foucault studies number 5

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Foucault Studies

© Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Morris Rabinowitz, and Kevin Turner 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203

Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 1‐4, January 2008

EDITORIAL A New Beginning and a Continuation… Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, and Alain Beaulieu; with Morris Rabinowitz & Kevin Turner When the first issue of Foucault Studies came out in 2004, interest in work of the French thinker was already high and steadily growing. This interest has continued to rise steeply since then. According to the Social Sciences Citation Index, Foucault was in 2004 and the two following years the most quoted thinker to live after World War II, outranking Bourdieu, Giddens, Habermas, Latour, Beck, Derrida, and Deleuze. In the same period, he also outranked those scholars in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Interest in Michel Foucault is not just growing in academia, however, his work is also being used in innumerable other contexts, under very different circumstances and in very different ways. His influence is not just theoretical: it is also practical.

With all this activity, the need for a journal devoted specifically and directly to Foucault’s work and its impact has never been greater. We need a channel – that is, an inlet and an outlet – to focus all this energy and activity that holds it to the highest academic and intellectual standards while maintaining the excitement. Foucault Studies is still the only international journal in English that takes on this challenge. The enormous interest among new readers, recently detectable through the great number of hits and downloads from http://www.foucault‐studies.com, indicates that this journal is indeed necessary. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure that we welcome you to Issue 5 of Foucault Studies. As some readers may be aware, the original editorial team, consisting of Stuart Elden, Clare OʹFarrell, Alan Rosenberg, and Sylvain Meyet, had decided that, due to lack of institutional, financial, and administrative support, they could no longer continue running the journal. Fortunately, a new editorial team was able to secure generous and timely grants from The Danish Social Science Research Council1 and The Danish Research Council for the Humanities.2

1 http://fist.dk/site/english/councils‐commissions‐committees/scientific‐research‐councils/the‐

danish‐social‐science‐research‐council 2 http://fist.dk/site/english/councils‐commissions‐committees/scientific‐research‐councils/the‐

http://www.foucault-studies.com/

Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 1‐4.

The new team consists of Sverre Raffnsøe3 (Editor‐in‐Chief); Alan Rosenberg4 (Managing Editor and Book Review Editor), Alain Beaulieu5 (Co‐Editor), Jens Erik Kristensen6 (Co‐Editor), Frederik Tygstrup7 (Co‐Editor) and Morris Rabinowitz8 (Copy Editor). With funding in place, much of the work that took up the time and energy of the original editorial team is now being done by our Editorial Assistant, Kevin Turner. It is a new beginning but we are not without a sense of continuity. We intend to preserve the ethos of the journal established by the original editorial team as stated in the Editorial of the first issue: that it be “web‐based and genuinely interdisciplinary and international.” Using the Open Journal Systems format, the journal will continue to be available online in the future. It will be accessible free of charge for anyone who wishes to use it. Foucault Studies will continue to be published biannually with Issue 6 scheduled to appear in November 2008.

As in the past, the new team strongly supports the desideratum to “provide a forum for discussion of Foucault which goes beyond received orthodoxies, simplifications, and uncritical appropriations.” Debate, critique and innovative use or development of Foucault’s own thinking will figure prominently in these pages. A key spur to reassessing his work is the recent ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures, which makes it possible to keep track of the development of his thought. We will also be reviewing books that are not directly about Foucault, but think our readership should know about, as well as books about Foucault that have been passed over. Foucault Studies aspires to be an organ for the advancement of Foucault’s thought through a continuously revived critical reception.

The quality of the journal will continue to be secured through double blind peer‐review and standard editorial and editing procedures. Such procedures will ensure that the journal remains a channel for the diffusion of high quality, rigorous scholarly work. The editorial team encourages the submission of work that deals with Foucault’s work in a detailed and qualified manner. In this issue, we present you with two articles, two interviews, two review essays, and twelve book reviews.

In the first article, Timothy OʹLeary discusses ‘Foucault, Experience, Literature.’ Here, OʹLeary addresses the question of how it is possible for a literary text to have transformative effects on its reader by way of a detailed analysis of the

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danish‐research‐council‐for‐the‐humanities

3 Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. 4 Department of Philosophy, Queens College, The City University of New York. 5 Département de Philosophie, Université Laurentienne. 6 Department of Philosophy of Education, School of Education, University of Aarhus. 7 Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. 8 Public Library Director (retired), Cambridge, MA.

Raffnsøe, Rosenberg, and Beaulieu; with Rabinowitz & Turner: Editorial

notion of experience in Foucault’s œuvre. In doing so, OʹLeary draws attention to an aspect of Foucault’s critical‐historical thought that has received scant attention in the secondary literature, and offers some suggestive ways of developing it further. In the second article, Cecile Brich notes that much of the scholarly commentary on the work of The Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), and Foucault’s involvement with this group, has focused on the relationship between the public pronouncements of the GIP and Foucault’s ideas on power and the role of intellectuals. Brich now asks whether the voice represented by this group was that of prisoners or that of Foucault’s, and she does this by looking at the extent to which the methods employed by the GIP accorded with their pronouncements.

The first interview in this issue is an exchange, conducted by email during 2005‐6, between two central figures in Foucault scholarship: Jacques Donzelot9 and Colin Gordon.10 The stimulus for this exchange was two‐fold: firstly the international events and publications in 2004‐5 which marked the 20th anniversary of Foucaultʹs death; and secondly, the French publication in 2005 of Foucaultʹs 1978‐9 lectures on governmentality. The specific focus of the exchange is how and why Foucault’s concept of governmentality came to meet with such success in the English‐speaking world while remaining relatively marginal in France. The second interview – which took place in Tampere, Finland in September 2006 – demonstrates quite clearly that studies in governmentality are no longer restricted to the English‐speaking world, and exhibits the broader applications of Foucault’s notion of government. In this exchange, Antti Tietäväinen, Miikka Pyykkönen, and Jani Kaisto interview William Walters (co‐editor of Global Governmentality11 and Governing Europe12) and the content of their discussion is the governmentalisation of Europe. The first of the review essays is a review by two native French speakers, Alain Beaulieu and Réal Fillion, of the recent English translation of Foucault’s History of Madness. In the second essay, Thomas F. Tierney’s reviews the publication of the English translation of Foucault’s 1978 lecture course at the Collège de France entitled Security, Territory, Population. Each review demonstrates, in its own way, the need for the ongoing translation of Foucault’s work into English. More specifically, they make clear how such translations offer the possibility of new insights and thus new understandings of the originality, development, and continuing relevance of Foucault’s œuvre.

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9 Jacques Donzelot (1977). La police des familles. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit; Jacques Donzelot

(1984). L’invention du social. Paris : Librairie Arthème Fayard. 10 Colin Gordon (1972) (ed). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books; Colin Gordon (1991)

(ed): The Foucault Effect, with Graham Burchell, and Peter Miller. Chicago. London/Toronto/Sydney/Tokyo: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

11 Wendy Larner and William Walters (2004). Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge.

12 William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr (2005). Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London and New York: Routledge.


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The twelve book reviews offered in this issue emphasize this point. Here, we are presented with a broad spectrum of the theoretical and practical application of Foucault’s work in diverse disciplinary and thematic fields. As part of the endeavour to further the development of Foucault’s work, the journal will – in the years to come – publish special issues with a focus on particular areas or themes. Plans have already been made with the organizers for contributions for The Fifth Annual SOCIAL THEORY FORUM 2008 Conference A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, to be held in Boston. Some of those papers will be published in a forthcoming special issue. Jorge Capetillo‐Ponce and Samuel Binkley will be Guest Editors for this special edition. Submissions will continue to be reviewed by peers.

The journal will also host a large, international conference in Copenhagen in the not too distant future. The overall theme will be the impact of Foucault’s thinking within various established forms and practices of science. In addition to sessions dealing with Foucault in general, the conference will offer sessions and workshops dealing with Foucault’s impact on specific disciplines and practices such as accounting, governance, pedagogy and education, geography, management and management theory, literature and the study of literature. A call for papers will be announced via the journal and contributions from the conference will be published in one or several special issues. As it is the intention of the journal to serve and facilitate the study and further development of Foucault’s thought, the coming issues will, in addition to the usual articles, also contain announcements of new, significant Foucault publications as well as review essays about them. Furthermore, they may include interviews with significant researchers or practitioners that have been inspired by Foucault, as well as briefings on conferences and other important events. Readers are welcome to submit news of such upcoming events and publications. If you register online at the present site under “Information for readers,” you will receive information about the journal regarding the publication of new issues, special issues, and announcements of special calls for papers. You will also receive news on important conferences, new publications and events of special interest. Registration is free.

Foucault Studies

© Timothy OʹLeary 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


ARTICLE Foucault, Experience, Literature Timothy OʹLeary, The University of Hong Kong

A book is produced, a minuscule event, a small malleable object… (Foucault).1

A book is a grain of sand… (Calvino).2

What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s reality, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads (Blanchot).3

The very general question that I want to address here is, ‘what can literature do?’4 If a book is a minuscule event, a small object, a mere grain of sand, how can it be said to do anything at all? In one of several interviews in which he discusses his dissatisfaction with the philosophical milieu of his student days, which was dominated by Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism, Foucault makes the following startling claim: “for me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.”5 My aim in this paper is to lay the groundwork for understanding how it is possible for a work of literature to have such an effect – that is, to force us to think otherwise. Is it really possible for works of literature to change the people who read them? Or, to give this question a slightly different focus, are people capable of changing themselves through their reading of literature? Let me

1 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy & J. Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006)

[Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique, 2nd edition, Gallimard, Paris, 1972 (references here are to the Gallimard edition of 2001)]. Henceforth, HM, with English and French page numbers given in the text: HM, xxxvii [9]. My translation varies occasionally from the published version.

2 Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, (San Diego, CA: Harvest Books, 1987), p.87. 3 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. A.Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska

Press, , 1982), p.198. 4 I would like thank several people for helping me to clarify my thinking about this question:

Timothy Rayner, who read the paper with great care and attention; the members of the School of Philosophy, UNSW, Sydney at which I spent part of my sabbatical in 2006; and the anonymous referees for Foucault Studies..

5 “Interview with Michel Foucault,” conducted by Charles Ruas, in Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), p.176.

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Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 5‐25.

say first of all, that I will be answering this question in the affirmative – that is, I will be arguing that literature can indeed have this kind of effect.

It would, however, be futile to answer this question in the affirmative if we could not say something about how literature can effect such changes, and it is this how which will be my focus here. Starting from the recognition that the work of literature can only be fully understood as occurring in the interaction between a reader and a text, we will have to address both sides of this dyad. My question then becomes: What is it, in the forms of the human subject, on the one hand, and in the forms and modes of literature, on the other hand, that makes it possible for the latter to act upon the former with a transformative effect? In this paper, due to limitations of space, I will focus primarily on the former aspect: the forms of human subjectivity and their essential historicity. But, ultimately, we will see that a Foucauldian approach to this question necessarily draws in the idea of fiction and the fictive, which will allow us to build a bridge to the question of literature itself. The approach I am taking here, however, first of all requires a detailed excavation of the development of the notion of experience in Foucault’s work, from his earliest to his latest. I Foucault’s Archaeology of Experience Among the central concepts of Foucault’s thought – power, knowledge, truth, critique – there is one which has received less attention than it deserves: experience.6 This concept runs through Foucault’s works from the earliest to the latest in a way that rarely draws attention to itself, but occasionally bursts out in such resonant phrases as “limit‐experience” and “experience‐book.” In an interview given in 1978,7 for example, Foucault gives an account of his entire philosophical development in terms of this concept. There were certain works, he says, by Bataille, Blanchot, Nietzsche, that opened up for him the possibility of philosophy as a “limit experience” – an experience which tears us away from ourselves and leaves us no longer the same as before (EMF, 241 [43]). Such books, which he also wishes to write

6 Two notable exceptions are: Timothy Rayner, “Between fiction and reflection: Foucault and the

experience book,” Continental Philosophy Review, no.36, 2003, pp.27‐43; and, Gary Gutting, “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience,” boundary 2, vol.29, no.2, 2002, pp. 69‐85. But, see also the chapter on Bataille, Blanchot and Foucault, in Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, , 2006), chap. 9.

7 “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Michel Foucault: Essential Works, Vol. 3; Power (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 2000). This collection, henceforth, EW3. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” in, Dits et écrits: IV, D. Defert and F.Ewald (eds.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). This collection, henceforth, DEIV]. This interview, henceforth, EMF with English and [French] page numbers given in the text. Unfortunately the English translation of this interview can be misleading in places.

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O’Leary: Foucault, Experience, Literature

himself, he calls “experience books” rather than “truth books”; and they are experimental (expérience also means experiment) in the sense that they put the author and the reader to the test of their own limits (EMF, 246 [47]). Hence, his books on madness, the prison and sexuality not only examine our forms of knowledge and our practices, they also try to transform them. But running alongside this dazzling use of the concept is a more mundane sense in which experience is taken to mean the general, dominant background structures of thought, action and feeling that prevail in a given culture at a given time. Hence, for example, the extensive discussion, in History of Madness, of “the classical experience of madness,” or the identification of a “modern experience of sexuality,” in History of Sexuality, volume 2. In that book, experience is finally presented as the historical mode in which being is given to us as “something that can and must be thought,”8 while, in his very last lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault can still speak in terms of the Christian experience and the modern European experience of philosophy.9 Experience is then, a limit‐transcending, challenging event, but also the dominant historical structure which is to be challenged. These two senses of experience, in all their apparent contradictoriness, will be my focus here.

Let us begin with the Preface to the first edition of History of Madness, where Foucault quotes, without attribution, a passage that comes from one of René Char’s prose poems, ending with the sentence “Développez votre étrangeté légitime” (develop your legitimate strangeness/foreignness).10 This imperative could stand as an epigraph to Foucault’s entire work, a series of books that in their effort to “think otherwise” (penser autrement) (UP, 9 [15]) constantly explore whatever is foreign to our ways of thinking and acting. The work on madness, in particular, sets out to explore the original gesture by which madness and unreason were expelled from the rational experience of the modern West – the division in which they became what is most strange, foreign and excluded for reason.11 When the book was re‐published in 1972, however, Foucault removed the original Preface and wrote a new one. In the new Preface, he steps back from the role of authorial voice, resisting what he sees as the temptation to impose a law of interpretation on the work. After all, a book, he

8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume II, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988) [Histoire de la sexualité, 2, L’usage des plaisirs, Paris, Gallimard, 1984]. Henceforth, UP, with English and [French] page numbers given in the text. UP, 6‐7 [13].

9 Lecture of March 28th 1984; unpublished, but recordings available at Fonds Michel Foucault, l’IMEC, Caen.

10 The original Preface is included in the English translation (op. cit.); the French is in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954‐1988: I, 1954‐1969, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.), Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Henceforth, HMP, with English and [French] page numbers given in the text. This citation, HMP, xxxvi [167]. For Foucault’s source, see René Char, Fureur et mystère, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, p.71.

11 It is no surprise to find that the group of poems from which the Char quotation comes is called Partage Formel (Formal Division).

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says, may indeed be “a minuscule event” (HM, xxxvii [9]), but it is an event that is followed by a proliferating series of simulacra – interpretations, quotations, commentaries – which an author cannot and should not try to limit. Making a curious distinction, Foucault says he would not want a book to claim for itself the status of text, to which criticism would like to reduce it. He would like it to present itself, instead, as “discourse,” by which he means “at the same time battle and weapon, strategy and blow… irregular encounter and repeatable scene” (HM, xxxviii [10]). What then is the series of events in which this book on madness is inscribed? To what battle and struggle does it contribute? One way to answer these questions is to begin with the centrality of the notion of experience that structures and animates Foucault’s approach to madness.

At the centre of this book, as the original Preface shows, there are two notions of experience. On the one hand, there is the idea of a “limit‐experience,” a foundational gesture by which a culture excludes that which will function as its outside (HMP, xxix [161]) – in this case, the exclusion of madness and unreason by reason. Hence, it is a question in this book of going back to the “degré zéro” (HMP, xxvii [159]) of the history of madness, where reason and unreason are still undifferentiated, not yet divided, to a time before this exclusion.12 Foucault suggests that one could do a series of histories of these limit‐experiences, which might include the construction of the Orient as other to the West, the fundamental division between reason and dream, and the institution of sexual prohibitions. To this list we could add the original division, represented for us by Plato, between the discourse of reason and the language of poetry. It is worth noting that this 1961‐vintage “limit‐experience” is not the same as the one Foucault appeals to in the 1978 interview that I quoted in relation to the “experience‐book.”13 In that interview, a “limit‐experience” is an extreme experience which transgresses the limits of a culture – an experience, that is, of the sort that Bataille both describes and conjures – whereas here it is the experience in which a culture actually creates those limits. Once again, we see that the tension between the senses of experience has reproduced itself, but this time within one of its forms. However, let us remain for the moment within the context of History of Madness. In order to understand the form of limit‐experience which divides reason from madness, it is necessary to turn to what Foucault calls “the classical experience of madness.” In this phrase, which recurs throughout the book, “experience” is taken as arising from the whole set of the dominant ways of seeing, thinking about, and acting towards madness – ways which include systems of

12 It is worth noting that Foucault is not here looking for access to madness in some sort of pure

state. Indeed, he explicitly states later in the same Preface that its “wild state” and “primitive purity” will always remain inaccessible (HMP, xxxiii [164]). However, one might object that he, nonetheless, seems to assume that there is such a state, although we cannot access it.

13 See note 6 above.

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thought, institutions and the legal apparatus (“notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts”) (HMP, xxxiii [164]).

The first point to note about this second use of the concept is that Foucault never gives an explicit definition of experience, he never tells us exactly what the term covers. Early in the book we read phrases such as “all the major experiences of the Renaissance” (HM, 8 [21]),14 “the Western experience of madness” (HM, 16[34]), “the experience of madness in the fifteenth century” (HM, 24 [43]), and of course the ubiquitous “classical experience of madness” (HM, 15 [32]), but experience itself is never defined. Nevertheless, it is possible to piece together Foucault’s understanding of this concept. In the first place, it involves the way in which a given object is seen and conceptualised in a given culture. For example, at the beginning of the Renaissance, Foucault tells us, there was a confrontation between two possible forms of the experience of madness – a “tragic” and a “critical” experience (HM, 26 [45]). And these two forms, we are told, are the basis of “everything that could be felt (éprouvé) and formulated (formulé) about madness at the beginning of the Renaissance” (HM, 27 [46]). Later, speaking of the great enclosure of unreason, he says that it is this “mode of perception” which must be interrogated in order to understand the classical age’s “form of sensibility to madness” (HM, 54 [80]). The practice of internment, he suggests, partly explains “the mode in which madness was perceived, and lived, by the classical age” (HM, 55 [80]). Out of this practice, a “new sensibility” (sensibilité) towards madness is born (HM, 62 [89]), a new object is created, and the many ways of engaging with unreason are organised around a form of “perception” (HM, 101 [140]). A final example: “classicism felt (éprouvé) a delicacy in front of the inhuman which the Renaissance had never felt (ressentie)” (HM, 143 [192]). The first aspect of any experience, then, will be the forms of perception or sensibility which it makes possible – or even necessary. A given structure of experience makes possible and gives rise to certain ways of sensing, seeing, feeling an object.

But these forms of perception are not the only components of a structure of experience. Despite Foucault’s apparent focus on phenomena of perception and (individual) consciousness, it must be emphasised that the experience of madness is not just a form of sensibility. It also comprises both the institutional practices of internment and the forms of knowledge which develop within and bolster those institutions. In an interview given shortly after the original publication, Foucault makes the following claim, which could serve as a summary of the book: “Madness only exists in a society, it does not exist outside the forms of sensibility which isolate it and the forms of repulsion which exclude or capture it” (DEI, 169).15 These forms of repulsion, which both exclude and capture, may be taken to comprise what Foucault would later call the power/knowledge aspects of the relation to madness. There is,

14 The English version, inexplicably, translates Foucault’s “toutes” with “many.” 15 This interview, published in Le Monde in 1961, is untranslated.

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for instance, a certain “practice and concrete awareness (conscience) in classicism” which is part of its distinctive experience of madness (HM, 158 [211]). Indeed, this experience is “expressed” in the “practice of internment” (HM, 137 [185]). In the classical age, then, the forms of repulsion comprised the great hospitals (such as Bicêtre in Paris and Bethlehem in London), combined with the modes of knowledge which tried to explain madness, for example, in terms of a purely negative absence of reason.

To speak of “the classical experience of madness” is, then, to speak of the forms of consciousness, sensibility, practical engagement and scientific knowledge which take “madness” as their object. And even though Foucault was later to admit that his use of the term experience was “very inconstant” [très flottant] in History of Madness,16 it is nevertheless a concept that recurs with a certain regularity throughout the rest of his work. So, for example, in The Order of Things, we are told that his aim is to show what becomes of the “experience of order” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His question here is how did the “experience of language” – a “global, cultural experience” – of the late Renaissance give way to a new experience in the classical age?17 It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the history of Foucault’s use of the concept is entirely seamless. It is clear, for example, that after the late 1960s, and up until the late 1970s, he was less and less willing to characterise his work in terms of an investigation of experience. We can surmise that this was a result of his increasing dissatisfaction with the fluidity of the concept, but also of the fact that the concept, with its connotations of individual psychology, clashed with his new focus on bodies, resistance and power. We can note, for example, his comment in The Archaeology of Knowledge that History of Madness had given too great a role to an inchoate notion of experience – one that was in danger of re‐introducing “an anonymous and general subject of history.”18

Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, accompanying the final twist in Foucault’s trajectory, the concept of experience had returned. Now it was no longer quite as inconstant as it had been before, a change largely the result of the increased complexity of his methodology as a whole. Summarising briefly, we could say that Foucault’s approach to any question will now contain three moments, each representing a particular phase his work has gone through. So, in a field such as sexuality, he will first consider the forms of knowledge (savoir) and discourse which

16 “Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader

(London: Penguin Books, 1991). For the French text, see, Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, IV, op. cit. Henceforth, PHS, with English and [French] page numbers given in the text. PHS, 336 [581].

17 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications,1982) [Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1966]. Henceforth, OT, with English and [French] page numbers given in the text. OT, 45‐46 [56].

18 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), p.18. Note, however, that “expérience” is misleadingly translated as “experiment.”

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are generated around sexual behaviour (roughly corresponding to his work in the 1960s); secondly, he will consider the forms of power that take hold of our behaviour (roughly corresponding to his work in the 1970s); and thirdly, a moment that is added only in the early 1980s, he will consider the modes of relation to self which our sexuality promotes and builds on. It need hardly be pointed out that even though this first, second and third followed that sequence in his own development, once all three approaches become available they are inextricably linked and have no chronological hierarchy. As Foucault points out in a late interview (RM), “these three domains of experience can only be understood one in relation to the others and cannot be understood one without the others.”19 Indeed, if the second phase does not so much add power to knowledge as introduce a new concept – power‐knowledge – we could say that the final phase introduces another new concept – power‐knowledge‐the self. What is important for us, however, is that this new tripartite concept can in fact be given a simpler name – experience. II The Transformation of Experience Foucault begins to be explicit about the centrality of the idea of experience from the late 1970s; initially in an interview conducted in 1978, but first published in 1980 (EMF), and later in the various versions of the Preface to the second volume of the History of Sexuality.20 In the 1978 interview, the interviewer presses him to clarify his relation to the entire constellation of French intellectual life after WWII, from Marxism and phenomenology to existentialism and literary modernism. What emerges most clearly from his responses is the sense that, at least at this stage in his thought, Foucault takes a certain notion of experience as the guiding thread linking multiple aspects of his intellectual, and personal, trajectory. We have already seen how this interview prioritises what he calls the “limit‐experiences,” which for him are represented by Bataille and Blanchot – those experiences that serve to “tear the subject away from itself” and ensure that the subject will not remain as it was before (EMF, 241 [43]). And we also saw that he wishes his own books to have this kind of effect, both for himself and for his readers – he wants them to be “experience‐books” rather than “truth‐books” or “demonstration‐books” (EMF, 246 [47]).

This interview also gives us a way of understanding how these limit‐experiences relate to the other kind of limit‐experience, those which, as we saw, represent a foundational gesture by which a culture excludes that which will function as its outside – for example, madness (HMP, xxix [161]). Foucault speaks of these moments of rupture, or division, as giving rise to a certain experience in which a subject emerges as a concomitant to a field of objects. Thus, the process by which

19 “The Return of Morality”, in L. Kritzman (ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture

(London: Routledge, 1988), p.243 [DEIV, 697]. 20 Details below.

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the object “madness” emerges in the late nineteenth century also involves the process of emergence of a subject capable of knowing madness (EMF, 254 [55]). This qualifies as a kind of limit‐experience because it involves a transformation in a form of subjectivity, through the constitution of a field of truth. However, what is important for Foucault is that a book which uncovers this history should itself provide an experience which, in its own way, is also a limit‐experience. Hence,

the experience through which we manage to grasp in an intelligible way certain mechanisms (for example, imprisonment, penality, etc.) and the way in which we manage to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them otherwise, should be one and the same thing. This is really the heart of what I do” (EMF, 244 [46], modified).

What we find, then, is that Foucault uses the concept of limit‐experience on, as it were, both sides of the analysis: it is both the object of the historical research, and in a different sense its objective. As he admits: “it’s always a question of limit‐experiences and the history of truth. I’m imprisoned, enmeshed in that tangle of problems” (EMF, 257 [57]). Alongside the many attempts Foucault made to characterise his own work (in terms of knowledge, power/ knowledge, or knowledge‐power‐ subject), we can place this as an additional and perhaps useful formula: his work continuously strives to understand and disentangle the connections between forms of experience and forms of knowledge, between subjectivity and truth. And this is an entanglement that he continues to explore up until and including his last works.

In the earliest version of the Preface to the second volume of the History of Sexuality,21 Foucault explains the relation between his new interest in subjectivity and his earlier focus on discourse and power, in terms of a general project of the critical history of thought. This would mean the history of the forms of objectivation, subjectivation and coercion which, at a certain time, for a particular set of people, constitute what he calls, “the historical a priori of a possible experience” (F, 460 [632]). Adopting the perspective of History of Madness, for example, we could say that for certain people in the eighteenth century the experience of madness was made possible by a historically specific combination of forms of objectivation, subjectivation and coercion. These forms, these structures of experience, determined the way that crazy, irrational people were seen, conceptualised and related to, by those who considered themselves to be sane and rational. In the second version of this Preface,22 Foucault explains that to treat sexuality as a historically singular form of experience means to treat it as “the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type

21 The dictionary entry titled “Foucault” that Foucault himself published under the name

Maurice Florence is, according to the editors of DE, based on an early version of this Preface. See the introductory note in DEIV, 631; and in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954‐1984, Vol. 2, James Faubion (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), p.459. Henceforth, EW2. This article, henceforth F, with English and [French] page numbers given in the text.

22 “Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume II,” PHS, cited above.

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of normativity and a mode of relation to self” (PHS, 333 [579]). In order to carry out a critical history of this “complex experience” (ibid.), however, he must have the methodological tools for investigating each of these areas, and it is for this reason that, in the early 1980s, he tries to work out a way of understanding the third domain – that of the self and its relations. It is interesting to note that in this Preface, referring back to his earliest work, he mentions his dissatisfaction with the method of existential psychology (represented for him by his work on Binswanger23) – a dissatisfaction that arose, he now says, from that method’s “theoretical insufficiency in the elaboration of the notion of experience” (PHS, 334 [579]). One of the key differences then, between what we could call Foucault’s pre‐critical and his critical phases is precisely the working out of a sufficiently complex notion of experience.

A key part of this notion is, as we have seen, the idea that our experience – in the everyday sense of the term – is determined by forms of knowledge, power and relation to the self which are historically singular.24 And now we can add that these forms, as a whole, constitute what Foucault calls thought – that is, the critical history of thought simply is the history of the forms, or structures of our experience. Indeed, thought, on this account, is what constitutes the human being as a subject.

By ‘thought’, I mean that which institutes, in diverse possible forms, the game of truth and falsehood and which, consequently, constitutes the human being as a subject of knowledge; that which founds the acceptance or the refusal of the rule and constitutes the human being as a social and juridical subject; that which institutes the relation to self and to others, and constitutes the human being as ethical subject. (PHS, 334 [579]).

Thought is, therefore, at the basis of the constitution of the human being as a subject in the three domains of knowledge, power and the self – which are, as we have seen, the three fundamental domains, or axes, of experience. Of course, on this account, thought is not something to be sought exclusively in the theoretical formulations of philosophy or science. It can, rather, be found in every manner of speaking, doing and conducting oneself. It can be considered, in fact, Foucault says, as “the very form of action” itself (PHS, 335 [580]). As we can see, Foucault is now working with a multi‐layered notion of experience; and it is one which is not accessed through individual awareness, but through an analysis of what he now calls “practices.” We can study the forms of experience, he says, through an analysis of practices – as long as we understand practices as “systems of action … inhabited by forms of thought” (ibid.). And this is precisely what he does in his histories of madness, the prison and sexuality.

23 See Foucault’s “Introduction” to Ludwig Binswanger, Le rêve et l’existence (Paris: Desclee, 1954). 24 This may offer a way of differentiating Foucault’s account of experience from that of

phenomenology. This is not the place to address that issue, but see Gutting’s article (in n.6 above) for a sketch of the issues involved.

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The Kantian echoes of this critical project have no doubt been resonating clearly: Foucault was awoken from the slumber of existential psychology by his encounter with Nietzsche, and emerged into a critical phase in which he sought the a priori of experience. However, it was not the Kantian a priori, but the historical a priori that he sought; and not all possible experience, but historically singular experience. Foucault’s project then, differs fundamentally from that of Kant not just because of this historicising of both the a priori and experience (and of course of the knowing subject), but also because it sets itself the task not of identifying unbreakable limits of reason, but of identifying singularities and working towards their transformation. Which is to say that it is critical in the Nietzschean, not the Kantian sense. What this means for experience is that the critical project aims not simply to understand the historical grounds of our experience, but to see to what extent it would be possible to change that experience – to transform it, through a critical work of thought upon itself. In the final version of the Preface to the second volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault situates this project in the context of a possible history of truth – a history of the “games of truth, the games of the true and the false, through which being is constituted historically as experience; that is, as something that can and must be thought” (UP, 6‐7 [13]).25 It is these games of truth, and through them, these historically singular forms of experience which can – perhaps – be transformed.

Now that we have reached this idea of the transformation of experience, let us return to the ambiguity within Foucault’s use of the term. On the one hand, as we have just seen, experience is the general, dominant form in which being is given to an historical period as something that can be thought. On the other hand, experience is something that is capable of tearing us away from ourselves and changing the way that we think and act. Throughout his work, and his life, Foucault valorised those experiences which take us to the limits of our forms of subjectivity. This was the attraction of writers such as Bataille, Blanchot and Nietzsche in the 1960s; it was the attraction of the sado‐masochistic practices which he discussed in interviews in the early 1980s; and it was also the attraction of his more sedate engagement with the Stoics and the Cynics of late antiquity. There was no point, he believed, in writing a book unless it was an experience which in some way changed oneself. As he says, at the end of the early version of the Preface to the History of Sexuality, “the pain and the pleasure of the book is to be an experience” (PHS, 339 [584]). But how is it possible for experience to be both the general dominant background and the external force which intervenes to change that background?

This problem, which can be related to the problem of explaining historical change, is one which, in different forms, animated Foucault’s entire theoretical trajectory. And it is a problem of which he was well aware. Let us look at one

25 Note that the French could be translated as “through which being constitutes itself historically

as experience” (“à travers lesquels l’être se constitue historiquement comme expérience”).

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example, from The Order of Things, where he raises the question of the legitimacy of establishing discontinuities and periods in a history of thought. How can we justify defining the limits of an age for which we claim a certain coherence and unity – such as the classical age for instance? Isn’t this simply setting an arbitrary limit in “a constantly mobile whole” (OT, 55 [64])? And, having established this continuity, how can we then explain the collapse or disappearance of this coherent system? If this age contains within itself a principle of coherence, then from where would come “the foreign element [l’élément étranger]” which undermines it (OT, 56 [64])? “How,” Foucault asks, “can a thought melt away before anything other than itself?” (ibid.) How can we explain the fact that “within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way”? (ibid). The best answer that Foucault can give is to say that this kind of discontinuity begins “with an erosion from outside” (ibid.), an erosion which is made possible by the way in which thought continuously “contrives to escape itself” (ibid.). The task of investigating these modes of escape, however, is one which Foucault says he is not yet prepared to undertake. For the moment, he says, we will simply have to accept the posited discontinuities – in all their obviousness and their obscurity.

Even though, in this context, Foucault backs away from further consideration of this outside of thought, in another sense we can say that all of his work was an attempt to investigate the way that thought “contrives to escape itself” through contact with such an outside. And at every renewed turn of that effort, the guiding thread was the idea of the strange, the foreign, the alien and the question of its provenance and its effects. Summarising briefly, once again, we could say that each of the three periods into which we can divide Foucault’s work carry with them a different conception of the outside.26 In the 1960s, that conception is bound up with his engagement with literature and, in particular, with the ideas of transgression and the outside which he gets from Bataille and Blanchot. In a series of essays published in literary journals at this time, Foucault demonstrated the influence that, for example, Blanchot’s “thought of the outside” had on the development of his own approach to this set of questions.27 In particular, Blanchot’s literary‐critical writing allowed him to formulate the connection between a certain crisis of subjectivity and

26 For a similar categorisation of Foucault’s approach to the ‘outside’ see, Judith Revel, “La

naissance littéraire du biopolitique,” in Philippe Artières (ed.), Michel Foucault, la littérature et les arts, Paris: Editions Kimé, 2004).

27 See, for example, “A Preface to Transgression,” on Bataille, and “The Thought of the Outside,” on Blanchot, both in EW2 and DEI.

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the experience of an outside that comes to us in a subjectless language.28 In the 1970s, with the turn to politics and the question of power, we could say that the outside of thought, the engine or motor of change, is conceptualised as resistance that, perhaps, has its source in the forces of the body. While in the 1980s, with the final turn, the outside becomes, in a strange way, the inside of subjectivity itself; in other words, the potential for change emerges out of a folding back of the self upon itself.

One of the constant elements in this development is the way that the term “étrange” (strange/foreign) keeps reappearing in all its forms. We have already seen the line from René Char that Foucault includes in the first Preface to History of Madness – “Développez votre étrangeté légitime.” Several years later he turns this around, in a display of ironic self‐deprecation, while responding to critics of The Order of Things. In response to their criticism he speaks of his sense of his own “bizarrerie [bizarreness]” – and what he calls his “étrangeté si peu légitime [his so little legitimate strangeness]” (DEI, 674).29 In The Order of Things itself, he speaks of literature as a form of discourse which is, since the sixteenth century, “most foreign” to western culture (OT, 49 [59]); and speaking of the figures of the madman and the poet, he says that they find their “power of foreignness [leur pouvoir d’étrangeté]” at the limits, the exterior boundaries of our culture (OT, 55 [64]). Much later, in the early 1980s, he can say that the whole – and only – point in writing a book, or doing philosophy, is precisely to introduce an element of the foreign into our ways of thinking. What would be the point in writing a book, he asks, if it did not allow the person who wrote it to “establish with himself a strange and new relation?” (PHS, 339 [584]). Indeed, according to the final volumes of The History of Sexuality, it is the task of philosophy to see to what extent it can think otherwise, by “the exercise which it makes of a knowledge which is foreign to it” (UP, 9 [15]).

Returning to the question of how experience can be both accepted background and transformative force, we can now say that this possibility always arises out of something that functions as an outside. There is nothing constant or universal about this outside, however, since it is always relative to the dominant forms of a given regime of thought and practice. We have seen that for Foucault the locus of the outside changes as his general methodology develops. In the 1960s it is something which is experienced and conveyed through certain works of literature, and also in the foundational gestures of exclusion, while by the 1980s it is something which

28 I do not have space here to do justice to this element in Foucault’s 1960’s engagement with

literature, but see my much more detailed exposition in “Foucault’s Turn From Literature,” Continental Philosophy Review, forthcoming. I would just point out that the approach I am developing in this paper owes less to Foucault’s explicitly literary writings of the 1960s than to his later elaboration of a theory of experience (although of course there are many necessary connections between the two).

29 See English translation (which varies from mine): “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govermentality (New York: Hemel Hempstead, Prentice‐Hall, 1991), p.53.

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makes itself felt, for example, in the cultivation of transformative techniques of the self. At this stage Foucault has, apparently, left behind his interest in – and his faith in – literature as one of the ways in which thought “contrives to escape itself.” In his late work, his experience books are no longer by Beckett, Blanchot or Bataille, but by Seneca, Diogenes and Plato. And they are also, of course, his own books – especially History of Madness, Discipline and Punish and the first volume of the History of Sexuality. We must, however, resist the temptation to see this shift as a progressive development which would leave behind each earlier phase. Rather, there is nothing to stop us from maintaining all three levels simultaneously, so that the work of transforming experience may, at different times and in different ways, be effected through works of literature, through a resistance whose source is in the body, and through a re‐elaboration of relations to the self. For us, it would then become possible to combine Foucault’s conceptualisation of the foreign, or the outside, of thought with his notion of experience and its possible transformation, and to use this framework as a way of understanding one of the effects of which literature is capable. III Fiction, Experience, Experiment Foucault’s analysis of experience gives us a way of answering the first part of my question, relating to the conditions of possibility of the transformation of experience, but it also gives us a way of beginning to answer the second part, relating to the capacity of literature to act as an experience‐transformer. It does this, as we will see, through the role which it gives to fiction and the fictive, a notion which may ultimately help us to determine the distinctive mode of action of literature which makes such transformation possible. Even though I have no wish to formulate a general definition of literature here, one which would safely include and exclude all those works which are or are not worthy of that title, it may still be possible to give a minimal, preliminary account of what these forms all share. And that, we could simply say, is a particular use of language that is fictive in nature. To say that this use of language is fictive, however, is not to say that it has no rapport with the world we live in, or for that matter with truth. In an early essay on some members of the Tel quel group, for example, Foucault rejects the easy option of understanding fiction in terms of an opposition between the real and the unreal, reality and the imaginary.30 He urges us instead to think of the fictive as arising from a certain kind of distance – not the distance between language and things, but a distance within language itself. The fictive, in this sense, would be the capacity of language to, as Foucault says, bring us into contact with “that which does not exist, in so far as it is” (DEI, 280).

30 Michel Foucault, “Distance, Aspect, Origine,” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954‐1988: I,

1954‐1969, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 281. Henceforth, DEI. This essay has not been translated into English.

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And, according to Foucault, any use of language which speaks of this distance, and explores it – whether it is prose, poetry, novel or “reflection” (presumably including philosophy) – is a language of fiction (DEI, 280‐1).

It might help if we situate this formulation in relation to a much later discussion of the role of the intellectual – from an interview in 1983. Here Foucault suggests that the task of the philosopher‐historian is to carry out a diagnosis of the present by focusing on the “lines of fragility” which make possible “virtual fractures” in our contemporary reality. By following these lines we would be able to grasp those elements of our present which are open to change. The role of the intellectual then would be to “say that which is, in making it appear as that which may not be, or may not be as it is.”31 This is an interesting echo and reversal of the earlier characterisation of fiction: fiction says that which is not, insofar as it is; while the intellectual says that which is, insofar as (potentially) it is not. But, of course, this is not so much a reversal as an alternative expression of the same suggestion: that fiction (in the broadest possible sense) relates to reality by opening up virtual spaces which allow us to engage in a potentially transformative relation with the world; to bring about that which does not exist and to transform that which does exist. The insight Foucault is expressing in the 1960s essay is that this possibility, the possibility of bridging the distance between that which is and that which may be, is given for us in the very nature of language.

There is no doubt that Foucault understood his own works of “reflection,” that is to say his works of historico‐philosophy, as operating within this field of the fictive. In a discussion of his History of Sexuality, volume I, for example, he responds to a question about the dramatic nature of his works by saying, “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions.”32 A fiction, however, is not necessarily outside of truth. It is possible for fiction to induce effects of truth, just as it is possible for a discourse of truth to fabricate, or to fiction, something. Since fiction is not defined in opposition to truth, therefore, Foucault’s statement cannot be taken as an admission of historical inaccuracy. It is, rather, a claim about the creative or productive power of the book in the context of a particular historical moment. This book, in fact all his books, are fictions in the sense that they intervene in a given situation in order to bring about – or, to fiction – a transformation. “One ’fictions’ history starting from a political reality which makes it true, one ’fictions’ a politics which does not yet exist starting from a historical truth” (ibid.).

We must think of fiction, therefore, in the same way we think of poesis, that is, as a fundamentally productive engagement in the world. To fiction is to fabricate, to produce, to bring into existence. The distinctive feature of Foucault’s histories, the

31 “Structuralism and Post‐structuralism,” in EW2, p. 450 (DEIV, 449). 32 “The History of Sexuality,” Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books,

1980, p.193 [Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954‐1988: III, 1976‐1979, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.) (Paris, Gallimard, 1994), p.236. Henceforth, DEIII.

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feature which gives them their transformative power, is the fact that they are not only descriptions of the past, but attempts to modify the present through a transformation, or a fictioning, of experience. And all experience is, at a certain level, related to the fictive. In a discussion of History of Madness, in the context of his idea of an experience‐book, Foucault underlines again the importance for him of inducing an experience in the reader that would have a transformative effect. This effect, however, must be based on historically accurate research. “It cannot,” as he says, “exactly be a novel” (EMF, 243 [45]). But what matters most is not the series of true, or historically verifiable, findings; it is, rather, the experience which the book makes possible. And this experience is neither true nor false; like every other experience, it is a fiction. “An experience”, Foucault says, “is always a fiction; it is something which one fabricates for oneself, which doesn’t exist before and which happens to exist after” (ibid., modified). Nevertheless, this fabricated experience maintains a complex set of relations with the truth of historical research. The experience that the book makes possible is founded on the truth of its findings, but the experience itself is a new creation which may even, up to a certain point, destroy the truth on which it is based. It is not surprising then, that Foucault admits that “the problem of the truth of what I say is, for me, a very difficult problem, and even the central problem” (EMF, 242 [44]).

But what of this idea that every experience is a kind of fiction, or is something that we fabricate for ourselves? How can we make sense of this suggestion? It might help here if we begin by recalling some of the semantic richness of the term “experience,” in both the French and the English languages. We have already seen that in French the term expérience can mean both experience and experiment and this is a possibility which, as Raymond Williams points out,33 also existed in English at least until the end of the eighteenth century. The term “experience,” at that time, “became not only a conscious test or trial but a consciousness of what has been tested or tried, and thence a consciousness of an effect or state.”34 And this is a consciousness that emerges, as the Latin root of the word indicates, from an openness to the world, an openness which is inherently dangerous. In Latin, expereri (to try, or to test) is linked to the word for danger – periculum.35 Experience, therefore, in both of its senses, is something that emerges from a necessarily perilous encounter with the world – or with the strange and the foreign. One philosopher who mobilises this way of conceiving experience is John Dewey. Briefly, for Dewey experience is not something that simply happens to us, it is not something in which we are merely passive recipients. It is also a form of activity. In its broadest sense, it is the interaction of an organism with its environment. The central idea here is that experience is a matter of doing and undergoing. In experience, Dewey says, “the self

33 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), p.99. 34 Ibid. 35 See the excellent discussion of these issues in Martin Jay, Songs of Experience, op. cit., pp. 9‐11.

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acts, as well as undergoes, and its undergoings are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds.”36 The organism, therefore, “is a force, not a transparency” (ibid.).37 If the organism, or the individual, is a force rather than a passive recording surface, then we can say that every experience is a fiction in the sense that something new is fabricated, that something new emerges from the interaction between organism and world.

In fact, the idea that experience is an activity of the individual, rather than something that happens to the individual, is already contained within the structures of the French language – in a way which is not the case in English. In French, to have an experience is faire une expérience (literally, to make an experience). In a similar way, just as in English we would say that we have a dream, in French one makes a dream (j’ai fait un rêve). In the case of experience, what this means is that whenever we read in English of Foucault discussing having an experience, more often than not in French he is using the phrase faire une expérience. The significance of this difference is that this is a phrase that could, almost as easily, be translated into English as “doing an experiment.” In Foucault’s use of the term, therefore, the idea that experience is an active and experimental engagement is never far from the surface.38 We can see now how it is possible to link up the idea of fiction, in its broadest sense, with the idea of experience. We can do this through the concept of experiment, which is the element that they have in common. So, when Foucault says that all his works are fictions, we can understand him as saying that they are fictions because they are experimental and, conversely, they are experimental precisely because they are fictions.

It should also be possible now to distinguish clearly between the two senses in which Foucault has been using the term experience. We can distinguish between, on the one hand, something that we can call “everyday” or “background” experience and, on the other hand, something that we can call “transformative” experience. In History of Madness, for example, we could say that Foucault described aspects of the everyday experience of madness in the classical age, whereas in the last volumes of the History of Sexuality, he explored the everyday experience of sexuality in the ancient world. However, we have to bear in mind that this everyday experience incorporates a wide range of elements (epistemological, normative, etc.) of which any given individual may be unaware. It is not everyday, therefore, in the sense of being

36 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1980), p. 246. 37 I discuss these parallels in “Foucault, Dewey and the Experience of Literature,” New Literary

History, vol.36, no. 4, 2005, pp. 543‐557. 38 Let me give one example of how this semantic richness is lost in translation. In the interview I

have been quoting from, Foucault says, “Mon problème est de faire moi‐même, et d’inviter les autres à faire avec moi…une expérience de ce que nous sommes…une expérience de notre modernité telle que nous en sortions transformés” (EMF, 242 [44]). The English translation, however, reduces this sense of engaging in a transformative experiment by speaking simply of “sharing an experience.” This translation also commits the error of translating the first “faire moi‐même” as “construct myself.”

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commonly understood, but in the sense that it forms a constant, albeit constantly changing, background to our ways of perceiving, understanding and acting in the world. This form of experience is what Foucault finally speaks of in terms of the three axes of knowledge, power and the self. On the other hand, the category of transformative experiences would comprise not only the Bataillean limit‐experiences of the 1960s, and the more sedate experiences provided by Foucault’s own books, understood as experience‐books, but also the sorts of experiences that many works of literature open up for their readers. These are experiences which stop us in our tracks and make it more difficult for us to continue to think and act as we had done before. In other words, they make it more difficult for us to carry on unthinkingly in the forms of our everyday experience.

But what about the relation between these two forms of experience? How do transformative experiences act upon everyday experience? Let us start by observing that when I speak of everyday experience I am speaking of experience in general, which is, in some sense, always singular, whereas in speaking of transformative experiences I am obliged to speak of experiences in the plural. What this indicates is that transformative experiences are discrete, punctual events which intervene in and interrupt the forms of everyday experience which are more fluid and continuous.39 However, they are not just high points, or moments of intensity, in the everyday flow; rather, or in addition, they are events which leave the background experience transformed. If we call this kind of experience transformative, then, it is because it tends to transform our everyday experience by bringing about a shift, or a re‐configuration, along the three axes of knowledge, power and the self. In other words, a transformative experience, whether it comes in the form of a work of philosophy, fiction, or history – or in any of its other multiple possible forms – will leave the individual no longer the same as before. IV Towards Literature At the beginning of this paper, I said that the question I wanted to address is, “what is it that makes it possible for works of literature to act upon the forms of the human subject and experience with a transformative effect?” The first part of my answer was to point out that these forms of human subjectivity and experience are built up historically in such a way that they are in a constant state of change and modification. The second part of my answer, which I will sketch now, is to suggest that literature can contribute to this process of transformation through its fictive nature which both resonates with the productive, creative nature of all experience,

39 It would be interesting to compare this account with the distinction Dewey makes between

ordinary experience and an experience; and also with the distinction common in German philosophy between Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Such a comparison is, however, beyond the scope of the present paper.

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and introduces something that can function as an outside in relation to the everyday experience of a reader. It is important to point out, however, that literature, like philosophy, is not always or necessarily on the side of transformative as opposed to everyday experience. It is just as likely, in fact much more likely, that what we call literature will bolster and reinforce accepted modes of experience and thought, than that it will undermine and transform them. These works are always tentative and experimental in nature; there is no guaranteed way to transform everyday experience, just as there is no way to accurately predict the effect or potential of any such work. And it is equally important to remember that such modifications are always small, fragile and uncertain, especially, we must admit, those which literature is capable of effecting.

In order to sketch this answer I want to return to Beckett; not to Waiting for Godot, which was so important for Foucault, but to his novel The Unnamable (1958), the third in a trilogy that included Molloy (1955) and Malone Dies (1956).40 What can we say about the effect of these novels? What kinds of transformation are they capable of effecting? One of their potential effects, I would say, is to make it more difficult for readers to carry on with a certain understanding of themselves as centers of rationality, language and experience. Speaking very schematically, we could say that the everyday experience of self which the books undermine is based upon the Cartesian cogito. Descartes can doubt everything, except his own existence as a thinking, and therefore rational, being. But Beckett can doubt even that. And in fact what his books make possible, through the fictional world they create, is for the reader to share in an experiment in which this conception of the self is put to the test and, perhaps momentarily, exploded. In a discussion of the art of the novel, Milan Kundera makes the point that a fictional character is not an imitation of a living being, but “an imaginary being. An experimental self.”41 We should not see this being as primarily an alter‐ego for the author, but more as an experimental self for any reader of the work. With regard to Beckett’s novels, however, we can say that his characters are experimental in a double sense: not only are they an experiment that the author sets up and allows the reader to participate in, but they continuously engage in experimentation on themselves. At times this can appear to be similar to the thought experiments that philosophers – such as Descartes or Husserl – use, but Beckett’s characters typically move in a contrary direction, that is, not through doubt to a new foundation for certainty, but from certainty, through doubt, to a splintering of the self and its hold on the world.

Early in The Unnamable, for example, the narrator (if we can call him that) begins a process which seems to be decidedly Cartesian: “I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open…” (U, 304). But this one certainty will not be allowed to

40 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1991). 41 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p.34.

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form the basis for any other knowledge. How does he know his eyes are open? “Because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly” (ibid.). He continues:

Ah yes, I am truly bathed in tears. They gather in my beard and from there, when it can hold no more – no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain. And were it not for the distant testimony of my palms, my soles, which I have not yet been able to quash, I would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg, with two holes no matter where to prevent it from bursting (U, 305).

It is important to notice that the process by which the speaker gives himself a form here is essentially fictive in nature. He does not ascertain his shape through introspection or self‐examination, rather he gives himself a shape, he fictions himself, through his own speech. “I would gladly give myself the shape…of an egg,” he says, and later even the tear‐filled eyes will be transformed. “I’ll dry these streaming sockets too, bung them up, there, it’s done, no more tears, I’m a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point” (U, 305). Whether or not such things exist is beside the point, because, nonetheless, they are there for us, the readers of the novel. They attest, as Foucault would say, to the power of language to convey “that which does not exist, in so far as it is” (DEI, 280).

Blanchot, in the epigraph I have used for this paper, decries the reader’s “stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads.” But Beckett’s work matches this with his own stubborn insistence upon engaging in an experimental disaggregation of his characters. The transformative experience this makes possible for the reader is for them, too, to lose their heads, to see if they could not also do without these organs, “all the things that stick out” – “why should I have a sex, who have no longer a nose” (U, 305). After all, why do we need organs? What is their function? As the speaker asks a little later about the mouth, “Would it not be better if I were simply to keep on saying babababa, for example, while waiting to ascertain the true function of this venerable organ?” (U, 308). In this way, the novel opens up the individual as an embodied, thinking, speaking being and stubbornly insists that the reader no longer remain herself in the face of what she reads. And this, to borrow Foucault’s words, would be the pleasure and the pain of the book. My suggestion, then, is that if we situate ourselves in the perspective of Foucault’s late work, drawing upon the analysis of the notion of experience which I have outlined here, we will be able to give an effective account of how literature can bring about a transformation of experience. My claim is that works of literature are capable, not so much (or, not only) of expressing an experience, but of transforming an experience. And they do this by experimentally intervening in and modifying our modes of thought – where thought is understood in the very broad sense outlined above. In other words, we can understand works of literature as experimental, transformative

23


interventions in the reader’s everyday experience – where everyday experience is understood along the three axes that Foucault’s account lays open.

This way of formulating the effect of literature, however, raises a number of important questions that we have not yet addressed . As we know, Foucault’s analysis of experience involves separating (at least in theory) three aspects or axes: knowledge, power, the self. The first question that may arise, therefore, is whether we should say that this tripartite experience is transformed only if all three of the axes are modified. In other words, can we speak of transformation occurring if only one of the three is affected? In the first place, we have to remember that Foucault’s approach to individual and social change has always recognised both the necessity and the value of partial, non‐totalising practices, and there is no reason to suppose his attitude to literature would be any different. We can safely suggest, therefore, for a work such as Beckett’s The Unnamable to be effective in these Foucauldian terms, we would not necessarily be required to modify our experience along all three axes. But that still leaves the question of whether works of literature are only, or particularly suited to having an effect on a single axis – which would, presumably, be the axis of the self or ethics. Following this line of thought, we might suggest, for example, that a work such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) had a profound transformative effect on our experience at the level of knowledge, whereas a work such as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879) was (and continues to be) more capable of effecting an ethical transformation. Would this imply that ethics is the domain in which literature is most likely to be effective – or even the domain in which it is exclusively capable of having an effect? There is no doubt that these are attractive, and in a way, easy conclusions to draw. But the problem is that they too easily compartmentalize the three axes of which Foucault speaks. Can we really say, for instance, which axis was most affected by Darwin’s work? Did it not profoundly alter our self‐understanding in terms of science, religion, and ethics – in fact all three axes of our experience? And, similarly, could we not say that the value of Dostoevsky’s work comes from his insight into human behaviour – and the knowledge we gain from that – as much as from its ability to modify our relation to ourselves? Going further, we could in fact argue that it modifies our relation to ourselves precisely insofar as it modifies what we take to be facts about human behavior. What this implies for the case of literature is the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of clearly delimiting the axis along which an effect takes place, given the reverberating consequences of such effects along the other axes. In other words, to be brief, we have to take seriously Foucault’s insistence that these three axes are intimately intertwined and that they “can only be understood one in relation to the others and cannot be understood one without the others.”42

42 “The Return of Morality” (DEIV, 69) 7, op. cit., p. 243.

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25

However, at least in the context of this paper, it is not necessary to give a final account of the complexities of these relations. Instead, it would be better to maintain an openness to the multiple effects of which literature may be capable. All we need to conclude for now is that the schema I have outlined here gives us a way of understanding the idea we started from; that certain works of literature can compel us to think otherwise. Because, while it is true that works of literature are, in a fundamental way, products of their time, this idea must be balanced with the insistence that they can act, in the manner of an experiment, both within their time and against their time. These minuscule events, these grains of sand, are not without their multiple, strange effects.

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Foucault Studies

© Cecile Brich 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


ARTICLE The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The voice of prisoners? Or Foucault’s? Cecile Brich, Leeds University In 1971 Michel Foucault founded the ‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’ (GIP), which planned to gather and publicise testimonies about prison conditions in France. The GIP had no reformist agenda, but rather aimed to enable prisoners themselves to speak out on prison issues and decide for themselves what should be done about them. The GIP membership thus theoretically included prisoners, ex‐prisoners and prisoners’ families alongside the intellectuals and professionals who founded it. They collected information from prisoners via questionnaires, inmates’ letters and personal narratives, and endeavoured to alert public opinion to the insalubrious nature of prisons, and to the unjust and inhumane treatment endured by countless inmates. The GIP organised demonstrations, distributed tracts, gave press conferences and published a variety of documents, in the form of articles in the press and through a series of pamphlets. The GIP’s campaign was successful on a number of fronts, winning the right for prisoners to read the daily press, for instance, and leading to a series of actions initiated by prisoners, from a wave of rooftop protests to the creation of the Comité d’action des prisonniers (Prisoners’ Action Committee), pursuing the fight for prisoners’ rights through the 1970s.

The work of the GIP has thus far mostly been discussed in hagiographical mode, most extensively in Foucault’s biographies, and in a handful of articles and unpublished French dissertations. Scholarly commentary on the work of the GIP has hitherto chiefly focused on the relationship between the public pronouncements of the GIP and Foucault’s ideas on power and the role of intellectuals.1 For the most part, however, these analyses are limited to emphasising the originality of the GIP’s approach on the basis of the statements published by the GIP, which they take at face

1 See for instance: Michelle Perrot, Les Ombres de l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); François

Boullant, Michel Foucault et les prisons (Paris: PUF, 2003); Gérard Mauger, ‘Un nouveau militantisme’, Sociétés et Représentations 3 (1996): 51‐77; Keith Gandal, ‘Michel Foucault: Intellectual Work and Politics’, Telos 67 (1986): 121‐134.

Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.

value. The announcement that the GIP wanted to give prisoners the opportunity to speak out without intermediary2, for instance, has thus been repeatedly commended as testimony to Foucault’s ethics, endlessly echoing Gilles Deleuze’s claim that Foucault was ‘the first […] to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others’3. Macey comments that: ‘The goal of Foucault’s political activity was the empowering of others by giving, for instance, prisoners the voice they were denied.’4 Halperin similarly argues that Foucault ‘consistently refused to speak for others, working instead to create conditions in which others could speak for themselves’5. The GIP’s work is thus generally acknowledged as ‘the advent of a new form of activism, allowing someone’s speech to be heard directly, rather than speaking on behalf of’6.

No critical assessment of the GIP’s work has as yet investigated the extent to which the GIP’s methods accorded with their pronouncements, and how the dynamics of their communication with prisoners affected the information which they were able to collect. This article proposes to address precisely these issues.

While the GIP’s procedures were no doubt often original, and went some way towards letting prisoners speak for themselves, I would like to argue that the intellectuals’ role within it was a rather more complex one than critics have so far maintained. Although their goal was to give prisoners the practical means to express themselves, I will show that the methods it used, and the responses it elucidated, suggest that the prisoners’ discourse was not simply ‘set free’, as Artières contends7, but was also subtly constrained by the GIP’s agenda.

I argue that the GIP’s discourse cannot be reduced to the publication of prisoners’ testimonies, but can rather be understood as the product of a dialogical process involving the intellectuals’ investigative methods and editorial decisions on the one hand, and the prisoners’ responses and contributions on the other.

Sylvain Dambrine suggests that the GIP was a movement which made prisoners access the status of discursive subjects8. He does not, however, substantiate this claim. I propose to investigate this assertion by analysing the statements and methodology of the GIP in order to assess how prisoners were constructed in the discourse of the GIP, and what types of statements [énoncés] they were expected to

2 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits [hereafter DE] (Paris: Gallimard,“Quarto”, 2001 [1994]), vol.1, p.

1072. 3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice, ed. D. F.

Bouchard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 209. 4 David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson Random House, 1993), p. 257. 5 David Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 53. 6 Philippe Artières, ‘Les Écrits de la révolte. La prise de parole des détenus (1970‐72)’, Drôle

d’époque 8 (2001): 47, original emphasis, my translation. 7 Ibid, p. 37, my translation. 8 Sylvain Dambrine, ‘Passages du mur: des subjectivations de prisonniers’ in Vacarme 29 (2004):

146.

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Brich : The Groupe d’information sur les prisons

formulate. I will thus construct a fuller picture of the ‘discursive subjects’ which prisoners became through the work of the GIP.

RATIONALE The impetus for the creation of the GIP in January 1971 lay in the attention drawn to the penitential regime by a group of political prisoners on hunger strike during the winter 1970‐71. In the aftermath of May 68, a number of drastically repressive measures were brought in by the government in order to regain control in the face of continuing social unrest. Among these, a bill known as the loi anti‐casseurs (‘anti‐wreckers’ law9) was passed in June 1970, which made the organisers of demonstrations liable for any disturbances, and thus led to the incarceration of increasing numbers of political protesters. Concurrently, the government ordered the dissolution of the Maoist organisation Gauche prolétarienne (GP), founded in 1968; several hundreds of members of the clandestine ex‐GP would subsequently be arrested. The political prisoners’ movement caught the attention of a few intellectuals, including Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert, who decided to form the ‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’, with the support of historian Pierre Vidal‐Naquet, and of Jean‐Marie Domenach, then editor of the Catholic monthly Esprit. The GIP proposed to gather information inside French prisons, building a case for a de facto trial of the prison service.

The GIP’s original rationale can be glimpsed in a number of its statements, such as an article published on 15 March 1971 in J’accuse, indicating a carefully thought out strategy on its part:

We want to break the double isolation in which prisoners are trapped: through our investigation, we want them to be able to talk to each other, to share what they know, and to communicate from prison to prison and from cell to cell. We want inmates to address the population, and for the population to speak to them. These individual experiences, these isolated rebellions must be transformed into a shared body of knowledge, and into coordinated action. […] Our investigation is not designed to amass facts, but to increase our intolerance, and transform it into active intolerance.10

The GIP’s aim, it is suggested here, was primarily to start a debate: amongst prisoners, and between prisoners and the rest of the population. This simple dialogue, however, was practically hampered by prison regulations, which forbade communication with unauthorised persons (i.e. everyone but close family members), while the daily press was not allowed inside and radio broadcasts were regularly censored. The GIP’s investigation was thus not an end in itself, for the sake of gathering information, but rather a means to an end: a way to set up a vast

9 Macey’s translation, op.cit., p. 258. 10 DE, vol. 1, p. 1044, my translation.

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communication network, between and around prisoners, so as to allow for discussion and coordinated action to take place.

The GIP’s project appears to rest on an implicit model of the outbreak of revolts, whereby individual experience can be processed in such a way as to become a trigger for uprising. The simultaneous articulation of similar experiences is expected to amplify their impact and legitimate dissatisfaction hitherto dismissed as merely personal and psychological, rather than collective and political.

Indications of an expected course of events in the article cited above and elsewhere suggest that the GIP was virtually engineering a rebellion unbeknown to those who were to be its actors – the prisoners themselves. The repetition of ‘we want’ constantly reinstates the GIP as the principal orchestrator and decision‐maker of the manoeuvres to be made, regardless of the prisoners’ wishes. The movement seems to have partly acted as a real life testing ground for Foucault’s hypotheses; interestingly, the editors of Dits et écrits note that Foucault delayed publication of Discipline and Punish for two years, so as to evade the charge of having been motivated solely by theoretical interest.

It is on 8 February 1971, at the press conference that marked the end of the political prisoners’ second hunger strike, that the public announcement of the creation of the GIP was made. The statement, signed by Foucault, Vidal‐Naquet and Domenach and published in several newspapers, explains that ‘together with a number of magistrats, lawyers, journalists, doctors and psychologists, we have founded a Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons’11. Prisoners are thus not included amongst the investigators at this stage, nor are they explicitly addressed with any more precision than as among ‘those who have some experience of prison or some connection with it, in whatever capacity’12, even though the statement would be published in Esprit, which was available in prisons.

The proposed role of those who would have relevant experience or information is ‘to contact us and pass on what they know. We have compiled a questionnaire, which is available on request. As soon as we have received enough responses, we will publish them.’13 Prisoners are thus seemingly addressed solely as sources of information, while the processing and use of the information remains the investigators’ monopoly. This first official GIP statement thus casts prisoners rather as passive objects of the GIP’s investigation, leaving the leading roles to the intellectuals and professionals.

The GIP’s request for prisoners to send in personal narratives of prison life and answers to a pre‐established questionnaire can be argued to cast them simultaneously as subjects and objects of the GIP’s investigation. The relatively passive role which they are given supposes that they are, to an extent, approached as

11 Translation in Macey, op.cit., p.258. 12 DE, vol.1, p. 1043, my translation. 13 Ibid., my translation.

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objects to be interrogated, in such a way as to extract data from them to be used by the researchers as they see fit. By having made key decisions about the investigative procedures and the role to be played by prisoners within them, the GIP can be seen to have created a certain position for inmates to occupy, thereby subjecting them to its own vision of what subjectivity they should take on. The ambiguities of this subjectivation process are explored further in the following sections, where I discuss some of the methodological problems pertaining to the GIP’s investigation.

METHODOLOGY Though the GIP’s avowed aim was to hand the floor over to prisoners, the methods by which it did so can be shown to have simultaneously imposed significant constraints upon prisoners’ voices. These constraints operated in a number of ways at different stages of the investigation, beginning with the imposition of the written medium to impart information to the GIP, the restrictive questionnaire format and the limitation of testimonial genres to questionnaire answers and factual personal accounts, through to the remarkably biased selection put forward for publication. I shall look at each of these constraints in turn, considering the way in which they limited prisoners’ discourse, and assessing the extent to which they recalled typically institutional practices. I will show that by thus imposing a degree of constraint on prisoners’ participation, and specifically on the discursive subject positions available to them, the GIP effectively delimited a subjectivity which inmates were expected to take up.

First of all, the GIP’s investigative methods failed to ensure the participation of a representative sample of informants. From the first invitation from the hunger strikers’ ‘comrades’ to send information to Foucault, to the GIP’s reliance on written questionnaires, the written medium is privileged. For the significant proportion of prisoners who have difficulty reading and writing, or for whom French was not their native language, writing will have been alienating at the very least, if not absolutely unmanageable.

The fact that the questionnaire’s dissemination was illegal inside prisons means that questionnaires were, however, often covertly read out to prisoners by visiting family members or fellow prisoners who had managed to smuggle in a copy, and the answers were collected orally. The formulation of some of the answers published in the GIP’s brochure Enquête dans vingt prisons indicates that they were given orally, and compiled by a third party: ‘According to the questions I have asked prisoners…’14. Among those is this revealing answer to the question ‘Have you been the victim of censorship?’: ‘People don’t write much in prison, because of spelling; they are ashamed of their spelling before the censors.’15 The GIP’s privileging of the

14 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 27 – my translation. 15 Ibid., p.29 – my translation.

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written medium will thus probably have led to under‐representation of illiterate prisoners and non‐French‐speakers, though perhaps more so in the letters sent in than in questionnaires, on account of their ad hoc dissemination in prisons.

The Administration pénitentiaire’s annual report indicates that French prisons housed 29,026 prisoners on 1 January 1970.16 The number of questionnaires sent out by the GIP, by contrast, approximated one thousand, but the number of answers received was around 50.17 Letters, prison narratives and diaries were also sent to the GIP by 20 or so inmates and ex‐cons. The total of the GIP’s informants thus represented only a tiny fraction of the prison population, favouring French‐speaking, literate and relatively politicised and articulate respondents, which may not be deemed representative of the whole of the prison population. However, given the drastic restrictions on all forms of communication with prisoners, the GIP’s aim of enabling inmates directly to express their grievances to the ‘outside’ was difficult to achieve without recourse to the written medium, even though this will have prevented many from taking part in the investigation. QUESTIONNAIRES One of the GIP’s key investigative tools, announced in their founding declaration, was the dissemination of a questionnaire destined to collect information on prison conditions from prisoners themselves. Interestingly, the authorship of the questionnaire seems to constitute a moot point. The first announcement of the availability of the questionnaire appeared in the GIP’s manifesto, which did not mention any involvement of prisoners or ex‐prisoners in the GIP at that stage. In an article published in La Cause du peuple‐J’accuse (25 May 1971), Daniel Defert (founding member of the GIP) states that it is prisoners themselves who drew up the questionnaire. Defert seems anxious to minimize the intellectuals’ involvement and maximize the prisoners’, so that the role of ex‐inmates in the drafting of the initial version of the questionnaire may be suspected to have been rather less than Defert claims.

By contrast, the historians who retraced the early meetings of the GIP altogether discount ex‐prisoners’ involvement at that stage, maintaining that the questionnaire was written by a small group of young philosophers and sociologists (including Jacques Donzelot, Daniel Defert, Danielle Rancière, Christine Martineau) around Michel Foucault18.

16 In Le Monde, 2/09/1970. 17 Elie Kagan and Alain Jaubert, Une Journée particulière (Lyon: Ædelsa Éditions, 2004), p. 40. 18 Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe d’information

sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p.30.

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The GIP’s claim that ‘This is not a sociological investigation’19 arguably referred not so much to the professional training of its investigators as to the purposes of the investigation. A covering letter to the questionnaire insists that the GIP’s investigation is to be understood as an act of resistance20, foregrounding the significance of the investigation’s motives over its format. Thus it is not a sociologists’ investigation because it does not share the aims that sociological investigations usually have. The meaning of the enquiry is a function of the socio‐political stance which the enquirers adopt, perhaps in the sense in which Pêcheux argues that ‘Words, expressions, propositions, etc […] change their meaning according to the positions held by those who use them, which signifies that they find their meaning by reference to these positions’21.

However, it could also be argued that the choice of the questionnaire format was actually crucial to the GIP’s goals, not least in that it positioned its authors as social scientists. The questions could thus be described as ‘énoncés’ in the sense that Foucault proposed in The Archaeology of Knowledge: ‘To describe a formulation qua statement [énoncé] does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.’22 Thus, the questionnaire format positions its authors as social scientists, regardless of how they wish to present themselves; the genre is that of the scientific institution, automatically casting its subjects as institutional researchers: ‘The positions of the subject are […] defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in relation to the various domains or groups of objects: he is subject questioning according to a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations, and listening according to a certain programme of information’23.

The institutional stamp carried by the questionnaire format in turn grants scientific authority to the investigative procedure. Questionnaires have been sanctioned by the social scientific establishment as a valid means of generating standardised knowledge. Their formal rigour is arguably instrumental in allowing the constitution of a ‘shared body of knowledge’ [‘savoir commun’], which the GIP foregrounded as one of the chief aims of the investigation. The involvement of sociologists in the GIP’s investigative methods, whether acknowledged or not, thus seems wholly cogent with the GIP’s rationale, of helping prisoners produce knowledge about their situation.

19 Ce n’est pas une enquête de sociologues’, in Artières et al, op.cit., p.52. 20 ‘ce n’est pas une enquête sociologique, une enquête‐curiosité, c’est une enquête‐intolérance’,

ibid., p.53. 21 Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, trans. H. Nagpal, (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1982), p.111. 22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (London & New

York: Routledge, 2003 [1972]), p.107. 23 Ibid. pp.57‐58, translation adapted.

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However, the GIP’s reliance on questionnaires can be considered problematical on a number of grounds. Firstly, the use of a strict question‐answer format has been shown to generate power asymmetry in the relationship between those asking the questions and those answering them.24 The GIP’s recourse to questionnaires may therefore be thought to have imposed an unequal interaction pattern on prisoners.

The GIP questionnaire set the topics, signalled by the sub‐headings ‘visits’, ‘letters’, ‘your rights’, ‘cells’ etc., which remained unchanged even as some of the questions were added or amended following initial feedback. A considerable part of the GIP’s discourse indeed consisted in politicising the daily life and material conditions of prisoners. In a 1973 interview Foucault explains how his rationale in asking prisoners to testify to their living conditions is inscribed in the redefinition of the political initiated by the late Sixties liberation movements. As Artières notes, since 1968 prisons had remained the only place not to be reached by the collective ‘speaking out’ undertaken by sections of the population hitherto denied access to the political platform, from women and gays to workers and students25. In a 1972 article, Jacques Donzelot, who was involved in the GIP, clarifies the GIP’s position in relation to movements largely influenced by psychoanalytic notions of liberation through speech, contending that the GIP aimed to move beyond merely freeing the voices of the oppressed, to formulate a potent political discourse. The GIP, he states, did not encourage prisoners to speak out for self‐expression’s sake, but saw that their testimonies should have a very specific content, revolving around their living conditions26.

The GIP’s strategy was thus very clearly defined in relation to the protest movements of the preceding years. One of its key premises built on the idea that the personal is political, and it therefore insisted that prisoners designate their daily living conditions as their primary concern. While it also drew on the contemporary power of the silenced voice finally speaking up for itself, the GIP nonetheless distanced itself from the clinical associations of confession, to rather channel testimonies in the direction of pre‐defined claims grounded in verifiable information on material conditions.

The range of issues deemed relevant was thus pre‐selected by the GIP, and can be suspected to have stopped other problems coming to the fore: as Drew and Heritage found, in question‐answer settings, ‘professionals may prevent particular issues becoming topics in their own right’27. Incidentally, Gudjonsson remarks that 24 See for instance: Roger Fowler et al, Language and Control (London, Boston and Henley:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power , 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1989]).

25 Artières, op.cit, p.37. 26 Jacques Donzelot, ‘Travail social et lutte politique’, Esprit 413 (1972): 654‐73. 27 Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds), Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.49.

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the police are aware of this effect and ‘ask specific questions in order to […] allow the police officer to have greater control over the interview’28.

Further, the validity of both closed and open survey questions has been challenged: Foddy contends that the ‘suggestion that open questions do not suggest answers to respondents [in contrast to closed ones] is not necessarily valid’29. Open questions have been observed to yield markedly different answers from closed versions of the same questions. Though this has been attributed to the inadequacy of the closed response options, Foddy remarks that ‘such an outcome can just as easily be the result of respondents having to guess what kinds of answers the researcher wants in response to open questions. The central issue is not which format produces the most valid responses but whether or not respondents know what kinds of answers they should give.’30 Respondents are thus thought not to answer absolutely freely, but rather to attempt to conform to what they assume the researcher’s expectations to be. This problem will certainly have applied to the GIP questionnaire: prisoners will have responded according to what they thought the GIP required. Leading forensic linguist Roger W. Shuy further warns that: ‘The way a question is asked can influence or even determine the answer given. […] Lawyers have long recognized the dangers of “leading questions,” for example, and the courts try to prevent this from happening.’31

These problematic aspects of the questionnaire format point to a rather more complex relationship between the GIP and the prisoners than the former simply offering a platform to the latter. The prisoners’ involvement in the GIP was thus restricted, at this early stage in the movement, to answering questions concerning material conditions of imprisonment. The GIP also suggested, however, that prisoners sent in ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment.’32

PRISON NARRATIVES What ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment’ (‘des récits détaillés de détention’) might involve is perhaps open to interpretation. They may arguably refer to second‐hand reports of events, but it is likely that they would be taken as autobiographical accounts of prison life. Whatever their exact contents, however, the suggested format

28 Gisli Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions and Testimony (Chichester: Wiley,

1992), p. 9. 29 William Foddy, Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in

Social Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 129. 30 Ibid. p.152. 31 Roger W. Shuy, Languages Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom

(Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), p.174, original emphasis. 32 In Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe

d’information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p. 42, my translation.

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is unambiguously that of narrative: ‘récit’. The suggestion of a narrative genre by the GIP is particularly interesting in light of Foucault’s comments on prisoners’ autobiographies in the preface to Serge Livrozet’s book, De la Prison à la révolte (1973). Foucault condemned the prevalence of the autobiographical genre as ensuring that ‘the convict cannot have thoughts, as s/he may only have recollections. His/her memory alone is accepted, not his/her ideas’33. Whether wholly autobiographical or not, the GIP’s ‘récits de détention’ likewise arguably preclude analytical critique, political manifesto, or any other non‐narrative genres prisoners might have wished to adopt.

Foucault’s analysis of the significance of the prisoners’ testimonies lays particular emphasis on first‐person enunciation and communication, rather than on contents. In a 1972 interview Foucault thus stated that ‘in our pamphlets, it was the inmates themselves who spoke out and revealed the facts. Since these facts were only known in restricted circles, it was important for the public to hear the voice of prisoners, and for prisoners to know that they themselves were speaking out’34. This observation clearly stresses the importance of viva voce dialogue between prisoners and ‘public opinion’, or ‘contact’ in Debray’s words35, rather than the terms of the discourse they held.

In requesting personal narratives the GIP can be said to have aligned itself with what Scannell shows to be the dominant distribution of discourse in the media, where ‘public persons [such as intellectuals] are entitled to opinions, private persons to experiences’36:

To have an opinion is to be entitled to comment on events, to have views about them, to assess their significance. To have an experience is to be entitled to describe an event that happened to oneself and to say how one felt about it. […] Public persons […] speak as representatives of institutions, as agents not as persons, and their views have generalised weight and authority. They are accredited spokespersons, whose views are legitimated and legitimating. Private individuals appear in news, become newsworthy, accidentally and usually disastrously. They are often the victims or witnesses of catastrophes and are interviewed for what they saw or for how it affected them […]37

The GIP reproduced this pattern by inviting prisoners to contribute experiences, while analysis and commentary was provided by the GIP intellectuals. They thus conformed to a generic convention reflecting the fact that ‘the powerless are not seen

33 ‘le condamné ne peut pas avoir de pensée puisqu’il ne doit avoir que des souvenirs. Sa

mémoire seule est admise, non ses idées’, in Serge Livrozet, De la Prison à la révolte (Paris: l’Esprit Frappeur, 1999 [1973]), p. 6, my translation.

34 DE, vol.1, p. 1297, my translation. 35 Régis Debray, L’État séducteur. Les Révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993),

p. 127. 36 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, in Culture and Power, ed.

Paddy Scannell et al (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1992), p. 344. 37 Ibid.

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as credible sources of knowledge and explanation and tend as a result to be marginalised’38.

By the same token, however, for the GIP to combine prisoners’ experience with intellectuals’ public pronouncements may be considered an efficient strategy in that it will have met discursive expectations, and hence have been more easily accepted and understood. In a 1975 interview first published in 2004, Foucault clarified his view on the role of the intellectual in relation to the discourse of powerless groups:

To me, the intellectual has no right to privilege his/her own discourse over that of others. Rather, s/he tries to make room for the discourse of others. This does not mean that s/he should keep silent, for this would be verging on masochism… His/her role is to open up possibilities in discourse, and to blend his/her discourse with others’, to intertwine it with that of others, like a support.39

This position is quite different from the GIP statements that insisted that it only put forward prisoners’ voices without intervening in any way. Contrary to previous claims that the GIP intellectuals aimed to remain silent, Foucault now suggests that such a position would be masochistic. He rather argues that the intellectual’s role is to open up recognised discursive channels for others, and to intertwine his/her discourse with theirs so as to lend them its institutional support. This view more accurately reflects the way that the GIP operated, in that the intellectuals, and Foucault in particular, indubitably intermingled their own discourse with the prisoners’, and thereby enabled the latter to find its way into the media.

In the same interview, Foucault repeats that the GIP intellectuals did not intend to remain silent and let prisoners alone speak – contrary to earlier GIP pronouncements:

What we tried to do with the prison issue was […] to weave together discourses which were on an equal footing. We did not keep quiet if an inmate was speaking, we did not acknowledge that he had the right to shut us up, but nor did we assume the right to speak in his place. It seemed to us that the fact of being on the outside was neither qualifying nor disqualifying for us. It was one position in relation to prison – a position allowing us to speak about prison without speaking on behalf on inmates.40

Foucault’s claim that neither the prisoners’ discourse nor the intellectuals’ was given more prominence breaks with both the GIP’s insistence that the inmates’ voices take precedence, and with Foucault’s consistent theoretical view that the discourses of intellectuals occupy a privileged place in the order of discourse, and that this is precisely why, as in the previous quote, they can provide support for others’ voices.

Foucault’s defence, that the fact of speaking from outside prisons does not invalidate a discourse about it, is probably made in response to ex‐inmate Serge 38 Romy Clark and Roz Ivanič, The Politics of Writing. (London and New York: Routldge, 1997), p.

33. 39 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation. 40 Ibid.

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Livrozet, who led the Melun protests in 1972 and founded the Comité dʹAction des Prisonniers on his release in 1973. Following Foucault’s anonymous publication of an article on illegalism and delinquency in the daily left‐wing newspaper Libération, Livrozet railed against the intellectual’s analysis in an interview with the same newspaper: ‘These specialists in analysis are a pain. I don’t need anyone to speak for me and proclaim what I am.’41 Mills remarks that Livrozet ‘clearly felt that Foucault’s position was not simply that of facilitator’42. It may be in light of such a challenge that Foucault saw fit to justify intellectuals’ right to comment on subjects on which their research can shed a different and complementary light.

As if anticipating potential criticism that, by mixing the GIP’s discourse with the prisoners’, the GIP might be said to have unduly interfered with it by giving it a more authoritative shape, Foucault continues:

You’re going to tell me: it is the intellectuals who are moulding this discourse… Big deal! The intellectual, in a given society, is precisely the ‘discourse officer’. Whatever happens in the order of discourse is inevitably going to be his/her business. S/he might be for or against it, but no operation can take place within the order of discourse without the intellectual’s intervention.43

Here Foucault effectively admits that the prisoners’ voices could not have become a discourse, that is, have had the potential to wield any power, had they not been framed by intellectuals – as only they have access to the order of discourse and can alter the configuration of discourses in a society. PUBLICATIONS As soon as information had been gathered, it was crucial to the GIP’s strategy that it be rapidly spread and shared, to enable the emergence of a collective voice, and of a ‘shared body of knowledge’ (‘savoir commun’)44. To this end the GIP published a number of articles, particularly in the Maoist press and in the Catholic monthly Esprit. They also published five brochures, four of which appeared under the especially created series title “Intolérable”.

Defert contends that: ‘we did not hold any specific discourse of our own; the heterogeneity of the GIP’s publications bears witness to this’45. While the GIP’s output undoubtedly covers a wide range of issues, and treats them in a variety of ways, from polemical essays on George Jackson’s death to word for word reproduction of questionnaire answers, I would like to suggest that the GIP’s

41 ‘Les spécialistes de l’analyse nous emmerdent, je n’ai besoin de personne pour prendre la

parole et expliquer ce que je suis.’ (Libération 19‐02‐1974), trans. Betsy Wing, in Eribon, Michel Foucault, (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991 [1989]), p. 234.

42 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 77. 43 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation. 44 GIP, Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 4. 45 Daniel Defert in Artières et al, op.cit, p. 324, my translation.

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publications did not always impartially reflect prisoners’ contributions. The editorial power exercised by the GIP in its publication of prisoners’ testimonies, together with the ideological standpoints discernible in their presentation of the issues they addressed, can rather be said to express, if not a unified ‘discourse’, at least a significant voice in the dialogical end products.

The first brochure to be published by the GIP, entitled Enquête dans vingt prisons, appeared in June 1971. The booklet, consisting of a selection of the questionnaire answers gathered by then, is prefaced with a three‐page introduction attributed to Michel Foucault. The tone set by his opening paragraph is far from neutral:

Expressed through courts, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, occupational medicine, universities, the press, and informational organs – through all these institutions, under different disguises, exists a form of oppression that is deeply rooted in the political. 46

Foucault thus introduces the prisoners’ answers to the GIP’s questionnaire with a very powerful framework within which to interpret them: courts and prisons are to be understood not as providing an impartial service, for instance, but as a form of oppression which is above all political. Foucault places the judiciary on a par with other institutions considered neutral and democratic, and whose avowed mission is indeed to care for and benefit all citizens: an independent justice system is widely hailed as a hallmark of democracy, while prisons allegedly serve the common good by simultaneously protecting those on the outside, and seeing to the rehabilitation of those on the inside. Yet Foucault challenges this idyllic picture of democratic institutions in no uncertain terms: far from neutrally serving the population, they ensure its oppression. Prisoners, specifically, are thereby cast primarily as victims of the oppression exercised by the judiciary.

The political dimensions of this oppression become clearer in the next paragraph:

This oppression has always been recognized by the exploited class, which has constantly resisted it, but has been thoroughly subjected to it. Now this oppression has become intolerable to other social strata – intellectuals, technicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists, etc. It still purports to be exercised through these professionals, with their help and complicity, but it is now failing to take account of their interests, and above all their ideology. Those in charge of distributing justice, health, knowledge, and information, are becoming aware of the oppressive force of a political power at the heart of their own practices. Their growing resistance is now joining forces with the proletariat in its long struggle.47

Here Foucault presents ‘political oppression’ in terms of his own evolving understanding of power relations. While partly relying on Marxist class terminology (‘the exploited class’, ‘the proletariat’), he distances himself from the idea that the 46 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, trans. Betsy Wing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 228. 47 Ibid., translation adapted.

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exploited are blinded by ideology: rather he argues that they are fully aware of the injustices committed against them, and are constantly engaged in resistance, but have not hitherto been able to defeat oppressive forces.

Foucault presents oppression as not simply exercised by economic forces at the service of the bourgeoisie, but as operating through a heterogeneous network comprising a range of fields, including science, medicine, justice, and information. In his later lectures on power, Foucault would emphasise that he was not concerned with the operation of power within central institutions such as State apparatuses, where it is expected and regulated by laws, but rather with the continued impact of it beyond those institutions: ‘power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, [...] those points where it becomes capillary, that is, [...] its more regional forms and institutions’48. His claim that increasing numbers of professionals have come to feel the exercise of power within their own practices is cogent with his focus on the impact of disciplinary practices brought to bear upon individual bodies by specific professional practices.

Foucault thus presents the GIP’s work in relation to his own understanding of the workings of power: he offers a theoretical framework within which the prisoners’ responses can be read as combating power at its very points of application: ‘attacking [power] where it is exercised under another name: that of justice, technique, knowledge, objectivity’49. This discourse thus casts prisoners as not simply protesting prison conditions, but as taking on power itself in one of the many forms in which it is exercised in modern Western society. Prisoners are thus presented as occupying a key position in the modern power configuration.

The prisoners’ responses are clearly not published simply on their own terms, as both the GIP and critics have sustained50, but they are rather encased within a very strongly‐worded interpretive framework: they are an integral part of an ‘enquête‐intolérance’, which is essentially ‘a political act […] the first episode in a struggle […] a front, an offensive front […] the struggle which will prevent oppression being exercised’51. The GIP thus presents the questionnaire responses through a distinctive discourse of anti‐oppressive struggle, of which only partial echoes can be found in the prisoners’ input. It therefore appears as primarily the GIP’s own discourse, rather than the prisoners’, and frames the latter as agents of a political struggle against oppression. Though Boullant argues that Foucault kept in the background, and unilaterally listened to prisoners52, this preface bears the unmistakable stamp of Foucault’s thought, and foregrounded his own ideas rather than faithfully reporting prisoners’ responses. 48 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,

1980), p. 96. 49 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, my translation. 50 Cf. Boullant, op.cit., pp. 14‐15; Artières op.cit., pp. 44‐46. 51 Enquête, pp. 3‐4, emphasis original, translated in Macey, op.cit., pp. 268‐69. 52 In L’Humanité 19/06/04.

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Following this introductory contextualisation of the GIP’s investigation, the brochure’s contents are summed up as follows:

In order to disseminate the information as rapidly as possible, we have written this pamphlet on the basis of the first questionnaires:

1. By way of illustration, two of the completed questionnaires are reproduced in full.

2. We also include two narratives which follow the order of the questions.

3. Finally, the most characteristic answers are brought together under the main questionnaire headings.53

These points indicate several ways in which the GIP operated a selection of texts for publication out of all the material that they initially received. Two filled out questionnaires were deemed worthy of publishing in their entirety; two continuous narratives were included in the midst of the dominant question‐answer format; and finally, a number of answers were selected as ‘characteristic’. The GIP thus undoubtedly brought its own judgement to bear upon what material should be widely publicised, and what could be omitted. As Macey notes, ‘the absence of any statistical breakdown of the responses makes the very notion of “characteristic” rather dubious’54. While the necessity of such a selection was probably dictated by practical concerns regarding the length of the pamphlet, the order in which the texts appear within the brochure suggest that it was also used to foreground radical views in line with the GIP’s activist agenda.

The first document in the brochure is a completed questionnaire seemingly published in its entirety, simply headed with the name of the Parisian men’s prison from which it emanated: ‘La Santé’. The answers are remarkably articulate – much more so than might be expected from the average levels of literacy recorded in prisons. This prisoner can thus be suspected, from the outset, not to be representative of the prison population at large. As one reads on, it becomes apparent that he holds clear political sympathies, as he bemoans the lack of access to Marxist publications within the prison.

The questionnaire answers are thus fronted by a strongly politicised and articulate prisoner – whom later questions further reveal to have been one of the prisoners involved in the hunger strikes organised by the political prisoners of the ex‐Gauche prolétarienne. None of the answers compiled in the remainder of the brochure express clear political views, suggesting that such a set of answers might have constituted the exception rather than the rule among the questionnaires collected. Yet the GIP chose to give it the most prominent place. The fact that it is largely coherent with Foucault’s radical introduction would seem to suggest that this questionnaire was selected on account of subversive contents supporting Foucault’s

53 Enquête, p. 4, my translation. 54 Macey, op.cit., p. 268.

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activist aims, rather than Foucault’s introduction having been based on overwhelmingly political responses from the prisoners.

The GIP’s last brochure, Cahiers de revendications sortis des prisons lors des récentes révoltes, published in 1972, highlights the growing gap between some of the GIP’s initial aims, and the struggles taken up by prisoners themselves. The GIP’s introduction to the Cahiers echoes its manifesto and first declarations, repeating some of the GIP’s initial statements almost word for word. The consistency displayed by the GIP’s discourse in no way reflects the relatively independent course taken up by prisoners’ collectives inside prisons. As against the innovative means of political struggle called for by intellectuals, the Cahiers rather betray the adoption by prisoners of traditional forms of political action. Prisoners indeed summed up their grievances as numbered bullet points spelling so many suggestions for timid reforms, such as the ‘right to a transistor in each cell’, ‘longer visiting hours’, or the ‘right to buy paperback books’55.

The original political subjectivity which the GIP tried to outline was thus not taken up by prisoners, who rather opted for more traditional modes of political struggle, and aligned their discourses either to a reformist agenda (as above), or to Marxist‐inspired revolutionary declarations.56

COMMUNICATIVE HEGEMONY

The GIP intellectuals’ alliance with prisoners can be seen not to have yielded the results which Foucault expected. Deleuze reports that Foucault felt the GIP had achieved nothing.57 In this section I review the key strengths and weaknesses of the GIP’s strategy, and I argue that the failure of the GIP can be attributed to its imposition of a hegemonic discourse on prisoners, defining subject positions for them which they neither wanted to nor could adopt.

The originality of the GIP’s approach resided in its endeavour to contrive a new way of championing the cause of an oppressed group. Although the use of questionnaires to gather information is problematic on a number of counts, it did nonetheless provide a way of transforming prisoners’ experience into ratified knowledge. In this the GIP can be argued to have contrived a means of interceding between the powerless and the spheres of power, while breaking away from the prevailing intellectual tradition of defending people’s causes from a humanist, theoretical position, as representatives of universal truths.

Discussing the role of intellectuals in the aftermath of 1968, Foucault commented that: ‘the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to

55 In GIP, Cahiers de revendications sortis des prisons lors des récentes révoltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),

p. 15. 56 Cf. Livrozet, op.cit. 57 In Eribon, op.cit., p.234.

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gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge’58. The GIP can be said to have attempted to tackle this de facto censorship of the masses’ discourse by channelling it through the approved mechanism of knowledge production which questionnaires constitute.

Foucault envisioned that: ‘The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge”, “truth”, “consciousness”, and “discourse”’59. The GIP’s work can be said to have put Foucault’s and other intellectuals’ privileged place in the order of discourse at the service of those who were excluded and oppressed by that very order. As objects and instruments of power, the GIP intellectuals lent their licence to manufacture truths to those who would challenge that very power, thereby subverting and short‐circuiting the order of knowledge’s allegiance to the repressive exercise of power.

Though as many have noted, the GIP’s work thus exemplified Foucault’s conception of the new role of intellectuals60, it can be argued that the success of its work nonetheless largely relied on the continuing prestige of intellectuals as bearers of universal truths. Halperin remarks that Foucault used ‘his prestigious social location to create specific opportunities for the voices of the disempowered to be heard, recorded, published, and circulated’61. It is indeed doubtful that, had the movement been led by lesser‐known individuals, it would have generated as much interest in the media – and thereby held as much sway with ‘public opinion’.

Thus, though Foucault insisted that the movement aimed to remain ‘anonymous’62, the vast majority of the press coverage of its actions foregrounded Foucault’s name, and later Sartre’s and Mauriac’s as they joined in the various protests. The fact that these intellectuals stepped back from the struggle after the creation of the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers (CAP) can further be regarded as one of the main factors accounting for the decrease of media exposure of the prisoners’ movement after 1972. In a 1976 article Defert and Donzelot thus express concern at the lack of coverage of the work of the CAP, wondering: ‘They are going on with it, but what response are they getting?’63

The position of power occupied by the GIP intellectuals, while an asset in exerting influence in official spheres, may however have hindered communication 58 In Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice, p. 207. 59 Ibid., pp. 207‐08. 60 Cf. Gandal, op.cit.; Mauger, op.cit.; Jean‐Claude Monod, Foucault: La police des conduites (Paris:

Michalon, 1997); Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge, 1985). 61 Halperin, op.cit., p. 52. 62 DE, vol.1, p. 1172. 63 ‘Ils continuent, mais avec quel écho?’ Trans. Betsy Wing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 234.

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with prisoners. The communication breakdown between the GIP and prisoners is evidenced first and foremost in the poor take‐up among potential respondents. I suggest that this may be due to the fact that the GIP chose to communicate with prisoners through the dissemination of written questionnaires in French, in spite of the higher rate of literacy difficulties, and the proportional over‐representation of non‐French speakers, in the prison population.

Analysis of the only completed questionnaire that has been archived further reveals a stark contrast between the GIP’s flawless grammar and elaborate wording, and the brevity, broken syntax, tentative spelling and use of dialect and slang which characterise the inmate’s answers. I would like to argue that, whether or not the GIP’s linguistic choices impeded comprehension, this prisoner’s failure to fulfil expectations implicit in open questions by answering at length, for instance, may be read as unwillingness or inability on the respondent’s part to submit to the conventions of a genre outside of his ordinary communicative repertoire.

Foucault himself would later remark on the class divide perpetuated by the judiciary: ‘in the courts society as a whole does not judge one of its members, but […] a social category with an interest in order judges another that is dedicated to disorder’64. Citing a striking passage from Rossi’s 1829 Traité de droit pénal, he then goes on to comment on the resulting linguistic gap commonly found in the courtroom:

The language of the law, which is supposed to be universal, is, in this respect, inadequate; it must, if it is to be effective, be the discourse of one class to another, which has neither the same ideas as it nor even the same words: ‘How are we, with our prudish, contemptuous languages, overloaded with formality, to make ourselves understood by those who have never heard anything but the crude, poor, irregular, but lively, frank, picturesque dialect of the market, the tavern and the fair… What language, what method should we use when drawing up laws that will act effectively on the uneducated minds of those less capable of resisting the temptations of crime?’ (Rossi, I, 33) Law and justice do not hesitate to proclaim their necessary class dissymmetry.65

Foucault thus shows that legislators have long been aware of the social asymmetry between judges and defendants, and of the confusion that can arise from the resulting clash of sociolects in the courtroom. Stubbs notes that ‘it is within such institutions that strangers, from different social classes and language backgrounds, are in interaction with each other. There are therefore likely to be misunderstandings in precisely those encounters which lead to important decisions in people’s lives.’66

The GIP’s questionnaire may have been read by prisoners as yet another cross‐examination session, to be carried out in the language of the prosecutor rather than that of the accused. It is with mitigated success that the GIP thus attempted to lend the powerless the intellectual clout of its jargon, as the vast majority of prisoners 64 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A.Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 276. 65 Ibid. 66 Michael Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis (Oxford and Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), p. 103.

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failed to take part. It is paradoxical that it should have shown some sensitivity in insisting on having the information gathered made public in the prisoners’ ‘own words’, while expecting respondents to understand the GIP’s language in the first place. In Briggs’s formulation, the GIP can be said to have been guilty of “communicative hegemony” – where communicative hegemony ‘refers to researchers’ efforts to impose their own communicative strategies on their subjects or consultants regardless of the possibility that these techniques may be incompatible with those persons’ own communicative repertoire’.67

The questionnaires thus constituted an ambiguous medium in the GIP’s investigation, simultaneously granting everyday personal experience the status of positive knowledge, and constraining prisoners’ input by a set of questions devised to suit a strategy planned by the GIP, with little (if any) input from prisoners or ex‐prisoners themselves.

Theorists of discourse argue that: ‘Discourse conventions carry with them prototypical identities: possible selves for real writers, “subject positions” that they inhabit when they participate in this discourse.’68 Imposing certain discourse conventions on prisoners can therefore be thought to have created specific subject positions for them to take up. Dambrine suggests that the GIP gave inmates access to the status of ‘discursive subject’69, but what sort of discursive subjectivity were prisoners able to take on?

The majority of commentators take at face value the GIP’s claim that, thanks to their movement, prisoners were finally able to speak for themselves. However, in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak points up a number of problems with Foucault’s descriptions of the role of GIP. First of all, she remarks that Foucault’s pronouncement that ‘the oppressed can know and speak for themselves […] reintroduces the constitutive subject’ which Foucault’s theoretical work has repeatedly called into question.70 The implication that prisoners are knowing subjects who can express their views without the corrupting mediation of discourse contributes to ‘restor[ing] the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that seems most to question it’.71 Foucault’s depiction of prisoners as ‘knowing and speaking for themselves’ is indeed inconsistent with his suggestion, in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 [1969]), that it is discourses that shape subjects, rather than sovereign subjects consciously and deliberately articulating their own original thoughts.

67 Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in

Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 90. 68 Clark and Ivanič, op. cit. p. 140. 69 Dambrine, op. cit. p. 146. 70 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of

Culture, ed. by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 279. 71 Ibid. p. 278.

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Spivak argues that the GIP’s position is also problematic from a political point of view. She notes that, in claiming that they let prisoners speak for themselves, ‘the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent’72: they deny their own influential role in bringing the movement to the media’s attention and shaping its whole strategy. Spivak suggests that the self‐denying posturing of the GIP intellectuals could be criticised as ‘interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges of power bestowed on the subject [as opposed to the oppressed non‐subjects]’73: in representing themselves as absent, the intellectuals fail to interrogate their own relationship with groups who have less access to the order of discourse, and the institutional responsibility which they can be thought to carry vis‐à‐vis less privileged sections of society. Thus, Howe concludes, radical political practice ‘must attend to its own ruses of power if it is to avoid underwriting a delusionary politics of self‐representing subalterns speaking for themselves’74. The long unpublished 1975 interview75 which I have discussed above sees Foucault partly answering these criticisms when he describes his privileged position in the order of discourse as having been instrumental in helping to formulate the prisoners’ demands as a discourse in its own right.

Gandal acknowledges that any formulation of discourse on the part of prisoners should, in Foucaldian terms, be understood as a form of subjectivation, and may therefore be at odds with his critique of subjection:

In the case of the prisons, what Foucault was attempting to struggle against were the forms of subjection that constituted the convict as other and that condemned him to brutal treatment in the prison and a marginalization that did not end when he got out. Of course, Foucault’s political work around the prisons also involved forms of subjection: it contributed to the creation of new identities for prisoners as they articulated their experiences. But rather than dividing prisoners from the rest of society, these forms of subjection, these practices of speaking and of developing new knowledge about themselves, provided links between prisoners and people on the outside.76

Gandal thus notes that the GIP shaped new identities for prisoners by making them voice their experiences. These identities, he contends, are not objectionable in as much as they do not separate prisoners from the rest of the population, but rather enable them to communicate with the outside. The form of subjectivation exercised on prisoners by the GIP can therefore be viewed as positive identity constitution.

Halperin equally argues that the GIP’s methods did not involve any questionable constraints on prisoners. He states that Foucault’s purpose was

72 Ibid. p. 275. 73 Ibid. p. 280. 74 Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London and New

York: Routledge, 1994), p. 211. 75 Le Monde 19‐20/09/04. 76 Gandal, op.cit., p.129.

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to authorize those who are normally the objects of expert discourses, who are spoken about while remaining silent themselves, to speak on their own behalf – not so that they might confess to the authorities the truth of their being, of course, but so that they could articulate their own needs, point out the conditions that were particularly odious to them, and advance their own political projects.77

Though the aims of the GIP were no doubt different from those of the authorities and repressive institutions which invite and rely on confession, the methods which they used do bear some disturbing resemblances.

Indeed, by requesting personal narratives, the GIP made prisoners voice their experiences of prison in a first‐person genre not dissimilar to confession. In addition, the assessment of the impact of prison conditions on detainees partly relied on the objects of its inquiry – the prisoners – constituting themselves as self‐monitoring subjects. In order to answer some the GIP’s questions, they had to turn inwards and watch their own thoughts and behaviour so as to isolate those conditions and factors which they found most intolerable, and hence most urgently wished to bring to public attention. It could therefore be argued that the GIP constituted prisoners as self‐monitoring subjects through a process similar to that through which the Panopticon shapes its inmates’ subjectivity. Answering the questionnaire also placed prisoners in the inferior position of those subjected to question‐answer examinations in institutional settings, such as suspects in police interrogations and defendants in court, where this procedure contributes to marking individuals out as criminal subjects.

CONCLUSION I have tried to demonstrate that, contrary to the GIP’s own claims, which have been uncritically echoed by the vast majority of commentators, the GIP did not simply give prisoners a platform, but inevitably contributed to channelling, moulding and mediating inmates’ discourse.

The various public pronouncements of the GIP described prisoners as an oppressed and exploited class who would now rebel against their scapegoat status and lead the struggle against the insidiously repressive power of so‐called democratic institutions. The GIP thereby constructed inmates as key political agents in an unprecedented rebellion against newly‐identified sites of power.

Prisoners’ subjectivity was not only shaped by the GIP by portraying them in this way in its declarations, but also by delineating subject positions for them to adopt within the GIP’s investigation by expecting them to formulate certain types of statements (énoncés). Foucault suggested in The Archaeology of Knowledge that énoncés define subject positions for those who utter them.78 By positioning prisoners as

77 Halperin, op.cit., p. 55. 78 Foucault, op.cit., p.107.

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47

respondents to questionnaires designed by sociologists, and as authors of first‐person narratives, the GIP made those of the inmates who answered them adopt the position of objects of an interaction closely resembling an interrogation or a psychological examination, where prisoners had little scope for influencing the dynamics of the dialogue and the topics dealt with. Even as they may be argued to have been subverted by their use within a specific political strategy, the historically loaded genres which the GIP thus called on inmates to adopt may still be seen to have delineated specific subjectivities for prisoners. The ‘discursive subjects’ constructed by the GIP can therefore be argued to have been shaped by constraints comparable with those which Foucault would later argue constitute criminal subjects in modern Western societies.

Though the GIP repeatedly claimed to be letting prisoners speak for themselves, I have shown that the methods it used to collect testimonials, and the way it framed prisoners in its various statements and publications in fact imposed a number of constraints on both the form and contents of prisoners’ contributions – constraints which may be argued to have shaped specific subjectivities for prisoners.

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Foucault Studies

© Jacques Donzelot and Colin Gordon 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


INTERVIEW Governing Liberal Societies – the Foucault Effect in the English‐speaking World1 Jacques Donzelot, University of Paris X‐Nanterre Colin Gordon, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust JD: In the two volumes of his lectures of 1978 and 1979, we see Michel Foucault making a major intellectual change of direction, moving away from an analysis of power as the formation and production of individuals towards an analysis of governmentality, a concept invented to denote the ‘conduct of conducts’ of men and women, working through their autonomy rather than through coercion even of a subtle kind. Out of this concept and the extended analysis of political economy which provides the material for its elaboration, Foucault never produced a published work. He broke off this series of investigations to occupy himself up to his death in 1984 with the writing of two books, which were evidently closer to his heart, of a history of the subject passing by way of the Care of the self and the Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1989a 1989b). This however did not prevent this concept of governmentality from meeting with great success in the English‐speaking world, in many ways stimulating there an intellectual dynamic more intense than in the case of his published works, which rapidly became classics and were treated as such and with the deference that status entailed, but not with the excitement which met the lectures on governmentality. In 1991, your volume The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon, Miller 1991) set off this dynamic by centring the “effect” in question precisely on this notion of governmentality. But in France Foucault’s lectures on the subject were not published until 2004 and without at first arousing great interest. So what accounts for this singular success of Foucault’s reflection on governmentality in the Anglo‐Saxon world? CG: We had a few advantages in Britain. In the first place, Foucault in his lifetime was more easygoing about foreign translations of his interviews and lectures than he was about their publication or reprinting in France. There may also have been more 1 Translated with minor revisions from Esprit, Novembre 2007, 82‐95: ‘Comment gouverner les

sociétés libérales? L’effet Foucault dans le monde Anglo‐Saxon’.


editorial latitude for juxtaposing this material with the work of people who were collaborating, virtually or actually, with Foucault. Some of Foucault’s important later lectures and texts dealing with government were given in America and originally published there. In The Foucault Effect I was able to publish a summary, based on lecture notes and tapes, of his governmentality lectures: many people could certainly have done the same in France.

Secondly, there is the difference in the national political conjuncture. In France after 1981, the dominant preoccupation remained socialism rather than liberalism, whereas Foucault had seen the importance of liberalism as a political issue and (I believe) conceived his 1979 lectures partly in response to the conjuncture of the Left’s 1978 electoral defeat at the hands of Giscard d’Estaing. It is reasonable to suppose he would not have greatly lamented the defeat of a Left coalition in which the Communist Party played a major role. Here Foucault presents neoliberalism as a modern political rationality worthy of attention and a certain intellectual respect, while commenting that democratic socialism for its part has failed to engender a distinctive governmental rationality. This seemed a prescient and pertinent observation to some of us in Britain who were entering in 1979 on 18 years of Conservative government, whereas in 1981 France was to enter on twenty years of mainly socialist government, endowed with the legacy of the “trente glorieuses”, the three French post‐war decades of notable socio‐economic progress. Viewed from across the Channel, the French socialist governments seemed to be protecting, and indeed extending these enviable accomplishments, while a right‐wing British government was busy dismantling the semi‐corporatist post‐war national system, and other English‐speaking countries over the same period were getting a dose of the same medicine.2 JD: One can entirely accept this explanation of the success of governmentality studies in the Anglo‐Saxon countries. There, neoliberalism triumphed and became an object of study whereas in France, given the relative dominance of the Socialist Party, we had to struggle for twenty years to produce a reflection on the social which uncoupled it from socialism and addressed it in terms of the governability of democracy. Showing that there existed an acceptable exit from socialism seemed to us more important than grasping the subtleties of liberalism as a political rationality. I have in mind a series of authors working to that agenda, including Robert Castel and myself, who were for a time close to Foucault, and others like Pierre Rosanvallon, who were not, who exemplify this national particularity of our relation to the question of government, in contrast to what you say about the destiny of that question in the English‐speaking countries.

2 Though Thatcher had fallen from power by the time The Foucault Effect was published; in the

80s the British Left’s preferred intellectual guide for the understanding of Thatcherism was Gramsci, not Foucault.

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Donzelot & Gordon: Governing Liberal Societies

One can also wonder if the fact that Foucault’s reflection was at odds with this French conjuncture might not have contributed to a certain hardening of his political stance in this terrain, a difficulty in positioning himself which led to abandoning this aspect of his reflection to concentrate on the care of the self? Because the context was a very delicate one : he had parted company with his “revolutionary” links without lapsing into the kind of political philosophy which he hated, the question of regime, of the State, of all those official objects which he had been so well able to bypass. It was also the moment when the circle of friends around him in the 70s broke up and he contented himself with a few close supporters. In a way you invented a French Foucauldian school which never existed, or no longer exists in France, but, with this “Foucault effect” where you assembled texts from this loose group of friends in the 70s, weren’t you fabricating an artefact which gave the illusion in Anglo‐Saxon countries of a dynamic which no longer existed in France.... and thereby managed to produce one in those countries? Hence my second question – what was it that led to this interest in governmentality there? CG: It is quite true that in our volume we did not inform our readers about some political and personal disagreements between our authors, where we could not see that these were linked to a clear intellectual difference. My introduction to our book was (as I admitted) an attempt to construct a plane of consistence between the work of individuals who, in some cases, had never met, and in others were no longer collaborators or desiring to be perceived as such. 3 The fabrication of our artefact ended up taking some time, nearly a decade in all: Foucault’s death in 1984 complicated and changed the terms of the project, which had been begun with his knowledge and approval, in various ways. Now that five volumes of Foucault’s lectures from the 1970s have been published, however, one can more easily see how much of what became, for a time, a shared research programme was already well developed in his own work, in parts well before 1978.

As to Foucault’s trajectory, I think it is with his 1976 lectures, at the latest, that he starts to distance himself from the militant ideal of the time. The discussion in those lectures of Sieyès and the Third Estate seems already to prefigure his later reflection on the formidable capabilities of liberalism as a political rationality. The intellectual path that led Foucault from the analysis of disciplines to that of governmentality is perfectly consistent, just as the theme of governmentality connects consistently in turn with his later themes of care of the self and truth‐telling. Let’s also remember that this ‘late’ Foucault, who is supposed to have retreated into solitary study of the Church fathers and the history of the sacraments of penitence, was also the treasurer of the French branch of Solidarnosc, engaged in public

3 Sylvain Meyet points out, accurately, that no contributor to our volume except Foucault himself

and the editors explicitly uses the term ‘governmentality’. Travailler avec Foucault. Retours Sur Le Politique, eds. Sylvain Meyet, Marie‐Cécile Naves, Thomas Ribémont, L’Harmattan, Paris 2005.

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discussion with the socialist trade union leader Edmond Maire, and in an institutional project with the law reformer and justice minister, Robert Badinter. It seems, as Michel Senellart rightly notes in his excellent editorial postface to the 1978‐79 lectures, that Foucault’s interest in liberalism and neoliberalism is very much connected, around 1978, with his support for the East European dissidents. There is a marked anticommunist context in his lectures of 1978‐9.

I have always been surprised that there was so little contemporary resonance at the time in France for Foucault’s work on governmentality. In 1979, Foucault said that he would work in the following years’ lectures on the genealogy of political parties – especially, I believe, that of the French Socialist party. I suspect that he was discouraged from pursuing this plan by the limited success of his dialogue with friends in, or close to, the Socialist Party. Perhaps his anticommunism still posed too many problems. But there was never any sign that he had repudiated this series of analyses. In the following years, he encouraged and supported some young researchers he taught at Berkeley who did research into governmentality in America. At the time of his death, he had a book announced for publication with Editions du Seuil entitled Le gouvernement de soi et des autres.

I never thought that Foucault would have been in serious political disagreement with your work at around this time or indeed that you would be likely to dissent from his views about security and autonomy in the Welfare State, as set out in his discussion with Robert Bono of the CFDT. Indeed I tried to show that Foucault’s analyses of liberalism were consistent with the approach of your L’invention du social (Donzelot [1984] 1994), notably in the lecture he gave in 1979 on Fergusson’s History of Civil Society where he sees emerging a notion of society as a “transactional reality”, a mobile surface of engagement between the practices of government and the universe of the governed which constantly tends to escape their grasp. Whereas he had clear political differences with Deleuze – who was another philosophical genius, but no genius in politics. Nowadays, as you know, there as are many people in the world, academics in particular, who favour a Deleuzian Foucault interpreted by Antonio Negri, as there are people interested in governmentality studies. While the successive waves of posthumous publication and circulation of Foucault’s work are reaching and inspiring new generations of readers, some of those who responded to his published work of the 70s and 80s may by now be looking elsewhere for stimulating novelty.

As for the results of English‐speaking governmentality studies (not to speak of work in the rest of the world outside France), it is hard to give a short and summary answer. Nikolas Rose and Mitchell Dean published books which have been seen as aiming to systematise governmentality, to make it into a theoretical programme. But many people (and probably both of these authors) would deny that there is or was a ‘governmentality school’ in any clear‐cut sense. Apart from the reference to a limited set of canonical texts by Foucault, there is typically a focus round the issue of

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liberalism and liberty, signalling the need to take liberalism seriously as an intellectual force which is also subject to historical transformation. Some original fields of research have been developed, such as the work of Peter Miller on the genealogy of management, and of Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose on biotechnologies; links have been made with other approaches, notably with Latour and actor network theory, in work on “government at a distance”. James Tully, Duncan Ivison, Tom Osborne, Graham Burchell, and I have been interested in the affinities between Foucault’s works on governmentality and certain currents of English‐language history of political thought, such as John Pocock’s work on civic republicanism. Then there is work by people who were taught by Foucault at Berkeley, including interesting studies of modern governmentality by David Horn and Keith Gandal, and Jonathan Simon’s important work on American penal justice. In recent years it is also becoming clearer that Foucault’s legacy, and particularly his work on governmentality, has had major international impacts in the rapidly changing disciplines of geography4 and anthropology and the new and important sector of postcolonial studies. Does this work imply a distinctive political orientation? In broad terms we are a loose faction in the post‐New Left diaspora which is still in search of its moral and ideological identity; more particularly, an episode in the experience of a Left coming to terms with a fresh advent and partial triumph of liberalism. There is not much evidence of a direct impact of this body of work on the political domain. I am not aware that Blair ever read Foucault. Anthony Giddens, for a time the Blair‐Clinton court philosopher, usually includes a caricatural account of Foucault only as a marginal item in his doctrinal digests. But I think parts of the formulae of Clinton and Blair for a ’third way’ may have effectively carried out a form of the operation which Foucault might have been taken as challenging the socialists to contemplate – the selective incorporation, in an updated and corrected social democracy, of certain elements of neoliberal analysis and strategy. In some ways, it is the continuation of a trend initiated in the 70s by Schmidt in Germany, Giscard in France and Healey in Britain, and in her different way by Thatcher – the truth‐telling role of government, in a world of global economic uncertainty and competition, as moral tutor of citizens in an ethic of enterprise and responsibility. The success of this formula in Britain seemed for a long time to be limited only by the irritability of citizens and the claims of the fourth estate, the media, to make and unmake governmental power (both of these reactions being severely aggravated, of course, by Blair’s extension of his governmental agenda to include the neoconservative enterprise of civilisational confrontation and global war on terror).

4 Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden,

Ashgate 2007.

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“Governmentality studies”, where they are identifiable as such, have been an academic activity governed by prevailing institutional and discursive norms; Foucault’s work, while inspiring to many, does not have the capacity to turn lead into gold. As part of this discursive order, there has been an ongoing discussion about which side such investigations are, or should be, on: that of a new rationalisation of government, or that of a critique of such rationality? No one has quite followed the trajectory of Francois Ewald, from a genealogy of social insurance to an ethical ontology of risk as the noble spirit of the enterprising class. All the same, the theme of governmentality has become involved in a debate where some are accused by others of seeking to legitimate, rather than to problematise, the idea of a “risk society” considered as the ineluctable contemporary form of collective reality which all citizens and governmental techniques are necessarily obliged to confront.

The reception of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism unfortunately often seems to be flattened into a set of polemical, ideological, and globalising generalities, dispensing with the kind of descriptive investigation Foucault undertook in 1979 of the different avatars of neoliberalism with their national, historical, and theoretical specificities. Indeed, neglect of post‐war history seems to be a frequent feature of this polemical discourse: from a recent book on neoliberalism by David Harvey, a post‐modern geographer who views Foucault’s work as obsolete, one might think that neoliberalism had been invented in the 1970s.

I hope the full publication of these lectures will revitalise this area of research. I think their publication will also show that this notion of governmentality can usefully be applied alongside Foucault’s earlier and later ideas (power/knowledge, discipline, government of self, perihelia). The theme of governmentality certainly needs to be seen in its continuity with the themes of the “late” or “final” Foucault (we are only talking here of an interval of five or six years): ethics, care of self, parrhesia or truth‐telling, the conditions of existence of critical discourse. To understand these implications in full we will have to await the publication of the final lectures. JD: After this harangue, I plunged into the “governmentality studies” for which you had pointed me to some of the key protagonists. And I emerged – at least for the moment – with mixed feelings of pleasure and unease. The pleasure was especially in reading sections of the books co‐edited and written by Nikolas Rose – Foucault and Political Reason, The Powers of Freedom, and the articles of Thomas Lemke. All of these show the pertinence of analysis in terms of governmentality in addressing neoliberalism. They all rely on the Foucaldian refutation of a fixed distinction between the domain of the State and the domain of civil society, between the domain of power and the domain of subjectivity. They use it to show that the “retreat of the State” which is supposed to constitute neoliberalism in fact corresponds to an extension of government.

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This extension is made possible by replacing the direct government of society by the State with a form of government at a distance. There is a destatification of government which goes in hand with the appearance of social technologies which delegate responsibility for individuals to other autonomous entities: enterprises, communities, professional organizations, individuals themselves. The use of contractual agreements, defined of objectives, measures of performance, combined with local autonomy, allows this shift of responsibility to governmental action at a distance. In this perspective, “Individuals are to become “experts of themselves”, to adopt an educated and knowledgeable relation of self‐care in respect of their bodies, their minds, their forms of conduct and that of the members of their own families” (Rose in Foucault and Political Reason (1997, 59f)). Individuals become “entrepreneurs of themselves”, and it is as such that they are bonded into society through the choices they make, the risks they take, and the responsibilities for themselves and others which thereby arise and which they are required to assume. Citizenship is consequently no longer exercised in a relationship with the State or within a public space (such a space becoming indeed difficult to discern as such), so much as a varied range of private, corporate or quasi‐public practices, ranging from work to consumption : “the consumer citizen becomes an active agent in the regulation of professional expertise ; the prudent citizen becomes an active agent of security, the citizen as employee becomes an active agent in the regeneration of industry” (ibid.)

It is at this point, at this equation of the simultaneous growth of individual autonomy and responsibility – one believes oneself autonomous: what is worse, one is; but this autonomy is designed to make us into agents of the system – that my unease begins. Not because the analysis is false – I entirely endorse it as a necessary stage, as far as it does – but because it is presented as sufficient, whereas the underlying questions start just at the point where it stops, sure of itself and of its intellectual effect. The sophisticated social technologies of advanced neoliberal society, it tells us, contain an enlarged component of freedom along with an enlarged component of required responsibility in comparison with those of the Welfare State. Just as the latter marked an advance on old‐style political economy, so political economy had represented a move beyond the model of reason of state. Each new model is evaluated only against the performance of its predecessor: they are always analysed at their ‘technical’ level, never in terms of a political criterion or in terms of value. This is the cost of the ability of governmentality studies to describe the materiality of social technologies while avoiding, for instance, the habitual denunciations of neoliberalism as an ideological rhetoric designed to mask a false economic theory and a practical anti‐humanism, as Marxists and antiglobalisers like to put it. But doesn’t the avoidance of that kind of simplification lead, in its turn, to a central ambivalence at the core of this kind of analysis? Isn’t that what you yourself point out when you say that this kind of analysis can lead either to a critique of political rationality or to a rationalisation of this same set of policies?

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In terms of political rationalities, in France we can all think of Francois Ewald’s celebration of risk written from his current standpoint as a leading official of the national employers’ organization. This is a classic case of counter‐transference where the analyst falls blindly in love with his object, in this case the technology of insurance, and finds in it the key to all problems of social and political life.

But the other standpoint, the critique of political rationality, can be no less irritating when it is presented as a self‐sufficient conclusion. I will give two examples which have struck me from my recent remedial reading course in governmentality studies.

The first is from Nikolas Rose’s book Powers of Freedom. In a chapter called “the community‐civility game“, he tries to establish a parallel between Bentham’s famous Panopticon and the virtues claimed for it by Bentham in terms of preserving morality, stimulating industry and spreading education, and the qualities attributed to the notion of community promoted by authors like Etzioni, Putnam, Fukuyama and Belloch (already a somewhat hastily amalgamated group), or with that of the idea of associational networks considered as new diagrams of power, promoting “moral” conducts in likewise subtly imperious ways. The “we” of community is shown as exercising a technico‐moral authority akin to that of the penitentiary Panopticon. At a stroke the Foucauldian analysis of governmentality as ”conduct of conducts”, as action at a distance, loses its distinction from the disciplinarising techniques of the 19th century. But more serious is the way this assimilation serves the cultivation of a posture of radical critique.

In Barbara Cruikshank’s analysis of the function of the notion of empowerment in the USA, I found this same inclination to adopt a posture of radical critique at the cost of losing the subtle capabilities inherent in of this notion of the ‘conduct of conducts’. When she denounces the invitation to self‐empowerment, she is not so far from our own Jean Baudrillard and his celebration of the inertia of the silent majority as a form of resistance to the modern injunctions to participation and expression. One needs to be aware that she is analysing Californian ”Welfare to work” programmes which are more systems of forced labour under harsh conditions than steps to the empowerment of individuals over themselves or in their relation with others: whereas this theme of empowerment does also and above all have a dimension of acquisition of power over oneself thanks to the power which the collective one belongs to is able to produce. The collective in this case is not thought of as demanding a sacrifice from the individual, but rather as a necessary support for individual self‐affirmation. But the choices as examples of these caricatural initiatives may also serve as indicating a wish to cultivate an exclusively critical posture.

One can also wonder if this ambivalence of these analyses in terms of governmentality may not lead them to incline towards one side or the other, the critical or the laudatory side, depending on the location where it is conducted. In Anglo‐Saxon countries where neoliberalism was imposed from the start of the 80s, Foucault studies provide the means of a sophisticated critique, albeit one which is

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visibly lacking a capacity to propose alternatives. Does this political ambivalence in the notion of governmentality not condemn it to serving an ideological function, determined by political circumstance, whereas it aspires to be precisely the antidote of an ideological reading of forms of government? CG: One negative feature of the Foucauldian diaspora is that people can be seduced by the idea of revealing the truth of the present, but this is can be contaminated by a taste for hyperbolic discourses which exceed any critical purchase on the real. The leading example of this is no doubt the work Giorgio Agamben, who detects in all government a virtual programme of extermination, and views the condition of the governed as universal reduction to the condition of homo sacer, and the like‐minded commentators who in the UK see every Blairite innovation in the policing of families as a step on the road to serfdom.

As for the question behind your question, that is to say Foucault’s critical standpoint vis‐à‐vis governmentality in terms of its potentiality for progressive technical invention, I suggest this brings us back to the distinctive quality of liberalism itself. Foucault says that the liberal art of government consists in the production and consumption of freedom, the creation and destruction of freedom. It is (as some say) the government of freedom and (as others remind us) the government of unfreedom5 – or rather, the government of a freedom which is itself an unfreedom. Liberals (Keynes and Beveridge) were architects of the Welfare State: other liberals have been its critics and reformers. It is the paradox of liberalism in all its forms (neo, advanced, post...) that much action is necessary before one can laisser faire – action even to the extent of acting to bring into existence the reality (freedom, society) which it is desired to laisser faire – “faire société”, as indeed you have it in the title of your recent book. Hence, one might partly counter some of your reproaches by saying that this kind of analysis brings out the ambiguity and ambivalence of liberal realities, in advance of any question of the practical consequences one chooses – or fails to choose – to infer from the analysis. The detached, Weberian value‐freedom of Foucault’s description of the constitutive operations of liberalism as a governmentality may look to some like a disarming of the power of critique. You are asking whether and how, having unlearned the easy rhetoric of denunciation, one can then reintroduce a pertinent basis for critical evaluation.

In the first place, the very experience of a degree of discomfort at the paradoxes, antinomies and aporias of liberal liberty may help lead to healthy lucidity rather than moral incapacitation. Further, this element of detachment does not prevent, but even encourages the introduction of certain counter‐analyses within the

5 Hindess, B. (2001) ‘The Liberal Government of Unfreedom’, Alternatives: Social Transformation

and Humane Governance, 26: 93‐111.

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terms of the liberal paradigm: for instance, the theory of social capital invented by Robert Putnam (that is, of the resources which individuals draw from relational networks of solidarity and local and private forms of mutual support), or again, in relation to the Lockean theory of self‐ownership as the necessary foundation of the liberal economy, the requirement that each person be endowed with the necessary resources to enable that self‐ownership to be effective in practice (as Robert Castel argues in his recent book on Social Insecurity, in terms interestingly similar to those of Amartya Sen’s work on “capability rights”). Having said this, many who work in governmental studies do not feel called upon to take up the tasks you propose to them. In the book you quote, Nikolas Rose writes that in this type of work the aim is to destabilize and think beyond “all those claims made by others to govern us in the name of our own well‐being”, and that studies of governmentality ”do not try to put themselves at the service of those who would govern better” [59‐60]. This sounds like a form of knowledge which wants to serve only on the side of contestation. However, while recognising the critical contribution which his analyses have indeed made, others might wish at least to qualify those statements of position (which Nikolas himself firmly refuses to assert as group doctrines). Because it is hard to see why it should be a necessary axiom of the study of governmentality that all government (even one which claims to take account of the good of the governed) is an evil in itself, or that the wish to govern better should necessarily be something from which one ought ethically to disassociate oneself. Certainly, Foucault himself said that critique is not obliged to harness itself to the programming of a reform designed only to maintain an existing relation of forces, but he also said that in talking with a government one can be “debout et en face” – that is, engage in dialogue as an independent and equal interlocutor. In this view of things, critique, struggle, discussion and collective invention are compatible and complementary tasks. I suppose that it was not out of pure malice that Foucault suggested to the French Socialists in 1979 the project to invent a governmentality of their own; he indeed subsequently showed some evidence of willingness to assist with that task.

The seductive element in Foucault’s rereading of liberalism was the thought that the art of better government was presented as the art of governing less, and that in this sense liberalism forms an autocritique of governmental reason: a governmentality which develops and corrects itself through its own critique. Alongside this there was his other seductive notion of critique (inspired by Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as an emancipation from tutelage) as an indocility of the governed, a will not to be governed so much or in such a way. That is where the permanent task of critique would demand an inventive sequel: how to govern in order to be governed less, how to govern in order to be governed or to govern oneself in the way one wishes? Here we meet Foucault’s refusal of the double blackmail, by the policy experts for whom a critique is invalidated if not

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accompanied by a prescription for reform, and by those who use the converse charge of recuperation, for whom every unprejudiced discussion of what is possible or desirable comes down to a capitulation of critique before the status quo.6

It is true that most of us have remained at a certain distance from the attempts, in the English‐speaking world as in France, to “remoralise” politics through the injection of new or revived doctrines of civic and democratic virtue. Some thinkers, like William Connolly and James Tully, have made interesting attempts to incorporate values of difference and multiplicity in political ethics. My reading of your recent book Faire société suggests to me that you also subscribe to that general project.

Why have we kept our distance from these initiatives (apart from the consideration that today’s civic pedagogues are sometimes too easily recognisable as recycled revolutionary ideologues)? For heuristic reasons Foucault drew a distinction between his field of research on governmental practices and the history of the political doctrine of sovereignty and its legitimate foundation, the history of citizens and their rights. This may have been initially necessary and effective as a means to establish and make visible a new object of study (except in respect of making that new object visible to historians of political thought), but I think it is time now for a more connected approach so that we can look, for instance, at what relation there might be between a certain notion of citizenship and a certain way of being governed7. This might help us to think more effectively about what we are becoming and what we wish or do not wish to become.

Another benefit of Foucault’s initiative which has been noticed recently is that it anticipates the effects of globalisation in relativising the status of national state institutions.8 It surprised me that François Ewald and Blandine Kriegel said recently that Foucault was concerned with problems of his time and that now we have other concerns. Foucault’s concerns in his later years seem to me to include notably neoliberalism, Islam, security, ethics, and the rights and global solidarity of the governed, all issues which I think we still recognise as pertinent today. JD: I agree with this idea that the concept of governmentality has a prescient value in relation to globalisation, because it registers, in a sense in advance, the relativisation of States and nations, and I would also see in this advantage an enhanced possibility of linking the ”technical :” analysis of governmentality with the ‘moral’ analysis of forms of citizenship corresponding to this new historical context.

6 To state what may be obvious: Foucault’s insistence on recognising the critical and anti‐

essentialist components of liberalism and neoliberalism does not mean that these doctrines are therefore to be considered as the permanent homeland of critical thinking in general.

7 As early as Histoire de la Folie, Foucault had identified the modern political problem of reconciling the two incarnations of the citizen, the “man of law” and the “man of government”.

8 CF. W Larner and W Walters eds. Global Governmentality. Governing International Spaces. (2004)

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The analysis of neoliberal governmentality shows a common orientation of developed countries striving to adapt to new realities. This orientation involves reducing the direct role of States in the economy and social relations, in favour of a new economy of social relations which emphasises autonomy and individual responsibility at all the local levels where autonomy and responsibility can be brought into interaction. In this sense, neoliberal governmentality is indeed a pure ”technical” product of critiques addressed to the Welfare State for the pasty forty years: left critics denouncing the creation in the name of progress of an order ever more disposed to control individuals, reducing their effective autonomy under the guise of an enhanced solicitude, and critics on the right who indicted the dismantling of the order necessary for progress through the deresponsibilising of individuals living under the increasing care of the State. The difficulty of sustaining an ever‐rising burden of State revenues without affecting the global competitiveness of enterprises prompted governments to use and play off these two critiques against each other, to counter the growth of demands and recriminations addressed at the State. The ‘civic’ question is so little foreign to this ‘technical’ solution that it arises out of the very fact of its application. For it is all very well to govern at a distance, relegating to the local level the play of encounters between the needs for autonomy and the demand for responsibility. That still requires that these “localities”, these diverse groupings, communities, enterprises, collectivities, form a society, and are not too disparate, too mutually estranged, too indifferent to anything outside of their own destiny, too incapable of a shared appreciation of what is right and just for all members of these constructed collectivities. Here there arises the question of consent to shared institutions, and therefore to the shared costs they impose. This consent is a form of civic engagement (civisme), its abstract incarnation, which we can counterpose to the direct mutual trust of people and citizens within the local frame of the specific community where they live.

Trust and consent are two relative values, the balance of whose roles can vary in the production of a civic society. They are in some sense the equivalents for citizenship of what autonomy and responsibility represent in the context of governmentality. They call for a similar concern for their mutual adjustment – what is the right relation of these two registers to permit the establishment of a civic society? And the intersection of these two registers, the ”technical” register of autonomisation and responsibility, and the ”civic” relation of consent and trust determines the way the concern for governmental effectiveness succeeds or fails to connect with the realisation of a civic society. Bringing together these two demands allows us to pose the question of how to make society exist in the context of neoliberalism. It seems to me that Europe is the place par excellence for the search for equilibrium between these two lines of transformation, the one which affects the governed and the one which affects the citizen.

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CG: Consent and trust and also, if possible, respect, are certainly things which every government today desires to produce and to enjoy – respect being incidentally the item which others most like to deny government, at least in Britain. The production of respect demands, in turn, persuasion and pedagogy. Persuasion for the social classes which are resistant to change because they feel insecure, and pedagogy for the minorities who may be inclined to disorder or revolt. On these subjects, alongside Foucault’s accounts of the pastoral function of government it is worth reading Paul Veyne’s essay on the irritability of the governed, ”When the individual is fundamentally affected by the power of the State“ (Economy and Society, Vol. 34, No. 2, May 2005, translated by Graham Burchell). Veyne explains how Roman opinion was humiliated and violated by the spectacle of a ruler, the emperor Nero, who forced the ruled to serve as the audience of an aesthetic performance. In Britain we until recently had a political leader who was the great tenor of what you yourself in the 80s dubbed the coming ‘civilisation of change’: the man of truth as ‘change‐maker’, telling the truth of global competitive modernity and the consequent obligation of all and each to be changed. But, just as Foucault taught us, it transpires that people can resist anything, even governmental parrhesia, even the pedagogy of reality and the ethic of change. The man of change and truth was not assassinated, but he was accused by a vocal segment of public opinions of being a corrupter and a liar. No governmentality will abolish resistance to government. Could the currents of work and reflection we have been discussing contribute to the formation of a European political culture? ”It would be a good idea”, as Gandhi said of Western civilisation. Foucault talked perhaps less about the common market than the social market (expect perhaps in that enigmatic question in one of his 1976 lectures:” and what if Rome, once again, were to conquer revolution?“): is anyone writing the history of the linkage between those two themes? 9

Foucault sketched the 20th‐century international transfers (sometimes covert, often mediated by emigration and exile) of neoliberal techniques and formulae, much as he had outlined the international movement of ideas around 1900 on crime, security and social defence. It would be interesting today to continue this kind of analysis, tracing for instance the transfer between national and political camps of notions and techniques of social exclusion and inclusion.

Perhaps we need to enlarge our thinking even beyond the still growing European space. It is worth noting that the global (at least Anglophone) impact of the

9 It is interesting that in his 1979 lectures on liberalism Foucault cites Kant’s Perpetual Peace on the

cosmopolitan right, prescribed by nature, of global free trade. “The guarantee of perpetual peace is, in effect, commercial globalisation (la planétarisation commerciale)” [2004, 60: my translation]. Cf. W Walters and J H Haahr, Governing Europe. Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration (2005).

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notion and theme of governmentality has coincided and in several cases interacted with the growth of the new discipline of postcolonial studies. The relation between proponents of postcolonial studies and Foucault’s work have been, in a somewhat similar way to the situation in feminist studies, contested and often contestatory; sometimes one has the impression of a generation of fractious and needy orphans, afraid of their own freedom, who cannot forgive Foucault for failing to write their books as well as his, or for only having written the books he lived to write; nevertheless, the encounter has led to some beginnings of analyses of colonial and post‐ or neo‐colonial styles of governmentality.10 Perhaps we are also seeing the beginnings of a new analysis of the question which preoccupied Foucault, along with neoliberalism, in 1978‐9, namely “Islamic government”, together with the now very current question of the possible civil and political modes of existence of Muslim citizens in societies with a liberal regime of government. If a European political culture was capable of accommodating and welcoming such reflections, it would be a step forward for Europe and the world.

Translated by Colin Gordon Bibliography

Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Foucault and Political Reason:

Liberalism, Neo‐Liberalism, and the Rationalities of Government. London: Routledge, 1996.

Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Cruikshank, Barbara, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Dean, Mitchell M., Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage Publications Limited., 1999.

Dean, Mitchell M. and Barry Hindess, Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Ivison, Duncan, The Self at Liberty: Political Argument and the Arts of Government. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Rose, Nikolas, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Steven Legg, ‘Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism,’ in

10 For a useful survey see Steven Legg, ʺBeyond the European Province: Foucault and

Postcolonialismʺ In Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (Eds) Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography (op. cit.)

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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Barbara%20Cruikshank&rank=-relevance%2C%2Bavailability%2C-daterank/102-5641436-8834540

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author-exact=Nikolas%20Rose&rank=-relevance%2C%2Bavailability%2C-daterank/102-5641436-8834540


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Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden, Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Kent: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2006.

Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Foucault Studies

© Antti Tietäväinen, Miikka Pyykkönen, & Jani Kaisto 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


INTERVIEW Globalization and Power ‐ Governmentalization of Europe? An Interview with William Walters. Antti Tietäväinen, University of Tampere Miikka Pyykkönen, University of Jyväskylä Jani Kaisto, University of Jyväskylä Associate Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at the Carleton University, Canada, William Walters is one of the leading researchers of governmentality in the globalising world. His recent works, Global Governmentality (edited with Wendy Larner, 2004) and Governing Europe (with Jens Henrik Haahr, 2005), concern the different kinds, forms and rationalities of international governance. Walters and his associates refuse to take international institutions and forms of power as given, but carefully follow the development of different genealogical processes. Governmentality does not mean any universal form of power, but occurs differently in different contexts. For example, the European Union is not a product of evolutionary development; rather, Walters approaches it as a heterogeneous entity, formulated through – at least partly – contradictory practices. The European Union does not have a direction of development that could be known in advance. The following interview was held in September 2006 in Tampere, Finland where William Walters was a guest lecturer in the summer school of the Finnish Doctoral Program in Social Sciences (SOVAKO). Q: Your latest texts have concerned the usefulness of a governmentality approach in analysing the globalising world and its manifold phenomena. By focusing on the dispersion of government you have tried to grasp the contemporary transformations of power from the perspective in which the state is not the necessary centre of all ʺart of governmentʺ. What do you think are the major benefits of this concept? WW: Well, I could of course mention the many things that I found attractive in this literature, but if I confine the answer to the area of international affairs, I think a big part of its promise could be thought about in terms of a wonderful essay by the

Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 63-73.

French historian Paul Veyne, “Foucault Revolutionizes History”. Veyne argues that Foucault’s great revolution conceptually is to place practices at the centre of analysis. With the great majority of social scientists there is a focus on objects and subjects. They are always asking: What do these subjects do? Why did they do it? Why do states act like this? How does the economy function and how do societies function? Veyne says that what they neglect, what they fail to see is the world of practices that constitute subjects and objects. The subjects and objects that social sciences are often obsessed with are themselves the effects of practices. And Foucault’s innovation is to place the practices first, to reveal in very concrete and empirical terms how practices are constitutive for objects and subjects. By doing that he is able to denaturalize and historicize whole sets of things that are simply assumed to be stable entities: Citizens, individuals, states, corporations, parties, and classes, just to mention a few.

There is great potential in pursuing that kind of insight within the fields of international politics and globalization studies. We could then begin to see the state as an effect of practices rather than a given, self‐evident entity. For instance, rather than focusing on development as either a policy or process, one would see development as a space of practices or as a dispositif – a whole complex of practices and knowledges. One would then ask: how does the emergence of this thing called “development” give rise to particular knowledges of states? How does it give rise to particular accounts of international space? How does it encourage or produce particular ways for states to act, to position themselves, understand themselves and others, advance and contest particular forms of politics.

I think that some of these insights are emerging from other theoretical directions. For instance, Judith Butler’s ideas about performativity are proving helpful in thinking about the ways in which states and international affairs are enacted. There are different pathways along which to move international relations in a more constructionist direction. I would see Foucault as having developed one of the most, for my purposes, useful and significant set of insights for that kind of enterprise. He changes the way in which one thinks about development. As Arturo Escobar has shown in his book Encountering Development, the work on the question of international development, people have more recently began to ask, how might civil society and global civil society be considered as technologies in their own right or how might they be understood as sets of practices? How are they particular territorializations of international and transnational space? Q: Many people argue that international networks or international organisations like the European Union are displacing or replacing nation‐states, which earlier were seen as the ultimate organisers of social forces and networks? Do you see this kind of approach fruitful? WW: I am not sure if it is very productive to formulate the question in that way. There is actually a strand in international relations of this way of thinking that asks: is the European Union a sort of supranational future in the sense that it ultimately

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Tietäväinen, Pyykkönen, & Kaisto: Globalization and Power

absorbs the nation state into something bigger. At least that is one possible way that Europe has been thought about – often by people who want to problematize or to politicize European integration in respect of a European superstate. So, the question is certainly valid in that kind of context. But it does not seem to me a very likely scenario. It seems that most of the time when we are looking at these international organisations they are not in the business of replacing states. It is more a question of how they reorganize and link states in new ways. It is not a kind of evolution from one state to another. This kind of evolutionary approach includes a problematic assumption. Genealogy as a method or an attitude tries continually to expose these kinds of evolutionary and teleological assumptions that work in many different areas and in different ways. And one of those assumptions is about the progression of political forms and spaces – from a world of small communities and localities like towns and villages to nation‐states and then on to to superstates and regions. I think Foucault’s idea of governmentality should not commit us to any assumptions about the necessary direction for political and social change, so there is no particular reason why we should assume that such states are merging and that these larger entities are rising. Instead we might take a more empirical attitude and ask what exactly do these organisations do. In many cases what they are doing is harmonizing the relations between states or regulating transactions between states so that perhaps extended economic and social spaces become more viable. Q: Let’s speak of the development of what Blair and Anthony Giddens call the ‘third way’ and what Nikolas Rose analyses in his texts of the late 1990s as a continuum of the process that Foucault calls ‘the governmentalization of state’. How do you see that this development influences the traditional trichotomy of the state, economy and civil society and how is this governmentalization of the state perspective possible to adopt in observing the EU? WW: The prominence of community kinds of themes comes partly as a reaction to a certain perception of the limits or excessiveness of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism of the 1980s turns out to raise a whole set of problems in its own right, so that many things bundled under the heading of the ‘third way’ or community seem to be attempts to rectify some of these excesses without going back to the strong state of social democracy. So we have all this talk about partnership, third sector, communities, networks, participation and those sorts of things. At one point Nikolas Rose talks about ethopolitics, which I think is a more useful, a more general heading under which to think of many of these things associated with the ‘third way’, because it emphasizes that there is kind of governmentalization of a new kind of territory, which partly explains the prominence that things like values or community came to have , all of these kinds of warm words. These warm words like community and individual have become central to political dialogue today. So it is a sort of ethopolitics, a domain that has become governmentalized: the promotion of community, the promotion of trust. Consider certain attempts by social scientists to

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quantify these things: the social capital movement, with its theories and policies, seems to connect to this theme of ethopolitics, because it says that prior policies and approaches have largely ignored trust and association, and it is a way of bringing them in. It is partly by saying, we can quantify them, measure them, we can prove that they have beneficial economic and social effects. So the idea is that the more trust we have and more associations we have, the less crime, the less unemployment, the less unhappiness we have.

I think that the context in which Foucault is talking about the governmentalization of the state is one of an argument with people of a more conventional bent. Perhaps he was thinking of Habermas’s thesis about the “stateization of society” or “colonization of the lifeworld”; the idea that the state is extending its power ever further into the pores and capillaries of society. So in a certain sense Foucault is being a bit polemical or playing off that kind of image. On the contrary, governmentalization of state is not a process that originates within the state, but has more to do with the way that the state becomes connected to the networks, techniques and programs of government that are in a sense already there. The phenomenon of social insurance offers a nice example of this governmentalization of the state. It reveals how the state will be reinvented according to the diagram of the insurance method, a method that long predates the existence of the welfare state.

So I think Foucault’s idea was to show how the state is remade on the basis of an encounter with these already existing, or already in some way developed techniques and practices of governing. In a way the state co‐opts them. It might be the question of state officials wilfully appropriating them, copying them, borrowing them or modifying them by making them universal, as in the case of social insurance. Or it might be a case of these techniques being forced upon the state by political struggles by political actors who demand that the state must take on some of these functions. You know, it is necessary to consider the field of political struggles in order to understand how the state becomes governmentalized and then becomes a kind of site that will coordinate these practices, rationalize them, perhaps strengthen them, spread them – and the outcome is a new kind of state, a governmental state, a social state.

In the book Governing Europe we talked about the governmentalization of Europe, which is again, and among other things, a way of distinguishing our project from the mainstream of EU studies where the theme of the Europeanization of government or state has become so popular. Of course, there is a large literature on the history of the idea of Europe, but to speak of the governmentalization of Europe is to think about the way in which it becomes possible to identify or to name something as Europe, which is a very political act, because what Monnet and others started to call Europe is obviously not Europe, but a particular combination or club of states who want to speak in the name of Europe, as though they are its destiny or embodiment.. But to speak of the governmentalization of Europe is to consider are

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the practices, technologies or techniques that made it possible at a certain time for an organization to govern key dimensions of social and economic life in the name of Europe. So Europe – which has long been an idea, a geographical idea, cultural idea, civilization idea – at certain point begins to acquire a much more positive existence. And here I mean positive in the sense of positivity, not in the normative sense. It is a positivity because it becomes a domain of statistics, calculation and projections ‐ the object and the subject of a whole range of policies. The governmentalization of the Europe is the process of making Europe practical.

It is important to stress that the governmentalization of Europe is not a singular process. It is not an evolutionary process of national economies becoming more integrated, which is one kind of interdependence theory version of European integration. Rather it would be about identifying discontinuous trajectories, and sites and events, each of which culminates in or gives rise to certain Europe effects. So, for instance, you might want to look at the history of thinking about and experimentation with common markets or customs’ unions. That is an entire history in its own right, the way in which customs’ unions were used as a practice of nation building, for instance, in Germany. All of that provides a background to and helps to account for the emergence of certain technologies of governing Europe being applied in other spaces, at other times, at other levels, for other reasons, but nevertheless it comes into existence as a certain technique which – by the 1950s – can be applied and taken up in that particular context. So there is a genealogy in a sense of European integration. But if we fast forward, as it were, to the Europe of Schengenland, you know, it is not in any way a kind of moment that you can read off extrapolate from that earlier history, there is nothing inevitable about it, it is not simply the result of spillover. Whatever Schengenland is or whatever wherever this area of freedom, security and justice is, it finds its particular conditions of emergence, its particular practices, its particular political opportunity in quite different circumstances from quite different places and it requires its own kind of history, its own genealogy of its particular techniques and ideas involved in creating this area of freedom, security and justice . So again when we were talking about the governmentalization of Europe, I do not know if we were clear enough about it in Governing Europe, but it is not a single line. It is more a question of these different lines and how they overlap.

How, then, do these recent developments affect the traditional trichotomy of state, economy and civil society? It is a common idea in political science that our political space can always be divided in terms of this trichotomy. But I think that this trichotomy is itself internal to certain liberal political discourse and one should not essentialize it or think that these are somehow transcendent political categories. I think it is more useful to attempt, especially when one is thinking about European integration or global governance, to be empirical and say what are the different ways in which political space or economic space are being imagined and classified and acted on. One needs to ask what is a “region”. I tried to do that in a paper about

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regionalism with Wendy Larner. Or one can refer to Andrew Barry’s work on technological zones. The zone is a concept that becomes more and more common in actual administrative discourse. For instance, governments talk about employment zones. So one should ask what is a “zone” or what is a “network” or what is an “area”, for example, this area of freedom, security and justice? How is an area different from a territory? What is a sector? In all of these things it seems to me to be more useful to analyse those things than to try to keep squeezing reality with all its complexity and manifold aspects into this kind of pre‐given trichotomy, which is a product of a particular historical moment. I think we have not paid enough attention to the actual novel spaces and arrangements that are coming into existence and have not asked what are the consequences of living with these kinds of things. Are they politically useful or are they politically dangerous?

When you think of the governmentalization of the state, you consistently think about the rise of the welfare state and welfareism in those terms. Does that mean that we are facing the de‐governmentalization of the state today or is a sort of ethopolitics, social capital and community schemes and all of these things, a continuation of the governmentalization of the state? I think there are elements of both. I mean there’s a kind of continuity in as much as the state tends to reinvents itself by forging connections and instrumentalizing these other spaces and these other projects. So there’s a sort of continuity there with the social project, the welfare project. Except that the difference is that the aim is not to bring these directly into the fold of the state, but rather keep them at a distance. So things are rather more dispersed and decentralized. And it is not done in the name of the state. The image of a big state is not a positive thing here. A big state is a bad thing. A community is a good thing. So we will try to provide communities with resources or forge a partnership with it. But there is not a degovernmentalization of the state in as much as even when we have these most drastic schemes of privatisation – and this point is made by many political economists – what follows is regulation. We have more and more regulation, of private industries, for instance. So there are new kinds of connections established between the state and these other sectors. It is very important to study regulation and what is a regulatory state. Obviously the core feature of what the European Union is about is regulation. This is a theme emphasized by political scientists like Giandomenico Majone and also by Andrew Barry, who has written extensively about the governmentality of Europe and regulation. Q: When we normally talk about the governance in the European Union we refer to European Union directives, which are hard labor–type legislative acts which require member states to achieve a particular result. In your book, Governing Europe, you deal a lot with the open method of coordination (OMC). The open method rests on soft law mechanisms such as guidelines and indicators, benchmarking and sharing of best practices. This means that there are no official sanctions for laggards. Rather, the methodʹs effectiveness relies on a form

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of peer pressure and naming and shaming, as no member state wants to be seen as the worst in a given policy area. It seems to be a very interesting change at the field of modern governance. WW: One should be careful not to see the open method as any kind of evolutionary framework, or future of international governance generally. Maybe the open method comes into play in situations where you have already used binding agreements to create extended economic and social spaces. So the EU is a good case of that: you have a common market and unitary currency. The open method then operates in relationship to the spaces and policies that already operate in that context. But if we look somewhere else, we are probably going to see an even stronger push from some of the major players like United States to enlist, say, South American countries in new kinds of binding trade arrangements. The open method is one more expression of governance, understood in political science sense: networks, dialogue and coordination. Not that all things are inevitably moving in that direction. Again, if we change the focus to other parts of the world, we often got violent politics in countries like Mexico, we got trading arrangements, we got trade unionists who are still killed by paramilitaries in different countries that are caught up in these struggles about the future of their nations or constitution of their economies. And all of those things are going on, right. If those battles are lost by the trade union and so on, and their own economies are further liberalized, at some later point the open method may be relevant there. But one should not see that as a smooth, bloodless or inevitable process or anything like that.

I could not say how the balance between directives regulation and open coordination has changed in recent years. I think one interesting line to pursue would be to ask, what kind of assumptions lie behind this open method. I mean, what does the open method as technique presume about the nature of states, nature of economies and nature of regions ‐ how is it imagining those things? What kind of world is it dealing with? One of its key motifs or themes seems to be that of “learning”, a sort of ceaseless process of mutual learning. So, it seems to presume governmental systems that are already set up and capable of more or less managing themselves. It seems to presume that instead of organizing things around a strong central authority that gives instructions or directives, we can have a regime that is capable, to a large extent, of steering itself, that it can be constituted as a mutual learning machine.

I think it would be interesting to relate the open method to Deleuze’s short paper about control societies. The control society concept is usually used for thinking about the transformations in domestic politics, for example, shifts in punishment – from prisons to more open forms of control. But it would be interesting to think about these logics of control at the level of interstate relations as well. Deleuze says that one of the features of control is modulation. It is an excellent little essay that opens up all sorts of things that have before been discussed as governance or the

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network society, but I think it brings a slightly more critical edge to the idea of a network society and also tries to do so, or should do so, in a way that avoids lot of the evolutionary baggage of the idea of a network society. Q: Could the open method of coordination be seen as in some way a violent technology, in a way that it invites some of the actors to take part and leaves some others outside. Is there some kind of process to that direction? Or what kind of actors can be invited? WW: Of course this is an empirical question, but clearly it’s a kind of process that selects. OMC kind of affirms the right of certain actors to speak on behalf of certain sectors or certain populations. And as you say it, it includes some and keeps others out of the game. When I was thinking of the question of violence, it was more on the lines of what was the kind of violence that took place and eventually cleared the space in which this thing could operate. In a same way that the Enclosure movement (forcible removal of peasants from the land) made possible some certain forms of capitalism.I think one could describe a traditional method of European Union as centralized, but again it is a question of context, because if we go back to the creation of the common market and we read the reflections of Monnet and the others who were the intellectuals of the common market. Then, from their perspective this was a promise of the kind of technology that would de‐concentrate or ward off the possibility of a dangerous concentration of power. Because, after all, this goes back to the context of European integration, and how it takes place in the shadow of World War II, and in the shadow of fascism particularly and communism as well. They see the common market as something that is going to consolidate principles and procedures that will stop economic power for one thing becoming too concentrated, because competition policy is one of its prominent features. It is also supposed to ward off the possibility of one state’s becoming hegemonic or excercizing imperial power over the European space. So the common market itself was seen from that perspective as something that will keep monopolization and centralization away. Q: In Governing Europe (2005, with Jens Henrik Haahr) you write that in addition to Monnet’s liberal, federalist and functionalist dreams of Europe, the twentieth century saw also authoritarian projects of European integration. By the latter you mean Europe perceived in terms of an “extended economic space” onto which the Nazi dream of German economic autarky, self‐sufficiency and racial supremacy was projected. Is it possible to compare these two projects from a governmentality perspective? What are the differences between the problematizations and discourses of German‐centered and liberal European integration? WW: We drew our perspective from Keith Tribe’s brilliant book, Strategies of Economic Order. Tribe has a chapter about the fascist’s conception of European economic order and the centrality of principles of racial hierarchy and economic self‐sufficiency. And he shows how there is a governmentality in this, right down to the

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scale of how these different races, as the Nazis conceived them, were to have different levels of calorie intakes. Calculations about food, that a typical German would require – this many calories in a week – whereas the Jews and the Slavs could be given the absolutely bare minimum of food. The idea was to structure this economic system partly along those kinds of lines. There were still to be markets but they were structured, and often in a subordinate relationship according to these governing principles of race and nation. We thought it was useful to offer such observations about authoritarian mentalities of rule as something of a provocation to European Union studies and European integration theory, which say nothing about that. The history of European integration tends to start from the 1950s in EU studies. It is not something we do in the book. I think it would be useful to push further some of the possible comparisons between these different ways of imaging different sorts of integrated European space, because it would bring into better focus the liberal and neo‐liberal nature of the European project. As long the focus is only on European institutions and the history of the European Union, there is a lot we take for granted. One could compare the liberal project with the authoritarian conception of integrated Europe. We can identify some of the peculiarities of the practices that are associated with or underpin the European community or European Union. Q: Giorgio Agamben has written that we can approach “refugee” as a somewhat ontological and metaphorical figure of today’s biopower. How do you see the European Union refugee regime’s discourse on refugees as outsiders relate to it? WW: I found Agamben’s writing on this topic very interesting, because I think he offers some concepts that are perhaps necessary or at least timely in a sense that they deal with the fact of social orders in which there is a certain permanent exception, and the ways in which certain populations find themselves in a kind of “in between” status: ‘captured outside’. I mean the discourse of social exclusion and inclusion is obviously very well established, it’s actually a part of official policy discourse in its own, but I think Agamben is saying something a bit different about this notion of being captured outside: it is not simply an inside or an outside: there is actually a space; he talks about it in different ways, but the ‘camp’ is one of the names for the space that is neither fully inside nor outside, but a kind of space in its own right. What I was saying about transit overlaps with that. I do not want to go and call everything ‘camp’, because the camp has become similar to panopticon. People find the camp everywhere. The Italian political theorist Sandro Mezzadra has written about some of the ways in which this is problematic, not least because this figure is derived from Auschwitz, and the idea of the generalization of the camp can trivialize that. Certainly it would make sense to speak about camps in relationship to refugee detention centres, while maintaining that obviously they are not concentration camps. But do we want to call gated communities camps as well? Or is it again the point that we need additional concepts that recognize that there are elements of the

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camp that do materialize in these different ways. But they are not simply camps. We need a more sophisticated and variegated taxonomy perhaps.

Engin Isin and Kim Rygiel have written a paper called “Abject spaces”. They are talking about series of spaces, camp being just one of them. Frontiers, export processing zones – a lot of these interesting mutations in territoriality. I see an interesting question here, which I have not satisfactorily dealt with, but it is useful to talk about what Monnet was doing as a kind of security project, or to ask what kind of vision of security was embedded in or assumed by that kind of enterprise. It is not a million miles away from social security; it is not a million miles away from what Foucault sometimes says is governmentality, namely, apparatuses that try to enframe social and economic processes to secure them, to strengthen the state and to promote the increase of population. The common market is a version of that, but working on transnational level and linking itself also to the threat, as you say, of interstate conflict and providing a kind of security there. While that kind of project still goes on and when the word security comes up now it is referring to a different regime, a different set of practices, not that these are all coherent in their own right but when people think or talk about security it is often a security that is like home security. Security that is not so much related to governmental processes, but security that is often imagined in relation to concrete individuals and subjects and in relation to threatening personae. That is one of security’s features. Another of its features is that it has a pronounced territorial dimension to it. Rather than playing itself out in a space of markets, it is about identifying actual territorial and, in some cases, geographic spaces. That is why border security is such a central practice within this version of security that’s becoming more and more prevalent, more and more influential. So the European Union is now connected to this space of security as well, this territorialized space with its practices of security. This is one of the features of the area of freedom, security and justice. Not its only feature, but it is a partly about security imagined in terms of the movement of people and goods and other mobile things, weapons, drugs, crime imagined as transactional moving things because crime can be imagined in other ways; in this discourse the movement of things is one of its key defining features. How can we govern those concrete movements in time and space? Free movement in the European Union is actually a flipside of this border control. Didier Bigo has argued that this version of internal security is the flipside of the project of freedom of movement. It is a kind of security practice. But border security is only one of its aspects. References: Escobar, Arturo (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third

World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (2004). Edited by Wendy Larner

and William Walters. London: Routledge.

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Tribe, Keith (1995). Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750-1950. Ideas in Context, no. 33. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Veyne, Paul (1996). “Foucault Revolutionizes History”. In Foucault and His Interlocutors. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Walters, William and Jens Henrik Haahr (2005). Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London and New York: Routledge.

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Foucault Studies

© Alain Beaulieu & Réal Fillion 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW ESSAY

Michel Foucault, History of Madness, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London/New York: Routledge, 2006) ISBN: 0415277019. Alain Beaulieu, Laurentian University Réal Fillion, University of Sudbury Introduction

Since its presentation on May 20, 1961, Foucault’s principal doctoral thesis has never ceased both to fascinate and to fuel controversy.1 Blanchot, Barthes, Serres and Mandrou2 published glowing reviews very early on. These were followed by a more reserved welcome from the Anglo‐American world. Doctor Gerald Weissmann held Foucault responsible for the free circulation of schizophrenics in the streets of New York,3 which is a paradox, inevitable perhaps, since Foucault understands “madness” less as a mental condition than as a cultural situation. Historian Lawrence Stone criticized Foucault for his pessimism, free interpretation and anti‐Enlightenment attitude.4 In 1990, the debate continued in two special editions of 1 Georges Canguilhem (thesis director) recognized the philosophical value of Foucault’s

investigation while Henri Gouhier (president of the jury) criticized Foucault’s use of allegories and myths to define madness. However, all agree on the originality of the work. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), Part 2, Chap. 1; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), Chap. 5; James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), Chap. 4. The 1961 “Preface” and the 1964 essay “Madness, the absence of an œuvre” (both included in History of Madness) provide answers to early critiques.

2 Maurice Blanchot, “L’oubli, la déraison,” NRF (1961), 676‐686; Roland Barthes, “Savoir et folie, Critique, 17 (1961), 915‐922; Michel Serres, “Géométrie de la folie,” Mercure de France (août 1962), 683‐696 and (sept. 1962), 63‐81; Robert Mandrou, “Trois clés pour comprendre l’«Histoire de la folie à l’époque classique»,” Annales ESC (juillet‐août 1962), 761‐771. Published later but worth mentioning is Robert Castel, The Psychiatric Order [1976] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

3 Gerald Weissmann, “Foucault and the Bag Lady,” Hospital Practice (August 1982), 28‐39. 4 Lawrence Stone, “Madness,” The New York Review of Books (December 16, 1982), 28‐36 [a review

of four books on madness that includes many attacks directed towards Foucault]; Michel


the review History of the Human Sciences.5 After the publication of History of Madness, there was again renewed debate about the thoroughness of Foucault’s historical analyses and his arbitrary criticism of the Enlightenment.6

In what way can this be considered a founding work? Throughout his dissertation, Foucault describes with great subtlety the development of knowledge/power practices by studying disciplinary and normalization strategies. These analyses go beyond the framework of the psychiatric field, extending to all control mechanisms. However, the principal thesis remains paradigmatic for this enterprise. Not only is Histoire de la folie, which marked Foucault’s spectacular entry onto the intellectual scene, by far the most frequently quoted work in Dits et écrits, but the arguments he developed there were also more fully developed during the 1970s.7 The work also became a reference for what is perhaps mistakenly called the “French anti‐psychiatry” movement (institutional psychotherapy of Jean Oury et al., Lacan’s desubjectivization of psychosis, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, etc.). Foucault’s renowned thesis also gave health sociologists arguments with which to rethink certain policies. Furthermore, History of Madness remains one of the hubs around which Foucauldian studies gravitate. Among the examples illustrating its relevance today, Foucault’s principal thesis is a source of inspiration for the contemporary activism that concerns both the denunciation of certain practices in psychiatry and, more generally, the “bio‐securitarian” obsession with risk so characteristic of our societies.8 The work also allows us to situate the originality of dissenting psychiatric movements outside France, particularly in Italy.9 Finally, it was in favour of a return to the 1961 thesis that the “technocratic turn” of Foucault’s last work was criticized, a work whose ethic breaks with the theme of transgression

Foucault and Lawrence Stone, “An Exchange with Michel Foucault, The New York Review of Books (March 31, 1983), 42‐44 [Foucault’s answer to Stone’s “Madness” and Stone’s reply to Foucault].

5 History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb. 1990) and Vol. 3, No. 3 (Oct. 1990). See also Arthur Still and Irving Velody, Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie (New York: Routledge, 1992).

6 Andrew Scull, “Scholarship of Fools. The frail Foundations of Foucault’s Monument,” The Time Literary Supplement (March 23, 2007), 3‐4; Colin Gordon, “Extreme Prejudice: Note on Andrew Scull’s TLS review of Foucault’s History of Madness:” http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/extreme‐prejudice/ (downloaded on June 12, 2007).

7 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973‐1974 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974‐1975 (London: Picador, 2003).

8 Mario Colucci, “Foucault and Psychiatric Power after Madness and Civilization” and Pierangelo Di Vittorio, “From Psychiatry to Bio‐politics or the Birth of the Bio‐Security State,” in Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard (Eds.), Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 61‐70, 71‐80.

9 Mario Colucci et Pierangelo Di Vittorio, Franco Basaglia (Milano: Mondadori Bruno, 2001); French. trans. Franco Basaglia. Portrait d’un psychiatre intempestif (Ramonville: Érès, 2005).

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Beaulieu & Fillion: History of Madness

that linked the young Foucault to the Collège de sociologie.10 There have been several editions of the French version of the work: the first by

Plon (1961), followed by an abridged version published by 10/18 (1963) and then a return to the unabridged version by Gallimard (1972 and 1976). The first two editions were entitled Folie et déraison with the subtitle Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (hereafter HF). In the Gallimard edition, only the subtitle was retained and the original 1961 preface was replaced. Two appendices were added in 1972 (“La folie, l’absence d’œuvre” and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu”), but were subsequently withdrawn from the 1976 edition. In 1965, Richard Howard translated an incomplete version of Folie et déraison into English, published as Madness and Civilization. History of Madness translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa is the first full version of the unabridged work. This latest version contains a foreword by Ian Hacking, the preface and the two appendices of 1972, a response to Derrida (another version of “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu”), the illustrations that accompanied the first edition, as well as several annexes, including an exhaustive bibliography dedicated to the 1961 work.

History of Madness ends with a defence of an anti‐discourse in reference to Nietzsche, Nerval, Van Gogh, Hölderlin, Artaud, et al. The complementary thesis reached a similar paroxysm towards the end, defending the “superman” against Kant’s question Was ist der Mensch?11 This may appear naïve to some. History of Madness nevertheless provides a wealth of analysis beyond compare, which has opened up new fields of research by playing a part in undermining some of the foundations of Western culture.

Where did Foucault’s interest in this type of work come from? In the early 1950s, he undertook vocational training related to his studies in psychopathology at the Sainte‐Anne psychiatric hospital, where he assisted a group of scientists (including Henri Laborit and Jean Delay) who had discovered and experimented with the first neuroleptic drugs. This gave him the opportunity to observe the effects of psychiatric knowledge and the power of medicine. In 1975, he recalled those years of training in the following words:

Not being a doctor, I had no rights, but being a student and not a patient, I was free to wander. Thus, without ever having to exercise the power related to psychiatric knowledge, I could nonetheless observe it all the time. I was a surface of contact between the patients, with whom I would talk, under the pretext of carrying out psychological tests, and the medical staff, who came by regularly to make decisions. This position,

10 Frank Pearce, “Foucault and the ‘Hydra‐Headed Monster’: The Collège de Sociologie and the two

Acéphales,” in Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard (Eds.), Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 115‐137.

11 Michel Foucault, Thèse complémentaire pour le doctorat ès lettres. Introduction à l’anthropologie de Kant. The complete introduction remains unpublished and is available at Archives Michel Foucault (IMEC, Abbey of Ardenne, France, document D‐60) or online ‹www.michel‐foucault.com/kant.pdf›.

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which was the result of chance, allowed me to see the surface of contact between the insane person and the power exercised over him, and I then attempted to render its historical formation.12

These training periods sparked his interest in phenomenological psychiatry, whose merit consists in understanding psychic disorders as expressions of specific ways of being‐in‐the‐world contained in a common world of meaning. In 1953, Foucault visited Binswanger; in Maladie mentale et personnalité, published in 1954 (a reworked version was published in 1962 entitled Maladie mentale et psychologie),13 he comments on existential psychiatry; in 1958 he wrote a long introduction to the work by Binswanger, Traum und Existenz.14 and the same year he translated (with Daniel Rocher) Der Gestaltkreis by von Weizsäcker.15 In his 1961 thesis, Foucault broadens his thoughts to a historical perspective in which he looks at culture and the way Western societies work. Disenchanted by the “monologue by reason about madness” (HM, xxviii), Foucault distanced himself from both the biological and the phenomenological aspects of psychiatric knowledge:

I worked with philosophers and also with Jean Delay, who introduced me to the world of the insane. […] But I do not practice psychiatry. What counts for me is the investigation of the very origins of madness. The good conscience of psychiatrists disappointed me.16

Title and Translation It is, of course, a good thing for those who work on Foucault in English now to be able to point to a complete translation of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. How this text will stand next to Madness and Civilization, Richard Howard’s translation of the abridged version of Folie et Déraison, will be interesting to follow as readers are encouraged to reconsider Foucault’s early masterpiece.

One doubts that it will be a simple matter of one text replacing the other. Already in the title, multiple texts appear. Ian Hacking’s “Forward” to History of Madness notes how the “Unreason” (Déraison) in the original title has faded away in subsequent editions; in such a fading, according to Hacking, one can find “all the signs of Foucault changing his mind about madness.” (HM, ix) Rather than focus on Foucault’s changing his mind, one might ask why in this edition the brief (not to say truncated) title History of Madness was chosen, especially when one considers that

12 Our translation. Taken from a 1975 interview (p. 55) not reprinted in Dits et écrits, but published

under the title “Les confessions de Michel Foucault,” in Le Point (1 Juillet 2004), 52‐63. 13 Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

For a detailed comparative study of the 1954 and the 1962 versions see Pierre Macherey, “Aux sources de l’Histoire de la folie,” Critique, no. 471‐472 (1986), 753‐774.

14 Michel Foucault, “Dream, Imagination and Existence,” in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993), 29‐78.

15 Viktor von Weizsäcker, Le cycle de la structure (Paris : Desclée de Brouwer, 1958). 16 Michel Foucault in Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 7.

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this is a direct translation of the title of the abridged version of the text! Is anything gained by this brevity? Is anything lost?

What might be gained is that it draws attention to the fact that the text presents itself first and foremost as a history, which, as Foucault tells us in his Archaeology of Knowledge, “is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably bound.”17 The complete text gives the reader a better sense of the “mass of documentation” that Foucault is working with and through in a way that Madness and Civilization did not. Will explicit reference to this mass of documentation reassure those readers of Madness and Civilization who are suspicious of Foucault’s scholarly appreciation of the historical record? Probably not.

One of the lasting features of Foucault’s work is the way his histories challenge the historiographical pretensions of all who appeal to the “historical record,” the way they have the historical record challenge itself. Here, the brief title History of Madness may be misleading. It can lead the unsuspecting reader to think that the text is a history of a particular “object” called madness. And yet part of the fascination exerted by this text is that it evokes something variously called madness, folly, insanity, precisely not as an object but as an Other to something else called reason, and this for a certain period and in a certain place (principally the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe). The (current) title of the French text (itself the original subtitle) makes this clear, as does the tripartite division of the complete text (a division not reproduced in Madness and Civilization). The focus of the text is “madness in the classical age.” The first and third parts (dealing with the Renaissance and the early nineteenth century) are contrastive and serve to frame the core discussion of the “classical age,” which, for Foucault, presents us the archival figure of what he calls Unreason, which itself serves as a contrast to the notion of reason itself. This division of the text, along with the introductory chapters to Parts II and III, should – somewhat paradoxically given the supplementary material – lead readers of Madness and Civilization to appreciate the tentative and exploratory dimension of Foucault’s text.

Foucault’s sensitivity to the “torn presence” (HM, 164) of madness probably most vividly expresses itself in his style. On this point, the new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa proves sometimes to be a hindrance to a full appreciation. One suspects that the translators, themselves sensitive to the various complaints about Foucault’s style, tried to compensate by translating as plainly as possible various passages, such as those that plausibly serve as summary statements. The problem with this is that it takes away from the force of the text, a force that through its style is attempting to remain true to the “torn presence” of the madness that is its concern. To that extent, the translation sometimes plays too heavily into the Hegelian thematic of self‐development as against the wariness of its Nietzschean 17 Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge [1969] (London: Routledge, 1972), 7.

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inspiration. For example, in the initial chapter “Stultifera Navis” (passages included in

Madness and Civilization), one discerns an attempt by the translators to downplay the dramatic tone in favor of a more didactic approach. Concerning “the great divide that was yet to come in the Western experience of madness” (HM, 16), “ce qui sera la grande ligne de partage dans l’expérience occidentale de la folie” (HF, 34), they offer this translation:

The rise of madness on the Renaissance horizon is first noticeable in this decay of Gothic symbolism, as though a network of tightly ordered spiritual significations was beginning to become undone, revealing figures with meanings only perceptible as insane. Gothic forms lived on, but little by little they fell silent, ceasing to speak, to recall or instruct. The forms remained familiar, but all understanding was lost, leaving nothing but a fantastical presence; and freed from the wisdom and morality it was intended to transmit, the image began to gravitate around its own insanity. (HM, 16‐17)

A little further, a transitional sentence is rendered as: “The strange fascination that lurks in these images of madness can be explained in a number of ways.” (HM, 18) And the sentence concluding the section is rendered thus: “These mad images are an expression of hidden Renaissance worries about the menacing secrets of the world, and it was those fears that gave the fantastic images such coherence and lent them such power.” (HM, 21)

Now, consider the passages in French: La montée de la folie sur l’horizon de la Renaissance s’aperçoit d’abord à travers le délabrement du symbolisme gothique; comme si ce monde, ou le réseau de significations spirituelles était si serré, commençait à se brouiller, laissant apparaître des figures dont le sens ne se livre plus que sous les espèces de l’insensé. Les formes gothiques subsistent encore pour un temps, mais, peu à peu, elles deviennent silencieuses, cessent de dire, de rappeler et d’enseigner, et ne manifestent plus, hors de tout langage possible, mais pourtant dans la familiarité du regard, que leur présence fantastique. Libérée de la sagesse et de la leçon qui l’ordonnaient, l’image commence à graviter autour de sa propre folie. (HF, 34); “Quelle est donc cette puissance de fascination qui, à cette époque, s’exerce à travers les images de la folie? (HF, 36); Dans tant d’images – et c’est sans doute ce qui leur donne ce poids, ce qui impose à leur fantaisie une si grande cohérence – la Renaissance a exprimé ce qu’elle pressentait des menaces et des secrets du monde. (HF, 39)

The perhaps overly succinct translation of the first passage (along with the mistake of translating “insensé” as “insane” rather than something like “without sense”), the absence of the interrogative form in the second passage, the omission of the “sans doute” in the third, along with its overly declarative translation are not unreasonable choices in themselves. What these translations, and other passages like them, lack is the full force of the evocative tone of the original which is intent on opening us to a perspective too quickly cast in rationalizing and normalizing form (including the rationalizing and normalizing form of historical development). A difficult task, no

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doubt. And this is a difficult book, even a disconcerting one, in Charles Taylor’s words.18 Indeed, if Foucault’s histories are disconcerting it is because they challenge our complacencies with regard to what we claim to know about the world and they confront us with the complicities that structure what is given us to do in the world. As Todd May has put it, Foucault’s histories serve “as reminders, reminders of who we are and how we got to be that way, and, even more important, of the contingency of both.”19 This contingency itself is not only historically demonstrated by opening up the archive, but is also evoked by a style that serves to query who we are not, and who we need not be. Hegel The reader might be struck by the duality of Foucault’s approach in History of Madness, which, though resolutely inspired by Nietzsche to write about madness outside of the recuperative and presentist mode typical of most histories, nevertheless remains indebted to a Hegelian thematic of a historically self‐developing reason unfolding through conflict and the attempt to resolve them. Much of the text describes the ways in which the classical age transforms madness such that, for it:

Madness becomes a form related to reason, or more precisely madness and reason enter into a perpetually reversible relationship which implies that all madness has its own reason by which it is judged and mastered, and all reason has its madness in which it finds its own derisory truth. Each is a measure of the other, and in this movement of reciprocal reference, each rejects the other but is logically dependent on it. (HM, 28‐29)

Throughout the text, Foucault tracks these various “dialectics” within which reason is seen to struggle with what it perceives to be its ambiguous other – first as folly, then especially as unreason, until with insanity, “the experience was no longer of an absolute conflict between reason and unreason, but rather of a play – always relative, always mobile – between freedom and its limits. (HM, 439) But, of course, these various “dialectics” are not described in terms of their “contradictions” with a view to the sublation of their terms. Foucault does not follow the Hegelian thematic of a self‐developing reason; rather, he might be said to track it, and warily at that. One gets the sense that Foucault’s text proposes itself as a closer look at what one finds when one observes what Hegel called the self‐development of “Reason in History” (the title of his Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History), not from 18 Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences:

Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 152. 19 Todd May, “Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise in Foucault and Deleuze,” Angelaki. Journal of the

Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), 227.

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its own perspective and preoccupations, but from the perspective of its most recalcitrant element: madness. Foucault does not presume to write his History of Madness from the point of view of the mad themselves, but from the perspective this reference to madness (within reason’s self‐development) opens up. Here, the full text will allow readers to appreciate Foucault’s attempt to explore this perspective which recognizes that “the meaning of madness for any age, our own included, can never be covered entirely by the theoretical unity of a project: it lies instead in its torn presence.” (HM, 164) Derrida and the Enlightenment What Derrida discusses on a “speculative” level through deconstruction, Foucault analyzes through “concrete” practices. In their debate surrounding History of Madness, they mutually accuse each other of fostering authoritarian thought. There was a complete rift between the two, until Foucault, out of intellectual solidarity, took the side of Derrida, who had been arrested for “drug trafficking” when taking part in a seminar organized by dissidents in Prague in 1981.20 The discussion began in 1963 with Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness”21 (published for the first time in 1964), in which he comments on Foucault’s work. Derrida refuses to see any trace of ostracism of madness in the sentence drawn from the first of Descartes’ Meditations and which was one of the watersheds in Foucault’s reasoning: “But such people are insane, and I would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as a model for myself.”22 Derrida notes: “The sense of Foucault’s entire project can be pinpointed in these few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages,”23 where Cogito and insanity conflict. According to Derrida, Descartes does not imagine madness as being exterior to Cogito and he does not submit madness to any particular exclusion. Descartes refutes the certitude of knowledge by the senses and by dreams, but not by madness. So, according to Derrida, Cartesian philosophy was founded before the division of reason and madness. In other words, Derrida believes that the mad person, as opposed to the empiricist or the dreamer, can experience the Cogito, which is therefore not exclusive to the philosopher or sound‐minded scientist:

The Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. There is a value and a meaning of the Cogito as of existence, which escape the alternative of a determined madness or a determined reason.24

20 Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), 121‐122. 21 Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL:

University Press, 1978), 31‐63. 22 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 77. 23 Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” art. cit., 32. 24 Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” art. cit., 55.

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According to Derrida, Cartesian reasoning does not exclude what is different from it, but it recognizes the presence of madness in itself; the division of madness therefore remains internal to reason. Derrida thus argues the auto‐deconstruction of Cartesian self‐identity to highlight the play of différance between reason and madness, accusing Foucault of creating another type of internment: that of reason.25

Foucault’s response (HM, 550‐590) appeared eight years after Derrida’s essay was published. He attacks the “little pedagogy” of Derrida, who “teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text.” (HM, 573) For Foucault, Descartes’ text remains incomprehensible if it is not replaced in the historical context of discursive and institutional practices. In refusing these practices, Derrida misses the meaning and scope of Descartes’ text (1641), contemporary of the “Great Internment” (1657), both presented as belonging to the same episteme associated with the exclusion of madness by reason.

Ferry and Renaut26 refuse to come out in favour of either Foucault or Derrida, whose interpretations they consider characteristic of French Nietzscheanism. In their view, classical reason is no more repressive (Foucault) than it is thrown into the play of différance (Derrida). Descartes would simply tell us that at this point in Meditations, there is no way of refuting the objection presented by the hypothesis of madness, an objection that is resolved by the radicalization of doubt. Ferry and Renaut are therefore seeking (and they are not the only ones) to bring reason back on track by criticizing the post‐structuralist attacks on the Enlightenment. But in doing so, they omit to consider that the repression exercised by reason in the Classical Age is not simply expressed in the “marginal” passage of the 1641 Meditations. In his Anthropology (1798), Kant repeats the Classical gesture of excluding madness from the philosophical field:

Subtilizing (without sound reason) is a use of reason that ignores its final end, partly from lack of ability and partly from adopting a mistaken viewpoint. To rave with reason means to proceed according to principles as far as the form of our thought is concerned, but with regard to its matter or end, to use means diametrically opposed to it.27

The madman is he who, according to Kant, is caught in a set of contradictions that make knowledge impossible. Additionally, for Kant there exists no way of curing the insane person of his illness and “no method of therapy can be effective.”28 Foucault, who himself translated this text, accompanied by a long introduction in his

25 Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” art. cit., 55. 26 Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism

(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 68‐89. 27 Emmanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1974), 72.

Monique David‐Ménard shows that the Kantian conception of knowledge finds its origin in Kant’s battle against the visionary delirium of Swedenborg. See La folie dans la raison pure. Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (Paris : Vrin, 1990).

28 Emmanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, op. cit., p. 84.

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complementary thesis,29 no doubt judged it appropriate to discuss Kant in History of Madness so as to avoid any overlaps. Nevertheless, Kant’s Anthropology clearly illustrates the fact that the division of madness from reason is one of the archetypal Classical concerns. Never did this division constitute such an important issue for thought and practice than in the Classical Age. And Foucault presents the first analysis of it in brilliant fashion. The Historians Foucault’s rapport with Kant and the Enlightenment subsequently underwent, as we know, numerous changes. But Derrida’s demonstration of the différance between reason and madness, as refined and as appealing as it may be, is no longer really at the heart of the debate. More adventurous critics tend to question the historical exactitude of Foucault’s interpretations in History of Madness.30 We must rule out prior interpretations as to why and under which circumstances mad people were locked up before the seventeenth century or that medical care existed before Pinel. Forms of oppression and medicalization did exist before the Classical Age, but Foucault is absolutely correct in presenting confinement as a trend that became established during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which led, in Europe, to the multiplication of asylums to marginalize what were deemed to be deviant minds. Several observers who criticize the lack of thoroughness of History of Madness attack the analyses constructed arbitrarily from works of the aesthetic sphere (Brandt’s novel Narrenschiff, Bosch’s painting Ship of Fools, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s plays, Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, etc.), even going so far as to liken History of Madness to a “romanticization of mental illness.” Foucault is also accused of speaking in the name of European culture although he relies mainly on French sources, of forcing the interpretation of certain archival documents, of misinterpreting the meaning to be given to the “Great confinement” of the Classical Age by making a connection between English experiments (small madhouses of fewer than twenty inmates) and Parisian ones (thousands of Parisians sent to the 29 Emmanuel Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique (Paris : Vrin, 1991). This book

contains an excerpt of Foucault’s complementary thesis (see p. 7‐10). 30 For a presentation and/or discussion of the historians’ critiques of Histoire de la folie see H. C.

Erik Midelfort, “Madness and Civilisation in early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault,” in Barbara C. Malament (Ed.), After the Reformation (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 247‐265; Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1982); José Merquior, Foucault (London: Fontana, 1985), Chap. 2; Colin Gordon, “Histoire de la folie: an unknown book by Michel Foucault,” History of the Human Sciences, 3/1 (1990), 3‐26; Andrew Scull, “Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,” History of the Human Sciences, 3/1 (1990), 57‐67; Colin Gordon, “History, Madness and other errors. A Response,” History of the Human Sciences, 3/3 (1990), 381‐396; Elisabeth Roudinesco & al., Penser la folie (Paris: Galilée, 1992); Gary Gutting, “Foucault and the History of Madness,” in Gary Gutting (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), 47‐70.

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Hôpital Général), and of too quickly assimilating Tuke’s interventions (holistic perspective on recovery at the York Retreat) and those of Pinel (medical care), and so on.

What value does Foucault’s thesis represent in terms of the study of history? Several historians have praised the way in which Foucault was able to revive the discipline (Braudel, Le Goff, Veyne, to name but a few). Nonetheless, certain of Foucault’s interpretations can be considered tendentious. On the one hand, his rich historical analyses are worthy of the highest esteem, while on the other, even though in his self‐criticism of 196931 he sought to apply methodological rigour to Histoire de la folie and his other works of the 1960s, Foucault finally candidly admitted having abandoned the ideal of scientificness:

I am fully aware that I have never written anything other than fictions. For all that, I would not want to say that they were outside the truth. It seems plausible to me to make fictions work within truth, to introduce truth‐effects within a fictional discourse, and in some way to make discourse arouse, ‘fabricate’ something which does not yet exist, thus to fiction something. One ”fictions” history starting from a political reality that renders it true, one ”fictions” a politics that does not yet exist starting from a historical truth.32

Does this mean that the moments of epistemological rupture – the “Great confinement” of 1657 and Pinel’s liberation of the insane in 1794 – used as critical points in the analyses in History of Madness, are the result of pure invention? This has to be admitted, at least in part, because Foucault’s main goal in writing was not to accumulate knowledge. His task was not simply intellectual but also eminently practical. He had to distance himself somewhat in order to recognize this. If Foucault “fictions” reality in the same way as a caricaturist, it is because he enlarges the features of a certain reality to make them more evident. Some historical facts therefore take on larger‐than‐life proportions. Foucault has a complex and particularly efficient way of transforming minor (“Great confinement,” panoptic, infamous man, etc.) into major. The only way to appreciate Foucault’s work is to accept to play this sometimes perplexing but most often revealing game. From a traditional point of view, some of it might be wrong. But we acquire visionary power when we accept these reversals. We also understand better what Foucault meant when he stated that he had only ever written fiction: he saw himself not as an intellectual thirsty for truth, but as a tactician or an “artificializer,” comparing his books to “mines” and “packets of explosives.”33 That is one of the significations that can be given to Foucault’s famous “toolbox.”34 The primary goal of the Foucauldian enterprise is not to reveal the truth that is common to all (which Foucault does not

31 Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge [1969] (London: Routledge, 1972), see “Introduction.” 32 Michel Foucault in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 204. 33 Michel Foucault, “Les confessions de Michel Foucault,”art. cit., 57. 34 Often attributed to Foucault, it is Gilles Deleuze who used this expression for the first time in

1972. See Deleuze in Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 76.

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believe in), but to produce “effects of truth” that enable us to fight against the dispositifs of knowledge/power without promise of redemption and only (which is already a lot) with a view to changing attitudes and beliefs. Commenting on History of Madness, Foucault states:

In reality, what I want to do, and here is the difficulty of trying to do it, is to solve this problem: to work out an interpretation, a reading of a certain reality, which might be such that, on one hand, this interpretation could produce some of the effects of truth; and on the other hand, these effects of truth could become implements within possible struggles. […] It is the reality of possible struggles that I wish to bring to light. That is what I wanted to do in History of Madness.35

Foucault reveals several forgotten moments of our past, but historical rectitude is not the primary object of his teachings. They are much more concerned with the fact that methods of fighting as well as solutions to conflicts must be invented. History of Madness is no exception. Its power to fascinate resides in its ability to provide an alternative way of looking at the division of reason and madness, by arguing in favour of this alternative. Gladys Swain Historical criticisms also came from the psychiatric camp. The most elaborate of these was produced by the psychiatrist Gladys Swain.36 By bringing the insane out of the asylums in favor of clinical treatment, Pinel apparently helped humanize the relationship with madness, which became mental illness. Pinel also very certainly helped toward the classification of psychic problems, starting with the works of Kraepelin and Bleuler through to the contemporary nosography established in the DSM.37 Foucault sees Pinel’s intervention as the development of a new control strategy, the creation of an objectivizing discourse pejoratively qualified as “monologue by reason about madness,” which remains alien to the deeper meaning to be given to insanity.

Against “the Myth of Pinel” constructed by Foucault, that is to say Pinel as a false humanist and agent of power, Swain proposes a new history of madness by showing the beneficial value of psychiatric medicine. Using Hegel, among others, as 35 Michel Foucault in Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live, op. cit., p. 261. 36 Gladys Swain, La question de la naissance de la psychiatrie au début du XIXe siècle (thèse pour le

diplôme d’État) (Caen : Université de Caen, 1975); Gladys Swain, Le sujet de la folie. Naissance de la psychiatrie (Toulouse : Privat, 1977); Gladys Swain, Dialogue avec l’insensé. Précédé de À la recherche d’une autre histoire de la folie par Marcel Gauchet (Paris : Gallimard, 1994); Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe [translation of La pratique de l’esprit humain. L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris : Gallimard, 1980)] (Princeton, NJ : Princeton UP, 1999).

37 American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 4th Edition (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1994). The DSM‐V is currently scheduled for publication in 2011.

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an example, she turns madness into a moment of reason, the two not being mutually exclusive but participating in the same becoming which makes dialogue possible, as well as treatment, based on democratic values (equality, integration, humanism, etc.).

In criticizing History of Madness in this way, Swain seems to forget that the primary intention of Foucault’s analyses was to view madness less as a clinical case than as a cultural condition. When he discussed the repression and medicalization of madness, Foucault was not primarily referring to the work of psychiatrists. Besides, Foucault never professed to be opposed to the prescription of neuroleptic drugs and he never denied the suffering of psychotics. What interested Foucault above all was the signification to be given to psychiatric practices arising from Pinelian medicine, in order to show what they involve in terms of a vision of man, the world, and organization of social life. History of Madness must be discussed from this standpoint. And in this respect, Foucault’s argument for a variety of techniques to control insanity remains highly relevant today. Therefore we do not so much need a new history of madness as a new chapter of History of Madness itself. A New Chapter Foucault did not live long enough to experience the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that began in the mid 1980s.38 At that time, policies were enacted in most industrialized countries to deinstitutionalize psychiatric care. A number of factors led to the closure of beds in psychiatric hospitals in order to help people with mental health problems return to the community: the discovery of neuroleptic drugs in the 1950s and 1960s, criticism of the asylum segregation practised in the 1960s and 1970s (Foucault, Goffman, Basaglia, Cooper, Laing, et al.), the neo‐liberal context that promoted State privatization and modernization, as well as recommendations relating to the link between well‐being and social integration emanating from the World Health Organization, among others.

Should we welcome this situation? After all, deinstitutionalization enables the so‐called “insane” to live outside the asylum and the hospital. They now have an address and the chance to enter the job market through employment programs. In reality, this is an pseudo‐emancipation in that it makes way for new extra‐institutional control strategies developed for the “social protection” of psychiatric ex‐patients. Without having had the chance to study them in themselves, Foucault anticipated the implementation of these new extra‐muros control practices:

While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become ‘de‐institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses

38 Ellen Corin et al., Sortir de l’asile? Avis sur les services de santé mentale de la France, de la Grande‐

Bretagne, de l’Italie et des États‐Unis (Québec : Les Publications du Québec, 1986); Henri Dorvil et al., Défis de la reconfiguration des services de santé mentale (Québec : Gouvernement du Québec, 1997).

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in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted.39

Policies of deinstitutionalizing psychiatric care are not as “neutral” as they claim. In fact, they open the way to new techniques of normalization that are subtler than the former infra‐muros control practices (asylum or hospital), and which also become more tolerable in the eyes of the public by insinuating themselves into and circulating within the social fabric in attitudes, beliefs, behavior and ideas. We will briefly present three of these normalization mechanisms resulting from the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care: urban zoning, the branching of the psychiatric hospital system and the continuity of care.

Certain zoning practices follow the principle of “ghettoizing” marginalized populations. For “public health” reasons, housing for people considered abnormal is built in out‐of‐town areas, for example, while community mental health organizations are forbidden from operating in certain more affluent areas. This control over the location of populations is a common practice implemented through municipal and town‐planning strategies that literally “sort” populations by legislating on the division of space, at the same time assuring the existence of uniform, standardized spaces. For example, census data show that in the territory of the city of Montreal, 45.5% of beds devoted to psychiatric clients were concentrated in only 5.5% of that territory.40 This is a good illustration of what Foucault might have meant by comparing town planners to the police.41

The technique of branching psychiatric hospitals into the community constitutes another normalization mechanism generated by policies of deinstitutionalization. In concrete terms, this means that hospitals prevent the money saved by bed closures from being transferred to the community. Several hospitals hold on to this money by managing community care residences. To illustrate this phenomenon, a simple comparison of the annual reports of the Louis‐H. Lafontaine hospital (one of Canada’s largest psychiatric hospitals) for 1990‐2000 shows that the hospital’s budget remained practically the same during that period, despite the fact that the number of patients was reduced by almost half. The budget set aside for caring for the former patients should have gone with them when they returned to the community, but the hospital maintains financial control by using the amounts saved by the closure of beds to manage residential services for “psychiatric ex‐patients” living in the community. The practical organization of daily life (activities, schedule, medication, etc.) for this “deinstitutionalized” population therefore remains covertly subordinate to the asylum model. 39 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (New York: Random House, 1977), 211. 40 Paul Morin, Espace urbain montréalais et processus de ghettoïsation des populations marginalisées

(Montréal : Université du Québec à Montréal, 1993). 41 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977‐1978 (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Lecture of April 5, 1978.

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This type of technique goes beyond the simple hospital framework to infiltrate the whole of society, so far as to produce a rational model of care continuity. The new paradigm of social integration placed under the generic title of “intersectorality”42 thus responds to the new imperatives of normalizing life for people classified as mentally ill. Intersectoral action in mental health can be defined as the setting up of an advisory network bringing together service users and professionals from various sectors (housing, employment, hospital, education, etc.) with the aim of defining the best way to integrate people suffering from mental health problems. The stated intent of these consultations is to avoid the logic of sectoring by developing “intersectoral strategies” that support different cooperation networks and encourage better communication among the various sectors of activity. But with this good will there is also a potential for “bureaucratization,” preventing those directly concerned from making a true choice. Psychiatrists, managers and certain social workers are therefore able to exercise subtle “partnership dictatorship.”43 Far from manifesting “political realism,” intersectorality presents itself rather as a naïve form of progressivism based on a consensual ideal.44 The actions, aptitudes, behaviour and performance of psychiatric ex‐patients continue to be normalized according to ideals defined by integration professionals around discussion tables.

These three control strategies are some of the “little tricks” (petites ruses, as Foucault would say) carried out beyond the boundaries of state governance or outside the legal system, promoting the emergence and development of decentred control techniques exercised continuously on the lives of individuals. They operate silently under colour of so‐called emancipatory policies and are encouraged by a new humanist ideal of the same type as that which incited Pinel to free the confined insane. Furthermore, the new strategies introduced to normalize the life of psychiatric populations remain hidden, which makes them all the more pernicious.

Our societies no longer choose to normalize the present by locking up deviants but to anticipate potential future risks so as to minimize their impact on the present. The life of psychiatric ex‐patients is therefore the subject of a sophisticated calculation of risk. The image of the “dangerous madman” conveyed by the media thus contributes to identifying those classed as mentally ill and living in the community with would‐be terrorists who could destabilize the established order. Yet we know that these people pose a greater threat to themselves (by suicide) than to others, and that in reality it is the so‐called “normal” people who, relatively speaking, are more likely to commit homicide. 42 Deena White et al., Pour sortir des sentiers battus: l’action intersectorielle en santé mentale (Québec :

Publications du Québec, 2002). 43 Julien Damon, “La dictature du partenariat,” Futuribles, no. 273 (2002), 27‐41. 44 Gilles Bibeau, “Lʹintersectorialité, une utopie mobilisatrice?”, in Deena White & al., Pour sortir

des sentiers battus: l’action intersectorielle en santé mentale (Québec : Publications du Québec, 2002), 279‐297.

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89

More than forty‐five years after its publication, History of Madness reminds us to what extent insanity continues to shape our culture’s future and to depend upon the society in which it exists, and also to what extent it has never ceased, since the Classical Age, to be perceived as the incarnation of a threat. The success of the DSM, which is the determining reference in psychiatry and whose successive editions continually add to the number of psychic troubles and their related biochemical treatments, shows very strikingly how History of Madness has failed in its attempt to widen the discourse on madness to a socio‐cultural dimension. All the indications are, unfortunately, that it is the large pharmaceutical companies, and not the history of ideas, that will benefit the most from the return of the “madman” into social life. A re‐reading of the 1961 thesis, whose imperfections can be forgiven in light of Foucault’s later comments relating to power, normalization, control strategies, etc., offers arguments that can be used to counter all these forms of health determinism.

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Foucault Studies

© Thomas F. Tierney 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW ESSAY

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977‐78 Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.) ISBN: 978‐1‐4039‐8652‐8. Price: $28.95. Thomas F. Tierney, The College of Wooster Security, Territory, Population is Palgrave Macmillan’s latest English translation of the courses Foucault delivered annually at the Collège de France from 1969 until his death in 1984. The lectures and course summaries from Foucault’s 1977‐78 and 1978‐79 courses were edited by political philosopher Michel Senellart, and published together in France by Seuil/Gallimard in 2004, as Sécurité, Territoire, Population and Naissance de la biopolitique, respectively. Senellart, who teaches at the Lyon École normale supérieure de letters et sciences humaine, relied primarily on tape recordings in editing the lectures, but also had access to Foucault’s manuscripts and notes. Beyond his careful editing of these important lectures, Senellart also appended an essay that establishes the context in which the courses were developed, and provided a very valuable service to Foucault scholars by adding copious notes to each lecture. These notes not only provide citations for the vast array of historical sources Foucault used in preparing the lectures, but also list numerous additional sources, and cross‐reference the course lectures with Foucault’s other publications, lectures, and interviews. Security, Territory, Population contains Graham Burchell’s superb (as usual) translation of the thirteen lectures and course summary from the 1977‐78 course, as well as Senellart’s editorial contributions, making this an invaluable resource for understanding this absolutely crucial period in the development of Foucault’s corpus.

In the first lecture of his 1975‐76 course, Society Must be Defended, Foucault lamented that his research from the previous five years was inconclusive and unsatisfactory, primarily because that work had implicitly relied on a traditional conception of power as repression and resistance.1 His first attempt to move past that

1 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975‐76, ed. Arnold I.

Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 17.


“struggle‐repression schema” was the introduction of the concept of bio‐power, which appeared both in that 1975‐76 course,2 and in La volonté du savoir, first volume of The History of Sexuality, which was also published in 1976. At the end of that first volume he famously described bio‐power by contrasting it with the sovereign’s traditional power of death; rather than threatening the lives of subjects, bio‐power was instead presented as a modern form of power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”3 Foucault took a sabbatical in 1976‐77, but upon returning to his academic duties the following year he picked up right where he had left off, and began his 1977‐78 course by announcing: “This year I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio‐power.”4 To further clarify this positive sort of power that was produced in modernity, he concentrated in this course on a new form of political rationality that appeared in the eighteenth century, which he identified as “governmentality.” In fact, about a third of the way through the course he claimed that a more accurate title would have been “the history of ‘governmentality,’” rather than Security, Territory, Population.5 In explaining the decision to publish the French editions of the 1977‐78 and 1978‐79 lectures simultaneously, Senellart claims that they “form a diptych unified by the problematic of bio‐power.”6 The volume under review here, then, is not simply another course of Foucault’s lectures, but rather the course that his thought took from bio‐power, through governmentality, toward biopolitics, and as we will see, that course revolved around liberalism. The thirteen lectures are divided into five primary topics, each of which reveals an important dimension of the origins of those governmental techniques that have come to prevail in modernity. The first three lectures deal with the issue of security; the fourth and most of the fifth lectures focus on the art of government; the sixth through the ninth examine the history of pastoral techniques; the tenth and eleventh discuss raison D’État; and finally, the twelfth and thirteenth lectures deal with the important early‐modern institution of the police. In carefully examining the historical development of each of these facets of governmentality, Foucault’s research covered sources from England, France, Italy and Germany, revealing that governmentality emerged as a result of transformations that occurred throughout Europe. 2 Ibid., 243, 253‐63. 3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New

York: Vintage Books, 1980), 137; also 140,143. 4 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1. 5 Ibid., 108. This lecture, from 1 February 1978, was the only one from the course published

during Foucault’s lifetime. It was first published in the Italian journal Aut Aut, in September‐December 1978, and then in an English translation by Pasquale Pasquino as “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87‐104. An alternative English translation is included Michel Foucault, Power, vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Foucault: 1954‐1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 201‐22.

6 Ibid., 369.

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Tierney: Security, Territory, Population

In his discussion of security in the first three lectures, Foucault used the example of the scarcity of grain to distinguish security techniques from those employed under mercantilism. The mercantilist policies that “practically dominated Europe from the start of the seventeenth until the start of the eighteenth century,”7 he claimed, were focused on protecting the wealth of the state by preventing scarcity from occurring. Toward this end regulations were placed on the pricing, storing, cultivating, and exporting of grain, in order to keep grain prices as low as possible for peasant populations.8 In late seventeenth‐ century England, however, a new scarcity policy emerged that was based on the free circulation of grain within, and between, nations, and this policy was adopted in eighteenth‐century France as one of the hallmarks of the physiocratic system.9 Rather than trying to prevent scarcity from occurring, this new approach allowed “natural” fluctuations in the price, supply, demand, and circulation of grain to occur, in the expectation that these processes would eventually reach a balance, and provide an adequate supply of grain. While he tended to ignore seventeenth‐century liberalism and social contract theory in much of his earlier work – for instance, he explicitly dismissed the relevance of Hobbes’ social contract theory in his discussion of bio‐power in both The History of Sexuality and his 1975‐76 course10 ‐ the eighteenth‐century “game of liberalism”11 played a central role in Security, Territory, Population.

Foucault emphasized that this new policy of “curbing scarcity by a sort of ‘laisser‐faire,’ a certain ‘freedom of movement (laisser‐passer),’ a sort of ‘[laisser]‐aller,’ in the sense of ‘letting things take their course’,”12 is at the heart of security. In contrast to the disciplinary techniques he examined in his earlier work, which aimed at regulating and prohibiting movement, security techniques required the freedom of movement and circulation that Foucault had earlier dismissed as largely ideological. In Discipline and Punish (1976), for instance, Foucault claimed that “[t]he real, corporal disciplines [which he described as Panopticism] constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties” of liberalism.13 But in Security, Territory, Population

7 Ibid., 32. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 34. 10 In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault asked, “Must we follow Hobbes in seeing

[the sovereign’s power to inflict death] as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others?’ (135). He answered that question in the course resume from Society Must Be Defended: “We must begin by ruling out certain false paternities. Especially Hobbes” (270). Contra Foucault, I have argued that Hobbes actually complements his analysis of bio‐power and governmentality in “Suicidal Thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault, and the Right to Die,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32, 5 (July 2006): 609‐17.

11 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48. 12 Ibid., 41. 13 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage

Press, 1979), 222.

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he reassessed that dismissive stance: Well, I think I was wrong. I was not completely wrong, of course, but, in short, it was not exactly this. I think something completely different is at stake. … An apparatus of security, in any case the one I have spoken about, cannot operate well except on condition that it is given freedom, in the modern sense [the word] acquires in the eighteenth century: no longer the exemptions and privileges attached to a person, but the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things. I think it is this freedom of circulation, in the broad sense of the term, it is in terms of this option of circulation, that we should understand the word freedom, and understand it as one of the facets, aspects, or dimensions of the deployment of apparatuses of security.14

From this discussion of security he turned to the political discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but rather than focusing on the classical English liberals, such as Hobbes and Locke, he instead concentrated on Machiavelli’s The Prince (1516). While The Prince was well received at first, Foucault pointed out that from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries a significant number of political treatises appeared that took issue with Machiavelli’s most well‐known work. Treatises such as Guillaume de La Perriere’s Le Miroir politique (1555) and Frederick the Great’s Anti‐Machiavel (1740) formed a new category of political thought that he identified as “the art of government.” Acknowledging that this was a “shallow representation of Machiavelli’s thought,” Foucault nevertheless emphasized that these treatises rejected what they took to be his claim that “the Prince exists in a relationship of singularity and externality, of transcendence, to his principality.”15 Rather than advising the prince on how to maintain his territory, as Machiavelli did, they instead argued that the sovereign should be primarily concerned with governing the subjects that inhabited the territory, as a father governs his household: “To govern a state will thus mean the application of economy, the establishment of an economy, at the level of the state as a whole, that is to say, [exercising] supervision and control over its inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each, as attentive as that of a father’s over his household and goods.”16 The move past the art of government to “governmentality” proper would occur in the eighteenth century, when the model of the household was replaced by the mercantilist conception of the economy that “designate[s] a level of reality and a field of intervention for government.”17 At this point in the course Foucault mentioned that both the early‐modern institution of the police18 and the science of statistics19 played crucial roles in the

14 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48‐49; brackets are Burchell’s, which replace Foucault’s

“that it.” 15 Ibid., 91. 16 Ibid., 95; brackets in original. 17 Ibid., 95. 18 Ibid., 94. 19 Ibid., 101, 104.

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shift from the art of government to governmentality, but he postponed a detailed discussion of these two factors, and shifted his attention to traditional pastoral techniques for governing the conduct of individuals. In fact, he spent more time discussing the history of the “pastorate” than any of the other factors that contributed to the emergence of governmentality. He traced the origins of the pastorate to the shepherd‐flock model of leadership that was “frequently found throughout the Mediterranean East, … in Egypt, Assyria, Mesopotamia, and above all, of course, in the Hebrews,”20 and spent nearly an entire lecture making the case that the Greeks, particularly Plato, did not embrace the idea of a political leader as a shepherd.21 However, Foucault was quite emphatic about the role that the pastorate played in Christianity:

I think the real history of the pastorate as the source of a specific type of power over men, as a model and matrix of procedures for the government of men, really only begins with Christianity. … The pastorate begins with a process that is absolutely unique in history and no other example of which is found in the history of any other civilization: the process by which a religion, a religious community, constitutes itself as a Church, that is to say, as an institution that claims to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life in the other world, and to do this not only on the scale of a definite group, of a city of a state, but of the whole of humanity.22

He discussed the development of the Christian pastorate in great detail, distinguishing it not only from the Eastern and Hebraic traditions, but from Greek techniques of the self as well.23 I will have to pass over that discussion here, however, in order to focus on what I take to be the most important point Foucault made about the pastorate, which is that it was contested throughout its history. Although there is no gainsaying the success of Christianity in spreading pastoral techniques throughout the Western world, he emphasized that there were always “counter‐conducts,” such as gnosticism, mysticism, and asceticism, which challenged the pastoral authority of the church.24 The Reformation was, of course, “the greatest revolt of conduct the Christian West has known,”25 and afterward “the pastorate opened up … burst open, broke up.”26 This “crisis of the pastorate” coincided with the emergence of the art of government, and as government began to take responsibility for the conduct of individuals, revolts began to appear in political rather than religious contexts.27 As examples of this new secular form of counter‐conduct, Foucault cited: the revolutions in seventeenth‐century England and eighteenth‐century France; the emergence of “secret societies,” such as the 20 Ibid., 123. 21 Ibid., 136‐46. 22 Ibid., 147‐48. 23 Ibid., 163‐85. 24 Ibid., 196, 201‐16. 25 Ibid., 196. 26 Ibid., 193. 27 Ibid., 197‐98.

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Freemasons; movements protesting the status of women both in convents and society; oppositional movements in medicine; and treatises concerning the education of children.28 He even interpreted Descartes’ early Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628) as a bid to govern the conduct of individuals in this newly opened field. At the end of his extensive discussion of the pastorate, Foucault “note[d] that this transition from the pastoral of souls to the political government of men should be situated in this general context of resistances, revolts, and insurrections of conduct.”29 The Scientific Revolution also played a role in the emergence of governmentality, by shattering that meaningful natural order that had served as the foundation for sovereign authority. Citing Aquinas, Foucault claimed that earthly sovereigns had traditionally governed on the basis of certain analogies drawn to “God’s government on Earth.”30 This transcendent foundation supported the dream of a universal Empire at the end of history, when all differences between nations would be overcome with the return of Christ.31 The scientific breakthroughs of Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo, however, revealed “that ultimately God only rules the world through general, immutable, and universal laws,” and “does not ‘govern’ the world … in the pastoral sense.”32 This “de‐governmentalization of the cosmos”33 meant that there no longer was any ultimate endpoint toward which earthly states were aimed, and that “we now find ourselves in a perspective in which historical time is indefinite;”34 each state, in effect, became an end in itself. In response to this disruption, a new theoretical perspective emerged, raison d’État, which sought to re‐establish the possibility of some sort of order among the now free‐floating states.

Raison d’État first appeared in Italy, and as with the art of government, it developed in response to the dangers posed by Machiavelli’s The Prince.35 When sovereignty was de‐coupled from a meaningful natural order, and from the pastoral concern for ensuring the otherworldly salvation of those subjects, there was a concern that the state would be directed by nothing more than the whims of a Machiavellian sovereign. Raison d’État responded to this threat by claiming that the sovereign should govern his subjects in a manner that would ensure the preservation of the state. But while the art of government urged the sovereign to govern on the model of the household, raison d’État viewed the state as a collection of subjects in a given territory. To emphasize this difference, Foucault quoted Botero, one of the first Italian theorists of raison d’État: ”’The state is a firm domination over peoples.’”36

28 Ibid., 196‐200, 228‐31. 29 Ibid., 228. 30 Ibid., 232‐34. 31 Ibid., 260. 32 Ibid., 234‐35. 33 Ibid., 236. 34 Ibid., 260. 35 Ibid., 242‐45. 36 Ibid., 237.

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As raison d’État developed, it became apparent that the mere preservation of the state was inadequate to cover the actual political situation, because states had a natural tendency to expand, and ended up competing with one another economically.37 This realization that the primary source of international strife was economic competition, rather than the rivalry of princes, was “undoubtedly one of the most fundamental mutations in both the form of Western political life and the form of Western history.”38 To make sense of this new threat to security, raison d’État learned from Newtonian physics, and viewed states as existing in a field of forces. “The real problem of this new governmental rationality,” Foucault claimed, “is not therefore just the preservation of the state within a general order so much as the preservation of a relation of forces; it is the preservation, maintenance, or development of a dynamic of forces.”39 The event that crystallized these lessons was the Thirty Years War, and the treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, marked the point where the “system of security” developed by this more sophisticated raison d’État “was fully installed.”40 According to Foucault, Europe was created at this point on the basis of a new “military‐diplomatic apparatus” that was comprised of three instruments: the use of war as a diplomatic technique (citing Clausewitz without inversion); permanent diplomatic relations based on the principle of a “physics of states”; and professional, scientifically trained armies.41 What Foucault outlined thus far in the course, therefore, was a very similar process that occurred both within, and among, states. The conception of society as a collection of economic forces, which he discussed in the first lectures on security and scarcity, was extended to international relations by raison d’État’s “idea that between themselves states form something like a society in the European space, the idea that states are like individuals who must have certain relations between them” maintained in a stable balance.42 However, there was an additional piece that had to be put in place before this system of governmentality could be fully operational, and that was provided by the police. Throughout the course Foucault had intimated that the police played an absolutely crucial role in the development of this new form of political rationality,43 and in the last two lectures he discussed this institution in great detail. While the term has come to be associated primarily with criminal justice, the police that concerned Foucault in these lectures was the much broader institution that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside the mercantilist program for strengthening the economic competitiveness of European

37 Ibid., 289. 38 Ibid., 294. 39 Ibid., 296. 40 Ibid., 297, also 291. 41 Ibid., 300‐06. 42 Ibid., 303. 43 Ibid., 58, 59, 94, 110, 296.

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states.44 “Police is not justice” and law enforcement,45 Foucault insisted, but rather an administrative system that was concerned with maximizing the size of the state’s population in relation to the natural resources of its territory, ensuring that this population was productive and healthy, and promoting the circulation of both people and goods through the creation and maintenance of adequate roads, canals, and other public amenities.46

It is important to note that the police promoted the broad interests of the population not for their own sake, but only insofar as this served to augment the power of the state.47 And rather than using the clumsy tool of the law, the police instead governed the population through the much more subtle use of regulations. As Foucault put it, “We are in a world of indefinite regulation, of permanent, continually renewed, and increasingly detailed regulation, but always regulation.”48 To even conceive of such a regulatory system, however, required a new form of knowledge beyond the law, which could provide a view of the population that was to be governed, and Foucault was emphatic about the complementary relationship that developed between the police and statistics:

Police makes statistics necessary, but police also makes statistics possible. For it is precisely the whole set of procedures set up to increase, combine, and develop forces, it is this whole administrative assemblage that makes it possible to identify what each state’s forces comprise and their possibilities of development. Police and statistics mutually condition each other.49

Foucault began his discussion of the police in France, and examined in some detail Turquet de Mayerne’s utopian police tract, La Monarchie aristodémocratique (1611),50 as well as Nicolas Delamare’s influential three‐volume Traité de la police (1705‐19).51 However, the police reached its most sophisticated form not in France, where it developed largely as an accretion of administrative practices,52 but in Germany. Unlike France, whose strong monarchical history and centralized administrative system fostered the development of mercantilism, Germany had no such tradition. The various Germanic states created by the Treaty of Westphalia had to develop an administrative system, and this gave rise to the highly centralized German form of mercantilism known as cameralism. By the early eighteenth century Prussian universities were teaching cameralistics, the science of finance and

44 Ibid., 337. 45 Ibid., 339. 46 Ibid., 323‐25. 47 Ibid., 328. 48 Ibid., 340. 49 Ibid., 315. 50 Ibid., 317‐28. 51 Ibid., 327, 333‐37. 52 Ibid., 333‐34.

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administration, to future government functionaries.53 It was in this particular German context that the police reached its most fully developed form:

[Y]ou see the development in German universities of something with practically no equivalent in Europe: the Polizeiwissenschaft, the science of police, which from the middle or end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century is an absolutely German specialty that spreads throughout Europe and exerts a crucial influence. Theories of police, books on police, and manuals for administrators will produce an enormous bibliography of Polizeiwissenschaft in the eighteenth century.54

The individual who went farthest in developing this statistical approach to the regulation of populations was Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi,55 who taught cameralistics in Vienna in the early 1750s. On the basis of these lectures he published Grundsatze der Policey‐Wissenschaft in 1756, and in 1769 this important work was translated into French as Elément généraux de police.56 The influence of this work was felt throughout Europe; however, the police never developed fully in France, or England for that matter, due to the role that liberalism played in those cultures. To illustrate this point Foucault returned to the issue with which he began the course, “because,” he claimed tongue‐in‐cheek, “basically I have done nothing else for several months but try to provide you with a commentary on these texts on grains and scarcity, which, through some detours, was always the issue.”57 As we saw earlier, in the late seventeenth century there emerged a certain suspicion of state interference in the grain economy among English economists and French physiocrats, but at the end of the course Foucault presented this stance as a form of counter‐conduct through which “that great over‐regulatory police I have been talking about breaks up.”58 For these liberal economists, “[p]olice regulation is pointless precisely because … there is a spontaneous regulation of the course of things. Regulation is not only harmful, even worse it is pointless.”59

So as the traditional Christian pastorate was broken up by the Reformation, and the medieval natural order was broken up by modern science, so too would that order of the state that was created by raison d’´Etat and Polizeiwissenschaft be broken

53 Ibid., n. 25 on 25‐6. 54 Ibid., 318. Foucault devoted the seminar of this 1977‐78 course to Polizeiwissenschaft (366‐67). 55 Ibid., 314. Foucault remained interested in von Justi throughout the remainder of his career,

and discussed him in Omnes et Singulatim, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that he delivered at Stanford University in 1979 (“Power”, vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Foucault: 1954‐1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 322‐23), and in the 1982 lecture, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” which he delivered at the University of Vermont (Power, 414‐16; this lecture was originally published in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, Massachusetts: the University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145‐62).

56 Ibid., n. 7 on 329. 57 Ibid., 341. 58 Ibid., 354. 59 Ibid., 344, also 341‐54.

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up by liberalism in the late eighteenth century. In place of “the artificiality of politics, of raison d’État and police,” there reappeared a sense of natural order, although “it is a naturalness that basically did not exist until then and which, if not named as such, at least begins to be thought of and analyzed as the naturalness of society.”60 And from this point on, there would be a division in techniques for governing the conduct of individuals in the population. On the one hand, the police were reduced to the “simple negative functions” with which we have come to associate the police – the prevention and suppression of disorder. But on the other hand there appeared those positive techniques for governing the conduct of individuals in the “natural” society, which Foucault described as “the great mechanisms of incentive regulation: the economy, management of the population, et cetera.”61 While Foucault vaguely identified these positive techniques as bio‐power in The History of Sexuality, by the spring of 1978 he had clarified his view of them in terms of governmentality: “Civil society is what governmental thought, the new form of governmentality born in the eighteenth century, reveals as the necessary correlate of the state.”62 Lest anyone think that I have overstated the role of liberalism in Foucault’s account of the development of these governmental techniques, a quick glance ahead to his 1978‐79 course indicates how seriously he took liberalism at this point in his career. In the resume of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault crystallized the distinction he tried to draw in his 1977‐78 course between the police‐friendly environment of Germany and the less hospitable culture of liberalism. The “Polizeiwissenschaft developed by the Germans … ,” he explained, “always subscribed to the principle: One is not paying enough attention, too many things escape one’s control, too many areas lack regulation and supervision, there’s not enough order and administration. In short, one is governing too little.” In contrast, liberalism “resonate[d] with the principle: ‘One always governs too much’ – or, at any rate, one always must suspect that one governs too much.”63 On Foucault’s account, this suspicion of state regulation emerged not out of a fundamental commitment to individual liberty, as neo‐liberals still like to argue, but rather from the idea that there exists a society can be governed through techniques that he will call, in this 1978‐79 course, “biopolitics.” In this course he lectured on Adam Smith and the liberal concepts of homo oeconomicus and civil society,64 but spent most of the course contrasting the very

60 Ibid., 349. 61 Ibid., 354. 62 Ibid., 350. 63 Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol.

1 of The Essential Works of Foucault: 1954‐1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 74.

64 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978‐1979), ed. Michel Senellart. (Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 53‐76, 271‐320. Although the lectures from this course have yet to appear in English, Thomas Lemke offers an overview of them in “’The Birth of Bio‐

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different forms of post‐war neo‐liberalism that developed in Germany and the United States. These lectures are forthcoming in English from Palgrave Macmillan, and their publication will carry Foucault’s illuminating analysis of the relationship between liberalism and governmentality into the twentieth century.

Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo‐Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society, 30, 2 (May 2001): 190‐207.

Foucault Studies

© Michelle Brady 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Helen O’Grady, Woman’s Relationship with Herself: Gender, Foucault, and Therapy (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), ISBN 0415331269 Foucault’s work has been enormously influential in feminist theory on the relationship between normalization and sex/gender; Woman’s Relationship with Herself: Gender, Foucault, and Therapy considers this relationship in the context of personal therapy. Helen O’Grady’s driving question is: “how can personal therapy assist women to counteract practices of self‐policing?” In the first two chapters, she sets out to illustrate the dominance of the practice of self‐policing in the contemporary West, and the relationship between self‐policing and gender. O’Grady’s concept of self‐policing, which she defines as “a range of debilitating internal practices”1 is derived from Foucauldian feminists Jana Sawicki2 and Sandra Lee Bartky3 and Foucault’s Discipline & Punish. For O’Grady the practice of self‐policing involves individuals taking up a range of dominant norms and discourses, such as the norm of femininity, individual autonomy, and individual responsibility, and engaging in an unremitting practice of assessing one’s performance against these norms. Drawing on feminist elaborations of Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, O’Grady argues that a range of socio‐historical forces have resulted in self‐policing being relatively more prevalent among women and comparatively more damaging for them. In part, this is because it helps tie women to norms and practices that “play a key role in maintaining aspects of women’s subordination”.4 At the same time women are “vulnerable to heightened experiences of self‐policing” because of “the absence of a cultural context” that encourages a balance between caring for oneself and caring for others.5 Women are incited to neglect practices of self‐care and to “monitor rigorously their thoughts, feelings, desires, speech and actions to ensure conformity to accepted rules or the approval of others”.6 O’Grady

1 O’Grady, Woman’s Relationship with Herself: 4 2 Jana Sawicki. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, (New York:

Routledge,1991) 3 Sandra Lee Bartky. Femininity and Domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression

(New York & London: Routledge) 4 O’Grady, Woman’s Relationship with Herself, 27 5 Ibid: 31‐2 6 Ibid: 31‐2

Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp 101‐104

argues that processes of normalization cannot be addressed without “addressing powerʹs hold at the intra‐subjective level of womenʹs self‐relations.”7

In the following three chapters, she examines a range of practices that can be used within a therapeutic environment to challenge these intra‐subjective relations, namely practices of self‐policing. Working across a range of literatures including psychology, feminist theory, Foucault’s later works, and feminist critiques of these works, O’Grady draws elements from each that can counter‐act self‐policing and brings these elements together. The wide range of literature from gender studies and psychology that O’Grady brings into conversation with Foucault’s work is a strength of Woman’s Relationship with Herself. Moving back and forth between Foucault’s work and these literatures O’Grady develops practical models and approaches that can be used within a therapeutic environment to counteract self‐policing and thus to challenge limiting gendered, class and ethnic identities.

Foucault’s work informs Woman’s Relationship with Herself in two primary ways. Firstly, O’Grady draws upon his work in Discipline and Punish to establish her argument that self‐policing has “soul destroying effects”. Disciplinary power links individuals to bio‐power through an incitement to internalize “group norms” and to constantly monitor and assess ones own behaviour and performance to determine if it is average, below average and so on.8 This self‐policing “tends to give rise to a strict overseer type of relation to the self which precludes spontaneity and keeps individuals tied to prescribed identities.”9 O’Grady argues that the effects of this self‐policing include “a debilitating type of self‐criticism, unfavourable comparisons with others and personal isolation”.10 Secondly, O’Grady examines Foucault’s analysis of the Hellenistic ethic of caring for the self and the degree to which it provides useful techniques and insights to challenge self‐policing. Although O’Grady ultimately concludes that Foucault’s works on the care of the self provide limited resources for challenging self‐policing, she identifies two significant elements. Firstly, the challenge the Hellenistic ethic of caring for oneself presents to the Western dichotomy of “self –and other – directed care”11 is significant for women whose training in caring for others has frequently “entailed forsaking oneself as a person deserving equal consideration.”12 A second significant element for O’Grady is that this ethics does not take the form of a universal law but involves a particular art of life that requires individuals to develop practical wisdom about how to act in a range of circumstances. O’Grady’s engagement with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish extends the existing Foucauldian feminist literature by analyzing the specific way that psychological therapy or counselling is frequently implicated in perpetuating

7 Ibid: 43 8 Ibid: 19 9 Ibid: 122 10 Ibid: 9 11 Ibid: 83 12 Ibid.

Brady: Review of Woman’s Relationship with Herself

the identities and norms that are prescribed for women. Her engagement with Foucault’s studies on care of the self extends the existing literature by suggesting links between the concepts derived in these studies and feminist work on love and women’s friendship.

Early in Woman’s Relationship with Herself O’Grady defines self‐policing as “a range of debilitating internal practices”13 and for the most part this definition is maintained throughout the text. However, O’Grady wavers in her definition of self‐policing at two points and appears to suggest that any form of self‐monitoring and regulation of ones behaviour and thoughts is self‐policing. For me, this wavering highlights a missed opportunity to engage more deeply with Foucault’s later works on the self and some problems with the concept of ‘self‐policing’ as it is developed in Woman’s Relationship with Herself. The first wavering occurs near the end of the second chapter where O’Grady argues that while Woman’s Relationship with Herself is concerned with

the type of self‐policing practices which give rise to harsh and debilitating relations with the self and which tie women to unwanted or unsatisfactory self‐ understandings there are many self‐policing practices which do not fall into the first category and are of little concern, in terms of their effects. These might include taking reasonable care of oneʹs health to ensure quality of life or behaving in ways that enable one to live in relative harmony with others; there are also useful habituated disciplines such as washing clothes, replenishing food supplies and generally following established procedures for a whole range of mundane activities.14

At the end of the following chapter, O’Grady raises another possible definition of self‐policing. While arguing that the effect of self‐policing and the intensity of self‐policing efforts may vary across women, she concludes that for marginalized groups self‐policing may be an important survival strategy. Self‐policing “can offer self‐protection by helping to detect or predict potentially denigrating or dangerous situations” and “in this sense, self policing can be experienced as empowering.”15 In both cases, O’Grady suggests that any regular systematic monitoring or assessment of one’s behaviour or one’s relationship with others is a form of self‐policing. In the latter case, O’Grady further suggests that practices of self‐policing include practices through which the individual prepares herself to avoid denigrating or dangerous situations. Her analysis in the first two chapters suggests that what distinguishes the “harsh and debilitating” self‐policing that she is concerned with from all other forms of self‐policing is that the former involves the individual regulating her thoughts and actions in relation to singular norms while the latter does not. However, this distinction is only implied. While O’Grady turns to Foucault’s later works in the second half of Woman’s Relationship with Herself, an engagement with these works in the early chapters would have helped to clarify at a conceptual level the specific

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13 Ibid: 4 14 Ibid: 6 15 Ibid: 38

Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp 101‐104

elements that distinguish the forms of self‐policing O’Grady wants to transform from those forms that “are of little concern.”16 In particular, Foucault’s elucidation of the differences between Christian and Hellenistic practices of the self ‐ the Christian practices of self‐renunciation, self‐subordination, and objectification of the self versus the Hellenistic practices of constituting the self, autonomy, and being a true subject ‐ may have been useful in developing this distinction. That, said, the detailed examination of self‐policing in Woman’s Relationship with Herself provides grounds for future feminist engagements on the relationship between normalization and women’s practices of self.

Michelle Brady, University of Alberta

16 Ibid: 6

Foucault Studies

© Cecile Brich 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Brent Pickett, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005). ISBN: 0739109758 This book sets out to offer a new appraisal of Foucault’s political thought, and to demonstrate that aspects of it can be re‐appropriated in support of a liberal democratic position. Although this certainly represents a largely original argument, the present volume fails to lay it out fully and rigorously enough to make it compelling. Three of the five chapters are previously published articles reprinted side by side without substantial further work, so that the resulting patchy ensemble disappointingly lacks the depth and sustained development one might have expected from such a promising book title.

The introduction betrays a startling disregard for nuance and consideration of alternative readings. The author categorically states, for instance, that: ”Because Foucault ignores both the positive and even ambiguous aspects of modernity, his historical narratives lose some of their plausibility. Foucault’s one‐sided description of the West is not an argumentative tactic. It is sincere, as is revealed by the intense loathing of modernity often displayed in his writings” (p.3). Such a loaded and limited interpretation of Foucault’s critique of modernity might be felt by many not to augur a particularly subtle understanding of his politics, and indeed it is sadly followed by more of the same.

The first chapter purportedly reviews Foucault’s writings on power, but focuses rather narrowly on discipline and bio‐power, cursorily running over the best‐known relevant passages of Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Volume I. This, however, by no means functions as a basic introduction to Foucault’s thoughts on power, as key concepts are mostly gestured at rather than explained in any detail. Further, clumsy syntax leaves many logical links unclear to those not already familiar with Foucault’s writings.

The second chapter interestingly attempts to trace the development of notions of resistance through the course of Foucault’s career, and suggests that it can be divided into three phases, covering the Sixties, the early Seventies, and the work from Discipline

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and Punish onwards respectively. While much could have been said about the relationship between transgression and resistance, or the dynamics of power relations and agonism for instance, this chapter is again frustratingly brief, superficial, and yet likely inaccessible to readers relatively new to Foucault’s thought. The term ”agonism” itself is not even defined, nor the context of its use ever hinted at.

In the remainder of the book, the author proposes a distinction between two strands in Foucault’s political pronouncements. One strand, which he labels the ”Postmodern Foucault”, refers to Foucault’s notorious refusal to commit to a set of principles worth defending, or to a political program worth fighting for. In various other statements, however, Foucault does not altogether oppose democratic practices, so that Pickett contends that there also exists a ”Modern Foucault”. However, none of the textual evidence for the latter is quoted at sufficient length to allow the reader instantly to see what Pickett’s argument rests on. The discussion swiftly moves on to the well‐rehearsed reasons why the Postmodern Foucault is thought not to offer a viable basis for any effective resistance movement, while the ”Modern Foucault”, Pickett suggests, is not incompatible with morally‐motivated human agents as drivers of resistance.

The subsequent chapters go on to build on these shaky foundations to speculate about the kind of right that Foucault might have envisaged in his reference to ”the possibility of a new form of right” (“Two Lectures”, Power/Knowledge, p.108). Foucault, however, did not expand on what this new kind of right would involve, so that Pickett has little to go on. Undeterred, he nonetheless offers elaborations on what he sees as the only possible kinds of right that Foucault could have envisaged, only to conclude that ”Foucault’s sketchy proposal for a new form of rights is unworkable” (p.95). Readers who take seriously Foucault’s repeated claims that his writings should not be read as ”a theory” will have little time for such alleged demonstrations of the many failings and lacunae in Foucault’s so‐called ”political program”. While there is much in Foucault’s work that could and should be used, or abused, for politics, it may be argued that its crucial strength is precisely not to be a finite, watertight political strategy, but rather a loose collection of methods to begin to question a potentially infinite number of unacceptable situations.

The concluding chapter attempts to argue that the”Modern Foucault” supports participatory democracy. Based on a rather hasty description of a few references to notions of freedom in Foucault, which are here forcefully interpreted as essentially liberal humanist, Pickett proceeds to argue that Foucault can therefore be read as ”a strong democrat”. Indeed, Pickett intriguingly states, ”The connection between the Foucaultian idea of freedom, as I describe it here, and many forms of positive freedom is that both [sic] require democracy and participation as prerequisites of freedom.” (p.102) On the strength of this somewhat sophistic piece of reasoning, Pickett boldly asserts that his ”Modern Foucault” is in essence a democrat, as indeed ”A strong democratic agenda

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shows more promise for dismantling disciplinary controls” (p.119). Once again, the evidence is scarce, the argument poorly constructed, and the point ultimately unconvincing.

Despite Pickett’s introductory claim that he”will be at pains to provide extensive quotation and citation in support of [his] interpretations” (p.6), the primary texts are rarely quoted, highly subjectively paraphrased, and inadequately referenced. Many central concepts drawn both from Foucault and from other theorists are dropped into the discussion without a hint of introduction or clarification of what Pickett takes them to mean. ”Power relations”, “agonism” or Connolly’s ”slack” are cases in point, where neither gloss nor references are provided. Readers are thus left wondering whether the author’s interpretation of these notions bears any relation to their own understanding. As Pickett’s analysis of Foucault often appears rather idiosyncratic, this lack of basic definition of terms at the outset is unsettling to say the least. Though Pickett’s basic contentions could potentially make a useful contribution to political theory, this book fails to develop its thesis adequately, and the reader is ultimately let down by its loose argumentation, unaccountable logical leaps and frustratingly vague and confusing syntax.

Cecile Brich, Leeds University

Foucault Studies

© David Lee Carlson 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds.), Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). ISBN: 9780754646556. It seems peculiar that a collection of essays on Foucault and space has not appeared in Foucault studies until now. As the editors1 of Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography note, matters of space permeate much of Foucault’s works. This is not your typical edited collection, however. While other edited collections2 have contextually sanitized his works, the editors of this collection highlight the exchange between Foucault and the editors of Hérodote to ground a reconsideration of Foucault’s questions about space and geography. They seek to examine the ways that geographers use Foucault’s ideas, and to ignite and continue a scholarly discussion about how to use Foucault’s notions of space in the present moment. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, they provide scholars with a multi‐faceted toolbox, one that reveals Foucault’s thinking at this time in his life and presents translations of essays written by Foucault and French scholars that were previously unavailable to English audiences, in an array of essays on how to apply Foucault.

If biographies3 are any indication, Foucault’s engagement with the editors of Hérodote warrants merely a footnote in Foucault’s intellectual life. He emerged as a

1 Stuart Elden’s Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London

and New York: Continuum, 2001) and Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) are, in my view, the best books on the topic.

2 A few of the most recent edited collections are: Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard, Michel Foucault and Power Today: International Multidisciplinary Studies in the History of the Present (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), Diana Taylor and Karen Vintges, editors, Feminism and the Final Foucault (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), and Bernadette M. Baker and Katharina E. Heyning, Dangerous Coagulations? The Uses of Foucault in the Study of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

3 Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991) and David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: a Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).

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Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 108-111

public political figure and as a consummate organizer for important causes. Hélène Cixous described Foucault as a “pragmatic person”,4 always looking to be “effective”. 5 Eribon writes that the GIP6 represented a new “intellectual engagement” that focused on the “realities that have gone unnoticed, showing what is intolerable and what it is in an intolerable situation that makes it truly intolerable”.7 It is interesting to note that in addition to prisons, the targets of the GIP included: “courts, cops, hospitals, asylums, school, military service, the press, television, the State”,8 all of which deal with issues of space and geography. For Foucault, to protest against these institutions was not a theoretical exercise, but arose out of a personal desire to contest specific power relations. Throughout most of his life, and certainly in the 1970s, Foucault participated in political movements, and linked his intellectual work with a materialism that sought to expose everyday power struggles and their intolerable effects.

The vital link between Foucault’s political projects and his works does not go unnoticed in this book. The book begins with newly translated versions of Foucault’s questions to the editors of Hérodote and their responses to him, all of which took place in 1976. In brief, the questions focused on the questions of whether power as strategy implies war, whether geographers constitute their knowledge as a science, and how they conceive of power. While many of their answers seem to be aligned with Foucault’s, the addition of space to knowledge and power is useful. For example, the editors of Hérodote assert in their response to Foucault’s questions that while there is no fluid whole to power, strategy involves the topography of the “knowing‐how‐to think‐space”.9 Moreover, Brabant argues in response to Foucault’s question about power that “what characterizes power is the way that its internal complexity goes hand in hand with a multiform intervention on the place of space”’,10 Racine and Raffestin state in response to Foucault’s question about science that “Geographers no longer begin with science, but with ‘popular knowledge’”, in order to “produce a counter‐discourse of possible alternatives”.11 The purpose of doing so, they contend, is to allow for more “democratic control” over the “production of their space”, which, in their view, is the

4 Eribon, Michel Foucault, 230. 5 Ibid., 230. 6 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. 7 Eribon, Michel Foucault, 234. 8 Ibid., 224. 9 Crampton and Elden, Space, Knowledge and Power,24. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., 32. 12 Ibid., 32. 13 Ibid., 133. 14 Ibid., 24.

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“sole criteria [sic] of truth”.12 Thinking of discourses, action, and knowledge within and throughout spaces can be a very useful way to look at Foucault’s works.

The section “The Anglo Responses” focuses on the way in which scholars have used or could use Foucault’s ideas within certain fields of study. The editors begin appropriately enough with an essay by David Harvey, whose “Social Justice and the City” (1973) represented a shift in the field of geography from quantitative and “law‐finding” analysis to a “political account”. No doubt, as the editors point out, this was largely the result of the political unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Harvey’s “The Kantian Roots in Foucault’s Dilemmas” criticizes Foucault for upholding a Kantian view of absolute space and time, or, perhaps more specifically, for not developing a “critical theory” of space and time prior to the interview with Hérodote. Raffestin’s “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography?” posits a different view of the relationship between Foucault’s ideas and the field of geography. He asserts that the lack of interest in and use of Foucault’s work is less due to Foucault’s lack of articulation than the field’s insistence on stability and certainty. He states,” The geographical gaze is self‐conditioned by a canonical tradition that finds legitimation in itself, without realizing that these practices are at fault”.13 They are “at fault” because they refuse to utilize the “elliptical” movement between the philosophy of relations and the philosophy of the object, where the “relations determine the object, and only what is determined exists”.14 Mill’s “Geography, Gender and Power” describes how feminist linguists and geographers understand Foucauldian power, arguing that spatial arrangements determine and are determined by a “consciousness” of appropriateness and effectiveness. Using the confessional as an example, she asserts that space, power and knowledge emerge together to resolve specific, local problems. Thrift’s “Overcome by Space: Reworking Foucault” exposes four “blind‐spots” of Foucault’s political project, arguing that scholars should consider utilizing Foucault’s interest in care of the self in order to construct “social‐cum‐spatial” associations that would expand our understanding of ourselves. The final essay in this section is perhaps the most useful in terms of explicating Foucault’s notion of power as strategy and how it relates to knowledge. Thomas Flynn’s “Foucault Among the Geographers” responds directly to each of the questions Foucault posed in Hérodote. What makes this chapter so effective is Flynn’s ability to weave in current material with Foucault’s ideas. He makes the important distinction between power situations and power institutions, a point that

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seems to get lost in much of the scholarship on power, where writers rely on the “power is everywhere”15 mantra. This book challenges scholars in Foucault studies to reconsider how they engage with his ideas. Contextualizing Foucault reminds us that he was continually responding to and contesting the socio‐political affairs of his time, all of which directly informed his works. While Foucault may be used as an explanatory lens to revisit previous historical moments (see Crampton’s “Maps, Race and Foucault: Eugenics and Teritorialization Following World War I”), and exegetical work to parcel and position Foucault within a larger field of study (see Huxley’s “Geographies of Governmentality”), the section that contextualizes Foucault’s works (part 4 ) illustrates how his ideas become realized when they are applied to current situations, specifically in Kerns’s “The History of Medical Geography after Foucault”, Howell’s “Foucault, Sexuality, Geography”, and Coleman and Agnew’s “The Problem with Empire”. Wood’s post‐surveillance essay provides a brilliant analysis of the various theories of power beyond panopticonism. His push to utilize Action‐Network Theory (ANT) , while may not be the most “comprehensive” iteration of a post‐Foucauldian conception of power, seems to be a very practical way to look at how practices and discourses of surveillance intrude on our everyday lives. In addition, he is correct to assert that not every matrix of power is the panopticon recreated, and that using other theories of networks and relations that may be linked to Foucault’s understanding of power can help us to complete critiques of social institutions and cultural products. In the end, those who are even remotely interested in Foucault will find this book to be most helpful in their scholarly pursuits. The book provides us with a stronger, more in‐depth analysis of Foucault’s concept of power, specifically focusing on power as strategy, and the relationship between space and epistemology. The editors successfully demonstrate that Foucault had a profound interest in space, and that it played a vital role throughout much of his work. Perhaps most important is that the book flows as smoothly as a conversation, placing Foucault as an interlocutor across time/spaces, providing scholars with additional avenues for future research. It also reminds us that Foucault was a scholar‐activist and that his personal and political activities informed and directed his works and ideas, work and ideas that should continue to motivate those who choose to use his multifaceted collection of tools.

Dr. David Lee Carlson, Arizona State University

15 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978), 93.

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REVIEW Shelley Tremain (ed.), Foucault and the Government of Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005). ISBN 0‐472‐06876‐8 The essays that comprise Foucault and the Government of Disability represent a cross‐disciplinary approach to writing Michel Foucault into the burgeoning cross‐disciplinary field of “disability studies.” The book is divided into four sections: Epistemologies and Ontologies, Histories, Governmentalities, and Ethics and Politics. While “no one model, doctrine, or vocabulary with respect to disability governs the essays,” two major themes from Foucault’s work run more or less constantly throughout the book.1 First, the essays offer a critique, implicitly or explicitly, of the governmentality of disability, specifically its neo‐liberal modalities, and the legal and political distinction made in the U.K. between “disability” and “impairment.” Second, following Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the essays explore the related theme of power in late‐capitalist societies, examining, with varying degrees of success, the ways in which the individual subject becomes complicit in the functioning of power—implicating the individual in the very processes of power that serve to control and delimit acts and behaviors, as well as the very possibilities of agency, identity, and perceived reality.

At their best, these articles convince by uncovering and describing specific circumstances whereby individuals submit to and/or resist forms of disciplinary control within concrete practices of subjectification. Just as often, however, these articles fail to substantiate their initial claims made along the lines of this most important of Foucault’s themes, and the arguments devolve into crypto‐Marxian critiques that push the limits of Foucault’s conceptualization of power and resistance.

Given that Foucault himself dealt directly with the histories of “feeblemindedness” and “idiocy,” as well as medical, psychological, and biological deviation in general, some might be surprised that Foucauldian analyses of this kind are not already firmly entrenched in the study of disability. Yet, with a handful notable

1 Shelley Tremain, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critical Disability Theory: An Introduction,”

Foucault and the Government of Disability, p. 13.

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exceptions (such as Bernadette Baker’s work on “ableist normativity” in education22), given the ostensible appropriateness of his theory to this subject, Foucault is conspicuously under‐represented. The best articles in this collection represent an important, prescient, and necessary contribution both to the study of disability and to the study of Foucault—a kind of litmus test for the efficacy of Foucault’s concepts in the study of disability, concepts that lead to a refusal of the biological essentialism implied in the disability/impairment binary.

Many will conclude that Foucault’s absence in disability studies is owed to the tenuous political rights afforded to those with disabilities; along these lines, in this collection, Bill Hughes calls into question the efficacy of the Foucauldian conceptualization of the body—which he characterizes as non‐materialist—to meeting the imperative to “improve the circumstances of disabled people’s lives.”3 Rebutting the skepticism of Hughes and others relative to putting aside the more established and ostensibly more materialist critique responsible for activating the current identity politics, many essays argue that the implicit dangers of the problematic ontological assumptions involved in identity politics are already evident in concrete practices, policies, and laws.

Beginning with Shelley Tremain’s introduction, the authors in this volume convincingly show how this identity politics reinscribes the subject within the transcendental norm of the “able body”—an evocation at least as binding as it is liberating. Within the loose confederation of scholarship comprising the increasingly popular field of “disability studies,” these convincing responses to the old paradigm of understanding disability reveal that there is a sea change occurring in the critical understanding of disability. Foucault has finally arrived.

“Inclusive Education for Exclusive Pupils,” by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, represents the very best of what this book, and Foucauldian scholarship in general, has to offer to the field; while remaining loyal to a distinctly Foucauldian project, this essay is at the same time forward‐looking and profound, picking up where Foucault left off with a careful and deliberate analysis of our subjectification that contextualizes our contemporary situation. Specifically, this article explores the shift from a modernist discourse on disability, characterized by normalization and exclusion, to a contemporary discourse characterized by the “entrepreneurial self” and compulsory inclusion.

Simons and Masschelein show that “this individual with needs and entrepreneurial freedom is not one who ‘naturally’ appears when segregation and

2 See Bernadette Baker, “The Hunt for Disability: The New Eugenics and the Normalization of

School Children,” Teachers College Record. 104 (4): 663‐704, June 2002. 3 Bill Hughes, “What Can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” in FGD, p. 78.

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normalization are resolved, and inclusive education is established.” “To the contrary,” the authors continue, “the ‘individual’ of the discourse on inclusion is an effect, or product of that discourse and the neo‐liberal forms of governmentality with which it correlates.”4 In short, the authors argue that the new rationality of inclusion is based on a particular conceptualization of the relation of the individual to society, where the entrepreneurial nature of the subject (individualization) is a common property that is doubled in the community (totalization), forming a “double bond” based on the production of a new “true nature of human beings.”

In other words, a new governmentality appears in the production of a new kind of human nature—a human nature no longer referenced to a norm of corporeal ability achieved through compensation, but to a norm of rational‐economic choice based on an ability to participate. In these terms, disability differs from normality only by degree of need—that is, the same kind of choosing entrepreneurial identity is germane to the disabled subject, only he/she requires more from the school to construct/fulfill this identity—rather than kind (e.g., abnormal, deviant, etc.).

Ultimately, the authors show how this double bond ironically “immunizes” the individual from various social obligations by establishing a new kind of governmentality through transparent rules, contracts, and exchanges that define what individuals in an inclusive society should and do have in common—namely, “communicated skills, enterprising capacities, and the ability to define and agree up on a common good.”5 They point out that this emergent rationality of inclusion creates a new kind of double bond of governmentality between the individual and society, one that, although different from the previous regime of normalization, “shared values,” and exclusion, nevertheless entails a new kind of “totalization” of the normal individual.

Julie Allen, on the other hand, draws different conclusions about the new rationality of inclusion. Arguing from the starting point that the “individual has a right to belong to society and its institutions,” Allen postulates that the project of inclusion is necessarily an ethical project that will require “major structural and attitudinal changes and a fundamental shift away from the deficit‐oriented thinking that has for so long driven educational practices.”6 While less successful using Foucauldian concepts than Simond and Masschelein—Allen’s interpretation of Foucault’s “ethics” seems at points interchangeable with Foucault’s “archaeology,” or critical examination in general7—the

4 Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, “Inclusive Education for Exclusive Pupils: A Critical

Analysis of the Government of the Exceptional,” in FGD, p. 220. 5 Ibid., p. 222. 6 Julie Allan, “Inclusion as an Ethical Project,” in FGD, p. 282. 7 For example, “To pursue a mode of subjection in relation to inclusive educational practice, the

academic might attempt to unravel the existing misconceptions about inclusion and problematize

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author nevertheless makes a convincing case that a successful shift to an inclusionist mentality must necessarily entail new ethical relations.

Where these articles grapple primarily with theory, other articles present case studies cast in Foucault’s terms. Martin Sullivan’s “Subjected Bodies” explores how the rehabilitation of paraplegics (re)produces a body based on function and a docile and self‐governing productive subject. The author shows, for example, that the disciplinary standardization of bowel evacuation and other such bodily processes is reinforced by a concept of “self‐neglect,” so that anyone who does not “buy‐in” to the institutions’ regimens based on the objectification of the functional body, in the ethical framework of peers, medical staff, and self, is seen as “just plain lazy, incompetent, a no‐hoper, wants attention, can’t hack it, [is] giving up.”8 At the same time, resistance to these objectifying regimens is common, and is “as much about the rejection of authoritarianism as it is about stating corporeal ownership….”9

Similarly, in analyzing the impairment/disability binary written into British law, Fiona Kumari Campbell conceives of “legitimate” identity as a kind of self‐ownership, bent on maximizing returns, by showing that “The formulations of disability that disability activists often engage, and which are enshrined in disability‐related law, in effect discursively entrench and thus reinscribe the very oppressive ontological figurings of disability that many of us would like to escape.”10 Ontological concepts of citizenship, Campbell finds, are thoroughly invested in an idea of freedom that is isomorphic with a certain kind of enterprising autonomy—“The ‘free’ citizen is one who can take charge of herself, that is, act as her own command center.”11 Ultimately, however, rather than exploring the ostensibly complicated relationship between disabled subjects, productivity, and discrimination claims, Campbell settles on the more basic point that claims of discrimination tend to reinscribe sanctioned or reified subject positions.

But where some articles succeed in giving concrete examples where governmentality works at the level of individual agency, others are lacking. “Docile Bodies, Docile Minds,” by Licia Carlson, is a “history” of mental retardation that begins with early iterations of “feeblemindedness.” For example, Carlson argues at one point

what is known about special education by questioning the so‐called scientific foundations of our knowledge,” seems to confuse Foucault’s “mode of subjection” (mode d’assujettissement), one of his four aspects of the ethical “relationship to self” (rapport à soi), with Foucault’s archaeology.

8 Ibid, p. 38. 9 Martin Sullivan, “Subjected Bodies: Paraplegia, Rehabilitation, and the Politics of Movement,” in

FGD, p. 40. 10 Fiona Kumari Campbell, “Legislating Disability: Negative Ontologies and the Government of Legal

Identities,” in FGD, p. 113. 11 Ibid., p. 111.

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that the emergence of the modern developmental subject (specifically, the emergence of “idiocy”) reflects a historical turn from a qualitative to quantitative subject. However, for Foucault, modern knowledge was not constituted at a moment where knowledge turned from the “visible” to the “invisible,” the “qualitative” to the “quantitative,” but through radical reorganizations of the empirical fields that constitute these binaries in the first place. By the end of the article, when the author states “One important Foucauldian avenue that merits further exploration is the relevance of ‘genealogy’ to a critical examination of retardation,”12 we seem to be left with more questions than we started with.

While some articles simply misinterpret Foucault on certain points, others come to conclusions that, while perhaps interesting, are not particularly Foucauldian. For example, “Who is Normal? Who is Deviant?” looks at the phenomenon of genetic counseling, making the point that we have moved from a “normativity” based on social norms, depicted here as juridical, “rule‐governed,” social norms, to a “normalism” based on statistics, “especially over the past three decades.”13 While I agree that there is something different that characterizes the operation of the norm in the last thirty years, certainly positing such a recent movement away from a distinctly juridical form of power does not accord with a Foucauldian chronology. In any event, Foucault scholars will hardly find revelation in the statement that “Normality—that seems to be the central buzzword of our time.”14 And when Jane Berger concludes in “Uncommon Schools” that “The spread of markets and the concomitant shifts in the patterns of production that accompanied the rise of capitalism led … to a new definition of independence in the late eighteenth‐and early nineteenth‐centuries,” she may well be correct, but the clear implications of economic causation do not rest easily in a Foucauldian analysis.15

These misinterpretations and fuzzy uses of Foucault’s terms add up. “Foucault on the Phone” simultaneously agrees and disagrees with Foucault’s critique of power; while superficially discrediting the concept of disability as a “static, biologically originating deficit,” the authors ultimately settle on the idea that a Foucauldian analysis is intrinsically limited in understanding disability because “the stark realities of living with disability entail an experience of power as direct and unidirectional, rather than

12 Ibid., p. 148. 13 Anne Waldschmidt, “Who is Normal? Who is Deviant? ‘Normality’ and ‘Risk’ in Genetic

Diagnostics and Counseling,” in FDS, p. 195. 14 Ibid., p. 191. 15 Jane Berger, “Uncommon Schools: Institutionalizing Deafness in Early‐Nineteenth‐Century

America,” in FDS, p. 14.

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indirect and diffuse.”16 And yet, the assertion that the disabled face everyday discriminations and exclusions—in this case, the authors cite the lack of representation of the disabled in telecommunications policy—hardly precludes, ipso facto, Foucauldian analysis. But per Foucault, one is left to wonder who, exactly, is committing this “direct” oppressive act, and why. And when the authors conclude that “If the needs and aspirations of people with disabilities were better understood … the technology would have been more accessible from the outset, and the corporations that produce it would have faced a better outlook in terms of their finances,” they seem to fall back on the very kind of biological essentialisms that they initially discredit.

Despite the fact that all of these articles work from a Foucauldian perspective, they represent an impressive array of scholarly approaches. Ranging from theoretical work to field research, the articles also cut a wide swath of topics, from the history of “human oddities” as entertainment, to contemporary sports stadium architecture. However, while evidencing the potential of a dynamic Foucauldian framework to address a variety of problems, these essays also vary greatly in their quality.

Edward Comstock, American University

16 Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell, “Foucault on the Phone: Disability and the Mobility of

Government,” in FGD, p. 273.

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REVIEW C. G. Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ISBN: 0521671337. In Searle and Foucault on Truth, C. G. Prado continues the efforts at a rapprochement between Continental and analytic philosophy begun in his earlier works, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy1 and A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy.2 In Starting with Foucault, Prado’s audience is comprised of analytic philosophers who, with few exceptions, have largely dismissed Foucault, considering him not to be a philosopher at all, much less one who has anything of value to say to them about philosophical theories of truth and knowledge.3 Accordingly, that work offers an introduction to Foucault via his genealogical texts with a focus on Foucault’s ideas on truth, knowledge, the subject, and rationality and, moreover, how they are products of power relations. By specifically developing Foucault’s positions on truth and realism, Prado’s aim is to disabuse analytic philosophers of the idea that Foucault’s work is “hopelessly relativistic and irrealistic.”4 In Searle and Foucault on Truth, Prado stays with the related themes of truth and realism, except that now he narrows his focus to a specific comparison between Foucault’s views and those of analytic philosopher John Searle. As such, the present work is a “study in contrast,” since Prado seeks to compare what he considers to be “two radically opposed conceptions of truth.”5 His objective is to demonstrate that the contrasting views on truth are tied together by the role that realism plays in each and, moreover, that a 1 C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

1995). 2 C. G. Prado, A House Divided: Comparing Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Amherst, NY:

Humanity Books, 2003). 3 One should also look at Linda Martín Alcoff’s Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), which also engages both analytic and Continental philosophers on similar themes of truth and knowledge. See especially chapters 4 and 5 on Foucault.

4 Prado, Starting with Foucault, 5. 5 C. G. Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.


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dispute over realism is not a sufficient reason for the split between analytic and Continental philosophy, as some have taken it to be. The book is divided into five chapters. In chapter one, Prado clearly sets out the two conceptions of truth that he compares throughout the work. The chapter also includes a useful background discussion on the problem of truth, the challenge posed by relativism to objectivist views of truth, common problems with the correspondence theory of truth, as well as a contrast of analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of canon, methodology, and each tradition’s conception of the nature of philosophy. Chapters two and three respectively serve as introductions to the oeuvres of Searle and Foucault, a strategy that is quite useful given that few readers of Foucault are familiar with Searle’s work and vice versa.6 Chapter two on Searle provides critical discussions of his work on language, mind, and social reality, while importantly showing the interconnections between these various domains and the guiding importance of realism that connects these areas. Chapter three initially presents an overview of and context for Foucault’s writings as well as a section on archeology, but then focuses on Foucault’s genealogical texts and what Prado discerns as five distinct uses of the concept of truth in Foucault’s work. 7 Finally, in chapters four and five, Prado further develops the contrasting positions on truth and realism. The remainder of this review focuses on the main points of Prado’s comparison of the respective positions of Searle and Foucault on truth and realism.

According to Prado, the two conceptions of truth are essentially differentiated by the role that extralinguistic reality plays in each. In Searle’s view, what Prado calls the relational conception, truth is dependent on extralinguistic states of affairs, that is, sentences are “made true by how things are in the world.”8 According to Foucault’s position, what Prado calls the discursive‐currency or currency conception, truth is internal to discourse and, as such, is not dependent on some relation to extralinguistic reality.9 Instead of reference to “how things are in the world,” this position maintains that truth is “a property attributed to expressions sanctioned by contextual and historical linguistic‐practice criteria.”10 The significant contribution Prado purports to make is demonstrating that the currency conception, despite what is commonly thought, does not necessarily entail a rejection of realism, that is, it is not necessarily irrealist or linguistic idealist in nature. Prado argues that Searle and Foucault, despite defending

6 Readers of this journal seeking further introduction to Searle’s work are referred to his Mind,

Language and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 7 For this discussion, see Prado, Searle and Foucault, 81–100. 8 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 219. 9 To avoid the baggage associated with the common names of these positions, the correspondence

theory and constructivism respectively, Prado prefers to refer to them in this way. 10 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 3.

DeAngelis: Review of Searle and Foucault on Truth

different conceptions of truth, are both “realist in nature and commitment.”11 Importantly, Prado’s goal is not a synthesis of the respective positions but, rather, is a demonstration of the differences in how each is a realist.

Though both Searle and Foucault, then, on Prado’s account, are realists, one source of confusion is that Searle explicitly avows and defends his commitment to direct or external realism, whereas Foucault only reveals his realism in passing dismissals of idealism. For example, Searle will unabashedly claim that the “world (or, alternatively, reality or the universe) exists independently of our representations of it,”12 whereas Foucault only infrequently rejects irrealism, such as when he explains that a discursive analysis of truth “does not mean that there is nothing there and that everything comes out of somebody’s head.”13 The confusion, Prado claims, results from the fact that Searle’s realism and relational conception of truth are tightly connected, as I will soon discuss, whereas Foucault’s discursive‐currency conception of truth is largely indifferent to realism, that is, the currency conception of truth is in theory compatible with linguistic idealism, despite Foucault not being an irrealist himself.14

Prado demonstrates that Searle’s relational conception of truth— that sentences are made true by how things are in the world—is a result of his realism.15 He explains that for Searle, “realism is a condition of intelligibility,”16 that is, each member of a “large class of utterances … requires for its intelligibility a publicly accessible reality.”17 Realism as an “intelligibility‐condition” is not an underlying assumption or philosophical position that Searle defends; rather, it is closely connected to the notion of the “Background” that he develops in his philosophy of mind. He defines the “Background” as a “set of nonrepresentational mental capacities that enable all representing to take place.”18 Prado explains that “Realism is a fundamental Background factor for Searle; [it] is an integral element of our thought and awareness … it is a defining component of the nonintentional and nonrepresentational capacities that enable us to represent, manipulate, move about in, and talk and think about our environment and ourselves.”19 Given this view of realism as an “inescapable precondition of representation,” Searle maintains that a relational conception of truth is

11 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 3. 12 Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 150. 13 Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault,

ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 17. 14 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 25–26. 15 For the main discussion of Searle’s conception of truth, see Prado, Searle and Foucault, 55–65. 16 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 26. 17 Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 190. 18 John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999), 143. Also, see Prado, Searle and Foucault, 38–50. 19 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 26.

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“grounded in [an] intuitive understanding of truth as an accurate depiction of states of affairs.”20 Thus, for Searle, there is a tight connection between his relational conception of truth and the realism from which his view of truth emerges.

Prado explains, however, that for Foucault realism is not the starting point for an analysis of truth; rather, truth, or more accurately “the production of truth,”21 is the starting point of Foucault’s analysis. Whereas for Searle the starting point is that “the world is as it is” and, subsequently, that “truth is getting it right,”22 Foucault’s starting point is that we are “subjected to the production of truth through power.”23 The task of his analysis, then, is not explaining how true sentences relate to the world but determining how power24 produces discourses of truth through “a complex enabling and limiting of discursive actions,” that is, by determining “what may and may not be uttered.”25 What to some seems to be the “initially paradoxical view” that extralinguistic states of affairs are placed to the side in analyses of truth is made quite reasonable by Prado’s explanation that Foucault’s starting concern is not realism, but the production of truth. As such, analyses need not give an account of how true sentences relate to how things are in the world outside of language but, rather, “how some sentences come to circulate as they do, to be regularly exchanged, and others fail to become or cease to be current.”26 Although Foucault’s position is seemingly a linguistic or discursive idealism, it is one of Prado’s main goals to demonstrate that “Foucault’s realism is tacit;” that is, “he does not deny extralinguistic reality explicitly or by implication.”27 Prado stresses that Foucault’s position is “not [a] denial of the world,” but contra Searle and others, “it is an assertion that extralinguistic reality plays no epistemic role in the determination of what is deemed to be true or to constitute knowledge,” in other words, “it is not the determinant of currency in discourse.”28 Therein lies the main similarity and difference between Searle and Foucault on Prado’s reading. Both are realists, yet, when it comes to conceptions of truth, for Searle, extralinguistic reality plays the pivotal role in determining the truth of sentences, whereas for Foucault, “truth is not about how things are beyond discourse,” but rather, “what goes on in discourse.”29 That is, questions

20 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 26. 21 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 27. 22 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 27. 23 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972‐1977, ed. Colin

Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 93. 24 For Prado’s discussion of power in Foucault, see Searle and Foucault, 79–81. 25 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 27, 76. 26 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 27. 27 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 28. For the main discussion of Foucault’s “tacit realism,” see 96–98. 28 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 29, 98–99. 29 Prado, Searle and Foucault, 28.

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about truth are questions about the historical developments of discursive practices, past and present.30

Cogently argued throughout, Prado’s book puts two important representatives of analytic and Continental philosophy in conversation on significant ontological and epistemological problems surrounding the concepts of truth and realism. In his analysis, Prado is critical of both Foucault and Searle, bringing out the strengths and weakness of both positions, while at the same time showing at what points they converge and diverge. Although Prado should be praised for avoiding the temptation of providing an unlikely synthesis of contrasting positions, some readers will inevitably feel that his project is limited by his ultimate refusal to come down on the side of one position or the other. Yet, given his aim of reconciliation between analytic and Continental philosophy, this potential weakness is also part of the book’s strength in that it challenges both positions in interesting and useful ways. In any case, Prado’s efforts are commendable in his continued attempts to engage Foucault with philosophers across the Continental–analytic “divide” and, as such, the book is an important contribution to Foucaultian scholarship.

Peter DeAngelis, The University of Memphis

30 This is the task of genealogy. For Prado’s discussion of genealogy, see Searle and Foucault, 76–81.

Also, see Starting with Foucault.

Foucault Studies

© Sébastien Malette 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Sergei Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). ISBN: 0754649083 Through an (un)faithful reconstruction of Foucault’s ontology of freedom involving authors like Schmitt, Deleuze, Agamben, Negri and Zizek, Sergei Prozorov proposes a daring return to the ‘sovereign subject’ as an epitome of freedom. (Un)faithful here does not necessarily mean ill‐advised: Prozorov does not reclaim a central position for the sovereign subject, but rather claims a position for a subject which reasserts itself at the limit of every political order as the paradigm of the subject of freedom. In clear terms, the project of this book can be summarised as an attempt to liberate a concrete experience of freedom through an engagement with Foucault’s philosophy, which, according to the author, allows us to conceptualize freedom as an ontological condition of human being rather than as an attribute of social order. The main argument of Prozorov is simple: if one wants to think freedom freely, one must resist ‘the temptation to fix its meaning and define the possibilities of its practice by locating it within a form of order, real or imaginary, practical or theoretical, possible or impossible’ (p. 17). Being Foucaldian has therefore more to do with the liberating experience of the movement of thought toward its own freedom, than with the fidelity to particular concepts, postulates, identities or orthodoxy.

Structurally, this book is divided into six chapters. The first part of the book (chapters 1‐3) establishes the locus of concrete freedom at the opening of the Deleuzian ‘diagram’, which ruptures its self‐immanence to reveal the figure of the subject as a concept which is primary to any historical ontology of truth, power and ethics. The first chapter addresses the question of whether a Foucaldian freedom is possible. According to the author, ‘the exclusion of Foucault from the discourse on freedom rests on his critics’ demand for a number of presuppositions that are allegedly necessary to ground a meaningful concept of freedom’ (p. 27). What is usually demanded of Foucault is a set of universal and normative criteria in terms of which a freer society can be posed. For Prozorov, such demands are more concerned with the establishment of a ‘perfect order’ than with freedom itself, an obsession that often overlooks the stakes and dangers involved in the politics of the global promotion of a specific liberal ideal of freedom. Although governmentality studies are praised for

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highlighting these dangers, the author remains equally critical of their tendency to reduce freedom to an immanent property of a specific diagram of power relations, and consequently to a positivity whose content is historically variable. What is therefore needed is a concept of freedom irreducible to any social order, but implicated in every project of its transformation, a concept of freedom capable of contesting the very process of the operation whereby the act of power implicated in the formation of any diagram is subsequently justified as ‘liberation’.

The second chapter attempts to portray this concept of freedom. It is not a search for a deeper stratum of free subjectivity that would precede all governmental processes of subjectification. It is rather an investigation of the diagrammatic plane to see whether something might escape its operation. This investigation leads the author to draw an ontological inside/outside distinction which allows the reader to understand the irreducible presence of resistance as a constitutive feature of human beings. For Prozorov, this irreducible presence reveals itself through acts and moments of transgression which generate an irruption of transcendence within the immanence of the diagrammatic plane. In short, freedom no longer appears as something a certain governmental diagram can guarantee through its positive intervention or commitment to non‐intervention, but rather as the result of the ontological impossibility for the diagram to achieve the degree of closure and stability that it purports to ensure. Here Prozorov carefully distinguishes his conception of freedom from Berlin’s negative liberty. The author suggests that Berlin’s negative liberty is not an opening of the diagram into the outside. It is rather a delimited and guaranteed space of possibility that becomes ipso facto restricted by its own governmentality, in much the same way as positive freedoms are. The Foucaldian ontology of freedom, which allegedly resists any positive specification or determinate identity, appears therefore as a more fitting example of a properly negative freedom.

The third chapter describes this ‘properly negative freedom’ by dissociating Foucault’s ontology of freedom from every form of identity politics. The author suggests that all forms of identity politics are heterogeneous to the practice of concrete freedom, insofar as they are tied to the language of positivity, the assumption of authenticity and the articulation of freedom with knowledge. Prozorov’s argument is not to be mistaken for the post‐modern attitude that conceives of identity as always in question, perpetually in the process of contestation and reconstruction. It is rather an invitation to de‐problematize identity, admit not knowing who we really are, and renounce all interest in such knowledge. Such disinvestment from identity politics comes with the realisation of one’s fundamental non‐identity with oneself, the ontological negativity that renders impossible even one’s own identity. This is not to say that there is no subject. On the contrary, the subject for Prozorov is precisely the being which is ‘beside its own diagrammatic identity’, a being which indicates through its persisting resistance to any form of enclosure that what is at stake in the affirmation of freedom is not identity or

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authenticity, but rather the human potentiality of being otherwise. Against the diagrammatic injunction to a positively specified identity that one must enact to be endowed with subjectivity, the locus of concrete freedom is therefore the subject understood here as this ‘being beside itself that is both actual and potential at the same time’, not as a mere antonym of power, but rather as a force which always presupposes ‐‐ and does not negate ‐‐ the intimate and irreducible power to be or not to be. The second part of the book (chapters 4‐6) repositions Foucault’s properly negative freedom as a political tool to resist biopolitical governmentality. To do so, the fourth chapter links Foucault’s ontology of concrete freedom and Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty on the basis of their alleged metaphysical disposition to locate the condition of possibility of order in the founding rupture of the exception. For Prozorov, it is in the interstice of Foucault’s poststructuralism and Schmitt’s political realism that we may draw the relation between the diagram and its sovereign foundation in terms of freedom. The author suggests that Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty restores the transcendence of the political as a force of disruption of the illusion of the self‐immanence of social order. As such, sovereignty is described as the ‘Other of order’ because of its potentiality to transgress what it establishes through the sovereign act of making the exception. In sum, ‘being free’ for Prozorov is to ‘be sovereign’ over one’s existence against all attempts to seize it and reduce it to a positive project; and, conversely, ‘being sovereign’ ‘is nothing other than being free to pursue one’s potentiality for being against all attempts to freeze this potentiality in all actual identity’ (p. 100).

Building on this description of ‘sovereign freedom’, Prozorov criticises both Agamben’s (chapter 5) and Hardt and Negri’s (chapter 6) treatment of biopower. The author argues that both approaches ‐‐ although in different ways ‐‐ are marked by the conflation of sovereign and biopolitical modalities of power. On the one hand, Prozorov charges Agamben with generating an improbable image of power relations as unchanging throughout human history. The author argues that the dissociation of sovereign and biopolitical modalities of power allows us instead to keep both the appreciation of the historical mutability of power relations, and the affirmation of sovereignty as the formal condition of concrete freedom, not as an order which is imposed on ‘bare life’ from the exterior, but rather as a condition of ‘bare life’, which is always already in a position of sovereignty over itself. On the other hand, Prozorov denounces Hardt and Negri’s conflation of immanence and autonomy as being too compliant with biopolitical rationalities. The author claims that without a clear distinction marking the externalisation we need in order to resist biopolitical rationalities of power, the Multitude will for the most part reproduce the undesirable features of biopolitics. Resistance should therefore ‘abandon its fixation on the figure of the sovereign and instead take the form of the refusal of the care’ which is allegedly inherent in biopolitical rationalities of government (p. 111). In sum,

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resistance should be an attitude of indifference not so much to the threat of power, but rather to its loving embrace; it should not be directed toward repossessing biopolitics from an external control, but rather toward a refusal of biopolitical production as such.

Combining both approaches for what they offer best, the author concludes by suggesting that to become a ‘singular‐universal’ subject of resistance to biopolitical investment, the Multitude should be rethought as an aggregate of equal subjects of freedom whose singular resistance is driven by their common feature of being ‘beside their diagrammatic identity’, which, in turn, precisely reveals another human commonality that takes the form of a ‘bare life’ condition, capable of asserting its own sovereignty by stripping itself of all identitarian or positive determination (p. 136). Thinking resistance and freedom in such manner, it is argued, should lead us to abandonment of all valorisation of production, and thus to a greater enjoyment of a purely negative freedom consisting of ‘being against’ (p. 137). Of course, the present review does not render the subtlety of the arguments deployed by the author, as well as his brilliant ability to articulate some of the most challenging questions on such topics as freedom, identity and sovereignty. Yet, despite all its success, readers might question what appears to be Prozorov’s own conflation of biopolitical with pastoral power in Foucault’s work. It is common knowledge that biopolitics now operates through the distance provided by numbers ‐‐ not identity ‐‐ in order to rationalise their normative and securing activities over populations. The whispering promise of the shepherd is therefore no longer required to generate the state of exception when one sheep goes astray. Numbers now provide the regulation as well as the state of exception without any need for strange dialectical contortion. In fact, those involved in the mathematical capture of ‘bare life’ could not care less about its embodiment through the figure of a ‘sovereign subject’. As long as the negative desires of the ‘elusive subject’ can be converted into numbers through their actualisation, Zizek and other philosophers are in fact more than welcome to ruminate over some transcendental negativity and symbolic (re)creation of the subject.

Readers might also question the motive behind the project of Prozorov. Why are we so anxious ‐‐ at least since Kant ‐‐ to determinate the a priori conditions for us to genuinely resist? More intriguingly, why does Prozorov return to categories like transcendentalism and immanentism when it comes to define freedom? Haven’t we read the epistemological tango described by Foucault at the end of The Order of Things to understand that such dualism is precisely the modern condition we should try to overcome? To be fair, such an attempt at overcoming can be read in the Prozorovian definition of the subject of freedom as this being which is both actual and potential at the same time. Unfortunately, it is often unclear if the author refers to the logical possibility for the subject ‘to be or not to be’ when he uses the term ‘potentiality’ (which implies either the termination of potentiality as such or its

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passage into actualisation), or if he refers to the subject’s capacity of becoming other than what s/he is (which implies the possibility of switching from a state of being to another within the subject’s potentiality of becoming). Finally, the radical disjunction made by the author between the freedom available within a regime of governmentality and the freedom to leave that regime altogether may appear more than just debatable, given that Foucaultʹs notion of ‘agonism’ signifies that the nature and extent of freedom is always contestable within an existing yet open set conditions, which precisely makes resistance enunciable and intelligible. Foucault’s perspectivism is indeed open to various uses and developments, but not to the point of introducing in his name some kind of non‐enunciable aprioristic and universal mode of ‘being free’. That is to turn Foucault in a ‘philosopher’ he was not. Nevertheless this thought‐provoking and well‐written book will surely prompt Foucaldian and non‐Foucaldian scholars alike to re‐examine ‐‐ and perhaps reassess ‐‐ their deepest assumptions about the questions of human freedom and identity.

Sébastien Malette, University of Victoria

Foucault Studies

© Paul Marcus 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW

Valerie Harwood, Diagnosing ‘Disorderly’ Children: A Critique of Behaviour Disorders Discourses (London: Routledge, 2006). ISBN: 0415342872. Dr. Valerie Harwood, a lecturer in Education at the University of Wollongong, Australia, has written a worthwhile book that uses three Foucauldian categories to deal with the trend in schools and mental health clinics to diagnose children as “disorderly.” In psychiatric jargon, these are the children with so‐called “conduct disorder” (but also, for example, with Attention Deficit Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder). “Conduct disorder,” at least according to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual put out by the American Psychiatric Association, is a “disruptive behavior disorder of childhood” characterized by repetitive violation of the rights of others or of age‐appropriate social norms or rules. Symptoms may include bullying others, truancy or work absences, staying out at night despite parental prohibition before the age of thirteen, using alcohol or other illegal substances before the age of thirteen, breaking into another’s house or car, setting fires with the motive of causing serious damage, physical cruelty to people or animals, stealing, or use more than once of a weapon (e.g., brick, broken bottle or gun) that could cause harm to others. To be sure, at least from my twenty years of clinical experience as a psychoanalyst who specializes in working with such “difficult‐to‐treat” teenagers, such children who act in the ways just described are very troubled and in great pain. Sometimes, they are “mean bastards,” as one teenager described himself, correctly in my view.

What Harwood has done for us, and this is a much needed service to the mental health and educational community, is to offer a searching and credible critique of today’s diagnosing practices as they pertain to so called “conduct disordered” children. In particular, using Foucault’s “three elements of experience,” she shows how the notion of “disorderly” children is constructed (i.e., “subjectivization”): by the influence of “expert knowledge” on behavioral disorders and its strong impact on schools, teachers and communities, by the effects of discourses of mental disorder on children and young

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people, and by the increasing medicalization of young children by treatment with such drugs as Ritalin in order to bring them “under control” and to make them “better functioning” individuals. Harwood focuses her analysis on Foucault’s “three elements of experience” as they relate to what we take to be conduct disorders: first, “games of truth,” how the concepts of disorderly children and conduct disorder have garnered the status of the scientific discourse through the fields of psychiatry and education; second, “relations of power,” how “conduct disorder” can function as authoritative knowledge of children and young people, using the prestige of psychiatry and education to enable the diagnosing of conduct disorder; third, how the concept of ‘technologies of the self” can show us how mentally disordered subjectivity is constituted. Harwood notes that her analysis, derived from games of truth and relations of power, provides an understanding of how they influence and animate the relations of the self. That is, how the child is implicated in the constitution of himself as disordered. “The primary question of this book is: ‘how is it that a young person can state with certitude that they are disordered?’”

Harwood’s book is based on her 1990’s doctoral dissertation, which included fieldwork material drawn from interviews with young Australians diagnosed or described as disorderly. Her book includes several quotations from her interviews of children who have experienced being subjected to discourses on disorderliness. This makes for interesting reading, though the author does not go nearly far enough in her analysis of this rich material. She does not adequately indicate how terrible being told one has a “conduct disorder” or other such psychiatric designation feels to the youngster so designated. Harwood’s study would have been more robust if she provided more and better nuanced phenomenological description, “dense description,” of what it feels like to be viewed as conduct disordered by the experts and, consequently, by oneself. Or as one teenager who stole cars told me, “I am a fuck up, and always will be a fuck up, you don’t want to meet me at night in the street wearing a Rolex.” How does a sixteen‐year‐old boy come to see his life as so hopeless, to see himself as a force to be reckoned with only when he is robbing and mugging? Harwood, an educator, not a clinician, offers us very little illumination as to how games of truth, relations of power, and technologies of the self interact and produce such an anti‐social identity.

Likewise, Harwood’s book would be improved if she used her case material to give us a better sense of how the children she interviewed actually deconstructed their conduct disorder identities and became better people, more able to respect, even love others. While Harwood does discuss how some of the children interrogated the “truth‐telling” that identified them as disorderly, her descriptions and analysis mainly deal with cognitive restructuring and willful behavioral change. Though such an approach,

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a kind of cognitive behavioral therapy applied to oneself, can be useful, the fact is that to transform one’s identity, on the level that counts, requires working through the affective elements that often motivate people to behave disrespectfully and violently towards others, that is the rage, emptiness and, following Emmanuel Levinas, the truncated ties to the kind of empathy that would allow one instinctively to put the needs and rights of others before those of oneself. Foucault had a lot to say about the technologies of the self that permit the individual to perform “certain operations” on himself. Thus, when considering the possibilities of reconfiguring one’s subjectivity, the self needs to be considered in relation to the effects of truth and power, no easy matter. It requires the capacity for courageous, honest self‐critique, “thinking differently,” risk‐taking, and other practices of freedom. It also requires, and this should be emphasized, facing tough emotions. Moreover, in many instances, it is through the help of others, including Foucauldian‐inspired “enlightened” psychotherapists that the conduct disordered youngster can get his life on track.

Overall then, I am grateful to Harwood for writing a thought‐provoking, accessible and timely critical analysis of some of the key issues facing schools and the mental health community. After reading this Foucauldian‐animated book, the mainstream educator and psychotherapist will never again look at “conduct disorder” and other such psychiatric/educational diagnostic categories and procedures, with a sense of comfort, acceptance and authority. Rather, as Foucault said, and Harwood aptly shows, such categories and procedures are divisive and dangerous, especially for the person so designated. The fact that Harwood has so successfully “disrupted” her reader, made her think and feel different about disorderly children, is no small accomplishment.

Paul Marcus, is a psychoanalyst in private practice.

Foucault Studies

© Stéphanie B. Martens 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ISBN 0‐521‐60053‐7. The second edition to the Cambridge Companion to Foucault, published in 2005, comes ten years after the original version. During this period, important posthumous works from Foucault have been released in French and in English. Among these, we find interviews and articles but also the infamous lectures at the Collège de France.1 The original contributions of the 1994 edition have either been updated or replaced to take into account these new resources in Foucauldian scholarship. For instance, in the new chapter “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity”, Béatrice Han makes use of the 1982 lectures L’Herméneutique du sujet in order to discuss Foucault’s conceptions of subjectivity. Also, Gerald L. Burns in “Foucault’s Modernism” explores Foucault’s relationship to literature, to Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s own modernism, and to contemporary authors such as Georges Bataille or Maurice Blanchot. For this enquiry, he makes extensive use of Dits et Ecrits and of the other collections of interviews published in English.2 The three other new contributions approach the biography and bibliography of Michel Foucault in relation to psychoanalysis in Joel Whitebook’s chapter, to phenomenology in Todd May’s, to German philosophy in Hans Sluga’s (Nietzsche and Heidegger) and David Ingram’s (Habermas). 1 In the original French: Michel Foucault, “Il faut defendre la société.” Cours au Collège de France 1976

(Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux. Cours au Collège de France 1974‐1975 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1999); Michel Foucault, L’Herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France 1981‐1982 (Paris: Gallimard‐Seuil, 2001); Michel Foucault, Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France 1973‐1974 (Paris: Gallimard‐Seuil, 2003). The only English translations published before the second edition of the Companion are Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975‐1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador US, 2003) and Michel Foucault, Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974‐1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador US, 2003). Translations of the other sets of lectures were published later in 2005 and 2006.

2 Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, vol. I‐IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). In English, a similar but less complete collection was published, organized thematically: Paul Rabinow, ed., Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. I‐III (New York: New Press, 1997‐1998).

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The new contributions thus add to the breadth of analysis proposed by the Companion. They work in conjunction with the original chapters analysing Foucault’s relation to the discipline of history (Gary Gutting), discussing his important contribution to the French tradition of the history of science (Georges Canguihlem) or working through his influence on feminist theory (Jana Sawicki). Together, they highlight the impressive reach of Foucault’s intellectual enterprise‐‐impacting most of the social sciences and humanities‐‐as well as his complex relationships to key figures of philosophy’s recent history. In this review, I will consider the volume as a whole and draw from both original and new contributions to illustrate its strengths: its interdisciplinarity, its careful and nuanced analyses of Foucault’s texts, and its introduction to current Foucauldian scholarship.

In his introduction to the volume, Gary Gutting stresses two distinctive aspects of Foucault’s work: “its specificity and its marginality.” It is specific because each of his analyses is determined by the terrain studied, not by a prior general theory or methodological commitment. (pp. 3‐4) It is marginal because his attacks on “the apparently necessary presuppositions … that define disciplines” can be “launched only from the peripheral areas”. These two characteristics contribute to Foucault’s inter‐disciplinarity or rather anti‐disciplinarity. Foucault approached each discipline from the margins and for this reason impacted them greatly while refusing to let his thought be appropriated by any of them. This also contributes indirectly to the timeliness of Michel Foucault’s thought: his refusal to remain prisoner of the academic trends and methods of a particular time, and his place at the intersection of several disciplines guarantee the foresight and durability of his insights and analyses. This anti‐disciplinarity justifies the heterogeneity of the volume, in terms of the authors’ backgrounds (although philosophy remains the dominant discipline), the objects of study selected and the approaches chosen.

Despite the heterogeneity of the volume, one common thread tying the contributions together can be identified: the concern with the ethical and critical paradox of Foucault’s work. By ethical and critical paradox, I am referring to the almost nihilist temptation often felt in Foucault’s writings, the idea that his works would be very powerful and effective in undermining traditional interpretive narratives or normative systems, yet would fail to provide some ground or standpoint on which to build positive theories and liberating practices. For instance, in “Power/Knowledge,” Joseph Rouse explains how Foucault tried to escape from traditional theorizations of power around sovereignty and legitimacy. This perspective, however, has been criticized for “undercutting any possible stance from which Foucault might be able to criticize the modern forms of knowledge and power he has described.” (p. 96) Joseph Rouse argues that this critical pitfall can be avoided if one considers “Foucault’s understanding of both power and knowledge as dynamic.” (p. 96) However, the

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Martens: Review of The Cambridge Companion to Foucault objection remains strong: in many of his books, the tone of Foucault seems to encourage resistance to the new forms of power/knowledge identified and yet he keeps rejecting any possible ground “from which such a call to resistance could be legitimated.” (p. 102) For Joseph Rouse, this challenge refers to the impossibility of political and epistemic sovereignty.

This impossibility is also a central issue for James W. Bernauer and Michael Mahon in “Michel Foucault’s Ethical Imagination” and, more generally, this concern is familiar to the readers of Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, who both deny the critical potential of Foucault’s historical analyses. (p. 149) For James W. Bernauer and Michael Mahon, these critiques are the sign of the originality and exceptionality of Foucault’s ethics, a form of ethics which does not require ‘normative yardsticks’ but instead a particular relationship to oneself—a self‐transformation. (p. 160) Béatrice Han is also optimistic about the potential offered by “an ethics of the self as the heart of resistance to power,” (p. 201) yet she recognized at the end of her analysis that “Foucault’s thought is caught between a rock and a hard place, because the idea of overcoming the epistemology with a return to the ethical” might end up “referring philosophy back to the scientific perspective that it sought to emancipate itself from.” (p. 204) Thus, Foucault’s own discourse finds itself out of criteria for its own acceptability, and runs the risk of being self‐defeating.

This Foucauldian paradox can occupy a more or less important place within the chapters, but though worded differently, it is apparent in each contribution. Hans Sluga, for example, while exploring the intellectual relations between Foucault and Nietzsche, comes to a similar conclusion: “it must be admitted that Foucault’s anti‐Nietzschean Nietzscheanism comes at a price. Can a general critique of morality be derived from specific genealogies of the sort that Foucault’s constructs?” (p. 234) He then describes the genealogical enterprise as a “never‐ending diagnostic and destructive process.” (p. 234) Gerald L. Burns in “Foucault’s Modernism” also mentions that “from a philosophical standpoint the desire to break with the sovereignty of the philosophical subject … is completely incoherent.” (p. 369) He suggests that rather than a break, what Foucault is attempting is a re‐conceptualization, and he then distinguishes between two conceptions of freedom in Foucault: a traditional one in terms of autonomy and agency, and a post‐subjectivist one. This distinction would allow for the possibility of resistance in Foucault, a resistance in terms of self‐escape rather than traditional liberation. The philosophical incoherence is avoided but the project seems to lose political potential. Even Georges Canguilhem, who is primarily concerned with Foucault’s contribution to his field, the history of science, proposes a very telling analogy. With Foucault, “we are dealing with an explorer not a missionary of modern culture” (p. 79): an explorer, whose task is to discover and map new intellectual territories, not to provide salvation or

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emancipation. Yet, we might add that, whether literally or figuratively, these two vocations are more interdependent than the explorer or missionary are ready to admit.

Each chapter not only mentions this Foucauldian paradox but also suggests its own ways to overcome or lessen this problem, through new interpretations of Foucault’s own texts and through the works of contemporary scholars. On the issue of interpretation, the Companion proposes an interesting compromise. Faithful to the spirit of the first edition, the second edition shies away from polemics and proposes ”sympathetic” yet critical readings of Foucault’s works. Gary Gutting starts his introduction with a rather common definition of interpretation, that of “finding a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author’s works.” (p. 1) As noted by the author himself, this is quite removed from Foucault’s own critical considerations on interpretation and hermeneutics. The contributors are generally aware of the dangers associated with such interpretive exercises and the pitfalls associated with commentaries.3 Still, the type of interpretations called for by a Companion are likely in fact to lead to a non‐Foucauldian approach to Foucault–‐a more traditional, academically oriented, explication of texts or use of biography. Although such exercises might also imply an excessive search for unity or consistency, they remain a quite legitimate and useful intellectual enterprise.

The two first chapters by Thomas Flynn on “Foucault’s mapping of history” and by Gary Gutting on “Foucault and the History of Madness” are illustrative of the type of studies to be found in this volume: respectively, an overview of Foucault’s thought, and a careful analysis of specific texts. Thomas Flynn explains Foucault’s relationship to history, as well as his diverse conceptualization and practice of historical analyses: archaeologies, genealogies and problematizations. This allows for an explanation of the different periods within Foucault’s work and its characterization as a form of “post‐modern history.” (p. 43) In contrast to this overarching survey, Gary Gutting approaches Foucault’s relationship to history through a close reading of the History of Madness. The question here is: what type of history is Foucault practising, if any? The study of the text seems to indicate that Foucault has “an idealist approach to history” where facts are not used as supports for an interpretive schema, but as mere illustrations. The interpretive schema is then evaluated according to its internal coherence. Drawing on the other contributions, one could even say that the interpretive schema ought to be evaluated according to its discursive and, more importantly, ethical effects.

Finally, in the Companion, the balance is nicely struck between the analysis of Foucault’s own work and the scholarship it has inspired. Most contributions focus

3 David Ingram, for example, notes at the beginning of his contribution: “I confess a deep reluctance

to commenting on Foucault in light of his astute observation that commentaries only ‘say what has already been said and repeat tirelessly what was nevertheless never said.’” (p. 240)

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principally on Foucault’s own writings, but also introduce the readers to the academic debates that followed, the issues still at stake in Foucauldian scholarship, and the paths of inquiry opened up by Foucault and pursued by others. For instance, Gary Gutting mentions the impact of Foucault’s early works on the ‘new cultural history’ (p. 50), while David Ingram gives us an updated look at the Habermas‐Foucault debate. The last contribution is the most illustrative in this regard. In “Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism,” Jana Sawicki shows how Foucault’s “political therapy” can be followed up by feminist theorists. She discusses the reception of Foucault’s work among feminist critical theorists (such as Nancy Fraser) and in the work of Judith Butler. Whereas the first group of theorists are left dissatisfied with Foucault’s understanding of social criticism, Judith Butler, by ”queering” Foucault, is able to use a “remarkably Foucauldian understanding of subjection” to address “the production of gendered subjects.” (pp. 392‐393) This last essay shows that Foucault’s concepts and analyses have great potential in contemporary social theory.

However, in this quick overview of the directions taken by Foucauldian scholarship nowadays, one regrets not to see an essay devoted specifically to governmentality studies, which followed from Foucault’s conceptualization of art of government and political reason in the late 70s. The two seminal books in this sub‐field, The Foucault Effect and Foucault and Political Reason, date from 1991 and 1996.4 With the recent publications of the 1977‐79 lectures at the Collège de France, Securité, territoire et population on governmentality and Naissance de la biopolitique on twentieth‐century liberalism, a new component of Foucault’s work is available; governmentality studies might be able to assert a more important position within Foucauldian scholarship, and in social and political science in general.5

In brief, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault is neither an introduction nor an explanatory textbook of Michel Foucault’s thought. It is more challenging: it is actually a true companion in that it encourages reading or re‐reading Foucault’s own works, and pushes the reader towards diverse and intellectually stimulating lines of enquiry and reflection. Michel Foucault often described his work as a ”conceptual toolbox;” the second edition of the Companion works as a ”secondary toolbox” for Foucault’s own works.

Stéphanie B. Martens, University of Alberta

4 Graham Burchell et al, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press, 1991); Andrew Barry et al, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo‐liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

5 Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire et population. Cours au Collège de France 1977‐1978 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2005); Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978‐1979 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2005).

Foucault Studies

© Corey McCall 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ISBN: 0‐521‐84779‐6 This book provides a thorough reconsideration of Foucault’s corpus. Oksala proposes that we read and understand Foucault’s thought through the lens of freedom. The relevance of freedom as a concept unifying the seemingly disparate themes of Foucault’s texts is a suggestive one, although this proposal must in the end meet with some amount of skepticism. I will give a brief overview of Oksala’s book before outlining some of the substantial reasons to recommend the book. Finally, I will conclude with some questions and criticism of Oksala’s endeavor. As we shall see, despite its flaws, the book does an admirable job of showing how freedom and subjectivity were issues of fundamental importance during Foucault’s entire career.

At the outset, Oksala makes the obvious point that it would be a mistake to understand Foucault’s conception of freedom in the traditional manner. Freedom for Foucault works in marked contrast with the dominant Western and Enlightenment notion of freedom as individual autonomy. Oksala is quick to point out that it is precisely this idea of freedom as autonomy (in the ethical sense) and emancipation (in the political sense) from which Foucault seeks to distance himself, and it is this ambivalence that Foucault’s critics find most troubling. Oksala thus has a twofold task: to show the relevance of freedom across Foucault’s works and to answer these various criticisms of Foucault. As Oksala points out, Foucault provides a genealogy of this mode of ethical subjectivity, and, in doing so, show that it is contingent and questionable. Indeed, this is the primary aim of genealogy: to show that the stable identities that we have become accustomed to our contingent and therefore open to question. By way of contrast with the self‐assured subject as source of transcendental value found in Kant’s ethics, Foucault’s self‐identities are contingent and always revisable. The first part of the book examines Foucault’s relationship to phenomenology, primarily that of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and focuses on Foucault’s early

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work. The second part of the book takes up Foucault’s genealogical writings in tandem with current feminist theory. The final part of the book concerns Foucault’s explicitly ethical period during the last years of his life. Each of these themes (the subject in Foucault’s archaeological writings, the body in his genealogical writings, and the explicitly ethical subject in his final writings) is approached from the idea of freedom understood as radical contingency. As this list of topics makes clear, Oksala takes seriously Foucault’s claim to have been primarily concerned with the subject during all phases of his career. Oksala takes a position akin to Thomas Flynn’s axial reading of Foucault’s texts, rather than hew to the periodization of Foucault’s oeuvre proposed by Dreyfus and Rabinow.1 Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s work as fundamentally discontinuous. According to their influential yet problematic analysis, Foucault took archaeology as far as he could before abandoning it due to the contradiction inherent in the method. Dreyfus and Rabinow construe archaeology as a theory immanent to discourse that at the same time attempts to transcend the limits of discourse by positing a totalizing theory outside of the discursive rules it analyzes.2 In short, they see Foucault as abandoning archaeology in favor of genealogy. In his recent work on Foucault and Sartre, Thomas Flynn analyzes the apparent shift in Foucault’s thought not in terms of a repudiation of archaeology but rather as a change in emphasis. Flynn detects three axes operating in Foucault’s texts: those of knowledge, power, and subjectivation.3 The apparent shifts in Foucault’s thought then become changes of emphasis and a unitary reading becomes plausible. Oksala implicitly relies upon Flynn’s unitary reading, for she wishes to read Foucault through the concept of freedom, and, by extension, through his notion of the subject. Oksala rightly criticizes the interpretation of Dreyfus and Rabinow and thus sees Foucault’s work as a unified whole. Indeed, in her criticism of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s characterization of Foucault’s archaeological method as ‘quasi‐structuralist,’ she points out that Foucault came to see archaeology and genealogy as complementary methods, and her book tracks the three distinct chronological periods of Foucault’s work in terms of the “domains” of language, the body, and ethics.4 The first part of the book concerns language and the role that freedom plays in Foucault’s archaeological texts. Chapter one consists largely of an exegesis of the key themes of The Order of Things, while the second chapter provides an insightful reading of The Order of Things as a response to Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Foucault 1 Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,

2nd.Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 2 Dreyfus and Rabinow, pp. 98-103. 3 Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping

of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 144. 4 Oksala, p. 10.

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McCall: Review of Foucault on Freedom

replaces the transcendental subject of Husserlian phenomenology with a theory of discursive subjectivities, for archaeology concerns the being of language, a formulation that becomes important for Foucault in his texts on avant‐garde literature and art.

Husserl had come to see the limitations of the Cartesian starting point for phenomenology by the 1930’s and sought to replace this theory of transcendental subjectivity with a theory of transcendental intersubjectivity through a phenomenological analysis of the invariant structures of the Lebenswelt. This means asking how these invariant structures themselves become constituted, and this is the primary task of the Crisis. Oksala argues that the influence of French historians and philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard, and Jean Cavaillès. For Husserl, scientific activity is grounded in the Lebenswelt and hence in experience. Foucault “understands scientific development as irreversibly removed from direct intuition and experience” (45). It is not experience that is decisive, but language and discourse. This leads Oksala to a discussion of the anonymity and, more importantly, the freedom of language.

The freedom of language is essentially tied to literature. Foucault discusses this idea in Chapter Eight (“Labor, Life, Language”) of The Order of Things, and then in a series of essays and interviews on avant‐garde figures such as Blanchot, Bataille and Andre Breton which culminate in his text on Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth. According to his analysis in The Order of Things, language becomes unmoored from things and loses its immediate representative function. Language still represents things, but only indirectly.5

Avant‐garde literary texts radicalize this tendency. In doing so, they test the limits of the sayable and thereby serve to critique dominant forms of subjectivity:

By being able to demonstrate the limits of a discursive order, literary writing is able to reveal important limits of subjectivity. Because the discursive order is constitutive of the limits of subjectivity, counter‐discourse in the form of avant‐garde writing, for example, can question these limits. Foucault aimed to show how modes of subjectivity are constituted in scientific discourse, and also how these limits are transcended in avant‐garde writing and art (Oksala, 85).

This can be clearly seen, for example, in Foucault’s essay on Maurice Blanchot:

Language is then freed from all of the old myths by which our awareness of words, discourse, and literature has been shaped. For a long time it was thought that language had mastery over time, that it acted both as the future bond of the promise and as memory and narrative; it was thought that its essence resided in the form of

5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (NY: Vintage,

1970), pp. 280-28

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words or in the breath that made them vibrate. In fact, it is only a formless rumbling, a streaming; its power resides in dissimulation.6

Oksala’s text furnishes a rare and enlightening reading of Foucault’s notoriously opaque Death and the Labyrinth in terms of this problematic of the transgressive questioning of limits. Oksala claims that this relationship between limits and their transgression remains a constant throughout Foucault’s work‐his work continuously probes the question of the boundary of the same and the other. Although some would argue that this focus on the boundary between, for example, reason and madness in Madness and Civilization or life and death in Birth of the Clinic disappears in Foucault’s later work (Oksala cites Clare O’Farrell in this regard), Oksala argues that the emphasis changes from language to the body and then finally to the ethical subject. The second section takes up Foucault’s genealogical texts (primarily Discipline and Punish and the initial volume of The History of Sexuality) relative to concerns of feminism. This is an intriguing juxtaposition, if for no other reason than because Foucault’s work has often been seen as critical of the aims of at least some versions of feminism. The genealogical subject is subject to the mechanisms of power relations. Many interpreters have misread Foucault’s genealogical texts as precisely denying the very possibility of freedom, a reading that superimposes a sort of Weberian “iron cage” upon Foucault’s analyses of mechanisms of power and knowledge. Primarily for this reason, Oksala’s insistence that the body be understood as a site of resistance is refreshing. She sees Foucault during this period calling into question the distinction between the natural body and the cultural body or the sex/gender distinction in texts such as Herculine Barbin and the La Volunté de Savoir. The body for Foucault is an object of discipline, but it is equally the site of resistance to the disciplinary regimes of power and knowledge. Foucault claims that there is no power without resistance, and power over bodies can ever only be partial. Feminist theorists critical of Foucault, such as Judith Butler and Lois McNay, claim that Foucault never articulates how this resistance manifests itself with regard to bodies, and this vagueness renders his thought useless for political feminism.

Oksala argues that Foucault does in fact provide resources for thinking of the body as a site of resistance, but only if we give up all attempt to reduce the body to its materiality. The body is both a passive object of power and an active locus of experiential meaning. If we understand the body in this way, then Foucault’s position becomes much closer to that of Merleau‐Ponty and his phenomenological lived‐body that is both experiencing and experienced.

6 Michel Foucault, “The Thought of the Outside,” Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume

2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (NY: New Press, 1997), p. 167.

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In the third and final section of the book, Oksala takes up the question of ethics in relation to freedom. It is in this section that she is most critical of Foucault’s thought. She provides a reading of his later work that connects his later focus on an ethics of individual autonomy back to concerns from the beginning of his career. She concludes by criticizing Foucault from a Levinasian perspective. Foucault’s analyses begin with a first person perspective that construes ancient ethics as the practice of autonomy, but, according to Oksala, Foucault was unable to see that these various practices of the self in the ancient world were really practices of domination. However, this criticism is anachronistic, and it is in danger of misreading the intent of Foucault’s project during this later period. After all, Foucault is not advocating these ancient practices of the self; rather, he is providing a genealogy of the ethical subject in the West, and any criticism that fails to acknowledge this fundamental fact is doomed from the start.

Her critique of Foucault from the standpoint of a Levinasian ethics of alterity might have been more nuanced if she had acknowledged the relationship between Foucault and Blanchot. This could have provided a further evidence of the relationship between the earlier and the later Foucault. While it is certainly true that Foucault does not acknowledge the dimension of radical alterity that calls subjectivity into question, he does argue that all practices of autonomy must be born of heteronomy, or in other words that the only way to become a contingently independent subject is through those very relations of power and knowledge that normalize the subject. One can become a subject only through subjection, and thus the charge that Foucault’s ethics begins with the individual is inaccurate. One further criticism is that Oksala relies too much on the adversarial model of power that Foucault develops in his texts and lecture courses of the mid‐70’s and she neglects to consider how reflection on the apparatuses of security and biopower that Foucault begins to develop in the lecture courses of the late 1970’s, along with the examination of liberalism and governmentality, could have deepened her analyses. For example, in the recently translated lecture course from 1977‐1978 (Security, Territory, and Population), Foucault writes:

The game of liberalism—not interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course; laisser faire, passer et aller—basically and fundamentally means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself.7

As this quotation illustrates, there remains much to be thought with regard to this issue of the relationship between Foucault’s thought and the question of freedom. Despite my

7 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978

(NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 48.

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criticisms, Foucault on Freedom does an admirable job of at least posing the question of freedom in Foucault’s thought as a question, and showing how this idea threads through Foucault’s work from beginning to end.

Corey McCall, Elmira College

Foucault Studies

© Alan Milchman 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Lessico Di Biopolitica, introduzione di Ottavio Marzocca (manifestolibri, la nuova talpa, 2006), ISBN88‐7285‐431‐8, Ottavio Marzocca, Perché Il Governo: Il Laboratorio Etico‐Politico Di Foucault (manifestolibri, la nuova talpa, 2007), ISBN978‐88‐7285‐466‐2. One of the outcomes of the intersecting processes of modernity and globalization, whose genealogies, grids of power, and modes of subjectivity Michel Foucault described, is the omnipresence of English as a veritable universal language in the scientific and academic domains. As a result, more people will read Foucault in English translation than in the original French, with the result that the very interesting and significant work on Foucault being done by Italian thinkers and scholars may be overlooked. Some, at least, of the most important work on Foucault in French or German will be translated into English, but unfortunately few of the Foucault studies written in Italian have or will likely appear in English translation. As these two volumes show, that will be a loss for those of us concerned with the task of grappling with Foucault’s thinking.

The lexicon has its point of departure in Foucault’s focus on the significance of biopolitics in contemporary life, and the importance of tracing its genealogy in the modern world. Much of the vocabulary of biopolitics is a modern phenomenon, e.g., biodiversity, sociobiology, genetically modified organisms, and even terms with a more ancient provenance, e.g., police, pastoral power, government, subjectification [assoggetamento], have been redefined as the very grids of power in the modern world have been transformed. The lexicon, with entries by more than thirty scholars, whose work includes important studies of Foucault, and the several dimensions of modern political power, is animated by Foucault’s own commitment to genealogy and to nominalism. For these thinkers, there are no fixed and ahistorical meanings to the terms through which we seek to comprehend the modes of political power that shape our world. The objective of the lexicon is to explicate both the contemporary modes of political power and their historicity. In this respect, it bears comparison with the

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Begriffsgeschichte championed by Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, who in the massive Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe brought together numerous scholars who sought to demonstrate both the historically shifting usage and meaning of key terms and concepts, as well as the emergence of completely new ones, and thereby to reveal the ever‐changing nature of our socio‐political experience.

Certain of the entries in the Lessico, which are typically five to eight pages in length, focus on the development of a concept in Foucault’s own work, as is the case with Alessandro De Giorgi’s entry on “discipline,” while others, like Renata Brandimarte’s entry on “biotechnology,” trace the emergence and usage of a concept in the political and scientific realms over the past few decades, while still others, such as Roberto Ciccarelli’s entry on “citizenship,” trace the upheaval wrought by the re‐appearance of this concept in the emerging world of modernity, and its successive transformations over the course of the past several centuries. In his excellent introduction, Ottavio Marzocca shows how the “specific emergence of BIOPOLITICS as a form of government” has given rise to the several dimensions of what Foucault designated as “modern GOVERNMENTALITY” (p. 14). What the lexicon permits us to do is to better link together the diverse manifestations of governmentality that have reshaped the very landscape of our political, social, and psychic lives, from our experience of our own bodies, to the ambient ecological transformations, and the omnipresence of genocide in our modern world.

Marzocca’s own volume, Perché Il Governo, is an important contribution to the growing number of studies that explore the various dimensions of Foucault’s understanding of “governmentality,” and the genealogy of the forms of government of human beings. Marzocca’s analysis of the new technologies of power that emerged in the form of the state’s power over life focuses on the genealogies that Foucault traced in his 1976‐1979 courses at the Collège de France. One dimension of this is his treatment of the links between Foucault’s analysis of the “biologization” of political life and conflicts, and the views of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri on the discussion of biopower. Here Marzocca demonstrates his command of the various elements that contribute to an understanding of the modernity of Nazism and racism, as well as the significance of Negri’s distinction (Spinozist in its origins) between two forms of power that the English language, alas, has no easy means to distinguish: potere and potenza (power over others and the creative power to transform oneself, respectively). Marzocca recognizes the significance of this distinction for an understanding of the final Foucault’s move from the political to the ethical, though the full implications of that move are not explored in this volume (and will only be clear when Foucault’s last lecture courses at the Collège are published, though the publication of the first of these, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981‐1982) already permits us to

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grasp the significance of Foucault’s distinction between subjectification [assujettissement] and subjectivation [subjectivation]).

The final Foucault’s concern with ethics, one’s relation to oneself, and the various technologies of the self, with its link to potenza, compliments his earlier focus on technologies of domination and control. In several ways Marzocca significantly contributes to our understanding of this aspect of Foucault’s thinking. In his analysis of Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution, Marzocca shifts the emphasis away from the accusation that Foucault failed to see the totalitarian thrust of the Khomeini regime, and provided its depredations with an ideological cover, to a subtle reading that both recognizes that Foucault – at the time, not just with hindsight ‐‐ saw the dangers represented by a fundamentalist clerical caste, even as he grasped the possibility that the mass movement against the reign of the Shah might interrupt the flow of history and constitute a manifestation of what he designated as spirituality, with its prospects for “a transformation of the subject” and the “ethical constitution of freedom” (p. 134). That such a process was thwarted by the reassertion of technologies of domination should not obscure the opening represented when a population hurled itself against the armed power of the state.

Marzocca also deftly handles the question of Foucault’s understanding of neo‐liberalism and its relation to biopower. Liberalism and its ideology of minimal government are not seen as a repudiation of the growth of biopower, technologies of control, and the grids of power linked to governmentality. In ways reminiscent, I believe, of Karl Polanyi’s analysis in his The Great Transformation, Marzocca shows how for Foucault the free market is not natural but constructed, a process in which the state plays the decisive role, one that continues in its phase of neo‐liberalism. Indeed, far from being a weak state or system, neo‐liberalism should be linked to control mechanisms that in some respects exceed what was possible for the Nazi or Stalinist regimes.

In his final chapter, Marzocca takes up the question of whether in a world shaped by governmentality and biopower, “another principle” [un altro principio] (p. 197) can assert its claims. In the only course at the Collège so far published from this last cycle, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Marzocca finds in Foucault’s journey to Greece, and his focus on parrhesia, a new and different possibility of government, and a prospect for “desubjectification” [desoggettivazione] (p.205). Given Marzocca’s understanding of the thrust of Foucault’s thinking, one can only hope that he will undertake to extend his analysis into a confrontation with all the implications of Foucault’s ethical turn, and the possibilities for a transfiguration of the subject. And that again raises the question of the need for Anglophone publishers to seriously consider the merits of translating more of the exciting work on Foucault being produced in Italy.

Alan Milchman, Queens College of the City University of New York

Foucault Studies

© John Protevi 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds.), Deleuze and the Social (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). ISBN: 9780748620920. As would be expected in an essay collection entitled Deleuze and the Social, Michel Foucault functions therein as a reference, interlocutor and, perhaps, rival. The volume is couched, however, in a Deleuzean idiom, and so requires a close familiarity with the technical terms introduced in the works of Deleuze, both his single‐authored works, and the collaborative works produced with Guattari.

For those readers with the appropriate theoretical background, one of the volume’s most interesting features is the introduction to an Anglophone audience of several thinkers from Scandinavia who specialize in “organizational studies,” a field which is a sort of hybrid of sociology, management, and cultural studies. Pieces by these thinkers appear in four of the volume’s five sections: “Order and Organisation,” “Subjectivity and Transformation,” “Capitalism and Resistance,” and “Social Constitution and Ontology.” The exception is “Art and the Outside,” which includes pieces by thinkers well‐known to Anglophone Deleuze studies, Ian Buchanan and Eric Alliez.

For readers interested in the Deleuze / Foucault connection, there are several major themes of interest in the collection, among them (1) the distinction between disciplinary societies and “societies of control;” (2) biopolitics; and (3) subjectification. As with all such images, it would be an exaggeration to say that Foucault begins on the inside (of discursive practices, of institutions) and seeks freedom, the outside (of thought), whereas Deleuze begins with the outside, with lines of flight, and seeks to show how insides are formed (as strata or residues). Nonetheless, there is something to this formula, as we see in Paul Patton’s essay, “Order, Exteriority and Flat Multiplicities in the Social.” Perhaps a more profound point of comparison is Deleuze’s affinity for working in the traditional philosophical area of ontology. While Deleuze does not hesitate to write about reality – all reality, natural and social – Foucault famously hesitates, especially about “nature.” While one could attempt to construct a Foucaultian

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Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 145‐147

ontology of the social – the categories by which human reality is constructed – we also need to acknowledge Foucault’s hesitancy to use philosophical terms in the straightforward way in which Deleuze uses them.

Thus while it is perfectly appropriate for several of the authors – Thanem and Linstead, Albertsen and Diken, and DeLanda in particular – to deal straightaway with Deleuze’s ontology, the reader interested in Foucault will have to do the work to see the connection with the latter’s work. Similar caveats apply to most of the other essays, which treat various aspects of social life, at either a micro‐scale of daily life both inside and outside organizations (Kornberger, Rhodes and ten Bos; Lohmann and Steyaert; Bay) or the macro‐scale of “capitalism” (Buchanan; Holland; Vähämäki and Virtanen) and the “posthuman” (Land). This is not to say that Foucault’s name or concepts do not appear from time to time, just that the Delezue / Foucault connection is not a major focus of the essays, with one exception, on which I will concentrate for the remainder of this review.

Maurizio Lazzarato’s essay is entitled “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” The “society of control” is Deleuze’s term for the contemporary world in which disciplinary institutions are in crisis (see Deleuze, Negotiations [Columbia University Press, 1995], 177‐182). Deleuze is of course aware that Foucault was perfectly cognizant of such a crisis, and had in fact posited it as the condition of his writing his genealogies of disciplinary institutions, the various “births” he described: of the hospital, the prison, and so on. In his essay, Deleuze proposes a series of oppositions. The factory has been supplemented by the corporation; the perpetual re‐beginning of discipline (“you’re not at school anymore, you’re in the army now!”) has been supplemented by the never‐having‐finished of perpetual re‐training; the centralized dossier has been supplemented by dispersed files in multiple databases (which form a “virtual” dossier that can be assembled when needed); the individual viewed from a central panoptic eye has been supplemented by the “dividual,” the dispersion of profiles in multiple aspects; the enclosures of disciplinary institutions have been supplemented by an open space of multiple formation (people are today students, workers, and military trainees all at the same time). The basic difference, Deleuze proposes, is that disciplinary institutions are “molds” in which a human matter receives a definite form (children become students; rabble become workers; recruits become soldiers), while control societies are “modulators” in which a continuously changing training regime molds itself in conjunction with its target’s potentials as they appear in the process of training (“we see from your performance in yesterday’s session that you would benefit from a shift to another field of study”).

Lazzarato takes this basic perspective and feeds it into a discussion of biopower. While biopower aimed at the reproduction of a population, the society of control aims at “noo‐politics” (the politics of nous rather than bios) or what Foucault would call

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subjectification: public opinion, shared emotions and tastes, etc. (186). The interest in Lazzarato’s piece comes from his use of the Deleuzean logic of multiplicity, what Deleuze called the “philosophy of difference.” Here, individuation comes from the integration of differential relations. Deleuze often adopted the image of crystallization from Gilbert Simondon to express this process: from a metastable field, the supersaturated solution, which contains only elements in differential, rather than individuated relations, crystals form as individuals. Lazzarato shows how a similar individuation process is at work in Foucault’s analysis of discipline and biopower: from the differential multiplicity of the small group (disciplinary institutions) or the mass of le peuple (biopower), individuals are formed with definite, malleable characteristics: the team or the population. The real benefit of his essay comes from his extending this analysis to control societies. Using Gabriel Tarde and Bergson, Lazzarato posits a virtual biological memory as the target of control, allowing the modulation of habits in a “noo‐politics.” From the virtual multiplicity of our social being‐together (what Tarde called invention and imitation at the level of “brains”), the society of control captures and renders malleable individuated forms of social life: the pre‐formed and “commodified” fads, habits, tastes, opinions, and “life styles” that are packaged and offered to us in what others have called “the postmodern condition.”

While the other essays offer here and there a confrontation with or at least a reference to Foucault, Lazzarato has provided a sustained meditation on three crucial elements of the Deleuze / Foucault connection: discipline vs. “control,” biopower, and subjectification. In other circumstances I would hesitate to recommend a volume to Foucault scholars based on only one essay, but the quality of Lazzarato’s work, combined with the more muted encounters with Foucault in the other essays, make Deleuze and the Social a worthwhile purchase for readers of Foucault Studies.

John Protevi, Louisiana State University.

Foucault Studies

© Philip Webb 2008ISSN: 1832‐5203


REVIEW Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). ISBN 0‐674‐01330‐1. By the mid‐1990s, the intellectual trend marked by François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism set the stage for a frenzied production of intellectual reflection in academic circles. This ferment grew from the implicit dual questions: if we are now in a postmodern era, what is the nature of the immediately past epoch, i.e., modernity, and how is it different from this new era. Thus began a flurry of publications about modernity. Some studies looked around the globe to see how modernity contextualized itself in postcolonial contexts, e.g., in Partha Chatterjee’s Our Modernity and Lisa Rofel’s Other Modernities. Elsewhere, intellectual concerns worked through the more traditional questions of European (or North American appropriations) of modernity. Eyal Chowers’ The Modern Self in the Labyrinth emerges from these 1990s ruminations on the nature of European modernity. He adapts this book from his 1996 award‐winning dissertation at McGill University—the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the field of political philosophy—to undertake a study of some of the great pessimists of modernity: Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault. He links these three figures and a number of their antecedents within a framework of entrapment. In his coinage, entrapment means “the dehumanizing sameness that springs from the duplication of the social—the menace of homogenized existence in a world conceived of as self‐made. Entrapment refers to the predicament wherein social institutions, which are perceived as overpowering and inescapable, sap moderns of their distinct identities.”1 Entrapment functions as a meta‐category that subsumes a broad spectrum of critiques of modernity. 1 Eyal Chowers. The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 2.

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Ideology, discourse, the Weberian iron cage, technology and bureaucracies, habitus, etc., can all fall under this rubric of entrapment. The social, linguistic, and psychological structures created in and by the modern world have become so encompassing that there is no outside. Even interiority does not proffer an escape from these theorists of pessimism. Earlier, proto‐entrapment thinkers still theorized a way outside of these seemingly all‐encompassing structures, but by the time of Weber, the possibilities of escape were foreclosed. Chowers’ later claims move beyond this opening definition. For here, Chowers seems to imply that there is some identity prior to and outside of institutions, which merely sap that identity rather than shape it. As he moves through his eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century intellectual background for this twentieth‐century pessimism, he starts laying a stronger claim for entrapment: it is that which shapes identity by establishing the conditions for modern life. In part, this opening ambiguity arises from his etiology of this peculiarly modern entrapment thinking. He traces its emergence to the rise of individualism at the moment “when individuals were beginning to celebrate their capacity for progressive rational conduct and for general authorship over the world.”2 Chowers traces the propensity of modernity to impose a hyper‐order and for humans to undertake a doubleness that undermines individuality through discussions of Kant and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who present contrary views of reason—uniformly functioning and clear, in the case of the former, and obscure and contingent in the latter. He juxtaposes these figures to establish a framework in which the hyper‐rational, e.g., Weber’s rationalizing bureaucracies, and the irrational, e.g., Freudian instincts, can play a role in entrapment. Over the course of the nineteenth century, proto‐entrapment thinkers began to see the limits imposed on social life by fragmentation, normalizing social institutions, and the dehumanization of modern economic and political conditions, yet they find the possibility for human action to transcend the strictures of modernity. Chowers traces the two primary paths outlined to overcome these binding social conditions: first, those writers exemplified by Nietzsche who attempt to escape modernity through the cultivation of individual authenticity, and second, those epitomized by Marx who argue for reining in society through purposive collective action. By the time intellectual life moved beyond these two, the self was so ensnared by modernity that escape became impossible. In Chowers’ estimation, the self of entrapment writers is an historical, elastic being shaped through modern institutions. His argument about an entrapped self problematizes liberal political theory’s emphasis on individual rights in the formation of a self. The external social world of family, schools, media, and institutions entirely

2 Chowers. Modern Self, 3.

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construct this self and thus undermine the possibility of free will. Yet, despite the overwhelming power of the collectivity of society to shape the individual, the influences of the social do not presage a unified community life, as tradition and culture remain as normative agents in the modern world. There is no true individuality, but also no basis for communal harmony. The self and the particular entrapment take on a distinct form with each thinker. Weber’s entrapment arises from rationalization run amok. The propensity for order takes hold and extends its reach into all facets of life, inhibiting the personality (which Chowers takes to mean a self) from finding meaning in a disenchanted world. The search for meaning, while possibly a concern for some later psychoanalysts, was not in any way central to Freud and his theory of the self. Moving away from the external search for meaning by Weber’s individual, Freud turns the self and its formation inward. The Oedipal process culminates in the formation of a superego that is the internalization of external limits on instincts; the social is internalized in this formulation, rendering the family as the agent of entrapment. With Foucault, modern entrapment returns to the external world of discourses and disciplines; the institutions here look more like the Weberian mass bureaucracies and organizational disciplinary practices. For Foucault, language sets the limits of subject‐formation; the implicit assumptions of the way that institutions deploy power and organize knowledge shape modern subjectivities. Chowers points out that some modern entrapment thinkers do not entirely succumb to pessimism. Walter Benjamin holds out messianic hope; Hannah Arendt argues that a revived public sphere offers the potential for a political resolution to entrapment; Jürgen Habermas extends this political response to reach the optimistic conclusion that reason properly deployed for communication, rather than in subordination to the instrumentality of rationalization, can produce a vibrant public sphere in which humans may realize their freedom. But despite these naively optimistic hopes for escape from entrapment, the general tenor of twentieth‐century social thought is found in the theorists of pessimism. But is there a usefulness in categorizing this group of thinkers and, more importantly, the nature of modernity, as a period of entrapment? The dominant categories of analysis of modernity have long involved some type of institutional, linguistic, psychological, or social structure in which humans are intertwined. Whether ideology, discourse, habitus, etc., entrapment is an integral part of critiques of modernity. This book simultaneously names this common element (entrapment) and elevates it to the defining characteristic of modernity. Yet, by making it the sine qua non of modernity, Chowers implicitly shifts the periodization of modernity. Everything prior to the twentieth century is prologue, since entrapment thought does not reach its fruition until Weber. Conventional wisdom of the highpoint of modernity coinciding

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with the long nineteenth century is upended, but we are given no compelling reason for this revision. Why should high modern thought cover the Weber‐to‐Foucault arc of thought and not Kant through Marx? He defers high modernity to the point where its frameworks were imploding; the fragmentation that had broken up social life so continued the process of atomization that the individual became a multitude of selves. The climax of modernity in the Chowers thesis is at the moment of its collapse. Beyond the question of periodization, the question of cognitive continuities emerges. The similar thematic concerns in the Weber‐to‐Foucault arc do not mean the cognitive frameworks are in any way mutually intelligible. Chowers passingly acknowledges the break (146), but primarily approaches the problem not as an epistemic shift but as a difference in degree. In his interpretation, all three thinkers focus on entrapment but each has a distinct sphere to which he applies his analysis of it. But if the grids of intelligibility cannot speak to each other, is this a useful category? Chowers’ argument is not merely about entrapment, however; it is predicated on two concepts: entrapment and the self, where we find an even greater break. Significantly, in the decades between Freud and Foucault there are two broad intellectual developments. The first, I will represent with Lacan’s idea that any sense of ego became so fractured that the possibility of a transcendental ego collapsed. The second, for which Lacan could again stand in but is more clearly aligned with other mid‐century appropriations of Saussure, is the linguistic turn in philosophy. By the time of Foucault, there is no longer a self but selves, and the subject becomes an entirely discursive construction. Chowers’ habit of collapsing the category of self into the quite distinct one of the subject (143, 154) creates some problems and some mistaken sense of continuities between the thinkers. Implicitly, Chowers smuggles a Cartesian knowing subject into the work of Foucault by collapsing these distinctions. With the notable exception of the famous Trombadori interview,3 the subject for Foucault is an object of knowledge [connaissance] shaped through the interplay of modern institutions, disciplines, and practices. Power and discourses create new forms of subjectivity in the deployment of knowledge. The formation of individual identity, which is at the heart of Chowers’ modern selfhood, is of little concern to Foucault’s studies of subjectivation, which he traces through modern mental, medical, and penal institutions.4 Even in those places where he appears to be

3 Michel Foucault. “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.3 (New

York: The New Press, 2000): 239‐297. At two points here (241 and 247) Foucault talks of engaging in a personal experience of desubjectivation, which is unrelated to the category of the subject as an object of knowledge.

4 Even his early, more Nietzschean Tel Quel writings undermine the transcendental categories of modern humanistic thought. For instance, Foucault predicts that the death of ‘man’ will soon follow that of God. See Michel Foucault “A Preface to Transgression,” trans. by Donald F.

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juxtaposing these categories, e.g., the second volume of The History of Sexuality, he is still looking at “the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject.”5 This subject is in no way Cartesian but still an object of knowledge constituted through an external gaze. Smuggling interiority into a subject that is an object of knowledge enables Chowers to posit greater continuities with the entirely interior subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Chowers’ Fouauldian crypto‐ego legitimates the selection of these three particular thinkers and elides the shifts in epistemic assumptions between the pessimistic humanism of Weber and Freud, on the one hand, and the more pessimistic entrapment thought of Foucault, which posits a completed postmodern dehumanization. The more pessimistic turns of entrapment thought trace the displacement of the category of the “human”: there is no humanity to be sapped or lost. With Foucault, one finds an ancient self or modern subjects, but not a modern self in Chowers’ sense of an individual personality or identity; there is no modern self in a labyrinth, and there is not even the possibility of flight into the interiority of selfhood. This is a book in which the parts are greater than their sum. Chowers’ understanding of individual authors, Freud in particular, can be quite compelling. But his case for the category of entrapment is much less so. The confining nature of social structures is a standard target of critiques of modernity. Identifying Weber and Foucault as entrapment thinkers is hardly a leap; after all, Weber has provided the most popular moniker for the subordination of modern life to the technological and economic demands of capital – the iron cage – and Foucault’s studies famously depict subjectivities entirely constituted through the language and practices of modern institutions. His reading of Freud through the lens of entrapment and homelessness requires more nuance than the analysis of the other two thinkers and thus provides a more compelling set of concepts. But the category of entrapment will not become an everyday term of political thought nor significantly alter evaluations of modernity. Though an interesting reading of important thinkers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth fails to establish a new paradigm (or periodization) for analyzing the modern world.

Philip Webb, Emory University

Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol.2 (New York: The New Press, 1998): 69‐87. The transcendental ego or a knowing subject of modern thought is notably absent in the work of Foucault.

5 Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Use of Pleasure, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986): 6.

foucault studies number 5

Education

discussion of foucault

new readers

foucaultstudies sverreraffnse

issue of foucault studies

morris rabinowitz kevinturner

new beginning

frederik tygstrup7 coeditor

jenseri kristensen6