Title: Objects without origins: Foucault in South African
socio-medical science.
Subject(s): FOUCAULT, Michel -- Criticism & interpretation; CRITICISM
Source: South African Journal of Psychology, Jun97, Vol. 27 Issue 2,
p101, 10p
Author(s): Butchart, Alexander
Abstract: Examines the writings of Michel Foucault, and its effect
within the work of South African socio-medical scientists. Failure to
apply and accurately understand Foucault; Information on the
Foucaultian thesis.
AN: 9709252580
ISSN: 0081-2463
Full Text Word Count: 10519
Database: Academic Search Elite
OBJECTS WITHOUT ORIGINS: FOUCAULT IN SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIO-MEDICAL
SCIENCE[1]
Received June 1996; accepted July 1996
Despite being freely available in English language translation since
the late 1970s, the writings of Michel Foucault have only faintly
imprinted themselves within the work of South African socio-medical
scientists. Where references to Foucault do stray beyond mere name
dropping, they frequently distort the lines of his thought by pressing
it into precisely the liberal-humanist and Marxist analyses Foucault
himself was so concerned to dispel. How is this possible, and what is
being done by this failure to accurately understand and apply
Foucault? Deploying a Foucaultian methodology of strategic
questioning, this paper explores the phenomenon to conclude that the
failure of Foucault in South African socio-medical discourse is only
apparent, the very irapermeability of these disciplines to his ideas
itself confirmation for the Foucaultian thesis that while sovereignty
is the preserve of an elite, discipline is within the grasp of us all.
In Britain, Europe and America the name of Foucault is synonymous with
the concepts of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1972, 1973), with the
history of discipline, prisons and governmentality (Foucault, 1977),
of asylums, hospitals and medical perception (Foucault, 1976), and of
sexuality (Foucault, 1979). Since the late 1970s (when Foucault's
writings had become freely available in English translation), this has
resulted in the establishment of two substantial sub-fields of
English-language Foucaultjan scholarship.
The first is colloquia!ly known as the 'Foucault industry'. This
consists in studies that engage in academic reflection upon Foucault's
work, often attempting to elucidate the philosophical origins of his
thought, or else offering a critique of his theories of power and
governmentality by comparing these with those of other theorists and
philosophers of the social and the subject (e.g. Burke, 1992; Hinkle,
1986; Lemert & Gillan, 1982; Paternek, 1987; Rorty, 1986; Scott,
1990). The second category of Foucaultjan scholarship includes studies
that do not reflect upon but rather apply the tools of FoucaultJan
thought to particular problems, such as the chronic patient (Arney &
Bergen, 1983), the profession and practice of obstetrics (Arney,
1982), 'the mouth with teeth and the profession of dentistry'
(Nettleton, 1992), the emergence and functioning of the psychological
sciences in Britain (Rose, 1985; 1988; 1989), and the relationship
between the sociomedical sciences, the individual and the social more
generally (e.g. Armstrong, 1979; 1983; 1993; 1995; Arney & Bergen,
1984; Jones & Porter, 1994).
The Foucault schema is therefore a prominent component within the more
general Euro-American corpus of critical theorising from which many
South African social scientists draw their theoretical inspiration.
Yet, despite its availability as a possible tool for analysis of the
social sciences and medicine in South Africa, a Foucaultian presence
in local work is conspicuous by its almost complete absence and, where
it does appear, by what is (in most instances) a systematic misreading
of the Foucaultian thesis.
The goal of this article is to explore this phenomenon, and its aims
are threefold. First, to set out the Foucaultian power-knowledge
diagram so as to convey the essence of Foucault's theory concerning
power as a productive and creative force that fabricates individual
and collective human bodies through the microtechniques of the
socio-medical sciences. Second, to examine the few examples of how
South African scholars writing about the socio-medical sciences2 have
(mis)appropriated and (mis)used Foucault in their own work. Third, to
apply the Foucault schema in illuminating how this limited and
distorted reception of Foucault is central to sustaining some of the
socio-medical sciences' most fundamental assumptions concerning the
human body, the mind, society, and power.
The Foucaultian diagram of power and knowledge
Conventional examinations of the socio-medical sciences- medicine,
psychology, anthropology, sociology etc. - proceed as if their subject
matter exists independently of them. They assume, for example, that
the human body with its anatomy and physiology has an a priori
existence to the techniques of anatomical dissection and clinical
medicine, or that the mind and subjectivity have always been there,
only remained shrouded by darkness and ignorance until discovered by
psychology.
Evident in Whig accounts of South African socio-medical science as a
progressive endeavour where truth is drawn 'through observation and
research' from 'the abyss of ... myth ... and philosophy into the
light of scientific understanding' (Malan, 1988, dedication), the
presumption of the human body and subject as pre-existing,
a-historical entities is even more apparent in the preoccupation of
critical theorists with showing how the influence of political and
economic interests led the socio-medical sciences to serve as
oppressive instruments that distort the true nature of the persons
upon which they impinge. For, whether written from a liberal-humanist
or Marxist position, the common asumption of such studies is a
fundamental belief in the ethical autonomy of the individual, manifest
in the humanist values and civil and political rights that pervade
western culture. Within this framework, individual ethical
inviolabality is a universal feature of the human condition, and the
process of objectification a fundamental assault on this state of
'wholeness' and 'authenticity' (c.f. Armstrong, 1994). For instance, a
1985 paper on the social use of intelligence tests in South Africa
drew on the Marxist notion of alienation to observe that:
Capital, in breaking peoples' skills down, redefines them in its own
terms. The knowledge and division of labour are now used as
instruments of control over the labour process and what was originally
the creation of the worker, is removed from him/her and turned against
him/ her. This is the process of alienation (Tyghe, 1985, p. 16).
Only if the human body and subjectivity exist as external and
objectively given entities can they be more accurately known (the Whig
perspective), or moved from a space of ideological distortion and
alienation towards one of liberation and authentic subjectification
(the critical perspective). The overt opposition between conservative
and critical studies of the socio-medical sciences thus conceals their
shared assumption of the human body as a transcendental entity and the
socio-medical practitioners who operate upon it as potentially
platonic observers. This, in turn, indicates another shared assumption
in respect of power, namely that power exists as a commodity to be
seized and held, and which is used to repress, destroy and conceal the
authentic nature of things and people. Hence the central concern of
liberalhumanist and Marxist thought, which is to liberate people and
restore their true identities through the complete removal of power in
its entirety.
The Foucaultian diagram of power-knowledge presents a radical
inversion of this conventional perspective. 'The individual is not a
pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The
individual, with his [sic] identity and characteristics, is the
product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities,
desires, forces' (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980, p. 74). Within the
Foucault schema, the human body, subjectivity, culture, society, and
so forth are not the origins of power or source of any answers, but
instead the end results and effects of forces, and therefore problems
requiring explanation. How is it possible to experience and perceive
the human body as an interior structure of organs and physiological
systems? What makes the psyche conceivable as the origin of thought
and locus of personal identity, and how can we think of the social as
an autonomous realm that shapes the ideas and actions of individuals?
The Foucaultian answer to these questions is that all such entities
exist only in so far as they are fabricated and sustained by the
socio-medical sciences as objects of positive knowledge- that in the
absence of anatomical pathology and clinical medicine our experience
of the body as an interior of tissues, organs and cells would fade;
that without psychology to produce the subject there could be no
notion of subjectivity, and that were it not sustained by sociology,
the social as an autonomous realm would not exist. In short, Foucault
asserts that the socio-medical sciences do not find but invent the
objects of their investigation, and therefore that instead of being
appendages to power the socio-medical sciences are in fact its very
essence, producing precisely the human and social objects of
day-to-day experience in the ab-sence of which the liberal-Marxist
notion of power as a commodity to be wielded and repealed becomes
inconceivable.
The origins of this vision reside in the Foucaultian method of
genealogy (see Armstrong, 1990). This maps through histories of the
present changes over time in the interdependence between tactics of
power, ways of knowing, and objects of knowledge: 'The exercise of
power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge
constantly induces the effects of power' (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980,
p. 52). From this perspective, the changing identity and
characteristics of the human body as it is known and responded to in
socio-medical practice do not reflect progress or liberation, but
instead are indexical of the different power regimes that have
invested and invented it. These were divided by Foucault (1977) into
two modalities which he termed sovereign and disciplinary power, the
former dominating in the west and in contexts of western colonial
occupation up until the mid-1800s, the latter characteristic of the
modern epoch and contemporary existence.
Prior to the end of the 18th century, and symbolized by the majestic
visibility of the sovereign, the dominant mechanism of power was what
Foucault termed 'sovereign power'. Functioning through being visible
to those on whom it had its effects, the force of sovereign power is
epitomized in Foucault's famous description of the public torture and
execution of Damiens the regicide.
On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned 'to make the amende
honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris', where he was
to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt,
holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds'; then, 'in the
said cart, to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be
erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs
and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife
with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and,
on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead,
boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then
his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body
consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds'
(Foucault, 1977, p. 3).
Analogous with the less bloody but equally ostentatious displays of
monarchical might embodied in rituals, palaces, processions, and
public displays signifying the royal presence, such ceremonies of
torture and execution maintained a power that constituted the public
as an extension of the monarchical body with the king as its head. 'In
a society like that of the 17th century, the King's body wasn't a
metaphor, but a political reality. Its physical presence was necessary
for the functioning of the monarchy' (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980, p.
55). Abstracted as a relationship of visibility, sovereign power was a
massive and capricious force dependent for its functioning upon the
visibility of itself. It was, accordingly, a regime where the only
'individuals' it produced were those - famous and infamous - inscribed
on the conscience of the public through privilege, ritual, heroics and
ceremony. It was, moreover, a power that because it depended on being
seen by the unseen eyes of the faceless crowd demanded that this
presence be constantly restored and renewed. 'The public execution,
however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals
in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronations, entry of the
king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects)' (
Foucault, 1977, p. 48).
Towards the end of the 18th century these mechanisms of sovereign
power gave way in the face of increasingly effective resistance to a
novel and more efficient arrangement of power. This inverted the
principle of sovereign visibility to create the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of the human sciences and their
invention of the everyday individual as the target and relay of power.
Within this new regime the prominence of the state as a source of
power and focus for opposition was actively reduced, criminal
punishment replacing the ostentatious public punishment of felons with
their incarceration and continuous surveillance behind the high walls
of the prison and out of sight of the many. Simultaneously, doctors
began for the first time to subject their patients to physical
examination within the new institution of the hospital, where novel
techniques such as auscultation, stethoscopy and pathological anatomy
localized disease to the body of the patient and its newly invented
interior of organs, tissues and systems. Contemporaneous with these
transformations in medical and penal practice was a swarming of
equivalent practices for bodily surveillance and the training of
individuals in a multitude of different sites. In schools, pupils
began to be tested to ascertain their scholastic proficiency; in the
army, the new routine of drill and parade-ground inspections created a
disciplined soldier, and in workshops, schools and hospitals the
timetable was widely introduced to subject bodies to temporal ordering
through the establishment of rhythms and regulated cycles of
repetition. This, then, was the moment at which sovereign power gave
way to what Foucault termed 'disciplinary' power, a new 'economy' of
power that rather than concentrated in the hands of the king or state
was 'distributed in homogenous circuits capable of operating
everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the
social body' (Foucault, 1977, p. 80).
Now, instead of the king or state being leant visibility, the ordinary
bodies of everyone were made prominent by myriad techniques of
surveillance encoded in new technologies of systematic observation and
examination rituals devoted to observing the fine detail of the body
and the mind, monitoring its activity, co-ordinating its movements and
habits, and recording its capacity and characteristics. In turn, the
objects that were the effects of these new observational methods
crystallized as the increasingly visible targets for a synaptic power
that operated not only upon, but through them, recruiting the
individual, the group and society itself as their relay. Accordingly,
the 1858 publication of the first edition of Gray's anatomy was less a
landmark in the history of medical discovery than the productive
outcome of pathological anatomy's sheer repetition having imprinted
the body's anatomical interior in consciousness as an object of
positive knowledge. Similarly, William James' 1890 declaration of
psychology as 'the science of mental life' signalled no new discovery,
but rather the materialization of mind as the end-result of a
psychological gaze.
In short, the concept of disciplinary power refers to a type of force
that is productive and illuminating, a form of power that cannot be
held or seized, but instead suffuses each and every relationship to
manufacture multiple objects of knowledge. 'Power produces; it
produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [sic]
belong to this production' (Foucault, 1977, p. 192). Where sovereign
power works through the brute force of authority emanating from an
identifiable source, disciplinary power operates everywhere and at all
times, through surveillance and the subsequent objectification of
entities such as the human body, subjectivity, the self, psyche,
population, culture and society. Where the signs of sovereign power
are discerned by tracing the course of great events and mapping the
ideas of the important, the traces of discipline are found where power
becomes capillary - such as the point where the patient bares the
chest for stethoscopic examination by the doctor, or in the gesture of
resistance by which an attempt to avoid surveillance is itself the
strongest proof of discipline's success in inventing the individual as
a self-contained and autonomous entity: 'Disciplinary power ...
provokes and works through resistance: an up-raised hand to avert the
gaze of surveillance marks the beginning of a self-existence for the
nascent individual' (Armstrong, 1987, p. 69). Thus, it is disciplinary
power which actually serves to fabricate the taken-for-granted objects
of sovereign power in the first place. Hence Foucault's claim that:
'It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated,
repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the
individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole
technique of forces and bodies' (Foucault, 1977, p. 217).
The net effect of the Foucaultian power diagram is to establish every
aspect of the socio-medical sciences as endowed with a dual power
structure. For, since its emergence as the dominant axis of political
individualization some two centuries ago, discipline has meant that
all power relations are both 'intentional yet non-subjective'
(Foucault, 1979, p. 94). In other words, that the performance of
social science to achieve a moral or socially orthopaedic end (a
sovereign formulation), always and at the same time enables the
productive effects of that performance as part of a disciplinary
apparatus which continuously invents, sustains, and transforms the
various individual and social entities that are its objects and
effects.
The Foucaultian analysis is therefore a reflexive one for which the
object of investigation is never found but always fabricated by the
analytical technique. Analysis - which includes bodies of knowledge
and their accompanying techniques and practices - is the procedure
through which the reality of the body, the mind and the social are
invented. A body analysed for genetic indicators of racial type
contains genetic indicators of racial type; a society analysed for its
impact on individual consciousness is a society that shapes individual
consciousness; and a population surveyed to reveal the risk factors
for disease in the gaps between bodies is a population in which the
spaces between bodies are an important site for public health
intervention. All such objects of knowledge are at the same time the
effects of the methods by which they are analysed, and so if the
liberal-Marxist scenario of a body or society removed from the field
of power were to be realised, then, instead of being liberated, the
body and the society would quite literally cease to exist.
Accordingly, the many techniques through which social scientists study
the body, the mind and society (e.g. clinical medicine, psychotherapy,
epidemiology, discourse analysis, action research, attitude surveys,
focus group discussions) are all components of a productive assembly
line that continuously creates and sustains reality. In South Africa
during the 17th and 18th centuries psychology and anthropology were as
unthinkable as epidemiology and social medicine. Instead, the
classificatory technique of natural history coincided with the regime
of sovereign domination to mark out the bodies of Africans as bodies
without organs, external morphological structures only, that it
located low on the great chain of being; where they were then
controlled through the brute force of violence and the spectacle.
Beginning in the mid-1800s, the African body began to become a
voluminous entity, the practice of missionary medicine fabricating as
its object and effect the African as a loquacious body possessed of a
spiritual interior, towards which the provision of curative care as a
form of 'benevolent conquest' (e.g. Brantlinger, 1985) was directed in
an effort to convert the African from 'heathenism' to Christianity -
this was the watershed between sovereignty and discipline. In the
first decade of the 201h century, mining medicine transformed the
bodies of African labourers from an inchoate mass into a closely
supervised economy of individual anatomical bodies and social
relationships. For, in its analyses, mining medicine's use of
pathological anatomy, radiography, and other devices for examining the
interior of the African body extended to it the medical gaze deep
within the body which established the existence of the pathological
lesion as the locus of disease. The African body was thus fabricated
as a container of disease, creating a need for technologies that could
monitor and prevent the transmission of disease between bodies - hence
the emergence within mining medicine and public health of an elaborate
system of barriers and surveillance devices directed to the hygienic
supervision of recruitment, working, sleeping, eating, spitting and
all other bodily functions that might enhance the spread of disease
from body to body (e.g. Butchart, 1996; Packard, 1989).
With the exception of missionary medicine and its goal of conversion
through benevolent conquest, these diverse strands of South African
socio-medical discourse were unified up until the early 1920s by their
common strategy of securing control over African bodies through the
extension of techniques for the 'prevention and suppression' of
disease from a centralized authority. The outcome and target of this
radiant power had been the mute body as an object to be rendered
docile by regulations, barriers and prohibitions that played upon
bodies rather than into and through them. By the 1920s, however, the
increasing numbers of Africans and Europeans resident in the towns and
cities meant that this centralized and purely objectifying power was
no longer effective, since it had little capacity to govern such
intimate activities as sexuality, bathing, bowel movements and dietary
habits. The effect of this failure was to provide the conditions of
possibility for a new set of disciplinary practices that embraced the
African body in a very different strategy of attention aimed at
overcoming these limitations. On the one hand, the rise of the
psychological sciences (see Dubow, 1987) and their invention of the
African mind as a site of disciplinary subjectification by which the
governmentality of the African could be established and the 'native
problem' regulated through self-surveillance on the part of the 'good
citizen'. As the anthropologist Marwick noted in 1918, the problem had
then become:
The regulation of the routine of human existence in our larger towns,
so that Europeans and natives may live on such terms that mutually
satisfactory relations shall subsist between the two races. This
foreshadows the necessity of a finely adjusted organisation in which
good legislation, good administration and good citizenship shall each
play a part (Marwick, 1918, p. 590).
On the other hand, the technology of social medicine which, in
recognizing a distinction between infectious and constitutional
diseases, confirmed this switch as one from a power that invented the
body as its object to a synaptic form of discipline which engaged the
mind as its relay and its target. According to Reid's 1927 text on
sanitation and public health in South Africa, while infectious disease
depended 'greatly on the environment of the individual', the cause of
'constitutional disease depends more on personal habits and ways of
living and as to how far the rules of health and the laws of nature
are obeyed' (Reid, 1927, p. 346). The power effect of this
transformation in socio-medicai knowledge was to lower the threshold
of describable individuality, for the cardinal object of concern was
no longer the body as an object, but the African as an individual who
through appropriatetraining in health and disease could be recruited
as an active relay in a synaptic network of discipline (see Butchart,
in press). Perhaps ironically, the success of this disciplinary regime
was confirmed with the 1970s popularization by Black Consciousness of
Fanon's attempt to free the black skin from its white mask of
internalized oppression (e.g. Fanon, 1976). Thus, in its analysis of
Africans as 'people who have lost their personality' (Biko, 1988/1970,
p. 35) Black Consciousness offered to liberate Africans from
internalized oppression, while manufacturing a new and essentialist
African personality to replace this with a recursive discipline
wherein each African was his own overseer, exercising surveillance
over and against himself. Most recently, there are the novel analytic
techniques of participatory and action research, which in inviting
people to empower themselves through the verbal confession of their
thoughts, feelings and emotions, fashion subjectivity itself as an
object and relay through which power is articulated in an ever more
anonymous and insidious format, a format wherein everyone clamours to
be heard in a power regime that amplifies to public audibility the
inner secrets and private passions of all.
Foucault's reception in South African socio-medical science
As argued above, the reflexive analysis of the Foucaultian approach
invests the knowledge and practice of socio-medical science with the
productive power of discipline by which the objects of knowledge
available for sovereign manipulation at any point in time are
manufactured. Thus, the presence or absence of certain theoretical and
methodological approaches within a particular society's knowledge
regime provide an index of its power economy, an 'anatomy' of the
power arrangements within it that permit some things to be thought and
said, and not others. It is therefore the aim of this and the
subsequent section to present a Foucaultian analysis of how the
Foucault schema has found only limited and distorted reception in the
South African socio-medical sciences, and in so doing examine the
power effects of this failure to 'do' Foucault.
In 1985 Muller published a book review of Changing the subject. The
review was titled 'the end of psychology', and in it Muller correctly
identified the disciplinary essence of Foucault's notion that power
is: 'the vital current that animates the microcircuits of human
commerce and sociality. It enables as much as it constrains. It is
explicitly against a Marxist notion of power as "the power to
exploit"' (Muller, 1985, p. 34). In another setting Muller's
recognition of the Foucaultian insight into power might have marked
the beginning of a novel and reflexive strand in analyses of the
socio-medical sciences as the knowledge side of disciplinary power in
South Africa. This, however, was not to be the case, and over the
decade since Muller's review an accurate reading of Foucault has been
conspicuous only by its absence from South African socio-medical
discourse. Instead, and on the surprisingly few occasions where
Foucault has been deployed by local scholars, his central thesis
concerning the contingent status of the body and the subject has been
systematically reversed to invent Foucault as yet another weapon in
the armoury of Marxist class struggle or laissez-faire liberalism.
For example, in what appears to be the sole instance where Foucault is
deployed by a South African scholar in relation to contemporary
medical practice, Pitfield characterized Foucault as an agent of the
"anti medical" critique of bio-medicine. 'Foucault's basic argument is
that the State upholds and promotes certain systems which appear to be
aimed at caring for people, but which actually restrict peoples'
rights in line with a dominant ideology' (Pitfield, 1995, p. 248). By
presenting 'the State' as the monolithic source of force and reversing
the Foucaultian thesis concerning the productive power of the medical
gaze, Pitfield cements a vision of power as that which is held and
wielded, her heavily flawed gloss of how disciplinary power works
itself serving as a disciplinary conduit in that it confirms the
individual as a pre-given entity.
The ingrained desire of human beings to strive for optimum health and
long life provides for a potential area of power domination within the
medical model. Our subconscious accepts this desire as a norm ...
Foucault suggests that power in these terms does not operate through
coercion, but rather through an infiltration of the subconscious mind
(Pitfield, 1995, p. 249).
In relation to the social sciences, a similar misreading of Foucault
characterized the 1986 paper by Cloete, Muller and Orkin on 'How we
learned to stop worrying and love the HSRC'. Suppressing the
Foucaultian qualification that for discipline the provocation of
resistance is a condition for the possibility of its extension, they
noted of their work which criticized the Human Sciences Research
Council (HSRC) 'without being constructive' that:
A first retort might be as Foucault ... has remarked, that critique
doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this is
then what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who
fight, those who resist and refuse what is (Cloete, Muller & Orkin,
1986, p. 44).
In seeing only the sovereign side of 'what is', they thus fabricated
Foucault as a tool of emancipation, and by suggesting that South
African social scientists restructure their research agendas and
methods, extended an invitation to the human sciences to insert their
surveillance technologies ever more deeply and insidiously over,
around and into 'those constituencies not catered for by the HSRC',
and 'towards empowering disenfranchised and oppressed communities of
our society' (Cloete et al., 1986, p. 4344). Elsewhere, the
sociologist Webster cited Foucault's The order of things - 'the
historical emergence of the human sciences was occasioned by a
problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical
nature' (Foucault, cited in Webster, 1986, p. 8) - not to demonstrate
how the micro-powers of observation, recording and inspection enable
the great shifts in political and economic conditions by providing the
human objects which these require to take hold, but instead to show
the reverse. Thus: '... (T)he structural transformation of the South
African economy, particularly the challenge of Black labour, is the
occasion for the emergence and growth of social research into
industry' (p. 16); and 'faced by the crisis of the 1970s, the
apartheid state is finding it increasingly necessary to mobilise
social scientists to serve apartheid' (Webster, 1986, p. 26).
Webster's view suggests that for Foucault power is something to be
grasped and wielded, that its locus resides in political life, when in
fact for Foucault 'power is neither there, nor is that how it
functions. The relations of power are perhaps among the best hidden
things in the social body' (Foucault, in Kritzman, 1988, p. 118).
Confirming this trend by which South African social scientists have
deployed Foucault not to study the productivity of power but rather to
highlight the repressive hypothesis Foucault was preoccupied with
dispelling, Dawes (1986) at once concealed the creativity of the
psychological sciences by demonstrating their 'unresponsiveness' to
the 'African context and to the needs of the majority of its
citizens,' while at the same time interpolating Foucault into a
machinery that could free the African subject from entrapment and
distortion.
It is based on a range of largely Marxian studies developed in Europe
as exemplified by Foucault (1970), Seve (1978), Althusser (1971) and
others. While not a coherent group, psychologists of this persuasion
are concerned to question the very basic assumptions of the discipline
and how its knowledge and practices have developed ... In so doing
they expose this (unitary) subject as a product of deeply embedded
ideological notions regarding the nature of 'man' inherent in natural
science and capitalist social formations (Dawes, 1986, p. 33-34).
By conflating Foucault with Marxist ideologists, Dawes implied that
the power to which Foucault refers is the sovereign power of
concealment and distortion, an ideological screen which ensures that
what is seen is something less than the real and objectively given
object of perception. Accordingly, Dawes responded only to the
sovereign side of South African psychology, his critique of its
'unresponsiveness' to the needs of Africans obscuring the fact that as
a component of disciplinary power it is precisely through the
socio-medical sciences that the 'African context and the needs of the
majority of its citizens' exist at all. In the Foucault schema, all
human and social objects of knowledge are never any more or any less
than the end result of a productive power. This includes the concept
of ideology itself, which every time it is invoked serves to further
crystallize the liberal-Marxist belief in an external reality that
exists independently of power. As Foucault argued, discipline:
... is the production of effective instruments for the formation and
accumulation of knowledge - methods of observation, techniques of
registration, apparatuses of control. All this means that power ...
cannot but evolve, organise and put into circulation a knowledge, or
rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs
(Foucault, in Gordon, 1980, p. 102).
As another example of how Foucault has been fabricated in the
discourse of conventional South African socio-medical science, Nell
(1991, p. 69) drew upon a quotation concerning the correlative nature
of power and knowledge - 'We are subjected to the production of truth
through power and we cannot exercise power except through the
production of truth' (Gordon, 1980, p. 93-94, cited in Nell, 1991, p.
69) - as a reminder that:
... (I)n a society on the brink of transformation, in which a search
... is under way for a democratization of knowledge, for a
redistribution of resources, for a sharing of knowledge and power in
our society for the greatest good and justice, we need to remember
that governments ... function by the truths rendered to them by an
intellectual elite (Nell, 1991, p. 69).
Where the Foucaultian schema as expressed in Foucault articulates
power as a network of disciplinary force relations distributed
everywhere and coursing through the bodies, behaviours, beliefs, and
words of everyone - through the body displayed in the photographic
exhibition; the patient who bares his chest for examination; the
township activist whose clenched fist rejects the intrusion of the
academic; the intellectual who calls for the observance and protection
of human rights- Nell's invocation did precisely the opposite,
localizing the power of knowledge to those formal centres of knowledge
production that in the diagram of discipline are simply the points of
concentration in a generalized force field.
A final example of Foucault's reception in South African socio-medical
science is Wilbraham's work on the ways in which psychological
techniques and practices - such as sex and marriage advice columns in
popular magazines - serve a disciplinary function in relation to South
African women (Wilbraham, 1996 a, b). In that her analyses correctly
identify the non-humanist nature of Foucaultian thought and the
productive power of psychological discourse, they suggest the
emergence of a new capacity to accurately read Foucault. However,
while Wilbraham's deployment of Foucault successfully liquidates
subjectivity by showing it as the end result rather than the origin of
discourse, it at the same time fails to recognize that discourse and
discursive regimes are themselves the outcome of disciplinary
fabrication, thus sustaining, however faintly, a sense that the
objects of contemporary psychosocial scrutiny are found, not
fabricated.
From this review of how Foucault has been fabricated in the South
African social sciences and medicine, it is clear that his famous
claim 'we have yet to cut off the head of the king' applies with
especial vigour to our society, its anatomy of power bending even the
written lines of Foucaultian analysis themselves into evidence for the
belief that power emanates from the top - the courts, the state, the
academy -when in fact power comes from below. Underlining this failure
of Foucault to take hold within the local social science research
community is the fact that British and American scholars writing about
South Africa have embraced the Foucault schema, and are able to
conceive of colonial and apartheid power relations in South Africa as
not merely destructive but also creative.
The first such study to suggest that power in South Africa might
operate in ways that are more complex than liberal-Marxist analyses
suggest appeared in the 1990 text by the English historian Megan
Vaughan, Curing their ills.' colonial power and African illness.
Although South African socio-medical science was not the main focus,
Vaughan did address the disciplinary function of South African
psychiatric and psychological research which, as performed by
psychiatrists such as Laubscher (1937) and Sachs (1937), was central
to invention of the African mind and tradition as components of
indirect rule in the first half of the 20th century. In 1992, the
Canadian historian Crush extended the FoucaultJan vision of discipline
as a power of surveillance and seeing into the domain of the mining
industry, his examination of the social control procedures deployed to
manage African miners in mine compounds and mine villages inspired in
large part by Foucault's reading of Bentham's idea of the Panopticon
(see Foucault, 1977, p. 206). Also in 1992, a further instance of how
scholars from abroad have deployed Foucault to show the disciplinary
side of South African power appeared in Manzo's (1992) Global power
and South African politics.' a Foucaultjan analysis. While only
peripherally concerned with the socio-medical sciences, this analysis
challenged conventional views on the South African state as the
monolithic source of repressive power, pointing to 'the practices of
knowledge-producing apparatuses such as schools, universities, and
churches' (Manzo, 1992, p. 55) as the capillary components off
... power as a netlike organization or web of relationships running
through the whole social body, which constitutes subjects and endows
them with capabilities. The subjects of struggle that power
relationships have constituted are always in the position of
simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power (Manzo, 1992, p.
55).
There is therefore a geo-politicai gap in the capacity to correctly
read and apply Foucault, a conceptual membrane marked by the contrast
between South African interpretations of Foucault as a champion of the
liberal-Marxist position on power which he contested, and the ability
of scholars from outside South Africa to correctly read and apply his
notion of disciplinary power to our South African situation. How is
this to be understood, and more importantly, what power function may
be served by this selective permeability of South African sociomedical
discourse to Foucault?
On the failure of Foucault in South African socio-medical science
At the most prosaic level of explanation, the failure of Foucault to
take hold in the South African socio-medical sciences may reflect
nothing more than an inability to fully appreciate the more elusive
ramifications of his writings, a failure that can itself be located
within a broader tradition of what Nettleton (1992) described as the
'perceived obscurity and inaccessibility' of Foucaultjan ideas to
scholars immersed in the philosophies of the English as opposed to the
French-speaking world:
Wittgenstein once said that if a lion could speak we wouldn't
understand it. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that if
Continental philosophers all spoke English, most British and American
philosophers wouldn't have much idea what they were saying. The two
traditions divided about a century ago, and have been moving steadily
apart ever since (Papineau, 1991, cited in Nettleton, 1992, p. 105).
The obvious difficulty with this explanation is that it produces the
idea that knowledge is unrelated to power, that it exists out there
waiting to be grasped, understood and applied to one or other problem.
It leaves untouched therefore the strategic question, the tactical
problem as to what the socio-medical sciences in South Africa do by
not 'doing' Foucault.
The answer has already been repeatedly given throughout this paper,
and is merely confirmed here by the recognition that counterpointing
its imperviousness to the Foucault schema is the readiness of South
African socio-medical discourse to embrace all those theories, models,
and methods that may be deemed 'social constructivist', in that their
aim is to expose how various types of interests (e.g. class, social,
political, technical) distort or contribute to the creation of certain
types of knowledge. Without listing the many Whig, Marxist, and
liberal humanist analyses that can be found on any library shelf,
examples of the more 'radical' approaches to have found favour in the
South African setting of attention include: the medical
anthropological models of Kleinman (1980) and Scheper-Hughes (1990),
which inform the work of local writers such as Rogers (1992), Lerer
and Scheper-Hughes (in press), and Swartz (1985, 1988, 1991); the
social constructionist approach of Berger and Luckmann (1967), Gergen
(1982), and Shotter (1984) as it informs the works of Levett (1987),
or Butchart and Seedat (1991); the method of discourse analysis
developed by Potter and Wetherell (1987) and applied locally by Lerer,
Butchart and Terre Blanche (1995), or Scrooby (1994); and Bulhan's
(1985) neo-Fanonian methodology for understanding the dynamics of
colonial domination and revolution (e.g. Nell & Butchart, 1989;
Seedat, 1993).
While all of these social constructivist approaches are consonant with
the FoucaultJan concern to see socio-medical knowledge as produced,
sustained and selected as an outcome of various social processes, they
at the same time share another premise that renders them dissonant
with the genealogical approach of Foucault. Following Nettleton, this
is that:
... whilst knowledge is socially created there exists an underlying
truth, a real external world which remains more or less disguised or
more or less understood. For all these constructivists' knowledge of
the world is constructed through the play of either interests,
perceptions or language; the material world, however, exists as an
external reality (Nettleton, 1992, p. 136).
Hence, as a tactical complex within the force field of disciplinary
power, the affinity of the South African socio-medical sciences with
methods devoted to stripping away veneers of interests, motives and
ideologies mutates into a machinery of production that sustains the
material matrix of the corporal and the social as parts of an
objectively given external reality. Perhaps ironically, it is
therefore precisely in this failure to accurately understand and
embrace the Foucault schema that the present methodological
configuration of the socio-medical sciences confirms the South African
anatomy of power as a Foucaultian economy of disciplinary forces,
tactics, strategies and knowledges. Because, within the genealogical
gaze the pejorative terms that are the bedrock of this methodological
configuration -objectification, reification, stereotyping, prejudice,
positivism, alienation and so on - are not the techniques through
which bodies are imprisoned, ... but the analyses through which they
are created. Discourses against positivism or against alienation are,
therefore, objectifying strategies themselves, a part of the whole
which they presume to criticise, devices for establishing the subject
as 'object' of perception' (Armstrong, 1985, p. 114-115).
The relevance of Foucault to socio-medical practice in the present
From these observations it is possible to see that the Foucaultian
perspective offers new insights and new ways of thinking about the
contemporary practice of the socio-medical sciences in South Africa.
For, while this paper has deployed materials from the past as a means
by which to make its point concerning the correlative relationship
between power and socio-medical knowledges of the human body and the
subject, its relevance can only be for the present in which it is
written and of which it is a product.
The Foucaultian perspective suggests, for instance, that biology, the
body and disease cannot be simplistically regarded as materially given
processes and external realities, but rather as at one and the same
time inherently social strategies of surveillance and visibility.
Consequently, they fall squarely within the remit of social
psychological and sociological study, with the effect that instead of
continuing to operate as adjuncts to biomedicine by assisting in the
understanding of illness experiences or the identification of social
factors in the aetiology of disease, these disciplines can now study
disease in its own right, by asking how certain diseases are invented,
what makes them possible, and what, in turn, they make possible.
Flowing from this recognition is the pertinence of the Foucaultian
approach to the ongoing and fractious debate between medicine and the
psychological sciences (e.g. Manganyi, 1991; Miller & Swartz, 1990;
Swartz, 1988; Swartz & Levett, 1989). As Nell (1992) has articulated
it from the side of psychology, the willingness of psychologists to
subordinate themselves to the profession of medicine perpetuates a
situation of medical hegemony that in reducing all human suffering to
mute lesions within the body or the mind stifles the psychosocial
origins and the subjectivity of illness.
... (T)he medical gaze is barren, and psychology's pathetic fate is
that its seduction by the clinic is followed by its own impotence.
Psychologists deluded by the medical gaze are made impotent by the
company they must keep in the klinikos - a silent doctor, and a
longing patient (Nell, 1992, p. 230).
As a result, continues Nell, psychology is rendered powerless to make
the 'significant contribution to human welfare and ... a just society'
(p. 228), that, as 'the bearer of an empowerment standard' (p. 238),
it should be doing by rescuing the 'lay public' from 'the ways in
which medical technology and medical information-giving ... disempower
clients, rendering them passive and ... helpless recipients of medical
care' (Nell, 1992, p. 237). Such an argument is a restatement of the
medicalization thesis, through which writers such as Illich (1976),
McKeown (1979), and Singer (1990) have drawn on various types of
evidence to demonstrate how medicine has invaded and taken control
over increasingly extensive and intimate areas of life. From the
Foucaultjan perspective, however, the currency of the medicalization
thesis is severely devalued by the disciplinary recognition that
instead of repressing the body and disease, medicine in fact invents
these, and therefore that those who oppose the power of medicine with
their calls for a humanistic and psychologized alternative can at best
triumph in a palace revolution only. For, since they are no more than
diverse sides of a unitary apparatus for the invention of the body,
the person, and the social as their objects and effects, any such
inversion of the hierarchical relationship between medicine and
psychology would be no more than the exchange of one spurious monarchy
for another, which through its promised emancipation would further
conceal the already well hidden locus of power to produce the knowing
and free subject as its target and its relay.
In short, freedom, empowerment and liberalism are always double edged,
at once enhancing and at the same time a concealing veil under which
an ever more finely tuned machinery of surveillance installs itself
within and around everyone. Psychology's challenge to medicine that it
be allowed to rediscover the authenticity of suffering in the words of
the sick is thus no more than a shift in disciplinary emphasis from
the technology of seeing to that of hearing. For, in place of the
purely clinical examination and the mute body that this fabricates,
its tactical effect is to install the confession, a technique of
intimate surveillance through which the most confidential ideas and
private secrets of everyone are amplified to audibility and lifted
into socio-medical space as devices of disciplinary subjectification.
This type of discourse is, indeed, a formidable tool of control and
power. As always, it uses what people say, feel, and hope for. It
exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it is enough to
cross the threshold of discourse and to remove a few prohibitions. But
in fact it ends up repressing and dispersing movements of revolt and
liberation (Foucault, in Kritzman, 1988, p. 114).
As a final example of the relevance of Foucaultian theory to the
practice of the socio-medical sciences in the present, it suggests a
whole new angle of approach to the question of the 'relevance' of
western psychological knowledges and techniques for Africans in an
African context (e.g. Anonymous, 1986; Asante, 1990; Berger & Lazarus,
1987; Bulhan, 1990; Seedat, 1993). Conventionally, it is argued that
because these emerged in Europe and America they can at best be of
only limited value in the 'alien' context of an African society upon
which they have been imposed, and at worst constitute the source of a
pernicious brand of neo-colonialism. As Seedat argued in relation to
the psychological sciences:
Liberatory psychology is centred ... around the organising principle
that rejects the primacy of Euro-American values and philosophical
assumptions about humankind. Liberatory psychology is oriented towards
placing the experiences of those other-than-European in the centre of
its discourse ... The commitment to centre the African or 'Third
World' psychosocial experience heralds the articulation of a dynamic,
formative agenda that is connected to progressive and democratic
voices throughout the world (Seedat, 1993, p. 253).
Against this point of view, and because within the genealogical
perspective knowledge is never independent of the objects that are its
effects, there can be no possibility of one way of knowing being more
or less 'relevant' than any other. This implies that in their haste to
dismiss 'Euro-American' science as irrelevant to Africa and Africans,
critical socio-medical scientists arguing from an Africanist framework
may be throwing out not only the bath water of a colonial past and a
neo-colonial present, but with it precisely the African body that in
the absence of these 'irrelevant' approaches would, quite simply,
cease to exist as a manageable object of socio-medical knowledge.
In all likelihood, it is of course true that the place of the western,
bio-medical body would immediately be taken by a novel African body as
the effect of an indigenous African knowledge. But would this provide
the apparatus of the state and the machinery of industry with the
individual, social, and demographic objects that have for so long
been, and continue to be, the prerequisites for their functioning?
While a study of indigenous African knowledge from the Foucaultian
perspective has yet to be performed to answer this question, it
probably would not. Hence the debate over relevance studiously avoids
problematizing all those micro-powers that produce these essential
objects - such as theclinical examination, the epidemiological survey,
or the participatory research interview - in favour of such
epiphenomenal questions as those around notions like cosmology,
epistemology, ideology and cultural imperialism.
The relevance of Foucault to the present lies therefore not in the
possibility of Foucault bringing some kind of therapeutic leverage to
bear on what the socio-medical sciences do, but simply in providing a
method of analysis that permits of a constant vigilance, a perpetual
monitoring not only of what these disciplines do, but of what it is
that is done by their performance.
Conclusion
Arguing from a feminist perspective, Nancy Harstock (1990, p. 166)
wrote: 'reading Foucault persuades me that Foucault's world is not my
world'. For, along with other critics such as Bury (1986), Walzer
(1986) and Dews (1987), she considers the genealogical aspiration to a
non-interventive analytical neutrality as Foucault's greatest failing,
the 'catastrophic weakness of his political theory' (Walzer, 1986, p.
67). For, they argue, Foucault's formulation of power as omnipresent
and obedient to only its own rules of ordering offers no hope for the
future. If power is 'always-already present, constituting the very
thing which one attempts to counter it with' (Paternek, 1987, p. 111),
there can be no escape and no progress, all phenomena continuously
suspended in the ever-presence of the present. However, whether one
agrees or not with Taylor's (1984) view that this is a spurious
objection since the very neutrality it critiques is itself derived
from an evaluative reason for this non-evaluative stance, it by no
means removes the Foucaultian analysis from a participant position in
the ongoing fabrication and recreation of reality. On the contrary,
precisely because knowledge produces power and power produces
knowledge, the knowledge of genealogy and the genealogy of knowledge
are always actively creating the world and so far more than mechanisms
by which it is simply studied.
What these critics reveal in their preoccupation with the Foucaultian
failure to provide any guidance for action is the 'assumption that
there must be action and progress, a non-relativist way forward that
has been defined by a western tradition in the sciences of man'
(Armstrong, 1987, p. 74). They thus fail to recognize that the
FoucaultJan analysis formulates its questions and performs its studies
from a plane of analysis independent of this liberal-Marxist
perspective, a plane that precisely because it is independent of any
humanist assumptions is neither for nor against it. Accordingly,
Foucault is able to remind us that there is likely to be a completely
different way of knowing and seeing our world, a way so different as
to be incommensurable with and unrecognizable from our late 20th
century perspective. As Rorty (1986) has noted, Foucault thus succeeds
in doing what philosophers are supposed to do, 'reaching for
speculative possibilities that exceed our present grasp, but may
nevertheless be our future' (Rorty, 1986, p. 48).
Because this article is itself a component of the Foucaultian
discourse that makes such an exercise possible, it cannot be viewed as
independent of the domain it has analysed. Indeed, precisely because
there can be no objects of knowledge in the absence of methods for
their production, this paper is itself a productive component in the
discursive context of FoucaultJan scholarship. As such, it can make no
claims about being more correct than alternative explorations for
thinking about thinking in the socio-medical sciences, and its
strategy of assuming a 'true' reading of Foucault from which local
scholars have deviated must be read as a tactic of provocation rather
than a claim to absolute certainty in respect of its readings of
misreadings of Foucault. What is hoped, however, is that its analysis
of Foucault's (mis)reception in South African socio-medical science
has gone some way to destabilizing what otherwise is experienced as
certainty, and to bringing about some appreciation of how, while we
can never be outside the loop of power, we can at the very least
observe its operation and in this way appreciate that while sovereign
power cannot easily be grasped by everyone, disciplinary power is
within the grip of us all. Seeing and caring for the objects of our
day to day experience is one thing, but only if we can also appreciate
their origins as in part the outcome of what we do can we understand
our place in the order of things.
Notes
1. This article is derived from my doctoral thesis (Butchart, 1995),
which examines the African body as an object and effect of changing
western socio-medical practices in South Africa, from the 17th century
to the 1990s.
2. It is important to note here that my observations concerning the
reception of Foucault in South African scholarship apply only to the
domain of the social sciences and medicine, and cannot therefore be
generalized to other disciplines such as philosphy or literary
studies.
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~~~~~~~~
By Alexander Butchart University of South Africa Health Psychology
Unit, NCOH, P.O. Box 4788, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa
_________________
Copyright of South African Journal of Psychology is the property of
Foundation for Education Science & Technology and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without
the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may
print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Source: South African Journal of Psychology, Jun97, Vol. 27 Issue 2,
p101, 10p.
Item Number: 9709252580
This section offers a series of articles that I have collected on
Michel Foucault. The section is designed to assist fellow scholars in
their research on this very rich and fascinating area of interest. The
collection is my personal library of articles and will serve as
the foundation for my own work on the work, life and thoughts of
Michel Foucault. All the articles have been, to the best of my
ability, properly referenced and where possible, the author's
name is included.
This article is being posted with very special thanks to the author
Alex Butchart. I have made every attempt to ensure that all the articles
being shared here are properly referenced and credited.
Reference information:
Butchart, A. (1997).
Objects without origins: Foucault in South African socio-medical science.
South African Journal of Psychology, 27(2), 101-110.
