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 being a surgeon does link up to his later writings on the political authority of doctors and the medical profession, but it would be too simplistic to argue that Foucault's dislike for his father led him to analyse the cruelties of modern government. 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. Soon 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 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. However, 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 later was published in 1966, Foucault was associated with anti-communism. (Simons, 1995, pp.9)
However, 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 had critique on the way in which history had been ordered (Philo, 2000, p. 209-211). Total history assumes that there is one central core in the social world that governs 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 were not the approaches, discourses or great leaders that created the 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.
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).
Written works
Madness and Civilization
The Order of Things
The Archaeology of Knowledge
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality
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, p225). 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 reed: Discourse, panopticon, power of institutions: Foucault, Total history vs general history, strategic, There is Nothing Outside Discourse, Genealogy, Discursive Formation
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, pp.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 pp.3)
He preferred his work to be used rather than studied. (Kelly, 2009)
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.
- 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, and biography enhancements by Kolar Aparna
- Main overview edited by Sander Linssen
