Foucault, Michel
French, b: 1926, Poitiers, France, d: 1984, Paris. Cat: Post-structuralist; historian of ideas. Educ: École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Infls: Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem. Appts: Professor of Philosophy, University of Clermont-Ferrand; Professor of History and Systems of Thought, Collège de France.
Originally trained as a philosopher, Foucault subsequently worked in the fields of psychology and psychopathology, the subject of his first book, Mental Illness and Psychology (1954), before returning to philosophy and, more specifically, to the history of ideas. He drew inspiration from Marxist, structuralist and Freudian theory at various points in his career, although he tended to disclaim any lasting influence on his thought from these traditions. The main thrust of Foucault’s work is to merge philosophy with history such that large-scale analyses, or ‘archaeologies’ as he has termed them, can be undertaken of those historical ‘discourses’ (Foucault’s name for thought when it is realized as a social practice) that have led to the present rationality-biased discourse of Western culture. Foucault sets himself the objective of constructing ‘a history of the present’ by means of these archaeologies, which have encompassed such diverse topics as changing attitudes to insanity in post-Renaissance European society, the development of the prison system within the same society, and the codes governing sexual practice in classical times. In each case Foucault’s concern is to trace the mechanisms involved in the development of the various discourses of social control in modern culture. There is a consciously anti-Enlightenment strain in Foucault’s enquiries, and somewhat notoriously he proclaims ‘the death of man’ in The Order of Things (1966), arguing, as do so many structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers, that the concept of ‘man’, in particular ‘rational’ man, is a very recent, and in many ways very regrettable, cultural invention. Foucault’s archaeologies tend to identify discontinuities in history, and he insists that his cultural analyses are specifically directed against all notions of teleology or assumptions of transcendental vantage points. Thus in Madness and Civilization (1961) he traces a radical change in social attitudes towards the phenomenon of madness over a relatively short historical period, whereby behaviour tolerated at one point within civil society was very soon designated as a social ‘problem’ requiring an institutional response. Foucault describes this cultural phenomenon of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as ‘The Great Confinement’, and emphasizes the discontinuity involved in such a significant shift in perception. The underlying ideological reason for this change, Foucault claims, is to be located in the growing cult of reason, which led to insanity, or ‘unreason’, taking on negative connotations that were unthinkable before. A whole new structure of power evolved, as it did also in the rise of the modern prison system with its systematized methods of repression and punishment, and Foucault is a particularly acute analyst of power in its institutionalized forms. The analysis of power is a continuing concern throughout his career, surfacing in all his major works. Foucault’s approach to cultural history is fairly broad-brush in style and can involve some questionable generalizations. He adopts a rather cavalier attitude to historical research, much influenced by Nietzsche’s iconoclasm about such matters, denying the possibility of historical objectivity and dismissing academic history as being merely ‘the history of the historians’. The latter requires a vantage-point outside history in order to make it work, Foucault argues, and he is harshly critical of all such examples of ‘transcendental narcissism’. Foucault pursues his archaeological enquiries throughout his oeuvre, culminating in his monumental three-volume history of sexuality in classical times, where the concern is to establish the process whereby the relatively guilt-free view of male sexuality in Greek times, including what is by modern standards a very relaxed attitude towards homosexual practices such as pederasty, evolved into the more repressive, as well as recognizably more modern, codes of behaviour of later Roman society. What Foucault identifies yet again is the development and institutionalization of methods of social control that are unacceptable to his quasi-anarchistic outlook. Like so many other French intellectuals in the post-1968 événements period, Foucault comes to display a deep distrust of all institutional power and its tendency towards overt control of individual behaviour. Foucault has been a highly controversial figure and his broadly based inter-disciplinary-minded analyses of culture and the nature of institutional power have made him a difficult thinker to categorize. Purists are only too apt to see his projected merger of philosophy and history as lacking the intellectual rigour required of either discipline. There is no doubt, however, that he qualifies as one of the most influential contributors to the field of history of ideas in the modern era. Discourse theory, one of the liveliest areas of debate in recent cultural theory, largely derives from the work of Foucault, and his project to map out a ‘history of the present’ through archaeological analyses of past discourses has been enthusiastically followed up by a host of scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Foucault has attracted criticism from various quarters. The left, for example, has denounced his anarchistic tendencies and quasi-Nietzschean outlook as inimical to socialist ideas (Foucault’s political and intellectual position might best be summed up as post-Marxist). A more general criticism has been, that his archaeologies, with their sweeping historical generalizations and often highly selective use of sources, have been wildly over-schematic. Rather in the manner of the structuralist and Marxist thinkers he affects to disdain, Foucault has been accused of imposing a model on the past which cannot always be substantiated by the available evidence: ‘tall orders largely unsupported by the facts’ being one not untypical verdict on his archaeological enquiries (J.G.Merquior). Foucault’s self-consciously anti-Enlightenment stance has also been the subject of much unfavourable comment, with Jürgen Habermas, for example, arguing that the abandonment of any commitment to universal reason on the part of poststructuralist thinkers like Foucault ultimately leads to the end of philosophy, and to any possibility of being able to discriminate between the claims of competing theories or discourses. In common with most poststructuralist theories Foucault espouses anti-foundationalism—he claims that the theories in The Archaeology of Knowledge are ‘groundless’, for example—and this aspect of his thought has come under considerable attack as well, on the fairly predictable grounds that it undermines the validity of his own theories and cultural analyses.
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