Foucault and Our Understanding

of Society and Social Theory

Joshua Dustin Watkins

Sociology 337: Modern Sociological Theory

Professor Sandra LeBlanc

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Foucault is an enigmatic figure, and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century

(Sugrue, 1997). He was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. His father and grandfather were both

respected surgeons, and he was expected to take up the family profession. Instead, however, he was

compelled to embark on an intriguing intellectual journey, studying psychology and philosophy; and

ultimately producing transformative understandings of society and social theory (Kelly, 2015).

His works are boundary crossing and path-breaking, incorporating diverse elements of, and

regularly being referenced across, the humanities (Elden, 2013; Ritzer and Ryan, 2011; Ritzer and

Stepnisky, 2021). Foucault's approach reflects C. Wright Mill's understanding expressed in The

Sociological Imagination; "intellectually, the central fact today is an increasing fluidity of boundary

lines; conceptions move with increasing ease from one discipline to another" (2000, 139). This is but

one way in which his approach to social theory was unique compared to traditional sociologists

(Roderick, 1993). It is therefore the purpose of this essay to chronicle these unique and transformative

aspects of his work beginning with Madness and Civilization, and concluding with his History of

Sexuality.

To begin, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (a condensed

version of his doctoral thesis) was originally published in 1961 in France, and was published in English

for the first time in 1965. This book, the first of Foucault's, is similar to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of

Tragedy. It sees a split between reason and unreason akin to Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian

differentiation. Also, the French history and philosophy of science, especially Gaston Bachelard's

“epistemological rupture,” Georges Canguilhem's emphasis on the separation of the normal from the

pathological, and Marx's historical analysis of social division were all vital influences not just in

Madness and Civilization but throughout Foucault's corpus (Kelly, 2015).

Madness and Civilization examines the history of our modern conception of mental illness as

well as the results of this interpretive shift. By analyzing 19th-century archival evidence Foucault came
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to reject the standard view of the time that psychiatry had "[liberated] [...] the mad from the ignorance

and brutality of preceding ages." Rather, he came to realize that the modern conceptualization, and

resultant medicalization of madness did not generally constitute an improvement, per se. In contrast, he

pointed to the conception of madness in the Renaissance which more positively or less problematically

saw the mad as being "in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy." He also examined the

transitional phase of the 17th and 18th-century in which madness was viewed as the repudiation of

reason in favor of animality. Ultimately, the pathologization of those deemed mentally ill, and the

seemingly neutral scientific discourse employed merely provided a veneer for bourgeoisie domination

of potentially problematic populations and ways of being (Gutting, 2022; Sugrue, 1997). It did so by

isolating such populations from society en mass, incarcerating them in hospitals, prisons, and

workhouses during what Foucault referred to as The Great Confinement (Foucault, 1988, pp. 38-39).

As Foucault scholar Mark Kelly notes, "The History of Madness thus sets the pattern for most of

Foucault’s works by being concerned with discrete changes in a given area of social life at particular

points in history" (2015).

Next, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, was originally published

in France in 1963, and relatively later in English in 1973. This work, similar to Madness and

Civilization explores—instead of madness—the historical emergence of medical knowledge and

practice, again via an analysis of the discourse as found in associated documents. Around the time of

the French Revolution a "transformation of social institutions and political imperatives combined to

produce modern institutional medicine." This transformation also produced the anatomo-clinical gaze

(Athabasca 2024), which dispassionately and objectively observes patients and their conditions, "in the

service of the demographic needs of society;" and ultimately generated the great break in Western

medicine (Kelly, 2015; Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2021, 426).

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Foucault's following work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, was

originally published in France in 1966 and in English in 1970. It explicitly defines the methodology

Foucault had been previously employing: archaeology. And he applies archaeology again; this time to

the human sciences which encompass "an interdisciplinary space for the reflection on the 'man' who is

the subject of more mainstream scientific knowledge such as anthropology, history, and, indeed,

philosophy." These human sciences include, for example, "psychology, sociology, and the history of

culture" (Kelly, 2015).

However, The Order of Things analyses the prehistory of the human sciences and their

discourses. In doing so it traces Western epistemology through a number of transformations giving rise

to differing épistémès—general understandings of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. The two most

important epistemic transformations in the West occur, according to Foucault, at the start of the 17th

century, giving rise to the Classical period; and at the beginning of the 19th century, giving rise to the

Modern period (Kelly, 2015).

Foucault states the before the Classical period, "Western knowledge [was] a rather disorganized

mass of different kinds of knowledge (superstitious, religious, philosophical), with the work of science

being to note all kinds of resemblances." With the Classical épistémè, however, the increasing

inclination towards categorization leads to more bounded disciplines (Kelly, 2015). The Classical

épistémès takes knowledge as being representative, in an abstract sense, of its object; "the map is a

useful model" (Gutting, 2022).

Kant, representative of a larger overarching epistemic trend, questioned "whether ideas do in

fact represent their objects," undermining the status of ideas as "unproblematic vehicles of knowledge"

(Gutting, 2022). Gradually a reflexive understanding arose in which the "individual [was] conceived

simultaneously as both subject and object;" (Kelly, 2015). This, by the end of the 18th century, had

began to inspire a new focus on language and the hidden, underlying logics of knowledges; leading to
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understandings as diverse as "the dialectical view of history, psychoanalysis, and Darwinian evolution"

(Ibid., 2015). Foucault critiqued this mode of thinking as tending to dichotomize "what is 'the Same'

and what is other; with the latter usually excluded from scientific inquiry," and having a bias towards

taking man—corresponding to the modern state's governable and abstract population/demographic, and

the accompanying sciences and discourses—as the object of investigation (Ibid., 2015).

This epistemic logic which takes man as its object, however, according to Foucault, opens the

door to man's eventual transcendence; as some of these sciences, such as psychoanalysis investigate

realities which are too deep to be fully properly examined within such a limited perspective. One can

argue, therefore, it is this epistemic shift which underlies the development in recent times of

interdisciplinary methodologies, such as New Materialism (Coole, 2010). Coole, author of New

Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics states, "interestingly, some indication of how new

materialists might investigate both the quotidian and structural dimensions of late capitalism can

already be found in work by Althusser and Foucault" (2010, 32).

Another example of recent development along these lines is Posthumanism, which, similar to

New Materialism rejects anthropocentrism, considering humanity within a broader web of

technological, urban, social, and political realities and relations (Braidotti, 2013, 40 and 55-105). In

regards to Foucault's influence, Braidotti states: "by the time Michel Foucault published his ground-

breaking critique of Humanism in The Order of Things (1970), the question of what, if anything, was

the idea of ‘the human’ was circulating in the radical discourses of the time and had set the anti-

humanist agenda for an array of political groups" (Ibid., 23). Foucault's epistemological-discursive

investigations up to this point, which a "[reject] the idea of an autonomous, meaning-giving subject"

(Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2021), were leading to a higher perspective from which to consider, create, and

critique knowledge, and humanity itself.

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Foucault's next book The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, was

published in France in 1969, and in English in 1970. It is his most conceptual work, and does not deal

with historical analysis; instead it looks at language on its own, examining "discrete linguistic events,

which he calls 'statements'" to understand how they relate (Kelly, 2015). Foucault comes to see

language as influenced by "extra-linguistic realities" but ultimately "governed by a 'system of its [own]

functioning'" (Ibid., 2015) outside "grammar and logic, [and] [operates] beneath the consciousness of

individual subjects and [defines] a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of

thought in a given domain and period" (Gutting 2022). Foucault calls this the archive and archaeology

entails its excavation (Kelly, 2015).

Foucault then, in 1969, produced an essay titled "What is an Author?" in which he critiques the

concept of the author. He suggests that the author, rather than being a sovereign and transcendent

creator, is a historically and socially constructed artifact operating from the nexus of influences, such as

discursive systems. This is similar in theme to another essay published earlier, in 1967, by Roland

Barthes, titled "The Death of the Author." Though Barthes is more interested in giving primacy to the

reader, over the author, in terms of the text's interpretation/meaning, stating "a text is made of multiple

writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,

contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader"

(1977, 148). These works both contributed to the Postmodern death of the author.

Next came "The Order of Discourse" in 1970. This work came about, in some ways, in response

to the volatile political climate of 1968 in France; and reflects a more political approach. Also, we find

here the methodology which Foucault calls genealogy (after Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals)

expressed and defined for the first time. Genealogy can be defined as "doing what Foucault calls the

'history of the present,' [...] [and] is an explanation of where we have come from, [...] to tell us how our

current situation originated, [...] motivated by contemporary concerns" (Kelly, 2015). Also, importantly,
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it should be noted that genealogy emphasizes "complex, mundane, inglorious origins," which are "in no

way part of any grand scheme of progressive history." Genealogy emphasizes that any particular

system of thought—its fundamental composition and dynamic having been revealed by archaeological

investigation of the archive—was merely an outcome of contingent historical developments, rather than

a rational and inevitable outcome (Gutting, 2022). This methodology is further employed in the

lectures, books, and interviews which followed.

The anthology Power/Knowledge collects his thought from 1972 to 1977, and "is closely linked

to the themes and arguments" presented in his 1975 work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

Prison, to be discussed afterward. Gordon Collin, the editor, states that this anthology focuses on "the

problematic of 'pouvoir-savoir', power and knowledge, which has given this book its title" (Foucault,

1980, vii and ix). It examines "power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points

where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions;" as opposed to

that which emanates from central, "regulated, and legitimate forms" (Foucault, 1980, 96). Also the

analysis disregards "conscious intention or decision", instead focusing on "processes which subject our

bodies, govern our gestures, [and] dictate our behaviours etc." (Ibid., 97).

The microphysics/politics of power therefore, is how "subjects are gradually, progressively,

really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials,

desires, thoughts etc." (Foucault, 1980, 97). Foucault also points out that individuals are not only sites

of power as applied, but also operate as vehicles, applying power themselves (Ibid., 98). This anthology

also describes the concept of bio-power, or somato-power, which "[penetrates] the body in depth." It is

a "network or circuit" which "acts as the formative matrix of sexuality itself as the historical and

cultural phenomenon" (Ibid., 186).

Foucault's next book, the well-known, highly influential Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

Prison, was published in France in 1975, and in English in 1978. Its title and methodology mirror that
 8

of The Birth of the Clinic (both titles deriving from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy), though it is more

genealogical.

Discipline and Punish traces the development of the carceral system to the 17th century, where

the prison system evolved as an alternative method to the system of punishment employed by medieval

societies. Medieval, or sovereign societies, would punish to avenge an affront to the power of the

sovereign; naturally Foucault defines the power in such societies as sovereign power (Foucault, 1995,

36). Such punishment would entail brutal, torturous violence applied to the offender's body publicly, as

a spectacle of justice (Roderick, 1993). However, this also allowed the crowd to sympathize with the

offender's suffering, and often riots would break out afterward, creating negative sentiment towards the

sovereign. Gradually, and subconsciously—helping to avoid such potentially problematic spectacle—

the development of the prison system and its associated reform "becomes a vehicle of more effective

control: 'to punish less, perhaps; but certainly to punish better'" (Gutting, 2022). This new mode of

punishment, "becomes the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and schools

modeled on the modern prison" and comes to make up a carceral archipelago (Ibid.; Foucault 1995,

297-301). This is what he terms disciplinary power (Foucault, 1995).

Another important concept presented in Discipline and Punish, is panopticism. This concept

stems from a style of prison architecture and its associated mode of surveillance developed by the late

18th, early 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the panopticon "each inmate is always visible

to a guard situated in a central tower. Guards do not in fact always see each inmate; the point is that

they could [...] [therefore] [inmates] must behave as if they are always seen and observed. As a result,

control is achieved more by the possibility of internal monitoring of those controlled" (Gutting, 2022).

For Foucault, this dynamic in general is a key aspect of modern disciplinary power. It is present

in schools, hospitals, shopping malls, etc. However, it is also integrated at the micro level into the

subjects themselves, who therefore observe and constrain their own behavior, perspectives, and
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attitudes as well as those of others (Gutting, 2022). This disciplinary power ultimately produces

manageable, compliant docile bodies (Kelly, 2015).

Before his early death in 1984, Foucault turned his critical and probing intellect toward the

topic of sexuality. The first volume of a multi-volume work was published in France in 1976, and in

English in 1978. Titled The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, it served as an

introduction, and focused on various concerns of modern sexuality including "children, women,

'perverts,' [and] population" (Gutting 2022). Kelly, author of The Political Philosophy of Michel

Foucault states that, "The Will to Knowledge is an extraordinarily influential work, perhaps Foucault’s

most influential" (2015). Similar to his previous works, he subjects different historical ways of thinking

about and conceiving sexuality to genealogical analysis. However, as sexuality involves deep aspects of

our subjective selfhood, the domination which emanates from scientific observation and discourse on

sexuality is particularly potent. In this case people "are controlled not only as objects of disciplines but

also as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects" (Gutting. 2022; Kelly, 2015). Ultimately, "sexuality

becomes an essential construct in determining not only moral worth, but also health, desire, and

identity, [as] subjects are further obligated to tell the truth about themselves by confessing the details of

their sexuality." This takes on a secularized religious dynamic where the doctor or psychiatrist takes the

place of the priest (Ibid.).

Foucault explains that the notion of modern society repressing sex is mistaken. In fact, he

argues that the opposite is the case; there has, in fact, been a great expansion of sexual discourse,

particularly that which is "medical, juridical and psychological." This, rather, leads to our society

becoming more sexualized. Also, because all sexuality is inherently based within enculturated

experience and understanding, the society's general view that there was a natural, repressed sexuality

needing to be liberated, was itself incorrect (Gutting, 2022). Foucault also points out in this work that

power is not only repressive, but that it is also productive, and works by producing "cultural normative
 10

practices and scientific discourses, [and] the ways in which we experience and conceive of our

sexuality" (Ibid.). This perspective influenced social constructivist understandings of sexuality, gender,

and identity. For instance, Judith Butler's work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of

Identity makes frequent reference to Foucault and his understandings of power-knowledge, as well as

the culturally relative/constructed nature of subjectivities and identities (2002; Kelly, 2015). Also,

Donna Haraway states in her "Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the

Late Twentieth Century" that "[Michel] Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg

politics;" where cyborg politics looks forward to "unclosed constructions of personal and collective

selves" (Haraway, 1991, 1 and 8).

Foucault completed Volumes II and III, and nearly completed Volume IV, all of which were

published after his death in 1984. Volume II, published in France in 1984, and in English in 1985; was

subtitled The Use of Pleasure. Volume III, published in France in 1984, and in English in 1986; was

subtitled The Care of Self. And finally, Volume IV published in draft form in France in 2018 and in

English in 2021 was subtitled Confessions of the Flesh. These works continue "to investigate how

individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics

of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion; [...] how, for centuries, Western man had

been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire" (Foucault, 1990, 5-6). They also continue to

examine the resultant power-knowledge dynamics. And Foucault also questions: "how, why, and in

what forms was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? Why this ethical concern that was so

persistent despite its varying forms and intensity? Why this 'problematization'?" (Ibid., 10). The

historical period analyzed ranges from the Greco-Roman period through to early Christianity. Kelly

notes how influential Foucault's thought has been: "concerns with sexuality, bodies, and norms form a

potent mix that has, via the work of Judith Butler in particular, been one of the main influences on
 11

contemporary feminist thought, as well as influential in diverse areas of the humanities and social

sciences" (2015).

Also, while most of Foucault's works had largely bracketed questions of how the state and such

institutions directly exercise power, his later work addresses these questions, especially the concept of

governmentality. Two collections of his lectures are of note, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at

the Collège de France 1977-1978, and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,

1978-1979. These works examine the intersection of statecraft and what Foucault terms the government

of the self. These works were also very influential, and form the "basis for what is effectively an entire

school of sociology and political theory" (Kelly 2015).

Foucault's understanding also influenced Deleuze's philosophy. Paul Bové—author of the

forward to Deleuze's work Foucault—quotes Foucault as saying, "'perhaps one day this century will be

known as Deleuzian" (Deleuze, 1988, xlii). Beyond Deleuze writing about him directly in the

eponymous Foucault, his influence is also foundational to Deleuze's essay "Postscript on Societies of

Control" (Deleuze, 1992). "Postscript" extrapolates Foucault's transition from sovereign societies to

disciplinary societies to what Deleuze calls control societies. This perspective is only increasing in

relevance, as the methods by which subjectivities and docile bodies are formed and governed

increasingly become the kind belonging to control societies. These modes of control, often based in

technology, are "ultrarapid," "free-floating," "inseparable," modulatory, gaseous, and "[perpetually]

[metastable]" (Deleuze, 1992). One simple example would be the discipline society's imprisonment and

associated prison cell, as opposed to the control society's house arrest and associated ankle monitor.

To summarize, Foucault's emphasized the discontinuity of historical development which

followed along "multiple, open-ended, heterogeneous trajectories of discourses, practices, and events"

and thereby contributed to the postmodern dismantling of meta/grand narratives. As Ritzer and

Stepnisky state, "[he] has no sense of some deep, ultimate truth; there are simply ever more layers to be
 12

peeled away" (2021, 421-422). And, as noted, his essay "What is an Author" contributed to the

Postmodern death of the author, re-conceptualizing the role of the transcendent subject, author, or

researcher.

Also, his structuralist/post-structuralist (Ritzer and Stepnisky, 2021) analyses show how

discourses generate, and relate to normative, subjectivizing power-knowledge dynamics which work to

categorize and marginalize certain groups seen as problematic from the perspective of the bourgeoisie.

This has given rise to a lifting up and centering of subaltern discourses, such as in "post-colonial

discourse theory, [or] multicultural theory," etc. (Athabasca University, 2024). It also contributed to the

rise of New Materialism, and Posthumanism (Sugrue, 1997); and his understanding of social

constructivism contributed significantly to the development of queer and gender studies (Ritzer and

Ryan, 2011). His Madness and Civilization "[gave] birth to the anti-psychiatry movement;" and,

relatedly contributed to the de-institutionalization of marginalized/incarcerated groups (Sugrue, 1997).

His understanding of bio-power/politics and the physics of micro-power significantly impacted social

theorists' understanding of power, which previously had been more attuned to its the top down

institutional manifestations. Conversely his ideas regarding the state and governmentality added to the

repertoire of macro level approaches to power.

Foucault's work was different from that of traditional sociologists in that he freely borrowed

from the methods and materials of any discipline. His approach was also different in that it—similar to

Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (2007), or Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome (2005)—blurred the

dichotomy of the micro/macro hierarchy.

In conclusion, this all examples Foucault's transformative influence which drastically changed

our understanding of society and social theory via his distinct methodology and perspective. This essay

is not—nor could it be—exhaustive. His influence is too intense, widespread, and diverse; it is nigh

impossible to trace all of its threads, to name all of its potential offspring, or delineate all the resultant
 13

realities. Foucault's work will continue to be impactful long into the foreseeable future; where it may

finally echo out to imperceptibility. And even then, it may perhaps at some unknowable point, be

revived; just as Duchamp's art took on renewed meaning for the (re)generation of the 1960s (Lebel,

2024).
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