Foucault: who built the thing we call normal, and how?

One way of measuring a thinker's influence is to ask whether he has left behind concepts used even by people who have never read him.

Michel Foucault passes that test with room to spare. "Discourse", "power relations", "normalisation", "panoptic surveillance" — the terms circulate today in sociology, law, architecture, literary theory and the newspaper columns, their source unmentioned.

He was born in Poitiers in 1926 and died in Paris in 1984. He worked as a philosopher, a historian, a teacher and a political activist.

His thought cannot be reduced to a single concept. But one question can be heard beneath everything he wrote:

How does a human being make himself a "subject" — and how does power operate in the process?

Madness: the history of a distinction#

History of Madness, an early work, sets out to show that the distinction modern societies draw between "reason" and "madness" is neither natural nor fixed.

Foucault's method comes into focus here. Rather than accepting a category and examining what falls under it, he asks when and how the category itself was constituted.

In seventeenth-century Europe the poor, the idle, the mad and the criminal were shut up together in the same institutions. Foucault calls this the Great Confinement. It was in this period that madness came to be defined as an illness — that is, as a matter for medicine.

Was that progress? Foucault does not put the question that way. He asks: what new possibilities of intervention did the definition open up?

Archaeology: the strata of knowledge#

In The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things the method acquires a name: archaeology.

The idea is this. Every period has an implicit order that determines what can be known and what can be said. Foucault calls it the episteme.

That order is nobody's conscious choice among those living under it. It is like the grammar of a language: the speaker uses it without knowing its rules.

The task of archaeology is to dig that grammar out.

Knowledge and power: an inseparable pair#

The thesis that made Foucault influential worldwide is that knowledge and power are not independent of one another.

On the conventional view, knowledge is a neutral instrument standing over against power: know the truth and you can limit power.

Foucault asks a more uncomfortable question: who produces knowledge, and which forms of knowledge make which power relations possible?

His answer gathers into a symmetrical formula. Power produces knowledge; knowledge creates the possibility of power. To govern a person you must first render him knowable — measurable, classifiable, on the record.

Which is why, in Foucault, prisons, hospitals, schools and psychiatric institutions are not merely social institutions. They are mechanisms that classify, measure, observe and normalise human conduct.

Discipline and Punish is the best-known instance of the approach.

The panopticon: invisible control#

Foucault's analysis of Jeremy Bentham's design for a panoptic prison is what carried his thought into popular culture.

The design runs as follows. The cells are arranged in a ring with an observation tower at the centre. The prisoner can see the tower but not into it. He can never know whether he is being watched.

What Foucault stresses is not the watching itself. It is that the possibility of being watched changes conduct.

The upshot: no watchman is required. Knowing that he may be observed, a person begins to police himself. Power ceases to be a pressure applied from outside and becomes internalised.

This is why Foucault is invoked so constantly in today's arguments about camera systems, algorithmic tracking and the data economy. Our recent piece on the MatrAIx persona simulation showed a new stage of the panoptic logic: instead of watching people, modelling their behaviour in advance.

Where is power?#

Foucault's most frequently misunderstood thesis is that power is not something held in the hands of the state.

Power, for him, is a relation, and it is dispersed through everyday life: the family, the school, the workplace, the hospital, sexuality, language. It is not an object possessed but a network in operation.

The thesis has two consequences. The first looks bleak: there is no outside to which one might escape from power. The second is hopeful: if power is everywhere, so is the possibility of resistance.

Objections#

Foucault has not been accepted uncritically.

The historical objection: his handling of sources and some of his historical claims have been questioned by specialists; the scope of the Great Confinement narrative is disputed.

The normative objection: Jürgen Habermas's is the best known. If Foucault ties every claim to knowledge back to relations of power, on what does he rest the validity of his own analysis? Criticism requires a criterion, and Foucault opens the criterion itself to doubt.

Foucault's answer emerges in his late work: the aim is not to establish a criterion but to show that what is given is not necessary. To show that an order was historically constituted is also to show that it can be changed.

The late work: the care of the self#

In the last volumes of The History of Sexuality Foucault turned in an unexpected direction: the practices of the self in ancient Greece and Rome.

The interest here is in the individual working upon himself to give himself a form — what the Greeks called epimeleia heautou, the care of the self.

This is not a break with the analysis of power but its completion. If the subject has been constituted, it can also constitute itself anew.

Legacy#

Foucault's influence long ago spilled beyond philosophy; he is a founding reference in sociology, history, political science, law, literature and cultural studies.

But his real legacy is less a theory than a habit of suspicion:

Why are the things we take to be normal normal? Who constituted the arrangements that look natural to us, how, and through which forms of knowledge?

The question has not aged in a period when categories are produced by algorithms. On the contrary: the more invisible the mechanism that makes the category, the more the question is needed.

In Turkish#

History of Madness, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Collège de France lectures have all been translated into Turkish. Foucault is among the most widely read twentieth-century philosophers in Turkey.