The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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214 / Samuel Talcott

the igure of man appears as the living, laboring, and speaking subject but also as the object of a knowledge that seeks to know man in all his activities. This requires that the human sciences operate a formal duplication of the empirical sciences in studying man.

Thanks to this duplication, each of the human sciences can be tied back to one empirical science that it doubles, even though it can also draw on the others. As psychology duplicates biology, sociology duplicates economics, and the analysis of literature and myth duplicates philology. In these duplications, each of the human sciences has its own basic set of concepts derived from its model empirical science. Psychology derives the conceptual categories of norm and function from biology, sociology draws conlict and rule from economics, and the study of literature gains signiication and a system from philology (EOT, 357). So, although each set is peculiar to its own area, they are applicable throughout the domain of the human sciences, often making it dificult to distinguish between them. Thus, “all the human sciences interlock and can always be used to interpret one another: their frontiers become blurred, intermediary and composite disciplines multiply endlessly, and in the end their proper object may even disappear altogether” (EOT, 358). Indeed, experience has already shown that the human sciences lead not to the apotheosis of man but to his disappearance (EEW2, 265). Yet this is not a defect in the human sciences that could be corrected so much as an instance of what makes them productive; a defect appears only when the interrelation of the distinct models has not been established in advance. And it is through the broad categories provided by the models that “man is able to present himself to a possible knowledge” (EOT, 362). A human science, therefore, not being deined by its object, is not a science at all. For Foucault, there is instead a “human science” whenever norms, rules, and signifying totalities are deployed in the domain of the unconscious in order to analyze the conditions of consciousness, both in its forms and contents (EOT, 364). The unconscious plays the role of a transcendental for the human sciences, which look to it in order to pose and explain man such as he appears to himself. The human sciences thus exist and function because man is epistemologically constituted as an empiricotranscendental doublet (EOT, 318) that “must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science” (EOT, 367). Man, as an empirical being, is made to stand in for his own transcendental conditions by these “sciences” – thus his empirical being as living, laboring, and speaking is studied as if it were the transcendental condition of all human behavior and activity, including practices of knowing. In this, the human sciences are soporiics that support the thought of man’s initude.

Foucault’s accounts in the 1970s, by contrast, emphasize nondiscursive events in seeking the conditions of the human sciences’ emergence and maintenance. Rather than unfolding man as an empirico-transcendental doublet, they function “to twin, to couple this juridical individuality and disciplinary individual, to make us believe that the real, natural, and concrete content of the juridical individual is the

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disciplinary individual cut out and constituted by political technology” (ECF-PP, 57–58). Knowledge of man therefore creates an impasse insofar as appeals to overthrow repressive institutions in the name of the individual’s human rights are mistaken about the meaning of those very rights.Although these rights may seem natural or universal, they are inherent within man, a being constituted by normalizing procedures, and so their afirmation is also an afirmation of disciplinary society itself. Moreover, Foucault argues that, “what gave birth to the sciences of man was precisely the irruption, the presence, or the insistence of these tactical problems posed by the need to distribute the forces of work in terms of the needs of the economy that was then developing” (ECF-PP, 73). Various disciplinary tactics were elaborated in response to these questions about how to accumulate men and rationally distribute the bodily singularities of this labor force so as to accumulate capital. Because of the growing importance of discipline, the knowledge of “plants, animals, objects, values, and languages” could no longer remain classiicatory, which had suficed when naming was itself power. The human sciences arise from a transformation in the role of knowledge and contribute to a descending individualization in which discipline aims to produce docile bodies that have been adapted to the goal of accumulating wealth via industrial production. By drawing on the disciplinary context as a primary resource for knowledge of man in general, the human sciences contribute to the shaping of political subjects as docile bodies.

A later inlection of this account is found in Foucault’s discussions of biopower, in which the human sciences play an important role since populations and environments can only be grasped and studied through knowledge of man. Emerging around the new realities established in the interplay of techniques of power and their objects, the human sciences would carve out new objects for these techniques, making these “the privileged correlate of modern mechanisms of power” (ECF-STP, 79). By establishing regularities within different segments of the population, the human sciences discover different normalities that then become objects of power insofar as one sort is to be favored over another (ECF-STP, 63). As Guillaume LeBlanc writes, the human sciences “oscillate permanently between the normal to be recorded and the normal to be instituted” (LeBlanc 2005, 168). The human sciences therefore contribute to normalization by producing new kinds of beings within the population – the hysterical woman, sexual pervert, masturbating child, and Malthusian couple (EHS1, 105) – so many kinds whose diagnosis and administration help to regulate and foster the social whole. They also function to grasp the diverse regularities of populations in relation to their environment; thus, for example, questions of hygiene were of vital importance for the security of towns and allowed knowledge of man to develop according to a medical model (ECF-STP, 63–64). Foucault writes, “if the question of man was raised ... the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human

216 / Samuel Talcott

historicity penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power” (EHS1, 143). Anthropology, understood as the condition from which the human sciences emerged, appeared when human life was discovered to be a historical phenomenon and the conditions within which it occurred could be modiied in order to achieve certain effects. In this, man becomes an orienting problem and the human sciences arise as responses offering a therapeutic kind of knowledge that seeks to control or ward off internal and external threats.

Samuel Talcott

Suggested Reading

Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Canguilhem, George. 1968. “Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?” in Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Vrin, pp. 365–381.

LeBlanc, Guillaume. 2005. L’Esprit des sciences humaines. Paris: Vrin.

INSTITUTION

The word “institution” appears throughout Foucault’s work in what seems to be an almost banal, nominal sense, most frequently in the plural, and often modiied by an adjective (“political institutions” or “psychiatric institu-

tions”) or a genitive (“institutions of power”); use of the singular, when it functions as an active verbal noun (“the institution of the Sovereign” or “the institution of sexuality”), is comparatively sparse and frequently occurs in close proximity to similar but not quite synonymous terms that have a special importance to Foucault, such as birth, emergence, and establishment. Compound forms, such as institutionalization, which can have an ambiguous meaning, are rarer still. And sometimes the appearance of the word in the original French can be obscured by translation – the French verb instituer is frequently translated as “to establish” and the adjective instituté as “established.” All of this serves to underscore that the word appears to be used in an ordinary, familiar, almost unrelected manner, and as such it might seem absurd to claim that there is a technical sense, or even concept, of institution in Foucault’s work. And yet, if we question the familiar and look beyond appearances, we soon ind that not only is there a philosophical concept of institution but also and more broadly a thinking about institution that pervades Foucault’s intellectual project in an insistent and consistent manner, such that his project might be characterized, at least in part, as the thought of institution, which would have a double sense. On the one hand is the nominal sense of a concretion or crystallization of power relations operating in the social body to subjugate humans and make them subjects and on the other hand the verbal sense, closely associated with both the problem of accounting for change in historical rationalities (as described in the Preface to the English translation of The Order of Things) and the later “method” of genealogy that, in part, address that problem. Indeed, it becomes clear that the thought of institution is a point of entry that gives access to most of Foucault’s major concepts. In order to examine the double sense of the thought of institution in Foucault’s work, it is

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218 / Robert Vallier

worthwhile to consider why and how this thought enters into his work. Although the sources and resources for this consideration could be multiplied indeinitely, here the concern will be with just three tightly intertwined approaches: his relation to both structuralism and phenomenology; his rejection of traditional history and appropriation of Nietzschean genealogy as an alternative; and the exigencies of his intellectual project.

First, Foucault’s complex and critical relations to both structuralism and phenomenology have been well documented. On structuralism in particular, one can see his own account in “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” as well as his famously derisive remarks in the Preface to the English translation of The Order of Things. Although he does appreciate that structuralism is better suited than phenomenology to account for the effects of meaning in history, his primary objection is that it seeks universal methodological structures that can explain every situation. Foucault instead advocates a historical and genealogical approach that traces how structures emerge from relations of power and games of truth. For him, there is no meaning in history “except in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, strategies, and tactics” (EEF, 304), and structuralism is not equipped to think of these. His view of phenomenology is even direr, because it posits reason as the founding act of a nonor transhistorical constituting subject that cannot elaborate a history of rationality independently of itself and its constituting function (EEF, 84). Now, when he speaks of “phenomenology,” he paints with very broad strokes; he is, however, much more nuanced when he speaks of a particular phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty, who, in courses no doubt attended by Foucault at École Normale (and later repeated in augmented form during his irst two years at the Collège de France), introduced French students to the then unknown work of Saussure and prepared the way for the rise of structuralism in the human sciences. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s critical encounter with language is an important turning point for Foucault (EEF, 83), as it not only undermines the phenomenological subject but also lays out the irst rules of discourse that Foucault will deploy in his earliest works and then considerably develop and formalize in The Archaeology of Knowledge, which could be characterized as the rules for a logic of institution of discourse. And it is telling that Merleau-Ponty concludes his 1953–1954 course on “The Problem of Speech” with the announcement that these analyses of language and meaning should allow him “to clarify the nature of institution,” a task that he takes up in the next academic year (MerleauPonty 1970, 26). The course on institution from 1954–1955 (when Foucault, then an instructor at the École, was immersed in a reading of Nietzsche, and of which he was no doubt aware) offers a deinition of institution that parallels the understanding that Foucault will later have. Merleau-Ponty says,

Therefore by institution, we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a

INSTITUTION / 219

whole series of other experiences will make sense [aura sens], will form a thinkable sequel or a history – or again the events which deposit a sense [sens] in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow [un appel à une suite], the demand of a future.... There occurs a simultaneous decentering and recentering of the elements of our own life, a movement by us toward the past and of the present reanimated toward us. And this working of the past against the present ... results in a picture [tableau] of diverse, complex probabilities, which are always connected to local circumstances, burdened with a coeficient of facticity, and such that we can never say of one that it is more true than another, although we can say that one is more false, more artiicial, and has less openness to a future which is less rich. (Merleau-Ponty 1970, 77–79)

Like Foucault after him, Merleau-Ponty is quite clearly talking about how our historical present is not a necessary outcome of an inexorable linear development governed by necessity, that it is instead the result of diverse and complex probabilities that have elective afinities for one another, thus producing a coniguration on the basis of local circumstances, and that it contains within it the possibilities for restructuring the ield of possibilities in which a subject is inscribed. But, unlike Foucault, what Merleau-Ponty was not yet able to grasp fully in his thinking on institution is the relations of power and the genealogical method necessary to analyze them (see ECF-PP, 14–15). Merleau-Ponty had recognized that the limitations of phenomenology needed to be overcome and a new nondialectical philosophy of history needed be developed. He therefore proposed to develop this new philosophy of history on the basis of the logic of institution but died before he was able to develop all the resources necessary to bring this project to fruition. To a certain extent, then, Foucault’s project – understood as a genealogy of institution – can be viewed as both a fulillment of Merleau-Ponty’s project and a transcendence of it, insofar as he goes far beyond his predecessor’s scope and intent with the genealogical analysis of the relations of power – but Foucault could not have developed his own thinking on institution without his critical engagement with both structuralism and phenomenology, the space for which was sketched preliminarily by Merleau-Ponty.

Second, as Foucault recounts in “Truth and Power,” traditional history, for which the concept of the event is central, and its methodological historical analyses depend on “the great biological image of progressive maturation” or the logic of unbroken continuity characteristic of evolution or other linear cause-and- consequence models (EEF, 302). Structuralist approaches to history emptied out the notion of the event, dismissing it as trivial, in favor of relations of meaning, which at least had the advantage of not depending on the intervention of a transhistorical or constituting subject to confer meaning in history (EEF, 304). But, for Foucault, neither a traditional nor a structuralist (nor, for that matter, a phenomenological

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or Marxist) approach to history is able to break from the linear, causal, continuist model that inevitably and inexorably results in the present as a necessary and selfevident outcome – and all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, also depend on a monogenetic origin and a inal telos. And yet, as Foucault discovers in his earliest works, these models cannot take account of what actually happens (in medicine, psychiatry, linguistics, etc.) over a relatively short period of time – namely, the sudden transformations in discourse that break with previous veridical and juridical models, thus instituting a whole new regime of knowledge. Foucault’s concern is for how to take account of these sudden deviations, accelerations, evolutions, and transformations that do not correspond to the continuist image (EEF, 302), and, moreover, how those that occur in one discourse infect the body of another, combining with what is speciic to that other body, mutating accordingly, and spreading throughout the entire social body to make us what we are and trap us in our historical present. Another model of history must therefore be developed, and Foucault does so, irst, through an encounter with the new historians, which allows him to resuscitate the concept of event, and second, through his reading of Nietzsche, which allows him to develop his method of genealogy. The new historians realize that the event is not merely an unthinkable and ungraspable irruption but instead distinguish different types of events “differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects,” which must be maintained in their dispersion and are in fact thinkable in terms of the relations of power and in terms of their effects. On this basis, and in order to avoid substantializing the event as an irruption that leads inexorably and causally to the present as a self-evident outcome, Foucault undertakes to think of “eventalization,” the complex polymorphic processes and the dispersed and diverse “connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies, and so on that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal, and necessary,” thus multiplying causes that structure the present ield of possibilities in which individuals act and are made subjects (EEF, 249). Since no other model of historical analysis can take account of the “plethora of intelligibilities and deicit of necessities” (EEF, 250) at work in the dispersed polymorphic process, Foucault has to invent what, following Nietzsche, he calls “genealogy.” As is clear in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” a genealogy does not seek origins but instead must “discover the myriad events” that give rise to an institution, and to maintain these diverse “events in their proper dispersion ... and to identify accidents, minute deviations, complete reversals, errors, faulty calculations that give birth to things that continue to exist” (EEF, 355). In this regard, genealogy unravels the complex processes of “institutionalization” – that is, the diverse strategies and “a profusion of entangled events” (EEF, 361) that overlap, cohere, intersect, and interfere with one another, eventually crystallizing in an institution – and thus also reveals how the social body is comprised of interrelated institutions that structure the ield of possibilities and govern what we are.

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Third, frequently – most often in interviews, and notably in “The Subject and Power” – when Foucault recounts the trajectory of his work, he begins by specifying that his objective had “not been to analyze the phenomenon of power” but rather to create an “alternative” history of the “different modes by which ... human beings are made into certain kinds of subjects” or subjugated by what seem to be necessity or the determinism of scientiic “knowledge” (EEF, 126). Such an alternative history would refer to “more remote processes” that act directly on the body and on behavior, which in turn led him to study complex power relations (EEF, 128). But, he soon discovered that there were no adequate analytic tools available to study them, so these had to be invented. Indeed, the available but inadequate tools were based on legal and institutional models (EEF, 127) – presupposing that institutions already exist as necessary, closed unities that simply deploy power or govern power relations; but this, in his view, is a false conception that merely begs the question. His question is how certain forms of historical rationality – strategies and practices – have allowed those institutions (e.g., the state, the prison, the asylum, but also a concept, a trait, an episteme, and our historical present) to arise and acquire the air of necessity, authority, and inevitability. Analyzing power relations on the basis of institutions as already “given” mistakenly locates power “in” the institution, reduces power relations to a function of the institution, and reveals only the mechanisms of power designed to preserve the institution (EEF, 139–140). If the remote processes (or different types of events) and power relations that have “trapped us” in our historical present are to be understood on the basis of their own speciic regularity and logic, regimes and practices – if, in other words, we are to understand how power relations shape and structure a ield of possibilities for the subject – then the order of analysis must be inverted. Institutions must instead be understood on the basis of power relations; that is, even though power relations may be “fundamentally anchored or crystallized in” an institution, institutions are themselves, and therefore the speciic nature of power relations is itself to be “found outside” of and “prior” to the institution as diverse and dispersed practices and strategies that make the institution possible as such (EEF, 140). Hence, Foucault studies not the institution of the prison but rather the practice of imprisonment, not the institution of the asylum but the strategies of internment and medicalization. Viewed in this light, institutions are interrelated and coordinated networks of power relations (overlapping with systems of communications and objective capacities) that have concretized or crystallized as “blocks” or semiregulated systems that are organized and adjusted as a strategic response to a problem (EEF, 136). As can be seen in the discussion of the educational and military institutions in Discipline and Punish, these blocks arrange space, manage time, and regulate the internal life and activities of persons, thus making them subjects. In this regard, institutions overlap with “disciplines,” integrally contribute to the disciplining of society, and are thus inscribed in the whole network of the social.

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So there is indeed not only a concept of the institution but also a thinking of institutionalization at work throughout Foucault’s oeuvre. An institution – understood narrowly as a concept or trait, more broadly as the asylum, the prison, or the clinic, or more broadly still as a historical rationality, an episteme, or our historical present – must be thought of on the basis of the diverse and complex power relations, events, and strategies or practices that exist outside of and prior to it but come to be crystallized and embodied in it, and they are susceptible to analysis only through a genealogy. Institutions arise in diverse forms, places, and circumstances in response to a problem (e.g., criminality, madness), constitute a regulated and concerted, constantly adjusting system that works to structure the ield of possibilities, act directly on the behavior of individuals, ordering space and time, coordinating the body, and thus subjugating the individual as a particular kind of subject, and in this regard are related to both “discipline” and “governmentality.” But why be concerned with institutions and institutionalization? Because, as Foucault observes, there is no society, no social existence without power relations – and power relations exist only where and when there is the possibility of freedom. Our historical present has produced us as subjects, limited our possibilities, and seemingly trapped us in our historical present. But the genealogical analysis of institutions reveals that our historical present is not a necessary and self-evident outcome. It did not and need not be this way, and if we are to resist power, if we are to be otherwise and maintain an open future of freedom, then “the task of analyzing power relations” and the institutions in which they are embodied “in their historical formation, their mechanisms of adjustment, appropriation, and reproduction [is] all the more pressing – it is the political task inherent in all social existence” (EEF, 141, Foucault’s italics).

Robert Vallier