Magazine: The Monist, April, 1991
Record: 1
97052846330026966219910401
Title: Foucault and the spaces of history.
Subject(s): FOUCAULT, Michel -- Criticism & interpretation; CRITICISM
Source: Monist, Apr91, Vol. 74 Issue 2, p165, 22p
Author(s): Flynn, Thomas R.
Abstract: Discusses the shift of historian Michael Foucault from time
to space as the paradigm guiding his approach to historical topics.
Information on Foucault; Reference to other historians; Details on
some of Foucault's beliefs.
AN: 9705284633
ISSN: 0026-9662
Full Text Word Count: 9209
Database: Academic Search Elite
FOUCAULT AND THE SPACES OF HISTORY
A critique could be carried out of this devaluation of space [in our
century]. Did it begin with Bergson, or before? Space was treated as
the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the
contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.
What the intellectual can do is provide instruments of analysis, and
at present this is the historian's essential role. What's effectively
needed is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one that
makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points,
positions where the instances of power have secured and implanted
themselves by a system of organization dating back over 150 years. In
other words, a topological and geographical survey of the
battlefield--that is the intellectual's role. (PK 62)
Michel Foucault was a kaleidoscopic thinker.[2] He gathered the
received opinions, established norms and major facts of our cultural
heritage and shifted the ensemble ever so slightly. The results were
startingly new configurations. What had been perceived as necessary
relationships, inviolable limits, pivotal events, emerged in this
altered perspective as contingencies that supported quite different
descriptions. This might simply be subsumed by some narrativist theory
as evidence that a variety of stories can incorporate the same facts.
But Foucault shifts the perspective on narrative as well. The chain of
influences, the temporal continuities, the sustaining consciousness,
the totalizing dialectic--these dissolve or are relativized by the
method he employs. In sum, Foucault is an historian, but suo modo.
Unlike that of the old or even the "new" French historians, his is a
self-declared history of the present, an objective, he argues, fully
in accord with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Enlightenment.[3]
I shall try to illuminate the nature and implications of that original
approach to history by focusing on one of his most striking
kaleidoscopic moves, the shift from time to space as the paradigm
guiding his approach to historical topics (the word topos having a
primarily spatial denotation). Of course, the kaleidoscope itself is a
spatial, and indeed an atemporal instrument.
I
Paul Ricoeur has long done battle with the rising tide of the "New
History" in French thought.[4] His basic argument has been that such
history cannot bear the name if it diminishes, much less excludes, the
temporal character of human experience as integral to the subject it
studies; time (not just chronological sequence) is ingredient in the
world of action, and it is this world that history seeks to articulate
(TN 1:91ff.). Ricoeur's strictures against quantitative and serial
history arise from his own commitment to hermeneutical phenomenology,
with its reliance on the ineluctably temporal character of the
lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the pretheoretical basis for any
"scientific" investigation.
The most extreme of theoreticians for the New History, as Ricoeur sees
it, is Foucault's friend and colleague at the College de France, Paul
Veyne. With his typical flair for shocking our common sense, Veyne
asserts: "Time is not essential to history, any more than is the
individualizing of events that it undergoes in spite of itself .... It
may seem paradoxical to deny time in history, but it is no less true
that the concept of time is not indispensable to the historian who has
need only of that of the intelligible process (we would say, of the
concept of plot)." (WH 65-66). His larger thesis is that what he calls
"complete history" must incorporate the "non-eventworthy description
of contemporary civilization" which has heretofore been left to
sociology. Indeed, "if history decides to be 'complete'," he goes on
to say, ". . . it makes sociology useless" (WH 264).$
In Veyne's opinion, two conventions have mutilated history, limiting
it to a kind of "biography of a national individuality," namely, the
belief that "there was no history, save for the past" and the
conviction that "history related the past life of a nation, was
centered on the special individuality of the latter, and established
itself in a spatiotemporal continuum" (WH 282-83). Echoing the words
of Foucault, as we shall see, he recommends, on the contrary, that
historians emulate the comparativist spirit of general geographers,
who "never consider a phenomenon without comparing it with related
phenomena that are spread over the other points of the globe" (WH
284).
Foucault, who praised Veyne's book for having "rekindled reflection on
historical methods and concepts in France,"6 has practiced what Veyne
was preaching, perhaps even subscribing to the latter's "narrativist"
conviction that the plot (l'intrigue) is essential to history.[7] He
joins Veyne in violating established history's two conventions with
his "history of the present," as he styles his book-length works,[8]
and his concentration on relationships that transcend national
boundaries as do the scientific community, the bourgeois culture and
the sociopolitical structures he describes. Particularly during his
"archaeological" period, when he treated the contrasting
understandings of insanity (Madness and Civilization), medical
diagnostic procedure (The Birth of the Clinic), and explanation in the
social sciences (The Order of Things) before and after the "break"
associated with the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath,
Foucault's method was avowedly "differential" somewhat along lines
recommended by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General
Linguistics.[9] Moreover, he explicitly credits Georges Dumezil for
having "taught me to analyze the internal economy of discourse quite
differently from the traditional methods of exegesis or those of
linguistic formalism. It is he," Foucault continues in his Inaugural
Lecture at the College de France, "who taught me to refer the system
of functional correlations from one discourse to another by means of
comparison. It was he, again, who taught me to describe the
transformations of a discourse and its relations to the
institution."[10] These were the works that earned him the label
"structuralist," a title he emphatically rejected.
Saussure, we may recall, was able to cordon off a separate and
autonomous realm called "language" (la langue) as distinct from
specific speech acts (la parole) in order to articulate the rules of
formation and transformation of the former in a scientific manner. By
a kind of methodological suspension of concern for the individual
practices of speaking, he was freed to seek the "meaning" of signs in
their relationship of similarity to and difference from other
linguistic signs. In a famous remark, Saussure asserts: "[In] language
there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the
signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that
existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic
differences that have issued from the system."[11] The popular
understanding of language as basically nomenclautre is systematically
rejected.
It is the non-subject-centered and relational nature of the
differential method that appeals to Foucault. He shares Saussure's
anti-substantialist view of the subject as well as his interest in
meaning as system-relative, but he rejects the structures of the
structuralists as axiomatic and formal. Foucault's "structures,"
whether they be called "epistemes" or "diagrams" (DP 205), are, he
insists, not at all "transcendental" in the Kantian sense; neither are
they origins or foundations. They possess a factual character that
appeals to his "positivist" tendencies; they are to be discovered, not
deduced.
When he characterizes his method as "diagnostic," he means that it
yields "a form of knowledge that defines and determines
differences."[12] The example he cites is a physician determining a
disease by comparing the symptoms with those of other diseases. He
seems to have adopted as a general rule what he characterized in The
Birth of the Clinic as "the diacritical principle of medical
observation," namely, that "the only pathological fact is a
comparative fact" (BC 134). This, of course, would accord with his
kaleidoscopic (what we shall soon call "spatializing") thought.
Foucault's diagnostic method is that of an historical nominalist.[13]
His entire project has been radically anti-Platonic and favorable to
those like the Sophists and Cynics in classical antiquity who have
been marginalized by the official history of Western philosophy. Thus
his interest in contrast and difference does not imply commitment to
an underlying unity. True to his nominalist proclivities, he urges:
The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction,
without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence;
affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the
multiple--of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not
limited or confined by the constraints of similarity .... What is the
answer to the question? The problem. How is the problem resolved? By
displacing the question .... We must think problematically rather than
question and answer dialectically.[14]
This emphasis on "problemization"--on how it came about that sexual
thoughts as well as practices, for example, became a major moral
matter, displacing considerations of diet and even civic duty in order
or importance--though most explicit in his second and third volumes of
the history of sexuality, was already present in his earlier writings,
a fact worth noting when addressing the unity of Foucault's thought.
Problemization, as we shall see, expresses the spatialization of
language in Foucault's later thought.
Because of his comparatist method, Foucault should be seen as less a
revisionist than a counter-historian. Each of the "histories" he
constructs, whether archaeological, genealogical or "problemizing"
(the last two volumes of his History of Sexuality, for example), are
dependent on prior histories against which they define themselves in
differential manner. As the signs in Saussure's system of language
derive their meaning through a relationship of contrast with other
signs, so the statements in Foucault's histories gain their
significance, not only from mutual differences but from the ongoing
distinction drawn between the set of statements being described and a
contrasting set in question. It is not simply that the set of
statements constituting the modern discourse of sexuality, for
example, displays a coherence that makes some statements possible and
excludes others or even that the discourse of sexuality creates a
space in which such statements may proliferate; rather, it is that the
entire "discursive formation" (the set itself and the rules that
govern it) assumes its meaning as a mechanism of social control in
contrast with alternative discourses that allow sex a less decisive,
cognitive role in constituting social subjects. Accordingly, the
alternative "bodies and pleasures" that Foucault speaks of at the
close of his first volume on sexuality have the force of resistance to
presently dominant discursive practices by virtue of their very
possibility.[15] Things can be otherwise, he is saying, not merely in
the utopian sense of imaginative constructions, but in the diagnostic
contrast that "heterotopias" establish.
In a lecture entitled "Of Other Spaces," delivered the year after The
Order of Things was published, Foucault undertakes a brief "history"
of space in support of the thesis that whereas history was the great
obsession of nineteenth-century thought, our present age could well be
termed "the epoch of space." He employs his diagnostic method to
distinguish "Heterotopias" (other places)from "utopias" ("good
places/no places"). The former, which is a constant of every human
group, includes such spaces as cemeteries, gardens and museums, as
well as the "space" of fairs and vacation villages, of libraries and
colonies. What makes this curious essay interesting, in addition to
the characteristic insightfulness of Foucault's descriptions, is its
use of the method of contrast to underscore the "space of
contemptation" that heterotopias inevitably introduce into a society.
Although they have a specific function proper to each society within
which they exist, in general these "other spaces" silently question
the space in which we live. Again, the diagnostic method illuminates
the fact that "we live inside an ensemble of relations which define
sites [emplacements] that are irreducible to and absolutely non
superposable upon each other."[16] Diagnosis concerning the nature of
the present, "by following lines of fragility in the present--in
managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be
that-which-is," inevitably opens up what Foucault calls "a space of
concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation."[17]
It is this revelation of the radical contingency of discourses that
makes Foucault's "histories" forms of social critique, a fact
seemingly lost on such critics as Habermas and Rorty. And it is
"space" or rather the spatialization of language, I wish to argue,
that fills the organizing role in postmodern thought played by "order"
and "history" in the Classical and Modern epistemic grids
respectively. To the extent that this reading is correct, one can
consider Foucault's archaeologies, but also his genealogies and his
problemizations, as illustrating the very postmodern thought from
which his "histories" of modernism emerge. In other words, far from
being a merely stylistic quirk, the discourse of these studies
exemplifies the postmodern "spatialization" of history in its analysis
of modern and premodern practices.
In an essay on Maurice Blanchot, whose thought he regarded highly,
Foucault speaks of "experience of the outside" (l'experience du
dehors), which historically was lodged in negative theology and in the
writings of thinkers such as Sade and Holderlin, as reappearing "at
the very heart of the language" of our culture with the works of
Nietzsche, Mallarme, Artaud, Bataille, Klossovski and Blanchot
(members of Foucault's pleiad). Such experience seeks a language that
excludes the subject, eschews dialectical attempts to recoup
otherness, and shows an affinity for space, "which is to fiction what
the negative is to reflection (while dialectical negation is tied to
the fable of time)."[18] Characterizing with approval Blanchot's
literary work, Foucault insists that language is "neither truth nor
time nor eternity nor man, but the ever defeated form of the
outside."[19] It is in "spatialized" language that Foucault seeks
liberation, not only from the suzerainty of time and phenomenology,
whether pure or hermeneutical, but from the metaphor of depth: his is
a geography, not a geology, or better, a geopolitics of the regions he
surveys.
In discussing the contrast between clinical and anatomo-clinical
medicine that surfaced in the early 1800s, for example, Foucault
notes:
What is modified in giving place to anatomo-clinical medicine is not,
therefore, the mere surface contact between the knowing subject and
the known object; it is the more general arrangement of knowledge that
determines the reciprocal positions and the connections between the
one who must know and that which is to be known .... It was the result
of a recasting at the level of epistemic knowledge (savoir) itself,
and not at the level of accumulated, refined, deepened and adjusted
knowledge (connaissances) .... It is not a matter of the same game,
somewhat improved, but of a quite different game. (BC 137)
What he is pointing out is a profound change in the way of looking at
the patient and a corresponding alteration in the body observed. The
initial medical query, "What is wrong with you?" leading to a
classificatory response, gives way to "Where does it hurt?" "The
notion of seat has finally replaced that of class" (BC 140). This
basic shift in the twin gears of seeing and saying is indicative, not
only of an epistemic revolution in nineteenth-century medicine, but of
the "postmodern" nature of Foucault's own thought. When he prefaces
his study of clinical medicine with the injunction, "We must place
ourselves, and remain once and for all, at the level of the
fundamental spatialization and verbalization of the pathological" (BC
xi), he is characterizing his general approach to history as well.
Foucault focuses upon what he calls "practice," both discursive and
nondiscursive,[20] He defines "discourse" as "the group of statements
that belong to a single system of formation" and what he calls
"discursive formation," as the regularity that obtains between
"objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices" (AK 107
and 38). He insists that the task that The Order of Things set itself
is one of no longer "treating discourses as groups of signs
(signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as
practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak"
(AK 49). But he is quick to insist that "the discursive formation is
characterized not by principles of construction but by a dispersion of
fact, since for statements it is not a condition of possibility but a
law of coexistence" (AK 116).
He has admitted that his use of "discourse" in the Archaeology is
rather ambiguous (see AK 107). The same might be said for" discursive
formation" which is a condition of existence but not a condition of
possibility (AK 117), except that here he seems to have adopted this
distinction to keep his project "positive" and not "transcendental"
(see AK 230). Indeed, this distinction between conditions of existence
and of possibility expresses his "principle of exteriority" enunciated
in the Inaugural Lecture, namely, that rather than burrowing to the
supposed hidden core of discourse, as hermeneutics, for example, might
counsel, but instead, "taking the discourse itself, its appearance and
its regularity, we should look for its external conditions of
existence, for that which gives rise to chance series of these events
and fixes its limits" (AK 229). His aim is not to constitute a realm
independent of the nondiscursive, but to reveal how these formations
function at the limit between discursive and nondiscursive
practices--not as representing some extralinguistic reality, but as
establishing a realm of signs and a specific object of
investigation.[21]
As if to offer a gloss on Sanssure, Foucault summarizes his method in
The Archaeology of Knowledge:
What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with `things.' To
`depresentify' them .... To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of
`things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that
emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to
the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body
of rules that enable them to form as objects of discourse and thus
constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. (AK 47-48)
The point of Foucault's analyses in each of these works is to reveal
the contextualization and radical contingency of our most prized
certainties. By examining what Veyne calls the "optics of the
sources," the commonplaces and taken-for-granted's of a particular
discourse, instituion or set of practices, Foucault is able to reveal
unsuspected affiliations that challenge the adequacy of our standard
readings of the phenomena in question and, more importantly,
constitute new phenomena of their own. As he says with ironic modesty
of his history of sexuality, "I would like to refocus the perspective
somewhat: seizing in any case the entire complex of operative
mechanisms."[22]
II
But it is not only his comparatist, differential method that I wish to
pursue, though this is integral to the counter-history he is
practicing. Foucault's marked preference for spatial metaphors is
indicative of his synchronic manner of conceiving the relations he
analyzes. Indeed, rather than refer to precedents and influences such
as a more temporally ordered discourse might employ, his makes liberal
use of such terms as displacement, field, position, site, domain and
limit to convey his grasp of the altered relations his kaleidoscope
reveals. His writings show a marked prefernce for lists, tables,
geometrical configurations, and illustrations, that not only
constitute his particular style of exposition but are integral to the
argument itself.
Next to the "Panopticon" paradigm of Discipline and Punish, The Order
of Things offers us the most striking examples of such "spatial"
arguments. First, there is the example of Velasquez's "Las Meninas"
which begins the work. In the manner of an art critic, Foucault leads
us along the path of argument by repeatedly calling our attention to
aspects of the singular image before us. We are drawn thereby to the
graphic conclusion that representation cannot represent itself, that
"the very being of that which is represented is now going to fall
outside representation itself" (OT 240). The work of Adam Smith in
economics, of the first philologists, of Jussieu and of Lamarck in
biology reveal that a "minuscule displacement" has occurred in the
space of representation, "which toppled the whole of Western thought:
representation has lost the power to provide a foundation ... for the
links that can join its various elements together" (OT 238-39). The
"space of order, which served as a common place for representation and
for things" in the Classical period is shattered. Henceforth there
will be things and their representations, but their mutual adequacy
will have to be established and the "fit" will not be perfect. On the
threshold of modernity, critical philosophy and positivism will seek
to occupy that space created by the displacement of being with regard
to its representations.
Whether he is describing the "anthropological quadrilateral" in
nineteenth-century thought (namely, finitude, the Kantian
empirical/transcendental doublet, the unthought underlying the Cogito,
and historicity) that defines the mode of being of "man" on which the
social sciences are founded, the epistemological trihedron (formed by
the deductive sciences, the empirical sciences and philosophical
reflection) generating the space of the social sciences in the modern
period, or the open-ended classical "quadrilateral of language"
centering on the naming relation between thing and its representation,
Foucault's arguments rely upon these configurations in more than a
metaphorical sense (see OT 201). They place the human sciences, for
example, within the boundaries set by mathematics and physical science
on one side, empirical science on the second side and philosophy on
the third. This iconic mode of argument brings to our attention not
only the "essential instability" of the human sciences but their
inherent danger to the "pure" disciplines that form their boundaries.
Thus, "psychologism," "sociologism," and what Foucault generically
terms "anthropologization" constitute a constant danger to the natural
sciences and philosohy from the human sciences (see OT 348). Like
Kant's geometrical arguments that relied on the figures for their
formulation and not merely for their illustration, Foucault's
quadrilaterials, trihedrons and the like "explain" the limits and
possibilities created by the relevant epistemes as well as the
permanent danger, in the case of the trihedron, for example, of
"anthropologizing" these three planes of knowledge.
Though he is careful to distance himself from deductivist or formalist
approaches, his archaeological method brings to our attention the
necessities that these relationships produce. The relations axe a
priori, albeit "historical" or regional a prioris. Once the
archaeologist has established the discursive practices, formations and
rules of formation from the empirical evidence, he/she attempts to
answer the question "How is it that one particular statement appeared
rather than another."[9] (AK 27) and why contrasting practices and
formations are excluded.
Setting his archaeological account against the "tangled network of
influenoes" that constitutes the standard history of ideas, Foucault
remarks:
But if we question Classical thought at the level of what,
archaeologically, made it possible, we perceive that the dissociation
of the sign and resemblance in the early seventeenth century caused
these new forms--probability, analysis, combination and universal
language system--to emerge, not as successive themes engendering one
another or driving one another out, but as a single network of
necessities. And it was this network that made possible the
individuals we term Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac. (OT 63,
italics mine)
Why one network succeeded another is a matter of chance, a throw of
the historical dice. But why one appeared with the form it possessed,
is a function of the "spaces" left vacant by its predecessor. The
"quasi transcendentals" of life, labor and language, for example,
filled the gap in the representational schema of the Classical period
(see OT 206-09), just as the latter displaced the resemblance scheme
of the Renaissance at the point of its greatest inadequacy. Likewise,
the famous eighteenth-century debates between mercantilists and
physiocrats in economics or between practitioners of the Method versus
the System (evolutionists versus 'fixists') in biology, are just
"surface disturbances" when viewed archaeologically in comparison, for
instance, with "the network of necessity which at this point rendered
the choice between two ways of constituting natural history as a
language both possible and indispensable. The rest is merely a logical
and inevitable consequence" (OT 139-40).
But if there is post factum necessity and intelligibility in these
archaeologies, they float on radial contingency, on the "fundamental
event" that introduces chance into historical accounts. "The forces at
play in history," Foucault observes, "obey neither goal nor regulative
mechanism, but follow the luck of the battle. They do not manifest the
successive forms of a primordial intention nor do they assume the
guise of an effect, for they always appear through the singular
randomness of events."[23]
III
Reference to "battle" lifts us to the next level in the spiral of
Foucault's methodological progression, that of genealogy. In its
opposition to any concept of historical "origins," its emphasis on the
pivotal role of chance occurrences to "maintain passing events in
their proper dispersion" (LCP 146), and its Nietzschean nominalism,
genealogy resembles archaeology. But its apparent difference lies in
the fact that genealogy "poses the problem of power and of the body
(of bodies), indeed, its problems begin from the imposition of power
upon bodies."[24] In retrospect, Foucault insists that he was always
dealing with the issue of power, and a glance at The Birth of the
Clinic, above all, would support the claim. But the later method
complements the earlier one by interpreting all social relations in
terms of the interplay of forces of domination, resistance and
control. Not meaning-giving but "warfare" becomes the proper model for
historical intelligibility, and the basic relation is one of strategy
and tactics.
Foucault brings to the fore the complementary nature of the
archaeology/genealogy relation when, shortly after publishing
Discipline and Punish, he in effect redefines the task of archaeology
in "genealogical" terms:
The archaeology of the human sciences has to be established through
studying the mechanisms of power which have invested human bodies,
acts and forms of behavior. And this investigation enables us to
rediscover one of the conditions of the emergence of the human
sciences: the great nineteenth-century effort in discipline and
normalization. (PK 61)
It was this condition that The Order of Things, subtitled "An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences," overlooked. His next two
genealogical studies supplied it.
Now it would seem that a casualty of the move from archaeologyis the
concept of space itself. One critic, for example, has simply asserted
that "in his writings of the 1970s Foucault abandons the notion of
"space"--even the entirely superficial space of an `order of
discourse.'"[25] What in fact does genealogy have to do with the
spatialization of history? Does it not rather signal a return to
genetic and hence to "temporal" issues? In an interview given a
publication for geographers, Foucault responds:
People have often reproached me for these spatial obsessions, which
have indeed been obsessions for me. But I think it was through them
that I came to what I had basically been looking for: the relations
that are possible between power and knowledge. Once knowledge can be
analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement,
transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge
functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power.
There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge,
relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to
transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated
by such notions as field, region and territory. And the
politico-strategic term is an indication of how the military and the
administration actually come to inscribe themselves both on a material
soil and within forms of discourse (PK 69, translation modified).
It is, in fact, this very spatialized discourse that enables Foucault
to bring into relation the power/knowledge dyad that comes to
characterize his genealogical works, especially Discipline and Punish
and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. "Displacement," for
example, is a military term and "field" and "region" are
economico-juridical and administrative notions respectively. We can
now say that his earlier vocabulary carried an implicit reference to
relations of domination and control in addition to their being common
terms for cognition. Indeed, Foucault believes that "anyone envisaging
the analysis of discourse solely in terms of temporal continuity would
inevitably be led to approach and analyze it like the internal
transformation of an individual consciousness. Which would lead to his
erecting a great collective consciousness as the scene of events." So
the use of spatial metaphors avoids the "anthropological" bias of
modern philosophies of history while enabling one "to grasp precisely
the points at which discourses are transformed in, through and on the
basis of relations of power" (PK 69-70).
Genealogy underscores the fact that Foucault's is a history of
"bodies"; not just the body politic, nor the body of information
(positivity) which a science incarnates, but the physical bodies of
individuals, tamed, trained, subjected to the scrutinies of experts
and normalizers. It is a history of physical bodies and the spaces
they occupy, not "mentalities" or ideologies: controlled and
anarchical "bodies" as well as the "spaces" that enable them to appear
as such, not inert matter or abstract, geometrical space; a
"geography" to be mapped, not a geology to be excavated and
categorized. Indeed, he shares with Deleuze the belief that
"difference can only be liberated through the invention of an
acategorical thought" and that such thinking alone will free us from
"the neurosis of dialectics" (LCP 186, 184).
Foucault is aware that his valuation of space has been read as
antihistorical, but he attributes such criticism to "those who confuse
history with the old schemas of evolution, living continuity, organic
development, the progress of consciousness or the project of
existence." What they failed to realize was that "to trace the forms
of implantation, delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of
tabulation, the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief
of processes--historical ones, needless to say--of power. The
spatializing of descriptions of discursive realities," he insists,
"opens on to the analysis of related effects of power" (PK 70-71,
translation modified).
Foucault's best known example of spatialized argumentation that
relates power and knowledge in a more than metaphorical sense is his
use of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon to characterize the self-custodial
nature of our modern, "carceral society," where "prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons"
(DP 228). The marriage of norm and surveillance that this interplay of
architecture and social science exhibits is brilliantly revealed in
Foucault's descriptions. Again, the demonstrative force of his
analyses depends upon the spatial organization of the institutions he
discusses. As with the Velasquez painting, one is constantly referred
back to the visual evidence, to the plans, the prospects, the models.
But now the line of sight is strategic, not just descriptive; the
contours inscribe relations of control, not just forms of
intelligibility. We are invited to view these practices, institutions
and sciences as techniques for mastering self and others. This theme
of self mastery as self constitution will move us up to the final
level of Foucault's methodological spiral, that of problernization.
IV
"A few years ago," Foucault observes, "historians were very proud to
have discovered that they could write not only the history of battles,
of kings and institutions, but also of the economy. Now they're all
dumbfounded because the shrewdest among them learned that it was also
possible to write the history of feelings, of behaviors and of bodies.
Soon they'll understand that the history of the West cannot be
disassociated from the way in which "truth" is produced and inscribes
its effects" (FL 139). At the time of his death, Foucault was said to
be working on a projected sixvolume study of the history of the
"production of truth" to have been published in a series under the
direction of Paul Veyne. His lectures at the College de France that
year and the previous one on truth-telling (plain speaking, parresia)
were part of the project.[26]
He defines this new approach to history, "problemization," as "the
ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that makes
something enter into the play of the true and the false and
constitutes it an object of thought (whether in the form of moral
reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis or the
like)."[27] Characteristically, he says it is what links all of his
writings since Madness and Civilization. In that work, for example, it
was a question of determining how and why at a particular moment
madness "was problemized via a certain institutional practice and a
certain cognitive apparatus." Likewise, Discipline and Punish dealt
with changes in the problemization of relations between penal
practices and institutions at the end of the seventeenth century. The
question of his last two books is "how is sexual activity
problemized?" (SV 18). As I have noted elsewhere, at each spiral of
his research, Foucault has read the previous turn as in fact dealing
with what the next professed to study.[28] The relation between truth,
self-constitution and problemization is worked out in Foucault's later
writings, enabling him to avow in a volume published just before his
death that his abiding interest was a "history of truth."[29]
It is noteworthy that Foucault, the apostle of discontinuity, has
retrospectively sought a coherence throughout his published works. Not
that he glories in the traditional intellectual values of consistency
and completeness; on the contrary, he loves to surprise us and himself
as he follows what he describes as the ethos of the intellectual: to
think otherwise than before (se deprendre de soi-meme).[30] But there
has been an identifiable line of advance running through his major
writings, I have been arguing, that charts the spatialization of
discourse characteristic of Foucault as a socalled "postmodem"
thinker. If that claim required some defense in the case of his
genealogical studies, it would seem most vulnerable with regard to his
"problemizations."
It is in the contrast Foucault paints between dialectical and
"problematical" thinking that the spatialization of discourse becomes
evident. Dialectical thought, he argues, is essentially temporalizing
thought, to borrow a phrase from Sartre. It seeks a unity and a
totality in consciousness, whether individual or collective, which is
itself diachronic. In discussion with a society of professional
historians, he is careful to distinguish study of a problem from that
of a period in history. The latter, he agrees, requires the kind of
"exhaustive treatment of all the material and a fair chronological
distribution of the examination" that such historians are accustomed
to. Dealing with a "problem," on the contrary, demands one follow
other rules: "choice of the material in function of the givens of the
problem; focus of one's analysis on the elements capable of resolving
it; establishing the relations that allow this solution."[31]
What he did not mention to the historians but spoke of elsewhere, as
we noted above, and practiced even in his last works is the fact that
the "solution" of a problem is the "displacement" of the question. It
is the twin terms transformation and displacement that have governed
Foucault's methods in all of his "histories." Both terms are intended
to free our understanding of history from the "general, empty category
of change," its "uniform model of temporalization" (AK 200) and
traditional reliance on consciousness and subjectivity as well as from
its dialectical subsumption of otherness and multiplicity in some
overarching purpose or end.
We have observed the transformation of medical perception in Birth of
the Clinic, with its corresponding displacement of the object of
medical investigation: of the body from occasion for the study of
classes of disease to the individual body as site of abnormality.
Discipline and Punish charts a similar transformation of discursive
and nondiscursive practices of "inquisitorial" justice into those of
"examinatory" justice that entailed "a displacement in the very object
of the punitive operation .... Since it is no longer the body, it must
be the soul" (DP 16). In effect, the offender and the guilty party are
displaced by such objects of social science as the deviant and the
delinquent. And this method continues in his "problemization" of
sexual morality in the volumes published just before his death. He
notes, for example, a transformation in fifth-century Athenian culture
from a "stylistics of freedom" in which pleasure and its dynamic
(chresis cphrodision) are the concern to the Socrato-Platonic erotic
in which desire is directed to its true object, truth, by recognizing
desire for what it is in its true being (see UP 267). The former asked
a deontological question: What is the fitting and honorable thing to
do?; the latter, an ontological one: What is love in is very being?
This transformation of "ethics" (in Foucault's special sense of
"practices of the self," "forms of subjectification") into a
metaphysics entailed a corresponding displacement of the very object
of discourse from the beloved and the honor of the loved one to the
loving subject and the life of truth itself.[32] So the spatialized
discourse of transformation-displacement continues to dominate
Foucault's histories to the very end.
V
Stating a thesis with which we are now familiar, Foucault observed
early in his career that, although for centuries writing had been
ordered toward time, with Nietzsche we have "completed once for all
the curve of Platonic memory and, with Joyce, closed the Homeric
narrative." This situation "reveals that langugae is (or, perhaps, has
become) something spatial (chose d'espace)."[33] Having surveyed the
spaces of Foucault's histories (his nominalism forbids us to speak of
"space" in the singular), let us conclude with some critical
observations about this paradigm shift and its import for human
history.
One immediate consequence of this change is the undermining of
universal history which, like the universal intellectual (see PK 126),
must give way to a plurality of regional studies. Though he is the
adversary of speculative philosophers of history, Foucault has never
claimed that his approach should be anything more than complementary
to more commonly pursued types of empirical history. Indeed, he has
insisted that the archaeological description of discourses "is
deployed in the dimension of a general history; it seeks to discover
the whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social
relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated; it tries
to show how the autonomy of discourse . . . [does] not give it the
status of pure ideality and total historical independence" (AK 165).
Unlike universal history, general history does not attempt to set the
telos of the human adventure or measure its advance. The
interdependence of discursive and nondiscursive practices as well as
their inscription in a broad general history is even more obvious in
his genealogies and especially his "problemizations," which in fact
resemble traditional history of ideas far more than Foucault seemed
willing to admit.
Another victim of Foucault' s spatialization of historical language is
appeal to historical accounts in terms of the ideology/science
dichotomy preferred by Marxists and others. Not only is the
distinction itself suspect, given the relativity of what counts as
science to a particular epistemic grid and the questionable notion of
truth implicit in the distinction, but the "political anatomy" or
"geopolitics" that genealogy constructs renders "false consciousness,"
"infrastructure," and other categories of ideologyanalysis trite and
unconvincing.
Spatialized discourse yields a history of "bodies" and not of
"mentalities." Like Sartre before him, Foucault is an enemy of the
inner life as well as its "exteriorization" in cultural objects and
events. The constitution of the moral self, the formation of a class
of delinquents, the alteration of our perception of diseased
subjects--all refer to the disposition of bodies both in relation to
one another and with regard to themselves (the self control, for
example, of the moral agent). So appeal to strategy and the model of
warfare rather than to meaning and intention is quite consistent with
this subtle form of materialism. Working on the "surface" of things,
Foucault displaces metaphysics with a "topology" of social practices,
charting the limits, exclusions and specific "conditions of existence"
of these practices in their actual occurrence.
Accordingly, Foucault argues, "the coherence of such a history does
not derive from the revelation of a project but from a logic of
opposing strategies" (PK 61). Now this is a nondialectical "logic" in
that it is neither reductive of multiplicity nor totalizing. "As
always with relations of power," he notes, "one is faced with complex
phenomena which don't obey the Hegelian form of the dialectic" (PK
56). It is in this context that he speaks of the intellectual's
providing us a "topological and geological survey of the battlefield"
(PK 62).
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the spatialization of history
is its freeing of the discipline from its moorings in philosophical
anthropology, the famous "death of man" that caused so much ink to
spill after the appearance of The Order of Things. Speaking of
archaeology as "diagnosis," Foucault claims that it "does not
establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions.
[Rather], it establishes that we are difference, that our reason is
the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our
selves the difference of masks. That difference," he concludes, "far
from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that
we are and make" (AK 131). A condition of the existence of this
dispersion is spatialized language that dissolves the unity of the
self, dissipates projects by chance events and multiplies
rationalities.
But such a radical undertaking, a counter-history, as we have termed
it, is not without its difficulties. One problem is precisely its
derivative nature. It depends heavily upon traditional historical
scholarship, the conceptual framework of which it often questions. How
this counter-history stands to the facts it organizes is unclear,
especially since Foucault seems to subscribe to the Nietzschean
refusal of brute, uncontextualized facts. To the extent that it is
"positivistic," it is subject to the falsification of its claims by
contrary empirical evidence. And this counter-evidence has not been
slow in emerging.[34]
Yet there is something of the poet in Foucault's easy way with
striking examples at the price of tedious factual corroboration.
Indeed, in a famous phrase he once avowed: "I am well aware that I
have not written anything but fictions" (PK 193)--which is not to say
they have nothing to do with the truth. The price of being an
historian suo modo is that he is not entirely at home either with
professional historians or with philosophers. Arguably, his greatest
influence to date has been with people working in literature and in
the social sciences.
The concept of counter-history underscores the power/knowledge dyad
that came to dominate Foucault's thought. Pure, disinterested inquiry
is impossible, he is saying; we must look for the uses to which a
concept, hypothesis or theory is being put, not just individually but
as part of an "economy" of warrants and justifications. But this
applies to Foucault's own claims, which, despite the rationalistic
rhetoric, are put forth as hypotheses themselves. Each of his
"histories" is a local investigation and an exercise of power against
the "lines of fracture," the veiled lineage, the presumed limit. Is he
not subject to the debilitating paradox of selfreference, the bane of
relativists? Rather than flee the objection, he seems to embrace it
fully. The paradox is debilitating only for someone committed to a
quasi-platonic objectivity or universality of concepts. If one's
claims and expectations are more modest, one needn't sink in the mire
of total relativism, a lesson we've known at least since Dewey.[35]
Another problem concerns the specific "logic" of spatialized language.
As Edward Said points out, what Foucault offers us by way of
"argument" is adjacency, not sequentiality. Indeed, that is the
significance of his using the image of the theatre to describe the
exchange between philosophy and history that his work exhibits.[36]
Now this is not necessarily a weakness; it's the mode of argument of
the geographer and often of the social theorist. But whether it
justifies the banner of "history," is another matter, which brings us
to our final problem.
The greatest difficulty with the spatialization of languge in general
and of history in particular is the recalcitrance of the temporal in
human activity. To the extent that Foucault retains a place for
practice, he has saved a spot for temporality as well. Pierre Bourdieu
has remarked in another context that "to substitute strategy for rule
is to reintroduce time, with its rhythm, its orientation, its
irreversibility" into the consideration. Although it is not clear that
Foucault ever respected this temporal rhythm, let alone its
"irreversibility," he valued the dispersive power of time implicit in
his appeal to "practice" over "structure" (rule).[37] Strategy figures
centrally in his genealogies and so by implication does time. The same
might be said of the temporal rhythms of "style" that comes to
dominate his last works. What Foucault's spatialization of language
does to temporality is dislodge it from its central, unifying function
in totalizing histories and existential projects. It restores to time
its power of multiplicity, its differential weight, its Dionysian
character. But it does so at a price: whether history as the narrative
of human action can withstand this dispersion is questionable. But if
not human action, what of freedom and moral life? Is an aesthetics of
existence a reasonable alternative to these? Or is Ricoeur perhaps
right after all--you cannot write a history without appealing to our
pretheoretical experience of the temporal.
Paul Veyne once repeated Jacques Maritain's observation that
historians ultimately acquire "a sane philosophy of man" (WH 156).
Whether as presupposition or product, a theoretical understanding of
human nature is operative in Foucualt's thought: "man" as the object
of the social sciences and their justification is fragmented into "the
dispersion which we are." This "counter-anthropology" is the
concomitant of his counter-history, each expressed and fostered by the
spatialized language they employ. But whether it is "sane" or not is
precisely the kind of normative question Foucault would insist we
answer contextually.
NOTES
[1]. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other
Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books,
1980), p. 70, hereafter cited as P K.
[2]. This characterization was first made by his friend, Paul Veyne,
in an appendix to the latter's Comment on ecrit l'histoire, entitled
"Foucault revolutionne l'histoire" (Paris: Seuil, collection Points,
1971 and 1978 respectively), p. 225. The main text is translated by
Mina Moore-Rinvolucri as Writing History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1974). I shall cite the main text in its English
translation as WH and the untranslated appendix as FRH.
[3]. See "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 42 ff.
[4]. His argument in distilled form is presented in the 1978-79
Zaharoff Lecture, "The Contribution of French Historiography to the
Theory of History" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) and at far greater
length, though scarcely less concentrated, in his Time and Narrative,
3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-88), hereafter
cited as TN.
[5]. It may or may not be assuring to sociologists that Veyne concedes
that "we are disputing the flag and not the goods" (WH 271). He
insists, for example, that "the work of Max Weber... is truly history"
(WH 287).
[6]. From the blurb for the English translation.
[7]. The matter is complex. For example, Veyne insists: "Every
historical account is a plot out of which it would be artificial to
cut discrete causes, and this account is directly causal,
comprehensible; only the comprehension it gets is more or less deep"
(WH 93). "Facts do not exist in isolation, in the sense that the
fabric of history is what we shall call a plot, a very human and not
very `scientific' mixture of material causes, aims, and chances--a
slice of life, in short, that the historian cuts as he wills and in
which facts have their objective connections and their relative
importance ..." (WH 32).
Michel de Certeau argues that Foucault's "stories" are, indeed, the
inevitable form of any "theory of practices" as exemplified in
Discipline and Punish and elsewhere. For he defends the hypothesis
that "a narrative theory [is] indissociable from any theory of
practices, for it [is] its precondition as well as its production"
("Micro-techniques and Panoptic Discourse" in Michel de Certeau
Heterologies. Discourse on the Other [Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986], p. 192).
On the other hand, Edward Said sees Foucault's method as
"postnarrative," as testifying to "an active search.., for a
nonnarrative way of dealing with nonnarratable units of knowledge"
(Edward W. Said, Beginnings [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1975], p. 282). The contradiction is resolved if one extracts
temporal sucession and subjectivity from narrative, leaving something
akin to Veyne's "plot." But, as I shall argue in the concluding
section of this essay, that may not suffice for a "theory of
practices."
[8]. Thus he describes his study of the prison system in the
nineteenth century as a "history of the present" (Discipline and
Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Pantheon, 19771, p. 31,
hereafter DP).
Contrasting modern philosophy with more traditional philosophical
concerns about permanence and change, mortality and immortality,
Foucault remarks: "h seems to me that, since the nineteenth century,
philosophy has not ceased asking itself the same question: `What is
happening right now, and what are we, we who are perhaps nothing more
than what is happening at this moment?' Philosophy's question is the
question of the present age which is ourselves. This is why philosophy
is today entirely political and entirely historical. It is the
politics immanent in history and the history indispensable for
politics" ("End of the Monarchy of Sex," Foucault Live, ed. Sylvere
Lotringer [New York: Semiotext(e), 1989], p. 151, hereafter cited as
FL).
Foucault first finds this modern understanding of philosophy in Kant's
What is Enlightenment? and he wonders whether one of the principal
tasks of philosophy since then should not be characterized as "to
describe the nature of the present and of `ourselves in the present'
"(Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other
Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman [New York: Routledge,
1988], p. 36, hereafter cited as PPC).
[9]. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans.
Wade Baskin (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 121.
Specifically, Foucault in the Preface to his The Birth of the Clinic,
after criticizing the tradition of commentary that has "doomed us
historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses
about discourses, and to the task of hearing what has already been
said," recommends a "structural analysis of discourses that would
evade the fate of commentary .... The meaning of a statement would be
defined not by the treasure of intentions that it might contain,
revealing and concealing it at the same time, but by the difference
that articulates it upon the other real or possible statements, which
are contemporary to it or to which it is opposed in the linear series
of time. A systematic history of discourses would then become
possible" (Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith [New York:
Random House Vintage Books, 1975], pp. xvi-xvii, hereafter cited as
BC).
In view of such remarks by Foucault, it is difficult to justify the
claim by Francois Wahl quoted with approval by Allan Magill that
"Foucault makes no use of the Saussurean conception of difference"
(Prophets of Extremity [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1985], p. 211).
[10]. "The Discourse on Language," published as an appendix to The
Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1972), p. 235, hereafter cited as AK. The concept of
the historicity of science as a discontinuous series of
epistemological "breaks" is, of course, the contribution of Foucault's
model, Gaston Bachelard, while he owes much of his distrust of
superficial "precursors" to his mentor in the history of science,
Georges Canguilhem. For a valuable assessment of his intellectual debt
to both of these thinkers, see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's
Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), ch. I.
[11]. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course, p. 121.
[12]. "An Historian of Culture," in Foucault Live, p. 74.
[13]. See my "Foucault and Historical Nominalism," in Harold A. Durfee
and David F. T. Rodier, eds., Phenomenology and Beyond.' The Self and
Its Languages (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 134--47.
[14]. "Theatrum Philosophicum" in Michel Foucault, Language,
CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), pp. 185-86, hereafter cited as LCP.
[15]. In a manner reminiscent of Sartre's existential humanism,
Foucault avows: "I am simply saying: as soon as there is a power
relation, there is the possibility of resistance. We are never trapped
by power: we can always modify its grip in deter minate conditions and
according to a precise strategy" ("End of the Monarchy of Sex," in
Foucault Live, p. 153).
[16]. Michel Foucault, "Des espaces autres,"
Architecture-Mouvement-Continuite 5 (October 1984), pp. 46-49. A
lecture delivered on March 14, 1967.
[17]. Michel Foucault, Politics, .Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and
Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York:
Routledge, 1988), p. hereafter cited as PPC.
[18]. Michel Foucault, "La Pensee du dehors," Critique 229 (June
1966), 529. Anyone pursuing this "spatialization" of language in the
literary realm must consider the writings of Maurice Blanchot.
[19]. Foucault, "Penske," p. 545.
[20]. I have explained elsewhere that by "practice" Foucault means in
general "a preconceptual, anonymous, socially sanctioned body of rules
that govern one's manner of perceiving, judging, imaging and acting. A
practice forms the intelligble background for actions by its twofold
character as judicative and "veridicative." "That is, on the one hand,
practices establish and apply norms, controls and exclusions; on the
other, they render true/false discourse possible. Thus the practice of
legal punishment, for example, entails the interplay between a "code"
that regulates the ways of acting--how to discipline an inmate, for
example--and the production of true discourse which legitimates these
ways of acting. The famous power/ knowledge dyad in Foucault's general
schema merely denotes respectively these judicative and veridicative
dimensions of 'practice'" ("Foucault and Historical Nominalism,"
Phenomenology and Beyond, p. 135).
[21]. See James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 109-10.
[22]. "End of the Monarchy of Sex," in Foucault Live, p. 138.
[23]. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in LCP,
154-55, translation modified.
[24]. Francois Ewald, "Anatomie et corps politique," Critique 343
(1975), p. 1229. 25. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity, p. 238.
[26]. See my "Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the College
de France," in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen eds., The Final
Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 102-18.
[27]. Interview with Francois Ewald, "Le Souci de la verite," Magazine
Litteraire, 207 (May 1984), p. 22.
[28]. "Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault," The Journal of
Philosophy 82/10 (Oct. 1985), 532.
[29]. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 2: L 'Usage des
plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 12, hereafter cited as UP.
[30]. Interview with Francois Ewald, "Le Souci de la verite," p. 22.
[31]. Michelle Perrot, ed., L'Impossible Prison (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1980), p. 32, hereafter cited as IP.
[32]. See my "Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault," p. 535.
[33]. Michel Foucault, "Le Language de l'espace," Critique 203 (April,
1964), 378.
[34]. See, for example, Jacques Proust et al., "Entretiens sur
Foucault," La Penske 137 (February 1968), 4-37, as well as Gutting,
Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, pp. 175 ff.
[35]. See my "Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity," Nous 23/2
(April 1989), especially pp. 196-97.
[36]. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings, pp. 302 and 291-92.
[37]. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 9.
~~~~~~~~
By Thomas R. Flynn, Emory University
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Source: Monist, Apr91, Vol. 74 Issue 2, p165, 22p.
Item Number: 9705284633
