Why Foucault Matters to Me
My red pill/blue pill moment: Picking up Madness: The Invention of an Idea, from my mother’s bookshelf. Michel Foucault, unlike Morpheus, didn’t speak to me directly. I did not see his dark eyes and bald head or hear his pleasing, indifferent voice until many years later. Even if I reluctantly put aside the delightful similarities between Foucault and Morpheus, however unwittingly, I took that red pill, and most definitely, the Matrix revealed itself to me. Revelation was not instantaneous. It was more of a slow dissolving of the fog of ignorance-complacency by the very slowly rising heat of knowledge-understanding, so I did not go into shock like Neo.
I was between twenty two and twenty-seven—those years when you don’t know you are growing old or that you are stupid—when I read Foucault for the first time. It was those same years when you believe every thought you have is urgent and important, and has originated right there in your brain with no help from anyone. I’m older now, and if not wiser, at least I know there’s no thought originating in my brain that someone, something, or my mother or Michel Foucault didn’t put there. I did not finish high school, am not a member of the Michel Foucault society, and all conclusions I came to, and I don’t come to many, derive from my own reading and interpretation of a few of his books, listening to lectures and debates (like the one between him and Chomsky), reading blogs and articles written by people more qualified than I am, reading the books again. That’s all in the interest of disclosure and lowering of expectations.
Foucault’s research has been criticized, sometimes severely. At the extreme, he has even been dismissed as a fraud. German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler says of him, “ because of the endless series of flaws in his so-called empirical studies […] an intellectually dishonest, empirically absolutely unreliable, crypto-normativist seducer of Postmodernism.” Well. I’m not professing to understand what that means. My understanding of this philosopher may be shallow—and narrow—because I read Foucault as a layperson, without academic guidance, perhaps without rigor. Even so, I found the attempts to debunk and frankly, vilify Foucault, petty and peevish, and debunkers, such as one Andrew Scull, have been debunked themselves by people who know Foucault’s work well. In any case all the peeve came too late to save this drowning witch, I was enthralled and captivated long before I read any of his detractors or knew such people existed.
Reading Foucault, at the outset, got me thinking about people, society, history, how the world works, and of course madness, in ways I had not. It changed me imperceptibly at first, and then entirely. I began to look past the obvious, past schools, streets, shops, relationships, past myself. I accepted all I read as fact, I wasn’t schooled to question anything, and certainly not Foucault himself. I began to feel that immense feeling— delight that comes with knowledge, a sense of superiority from knowing what those around me did not. I could see the Matrix, therefore I could choose my level of participation in it.
Madness: The Invention of an Idea, the first book I read, was a revelation and the cause of a revolution within me. The history too, was a revelation—I had no idea that asylums were once lazar houses, that the mad were originally interred not for their health, but for the safety of the rest of us, that what is considered insane in one culture might be necessary, even central to another—shamans, babas, the village idiot, the king’s fool. I remember certain people at the small town weekly market where my aunt lived. Those people’s nakedness was ignored by everyone but the children, of whom I was one. They had expressions—or lack of any—creating faces I had never seen on “normal” people. When I asked I was told quite casually that they were mad, and being a child, I took it at is was said, and assumed that these “mad” people were a bit unlike most, but a normal part of the world. I have a later, quite different memory, of sitting in a car waiting outside a building my grandmother had gone into. I remember watching for a glimpse of a person behind the barred windows. It was the state mental asylum (Yerawada, Pune, established in 1889.) I didn’t understand what this place was, or why there were people inside who were not allowed outside. Nobody said “mad” anymore with the casual dismissive acceptance I had encountered in the village market. I was told this was where people were taken when they got mindsick, exactly like a hospital. I knew what that was, of course, it was where I was born, and my sister.
Birth of the Clinic made me rethink the hospital, or, think about it for the first time. I understood something about the body of the patient— myself. I understood my feeling of helplessness, of loss of control in doctors’ offices, most of all at the gynecologist. This man (I just happen to have a male doctor) has seen countless vaginas and probed countless uteruses (uterii?) and so must know my body better than I do. But before I even got to that part, I had accepted the rules of the space itself: my child who had come with me had to wait outside because this was a private matter, the probing of my vagina, not “appropriate” for a young child to be present during the process. And though I don’t take my child into the examination room with me, I do think about why not, as I negotiate those stations of the stethoscope I have to pass before being seen. First my identity, then my companions, then my physical dimensions (I am weighed and measured) — at each station I relinquish control in small increments, until I am on that table, spreadeagled and compliant. Alright, I am being dramatic. But maybe not. It is an incredibly vulnerable position to be in. Reminding myself that the choice is mine, gathering some control from knowing, it makes the whole experience quite different. I participate in my own care, I even talk, and make the doctor laugh sometimes. I am aware of being observed and recorded, not just for my individual health, but as part of the larger project of modern medicine. Being observed and categorized in these precise ways cements me into controllable spaces: I am female, sexually active, almost menopausal, and so on. I have really no choice but to acquiesce, and belong to them. But I am at least aware. And knowing gives me some tiny measure of power.
Reading Foucault (even Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison) didn’t stop me from sending my children to school, but I didn’t do it with the same trust in institutions anymore, I had the sense that this —their education, their life, their future—was up to me, and up to them. My son’s outrage that a person on a golf cart patrolling the school could prevent him from leaving the premises to get some food delights me. His question to me: “Who is that guy anyway? How can he possibly have the authority to tell me when to eat, or even speak? How can this be?” (Actually he said “What the fuck??”) His thinking may also have come from the scary school nightmare video I showed him some years ago which I was told was an utterly inappropriate thing to do because it would put ideas in his head that he didn’t need, especially if I wanted to maintain control. But I didn’t, not then, and not now. Control, and power, come weighted by a lot of responsibility. Unlike feeding, clothing, shelter, love and guidance, which are essentially altruistic, control pre-supposes a desire for particular outcomes. The delight and uncertainty of not knowing, nor of knowing that the outcome will be chosen by the child himself—I wouldn’t trade these for the mundane, the expected, and yes, possibly the safe outcome.
I’m not saying I would let a seventeen-year-old boy smoke dope without saying words first of caution and then of threat. But I would let him (as far as that freedom is mine to give) choose business or law over jazz saxophone if he wanted, or vice versa, which one of my children in fact did. The younger one is in the equally esoteric, rarefied—and “future-less” as some call it—field of middle distance running. Asserting control and limiting his training because he was neglecting his homework may have saved his plummeting grades. Many parents I know did do this, and their children’s better grades may result in some better future. But will that resulting adult have found his or her own love in this wide world, I don’t know. My son may be a has-been at twenty-six, when he is past his running prime, or not. But I think there’s a strong possibility that he will be satisfied that he took—no, ran that path to its conclusion. That he won’t have to say “I could have been a contender.” I may be wringing my hands and ruing my stupidity, arrogance, or just bad parenting a decade from now. But I think I won’t be. How do I attribute my parenting style to Foucault? Simply that reading him changes my perspective, and that gives me the ability to see the Matrix. It no longer seems an immutable monument. It’s a moving, changing — Matrix — and it belongs to each of us. We may not always be able to bend it or ourselves. But if we can see it, we can try.
After Foucault, I didn’t believe in conspiracies anymore. I couldn’t hold on to that notion of “them” and “us” — the evil government, big brother, old white men, etc vs me (woman, non-white, and so on.) I began to see that there was no conspiracy, that evil corporations exist at least to a small extent because I want something they provide, and charge me for. I couldn’t feel the same way I did about authority, about the state, about anything at all that I saw around me that made up my world, my society, my neighborhood, right down to the actual street and why it leads from my house to the main street to the school, the state capitol, the grocery store and so on. It’s not as if I think corporations don’t behave abominably or are corrupt. I am just not so quick to separate myself from them. I can’t quiet my conscience with a month-long boycott of BP. I am aware of my complicity. I am guilty.
These are all simplistic views, I know. I could, and will go further and deeper in my thinking about institutions, rituals, social and personal constructions. But this is why Foucault matters to me, to my life. I learned to question without hurrying to answer, and categorize myself. I am willing to be wrong, or on the wrong side, allow myself to feel things that I didn’t want to feel. I know that I am “against” abortion, for example, and I am able to defend my stance because I have thought about it — in fact I came to that stance because I could think about it in ways I would not have, had I not read Foucault. I’m not saying no woman should be “allowed” to have abortions, just that it is a bloody horrific procedure, and we have the technology to make it completely unnecessary, and we should make it completely unnecessary. Not now, instantly, by law—but we should, as a sentient, and I hope humane race, work toward never having to abort a fetus. By, for example, making an unwanted or accidental pregnancy not even a thing. I don’t understand why, in this country, those most against abortion do the least, and in fact actively fight any ways to actually prevent it. I am against gay marriage — which I know is not up to me — if anyone wants to get married, they should be free to do so. I came to it because I was able to think past gay marriage or any marriage, and understand it as a matter of human rights. It bothers me that people are willing to — in fact very much want to—become part of a discriminatory, exclusive club from which they were themselves excluded because of their caste, color, sexual orientation, class, economic status, depending on what country, culture or historical period they belonged to—and they can now do the same to whatever group of people are still excluded from their club. No, I’m not against gay marriage per say, just against all marriage.
Reading Foucault gave me tools to look under and over and into things in ways that I could not have all by myself. I must give credit, as Bill Bowerman insisted, where credit is due.
The Archaeology of Knowledge, the two volumes of The History of Sexuality, The Order of Things—a long list of reading/rereading awaits me. But even without those, whatever be his failings and shortcomings, Foucault has been immeasurably valuable to my understanding, or at least questioning of how, and why we live as we do, and to my intellectual journey on this Ship of Fools that is life.
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