What is the human relationship to knowledge? How is it collected, organised, thought about, and in what ways does it have power over us? How does it shape us, mould our desires, discipline us?

If Foucault’s argument had to be summed up in a crude way it would be this: that knowledge and power are intimately linked.

He isn’t talking about power as we normally understand it though.

In fact, his entire body of work can also be thought of as an exploration of how power functions – and how the power/knowledge duality changes shape over time.

Philosopher Todd May sums up Foucault’s body of work in another way: he is always asking one question – who are we?

Power/knowledge and, importantly, history is a part of us.

It forms us. But it could have, and always can be, different.

The standard account of the human relationship to knowledge might look something like this.

As we learn more, knowledge accumulates around us, in front of us.

This account assumes that the person looking at the accumulation stays the same while the knowledge builds around it over history.

It assumes the perspective doesn’t change.

It also presumes that the way this knowledge is organised and the conditions that gave rise to it are always the same.

It doesn’t matter where the collector is – the knowledge, if verified, is objective, and added to the pile.

This traditional view then assumes that the human is objectively, freely, looking over the acquired knowledge.

Foucault disagrees.

Our perspective matters.

As Thomas Nagel put it, there is ‘no view from nowhere’.

If we acknowledge that the way we collect and order knowledge matters – makes a difference as to how it is approached, used, interpreted, then this insight becomes even more powerful when we ask, what if that knowledge is about us? About humans themselves?

If the way that knowledge is collected, ordered, and interpreted changes, does that change who we are?

Foucault said in an interview: ‘in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores – all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society’.

These bodies are ‘what makes possible, at a given moment, the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a practice’.

Understanding Nietzsche is essential for understanding Foucault and the post-structural trend in general – Nietzsche is the thinker that had the biggest influence on Foucault.

Nietzsche challenged the idea that human nature was universal and unchanging over time, and he also challenged the idea that history is progressive, linear, moving towards a goal, having a grand narrative.

History is contingent – it is open-ended.

He argued that the concepts of good and evil were defined differently at different times – they were not static ideas – but historically relative. There is no universal concept of good or evil.

Not only this; our understanding of what is good and evil is determined, in part, by power.

Who is in power – in Nietzsche’s case the clergy – determined what the flock should think of as good and evil.

Religious morality became culturally dominant because of the Church’s power, but we can see how arbitrary some of that morality is today.

Importantly, for both Nietzsche and Foucault, power is power in the neutral sense. It doesn’t mean nefarious power or physical strength or technological or military power.

It means power as in influence, the power to. The way the sun powers plants, petrol a car, professors’ influence on students, or the power of a politician to represent a constituency.

Foucault also owes a debt to Freud and Marx: whereas for thinkers like Descartes or Kant there is a rational calculating mind at the centre of consciousness, Marx and Freud realised, revolutionarily, that we are also the product of unconscious, material and preconscious phenomena, desires, economic structures – we can be largely unaware of how the cogs of our mind function beneath the surface.

The debate over whether we’re free thinking Is or predetermined subjects continued into the 20th century, where it developed into a debate in France between existentialists – emphasising the free I, and structuralists – emphasising the social, cultural, or linguistic structures that determine who we are.

Foucault was influenced by and educated in the context of this debate but in many ways also ignored it, or sidestepped it.

For Foucault, we are both a product of history, of the structures around us, and able to change them. The fact the structure can change – and does change over the course of history – is why Foucault is labelled as a poststructuralist.

He is, though, most fundamentally interested in how we are moulded, normalised, disciplined, and subjectified by these long historical processes.

I will introduce Foucault’s thought through his three most important works – The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and the History of Sexuality.

The earlier Foucault approached the question of power/knowledge by what he called archaeology, and the latter work used genealogy.

For Foucault, different time periods – what he calls epistemes – have different underlying assumptions, codes and rules, mostly unconscious or at least structural, about how to think about things in the world.

He wrote: ‘My objective for more than 25 years has been to sketch out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-called sciences as very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves’.

Because these rules change over time, different periods or cultures can have completely different ways of looking at knowledge, and subsequently, of understanding themselves.

Discovering these rules is what Foucault called archaeology.

The seminal Order of Things, published in France in 1966 and in English in 1970, is Foucault’s archaeological study of these unconscious rules and their changes over time – what he calls the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the emergence of knowledge.

Not just what we think, but the very way we think changes over time. And the way we think, in turn, determines the possibilities of what we think.

He wants to discover not the real, empirical processes between say, the scientist and the object of their study, those matters of fact that make the moment objective, but the conditions that give rise to the moment in the first place – the underlying structure that moves the scientist to choose that object, ask that question, order it, catalogue it, talk about it in a certain way.

He looks at three different epistemes: the Renaissance, roughly the 14th to the 17th centuries; the classical, the 17th to the 18th centuries; and the modern, from around the beginning the 19th century.

He argues that during the Renaissance, the world was thought of as being ordered by resemblance and similitude.

Aconite, for example, was thought to cure eye diseases because it resembled the eye.

Words, too, were part of a great system in which the word eye resembled the aconite and the physical eye.

The Renaissance saw the reintroduction of ancient ideas in Europe that influenced this. For the Greeks, resemblances could be hidden.

When Socrates asks what the human soul is, for example, he compares it to the city – both the soul and the city have a harmony of three elements – merchants, who provide and make money, like the soul’s desires; guardians who protect the soul’s honourable part; and rulers who rule, like the soul’s reasons.

If an encyclopaedia had been written in this period, it would have been ordered in this way – by similitude, resemblance.

During the next period – the classical one – things started to be measured, classified, taxonomized, ordered, put into tables.

Words and symbols, rather than being part of the system of similitude, began to thought of as just representing the signified object.

Unlike the renaissance period, in the classic you can’t decipher language – like biblical interpretation – to understand the world. Observation becomes more important.

Ordering becomes a matter of classification and questioning how we classify – by counting? (how many legs?) by magnitude? (how big?).

In the modern period we start to question the hidden inner secret of the object.

Marx analyses what is hidden under labour, biology looks at the inner-workings of the body. Language becomes studied in depth as linguistics.

These discipline arise at the same time as transcendental philosophy – both are searching for a hidden meaning beneath the surface. Disciplines bleed into each other.

In the modern period, language is no longer seen as being representative of its object – the world becomes much more complicated, the secret is hidden within things.

Ordering – the ordering of species, for example – gives way to examining and understanding the hidden structure beneath.

In these three ‘human sciences’ – economics, biology, linguistics, Foucault argues – we can see ‘man’ emerge as an object of study for the first time.

This is why he famously remarks that man is a recent invention.

If this new object of study – man – is dictated by these changing orders of how we study him, our reflection of ourselves appears as a mirror maze – shifting.

Foucault predicts that this way of thinking will change again: ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.

His important point is this – we may look at the Renaissance way of ordering by similitude as ridiculous to our modern eyes, but to them, of course, it wasn’t, it was the truth.

There is no neutral, ahistorical, objective position from which to view the world.

Will future generations think the same about our episteme as we do about the Renaissance?

Foucault’s later genealogical project – marked by the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975 – is similar to the archaeological one.

They are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin.

Foucault’s genealogy asks how we got to where we are now. What effect has history had on our own minds.

The way we’re educated, punished, and governed all have an effect on our constitution – our make-up.

Instead of the Cartesian I, or the Kantian unchanging self, the Foucauldian ‘subject’ is a product of history – and like the way knowledge is ordered, the way knowledge then shapes us has a mirroring affect.

Lisa Downing puts it like this: Foucault analyses the ‘means by which the body is made to conform to the utilitarian ends of social regimes thanks to the operations of disciplinary power’.

Discipline and Punish takes the history of the prison system in France as its central example.

For Foucault, the walls of prison reach far beyond their physical boundaries, they become part of the psychology of the mind – dictating the rules about what is and what is not acceptable, what is authorised, and what is forbidden. The modern disciplinary system has a conforming affect.

Discipline and Punish begins with a stark description of the torture of a man in 1757 for attempted regicide.

Foucault then jumps starkly to a dry description of a prison timetable just 80 years later – a change from punishing the body, to what he describes as punishing the soul.

He argues that while this appears to be a humanitarian shift, a progressive shift, there is something going on underneath the surface.

The torture of the body usually attracted an excited crowd that also sympathised with the condemned, while the executioner was always treated as a moral outcast.

Violence against the crown was met with violence against the offender – everything was on display.

It was accepted that power was always going to be challenged.

In modern society, prisoners are locked away from the eyes of society behind walls and instead of simply punishing the act, crime is examined, prodded, psychologised, and the subject is moulded.

Rather than punishing the act, simple retribution, power attempts to control the ‘shadows lurking behind the case itself’. Discipline becomes about creating citizens.

Punishment is not just punishment but also social control, a strategy of politics, what Foucault later calls biopolitics.

In this classifying and ordering of criminality, we see how the genealogy of Discipline and Punish is explicitly linked to the archaeology of The Order of Things. Power, knowledge, and discipline are all inherently linked and justified by their claim to be rational and reasonable. Criminality is researched through psychology, which, as we saw, during the modern period is organised around finding the inner secret, the underlying desire. Why are you a criminal?

Foucault goes on to argue that this logic works in the same way in the army, in disciplining soldiers, in schools, and even in hospitals – in the apparatus of the state and the economics of capitalism and the requirement for efficiency that comes with it.

He asks, ‘is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’.

In all areas of society there are ‘stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information’.

Subjects expect to conform, become normalised, something Foucault argues didn’t exist in previous periods.

Discipline becomes about hierarchical training, standards of judgement and examination, how good or right you are compared to the norm.

He uses the image of panopticon – a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791 – to illustrate how this power has the effect of being hidden.

While the guards can see in every cell, the prisoners cannot see the guards and so do not know if they’re being watched.

It gives the illusion of being watched all the time – modern discipline, Foucault argues, works in the same way.

It is important to emphasise a few things: Foucault isn’t saying there is anyone specific conspiratorially pulling the strings behind the scenes.

And similarly, because power in this sense is diffuse, it is everywhere, and isn’t for Foucault simply negative. He doesn’t think the whole thing should simply be torn down – his goal is simply to describe, to bring to the surface what is usually hidden.

Neither is he arguing that things have necessarily got worse – he is just describing a change.

He does argue, though, for example, that prisons don’t diminish crime rates, and, that like in The Order of Things, what seems normal and humanitarian to us will likely seem ridiculous and arbitrary to later generations.

As might another way we have of looking at things…

Foucault’s later work on sexuality is a genealogical one, but also incorporates an ethical perspective for the first time.

The History of Sexuality has three volumes, was published between 1976 and 1984, and was meant to continue, if not for Foucault’s death in 1984.

He argued that the way we think about sexuality is largely an invention of the 19th century.

The first volume is influential because it’s a concise articulation of Foucault’s position in general, and can be read as an extension of his ideas of archaeology and genealogy. The second and third volumes look at Ancient Greek and Roman sexuality and ethics – linking the two.

The central question outlined in the first volume is that of the ‘repressive hypothesis’.

The narrative dominant in the 1970s said that where Westerners were once sexually oppressed, we have become gradually more liberated, more liberal.

Is it really that simple?

Like in the rest of his work, Foucault questions this progressive, teleological narrative.

He points out that sexuality, and attitudes to sexual practices, have fluctuated dramatically over time.

For the Greeks, sexuality was very clearly linked with ethics. Sexual pleasure was seen as being a part of man’s animality – and as such, overindulgence of enjoyment was seen as a failure to master one’s animal side.

Like other pursuits, mastering your character was seen as good for oneself and society. Being austere – austerity in our terms – wasn’t something commanded by the state but was personal – about managing oneself in all areas of life.

In the Victorian Period, on the other hand, we see the classificatory and taxonomical attitude to ordering described in The Order of Things.

Acts began to be named, codified, given labels in a specific way for the first time in history – sexuality became scientific.

Under the Church, a certain sexual act might have been condemned as a sin – but the person wasn’t labelled and classified by this act. In the Victorian period, the rise of classification and the ‘invention of man’ meant that a person could be labelled and defined by their acts for the first time.

Taxonomies push us to ‘know ourselves’ – to put ourselves in pre-defined boxes organised by medical professions, schools, prisons, scientists.

But again, as the episteme shifted to the modern one that tried to uncover the hidden secret, sex became more intimately tied to the question of who we are, what do you want, what are your desires. Psychoanalysis became popular.

Victorians were actually far from silent about sex.

Foucault writes that, ‘Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and distributing what is said about it’.

Naming taboos had, paradoxically, the effect of also bringing them to light, drawing them out, and so fertile ground began to be sowed for what we think of as sexual liberation. Without creating a category, what is there to liberate?

Because sexual impulses aren’t just biological – they have a relationship, at differing times, to things like personal psychology, theological ethics, scientific classification.

His later work also shifted to a focus on politics and what he called governmentality – the process of how all of this – classification, taxonomy, psychologising about sexuality, discipline – had an effect on the body – biopolitics. Again, how modern power is productive on bodies, not simply defensive of the crown, for example.

Foucault’s genealogies are loosely related to the birth of capitalism and the end of the domination of the Church, but he largely avoids making statements about causation because his idea of why things change, and how power relates to knowledge is meant to be ambiguous and complicated – just as power really is.

Importantly for Foucault, power is not unidirectional – it manifests itself everywhere in differing combinations and directions.

‘Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy. [. . .] For example, let us take sexual or amorous relationships: to wield power over the other in a sort of open-ended strategic game where the situation may be reversed is not evil; it’s a part of love, of passion, of sexual pleasure. And let us take as another example [. . .] the pedagogical institution. I see nothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and transmits knowledge and techniques to them’.

When power is illuminated, drawn-out, given a name, theorised, it can be addressed, judged, questioned, modified, or maybe even justified.

For Foucault, it was simply important to name power.

Foucault’s thought, his ‘technologies of the self’, has been probably the most influential of the 20th century.

To understand Foucault is to see how much our history has an effect on us, and how long term we have to think to understand ourselves and how we can change society.

He extends psychology beyond the confines of the skull to timespans of millennia.

I’ll end on the optimistic tone Foucault himself advocated.

‘My optimism’, he wrote, ‘consists … in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than with necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints’.

Sources

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1-3

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power

Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michael Foucault

Todd May, The Philosophy of Michel Foucault