Hi, my name's Tom. Welcome back to my
channel and to another episode of What the
Theory?, my ongoing series in which I aim
to provide some sometimes enjoyable but
always accessible introductions to key
theories in cultural studies and the
wider humanities. Today, we're taking a
look at the work of French philosopher
Michel Foucault; we're going to take a
look at some of the key terminology and
methodologies from his work including
archaeology, genealogy, episteme and power
and we're also going to have a brief look
at some of his key books such as
The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish
and The History of Sexuality. As always,
if you have any thoughts or questions as
we go along then please do feel free to
pop those down below in the comments and,
if you're new around here and this seems
like your kind of thing, then please do
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humanities-based educational content
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my Patreon. With that out of the way however,
let's crack on with Michel Foucault:
What the Theory?
If we wanted to boil the work of Michel
Foucault down to its most basic insight
it would be that human knowledge is
locked in an intimate relationship with
power. As Foucault himself writes in the
opening chapter to his book Discipline
and Punish: 'there is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of
a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge
that does not presuppose and constitute
at the same time power relations'. In
short, though we often like to think of
knowledge—particularly scientific
knowledge—as operating outside of the
more value-driven realm of political,
social and economic power relations,
Foucault instead argues that the two are
inextricably linked. He argues that the
knowledge that exists at any given time,
the facts that are deemed to be
incontrovertible and the discoveries
that it is possible to make are, in fact,
heavily influenced by that same era's
power relations. Now, those of you who have
watched a number of my other videos
might be thinking that a lot of this
sounds a little familiar. When we looked
at Gramsci's notion of Hegemony,
for example, there was a similar idea
that the culture which exists within
capitalist society tends to be
legitimized by—and therefore in turn
legitimize—the economic base of that
society. There are a number of ways,
however, in which Foucault's work, though not
entirely disagreeing with that of
Gramsci, is pretty distinct from it.
Firstly, in unpacking the relationship
between power and knowledge, Gramsci is
pretty much exclusively interested in
the power element of that equation.
Foucault, however, takes the opposite
approach.
In fact, he writes in great detail about
some specific effects which he sees the
power relations of certain eras having
had upon specific bits of scientific
knowledge. Furthermore, Foucault's conception
of power is far less centralized than
that of Gramsci. Power, in Foucault's work,
is very rarely a matter of
representative politics, the state or
economy and instead tends to be a
question
more of the possibilities for
self-empowerment—does the received
wisdom of the era in which we live allow
us to have agency, to truly know
ourselves and to construct our
identities to our own design, or does it
subtly coerce us into appealing to some
kind of "normality"? Now, in seeking to
explore such matters, many philosophers
would have taken a very broad and
largely theoretical approach. What is
particularly interesting about Foucault's
work, however, is that he is actually
engaged in intricate studies of real
world examples of the things that he's
talking about. Indeed, although many would
very broadly conceive Foucault to be a
philosopher or critic of some kind, the
vast majority of his books were
histories. As Gary Gutting explains in his
overview of Foucault's life and work, on
becoming a professor of the Collège de
France,
Foucault chose to title Professor of the
History of Systems of Thought. In works
such as History of Madness, The Order of
Things, The Birth of the Clinic,
Discipline and Punish and The History of
Sexuality, Foucault is thus interested in
how dominant structures of thought or
ways of thinking in Western Europe have
changed over time. In particular, he's
interested in how the shift from one
structure of thought to another might
have enabled new scientific discoveries,
new medical practices, new punishment
systems and new sexual identities to emerge
which would previously have been
unthinkable while, at the same time,
stopping other ideas from emerging. All
of this, however, may be a lot to take in
all at once.
So, let's slow it on down, take a step
back and start with that very central
idea that knowledge, rather than being
universal and incontrovertibly objective,
is in fact historically contingent—by
which I mean specific to a particular
moment in time. And, in order to best
understand this, I think it's useful to
take a look at one of Foucault's key
influences: Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich
Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for
pronouncing that 'god is dead'. And with
phraseology like that it's no surprise
that popular understandings of his work
tend to be somewhat lacking in nuance.
For instance, though many often assume
Nietzsche's declaration of the "death of
God" to be an attack on a religion, what
Neitzche was actually doing there is
reflecting on what consequences the
Enlightenment might have for human
morality. See, during the 17th and 18th
centuries, a scientific and philosophical
movement which we refer to as the
Enlightenment had pretty much seen
theological explanations for why the
world is and how the world works
supplanted by ones based in logic, reason
and the early scientific method. And a
central theme of Nietzsche's work was
what this metaphorical murder of God by
science might mean for human morality—
without an appeal to the divine as an
outside arbiter of what is moral, how
would society decide what is good and
what is evil?
Nietzsche, however, was not an advocate for
a return to a society under the grip of
religion, he was simply interested in
asking what comes next. In fact, the book
of Nietzsche's which perhaps had the
most significant influence on Foucault
was On the Genealogy of Morality which
is itself a pretty incisive attack on
the church. Within it, Nietzsche sets out
to explore how popular held conceptions
of what is good and what is evil had
changed over time. Nietzsche argues that,
throughout history, 'everywhere, "noble",
"aristocratic" in social terms is the
basic concept from which, necessarily,
"good" in the sense of "spiritually noble",
"aristocratic", of "spiritually highminded",
"spiritually privileged" developed: a
development that always runs parallel
with that other one which ultimately
transfers "common", "plebeian", "low" into the concept "bad"'.
Nietzsche's argument that, throughout
history, ideas around
what is moral and righteous had largely
been constructed in order to celebrate
those who were already powerful and
further marginalize the already
disempowered, however, had consequences for more than just the already pretty
embattled Church. For, though taking a
more secular approach, the proponents of
the Enlightenment—most notably Immanuel Kant—had equally taken it for granted
that morality could be universally and
objectively defined. And Nietzsche's
suggestion that this had almost never
been the case in the past raised
significant questions about whether it
would be possible in the future.
Questions of morality certainly appear
both implicitly and explicitly
throughout Foucault's work. What he takes
most of all from Nietzsche, however, is
this notion that ideas, rather than being
universal and objective, are actually
quite often historically contingent;
Foucault simply substitutes out
post-enlightenment morality for post-enlightenment science. With all its
claims to be driven by logic and reason,
Foucault set out to ask whether what is
considered logical or reasonable might
also be historically contingent. In
arguing that this was indeed the case,
Foucault suggests that each period of
history—or, indeed, the present—might have
a corresponding structure of thought or
what he calls an "episteme" which he
defines in his book The Archeology of
Knowledge as 'something like a world-view,
a slice of history common to all
branches of knowledge, which imposes on
each one the same norms and postulates, a
general stage of reason, a certain
structure of thought that the men [sic] of a
particular period cannot escape'. An episteme, then, refers to the way in which a society thinks at any
given moment. And a shift from one
episteme to another allows
new discoveries to be made which
previously would have been seen as
entirely illogical, while at the same
time continuing to limit new thoughts
from being had. In The Order of Things,
for instance, he delineates between three
different episteme in Western Europe
from the 17th century onwards. To foreground
just one of these,
he writes that, in what he refers to as
the Classical period, 'the naturalists,
economists, and grammarians employed the
same rules to define the objects prior
to their own study, to form their
concepts, to build their theories'. He
argues that, across three distinct
disciplines in this period, there was a
tendency to want to classify, group and
describe objects of study; whether that
be plants and animals, the workings of
the economy or language. While this
certainly enabled new discoveries to be
made, in other ways, it limited the
progress of scientific, economic and
linguistic thought. In particular,
suggests Foucault, this focus on
categorization and definition tended to
ignore the role of time and thus view
the world as temporally static he therefore
argues that, with regard to the natural
sciences, theories of evolution were
almost unthinkable in this episteme and only became
so when the Classical period 'which
retained a view of a static, ordered,
compartmented universe that is subjected
from its very beginnings to the
classification table, and the still
confused perception of a nature that is
the heir to time' gave way to a modern
episteme 'open to the possibility of an
evolution'. Foucault refers to the
methodology he uses to identify these
episteme as "archeology". For, just as an
archaeologist, on uncovering a monument,
then uses what they learned from that
monument to make broader hypotheses
about the society which built it, so too
does Foucault view
texts and documents as monuments. He then uses the things which they say in order
to make broader hypotheses about the way
in which the society in which they were
written was thinking. This approach is
evident not only in The Order of Things
but also Foucault's History of Madness and
The Birth of the Clinic in which
Foucault seeks to explore changes in how
French society thought about mental
illness and medical practice over time.
What we see in those earlier works far
more than in The Order of Things, however,
is the beginnings of an interest in how
different episteme might not only mark
out certain ideas as illogical or
unreasonable but people. For, in
exploring the limits about what it is
possible to know about either mental or
physical health in a given period, there
is also an implicit explanation about
what it is possible to know about
ourselves, our own minds and bodies.
Furthermore, there are clear implications
for power here too. For example, is it me
that decides whether I am ill or not
or is that left up to a doctor to decide
for me?
Nevertheless, it is only in Foucault's later
work that the implications for a
society's way of thinking for that
society's power relations starts to be
not only acknowledged but the central
focus of Foucault's research. In Discipline
and Punish and The History of Sexuality,
Foucault again uses archaeology in order
to identify changes in the way that
Western Europe thought about both the
penal system and sexuality over time.
Alongside this, however, he also adds a
new methodology which he calls, after
Nietzsche, "genealogy". In common parlance,
of course, genealogy refers to the study
of our biological ancestors; it is the
process of seeking out who our great
grandmothers and great great
grandmothers were in order to gain an
insight into how we came to be the
people we are today.
And genealogy, as Foucault and Nietzsche
use the term, seeks to pursue a similar
explanation for the present in the past
with regard to ideas. Furthermore, as
Nietzsche's study of morality perhaps
indicated, where archaeology took a
slightly more detached approach to
viewing the changes in episteme and
that relationship to power throughout
history, genealogy is explicitly
interested in how a change in the way in
which a society thinks might relate to a
change in its power relations. In The
History of Sexuality, then, Foucault is
interested in how contemporary
perceptions of sexuality came to be
formed. A key element of his argument is
the idea that, although same-sex romantic
and physical relationships have existed
throughout history, the concept of homo-
and heterosexuality as distinct ways of
being is actually only a late 19th
century invention. Interestingly, however,
though acknowledging that the coining of
the terms homo- and heterosexual were
part of broader attempts to suppress
non-heterosexual—and, broadly speaking,
non-marital sexual and romantic
relationships, Foucault in fact sets out
to critique what he calls the 'repressive
hypothesis': the notion—still fairly
prevalent today—that, from the 17th
century onwards—bourgeois society had
largely sought to suppress any
discussion whatsoever of sex. For, as the
codification of homo- and heterosexuality
infers, seeking to moralize sexual
activity actually involved an awful lot
of discussing it. Foucault therefore
argues that, rather than repression, the
(broadly-speaking) Victorian episteme
was, instead, characterized by 'the
proliferation of specific pleasures and
the multiplication of disparate
sexualities'. Now, some attempt to
characterize Foucault as a constant
pessimist in his conceptualization of
power. However what we see here is a
distinctly nuanced
argument. For Foucault is arguing that,
yes, the codification and categorization
of a notion of homosexuality was part of
an attempt to define homosexuality as
some kind of illness yet, as Foucault
writes, it 'also made possible the
formation of a "reverse" discourse:
homosexuality began to speak on its own
behalf, to demand that it's legitimacy or
"naturality" be acknowledged, often in the
same vocabulary, using the same
categories by which it was medically
disqualified'. Though meant to subdue, the
categorization of homosexuality in this
way thus, in some regards, provided a
language for empowerment of those people
being subdued. Had he been able to
complete his work on how we think about
sexuality, Foucault's plan was to use the
insight that he'd gained from exploring
this particular topic to draw broader
conclusions about how the present episteme
governs how we come to know and
come to use our bodies in a study of
what he called biopolitics. Just as, in
The Order of Things, he had argued that
the classical episteme's tendency to
want to classify and describe different
things was not just present in the
Natural Sciences
but also in linguistics and economics, so
too did Foucault think that we might
find echoes of the ways in which we
think about sexuality elsewhere in
society. Unfortunately, however, he sadly
died before he was able to finish that
work. Where we do find a really good and
really finished example of his thinking
about one specific topic rippling out
into thinking about society as a whole,
however, is in Discipline and Punish.
Like The History of Sexuality, Discipline
and Punish begins with a very specific
focus. Foucault observes that, towards the
end of the 18th century, the manner in
which France punished criminals changed
significantly. Previously, the focus had
been on public acts of
brutality. Indeed, Foucault opens the book
with a description of the very public
drawing and quartering of a man who
would had drawn a penknife on Louis XV.
He then contrasts this with the minutely-detailed daily schedule of a prisoner in
the House of Young Prisoners in Paris
just 80 years later. He writes that 'we
have, then, a public execution and a
timetable. They do not punish the same
crimes nor the same type of delinquents.
But they each define a certain penal
style'. Our tendency, of course, is to see
the latter form of punishment as far
more humane than the former. And Foucault broadly agrees. However he does suggest
that the latter form of punishment is
far more insidious. For, where the first
is very public and very chaotic, the
latter both hides the exercise of power
from view while also being minutely
detailed. Having studied this shift in
episteme as it related to French
society's ways of thinking about crime
and punishment, Foucault then goes on to
consider whether this move away from
very public and chaotic exercises of
power towards more private, insidious and
details ones might be found elsewhere in
society. See, as Foucault argues, the
routine of the prison 'produces subjected
and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies.
Discipline increases the forces of the
body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes
these same forces (in
political terms of obedience). Foucault
argues however that, since the 17th
century, such practices of instilling
obedience through discipline and routine
'had constantly reached out to ever
broader domains, as if they tended to
cover the entire social body'. Schools,
hospitals, the military and numerous
other institutions had, in Foucault's view,
come to operate in a very similar
manner and to a similar end. Foucault had
always argued that power was diffuse
throughout society rather than
centralized, but, here perhaps more than
anywhere else in Foucault's work, we see
quite how true that fact is. What makes
Discipline and Punish a particularly
astute example of Foucault's wider body of
work, however, is that, as well as being an
exploration of how structures of thought
or ways of thinking might have shifted
power relations in society, the power
that Foucault is exploring being
exercised here is also definitively
epistemological. For, this particular form
of discipline operates precisely by
limiting the knowledge that we are able
to gain about ourselves; the routine
encourages us to want to conform in some
way, to try and fit in and therefore
limits our ability to construct our own
identities.
Indeed, Foucault argues that the real
insidiousness of these forms of
discipline lies in the fact that much of
the work is done internally: by ourselves
to ourselves. He uses the metaphor of the
panopticon, a form of prison designed by
the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the
late 18th century. The design features a
central tower from which a single prison
officer can see every single cell in the
prison while themselves being obscured
by a blindingly bright light. Though the
single officer can only actually be
looking in one direction at any given
time, then, the prisoners have no idea
whether or not it is they that are
currently being observed. The idea, then,
is that the prisoners will be forced to
be constantly on their best behavior
whether the prison officer is looking at
them or not because there is always the
possibility that they might be. Just as
this leads to a situation in which the
prisoners are disciplining themselves as
much as being disciplined by the prison
officers, Foucault suggests that we come
to internalize
the ways of thinking that we are
routinely forced into through school,
workplace or the prison. And, just as a
lack of awareness as to the role of time
in nature meant that the natural
scientists of the Classical episteme
couldn't quite get their heads around
the notion of evolution, so too does this
limit the knowledge that we are able to
gain about ourselves; it, in some ways,
stops us all from being able to form our
identities to our own end and turns us
into conforming, docile bodies. So, to
conclude. The central thesis of Foucault's
work is that all human knowledge is very
rarely universal or objective but is, in
fact, historically contingent. Through
archaeology and, later, genealogy, Foucault
sets out to suggest that each period of
history has a corresponding episteme
which certainly allows new discoveries
to be made but also limits in some way
what is thinkable at that point.
Initially, Foucault restricts
this discussion to the discussion of the
natural sciences and medicine but, in his
later work, we really see him start to
expand out into using these ideas to
discuss how we might be limited in the
knowledge that we are able to gain about
ourselves and our own identities. In
effecting our individual agency in this
way and our potential for personal
empowerment or subjection, knowledge thus
comes to be intimately associated with
power. And, just as Foucault often sought
to explore the diffuse consequences of
power, so too does he often see its
source as being diffuse.
For, just as it is not, in the end, the
prison officer who is subjecting those
prisoners to their routine but the
prisoners themselves, so too do the ways
of thinking in which we have been
instructed force us to regulate
ourselves rather than any outside
force. Thank you very much for
watching, I hope this has been useful to
you if you're currently trying to get
your head around Foucault's ideas. If you
would like to see me go more in-depth into any of Foucault's individual
books in the future then do let me know.
And, if you'd like to get your hands on a
copy of the script for this video with
footnotes and references to mull
over to your heart's content,
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down below is always appreciated but,
other than that, thanks very much for
watching once again and have a great
week!
