foucault

Institutions of Terror - Michel Foucault in the light of his methodological importance

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned 'to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris', where he was to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds'; then, 'in a cart, to the Place de Gréve, where on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breast, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the wind' (Foucault 1975, 3; Pieces originales..., 372-4)

Previous lines start Michel Foucault's work Discipline and Punish (1975). With his methodologically revolutional theories on total institutions, Foucault was one of the most influental thinkers in the contemporary world. He worked as Professor of History of Systems of Thought at the Collége de France. He wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews, and edited Critique. In addition to Discipline and Punishment, Foucault wrote several other awarded books such as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), The Birth of the Clinic (1973), and The History of Sexuality (1981-1990).

Foucault studied total institutions as forms of social power. He concertrates on discourse and on detailed context of actions. In his earliest works, it appears as if Foucault was studying how the body can emerge in different practices related to the control and management of human beings. In Madness and civilization and, Birth of the Clinic - Foucault concentrates on the analysis of historically situated systems of institutions and discursive practices. In The Birth of the Clinic , Foucault analyses medical knowledge and practice; how do they produce the body and appropriate it within a network of institutions functioning at the micro level to establish medical power. In his study of the prison, Foucault enlightens the growth of the disciplined and docile body as an effect of penitentiary practices that were linked to a utilitarian theory of pain. Within The History of Sexuality , Foucault consideres how the emergence of a discourse of sex became an object of political struggle exercised through particular medical knowledge (Turner 1992, 53).

In this essay, I will introduce some of Foucaults methodology with a brief history of his central ideas. At the same time, I will explore the reasons why this thinker and his methods have been important for institutional studies such as the study of hospital. I will also discuss the role of the state in politics of life.

Foucault: Social scientist and historian of ideas

As noted in the previous section, Foucault's method went through some important changes. Through discursive practices Foucault concentrates on institutionalized and professionalized fields of speech acts. However, Foucault later tries to purify his analysis of discourse by temporarily putting aside his institutional analysis. He argues that what can be roughly referred to as the sciences of man may be treated as autonomous systems of discourse.

Foucault makes clear that his method, since it must remain neutral as to the truth and meaning of the discourse systems it studies, is not another theory about the relation of words and things. It is a theory about discourse-orthogonal to all disciplines with their accepted concepts, legitimized subjects, taken-for-granted objects, and preferred strategies, which yield justified truth claims. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, XX)

However, Foucault's method also includes analysis on micro-level. He gives a concrete demonstration of strategic dimensions of the gradually developing totalizing practices which not only produce man as object and subject but, more importantly, preserve both in our objectified, meaning-obsessed society. In The History of Sexuality (1977), Foucault challenges the hermeneutic belief in deep meaning by tracking the emergence of sexual confession and relating it into practices of social domination. He shows the significance of confessional practices such as psychotherary or medical procedures as revealed by enormous growth of interest in the psyche in all realms of life.(XXi)

Foucault isolates and identifies the pervasive organization of our society as "bio-technico-power". Bio-power is the increasing ordering in all realms under the guise of improving the welfare of the individual and the population. To Foucault this order reveals itself to be a strategy, with no one directing it but with everyone increasingly emmeshed in it. While reading our history this ways, Foucault clearly follows some ideas from thinkers such as Nietzsche, Weber, late Heidegger, and Adorno. His contribution, however, is a heightened methodological sophistication and a unique emphasis on the body as the place in which the most minute and local social practices are linked up with the large scale organization of power.

I will next explore Foucault's methodological evolution more closely. I will first discuss the Theory of Discursive Practice and then turn to The Genealogy of the Modern Individual.

From The Archaeology of the Human Sciences towards a Theory of Discursive Practice

Foucault's method evolves already by the time he writes Madness and Civilization. His methodological starting point was called The Archaeology of the Human Sciences. This archaeological method of detachment allows him to characterize Modernity as the Age of Man. Foucault's central aim was to show that "man" is a special kind of total subject and total object of his own knowledge, which gives to the sciences of man an especially tortured and ultimately stultifying structure. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 18)

The archaeology of the human sciences applies and purifies the method development for the archaeology of medical perception. It attempts to study the structure of the discourses of the various disciplines that have claimed to put forth theories of society, individual, and language. Reflecting on his analysis of discourse Foucault finds that his theme (Foucault 1972, 114) has been what he takes to be a previously unnoticed type of linguistic function - the statement (énoncé). (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 45) The statements Foucault is referring at are preserved through the unique events of the enunciations. The identity and nature of these statements is constituted by the functioning of the field of use in which it is placed.

"The analysis of statements, then, is a historical analysis, but one that avoids all interpretation: it does not question things said as to what they are hiding, what they were 'really' saying, in spite of themselves, the unspoken element that they contain....; but, on the contrary, it questions them as to their mode of existence,....what it means for them to have appeared when and where they did - they and no others" (Foucault 1972, 109)

Foucault concludes with the idea that discursive formations produce the object about which they speak. For example, madness is not, as he had earlier assumed, an object or limit experience outside of discourse which each age had attempted to capture in its own terms. Mental illness is constituted by all that is said in all the statements that name it, divide it up, describe it, explaine it, trace its developments, indicate its various correlations, judge it, and possibly give it speech by articulating discources that are to be taken as its own (32).

For Foucault, archaeology was thus "a task that consists of not - of no longer - treating discourses as groups of signs ( signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (49). Since "one cannot speak of anything at any time" (44), what is required is a way of talking about "the space on which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed" (32).

Foucault proposes that discursive relations have a certain effect on all other relations. Foucaults clearest example of the way discursive practices influence these non-discursive elements, is found in his discussion of the relation of medical discource and other factors influencing medical practice.

In the end, Foucault withdraws from the historical structuralism and restricts his analysis to the structure of discursive practices - to the rules governing serious speech acts. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 64) Considering medical institutions, we may ask, what is the relation of the rules governing medical discourse to the other forces which affect medical practice? Foucault's answer is that discource takes use of the various social, technical, institutional, and economic factors which determine medical practice by takind them up and unifying them.

Thus for Foucault, it is not a question of giving that by which the disease can be recognized, but of restoring, at the level of words, a history that covers its total being. To the exhaustive presence of the disease in its symptoms corresponds the unobstructed transparency of the pathological being with the syntax of a descriptive language: a fundamental isomorphism of the structure of the disease and of the verbal form that circumscribes it. The descriptive act is, by right, a 'seizure of being' ( une prise d'étre ). Inversely, being does not appear in symptomatic and therefore essential manifestions without offering itself to the mastery of a language that is the very speech of things. In the medicine of species, the nature of a disease and its description could not correspond without an intermediate stage that formed the 'picture' with its two dimensions; in clinical medicine, to be seen and to be spoken immediately communicate in the manifest truth of the disease of which it is precisely the whole being. There is disease only in the element of the visible and therefore statable.

To understand the variety and complexity of statements, Foucault found that the archaelogist has to take into account other systematically changing discursive practices, such as who has the right to make statements, from what position these statements emanate, and what position the subject of discourse occupies. In the case of medicine, Foucault had to describe, in line with other things, how doctors are certified, hospitals are organized, and how the position of the doctors as observer, interrogator, data collector, researcher, and so forth, changes. (67-68)

During his literally organized development, Foucault seeks a level of analysis which takes account of concepts, their continuities, small shifts, and revolutional reordering without recourse to an immanent rationality. Foucault argues that the island of density in which serious speech acts proliferate are the result of principles which operate from within or from behind discourse to constrain what can count as objects, what sorts of things can seriously be said about them, who can say them, and what concepts can be used in the saying. (71).

The Genealogy of the Modern Individual: The Interpretative Analytics of Power, Truth, and the Body

In his later works, Foucaults treats detailed actions as more fundamental then theory. Foucault introduces a new method of "deciphering the meaning of these practices". He works out then method of genealogy especially to diagnose of what he calls bio-power, a set of historical practices which produces the human objects systematized by structuralism and the human subjects explicated by hermeneutics. (103) For Foucault the genealogist is a diagnostician who concentrates on the relations of power, and the body in modern society. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 105)

The task of genealogy has been to show that "the body is also directly involved in a political field....Power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs" (Foucault 1975, 25). This is directly connected to the economic system, for the body is both useful and productive. But it becomes possible to make men work efficiently and productively only after they have been "caught up in a system of subjection". (Foucault 1975, 26)

In both Madness and Civilization and The Birth of Clinic, Foucault began to analyze the interrelations of biological knowledge and modern power. First his interests concentrated on the body as it has been directly investigated by scientists and in the power which resides in specialized institutions. Later he recognized that this potent combination of knowledge and power, localized on the body, is actually a general mechanism of power of the greatest import for Western society. (113)

As Madness and Civilization is a history of attitudes towards and treatment of those designed as insane, The Birth of the Clinic is a study of the birth of modern medicine. Foucault analysis the origins of modern clinical medicine, pointing out the eighteenth century when the epistemological basis of men's thinking saw total transformations. Many of the basic ideas of modern medicine about the nature of illnessness, about what life should be etc. were formulated during this period. The guiding idea has been the one that Foucault named as Bio-Power.

Bio-Power and conclusions

In the seventeenth century bio-power emerged as a coherent political technology. It was the period when demographical issues such as fostering of life and the growth and care of populations became a central concern of the state. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 133)

"Bio-power brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of tranformation of human life....Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence in question" (Foucault 1975, 143).

The Body was an object to be manipulated. A new science - a technology of the body as an object of power - gradually formed in disparate, peripheral localizations. Foucault labels this 'disciplinary power' and analyzes it in detail in Discipline and Punishment. (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982,134)

The state was largely involved in this process while it seemed to be extremely cencerned with the demograbhical issues. What first had been a study of population, soon became political arithmetic. Administrators needed detailed knowledge not only about their own state, but about other states as well in order to calculate their relative forces. For the state was involved it was a question about the force. Welfare and survival were functions not of virtue, but of strength. (138)

Politics thus became a bio-politics. Once the politics of life was in place, then the life of these populations, and their destruction as well, became political choices. Since these populations, were nothing more or less then what the "state cares for its own sake," the state was entitled to relocate them or to slaughter them, if it served the state's intrest to do so.

Politics took a step further from the idea that the state has its own nature and its own finality, to the idea that man is the true object of the state's power. As far as man produces a surplus strenght, as far as he is a living, working, speaking being, as far as he constitutes a society, and as fas as he belongs to a population in an environment, he is a useful source for the state.

The importance of life for these problems of political power increased; a kind of animalization of man through the most sophisticated political techniques was one of the results. Both the development of the possibilities of the human and social sciences, and the simultaneous possibility of protecting life and of the holocaust made their historical appearance. (Foucaults lectures delivered at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, October 1979 ref. Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982, 138)

The central poles of bio-power had developed separately in the eighteenth century. Control of the body and control of the species were finally brought together in the nineteenth century preoccupation with sex. The state became an interventive part in the discourse about sexuality and in the new tactics for controlling sexual practices. Sex became the construction through which power linked the vitality of the body together with that of the species. (140).

Several reforms, such as the ones in social welfare programs, were made in order to streghten the fertility and the state of health of the existing population. What happened around the sex later formulated as a more concluding method for the state. The state had the power what was needed in order to control the everyday life of the poeple. The scientified knowledge seemed to become as a tool for realizing this ideology within large amouts of people.