Michel Foucault 9781472541468, 9781847060884

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Series Editor's Preface

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum, and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends, using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty it is to deliver them with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory? Recent years have seen politicians and policy-makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is offered by a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: `having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity.' This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges, and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based. Educational theorists, then, are trouble-makers in the realm of ideas. They pose a threat to the status quo and lead us to question the commonsense presumptions of educational practices. But this is precisely what they should do, because the seemingly simple language of schools and schooling hides numerous contestable concepts that in their different usages reflect fundamental disagreements about the aims, values, and activities of education. Implicit within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is an assertion that theories and theorizing are vitally important for education. By gathering together the ideas of some of the most influential, important, and interesting educational thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary scholars, the series has the ambitious task of providing an accessible yet authoritative resource for a generation of students and practitioners. Volumes within the series are written by acknowledged leaders in the field, who were selected for

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both their scholarship and their ability to make often complex ideas accessible to a diverse audience. It will always be possible to question the list of key thinkers that are represented in this series. Some may question the inclusion of certain thinkers; some may disagree with the exclusion of others. That is inevitably going to be the case. There is no suggestion that the list of thinkers represented with the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is in any way definitive. What is incontestable is that these thinkers have fascinating ideas about education, and that taken together, the Library can act as a powerful source of information and inspiration for those committed to the study of education. Richard Bailey Birmingham University

Foreword

Does the world need yet another Foucault primer? The question kept resonating for some weeks after I received the invitation to write a foreword to this book. It was Lynn Fendler who raised it in her own peculiar way, humble and witty as usual. However elusive the notion of the `needs of the world' might be, the what for of a Foucault primer is an issue that deserves to be taken seriously. Apparently, we know much more about Foucault than we can account for. Libraries could be filled with the thousands of books, dissertations, and articles that have been written on the French philosopher. Most of his concepts and texts have been dealt with extensively, putting them in relation to the history of philosophy, political debates, or social history. It can be said, without sounding pretentious, that few other thinkers have been as influential as Foucault in the last decades. Yet, there is always a sense of obscurity, of ungraspability, when it comes to Foucault. This perception of ambiguity is probably linked to his refusal to embrace any established system and to his will to continuously dismantle any fixed boundary (his `tendency to be contrarian,' as Fendler puts it), which made his prose more opaque than what we are used to. He used sophisticated words and constructed elaborated statements to argue for a new understanding of the notions of truth, knowledge, subject, and power. His quest for a poetic language in the social sciences and in philosophy was based on his belief that form was as important as content. Therefore, my first answer would be that yes, we need many more readings to help us understand the complexities and nuances of a path-breaking thought written in an intricate language. But Lynn Fendler's book is not simply `another primer.' Being as she is an intelligent, rigorous, relentless reader, she gives us one of the

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more thorough studies of Foucault's work that can be asked for. The text initiates with an intellectual biography that locates Foucault in the context of philosophical, historiographic, and political traditions in continental Europe, an undertaking that would make many scholars sink in the middle of the venture but from which Fendler emerges out bright and clear. It then moves to an analysis of Foucault's central ideas and a brilliant summary of his most important books, essays, courses, and interviews. It is laudable that the author includes in this summary initially oral texts such as interviews and lectures, thus providing us with a more complete canvas of Foucault's work than we usually get when he is reduced to what was published during his lifetime. The playfulness and provocativeness of his thought appear more evidently in this type of text, and Fendler uses this to draw us nearer to one of his signature marks. In addition to this wonderful analysis, the author discusses the reception of Foucault's work in different geographies (French, German, and Anglo philosophies) and fields (history, education, and feminism), and advances some arguments about the relevance of his ideas for today's social theories and educational practices. Besides its erudition and breadth, this text is formidable in its pedagogic qualities. The author is always concerned about being accessible for all kinds of readers, avoiding jargon terms and theoretically-charged statements. I particularly value the many times in which Fendler explicitly points to the distance between some of Foucault's ideas and our intuitive beliefs. For example, she remarks that the notion of `governmentality' goes against the commonsensical opposition between `government' and `people,' suggesting instead that the very mentality of people is intrinsically linked to governmental practices. Another instance she provides is related to the controversial knowledge/power relation in Foucault's theory, which has usually been misunderstood as the truism that the more knowledge a person has, the more power she holds. These kinds of interventions are especially welcome in a milieu in which the taken-for-granted conceptualizations act as an excuse for lousy readings and `anything goes.' Fendler does not compromise with simplifications or banalizations of a difficult thought, and yet she succeeds in making it amenable and understandable. That is quite an achievement in academic writing.

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Equally remarkable are the analogies she builds between some of Foucault's most difficult concepts, such as `technologies of the self' and `discourse,' and daily life examples (breakfast choices and the internet, respectively). Fendler also brings stories from her own teaching to show how each one of us is caught in power relations, rejecting the idea that critical thinkers are beyond and above political struggles or positionings. There is a continuous dialogue between everyday life and theory that is one of the keys for this book's readability. Finally, what I find the most notable feature of Lynn Fendler's text is that she does all this without enclosing any final idea of what Foucault `really is.' As she states herself, `there is no ``Real Foucault'' out there.' To be faithful to Foucault's thought, one has to abandon the notion that there will be something like a truly authentic version of his ideas, or a univocal definition of concepts. Instead, she reads his work as an impulse to `think our lives afresh,' to ask us how we cannot be `governed quite so much,' to reach for new experiences of freedom. So, coming back to the initial question that Lynn Fendler halfjokingly posed me, I would answer that yes, Lynn, we need another Foucault primer. But not any other Foucault primer: your Foucault primer. Thanks for giving us this book for introducing yet another audience to the exciting world of Foucault's ideas. IneÂs Dussel

Acknowledgments

It was my remarkable good fortune to have been offered an opportunity to write a book about Foucault, so first acknowledgments must go to my colleague Richard Smith, who suggested my name to series editor Richard Bailey, who then generously extended the invitation and the editorial support for me to take on this project. For ten years of intellectual stimulation and camaraderie, I am grateful to the members of the Research Community, Leuven, Belgium and the Fonds Voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen. Thanks especially for the dedication of the organizers, Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe, who bring us together from all over the world to imagine what might be possible in the history and philosophy of education. IneÂs Dussel has been a friend and intellectual inspiration since we met in graduate school. It is an honor to have her gracious words as the foreword to this book. Since 2001, the Critical Studies reading group has been the most enjoyable part of my work. For their thoughtful readings and insightful comments, I appreciate Adam Greteman, Ajay Sharma, Amy Parks, Ann Lawrence, Brett Merritt, Cleo Cherryholmes, Crystal Lunsford, Ira Socol, Irfan Muzaffar, Jeanne Meier, Jory Brass, Kelly Merritt, Sharon Strickland, Stephen Vassallo, Steve Tuckey, and Susan Peters. Hsuan-Yi Huang prepared the index with care and heart. In the early days when Foucault's writings were still incomprehensible to me, (now Dean) Katy Heyning encouraged me. Hans Foster helped to make the manuscript more readable, and Christopher keeps me checking facts. Azure Akamay (Veneer Magazine) and Keper Amun (CodeChimera) are my teachers for everything in life that is most important. My wonderful husband Stuart not only plays Schubert on the piano while I cook, but he is also my most valuable reader. Through countless drafts, he raised the key questions that helped me to

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untangle conceptual confusions and sustain a focus on what's beautiful and fun. Finally, I owe a world of gratitude to Tom Popkewitz, who assigned me to read Foucault's work for the first time, and whose scholarship and teaching have always been exemplary of the best that intellectual life can be.

Chapter 1

Foucault and His World

Certainly, learning can be made an erotic, highly pleasurable activity. Now, that a teacher should be incapable of revealing this, that his job should virtually consist of showing how unpleasant, sad, dull and unerotic learning is ± to me, this is an incredible achievement. (Foucault 1975a, p. 136) The quotation above is from a radio interview that Michel Foucault1 gave in 1974. From this brief excerpt, we can see already that Foucault is a provocative thinker. The provocation comes as Foucault challenges us to imagine teaching and learning in a dramatically new way. We may typically think of learning as sad and dull. We may even take it for granted that school is boring. Here, however, Foucault provokes us to imagine that it is `an incredible achievement' for a teacher to make learning dull. How surprising that learning could be made unpleasant! We are provoked to amazement: How is it possible that something so incredibly exciting as learning could be transformed into something so dull and uninteresting? Here is another excerpt from the same interview: [I]f you want to keep the number of people with access to learning at a minimum, then you have to present it as this perfectly disagreeable thing and induce people to learn solely by means of such social perks as the ability to compete and high-paying jobs at the finish line. (1975a, p. 136) This quotation conveys Foucault's attitude of political critique. Here he is being facetious, criticizing our current social practices that treat

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money and status as if they were more valuable than learning. Foucault called his approach to critique problematization, a form of critique that targets the limitations we take for granted and questions why some ways of living have become problematic, and other ways of living have become totally acceptable. The interview continues this way: We need to know why our society considers it so important to show that learning is something sad; maybe it's because of the number of people who are excluded from it. Imagine what it would be like if people were crazy about learning the way they are about sex. They would knock each other over in a rush to get into school. It would be a complete social disaster! (1975a, p. 136) This quotation uses poetic language to evoke a scene in our imaginations: Imagine a school. Now imagine that people are so excited about learning that they are `knocking each other over in a rush' to get into that school. While reading this excerpt we discover a third characteristic of Foucault's philosophy, namely its poetic qualities. In addition to provoking our awareness, and focusing on problematizations, Foucault also used poetic language to write philosophy.2 The poetry comes across in the poignant tone of his words about learning, and in the playful way he compares learning to sex. Poetic in this case does not mean the same thing as lighthearted or frivolous; Foucault's philosophy is profound, erudite, and rigorous throughout.3 However, Foucault's philosophy is not exclusively expository. He wrote to give pleasure to the reader. Like good literature, his language often includes witticisms, repartee, plays on words, and above all, irony. The ironic poetic aspects of Foucault's work are an integral part of his philosophy, and if you disregard the poetry, you will be left with only a partial grasp of his work. To appreciate Foucault's philosophy, it is an advantage to possess a vivid imagination. If you exercise your imagination while reading Foucault's work, you will have a better chance of getting it. Throughout Foucault's writing you will find graphic depictions of

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various scenes, sometimes playful (such as this one about the school), sometimes sensuous, and sometimes horrific. You will also find humor, sarcasm, allusions, and beauty. Most importantly, if you take Foucault's words literally and fail to perceive the imaginative and poetic dimensions of what he said, you will miss an opportunity to read for pleasure. As you read Foucault's work, you will appreciate his philosophy more deeply if you keep these three features in mind: provocation, problematization, and poetry. These three features distinguish Foucault's philosophy from many other western philosophies. The provocative (not prescriptive) feature of Foucault's philosophy also distinguishes his work from many forms of critical theory, and from various approaches to historical writing as well. Since most other critical theorists propose solutions to political problems, Foucault's refusal to offer answers to questions and solutions to problems is one of the things that makes his work so controversial. Since most analytic philosophy demands logical rigor in its formulations, Foucault's use of poetic and imaginative language ± like Nietzsche's before him ± has led some people to disqualify Foucault's work from the domain of proper philosophy.

Genre How can provocation, problematization, and poetry constitute philosophy? Some philosophers have argued that these characteristics are not properly philosophical, and therefore, they argue, Foucault should not be regarded as a philosopher. If you believe that philosophy must be somber, logical, and relentlessly rational, then Foucault's work will not seem like philosophy to you, either. However, if you take philosophy to be the investigation of how things `hang together' (Prado 1992, p. 20) in the most general way, then Foucault is indisputably a philosopher. `Modern philosophy' is a technical term that refers to a historical era of western philosophy beginning at about the mid-seventeenth century. Most textbooks on the history of philosophy identify Rene Descartes as the `father' of modern philosophy. In 1637, Descartes

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wrote Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. As the title indicates, Descartes wrote the precepts of modern philosophy in a formal and systematic way. His method of searching for truth has endured to shape scientific and philosophical inquiry for about 300 years. Following in the footsteps of Descartes, modern philosophical investigations have been those whose aim is to know the truth about the world and our lives in it. Modern philosophy shares some features of modern science and is exemplified by John Locke, David Hume, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Bertrand Russell. However, Foucault's work follows Nietzsche on a philosophical path that breaks away from the tradition of modern or Cartesian4 philosophical inquiry. Because it is not modern or analytical, Foucault's work has been deeply controversial and (at least for some people) quite difficult to understand. The main point is that Foucault's philosophy does not follow in the tradition of modern philosophy; it does not propose solutions, search for truth, or provide guidelines for living rationally or behaving ethically. Foucault's work is not in the same genre as modern philosophy because it does not have the same purpose and it does not obey the same rules. Foucault characterized the purpose of modern philosophy (since Descartes) to have been a search for truth. The rules of modern philosophical inquiry have been the principles of Cartesian rationality. This traditional `modern' search for truth is based on several assumptions: 1) that there is, in fact, such a thing as truth; 2) that humans have the capacity to apprehend or know what is true (at least to some degree); and 3) the search for truth is what makes us truly human. Modern philosophy has traditionally been focused on trying to ascertain the difference between what is true and what is false, and this focus has implications for our core humanist values, most especially freedom. The purpose of Foucault's philosophy is not to search for truth. The purpose, instead, is to provoke in us new questions about who we are and how we think: to wonder about whatever is presented to us as truth by challenging our assumptions of what is natural or inevitable. Foucault was not attacking truth per se; he was attacking the effects of our obsession with truth. Specifically, Foucault's philosophy strikes at

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the normalizing, limiting, disciplining effects that the search for truth has imposed on human creativity and imagination. Each of his books attacks a different set of assumptions about what we have come to accept as normal and natural. If the overriding aim of modern philosophy is the search for truth, Foucault's philosophy is not part of that tradition because its purpose is to provoke, awaken, and inspire us in ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, and political ways.

Philosophical Context: Criticism, Nihilism, Skepticism, and Determinism To provide a philosophical context for understanding Foucault's philosophy, the following section explains four philosophical concepts ± criticism, nihilism, skepticism, and determinism ± and their respective relationships to Foucault's work. Criticism Scholars generally identify Foucault's work as part of the `critical' tradition of philosophy. Other philosophies in the critical tradition include those of Immanuel Kant (whose books include the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment), Karl Marx (who wrote Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto), and the Frankfurt School (official name: The Institute for Social Research; including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin). These schools of thought are considered `critical' in so far as their aim is to facilitate human liberation by working to understand the ways reason can be used to enhance human life, and also the ways reason might function to put limits on what it means to be human. Foucault's philosophy engages in many of the same issues as other critical theories do, including power, freedom, politics, and possibilities for reasonable thought. It focuses on similar issues as other critical theories; however, Foucault approached those issues in a way that is more like Nietzsche than like modern critical theorists. In contrast to many other critical theorists, Foucault's writings do

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not propose solutions to political problems.5 Unlike Kant, Marx, or the Frankfurt School, Foucault's philosophy does not offer us a vision of a just world, a moral universe, or a classless society.6 His approach to critique was not to provide answers to social and political problems, but to ask questions about how we think. The popular slogan `Question authority' comes close to describing Foucault's approach to critical theory. Foucault called his philosophical focus problematization. This term has a double meaning. In one sense, to problematize means to turn facts into problems. Foucault studied social and political history in order to challenge the authority of things that we take for granted, especially those things that we assume are inevitable or impossible. The other meaning of problematization is to take problems as the object of study. Foucault was interested in how the problems of the seventeenth century were not the same as the problems of the eighteenth century. He wondered, `What are the historical conditions that make some things ± and not other things ± look like problems? Why does something become an issue?' For example, he was interested in the conditions that gave rise to such things as school dress codes. How strange that pupils' clothing would matter to school officials! What was going on in schools to explain why students' clothing would become an issue of school discipline? (Dussel 2004; 2005) Political critique for Foucault does not mean `to solve problems.' It means to challenge prevailing assumptions, undermine the status quo, question authority, and provoke us to look with new eyes at ourselves in the world. In this way, Foucault's problematizing approach to philosophy is in some ways similar to other critical theorists and in other ways distinct. Some Foucault scholars characterize his work as being nihilistic, skeptical, and deterministic. In each of these three concepts, there are reasons that justify those accusations, and also reasons why those accusations do not rightfully apply to Foucault's work. These three concepts ± nihilism, skepticism, and determinism ± are discussed briefly below, and they provide a philosophical context for appreciating Foucault's place in the philosophical landscape.

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Nihilism Because Foucault did not offer solutions to problems, some modern critical theorists have called his philosophy nihilistic. Depending on how nihilism is defined, Foucault's work is more or less nihilistic. Nihilism is the philosophical position that there is no basis on which we can discern truth or decide on the value of anything. Nihilism asserts that there are no foundations to which we can appeal in order to evaluate the truth of our beliefs or claims. The accusation of nihilism might apply because Foucault's philosophy does not contribute to the modern or scientific search for truth. Foucault's philosophy rejects appeals to foundations (things we hold to be always and everywhere true). He was also critical of `isms,' schools of thought that provide a basis for deciding what is good and what is bad, or what is true and what is false. Foucault did not give us guidelines for evaluating the truth or value of anything. Moreover, his philosophy problematized philosophical efforts to rationalize or justify such evaluations. Foucault's philosophy may be regarded as nihilistic in so far as it rejects efforts to provide foundations (dependable reasons or systematic justifications) that might help us distinguish good from bad, or true from false. At the same time, Foucault's work might also be regarded as antinihilistic. He was not working to figure out the basis for what is true, but ± and this is very important ± this does not mean that he was working to prove that there is no basis for truth. Foucault's philosophy does not assert, `There is no such thing as truth,' so in that sense it is not nihilistic. Instead, his position resembles this: There may or may not be some universal basis for truth. I am not interested in that. However, people throughout history have acted as if certain things were true. I am interested in how people make rules for deciding what is true and what is false. In order to understand what Foucault was doing in his writings and teachings, it is most important to remember that the search for truth (or falsity) is not the purpose of his philosophy. Foucault's philosophical orientation can be glimpsed in a set of questions something like these:

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1 What if the search for truth is a trap? 2 What if the search for truth is a `wild goose chase'7 that is distracting us from other interesting questions? 3 Where do our philosophical problems come from? 4 In what ways has the search for truth imprisoned our thinking and constrained our possibilities for being human in the world? Foucault was interested in the historical conditions that led to different systems of thought. There were systems of thought in the seventeenth century that established rules for determining truth, and those systems were different from the systems that established the rules in the eighteenth century. Different times in history have invented different criteria for determining what is true. The rules for one historical epoch are not the same as the rules for truth for another historical epoch. There have been different sets of criteria in history to determine what is true; Foucault actually used the phrase `games of truth' to refer to these various historical systems of thought. Historicism is the philosophical position that particular local conditions shape concepts and perspectives. Because Foucault studied the games of truth as products of their historical contexts, his philosophy may be classified as more like historicism than nihilism.8 Relativism is related to nihilism, and it is another philosophical criticism that has been applied to Foucault's work. Relativism is most familiar to us in the phrase `It's all relative,' which means that there is no single truth, but there are many different truths. For Descartes and other modern theorists, relativism is a philosophical problem because it does not give us any basis on which to judge the truth or falsity of our beliefs. It's true that Foucault rejected all universal laws and bases for judging what is true. However, that does not mean that for Foucault `anything goes.' Just because there are no universal laws does not mean that we have no basis for judgment. Foucault's philosophy does not provide laws, principles or foundations to help us make judgments; however, it does provide perspectives, insights, theoretical tools, and inspiration for us to examine our lives more deeply and judge critically. There is another factor that argues against categorizing Foucault's philosophy as nihilistic. In his personal life, he was very active politically. He worked publicly to protest social injustices, not only in

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France but also in many other countries. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party in France, he joined political protests against discriminatory laws, he founded a group that campaigned for the civil rights of people in prison, and he spoke out in public media against exploitation and abuse. If nihilism connotes a kind of giving up on the world, then Foucault's persistent activism was decidedly not nihilistic. With characteristic subtlety, he described his own position as `pessimistic activism.' In this phrase we can recognize a philosophical position that is characterized more by irony than by nihilism. Skepticism Some scholars classify Foucault's philosophy as an example of skepticism (see, e.g., Rajchman 1985). Skepticism is a philosophical position that withholds judgment about claims. Skepticism is a position that asks, `Are you sure about that?' In that broad sense of the term, Foucault's work is aligned with skepticism. Foucault was even skeptical about the entire modern philosophical enterprise itself. He dared to ask these kinds of questions: 1 2 3

Are you sure that truth is the most important issue for philosophy? Why doesn't philosophy search for ecstasy instead? Why is western philosophy so concerned about truth?

This radical level of skepticism challenged philosophy at the core of its being, and has therefore made Foucault's writings unacceptable to many modern thinkers, scientists, and intellectuals. He was suspicious that philosophy's search for truth might ± ironically ± be limiting how it is possible for us to think. Foucault's critical philosophy raises the possibility that the Enlightenment focus on reason and truth, which was once a liberating pursuit, had run its course, and that the search for truth may now be normalizing human thought rather than liberating it. Along with his rejection of the search for truth, Foucault was also skeptical about the requirement that philosophical inquiry be conducted according to rules of reason and rationality. In fact ± and this comes as quite a surprise to many philosophers ± Foucault took reason itself as an object or target of philosophical investigation. In

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other words, while modern philosophers use reason as a tool for philosophical inquiry, Foucault was skeptical about the rules of reason. Instead of using reason as a tool, Foucault looked at reason as a philosophical problem. Rather than assuming that philosophy must always be reasonable, Foucault's work shows us that the meaning of reason has changed many times in history, and reason itself is a philosophical issue to be contested and debated. By questioning the pursuit of truth and the role of reason, Foucault's work posed potentially devastating challenges to both philosophy and history. At the same time, however, there is another perspective suggesting that Foucault's philosophical approach cannot be characterized as skepticism. Paul Veyne, French historian and professor at the ColleÁge de France, argues that Foucault was not a skeptic, but rather a `positivist' (Veyne 1997, p. 175). Positivism is the philosophical position that real knowledge can only come from sensory experience like seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Since positivism examines tangible things of the world, many people would be surprised to hear Foucault's philosophy described as positivistic. Veyne's argument is that Foucault was critical of modern philosophy and many of the concepts that comprise modern philosophy like rationality, individuals, governments, freedom, and human rights. Foucault refused to take those concepts for granted. Instead, he examined the practices and activities that people called `rationality,' or `government,' or `freedom.' He studied how those concepts were put into practice. Determinism Determinism is the philosophical belief that we do not control our own lives. Sometimes also called `fatalism,' determinism tells us we have no choice but to accept life as it is because we cannot do anything about it. In philosophical terms, determinism is the opposite of the belief in free will. Some people believe that human beings have free will ± that we have some degree of control over what happens to us in our lives ± and other people believe our lives are controlled by outside forces. Outside forces of control can be religious (e.g., God), scientific (e.g., genetics), or historical (e.g., demographic features).9 Most people believe in a

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middle position that is somewhere between those two extremes. Examples of middle-ground beliefs are that we have control over some aspects of our lives and not others, or that we have a limited number of choices in any given situation. In any case, the free-will-versusdeterminism debate has been going on in philosophy for centuries.10 Curiously, some critics have accused Foucault's philosophy of being deterministic, and other critics have accused it of proffering an unwarranted belief in free will. In fact, however, Foucault rejected both determinism and the belief in free will. He did not take the position that we could explain historical events as if they had been caused by external forces like God, capitalism, the system, DNA, or social institutions. He also did not take the position that we could explain events by blaming individual people as villains or crediting particular heroes. He did not assume that individual actors could necessarily change the course of history, either. Foucault rejected the belief that control (determination) comes from a single source (whether it be an institution or a person). Rather, to examine historical events, he looked for the interrelation of multiple factors and complex power relations. In Foucault's analyses, events are shaped by clusters of historically specific factors, including, but not limited to, acts of individual people. For Foucault, we cannot know in advance what factors will shape any given event. We can only look back on events and try to come to a critical perspective about the past. One of the most difficult things to understand about Foucault's philosophy is his rejection of both determinism and free will. His philosophy rejects the entire free will versus determinism dichotomy. For modern philosophers engaged in a search for truth, the choice between determinism and free will was usually an `either/or' choice; there were no other (third) possibilities.11 But Foucault's philosophy challenged the terms of this debate, and his theories replaced the entire determinism-versus-free-will dichotomy. With respect to that dichotomy, Foucault's position was more like this: 1

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What are the historical circumstances that tend to favor belief in determinism? What circumstances tend to support belief in free will? What effects do these beliefs (determinism and free will) have on

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Intellectual Biography us? We might have control over parts of our lives, and we might not have control. But we have no idea which is which. Let's explore a different kind of question for a change.

Philosophers have been arguing about determinism versus free will for centuries without a satisfactory answer, and Foucault regarded the argument as tiresome. In his view, this old argument was not helping anybody figure out how to live a better life. So he turned his attention away from the (false) dichotomy of determinism versus free will in order to pursue other questions, hoping that another kind of philosophy might have the chance to open up new vistas for realizing justice and pleasure.

The Historical Context of Foucault's Philosophy Philosophical ways of thinking emerge in particular times and places. All philosophers have made arguments for some things and against other things. Sometimes the targets of arguments are explicit in the philosopher's work, and sometimes they are not. In order to understand what a philosopher is arguing, it is helpful to understand what he is arguing against. Foucault lived and wrote in France in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. What were the predominant ideas and common ways of thinking that existed at the time Foucault's writing emerged? What was the intellectual climate of which Foucault's work was part? What historical events surrounded his philosophy? In what ways is his work related to other philosophical positions? What intellectual traditions was he challenging? At the most general level, Foucault's work challenged all the prevailing critical traditions of modern western philosophy in the twentieth century: Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism. Foucault's philosophical position with respect to prevailing intellectual and political traditions changed in his various writings. However, eventually, and in an unremitting sense, Foucault's philosophy was deeply critical of all major philosophical

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projects that were popular at the time. This section briefly describes several aspects of Foucault's historical context. Critique of critical theories In the middle of the twentieth century the predominant influences shaping the European intellectual climate were derived from several lines of inquiry: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Marxism Structuralism/poststructuralism Modernism/postmodernism Psychoanalysis Phenomenology Existentialism Annales historiography

Each of these traditions was critical in its own right, meaning that each set out to liberate human thought from a set of previously established philosophical beliefs. Below, each critical tradition is briefly described in order to set the stage for exploring the ways in which Foucault's work constituted a critique of critical theories. Marxism: Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School Karl Marx lived in Germany from 1818 to 1883. He is best known as a political philosopher and theorist of communism. Marx's most famous works are The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital (Capital). Political positions that can be described as socialist or leftist generally subscribe to Marxian philosophies of social welfare and empowerment of the working classes. In the early 1950s, Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, but more importantly, the socialist tenets of Marxism heavily influenced European continental philosophies at that time. It was impossible to ignore or avoid Marxism in twentieth-century European philosophy. Marxism was an influential intellectual tradition in Foucault's time, and Foucault's philosophy was critical of several aspects of Marxism. For one example, Foucault's philosophy was framed in terms of

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discourse, which was a critical transformation of the Marxian concept of ideology. For Marx, ideology meant a set of beliefs that supported a particular lifestyle. Usually (but not always) for Marx, ideology referred to the way of thinking that supported a middle-class lifestyle (i.e., bourgeois ideology). A middle-class ideology, for example, supports the assumption that professionals with a college degree have a right to earn more money than workers without a college degree, regardless of the fact that working-class jobs are as beneficial to society as middleclass jobs are. Foucault's use of the term `discourse' has some similarities with Marx's ideology because discourse means a network of language, actions, laws, beliefs, and objects that make our lives understandable. However, ideology tends to suggest that if you are a member of the middle class, then your lifestyle will be shaped by that ideology. Foucault was not satisfied with the fatalistic thinking that makes the events of our lives seem inevitable. Marx's philosophy makes class conflict seem inevitable, and Foucault used the term `discourse' partly to escape from any implication of inevitability or determinism associated with Marxist ideology. Another aspect of Marxism that Foucault critiqued was the Marxist theory of history. In The Communist Manifesto (1848) Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels outlined a theory of history that stipulated that the working classes would unite and revolt against their exploitation. Marx and Engels then outlined the series of steps that a capitalistic society would go through, from revolution to the dictatorship of the proletariat, to a classless society. This Marxist theory of history is based on a belief that workers will exercise agency as resistance against domination. However, Foucault was critical of all assertions of historical inevitability, so he did not accept Marxist historical predictions. Foucault's philosophy replaced assumptions of inevitability and free will with provocations to think differently. In that way, Foucault's problematization of historiography criticized and departed from a Marxist theory of history. Structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude LeÂvi-Strauss There is no agreement about classifying Foucault's philosophy in terms of either structuralism or poststructuralism. Both intellectual movements are components in the philosophical context of Foucault's work.

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Foucault was influenced by structuralism, and some Foucault scholars have classified his early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) as structuralist philosophy. But his relationship to structuralism ± like his relationship to all other major intellectual traditions ± is complicated. In order to understand how structuralism is implicated in Foucault's work, it is helpful to have a little background about structuralism itself. People may argue about when structuralism actually started, but it is generally accepted that Ferdinand de Saussure (linguist) and Claude LeÂviStrauss (anthropologist) were the two major contributors to the early development of structuralism. Since they are both French speakers, and they influenced Foucault's work, we will start with them. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857±1913) was a Swiss linguist who is famous for his development of a formal theory of linguistics in terms of signs, signifiers, and signified.12 Saussure did not study the ways people actually speak or use language. Rather, he focused on the underlying patterns of language in an ideal or theoretical sense. For Saussure, language was a two-tiered reality system consisting of signs and signified. What is important to understand about Saussure's structuralism is that it theorizes an abstract and invisible layer of language ± langue ± that is separate from the actual speech that we hear in real life ± parole.13 That abstract and invisible layer, langue, is the focus of structuralist analyses. For structuralists, langue is the part of language that can be studied scientifically. Langue has a kind of purity. Parole, on the other hand, is always messy with grammatical mistakes, incomplete sentences, misconceptions, wrong words, and incoherent meanings that occur when people actually use language. Foucault was critical of structuralism. He questioned the theory of a two-tiered reality and asked why we would take this abstract, invisible layer as `real' language. He was interested in why linguists would want to invent a two-tiered theory of language in the first place, and what kinds of possibilities and limitations were associated with beliefs in this theory. Saussure's linguistic structuralism influenced French anthropologist Claude LeÂvi-Strauss (born 1908). LeÂvi-Strauss was intrigued when he noticed that myths from all over the world shared certain features; myths from many different cultures are similar in some underlying ways. Based on these perceived similarities, he proposed a two-tiered theory of reality for myths. He theorized that myths (like language)

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Intellectual Biography

have an underlying pattern, and this underlying pattern ± the structure ± is what makes them myths. On the basis of this analysis of structure, his theory of myths is similar to Saussure's theory of language. In both cases, the theories are based on the existence of an invisible layer that is theoretical and pure; and in both cases, the invisible layer is the place where structure can be described and analyzed. Some scholars think that Foucault's early books (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things) are structuralist. They argue that Foucault's theories are structuralist because, in those books, Foucault theorized that there are underlying patterns of similarity across various disciplinary fields (such as history, science, and linguistics). Foucault's books point out relationships across fields of medicine, law, and religion that were practiced contemporaneously in particular periods of time. His analyses proposed that there was an underlying pattern of resemblances across disciplinary fields and these sorts of analyses resemble the analyses of structuralism. Moreover, Foucault's theories share with structuralism the conviction that thought cannot be separated from language (see White 1973a, pp. 23±54). Therefore, in so far as Foucault's historical analyses establish underlying patterns across fields and refuse to separate language from thought, his theoretical approach might be regarded as structuralist. At the same time, there are other factors that argue against classifying Foucault's work ± even his early books ± as structuralist. For one thing, Foucault always explicitly denied that his work was structuralist. In addition, structuralist analyses tend to search for similarities in order to make generalizations that hold true over time. But Foucault did not point out patterns in order to generalize about the truth; he was always critical ± maybe even contrary at times: If there were a widespread belief in an underlying pattern, Foucault's critical analysis would be inclined to search for discrepancies; and if there were a commonsense assumption of discrepancy, Foucault would be skeptical and search for connections. His theories do not work to establish generalizations, so in that way they have a purpose that is different from structuralism. Finally, Foucault's work is different from structuralism because he never treated the underlying structural layer as if it were the real thing. Saussure and LeÂvi-Strauss focused on the

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pure underlying structure (langue) as the proper object of analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In contrast, Foucault was interested in studying practices in the world, and how theories served to normalize what it was possible to think and do. It is also possible to understand Marxism as a kind of structuralism. Like linguistic structuralism, Marxism posits an underlying layer of patterns, namely an ideological system (e.g., capitalism). Marxism theorizes social relationships in terms of these underlying patterns. Just as structural linguistics analyses the underlying patterns or langue, not the surface or parole, similarly, Marxian analyses study the underlying patterns of society (the base), to explain society (the epi-phenomena) of everyday life. Like linguistic structuralists, Marxist analyses focus on the regular underlying patterns. Poststructuralism Structuralism is a fairly well-defined theoretical approach, but poststructuralism is not well defined. The simplest way to define poststructuralism is to describe it as a theoretical approach that follows from structuralism but rejects the major claims of structuralism. Part of what makes poststructuralism so difficult to define is that there are many different structuralist claims, and many different poststructural ways to reject those claims.14 Foucault focused primarily on structural assumptions about the relationship between truth and subjectivity. His approach was to problematize both truth and subjectivity. Poststructuralist analyses may not resemble one another because they target different aspects of structuralism, and they pursue diverse philosophical paths away from structuralism. In brief, there are three broad features of structuralism that poststructuralism rejects: 1 2 3

An underlying layer of meaning that is timeless and universal. The dichotomy of structure and agency. Rational coherence in the form of totalizing claims.

Poststructuralist theories may reject any or all of those features of structuralism.

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Modernism and postmodernism As we have just seen, poststructuralism is not just one thing, and there are disagreements about the definitions of both structuralism and poststructuralism. To make things even more confusing, sometimes the terms `poststructuralism' and `postmodernism' mean the same thing, but sometimes they do not. As far as Foucault's philosophy is concerned, poststructuralism and postmodernism can be understood to mean the same thing. Since Foucault's philosophy has been associated with postmodernism, some brief explanations of the terms `modern' and `postmodern' are offered here. The term poststructuralism is derived from linguistics and anthropology; the term postmodernism is derived from architecture and the arts. Postmodernism departs from modernism. Modernist architecture is exemplified by the work of the Bauhaus School, which began in Germany in 1919. Famous modernist architects are Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. The characteristics of modernist art and architecture are functional design, lack of ornamentation and decoration, and simplicity in form. One way to think about the concept behind modernist architecture is `the bare necessities.' A modernist style of design includes the bare functional necessities of a building, and eliminates anything that might be added for decorative purposes only. Modernism, like modern philosophy, is associated with industrialism, efficiency, rationality, and functionality. Just as poststructuralism follows from structuralism, postmodernism follows from modernism. And just as poststructuralism takes many diverse paths away from structuralism, postmodernism also takes many diverse paths away from modernism. Postmodernism is not just one thing; it is many different things. Postmodern movements are generally those that reject modernist qualities of coherence, rationality, objectivity, linear hierarchy, and organization. The term postmodernism was used in the first part of the twentieth century to describe trends in art and architecture that shifted away from modernist styles. In architecture, postmodernist design included components beyond the bare necessities, but unlike pre-modern architecture, the decorative components did not follow classical aesthetic sensibilities. Postmodernist art does not try to be beautiful

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in a traditional or conventional sense. Rather, postmodern work includes elements that seem to make no sense, such as asymmetrical shapes, random curves, and whimsical lines. Postmodernism also describes styles of painting such as Dadaism and surrealism. Literary works such as those by Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon can be described as postmodern because the stories contain no conventional plot lines, and may also include deliberately contradictory elements. Musician David Byrne captured a key theme of postmodernism when he wrote, `Stop Making Sense.' Foucault himself rejected the label of postmodernist; in fact, he claimed (provocatively and playfully) that he did not know what `postmodern' meant. However, since Foucault's philosophy departs so radically from modern philosophy in its aim and method, it is easy to see why he is considered by many people to be a postmodern thinker. Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist who lived from 1856 to 1939. He is most famous as the originator of psychoanalysis (not to be confused with the generic term `psychotherapy'). Freud's psychoanalysis is different from other psychiatric approaches because it is not based on medical diagnosis for the treatment of mental illness. Rather, Freud's psychoanalytic approach is called the `talking cure.' Psychoanalysis is based on the theory that there is a `subconscious' part of the human mind. The purpose of psychoanalysis is to release and express the subconscious mind, especially those feelings that have been buried inside us. Psychoanalysis calls the burying of feelings `repression.' The psychoanalyst's job is to get the patient to talk: to remember and express those repressed feelings. The important thing to know about Freud is that he was a major theoretical influence for Jacques Lacan, who was, along with Foucault, among the most influential intellectuals in France in the middle of the twentieth century. Lacan (1901±1981) was a psychoanalyst and theorist in France at the same time as Foucault and LeÂvi-Strauss. Lacan's theories of psychiatry were influenced by both Freud's psychoanalysis and LeÂvi-Strauss's structuralism. Lacan's version of psychoanalysis was very famous and popular during Foucault's lifetime.

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Intellectual Biography

Along with structuralism, Lacan's psychoanalytic theories contributed to the intellectual context for Foucault's philosophy. Lacan subscribed to a theory of repression that was first formalized by Freud. Repression in psychoanalysis means that we have deep feelings about which we tend not to be aware because those feelings are pushed down or buried deep in the recesses of our minds. This theory holds that feelings get repressed when they are too painful or too embarrassing for us to think about. Both Freud and Lacan believed that we are not conscious of our most personal desires and fears because those feelings have been `repressed' (unconscious) rather than confronted (conscious). Lacan theorized that there are three orders of human experience: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.15 By `imaginary,' Lacan meant something like our fantasy lives. The symbolic order is how we put our feelings into words as a way of communicating with others about them. Finally, the real order exists at an abstract and invisible layer. Lacan believed that the real is who we are deep down. The real order is so deep that we never have access to it, and in Lacan's theory, the inaccessibility of the real causes us to feel anxiety. Lacanians believe that we become frustrated because we are unable to express our real selves. Foucault objected to the `repressive hypothesis' and was also skeptical about the Lacanian assertion that we never have access to what is real about ourselves. We can see in Lacan's theory the influences of both Freud and LeÂviStrauss. Freud and Lacan practiced psychoanalysis as a way of working with patients. Lacan's theory is similar to LeÂvi-Strauss's structuralism in the distinction it draws between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. For both Lacan and LeÂvi-Strauss, the proper object of study is something that is abstract ± an invisible layer that underlies the world we can see, hear, smell, taste, and experience. Foucault's work challenged this underlying layer ± the structuralist langue and the Lacanian `real.' Foucault was skeptical about this abstract underlying construction, and he worked to provoke us to question the influence ascribed to such assumptions about reality. In what ways did psychoanalytic theories intersect with Foucault's philosophical project? Why would Foucault have criticized psychoanalysis? First, in mid-twentieth-century France, Lacan's theory had

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become a dominant intellectual tradition along with Marxism and structuralism. As usual, Foucault challenged dominant philosophies and ways of thinking. In addition, he criticized all theories that make things seem natural or inevitable. It could be argued that the unconscious, as posited by psychoanalytic theory, might impose a kind of inevitability in so far as Lacan's theory insists that we cannot access the unconscious, critique it, or change it. Finally, Foucault was critical of the ways in which psychiatry pathologized people. In particular, he historicized psychiatric distinctions between `normal' and `abnormal.' Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty The philosophical tradition known as phenomenology has Edmund Husserl as its most famous proponent. Husserl lived from 1839 to 1938 in Moravia (formerly part of Austria and now part of the Czech Republic). Phenomenology was a philosophical position that was critical of earlier philosophies of objectivity.16 Husserl's phenomenology insisted on the importance of intention or intentionality in our thinking. That means that phenomenological inquiry is more interested in the meanings of our subjective experiences than in the reality of objects that are assumed to exist out in the world. Husserl's phenomenology was taken up and extended by a French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty, who lived in France from 1908 to 1961, was one of Foucault's teachers and among the French intellectuals whose theories were influential at the time Foucault was writing. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology was critical of dualisms such as mind versus body, or subject versus object. He was also very interested in art as a venue for human thought and creativity. These foci led Merleau-Ponty to a philosophy of the body as a way of objecting to the `mind in a vat' philosophy of previous rationalists. With Merleau-Ponty, Foucault's work shares an interest in questioning dualisms and also an interest in the meaning of art for human expression. At the same time, Foucault objected to the phenomenological theory of the perceiving subject. Most importantly, Foucault was skeptical about the purity of our perceptions. Foucault's challenge to phenomenology was his suggestion that human perceptions are not free or pure, but rather we see things from a culturally and historically

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Intellectual Biography

specific point of view. For Foucault, the problem with phenomenology is that it is too general and abstract, and not sufficiently historical. Existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre went to school with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. There is some relationship between Sartre's existentialism and MerleauPonty's phenomenology: both focus primarily on our subjective experiences of things. Existentialism and phenomenology are more interested studying how people perceive things (subjective experiences) than in describing what things are like (objective reality). Sartre was a French philosopher who lived from 1905 to 1980. His most famous book is Being and Nothingness. He is also famous for his relationship with the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together with LeÂvi-Strauss, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre was among the intellectuals who were active in French-speaking philosophy at the time Foucault was writing. Sartre was also a critical intellectual who was deeply concerned about human freedom. In this regard, Sartre's existentialism was influential for Foucault. Like Sartre, Foucault was primarily concerned about the possibilities for freedom; however, unlike Sartre, he was ultimately skeptical about our capacity for achieving freedom. The aspect of existentialism that is not shared by Foucault is the insistence on human autonomy and choice. Foucault was connected to Sartre in their respective engagements in philosophies of freedom through art and literature. Foucault's work, however, departed from Sartre's in so far as Foucault concentrated on the power relations that shape possibilities for our thoughts and actions.

May 1968 In Europe, the phrase `May 1968' has a literal meaning and a figurative meaning. In its literal sense, May 1968 was a month of student strikes and protest movements in France.17 In its figurative sense, May 1968 signifies a major turning point in French culture and politics: a shift from conservative (right wing) to more liberal (left wing) social cultural values.18

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Foucault was not in France in May 1968 ± he was in Tunisia working at the University of Tunis. In Foucault's intellectual biography, the events of May 1968 occurred between the publication of The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Scholars refer to the May 1968 events as a turning point in Foucault's philosophy as well. For example, some argue that before 1968, Foucault was a structuralist in his writing, and after 1968 his work is poststructuralist. That may be the case; the degree to which Foucault's work changed course is debatable, and Foucault himself denied all of those labels. In any case, the relevance of May 1968 in Foucault's intellectual biography is that the date signifies a cultural turning point, and Foucault's philosophy belongs to the new order of things. Furthermore, in France there is a cultural tradition in which philosophers, writers, and intellectuals speak out and participate in political debates. Foucault referred explicitly to `May 1968' in several of his writings, and the events of that month had a lasting impact on French culture and intellectual life.

Annales School of Historiography Historiography is the study of the writing of history: the theories of historical research and the history of historical writing. At the time of Foucault's writing, there were active debates among European intellectuals about what it means to write history.19 The Annales is a school of French historiography that began in 1928. The major historians in the Annales School are Max Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel. Their major contribution to the writing of history was to incorporate social science methods (sociology, economics, and geography) into the study of history, and to examine trends over long time spans of history. Annales School historians studied history over the longue dureÂe (long duration), which meant studying centuries of a concept's development and change. For example, Braudel wrote a three-volume book called Civilization and Capitalism, 15th±18th Centuries. We can see some similarities between the Annales theory of history and Foucault's. Most notably, Annales historians wrote history in

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Intellectual Biography

order to demonstrate that things in history are changeable; they are not fixed and immutable.

Nietzsche's Profound Influence on Foucault Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher who lived in Germany from 1844 to 1900. Many people call Nietzsche an existentialist philosopher (like Sartre), and that is a reasonable classification. For our purposes, Nietzsche merits special attention because his influence on Foucault was particularly profound. Two of Nietzsche's most famous books are Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche was very critical of people who followed the crowd. He called such conformity `herd mentality,' and his writing challenged people to become more like `supermen' (UÈbermensch; UÈber means super). With a similar meaning, Nietzsche famously wrote, `God is dead' as a way of challenging people to stop being subservient, obedient followers. You can imagine how this kind of challenge might have appealed to Foucault. Like Nietzsche, he also wrote to provoke people to think for themselves and not to be passive followers of convention. Although Foucault seldom referred to Nietzsche explicitly in his writings, he did declare that the impact of Nietzsche's writings on his philosophy could not be overstated. For example, Nietzsche's philosophy is like Foucault's in that it does not follow in the tradition of a modern quest for truth. Like Nietzsche's, the genre of Foucault's philosophy is meant more to galvanize readers, not just to inform them. Following Nietzsche, Foucault called his own later historical work genealogy. We can also see Nietzsche's influence in Foucault's poetic use of language and in his historical approach to political problematization. Here are some quotations from Nietzsche's writings that reflect some of the similarities to Foucault's philosophy: 1 2

`Art is the proper task of life.' `The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often,

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3 4 5 6

27

and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.' `The future influences the present just as much as the past.' `We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.' `Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.' `The more mistrust, the more philosophy.'

Like Nietzsche, Foucault approached political critique not primarily by attacking the logic of the opposition, but rather through poetic provocation and historical challenges to the normal bases for our beliefs. Nietzsche is often considered to be an existentialist philosopher because of his emphasis on human initiative. Foucault's work does not precisely follow the existentialist currents of Nietzsche's; nevertheless, his work does show influences from Nietzsche's critical and exuberant genealogies. If you read any of Nietzsche's work, but especially Ecce Homo, you will get a sense of how non-traditional Nietzsche's philosophy is. Foucault's philosophy is non-traditional in similar ways. Both philosophers write poetically and playfully for the purpose of provoking questions and promoting skepticism. Both regard passivity and compliance as morally objectionable. Finally, both use historical ± genealogical ± arguments to build their critical philosophies.

Timeline Foucault was a French intellectual of the twentieth century. Recognition of that historical context is an important element in understanding his work. He was also a global intellectual. He traveled to many places in the world to study and teach. Moreover, his work has been published in several different languages. Some works appeared originally in languages other than French, including English and Italian, but Foucault's writings have also been translated from the French into Chinese, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Spanish, and Swedish. This timeline provides a rough outline of the chronology of

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Intellectual Biography

Foucault's professional life. Although it is incomplete, it gives some indication of the global extent of his intellectual engagements. 15 October 1926 Born in Poitiers, France 1948 Licence in Philosophy from the Sorbonne (teacher: Maurice MerleauPonty) 1949 Licence in Psychology from the Sorbonne DiploÃme in Psychology from the Sorbonne 1950 Joins Communist Party 1950±1954 Studies and volunteers as a psychologist in a mental hospital in France 1951±1955 Â cole Normale SupeÂrieure Lectures at the E 1952 Â cole Normale SupeÂrieure AgreÂgation in philosophy from E DiploÃme in psychopathology from the Institut de Psychologie in Paris 1952±1953 Travels to Switzerland to study with Binswager 1953±1955 Lectures in psychology at the University of Lille 1954±1955 Mental Illness and Psychology (revised in 1962) 1955±1958 Teaches in French Department, University of Uppsala, Sweden 1958±1959 Teaches at Institut FrancËais, Warsaw, Poland

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1959±1960 Teaches at French Institute in Hamburg, Germany 1960±1966 Returns to France as lecturer in psychology and eventually professor of philosophy at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (home of Blaise Pascal) 1961 Doctorat d'eÂtat (Georges Canguilhem) Submits History of Madness as a doctoral thesis in the history of science Translation and Introduction to Kant's Anthropologie Begins 23-year relationship with Daniel Defert 1963 The Birth of the Clinic one of two theses for doctorate degree (revised in 1972; Sheridan's English translation 1973) Death and the Labyrinth: Raymond Roussel 1964 History of Madness (abridged version; unabridged version published 2007) 1965 Madness and Civilization (English) Lectures in Brazil 1966±1968 Works in Tunisia Order of Things (French) Corresponds with Magritte Writes on language and literature Turns to history of science 1968 Teaches at Philosophy Department at the University of Paris-VII at Vincennes 1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge (French) Elected to a position at the ColleÁge de France (History of Systems of Thought)

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1970 Lectures in Japan and the United States Gives inaugural lecture at the ColleÁge de France (`The Order of Discourse') in December 1971 Lectures in Tunisia Debates with Chomsky in The Netherlands Founds Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP) 1972±1973 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `The Disciplinary Society (penal theories and institutions)' 1973 I, Pierre RivieÁre 1973±1974 Lectures in New York, Montreal, SaÄo Paulo, Brazil The Birth of the Clinic (English) Course at the ColleÁge de France: `Power of Psychiatry' 1974±1975 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `The Abnormals' Lectures in SaÄo Paulo 1975 Discipline and Punish 1975±1976 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `Society Must Be Defended' 1976 The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 Lectures at University of Bahia, Brazil; University of California, Berkeley, and University of Toronto, Canada. 1977 Teaches in Toronto, Canada 1978 Travels to Iran and Italy

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Studies Zen in Japan 1979±1980 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `The Government of the Living' 1980 Lectures in Berkeley and New York Introduction to Herculine Barbin (Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite) (translated by Richard McDougall) 1981 Appears in Time magazine (16 November, pp. 58±59) 1981±1982 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `Hermeneutics of the Subject' 1982 Teaches in Toronto Lectures in Vermont 1982±1983 Course at the ColleÁge de France: `The Uses of Pleasure and the Technologies of Self' 1983 Teaches at University of California, Berkeley 1984 The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 The History of Sexuality, Volume 3 25 June 1984 Dies in Paris

Chapter 2

Definitions of Major Concepts

The concepts explained in this chapter are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Discourse History, archaeology, and genealogy Power Subjectivity Role of the intellectual Freedom Everything is dangerous

Foucault was not only a writer; he was also a teacher, media celebrity, and political activist. His ideas are communicated differently through these various venues.1 Discourse The word `discourse' is used in common everyday speech as well as in scholarly writing. In scholarly writing, `discourse' is usually associated with the field of linguistics. Within linguistics, discourse refers to a group of sentences, which could be a conversation, a paragraph, or a speech. In the field of linguistics, discourse analysis is the study of the relationships among sentences in a paragraph or conversation. The term `discourse' is also used in fields of cultural studies and communication arts where it can refer to a group of sentences (as in linguistics), or it can mean a system of reasoning, an `ism,' such as `the discourse of communism' or `the discourse of capitalism.' `Discourse' is the noun form of the word, and `discursive' is the adjective form. Not surprisingly, when Foucault used the term discourse, he used it

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

in his own special way. The easiest way to understand Foucault's concept of discourse is by analogy to the internet: The internet is everything we can access with a browser. Discourse is everything we can access with our minds. As soon as someone posts something on a website, that website becomes part of the internet. Similarly, as soon as we can put something into words, that thing becomes part of discourse. Almost everything we can imagine is on the internet; if it is not on the internet, then in some sense, it does not exist for us. Similarly, if something has never been thought or put into words, then it is not in discourse, and in some sense, it does not exist for us. For anything that is not in discourse, we cannot know it; and as soon as we can know something, it is in discourse. The internet is created by people. Discourse is created by people. New content is always being added to the internet, and the scope, content, and organization of the internet are always in flux. Similarly, discourses are continually being re-created by people as they think and talk in different ways about things of the world. The internet is not produced by one person; it is the product of collective thoughts and actions. Similarly, discourse is not produced by one person; it is the product of collective thoughts and actions. People do not control the internet, and the internet does not control people. People do not control discourse, and discourse does not control people. Discourse is not a kind of law that determines what people can and cannot do. Some theorists think of discourses as authoritative systems like laws, but Foucault does not use the term discourse in that way. Discourses may have an effect on how people think and how we see the world, just as the internet may have an effect on what people

Definitions of Major Concepts

37

perceive and how we think. But, as noted above, the internet does not control people and discourses do not control people. There are no clear boundaries around websites. There are no clear boundaries around discourses. Every website has links to other websites. Similarly, every discourse has links to other discourses. We usually limit the scope of what we search for on the internet, but that limitation is imposed by us arbitrarily or strategically. Discourse is the same. When we refer to a discourse in an analysis, we impose a strategic limit on that discourse for writing or speaking purposes. For example, whenever we make a reference to the discourse of capitalism, we will choose some aspect of capitalism to refer to. We will not include all aspects of the discourse of capitalism, for example, its Marxist definition, how capitalism was re-defined by later economists, how it is manifested in Hong Kong, how it is related to Protestantism, how it is associated with corporate development, etc. The internet is historical ± it exists in time and space. Discourses are historical ± they exist in time and space. The internet was not the same thing five years ago as it is now, and we use the internet differently now compared to how we used it in the past. Similarly, discourses are not the same now as they were in the past. Discourses are historically specific. There is nothing that is universally true on the internet, just as there is nothing that is universally true in discourse. Extending this internet-discourse metaphor even further, we might begin to think of ideologies as analogous to search engines. Search engines (like Google) control access to knowledge and information. They sort and filter the content of the internet, presenting information in a hierarchy and making some information more accessible than other information. Ideologies work the same way ± they sort and filter discourses; they make certain kinds of knowledge accessible to us and other knowledge inaccessible.

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

History, archaeology, and genealogy Just as some philosophers do not consider Foucault to be a philosopher, some historians do not consider him to be a historian. The reasons for both are similar: Foucault's work challenged the rules of research in both philosophy and history. For anyone who holds traditional beliefs about philosophy or history, Foucault's work will not seem to fit properly into either one. Scholars do not always agree on the meanings of history, archaeology, and genealogy, and they do not agree on how to interpret Foucault's various historical projects. Many people think that Foucault's work can be divided into successive periods or phases: the early work is called `history of ideas,' the next period is labeled his `archaeological' work, then comes the `genealogical' work, and the last works are described as `history of thought.' Foucault himself rejected all these classifications, and he was not consistent in his uses of any of these terms. Foucault's use of the term archaeology helps to distinguish his historical work from mainstream history. In brief, mainstream history is longitudinal: it studies the development of something over a period of time. In contrast, archaeology is cross-sectional: it studies many different things that occurred at the same time.2 Archaeologists study artifacts of a given time: the pottery, building materials, books, instruments, and artwork of a particular stratum. Archaeologists try to make sense of how all of those various artifacts fit together. Foucault's archaeological approach to history is similar. He examined several different things that occurred at the same time. For example, he studied artifacts of eighteenth-century European linguistics, economics, and science. Then he tried to figure out how those artifacts made sense together. Archaeologists try to explain what was going on in one selected historical time. When he conducted archaeological studies, Foucault was particularly interested in knowledge, and he used the term episteme to refer to the knowledge system of a particular time. The episteme is the pattern that can be seen across various disciplines like economics, linguistics, and science. An episteme is a set of rules for distinguishing true knowledge from false knowledge:

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I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won't say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the `apparatus' which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific. (Foucault 1980b, p. 197) As the word suggests, an episteme pertains to epistemology. In other words, it is a historically specific way of knowing.3 In sum, archaeology is the study of a cross-section of artifacts in a particular time. It is unlike mainstream history because it analyzes a variety of artifacts in one time period rather than tracing the development of one thing over a period of years. Foucault's use of the term genealogy is usually distinguished from archaeology. However, by most reckonings, genealogies are based on archaeologies. While archaeology works to understand how artifacts fit together in a historical moment, genealogy works to figure out what kind of people would fit into that set of artifacts. Foucault's genealogies are generally based on archaeological-type studies. That is, he examined a cross-section of artifacts (archaeology), and then asked questions like: 1 2

What kind of people would live in such a way? Given those artifacts and epistemes, how did people think of themselves in the world?

No matter whether we think that archaeology is similar to or different from genealogy, there are three major features that distinguish Foucault's historical work from mainstream approaches to history. First, Foucault's historical work challenges both continuist and discontinuist historical accounts. Continuous histories emphasize how much things stay the same, and discontinuous histories emphasize how much things change. An epigram of continuous history is: `Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.'4 An epigram of discontinuous history is: `It is not possible to step twice into the same

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

river.'5 It is a matter of preference whether we emphasize how things stay the same or how things change, just as it is a matter of preference whether we see the glass as half-empty or half-full. If you read a history of science in which science is depicted as a continuous series of improvements, then that is an example of continuous history because it emphasizes how science is basically the same; it just gets better. In contrast, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) is an example of discontinuous history because it emphasizes how science has undergone revolutionary changes. In cases when mainstream histories assume continuity, Foucault's history was likely to emphasize differences, and when mainstream histories assume discontinuity, Foucault's history was likely to show similarities. For example, mainstream histories usually portray modernity as a continuation of the Enlightenment. These mainstream histories emphasize the continuous developments in reason, science, and democracy around the world. In his critical spirit, Foucault's history challenged that continuity. He emphasized how modern institutionalization and industrialization constituted a break from earlier Enlightenment intellectual debates between rationalism and empiricism. In other cases where mainstream histories claim discontinuity, Foucault argued for (some degree of) continuity. In one famous example, mainstream history usually portrays a historical rupture (or a paradigm shift) between Greek and Christian worldviews, especially with regard to morality. Mainstream history tends to regard Christianity as a break or rupture in history from earlier `pagan' times. However, Foucault's analysis (in The History of Sexuality) emphasizes the continuities between Greek and Christian ethical systems. He argued that both systems were governed by fairly strict and explicit principles. His analysis acknowledges differences between Greek and Christian ethical systems, but also argues that there are striking similarities between the two. One way to understand Foucault's historiographical approach is to say that he was being critical, provocative, or contrary. Whether mainstream history emphasized continuity or discontinuity, Foucault offered a challenge to that emphasis, whenever it appeared as an unquestioned assumption about history.

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Second, Foucault's approach to history does not try to be objective, but rather it aims to be a critical history of the present. Mainstream historians have been interested in objectivity; their approach to studying history was to find and record `how it really was' in the past.6 Just as modern philosophers have generally been focused on finding the truth about our lives, mainstream historians have generally been focused on finding the truth about what happened in the past. Foucault's study of history was not focused on finding the truth about the past, and therefore many historians assert that his work is not really history. However, this does not mean that Foucault wrote history in flagrant disregard of facts. Rather, the focus and emphasis of his historical analysis was shaped by concerns about the present. Here is a sketch of Foucault's perspective on critical historiography: 1

2

3

4

5

6

No history can include everything that happened in every day in every place. In our own lives, we see that every day is filled with thousands of ordinary events, happenings, and incidents. No history includes everything about everything, so no history is really objective. Millions of people have been born, lived their lives, and died. The vast majority of things that have occurred in the past have never been recorded or included in any historical account. Only a small selection of things has been included in any historical record. Sometimes the things that have been included are those that historians believed to be interesting or worth writing about; other times things have been included by habit, custom, and convention. Some kinds of things (like certain aspects of wars and particular kinds of heroes) have been regularly included in historical records, and other things (like housekeeping and child-raising) have been regularly omitted from historical records. Since it is not possible for any historical record to include everything that has ever happened, it must be the case that all histories exclude a great deal. All selections lead to exclusions.7 Since all histories are selective, it is intellectually ethical to take responsibility for selection bias, rather than to pretend that histories are objective.8

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

Foucault explained very explicitly his criteria for inclusion in the historical accounts; he wanted to question our assumptions about the present. He made his selection biases explicit. He wrote history in order to help us gain surprising insight into our present circumstances. That is what `history of the present' means. Third, Foucault's approach to history is influenced by Nietzsche's `effective history.' Foucault did not write objective history; he wrote `critical and effective history.' He used the term `effective history' after Nietzsche's Wirkungsgeschichte. One helpful tool for understanding the difference between objective history and effective history has been provided by two educational historians from Belgium, Marc DePaepe and Frank Simon (1996). They use the metaphor of mirror and lever to capture political and pedagogical differences between objective history and effective history. DePaepe and Simon's metaphor helps us understand that history can serve multiple and complex purposes. Objective history is meant to function like a mirror that provides us with a reflection of the past. In contrast, effective history is meant to function like a lever that disrupts our assumptions and understandings about who we think we are. Foucault's history, with its provocative and ironic stance, conveys the message that mirrors make the best levers. Finally, Foucault tended to celebrate the role of chance in human lives. As he wrote, the job of genealogy is to restore chance to its rightful place in history. Recognizing that reason has been one of the disciplinary technologies of modern societies, Foucault repeatedly reminded us that much of history cannot be explained by anything other than `the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance' (Nietzsche's Dawn quoted in Foucault 1998, p. 381). Foucault celebrated the role of chance in history because chance makes change easier to imagine. If we do not think of history as proceeding in some inevitable or predictable manner, then history is not so deterministic, and it is easier for us to imagine that things might be different in the future. In summary, Foucault's historical work: 1 2 3 4

Challenges both continuist and discontinuist accounts of history. Does not try to be objective, but is a critical history of the present. Is strongly influenced by Nietzsche's `effective history.' Allows for the possibility of chance.

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Power As with many of Foucault's ideas and uses of terms, the term power is used in various ways over the course of his writings. It is not easy to pin down a single, consistent, articulated definition of power. This section will emphasize the definition of power that is 1) most closely aligned with Foucault's later works, and 2) is most unlike other (traditional, classical, or structural) notions of power. In this way, at the risk of overstating the uniqueness of Foucault's concept, this exposition of power highlights meanings of power that are distinctively Foucaultian. Modalities of power In common use, the term power is a very broad concept that encompasses many different things including ability, agency, domination, and potential. Foucault's analysis breaks the concept of power apart, and his theory explains differences in various modes of power. He argued that over centuries, societies have changed from feudalism, to monarchies, to democracies; but our political theories of power have not kept up with those changes. Since we no longer live in monarchies, Foucault argued, we need a more finely tuned theory of power that can help us understand the many different ways power operates when there are no dictators. Foucault was very interested in the history of governments, and he paid a great deal of attention to the meaning of democracy. When he analyzed the effects of democratic revolutions, his analysis of those historical power shifts was not naive. He did not suppose that in a democracy there would be total freedom or that democracy would mean equal power for all people. He did not assume that the end of sovereign power meant the end of power. Quite the contrary. He was interested in analyzing how power operates within a democratic system in which people are supposed to govern themselves. Foucault argued that democracies9 have many kinds of power ± modalities of power. Democracies have laws, police, judges, and prisons, so there are elements of sovereign power still at work. At the same time, however, in democracies people are supposed to govern themselves, so that is a different mode of power from the sovereign mode. We tell ourselves how to behave. Furthermore, democratic

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

governments do not gain legitimacy through threats of terror, so we need a careful theorization of power in order to perceive how this new `kinder and gentler' mode of power works. As modes of power in democracies, Foucault explicitly identified: 1 2 3 4

Sovereign power Disciplinary power Pastoral power Bio-power

As the name suggests, sovereign power refers to the mode of power most obvious in a monarchy, where the king or queen possesses ultimate authority over other people's lives. Foucault used the term `sovereign' to refer to this noble mode of power. The sovereign mode of power operates in democracies when authorities (people or laws) try to control other people. For example, the mode of sovereign power describes the situation in which headmasters use their authority to expel or promote students, when bullies persecute their victims, and when some people have the right to vote while others are denied. The sovereign mode of power is easy to recognize and understand because it most closely resembles forces of domination and control with which we are familiar. In democratic societies, people are subjected to laws and coercive practices (sovereign power), but that is not the only kind of power in democracies. In democracies, we also control ourselves. Disciplinary power is the kind of power we exercise over ourselves based on our knowledge of how to fit into society. We discipline ourselves on the basis of messages we get from society ± knowledge, rewards, and images ± of how we are supposed to live. We try to be normal by disciplining ourselves even in the absence of threats of punishment. Foucault's analysis tells us that disciplinary power is executed through mechanisms that are different from the mechanisms of sovereign power. For example, sovereign power is exercised through physical punishment and rewards. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through surveillance and knowledge. One surveillance mechanism is the gaze. The gaze is symbolized by the panopticon, a prison design that allows a supervisor to watch inmates.

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The concept of the gaze is important because it shows that it is not necessary to watch people constantly because people will regulate themselves even when they think they are being watched. The gaze gives people the feeling that they are being watched, and that feeling is a mechanism of our self-discipline. Another mechanism of disciplinary power is the production of particular kinds of knowledge, especially knowledge of the human sciences. The word `discipline' also refers to an academic subject, such as the discipline of sociology or the discipline of political science. This meaning of `discipline' highlights the role knowledge plays in the governing practices of modern democracies. In the disciplinary mode of power, knowledge of psychology and social science helps us to understand who we are. Academic disciplines provide the basis on which we know what is good, what is normal, and how we ought to behave. Particular kinds of knowledge are produced and made available to us, and that knowledge allows us to govern ourselves in particular ways. It is on the basis of our knowledge that we discipline ourselves to eat nutritious foods, join a health club, listen politely when people are speaking to us, and read the books our teachers assign. Foucault called the gaze and human sciences mechanisms (or technologies) of disciplinary power. Foucault used the metaphor of the pastor as a strategy to explain another mode of power that operates in democracies: pastoral power. This mode of power was derived through the traditions of Christianity. Literally, `pastoral' refers to a pasture where a shepherd cares for a flock of sheep. You may recognize the language of pastorship from Christianity: in some Protestant churches, ministers (priests) are called `pastors,' and the Twenty-Third Psalm begins `The Lord is my Shepherd.' The members of a Christian church are often called the `flock,' and the Bible uses the sheep and shepherd metaphor to refer to the relationship between people and clergy in religious settings. The metaphor of `pastoral' serves to highlight this particular mode of power. For example, kings have the reputation of being powerful in a military way, and that is sovereign power. However, pastors have the reputation of being of service to their respective flocks, and that is characteristic of the pastoral mode of power. Also, the members of the

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

flock are dependent on the shepherd; that, too, is an element of pastoral power. Finally, it might make sense to rebel against a king whose power can be abused, but it does not make sense to rebel against a pastor, since the pastor exercises power only to protect and nurture the flock. Foucault invoked these levels of literary meaning to spur our imaginations in the process of trying to make sense of this caring mode of power in democracies. There are limits to the extent of this metaphor. Pastoral power does not necessarily mean that power is being exercised through religion. It also does not mean that people in a democracy are as helpless as sheep. Pastoral power does not imply that people are locked in corrals like so many flocks of sheep; instead, the metaphor of pastoral power serves to emphasize that there are modes of power in democracies other than sovereign power. Since democracies are different from monarchies, the exercises of power in democracies may go undetected if all we are able to recognize are the sovereign modes. If we do not recognize power in its many different guises, then we become subject to the effects of power without knowing it. It is Foucault's purpose to make the exercises of power recognizable. The term `pastoral power' gives us language to recognize the kindly exercise of power that is an element of democratic governance. If the exercise of power is made recognizable, then we increase our options for participation in relations of power and leadership. Finally, the term bio-power is a neologism, an invention of Foucault's to bring into view a particular mode of power in modern democracies. He first used the term in the 1975 lecture series, `Society Must Be Defended.' In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault explained that bio-power is a modality of power that is exercised through our relationship to demography (Foucault 1978a, p. 139). We modern people have grown up in societies, so we govern ourselves according to what we have come to understand about ourselves in terms of race, class, gender, age, and so on. When Foucault used the term `bio-power' in the 1975 lectures, he was talking about his historical analysis of a particular change that occurred across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely a change in how governments handled `bio' issues. Bio issues ± including

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births, deaths, health, sickness, and demographic (e.g., race, class, and gender) descriptions ± were not always formally administered by governments. At one time there were no officers, cabinet ministers, oversight boards, or legislative policy statements that were in charge of demography; governments did not record, predict, or intervene in birth rates, death statistics, or disease management. However, in the eighteenth century when these bio issues came into the sphere of government and administration, the change in the scope of government signaled a change in power dynamics that Foucault called `biopower.' Bio-power does not mean that in the eighteenth century the state began to take control of more aspects of our lives. It is not a good thing or a bad thing. Rather, bio-power refers to a mode of power that shapes how we think of ourselves relative to populational factors such as births, deaths, health, sickness, and demographics. In summary, there are many modes of power operating in democratic societies. Different modes of power are exercised with different mechanisms. In democracies, sometimes we are subjects of sovereign power, sometimes disciplinary power, sometimes pastoral power, and sometimes bio-power. We could probably come up with many other modes of power. In Foucault's philosophy, the more finegrained our analysis of power, the better equipped we are to adopt a critical perspective on the modes of governance in which we participate. Technologies of the self When Foucault referred to power relations in terms of technologies of the self, he was emphasizing a mode of power that is different from control or domination. Technologies of the self are those mechanisms by which we govern ourselves in modalities like disciplinary power, pastoral power, and bio-power. Because these mechanisms ± technologies ± have effects, Foucault considered them to be exercises of power. A preliminary notion of what Foucault meant by technologies of the self can be illustrated with the ordinary example of what you ate for breakfast this morning. Here are some of the factors that may be contributing to your breakfast practices:

48 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work What you customarily had for breakfast as a child growing up. What you regard to be healthy, in terms of calories, cholesterol, temperature, quantity, protein, or freshness. Whether you have access to food at all. What you see as convenient in terms of saving time, money, or effort. Cultural associations with menu designations such as `continental breakfast,' `full English breakfast,' `American breakfast,' `lite fare,' or `healthy choice.' Body-image aspirations to lose weight, gain weight, or affect muscle-building. Religious calendars that specify fasting and feasting seasons.

Your breakfast is an example of how you regulate yourself relative to various factors such as those listed above. It does not matter whether you are following or resisting any of those factors: following, resisting, choosing, or ignoring are all ways of relating to those factors. Not eating breakfast is also an expression of how you regulate yourself. `Technologies of the self' is not about you controlling yourself or being controlled by something else. Technologies of the self are practices in our everyday lives that make us who we are. If we recognize technologies of the self as exercises of power, we can study those technologies in relation to various kinds of knowledge (e.g., science, culture, language, religion, economics) that are available to us. `Technologies of the self' is a concept that allows us to study how power works to make us who we are. In several cases, Foucault provided examples from classical Greece to show how technologies of the self could operate differently in different historical circumstances. One example of such a technology is parrhesia, a Greek word that means `to speak the truth.' Parrhesia has the connotation of honesty that comes with some danger: perhaps the truth is embarrassing, or perhaps the truth puts the speaker at some risk. Foucault's (2001) book on parrhesia is called Fearless Speech. In classical Greece, parrhesia meant speaking the whole truth, especially when that was very hard to do. Foucault used the term parrhesia as a way to help us understand that different societies have different rules about telling the truth: What truths are we allowed to speak freely, and what truths are

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we supposed to keep to ourselves? For example, in some societies, we are not supposed to reveal intimate details of our personal lives. In other societies, we are not supposed to tell the truth about how much money we earn. This is an example of a technology of the self. The term `care of the self' is another example of Foucault's analysis of technologies of the self in classical Greece. `Care of the self' is the English translation of the French le souci de soi, which Foucault used as a translation of the Greek term epimelia heautou. The term `care of the self' is often misunderstood to mean something like `being good to yourself.' However, that is not Foucault's meaning. Rather, he meant something like `paying attention to yourself' or `being concerned about yourself.' `Care of the self' for Foucault does not have a normative connotation, which means that care of the self is not a good thing or a bad thing; it is just a description of some of our daily practices that make us who we are ± for better or worse ± and in relation to the knowledge and power relations in which we live. Governmentality The word governmentality is another neologism, a newly invented word. Foucault coined the word for an important critical purpose. Happily, the word governmentality works the same way in English as it does in French, so the translation problems are minimal. In both languages, the word is a combination of `government' and `mentality.' The combination of these two words into one word is somewhat difficult to grasp, but very important for understanding Foucault's concept. It is difficult because intuitively, we tend to assume that government and people are two separate (maybe oppositional) entities, namely `them' and `us.' The usual intuitive understanding is that an individual's mentality is separate from the entity we call the government. This distinction between `us' and `them' is one of the cornerstones of modern political theory, and a situation that we tend to take for granted. To challenge that, the one-word term `governmentality' provides a Foucaultian perspective in which government and mentality swirl around together and define one another. Governmentality challenges the assumption that we can easily separate `government' from our `mentality.' Governmentality is a concept that is closely related to Foucault's theory of power. Recall that

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

Foucault's theory of power extended the notion of sovereign power to recognize other modalities of power. That is, Foucault noted that in the context of democracy, sovereign power is only one dimension of the power and government in our lives. Governmentality is related to Foucault's theory of power because it highlights the ways we ± the people ± govern ourselves in a democracy. The term governmentality signals Foucault's conceptualization of power in which it is not possible to separate government from our mentality. Governmentality describes a relationship in which we govern ourselves as free people. To govern ourselves does not mean that we act autonomously; it does not mean that individuals are independent of society; it does not mean we are isolated individuals. To govern ourselves also does not mean that we have been conditioned by the dominant rules; it does not mean that we have become puppets of the state; and it does not mean that we have some version of `false consciousness'10 in which we have been duped into acting against our own best interests. The important feature to understand about governmentality is that freedom and government are completely interconnected. In the context of modern democracies, we cannot have one without the other. Freedom and government are not oppositional; they are interdependent and mutually constitutive. This is a counter-intuitive relationship, so it merits some further explanation. To elaborate Foucault's theory of power more thoroughly, the following section draws explicit distinctions between Foucault's conceptualization of power and other related conceptualizations. Power versus domination Unlike Marxism, Foucault's approach draws a clear distinction between domination and power: `By [power relations] I mean something different from states of domination' (1984e, p. 434). Foucault recognized that there are instances in which domination occurs, for example, in slavery or child abuse. However, Foucault preferred to call that domination rather than power. In the case of domination, one of the parties has no options. In contrast, power relations are those in which everybody has options, even if those options might be considered extreme, such as suicide or murder.

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Even when the power relation is completely out of balance, when it can truly be claimed that one side has `total power' over the other, a power can be exercised over the other only insofar as the other still has the option of killing himself, of leaping out the window or of killing the other person. (Foucault 1984e, p. 441) By drawing a distinction between power and domination, Foucault did two important things: 1) he separated his theory of power from Marxism and structuralism; 2) he conceptualized power as not necessarily a bad thing. Power and repression In several of his works, Foucault argued against `the repressive hypothesis.' Again, his theory of power is critical of Marxist theories of oppression and Freudian theories of repression. For Foucault, it did not make sense that repression would be so effective in getting people to behave in particular ways. He suggested that power also had a productive aspect to it. That is, power does not only prevent us from doing things, it also produces certain behaviors: If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no; it also traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the whole social body. (1976, p. 120) When he analyzed power in terms of productive mechanisms that circulate in discourse, Foucault undermined the modernist and structuralist claims that power belongs only to certain people or groups of people. Some philosophers use the terms liberation, empowerment, freedom, and emancipation to mean approximately the same thing, and these terms mean the opposite of oppression and domination. Modern

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

critical theories tend to proceed from the assumption that oppression is readily distinguishable from freedom. For example, a critical theory such as that of Freire (1970) in education have analyzed practices of schooling to determine the degrees of oppression and freedom allowed in various pedagogical practices. In this characterization of education, induction into the `culture of power' (see, e.g., Delpit 1988) might be considered a practice of freedom, and/or it might be considered as an act of subjection. However, for Foucault, our democratic behaviors and practices are produced by mechanisms of power. Also, our capacity for acting freely, as well as our capacity for inflicting abuse, are all products of power relations. Mechanisms of power do not only prevent us from acting; they also create the possibilities and opportunities for our actions. Power and resistance The role of resistance is one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts in Foucault's theory of power. Perhaps the misunderstandings exist because we tend to think of resistance in the context of sovereign power. Resistance makes sense in the modality of sovereign power, but it does not make as much sense in the modalities of disciplinary power, pastoral power, or bio-power, with which we govern and regulate ourselves: power relations are thus mobile, reversible and unstable. It should also be noted that power relations are possible only insofar as the subjects are free. If one of them were completely at the other's disposal and became his thing, an object on which he could wreak boundless and limitless violence, there wouldn't be any relations of power. Thus, in order for power relations to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of freedom on both sides. (1984e, p. 441) In Foucault's theory of multiple modes of power, resistance is implicated in all of them. Resistance is not the opposite of power or the reaction to power. Instead, there is no power where there is no freedom.

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Power and knowledge You may have heard the truism `knowledge is power,' which means that a person who has more knowledge has more power. This is not what Foucault meant. His theory of knowledge and power is almost the opposite of that ± namely that knowledge is produced through power struggles. When Foucault asserted that knowledge is produced by power, he did not mean that `might makes right.' Rather, he referred to something more analogous to chemical reactions that result in products. In chemistry, we get different products depending on which substances are combined in what quantities under which conditions. Foucault's theory of power-knowledge is something like that. We get different products of knowledge depending on which beliefs are combined with what societies under which political conditions. Foucault studied history to learn more about how various combinations of factors and power relations produced one kind of knowledge rather than another. In Foucault's theory of power-knowledge, knowledge is always produced in history under specific conditions. History comprises all kinds of relations: networks of power and games of truth. So depending on the historical context, some observations and claims will become knowledge and others will not. Knowledge is shaped by a network of interactions among sectors such as research funding agencies, religious convictions, economic viability, personal fame and fortune, aesthetic tastes, and technological affordances. The important point is to remember that for Foucault, knowledge is created as a product of complex interactions among struggling and competing sectors. Subjectivity Foucault theorized the term `subject' in a poetic way that plays on the ordinary meanings of the word `subject.' His theory of the subject includes all of these meanings simultaneously: 1

A subject is a term in grammatical analysis: a sentence is comprised of a subject and a predicate. In that grammatical sense, the subject is an actor or an agent because the subject does

54

2

3

4

5

Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work something; the subject acts. Foucault's theory of the subject includes this acting role. A subject is the topic or focus under investigation, as in the subject of a discussion or subject of a conversation. There is irony here because the subject is the object of our perception. This irony is intentional in Foucault's theory. We look at ourselves, so we are both the subject and object of our perceptions, and these two positions cannot be separated. Foucault's genealogies trace how, in modern ways of thinking, the self has become the object of investigation ± the subject ± of scholarly domains and in everyday pursuits. A subject is a person who is governed. In a monarchy, for example, people are subjects of a king or queen, and in a constitutional democracy, people are subjected to the rule of law. Foucault's subject is also implicated in a system of governance. A subject is the opposite of an object. `Subjective' describes our personal perspective, as in our subjective opinion on an issue. For Foucault, subjective is personal. The subject has an aspect that is not reducible to objective characteristics such as race, class, gender, age, ability, or sexual identity. In academic realms, a subject is a disciplinary domain. We talk about the subjects of history, mathematics, economics, and linguistics. In Foucault's theory of the subject, knowledge plays a big role. It is characteristic of a modern ethos that knowledge carries more authority than kings do. Therefore, the production of knowledge and the ways we relate to knowledge contribute to the construction of the subject.

Because Foucault used the term subject in this poetic sense, it is difficult ± and in some senses misleading ± to try to untangle its meaning or simplify its definition. Foucault's theory of the subject is not just one of those five definitions above; it is all of those definitions put together. Since some of those definitions contradict one another (like subject versus object), Foucault's theory of the subject can feel elusive and incoherent. The only possible consolation is to try to remember that we humans are not coherent beings. We do not behave rationally all the time; our actions do not always match our thoughts;

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and we are simultaneously logical, emotional, instinctive, sensuous, and impulsive. Finally, Foucault theorized subjectivity as a way of being provocative, not as a way of asserting truth. Foucault devised an uncharacteristically schematic four-part framework for analyzing the subject. Using this framework, he analyzed and contrasted various historical constructions of the subject. To summarize in advance, these are the four parts of the framework: 1

2

3

4

What part of myself am I supposed to work on? What part of me is supposed to change: My actions? My thoughts? My attitude? My self-concept? He called this the substance (substance eÂthique). For what reason should this change happen? What is the rationale or invitation for working on the self: To fulfill my duty? To live up to my potential? To deserve a place in heaven? To enjoy my life on earth? He called this the mode of subjectification (mode d'assujettissement). What am I supposed to do to change myself? Am I expected to: Control my appetites? Break free of rules? Be a leader? Be a follower? Discover who I am? Invent a new persona? Foucault called this the regimen (pratique de soi). What kind of person am I aiming to be? What is the ultimate goal of this work on myself? To become my own master? To be free of restraints? To become all-knowing? To become one with the universe? To be normal? This is called the telos (teleologie).

Foucault's analysis of the subject This four-part framework is articulated explicitly in at least two different places in Foucault's writing, namely in Chapter 3 of The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (1984b), and in the interview `On the Genealogy of Ethics' (1983). In addition, Paul Rabinow (1998) included an extensive summary of the ethical fourfold as part of his introduction to the first volume of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954± 1984. In addition to these explicit treatments, this framework serves as the conceptual basis for the historical analyses in The History of Sexuality, especially in Volumes 2 and 3. When Foucault theorized the subject, he was interested in theorizing a very specific set of relationships, namely the relationships

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between the self, power, truth, and freedom. That is Foucault's philosophical project. He called these relationships ethics, and used the four-part framework to theorize the ethical subject. This definition of ethics is very different from the ordinary definition, and also very different from other philosophical definitions of ethics. By `ethics,' Foucault was referring to what we do in the name of freedom. Ethics is what we do to try to be free. You might be interested in theorizing a different kind of subject ± the educated subject, the mathematical subject, the healthy subject, or the disabled subject. However, Foucault was interested in theorizing the ethical subject, and the results of his historical analyses are presented below. Substance Here are three different ways the ethical substance has been defined: 1 2 3

`Which is the aspect or the part of myself or my behavior which is concerned with moral conduct?' (Foucault 1982a, p. 238). `The ethical substance is like the material that's going to be worked over by ethics' (Rabinow in Foucault 1982a, p. 238). `The way that the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct' (Foucault 1984b, p. 26).

One helpful way to think of the ethical substance is as the target of change: What part of the self is supposed to be changed as we work on ourselves to become free? Foucault used historical comparisons to highlight contrasts between various ethical systems. He described the ethical substance of sexual subjectivity for (classical) Greeks as being linked to pleasure or aphrodisia, whereas for early Christians it was fleshly desires, for Kant it was intentions, and for us moderns it is feelings. Foucault provided a detailed example to contrast our modern ethical substance with a Kantian ethical substance. He suggested that within modern (French) norms of sexuality, having sex with someone other than your spouse is frowned upon, but it is not as bad as falling in love with someone other than your spouse. In modern moral judgments, feelings are usually more important than actions. So

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Foucault theorized that for modern times the ethical substance is comprised of feelings. In contrast, for Kant it was intentions ± that is, the most important ethical focus was to align intentions with rational principles. The relationship between intentions and (universal) rational principles is the most important test of morality, and intentions override behavior or feelings as the target for ethical judgment. So, Foucault argued, intentions are the ethical substance of a Kantian subject. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Foucault devoted quite a bit of attention to the substance of aphrodisia as the classical Greek ethical substance. This is a foreign concept for us, and so it merits some further explanation. By aphrodisia, Foucault meant something like `the art of enjoyment.' Greek philosophy took the issue of pleasure very seriously, and a great deal of Greek philosophy is devoted to figuring out the means by which people could intensify their enjoyment of life's pleasures ± including sex, eating, drinking, art, bathing, exercising, and poetry. As Foucault explained in The History of Sexuality, Greek philosophers theorized their experiences of pleasure, and composed thoughtful recommendations for how people could work to intensify their enjoyment. For example: 1 2 3 4

5

When eating, what is the maximum quantity one can consume without suffering ill effects of bloating, lethargy, or obesity? What frequency of meals offers the maximum pleasure without the undesirable effects of hunger or neglect of responsibilities? Which modes of music enhance contemplation and which modes enhance periods of physical exercise? What kinds of poetry are best enjoyed late in the evening or early in the morning, and how can we use poetry to help create a jovial atmosphere at a party? What kinds of images should sculptures portray, and how should they be displayed to the best advantage so that people can truly appreciate them?

From these examples it is clear that the Greeks were not interested in wanton acts of indulgence or any kind of excess. Indulgence and excess always lead to some negative ± unpleasant ± effects, so that kind of

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work

behavior does not make sense in this ethical system. For classical Greeks, aphrodisia is the ethical substance because, for making a judgment about ethics, pleasure is the bottom line. The Greeks devoted a great deal of study to the cultivation of pleasure, and their concentration on aphrodisia provides a striking contrast to our own ethics. By explicating the Greek ethical substance as aphrodisia, Foucault's analysis emphasized the degree to which we moderns have diminished the centrality of pleasure as a basis for ethical judgments and have replaced pleasure with a measure of our feelings. The ethical substance is just the first of the four dimensions of analysis, and the substance needs to be understood in relation to the other three dimensions, and in the context of a genealogical project, to help us see ourselves as ethical, that is, freedom-seeking, beings. Mode of subjectification11 The mode of subjectification is the second dimension of the four-part framework. Here are two ways Foucault paraphrased the definition of the mode: 1 2

`The way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations' (Foucault, 1982a, p. 239). `The way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obligated to put it into practice' (Foucault 1988, p. 27).

The mode of subjectification is perhaps a little more intuitively familiar to us than the concept of the ethical substance. It is the `why' behind our actions, or the rationale we give ourselves: Why should we work on ourselves to be free? To explicate this dimension, we will use an analogy about food. Rather than considering Foucault's ethical task of freeing ourselves, this example considers various rationales that inform an ethical judgment about eating. The example is, `What is the most important thing to consider when deciding whether to eat a peach?' Here are several possible modes of subjectification:

Definitions of Major Concepts 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

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Religious law. Is it against my religion (e.g., kosher, halal, ahimsa) to eat a peach? Health beliefs. Is this peach good for my health (e.g., low fat, low carb, allergy concerns, calorie limits)? Political commitments. Were people mistreated in the production of this peach (e.g., farm worker exploitation, violation of safe labor laws, child labor)? Environmental concerns. Was this peach raised according to acceptable growing principles (e.g., organic farming, preservation of species, protection of habitat, sustainable agriculture, local product)? Taste. Is it delicious (e.g., sweet, juicy, mealy, rotten, ripe)? Courtesy. Would it be rude to refuse (e.g., gift, ceremony, social etiquette, cultural norms)? Money. Can I afford to eat this peach?

So in the analysis of the dimension of the mode of subjectification, the issue is not whether you eat the peach or not, it is why did you eat (or not eat) that peach? What kinds of reasoning did you appeal to in order to persuade yourself to eat or not eat the peach? Similarly, Foucault's ethical subject may be working for freedom in order to gain fame, go to heaven, become self-actualized, feel accomplished, fulfill a promise, or feel greater pleasure. Another example of the mode of subjectification from the field of educational psychology is illustrated in Kohlberg's concepts of moral stages. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927±1987), a U.S. psychologist, developed a theory that classifies moral reasoning into stages of development. Kohlberg argued that lower forms of moral reasoning are obedience and self-interest, while the highest form of moral reasoning is a (Kantian-like) principled conscience. Kohlberg's theory is an example of theorizing the mode of subjectification because the theory focuses not on the morality of acts or behaviors, but rather on the morality of the reasons behind those actions. In Foucault's analysis, the mode of subjectification for classical Greece was politicoaesthetic, while for early Christians it was divine law. The politicoaesthetic mode refers to the ethical system in which a Greek man must master his own experiences of pleasure. Becoming

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master of one's own pleasures is the rational thing to do, and in classical Greece, men who wanted to live a beautiful life acted rationally. This Greek mode is different from the Christian mode in which the most acceptable reason for doing something was that the scriptures required it. Both Greeks and Christians might abstain from sexual relations, but they would do so for very different reasons, so the mode of subjectification would be different in the two ethical systems. This analytical framework allows us to recognize both similarities and differences across multiple ethical systems. Regimen In this ethical fourfold, we are trying to analyze the various ways in which the struggle for freedom gets carried out as the subject: the substance is the `what,' the mode is the `why,' and now we come to the regimen, which is the `how.' Like the mode of subjectification, the regimen is also fairly easy for us to grasp intuitively. It is the set of practices and activities that people do in order to constitute themselves as ethical subjects. Here are Foucault's formulations that describe the third dimension of the ethical fourfold, the regimen: 1 2 3

`What are the means by which we can change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects?' (Foucault 1983, p. 239). `The work one performs to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one's behavior' (Foucault 1988, p. 27). `What are we to do, either to moderate our acts, or to decipher what we are, or to eradicate our desires . . . That's the third aspect, which I call the self-forming activity' (Foucault 1983, p. 239).

Should we obey a set of rules, or resist them? Should we intensify our desires or try to eradicate them? Should we work to increase or decrease our willpower? Should we try to make body and mind more integrated, or make them more separate? Should we try to take control of our lives, or try to relinquish control? What are the practices associated with becoming an ethical subject? In his historical comparison, Foucault contrasted classical Greek regimens with those of early Christians and moderns. He called the Greek regimen askesis, which is related to the English word asceticism.

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Askesis refers to a kind of practical training in which the recommended activities are designed to test and develop a person's ability to exercise mastery over himself. Mastery is not judged according to a system of social rules, but according to individual needs. In any regimen, practices can include thoughts as well as actions. In a Greek regimen, since everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, the activities of the regimen are not the same for everyone. Some people need more practice overcoming laziness, and other people need more practice overcoming arrogance. Some people have stronger appetites for food, drink, sex, or gambling, and they need to practice taking control of their own idiosyncratic appetites. Practicing control over appetites does not mean to stop those actions, but to control your impulses so that the fulfillment of appetites gives you the maximum intensity of pleasure. If you are not practicing control of your impulses, those appetites will control you. Not only would that lead to painful or undesirable side-effects, but you would also have not accomplished your ethical purpose, which is to become master of yourself. In any case, the regimen for cultivating the ethical subject required all people to customize their own practices to fit their own personal strengths and weaknesses. The Greek regimen stipulated that a man should practice the discipline of self-mastery, but there were no universal rules about eating or sex. This Greek regimen of askesis is somewhat different from later Christian regimens of orthodoxy12 and eventually, self-renunciation. One feature introduced by Christianity is the practice of orthodoxy as part of the regimen. The regimen for a Christian ethical subject was based more on adherence to church laws than on self-mastery. For example, fasting (abstaining from food) has been a long-standing practice for Christian monks and priests. The Christian scriptures stipulate fixed seasons and circumstances for fasting that apply to everyone, regardless of individual strengths or weaknesses. Foucault's analysis of the ethical subject of early Christian time emphasizes the Christian orthodoxy of self-renunciation: many Christian ethical practices are those of self-denial, sometimes imposing severe restrictions or prohibitions on sex, food, warmth, and comfort. As Hoy (1986) writes, `For [Greeks] it was not how or with whom one had sex that was crucial, as it supposedly is now, but whether one was

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master or slave of one's passions' (p. 17). Foucault's extensive descriptions of the ethical subject in history (particularly in Volumes 2 and 3 The History of Sexuality) do not paint a picture of simple differences between Greek and Christian subjects. Rather, the detailed historical descriptions highlight subtle similarities and differences among various ethical systems. Human beings are complex, and Foucault's analysis of subjectivity acknowledges a high degree of complexity and nuance. It would be possible to make a table showing key words for each dimension of the ethical fourfold in each of the historical contexts (classical Greek, Roman, Christian, and modern), but key words would not do justice to the level of complex detail included in Foucault's analysis. Along these same lines, it is also important to remember that Foucault's genealogy of the ethical subject is a critical endeavor, not a search for truth. The point is not to memorize or learn that the Greek regimen is askesis and the Christian regimen is renunciation. Those explanations are intriguing points of history, but they are not the main purpose of Foucault's analysis. Rather, the purpose is to provoke you to become curious about your own ethical practices. When you read about the changes between Greek and Christian ethics, did you consider your own ethical practices? Where do your practices come from? What are your practices based on? What would happen if you changed them? How do those practices fit together with other beliefs, commitments, and wishes that you hold? The purpose of Foucault's philosophy here is to generate curiosity and imagination in readers, awakening in us a sense of possibility that we did not know we had. Telos The telos is the fourth and final of the dimensions of the ethical fourfold. Like the substance, the telos is probably more difficult for us to grasp intuitively, compared to the mode and the regimen, which tend to be a little more intuitively accessible. Telos means end or purpose; `teleology' is the study of the final outcome of something. Similarly, the telos of the ethical subject is the end point or goal of the ethical project of constructing oneself as a subject. If you work on the proper substance for the right reasons with

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the correct procedures, what will be the end result? Here are two of Foucault's formulations of the telos: 1 2

`Which is the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way?' (Foucault 1983, p. 249). `A moral action tends toward its own accomplishment; but it also aims beyond the latter to the establishing of a moral conduct that commits an individual . . . to a certain mode of being characteristic of the ethical subject' (Foucault 1988, p. 28).

The telos is the ideal goal ± what the completed struggle for freedom looks like in the end ± never a universal ideal, but always situated in a particular time and place. According to Foucault's genealogical analysis, the classical Greek telos for the ethical subject was mastery of self. The internal conversation of the `completed' ethical subject would have no internal conflict because there would be perfect mastery. The ethical Greek subject, as master of his passions, would then thoroughly enjoy life: eating would offer full pleasure combined with optimal health; sex would bring ecstatic pleasure while avoiding all debasement and abuse; dancing and music would be joyful pursuits that never interfered with relationships or responsibilities. Foucault's analysis of the telos of the Christian ethical subject is one who is consumed by the Holy Spirit. The Christian ethical subject, created in the image of God, would then freely and joyfully live according to biblical laws of celibacy, fasting, prayer, and devotion. Foucault's purpose in drawing these comparisons is not to imply that either Greek or Christian ethics are better. This is not a nostalgic argument about a Golden Age of Greece. Rather, the purpose of this comparison is to make the familiar strange, to help us see alternatives to what we assumed was inevitable, and to inspire us to imagine how we might live our lives differently. In this way, Foucault's analysis of the subject provides a variety of possibilities to consider as we do the work to try to free ourselves. When asked to sum up the main ideas of this framework, Foucault provided a brief explanation comparing the classical Greek with the early Christian construction of the ethical subject. In table form, this is

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Foucault's analysis. Aspect

Greek

Christian

Substance Mode Regimen Telos

Experience of pleasure Politicoaesthetic choice Self-examination Mastery of the self

Desire of the flesh Divine law Self-decipherment Immortality and purity

The analysis of subjectivity is a critical pursuit As with every aspect of Foucault's philosophy, it is important to remember that the purpose of the philosophy is not to establish truth about the subject but to be provocative, poetic, and problematizing. Accordingly, the purpose of Foucault's theory of the subject is not to establish the truth of who we are or the truth of what it means to be human. Rather, the purpose of investigating subjectivity is to surprise us with an awareness ± namely, that we do not have to be what we had assumed. In Foucault's philosophy, this is an ethical contribution because it opens up more possibilities for what we mean by freedom. It allows us to see ourselves in a new light. Foucaultian analytics provide us with a theory of the subject that can ask, `How does discourse work to construct subjects?' but it is not a useful theory for prescribing solutions or creating policies for regulating people. For Foucault, those are prescriptive projects, not critical projects. For those prescriptive projects, modern sociological and modern critical theories are more useful than Foucaultian theories.

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Role of the intellectual In answer to the interview question, `How do you see the intellectual's role in militant practice?', Foucault answered that he did not want people to follow his directions: The intellectual no longer has to play the role of an advisor. The project, tactics and goals to be adopted are a matter for those who do the fighting. What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis, and at present this is the historian's essential role. What's effectively needed is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one that makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points, positions where the instances of power have secured and implanted themselves by a system of organisation dating back over 150 years. In other words, a topological and geological survey of the battlefield ± that is the intellectual's role. But as for saying, `Here is what you must do!', certainly not. (1980a, p. 62) Foucault did not recommend solutions. He wrote, `I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions' (Foucault 1991, p. 157). Because he refused to recommend any solutions, his work has been accused of being pessimistic, nihilistic, or unproductive. Why might Foucault have refused to offer solutions to problems? He was a political activist who was concerned about social justice. What possible justification would he have had to offer criticisms without ever presenting any solutions? Here we will consider three possible ways of understanding why Foucault might have taken a stance against prescribing solutions to problems. 1

Prescriptive solutions can be presumptuous. Foucault argued that there are many different perspectives that one could reasonably take when considering a problem or a solution. On that basis, a solution that might seem helpful for one person might seem like an even worse problem to someone else. Refusal to prescribe solutions can be understood as a humble position, or an acknowledgment that there are other perspectives on the world that one person cannot anticipate. If we take that position, we may

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2

3

Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work decline to propose a solution out of respect for other people's perspectives on an issue. We might decline to put forth our opinion in deference to others' opinions. Prescriptive solutions can reproduce problems. Foucault was suspicious that strategies for improving society might have arisen from the same sets of assumptions that led to the problems in the first place. Audre Lorde, feminist poet, meant a similar thing when she wrote, `The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' (Lorde 1984). Therefore, in his spirit of critique, Foucault pointed out the ways in which the solutions we propose have already been limited by what we can see and the kinds of questions we can ask. Prescriptive solutions can be condescending. Another possible way to understand why someone may refuse to prescribe solutions is as an effort to give people credit for the capacity to take care of their own problems. The implicit message of such a refusal could be, `You know more about your own situation than I do, so don't look to me to tell you what to do.' Refusing to prescribe solutions is a political position that can be understood as an egalitarian stance, a belief that people are capable of generating their own ideas and solutions to their own problems. Prescribing solutions might be seen as a way of enabling helplessness or dependence. Refusing to prescribe solutions is consistent with a political position that encourages people to be leaders rather than followers.

When Foucault refused to propose solutions, this was not the same thing as saying that proposing solutions is a bad thing. Rather, proposing solutions is ± like all things ± dangerous. Foucault's spirit of critique is not one that tells us how to act; it is a spirit that looks to make explicit the tacit rules of any game. His work is an example of the role of the intellectual as one who provokes us to question our assumptions, and who calls attention to the rules of power that operate unacknowledged around us. Foucault was a great believer in historical chance. He always allowed for the possibility that things in the world can happen that do not obey rational rules of cause and effect. This is a position that is connected with his refusal to believe that our lives are pre-determined or that our fate is somehow inevitable.

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Freedom In some places, Foucault argued that freedom was not the same thing as liberation or emancipation. By drawing this distinction, he was (in part) distinguishing his political views from Marxist theories that often use freedom, emancipation, and liberation interchangeably. Like his concept of power, Foucault's concept of freedom is not some abstract thing. Freedom is not a utopian vision or a goal we can aim toward. For Foucault, freedom means to act freely. In Foucault's theory, we cannot wait until someone declares us to be free, which will then allow us to act freely. Rather, we act freely first, and that action is what we can call freedom. Freedom (like power) is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. When people act freely, those actions might be virtuous, evil, or neutral. There is a complicating aspect to Foucault's concept of freedom. That is, a `pure' kind of freedom is impossible because our lives have already been shaped by our language and life experiences. We cannot unlearn the languages in which we think, and we cannot un-experience the things we have already experienced. We cannot envision pure freedom because we have never experienced what it might feel like to be free. We cannot know in advance what freedom looks like. Recognizing that we have always already13 been shaped in our lives, Foucault conceptualized freedom as relative to our own particular circumstances. When looking back on our lives, we might be able to identify freedom in particular actions such as when we behaved like a different person, allowed ourselves to feel extreme pleasure or pain, or experienced a moment of extraordinary courage or weakness. But freedom appears to us only in retrospect. Everything is dangerous This is one of Foucault's most famous quotations. It has been taken from one of the last interviews that he gave in his life. The most famous phrase is `Everything is dangerous,' but the rest of that quotation helps us understand the ethically complicated philosophy that Foucault's work presents for us: My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (1983, pp. 231±232)

That quotation is full of meaning, so we will examine it sentence by sentence. The first sentence distinguishes `dangerous' from `bad.' This applies especially to Foucault's critiques. When Foucault was critical about discipline and regulation, for example, he did not mean to imply that discipline and regulation are bad. He meant that we should be wary of them. In this case, `dangerous' implies that discipline and regulation can have unintended effects, for better or worse! If we understand these things as dangerous, then we will not necessarily try to resist discipline and regulation; sometimes we will recognize discipline and regulation as good things. If we see them as dangerous instead of bad, we can examine them critically and evaluate how they are functioning in our lives. The second sentence, `If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do,' is a little bit playful. In this sentence, Foucault is probably referring to critical intellectual work. When we philosophers regard something as dangerous, then we cannot just dismiss it as bad; instead, there is plenty of work for us to do in trying to study and analyze what is going on in our lives. Finally: `my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism' is a rejoinder to Foucault's critics who accuse his philosophy of nihilism or determinism. This sentence encourages us to take a hard look at the ways in which our society has become more unjust. It dares us to have the courage to suspect that our society has in some ways become more confining and more restrictive. Foucault's critical stance is something like this: If it seems that everything is hopeless, then we need to work even harder. That is `hyper- and pessimistic activism.' It is easy to be an activist when we believe we can be successful. It is much more difficult to be an activist when the prospects for success are dim. Foucault offers a moral challenge in this sentence. We may have very little evidence that we are going in the right direction, and we may have very little confidence that we are doing the right thing. In the absence of certainty, we are called to the morally courageous stance of acting anyway.

Chapter 3

Summaries of Major Works

Books The human sciences Foucault wrote four books about the human sciences: Mental Illness and Psychology (1954; 1976). Madness and Civilization (1965) (the abridged version of History of Madness in the Classical Age, 1961; 2006).1 The Birth of the Clinic (1963). Discipline and Punish (1975).

Each of these books examines the ways human and social sciences have changed over time, and how they have contributed to our general understandings of what it means to be human. Foucault's analyses show that psychology, psychiatry, education, and criminology have all been implicated in other historical trends like culture, religion, and politics. He examined how changing trends in the human sciences throughout history have served to carve out different possibilities for what it means to be a person. For Foucault, psychological theories and concepts are not answers or tools for diagnosing and treating people; rather, those theories and concepts are themselves historical puzzles to be critically examined: My objective for more than twenty-five years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific `truth games' related to specific techniques that human

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work beings use to understand themselves.

(2003a, p. 146)

Mental Illness and Psychology Foucault's first book, published in 1954 (as Maladie Mentale et PersonaliteÂ) is a relatively brief thesis on the question, `How do we know what mental illness is?' It was written while Foucault was lecturing at the University of Lille, after having graduated from the Sorbonne with a licence (roughly equivalent to a bachelor's degree) in psychology. In this book Foucault provided specific examples of the contrast between physical illness and mental illness, and built a compelling case that psychology is unlike physical medicine. For example, in psychology, the cause of a particular individual's illness can only be explained with access to information about that individual's life history, as is the practice in Freudian psychoanalysis. According to Mental Illness and Psychology, it is Freudian psychoanalysis that provided psychology with mechanisms by which doctors could explain the causes of an individual's illness. Physical medicine has no such mechanism. We have come to think of mental illness and physical illness in similar terms; psychiatrists use diagnostic and treatment approaches that resemble other medical practitioners. However, Foucault's argument in this book challenges us to recognize that psychiatry is different in dramatic ways from other branches of medicine. With that understanding, we can begin to recognize the techniques by which psychiatry shapes our assumptions about being normal and healthy. Already in this 1954 book, there are traces that were to persist throughout Foucault's writing career. Foreshadowing his later focus on the relationship between truth and subjectivity, Foucault wrote: man became a `psychologizable species' only when his relation to madness made a psychology possible, that is to say, when his relation to madness was defined by the external dimension of exclusion and punishment and by the internal dimension of moral assignation and guilt. (1954, p. 73)

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Madness and Civilization Foucault began writing this book during his academic studies in psychology, and continued to work on it as he was teaching in various European educational institutions and hospitals. In 1961, an abridged version of this long book was published, entitled Folie et deÂraison: histoire de la folie aÁ l'aÃge classique. This short version was translated as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Scholars have suggested that Foucault's experiences as a patient and psychologist in psychiatric institutions affected him, and that the effects of these experiences can be discerned in his critical history of psychiatry. Foucault was working on Madness and Civilization during the same years as he was writing two other books: The Birth of the Clinic is a history of insane asylums, and Death and the Labyrinth is a work of literary criticism focused on the structurally complex writings of Raymond Roussel. Madness and Civilization can be read as a blend between those two books. It is a study of the history of insanity using analytical devices and reference points from literary criticism. One way to understand the structure of Foucault's argument in Madness and Civilization is as a depiction of changing themes in the historical conceptualizations of insanity. As presented by Foucault, these changing themes do not represent a continuous or progressive advance in our understanding of insanity. Rather, the themes represent historical trends that reflect cultural dispositions and intellectual styles of their respective times. To give the briefest hint of Foucault's extensively documented argument, some of the themes in his history of madness are listed below: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Madness Madness Madness Madness Madness Madness

is important in literature. is an expression of humans' animal nature. is related to passion. is contrary to reason. has moral consequences. is a disease of the nerves.

An important factor in the relationship between madness and morality is the life of the Marquis de Sade (1740±1814).2 The word `sadism' is derived from the name `de Sade.' The Marquis de Sade

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wrote pornographic novels and licentious essays and was imprisoned in an insane asylum for most of his adult life.3 In a chapter called `The Great Fear,' Foucault referred to the case of the Marquis de Sade as an example of the complex intertwining of the discourses of morality, insanity, literature, human freedom, and criminality. Foucault's analysis of de Sade raises questions about whether there ought to be laws restricting the sexual behaviors of consenting adults, whether pornographic literature ought to be censored, and whether it is justifiable to order insane people into prison. Madness and Civilization is typical of Foucault's writing in so far as it interweaves philosophy with the history of science, art, medicine, literature, religion, law, economics, and human passion. This interweaving is present in Foucault's poetic style of writing that embodies the interconnections of reason and passion. As one of his closing statements, Foucault wrote: There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art ± the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth. (1965, pp. 288±289, emphasis in original) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Published in 1963, The Birth of the Clinic is a history of insane asylums. The title of this book introduces Foucault's use of the term `archaeology' as an innovative approach to historiography. Some scholars regard The Birth of the Clinic and earlier books as representative of Foucault's `archaeological' phase, as distinct from his later `genealogical' phase of historical inquiry. Foucault's analysis in this book draws substantially on terms and concepts from structuralism. We can see in the arguments indications as to why some scholars regard Foucault's early work as structuralist. Some scholars (notably James Miller in his biography of Foucault) have suggested that death was a major thematic focus of Foucault's work. The theme of death is apparent throughout The Birth of the Clinic. One of the major concepts of The Birth of the Clinic is the gaze. To gaze means to look intently, but Foucault used the term gaze in a

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technical and precise way to conduct this analysis. In this book, he asked the research question, `What do doctors see when they look at a patient?' It is Foucault's argument that the `clinical gaze' ± what doctors see ± underwent dramatic changes in the decades just before and just after 1800. Depending on the system of thought at the time, doctors would see different things when they looked at a patient, and they would convey different messages to patients about who they were. Foucault concluded this book by remarking on the conditions of modernity, namely that we humans have become both the subjects and objects of our own knowledge. Modern knowledge means we look with our own eyes at our own eyes. To emphasize some of the complexities of this condition, Foucault reminded us that systems of knowledge always affect what we can and cannot see. There is never anything like pure, objective observation. Foucault's history of the clinic was made visible through his theory of the gaze. If we appreciate Foucault's history, we will come away from reading The Birth of the Clinic with a profound skepticism about our existing definitions of insanity and a compelling urge to see beyond the limits of what we regard as normal. Discipline and Punish Foucault's 1975 book in French was entitled Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, literally translated, `Surveil4 and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.' Of all of Foucault's books, this one has received the most attention from educationists. Although the book is a history of penal systems, it is also among the few places in which Foucault writes explicitly, and in some detail, about schooling. The opening paragraphs of Discipline and Punish contain some of the most sensational images ever to appear in a scholarly book: a graphic description of the gruesome torture of Robert-FrancËois Damiens, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate King Louis XV of France in 1757. This description of the torture and execution of Damiens in the introduction serves at least two purposes: 1 2

It grabs the reader and evokes in us a visceral awareness of how savage and brutal we humans can be. It illustrates an obsolete judicial practice, thereby setting up a

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The main purposes of Discipline and Punish are to 1) provide a historical argument showing many of the ways humans have devised to enforce regulations, and 2) provoke us to re-examine the disciplinary forms of punishment that we have come to take for granted as humane and enlightened forms of governance. The book is divided into three main sections that give labels to different historical modes of enforcing regulations: Torture, Punishment, and Discipline. In Part 1, Torture, Foucault cited laws and ordinances to trace changes in practices of punishment from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, Foucault explained, torture was `not an extreme expression of lawless rage' (1975, p. 33), but a technique that was deliberate and calculated: `Torture rests on a whole quantitative art of pain' (p. 34). Calling attention to `the spectacle of the scaffold,' Foucault argued that the function of seventeenth-century torture was (in part) as a means by which the king's power could be re-established as authoritative. The public aspect of torture was an exercise in sovereign power. In Foucault's analysis, torture is not an expression of primitive brutality, but a calculated and reasonable mechanism given the aims of government. A large portion of Foucault's argument in this book is focused on the relationship between torture and the production of truth. In describing eighteenth-century punishments, Foucault emphasized the practice of `judicial torture,' the infliction of pain to coerce the accused into telling the truth. In judicial torture, `It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed' (p. 41). Between 1670 and 1775, an entirely new way of thinking about punishment had evolved. Eighteenth-century punishment was no longer about reasserting the power of the king by staging public rituals of pain and torture. Rather, there was a `more equivocal attitude' about punishment in which the state enforced its laws through torture, and at the same time concealed those acts while rationalizing them in terms of social justice. Punishment had begun to require political justification beyond the sworn allegiance to a king. At the end of this first section on torture, Foucault illustrated yet another shift in ways of thinking about punishment indicated by the

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development of `a whole new literature of crime.' In the nineteenth century, it became possible to think about a crime as `glorious' and a criminal as a `genius.' Citing trends in literature and government statements (called `broadsheets'), Foucault noted that punishment had moved from a physical struggle to an intellectual struggle between the criminal and the investigator. In Part 2 of the book, `Punishment,' Foucault traced more dimensions of changes in the history of punishment, emphasizing at first the shift from violent punishment to intervention. Calling this `the shift from the criminality of blood to the criminality of fraud,' Foucault pointed out that increased wealth and productivity were accompanied by an increased emphasis on crimes against property, and increased efficiency in the techniques of investigation and punishment. He explained the rise of intervention techniques as a self-perpetuating cycle: Following a circular process, the threshold of the passage to violent crimes rises, intolerance to economic offences increases, controls become more thorough, penal interventions at once more premature and more numerous. (p. 78) The shift from punishment to intervention accompanied economic and political rationalities that were instituted to prevent wrongdoings. One of the most revealing parts of this section is Foucault's lengthy quotation of Joseph Michel Antoine Servan (1737±1807), a French journalist. Servan wrote: A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas. (p. 103)

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After quoting Servan, Foucault explained another mode of punishment as `the gentle way.' `The gentle way in punishment' is a description of trends that shifted the purpose of punishment away from redeeming the sovereign or reforming the criminal, and toward a mechanism for administering society at large. Punishment began to take on a purpose that extended beyond the criminal to have an effect on innocent, non-involved people. These days, we call that aspect of punishment a deterrent. In Foucault's words, `How did the coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representative scenic, signifying, public, collective model?' (p. 131). This is a turning point for Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish. In the quotation from Servan, we can begin to detect Foucault's definition of disciplinary power. By highlighting this historical addition to the intended effect of punishment, namely from punishing the guilty to deterring the innocent, Foucault laid the groundwork for the rest of the book that explains how punishment took on another modality, namely discipline. `Discipline,' the title of Part 3 of Discipline and Punish, is comprised of three sections. The first two, `Docile Bodies' and `The Means of Correct Training,' contain the bulk of Foucault's explicit writing about schooling and education. In these sections, Foucault focused primarily on five aspects of education: the architecture of the classroom; the timetable; the pedagogization of learning; the organization of people into institutional roles; and examination techniques. Below are brief descriptions of each of those five aspects of education, according to Discipline and Punish. Foucault described the architecture of eighteenth-century schools as enclosures separated by partitions and organized to promote supervision, work, and hierarchy. Since this is the kind of classroom with which we are most familiar, it might be difficult to imagine any alternative. However, we can begin to imagine an alternative if we remember the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712±1778), a Swiss philosopher. In his famous book, EÂmile (1762), Rousseau advocated an approach to education in which children would be allowed to pursue their own natural curiosity using their God-given rational faculties by traveling in the company of a wise and sympathetic adult who acted as

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a protector and resource of information for the child. Rousseau's approach to education criticized the enclosed, partitioned, organized classroom saying that such regimented classrooms tended to perpetuate all the weaknesses of aristocratic and bourgeois civilization. Foucault described the architecture of schools to highlight how enclosures and partitions, by regulating people's movements, serve as disciplinary mechanisms. Among other things, enclosed, partitioned classrooms prevent spontaneous gatherings and unsupervised wandering, and in that way the architecture is an intervention to prevent wrongdoings. The purpose of mentioning Rousseau's EÂmile here is to emphasize that the enclosed, partitioned, organized classroom is not the only way schooling can be conceived.5 The timetable is the second aspect described by Foucault as a disciplinary feature of schooling. Like the enclosed classroom architecture, timetables also regulate people's actions with the intention of preventing wrongdoings. Like military organization, school timetables serve as disciplinary mechanisms: A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. (p. 152) The `pedagogization of learning' is another aspect of schooling we tend to take for granted, and Foucault called this into question as well. `Pedagogization' refers to the ways school learning is separated from adult life and organized into developmental sequences that are assumed to be understandable by children. Foucault contrasted this pedagogization of learning with the previous practices in guilds where learning occurred between masters and apprentices. In guilds, apprentices learn from masters in sites where adult work actually takes place. Schools change that. In schools, the adult world is only simulated. A school approach to learning takes on a particular sequence that is regulated and mediated by (psychological and moral) assumptions about children.6

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Schooling consists of a series of exercises, and as such, this specified sequence serves to discipline people. In Foucault's words: Exercise is a technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behaviour towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual either in relation to this term, in relation to other individuals, or in relation to a type of itinerary. (p. 161) The fourth aspect of educational discipline is the organization of people into functional roles. Here, Foucault gave the example of the famous `peer tutoring' method that was instituted by Joseph Lancaster in his London school in 1798. In the Lancaster approach to schooling, older students were in charge of younger students, imposing order and enforcing rules on them. The Lancaster approach instituted a chain of command, a hierarchy of accountability and responsibility according to age. In that way, the students were not an undifferentiated mass; they were organized into ranks that aligned with the school's purpose of maintaining order and discipline. In the Lancaster approach, the organization of students into ranks facilitated the development of what psychologists now call `conditioned responses' or `automaticity.'7 With constant monitoring of students by students, there was little flexibility in the classroom for students to behave in any unregulated manner. As Foucault's history tells us, the degree of regulation in the classroom occurred at minute levels of detail that Foucault described as `dressage.' `Dressage' is a term from horseback riding; it is the training of horses to respond with precise movements when the rider gives only minimal signals. Lancaster's methods were like dressage. A signal like a bell was used to command the students: a single ring of the bell meant the student should be silent and pay attention to the teacher; two rings meant the student should read aloud to his classmate, and so on. The students were expected to obey the signals immediately. The Lancaster method of schooling serves as Foucault's historical example of the ways in which education constructs `docile bodies.'

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The last aspect of schooling is described in `The Means of Correct Training.' Here, Discipline and Punish provides historical detail about the function of examinations in schools and hospitals. By `examination,' Foucault was not referring only to written tests that measure learning, but to the practices of schools in which teachers looked into students' lives to find out what kinds of people they were. This `examination' included written tests of learning, but it also included conduct, posture, attitude, and cleanliness. When we understand `examination' in this way, we can begin to see another of the famous concepts in Foucault's analysis, namely the `gaze.' The gaze refers to the practice of students monitoring students, and students learning to monitor themselves: The examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher. The school became the place of elaboration for pedagogy. And just as the procedure of the hospital examination made possible the epistemological `thaw' of medicine, the age of the `examining' school marked the beginnings of a pedagogy that functions as a science. (p. 187) In this excerpt we can read Foucault's argument that science and rationality are mobilized in the service of school examinations. Examinations, in their turn, are a practice of the monitoring gaze that serves as a mechanism of power in administering people. One important point to notice about the function of the gaze is that it is very different from torture. In Foucault's description of how students are monitored minute-by-minute in school, we are compelled to notice that the methods of enforcing school discipline do not include torture or the threat of torture. Foucault's question is: Without the threat of torture, why do people do as they are told? Nineteenth-century discipline in schools is not the same as seventeenth-century enforcement of monarchical authority through the use of public displays of torture, but discipline is nonetheless effective. Discipline through the monitoring gaze has been instituted

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in schools so effectively that people actually comply with rules and regulations. Through these examples of schooling practices, we are struck with the disturbing realization that discipline can be as effective as torture as a means for getting people to behave in a particular way. Moreover, in reading these historical descriptions we may be simultaneously relieved and chagrined to realize the degree to which we view discipline in favorable terms. For most of us, discipline is a good thing, a necessary practice, and a civilized mechanism for administering society. At the point when we accept that discipline is a more civilized mechanism than torture, we have become (what Foucault called) `normalized.' As a way of emphasizing the relationship between surveillance and normalization, Foucault ended Part 3 with a description (including pictures) of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Bentham (1748±1842) was an English philosopher who was known as a social reformer and defender of human rights. As part of his social reform, he drew the blueprint for a new architectural design for a prison called the panopticon. The panopticon is circular and consists of several levels (stories). At the center of the panopticon is the guard's station. At the periphery of the circle are the prisoners' cells. The guard can see all the prisoners, but the prisoners cannot see the guard. Bentham's speculation was that the prisoners would never know when they were being watched, and therefore they would behave properly all the time whether they were being watched or not. It was this last part, `whether they were being watched or not,' that became an item of intrigue for Foucault. The feature of the invisible watchman is at the heart of Foucault's theory of discipline as normalization: we behave in a particular way whether we are being watched or not. The threat of torture is not necessary; even the posted guard is not necessary. We discipline ourselves for better or worse; and to the degree that we accept our discipline as natural, we have become normalized. If we are not being threatened by torture, and we do not know whether we are being watched, then what are the regulatory mechanisms in place that explain the processes of normalization? In Part 4 of Discipline and Punish, `Prison,' Foucault specified `seven

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universal maxims' of the prison. These are the mechanisms of regulation in prisons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Correction Classification Modulation of penalties Work as an obligation and a right Penitentiary education Technical supervision Auxiliary institutions

We can read into Foucault's analysis here the literary device of parallelism. The principles of prisons listed in Part 4 are presented as parallel to the principles of schools outlined in Part 3.8 Because the analysis of prisons is presented as parallel to the analysis of schools, we are invited to imagine a relationship between schools and prisons. However, the relationship between prisons and schools is not metaphoric; we are not supposed to conclude that schools are like prisons. Rather, in Foucault's analysis, the relationship is that schools and prisons both emerged under the same historical conditions. The mechanisms of governance ± as reflected in both prisons and schools ± multiplied in dimension over time to include torture, punishment, and discipline. Even as we imagine a relationship between schools and prisons, it is important not to misread this relationship as a simple correspondence. It would be a mistake to understand Foucault's meaning to be that schools incarcerate people as prisons do, or that both schools and prisons somehow thwart human freedom. The argument in Discipline and Punish is more subtle and nuanced than that. Foucault's historical analysis does not conclude that prisons gradually became less brutal and more civilized as they abolished torture and replaced it with discipline. It does not conclude that discipline is the antithesis of freedom. It does not conclude that the mechanisms of discipline in schools were a step toward progress in the civilizing process. Rather, the analysis suggests that each of these penal modes ± torture, punishment, and discipline ± had its own logic, its own system of reasoning, and its own mechanisms of practice that made sense for

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their time. Furthermore, it is not so certain any more that torture is more onerous than discipline. When you read Foucault's graphic descriptions of disciplinary practices, you may find yourself entertaining the suspicion that the designs of school enclosures, the rigid timetables of classes, and the lockstep routines may not, after all, be completely free of the inhumanity demonstrated by the burning and dismemberment of Damiens. Historiography The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge are unlike Foucault's other books because they are devoted to explanations of theory, method, and purpose rather than histories of various social practices. Foucault scholars generally agree that The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge go together, and they constitute a line of inquiry that separates them from Foucault's other books. Some Foucault experts (notably Alan Sheridan) regard these two books as sections of the same work. Because these two books respond theoretically to criticisms of Foucault's earlier studies, they are generally less accessible to novice readers than Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Nevertheless, it was The Order of Things that made Foucault a celebrity because of its enthusiastic reception by critics. The Order of Things Published in 1966, Foucault's first historiographical book is one of his most difficult and theoretically complicated works. The original French title is Les Mots et les Choses, which means `words and things.'9 In this book, Foucault contrasted three periods of history: the Classical, the Renaissance, and the Modern. Across those three periods of history, Foucault focused on three fields of knowledge: general grammar, natural science, and economics. Finally, his purpose in writing The Order of Things was to challenge the reigning intellectual approaches in Europe of the 1960s, namely Marxism, structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. As a way of gaining some access into The Order of Things, we focus on two of the examples that Foucault used to illustrate theoretical

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problems in the writing of history: a quotation from a Chinese encyclopedia, and a seventeenth-century Spanish painting. The preface to The Order of Things opens with a passage that Jorge Luis Borges quoted from a Chinese encyclopedia that allegedly made Foucault laugh: animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (p. xv) We modern readers find this classification system confusing or maybe even bizarre. For us, it does not make sense for a classification system to include both `suckling pigs' and `having just broken the water pitcher' as two parallel categories that might be used to classify types of animals. Why does Foucault cite this passage? What purpose does it serve to explain the order of things in history? This passage has a couple of purposes. One is to make us laugh. We are meant to wonder how in the world anyone could think that this list constituted a classification system. Another purpose is to show that historians impose order on chaos as they write. This excerpt from the Chinese encyclopedia provides us with an example of an ordering system that clearly does not make sense to us. But the important point is that this list must have made sense to its writer. The list exemplifies the imposition of an order, but not our order. By citing this passage, Foucault was provoking us to notice that all historians have imposed a particular classification system ± an order of things10 ± by the ways they write history. In characteristic fashion, Foucault has provoked us to reexamine things we may have taken for granted, and in this case, we are invited to ± maybe shocked into ± a reconsideration of what we have taken for granted as a natural way of imposing order on things. By making the point that it is always necessary to be selective in order to write history, Foucault was able to address the historians' criticisms

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that his earlier books were not really history. He argued that his own histories of madness and the asylum are not `wrong' ± rather, he wrote those histories based on selection criteria that are different from the selection criteria of other more traditional historians. Foucault used the example from the Chinese encyclopedia in a playful way in order to shake up what we assume to be the `normal' way of thinking about the order of things. The encyclopedia passage is both funny and weird. In The Order of Things, the passage paves the way for a reconsideration of `normal' ways of writing history. At the end of that section of the preface, Foucault asks us, `But what is it impossible to think?'11 Foucault began The Order of Things with an analysis of a famous work of art called Las Meninas (`The Maids of Honor'), which was painted by Diego VelaÂzquez in 1656. Foucault used this painting to illustrate an idea; this is similar to the way he used the excerpt from the Chinese encyclopedia earlier. The encyclopedia excerpt served to illustrate that there are different possibilities for imposing order on chaos. Similarly, the painting illustrates that there are multiple possibilities and perspectives from which we might see and understand something. Foucault argued that if we examine the history of historical writing, we can see that there have been major changes over time in what has been included and what has been excluded from the historical record. In effect, we can see that history has been written from a wide variety of perspectives, and depending on the point of view, a different story can be told. In this painting, `No gaze is stable . . . subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles' (p. 4). We can outline Foucault's argument by making references to the figures in the painting. The picture serves as a graphic depiction of Foucault's argument. On the left is an artist holding a paintbrush and palette. Art historians have told us that this figure is a self-portrait of VelaÂzquez. The artist in the painting is working on a canvas, but we can see only the back of this. It seems as though the artist is painting a portrait of the king and queen, but we cannot see them directly; we can only make inferences about what the artist is painting on the basis of a reflection of them in a mirror on the wall we see behind the artist. At the center and foreground is a young princess (Infanta Marguerita) surrounded by her attendants, `las meninÄas.'

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When we look at the painting from one perspective, the young princess is the central subject. From another perspective, the artist is the main subject. From yet a third perspective, the king and queen should be considered the focal subjects, even though other people might suggest that they are not even in the painting. Finally, the painting invites us to consider our own spectator stance. We, too, are implicated in the composition by virtue of our position, which could conceivably be the same `position' as the king and queen who are posing. When you look at Las Meninas, ask yourself the questions, `Where am I?', `What is the subject of this painting?', and, `How many different perspectives are represented or suggested in this painting?' Analogously, Foucault's argument in The Order of Things is that 1) there are different perspectives on the order of things in the world; 2) depending on our perspective, different things will appear central, and relationships among objects will change; and 3) different perspectives are not random or irrational, and there are reasonable grounds for taking any one of several different perspectives on the order of things. In Chapter 2 of The Order of Things, Foucault framed the argument for the rest of the book. He first explained four different ways to think about similarity: convenience, emulation, analogy, and sympathy. By convenience, he meant a kind of similarity that pertains when things are close together in time and space. For example, convenience similarity describes the relationship between a gymnasium, a physics laboratory, and an auditorium in that they are all parts of a school building. By emulation, Foucault meant the sort of similarity that exists between an object and its reflection in a mirror. The third relation is analogy, and Foucault's use of the word is fairly conventional. Analogy refers to certain kinds of similarity that can be drawn between a fish's fins and a bird's wings. Finally, by sympathy, Foucault meant a relationship that occurs at the level of how we are affected by things. For example, a hurricane and a war are similar in so far as they both have a terrifying effect upon us. The point is that our language is replete with meanings: `Without imagination, there would be no resemblance between things' (p. 68). Why did Foucault go into such detail to try to explain four different ways in which we might construe similarity? What is the purpose of his explanation in this early chapter? As it turns out, these four ways to think about similarity provide a framework for understanding historical

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arguments that follow in the rest of the book. On the basis of this understanding, the original French title of the book, Words and Things, begins to make sense. The title refers to Foucault's study of various kinds of relationships that can exist between words and things in different periods of time. Words might be related to things in any of the four ways indicated above: convenience, emulation, analogy, or sympathy. In the following passage, Foucault posited that there was a big difference between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of how words are related to things. In this passage, a sign is a word: in the sixteenth century, one asked oneself how it was possible to know that a sign did in fact designate what it signified; from the seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified. (pp. 41±42, emphases added) According to Foucault's analysis, in the sixteenth century, words were used as if they were reflections of things ± a relation of emulation. The intellectual work of that century, then, was to figure out more about the thing that was being reflected in the word. Sixteenth-century knowledge connected things of the world with scripture and culture. To study a plant or animal, for example, meant to understand that animal's place in the divine order and in relation to truth. In contrast, in the seventeenth century, words were no longer assumed to be reflections of things, and intellectual work began to question the relationship of words and things. Foucault's argument is that words are always similar to things, but the kind of similarity between words and things varies over times and places. Throughout The Order of Things, Foucault drew examples from general grammar, natural history, and economics to show changes in the relationships between words and things. Chapters 3 through 6 are entitled, `Representing,' `Speaking,' `Classifying,' and `Exchanging.' Each of these chapters goes into considerable historical detail to explain how the relationship between words and things is different in different time periods. The overall argument of the book leads us to the insight that there is no natural or self-evident use of language. Our language, our

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perceptions of the world, and the limits of what we can possibly think are shaped by systems of thought. Discourse, as that which we can access with our minds, functions therefore as a regulatory system that we generate ourselves. The Order of Things was written to help explain the theories and methods that Foucault used to show some relationships between words and things, people and discourse. The Archaeology of Knowledge Published in 1969, The Archaeology of Knowledge was written before the events of May 1968. This book is regarded by some Foucault scholars to mark the end of the `archaeological' phase of his writing, which was to be followed by the `genealogical' phase. Three of Foucault's early books ± Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things ± were histories of systems of thought, especially in the human sciences. In those books, Foucault's approach to doing history was controversial. He received serious criticism from historians and philosophers about his historiographical methodology and the materials he used as historical evidence. In the Archaeology Foucault responded to some of these criticisms that were raised against his earlier historical writings. The book explains the historiography and methodology of the earlier books and in that sense it is a kind of retrospective summary.12 Although The Archaeology of Knowledge can be quite difficult to understand, its meaning becomes a little clearer if we remember that the purpose of the book is to respond to historians and philosophers who criticized Foucault's earlier writing (especially Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things). In some ways, The Archaeology of Knowledge provides us with a systematic (if opaque) explanation of the approach Foucault used to write his earlier books. At the time Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge, historiography was dominated by Marxism, structuralism, and the Annales School of historical writing. All three of these approaches looked for patterns in history at a very large scale, patterns or continuities that spanned several centuries. Historians often refer to this approach as a continuous view of history. For example, Marxist historians looked for the long-term pattern of class conflict, exploitation, solidarity, and revolution; they explained all of history

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according to this long-term pattern. Structuralists sought to explain historical events in terms of patterns that resembled grammatical rules; structuralists argued that events in history might look different on the surface, but those events were really expressions of underlying patterns that resembled grammatical structures. Foucault problematized all of those approaches that emphasized historical continuity. In the first chapter of the Archaeology, he explained how his earlier books on history rejected historical continuity. In the Archaeology Foucault argued that the point of writing a critical history was not to explain continuity, or why things continued to stay the same over time ± rather, he argued, another point of writing history was to try to explain discontinuity, or why things changed. For Foucault, what is the problem with historical continuity? Why might a critical historian want to look for discontinuities in history as well as continuities? If we remember the Foucaultian themes of provocation and political problematization, then the project elaborated in the Archaeology becomes a little clearer. For Foucault, the problem is that if historical writing emphasizes continuity, then, when we read history, we will get the message that nothing ever really changes. If we resign ourselves to accept that nothing really changes, then we may come to believe that we are stuck the way we are. Philosophers call this position `determinism' or `fatalism.' Foucault never wanted us to accept that we are stuck the way we are; he always wanted to provoke us into thinking that we might be able to think and do otherwise. Therefore, he argued, it is both critically effective and methodologically rigorous to highlight change and discontinuity in history, especially in the places where the historical record establishes continuities and patterns. Histories that are written to emphasize discontinuities convey the message that change is possible, and if we are persuaded to believe that change can actually occur, then we can entertain the possibility that we are not stuck the way we are, but are freer than we had previously imagined. The Archaeology of Knowledge is written in five parts. In the first part, the introduction, Foucault explained the historical approach of his earlier books. It is in this introduction that Foucault problematized the assumption of continuity in history and explained why his approach of

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discontinuity was effective both for purposes of provocative critique and for methodological rigor. Foucault argued that a focus on continuity in history requires historians to make large-scale generalizations (or what Foucault referred to as `totalities'). However, a focus on discontinuities in history requires historians to make more precise differentiations; for example, to differentiate concepts from institutions and structures. Discontinuities do not contribute to the construction of an overall totalizing history. Objecting to the generalizations (totalizations) that characterize continuous and structuralist approaches to history, Foucault wrote: it is a long time now since historians uncovered, described, and analysed structures, without ever having occasion to wonder whether they were not allowing the living, fragile, pulsating `history' to slip through their fingers. (p. 11) This opening part of the Archaeology explicitly criticizes Marxist and structuralist approaches because of their tendencies to over-generalize and totalize history. The second part of the Archaeology is called `The Discursive Regularities.' In this section, Foucault analyzed the problems of historical continuity in greater detail and with several specific examples. He called attention to conventional historical methodology in his characteristically playful manner. He asked why, for example, when we set out to write a history of Nietzsche's writings, historians always include references to his famous books and essays. However, Foucault questioned, should we also include Nietzsche's early drafts, versions that Nietzsche later rejected? How about Nietzsche's letters to his friends? How about his shopping lists and diaries? Foucault's questions about historical methodology help us to realize that historical continuity depends on certain conventions about what to include and what to exclude as historical data. Foucault's arguments in this section emphasize that history has been shaped by cultural conventions about what to include and what to exclude. In another example from `The Discursive Regularities,' Foucault problematized the ways in which disciplinary discourses, such as

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linguistics or medicine, have been defined and bounded. For example, he pointed out that the discourse of grammar consists of several aspects that are only tenuously connected. How is it possible, Foucault questioned, that morphology (the study of the forms of words) is clumped together with syntax (the study of the rules that govern the formation of sentences) under the general term `grammar'? To think about morphology, we have to think about sounds and the scope of possible meanings. In contrast, to think about syntax, we have to consider a whole array of possible conceptual and logical relations that might pertain between a subject and a predicate. Moreover, the discipline of grammar as defined by the Port-Royal Logic13 would not accommodate grammatical issues that have been raised more recently by linguists such as Noam Chomsky. The point of this example is to problematize our assumptions about `discursive regularities.' The example emphasizes that disciplinary discourses are not fixed or natural, and they do not remain the same over time. Overall in this second part of the Archaeology, Foucault was arguing that archaeology is never a matter of `discovering' what happened in the past. Rather, history is always produced by discourse, which imposes order on chaos. In other words, whenever history is written ± or put into words ± it is impossible to record everything that happens to everyone everywhere. Therefore, any attempt to put history into words ± into discourse ± is always selective. Foucault's argument is that there are regularities in the selection patterns for putting history into discourse. He showed that natural history in the sixteenth century had some discursive similarities with economics and linguistics at the same time; and the natural history of the seventeenth century had some discursive similarities with economics and linguistics at the same time. However, the discursive patterns of the sixteenth century are different from those of the seventeenth century in subtle but powerful ways. There is one final level of complexity in Foucault's analysis here. That is, the way we write history also becomes part of history. So the way we think and talk about the past is shaped by the ways previous historians have written about the past. The third part of the Archaeology is called `The Statement and the Archive.' Like the other parts of this book, this section was written as a critical response to objections by more conventional historians to

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Foucault's earlier historical writing. A conventional assumption about the relationship of a statement to the archive would be that the statement comes first. Then, in a conventional sense, when many statements are collected in one place, that collection is known as the archive. Hayden White explains Foucault's reversal of that convention this way: But how are these different epochs in the chronicle of the human sciences related to one another? In L'Archeologie du savoir, Foucault explicitly rejects four forms of explanation of the events he has chronicled in Les Mots et les choses. First he rejects the so-called `comparative' method, which proceeds by analogical methods to define the similarities that appear to exist between different forms of thought. Then, he rejects the `typological' method, which seeks to establish the order, class, generic, and species characteristics of the `objects' presumed to inhabit the field of study. Third, he rejects the `causal' explanation of the phenomena of `history of ideas,' all causal explanations, of whatever sort. And finally he rejects any explanation by appeal to the notion of the Zeitgeist or mentality of an era. (White 1973a, p. 31) In Foucault's own words, it is said like this: `The archive is the first law of what can be said . . . It is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration' (p. 129). One way to look at Foucault's overall project in the Archaeology is to consider the term `archaeology' itself and contrast it with traditional chronological (continuous) histories. Traditional continuous histories tend to focus on one entity (such as a disciplinary subject), and trace the development of that subject chronologically over time. Archaeology, in contrast, examines a cross-section of several disciplines in one particular time period ± the archive of that time period. Traditional history examines a longitudinal path of time; archaeology examines a slice of time. Traditional history looks for patterns across different time periods for one thing; archaeology looks for patterns within one time period across a whole variety of things. What might be the value of an archaeological perspective? Why would Foucault criticize history and advocate archaeology? For him,

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archaeology is both provocative and critical. An archaeological investigation can help us identify the ways in which our thinking is limited or stuck ± in other words, the ways in which we are prisoners of our time. If `it takes a smart fish to see water,' then archaeology is designed to help us be able to see the water in which we swim.

The History of Sexuality The History of Sexuality was originally planned to be a series of six books. Only three volumes were published, and they are not the books that had originally been planned. Before the series could be completed, Foucault contracted AIDS. Before he died in 1984, he gave several interviews that have been transcribed and published; however, Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality series, The Care of the Self, is the last book Foucault ever published. In this series of books, Foucault did not write a history of sexual practices. That is not what he meant by the history of sexuality. Rather, he wrote a history of the ways we have thought of ourselves as sexual beings, a history of the kinds of thoughts and behaviors that have been included under the label `sexual' in different times and places. This is an example of what Foucault meant by the `history of systems of thought.' Characteristically, The History of Sexuality is provocative, poetic, and playful. Foucault's history shows us that most of what we take for granted as sexuality turns out to be convention rather than nature. Volume 1: An Introduction or The Will to Knowledge Published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, this book was intended to serve as the introduction to a six-volume series. It follows the genre conventions and organization of an introduction. It is organized into five parts that identify the object of study, the theoretical approach, and the proposed methodology for the series. In the first part, `We ``Other Victorians'',' Foucault summarized what people have generally taken for granted as the history of sexuality. This `received history' became the target of his criticism in

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The History of Sexuality, and he reiterated the traditional historical view here only to challenge every dimension of it throughout the subsequent chapters. In the conventional view of history, the Victorian period (which refers to the 1837±1901 reign of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom) was characterized by rigid and puritanical social mores including a disapproving attitude toward sexual pleasure. In this traditional view of history, Victorian social norms, which valued celibacy and restraint, supposedly contributed to the repression of sexual urges and desires among the people. In this first part of the book, Foucault related this conventional understanding and then asked, `Why has this version of history become so widely accepted?' If we look back over historical evidence including books, poetry, laws, and educational policies, we can see that sex was a huge topic of conversation and cultural events. With all of this explicit talk about sex during the Victorian period, why do we continue to believe that sex has been repressed? Not surprisingly, Foucault articulated the aim of his research project in a poetic form. In a playful and sardonic tone, he explicitly named the peculiar contradictions that have beset our attitude of acceptance toward the repressive hypothesis in history: my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function. (p. 8) So Foucault's project, as outlined in this section of the book, is not only to challenge the repressive hypothesis in history, but also to examine why we have been so eager to believe that we have been repressed. Part 2, entitled `The Repressive Hypothesis,' relates Foucault's theory of history, the analytical framework that he proposed to employ for the whole series of The History of Sexuality books. Explaining his approach, he distinguished his theory of history from Marxism, explaining that his

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study of discourse is not the same as a Marxist study of economy. Then he distinguished his historical approach from Freudian analysis, explaining that his history of sexuality was not only a matter of psychology, but also a matter of politics and religion. An important point in this regard is Foucault's argument that with the rise of modernity in the nineteenth century, we began to see the establishment of public legislation, religious edicts, educational policies, and civil ordinances around sexuality. Sexuality shifted from being a private practice to being a public issue, and this shift is crucial in recognizing changes in the discourse of sexuality. Finally, in this part, Foucault asserted that in the nineteenth century, the restrictions stipulated by sexual laws were loosened; however, the increase in the number and scope of social agencies regulating sexual practices created different sorts of disciplinary mechanisms within the discourse of sexuality. Part 3, `Scientia Sexualis,' addresses the question, `If sexuality has not been constituted by repression, then what has it been constituted by?' In response to this question, Foucault drew a sharp distinction between `Ars Erotica' (erotic arts) and `Scientia Sexualis' (science of sex). As the respective names suggest, Ars Erotica is a system of thought that construes sexuality as a matter of aesthetics and pleasure. In contrast, Scientia Sexualis is a system of thought that construes sexuality in terms of science and the quest for truth. As an example of Ars Erotica, Foucault made reference to Asian traditions, alluding to such works as the Kama Sutra.14 Foucault characterized western discourses of sexuality in terms of Scientia Sexualis, in contrast to Ars Erotica. In the West, one of the noteworthy practices of sexuality is the confession. In this case, confession refers both to the formal Roman Catholic sacrament (in which parishioners tell the priest what sins they have committed) and also the informal practices in which social conversations, literature, and cultural artifacts give accounts of personal descriptions of sexual behaviors. Foucault argued that confession was a practice that aimed to establish the `truth' of sexuality. In confessional practices, people were not supposed to hold back secrets; they were supposed to reveal everything. In that way confession, as a practice of telling the whole truth, served to link the discourse of sexuality with the modern search for truth.

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After characterizing western Scientia Sexualis by contrasting it with Ars Erotica, Foucault then, in typical fashion, complicated his own distinction by noting that the West developed its own peculiar form of pleasure in truth-telling: `We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: the pleasure in the truth of pleasure' (p. 71).15 The fourth and longest part of this book is `The Deployment of Sexuality.' Here is where Foucault addressed the issues of objective, method, domain, and periodization that introduce The History of Sexuality. Foucault reiterated here that it was not his objective to critique sovereign power, but rather to trace the analytics of power that have given particular shape to various discourses of sexuality. He distinguished his methodological approach from Marxian and Freudian analysis, and proposed instead to investigate the powerknowledge nexus. The domain of this study is explained not in terms of institutions or essences, but rather as practices in their discursive contexts. Finally, Foucault explained that historical periods that were made recognizable in the repressive account of sexuality would not apply to his study since his project on the history of sexuality had a different object of study viewed through different analytical lenses for different purposes. The fifth and final section of the book is `Right of Death and Power Over Life.' Here Foucault views sexuality through a prismatic lens; he examines the term `sex' to find that this seemingly unified concept is actually made up of several disparate components. Foucault presented his argument here in a way that helps us be surprised at the wide diversity of concepts that are included under the umbrella term `sex': anatomy, reproduction, romance, religion, relationships, sensations, procreation, family, pleasure, laws, and health. The book ends by reprising the introductory theme: Why have we been so attracted to the repressive hypothesis? Why do we think it is so important to believe that we have been repressed? When we think about sexuality, these are the things we should wonder about. Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure One example of an attempt to invent new ways of thinking can be found in the second volume of The History of Sexuality where Foucault

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reconsidered the conventional understandings about Greek sexual practices. Conventionally, historians agree that homosexual relations were commonly accepted in classical Greece.16 For that reason, some people have developed the impression that classical Greek sexual customs were more permissive than later Christian sexual customs. Foucault challenged these assumptions about comparative history. He argued that classical Greek sexual norms were different from Christian norms; however, they were not more permissive. Rather, classical Greece had its own set of rules governing sexual relations that are different from the rules imposed by Christian moral norms. The Use of Pleasure explains the complicated regulatory principles that governed classical Greek sexual practices: [A]s much as we like to credit the Greeks with a great liberty of morals, the representation of sexual acts that they suggest in their written works ± and even in their erotic literature ± seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve. (p. 39) To write The Use of Pleasure, Foucault drew from historical documents in meticulous detail to show that classical Greek sexuality was governed by strict principles. It is true that Greek norms did not prohibit homosexuality; however, the norms prohibited loss of control. That is, to be considered moral, a sexual act had to be controlled by rational judgment. According to Foucault's history, sexual acts in classical Greece would be considered immoral if they were practiced in an irrational or impulsive way. The object of moral development in classical Greece was the rational control of appetites. It is important to understand that rational control of sexual appetites does not necessarily mean abstinence from sexual practices. It is, after all, not rational to deny pleasure. Rather, the goal of moral development in classical Greece was to use rational judgment to maximize pleasure and to minimize harm. In addition to showing us how Greek sexual norms were strictly regulated, The Use of Pleasure also provides us with historical evidence that Christian sexual norms should not be understood as repressive. Foucault's historical account argues that Judeo-Christian sexuality was not more repressive or rule-governed than that of the Greeks:

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If one wanted to assign an origin to those few great themes that shaped our sexual morality (the idea that pleasure belongs to the dangerous domain of evil, the obligation to practice monogamous fidelity, the exclusion of partners of the same sex), not only would it be a mistake to attribute them to that fiction called `JudeoChristian' morality, it would be a bigger mistake to look behind them for the timeless operation of prohibition, or the permanent form of law. (p. 251) After reading the second volume of The History of Sexuality, it is very difficult for us to continue to believe that Greek sexual mores were more libertarian than Judeo-Christian mores. Moreover, this history of sexuality provokes us to rethink the inevitability of sexual rules of behavior as they are currently practiced. This theme of rethinking is expressed in Foucault's words in one of his famous quotations that comes from this volume: what is philosophy today ± philosophical activity, I mean ± if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? (p. 9) Volume 3: The Care of the Self This, the last book Foucault ever published, appeared in 1984, the same year as the previous volume, and only a month before Foucault died. The Care of the Self is an extended meditation on a single book written in the second century A.D. by Artemidorus: The Interpretation of Dreams.17 At the outset, Foucault explained that Artemidorus's book is a detailed manual for how to interpret dreams. He also explained that he was not interested in the history of dream interpretation per se. Rather, he was interested in how this manual might help us understand `the ethics of the subject' of Artemidorus's time. Volume 2 (The Use of Pleasure) was primarily about classical Greece; Volume 3

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(The Care of the Self ) is primarily about the early years of the Christian era, and it emphasizes how conceptualizations of sexuality changed from the earlier period to the later. In his analysis of the ethics of the subject, Foucault employed the four-part framework for analysis of the subject that also appeared in `On the Genealogy of Ethics.' The elements of this four-part framework (substance, mode, regimen, and telos) appear at various levels throughout this book. `Care of the self' is the English translation of the French souci de soi. In his book, Foucault also uses the equivalent terms from Greek epimelia heautou and Latin cura sui. In The Care of the Self, `care' means something like `cultivate.' The meaning is closely related to the German concept Bildung, for which there is no satisfactory English equivalent. Bildung connotes a form of education that aspires not only to convey knowledge, but also to build an exemplary kind of person. The point of Foucault's argument in this book is not only to inform us about what happened in the past, but also to help us discern a whole variety of practices that comprise the ethical subject in different contexts. As usual, the purpose of his genealogy here is to provoke us to new awareness about the present and our own ethical practices. As we read The Care of the Self, we are invited to recognize the mechanisms by which we regulate ourselves as human beings. These regulatory mechanisms include diet, sleep, bathing, exercise, sex, listening to music, relationships, prayer, meditation, dress, and reading. Care of the self does not necessarily mean to please yourself; it can entail mechanisms of self-denial and even self-mortification as well as practices of nurturing and comforting. What do you think you need to give up in order to be an ethical person? What do you think you need to force yourself to do in order to live up to your hopes for yourself? Why do you believe these things? Galen was a medical researcher who lived at the same time as Artemidorus (second century A.D.). In this book, Foucault referred to Galen's writings on medicine as a way of gaining perspective on Artemidorus's Interpretation of Dreams. Galen's medical theory asserted a relationship between the sexual act and convulsions. According to Galen, both epileptic seizures and orgasms are kinds of convulsions. Foucault related Galen's theory of medicine to

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emphasize how the earlier Greek modality of aphrodisia had begun to be transformed in later contexts to a modality of diseases and pathology. Another theme in The Care of the Self is the historical shift in emphasis from food to sex: For [Greek and Roman] medicine, the thing that matters is eating and drinking. A whole development ± evident in Christian monasticism ± will be necessary before the preoccupation with sex will begin to match the preoccupation with food. (p. 141) In this line of argument, Foucault invites us to wonder about the confluence of historical conditions that might have produced such a peculiar and dramatic shift of emphasis from diet to sexuality. Part 5 of The Care of the Self is entitled `The Wife.' Here Foucault outlined three major changes from earlier Greek times regarding relationships between husband and wife. The first change he noted was that there was new emphasis on spousal compatibility. In earlier times, marriage was discussed primarily in terms of bloodlines, property, and political alliances. Later, however, marriage discussions raised issues of friendship and companionability. The second change was in the shift in the role of the husband from mastery to duties of reciprocity. The third change was a greater emphasis on the `problems of sexual relations between spouses' (p. 149). Foucault illustrated each of these three changes with references to an array of texts from the early Christian era. Part 6 is `Boys,' in which Foucault analyzed a text by the philosopher Plutarch (A.D. 46±120). The main purpose of this analysis is to show how conceptualizations of sexuality had changed with respect to homosexuality. One notable difference is that the mode of aphrodisia in earlier Greek times analyzed homosexual relations according to the same set of ethical criteria as were used for heterosexual relations; all sexual encounters were subject to the same ethical principles of mastery and self-control. In contrast, Plutarch's later text suggests that homosexual encounters were evaluated according to a different set of ethical criteria from heterosexual

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encounters. Among the factors that Plutarch cited to distinguish love of women from love of boys were that women are mysterious (they are unlike men, and their jewelry and make-up can be deceiving), and boys are too young to engage in much interesting conversation. Foucault related these examples from Plutarch in order to paint a picture of `a new erotics.' This early Christian conceptualization of sexuality is different from that in classical Greece, but it is also different from later Christian systems of sexuality. These depictions of variations in sexuality show us that sexuality is not a natural or monolithic construct; rather, there have been many variations on sexual ethics. When we compare one system of sexual ethics with another, we find not that one is more permissive than another, but rather that each system has its own specific profile of restrictions and permissions. If classical Greek sexuality permitted homosexual relations, that does not imply more permissiveness. Greek sexual mores strictly regulated the ethics of all relationships, whether homosexual or heterosexual. To fully appreciate Foucault's point here, consider the following profile of permissiveness: there are still some places in the world today where laws forbid men to have sexual relations with men, but which permit husbands to have sexual relations with their wives whether their wives consent or not. These are the only three volumes of The History of Sexuality to have been published. As mentioned, the original plan had been a series of six books: 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Will to Knowledge Flesh and Body The Children's Crusade Woman, Mother, and Hysteric Perverts Population and Races

In his will, Foucault specified no posthumous publications, so these three existing volumes may be the only ones of this series that we will ever see.

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Essays In addition to his books, Foucault wrote many essays, most of which appeared originally as journal articles, and many of which were subsequently reprinted in anthologies. This section summarizes eight of Foucault's best-known essays. Collectively the themes of these essays cover art, history, revolution, research methodology, subjectivity, power, and reason. The eight essays are presented here in chronological order. The last essay summarized here is an autobiographical dictionary entry that highlights the major themes of Foucault's life work. This is Not a Pipe (1968) In the early part of his career, the 1950s and 1960s, Foucault's topics were primarily psychology, psychiatry, literature, and art. Recall that The Order of Things begins with an analysis of VelaÂzquez's painting Las Meninas. The essay `This is Not a Pipe' is an analysis of two paintings by Magritte. Foucault corresponded with the Belgian artist Rene Magritte (1898±1967), and they exchanged ideas on painting, philosophy, and the cultural position of art in society. This essay was later expanded into a monograph that was published separately as a short book with the same title. Magritte is considered by some to be a surrealist artist; however, his paintings are not surreal in the same way as those by Salvador DalõÂ. DalõÂ's paintings are famous for images like the liquid watch pouring over the edge of a table. Magritte's images, in contrast, portray recognizable objects in strange relationships to one another. One of Magritte's famous images is a portrait of a man in a bowler hat with a green apple instead of a face. Another famous image is a steam locomotive coming out of a fireplace. Two of Magritte's paintings depict pipes (the kind of pipe used for smoking tobacco). One is a simple and recognizable image of a pipe, and underneath the image is the caption, `Ceci n'est pas une pipe' (This is not a pipe.') The other painting contains that same image, but the image of the pipe is displayed on a canvas that rests on an easel. These paintings are the subjects of Foucault's essay, `This is Not a Pipe.'

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Philosophically, what interested Foucault about these paintings is their `multiple ambiguities.' The paintings could mean several different things at the same time: There are two pipes. Or rather must we not say, two drawings of the same pipe? Or yet a pipe and the drawing of that pipe, or yet again two drawings each representing a different pipe? Or two drawings, one representing a pipe and the other not, or two more drawings yet, of which neither the one nor the other are or represent pipes? (1968, p. 188) The paintings provide us with a visual depiction of a philosophical issue that Foucault addressed in The Order of Things, namely the question of whether words represent things. In Descartes's time, there was an assumption that words represented things; however, Foucault's analyses show that representation is not the only possible way words can be related to things, and that the relationship of words and things can change over time. In his analysis, Foucault pointed out multiple ambiguities in the possible relationship of words and things in Magritte's paintings. The paintings serve as a kind of graphic illustration of this part of Foucault's philosophical analysis. The essay goes on to comment that the first of the two paintings renders a simple but effective surprise. Of course it is not a pipe; it is a drawing of a pipe! Foucault calls this painting `a perfect trap' because it forces us to confront and be confused by how things can and cannot be represented by images and words. What is an Author? (1975) This essay was published just after Discipline and Punish. In it, Foucault investigated what we mean when we say `author,' and concluded that we mean many different things. This text has been interpreted to mean that for Foucault, authors do not exist. However, that would be an over-simplification of the argument in this essay. The argument is something more like: We think we know what an author is, but when we look at the term closely, we find out that it has many different meanings.

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To help excavate several meanings of the term author, Foucault used the phrase `author function' to differentiate historically disparate roles that the label `author' has served. One example given in this essay is a historical change in the author function with regard to literature and scientific writing. Before the seventeenth century, literature, paintings, and music were not identified with particular authors. These kinds of works could become accepted into the culture without having to be legitimated by some author's name. In contrast, during this early period, works of science would only be acceptable in the culture if they were legitimated with the name of a respected scientist. But this arrangement of authorship changed with modernity. According to Foucault there was a reversal of the previous author function. In modernity, scientific works were acceptable without the label of a respected scientist, as long as the work carried the textual clues of science, or the earmarks of scientific discourse (i.e., scientific vocabulary, adherence to a specific methodology, and scientifically acceptable topics). In contrast, works of art could gain acceptability only when they were attached to specific authors as creators. This author function of modernity is still evident today. We know and select music and novels based on who wrote or performed them. However, that is not how we recognize scientific inventions or theories. Scientific knowledge is seldom validated on the basis of who the author was. According to Foucault, the author function had `faded' from scientific discourse. A second major contribution of `What is an Author?' is Foucault's concept of `founders of discursivity.' To explain this, Foucault gave the two examples of Marx and Freud. By `founders of discursivity,' Foucault meant that these authors' names stand for more than a particular individual or a single idea. When we say `Marx,' we seldom mean the young boy who was third of seven children in a Jewish family in Prussia in the mid-nineteenth century. When we say `Marx' we usually mean `Marxism.' By `Marx' we mean an entire body of scholarship, ideas, and theories. There is a prolific range of political writings that use the terms `capital' or `class struggle,' and we associate that entire body of literature ± that discourse ± with Marx. Even if some of that literature disagrees completely with Marx's theories, or uses the terms in totally different ways, we still associate it with Marx.

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Marx is therefore a `founder of discursivity' because his name is now associated with a whole philosophy, or `Marxism.' Foucault used the example of Marx to show us that the term `author' means different things. When we say that Marx is an author, we mean something very different from when we say that Beethoven is an author. The title of this essay, `What is an Author?' is apt. Foucault's answer to that question suggests that `author' means many different things. If we say, `The author is dead,' that just means that our old assumptions about an `author' are obsolete. The old, oversimplified definition is inadequate to capture the vast range of meanings associated with the term `author' when we examine how we actually use the term in practice. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1978) This is a widely cited essay because it offers some systematic formulations for Foucault's approach to writing history. Not surprisingly, however, Foucault later denied some of the claims that appear in this article. Nevertheless, there are some key points that help us appreciate Foucault's historical work. In his characteristically critical style, Foucault did not pursue history in a traditional manner. Mainstream history often studies the past in order to discover when something began, and we can call this mainstream approach a search for origins. An example of the search for origins from mainstream history is the ongoing debate about when the modern age really started. Mainstream historians argue with each other about whether the modern age started with seventeenth-century Cartesian rationalism, or eighteenth-century democratic revolutions in France and the United States, or the rise of capitalism, or the nineteenth-century formal establishment of social institutions. Mainstream historians in this debate draw on documentary evidence from various events in the past to support their assertions that the modern age really started at one time or another. In this essay, Foucault explained explicitly why he was not interested in doing the kind of history that searches for origins. He wrote, `A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will

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never confuse itself with a quest for their ``origins'' ' (1978b, p. 373). He argued that conventional historians' search for origins is associated with the search for truth, and the search for origins usually operates as a thinly disguised tactic for advancing a pet theory about reality. Foucault's argument is that since there are always several possible ways to identify the origin of something, a historical choice of what to call the origin reflects a preconceived notion and a biased perspective on truth. Foucault's argument contrasting genealogy with a search for origins continues by explaining various ways in which Nietzsche's genealogies have provided us with alternatives to the historical search for origins. As you read the following quotation, keep in mind Foucault's critical purposes to be provocative, problematizing, and poetic: the veneration of monuments becomes parody; the respect for ancient continuities becomes systematic dissociation; the critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge [connaissance] by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge. (p. 389) In order to understand why Foucault might have rejected the search for origins, it may be helpful to consider an example from ordinary life. In educational discourse, researchers and policy-makers often try to explain why some students are more successful than others in school, and this research question is an example of a historical search for origins. These researchers are trying to explain student failure (or success) by looking to past events. As the researchers construct an explanation for success or failure, they tell a story. Every story has a beginning, so there is always some point of departure that is (implicitly or explicitly) established in the storytelling. These research projects are designed to find the origin of student failure or success in school, and depending on the perspectives of the researchers, different points of origin will be identified. For example, in an effort to explain student failure, some research examines the role of families by focusing on such things as the level of literacy among family members, the number of books in the home, or the parents'

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income level. Other research projects do not study families; rather, they examine characteristics of the school to try to explain success and failure. Research on schools pays attention to such things as curriculum, teaching methods, class size, and length of school day. Still other research does not examine families or schools, but examines social systems such as school financing, privatization, and credentialing processes. The point is that the kind of research focused on the role of parents will conclude with an explanation for student failure that is related to parents. The kind of research focused on social systems will conclude that student failure is related to systemic issues. Conversely, research on families will not establish that a social feature like privatization is the origin for student failure, just as research focused on school financing will not establish teacher quality as the origin of student failure. Each research approach will conclude with an explanation that is within the realm of the research questions: research on the role of parents will generate an explanation that has something to do with parents, and research on schooling characteristics will generate an explanation that has something to do with schooling. These limitations on the relationship between questions and answers do not occur because research is sloppily conducted; they are an inevitable feature of inquiry. As soon as you decide on a research question, you limit the set of possible answers. This inevitable relationship between questions and answers is what Foucault was talking about when he objected to mainstream history's search for origins as the only worthy path of historical inquiry. Foucault's theory of history emphasizes that any search for origins has already been determined (at least to some degree) by the formulation of the questions, and the evidence follows from those questions. Furthermore, we do not have a satisfactory way to evaluate whether one claim about origins is more or less valid than another claim about origins because these various claims for origins have been derived from research approaches that are so different from one another. Judging the validity of various claims to origin would be like trying to compare apples and telephone poles. In his discussions of historical work, Foucault established that the search for origins is an example of the search for truth. In summary, he

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argued that 1) there is no way to decide between competing truths of origin, and 2) the search for origins is itself a historically particular approach to writing history. About the Concept of the `Dangerous Individual' in Nineteenth Century Legal Psychiatry (1978) This article was originally published in English in the Journal of Law and Psychiatry. That is a particularly appropriate journal because the argument of this essay focuses on the intersection of law and psychiatry. As usual, Foucault was executing a critical purpose. This essay traces several lines of thinking focused ultimately on the Foucaultian questions of who do we think we are, and what do we think we might be capable of. This long essay provides us with a historical argument that has several intertwining threads. For purposes of explication, this summary presents the threads as separate lines of argument. However, to capture the entire argument, the threads will need to be re-entwined. One thread of argument is the challenge to a prevailing assumption about what it means to be human. We may tend to take it for granted that there is such as thing as `criminally insane' people, but Foucault's historical argument in this essay shows us that this `dangerous individual' is not a natural thing. In fact, Foucault makes the `dangerous individual' seem like quite a surprising invention, given the historical circumstances. A second thread traces historical changes in how people think about crime. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, people did not really talk about criminals the way we do today. Rather, Foucault argued, the general way of talking about crime (the discourse of crime) was in terms of acts and punishments. If someone did something bad, then that act was judged and punished. There were different ways of understanding and explaining why someone might commit a crime; it might be because of a sinful human impulse (e.g., greed or jealousy), or it might be because of an evil spirit. In any case, a crime was generally understood to be an act against the law, and punishment was supposed to fit the crime. Courts did not punish people; they punished acts.

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The important point to notice in this thread of the argument is that in the nineteenth century, people started talking about crimes in terms of the kinds of people that committed them. That seems natural to us because we take the idea of `criminal' for granted. However, Foucault's argument presents us with a different perspective. One way to appreciate the strangeness of the notion of `criminal' is to recognize that in our current judicial systems, it is still very complicated and difficult to decide whether a person is `sane' and therefore responsible for committing a crime, or `insane' and therefore not responsible. Can a sane person commit a murder? Some people say yes, sane people can commit murder if there is a reasonable motivation like overwhelming anger. Other people say no; murder is an insane thing to do, or they might call it `temporary insanity.' Another important factor in current court decisions is to try to understand why the person committed the crime. Was it premeditated? Were there any extenuating circumstances? Has the person done anything like this before? It is precisely this changing relationship between crime and criminals that Foucault addressed in this essay. A third thread of the argument is to trace the history of how psychiatry got connected with the court systems in the first place. At first, before the nineteenth century, psychiatrists identified certain behaviors as medical problems, and they worked very hard to distinguish insane people (who should be treated in the medical domain) from criminals (who should be treated in the judicial domain). Surprisingly, however, in the nineteenth century, psychiatrists began trying to participate in criminal cases. Foucault's historical account shows us that the first criminal cases that psychiatrists tried to be involved in were monstrous, rare, gruesome, and shocking crimes that shared two particular characteristics: the people who committed them did not have any (other) symptoms of insanity, and these were crimes `against nature' (like a mother killing her child).18 Why would psychiatrists want to see these monstrous and horrible acts as medical problems? Why would judges and magistrates want to classify such acts as medical problems? It does not seem to make sense that either psychiatrists or magistrates would want to explain these crimes in terms of medicine:

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Why was this accomplished, and relatively easily at that? In other words, why did the penal institution, which had been able to do without medical intervention for so many centuries, which had been able to judge and condemn without the problem of madness being raised except in a few obvious cases, why did this penal institution so willingly have recourse to medical knowledge from the 1820s on? (1978c, p. 186) Foucault's argument in this essay suggests that the psychiatrists and the magistrates actually wanted two very separate things, and it is only an accident of history that these happened to have coincided in Europe the way they did. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists saw things this way: 1

2

If the act ± like murder ± is horrendous and there is no explanation (like anger or dementia), then the murder itself is the insanity. Therefore murder is an indication of a medical problem. If there are no visible symptoms, no previous warning of the impending murder, then it takes an expert in human mental illnesses to predict and prevent such acts.

In contrast, nineteenth-century magistrates saw it this way: 1

2

Punishment is supposed to be a kind of intervention to transform the criminal. We need to understand what is wrong with the criminal so we can prescribe the correct punishment. If we do not know what is wrong with the person, then we do not know how to punish it. There are some crimes that don't make sense from a legal point of view. Extreme forms of insanity erupt as criminal acts.

In other words, Foucault argued, psychiatry could not have joined forces with the court system unless both sides saw advantages for themselves in the merger. Even though magistrates and psychiatrists saw things very differently, they both saw reasons to explain some crimes in terms of medical problems. It is worth pointing out a literary facet of Foucault's writing here. The essay goes into some detail explaining six dreadfully gruesome

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crimes. Like the scene of torture that opens Discipline and Punish, these horrific depictions have a purpose in the writing. The images are meant to have a visceral effect. Reading these descriptions of decapitations and dismemberments, we cannot remain rationally removed from the historical issues. We are compelled to respond emotionally. This is a deliberate and indispensable part of Foucault's philosophy. The writing is meant to generate intellectual, emotional, and sensual effects. In this case, the writing provides us with the same kind of pleasure as we might seek when watching a horror movie. A fourth thread of this argument draws together the history of psychiatry with the creation of new ways of categorizing people. Psychiatrists gained entry into the judicial system, and that was the first historical step toward the creation of the `dangerous individual.' In the early stages, psychiatry was called upon to explain only the most bizarre and monstrous acts, crimes that did not make sense any other way. As the nineteenth century went on, psychiatry's role in explaining crime grew. As people began to understand crime more and more from a medical point of view, it became possible to talk less in terms of crimes and more in terms of criminals. Foucault's essay points out that the middle of the nineteenth century saw the creation of the categories of necrophilia and kleptomania. From the most heinous of crimes, psychiatry was then called upon to explain crimes of all levels of seriousness and all levels of frequency. But Foucault's historical explanation does not stop with the analysis of the respective roles of psychiatrists and magistrates. For Foucault, those two professional domains would not have been sufficient to change the course of history. There must have been many other factors in place. This is another thread of the argument. For one thing, the role of government was gradually shifting from punishing criminal acts to protecting society. If it is the role of government to protect society, then the nature of punishment is not the same as when the role of government was to administer justice in the form of retribution or recompense. For another thing, there had to be a social climate that supported the merger of psychiatry and crime. As the nineteenth century went on, the social climate gradually came to support a more rational form of social management, which, in this case, meant to try to reduce the probability of crimes being committed. Psychiatrists,

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with their science of mental illness, seemed to provide the most effective source of risk management. Finally, the penitentiary system of the nineteenth century was not seen as very effective; prisoners were not being rehabilitated, so punishment was not having the therapeutic effect that was intended. With all these historical factors in place, the groundwork was laid for the invention of the `dangerous individual.' Foucault's essay notes that in 1905, the term `dangerous being' was formally introduced into law. The essay concludes by reiterating that there was a major shift in focus from the crime to the criminal. Although we take it for granted that there are such things as `dangerous individuals,' that way of thinking emerged in particular historical circumstances. Most importantly, our current way of thinking about criminals ± in terms of psychiatric measurements ± contributes to our assumption that society has the right and the duty to judge not only what we do, but also who we are as people. With this as the conclusion, we can recognize what will be the major themes of Foucault's subsequent works, namely the relations among subjectivity (who we are), objectivity (criminality), and truth (science of psychiatry). We can also appreciate the several threads of argument in this essay that intertwine to make a historical case that the `dangerous individual' was a creation of historical happenstance under very particular conditions. We have been invited to share in this experience emotionally. If the `dangerous individual' is a kind of historical accident, then we do not need to be dictated by that definition of normal. The whole notion of criminality becomes problematic, and we are free to imagine alternatives. Is it Useless to Revolt? (1979) The year 1979 brought the Iranian revolution in which there was an uprising against the Shah. Foucault, being a politically engaged intellectual, was called upon to express his opinion on the viability of revolution as a means of political activism. This short piece appeared first in Le Monde, France's most respected newspaper. It is important to remember that, in the 1970s, Marxism was still a major intellectual influence in Europe, and revolution is a major component in Marxist political philosophy. Within this context, the

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debates on revolution were generally polemical. That is, most political activists at the time would have taken a position on one side or the other: either in support of revolutions as liberation movements, or against revolutions as violent and ineffective. Not surprisingly, Foucault took neither of those positions. Foucault's position as expressed in this essay does not correspond to one of the polemical sides of the argument. At the same time, his position is not non-committal, either. It is neither a relativistic stance nor an apathetic stance. One way to understand Foucault's essay is to recognize that it accomplishes two things: it honors the commitment of people who revolt, and it provides a range of considerations for problematizing revolution as a political tool. Foucault saluted revolution as an expression of an irrepressible human spirit: If societies persist and live, that is, if the powers that be are not `utterly absolute,' it is because, behind all the submissions and coercions, beyond the threats, the violence, and the intimidations, there is the possibility of that moment when life can no longer be bought, when the authorities can no longer do anything, and when, facing the gallows and the machine guns, the people revolt. (p. 450) No matter how oppressive, cruel, and well armed the authorities, people put their lives on the line in defiance of that show of force. Foucault called this an `irreducible' fact. The meaning is that revolution has some heroic qualities; we cannot explain with ordinary means why a person would stand in the path of an oncoming tank. But that is only part of the story. Another undeniable feature of revolutions is that they tend to replace one set of atrocities with another set. In this essay about Iran, Foucault pointed out that the imprisonments ordered by the Shah had been replaced with the `severed hands' ordered by the Ayatollah. Sometimes revolutions maintain oppressive systems; they just put different people in charge. As part of this essay, Foucault draws a connection between revolution and religion. Certainly religion was a major factor in the

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Iranian revolution that Foucault was discussing here. However, he did not argue that religious fervor causes revolutions. Rather, he argued that revolutions are life-and-death propositions, so of course religion comes into play. Foucault's argument, though, is not simply that revolutions have advantages and disadvantages. That would have been a non-committal stance. Instead, Foucault made the more subtle point that we cannot judge revolutions from afar. If we ourselves are not putting our own lives in mortal danger for a cause, then we have no fair basis from which to understand what is going on. If we are standing in a position of relative safety, we cannot know the full meaning of a revolutionary act. As a public statement about revolution, Foucault's intensely political position was to reject both sides of the polemical debate. Instead, the essay asks us to remember that human beings risk their lives and die in revolutions. As human beings, we are obligated to honor the intensity of that path. How many of us have willingly stood in front of machine guns? At the same time, it would be a mistake to celebrate all revolutionary stances. Historically speaking, revolutions have not usually led to freedom for the people. More often, revolutions have brought new kinds of government and new sets of restrictions. Most importantly, however, it would be a dishonor for anyone to evaluate from a distance the moral worth of risking one's life for the cause of freedom. The Subject and Power (1982) Foucault wrote the first half of this essay in English and the second half in French.19 It appeared first in Dreyfus and Rabinow's (1983) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, and it consists of responses to criticisms of two of Foucault's most important concepts, namely subjectivity and power. We may normally think of `subject' and `object' as opposites, but Foucault's essay plays with both of these terms and shows how their meanings are interdependent; we cannot have a subject without an object, and vice versa. The interweaving of these two terms is a strategy that becomes available to us from the perspective of Descartes's worldview in which we humans acquire the ability to investigate our

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own selves. It is a characteristic of modernity that `man' is both subject and object of knowledge, simultaneously the researcher and the researched. Another key point that Foucault made in this essay is that subjects are not determined by ideologies or institutions. With this point, he was responding to Marxist critiques. In a Marxian theory of power, the system (e.g., capitalism) makes us who we are. In this essay, Foucault argued against Marxism to say that ideologies, institutions, and subject positions all affect one another. Unlike in Marxism, it is not the case that one of these factors is `more powerful' than the others. Rather, for Foucault, it is the case that among those entities, power gets exercised in any number of ways. Regarding power, this essay includes a characteristically Foucaultian analysis in which a broad concept (in this case, power) is shown to be not simple, coherent, or homogeneous in practice. Foucault argued in this essay that when we use the word `power', we actually mean several different things. He provided the following examples to emphasize differences in what the term power implies: 1 2 3 4 5

Men over women Parents over children Psychiatry over the mentally ill Medicine over the population Administration over the ways people live (1982a, p. 211)

With this list of examples, Foucault showed that the mechanisms of power in the case of men over women are quite different from the mechanisms of power in the case of medicine over the population. Similarly, each of these cases of asymmetry requires a different set of techniques for domination and resistance. Foucault's point here is that if we want to understand how administrations exercise power over people, it will not help us to study how parents exercise power over their children. We cannot generalize about power across all these different relationships. We need new and more customized conceptualizations of power in order for us to be able to analyze the practices of power as they are exercised in different kinds of relationships. The previous example showing different modes of power then leads

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to the second section of the essay, `How is Power Exercised?' Foucault's question is not `What is power?' because he has just shown that power is not one thing. In this section, Foucault was responding to the criticisms leveled against Foucault's theories by Habermas (1981/1984) in his Theory of Communicative Action. To respond to this critique, Foucault explained that `communication' and `power' are not the same, although in things like academic disciplines, they can be `welded together.' This essay includes one of Foucault's most famous quotations: `Power is exercised over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free' (p. 221). In this quotation, Foucault was emphasizing his conceptual distinction between domination and power. Domination is a relationship in which one of the parties is helpless. Power, in contrast, is a relationship in which all parties are capable of some kind of action, even if the only options for action are extreme, like committing suicide. The essay concludes by suggesting an analysis of power in terms of practices. Rather than trying to define what power is, Foucault explained his theory of power as a study of what is done, which he terms `strategies' of power. If we focus our investigation on strategies, then we give ourselves a critical vantage point to think and act accordingly. What is Enlightenment? (1984) This essay has a special place in Foucault's body of works for three distinct reasons. First, it was written 200 years after Immanuel Kant wrote his essay of the same name: `Was heiût AufklaÈrung?' Along with Descartes and Hegel, Kant is one of the pre-eminent philosophers in the western intellectual tradition. In this essay, Foucault establishes his own philosophy with respect to Kant's. Second, the Enlightenment is at the heart of western philosophy. Regarded as the `age of reason,' the Enlightenment project has symbolized the greatest hope of philosophy in its endeavor to overcome the veils of mysticism and the shackles of religion. This essay establishes Foucault's philosophy with respect to features of the Enlightenment. Third, and finally, this essay explicates what Foucault meant by `critique.' The critical tradition in philosophy

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was inaugurated by Kant's seminal essays (The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and The Critique of Judgment), extended by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century by the Frankfurt School.20 In the 1980s, when Foucault wrote this essay, the definition of critical theory generally implied the ideas of the Frankfurt School, whose project was to articulate an agenda for social and cultural emancipation. Not surprisingly, Foucault's critical theory does not subscribe to Frankfurt School traditions, and in this essay he challenged prevailing definitions of what it could mean to be critical. The essay begins with Foucault's reading of Kant's original text. According to Foucault, Kant's essay on the Enlightenment constituted a critical departure from earlier traditions of writing history. Before Kant's time, the usual themes of historical writing cast the present in one of three modes: the present as a unique moment in time, the present as a herald of things to come, and the present as a turning point to a better world. Foucault's reading tells us that Kant asked a different question of the present, namely: `How is the present different from the past?' Specifically, Kant was interested in the ways in which Enlightenment reasoning was coming of age in the present. Kant characterized the present as different from the past in terms of a maturing or ripening: `What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?' (p. 305). Foucault's essay expresses appreciation for the critical contribution of Kant's essay, saying that Kant effectively raised fresh questions and opened a new conversation in terms of how we might talk about the meaning of Enlightenment. At this point it is worth noting an extra layer of meaning that occurs in Foucault's essay. Kant died in 1804. It is possible to see Kant's writing as the culmination of Enlightenment philosophies, to be followed by modern philosophies in the nineteenth century. Therefore, Foucault was addressing two levels of meaning: 1) In what way is Kant's philosophy indicative of Enlightenment critique? and 2) What does Enlightenment mean now relative to Kant's critical theory? In response to the first question, Foucault provided an analysis of how Kant's definition of reason was different from earlier kinds of reasoning. For Kant, reasoning was an expression of freedom, the

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opposite of obedience. Encapsulating Kant's position, Foucault wrote: `There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another' (p. 307). The second half of this essay no longer summarizes Kant's text, but rather presents Foucault's own critical theory. Previous treatments of the Enlightenment characterized it as a period (usually centered around the eighteenth century), but Foucault approached the question in a whole new way. Instead of an epoch or period, he suggested that we think of the Enlightenment as an attitude: `Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history' (p. 309). To develop his theory of Enlightenment, Foucault turned to the writings of the eighteenth-century French author Baudelaire. Foucault's references in this essay to Baudelaire21 accomplish at least two critical interventions into the question `What is Enlightenment?' First, using Baudelaire interjects an artistic and literary element into the theory of reason. Since Enlightenment is often assumed to be the dawning of reason and science, it is a critical challenge to cite literature as a way of characterizing it. Second, Baudelaire's writing allows Foucault to highlight a kind of irony in the attitude of modernity. The irony Foucault's analysis depicts is the attitude of heroizing the present while at the same time trying to imagine a way out of that present: `Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it' (p. 311). The final critical point of Foucault's essay is a problematization of the meaning of humanism. Humanism is traditionally associated with the Enlightenment because it is associated with a rejection of religious and noble authority and toward the authority of human reason. Foucault by Maurice Florence (1988) This is a unique and playful essay. In the early 1980s, a new edition of the French Dictionary of Philosophers (Dictionnaire des Philosophes) was being prepared. The editor (Denis Huisman) invited Foucault's assistant, FrancËois Ewald, to contribute the entry on Foucault. As it turns out, Foucault wrote this entry himself and signed it with the

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thinly disguised pseudonym `Maurice Florence.' This very short statement was written toward the end of Foucault's life and is a comprehensive summary of his philosophy. For those reasons, this brief work is an illuminating capsule that is worthy of special attention. The first third of this essay summarizes the themes and topics that constituted the focus of Foucault's work ± `what' he studied. The last two-thirds of the essay are devoted to questions of method ± `how' he studied. In the first part, the key terms are `subject,' `object,' and `truth.' Foucault went to some length here to explain that he did not study subjects, objects, and truth independently, but rather he studied the interrelations among those three aspects. The focus on interrelations is noteworthy because previous philosophies (both scientific and phenomenological) were focused on trying to establish a clear distinction between subjects and objects. For example, scientific22 philosophers worked hard to establish objectivity by specifying methodological safeguards that would prevent subjectivity from polluting the truth of objective knowledge. Repeatability, reliability, and validity are examples of such methodological safeguards for scientists. Phenomenological philosophers also worked diligently to specify the distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity, but (unlike the scientists), they put more value on the truth of subjective knowledge. Given this context, Foucault's focus on the interrelationships among objects, subjects, and truth constituted a radical change for philosophical study ± a new kind of problem. For Foucault, to be critical meant to instigate radical change ± to pose new problems. He was not interested in figuring out how to separate subjects, objects, and truth ± that had been the domain of mainstream philosophies. He was interested in figuring out how subjects, objects, and truth are mutually implicated in one another ± that was a new (and therefore critical) problem. It can be difficult (not only for novices but also for experienced philosophers) to grasp what Foucault meant by the mutual implication of subjects, objects, and truth. This dictionary entry provides one of the most direct and explicit explanations for what this means. Here is how Foucault defined the focus of his philosophical investigations:

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[Foucault studies] the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyze himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. (p. 461) In other words: What do people accept as truthful ways of seeing themselves? In sum, the first part of this dictionary entry provides an explanation of Foucault's major themes of philosophical study, namely the interrelationships among subjectivity, objectivity, and truth. The second part of the essay is devoted to an explanation of research methods. Foucault's first point pertaining to method is to draw a distinction between skepticism and nihilism, and to describe his own methodological approach as skeptical. He called for a `systematic skepticism toward all anthropological universals ± which does not mean rejecting them from the start' (p. 461). Skepticism means to question what is assumed to be true, not to reject the possibility of truth.23 The second methodological point is to question the transcendental subject. This point is related to critique because to question the transcendental subject is to be critical of assumptions. In this methodological point, Foucault differentiated his approach from that of phenomenology. Phenomenology (at least some forms of it) tends to take the perceiving subject for granted, that is, to assume a transcendental subject. When Foucault questioned the transcendental subject, he did not reject subjectivity. Again, he is not nihilistic. To question the transcendental subject means to suppose that our subjective possibilities are changeable. For example, our subjective possibilities in discourses of mental illness may not be the same as our subjective possibilities in the discourses of sexuality or delinquency. The third methodological point is to focus on practices as the proper focus of analysis. In this methodological point, Foucault differentiated his work from that of structuralism. Recall that a structuralist analysis focuses on underlying patterns (langue), not on surface practices (parole). Here, Foucault emphasized that his approach was to analyze practices ± the messy, complicated, incoherent, quirky things that people do (not the underlying regular structures).

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This dictionary entry concludes with an explanation of how a focus on subjectivity, objectivity, and truth lead to an analysis of power relations. In this closing section, Foucault differentiated his theory of power from that of Marxism. Marxist analyses try to locate and identify the origins of power. In contrast, Foucault studied power as the affordances and constraints that constitute our possibilities for being who we are.

Courses The ColleÁge de France The ColleÁge de France is an institution that is not like universities elsewhere in the world. In the ColleÁge, anyone can attend lectures. People who attend are called `auditors,' not students. People do not register or pay tuition fees to attend lectures, and auditors do not get evaluations, grades, or credit for attending. Courses at the ColleÁge are more like free public lectures. It is a great honor to receive an appointment as a professor at the ColleÁge de France; Foucault was elected in 1969, and he called his chair History of the Systems of Thought. In the ColleÁge, professors must provide 26 hours of teaching every year. They must also provide a written summary of each course at the end of the year. The content of the courses as provided in the lectures must reflect the professor's original research. Beginning in 2003 the transcripts of Foucault's lectures and the summaries of his courses have appeared in book form. Here are the course titles for the years Foucault taught at the ColleÁge de France (dates in parentheses indicate publication in English): 1970±1971 1971±1972 1972±1973 1973±1974 1974±1975 1975±1976 (1976±1977

The Will to Knowledge (forthcoming) Penal Theories and Institutions (forthcoming) The Penal Society (forthcoming) Psychiatric Power (2006) Abnormal (2003) Society Must Be Defended (2002) Foucault took a sabbatical leave)

Summaries of Major Works 1977±1978 1978±1979 1979±1980 1980±1981 1981±1982

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Security, Territory, Population (2009) Birth of Biopolitics (2008) On the Government of the Living (forthcoming) Subjectivity and Truth (forthcoming) The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005)

These books from the courses at the ColleÁge de France give us the texts of Foucault's spoken lectures that were audiotaped and then transcribed. The books also contain Foucault's course summaries, and essays about the context of each course. These courses are a different genre from the books and articles because they were originally given orally. The courses are more didactic, and sometimes more systematic than some of the written works. Also, we can read in these lecture transcripts the development of Foucault's thoughts that eventually appeared in his books and articles. Lecture at Stanford: `Omnes et Singulatim': Toward a Critique of Political Reason24 In the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault spent quite a bit of time in California, U.S.A. `Omnes et Singulatim' is the title given to a pair of lectures given at Stanford University in 1979. The style of this piece is quite unlike most of Foucault's other works, probably because it is the transcript of lectures given in English to a U.S. audience. For that reason, many English-speaking readers may find it more accessible than other works. In this pair of lectures, Foucault argued that it is not helpful for political analysis to assume that rational and irrational are opposites. He was objecting to modern political science theories that evaluate governmental systems according to how rationally (or irrationally) they are designed. In place of a rational-irrational dichotomy, Foucault argued that there are many different kinds of rationality. In these lectures, the main topic is political rationality, and the analytical approach is (not surprisingly) comparative history. In these lectures, Foucault contrasted several political systems, focusing primarily on Greek, Hebrew, and Christian political

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rationalities. The first lecture concentrates on pastoral power, and the second explicates how pastoral power came to work together with state reasoning. Foucault called attention to pastoral power as a way of `unsettling our certitudes,' and highlighting the specificity of a form of political rationality that we have come to take for granted. Pastoral power is a metaphorical device that Foucault used to illustrate a particularly Christian form of political rationality. In schematic form, Foucault explained four ways in which the political rationality of Christian pastoral power is different from Greek political rationalities: 1 2

3

4

Greek leaders are in charge of the land; but the shepherd is in charge of the sheep. If Greek leaders leave the city, the city continues to exist on its own; but the flock exists only while the shepherd is in attendance (if the shepherd leaves, the flock disperses). Greek leaders are invoked in emergencies to prevent catastrophes; but the shepherd is expected to watch over every sheep every minute. Greek leaders are glorious; but shepherds are devoted.

Remember that Foucault's purpose in drawing this comparison is to help us question our assumptions about what political rationality is or could be. When we recognize alternatives to the things we take for granted, we are in a position to look at our own limitations with a more critical eye. In this case, the metaphor of the shepherd and the designation of pastoral power help us to recognize the specificities of our own expectations for political leadership. Do we expect our leaders to be responsible for us every minute of every day? Would that be a good thing? What are the benefits and costs of having a leader watch out for every individual as well as for the collective as a whole? This first `Omnes et Singulatim' lecture also includes an illuminating explanation of how the word apathy changed meaning from classical Greek times to Christian times. Pathos means passion, and a means without, so the basic meaning of the word apathy is `without passion.' In the classical Greek context, apathy referred to the virtue of

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self-control in which passions are controlled through the exercise of reason. In the Christian context, however, apathy meant subordinating one's own passions to God's law. The change of the meaning of the word illustrates a change in political rationality. In Greek political rationality, virtuous people act when they are persuaded by reason to do so. In Christian political rationality, virtuous people act when God's law tells them to do so. One of the major features of pastoral power is how it operates on individuals as well as on the collective. This is what the title of the lecture refers to: Omnes means all, and singulatim means one. This lecture ends by remarking that our civilization has developed one of the most complicated systems of political rationality. This political rationality entails intimate and unrelenting care of individuals, responsibility for the welfare of the collective, the distinction between good and bad, and a complex reciprocal accountability between the leaders and the people. The second lecture builds on the notions of pastoral power and individualization that were the focus of the first. The second lecture then adds to those concepts two other features that characterize our current political rationality, namely `reason of state' and `police.' A major purpose of this lecture is to show how pastoral power, individualization, reason of state, and policing all work together to constitute the particular kind of political rationality in which we now find ourselves. The specific historical examples in this lecture serve to make the point that there is no such thing as a general rationality, but rather there are different systems of thinking that constitute various political rationalities. One way to understand what Foucault meant by this distinction is to consider that the rules and strategies for playing soccer are very different from the rules and strategies for playing rugby. Similarly, the rules and strategies for governing in classical Greece were very different from the rules and strategies for governing in Hebrew or early Christian contexts. It is not the case that there is one rational way of playing all games, just as it is not the case that there is one rational way for conducting a government. Foucault refused to extend his analysis to Russia and China because he had not studied the specificities of their political situations.

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In this lecture, Foucault elaborated on these several historical examples to illustrate possible ways in which political rationalities can vary. They can vary according to the kind of care that is expected (emergency rescue or constant attention), by the definition of virtue (control of passions or submission to law), by what leaders and people are supposed to know in order to fulfill their respective roles (organizational management or intimate personal secrets), and the kinds of motivations (fulfillment of human values or instrumental rewards) that are effective for getting people to act in a particular way. These are only a few of the possible parameters around which political rationalities can vary. With these examples, Foucault claimed to be suggesting not solutions to political problems, but rather a way of approaching the analysis of political situations: [E]xperience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism. (1979b, p. 323) This second lecture ends by saying that political critique cannot be effective if it attacks only the individualizing functions of government, and neither can it be effective if it attacks only the totalizing functions of government. Rather, Foucault warns us, `Liberation can come only from attacking . . . political rationality's very roots' (p. 325).

Interviews There is a tradition in French society for intellectuals and artists to speak publicly, sometimes in lecture format, and sometimes through the mass media. University professors offer open lectures, and intellectuals participate in discussions on radio and television, in magazines and in newspapers. In accordance with this tradition, Foucault gave many interviews, not only in France but also in many other countries. Interviewers used the occasion of the question-andanswer format to clarify what Foucault meant in his various writings and also to express public reactions to his works. The interview format

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allows the interviewer to ask pointed questions to which Foucault responded with relatively brief and direct answers. Interviewers also tended to ask the questions that reflect the general public's perceptions of Foucault's ideas. As a result, Foucault's interviews are often more accessible and easier for novices to understand than some of his books and articles. The interview texts are a good place to begin if you are reading Foucault's work for the first time. This section will introduce and summarize seven of these interviews. From each one, a `key quotation' has been selected as a highlight. The summaries are arranged chronologically. Rituals of Exclusion (1971)25 KEY QUOTATION [W]hat I would like to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice without realizing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent. (1971, p. 73) This interview was conducted in 1971 at the end of Foucault's first visit to the United States during which he taught in Buffalo, New York, for two months. The interviewer, John Simon (who also translated it for publication), was particularly interested in Foucault's perception of U.S. universities. By the time of this interview, Foucault had already published Madness and Civilization, History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, Raymond Roussel, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Discourse on Language, as well as scores of articles. Also, this interview took place only three years after the events of May 1968. Understandably, then, the interview focuses on comparisons between U.S. and French universities, particularly the relationship between students and faculty. In the early 1970s, the political value of Marxism and communism was being debated in several public sectors, in Europe and North America. Foucault's responses in this interview show that he rejected over-simplified understandings of communism or Marxism. In each of his responses to the interviewer's questions, Foucault directed our

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thinking away from simple generalizations and toward a more complicated and theoretically nuanced understanding of communism and of power dynamics in the world. For example, the interviewer asked Foucault if he thought university students were imprisoned in some kind of system. This question is understandable, following as it does from the events of May 1968, when many critical theorists were espousing communism as a revolutionary path toward emancipation. Many students and political activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s looked to the revolutionary theories of Marxism and communism to talk about social protest movements. However, Foucault refused to agree with the communist standpoint that students were imprisoned in institutions just as insane people were imprisoned in asylums. Instead, he pointed out that there is a distinction between students and other groups of institutionalized people. He said: There is a significant difference between the insane and the sick on the one hand, and students on the other, in this respect: in our society it is difficult for the insane who are confined or the sick who are hospitalized to make their own revolution; so we have to question these systems of exclusion of the sick and the insane from the outside, through a technique of critical demolition. The university system, however, can be put into question by the students themselves. (pp. 68±69) Foucault's response calls attention to the specific workings of power in different contexts; hospital inmates are not the same as university students. Because of these differences, Foucault cautioned that we should not attempt to generalize our political analyses across these two situations. His response works against an earlier approach to analysis that sought to understand the world in Marxian terms that provided a general or totalizing theory of domination and oppression. Instead, Foucault's writings provoke us to consider the local specificities of every situation and the power dynamics of each. There is another interesting dimension to Foucault's words here. He refused to characterize students as victims of institutional

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oppression in the same way as inmates in insane asylums. When the interviewer asked if students were similar to asylum inmates, he said that inmates and students were not the same. Asylum inmates are in no position to challenge their circumstances; in contrast: `The university system . . . can be put into question by the students themselves.' This is a characteristic Foucaultian message: in most cases, it is not necessary for people to wait for some expert to give them voice or to rescue them. It is true that some people (like prisoners, inmates, and children) are in relatively helpless situations; those are exceptional cases that require specific analysis. However, most people (like students) have the means to question, challenge, and express opinions about their institutional circumstances. In these ordinary cases, Foucault emphasized that people generally have more options than they sometimes assume. One important thing to understand about Foucault's stance is that it casts students neither as victims nor as free agents. It would be an over-simplification to think about a whole group of people as being only victims or only free agents. Foucault's is a more nuanced ± and in some ways more realistic ± stance that recognizes the complications of real-life situations where power distinctions are seldom as simple as a black-and-white relationship. Foucault's stance asks us to remember that different contexts may give rise to different power dynamics, and in any given context, several different things (like laws, gender dynamics, age, race, personalities, dispositions, and ambitions) may be going on at the same time to complicate the situation. Similarly, in another example from this interview, Foucault rejected the earlier Marxian formulation of inclusion versus exclusion. The interviewer asked, `Are there parallels aside from the master-slave relationship between the student as an excluded figure and the madman?' In reply, Foucault offered a more complicated way of understanding the relationship between inclusion and exclusion. He explained how students are both included and excluded from society in complicated ways: `There is the first function of the university: to put students out of circulation. Its second function, however, is one of integration' (p. 69). Foucault argued here that students are both excluded from society and included in society at large. Exclusion is accomplished through

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several different mechanisms: physical isolation on a campus, mental isolation in esoteric academic subjects that are unconnected to everyday life, and emotional isolation in an artificial game-like lifestyle. But students are also included because university education has the social function of preparing people to function effectively in society. The purpose of the university is to educate students into socially desirable ways of living. A university education functions as a kind of initiation into society, and its value is measured in how effectively it provides society with socially compatible knowledge and abilities. This aspect describes Foucault's position regarding how students are not only excluded but also thoroughly included in society. A last example from this interview concerns Foucault's response to the question `Are there differences between faculty and students?' In his reply to this question, Foucault again refused to give a general or over-simplified answer. Instead, he suggested that there is no overall ± totalizing ± statement that can be made about the relationship of faculty to students. In this interview Foucault explained that faculty and student relationships have been different in different historical periods, and may also be different from place to place. For example, French academic relationships may be very different from U.S. academic relationships: In France, a professor is a public official and therefore is a part of the state apparatus . . . In the United States, it is probably different because of the open market for professors. I don't know whether the American academic is more threatened, more exploited, or more ready to accept the values imposed upon him. (p. 71) By claiming he does not know whether U.S. academics are similar to French academics, Foucault made the point that we must study different local contexts in order to understand them. His position is that there is no totalizing theory that explains in advance what the relationship between students and faculty might be. This interview concludes with an example that captures one of the main themes of Foucault's work, namely political critique as making

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the implicit explicit. As reflected in the key quotation for this interview, Foucault's objective is to provoke us to new awareness of our possibilities and limitations by making our tacit assumptions explicit. In summary, this interview provides a few examples of the degree to which Foucault insisted upon studying specific situations at specific times, rather than drawing generalizations across various times and places. This preference for local specificity is one way in which Foucault's work departs from Marxism, which offers a unified and totalizing theory for understanding human society in every time and place. Foucault's purpose in focusing on local specificities is not to introduce a kind of cultural pluralism (although there may be some pluralizing effects associated with this approach), but rather to break down the big generalizations that entrap our minds. If we study different situations in their own particularity, we may be able to perceive alternatives to our own habitual ways of seeing the world. By rejecting generalizations and over-simplifications, we may be able to acquire new ways of thinking about how we are living our lives. Talk Show (1975)26 KEY QUOTATION I would like to write in such a way that people feel a kind of physical pleasure in reading me. (1975a, p. 137) This radio interview was conducted eight months after the publication of Discipline and Punish, and most of the interview questions are about that book. The interview is also the source of the three quotations about schooling that appear in the introduction to Chapter 1 of this book. A fairly long section of Discipline and Punish is devoted to education and schools. That book and this interview are two of the few places where Foucault refers explicitly to schools or teaching. It is a particularly playful interview, and Foucault used the occasion to incite our suspicions regarding many of our assumptions about schools, teachers, and learning.

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In addition to facetiously expressing his shock and dismay that learning could be made dull and boring, Foucault also overturned the assumption that teachers evaluate students. He reminded us that at the ColleÁge de France (where he was a professor), students are not required to attend lectures. Faculty lectures are open to the public, so non-students may attend lectures if they wish. Therefore, he remarked, at the ColleÁge de France, it is the students who evaluate the professors, and they express that evaluation in their attendance or absence. If the professors are good, then many people attend the lectures; but if the professors are not good, then people do not attend. Attendance, then, constitutes a very practical kind of evaluation. By expressing the relationship of students to teachers in this way, Foucault's words help us see an alternative to a relationship we probably take for granted. Another example of overturning an assumption is Foucault's expressed opinion about the role of parents in their children's education. It is a commonplace assumption that parents should be concerned about and involved in their children's education. Provocatively, however, in this interview Foucault took the opposite side. He asserted that parents' concerns make children very anxious, and this anxiety becomes a heavy burden on the suffering children. In his playful tone, of course Foucault was not seriously suggesting that parents neglect their children's education; rather, his reply prompts parents to examine their own motives, and to consider the possibility that any efforts to do the right thing may have mixed effects. His caution here reminds us that even our best intentions are always complicated with ethical trade-offs. The questions in the middle of this interview are about the history and current practices of psychiatry. Remember that Foucault's earliest books were critical histories of psychology and psychiatry. Here, Foucault is asked to clarify certain ideas about madness. Specifically, he clarified what he meant in his analysis of the relationship between punishment and psychiatric treatment, as well as a couple of the main ideas of Discipline and Punish. One main purpose is to call our attention to the ways in which both punishment and psychiatric treatment function to govern our lives and establish definitions of what is normal and acceptable behavior. Magistrates and psychiatrists are both `technicians' of behavior, and their function is to shape people in

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particular ways. A second major purpose of the book is to challenge an assumption about historical progress, namely that punishment used to be more savage, and has now become more humane. Foucault's ideas confront us with different ways of thinking about the history of punishment. First, it is true that public torture is no longer a common practice. At the same time, torture is still practiced, although now it is perpetrated by the police and only behind closed doors. Moreover, our current policing practices are more general and more widespread than punishment practices of the past. Punishment has become institutionalized, and we now regard it more in terms of `corrections' than in terms of revenge. In the United States and other places, prison systems are even called `Departments of Correction.' This interview concludes with a discussion of the relationship between power and pleasure. When the interviewer asked whether Foucault believed that people could `become better,' he replied ± provocatively ± that he did not hope that people could become better; rather, he hoped people could become happier. With this response, Foucault presented us with an alternative to the focus on `correction.' Repeatedly in this interview, his responses emphasized the historiographical aims of Discipline and Punish. From his analysis we can see that our social institutions of schooling and punishment throughout history have been focused on trying to make people into the `right' kind of people. Social governance has been an orthopedic project in the sense that schools and prisons are designed to `correct' people. The corrective (normalizing) function of social institutions is something that we have learned to take for granted. In this interview, Foucault's responses challenge that assumption. In place of making people `better' or more `correct,' Foucault's words inspire us to imagine that social institutions might have been designed for an entirely different purpose. After reading this interview, we come away wondering, `Why do we accept that the function of education and government is to normalize and correct people? Why shouldn't the purpose of school be to educate us in the pursuit of pleasure ± to help cultivate in us greater capacities for enjoying our daily lives?'27

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Truth and Power (1976) KEY QUOTATION `Dialectic' is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and `semiology' is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody, and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue. (1976, p. 116) This interview was conducted after the publication of Discipline and Punish. It covers several different topics including science, ideology, and war. For our purposes, this summary will concentrate on one overall theme of the interview, namely Foucault's explicit critique of Marxism. His critique consists of three parts: structuralist science, power as sovereignty, and the role of the intellectual. Foucault explained his view that Marxist theories aspired to be scientific, and this attachment to a scientific worldview turned out to be a theoretical obstacle for analyzing human institutions. He said that physics and psychiatry are two vastly different domains of study, and the rules for studying physics are not always appropriate or useful in the study of psychiatry. For example, he explained that, for one thing, physics is an academic discipline that can be located almost exclusively in specialized scientific laboratories. In contrast, psychiatry is more than an academic discipline, and it encompasses several different institutional sites including laboratories, clinics, asylums, political legislatures, court systems, and schools. Since we cannot practice psychiatry in a cyclotron or test tube, we should not study psychiatry using the same kinds of investigative tools as we use to study physics. Foucault suggested here that medicine is probably more closely related to physics than psychiatry is, but even medicine is unlike physics in so far as medicine is enmeshed in social institutions that physics is not. Foucault argued in this interview that Marxism's repeated attempts to remain scientific have resulted in a failure to understand complicated human practices like psychiatry. Another serious problem with Marxist structuralism is its insistence on the presence of social structures like capitalism, class, and the state. Following the patterns of structuralism in linguistics, Marxist theories

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are not focused on the arbitrary, unique, and messy phenomena of speech (parole) or society (random events). Instead, Marxism posits that societies can (and should) be understood by studying the patterns or regularities (langue) that underlie various activities in human life. Foucault argued that Marxism's search for patterns (structures) resulted in analytic over-generalizations and the exclusion of large segments of human activity. Marxist analyses are usually focused on patterns, so they tend to emphasize how things are similar. Foucault was more interested in studying `events,' the different random, unique or arbitrary things that happen in life. This is not to say that Foucault denied that there were patterns or regularities ± he frequently pointed out patterns, similarities, and regularities of history. Rather, it is to say that Marxism had taken the structuralist generalizations too far, and these structuralist generalizations had become fixed into a kind of status quo. The Marxian structural analyses no longer served a critical function in so far as Marxist concepts had themselves become a kind of dominant, mainstream way of thinking. In critical response, Foucault preferred to focus on events. Historical attention to random happenings serves a critical function in so far as such attention can help wake us up to new possibilities. In this interview, another problem with structuralism is related to the previous problem. Just as structuralist social theories tend to seek similarities in human relations, structuralism also tends to seek patterns in history, making the flow of happenings in the past look similar to the present. Foucault's approach to history did not comply with the Marxian theories of a continuous dialectical progression of history. Because Foucault's histories departed from Marxian historical continuity, many scholars thought that they were focused instead on discontinuity: histories that emphasize how things are different rather than how things are similar. However, in this interview, Foucault rejected the idea that his histories were founded on a theory of discontinuity. In fact, he said this characterization of discontinuity `bewildered' him. In an effort to clarify his objections to Marxist continuity, he explained that in his historical studies, he studied the `discursive regimes' that set the limits on what counts as a scientific question or issue. For example, he was interested in why modern science became so obsessed with truth in the

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form of universal or general patterns. What kinds of things were going on (in religion, law, culture, industry, and politics) that would make the search for truth so popular ± almost totally pervasive ± all over the world for so many years? In addition to the critique of Marxist structuralism, in this interview Foucault also criticized the Marxist theory of sovereign power. By sovereign power, he was referring to the kind of power possessed by an absolute ruler (like a monarch, emperor, tsar, or god). The main point of this part of the interview is that many western countries have undergone democratic revolutions that unseated sovereign rulers. The problem, explained Foucault, is that political theory has not kept up with political reality. That is, even though the forms of government have changed from monarchies to democracies, our political theories still operate as if sovereign power were the only kind of power that existed. Foucault criticized Marxist theories of dominance and oppression for depicting modern democratic power relations as if they were similar to sovereign/subject power relations. Foucault argued that in modern democracies sovereign power is not the only kind of power in operation. In democracies there are several kinds of governing power at work. Foucault's point is that governance in modern democracies is conducted through technologies and not only by laws and decrees. His historical studies investigate the ways power is exercised in modern democracies, namely `technologies of the self.' This interview contains another famous Foucault quotation, `We need to cut off the king's head.' But the sentence following that one is equally as important: `In political theory, that has still to be done' (p. 122). This is Foucault's explicit criticism of Marxian theories of sovereign power, which, like theories of structuralism, lead to overgeneralizations and exclusions of many varieties of human activities. The third and final aspect of Marxist theory that Foucault criticized is the role of the intellectual in political activism and social justice movements. This last part of this interview was given in writing rather than orally, so it is more elaborated than other sections. Using the terms `general intellectual' and `specific intellectual,' Foucault explained the difference between a Marxist intellectual and his own conceptualization. By `general intellectual,' Foucault was referring to the Marxist political position that intellectuals ought to join with the

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lower classes (proletariat) to help them overcome oppression and exploitation. Foucault referred to Marxian intellectuals as `general' because they are expected to understand and work on behalf of all people. In contrast, he advocated a position that he called the `specific intellectual.' By that he meant intellectuals doing their political work in their own particular contexts (not on behalf of people in general). He was referring, for example, to people in universities ± a relatively privileged position ± taking up their own causes of injustice in their own university classes and in their own professional relationships. Foucault's position on the role of the intellectual is frequently misunderstood, so it is worth elaborating the concept in a little more detail here. When he rejected the idea that intellectuals should work on behalf of the lower classes, some critics (especially Marxist critics) accused Foucault of being elitist and apolitical. This criticism is difficult to sustain in view of the fact that he was intensely involved in political movements of his day (including student protests of May 1968, Algerian independence, and gay rights). More to the point, in this interview, Foucault explained his conception of the specific intellectual as being closer to the masses than general intellectuals can be. This may sound like a confusing or surprising statement, but he outlined two reasons for his assertion. First, general intellectuals focus on other people's problems, so the problems are somewhat removed and abstract. Specific intellectuals, in contrast, must confront their own real-life everyday material conditions, not abstract problems that they assume other people have. This casts specific intellectuals into positions that are parallel and similar to everybody else's. Second, specific intellectuals are similar to the masses in that everyone has to deal with multinational corporations (like the testing industry), exploitation of women and workers (like secretaries and graduate assistants), and administrative surveillance and policing (like principals, deans, and dons). The interview goes on to offer an elegant theorization of the derivation of the specific individual in France. In terms of social justice activism, it is important to notice how Foucault's position on the role of the intellectual is neither elitist nor condescending. His position does not claim that intellectuals have the same problems as factory workers, and he does not claim that intellectuals have the right or

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capacity to speak on behalf of factory workers. His position of `specific intellectual' is a way of doing intellectual work that is politically engaged with everyday life, cognizant of social injustices, and respectful of the specificity of political problems as they are experienced by different kinds of people. Power Affects the Body (1977)28 KEY QUOTATION I am quite aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I'm not saying for all that this is outside the truth. It seems to me the possibility exists to make fiction work in truth, to induce effects of truth with a discourse of fiction, and to make it so that the discourse of truth creates, `fabricates' something that does not yet exist, therefore `fictionalizes.' (1977, p. 213) In this interview, Foucault was responding to questions about his recently published first volume of The History of Sexuality. Responses in this interview reiterate several of the major concepts that had been explicated in `Truth and Power' (above). There are many overlaps between `Truth and Power' and this interview. The overall theme of `Power Affects the Body' is that there is a more complicated relationship between power and the body than had been generally assumed. Previous assumptions were that power affects bodies primarily in the form of repression. Repression refers to the social, cultural, historical and psychological mechanisms that prevent people from acting on their desires. Foucault's work, however, rejects that repressive hypothesis. In its place, his study of sexuality posits that power produces particular kinds of sexualities. In this interview, the pivotal word is fabrication.29 Fabrication is a key concept in this interview because it has two meanings ± to construct and to fictionalize. Foucault used the term fabricate deliberately to mean both things. To say that discourse fabricates sexuality means that laws and social norms make it possible to think about sexuality in particular ways.

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Power gets exercised any time people interact with laws and norms (by writing them, obeying them, fighting them, or ignoring them). Each time we engage in those interactions (power relations) we make up a sexual way of being. To make up a sexual way of being is to fabricate sexuality in the senses of both creation and fiction. The first questions in this interview are about the relationship between Foucault's previous books about madness, and his most recent book about sexuality. He explained that he did want to write parallel histories, one of madness and the other of sexuality. The idea was to show elements in both domains that are permitted and forbidden, or normal and abnormal. These parallel histories allow us to recognize the development of `the great technology of the psyche' (p. 208) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By `the great technology of the psyche,' Foucault was referring to the rise of psychology as a science and as an increasingly popular way of thinking about normality. As the scientific knowledge about psychology developed, this science also contributed to the fabrication of sexuality and madness as it made up ways of thinking about normality and abnormality. Later the interview goes on to explain that Christian practices have also fabricated sexuality. The example given in this interview is that of confession.30 In Catholic practices, the way people talk about their sins constructs a discourse about normal and abnormal sexuality. In this way, practices of Christianity also contribute to the network of power relations and the fabrication of sexuality. The discussion of bio-power then leads to Foucault's clarification of the roles of institutions and individuals in the exercise of power. At this point, his philosophy is characteristically nuanced. In his definition of power, he objected to analyses that cast either the state or the individual as the sovereign or locus of power. Traditional political analyses tend to assume an agonistic relationship between the state and the individual; some analyses see the state as exerting power over the individual and some analyses see the individual as exerting power over the state. Foucault was objecting to both positions. He used the term sovereign to indicate the belief in state power or individual power. `Sovereign' here means that somebody (person) or something (state or group) exercises power. In this interview, Foucault

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clarified that his analysis of power includes more modalities than sovereign power. He asked us to recognize that each of our interactions with the world is an exercise of power unto itself; the power that was exercised yesterday is not the same as the power we will exercise today. We can create ± fabricate ± our possibilities anew each time, never in a vacuum, always enmeshed with a whole network of historical conditions. Foucault's history of sexuality is a study that helps us to see more clearly the network of historical conditions that surround us. Sexual Choice, Sexual Act (1982)31 KEY QUOTATION [T]he important question here . . . is not whether a culture without restraints is possible or even desirable but whether the system of constraints in which a society functions leaves individuals the liberty to transform the system. (1982b, p. 327) Foucault's homosexuality was not a secret. Moreover, his writings included philosophical and historical studies about sexuality, homosexuality, and the public discourse on sexuality. Interviewers frequently asked him to explain his views on homosexuality and this interview is one such occasion. Homosexuality is a sensitive and highly charged topic in some circles. Some people may find it quite difficult to think critically about homosexuality and sexual preferences. It should come as no surprise to find that Foucault's views on homosexuality were complicated, subtle, and nuanced. As a way of trying to clarify his stance as expressed in this interview, here are some questions that might be asked by today's readers: 1

Are people born homosexual or is it a choice? Can homosexuality be attributed to nature or nurture? The nature/nurture question has dominated public discussion about homosexuality. In direct response to this question, Foucault responded, `No comment.' Elaborating on his refusal to speak about this issue, he stated that

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he had no expertise in this area of study. He refused to express an opinion on this question. One way to understand Foucault's deliberate silence on this issue is to recognize that he was genuinely not interested in the question of whether homosexuality was attributable to nature or nurture. In other writings, he called such questions `tiresome.' For one thing, scientists and philosophers have been studying the nature/nurture question for a very long time, and have never been able to come to any satisfactory conclusion. For another, from Foucault's point of view, finding an answer to that question does not necessarily help us live our lives in a more satisfactory way. The nature/nurture question does not generate provocative questions about how we might live; instead, it backs us into a philosophical dead end. With respect to many of these perennial philosophical questions (like nature/nurture, determinism/free will, chicken/egg), Foucault's response was to ask a different question. In the history of philosophy, we can see an analogy: Enlightenment philosophers eventually rejected the earlier Scholastic question of `How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' and they turned their attention to other kinds of questions. Similarly, in his approach to studying the history of sexuality, Foucault rejected the question of whether sexuality has its origin in nature or nurture. He was more interested in studying the history of how sexuality has been talked about and governed. Is sexuality controlled primarily by instinct or laws? In his study of sexuality, Foucault paid attention to legal systems and to the specific laws (both religious and secular) that operated in any historical time period. However, he never assumed that laws were necessarily reflective of historical practices;32 people do not always behave the way the law says they should behave. Laws are only one small aspect of any historical context, and there are many more factors that contribute to the discourse of sexuality in any given time or place. Just as Foucault took a non-committal stance on the question of nature/nurture, he also refused to take an unqualified position on the question of instinct or law: `Sexual behavior is not, as is too

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do' (p. 322). In Foucault's philosophy, sexuality is always a complicated construct, and it is influenced by a whole gamut of historical circumstances that include ± but are not limited to ± instinct and laws. Should societies tolerate all sexual acts? To this question, Foucault responded with an unequivocal `no': `there are sexual acts like rape which should not be permitted whether they involve a man and a woman or two men' (p. 324). Foucault's stance on this issue is that there are sexual acts that are absolutely wrong ± unethical and immoral: `I don't think we should have as our objective some sort of absolute freedom or total liberty of sexual action' (p. 324). Foucault's writings always challenge the restrictions on our behavior, and they always question the imposition of social norms. At the same time, his writings do not advocate categorical acceptance of any and all behaviors. Foucault's philosophy is profoundly critical of existing norms and customs, but that does not imply that `anything goes.' His philosophy does not invite us to abandon moral judgments ± quite the contrary; it provokes us to examine all of our moral judgments more rigorously, more historically, and more graciously. Should we support the legalization of homosexual marriage? Foucault called this question `fundamentally obscure.' The problem is that `marriage' is not a simple thing, it is not the same everywhere, and it can entail a whole range of advantages and disadvantages. Depending on local laws and customs, marriage might include legal rights, possession, insurance, prohibitions, property and inheritance, custody of children, and/or taxes. Historically speaking, marriages all over the world have been arranged for purposes of consolidating property and forging political alliances. Marriages have traditionally imposed heavy restrictions on women, who often did not have any choice in the matter of whom to marry. The institution of marriage has historically turned women into property, stripped them of their rights to pursue careers, subjected them to their husbands' rape and battery, and deprived them of

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legal protection or other recourse within the marriage. For these historical reasons, the question of marriage for homosexuals must be made more complicated than a simple yes or no. In order to address the question of gay marriage carefully and critically, we should consider the possibility that the institution of marriage might entail old-fashioned and oppressive customs in addition to privileges and social sanctions. Many societies impose heavy social and religious pressures on heterosexual people to get married, and heterosexual people may feel as though they have no choice but to get married in order to avoid social ostracism. If we look at marriage in this way, it looks less like a human right and more like a system of oppression. From that point of view we can see why Foucault called the issue `obscure.' He did not say that marriage was a good thing or a bad thing. Rather, in response to questions about gay marriage, he took the position that we should look critically at the institution of marriage in general and examine the degree to which it might function as a right, a privilege, and/or an oppressive custom. Should homosexuals be allowed to be teachers? Foucault responded that this question has been `wrongly formulated.' He argued that homosexuality is simply outside the realm of relevant factors to be considered when assessing a person's suitability for any profession: `A homosexual teacher should not present any more of a problem than a bald teacher' (p. 325). What about teachers who use their position to promote homosexuality? To this question, Foucault responded that this practice would not be desirable; teachers should educate children about cultural diversity, but they should not promote any particular lifestyle. At the same time, however, current practices in schools ± including anti-gay propaganda, the falsification of history, and the censorship of information about homosexuality ± are prejudicial, unjust, and potentially damaging to children. What about the problem of teachers who seduce their students? To this question, Foucault responded that more students have been seduced by their heterosexual teachers ± if only because there have been more heterosexual than homosexual teachers. In any case, the problem of the sexual seduction of students cannot be

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work attributed to homosexuality. The fear of seduction cannot reasonably be a factor in the consideration of whether homosexuals should be allowed to be teachers. In sum, the selection of teachers should be based on factors that pertain to the ability to educate students, not on factors (like sexuality) that are completely unrelated to any professional qualifications. Feminist intellectuals in the United States have argued that gay men are fundamentally different from lesbians. Do you agree? To this question, Foucault's response was to laugh aloud. We might imagine several reasons why he would find this question amusing. Nevertheless, the answer that he gave was to say that the characterization of lesbians that has been formulated by U.S. academic feminists does not represent the views of lesbians everywhere in the world in all social classes. Is sadomasochism (S & M) a kind of gay perversion? Foucault's response to this question is fairly involved, creative, and maybe somewhat playful. He called his response a `hypothesis,' and in skeletal form, it goes like this: . Heterosexual relationships have two distinct phases of pleasure, namely sexual courtship (the `chase') and the sexual act. In western cultures there are highly developed customs for intensifying pleasure in both of those phases, although for heterosexuals, the pleasures of the courtship phase are more apparent in cultural artifacts like literature. . Homosexuality has been widely outlawed and disparaged, which has had the effect of prohibiting the courtship phase and the pleasures associated with courtship. Therefore, unlike heterosexuals, homosexuals have been deprived of the pleasures of courtship, and the only phase of pleasures available to them is the sexual act. . Having been denied the excitement and novelty of the courtship phase, homosexual relationships have instead concentrated on intensifying the pleasures of the sexual act. . Sadomasochism is just one of many possible variations in the vast array of sexual pleasures that are available to humans. For homosexuals, the cultivation of sadomasochistic pleasures is one

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of the ways that sexual pleasures have been diversified in order to compensate for the loss of the pleasures of courtship. Just as Foucault cautioned us to regard the institution of marriage from multiple perspectives, similarly he prompted us to regard a wide variety of sexual practices from multiple perspectives. Again, he neither promoted nor rejected sadomasochism. Rather, he took a deeply circumspect position, and considered many possible perspectives on the issue. He recognized that sadomasochistic acts may, in some cases, be unhealthy or abusive; at the same time conventional heterosexual acts may, in some cases, be unhealthy or abusive, also. Foucault's position invites us to consider the possibility that sadomasochism may be just another option for people to experience sexual pleasure. What about the gay worship of youthful bodies? Foucault's response to this question resembles his response to the question about homosexual teachers. That is, lots of different people appreciate youthful bodies; this appreciation is certainly not restricted to gay men. There is abundant cultural evidence that heterosexual people are attracted to youthful bodies. Take, for example, the cliche of older heterosexual men's sexual pursuit of younger women. So Foucault's response to this question is that while it may be true that some homosexuals worship youthful bodies, that particular aesthetic preference does not distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals. What would it be like to have complete sexual freedom? Foucault's response reiterates his position on freedom as he articulated it in other places. It is Foucault's position that we do not know ± we cannot know ± what it would be like to be free. This is not to say that freedom is impossible or unreachable. Rather, it is to say that because all of us have been socialized and acculturated, it is impossible for us to think as if we had not already been socialized, at least to some degree. Socialization is inescapable. Our thoughts and conceptions will always be affected ± at least to some extent ± by our previous experiences, language, and personalities. Foucault did not argue that we are controlled by society's pressures, but he did argue that we cannot separate ourselves from our life experiences or pretend that we never learned a language.

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Critical Exposition of Foucault's Work For Foucault, the impossibility to conceive of total freedom is not a cause for despair. Rather, this human condition is an opportunity for us to exercise creativity and imagination: If the relationships to be created are as yet unforeseeable, then we can't really say that this feature or that feature will be denied . . . As gays learn to express their feelings for one another in more various ways [they will] develop new lifestyles not resembling those that have been institutionalized. (p. 333)

This quotation points toward human creativity. Our language, previous experiences, and habits of mind have all constructed limitations on what it is possible for us to think and imagine. Foucault's philosophy provokes us to push against those limits, to allow ourselves to consider that we have possibilities that lie beyond our current capacities to imagine. Lastly, an important thing to keep in mind for understanding Foucault's position here is that most of the responses in this interview are imbued with a playful spirit. Many are humorous, and the tone is absolutely not pedantic or accusatory. Foucault's analysis of homosexuality cannot be understood separately from an experience of pleasure. This focus on pleasure does not mean that Foucault was somehow in denial about the injustices of homophobia or the history of horrific acts of violence that have been perpetrated against homosexuals. He was more than aware of these atrocities. At the same time, his philosophical position does not resemble the sort of moral outrage or self-righteousness that characterizes some other outspoken critics of this or that sexual persuasion. The best way to do justice to Foucault's moral philosophy is to speak out against all cruelty and enjoy a humble amazement for the surprising array of human diversity. 10 Are intellectuals more tolerant than other people of sexual diversity? Maintaining a playful spirit in his response to this question, Foucault basically said that intellectuals often speak as though they were highly tolerant, but they do not always live up to their lofty pronouncements. For example, he noted that incest was a very common practice for a long time in human history; however, at the

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end of the nineteenth century, it was intellectuals who established the interdictions against incest. Intellectuals have shown less tolerance than other people for some sexual behaviors. As an overall view, Foucault expressed the position that intellectuals as a group are no more homogeneous in their level of tolerance than any other subculture; some are more tolerant than others. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress (1983) KEY QUOTATION My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (1983, pp. 231±232) This is a noteworthy interview for two reasons: first because of the circumstances surrounding its creation; and second, because two of Foucault's most famous quotations can be found here. Regarding the circumstances of its creation, the interviewers, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, were among Foucault's closest colleagues. By April 1983, it was known that Foucault did not have much longer to live. `On the Genealogy of Ethics' is a comprehensive summary of Foucault's latest ideas, garnered from free conversations in English among Dreyfus, Rabinow, and Foucault. Along with many other things, this interview provides us with Foucault's discussion about the purposes for The History of Sexuality, which as previously noted was originally intended to be a multi-book series. Tragically, of the six intended volumes, only three were completed before Foucault died. In their own book, the editors arranged this interview into four subtitled sections, which are summarized here in turn. Part I: History of the project33 This interview opens on a playful note. When the interviewers asked whether it was very important to understand our sexuality in order for

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us to understand our lives, Foucault responded, `sex is boring.' From that point, this section goes on to explain the problematic that Foucault was addressing in The History of Sexuality. This interview took place after the first two volumes of The History of Sexuality had already been published, and the focus was prompted by the fact that many people had apparently misunderstood Foucault's project. Foucault's use of the term sexuality is quite unfamiliar to us and therefore easily misunderstood. For example, many people have mistakenly thought that Foucault wrote a history of sexual practices. The History of Sexuality is not about sexual practices per se, and it is not an anthropological study of cultural differences in sexual norms. This section of the interview provides a clarification of what Foucault meant by sexuality. In order to try to explain this, it is helpful to think of an analogy with the term diet. When you hear the term `diet', you may immediately think of a weight-loss regimen. However, there are many other kinds of diet ± like Kosher, low salt, bio-sustainable, organic, raw, or gourmet ± that are based in various systems of thought, so it is not just about eating. Similarly, Foucault's term `sexuality' refers to an array of systems of thought ± it is not just about making love. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault asked questions about sex that are similar to the kinds of questions we could ask about diets. He was not interested in studying sex as much as he was interested in studying the systems of thought that constituted the rules and practices around people's understanding of their own sexuality. For example, it is fascinating, and perhaps inspiring, to think about why some people's diets are governed by religious beliefs, while others' diets are governed by scientific commitments, and still others' diets are governed by enjoyment and pleasure. Similarly, it is fascinating and instructive for us to try to understand what kinds of rules we are following in our beliefs about our sexuality. We do not want to behave like sheep, mindlessly following what other people tell us to do; therefore it is ethically worthwhile to ask ourselves where those rules come from. The objective of The History of Sexuality is not to evaluate or prescribe which approaches to sexuality are ethical; rather, the objective is to try to understand how our own sexuality has been shaped by complicated

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and culturally specific networks of beliefs, traditions, rituals, proscriptions, and knowledge. Given this kind of problematic, we can see how Foucault described his history of sexuality project as a study of the ethical care of the self. Foucault cited many examples from history in order to compare classical Greece with early Christianity. By comparing Greek with Christian lifestyles and highlighting the range of possible options, it becomes easier for us to look more critically at things we take for granted. The study is written as if to say, `Look. We do not have to think about sex the way we do. We can think about it very differently. Some sexual acts are definitely immoral, but some variations in sexual activities are simply a matter of personal taste.' In that way, his philosophy performs a political critique by asking us to question many of our beliefs and assumptions about sexuality. Part II: Why the ancient world was not a Golden Age, but what we can learn from it anyway This section of the interview addresses another way people misunderstood Foucault's work on sexuality. The common misunderstanding is that Greek sexual life was more permissive than Christian sexual life. However, in this interview Foucault emphasized that Greek sexual life was highly regulated, even though it was not regulated the same way as Christian sexual life. Greek care of the self (epimeleia heautou) was based in the ethics of living a beautiful life, and it took a great deal of knowledge and practice for classical Greek citizens to learn how to conduct themselves (including with food and sex) so that they would enjoy maximum pleasure without incurring any bad effects such as obesity, exploitation of others, sickness, loss of welfare, or social disapproval. Foucault clarified that the classical Greeks were interested in the relationship between good health and pleasure. This focus pertains to both food and sex. Sexual ethics were shaped by such questions as: What is the optimum frequency for sexual encounters that will maximize pleasure, good health, and vitality at the same time? What kinds of sexual encounters will cultivate a capacity for ethical leadership? In classical Greek morality, an ethical person is one who is in control of his own behavior; therefore, an ethical person needs to

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know himself well enough to recognize and resist any behavior in which he acts like a slave to his own sexual appetites. The end of this section includes one of Foucault's most famous quotations: `we have to create ourselves as a work of art' (p. 237). The context of this statement was a response to a question about Sartrian existentialism. Foucault differentiated his position from existentialism, saying that his own position was much closer to Nietzsche's than to Sartre's. Specifically, Foucault emphasized here that we recreate ourselves (for better or worse) each time we speak and act, and to the extent that we create ourselves anew, we create ourselves as writers create poems. Part III: The structure of genealogical interpretation There has always been quite a bit of debate in the literature about the degree to which Foucault's later works were similar to and different from his earlier writings. For example, some scholars have argued that Foucault's earliest writings were structuralist, the middle writings were archaeological, and the late writings were genealogical. Foucault himself sometimes agreed that his writings did not remain the same over the course of time. Nevertheless, in this interview, he offered a perspective that emphasizes the ways in which his books are interrelated. Foucault specified that genealogy has three axes, namely the axis of truth, the axis of power, and the axis of ethics. He said that Madness and Civilization includes all three axes, but that those axes are not clearly formulated. He characterized The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things as being focused on the axis of truth. He described Discipline and Punish as an investigation along the axis of power. The axis of ethics he designated as the focus for The History of Sexuality. By describing his books in this way, Foucault made an argument that the trajectory of his writings should not be understood as being in a linear relationship or as a progressive development of one to the next. Instead, he invites us to see his body of work as an investigation along several different axes related to the problematic of the subject. In the remainder of this section of the interview, Foucault reiterated his famous four-part framework for studying the ethical construction of the subject, or one's relationship to oneself. In brief, the four aspects

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of this analytical framework ask: 1) What part of me is supposed to change? 2) On what basis (for what reason) should I feel motivated to change? 3) What am I supposed to do in order to make changes in myself? and 4) What am I supposed to be like after I have undergone this ethical transformation? The conclusions of Foucault's analyses are interesting in themselves. However, it is most important to remember to read his genealogy as provocative, playful, and politically critical ± to enjoy his ideas and allow yourself to be intrigued by them. His historiographical project does not ignore evidence from the past; at the same time, genealogy is a history of the present. As Foucault said in another interview: `I start with a problem as if it were posed in contemporary terms and try to make a genealogy of it. A genealogy means that I conduct the analysis beginning with a current question' (1984d, p. 460). Part IV: From the classical self to the modern subject The last section of this interview is devoted to the clarification of certain ideas that had been put forward in the first two volumes of The History of Sexuality. Again, the emphasis is not on providing documentation for historical facts, but rather on appreciating the ways in which understandings of Greek culture can help us unlock our assumptions about who we think we are. One interesting feature of this section is the discussion of writing, especially writing about the self. Some versions of history suggest that writing about the self is a modern phenomenon beginning (usually) with the essays of Montaigne. Foucault's version of history, in contrast, suggests that people have been writing about themselves for over 2,000 years. However, Foucault cautioned, even though people have been writing about themselves for a long time, the rules and contexts of writing about the self have changed. Noting that all skills require exercise, Foucault pointed out that the care of the self has entailed different kinds of practices at different times. For the Greeks, the purpose of writing34 was to be able to understand one's personal experiences, and in that way to write oneself into being: The point is not to pursue the indescribable, not to reveal the hidden, not to say the nonsaid, but on the contrary, to collect the

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already-said, to reassemble that which one could hear or read, and this to an end which is nothing less than the constitution of oneself. (p. 247) In contrast to Greek writing practices, Christian writing practices tended to be more like exercises in self-analysis. Greek writing was understood to be a practice of self-creation; it is as if the self is created in the process of the writing. In contrast, Christian writing was understood to be a practice of self-discovery; it is as if the self already existed, and the writing is a way of uncovering what is already there. Foucault's history emphasizes these differences so that we can have a wider repertoire of ideas to fuel our creative thinking. Reading this interview, we are provoked to imagine dramatically different ways of thinking about who we might become. The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom (1984)35 KEY QUOTATION The idea that power is a system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom cannot be attributed to me. (1984e, p. 442) This interview took place only five months before Foucault died. Like most of his interviews, it serves as a venue in which terms from his books are clarified and his articles are elaborated. It covers several topics including liberation versus freedom, care of the self, subjectivity, and Habermas's philosophy. For the moment, our summary will concentrate on only one of the many topics, namely the relationship between truth and power. In the middle of the interview, Foucault stated that the central question for western philosophy is the question of how western culture became so obsessed by a search for truth, to the exclusion of almost all other aims and purposes. It is Foucault's position that western culture is defined by a search for truth the way a fish's life is defined by water. Just as `it takes a smart fish to see water,' it also takes an unusually perceptive philosopher to `see' the search for truth that utterly engulfs

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western culture. For all of us, it is extremely difficult to discern the particularity of something for which we have never encountered any alternatives. In order to understand Foucault's statement about truth in western culture, it may be helpful to pose possible alternatives. Here, as a strategy of explanatory contrast, we will refer to the traditional Chinese cosmological principles of yin and yang. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang function as the fundamental complementary principles whose relationship constitutes the whole make-up of the universe. Traditional Chinese cosmology is not defined by a search for truth. Rather, it is defined by the search for balance between yin and yang. The focus of traditional Chinese philosophical discernment is not to figure out whether yin is true or yang is true, or whether some combination of them is true. The objective is not to use the principles of yin and yang to arrive at the truth. While western civilization has been dominated by a pursuit of truth, Chinese civilization has been dominated by a focus on balance and proportion, specifically with respect to the complementary principles of yin and yang. Another example of an alternative to the western preoccupation with truth can be found in U.S. pragmatist philosophy. Foucault never wrote explicitly about U.S. versions of pragmatist philosophy, but for purposes of clarification, pragmatism provides another contrast that helps to differentiate the traditional dominance of truth in western culture. Pragmatist philosophical investigations are not concerned with the search for truth; rather, pragmatist philosophy searches for effective means toward specified ends. The paths of reasoning that characterize pragmatism are not evaluated by the degree to which they conform to or depart from the truth. Rather, they are evaluated by the consequences of actions, and the degree to which those consequences accomplish specified aims. In this way, similar to Foucault's philosophy, pragmatism has also constituted a radical break from modern philosophical projects' focus on truth. To summarize: yin and yang comprise a philosophical milieu focused on balance; pragmatism comprises a milieu focused on effectiveness. Other alternatives to a search for truth might include a focus on aesthetics in which beauty or pleasure become the dominant

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themes. It is Foucault's assertion that the search for truth has been the defining concern of western philosophy, at least since Descartes. In most western cultures, you can recognize the search for truth in many facets of everyday experiences: in the high social status afforded to the sciences (more than to morality or the arts), in the scholarly demands for evidence (more than for communicative effectiveness or poetry), and in the persuasive force of logic and validity (more than pleasure or beauty). An aspect of the relationship between truth and power comes through in Foucault's critique of the western truism `the truth shall set you free.' Western philosophy has been preoccupied with the search for truth partly because of the assumption that truth is associated with freedom, and that falsehoods are a kind of imprisonment. This preoccupation with truth also involves power relations in so far as certain types of knowledge have a higher `truth status' than others. If some people have more access to high-status knowledge than others, then they are perceived to have more power. Foucault's histories describe this relationship of truth and power as the definitive character of modern western philosophy. Foucault criticized this understanding of the relationship of truth and power, and therefore of truth and freedom. In this interview, he elaborated his radically different ideas by using the term games of truth. In this context, `game' does not mean entertainment or diversion; rather, it means a kind of contest with rules: `when I say ``game'', I mean a set of rules by which truth is produced' (p. 445). We can begin to understand what Foucault meant by this phrase if we remember the formulation that `history is written by the victors.' Similarly, truth is fabricated in relation to the victors. This does not mean that truth is determined once and for all; there is a continual struggle ± a game ± in which competing perspectives vie for status and acceptance. When Foucault uses the term `games of truth,' he is referring to the ways in which ideas and beliefs circulate, compete, transform, become established, and get undermined in various times and places. One example from history that helps to illustrate what Foucault meant by games of truth can be seen in the way in which the Christian Bible was compiled. Before the time of Jesus of Nazareth (`B.C.'), there was a collection of books revered by Jews as the Torah and by Muslims

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as the Koran. Later, Christians referred to those writings as the `Old Testament.' Following the life of Jesus of Nazareth, there appeared many other writings (including many letters by Saul of Tarsus, who became St. Paul). Christians considered some of these writings to be holy works, inspired by God and the belief in Jesus as the Messiah. From 1545 to 1563, there was a meeting called the Council of Trent. At this meeting, several bishops, clergy, and Church officials met to discuss which of these writings (books, stories, and letters) should be canonized as the books of the Bible. If you are a particular kind of Christian, you may believe that the Church officials were doing the will of God as they chose the books. If you are not a particular kind of Christian, you may believe that the books were chosen according to some other criteria. In either case, you can see that the books of the `New Testament' now exist as the product of power relations (whether sacred or secular). This history of the creation of the Bible helps us to understand what Foucault meant by games of truth; there are sets of rules of engagement in which knowledge is maneuvered, and out of which truths are produced, challenged, and rewritten. Finally, in this interview, Foucault summarized the shape of his philosophy of power: `There are three levels to my analysis of power: strategic relations, techniques of government and states of domination' (p. 448). Strategic relations include games of truth. Techniques of government are the things that people create in relation to those truths (e.g., sciences, beliefs, laws, and disciplines). States of domination are the abuses of authority like slavery and child abuse in which people have no control over what happens to them. For Foucault, ethics meant how we treat ourselves ± how we relate to ourselves ± especially in our work to free ourselves, whatever that means. This ethical work can take several different forms. Sometimes we care for ourselves by regulating what we eat or how we spend money. Sometimes we try to live up to visions of goodness or strength, and sometimes we work to feel autonomous and break ourselves free of norms and expectations. Sometimes we try to intensify our feelings of pleasure, and sometimes we try very hard to deny ourselves pleasures. Sometimes we behave like care-givers, and sometimes we see ourselves as being needy of care. Sometimes we exert our authority over other people and at other times we try to be of service to others.

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The fascinating thing is that we do all of these different things in the name of freedom. `The Ethics of the Concern for Self' is a way of taking a step back and looking at our own behavior ± examining who we have become. We can never step outside ourselves to get an objective view, but we can take on a subjective perspective of curiosity, wonder, courage, and compassion as we watch our lives unfold in exquisite and maddening ways.

Chapter 4

The Prolific Writer and Thinker

In its relentlessly critical mode, Foucault's philosophy challenged most of the boundaries that circumscribe traditional disciplinary fields and their methodological approaches. Either in spite of those challenges or because of them, Foucault's work has been taken up in a startling array of intellectual fields, ranging from philosophy and history to social work, religion, and education. Alan Sheridan, who translated many of Foucault's works from French to English, describes its reception and influence this way: There was no discipline, with its institutions, journals, internal controversies, conceptual apparatus, methods of work, within which Foucault could carry out the task he had set himself. Indeed, there was a sense in which, like Nietzsche's, his work would have to be carried on outside, even against, the existing academic frameworks. (Sheridan 1980, p. 208) Foucault refused to advocate specific political agendas or methodological directives for intellectual inquiry. He also discouraged readers from following his lead: `What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis . . . But as for saying, ``Here is what you must do!'', certainly not' (Foucault 1980a, p. 62). Nevertheless, the appeal of Foucault's work has been so extensive that there is a substantial literature of Foucaultian scholarship, some focused on the interpretive question `What did Foucault really mean?' and others focused on the application question `How might Foucault's philosophy extend to areas beyond those he himself engaged?' Here, the reception and influence of Foucault's work will be organized into two parts according to the following questions:

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The Reception and Influence of Foucault's Work How has Foucault's work been received in various philosophical contexts: French, German, and English? What has been the influence of Foucault's work in academic disciplines: history, education, feminisms, and queer theory?

Philosophy: Reception in French, German, and English Philosophy as a disciplinary field can be divided according to different criteria (e.g., by period, by topical focus, or by purpose), and one common distinction, relevant to Foucault's work, is that between Anglo or analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. There is no clear definition of either term, and there is disagreement about the relationship between the two. However, the terms are still used in university philosophy departments in which faculties are typically identified as analytic or continental philosophers.1 Broadly speaking, much of the philosophy from the analytic end of the philosophical spectrum was originally written in English, so the term `Anglo-philosophy' is often used to connote analytic traditions. In contrast, continental philosophy is traditionally written in German or French, and tends to take up Nietzschean and Heideggerian issues by asking what it means to be human in the world. With an unusual degree of unanimity, Foucault's work is classified as continental philosophy. Some scholars argue that reception of Foucault's work in continental traditions has been different from its reception in English-speaking or Anglo traditions (i.e., Great Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). For example, Vincent Descombes, a contemporary French philosopher, said, `The French Foucault and the American Foucault are not two sides of one and the same thinker: they are philosophers who hold entirely incompatible doctrines' (1987, p. 20). Richard Rorty, a U.S. philosopher, explains the difference this way: [T]he American Foucault is Foucault with most of the Nietzscheanism drained away. The French Foucault is the fully Nietzschean one . . . Insofar as the French Foucault has any politics, they are anarchist rather than liberal. (Rorty 1991, p. 193, emphasis in original)

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At the same time, it may not always be so easy to draw a sharp distinction between Foucault's reception in continental and Anglo traditions. For one thing, some of Foucault's work appeared originally in English and was directed to English-speaking audiences. For another thing, he worked very closely with colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley. Some Foucault scholarship written in English is aligned more closely with continental philosophy than with analytic philosophy. There may be some extreme cases in which the reception of Foucault's work in Anglo traditions is dramatically different from his reception in continental traditions, but there is also a continuum between the two extremes in which Foucault's work has been received with thoughtful nuance. The scholarship on Foucault's work is abundant. This chapter does not attempt broad coverage of the reception of his work all over the world. Rather, it highlights only a handful of exceptionally prominent examples written in French, German, and English. French philosophy Foucault's reception and influence in French philosophy reached its height in the 1980s. Since that time, his influence in France has declined, some would say virtually disappeared.2 There are two famous contemporary French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze (1988) and Jean Baudrillard (1987), who wrote books with Foucault's name in the title. Along with Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard are regarded as nonrepresentational philosophers, meaning that their work tends to follow in the tradition of postmodern critique rather than modern metaphysics. In the overall realm of philosophy, Foucault, Deleuze, and Baudrillard are more similar than different. All of them engage in various ways with the legacies of Marx, Freud, and structuralism. Gilles Deleuze (1925±1995), French philosopher and political theorist, published a book in 1988 entitled simply Foucault. Deleuze and Foucault were friends, and in his writing, Deleuze refers to Foucault as `Michel.' One of Deleuze's most famous books is AntiOedipus (1977), which he co-wrote with FeÂlix Guattari, French philosopher and psychoanalyst.3

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According to Deleuze, Foucault was interested in power, but Deleuze himself was interested in desire. Deleuze explained that his philosophy differs from Foucault's because it deals with a different set of issues that arise `given my primacy of desire over power' (Deleuze, p. 186). It was Deleuze's stance that power was a useful analytic approach for macro issues, those that appear at the level of societies; however, he claimed, theories of power were not so useful for micro issues, those that arise between two people or within one person. Expressing both admiration and critique for Foucault's work, Deleuze said, The last time we saw each other, Michel told me, with much kindness and affection, something like, I cannot bear the word desire . . . [However] for my part, I can scarcely tolerate the word pleasure. (Deleuze 1997, p. 189) Foucault's philosophy tends to be critical of psychoanalytic traditions, while Deleuze's philosophy aligns more comfortably with aspects of psychoanalysis, especially with the work of Jacques Lacan. Foucault's foremost biographer, Didier Eribon (1991), suggested that Foucault and Deleuze parted ways in the 1970s over the issue of terrorism. Jean Baudrillard (1929±2007) was a French philosopher of postmodernity. One of his famous books is Simulacra and Simulation (1994) in which he theorized that simulacra change meanings over time.4 Baudrillard's analysis of different simulacra bears some resemblance to Foucault's analysis of different kinds of resemblance in The Order of Things. Both philosophers claimed that there has been a historical shift from an earlier time when language and symbols could represent reality, to a more recent time when language and symbols no longer have referents to back them up. Foucault and Baudrillard were both disenchanted with Marxist and communist movements for social justice. Baudrillard's (1993) philosophy is famous for announcing the end of reality as we have known it: The end of society, the end of labor, the end of production, the end of political economy, the end of the signifier/signified dialectic. In 1987, he wrote a book with the

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provocative title Forget Foucault (Oublier Foucault). In it, he described the end of power, and claimed that Foucault theorized about a kind of power that was dead. Baudrillard also reiterated Deleuze's view on the roles of power and desire: One can only be struck by the coincidence between this new [Foucault's] version of power and the new version of desire proposed by Deleuze and Lyotard . . . Such a coincidence is not accidental: it's simply that in Foucault, power takes the place of desire. (Baudrillard 1987, p. 17) After the 1980s, both Foucault and Baudrillard tended to be more influential in English-speaking contexts than in France. German philosophy: Habermas JuÈrgen Habermas (born 1929) is a German philosopher who wrote The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Habermas's critique of Foucault's work is famous, and there has been extensive scholarship on the Foucault-Habermas debate (see, e.g., Kelly 1994; Flyvbjerg 1988; Ingram 1994). Habermas's critique is exemplary of the modern philosophical critique of postmodernism. Habermas argued that Foucault's philosophy is not critical theory because Foucault did not contribute to the cause of furthering rationality as a path toward human liberation. Habermas's political philosophy has been characterized as an extension of the Frankfurt School of social research, and it is generally classified as modern critical philosophy. His philosophy posits an `ideal speech situation.' Because his theory posits an `ideal' dimension, it resembles and extends structuralist theories by focusing on underlying patterns rather than on the messy surface practices. Habermas's philosophical project aims to complete the unfinished project of modernity, namely the development of rationality in the advancement of human freedom. Habermas's philosophy argues that rationality offers the best hope for freeing humans from the bondage of ideology and propaganda. On the basis of that commitment, Habermas regards Foucault's philosophy as an obstacle to advancement of humanity. Habermas and

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Foucault both focus on issues of politics and power however, they have incommensurable definitions of our political problems, and competing approaches to critical theory. For example, Habermas's critical theory provides us with a hopeful vision, a more just alternative to the world of oppression and exploitation to which we have unfortunately become accustomed. In the tradition of modern critical theory, it is the job of the public intellectual to explain what justice should look like. Habermas's philosophy aims to empower us with a vision of a better world; Foucault's philosophy does not. On that basis, Habermas argued that Foucault's approach to genealogy was cynical and by implication, demoralizing. In Habermas's political commitments, cynicism does not help people resist the oppression in their lives, so Foucault's philosophy does not help us with the moral imperative to move toward a more just world. From Foucault's perspective, Habermas mis-recognizes the critical agenda of genealogy. For example, Habermas made a remarkable statement distinguishing archaeology from genealogy: Under the stoic gaze of the archaeologist, history hardens into an iceberg covered with the crystalline forms of arbitrary formations of discourses . . . Under the cynical gaze of the genealogist, the iceberg begins to move. (Habermas 1987, p. 252) In this excerpt, we can see that, ironically, Habermas explicitly recognizes genealogy as an effective critical approach. History that effects change (`moves icebergs') is precisely the critical aim of genealogy. Genealogy does not offer a vision of a better world, so it is not critical in that modern tradition. Hence it belongs to a nonmodern critical approach. Philosophy in English: Rabinow, Rorty, Taylor, Chomsky, Hacking, Fraser Paul Rabinow with his colleague Hubert Dreyfus wrote Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, publishing the first

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edition in 1982 and a second edition in 1983 (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). This is one of the most important books about Foucault's work in English, partly because Dreyfus and Rabinow worked closely together with Foucault to write it. Its purpose is to explain Foucault's philosophy with respect to other major intellectual influences of the time, particularly structuralism and hermeneutics. This book also contains the famous `Afterword: On the Genealogy of Ethics,' an interview with Foucault that provides a pithy summary of his thinking in the last years of his life.5 Rabinow is the person who is primarily responsible for the access to and reception of Foucault's work in the United States. He is the series editor for the recent three-volume collection of Foucault's works in English, the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, currently the most authoritative collection of Foucault's work available in English. In addition, Rabinow, together with Nikolas Rose, is the editor of The Essential Foucault (2003), which is a portable version of the threevolume set. In addition to providing access to Foucault's writings in English, Rabinow has also intervened in certain areas of Foucault scholarship by pointing out what he regards as misleading appropriations of some of Foucault's terminology. For example, Rabinow and Rose (2003) argued that Foucault's term bio-power has been misused by both Giorgio Agamben (who wrote The Coming Community, 1993) and Antonio Negri (who co-wrote Empire with Michael Hardt, 2001). Rabinow also formulated a statement on Foucault's contentious reception in both philosophy and history. Explaining that Foucault combined the best of both worlds by working with `philosophical concepts and `detailed empirical inquiry,' Rabinow continued: `This deceptively simple rule of thumb provided him with a powerful means to counterbalance the weaknesses and to multiply the strengths of standard historical and philosophical approaches' (Rabinow 1994, p. xi, emphasis in original). Finally, Rabinow reminded us that Foucault's analysis of power ± in terms of sovereignty, discipline, governmentality ± does not apply to successive historical periods, but rather, sovereignty-discipline-governmentality together constitute a triangle of power. Richard Rorty (1931±2007) was an American philosopher in the tradition of pragmatism and professor of philosophy at Princeton

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University for 21 years. He was a public intellectual who appeared on television and radio. His writing also appeared in popular newspapers and magazines. Rorty also wrote explicitly about Foucault's work. Pragmatism is an example of a philosophical tradition that is neither analytic nor continental. In fact, in one of his books, Rorty (1986) argued that analytic and continental traditions were not oppositional but rather complementary. Rorty's pragmatist philosophy was focused on discerning useful and effective modes for addressing given problems. For pragmatists, philosophy is not a search for truth, and that feature provides a point of intersection between pragmatism and Foucault's philosophy. Rorty's pragmatist approach to philosophy provides us with an interesting case of the reception of Foucault's work because Rorty's interpretation of Foucault is neither polemical nor dismissive. Rorty contrasts Foucault's theory of knowledge with those of Descartes and Hegel; he then explains ways in which Foucault's approach to knowledge resembles Nietzsche's. Rorty does not approve of the anarchism suggested in Foucault's political critique but at the same time, he ends by commending Foucault's work for `reaching for speculative possibilities that exceed our present grasp, but may nevertheless be our future' (Rorty 1986, p. 48). Charles Taylor6 is an analytic philosopher and political theorist. He has published one of the most elegant and compelling critiques of Foucault's work in an essay entitled `Foucault on Freedom and Truth' (1986). Taylor's argument explicates and affirms several dimensions of Foucault's philosophy, pointing out its similarities to Nietzsche's work. The crux of Taylor's criticism is that Foucault's theory of power does not sufficiently address issues of truth and freedom, and that Foucault's portrayals of some historical events tend to over-simplify the messy conditions of history: The problem is that Foucault tidies it [history] up too much, makes it into a series of hermetically sealed, monolithic truth-regimes, a picture which is as far from reality as the blandest Whig perspective of smoothly broadening freedom. (Taylor 1986, p. 98)

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Taylor makes a good point when he calls Foucault a terrible simplificateur. In many arguments, Foucault overstates the case for his radically alternative perspectives and glosses over the role of mainstream views. A charitable reading of Foucault's tendency to overstate perspectives is that it was a rhetorical strategy to make a point. That is, Foucault shaped his language to suit a specific audience, just as teachers emphasize particular viewpoints to suit different students. Noam Chomsky7 and Foucault participated in a televised debate in The Netherlands in November 1971. The transcript from this debate has been published in book form (Chomsky and Foucault 2006). The crux of the disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault has to do with their respective stances on the nature/nurture debate. Chomsky advocates a position favoring the role of nature. He argues that human faculties, particularly language acquisition, are hard-wired in our brains. Foucault, on the other hand, takes a position on the nurture side. He argued against Chomsky saying that we can account for human faculties through processes of history, learning, and experiences. Chomsky is, and Foucault was, engaged in serious political activism. Both of them are famous for working around the world in protest against exploitation and political injustices. Ian Hacking8 is a Canadian philosopher, historian, and mathematician. He has contributed to the critical scholarship on Foucault, and his own historical work is written in the same tradition as Foucaultian genealogy. Hacking's histories of statistics and multiple personality intersect with Foucault's work by focusing on clinical practices, critical history, and analyses of power relations (see, e.g., Hacking 1990, 1995, 1999, 2004). In his critique of Foucault's work, Hacking describes Foucault's philosophy as `extreme nominalism.' Hacking focuses on Foucault's rejection of the humanist subject, explaining that Foucault is no romantic, so his political stance is tough on hope: Foucault said that the concept of Man is a fraud, not that you and I are as nothing. Likewise, the concept of Hope is all wrong. The hopes attributed to Marx or Rousseau are perhaps part of that very concept Man, and they are a sorry basis for optimism. (Hacking 1986, p. 39)

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Hacking concludes this message with the poignant remark that Foucault's worldview does not accept any surrogates for hope. Nancy Fraser9 is a U.S. political scientist and social theorist. According to her, it is the job of political theory to work out programs of social justice that address social needs and political rights. Her critique of Foucault's work provides a nuanced analysis focusing on the relationship between Foucault and Habermas. Without taking a polemical position on either side, Fraser ultimately criticizes Foucault's philosophy for being `rejectionist' and failing to provide a meaningful alternative to the rationalist and humanist theories that his philosophy undermines (see Fraser 1989).

Foucault's Influence History French historians responded to Foucault's work within an intellectual context shaped by Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the Annales School. In contrast, Anglo historians have responded from an intellectual context shaped by the work of the historians R.G. Collingwood, E.P. Thompson, and John Toews. U.S. historian Alan Megill characterized Foucault's reception in the discipline of history as having three phases: ` ``non-reception,'' ``confrontation,'' and ``assimilation'' ' (Megill 1987, p. 125). According to Megill, in 1962 Fernand Braudel, editor of Annales (the journal) praised Foucault's The History of Madness. However, Foucault did not appear again in Annales between 1963 and 1969. On this basis, Megill characterizes the 1960s as the `non-reception' phase. He explains this non-reception by saying that French historians did not pay much attention to history of science, and Foucault's writing in the mid-1960s was primarily a history of science. Later, according to Megill, the confrontation phase happened in the 1970s when Braudel called Foucault a philosopher, not a historian. Historians' confrontations with Foucault's work were spurred outside France primarily by reviews written by Hayden White, the U.S. historian whose literary analyses of history caused a stir in

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historiography (see, e.g., White 1973a, 1973b, 1978). Another U.S. historian, George Huppert, in 1974 published a review of The Order of Things, arguing that Foucault was simply wrong about sixteenthcentury European history; Huppert argued that Foucault's analysis was based on unrepresentative texts and wrong interpretations. According to Megill, the confrontation phase ended and the assimilation phase began in France about 1970 and outside France shortly thereafter, when it became impossible to write about historiography without engaging with Foucault's work in one way or another. Megill doubts that Foucault's theories can be fully assimilated into the discipline of history. His reasoning is that conventional history has always entailed a search for truth; establishing the truth about the past defines conventional historical inquiry. But Foucault's work belongs to a genre other than the search for truth. In so far as history maintains its focus on finding the truth about the past, Foucault's work will never be fully assimilated or accepted into the discipline. Among the prominent French intellectuals who have explained Foucault's work to historians was Paul Veyne, French archaeologist and historian, now honorary professor at the ColleÁge de France. Veyne is famous for his article `Foucault Revolutionizes History' (1997). In a surprising and amusing assertion, Veyne characterized Foucault as a positivist historian. In philosophy, positivism is the belief that knowledge comes from sensory experiences (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell). This characterization of Foucault as a positivist came as quite a surprise to conventional historians who generally regard Foucault's work to be highly theoretical, even ideological. Nevertheless, Veyne argued that Foucault studied practices in the material world as opposed to concepts like ideology, gender, or the state. According to Veyne, Foucault did not write histories of concepts or ideas; rather, he studied practices ± the things people do. In his explanation of Foucault's focus on practice, Veyne wrote: Practice is not some mysterious agency, some substratum of history, some hidden engine; it is what people do . . . `practice' shares the fate of nearly all our behavior and that of universal history; we are often aware of it, but we have no concept for it. (Veyne 1997, pp. 153±154)

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If structuralism is the study of underlying patterns or abstract concepts, then Veyne's characterization corroborates the assertion that Foucault's work is not structuralist. Foucault preferred to study practices, so Veyne described Foucault's historical work as positivistic: The Foucault-style genealogy-history thus completely fulfills the project of traditional history: it does not ignore society, the economy, and so on, but it structures this material differently ± not by centuries, people, or civilizations, but by practices. (Veyne 1997, p. 181) Veyne's explanation of Foucault's historiography emphasizes the degree to which traditional histories are structured according to abstract concepts like capital, oppression, progress, and science. In contrast, Foucault's work focuses on visible things that happen in prisons, asylums, and bathhouses. Among historians who write in English, one influential collection of scholarship on the reception of Foucault's work in history is Foucault and the Writing of History, edited by Jan Goldstein (1994).10 With chapters by some of the most eminent historians in the United States. and France, this volume works to make Foucault's ideas accessible to historians by highlighting some aspects of his work that they may consider pursuing, and other aspects that are worthy of historians' criticisms. Finally, U.S. historian Hayden V. White11 has written extensively on Foucault's work. Both Foucault and White reject the search for truth as the necessary aim of historiography. White is famous for his analysis of historical `emplotment,' a theory that views historical writing in terms of literary genre such as tragedy, romance, or satire (see especially White 1973b). White historicizes Foucault's work, explicating the relationship between Foucault's theories and the social and intellectual contexts of its authorship, and emphasizes the degree to which Foucault's archaeologies and genealogies depart from standard historiographical fare. White's work has provided explanations and clarifications of Foucault's historical project in terms of mainstream history.

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Education12 In the field of educational studies, British educational sociologist Stephen J. Ball edited the first collection of essays explicitly engaging the work of Foucault in education. Published in 1990, Foucault and Education contains chapters written by nine educationists from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand. In their analyses of educational issues, these chapters draw primarily from Foucault's book Discipline and Punish. In 1996, James Marshall, an educational philosopher originally from New Zealand and contributor to the earlier Ball anthology, published Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. This book focuses on the philosophical issues of humanism and offers an elegant analysis of Foucault's relationship to Enlightenment commitments. In 1998, Foucault's Challenge was published, extending Ball's previous work on Foucault in educational studies. This volume, edited by Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan, brings together authors from Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States. Contributors to this book draw from a wide range of Foucault's works, and the chapters range from interpretations of Foucault's work to applications in such fields as political science and literary criticism. In 2004, another anthology appeared entitled Dangerous Coagulations? Editors Bernadette Baker and Katy Heyning selected for this volume papers from the inauguration of the Foucault and Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association.13 Also in the field of education, Michael Peters and Tina Besley published two books on Foucault: Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research (2007a) and Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of the Self (2007b). Clare O'Farrell14 deserves special mention for her contributions to the scholarship on Foucault in the field of education. In 1997 O'Farrell created a website that she maintains to provide `a variety of resources relating to the work of the famous French philosopher who lived from 1926 to 1984' (www.michel-foucault.com/). In addition to this website, O'Farrell has also published three books on Foucault (1989, 1997, 2005). She was also founding editor in 2004 of the Journal of Foucault Studies (http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/index).

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Foucault's philosophy, his concepts, theories, and histories have been appropriated to serve in multiple and contradictory projects in educational studies. The magnitude of disagreement is so great that it would be appalling if it were not also appropriate to Foucault's philosophy. Educational psychology Foucault studied psychology and psychiatry, so it might seem at the outset that educational psychologists would receive Foucault's work enthusiastically. However, that has generally not been the case. Very few educational psychologists have engaged with Foucault's work in their research. This reluctance to embrace Foucault may be because ultimately Foucault's work problematized the scientific assumptions that constitute psychology as a field of study. Furthermore, Foucault's approach to the study of psychology was not normative; he did not recommend best practices or evaluate the effectiveness of one or another approach to learning. In spite of this apparent incompatibility of intellectual goals between Foucault's work and educational psychology, he has had some influence in that area. For example, educational psychologists Steinar Kvale15 (1992) and Jack Martin16 (Martin 2006; McLellan and Martin 2005) have drawn on Foucault's work to provoke questions about issues such as self-efficacy, normality, learning theories, and research methods. As a former psychologist, Nikolas Rose also draws on Foucault's theories to examine the roles of `the helping professions': [W]hile many associate behavior techniques with manipulation and control, their practitioners stress their potential for enhancing skills of `self management' and helping clients gain control of their feelings and behavior; they see them as consonant with profound humanistic values. (Rose 1996, p. 230) Overall, however, in spite of its clinical focus, Foucault's work has not been received enthusiastically in educational psychology.

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Curriculum studies: knowledge production Curriculum studies is a broadly defined specialization with a focal interest in knowledge: its production, selection, history, uses, and applications. Foucault's work appears in the area of curriculum theory more than in other sub-specializations. Critical theories in education tend to be associated with curriculum studies, so Foucault's theories of power and knowledge have been cited in curriculum studies journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, the Journal of Curriculum Studies, Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. One of the most generative Foucaultian contributions for curriculum studies is his concept of power-knowledge. By studying the historical power dynamics that shape what we call knowledge, Foucault's theories have been used to shed light on the production of knowledge, and the histories and processes by which various curricula are created, aligned, revised, legitimated, and rejected. In curriculum theory, Foucault's concept of governmentality has been influential in discussions of power relations in schooling, and with regard to issues such as critical pedagogy and possibilities for freedom in schools. In their wonderful introduction, Barry et al. (1996) summarize Foucault's thinking about freedom this way: The possibilities for liberal forms of freedom may historically depend upon the exercise of discipline. Freedom, in a liberal sense, should thus not be equated with anarchy, but with a kind of wellregulated and `responsibilized' liberty. (p. 8) As this quotation illustrates, rather than opposing government and freedom, the notion of governmentality emphasizes that practices of freedom are themselves a form of governance. Governmentality is a term that allows us to talk about the norms by which we govern ourselves as free people. We as free people understand that we act in some particular ways, and not in other ways. We as free people have a notion (more or less conscious) of what `free person' means. In that way, `free person' is a normalized state, and that's what the concept of governmentality opens up for us as an area of inquiry, suspicion, and critique.

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For example, Rose investigates the ways free people govern themselves as free people, which is what governmentality means: [P]romises of self-assertion and self-control offer each of us access to those qualities that ensured the success of these we envy. But these progressive principles are double edged. They institute, as the other side of their promises of autonomy and success, a constant self doubt, a constant scrutiny and evaluation of how one performs, the construction of one's personal part in social existence as something to be calibrated and judged in it minute particulars. (1989, p. 239) To understand what Rose is saying, it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that governmentality is a bad thing or a good thing. Neither Foucault nor Rose argues that governmentality is something we should try to resist or promote. The point of Rose's analysis is to help us understand some of the mechanisms by which knowledge about ourselves is generated. For behaviors like voluntarily obeying traffic signals, it's easy to imagine why we might view governmentality as a good thing, a necessary thing, in a democratic society. For some other voluntary acts of compliance, the notion of governmentality may provoke us to take another look. Rather than regarding governmentality as a kind of power to be resisted in education, we can understand it as a lens through which we recognize ourselves and the ways we behave. Through the lens of governmentality, it is more difficult to disclaim ethical responsibility for our own actions; that is, we cannot so easily say, `It is because of the system that I act this way. It's not my fault. There are dominant social and political forces at work.' The lens of governmentality leads us to question ± not to deny ± the degree to which our actions have been dictated by social norms. At the same time, through the lens of governmentality, it is also more difficult to claim individual autonomy for our actions; that is, we cannot so easily say, `I have agency that allows me to resist the forces of domination. I am capable of acting independently, and I can take responsibility for my own actions.' Governmentality supports neither state control nor individual autonomy.

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For Foucault, governmentality, like genealogy, serves a criticalprovocative function. Governmentality is a deliberately nuanced theory. If you happen to be a person who is inclined to hold schools or state educational policies responsible for people's education, then governmentality challenges you to consider the possibility of individual responsibility; and if you are a person who is inclined to hold individuals responsible for their educational possibilities, then governmentality challenges you to consider the possibility of systemic factors (e.g., school systems or social inequalities). Foucault's theory of governmentality does not tell us which perspective is `true.' Ultimately, the concept of governmentality serves to undermine the individual-versus-state dichotomy and replace it with a perspective in which we understand freedom to be regulated by government, and government to be defined as a practice of freedom. This perspective, then, serves as a basis for us to be skeptical and critical every time we hear allegations of blame and responsibility that attempt to explain problems with the educational system, students, or teachers. Purposes of schooling As an example, consider what we know about the various purposes of schooling. Comparative education researchers and educational historians have shown a wide variety of purposes of schooling in different places and times, including social reproduction, vocational preparation, social assimilation, upward mobility, credentialism, and preparation for democratic participation. Those are debatable purposes and contentious issues in education, and they are all thinkable. Here is an example of something that is less thinkable: the purpose of schooling could be to learn how to intensify our experience of pleasure as we eat, dance, make love, and listen to music. Those purposes seem utterly foreign to our idea of schooling. We can hardly imagine what a school would be like that was designed for such purposes. We may even be unable to consider those purposes without also imagining prurient and lascivious behaviors. The idea that schools ± including curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments ± would be designed to cultivate our capacities for pleasure does not really make sense. What would a primary grade curriculum look like if the purpose

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of schooling were to cultivate enjoyment of life? How would we design a lesson plan to teach children to be more fun-loving? We may have difficulty envisioning the epitome of the most highly educated person as one who has the greatest capacity to take pleasure in life. We can hardly imagine how the intensification of pleasure would be recognized as a high moral achievement and honorable contribution to society. Foucault's historical studies show us that the cultivation of pleasure was a recognizable purpose of education in classical Greece; however, we are no longer like the classical Greek educators. Our ability to think about schooling is now shaped by a different combination of factors, resulting in different knowledge about the purposes of schooling. In terms of power-knowledge, the example of the purposes of schooling serves to show that our knowledge (about school in this case) has come about as the product of a `long baking process' of history, shaped by science, art, culture, language, religion, economics, law, and politics. Each of those disciplines has a turbulent history in which certain worldviews took precedence over others. Some ways of thinking became more acceptable than others. The following quotation, from the preface to Discipline and Punish, begins with the question, `But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here?': We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relations without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (1974, p. 27) Feminisms Given that many of Foucault's works focused on issues of sexuality, it is not surprising that feminists have taken his work seriously and contributed a wide range of scholarship. Foucault's reception in feminist circles has not been uniform. One way to understand the

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variety of receptions among feminists is to understand that there are many different kinds of feminisms, and depending on the strand of feminist theory, there have been different responses to Foucault's theories (see, e.g., Diamond and Quinby 1988). Most feminist theories regard Foucault with a mixture of critique and approval, appreciating that his theories advance the cause of sexual equity, and criticizing that his theories rarely recognize women or women's issues. There are many versions of feminism that have responded differently to Foucault's philosophy. This section summarizes only a few of the most widely referenced feminist positions. Early waves of feminist theories advanced the political position that 1) there is an essential difference between men and women, and 2) men and women should have equal rights. This tradition of feminism is sometimes referred to as `cultural' feminism in current debates. For over a century, feminist theories have been invoked on behalf of political projects of social justice equality, such as campaigns for women's suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment. Since many existing social customs and laws are based on the belief that there is a fundamental difference between men and women, this traditional version of feminism provides a theoretical basis for providing equal rights across essential differences. This belief in essential differences positions cultural feminists to fight against social laws and customs that enforce inequality between men and women. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, however, poststructuralist studies challenged essentialist thinking in several intellectual fields including feminism. There is quite a bit of writing by feminists about Foucault, and almost all of it takes a cautious or nuanced analytical and political approach. For his part, Foucault never claimed to speak on behalf of women, and he never aspired to an alliance with feminists. His historical accounts clearly acknowledged that women (especially those in classical Greece) have been treated as less than fully human. In that sense, feminists can appreciate Foucault's versions of history as being in support of their political project. Socialist feminism focuses primarily on the material conditions of women as members of an underprivileged group. Calling attention to the oppression and exploitation of women around the world, socialist

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feminists look to strategies of solidarity and consciousness-raising as political tools of emancipation. They advocate organizations of solidarity as political strategies of empowerment. Socialist feminism has derived much of its theoretical base from Marxism, and Foucault's philosophy is critical of Marxism. Socialist feminists criticize three features of Foucault's philosophy, saying that it denies agency, it does not contribute to solidarity and empowerment, and it is too pessimistic so it leads to political apathy. When socialist feminists accuse Foucault's philosophy of denying agency, they are criticizing his poststructuralism. The definition of `agency' for most Marxian political theorists is the capacity to resist the dominant ideology of capitalism and patriarchy. In Marxian-derived social theories, agency stands in dialectical opposition to capitalism, which has become the dominant ideology. Agency is usually defined in terms of resistance, but agency can also entail other acts of freedom, liberation, or emancipation. For socialist feminists, the structure that oppresses women is an ideology that is capitalistic and patriarchal. In order for women to liberate themselves from this ideology, agency is required. Agency is the power to resist domination. When socialist feminists assume a structure of ideological domination, then agency becomes the means of liberation. It is true that Foucault's philosophy does not rely on a notion of agency such as the socialist feminists endorse. This is because Foucault's analytical approach does not see the world in terms of a base structure (underlying pattern) and surface phenomena. Foucault's poststructuralism has abandoned the theory that there is a two-tiered reality of underlying structure and surface phenomena. If the theory does not acknowledge the underlying structure, then there is no need for agency. Agency (such as the socialist feminists define it) is only necessary when there is a dominant structural reality that needs to be resisted. Socialist feminists are persuaded by the reality and crucial importance of structural systems of oppression (capitalism and patriarchy), so they find Foucault's poststructuralism to be unrealistic, and his rejection of the structure-agency analysis to be politically impotent. Socialist feminists also criticize Foucault's philosophy for not supporting political solidarity. A socialist feminist political agenda is

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based on the model of labor unions in which solidarity is always politically desirable. In the face of a dominant ideology, socialist feminists look to strategies of solidarity among women for empowerment. In this political stance, women are assumed to be oppressed in the face of the dominant ideology of patriotism, and women need to band together for strength to oppose the dominant ideology that exploits them. Solidarity is strengthened when people see themselves as belonging to the same group ± when they identify themselves as members of a group that is working together toward a common cause or against a common enemy. Structural analyses like those of Marxism tend to look for patterns and similarities. Patterns and similarities have two advantages for structuralists: 1) patterns are compatible with rational scientific explanations like laws; and 2) similarities provide a theoretical basis for political solidarity. Based on the analysis of patterns and similarities, structuralists can maintain a commitment to Enlightenment rationality and also work against social injustices. This theory forms the basis for an emancipatory political agenda. Socialist feminists accuse Foucault's philosophy of promoting fragmentation instead of solidarity. The criticism comes from the perception that Foucault's analyses tend to seek differentiations and local variations where structuralists have established patterns and similarities. From Foucault's point of view, this kind of differentiation is appropriately critical because it challenges prevailing assumptions. However, from a socialist feminist point of view, differentiation undermines the basis for solidarity, which is the strategic means for overcoming oppression and gaining empowerment. In the view of socialist feminists, Foucault has refused to join the union that has been formed to fight against oppression. Queer theory Like poststructuralism, queer theory is not a sharply defined or delineated theoretical domain. And like poststructuralism, it is more recognizable by what it criticizes than what it stands for. There are two facets of Foucault's philosophy that have been favorably received by queer theorists. First, Foucault was gay and his philosophical analyses

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pay attention to gay issues, and second, Foucault's philosophy is critical of normativity including heteronormativity. Some scholars have suggested that Foucault's philosophy launched queer theory. In any case, the role of Foucault in queer theory was bolstered by the publication of David Halperin's (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Critical ideas from queer theory have been brought into educational studies through a book edited by William Pinar,17 Queer Theory in Education (1998).

Conclusion There is a famous folktale from Asia about three blind men and an elephant. According to this story, the first blind man touched the elephant's leg and said, `Elephants are like trees.' The second blind man touched the elephant's tail and declared, `Elephants are like snakes.' The third blind man touched the elephant's tusk and claimed, `Elephants are like ceramic.' The reception of Foucault's work in various intellectual domains has been something like the descriptions of the elephant. Analytic philosophers understand Foucault's logical arguments and ethical formulations, but they do not know what to make of his focus on clinical practices or the poetry of his language. Writers in rhetorical studies and literature make sense of the poetry and his exemplary mode of persuasion, but the details about obscure practices in psychiatric hospitals may seem unnecessary and off the point for them. Historians can relate to the meticulous empirical archival work in Foucault's studies, but they may be put off by his refusal to look at history objectively. With all these different characterizations and criticisms of Foucault's work, how are we to decide what he really meant? This is a clear question, but unfortunately, for any discussion of Foucault's work, it does not have a clear answer. If we follow in the spirit of Foucault's work, then we are obligated to accept ± however grudgingly ± that there is no `Real Foucault' out there. There is no `Authentic Foucault' that stands behind the discourse of Foucault. This lack of consensus on what Foucault `really means' can lead to considerable frustration and/or delight.

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Foucault is what we make of him. All the writings about his work have contributed to the meaning of Foucault. All three of the blind men's descriptions are correct. When we discuss Foucault's work, we become part of the discursive construction of Foucault. If we take to heart Foucault's essay `What is an Author?' then we begin to see him as an epistemic figure, an icon that anchors a certain vortex of conversations. When we read about all the different ways Foucault's work has been received in educational studies, history, philosophy, and the feminisms, it is helpful to remember the characteristics of Foucault's philosophy as provocative, problematizing, and poetic. The objective is not to arrive at certainty about the truth, but rather to seize the opportunity for thinking our lives afresh.

Chapter 5

A Philosophical Legacy

Foucault scholars disagree with each other about almost every aspect of his work. However, they agree on one thing: he was inconsistent. Foucault used terms like power and subjectivity with different meanings and inflections across his many books, interviews, and lectures. Some Foucault scholars have argued that some of the major concepts were developed and clarified over the course of his career. That may be so. At the same time, those terms sometimes take on different meanings within the same book. Another aspect of apparent inconsistency is Foucault's tendency to be contrarian. That is, for every firmly held assumption about truth, history, or ethics, he was likely to pose a challenge to it. Some critics of Foucault's work regard this characteristic of inconsistency as imprecision, sloppy writing, or bad philosophy. Certainly, that has been the reaction of some modern readers, and it is true that Foucault's writing offers few systematic definitions and no programmatic directives for conducting inquiry or redressing social injustices. His work is not an example of analytic philosophy.

Teaching by Example One path of insight into Foucault's philosophical project is to look at it in terms of pedagogical theory. In pedagogical theory we can analyze teaching as being comprised of three roles: providing, facilitating, and modeling. Most teaching includes all three, and different teachers may favor one over the others at different times for different purposes. Characteristics of these three roles are described in the following table:

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Providing

Facilitating

Lecturing Giving information Didactic instruction Resource for materials Expert consultant Expository genre Talk the talk

Coaching Designing activities Arranging practices Motivating Conducting exercises Administering assessments Scaffolding experiences

Modeling Embodying ethics Showing character Demonstrating attitude Role model Teaching by example Exemplar Walk the walk

Using this frame of pedagogical theory we can classify Foucault's philosophy as being most closely related to modeling or `teaching by example.' Classifying Foucault's work in terms of pedagogical modeling offers three key points by way of insight. First, people who are not educators may not recognize facilitating or modeling as important aspects of teaching. Non-educators often perceive lecturing as `real' teaching; teaching equals providing information. Along the same lines, some readers tend to assume that the role of philosophy is to provide solutions for problems and guidelines for action. Modern and analytic philosophies are regularly written in the form of lectures, and they can be classified as expository in genre. When we read philosophy, we generally expect to be informed about an issue. We expect philosophy to provide us with information, principles, and evaluations, just as we expect teachers to provide us with information, principles, and evaluations. But Foucault's philosophy does more than provide us with these things; it also facilitates and models. By means of provocative devices, Foucault's philosophy facilitates our ability to think critically. By means of its poetic devices, Foucault's work excites our imaginations and disconcerts our expectations. Foucault's work also exemplifies for us a particular mode of critical thinking. When Foucault problematized the foundations of modern philosophy ± including reason and the search for truth ± he was practicing an ethical life. His philosophy does not explain to us how we can be free, and it does not try to persuade us to resist dominant forces. Foucault does not enjoin us to `Do as I say.' In fact, he does quite the opposite; he entreats us not to follow him.

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Rather, Foucault's philosophy offers us a model ± an example ± of one person's striving to live an ethical life of critical proportions. We can take it or leave it. Just as non-educators may be unaware of the pedagogical importance of facilitating and modeling, some readers of philosophy may also be unaware of the value of provocative and exemplary philosophy. If we think in terms of pedagogical theory, we can appreciate that Foucault's philosophy is not limited to direct instruction. We can then begin to appreciate its performative qualities ± namely that it facilitates our capacity for thinking outside the box and it exemplifies an attitude of perpetual critique. Second, the three different teaching modes ± provider, facilitator, and model ± suggest different ethical relationships and power dynamics between teacher and student. In the mode of provider, a teacher is cast as an authority, and the students are cast as recipients of knowledge.1 This analysis of pedagogical modes is not meant to suggest that all lecturing is done in the provider mode, neither is it meant to imply that the role of provider is an example of bad teaching. After all, some lectures are crafted effectively to be sensitive and responsive to listeners, and providing information can be done in the spirit of giving a gift or serving a need. The point is that the provider mode casts teachers and students in positions of givers and receivers, and this mode defines leadership in terms of a particular kind of authority. Third, in terms of pedagogical theory, Foucault explicitly rejected the authoritative leadership position. He repeatedly warned us: `Do not look at me to tell you what to do!' The relationship between writer and reader that Foucault's philosophy engenders is more like that of role model than authoritative provider. David Owen (1995) has provided an analysis that contrasts legislative critique with exemplary critique. This contrast helps to explain the pedagogical genre of Foucault's work: Genealogy cannot legislate autonomy for us, it recognizes no grounds on which such an act of legislation could be secured, but it can (and does) exemplify its commitment to the value of autonomy in the form of its reflection on our present. (Owen 1995, p. 492)

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As a form of exemplary critique, genealogy is itself an act of transgression. In sum, legislative critique is like direct instruction; it teaches by telling, and bestows agency. Exemplary critique is like modeling; it teaches by example, and it embodies agency. The pedagogical genre of Foucault's work, then, suggests possibilities for reading that are not simply that of receiving information. If we read Foucault's work (or any other text) in an exemplary genre, then we will often find ourselves stopping in the middle of a page, looking up to gaze out the window, and reflecting. The writing makes you stop and think. When a text makes you stop and think, we call that text `generative.' The text does not just inform you; it also inspires you. When a text is generative, it may take you a very long time to finish it because in the process of reading, your mind becomes stimulated with new ideas. You may begin imagining all kinds of things ± perspectives you had never before considered, worldviews you had never identified, courses of action that you had never conceived of. A generative text pushes you to know new things; it generates knowledge. The generative qualities of Foucault's writing, then, are relevant to any consideration about what kind of knowledge is worthy of being included in an educational program.

What Does `Death of the Subject/Author' Mean Today? It is true that Foucault's theories function to undermine assumptions of anything essentially or transcendentally human. In some ways that seems like a tragedy; in other ways it opens up new possibilities. Foucault's thought exemplifies what critical scholarship might look like when the foundation of essential subjectivity has been displaced. Foucault's dismantling of essential subjectivity is regarded by some modernist philosophers as a grievous loss. Modernist philosophers are committed to pursuing the Enlightenment aspiration to the quest for truth, and that commitment is usually based in a belief in an essential human nature. A modernist commitment to an essential subjectivity goes something like this:

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The Enlightenment is a human achievement in which we learned that knowledge is not mysterious, and the king does not have more authority than ordinary human beings to determine what is true or real. The Enlightenment worldview promotes humanism: the belief that ordinary human beings have access to knowledge through science and reason. The capacity to think reasonably and scientifically is in our human nature. The Enlightenment commitment to human freedom is based on the belief that humans are endowed with the natural ± and therefore essential ± capacity for reason. This essential capacity constitutes the basis on which we can claim our freedom and declare our autonomy from external control. Why would we want to give up our belief in this essential part of being human?

Given that modern disposition, it is easy to see why modernist philosophers would object to Foucault's dismantling of the belief in the essential subject. To modernist philosophers, the loss of the essential subject feels like a step backward ± giving up hope on possibilities for human progress. However, there is another way to look at this `death of the essential subject.' To understand Foucault's position, it may be helpful to think about the difference between discovery and invention: We discover things that were already in existence, and we invent things that had not existed previously. For modernist philosophers, an essence is something that is possible to discover.2 Foucault did not think in terms of discoveries; rather, in most cases, he preferred to imagine that the world is continually re-invented. Critics argue that Foucault's rejection of the essential subject is a denial of human agency or a kind of anti-humanism. However, there is an ironic twist in that line of critique because the belief in an essential subject serves to deny agency in a different way. Within the scope of Foucault's critical philosophy, the argument against essential subjectivity goes something like this:

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The Relevance of Foucault's Work Today If we believe that we can discover our human essence, then that essence must have existed before us (a priori). If our essence is a priori, then we are not responsible for it. If we are not responsible for our essence, then our essence determines who we are, a condition that, from a certain perspective, seems like a denial of agency.

Foucault took the position that belief in essential subjectivity tends to be deterministic. In a sense, he took the more radically humanistic position that we can create ourselves. So when Foucault's theory announces the rejection of the essential subject, it also implies a rejection of determinism. Invented subjectivity, then, is a different kind of freedom from the kind of freedom modernist philosophers believe in. For educationists who believe that the purpose of education is to advance possibilities for freedom, this challenge to the definition of freedom may seem both disconcerting and hopeful. This is what Foucault meant when he issued the invitation for us to create ourselves as a work of art. Foucault did not reject the possibility of subjectivity; he rejected the imposition of an essential subjectivity. After all, he devoted a large portion of his work to philosophizing subjectivity. Foucault's critique of the essential subject is directed against the ways in which essentialism imposes limits on possibilities for being human. In dealing with the issue of subjectivity, Foucault displaced discovery and inserted invention. When discovery is devalued, then humanistic commitments to science and reason are also devalued. In place of discovery, Foucault's philosophy offers the inspiration and theoretical tools for creating ourselves. Rather than working to discover ourselves as part of a quest for truth, his philosophy dares us to create ourselves as works of art. Foucault's philosophy contains poetic elements, and this notion of the essential subject is an example of such a poetic irony. The irony comes as modern philosophers accuse Foucault's philosophy of abandoning possibilities for human freedom. But Foucault's philosophy invents a different kind of freedom, namely freedom from the limits imposed by modern philosophical definitions of freedom.

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What Does Foucault's Critique of the Will to Truth Mean in Education Today? In the Enlightenment, science and reason offered epistemological alternatives to mysticism and theology, so for over 200 years science and reason have constituted the philosophical path toward human freedom. In the tradition of Enlightenment, the assumption is that the truth will make us free. If you believe that science and reason are the ultimate accomplishments of human beings, then you will be persuaded (together with modernist philosophers) that the project of modernity has not yet been completed, and we need to `stay the course,' to keep following the path of science and reason in order to make progress toward the truth that will make us free. However, if you suspect that science and reason are culturally specific products of a particular historical era, then you will be persuaded (together with Foucault) that science and reason are not the ultimate accomplishments for all humanity, and that humans are capable of creating other ways of being in the world. What if we are incarcerated by our beliefs in Enlightenment reason? What if our assumptions about the relationship between truth and freedom are actually closing down possibilities rather than opening them up? Here is another ironic aspect of Foucault's philosophical message: Our pursuit of freedom has become a prison in itself. In some ways, we have allowed ourselves to become imprisoned by our will to truth. Considering Foucault's challenge to the will to truth, in educational studies we are confronted with an opportunity to reconsider what we have assumed to be the purpose of education. This challenge does not suggest that we abandon science or the will to truth. As Hacking (2004) reminds us, rockets will still get us to the moon. Foucault's challenge to the will to truth does not diminish scientific study. There is, in fact, a sense in which his challenge enhances and furthers scientific investigations. It does so by encouraging us to investigate everything. Foucault's challenge pushes us not to censor any conceivable line of inquiry, even if that line of inquiry may, at the outset, appear improbable or outlandish. In education, then, we are challenged to confront the limits that the will to truth has imposed on our assumptions about what knowledge is and what schools are for.

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How Foucault's `History of the Systems of Thought' is Relevant to Education In his Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault provided a schematic way of thinking about the formation of discourses over time. He specified four `thresholds' of discursive formation that occur in this order: 1 2 3 4

Positivity Epistemologization Scientificity Formalization

This approach to historical analysis is relevant to the way we understand the role of education in history. In order to understand what Foucault means by `thresholds of discursive formation,' we will illustrate these four thresholds by contrasting the history of the internet with the history of public schooling. By tracing the various stages of development of these two facets of life we can illustrate what Foucault meant, and we can show the relevance of his theories to education. Positivity is the first threshold of discursive formation. It refers to the point at which it is first possible to think of something. In our example, internet historians agree that the first description of a computer-based social network was in 1962 when J.C.R. Licklider wrote about a `Galactic Network.' In Foucault's terms, this writing means that the threshold of positivity has been reached. It is the first step into discourse. Epistemologization is the second of Foucault's thresholds of discursive formation. At the threshold of epistemologization, it becomes possible to talk about something with others. In the case of the internet, the threshold of epistemologization was crossed some time in the early 1960s when scientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A.) were discussing the idea, and starting to build the technology associated with it. The third threshold of discursive formation is scientificity. At this threshold, an idea has enough substance that we can start arguing about it. In 1965, for example, Lawrence Roberts and Thomas Merrill

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connected computers in New York and California, which was the first remote computer network. There were parallel developments in computer networking at MIT and NPL (National Physical Laboratories, U.K.). In 1967, these scientists met at a conference and discussed possibilities for building a network of computers. They had different ideas about technical mechanisms and design possibilities for computer networking. The threshold of scientificity had been crossed. The fourth and final of Foucault's thresholds of discursive formation is formalization. At this threshold, an idea is so widely accepted that it is taken for granted. At some point in the 1990s, people stopped asking what the internet was, and began asking about how they could use it. The internet had crossed the threshold of formalization (at least for most people in the world). The internet moved very quickly through the thresholds of discursive formation; however, other discourses of our everyday lives went through the thresholds of discursive formation much more slowly. For example, contrast the history of the internet with the history of public schooling in the United States. In the early days of the eighteenth century (following U.S. independence) Thomas Jefferson spoke out in favor of `universal education' as a means for preparing a democratic society. He drafted the Elementary School Act to provide for general public education. In the early 1800s, only a few public officials were debating the establishment of public schools. The idea of public education was not a popular one in those days because the general public at the time assumed that it was the responsibility of the family to provide tutoring and apprenticeships for their children. In the early nineteenth century, the idea of a public school in the United States did not make sense to most people. It took several decades, almost half a century, for the discourse of public education to cross the threshold of formation from positivity to scientificity. Over time, of course, schools became a topic of public debate, budgets were designed to provide schools and teachers, laws were enacted that governed the organization of schools, and schooling became an expectation for professional roles in society. All these domains together ± ways of thinking and talking, laws, customs, money, and people's identities ± comprise a discourse. Many domains

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support one another and interact to give meaning to what people refer to when they say `public schools.' It took many more decades after that for the discourse of public schooling to cross the threshold of formalization in the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was not generally taken for granted that public schools would be made routinely available to all children. Now, in many places of the world, the discourse of public schooling has crossed the threshold of formalization ± schooling is associated with almost every facet of people's lives. There are school systems, tests of teacher certification, and laws governing curriculum. Access to education is measured as one of the indicators of development of a society. It is difficult for many of us to imagine what life might have been like before schools were a routine part of growing up. We have become accustomed to the presence of public schools, and we take for granted many of the features that comprise the discourse of public schooling, including taxes and funding mechanisms, examinations, school buses and transportation, school uniforms, diplomas, curricular policies, teacher preparation, and highschool reunions. The discursive formation of the internet was very fast; it went from a spark in somebody's imagination to a routine aspect of everyday life in less than thirty years. The discursive formation of public schooling, in contrast, took place over centuries. According to Foucault's theory of thresholds of discursive formation, we must recognize that many discourses never reach the threshold of formalization. Some things that reach the threshold of positivity do not go on to reach epistemologization, and some things that reach epistemologization do not go on to cross the threshold of scientificity. In order to understand Foucault's thinking about thresholds, it may be helpful to think of an analogy to the `shelf life' of pop music. Many popular songs are recorded and broadcast publicly on radio or in clubs. After they are introduced into the music world, some songs go nowhere; they make very little impact in the culture at large, and they are forgotten by almost everyone within a year. Other songs catch on; they may become recognizable, and even well known to various groups of people. Still other songs grow in influence beyond the music world. Those songs may get picked up and further

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distributed by advertising, Muzak, films, or television shows. Analysts and historians do not have a theory that reliably predicts which songs will catch on and which will die quickly. We don't know why some songs carry through all thresholds of discursive formation and others do not. A pop song is not a discourse, but this way of thinking about the shelf life of pop music is analogous to Foucault's schema of thresholds of discursive formation. Some ideas and inventions in history catch on and become popular. Other things never develop beyond the germ of an idea. Historians and other analysts do not have a theory that reliably predicts which things (inventions, words, ideas, foods, gadgets, beliefs, fashions) will get taken up in discourse and endure to cross the threshold of formalization. We can only learn the fate of such things by examining them in retrospect. This way of thinking about discursive formation helps to illustrate Foucault's notion of discursive formation over time. Similarly, for Foucault, we can only study the formation of discourses in retrospect. In Foucault's way of thinking about history, we cannot predict the fate of anything. He told us that there is no Grand Theory for why some things endure and other things disappear quickly. In fact, his theory of history rejects the whole possibility of Grand Theories. Examples of Grand Theories of history have included religious explanations, such as the belief that everything in history is a reflection of divine purpose or a manifestation of God's will. Another commonly held Grand Theory of history is progress. People who assume history is progressive believe that change means improvement; they trust that newer ways of doing things are probably better than older ways of doing things. Other examples of Grand Theories of history are devolution (the belief that things are getting worse and worse), circularity (the belief that things in history happen in cycles that repeat themselves), the pendulum (the belief that historical trends go back and forth between extremes such as from liberal to conservative and back again), and the dialectic (the belief that change in history can be explained as a continual power struggle between actions and reactions). Foucault's historical work, then, may provide a perspective on history and educational reform that we may not otherwise have been able to share.

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How is Foucault's Theory of Power Relevant for Teachers and Students? The concept of pastoral power helps us see ways in which people who are taking care of us are also governing us. The care may be benevolent, rational, and healthy, and it is an exercise of power. Pastoral power helps us to see that a democratic citizen is a particular kind of person. If we are participants in a democracy, we are expected to want to govern ourselves in ways that are recognizable to others. There are many ways of behaving that are not acceptable in a democracy. Our definitions for being good people are aligned with democratic definitions of what it means to be normal. There is a limit to the diversity that is tolerated in our democratic systems, and there is a tacit model for the kind of behavior that is valued in a society. In order to appreciate the relevance of Foucault's theory of power, we will contrast his theory with modern theories and examine an ordinary classroom. From the perspective of a modern critical theory of power, we would be inclined to see the teacher as more powerful, and the students as less powerful. When we examine a classroom from the perspective of this modern theory, we are able to perceive some of the patterns of who gets to speak, who gets to give directions, what rules are at play, and the forms of interaction that occur. Analyses from this point of view have formed the basis for seeing power in terms of the institutional roles that people play; the institutional position of teacher is regarded as being more powerful than the institutional position of student. However, Foucault's theory of power operates differently. When we examine a classroom from the perspective of his theory, we can see that many different kinds of power may be at work at the same time in a single moment in a classroom, for example: 1 2 3

The teacher tries to get students to stop talking and listen to her, so she bestows rewards and/or punishments. A student is bored and may continue to exercise powers of speech to talk privately with a classmate. The teacher strives to raise student examination scores, so she exercises powers of coercion, persuasion, and/or bargaining with students.

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A student is more interested in impressing other students than in pleasing the teacher, so that student exercises powers of charm or humor in an effort to be recognized and admired by peers. The teacher is a dedicated professional and believes that she has designed her course in the best interests of her students. She may be exercising well-developed powers of intellect and emotional sensitivity to try to reach the students. A student wishes to succeed in the class, and is interested in the material, but is distracted by a recent emergency in the family. That student may be faking attention in order to appear attentive to the teacher. The teacher is distracted by her own personal problems, so she loses concentration and forgets to complete part of the lesson. A student knows something personal and intimate about the teacher's family and withdraws emotionally because of feelings of awkwardness.

The actions of the teacher and students are exercises of power because they occur in a relational setting (classroom) in which each person's words, silences, and behaviors collectively comprise the class as a whole. The class is what the people make it by their actions ± for better or worse. Foucault's theory of power invites us to be aware of many different kinds of power operating in the classroom for different purposes at the same time. Foucault's theory of power is also relevant today as a perspective from which to view post-nationalistic global relations. Events in recent decades have confounded previous economic and political analyses that were articulated in terms of the nation state. Post-nationalistic trends include the formal establishment of the European Union, the spectacular rise in multinational corporations, information technologies such as the internet, global citizenry, and cosmopolitan cultural identities.3 The point is that Foucault's theory of power is much more openended than structuralist theories of power. Structuralist theories of power in the classroom emphasize a two-sided relationship between the teacher and the students in which the teacher exercises power, and the students are either dictated to by the teacher's power, or they resist

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the teacher's power. Structuralist theories in global relations tend to emphasize how nations are separate, rather than how we are all institutionally interconnected. In Foucault's theory of power, that kind of two-sided or oppositional relationship is only a part of what goes on in classrooms and in the world. From Foucault's perspective, there are many other exercises of power, and it is a critical stance to recognize how students exercise power as well as how teachers exercise it. Foucault's concept of bio-power refers to governing populations, and how some behaviors have been regarded as problems, but others have not been. Rabinow and Rose (2003a) give the example `Why has cloning become such a hot topic of discussion while cigarette smoking has not?' Cigarette smoking affects many more people, has been proven to cause cancer, and has led to extremely expensive healthcare requirements. Why have there been more public debates about cloning than about smoking? From one point of view, it makes no sense that cloning would have become a bigger issue than smoking. Foucault's concept of bio-power invites us to investigate the historical conditions that have allowed cloning to become a bigger social issue. Another example is the question `In what ways has the human genome project shaped our understandings of race?' Rabinow and Rose wrote: [R]ace, health, genealogy, reproduction and knowledge are intertwined, continually transforming one another and recombined in multiple manners and modes. By this we mean that knowledge of health transforms the idea of race, that ideas of genealogy are reframed by new conceptions of reproduction, that changing ideas of genealogy radically impact upon the politics of race, races and racism. (Rabinow and Rose 2003a, p. 11) Rabinow and Rose go on to explain bio-power in terms of the ways the genome project has begun to redefine what `race' means and what a new definition might imply for how we understand ourselves. The concept of bio-power is relevant in education when it provokes us to question why, for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has become a problem for education, whereas

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the climate crisis (e.g., global warming) has not become an educational problem. In democracies, we cannot tolerate dictatorship, and yet we must have leadership. Leadership is an exercise of power. How can we think about the exercise of power in a democracy? How can we think about leadership in a classroom setting? Foucault's philosophy of different modalities of power gives us some conceptual purchase on analyzing the complicated dynamics of a classroom, or of a state educational policy. Foucault's philosophy presents us with an ethical burden. From this perspective we cannot `blame the system,' nor can we `hold individuals accountable.' We cannot wait for a leader to tell us what to do, and we cannot wait for someone else to declare us to be emancipated. Instead, we are challenged to see a wide variety of possible power moves, many options, and a whole array of possible consequences. Foucault's philosophy of power does not tell us what to do, but it does provoke us to try to think outside the box and imagine alternatives to power that we had not previously imagined, and to question why some things rather than other things have been problematized.

What Does the Theory of Governmentality Mean to Educational Studies? Among critical educators, the power relationship between students and teachers has presented a problematic issue. How shall we regard the role of the teacher in the classroom if not as an oppressor? How shall we perceive the relationship between students and teachers if not in terms of oppressed and oppressor? In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault asked the research question `What do doctors see when they look at a patient?' Analogously, a Foucaultian question about pedagogy could be: `What do teachers see when they look at a student?' An anecdote from my teaching can illustrate these confounding relations and the relevance of Foucault's theory of governmentality. When I teach masters' level courses in the college of education, I ask students to write their own participation rubrics as part of their grade for the course. At the end of the course, students evaluate themselves

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according to their own rubrics, and I record their evaluations as the `participation' part of the grade. As I give instructions for writing the rubrics, I invite students to specify their own participation goals. These could include various forms of contributions to the course like attendance, speaking, writing, listening, working with classmates, volunteering assistance, and contributing to a positive atmosphere in the classroom. I ask students to write their own participation rubrics assuming that this policy is a democratic practice. I, as teacher, am not imposing norms for participation, but rather students can determine their own goals and evaluate themselves. After several semesters in which I followed this policy, I had to face an unsettling realization about how these student-created rubrics were functioning. The participation rubrics that students wrote for themselves were always far more demanding than any I would have written. All rubrics written by students stipulated rigorous participation expectations for themselves. At no point did a student write a participation rubric that said, `I am a single parent with three children, I teach full-time, and I take care of my aging parents. I will do the best I can with all these theoretical readings, but really I just want to pass this course and get my masters degree.' Why did no student ever write a participation rubric like that? There were no risks, and there were no rewards or penalties associated with the rubrics. Students understood their options and autonomy in this realm. My policy had attempted to minimize authoritarian expectations by the teacher and allow for a diversity of styles of participation among the students. However, my allegedly democratic intentions resulted instead in students writing rubrics that were more restrictive than I would have devised. In practice, this policy generated a set of norms that allowed for less individuality in participatory expectations across the members of the class. The students were governing themselves ± exercising power on themselves and by themselves ± according to what they took to be the norms and expectations of good students. More importantly, perhaps, as I assumed I was acting freely in an innovative way, my assumptions about democratic teaching were also being dictated by structuralist assumptions about the potential for the democratic teacher to empower students by instituting presumably democratic pedagogies in the classroom.

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Viewing this experience through a Foucaultian lens, however, I can no longer assume that any of my actions are safely democratic. I have had to come to terms with the unpredictability of unintended consequences and realize that I can never be certain whether my actions are complicit with institutional power relations or disruptive of them. Seemingly authoritative practices sometimes engender obedience, sometimes defiance, and sometimes laughter. Similarly, seemingly democratic practices sometimes result in disruption, sometimes retrenchment, sometimes resentment, sometimes inspiration, and sometimes paralysis. This anecdote illustrates dimensions of Foucault's theory of governmentality. Most students were sincere and honest when they wrote their rubrics. They took seriously the responsibility of writing the specific behavioral objectives, and they responded to the assignment with a great deal of care and thought. In the process of writing the rubrics, most students were exercising governance over themselves as free agents. In a real-life relationship to the task at hand, the writing of a participation rubric became a technology of the self in which students constructed norms for the invention of themselves as good students, and I constructed myself as a democratic teacher. We were all behaving normally. This example is an instructive case to illustrate Foucault's theory of governmentality. From it we can begin to understand that governmentality is neither individual autonomy nor external control. It is how we make decisions for ourselves when we are doing the best that we can. Governmentality operates through teachers just as much as it operates through students; the roles may be distinct from one another, but all the roles are rule governed. Teachers are not freer than students. Foucault's theory of governmentality problematizes both freedom and regulation, showing us how they are inextricable from one another. Governmentality is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It is not something we are supposed to celebrate or resist. Rather, it is a window on how democratic power works, allowing us to perceive the mechanisms by which we regulate ourselves in order to be free.

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How is Foucault's Theory of the Subject Relevant in Education? To imagine the relationship between knowledge and the subject, it may be helpful to consider an example from ordinary experience. You may remember that in the 1990s, a new line of products for whitening teeth was introduced for sale to the public. There were several competing brands of tooth whiteners, and they were advertised extensively on television and in magazines. In the case of tooth whiteners, commercial advertisements contributed heavily to the development of a new `truth' about being human, namely that whiter teeth makes people more attractive. Of course, a commercial advertisement cannot establish this `truth' by itself; some advertising campaigns fail, and not every product that is introduced becomes popular. In order for an idea to take on the status and function of knowledge, people have to believe it; knowledge requires a certain amount of acceptance among the general population. The point is that tooth color has become a new domain of knowledge, a perceived standard by which people can judge themselves. Prior to the introduction of these tooth-whitening products, tooth color was not part of knowledge (except perhaps for the purposes of cosmetic dentistry). Tooth color was not part of the knowledge we had about ourselves. Now let us consider a less trivial example. There is a generally accepted truth that humans come in one of two sexes, male or female. This `truth' is reinforced in almost every sector of our society: popular science, public bathrooms, official forms with boxes for checking `male' or `female,' clothing store departments, institutions like marriage and the military, religions, and language (especially names and pronouns). There is widespread acceptance of this two-sex theory in almost all societies,4 and the two-sex theory functions as a fundamental truth by which people see (objectify) themselves. Our subjective experiences are defined when we identify ourselves as being either male or female. The fascinating (and perhaps shocking) thing is that there are more than two sexes of human beings.5 Even though biological sciences have clearly established that humans come in many sexes, the two-sex theory still functions as if it were true in most societies. In relation to that truth, our subjective experiences are shaped in very particular ways. We understand ourselves as subjects in relation to the objective

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categories of male and female. This is an example of what Foucault meant when he said he was interested in studying the interrelationships among subjectivity, objectivity, and truth. In the case of sex identity, Foucaultian questions would be to ask: 1 2 3

What activities in our lives reflect and reinforce the ways we identify ourselves as being either male or female? What everyday experiences of sexuality make us who we think we are? What material conditions of the world support the two-sex theory as if it were true?

In Foucault's terminology, these questions are formulated as `By what technologies do we constitute ourselves as subjects?'

Specializations Within Educational Studies Foucault's philosophy offers provocative ideas about the production of knowledge and power relations, so the relevance of his work in educational studies has been most apparent in the area of curriculum theory. Foucault's work has been taken up more extensively in curriculum studies than in any other educational sub-discipline. Exercising our imaginations, however, we can speculate about the relevance of his work in other specialized areas of educational studies. Foucault never promoted or maligned any particular research methodology, and so it is a form of extrapolation to use his writings for recommendations on `how to' conduct research or legitimate the value of our proposed research projects. It is also extrapolation to appeal to Foucault's philosophy as justification for any of our pedagogical approaches or beliefs about teaching. However, the provocative spirit of Foucault's work may encourage the cultivation of an epistemological vigilance ± a watchful eye ± with respect to the kinds of questions we ask and the practices we take for granted as natural. Foucault's definition of the Enlightenment as an `attitude of perpetual critique' is relevant in all intellectual domains within educational studies as inspiration for us to be daring as we question our own assumptions in

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research, knowledge, schooling, psychology, curriculum, educational policy, and the philosophy of education. Relevance of Foucault's Philosophy in Educational Research Research in the field of education is dominated by two methodological approaches: large-scale quantitative projects (usually implementation studies) of schooling; and small-scale qualitative projects (usually interpretive studies) of classrooms, students, and teachers. Foucault's work has something to say with respect to both of those conventional research paradigms, and it also provides inspiration to explore beyond the current horizon of research traditions. Within current methodological paradigms, Foucault's philosophy provokes us to ask: 1 2

How did we come to believe that this is a worthy question to study? In what ways does the search for truth help us clarify our educational values and strengthen our ethical commitments?

Take, for example, educational inquiry about inclusion and access to education. Educational research has studied patterns of inclusion and exclusion pertaining to a broad range of demographic characteristics including race, class, gender, ability, learning style, and age. Some educational research is experimental in design; very few educational research projects are conducted in laboratories. Some educational research tries to explain what people mean (e.g., analysis of policy statements, comparisons among written curricula, interpretations of what teachers say they believe, compilations of survey results), and other educational research tries to describe what people do (e.g., observations of classroom activities, analyses of test results, case studies of students). Some people would call these two paths of inquiry theory and practice. Educational research is comprised of a combination of scientific, theoretical, interpretive, historical, clinical, and descriptive approaches to inquiry. Foucault may be a philosopher, but he is a philosopher who studied practices and not just concepts. He conducted detailed empirical studies of how criminals were tortured, how psychologists experi-

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mented with patients, and how people changed their lifestyles to intensify their experiences of pleasure or pain. Then he analyzed how those practices made sense with respect to discourse ± the way people talked, wrote, and thought about what they did. Some philosophers study concepts, and some historians study practices. Foucault's approach was to bring a critical perspective to questions about the interactions between concepts and practices. He analyzed the relationship between what people said and what people did. His studies focused on knowledge in practice as it was visible in insane asylums, prisons, schools, and bathhouses. The relationship between what people say and what they do is the discursive construction of subjectivity, and so Foucault's focus on subjectivity makes his work especially relevant to education, which is a field of scientific, philosophical, and clinical or applied knowledge. Here we will consider the example of case-based research in education.6 Case-based research, or case-study methodology, has been most familiar in legal studies where the study of previous legal cases forms the basis for judicial decisions. Following from practices in other clinical settings like medicine and law, case-based research in education has been increasingly acceptable as a methodological approach for investigating teaching and classroom practices. Foucault's philosophy has both similarities and differences vis-aÁ-vis case-based research in education. For both Foucaultian inquiry and case-based methodologies, here are some similarities: 1 2 3 4 5 6

The studies are historical; they look back on things that happened in the past. The object of study is an event or circumstance in a particular time and place. The focus is on practices and thinking in context. The analyses do not seek to generalize their findings beyond the particular case under investigation. The analyses consider many different perspectives, including possible conflicting hypotheses as explanations for events. The analyses take into account many different sources of influence including individual, functional, sociological, psychological, structural, cultural, religious, economic, and linguistic.

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Between Foucault's approach to inquiry and case-based methodologies, there are also some differences: 1

2 3

4

5 6

Foucault's inquiry is not a search for truth, whereas case-based inquiries are generally focused on establishing some kind of validity. Foucault's inquiries are critically oriented, whereas case-based inquiries are usually interpretive. Foucault did not offer normative solutions or suggestions for best practice, whereas case-based inquiries often seek to assess practices in terms of value and/or effectiveness. Foucault's inquiries do not fit into the parameters for scientific or social scientific studies, whereas case-based researches usually adopt the evidence and argument conventions of science or social science. Foucault's philosophy is not strictly expository, whereas case-based research is usually directed toward explanations. Power is of paramount importance to Foucault whereas case-based studies do not necessarily concern themselves with questions of power.

This brief comparison of methodologies may help educational researchers define their purposes with more specificity, and encourage them to refine the ethical dimensions of their analyses by questioning assumptions about power and the search for truth. Foucault and the Philosophy of Education Foucault's challenge to educational philosophy comes in his provocative focus on the triangular relationships among ethics, power, and truth. We confront our own ethical stance when we realize that our thoughts do not always match our actions. According to Foucault, we encounter ethics at the moment when we acknowledge that our thoughts and actions are not aligned. From the perspective of some modernist philosophy, this mismatch between thoughts and actions would be regarded as irrational or unethical. For Foucault, the mismatch is an inevitable condition of being human, and the source of our ethical possibilities.

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In a poetic way, Foucault's genealogical analyses are designed to make the most of our irrationality. Through a genealogical lens, we confront the routine contradictions that shape and constitute our lives. We can try to make our thoughts align coherently with our actions, but fortunately that is not our only option. We might decide that thought and action are two separate domains of our lives, and that being human means having multiple dimensions of existence ± thought, action, dreams, fantasies, rationality, and sensuality. We might also try to study ± even to take pleasure in ± the quirky mismatches between our thoughts and our actions. Foucault's philosophy does not require us to censor the irrational or abstain from the motley practices of our lives. On the contrary, it encourages us to examine our practices with curiosity, wonder, amusement, and outrage. In our classrooms, for example, we teach contradictory lessons every day: 1 2 3 4

Learn to follow directions, and learn to think for yourself. Learn to adapt to the real world, and strive to change the world. Work independently, and become a member of a community. Pursue your personal dreams, and serve the public good.

Foucault's philosophy provides us with no evaluation criteria for determining what is right or true. It provides us with no guidelines for how to behave. His ethical regard, however, does provoke and inspire us to come to terms with ourselves as intelligent, contradictory, sensuous, fearful, and passionate beings.

Conclusion Almost all scholarship on Foucault's work includes a statement like this: `There are many different Foucaults.' This book, like all other books on Foucault, does not provide a complete picture of his work. Neither has it included all the ways Foucault's work has been taken up, understood, or realized in education, philosophy, history, or other intellectual disciplines. This book portrays only one of many Foucaults.

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Much of the scholarship on Foucault's work has been written in such a way that more or less follows a modern philosophical quest for truth. That is, in effect, the writing about Foucault asks, `What did Foucault really mean?' There is an irresistible irony in asking that question about Foucault's work. It is ironic because his primary message was, `The search for truth is a huge problem.' Some scholars even explicitly recognize the irony in their own truth-seeking interpretations of Foucault's work.7 This book has been written with some effort to reflect a glimmer of Foucault's provocative, problematizing, poetic approach to philosophy. There are, at the same time, theoretical and practical quandaries in any attempt to write about a philosophy that aims to dismantle the search for truth. All attempts to write about Foucault's philosophy confront the same `Catch-22' situation8 ± a hopeless dilemma in which there is no satisfactory option: If you `stay true' to the meaning of Foucault's ideas, then you betray Foucault's spirit of provocative critique; and if you pursue a flight of creative and provocative critique, then you fail to do justice to the substance of Foucault's philosophical contributions. This maddening condition of writing about Foucault's philosophy is somehow fitting. Dreyfus and Rabinow have described the overall relevance of Foucault's philosophy this way: As Foucault showed us in his last books and in his life, there is a kind of ethical and intellectual integrity which, while vigorously opposing justifications of one's actions in terms of religion, law, science or philosophical grounding, nonetheless, seeks to produce a new ethical form of life which foregrounds imagination, lucidity, humour, disciplined thought and practical wisdom. (1986, p. 121) Their description emphasizes that for Foucault, an ethical life is not the same as an obedient life. Living an ethical life is not the same as finding a set of principles and sticking to them, and it is also not the same as seeking liberation from social norms or resisting dominant ideologies. It is pessimistic activism. For Foucault, living an ethical life is more onerous than following or

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resisting the rules. Foucaultian ethics are more burdensome, more frightening, and more delightful than that. Living an ethical life means that at every turn, with every routine thought and action of our daily lives, we must feel the weight and the pleasure of creating our own lives. Without recourse to the `truth' or `the right way' to do something, we have no choice but to exercise our own capacities for thinking and acting, knowing all the while that we can never escape our place in history. No person, no principle, no sacred text, and no set of beliefs can guarantee for us that we are doing the right thing. We find ourselves in the multiple roles of actor, director, critic, playwright, and audience. Foucault's philosophy leaves us nowhere to turn to for authentification. That profound level of anti-foundationalism has sometimes been perceived as nihilism and sometimes as determinism. Having been deprived of all possible foundations for belief, we are left with only ourselves ± a condition that can be seen, ironically, as a kind of hyperhumanism. Living face-to-face with our own selves, bound to be free, is what Foucault meant by subjectivity. The spirit of Foucault's work can be summed up in the following caveat ± both a blessing and a curse: You are freer than you feel9 It is a blessing in so far as it affirms the Enlightenment hope for human freedom and possibilities for life on earth. At the same time it is a curse because of the ironic realization of freedom: No matter how free you feel, Foucault playfully suggests, you are actually freer than that.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Michel Foucault is a French name. It is pronounced mee-SHELL fooKOH (in IPA: /mi -sÆ EL fu - ko/). In the philosophical literature there are several versions of the adjective form of Foucault's name. Sometimes, especially in literature written by scholars from the United Kingdom, we find the spellings Foucauldian or Foucauldean (usually pronounced fooKOH-dee-un). There has been no agreement, and (I think appropriately) no attempt to regularize the spelling of the adjectival form. I prefer the spelling Foucaultian because it is closer to the original spelling of the name and is readily pronounceable as foo-KOH-shun. 2. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1998) said that Foucault's work had reached the point where `philosophy was necessarily poetry.' 3. Foucault wrote that his work was not poetic in the same sense as Baudelaire's (see Foucault's `What is Enlightenment?'). Foucault's philosophy is not an entertaining diversion. It is poetic in the sense that it touches and evokes an array of human sensibilities that incorporates and goes beyond intellectual faculties. 4. `Cartesian' is the adjective form of `Descartes.' The term `Cartesian grid' refers to the mathematical representation of coordinates formalized by Rene Descartes. 5. When philosophers write about modern critical theories, they often use the word `normative' to refer to philosophies that advocate some approach to a solution. A `normative' philosophy is one that specifies criteria (`norms') for distinguishing the good from the bad. Explicitly, Foucault claimed that his approach to critique was not normative. Some philosophers argue that all critical theory must be normative, and therefore Foucault's philosophy is not critical. 6. Philosophers often use the term `utopian' to refer to those philosophies that try to paint a picture of a perfect society. 7. `Wild goose chase' is an English idiom (originating in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) that refers to a hopeless quest or a fruitless pursuit. 8. Foucault's philosophy is not precisely historicism, either, in so far as historicism searches for truth in particular local contexts. Rather,

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Notes Foucault's project was to shed new light on the present by contrasting our rules of truth formation with various other `regimes of truth' in history. The religious form of fatalism holds that the fates of human beings are in God's hands; God is in control of human lives. The non-religious forms of fatalism hold that there are secular mechanisms that control human life. For example, Thomas Hobbes theorized that our fate is determined by our brutish human nature. Karl Marx's theory asserted that it is the fate of humans to be caught in class conflict. Some genetic scientists theorize that our DNA determines our fate, at least to some degree. One of the best philosophical statements on the free-will-versusdeterminism debate was offered by philosopher and rabbi, Isaac Bashevis Singer: `Of course I believe in free will; I have no choice.' In philosophy, logicians have identified the `either/or' position as a fallacy or false dilemma. See, for example, www.fallacyfiles.org/ eitheror.html. For Saussure, a sign is usually a word. Every sign has two parts: the signifier and the signified. Saussure's linguistic theory is complicated, but you can think of this relationship as something like that between an ideal of something and the real-life thing. The French words langue and parole can both be translated into English as `language.' However, the distinction between langue (the ideal form of language) and parole (the way people speak in real life) is necessary for structuralism. For example, Derrida's philosophy was primarily focused on problematizing the structural assumption of rational (grammatical) coherence, and Derrida's poststructural approach was to play with the ambiguities of language. Lyotard's poststructural philosophy was focused on undermining the structural assumption that society could be explained in rational terms, and his analysis highlighted the contradictions in sociological phenomena. Deleuze's philosophy criticized the structural assumptions of linear history, objectivity, and discrete categories of analysis. Deleuze's poststructuralism pointed out how categories split and multiply. This description of Lacan's theory is greatly simplified. Philosophies of objectivity include Descartes' rationalism and Comte's positivism. Descartes' philosophy drew a binary distinction between the subject and the object. Within Descartes' view, there must be a distinct separation between the subject-who-sees (on the one hand) and the object-that-is-seen (on the other hand). Similarly, Comte's positivism insists upon a strict separation between the objective world (which we can study scientifically) and human subjectivity. Phenomenology challenged both of these versions of objectivity.

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17. These events in France are similar to and related to the social protest movements that occurred around the world at about the same time. For example, Martin Luther King was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Later that month, students protested and occupied Columbia University in New York City. The Beatles' song `Revolution' was written about the events of May 1968. In later related events, the U.S. National Guardsmen shooting of four college students at Kent State University took place on 4 May 1970. On 24 August 1970, the Army Math Research Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was damaged by a bomb in an act that was meant to express objection to the ongoing war in Vietnam. 18. Charles de Gaulle was president of France in May 1968, and the student protests were directed against class discrimination and changes in government funding of universities. 19. Other historians that were influential in Foucault's work are: . Louis Althusser (1918±1990). He was a professor of philosophy at the  cole Normale where he was one of Foucault's teachers. Althusser's E philosophy focused on the relationship between Marxism and linguistic structuralism. . Georges Canguilhem (1904±1995). A philosopher of science who died in 1995. Canguilhem was Foucault's teacher and the faculty sponsor for Foucault's thesis, Madness and Civilization. Foucault wrote the introduction to one of Canguilhem's books in which he said that Canguilhem's histories of science had had a major influence on French history, sociology, and psychoanalysis. . Georges DumeÂzil (1898±1986). A comparative linguist whose crosscultural work included studies of Greek, Hindi, and Etruscan. DumeÂzil worked with Foucault in Sweden. . Jean Hyppolite (1907±1968). One of Foucault's philosophy teachers and a professor in the ColleÁge de France. Hyppolite published the first French translation of Hegel's famous work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He was interested in the philosophy of history and political activism.

Chapter 2 1. Foucault wrote prolifically over a period of 30 years, and he spoke to audiences all over the world. The meanings of his concepts did not always stay the same for every occasion over the course of three decades. The following explanations of major terms tend to focus more on Foucault's later works. At the risk of over-emphasizing Foucault's

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

Notes singularity, this approach provides a way to appreciate some of the unique contributions that his work has made to our intellectual heritage. This cross-sectional approach to archaeological work has led some scholars to describe Foucault's work as `spatial history' rather than `temporal history'. In French, there are two words that translate into English as knowledge, namely savoir and connaissance. Savoir refers to being wise or understanding, while connaissance refers to being knowledgeable. Foucault's analyses of epistemes focused on the relationship between savoir and connaissance.  mile Coue (1857± This aphorism is attributed to French psychologist E 1926). This aphorism is usually attributed to Heraclitus (Greek, circa 500 BCE). However, this particular way of phrasing is closer to the words of Plato (Cratylus, 402a) and Plutarch than to Heraclitus' original phrase, which is more perplexing: `Into the same rivers we step and do not step.' German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795±1886) famously called this approach a historical search for `Wie es eigentlich gewesen' (`How it really was'). This selectivity is not an indication of poorly conducted research; it is unavoidable. Historical objectivity is impossible, but that does not mean that history is unimportant or worthless. It means we have to think critically when we read and write history. Historians call this selection bias `perspectivalism' because the selection comes from a particular perspective on an issue. This shift refers specifically to the democratic revolutions in the U.S.A. (1777) and France (1787), but it applies in general to democratic systems around the world. `False consciousness' is a term from Marxism. It is part of a Marxian theory of ideology. This theory stipulates that people have been socialized (by means of propaganda, education, media, or cultural messages) into believing that capitalism is a good thing. For example, the concept of `false consciousness' is used by Marxian theorists as an explanation for why poor people who have no health insurance would vote for political candidates who refuse to support legislation that would establish universal health insurance. This voting pattern makes no rational sense unless you explain it by saying that people have been `brainwashed' into believing (in the ideology) that health insurance is a privilege rightfully belonging to rich people but not to poor people. In Dreyfus and Rabinow's (1982) book, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, the mode d'assujettissement is translated as `mode of subjection.' However, in the later (1994) collection, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Rabinow explains a preference for the translation

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of `mode of subjectification.' See page xliv of Volume 1 (Ethics) of The Essential Foucault. 12. Foucault and other philosophers often use the Greek form of the word, doxa to refer to a prescription or set of rules for behavior. 13. `Always-already' is an adverb in philosophy. `Always-already' was used by Kant and also by Heidegger to refer to experiences that become part of us and are inseparable from who we are.

Chapter 3 1. The History of Madness was originally published in 1961 as an abridged version of Foucault's doctoral dissertation. The unabridged version was published in English by Routledge in 2006. 2. His full name is Donatien Alphonse FrancËois de Sade. 3. The Hollywood movie Quills is a fictional portrayal of the prison life of the Marquis de Sade. Some people regard this movie as an expression of a Foucaultian analysis of history. 4. The verb `to surveil' (derived from the noun surveillance) has not become standard usage in all English registers. `Surveil' is sometimes defined as `to supervise or oversee.' `Surveillance' also has the connotation of watching over in secret, perhaps for purposes of evaluation or judgment. 5. For alternatives to the enclosed, partitioned classroom, see also the educational philosophies of Friedrich FroÈbel, Johann Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Ivan Illich, and Rudolph Steiner. 6. This transformation has been called `the alchemy of school subjects.' See Popkewitz (1998). 7. Classical conditioning is a term from B.F. Skinner's theory of behavioral psychology. A conditioned response is one that has become a habit following multiple repetitions and responses to stimuli, positive and/or negative. Automaticity is the ability to do something so well that you do not have to think about it while doing it. Automaticity and conditioned responses are both learned through repetition. 8. I am not aware of any existing argument in the literature that draws this parallel. It is my own reading. 9. According to Sheridan (1980), when Les Mots et les Chose was translated into English, there were already other books with the title Words and Things. Sheridan reports that Foucault suggested and preferred the English title The Order of Things (p. 47). 10. The Order of Things is not a translation of the original French title, Les Mots et Les Choses (which means `words and things'). Nevertheless, the meaning of the English title helps to provide some insight into major themes of the book.

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11. This question is an allusion to Kant's question, `What is it possible to think?' 12. Alan Sheridan calls the Archaeology of Knowledge an `extended theoretical postscript' to The Order of Things. See Sheridan (1980, p. 89). 13. The 1662 Port-Royal Logic was published anonymously but later attributed to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. 14. The Kama Sutra is a traditional Sanskrit text on love and sex. It includes graphic depictions of various sexual positions. 15. Among other things, this comment on pleasure may also refer to the entertainment appeal of tabloids such as True Confessions. 16. The period generally referred to as `Classical' Greece is the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, or roughly 500±300 BCE. 17. Foucault's first publication, `Dream, Imagination, and Existence' (1954) was a detailed examination of dreams. Because his last book is also about dreams, Clare O'Farrell (2005) suggests that Foucault had come `full circle' (p. 34). 18. This essay lists examples of six of these horrendous crimes that include a babysitter chopping off a child's head and throwing it out the window, and a mother cutting off her daughter's leg to put it in a pot of soup. 19. Leslie Sawyer is the translator. 20. Commonly known as the Frankfurt School, the Institut fuÈr Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) was founded in 1930 and comprised a group of social and political theorists. Famous members include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. The philosophy of JuÈrgen Habermas is also regarded to be a contemporary extension of Frankfurt School's critical theories. 21. Charles Baudelaire (1821±1867) was a French poet and translator whose writing about sex and death were regarded as scandalous by some people. 22. `Scientific' is a useful but problematic designation here because philosophers have accorded several meanings to the term `science'. In this paragraph, `science' is used in its colloquial shorthand sense to designate a modern, western, positivistic, methods-driven approach to inquiry. 23. Foucault's skepticism and Descartes' doubt: recall that Descartes' philosophical approach was to begin by doubting the truth of all propositions, and then subjecting those propositions to systematic rational tests. Foucault's approach is similar in so far as he begins by being skeptical of assumptions. Of course Descartes' theism is not shared by Foucault, so their projects are utterly different in some ways; however, there is a point of methodological similarity in the approaches of these two philosophers. 24. This is the transcript of two lectures that Foucault gave at Stanford University, California, U.S.A. in June 1979.

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25. This interview with John K. Simon was originally published in Partisan Review, April/June 1971. 26. The unedited transcript of a radio interview with Jacques Chancel was translated by Phillis Aronov and Dan McGrawth. 27. Remember that pleasure here does not mean decadence, indulgence, or wantonness. Pleasure here means enjoyment and appreciation of things like music, conversation, gardens, food, architecture, painting, poetry, and dance. It also means to emphasize the aesthetic and pleasurable aspects of sciences, engineering, and mathematics. For a lovely treatment of mathematical aesthetics, see Sinclair, 2004. 28. This interview with Lucette Finas was originally published in La Quinzaine LitteÂraire, 247, January 1977. It was translated by Jeanine Herman. 29. Happily, the word fabrication has the same two meanings in both English and French. 30. Confession is one of the sacraments or rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. The expectations of confession are that the parishioner has a private meeting with a priest in which the parishioner tells the priest every sin (bad or wrong thing) that he or she did since the last confession. Strict Roman Catholics attend confession every week before they go to church and receive Communion, another Roman Catholic sacrament. 31. This interview with James O'Higgings was originally published in Salmagundi, in the fall/winter of 1982. It was translated by James O'Higgings. 32. Just as langue is not always reflective of parole. 33. Other translations do not have the subheadings provided by Dreyfus and Rabinow. 34. Foucault provided us with the Greek word for this writing practice: hypomnemata. It may be helpful to break the word into its constituent parts: hypo, meaning `under' or `deep', and mnemata, meaning `memory'. Hypomnemata, then is a practice by which one can find oneself in deep memories. 35. This interview was conducted by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Muller on 20 January 1984. It was first published in Concordia, 6. It was translated by Phillis Amarov and Dan McGrawth.

Chapter 4 1. For a helpful discussion of the terms `analytic' and `continental,' see www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp. `Continental' refers to the European mainland, which does not include Great Britain. 2. One of the ironies of Foucault's reception and influence is that French philosophy has recently been faced with responding to the reception of

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Notes Foucault's work written originally in English. See, for example, a special 2001 issue of Recherche et Formation pour les Professions de l'education, 38, which offers French translations of studies in English on Foucault in the field of education. Guattari was analyzed by the famous French psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan. `Simulacrum' (plural: simulacra) is from the Latin meaning `similarity' or `likeness'. For Baudrillard, there are different kinds of simulacra: 1) reflection of reality, such as a photograph; 2) perversion of reality: a huge statue or building whose top is made disproportionately large in order to appear proportional when viewed from the ground; 3) pretense of reality, a school or academy; 4) simulacrum, such as Disneyland or Second Life. See Baudrillard, 1983. Both Dreyfus and Rabinow are professors at the University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A. Dreyfus is in philosophy and Rabinow is in anthropology. Charles Taylor (born 1931) is an emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S.A. Ian Hacking (born 1936) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto in Canada. Nancy Fraser (born 1947) is a professor of political and social science at the New School in New York City, U.S.A. Jan Goldstein (born 1946) is a historian at the University of Chicago, U.S.A. Hayden White (born 1928) is a professor emeritus of the history of consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz, U.S.A. Australia and New Zealand have distinguished themselves in the arena of Foucault studies, with scholars including Bernadette Baker, Tina Besley, Marie Brennan, Valerie Harwood, Jane Kenway, John Knight, Jennifer Gore, Allan Luke, James Marshall, Julie McLeod, Erica McWilliams, Clare O'Farrell, Mark Olssen, Michael Peters, Mary Louise Rasmussen, Judyth Sachs, Richard Smith, and Stephen Thorpe. The Foucault and Education SIG of AERA was founded in 1997 by Bernadette Baker, Lynn Fendler, and Katharina Heyning who were at that time graduate students in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A. Clare O'Farrell is a member of the faculty of Cultural and Language Studies in Education at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Steinar Kvale, born in Norway, is Professor of Educational Psychology at

Notes

217

Aarhus University in Denmark and the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, U.S.A. 16. Jack Martin is Burnaby Mountain Endowed Professor of Educational Psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. 17. William Pinar is Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Chapter 5 1. Some critical pedagogues have objected to the power relations implied in the provider mode. Paulo Freire (1921±1997), for example, is a Brazilian educational theorist who is famous for his 1968 book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. From his Marxian political perspective, Freire refers to the provider mode of teaching with the metaphor of `banking.' `Banking education' is when teachers make deposits and withdrawals of information from students' minds through the practices of lectures and examinations. Freire objected to this mode in so far as students had no voice in determining what or how they should learn. Remember, however, that Foucault was critical of Marxian approaches to critical theory, so Freire's critique of this power dynamic does not align with Foucault's philosophy. 2. There can be many paths of discovery, for example, science, religion, meditation, renunciation, art, work, and reason. 3. For an interesting discussion of the legal issues in citizenship eligibility for national teams in the Olympics, see Peter Spiro, `Citizenship and the Olympics: The End of Surrogate Warfare' in Opinio Juris, 10 August 2008, available at http://opiniojuris.org/2008/08/10/. 4. Thailand is an example of a culture that assumes more than two sexes. 5. If you are interested in the biological explanations of multiple sexes, you can read Marianne van den Wijngaard's Reinventing the Sexes (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). If you are interested in the personal experiences of people who do not fit into the two-sex model, consult the Intersex Society of North America (http:// www.isna.org/). The history of sex testing in the Olympics provides evidence that the determination of sex is much more complicated than a simple male-female dichotomy. See, for example: Gail Vine, `Last Olympics for the sex test?' in the New Scientist, 4 July 1992 (http:// www.newscientist.com). 6. Case-based reasoning, which philosophers call casuistry, is most familiar as a practice in English-speaking legal systems where decisions can be justified on the basis of precedent (the history of previous decisions in

218

Notes

similar cases). In case-based reasoning, attorneys do more than study laws; they also do research to find records of what judges have decided in previous cases. Then the attorney cites the rulings in those previous cases in order to make an argument about the ruling in the new case. The legal term for such reasoning is stare decisis, which means to stand by previous decisions. 7. Erica McWilliams, Foucault scholar and professor in the Centre for Learning Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, has provided us with this unforgettable characterization: `The problem with educational research is its irony deficiency.' 8. Catch-22 is the title of a 1961 novel written by Joseph Heller. The novel is about U.S. Army Air-forces fighting in World War II. Heller's original term `catch-22' is now a term in logic that refers to a dilemma in which all possible choices are sure to fail. A `catch-22' situation can be described as something like a `lose-lose' proposition. 9. In an interview, Foucault (in Martin 1988) described his role this way: `For rather a long period, people have asked me to tell them what will happen and to give them a program for the future. We know very well that, even with the best intentions, those programs become a tool, an instrument of oppression. Rousseau, a lover of freedom, was used in the French Revolution to build up a model of social oppression. Marx would be horrified by Stalinism and Leninism. My role ± and that is too emphatic a word ± is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people ± that's the role of an intellectual.'

Bibliography

Works by Foucault (1954/1976) Mental Illness and Psychology, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (1963/1994) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Vintage. (1965/1988) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard, New York: Vintage. (1966/1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage. (1968/1998) `This is Not a Pipe', in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1969/1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon. (1971/1996) `Rituals of Exclusion', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1974/1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage. (1975a/1996) `Talk Show', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1975b/1998) `What is an Author?' in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1976/2000) `Truth and Power', in Power, Volume 3 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1977/1996) `Power Affects the Body', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1978a) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (The Will to Knowledge), trans. R. Hurley, New York: Random House. (1978b/1998) `Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press.

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(1978c/2000) `About the Concept of the ``Dangerous Individual'' in Nineteenth Century Legal Psychiatry', in Power, Volume 3 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1979a/2000) `Is it Useless to Revolt?' in Power, Volume 3 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1979b/2000) `Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason', in Power, Volume 3 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1980a) `Body/Power', in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972±1977, New York: Pantheon. (1980b) `The Confession of the Flesh', in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972±1977, New York: Pantheon. (1980c) `Prison Talk', in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972±1977, New York: Pantheon. (1982a) `The Subject and Power', in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1982b) `Sexual Choice, Sexual Act', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1983) `On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1984a/1997) `What is Enlightenment?' in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Volume 1 of P. Rabinow (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1984b/1990) The Use of Pleasure, Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Random House. (1984c/1988) The Care of the Self, Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Random House. (1984d/1996) `The Concern for Truth', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1984e/1996) `The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in S. Lotringer (ed.) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961±1984, New York: Semiotext(e). (1984/1998) `Foucault by Maurice Florence', in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (1991) Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R.J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito, New York: Semiotext(e). (1998) `Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of J.D. Faubion (ed.) Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press.

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(2001) Fearless Speech, New York: Semiotext(e). (2003a) `Technologies of the Self', in P. Rabinow and N. Rose (eds) The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (2003b) `What is Critique?' in P. Rabinow and N. Rose (eds) The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954±1984, New York: The New Press. (2008) `Introduction to Kant's Antropologie, R. Nigro (ed.), R. Nigro and K. Briggs (trans.), New York: Semiotext(e).

Authoritative compilation of Foucault's work in French Dits et EÂcrits is a collection of almost all of Foucault's shorter writings organized chronologically. It originally appeared in four volumes, and later in two volumes: Dits et EÂcrits: 1954±1988 (1994) edited by Daniel Defert and FrancËois Ewald, Paris: Editions Gallimard.

Authoritative compilation of Foucault's work in English The three volumes of the Essential Works draw from Dits et EÂcrits; however, Rabinow's series, which compiles English translations of Foucault's work, is organized thematically, not chronologically: Volume 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1997) ed. Paul Rabinow. Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (1998) ed. James D. Faubion. Volume 3: Power (2000) ed. James D. Faubion.

Other one-volume collections Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972±1977, ed. C. Gordon, New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1988a) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977±1984, ed. L. Kritzman, New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1988b) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutten, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, M. (1991) The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1996) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews: 1961±1984, ed. S. Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (1999) Religion and Culture, ed. J.R. Carrette, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech, ed. J. Pearson, New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2003) The Essential Foucault, ed. P. Rabinow and N. Rose, New York: The New Press.

Works by Other Authors Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Baker, B.M. and Heyning, K.E. (eds) (2004) Dangerous Coagulations? The Uses of Foucault in the Study of Education, New York: Peter Lang. Ball, S. (ed.) (1990) Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Barry, A., Osborn, T. and Rose, N. (eds) (1996) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage. Baudrillard, J. (1987) Forget Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bernauer, J. and Rasmussen, D. (eds) (1987) The Final Foucault, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bernstein, R. (1994) `Foucault: Critique as a Philosophic Ethos', in M. Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Besley, T. (2002) Counseling Youth: Foucault, Power, and the Ethics of Subjectivity, Westport, CT: Praeger. Blades, D.W. (1997) Procedures of Power and Curriculum Change: Foucault and the Quest for Possibilities in Science Education, New York: Peter Lang. BoveÂ, P. (1986) Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, New York: Columbia University Press. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Chomsky, N. and Foucault, M. (2006) The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, New York: The New Press. Cladis, M.S. (ed.) (1999) Durkheim and Foucault: Perspectives on Education and Punishment, Oxford: Durkheim Press.

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Clark, M. (ed.) (1983) Michel Foucault, an Annotated Bibliography: Tool Kit for a New Age, New York: Garland. Cruikshank, B. (1999) The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davidson, A. (ed.) (1997) Foucault and His Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, M. (1994) Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology, New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1997) `Desire and Pleasure', in A.I. Davidson (ed.) Foucault and His Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1977) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Delpit, L. (1988) `The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children', Harvard Educational Review, 58: 280±298. DePaepe, M. and Simon, F. (1996) `Lever or Mirror in the Making of the History of Education?' Paedagogica Historica, 32(2): 421±450. Descombes, V. (1987) `Je m'en Foucault, Review of Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy and Foucault by Gilles Deleuze', London Review of Books, 1987: 20±21. Diamond, I. and Quinby, L. (1988) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1983) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. During, S. (1992) Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, New York: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1961) Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, ed. and trans. E.K. Wilson, New York: Macmillan. Dussel, I. (2004) `Fashioning the Schooled Self through Uniforms: A Foucauldian Approach to Contemporary Educational Policies', in B. Baker and K. Heyning (eds), Dangerous Coagulations: Essays on Foucault and Education, New York: Peter Lang. Dussel, I. (2005) `When Appearances are Not Deceptive: A Comparative History of School Uniforms in Argentina and the United States (19th± 20th centuries)', Paedagogica Historica, 41(I±2): 17±195. Eribon, D. (1991) Michel Foucault, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flyvbjerg, B. (1998) `Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society?' British Journal of Sociology, 49(2): 208±233. Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder & Herder. Goldstein, J. (ed.) (1994) Foucault and the Writing of History, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Gore, J.M. (1993) The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth, New York: Routledge. Gutting, G. (ed.) (1994) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1981/1984) The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F.G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hacking, I. (1986) `The Archaeology of Foucault', in D.C. Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader, New York: Basil Blackwell. Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hacking, I. (2004) Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halperin, D. (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoy, D.C. (ed.) (1986) Foucault: A Critical Reader, New York: Basil Blackwell. Hultqvist, K. and Dahlberg, G. (eds) (2001) Governing the Child in the New Millennium, New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Huppert, G. (1974) `Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault', History and Theory, 13: 191±207. Ingram, D. (1994) `Foucault and Habermas on the Subject of Reason', in G. Gutting (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jardine, G.M. (2005) Foucault and Education, New York: Peter Lang. Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kvale, S. (ed.) (1992) Psychology and Postmodernism, London: Sage. Lorde, L. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, New York: Crossing Press.

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Recommended Internet Resources Overview site maintained by Clare O'Farrell called `Foucault Resources': www.foucault.qut.edu.au/index.html Foucault blog: http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/ Listserv dedicated to online discussions of Foucault's work: http:// foucault.info/Foucault-L/index.shtml Repository of many works by Foucault: www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/ Comprehensive bibliography of Foucault's work compiled by Richard A. Lynch: www.foucault.qut.edu.au/biblio/mfbiblio.pdf Chronological bibliography of Foucault's work compiled by Machiel Karskens: www.foucault.info/foucault/extensiveBibliography.pdf Time magazine article about Foucault, November 1981: www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,953214,00.html

Index

Agamben, Giorgio 163 agency 43, 167, 172, 186 in Marxism 16, 176 and power 176 in structuralism 19 and the subject 187, 188 Althusser, Louis 211n. 19 Annales School 15, 25±6, 87, 166 aphrodisia 56±58, 98 archaeology 38±39, 168 in The Birth of the Clinic 72 and episteme 38±39 and genealogy 39, 162 and history 38, 39, 89, 90±2, 162, 212n. 2 discourse regularities 89±90 statement and the archive in 91 Archaeology of Knowledge 25, 29, 72, 82, 87±91, 125, 214n. 12 Ars Erotica 94±95 Artemidorus 97, 98 see also dreams author 102, 103±4 Baker, Bernadette 169, 216n. 12 and 13 Ball, Stephen J. 169 Baudelaire, Charles 117, 209n. 3, 214n. 21 Baudrillard, Jean 159±61, 216n. 4 Bauhaus School 20 Beauvoir, Simone de 24 Bentham, Jeremy 80 Besley, Tina 169 Bildung 98 Binswanger, Ludwig 28 bio-power 46±7, 52, 137, 163, 196±7 Birth of the Clinic 18, 29, 30, 69, 71, 72, 82, 87, 125, 148, 197

Bloch, Max 25 Braudel, Fernand 25, 166 Brennan, Marie 169, 216n. 12 Canguilhem, Georges 211n. 19 care of the self 49, 97±8, 147, 149, 150 see also The History of Sexuality Cartesian rationality 6, 10, 113, 152, 209n. 4, 210n. 16, 214n. 23 Chinese cosmology 151 Chinese encyclopedia 83±4 Chomsky, Noam 30, 90, 165, 216n. 7 ColleÁge de France 12, 29, 30, 120±1, 130 Comte, Auguste 210n. 16 Council of Trent 153 curriculum studies 171, 201±2 Dali, Salvador 101 Damiens, Robert-FrancËois 73, 82 Death and the Labryinth 71 Deleuze, Gilles 159±161, 209n. 2, 210n. 14 democracy 40, 43±47, 50, 52, 54, 104, 134, 172±3, 191, 194, 197±9, 212n. 9 DePaepe, Marc 42 Descartes, Rene 5±6, 114, 115, 164 see also Cartesian rationality Descombes, Vincent 158 determinism 7±8, 12±14, 88, 139, 207, 210n. 10 Dictionary of Philosophers 117±9 discipline 90±1, 153, 157, 163, 171, 174, 206, see also power academic subjects 45, 115, 132, 158, 166±7 in education 76±9

230

Index

Discipline and Punish 30, 69, 73±76, 79±82, 102, 110, 129,130±2, 148, 169, 174 discourse 16, 35, 51, 64, 72, 136, 162, 178, 203 formation 190±3 regularities 89±90 and history 90, 91, 93 and the Internet 36±7 of public education and schooling 191±2 and sexuality 136±9 of sexuality 94±5 domination 16, 43±4, 47, 50±1, 114, 115, 126, 150, 153, 172, 176 dreams 97, 214n. 17 see also Artemidorus dressage 78 Dreyfus, Hubert 113, 145, 162±3, 206, 212n. 11, 215n. 33, 216n. 5 DumeÂzil, Georges 211n. 19 Engels, Friedrich 16 Enlightenment 40, 115±7, 186±7 see also Kant, Immanuel attitude of critique 3, 117, 185, 201 critical theories of 116±7 freedom in 187±9, 207 reason in 11, 117, 187, 189 structuralism and 177 subjectivity and 187 see also subjectivity and truth 11, 186, 189 episteme 38±39, 212n. 3 epistemologization 190±2 epistemology 39, 79, 189, 201 Eribon, Didier 160 ethics 147±8, 163, 204, 207 Christian 40, 56±64 Greek 40, 56- 64, 147 sexual 100, 147 of the subject 56±63 97±8 see also subject in teaching 184 Ethics of the Concern for Self 150±154 everything is dangerous 67±8, 145 existentialism 14±15, 24, 82, 148

fabrication 136±7, 215n. 29 Febvre, Lucien 25 feminisms 174±6 four-part framework 55±64, 98, 148 see also substance, mode, regimen, telos France 11, 14, 21, 23, 73, 104, 124, 128 Foucault's influence in 159, 161, 166, 167, 168 Frankfurt School 7±8, 15, 116, 161, 214n. 20 Fraser, Nancy 166, 216n. 9 freedom 6, 7, 35, 67, 72, 148, 154, 161 in democracy 43 and Enlightenment 117, 187±9, 207 and ethics 56 and ethical subject 58±9, 60, 63, 64 and government 50, 173 and governmentality 171, 173, 199 in modern philosophy 12, 161 and power 52±3, 150, 176 and revolutions 113 in schools and prisons 81, 171 sexual 140, 143±4 truth and 152, 164 free will 13±14, 16, 139 Freire, Paulo 52, 217n. 1 Freud, Sigmund 21±2, 51, 70, 159 Galen theory of medicine 98 gaze 45, 72±3, 79, 162 genealogy 26, 35, 104±5, 173, 185±6, 196 see also archaeology, history axes of 148±9 in educational research in 105 of the ethical subject 62, 98 see also subject structure of 148±9 and subjectivity 54±5 Goldstein, Jan 168, 216n. 10 government 12, 43, 49, 110, 113, 134, 153 governmentality x, 49±50, 163, 171±3, 197±9 Guattari, FeÂlix 159 Habermas, JuÈrgen 115, 150, 161±2, 166, 214n. 20

Index Halperin, David 178 Hacking, Ian 165±6, 216n. 8 herd mentality 26 see also Nietzsche Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 115, 164 heterosexuality 99, 100, 141±3 Heyning, Katy 169, 216n. 13 historicism 10, 209n. 8 historiography x, 15, 16, 25, 41±3, 72, 82±92, 131, 149, 167±8 history 13, 40, 93, 104, 106, 110, 117, 145, 167±8,193 see also archaeology, genealogy of the Bible 153 chance in 42, 43 comparative 96, 121 continuous and discontinuous 39±40, 42, 87±9, 91, 133 critical 41, 42, 88, 165 disciplinary field 18, 158, 166, 167, 206 discursive regularities in 89 education in 190±1 effective 42, 43 see also Nietzsche falsification of 141 Grand Theories of 193 of insane asylums 71, 72, 84 and knowledge 53, 171, 174 Marxist theory of 16, 93, 133 objectivity 41, 42, 212n. 7 perspectivalism 212n. 8 philosophy and 12, 38, 157, 163 of philosophy 5, 139 of psychiatry 71, 108, 110, 130 of science 40, 72, 166 search for origins in 104, 105, 106, 107 see also truth of sexuality 92±5, 96, 97, 138, 139, 147 see also sexuality writing 25, 83±4, 104, 107, 116, 149±50, 152 History of Madness 125, 166, 213n. 1 History of Sexuality 30, 31, 82, 92±100, 136, 145, 146, 148 the care of the self 97±8, 149 see also self Christian sexual regulations 96±7, 100

231

Greek sexual regulations 96, 100 repressive hypothesis in 93 sexuality 94±5, 99, 100 theory of the subject 55±7, 62 The Use of Pleasure 95±6, 97 homosexuality 99, 138±9, 140±44 humanism 117, 169, 187, 207 Hume, David 6 Huppert, George 167 Husserl, Edmund 23 Hyppolite, Jean 211n. 19 ideology 16, 19, 37, 114, 132, 161, 167, 176±7, 212n. 10 insanity 71, 72, 73, 108, 109 intellectual 134±5, 144±5 role of the 35, 36, 65, 132, 134±6 Iranian revolution 111±3 irony 4, 11, 42, 54, 117, 162, 187, 188, 189, 206, 207, 215n. 2, 218n. 7 Kama Sutra 95, 214n. 14 Kant, Immanuel 6±8, 29, 56±9, 115, 116, 117, 213n. 13, 214n. 11 knowledge 37, 44±5, 82, 86128, 164, 172 in Bildung 98 in The Birth of the Clinic 73 in the Enlightenment 187, 202 episteme 38, 211n. 3 see also episteme genealogy of 104, 196 and history 53, 171, 174 see also history medical 109 in modernity 73, 114 in practice 203 and power relations 49, 51, 52, 201 savoir and connaissance 212n. 3 scientific 103, 137 students and 185 and the subject 54, 114, 118, 200 technologies of the self and 48 theory of power-knowledge 45, 53, 95, 171, 174, see also power and truth 69, 118±9, 153, 189 the will to 105 Kohlberg, Lawrence 59±60

232

Index

Kuhn, Thomas 40 Kvale, Steiner 170, 216n. 15 Lacan, Jacques 21±24, 160, 210n. 15, 216n. 3 Lancaster method 78 langue 17, 19, 22, 119, 133, 210n. 13, 215n. 32 Las Meninas 84±5, 101 Le Monde 111 lesbians 142 Levi-Strauss, Claude 16±19, 21±4 Locke, John 6 Lorde, Audre 66 madness 70±72, 84, 109, 130, 137, Madness and Civilization 18, 29, 69, 71, 72, 82, 87, 125, 148, 211n. 19 marriage 99, 140±1, 143 Magritte, Rene 29, 101±2 Marshall, James, 169, 216n. 12 Martin, Jack 170, 217n. 16 Marx, Karl 6±8, 15±16, 103±4, 116, 159, 165 Marxism 14, 15, 82, 134 see also Marx, Karl agency in 16, 176 see also agency author and 103±4 and communism 125±6 critical theories of 116 critique of 132±4 dominance in 134 historical writing 87 structuralism 19, 23, 177, 132±4, 211n. 19 see also structuralism power theory of 50±1, 114, 120 revolution in 111 May 1968 24±5, 87, 125, 126, 135, 211n. 17, 211n. 18 Megill, Alan 166, 167 mental illness 28, 69, 70, 109, 111 Mental Illness and Psychology 70 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23±4 methodology 87, 89, 92, 103, 119, 202±3 case-based research 203±4, 217n. 6 of phenomenology 119

of nihilism 119 research methods 101,170,201 of structuralism 119 Mill, John Stuart 6 mirror and lever 42 mode of subjectification 55, 58±60, 212±3n. 11 Kohlberg's moral reasoning 59±60 Christian 61±2, 64 Greek 60, 64 modernism 15, 20 modernity 40, 73, 94, 103, 114, 117, 161, 189, Negri, Antonio 163±4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 6±7, 26±7, 42, 43, 89, 104, 105, 148, 157, 158, 164 nihilism 7±11, 68, 119 objectivity 20, 23, 118, 210n. 16 see also subjectivity and truth in history 41, 212n. 7 subjectivity and 111, 118, 119, 120, 201 truth and 111, 119, 120, 201 object 52, 54±5, 85, 91, 96, 101 subject versus 23, 54, 73, 84, 113, 114, 118, 210n. 16 O'Farrell, Clare 169, 216n. 12 On the Genealogy of Ethics 55, 98, 145, 163 Order of Things 18, 25, 29, 83±7, 101±2, 125, 148, 160, 167, 213n. 9, 213n. 10, 214n. 12 Panoptican 80 parole 17, 19, 119, 133, 210n. 13, 215n. 32 parrhesia 48, 49 see also technologies of the self pastoral power 44±7, 52, 122±3, 194 patterns 18, 134, 176, 194 in educational research 202 Habermas's 161 in history 38, 87, 90, 91 of language/ linguistics 17, 18, 119, 132

Index in Marxism 19, 88, 133, 177 in structuralism 133, 168, 177 pedagogization 77±8 pessimistic activism 11, 68, 145, 207 Peters, Michael 169, 216n. 12 phenomenology 14±15, 82, 119, 166, 210n. 16 and existentialism 24 intentionality in 23 methodology of 119 philosophy analytical 158±9, 184, 215n. 1 Chinese 151 French 159±61 German 161±2 Greek 57 western 11, 115, 150, 152, 184 Pinar, William 178, 217n. 17 pleasure 4, 5, 14, 51, 56±63, 64, 67, 94±6, 110, 129, 131, 205 aphrodisia 56±8 desire and 160 ethics and 153, 207 freedom and 67 power and 51, 131 in purpose of schooling 131, 173±4, 215n. 27 search for truth and 151±2 sexual 93, 142, 143 sexuality and 94±5, 96, 144, 146, 147, 214n. 15 subject and 56±61, 64 writing 4, 5, 110, 129 Plutarch 99±100, 212n. 5 Popkewitz, Thomas 169, 213n. 6 Port-Royal Logic 90, 214n. 13 positivism 12, 167 postmodernism 15, 20, 21 poststructuralism 15±16, 19, 20, 176, 177 power 47, 50±3, 115, 126±7,137, 153, 164, 171, 176, 185, 194±7 see also governmentality, bio-power, pastoral power, domination, power/knowledge in democracies 43±4, 46, 197 desire and 160±1

233

disciplinary 44, 45, 47, 52, 76 exercises of 114±15, 137, 138, 194, 195, 197, 198 and freedom 50, 53, 53, 150 Marxian theory of 114, 134 and pleasure 51, 131 relations 13, 24, 47, 50, 51±3, 120, 137, 152, 153, 165, 171, 174, 197, 199, 217n. 1 sovereign 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 95, 134, 137 sovereignty-disciplinegovernmentality 163 subject and 113±4 see also subject truth and 136, 150, 152, 204 see also truth power/knowledge 45, 53, 95, 171, 174, 201 pragmatism 151, 163±4 problematization 4, 5, 8, 16, 26, 88, 117, 210n. 14 Protestantism 37 psychiatry 23, 69, 70, 71, 101, 107, 114, 130, 132, 137, 170 crime and criminals in 107±10 and court system 108, 109 dangerous individual in 107, 110±1 psychiatrists and magistrates 108, 109±111, 130 psychoanalysis 14, 15, 21±3, 70, 82, 160, 166 punishment 44, 70, 74±6, 81, 107, 109, 110, 111, 130, 131, 194 see also Discipline and Punish Pynchon, Thomas 21 queer theory 177±8 Rabinow, Paul 113, 145, 146, 162±3, 196, 206, 212n. 11, 215n. 33, 216n. 5 von Ranke, Leopold 212n. 5 reason 11, 12, 42, 71±2, 115, 116, 117, 184, 187, 188, 189 see also Enlightenment, rationality case-based reasoning 217n. 6 see also methodology

234

Index

reasoning 35, 56, 59, 81, 116, 117, 122, 151, 167 rationality 11, 12, 20, 79, 121±4, 161, 177, 205 see also reason, reasoning regimen 60 see also four-part framework Christian 61, 62, 64 Greek 61, 62, 64 modern 61 relational analyses 74, 81, 86, 127, 131, 136, 137 relativism 10, 112 repression 21±2, 51, 93±4, 136 see also power repressive hypothesis 22, 51, 93±6, 136 revolution 16, 43, 87,101,104, 111±3, 126 role of the intellectual 65±6, 134±5 see also intellectual Rorty, Richard 158, 163±4 Rose, Nikolas 163, 170, 163, 165, 196 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 76, 165 Russel, Raymond 71 Russell, Bertrand 6 de Sade, Marquis 71±2, 213n. 2, 213n. 3 sadomasochism 142±3 Sartre, Jean-Paul 24, 26, 148 see also existentialism Saussure, Ferdinand de 16±17, 210n. 12 schooling and schools 73, 76±9, 191±2 academic disciplines 157, 158, 206 architecture of the classroom 76±7 Bildung 98 in Discipline and Punish 73, 76, 129±31 disciplinary mechanism in schooling 76±9 see also Discipline and Punish educational discourse in genealogy 105±7 exercise of power in the classroom 194±6 see also power history of 190±1 learning 3±4, 76±7, 79, 129, 130, 165, 170 pedagogical theory 183±6 purpose of 131, 173±4, 188, 189

research on 106, 202±4 role of parents in education 130 timetable 77 Rousseau's approach to education 76±7 Scientia Sexualis 94±5 self 54±6, 63, 64, 149±50 the care of the 49, 97±8, 147, 149, 150 Greek care of the 147 technologies of the 47±9, 134, 199 writing about the 149±50 Servan, Joseph Michel Antoine 75±6 sexuality 146±7 Christian sexual customs 96±7, 100, 147 see also The History of Sexuality Christian sexual subjectivity 56 discourse and 136±9 Greek sexual ethics 99, 100, 139±43, 147±8 Greek sexual practices 95±7, 100 see also The History of Sexuality Greek sexual subjectivity 56±8 history of 92±5, 96, 97, 138, 139, 147 and knowledge 147 and laws 139±40 philosophy on 140, 147 and pleasure 94±5, 96, 144, 146, 147, 214n. 15 sexual act 138, 140 sexual choice 138, 143±4 Sheridan, Alan 82, 157, 214n. 12 Simon, Frank 42 skepticism 7±8, 11±12, 27, 119, 214n. 23 solutions 5, 6, 8, 9, 64, 65±6, 124, 184, 204, 209n. 5 Stanford University 121, 214n. 24 students 44, 105±6, 126, 202 and asylum inmates 127 in ColleÁge de France 120, 130 dress codes 8, 98 examinations 79 inclusion and exclusion 127±8 Lancaster approach 78 power relationships between teachers and 125, 128,185, 194±7 sexual seduction of 142

Index structuralism 15±19, 20, 51, 72, 82, 87, 88, 119, 159 agency 19 see also agency of historical writing 87±88 methodology of 119 structuralist science 132 theory of power 195 subject 23, 45, 53±64, 85, 90, 91, 99, 128, 165, 201 agency 187, 188 see also agency death of the essential subject 186±8 the ethics of the subject 56, 97±8 the ethical subject 59±64, 98 see also ethics the four-part framework of the 53±64, 98, 148±9 knowledge and 200 versus object 23, 54, 73, 84, 113, 114, 118, 210n. 16 and power 46, 47, 52, 101, 113±4, 115, 134, transcendental subject 119 and truth 118 subjectivity 19, 35, 53±60, 62, 64, 101, 150, 183, 186±8, 203, 207 essential subjectivity 186±8 and objectivity 111, 118, 119, 120, 201 and power 101, 113, 120, 183, truth and 19, 70, 111, 118, 119, 120, 121, 201 substance 55±63, 64 see also four-part framework Taylor, Charles 164±5, 216n. 6 teacher 183±4 see also student in ColleÁge de France 130 democratic 198±9 disciplinary power 45 examination 79

235

homosexual 141±3 Lancaster approach 78 and learning 3 power relationship between students and 185, 194±7 research on 202 technologies of the self 134, 199 see also self parrhesia 48±9 care of the Self 49 in power 47±49 telos 55, 62±4 thresholds of discursive formation 75, 190±3 truth axis of 148 in educational studies 188, 189, 200, 202, 204, 206, and freedom 152, 164, 189, games of 10, 53, 152, 153 in genealogy 148 parrhesia 48±9 and power 132, 136, 150±2, 204 search for truth 62, 134, 206, 209n. 8 in western culture 150, 152 and subjectivity 19, 70, 111, 118, 119, 120, 121, 201 the will to 188, 189 Velazquez, Diego, Las Meninas 84±5, 101 Veyne, Paul 12, 167±8 Vonnegut, Kurt 21 White, Hayden 91, 166, 167, 168, 216n. 11 will to knowledge 105 will to truth 188, 189 Wirkungsgeschichte 42 see also Nietzsche