Foucault vs. Utopia

The trajectory of Michel Foucault’s theoretical work can be characterised broadly as moving from archaeologies to genealogies to technologies of the self. What these formations share is an underlying commitment to interrogating the structures of knowledge and power in societies. As Foucault stated in an interview from October 1982:

'All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made'.

In his later essay, Technologies of the Self, Foucault defines his interest in technologies of the self – ‘the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself’ – against the concerns to which the best part of his career had been devoted:

'I have attempted a history of the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self. For example, I studied madness not in terms of the criteria of formal sciences but to show how a type of management of individuals inside and outside of asylums was made possible by this strange discourse. This contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call governmentality'.

What is described as the ‘history of organization’ in this extract refers to the different ways that humans develop knowledge. Foucault is clear that we must not accept this knowledge at face value, instead it should be considered as a set of ‘very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves’.

This brief overview of Foucault’s work defines the key concerns of his project, which are crystallised in his comment about being ‘against the idea of universal necessities in human existence’. It is therefore unsurprising that he was skeptical about the idea of utopia, speaking of Habermas’ essay on Utopia in an interview in the following terms:

'The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth would circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint, and without coercive effects, seems to me to be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free oneself. I don’t believe there can be a society without relations of power […] The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination' – (1991) The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an interview (translated by J.D. Gauthier), in J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen (Eds) The Final Foucault, pp. 102-118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Likewise, in ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault warns that:

'We know from experience that the claims to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led to the return of the most dangerous traditions' – (1984), p. 46.

In contrast to utopias, Foucault proposes the heterotopias – ‘localisable’ instances of the utopian idea. This is discussed most extensively in The Order of Things and his 1967 lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’. Describing utopia as a space that represents an inverted analogy of society or society in its perfected form, the heterotopia is portrayed as its parallel in physical form, the closest equivalent or approximation of a utopia. Examples include cemeteries, gardens, museums and theatres. Because Foucault’s thought dismisses essential or primary notions, i.e. ‘universal necessities’, the break through to something else evoked by utopias (see Jameson) is not accommodated in the heterotopian model. However, heterotopias are still able to provide an alternative ‘reservoir of imagination’. Further, the concept works strategically to highlight and reflect upon changing cultural and historical relations, functions and the effects of specific spaces; heterotopias do not function fully except in relation to each other (work at a descriptive and exploratory level).

In this sense, a comparison with Fredric Jameson’s work on utopia, which highlights the failure to imagine the future in utopian texts (in order to explore the structural limits of these imaginings), may be productive. To some extent, both thinkers are concerned with undermining a form of historical enclosure. However, the theoretical implications and political ramifications of a commitment to utopia are, for Foucault, too great.

Foucault’s critical principle: - that one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.