Michel Foucault (historian and philosopher)
“Do not ask me who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same…Let
us leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are
in order.”
Born 1920
Studied at the Famous Ecole Supérieur Normale in Paris.
Completed his Ph. D. at the Sorbonne.
Madness and Civilisation [L’Histoire de la Folie à l’Age Classique] 1961
The Birth of the Clinic,
1963
The Order of Things, [Les Mots et les Choses]
1966
The Archeology of Knowledge,
1969
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
1975
The History of Sexuality, 3 vols,
1976-1984
Morality
Friedrich Nietzsche on Morality and Criticism
So long as the world has been in existence there was no authority willing
to make itself the object of criticism, and even to criticise morality, to
take morality as a problem, as something problematic: Why? … it is not
only the case that morality has at its disposal all kinds of scary
deterrents to keep critical hands and the instruments of torture away
from its body. Its security owes more to a certain magical art of casting
spells, which it insists on using: morality knows how to ‘enthuse’. And
frequently morality succeeds, in paralysing the critical will with a single
stare, and winning it over to her side, indeed there are cases when she
manages to turn criticism against itself, so that it plunges its sting into its
own body like a Scorpion….
Why else is it then that from Plato onwards all the philosophical
master-builders of Europe have built in vain, and that everything they
once sincerely and earnestly thought to be there for aere perennius is
about to collapse or already lies in rubble? Oh how false is the answer
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to this question, which to this day is still held to be correct: “because
they all neglected the indispensable preliminary examination of the
foundations, of a critique of reason in its entirety” - the fateful answer
given by Kant, who therewith truly did not succeed in luring us moderns
onto a more solid and less treacherous ground. ( - And to pose a
question: In retrospect, was it not somewhat curious to demand that a
tool should criticise its own appropriateness and usefulness, that the
intellect should inquire into its own value and power, its limits? Was
that not even a little nonsensical? - ) The correct answer would rather
have been that all philosophers have built under the seduction of
morality, even Kant - they only appeared to aim at certainty, at
“truth” but actually aimed at the “majesty of the moral edifice”.
Nietzsche Daybreak [Morgenröthe] Preface Kritische Schriften eds. Colli
& Montinari, vol. 3 p.13
These contrasting forms of the optics of value are […] ways of seeing
which are unaffected by reasons and refutations. One does not refute
Christianity, just as one does not refute the defect of the eyes.
The case of Wagner, Epilogue.
Nietzsche on Genealogy
Genealogy and Pedigree
Gospel According to St. Luke 3
[23] And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as
was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,
[24] Which was the son of Matthat, which was the son of Levi, which
was the son of Melchi, which was the son of Janna, which was the son of
Joseph, …
[37] Which was the son of Mathusala, which was the son of Enoch,
which was the son of Jared, which was the son of Maleleel, which was
the son of Cainan,
[38] Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was
the son of Adam, which was the son of God.
The Iliad Book II
Powerful Agamemnon
stood up holding the sceptre Hephaistos had wrought him carefully.
Hephaistos gave it to Zeuss the king, son o Kronos,
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And Zeus in turn gave it to the courier Argeiphontes,
And lord Hermes gave it to Pelops, driver of horses,
And Pelops gave it to Atreus, the shepherd of the people.
Atreus dying left it to Thyestes of the rich flocks,
And Thyestes life it in turn to Agamemnon to carry
And to be lord over many islands and over all Argos…
A pedigree begins with an item, with a positive value, and a single
origin, which is the actual course of that value, and an unbroken line of
succession in which the value is preserved or increased.
“The whole point of Genealogy of Morality is that Christian morality
results from a conjunction of a number of diverse lines of development:
the ressentiment of slavs directed to their masters (GMI 1-10), a
psychological connection between ‘having debts’ and ‘suffering pain’
that gets established in archaic commercial transactions (GMII 4-6), a
need people come to have to turn their aggression against themselves
which results from urbanisation (GMII 16), a certain desire on the part of
a priestly caste to exercise domination over others (GM III 16) etc.”
R. Geuss in ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’ in Morality, Culture, History,
CUP, 1999.
Foucault’s genealogies concern institutions of Government - law, prisons,
military and the police, but also educational and medical
establishments like schools, hospitals etc. Achievements of civilisation,
arose in part by accident and gain a social function:
1. training human beings into docile obedience,
2. inculcatings standard of normality/abnormality.
Foucault on Power:
Modern state has incorporated a technique of power, he calls ‘pastoral’
that originated in the Christian Church. This pastoral technique involves
ministering to individuals.
“In the final analysis this form of power can only be exercised cannot be
exercised without knowing what is happening in the heads of people
without exploring their souls without forcing them to reveal their most
intimate secrets. It implies a knowledge of the individual’s conscience
and in the ability to direct it.” DE 229
Power = le pouvoir = capacity.
He is speaking of a capacity by which certain people or groups of
people exercise power over others.
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Power is put in place by a set of mechanism or rules, that regulate,
impose an order, or what he calls a ‘discipline’.
“The exercise of power is a manner by which some people structure the
field of possible actions of others.” DE 239
It is deeply rooted in the “social nexus” or plays a central role in keeping
societies together. A society without any relations of power, would be a
mere abstractions. DE 239
Violence is the primitive form of discipline.
Public executions and torture the “spectacle of the scaffold” were
symbolic displays of the power of the sovereign. E.g. Damiens – the
regicide.
In Discipline and Punish, he shows how the prison is born out of the
existing institutions of the leper-house and the dungeon.
“The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which
every individual is subjected brings us back to our own time by
applying the binary branding in exile of the letter quite different objects
the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions are
measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the
disciplinary mechanisms…” DP 199.
Bentham’s Panopticon.
“We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an
annualar building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with
wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric
building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of
the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding
to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light
to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to
place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a
madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By
the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out
precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the
periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in
which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible.
The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unit is that make it possible
to see that comes to see constantly and to recognise immediately. In
short it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three
functions -- to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide -- it preserves only
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the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eyes of the
supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected.
Visibility is a trap.”
Panopticon is a metaphor for a society regulated by surveillance.
“The Panopticon… must be understood as a generalisable model of
functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday
life of men” DP 205
Domination: = One sided, global and congealed or fixed relations of
power.
“What makes the domination of a group, caste or class, and the
resistances or revolts which assail it, into a central phenomenon of the
history of societies, is that they manifest, on a global and massive scale –
that of the whole social body – the interlocking of relations of power
and strategic relations and their reciprocal effects of training.” DE p. 243
The Subject and Subjectivity
“So it is not power of the subject which constitute the general theme of
my research.” [‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982/ Dits
et Ecrits, vol 4 p.223.]
“It is a form of power which transforms individuals into subjects. There
are two meanings to the word ‘subject’: the subject that submits to and
is dependant on control by an other person; and a subject attached to
his own identity by knowledge and by self-consciousness. In both cases
this word suggests a form of power which subjugates and subdues.” DE
p. 227
“One can see how the analysis of relations of power in a society cannot
lead just to the study of a series of institutions, not even to the study of
those institutions all which merit the name political. Relations of power
have deep roots deeply entwined in the whole of the social network.”
DE 241
Power produces reactions – not just sites and opportunities – but actual
instances of struggle and resistance.
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He suggests that the refusal to submit to relations of power, is “the
permanent condition of their existence.” DE 242
Some Worries
Power is a very wide concept, in Foucault. Almost no human
relations are not also power relations. Power is inescapable.
Habermas: Foucault is wrong “to postulate that all discourses (by no
means only the modern ones) can be shown to have the character of
hidden power and derive from the practices of power.” Habermas,
Philosophical Discourses of Modernity p.264
N.B. Power in general is not a normatively or evaluatively negative
cocnept. Power can be either good or bad, and sometimes both.
Nancy Fraser:
“Because Foucault has no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of
power that involve domination from those that do not, he appears to
endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such…Clearly
what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for
distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power.” Unruly
Practices, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p.32-3.
Maybe there are no normative criteria which the historian or
philosophcer can use. What is acceptable form of power, is simply what
each political community is prepared to tolerate.
Jürgen Habermas:
1.
Accuses Foucault of being wholesale against modernity.
For JH modernity has had sucesses and failures - the ability to
distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of govt. is one of
its achievements.
2.
Foucault is guilty of “crypto-normativism”.
He implies that domination is a bad thing and that liberation good.
He is not just providing historical description and anlaysis.
Since he rejects morality - with Nietzsche - as a form of power.
He has not ground on which to claim that domination is bad.
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3.
He argues that all discourses are expressions of power.
therefore his own discourse is an expression of power.
I think that Foucault would probably accept that claim.
4.
Fraser and Habermas think that Foucault cannot give an
unambiguous answer to the question:
Why ought domination to be resisted?
It is just what some people, including him, have chosen to do.
1.
Does resistance need a moral/evalautive justification?
2.
Does this mean that resistance is no more legitiamte than the
forms of power and domination it resists?
3.
Does this mean that resistance is optional?
“Without doubt the principal objective today is not to discover who we
are, but to refuse to accept who we are. We have to imagine and to
construct who we could be, in order to escape this sort of political
<double-blind> that consists in the simultaneous individualisation and
totalisation of the structures of modern power.”
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