INTRODUCTION: MICHEL FOUCAULT AS CRITICAL THEORIST
1. All citations shall be included parenthetically in the text, by last name and date of publication. Works by Foucault are cited by year only (“Foucault” is omitted) or by another designation; full details of this apparatus are included in the bibliography. For another allusion to Taylor’s claim that “Foucault disconcerts,” cf. Bernauer and Mahon (1994, 141).
2. The first essay in Sullivan (1998) is a very compelling discussion of the new personal and sociocultural landscape, both for HIV-positive gay men and for society as a whole.
3. The number of feminists inspired by Foucault is by now far too long to even pretend to provide an exhaustive list. Illustrative early examples include Bartky (1990), Butler (1991), Sawicki (1991), McNay (1992), and the essays collected in Diamond and Quinby (1988); examples of more recent engagements include the essays in Taylor and Vintges (2004) and Huffer (2010).
4. For a different analysis of ways in which Foucault resembles Socrates, cf. Nehamas (1998, 157ff.).
5. We can note (as an aside at this point) that this kind of freedom, the challengability and revisability of our interpretations as well as actions, which is what produces the “empowering danger” that Foucault describes, is closely related to the kinds of challengability that Jürgen Habermas sees at the core of communicative rationality and validity.
6. Her citation is from Marx’s “Letter to A. Ruge, September 1843” (Marx 1843a, 209). Pages 206–209 of Marx 1843a and 1843b are two different translations of the same German text. In the second translation, this passage is rendered as “the work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggle and its own desires” (Marx 1843b, 15).
7. Cf., for example, Habermas (1983) and Honneth (1992).
8. Benhabib’s definition is a good representative. Consider one additional example, Raymond Geuss’s definition of critical theory in The Idea of a Critical Theory: “A critical theory, then, is a reflective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation” (Geuss 1981, 2). The key elements that he highlights—critical theory is (1) a form of knowledge, (2) which is reflexive, and (3) which serves as a guide to action, in particular, toward enlightenment and emancipation—correspond not only to Benhabib’s definition but to Marx’s as well.
9. McCarthy makes this point to distinguish “critical social theory,” by which he means Frankfurt School approaches, from Foucauldian genealogy. While McCarthy does bring out several important similarities between Foucault and the Frankfurt school in this essay (which I’m emphasizing here), his main task is to highlight key differences. I think that on the whole, however, McCarthy has misread Foucault’s project.
10. Machiavelli’s analysis is given in The Prince (1532), and Foucault observes that “Machiavelli was among the few—and this no doubt was the scandal of his ‘cynicism’—who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships” (1976ET, 97). Machiavelli is the key figure for Friedrich Meinecke (cf. Meinecke 1924), and Foucault draws on Meinecke in CdF1978 and DE291, when he turns to raison d’état. Hobbes’s account, however, looms larger for Foucault’s first articulations of his account of power, which emphasize disciplinary micropower and which will be our concern here.
11. We can recognize in Rousseau a theme that will loom large in Foucault’s work: freedom as deviation from a rule, that is, freedom in resistance.
12. The theme of friendship, too, is one that Foucault will take up.
13. Lynch (2001) shows how Kojève misreads Hegel and how a more hopeful reading emerges from Hegel’s text.
14. Joan Tronto’s work (e.g., Tronto 1993) was pioneering in bringing care and politics together; others have also done so.
15. Because the English title is so unwieldy, I’ll refer to this text throughout by its French title.
1. APPROACHING POWER FROM A NEW THEORETICAL BASIS
1. The French original is at 1976, 120: “en se donnant une autre théorie du pouvoir.”
2. This and the next two paragraphs are drawn from Lynch (1998), which gives a much fuller discussion of Foucault’s view of the omnipresence of power.
3. These are not necessarily the same relationships.
4. When Foucault articulates his new theoretical framework for ethics, he will again criticize the theoretical privilege of the “code”—this time in the form of a “moral code”—in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure (1984aET, 25).
5. More precisely, I should say not only “will guide” but also “has emerged out of.” This theory of power was intended to guide his empirical investigation of nineteenth-century practices of sexuality, but it also emerged from earlier empirical investigations, in particular his studies of psychiatry and the prison. In this study, I begin by working backward from this theoretical articulation to the earlier empirical studies.
6. As, for example, some Vienna Circle philosophers sought to reduce all scientific languages (and disciplines) to a basic set of physicalist “protocol sentences,” so that psychological claims could be reformulated as biological claims, biological as chemical, and chemical as physical. Cf. Neurath (1932).
7. In this passage, Foucault is making an observation about Boulainvilliers’s eighteenth-century history of France. But his point here in reference to Boulainvilliers is, in fact, a general one. More precisely, it speaks to Foucault’s own methodology.
8. To anticipate, I quote from a 1984 interview: “What I refused was precisely that you first of all set up a theory of the subject—as could be done in phenomenology and in existentialism—and that, beginning from the theory of the subject, you come to pose the question of knowing, for example, how such and such a form of knowledge was possible. What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself . . . through a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so forth” (DE356.2, 10).
9. He explicitly suggests this inversion in the first lecture of his 1976 Collège de France course (CdF76ET, 15) and takes it up again in the third and seventh lectures (CdF76ET, 47–48, 165)—he very clearly uses this inversion to frame his analysis. I’ll discuss this phrase and its significance further in Chapter 3.
10. In a 1977 interview, Foucault again apparently juxtaposes a Kantian view of the moral state, “the Kingdom of Ends,” with his own analysis of power relations at the basis of social relations: “I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (DE157.1, 55).
11. We’ve already seen one example of this continuity: resistance as constitutive of power relations, from “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (DE356), an interview given in 1984. Another late essay that reiterates this basic framework is 1982’s “The Subject and Power” (DE306).
12. Halperin himself recognizes that the charge is not fair. Immediately after quoting it, he adds, “I would not write such a sentence today” (Halperin 1995, 5).
2. DISCIPLINARY POWER: TESTING THE HOBBESIAN HYPOTHESIS
1. That something, I think, is a sense of hope in the face of an otherwise bleak portrait of modern society. This hope is an important key to Foucault’s ethical vision and is the very thing that provokes critics like Nancy Fraser. We will take these ideas up in the last sections of this chapter and in Chapter 4.
2. This and the next three paragraphs are adapted from Lynch (1998).
3. We can note that this understanding of power relations is very Kantian in structure—although Foucault is quite clear that these power relations are not transcendental but contingent. In this respect, Foucault’s analysis of power relations as an empirically grounded enabling constraint shares even more with Simone de Beauvoir’s similarly detranscendentalized Kantian understanding of freedom: “Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justifications of existence. . . . But this justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded; it founds itself” (de Beauvoir 1947, 24, 26). Indeed, a certain kind of freedom is necessarily presupposed in Foucault’s account of the interplay between power and resistance, and it will play an important role in his ethics, too. This insight is the basis of what I will call “bootstrapping” in Foucault’s ethics.
4. For the date that the interview was conducted, see Eribon (1989, 356n10). For more information about the circumstances of this interview, see also Miller (1993, 262–263).
5. As Foucault notes in the second lecture of the course (CdF74ET, 19, 28–29).
6. He makes this suggestion in the 1976 Collège de France course (CdF76ET, 15). I will discuss the course and the remark in more detail below.
7. In fact, George III did relapse, twice, in 1810, three years after Willis’s death. This episode thus also illustrates disciplinary psychiatric power’s troubled relationship to discourses of truth, which Foucault takes up in the lecture of 12 December 1973 (esp. CdF74ET, 128–139).
8. Foucault here follows the analyses of Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies (1957). He also takes up Kantorowicz in Discipline and Punish (1975ET, 28–29), where he suggests that the body of the prisoner may be the analogue in disciplinary power to the king’s body in sovereign power.
9. Foucault drew out certain similarities between his analyses of power and Marx’s analysis in Capital in a 1976 lecture in Brazil. In this lecture, he summarizes his methodological guidelines (which we have discussed in Chapter 1), defines power as “forms of domination, forms of subjection, which function locally, for example in the workshop, in the army, in slave-ownership or in a property where there are servile relations,” and notes that “we must speak of powers and try to localize them in their historical and geographical specificity” (DE297.1, 156). He also goes on to summarize the transformation from sovereign to disciplinary power in economic terms (esp. DE297.1, 258–259).
10. Foucault echoes this theme in the introductory lecture of the 1979 Collège de France course: “for, after all, what interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, d’Argenson, Adam Smith, Bentham, and the English utilitarians, if not because the problem of liberalism arises for us in our immediate and concrete actuality?” (CdF79ET, 22).
11. We shall return to this quotation and its highlighting of “populations” below—it illustrates how Foucault in Discipline and Punish sees macro forms of power as reducible to the disciplinary micro forms.
12. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (1975ET, 228).
13. Indeed, Foucault will later identify other practices of individual-production that explicitly contrast with the disciplinary examination. See, for example, Foucault’s discussion of the hypomnemata in “Self-Writing” (DE329).
14. The Gulag Archipelago was published in 3 volumes between 1973 and 1976.
15. This historical study will also provide illustrations of biopolitical techniques as well as of the ethical importance of freedom. Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), published after this manuscript was complete and therefore not discussed, also provides a rich catalog of the disciplinary techniques at the core of antebellum slavery. I do take one term from Baptist: “enslaver” in lieu of Stampp’s more traditional but troublesome “master.” Baptist’s work is, in its style and power, reminiscent of Discipline and Punish; I highly recommend it.
16. Recall Foucault’s discussion of soldiers as “natural” or “manufactured” at the beginning of Part 3 of Discipline and Punish (1975ET, 137), discussed above.
17. Shortly after reaching this nadir, Douglass notes that “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (Douglass 1845, 50). Douglass recounts his resistance and eventual escape but refused until decades after the end of slavery to tell exactly how he escaped—so that those means of resistance would remain open to others.
18. This cautionary “or almost” is in fact quite important: it suggests that even in this “purest” manifestation of disciplinary power, the system is not “airtight,” that there are other important elements of the subject’s constitution that might allow for a subversion of or resistance to this discipline.
19. In, for example, the first lecture of the 1979 Collège de France course, The Birth of Biopolitics.
3. REFRAMING THE THEORY: BIOPOWER AND GOVERNMENTALITY
1. This is the third of three lectures that Foucault gave in Brazil in October 1974; they largely follow the lines of thinking that he had articulated in his 1974 Collège de France course. See my discussion of that course in Chapter 2.
2. Compare this with a passage from La volonté de savoir (part of which I quoted above): “If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (1976ET, 143).
3. The second essay also includes a long list of “bibliographical suggestions,” which were not included in 1976.
4. This is the title of Taylor (1977).
5. The theme of liberalism will be a central concern of Foucault’s 1979 Collège de France course, The Birth of Biopolitics.
6. In Discipline and Punish (esp. 1975ET, 221–224).
7. Consider two examples from a recent issue of the New York Times to illustrate how this series continues to function: First, biopower’s “global” reach has continued to expand, encompassing the entire ecological environment within its scope: “Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic—they originate in animals. . . . Public health experts have begun to factor ecology into their models” (Robbins 2012). While on the one hand its scope has been becoming more global, it has also continued to insert itself into individual choices as well: “The current fascination with breast-feeding is also an extension of a society’s efforts to control risk, including risk to our children” (Quart 2012).
8. These remarks suggest that Foucault would call for some sort of “total revolution.” Indeed, a case could be made that he was tempted by such possibilities—hence his initial excitement for and close attention to the Iranian revolution in 1978–1979. But the lessons that he learned from the course of events in Iran—that he rather saw reconfirmed, since it had been the basis of his critiques of Maoists and Marxists throughout the 1970s—is that such a “total” revolution is neither possible nor effective and that smaller, local engagements are a more productive direction forward. See, for example, the 1977 interview “Power and Strategies” (DE218).
4. FREEDOM’S CRITIQUE: THE TRAJECTORIES OF A FOUCAULDIAN ETHICS
1. Specifically, he says that “as to those [who think so] . . . all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet” (1984aET, 7).
2. Timothy O’Leary brought my attention to this passage (O’Leary 2002, 24).
3. Foucault discusses S&M in two interviews, both given in 1982, though they were published later: “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” (DE317) and “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (DE358). For a very informative general introduction to S&M, I recommend Johnson Grey’s “The soc.subculture. bondage-bdsm FAQ List” (Grey 1999). One will note, after reading the first frequently asked question (FAQ), that Foucault uses S&M as a generic term to refer to a variety of distinct practices, including (1) s&m—“sadism and masochism,” the pleasures of giving and receiving pain; (2) b&d—“bondage and discipline,” the pleasures of binding and otherwise regimenting the body; and (3) d&s—“dominance and submission,” the pleasures of being in or under the control of another. To be strict about these distinctions, it is in d&s (and, to a lesser extent, b&d) rather than s&m where power relations are explicitly thematized (and eroticized) as such. However, since these distinctions are often merely analytic and since Foucault obviously has d&s and b&d relations in mind, as well as the pleasures of simple pain, I shall use S&M in this discussion in the generic way that Foucault does.
4. In a 1984 interview, Foucault again explains this pattern in reference to “the subject”: “What I rejected was the idea of starting out with a theory of the subject—as is done, for example, in phenomenology or existentialism—and, on the basis of this theory, asking how a given form of knowledge was possible. What I wanted to try to show was how the subject constituted itself . . . I had to reject a priori theories of the subject in order to analyze the relationships that may exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so on” (DE356.4, 290). Foucault won’t begin by assuming what he wants to justify but rather will show that assuming its negation leads to a contradiction—thus justifying speaking of some sort of self-fashioned subject or of relations of pleasure that can’t be reduced to power.
5. Leo Bersani notes that this passage “clearly echoes the call, at the end of the first volume of his History of Sexuality, for ‘a different economy of bodies and pleasures’” (Bersani 1995, 79). This is, of course, unsurprising, since Foucault’s exploration of S&M constituted one of the experiments by which he developed the ethical resources in “bodies and pleasures.” Several letters (IMEC-K.2, dating from 1979 and 1982) from Bersani to Foucault suggest that they may have explored these “laboratories of sexual experimentation” (DE317.4, 151) together.
6. Carol Gilligan’s own intellectual trajectory has followed a seemingly Foucauldian arc, as suggested by the titles of her books after In a Different Voice (1982): The Birth of Pleasure (2002), The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance and Democracy’s Future (2009—co-authored with David A. J. Richards, this book begins with a study of women’s roles in ancient Rome), and Joining the Resistance (2011).
7. We will see this notion of ontological priority again, in the final section’s discussion of freedom. And there is an analogy here, too, to Kant’s vision of the role of the moral law in rational beings as legislators in the Kingdom of Ends (Kant 1785, 39–40).
8. Foucault does acknowledge, as we will see below, that individual rights have been an effective and important tool for a critical resistance to unjust power: “not wanting to be governed in this way is not to accept these laws because they are unjust. . . . From this point of view, critique is thus, in the face of the government and the obedience it demands, to oppose universal and indefeasible rights to which every government—whatever it might be, whether it has to do with the monarch, the magistrate, the educator, or the father of the family—will have to submit” (OT-78-01ET, 385).
9. For a further discussion of the ethics of dialogue, see Lynch (1993).
10. Two examples immediately come to mind: heterosexual men may find more avenues opening for intimacy and friendship with each other, and heterosexual couples may find new ways of creating reciprocal relations—particularly regarding communication about consensual and safer sex.
11. “We could therefore conceive of the history of Cynicism, not, once again, as a doctrine, but much more as an attitude and way of being, with, of course its own justificatory and explanatory discourse” (CdF84ET, 178).
12. Foucault had earlier discussed this play in his 1971 course at the Collège de France and in a series of lectures given in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1973 (DE139).
13. Ladelle McWhorter brought my attention to this passage (McWhorter 2003, 42).
14. Foucault discusses this text in The Care of the Self (the third volume of The History of Sexuality; 1984bET, 61–62); his 1983 course at Berkeley (Fearless Speech, OT-83-03ET, 145ff.), in both the 1980 (CdF80ET, 239–246) and 1982 Collège de France courses (CdF82ET, 481–484), and a 1982 lecture at the University of Vermont (DE363.2, 237).
15. Koopman (2013, esp. the final chapter) offers a more extensive discussion of the connections between Foucault’s work and American pragmatism.
16. Bartky (1995) directly addresses this first aporia. Foucault himself is much more dismissive: “to depict this kind of research as an attempt to reduce knowledge to power, to make it the mask of power in structures, where there is no place for a subject, is purely and simply a caricature” (CdF84ET, 8–9).
17. Cf. Taylor (1984) and the two essays on Foucault in Habermas (1987). Both Taylor and Habermas ultimately misread Foucault, however. For example, Taylor reads Foucault to assert that “There is no escape from power into freedom, for such systems of power are co-extensive with human society” (Taylor 1984, 153). The problem is that, as we have seen quite clearly, freedom is not something found only “outside of power” but rather a very condition of possibility for power—freedom is present within, not outside, power relations. Since Amy Allen (2010) offers a succinct response to Habermas, I will not discuss him here.
18. Indeed, a typical Alger hero rises to financial success not merely through his or her own efforts but through a wide social support network and even wealthy benefactors—hardly “making use of what is already present” within him- or herself. The example I have in mind is Ragged Dick. Dick, a young bootblack and the hero, is told by just such a benefactor (the benefactor’s own financial and moral support notwithstanding) to “Remember that your future position depends mainly upon yourself, and that it will be high or low as you choose to make it” (Alger 1868, 50)—a nice statement of the bootstrapping myth. My thanks to Debbie Geis for pointing out this potential confusion.
19. Foucault explicitly cites Kant’s essay on perpetual peace in the January 24 lecture of his 1979 Collège de France course (CdF79, 58–60; CdF79ET, 57–58).
20. Kristana Arp (2001, 55) uses these terms in reference to de Beauvoir’s ethics, and I find them apt.
21. Indeed, the interviewer explicitly references The Hermeneutics of the Subject (CdF82).
22. He says, “In other words, you understand freedom as a reality that is already ethical in itself” (DE356.4, 284).