Foucault, Power, and Institutions
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00204 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Foucault, Power, and Institutions
MARK BEVIR
University of Newcastle
Michel Foucault (1926±84) was, from 1970 until his death, Professor of the
History of Systems of Thought in Paris. He surely will be remembered as one of
the great thinkers of the twentieth century. The literature on him and his work,
not to mention that inspired by his methods, concepts and concerns, is already
vast.1 The range and depth of his scholarship is astonishing. He wrote detailed
histories of madness, psychology, medicine, the human sciences, the penal
system, and Greek and Roman ethics. These historical studies drew on, and also
inspired, philosophical explorations into meaning, rationality, truth, power, and
subjectivity. What is more, he made a number of forays into modern literature
and current aairs. Few scholars have straddled so eectively such diverse areas
within the humanities and social sciences.
Foucault's importance derives not only from his impressive scholarship, but
also from his relationship to other signi®cant French intellectuals. As we will
see, he belonged to a group of French thinkers who were tied more or less tightly
to a distinct set of structuralist and post-structuralist concepts and methods.
The intellectual rigour and excitement of these thinkers, as well as their Parisian
chic, made them attractive to a later generation of French thinkers ± where their
post-structuralism supplanted existentialism as the thought of the moment ±
and also to the American Academy ± where their ideas resonated with native
traditions of textual study and concerns with identity politics.
Foucault himself, although always based in France, made a similar trans-
Atlantic journey.2 His life had its dark and glamorous moments: he attempted
suicide more than once and was referred to a psychiatrist; and he worked
outside the centres of French intellectual and academic life, as a cultural ocial
in Uppsala, Warsaw, and Hamburg, before acquiring his ®rst university post at
Clermont-Ferrand. Yet the most controversial moments occurred after he
began regularly to visit the United States in the mid-1970s: he experimented
with LSD and other drugs; and he explored a liberated gay culture that included
bath houses, anonymous relationships, and sadomasochism. The controversies
that surround Foucault often occur where his life overlaps with his theories. Just
as his life challenged bourgeois norms, so his writing typically takes an opposi-
tional stance, attacking cherished humanist ideas of the subject, truth, freedom,
1 Useful studies of Foucault's later work on power, government, and political philosophy include
T. Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (London, Sage, 1996); L. McNay, Foucault:
a Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Polity, 1994); and J. Simon, Foucault and the Political (London,
Routledge, 1995).
2 For biographies see D. Eribon, Michel Foucault (London, Faber, 1991); D. Macey, The Lives of
Michel Foucault (London, Hutchinson, 1993); and J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New
York, Simon & Schuster, 1993).
# Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
346
Review Section
and social order. Indeed there is a tension in Foucault's work between his
constant refusal of all forms of knowledge as totalizing and his defence of
various struggles against the normalizing eects of social power.
Foucault can be understood in terms of his post-structuralist opposition to
the humanist concepts of subjectivity and truth. There are, of course, problems
and selections involved in any attempt to pin his work down in this way. His
style of writing is ornate and convoluted as well as elegant and dramatic. He
eschewed the programmatic production of a grand theory in favour of a series of
iconoclastic works suggesting innumerable possible lines of development.
Nonetheless, there are recurrent themes and concerns in his work and we
perhaps do best to approach these in terms of positions to which he remained
hostile rather than positions that he overtly armed. Foucault opposed the
concepts of self and objectivity often associated with humanism and modern-
ism. We can ®nd these oppositions in his intellectual environment; we can trace
them in his archaeological and genealogical studies, including those of modern
power and modern government; we can see how they set up themes in his work
pertinent to the study of institutions; and we can unpack aporias and problems
in his work in terms of their excesses.
Structuralism and Beyond
In The Order of Things, Foucault trumpeted the fall of humanism before new
approaches to linguistics, anthropology, and psycho-analysis.3 His prototypes
for the future were the structuralists, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude LeÂvi-
Strauss, and Jacques Lacan. In the introduction to the same work, he described
his relationship to structuralism, saying he deployed a structuralist language
because it provided the inescapable philosophy of the time, but also insisting
that structuralism neither de®ned nor constrained his work. Foucault certainly
developed his early theories in an intellectual environment pervaded by
structuralism. He studied at the Ecole Normale SupeÂrieure, where he became
close friends with a philosophy teacher, Louis Althusser, through whom he
discovered the French tradition of epistemology and the philosophy of science
associated with the work of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.4 These
philosophers argued that scienti®c progress is not linear but full of ruptures.
A rupture is characterized by a change of problematic de®ned in terms of an
orientation towards a given set of theories and questions within an established
science.
Later, in the 1950s, Foucault became good friends with, and a periodic
lover of, the structuralist critic Roland Barthes. Like Barthes, he developed his
philosophy by drawing on structuralism in conscious opposition to the humanist
existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. He evoked a dichotomy between philosophers
who emphasize consciousness and those who emphasize concepts. The former,
including Sartre, devise accounts of the subject that centre on experiences
and their meaning. The latter, including Althusser, Bachelard, and Canguilhem,
devise accounts of systems of knowledge that centre on concepts and their
3 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, Routledge,
1986).
4 On Foucault's debt to Bachelard and Canguilhem see G. Gutting, Michel Foucault's
Archaeology of Scienti®c Reason (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989).
# Political Studies Association, 1999
Review Section
347
relations. Yet while Foucault identi®ed with some aspects of Althusser's
structuralism, he also rejected other aspects of it. Certainly he never really
embraced a realist ontology, let alone the analytical concepts of Marxism.
Foucault's refusal of the scientism characteristic of much structuralism can be
linked to his embrace of two key themes prominent among radical structuralists,
even post-structuralists, such as Barthes and Lacan. He opposed, ®rst, the idea
of the autonomous individual. The subject is not a rational agent thinking and
acting under its own self-imposed and self-created commands. Rather, the
subject is a product of social structures, epistemes, discourses, or something else
of the sort. He opposed, second, an objectivist epistemology. Our meanings,
experiences, reason, and so truths are not simply given to us as stable and ®xed
objects. Rather, they are constructed for us by the same social structures,
epistemes, and discourses that give us our identity.
Archaeology and Genealogy
Foucault's early archaeological studies explored the successive historical
epistemes that governed theory, practice, and institutions in things such as
psychology, health, and the human sciences.5 An episteme is a set of structural
relations between concepts. It `delimits in the totality of experience a ®eld of
knowledge, de®nes the mode of being of the objects that appear in that ®eld,
provides man's everyday perception with theoretical powers, and de®nes the
conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognized to
be true'.6 An episteme is a fundamental code governing the way in which people
understand, and act in, the world. Although epistemes are rarely held con-
sciously, they exercise an all-pervasive in¯uence, saturating all of the religious,
philosophical, scienti®c, social, and artistic thought and practice of an age.
Clearly Foucault's concept of an episteme re¯ects his quasi-structuralist
hostility to objectivism and the subject. For a start, epistemes are historical a
prioris in that they have no atemporal basis but nonetheless people take them
for granted without ever questioning their validity. Far from the epistemes that
govern our thinking being a re¯ection of a natural order or a product of rational
deliberation, they themselves construct both the world we study and the concept
of rationality that we adopt. The way we perceive the world and the way we
classify things depend on the codes that govern our thinking. Each episteme
prescribes rules for the ordering and classifying of our concepts, and these rules
thus ®x our view of the world at any given time. What is more, Foucault insists
that epistemes are not the products of the rational activity of individual subjects.
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