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December 17, 2000
Deconstructing the System
In the final volume of his writings, Foucault explores the nature of power.
Related LinksFeatured Author: Michel Foucault First Chapter: 'Power'
By EDWARD W. SAID
POWER
Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three.
By Michel Foucault.
Edited by James D. Faubion.
Translated by Robert Hurley and others.
484 pp. New York:
The New Press. $30.
hen he died of AIDS in 1984 Michel Foucault was 57, perhaps the most celebrated public intellectual in Europe and extremely well known elsewhere. He had been an itinerant professor of philosophy in places like Tunis, Uppsala and Warsaw until 1970, when he gained one of the chairs at the Collège de France, the most sought-after and elite teaching positions in the country. Though without registered or degree-seeking students, the Collège is where 50 professors lecture formally to anyone who wants to listen without questions or discussion. Although his first book, ''Madness and Civilization,'' has still never been fully translated into English (only an abridgment), Foucault has benefited from an extraordinarily attentive audience of academic readers in the United States for whom the long, unbroken succession of his many books has been a resource of quite seminal theoretical and historical importance.
In such works as ''The Order of Things,'' ''The Archeology of Knowledge,'' ''Discipline and Punish'' and ''The History of Sexuality,'' plus several volumes of essays and interviews, Foucault propounded fascinating, highly original views about such matters as the history of systems of thought, delinquency, discipline and confinement, in addition to introducing into the vocabulary of history, philosophy and literary criticism such concepts as discourse, statement, episteme, genealogy and archaeology, each of them bristling with complexity and contradiction such as few of his imitators and disciples have ever mastered or completely understood.
Of Foucault's work it is, I think, true that it leaves no reader untouched or unchanged for two main reasons. One, because, as he has said, each book was an experience for him of being enmeshed, imprisoned in ''limit-experiences'' like madness, death and crime, and also of trying rationally to understand ''this involvement of oneself'' in those difficult situations. Second, his books were written ''in a series: the first one leaves open problems on which the second depends for support while calling for a third. . . . They are interwoven and overlapping.'' Even those readers in whom he has produced a distaste that goes as far as revulsion will also feel that his urgency of argument is so great as to have made a lasting impression, for better or for worse.
While it is probably too early to say that Foucault is as radical and strong a figure as Nietzsche, the revolutionary German philosopher is the writer closest to him. During much of his career, Foucault studied, commented on and took up Nietzsche with a rare affinity of spirit. ''Power'' contains a long essay, ''Truth and Juridical Forms,'' whose best section is also a remarkable meditation on Nietzsche's thought.
This volume is the latest addition to the list of Foucault's posthumous writings to appear in average (in some cases somewhat below average) English translation. Shortly after his death, two of Foucault's closest friends collected all his miscellaneous shorter works in four large volumes that were published by Gallimard as ''Dits et Écrits, 1954-1988.'' Three English-language volumes have been selected and compiled from the Gallimard edition. They have been arranged, according to the series' editor, the Berkeley anthropology professor Paul Rabinow, quoting Foucault, as follows: Volume I, ''Ethics,'' about ''the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject,'' that is, a self or ego; Volume II, ''Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology,'' ''organized around Foucault's analysis of 'the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of the sciences' ''; and now ''Power,'' about ''the objectivizing of the subject in dividing practices,'' or, Rabinow adds, ''power relations.'' I would guess that ''dividing practices'' means the way by which, for instance, psychology is distinguished or divided from biology as a science, and the way the thinking ego or individual scientist in one case is a different persona in different situations.
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Featured Author: Michel Foucault
To the untutored reader even the introductory notes to this collection, while somewhat helpful, require decoding, since they depend on familiarity with a whole world of philosophical investigation inherited and assumed by Foucault. Take ''the subject.'' Classical European philosophy from Descartes to Kant had supposed that an objectively stable and sovereign ego (as in ''cogito ergo sum'') was both the source and basis for all knowledge. Foucault's work not only disputes this but also shows how the subject is a construction laboriously put together over time, and one very liable to be a passing historical phenomenon replaced in the modern age by transhistorical impersonal forces, like the capital of Marx or the unconscious of Freud or the will of Nietzsche. Each of these explanatory forces can be shown to have a ''genealogy'' whose ''archaeology'' Foucault's histories provide. Foucault's studies furnish the evidence for this dismantling, in addition to showing how various powerful social institutions like the church, the public health and medical professions, the law and the police, as well as the processes of learning themselves, actually have built and administer the power that rules the modern Western state. For him, what matters is not the individual writer or philosopher but an impersonal, continuing activity he calls discourse, with its rules of formation and possibility. Those rules mean that users of the discourse must have qualifications and academic accreditation -- plus a specialized technical knowledge -- that not just anyone can either possess or provide.
Thus, to contribute to early-18th-century medical discourse one would have had to think in very specific, even confining terms and be able to form statements according to prescribed lines, rather than freely making direct and immediate observations that correspond to a patient's actual physical malady. Foucault's interesting idea is that ''health'' and ''disease'' are never stable states, or matters of truth and reality, but are always constructed to suit the type of medical ''gaze'' that the doctor has, whether that is therapeutic, punitive, providential or charitable.
Truth is not a fixed absolute, Foucault says provocatively, but an effect of the scientific discourse, which sets up a working, albeit contingent, distinction between true and false. And all of that depends on how the socially constructed networks of hospitals, clinics, laboratories, medical schools and governmental administrations function together at various historical moments, which Foucault's work strives painstakingly to describe and demystify, moment by moment, step by step. The net result is nothing less than a history of truth seen, in the final analysis, as an art of government.
It is quite evident from this brief summary that Foucault's interest in such things as penology or mental illness or even sciences like philology and economic theory can be traced back to his lifelong fascination with confinement, punishment and the micromanagement of details by an at times insinuating, at other times dominating power. ''Power'' is full of essays and interviews that show in often compelling and ingenious terms the way a Renaissance sovereign personality like the king or cardinal slowly disappears, in order to reappear as the legal minutiae of a penal code administered by impersonal committees, theoreticians of surveillance and punishment like Jeremy Bentham or guilds of scholars and experts who guard their ''fields'' with jealous alertness against intruders. Whereas Louis XV had a would-be regicide slowly tortured to death before his impassive gaze, the modern wielders of power are scattered along many strands of the social fabric, invisible, impersonal, but just as cruel when they deal with transgressors and delinquents. No one more than Foucault has studied the workings of these systems of power, and the way in which we have all become ''governable.'' No one more than he has understood the dangers posed to the system by renegades and rebels like Sade, Nietzsche, Mallarme and other great transgressive artists.
There are many problems and questions that come to mind as one reads Foucault, but one thing is never in doubt: he was a prodigious researcher, a man driven by what he once called ''relentless erudition.'' Perhaps the most riveting extract in ''Power'' is ''Lives of Infamous Men,'' a short introduction he wrote to a collection of early-18th-century records of internment (police blotter entries most likely), about quasi-anonymous men and women convicted of particularly horrible crimes -- infanticide, cannibalism, incest, dismemberment and the like. These minimal biographies, he says, are ''singular lives, transformed into strange poems through who knows what twists of fate -- this is what I decided to gather into a kind of herbarium.'' In other words, they are gems gathered by him from the leavings or excess of his bibliophilia. These not-quite-anonymous people ''were able to leave traces -- brief, incisive, often enigmatic -- only at the point of their instantaneous contact with power,'' a convergence that produced a ''blend of dark stubbornness and rascality . . . lives whose disarray and relentless energy one senses beneath the stone-smooth words.'' Just as their memorialist Foucault displays remarkable literary flair, responding brilliantly to the grisly semi-secrecy of their lives, their macabre presence on the fringes of society, simultaneously menacing and gripping.
"French intellectual life is a scenario. It has its stars and histrionic polemics, its claque and fiascoes. It is susceptible, to a degree remarkable in a society so obviously literate and ironic, to sudden gusts of lunatic fashion. A Sartre dominates, to be followed by Levi-Strauss; the new master is soon fusilladed by self-proclaimed 'Maoist-structuralists.' The almost impenetrable soliloquies on semantics and psychoanalysis of Jaques Lacan pack their full houses. Now the mandarin of the hour is Michel Foucault.
FROM THE ARCHIVES ". . . an honest first reading produces an almost intolerable sense of verbosity, arrogance and obscure platitude. Page after page could be the rhetoric of a somewhat weary sybil indulging in free association. Recourse to the French text shows that this is not a matter of awkward translation. . . .
"One asks these questions because Foucault's claims are sweeping, and because, one supposes, he would wish to be read seriously or not at all. His appeal, moreover, to contemporaries of exceptional intelligence both at home and in England (this book appears in a series edited by R. D. Laing) is undeniable. This is no confidence trick. Something of originality and, perhaps, of very real importance, is being argued in these often rebarbative pages."
-- George Steiner's review of "The Order of Things," (Febr. 28, 1971)
It is that exercise of imagination focused on the marginal and shadowy, harnessed to a formidably ascetic work ethic, that so distinguished Foucault as a philosopher and historian. I saw him lecture once at the Collège de France in the early spring of 1978, when he addressed a very large and quite motley crowd drawn from the beau monde all the way through the academic ranks down to the clochards (or tramps) who had wandered in for shelter. Dressed in a white shirt buttoned to the very top, tieless and in a black suit, his completely bald (perhaps shaven) head glistening in the poor light, he strode in quickly, sat down and began to read from his redoubtably well-prepared text. No jokes, small talk, hemming and hawing. His performance that day was an exercise in stark, concentrated asceticism, his severity of learning and dedication keeping every word taut and in place. The subject was ''governmentality,'' and the lecture is in ''Power,'' where it is identified as part of a yearlong course on ''Security, Territory and Population.'' Though this was just before he had openly espoused the gay politics and self-experimentation of his last years (probingly investigated by James Miller in ''The Passion of Michel Foucault''), one could sense in his lecture a coiled-up energy as he surveyed the pastoral and police element in modern government that, I now feel, he was highlighting in order to undermine later.
Unfortunately, not all of the material in ''Power'' is of equal merit, neither in the way it is presented nor in its substance. In order to make shorthand generalizations about major social and epistemological shifts in several European countries, Foucault resorts to maddening, unsupported assertions that may be interesting rhetorically but cannot pass muster either as history or as philosophy. Too often, grand statements about society as a whole or at its extremes are presented without evidence or proof (Foucault seems to have had an addiction for the beginnings of centuries, as if history ran in hundred-year periods, of which the first part was usually where the important events occurred), while at other times complicated interviews that were conducted with him about a specific situation in Iran or Poland are left to stand gnomically, without explanation or context, and, sad to say, seem very dated. At other times, a lamentably literal translation, as in ''One of the great problems of the French Revolution was to bring an end to this type of peasant plunder,'' delivers approximate meanings that may be funny but aren't very helpful. Can you imagine an energetic bureaucrat called ''the French Revolution'' bustling around like the March Hare trying to do something about a ''problem'' called ''peasant plunder''?
Some of these difficulties have to do with editors, translators and a publisher who out of a worthy respect for Foucault's memory and achievement probably thought they should leave the great man's words as they were, even when they were delivered hastily or far too allusively. While this assures completeness of texts, it doesn't help the reader, who is left to flounder unnecessarily in passages that could have been eliminated altogether or improved considerably with useful notes. On the other hand, to footnote a passage from an untranslated essay in an unobtainable source by way of assisting the reader is, finally, a silly conceit. That occurs too. But despite these flaws there is no doubt that at least half of ''Power'' is well worth having and making the effort to understand.
What I found specially valuable in the collection were the unexpected pleasures of essays like ''Lives of Infamous Men'' and a magnificent long discussion, ''Interview With Michel Foucault,'' originally published in Italy around 1980. Not only can one hear him elaborate on the continuity of his thought and its relationships with the Frankfurt School, Freud, Marx, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem (his main teacher, the eminent French historian of science), but we are also given a rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well as itself at the same time, clarifying issues while discovering new problems in thought and in life. Foucault's extraordinary blend of energy and pessimism gives a remarkable dignity to his work, which is anything but an exercise in professorial abstraction.
Rather, as Foucault puts it, his thinking is animated by the frightening realization that ''the Enlightenment's promise of attaining freedom through the exercise of reason has been turned upside down, resulting in a domination by reason itself, which increasingly usurps the place of freedom.'' This impasse is the real core of Foucault's work. Even more dramatically, it also illuminates the impasse that his astonishingly intense, compacted life seems on some level to have exhibited.
Edward W. Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of the forthcoming book ''Reflections on Exile.''
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