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Home  Foucault 4-Early Foucault
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Chapter 5--Early Middle Foucault |
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Chapter Five
Early Middle Foucault (1964-1969)
Let me restate the point of writing about measles in the previous chapter, at the risk of being repetitive, for the sake of being clear. There is a disease called measles. It thwarts life and is therefore a problem. The problem should be solved. Voilá, there you have it: a metaphysics and an ethics; that is to say, an illustration of a metaphysics and an ethics. The metaphysics is realism. The ethics is solidarity. The social philosophy: a hyper-Popperian pragmatism. Illustration: there should be medical doctors, vaccinations, nurses, caring parents, clinics, research institutions….; in general, there should be a health care system designed and periodically evaluated and improved to cope with the measles problem, among others.
My pragmatism is hyper-Popperian rather than simply Popperian because Karl Popper himself never acknowledged that achieving social democracy requires transforming the basic structures of the modern world. And because Popper was unwilling to work with, rather than against, the ancient emotions he called tribal. (Richards and Swanger 2006, chapter 9) It is a pragmatism blended with realism that acknowledges that truth works because it is true. You may if you wish say I am not a pragmatist even though I want to call myself one, but please do not attribute to me the view that the meaning of truth, of what is, of being, can be reduced without remainder to the meaning of “what works.”
To do philosophy is to decide how to talk. In the early 1960s Foucault decided to talk about medicine in terms of ideology. I have decided to talk in terms of problem-solving. Following Dewey, I take the view that talking itself evolved to solve problems. Chapter One accordingly begins with a list of problems to be solved, a list which, I fear, will remind some readers of the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges’ famous list of animals, attributed to an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, which includes animals belonging to the Emperor, stray dogs, embalmed animals, imaginary animals, animals that from a distance look like flies, and other categories that seem to have either nothing in common or no proper separation from each other entitling them to be discrete items on one list. Foucault quotes Borges’ list of kinds of animals in full at the beginning of his preface to Les Mots et les Choses (1966) (a book whose English title, The Order of Things, is a translation of the title Foucault had originally intended for the French edition) because, he says, this is going to be a book about what it is possible to say. Borges’ list plays with what it is possible to say by being transgressive. Borges discloses and destabilizes the rules by violating them. He laughs at “our millennial practice of Same and Other.” (Foucault 1966, p. 7)
In the course of the book Foucault helps me to improve my own practice of Same and Other by naming a common feature of each of the items on my list of problems to solve, and by helping me to articulate a reason why deciding to speak in terms of problem-solving is a good decision. Foucault helps me by providing some history of the word “life,” which I then connect with the word “problem.” Foucault writes, “…here the relations of importance are the relations of functional subordination. If the number of cotyledons is decisive for classifying plants, it is because they play a specific role in the function of reproduction, and they are linked, therefore, to all of the internal organization of the plant; they indicate a function that commands all the dispositions of the individual.
Thus, for the animals, Vick d’Azyr has shown that the alimentary functions are without doubt of the greatest importance; it is for that reason that [quoting d’Azyr] ‘constant relationships exist between the structure of the teeth of carnivores and those of their muscles, of their fingers, their claws, their tongue, their stomach, and their intestines.’ Their character is not therefore established by a relation of the visible to itself; it is not in itself more than the visible point of a complex and hierarchical organization whose functions play an essential role of command and determination. It is not because something is frequent in observed structures that it is important; rather it is because it is functionally important that it is frequently observed…. One thus understands in what conditions the notion of life was able to become indispensable to making orderly sense of natural beings.” (Foucault 1966, pp. 240-41)
Building on such an idea of life as systems providing for the performance of vital functions, in the spirit of Dewey a “problem” can be regarded as an obstruction, an impediment, a frustration, of the vital functions that constitute it, including those of reproduction, nourishment, respiration, circulation, and others. Again building on Dewey, taking cognizance of the fact that most human behavior is conventional (customary, norm-guided, rule-following) the general form of most major problem solving is to modify the rules that constitute institutions (modify the culture, the conventions) so that they function in ways that assures the performance of the vital functions of life. This includes unavoidably, in the modern world-system we live in, modifying those basic cultural structures that govern property ownership and the exchange of goods and services in (and outside of) markets. A society that continuously engages in such modifications (some basic, some non-basic) for the sake of continuously improving the welfare of its population is called a social democracy.
Michel Foucault was not opposed to social democracy. He was favorably impressed by its Swedish version when he was a cultural attaché in Uppsala, and he was offered a post as cultural attaché in New York by the French socialist president François Mitterand (which he declined). However, his purpose in the passage I have quoted was not to contribute to a realist socialist ethic; it was to show how “quelque chose comme la biologie va devenir possible.” (Foucault 1966 p. 245). There had to be a concept of life as constituted by systems that perform vital functions before biology as we know it could become possible. It remains to inquire why he thought it important to determine the historical conditions of possibility of the science of biology, and, indeed, those of all the sciences.
Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault tells his readers in his preface, is going to be about “the fundamental codes of a culture –those that regulate its language, its perceptive schemas, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices…” (Foucault 1966 p. 11) In contrast to Histoire de la Folie which was about the Other (l’Autre), it is going to be about the Same, the mainstream (le Même). It is a book about how things can be mastered, organized in networks, designed according to rational schemas. (Foucault 1996B, p. 498)
At the beginning of the book, Foucault produces an example of a fundamental cultural code. It was resemblance in renaissance Europe. Already at the beginning of the second chapter he writes, “Until the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructing role (rôle batisseur) in the knowledge (savoir) of the western culture.” (Foucault 1966 p. 32) (The second chapter is in a sense the first chapter, since the first chapter in the published book was written subsequently as an afterthought when the manuscript was already completed.) The idea that resemblance could play a rôle batisseur for a whole culture echoes Roussel (whom Foucault mentions on page 9); for, as a writer of fiction could batir (build) whole imaginary worlds starting with a grammatical relationship, so an entire culture could endlessly build variations on structurally possible relationships of sign to sign. Forms of resemblance proliferated in late medieval and renaissance Europe: amicitia, consonantia, concertus, continuum, paritas, proportio, similitudo, conjunctio, copua, aequalitas, and under this last head contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax et similia. (Foucault 1966 p. 32) Foucault discusses four similitudes at length: convenentia, aemulatio, analogie, sympathies.
I offer, instead, the alternative of identifying the fundamental codes of a culture (which I call “basic cultural structures”), not with a fundamental code that builds knowledge in a culture, but with those rules that govern the satisfying of basic needs, agreeing with Vick d’Azyr, quoted in the passage from Les Mots et les Choses reproduced above, that for any animal the alimentary functions are of the greatest importance; and finding (as a fact that is both a priori plausible and empirically observed) that in any culture the ways basic needs are satisfied (or not satisfied) has pervasive effects on every institution including but not limited to those that produce knowledge. (Richards 1995, Richards 2000, Richards and Swanger 2006, Richards 2007). In the case of the modern world-system, the fundamental codes (or basic rules) are those of property ownership, commercial exchange, and, for everybody except the leisure class, work. I believe that most anthropologists view culture in a manner more akin to mine than akin to Foucault’s, since they tend to speak of cultures as hunting and gathering, nomadic pastoral, settled pastoral, slash and burn agricultural, settled agricultural, fishing, and the like, according to their food source; and as class-divided only after the agricultural revolution made it possible to produce surpluses that could be used to maintain upper classes. Claude Levi-Strauss, to be sure, viewed culture in a manner more akin to that of the Foucault of 1966.
My realist problem-solving approach calls particularly for two kinds of respect: respect for physical reality as a judge whose requirements culture must ultimately satisfy; and respect for common sense (whatever it may be at any given time and place) as the locus of the patterns of legitimate authority that currently exist (which must necessarily be the point of departure for constructive change).
I have been saying, in agreement with Charles Taylor, that respect for common sense follows smoothly from applying the phenomenological interpretive analysis of being-in-the-world of early Heidegger, and of similar thinkers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Applied phenomenology has become a source of useful tools for Paulo Freire and his many followers, for community organizers generally, and for anybody who seeks to facilitate citizen participation in democratic social change. (Freire’s practice of organizing adult education starting with a codification of a thematic universe draws directly on Husserl’s idea of a theme in a lived-world –Lebenswelt in Husserl’s terminology, roughly equivalent to in-der-Weltsein in Heidegger’s) An interpretive social science of everyday life leads inevitably to acknowledging that the kind of society we are in and in which we have our everyday experience is what Taylor calls a bargaining society; it is a property-owning society, sometimes called an acquisitive society or a commercial society. Unavoidably, questions comes up like the question whether land like the land Foucault’s mother inherited from her ancestors should remain private property, or should be socialized or pressed into the service of public or community needs, or of the needs of the propertyless, in some way. Thematizing the rules of everyday life and problematizing them de-naturalizes them; in Freire’s terms, it raises consciousness.
Foucault declared in an introduction to the English translation of Les Mots et les Choses that he had broken with his past when he was a student of Merleau-Ponty and a devotee of early Heidegger, and he had now written an anti-phenomenological book His declaration should be marked with an asterisk and qualified with marginal notes, even assuming that his biographer is right to note that the book was regarded by some as a polemic against Maurice Merleau-Ponty from beginning to end, and assuming that his biographer is well-informed in asserting that the original manuscript included many direct attacks on Jean-Paul Sartre that Foucault suppressed before publication. (Eribon 1989 pp. 184-5) It is true that there is no Dasein in Les Mots et les Choses. There is no stand-in for the first person singular conceived as knower. Les Mots et les Choses is a book about words which do not originate in the mouths of speakers and about ideas that are not located in minds. But it is not a book about objective physical reality either. It is not about ecology; or about the ecology of culture. Foucault still rejects, for example, placing “…the appearance of culture, the dawn of civilizations, in the movement of biological evolution.” (Foucault 1996 p. 344) He still seems to feel, as he implied in 1955, and as discussed in the preceding chapter, that conceding that humans are part of nature, accepting homo natura, would constitute giving in to the enemy, whatever the enemy might be; whether it is, as in 1955 and 1961 “positivism” or whether it is something else. He once described his research for Les Mots et les Choses as doing an ethnology of our culture, or at least an ethnology of our rationality, our discourse. (Foucault 1969C p. 606) He writes a book about a domain whose boundaries he never succeeds in marking, where subjective consciousness used to be before subjectivity and consciousness were banished from it.
Foucault still stands, moreover, in Heidegger’s shoes and in Husserl’s, because he, like they, is engaged in a project of massive trumping. As in a card game, the player with the trump card wins no matter what cards other players may have, so a philosopher who holds the intellectual equivalent of a trump card can afford to disregard massive evidence and argument adduced by other players. For early Heidegger his inquiry into “being” and “time” was trumps because science depended on it but it did not depend on science. Centuries earlier Aristotle’s inquiry into the meaning of ousia in the book that came to be called Metaphysics was trumps because it established first principles everything else depended on, but which themselves did not depend on anything. (Richards 1995) Similarly, Foucault proposes a trump (remember that I am talking about 1966) when he subtitles Les Mots et les Choses “an archaeology of the human sciences.” Archaeologists are people who dig. The word suggests that Foucault is not digging up foundations, but digging deeper, to find what lies under the foundations. He says his book is going to work at an “archaeological level,” to be contrasted with the level of “surface effects.” (Foucault 1966 p. 14) It is to be about “that experience of order, massive and first in its being,” and something “more solid, more archaĭque, less doubtful, always more ‘true’ than the theories that try to give it an explicit form, an exhaustive application, or a philosophical foundation.” (Foucault 1966 p. 12) There is a line in a magazine article Foucault published the same year he published Les Mots et les Choses that illumines how the trumping process works: “The plot (fable) of a story takes place inside the mythical possibilities of a culture; the writing of the story takes place inside the possibilities of a language; its fiction inside the possibilities of the act of speaking.” (Foucault 1996A p. 506) Viewing matters in this manner, it appears that the person who investigates possibilities trumps the person who investigates actualities, since the latter works within a framework framed by the former. In this respect the post-phenomenologist anti-phenomenological Foucault follows exactly the imperial strategy of Husserl and Heidegger. As orthodox phenomenologists defined “regional ontologies” which articulated the modes of being of the objects of study proper to specific academic disciplines inside the larger framework of general phenomenology, so Foucault in the last chapter of Les Mots et Les Choses, Chapter 10, defines the fields of each of the human sciences, and identifies the central concepts of each one inside the discourse he himself has established during the course of the book. His archaeological discoveries of the conditions of possibility of their disciplines, which are reported in the previous nine chapters, presumably authorize him to tell other scholars what the boundaries and key organizing concepts of their respective fields of study are. “It is that [the knowledge produced by archaeology] that makes possible the appearance at a given time of a theory, of an opinion, of a practice.” (Foucault 1966B, p. 498. Compare Heidegger 1927, p. 9). I do not mean to suggest that Foucault ever succeeded in explaining what he meant by “archaeology.” I do mean to suggest that what is ultimately at stake is authority.
The digging of Foucault the archaeologist of European culture just before the early 1600s uncovers Resemblance; it was, as noted above, a fundamental code governing knowledge in Europe at the time of the Renaissance; he calls it the Renaissance’s episteme. At the beginning of the 17th century, it rather abruptly ends. “We must stop for a moment at that point in time when resemblance will detach itself from its connections with knowledge (savoir) and disappear, at least in part, from the horizon of knowledge (connaissance). At the end of the 16th century, and still at the beginning of the 17th….” (Foucault 1966, p. 32). Europe’s new episteme will be Representation; Representation will reign throughout four of the ten chapters of the book (chapter three through six); throughout the classical age of the 17th and 18th centuries, until the French Revolution and the beginning of what Foucault calls notre modernité at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.
Foucault’s periodization discombobulates my mind. Assuming the truth of my modest hypothesis that humans are animals who need to eat, I am accustomed to identifying as the major changes in history the ones that affect how people survive. Accordingly, I am persuaded by the periodizations of those historians and social scientists who classify the kind of world we live in as Marx classified it, as “…that form of society whose wealth appears as a vast collection of items for sale,” (of “Waren”, usually translated as “commodities”) because in our modern world most people survive by purchasing what they need from among the items for sale in markets. I believe Immanuel Wallerstein’s explanation that the modern world-system began in the 15th century due to the expansion of long distance trade made possible by the exploratory voyages of Portuguese navigators, because it makes sense to me; as does Fernand Braudel’s account of the gradual transformation of material life due to the penetration downward into the lives of the majorities of the new forms of social relationship created by large scale commerce, finance, and, later, production; and as does Karl Polanyi’s account of economic relations becoming “disembedded” from the general matrix of social relations. Explanations of historical events that take into account the logic of capital accumulation provide me with contexts for at least trying to understand the diverse factors and the achievements of human inventiveness that have led to the rise of science, the protestant reformation, early modern philosophy, colonialism, the reception of Roman Law and the promulgation of modern commercial and civil codes, nationalism, mass consumption society, mass media, marginalized surplus populations, and wars. Foucault’s periodization making modernity begin around 1800 because Europe’s episteme changed from Representation to Modernity helps me to see that logically there could not have been modern biology, or modern medicine, or modern economics, or modern linguistics, before certain conditions of possibility identified by Foucault were satisfied, but it does not associate periodizing with a dynamic force that moves events. It refrains from identifying causal powers and therefore does not provide all the guidance concerning why things happen and how to make more good things and fewer bad things happen that activists who want to make a difference for good in the world would desire. I concede that there is a danger that I may think I understand more than I do understand; and therefore act as a communitarian social democrat, who seeks to re-embed economic relations into social relations, and to build another world not dominated by the logic of capital accumulation; based on my realist understanding of history, when in fact my realist understanding of history is false, and when in fact my social change efforts do more harm than good. Consequently, I will continue to read Foucault, seeking especially to find in his texts some reason to believe that my understanding of history is not just different from his, but mistaken in ways his investigations will call to my attention, so that I can rectify my understandings and my actions.
Foucault does not even try to analyze every field of knowledge that existed in Europe during the two centuries when Representation reigned as its episteme. He limits himself to three fields that he identifies as dealing with complex phenomena and as having in common arranging knowledge in tables, doing taxonomies. They are: general grammar, natural history, and the theory of wealth. They are the predecessors, respectively, of philology, biology, and political economy. The members of the latter trio could not exist yet because the logical/historical conditions for the possibility of their existence had not yet been satisfied; for example, there could be no biology because the concept of “life” discussed above was not ready. His articulation of the historical material he places under the rubric of a Representation episteme depends on finding similarities among naming things in grammar, classifying species of animals and plants in natural history, and exchanging goods for money in the theory of wealth; so that all three –naming, classifying, and exchanging—count as Representing. But not all three fall into the pattern of the Representation episteme at the same time. Exchanging is late. There is a décalage. Naming and classifying become Representation early in the 17th century, while it took another half century to bring the theory of wealth under the sway of its episteme by establishing that money represents wealth as signs represent what they signify. Foucault explains, “But while in the last two cases, the mutation happened quickly (a certain mode of being in language appears suddenly in the Grammaire de Port-Royal, a certain mode of being of natural individuals manifests itself almost d’un coup with Jonston and Tournefort), on the other hand the mode of being of money and wealth, because it was connected with a whole praxis, with a whole set of institutions, had an index of historical stickiness (viscosité historique) that was much greater. Natural beings and language did not need the equivalent of the long operation of mercantilism in order to enter into the domain of representation, to submit themselves to its laws, and to receive from them their signs and principles of order.” (Foucault 1966 p. 192)
This is the opposite of what one would have expected from the Foucault of Histoire de la Folie (1961). There, praxis and sets of institutions led to the new ways of thinking; they were not the historical stickiness that slowed them down. Internment in asylums was the historical a priori, the condition of possibility, for the concept of insanity. Now, in Les Mots et les Choses (1966) it is the other way around. Institutions resist the rise of the rule of Representation, but in the end, their resistance collapses and they submit to the requirements of the ruling episteme. This volte-face was one reason why Louis Althusser, Foucault’s teacher and friend, approved of Histoire de la Folie but did not approve of Les Mots et les Choses. The earlier book was close to structuralist historical materialism. The later was close to idealism (“expressive causality” in Althusser’s terminology). My opinion is that Foucault was partly right both earlier and later, not right in the sense of being perfectly accurate or encyclopedically complete, but philosophically right in suggesting different sorts of causal explanations for the various phenomena he describes in his various works. Institutions and practices have causal powers. Speech acts have causal powers. Rules have causal powers; as do stories and ways of thinking growing out of stories. A way of thinking (a loose category intended to include the tight notion of episteme), once it gets rolling, can indeed spread just because of its own momentum and in spite of institutional resistance; a whole society can be blinded or illuminated by its ideology just because it is its ideology. To reply to the objection that Foucault would not accept the compliment I am paying him because the phrase “causal powers” was not part of his vocabulary and suggesting causal explanations was not part of his intention, an objection to which one might add that in addition to not making causal claims himself Foucault did not approve of people who did (Foucault 1966 p. 275); I would employ the lacanian phrase, il ne sait pas qu’il sait. (“He does not know he knows.”)
But Althusser had other and better reasons for objecting. Even if one agrees with me that at this point in time the issue of material causes vs. ideal causes should be cheerfully disregarded as a non-issue, because both of these two supposedly opposed categories have now been superseded by better ways of talking about science, one should still acknowledge that leftists in Paris in 1966 were not wrong to recognize in Les Mots et les Choses a sophisticated salvo fired against them. (See the summary of their critical reactions in Eribon 1989 part two chapter 5) Archaeological analysis in terms of the episteme of the age had the consequence that questions leftists are accustomed to thinking of as important, such as the question whose interests are served by an ideology, were dismissed as irrelevant. They were surface effects above the archaeological level. For example, in a long discussion of the various economic theories of the classical age (Chapter 6); full of quotes airing bourgeois commonplaces that Marx satirized, such as the commonplace that everybody gains by trade since if each party did not consider what he was buying to be worth more to him than what he was selling there would be no contract and no transaction; which Foucault repeats with a straight face, not because he is saying he takes common liberal economic ideas at their face value and agrees with them, but because he is saying something at a wholly different level; namely, that all parties to those 17th and 18th century controversies were disagreeing with each other within the common framework of the same episteme; when he finally gets to a question about whether an ideology serves class interests, he writes, “It is necessary to distinguish carefully between two forms and two levels of study. One would be an opinion inquiry to find out who in the 18th century was a Physiocrat and who was an anti-Physiocrat; what were the interests at stake; what were the points and the arguments in the polemics; how the struggle for power played out. The other consists in without considering the personalities and their histories defining the conditions in which it was possible to think coherently and simultaneously both the knowledge (savoir) of the Physiocrat and the knowledge (savoir) of the Utilitarian. The first analysis would lead to a doxology. Archaeology can only recognize and practice the second.” (Foucault 1966 p. 214)
David Carroll argues that the key concepts Foucault invented in his 1966 book, “archaeology” and “episteme,” already positioned him to be what he became in the 1970s, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and the “nouveaux philosophes” a leader of the wave of anti-Marxism that was then sweeping Paris. Carroll writes, “In Foucault’s archaeology events in their traditional historical sense -- events produced by human subjects (individual or collective)—are considered to be of only superficial interest, surface rather than fundamental, non-events in the archaeological sense. The only ‘true’ events are epistemological events, those produced by changes in the episteme. Time and time again Foucault-archaeologist will judge changes in historical, philosophical, political, scientific, and literary positions to be inconsequential, not by denying their existence, but rather their pertinence and their status. The differences between Marx and Ricardo, for example, are inconsequential because they do not affect the episteme, because they occupy the same space and are determined to be in the same context; Foucault argues that they are ultimately (epistemologically) the same. In other words, Marxism is a non-event.” (Carroll 1978 p. 712 referring in his example to Foucault 1966 pp. 213-4)
For Jean-Paul Sartre it was clear that the purpose of Les Mots et les Choses was to undermine Marxism and that its way of achieving its purpose was to remove from history any reference to the dynamic forces that shaped it. In an interview shortly after its publication he said, “What Foucault has presented us with, as Kanters has rightly seen, is a geology: a series of successive layers that form our ‘soil.’ Each of these layers defines the conditions of possibility of a certain type of thought that has triumphed during a certain period. But Foucault does not say what would be most interesting: namely how each thought system (pensée) is constructed starting with certain conditions, nor how people pass from one thought system to another. For that it would be necessary to make reference to the role of praxis, therefore of history, and that is precisely what he refuses to do. Certainly his perspective remains historical. He distinguishes epochs, a before and an after. But he replaces the cinema with the magic lantern, movement with a series of immobilities.” (Sartre 1966)
But. The waves of anti-Marxism, in which Foucault was a participant, can also be viewed –and I view them that way—together with the rise of neoliberalism, more as effects than as causes of the breakdown of social democracy, which in turn can be viewed as due to its inability to escape from the systemic imperatives of capitalism. I am looking for ways to build a culture of solidarity, and to build strong and efficient public sectors, so that between them they can weaken the power of capital to dictate the terms of the social contract; that is to say, so that between them they will decrease the dependence of all of society –of ordinary people for jobs, of governments for tax revenues—on compliance with the requirements of a regime of accumulation. The crisis of authority can be viewed –even at the pre-political levels of families and classrooms—as the crisis of a society that does not know how to organize social and economic democracy. In order to relate the text written by Foucault published in 1966 to the discussion of these larger issues; and in the process to pen some nuances to the rather harsh judgments about it made by David Carroll and Jean-Paul Sartre; and in the process to acknowledge that Foucault and others have some valid points to make against obnoxious forms of Marxism; I need to first to say something about how Foucault handles the transition from the episteme of Representation to the episteme of modernity which is supposed to have happened between 1775 and 1825. “The last years of the 18th century are broken by a discontinuity symmetric to that which broke, at the beginning of the 17th, the thought system (pensée) of the Renaissance:…” (Foucault 1966 p. 229)
I use the generic term “handles” because Foucault does not explain why there was a sea-change in the fundamental cultural codes around 1800. He does not explain anything in the sense of providing an account of the causes that produced it. What then does he do? “Archéologie, elle, doit parcourir l’evenement selon sa disposition manifeste; elle dira comment les configurations propres a chaque positivité se sont modifées.” (p. 230) I quote these lines in French so that the reader will not have to rely exclusively on someone’s attempt to translate them. My feeble attempt is this: “Archaeology, for its part, should follow the pattern of appearance of the train of events; it should say how the configurations proper to each positivité are modified.” The word positivité, positivity, seems to refer both to a pattern of phenomena and to an episteme, a way of talking about, of seeing, and of thinking about a pattern of phenomena. It is what is given at any given period of time, but Foucault has taught us that what is given is never simply given by nature; it is always also given by history. Briefly, in some sense still problematic, which Foucault himself will struggle to clarify in later years, Foucault will tell us what happened to knowledge between 1775 and 1825 without “saying why.” In an important sense Foucault cannot possibly “say why” because what counts as “saying why” changed as a result of the very epistemic mutation between 1775 and 1825 whose history he traced. It was a prime example of what Foucault calls the, “..perpetual oscillation which makes the human sciences always contested, from the outside by their own history.” (Foucault 1966 p. 388)
Foucault justifies his claim that there was a general epistemic mutation around 1800 by referring to three specific fields. First, as already mentioned, biology became possible because the classification of living species switched to being based on the functions performed by their vital systems. (e.g. Foucault 1966 pp. 238-245) Second, philology and linguistics became possible because the study of language shifted from studying the meanings of words to studying the transformations of grammatical systems. (e..g Foucault 1966 pp. 245-49). Third, political economy became possible because “…since Ricardo the possibility of exchange is founded on labor [i.e. on a labor theory of exchange value HR], and the theory of production from his time forward had always to precede that of circulation.” (Foucault 1966 p. 267) (Writing in Paris in the early 1960s, Foucault did not then anticipate that Chicago economics would in the late 20th century lead a comeback of theories giving circulation priority over production, but he did begin to study the comeback of liberal economics in his lectures and seminars at the Collège de France shortly before his death.)
What these three disciplinary mutations have in common, and what makes them elements of a general culture shift is that origins, causality, and history came from, “…great hidden forces starting from primitive and inaccessible cores ….” “From now on, things would no longer come to representation any way but on the basis of that thickness retired into itself, troubled perhaps and rendered more somber by its obscurity; but knotted strongly to themselves; assembled or divided, grouped without appeal by the vigor that hid them there down below, in that depth.” (Foucault 1966 pp. 263-64)
The episteme of modernity cannot be neatly named with a single word like Resemblance of Representation. Its consequence is dispersion, not unity. Descartes’ famous deduction, “I think therefore I am” no longer works. “Can I say indeed that I am this language that I speak …..? Can I say that I am this labor that I do with my hands, but which escapes me not just when I finish it, but even before I start ? Can I say that I am that life that I sense in the depth of my being, but which at the same time envelopes me …? (Foucault 1966 p. 335) What does work for a time, at least to the extent of creating an illusory concept of humanity that has enjoyed considerable prominence for nearly two centuries, is Kant’s transcendental account of human nature, his “… discovery that the subject, to the extent that he is reasonable, gives himself his own law which is the universal law,” (Foucault 1966 p. 339) both with respect to morals and with respect to general truths. The human is thus defined as a double being: an empirical being studied by biology, linguistics, political economy and other sciences; and also a transcendental being –what Kant called a rational being—whose transcendental rationality established the conditions of possibility of experience, for example the condition, without which experiences would not be possible, that there is a three dimensional space to have experiences in. “…the threshold of our modernity is not located at the moment when one decided to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather on the day when there was constituted a dual empirical-transcendental being and it was decided to call it humanity.” (homme, more literally translated as man) (Foucault 1966 p. 330)
One needs to add some nuances to Foucault’s rejection of Marxism, which at this point becomes explicit (e.g. p. 274). He accepts many of the characteristic doctrines of Marxism, if not as truth then at least as central characteristics of a modern episteme that has rejected the bourgeois commonplaces so prominent in 17th and 18th century theories of wealth. Those characteristic doctrines include the priority of production over circulation, capital accumulation, the labor theory of value, the theory of surplus value, and the concept of alienated labor. The conceptual mutation that led to these modern ideas is attributed to Ricardo, and in the last analysis not to any individual but to a general shift of cultural codes which made Ricardo possible. (See Foucault 1966 pp. 265-275) With respect to them Foucault regards Marx as an optimist and Ricardo as a pessimist. Foucault also connects phenomenology with Marxism, disparaging both at once, and disparaging their essential connection with each other. (Foucault 1966 p. 332) It is as if Foucault had been reading my book, or reading Charles Taylor, and had agreed with us that the interpretation of the lived-world can only lead to a critique of it reminiscent of Marx. If I can say so without getting too far into the question what Foucault personally thought of Marx personally, which should not be the issue, and concerning which numerous diverse quotes could be collected, I should say that although within the script of Les Mots et les Choses Marx plays the modest role of author of optimistic variations on themes from Ricardo, elsewhere Foucault pairs Marx with Freud as one of the two most important modern pathbreaking founders of new forms of discourse. (Foucault 1969D p. 805). Foucault once explained that Marx’s work was not an epistemic break in economics, but was an epistemic break in politics and history. (Foucault 1967 p. 587)
I do not for one minute agree with Foucault that humanity is a dual being, at once empirical and transcendental, whose birth was indistinguishable from the birth of modernity at the time of Kant and the French Revolution, and whose short life ended when Nietzsche made it clear that the death of God entailed the death of man, whose posthumous ghosts still walk the earth in the form of bogus doctrines “gauches et gauchies” that the honest philosopher can only oppose with a silent philosophical laugh. (Foucault 1996 p. 353-4) On the contrary humanity was born some 200,000 years ago, more or less, the exact date depending on how one reads the fossil evidence. Humanity has invented many cultures and if the systemic imperatives of capitalism and the other ideologies and institutions that drive irresponsible industrialization do not lead it to destroy itself by destroying its habitat, it will invent many more. Most of human culture has either been at a different time or at a different place, or at both a different time and a different place, from the capitalist Europe between 1650 and 1966 whose ways of knowing are charted by Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses.
Neverthless, Foucault does make some valid points, and when he steals the concept l’homme to make them with he is only copying the imperialism his analysis dissolves. When Kant wrote that it is a categorical imperative to treat humanity, whether in yourself or in some other person, never only as a means, but always as an end-in-itself, he really did mean by “humanity” precisely the dual being, at once empirical and transcendental, that Foucault identifies as l’homme. (I think when Foucault names the concept of humanity as masculine he deliberately evokes its links with patriarchy; e.g. in the French Revolution, in Kant, and in Auguste Comte; if he had been interested in refurbishing it and in rescuing its positive aspects he would have found a gender-neutral way to refer to it; if not in 1966 then later. ) The network of meanings Foucault calls l’homme really was invented when Foucault says it was, with the precursors Foucault notes; it really was the object of worship in Auguste Comte’s religion of humanity; and it really has become the official moral framework for the period Foucault calls modernity, which, following Wallerstein, I prefer to call the liberal period of a modern world-system that began earlier. Kant crystalizes ideas of l’homme typical of his time and characteristic of the French Revolution; he has many followers, most of whom have not read him, and (a point Foucault does not make but could have) the other characteristic ethical theories of liberal culture, such as utilitarianism, differ from Kant very little in their practical conclusions and in what Foucault would call their archaeological basis. Even people in modern times who have no philosophy usually have modern common sense; and it is precisely modern common sense, the moral and legal framework of a commerical society, that Kant brilliantly rationalized, with a logical elegance superior to that of the other early moden philosophers who were offering similar rationales for the same institutions. (Richards 1995) Kant’s concepts of human dignity and respect for persons are explicitly included in the United Nations Charter, and in many international declarations of human rights; they are in several national constitutions. Foucault is right also in a sense he himself does not make explicit: l’homme is the juridical subject of a world physically organized by commodity exchange and capital accumulation. L’homme fits its ethical and legal paradigm.
Foucault is also right to identify the death of l’homme with: (1) Neitzsche’s death of God, (2) The death of the king in the French Revolution (Foucault 1996 pp. 318-323), and (3) the collapse of belief systems as the transcendental philosophies hastily invented at the end of the 18th century to make up for the lack of God and king lose credibility day by day. In the end the issues are about authority; Dewey was right to say that Kant’s critique of knowledge posed the central political question of modernity. Foucault echoes Dewey by saying that when the transcendental collapses, l’homme as conceived by Kant no longer exists. Although it is true, as Foucault assumes and as critical realists state, that there is no a priori reason to expect an individual biological human body to be inhabited by a single human personality; it might be inhabited by multiple personalities as in the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or by zero as in the case of a body in a lengthy vegetative coma; or by a weak personality tending toward disintegration as in the case of a homeless beggar on the street who has no sustained personal relationship with anybody and whose struggling brain is periodically drowned in shock waves emanating from drugs and from the mass media; nonetheless in those normal cases in western cultures where there is one social person in one physical body, what integrates behavior to make the body’s behavior a person’s behavior is normally some principle of authority; for example the alliance of logos and thymos in the soul as Plato conceives it, or the alliance of Ich and Űberich in the personality as Freud conceives it; hence the death of God and the death of the king, in a world where un gentilhomme ni vit que pour servir son Dieu et son roi means not only the dissolution of the principles of societal order but also the disintegration of the individual person. The invention around 1800 of l’homme, a dual being at once empirical and transcendental, in principle an autonomous moral agent whose self-given law is simultaneously the source of its own dignity and of the basic constitutive rules of society, was a key to solving both general social problems and specific personal problems. Foucault is right to say that it made psychology possible. Foucault is right to say that it made possible emancipatory social movments whose aim was to reform social institutions so that l’homme would enjoy in life the rights and the dignity to which he was entitled in thought.
The alternative I am offering is in an important sense also a transcendental one. In that important sense legitimating authority by putting culture in its ecological context conflicts with Foucault’s general objections to any transcendental argument (Foucault 1969). (I will also suggest below and in Chapter 11 that Foucault’s argument against Kant’s transcendentalism is overstated, and that some important insights of Kant survive Foucault’s critique.) The important sense in question is this: Critical realism has been justified by Roy Bhaskar with a transcendental argument that asserts what must be the case for science to have had the success it has in fact had. Bhaskar makes a quasi-Kantian argument that the condition for the possibility of science is the existence of a real world independent of the ways humans conceive it. (Bhaskar 1979) I endorse this transcendental argument for naturalist realism; it is one of the premises presupposed by my claim that nature judges culture; and hence by my claim that nature helps to provide good reasons for preferring one pattern of authority over another. The alternatives I favor also call for respect for persons in Kant’s sense, partly for reasons Kant gave (somewhat reinterpreted in a manner to be explained below) but mainly for reasons Durkheim gave. What ought to be respected in the end is common sense. Common sense is the current accommodation of culture to physical reality; it is the rules of the culture that exists here and now, wherever here may be and whenever now may be. It has to be the starting point for improving norms and institutions to make them more compatible with physical reality, or to make them better in any way. Respect for that animal whose ecological niche is culture needs to be respect for culture. Kant is unavoidable for the reason Durkheim gave: we happen to have a conscience collective that denies that there is a conscience collective. It asserts that we are all individual subjects with rights who deserve respect. We need to accept Kantian ethics (and build on it, and reform it) just because it is an ingenious philosophical rationale for the common sense of the world we live in. (Durkheim )
For Foucault the death of l’homme spells the futility of misguided projects seeking “..the liberation of l’homme, human being in plenitude.” (Foucault 1966B p. 502) For this reason Foucault must be acquitted of any charge of avoiding Marx if avoiding Marx is defined as avoiding the phenomenological Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre. He attacks Sartre’s philosophy of human liberation (not Sartre alone, but Sartre and others who think in similar ways) as straightforwardly as Ludwig von Mises attacks proposals to socialize ownership of the means of production. (However, it was Guy Debord, not Foucault, who persuasively argued that Sartre was deluded when he wrote of a proletarian revolution as if it were a real possibility.) (Debord 1994 )
Foucault briefly summarized his anti-Sartrian (anti-emancipation) strategy in an interview with Madeleine Chapsal (Foucault 1966 C, p. 514) as follows:
Madeleine Chapsal: As a philosopher, what most interested Sartre?
Michel Foucault: …Sartre wanted to show… that there was meaning (sens) everywhere. But that expression, in his thought, was very ambiguous: to say “there is meaning” was at the same time an observation and an order, a prescription. There ought to be meaning; that is to say, we ought to give meaning to everything….
Chapsal: When did you stop believing in meaning ?
Foucault: The point of rupture was the day when Levi-Strauss for societies and Lacan for the unconscious showed us that the meaning was probably no more than a surface effect, a mirroring, a foam; and that what deeply ran through us, what was there before we were, what sustained us in time and in space was the system. (Foucault 1966C, p. )
Foucault’s answer fits the pattern of the varied arguments I am assembling in favor of the view that interpreting the meanings of everyday events leads to engagement with the ethical issues concerning property rights and the commodification of human relationships classically posed by the works of Karl Marx. The phenomenology of daily life leads to radical criticism. The French structuralism of the 1960s, or Pareto’s theory of residues and derivatives, or any social science that avoids looking directly at the rules of everyday language games, leads away from raising consciousness by critiquing those rules. It leads away from democracy, not mainly because the ideas of ordinary people are held to be illusions while only sophisticated scholars understand the deeply hidden processes that produce those ideas; but rather mainly because the rule-following of everyday life is seen as lacking causal efficacy; it is not, as it is in critical realist social theory, the very source and constitution of social structure; it is not the script of the actors in the theater where social change must be performed; it is the opposite of Aristotle’s uncaused cause, it is the effect that causes nothing; the uncausing effect, mere surface, mirroring, foam. To this line of thought, a line of thought which identifies progressives with respect for common sense and structuralism with conservative elitism, the obvious objection is: But what about Louis Althusser? Was he not supposed to be a Marxist? And was he not a French structuralist of the 1960s? My answer to this question is E.P. Thompson’s: Althusser recycled the latest trends in bourgeois ideology into a Marxist form. “Althusser announces , as original and rigorous Marxist theory, notions disintegrative of the full historical process, notions highly regarded within bourgeois historiography ....” (Thompson 1995 p. 123) When ideas like Althusser´s come to define Marxism, honorable scholars like Cornelius Castoriadis decide to leave the Marxist tradition because “... they see it as irreparable, inherently elitist, dominative, and anti-democratic (the ´scientists´ and the vulgar rest)....” (Thompson 1995 p. 227) For Foucault in 1966, on the other hand, Althusser’s efforts inside the Communist Party to free Marxism from humanism were steps in the right direction. “Our task today is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and in that sense our work is political.” (Foucault 1966 C, p. 516) (Foucault later emerged as a critic of Althussser as well as of Marxism in general. (Foucault 1978 p. 611)) Foucault considered that the powers-that-be East and West were defrauding the people under the cover of an empty rhetoric of human rights and human dignity. “Experience shows that in their development the sciences of man lead rather to man’s disappearance than to his apotheosis.” (Foucault 1966 B p. 502) Foucault has in mind especially scientific advances due to Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumezil.
Foucault’s answer to Madeleine Chapsal also illumines the overall design and plan of Les Mots et les Choses. Today ( in France in the 1960s) knowledge is reverting to the Empire of the Sign, to the episteme of the classical age; l’homme must disappear for the same reason he appeared; he could not appear in the 17th and early 18th centuries because he was incompatible with the episteme of Representation; he appeared when it ended, as that dual being the subject at once empirical and transcendental, required by modernity; he must now disappear as Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Dumezil dissolve the subject into the system. “In a certain fashion we are returning to the point of view of the 17th century, with this difference: not putting man in the place of God, but rather an anonymous thought, a knowledge without a subject, a theory without identity…” (Foucault 1966C p. 515). What I am suggesting is not that Foucault interpreted his immediate intellectual environment in the light of 17th century thought but rather the reverse; in Les Mots et les Choses he created an interpretation of the 17th century for the purpose of grounding an argument he wanted to make in his immediate intellectual environment. (He himself says that contemporary French debates on humanism provided the “point of historical possibility” for his own archaeological research. (Foucault 1969 p. 26)) Foucault was perfectly aware that for the renaissance humanists man was a being made in the image of God and placed by Him a little lower than the angels, that for Shakespeare man was an actor on the stage of life, that for Descartes he was a chose qui pense (thing which thinks). If during those centuries man (and woman) did not exist, in spite of what appeared to be endless talk about them, it was because the endless talk was not specifically about l’homme as a later age would come to define him. Foucault found in the 17th century a passion for conceiving knowledge in terms of tables, for classifying everything. In those tables there was no need to create a space in the table for locating l’homme as classifier; there was no need for the Kantian rational being whose a priori categories determined the conditions of any possible experience. Why not? Because God has already classified everything when He created it. Things were simply there. Hume was possible because God had been there ahead of him, laying out a field of phenomena which only had to be perceived, and then represented. But Hume was only possible for a while and to a certain extent; as Foucault says more elaborately and in more detail in his chapter (Chapter 7) on the limits of Representation. Hume himself was consistent enough to realize that on his own worldview he himself was not necessary; he could find no perception of the self, and therefore rightly concluded that in the terms of the episteme he was working with he had no good reason to believe in his own existence, or in that of anything else, or of any links between causes and effects. It was because the classical episteme of Representation was not viable without God that there had to be a Kant, there had to be l’homme to make modernity viable. So conceived, l’homme was needed, but he is not needed anymore, now that we have systems. “By system, one should understand a set of relations which maintain themselves, which transform themselves, independently of the things they link. One has been able to demonstrate, for example, that the Roman myths, and those of Scandinavia and the Celts, caused to appear gods and heroes quite different one from another but the organization that linked them (those cutures were ignorant of each other) their hierarchies, their rivalries, their betrayals, their contracts, their adventures obeyed a single system.” (Foucault 1966C p. 514) Foucault goes on to talk about codes in biology, about Lacan’s psychoanalysis, about recent discoveries in prehistory, and concludes: “Before any human existence, before any human thought, there was already a knowledge, a system, which we rediscover.” (Id. p. 515)
Foucault acknowledges, even in Les Mots et les Choses that it is more common to see in the 17th and early 18th centuries not so much a passion for tables as a passion for Galilean physics, for Cartesian analytic geometry, and finally for a Newtonian mechanical worldview, culminating in Kant’s granting to the principles of Newtonian physics the status of a priori synthetic conditions of any possible experience, in Kant’s ethics proposing a realm of ends modeled on Roman Law as the social equivalent of the laws of nature, and in political economy conceived as social physics. (e.g. Husserl, Merchant) Foucault distinguished his project by saying that the mathematizing of the world characteristic of the period he studied applied mainly to simple phenomena, such as the orbits of planets which could be represented as one conic section or another, while making tables applied to his preferred field of study, complex phenomena: life, language, exchange. Later, in a theoretical work devoted to methodological issues L’Archéologie du Savoir Foucault agrees with his critics. (Foucault 1969 pp. 26-28, 256-275; Foucault 1969B) His interpretation of the 17th century was arbitary. Its episteme was Representation because Foucault decided to talk that way, not because of anything in his sources that compelled him to do so. In his interview with Madeleine Chapsal he disclosed why he decided to cast what he wanted to say in terms of an episteme incompatible with l’homme.
Let me now give more reasons why l’homme (not just humanity in general but the specifically Kantian creature Foucault designates as l’homme) survives in spite of Foucault’s low opinion of him. I have already given some. Immanuel Kant, who according to l’homme’s birth certificate was his father, although he lived in the 18th century had little or no truck with that century’s foucauldian episteme, neither with Linnaeus, nor with the Port-Royal grammar, nor with debates among theorists of wealth concerning currency devaluations in France. He was a died-in-the-wool Newtonian. When he wrote jede naturliche ding wirkt nach Gesetze, (everything in nature works according to laws) the Gesetze he had in mind were Newtonian laws plus the similar laws he expected would be discovered in the future. When he wrote nur ein vernunftige Wesen kann nach der Vorstellung des Gesetz taten (only a rational being can act according to the conception of law) he had in mind the capacity of human beings to follow moral and juridical rules conceived as analogous to physical laws. But this remarkable human capacity, the capacity to form groups whose members respect the rules of the group, does not depend on a transcendental premise that Kant affirms and Foucault denies. It is observed. The biologist-turned-psychologist Jean Piaget (Piaget 1932) showed empirically that children growing up under normal conditions develop patterns of behavior guided by norms of mutual respect remarkably similar to the ideals Kant had described more than a century earlier in his philosophy. Piaget’s findings have been amplified, modified, and generally confirmed, within and across several rather different cultures, by hundreds of researchers working in the field of the psychology of moral development. For this and other reasons we can say that the human being is biologically programmed to be ethically programmed. Non-authoritarian moral authority is not an unrealizable utopian dream nor is it a metaphysical postulate. It is everyday life. L’homme survives because people (and indeed la femme even more than l’homme) really are what the liberal thinkers at the beginning of the 19th century thought they were: social animals who can learn (and normally do learn) to respect moral and legal rules. The rule of law as a principle of political authority is viable because of a biological proclivity.
Foucault’s 1969 book L’Archéologie du Savoir defines itself as an answer to a question that is a non-question if rules are understood as I have been proposing to understand them, following Wittgenstein, Winch, Hart, Harre and Secord, and Searle. It is the question Foucault succinctly stated in a letter to the French magazine Esprit as that of the relation of “la contrainte du systėme” (the constraint of the system) to the (for Foucault problematic) human subject and to innovations that produce historical discontinuities. (Foucault 1968 p. 674) The problem arises, as is clear in Foucault’s Introduction (Foucault 1969 pp. 9-24) because historians have treated economic history as a history of physical events, as if the behavior of markets were determined by the same sorts of causal powers as those that determines droughts and floods, births and deaths. The problem (here I am speaking, not Foucault) is (I claim) in the very idea of economics; an idea which ought to be treated, as its 18th century equivalents were in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a chapter in the history of jurisprudence. (Richards and Swanger 2006) Economics is located at the intersection of social reality and physical reality; its central concepts depend on the legal concepts of property and contract; its history is a history of rules and of the consequences of following rules, most notably those that constitute markets. (Richards 2000) For this reason questions about la contrainte du systėme are non-questions. Foucault has in mind the discoveries of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Dumezil regarding unconscious hidden deep structures that determine what goes on in people’s minds without them knowing anything about them or making any decisions regarding them. When he writes about economic historians who find long period continuities that for some readers look like consequences of systemic constraints, Foucault has in mind the Annales historians, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel. (Foucault 1969A p. 773) I have been subscribing to a point of view in which the systemic imperatives of capitalism are real enough, but are not systemic constraints analogous to the underlying structures found by Chomsky in languages or Levi-Strauss in myths; I think Levi-Strauss was mistaken when he said he was inspired by Lyell’s geology and Marx’s economics as if the underlying invisible determining structures of tectonic plates deep in the earth were similar to the logic of capital accumulation. What happens in commercial transactions is that people buy and sell. They know what they are doing. They have not read Karl Marx or Rosa Luxembourg. They do not know the long-term consequences of many people following the same norms they follow. Nevertheless, they know what they are doing. They are buying and selling. Contracts are meetings of minds usually written on paper and signed; property rights are recorded on deeds at courthouses. The system is made up of what Aristotle called praxis, i.e. physical activity accompanied by talk; it is made up of what Saint Thomas called human acts; of what Rom Harre calls self-monitoring activity. Consequently it is misleading to write as if history were run by blind structures.
L’Archéologie du Savoir is both an engagement with a Sartrean version of Marx, a version which conceives of revolution as subjective consciousness assuming the management of human affairs (Foucault 1969, p. 22); and an avoiding of a common-sense reading of Marx, a reading which questions and proposes to modify the rules that govern market transactions and property rights. In his Introduction, Foucault refers rather to an Althusserian Marx, an anti-humanist one who achieved an epistemological mutation. (Foucault 1969, pp. 21-24). It is the common-sense reading which (I am claiming) is crucial today: crucial to overcoming the worldwide defeat of labor by capital produced by free market globalization; crucial to repeal the systemic imperatives that are driving global warming, crucial to softening the hardness and stabilizing the chronic insecurity of life under capitalism, and therefore crucial for showing young people that it is feasible to follow better paths to happiness than the paths of drugs, alcohol, wild sex, and the thrills of violence. We live in a world where production is done for profit and where the right to consume normally depends on success in selling something; a world in which meeting people´s needs, ecology, and everything else must taken second place behind doing whatever it takes to persuade people with money to invest and to advance operating funds. To get out of the traps we are in we need to motivate production and distribution if not entirely differently then at least supplementarily; and to make such needed improvements practical we need cultures of solidarity –which requires, in turn, non-authoritarian authority.
Foucault´s chosen prime target, the Sartrian revolutionary consciousness, is, at one and the same time, like the tendency of the economic historians, a big theory that threatens to become a total theory explaining everything and leaving nothing to human choice; and like Kantian liberalism, a celebration of conscious human freedom. “Time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never understood as anything other than achievements of consciousness.” (Foucault 1969 p. 22) Foucault’s methodological alternative opts for dispersion. “Dispersion,” as Foucault employs the notion, dissolves both historical totalities and conscious human subjects. The method begins at a descriptive level defining the items to be described as enoncés, or, interchangeably, as évenements discursifs. (locutions or discursive events). (Colin Gordon reads “enoncés” as “effective oral or written utterances” (Gordon 1985, pp. 243-44)) What is special about Foucault’s enoncés, or évenements discursifs; what clearly distinguishes them from Wittgenstein’s language-games, is that they are to be understood as dispersed. They are not to be understood as patterns. I take “dispersed” to mean something like “separated” and “individual.” Domains of enoncés are”…constituted by the set of all enoncés (whether spoken or written) in their dispersion of events …. It is a population of events in the space of discourse in general.” (Foucault 1969 p. 38) Foucault’s enoncés are also different from some other notions taken to be the ground-level starting point of a scientific method, because they are not to be taken as documents, but rather as monuments. This means that they do not represent anything. They just are. For several chapters Foucault elaborates on how to do archaeological research starting with enoncés, building up a theoretical machinery whose parts are defined in terms of enoncés, in which each part is as subtle and elusive as enoncés themselves. The parts of the apparatus include discursive formations, objects, concepts, what Foucault calls archives (a full set of “discourses effectively pronounced” (Foucault 1969A p. 772), not just as a set of items but as a set which has its own principles of transformation ); and a number of other foucauldian technical terms I do not name because I do not think their bare names out of context mean anything. He starts with a rough idea of enoncés and then tries to make his way of using that term more precise later. But all along –true to his anti-totalizing, anti-Sartrian, bent-- he sticks with dispersion. When he discusses the historical a priori –what three years earlier in 1966 was the historically given equivalent of Kant’s universal conditions of the possibility of experience; and eight years earlier in 1961 was what made it possible, for example, to experience insanity in the 19th century but not in the 17th-- even “that a priori must give an account of the enoncés in their dispersion.” (Foucault 1969 p. 167) “The archive is first of all the law of what can be said, the system which governs the appearance of singular events. …. it is that which, at the very root of the enoncé-évenement, and in the body where it is given, defines the entry into the game of the system in which it can be said.” (Foucault 1969, p. 170) The archive thus manages to avoid being a structure or a generality of any kind, to be faithful to the basic idea of dispersion, but nonetheless to provide a sort of law, a law defining what can be said.
Foucault’s arguments against l’homme take a turn in 1969. In his own mind the turn came a few years earlier, since Foucault said that he had finished writing the book before the tumultous events in France in 1968, even though it was not published until 1969. (Foucault 1980, p. 71). Now they rely more on Alain Robbe-Grillet who wrote novels in which events lack patterns and characters lack coherent personalities, and less on Claude Levi-Strauss who thought cultures were governed by the patterns of underlying myths; more on the idea that when Sigmund Freud psychoanalyzed someone he found something like a pulsing of desire instead of a dual empirical/transcendental being, and less on the idea that when Jacques Lacan analyzed someone he found language instead of an individual; more on dispersion and less on system.
His increasing emphasis on the dispersed and the singular (reminiscent of the emphasis on “differences” of Jacques Derrida, who, in a review article, had accused the early Foucault of being a totalitarian structuralist (Derrida 1966)) leads the Foucault of 1969 to apologize for what he now regards as his own earlier errors. The same author who earlier had said he ceased to believe in Sartrian meaning because Levi-Strauss and Lacan had convinced him that meaning was a mere surface effect of deep underlying structures, the same person who earlier had spoken of the archaeological level as if it were a deep underlying level, now says, “What I am researching are not secret relationships, hidden, more silent or deeper than the consciousness of men. I seek on the contrary to define the relationships that are on the very surface of discourse; I seek to make visible what is only invisible because it is too much on the surface of things.” (Foucault 1969A p. 772). In Histoire de la Folie he was still writing as if history had some sort of subject, not to be sure a Cartesian or Husserlian or Humean individual consciousness, but some sort of “anonymous and general subject of history,” (Foucault 1969 p. 25) which had “experiences” of folie that differed from one period of time to another. In Naissance de la Clinique he was too close to structural analysis, in danger of ignoring the specificity of the problem posed. In Les Mots et les Choses he had written of cultural totalities, the famous epistemes. Having used the totalizing explanations of the structuralists to argue that the human subject was an outdated illusion that should be abandoned, he now distances himself from them. At one point he says that among all the diverse trends in social science, the central transformation taking place in our time is the one that questions the subject; it questions the privilege of the human. His own thought is part of this great transformation. It is located beside structuralism, not in it. It is another part of the same anti-humanist transformation. (Foucault 1969A p. 779). Elsewhere, in an interview for an Italian magazine, he says that for a long time he had a “badly resolved conflict” between his literary interests, the eroticism of Bataille and the preoccupation with language of Blanchot (he also discusses Sade, the musicians Boulez and Barraqué, and the painter Klee) on the one hand; and on the other hand his interest in the positive sciences, for example the studies of Georges Dumezil and Claude Levi-Strauss. The former led to the dispersion, the dissolution, the disappearance, of the erotic subject and the speaking subject. They suggested to him a theme which he then transposed to the latter, to structural and “functional” social science: an analogous disappearance of the subject. (Foucault 1969C pp. 614-15) As in the hot intensity of orgasm one can cease to exist as a social person, so in the cold light of science one can cease to exist as a social person. The social necessity of a humanist ideal is now “…neither more nor less than that of the idea of God.” (Foucault 1969C p. 619). “The role of the philosopher, which is that of saying ‘what is happening’ consists perhaps today of showing that humanity is beginning to discover that it can function without myths. The disappearance of philosophies and religions relates no doubt to something of that sort.” (Id. p. 620)
In a 1963 homage to one of his sources mentioned above, Georges Bataille, Foucault devotes many pages to long paradoxical poetic sentences whose meaning is that at this point in the history of culture there is no meaning. (Foucault 1963) On about the twentieth page he takes a break from fanciful images as if he needed to catch his breath, and there he explains what the worldview of Georges Bataille is an alternative to. The outdated common sense his and Bataille’s philosophical poetry is intended to get beyond is identified with an economic interpretation of history, “…based entirely on need, and need based itself on the model of hunger.” (Foucault 1963, p. 49) I regard this as a scrap of evidence supporting my thesis that Foucault can be read as a young conservative who opposed common sense because he realized (consciously, semi-consciously, or unconsciously) that common sense, ordinary meanning, and an economic interpretation of history go together. They jointly lead to the herd morality, the democracy, the socialism, and the anarchism that Friedrich Nietzsche, another of Foucault’s sources, hated and feared. (See Chapter Nine below)
L’Archéologie du Savoir set out to be an explanation of the archeological method, offered as an alternative to the sort of economically oriented history practiced by the Annales school and as an alternative to Sartre’s vision of conscious revolutionary transformation. It regarded as error much of what Foucault himself had done in the past. It turned out to mark a turn toward a version of positivism, which would be followed by a Nietzschean turn. After the latter, Foucault would with a few exceptions cease to call his work archaeology and would begin usually to call it genealogy instead. * (However, he still found uses for both terms. In a 1977 lecture in Italy he said, with some qualifications I omit: “…`archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology for the analysis of local discursivities, and `genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play.” (Foucault 1985, p. 85))
Let me now do a short review of the main works discussed so far.
Foucault’s first book, the one he preferred to forget, was an exposition of the positivistic psychology he later devoted himself to fighting. His 1955 introduction to Binswanger defended Mensch-sein with arguments borrowed from Heidegger. His 1957 articles on psychology recommended the study of history as the only possible route to understanding human beings. His 1961 polemic against positivism Histoire de la Folie amassed enormous quantities of historical detail to show that the social world taken for granted by contemporary psychology is neither natural, nor eternal, nor universal, nor desirable. La Naissance de la Clinique (written 1961, published 1963) did the same for medicine.
Immersion in the details of history, according to the interpretation I am offering (and of course other readers read Foucault differently), led Foucault in a direction he did not want to go. His next book Raymond Roussel (1963) developed an aspect of an account he now gave of himself as an historian inspired mainly not by his Marxist teacher Louis Althusser, nor by his phenomenology teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, nor by the professor of the history of science Georges Canguilhem who sponsored his dissertation, but by his independent reading of works of fiction. Language structures experience. Foucault learned this from literature and applied it to history.
The thesis of Les Mots et les Choses (1966) is that cultural codes determine not precisely history but the organization of knowledge at any given point in history. The cultural codes determine so much that the human subject fades away and in its classic form as l’homme it disappears completely. A strange result. Foucault says he learned from Levi-Strauss and from Lacan that social science can proceed without subjects, and from his literary readings that novels can be written without characters. What is strange is that a philosopher who had dedicated himself so passionately to defending Mensch-sein against its positivistic enemies should regard this news as good news. One can hardly resist the hypothesis that there is some underlying constant in Foucault’s motivation, such that at one time humanism and at another time anti-humanism serve for him the same constant purpose.
It is not hard to find a constant purpose served by varying philosophical arguments when comparing Les Mots et les Choses (1966) to L’Archéologie du Savoir (1969). The constant purpose is to refute Jean-Paul Sartre. Foucault deleted explicit references to Sartre from the first book prior to publication, but he clearly makes Sartre a target in his Introduction to the second. The second book is far from the all-embracing cultural codes of the first. The second book announces itself from the beginning as offering an alternative methodology of social science designed to correct the errors of people like Sartre (whom he does not, however, actually name); that is to say, the errors of people who think both that subjective consciousness determines human action and that economic forces determine the course of history. (Foucault 1969, p. 22) The methodology offered corrects archaeology as it explains it. Foucault now resembles an Ockham’s Razor positivist historian, who parsimoniously shaves the documents he finds in libraries. The primary unit of discourse found in the document (the statement, the énoncé) does not represent anything. It has no necessary connection with anything else. Knowledge begins in dispersion. (Foucault 1969, pp. 32-66) “The analysis of statements [énoncés], then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation.” (Foucault 1972, p. 27) If finally a study of the entire archive shows that there are patterns in the dispersion that mark historical discontinuities or exclude certain possibilities, they are not patterns determined by an originating consciousness or by laws of historical development. (Foucault 1969, pp. 217-231) The classical age of the earlier book no longer has an episteme, a cultural code, which imposes its form on all its discourse. On the contrary, to refer to the classical age is now simply to give a name to observed continuities and discontinuities. (Foucault 1969, pp. 230-31) Sartre is wrong once again, but now for different reasons.
References
* From 1971 on Foucault usually called his studies genealogies, following the paradigm of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. He even re-described his pre-1971 works as genealogies. (See Foucault 1983, p. 618). However, he also sometimes continued to speak of his work as archaeology. (See Foucault 1976, p. 172: Foucault 1984 p. 632)
Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: a Philosophical Critique of the Human Sciences. New York: Humanities Press, 1979.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
David Carroll, “The Subject of Archaeology, or the Sovereignty of the Episteme, MLN volume 93 number 4, May 1978, pp. 695-722.
Jacques Derrida
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault 1926-1984. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.
Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. (edited by Donald F. Bouchard). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. (original French version 1963)
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Michel Foucault, “L’Arriere-Fable” in L’Arc number 29, May 1966, (1966A) pages 5-12, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Page 506 of the reprint.
Michel Foucault, Interview with R. Bellour regarding Les Mots et les Choses in Les Lettres Francaises no. 1125. March-April 1966, (1966B) pages 3-4, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Page 498 of the reprint.
Michel Foucault, Interview with Madeleine Chapsal regarding Les Mots et les Choses in La Quinzaine Littéraire no. 5. May 16, 1966, (1966C) pages 14-15 reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I Page 514 of the reprint.
Michel Foucault, Interview with R. Bellour regarding Les Mots et les Choses in Les Lettres Francaises no. 1187. June 15-21, 1967. pages 6-9 reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I Page 587 of the reprint.
Michel Foucault, Letter published in Esprit, (1968) pages , reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I Page 674 of the reprint.
Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du Savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. English translation: The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Michel Foucault, Interview with J.-J Brochier regarding ’L’Archéologie du Savoir in Magazine Littéraire no. 28. April-May 1969, (1969A) pages 23-25 reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages cited to reprint.
Michel Foucault, Interview with J.M. Palmier regarding L’Archéologie du Savoir in Le Monde May 3, 1969, (1969B) reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages 786-89.
Michel Foucault, Interview with P. Caruso, in P. Caruso (ed.) Conversazione con Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Milan: Mursia, 1969, pp. 91-131. (1969C) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Page cited to reprint.
Michel Foucault, talk given at a meeting of the Societé Française de Philosophie, February 22, 1969. (1969D) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages 789-842 of reprint
Michel Foucault, La Volonté du Savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. At page 172 Foucault suggests that his history of the dispositif of sexuality can be regarded as an archaeology of psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and others continued to speak of Foucault’s studies as archaeologies even after Foucault began to refer to them usually as genealogies.
Michel Foucault, “Méthodologie pour la Connaissance du Monde: Comment se Débarasser du Marxisme, “ interview with R. Yoshimoto, April 25, 1978. Umi July 1978 pp. 302-338.talk Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume III. Pages 595-618 of reprint
Michel Foucault, Interview with D. Trombadori at the end of 1978, published in Italian in 1980, translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 41-95. (1980)
Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, published in English in 1983, in French in 1984, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 609-631 (1983)
Michel Foucault, “Foucault,” an article about himself contributed to D. Huisman (ed) Dictionnaire des Philosophes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV, pp. 631-636. (1984)
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Colin Gordon, “Afterword,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. (1927)
Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie. Translated by Michel Foucault. Paris: Vrin, .
Robert Paul Resch, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Social Theory: a Comparison of Althusser and Foucault,” Poetics Today. Volume 10, number 3, Autumn 1989. pp. 511-49.
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Jean-Paul Sartre Répond,” interview in L’Arc number 30, 1966, quoted in Eribon 1989 at p. 191.
E.P. Thompson , The Poverty of Theory . London: Merlin Press, 1995.
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