{"id":934,"date":"2015-11-13T09:13:58","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T09:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testing.elotroalex.com\/foucault\/?p=359"},"modified":"2015-11-13T09:13:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-13T09:13:58","slug":"emmanuelle-saada-from-foucault-to-foucault-by-way-of-canguilhem-the-history-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/11\/13\/emmanuelle-saada-from-foucault-to-foucault-by-way-of-canguilhem-the-history-of-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Emmanuelle Saada: From Foucault to Foucault by Way of Canguilhem*\u2014the History of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emmanuelle Saada (Footnotes need to be linked)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0Abnormal,\u00a0<\/em>Foucault studies \u201cthe emergence of the power of normalization, the way in which it has been formed, the way in which it has established itself without ever resting on a single institution but by establishing interactions between different institutions (i.e. judicial and medical institutions<\/em>), and the way in which it has extended its sovereignty in our society\u201d (26).\u00a0 Thus,\u00a0Abnormal<\/em>\u00a0(as well as the lectures from the previous year) is one of the most systematic explorations of the genealogical approach in Foucault\u2019s work, after the 1971 \u201cturn\u201d from archeology. Very much like Bichat who had, according to\u00a0The Birth of the Clinic<\/em>, made \u201cthe medical gaze pivot on itself\u201d in order to call death to account for life, Foucault here calls the \u201cabnormals\u201d to account for normative power. To grasp the importance of this move, one must first account for what might appears as a series of tensions in the demonstration, related to the way in which Foucault discusses power.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, the historic demonstration of the pathologization of masturbation, so central to Foucault\u2019s genealogy of normative power, is, if I may say so, a little anticlimactic. In his critique of the \u201crepressive hypothesis\u201d, he offers an apparently similar analysis when he explains the pathologization of masturbation by \u201ca political and economic interest in the child\u2019s survival. (\u2026) The State demands from parents, and the new forms or relations of production require, that the costs entailed by the very existence of the family, by the parents and the recently born children, are not squandered by the early death of children.\u201d (A, 255). At this point, \u201cbiopower\u201d (the word does not appear in Foucault\u2019s lectures) seems barely distinguishable from old capitalist power, especially as it also produces what strangely resembles what one could call \u2018ideological effects\u2019, such as the \u201ctrick\u201d of the constitution of the \u201ccellular family\u201d around the control of the child\u2019s sexuality, also described as \u201ca great deception\u201d organized by \u201cthe State, psychologists and psychologists\u201d (A 257-8).<\/p>\n

A few other instances of Foucault\u2019s analytics of \u201cpower\u201d are slightly disconcerting, at least to this reader. What does he mean when he evokes a \u201cgrotesque\u201d or \u201cubuesque\u201d power in the first lecture, which he associates with \u201cthe fact that, by virtue of their status, a discourse or an individual can have effects of power that their intrinsic qualities should disqualify them from having\u201d (A, 11)? Does this imply that there is a more \u201cqualified\u201d form of power?<\/p>\n

Another surprise can be found in the way Foucault describes \u201cnormative power\u201d as different from judiciary and medical powers when he presents expert medico-legal opinion as a technique belonging neither to \u201cjudicial\u201d nor to \u201cmedical\u201d power: \u201cit does not derive from a power that is either judicial or medical, but from a different type of power that for the moment I will provisionally call the power of normalization\u201d (A, 42). What is this third kind of power, which, surprisingly, seems not to be linked to specific institutions and, in some ways, subsumes the two other more \u201cconcrete\u201d forms of power? It is difficult not to see it here as a more fundamental\u2014and maybe even more foundational\u2014form of power, which obviously, again, seems not to fit with the complete immanence we associate with Foucault\u2019s conception of power.<\/p>\n

Finally, the saturation of\u00a0Abnormal<\/em>\u00a0with the vocabulary and explanatory schemas of \u201cmechanics\u201d might make the reader pause for a while. Of course\u2014and we are used to it at this point in his series of lectures\u2014Foucault conceives of power as a technique because it implies relations between individuals and groups and because, and this is an absolutely crucial point, it is always \u201cphysical.\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Throughout\u00a0Abnormal<\/em>, power uses technologies, produces effects through mechanisms, which Foucault describes in several occasions as \u201ccogs\u201d (rouages<\/em>) (A 12 and\u00a0passim<\/em>). The spoken rhetoric of Foucault, who tells us, rightly, that he is repeating himself again and again, reinforces the impression that the recourse to \u201cmechanisms\u201d is sometimes a little \u2026 \u201cmechanistic\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of course, we all know that Foucault\u2019s project is not to reintroduce a form of necessity in history. And to help us here, he takes the precaution of reminding us that mechanisms and technologies of power have no agency: they are themselves produced in the course of the transformation of relations of power (A, 110). Yet one needs to interrogate a little more deeply the workings of the myriad forms of mechanisms that Foucault is obsessed with because they introduce into the historical demonstration a degree of rigidity\u2014in the end, a form of localized, and always fragile, necessity.<\/p>\n

First, one can note that the existence of mechanisms is not incompatible with sheer contingency.\u00a0Au contraire<\/em>, the genealogy of the power of normalization places contingency at its core, even if this is in a rather discreet manner in the course of the lectures. The zooming in of psychiatry on the body, Foucault shows, is the utterly contingent result of the fact that the confession was first perfected in seminaries, that is, in places in which sexual relations were mostly with oneself. In addition,\u00a0 seminaries later became the model of the institutions of secondary education (A, 191) which allowed for a \u201cdistribution\u201d of the techniques of confession to the education of the bourgeoisie and, ultimately, to the transformation of childhood as the main \u201cpoint of application\u201d of psychiatric power.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the mechanics of power are obviously not incompatible with practices of resistance and the exercise of freedom. On the contrary, in the lectures, as well as in the rest of Foucault\u2019s work, resistance, if not everywhere, is nonetheless essential. It appears as constitutive of the constant adjustment of mechanisms of power. It incessantly responds to, displaces and transforms power. In\u00a0Abnormal<\/em>, the affair of the Possessed of Loudun (Poss\u00e9d\u00e9s de Loudun<\/em>) in the 1630s, described at length in the February 26th\u00a0lecture, is another pivotal moment in the demonstration. The possessed\u2019s body is seized by the demon, a phenomenon that \u201cfollows the trajectory\u201d of the new technique of confession while also indicating its limits. For Foucault, it is a point of \u201creversal\u201d and a form of resistance to a new wave of Christianization and to the new power of normalization. The church\u2019s response to this problem is first the enunciation of a \u201cnew rule of reserved enunciation\u201d which will parallel \u201cthe rule of exhaustive and exclusive discourse\u201d (A, 220).[2]<\/a>\u00a0The second tool used by the church constitutes an essential step in Foucault\u2019s historical narrative. It is the \u201cexternal transfer: (the) expulsion of the convulsive (\u2026) It is at this point that the major and famous transfer of power to medicine begins \u201c (A, 221). The expulsion of the possessed from the church to psychiatry is an essential moment in medicine\u2019s \u201chygienic control of sexuality\u201d and its appropriation of the \u201cdomain of the flesh\u201d (A, 223). Ultimately, this is also how \u201cpsychiatry was able to construct hystero-epilepsy\u201d (A, 224).<\/p>\n

Still, we are left with the tension between contingency and freedom on one hand and what we could characterize as a \u201clocal necessity\u201d in the form of \u201ccogs\u201d in the machine of (normative) power. I think that understanding these tensions, these zones of friction within Foucault\u2019s lectures, might benefit from exploring how much these texts owe to a discussion of Georges Canguilhem\u2019s work on norms. Second \u2013and it is correlated with this first point\u2013 it is also important to situate the 1974-75 lectures in a trajectory that is marked as much by the pushing aside of Marxism as by the progressive abandonment of the concept of \u201csociety\u201d as a meaningful category of historical analysis in Foucault\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the second lecture\u00a0 (January 15th, 1975), Foucault announces that he draws three main ideas from Canguilhem: (1) there was a \u201cgeneral process of social, political and technical normalization starting in the 18th\u00a0century\u201d, (2) the norm does not function as \u201ca natural law\u201d but exercises an \u201cexacting and coercive role\u201d and finally (3) the norm brings a \u201cprinciple of both qualification and correction\u201d(A, 49-50).<\/p>\n

To unpack further the articulation between Foucault and Canguilhem, one can note that for both norms are productive\u2014they are not\u00a0constituted<\/em>\u00a0by an outside force but they are in themselves\u00a0constitutive<\/em>\u00a0of specific forms of life. For Canguilhem, biological norms are not a given of nature but the result of life affirming itself against illness and, ultimately, death. A norm is, in a way, a reaction (this is why \u201cthe abnormal is existentially first\u201d). But life\u2019s reaction is also definition and designation of the abnormal, which becomes \u201cthe effect of the normative project\u201d, the \u201cnorm exhibited in the fact\u201d. In that sense, the abnormal is \u201clogically second\u201d(Normal and Pathological<\/em>, 149). This is why the concept of norm is \u201cpolemical\u201d as Foucault notes in the January 15th\u00a0lecture.<\/p>\n

This has important methodological consequences for Foucault\u2019s project. In Canguilhem\u2019s work, the \u201cforce of life\u201d manifests itself only through its errors, its failures, when it stumbles over obstacles that limit it. And this is why the \u201cknowledge of life\u201d (connaissance de la vie<\/em>) rests on an understanding of the pathological, the abnormal.\u00a0 In this sense, biology is not a knowledge of the \u201claws\u201d of life, but of the norms it produces.[3]<\/a>\u00a0In this process, biology distances itself from mechanics. One understands better, I think, not only the centrality of\u00a0Abnormal<\/em>\u00a0to a genealogy of power but also the potential tension between the study of norms and the project of a (micro)physics of power. This is because norms are constantly being produced \u2013 and are producing effects \u2014in the context of the movements of social life. \u201cThe concept of normalization excludes that of immutability, includes the anticipation of a possible flexibility\u201d (Normal and Pathological<\/em>, 152). Yet\u2014and this is an essential point for understanding the insistence on the \u201cmechanics\u201d of power in Foucault\u2014the integration of different norms in society seems to produce a certain degree of rigidity, through institutions of knowledge and power. Not everything moves all the time. In Canguilhem\u2019s words, borrowing from Auguste Comte, \u201csociety is both a machine and organism\u201d (Normal and Pathological<\/em>, 155). Foucault says something very similar when he describes the \u201csolidity and suppleness\u201d of\u00a0dispositifs<\/em>\u00a0as \u201cdifferent strategies which are mutually opposed, composed and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The realization of the normativity of life, both biological and social, I believe, will inform Foucault\u2019s turn to the \u201csubject\u201d in the years following these lectures, when he will no longer interrogate individuals as\u00a0objects<\/em>\u00a0of norms but as their\u00a0subjects<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The project of a genealogy of normative power is also associated with the disappearance of the notions of \u201cSociety\u201d and the \u201csocial\u201d as useful categories of historical and political analysis in Foucault\u2019s work. This progression is obvious to the attentive reader of the sequence of books from\u00a0Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em>\u00a0(1971-72) to \u201cSociety must be defended<\/em>\u201d (1975-76). In the first books, and especially in\u00a0Punitive Society<\/em>, \u201csociety\u201d, coupled with the \u201cstate\u201d, is the place where social wars are waged (see for ex. Lecture of February 21, 1973). From one title to the other, society goes from being the subject exerting punishment (La soci\u00e9t\u00e9 punitive<\/em>) to an object of discourse, which is itself an object of Foucault\u2019s exploration (Il faut d\u00e9fendre la soci\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>).\u00a0 The use of these categories in the early years is obviously linked to the very Marxian script that Foucault is following at the time. A few years later, in\u00a0Il faut d\u00e9fendre la soci\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>, \u201csociety\u201d is no longer a category used by Foucault in his demonstration but the object of the discourse on security and danger.\u00a0 This displacement is, I think, partly the result of the central place given to norms. In the Durkheimain paradigm\u2014 still dominating French sociology in the 1970s and irrigating the work of sociologists read and quoted by Foucault, such as Bourdieu and Passeron\u2014norms are second to society; they are nothing more than \u201claws\u201d in the sense that they crystalize forms of collective morality. When norms take center stage, they are no longer \u201claws\u201d reflecting social morphology, but affirmations of preference and disqualification of\u00a0abnormals<\/em>\u00a0which shape relations between individuals and between groups. There is no longer a coherent and static \u201cSociety\u201d that can be analyzed as an entity\u00a0sui generis<\/em>, a reality larger than the sum of its parts, to borrow from the Durkheimian analytical apparatus. Society is not even the scene on which social wars are waged and behind which power hides itself (as it is described in the note at the end of the January 3d, 1973 lecture) but only the object of a specific discourse at a certain point in the history of power.<\/p>\n

More than his previous work on the\u00a0History of Madness<\/em>\u00a0or his critiques in\u00a0Archeology of knowledge<\/em>, it is this displacement of \u201csociety\u201d that led, I think, to a break between Foucault and the French historians of his time\u2014most of them practicing one form or another of social history inspired by Durkheimian sociology. But, by freeing us from society and by directing us to the centrality of norms, Foucault\u2019s project has opened up many new paths for the history of power.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

*The\u00a0title would like to point to the fact that this reading of\u00a0Les Anormaux<\/em>\u00a0is largely indebted to the reading of Pierre Macherey,\u00a0De Canguilhem \u00e0 Foucault. La forces des normes<\/em>\u00a0(Paris, La Fabrique, 2009) and most specifically of the short text in this volume entitled \u00ab\u00a0From Canguilhem to Canguilhem by Way of Foucault\u00a0\u00bb, included in an English translation of Macherey\u2019s essays (In a Materialist Way, Selected Essays<\/em>, Walter Montag, 1998).<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0Michel Foucault,\u00a0Le Pouvoir psychiatrique<\/em>, Paris, EHESS\/Gallimard, p.16<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0One might infer that the partisans of the \u00ab\u00a0repressive hypothesis\u00a0\u00bb were blinded by this new (and maybe more explicit) rule to the point that they neglected the first rule of \u201cconstant discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0La Connaissance de la vie<\/em>\u00a0is the title of another important collection of essays by Canguilhem (Paris, Vrin, 1952).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0Michel Foucault \u201cQuestions of Method\u201d, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller,\u00a0The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governementality<\/em>. The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p.80-1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Emmanuelle Saada (Footnotes need to be linked) In\u00a0Abnormal,\u00a0Foucault studies \u201cthe emergence of the power of normalization, the way in which it has been formed, the way in which it has established itself without ever resting on a single institution… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38958,38969],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lecture-5-13","category-to-do-link-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}