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M I C H E L
F O U C A U L T
AESTHETICS
METHOD
AND
EPISTEMOLOGY
dited y
JAMES D.
FAUBION
Translated
y
ROBERT HURLEY
ND OTHERS
ESSENTI L
W O R K S O F
FOUCAULT
1954 1984
V O L U M E
T W O
ALLEN LANE
THE PENGUIN
PRESS
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PH I LOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY
A.B.
What
is psychology?
M F Let me say that I don t think we should try to define psychol-
ogy as a science but perhaps as a cultural form. It fits into a whole
series
of phenomena with which
Western culture
has been
familiar
for a long time, and
in
which there
emerged such
things as confes-
sion, casuistry, dialogues, discourses, and argumentations that could
be articulated in certain milieus of the Middle Ages, love courtships or
whatnot in the mannered
circles of the seventeenth century.
A.B. Are there
internal
or external relations
between
psychology
as a cultural form and philosophy as a cultural form? And is philoso-
phy a cultur al form?
M F You re asking two questions:
1.
Is philosophy a cultura l form? I have to say that I m
not much
of
a philosopher, so
I m not
really
in
a position
to
know. I
think
that s the
great problem
being debated now; perhaps philosophy is in fact
the
most general cultural form in which we might be able to reflect on the
reality of the West.
2
Now, what are the relations between psychology as a cultural
form and philosophy? Well, I believe that we are looking at a point of
conflict that for five
hundred
years
has
set philosophers
and
psy-
chologists against one another, a problem that is given a new perti-
nence by all the questions
that
revolve
around
educational reform.
'This
interview, conducted
by
Alain Badiou, appeared in ossiers p edagogiques
de
la
r d i o ~ t e t e v i s i o n scolaire (27 Feb. 1965),
pp.
65 71. Robert Hurley s translation.
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Aesthetics Method nd Epistemology
I think
we
can say this: first, that psychology and, through psychol
ogy the human sciences have indeed
been in
a very tangled relation
ship
with
philosophy since the
nineteenth
century. What is one to
make of
this
entanglement
of philosophy
and the
human sciences?
One
can
tell
himself
that philosophy in the Western world delimited a
domain, blindly
and in
the void as
it
were, in darkness, in the obscu
rity of its
own
consciousness
and
its
methods-the
domain that
it
called the soul or thought,'' and that now serves as a legacy that the
human sciences have to cultivate in a clear, lucid,
and
positive
man
ner. So the human sciences would be legitimately occupying that
rather vague domain which was marked
off
but
left fallow by philoso
phy.
That is
what
one might reply. I think it is what would be said,
rather willingly, by people who can be thought of as the defenders of
the
human
sciences, people who consider that the ancient philosophi
cal task, which originated
in
the West
with
Greek thought,
should
now be resumed using the tools of the human sciences. I don't think
that defines the exact dimensions of
the
problem.
I t seems
to
me
that
such a way of analyzing things is clearly tied to a philosophical per
spective,
which
is positivism.
One might also
say something
else- the contrary. It may be part of
the destiny of Western philosophy that, since the nineteenth century,
something
like an anthropology became possible;
when
I say anthro
pology I am not referring to the
particular
science called anthropol
ogy, which
is
the study of
cultures
exterior to our own;
by
anthropology I
mean
the strictly philosophical structu re responsible
for the fact
that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within
the domain that can
be called
that
of
human
finitude.
If one
can
no longer philosophize about anything but man insofar
as
he
is a
Homo natura
or insofar as he is a finite being, to
that
extent
isn't every philosophy at bottom an anthropology? This being the
case, philosophy becomes the cultural form within
which
all
the
sci
ences of man in
general
are possible.
That
is what could be said,
and it
would be,
if you
will, the opposite
analysis to the one I outlined a
moment
ago, so that in the great des
tiny of Western philosophy it could co-opt the
human
sciences, just as
previously one could co-opt philosophy as a
kind
of blank program of
what
the human sciences should be. That is the entanglement, which
Philosophy nd Psychology
is
what we
have to think through, bot h now, here where
we
are, and
generally in the coming years.
A.B. You
said in the first perspective that, on the whole, philoso
phy
was
conceived as presc ribing its
domain
to a positive science
that
would later ensure its actual elucidation. In this perspective
what
can
ensure
the specificity
of
psychology, in comparison
with
other types of
investigation? Can positivism, by its own means, ensure that specific
ity
and
does
it intend to
do so?
M F Well, at a time
when
the human sciences did in fact receive
their problematic, their domain, and their concepts from a philosophy
that was mainly that of the eighteenth century, I
think
that psychology
could be defined either as a science, let's say, of the soul, or as a
science of the individual. To that extent, I
think
the differentiation
from the other human sciences that existed then, and that was already
possible, could be
made in
a
rather
clear manner: one could oppose
psychology to the sciences of the physiological order, just as one op
posed
the
soul to the body; one c ould oppose psychology to sociology,
just as on e opposed the individual to the collectivity or the group, and
if one defines psychology as the science of consciousness, to
what
is
one going to oppose it? Well, for a period extending roughly from
Arthur
Schopenhauer
to Nietzsche, it could be said that psychology
was
opposed to philosophy, just as consciousness
was
opposed to the
unconscious. I think, moreover, that it was precisely around the eluci
dation of the
nature
of the unconscious that the reorganization
and
the repartitioning of the human sciences were carrie d out, essentially
around
Freud,
and
the positive definition, inherited from the eigh
teenth century, of psychology as a science of consciousness and of the
individual can no longer stand, now that Freud has existed.
A.B.
Now let's place ourselves
in
the other perspective:
the
prob
lematic of the unconscious, which you see as the source of the re
structuring of the domain of the human sciences. What meaning do
you
assign to it, given that the human sciences are regarded as a
moment
in the destiny of Western philosophy?
M F This
problem
of the unconscious is really very difficult, be
cause apparently one
can
say that psychoanalysis is a form of psy
chology that is
added
to the psychology of consciousness, doubling
the psychology of consciousness
with
a supplementary layer
that
would, be that of the unconscious. And, as a
matter
of fact,
it
was
realized immediately that by discovering the unconscious one pulled
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in
at the same
time a lot
of
problems
that no
longer involved
either
the
individual, exactly, or the soul opposed to the body; but that one
brought back inside the strictly psychological problemati c what had
previously been excluded from it,
either
on the grounds that
it
was
physiology, rein troducing the
problem
of the body, or sociology,
rein
troducing the problem
of
the individual with his milieu, the group to
which he belongs, the society in which he is caught, the culture in
which
he
and
his ancestors have always thought. With
the result
that
the simple discovery of the unconscious is not an addition of domains:
it is
not
an extension
of
psychology,
it
is actually the appropri ation, by
psychology of most of the domains
that
the human
sciences
covered-
so that one can say that, starting with Freud, all the human
sciences became, in one
way
or another, sciences of the psyche. And
the old
realism a
a
Emile Durkbeim- conceiving of society as a sub
stance in opposition to the individual
who
is also a
kind
of substance
incorporated into society-appears to me to be
unthinkable
now. In
the
same
way,
the
old distinction
of
the soul
and the
body,
which
was
still valid
even
for
the
psychophysiology
of the
nineteenth
century,
that
old opposition
no
longer exists,
now that
we
know that our
body
forms part of our psyche, or forms
part
of that experience, conscious
and unconscious at once, which psychology
addresses-so
that all
ther e is now, basically, is psychology.
A.B.
This restructuring, which culminates in a sort of psychologi
cal totalitarianism, is carried out
around
the theme of the discovery of
the unconscious, to repeat your expression. Now, the word discovery
is usually linked
to
a scientific context. How do
you understand
the
discovery of the unconscious, then? Wbat type of discovery is in
volved?
M.F.
Well,
the
unconscious
was
literally discovered
by
Freud
as a
thing; he perceived it as a certain
number
of mechanisms that existed
at
the same time in man in
general
and in a given particular
man.
Did Freud thereby commit psychology to a radi cal concretification
[chosification]
against
which
the entire subsequent history ofmodem
psychology never ceased to react, up to Maurice Merleau-Ponty; up to
contemporary
thinkers? Possibly so;
but
it
may
be precisely
in
that
absolute horizon of things that psychology was made possible, if only
as
criticism.
Then again, for
Freud
the unconscious has a languagelike struc
ture; but one
should
bear in mind that Freud is an exegete and not a
Philosophy
nd
Psychology
semiologist;
he
is
an interpreter and not
a
grammarian.
His problem,
finally, is not a
problem
oflinguistics, it is a problem of decipherment.
Now,
what
is it to interpret,
what
is it to treat a language not as a
linguist does but as an exegete or hermeneut does- if not in fact
to
grant that there exists a kind of absolute graphy that we will have to
discover in its very
materiality- and
go on to recognize that this mate
riality is meaningful, a second discovery; and then to find out
what
it
means a third discovery;
and
finally, fourthly, to discover
the
laws
according to which these signs
mean
what they do. t is then,
and
only
then,
that
one
encounters the
layer of semiology,
that
is, for example,
the
problem
of metaphor
and
metonymy, that is, the ways
in
which a
group of signs may be able to say something. But this fourth discovery
is fourth only in relation to three more fundamental ones,
and
these
three primary discoveries
are
the discovery of something that is there
in front of us, the discovery of a text to be
interpreted-
the discovery of
a
kind
of absolute ground for a possible hermeneut ic.
A.B.
The
specialists
of decipherment of
texts distinguish decipher
ment and
decoding:
decipherment
consisting
in
deciphering a text to
which
one
has
the key,
and
decoding, a text
to which
one doesn t have
the key, the
very
structure of the message. Would psychological meth
ods be in the category of decipherment or that of decoding?
M.F. I ll say that it s decoding, and yet not entirely, becaus e there
again the concepts of
decipherment
and decoding are concepts that
linguists have essentially defined in order to co-opt what is, in my
view, unco-optable for
any
linguistics-that is, hermeneutics, inter
pretation. Let us accept, if you will, the notion of decoding: I
would
say that Freud in effect decodes, which is to say, he recognizes that
there
is a message there. He doesn t
know
what
that
message
means;
he
doesn t
know
the laws according to
which
the
signs
can
mean
what
they
mean.
So he has to discover at one
go
both
what
the mes
sage means and what the laws are by which the message means what
it means. In other words, the unconscious
must
convey not only
what
it says
but
the key to what
it
says. And
it
is for that reason, moreover,
that psychoanalysis, the exper ience of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic
language
have
always intrigued literature.
There
is a
kind
offascina
tion of contemporary literature, not only with psychoanalysis but
with
all the phenomena that
are
connected with madness: because
what
is
madness now,
in
the contemporary world, if not a message, if not
language, signs that one hopes-because
it
would be too dreadful
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otherwise-mean something, signs
whose meaning
is
not known and
whose means of conveying
it
is not known. And, consequently, mad
ness must be treated as a message that would have
its
own key
within
itself. That is what Freud does when he's faced with a hysterical
symptom; that is what is done by people who are now trying to ad
dress the
problem
of psychosis.
And, after all, what is literature if not a certain language
about
which we
know
very
well
that
it
does
not
say what it says.
For
if
literature meant to say what it says,
it
would simply say: The mar
quise went
out
at five o'clock We
know very well that
literature
doesn't say that, so we
know
that
it
is a second-order language, folded
back on itself, which means something other than
what
it says. We
don't
know
what that other language is that's underneath; we know
just that, at the end of our
reading
of the novel, we should have dis
covered what
it
means and in
terms
of
what,
of what laws the author
was able to say what he meant. We need to have done both an exege
sis
and
a semiology of
the
text.
Hence there is a
kind
of symmetrical
structure
of literature arid
madness that
consists in the fact
that
one
cannot
do
their
semiology
except by doing
their
exegesis, their exegesis except by doing
their
semiology, and this reciprocal tie absolutely cannot be undone, I
think. Let us say simply that up to 9 5 ~
it had
merely
been
understood,
very poorly moreover,
very
approximately,
with regard
to psycho
analysis or literary criticism, that something like
an
interpretation
was at issue. It had not
been
seen that there was a whole dimension of
semiology, of analysis of the
very
structure
of
signs. T his semiological
dimension is now being
uncovered
and, consequently, the interpre
tive dimension is being
hidden
-and,
in point
of fact,
it
is the
structure
of envelopment,
of
wrapping,
which
characterizes the language of
madness
and the language of literature, and that is why we would
arrive at
a situation
where
not only all the human sciences are psy
chologized, but even literary criticism and literature are psychologized.
A.B. If the unconscious
presents
itself on the whole as a text
object, to preserve your concretist [chosiste perspective,
in
which the
message is discovered as always
adhering
to a code-so that
there
is
no
general
code
within
which the message might disclose its meaning
in an a priori fashion, as
it
were-then a psychology
cannot
be a gen
eral
science:
it
never deals with anything but texts that are radically
singular, being the bearers of their own specific code. And psychology
Philosophy
nd
Psychology 255
is, therefore, a science
of the
individual,
not
only by virtue
ofits
object
but ultimately by
virtue
of its method. Or is there a general herme
neutic?
M F
One
needs
to distinguish,
in
this instance and elsewhere, be
tween
the general and the absolute; there is no absolute hermeneutic,
in
the
sense that
one
can
never be
sure
that one has obtained the final
text,
that
what
one
has
obtained doesn't
mean
something else
behind
what
it
means. And one
can never
be sure,
on the
other hand, of doing
an absolute linguistics. So, whatever the approach, one is never
sure
of reaching
either
the absolutely general form or the absolutely pri
mary text.
That being said, I still
think
that there are relatively large general
ized structures,
and
that, for example, there may
be
among several
individuals a certain
number
of identical processes
[procedes]
that
may be encountered in all of them alike; and there is no reason why
structures
you
have discovered for one would
not
apply to the other.
A.B.
Will psychology be, in the last instance, the science of these
structures
or
knowledge of the individual text?
M F Psychology
will
be the
knowledge
of
structures;
and the
eventual therapeutics,
which cannot
fail to be tied to psychology, will
be knowledge of the individual text-that is, I don't
think
psychology
can
ever dissociate itself from a certain nor mative pr ogram. Psychol
ogy
may
well be, like philosophy itself, a
medicine and
a thera
peutics-actually, there is no doubt that it's a
medicine
and a
therapeutics. And the fact
that
in its
most
positive forms psychology
happens to be separated into two subsciences, which would be psy
chology
and
pedagogy for example,
or
psychopathology
and
psychia
try, separated into two
moments
as isolated as these, is really nothing
but the
sign
that
they must be brought together. Every psychology is a
pedagogy, all
decipherment
is a therapeutics:
you
cannot know with
out transforming [sans tran,iformerj.
A.B. Several times you have
seemed
to say that psychology is not
satisfied
with
establishing relations, structures,
no matter
how rigor
ous and
complex,
between
given elements,
but
that it always involves
interpretations-and that the other sciences, on the contrary,
when
they
encountered
data to be interpreted,
were
no longer adequate to
the task. And you
seem
to be saying that psychology
had
to
appear
on
the scene. If that is the case, does the word psychology seem to you
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Epistemology
to
have
the
same meaning in
expressions like
human
psychology
and animal psychology?
M.F. I'm glad you've asked that question, because as a matter of
fact I'm res ponsible for a shift. First, I said that the
general
articulation
of the human sciences had been completely
remodeled
by the discov-
ery of the unconscious,
and
that psychology
had
paradoxically as-
sumed a
kind
of imperative over the other sciences; and then I started
talking
about
psychology
in
a strictly Freudian
perspective-as
if all
psychology could only be Fr eudian. There was a
general
repartition-
ing of
the human
sciences starting
with
Freud; that's
an
undeniable
fact, I believe, one that even the most positivist psychologists couldn' t
deny. This doesn 't mean that all psychology, in its most positive devel-
opments,
became
a psychology of the unconscious or a psychology of
the relations of consciousness to the unconscious. There remained a
certain physiological psychology; there
remained
a certain experi-
mental psychology. After all, the laws of memory, as they were estab-
lished by my
namesake fifty,
sixty years ago,
have
absolutely nothing
to do
with Freudian
forgetting.
That remains
what
it
is,
and
I don't
think that at
the level
of
positive, quotidian knowledg e
the presence
of
Freudianism
has really changed the observations
that can
be
made
either about
animals, or
even about
certain aspects of human behav-
ior. Freudianism involves, a
kind
of archaeological transformation;
it
is not a general
metamorphosis
of all psychological knowledge.
A.B. But then, if the
term
psychology encompass es aspects
that
are so different, what meaning do these aspects share? Is there a unity
of psychology?
M.F. Yes if we grant that
when
a psychologist studies the
behavior
of
a rat in a maze, what he is trying to define is the general form of
behavior
that might
be
true
for a
man
as
well
as a rat;
it
is always a
question of
what
can be known about man.
A.B.
Then
would
you
agree with the
statement
that the object of
psychology is knowledge of
man,
and the different psychologies are
so many ways of gaining that knowledge?
M.F. Yes basically, I would agree
with
that- but I wouldn't want to
repeat it
too often, because
it sounds
too simp le But it's much
less simple if one considers that, at the beginning of the
nineteenth
century,
there appeared
the very curious project
of
knowing
man.
That is probably one of the fundamental facts
in
the history of Euro
pean culture- because
even though
there were, in the seventeenth
Philosophy
and
Psychology
and
eighteent h centuries, books titled
Traite de l hommr? or A Treatise
q
uman
Nature,
2
they absolutely did not treat of man in the way that
we
do when
we
do psychology. Until the end of the eighteenth
century-that is, until
Kant-every
reflection on
man
is a secondary
reflection with respect to a
thought
that is primary, and that is, let's
say, the
thought
of the infinite. t
was
always a
matter
of answering
questions like these: Given that the truth is what
it
is, or that math
ematics
or
physics have
taught
this thing
or
that,
why
is
it that
we
perceive in the way that we perceive, that we know in the way that we
know,
that
we
are wrong
in the
way that
we
are
wrong?
Starting
with
Kant, there is a reversal: the problem of man will be
raised
as a kind of cast shadow,
but
this will not be in terms of the
infinite or the t ruth. Since Kant, the infinite is
no
longer given, there is
no
longer anything but finitude; and it's in that sense that the Kantian
critique carried the possibility-or the peril-of
an
anthropology.
A.B. During a certai n period,
in
our classes, much was made of the
distinction
between
explain
and understand in
the human sci-
ences. Does
that
distinction
have
any
meaning in your
view?
M.F. I'm
afraid to say yes,
but it
does
seem
to me that
the
first time
explain and
understand
were distinguished and put forward in
that way- as radical, absolute, and mutually incompatible epistemo-
logical forms-it
was
by Wilhelm Dilthey. Now, all the same, it is
something
very
important, and it was precisely Dilthey who wrote, to
my knowledge, the only history
of hermeneutics
in Western history, a
work that was a bit rough but extremely interesting. Now, I think
what is profound in
him
is the feeling he
had
that
hermeneutics
rep-
resented
a quite
particular
mode of reflection, whose meaning
and
value risked being
hidden
by different
modes
of knowledge
more or
less
borrowed
from the
natural
sciences. And
he
had
a strong feeling
that the epistemological model of the natural sciences was going to be
imposed as a
norm
of rationality on the human sciences, whereas
these
same sciences were probably just one of the avatars of the
hermeneutic
techniques that had always existed
in
the Western
world, since the first Greek grammarians, in the exegetes of Alexan-
dria,
in
the Christian
and modern
exegetes. And I think tha,t Dilthey
intuited the historically general context that psychology
and
the hu
man sciences
in
general belonged to in
our
culture.
That
is what he
defined, in a
rather
mystical way, by understanding as opposed to
explanation. Explanation would be the bad epistemological model;
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Aesthetics Method
nd
Epistemology
understanding is the mythical figure of a
human
science restored to
its radical meaning as exegesis.
A.B.
Do
you
think that what is said of the exact and rigorous sci
ences
can
be
said
of psychology as a science and a technique-that
it
carries out its own critique of its methods, its concepts, and so on?
M.F.
I beiieve that what is currently taking place in psychoanaly
sis and in certain other sciences such as anthropology is
something
similar to that.
The
fact
that
after Freud s analysis
something
like
Jacques Laca n s analysis is possible, that after Durkheim something
like Claude Levi-Strauss is
possible-all
of
that
proves, in fact,
that the
human sciences are establishing in and for themselves a certa in criti
cal relationship that calls to mind the relationship that physics or
mathematics
maintain
towards themselves. The
same
is true of lin
guistics.
A.B. But
not of
experime ntal psychology?
M.F. Well, no, not up to now. But, after all,
when
psychologists do
studies on
learning and
they look
at
the data, determining the extent
to
which
their
informational analyses
may
enable
them
to formalize
the
results obtained,
that
is also a kind
of
reflexive
and generalizing
and foundational- relationship that psychology establishes for itself.
Now, it cannot be said that cybernetics or information theory is the
philosophy or the psychology
oflearning, just
as it cannot be said that
what
Lacan is doing, or
what
Levi-Strauss is doing, is the philosophy
of
psychoanalysis
or
of anthropology. t is instead a certain reflexive
relationship of science with itself.
A.B. If
you were in
a philosophy class, the
kind
that
we have
now,
what would
you
teach on the subject of psychology?
M.F.
The first precaution I
would
take,
i f were
a philosophy pro
fessor
and
I
had
to
teach
psychology,
would be
to buy myself the
most
realistic mask I
can
imagine and the one farthest from my normal
face, so that my students would not recognize me. I would try, like
Anthony Perkins in Psycho to adopt another voice so that none of my
speech patterns would appear.
That
is the first precaution I
would
take. Next I would try, as far as possible, to introduce the students to
the techniques
that are
currently being
used
by psychologists, labora
tory methods, social psychology methods. I would try to explain to
them what psychoanalysis consists in. And then, the following hour, I
would remove my mask, I would take up my own voice again, and we
would do philosophy,
even
if this meant
reencountering
psychology,
Philosophy
nd
Psychology 59
at that moment, as
a
kind
of absolutely unavoidable
and
inevitable
impasse that Western
thought
entered into
in
the
nineteenth
century.
But when I would say that it s an absolutely unavoidable and inevi
table impasse, I would not criticize
it
as a science; I would not say that
it
is not really a positive science; I wouldn t say that it s something that
ought to
be more
philosophical or less philosophical. I would say sim
ply that there was a kind of anthropological slumber in which phi
losophy
and the
human sciences
were
enchanted, as
it were, and
put
to sleep by one another- and that we need to awake from this anthro
pological slumber, just
as in the past
people
awoke
from
the
dogmatic
slumber.
NOTES
1 Rene Descartes, Traite
de
l homme
Paris:
Clerselier, 1664), in
Oeuvres et
lettres ed. A. Bridoux
Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp 8o5 73
[lreatise q Man,
trans. Thomas Steele Hall Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972)].
2
David Hume, A
Treatise
Q[ Human Nature, Being an Attempt to Introduce
the
Experimental
Method
q
Reasoning into oral Subjects London:
J.
Noon, 1739-1740), 5 vols., trans. by A.
Leroy as Traite
de
lii
nature humaine: essai pour introduire la
mk.thode
experimentale dans
le s
sujets morau.x
Paris: A u b i e r ~ M o n t a g n e 19T3), 2
vols.