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   Source:  Whole Earth Review, Winter 1995 n88 p72(2).
                                                                              
    Title:  Foucaltphobia.(philosopher Michel Foucault)
   Author:  Andrew Needham
                                                                              
 Abstract:  Foucault believes that human instincts change over time and that
there is no universal morality. He believes in the importance of discourse,
and his books are about the sciences and social institutions. Several of these
books are discussed.
                                                                              
   People:  Foucault, Michel - Authorship
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  82A5103
Electronic Collection:  A17922436
                   RN:  A17922436
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1995

Michel Foucault is one of those intimidating figures of modern thought:
French, bald, confusing, French. He's known as "the most influential
philosopher since Sartre," but when I asked my lit-crit friends who said his
name like a mantra ("Foo-coe, foo-coe") to explain, they stumbled over
themselves, spitting out phrases like "the genealogy of the modern subject,"
"the subjectivity of the carceral body," and "selves produced in the
interpretation of social discourses." After a frightening moment when I
considered denouncing them a la William Bennett, I decided that Foucault
couldn't be as baffling as my friends.

Foucault is not as difficult as you might intelligently assume. Reading
Foucault halfheartedly does not work; to read him requires a willingness to be
confused, lost, even helpless at times. It requires that you watch Foucault
immerse himself in paradox while dancing lightly over contradiction. However,
as French theorists go, he writes beautifully; and because his investigations
are overtly political, he writes to the understanding of how we are shaped,
molded, constrained. So don't let the skeptics get to you, Foucault is
possible, and more importantly, valuable. He has profoundly changed my
interpretations of history and language -- how they are shaped, and who does
the shaping.

Despite the many fields that use his ideas as means of
interpretation--linguistics, literature, sociology, political science, and
others -- Foucault's investigations are historical. Specifically, he
interprets changes in the nature of power and knowledge. To provide the
briefest of cosmologies, he believes that human nature, instinct, and other
intrinsic underpinnings of mankind are not fixed; humans are conditioned
through discourse: how we talk, how we formulate knowledge, and who we look to
for knowledge. No universal certainties exist; justice, sexuality, insanity,
morality -- all knowledge is a construction of discourse. Foucault is
specifically interested in the disciplines and institutions that create expert
forms of discourse, and therefore, modern knowledge.

His books focus on subjects like asylums, prisons, sciences, clinics;
institutions that create normality. Increasingly, in the era of the scientific
and industrial revolutions, these institutions and the experts at their heads
became valued for their definition of the normal. Experts created categories
of knowledge and controlled the discourse of these categories; medicine arose
as expert knowledge of sickness, and doctors were the only people qualified to
determine an unwell body. For the first time, unified categories arose to
incorporate all measures of differences. Deviants from the defined conditions
of normality were no longer allowed to form a part of society (like the
village idiot); they were kept apart, in institutions where they could be
efficiently observed and known. Foucault demonstrates how this institutional
knowledge enters society in new forms of discourse. the "insane" can no longer
speak for themselves; they cannot know themselves because of their
abnormality. Only the "experts" really know them. Through institutional
knowledge, we now talk of ourselves as guilty or innocent, gay or straight,
sane or insane.
                                                                              
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