656725

Michel Foucault: Ending the Era of Man
Author(s): Edith Kurzweil

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 395-420
Published by: Springer
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395
FOUCAULT*
MICHEL
Endingtlhe Era of Man

KURZWEIL
EDITH
InAmerica the historian is a relic, but France'sMichel Foucault, a historian

ofscientific thought, has become a prophet. Of course he is not a conven-
on
tionalhistorian, but one whose "radicallynew" methodology- based
-denies historical evolution, and moves throughtime and space
Levi-Strauss
tolook at madnessand disease, order and language,literatureand art, crime
andparricide,and most recently, prisons and power. As Foucault's themes
his
recurand intersect, confirm and contradict, we are dazzled by many of
brilliantinsights, and understandwhy, even as we question his structuralist
constructs, he has become the most recent intellectualsuper-star.
Histreatment of Madness and Civilization catapulted him to fame. Since

then,his additional studies of deviance,which are also histories of psychiatry
andpsychopathology,medicine and naturalhistory, economics and grammar,
have
linguisticsand criminology, have not only become more complex, but
reexaminedevery facet of society and of thinking.And as Foucault's detailed
and
descriptionsof bizarre behavior and sadistic torture, of chastisement
maiming,link humanity to inhumanity, they add to our "scientific" knowl-
to
edge of delinquency. But unlike most of our own experts, who tend
to
analyzeconditions in order to improve them and who propose either
humanizethe deviants or the society, Foucault perceives devianceas a social
fact, a function of the normal, and focuses on how it is dealt with, and by
whom,duringvarioushistorical periods. Thus he avoids traditionalanalyses,
be they Marxist, functional or pragmatic;instead, he uses them all to cut
throughthe languageand to arriveat underlyingbeliefs or structuralcodes of
knowledge.His work reflects his personality: he is a loner in touch with his
a
peers,a theoretician in touch with practice,a historiandigginginto records,
thinkerwho doggedly teases out the last ounce of truth from all the available
evidence.
Department of Sociology, Montclair State College

* From a forthcomingbook on Frenchsocial thought.
? 1977 by Edith Kurzweil

396
We can trace Foucault's own evolution through his books which initially
concentrated on methodology and the establishment of his epistemological
epochs of knowledge, then on the theoretical linguisticshe used throughout,
and most recently, on the locus of power duringeach epoch. But this type of
schematizationis the sort of oversimplificationthat led at least one reviewer
to accuse Foucault of having written the same book over and over again.
True, he becomes repetitious, but each book deals with a different central
topic, and refines the previousworks. Thus Madnessand Civilization(1961)
recreatesthe existence of mental illness, folly, and reasonin their time, place,
and social perspective, while The Birth of the Clinic (1965) focuses more
explicitly on the rise of the doctor's power. Both books mediate in Saus-
surean fashion between the signifierand the signified of the many texts on
madness and disease, so that the sane and the insane,the healthy and the sick
are always discussed in relation to each other. This search for structuresof
knowledge tends to dehistoricizehistory and reintroduces"historicalblocks
of time." In this way Foucault "outflanks"the debate between Sartre and
Levi-Strauss,as he uses Bachelard'sconcept of "scientific ruptures"(resem-
bling Kuhn's paradigms)1to study "periods dominated by a specific knowl-
edge," while he moves back and forth in time and space within each of the
periodshe has "found" to be self-contained.
He clearly left himself open to attacks - attacks to which he respondedwith

his next two works. Here deviance and history, social needs and political
expediency, ideologies and scientific beliefs, became the backdrop, or the
foil, for what I call his "GrandHistoricalCode of Knowledge."In The Order
Of Things (1966) he observed how culture experiences the similaritiesand
relationships between things, the order of their arrangement,while The
Archeology of Knowledge(1969) expanded this order and zeroed in on the
history of thought. But after he finished questioning"teleologiesand totaliza-
tions, consciousness and origin,"2 the philosophicalproblems in relation to
structuralcontinuities and discontinuitiesreceded into the background,and
he examined one concrete case of madness - crime, in I, Pierre Riviere,
Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother... (1975).
Inevitably, the review of this crime through all the available records -
includingthe madman's- with the contradictorydiscoursesand opinions by
lawyers, doctors, journalistsand other experts, not only proved to Foucault
the irrationality of lationality in 1836, but implicitly shows why we still
cannot differentiate between madness and crime. Foucault's latest work,
Surveilleret Punir (1975), was bound to deal with the treatmentof prisoners
- again from the 16th to the 20th century, while more recently; he has
looked at racismand homosexuality.

397
Currentpopularinterestin madness,diseaseand crimeundoubtedly helped to

make him a best-seller,so that he was (and is) readby people who could not
possibly understandhis theories but who liked his tales of madness and his
mad tales. As in the case of Levi-Strauss,the popular success of a new
metaphysical construction dressed in scientific cloth preceded Foucault's
appointmentto the Collegede France,as Professorof History and Systems of
Social Thought. His lectures continue to be mobbed, as he spins out the
intricate connections between society's need for devianceand the deviants'
responses and "counter-needs." His intellectual peers respect him. Like
Althusser, he uses structuralistmethods, but takes offense at being called a
structuralist.And his theoretical arguments with Barthes, Althusser, L6vi-
Strauss,or Sartre prove his connection to them and locate him in the center
of French thought. His references,phrases,ironies and commentsare typical-
ly French, even when he conceives subject and object in a novel fashion,
follows a non-Marxist "discursive practice," refers to social rather than
unconscious structures, and ties psychoanalysis and psychiatry to the
"medicalpersonage."His codes of knowledge that focus initially on religion,
then on philosophy and science, and that show the changingrole of priests,
lawyers, judges and doctors, are refinements on Saint-Simon. But whereas
Saint-Simonlooked to the past in orderto explain the presentand to predict
the future, Foucault might introduce him as one of the first greatthinkersof
our own era - the era of man. And because Foucault also anticipatesthe end
of this era - as an "end of history" or an "end of man" - the more popular
media often depict him as a millenarian.But he is reallytalkingabout the end
of our "scientific" and fragmentedworldviewswhich he himself attempts to
bridge.
For Foucault, Marxism'semphasis on economics, psychoanalysis'(French-

style and Lacanian)isolation of the individual, structuralism'sunconscious
structuralunity, and Existentialism'sfocus on the relation between subject
andobject, makethem all "partial"theoriesthat end up as ideologies. Foucault
sets out to uncover the underlyingunity - the grand code of knowledge -
thatwould explain our entire universe.Hence, his psychiatry,for example, is
"aboutall the beliefs, singularities,and deviationsused in psychiatricdiscourse
... [about] the space in which a subjectmay place itself and speak of objects
with which his discourse deals,... [about] the field of coordination and
subordinationof statements ... [and] of concepts that appear,are defined,
applied and transformed."3 Like Durkheim, he diagnoses the societies'
malaisethrough the magnitudeof deviance. But he goes beyond Durkheim,
because the scientists themselves are included in the diagnosis, as both
symptomand cure: they create the knowledges and languagesand wield the
power to implement and to perpetuate the very deviance they set out to

398
eradicate.That is how Foucault'sironic vision, which NorthropFrye calls the

detachmentfrom detachment, has made him the guru of the humansciences.
We wonder whether this self-effacingyet self-proclaimedMessiahwill save us,
or will lead us down the gardenpath.
1.
What then are his theses and themes, his tales of horror and predictions of
doom? In what way does he "up-date" history and make it relevant to a
generalpublic? What themes does he tackle, and how do these themes evolve
from one work to another?In other words, what do Foucault and his system
promise,what theoreticalproblemsdo they solve?
It all began with Madness and Civilization, when he painstakingly docu-

mented how the elite's definition of madnessdependedupon the composition
of this elite itself, upon society's need for outcasts, and upon the examination
of madness as a phenomenon only when leprosy disappeared.All societies
need deviants, argues Foucault, because their exclusion and the act of their
exclusion make for everyone else's feeling of inclusion - for social solidarity.
Thus, in his descriptionsof the Ships of Fools at the end of the MiddleAges,
he keeps reiteratingthat these individuals'fate was less important than the
act of their expulsion, becausetheir exclusion would, symbolically,purify the
society.
Furthermore,Foucault continues, everyone was fascinated by madness; its

very ambiguity and its existence at the edge of experiencehelped men to deal
with their anxieties about death. In literature and art, the fool seemed to
know both more and less than the sane. But ratherthan ask the customary
questions that connect madness to the creative mind, Foucault looks at the
fool in relation to the sane. Because the fool seemed to be able to look into
the future, he was frequently cast in the role of prophet, or placed at "the
midpoint of man's origin, between life and death: his laugh could anticipate
the macabrehe had disarmed,"4and painters could "appreciate"him as a
vehicle for their interpretation. Bosch's Ship of Fools, for example, has a
shipmast in the form of an uprooted tree of knowledge, and the fool's
pleasurein the victory of the Antichristseems a manifestationof his position
as mediator between God and the Devil, passion and delirium, which sud-
denly was perceivedto exist in every man. Thus Erasmus,continues Foucault,
saw madness "from the heights of his Olympus" as a "disorderlyuse of
science, as the truth of absurd knowledge, as the comic punishment of
knowledge and its ignorant presumption,"5 while the painters were less
"earthbound".Still, at that time, all creativeworks seemed to use the mad as

399
the means to depict the proximity of heaven and hell, sanity and insanity, if
only because the mad appearedto have access to a symbolic, and completely
moral,universe.6
But at the end of the MiddleAges, Foucault argues,a new code of knowledge
emerged that made people fear the very duality of madness, as they listened
to its moral messages, identified with the fool, and went to see the per-
formance of Don Quixote. Foucault quotes novels and satires, Shakespeare
and Cervantes,to reinforce this point, as he perceivesauthors themselvesas
transitory links between the previous view of madness as inhuman, and the
emerging view of it in the 17th century as all too human. Carefully, and
credibly, he reconstructsthe social climate and the prevalentbeliefs about
madnessfrom the archives,and shows how changingbeliefs and needs led to
the confinement of the mad in the hospital after the HopitalGeneralof Paris
was founded in 1656.
This confinement, Foucault concludes, marked the beginningof a new age,

when madness still preservedits ambivalencesand appearancesbut was also
tied to the rise of scientism and the loss of religiousvalues. Now the mad
were availablefor discussionand treatment,for legal regulationand scientific
diagnosis, even though it was not until the 19th century that they were
separatedfrom thieves and criminals,squanderersand beggars,vagabondsand
unemployed. Their separation from other deviants is said to have become a
scientific question that occupied doctors, lawyers and police. Both I, Pierre
Riviere, Having SlaughteredMy Mother, My Sister and My Brother. .. and
Surveiller et Punir zero in on medical, legal and administrativeauthority
itself, and on the shifts between their knowledges and powers, while The
Birth of the Clinic examines medicine and doctors.But once more, Foucault
looks at the functions of deviants, and at the fact that their confinement not
only condemned the idle, the beggars,the poor and the mad, but provideda
source of cheap and forced labor.
This sort of sociologicalhistory led to Foucault'sacclaim.Even though he has

sharpened these insights since then, his thrust is already evident when he
describesthe conditions of horror to which the mad were condemned,or the
total domination by the hospital directors who were given "power of
authority and direction, administration and commerce, police and juris-
diction, correction and punishment," who were allowed to use "stakes and
irons, prisons and dungeons."7 But whereas previously the mad had been
chained, exposed to rats, often in wet and sewerlesscells, and in conditions
that would have driven anyone insane, Foucault finds that their condition
itself "justified" mistreatment and brutalization, while simultaneously out-

400
sidethe asylums, "insane passions" were thought to exist in everyone and

"radiatedto both the body and the soul."8
Inthis structuralist fashion he contrasts sanity and insanity from a new

vantagepoint, as the new scientific Zeitgeist led to investigationsof madness
andto differentiationsbetween hallucinations, delirium,mania, depression,
andgeneral derangement. Foucault's lively casehistories prove that the
imaginationsof thedoctors equalled the imaginingsof the fools, while they
reintroduced madness as a disease, as a human condition. The very construc-
tionof thedoctors' reports and thoughts formed a new languageof signsand
last
symbolsthat allows Foucault to perceive "languageas the first and
structureof madness, its constituent form."9 In line with his own Zeitgeist,
Foucault mediates between insanity and sanity, the way LIvi-Strauss does
betweenmyth and reality. And like Freud, he links the language of delirium
to dreamsand to a "blindnessof words that abandon reality," which means
thatwords, in turn, could bring about "a rationalhold over madnessto the
of
verydegree that madnesswas non-reason."'?In other words, the structure
of
madnessgets mixed up with the structure language while the very mix-up
"legitimates"Saussurean dichotomies that are themselves broken up by
Bachelardian "epochs of knowledge."Thus, arguesFoucault, the advanceof
scientificthought duringthe ClassicalAge initiated its own end.
Thisadvance came primarilyfrom the treatment of the insane outside the

institution,where doctors consolidated spirits and nerves through purifica-
be
tion, or hired actors to embody a hallucinatorysubject which could then
'exorcised." These new methods, based on the realizationthat melancholia,
for example, was not due to animality, that non-being or deliriumwas not
caused by spirits, that mania could not "pierce new pores in the cerebral
matter'""1 or that hysteria was not a displacementof the womb, often led to
over-archingconclusions. Women, for instance, now acquired "frail fibers,
were easily carried away in their idleness by the lively movements of their
who were
imagination,and were more subject to nervous disease than men
morerobust, drierand hardenedby work."12
to
Foucault's method does not allow him to draw "direct" conclusions
currentissues: his links are horizontal,as he ties mental illness to feelings, and
Now the
consequentlyto nervous complaints and to the morality of the day.
mental disease was
person became both more innocent and more guilty, as
Enter
tied to passion to leisure and to irritability, that is, to the rich.
as the link between reason and un-
psychological medicine and language,
reason - the forerunner of the "talking-cure." Since language itself, says
new
Foucault, was part of the cure, its structure too was altered by the
"scientific"knowledgeit incorporatedand evolved.

401
Treatmentof the not-so-madoutside the asylumswas eventuallyextended to

theconfined mad. Their plight was reexaminedin keepingwith theprinciples
ofthe French revolution;they were "rediscovered,"and their human rights
wereaffirmed through the creation of asylums without doors. Foucault
explainsjust how, when philanthropic doctors applied the techniques they
hadused on the rich to the poor, patients began to be managedthroughfear
ratherthan through physical constraints, and the wardensbecame the new
socialauthority - as both judges and representativesof sanity. Now the
madmancould expiate his sins through work, and couldreturn to God's
commandments,be rewarded and punished, as the lawyers increasingly
restructuredmadness and as the asylum became a religiousdomain without
Foucault examinesthe evolvingauthority structureand shows how
religion.13
itnot only dominated the fools who were, legally and emotionally, reduced
to children, but how it made for the rise of patriarchyand of the bourgeois
familyin the asylum as well as in the prison, theschool, the army and the
factory.Controlthroughmanipulationbecame thenorm.
Insidethe asylum, the keeper's new "scientific" language"taught" the mad

abouttheir madnessby pointing out the irrationalityof their fellow inmates.
HereFoucault applies Lacan's concepts of the mirror image that is said to
reflect everyone'smadness.Thus madnessbecame both a pure spectacleand
an absolute object and was demystified. Hence, explains Foucault, madness
was constantly called upon to judge itself in interaction, in an asylum
structuredaround the mirrorof madness and the guilt it reflected. Now the
madman could be punished with justification when he did not fit in. So he
learnedto comply and to represstransgressions.
That is how madness turned into a disease - a disease to be treated by

doctors,with the help of language.And because languagehad become a major
tool of psychiatry,psychiatrybecame autonomous. Foucault concludesthat
psychiatricpractice itself "remystified"madness,because once more the sane
and the insanewere separatedas the doctor-patientrelationshipbecame more
personaland as the patient had to surrenderto the psychiatrist"in advance,"
by accepting the latter's reputation and prestige. In this fashion, language
"served" to explain, to cure and to structure madness - and preparedthe
ground for Freud, for whom languagebecame the structureof madnessitself.
2.
In his next book, The Birthof the Clinic, Foucault focused on diseaseand on
medicalpower- power that "emerged,"roughlybetween 1794 and 1820. He
writes "about space, language, death and the act of seeingl4- the regard

402
medical, or gaze. Even though he has since discardedtiffsnotion, it was a way

to examine the deepest structures of medicine and of disease, of clinical
discussionsand medical reports, of historical recordsand scientific literature
from a structuralistperspective.But Foucault not only dissectedthe language
that establishedthe myths about the "medicalpersonage"and his profession,
he also wrote his most literaryand readablebook.
Foucaultanalyzes 18th century medicine through its concernwith "species"

of illness that were present in
(or representedby) a patient. Such species had
their natural state and ideal processes, which gave the doctor a chance to
watchand diagnose the reciprocitybetween patient and diseasein its natural
environment.i5He links the space and place of medieal practice to the state
of knowledge that changed in response to social needs. Thus he finds that
medicineexpanded along with its language,because after the French revolu-
tion there were more patients who needed more hospital care and more
doctors -doctors who were bound to create more medical knowledge, as
they talked of metastasesand metamorphoses,of sympathies,or of "distinc-
tionsbetween the convulsions of an epileptic with cerebralinflammationand
the hypochondriac with congestion of the viscera."16In general, disease
became circumscribed,medically invested, isolated and divided. Foucault
parallelsbodily regionsto geographicregions,and comparesthe many debates
aboutillnesses to those that involved the need for hospitals, usually in the
context of the revolution and of equality. Because doctors began to link
epidemicsto poor housing and sanitation, to inadequate education and
politicalnegligence,and knew from the new statistical supervisionof health
thatthe poor got sicker and died more frequently than the rich, they were
castas the saviors of both individualsand of society. Foucault brilliantly
describesthe doctors' ambiguousrole - as crusadersfor social reformand as
advocates for medicalpower.
Inany case, the need for experimentation, and for the unification and
expansionof medicine itself, put the doctors in a privilegedposition - in a
societythat had just abolished privilege.Political equality had also crowded
existinghospitals, had made them impersonal and costly, so that they had
becomebreedinggroundsfor communicablediseases. Thus, when it became
preferableto send the sick back home, Foucault discernsshifts in revolution-
aryrhetoric. He argues that doctors' and politicians' needs convergedwhen
itwas cheaper to keep the sick at home (they were often poor), especially
whenthey were entitled to state support. Now "humaneness" became
expedient,and doctors were to make housecalls.For Foucault this indicatesa
newepoch of knowledge, when medical space changed, when diseasemoved
outof the hospitals, and hospitals became research-oriented.Doctors who

403
had accused the state of negligence and of furthering "disease-producing

conditions" now asked that state to provide laws, funds, and the climate for
research.That is how the clinic was born. Inside the clinic, just as inside the
asylum, the poor were inevitably the guinea-pigs.This was justified because
the rich subsidized their treatment, and because science was to benefit
everyone. Doctors were to keep track of diseases,the governmentwas to keep
track of doctors, regulatemedicine, and get rid of quacksand charlatans.This
division of functions, says Foucault, led to the disappearanceof the in-
stitutionalizationof diseaseand of the "medicineof space".
From then on, "knowledge was to be empirically derived and tested in a

radically restructured clinic."17 Foucault compares the doctors' lectures
about disease to the philosophers' descriptions of unknown countries, or
of the blind restored to light. They had to find cures now for the many
diseases caused by de-hospitalization,quackeryand epidemics. For the first
time, the sick were observedin their beds and became a subject of structured
curricula for students. Simultaneously the clinics controlled professional
access; Foucault shows how social and professional stratification based on
scientific knowledge began as criteria for licensingof health officials, doctors
and paraprofessionalswere established. Essentially, he says, they built a
structurethat would preservethe hospitals,strengthenthe doctors' privileges,
and incorporateliberalpolitical principles.
All of these factors produced new codes of knowledge that had to be

understood.And the very dominance of the doctors helped to institute laws
favorableto medicine. The dissection of corpses, for instance,was legalizedat
their instigation, and they could then begin to "gaze"at death. For Foucault
this is the basis of the new knowledge, knowledge he once more examines
through structuralistoppositions, where the dialectic of diseaseparallelsthat
of linguistics, where the relationshipsbetween disease and its progress,and
the doctor's diagnosis and his treatment, are subsumedin a clinical method
that "distinguishesbetween signs and symptoms," recognizes their "con-
stituent rights and the effacement of their absolute distinction." When he
talks of the "signifiler(sign and symptom) as ... transparentto the signified,
whose essence (the heart of the disease) is (in turn) exhausted in the
intelligible syntax of the signifier, and when the (aptive) symptom is the
diseasein its manifest state," then the readerhas a previewof his subsequent
works.18Foucault's theory becomes even more abstrusewhen his philosophy
"unites" languageand perception in the clinic, and distinguishesvisible and
invisible components of a disease,"in a languagethat is at one in its existence
and its meaningwith the gaze that deciphersit: a languageinseparablyread
and reading."19Here he borrows from Barthes, as he comparesthe clinician's

404
gaze to the philosopher'sreflection in many texts, and searchesfor analogies

and frequency of occurrences,for degrees of certainty and probability,even
while affirmingthat these logical analyses that follow a mathematicalmodel
cannot work. He says that his own structural linguistics is free of mathe-
matical ideology, that his clinical gaze can "hear a language"as soon as it
"perceivesa spectacle,"as he mediatesbetween hospital domain and teaching
domain, medical experience and hospital field, visual and oral investigation,
patient and symptom, sicknessand its progress,prescriptionand intervention,
etc. Eventually he subsumes it all in the doctor and his expression, the
enonce.
No summarycan do justice to Foucault's complexity or to what seems to be

his philosophicalmission.When, for example, autopsiesand the dissection of
corpses herald the new scientific era, when dead tissues could be examined
apart from the individual'sdeath, or when diseasecould be restructuredfrom
the corpse, and "new knowledgeabout life could be discovered,"then we are
aware of Foucault'sstrangeand somewhat disturbinggeniusthat alwayspicks
on the unusual and weird, only to make it seem inevitable and true.
Documentation of the changing discussion of tissual communication and
impermeability,about the invention of the stethoscope that added ear and
touch to sight, criss-crosseswith philosophicalconclusions about "death as a
disease made possible in life," until "deviationin life is both the orderof life,
and life that moves toward death."
Foucault uses the stethoscope to bridge technological as well as moral

obstacles for the doctors, and for his theory. The doctors, he claims,became
ever more differentiated from ordinarymortals when they were thought to
know all about life and death, when they began to write about their new
techniques, about fevers and their roots, about pathological causes and
physio-pathological processes. He already finds this abrupt change when
Broussaiswrote his Traite that focuses on the sick organism,and on the new
way to see, in 1816. This event represents Foucault's scientific break in
medicine that inauguratedthe discourse of our own age, and that "proves"
his theory. True, the doctors' insights and observations are, themselves,
constituted by previous observations,but they progressedfrom an "anato-
clinical" method to the "historicalcondition of positive medicine" that was
"incorporatedin space, language and death."20This statement is typical of
Foucault and of the general debates since Comte, because positive science in
France has remainedmore an ideal construction than an empiricalstudy. In
any event, Foucault's idealist discussionslink death, at the end of the 18th
century, to life and to medicine,just as they tied madnessto psychiatry.Both
incorporatedthe new moral methods in responseto the social conditions and

405
needs the French revolution had created, and gave birth to a "science of the
individual." This science, he concludes, is based on a new language - a
languagewhose discovery "promises,"ultimately, to explain all of European
culture.
3.
Foucault tackles this task in The Orderof Things. He seems to out-do both
Comte and Levi-Strausswith his at once sweepingand narrowexplicationsof
our universe, which move from medicine to psychiatry, from economics to
physics and technology, to unearth a unified structureof knowledgethrough
language - language that was ambiguous from the very beginning,and was
never value-free.Foucault does not touch on our customaryWeberiandebate,
although it could be argued that like all other knowledge, it is subsumed
within his structural-linguisticframework.For him, the productions or the
texts of doctors and humanscientists, of artistsand philosophers,are there to
be deciphered,as "the very constitution of medicine or biology [becomes] a
poetic act, a genuine 'making'or 'invention'of a domain of inquiry."21As he
strips away linguistic representationsand games, by trying to get at the
underside of discourse and at structuresof knowledge and by unveilingthe
strategies that sanction the "conceptualizingrituals," his systematic search
for order, is, in effect, upsetting conventional history. Sequential events are
transcended, as his sophisticated free associations take over and as events,
authors and their works bolster and "prove"his theories. Like Levi-Strauss,
he promises order at the end, after all representationshave been stripped
away, when the codes of knowledge of each of his periods will be clearly
known. Like Levi-Strauss,he uses a four-corneredsystem, his "quadri-lateral
of language"(proposition, articulation,designationand observation),whose
"segmentsconfront each other in pairs,"and whose diagonalrelations place
the name at the center. This scheme, applied to all literaturefrom fiction to
science, "unifies" all written texts and "proves"the unity of languageitself,
when, for instance, all movement in classical literature proceeds from the
figure of the name to the name itself, as the raw material of language is
treated like a mechanicalconstructionthat puts syntax into historicalcontext
and links it geneticallyto nature.There, analysisand space meet at the end of
the Middle Ages and emerge as the prose of the world - a prose that is
treated like madnessand disease.22
Foucault maintains that until then, all three (and later on crime) had been
rooted in resemblancesthrough adjacency, convenience, analogy and sympa-
thy. But when signs began to be arranged in binary fashion as the con-
nection of a significant and a signifier,23chains of resemblancesled to

406
signatures (recognitions and similitudes, or signs that tie resemblances),as

"intermediateforms of the same resemblances,"or "marksof sympathy,"to
delimit the world and to form one vast single text for those who could
read."24Foucault tries to reconstructthe entire universethroughsuch textual
analysis - analysis of everythingwritten about nature and animals,grammar
and syntax, verbsand plants, and about whateverone comes across.
As Foucault "articulates" and "designates," "speaks" and "classifies," he

demonstratesthat the resemblancesthat governeduntil the Renaissancewere
suddenly changedand reorganizedas doctors replacednaturalclassifications
by comparativeanatomy, as political economists talked of labor and produc-
tion rather than of wealth, and as general grammargave way to historical
philology. Yet Foucault does not focus on these transformations,but on the
new consciousness and the codes that emerge from them- codes that can
only be known, as it were, after the fact, and that depend upon a combina-
tion of availablelanguagewhose representationsand signaturesact back upon
themselvesto "prove"disjunctionin these epistemic codes. Such disjunctions
are once more "demonstrated" through literary works like Don Quixote,
whose analogies and ambiguities "introduced" literature. With him, "the
writtenwords and things no longer resembledeach other, as between them
Don Quixotewandersoff on his own,"25as madnessand sanity are united in
him, and as language gets separated from things, in order to return only in
literaturethat no longer "speaks." This sort of literary analysis of texts,
arguesFoucault, will ultimately lead us to the codes of knowledge.
Butthese analyseshave to be tied to changes that occurredin other areasof

knowledge.Analysis of commodity and wealth, for example, wasreplacedby
a system of exchange based on money, so that economic knowledge also
changedits space, became discontinuous, and rupturedwith its past. Yet, by
locatingthe discontinuity in economic knowledge rather than in economic
conditions,Foucault not only by-passes Marx's potential revolution, but
Althusser's"scientific" and somewhat dogmatic Marxism. Foucault bases
economicconditions on the new understandingby man of his own situation,
andon the way capital and labor, production time and wages were now
relatedto new means of production.Although he does not discussalienation,
itappearsto be a "knowledge"that surfacedat the end of the ClassicalAge.
Yeteverything, Foucault keeps reiterating,depended upon language.So he

traceslanguagefrom archaicanalysesof inflection and criesthroughlanguage
developmentto generalgrammar,because,in fact, languagewas createdalong
withthe ideologies and the biasesit incorporated.26Thus the Kantiancritique
thatquestioned its limits brought us to the threshold of modernity, where

407
positivism had to give way to the modernepisteme;Fichte's reflectionswhich

provided firm foundations were opposed by Hegelianphenomenology,which
led us back to the interior of consciousnessthat could revealitself as a spirit.
This was how, for Foucault, Hegel pavedthe way for Husserl,whose philoso-
phy againlinked empiricaldomainswith reflections on subjectivity.
Becauseall structuralistuniversalismmust reject subjectivityin orderto insert

the individualinto his total environment,Foucault makesauthors,works and
language objects that search for a logic independent of grammars,vocabu-
laries, synthetic forms and words.27Thereby man becomes the subject of his
own discourse,as both the object of knowledge and the subject that knows.
This recurrent theme in all his books places Foucault outside his own
discourse: he is the marginalthinker with the sociology of knowledge per-
spective. Hence he can depict man as both slave and sovereign,like "the king
in Velasquez'painting, whose real presenceis excluded, and whose finitude is
heralded in the positivity of knowledge that is both exterior to himself and
anticipateshim."28Here Foucault reintroducesdeath, as he did in The Birth
of the Clinic, when his "human being begins to exist within its organism
inside the shell of its head... with limbs, in structure of his physiology,
when he's the center of his labour, and when he thinks in languagemuch
older than himself."29He links the new modem age to his archeology of
knowledge, where "pre-criticalnaivete" and scientific advance meet as an
"empirico-transcendentaldoublet." On this level, Comte and Marxbecome
"archeologically"indissoluble, so that he does not directly confront them,
when he questions man's being, the relation between the thought and the
unthought - a new form of "reflection removed from both Kantian and
Cartesian analysis." He leads up to Freud when his unconscious is "the
unthought that articulates itself upon thought," or when "the unthought is
the other that is not only a brotherbut a twin, born not of man, nor in man,
but beside him and at the same time, in an identicalnewness, in an unavoid-
able duality."30As Foucault goes on through Hegel and Marx, Sade and
Nietzsche, Artaud and Bataille, to "prove" that thought could no longer be
theoretical, but is in itself a perilous act, his final oppositions resemble
Levi-Strauss': his doubles end up unveiling the same, are thought and
unthought,empiricaland transcendental.31
This search for the ultimate explanation of our universeends in "three faces
of knowledge:"mathematicsand physics, the sciences(language,life, produc-
tion and distribution of wealth) and philosophical reflection. The human
sciences are said to exist at the interstices of them all, because they lend
relevance to the others, and follow three constituent models based on
biology, economics and language which operate in interlockingpairs: func-

408
tionand norm, conflict and rule, significationand system. And history- the
customarybete noire in the structuralistpolemics - is perceivedas the oldest
ofthe human sciences that existed long before man who appearsonly at the
beginningof the 19thcentury. Hence, history "constitutes the environment
forthe human sciences," which means that Foucault "must limit its fron-
tiers"to coincide with his epochs of knowledge, related to codal periods
ratherthan to chronologicalevents.
Yet,even though he views psychoanalysisand ethnology as the sciences of

the future that are said to "form an inexhaustible treasure- hard of
experienceand concepts, of contestationand criticism," he admonishes
LIvi-Straussfor "definingethnology as the study of societies without
history"and for remainingin Kant's "I think." This "anthropologicalquadri-
lateral"ought to be overcome in its very foundations becauseit is, in effect,
asleep.32Instead, he suggeststhat ethnology ought to deal with unconscious
processesthat characterizethe system of a culture. For Foucault wants to
find the relation between conscious and unconscious, between nature and
culturethat does not question man himself, but questions all possible knowl-
edge,spansthe sciences and "dissolves"man.
4.
The very globality of these theoretical propositions presented all kinds of
Some
problemsand was bound to evoke criticism from all Foucault's peers.
of their comments led Foucault to reevaluatea number of his basic postu-
lates. His Archeology of Knowledge, he says, answersthe theoretical objec-
tions, as he extends his previous works and reexaminesold concepts.33
Formercategoriessuch as the "experience"of Madness and Civilization,the
"gaze"of The Birth of the Clinicand the "episteme"of The Orderof Things
arealtered, as his new focus becomes the enunciativefunction (enonce). Now
he sets out to reorganize,to recover in controlled and methodical fashion,
whathe had previouslydone blindly.34As he proceedssystematicallyto catch
each aspect of spoken and unspoken languagein his net, he tries to uncover
"autochthonous"transformation.By this he meansthat when after a rupturea
new knowledge begins, it begins from zero. He wants to get away from
culturaltotalities, so that he can "impose the forms of structuralanalysison
freed of
history itself," while constructing a method of "historicalanalysis
in a still
anthropology" in a "blank space that is slowly taking shape
of its
precariousdiscourse,"or at "a particularsite defined by the exteriority
the
vicinity."35As he refutes both the continuity of history as subject and
structuraldiscontinuity of its ruptures,he is inventinga method-
structuralist
and
ology without structuresor history, that is to uncover "pure"language,
that resemblesa Barthiantextual reading.

409
Naturally, his continuous circling of languageand blank space, analogous to

the cat chasingits tail, becomes heavy and dull. Madness,disease and crime
are more "relevant" than this linguistic excursion into history and into the
impersonality, regularity, and dispersion of thought itself, expecially as
examples are piled up to "prove" its scientificity. Foucault says that his
archeology of dead monuments, inert traces and objects without context
works from its interior, so that progress of conscience and evolution of
thought, themes of convergenceand accomplishmentbecome invalid."Global
history" fades away as "generalhistory" emerges,with series,ruptures,limits,
chronological specificities and types of relation. It is said to operate from
anti-anthropologist,anti-humanist and anti-structuralistpremises, so that
once more Foucault pits himself against those of his peers whose global
constructionsconflict. Again, his linguistic practice undercutsMarxistswhen
he avoids political engagement, and refutes Levi-Strausswhen he attacks
anthropology's floating languages and unconnected themes. And when he
repeatedlyrejects the author as the specific creator of a work, and spins out
the concept of ruptureto turn it against the "subject,"he pushes the notion
of relations between Sartre's object and subject over the brink, and "pins
down" Bachelard'sepochs somewhat too definitively.
In sweeping statements, Foucault spans our entire intellectual universe,cuts

through "historical successions that exist behind revolutions, governments
and famines, to other pasts, hierarchies and networks whose internal
coherences constitute and maintain themselves.36Because his task requiresa
"pre-systematicsystem" to accomodate this history of thought and knowl-
edge, of philosophy and literature,he accumulates"stratifiedensembles"and
"discursiveregularities,"and unites "discursivestrategies" for the sake of
order between objects and concepts, choices and enunciations. Thus he
arrives at his new, and basic, enunciative unit in language, which I would
roughly compare to Levi-Strauss'constituent unit in myth. These enunciative
units are said to produce relations and a play between relations, and are
defined without referenceto their foundation. Instead,they "exist in relation
to a body of rules that enable them to form as objects of discourse... that
situate them in the nexus of regularitiesthat govern their dispersion."37So
the doctor, for example, is related to his "institutionalsite," is part of his
object-orienteddiscourseinside his enunciativefield38- a field dominatedby
a strategy with its own ideas and ideality that is to be circumventedthrough
linguisticrules. This meansthat doctors constructedtheir own mystifying and
scientific lingo in relation to their temporal context, by separating the
symptom from the sicknessand the signifierfrom the signified.This is clearly
a direct translationfrom linguistics,which Foucault extends to all statements
and enunciations, to their functions and descriptions,and then to discursive
formations. 39

410
And as this linguistic theory-to-be gets murkier, his enunciative unit - a

function of existence that presentsitself as a positivity between languageand
thought -becomes part of "verbal performance"and of the "ensemble of
signs produced by a natural or artificial language."Its formulation follows
from a determinedmodality of pure existence, of this same ensembleof signs.
Like a disease, it is neither hidden nor visible, is hard to recognize,does not
deciphera "fundamentalmuteness," and facilitates "the transcendentalends
of a form of discourse that is opposed to all analysis of language."Yet, as
Foucaultgazes into the depths of consciousnessand of un-thoughtthought,
and into the relations and roots of every thought, he continues to insist that
he must also free himself of the limits of linguistic structure. Hence, his
"blankspace" becomes independentof phrasesand grammar,of propositions
andlogic, or of psychology. Even his subjects, have no specialimportance.40
Instead,they are linked to the present and the past through recurrences
whichrelateto antecedentelements in the form of selectivememories,and to
largerensembles.These ensembles are Foucault's "archives,"the repositories
of myriads of unique relationships that play the role of what he calls
"historical a priori"41or constructs that determine the reality of the enun-
ciativeunits which are to help us understand internal points of contact,
insertionsor irruptions,or the emergenceof disciplinesof knowledge. They
provideFoucauldian history, as they exist only to be rememberedunder
specificcircumstances.The archives also control the appearanceof enun-
ciativeunits, regulatewhat canbe said and what is to be left out, and form
distinctconfigurations,compositions, and rapports.But becausethe archives
of a culture are never complete and only emerge in fragments,Foucault
creates"a generalhorizon" for them all- his "archeology."42This archeolo-
gy is primarily described by what it is not: it is "neither a search for
beginnings," nor a geology that attempts to define discourseitself. It is not a
historyof ideas, because it is not interpretive, does not look for trans-
formations, and has no slow progressions;it neither tries to graspmoments on
itshorizon, nor does it attach itself to sociology, anthropology,psychology
orcreation. Itnever reconstitutes what was thought, wanted, or proven,but
is"the systematic description of a discourse-objectitself," on a horizon
"entangledin unique interrelationshipsof relations" (interpositivities).43
Hence,Saussure's,Keynes' and Darwin's systems, for example, are able to
operate in different fields of "enunciative regularities
that characterizeenun-
ciativeformation," and yet use the same grammarand logic. This "proves"
enunciative homogeneity, but places them into three different knowledges
duringan epoch. Nevertheless,archeological observationhas no "deductive
schema," and does not attempt any "totalitarianperiodization."44

411
Endless archeological examples tie irregularitiesand contradictions in lan-

guage, on all levels, to coherences that are said to show similaritiesbetween
chronological discourse (such as Madness and Civilization or Birth of a
Clinic), and lateral discourse(such as The Orderof Things).They differ from
the customaryapproach,claims Foucault, because they do not try to recon-
struct a particulardomain or rationality, a specific classificationor causality,
but are to "reveal"the relations between well-determinedsets of discursive
formations. Consequently,Foucault can talk of the ClassicalAge as he denies
the Classicalspirit, as his archeology refutes symbolic projection, expression
and reflexion, and as he gets away from a traditional history.45Actually,
Foucault "freezes"history in order to make his discontinuitiesviable, or to
"prove" his scientificity. He seems to reach for the farthest corners of his
horizon, while descending into the deepest reaches of language, as his
archeology "disarticulatesthe synchrony of breaks, does not use the epoch,
the horizon or its objects as basic unities, but only as discursivepractice."46
Foucault ends the Archeologyof Knowledgewith a discussionhe had thus far

managedto avoid: the relation of science and knowledge to ideology. As we
would expect, ideology for Foucault springsfrom the discursiveformations
and becomes a unique relationshipthat cuts throughall kinds of practices,be
they discursive,political or economic.
5.
In I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My

Brother. . ., Foucault demonstratesthis (ideological) practicethroughthe use
of one case of murder, and appears to "up-date" parts of Madness and
Civilization. In this edited account of historical documents (dating from
June 3, 1835 to October22, 1840), Riviere'sown narrativeabout his crime
and its motives is included in the analysis.Half the experts had found this
strange and ignorant peasant insane, and the jury could neither acquit nor
condemn him. For Foucault, Riviereprovidesthe "excuse"to examine power
structuresand social institutions, as he questions the scientificity of medical
science and as he illustratesthe chaos of valuesand beliefs, of knowledgeand
power 150 years ago - chaos we have not yet solved. But now, says
Foucault, we can examine the evidence impartially, and are able to recon-
stitute its knowledge, by putting Riviere'smemoir in its proper place. In his
search for the perfect crime-to-study,he found that although parricidewas
not rare then, Riviere's memoir was unique. It made "the murderand the
narrative of the murder consubstantial."47Its text became an "exhibit in
evidence," an element in Riviere'srationality or irrationality,becauseit "did
not relate directly to the deed." Instead,memoir and murderare found to be

412
intricately interwoven, support each other, and "carryone another in ever-

changingrelation." In this Foucauldiannarrative - his applied archeology-
"the text was to surround the murder," as Riviere free-associatedfrom
minute descriptionsof family relationsand circumstances,and interpretedhis
emotions from his intention to write the plot before the murdertook place,
to its actualwriting,afterwards,in prison.
Riviere'sbrutal murderhad been premeditated,but had Rivierebeen sane or

mad when he had decided that his father had to be "deliveredfrom all his
tribulations"?Judges and lawyers, doctors and psychiatristsdid not know,
yet produced "expert" opinions: opinions rooted in the new knowledge
about madness. Foucault does not know either, but reconstructsthe horizon
of its archeology. He notes that only a few years before a similaract would
not have engaged the "experts," since insanity had not yet become a
"disease"to be cured, and had not yet been separatedfrom crime. The trial,
the legal and medical opinions, were themselves product and precedent of
new practices. Riviere provided a pivot for the crystallizationof a new power
structurebased on "scientific" pronouncements.
Psychoanalytic hindsight might interpret the murder as the acting-out of

arrestedoedipal attachment,an act of insanity. Some neighbors,townspeople
and journalistsreached a similarconclusion: for some only a madmancould
have committed such a beastly act, even though many thought that Riviere's
mother could have drivenanyone insane. For the lawyersit was parricideand
oughtto be punishedlike regicide,that is, more severelythan a run-of-the-mill
murder,if sanity could be proven.Foucault includeseverybody'spronounce-
ments, languageand positions. But these are reflectionsof the political, social
and economic relations, of the changing rights and obligations related to
family and property after the revolution,when the legal equality of previous-
ly poor peasantsbegan to expand knowledgeand to expressit in a new code.
With his colleagues,Foucault deciphersthis code by looking at the same texts

from different angles: madmanvs. animal, extenuatingcircumstances,power
of medicine vs. law, and intermittencesof rationality.This multi-dimensional
textual analysis makes Foucault part of his own era, and situates him in the
French philosophical-empiricaltradition, as well as in structuralism.He omits
quantitativedata as he teases out all possible informationfrom one case, and
insists it is scientific. He leavesthe generalizationsto the reader.In any event,
he shows how currentlegal language(i.e. particulars,circumstances,explana-
tions, and occurence) became popular then to explain the grotesque, the
gruesome,or the despicable.The new words, he contends, helped to make the
transition from the familiar to the remarkable,from the everyday to the

413
historical, when, suddenly, the act of writing could turn gossip into history.
Since then, he says, the histories of street brawls and murder"joined" the
histories of power, and "murderwas at the intersection of the segments of
language."It was set to music in popular lyrics, indicates Foucault, in the
form of lamentations by the dead person about his guilt, his expiation
throught punishment,and his isolation. "PierreRivierefilled his place in this
fictional lyricism by a real murder,"and "came to lodge his deed and his
speech in a defined place in a certain type of discourseand a certainfield of
knowledge." His parricidewas paid for in the glory he sought, and was sung
in the fly sheets.48
The reader no doubt recognizes that deviance is still dealt with in such a
fashion - either when we blame the system that produces the deviant, or
when we advocate law and order. For Foucault, it "proves"that the sym-
biotic collusion between medicine and law has become the norm, whetherwe
look at England where mental institutions are increasinglyused to punish
crime, at the U.S.S.R. where they have become political prisons,49or at
Americawhere proof of insanity - however brief- "excuses" crime.
6.
Surveilleret Punir, Riviere's sequel, links crime to madness and politics in
formal and central fashion, and "traces"it in France from the 18th century
to the present, and from the "punishmentof the body to that of the soul."
The book begins dramaticallywith the condemnation of Damien, in 1757,
who, "in order to make amends,"had to be
led naked, in a dung-cart, wearing only his shirt, holding a burning

two-pound candle, and then was to be strappedto the scaffold while still
in this cart; the strapswere to be tied aroundthe breasts,arms,thighsand
fat of the legs, while his righthand was to hold up the knife with which he
had committed the parricide;and on the places where he was strapped,
boiling oil from the melted lead of the bullet was to be poured from the
burning sulphur fire, until the burning skin, the candle wax, and the
sulphur would melt together; his body was then to be dismemberedand
was to be pulled by four horses; and after that it was to be consumedby
fire, reducedto ashes and the ashes were to be thrown to the wind.50
Foucault's detailed description of Damien's punishment and of witnesses'

reports "involves"the readertoday, as the public was involvedthen. Actual-
ly, he is once again "proving"that his epistemologicalruptureshold up for
the study of crime as they had for madness and disease. As he mediates

414
between crime and punishment to show that they were public ratherthan
secret, physical rather than mental, and violent rather than "civilized,"he
has a new subject for an old theme: crime is shown as another deviance
within the social fabric, as judges and lawyers, police and public, create the
new system that both needs and producesthem.
Until the turn of the 18th century, Foucault says, punishment of crimehad
been a theater of torture and pain that destroyed the body and served as
social control. Since then, attitudes changed, as cruelty was replaced by
pseudo-leniency. This is because our penal operation "charged itself of
extra-juridicalelements and personage,"and now judges the soul ratherthan
the body. But, observes Foucault, that has not altered the judges' qualifica-
tions; it just helps to absolve them of responsibility,to veil their power.
(Naked power exists exclusivelyinside the prisons.)They now use psychiatric
knowledge to chastise, as they justify and strengthen their own hidden
power, power they effectively mask under the law they help create. For
Foucault, this new type of punishment,along with the new "technology of
power," serves new social, political and economic ends. He arguesthat in the
prevailing system of production, "the punished provide a supplementary
work force that constitutes civil slavery."51Psychologicalpunishment is an
adjunct to a penal system that incorporatespsychiatricand medical knowl-
edge in order to legitimate the legal power that can now establish "truth"
even in the absence of the accused. Foucault means that a crime can now be
legally reconstructedand evidence can be produced, so that the criminalcan
then confess, post-facto and spontaneously, to this legally-induced truth.
Thus Foucault once more combines data from various fields to provide new
insights, and includesboth Marxistand capitalistpremisesas he constructshis
"horizon of crime." New rituals are compared to previous ones, arbitrary
sovereigns are contrasted to the new "egalitarian"legality, and old-style
executioners to modern and anonymous electric chairs. He even juxtaposes
the people's solidarity against "real" criminals to their near-identification
with the new post-revolutionary delinquencies - delinquencies that are
investigatedby the new class of inspectorsand police. And as propertycrime
increased,he finds that it became more and more differentiatedfrom blood
crime. The latter, it seems, fascinatedthe people, who then glorifiedcriminals
and executions, so that Rivierecould, posthumously,become a neo-saint.
Foucault even links the decreasein blood crimesand the increasein property
crimes to the social conditions that made for the systematizationof punish-
ment - punishment that now had to be universalizedand that had to
differentiate illegalities from suppression.Crimewas punished in relation to

415
its damage to the social pact. Now Foucault can talk of an economy of
punishment by politicians who developed this art, and can base it on a
"technology of representation".52An offender'sintent was judged along with
the crime, so that "the length of pain was integrated to the economy of
pain." But where previouslytorture, days of pillory, years of banishment,or
hours on the wheel had been prescribed,now the condemnedwould expiate
his crime through work. In other words, a pseudo-MarxistFoucault talks of
productions of crime and punishment - productions that, analogous to
madness, turn into knowledge that is tied to "manipulable"guilt. But guilt
only changedthe "quality"of crime and of punishment.
Because punishmentnecessitatedthe constructionof prisons,Foucault ties in

the construction of new prisons, prisons modeled after the Walnut Street
prison of Philadelphia.53There he perceives scientific rationality in the
allocation of space, (hierarchicallyorganized in line with the offense) and
talks of the regimentationand control of work and guilt that was to modify
behavior inside the institution. He then compares it to similar controls in
schools, in the army, and in the factory. Time was strictly organized,
surveillancewas efficient and uninterrupted,so that once more, Foucault can
liken rules and obligations to the new apparatusof knowledge that never
deterred crime but that regimentedcriminals.And as crime became another
corollary of modern economic production, it had to be processed. Foucault
illustrates how the aim to perfect society resulted only in the perfection of
punishment. He describes the machinery of punishment with its adjunct
coercion, docility and regimentationthat graduallyturned people into cases,
until hierarchicsurveillancebecame the norm. Power became anonymousand
functional. Foucault finds that this new disciplinarysystem "celebrated"the
deviant, the child, and the mad, because individualizationproceeded by
singling out inherent differences, defects, childish traits or secret follies. Yet
this "individualism"helped to hide disciplinarysociety with its centralized
police force attached to political power. Of course, Foucault is not the first
to describe the total institution, the solitary confinement,the accompanying
disciplinary measures, coercions and ideologies, or the total power of the
staff.54His endless excursions throughprisonsand processesof incarceration,
through the Panopticumand delinquency,throughthe rules and penitentiary
conditions, come alive in his erudite "transformationalinteractions"-inter-
actions that integrate everything,from comportment to isolation, from pain
to work, from education to control by "specialists,"from word to language,
and from there to his theoretical dialectics between languageand thought,
conscious and unconscious.

416
His trenchant insights which relate the police to the organizationof prosti-
tutes - from their health and houses to their regulated passage through
prison, and the relations between informers and participants- do "prove"
how financial profit from illicit sexual pleasurewas funnelled back into the
society. When Foucault shows how morals were lost as moralization in-
creased, when he concludes that "the delinquent milieu was in complicity
with an interested puritanism"in setting a price for pleasureand in makinga
profit on the repressedsexuality it later "recuperated,"or when he relates
illegalities and crime to bourgeois illegalism that was both punished and
fostered, he is at his best. Political expediency, bourgeois pretension and
power itself, he argues, "constantly mixes up the art of rectifying with the
right to punish,"55 so that legality and nature are constantly confused.
Essentially,he shows just how legal experts with the help of medicalexperts
created the very knowledge and norms they then hold up as "normal."And
when in this confusionjudges "indulgetheir enormousappetites for medicine
and psychiatry,... which in turn allows them to babbleabout the criminolo-
gy they forget to judge,"56then they are bound to hand down therapeutic
verdicts and readaptive sentences that help to perpetuate the norms of
corrupt power along with crime. Foucault's indictment of this power is
devastating.
7.
This is the strongest argumentin favor of Foucault's works, the theme that
emergesafter all his structuralistcriss-crossingtransformationsand history of
thought have been peeled away. French thought clings to this philosophical
tradition, either becauseFrance'spolitical history is more memorablethan its
present, or because the universitiescontinue to teach it at public expense, to
all citizens able to understand.In Foucauldianterms, we could arguethat in
addition to the legal-medical power, free public higher education also
emerged after the French revolution, and created an intellectual public that
could listen to Foucault and his peers at the College de France today. After
all, without some familiarity with the philosophes (i.e. Rousseau, Mon-
tesquieu, Voltaire), with Durkheimand Descartes,with Hegel and Marx,the
public would not have attended to Foucault's complex and inter-disciplinary
theory. Like Sartre, Foucault set out systematically to understand our
universe without giving up either literature or philosophy. We know that
Weber, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, Arendt, Orwell, and others, addressedthe
same issues without finding the answers,and that none of the synthesizersof
Marxand Freudhave been successful.Still, Foucault'squestions,just because
they include "everything," are particularly challenging. Some American
historians are currently examiningthe effects of Puritanmorals on political

417
structures,and are searchingfor a sociological synthesis between politics and

psychology that could explain the present in relation to the past. Yet their
focus is primarilyon America, while Foucault's is on the world; his theory
"easily" crosses oceans, moves from U.S. prisons to French morality, and
from physical torture to psychological guilt. In a way, his theory, like his
mind, is a catch-allor a sponge that is able to absorball of the specializedand
fracturedknowledges,and orders them into a theory, a theory to "up-date"
Durkheim's"organicsolidarity"- unfortunately under police surveillance.
As we follow Foucault, we can buy his conclusions,his "end of man." Where

can we go from a police state, whose police do not even know whom they are
policing, from a repressivesociety whose citizens think they are free and who,
for the most part, do not even have the capacity to recognize their own
delusion. Foucault locates the reasons for this "false consciousness"in the
production and the perpetuationof surveillanceby the legal-medicalpowers.
Social workers and therapists,for instance, by helping individualsto "adapt,"
are cast as unwitting accomplicesof this power. But socialist society - itself a
failure and a victim of the police state in a more conscious form -never
presented a solution for Foucault. This pits him directly againstAlthusser,
whose own structuralistmethods get "opposite" results. For Foucault, the
only salvation, if any, can be through knowledge, knowledge that will grow
on the ruins of our own epoch. Although he does not predict just how this
will happen, he seems to imply that his own type of object-subjectrelations
and his own method will be instrumental,as he searches for the locus of
power even Marx and Freud did not fimd - power that is both visible and
invisible,presentand hidden, and investedeverywhere.
Foucault's Marxist critics, of course, object to his claim that archeological

practice is not a very different enterprise than historical materialism.He is
using words, argues Lecourt, since he has no answer to his own questions
about the rapportbetween infrastructureand ideology; he does not say how
practical ideologies are represented in the theoretical ones, or how the
eruption of science in knowledge is inserted into social formation. This is
because the archeology lacks a class viewpoint and forgets the answers
historical materialism,Althusser-style,can supply; this makes an ideology of
the archeology itself. Although Lecourt may be correct, his conclusion that
historicalmaterialismhas the answer,seems to be a counter-ideology.57
But other French critics, who value Foucault's approach to the history of
thought, doubt that its dogmaticassertiveness,its selectivity of disciplines,its
autonomy, or its location within the history of ideas, are valid. They question
the object-subjectrelations- primarily in the Archeology of Knowledge - of

418
this speculative enterprise itself, the
dissociations between logical and
discursivepractice, between words and
things, and between the "undiffer-
entiated unities in the ensembles"and in the course
of history. This history
of science, with its "grounds"of
and epistemology, scientificity
andformation,appearstoo simple topositivity
them underneathFoucault'sconvoluted
discoursethat "no longer consists only of
retracingthe linear cumulationof
truths,and of orthogenesesof reason,and yet
allegesto be scientific."58They
questiona scientificity that appearsconsistentwithin
itself, but separatefrom
othersciences.
Americansociologists have "applied" Foucault to
various theories of
deviance,when his concept of exclusion introduces a
study, or when narrow
biases,or pseudo-neutrallanguageare refuted. In this
context, his criticisms
areused radically, even though his lack of
political affiliation places him
amongFrench "conservatives."Actually, his trenchant
exposure of justice
andmedicinein relationto modernpower structures
and belief systems could
conceivablyinfluence policy, especially in America where
radicalism is
practicedby idealistic attacks on those in power. In
France, such action
wouldbe located in the Communist Party or in the various anarchist and
Marxistgroups,and there, history relatedto the class struggle.
is
YetFoucault not only challenges Marx, but also
Durkheim'snotion that
socialsolidarity increaseswith an increasein written laws. Instead,
however
he shows that the myriadsof laws - laws
indirectly, engenderedwith the help
ofmedicine - made doctors and lawyers our
new "priests" who have
legalizedand medicalized us into increasing anomie. And
just like their
predecessors,they perpetuatetheir own Their
mystification. high remunera-
tion"expresses their worth," a worth achieved through
strong professional
organizationsthat prohibitaccess to many and indoctrinatethe
-in a society whose values, as "elected" few
Simmel said long ago, are all expressed
through money. The Patty Hearst trial,
for instance, with its show of
celebrity-type psychiatrists to prove guilt or innocence,
exemplifies
Foucault'sthemes. The very presence of such professionals
together with the
actor-lawyers is our modern spectacle. Like Damien's fate, Patty's fate
became a public show that served to perpetuate
authority and social solidari-
ty,
though in an anomic context. But whereas the Damiens and
Rivieres
exposedtheir pain and subsequently their sins, our
Patty Hearstsplead their
and/or insanity as both reason and expiation for their crimes.
guilt Foucault
wouldarguethat it is part of our code of knowledge.
If I
understand him correctly,he foresees the end of our age,
exactly because
there
seems no way out: our very therapeutization that
linked up with

419
legalization in the interest of social order has created the loopholes for chaos
- loopholes that have become wide gaps, and that have allowed chaos to
become the norm. By now, crime is "everybody's business," and business
crime is as normal as the therapy that "eases" its accompanying guilt and
helps "adaptation". Thus, more therapy and more police are needed and
"produced," as manipulation has even reached the American presidency, and
as the honest person has, gradually, taken the place of the fool. Analogous to
Foucault's fool of the Renaissance, he is uninfluential, poor, and marginal: he
might appear as the prophet, predicting the doom of our scientific era.
Foucault himself seems to be one of the prophets, as his non-historical

approach looks at a process, at a continuum that is bound to be broken.
Whether we "gaze" at his fools, his criminals, or his geniuses, at Don Quixote
or at Velasquez, his dialectic of language, just because it covers everything,
does not leave a loophole: we are in for a break, not only in knowledge, but
in practice. Foucault's millenarian predictions, it appears, are solidly
grounded. And for those who will be around after the "era of man" is ended,
structuralist analysis might be useful.
NOTES
1. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970),

where he essentiallymaintainsthat the testing of scientific hypothesestakes place
in a certain context, so that there are paradigmsfor each one, which preclude
others.Communicationacrossparadigmsis inevitablypartial.
2. MichelFoucault, The Archeologyof Knowledge(New York, 1972), Introduction.
3. MichelFoucault,The Orderof Things(New York, 1970), Introduction.
4. MichelFoucault,Madnessand Civilization(New York, 1965), p. 16.
5. Ibid., p. 27.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Ibid.,p. 91.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 107.
11. Ibid, p. 126.
12. Ibid, p. 156.
13. Ibid., p. 257.
14. MichelFoucault,TheBirthof the Clinic(New York, 1973), Introduction.
15. Ibid., p. 10.
16. Ibid., p. 14.
17. Ibid., p. 62.
18. Ibid., p. 92.
19. Ibid, p. 96.
20. Ibid., p. 196.
21. HaydenV. White,"Foucault Decoded: Notes from the Underground,"Historyand
Theory1 (1973). o. 45.

420
22. MichelFoucault,The Orderof Things,op.cit., pp. 116-120.

23. Ibid, p. 42.
24. Ibid., p. 34.
25. Ibid., p. 48.
26. Ibid., pp. 240-242.
27. Ibid., p. 312.
28. Ibid., pp. 313-314.
29. Ibid., p. 317.
30. Ibid., p. 326.
31. Ibid., p. 328.
32. Ibid., pp. 378-387.
33. Foucault,TheArcheologyof Knowledge,op.cit., Introduction.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 17.
36. F. Russo, "Archeology of Knowledge," Archives de. Philosophie, 36 (1973),
pp. 69-105.
37. Foucault,Archeologyof Knowledge,op.cit., p. 48.
38. Ibid., p. 59.
39. Ibid., p. 114.
40. Ibid., p. 122.
41. Ibid., p. 127.
42. Ibid., p. 131.
43. Ibid., p. 140.
44. Ibid., p. 148.
45. Ibid., p. 165.
46. Ibid., p. 177.
47. MichelFoucault, I, PierreRiviere,HavingSlaughteredMy Mother,My Sister,and
My Brother .. . (New York, 1975), p. 200.
48. Ibid., p.,210.
49. MichelFoucault,"TableRonde,"Esprit4 (1972), pp. 678-703.
50. MichelFoucault,Surveilleret Punir(Paris,1975), p. 9.
51. Ibid., p. 32.
52. Ibid.,p. 106.
53. Ibid.,p. 127.
54. See, for example, ErvingGoffman, Asylums (New York, 1961), Max Weberon
bureaucracy,and many others.
55. Foucault,Surveilleret Punir,op.cit., p. 310.
56. This is a recurrenttheme that appearsto get moreand more obvious,and is spelled
out frequentlyin Surveilleret Punir.
57. Dominique Lecourt, "Sur rArcheologie du Savoir," Pensee, 152 (1970),
pp. 69-87.
58. F. Russo,op.cit., pp. 69-105.
Theory and Society, 4 (1977) 295-420

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Michel Foucault: Ending the Era of Man

Author(s): Edith Kurzweil

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.198 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 17:53:32 PM

Endingtlhe Era of Man

InAmerica the historian is a relic, but France'sMichel Foucault, a historian

Histreatment of Madness and Civilization catapulted him to fame. Since

Department of Sociology, Montclair State College

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He clearly left himself open to attacks - attacks to which he respondedwith

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.198 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 17:53:32 PM

Currentpopularinterestin madness,diseaseand crimeundoubtedly helped to

For Foucault, Marxism'semphasis on economics, psychoanalysis'(French-

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eradicate.That is how Foucault'sironic vision, which NorthropFrye calls the

It all began with Madness and Civilization, when he painstakingly docu-

Furthermore,Foucault continues, everyone was fascinated by madness; its

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This confinement, Foucault concludes, marked the beginningof a new age,

This sort of sociologicalhistory led to Foucault'sacclaim.Even though he has

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sidethe asylums, "insane passions" were thought to exist in everyone and

Inthis structuralist fashion he contrasts sanity and insanity from a new

Thisadvance came primarilyfrom the treatment of the insane outside the

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Treatmentof the not-so-madoutside the asylumswas eventuallyextended to

Insidethe asylum, the keeper's new "scientific" language"taught" the mad

That is how madness turned into a disease - a disease to be treated by

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medical, or gaze. Even though he has since discardedtiffsnotion, it was a way

Foucaultanalyzes 18th century medicine through its concernwith "species"

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had accused the state of negligence and of furthering "disease-producing

From then on, "knowledge was to be empirically derived and tested in a

All of these factors produced new codes of knowledge that had to be

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gaze to the philosopher'sreflection in many texts, and searchesfor analogies

No summarycan do justice to Foucault's complexity or to what seems to be

Foucault uses the stethoscope to bridge technological as well as moral

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This content downloaded from 188.72.126.198 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 17:53:32 PM

signatures (recognitions and similitudes, or signs that tie resemblances),as

As Foucault "articulates" and "designates," "speaks" and "classifies," he

Butthese analyseshave to be tied to changes that occurredin other areasof

Yeteverything, Foucault keeps reiterating,depended upon language.So he

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positivism had to give way to the modernepisteme;Fichte's reflectionswhich

Becauseall structuralistuniversalismmust reject subjectivityin orderto insert

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Yet,even though he views psychoanalysisand ethnology as the sciences of

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Naturally, his continuous circling of languageand blank space, analogous to

In sweeping statements, Foucault spans our entire intellectual universe,cuts

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And as this linguistic theory-to-be gets murkier, his enunciative unit - a

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Endless archeological examples tie irregularitiesand contradictions in lan-

Foucault ends the Archeologyof Knowledgewith a discussionhe had thus far

In I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My

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intricately interwoven, support each other, and "carryone another in ever-

Riviere'sbrutal murderhad been premeditated,but had Rivierebeen sane or

Psychoanalytic hindsight might interpret the murder as the acting-out of

With his colleagues,Foucault deciphersthis code by looking at the same texts

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