foucault gutting on

8/3/2019 Foucault Gutting on

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Gutting on Foucault (Intro to The Cambridge Companion to Foucault):

No unifying theme can make sense of Fs work as a whole, although the demand

for interpretation that his work makes encourages the search for such a theme

(1).

His work is fragmentary, ad hoc and incomplete (2); each work is determined by

concerns and approaches specific to it. There is no progression.

Tempted, though, by the thought that we can map two dimensions to his work:

first, he is a philosophical historian who developed a series of complimentary

methodsan archaeology of discourse (inHist Mad, The Birth of the Clinic, The

order of things and The Archaeology of Know), a genealogy of power relations(Disc & Pun, The history of sexuality 1) and a problematization of ethics (The use

of pleasure and The care of the self). The second dimension makes him a

historicist philosopher offering successively deeper and complementary theories

of knowledge, power and the self. Together these make for a tempting overall

interpretation of F as offering a comprehensive understanding of human reality

underpinned by new methods of historical analysis.

He instances Dreyfus and Rabinows who see F as offering an interpretive

analytics, (an analysis of the sources and legitimacy of our concepts interpreted

by the historically given set ofpractices that express them) that is the most

powerful (if not ahistorical) instrument of cultual analysis on offer.

This wont do, however: Foucaults distinctive and most valued characteristics are

his specificity and his marginality. The strength of each of his works is

undermined if one tries to force all of them into an embracing and harmonising

overall framework. F himself hardly ever refers to his own earlier works, even

when he is returning to a topic hes dealt with earlier. He wants to show us

liberating alternatives to specific realms of inevitabilityin psychiatry, medicine,

the social sciences, for example. He wants to help us save ourselves (4).

Foucault fights guerilla campaigns, construct[ing] theories and methods

subordinated to the tactical needs of the particular analysis at hand (4).


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Foucault is not offering us a reconstructed or even a new discipline: he is trying to

alert us to and to move us away from the dangers of disciplines, and the

apparently necessary truths they incline us to commit to.

(The masked philosopher is an anonymous interview in which F describes his

dream that books are no longer subjected to totalizing judgementsones that

would sovereign or dressed in red [4].)

On the other hand, Foucault does offer synoptic characterisations of his works

(even if they vary as much as his works). a) in 1969 all his previous works were

trying to sketch the approach to the analysis of discursive formations that he

offers in theArch of know;b) in 1977 he sees himself as always having been

interested in power; c) by 1982, it is not power, but the subject, which is the

general theme of my research (4). [Of course, its not hard to see ways in which

these three claims can be read as mutually consistenteven supporting.]

Also, G presents textual evidence that when he wrote AK F was tempted to see

himself as offering a new discipline (5).

Overall, it is best to see him as like a skilled artesan, who produced a number of

outstanding intellectual objects under the stimulus of specific circumstances. By

looking thus, we can see that he produces three broad sorts: histories, theories and

myths (6). And G goes on to characterise each of these sorts.

The histories are driven by specificities and it is only in retrospect that these are

idealised as coming in the archaeological v the genealogical forms. G proposes

tracking them along four dimensions: the history of ideas, of concepts, of the

present and of experience.

* Although he disdains conventional history of ideas, F does quite a bit of it in his

histories (7).

* Yet Canguilhems history of concepts is central to F. Canguilhem insists on

the distinction between the concepts that interpret scientific data and the theories

that explain them, whereas Anglophones (Kuhn as much as Hempel) see theories

as interpretations of data, which, therefore, define the concepts in terms of which

the data are understood (7; he gives some egs pp7-8). [V interesting and links up

with lots of important questions {see, especially, the discussion of Cuvier v


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Lamarck as developing the idea at the heart of Darwins descent with

modification; one should consult Hacking, here}, but it seems obvious that

concept v theory of x wont do: one needs, at least,to consider concept v

conception v theory of x.]

Yet F also extended Cs methods: the latter saw concepts and disciplines as tied

together [through the history of the discipline in which theoretical alternatives

compete with one another], but F argues that apparently v different disciplines can

have similar basic concepts, so that the various disciplines of one era can have

more in common than each has with its successor discipline of the subsequent era.

F holds that second orderphilosophicalconcepts held in common

(representation, man, resemblance) are conditions of possibility of first order

concepts and it is these that form the basis of the episteme, that system of

concepts that defines knowledge the intellectual subconscious for a given

intellectual era (8-9). [Very Durkheimian, in fact.] This enables the historian to

define a discipline in terms other than those in which it defines itself.

This archaeological approach really does contrast with std hist of ideas, with its

emphasis on thinkers and their works and the influences upon one another. It

allows F to construct a space, defined by a system of rules more fundamental

than the assertions of individuals thinking in the space the study of which is

usually thought to be most important, but which F dismisses as doxology (10).

F also offers us histories of the present, notwithstanding the fact that by

definition history is concerned with the past. F begins with a diagnosis that

something is wrong in current circumstancessomething intolerableand then

sets about trying to discover how it got to be so: to use an understanding of the

past to understand something that is intolerable in the present (10): in short, to

come up with an aetiology. G holds that this is not so unusual in historians,

although the way F stresses this aspect of his work is, but points out that whereas

they want to show how, given all the historical causes in operation, the present

was inevitbale, F wishes to stress how contingent and therefore surpassable our

present was. How could we do anything but put lunatics into asylums? Etc. F

wants to show that the processes leading to our present practices and institutions


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were by no means inevitable (10). [Evitability v inevitabilitynecessity v

contingency even more soa trouble/muddle inducing opposition: cf determined

v predetermined.] He wants to stress the social construction, and hence historicity,

of our conceptions of, for example, madness, and their lack of privileged access

to the truth of madness (11).

[All this makes clear why G elsewhere {the SEP article: section three} says that F

reverses Kants move of showing the necessity in the apparently contingent, by

showing the contingent in the apparently necessary. {A formulation which, like

those beautiful, voluptuous drag queens, is also nicely decked out to sow

confusion and heartache.}]

As for madness so with man, a concept that only came into existence after

Kant distinguished thought from representation, by showing that representation

could be treated as just one form of thought (12). [Is this clear? I suspect not,

but see Gs SEP article.] F held that the concept of man as both finite, according

to his representation in the sciences, yet also the source of representations (as

both the source of the world and an object in the world) is a failure, for it cannot

be made coherent. Counter-sciences, like anthropology and psychoanalysis.

* The history of the present is one definition of genealogy: this represents the

effort to question the necessity of our dominant categories and procedures (12).

Foucault intended the term "genealogy" to evoke Nietzsche's genealogy of

morals, particularly with its suggestion of complex, mundane, inglorious origins

-- in no way part of any grand scheme of progressive history. The point of a

genealogical analysis is to show that a given system of thought (itself uncovered

in its essential structures by archaeology, which therefore remains part of

Foucault's historiography) was the result of contingent turns of history, not the

outcome of rationally inevitable trends. (SEP article.)

* The history of experience was a notion F used at different points to characterise

his histories (Hist of mad; The use of pleasure, for example); but he use it in

different sensessometimes to refer to what might be available to an abstract,

anonymous subject at a given point, and at others to refer to individual persons


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(although these are always situated in fields of knowledge and systems of norms

the objects uncovered by archaeology and genealogy).

These dimensionssome constant, others not, depending on the object of enquiry

can chart Fs histories, G claims (13-14). And just what criteria of assessment

one should apply to his works varies with the relevance of each of these

dimensions to the work in question (15). It would be wrong to judge a history of

the present (the history of something he finds intolerable) in the same terms as an

archaeological history of a human science. But every one of his historical claims

needs to be justified on the basis of some set of facts accessible to standard

historiography [lest his] claims be either gratuitous or not really historical

(16).

G then turns to Fs theories: he sees him as an impressive theoretician, but theory

is not his central concern. He builds temporary scaffoldings for particular

analytical purposes (and is happy to abandon them to whomever once he has

finished the project: 16-20).

* In Ord of things andArch of Know (published only three years apart), for

example, F uses two very different theories of language (a Heideggerian

historical ontology in the former, and a structuralist theory in the latter), which G

sees as a matter of Fs using different intellectual tools to achieve the verydifferent aims of the two works (eschatological assessment based on what the past

reveals versus a methodological concern to establish a general approach to the

history of thought). G says [in an interesting argument] that F need not be

antirealist about theories, nor feel he has phil grounds for rejecting the idea of a

true theory, but that he is concerned about values theories may have quite apart

from questions about their ultimate truth (19). [NB. Parts here relevant to

discussion of Sahlins muddles about structuralist history.]

* F, then is nonrealistabout theories (19), an insight that G feels helps make

sense of Fs much discussed views of power (as inHist of sex). For example, his

reversal of Clauswitzs aphorism about war as politics by another means is a gross

over-simplification if one is wanting to understand Western history (19). F,

though, wants to produce a different conception of power through the course of


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the detailed analysis of the history of modern sexuality: and ifthatis illuminated

by the non-standard approach to power, then its introduction will have been

amply justified (20).

Foucaults myths are no less important than the scholarship and brilliant

theorising to the success of his books. These deeply emotional themes take the

form of monsters [and their victims?] and heroes (20). G gives many examples,

but says the monsters are all manifestations of the grand bogeyman of French

intellectuals since Flaubert: bourgeois society (21). The myths give his work

much of their power and intensity, but also make him insensitive to nuance in

that which he despises. G discusses Fs concern with transgression and intensity

(22-3) and then notes how, byDisc and punish his heroes are no longer the great

transgressive artists but those fighting and suffering on the margins of ordinary

Western life (24).

* But in his last two books, the unexpectedly different studies on Greek and

Roman sexuality (The use of pleasure and The care of the self), Fs style and

tone abruptly change. There we get a cool exploration of alternative aesthetic

forms of human existence, [which indicate] a calm humanity not found in his

previous work (24). It is not possible to know what this meant or what it might

have led to, G avers.

Flynn on Fs mapping of history (Chap 1)

All Fs works are histories of a sort: archaeologies, genealogies or (the last two

books) problematizations. No conflict here; genealogies make explicit what was

implicit in archaeologies, just as problematizations make explicit what was

implicit in boththe issue of truth and subjectivity (28).

Flynn wants to consider these three forms and then say what is distinctive aboutFs approach to history, which he thinks inheres in Fs nominalism, his approach

to the historical event, his spatialization of Reason and his conception of

problematization: these themes serve to critique, respectively, Platonists,

historians of culture, dialecticians and traditional historians (of the battles-and-

treaties variety).


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Fs three archaeologies (of madness, clinical medicine and the human sciences)

examine the systems that establish statements as events (with their own

conditions and domain of appearance) and as things (with their own possibility

and field of use) (AK: 128). These statements represent the discourses that

condition what counts as knowledge in a particular period (29). These

statements, though, are not langue [how could they be?]; rather they are forms of

practice, and they represent the archive [consider the etymology] that in a given

period constitutes the historical a priori (29).

Flynn suggests that F views discourses in the same way Witt viewed languge

gamespreconceptual, anonymous, socially sanctioned body of rules that

govern ones manner of perceiving, judging, imagining and acting; these form

the background of intelligibility to actions (30). They do so by defining what is to

be done (and rationalise it with rules and norms) andthey render true/false

discourse possiblethey arejudicative and veridicative. (So power/knowledge

couple is set up is here and the later focus on it is merely an elaboration.)

So the archive is the locus of the rules and prior practices forming the conditions

of inclusion or exclusion that enable certain practices and prevent others from

being accepted as scientific or moral, or whatever other social rubric may be in

use at a particular epoch (30). Different epochs, different archives; and thepractices that they comprise are not deduced but discovered; they are

positivities to be encountered rather than texts or documents to be interpreted

(30). This positivism he never abandoned.

His early archaeologies are of borderline sciences, where epistemic breaks

suddenly make new disciplines appear. The post factum necessity that these

breaks assume is misleading: they could not have been predicted beforehand and

they involve chance events; he wantedeven at this stageto make chance a

category in the production events (AK:231)an ambition that becomes more

important with the genealogies. [Sahlins and his structure of the conjuncture is

similarly struggling with chance and necessityhe even mentions Monod, I

think; he and F both misconstrue the distinction as an opposition, as do the

legions of current writers who fetishize contingency.]


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F gives a special termepistemeto those aspects of the archive that constitute

the veridicative function of a scientific practice. It was the way this and cognate

terms were used in Fs early work that led readers to see him as a structuralist,

especially as he too wrote against subjectivist/humanist thought. Flynn, though,

says that his nominalism, positivism and his Nietzschean inclinations all make

him a post-structuralist.

The four works of the archaeological period show a curious unity-within-

diversity in addrssing practices that make the exclusions needed to gain the

honorific science and revealing a sense of the unspoken and unspeakable

relationships between such apparently disjointed areas as clinical medicine,

medicalization of madness and the scientific status of various social inquiries

which are pronounced to have more in common with each other than with their

presumed precursors in traditional historical accounts (31).

Bachelards notion of an epistemic break is important to the archaeological

picture: the world is perceived in different ways either side of such a breaknew

objects for investigation come into being and others fall away (the brain or a

corpse were different objects before and after the end of the Classical Age [clouds

of confusion condensed into a drop]). [Note the Whorfian/Saussurean tenor of

this, but its a mistake to assimilate F to these {just as its a mistake to associateWhorf and Saussure, except in so far as they appeal to a certain simple

relativism}. His is still a processual rather than a structural model.]

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