Aug 25 2008
Foucault’s Use of Narrative in Discipline & Punish, Part I
Michel Foucault’s histories of the modern institutions of the hospital and the prison each carry the term ‘Birth’ (Naissance) in their titles.[1] Of course, the word can only be read in a metaphorical sense in these cases, and Foucault used it more loosely than would have been expected in the sort of history that might point to a founding personality as a ‘parent,’ or to a nation as a ‘cradle.’ Still, the metaphor is consistent with his project of ‘genealogy,’ a term taken up from Nietzsche to describe an inquiry into past systems of thought, understood as flexible power relations with consequences for the present.[2] A ‘birth,’ no matter how metaphorical, is a first instance, and indicates a set of formative conditions. Any historian might have both rhetorical and practical interests in the beginning of an object of historical study. In fact, Foucault once described the history of ideas—which his ‘archaeology’ was overtly intended to supersede—as the “analysis of silent births.”[3]
In her overview of the genealogical method in “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” Patricia O’Brien presents Foucault’s “essential distinction” between beginnings and origins. According to O’Brien, the distinction is that beginnings are the crucial evidence of difference, while origins implicate the idea of causation.[4] Both O’Brien and Alan Munslow characterize Foucault’s approach as hostile to causality as a category of analysis, which seems to raise some immediate problems for the work of history.[5] In The Archaeology of Knowledge, however, Foucault provided a somewhat different distinction between beginning and origin. There, he explicitly renounced any desire to appeal to the “real event” as a “secret origin” which has been thought to underlie and motivate “any apparent beginning.”[6] Foucault was not rejecting the idea of causality in this case: he was instead denying any realist epistemology which would place a hidden noumenal order at the back of the discursive phenomena of history, “to cleanse [history] of all transcendental narcissism.”[7] So, to return to the idea of ‘birth,’ Foucault would likely set himself methodologically against any extension of the metaphor to include a ‘conception’ that would be the ‘real cause’ of the cultural and discursive effects that he grouped as carceral in Discipline & Punish, for example.
[1] Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Achaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (
London, 1972). Ibid. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).
[2] Ibid. “Prison Talk,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 53
[3] Ibid. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 138.
[4] O’Brien, Patrica. “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 37.
[5] O’Brien, “Foucault’s History of Culture,” p. 44. Munslow, Alan. “Michel Foucault and History,” in ibid., Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 132.
[6] Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 25.
[7] Op. cit., p. 203. In this respect he was still working on his extension of the Nietzschean project. See e.g. the section on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” in Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 485-6.
