Foucauldian Turn

Conceptual Overview

Foucault's books are typically structured around real or imaginary events, paintings, myths, and architectural drawings—visual imagery that disrupts as well as organizes the text. This is not an authorial conceit but is central to his historical method. First, the use of striking historical images captures not so much worlds that we have lost, but worlds that modern sensibilities find impossible to contemplate. Second, they act as a reminder that our modern world will seem no less strange to future commentators. Third, these images, particularly those that he knows are fictions, convey his disdain for teleological historical narratives that trace the emergence of the present from the absurdities or the failings of the past. Finally, Foucault uses the genealogical method to raise questions about the present. His histories, in other words, are not bounded by period but constantly seek to introduce concepts that can be used to interrogate contemporary assumptions, practices, and institutions. These are also the reasons for Foucault's controversial reputation as a historian. His aim was not to produce definitive accounts of the rise of the asylum or the prison but to throw doubt upon existing versions, to challenge the very notion of a single authoritative history, and to generate multiple alternative readings.

For Foucault, the Enlightenment marked the beginning of the human sciences, a departure in which the individual and society became the subject and object of our own knowledge. Foucault's genealogical studies of the hospital, the asylum, and the prison asked the same fundamental questions: Why did specific institutions emerge to deal with particular populations during the 18th century; why did the new sciences of the Enlightenment—medicine, psychiatry, penology—share a moral, humanist purpose; and why, despite this humanist imperative, did these new sciences and institutions produce regimes of isolation, repression, and exclusion? His answer is beguilingly simple. The Enlightenment project unleashed liberalism that both freed the individual from the necessity of monarchic and religious rule and created institutional regimes to regulate these newly liberated citizenries. While the experience of the patient and the prisoner, far less the doctor or warder, is all but absent from Foucault's accounts, there is a deep empathy that leaves little doubt where his sympathies lie. In this sense, Foucault's method relies on a hermeneutics that stresses the historicity of human subjectivity. Foucault's point is not that power uses or abuses knowledge for its own ends, nor that power corrupts knowledge. Rather, he insists that power and knowledge are necessarily intertwined. Power and knowledge are mutually constitutive. “Power/knowledge,” as he styles it, acknowledges the ways in which specific abstract and applied knowledges provide the categories necessary for the operation of power. So, [Page 522]criminology and penology provides the categories of deviance and the policies and institutions designed to confirm and elaborate these categories. For Foucault, the practices that confirm and extend these categories are inherent in the organizational form, sometimes the very architecture, of institutions. Surveillance is essential to the development of power/knowledge. Populations have to be enclosed, tabulated, categorized, observed, and compared over time. From this, the impact of practical interventions can be compared, evaluated, and adjusted. Every human science shares the aim of controlling populations in order that individuals can be reformed, the better to manage themselves. The search is always for more effective, more efficient systems of governance in which individuals can be more securely relied upon to govern themselves. There is a danger that we misunderstand Foucault as the fatalistic prophet of a gray, wholly disciplined social world. Nothing could be further from the truth: Surveillant systems are always incomplete, always incapable of delivering the compliant prisoners, workers, or citizens that they promise.

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