GEOFF GANAHER
FOUCAULT'S ANTI-HUMANISM
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Michel Foucault born Paul-Michel Foucault
(15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984), was a French
philosopher and historian of ideas. He held
a chair at the prestigious Collège de France
with the title "History of Systems of
Thought," and also taught at the University
at Buffalo and the University of California,
Berkeley. Foucault is best known for his
critical studies of social institutions,
most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human
sciences, and the prison system, as well
as for his work on the history of human sexuality.
His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse
have been widely influential. In the 1960s
Foucault was associated with structuralism,
a movement from which he distanced himself.
Foucault also rejected the poststructuralist
and postmodernist labels later attributed
to him, preferring to classify his thought
as a critical history of modernity rooted
in Kant. Foucault's project was particularly
influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy
of knowledge" a direct allusion to Nietzsche's
"genealogy of morality". In a late
interview he definitively stated: "I
am a Nietzschean." Foucault was listed
as the most cited scholar in the humanities
in 2007 by the ISI Web of Science.
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Geoff Ganaher
Foucault's Anti-Humanism
"Much of the notice Foucault initially
attracted derived from his ability to coin
the striking phrase. The most notorious was
his declaration, at the end of his 1966 book,
The Order of Things, of 'the death of man'.
His obvious allusion to Nietzsche's proclamation
of 'the death of God' drew a considerable
degree of attention to himself and to the
then-burgeoning school of anti-humanist philosophy.
Foucault meant by 'the death of Man' that
humanist philosophy had now been overthrown.
. . .Humanists have long shared a commitment
to the idea that individual man himself,
the human subject-understood as man's consciousness
and will-is the originators of human actions
and understanding. The notions of individual
freedom and individual responsibility, and
the philosophies that support them have long
been based upon it. However, according to
Foucault, this movement has now run its course.
His proclamation was based not only on his
rejection of this 'philosophy of man' but
on its demise from its position at the centre
of contemporary thought and culture. The
humanism of the modern era had been toppled
and replaced by the anti-humanism of the
postmodern.
One of anti-humanism's central philosophical
claims is that humanism's belief in the autonomy
of the subject is an illusion. The two characteristics
of 'the subject' that come under strongest
attack are those of free will and consciousness.
From a humanist perspective, the individual
is a free agent who normally weighs up the
issues confronting him and makes his own,
rational decision about what to do. The anti-
humanist rejects this as naive, for it omits
the dimension of the unconscious. The concept
of the unconscious, which originated in mid-nineteenth
century German philosophy, has allowed anti-humanists
to proclaim that the entire humanist tradition
has been wrong to assign the conscious mind
the central role in the functioning of a
human being. They believe that the unconscious
is the dominant influence on behaviour and
thought, and that we must abandon the assumption
that purposive action is consciously derived.
Hence, we must reject our believe in the
autonomy of the individual subject.
Foucault also insists that we have to abandon
the common sense assumption that there is
a real world outside ourselves and that we
can have knowledge about it. This is another
illusion of humanism, he claims. Our minds
are confined to the realm of our language.
Though he shares this assumption with structuralist
theory, Foucault denied he was a structuralist.
He took the 'primacy of language' thesis
straight from Nietzsche. Through language,
Nietzsche contended, human beings imposed
their own arbitrary constructions of meaning
on what would otherwise be nothing but chaos.
If we could think of the world beyond our
minds, Nietzschean philosophy holds, there
would be none of our categories, causes,
or hierarchies, and none of the boundries
that we think separate these things and fashion
these forms of order through language. Moreover,
we should not think that our language reflects
reality in any way, or that the words we
use correspond in some direct sense to objects
in the world outside. We have no way of knowing
about any such reality. All we have access
to are the words and meanings we create ourselves
which are, of necessity, distortions of whatever
reality might be. From this perspective,
those who are influential enough to define
the concepts of an era consequently define
the sense of reality held by their fellow
human beings. If we accept this, theory can
indeed be practice.
Genealogy
In the 1970s, Foucault shelved 'archaeology'
as a description of his work and adopted
that of 'genealogy'. This marked his emergence
as a militant critic not only of modern philosophy
but of modern society itself. 'Genealogy'
is a concept derived from Nietzsche's work,
On the Genealogy of Morals, where the idea
of the objectivity of science is dismissed:
there is 'only a perspective seeing, only
a perspective knowing'. Foucault combined
this idea with those in another of Nietzsche's
books, The Will to Power, to argue that not
only was all so-called scientific knowledge
subjective but that it was a 'tool of power'
in the hands of those who formulated it.
In 'archaeology' the task was to analyse
the content of a discourse; in 'genealogy'
the task is to analyse who uses discourses
and for what ends. In this new, militant
phase, moreover, Foucault declares that the
genealogical method is 'anti-science' and
that it is waging a struggle 'against the
effects of the power of discourse that is
considered to be scientific'.
In a theme similar to Marxism's support for
the working class, Foucault's genealogy claims
to serve a different but still oppressed
group, the deviants and the afflicted. Again,
in parallel with Marxism, Foucault argues
that theories which call themselves scientific
are not disinterested but are linked to relations
of authority. However, unlike Marx who believe
that some knowledge could be objective (notably,
that of his own writings), Foucault goes
on to insist that knowledge and power are
always and necessarily interdependent. A
site where power is enforced is also a site
where knowledge is produced, and conversely,
a site from which knowledge is derived is
a place where power is exercised. In Discipline
and Punish he ewants to show the prison as
an example of just such a site of power,
and as a place where knowledge essential
to the modern social sciences was formed.
Reciprocally, the ideas from which the social
sciences were formulated were also the ones
that gave birth to the prison. The belief
that a scientist can arrive at an objective
conclusion, Foucault argues, is one of the
great fallacies of the modern, humanist era:
Modern humanism is therefore mistaken in
drawing this line between knowledge and power.
Knowledge and power are integrated with one
another, and there is no point in dreaming
of a time when knowledge will cease to depend
on power; this is just a way of reviving
humanism in a utopian guise. It is not possible
for power to be exercised without knowledge.
It is impossible for knowledge not to engender
power.
So instead of referring to 'power' and 'knowledge'
separately, he prefers to compound the term
'power/knowledge'.
Foucault defines the principle methodology
of the genealogist as that of history. In
fact, he calls the genealogist 'the new historian'.
The role he prescribes for this new historian
is essentially political: to foster the 'insurrection
of subjugated knowledges', which are opposed
to the 'centralising powers which are linked
to the institution and functioning of an
organised scientific discourse within a society
such as ours'.
This raises a few questions:
1.) Foucault was interested in fostering
the insurrection of marginalized groups and
their subjugated knowledges. What group is
more marginalized in our society than any
other? Nationalists.
2.) If Foucault and Nietzsche are right and
our sense of reality is structured by our
language and the symbolic universe of the
concepts we use, then who possesses the power
that is generated by the discursive means
of production? Who has hegemony over the
discursive means of production today? Globalists.
3.) If power and knowledge are interdependent,
then it must follow that 'knowledge' produced
by historical practices cannot be disinterested
and should not be regarded as such. A set
of power relations is necessarily involved.
Genealogy would seek to uncover who politically
benefits from such discourses and who is
marginalized by them.
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