Literature and varieties of history

[Part 7]

In today’s column on the topic of literature and varieties of history, I wish to focus on the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926- 1984). He was a philosopher, historian, social activist. His is a remarkable career, and his intellectual odyssey carried him across several fields of inquiry and frequently ended up in unmapped territories. He is the author of such widely influential works as The Archaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality.

There are many facets to his writings, and I would like to confine myself to his significance as a historian. Foucault is generally regarded as one of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth century and some would argue that he was the most important French thinker of the twentieth century.

His works have had a profound impact on both the humanities and social sciences; he was able to open up new avenues of social inquiry that have been profitably pursued by later scholars. He published a number of scholarly books that served to transform our understanding of the way various institutions function in Western cultures.

His book Madness and Civilization was devoted to an analysis of modern mental institutions while The Birth of the Clinic focused on the hospitals; In Discipline and Punish he explored the ways in which prisons function as social institutions and his The History of Sexuality he dealt with the institutions of family and schools. In all these studies, one of Foucault’s primary concerns was to investigate into the role of power in society.

He examined the notion of power in a way that marked a radical departure from the standard approaches; he was keen to probe into the pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power ‘reaches into the very gain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.’

Michel Foucault, interestingly and contrary to conventional wisdom, perceived of power not solely in negative terms; he also discussed its positive and productive aspects. I shall discuss this aspect later in the column. His explorations into medicine, madness, sexuality and punishment were united by a vision that underscored the role of power play in the management of truth, reason and knowledge.

Controversial

As I stated earlier Michel Foucault is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. On numerous occasions, in my columns, I have discussed various facets of his achievements. He was consequential as he was controversial, widely appreciated as he was misunderstood, received with boundless enthusiasm and fierce irritation. This is indeed the fate of most innovative thinkers. Today, my primary interest is on his work as a historian, and his writings on history, to my mind, have generated some of the staunchest resistance from academics.

Before I examine this theme let me offer a quotation from the eminent American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. It summarises admirably the attainments and problems of Foucault as a contemporary thinker.

‘Michel Foucault erupted onto the intellectual scene at the beginning of the sixties with his Histoire de la folie ( Madness and Civilization), an unconventional but still reasonably recognizable history of the western experience of madness.

He has become, in the years since, a kind of impossible object; a non-historian historian, an anti-human human scientist, and a counter-strucruralist structuralist. If we add to this his terse, impacted style, which manages to be seen imperious and doubt-ridden at the same time, and a method which supports sweeping summary with eccentric detail, the resemblance of his work to an Escher drawing – stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves, doors leading outside that beings you back inside – is complete.’

It is interesting that Geertz should allude to the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher. (1898-1972). He was greatly influenced by mathematics and created works of art that were puzzling and cognitively challenging. Geertz’s statement points to the antimonies and contradictions that characterize Foucault’s work as well its complex reception by the public. Foucault sought to introduce a new kind of historical analysis that stood in sharp contrast to mainstream historical investigations and thereby incurring the hostility of many of the historians associate with the establishment.

As he once remarked, ‘is it not necessary to draw a line between those who believe that we can continue to situate our present discontinuities within the historical and transcendental traditions of the nineteenth century and those who are making a great effort to liberate themselves, once and for all, from this conceptual framework.’

Historian

Here, Foucault is underlining what to him, as a historian, is a very significant point.

As a commentator on history, it was his declared intention to move away from universalist, foundationalist, normative view points and instead lay stress on concepts of difference, discontinuity and contingency.

He was keen to dissolve such abstract essences and universal categories as truth, reason, history, right, which mainstream historians held in reverence, into multiplicities of distinct social and cultural forms. In doing so, he was persuaded to question the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally existed between history, philosophy, psychology, political theory; he was also interested in abandoning the conventional approaches to these disciplines.

As one scholar remarked, ‘he does not do theory in the modern sense, which aims at clarity, consistency, comprehensiveness, objectivity and truth. Rather, he offers fragments, fictions, truth-games, heterotopias, tools, experiments that he hopes will prompt his readers to think and act in new ways. Trying to blaze new intellectual and political trails, Foucault abandons both liberalism and Marxism and seeks a new kind of critical theory and politics.’

Foucault’s approach to history, then, is the very antithesis of Hegel’s. Hegel proposed a vision of history that was marked by continuity, progress, reconciliation, freedom.

Foucault’s concept of history was diametrically opposed to this. Like the German philosopher Nietzsche, whom Foucault admired greatly, he proposed a vision of history that rejected universality, inevitable progress, the multiplication of ever growing conflicts, the prominence of differences, and an emphasis on rupture and contingency.

This was, therefore, a whole new approach to the understanding and writing of history. What is clearly evident in Foucault’s writings on and in history is his disenchantment with enlightenment values such as universalism and rationalism and optimism and humanism and instead focus on discontinuities, sudden reversals, the salience of differences.

Another important shift that Foucault effectuated relates to the question of the objects of scientific study. He displaced emphasis from the ways in which scientific objects are constituted to the manner in which human beings are made into subjects of knowledge to the extent that they themselves are made into objects of knowledge. As Foucault remarked, ‘while historians of science in France were interested essentially in the problem of how a scientific object is constituted, the question I asked myself was this; how is it that the human subject took itself as the object of possible knowledge?

Through what forms of rationality, and historical conditions? And finally at what price? This predilection is vitally connected to Foucault’s ambition of providing a critique of the ways in which populations in contemporary societies are controlled and disciplined by sanctioning the claims to knowledge and the practices associated with the human sciences. Hence his deep concern with such fields of inquiry as psychiatry, psychology, medicine, sociology and criminology.

It is his conviction that human sciences have succeeded in undercutting the classical social order premised on rights and independence and have put in place new operations of power exercised through disciplinary mechanisms. These concerns of Foucault are interconnected and shape his vision of history and historiography.

Transformation

Foucault succeeded in bringing about a fundamental transformation in our thinking about history. He challenged the standard approaches to history and knowledge production by repudiating the empirical method much favoured by historians and replaced with narrative interpretation as the principal mode of historical knowing and explication. He was adamant in his assertion there is no unmediated access to the past and reality available to us, and therefore the only way in which we can access the past is through language which is, of course, inseparably linked to power and legitimacy.

Clearly, this is a mode of thinking, as Foucault himself admitted, that was greatly influenced by Nietzsche. Foucault’s contention is that we cannot know the past objectively, because this idea of objectivity itself is a product of historical factors and cultural forces. This line of thinking, it is apparent, went against the central tenets of traditional history-making.

Many mainstream historians have characterised Foucault as an anti-historian. This is primarily due to two reasons. On the one hand, he is unwilling to privilege the notion much valorised by historians of scientific truth, objectivity and standard forms of evidentially derived investigations.

On the other hand, he rejects the easy linear chain of causation favored by mainstream historians between events and periods, and instead proposes a history that is marked by non-linearity and discontinuities and sudden ruptures. In addition, Foucault believes that all representations of the past are partial in both senses if the term. This, once again, had a devastating impact on traditional historiography.

Congruence

Another significant aspect of Foucault’s vision of history was that, methodologically speaking, there is congruence between the writings of philosophers of history and the work of historians. This has great implications for the forward movement of historiography. What Foucault was articulating was the need for historians to be self-reflective – self-reflective about the content, about the style. It also raises issues abut the nature of the production of historical knowledge and how it is made use of.

As Alun Munslow observed, ’ultimately ,as he says, the past construed as history is an endless process of interpretation by the historian as an act of imagination, and our categories of analysis, assumptions, models and figurative style all themselves become a part of the history we are trying to unravel.’ What this underscores is the essential self-reflexivity that characterizes the historian’s investigative pursuits.

In order to understand Michel Foucault’s distinctive approach to history we need to pay attention to an important distinction he made between total history and general history. It was his belief that total history should give way to general history. By total history what he meant was a history that had the ability to draw diverse phenomena toward a central and unifying center; ideas of principles, meanings, visions, general understandings of culture, converged around a recognisable center.

This same principle was discernible in practices related to economics, politics, social life, religion and so on; they were subject to a centripetal power, were pulled towards a center that went by the general designation a period of time. In contrast, general history calls attention to, ‘series, segmentations, limits, difference of level, time-lags, anachronistic survivals, possible types of relation. ’What the adherents of general history were interested in were not the conjunctions of diverse histories such as economic, political, cultural, or the quest for similarities and coincidences between them. Total history focuses on cohesion and causality and while general history rejects totality in favor of interplays and correlations. It was the preferred function of the general historian to assess what kinds of connections and linkages may be forged between them. Clearly, Foucault’s interests were closely wrapped up with the concept of general history.

Objectives

If one were to examine Foucault’s corpus of writing very carefully one would be struck by the fact that one of his central objectives as a thinker and writer has to been to dethrone the human subject and the accompanying consciousness and replace it with language, rhetoric, cultural practices. This objective finds expression in his historical writings as well. Two seminal thinks who sought to minimize the centrality of human consciousness were Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Marx was interested in displaying how human consciousness was shaped by social forces while Nietzsche related human consciousness and morality to social struggles and power plays. Both had the effect of undermining human consciousness. Foucault, however, felt that their attempts had been misinterpreted by later commentators. Marx was presented as a historian of totalities while Nietzsche was made into a philosopher who was interested in origins. Both these sets of mischaracterisations, he contended, twisted the original intent of the two thinkers.

Consequently, Foucault aimed to clarify as forcefully as he could the issue of subjecthood and consciousness. This attempt of Foucault was denounced by some historians as an attempt to undermine the very foundations of history. Human consciousness is, according to traditional thinking, what united the disparate historical events spread out over time, and hence it was valued as a master concept. Foucault once remarked that,’ The cry goes up that one is murdering history whenever in a historical analysis- and especially if it is concerned with thought, ideas of knowledge – one is seen to be using in too obvious a way the categories of discontinuity and difference, the notions of threshold, rupture, and transformation, the description of series and limits.

One will be denounced for attacking the inalienable rights of history and the very foundations of any possible historicity. But one must not be deceived, what is being bewailed with such vehemence is not the disappearance of history, but the eclipse of that form of history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject….’

One area in which Michel Foucault’s ideas are especially relevant is in the domain of intellectual history; his writings, by way of challenges and interrogations, have much to offer to practitioners in this domain. One can say that intellectual history, as it has developed in the West, rests on four thought -pillars. The first it takes for granted the unity of the Western intellectual tradition; second, it recognizes a continuous and steady evolution of this tradition; third, it is held that the values that support this tradition are reason and freedom; fourth, it focuses in harmony and unity as opposed to conflicts and fissures.

It is this intellectual tradition that Foucault sought to subvert as evidenced in a book like the Archaeology of Knowledge. Understandably, many historians opposed his efforts. Some accused him of coming up with new analytical concepts such as discourse, archeology, episteme that ate too abstract and fuzzy and unable to perform efficaciously the tasks if historical investigation. It is the considered judgment of these denigrators that Foucault has forsaken the field of inquiry called history for a kind of structural analysis that is inadequate to the task of examining social change.

Observation

Commenting on such criticisms, Foucault makes the observation that, ‘continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject; the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject – in the form of historical consciousness – sill once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept a distance by difference, and find them in what might be called his abode.’

The kind of history that he wishes to promote is what he terms a form of archeology. This archaeology, in his words, will be able to’ operate a de-centering that leaves no privilege center.’ in his historical writings it is his proclaimed desire to see ‘questions of human being, consciousness, origin and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle and separate off.’

In order to comprehend and map the trajectory of history-making that Foucault has taken, we need to focus on two crucial technical terms – archeology and genealogy. Clearly, he is deploying these two words in a way that is different from the manner in which they are employed in daily parlance. Let us first consider the term archaeology. This metaphor tells us that the intention of Foucault us to excavate knowledge, to search for underlying conditions of possibilities and shaping factors. As an archaeologist of western societies, he is on a quest to uncover the basic codes of discourse and knowledge as they take shape and expand within a historical context. It is the aim of archaeology to explore the rules that guide human thinking and knowledge.

In Foucault’s own words, ‘the goal of archaeology is to; explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the riles that come into play in the very existence of such discourse…the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject not to a theory of the knowing subject but rather to a theory of discursive practice’ This term discursive practice occurs frequently in Foucault’s writings as well as in those of his followers.

Levels

Foucault, then, it is clear, is seeking to undermine the individual subject as the originator of discourse and demonstrate how it develops inharmoniously at various levels without the aid of a unifying and guiding consciousness of a subject. This is very different from traditional history, As a perceptive expositor of Foucault’s writings, Steven Best remarks, ‘archaeology seeks to identify the conditions of possibility of knowledge, the rules of formation, of discourse rationality (discursive objects, concepts, statements, themes, and theories) that operate beneath the level of theme-content and subjective awareness and invention.

And Foucault makes statement tat these rules are ‘the fundamental codes of a culture- those determine its language, its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of practices.’ Hence Foucault sees the concept of archaeology as being central to his newer approach of historical inquiry.

The second important technical term that we should examine is that of genealogy. Once gain Foucault is not using this term in its ordinary sense. He is drawing on the work of Nietzsche such as Genealogy of Morals to fashion a string analytical tool. He counterposes genealogy to the traditional methods of historical investigation. As he says, its objective is to ‘record the singularity of events outside any monotonous finality.’

Genealogy repudiates mutable essences, fixed underlying laws, metaphysical conclusions; it is interested in identifying discontinuities instead of unbroken development. While traditional historians harp on progress and gravity, genealogists focus on repetitions and play. As Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in their book on Foucault’s work – in my judgment the most insightful introduction to his writings – assert, ‘genealogy’s coat of arms might read: oppose depth, finality, and interiority. Its banner: mistrust identities in history; they are only masks, appeals to unity. The deepest truth that the genealogist has to reveal is ‘the secret that things have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.’

Goals

It is clear that genealogy is not particularly enamoured of goals, schemes, ends in history which are all premised upon a clear purpose put in place by God or Spirit or Reason. Consequently, it turns its back on ideas of progress and universal history. Genealogists do not perceive of history as a progressive march towards freedom with the aid of reason, but rather an eclectic succession of diverse social formations shaped by power. As Foucault said, ‘humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violence in a system of rules and this proceeds from domination to domination.’

An important function performed by genealogy, it seems to me, is to de-familiarize the familiar – to see the strangeness in what we take to be normal and ordinary, to challenge conventional responses and turn them into questions, to convert past into a unfamiliar country with surprises and diversities. It is Foucault’s way of challenging mainline continuous history and investing the silenced with voices and the invisible with eye-catching powers. Consequently, in Foucault’s histories the marginalized, silenced, those condemned to invisibility and a state of non-being are made into objects of inquiry.

This is Foucault’s understanding of effective history. As the distinguished historian Harry Harootunian says effective history de-familiarizes the familiar in order to show how the past not only differs from the present, but also refuses to offer the present its sanctions and resists assimilation to its own requirements.’ Moreover, effective history is a practice that begins and ends with the present. And interestingly, Foucault’s aim has always been to write a history of the present.

Concepts

I have discussed briefly the two concepts archaeology and genealogy that Foucault disseminated. In his later writings he gave up the idea of archaeology, which he regarded as too restrictive and did not take adequately into considerations politics and power, in favor of the idea of genealogy. Some commentators argue that he totally rejected the concept of archeology when he embraced genealogy. I think this is an overstatement. I myself prefer to read them as a pair of complementary concepts.

As I stated earlier, the idea of power – the distinctive inflection he gives it – is pivotal to Foucault’s formulations. He saw power not as a substance but a relation and as a consequence he maintained that power is not possessed but exercised. What this means is that it is important that we give up on the idea of power the property of any one whether it is a king or executive or the State; power signifies the complicated relations that exist among various segments of society.

Therefore, power has to be understood as a moving situation, whether individual institutional or social. As a consequence of the fact that power in conceptualised by Foucault in relational terms, he characterises political struggles not in terms of total power but in terms of what he calls relations of power. Contrary to standard opinion, he rejects the notion that power flows from dominating to dominated, and makes a case for power as fluid and embedded in social relations in general. In his writings Foucault makes the point that power is not solely negative; it can be positive as well as creating the space for action and choice and the re-focusing on the idea of freedom.

Relevance

These concepts of Foucault that he has put into circulation in his commentaries on history have a deep relevance to understanding literary discourse. I would like to refer to one other concept of his, namely, subjugated knowledge. Throughout his life Foucault distinguished himself as a transgressive thinker, and therefore it is hardly surprising that he chose to call attention to this concept. By subjugated knowledge he primarily meant two things.

First it is the kind of knowledge that has been buried or ignored by the generality of historians; second, it refers to the kind of knowledge that in Foucault’s words,’ has been disqualified as non-conceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges; naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.’ This idea of subjugated knowledges, I am persuaded, has a great bearing on literary creation.

So far I have been laboring to explore the nature and significance of Michel Foucault as a historian by highlighting some of the central concepts that underwrite his work. He is, in my estimation, an innovative thinker who opened up fascinating new paths of inquiry for historians. However, not all are enthusiastic about his work or convinced by his intellectual agenda. They complain that he is anti-historical, ahistorical, too structural, nihilistic and vague; it is also argued that in his historical excavations he has got his facts wrong and missed out on important areas of data. In addition, there are those who criticize him for his elusive and elliptical style which leads to obscurity. Some of these charges, I dare say, have some merit. As Foucault himself once remarked,’ No one is perfect’. However, despite his shortcomings and blind spots, it is my contention that Foucault is a thinker of the first rank who has galvanized the study and writing of history.

Literature

It is against this general background that I now wish to turn my attention to literature, modern Sinhala literature in particular, and try to see what possible connections can be made with Foucault’s pathways of thought. Our discussion so far establishes the fact that Foucault saw history, culture and power as defining each other. This, it seems to me has great implications for literature. For example, if we take Gunadasa Amarsekera’s eight novels beginning with Gamanaka Mula that aim to explore the social history of the past eight decades, one can make use of this Foucauldian framework with great profit.

In addition Foucault’s work should encourage us to re-examine the social, political, historical contexts and consequences of literary production from newer angles of perception. Not only the writing and reading f literary texts but also the ways in which they circulate and are subject to categorisation and taught at various levels become important aspects of cultural work. And Foucault has much to tell us on this matter.

Similarly, Foucault enables us to think through the role of discourse in cultural formation in interesting ways. What he has taught us is that, as the above discussion indicated, cultural change can be most profitably explained as a function of discourse. Let us, for example, consider the rise of the Sinhala novel in the early twentieth century as a consequence of the work of novelists such as Isaac de Silva, Albert de Silva, A Simon de Silva, M.C,F..Perera and Piyadasa Sirisena. The discourse that led to the origins of the Sinhala novels consisted of many phenomena: the rise of secularism, the resistance to colonialism, the gathering force of nationalism, engagement with modernity, the emergence of individuality, the concept of Western-inspired romantic live, the growth of the middle class etc. The intersections of these diverse constituent elements can be profitably studied using a framework inspired by Michel Foucault’s work and thereby open up new pathways of inquiry into the Sinhala novel and the larger cultural discourse.

(To be continued)