Abstract
Michel Foucault was one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century, and thereafter. Like Marx, he also became a cartoon character as well as a guru; the toolbox mentality among his audience worked against the nuanced interpretation of his work, as his project was plundered by enthusiasts, not least for the grim implications of Discipline and Punish. Here was the dark side of modernity pitched large. Foucault’s work was, indeed, a body of research of extraordinary achievement, whose richness is still now difficult to fathom or comprehend. The reception of Marx’s work is doing better, these days, but it took another hundred years to get to this point.
One way into these labyrinths, whether of Marx or Foucault, is archival. These paths of interpretation are philological. This is to read Foucault as he read, in the archive, line by line, looking for clues. Those early days of looking to find Foucault, the activist, the bald guy with the megaphone, are long gone. Now, at the hands of scholars like Stuart Elden, the state of scholarship is light years on. What might it now mean, to understand Foucault? And, what might it mean to follow, after?
The quantum shift here is towards the archive. Elden works at a level of detail that is astonishing, so deep is it in nuance and insight. This also makes his a difficult book to review, given our incapacity to follow it step by step, like the imaginary map of the world that is one to one. The scholarship is forensic, painstakingly given to detail, and also has a heightened sense of its own contingency. For there are always more archives.
This is, as Elden knows, also to follow Foucault – to work with archive more than text alone. The result, in Elden’s hands, is palimpsest. The context we know – Dumezil, Canguilhem, Hyppolite. The echoes are often in the published records of the Annales School, with the difference that the curiosity is in power, and its constellations of critical concepts. Nietzsche is a significant critical additive, of course, but so, here, is Marx, who as Elden shows is often at Foucault’s elbow as he shadows problems of capitalism and the disciplinary regimes that make ‘productive bodies’.
There is much in this book outside Discipline and Punish, of course: madness, illness, the state, the normality of civil war as it inhabits the interstices of civil society; and underneath all this, so to speak, the architecture of space, and the legacies of the Greeks. As much as may have been taken from Discipline and Punish for the concern with prisons, Elden usefully reminds us that Bentham’s remit was always broader in its ambitions, and universal in its impulse. Panopticon could be a model for all institutions, a machine whose purpose was to exercise power.
Yet Foucault’s purpose was not to patent or sell models. That was Bentham’s schtick. As Elden reminds, Foucault was far more given to self-effacement. ‘Basically, I do not like to write…I would like my books to be a kind of scalpel, Molotov cocktails, or undermining tunnels and to be burned up after use like fireworks…I am an instrument dealer, a recipe maker, a guide to objectives, a cartographer, a plan maker, an armourer.’ Yet he was, as Elden concludes together with Keith Reader, nevertheless assimilated into the academic mainstream, for the French left after 1968 identified with the areas of study that he examined, rather than the concepts he deployed to examine them. Like Marx, his legacy was misdirected, because misunderstood.
How does the logic of Elden’s practice reflect or refract this persona? Foucault’s self-characterizing claims are appealing, even if they are less than entirely convincing. He was also a scholar, of most serious intent. And he was also, in this moment, politically active, and committed to team work as well as to lobbing the odd solo Molotov. Watching Elden at work is intriguing. What is this process? It is as though in reading his book we are watching a movie, or a movie about a movie – The Name of the Rose? Is it an encyclopaedia? a training manual? a game? a theatre, or tableau? ‘At the BNF, box 3 is labeled as preparatory material…It includes just two folders…But the second folder in the box does not contain the material for the next course…’
The logic of Elden’s prose and persona is that we are only at the beginning of the task, if our purpose is to understand Michel Foucault. Brian Harcourt does not oversell when he says of this book that ‘it is the perfect reading companion to Foucault’s “power-knowledge” period’. We can look forward to the further work that follows, as to the spectacle of watching the scholar follow the scholar.