Religions Reviewed

Elsewhere in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault was indeed scornful of “simple causality,” and he associated “endless processes of causality” with a “continuous history” which he rejected.[1] Munslow claims that “Foucauldian history does not evolve diachronically, but is best understood synchronically, as an explosive discursive structure.”[2] And yet, for all that Foucault insisted on ruptures and discontinuities, he still worked in a narrative form.[3] (The association between history and narrative is of course much stronger in Continental discourses where the words themselves—histoire, geschichte—fully embrace both meanings.) If not “simple causality,” there must nevertheless be some associative principles by which events are organized into the temporal ‘series’ which form the basis of “general history.”[4] And, for all of his effort to break with convention, Foucault’s titles still show his willingness to begin at a beginning.

As O’Brien observes, Foucault’s intellectual project was in many respects highly traditional: a history of Western civilization.[5] But the narrative of the most traditional histories involves not only causal plot, but characters, whether they are leaders, thinkers, peoples, states, or classes. Foucault was willing to illustrate his narrative with vivid anecdotes centered on individuals, such as the torture and execution of the regicide Damiens in Discipline & Punish, and the “Dossier” that makes up the body of I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother….[6] But Foucault’s accounts typically lack the sort of individual or collective characters common to historical narrative, in contrast to Bertrande in Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, or white male workers in Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness. The principal agents in Foucault’s narrative are developments of power/knowledge evident in constellations of effects on institutions, personal practices, artifacts, architecture, and documentation by which humans develop and define themselves and others. Thus Foucault wrote a story in which the prison (or, as we finally come to know it, the “carceral archipelago”[7]) is the protagonist, overcoming the “punitive city” in competition to take its place as the penal system of the modern West.[8] Another principal character of Discipline & Punish is the old spectacular and corporeal penal system of the avenged sovereign.

[1] Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 7, 203.

[2] Munslow, “Michel Foucault and History,” p. 132.

[3] Munslow is particularly insistent on the importance of narrative for Foucault: “Michel Foucault and History,” pp. 134-7.

[4] Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 9-10.

[5] O’Brien, “Foucault’s History of Culture,” p. 33. Foucault himself might well have disdained this conclusion, since he set himself against the efficacy of the notion of an author’s ouvre (The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 23-4).

[6] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, pp. 3-5. Ibid. (ed.). I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother… (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

[7] Foucault, Discipline & Punish, p. 298.

[8] Op. cit., pp. 130-1.