1. Towards the end of my discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno I emphasized the theoretical and political cul de sac into which they were led by their final version of critical theory. Having maligned reason as a contaminated instrument of civilisatory barbarism, they are forced to abandon positive knowledge in favour of art and negative critique which, nevertheless, as the self-criticism of reason cannot escape the domain of conceptuality all together. At the same time, the idea of the "totally administered society" and the "end of the individual" is a totalising and oversimplified vision. The result is the practical impasse of their work: an audience reduced to the isolated survivors and an unspecified future. Now we shall turn to Michel Foucault who, although he offers an equally radical and unrelenting critique of modernity, does so from a very different standpoint. I said earlier that the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity from the perspective of the missed revolution. "Revolution" is also a vital theme for Foucault. However, for him the problem has been drastically transformed. His question is how are we to think revolution after the demise of revolutionary Marxist politics and its emancipatory view of history. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, Foucault marshals radical historical scepticism. He announces not the "end of the individual" but the "death of man": this slogan proclaims Foucault's determination to avoid humanist values and expose their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination. However, in terms of revolutionary hopes and prospects he suggests that today is no better nor worse than any other time. In place of what he will call the “empty shell of universal revolutionism”, he prefers the project of experimentation on limits: “to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take”, (W is E?, Pol of Truth) p114.
2. Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. From that time he spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while writing his early works. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties he become a Professor at Vincennes and was elected to the College de France in 1972 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France) where he taught until his death from AIDS in 1984. The lectures Foucault gave during those years are indispensable to understanding the evolution of his thought but are only now in the process of translation. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography. As a young man he experienced great difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. He personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. These studies, followed by first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, led him to a distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism as to the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psycho-analysis, political economy, criminology and sociology. What distinguishes Foucault's accounts from the more orthodox historians of science was his fascination with the other side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of these discourses that mask domination behind a white coat, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this control and register it as crisis. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason".
3. From the seventies Foucault became an international figure. He threw himself into a whole series of radical social and political causes around prisons, schools, reformatories and psychiatric clinics. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed: these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist. Yet, like most radical intellectuals of his generation, he was brought up on the leftist notion of the revolution. From 68, he began to question the orthodox Marxist scenario of revolution and became suspicious that the theoretical framework behind this idea served totalitarian and exclusionary purposes. Foucault developed a critique of globalising political strategies and movements. This notion of a once and for all radical transformation reproduces the totalising logic of domination against which it purports to struggle. It imposes an impossible global scenario on a diverse range of struggles against oppression requiring the subordination of their demands to long term global political goals and strategy. Foucault came to feel that accepting the revolutionary strategy of transforming society was an endorsement of the logic of modern society that inevitably inhibited the autonomy, interests and strategic flexibility of particular struggling groups. Such a totalising political perspective also abstracted from the vast domain of mundane, supposedly "unpolitical" struggles, of oppression and social conflict not reducible to class struggle and economics--sanity, insanity, illness, crime and sexuality.
4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to focus on his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen with Weber and the Frankfurt School that with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern individual subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by sceptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” slogan signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing it as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. These traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant: as we have seen with the Enlightenment, it becomes the essential origin and final court of legitimisation for all knowledge claims and values-both of rationality and morality.
5. Foucault stands at the junction of a number of trends of modern thought, which have questioned the humanist notion of the subject. Firstly the historicist tradition, including Hegel and Marx, that questioned the invariance of the humanist subject and underlined its historico-social constitution but still remained within the humanist camp by viewing this historically shaped form of subjectivity as the bearer of critical universal values. More radically, Foucault takes over Nietzsche’s view that the modern subject is an ascetic prejudice both serving and distorting the multiple and unconscious, instinctual drives. Finally, in his early work Foucault aligns himself with structuralism, one of the anti-subjectivist currents coming from the new disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. Structuralism displaces the human individual from the favoured position as the action-determining subject. Human intentions are subordinated to an external linguistic order of signs. This order is not the product of meaning bestowing acts of subjects but the product of an arbitrary arrangement of linguistic elements. Here the linguistic structure or its equivalent becomes the real bearer of action-events. Foucault speaks of episteme or discourses that designate the patterns of thought that determines a society as a whole for a specific period. It is the state of this system of signs, forms or unconscious presuppositions that governs the meaning humans are capable of expressing in their understanding and experience. His early archaeological method involved the excavation of the hidden rules and regularities of mentalities. These are inaccessible to consciousness yet make it possible for subjects to say what they do. This approach will later be supplemented in the works of his middle period by a genealogical method that excavates not just the subterranean discursive rules but traces the historical constitution of these in non-discursive practices and relations of power. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the regimes that create subjectivity by connecting governing mentalities to the relations of power. The force of both these approaches is the claim that the human subject is not the experiential centre or creator of a course of action. It can no longer be viewed as instigating and overseeing but is reduced to the arbitrary effect or a point of application of a network of events produced by the rules of language or disciplinary practices and out of which there is no overriding commanding centre or logic. From this, follows that it is necessary in the human sciences to break with the search for meaning. Until the last phase of his work where he began to talk about subjectivation as a process of the subject’s own wilful and reflective self-constitution, Foucault disdains subjectivist meanings and the subject as a positive moral agent.
6. The merging of all of these trends produces Foucault's wholesale repudiation of the humanist notion of subjectivity.The universality and unity of this specific historico-cultural construct is illusory; furthermore, it is an instrument of social repression and subjugation. There is no coherent or constant human being or condition that could sustain such a notion. For Foucault, the individual subject is a product of historically changing practices and discourses. Subjection is not a process aimed at generating subjects of law as the Enlightenment claimed, but obedient subjects principally characterised by their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. Thus subjectivisation is always a specific historical mode of subjugation. This takes a variety of historical forms but Foucault views the Enlightenment version as especially oppressive because it coincides with the new disciplinary modalities of power. The modern subject is a 'fictive atom of an ideological representation of society, a product of overlapping discourses and disciplinary practices':
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis a vis of power: it is, I believe, one of its prime effects (History of Sexuality).
7. One of Foucault's principal aims is to peel away the historically imposed, fictive forms of individualisation, stripping subjectivity of everything that limits it. The source of this anti-subjectivist rhetoric is what I shall call Foucault’s experimental emancipatory project. He understands this project as the elimination of all limitations on human possibility. Foucault has abandoned not just all holist strategies of total transformation but also all historically created emancipatory values as complicit in oppressive regimes. He favours multiple experimental transgressions that test the limits of our historically created, but apparently necessary, conditions and forms. When critique reveals these all to be a contingent historical construct-- even our received forms of subjectivity -then, Foucault tells us, it becomes clear that almost nothing has to be the way it is. Identity may be nothing more than a received straitjacket that constrains the individual by imposing selected characteristics, desires and gestures. When it is recognised that such identity is contingent, contemporary social struggles can more uninhibitedly assert the excluded claims of difference. Clearly the sources of Foucault's suspicions against modern subjectivity lie in his continued sympathy and empathy of the insane and marginalized (prisoners, patients, gays, oppressed Third World peoples) his early experience of modern psychiatry both as a student and as a patient, his own marginalisation as a homosexual before the era of gay liberation. First-hand experience of the violence and coercion involved in modern socialization and institutional practice leads him to profoundly question this society and the constellation of values that perpetrates this continuous violence, repression and marginalisation. This leads us to the heart of the negative image of modernity that characterises Foucault's middle work --what I will call the carceral society.
8. We have seen that in one decisive respect Foucault goes much further than Weber or Horkheimer and Adorno in his critique of modernity. Despite the Frankfurt School misgivings about the self-preservative instrumental core of modern subjectivity, they could still uphold the ideal of the autonomous modern subject as an everywhere endangered critical standard and a potential ally in the struggle against the increasingly rationalised, administered totalitarian society. Foucault by comparison can see here only another shape of oppression. In fact, he argues that this depth of oppressive control is intimately connected to the pervasive character of modernity, to the unique reach, sophistication, and intensity of its disciplinary regime of normalization that reaches into the core and shapes the very sense of the modern subject. Despite his general hostility to the notion of totality as it presents itself in revolutionary rhetoric and philosophy of history, the description of modernity in his major works often has a totalising character. For example, in one interview, Foucault says “ industrial capitalism…is the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’ (Dialogue with Bequir Parham’ F&IR, p.183).
9. For him, like Weber, modern western society is a unique historical constellation that has achieved an accidental yet ominous success in constituting itself as an interlocking system of requirements, norms, techniques, strategies, knowledges and practices of power. The early critique of the deformed rationality of the human sciences that remained an undertone in his histories of madness and the clinic take center stage in the works of his middle period. This now becomes a critique of the once peripheral institutions of correction and internment, their technologies and disciplines that have now moved to the center of a whole network of institutions that shape and correct individuality in modern society. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by asserting that he is not merely writing academic history of the past but the "history of the present". His portrayal of the evolution of disciplinary techniques, juridical judgements, criminology, psychiatry and penal institutions from the end of the classical age (18th century) through into the 19th century--a supposedly descriptive but implicitly critical narrative -- expands into a comprehensive condemnation of the modern disciplinary society. Foucault wants us to look at the major institutions of modern society and of the values they have advances in a new more critical way. Foucault maintains that the rapidly expanding network of disciplinary institutions of the 19th century provided the answer to the problem of organisation, administration, surveillance and control of large populations that emerged at this time with massive populations increase and the lift-off of the bourgeois economic system.
10. These were the problems becoming constitutive for modern politics. In Foucault's mind the "carceral network" is a microcosm prefiguring the whole range of new techniques, instruments, attitudes, powers and institutions that now dominate modern society. This network has both temporal (stages of life) and spacial (variety of institutional locations and types) dimensions and manifests a range of micro-technologies of coercion. The experts, technocrats, administrators, managers and social workers preside over a comprehensive and closed system of supervision and control that is really not essentially different from the institutions of correction:
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. It might be said that nothing really distinguishes them any more except the singularly "dangerous" character of the delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating.
