At the outset it was
understood
as very rare, affecting perhaps 1 in 100,000 children (Rekers et al.
Foucault-Key-Concepts
Despite his famous interest in questions concerning "sexuality", Foucault does not take up the matter of sexual difference directly; nevertheless, Foucault's work has been highly influential among scholars and activists over the past sev- eral decades who have done so, and have compellingly demonstrated how the tools offered by Foucault's analysis can help us to clarify and deepen our understanding of a critical, yet surprisingly under-studied, concept.
Example: dividing the sexes, or boys will be boys
We take for granted sexual difference. It seems obvious that men and women, boys and girls, make up the world's populace. We may rec- ognize that sexual difference can be understood somewhat differently across the globe; some cultures have standards for masculine and femi- nine behaviour that differ from others. But there remains under the blan- ket of social distinctions what we take to be a brute biological or genetic "fact" of sexual difference. Common sense ? a kind of unquestioned knowledge - tells us that this sexual division into male and female is true, how things are. But if this difference is so obvious we might ask why the distinction between the sexes requires enforcement.
Take the example of four-year-old Nathan who is teased by his class- mates because he enjoys playing "like a girl", dressing up in high heels and dresses instead of like a cowboy, enjoying play with baby dolls instead of trucks. Perhaps we could say that the boy suffers the teasing of his preschool classmates because his play violates the other children's common sense. "You can't be a little girl" (Rekers & Varni 1977: 428), the other children tell Nathan.
What happens to Nathan is not unusual among preschoolers. But Nathan's story is distinctive because his is a published case, among the first of a number of cases, of a condition that was first discussed in US psychiatry in the early 1970s. "Gender Identity Disorder", or GID, continues to be actively treated today. In the paper in which Nathan's story is featured, the authors recount how Nathan's diagnosis led to a long period of therapy designed to help him accept that as a boy he was expected to play with "boys' toys". His parents were instructed to observe him and offer positive reinforcement for playing with gender- appropriate toys, and to ignore him when he played with inappropri- ate toys. Eventually, the case study reports, Nathan was given a wrist counter and told to press the counter when he played with boys' toys
? ? 57
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KE Y CONCEPTS
but not when playing with girls' toys. When he accumulated enough points he received a prize.
Reading the story of Nathan through the theoretical lens of Foucault, it is striking how closely Nathan's treatment regimen corresponds to the levels and character of surveillance Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, and to the levels of surveillance the Panoptic structure organ- izes. Most accounts of the Panopticon focus on the prisoners (or mad- men, paupers, schoolchildren) in the machine, those who are isolated and are the clear objects of the anonymous gaze signified by the invisible inhabitant(s) of the central tower. The objective of panopticism is the "internalization" of the authoritative gaze, where one:
subjected to a field of visibility . . . assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1979: 202-3)
But among the many lessons of panopticism is that the power that seems focused on one individual is in fact "distributed" throughout the structure, so that every individual is at the same time both "object" and "subject" of this power: the prisoner is "watched", but is being trained to watch himself, to be his own inspector. The inspector is by definition the "watcher", and yet he, too, is the object of a gaze: his performance as watcher is ever under scrutiny. The Panopticon is Foucault's best lesson in unsettling the way we typically conceive power and its operation.
Foucault's analysis points us to ways that power can be exercised from unexpected places. As the study reports the succession of events, it is not Nathan 's distress -- over his desire to play with girls' toys, or the teasing he faces - or worry by his parents or teacher about his behav- iour that brings him to the team of psychologists and researchers who subject him to treatment; it is, rather, the other children's teasing that distresses the teacher, who alerts the parents, who finally bring Nathan to treatment. It may seem obvious that children's interaction with one another is an important dimension of their psychosocial development, but the authority the children's voices command is arresting. We could speculate that the parents, teacher and treatment team see something important, even "natural", about the other children's intolerance of Nathan's behaviour. Viewing children as natural arbiters of gender norms might capture something of the intuitive sense of the adults involved in the case of Nathan, but this perspective calls for analysis of how such authority is vested in Nathan's four-year-old peers.
58
POWER/ KNOWLE D GE
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts disciplinary power with the ordinary understanding of power as something that can be "pos- sessed as a thing" and brandished against another (1979: 177; see also 1990a: 94). Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, is instead an expression of power that is associated with what he calls, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the "assignment" of subjective positions (1972: 95), whereby individuals are allotted roles in the social world, positions that provide different possibilities for the exercise of power. The power that one can exercise as parent, simply by virtue of being a parent - power that is supported by society and by law - is one good example, but so is the power that is exercised by a bureaucrat in the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It is not that the individual in one or the other of these positions "is" powerful in Foucaultian terms, but that different positions individuals take up or are assigned afford specific arenas for the exercise of power. Once an individual no longer occupies a given position - the parent goes to school to finish his college degree and at least for some part of the day occupies the position of student, or the clerk at the DMV goes home after a day of work - the power associated with that position can no longer be exercised. In the first volume of The History ofSexuality, Foucault clarifies that "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (1990a: 93). The story of a little boy who is teased in the playground and becomes a psychological case-study illustrates how power relations are distributed widely among young children, teachers and mental health professionals, forming what Foucault described as a "dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being localized in them" (ibid. : 96). Power is for Foucault inaccurately described as issuing "from above" or "outside"; instead, i t i s more instructive t o understand first the way it "comes from below" (ibid. : 94).
In Bentham's design of the Panopticon, the occupants of the central tower take up positions of surveillance vis-a-vis each of the inmates (and indeed, of one another). Nathan's classmates are similarly enjoined, enlisted in a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gen- dered subjects. If the exercise of the classmates' gaze is evidenced by their teasing, it should be counted among the "essential techniques" of disciplinary power. Foucault describes such techniques as:
always meticulous, often minute techniques, but they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a "new micro-physics of power" [that] had constantly reached out to
? 59
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
ever broader domains, as if . . . intended to cover the entire social bod? (1979: 139)
Loosed from its discursive field, the children's forthright announce- ment to Nathan that "You can't be a little girl" resists characterization as a subtle expression of power. Conceived within the terms of its field, however, their blunt repudiation is precisely the sort of "capillary intervention" (1990a: 84) that epitomizes a microphysics of power. It is consequential not for its sheer force but for the disciplinary effects it can provoke, that is, for its ability to "reach out to ever broader domains". The children's intervention in the case of Nathan activates a complex machinery of interlocking institutional interests - embodied by his teacher, his parents and an entire team of psychologists, assistants and technicians - functioning to subject Nathan to a "field of visibility" whereby he will learn, as his peers have already learned, to assume "responsibility for the constraints of power . . . [to] become the princi- ple of his own subjection" (1979: 202-3). Located at the extremities of this "productive network of power which runs through the whole social body" (1980d: 119), the children's exposure of Nathan's viola- tion is instrumental in two linked ways: it rouses the apparatus that will therapeutically draft Nathan into his prescribed role and correct the parental missteps that resulted in Nathan's deviation; it also provides an opportunity to produce new knowledge, that is, new "understand- ings", new "truths", not only about Nathan, but about the increasing numbers of children - and their parents2 - who would be identified under this new disorder. 3
Bentham himself understood that "panopticism" functions not only to circulate power, as it clearly does in the example of the prison, but also to produce knowledge. Foucault's formulation of the term "power/ knowledge" is developed from Bentham's own expectation that the Panopticon would serve as a "laboratory . . . [that] could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train and correct individuals" (Foucault 1979: 203). It is a "privileged place for experi- ments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transfor- mations that may be obtained from them" (ibid. : 204) . "Thanks to its mechanisms of observation," Foucault reflects, the Panopticon "gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowl- edge follows advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (ibid. : 204). But while many would understand in narrow terms the new "object" that is cre- ated to be the "gender disordered" child of the late twentieth century, Foucault's advancement of the analysis of power/knowledge clarifies
? ? ? 60
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
that the objects must be taken to be more widely dispersed, that no one, in fact, escapes the objectification that comes, in the nineteenth century, to be centred around the notion of sexual identity.
Normalizing sex(uality)
Foucault most famously elaborated on this expression of power/ knowledge in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (tellingly titled in French as La Valente de Savoir, "The Will to Knowledge"), the book that immediately follows Discipline and Punish. In The History of Sexuality Foucault makes the remarkable claim that "the 'question' of sex" becomes in the late nineteenth century the most important question "in both senses: as interrogation and problema- tization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of rationality" (1990a: 69). A whole host of technologies are born to regulate what becomes understood as a person's (sexual) "essence", the truth of an individual, who he or she "really" is. The most sali- ent of these technologies is confession, first religious (as mandated by early Christianity), then psychological (in the nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis) and finally political, as the mandate to pro- duce information becomes the ground for what became known as population control. 4 What unites these different technologies is the concern with identifying (and so, Foucault explains, what in fact turns out itself to create, as a category, or object of understanding) a whole variety of "perversions" born during this time, different ways to vio- late the multiplying rules governing the important distinction between licit and illicit, normal and abnormal.
Of all the technologies, medicine comes to play the most important role in the development of "the norm", dictating, for example, what constitutes normal marital relations. Children's sexual activity also became an object of keen interest and concern, not only because of a perceived need to "detect" violations of new norms, but, as we saw in the example of the case of Nathan, to be on the alert for problems with parents' rearing of their children:
Wherever there was the chance that [masturbation] might appear, devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compel- ling admissions . . . parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not sufficiently strong . . . [parents'] conduct was prescribed and their pedagogy
? 61
MICHE L FOUCAU LT: KEY CONCEPTS
recodified; an entire medical-sexual regime took hold of the fam- ily milieu. (Foucault 1990a: 42)
Further, a whole class of deviant individuals comes to be identified at this time. Among the zoophiles (those who engage in sex with non-human animals), auto-monosexualists (those who are only able to experience erotic pleasure by themselves), gynecomasts (men with atypically large breasts), presbyophiles (those who engage in sex with the elderly) and dysparauenistic women (those for whom sexual intercourse is painful), perhaps the most lasting category of individual is "the homosexual", a new species of individual "born" in 1 8 70 (ibid. : 43 ) . 5
I n the late-twentieth-century diagnosis o f the gender dysphoric child there is embedded a whole history of power/knowledge that involves a complex of elements that come to be designated in Foucault's work by the term "normalization". Normalization, the institutionalization of the norm, of what counts as normal, indicates the pervasive standards that structure and define social meaning. Norms are at once everywhere and nowhere. They are obvious when we are talking about the sorts of standards against which one can be tested with respect to intelligence or body mass, for example. But they are less conspicuous when they are unspoken, what we may even take to be natural or understand as our own (what Foucault would see as their "internalization"), as is often the case with norms concerning gender.
We may think that medicine has always played the role it has in shaping our understanding of the norm, but Foucault's earlier his- tory of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, suggests otherwise. In the ancient period, conceptions of health were understood not in terms of a single standard against which one should be measured, but rather in terms of the harmonious functioning of the individual. The role of medicine was to provide "techniques for curing ills" (Foucault 1975 : 34). This view of medicine persisted into the eighteenth century, at which time, according to Foucault, medicine begins to fashion a con- cept of "the healthy man, that is, a study of the non-sick man, and a definition of the model man" (ibid. ). At this point, medicine assumes a "normative posture, which authorizes it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physi- cal and moral relations of the individual and the society in which he lives" (ibid. ). This is a crucial change in the understanding of medi- cine, by the profession and by the public at large, paving the way for the shift that will take place from a focus on health understood as qualities specific to an individual, to normality, a standard imposed from without.
62
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
In the example of Nathan, and of his parents, there is an obvious effort to correct the behaviour that is regarded as abnormal. The tech- niques described by the case study enforcing "good" behaviour with reward and punishing bad behaviour with being ignored, asking him to regulate himself with a wrist counter exemplify the sorts of practices Foucault characterized in Discipline and Punish with respect to the operation of the Panopticon. For Foucault it is not accurate to describe the aim of these practices in terms of "repression". Instead, the aim of the panoptic expression of power/knowledge is to enforce a standard that it is at the same time trying to establish by comparing individuals against one another, measuring their differences and then asserting the truth of the standard it "discovers" as the rule (1979: 182-3). Practices such as these exemplify why Foucault makes use of this composite term, power/knowledge: the expression of each term, power and knowledge, are at every point implicated with one another.
Power/knowledge and resistance
In looking at the operation of power/knowledge, it can be difficult to remember that for Foucault power should not be understood solely in the negative terms of repression or constraint. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault insists that:
we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals. " In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (1979: 194)
While many seek to resist the effects of normalizing power that have wrought so much harm (arguably to us all, albeit in different ways, and to different effect), for Foucault the very effort of resistance must be understood itself as an expression of power. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault returns to the exemplary case of homosexuality to make this point:
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of dis- courses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inver- sion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a
? ? 63
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
strong advance of social control . . . but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.
(1990a: 101)
What does Foucault mean b y "reverse" discourse ? I f the "normali- zation" of the homosexual by nineteenth-century medicine marked the production of a new conception of abnormality, and with it the abnormal individual, twentieth-century resistance to this process must likewise be understood in these terms, but in reverse; as an effort, in other words, to recast normalcy, to understand as normal this new per- son the homosexual. The recasting of normalcy would mean making use of the medical category, not in the sense of the one constricting norm against which all of us should be judged, but to understand homosexual orientation in the "older" sense of the individual standard of health that continues to be active in, and provide validation of, current conceptions of normality. (Even as there are clear standards of health of all kinds, it still makes sense for us to talk about what is healthy " for me" . ) This nor- malizing power that "made up" the "homosexual person" as an object ofpsychiatricmedicinealsoproduced"improbably", "spontaneously", as Foucault puts it (ibid. : 96), the previously unthinkable concept of "gay pride", which led to the depathologization of homosexuality in the United States in 1973 .
The story o f the depathologization of homosexuality, of its removal as a diagnosis from the handbook of psychiatric disorders called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders (DSM), is remark- able in many ways (among them: it was the first, and to date the only, time that a diagnosis was removed from the DSM as a result of a vote by the membership of the American Psychiatric Association) (Bayer 1 9 8 1 ) . But it is also notable because the first edition of the DSM that did not include homosexuality as a diagnosis (DSM III, published in 1 9 8 0) introduced Gender Identity Disorder (GID) of children as a diagnosis. The "risk" of what are characterized as untreated "problems" of gender identity, according to the most influential researcher responsible for the diagnosis, is the eventual assumption of a homosexual identity (Rekers etal. 1977: 4-5). 6
There are at least two lessons to be learned from the replacement of homosexuality with GID. One lesson concerns the role of children in the "society of normalization", something that Foucault addresses in some detail in the first volume of The History ofSexuality. For the
? ? ? ? ? 64
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
purposes of understanding the operation of power/knowledge, it is a lesson in how resistance, expressed as a "reverse discourse", can itself be resisted: psychiatry found, in the diagnosis of GID, a new way to pathologize (or maintain the pathologization of) homosexuality, a new way, in other words, to make it known as an object of psychological intervention, to dictate its truth and to manage the treatment of those so labelled, both medically as well as socially.
As a new revision of the DSM is currently in preparation (scheduled for publication in 2012) there has been a great deal of controversy about the diagnosis of GID, with many activists and mental health practitioners, as well as some academics, arguing in favour of remov- ing the diagnosis, just as homosexuality was removed more than two decades ago. And yet, removal of the diagnosis could inhibit those mental health practitioners who have made use of the diagnosis to treat the distress that gender nonconforming, or "gender variant", children may experience as a result of familial or societal intolerance, a form of counter-attack that validates gender variant behaviour. This approach to treatment is itself a form of resistance to the "usual" understanding of the diagnosis of mental disorder, which locates the problem in the indi- vidual so diagnosed. And while many, perhaps even most, practitioners continue to see GID in the terms dictated by the DSM, which perceives mental disorders "in" the individual, there are those who understand the problem to lie instead in the hostile conditions that gender variant children may face. The implicit rationale of those who approach treat- ment of gender variation in this way is similar to that made about a variety of forms of disability (is the problem in the bodies of those with disabilities, or in the material conditions that make mobility or com- munication difficult? )? What some mental health practitioners have done in their practice is turn psychiatric treatment on its head, seeing a child whose gender behaviour does not correspond neatly with her assigned sex as suffering not from a gender identity disorder, but rather as a victim of an intolerance of gender variation that should instead be the focus of intervention.
Seeing the diagnosis in this way would mean, practically speaking, that it should be cast differently (for example, using terms like "Gender Variance" rather than "Gender Identity Disorder", which is an unneces- sary and furthermore misleading term, because it suggests that psycho- logical identity is the problem that needs to be corrected) . Rather than remove the diagnosis, another possibility could be to rename and refor- mulate the diagnosis to better reflect the life goals and distress experi- enced by individuals, and furthermore direct treatment toward the most appropriate means of alleviating distress and promoting flourishing.
? ? 65
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Beyond the change of name, an interesting and promising recom- mendation may be to make use of complementary diagnostic codes known as "V-codes". V-codes are defined in the International Clas- sification of Disorder (ICD, a global handbook with which the DSM is meant to correspond) as "other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention" (World Health Organization 2004). Some V-codes are diagnoses that have not yet been formally established as diagnoses through appropriate research (and in this sense it would seem that GID as it stands would qualify). Other V-codes are "conditions" that are located outside the individual, but that nevertheless affect the individual's functioning or well-being. An ''Acculturation Problem" (V62. 4), for example, can include a variety of problems adjusting to a new culture, a problem that is cast not as "the individual's" problem; an "Occupational Problem" (V62. 2), which the DSM conservatively describes as "job dissatisfaction", could include distress as a result of working in a hostile environment where again, the problem cannot be understood properly to belong to an individual. With respect to GID in children, probably the most typical problem would be described as a "Parent-Child Relational Problem" (V61. 20), but it could also include a "Phase of Life Problem" (V62. 89). Including V-codes in the very structure of the diagnosis would provide a more accurate picture of the problems that gender variant children face, and furthermore indicate to practitioners that the object of treatment needs to be dif- ferently understood. 8 The use of V-codes in the case of GID could (indeed, would) entail disciplinary effects, but rather than seeking to activate these effects in the life of an individual subjected to treatment, these effects could promote - among therapists and society at large - a different story to tell about sexual difference.
The possibility of making use of V-codes in the diagnosis of GID is one that is consistent with Foucault's analysis of power/knowledge as a pervasive apparatus from which there is no escape, but that can at the same time be resisted or "reversed". Possibilities such as these become the focus of Foucault's attention in his later, "ethical" works.
Conclusion: power/knowledge and technologies ofthe self
After the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault does not explicitly make use of the term "power/knowledge". Yet the focus on "technologies of the self " in Foucault's ethics provides what could well be understood as an elaboration of the concept of power/knowledge in the "positive" terms that are only suggested in the middle work.
? ? ? ? 66
? POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
He is still interested in the notion of subjectivity (assujettissement), both in the sense of "making a subject" and "making subject to". He is also concerned with disciplinary practices. Rather than focusing, as he does in Discipline and Punish, on how disciplinary practices pro- mote normalization, he is far more concerned with how these practices can be put to work to resist normalization. At this point in Foucault's analysis he turns to the subject's relationship to her self, that is, her own subjectivity.
One of the most important ways that knowledge is constituted is through the asking of questions. Investigation of the kinds of questions that can be asked within a given historical period was arguably the focus of Foucault's earlier, archaeological works, and the use to which particular questions could be put and to what effect, the focus of the genealogical works. In the later, ethical works, Foucault turns to the kind of knowledge resulting from reflection, "an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought", or askesis (1990a: 9). Practices of thought that could be promoted in gender variant children, their parents and the mental health workers charged with their care could include a reframing of the questions posed. Interrogating "the problem" of gen- der variance, for example, could provide an opportunity, as Foucault recounts, to "learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently" (ibid. ). Seeing the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder not as a disorder located in the individual, but as a larger problem of intolerance and the suffering it causes would indeed exemplify how this exercise of thought could, as Foucault remarked in an interview, "show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed" (1988: 10).
Our understanding of madness, standards of "health", "normal" sexuality: all of these, Foucault finally argues, are consequences of a complex operation of power/knowledge of which his own works are also a part. His aim, in narrating the histories that make up his work, is not to uncover "the timeless and essential secret . . . behind things" but rather to expose the greater secret: the "secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion" (1977: 142). With his own projects, he is interested, as he put it in an interview, in exploring "the possibility of a discourse that would be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of an historical truth which could have political effect" (1980f: 64).
? 67
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CON C EPTS
Notes
1. One way power/knowledge manifests itself in Foucault's early work is in the closely related concept of the episteme, elaborated in The Order of Things (1973). An episteme, the prevailing order of knowledge particular to a histori? ?
cal period, accounts for the understanding of how things are connected in the overall "field" of understanding or knowledge; it describes the conditions under which what is taken to be knowledge is possible.
2. Parents of children with GID have themselves been diagnosed with different psychopathologies, and become themselves "cases" for further investigation (see e. g. Coates 1990).
3. The incidence of the disorder has ranged over the years.
At the outset it was understood as very rare, affecting perhaps 1 in 100,000 children (Rekers et al. 1977: 4-5); by 1990 clinicians had concluded that it "may occur in two percent to five percent of the general population" (Bradley & Zucker 1990: 478), a finding revised by these same authors nine years later, who liken its frequency to a disorder such as autism, itself a diagnosis with an estimated incidence rate that has steadily increased over the past decades (Zucker & Bradley 1999: 24). For Foucault these differences would indicate changing historical needs t o justify diagnosis and treatment.
4. Interventions by the state in matters such as population control are an example of what Foucault called "biopower". For discussion of this distinctive form of power, which must also be seen as an expression of power/knowledge, see Chapter 3 on biopower in this volume.
5. For a detailed treatment of the history of the "invention" of homosexuality, see Katz (1995).
6. Laterinthedevelopmentofthediagnosis,perhapsevengreaterriskofuntreated GID is the assumption of a transsexual identity (Bradley & Zucker 1990: 482).
7. See, for example, Fine & Asch (1988).
8. This could also be seen in light of the idea of "exteriorizing" a problem faced
by an individual or a family, a process that allows the emergence of a different meaning, "the development of an alternative story", as the psychologist Michael White, himself a close reader of Foucault, has put it (see e. g. White & Epston 1990: 39).
? ? 68
? PART II
m
? ? FIVE
uca It's nee
Todd May
The concept of freedom is an elusive one in philosophy. It lies at the centre of at least two very different sets of philosophical problems. One concerns the metaphysical status of human beings. The other concerns their political status. And, to make matters more complicated, Michel Foucault's perspective on freedom lies within neither set of problems. It does, however, interact with and complicate them. What I propose to do here, then, is to approach Foucault's own approach to freedom in three stages. First, I will discuss the two notions of freedom that characterize traditional philosophy. Then I will turn to Foucault's con- ception of freedom, showing how it interacts with those traditional notions. Finally, in order to get a better sense of all this, I will briefly contrast his conception of freedom with that of another subtle thinker of freedom, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
We might call the two traditional conceptions of freedom meta- physical and political. The term metaphysical is somewhat loaded, however, so it might be best to be clear about what we mean by it before we proceed. Metaphysics has been thought to concern the ulti- mate nature of reality. It concerns what there is, or what the first or founding principles are of what there is. In that sense, it can also be characterized by the term ontology. One area of focus in metaphysics has been with the relation of mind and body. This is because if reality ultimately is made up of two different kinds of stuff - mental stuff and physical stuff - the question of their relationship becomes a central one, as it has been at least since Descartes. And among the questions that this question concerning the relationship between mind and body raises is whether or not the mind can control the body. That question
? ? ? 71
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
has evolved into the question of free will, a question we will return to in a moment.
The loaded character of the term "metaphysics" emerged over the course of the twentieth century under the influence of the thought of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, the entirety of Western philosophy is characterized by what he called metaphysics. Metaphysics, in his use of the term, is related to but not the same thing as metaphysics as we have just seen it. For Heidegger, the ultimate question for thought is that of Being. The problem, in his eyes, is that Being has been interpreted throughout most of Western philosophy in terms of beings. Being has been thought of as just another type of being. So, when we ask about the nature of reality, when we ask what there is, we wind up asking what kinds of beings there are. This approach neglects the question of Being itself. So when Heidegger uses the term "metaphysics", he is referring to a particular approach to philosophy that has forgotten philosophy's ultimate question, that of Being, in favour of questions about beings.
Heidegger's use of the term "metaphysics" has been enormously influential, particularly in the thought of recent French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his followers. For the purposes of this essay, how- ever, we can leave this use to the side. What we mean by metaphysical freedom does not have to do with the question of Being or of beings, but with that of free will. (Philosophers influenced by the Heidegger/ Derrida trajectory may accuse me of engaging in metaphysics in their sense. That is a debate that will have to await another occasion. )
What, then, is metaphysical freedom? It is something that human beings may or may not have. Those who endorse the idea of metaphysi- cal freedom have very different views of what that freedom consists in, but all agree that whatever it is, it involves something that resists our being determined. To understand metaphysical freedom, then, one must understand the doctrine of determinism. What, then, is determin- ism? It is the view that human beings are in control of none of their actions or thoughts. Whatever we do, its source can be found outside of our conscious control. There are many different types of determinism. Calvinists adopt a religious view called predestination. This is the view that God has determined everything that is going to happen, and that human life is merely a playing out of God's script. Genetic determin- ists think that everything about who we will be and how we will react to things has been coded into our genes. Alternatively, behaviourists hold that our environment wholely shapes who we are ; we are nothing more than the products of positive and negative reinforcement. What all these views have in common is the idea that people do not control
72
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM
any aspect of their lives. They are the product of forces over which they have no influence.
Those, by contrast, who hold that there is metaphysical freedom deny that human life is entirely determined. Here there are many dif- ferent views, not only in what metaphysical freedom might consist in, but in how much of it we actually have. Some, though very few, philoso- phers hold that we are entirely free in every decision we make. Most hold a less radical doctrine. What characterizes all views of metaphysical freedom, however, is simply the denial that we are entirely determined. Humans, unless they are psychologically damaged, have some conscious control over their thought and their behaviour.
Political freedom is distinct from metaphysical freedom. Political freedom concerns the liberties one does or does not have as a member of a particular society. Freedom of speech, for instance, is a political freedom. People in the UK (at least informally) and (decreasingly so) in the US have it; people in Burma do not. Political freedom is not, as metaphysical freedom is, a doctrine about human nature. It is instead a characterization of particular elements in a society.
Metaphysical and political freedom are conceptually distinct. One can imagine people possessing one kind of freedom without having any of the other. On the one hand, one could be metaphysically free without any type of political liberty. For example, let us assume that people are not entirely determined in their behaviour. Someone who was being held as a political prisoner would, under that assumption, be metaphysically but not politically free. On the otherhand, ifwe assume that people are entirely determined in their behaviour, then in a society that afforded many political liberties they would be politically but not metaphysically free.
This conceptual distinction is characteristic of the philosophical tra- dition. Perhaps, however, it is a little too neat. Perhaps it serves not so much to clarify concepts as instead to obfuscate reality. After all, cannot one imagine, for instance, that a sustained lack of political freedom in a society would limit the kinds of things people would be able to do, even if they were suddenly liberated? Behaviourists argue that we are entirely determined by our environment. We do not have to go quite that far to recognize that what we call our metaphysical freedom might be constrained by environmental factors, among them a lack of political freedom. After all, we have observed over the past several decades the difficulty people have in exercising political freedoms when they have been held for generations under conditions of political subjugation.
The theorist of metaphysical freedom might argue here that a lack of political freedom does not compromise the existence of metaphysical
? 73
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
freedom. Their claim would be that metaphysical freedom is something all humans possess. People who are politically liberated do not gain or lose any of their metaphysical freedom. They are simply displaying an ignorance of how to utilize this metaphysical freedom in the service of their newly gained political freedom.
There is something about this response, however, that seems to miss the point. If we want to know what people's lives are like, what they can and cannot do, then it is perhaps not entirely helpful to be told that, regardless of their particular conditions, they are metaphysically free. What most people are interested in is not whether they are uncon- strained in some abstract sense, but what options they might have in a more concrete one. That is to say, if people have been reinforced to be a certain way over a long period of time, the claim that they do not have to be will ring empty if all that is meant is that there is something about being human that is not entirely subject to those reinforcements. What would be of more interest to them would be to understand the character of their particular constraints, how those constraints affect who they are and what they do, and what they might do to liberate themselves from them.
It is at this precise point that the thought of Michel Foucault becomes relevant in thinking about freedom. Foucault does not defend any form of metaphysical freedom. Neither does he deny metaphysical freedom. He is often taken to be doing the latter, because he describes a number of constraints that have bound us. However, the constraints he describes, as he insists over and over again, are not metaphysical constraints but historically given ones. They are constraints that can be overcome. The overcoming of these constraints, however, is not a metaphysical or philosophical exercise. It is a political one. To put the point another way, Foucault neither defends nor denies metaphysical freedom. He assumes something like it in order for political resistance to take place. However, his interest does not lie there but rather in the question of the specific constraints that are part of our historical legacy. He would like to know what they are, how they came to be that way, and what their effects are. It is only then that we can liberate ourselves from them. As he writes in one of his last published works, ''After all, what would be the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeable- ness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? " (Foucault 1990b: 8).
Foucault did not publish any books on freedom. He has no sus- tained reflections on freedom, either metaphysical or political. When he invokes the term or the concept of freedom, it is almost always in a context of a discussion of some other matter. Nevertheless, one can
74
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION O F FREEDO M
fairly say that, from one end of his career to the other, the question of freedom motivates his work. Not the question, ''Are we free? " Instead, the question, "How are we historically constrained and what might we do about it? " And, although Foucault had little to say about the second part of this question, he was very dear about his role regarding the first part. His role was not to tell us what to do: that is, to offer up a new set of constraints. Rather, it was to help us (and himself) understand our particular historical constraints and, moreover, understand that those constraints are nothing more than historical. In that vein, he once wrote,
There is an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn't be better. My optimism would consist in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.
(1990d: 156)
Up to this point, we have been discussing freedom in a very general way. However, if Foucault's approach is a fruitful one, we need to move from broad philosophical reflections on freedom to situated, historical analyses of our particular situation. That, of course, is what Foucault's writings do. In order to see the implicit role freedom plays in these works, let us briefly consider an example. Discipline and Punish is Foucault's history of the rise of prisons, especially (although not solely) in France. It describes the transition from torture to rehabilitation, passing through a phase that has one foot in each. During the period of torture, crimes were punished only sporadically, but severely. Every crime was considered an offence against the sovereign, an offence that was quite literally an attack against the sovereign's body politic. This offence had to be countered by an overwhelming punishment against the body of the criminal, one that would re-establish the power and standing of the sovereign. Thus, torture.
Torture was, in many ways, an ineffective method of punishment. It was costly, unevenly applied, and often generated sympathy for the criminal. With the rise of capitalism and the corresponding focus on property crimes, a more efficient system of punishment was needed. Foucault tells a complex story about the rise of the prison as a single method of dealing with this problem. For our purposes, what is relevant in this story is the emergence of a gradual shift of focus from crime to criminal. Instead of punishing crimes, a system arose that treated crimes as expressions of criminality. What needed to be treated, then,
? 75
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
was the criminal behind the crime. Doing that required more advanced techniques of surveillance and intervention, which had been developing independently of the penal system in monasteries, hospitals and the military. These techniques were merged in the closed environment of the prison, where one could constantly monitor and intervene on the body of the incarcerated. The prison was the place where what Foucault calls docile bodies were created, bodies that were both efficient in per- formance and obedient to authority.
What was forged in the prison did not remain there. Techniques of surveillance and intervention have diffused throughout society. The former are more in the news these days, with the emergence of tech- nologies such as surveillance cameras all over London and wiretapping in the United States. The latter have spread more quietly but no less effectively. From human resource departments in every mid-size to large corporation to the profusion of school counsellors and social workers, families and individuals are constantly exposed to psychological moni- toring dedicated to ensuring conformity to appropriate social roles.
There has been much discussion about the contemporary status of this system of surveillance and intervention, a system Foucault labels discipline. Some, most notably the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, have argued that we have entered a new, post-disciplinary phase (Deleuze
1995). Our concern, however, is with the question of how freedom is implicated in this historical study. In order to see this, we must rec- ognize first that what Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish is the rise of a set of historical constraints on people's behaviour. These constraints work in a way that is often neglected by traditional politi- cal philosophies. They do not operate by stopping people from doing something that they might otherwise be tempted to do. Instead, they create people to be certain kinds of ways, and by doing so make them into docile bodies.
The concept of power will be discussed in more depth in other essays in this volume. For the moment let me say only that what Foucault offers with Discipline and Punish and others of his historical analyses is what might be called a positive rather than negative view of power. On this view, power works not by restraint but by creation. Power does not place a limit on our liberty; it makes us be certain kinds of people. It does so on two levels. First, it trains our bodies to be oriented toward particular kinds of behaviour. Second, and perhaps more important, it makes us think of ourselves in certain kinds of ways. For example, the profusion of psychological monitoring and intervention that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish creates a society in which people think of themselves as psychological beings. As a result, they consider
? 76
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION O F FREEDO M
their unhappiness as psychologically rooted and in need of psychologi- cal cure. Rather than questioning the character of the society in which they live, they instead question themselves. It is they rather than the social arrangements that must change. This, in turn, reinforces those social arrangements by deflecting any criticism of them back onto those who are dissatisfied. All problems become psychological rather than social or political in origin.
Power, in this case, works by what might be called constraint rather than restraint. But, like restraint, constraint works to limit one's options. By making someone into, say, a psychological being, it creates a conform- ity and blunts the possibility of either social resistance or experimenta- tion with other forms of living. Moreover, it does so more effectively than restraint would. When one is restrained, one still desires that which is forbidden. However, when one is constrained, one is moulded to desire only that which is considered appropriate to desire. One is not simply blocked from attaining what one wants; one does not even con- sider alternatives to what are presented as the available social options.
What does all this have to do with freedom? Recall the concept of metaphysical freedom. If we are metaphysically free, then we can control some of our thought and/or behaviour; we are not controlled by some force or another outside of us. What Foucault recounts in
Discipline and Punish is a force outside of us that is influencing how we think, how we act, and in fact who we are - at least at this point in our history. The difference between the force he describes and the forces that concern metaphysical freedom is that his are historical rather than metaphysical. He does not describe a type of force (God, the environ- ment, genes) that necessarily controls human thought and behaviour. He depicts a historically contingent set of practices that have come to have influence over our behaviour in this particular period. Because of this, there is no reason to believe that, if we understand our historical legacy, we cannot change it.
That is why Foucault says, in the citation above, that "so many things can be changed". He has the view, inherited from the Enlightenment, that so many people see him as rejecting: if we understand our situation then we have a chance at changing it. This perspective tacitly embraces the idea of metaphysical freedom, although it does not argue for it and it does not seek to establish its particular character or limits. One can see this idea when Foucault writes that,
One must observe that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which
? 77
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CO N CEPTS
he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power.
Example: dividing the sexes, or boys will be boys
We take for granted sexual difference. It seems obvious that men and women, boys and girls, make up the world's populace. We may rec- ognize that sexual difference can be understood somewhat differently across the globe; some cultures have standards for masculine and femi- nine behaviour that differ from others. But there remains under the blan- ket of social distinctions what we take to be a brute biological or genetic "fact" of sexual difference. Common sense ? a kind of unquestioned knowledge - tells us that this sexual division into male and female is true, how things are. But if this difference is so obvious we might ask why the distinction between the sexes requires enforcement.
Take the example of four-year-old Nathan who is teased by his class- mates because he enjoys playing "like a girl", dressing up in high heels and dresses instead of like a cowboy, enjoying play with baby dolls instead of trucks. Perhaps we could say that the boy suffers the teasing of his preschool classmates because his play violates the other children's common sense. "You can't be a little girl" (Rekers & Varni 1977: 428), the other children tell Nathan.
What happens to Nathan is not unusual among preschoolers. But Nathan's story is distinctive because his is a published case, among the first of a number of cases, of a condition that was first discussed in US psychiatry in the early 1970s. "Gender Identity Disorder", or GID, continues to be actively treated today. In the paper in which Nathan's story is featured, the authors recount how Nathan's diagnosis led to a long period of therapy designed to help him accept that as a boy he was expected to play with "boys' toys". His parents were instructed to observe him and offer positive reinforcement for playing with gender- appropriate toys, and to ignore him when he played with inappropri- ate toys. Eventually, the case study reports, Nathan was given a wrist counter and told to press the counter when he played with boys' toys
? ? 57
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KE Y CONCEPTS
but not when playing with girls' toys. When he accumulated enough points he received a prize.
Reading the story of Nathan through the theoretical lens of Foucault, it is striking how closely Nathan's treatment regimen corresponds to the levels and character of surveillance Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, and to the levels of surveillance the Panoptic structure organ- izes. Most accounts of the Panopticon focus on the prisoners (or mad- men, paupers, schoolchildren) in the machine, those who are isolated and are the clear objects of the anonymous gaze signified by the invisible inhabitant(s) of the central tower. The objective of panopticism is the "internalization" of the authoritative gaze, where one:
subjected to a field of visibility . . . assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1979: 202-3)
But among the many lessons of panopticism is that the power that seems focused on one individual is in fact "distributed" throughout the structure, so that every individual is at the same time both "object" and "subject" of this power: the prisoner is "watched", but is being trained to watch himself, to be his own inspector. The inspector is by definition the "watcher", and yet he, too, is the object of a gaze: his performance as watcher is ever under scrutiny. The Panopticon is Foucault's best lesson in unsettling the way we typically conceive power and its operation.
Foucault's analysis points us to ways that power can be exercised from unexpected places. As the study reports the succession of events, it is not Nathan 's distress -- over his desire to play with girls' toys, or the teasing he faces - or worry by his parents or teacher about his behav- iour that brings him to the team of psychologists and researchers who subject him to treatment; it is, rather, the other children's teasing that distresses the teacher, who alerts the parents, who finally bring Nathan to treatment. It may seem obvious that children's interaction with one another is an important dimension of their psychosocial development, but the authority the children's voices command is arresting. We could speculate that the parents, teacher and treatment team see something important, even "natural", about the other children's intolerance of Nathan's behaviour. Viewing children as natural arbiters of gender norms might capture something of the intuitive sense of the adults involved in the case of Nathan, but this perspective calls for analysis of how such authority is vested in Nathan's four-year-old peers.
58
POWER/ KNOWLE D GE
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts disciplinary power with the ordinary understanding of power as something that can be "pos- sessed as a thing" and brandished against another (1979: 177; see also 1990a: 94). Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, is instead an expression of power that is associated with what he calls, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the "assignment" of subjective positions (1972: 95), whereby individuals are allotted roles in the social world, positions that provide different possibilities for the exercise of power. The power that one can exercise as parent, simply by virtue of being a parent - power that is supported by society and by law - is one good example, but so is the power that is exercised by a bureaucrat in the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It is not that the individual in one or the other of these positions "is" powerful in Foucaultian terms, but that different positions individuals take up or are assigned afford specific arenas for the exercise of power. Once an individual no longer occupies a given position - the parent goes to school to finish his college degree and at least for some part of the day occupies the position of student, or the clerk at the DMV goes home after a day of work - the power associated with that position can no longer be exercised. In the first volume of The History ofSexuality, Foucault clarifies that "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (1990a: 93). The story of a little boy who is teased in the playground and becomes a psychological case-study illustrates how power relations are distributed widely among young children, teachers and mental health professionals, forming what Foucault described as a "dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being localized in them" (ibid. : 96). Power is for Foucault inaccurately described as issuing "from above" or "outside"; instead, i t i s more instructive t o understand first the way it "comes from below" (ibid. : 94).
In Bentham's design of the Panopticon, the occupants of the central tower take up positions of surveillance vis-a-vis each of the inmates (and indeed, of one another). Nathan's classmates are similarly enjoined, enlisted in a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gen- dered subjects. If the exercise of the classmates' gaze is evidenced by their teasing, it should be counted among the "essential techniques" of disciplinary power. Foucault describes such techniques as:
always meticulous, often minute techniques, but they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a "new micro-physics of power" [that] had constantly reached out to
? 59
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
ever broader domains, as if . . . intended to cover the entire social bod? (1979: 139)
Loosed from its discursive field, the children's forthright announce- ment to Nathan that "You can't be a little girl" resists characterization as a subtle expression of power. Conceived within the terms of its field, however, their blunt repudiation is precisely the sort of "capillary intervention" (1990a: 84) that epitomizes a microphysics of power. It is consequential not for its sheer force but for the disciplinary effects it can provoke, that is, for its ability to "reach out to ever broader domains". The children's intervention in the case of Nathan activates a complex machinery of interlocking institutional interests - embodied by his teacher, his parents and an entire team of psychologists, assistants and technicians - functioning to subject Nathan to a "field of visibility" whereby he will learn, as his peers have already learned, to assume "responsibility for the constraints of power . . . [to] become the princi- ple of his own subjection" (1979: 202-3). Located at the extremities of this "productive network of power which runs through the whole social body" (1980d: 119), the children's exposure of Nathan's viola- tion is instrumental in two linked ways: it rouses the apparatus that will therapeutically draft Nathan into his prescribed role and correct the parental missteps that resulted in Nathan's deviation; it also provides an opportunity to produce new knowledge, that is, new "understand- ings", new "truths", not only about Nathan, but about the increasing numbers of children - and their parents2 - who would be identified under this new disorder. 3
Bentham himself understood that "panopticism" functions not only to circulate power, as it clearly does in the example of the prison, but also to produce knowledge. Foucault's formulation of the term "power/ knowledge" is developed from Bentham's own expectation that the Panopticon would serve as a "laboratory . . . [that] could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train and correct individuals" (Foucault 1979: 203). It is a "privileged place for experi- ments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transfor- mations that may be obtained from them" (ibid. : 204) . "Thanks to its mechanisms of observation," Foucault reflects, the Panopticon "gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowl- edge follows advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (ibid. : 204). But while many would understand in narrow terms the new "object" that is cre- ated to be the "gender disordered" child of the late twentieth century, Foucault's advancement of the analysis of power/knowledge clarifies
? ? ? 60
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
that the objects must be taken to be more widely dispersed, that no one, in fact, escapes the objectification that comes, in the nineteenth century, to be centred around the notion of sexual identity.
Normalizing sex(uality)
Foucault most famously elaborated on this expression of power/ knowledge in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (tellingly titled in French as La Valente de Savoir, "The Will to Knowledge"), the book that immediately follows Discipline and Punish. In The History of Sexuality Foucault makes the remarkable claim that "the 'question' of sex" becomes in the late nineteenth century the most important question "in both senses: as interrogation and problema- tization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of rationality" (1990a: 69). A whole host of technologies are born to regulate what becomes understood as a person's (sexual) "essence", the truth of an individual, who he or she "really" is. The most sali- ent of these technologies is confession, first religious (as mandated by early Christianity), then psychological (in the nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis) and finally political, as the mandate to pro- duce information becomes the ground for what became known as population control. 4 What unites these different technologies is the concern with identifying (and so, Foucault explains, what in fact turns out itself to create, as a category, or object of understanding) a whole variety of "perversions" born during this time, different ways to vio- late the multiplying rules governing the important distinction between licit and illicit, normal and abnormal.
Of all the technologies, medicine comes to play the most important role in the development of "the norm", dictating, for example, what constitutes normal marital relations. Children's sexual activity also became an object of keen interest and concern, not only because of a perceived need to "detect" violations of new norms, but, as we saw in the example of the case of Nathan, to be on the alert for problems with parents' rearing of their children:
Wherever there was the chance that [masturbation] might appear, devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compel- ling admissions . . . parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not sufficiently strong . . . [parents'] conduct was prescribed and their pedagogy
? 61
MICHE L FOUCAU LT: KEY CONCEPTS
recodified; an entire medical-sexual regime took hold of the fam- ily milieu. (Foucault 1990a: 42)
Further, a whole class of deviant individuals comes to be identified at this time. Among the zoophiles (those who engage in sex with non-human animals), auto-monosexualists (those who are only able to experience erotic pleasure by themselves), gynecomasts (men with atypically large breasts), presbyophiles (those who engage in sex with the elderly) and dysparauenistic women (those for whom sexual intercourse is painful), perhaps the most lasting category of individual is "the homosexual", a new species of individual "born" in 1 8 70 (ibid. : 43 ) . 5
I n the late-twentieth-century diagnosis o f the gender dysphoric child there is embedded a whole history of power/knowledge that involves a complex of elements that come to be designated in Foucault's work by the term "normalization". Normalization, the institutionalization of the norm, of what counts as normal, indicates the pervasive standards that structure and define social meaning. Norms are at once everywhere and nowhere. They are obvious when we are talking about the sorts of standards against which one can be tested with respect to intelligence or body mass, for example. But they are less conspicuous when they are unspoken, what we may even take to be natural or understand as our own (what Foucault would see as their "internalization"), as is often the case with norms concerning gender.
We may think that medicine has always played the role it has in shaping our understanding of the norm, but Foucault's earlier his- tory of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, suggests otherwise. In the ancient period, conceptions of health were understood not in terms of a single standard against which one should be measured, but rather in terms of the harmonious functioning of the individual. The role of medicine was to provide "techniques for curing ills" (Foucault 1975 : 34). This view of medicine persisted into the eighteenth century, at which time, according to Foucault, medicine begins to fashion a con- cept of "the healthy man, that is, a study of the non-sick man, and a definition of the model man" (ibid. ). At this point, medicine assumes a "normative posture, which authorizes it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physi- cal and moral relations of the individual and the society in which he lives" (ibid. ). This is a crucial change in the understanding of medi- cine, by the profession and by the public at large, paving the way for the shift that will take place from a focus on health understood as qualities specific to an individual, to normality, a standard imposed from without.
62
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
In the example of Nathan, and of his parents, there is an obvious effort to correct the behaviour that is regarded as abnormal. The tech- niques described by the case study enforcing "good" behaviour with reward and punishing bad behaviour with being ignored, asking him to regulate himself with a wrist counter exemplify the sorts of practices Foucault characterized in Discipline and Punish with respect to the operation of the Panopticon. For Foucault it is not accurate to describe the aim of these practices in terms of "repression". Instead, the aim of the panoptic expression of power/knowledge is to enforce a standard that it is at the same time trying to establish by comparing individuals against one another, measuring their differences and then asserting the truth of the standard it "discovers" as the rule (1979: 182-3). Practices such as these exemplify why Foucault makes use of this composite term, power/knowledge: the expression of each term, power and knowledge, are at every point implicated with one another.
Power/knowledge and resistance
In looking at the operation of power/knowledge, it can be difficult to remember that for Foucault power should not be understood solely in the negative terms of repression or constraint. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault insists that:
we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals. " In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (1979: 194)
While many seek to resist the effects of normalizing power that have wrought so much harm (arguably to us all, albeit in different ways, and to different effect), for Foucault the very effort of resistance must be understood itself as an expression of power. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault returns to the exemplary case of homosexuality to make this point:
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of dis- courses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inver- sion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a
? ? 63
? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
strong advance of social control . . . but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.
(1990a: 101)
What does Foucault mean b y "reverse" discourse ? I f the "normali- zation" of the homosexual by nineteenth-century medicine marked the production of a new conception of abnormality, and with it the abnormal individual, twentieth-century resistance to this process must likewise be understood in these terms, but in reverse; as an effort, in other words, to recast normalcy, to understand as normal this new per- son the homosexual. The recasting of normalcy would mean making use of the medical category, not in the sense of the one constricting norm against which all of us should be judged, but to understand homosexual orientation in the "older" sense of the individual standard of health that continues to be active in, and provide validation of, current conceptions of normality. (Even as there are clear standards of health of all kinds, it still makes sense for us to talk about what is healthy " for me" . ) This nor- malizing power that "made up" the "homosexual person" as an object ofpsychiatricmedicinealsoproduced"improbably", "spontaneously", as Foucault puts it (ibid. : 96), the previously unthinkable concept of "gay pride", which led to the depathologization of homosexuality in the United States in 1973 .
The story o f the depathologization of homosexuality, of its removal as a diagnosis from the handbook of psychiatric disorders called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders (DSM), is remark- able in many ways (among them: it was the first, and to date the only, time that a diagnosis was removed from the DSM as a result of a vote by the membership of the American Psychiatric Association) (Bayer 1 9 8 1 ) . But it is also notable because the first edition of the DSM that did not include homosexuality as a diagnosis (DSM III, published in 1 9 8 0) introduced Gender Identity Disorder (GID) of children as a diagnosis. The "risk" of what are characterized as untreated "problems" of gender identity, according to the most influential researcher responsible for the diagnosis, is the eventual assumption of a homosexual identity (Rekers etal. 1977: 4-5). 6
There are at least two lessons to be learned from the replacement of homosexuality with GID. One lesson concerns the role of children in the "society of normalization", something that Foucault addresses in some detail in the first volume of The History ofSexuality. For the
? ? ? ? ? 64
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
purposes of understanding the operation of power/knowledge, it is a lesson in how resistance, expressed as a "reverse discourse", can itself be resisted: psychiatry found, in the diagnosis of GID, a new way to pathologize (or maintain the pathologization of) homosexuality, a new way, in other words, to make it known as an object of psychological intervention, to dictate its truth and to manage the treatment of those so labelled, both medically as well as socially.
As a new revision of the DSM is currently in preparation (scheduled for publication in 2012) there has been a great deal of controversy about the diagnosis of GID, with many activists and mental health practitioners, as well as some academics, arguing in favour of remov- ing the diagnosis, just as homosexuality was removed more than two decades ago. And yet, removal of the diagnosis could inhibit those mental health practitioners who have made use of the diagnosis to treat the distress that gender nonconforming, or "gender variant", children may experience as a result of familial or societal intolerance, a form of counter-attack that validates gender variant behaviour. This approach to treatment is itself a form of resistance to the "usual" understanding of the diagnosis of mental disorder, which locates the problem in the indi- vidual so diagnosed. And while many, perhaps even most, practitioners continue to see GID in the terms dictated by the DSM, which perceives mental disorders "in" the individual, there are those who understand the problem to lie instead in the hostile conditions that gender variant children may face. The implicit rationale of those who approach treat- ment of gender variation in this way is similar to that made about a variety of forms of disability (is the problem in the bodies of those with disabilities, or in the material conditions that make mobility or com- munication difficult? )? What some mental health practitioners have done in their practice is turn psychiatric treatment on its head, seeing a child whose gender behaviour does not correspond neatly with her assigned sex as suffering not from a gender identity disorder, but rather as a victim of an intolerance of gender variation that should instead be the focus of intervention.
Seeing the diagnosis in this way would mean, practically speaking, that it should be cast differently (for example, using terms like "Gender Variance" rather than "Gender Identity Disorder", which is an unneces- sary and furthermore misleading term, because it suggests that psycho- logical identity is the problem that needs to be corrected) . Rather than remove the diagnosis, another possibility could be to rename and refor- mulate the diagnosis to better reflect the life goals and distress experi- enced by individuals, and furthermore direct treatment toward the most appropriate means of alleviating distress and promoting flourishing.
? ? 65
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Beyond the change of name, an interesting and promising recom- mendation may be to make use of complementary diagnostic codes known as "V-codes". V-codes are defined in the International Clas- sification of Disorder (ICD, a global handbook with which the DSM is meant to correspond) as "other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention" (World Health Organization 2004). Some V-codes are diagnoses that have not yet been formally established as diagnoses through appropriate research (and in this sense it would seem that GID as it stands would qualify). Other V-codes are "conditions" that are located outside the individual, but that nevertheless affect the individual's functioning or well-being. An ''Acculturation Problem" (V62. 4), for example, can include a variety of problems adjusting to a new culture, a problem that is cast not as "the individual's" problem; an "Occupational Problem" (V62. 2), which the DSM conservatively describes as "job dissatisfaction", could include distress as a result of working in a hostile environment where again, the problem cannot be understood properly to belong to an individual. With respect to GID in children, probably the most typical problem would be described as a "Parent-Child Relational Problem" (V61. 20), but it could also include a "Phase of Life Problem" (V62. 89). Including V-codes in the very structure of the diagnosis would provide a more accurate picture of the problems that gender variant children face, and furthermore indicate to practitioners that the object of treatment needs to be dif- ferently understood. 8 The use of V-codes in the case of GID could (indeed, would) entail disciplinary effects, but rather than seeking to activate these effects in the life of an individual subjected to treatment, these effects could promote - among therapists and society at large - a different story to tell about sexual difference.
The possibility of making use of V-codes in the diagnosis of GID is one that is consistent with Foucault's analysis of power/knowledge as a pervasive apparatus from which there is no escape, but that can at the same time be resisted or "reversed". Possibilities such as these become the focus of Foucault's attention in his later, "ethical" works.
Conclusion: power/knowledge and technologies ofthe self
After the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault does not explicitly make use of the term "power/knowledge". Yet the focus on "technologies of the self " in Foucault's ethics provides what could well be understood as an elaboration of the concept of power/knowledge in the "positive" terms that are only suggested in the middle work.
? ? ? ? 66
? POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
He is still interested in the notion of subjectivity (assujettissement), both in the sense of "making a subject" and "making subject to". He is also concerned with disciplinary practices. Rather than focusing, as he does in Discipline and Punish, on how disciplinary practices pro- mote normalization, he is far more concerned with how these practices can be put to work to resist normalization. At this point in Foucault's analysis he turns to the subject's relationship to her self, that is, her own subjectivity.
One of the most important ways that knowledge is constituted is through the asking of questions. Investigation of the kinds of questions that can be asked within a given historical period was arguably the focus of Foucault's earlier, archaeological works, and the use to which particular questions could be put and to what effect, the focus of the genealogical works. In the later, ethical works, Foucault turns to the kind of knowledge resulting from reflection, "an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought", or askesis (1990a: 9). Practices of thought that could be promoted in gender variant children, their parents and the mental health workers charged with their care could include a reframing of the questions posed. Interrogating "the problem" of gen- der variance, for example, could provide an opportunity, as Foucault recounts, to "learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently" (ibid. ). Seeing the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder not as a disorder located in the individual, but as a larger problem of intolerance and the suffering it causes would indeed exemplify how this exercise of thought could, as Foucault remarked in an interview, "show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed" (1988: 10).
Our understanding of madness, standards of "health", "normal" sexuality: all of these, Foucault finally argues, are consequences of a complex operation of power/knowledge of which his own works are also a part. His aim, in narrating the histories that make up his work, is not to uncover "the timeless and essential secret . . . behind things" but rather to expose the greater secret: the "secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion" (1977: 142). With his own projects, he is interested, as he put it in an interview, in exploring "the possibility of a discourse that would be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of an historical truth which could have political effect" (1980f: 64).
? 67
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CON C EPTS
Notes
1. One way power/knowledge manifests itself in Foucault's early work is in the closely related concept of the episteme, elaborated in The Order of Things (1973). An episteme, the prevailing order of knowledge particular to a histori? ?
cal period, accounts for the understanding of how things are connected in the overall "field" of understanding or knowledge; it describes the conditions under which what is taken to be knowledge is possible.
2. Parents of children with GID have themselves been diagnosed with different psychopathologies, and become themselves "cases" for further investigation (see e. g. Coates 1990).
3. The incidence of the disorder has ranged over the years.
At the outset it was understood as very rare, affecting perhaps 1 in 100,000 children (Rekers et al. 1977: 4-5); by 1990 clinicians had concluded that it "may occur in two percent to five percent of the general population" (Bradley & Zucker 1990: 478), a finding revised by these same authors nine years later, who liken its frequency to a disorder such as autism, itself a diagnosis with an estimated incidence rate that has steadily increased over the past decades (Zucker & Bradley 1999: 24). For Foucault these differences would indicate changing historical needs t o justify diagnosis and treatment.
4. Interventions by the state in matters such as population control are an example of what Foucault called "biopower". For discussion of this distinctive form of power, which must also be seen as an expression of power/knowledge, see Chapter 3 on biopower in this volume.
5. For a detailed treatment of the history of the "invention" of homosexuality, see Katz (1995).
6. Laterinthedevelopmentofthediagnosis,perhapsevengreaterriskofuntreated GID is the assumption of a transsexual identity (Bradley & Zucker 1990: 482).
7. See, for example, Fine & Asch (1988).
8. This could also be seen in light of the idea of "exteriorizing" a problem faced
by an individual or a family, a process that allows the emergence of a different meaning, "the development of an alternative story", as the psychologist Michael White, himself a close reader of Foucault, has put it (see e. g. White & Epston 1990: 39).
? ? 68
? PART II
m
? ? FIVE
uca It's nee
Todd May
The concept of freedom is an elusive one in philosophy. It lies at the centre of at least two very different sets of philosophical problems. One concerns the metaphysical status of human beings. The other concerns their political status. And, to make matters more complicated, Michel Foucault's perspective on freedom lies within neither set of problems. It does, however, interact with and complicate them. What I propose to do here, then, is to approach Foucault's own approach to freedom in three stages. First, I will discuss the two notions of freedom that characterize traditional philosophy. Then I will turn to Foucault's con- ception of freedom, showing how it interacts with those traditional notions. Finally, in order to get a better sense of all this, I will briefly contrast his conception of freedom with that of another subtle thinker of freedom, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
We might call the two traditional conceptions of freedom meta- physical and political. The term metaphysical is somewhat loaded, however, so it might be best to be clear about what we mean by it before we proceed. Metaphysics has been thought to concern the ulti- mate nature of reality. It concerns what there is, or what the first or founding principles are of what there is. In that sense, it can also be characterized by the term ontology. One area of focus in metaphysics has been with the relation of mind and body. This is because if reality ultimately is made up of two different kinds of stuff - mental stuff and physical stuff - the question of their relationship becomes a central one, as it has been at least since Descartes. And among the questions that this question concerning the relationship between mind and body raises is whether or not the mind can control the body. That question
? ? ? 71
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
has evolved into the question of free will, a question we will return to in a moment.
The loaded character of the term "metaphysics" emerged over the course of the twentieth century under the influence of the thought of Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, the entirety of Western philosophy is characterized by what he called metaphysics. Metaphysics, in his use of the term, is related to but not the same thing as metaphysics as we have just seen it. For Heidegger, the ultimate question for thought is that of Being. The problem, in his eyes, is that Being has been interpreted throughout most of Western philosophy in terms of beings. Being has been thought of as just another type of being. So, when we ask about the nature of reality, when we ask what there is, we wind up asking what kinds of beings there are. This approach neglects the question of Being itself. So when Heidegger uses the term "metaphysics", he is referring to a particular approach to philosophy that has forgotten philosophy's ultimate question, that of Being, in favour of questions about beings.
Heidegger's use of the term "metaphysics" has been enormously influential, particularly in the thought of recent French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his followers. For the purposes of this essay, how- ever, we can leave this use to the side. What we mean by metaphysical freedom does not have to do with the question of Being or of beings, but with that of free will. (Philosophers influenced by the Heidegger/ Derrida trajectory may accuse me of engaging in metaphysics in their sense. That is a debate that will have to await another occasion. )
What, then, is metaphysical freedom? It is something that human beings may or may not have. Those who endorse the idea of metaphysi- cal freedom have very different views of what that freedom consists in, but all agree that whatever it is, it involves something that resists our being determined. To understand metaphysical freedom, then, one must understand the doctrine of determinism. What, then, is determin- ism? It is the view that human beings are in control of none of their actions or thoughts. Whatever we do, its source can be found outside of our conscious control. There are many different types of determinism. Calvinists adopt a religious view called predestination. This is the view that God has determined everything that is going to happen, and that human life is merely a playing out of God's script. Genetic determin- ists think that everything about who we will be and how we will react to things has been coded into our genes. Alternatively, behaviourists hold that our environment wholely shapes who we are ; we are nothing more than the products of positive and negative reinforcement. What all these views have in common is the idea that people do not control
72
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM
any aspect of their lives. They are the product of forces over which they have no influence.
Those, by contrast, who hold that there is metaphysical freedom deny that human life is entirely determined. Here there are many dif- ferent views, not only in what metaphysical freedom might consist in, but in how much of it we actually have. Some, though very few, philoso- phers hold that we are entirely free in every decision we make. Most hold a less radical doctrine. What characterizes all views of metaphysical freedom, however, is simply the denial that we are entirely determined. Humans, unless they are psychologically damaged, have some conscious control over their thought and their behaviour.
Political freedom is distinct from metaphysical freedom. Political freedom concerns the liberties one does or does not have as a member of a particular society. Freedom of speech, for instance, is a political freedom. People in the UK (at least informally) and (decreasingly so) in the US have it; people in Burma do not. Political freedom is not, as metaphysical freedom is, a doctrine about human nature. It is instead a characterization of particular elements in a society.
Metaphysical and political freedom are conceptually distinct. One can imagine people possessing one kind of freedom without having any of the other. On the one hand, one could be metaphysically free without any type of political liberty. For example, let us assume that people are not entirely determined in their behaviour. Someone who was being held as a political prisoner would, under that assumption, be metaphysically but not politically free. On the otherhand, ifwe assume that people are entirely determined in their behaviour, then in a society that afforded many political liberties they would be politically but not metaphysically free.
This conceptual distinction is characteristic of the philosophical tra- dition. Perhaps, however, it is a little too neat. Perhaps it serves not so much to clarify concepts as instead to obfuscate reality. After all, cannot one imagine, for instance, that a sustained lack of political freedom in a society would limit the kinds of things people would be able to do, even if they were suddenly liberated? Behaviourists argue that we are entirely determined by our environment. We do not have to go quite that far to recognize that what we call our metaphysical freedom might be constrained by environmental factors, among them a lack of political freedom. After all, we have observed over the past several decades the difficulty people have in exercising political freedoms when they have been held for generations under conditions of political subjugation.
The theorist of metaphysical freedom might argue here that a lack of political freedom does not compromise the existence of metaphysical
? 73
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
freedom. Their claim would be that metaphysical freedom is something all humans possess. People who are politically liberated do not gain or lose any of their metaphysical freedom. They are simply displaying an ignorance of how to utilize this metaphysical freedom in the service of their newly gained political freedom.
There is something about this response, however, that seems to miss the point. If we want to know what people's lives are like, what they can and cannot do, then it is perhaps not entirely helpful to be told that, regardless of their particular conditions, they are metaphysically free. What most people are interested in is not whether they are uncon- strained in some abstract sense, but what options they might have in a more concrete one. That is to say, if people have been reinforced to be a certain way over a long period of time, the claim that they do not have to be will ring empty if all that is meant is that there is something about being human that is not entirely subject to those reinforcements. What would be of more interest to them would be to understand the character of their particular constraints, how those constraints affect who they are and what they do, and what they might do to liberate themselves from them.
It is at this precise point that the thought of Michel Foucault becomes relevant in thinking about freedom. Foucault does not defend any form of metaphysical freedom. Neither does he deny metaphysical freedom. He is often taken to be doing the latter, because he describes a number of constraints that have bound us. However, the constraints he describes, as he insists over and over again, are not metaphysical constraints but historically given ones. They are constraints that can be overcome. The overcoming of these constraints, however, is not a metaphysical or philosophical exercise. It is a political one. To put the point another way, Foucault neither defends nor denies metaphysical freedom. He assumes something like it in order for political resistance to take place. However, his interest does not lie there but rather in the question of the specific constraints that are part of our historical legacy. He would like to know what they are, how they came to be that way, and what their effects are. It is only then that we can liberate ourselves from them. As he writes in one of his last published works, ''After all, what would be the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeable- ness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? " (Foucault 1990b: 8).
Foucault did not publish any books on freedom. He has no sus- tained reflections on freedom, either metaphysical or political. When he invokes the term or the concept of freedom, it is almost always in a context of a discussion of some other matter. Nevertheless, one can
74
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION O F FREEDO M
fairly say that, from one end of his career to the other, the question of freedom motivates his work. Not the question, ''Are we free? " Instead, the question, "How are we historically constrained and what might we do about it? " And, although Foucault had little to say about the second part of this question, he was very dear about his role regarding the first part. His role was not to tell us what to do: that is, to offer up a new set of constraints. Rather, it was to help us (and himself) understand our particular historical constraints and, moreover, understand that those constraints are nothing more than historical. In that vein, he once wrote,
There is an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn't be better. My optimism would consist in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints.
(1990d: 156)
Up to this point, we have been discussing freedom in a very general way. However, if Foucault's approach is a fruitful one, we need to move from broad philosophical reflections on freedom to situated, historical analyses of our particular situation. That, of course, is what Foucault's writings do. In order to see the implicit role freedom plays in these works, let us briefly consider an example. Discipline and Punish is Foucault's history of the rise of prisons, especially (although not solely) in France. It describes the transition from torture to rehabilitation, passing through a phase that has one foot in each. During the period of torture, crimes were punished only sporadically, but severely. Every crime was considered an offence against the sovereign, an offence that was quite literally an attack against the sovereign's body politic. This offence had to be countered by an overwhelming punishment against the body of the criminal, one that would re-establish the power and standing of the sovereign. Thus, torture.
Torture was, in many ways, an ineffective method of punishment. It was costly, unevenly applied, and often generated sympathy for the criminal. With the rise of capitalism and the corresponding focus on property crimes, a more efficient system of punishment was needed. Foucault tells a complex story about the rise of the prison as a single method of dealing with this problem. For our purposes, what is relevant in this story is the emergence of a gradual shift of focus from crime to criminal. Instead of punishing crimes, a system arose that treated crimes as expressions of criminality. What needed to be treated, then,
? 75
? MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
was the criminal behind the crime. Doing that required more advanced techniques of surveillance and intervention, which had been developing independently of the penal system in monasteries, hospitals and the military. These techniques were merged in the closed environment of the prison, where one could constantly monitor and intervene on the body of the incarcerated. The prison was the place where what Foucault calls docile bodies were created, bodies that were both efficient in per- formance and obedient to authority.
What was forged in the prison did not remain there. Techniques of surveillance and intervention have diffused throughout society. The former are more in the news these days, with the emergence of tech- nologies such as surveillance cameras all over London and wiretapping in the United States. The latter have spread more quietly but no less effectively. From human resource departments in every mid-size to large corporation to the profusion of school counsellors and social workers, families and individuals are constantly exposed to psychological moni- toring dedicated to ensuring conformity to appropriate social roles.
There has been much discussion about the contemporary status of this system of surveillance and intervention, a system Foucault labels discipline. Some, most notably the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, have argued that we have entered a new, post-disciplinary phase (Deleuze
1995). Our concern, however, is with the question of how freedom is implicated in this historical study. In order to see this, we must rec- ognize first that what Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish is the rise of a set of historical constraints on people's behaviour. These constraints work in a way that is often neglected by traditional politi- cal philosophies. They do not operate by stopping people from doing something that they might otherwise be tempted to do. Instead, they create people to be certain kinds of ways, and by doing so make them into docile bodies.
The concept of power will be discussed in more depth in other essays in this volume. For the moment let me say only that what Foucault offers with Discipline and Punish and others of his historical analyses is what might be called a positive rather than negative view of power. On this view, power works not by restraint but by creation. Power does not place a limit on our liberty; it makes us be certain kinds of people. It does so on two levels. First, it trains our bodies to be oriented toward particular kinds of behaviour. Second, and perhaps more important, it makes us think of ourselves in certain kinds of ways. For example, the profusion of psychological monitoring and intervention that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish creates a society in which people think of themselves as psychological beings. As a result, they consider
? 76
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION O F FREEDO M
their unhappiness as psychologically rooted and in need of psychologi- cal cure. Rather than questioning the character of the society in which they live, they instead question themselves. It is they rather than the social arrangements that must change. This, in turn, reinforces those social arrangements by deflecting any criticism of them back onto those who are dissatisfied. All problems become psychological rather than social or political in origin.
Power, in this case, works by what might be called constraint rather than restraint. But, like restraint, constraint works to limit one's options. By making someone into, say, a psychological being, it creates a conform- ity and blunts the possibility of either social resistance or experimenta- tion with other forms of living. Moreover, it does so more effectively than restraint would. When one is restrained, one still desires that which is forbidden. However, when one is constrained, one is moulded to desire only that which is considered appropriate to desire. One is not simply blocked from attaining what one wants; one does not even con- sider alternatives to what are presented as the available social options.
What does all this have to do with freedom? Recall the concept of metaphysical freedom. If we are metaphysically free, then we can control some of our thought and/or behaviour; we are not controlled by some force or another outside of us. What Foucault recounts in
Discipline and Punish is a force outside of us that is influencing how we think, how we act, and in fact who we are - at least at this point in our history. The difference between the force he describes and the forces that concern metaphysical freedom is that his are historical rather than metaphysical. He does not describe a type of force (God, the environ- ment, genes) that necessarily controls human thought and behaviour. He depicts a historically contingent set of practices that have come to have influence over our behaviour in this particular period. Because of this, there is no reason to believe that, if we understand our historical legacy, we cannot change it.
That is why Foucault says, in the citation above, that "so many things can be changed". He has the view, inherited from the Enlightenment, that so many people see him as rejecting: if we understand our situation then we have a chance at changing it. This perspective tacitly embraces the idea of metaphysical freedom, although it does not argue for it and it does not seek to establish its particular character or limits. One can see this idea when Foucault writes that,
One must observe that there cannot be relations of power unless the subjects are free. If one or the other were completely at the disposition of the other and became his thing, an object on which
? 77
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CO N CEPTS
he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power.
