Michel Foucault

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Biography

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same." - Michel Foucault in the introduction to L'Archaeologie du Savoir.

Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was born in the small town of Poitiers in France to a well-established, outwardly Catholic medical family. His father was a surgeon, and probably this linked to his later writings on the political authority of doctors and the medical profession. But Foucault was indeed interested in the broader workings of power relations beyond the medical field and for reasons outside his relation with his father. Foucault was a bright but not an outstanding student. In his early years he experienced the political uncertainties in France, especially of the German occupation. He gained entry to the L'école normal supérieure in 1945 where he studied philosophy and psychology. He spent his time here mostly as a solitary and troubled figure, having attempted suicide more than once and was even referred to a psychiatrist. Later he gained first-hand experience of positivist, experimental, psychology in a mental hospital as both technician and an intern with an undefined role (Simons, 1995, pp.8-9).

However, Foucault was still searching for his niche intellectually and politically. After his graduation he joined the French Communist Party for about two years. But more significant was his friendship from 1952-55 with a group of experimental musicians, especially Jean Barraqué, with whom he had a stormy relationship - who were working on the limits of their art. He read avant-garde authors such as Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Sade, Bataille, Blanchot and Nietzche to think in ways other than the dominant modes of thinking that were present then such as existentialism, phenomenology, or Marxism and Hegelianism. He took up positions as a cultural official in the French institutes at Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. During this period till the end of the 1950s, Foucault wrote Madness and Civilization as his doctoral dissertation. In the meanwhile he indeed missed the political controversies at this time in France surrounding Algeria. (Simons, 1995, pp.9)

Arriving back in France, Foucault was mostly absorbed in finding a position for himself, and he even sat on a government commission to implement university reforms in 1965. He published several pieces of literary criticism about avant-garde authors and began working on Birth of the Clinic (1973a) and his best selling The Order of Things (1973b). Till the latter was published in 1966, Foucault was associated with anti-communism. (Simons, 1995, pp.9) His radical initiation to political resistance occurred in Tunisia (1966-8) when he illicitly aided students opposed to the political regime. At the same time he was working on The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972a). In the 1970’s Foucault threw himself into political and social activism and he strived for the acceptance of homosexuals and for reformation in prison. He became instrumental in establishing the Groupe d'information sur les prisons, in the wake of prison revolts in 1971. While the aim was to give voice to the prisoners' protests, the impetus of the agitation came from imprisoned Maoist militants who refused to dissociate themselves from the common criminals. From this refusal and a visit to Attica prison in 1972 developed the thesis for his next book, Discipline and Punish (1979a), that disciplinary power is exercised over everyone in modern society. He was also involved, alongwith Sartre and Jean Genet, in anti-racist, pro-immigrant campaigns, and in the establishment of a new press agency and newspaper, Libération, which was to be based on the principle of ordinary people's testimony. In 1975, along with the actors Yves Montard and Simone Signoret, Foucault protested against the execution of eleven prisoners in Spain. He then came around to writing The History of Sexuality around this time. These were but only some instances of his socio-political activism but he withdrew from it for a while(Simons, 1995, pp. 9-11).

Soon he became associated with the neo-liberalism of the New Philosophers, such as André Glucksmann, who had been disillusioned by the failure of post-1968 radical politics. By this time, Foucault was visiting the USA more often, enjoying popularity and discovering new ways of enjoying himself. Indeed, the focus of his intellectual work shifted away from sexuality per se to the more general notion of the human as the subject of desires. His studies of Christianity led him to characterize it as a mode of governing desire by renouncing it, in contrast to the Greeks and Hellenists, who moderated pleasures through techniques and arts of the self. At the same time, Foucault was teaching and lecturing about technologies and modes of government of polities (Simons, 1995, pp.11).

However, the main work in his last years can be said to be himself and his pleasures. With his first mind-blowing LSD trip in the Death Valley of California, Foucault took better to the free gay subculture of California that France could not offer. Here he explored the anonymity of sexual encounters, the strategic reversals of relationships and intense experiences of sadomasochism, and spoke about the construction of a gay lifestyle on the basis of a form of friendship between men that had been suppressed since the 17th century. Here he was practising an art of the self, living the philosphy he believed in. Yet his interests in politics and social activism did not totally die. Sometime in 1983 he knew that he would die of AIDS, ye he continued visiting American bathhouses. It is not clear whether he was taking risks with others willing to participate in a suicidal orgy, or was irresponsibly placing his pleasures above the lives of others. Back in France, he finally put his energies to write his last two works, dying on 25th June 1984. The true cause of his death was not mentioned (Simons, 1995, pp. 11-12).

On History

Foucault critiqued the way in which history is ordered (Philo, 2000, p. 209-211). He was against what he called total history that assumes one central core in the social world governing all things. You may think for example of great leaders, approaches etc. According to Foucault total history was not concerned with the social structures and processes that created history. History wasn’t a continuity of events, but it was a timeline divided into periods, stages and phases that had barely relations to other distinct periods.

Foucault rejected this way of structuring history and tried to see history as a flow of events without a single world-view. These ‘places of dispersion’, may be seen as small spatial cells which move around each other and may be related. In this way it’s possible to make a network of causality with all relations turning round one core centre. Their relation depends on their distance to each other. He called this his ‘general history’.

According to Foucault it was not the approaches, discourses or great leaders that created history, but he was searching for the conditions in which these approaches, discourses or great leaders may arise. He searched for the ‘moments of change’ in the knowledge of people which effect history and which gave society a new direction.

He insisted on the importance of space, place and geography within historical thinking. To Foucault, phenomena, events, processes, and structures of history are always fragmented by geography, by the complicating reality of things that are always more or less different in different places, thus leading him to embrace a spatial perspective in his own works of history (Philo,2000, pp. 209) Foucault embarked on a history because of his judgment that certain current social circumstances are "intolerable". His motive was to understand the past in order to understand that which is intolerable in the present. In this process he dismissed the idea of historical events as inevitable. Foucault himself referred to his historical analyses as "histories of experience". His histories of experience is mainly concerned to describe the basic categories that structure the way a given age perceived and thought about objects such as madness or disease (Gutting, 2005, pp.10-15).

Power, discourse, and knowledge

Foucault was also concerned about the power issues and wrote several books about it. Foucault suggested that power isn’t something you can see and neither can be found in a personality. Power can only ‘exist’ in actions and relations between persons, institutions, groups etc. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p.217). Power can only be exercised over free subjects (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 221). Power is always present, and may become an intrinsic feeling that makes people act in an ‘appropriate’ way. (His concept of the panopticon became one of his most famous examples) (Sharp, 2000, p.78).

Foucault also thinks knowledge is a good condition for power relations. The more knowledge the more power, one can have on another. A discourse is a set of reasoning, which put a subject in a certain perspective. A discourse is formed by written or spoken texts around a subject. It tells people in an indirect way what is normal and what is not. In this way it also exercises power because it tells people how they should behave and it may give power relations to different institutions and people. Discourse is therefore embedded in culture and knowledge. According to Foucault nothing can exist without discourse (Hall, 2006, p. 279).

Bodies and Biopower

Foucault is interested in the relation between politics and bodies. He points out how bodies are trained to be socially productive. Management of bodies is important for economic and social development, for healthy and docile bodies can be productive. This is the reason why capitalist states promote life and try to control their population. The main means of control are statistics and probabilities. Life and living are at the center of the modern political battles.

Biopower was the term Foucault used for the technology which is used for managing populations. It manages births and deaths and the reproduction and illnesses of a population. The modern western societies start to consider humans as a species which can be controlled, measured and counted.

"By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower" (Foucault. (2007). Security, territory, population. p. 1)

Public hygiene, psychiatry and assistance to the poor are examples of this kind of power, introduced in the 18th century in the modern surveillance society. A whole population is controlled through discipline and regulatory controls. But when life and health become so important to the state, this justifies eradication of groups threatening life or humanity . This realization makes Foucault warn for genocide “ because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.” (Foucault. (1984). The history of sexuality volume 1. p. 137)

Written works

In Foucaults work three main issues or topics can be distinguished. He focussed on truth (1960's), on power (1970's) and on lust and the self (1980's).

Madness and Civilization (1961)

The birth of the clinic (1963)

The Order of Things (1966)

The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Discipline and Punish (1975)

The History of Sexuality (1984)

Contributions to Geography

Foucault did not especially examine geography and actually did not precisely define space, but in all his works he refers to the role played by spatial relations within a complex working of knowledge, power and discourse (Philo, 2000, p. 225). For Foucault space was bound up in history. His spaces of dispersion are things that are scattered across a landscape and are related to another through their geography (Soja, 1989, p.16).

The only order is the distance to another and being positioned in locations or being associated with a type of environment (Philo, 2000, p.221). Foucault tended to think of space in terms of orders and forms of spatial reasoning that classifies and categorizes inherited knowledge. For example a historical map is a presentation of facts in history which may be used to shape the future; it imposes control of the future (Crampton & Elden, 2007, p. 55).

For Foucault (social) space could be found in ‘enclosures’ of society, which means that people are locked away in institutional spaces, which in turn can be classified into smaller partitions and so on. This gave also form to a chain of power and commands which is designed to physically maintain this organized social space.

“Foucault opens the way in which historical processes involving discourse, knowledge and power are always at work and (re)shaped by the real-world space ‘criss-crossed by trade routes, valleys, highlands, mountains and rivers (Philo, 2000, p. 227).”

For more information about Foucault also read: Discourse, panopticon, power of institutions: Foucault, Total history vs general history, strategic, There is Nothing Outside Discourse, Genealogy, Discursive Formation, Michel Foucault's Geography, Spatial turn

Interpretations on Foucault

Foucault is a hard figure to pin down and he himself has often criticised the efforts of academicians to box him within certain ideologies or disciplines. As Gutting rightly points, any general interpretation of Foucault denies the two most valuable things in his voice, i.e. specificity and marginality (Gutting, 2009, p. 3). In fact, Foucault himself did not refer back to his previous works in his books, and saw himself mostly experimenting rather than developing concrete methodologies as is reflected in the following quote.

"I am perfectly aware of having continuously made shifts both in the things that have interested me and in what I have already thought. In addition, the books I write constitute an experience for me that I'd like to be as rich as possible. An experience is something you come out of changed....In this sense I consider myself more an experimenter than a theorist; I don't develop deductive systems to apply uniformly in different fields of researcher." (Foucault, (Remarks on Marx, 1991) in Kelly, 2009 p .3)

He preferred his work to be used rather than studied. (Kelly, 2009)

'My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.' (Foucault. (1988). 'Truth, power, self: An interview with Michel Foucault October 25 1982'. In Luther H. Martin and Patrick Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, p.10.)

'It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers.' (The encyclopedia of philosophy on Michel Foucault)

Post-structuralism

Existentialism

Critique

References

• Crampton, J. & Elden, S. (2007). Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography. Hampshire: Ashgate publishing limited

• Gutting, Gary. (ed). (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. USA.

• Hall,S. (2000).Representation and discourse. In Smith, M. Social science in question (p. 279). London: Sage

• Kelly, Mark. G.E. (ed). (2009). The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault, Routledge, New York.

• Khalfa, J. (2006). History of madness. London: Routledge.

• O’farell. (2007). Key Concepts. visited 18 september 2011, on Michel-foucault.com on http://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/index.html

• Philo, C. (2000). Foucaults’geography. In Crang, M. & Thrift, N. (Ed.), Thinking Space. (p. 205-238). London: Routledge.

• Sharp, J. (2000).Entanglements of power: geographies of domination/resistance. New York: Routledge

• Simons, Jon. (1995). Foucault & the political. London: Routledge.

• Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The reassertion of space in Critical Social Theory, London: Verso.

Contributors

• Published by Marjolein Selten and Fleur van der Zandt

• Interpretations on Foucault, biography enhancements and addition to 'On History' by Kolar Aparna

• Main overview edited by Sander Linssen

• Bodies and biopower and enhancements biography and interpretations by Judith Nijenhuis