Michel Foucault

 

Foucault welded hermeneutics, Freudian psychiatry and Saussurian semiotics into a powerful and idiosyncratic attack on rationalism. Though Foucault overstated the case for political repression through language, metaphor theory has independently developed some of his insights — how language colours and partly controls our outlooks, how social attitudes may be regulated by binary opposites.

Michel Foucault wrote challengingly on psychiatry, medicine and the human sciences. Despite the width of reference, his subject is discourse, which he regarded as the only reality. His baroque, glittering, and apocalyptic style is unconcerned with referents (the signified) or the usual narrative of explanation. Also immaterial is the author, Foucault himself, who is generally regarded as a Poststructuralist but in fact rejected all such labels. The text writes itself. Driven by the power and sexuality inherent in all human beings, text wells out of any gaps in discourse, creating itself in a free play of words that is only constrained by what society will permit. Society is the law-maker. Its power permeates all levels and all discourse, showing itself in such distinctions as sane-insane, natural-unnatural, sickness-health, truth-error.

Also important were figures of speech, the tropes that control discourse, which dominated certain epochs of intellectual behaviour. Underlying our historical view of madness we have successively metaphor (resemblance), metonyny (adjacency), synecdoche (essentiality) and irony (doubling). Madness in the sixteenth century loses its sign of sanctity and becomes identified with human wisdom, the Wise Fool. Two centuries later, madness is set against reason, and the insane are incarcerated with paupers and criminals. Come the nineteenth century and madness is regarded as part of normal humanity, a phase in its development, and the insane are given special treatment in lunatic asylums. Today, after Freud, the similarities with the sane are stressed, and the mad are encouraged to understand the sources of illness, under the watchful control of a psychoanalyst.

In the seventies, Foucault turned to the themes which made his name: sexual repression and the relationship of power to knowledge. Society is a mosaic of power relationships, with multiple points of resistance and competing strategies of resistance. What these strategies were, Foucault did not explain, though much of his life was spent fighting for various social and political causes.

But power also suppresses truth, or at least controls the truths that we can recognize. Knowledge and power are therefore inextricably enmeshed: truth, like sexuality, is historically conditioned. Hermeneutics returns: there is no privileged position from which to obtain an objective view of truth, and we are inside any society we choose to study. Practices that use truth as a weapon against power — e.g. Marxism and psychoanalysis — should beware: their procedures may be self-defeating. The 1968 students strike in Paris, which brought Foucault to prominence, and bewildered the French Communist Party, showed only that Marxists were no different from the ruling elites in falsely viewing society as one unified whole.

 

An expanded article can be found on TextEtc.

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Michel Foucault


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