Tony O’ Connor
Much of Michel Foucault’s work involves complex and detailed studies of madness, the clinic, the prison, the human sciences, sexuality, etc. In addition to these studies, however, three major themes may be identified on his intellectual journey. These are the analysis of epistemes, or historical regions of discourse; the investigation of “regimes of truth”; and the study of “techniques of the self.” The method employed on this enterprise is a mixture of archaeology, genealogy, and “problematizations” of various kinds.
Foucault’s investigations do not take the conventional philosophical form of seeking invariant universal or transcendental grounds for truth and value; rather, they are pursued as a series of apparently disconnected studies of different topics and themes and of different historical periods. His break with the search for the invariant structure, or the necessary condition of the world, is quite deliberate. Traditional philosophy thinks of itself as a matter of a “second-order” discourse, or reflective investigation of its own critical claims to determine their truth or falsity. Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy is central here insofar as it claims to offer a better resolution to an older question about the conditions of possibility of knowledge.
Foucault rejects the unchanging transcendental method. He thinks that it must give way to an investigation of the “historical a priori,” which holds that interpretation contains no neutral elements but always occurs in terms of historical conditions of some kind or other. Hence, philosophy should not investigate “essences in general” but “the historical a priori which, since the nineteenth century, has served as an almost self-evident ground for our thought” (Foucault 1987, 344).
Some philosophers, notably Jürgen Habermas, consider that Foucault’s enterprise is fatally flawed because it uses a universal claim to reject universal claims and, consequently, it leads inevitably to performative contradiction (Habermas 1986, 103–108). Against this objection, however, Foucault thinks that Habermas’s presumption that reason has universal scope cannot be reconciled with the historical conditions that govern reason’s appearance. This means that philosophical questions must be resolved within historical frameworks. Hence, he thinks that philosophical investigations are both profoundly historical in character and occur within contingent regimes of knowledge, disciplines, cultural spaces, etc.
This can be seen in The Order of Things, where Foucault’s problematic is linked to his general claim that explanation and language do not stand on a single ground or origin which sustains them (Foucault 1987, xv). Rather, different epistemes, or historical periods, categories or regions, operate. Each episteme has its own content and meaning, which do not combine to form a single whole (ibid., xvii). He illustrates this claim by referring to Borges’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which identifies a series of incongruous categories that is meant to show that it is impossible to identify a common ground for all possible categories (ibid., xvi–xvii; Borges 1999). Foucault thinks that once this impossibility is acknowledged, philosophers will cast off their invariantist pretensions and no longer seek unchanging and universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge and action. This does not imply that the question of possibility conditions itself should be discarded, but rather that ideals of universal objectivity or rationality should be replaced by the acknowledgment of discontinuities, differences, and varieties of knowledge and value.
Foucault attempts to practice what he preaches by allowing for limited general claims while rejecting the possibility of underlying invariance as the necessary condition of the world. He proposes, therefore, to investigate particular networks of discourses, where both regular and irregular patterns may be identified. His proposed method for this is both epistemological and archaeological. For example, he holds that in the classical age (roughly from Descartes to Kant), various social regions, practices, and disciplines share a common problem of correct representation, which is pursued in connection with the attempted determination of the character of order, truth, and the subject. This means that the classical age is one of a number of interpretive, linguistic, or cultural periods or regions of the world, which are governed by “regularities” such as principles, ideals, codes, methodologies, etc. These cultural periods are “epistemes,” in which operate the regularities that determine the conditions of possibility of both the epistemes themselves and the discourses that occur within them.
In The Order of Things, Foucault identifies three different historical periods since the fourteenth century which are dominated by different guiding principles, major problems, and practices. They are the Renaissance period, the “classical age,” and the “modern age.” He holds that “resemblance” is the dominant concept for the Renaissance, where it functions as the principle both for the analysis and determination of the relations between things. A central problem here is the determination of what words stand for, which is a matter of identifying the essence of the object designated by the word. In the later classical age, however, the question of resemblance is replaced by that of “representation,” and the central concern now is to identify or establish a universal science of measurement and order. This is linked to the question of the nature of thought, which is assumed to be the model for language. This involves efforts to establish an ideal language, whose elements relate in a direct way to supposed underlying invariant essences. But, Foucault holds that in due course the classical age is replaced by the modern age, where representational concerns are superseded by questions about the nature of “man.” The concept “man” has a dual function, because “man” is simultaneously an object of knowledge and a knowing subject. In the modern episteme, the meaning of things is to be determined in terms of history, but a history as related to a more general ground that serves as both the necessary condition of things, and as other than that meaning itself.
Overall, Foucault identifies his enterprise in The Order of Things as one of “seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false” (The Order of Things, 131–133). As observed, this project arises from the character of epistemes, which show internal structural regularities but no common feature or quality uniting them all. The epistemes of the various ages are not linear, because they result not from a single progression in history but from abrupt alterations of knowledge and values.
Foucault’s discussion of epistemes in The Order of Things offers a radical challenge to invariantist or transcendentalist philosophical aspirations. It seems to be open to a major objection, however, that his account of the epistemes is somewhat implausible because they are overly self-contained and separate from each other, and, consequently, appear to forbid any interaction between them. Foucault’s response to criticism of this sort leads him to focus more on the second feature of his philosophical method, namely, genealogy. This serves to complement and complexify the historical contexts identified by archaeology. Genealogy is also meant to develop and strengthen his basic view that philosophical questions and concerns change under the terms of their historical conditions, or in terms of their “historical a priori.”
The genealogical method leads Foucault to investigate regimes of truth as constitutive features of social practices: “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (Foucault 1996, 430).
Genealogy develops the historical perspectivism opened up by archaeology and further supports Foucault’s view that the presuppositions and norms governing particular cultures and periods are maintained by a mixture of ideologies and strategic factors of various kinds. These ideologies and strategies generate possibilities for change and also impose limitations. This leads to a view of truth as a contextual product of practices (epistemological, moral, political, etc.), and as bound up with historical conditions of the possibility of knowledge and action.
Foucault’s archaeological/genealogical investigations serve to reveal the historical character of various epistemes, discourses, technologies of power, etc., while recognizing that the contents of, and claims generated by, these epistemes have themselves been constituted by/within a particular episteme. He thinks this shows that interpretation does not rest on fixed, necessary foundations, and that it excludes valid appeals to unchanging a priori conditions of knowledge and truth regarded as ideal, extra-historical forms or grounds. Thus, Foucault could respond to Habermas’s claim that philosophers must rely on some conceptual necessity and transcendental grounds, by arguing that necessity and the transcendental do not possess the invariant character and status that Habermas attributes to them. Rather, these concepts have emerged historically, and especially as central features of the notion of “man” and its function in the modern episteme:
Man, in the analytic of finitude, is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible. The threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called “man.”
(The Order of Things, 318–319)
In other words, conceptual necessities and transcendental grounds, or “necessities of thought or language,” are not invariant features of human nature, but are interpreted in this way as part of the cognitional constitution of the “empirico-transcendental doublet”—“man”—in the modern age.
Foucault’s genealogies support the archaeological method because they seek to illustrate the historical origins of various epistemes, discourses, technologies of power, etc., while acknowledging that the contents of these epistemes, and the claims generated by them, are themselves a construction of some such discursive space and practice. This leads him in Power/Knowledge to outline the core features of his genealogical analysis: “I wanted to see how these problems of constitution producing “objects” could be resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring them back to a constituent object …. what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourse, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in empty sameness throughout the course of history” (Foucault 1980, 117).
Foucault holds that archaeological-genealogical analysis is not just a matter of epistemology but also involves investigation of the sociopolitical conditions and circumstances of human life. He thinks that modern society is a disciplinary one, which has emerged from its identification of the body as both an “object” and a “target” of power. In the modern age, there are two broad ways of categorizing the body. First, the body is viewed mechanically as needing discipline and control as part of some regulatory system or other. Second, it is regarded as a species such that its supervisory and regulatory control becomes connected to issues such as the propagation of life and longevity. This has resulted in the body being conditioned in the ways of society, as part of which people learn to respond and behave appropriately, for example, by being orderly, docile, skilful, etc. The conditioning activity is widespread, and occurs in homes, schools, factories, hospitals, asylums, prisons, armies, and other institutions where individuals become subject to, and targets of, parents, educators, employers, managers, medical personnel of various kinds, etc.
Foucault’s examination of techniques of containment, surveillance, and control in the modern age rejects a view of power as a matter of exterior control or domination in the arenas of politics, society, military, etc. He thinks, rather, that power is a matter of the very relations in which humans are involved and through which they are constituted. Power and knowledge are interwoven.
Foucault’s discussion of power can be linked with his treatment of Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” (Foucault 1984, 32–50). Kant identifies a new dimension for philosophy by highlighting the need for concern with our own actuality, what is happening around us, what is our present. Philosophy, therefore, has the task of informing us who we are, what our present is, and what that is, today. Foucault undertakes this task in terms of various specific investigations, as in Discipline and Punish, which includes an interpretation of historical changes in the character of the prison and in the treatment of criminals, a study of modern concepts of criminality, recidivism, punishment, correction, and prison reform. But he also thinks of his work as offering a more general account of power, as when he says in 1977: “When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power?” (Foucault 1980, 115).
For Foucault, therefore, power involves both implicit as well as explicit controls, as in the operation of anonymous arrangements of various kinds. This means that the conditions of human knowledge and action are conditioned by the limits of our actual capacities and of the systems in which we are involved. This is revealed as part of the double structure of the historicity of power and truth. On the one hand, power and truth are constituted in terms of the historical processes of particular societies, cultures, and traditions; and, on the other, they also involve a determination of how they are established, or normalized, in particular societies: “My problem is … this: what rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of truth? Or alternatively, what type of power is susceptible of producing discourses of truth that in a society such as ours are endowed with such potent effects?” (Foucault 1980, 93).
A major implication of this is that philosophy can never establish anything like a neutral explanatory account that is able to resolve its problems once and for all. Rather, philosophy must be open to regular interpretive change and revision of problems, methods, and solutions. A central effect of historical change on power, then, is that the conditions of identification, description, and justification of its problems are also subject to change. Consequently, our claims to validity and truth are always evidentially underdetermined.
Once more this leads Foucault both to reject the presumptions that things have unchanging natures and that reason has universal range, in favor of the question of how the “problems of constitution producing “objects” could be resolved within a historical framework” (ibid.). Here again, he uses both archaeology and genealogy to demonstrate how the historical contextualization of culturally produced objects can “account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework” (Foucault 1980, 117). As observed, his archaeological investigations attempt to identify a mixture of regularities and irregularities that constitute particular networks of discourses, which are cultural constructs that use linguistic, symbolic, and behavioral characteristics of the world. The networks are governed by various “regularities,” which clarify the conditions of the possibility of the discourse in question by determining both what must be included in, and excluded from, the discourse.
This gives rise, in turn, to the genealogical effort to account for the constitution of knowledge, discourse, domains of objects, etc., without referring to an unchanging transcendental ground that operates invariantly in the course of history. In other words, genealogy develops the historical perspectivism opened up by archaeology, and critically supports the archaeological view that the presuppositions and norms governing particular cultures and periods are maintained by a mixture of ideologies and strategic factors of various kinds. These operate in a double fashion by both generating possibilities for change and imposing limitations on them: “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (Foucault 1996, 430).
As observed in The Order of Things, Foucault links this archaeological-genealogical enterprise to the notion of the “historical a priori” where he uses this latter term to address the question of objectivity in history in the context of a historicized theory of interpretation.
This project is left incomplete. Foucault situates himself at the intersection of various currents and problems where social institutions and collective experiences have a structuring function. He is led to analyze the social and collective composition of experiences and institutions in terms of both personal experiences and the group of institutions and practices that pertain to them.
The lack of resolution of Foucault’s position means that invariantist philosophical claims continue to be made. However, his work offers various strong indications of an alternative to such an approach to philosophy. In particular, he challenges us to critically question our total system of reasoning and action by asking his version of the Kantian questions: “What are we?” and “what are we at the present time?” His answer begins from the actuality of the present and addresses at least two major concerns: concrete problems that function on the edge of contemporary practices and values; and “new” possibilities that reveal limitations in our current practices and their justification, and thereby open other possibilities that have escaped our thought thus far.