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Michel Foucault: A brief introduction to major Foucaultian themes.

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Level 7 Philosophies of Research 2

Picture cited at UCL Philosophy society

‘MICHEL FOUCAULT: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO

MAJOR FOUCAULTIAN THEMES

Nancy Ali

Nancy Ali, PhD student, faculty of Health and wellbeing, Sheffield Hallam University. Postgraduate Research Centre,
Chestnut court, collegiate crescent, Sheffield, S10 2BP. Email: nancy.ali@student.shu.ac.uk

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Index:

Title Page
Introduction 3
Theme 1: Power/Knowledge and Truth 4-7
Theme 2: Subjectivity 7-10
Theme 3: Technologies of the Self and Ethics 10-12
Critique 13-14
Conclusion 15
References 16-21

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1. Introduction:

“Do not ask who I am…” (Foucault 1972, p17).

The first words are accorded to Foucault as he spares us the morality of scrutinizing into who he

was, so we can explore who we think we are in the labyrinth of his writings. Yet the intellectual

community refused to spare Foucault such morality; weaving several stories about who he was

(Hughes 1988).

Some stories depict him as an exceptional thinker and a major figure in every humanistic discipline

with immense posthumous fame (Smith 1972). Other stories see him as the tormented

homosexual who attempted suicide at the Ecole Normale, but survived to lead a controversial life

of remarkable intellectual success and limit experiences with drugs and sadomasochism; a

spectacular journey that ended with an equally controversial death from AIDS (Eribon 1989).

None such stories are entirely false (Duncker 2006), thereby their mutual truths impede the

construction of a single narrative about Foucault; which is what he wanted (Blanchot 1986). He

lived, thought and wrote to escape the shackles of fixed identities; “to become someone else than

you were in the beginning” (Foucault 1988b, p9).

It can be said that a vast dimension of Foucault’s legacy lies in his endeavors to question what

we know, how we know it, who produced knowledge and how (Barette 1991). The next section

will elaborate on such major themes of Foucauldian work.

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2.1. Theme 1: Power/Knowledge and Truth:

In Foucault’s essay ‘Prison Talk’ he makes a strong link between power and knowledge; arguing

that “it is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge

not to engender power” (Foucault 1980a, p52).

There are multiple ideas outlined here; particularly the understanding that power is exercised, not

owned by anyone, it does not manifest itself in apparent ways but rather as an ephemeral entity

that manages its way into our imaginations and acts to discipline our actions (Foucault et al. 1988,

2003 and 2010). For instance, power in a workplace does not merely flow from the top-down; on

the contrary it circulates in a relational fashion through organizational practices. These practices

resemble a grid, encouraging certain modes of thinking and behaving while inhibiting others (Hall

2001).

Similarly in everyday social interactions, power is covert and dispersed making it difficult to identify

what is power, who is in charge, what are they trying to achieve and how (Foucault 1970 and

1983). Therefore, Foucault asks us to question why certain metanarratives are being put across

as self-evident, what kind of truths are they consolidating and why; because there are no

‘innocent’ knowledges (Rainbow 1994). He urges us to examine our role in reproducing given

practices and discourses, whereas power is most effectively exercised when all parties willingly

accept and perpetuate what is laid down by power (Mills 2001).

These understandings make Foucault’s account of power more intricate and robust than most

accounts by Dahl, Bachrach, Baratz, and Lukes (Clegg 1993, Lukes 2004). Their causal

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explanation of power as A affects the actions or interests of B, or prevents the actions of B through

non-decision, may be too linear and simplistic to enable a critical analysis of the omnipresence

and invisibility of power (Gohler 2009).

It is also embedded in Foucault’s former quote that the relationship between power and

knowledge is recursive; hence knowledge production is a claim for power, while imbalances in

power dynamics create opportunities for the generation and dissemination of knowledges (Mills

2003). In Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault discusses the interplay

between power and knowledge within the context of biomedicine (Foucault 1988a, Midelfort

1995).

He explains that in the mid-seventeenth, the mad, the criminal and the idle were excluded from

the society in houses of confinement that were previously occupied by lepers; to avoid disrupting

public order and the industrial values of modesty, morality and productivity (Foucault 1988b).

Institutionalizing these values was essential to make people useful and also there was a need to

protect people from the disease and evil lurking through the permeable walls of asylums (Sass

1994). These two factors structured the field of possibilities that made physicians in charge of

asylums (Scull 2015).

Although biomedicine had limited knowledge of madness at that time, doctors assumed authority

based on the power invested in them as people of wisdom and virtue (Lash 1984). Once in control,

doctors then used the dual technologies of confinement and surveillance to reconstitute the

confined as subjects of bio-power and objects of new knowledges called psychiatry and

psychoanalysis (Connor 1982).

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These new knowledges further contributed to the rise of bio-power because doctors monopolized

the knowledge of reason which opened more possibilities for them to produce and normalize

particular exclusionary discourses of madness and deviance that constructed the society’s

understanding of these constructs (Rose 2009). Nonetheless they become expert judges in courts

because they can differentiate insanity from crime based on sound bodies of knowledge; to then

excuse the mad and protect the society from offenders (Clarke 2010).

However, the victory of modern scientific reason over religious/mystic explanations of madness

as devilish, symbolizes neither a more ethical perception of the mad nor an evolution of our

thinking (Foucault 1977a). It rather denotes a change of systems of thought brought about by

modern institutions including science and law that gained power over the church and monarchy

(Dreyfus and Rainbow 2014). By the eighteenth century we stopped interpreting the world in terms

of angels and demons because we became under the influence of the new episteme of reason

and unreason (Merguior 1985).

De Sousa Santos, amongst others, agrees with Foucault on the argument that the prevailing

episteme constitutes our ‘sole criteria of truth and aesthetic quality’ (De Sousa Santos 2006, p16).

For instance, consider how illogical it would be to exonerate a convict because they are under a

demonic disposition, compared to a scientifically-proved mental derangement. It may be

unthinkable, even laughable, in today’s western world although it may be possible in other parts

of the world which have a different ‘regime of truth’ that legitimizes discourses of possession as

factual (Brante 2010, Foucault 1972 and 2010).

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Foucault and Certeau’s suggest that truth, like knowledge, is tied to power (Frijhoff 1999), so for

many Western countries (and increasingly elsewhere), scientific institutions and discourses are

hailed as the personification of truth (Colebrook 2001). However, Foucault affirms that the

objectivity of science does not mean it is neutral/value-free because the biasing corporeality and

agenda of knowledge producers cannot be distilled from the conditions in which knowledge was

manufactured (Rouse 2005). This overthrows positivistic, rational and empiricist views of scientific

knowledge as objective, complete and timeless ‘Truth’; for there is no truth, there are only claims

of truth (Gordon 1980).

2.2. Theme 2: Subjectivity.

In Foucault’s early work we can sense an affiliation with Nietzsche’s idea that ‘the author is dead’

suggesting that people are not free agents; instead their thoughts and actions are orchestrated

for them (Mahon 1992). Foucault started by exploring how knowledge-producing institutions

including the media and education, have the power to define what it means to be a normal person

(Foucault 1984a). They then utilize examination and differentiation technologies to label us as

subjects if we conform to what is accepted as normal under the episteme of our time and place

(Gutting 2005).

Those who fail to meet the conditions defined as normal are considered ‘not quite subjects’

(Foucault 1982). They are often excluded from the society in prisons (e.g. 1 in 3 black transgender

females in America have been incarcerated at least once), or mental institutions (e.g. being gay

is considered a type of neurosis in Egypt), or in poverty (e.g. the majority of middle-aged female

employees earn less than the minimum wage in the UK).

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Such exclusionary/disciplinary practices force us to comply with the models normalized by our

culture to gain the status ascribed to being normal (Simon 1998). Consequently, we feel that we

are being watched and judged so we bring ourselves in check to fit-in the identity that is made

available for us; we become good citizens, we become docile bodies (Foucault 1986b, Hoskin

1979).

Being aware of the ‘gaze’ the subject becomes the “principle of his own subjection”; we

internalizing cultural and institutional values because we take these to be the norm and

accordingly we build our personal Panopticon and CCTV our conduct (Foucault 1977b and 1979).

Well, if this method of control sounds less than total domination that is because we come to

believe that it is our responsibility to discipline ourselves under the effect of disciplinary power

(Lash 2007).

Despite thinking that we can act freely, we still opt for constraining our behavior because we

recognize what is expected of us and believe that our happiness lies in meeting these

expectations (McLaughlin 1972). This explains how power operates as an anonymous force,

inciting us to think and function in ways that make it difficult, even unthinkable, for us to do

otherwise (Grosz 1990).

But it also shows that power can act as a positive force because it enables us to exercise control

over ourselves (Allen 2002). For instance, we automatically queue in a supermarket although

there is no hand of power pushing us into the line, only our acknowledgement that we function

within a framework of choices structured by norms and values.

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Still we can have the final decision if we choose to question the consequences of our actions and

what structures and practices they perpetuate for “people know what they do, frequently they

know why they do what they; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (Foucault 1964,

p187). Therefore, Foucault does not propose that we are puppets, instead he thinks that we are

capable of actively constituting and negotiating our subjectivities (Foucault 2012).

In the Order of Things he examined the conditions by which ‘man’ became an object of knowledge

in sociology, through an archeological approach which analyzed the different ways in which

selfhood has been conceptualized along history; while in the History of Sexuality he delved into

how subjects constitute themselves (Foucault 1995 and 2005). By examining various productions

of subjectivities (the pervert, the old or insane), Foucault makes the following propositions about

the subject:

1- The subject is neither dead nor natural; it is historically constituted.

2- The subject constitutes itself; se constitute lui- même.

3- Subjectivity has a reality that is ontologically distinct from the body but it is a form not a

substance.

4- Finally, the subject is constituted through techniques and practices.

Both Kant and Foucault believed that the subject actively constitutes itself (McLaren 2012). Kant

thinks that self-constitution always produces the same thing (Korsgaard 1999). However,

Foucault’s radical historicism does not believe that subjectivity has a universally fixed content

because subjectivity varies as the techniques of subjectivation change over time as influenced by

social structures, dominant discourses and power/knowledge dynamics (Simons and

Masschelein 2010).

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He was less interested in the ontological origins of the subject although he discussed, in The

Hermeneutics of the Subject, the question posed in Plato’s Alcibiades of what the self is (Besley

and Peters 2007, Foucault 2002 and 2005). Foucault suggested that the answer to this question

lies in differentiating the doer from the actions they undertake; it “involves drawing the dividing

line within a spoken action that will make it possible to isolate and distinguish the subject of the

action from the set of elements (words, sounds etc.) that constitute the action itself” (Foucault

1980, p54).

The separation between actor and action may sound rather Cartesian as it speaks to the division

drawn by Descartes between the body and soul; although Plato mentioned such separation

perhaps two millennia before Descartes (Descartes and Cottingham 1996). Like most

contemporary philosophers, Foucault does not agree because he thinks that the subject is not a

substance (Foucault 1979).

If the subject is not a substance like the soul, then the reality of the subject that Foucault proposes

could be that of a form of matter, which means that subjectivation is a process of shaping what is

already there instead of the subject producing itself out of nowhere (Prado 1992). He

hypothesizes that subjectivity is something material, constituted by what it is and what it is not

and based on a relative ontological division between itself and the body (Kelly 2013). So, the

subject can possess or lack self-identity and has the capacity to change which gives it a distance

from itself to (re)constitute itself through techniques that Foucault calls technologies of the self

(Balibar 1994).

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2.3. Theme 3: Technologies of the Self and Ethics.

One aspect in which the subject is not entirely self-creating, is in its use of techniques and models

that are simultaneously suggested and imposed on it by its own culture to constitute itself (Youdell

2006). These models are not a direct product of the subject’s social role; owing to the complex

ethical dimension of subjectivation (Veyne 1997).

Foucault perceived ethics as “the elaboration of a form of relation to self that enables an individual

to fashion himself into a subject of ethical conduct” (Foucault 1985, p251). This perception seems

to draw on the ancient Greek understanding of ethics as character (Foucault 1984b). Ethics as

character is far more intricate than the mainstream conception of ethics as what is right; because

it defines ethics a type of relationship we should have with ourselves, rapport à soi (Broadie 1991).

According to the French intellectual ethics “determines how the individual is supposed to

constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions” (Foucault 1997, p263). Therefore, ethical

self-constitution occurs in relation to moral codes or values that Foucault argues are socially

constructed, while ethics understands itself to represent historically universal truths (Foucault

1977).

He admires ethical ethos of self-constitution in ancient Greece which indicated that all practices

should aim at self-care or epimeleia heautou (Porter 2005). He deems it ethical and insists that it

was not a call for self-indulgence because it emphasized self-mastery through restraint and taking

care of our relationships with others (Foucault 1988c). However, with the arrival of Christianity

self-care was suppressed and overthrown by a concern for self-salvation; which may be the

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reason why today self-care may have selfish connotations, thus may sound to us like the opposite

of being an ethical subject (Foucault 1987).

Greek history also shows that the ethical technology of self-care was coupled with another

technology that is self-knowledge (Foucault 1988c). Unlike self-care, the duty to know one’s self

became more powerful with time whereas the Christian practice of confession became widely

secularized in the modern Western world as a technique of understanding one’s self to better

one’s self (Markula-Denison and Pringle 2007). A classic example of this are the

confessions/stories we hear on the Dr Phill or Opera Winfrey shows; where people are

encouraged to unpack their subjectivities are so they can act on it.

Here Foucault announces that we cannot know the truth about ourselves whereas there is no

truth to find out, merely a set of practices that make up the self (Foucault 1986a). The subject

thus does not emerge naturally in society because we are produced through games of truth and

power/knowledge relations (Hutton 1999). The absence of any final guarantor of truth inevitably

ties our subjectivities to the practice of ethics as techniques of resisting power and building a

moral, conscious and beautiful self (Gardiner 1996).

Nietzsche, Foucault and several contemporary thinkers acknowledge that we cannot escape

social structures, regulatory institutions and the normalizing discourses in which we are

constituted (Staten 2004). Yet we can identify and understand some of them and discover self-

care tactics to fashion ourselves in ethical ways that maximize the aesthetics of our existence

(Foucault 1998a and b).

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In conclusion, although Foucault does not accept the idea of a true self; he insists that the author

just refuses to die (Foucault 1996). We all have the capacity to invent ourselves and our lives like

art work to enjoy our beautiful existence as better fitted for living with the self and others (Huijer

1999).

3. Critique:

Much of the criticism directed towards Foucault argues that he conceptualizes subjects as dupes

of dominant social groups, never comprehending what they do thus unable to resist the power of

state, ruling class, capitalism or other institutions (Danaher, Schirato and Webb 2000). However,

the discussion around power/knowledge and subjectivity presented in this essay shows that

Foucault’s ideas are neither agent proof nor imply the stability of structures and power relations;

instead he problematizes the challenges involved in constituting our subjectivities and resisting

power (Foucault 1982).

Moreover, there can be articulations between Foucault’s ideas and the more interpretative

schools of thought despite apparent departures (Kincheloe 1997). Some Foucaultian

assumptions about selfhood can be in line with constructivist and interactionist beliefs because

all agree that there is no true genesis of the self, only continuous reconstitution, which makes the

self a societal product (Al-Amoudi 2007).

Yet departures exist whereas interpretative philosophical approaches believe that social agents

enact their particular realities and endow them with meanings (Hammersley 1993). Foucault does

not dismiss our ability to be creative/original or to experience things differently; but he draws

attention to the difficulties involved in such tasks under the power of epistemic suppositions,

salient discourses and self-evident knowledges (Wilkin 1999).

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Foucault conceptualizes epistemes as products of power/knowledge struggles which set the

principles of allocating meanings and values to constructs and relate them to one another

(Antoniades 2003). Consequently, epistemes regulate our thoughts by determining what we can

know, how we can know and how to interpret things; which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for

most subjects to think outside their epistemic reach (Rawlinson 1987).

Furthermore, epistemic principles tend to be taken for granted because they formulate the

grounds upon which we base everything thereby function subconsciously which makes it difficult

for us to question (Burrell 1988). Certeau (1998) explains the challenge in being aware of our

episteme through cartoons, where a characters like Tom and Jerry can stride on thin air as long

as they do not look down to realize that they are not on firm ground. This analogy highlights the

recursive effects of power and knowledge production on structuring our subjectivities and the

world as we know it (McHoul and Grace 1993).

Several thinkers then criticize Foucault for not dedicating enough attention to the ways by which

subjects can resist power (Mahon 1992). But his writings on aesthetics of existence suggest such

ways by utilizing ethical technologies of subjectivation which enable us to explore our ideas, probe

our feelings and question the repercussions of our actions so we can identify ways of being that

suit us best (Foucault and Bernauer 1981).

Nonetheless, he was criticized for his perception of all knowledges as products of power struggles

where one explanation triumphs over the other, not simply because it is ‘True’ but because of a

field of political, economic and/or cultural reasons making it possible for a particular explanation

to win (Foucault 1984). However, this perception is in itself liberating because it renders all

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knowledges as local, temporary and fallible; thereby creating possibilities for multiple, co-existing,

complementary or contesting knowledges and subjectivities (Richardson 1996).

4. Conclusion:

Despite finding great value in Foucaultian insights, the intellectual community continues to take

great pains at accusing him of historical inaccuracies, being too nihilistic or being the ‘enfant

terrible of structuralism’. The author of this paper chooses to think about Foucault’s ideas in the

manner he suggested; as tentative and sensitizing rather than law-abiding theories. She

encountered some vagueness in his writings about the evolution of power in modern states; he

explains that it was formed by individuals but does not mention by whom and more importantly

who was excluded from this creation. Perhaps she will discover the answer to these questions by

digging more into Foucault’s work.

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