of madness (Folie et déraison), the hospital (Birth of the Clinic), the social sciences (The Order of Things), and the prison (Discipline and Punish) were, if taken together, a systematic recalibration of the social history of the early modern culture and political economy. In them, Foucault more or less intentionally set about to answer the question that since Karl Marx’s German Ideology (1848) had troubled critical theorists of the industrial order. If, as Marx said in his famous inversion of Hegel’s method, ideas and knowledge generally are but the reverse image of the actual power relations in society, then how is one to account for the apparent fact that on the surface, the modern world claims to be more reasonable and fair, while underneath, it is just brutal as any other? Foucault’s answer turned on the key word discipline. The modern factory system, for example, required laborers disciplined to the conditions of factory work. The first generations of industrial laborers were largely recruited from the countryside, where work is scheduled more according to daily and seasonal cycles of rural life. Industrial life, by contrast, moves relentlessly to supply the demands of an abstract, timeless market. As a result, the modern world had to retrain its workers and the population as a whole.
Foucault held that the so-called human (or social) sciences were crucial to the task of redisciplining the cohorts of workers new to the modern system. This meant, most fundamentally, disciplining how they thought of the means of controlling their laboring bodies: hence the unique importance of the hospital and the prison. Where medical practices (and what today we call the “health care system”) monitored the levels of health and well-being in the population, the prison controlled the bodies of those deviant to the emerging norms of the socially disciplined life. Thus, more broadly, one can see that Foucault’s choice of topics in the early work—mental health, the hospital, the human sciences, and the prison—was far from accidental. By these studies, Foucault was working through a comprehensive solution to the first-and-foremost question of any social science of the modern world. Where Marx put the query in the classical terms of the relations between ideal and material factors in society, by Foucault’s day, the question had long been transposed into one of the relations between power and knowledge (or ideology). The question itself had two variants, one being: How does power use knowledge? This, of course, is the question provoked by the Nazi reign of terror across Europe (and was the central question of the German school of critical theory). The second variation on the theme was: How can knowledge be liberated from the distorting effects of power? This was, to a degree, the American variant, for it was in the United States after World War II that the social-scientific ideal that pure, uncorrupted social knowledge could perfect society was put into play.
One can readily see why a thinker like Foucault might only have arisen in France in the generation after Nazi occupation. In a sense, the foundational experience of the French intellectual during the occupation was the underground resistance movement. This was in contrast to the Americans who thought of themselves as heroic conquerors of evil and the German intellectuals who were forced to quit their native society for England or the United States. The French experience thus explained the starkly different, and rival, schools of French social thought in the postwar era. On one side, structuralisms, such as the cultural theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss (who suffered the war in exile), were attempts to rethink the structural whole of culture with respect to its hidden members. On the other side, existentialisms, such as that of Jean-Paul Sartre (whose war experience was shaped by the Resistance), emphasized a radical consideration of the moral choices made in the flux of historical action. A scant generation later, the name “poststructuralism” came to be affixed to those, such as Foucault, for whom the war had faded as a defining experience. They sought to reconstruct both society and social thought, which led them to develop a theoretical position that was at once structural and existential, without being either objectivist or subjectivist.
Foucault’s early emphasis on discipline as the principal desideratum in the study of modern social life was therefore a topic poised between the two extremes. He chose not to study either the structures of power or the contents of knowledge, but to investigate the history of modern power’s relation to knowledge. The effect of Foucault’s work through Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) was to move the human sciences to the center of social theory without falling into the trap of writing either a mere history of ideas (in effect, a sociology of knowledge) or a social history of the social sciences (a kind of sociology of social sciences). Rather, he took the emergence of the social and human sciences (in the broadest possible senses of the terms) to be a (if not the) watershed change by which modern society came into being (in its broadest possible sense).
If the central issue in the social study of the industrial society was how to discipline workers, then the institutional spheres in which this took place had to be the disciplines. How were workers disciplined through disciplinary knowledge? (And note that the knowledge in question is savoir, the practical knowledges of daily life.) Of course, the disciplines to which Foucault referred were at once the formal academic ones (such as ethnography and political economy) and the applied professional ones (such as medicine) and the quasi-professional ones (such as what Americans call, oxymoronically, “administration of justice”). Here, one sees the irony in Foucault’s method: To collapse discipline, in the sense of the application of power to behaviors, into the practical work of the disciplines is to collapse power into knowledge in a way that permits rigorous (if untraditional) empirical examination. Thus, compounding irony upon irony, the clever methodological shift also marks the beginning of what many came to call a “postdisciplinary” approach to knowledge that refuses to accept either artificial lines drawn among the officially sanctioned academic fields or the line customarily drawn between the academic sciences (connaissances) and practical knowledges (savoirs).
Thus, the reader can appreciate that though books such as Archaeology of Knowledge are intensely theoretical (and to some impenetrable), Foucault’s theoretical position was forged on strict empirical grounds. Plus, in contrast to many widely read and productive historians, Foucault is known to have done the archival work himself, which itself led to striking discoveries, such as the eerie historical tales of the hermaphrodite, Herculin Barbin (1982), and of the parricide in Moi, Pierre Rievière ayant égorge ma mere, ma soeur et mon frère … (1973), both published separately with Foucault’s comments. The surprises that come to the archivist come in part to relieve the boredom. Archival work is hard, slow, and tiring, but it has its own distinctive methodological benefits.
Work in historical archives requires a special type of mental alertness: realizing that one is traveling through layer upon layer of historical time, back to events reported in archival texts of the near or distant past. To work on a daily basis with fragile pages of letters or court documents (or poor facsimiles thereof) is to experience the strange effect of the past on the researcher. One digs through the layers to find documents as real as any one finds today. But always the question is: In what does the truth or reality of the text subsist? It is never, for example, possible to fact-check an ancient text by asking its authors what they meant. Archives of the historical past are, strictly speaking, unguarded by the voice of an author. In other words, they are pure discourse, outside the sphere wherein anyone can second-guess the meanings. In contrast, even, to literary texts, where one is tempted to imagine what the poet meant, it is nearly impossible to attribute meanings to the archival texts. Most of the time, the author or authors are unknown. When they are known, usually (as in the case of private letters) the texts convey meanings outside and often at odds with the exterior record of their public lives.
The interpretation of texts without authors is closer, thereby, to natural history and astronomy than to survey research or ethnography. It is, in short, to use the word Foucault made famous, closest of all to the work of the archaeological digs of the physical anthropologist, wherein the story of unknown and unknowable ancients is told by the cracks and fissures in the dry bones, shards of pottery, broken tools, and weapons. The story of the first man is a story without an author. Foucault chose his terms prudently when he described his method, first, as an “archaeology” and later as “genealogy.” Both terms owe to the influences of the Annales school of historiography (of which the great French historian Fernand Braudel is the acknowledged founder, and today, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems analysis is the intentional successor). The latter term, genealogy, captures a bit more of the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the background, however, one can discern the traces of Marx’s historical method and Freud’s psychoanalysis, both of which reconstruct a practical knowledge of hidden pasts by digging through the layers of dirt (bourgeois deceptions and mental repressions) under which they are buried. The method, however, is not to be confused with German hermeneutics, wherein the effort is to uncover by intersubjective decipherment the original truths. Archival archaeology is dirty work, done without instructions.
In Foucault’s method, the truth of the archival past is a truth that survives on the wings of the descriptive presentation of the facts, that is, on the descriptive work permitted in a given historical time by the predominant community of discourse. Whether in sciences or practical life, certain things cannot be said, however true they may be. Thus also, the strangely brilliant quality in all of Foucault’s methods: The prevailing norms do not always allow the ancient truths to be told. Hence, madness was not originally a disease, even a disorder; and punishment was a cruel public spectacle without the least consideration of rehabilitating the interior attitude of the criminal. Likewise, medicine before the modern era was a kind of epidemiological study (often of humors or fluids, only later of germs) in a world in which, remarkably, the body was not a significant etiological site due to moral restrictions on the physical examination of bodies. In a similar fashion, what we today call the “social sciences” were, in the classical era, the formal classification of naturally occurring forms that corresponded to abstract types, as opposed to the empirical examination of variances as they occur in the evidentiary record. When one works in archives, the labor is so time-consuming that as much as one would like to, it is impossible to go to ancient court records looking for some preconceived form. One can only read, and take notes, and read, then (as Max Weber once said) wait for the idea to occur to you. This is what allowed Foucault to discover what others overlooked. His archaeological method was thus a very modern, if late-modern, empirical method—one by which the evidence, being hidden below the layers of records stacked upon each other (often literally), is to be interpreted only when the researcher awaits the surprise.
Thus, all of Foucault’s historical books begin with a surprise story, each meant to call the reader into the lower strata of the historical evidence he then recounts. Discipline and Punish, for example, starts off immediately with the shocking story of the torture on March 2, 1757, of the regicide Damiens. The account of the murderer’s flesh being torn with pinchers and worse excites the reader with terror and pain. But soon after, quiet is restored as Foucault calmly recites the rules for the care of prisoners according to Leon Faucher. In the space of three pages, time shifts to 1837, precisely 80 years after Damiens’s torture. The new punitive rules are more those of a monastery than of the public torture. In the 80-year interim (which included, of course, the American and French Revolutions), the modern world had settled uncertainly into place. The power to punish had been transposed into a faith that the body is the mere surface upon which control does its disciplinary work without bloodletting. The new faith is a social science of sorts. It is, in Foucault’s most famous concept, the work of power/knowledge, in which the dichotomous terms are joined, if not quite fused, in one operation. Methodologically, the shift could not be predicted on the basis of abstract theories or principles. It surfaces only when one traces the layers of the archival record back through years until one comes upon the irregularities when, in the example, punishment as a public display of power gradually receded behind the prison walls and (at least originally) the criminal was subjected to the surveillance of those with the moral knowledge to correct his moral attitude and to discipline the misbehaving body.
In the years after his election to the Collège de France, in 1969, Foucault’s work held true to the general principles of the early period but changed discernibly as to subject matter and even method. The changes, though necessary to note, were not anything of the kind his teacher, Louis Althusser, attributed to Marx (in Pour Marx, 1965) from a youthful humanist to a mature scientist. Foucault was far too insistently original to allow his life, much less his work, to be subdivided. Yet he was a man of the world, and the events into which he was more and more drawn had their effect. By the early 1970s, Foucault had become one of France’s most celebrated public intellectuals and the proper successor to Jean-Paul Sartre—and in France, the public intellectual is a role that invites serious political responsibilities. At the same time, in the decade after the revolutionary 1960s, French social thought came more and more into the international spotlight, especially in the United States. Translations of Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and later Pierre Bourdieu soon appeared in English within months of original publication in French. This was the period when the term poststructuralism assumed its notoriety in the English-reading world. Though French social theory was poorly understood, especially in the United States, there was a good reason that young academics took it to heart as they sought to rebuild their adult lives after the political failures of their youth. The 1960s had been, for Americans in particular, their time of revolutionary pathos, a time that marked the lives of a later generation of young Americans to much the same degree as World War II and the wars of decolonization had influenced an earlier generation of Europeans. Above all, for Americans who had been culturally or politically revolutionary in the 1960s, the 1970s were a time of stock taking. With the election of Richard M. Nixon to the American presidency in 1968, the United States began a long period of conservative withdrawal from the progressive dreams of the 1960s. The axis of hope had rotated from America to Europe. For American intellectuals, the prefix post had a special appeal. It was a time when ideals had to be assessed; hence the turn to European social thinkers who were in recovery from the effects of the war.
What the so-called poststructuralism movement offered was exactly what it intended to offer: a new way of thinking in robustly structural terms that also permitted access to the personal or subjective elements in social life. One should note that chief among the slogans of the new social movements of the 1970s were phrases such as “personal politics” and “participatory democracy.” Of all the social theorists that came to their fame in France in the time, Foucault’s writings were in many ways the more accessible to American sensibilities (not to mention British philosophical tastes that, even by the early 1970s, were a bit trapped in analytic methods and cautious about Continental cultures). One direct consequence for Foucault, as for Derrida and others, is that they were drawn more and more into American university life. For Foucault, the regular visits, especially to the University of California at Berkeley, were a relief from the pressures at home and a free space to explore his own personal politics—to both creative and tragic ends.
When Surveiller et punir appeared in 1975, Foucault had less than a decade to live. The AIDS virus that killed him was unknown at the time. He was, like many others, drawn into a new kind of politics in which the struggle was to overcome the subjugation of subjecthood that Foucault considered the fundamental evil of modern culture. One of the most frequently cited passages in his study of prisons is the interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, that deceptively intrusive early form of prison architecture in which the prison population was exposed to the continuous gaze of the powers, an arrangement that allowed power “to induce…a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1977:201). Hence is given another of Foucault’s famously duplicitous ideas: that in the modern world, subjects are created by subjugation. The observing prison was also a figure for the working of power throughout the modern society. From this adumbration of his concept of power/knowledge, Foucault stepped off toward the work of his last years.
In 1976, La volonté de savoir (translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 1978) announced Foucault’s plan of teaching and research. This book became, at once, the locus classicus of queer theory and of the theory of the instability of analytic categories. In effect, by arguing that knowledge is behind (even) the power of sex in the social whole, Foucault showed that queering, in addition to being a sexual practice, was also an undermining of the idea that analytic differences (including that between truth and power) could be kept separate and pure.
Just as important, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, was also Foucault’s most explicit and powerful theory of sociology’s most urgent question: How does power work? After the revolutions of the 1960s, social and political theorists were forced to explain the obvious weakness of the classic top-down concept of power. Both Marx and Weber were responsible for the idea that power is domination and thus that it is a conscious, intended, and downward exertion of force upon those in the weaker power positions. What the new social movements did, however, was to invoke the fact that women, homosexuals, workers, racial minorities, and colonial subjects rebelled late in the history of their oppressions because in some fashion, they had colluded with those who controlled their destinies. Power thus had to be as much from the bottom up as from the top down. This led to Foucault’s completely original dismissal of the so-called repressive hypothesis on power.
The surprise at the beginning of La volonté de savoir is the subversion of the idea that the Victorian Age was repressive. On the contrary, talk about sex was everywhere in the nineteenth century, as it had been through the ages. But Foucault’s most striking example is that of the medieval Christian church’s confessional, which served to encourage people to talk about sex as the subtly powerful method for regulating sexual behavior. In this, Foucault breaks with his earlier method by reaching back before even the classical era, to the medieval church and, eventually, to the Greeks. Dominant powers, whether the capitalist class in the modern era or the priestly class in the Middle Ages, had no choice but to regulate sexual practices, because sex is necessarily central to their need to regulate the growth of populations, whether of workers or adherents. Pure repression, thus, is impossible. Without sex, no babies; the population dies off, and the system collapses.
Power cannot easily regulate intimate behavior, even by the most repressive measures. The bedroom is beyond explicit top-down force. Controlling sex requires cooperation of the subjects of the realm. Hence, Foucault’s (1978) stunning announcement that the modern subject—so proudly advertised as the new, liberated man—was, in fact, still a subject in the medieval sense: “An immense labor, to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce—while other forms of work ensured the accumulation of capital—men’s subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word” (p. 60). The confessional was thus the precursor to the nineteenth-century factory school and the diffusion of self-help and therapeutic practices in the twentieth century. Power regulates sex (hence: reproduction) by forming subjects who willingly subject themselves to the prevailing regime of power. How is this done? The only way it can be done: by inducing the subjects to talk about sex, to talk in ways that adjust sexual behaviors to the needed level of fertility. This explains the French title of the book, La volonté de savoir: The Will to Knowledge. This play on Nietzsche’s idea of the Will to Power served to revolutionize the sociology of power, even to suggest that power/knowledge was at work well before the industrial system was to assert that the modern world worked according to a virtually universal requirement of social power.
After the first volume of The History of Sexuality, 1976, there was a long wait for Foucault’s next books. He was, in these years, as productive as ever as an essayist, activist, teacher, and researcher. The demands on him in France had grown to a degree that lesser men would have found them unbearable. He spent more and more time at Berkeley. San Francisco drew him not only for the pleasure of the intellectual company at the university but also for the sexual pleasures of the gay community, in the days before AIDS was known to be what it has become.
When back in France, Foucault made the time to research the history of sexuality. Then, he worked mostly in the archives of the Catholic traditional and turned ever more back to the Greeks. Slowly, the concept power/knowledge was transposed into governmentality. Foucault meant to make the workings of power in the formation of subjecthood ever more concrete. In a sense, governmentality is a term that drops the irony and wordplay in favor of a specific historical claim. The governing of a people depends on the way people govern themselves. The second and third volumes of the sexuality project, L’usage des plaisirs, 1984 (The Uses of Pleasure, 1985) and Le souci de soi, 1984 (The Care of the Self, 1986), ended up quite different in subject and nuance from the original plan. Foucault’s history of sexuality had become, in effect, a history of the Self as the simultaneous object and subject of power. “Short of being the prince himself, one exercises power within a network in which one occupies a key position” (Foucault 1986:87). Power, then, is more explicitly the work of governing—still a work that entails knowledge and discourse, but a work that issues in an ethic of care for the self, an ethic that assures the possibilities of sexual pleasures.
Those pleasures, in the end, killed Foucault. He died of AIDS on June 25, 1984, just as his books on the care of the pleasuring self appeared.