Foucault, Michel
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who was born in Poitiers, France on October 15 and died in Paris of AIDS on June 25, was a controversial philosopher whose interdisciplinary work has important if indirect implications forscience, technology, and ethics. His research often changed directions—archaeology and genealogy as ideas, history of the present, problematization, and modes of subjectification were prominent. In his final years he viewed these directions as theoretical tools to examine three perennially related but distinct relations: to truth, to power, and to self. Foucault was sufficiently intrigued by various sciences and technologies to devote much of his work (and personal involvement) to analyzing and questioning how they increasingly engage formative and dangerous aspects of human life.
Michel Foucault, 1926–1984. The French philosopher, critic, and historian was an original and creative thinker who made contributions to historiography and to understanding the forces that make history. (© Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.)Four themes with ethical implications highlight this intrigue. They are space, vision, biopolitics, and art of the self. Among humans space is seldom only a natural given. People instead design, build and defend, or violate a variety of spaces. Some illuminate ideals (utopias), many are ordinary (common domains), while others are designed for extraordinary times or unfamiliar figures (heterotopias). Asylums, hospitals, schools, and military camps are built to distinguish rituals and events (treating the mentally ill or sick, transforming adolescents or enlistees) that specifically aim to change our body, conduct, and self-understanding. Foucault studied how these spaces emerged, but also questioned their effect on human freedom, individuality, and justice.
Related to the technology of space are innovative kinds of vision. Obviously instruments such as the microscope introduce surprising ways to diagnose the body. Institutions repeatedly introduced strategies for observing the human body. Employing these different visions has two effects. First it renders individual subjects silent, because they are observed at a distance while their own words are discounted. Second this distance ushers in an allegedly more scientific understanding of human beings.
These effects are strikingly presented in the 1975 landmark book, Discipline and Punish. The book opens by juxtaposing an elaborate torture spectacle in 1757 Britain with a prison scene in 1838 France. A sign of moral progress in modern Europe? Not entirely. While English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's (1748–1832) design of an ideal prison, the Panopticon (literally, all seeing) was itself a practical failure, it paved the way for a radical shift from punishing the criminal to focusing on potentially deviant or abnormal persons—anyone, in principle. The result is a disciplinary society, one bent on surveillance and control. With typical rhetorical flair, Foucault asked, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (Foucault 1977, p. 228) Foucault acknowledged, however, that his portraits of modern society were occasionally hyperbolic.
The formation of new kinds of knowledge and their cultural effects has extensive political repercussions and culminates in what Foucault called biopolitics. This term refers to a political rationality in which specific knowledges and administrative technologies are used by a government to understand and regulate not only individuals but also groups or populations. Hence the ongoing links between, say, longevity and social security, health and insurance, risky behavior and family assistance, or poverty and education programs. Ian Hacking, an insightful extender of Foucault's approach, describes these relations as having looping effects, loosely but evidently intertwined in terms of a development of an expertise and its gradual influence on how human beings subsequently understand (accepting or resisting) new ideas about themselves.
During work on The History of Sexuality (1978–1984), Foucault began focusing on technologies of the self. Here technology is not so much about instruments or tools, but it is more a craft or care for oneself insofar as one uses available knowledge and experiences (such as diet, love, physiology, dream analysis, and structure of home life) to practice a moral life. While his scholarly attention surprisingly turned to texts of the early Greeks and Christians, Foucault cautioned against emulating them. Address the possibilities, he argued, rather than succumb to one's own blind spots.
Foucault was reluctant to spell out a theory of normative ethics. Not only was such an endeavor impossible for modern thought (see Order of Things, p. 328), he believed intellectuals should be wary of imposing solutions for those involved in specific struggles. In this light Paul Rabinow nevertheless identifies a four-fold of Foucault's ethics as comprising a will to truth, stylization of one's self, critical thought, and a telos or purpose that involves a dissembling of the self. Be prepared, in other words, that leading an ethical life amid scientific and technological changes will not confirm your identity, but transform you.
The work of Michel Foucault is daring in its range and depth. Although he builds on the approaches of phenomenology, Marxism, and existentialism, he takes the twentieth century European intellectual tradition into a new historical critical phase. As different strains of scientific discovery and technological innovations continue to emerge, his conceptual tools demand that one ask: How is it true? Where is its power? How might it change individuals and their relations to others?
Regulation;; Monitoring and Surveillance;; Science, Technology, and Literature;; Space.
Bibliography
Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Connolly, William. (1999). Why I Am Not A Secularist Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Uses Foucault's style of analyzing discourses to examine controversies of contemporary politics. Connolly undercuts familiar oppositions—such as religion versus secularism, liberalism versus conservatism—to present new options in political pluralism.
Donzelot, Jacques. (1979). The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon.
Dumm, Thomas (2002). Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Eribon, Didier. (1991). Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The most thorough and balanced treatment of Foucault's personal life and intellectual development. Recounts philosophical and political climate of his life, interviews numerous associates and friends, and carefully describes his books and projects.
Foucault, Michel. (1965). Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. (1978–1984). The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley. 3 vols. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, Michel. (1997). Essential Works: Volume I—Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press.
Fraser, Nancy, and Mary Gordon. (1997). "Genealogy of Dependency in Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State." In Justice Interruptus, by Nancy Fraser. New York: Routledge. Insightful and concise application of Foucault's genealogy. Fraser and Gordon discuss how changes in the definitions of dependency correlate with cultural shifts (from benign to negative) on the value and status of being dependent.
Hacking, Ian. (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Investigates the emergence or discovery of contemporary pathologies in light of popular perceptions, scientific analysis, and the growing prominence of psychology.
Hacking, Ian. (1999). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sometimes playful but always enlightening discussion of how specific ideas and discourses arise and the disputes they foster among various political and scientific representatives, particularly those who claim to ground their views either in natural kinds or social construction.
Martin, Luther; Huck Gutman; and Patrick Hutton, eds. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Collaborative project among scholars during Foucault's visit to University of Vermont. Historians, religious scholars, and philosophers develop their own themes sparked by Foucault's work. He has an essay and an interview with the hosts.
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