Rille Raaper:
Foucault’s transformative writing style is well known. Some Foucauldian scholars even differentiate between an early and late Foucault, pessimistic and optimistic Foucault among other similar contrasts. I have found these variations in his work fascinating. It seems that Foucault was also aware of his transformative style, if we can call it like that. He explained in one of his interviews that it was a desire to explore and understand the unknown that inspired his work: “I write a book only because I still don’t know what to think about this thing I want so much to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think” (Foucault, 2002a, pp. 239–240). In other words, Foucault allowed himself to challenge and change his thinking over time. Perhaps one of the most important transformations in his work relates to his methodological shift from archaeology to genealogy. Foucault (1972, p. 154) explained archaeology as an approach that helps to resist the ideas of linear progression and
Mark Olssen:
I think Foucault is a towering thinker. It is pointless to seek to rank or be precise as to exactly where he stands in a rather large list of 20th-century thinkers, but Foucault surely ranks as important, as does Deleuze, in reinterpreting Nietzsche, and Heidegger in a way that offered a new understanding of our most prized certainties, that incorporates them and underscores their importance for sociological and historical studies. It may seem strange to say this but he draws upon Nietzsche and Heidegger in a way that makes him more liberal than classical Western liberals at any rate. He finds teleology and vestiges of metaphysics not just in Hegel and Marx but in the standard Western liberal epistemologies and roads to truth, such as empiricism, and of course in that arch liberal, Kant, himself. In this, he agrees with and utilises Nietzsche, who finds in Kant too much metaphysics, especially concerning the foundational status of the subject, whose self-consciousness sits motionless and largely unaffected as history sweeps on past it. Such an anthropology of the subject underpins Kant’s transcendentalism. It was this identification of a constant human subject, which depicts the subject as ahistorical, with an integral identity or “essence”, that Foucault opposes under the umbrella of anthropological humanism.
Rille Raaper:
Mark Olssen:
The critique of humanism is consistent throughout his work, and must be seen as having a very specific and limited scope, in the sense just stated. As Foucault explains, it envelops the subject in multiple senses:
By humanism I mean the totality of discourse through which western man is told: “Even though you don’t exercise power, you can still be ruler. Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty”. Humanism invented a whole series of subjected sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgement, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and “aligned with destiny”). In short, humanism is everything in western civilisation that restricts the desire for power. … [T]he theory of the subject is at the heart of humanism. (Foucault, 1980d, p. 221)Unfortunately, many liberal critics of Foucault have extrapolated and embellished the argument in a way that is simply intended to debunk and mystify. Foucault was well aware that humanism as a concept can take various forms, and can be seen exemplified in Christianity, Marxism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Liberalism, even Nazism and Stalinism. Further, he appreciated that:
Humanism is … a theme, or rather, a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time, in European societies; these themes, always tied to value judgements, have obviously varied greatly in their content, as well as in the values they have preserved. … From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected, but that the humanistic thematic is itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that, at least since the seventeenth century, what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of manIn this Foucault follows Nietzsche who sees no constant, ahistorical, essence or nature that characterises man. Influenced by Nietzsche, too, Foucault utilises and extends the focus on language and interpretation to a formalised system of discourse where prized certainties piled up over time by science operate as forms of power which function as instruments of power and control, inclusion and exclusion. Such scientific discourses operate as new forms of biopower which increasingly pervade the various spaces of reason, truth, authority, and legitimacy, making the viewpoints or expressions of marginalised groups difficult to be heard or gain traction. As Foucault (1981, p. 52) says in “The Order of Discourse”: “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers. … [T]he procedures of exclusion are well known”. Foucault manifests a concern with the oppressive consequences of reason and science, seeking to expose its irrational underside. Like Nietzsche, in this sense, Foucault subjects Kant to a historical and sociological critique. For Foucault, the unresolved tension of Kant’s philosophical project is that he fails to appreciate the contingent and historically contextualised character of all truth claims, that is to advocate a notion of critique which claims to transcend specific historical conditions through the exercise of cognitive faculties (of understanding, reason, and judgement) deduced a priori as timeless structures. In this sense, Foucault rejects Kant’s claims to have established the universal grounds for the conditions of possibility of human knowledge, and Kant’s claims for transcendental reason are replaced for Foucault by a principle of permanent contingency. Importantly here, Foucault is within the Kantian theatre, and effects similar criticism to those made of Kant by Hegel. By extension, Foucault disputes Kant’s claim to have established a secure foundation by which to differentiate various types of knowledge claims, relating to science, practical reason, or aesthetics. The objective is to switch from a conception of critique which is transcendentally grounded to a conception of critique—hence, autocritique—which conceives it as practical and as historically specific.I have found Foucault’s life and academic career also fascinating. He was lucky enough in the end to be appointed to a high-status position in the Collège de France, where he had relative freedom to develop his research programme. As with many leading French academics, Foucault was also passionately political. This link between academic life and the world outside the university is one thing that defines the distinctiveness of the French intellectual. Foucault commented upon and was involved with many causes, but his work with prisonborrowed from religion, science or politics. Humanism serves to colour and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse. (Foucault, 1984, p. 44)
there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only to be found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. … [I]ntellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power. (Foucault, 1980a, p. 207)
Rille Raaper:
I like your description of Foucault as an academic with a clear societal contribution, whether it was his contribution to prison reform in France, the Iranian Revolution or involvement in other political events. We also know that he we was a member of the French Communist Party during the Cold War years. This obviously is a factual detail in Foucault’s autobiography rather than significant political engagement. There has been a lot of discussion around Foucault’s relationship with Marxism. I know that you have explored Foucault’s critique of Marxism in your writings. For example, in one of your earlier articles, you have argued that Foucault’s archaeological method allowed him to “challenge Marxism, which is concerned with a narrow linear conception of causality and enables him to advance a non-reductive and holist analysis of social life” (Olssen, 2003, p. 192). It is obviously clear that Foucault did not speak the language of the “dominant left”; he did not perceive the world in terms of ideology or economic oppression. The social world from a Foucauldian perspective is much more complex—power is not necessarily negative but can be productive even if sometimes risky or dangerous (Foucault, 2002d). We could therefore say that Foucault promoted a shift from traditional understandings of power in which power only presses on the subject from the outside (characteristic of Marxist views of power and oppression) towards an understanding of power as something that forms the subject by “providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire” (Butler, 1997, p. 2): power is what subjects depend on for their existence. From a Foucauldian
Mark Olssen:
Foucault’s thesis on the subjects of Marxism and totalitarianism were themselves relatively undeveloped, yet important. In my own work, I have sought to extrapolate Foucault’s position on Marxism in relation to his express rejection of Hegel, his own more pluralist ontological position, as well as in relation to his scattered comments on Marx. I think also, his magazine articles, especially the one in Le nouvel observateur in 1977, were also insightful and effectively summarise his position. Foucault’s endorsement of Glucksmann’s “new philosophy’1 reciprocated Glucksmann’s positive endorsement of Foucault’s thesis, and his earlier suggestion that political theory should take a “Foucauldian turn” (see Glucksmann, 1975). Foucault’s endorsement of Glucksmann’s book signalled a number of important political and philosophical dimensions, even if only developed in embryonic form: first, a consistent anti-totalitarianism as an essential feature of Foucault’s own philosophical pluralism; second, a disillusionment with 1968 and post-1968 revolutionary politics as potentially totalitarian; and third, a chance to crystallise his rejection of Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, as political movements. Glucksmann had in an earlier work analysed Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago as representing the culmination of Marxist historical dialectical development, ending up in the residue of totalitarian politics as expressed in the camps of Siberia, genocide and, by extension, Nazism (Glucksmann, 1975). As Foucault wrote in his review of Les maîtres penseurs:
Stalinism was the truth, “rather” naked, admittedly, of an entire political discourse which was that of Marx and of other thinkers before him. With the Gulag, one sees not the consequences of an unfortunate error but the effect of the most “true” theories in the order of politics. Those who hoped to save themselves by opposing Marx’s real beard to Stalin’s false nose are wasting their time. (Foucault, 1977a, p. 84)Foucault, for his part, found sustenance in the anti-statist and pluralist discourses that characterised his own early works, focusing instead on the “micro powers” and “disciplines” that underpinned the state, and were prior to it. Marx is rejected, as is Hegel, as philosophers who totalise history and who represent the state as a legitimate organ of domination and truth. For Hegel it was philosophy that led to this totalisation through the reconciliation of opposites by which all contradictions were overcome. For Marx, it was the history of class
Rille Raaper:
Can you be more specific about the concept of totality to which Foucault objects?
Mark Olssen:
The notion of totality is important here if one is to understand Foucault’s relation to Hegel. Foucault’s scepticism towards the idea of totality is developed forcefully in the “Introduction” to The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault (1972, p. 10) distinguishes between “total history”, which he opposes, and “general history” which characterises his own pluralist methodological approach, an approach which he says, “speaks of series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relation”. Although neither Marx nor Hegel is named in the text at this point, it is clear that Foucault is opposing a well-known trend in historical philosophy associated with their writings. As he says:
The project of total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle—material or spiritual—of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion—what is called metaphysically the “face” of a period. … [I]t is supposed that history itself may be articulated into great units—stages or phases—which contain within themselves their own principle of cohesion. (Foucault, 1972, p. 10)The idea of society as an organic totality or whole had been an animating spiritual principle from ancient Greece through to the Middle Ages. The whole pertained to both the spiritual and physical order. Leibniz (1646–1716) had characterised society as a “pre-established harmony” in his Monadology based on the concept of the continuum; that the differences between things were differences of degree and were interconnected to the extent that “each simple
Rille Raaper:
In his own pluralist approach, which shuns totality, we can note that power, particularly a location of power, is a key concept in understanding how Foucault differed from Marx and Hegel. You also argue in one of your articles that it was Foucault’s methodological focus on discourse that makes his work distinctive and helps us understand the complex relationship between Foucault and thinkers like Marx and Hegel (see Olssen, 2010). I remember you explaining that Foucault used his archaeological and genealogical methods—which are discursive methods—to challenge Marxism and its linear conception of causality and power that operates between the oppressor and oppressed (Olssen, 2003). It is obviously clear that social world for Foucault is much more complex, and like you said, he promoted a shift from singular power towards an understanding of power that operates in multiplicity and also allows multiple resistances. Based on a similar logic, Foucault perceived discourse as something more complex than just written and oral language. Foucault (1981, p. 67) argued that discourses should be considered as “discontinuous practices” which can be juxtaposed with each other but may exclude each other. It seems to me that his understanding of plurality in both discourse and power allows him to develop his distinctive approach to history. He was able to shift away from linear approach to historic events and to rather investigate “series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling and possible types of relation” (Foucault, 1972, p. 11). Can we explore Foucault’s approach to history a little further, and how does Foucault’s understanding of history make him differ from other influential theorists, say Hegel?
Mark Olssen:
The relation to Hegel and Marx, following Hegel, is of course central to understanding Foucault’s methodology as well as his project as a whole. I have always emphasised this relation to Hegel by Foucault since my first book, Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education (see Olssen, 2006a). In a way, Foucault’s entire approach reflects a conversation with Hegel. Another excellent more recent treatment appears by Gary Gutting, in his book, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960 (see Gutting, 2011), where he points out the central role of Hegel as the figure to which French philosophy for much of the 20th century has responded.Gutting (2011, p. 13) makes the point that “Foucault first came to full philosophical life when he encountered Jean Hyppolite”. Hyppolite taught a course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the Lycée Henri IV, where Foucault underwent his preparation for his entrance to the École Normale Supérieure
For him the relation to Hegel was the site of an experiment, a confrontation from which he was never sure that philosophy would emerge victorious. He did not use the Hegelian system as a reassuring universe; he saw in it the extreme risk taken by philosophy. (Foucault, 1981, p. 74)Foucault clearly credits Hyppolite, in the same way as Arkady Plotnitsky in his Foreword to Hyppolite’s Hegel’s Philosophy of History, as presenting a Nietzschean reading of Hegel (see Plotnitsky, 1996). Hyppolite concludes his thesis with the observation that:
There exists in [Hegel’s] thought an ambiguity. That ambiguity is that the reconciliation of subjective spirit and objective spirit, the supreme synthesis of this system, is perhaps not completely realizable. (Hyppolite, 1996, p. 72)Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel is represented by Foucault as being deeply sceptical and sets Foucault on a trajectory which takes him outside of the Hegelian
[a] task without end and consequently as task forever recommenced. … [T]he inaccessible thought of the totality was for Jean Hyppolite the most repeatable thing in the extreme irregularity of experience. … He transformed the Hegelian theme of closure on to the consciousness of self into a theme of repetitive interrogation. (1971, p. 75)For although the interest in obtaining absolute knowledge is rejected in Hegel, it is also the case that Foucault saw a similar concern as underpinning modernist thought in general, in that all major Western systems of knowledge saw truth as a slow upward pilgrimage towards greater and greater knowledge or truth. Notwithstanding all this, certain aspects of Hegel—the interest in historicity, mediation, language, culture, and history—are retained while being adapted. He was no doubt also aware of a certain non-foundationalism suggested by Hegel especially concerning notions such as truth, knowledge, ethics, culture and community could be retained while avoiding Hegel’s overarching metaphysical system.6 Rather than Hegel’s system, then, it was the sense in which he conceptualises history teleologically and totalistically that is rejected. Foucault regarded Hegel’s philosophy as a closed system. Having studied with Hyppolite then, Foucault is very aware of how and in what senses his own philosophy departs from Hegel’s.
Rille Raaper:
So if Foucault rejected Hegel’s Absolute Idealism and his way of doing philosophy, what was his influence on Foucault’s approach to history?
Mark Olssen:
Foucault is concerned not just with Hegel, but with something much bigger. He wants to avoid totalising approaches because they are teleological and closed. He is concerned very directly in his early writings on literature and on history with a new way of writing history, a way that constitutes what has become very definitely a new paradigm or a word I like better, a new settlement for how we understand knowledge of the world, a settlement which is both beyond Aristotle, and also Newton and Descartes. At the same time, Foucault appreciates the many ways in which he is close to Hegel. One thing both thinkers agree upon is their rejection of representationalist
Rille Raaper:
In other words, history as we know it is always biased and surrounded by falsehoods. We could even see the bias from the ways in which World War II is taught in different countries. It is the case of winners writing the history. So it is a very intriguing approach to history that Foucault was promoting, and I can see why he received and still receives quite a lot of opposition from historians. But if it diverges from Hegel and Marx, what else goes on here in Foucault’s view of history? It cannot all come down to his opposition to empiricism and methodological focus on discourse?
Mark Olssen:
No, there is far more than simply an opposition to classical empiricism and phenomenology and his development of the concept of discourse.
Rille Raaper:
What does this mean in terms of his methodological approach, genealogy in particular? I know he described genealogy as being “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary”, operating “on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times” (Foucault, 1980b, p. 139). By working with a wide range of documentary evidence, he aimed to prove that humanity does not progress from “combat to combat” towards universal reciprocity but rather repeats its systems and mistakes (Foucault, 1980b, p. 151). I wonder if this is what you meant by interconnectedness
Mark Olssen:
Foucault’s genealogical empiricism was an empiricism of history and conflict where Foucault sought to chart histories based upon detailed archival investigations where he sought to avoid a dialectical account of historical change or of subsuming facts to an already established teleological system of the sort that Hegel developed. Foucault wanted a lesson from history which did not state it in advance but emerged as the outcome of history. In addition to this, he opposed the phenomenological view of the subject and consciousness as a foundation for history, preferring instead to give an account of the manner in which concepts rules, structures, and practices developed and changed over time. In this, while avoiding Hegel’s overall system, he invoked many of the elements with which he was concerned and he saw in Hegel many ideas from which he profited. Yet, Foucault was interested in describing the way fundamental ideas pertaining to a society changed and for this he invoked Nietzsche and Heidegger against Hegel.Foucault’s approach to history also introduces a new model of determination as it operates in the world and introduces complexity themes of non-linear determination, uncertainty, non-predictability, novelty, uniqueness, and chance (aléa) into the historical process. He also rejects the model of machine replacing it with that of power (pouvoir, puissance, possibilitié, autorités, capacité, énergie, faculté, faire fonctionner, faire marcher, force). This is not necessarily to replace the metaphor of machine in all cases, but to supplement the model of machine with another model, and to see power rather than mechanism as what is central and all pervasive. Foucault did not deny the existence of linear relations of causality but was also aware that in many instances they were inappropriate. This constitutes a view of power as ubiquitous, and as productive as well as constraining, making Foucault’s conception quite different from the Marxist tradition. Although he did not use the language of the quantum or post-quantum complexity theorist, nevertheless, in articles such as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (see Foucault, 1980b), in his major books (see Foucault, 1972, 1977b), and in some of the lectures in Dits et écrits (see Foucault, 1994a, 1994b), Foucault seeks to analyse different sorts of determination, characterised by non-linear relations, feedback loops, and chance. Notice that this approach to history is also holistic, both ontologically and methodologically. It is not holistic in Hegel’s or Marx’s sense, of course, in reducing everything to a single foundation, nor in the sense of the Romantics, in positing the whole to the exclusion of the parts, but it does assert an ontology of interdependence of part and whole, and is, centrally, non-reductionist as well. Foucault announces a view of history which seeks to account for elements of individuality, novelty, uniqueness and freedom from a platform of historical constitution. It is in fact a new model of order based upon contingent and non-contingent relations, and where everything affects and implicates everything else. He sought in other words to establish an alternative model of history which remains open to both present and future and incorporates differences and otherness rather than seeking to homogenise or reconcile them. In relation to developments in science, his approach has resonances with quantum and post-quantum developments, of Planck, Heisenberg, Schödinger, Bohr, and Prigogine. It also confronted the dominant modernist view of science and knowledge, premised on predictability and certainty, with ideas of non-predictability, chance (aléa), uncertainty, the unforeseen, and unforeseeable.
Rille Raaper:
You have written recently that Foucault developed much of this approach to history through his reading of literature. Can you say more on this?
Mark Olssen:
I wrote an extended review essay of Michel Foucault’s Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. Gary Gutting from Notre Dame asked me if I would do it. I also published a shorter version of this article as a book review in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (see Olssen, 2016). My central task was to illuminate Foucault’s core ontological and epistemological themes that developed in these early commentaries on literature and that were to inform the philosophical orientation of his social science investigations, including madness, psychiatry, medicine, the prison, sexuality, and the care of the self. The article suggests that Foucault’s early works on literature establish a thesis of philosophical materialism which articulates many of the themes of post-quantum complexity science as they affected the social and physical sciences in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
Rille Raaper:
This is very interesting. It also means that Foucault’s relationship with literature was highly strategic, helping him to distinguish discursive practices from non-discursive practices. Can we then say that Foucault was searching for a non-Hegelian conception of history, something that would help to reject totality? Was this in your view central to Foucault?
Mark Olssen:
What emerged from his readings of literature was
I know … our age, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or through Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel. … But to truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. (Foucault, 1972, p. 235)9This is a very interesting statement. In recent quantum and post-quantum complexity approaches to the social sciences, Hegel’s representation of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, as a general relational form of community, which stresses the
Whereas Hegel stresses that reason and history are one, Foucault seeks to write a history of madness; whereas Hegel seeks to guarantee historical continuity, through a dialectical process that links opposing and discontinuous terms, Foucault attempts to break with the various forms of historical continuity, and in particular the historical narrative. Whereas Hegel writes the history of the subject, Foucault focuses his “histories” on themes that reveal the precarious—or in any case the derivative—status of the subject. (1992, p. 58)
Rille Raaper:
Can we then say that Foucault’s desire to find an alternative model of history is actually about finding a new way to explain social reality?
Mark Olssen:
Whereas Hegel unifies subject and object in the Absolute Spirit via successive reconciliations, Foucault rejects the dialectic in favour of an ontology of differences, and of the ultimate irreconcilability of discourse and practice. Foucault most emphatically objected to the idea of dialectical progression as well as the equation of the real and the rational. At one important level Foucault took this as to mean that there was an equivalence between perfected thought, and scientific observation, and reality itself. In their different ways, this was the dream of rationalism, positivism, empiricism, and phenomenology. Did not all of these advocates declare that there was no distinction between thought and reality, between ideas or words and things? Did they not all, like Hegel, declare there to be no such world of ideas separate from reality, which required relating to reality? Hegel, along with many others, thought that discourse, ideas, thought, what have you, was all of a piece. Russell criticised the British Hegelians for this, referring to it as panlogicism. For Foucault, similarly, reality always needed interpreting, not so much by thought, which is very idealist, and subjective, but by discourses, which are themselves historically
Rille Raaper:
It clearly appears that it is the concept of discourse that reveals Foucault’s understanding of reality and truth. In your very recent review paper, you described Foucault’s work as constructivist (see Olssen, 2016). Correct me if I am wrong, but is not constructivism rooted in phenomenology and hermeneutics, shaped by the earlier works of Edmund Husserl on phenomenology as well as by German philosophers on hermeneutics. I suppose you understand why I am curious about your statement. Would you explain how does constructivism align with Foucault’s work on discourse? Can you elaborate on that?
Mark Olssen:
A great deal of confusion has developed over the concept of constructivism. Many writers, especially feminists like Butler (1990), Haraway (1991), and Barad (2007), have all criticised use of the concept. Barad (2007, pp. 32, 90, 134–137) uses the concept of “proto-performativity” rather than constructivism and claims that the latter elevates the linguistic or the discursive over the material. I think the argument is trivial and pedantic in most respects in that words can mean anything you like, as Alice said, in Wonderland. It has been also rather confusing. Initially I stopped using the word “constructionism” because of its association with idealistic ontologies, that is, that discourse constitutes the things of which it speaks. I intended constructivism to avoid such idealistic connotations by representing discourse as a way of organising or representing practices, by referring to its constructive aspect on the grounds that practices or world cannot be represented except through discourse. This is clearly more in the sense that Foucault intended it notwithstanding that some of his own phraseology contributed to the confusions in question.Clearly the problems that Barad identifies as being associated with constructivism are indeed problems, if indeed one commits the sins she associates with the concept, and likewise that Butler (1990, pp. 109–114) and others associate with the concept, but my use of the term constructivism does not commit any of these fallacies. In my use of the concept, constructivism does a number of things: firstly, pertaining to an epistemological sense, it refers to the discursive construction of meaning and it challenges the representationalist claim
Rille Raaper:
Can we consider Foucault as being constructivist also in terms of science and scientific knowledge?
Mark Olssen:
Yes, Foucault is also a constructivist as regards scientific knowledge. Again, this does not entail that Foucault believes that the world is constructed through discourse, or that empirical adequacy is not important, or relevant, to knowledge. I think that methods of cross-referencing or triangulation can provide some basis for epistemological warrantability. At the same time, it is no use trying to insist that empirical adequacy contradicts or counters constructivism, or that it constitutes evidence of realism. The issues at stake are far more complex. Foucault is not, also, denying the existence of a mind or discourse or human independent world, nor is he denying that human independent facts are important constraints on the development of knowledge. What he is denying is that our perspectives of the world, generated through language and discourse, constitute in any sense, a “mirror of nature”, in any simple or straightforward sense. Having said that, they are not straightforwardly either, mirrors of society or culture or power as wielded in history. Such views of constructivism are simply an oversimplification and generate simplistic confusions. As an epistemological issue, constructivism signals that discourse is not solely a vehicle for representing true knowledge, or reason, but contains also within the discursive framework of representation, various, let us say, non-epistemological factors—idols, ghosts, superstitions, ideologies, and distortions—that are carried along with it; that are generated within history, and which serve, in different ways, at different times, to distort, obfuscate, slant, warp, structure, or qualify, the epistemological returns of knowledge generation. In this sense, constructivism is a shaking free from Descartes dualist postulations about knowledge or science, mind and world. Science, of course, seeks to be systematic and objective, and sometimes it may be, but witness the many false starts, wrong turnings, reversals, setbacks, errors, and deceptive announcements.
Rille Raaper:
Isn’t this an unacceptable scepticism? Is there any way to distinguish the idols or superstitions that inextricably accompany knowledge in order to gain reliable knowledge, in an epistemological sense, or are we forever with Foucault stuck deep in a quagmire of relativism?
Mark Olssen:
Rille Raaper:
If Foucault agreed with the existence of an independent reality, should not we say that he was a realist rather than a constructivist? For example, Al-Amoudi (2007) argues that while Foucault uses a vocabulary that is different from critical realist vocabulary, he still promotes a similar understanding of reality as the realist, Roy Baskhar, would do. Al-Amoudi (2007) explains that Foucault promotes a relational conception of society, while recognising that people’s actions and social relations exist in two groups of mechanisms that are ontologically distinct: so-called strata of tactics/individuals and strategies/society. I wonder whether the two—critical realism and constructivism—are actually more alike than we usually think. What are your thoughts on it?
Mark Olssen:
Whereas the ontological fabric of reality is for the realist a matter of transparent discovery via a neutral method, for Foucault, discourse maintains an autonomous and constructive or dynamic relation to the world which means that it scars, it distorts, it conceals, and adds to or embellishes,
Rille Raaper:
To conclude our conversation, let’s explore Foucault’s legacy a little further, particularly his contribution to poststructuralist school of thought as we understand it today. You have argued that you would align Foucault with poststructuralism, particularly of materialist tradition (see Olssen, 2010, 2006a; Olssen, Codd, & O’Neill, 2004). It is obviously clear that Foucault (1997a, p. 131) described his work as situated “at the intersection of different currents and different problems”. He described those “currents” and “problems” as placed in phenomenology, Marxism and the history of sciences (1997a, p. 131). We also know that he tried to escape these dominant forces by studying Nietzsche, opposing Hegel and Marx, and aligning with thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski (Foucault, 2002a). Those scholars invited him to question “the category of the subject, its supremacy, its foundational function” (Foucault, 2002a, p. 247) and allowed him to develop the practice of desubjectivation: the process that Foucault described as “wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution” (2002a, 241). This view of the subject, as well as his approach to history and reality as discussed earlier, is something we often associate with poststructuralism. To summarise our conversation, can you reflect on Foucault’s role in poststructuralist school of thought? I mean, how did his readings shape his work and perhaps also his belonging to the new way of practising history, science and philosophy?
Mark Olssen:
It was through a very broad reading of literature in the library of the École Normale Supérieure that Foucault “deconstructed an order of discourse”. The editors of Foucault’s Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature (see Artièries et al., 2015), cite Daniel Defert (2001) who fills in some of the detail of Foucault’s engagement. We are told that Foucault read:
Saint-John Perse in 1950, Kafka in 1951, Bataille and Blanchot in 1953, followed by the progress of the nouveau roman (including the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet), discovered Raymond Roussel in the summer of 1957, the authors associated with Tel Quel (Philippe Sollers, Claude Ollier) in 1963, reread Becket in January 1968. (Artièries et al., 2015, p. VIII)
This chapter originally appeared as Raaper, R., & Olssen, M. (2017), In conversation with Mark Olssen: On Foucault with Marx and Hegel, Open Review of Educational Research, 4(1), 96–117, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2017.1334575. Reprinted here, with minor edits, with permission from the publisher.
Notes
1
Translated by Michael Scott Christofferson, the article is reproduced under the title of “The Great Rage of Facts”, in Zamora and Behrent (2016, pp. 170–175).
2
See, for instance, the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel says: “The truth is the whole”.
3
Hegel was impressed initially both by Rousseau’s ideas of democracy as well as his thesis concerning the disintegration of society under the force of economic and social developments.
4
See Plant (1973). Plant argues that in his An Enquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), Steuart develops a progressive, evolutionist approach to political economy. The thesis is included in Hegel’s early essay “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (1798–1800); see Hegel (1948).
5
See Hegel (1948). I am indebted to John E. Grumley for his excellent discussion of the importance of religion in Hegel’s early writings; see Grumley (1989).
6
The view that Hegel’s philosophy can be interpreted to represent truth and knowledge in distinctively non-foundationalist and non-metaphysical terms has been suggested by many thinkers, for instance, in recent decades, Hartmann (1972), Rose (1981), Houlgate (1986), Maker (1994), Sallis (1995), Hutchings (2003) to name but some.
7
Such a view is found in Leibniz for instance, in both: Leibniz (1898/1968, Sections 8, 10, 16, 56–58, 61); and Leibniz (1898/2009, Sections 1, 2, 4). The phrase “invincible solidity” is from Leibniz, cited in Stark (1943).
8
See, for instance, the early essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Nietzsche, 1997).
9
Foucault had earlier expressed this view in his eulogy to Hyppolite in French at the École Normale, published in 1969 in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale. See Canguilhem and Foucault (1969). The lecture was also presented at the Collège de France, 2 December 1970, and was appended, under the title “the discourse on language to the archaeology of knowledge”.
10
Epigenetics asserts that environment is crucial in switching genetic predispositions on or off; see Carey (2012).
11
Published in English as Death and the Labyrinth in 1986; see Foucault (1986).
References
Al-Amoudi, I. (2007). Redrawing Foucault’s social ontology. Organization, 14(4), 543–563. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508407078052
Olssen, M. (2003). Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: Assessing Foucault’s legacy. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 189–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043047
Olssen, M. (2006b). Foucault and the imperatives of education: Critique and self-creation in a non-foundational world. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 25, 245–271. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-006-0013-0
Olssen, M. (2016, March 28). Language, madness, and desire: On literature. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/language-madness-and-desire-on-literature/