Freundlieb - Foucault and The Study of Literature

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Foucault and the Study of Literature

Author(s): Dieter Freundlieb
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 301-344
Published by: Duke University Press
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Foucaultand the Study of Literature
Dieter Freundlieb
Humanities, Griffith
Abstract In this essay I investigate systematically how relevant parts of Fou-

cault's work might be brought to bear on issues in the study of literature. I
approach Foucault's intellectual career as one with four phases: (1) an early
archaeological phase, in which Foucault regarded literature as one of a num-
ber of "counter-discourses" partly associated with the experience of mad-
ness and opposed (as an "Other") to an all-encompassing Reason; (2) a later
archaeological phase, beginning in the late 1960s with the publication of
The Archaeologyof Knowledge, in which Foucault no longer saw literature as
a counter-discourse but, like the associated discipline of literary criticism, as
one of the many discourses governed by an anonymous set of rules; (3) a gene-
alogical phase, when Foucault turned from the analysis of the rules governing
discursive formations to the question of such formations as embodiments of
ubiquitous power relations concerned with the production and formation of
subjects; and (4) a phase in which Foucault returned to problems of self-
formation and subject agency and considered the possibility of an "aesthetics
of existence." In a separate section, between the discussions of phase (1) and
phase (2), I discuss Foucault's influential essay on authorship in relation to the
parameters of phase (2). Finally, in a brief concluding section, I summarize
my largely negative findings.
Introduction
While Michel Foucault had always shown a keen interest in literature,
even to the point of publishing a book-length study (Foucault 1963)
of the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), he never pro-
vided us with any detailed theoretical account of how the results of
his work might be applied to the study of literature. His influence
PoeticsToday16:2 (Summer 1995). Copyright ? 1995 by The Porter Institute for

Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50.

302 Poetics Today 16:2
on literary studies has been considerable nonetheless and is likely to

grow for some time to come. The literary-critical schools of the New
Historicism in the United States and its British counterpart Cultural
Materialism, as well as various German modes of Diskursanalyse,tes-
tify to a growing fascination among literary scholars with Foucault's
ideas.' In virtually all of these cases, however, there is a lack of system-
atic methodological attention to the question of how relevant parts of
Foucault's work can be appropriated for literary studies, either as cur-
rently conceived or in terms of its future practice.2 Such a systematic
investigation will be attempted here.
Much of the still-growing literature on Foucault is either exegetical,
and often adulatory, or highly critical, often dismissive despite little
effort to understand, in sufficient detail, Foucault's complex and fre-
quently confusing intellectual trajectories. This is no doubt an effect of
Foucault's provocative thought and his often overstated claims. But it
is also due to the fact that Foucault's work, contra some of his exegetes
(e.g., Deleuze 1986), does not constitute a single, coherent body of
thought. Foucault himself remarked on several occasions that he had
changed his mind about various aspects of the problems and issues
he had addressed in his writings and that this was perfectly normal
for any thinker. And even then he sometimes glossed over, or re-
mained silent about, some of the more radical shifts in his work. The
best analyses are therefore, it seems to me, those that, in a rather un-
Foucaldian way, trace his intellectual biography as a history of problem
solving, an approach that can account for the discontinuities in his
work without positing its incoherence, that is, without rendering its
various parts incommensurable.3 This does not mean, of course, that a
rational reconstruction of Foucault's thought as the pursuit of a series
of related intellectual problems and their possible solutions cannot
1. In his introduction to Ethos der Modeme: Foucaults Kritik der Aufkliirung, Axel
Honneth (1990) lists four areas on which the current discussion of Foucault's work
is centered. One of them is the potential relevance of his early work to aesthetics.
While this is no doubt one area in which his writings have influenced contempo-
rary debates, Honneth entirely overlooks (presumably because it lies outside of his
field of interests) the important role that Foucault's later work has been playing in
literary studies.
2. Clemens Kammler's (1990) "Historische Diskursanalyse (Michel Foucault)"
raises the issue of the applicability of Foucault's work to literary studies in a fairly
systematic way, but it is not very detailed and leaves room for further discussion. In
"Einleitung: Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft," Jurgen Fohrmann and
Harro Miiller (1988) discuss the relevance of discourse analysis to literary studies,
but they define "discourse analysis" much more broadly than Foucault did.
3. Prime examples of such work are Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1983
[1982]), Hinrich Fink-Eitel (1989), Rudi Visker (1991), and Urs Marti (1988). See
also the relevant chapters in Axel Honneth (1986: 113-224) and Jiirgen Habermas
(1987: 238-93).

Freundlieb ? Foucaultand Literature 303
come to the conclusion that he abandoned or otherwise left unresolved

many of the questions he had raised. But it can profitably recognize
the depth and complexity of his work without making it more uniform
than it is, praising it unduly, or dismissing it without having done it
justice.
The fact that Foucault's work was, during a considerable portion
of his intellectual life, concerned with a critique of the social sciences
should perhaps have cautioned those among today's literary scholars
who are now looking to Foucault in their attempts to develop new
ways of doing literary studies. What is more, since the interpretation
of texts, in one shape or another, is still considered the major activity
of literary critics and even informs the work of many who claim to
be inspired by Foucault, and since he often rejected, at least for his
own purposes, the idea of a hermeneutical approach to texts, the ap-
propriation of Foucault for or by literary studies should encounter a
number of problems. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that at a
more general level there is a considerable resemblance between his
work and that of literary critics, in the sense that his overall style of
thinking and argumentation, as well as his writing style, is quintessen-
in other words, the attraction that Foucault's
tially geisteswissenschaftlich;
work holds for many scholars lies not so much in the cogency of his
arguments and the empirical evidence on which they rely-in fact,
both are often rather scanty and shaky-but in the rhetorically skill-
ful, flamboyant, and highly metaphorical presentation of his ideas.
Paradoxically, in this sense, his critique of the human sciences relies
on a style of thinking and presentation characteristic of precisely these
sciences.4 This, in turn, has had the equally paradoxical result that his
work, like a body of literary texts, acts as a continual stimulation to
further scholarly exegesis, thus contributing to the maintenance of a
type of geisteswissenschaftlich and interpretative commentary which
was the target of at least some of Foucault's criticism.5
The style of Foucault's writing, however, raises another, perhaps
more important issue. It could be argued that to regard Foucault's
4. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as the far more sober style
of his last two books (volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality [Foucault 1986a,
1988e]), and the more analytical style of The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault
1972a). The intimate connection between the metaphorical language of literary
texts and the equally metaphorical style of literary criticism has been demonstrated
by Harald Fricke (1977).
5. In arguing that the best analyses of Foucault are those which try to reconstruct
his thought in terms of a history of attempts to solve certain intellectual prob-
lems, I am, at least implicitly, rejecting certain notions of intellectual history and
of authorship promoted by Foucault. Such analyses, however, do not (or should
not) entail the imitation of Foucault's writing style and terminology, and they are
not interpretive in a specifically literary sense.

work as engaged in a language game of serious philosophical argu-

mentation and theorization that needs an equally serious philosophical
and analytical reply is to miss the point of that work altogether. If so,
then critical responses such as those by Habermas (1987) and Hon-
neth (1986), for example, would be somewhat off the mark. This is
a matter of interpretation, but I am inclined to think that Foucault's
writing does indeed often display a nonphilosophical language that is
partly expressive and partly strategic in that while it reveals Foucault's
personality, particularly his literary and artistic affiliations with sur-
realism and other modernist and postmodernist movements, it also
seems deployed as a form of cultural critique that aims to persuade
but not necessarily via detailed argument and evidence. However, I
do not think that this makes a philosophical or even a slightly pedan-
tic critical analysis of his work unnecessary or beside the point. Both
Foucault himself and most of his followers have made important va-
lidity claims, in Habermas's sense, even if they have not conformed to
certain rules of argumentation customary in the analytic tradition of
philosophy. Indeed, the fact that writers such as Foucault often em-
ploy strategies of persuasion that resort to more subtle rhetorical and
literary means without refraining from making empirical and philo-
sophical validity claims warrants a careful analysis of the underlying
argumentative structure and its evidential basis.6
Now, what issues are pursued in Foucault's work that could be of
systematic interest and relevance to literary studies, and how are these
issues related to the various phases of his work? In answering this
6. What worries many of those who are sympathetic to Habermas's (and Apel's)
notion of communicative reason, which insists on the principle that arguments not
be accepted unless they conform to protocols of validation based on the regulative
idea of an ideal speech situation, is that poststructuralists such as Foucault and
Derrida often seem to use scholarly language and argumentation for purely stra-
tegic purposes rather than for participation in a communal and democratic effort
to reach consensus. Occasionally, this is even openly admitted, as when Derrida
(1985: 15), commenting on his allegedly often misunderstood phrase that there is
nothing outside the text (and similar statements), said it served a strategic function.
To Habermassians, such strategic uses of language must seem close to intellectual
dishonesty, while they are, of course, "rational" once questions of validity in argu-
mentation have been reduced to questions of power and politics. Foucault's writing
dis-
style (and that of other poststructuralists) has also given rise to interminable
putes over what Foucault really meant or what his position on various issues really
was. In my view, the question of the real Foucault, as opposed to, say, the American
or German version of him, does not much matter. The critique of the Foucault re-
constructed in my own analysis here would still be justified even if another side to
him were demonstrated because this Foucault has been so influential within liter-
Foucault's
ary studies and other disciplines of the humanities. Given the nature of
style and the shifts in his work, his real position is likely to remain an elusive
writing
interpretive ideal.

Freundlieb * Foucaultand Literature 305
double question we should perhaps bear in mind that there is a cer-

tain degree of uniformity to Foucault's work-and that it should not
be overlooked. Many Foucault scholars would now agree that he was
concerned throughout his career with questions regarding the forma-
tion of the subject and the relations between power and knowledge,
although neither of these issues was at the forefront of his investiga-
tions during his early archaeological phase. At this point in his career,
Foucault took the Nietzschean, psychoanalytic, and structuralist de-
centering of the subject more or less for granted (with an emphasis
on the Nietzschean7) and focused not so much on processes of sub-
jectivation as on the anonymous structures and subject positions that,
in Foucault's history of the human sciences, replaced the traditional
notion of the knowing and acting subject. In any case, the question
of the formation of the subject, which runs through almost all of his
writings, including his last work on technologies of the self, is only one
of the Foucaldian issues relevant to literary studies.
Here, I shall look at what can be regarded as four phases in Fou-
cault's intellectual career: First, an early archaeological phase, in
which Foucault regarded literature as one of a number of "counter-
discourses" partly associated with the experience of madness and op-
posed to the rigidities of an all-encompassing Reason-literature as an
"Other" of Reason; second, a later archaeological phase, beginning in
the late 1960s with the publication of The Archaeologyof Knowledge,in
which Foucault no longer regarded literature as a counter-discourse,
but, together with the associated discipline of literary criticism, as one
of the many discourses governed by anonymous sets of rules; third,
a genealogical phase, when Foucault turned from the analysis of the
rules governing discursive formations to the question of such forma-
tions as embodiments of ubiquitous power relations concerned with
the production and formation of subjects; and, finally, a fourth phase,
in which Foucault returned to problems of self-formation and subject
agency and considered the possibility of an "aesthetics of existence."
(Between my discussions of phase one and phase two, I will pause to
consider Foucault's influential essay on authorship, in which the con-
cept of the author is addressed from within the parameters of phase
two.) In this discussion, as well as in those on the four phases, I will
raise questions about how Foucault's views may be (or already have
been) applied to issues in literary studies.
7. In one of his late interviews, Foucault (1988c: 22-24) claimed that he had never
been a Freudian, a Marxist, or a structuralist and that the main influence on his
thinking about the subject in the 1960s was Nietzsche.

Literatureas Counter-Discourse
Foucault's early archaeological phase included his investigation of
madness, and this is certainly relevant to literary studies. Here, Fou-
cault was still working within a more or less realist epistemology, with
a type of experience that was innocent of discursive structures. Thus
Foucault's analyses of madness entail a belief in both the existence
of a pure (prediscursive) madness and an experience of this madness
that was still undistorted by the psychiatric sciences.8 While Foucault's
antirealist assumptions about the constituted nature of the objects of
the human sciences are well-known and clearly emphasized in much
of his later work, things are obviously somewhat more complicated in
his work on madness. He seems to argue that what we call "madness"
is not a natural kind and that we must reject histories of psychiatry
which are based on the assumption that madness was a preexisting
object, or set of objects, waiting to be discovered by a progressively
enlightened science. But he also seems to want to say that there was,
and can be, an experience of madness, by both those who are "mad"
and those who come into close contact with the "mad," that is prior
to the experience made possible by the development of psychology or
psychiatry. It is this "pure" madness as the "Other" of Reason which
Foucault initially hoped to restore to its rightful position. According
to Foucault, madness became alienated from itself the moment rea-
son and unreason were conceptually distinguished, a sundering that
occurred even before psychology got ahold of madness. So what psy-
chology encountered when it constituted itself as a science was, in a
way, an already alienated form of madness (Visker 1991: 37ff.).
Now the interesting point, from our perspective, is that Foucault
associated pure madness, whose tragic experience was sentenced to
silence by the conceptual separation of reason and unreason and by
the discourse of psychiatry, with a certain conception of language
and literature as "counter-discourse." What Foucault admired in such
writers as Holderlin, Nerval, Artaud, Blanchot, Bataille, and Roussel
was that their language could give us at least some, if only momentary,
access to the silenced truth of pure, tragic madness. It is in this con-
text that Foucault speaks of the "being" of language, which reemerges
in literature and which we need to recognize and learn to think. In
fact, as John Rajchman (1985: 9-41) has shown, in the 1960s Foucault
developed a "theory" of literature that purported to explain crucial
aspects of modernist culture and its return, following the "classical
age," to questions of language. As we will see, and as Rajchman makes
8. In this and in some of my other analyses of Foucault here, I am indebted to the

work of Rudi Visker (1991)-even where I depart from it.

clear, Foucault rejected what he had said in his earlier work about
literature and its conception of language. But in order to be system-
atic here, it is important to investigate, at least briefly, the possible
relevance of Foucault's early work on literature as "counter-discourse"
and "transgression" to literary studies, particularly since some writers
on Foucault still believe in its critical potential.9
Avant-garde literature was for Foucault self-reflexive language that
broke entirely with such traditional notions as "genre," "expression,"
"intention," "author," and so on. Neither expressing individual ex-
perience nor representing external objects and states of affairs, such
literature at its best exposes the limits of experience. It was through
this kind of literary language that Foucault hoped to regain access to
a fundamental thinking, a thinking from without (la pensee du dehors)
that could break with the traditional philosophy of consciousness and
the subject. According to Foucault's analysis in The Orderof Things, lit-
erature compensates for the "demotion of language to the mere status
of an object" (Foucault 1970: 296). In this compensatory process, lan-
guage is
reconstitutingitself elsewhere, in an independent form, difficultof access,
folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in refer-
ence to the pure act of writing.Literatureis the contestationof philology(of
which it is neverthelessthe twin figure):it leads language back from gram-
mar to the naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed,
imperious being of words. (Ibid.: 300)
Foucault concludes these deliberations on literature as a compensa-
tory return of a repressed language, a "being of words," as follows: "At
the moment when language, as spoken and scattered words, becomes
an object of knowledge, we see it reappearing in a strictly opposite
modality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness
of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocu-
tor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine
in the brightness of its being" (ibid.). For Foucault the real "being"
of language lies outside its representative function; if language at-
tempts to represent anything at all, it is the unrepresentable. This is
why Rajchman (1985: 17ff.), using Lyotard's terminology, connects it
with the idea of the sublime. It manifests itself in madness and finds
its "freedom" in what Foucault (1970: 383) called an "unsignifying
region."
9. See, e.g., Martina Meister (1990: 258). There is, of course, a long tradition in
aesthetics, going back to early Romanticism, of linking literary language with the
subversive, the particular, the nonconceptual, and the nonidentical on the basis
of the way it exploits the materiality of language, often to the extent of making
semantic closure and the determination of meaning impossible or at least very
difficult. But Foucault did not engage with this tradition in any detailed way.

Foucault's critique of conceptual-representational language is simi-

lar, in many respects, to the Nietzschean notion that all signification
or linguistic representation is a falsification of reality since it cannot
grasp the uniqueness of objects and events. It is a negation of dif-
ference in favor of identity.10 Literary language, however, can avoid
such an identifying function since even representational language may
contain remnants of a material mode of being that is nonrepresenta-
tional and nonrepresentable. Foucault argued that making language
an object of investigation and representation, as happened during the
"classical age," fails to capture the true being of language, which is
essentially unrepresentable. As Matthias Rub (1990) has emphasized,
Foucault's conception of language was closely tied to his critique of the
autonomous subject, a subject who attempts to annihilate difference
by reducing what is "other" to what can be known and thereby assimi-
lated to the self. An essential part of Foucault's conception of language
in his writings of the sixties, therefore, was his rejection of the idea
that subjects are in control of language, which, in the case of literature,
led to his well-known critique of the figure of the author.
Apart from a possible link with Heidegger, as far as the primacy of
language over the subject is concerned, there is an interesting analogy
between Foucault's defense of the unrepresentable and Adorno's
(1966) notion of the nonidentical, both of which are better preserved
through the mimetic processes of art than through conceptual rep-
resentation. But whereas Heidegger's influence on Foucault is a well-
known fact, confirmed by Foucault himself, there is no evidence of
Adorno's direct influence on him. Still, the analogy is there, and Fou-
cault's defense of the unrepresentable engendered a similar problem
as that faced by Adorno, namely, how the nonconceptual and unrep-
resentable can become an object of (conceptual) knowledge without
being distorted in the process. Even if art itself could somehow solve
10. In reviewing Gilles Deleuze's Differenceet repetitionand Logiquedu sens,Foucault
(1977b: 186) said, "The most tenacious subjectionof difference is undoubtedly that
maintained by categories. By showing the number of different ways in which being
can express itself, by specifying its forms of attribution, by imposing in a certain
way the distribution of existing things, categories create a condition where being
maintains its undifferentiated repose at the highest level. Categories organize the
play of affirmations and negations, establish the legitimacy of resemblances within
representation, and guarantee the objectivityand operation of concepts. They sup-
press the anarchy of difference, divide differences into zones, delimit their rights,
and prescribe their task of specification with respect to individual beings. On one
side, they can be understood as the a priori forms of knowledge, but, on the other,
they appear as an archaic morality, the ancient decalogue that the identical im-
posed upon difference. Difference can only be liberated through the invention
of an acategorical thought." (The review was originally published in Critique282
[1970]: 885-908.)

the problem of evoking an experience of an "Other" by means of the

aesthetic and phonetic rather than the conceptual resources of lan-
guage, the moment this capability of art became theorized it would
no longer be possible to sidestep the problem of a conceptual repre-
sentation of the allegedly unrepresentable, which would require an
aestheticization of theory itself. While Adorno (1970) had a very clear
conception of this dilemma and indeed devoted most of his intellec-
tual energies to its solution, Foucault's writings from this period are
much less philosophically self-conscious in that respect. In any case,
his attempt to recuperate what he saw as the original experience of
madness by lending it a voice and speaking in its name in Madnessand
Civilization (Foucault 1967) and, to some extent, in his writings on lit-
erature was ultimately unsuccessful.1l As Derrida (1978) pointed out
in his critique of Foucault, one cannot legitimately use a discourse of
reason in praise of unreason or rely on a knowledge of what madness
truly is while claiming that knowledge itself is what represses the truth
of madness. Perhaps the highly literary, even poetic, style Foucault
used when he wrote about both madness and literature is a manifes-
tation of the need he felt to escape the pragmatic self-contradiction
underlying a reasoned critique of reason. But this was no solution to
the problem. Let me return, then, to the question of the relevance
of Foucault's early writings on literature to literary studies in gen-
eral, a relevance which cannot consist in the mere fact that he himself
frequently used poetic language.
Foucault's claims about literature as counter-discourse and trans-
gression seem to have been based on a notion of literature that was
at once too vague and too specific. What I mean is that while one
can recognize the Heideggerian (and Mallarmean) overtones of his
notion of the being of language, what he said about this being and its
links to the unrepresentable and the unthought is too vague and too
little developed to be of much help even within the limited field of
an aesthetics of literature, let alone in literary studies more generally.
As already noted, the situation with respect to Adorno's notion of the
11. David Carroll has argued that the critical force of Foucault's enterprise has, or
was meant to have, virtually the same subversive power that he attributed to litera-
ture as counter-discourse. In "A Preface to Transgression," Foucault (1977a: 39)
suggested that "our task for today is to direct our attention to this nondiscursive
language, this language which, for almost two centuries, has stubbornly maintained
its disruptive existence in our culture." But, as Carroll (1982) observes, Foucault's
alignment with the allegedly disruptive power of the nondiscursive language of
literature in order to avoid being implicated in the power/knowledge network he
claimed to have identified everywhere else was an evasion of the critic's responsi-
bility to confront the issues at the level of conceptual, argumentative analysis (see
also Carroll 1987: 107-29).

nonidentical is quite different.12 While the problems of Adorno's aes-

thetics may not be resolvable within the conceptual framework of his
theory, Adorno's relevance to and actual influence on literary studies
rests on the fact that the idea of the nonidentical is at the center of an
elaborate and sophisticated philosophical theory.13 In the case of the
early Foucault, on the one hand we have only a fairly small number of
analyses, which simply cannot compare with the detail and complexity
of Adorno's theoretical work on aesthetics; on the other hand, we have
a concept of literature that is too specific, in that it illegitimately gen-
eralizes from the self-reflexive work of certain surrealist and modern-
ist writers or those who suffered from mental illness (e.g., Holderlin
and Nietzsche) to a much broader notion of literature.'4 The charge
of overgeneralizing from a specific aesthetic practice to literature in
general, however, can also be brought against Adorno.
All this explains, I believe, why Foucault's conception of literature
as counter-discourse did not, and probably will not, have a major im-
pact on literary studies.15 Foucault himself eventually abandoned his
early views on literature, but before we take a look at this change of
mind I would like to comment on Foucault's (1977c) essay "What Is an
Author?" which was first published in 1969 and has had a consider-
able impact on literary and film criticism, at least in some quarters
(see, e.g., Caughie 1981).
What Is an Author?
At this time, Foucault obviously still believed that language had taken
the place of the autonomous subject and that the relationship between
an author and his or her text was both tenuous and uninteresting,
except as an object of discursive analysis. Who speaks did not matter
12. The difference as well as the similarities between Heidegger's Sein and
Adorno's Nichtidentischehave been perceptively analyzed by Hauke Brunk-
horst (1989).
13. For some very interesting attempts to save Adorno'saesthetics by transcending
the limits of his conceptual framework, see Albrecht Wellmer (1985, 1988, 1991).
14. This point is also made by Peter Burger (1988) in his highly critical "Die
Wiederkehr der Analogie: Asthetik als Fluchtpunkt in Foucaults 'Die Ordnung
der Dinge.'" Burger interprets Foucault'scomparison of the return of language in
the postclassical age to the Renaissance conception of the cosmos as writing and a
network of analogical relations in which the difference between signs and objects
disappears as Foucault'sidealist longing for an end to the subject/objectdichotomy.
However, this interpretation is difficult to reconcile with what Foucault said about
the void that the being of language encounters.
15. Claims concerning the inherently subversive nature of all literary language
have, of course, been made by a number of critics (e.g., Paul de Man and Julia
Kristeva). But it is now generally recognized that this is at most true of only some
kinds of literary texts. And even then, the political efficacy of such subversiveness
has often been exaggerated.

to Foucault because what always really speaks is language itself. But

what is interesting in our context is the shift from the idea of literature
as counter-discourse to the discursive analysis of a central concept in
literary studies, including literary history. Here Foucault is no longer
concerned with the literary text as such, but with the ways in which
"the literary," or "authored," text is constituted through the discourse
of literary criticism and its so-called author function.
With this programmatic essay, Foucault was announcing (to the Col-
lege de France, where "What Is an Author?" was read in February
1969) a research program that he never really carried out. Admitting
a lack of any ready-made answers, he claims only to be raising some
questions and indicating some ways of pursuing them. He takes his de-
parture from the observation that in recent writing the author figure
has more or less disappeared and that both philosophy and criticism
have posited this figure's disappearance as the origin and expressive
agency of texts. (Here we have another Foucaldian overgeneralization
in which a specific development of self-reflexive modernist literature
and criticism, particularly the French nouveau roman and nouvelle cri-
tique, is taken to be the model for all contemporary literary practice
and thought about literature.) At the same time, Foucault warns that
many of the characteristics previously attributed to the author figure
are now being attributed to texts, so the author figure has not yet really
been abolished.
For Foucault, the disappearance of the author was then still asso-
ciated with the emergence of a new episteme,a way of thinking that was
radically different from all previous ones. Perhaps in order to help
usher in this new era, Foucault here proposed that all prior concep-
tions of the author and authorship be subjected to discourse analy-
sis. Nevertheless, his proposal offered no uniform methodology, but
merely combined, in a rather nontechnical way, questions about the
semantics of proper names, as they had been addressed by philoso-
phers of language such as John Searle (whose name he mentions),
with a historical review of concepts of authorship and its function in
the discourse of literary history and criticism, as well as in such areas
as the history of mathematics and the natural sciences.
"What Is an Author?" attempts to problematize a whole cluster of
concepts entailed by the conventional notion of authorship, including
the concept of ceuvreand the idea that texts contain hidden meanings.
Thus Foucault tries to cast some doubt on the usefulness of the con-
cept of oeuvre by emphasizing the difficulty of determining exactly
what, amongst all the written material produced by a writer, is to be
included in his or her oeuvre. Foucault claims that we have no theory
of what constitutes the unity of "the work," a point that can be readily
conceded. But, to take one of Foucault's examples, the question of

whether to consider "a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an

address, or a laundry bill" (Foucault 1977c: 118) contained in a note-
book of aphorisms as part of an author's work is hardly exciting. Most
scholars would probably say that such information is potentially rele-
vant for biographical reasons, but hardly anyone would argue that
it is part of an author's oeuvre, if what we mean by that is creative
and/or scholarly work. Foucault's point is therefore not very convinc-
ing because, while most concepts have fuzzy edges, that by no means
precludes their theoretical usefulness in those areas where border dis-
putes do not arise. All of the questions that Foucault raises with regard
to the problem of demarcation could be raised, and probably with
much more justification, about the concepts he wants to introduce as
substitutes for the traditional ones. The question of how to determine
where one discourse ends and another begins, for example, is far more
difficult, and far from resolved, in Foucault's own work.
More interesting and better supported claims are made when he
looks at how we use the names of (famous) authors, such as the met-
onymic use of "Shakespeare" or "Dickens" in constructions like "Have
you read any Dickens recently?" (meaning "Have you read any of
Dickens's novels recently?"). Names of authors can indeed stand for
their whole work. They have, as Foucault says, a classificatory func-
tion. He also points out, quite correctly, that the use of an author's
name to refer to his or her writings as a whole is an indication of the
privileged status these writings are accorded in the discourse that uses
such names and of their being differently read or received than other
writings. Works that are customarily associated in this way with the
name of an author are those that form the "canon." The names of
authors, and the concept of authorship itself, are reserved for specific
discourses which are often, but not necessarily, literary.
There is, of course, nothing terribly exciting about these observa-
tions. What makes Foucault's analyses of existing conceptual frame-
works stand out from others is his rigidly nominalistic approach. In
much of his work, he emphasized that since everything is historical,
everything could, at least in principle, be different.16 This often meant
that Foucault would entirely ignore the reasoning processes that had
led to the development of conceptual configurations, such as those he
16. A small but striking example of this nominalism is the use Foucault (1970:
xv) made of Borges's (fictional) example of a Chinese encyclopedia and its (to us,
totally confusing) classification of animals. What Foucault seems to have ignored is
that cross-cultural research in cognitive psychology indicates such classifications,
while logically possible, to be empirically impossible, in that there are universal prin-
ciples of human classification which simply do not produce them under normal
circumstances. (On the idea that everything made by humans is historical and can
therefore be unmade, see, e.g., Foucault 1988c: 36ff.)

associated with traditional teleological historiography or mainstream

literary criticism.17 In putting those concepts in question, Foucault
would often achieve a certain persuasive effect through two strate-
gies: the first being the one I just referred to, that is, ignoring the
reasoning behind the development of theoretical concepts, while the
second involved a certain critical radicalism of particular appeal to
many scholars in the humanities, given their frustration over their
field's relative loss of cultural prestige. Ironically, however, Foucault's
radicalism would sometimes give way to a peculiar kind of positivism
content to register, for example, the notion of authorship and its func-
tion in a certain discourse as part of the cultural practice of privileging
literary and certain other kinds of texts, without addressing the ques-
tion of how and on what grounds such a privileging might or might
not be justified.
In any case, "What Is an Author?" elaborates on what Foucault be-
lieved to be the four most important aspects of the so-called author
function. The first one concerns the fact that at a certain point in his-
tory an author's writings began to be legally treated as his property.
In other words, Foucault is taking up the introduction of copyright
legislation. This is no doubt a very interesting field of study in intellec-
tual history, but unfortunately Foucault has little to say about it here,
except to suggest that copyright may be a kind of compensation for
the risks of transgression a writer faces.
The second aspect of the author function has to do with the fact
that it operates only in relation to certain kinds of texts and that ex-
tant "authorless" texts can actually become"authored." This is a some-
what roundabout way of making the point that what counts as literary
or is similarly privileged by a society varies historically and cultur-
ally. Thus conceptions of what is poetic changed dramatically from
the Neoclassical to the Romantic period. Again, an interesting topic
and one worth exploring, but there are at least two problems with
Foucault's approach to it here. The first is that his description of cer-
tain assumptions about literary texts and their cultural relevance that
are built into many contemporary forms of literary criticism, such as
the assumption that literary texts are manifestations of an underlying
aesthetic creativity, seems intended as a critique, but Foucault does
17. In the preface to The Order of Things Foucault (1970: xxii) says, "What I am
attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the epistemein which knowl-
edge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to
its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which
is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possi-
bility." For a critique of Foucault's neglect of the reasoning processes in the history
of science, see my essay "Foucault's Theory of Discourse and Human Agency"
(Freundlieb 1994).

not specify exactly what is wrong with those assumptions. The sec-
ond problem is that Foucault never asks whether this culturally and
historically variable "construction" of the author figure might have
something to do with the different kinds of texts that have been pro-
duced at different times and in different cultures. Literary critics who
have been influenced by Foucault and are interested in reversing our
culture's privileging of literary texts in the past likewise tend to ignore
this question when they assume that, simply because the contemporary
concept of authorship (which still owes a great deal to Romantic poet-
ics and its notion of the creative genius) is historically specific rather
than universal, the cultural privileging of literature must be ideologi-
cal. Literary creativity is then seen as another ideological construct
that has little or nothing to do with real writing processes (insofar as
the reality of such processes is even admitted, given the constructivist,
idealist premises of Foucault's analyses). What gets overlooked in this
argument is that there may indeed have been significant differences in
the literary practice of, say, Romantics such as Wordsworth or Nova-
lis, on the one hand, and the producers of medieval romances, on the
other-differences that could well be reflected in historically different
notions of authorship.
The third important aspect of the author function, according to
Foucault, is that our concept of the author figure is not derived from
our knowledge of real writers and their activities, but rather is con-
structed from certain established exegetical practices of textual
analysis, a construction whereby authors, through a psychological pro-
jection of textual properties onto persons, are identified with the at-
tributes of texts. The rules for constructing authors are again said
to be culturally and historically variable. In particular, Foucault ar-
gues that the notion of the author plays an important explanatory role
when it comes to questions of textual unity, internal inconsistencies,
stylistic uniformity or variation, differences between early and late
works, comparative degrees of artistic or moral achievement among
texts, and so on. Foucault is, of course, quite right about this explana-
tory role of the concept of the author, but again a question arises as to
the criteria that would make his account noteworthy. What Foucault
describes as a mere construction is based, it seems, on perfectly nor-
mal assumptions about how the human mind works: namely, that the
production of texts is usually governed by a certain logic and by rules
of consistency and coherence, that it is empirically possible to iden-
tify personal styles of writing, that writers often change their minds
about the questions and problems they address as they grow older,
and so forth. To be sure, such assumptions may turn out to be unjus-
tified, either generally or in specific cases, and it is certainly possible
for a writer to deliberately flout all the rules of consistency and co-
herence; but the special effects thus achieved by writers would not be

possible if adherence to these rules were not the norm from which
their writings could be seen as deviations. By describing the assump-
tions underlying our dealings with literary texts as he does, that is,
by deliberately making them seem strange, Foucault achieves a cer-
tain critical effect. But again, only by having actually provided some
evidence that these hitherto well-established and widespread assump-
tions were wrong would he have stood a chance of convincing his more
skeptical readers to abandon the conceptual framework within which
questions of authorship are currently addressed.
Foucault notes that different kinds of "authorship" are "con-
structed," depending on whether the subject is a philosopher, say, or
an eighteenth-century novelist. Again, this is hardly surprising, for
what could be a more natural or obvious thing to do? The texts pro-
duced by such writers are very different indeed, and it is theoretically
fruitful to ensure that these differences are reflected in the respective
concepts of authorship we attribute to them. Such differences acquire
an air of arbitrariness only in terms of an antirealist epistemology
that would negate the effect of external objects on our conceptual-
izations of them. In part, questions about the relationship between
author and text are simply a matter of what we are interested in rather
than anything to do with epistemology or the "construction" of con-
cepts. Whether we want to explain certain aspects of a literary text,
for example, in terms of its author's life depends on what we want
to know. Many would argue that such questions are unimportant or
irrelevant and that they should not be pursued, given our limited re-
sources. But this raises another vexed question: Who is to determine
which questions are worth pursuing and which ones are not?
One point that is particularly worth mentioning in the context of
Foucault's discussion of the author function is how perfectly obvious it
is when he looks back and comments on his own work and intellectual
biography, such as in his interviews, that he is operating under exactly
the same assumptions that he criticizes as conventional constructions
in "What Is an Author?" For example, he has explained the thematic
and theoretical changes in his own work as the result of greater insight
into the subject matter he had been pursuing over a long period, thus
applying the "author function" in an exegesis of his writings and their
interrelations. Likewise, none of his own exegetes has ever, as far as I
can see, treated Foucault's work within the framework of an archaeo-
logical analysis, in spite of expressing an occasional awareness of the
irony of "interpreting" Foucault's "ceuvre." What this indicates is that
there may be little to say in favor of some of Foucault's statements
about authorship.'8
18. One need not go as far as Marcel Gauchet, the recently appointed (1990)
director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, did in an interview

The fourth important aspect of the author function, for Foucault,

relates to the fact that texts usually contain so-called shifters, that is,
personal pronouns and deictics that refer to the author of the text.
Foucault claims here that these shifters function differently in "au-
thored" versus "non-authored" texts. From the example Foucault dis-
cusses-the first-person novel-it is obvious that what he has in mind
here is the difference between fictional and nonfictional discourse and
the different roles of narrators, implied authors, and real authors. But
there are innumerable fictional texts in which these distinctions make
perfect sense despite their not being "authored" in Foucault's sense of
playing a privileged role in society. What he seems to be suggesting,
rather, is that authored texts operate with different "egos" in different
roles and that all texts establish subject positions, as opposed to being
expressions of the mind of a subject.
In spite of Foucault's general hostility to the idea of the creative
author at the time when he wrote "What Is an Author?" he does admit
that new discursive practices are occasionally initiated by an individual
writer. Citing Freud and Marx as examples, he points out the differ-
ences, as he sees them, between the way we treat the work of such
initiators and that of scientists or mathematicians. These differences
obviously have to do with the fact (though Foucault does not him-
self use these terms) that Marxism and psychoanalysis are doctrinal
bodies of knowledge rather than falsifiable scientific theories which
may once have been viewed as important discoveries, but are now
of interest only to the historian of science and not to the practicing
scientist. In the case of doctrinal bodies of knowledge, current prac-
titioners will always, from time to time, return to the original texts
as still unexhausted sources of wisdom. Again, these are interesting
observations about our attitudes toward certain kinds of texts and
their writers/authors, but as Foucault himself admits, none of his ob-
servations is worked out in much detail. More importantly, perhaps,
nothing he says is so well-established as to warrant a total rejection of
the conceptual framework he criticizes and would like to see replaced.
While there may well be good reasons for rejecting an inflated notion
of artistic creativity and originality, it certainly does not follow from
what Foucault says here that "the subject (and its substitutes) must be
stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable
function of discourse" (Foucault 1977c: 138). If writers can initiate
with Karin Westerwelle when he spoke of the "enormous stupidity" of Foucault's

essay on authorship (Gauchet and Westerwelle 1990: 674). Gauchet went on to
say that Foucault had nothing new to offer, philosophically, that his theory of the
microprocesses of power was nothing but a complicated remake of a functional-
ist sociology, and that he had been intellectually dishonest. Only the richness of
Foucault's historical material drew praise from Gauchet.

new discourses, as Foucault himself has argued, at least some authors

must be morethan a "function of discourse," which means that at least
occasionally the rhetorical (Beckettian) question "What matter who's
speaking?" is far too dismissive.
FromCounter-Discourseto an Archaeology of Knowledge
By the time Foucault developed his analysis of discursive formations,
particularly in The Archaeologyof Knowledge(the original French ver-
sion of which appeared in 1969, the same year he presented "What
Is an Author?"), he had clearly abandoned the idea of literature as
counter-discourse. By then, he had recognized the concept of litera-
ture itself as historically variable and, like that of the author, as playing
a specific role in the discourse of literary studies. Six years later, in an
interview with Roger-Pol Droit on the functions of literature, he gave
this answer to Droit's question about how to distinguish between good
and bad literature:
That is precisely the question that will have to be confronted one day. On
the one hand, we shall have to ask ourselveswhat exactlyis this activitythat
consistsin circulatingfiction,poems, stories ... in a society.We should also
analyzea second operation:amongall the narratives,why is it that some are
sacralized, made to function as "literature"?They are immediatelytaken
up with an institution that was originallyvery different: the universityin-
stitution. Now it is beginning to be identified with the literaryinstitution.
(Foucault1988d: 308)
When asked whether there are any criteria internal to literary texts
that account for the sacralization they have received, or whether it is
the university itself which constructs those criteria, he replied:
I don't know. I would simplylike to say this: in order to break with a num-
ber of myths, including that of the expressivecharacterof literature,it has
been very importantto pose this great principlethat literatureis concerned
only with itself. If it is concernedwith its author,it is so rather in terms of
the death, silence, disappearanceeven of the person writing. (Ibid.: 309)
Foucault was not content with the idea of literature as concerned
only with itself, however, because this principle would by no means
prevent its sacralization. In fact, by attributing self-referentiality to
literature, he claimed, one runs the risk of promoting such a sacral-
ization. He had also recognized that the "intransitivity" of literature
implied a depoliticization as well, which led him to make the following
statement:
Some people were even able to say that literature in itself was so eman-
cipated from all determinationsthat the very fact of writing was in itself
subversive,that the writer, in the very gesture of writing, had an inalien-
able right to subversion!The writerwas, therefore,a revolutionaryand the
more writing was writing, the more it sank into intransitivity,the more it

produced, by that very fact, the movementof revolution!As you know,such

things were, unfortunately,said. (Ibid.: 309-10)
Foucault seems to have forgotten that his own earlier conception of
literature as transgression had led him to say similar things himself.
But in any case, what he is interested in here is the question of "how it
comes about that a culture decided to give [literature] this very special,
very strange position" (ibid.: 310). What Foucault is saying here makes
sense only if we look at it from the point of view that he had already
recommended in The Orderof Things when he discussed ethnology as a
counter-science. By assuming the position of an ethnologist of our own
culture, he would make our privileging of literature appear strange
and alien when, to most of us, it seems perfectly "natural." Part of
his rather positivist stance of the neutral observer involves remaining
entirely noncommittal with regard to the truth or knowledge claims
of either literary texts themselves or the commentaries on them in lit-
erary criticism. Whether literature is regarded as culturally important
because our reading of it is part of the general process of cultural
reproduction and the passing on of traditional values and practical
knowledge, or whether it is accorded a subversive status within this
process, did not really matter much to Foucault at this point because
he wanted to avoid any normative engagement of his own with this
process. In the Droit interview, he claims that literature is valued by
the university institution for its subversive status:
Our culture accordsliteraturea place that in a sense is extraordinarilylim-
ited: how many people read literature?What place does it really have in
the general expansion of discourses?
But this same cultureforcesall its children,as they movetowardsculture,
to pass through a whole ideology, a whole ideology of literature during
their studies. There is a kind of paradoxhere.
And it is not unconnected with the declarationthat literature is sub-
versive. The fact that someone declares it to be so, in this or that literary
review, is of no importanceand has no effect. But if at the same moment
the entire teaching profession, from primaryschool teachers to heads of
universitydepartments,tell you, explicitlyor not, that if you are to find the
great decisions of a culture, the points at which it changes direction, then
you must turn to Diderot [or] Sade, or Hegel, or Rabelais-and you'll find
it all there. At this level, there is an effect of mutual reinforcement.The
so-called avant-gardegroups and the universityteachersare in agreement.
This has led to a very heavy politicalblocage. (Ibid.)
In order to find out what literature is, Foucault suggests, we should not
look for the internal structures of literary texts, but look at how these
texts acquire the status of literature. And, somewhat surprisingly, he
ignores the fact that during most of its history, literary criticism, par-
ticularly in its educational applications, has treated literature not as a

subversive force, but as a treasure-house of cultural wisdom. In any

case, he at least implicitly rejects both the realist assumption that texts
regarded as literary by a culture might have intrinsic qualities about
which one could make true or false statements and the hermeneutical
insistence that we take the moral or cognitive claims of literary texts
seriously and respond to them at a normative level. His position is
virtually that of a value-neutral external observer who describes the
"sacralization" of literature and its implications. Of course, as we all
know, Foucault never really abandoned the role of cultural critic, a
role which became more obvious as he shifted from "archaeology" to
"genealogy." The subversive function of literature now rests with the
Foucaldian critic of literary studies, but in a way that allows him or
her to avoid the language game of systematic moral or ethical argu-
mentation, a fact which has led many of Foucault's critics, quite rightly
I believe, to accuse him of having failed to provide a normative basis
for his critique.
To return to the question of the literary text, however, where do
Foucault's observations about the institutional sacralization of litera-
ture leave literary texts? It is fairly obvious that while they are no
longer regarded as a major site where a transgression of discursive
and other rules takes place-for the subversive nature of literature
has turned from an intrinsic quality of texts into a (questionable) attri-
bution of subversion at the metalevel of literary criticism-they still do
not constitute a specific discourse in their own right. Foucault treated
discourses as the primary sites for the social production of knowl-
edge and truth. But in his scheme of things the writing of such texts
does not constitute an activity in one of the human sciences, or in
any other science for that matter. Given their rather indirect claims
to truth, literary texts do not seem to fit easily into the parameters
of discourse analysis. While no doubt making use of culturally shared
and sometimes even quite specialized bodies of knowledge, they do so
eclectically, and they do not make knowledge claims in the same way
that such claims are made in the discourses from which they may have
taken certain elements.
Nevertheless, it would be possible, of course, within literary criti-
cism and literary history, to use the Foucaldian ontological and meth-
odological framework of discourse analysis in order to trace discur-
sive elements that traverse literary texts of various kinds at different
times. Foucault himself anticipated such an application to painting
when, toward the end of The Archaeologyof Knowledge,he said that an
archaeological analysis of painting would
try to discover whether space, distance, depth, colour, light, proportions,
volumes, and contours were not, at the period in question, considered,
named, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and

whether the knowledge that this discursivepractice gives rise to was not
embodied perhaps in theories and speculations,in forms of teaching and
codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very
gesture of the painter. (Foucault1972a: 193-94)
Similar things could, of course, be said about literature, but the ex-
ample shows that a discursive or archaeological analysis would always
be directed at more than just the practice of painting or literature.
It would inevitably contextualize the literary text in terms of its re-
lation to other genuinely knowledge-producing discourses and their
histories, leaving the status of the literary text somewhat uncertain
and untheorized. An archaeological analysis of literature thus would
not be particularly satisfactory for at least two reasons. First, it would
more or less reduce literature to a subsidiary, or some sort of reflec-
tion, of the real processes of knowledge production within genuine
discourses. As long as literature lacked the status of a discourse, its
role in the historical development of a culture would remain unclear
within an archaeological framework. Second, and more importantly,
any application of Foucault's archaeological analysis would be saddled
with all the problems that are intrinsic to this approach. Since Fou-
cault's archaeology continues to have a considerable influence on liter-
ary studies, it seems appropriate to discuss at least some of its inherent
problems.
Two problem areas must be addressed here. The first has to do with
the new kinds of theoretical entities that Foucault introduced to re-
place the old familiar ones. In other words, we need to ask whether
Foucault developed a well-defined set of objects, together with their
interactions and modifications, that can be investigated in a theoreti-
cally fruitful way. The second problem area involves the epistemologi-
cal assumptions underlying Foucault's theory of discourses. But before
we tackle'these problems, some comment on Foucault's analysis of the
human sciences at the end of The Orderof Things is needed.
Foucault's archaeological project can be seen as a response to prob-
lems arising from his earlier attempt to identify epistemes as the his-
torical a prioris of thought governing long historical periods and as
a continuation of his attempt to develop a method of analysis that
could avoid what he saw as the inevitable disintegration of the human
sciences. According to Foucault, these sciences are ultimately impos-
sible because their objective is the complete self-transparency of man,
which they try to achieve by turning the conditionsof the possibilityof
empirical knowledge into objectsof empirical knowledge. The human
sciences are made possible, Foucault believed, by the fact that human
beings can form representations of their own lives. This has two con-
sequences, one of which is that since the human sciences not only
have representations as their object of investigation, but move entirely

within the sphere of representations, they "have been unable to find a

way around the primacy of representation" (Foucault 1970: 363). The
other consequence, as already noted, is that they
find themselves treating as their object what is in fact their condition of
possibility.They are alwaysanimated,therefore,by a sort of transcendental
mobility.They never cease to exercise a criticalexaminationof themselves.
They proceed from that which is given to representationto that which
renders representationpossible, but which is still representation.So that,
unlike other sciences, they seek not so much to generalize themselves or
make themselvesmore preciseas to be constantlydemystifyingthemselves:
to make the transitionfrom an immediateand non-controlledevidence to
less transparentbut more fundamentalforms. This quasi-transcendental
process is alwaysgiven in the form of an unveiling .... On the horizon
of any human science, there is the projectof bringing man'sconsciousness
back to its real conditions, of restoring it to the contents and forms that
brought it into being, and elude us withinit; this is why the problemof the
unconscious-its possibility,status,mode of existence, the means of know-
ing it and bringing it to light-is not simplya problemwithin the human
sciences which they can be thought of as encounteringby chance in their
steps; it is a problemthat is ultimatelycoextensivewith their very existence.
A transcendentalraisingof level that is, on the other side, an unveiling of
the non-consciousis constitutiveof all the sciencesof man. (Ibid.: 364)
This lengthy quotation may help to clarify somewhat Foucault's con-
ception of the human sciences, which is, on the whole, made far from
clear by the rather tortuous discussion at the end of The Order of
Things. The particular shape of the human sciences was determined,
for Foucault, by an underlying episteme, and here, as in his later,
more specifically archaeological discourse analyses, he describes vari-
ous epistemes without treating their normative claims. Claiming that
the human sciences are neither real sciences nor mere ideologies, he
argues that they should not be subject to either scientific standards
or those of a critique of ideology. As we can see, Foucault cannot be
entirely value-neutral in making this assessment of the status of the
human sciences, but he does try to remain fairly neutral by suggest-
ing that the standards to which "knowledges" are held should be their
own, that is, internal standards rather than those with a claim to uni-
versality. The human sciences, he says, "constitute, in their own form,
side by side with the sciences and on the same archaeological ground,
otherconfigurations of knowledge" (ibid.: 366).
Foucault could be accused of a performative self-contradiction here
because claiming that the human sciences must be assessed by intrinsic
standards is itself a claim that appeals to a more than local standard;
but this is not an issue I want to pursue now. What is more important
to assess at this point is his view that, given the dialectic between tran-
scendental and empirical investigations, the human sciences ultimately

cannot succeed and that the figure of "man" is therefore doomed to

disappear. Much depends here on how we define transcendental ques-
tions. If by "transcendental" we mean that all empirical knowledge
claims confront the problem of how their objectivity and validity can
be demonstrated and that the normativity of this problem cannot be
reduced to a matter of empirical facts, then the transcendental/em-
pirical dichotomy is irreducible-but that does not make the sciences
as such impossible, be they natural or human/social sciences. While
there is a material and empirical aspect to human reasoning that can
always be turned into an object of an empirical science, and while the
results of such sciences might even affect our understanding of the
normative aspects of reasoning, there is no escape from questions of
validity. Within a generally fallibilist framework, we can acknowledge
that none of our currently most successful claims to knowledge, nor
any of our currently strongest reasons, is safe from future modifica-
tion, but none of this means that the sciences that have "man" as their
object of investigation are somehow intrinsically doomed to failure.
However, if by "transcendental" we mean structures of human cog-
nition that are universal and unchangeable, in a Kantian sense, and
that imply a dualism of scheme and content, to use Donald Davidson's
terminology, then we might have to admit that this is ultimately an in-
valid assumption. But to reject this conception of the "transcendental"
does not entail rejecting the idea of human sciences per se.
It could be argued, however, that this is not really Foucault's point
anyway. As long as transcendental and empirical questions are strictly
separated, the anthropologism which Foucault claims is inherent in
the human sciences can be avoided. But Foucault seems to want to say
that anthropologism (i.e., the uneasy amalgamation of empirical and
transcendental questions) is unavoidable for any human science with
representations as its object of investigation. Still, it is far from certain
that Foucault has actually demonstrated this.
From the beginning of his archaeological phase proper, that is, with
the publication of TheArchaeologyof Knowledge,Foucault was no longer
inclined to deny the feasibility of the human sciences in terms of
transcendental/empirical dualism. But as Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983
[1982]) have argued, Foucault's analysis of discursive formations was
itself a product of such dualism-indeed one of its intrinsically inco-
herent versions. And this leads us back to our earlier question about
the theoretical framework of Foucault's discourse analysis, on the one
hand, and the epistemological implications of its idealist inclinations,
on the other.
Taking his point of departure from changes that he viewed as
already occurring in historiography, Foucault begins The Archaeology

of Knowledgewith a series of methodological deliberations designed to

question all the traditional concepts of the history of ideas which em-
phasize notions of lived experience, continuity, coherence, influence,
spirit, rationality, origin, teleology, and so on, for these are all charac-
teristic of the kind of anthropologism and humanism he wishes to get
rid of.19 His own method of analysis will be one that is "purged of all
anthropologism" (Foucault 1972a: 16). But while he claims that it is
necessary to scrutinize the justifications that have been given for these
concepts-which, he believes, we take too much for granted-there
is actually very little in the way of such validity testing to be found in
Foucault. Apart from some critical remarks concerning the difficulty
of determining the precise limits of such concepts as "oeuvre" and
"book," for example, the alleged shortcomings of traditional concepts
are rarely addressed, let alone rigorously investigated. In fact, Fou-
cault seems to simply beg the whole question by suggesting that these
concepts are products of their own discursive formation-in other
words, that what he is investigating is their conditions of existence.
This has the distinct advantage, of course, of relieving Foucault of
the need to engage in any normative discourse about the reasonsthat
motivate the development of these concepts.20
Foucault was right, of course, about the concepts governing tradi-
tional history of ideas not being givens but the result of theoretical
constructions. Notions such as "tradition," "influence," "evolution,"
and "spirit" are said to be "ready-made syntheses" (ibid.: 22) that need
to be rejected. But it is surprising to find Foucault, at least sometimes,
claiming that once one had eliminated all those concepts an entire field
of investigation would be freed up, as if this newly opened field were
not itself an alternative theoretical construction but something that
had been awaiting a "pure description of discursive events" (ibid.: 27).
19. Herbert Schnadelbach (1989a) has argued, quite convincingly, that Foucault
seriously misunderstood Kant in attributing to him a return to the kind of anthro-
pologism that Foucault found so objectionable in the human sciences (see also
Schnadelbach 1989b). Schnadelbach (1989a: 240ff.) shows very clearly that Fou-
cault was unjustified in accusing modern philosophy from Kant to the present
of being subject to a certain kind of anthropologism solely on the basis of an
unwarranted projection of a young-Hegelian (e.g., Feuerbachian) and Marxian
conception of philosophy onto philosophy as a whole.
20. It is the advantage gained by all "symptomatic" readings, including many
forms of Ideologiekritik, for they can thus treat opposing arguments, however well
supported by reasons and evidence, as symptoms or causal effects beyond the
opponent's control. Such readings enormously reduce the intellectual effort that
must be expended, with the added bonus of enabling the critic to treat the oppo-
nent as inferior, in principle, by contrast to the critic's own level of argumentative
sophistication.

Of course, Foucault knew perfectly well that he was offering an alter-

native theory, but it is unfortunate that his skepticism with regard to
the history of ideas was not matched by an equally strong awareness of
the problems inherent to his own approach, such as his failure to give
any clear account of what sort of entities the rules are which, according
to him, govern a discursive practice. Sometimes they are said to be not
conditions of the possibilityof a discursive formation but conditions of
its actual existence.Unlike the body of linguistic rules that determines
the formation of (grammatically) well-formed statements, discursive
events are precisely that: events that have actually occurred. And dis-
cursive rules are supposed to account for the existence or occurrence
of such events: "The question posed by language analysis of some dis-
cursive fact or other is always: according to what rules has a particular
statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could
other similar statements be made? The description of the events of
discourse poses a quite different question: how is it that one particular
statement appeared rather than another?" (ibid.).
The analysis of discursive events that Foucault envisages here thus
looks suspiciously like an ordinary causal analysis of an event which,
in this case, happens to be a linguistic one. The concept of condi-
tions of existence is certainly very closely related to that of a cause,
although it is less ambitious in that we do not regard all the condi-
tions of something's existence as its cause. Since Foucault rules out
the intentions and even the unconscious thought of a speaking sub-
ject, severe ontological restrictions are imposed on the conditions of
existence of statements, and it is far from clear in what sense these
conditions can be rules. For nothing can be a rule that does not have
any future instantiations and is therefore both more and less than a
condition of something's existence. While it is more than a condition
of a statement's existence in that it can operate repeatedly and thus
produce an indefinite number of statements, a rule is less than what
is required for the actual existence of a statement in that the avail-
ability of a rule for making a certain kind of statement is insufficient
as its cause. Something else must be operative for someone to actually
apply the rule and produce a statement. The existence of the rule is
merely a necessary condition for making a statement that conforms
to it. Since Foucault's account is far from clear about the conceptual
difference between conditions of possibility and conditions of exis-
tence, it is not surprising that his terminology alternates between rules
and regularities, sets of relations and often even of laws, without ever
clearly indicating how these different terms apply to what governs the
formation of statements or the evolution and interaction of other dis-
cursive elements. Foucault develops a bizarre panoply of supposedly
technical or theoretical terms, but because of the virtually complete

absence of paradigmatic examples and empirical evidence it is almost

impossible to say what exactly Foucault is describing.21
Even what a statement is remains largely unclear. It is not very help-
ful to have an enormous number of negative descriptions and defi-
nitions, that is, cast in terms of what a statement is not, since these
descriptions do not reduce the range of given possibilities. And since
Foucault deliberately rules out causal and intentional analyses of se-
quences of linguistic events, it is by no means obvious what his analyses
are ultimately good for. What is it that we can learn from them for our
current purposes? Our present choices are among different courses
of action, but it is impossible to tell how the results of noncausal and
nonintentional analyses might affect these current options and their
outcomes.
Foucault's archaeological analysis tries to identify a level beyond that
of purely linguistic analysis since discourse analysis is not concerned
with the grammaticality of statements, but with their actual enuncia-
tion, their content, and their relationship to a referential field and a
whole discursive practice. Linguists wisely refrain from attempting to
explain why someone is saying something, confining their explanations
to how we distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical expressions,
regardless of their content and what motivated it. Explaining such
content is neither a linguistic problem nor one that can be success-
fully and systematically tackled, in most cases, by any other science at
the moment. Conditions for the possibility of certain statements are
easier to establish than the specific causes that bring them into exis-
tence, but with Foucault one often gets the impression that, when he
21. In "Theory of Events: Foucault and Literary Criticism," David E. Wellbery

(1987: 428, 429) argues that Foucault's concept of a discursive event is an important
contribution to what Wellbery calls a "fundamental semiotics" and a "provocation
for literary theory." He admits that Foucault, while having pointed to the need for
a theory of the event-character of discourse, did not develop and elaborate such a
theory. Wellbery argues that the significance of Foucault's work for literary studies
is not just a matter of new ways of contextualizing literary texts within literary
history, but rather a new description of discourses as partly rule-governed, partly
random events. I am not so convinced that Foucault's "provocation" can lead to
fruitful investigations, particularly if carried out along the lines suggested by Well-
bery. To begin with, the idea that radical innovation in literature can be explained
in terms of the randomness of the literary event seems to me to be only half true,
at best. Another problematic aspect of Wellbery's discussion is that he seems to be
operating with the fallacious notion that the randomness of a domain of objects
makes a systematic theory of such objects impossible, for he suggests that because
discursive events are only partly random this problem can be avoided (ibid.: 431-
32). Finally, in focusing on "the stabilizing and the destabilizing aspects of semiotic
phenomena," Wellbury addresses a problem that is by no means specific to lit-
erature, so it remains unclear why this aspect should form "the task that falls to
literary theory and analysis" (ibid.: 432).

claims to have uncovered what was possible to say within the limits
of a particular discursive practice, the possible and the actual simply
coincide-in other words, what was actually said was what was pos-
sible to say, but of course we knew that before Foucault told us so. In
many cases, the conditions under which certain kinds of statements
are made cannot possibly be characterized as "rules," although this
seems to be Foucault's favorite term. What he identifies are simply
contingent empirical conditions that bring about or make possible,
empirically, the study of certain phenomena, such as the hospital or
the prison as a site of close observation.
The notion of a discursive practice or a discursive formation has a
certain intuitive plausibility as the designation of a body of linguistic
and institutional practices and elements that somehow hang together
and whose performance is subject to certain restrictions. Thus Fou-
cault points to the rarity of statements, or the fact that of the immense
number of things that could be said on the basis of grammatical rules,
only a very few are actually ever said. There are clearly limits to what
is appropriate to say or write under various conditions and in vari-
ous social contexts. But it is far from clear whether the assemblage of
objects and practices which, according to Foucault, constitutes a dis-
cursive formation can also form a theoretical entity that is amenable to
a coherent theoretical analysis. Unfortunately, the almost hopelessly
vague nature of this entity and the many elements, events, and prac-
tices it is said to comprise, not to mention its relations with other
discourses and nondiscursive practices and objects, has not prevented
scholars in the humanities from constantly using this term as if its
meaning were reasonably clear.22 But Foucault, it seems to me, never
developed an analysis that would have allowed us to recognize and
identify the many discursive elements he listed when we encounter
them. The linguistic elements described by structuralists, for example,
the phoneme, the morpheme, the syntagm, and even larger narrative
units such as the narrator and the narratee, are far more precise and
identifiable than Foucault's peculiar set of objects of investigation. His
theory of discursive formations and their history is an elaborate edifice
of hierarchically ordered theoretical terms, but with not much of an
empirical basis to it. In fact, the whole ontology of his rules, regulari-
ties, and laws remains largely unarticulated. Unlike grammatical rules,
they are not to be conceived of as arising in the minds of speakers and,
consciously or unconsciously, governing their linguistic productions.
But what mode of existence is conceivable for rules if not one that
locates their genesis in the minds of individual or collective subjects?
22. Manfred Frank (1988) makes a similar point about the inflationary use of the
term "discourse"in literary studies despite its inherent vagueness.

Even in the case of regularities or laws-and it is not clear how Fou-

cault distinguishes between these-it is difficult to tell just how and
where they exist. Are they merely the mental constructs of the ana-
lyst of discursive formations, or must they be conceived of realistically,
as extra-mental entities of some sort (as in the case of a realist inter-
pretation of natural laws and natural necessity)? Whatever Foucault's
ideas on these issues concerning the ontologyof his theoretical entities
may have been, they lead us to the related question of the epistemo-
logical coherence of Foucault's enterprise in the analysis of discursive
practices.
Foucault defined the structures, rules, laws, and so forth of an epis-
teme, or discursive formation, as a "historical a priori." This raises
with particular acuteness not only the question of their ontological
status, but also the question of how they determine the validity of that
which is constituted on their basis. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983
[1982]) have argued, the idea of a historical a priori is still implicated
in precisely the kind of empirical/transcendental dialectic in which
the human sciences are said to be caught up. Unlike Kant's universal
cognitive structures, Foucault's historical a prioris are, from his own
perspective, objects of empirical investigation. But they seem to have
the status of transcendental conditions of the constitution of objects
for those who are (unconsciously or otherwise) governed by such an
a priori. While the validity of the "objectivity"that such a prioris make
possible is no longer viewed as universal and ahistorical, they provide
at least a temporal validity, even if not one that can be demonstrated
in a Kantian transcendental deduction by those whose production of
knowledge is determined by it. As quasi-transcendental conditions
that are conceptualized as sets of anonymous rules governing discur-
sive practices, historical a prioris remain the unthoughtof a period until
a transformation of the governing a priori makes them thinkable and
analyzable by a later generation. But the overall conception of a his-
torical a priori along Foucault's lines is ultimately unintelligible. If it
is conceived empirically, there is no principled reason why it cannot
be analyzed, and thus transcended, even by those who are under its
influence. But then it would no longer be an a priori, and some of the
basic assumptions underlying Foucault's discursive analysis would have
to be changed. If historical a prioris are indeed transcendental in the
sense of constituting discursive objects that do not have an indepen-
dent status as external objects or referents, even worse problems arise,
for it follows from Foucault's own conception that the objects he inves-
tigates are not to be interpreted realistically, but as discursive objects
produced by the very discursive formation that determines Foucault's
own analyses. Discursive formations must then be constructions from
within one's (i.e., Foucault's) own discursive formation. As a conse-

quence, Foucault's work would be caught in a self-destructive idealist

relativism according to which the objects he investigates have no inde-
pendent existence. The validity of his knowledge claims would there-
fore be relative to the contingent standards of the discourse that in-
forms his work, and different discourses would then be radically in-
commensurable.
As the debate with his imaginary opponent at the end of The Archae-
ology of Knowledgemakes clear, Foucault was well aware of this prob-
lem, but he gives no indication as to how it might be solved. In fact,
he does not even seem to view its solution as absolutely crucial for
the success of his project. When asked by his imaginary opponent
what gives him the right to speak about the various determinations of
the subject and the limits imposed by previous discursive formations,
Foucault simply sidesteps the question and launches a psychological
counterattack that diverts attention from the epistemological issue. He
says that the determinates of a discourse are neither internal to it nor
imposed from outside it, but are "conditions in accordance with which
a practice is exercised" (Foucault 1972a: 208); yet it is difficult to see
why these conditions should not have the same function as restrictions
or limitations.
Foucault did identify, though in an annoyingly vague fashion, a set
of conditions which restrict what can be said by whom and with what
expectations of acceptance within various knowledge-producing social
practices. But instead of treating such conditions as purely empirical
objects of investigation within a sociology of knowledge and a soci-
ology of language, he attributed a quasi-transcendental status to them,
in combination with the idealist notion that discourses produce rather
than discover their objects. At the same time, he took the relativist
view that discourses develop their own specific standards and criteria
for the acceptability of statements. But it was precisely this combina-
tion of factors that made his conception of the history of knowledge
ultimately incoherent.
Any appropriation of Foucault's concept of an archaeological or dis-
cursive analysis, if it is to be more than a dressing up of traditional
literary history in Foucault's rhetorically impressive but ultimately un-
helpful terminology, must confront and solve the problems inherent
to his theory. But such an appropriation would also have to come to
grips with Foucault's explicitly anti-hermeneutical stance, since virtu-
ally no interesting form of literary studies can be practiced without
presupposing an answer to the question of how literary texts are to be
understood and interpreted. In other words, since no study of texts is
possible without at least an implicit theory of interpretation, whatever
Foucault has said about our understanding of statements must be con-
sidered. The point is that the illusion, which Foucault seems to have

sustained for some time, of statements as events that can be (neutrally)

described needs to be exposed. Foucault's attack on the idea of a hid-
den meaning in the text, the unsaid beneath or behind what is said,
was misguided-it is an undeniable empirical fact that statements, like
all other linguistic expressions, do not wear their meanings on their
sleeves. Foucault himself tacitly admitted this when he argued, quite
rightly, that two identical sentences do not necessarily mean the same
thing. Statements have a determinate meaning only in relation to what
he called an associated field or a referential. But as soon as this holistic
form of meaning is adopted, interpretation becomes necessary. The
referential that determines a statement's meaning, at least in part,
must be established and its borderlines defined with a reasonable de-
gree of precision, neither of which is a matter of simply describing
an event or even of determining a number of specifiable codes in a
semiological sense. In fact, it can be argued that this "background
of meaning," as Searle (1983) calls it, cannot possibly be specified in
terms of a finite propositional content. Thus every statement is open
to interpretation, even if its relationship to a referential has been de-
termined.
On the whole, it seems that Foucault's archaeological conception of
discourse analysis has to be treated with extreme caution before its
application to literary studies, even in a modified form, can be con-
sidered. Much of the widespread talk about discourse analysis must
therefore be regarded with a good deal of suspicion. It often pretends
to be an innovative approach to the study of literature, but it fails
to address the problems associated with this part of Foucault's work,
both internally and with regard to its potential applicability to literary
studies.
The Genealogy of LiteraryCriticism

A more promising appropration of Foucault's work for the purposes
of literary studies seems to have been opened up by his shift from
archaeology to genealogy, that is, from an analysis of discursive forma-
tions in terms of anonymous sets of rules to an analysis of discursive
practices as one of the ways in which power and the will to truth mani-
fest themselves. A genealogy of the human sciences is not primarily
focused on the epistemological problems arising from an investiga-
tion of the transcendental/empirical conditions of knowledge-or so
it seems-but instead looks at the origins of these sciences and their
involvement in the ubiquitous operation of the powers which shape
and normalize individuals into subjects.
If we assume again, as I think we must, that literary texts as such,
having lost their status as counter-discourses, are not the kinds of dis-
cursive practice to which a genealogy in Foucault's sense addresses

itself, it becomes clear that the applicability of this concept to literary

studies is largely restricted to the metalevel of investigating literary
criticism as an institutionally established discourse. While it would be
possible, to some extent, to analyze the writing of literary texts as a
practice that is not entirely independent of what is happening in the
knowledge-producing discourses that surround this practice (which is
no doubt how many of the New Historicists make use of Foucault),
a more congenial type of analysis would be history of literary criti-
cism, particularly in its educational function, from a genealogical point
of view.23 Here it would be possible to pursue exactly the question
Foucault himself raised when he suggested that the "sacralization"
of literature needed to be investigated. One could attempt to show
that the teaching of literature in schools and universities is designed
to produce certain kinds of subjects whose existence and attributes
are functionally required in a certain kind of society and economy.
The teaching of literature would no longer be considered the trans-
mission of culturally important, perhaps even timelessly valid, truths
contained in canonical texts and brought to light by a methodologi-
cally controlled process of interpretation; instead, it could be seen as
an ethico-political training and a disciplinary formation of subjects
under the guise of a search for truth in literature. Literary criticism,
particularly within a pedagogical context, could be regarded as work-
ing on the "soul" instead of on the body, and as part of an apparatus of
ethical surveillance and normalization, including self-surveillance and
self-fashioning, similar to that which operates in religious practices.
As Foucault's own statements in "The Functions of Literature" imply,
it seems to be of little significance whether literature is "sacralized" in
terms of its revolutionary potential or its conservative role in the re-
production of traditional bourgeois values. A subtle exercise of power
in the name of truth would occur in either case.
Nevertheless, Foucault's critique of the sacralization of literature in
the Droit interview is somewhat surprising precisely because it is di-
rected against giving literature the status of a subversive text, a status
that Foucault had earlier suggested, as we saw, though admittedly only
with respect to certain writers. Another reason why Foucault's critique
of the sacralization of literature is surprising is that the force of his
critique of the human sciences from a genealogical perspective relies,
as Rudi Visker (1991: 73ff.) has pointed out, on the possibility of dis-
tinguishing between good and bad forms of power, to put it simply.
23. A good example of this is Ian Hunter's (1988) Cultureand Government:The

Emergenceof LiteraryEducation;see also Burton Hatlen (1988). Steven Mailloux
(1985) has also argued for a Foucaldian history of literary criticism as an academic
discipline.

Literature's sacralization as subversive could then be seen as one of

the "good" forms of power. If power is constitutive of any form of
knowledge, and if power, as Foucault emphasizes, is often productive
and positive rather than negative, then it is difficult to see any basis for
criticizing its deployment in the human sciences. This is why Foucault
had to distinguish, at least implicitly, between a genealogical origin
in techniques of surveillance and normalization, as in the case of the
human sciences, and the origin of the natural sciences, where the im-
plication of power and knowledge is their not being primarily aimed at
the formation of subjects. But this distinction does not solve the prob-
lems inherent to his conception of power/knowledge, and, as in the
case of his archaeological model and its application to literary studies,
the question of his genealogical model's applicability to literary studies
can be answered only if those who wish to make use of Foucault's
work address its inherent problems before rushing into a fashionable
but untenable appropriation of Foucaldian terminology. This does not
mean that Foucault's analyses cannot be fruitfully applied in an insti-
tutional history of literary criticism. In fact, I believe that this is the
area where Foucault's work is or could be most relevant to literary
studies. But such an application should be attempted only after the
inherent problems of Foucault's genealogical model have been solved.
The three main problems of this model are the status of Foucault's
concept of power, his notion of truth, and his conceptualization of
the human subject. As a number of critics have pointed out, it re-
mains unclear in precisely what way power and knowledge/truth are
interrelated. It would obviously be wrong to accuse Foucault of iden-
tifying the two, and he explicitly denied such an identification (Fou-
cault 1988b: 264). But this still leaves the problem of their relation-
ship. If finding out the truth about something (regardless of whether
truth is understood relativistically or absolutely) necessarily implies
the deployment of power over the object of investigation, which is sug-
gested, for example, by Nietzsche and occasionally by Foucault when
he argues, along Nietzschean lines, that conceptualization as such is
a violation and distortion of the object, then Foucault is caught in
a performative self-contradiction. His analysis of the history of the
human sciences is itself governed by a will to truth that is as guilty of
a deployment of power as the object he analyzes.
Another, independent problem arises from Foucault's relativistic
tendencies, which were carried over from the archaeological to the
genealogical model: How can Foucault maintain a claim to truth
and validity despite saying that each society operates under different
"regimes of truth"? If truth is historicized and conventionalized rather
than conceived of as a regulative idea and a normative claim that ap-
peals to a time- and context-transcendent standard (in the sense that

each factually accepted standard remains open to future revision),

then Foucault's own investigation and critique become unintelligible,
both to his readers and to himself. For if standards are relative to dis-
courses or "truth games," the point of a critique of such standards dis-
solves. The reasoning process that Foucault himself engaged in would
only convince the already convinced, that is, those whose thinking was
already governed by the same criteria of truth. To those who did not
accept his criteria, his critique would be incomprehensible. Individual
and collective learning processes would be impossible because such
learning always depends on hitherto accepted standards having been
successfully criticized and revised.
The problematic concept of power that underlies Foucault's gene-
alogical approach is not unrelated to his conception of the human
subject. We noted earlier that in order for Foucault's critique of the
human sciences to make sense, he had to distinguish between repres-
sive power and productive power. The "microphysics" of power that
is typical of the human sciences is repressive because the will to dis-
cover the truth about "man" and the results of this pursuit of the truth
are immediately turned back on "man" as the "object" of investiga-
tion. The will to truth is simultaneously a will to power because the
"truth" that is "discovered" is precisely what shapes or even constitutes
the subject. In other words, unlike what happens in the natural sci-
ences, the conceptual framework and findings of the human sciences
are constitutive of their object in a realist rather than an idealist sense
since they actually produce, at least in part, human subjects endowed
with certain attributes. What they do is what Ian Hacking (1986) has
called "making up people." As Foucault himself said,
The individualis no doubt the fictitiousatom of an "ideological"represen-
tation of society;but he is also a realityfabricatedby this specifictechnology
of power that I have called "discipline."We must cease once and for all to
describe the effects of power in negativeterms:it "excludes,"it "represses,"
it "censors,"it "abstracts,"it "masks,"it "conceals."In fact, power produces;
it produces reality;it producesdomainsof objectsand ritualsof truth. The
individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this
production. (Foucault 1979: 194)
But this is also the point where the problematic nature of Foucault's
concept of the subject emerges. First of all, not all knowledge acquired
in the human sciences has a repressive effect just because such knowl-
edge is integrated into our own self-interpretation. Again, the idea of a
critiqueof the human sciences (which, despite being situated at a meta-
level, is concerned with the human subject as well) would not make any
sense, unless one assumed that such a critique contributed to a self-
understanding that was liberating rather than repressive. Second, if
the power/knowledge of the human sciences is repressive, the question

that must be asked (as it has been) is what exactly is being repressed.
Foucault's (1978) rather famously unsatisfactory answer was "bodies
and pleasures."24 Here then, as Visker (1991: 87) has observed, the
concept of the body occupies the place that madness did in Madness
and Civilization.Just as the true experience of madness was allegedly
violated and distorted by its designation as unreason and later by the
discourse of psychiatry, the experiences and pleasures of the body are
now repressed by the sexual sciences and their relentless search for
the truth about "man."
But Foucault's notion of the body and its role in the processes by
which subjects are formed was rather vague. In fact, in his gene-
alogical phase Foucault seems to have come very close to an extreme
behaviorist position by arguing, at least implicitly, that the human
subject is formed from an almost infinitely malleable material whose
only power of resistance derives from a diffuse agglomeration of
bodily pleasures before they have been segmented and classified by
scientific analysis. Ironically, Foucault's conception of the subject as
the product of disciplinary techniques imposed on the body left no
systemic theoretical space for his own intellectual revolt against what
he saw as a ubiquitous process of subjectivization and normalization.
Foucault's dilemma seems to have been that the more he denied the
autonomy of the subject, the less logically possible it was to launch a
meaningful critique of the "carceral" society. This is the problem that
all radical historicizations of the subject face. For only where there
is at least a minimal set of universal conditions outside which human
beings simply cannot live meaningful and reasonably satisfying lives
does it make sense to talk about repression and possible or desirable
alternatives to whatever is the case.
The Teaching of Literatureand Technologiesof the Self

When, to everyone's surprise, Foucault did not continue his project of
a history of sexuality as originally planned and instead, after a pause
of about eight years, published his two volumes on Greek and Roman
"technologies of the self," it became obvious that he had changed tack
again. He seemed to have returned to a conception of subjectivity that
was much closer to more traditional notions of the subject as largely
self-determined and a free agent. While Foucault by no means argued
that the ethics underlying the aesthetic self-fashioning of a privileged
class of Greek males was something we ought to emulate, he neverthe-
less made it clear that the idea of the formation of the self by the self
24. Thus, at the end of TheHistoryof Sexuality,Foucault (1978: 157) says that "the
rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not
to be sex-desire but bodies and pleasures."

on the basis of a freely chosen set of rules, rather than a set of norms
to be accepted by everyone, appealed to him. Yet the fact that Foucault
dropped his idea of an all-pervasive network of power relations that
virtually determine the formation of subjects did not mean that he
had solved the problems created by his genealogical model. His latest
(and last) conception of a subject who is capable of fashioning his or
her own life in accordance with a self-chosen "aesthetics of existence"
is far from convincing, both in terms of the concept's intelligibility and
in terms of the desirability of the ethics outlined by Foucault.
As far as the subject is concerned, the notion of "technologies of
the self" is already an indication of a certain contradiction in his ap-
proach. It suggests a system of self-applied technological or strategic
measures, but it is difficult to see how we can make sense of this pro-
cess. The idea of a self, or a part of the self, which can be changed
through a mechanism that operates on the self as scientific technology
operates on, or interferes with, nature is inconceivable, particularly
given that setting such a process in motion presupposes a self already
capable of envisaging a desired change of self, that is, one that must
attribute to itself the capacity to initiate this change and thus must
have a conception of itself as a more or less free agent. Foucault, in
fact, admitted that such a freedom exists and must be postulated, but
there is little evidence that he adequately considered the consequences
of this conception for his notion of "technologies" of the self and for
the subject in general. "Technologies of the self" is at best a highly
misleading metaphor designed, perhaps, to disguise the fact that his
prior reductionist account of the subject's formation as an effect of
power/knowledge had to be abandoned, or perhaps his use of "tech-
nologies of the self" merely indicates a somewhat confused notion of
subjectivity. In a discussion with Alessandro Fontana in 1984, Fou-
cault remarked that "the subject is constituted through practices of
subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of libera-
tion, of liberty, as in Antiquity, on the basis, of course, of a number
of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment"
(Foucault 1988a: 50-51)-which was not terribly helpful either. The
fact that "inventions" are said to be "found" in the cultural environ-
ment, rather than what the self-fashioning subject is capable of, is
characteristic of the reluctance with which Foucault moved in his last
work toward the idea of a more autonomous subject. The same re-
luctance is evidenced by Foucault's notion that the subject constitutes
itself through several different "practices of subjection" among which
there need not be any close relationships. If he simply means that we
learn to play different roles in our private and public lives, Foucault
is not saying anything new or controversial. But the important point
is that he refuses to say anything about the relationship between all

of these "subjects" and the one subject that is "constituted" by them.

As a consequence of his refusal to develop a "theory of the subject,"
important questions about the status of the constituting subject (as op-
posed to the constituted one) remain unanswered.25 In fact, Foucault
never provided an account of that part of the self which decides to
shape its own existence and which chooses or invents a style of living
(see Visker 1991: 16). Foucault's distinction, within the self, between
a subject as subject and a subject as object therefore lagged behind
not only earlier philosophical conceptions of subjectivity (e.g., Fichte,
Schelling, and Schleiermacher), but also contemporary ones, such as
those developed by Manfred Frank (1991) and Dieter Henrich (1967).
The extent to which Foucault was still operating even in his last books
with a simple and untheorized reflexive model of the self in which it
is divided into an acting subject and one that is acted upon, becomes
clear in the following statement:
A historyof the wayin whichindividualsare urged to constitutethemselves
as subjectsof moralconductwouldbe concernedwith the models proposed
for setting up and developingrelationshipswith the self, for self-reflection,
self-knowledge,self-examination,for the deciphermentof the self by one-
self, for the transformationsthat one seeks to accomplishwith oneself as
object. (Foucault 1986a: 29 [my emphasis])
Unfortunately, Foucault also seems to have failed to revoke his
earlier relativist conception of truth, for he still conceived of his his-
tory of a "hermeneutics of the self" as part of a history of truth. The
"hermeneutics of the self" was a "truth game" (ibid.: 6-7), just as his
earlier discussions of madness, the human sciences, labor, and lan-
guage were concerned with truth games. The notion of a truth game
seems meant to have the same relativistic connotations as Wittgen-
stein's notion of language games. It is difficult to determine exactly
how relativistic Foucault's notion of truth was because his observa-
tions on the function of "truth games" were often rather vague. But
they generally leave one with the impression that he refused to com-
mit himself to a nonrelativistic notion of truth. As in other contexts,
his comments leave open the question of whether he used "true" in a
purely descriptive way (i.e., in the sense of "this is what countsas true")
or in a normative way.
Foucault's unsatisfactory conception of the subject in his late work
(his attempt to provide some space for a more self-determined subject
notwithstanding) corresponds to his equally unsatisfactory conception
of the ethics underlying the notion of an aesthetics of existence or a
cultivation of the self. To begin with, Foucault's position on the possi-
25. Such a refusal is voiced, for example, in "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a
Practice of Freedom" (Foucault 1987: 121).

bility of an aesthetics of existence was too egocentric to be acceptable

as a kind of ethics. "The Ethic of Care for the Self" (Foucault 1987:
118) leaves no doubt that our relationship to, and care for, ourselves
has an ontological priority. But a "care for the self" that is not also a
care for others, at least insofar as they may be affected by the self's
style of life (and insofar as care for the self becomes possible only
under conditions which restrict the choices and chances of others to
achieve the same style) can hardly hope for general validation as an
ethics. It must be recognized, of course, that Foucault's focus on a per-
sonal ethics did not entirely rule out consideration of others. Quite
the contrary. But other subjects seem to have figured in Foucault's de-
liberations only at the level of personal relationships, such as those
developing out of sexual relations or like the one between the Greek
master of a household and the other members of this small social
group (although Foucault never says what the master/household re-
lationship ought to be). And he still seems extremely reluctant to pro-
vide any explicit normative arguments. Instead, his analyses remain
purely descriptive accounts of the historically specific "games of truth"
in which subjects are involved in their self-formation practices. Any
generalization from basic principles that would allow us to establish
rules applicable to everyone is studiously avoided. In fact, Foucault
(1984: 350) clearly thought we should drop the idea of a necessary
connection between ethics and our social, economical, and political
structures.
What should also raise one's suspicion is the emphasis on an aes-
thetics of life rather than an ethics. Whereas the early Foucault had
rejected such notions as the work and the ceuvre, he came to talk
about turning one's life into a work of art or making one's life one's
ceuvre (Foucault 1988a: 49; 1986a: 10). Of course, this idea of turn-
ing one's life into an artwork is by no means new. Foucault himself
explicitly drew on Baudelaire when he developed this idea. It was
voiced as early as 1799 by the German Romantic writer Wilhelm Hein-
rich Wackenroder, for whom it formed part of a more sophisticated,
though not fully developed, philosophy of art.26The idea of living aes-
thetically was treated extensively in the pre-existentialist philosophy
of Kierkegaard (1959), although here it was starkly contrasted with,
rather than assimilated to, an ethical life. And it is clearly present
in the Nietzschean notions of self-invention, or "becoming what one
26. At the end of the section entitled "Die Ewigkeitder Kunst"(The eternal nature
of art) of his PhantasienuberdieKunstfur FreundederKunst,Wackenrodersays: "Let
us therefore turn our lives into works of art, for we might then be able to argue
that even in our earthly existence we will become immortal" (Wackenroder 1968
[1799]: 150 [my translation]). Some critics attribute this piece to Wackenroder's
friend Ludwig Tieck, the original editor of Wackenroder'swork.

is."27 But the question that immediately arises is who will be able to
fashion his or her life in an aesthetically pleasing and satisfying way?
(And what exactly is meant by "aesthetics" when applied to the life
of a person?) As Hans-Herbert Kogler (1990: 223) has pointed out,
it would be extraordinarily naive to assume that opportunities for an
aesthetically pleasing lifestyle are equably distributed in our society.28
Since they are not, the elitist (Nietzschean) nature of Foucault's notion
of an aesthetics of existence becomes obvious. The radical liberalism
underlying Foucault's idea of self-chosen aesthetic existence is incom-
patible with the real social and political conditions in contemporary
societies; and without a discussion of how it might be realized (and at
what social cost), its promotion is ethically dubious, to say the least. As
Kogler has also shown, Foucault was forced, against his explicit inten-
tions, to introduce an element of universalism into his ethics when he
presupposed, as he seems to have done, that everyone ought to have
a chance to choose his or her lifestyle, a norm which, ironically, Fou-
cault had introduced in order to avoid the universalism implied by the
idea that every member of society ought to accept certain universally
binding ethical norms as valid (ibid.: 222-23).
What remains in question is the effect of Foucault's return to the
notion of a relatively self-determined subject and to the previously
rejected unities of the work and the oeuvre, as well as his implicit re-
jection of his earlier, reductionist theory of power (according to which
even the most subjective experience of the self is the result of the
power/knowledge network that subsumes one), on the use of his work
within literary studies. While it is not obvious how literary criticism
might appropriate Foucault's late ideas about an aesthetics of exis-
tence, a rather undesirable and politically dubious way is certainly
conceivable. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault (1986a: 29) proposes that
27. This is reflected in the title of Alexander Nehamas's(1985) book Nietzsche:Life

as Literature.For a critique of the Nietzschean notion of an aesthetic self-creation in
the context of a postmodern reinterpretation of individual freedom, see Axel Hon-
neth's (1992) essay "Pluralizationand Recognition: On the Self-Misunderstanding
of Postmodern Social Theorists."
28. A similar point is made by Rainer Rochlitz (1992: 225), who says: "'Making a
work [of art] of one's life' is a project for privileged minorities, liberated from all
functions in the material reproduction of society, who can use all their strength
to perfect the refinement of their lifestyle." Thomas McCarthy(1991: 7) has also
commented on the ethical inadequacy of Foucault's"aestheticsof existence," argu-
ing that the "aesthetic individualism of much postmodern theory" is even less able
to deal with questions of social justice than "the possessive individualism of early
modern political theory."RichardJ. Bernstein (1992: 163ff.) has expressed misgiv-
ings about Foucault'slinking of ethics with the idea of an aesthetics of existence as
well. At one point, at least, Foucault (1984: 350) rather naively posed the question:
"But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?"

we engage in a "history of the way in which individuals are urged to

constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct." Such a history,
says Foucault, "would be concerned with the models proposed for set-
ting up and developing relationships with the self" (ibid.). As is clear to
everyone familiar with the history of literary studies, one such model
can be found precisely in the traditional pedagogical use of literature,
which is why some Foucaldian literary scholars have begun to investi-
gate the institutional history of literary criticism. But they usually do
so from the point of view of the earlier Foucault, that is, the Foucault
who was concerned with subtle institutionally organized processes of
normalization and discipline. While these investigations are encum-
bered with the problems of Foucault's theory of power and lack a
normative basis for an explicit critique of the power exercised by liter-
ary studies as a pedagogical institution (see, e.g., Hunter 1988), more
traditional and conservative literary critics could argue that their work
has always been concerned with moral and aesthetic self-fashioning.
What seemed to be part of the subjectivization and individualization
imposed on subjects, or certain groups of subjects, can now be re-
interpreted as the largely self-chosen process of shaping one's own life
through the study of literature. Foucault's propagation of an aesthet-
ics of existence could certainly play into the hands of those who have
always praised literature as a source of human wisdom while using it
to reinforce a certain ideology. Traditional literary critics could find
themselves reinstated in their paternalistic role as masters of those
who would be initiated into literature, for Foucault (1987: 118) him-
self argued that the ethic of care for the self implies a master/pupil
relationship.
Then there is, in the late Foucault, the peculiar confusion, or at least
a lack of differentiation, between the aesthetic experience of creating
objects, particularly works of art, and the experience of shaping one's
own life as an aesthetic object. The aesthetic experience of art has
traditionally been justified in terms of its cognitive value, either as an
experience sui generis, that is, independent of other, more discursive
means of gaining knowledge, or in terms of its close associations with
ethical knowledge. Alternatively, art, particularly twentieth-century
art, has been regarded as a challenge to both scientific and everyday
ways of making sense because it generally refuses to be understood on
the basis of commonly available modes of sense making. Its allegedly
subversive potential lies in its refusal to mean and thus to be a source of
traditional knowledge or wisdom.29 This is presumably what Foucault
had in mind when, in his early writings on literature, he spoke of the
29. This idea is developed in great detail and with great circumspection by
Christoph Menke-Eggers (1988).

"being of language," a being that refuses to serve the communication

of meaning and that constitutes an "Other" of reason.30
But it is difficult to see how one's own life could function as an object
of aesthetic experience, whether for oneself or for others. There is,
therefore, a danger that the aesthetic shaping of one's life might lead to
nothing more than a form of sophisticated Baudelairean dandyism.31
Foucault's emphasis on an ascetic life, a mastering of the desires and a
striving for dignity and wisdom, would seem to preclude such a devel-
opment. But since this asceticism is not grounded in a moral context
of wider social considerations (such as ecological ones), and since it is
definitely not a Christian asceticism, the distance between "dandified"
aestheticism and Foucaldian asceticism is clearly diminished.
Conclusion
Our look back over the whole of Foucault's work and its potential
for literary studies has revealed few grounds for enthusiasm. The
potential for a literary aesthetics in his early writings remained largely
underdeveloped and restricted to self-reflexive modernist and post-
modern literature. It is this kind of literature that foregrounds the
material aspects of language, the "being" of language that transcends
its instrumental character as a message-bearing medium. Foucault's
archaeological model allowed only very limited application of the
notion of discourse or discourse analysis to literary texts, since these
texts do not in themselves constitute a discursive practice; and Fou-
cault's whole archaeology is plagued, in any case, by its inherent prob-
lems of linguistic idealism and relativism. The genealogical model, in
which archaeological discourse analysis is connected to a theory of
power/knowledge that implicates discourses in a ubiquitous network
of power relations, is no doubt the most promising part of Foucault's
work as far as its literary-critical and literary-historical appropriation
is concerned, particularly its application to the discourse of literary
criticism rather than to literary texts as such. With regard to literary
texts themselves, Foucault's ideas have no doubt had a salutary effect
insofar as they made it possible to see the production of literature as
part of a more general process of cultural reproduction that is neither
merely reflective of a social or historical context nor somehow aloof
from the power relations that shape the development of a culture. A
30. Richard Wolin (1992), whose essay came to my attention only after this paper
was virtually completed, draws similarly negative conclusions from Foucault's "aes-
thetics of existence."
31. That there is such a danger in Foucault's aesthetics of existence is confirmed
by Pierre Hadot (1992: 230). Hadot, whose work on spiritual exercises in antiquity
Foucault drew on, also tries to show that Foucault's interpretation of some of the
ancient sources is seriously flawed.

literary history that is informed by Foucault's genealogy will regard

literary texts as integral parts of, and interventions in, the process
of cultural reproduction. The "sacralization" of "the literary" will no
longer be taken for granted, but will become one of the phenomena
to be explained by such a genealogical approach. The main problems
with Foucault's genealogical analysis are, first of all, the reductionist
consequences of his concept of power, which led to an almost behav-
iorist conception of the formation of subjects out of a highly malleable
body whose only source of resistance was a vaguely and preconceptu-
ally understood desire for pleasure. Second, Foucault's refusal to make
the norms underlying his own intellectual critique explicit, which he
could have done only by modifying his claim that the will to truth
is necessarily also the will to power, led to a peculiar positivism that
eschews any need to engage, on the normative level, with the argu-
ments and validity claims of the discourses he investigated. The work
that constitutes his final phase, in which he-somewhat reluctantly-
returned to the notion of a (partly) self-determined subject and an
ethics and aesthetics of existence, could easily be appropriated for tra-
ditional literary studies. What could be (and has been) interpreted as
a process of normalization from a genealogical point of view (i.e., the
idea that societies institutionalize the teaching of literature in order
to produce subjects of a certain kind) can now be reinterpreted more
positively as a way of encouraging subjects to apply certain ethical and
aesthetic technologies to themselves. Foucault (1988f: 14) himself ob-
served, in an interview shortly before his death, that the acquisition
of knowledge had always played a very important role in his own self-
transformations and that this process was akin to aesthetic experience.
(But this poses the danger of falling back into precisely the kind of
moral sensitivity training that is associated, in England, for example,
with Leavisite literary criticism and that could be appropriated by
various ideologies.) The conclusion that seems to follow from our in-
vestigation of Foucault's thought and its potential fruitfulness for the
study of literature is that any application would require a considerable
revision of some of the main assumptions underlying his work.
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Freundlieb - Foucault and The Study of Literature

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Foucault and the Study of Literature

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Abstract In this essay I investigate systematically how relevant parts of Fou-

PoeticsToday16:2 (Summer 1995). Copyright ? 1995 by The Porter Institute for

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on literary studies has been considerable nonetheless and is likely to

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come to the conclusion that he abandoned or otherwise left unresolved

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work as engaged in a language game of serious philosophical argu-

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double question we should perhaps bear in mind that there is a cer-

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8. In this and in some of my other analyses of Foucault here, I am indebted to the

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Foucault's critique of conceptual-representational language is simi-

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the problem of evoking an experience of an "Other" by means of the

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nonidentical is quite different.12 While the problems of Adorno's aes-

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to Foucault because what always really speaks is language itself. But

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whether to consider "a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an

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associated with traditional teleological historiography or mainstream

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The fourth important aspect of the author function, for Foucault,

with Karin Westerwelle when he spoke of the "enormous stupidity" of Foucault's

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new discourses, as Foucault himself has argued, at least some authors

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produced, by that very fact, the movementof revolution!As you know,such

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subversive force, but as a treasure-house of cultural wisdom. In any

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within the sphere of representations, they "have been unable to find a

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cannot succeed and that the figure of "man" is therefore doomed to

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of Knowledgewith a series of methodological deliberations designed to

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Of course, Foucault knew perfectly well that he was offering an alter-

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absence of paradigmatic examples and empirical evidence it is almost

21. In "Theory of Events: Foucault and Literary Criticism," David E. Wellbery

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Even in the case of regularities or laws-and it is not clear how Fou-

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quence, Foucault's work would be caught in a self-destructive idealist

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sustained for some time, of statements as events that can be (neutrally)

The Genealogy of LiteraryCriticism

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itself, it becomes clear that the applicability of this concept to literary

23. A good example of this is Ian Hunter's (1988) Cultureand Government:The

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