Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 26, 1984) was a French philosopher and "historian of systems of thought". He had an enormous impact on many fields including literary criticism and theory, philosophy (especially philosophy of science in the French-speaking world), critical theory, history, psychoanalysis, history of science (especially scientific medicine), and the sociology of knowledge, which he transformed altogether.

He is considered a postmodernist and a poststructuralist (though some consider his earlier works, especially The Order of Things, to be structuralist - possibly reflecting a lack of distinction at the time. Foucault, however, firmly denied the label in the preface to the English edition of this work). His structuralist or poststructuralist leanings have led others to question the basis and sincerity of his political activism - a problem he shares with Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff and Jane Jacobs.

Biography

Foucault was born in 1926, in Poitiers, France, as Paul-Michel Foucault. At 17, in the midst of a fight with his parents over whether or not he would become a surgeon, Foucault dropped the "Paul" from his name. His early education was a mix of success and mediocrity until he attended the Jesuit College Saint-Stanislaus where he excelled. He eventually qualified for the Ecole Normale Superieure, considered the best school in France.

At the Ecole Normale, Foucault suffered from acute depression, eventually attempting suicide. He was taken to see a psychiatrist, to whom he admitted his sexual attraction to men. Psychiatry at the time considered homosexuality an illness, and attempted to cure it - something that did not sit well for Foucault. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Foucault became fascinated with psychology.

As with most young French thinkers of the time, Foucault was a member of the Communist Party from 1950 to 1953, leaving, again, along with many others, due to concerns about what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

From 1954 to 1970, Foucault taught at a variety of universities across Europe, including the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the University of Warsaw, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France. At the University of Clermont-Ferrand, he met Daniel Defert, with whom he would be in what he called a "state of passion" for the rest of his life.

In 1966, Defert was called to serve in Tunisia, and Foucault followed, teaching there for 2 years. In 1968, he returned to France, where he was profoundly impacted by the student rebellions of that year. He helped found the Prison Information Group (GIP) to provide a way for prisoners to voice their concerns.

In 1970, Foucault received an appointment to the College de France as a Professor of the History of Systems of Thoughts.

Foucault's involvement in gay culture, particularly in the S&M culture, put him at particularly high risk for AIDS in the days before the disease was understood. Foucault died of AIDS-related complications in Paris in 1984. Although his family initially denied that he had died of AIDS, it was later admitted.

Works

Foucault's major works contain a few common elements and themes. His most common concern is with the idea of power, its relation with knowledge (the sociology of knowledge) and how it manifests in a given historical context. He breaks history into a series of epistemes, which are defined as a given arrangement of power within a culture.

Foucault does not use power purely in the sense of physical or military might, although these are certainly elements of power. For Foucault, power also exists in the ways in which social orders are arranged. Foucault argues that being recognized as having knowledge is also a source of power, because it lets you speak authoritatively about what other people are, and why they are that way - Foucault does not see power as formal, but as the various methods that ingrain themselves by way of social institutions and the positing of a form of truth.

So, for instance, when Foucault looks at the history of prisons, he does not merely look at the ways in which guards are physically given power (i.e. security systems, batons, etc) but in the way that they are socially given power - the way in which the prison is designed to give prisoners a particular idea of who they were, and to make them internalize particular methods of behavior. He also looks at the development of the idea of "the criminal," and how the nature of what a criminal is has changed over time, thus changing the dynamics of power.

For Foucault, "truth" (that is, what functions as truth or is taken as truth in a given historical situation) is produced by the operations of power, and the human subject is simply a handle for the manipulation by power of bodies.

For Foucault, power that is determined through systems of truth could be challenged by appeal to disqualified forms of discourse, knowledge, history, etc., through the privileging of body over abstract intellect, and through artistic self-creation.

Foucault's books tend to be densely written and packed with historical information, particularly small "minutae," that serve to illustrate his theoretical points with memorable examples. Critics of Foucault, however, often claimed that he was insufficiently careful in his history, and that he frequently misrepresented things, or simply made them up entirely.

Madness and Civilization

Madness and Civilization is an abridgement of the French book Folie et deraison, published in 1961. It was Foucault's first major book, written while teaching French in Sweden. It looked at the way in which the idea of madness had developed through history.

Foucault starts his analysis in somewhat surprising place, namely the middle ages, noting how lepers were locked away, in part because of their disturbing appearance. From there, he traces the history through the idea of the ship of fools in the 15th century, and the sudden interest in imprisonment in 17th century France. He then looks at the way in which madness was treated as a disease associated with women, and caused by their wombs becoming dislodged and wandering around their bodies. Eventually, madness became thought of as a malady of the soul, and, finally, with Freud, as mental illness.

Foucault also pays a lot of attention to the treatment of madmen, and the way in which the madman went from an accepted part of the social order to being someone who was confined and locked away. He also looked at the ways in which people tried to treat the insane, particularly the cases of Phillippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke. He claimed that the treatments offered by these men were in fact brutal and cruel. Tuke's country retreat for the mad consisted of punishing the madmen until they learned to act normally, effectively intimidating them into behaving like well-adjusted people. Similarly. Pinel's treatment of the mad amounted to an extended aversion therapy, including such treatments as freezing showers and use of a straightjacket. In Foucault's view, this treatment amounted to repeated brutality until the pattern of judgment and punishment was internalized by the patient.

The Birth of the Clinic

Foucault's second major book, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Naissance de la clinique: une archeologie du regard medical in French) was published in 1963 in France, and translated to English in 1973. Picking up from the endpoint of Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic traces the development of the medical profession, and specifically the institution of the medical clinic or hospital.

The Order of Things

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences is the English title of the French Les Mots et les choses: un archeologie des sciences humaines, published in 1966, and translated to English in 1970.

Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was translated to English in 1977, from the French Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison, published in 1975. It looks at the ways in which the overt control through brutality used in pre-modern times (public executions and torture, for example) have generally given way to covert, psychological controls. Foucault also remarks that since the birth of the prison system, prison has frequently been considered the only solution for criminal behavior.

Foucalt compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons, in which a few guards can watch over many prisoners while themselves remaining unseen - this he terms "The Gaze".

The History of Sexuality

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, An Introduction (Histoire de la sexualite, 1: la volonte de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, with a particular focus on the Victorians. The second volume, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) focused on the middle ages, and the third volume, The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualite, III: le souci de soi) focused on the Greeks and Romans. Both were published in 1984, with the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986.

Terms coined or largely redefined by Foucault, as translated into English:

• discourse (discours) - the medium by which ideas are exchanged; a field's discourse is a system of knowledge by which the veracity of statements related to that field can be determined
• episteme (épistémè)
• exemplar - used by Thomas Kuhn to replace paradigm, refined by Foucault
• governmentality - the methods through which people are forced to accept the dominance of the state
• heterotopia - physical locale set apart from traditional public life where rules and expectations are suspended, often to address moments of crisis or deviance
• mathesis - any universal science of measurement and order, i.e. modern mathematics, or any prior system of folk mathematics
• taxinomia (taxinomie) - a principle of classification and ordered tabulation, e.g. classification of animals into kingdoms or genera
• "The Gaze", carceral state and panopticon - similar ideas
• "Man" in the broad sense of humanity as both subject and object, i.e. humanism
• "repression" - the idea that power represses sexual discourse
• "queer" or homosexual defined as a species not an action
• "archaeology" as applied to the history of science and of medicine
• "parrhesia"

NOTE: Many of these terms do not have rigorous definitions, due both to the difficulty of translation, and to the fact that Foucault often invented terms without explaining them, relying on context to explain them, much as real words enter language. Accordingly his use of them may not be easy to correctly apply.

Bibliography

• Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954); reed. Maladie mentale et psychologie (1995).
• Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique - Folie et déraison (1961) (Madness and Civilization)
• Naissance de la clinique - une archéologie du regard médical (1963) (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception)
• Les mots et les choses - une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966) (The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences)
• La pensée du dehors (1966)
• L'archéologie du savoir (1969) (Archaeology of Knowledge)
• Sept propos sur le septième ange (1970)
• L'ordre du discours (1971) (Literally, The Order of Discourse, Published in English as: The Discourse on Language)
• Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1973) (This Is Not a Pipe)
• Surveiller et punir (1975) (Dicipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
• Histoire de la sexualité (The History of Sexuality)
• Vol I: La Volonté de savoir (1976) (An Introduction)
• Vol II: L'Usage des plaisirs (1984) (The Use of Pleasure)
• Vol III: Le Souci de soi (1984) (The Care of the Self)