Playing the Game of Life, Man can Transform Himself for the Better and Worse.

How do we arrive at what’s true and false, and how do reality and fiction relate to Power? Foucault’s analysis of power relations is predicated on this question. For Foucault, Power isn’t so much an external force, acting upon a society but, instead, a social product, delimited by the rationality of any specific society. Today, I will explore some specific examples to show how Foucault reached this conclusion.

In The Birth of Social Medicine, Foucault explores a specific problem: the medicalized state. At the heart of this piece, Foucault is interested in where the state’s medical apparatuses came from. What he discloses is illuminating for himself and his readers.

Foucault begins by asking the following: “Is Modern medicine individualized?” His response is succinct. “No”: Foucault believes that medicine is a social phenomenon. “The body is a biopolitical reality; medicine is a biopolitical strategy,” (pp. 136-137), he says. For Foucault, individuals within a society are the product of the social forces and powers of that society acting upon them and shaping their character through that society’s internal logic. This biopolitical body was, according to Foucault, constituted by the various practices of social medicine. This started with State Medicine in Germany, followed by Urban Medicine in France, and then, finally, Labor Force Medicine in England.

State medicine was established in Germany in response to political and military competition with its neighbors (pp. 137-142). To achieve this, Germany established a system of observation to collect data; it standardized its medical practices; it set up administrative medical authorities to oversee the activities of its doctors; and lastly, created a body of medical officers to oversee various regions within Germany. Germany wanted healthy individuals and it used the state’s powers to achieve its aims.

Urban medicine, as was previously stated, expanded primarily through urbanization in French cities (pp. 142-151). Foucault identifies three causes related to urban medicine. Firstly, the city was a market and produced goods, requiring homogenous and coherent regulation mechanisms. Secondly, as urban tensions increased in the French urban centers, the city required tighter regulations and control of people. Lastly, Urban panic – fear of disease – required medical procedures to be established to regulate the unwell and to quell fears. The goal of urbanized medicine was to supervise and control large populations to prevent illness. The French achieved this by studying how refuse accumulated, specifically dead bodies; controlling water and air circulation; and lastly, controlling where and how medical facilities should be placed. Foucault argues that urban medicalization matters because medicine and chemistry were given a chance to cross paths, resulting in the physiochemical sciences; statists began to study and catalog, i.e., build theories of knowledge, about the living conditions of people; and lastly, massive public hygiene policies and practices were put in place, radically reshaping the cities’ characters. The practice of urban medicine remained in the big cities and did not extend as far as the German practices, which covered whole territories, because the French state valued private property.

Lastly, Labor Force Medicine. Labor Force Medicine was established to address the poor who had become a medical and political hazard; i.e., they could cause social unrest (pp. 151-156). Therefore, the state responded by establishing a surveillance and care system for the poor. Initially, the Poor Laws served this purpose. These laws enabled the wealthy to care for and separate themselves from the poor. The wealthy, perhaps justifiably, saw the poor as a source of disease and so they wanted to separate themselves from them. However, the general population also wanted protection from the problems of disease and unrest rooted in the indigent populations. The general population, thus, established health services. These were established to vaccinate and immunize members of the population; organize information about deadly diseases and require people to report any symptoms of disease they spotted; and lastly, identify unhealthy places and, if needed, ways to destroy those places. Some members of the population resisted these enforcements. Foucault seemingly argues that these were genuine resistance against authoritarian mechanisms and state apparatuses that infringed on the people’s rights rather than merely archaic or backward holdouts.

Three facts should be taken away from the medicalization of Europe. Firstly, as de Jouvenel had identified in his writings, Power’s and the state’s development were rooted in international competition. An unhealthy population in Germany, England, and France would have caused political unrest or disease, preventing the nation from competing or leaving it open to invasion from a competitor. Secondly, each nation appears to have established a system of surveillance to watch over its citizens, enabling a corpus of knowledge to be gathered about them. This corpus of knowledge led to advancements such as physiochemistry, but they also had logical, rational systems whose scientificity could have prevented them from incorporating relevant pieces of information. Lastly, the European character was significantly altered by these advances, as well. The salubrious policies established by the French and the surveillance systems established by Germany and England would have changed how each citizen saw the other. Either one was clean or unclean, vaccinated or unvaccinated, able-bodied or ill. However, the problem is more severe than this; being unclean, unvaccinated, or ill, did not merely mean you hadn’t followed orders or were unwell; it meant you were a problem for the state and society, or that you were immoral. A new moral conception of the body, of Man, would have naturally been a derivative of these sociological changes within the European system.

The development of the European character through social influence was clearly a fascination for Foucault. In Lives of Infamous Men, Foucault explores the quotidian or mundane, i.e., everyday stories of Men and Women in Europe during the medical state’s ascent. I found this piece to be an extremely fascinating exploration of how, from the bottom to the top, the people ensured their subjugation. The mundane or quotidian, the picadillo, or relatively small or unimportant offenses or sins, colored this piece beautifully. The little events that most people would unthinkingly gloss over are meditated upon in lucid detail. Specifically, Foucault once again sees the letters de cachet as a major source of inspiration. These little letters, poorly written demands for the king to resolve this or that problem by the citizenry, show how very basic people can use mechanisms that they know are a potential liability for them to acquire power for themselves or garner some fleeting security. These public tools of gossip and surveillance were relatively simple, as were the people using them. It was not some monster or abstract alien that subjugated the people to the state. Normal people, who just wanted something from the state, using its mechanisms, enabled its expansion and – in some cases – were better off for doing so.

For the state's citizens, the Madman -- the “Dangerous Individual” -- also became an obsession, leading to new understandings of humanity. A fascinating exploration of the development of knowledge, as it relates to Power or the state, can be found in Foucault’s essay, About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry. In this piece, Foucault seems to be interested in the history of the madman. What he makes clear is that the problem of the madman wasn’t that he suffered from dementia or furor. The problem of the madman was related to the development of the medical state; specifically, the state wanted to understand how to regulate the madmen and how to treat them for the population's well-being. Since the social body needed to be controlled (as Foucault made clear in The Birth of Social Medicine), there was a need to understand the “dangerous individual” for the well-being of the social body. Motivation for the crime became an obsession – the system had to know why these alien phenomena occurred. The pattern of the “dangerous individual” emerges from this obsession, giving rise to the anthropological study of the criminal man in Italy and the Theory of Social Defense out of Belgium (pp. 184-190).

Foucault also explores how criminal psychiatry’s interest in the “dangerous individual” led psychiatrists to play a knowledge game with the law. This undermined the concept of responsibility and transformed the madman into a problem of potential harm. In part, this was facilitated by the legal conception of risk, which made “dangerous individuals” a concern for the health and well-being of the society (p. 190-200). In the end, Foucault seems critical of where this idea could lead in its post-WW form. As scientific knowledge tells us more about what a person might do, i.e., the risks they could pose to society, that society could have reason to control the bodies of those people (p. 200). This is also disturbing when one realizes the state cannot hold itself responsible for its actions. “Responsibility” as a concept has been undermined through the admixture of the human sciences and law. Thus, the state or Power might only admit that its actions were a potential risk to the community or society it was supposed to care for; it might try to control itself more, but it will never recognize it caused the problem. Still, this seems like wishful thinking. As a representative of the people, the government, i.e., the state, cannot harm the people. The state harming the people is -- for all intents and purposes -- the people harming themselves, i.e., the people posing a risk to themselves. Therefore, if the people wish to be represented by the state, i.e., if they want people to be held responsible for their actions, they must learn to wield the state or it will continue to act against their interests and on their behalf.

This leads us to the concept of governmentality, explored in Foucault’s essay on the topic: Governmentality. Foucault begins this piece by establishing a dichotomy between Machiavellianism and the art of government. Government in its new form is defined as “[the] right manner of disposing things, so as to lead… to an end that is ‘convenient’ for each of the things that are to be governed” (p. 211). The governed thing was defined by its relation to the father, the sovereign, the King, or Power. The family, thus, became the model defining the state. In time, the family was replaced with the population but preserved as a way to extract information that could lead to better governance. According to Foucault, this shift from the family model to the population model is “absolutely fundamental” to understand (p. 216). Again: the state dissolved the importance of the family and replaced it as a model for the total population to increase its ability to compete with other nations; the family. then, became a way for the state to preserve its population rather than being the society's cornerstone. Having switched from the family as a model to the population, the state’s security apparatuses and the government (composed of the sovereign [state], disciplinary mechanisms, and any other government apparatuses) targeted the population to increase the state’s productivity (p. 214). Using the pastoral model (discussed thoroughly in Foucault’s ethical works), military discipline technics, and the police, the state, sovereign, or Power could affect its will on the populace and govern them as was most convenient for them, for itself. The individual was dissolved into the total population. As de Jouvenel consistently points out – by the state’s internal logic, there’s no separation between the population and Power. Whatever Power does in the people’s name – think Napoleon – it is the people’s will. Having delegated their authority to him – e.g., letters de cachet – they became his subjects. Having beckoned to the heavens for salvation, the Prince of Government seats himself on his throne and gives them aid, only to make them part of his flesh.

The problem of rationality is explored more thoroughly in Questions of Method, an interview conducted with Foucault and published in 1980. In this interview, we find out that Foucault looked at rationalizations to “see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth ([and]… by production of truth [he] means… the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent.)” (p. 230). From this interview, it seems clear that Foucault is interested in a truth that's relevant to his life, i.e., that he can use to make sense of the systems he’s part of and the infrastructures that shape his character. Exploring true and false statements, constrained by systems of knowledge construction (i.e., interpretation and verification), could – as was made evident in his ethical, methodological, and epistemological research – prevent one from more deeply understanding the circumstances they find themselves within. For example, Foucault’s focus on prisons isn’t so much an interest in prisons themselves. Rather, he wants to understand the historical events that generated the prison as a knowledge-generating device and mechanism of subjugation that sometimes exacerbates problems instead of alleviating them. This is why he is critical of rational systems. He sees rational systems as social constructs rather than emanating from some objective source. For example, rational systems can be fields of inquiry and investigation derived from certain historical milieus that want to understand specific questions. The methods used to generate these knowledges through these rational systems are inevitably provided to the state to exert its authority over the populace for its benefit. These knowledges are potentially only true within the rational framework that produces them, perhaps because they are helpful for the state. Effectively, these rational frameworks are like lenses used to engage in certain behaviors, acquire certain understandings (connaissance) and generate conceptual categories (savoir) that the state can use to understand the population. This doesn’t inherently invalidate these concepts, but it should make us think twice about them.

What is evident from Foucault’s work is that these systems, derived from the people’s interaction with the state, and the state’s tendency to develop domains and fields of knowledge to produce conceptual categories, help the state understand the population but do not generate truths that are necessarily helpful for the people. These representational truths – rather than literal truths – are used by the state to subjugate, coordinate, command, or make the population more productive. The institutions, agencies, and administrative bodies, these the state can use to achieve its ends and develop normative modes of behavior – enunciations – from the bodies of knowledge produced by the domains and fields of the state or Power. In this way, Power can capture these knowledge-generating systems, produce conceptual knowledge that they feed into the administrative agencies (i.e., give them a frame to see the world with and, thus, to interact with the world in a particular way) to get them to behave in particular ways. Because this process can be separated from the people’s awareness, because the state and Power can act on their behalf without them knowing, this can result in administrative agencies acting in the people’s name, using conceptual knowledge and frameworks produced by knowledge constructing (i.e., interpreting and verifying agencies), to subjugate the population. The agencies, i.e., bureaucracies, wouldn’t realize they were doing anything wrong. The logic of their behavior would be internally consistent, i.e., coherent, it would produce the expected results predicted by the model provided to them, but the output wouldn’t be a natural occurrence – it would be a phenomenon produced by the model. In this way, Foucault is highly critical of rational systems because they can be a way to conceal completely irrational and self-serving behavior.

In Foucault’s words: “My general theme isn’t society but the discourse of true and false, by which I mean the correlative formation of domains and objects and of the verifiable, falsifiable discourses that bear on them; and it’s not just their formation that interests me, but the effects in the real to which they are linked.” (p. 237).

I will now try to bring together some of the ideas I’ve been exploring over the past several days.

What I think Foucault is trying to get the reader to think about is how a subject, who happens to find himself in certain circumstances and is equipped with certain capabilities, can generate solutions to the problems he discovers in his environment through something like play. Within the social and hierarchical milieu, the state, city, country, etc., i.e., faced with oppressive forces, the individual can play games with these forces of Power, specifically by discovering the internal logic of the games that define the society. Here the subject can see how he is shaped and shapes the rationale of the systems he engages with. These rational systems are not objectively binary, they are not absolute, and they are socially constructed and interpreted based on the society's needs and its members. The knowledge generated by these systems and their subjects are by no means inherently a problem, and in Interview with Michel Foucault, Foucault makes this point relatively clear. Rather, as he identified in his ethical work, Foucault sees that people can become blinded by these frameworks; they lose their sense of self and become possessed by them. When this happens, the state may use people to achieve aims that are contrary to the people’s wishes. However, people will feel these systems are justified because they cannot see how they are wrong within their perspectives defining framework.

Under these circumstances, the individual perceives their action as moral, good for the whole social body, an act of cleansing, and their victim as a genuinely evil person. However, all of these perceived facts might be false. Acting on behalf of the state, under a framework provided by the state, sovereign, or Power, a state’s subject may be a pure agent, unaware of the consequences of its behavior or the falsity of its claims; literally, an individual possessed by the state. It is very hard to fault Foucault for pointing out this problem or bringing our attention to it by the means he did. Under these circumstances, it’s not impossible to imagine not wanting to question everything asserted by the state or Power. The people, effectively, needed to be irritated – they needed to see that they were – in the prisons and psychiatric hospitals – potentially causing the problem rather than resolving it.

In Interview with Michel Foucault, Foucault does have some advice for people becoming aware of these kinds of problems. He goes back to his archeological and genealogical work and advises the intellectuals to focus on the problems that they face in their everyday work environments. As most writers are taught from an early point in their career, Foucault is effectively telling them to write, i.e., do ethical and existential work, about what they know. This kind of writing, as Foucault also makes clear in this interview from 1980, is a developmental exercise. Writing about the problems, dissecting them, looking for the historical causes and roots, and understanding the logic of these socially constructed logic systems, is a way to grow. Writing, as was made evident in his ethical work, is a “fiction” for Foucault. I construe this to mean that it allows one to construct a representation of the self as a subject that an individual can inhabit and use to perceive the world in a new light. Being a Nietzschean, this is Foucault’s conception of the new man.

Foucault is trying to point out how the subject, engaging in power games, develops a self inhabited by himself and his descendants. By doing the work Foucault advises us to do – i.e., writing as an existential and ethical exercise, meditative practices that put one in real and tangible scenarios, and self-reflection exercises that allow one to observe the logic systems they engage with and inhabit – one can become aware of these power games and consciously manipulate them to his advantage. It’s all well and good to be a good fighter in a given domain, but are you conscious of how you fight, what you can do to improve, and how the kind of fighting you’re doing can limit your ability to engage with an opponent outside the form you’re accustomed to? Effectively, Foucault is asking us to engage in philosophical and social MMA.

Who would have thought that such a simple proposal, -- that we are all just playing games -- could change someone’s life so significantly?

Bibliography

Foucault M. and Faubion J.D. (editor) (1994). Michel Foucault: Power. Edition Gallimard.