Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, was successively a university teacher, professor at Clermont-Ferrand, Paris-Vincennes, and from 1970, professor of the history of systems of thought at the College de France.
At first sight—and on account of the tide of his chair—one might take Foucault to be engaged in a kind of history of ideas. In fact, he refuses any such definition of his work. His L’Archéologie du savoir (1969) (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972) is directed against the discipline called ‘the history of ideas’, which he takes to be something like a totalizing overview that rewrites the past in order to produce a unified object of study. In the same book he criticizes certain aspects of his own earlier work: for example, the presupposition of the existence of a ‘general subject of history’ contained in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) (Madness and Civilization, 1967). In Les Mots et les choses (1966) (The Order of Things, 1970) Foucault claims that humankind is a modern invention and destined to disappear. Such an opinion might lead us to call him a structuralist, for he takes the idea of man, in any sense recognizable to the contemporary reader, to be a product of nineteenth-century structures (in fact, of structures of knowledge or savoir). But in L’Archéologie du savoir he had also turned against the structuralist leanings of his earlier writings.
The problem appears to have lain in the use made in those writings of the concept of an episteme: roughly, a structure of knowledge or (in his own terms) a ‘discursive formation’, which determines the manner in which the world is experienced in a given epoch. Can a study of the history of the appearance and disappearance of epistemic formations itself make use of the concept of episteme as an explanatory tool? If not, what does explain epistemic ruptures and eruptions? Foucault insists that the explanation must lie in ‘the regime of materiality’, which he then interprets as consisting in the institutions in which the material relations structuring discursive events are embodied.
Knowledge therefore has to be explained in terms of institutions, and of the events which take place in the latter—events of a technical, economic, social and political nature. But institutions cannot function without the exercise of power. Foucault therefore turns to an examination of the question of power, which, being institutional, is not and cannot be personal in origin or character. Unlike Marxists, however, he wants to study not some mechanistic process whereby power in general is explained in terms of economic ownership, but rather what he calls the ‘strategies’ of power. In order to avoid any semblance of anthropocentrism, he explains that he means by the term ‘strategy’ not the conscious plan or design of some human individual or group but ‘the effect of a strategic position’.
The merely descriptive—and structuralist—notion of the episteme is now subordinated to a genuinely historical conception of the eruption of new epistemic configurations, including new sciences, a conception which (as mentioned) is avowedly materialist.
Power, he says, is located in strategies which are operative at every level: they cannot be reduced to the power of, for example, the state or of a ruling class. Power is productive (and in particular productive of knowledge). He talks about a ‘microphysics of power’, power disseminated throughout the whole of society. There are of course clashes between the multifarious and multi-levelled strategies of power. What is not clear is how the outcome of such clashes and similar processes is to be explained, given that no general mechanism of the generation of power is provided. Foucault has thus been criticized for offering, at the theoretical level, no more (nor less) than a metaphysics of power.
This critique does not detract from the interest of the detailed studies carried out by him (often in collaboration with pupils): for instance, his study of prisons and imprisonment (Surveiller et punir, 1975) (Discipline and Punish, 1977) and of the history of sexuality (La Volonté de savoir, 1976) (The History of Sexuality, vol. I, 1979).
Foucault’s metaphysics of power—if such it is—is in any case, as we have seen, a microphysics. This point is worth underlining in the light of the exploitation made of his work by the so-called ‘nouveaux philosophies’ (André Glucksmann and others), who have drawn on some of its themes or vocabulary in order to produce a violently anti-Marxist metaphysics of the state—otherwise called a theory of totalitarianism which reintroduces the idea, rejected by Foucault, of a single centre of power (see Glucksmann 1977).
Grahame Lock
Catholic University ofNijmegen
Reference
Glucksmann, A. (1977) Les Maitres penseurs, Paris.
Further reading
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton.
Foucault, M. (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. Bouchard, Oxford.
——(1979) Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. M.Morris and P.Patton, Sydney.
——(1980) Power/Knowledge, ed. C.Gordon, Brighton.
Sheridan, A. (1981) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, London.
White, H. (1979) ‘Michel Foucault’, in J.Sturrock (ed.) Structuralism and Since, Oxford.
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