It inhabits our daily practices, moulding us into particular kinds of
compliant
beings.
Foucault-Key-Concepts
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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.
(1994: 12)
As can readily be seen, Foucault's approach to freedom as some- thing that concerns changing our present is politically inflected. This raises the question of what it has to do with political freedom. Politi- cal freedom, recall, is a matter of what liberties we are afforded in a particular society or social arrangement. One might say, at a first go, that Foucault describes ways in which particular societies and social arrangements impinge upon liberty. This would not be entirely mis- taken. Foucault does describe ways in which alternative ways of living are constrained by who we are made to be and how we are made to think about ourselves. However, there is something misleading about this way of putting things. It seems to presuppose a model of conceiving power and liberty that is not Foucault's model. In order to see this, we need to take a moment to describe that model.
For traditional liberal political theory, there is a tension between state power and liberty that must be balanced. If the state has too much power, then it unfairly curtails an individual's right to create one's life as one sees fit. On the other hand, if liberty is unbounded, then people themselves could interfere with one another's right to pursue a life of their choosing. Therefore, the role of liberal political theory is to figure out the particular balance between state power and liberty, the balance that will best avoid these two extremes. (Liberal political theory has other tasks as well; here we are looking only at its role vis-a-vis political freedom. ) On this view, state power is an external constraint placed upon individual liberty; the question is, how much and where should it be applied?
This is a view of power as negative, as restraint. As we have seen, however, Foucault's treatment of power in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere does not operate with a negative view of power. To be sure, he does not deny that negative power exists, and particularly at the level of the state. However, much of the way power operates, in his view, is not at the level of the state and its various repressive apparatuses, but closer to the ground.
It inhabits our daily practices, moulding us into particular kinds of compliant beings.
To the extent that Foucault's writings capture a real mode of power's operation, we must modify the traditional liberal view of liberty. It can no longer simply be an issue of how much restraint can be placed on which kinds of actions. It must also concern how we have come to be
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who we are, and what we can do about it. Therefore, political liberty is not just a matter of being left to do what one pleases. It is also, and more pointedly, a matter of understanding how we have been moulded in ways that certain things please us rather than others. And beyond that, it is a matter of understanding what else might be available to us. We might put all this somewhat schematically by saying that political freedom no longer simply concerns what we might be free from, but more significantly what, given current constraints, we might be free for.
Foucault captures this idea in a citation that will also allow us to deepen our view of his conception of freedom:
I would like to say something about the functions of any diagno- sis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead ? by follow- ing lines of fragility in the present - in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i. e. a space of possible transformation. (1990c: 36)
Here we can see clearly the themes that we have isolated in Foucault's approach to freedom: constraint as a historical matter, the contingency of that constraint, and freedom as concrete rather than abstract. Moreo- ver, in using the phrase "a space of possible transformation", Foucault captures the idea that freedom is not simply a matter of being left alone but also a matter of re-making ourselves into what we would like to be: freedom for, not just freedom from. Based on this citation, we might define Foucault's concept of freedom as that which we can make of ourselves from within the parameters of a particular historical situation.
If we define freedom this way, we need to be careful to understand this definition of freedom the right way. First, we should not think that there is a pre-given set of things that we can make of ourselves in a given particular historical situation. It is not as though there is what we might call a "truth" of what we can become, and that once we understand our historical situation, we can discover that truth. Such a view would violate Foucault's project of historicizing those aspects of ourselves that we think of as permanent or unchangeable. It would reify our possibili- ties in what is in reality a fluid historical situation.
Second, and related, we should not assume that we can come fully to understand our historical situation. If who we are is the product of a complex interaction of practices, then at least aspects of the forces
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that shape us are likely to elude our comprehension. Discipline and Punish, for instance, is not an account of the whole of who we are. It is an account of only one aspect of who we are. The first volume of The History of'Sexuality is another, and the lecture series Foucault gave on governmentality (2007, 2008c) yet another. Moreover, who we are changes with the changes in our practices. So it is even more difficult to get a grasp on who we are at a particular moment. We always risk
understanding who we just were, rather than who are now.
The upshot of this is that, for Foucault, freedom is a matter of experimentation. To open up "a space of concrete freedom" is not to figure out who we might be and then go there; it is to try out different possibilities for our lives, different "possible transformations", to see where they might lead. To live freely is to experiment with oneself, not always knowing whether one is getting free of the forces that have moulded one, nor (and we will return to this in a moment) being sure of the effects of one's experimentation. It is to try to create a life from within a space of uncertainty, having some knowledge of how one has
been made to be.
Our situation, then, is this. If we construct histories like Foucault's,
histories which give us accounts of different aspects of the forces that have influenced us to be who we have become, then we have a partial knowledge of how we came to be that way. From there, we can decide which among those forces are acceptable to us, and which are, to use Foucault's term, intolerable. (Foucault's histories give accounts only of intolerable forces, since those are the ones we are most likely to want to change. ) In seeking to overcome the intolerable forces, we must experiment with who we might become, not knowing entirely whether we are indeed escaping them. That is something we can only find out later, after our experiments are under way. We are, then, neither help- less in the face of what moulds us nor certain of how and what we can do about it. We are somewhere in between. That is where our freedom lies, and indeed that is what our freedom is.
Since we can only experiment without certainty as to the results of our experiments, we must always be vigilant. We do not know in advance where our experimentation will lead us. We might wind up either re-creating intolerable forces or creating new ones. Therefore, we cannot stop doing the kinds of histories Foucault engages in, nor resting content with his. The history of who we are is an ongoing project. Oth- erwise put, the effects of our freedom are as uncertain as our freedom itself. We must never assume that the "space of possible transforma- tions" we exploit will necessarily lead us to a better situation. Freedom is not the same thing as liberation. Whether our freedom is liberating or
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not is something that is not guaranteed to us. It can only be approached through experimentation and historically informed reflection.
In order to get a better understanding of Foucault's conception of freedom, it might be useful to contrast it with that of a French philoso- pher from the generation preceding Foucault's. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also has a notion of situated freedom, one in which we are free but not entirely free. Seeing the differences between the two conceptions of freedom may sharpen our grasp on Foucault's own approach.
Merleau-Ponty constructs his concept of freedom in contrast to that of his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's view of freedom is that we are radically free in the metaphysical sense. There is nothing that is not in our power to decide. Sartre, at least in his early works, rejects all notions of a psychoanalytic unconscious or hidden historical forces that make us be who we are. In pure existentialist fashion, Sartre posits that our choices are solely our own. We must take full responsibility for them. Merleau-Ponty does not embrace this radical view of freedom. For Merleau-Ponty, one of the forces that we cannot control but that makes us who we are is the body. Corporeality - which it is the core project of Merleau-Ponty to understand - gives us our first interactions with the world through perception, and our first understanding of the world. The living body, rather than being an inert substance through which sensations pass, is instead the source of our primal engagement with the world. We might be able to alter that engagement in certain ways, but our embodiment ensures that there will be aspects of our living over which we do not have complete control. There is a certain unconscious aspect to our lives that will always elude us, the aspect that runs through our corporeal interaction with the world. Further, as Merleau-Ponty points out, that interaction is not properly described in terms of a body on the one hand that interacts with a world on the other. It is more intimate than that. The interaction is instead better characterized as that of a body/world complex.
This position leads to a view of freedom far less radical than Sartre's. For Sartre, the body is simply an inert object manipulated by conscious- ness. If consciousness is unconstrained, then freedom of consciousness would be absolute. Sartre, of course, recognizes that consciousness is in some way embodied, so that even if one freely decides, say, to fly, that does not mean that one will actually be able to fly. But the decision itself is radically free. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of corporeality erases Sartre's radical distinction between mind and body. As Merleau-Ponty shows, the body already engages in perceptual interpretation before one consciously reflects on it. (He uses examples of visual illusions to make his point. Illusions are already seen as something before conscious
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reflection attempts to correct them. ) If this is true, then there is no radical freedom. Embodied creatures are constrained by their body/ world engagement. This does not mean that one cannot reflect on that engagement. But one always does so as an already embodied being.
The freedom of that reflection and of one's behaviour is, for Merleau- Ponty as for Foucault, a form of situated freedom.
We choose our world and the world chooses us . . . freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer . . . and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 454)
Our freedom is had within and through the constraints set by our bodies and our world. Those constraints can allow greater or lesser room for action: greater or lesser tolerance. But without bodies and historically given institutional frameworks, there would be no freedom, because there would be nothing through which (i. e. the body) to enact it and nothing about which (the world) it would concern.
There are ways in which Merleau-Ponty's conception of situated freedom is similar to Foucault's. Both of them acknowledge the impor- tance of our embodiment, and they recognize the body's exposure to the world and its practices. Moreover, in both approaches that expo- sure opens out on to limitations on one's freedom. What distinguishes them is the level of analysis on which these recognitions rest. Merleau- Ponty's situated freedom is a metaphysical freedom. He offers a general philosophical account of the human body in its intertwining with the world. That account shows how mind and body as well as body and world form a single whole. From that he derives the conclusion that, contra Sartre, all human freedom must be situated. There can be no radical freedom because there is no aspect of our being that can stand outside our encrustation into the world. All freedom is the freedom of an embodied consciousness embedded in the world and its history.
Foucault does not need to deny any of this. Neither, however, does he need to embrace it. His approach is constructed along a different register. His question is not the metaphysical one of what the nature of human freedom is. Rather, his question is the more political one of what freedom we might have under particular historical conditions, namely our historical conditions. The situated freedom he is interested in is not the freedom of one situated as a human body in the world; it is the freedom of our situation. In the citation above, Foucault empha- sizes that a diagnosis of the nature of the present must characterize that
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present in such a way as to show its fragility, its fractures. The fragility of the present is not due to humans' possession of metaphysical freedom, although, as we have seen, he does seem to assume some form of meta- physical freedom. It is due, rather, to the contingent structure of history.
History does not unfold according to a pre-given or transcendental framework. It is largely the product of dispersed practices that intersect with and influence one another in ways that cannot be predicted in advance and that conform to no transcendent pattern. (This does not mean that one cannot find patterns within history; it means that one can only see them after they have created themselves through the interac- tion of contingent practices. ) Situated freedom arises as a result of this contingency of history. The issue for one interested in one's freedom, then, is not the metaphysical question of who one is and where one's freedom lies, but rather the question of where one's particular history has deposited one, and how that history might be intervened upon. For Foucault, in short, situated freedom is a historical and political concept rather than a metaphysical one.
Foucault's approach to freedom, then, like the approach of many aspects of his work, is at once philosophical and historical. As a philo- sophically oriented concept, it takes history in a more sophisticated direction than most historians are capable of. As a historically inflected concept, it raises questions to traditional philosophical analyses. Foucault's writings ask to be read along both of these axes, each one in conversation with the other. If we allow ourselves to engage in this two-level conversation, we may become more aware not only of the particular philosophically inflected way in which we often view the world, but also of the historically contingent and malleable character of that way. In other words, we may come face to face with our freedom.
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SIX
a
Johanna Oksala
The critical impact of Michel Foucault's philosophy is not based on the explicit theories or judgements he makes, but rather on the approach that he adopts to analysing our present. While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempts to find among the apparent necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turns out to be contingent, historical and cultur- ally variable. Everything, especially those things that we are convinced do not have a history, is scrutinized.
This method is also utilized regarding Foucault's conception of the body. He does not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles. Yet his philosophical approach to it is distinctive. The body is central for understanding the influence of history and the mechanisms of modern power. Its intertwinement with practices of power means that it has a central role in practices of resist- ance too: it is capable of displaying a dimension of freedom.
According to Foucault, we believe that the body obeys only the nec- essary and universal laws of physiology, and that history and culture have no influence on it. In reality, bodies are shaped by society: they are used and experienced in many different ways and their characteristics vary according to cultural practices. They are moulded by rhythms of work, eating habits and changing norms of beauty. They are concretely shaped by diet, exercise and medical interventions. In short, they too have a history.
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In his most widely read books, Discipline andPunish (1975) and The History ofSexuality, Volume I (1976), Foucault aims to bring the body into the focus of history by studying its connections with techniques and deployments of power. His understanding of the body is further elaborated in numerous interviews and articles. I will focus here on the central texts in which he discusses it in order to present a coherent and cohesive account of Foucault's understanding of the body, paying particular attention to its relationship to both power and freedom. In order to illustrate the body's relationship to power, I will discuss his analyses of the prison, as articulated in Discipline and Punish, and of sexuality, as articulated in Volume I of The History ofSexuality. In order to illustrate how the body is implicated in resistance and the practices of freedom, I again draw upon The History of Sexuality, as well as Foucault's analysis of the life of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. I conclude the chapter by discussing the ways in which Foucault's work has influenced emancipatory efforts by queer and feminist theorists.
It should be kept in mind that Foucault never intended his views on the body to form a unified theory. His genealogies are best understood as a toolbox, a flexible and varied methodological approach that draws from a multiplicity of sources and is applicable to a variety of questions. However, one of the key ideas that unites them is that genealogies are always crucially "histories of the body": they typically question all purely biological explanations of such complex areas of human behav- iour as sexuality, insanity or criminality.
Docile bodies
In an early and definitive article on his genealogical method, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault follows Nietzsche in insisting that the task of genealogy is to focus on the body. Nietzsche had attacked phi- losophy for its denial of the materiality and vitality of the body, for its pretentious metaphysics that deals only with abstractions such as values, reason and the soul. Genealogy must be "a curative science", charting the long and winding history of metaphysical concepts in the material- ity of bodies (Foucault 1984b: 90). Rather than contemplating what is understood as high and noble, genealogy will focus on the things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies (ibid. : 89). Foucault writes polemically that the philosopher needs the genealogy of the body to "exorcise the shadow of his soul" (ibid. : 8 0) .
In this text Foucault also presents his most extreme formulations of the body as completely shaped by history and culture. He seems to
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deny that there is anything universal and ahistorical about it that could be understood as its stable and fixed core : "nothing in man - not even his body ? is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men" (ibid. : 8 7) .
Foucault's aim i n this discussion o f Nietzsche's conception o f the body as a historical construct is not to develop some kind of extreme social constructivist theory of the body, however. He does not con- sider the body here as an object of a theory, but rather as essential to his genealogy in two different ways. The first is political or ethical: Foucault wants to use genealogy to study the history of the very things we believe do not have a history. As Gary Gutting writes, "whereas much traditional history tries to show that where we are is inevitable, given the causes revealed by its account, Foucault's histories aim to show the contingency - and hence surpassability - of what history has given us"(1994: 10). Foucault'spointisthusnottoargueforanextremeview of the body as a cultural construction, but to place under suspicion and subject to further scrutiny all claims of its immutable being: essences, foundations and constants.
The second way in which the body is essential to Foucault's geneal- ogy is methodological: he wants to bring the body into the focus of history and study history through it. Foucault's genealogy is methodo- logically distinct in that it criticizes the idea of power operating by the ideological manipulation of minds: the idea that those in power are trying to brainwash people into believing things that are not true. Foucault's aim is to show the inadequacy of such a conception of power by revealing the material manipulation of bodies.
Foucault's illustration of how power operates through the manipu- lation of bodies is done in a powerful manner in his first major work of the genealogical period, Discipline and Punish. The book charts the genealogy of the modern prison institution and brings under scrutiny the connection between power and the body by analysing the ways in which the bodies of prisoners are consciously manipulated. It also demonstrates effectively Foucault's idea of the essential intertwinement of body and power: bodies are not given, natural objects, but assume their shape and characteristics in cultural practices of power, including punitive practices.
Discipline is a historically specific technology of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body both docile and useful. Bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were subjected to new kinds of discipline in order to make them more use- ful for mass production and at the same time easier to control. The
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functions, movements and capabilities of these bodies were broken down into narrow segments, analysed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective way. The human body became a machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated and improved. Foucault argues that in the seventeenth century a soldier, for example, still learnt his profession for the most part in actual fighting in which he proved his natural strength and inherent courage. But by the eighteenth century a soldier had become a fighting machine, something that could be constructed through correct training. Foucault tells us:
The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it . . . It defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies. (1979: 138)
Hence, a novel aspect o f modern disciplinary power i s that i t i s not external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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he can exercise an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain form of liberty.
(1994: 12)
As can readily be seen, Foucault's approach to freedom as some- thing that concerns changing our present is politically inflected. This raises the question of what it has to do with political freedom. Politi- cal freedom, recall, is a matter of what liberties we are afforded in a particular society or social arrangement. One might say, at a first go, that Foucault describes ways in which particular societies and social arrangements impinge upon liberty. This would not be entirely mis- taken. Foucault does describe ways in which alternative ways of living are constrained by who we are made to be and how we are made to think about ourselves. However, there is something misleading about this way of putting things. It seems to presuppose a model of conceiving power and liberty that is not Foucault's model. In order to see this, we need to take a moment to describe that model.
For traditional liberal political theory, there is a tension between state power and liberty that must be balanced. If the state has too much power, then it unfairly curtails an individual's right to create one's life as one sees fit. On the other hand, if liberty is unbounded, then people themselves could interfere with one another's right to pursue a life of their choosing. Therefore, the role of liberal political theory is to figure out the particular balance between state power and liberty, the balance that will best avoid these two extremes. (Liberal political theory has other tasks as well; here we are looking only at its role vis-a-vis political freedom. ) On this view, state power is an external constraint placed upon individual liberty; the question is, how much and where should it be applied?
This is a view of power as negative, as restraint. As we have seen, however, Foucault's treatment of power in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere does not operate with a negative view of power. To be sure, he does not deny that negative power exists, and particularly at the level of the state. However, much of the way power operates, in his view, is not at the level of the state and its various repressive apparatuses, but closer to the ground.
It inhabits our daily practices, moulding us into particular kinds of compliant beings.
To the extent that Foucault's writings capture a real mode of power's operation, we must modify the traditional liberal view of liberty. It can no longer simply be an issue of how much restraint can be placed on which kinds of actions. It must also concern how we have come to be
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who we are, and what we can do about it. Therefore, political liberty is not just a matter of being left to do what one pleases. It is also, and more pointedly, a matter of understanding how we have been moulded in ways that certain things please us rather than others. And beyond that, it is a matter of understanding what else might be available to us. We might put all this somewhat schematically by saying that political freedom no longer simply concerns what we might be free from, but more significantly what, given current constraints, we might be free for.
Foucault captures this idea in a citation that will also allow us to deepen our view of his conception of freedom:
I would like to say something about the functions of any diagno- sis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead ? by follow- ing lines of fragility in the present - in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i. e. a space of possible transformation. (1990c: 36)
Here we can see clearly the themes that we have isolated in Foucault's approach to freedom: constraint as a historical matter, the contingency of that constraint, and freedom as concrete rather than abstract. Moreo- ver, in using the phrase "a space of possible transformation", Foucault captures the idea that freedom is not simply a matter of being left alone but also a matter of re-making ourselves into what we would like to be: freedom for, not just freedom from. Based on this citation, we might define Foucault's concept of freedom as that which we can make of ourselves from within the parameters of a particular historical situation.
If we define freedom this way, we need to be careful to understand this definition of freedom the right way. First, we should not think that there is a pre-given set of things that we can make of ourselves in a given particular historical situation. It is not as though there is what we might call a "truth" of what we can become, and that once we understand our historical situation, we can discover that truth. Such a view would violate Foucault's project of historicizing those aspects of ourselves that we think of as permanent or unchangeable. It would reify our possibili- ties in what is in reality a fluid historical situation.
Second, and related, we should not assume that we can come fully to understand our historical situation. If who we are is the product of a complex interaction of practices, then at least aspects of the forces
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that shape us are likely to elude our comprehension. Discipline and Punish, for instance, is not an account of the whole of who we are. It is an account of only one aspect of who we are. The first volume of The History of'Sexuality is another, and the lecture series Foucault gave on governmentality (2007, 2008c) yet another. Moreover, who we are changes with the changes in our practices. So it is even more difficult to get a grasp on who we are at a particular moment. We always risk
understanding who we just were, rather than who are now.
The upshot of this is that, for Foucault, freedom is a matter of experimentation. To open up "a space of concrete freedom" is not to figure out who we might be and then go there; it is to try out different possibilities for our lives, different "possible transformations", to see where they might lead. To live freely is to experiment with oneself, not always knowing whether one is getting free of the forces that have moulded one, nor (and we will return to this in a moment) being sure of the effects of one's experimentation. It is to try to create a life from within a space of uncertainty, having some knowledge of how one has
been made to be.
Our situation, then, is this. If we construct histories like Foucault's,
histories which give us accounts of different aspects of the forces that have influenced us to be who we have become, then we have a partial knowledge of how we came to be that way. From there, we can decide which among those forces are acceptable to us, and which are, to use Foucault's term, intolerable. (Foucault's histories give accounts only of intolerable forces, since those are the ones we are most likely to want to change. ) In seeking to overcome the intolerable forces, we must experiment with who we might become, not knowing entirely whether we are indeed escaping them. That is something we can only find out later, after our experiments are under way. We are, then, neither help- less in the face of what moulds us nor certain of how and what we can do about it. We are somewhere in between. That is where our freedom lies, and indeed that is what our freedom is.
Since we can only experiment without certainty as to the results of our experiments, we must always be vigilant. We do not know in advance where our experimentation will lead us. We might wind up either re-creating intolerable forces or creating new ones. Therefore, we cannot stop doing the kinds of histories Foucault engages in, nor resting content with his. The history of who we are is an ongoing project. Oth- erwise put, the effects of our freedom are as uncertain as our freedom itself. We must never assume that the "space of possible transforma- tions" we exploit will necessarily lead us to a better situation. Freedom is not the same thing as liberation. Whether our freedom is liberating or
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not is something that is not guaranteed to us. It can only be approached through experimentation and historically informed reflection.
In order to get a better understanding of Foucault's conception of freedom, it might be useful to contrast it with that of a French philoso- pher from the generation preceding Foucault's. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also has a notion of situated freedom, one in which we are free but not entirely free. Seeing the differences between the two conceptions of freedom may sharpen our grasp on Foucault's own approach.
Merleau-Ponty constructs his concept of freedom in contrast to that of his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's view of freedom is that we are radically free in the metaphysical sense. There is nothing that is not in our power to decide. Sartre, at least in his early works, rejects all notions of a psychoanalytic unconscious or hidden historical forces that make us be who we are. In pure existentialist fashion, Sartre posits that our choices are solely our own. We must take full responsibility for them. Merleau-Ponty does not embrace this radical view of freedom. For Merleau-Ponty, one of the forces that we cannot control but that makes us who we are is the body. Corporeality - which it is the core project of Merleau-Ponty to understand - gives us our first interactions with the world through perception, and our first understanding of the world. The living body, rather than being an inert substance through which sensations pass, is instead the source of our primal engagement with the world. We might be able to alter that engagement in certain ways, but our embodiment ensures that there will be aspects of our living over which we do not have complete control. There is a certain unconscious aspect to our lives that will always elude us, the aspect that runs through our corporeal interaction with the world. Further, as Merleau-Ponty points out, that interaction is not properly described in terms of a body on the one hand that interacts with a world on the other. It is more intimate than that. The interaction is instead better characterized as that of a body/world complex.
This position leads to a view of freedom far less radical than Sartre's. For Sartre, the body is simply an inert object manipulated by conscious- ness. If consciousness is unconstrained, then freedom of consciousness would be absolute. Sartre, of course, recognizes that consciousness is in some way embodied, so that even if one freely decides, say, to fly, that does not mean that one will actually be able to fly. But the decision itself is radically free. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of corporeality erases Sartre's radical distinction between mind and body. As Merleau-Ponty shows, the body already engages in perceptual interpretation before one consciously reflects on it. (He uses examples of visual illusions to make his point. Illusions are already seen as something before conscious
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reflection attempts to correct them. ) If this is true, then there is no radical freedom. Embodied creatures are constrained by their body/ world engagement. This does not mean that one cannot reflect on that engagement. But one always does so as an already embodied being.
The freedom of that reflection and of one's behaviour is, for Merleau- Ponty as for Foucault, a form of situated freedom.
We choose our world and the world chooses us . . . freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer . . . and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 454)
Our freedom is had within and through the constraints set by our bodies and our world. Those constraints can allow greater or lesser room for action: greater or lesser tolerance. But without bodies and historically given institutional frameworks, there would be no freedom, because there would be nothing through which (i. e. the body) to enact it and nothing about which (the world) it would concern.
There are ways in which Merleau-Ponty's conception of situated freedom is similar to Foucault's. Both of them acknowledge the impor- tance of our embodiment, and they recognize the body's exposure to the world and its practices. Moreover, in both approaches that expo- sure opens out on to limitations on one's freedom. What distinguishes them is the level of analysis on which these recognitions rest. Merleau- Ponty's situated freedom is a metaphysical freedom. He offers a general philosophical account of the human body in its intertwining with the world. That account shows how mind and body as well as body and world form a single whole. From that he derives the conclusion that, contra Sartre, all human freedom must be situated. There can be no radical freedom because there is no aspect of our being that can stand outside our encrustation into the world. All freedom is the freedom of an embodied consciousness embedded in the world and its history.
Foucault does not need to deny any of this. Neither, however, does he need to embrace it. His approach is constructed along a different register. His question is not the metaphysical one of what the nature of human freedom is. Rather, his question is the more political one of what freedom we might have under particular historical conditions, namely our historical conditions. The situated freedom he is interested in is not the freedom of one situated as a human body in the world; it is the freedom of our situation. In the citation above, Foucault empha- sizes that a diagnosis of the nature of the present must characterize that
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present in such a way as to show its fragility, its fractures. The fragility of the present is not due to humans' possession of metaphysical freedom, although, as we have seen, he does seem to assume some form of meta- physical freedom. It is due, rather, to the contingent structure of history.
History does not unfold according to a pre-given or transcendental framework. It is largely the product of dispersed practices that intersect with and influence one another in ways that cannot be predicted in advance and that conform to no transcendent pattern. (This does not mean that one cannot find patterns within history; it means that one can only see them after they have created themselves through the interac- tion of contingent practices. ) Situated freedom arises as a result of this contingency of history. The issue for one interested in one's freedom, then, is not the metaphysical question of who one is and where one's freedom lies, but rather the question of where one's particular history has deposited one, and how that history might be intervened upon. For Foucault, in short, situated freedom is a historical and political concept rather than a metaphysical one.
Foucault's approach to freedom, then, like the approach of many aspects of his work, is at once philosophical and historical. As a philo- sophically oriented concept, it takes history in a more sophisticated direction than most historians are capable of. As a historically inflected concept, it raises questions to traditional philosophical analyses. Foucault's writings ask to be read along both of these axes, each one in conversation with the other. If we allow ourselves to engage in this two-level conversation, we may become more aware not only of the particular philosophically inflected way in which we often view the world, but also of the historically contingent and malleable character of that way. In other words, we may come face to face with our freedom.
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SIX
a
Johanna Oksala
The critical impact of Michel Foucault's philosophy is not based on the explicit theories or judgements he makes, but rather on the approach that he adopts to analysing our present. While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempts to find among the apparent necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turns out to be contingent, historical and cultur- ally variable. Everything, especially those things that we are convinced do not have a history, is scrutinized.
This method is also utilized regarding Foucault's conception of the body. He does not present a theory of the body anywhere, or even a unified account of it, and his conception of it has to be discerned from his genealogical books and articles. Yet his philosophical approach to it is distinctive. The body is central for understanding the influence of history and the mechanisms of modern power. Its intertwinement with practices of power means that it has a central role in practices of resist- ance too: it is capable of displaying a dimension of freedom.
According to Foucault, we believe that the body obeys only the nec- essary and universal laws of physiology, and that history and culture have no influence on it. In reality, bodies are shaped by society: they are used and experienced in many different ways and their characteristics vary according to cultural practices. They are moulded by rhythms of work, eating habits and changing norms of beauty. They are concretely shaped by diet, exercise and medical interventions. In short, they too have a history.
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? MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
In his most widely read books, Discipline andPunish (1975) and The History ofSexuality, Volume I (1976), Foucault aims to bring the body into the focus of history by studying its connections with techniques and deployments of power. His understanding of the body is further elaborated in numerous interviews and articles. I will focus here on the central texts in which he discusses it in order to present a coherent and cohesive account of Foucault's understanding of the body, paying particular attention to its relationship to both power and freedom. In order to illustrate the body's relationship to power, I will discuss his analyses of the prison, as articulated in Discipline and Punish, and of sexuality, as articulated in Volume I of The History ofSexuality. In order to illustrate how the body is implicated in resistance and the practices of freedom, I again draw upon The History of Sexuality, as well as Foucault's analysis of the life of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin. I conclude the chapter by discussing the ways in which Foucault's work has influenced emancipatory efforts by queer and feminist theorists.
It should be kept in mind that Foucault never intended his views on the body to form a unified theory. His genealogies are best understood as a toolbox, a flexible and varied methodological approach that draws from a multiplicity of sources and is applicable to a variety of questions. However, one of the key ideas that unites them is that genealogies are always crucially "histories of the body": they typically question all purely biological explanations of such complex areas of human behav- iour as sexuality, insanity or criminality.
Docile bodies
In an early and definitive article on his genealogical method, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault follows Nietzsche in insisting that the task of genealogy is to focus on the body. Nietzsche had attacked phi- losophy for its denial of the materiality and vitality of the body, for its pretentious metaphysics that deals only with abstractions such as values, reason and the soul. Genealogy must be "a curative science", charting the long and winding history of metaphysical concepts in the material- ity of bodies (Foucault 1984b: 90). Rather than contemplating what is understood as high and noble, genealogy will focus on the things nearest to it: the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies (ibid. : 89). Foucault writes polemically that the philosopher needs the genealogy of the body to "exorcise the shadow of his soul" (ibid. : 8 0) .
In this text Foucault also presents his most extreme formulations of the body as completely shaped by history and culture. He seems to
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deny that there is anything universal and ahistorical about it that could be understood as its stable and fixed core : "nothing in man - not even his body ? is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men" (ibid. : 8 7) .
Foucault's aim i n this discussion o f Nietzsche's conception o f the body as a historical construct is not to develop some kind of extreme social constructivist theory of the body, however. He does not con- sider the body here as an object of a theory, but rather as essential to his genealogy in two different ways. The first is political or ethical: Foucault wants to use genealogy to study the history of the very things we believe do not have a history. As Gary Gutting writes, "whereas much traditional history tries to show that where we are is inevitable, given the causes revealed by its account, Foucault's histories aim to show the contingency - and hence surpassability - of what history has given us"(1994: 10). Foucault'spointisthusnottoargueforanextremeview of the body as a cultural construction, but to place under suspicion and subject to further scrutiny all claims of its immutable being: essences, foundations and constants.
The second way in which the body is essential to Foucault's geneal- ogy is methodological: he wants to bring the body into the focus of history and study history through it. Foucault's genealogy is methodo- logically distinct in that it criticizes the idea of power operating by the ideological manipulation of minds: the idea that those in power are trying to brainwash people into believing things that are not true. Foucault's aim is to show the inadequacy of such a conception of power by revealing the material manipulation of bodies.
Foucault's illustration of how power operates through the manipu- lation of bodies is done in a powerful manner in his first major work of the genealogical period, Discipline and Punish. The book charts the genealogy of the modern prison institution and brings under scrutiny the connection between power and the body by analysing the ways in which the bodies of prisoners are consciously manipulated. It also demonstrates effectively Foucault's idea of the essential intertwinement of body and power: bodies are not given, natural objects, but assume their shape and characteristics in cultural practices of power, including punitive practices.
Discipline is a historically specific technology of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and operates through the body. It consists of various techniques, which aim at making the body both docile and useful. Bodies of prisoners, soldiers, workers and schoolchildren were subjected to new kinds of discipline in order to make them more use- ful for mass production and at the same time easier to control. The
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functions, movements and capabilities of these bodies were broken down into narrow segments, analysed in detail and recomposed in a maximally effective way. The human body became a machine the functioning of which could be optimized, calculated and improved. Foucault argues that in the seventeenth century a soldier, for example, still learnt his profession for the most part in actual fighting in which he proved his natural strength and inherent courage. But by the eighteenth century a soldier had become a fighting machine, something that could be constructed through correct training. Foucault tells us:
The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it . . . It defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile" bodies. (1979: 138)
Hence, a novel aspect o f modern disciplinary power i s that i t i s not external to the bodies that it subjects. Although the body has also in the past been intimately tied to power and social order, Foucault claims that disciplinary power is essentially a modern phenomenon.
