Foucault

162 Pages·10.561 MB·English

by  Robert Nola, Keith Windschuttle, Joseph Margolis, Barry Hindess, Robert Wicks

FOUCAULT
Edited by
ROBERT NOLA
FRANK CASS
LONDON • PORTLAND, OR
First published in 1998 in Great Britain by
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liford, Essex IG2 7HH, England
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Copyright © 1998 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Foucault
1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984
I. Nola, Robert
194
ISBN 0 7146 4915 5 (cloth)
ISBN 0 7146 4469 2 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
,,
'
Foutault I edited by Robert Nola.
p. cm.
Iilduaes'tsibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-4915-5 (hbk). - ISBN 0-7146-4469-2 (pbk.)
1. Foucault, Michel. I. Nola, Robert.
B2430.F724F67 1998 98-21412
194-dc21 CIP
This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on 'Foucault' of
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, (ISSN 1369-8230)
1/2 (Summer 1998) published by Frank Casso
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher of this book.
Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wilts.
Contents
Introduction Robert Nola 1
Foucault as Historian Keith Windschuttle 5
Foucault's Problematic Joseph Margolis 36
Knowledge and Political Reason Barry Hindess 63
Foucault and the Possibility of
Historical Transcendence Robert Wicks 85
Knowledge, Discourse, Power and
Genealogy in Foucault Robert Nola 109
Notes on Contributors 155
Index 157
Introduction
The writings of Michel Foucault (1926-84) have influenced diverse
fields such as literary and cultural studies, the history of ideas and
science, and disciplines such as sociology, history, law, politics and
philosophy. His areas of investigation have been equally diverse and
include: our practices concerning sexuality and more generally
'technologies' of the self; our institutions, such as asylums or prisons;
the history of these practices and institutions from ancient Greece to
modern times; and lastly theoretical matters, such as the nature of the
self, power, politics, discourse and knowledge. The secondary
literature on Foucault has grown so fast that a recent author! entitled
the Preface to his book 'Not Another Book on Foucault'! The same
might be said of even a special issue of a journal.
Foucault's writings have also excited commentary ranging from
the hagiographical to the sternly dismissive. In the absence of a
current consensus, it befits a journal with the word 'critical' in its title
to engage in the task of critical evaluation. Such an evaluation raises
a host of questions from the historical to the philosophical. How
correct is Foucault as a historian of our culture? What is the alleged
connection between power and knowledge? Is Foucault right about
the connections between power and knowledge within liberal
societies? Is there something inconsistent about Foucault's strongly
historicist stance and the seemingly more objectivist transhistorical
position he often seems to adopt?
How might one begin to answer these questions given that
Foucault holds that there are no fixed norms of truth, knowledge and
objectivity, but merely 'regimes' or 'games' of 'truth'? Should we
conclude that there are simply 'readings' of Foucault between which
no consensus need be found or ought to be sought? Would a positive
answer to the last question merely evade the hard problems that
Foucault's work raises? These are urgent questions to raise and
answer given the wide range, complexity and sometimes bewildering
obscurity of Foucault's work. Lastly, even before the dust settles over
the controversies raised by these questions, how do historians of
ideas situate Foucault's work in the context of other twentieth-
2 FOUCAULT
century writers, ranging from philosophers such as Heidegger or
Kuhn to sociologists such as Goffman or historians of Greek culture
such as Dover?
The papers in this collection attempt to answer only aspects of the
above questions. Though the papers range over all of Foucault's
works, their main focus is on themes of objectivity, power and
knowledge. Moreover, it has been left to each author to specify the
extent, and kind, of critique their paper provides of Foucault's
writings, whether they ultimately support, refine or reject his views.
This is an important matter because the very possibility of a critical
stance is a recurring theme in all of Foucault's works, turning as it
does on his views about truth and reason in relation to power and
government.
Keith Windschuttle challenges Foucault the historian. In
considering the 'reason-madness nexus', Foucault alleges that there
was a change in our attitude toward the mad in the transition to the
Enlightenment, during which 'the great confinement' of the mad first
occurred. In contrast, Windschuttle argues that historians have
shown that while the great confinement did occur, it was after the
French Revolution, which marks the emergence of the modern era
and the end of the Enlightenment. In the case of punishment,
legislation directed against 'the body' rather than 'the soul' increased
rather than declined at the end of the Enlightenment and the
beginning of the modern era with an increase in the number of
capital offences. Again, Windschuttle argues that there is a lack of fit
between the development of sciences such as psychiatry and
criminology and changes in the way we dealt with criminals and the
insane. Lastly, Windschuttle criticises the account of homosexuality
in ancient Greece that Foucault gives in his final works. He argues,
following the research of the classicist Thornton, that Foucault has
relied on too narrow a selection of source material concerning the
extent of homosexuality in, and its endorsement by, ancient Greek
society. Windschuttle presents a challenge to Foucault's endorsement
of Nietzsche's 'effective history' with its 'affirmation of knowledge as
perspective', by contrasting it with the practice of traditional
objective history.
Joseph Margolis' discussion also ranges over Foucault's entire
span of writing. It emphasises how Foucault's efforts at the end of his
INTRODUCTION 3
career to explore the 'technologies of the self' bear on the master
themes of his entire work, particularly archaeology, genealogy,
historicity, and problematic. Margolis finds Foucault's analysis of the
human self or subject particularly elusive. He considers the use of
Althusser's version of structuralism in this context, but notes the
general sense in which Foucault has failed to formulate a rounded
theory of the self. The relevance of this lacuna is examined,
particularly with respect to Foucault's occasional explicitness on
moral issues and, at the same time, his disinclination in the later
works to restore any sort of essentialism.
Barry Hindess argues that Foucault's earlier 'power/knowledge'
perspective presents the social sciences as normalising technologies,
while his later governmentality perspective offers a more
differentiated account. This suggests that the development of a liberal
rationality of government is responsible both for the discovery of
society as a reality independent of government and for the emergence
of the sciences which aim to study its workings. Hindess argues that
Foucault's treatment of this issue presents too direct a set of
connections between liberalism and this conception of society. In
contrast, Hindess proposes an alternative account of relations
between liberal government and knowledge of various domains of
social interaction.
Robert Wicks's essay explores the allegation, by Habermas among
others, of an inherent self-referential inconsistency in Foucault's
method of genealogical critique by considering the extent to which a
transhistorical standpoint is implicit within Foucault's manifestly
historically grounded outlook. He argues that Foucault's account of
freedom implicitly recognises a transhistorical perspective, and shows
that if Foucault's conception of 'power/knowledge' is understood as
an expression of 'concrete thinking', which has its history in Berkeley
and Hegel, then Foucault can maintain consistently that all
knowledge, as it exists in a concrete social situation, must arise within
the context of power, while assuming that there is a legitimate vision
of how a less oppressive society ought to be.
Robert Nola argues that Foucault links power to knowledge and
discourse in such a way that he appears to challenge traditional
theories of knowledge, either bypassing their concerns or proposing
a rival genealogy of knowledge and discourse. Despite its radical
4 FOllCAll LT
character, it is argued that Foucault's theory not only needs notions
of traditional epistemology, but also, by its standards, is found
wanting. Foucault's epistemic notions are linked to his theory of
discourse. The main part of the paper examines Foucault's theory of
discourse and its accompanying account of rules for the formation of
objects, highlighting the anti-realist constructivism to which both are
committed. It is shown that the theory bears many similarities to the
views of Kuhn and Feyerabend concerning incommensurability.
However, its account of the 'objects' of a discourse is bizarre and this,
in turn, vitiates any prospects of its providing a rival to traditional
epistemology in the form of a 'genealogy of knowledge'.
ROBERT NOLA
Editor
1. Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique (London: Verso, 1995).
Foucault as Historian
KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE
In 1966, Michel Foucault attracted a great deal of academic attention
by coining the phrase 'the death of man'. His obvious allusion to
Nietzsche's well-known proclamation of the end of religion in the
phrase 'the death of God' drew a considerable notoriety to himself
and to the then burgeoning school of 'anti-humanism'. By 'the death
of man', Foucault wrote in his book The Order of Things, he meant
the end of the humanist concepts of mafias a creature ruled by reason
and of history as a phenomenon governed by the decisions of
powerful individuals. Instead,: history was a process without a:
I
subject. Not only did men not make their own history, but the
concept of 'man' itself, he argued, was passe. Foucault shared this
thesis with other anti-humanist thinkers of the time, including the
Annales school of French historians, all of whom regarded history as
being driven by forces far more powerful than those of any
individual. i Anti-humanism's) main proposition was that the
autonomy of the individual s~bject was an illusion. The humanist
tradition had been wrong to assign the central roles of human affairs
to the conscious mind and free will. Instead, some strands of anti
humanism claimed that human behaviour and thought were
dominated by the unconscious, and hence humanists should abandon
their assumption that purposive behaviour was consciously directed.
Others, like the Annales school, held that the impersonal forces of
geography and demography\governed the destiny of mankind.
At the same time, Foucault believed the historian could not avoid
the role of political activist. All knowledge 'exuded power, he insisted,
so the knowledge produced by the historian must serve political ends
of one kind or another. Most historians, he claimed, were
traditionalists who supported the established regime. However, he
This paper is an adaptation of sections of the author's book The Killing of History, while
other material is new.
6 FOUCAULT
also identified 'the new historian', someone who could help foster an
'insurrection of subjugated knowledges' opposed to what he called
'the centralising powers which are linked to the institution and
functioning of an organised scientific discourse within a society such
as ours'.2 In the 1970s, Foucault claimed this insurrection was being
led by outcast groups struggling against authority, especially
psychiatric patients and prisoners. At the time he proclaimed these
ideas, Foucault himself was engaged in the radical prison activist
movement, attending meetings and offering advice. He argued that
the 'local knowledges' of groups such as prisoners were crude
responses to their immediate situation. They lacked any historical
knowledge of predecessors who might have emulated their deeds. So
their demands needed to be supplemented by the interpretations of a
sympathetic academic like himself (a person he defined as 'the
specific intellectual'), thereby uniting 'erudite, historical knowledges'
with the 'disqualified knowledges' of the outcasts. This union would
produce 'subjugated knowledge' or a 'historical knowledge of
struggles' that was formidable enough to challenge the power of
those sciences which sided with authority.3
In his 1971 article, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy and History', Foucault
declared the need to distinguish between 'effective history' (a term of
Nietzsche's) and traditional history.4 He said that the aim of
traditional history) to discover(a pattern or a rational sequence of
events in the past is impossible because there is nothing constant or
universal in either human nature or human consciousness. Different
historic eras cannot relate to one another and a new era is not born
within and nurtured by its predecessor. A new era (or episteme or
'discursive formation', to use his earlier terminology) simply appears
in a way that cannot be explained. History does not display any
pattern of evolution, he says, because the past is nothing more than
a series of discontinuities or unconnected developments:
'Effective history}idiffers from traditional history in being without
constants ... Nothing in man - not even his body - is sufficiently
stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding
other men. The traditional devices for constructing a
comprehensive view of history and retracing the past as a patient
and continuous development must be systematically dismantled.
I