Positive Liberty

You know you are running a hardcore academic blog when people actually ask you for a post on Michel Foucault. But they have, and here it is.

In academic history, everyone must adopt a stance of some sort toward Foucault, particularly if they work in early modern French history–and I do. What follows is my attempt toward a useful understanding of Foucault’s writings, a way to make them do work for me.

I should be clear about what this post is not, however. It isn’t a thorough treatment of all of Foucault’s ideas, nor does it pretend to be. It is only a description of how I relate to Foucault, as someone with political tendencies far removed from his and with deep skepticism toward some of his stronger claims.

Many, including Judith Butler and David Halperin, would insist precisely on those areas of Foucault that I would prefer to downplay. But Foucault’s anti-essentialist and anti-authoritarian tendencies can all be reconciled with a more libertarian politics than Foucault would likely have preferred, and this is exactly what I propose to do. We should set aside, then, his kind words for the Maoist death squads–never forgetting that he really did utter them, but recalling as well that we don’t have to accept everything the man said to find some of his ideas useful.

My reading of Foucault here is bound to be controversial; in a sense, I really will be twisting his meanings, possibly in ways that he would not have preferred. Heaven forbid that this piece should be anyone’s introduction to the subject. And don’t even try stealing it for a term paper; your profs will catch on almost immediately, because what I’m doing to Foucault here probably should not be allowed by the canons of academic interpretation.

The late social theorist Michel Foucault is often thought of as the quintessential antiliberal: Just look at his politics, for instance, wherein he was fooled not once but twice, enamored of Stalin early in life–and of Mao later on. Or consider his bitter railing against the very idea of progress, to which liberals of all varieties are at least in some sense committed. Civilization, Foucault seems to say, is but trick that we play on ourselves, and whether we are talking about progress toward greater freedom, or greater health, or greater humanity–Foucault often seems to believe in none of it.

While I have grave reservations about any effort to make a real-world politics out of Foucault’s insights, I do believe that there is something of value to be had in his work, even for old-style liberals, for libertarians, for classical liberals, and all those who work in the Enlightenment tradition. Though Foucault is often seen as a radical critic of the Enlightenment, it is an open question both how deep this radicalism runs and how far we must follow it.

From his intellectual genealogy, both avowed and inferred, Foucault can be likened to the Socratic speaker Thrasymachus, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the deconstructionist literary critic Jacques Derrida. But perhaps the best approach to Foucault, for those who mistrust all things postmodern, is through the work of Thomas Szasz, the radical psychologist who has had a surprisingly strong influence on recent libertarian thought.

In his work, Szasz has strongly critiqued the social and coercive elements of our mental health system. He argues that most of what we understand as “insanity” can be reduced to a set of practices or beliefs that we find disagreeable. He argues, at times quite forcefully, that these have nothing to do with the physiology of the patient: The “fault,” if such exists, lies at least as much with the observer.

We could easily give an example from history, too: Resurrect a reasonable individual of the seventeenth century–and we would almost certainly find him a barking madman, provided only that we did not know his extraordinary life circumstances. Send any one of us back to his time–and we would all pass for madmen just as he did. Does this mean that all present-day people are mad by seventeenth-century standards? Or that all people of the seventeenth century were mad by ours? If so, then of what did their (physiological) disease consist? Or is madness really just the failure to conform to everyone else’s expectations? As Szasz writes,

If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist;
If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

As reviewers have noted, his stance here is actually straight out of Foucault’s playbook. Foucault did not focus so much as Szasz on the lack of physiological signifiers to madness or on their seemingly arbitrary social referents. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault instead examined the idea of madness as it developed in the early modern era, focusing above all on the institutions that created this idea, from the fools and village idiots of the Renaissance, who made madness seem domestic, unthreatening, and even banal–to the asylums of the modern era, wherein madness is confined as though it were a contagion that might infect the rest of us. Foucault’s aim was not necessarily to liberate humanity from the social and coercive elements of mental health, but merely to point out these social and coercive elements had an unquestioned existence at the heart of what we think of as civilization. In a way, the scope of the claim makes Foucault far more unsettling than even the radical Dr. Szasz.

(To my knowledge, Foucault did not consider Szasz’s work while he lived; Foucault’s Madness and Civilization does not cite Szasz in its footnotes. Perhaps someone with a deeper knowledge of these figures would be able to shed light on this question, though I cannot.)

In a more general sense, Foucault delighted in subverting our existing categories of thought, not because he believed thought itself was illegitimate (a common misreading), but because he held that vast substructures of thought existed beneath the surface assumptions of our culture, structures that often do nothing in particular for our own benefit and may even serve to limit us. Ideas like madness, civilization, representation, justice, health, and sovereignty all turn out, Foucault believed, to rest on deeper beliefs (Foucault often, though not always, referred to these as discourses) that were usually left unspoken or that were even incapable of being expressed by the culture that created them. And the structures of human institutions–clinics, prisons, asylums, schools–served primarily to perpetuate the discourses that made themselves possible. Not us.

In this way, Foucault’s discourses also resemble Richard Dawkins’s memes (an idea introduced in The Selfish Gene that has since become ubiquitous), the pseudo-genetic elements of human thought that replicate chiefly because they are good at replicating, and not because they possess any particular virtue as regards human betterment. Take Szasz on mental health, add Dawkins on the replicability of ideas–and throw in some very nasty institutional teeth to make the whole thing work. The result is Foucault, more or less.

To give an example that is somewhat more abstract than mental health, here is Foucault dissecting the discourse which up to the end of the sixteenth century gave great priority in western science to the doctrine of resemblance. He argues that, far more than we do today, thinkers of that era privileged connections between objects (and ideas) so long as they resembled or could be claimed to resemble one another in form. The exterior was often held to be an unproblematic reflection of what could be found within:

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible [my emphasis], and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. Painting imitated space. And representation–whether in the service of pleasure or knowledge–was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech [Foucault, The Order of Things].

What Foucault claims to discern here–and what cultural historians have been arguing about ever since–is the deep-seated tendency throughout Western cultures of this era to privilege resemblance even, curiously, for those things that were invisible. The inclusion of an obviously false category–how can invisible things resemble anything at all?–is also one of the hallmarks of Foucault’s work. Unveiling paradoxes like these, Foucault believed, would also unveil the discourse he hoped to explore. They provided for him the keys to subverting institutional power.

Foucault also delighted in finding similarities between social formations that were seemingly far removed from one another: Between quarantines for the sick and prisons for the criminal; between mental hospitals and schools; between our ideas of mental illness and of “healthy” sexuality. He found western civilization a maze of mirrors, where so many things reflected one another that it became impossible ever to grasp which one was “real.” In a sense, we have never fully escaped the early modern obsession with resemblance.

Based in part on these similarities, Foucault sought to tell a disturbing story about the trajectory of progress in the West: Where we often believe that we are freer than our ancestors, in reality we are only more tightly disciplined. It is not that the space of human freedom has expanded, leaving us feeling less cramped; on the contrary, we all have shrunk, and we shy away from many of the freedoms our ancestors took for granted. They have been disciplined out of us.

As an example of how our freedoms have diminished, Foucault’s treatment of the history of sexuality argued that modern sexual science–and modern sexual identities like heterosexual and homosexual–have served chiefly to constrain human desires by tying them to a rigorous medical framework: The “homosexual” (who, Foucault famously declared, did not exist before the nineteenth century) now became a subject for medical science, a “sick” person who had to be cured.

Curiously, this shift happened at exactly the same time that “normal” people stopped entertaining even the possibility that they might someday commit sodomy–a sin which promptly vanished. In its place came the illness of homosexuality.

Modern identity politics has been sorting out the mess ever since then, but Foucault himself would likely have had none of it. He would most likely have asked a question that would deeply trouble today’s gay activists: How on earth do you expect to see liberation, when you base your struggles upon a set of categories that medical science created with the designed purpose of institutionalizing you? As philosopundit has written,

People often consider Foucault an intellectual inspiration for identity politics. But, in fact, Foucault’s thinking works to undermine such conceptions of politics. The rejection of any conception of identity or essence to human nature that is eternal or unchanging is central to Foucault’s thought (see The Order of Things)… Identity politics usually suppose just such a conception of the human subject insofar as it presumes some conception of the autonomous, self-determining individual to be the basis of politics. According to Foucault, it is not just that politics must reject self-deprecating and other-imposed forms of identity if we are to engage in projects of self-determination; we must also reject self-imposed conceptions of identity in order to avoid reinforcing our own subjugation. If identity politics is the project of rejecting other-imposed forms of identity in order to realize ones authentic or self-determined identity free from the inference of others then it retains precisely what Foucault rejects.

It sounds from this quote as though Foucault proposed a certain interior anarchism, a systematic, inward-looking rejection of the “natural” categories of human life, for these things are by no means natural. Sadly, Foucault wrote far too little on what he actually believed the good life to be. The overwhelming majority of his work was critical, and it would be interesting to read or even to recreate him, fancifully, in a different mode.

But Foucault sought mainly to shatter as many of our mirrors as possible; he believed that human freedom was not to be sought through institutions or regimes. For him, structures like these almost invariably ended up being mirrors that reflected something else–often something tyrannical and dehumanizing.

Perhaps the most interesting of Foucault’s works for the classical liberal is his essay “On Governmentality.” Were I to recommend only one of his writings, this would be it. To give a short sketch of the argument, Foucault notes how the modern era has witnessed a remarkable shift in how we understand the nature of what a government is. Formerly, we might have understood the state as a reflection — that word again — of the family. Subjects were children; nobles were adults. The king, of course, was the patriarch of the family. State business was family business — until there came that beloved moment of Foucault’s thought, the epistemic break, where one system of knowledge/power fell, and where another took its place. In the fully modern world, states are not understood as families any longer; now they are seen as the statistical regulators of populations. Rather than personal or filial loyalty, states now rest upon the logic of number. They are democracies; they organize their citizens through the census and the draft. They pride themselves on collecting taxes efficiently and uniformly, where once this was unknown.

Is the numerical state better than the patriarchal one? Foucault never answers this question, nor did he see it as his purpose to do so. At every turn, Foucault is relentlessly amoral, and it is perhaps this aspect of his writing that is the most shocking of all. As in his examinations of the interior life, his look at government offers nothing normative to grab hold of.

It is therefore tempting to throw him away as merely a fascinating dead end. As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper to just this effect: Foucault raises some interesting and counterintuitive challenges, but he arguably gives us nothing that could ever be acted upon. I still find it a reasonable take on Foucault, and if in one of my classes someone made a similar argument today, I might well give it a favorable mark. (My own paper got an A from an avowedly Foucaldean professor. Who says academic diversity is dead?) Or, as Michael Walzer has written, Foucault “stands nowhere and finds no reasons. Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home.” (Walzer, cited without footnote in Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, p 92. I would very much like to find the original work from which this citation is drawn.)

We may argue with Foucault’s approach on a number of other levels. First, we may say that the similarities Foucault dwelled upon were superficial or beside the point. Hospitals look like prisons due to convergent cultural evolution, not to some deep-seated fear of contamination that we must fight with paranoid texts in theoretical history. Quarantines developed because they were a good trick, one that allowed control over epidemics even in societies lacking the germ theory of disease.

Alternatively, we may argue that Foucault’s commonalities (”technologies of control,” he calls them when they really meant business and were particularly oppressive) are real–and that they exist for very good reasons. This tactic, which tends to excuse some of the recent barbarisms of the state, will not be popular with libertarians or even with many liberals. I don’t advise it myself.

Yet again, we may attack many of Foucault’s factual premises. For instance, my own reading of primary sources from the eighteenth century has convinced me that Foucault was speaking nonsense when he claimed that “the homosexual” did not exist until late in the following century. While gays may not have been medicalized until then, they certainly existed, with remarkably well-developed subcultures, codes of conduct, meeting places, and self-awareness. Intriguingly, gays and lesbians were understood through quite different filters at the time, a subject that would one day be worth my writing about, and toward which historian Jeffrey Merrick has already made great strides.

Yet this critique does not necessarily undercut Foucault’s assertions about the nature of societal power; it only points out that certain examples he used to illustrate it were poorly chosen. Others presumably would endure.

Finally, we may suggest a meta-critique of Foucault: As a social theorist, he is just as much a product of institutionalized society as anyone else, and because of this, Foucault’s own analysis shuts off all possibility of an authentic freedom. As I wrote in my undergraduate paper,

Foucault as a purveyor of knowledge intends to pull one over on us, to rope us into the system of power relations that he finds preferable: His knowledge is power, not merely in the conventional sense, but with the implication that the purpose of knowledge is the establishment of a subtle control over the one who is its subject–or even over the one who learns it. What is more, this purpose remains the same whether the knowledge be learned in a mental hospital, in a prison, or, one could easily argue, in a university.

[Foucault offers] a denial of the possibility of an honest honesty, of a truth behind the mask of power. All is power, and honesty is merely the pleasant-sounding word we use for the forced process of conforming to the wishes of those who have it. In the face of this, what can one say? Can a separate peace with Foucault’s totalizing realpolitik of ideas even be negotiated?

Undergraduate bluster aside, I think I was really onto something. But many of Foucault’s works, particularly in his later years, stressed the incompleteness inherent to all technologies of control. There is always a way out, the later Foucault seems to argue, although he could be terribly laconic about just where to find it.

All of this raises a very important question, though, one that could make or break Foucault’s entire intellectual project: If “power” is simply another name we give to a knowledge that happens to enjoy the weight of consensus–then how does Foucault really differ from social thinkers like Szasz, or even like Thomas Kuhn, who made similar claims, but who were much more modest in their pronouncements? What does the insistence on power really add, apart from a thrilling tinge of paranoia (one that may thrill anti-authoritarians of any stripe whatsoever)? After having encountered all of Foucault’s major works, plus so many more written by those who admired him, it remains my most pressing question: If Foucault is to be understood primarily as a subverter of socially exercized power, this question will require an answer that I do not yet have.