The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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THE INTELLEC TUAL

Foucault participated in only one struggle, the struggle that, to his eyes, arises from the work of the intellectual. This is the struggle for information. Foucault made use of the position of power that his status as a scholar conferred on him in order to make the mumbling of the world be heard. After 1968, Foucault, with the organization Groupe d’Information sur les prisons (GIP: Prison Information Group), launched his irst inquiry on prisons (see Macey 1993, 257– 289). He intended to throw some light into this dark affair of society. Thanks to the testimony of families and the inmates, GIP succeeded therefore in making the prison enter actuality, not in the form of a moral problem, or in the form of a problem of general management, but as a place that takes place without history, the everyday, life, events of the same order as those of a strike in a factory or a job action in a neighborhood, etc. As Gilles Deleuze emphasized in 1972, with GIP, a new theory– practice relation is proposed. For the intellectual, the question is no longer to guide struggles by means of his actions or his words. The question is not even to encourage struggles. What is at issue for the intellectual is to turn himself into the relay of local struggles: here women, there inhabitants of a housing project, elsewhere homosexu-

als (see Miller 1993, 245–284; Allen 2008, 45–72).

That deinition of the intellectual does not stop Foucault from getting up in arms each time political power is exercised in a way that is too arbitrary – as in Spain. In 1975, Foucault went to Madrid in order to physically protest the execution of Basque militants. He also supported the dissidents of the East and a number of opponents of Latin American dictators. Invited by the editor-in-chief of the Italian daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, Foucault twice went to Iran in 1978 (see Eribon

1991, 281–295). There, he encountered certain personalities of the opposition to the regime and was present at several protests. Returning to Paris, he wrote up a long series of “reports.” In them, Foucault gave an account of what he saw and heard during this time when the Iranian people revolted against the Shah, trying out in these

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“reports” what he called a “radical journalism.” He was following a dangerous and unique path that outlined, over twenty years, a new relation between the intellectual and actuality: an antistrategic morality: “One has to watch out for, a little below history, what breaks history apart and stirs it up, and, at the same time, one has to look, a bit behind the politics, for what must unconditionally limit that politics.” In Iran, Foucault witnessed the emergence of a new force. In 1961, he had pursued this open quest for the plentitude of history that is possible only in “the space – at once empty and populated – of all these words without language that make a dull sound be heard for those who are listening.” It is this same conviction that encouraged Foucault to support, with Pierre Bourdieu, the Solidarity movement in Poland (see Eribon 1991, 296–308). He went there just after martial law was established at Varsovie in December 1981. It is likewise this same conviction that made Foucault lash out at the position of the recently elected French socialist government of Francois Mitterand, who had refused to take a position in regard to the establishment of martial law. By his criticism, Foucault put in boldface his refusal to become the oficial intellectual of the new government.

Philippe Artières

See Also

Actuality

Philosophy

Politics

Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Eribon, Didier. 1991. Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage.

Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster.

40

KNOWLEDGE

The outsized impact of Foucault’s thought on all humanistic and social science research ields is notorious. For many scholars in these ields, his philosophical proposals contain productive implications for the deepest questions of methodological approaches and aims. Indeed, his work was in part received as an

innovation of a generally epistemological kind. Yet, the exact nature of his speciically epistemological contributions is still under dispute among specialists. This entry does not treat these debates but principally addresses some main points of general agreement about Foucault’s contributions to philosophical relection on the topic of knowledge. A suggestion is also advanced that the singularity of Foucault’s philosophy of knowledge can be attributed in part to his prioritization of the ontology of epistemology.

Foucault’s principal epistemological position can be characterized in a general fashion as historicist and constructivist. Its distinctive character is most often understood to have resulted from Foucault’s insistence on the importance of the explanatory triad of the philosophical concepts of knowledge, power, and subject. It may also be characterized by its treatment of a whole host of additional crucial notions: discourse, episteme, law, regularity, archive, archaeology, event, statement, actuality, anonymity, positivity, possibility, objectiication, subjectiication, apparatus, and, of course, history itself. Some of the philosophical igures whose epistemology most inluenced Foucault also can be identiied: Kant, Nietzsche, and Canguilhem are of chief importance, with Heidegger and Hegel in the background. In what follows, Foucault’s thought on knowledge will be sketched in terms of several of these notions and igures.

Note irst two well-known distinctions that characterize Foucault’s thought with respect to knowledge.The irst is a periodizing and methodological distinction applied to Foucault’s own corpus. It divides his work by epistemological and methodological approaches into an earlier “archaeological” period succeeded by a later “genealogical”

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one, commonly held to have begun in the early 1970s. Indeed, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Medical Gaze (1963), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), and Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) all underscore the centrality of something called “archaeology” in their titles. The genealogical period is commonly dated to the 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” with Foucault’s theoretical presentation of the distinctive importance of a Nietzschean-inspired method of exposing the historical contingencies of the relations between knowledge on the one hand and forms of power and exercises of will and desire on the other.

The second distinction is one that Foucault draws between two French terms pertaining to knowledge: savoir and connaissance. In ordinary usage, both words may be rendered in English as “knowledge.” Since Foucault employs them with differing technical senses, they are often left untranslated. In a 1978 interview, he explains these senses. By savoir he designates

a process by which the subject undergoes a modiication through the very things that one knows [connaît] or, rather, in the course of the work that one does in order to know. It is what enables one both to modify the subject and to construct the object. Connaissance is the work that makes it possible to multiply the knowable objects, to manifest their intelligibility, to understand their rationality, while maintaining the ixity of the inquiring subject. (EEW3, 256)

Foucault supplies several examples from his work to clarify this distinction. He describes his 1961 book The History of Madness in the Classical Age as an effort to show that the constitution of a savoir about madness is at once the production of the object called madness and the production of a subject who knows the mad. He holds the same view about the dual production of certain historically contingent knowing subjects and their epistemological objects in the cases of the social and life sciences.

This bilateral, constitutive epistemology of subject and object has implications for projects of knowing in the modern period. One implication is that such knowledge projects take experiences that mark out the very borders of the traits that canonical Western philosophy considers typical of the human being – rationality, living animality, and sociality or lawfulness – and make these experiences into objects of knowledge. Thus, in modernity there arise organized inquiries into the experiences of madness, death, and crime. The organized bodies of knowledge that are psychiatry, the life sciences, and criminology are constructed around these objects of madness, death, and crime. But in each body of knowledge, to develop knowledge of these objects is equally to constitute certain speciic types of subjects: the rational subject, the living subject, and the lawful subject. So, the particular knowledge of various objects that is produced is an instance of connaissance. But the very process of simultaneously constituting the particular type of subject that is created in producing a particular connaissance is an instance of savoir. As Foucault speciies: “there

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is always this involvement of oneself within one’s own savoir” (EEW3, 257). This is stipulative; by deinition, a kind of knowing is not savoir unless it is a form of epistemological co-constitution of subject and object.

A point of great importance about Foucault’s thought on epistemology is that it seeks consistently to be an ontology of knowledge. This point is plain when we consider Foucault’s thought on knowledge in the light of Kantian epistemology. Kant’s transcendental philosophy challenged traditional metaphysics with an epistemology that rigorously limited the legitimate reach of human knowledge. It did so by making fundamental the question of what conditions the very possibility of various forms of knowledge. For Foucault, this question of conditions means that an essential move in Kantian philosophy is the establishment of a fundamentally modal basis for human knowledge; it implies that philosophical inquiry into knowledge concerns the conditions for the possibility of knowledge and not the conditions for the existence of knowledge. It also means that a distinction is drawn between conditions for possibility and conditions for existence, and thus that even if conditions for possibility were to be understood to be conditions for possible existence, the latter is not synonymous with conditions for actual existence.

Foucault’s insistence on the theoretical goal of an ontology of actual, not possible, statements is essential to his philosophy of knowledge. In this insistence on the importance of creating an ontology of actual statements, Foucault is particularly focused on the special kinds of statements that are the province of scientiic practice, following the thought of Georges Canguilhem. That is, his concern is with statements whose intrinsic aim is to claim to be true. From Heidegger, Foucault retains an attention to language as a multiform phenomenon and the view that propositional language is a secondary or deicient mode of language whose primary mode is expressive, meditative, and lyrical. He argues that the division between true and false “emerged between Hesiod and Plato” and demoted nonpropositional forms of discourse or saying in relation to propositional forms, which sought knowledge precisely as the division between true and false on the propositional level (EAK, 218). Thus, ritual, performative, poetic, or dramatic kinds of speech were no longer the sorts of speech identiied with knowledge. This historical emergence of the division between true and false in propositional language developed continually in Western culture thereafter, although it still characterizes modern forms of knowing (ibid.).

But the set of all actually uttered statements that make truth claims is plainly not unlimited, does not exist of necessity, and does not have the speciic content it has of necessity; it is limited, it need not have occurred, and it need not have occurred with the speciic content it has. To analyze this limitation and indeed rarity, Foucault employs the notions of rule and regularity. But if the limited set of what is actually said is neither limited according to traditional conceptions of possibility nor determined to be necessary, in what sense and by what means is it limited or

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governed by rules? The answer to this question reveals Foucault’s positivism, in a traditional sense of the term; that is, as a philosophical position that prioritizes the lawlike character of reality. Positivism in this sense elevates the nomological character of reality, ranking it epistemologically above other customary contenders such as the purely empirical, intelligible, rational, or transcendental. In the present case, this implies that statements occur as elements in systems of statements and that these systems are rightly described in terms of rules. It is thus the historical occurrence of systems of statements that conforms to rules for those occurrences. Note that it is not a matter of statements conforming to rules for their being true but for their being and for their being claimants to truth. The task of the thinker interested in “the historicity of knowledge,” then, is to identify and expose the real, but obscured, nomological order that subtends and epistemologically governs the production of systems of actual statements.

Foucault describes this nomological epistemic principle as “the historical a priori.” Derived initially from Husserl, the expression “historical a priori” means

an a priori that is not a condition of validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements. It is not a question of rediscovering what might legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence with others, the speciic form of their mode of being, the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and disappear. An a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things actually said. (EAK, 127)

However, the sort of regularity of this nomological order is not that of the recurrence of identical items, whether they be statements or discourses. Rather, Foucault seeks to describe the fundamental epistemological matrix, or “episteme,” of an epoch, which makes possible its speciic “system of dispersion” of discourses (EAK, 37, 47). He deines this technical term: “By episteme we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological igures, sciences and possibly formalized systems.... [I]t is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyzes them at the level of discursive regularities” (EAK, 191). The historiographical method of archaeology aims to expose the simultaneous and successive differences between the discourses of an era, not an underlying common identity that would unite such discourses. As Foucault puts it:

Where previously the history was told of traditions and invention, of the old and the new, of the dead and the living, of the closed and the open, of the static and the dynamic, I would set out to tell the history of perpetual differences;

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more precisely to tell the history of ideas as a set of speciied and descriptive forms of non-identity. (EFE, 62)

This search for a system of dispersion implies that there can be a form of regularity that governs the divergences, rather than the resemblances, between discourses of a single epoch.

In an interview with Jean Hyppolite, Foucault supplied a laconic formulation of a thesis about contemporary philosophical anthropology that is central to The Order of Things. The modern era, he offered, is a thoroughly anthropological period in which the anthropology that prevails “is a transcendental that seeks to be true at the level of nature” (FDE1, 480). This remark expresses the common Foucauldian position that modern thought is marked by the repetition of the empirical in the transcendental (EOT, 316). Joining a Kantian idiom with a Nietzschean critique of modernity, Foucault argued that a massive reorientation of knowledge took place between the classical and the modern ages. The sort of transcendental in force in modern thought is determined by the absence or death of God in the Nietzschean sense (EIKA, 117, 124). This is so because the death of God produces a problem for the question of knowledge; absolute knowledge, or divine or totalizing knowledge, is no longer possible, and this has crucial implications for human self-knowledge. Foucault essentially identiies a difference in the sorts of initude, ininity, and knowledge possible with the absence of a divine epistemological position. The initude of the classical age, and speciically human initude, was conceived through a negative relation to the divine ininite. Moreover, human initude in the classical age explains both ontologically and epistemologically; it explains that man exists with a speciically limited empirical nature – his living, laboring, and thinking is inferior to God’s existence, works, and thought – and that this epistemically limited man cannot have absolute knowledge of these speciic contents of his initude.

Modernity, by contrast, must have a fundamentally different notion of initude, and of human initude. On the shift to this modern conception of initude, Foucault writes: “The experience taking form at the beginning of the nineteenth century situates the discovery of initude not within the thought of the ininite, but at the very heart of those contents that are given, by a inite act of knowing, as the concrete forms of inite existence” (EOT, 316, my italics). The concrete forms are those that human beings confront in physical need and death, labor, and speech. Each will become the occasion for the emergence of an empirical science in modernity. Foucault sees modern thought itself as directed to the question of whether empirical knowledge of initude is possible. The Cartesian answer to the question had relied, still, on God’s guarantee of the epistemological reliability of human cognition, given the correct rules for the direction of the mind, in an “ontology of the ininite” (EIKA, 117). Hence, it did not confront the truly modern question of what can be known and how it can be known in the absence of ininite or absolute knowing. By contrast,

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in Foucault’s view, Kant eschews an ontology of the ininite but still must ground empirical knowledge in something other than itself (EIKA, 118). Foucault’s thesis is that it is the igure of “man” himself who begins in this period to occupy the double and collapsed role of an epistemic knot in which initude is paradoxically grounded. This “strange empirico-transcendental doublet” that is man “is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (EOT, 318). A chief thesis is that the historical emergence of modern man is contemporaneous with and required for the advent of the empiricities of the life and human sciences. Speciically, in modernity, the sciences of biology, economics, and linguistics succeed the domains of natural history, the study of wealth, and philology that lourished during the classical age. The only “transcendental” level found in modern thought is that of the “quasi-transcendentals” of life, labor, and language that operate to structure respectively the new empirical inquiries of biology, economics, and linguistics. In the epistemology of modernity, “it is a question of revealing the conditions of knowledge on the basis of the empirical contents given in it” (EOT, 319), for neither life, nor labor, nor language is itself an empirical object of study, yet each governs the investigations of a new empirical science. Finitude, as Foucault puts it, “never ceased to refer back to itself” (EOT, 317). The evacuation of the divine ininite leaves God’s theological partner, man, to play out the relation between grounding principle and grounded claims in a solitary epistemic ouroboros.

From Nietzsche, Foucault derives a dynamic, historical epistemology; that is, one that employs the notion of force or power at its heart. This orientation toward providing an explanation in terms of forces grounds the historiography that Nietzsche terms “genealogical” and Foucault explicitly redeploys. Nietzsche holds that the most “important proposition” for “historiography of any kind” is the principle that separates the origin from the purposes of a given historical phenomenon to be understood. As Nietzsche puts it: “[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart” (Nietzsche 1967b, 77). All events, for Nietzsche, are recurrently lent new purposes through fresh interpretations. These successive interpretations are always the products of an imposition; that is, the supplanting by force of one interpretation by another. The force at issue is a will to power that manages to compel something, which is therefore weaker, to assume a speciied function. In his classic example, the history of punishment is the history of the changing relations between the persisting practices of punishing, on the one hand, and the ever-varying ends or functions attributed to those practices. Genealogical historiography refuses a commonly held teleological presupposition that the present purpose of a practice accurately indicates and historically carries the causal explanation for its origin. Punishment as a practice with a corrective end was historically grafted onto punishment as pure venting of anger at a wrong. The difference between these two forms of punishment is so great – the second requiring the introduction of notions of guilt, conscience,

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measurable wrong, and equivalence of wrongs and penances – that the nature of the successive form cannot be explained by its sharing a common cause, aim, function, or effect with the preceding form. Genealogical historiography requires, then, that the account of the development of the phenomenon under investigation trace independently varying linkages of practices with their imposed meanings, including those linkages that occur on the basis of discontinuity of cause, aim, function, or effect. Further, it must do so by taking as fundamental what Nietzsche terms a “will to knowledge,” a “will to truth.” Active, imposing forces of will and desire are the sources of all knowledge seeking; curiosity is never indifferent. Thus, for Nietzsche, knowledge creation is, like interpretation, a forceful imposition, a phenomenon that must be described in terms of power.

We ind a version of this position in Foucault’s critique of our common contemporary understanding of the scientiic discourse as free from the realm of distorting, partial desires. Here, he identiies a self-blindness intrinsic to the conventional conception of scientiic discourse: “True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognizing the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it” (EAK, 219). Scientiic pursuits of truth as customarily conceived will produce only truths that protect that version of truth as yielded by an indifferent, nonwilling knower. Both Nietzsche and Foucault reject this conception of knowledge produced by indifferent, unwilling knowers whose conclusions are thus allegedly compelled purely by the facts of the matter. For both thinkers, knowledge must be understood in terms of power.

Indeed, there is scarcely a more important element in Foucault’s philosophy of knowledge than his conception of “pouvoir-savoir,” or “power-knowledge” (FDE1a,

1565). Foucault details many versions of power-knowledge, but we can take the variant of disciplinary power-knowledge as a prime example. In Foucault’s analysis of the prison in Discipline and Punish, the aforementioned bilateral epistemology of subject and object is developed more fully in conjunction with the notion of power; in particular, with the notion of disciplinary power. For Foucault, this was historically the irst to emerge of two variants of biopower. Part of Discipline and Punish is devoted to the argument that this new form of power, which Foucault calls the power of the Norm, emerges in the regime of discipline in the classical age, at the start of the seventeenth century. The hospital and the school are models of disciplinary power, this essentially new form of social control. They are sites of the advent of a new kind of training that is characterized by hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination, a technique at the heart of a growing practice of surveillance. Hierarchical observation coerces precisely by means of observation, which itself is made possible by architectural design, new forms of documentation and a new form of penality that takes the statistical norm, rather than the law, as its principle of operation. The creation of visible individuals is a chief aspect of the novelty of this

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system of discipline. But it is the invention of a “homogeneous, continuous, functional power” that concerns Foucault. It is the power of the Norm that is important here, and Foucault distinguishes this power from several others that precede it and that often continue to operate parallel to it after its emergence: the powers of the Law, Word, Text, and Tradition.

Discipline, with its new disciplinary technology of description, is a speciic, novel conjunction of power and knowledge. Importantly, discipline is not simply hierarchical organization, normalizing judgment, and the examination, and the new hierarchizing, constant, and functional form of surveillance they permit; the critical points here are that discipline is simultaneously the creation of knowledge and that this knowledge is a form of power. Here, Foucault intends to expose a form of objectiication that rigorously is tied to practices that simultaneously produce both an object of knowledge that is a peculiar kind of subject or, better, a particular kind of subjected being. Through discipline, the individual “is constituted as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge” (EDP, 192). What is to be considered distinctive about disciplinary power is its dual, simultaneous “subjection of those who are perceived as objects” and “objectiication of those who are subjected” (EDP, 185). The term “object” here designates the object of a gaze, control, and increasingly formalized scientiic and administrative knowledge. Discipline and Punish is replete with references to, and criticisms of, the history of science contemporary to Foucault. He charges it with failing to analyze the gradual constitution of the epistemological object of scientiic and administrative inquiry that is equally the subjection of human beings to those forms of practiced knowledge as social control, to the disciplinary form of power-knowledge.

Philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem was one of the principal architects of twentieth-century “épistémologie,” or the current in French philosophy of science that is known in Anglophone terms as “French historical epistemology.” The term “epistemology” in this case differs from customary contemporary Anglophone usage and refers more narrowly to philosophical inquiry into questions of knowledge limited to the sciences. Although Foucault adapts and extends Canguilhem’s thought on knowledge for his own purposes, Foucault shares a number of critical epistemological orientations with his teacher. First, they analyze scientiic knowledge in terms of discourse, and they consider discourse as inevitably historical. This means that they understand science to be an inescapably cultural practice and product. However, both rigorously refuse the position that science can be understood as the pure issue of economic, political, or ideological forces. To do so would be to miss radically the distinctive nature of scientiic discourses, which cannot count as such unless they seek to demonstrate what is to count as real. In other words, they are discourses singularly designed to put forth statements purporting to be true. Canguilhem offers two important points about this distinctive aim of science. One is that a statement must irst achieve the status of being intelligible as expressing a