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Chapter 4--Early Foucault |
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Chapter Four
Early Foucault
Solving the complex economic puzzle posed by the need simultaneously to manage capitalism and to transform it, is not independent of building cultures of solidarity; on the contrary, building cultures of solidarity is the key to solving the complex economic puzzle. Achieving a broad social consensus that what solidarity and ecology require ought to be done—in other words achieving social cohesion based on non-authoritarian authority—is both a somewhat separate achievement and a key to disarming the systemic imperatives that tend to override even a broad social consensus. It requires a philosophy that facilitates cooperation among straights and queers, women and men, religious believers and irreligious unbelievers, conservatives and liberals, and in general people of all kinds. It requires a philosophy that combines the celebration of diversity with working together for the common good. It requires a philosophy that compensates for the conflicts inherent in the facts; most notably the conflicts inherent in our basic rules between those who work for a meager living, those who cannot even find work, those who are comfortable in their careers and businesses and do not understand why everyone else cannot do as they do and be comfortable as they are, and the rentiers. Revolutions do not work. (Debord 1994) A philosophy is needed that can cope with the conflicts there are and the illusions there are, and can help bring to fruition the possibilities for cooperation there are. I have been suggesting that Deweyan naturalistic pragmatism is such a philosophy (or, to put the same point a bit differently, I have been suggesting that Deweyan naturalistic pragmatism offers a flexible and scientifically valid framework within which people with different interests, different cultures, and different philosophies can understand each other while continuing to be different.) The welcoming cultural transformation I am advocating is more likely to precede than to follow economic transformation. It is even more likely, of course, that it will neither precede nor follow, but that instead what Norbert Lechner called “the conflictive and never completed construction of the desired social order” (Lechner 1983) will continue indefinitely on several fronts at once, and will be marked by innumerable interrelated advances and setbacks.
An examination of Michel Foucault’s philosophy will test my Deweyan naturalistic approach. If there is something false in my philosophy, its falsity should come to light if it turns out that Foucault disagrees and has good reasons for disagreeing. If my neo-Kaleckian interpretation of contemporary philosophy as shifting in accordance with the perceived interests and the ideals of people who control society’s discretionary expenditures is valid, then the case of Foucault should confirm it. If it is not valid, then the case of Foucault should refute it. My overall aim, of course, is not to evaluate Foucault´s work, but to propose a social democratic philosophy for improving humanity´s capacity to solve its principal problems. Although I do not intend to be deliberately unfair to Foucault, I am not directly or principally interested in assessing the value of his work or in interpreting it correctly. What is important from a problem-solving point of view is not whether Foucault really meant what I take him to mean, or whether he perhaps left the door open for people to attribute to him implausible views which in fact he never held, but rather what is true. We need to work on solving our problems on the basis of what is, not under illusions which lead us to mistake what is not for what is. For example, when a reading of Foucault suggests that politics is the continuation of war by other means (Foucault 1997), I am less interested in perfecting my interpretation in order to grasp exactly what Foucault meant (as if “exactly what Foucault meant” were an entity capable of being grasped by a mind or by a text) than I am interested in assessing what consequences for practice such a claim might have if it is in some sense or senses true. Examining Foucault is a way of testing my own philosophy, and also a search for ideas in Foucault that promise to be useful.
Foucault was born into a family of the kind I described in Chapter Two as combining advanced education with property ownership; his father was a physician and medical school professor, his mother inherited land (Eribon 1989, p. 21); but even if he had not been born into a rich family, Kalecki would suggest that the funding of literary and academic life in France or anywhere else largely depends on decisions made by people like the Foucaults who have enough money to be able to decide what to fund. It is likely that broad trends in academic work will reflect the perceived interests and the ideals of the bulk of the funders and purchasers.
On a first and superficial glance, my philosophy and Foucault’s are incompatible. If one is right, the other must be wrong. Foucault is against authority. I am for authority. Foucault unabashedly favors devoting life to pleasure-seeking, although perhaps he changed his mind in his last years to the limited extent of favoring discipline of the self by the self. I am in favor of social norms (although on the whole not of laws) that limit and channel pleasure-seeking. Foucault sides with the sophists; I with Plato. He with Nietzsche; I with religion and the morality of the herd. I believe there is an objective basis for ethics in physical reality; he believes discourse defines its objects. I believe in truth. Foucault (it is sometimes said) does not. I explain social reality in terms of rules. He explains it in terms of power. I have any number of proposals for solving humanity’s main problems. Foucault has none. (Even his activism on prison issues was not framed as a proposal for solving the prison problem; it was framed as giving voice to the prisoners to tell their own stories in their own words. He says he offers no solutions at Foucault 1980B pp. 86-87.)
On a closer examination, these differences which appear on a first and superficial glance, tend to vanish. I agree with Foucault more than would appear from my self portrayal in the preceding paragraph. His claims are on the whole rather modest and limited, although not uninteresting or unimportant. He did believe in truth. His writings are often not so much extremist as ambiguous, lending themselves to multiple and sometimes mutually inconsistent interpretations. Jana Sawicki wrote about him, “That he has been labeled structuralist determinist and voluntarist, activist and fatalist, leftist and neoconservative suggests either that his own discourse was incoherent and confused or that his interpreters have been unwilling to suspend assumptions and categories when judging it.” (Sawicki 1994, p. 354)
Let us begin a closer examination by looking at one of the introductory summaries of his work provided by Foucault himself. In 1983 on a visit to Berkeley during the year before he rather suddenly and unexpectedly died leaving a great deal of work in progress uncompleted, he wrote a brief introduction to his philosophy in English, which included the following words:
“As a starting point, let us take a series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live.
“It is not enough to say that these are antiauthority struggles. We must try to define more precisely what they have in common.
“1) They are ‘transversal’ struggles; that is, they are not limited to one country. Of course, they develop more easily and to a greater extent in certain countries, but they are not confined to a particular political or economic form of government.
“2) The aim of these struggles is power effects as such. For example, the medical profession is not criticized primarily because it is a profit-making concern, but because it exercises an uncontrolled power over people’s bodies, their health and their life and death.
“3) These are ‘immediate’ struggles for two reasons. In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals. They do not look for the ‘chief enemy,’ but for the immediate enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problems at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). In comparison with a theoretical scale of explanations or a revolutionary order which polarizes the historian, they are anarchistic struggles.” (Foucault 1983, p. 211)
Each of these three commonalities of the new struggles defined in Foucault’s proposed “starting point” is consistent with what Foucault told Catherine von Bülow at Sartre’s funeral when he said that his youthful passion had been to separate himself from the “terrorism” of Sartre and
Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes. (Eribon 1989, p. 297) He is building an alternative to phenomenological Marxism. In each of the three cases the “anarchistic struggle” Foucault endorses is contrasted with notions typical of Marxism, namely: concern with a particular political or economic form of government; criticism of profit-making; solutions to problems at a future date through liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle.
Having identified the above three commonalities of the new struggles, Foucault goes on to say three more things about them which he calls “more specific,” namely:
“4) They are struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way.
“These struggles are not exactly for or against the ‘individual,’ but rather they are struggles against the ‘government of individualization.’
“5) They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people.
“There is nothing ‘scientistic’ in this (that is, a dogmatic belief in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions: In short, the regime de savoir.
“6) Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question, Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is.” (Foucault 1983, pp. 211-12)
Earlier in the same text Foucault states what his own goal has been “during the last twenty years,” i.e. during the period 1963-1983. He writes, “I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis.
“My objective, instead, has been to create a history of different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” (Foucault 1983 p. 208)
He identifies three such modes. The first is science, or, rather, modes of inquiry which pretend to be scientific. The second is dividing practices: e.g. dividing the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “good boys.”
The third: “Finally, I have sought to study –it is my current work—the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality – how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of ‘sexuality.’” (Foucault 1983, p. 208)
Let me follow up these quotations in which Foucault introduces himself with some general remarks discussing three worries, or three sets of worries, people might have about Foucault.
Since Foucault supported several worthy and important causes, one might worry that his influence would divert energy away from other equally or more worthy and important causes that are less identified with his name. He is sometimes assigned part of the blame for the rise of a divisive identity politics that put movements to transform capitalism on the back burner. His friend Gilles Deleuze credited him with having undermined all “leftism” by making “normalization” rather than some typically Marxist theme like oppression or exploitation the center of historical analysis. (Deleuze 1977, pp. 183-84) One might worry that Foucault’s influence has undermined and continues to undermine social movements that think of themselves as resisting oppression or exploitation. My view is that it is unlikely that transforming capitalism, ecology, and other important issue areas will be neglected because some people emphasize queer rights, prison justice, and other topics that were Foucault’s special concerns. I see no logical reason why this should be so. However, this does not mean I am not worried about Foucault. It is one thing for one person to work on poverty issues and another person to work on prison reform issues while both persons have a comprehensive understanding of how the system works and how to change it. It is quite another thing for Foucault to go out of his way to construct a non-economic interpretation of history that filters out the economic structures that need to be changed. (See for example the Introduction to Foucault 1969).
Barry Smart has written that the political effect of Foucault’s philosophy is, in summary, to render problematic the classic discourse of socialism and its associated forms of political strategy (Smart 1986, pp. 166-69). Although Smart does not explicitly consider the possibility that this political effect was one Foucault intended, consciously or unconsciously, I believe that the following chapters will convince an open-minded reader that this possibility is a probability
Having chosen, like John Dewey, to identify with the positive, liberal, and undogmatic senses of the historically-battered term “socialism;” with full awareness of the crimes that have been committed in its name, with an intention to eliminate those ideas historically associated with the term that have lent themselves to committing them, and with no intention of eliminating either markets or privately owned businesses; I tend to identify achieving desirable forms of socialism with making progress toward solving humanity’s principal problems. To get from here (a world exchange value made) to there (a world where people evaluate and revise institutions continually so that little by little the institutions do a better job of meeting human and environmental needs) I believe that theories are needed. (By a “theory,” I mean an account of causes and their effects.) Without embracing what are pejoratively called totalizing theories, one can see the need for theory linking actions to be taken (causes) to expected consequences that will tend to solve problems (effects). I think I have good reasons for worrying about Foucault insofar as his work tends to discredit social democracy and to discredit theory.
One might also worry that Foucault’s chronic aversion to authority (Sawicki 1994, p. 394) would make him anti-social. However, he also came to speak toward the end of his career of a crisis of governability similar to Arendt’s crisis of authority. (Foucault 1980B p. 94) I believe Foucault would agree that in the real world the breakdown of reasonable, functional, legitimate non-authoritarian authority does not lead to the full freedom of the individual to pursue unusual pleasures; it leads instead to chaos quickly followed by brutal authoritarian domination. (My thinking here is influenced by my experiences living in Chile during the Pinochet coup and its aftermath (C. Richards 1985).) Foucault was sympathetic not only to the anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s but also to that periods’ experiments in communal life and worker ownership; he opposed “…everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way.” (Foucault 1983, p.211) In general, I am not worried about anti-authoritarian passions overwhelming an ethic of solidarity. One of my reasons for optimism is empirical. Findings of studies in the psychology of moral development show that the people committed to cooperating under the guidance and direction of norms of solidarity and the people who respect other people’s right to be different tend to be the same people. (Hoffman 2000) Being anti-authoritarian appears to make people less anti-social, not more anti-social.
A third set of worries one might have concerns Foucault’s relationship with Marxism. Sometimes he associated himself with Marx. (e.g. Foucault 1980A, p. 53). Sometimes he distanced himself from Marx. (e.g. Foucault 1980A, p. 58). One might fear that he gives aid and comfort to whoever one takes the enemy to be. He once described himself as neither an adversary nor a partisan of Marxism. (Foucault 1984 p. 595) That self-description can be contested, but it is not wrong if it mainly means that he was willing to learn from Marx and Marxists. He was clearly an intellectual adversary, although not a personal enemy, of Jean-Paul Sartre. I will be regarding Foucault as a life-long Marx-avoider with respect to the ethical issues discussed in the previous chapters. I confess that my terminology is odd in the respect that Marx himself can be regarded as a Marx-avoider in my sense if he is read through lenses, for example althusserian lenses, which sharply separate science from ethics and see him as a partisan of the former at the expense of the latter.
Foucault on the whole avoided the political commitments of Sartre engagé; although for a time, he became engagé in his own way with the prison rights and the anti-psychiatry movements. In the last years of Sartre’s life, the aging Sartre leaning on the arm of Simone de Beauvoir sometimes marched down a street in Paris together with Michel Foucault demonstrating for the same worthy cause. But Sartre and Foucault were not engagé in the same way. Even when they were at the same place at the same time doing the same thing, their philosophies were different. Sartre was participating in a long-term global movement to change the system. Foucault was participating in a short-term specific action to resist an effect of power.
Now I will make some specific remarks concerning Foucault’s earliest books, of which the first will be biographical and a bit repetitive.
Remark 1: Paul-Michel Foucault, later known as Michel Foucault, was born 15 October 1926 en the provincial city of Poitiers, being the second child of his parents, following his older sister Francine and preceding his younger brother Denys. The family is rich. A governess takes care of the children, while a cook does the cooking. There is even a chauffeur. (Eribon 1989, p. 21) His father, Paul Foucault senior, with whom he never had an affectionate relationship, is a surgeon and a teacher at a school of medicine. His mother, with whom he will spend the month of August and other vacation days throughout his life (Id. p. 31) inherited extensive real estate holdings in the region. Madame Foucault devotes herself to the education of young Paul-Michel, even sometimes hiring private professors to supplement what the local lycée is able to offer (Id. pp. 23-24) When he fails in his first attempt to gain admission to the École Normale Supérieur she sends him to Paris to prepare for the entrance examinations again, this time at the prestigious lycée Henri IV. He does not get along with his classmates. He is different because he lives alone. The students at Henri IV, except for Paul-Michel Foucault, are either external or internal. Those from Paris live with their families and are externals. The provincials like Foucault live in the dormitory. But Paul-Michel cannot stand to live with a group, and since his family has means his mother tries to buy an apartment for him. She finds none for sale and Paul-Michel ends up taking a room in a house on Boulevard Raspail. (Id. pp. 32-33). Both in the lycée and later at the École Normale Supérieur, to which he is admitted after a second attempt, Foucault is seen by his classmates as wild, enigmatic, a loner, sarcastic, argumentative, aggressive, and half crazy. He was almost unanimously detested. (Id. p. 33, p. 43) In the 1940s, homosexuality was not as widely accepted as it is today, and young Paul-Michel suffered greatly because of being gay and because of what appeared to be some form of insanity. More than once he attempted suicide. (Id. p. 43, p. 44) He read widely and passionately. He read Plato, Kant, Hegel, and all the philosophical classics; he read the Marquis de Sade, Kafka, Genet, Faulkner and vanguard literature generally; he read Freud and other psychologists; and like everyone else of course he read Marx. But more than anyone else he read Martín Heidegger. (Id. p. 47) At a slightly later period, he read more Nietzsche than Heidegger; in an interview in 1984, Foucault said that reading Heidegger and reading Nietzsche were for him two fundamental experiences. (Id. p. 48) First he read the translation of Sein und Zeit into French by Alphonse de Waehlen which appeared in 1942, and then he devoted himself to learning German so that he could read Heidegger in the original. (Id. p. 47) In 1948, he graduated with a degree in philosophy, writing a senior thesis on transcendental history in Hegel. In 1949, he graduated again, this time in psychology. In 1952, he finished earning a graduate level diploma in pathological psychology. (Id. p. 62) He joined the Communist Party in 1950 and left it in 1953.
Remark 2: Interviewed by Gerard Raulet, Foucault said that his first book was his doctoral dissertation, his history of madness published in 1961. (Foucault 1994) He preferred to forget a 1954 book written for a series edited by his then supervising professor Louis Althusser. It was an introductory manual for students of psychology oriented toward so-called scientific psychology. It included a lengthy and favorable presentation of the tenets of Soviet behaviorism. (Foucault 1954)
Remark 3: In 1955, in his first published book (not counting the book he preferred to forget), a long introduction (so long that it was longer than the text it introduced) to a French translation of Traum und Existenz by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, Foucault described his method as a Heideggerian one in which philosophy was always present but not presupposed. Therefore, he wrote, “…we can dispense with an introduction that summarizes Sein und Zeit with numbered paragraphs, and free ourselves for the less rigorous task of writing marginal notes to Traum und Existenz.” (Foucault 1955, p. 68). Following Heidegger, but without explicitly stating the reasons Heidegger gave for taking the positions he took, Foucault rejected all “positivist” psychology. Since positivism has had a long and varied history since it began with Auguste Comte in the early 19th century, it is well to note what sort of thinking he had in mind when he rejected the thinking he named with that word. He glosses his own meaning by saying he rejects all psychology that treated the human mind and the human being as part of nature. The existential analysis of Dasein, which Foucault contrasts with “positivism” as its polar opposite, is, “…a form of analysis that designates itself as fundamental with respect to any knowledge that is concrete, objective, and experimental; in which the point of beginning and also the method are determined only by the absolute privilege of their object: man, or rather human being, Mensch-sein.” (Foucault 1955, p. 66)
Since Foucault takes Heidegger’s position without reviewing Heidegger’s reasons for taking it, I will briefly add to what I already wrote about Heidegger in the preceding chapter, reviewing some of the philosophical moves that accomplished the turning of the tables that allowed Foucault and Heidegger to regard naturalistic psychology as naïve, and Daseinanalysis as fundamental, starting with Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl. Husserl called for “bracketing the natural standpoint,” in other words for putting the natural standpoint between parenthesis and suspending judgment concerning it. The natural standpoint is a standpoint that takes the objects in the everyday world and ordinary ways of thinking about them for granted. Husserl insisted that from a scientific point of view, the natural standpoint assumes what is to be proved. It accepts without question what needs to be rationally examined. Husserl revived the Hegelian word “phenomenology” and started a school of thought that proposed (as Descartes had proposed more than 300 years earlier) to rebuild knowledge on a sound basis, this time starting (instead of with Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas”) with the phenomena given to consciousness. In other words: starting with experience—not the naïve experience of the person who simply reads reality through the lenses of the common sense of her time and place, but the carefully bracketed experience of people who follow Husserl’s method for purifying experience of all its built-in assumptions.
As already mentioned in the previous chapter, Heidegger elaborated Husserl’s phenomenological method in his own way, as did Foucault’s teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (Merleau-Ponty 1945) Heidegger made “being” the central issue. (His point is clearer in German because the verb to be (sein) is spelled with the same letters as the capitalized noun being (Sein)) This makes intuitive sense. How can you say anything about anything before you know what “is” “are” and other forms of the verb “to be” mean? At the beginning of Sein und Zeit (pages 5-38) Heidegger proposes a method for going about inquiring what being is. It turns out that the right way to ask the question is to ask about the questioner, i.e. that being for whom being is a question, i.e. human being, designated by Heidegger as Dasein (literally being-there). (Heidegger 1927 pp. 7,11,12,41-49) (Instead of just calling it human being, Heidegger needs to coin a term like Dasein in order to avoid falling back into the natural standpoint.) Dasein (human being) turns out to be a being always interpreting itself; it is a self that is always a question for itself; it is always reading itself, always telling stories about itself; and it always finds itself already thrown into the world, it is already in-der-Welt-sein, being-in-the-world, experiencing a world where the sun rises in the East and sets in the West (even though science says the planet earth revolves around the sun) and in which (to borrow an example from Frege) there is a morning star and an evening star (even though science says both are the same planet, Venus). (pages 50-88)
I have suggested earlier that evoking respect for traditional patterns of social authority is the main payoff for Heidegger of his strategy for turning the tables on the neo-Kantians, thus establishing the interpretation of experience as a foundation of knowledge prior to natural science. The world where the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and where there is a morning star and an evening star, is the same world that has the heaven above and the earth below (a point Heidegger elaborates in his essay on “The Thing” (Heidegger 1987)) The main payoff for early Foucault is that Daseinanalysis authorizes the study of “concrete experience.” (For Heidegger the question of being far from being empty and general is the “most concrete question.” Heidegger 1927 p. 9) Foucault’s work will give new meaning to the word “experience.” That “concrete experience” is for him a doorway to realms disregarded by naturalistic psychology quickly becomes apparent in Foucault’s comments on Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. Descartes, the grandfather of modern science, had worried that everything he thought he knew might be false because although he thought he was sitting in his robe in a chair beside the fire, he might be dreaming. Merely dreaming. Freud had rescued dreams from being “mere dreams.” Foucault writes of Freud, “With his book Traumdeutung the dream made its entry into the field of human meanings.” (Foucault 1955, p. 69) But Freud only rescued the semantics of dreams. He interpreted fire as a symbol for sex or water as a symbol for death. It was not until the coming of Ludwig Binswanger, the Heideggerian author of Traum und Existenz, that science took seriously the morphology and the syntax of dreams.
Later in his career, Foucault will rescue not only dreams but also madness, art, criminality, unusual sexual behavior, the history of the sciences, and history itself from reduction to the pre-formed categories of naturalistic analysis (which early Foucault calls “positivist”). What he did always was “concrete analysis.” It started with Mensch-sein and later, after a series of transformations, it became the creation of “... a history of different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects;” and still later it became a history of sexuality. Consistently until the end of his days, in spite of the changes his thought underwent from one period of his life to another, and even though in 1969 he decided that in some senses it was good and not bad to be a “positivist” and study “positivities” (Foucault 1969) his studies always carried an anti-naturalist message, although not always the specifically Heideggerian message, of his 1955 introduction to Binswanger. “This project locates itself in opposition to all the forms of psychological positivism that seek to extinguish the meaningful content of the person by using the reductive concept of homo natura, and it replaces them into the context of an ontological reflection that takes as its major theme the presence of being, existence, Dasein.” (Foucault 1955 p. 66) When in 1983 Foucault identifies with social struggles that “… underline everything which makes individuals truly individual,” he is talking about the freedom to be authentic, to be crazy, to be an artist.
Remark 4: Although early Foucault took phenomenological hermeneutics in a somewhat different direction, which with the benefit of hindsight we can call a characteristically Foucauldian one, he also participated in characteristically Heideggerian moves. Pierre Bourdieu has shown that Heidegger was the academically respectable spokesperson for numerous popular conservative writers who dreamed of soulful rural utopias of yesteryear and despised and feared the soulless urban masses. (Bourdieu 1985) Although I have found nothing in writing regarding Foucault’s mother’s ideology, since we do know that a conservative one would have served her material interests, and since we do know from Bourdieu’s research and other sources that a conservative romanticism was in the air in Europe, it seems likely that Foucault himself imbibed popular conservatism with his mother’s milk. Consistently with this likelihood, in his early work Foucault, following Heidegger, re-enchanted the disenchanted modern world. In the process, he returned to it a vivid sense of right and wrong.
Here are two examples [with explanatory notes in brackets]:
(i) “Every act of expression is to be understood against the background of these primary orientations [those of Daseinanalyse]; it is not produced ex nihilo, but it situates itself in their trajectory, and it starts with them, as the starting point of a curve to which one must attribute the ensemble of the movement of its total accomplishment. It is in that measure that there can be a [philosophical] anthropology of art, which is in no way a psychological reduction. It cannot be a matter of tracing back the structures of expression to the determinism of unconscious motivations, but it is a matter of being able to acknowledge them along all the line of transformation of human freedom. Along that line that goes from near space to distant space, we will encounter a specific form of expression; there where existence knows the dawn of triumphant departures, the voyages and adventures, the marvelous discoveries, the sieges of towns, the unforgotten exiles, the stubborn insistence on returning, the bitterness of the things found unchanged and aged, throughout the length and breadth of that Odyssey of existence, in the ‘great songs woven of dreams and realities’ epic expression takes its place as a fundamental structure of the expressive act.” (Foucault 1955, p. 105)
(ii) “…the experience of dreaming cannot be separated from its ethical content. Not because it reveals secret penchants, unspeakable desires that bring to the surface nude instincts, not because dreams are able, like Kant’s God, to ‘plumb the depths of hearts and kidneys;’ but because it restores to its authentic sense the movement of freedom, because it shows in what way it is grounded or alienated; because it shows whether it is constituted as radical responsibility in the world, or whether it forgets itself and abandons itself to the fall into causality. The dream is the absolute revelation of ethical content, the naked heart.” (Foucault 1955, pp. 91-92)
As a critical realist, I want to say that such characteristically conservative ideas and passions (those of Heidegger, those of Bourdieu’s popular proto-fascist writers in central Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those of early Foucault, those of similar contemporary thinkers) can be understood, accommodated, and respected within an ecological view of the physical functions of human cultures.
I should say here, hoping it will be understood implicitly elsewhere, that although in some important ways some of his work is appropriately called anti-naturalist, I do not believe that Michel Foucault ever denies the main premises of critical realism. The dialogue between him and critical realists is not one between people who agree on the definitions of the terms, but disagree about the truth values of the statements made with the terms; so that some say yes where others say no, some say true where others say false; it is rather a dialogue among speakers who have made different choices about how to speak. Although in later years Foucault became famous for showing how discourses create their objects, to my knowledge he never said there are no natural objects prior to people giving names to them, nor that the natural world is unknowable, nor that socially created realities are the only realities, nor anything similar to any of these three claims but expressed in different terms. Sometimes he makes it a point to distinguish nature from culture. (e.g. Foucault 1966) He also makes it a point to distinguish legitimate natural science from bogus disciplines that pretend to be natural science. (e.g. Foucault 1976, p. 73)
Remark 5: Foucault was driven to the study of the history of mentalities by the same anti-positivist anti-naturalist concerns that drove his 1955 work on dreams. In 1957 he contributed to an anthology on contemporary philosophy a chapter on “Psychology from 1850 to 1950.” Foucault began his review of a century of psychological research and writing by saying that psychology had inherited from the Enlightenment the desire to align itself with the natural sciences and to find in human beings the prolongation of the laws that govern natural phenomena. Thus alignment with the natural sciences and seeking to prolong natural laws into the explanation of human behavior are what Foucault has in mind in rejecting positivism. From its beginnings until the middle of the 20th century psychology had been unable to escape the contradiction between its project (to understand human beings) and its postulates (anti-historical positivism). He concludes, “Is the future of psychology not then to be found in taking seriously its contradictions, the very contradictions that gave it birth? There would not then be any psychology possible except by the analysis of the conditions of human existence and by the recurring to the study of what is most human in man, that is to say, his history.” (Foucault 1957A p. 137; see also Foucault 1957B) Thus Foucault sets the stage for his doctoral dissertation, his history of madness, Histoire de la Folie. It was a study of a psychological topic, insanity, written using an historical methodology. Its aim would be humanistic: to recover what is most human from the grip of a dehumanizing positivism.
Remark 6: His 1961 doctoral dissertation, Histoire de la Folie a l’Age Classique (Madness and Civilization) was a polemic against positivism from beginning to end. (Foucault 1961, pp. 67-70, 166, 179, 188-9, 208, 274, 428, 440, 472, 548, 552, 572, 598; cf. Derrrida 1994 pp. 65-68). Like Sein und Zeit it was a story of decline and fall. In the early days, “En marche vers Dieu, l’homme est plus que jamais offert a la folie, et le havre de verité vers lequel finalemente la grace le pousse, qu’est-il d’autre, pour lui, qu’un abime de déraison? (Foucault 1961, p. 51) (On the way to God, man is more than ever opened to madness, and the haven of truth toward which finally grace pulls him, what else is it, for him, than an abyss of unreason?) The story ends sadly: “Le positivisme alors ne sera plus projet theorique, mais stigmate de l’existence alienée. Le statut d’objet sera imposée d’entrée de jeu à tout individu reconnu aliené.” (Foucault 1961, p. 575) (Positivism now would now no longer be a theoretical project, but the stigma of alienated existence. The status of object would be imposed at the beginning of play on every individual considered insane.) One is reminded of Heidegger’s famous question, “What has happened to us in the roots of our being now that science has become our passion?”
Remark 7: Also like Sein und Zeit, Histoire de la Folie can be treated –quite apart from its author’s explicit claims-- as a prophetic book that reveals what must be done to cure modernity of its crisis of authority. I will here use Histoire de la Folie to revise my own proposals for social transformation without claiming to speak for Foucault. In the final chapter Foucault says that Descartes’ approach to truth made impossible le lyrisme de la déraison. (Foucault 1961, p. 638). It would seem to follow that if early Foucault and his allies succeed in dispelling the illusions of a Cartesian approach to truth generally, and of naturalistic psychology specifically, then le lyrisme de la déraison, which continued to exist during the times when a Cartesian approach to truth was rising and gradually becoming dominant –the poetry and prints of William Blake come to mind; as do Nietzsche’s last words, proclaiming himself to be at once Christ and Dionysius; as do Friedrich Hölderlin and other romantics Foucault mentions appreciatively-- will again be available. Perhaps it will save us. Perhaps the following words of Foucault tell us what it is: “Thus, in the common discourse of delirium and dream we find together the possibility of a poetry of the world; since madness and dream are at once the moment of extreme subjectivity and that of ironic objectivity, there is here no contradiction: the poetry of the heart, in the final solitude of its lyricism, exasperated, finds itself being by an immediate return the original song of things; and the world, long silenced by the tumult of the heart, finds again its voices.” (Foucault 1961, p. 639) I do not fully understand what Foucault might have meant in the lines I have just quoted. Clearly he is in favor le lyrisme de la déraison. Perhaps like Plato he conceives of divine madness being integrated into a healthy harmonious well-disciplined personality and a just social order; perhaps he is mainly interested in authority figures leaving individuals alone so they can enjoy le lyrisme de la déraison by themselves. In any case, early Foucault and Heidegger make me fear the emotional power of fascism; and they make me believe that social democracy must compete with it to succeed. People cannot endure even the Supreme Good if it is boring. Although I do not fully understand what Foucault might have meant in this passage, I do think he reflects here in poetic language an important fact: most people, maybe all people, maybe some people all the time and all people some of the time, are not satisfied with dull routine and live for excitement. Whether one deduces this fact from phenomenological Daseinanalyse; or intuits it identifying with poets, novelists, and playwrights one admires; or proves it by writing a history of madness; or breathes it every day as part of the breath of personal experience; or, as appears to be the case with Foucault, derives it from all four of these sources; or whether, like Elias and Dunning, one extracts it from sociological analysis of human behavior (Elias and Dunnning 1986); or whether, like me, one deduces it from emotional proclivities of the human body hundreds of thousands of years old; it is, undoubtedly, a fact.
Remark 8: The word “experience” takes on new meanings as Foucault researches the historical conditions of the possibility of having one. The subject of an experience is no longer a John Locke or a David Hume sitting by himself having his sense impressions. The subject of a Foucauldian experience in Histoire de la Folie is likely to be “the nineteenth century” or “l’age classique.” Nor is Foucault an Immanuel Kant who prescribes once and for all the conditions of any possible experience. Foucault delineates the “concrete a priori” that determines what experiences are possible at a given time and place. (He will later delineate the concrete a priori that made Hume possible. (Foucault 1966, chapter 7))
Let me give an example. Actually my example will be a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, because it will be the central particular scientific achievement of Michel Foucault in Histoire de la Folie.
The condition of possibility of the age classique’s experience of folie was déraison. Déraison was the background, the fond, against which it was possible to see and to talk about “the fool.” Déraison in turn presupposed and meshed with a set of institutions, practices, and meanings, all of which themselves came into being during earlier periods of historical time. It required, in particular, notions of reason, in comparison with which there could be unreason.
(For Foucault an “experience” is simultaneously what is seen and what is said.)
The condition of possibility of the nineteenth century’s experience of insanity was early Foucault’s bête noire, the psychology that seeks to align itself with the natural sciences and to find in human beings the prolongation of the laws that govern natural phenomena. It classifies mental illnesses as botanists classify plants. Foucault turns the tables on the “hard scientists,” who in their proud overconfidence had regarded themselves as the real scientists of the social and psychological domains, by describing in great detail the historical processes that had to occur before it would become possible for them to have the experiences they have.
Remark 9: My questions now are: Does Foucault give any good reasons for considering the principle that nature judges culture to be false? Is Dewey wrong when he says philosophical (ethical) hypotheses are to be evaluated by their consequences? Ought institutions to be reformed because they are defective when they fail to assure that everybody has food, clean water, pure air, shelter against cold and heat, and medical care; or are the institutions that do not facilitate the provision of basic security for all simply different, no better and no worse, but only other series of experiences, miserable ones, that people in the course of history happen to have? It seems clear to me that Foucault would answer this last question in the affirmative, that is to say, choosing the first and not the second option---judged by his practical political activities, and by the favorable impressions he had of Swedish social democracy when he lived and taught there. This would be my resolution of my doubts about the passage I said I could not understand above: Foucauld did not say le lyrisme de la déraison in a good society would be physically functional, but if you had asked him he would have said so. It also seems clear that Foucault did give good reasons, noted above in Remark 7, why such prosaic achievements as those I have listed in the last question are, although necessary, not sufficient. People also need le lyrisme de la déraison. I would say, being fairly confident that I am agreeing with Foucault but using language he would probably not use: People need mystical experiences; they need them so badly that they will get them from rock music concerts, from football frenzy, from all night fiestas, from experimental sex, from substance abuse, and/or from violence if they do not get them from religion, and/or art. The need for le lyrisme de la déraison is both an intrinsic and an instrumental need. It is the latter because social structures that do not cultivate it collapse in quarrels. For lack of charm they do not maintain workable human relationships. They do not succeed in meeting even basic physical needs because they fail at what Hanna Arendt calls “the art of living together.”
Remark 10: I am reasonably certain that Foucault would agree with the critical realist that society should adjust to physical reality in order to provide concrete benefits for its members. Nevertheless, what he emphasizes is a different point: that people who claim to know what reality is and how to adjust to it, abuse their position as possessors or soi-disant possessors of knowledge. Doctors and other experts exercise unwarranted control over other people’s bodies, on the pretext that they, the experts, know what people’s needs are and how to meet them. But surely neither Foucault nor anyone else would deny that there are physical needs that would exist even if there were no doctors, or even if there were none of the cultural forms we know Foucault sheds some light, and perhaps also some darkness, on this question in his discussions of signs and symptoms in La Naissance de la Clinique (finished 1961, published 1963). This book continues the humanist and anti-positivist work of the book on madness. Its general thesis is that the medical gaze, le regard médical, the clinical experience, should not be taken for granted as part of nature, for it is a product of history that could only come into existence after the historical conditions of its possibility were met. It is an undesirable product of history: the human being becomes an object, a case. However, so much of the book is about historical facts that it could almost pass for materialist history, and inded Louis Althusser thought it was. Much of it could have been written by Fernand Braudel or by Immanuel Wallerstein. The clinical experience, the experience of diagnosis of the patient at the clinic, arose out of the rough and tumble of political struggles, and out of a series of efforts to reorganize medical practice to make it work, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The old university faculties of medicine had been abolished and dissolved. Something had to be done to train and certify doctors, and to organize health services. But Foucault adds a non-naturalistic dimension, a Heideggerian one, to his otherwise Braudelian history of medicine. Or –to put it the other way around—Foucault, coming from a background strongly marked by phenomenological studies with Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger; and following out early Heidegger’s principle that human being is through and through interpretive and historical; and following it out with a personal passion to redeem outcasts and to expose the frauds of those who abuse science to abuse power; is in La Naissance de la Clinique in the process of becoming more and more immersed in history’s material details. Foucault’s methodology coincides with his way of looking at the history of science. Science´s very categories change in time; in this respect its categories are no different from myths; the history of science intertwines with that of myths. (See Foucault’s 1961 review of Alexandre Koyre’s La Revolution Astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli (Foucault 1961A)). It is not simply the case that after shutting down the old medical establishment, the French Revolution had to reorganize medicine somehow to provide for the health of the people. It is rather the case that the very possibilities of thinking and seeing “medicine,” “health,” and “people” are historically contingent and hotly, often violently, contested. In the new order, that of the modern clinic, the doctor or the apprentice-in-training-to-be-a-doctor (or, more impersonally, le regard médical) sees the patient at the clinic. The doctor or assistant takes the pulse, measures the heartbeat, weighs the patient, asks questions, listens to patient’s self-reports, examines the body, checks the temperature, and diagnoses. In the signs the doctor sees symptoms. Symptoms of what ? Symptoms of the underlying cause, the disease. Given the underlying cause, the patient’s condition can be expected to develop --give or take individual differences-- as other cases with the same diagnosis develop. It can be treated with the same remedies. The sign/symptom structure of the diagnosis is, Foucault points out, homologous with ideology (ideology as an empiricist semiotic, a systematic study of ideas of the sort Destutt de Tracy proposed when he coined the word). It follows the same pattern in relating words to things as other ideologies. It is a social product, as are other ideologies. Very well, says the critical realist. At a phenomenological level, the relation of sign to symptom is an ideology. Foucault is quite right to say that the regard is fondateur with respect to the object of discourse (Foucault 1963, p. vii, x) But, continues the critical realist, if the correct diagnosis is that the patient has measles, the reason why the diagnosis is correct is that the patient has measles. Measles is the physical reality the doctor has detected. I do not believe that anywhere Michel Foucault specifically denies this point, and if he were to deny it, I would not believe that he could have any good reasons for denying it. When the signs are taken as symptoms of measles, the diagnosis is either right or wrong depending on whether the patient has measles or does not; and whether the patient has measles or not depends on the presence or absence of certain germs in the blood and tissues, which have certain molecular structures. Of course, admits the critical realist, there are socially created realities (Harre 1979), and in an important sense the molecular structures of measles germs can be counted among them; they are ideologies too; they are part of the discourse of chemistry and bacteriology; but, adds the critical realist, in an important sense they are not. (Bhaskar 1978, 1979)
Remark 11: I will not give reasons why critical realism is a plausible position to hold vis a vis other contemporary philosophical positions, since to do so would be to repeat unnecessarily what has already been written by Roy Bhaskar, Rom Harre, Margaret Archer, Heikki Patomaki, and others.
Remark 12: Acknowledging the existence of physical realities is a step toward acknowledging the need to change social realities so that they in turn will change physical realities, which will then in turn change social realities again –hopefully, if all goes well, favoring non-authoritarian authority by making a society’s norms more respectable and more respected because the norms are working better at a physical level. Social realities change physical realities not only because discourses define their objects, as in the case of madness-talk creating the category of “insane” and placing certain persons in it. The social changes the physical also because human action guided by conventional rules changes what physically happens. For example: the futures of plant and animal species today depend less than previously on random mutations and old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection, and more on the relationship of the species to the activities of homo sapiens sapiens. Human activities, in turn, are programmed by culture. The future of a species is likely to depend today on whether urbanization will destroy its habitat; or on whether, as in the case of the coyotes who hunt rats in the landscaped borders of the freeways of Los Angeles, human activity is creating new opportunities for the species; or on whether heating of waters due to human CO2 emissions is moving the species’ habitat out of the temperature range it requires; etc. But the activities of homo sapiens sapiens --the ways our particular species interchanges matter and energy with the environment-- are driven by the prevailing basic cultural structures, notably by capital accumulation. It is still true that human activities are driven by capital accumulation to a major extent –certainly to an extent large enough to impact the future of many species—even after due account is taken of the endless attacks on totalizing theories that have proliferated since May of 1968. The conventional social rules that organize commerce conducted for the purpose of turning money into more money explain a lot and move many activities, even though they do not explain all or move everything.
Remark 13: As I write this, on the sidewalk outside my hotel poor people are trying to sell trinkets nobody wants or needs. Basic conventional rules, the ones derived from the Roman jus gentium, explain and animate what they are doing. On the sidewalk they are doing a form of selling that amounts to begging, since it is more likely that someone will buy from a desire to help than from a desire to own; it is a combination of selling and begging that could easily turn into stealing if a seller-beggar encountered a tourist in a dark alley. Their pain and their needs are physical realities, even though there are many layers of cultural interpretation intervening between the cellular level and the experienced in-der-Welt-sein of a contemporary impoverished Latin American urban Dasein. They are physical realities interwoven with the legal norms written down in the Civil Code.
Remark 14: In 1961 when a reporter from Le Monde asked Michel Foucault who had inspired the methodology he employed in Histoire de la Folie, in reply he named two literary artists, Maurice Blanchot and Raymond Roussel, and one specialist in the study of the religious myths of ancient India, Georges Dumezil. (Weber 1961) Let us pretend that it is still 1961, and we know who Foucault told Le Monde the inspirers of his methodology were, but we do not know what Michel Foucault will write next; we can only speculate. Let us pretend that we have to speculate without knowing what in the later sixties, the seventies and eighties he will say about the choices he made in 1961. His interests in language and myths, one might speculate, might lead him to study language-games as episodes in the natural histories of human beings. Having written a cultural history of a science (psychiatry), he might have decided to write next a scientific history of a culture, in which he would analyze the material conditions that influence the generation, growth, and selective survival of symbolic structures. Given that he had chosen not to tell the reporter from Le Monde that Heidegger was a major influence, even though there are numerous employments of Heideggerin concepts in Histoire de la Folie (see Foucault 1961, pages 52, 140, 166, 178, 179, 180-82, 298, 210, 264, 278, 282, 472) we might guess that in 1961 in public Foucault is backing away from Heidegger. He might have written the material history of the juridical myths that constitute the conditions of possibility of the concrete experiences of entrepreneurs, accountants, lawyers, and economists. He had indeed already advanced in that direction regarding the concrete experiences of doctors and patients by writing La Naissance de la Clinique (which by the end of 1961 he had finished writing but had not published), a study of how the forces of history had shaped the culture of the medical profession. What actually happened was that on Christmas Day of 1961, right after finishing La Naissance de la Clinique he began to write an article that grew until it became a book on a purely literary subject, Raymond Roussel. (Defert and Ewald 1994, p. 24) My suspicion is that having gotten into writing history, as he said, to rescue from positivist psychology what is most human in human beings (Foucault 1957A, 1957B) he found himself veering toward historical materialism more than he wanted to veer. Histoire de la Folie and even more so La Naissance de la Clinique tend toward the conclusion, in my opinion contrary to their author’s intentions, that material conditions determine the course of history. Raymond Roussel (1963A) was a first step in avoiding that unwanted conclusion, to be followed later and more famously by Les Mots et les Choses (1966); and to be followed by explicit critiques of seeing economics as the mainspring of history in Archéologie du Savoir (1969) and in Foucault´s lectures at the Collège de France and published books in the 1970s.
Remark 15: The terrifying truth is that many human beings are rejected by the labor market, and that most of those who are accepted are accepted only provisionally. Having evolved as hunters and gatherers over several hundred thousand years to live in small tribal groups organized by kinship ties, we find ourselves in successor states of the Roman Empire, where the principle of dominus implies that every physical thing is under the control of one juridical subject or another, leaving those who do not control any place with no place to sleep; and where the principles of commerce imply that unless there is a contract nobody owes anybody anything. These facts are consequences of the constitutive rules of modernity -- the rules of our kind of society, the kind the legal historian Sir Henry Maine describes as having achieved the transition from being a traditional society based on status to being a modern society based on contract. Employment is a contract. Those who do not own enough property to live without working need employment, but like any contract employment requires another party. That other party may and may not be found. As John Maynard Keynes showed, normally there will be more work-needers than work-providers. Keynes wrote his theory in 1936, but in Europe ever since the dawn of modernity (and even previously in some civilizations with similar institutions, such as the imperial Rome from whose laws modern laws mainly derive) there has existed the phenomenon of surplus population. The phenomenon is not a function of the ratio of number of people to quantity of land; it is a function of supply of people to demand for people. It can be and has been modified by charitable and socialistic measures; hopefully in some sweet future day it will not occur. Now it does occur; it has for several centuries, and it has ramifications throughout the social order in many forms, including sending surplus people to colonies, sending them to jail, keeping them in various kinds of asylums, enlisting them in the army, having them go to school year after year; and it has ramifications of many other forms concerning which details are given by many writers among whom Michel Foucault is one; Michel Foucault stumbled onto the phenomenon of surplus population (Foucault 1961, chapter two) when he encountered le grand renfermement of the 17th century, the great locking up in hospitals of fools along with surplus people of all kinds, as he was in the process of using history to save psychology from positivism; and it has not only ramifications but also analogues; it goes together with parallel forms of alienation growing from the same roots; because, remember, the rejection of people by the labor market is only an example, not the root source of all the market-generated hipermodern Unsicherheit that spreads everywhere uncertainty, insecurity, and isolation. (Bauman 2001) We live in a world so disconnected that almost everyone, at one point in time or another, suspects himself or herself of being crazy; where almost everyone can relate to the feelings of Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel La Nausée, for whom everything, the trees, the buildings, the streets … was de trop, too much, unnecessary. Nature contradicts culture. By natural processes people are born; they emerge into the light from the wombs of women. But it is culture, largely through its principal institution, the market, which threshes out the difference between those who are wanted and those who are unwelcome. Foucault stumbled across the phenomenon of surplus population in his history of madness in early modern times. He was not looking for it. He was writing a polemic against positivism designed to redeem social outcasts, to promote respect for deviant individuals, and to deflate the pseudo-scientific pretensions of knowledge-based power trips. He discovered that the history of lunacy was part of the history of surplus population. In the grand renfermement of the mid seventeenth century hospitals were created to put out of the way and to care for all the people whom society did not know what to do with: people who refused to go to mass, blasphemers, invalids, indigents, mentally retarded people, people who walked the streets talking to themselves, troublemakers, old people with no family to support them, dangerous people given to rages, people who denied Christ or thought they were Christ …. The result was similar whether they were deranged and impoverished because they were socially rejected, or whether they were socially rejected because they were deranged and impoverished. In either case France had a surplus population. A royal decree of 27 April 1656 founded a General Hospital charged with preventing “… begging and laziness as the sources of all disorders.” (Foucault 1961, p. 90) In England and Germany and elsewhere in Europe there were workhouses and poorhouses with a similarly catholic clientele. We do not read in Histoire de la Folie anything about what was happening in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East in the mid 17th century. Those places were, as we learn from Braudel, Wallerstein, and others who fill in parts of the picture Foucault does not paint, at that time still places where modern economic relations had not yet arrived. Having written a history of stigmatism and separation in the particular case of madness, and having shown how the histories of psychiatry and of medicine as sciences are interwoven with the history of institutions, Foucault might have written, as his next book, a history of class-divided societies in general. Instead he began a book about someone in many ways similar to himself – someone who never had to do manual labor; somebody who suffered from bouts of madness and suicide attempts (Eribon 1989 p. 43-44), who had indeed been treated by the famous psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who was however in that respect unlike Foucault because Foucault on Louis Althusser’s advice declined to seek psychiatric treatment (Eribon 1989, p. 50); a homosexual; a writer; a sensualist; someone who meditated at length on the relation of death to language; someone who prolonged his life beyond his life by his writing. Janet in his book Angoisse et Exstase had described his patient Raymond Roussel as “a poor little sick man.” In his book on Roussel Foucault shows (once again deflating the pretensions of psychiatry) that folie, madness, is admittedly and declaredly absence d’oeuvre, absence of work; it appears to be useless, but it is akin to great art. He shows that the same discourse can be madness or literature, in Roussel’s case madness during the period of his life and literature in a later period. (Foucault 1969A p. 605) I want Foucault to be right in honoring Roussel, because I want it to be true that through writing works of fiction, sometimes closely allied to madness -- always closely allied to dreaming and to playing-- humans can create alternative worlds, which can then influence and hopefully imrpove the existing status quo. I agree with Herbert Marcuse and with Johan Galtung that to change the world empirical social science devoted to the study of what happens, needs to complemented by other methodologies that focus on what might happen, what is possible, what could be imagined. Otherwise humanity has no hope of transcending the tragic social reality in which it has, for now, trapped itself. When I read Claude Levi-Strauss’s account of totemism, in which he depicts Australian aborigines as snobs who construct elaborate genealogies non motivés that achieve no objective and serve no discernible function; I attribute to the aborigines’ prolific exercise of their symbolic capacities enormous long run survival value. Homo ludens lives in stories. From taking pleasure in making up stories for no reason at all have come all the sciences and all the civilizations. Pierre Machery, in his Presentation to a reprinting of Foucault’s Raymond Roussel encourages me to believe what I want to believe about the causal powers of imagination and about Foucault: “At first glance,” writes Machery, “one might be tempted to consider that Foucault then applied his notion of experience, elaborated at the junction of philosophic discourse and history, to the study of literary texts. But, if one reflects attentively, one will perceive that in fact it is the contrary that must have been the case. Literature was without doubt for him the privileged place where he elaborated on the status of experience, considered as such, and starting from which he was able to think-- based in a way on a literary model-- other ‘experiences’ such as those of exclusion, of knowledge, of punishment, or of sexuality.” (Machery in Foucault 1963A, p. ix) Roussel, an admirer of Jules Verne and a precursor of Alain Robbe-Grillet, structured bizarre experiences that do not happen. For example, concerning Roussel’s La Vue, Foucault writes, “The View, as an immediate contradiction to its title, opens onto a universe without perspective. Or perhaps it combines the vertical point of view (which makes it possible to embrace everything as in a circle) and the horizontal point of view (which places the eye at ground level and only allows the foreground to be seen).” (Foucault 1963A, p. 138) Foucault’s account of Roussel begins in the first chapter and ends in the last chapter with Roussel’s suicide, representing his suicide as the end toward which his literary activity was tending; in language reminiscent of Heidegger’s notion that human being is being-towards-death (Heidegger 1927 pp. 235-267); and also reminiscent of young Foucault’s own attempts at suicide. Roussel staged his own death, elaborately contrived and passionately desired, in a hotel room in Palermo, where he had gone to live alone in a state of constant drug-induced euphoria. Foucault seems to me to give away the secret of Roussel’s suicide in words which confirm Emile Durkheim’s empirical study of the subject, and which illustrate the terrible truth that in modern society many people are bonded to others by nothing more solid than contracts, and in the absence of contracts by nothing at all. I think my Durkhemian reading of the following words of Foucault about Roussel will be understood by those who acknowledge that in modern society the alienation of the rich is of a piece with the alienation of the poor; and by those who agree with me that Roquentin in Sartre’s La Nausée was projecting onto the world around him his own sense that he was unwanted and unnecessary; and that his presumably leftwing (because his creator Sartre was leftwing) boredom with middle-class life in Mudville reflected its Weberian disenchantment, its Polanyian disembeddedness; and that the same terrifying truths are perceived from a different perspective when the rightwinger Heidegger writes of das Man and the rightwinger T.S.Eliot writes “The crowds crossing over London Bridge so many/ I had not thought that death had destroyed so many.” Foucault on Roussel: “Roussel at the time when he was writing his first book experienced a feeling of universal glory. Not an exasperated desire to be a celebrity, but a physical confirmation: ‘[quoting Roussel] What I was writing was surrounded by rays of sunlight. Every line was repeated with thousands of copies, and I wrote with thousands of flaming penpoints.’ When the book was published [and turned out to be a failure] all the doubled suns were extinguished; the flaming words drowned in black ink; and all around Roussel the language which scintillated in the depths of his least syllable like marvelous waters dissolved into a faceless world. ‘[quoting Roussel again] When the young man with great emotion walked out onto the street and realized that nobody noticed as he walked by, the feelings of glory and luminosity were quickly extinguished.’ It was the night of melancholy; and nevertheless that light continued to burn near and distant (as at the heart of a darkness that abolished distances and made them unattainable), troubling and imperceptible in a mistake in which all his work was lodged; it was there also that there was born his decision to die, in order to rejoin in one bond that marvelous point, that heart of the night and threshold of light.” (Foucault 1963A, p. 199) In short, a simple story: a man who wanted love and did not get it. A classic Durkheimian suicide. Because I want a world in which the terrifying truth is not true, I want to retain from Foucault on Roussel the suggestion (which I will not say is Foucault’s suggestion because he hedges it with qualifications that do not appear when I quote him partially) that language has the power to create new realities. I find that suggestion in passages like this: “There is no system common to existence and language; for a simple reason; it is because language, and it alone, forms the system of existence.” (Foucault 1963A, p. 203, cf. pp. 69, 74, 85, 137, 142, 171, 209-10) Foucault developed similar notions of self-referential languages creating their own worlds in two articles also published in 1963, one in Critique (Foucault 1963B) and one in Tel Quel (Foucault 1963C). I take Machery in his Presentation to be saying that Foucault discovered the capacity of language to create experience in fiction, and then found that capacity to be operative in history. (If we now relax the rule that we are not allowed to consider what Foucault later said about his book on Roussel, we will find that although Machery´s thesis is a plausible one, and one perhaps not incompatible with accounts that emphasize the importance of Nietzsche or of music for the genesis of Foucault’s early methodology (e.g. Eribon 1989, p. 89) it is not one endorsed by the late Foucault. Foucault later said that his youthful passion for Roussel was a summer love that did not lead anywhere, while characterizing the methodology he adopted in L´Histoire de la Folie as defined by a “rupture” with phenomenology and Marxism that was sparked by a series of influences, more influences than he mentioned to the reporter from Le Monde at the time and only some of them literary. (Foucault 1983A))
Remark 16: In saying that humanity has trapped itself in a tragic social reality, because its dominant constitutive rules do so much harm at the same time as they do so much good, and because they so fiercely resist change, I do not want to get sidetracked onto the question whether modernity is good or bad; or onto questions about whether our time and our place are better or worse than other times and other places. I do not want to make wholesale value judgments, nor do I want to tell people what ought to be their mood. I want to help people solve problems. I call attention to modernity’s basic cultural structures because I think solving humanity’s main problems requires consciously revising them.
References
* The book Foucault preferred to forget was a manual for the study of psychology featuring praise of Soviet psychology, written under the direction of his then supervising professor Louis Althusser. His preference for forgetting it was shown, for example, in an interview with Gerard Raulet in the 1970s when he called Histoire de la Folie “my first book.” (Foucault 1994 p. 114)
Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Unsecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science. Hassocks UK: Harvester Press, 1978.
Roy Bhaskar et al. Critical Realism. London: Routledge, 1998.
Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: a Philosophical Critique of the
Human Sciences. New York: Humanities Press, 1979.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
Pierre Bourdieu, L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1985.
Georges Dumezil, Du Mythe au Roman. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.
Daniel Defert and François Ewald, “Chronologie,” in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, Tome I. Paris : Gallimard, 994.
Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” in Arnold Davidson (ed.) Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997. (French original 1977)
Jacques Derrida, “`To do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in Arnold Davidson (ed.) Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. (French original 1994)
Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, The Quest for Excitement. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Emile Durkheim, Suicide. New York: Free Press, 1951. (French original 1897.)
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault 1926-1984. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.
Michel Foucault, Maladie Mentale et Personnalité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.
Michel Foucault, “Introduction” to Ludwig Binswanger, Reve et Existence. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1955, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages are cited to the latter source, which regards the text as from 1954; here and elsewhere translations to English are mine.
Michel Foucault, “La Psychologie de 1850 a 1950,” in D. Huisman and A. Weber (eds.) Histoire de la Philosophie Européene, tome II. Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1957A, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “La Recherche Scientifique et la Psychologie,” in E. Morére (ed.) Des Chercheurs Francais S’interrogent. Orientation et Organisation du Travail Scientifique en France. Toulouse: Collection Nouvelle Recherche no. 13, 1957B, pp. 173-201. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. pp. 137-158.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie à l’Age Classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972 (1961).
Michel Foucault, “Alexandre Koyre, La Revolution Astronomique: Copernic, Kepler, Borelli,” La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1 decembre 1961, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. (1961A)
Michel Foucault, La Naissance de la Clinique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel. Presentation by Pierre Machery. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. (1963A)
Michel Foucault, « Hommage a Georges Bataille, » in Critique, numbers 195-96, 1963, partially translated and reprinted as « A Preface to Transgression, » in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. (1963B)
Michel Foucault, « Language to Infinity, » in Tel Quel, number 15, 1963, translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. (1963C)
Michel Foucault, “Message ou Bruit,” Concours Médical, year 88, 22 October 1966, pages 6285-6286. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Pages 557-560.
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Michel Foucault, Archéologie du Savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Michel Foucault, Interview with P. Caruso, in P. Caruso (ed.) Conversazione con Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Milan: Mursia, 1969, pp. 91-131. (1969A) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I. Page 605 of reprint.
Michel Foucault, La Volonté du Savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings. New York: Pantheon, 1980A.
Michel Foucault, Interview with D. Trombadori at the end of 1978, published in Italian in 1980, translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 41-95. Foucault also lectured on governability at the Collège de France. (1980B)
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Michel Foucault in an interview with C. Ruas September 15, 1983, later published as an appendix to an English translation of his Raymond Roussel titled Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth . New York: Doubleday, 1984. pp. 169-186. (1983A)
Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. New York: Semiotext, 1991.
Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Michael Kelly (ed) Critique and Power. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. (This is a reprint of a translation of an interview with Gerard Raulet.)
Michel Foucault, Interview with Paul Rabinow in May of 1994, translated and published in English in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader . New York: Pantheon, 1984. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 591-98.
Michel Foucault, Il Faut Défendre la Societé. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Rom Harre, Social Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. (1927)
Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987.
Martin Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development; implications for caring and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Money, and Interest. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
Norbert Lechner, La Conflictiva y Nunca Acabada Construccion del Orden Deseado. Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1983.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Le Totemisme Aujourd’hui. Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1992. (1965)
Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law. New York: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1960. (1861)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
Heikki Patomaki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (re)Construction of World Politics. London: Routledge, 2004.
Caroline Richards, Sweet Country. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1985.
Howard Richards, Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia: Conversaciones sobre el Socialismo en Rosario, Argentina. Rosario: Fundacion Estevez Boero, 2007.
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, Dilemmas of Social Democracies. Lanham MD: Lexington Books: 2006.
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, “Culture Change: a Practical Method with a Theoretical Basis, “ in Joe de Rivera (ed), Manual for Building a Culture of Peace. New York: Springer, 2008.
Jana Sawicki, “Foucault and Feminism: a Critical Reappraisal,” in Michael Kelly (ed) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.
Barry Smart, “The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony,” in David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: a Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947. I refer to Toynbee because of his view that successful civilizations are governed by charm.
J.-P. Weber, Interview with Michel Foucault in Le Monde. 22 juillet 1961, p. 9, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume I.
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