Foucault draws our attention to a historical fallacy. We forget when interpreting events that our concepts are a product of those events. Since our concepts didn't exist before the events, we can't legitimately draw on them to explain the events.
The intelligent postmodernist contention is that the network of concepts which form part of a social institution cannot be used to explain how the institution has come to have the form it does: the concepts are a product of these changes, and therefore can't have a causal role in the development of the system.
These concepts are part and product of the development of the system - they have their own history, their own contingency, and need explaining and evaluating as much as the system they describe. In fact, you can't describe the history of the system without paying attention to the history of the concepts in the system: earlier concepts gave birth to the system and the resulting concepts.
For example, there was a drastic change in the institution of punishment between 1750 and 1850. The change was well-known to historians of the penal system, but until Foucault came along the change was generally explained in terms of an increasing humanisation of the system, brought about by greater recognition of the rights of the criminal (or some such).
Foucault's observation in Discipline and Punish is that the increased degree of humanity exhibited in the modern penal process is a phenomenon that itself needs to be accounted for: to state that increased humanity is the reason for the new system would be to mistake an effect for a cause. The question for Foucault is - what happened which allowed the concept of prisoners' rights to take hold? What happened so that we can even think about and interpret the history of the penal system in those terms?
In his account of the reform process, Foucault describes how much of the reform debate centred not around acknowledging the criminal's rights, but replacing a system which through its uneven activity was providing a locus for opposition against the crown and inhibiting the activity of the bourgeoisie. Reform was not born of a new sensibility, but the was the product of the ruling elite's need for a regularised system of justice.
That need for regularisation produced the ideal of the system which we have today: where punishment fits the crime; where there is a system of surveillance which ensures criminal behaviour goes detected and punished; where courts are disconnected from the influences that make their judgements discontinuous; where punishment only happens after an offence has been verified; where someone is innocent until proven guilty.
This idea of justice has since come loose from its origin and taken on a life of its own, no doubt because it is a vital conceptual weapon for the average citizen looking to defend himself against an omnipotent state. Nonetheless, its existence is an historical accident, whatever its contemporary importance in framing debates around penal reform, identifying miscarriages of justice, and protecting individuals from the state.
In this account, Foucault is highlighting a historical fallacy: it doesn't follow from your ability to interpret a change in a certain way that the concepts you are using in fact explain that change - accurate interpretation is much harder to achieve than that. The fallacy is made when it is forgotten that concepts have their own history, so cannot be assumed in interpretation.
The lesson is to avoid the mistake of using current concepts to explain historical changes: the first job of the historians of cultural change is to learn which concepts were being used at the time of the change they are studying. It is only their second job is to figure out what happened that produced the systemic change they are studying: what caused the old system to break down and disappear, and what happened so that the new system has the form that it does?
For me, this is a very significant lesson in postmodernism, although it rather pulls the interpreting rug out from under your feet. You end up trying to give a history of developments in some area, using concepts which have a history, with your own concepts that have their own history. You can never get out of the system to some point where you can observe all the conceptual moves. You just swim around inside it forever.
Is this a contradiction at the heart of postmodernism, that renders inquiry itself unintelligible? Or is it a discovery about human inquiry? I think it's a discovery. I think it is possible to do historical research within these limits - better research than the penal theorists whom Foucault was criticising, certainly - so there is no loss.
It might be interesting to ask in conclusion: If what Foucault says is so damaging to inquiry and undermining of our concept of truth and ability to interpret, then why was he such a painstaking and relentlessly thorough historian? Why did he try so hard to uncover errors? He wasn't a stereotypical postmodern waffler - so what gives?
** Join discussion at the sixteenvoices google group. Sign up today! **The intelligent postmodernist contention is that the network of concepts which form part of a social institution cannot be used to explain how the institution has come to have the form it does: the concepts are a product of these changes, and therefore can't have a causal role in the development of the system.
These concepts are part and product of the development of the system - they have their own history, their own contingency, and need explaining and evaluating as much as the system they describe. In fact, you can't describe the history of the system without paying attention to the history of the concepts in the system: earlier concepts gave birth to the system and the resulting concepts.
For example, there was a drastic change in the institution of punishment between 1750 and 1850. The change was well-known to historians of the penal system, but until Foucault came along the change was generally explained in terms of an increasing humanisation of the system, brought about by greater recognition of the rights of the criminal (or some such).
Foucault's observation in Discipline and Punish is that the increased degree of humanity exhibited in the modern penal process is a phenomenon that itself needs to be accounted for: to state that increased humanity is the reason for the new system would be to mistake an effect for a cause. The question for Foucault is - what happened which allowed the concept of prisoners' rights to take hold? What happened so that we can even think about and interpret the history of the penal system in those terms?
In his account of the reform process, Foucault describes how much of the reform debate centred not around acknowledging the criminal's rights, but replacing a system which through its uneven activity was providing a locus for opposition against the crown and inhibiting the activity of the bourgeoisie. Reform was not born of a new sensibility, but the was the product of the ruling elite's need for a regularised system of justice.
That need for regularisation produced the ideal of the system which we have today: where punishment fits the crime; where there is a system of surveillance which ensures criminal behaviour goes detected and punished; where courts are disconnected from the influences that make their judgements discontinuous; where punishment only happens after an offence has been verified; where someone is innocent until proven guilty.
This idea of justice has since come loose from its origin and taken on a life of its own, no doubt because it is a vital conceptual weapon for the average citizen looking to defend himself against an omnipotent state. Nonetheless, its existence is an historical accident, whatever its contemporary importance in framing debates around penal reform, identifying miscarriages of justice, and protecting individuals from the state.
In this account, Foucault is highlighting a historical fallacy: it doesn't follow from your ability to interpret a change in a certain way that the concepts you are using in fact explain that change - accurate interpretation is much harder to achieve than that. The fallacy is made when it is forgotten that concepts have their own history, so cannot be assumed in interpretation.
The lesson is to avoid the mistake of using current concepts to explain historical changes: the first job of the historians of cultural change is to learn which concepts were being used at the time of the change they are studying. It is only their second job is to figure out what happened that produced the systemic change they are studying: what caused the old system to break down and disappear, and what happened so that the new system has the form that it does?
For me, this is a very significant lesson in postmodernism, although it rather pulls the interpreting rug out from under your feet. You end up trying to give a history of developments in some area, using concepts which have a history, with your own concepts that have their own history. You can never get out of the system to some point where you can observe all the conceptual moves. You just swim around inside it forever.
Is this a contradiction at the heart of postmodernism, that renders inquiry itself unintelligible? Or is it a discovery about human inquiry? I think it's a discovery. I think it is possible to do historical research within these limits - better research than the penal theorists whom Foucault was criticising, certainly - so there is no loss.
It might be interesting to ask in conclusion: If what Foucault says is so damaging to inquiry and undermining of our concept of truth and ability to interpret, then why was he such a painstaking and relentlessly thorough historian? Why did he try so hard to uncover errors? He wasn't a stereotypical postmodern waffler - so what gives?
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