Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984, and pronounced: “Fookoh”) was a French philosopher who was also a professor, literary critic, and political activist. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between social and political Power as contrasted with traditional studies of Knowledge, Existence, or Liberty, analyzing in depth how Power is used as a form of social control throughout multiple institutions, such as prisons, schools, and asylums. One of the strongest and most disturbing elements of Foucault's work is his thorough establishment that the Body is the “prison” of the Mind. Power Structures act upon the Body, which in turn individuates and oppresses or controls the Mind or Soul. This use of Power is somewhat similar to what is found in Plato's 'Myth of the Cave' or Descartes's 'Meditations', but for Foucault, Power is rooted in a deeply nefarious regime of institutional control and devaluation.

Though often cited as a Structuralist/Post-Structuralist and Postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, while his philosophical thought and efforts against homophobia and racism have influenced thinkers and academics in many contrasting areas of study, especially including Anthropology, Communications, Criminology, Critical and Literary Theory, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, and more. Across numerous humanistic and social scientific disciplines, Foucault is recognized as one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the Twentieth Century, particularly the Post-War era ^[1]^[2] According to the London School of Economics in 2016, his works Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality were among the 25 most cited books in the Social Sciences of all time, at just over 100,000 citations.^[3] In 2007, the ISI Web of Science listed Foucault as the single most cited scholar in the Humanities among a large quantity of French philosophers. The compilation author commented that “What this says of modern scholarship is for the reader to decide - and it is imagined that judgments will vary from admiration to despair, depending on one's view”.^[4] Yet, Foucault's “detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory Biopower have been widely influential”.^[5] ”[Foucault] is our most brilliant philosopher of Power”, wrote Leo Bersani, “More originally than any other contemporary thinker, he has attempted to define the historical constraints under which we live, at the same time that he has been anxious to account for - if possible, even to locate - the points at which we might resist those constraints and counter some of the moves of Power. In the present climate of cynical disgust with the exercise of Political Power, Foucault's importance can hardly be exaggerated.”^[6] His work Discipline and Punish influenced his friend and contemporary Gilles Deleuze, who published the paper “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, praising Foucault's work and arguing that contemporary Western society has in fact developed from a 'disciplinary society' into a 'society of control'.^[7] Deleuze went on to publish his 1988 book, Foucault, dedicated to his friend.

Life and Works

Paul-Michel Foucault was born on 15 October 1926 in the city of Poitiers in West-Central France, the second of three children (with Francine and Denys) in a prosperous, socially conservative, upper-middle-class Catholic family. His father, Paul Foucault (1893 - 1959), had set up his own practice as a surgeon, and his mother, Anne Malapert, was the daughter of prosperous surgeon Prosper Malapert, who owned a private practice and taught anatomy at the University of Poitiers' School of Medicine. While family tradition prescribed being named after his father, Paul his mother insisted on the addition of Michel, and though referred to as Paul at school, Foucault expressed a preference for “Michel” throughout his life.

Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an interest in Philosophy and came under the influence of his tutors, Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser, and then at the Sorbonne he earned degrees in Philosophy and Psychology. “I wasn't always smart,” he said in 1983, “I was actually very stupid in school [...] there was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him - and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.”

After several years as a cultural diplomat abroad, he returned to France and published his first major book, Madness and Civilization (1961). After obtaining work between 1960 and 1966 at Blaise Pascal University, he produced The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The Order of Things (1966), publications that displayed his increasing involvement with structuralism, from which he later distanced himself. These first three histories exemplified an historiographical technique, which Foucault called an “Archaeology of Knowledge”.

From 1966 to 1968, Foucault lectured at the University of Tunis before returning to France, where he became head of the Philosophy Department at the new experimental University of Paris VIII. Most of the courses were Marxist–Leninist oriented, although Foucault himself gave courses on Friedrich Nietzsche, “The end of Metaphysics”, and “The Discourse of Sexuality”, which were quite popular. While the Right-Wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, the Minister of Education refused national accreditation of the department's degrees. Foucault subsequently published The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In 1970, Foucault was admitted to the Collège de France, a membership he retained until his death. He also became active in several Left-Wing groups involved in campaigns against racism and other violations of human rights, focusing on struggles such as prison reform. Foucault later published Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), in which he developed archaeological and genealogical methods that emphasized the role that Power plays in society. Foucault was an Atheist, saying “If I were not a total atheist, I would be a monk...a good monk.” He loved classical music, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and he became known for wearing turtleneck sweaters.

Foucault died in Paris from complications of HIV/AIDS, and was the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. His partner, Daniel Defert, inherited Foucault's considerable estate and founded the AIDES charity in his memory, which continues to campaign today. After his death, Foucault's friend, Georges Dumézil, described him as having possessed “a profound kindness and goodness”, also exhibiting an “intelligence [which] literally knew no bounds”.

Philosophy and Power

Pierre Bourdieu summarized his colleague Foucault's thought as “a long exploration of transgression, of going beyond social limits, always inseparably linked to knowledge and power”, while Philip Stokes described Foucault's work in 2004 as a study of “the relationship between Power and Knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'Scientific Knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the Eighteenth Century 'madness' was used to categorize and stigmatize not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome.”

Foucault explained that his work was less about analyzing Power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterize the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of Power to “objectivise subjects”. These have taken three broad forms. One involves scientific authority to classify and “order” Knowledge about human populations. The second categorizes and normalises human subjects by identifying madness, illness, physical features, and so on. The third describes how the impulse to fashion sexual identities and train one's own body to engage in routines and practices actually ends up reproducing certain patterns within a given society.^[8]

A most compelling and chilling Foucauldean formula of Power, sometimes called Disciplinary Power, is his highlight of philosopher Jeremy Bentham's plan for the “optimal prison”, known as the Panopticon, an all-seeing circular building where every cell is inhabited by only one prisoner. In each cell there are two windows or openings, one to let in light from outside and one on the inside opening to the core of the building. In the middle core there is a tower where guards can observe the prisoners using the light passing through the windows and core, while the guards would not be seen inside the tower by the prisoners. Since a prisoner will never be able to know whether or not they are being watched at any given moment, they internalize this Disciplinary Power to self-regulate their own behaviours as if constantly watched. For Foucault, Bentham's Panopticon is clearly an intended model, whether using a circular building or not, for many forms of institutions, from schools to hospitals to factories. The model is as much metaphysical as architectural, creating “individuation” rather than individuality, self-policing as another form of control, and it allows unlimited documentation and isolation of “subjectivities” as problems to be studied and categorized.

What makes Foucault's analysis so chilling is the realization of how deeply the “Panopticon” is rooted in society itself to this day. From how we use windows themselves to security cameras, our buildings and social structures need not be circular in shape in order to be panoptic. The power of Disciplinary Power is in getting us to exert that Power over ourselves, to feel like we are being watched at all times, judged, and categorized, such that we watch ourselves, we judge ourselves, and we categorize ourselves. Our focus on our own bodies is a wholesale paradigm shift from previous millennia reflecting how Panopticism and Power have entwined to produce whole new populations of “individuated” subjectivities who are not actually individuals. Foucauldean Philosophy is thus as revolutionary as Immanuel Kant's Copernican Revolution, or Karl Marx's Communist Revolution. For Foucault, the only way to be free of Power is to embody experimentation, “transformation”, even illegality, to “care for the self” in ways unavailable to those who self-police and accept normalization. It is not difficult to see how Counter-Culture comes about, or how something like the The Matrix Philosophy would develop within it. As the line from ''The Matrix Reloaded” goes, “The problem is Choice”.

How this Foucauldean revolution plays out in terms of more traditional philosophical topics, including Metaphysics, Epistemology, or Ethics, is to ask how Truth, Knowledge, and Good have become suspect reflections of contingent histories. Another way to describe this is as an official narrative which is spoon-fed to a population. Compare a person engaged in intellectual activities, who pursues at least some form the ethical Good while independently investigating Reality, alongside those who greatly outnumber them, those who inexplicably get all of their false info-tainment from Fox “News” and spout off in public or private forums about who and what they hate. The former is an example of someone pursuing their own ethic and character, building Knowledge from direct observation and rational inquiry. The latter is what we all know too well around us, the example of those who do not think, and do not want to investigate or discover what is real. They want to blame and hate those who do not follow their chosen form of individuation, which is self-regulation to the point of becoming a mere ant in an endless farm of fake dystopian information.

Criticism

One could say, as Douglas Murray did in The War on The West, that “Foucault's obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia”.^[9] Richard Rorty argued that Foucault's “Archaeology of Knowledge” is fundamentally negative, and fails to adequately establish any “new” Theory of Knowledge per se. Rather, Foucault offers “brilliant redescriptions of the past, supplemented by helpful hints on how to avoid being trapped by old historiographical assumptions. These hints consist largely of saying: 'do not look for progress or meaning in history; do not see the history of a given activity, of any segment of culture, as the development of rationality or of freedom; do not use any philosophical vocabulary to characterize the essence of such activity or the goal it serves; do not assume that the way this activity is presently conducted gives any clue to the goals it served in the past'.^[10] Even Jean Baudrillard's 1977 tract, Oublier Foucault (Forget Foucault), was a critical analysis of Foucault's book the History of Sexuality. Baudrillard also launched attacks on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, like Foucault, believed sexual desire and sexual liberation could be a revolutionary force. For Baudrillard, “Foucault's discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes.”

However, what does such knee-jerk criticism actually accomplish? While an unpalatable concept, doesn't Foucault's description of Power lay to waste Philosophy, Religion, and many other institutions? Have we not all participated in generating a Modern World which in fact leaves us with little more than transactions, punitive reactions, and a dystopia of idiots urging us all to accept their stupidity and immorality, even to bathe in it as if Divine Virtue? If true, Foucauldean Power, somewhat like Nietschean Force and Eternal Return, urges us engage within to find true individuality, transgression, disobediance from normalization. While a negative and often disturbing read, Foucault's “power” was to subvert those forms of control which enforce the lie that there are no forms of control.

Scholarship by M.R.M. Parrott

Synthetic A Priori: Philosophical Interviews
Interviews, Discussion

©1998-1999 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: 99,00,02,08,11

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The Ethos of Modernity: Foucault and Enlightenment
Philosophical Monograph

©1995-1996 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: May 96/Oct 02

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The Generation of 'X': Philosophical Essays 1991-1995
Academic Papers

©1991-1995 M.R.M. Parrott
First Published: Oct 2002

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References

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