Abstract
In assessing Michel Foucault’s most recent publications, posthumously collected now some 30 years after his death, it is tempting to do everything we can to train those texts on the political problems of our present. In the context of Foucault’s writings and words documenting his engagement with the Prisons Information Group, this is no doubt an urgent task. But we might also ask how Foucault’s engagement with the Prisons Information Group transformed his conception of the work of philosophical critique. Such an inquiry might even help to enrich that seemingly more urgent task of putting Foucault into contact with the politics of today. Or so at least we (those of us who would philosophize with political intent) should hope. The specifically philosophical task of engaging political realities must always work in reflexive engagement with both its subject matter and its own conditions of critique. Methodology is one useful label for this reflexive work of self-reconditioning, even if for many political theorists the term “method” is unfortunately a jarring provocation.1
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Notes
My argument involves a self-conscious alternative to recent tendencies in political theory to disparage the importance of method in the work of political critique. The explicit refusal of method in political science branches of political theory is largely due to the influence of Sheldon Wolin—see “Political Theory as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review 63.4 (1969): 1062–1082. I believe that Wolin’s argument is better read as a critique of a specific family of methods than as a generalized assault on method in political theory. For it simply cannot be the case that all methodological self-preparation is a postponement of political engagement.
I develop this distinction in Colin Koopman and Tomas Matza, “Putting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian Inquiry,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 824.
Arnold Davidson, “Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy (Malden: Blackwell, 1986), 227.
For one recent exposition, see Linda Alcoff, “Foucault’s Normative Epistemology,” A Companion to Foucault, eds. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
See Foucault “The Concern for Truth,” EPPC, 257; see also my commentary in Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” EEW3, 241. Though first published in 1982, I agree that “there is compelling internal evidence that parts of [“The Subject and Power”] were written several years earlier,” probably in 1978, as argued by Arnold Davidson, “In Praise of Counter-Conduct,” History of the Human Sciences 24 (2011): 39n4.
Foucault, EHS2, 11 and Foucault, “Foucault, Michel, 1926-,” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 318.
In addition to Davidson’s work noted above, see also Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); my own prior work on this subject is in Koopman, Genealogy, 3–44.
See Foucault, ECF-WK, 8, 23. Foucault’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s argument, which he then calls into question, is intriguing in part because of suggestive connections to analytic-pragmatic critiques of empiricism circulating around the same time such as Richard Rorty’s Sellarsian critique of empiricist givenism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Foucault’s critique of the Aristotelian thesis that “sensation really is a knowledge” (ECF-WK, 8) is what is especially reminiscent of the Anglophone critique of empiricism: “Difference therefore from empiricism, which puts perception, or sensation, or impression, or representation in general behind knowledge” (ECF-WK, 203).
Ibid., 22; cf. 215.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 1
Ibid., 64, 68.
Ibid., 71ff., 75–76.
Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 32ff., 41ff.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 214–5.
Ibid., 191; cf. 244.
Ibid., 256; cf. 244. The first written and public formulations of the signature “pouvoir-savoir” phrasing appear in Foucault’s Spring 1972 course summary for his 1971–72 lectures on “Penal Theories and Institutions” (see FDE2, 1258, and EEW1, 317) and in the 1973 “Truth and Juridical Forms” lecture on Nietzsche and Oedipus in Rio (see FDE2, 1456, and EEW3, 52). The phrasing in the “Oedipal Knowledge” lecture from Buffalo in March 1972 (which has only recently been published as part of the Lectures on the Will to Know volume) may thus be the chronologically first appearance of the “power/knowledge” pairing in Foucault’s corpus. Michel Senellart, however, notes the phrase’s appearance in the final lecture of the still-unpublished (at time of writing) 1971–1972 Collège de France lecture series Théories et institutions pénales (ECF-GL, 339). An even earlier but somewhat different usage of the phrasing is found in the February 17, 1971, Collège de France lecture when Foucault refers to a “knowledge-power break” (ECF-WK, 120). But what we have here is a kind of negative (“break”) conceptualization of what Foucault would later thematize as a productive and positive “power/knowledge” pairing. What is in any event quite clear is that Foucault in early 1971 was already thematizing the connection between knowledge and power even if the idea of a conjunct of the two as an analytical category seems to have emerged with full clarity only in early 1972. Indeed the entire 1970–71 lecture series can be fruitfully read as hunting down the power-knowledge idea beginning as early as that year’s inaugural lecture on “The Order of Discourse” where Foucault writes at one point of “a distribution and an appropriation of discourse, with all its powers [pouvoirs] and its knowledge [saviors]” (in EAK, 227; translation modified). My thanks to Daniele Lorenzini for pointing me to this passage.
Foucault, “Toujours les prisons” (1980), FDE2, no. 282, 915. Consider also: “one can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us” (Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” EEW3, 475). For discussion of Foucault’s refusal of indignation in the GIP context, see the provocative analysis by Nancy Luxon in chapter 11 of this volume.
Ibid.
Foucault, “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence” (1971), FDE1, no. 88, 1045.
Ibid., 1046.
Foucault, “(Sur les prisons)” (1971), FDE1, no. 87, 1044.
Ibid.
Michel Foucault, “Préface” (1971), FDE1, no. 91, 1063. As Luxon puts it, the GIP’s work is “less an inclusion of new voices (although it was in part that)” and more “the creation of a new regime of veridiction that might apprehend audiences and claims differently” (see Nancy Luxon in chapter 11 of this volume, 210).
Foucault, “Non, ce n’est pas une enquête officielle …” (1971), FGIP-AL, 67.
Foucault, “Pour échapper à leur prison …” (1971), FGIP-AL, 151.
Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près …” (1972), FGIP-AL, 195.
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Koopman, C. (2016). Conduct and Power: Foucault’s Methodological Expansions in 1971. In: Zurn, P., Dilts, A. (eds) Active Intolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_4
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