Foucault and reality

Abstract

Introduction This article looks at Foucault from the standpoint of realist philosophy, in particular the critical realism developed by Roy Bhaskar and others. So far little has been said on this possible connection, although this article examines some of the claims made by Richard Marsden in his recent book, The Nature of Capital. The opening sections concentrate on epistemological issues and in particular the criticisms made of Foucault's conception of truth. These sections also distinguish between Foucault's early, middle and late works and take up the debate in relation some of the claims of postmodernism. Foucault's early works are heavily influenced by an anti-humanist structuralism which is employed in the studies of madness and illness and theoretically elaborated in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. These works attempt study social history according changes in discourse. The concept of discourse becomes an overarching category that explains the cohesion and unity of social practices. It is argued that while there are problems with Foucault's notion of discourse, his position should be distinguished from the postmodern approach. The third section argues that Foucault's later work moves away from discourse and concerns itself more with practice and power. However, Foucault also moves away from structure, leaving a social ontology that is fragmented, pluralistic and dispersed. This is seen be the main weakness in Foucault's work on governmentality which is covered in the fourth section. It is argued that critical realism's conception of a structured and stratified social world is necessary if we are conceive of traditional Marxist notions of state power and underlying economic relations. However, Foucault's work does add considerably a Marxist understanding of the way the social operates through techniques of discipline and regulation and this is covered in the final section in relation the production process. Knowledge and the real world On a spectrum that runs from realism postmodernism Foucault stands somewhere in the middle. Critical realism is driven by the need offer some explanatory power for how we understand the world around us, while remaining aware of the limitations of such an exercise. Ontologically bold in recognising the need to offer an explanation, critical realism is epistemically cautious in how it regards the status of this explanation. Caution comes from the premise that the real world is independent of the knowledge we have of it and that the world itself and the knowledge we have of it are not one and the same thing. Consequently, all knowledge is necessarily fallible. The object of knowledge is intransitive, the knowledge we have of it is transitive. This transitive domain is subject the kind of power-knowledge relations discussed by Foucault. This does not, however, affect the status of the knowledge-independent intransitive realm. As Bhaskar writes: 'The intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant our knowledge of them; they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us' (Bhaskar 1978:22). For the postmodernist, there is no such distinction between the intransitive and the transitive, never mind any comprehension of structures, mechanisms or processes. Knowledge and reality are regarded as one and the same thing, or at least reality outside of knowledge is declared meaningless. Postmodern thought displays the clearest case of what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy, or the reduction of the world the knowledge that we have of it. For those foolish enough take Derrida at his (or his translator's) word, there is nothing beyond the text, no outside text, no intransitive reality. Of course such a position can lead the kind of absurdities of which we are all too familiar--Baudrillard's hyper-real takes over from the real: 'It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real. …