The world of Michel Foucault

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault is a collection miscellaneous writings published shortly after his death. These are clear inquiries into how domains of knowledge have been formed on the basis of social practices, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.

MICHEL PAUL FOUCAULT is not a Delphic oracle. Neither did he consider himself a saviour of mankind: nor did he subscribe to final solutions, lasting cures for the ills that confront humanity. Far from these, he was an empirical philosopher; a social scientist with his feet well planted on the earth. He was born in Poitiers, France on October 15, 1926 and died in Paris on June 26, 1984, reportedly, of AIDS. His premature death was a terrible blow to the intellectual community of the world. He held teaching positions at the Universities of Uppsala and Warsaw before he was invited, in 1970, to take the chair of the Professorship of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France, the most coveted position in that country, where he delivered formal lectures for 14 years, till his death. Foucault is one of the most incisive, courageous thinkers and celebrated intellectuals of the modern era. His close associates brought together, shortly after his death, his miscellaneous writings, mainly the shorter ones, and published them in four volumes, in French. From this edition was compiled The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-84, in three volumes, in English, by the series editor Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The book under review, Volume III, Power, deals with power relations in the politics of personal conduct and freedom. It raises the overwhelming issue of how power relations are a driving force in historical change. Volume I of the series is titled Ethics and Volume II, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. The aim of the series is "to assemble a compelling and representative collection of Foucault's written and spoken words outside those included in his books". The three volumes are representative of the three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.

There are altogether 30 sections or units in this weighty book, comprising articles, lectures, interviews and position papers which he wrote or gave during the last 12 crowded years of his eventful life. The first "Truth and Juridical Forms" constitutes five lectures (one of which being a scintillating meditation on Nietzsche's thought) that he delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. These are clear inquiries into how domains of knowledge have been formed on the basis of social practices. These inquiries are conducted historically to prove that social practices engender domains of knowledge which bring to light new concepts and give rise to new subjects of knowledge. Such an inquiry stands in clear opposition to Western philosophy in general which assumes a stable source as the basis of human knowledge and academic Marxism in particular that assumes that human subject and forms of knowledge are given before-hand and the economic and social conditions of existence get imprinted on this given subject.

This historical determinism of Marx is simply unacceptable to Foucault. For him it is the subject "that constitutes itself within history and is constantly established and reestablished by history". His efforts, therefore, are directed towards a critique of the human subject by history. He did not view history (as most historians do) as a continuous and cumulative process in linear progression. History, for him, is not seamless but disjointed. History, as we have known in its traditional sense, is a chronicle or record of events that had taken place over a period of time in the past. According to Foucault, in its traditional form, history "memorised" the "monuments" of the past and transformed them into "documents". In his "new" history, he undertakes to remodel these "documents" and reconstruct them as "documents". One should no longer envisage it as the lengthy record of an era or the rise and decline of a civilisation. Foucault challenges the postulates and teleologies that go into the creation of the totalised version of history that uses common and collective causes and establishes a continuum, a homogeneity, as it were. He dispenses with such integrating terms as "world views" (weltanschauung) "spirit of the times" (zeitgeist) that unite and build wholes. Instead, he is interested in fathoming and digging out - hence the metaphor "archaeology" - strata after strata of those very breaks, interruptions and discontinuities which had been amalgamated into organic whole by traditional histories. Concepts of progressivism and evolution are mere myths imposed on stray incidents and disjointed happenings just to appease our nostalgic hunger for unity. Foucault's strategy involves cutting up a larger corpus and splitting it into manageable microforms; in other words, historicising grand abstractions. He is not in the least fascinated by a history that falsifies events by raising extravagant hopes and offering spectacular solutions.

Foucault maintains that at any given point of time in a society, it is possible to investigate a dimension of knowledge (for which he reinvests the term "episteme" retaining partially the Greek sense), which regulates the functioning of the thought of the people. Foucault manoeuvres to retrieve the "episteme" from the archives of the society. Since these are not available for direct observation, they have to be reconstructed from accessible discourses, social practices. The cultural anthropologist that Foucault is, he is engaged in unearthing the different layers and sediments from the archives. The discourses are the "material manifestations of the thought that is preserved, transmitted and still affects our present-day thinking". The nature of this discursive power attracts Foucault. His archaeological analysis "individualises and describes discursive formations". Hence he isolates ruptures, gaps, thresholds, breaks, and discontinuities in any social formation and subjects them to a close examination. To quote Foucault, "the horizon of archaeology, therefore, is not a science, a rationality, a mentality, a culture; it is a tangle of interpositives whose limits and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single operation. Archaeology is a comparative analysis that is not intended to reduce the diversity of discourses and to outline the unity that must totalise them, but is intended to divide up their diversity into different figures. Archaeological comparison does not have unifying but a diversifying effect".

In the interview "Truth and Power", he defines himself as a "specific intellectual" who would confront real, material and everyday struggles rather than play the role of the conscience- keeper and a spokesman of the universal, "a bearer of universal values". He is not "the rhapsodist of the eternal but the strategist of life and death". Foucault would maintain that:

Truth isn't outside power or lacking in power... truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular forms of power... it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); finally it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation ('ideological' struggles) (p.131).

How does Foucault conceive "discontinuity"? Through calculated moves, he squeezes out and eliminates an individual event or social formation and directs his analysis on it to reach out to "knowledge" or "truth" about it. To quote him again, "Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements". He scans such institutional networks of social formation as asylums, hospitals and prisons. Madness, called in scientific terms insanity or mental illness, is not to be held as an undifferentiated experience. It is a phenomenon that is created and conditioned by our thought. Initially lunatics were consigned to asylums, later newer ways were found to treat insanity. One set of practice yielded place to another. Foucault presents differences in social beliefs without imposing on the problems of madness - and its cure - a framework of progress and evolution.

Foucault uses the term "genealogy" (the natural successor to archaeology) in the Nietzschean sense, to mean the analysis of the modalities of power. Knowledge and Power ought to be distinguished from each other. Knowledge is a function of human interests and power relations. Genealogy is a method of understanding the mutual relations between systems of truth and modalities of power. Truth is always linked to Power. Our view of power is partial and one-sided, narrow and negative. We have always denounced it as repressive (and hence, reprehensible) without analysing how it functions. Power can never be thought of in isolation; it is exercised through social practice and production. It is not applied externally through coercion or force but is circulated by practices which influence people to think, act and behave in particular ways. Hence power constitutes a way of social cohesion, a way of life. Foucault, therefore, reconceptualises power and hegemony in such a positive manner. Without ever trying to legitimse power, he proves that it is part and parcel of our life. It is indispensable to our existence. It operates in an impersonal way, not through an external agency. "Power is exercised rather than possessed". It is a strategy in which both the dominating and the dominated are jointly engaged. One colludes with the other in the exercise of it. Foucault breaks the traditional bond between power and repression and in doing so, holds that to live socially is to be involved in power relations and that is the only truth about it. He maintains that beyond power there is only more power.

The History of Sexuality is a genealogical study of sex from the early Greek civilisation onwards. As always, the method is the scrupulous avoidance of progressivism and ethnocentrism. Foucault creates ruptures and builds up a critique of sexuality at various times in Western civilisation, without reference to universal theories. In the field of human sciences, sex has not been studied in depth, apart from biological features and procreative factors. Foucault studies it at the moral level of self- constitution. "Why and in what ways is sex a problem for the individual in his/her effort to lead a normal life?" The genealogical analysis is on the constitution of the self through the discourse of sex. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault scrutinises the chosen episteme by creating ruptures into the Western attitude to crime and punishment from the earliest recorded time. The essential Foucaultian method is to analyse specific mechanisms and build little by little, strategic knowledge.

Talking of his method of inquiry, Foucault says that his books are not treatises in philosophy or studies in history; at most, they are philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems. He is a great experimenter for whom an experience is something that one comes out of transformed. He always seeks new theoretical footholds for exploring the fundamental forms of experience. Nietzsche was the philosopher who shaped his thinking and enabled him to free himself from the dominant influences in his university training - Hegel and phenomenology. It is to Nietzsche he owes his anti-metaphysical, anti-ontological stance. In an important interview, Foucault says his role has always been to raise questions in an effective way and with the greatest possible rigour, complexity and difficulty that no easy solution can spring suddenly from some reformist. The problems he poses on crime, madness, sex are those that concern us in our everyday life but which cannot be resolved easily once and for all. He would rather facilitate social projects and would participate in these projects without delegating responsibilities to any specialist. He would never dictate how things should be.

Foucault's oeuvre is immense. He has traversed a vast and wide range of subjects. To the vocabulary of the discipline of literary criticism and the history of ideas he has introduced new concepts capable of drawing out fresh insights. Power furnishes ample evidence to assert that Foucault has studied the workings of power right from the earliest times in recorded history. It is true that sometimes he resorts to untested assertions on social problems as a whole, dismisses events that have had sure impacts on countries and peoples. Some interviews are of topical interest and hence get dated: the views expressed in them have not much of relevance for us now. All the same, his prodigious learning and implacable erudition are felt in every page of Power. In the words of Paul Rabinow, "there is a kind of intellectual integrity which, while vigorously opposing justifications of one's action in terms of religion, law, science, or philosophical grounding, nevertheless seeks to produce a new ethical form of life which foregrounds imagination, lucidity, humour, disciplined thought and practical wisdom". It is to this world of intellectual integrity would Michel Paul Foucault lead us ever so often.

The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others, Vol. 3. The Penguin Press, 2001, £25.

The writer is former Head, Department of English, Madras University.

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