Michel Foucault was a French historian and post-structuralist philosopher who had a strong influence on a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines. He was also a political activist who was involved in a wide range of protests and campaigns. Foucault was born in Poitiers France, on October 15, 1926. As a student, he was brilliant but psychologically tormented. His academic formation was in psychology and history as well as in philosophy. Foucault’s passions were literary and political and his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences. His most famous works are The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and Madness and Civilization. Foucault began publishing his work in the 1960s and became known as one of the leading social theorists and continental philosophers of the 20th century, ultimately having a powerful influence in the fields of sexuality, power and authority, and social education. He thoroughly inspected the institutions of his time, questioned them, and further investigated into their histories and evolutions in order to assess their functionality and nature. Foucault spent his career criticizing and analyzing the power of the state, including police, laws, prisons, doctors, and psychiatrists, as well as studying the relation between knowledge and power.
Foucault wrote in his book Discipline and Punish “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Foucault was adamant that power and human knowledge are intrinsically linked. Foucault argues that, contrary to popular belief, even scientific knowledge is deeply linked to the more value-driven political, social, and economic power relations. The people in positions of authority take charge of the production of knowledge to maintain and grow their power. The knowledge that exists at a given time, the facts that are deemed to be indisputable, the experiments that are done, the research that is executed, the pieces that are written, and all potential discoveries that may arise in a certain era are heavily influenced by that era’s power relations.
Foucault is interested in how the shift from one structure of thought to another might have enabled new scientific discoveries, new medical practices, new sexual identities, and new punishment systems to emerge which would previously have been unthinkable. When Foucault became a professor at the college of France, he chose the title of “professor of the history of systems of thought” as he is intrigued by how dominant structures of thought and ways of thinking in western Europe have evolved over time. In Foucault’s eyes, power is seldom a matter of representative politics, the state, or the economy; instead, it tends to be a question of the possibilities of self-empowerment. Does the conventional wisdom of the time in which we live allow us to exercise our free will, to fully know who we are, and to become the individuals we want, or does it subtly pressure us to conform to "normality"? Knowledge—rather than being universal and inconvertibly objective— is historically contingent and specific to a particular moment in time. One way to better understand this is to learn about one of Foucault’s biggest influences: Friedrich Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche is most famous for declaring that “god is dead”. Though many assume that declaration to be an attack on religion, what Nietzsche was actually doing was portraying the consequences the era of the enlightenment had on human morality. The enlightenment in the 18th century marks a scientific and philosophical movement that set aside theological explanations as to how the world works and what the world is, and instead implemented scientific explanations based on logic and reason. Nietzsche was asking what this murder of god by science will mean for human morality. The book that arguably had the most impact on Foucault’s philosophy is “The Genealogy of Morality”, other than this book being a critique of Christianity, it explores how perceptions of what is good and evil changed over time. Nietzsche argues that, throughout history, what is moral and righteous had largely been constructed in order to celebrate the already powerful and to further marginalize the already disempowered. Foucault wanted to explore the concept of that specific change in morality and its effect on thought over eras.
Questions of morality appear throughout Foucault’s work, but what he takes most from Nietzsche is the notion that ideas are historically contingent rather than universally objective. However, where Nietzsche was focused on post-enlightenment morality, Foucault was focused on post-enlightenment science. Foucault questioned the nature of these logical scientific claims and asked if they too can be historically contingent. Foucault suggests that each period has a corresponding structure of thought that he refers to as an “épistémè”. Foucault defined épistémè as “something like a world-view, a slice history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape” in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault refers to the methodology he uses to identify these épistémè as archaeology. Just like an archaeologist studies historical monuments to learn about the society that built them, Foucault uses texts and documents in order to make broader hypotheses about the way the society in which they were written was thinking. So, an épistémè is the way in which a society thinks at a given moment, and the shift from one épistémè to another allows new discoveries to be made that previously would have been seen as completely illogical. While at the same time, the shift from one épistémè to another also continues to limit new thoughts from being explored; because that is the nature of having a structured ever-changing scope of knowledge, a wide variety of ideas are tackled at the expense of other ideas.
Foucault wrote in his book The Order of Things “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'épistémè' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.” In The Order of Things, he distinguishes between three different épistémè in western Europe from the 17th century onwards; renaissance épistémè, classical épistémè, and modern épistémè. In what Foucault refers to as the classical period “the naturalists, economists, and grammarians explained the same rules to define the objects prior to their study, to form their concepts, to build their theories" he argues that in three different disciplines in that period, there was a tendency to classify, group and describe objects of study; whether that be planets and animals, the workings of the economy, or language. While this allowed for many discoveries to be made, in other ways it limited the progress of scientific, economic, and linguistic thought. Foucault believed that this focus on categorization and definition tended to ignore the role of time and thus view the world as temporally static. An example of that is natural sciences, where theories of evolution at the time were almost unthinkable in the classical épistémè, and “only became possible when the classical period which retained a view of a static, ordered, compartmented universe that is subjected from its very beginnings to the classificatory table, and the still confused perception of nature that is the heir to time gave way to a modern épistémè open to the possibility of an evolution”. In The History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault explores changes in how French society thought about mental illness and medical practice over time. In these two books, we notice how Foucault shows how different épistémè do not only mark out certain ideas to be illogical and unreasonable, but also certain people. In exploring the limits of the knowledge of mental and physical health in a given period, we get an implicit explanation of what it is possible to know about ourselves, our minds, and our bodies; furthermore, there are also implications of power.
According to Foucault, there is a tendency deeply rooted in the west found in many political analyses of power to see power as a top-down phenomenon power is seen as something that is wielded by the powerful over the weak. Central to this conception is the idea that power always operates negatively; power dictates what is allowed and what is restricted, and it punishes us if we transgress these rules. Foucault thinks that this conception is rooted in misdirection, causing us to overlook the majority of power’s workings because we are fixated on a single narrow aspect of it. Power is not the power of the state dominating over its subjects nor the domination of one class over another, these are partial views that obscure the fundamental nature of power. Foucault believes that, much like gravity or magnetism, power is an immanent force in the universe. We might not be able to observe power directly, but we are constantly affected by it. Foucault states that power is intentional and non-subjective. He believes we make choices as free agents, we have intention in the decisions that we make but these decisions are governed by non-subjective forces. Though we may think we are making our own decisions, we often forget that these decisions are shaped and molded by non-subjectivity, the force outside of our power.
Foucault distinguishes between two types of power, repression and normalizing power. To think of power as repression is the traditional way of thinking, Foucault suggests the most important kind of power in our society is not repressive at all. When we think of someone exercising power we may think of a dictator calling for war, a judge ordering the death penalty, a boss threatening to fire their employee, and so on. We associate power with violence. However, the need to apply power implies failure. The state only needs to punish criminals when its laws have been broken, a dictator is in power when democracy is failed to be exercised, and a boss who flaunts the extent of his power isn’t really in power; a boss who is really in power is obeyed without the need for threats. Though repressive power is common, it is second-rate; if you were really in power you wouldn’t need it. Our lives are very rarely affected by repressive power. For instance, stealing. Very few of us want to steal and very few of us go to jail for doing so. However, it is not like we refrain from stealing because we are afraid of going to jail. For the vast majority of people, stealing never crosses their minds. Most people when given the choice of whether to steal or not, choose not to because they simply do not want to. Repressive power forces us to do what we don't want to do, while normalizing power makes us want to do what we have to do; it turns us into people who, by their own will, do what society wants them to do. If our parents and our education successfully taught us not to steal, we can’t even imagine ourselves doing it.
The normalization of power is the power that determines what we see as normal; it constructs our view of ourselves and the world and it shapes our beliefs and decisions while giving us the idea that these are our own beliefs and decisions. However, we have been subjected to normalizing power all our lives; our lives have been shaped by the normalizing power of society. Foucault does not believe in the existence of you as an entity independent of the impact society has had on you. He does not believe that there is a true you hiding underneath what society has made of you. This is how repressive power and normalization of power go hand in hand; the normalization of power prevents repressive power. If you need to implement repressive power by making threats and punishments to get people to do what you want, you are solving a problem that ideally would not have arisen. Ideally, people would do what you want them to because they believe it is the right thing to do. It is the power that programs us to comply with the already present power systems. By normalizing power, we would do what our boss tells us to because we believe in the hierarchy, we wouldn’t go to jail because we would not steal anyway.Another trait that Foucault examined in power is resistance. In the first volume of his book The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, he writes “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in the position of exteriority in relation to power”. Rather than seeing resistance as external to power, Foucault sees it as internal. In the “classical épistémè” the revolutionaries and rebels might be seen as resisting the power structure from the outside; there is power and then there is our external reaction to that power. But Foucault thought that resistance is a fundamental part of the power dynamic. If there is no resistance there is no power; resistance feeds power. One does not resist or rebel against power to achieve justice, but rather to take power.
In the will to knowledge, Foucault defines power as something that “must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate”. The force relations Foucault mentioned are the different entities of power that act on you. An example could be that you’re getting ready to go to school one morning and you think about what you’re going to wear. Different forces are pulling on you in an attempt to overtake your decision. The force relations of power are the considerations of domination from above, you have to worry about the school’s dress code and whatever rules your country has (for example in France you cannot wear a niqab while in Saudi Arabia you can’t not wear a niqab). You also have to consider the opinions of your parents, your teachers, your clique at school, and your other classmates, and then a general consideration of what’s in fashion and what’s cool; these are all force relations operating on you all at once. They are the different elements coercing you in different directions. These force relations do not remain static and contained, however. The force relations of your peers, friends, and parents’ opinions all pulling at you do not exist in isolation from one another; they do not just act on you, they also act on each other.
Foucault says “the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another.”ix These several force relations act not only on you but also on one another. They are clashing and challenging one another. This confrontation can lead these force relations to transform and strengthen or to reverse; force relations don’t just struggle with each other, they can also support one another and bond together to form chains or systems. In different force relations, some combat and isolate, and some support and combine. Local force relations — the opinions of your friends, your classmates, and your parents — are what Foucault calls tactics. Tactics are local; they are micro. But at the macro level, we have strategies. Force relations can work together. The force relations of your parents’ opinions can join with those of the school and the state. Since Foucault’s theory of power is bottom-up, it is local micro-opinions like our parents’ and friends’ that ultimately create the force relations between the school and the state. Their opinions join with those of other people and like-minded parties and these tributaries of force relations become powerful and garner more and more power and they become a great globalized influence.
Furthermore, Foucault established his theory of power and related it to the power systems that exist in institutions. He examined the evolutions of these institutions through their history. Foucault’s first book was “Madness and Civilization”, in which he delved into the history of psychiatry and deconstructed it. It could be claimed that our treatment of mentally ill people today is far more humane than it had been in the past. We place them in hospitals, supply their medication, and provide their care. In "Madness and Civilization," Foucault aimed to destroy precisely this outlook. In the book, he made the case that conditions were definitely better for the mentally ill during the Renaissance than they are today. The mad were perceived as unique rather than insane in the renaissance épistémè. Because they showed the boundaries of reason, they were considered to have some form of wisdom. They were respected, given absolute freedom, and frequently regarded as significant sources of inspiration for artwork. Foucault wrote “man’s despite with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by the images of the fall and the will of God, of the beast and the metamorphosis. And of all the marvelous secrets of knowledge”.
But then, Foucault found that in the “classical” period in the mid-17th century, the new épistémè carried an outlook that medicalized and institutionalized mentally ill people. No longer were they allowed to live alongside the “sane”. They were taken away from their families and locked up in asylums and seen as something people should try to cure rather than tolerate for being different. The abnormal are frightening and had to be detained, while the healthy and stable ruled the world. The madmen, along with other groups of people considered inferior (i.e. vagabonds, beggars...), were confined and suppressed. This confinement was not medical, but rather an affirmation of powerful control; for to oppress and stigmatize a group of people only grows the extent of power of the oppressors. These views of madness became a staple of the épistémè of the time, which only helped further perpetuate the oppression. As I’ve previously covered, the scientific knowledge of a time highly depends on the power relations and épistémè of that time. So, because discrimination against the mentally ill became normalized, it had also become backed up scientifically and explained physiologically. Mental illnesses became confirmed through qualitative descriptions in relation to the body that made madness perceptible. For example, they had diagnosed melancholic people with “dried blood vessels.” They had even begun to create cures, and that further confirms the malicious existence of madness in society’s view. Then in the 18th century, society had begun to throw the mentally ill in noxious asylums labeled as “moral imprisonment.” The inmates of the asylums were treated by having guilt, remorse, and inferiority instilled in their core. The physicians of the asylums imposed repressive power on the patients, establishing fear as the basis of control. This was an underlying philosophy in Foucault’s 1963 book “The Birth of the Clinic”. Foucault believed in the 18th century “the doctor” was born, and that he was a sinister figure who would always look at the patient with the fearsome “medical gaze” conveying a dehumanizing attitude that disparaged a patient as just a set of organs, not a person. Under the medical gaze, a patient is merely a malfunctioning body not a person to be considered as a whole entity. This view devalued the mentally and physically ill and turned them into an inferior group of deviations in the eye of society. It just so happens that this phenomenon isn’t only exclusive to the mentally and physically ill minorities, but also the sexual minorities.
Foucault was openly homosexual during a time when homosexuality was unfortunately highly stigmatized. He definitely had experienced firsthand how social power structures can be used to oppress and control sexual minorities. These personal experiences fueled his work on sexuality, making it all the more powerful and sincere. Foucault argued that the victorian ideals of sexuality did not lead to sexual repression, but rather that the classical épistémè did by normalizing and producing certain codes of sexuality. They continued to turn “sex” from something that people tend to do differently, into a categorized field of “sexuality.” They made sexuality a discoursexi full of concepts and various identities. Foucault’s idea was that normalizing power molded sex into discourses of sexuality in the scientific, psychological, and judicial realms; in other words, it took something completely humane and natural, classified and labeled it, then made it a subject of study and analysisxii. Therefore, the concept of sex and sexuality gets fractured, divided, defined, and compartmentalized; and thus, we begin to codify normal and abnormal sexuality. Segregation leads to limitation. Completely excluding and differentiating one sexuality from another leads to negative discrimination. We start to attach sex to sexuality to our identity. We become in a position of dire need to label ourselves and define our identities. A person who engaged in same-sex activity used to be someone who succumbed to the “sin of sodomy”, but then in the 18th and 19th centuries, that person became a homosexual. Notice the unison between sexuality and identity, there no longer was a division between a person and their sexual preferences but rather there was a form of policing; not just policing the act itself, but also the people who identify with the acts. “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct”xiii. It was Foucault who first attempted to support historically the view that sexual orientation is not a natural given, but rather a human construct and that this constructed sexual identity constituted a vital aspect of the self in modern society.
Foucault thinks of human sexual behavior as culturally determined. Sexual beings are made rather than born because people evolve into their sexuality according to the culture and environment in which they live. This hands over the task of analyzing how different sexualities were in place at different points in time to historians. The idea that we are all now profoundly liberated and at ease with the concept of sex was rejected by Foucault. He claimed that starting from the 18th century, sex has been constantly medicalized and handed to scientists and researchers. We are in a time of "scientia sexualis," as Foucault put it. He believes that sexual orientation is actively shaped by society rather than being static or predestined. This indicates that different communities have various conceptions and standards of what constitutes "sexuality," and that these conceptions are not fixed but rather change throughout time. This hypothesis was very divisive and received a considerable deal of opposition as it contradicted many previously established notions about human nature and sexuality at the time.
Foucault also related his theory of power to the inner workings of the punishment system. While we have a tendency to think that the prison and punishment systems of our world today are a lot more humane than they were in the past, Foucault believed inversely. He came to the conclusion that the problem is how now power looks kind when it really is not. Whereas in the past, it clearly was not kind or fair, and therefore could encourage resistance and rebellion in protest. Foucault noted that in the past, in an execution, a convict’s body could become a focus of sympathy, and the executioner rather than the convict would be the focus of shame. Public executions frequently resulted in riots in the prisoner's support; but, after the development of the modern prison system, everything took place behind closed doors. One can no longer see state power and therefore can no longer resist it. In the past, the citizens were the observers of state punishment; however, that dynamic has toppled over. The surveillance switched from that of the public over the state, to the state over the public. Foucault argues that prison created and merged into a wider system of surveillance that extends throughout society. Today, violence is no longer used to directly exert power. Foucault’s main argument is that modern states have moved away from enforcing their authority physically to enforcing it psychologically. Prisoners who were once executed are now monitored and controlled. And the fear of being watched leads them to behave in ways that those in power approve of. This insidious method has moved way beyond the bounds of prison walls. It is now part of all our lives. The old methods of discipline punished the body, Foucault concludes, and the new ones punish the soul.
To demonstrate his point, Foucault examines a new type of prison created by the British social theorist, Jeremy Bentham. It was a circular prison with cells around the external walls and a watchtower in the center called the Panopticon. The theory was that inmates would assume they were being watched and as a result would not misbehave, eliminating the need for prison guards. This phenomenon of ‘self-governance’ is the center of Foucault’s theory of modern power. He states that surveillance is being implemented in our modern institutions as an instrument to control the people and manipulate them into acting appropriately. In our current modern-day, surveillance took the form of CCTV we encounter in our everyday lives. The presence of surveillance helps in catching those who break laws, by recording their activity, and also acts as a deterrent. A pedestrian is less likely to litter and graffiti artist is less likely to spray-paint a wall if they think they are being watched by CCTV. A driver is less likely to break the speed limit if they believe a police camera is watching. Whether or not the cameras are switched on is irrelevant, because the mere presence of them is enough to influence the behavior of most people. Surveillance techniques are there to ensure societal rules are followed, but Foucault believed they have huge negative implications. He claimed that living with the awareness of being observed stifled individuality and perpetuated conformity. People end up acting, thinking and being the same, for fear of being caught or punished. Foucault asserted that this is fundamentally non-democratic because it eradicates free will and independent critical thinking, creating a society of what Foucault described to be robots. Foucault thought that, over time, this would put an end to our instinct to think for ourselves, behave spontaneously, or develop original impulses and ideas.
Foucault left some of his most enticing work unfinished as he was an early victim of AIDS. He died in 1984 leaving behind him a remarkable literary legacy and a lasting contribution to the way society views history. Foucault said in an interview in 1983 just one year before his death, "I wanted to reintegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices in the historicity of some of these practices and thereby rob them of their evidentiary status, in order to give them back the mobility that they had and that they should always have.” Foucault wanted us to look at the way in which the certainties that we hold as natural and normal—such as our knowledge, our sexuality, and our medical, psychiatric, and state institutions— with an analytic eye. He urges us to understand the everyday elements of our lives through layers of social discourse in order to realize how fluctuating and ever-evolving they are; that they have quote-unquote mobility through time and circumstance. Understanding the very core and structure in which the world around us functions, allows us to exercise our critical thinking and better maneuver our lives. There are lots of things in our modern world that we are constantly being told are fantastic as they are. Foucault encourages us to break away from this optimistic smugness about our now and go back to history and see many ways of doing things in order to evaluate for ourselves how good our present really is. He wanted us to pick up some lessons from the past in order to improve how we live now. Foucault believed history shouldn’t be kept in the attic untouched but should rather be an open book to be studied, analyzed, and learned from. He emphasized the importance of learning and knowledge and how powerful a resource it is. Based on knowledge, doctors get to decide whether I am sick or healthy, psychiatrists get to decide whether my behavior is normal or a sign of mental illness, economists get to decide at what age I can stop working, and historians get to decide what I am taught about the world around me. Knowledge is central to power, as it plays an extremely important role in the social structures that surround us. One may argue that those structures are continuously exerting their normalizing power on each of us and that they are inextricably ingrained in our core, so what's the use of knowing all of that if we cannot break free? Foucault doesn't believe that you can radically break from the ways you have been shaped by society because then there would be nothing left of you. However, he does believe that by becoming aware of all the many ways in which we are subjected to power, we can be more autonomous than if we remained in the dark and ignorantly believed ourselves to be as free as birds.