Foucault's Turn From Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies

No critic of phenomenology, arguably, has been more influential in prefiguring recent discourses on power, gender, and sexuality that have emerged in dance studies in recent decades than the philosopher-historian-critic Michel Foucault. The number of dance scholars directly citing Foucault, and the number influenced indirectly by his ideas through intermediary theorists such as Judith Butler—perhaps the single most popular one—is so large as to require an essay of its own just to survey. Virtually every analysis of choreographic practice that has addressed these topics since the 1980s has drawn directly or indirectly on Foucault's theories. Indeed, the very mention of the term "discipline" in current dance scholarship (and many related fields as well) more or less automatically makes reference to Foucault's genealogical study of incarceration, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, translated into English as Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, and, in particular to the chapter, "Les corps dociles" or "Docile Bodies" (Foucault 1975, 137-171; 1975/1995, 135-170).¹

It might seem, in this regard, that any critical reappraisal of phenomenology as it relates to the intellectual study of dance would be inclined to take its cue from Foucault. This purports to be a somewhat complicated prospect, however, as opinions diverge regarding the precise character of Foucault's relation to phenomenological inquiry generally, and to specific phenomenological philosophers in particular. Foucault made intensive studies of various phenomenologists during the early years of his academic career—Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and the phenomenologically oriented work of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel. He developed markedly different relations to the work of each, with Heidegger having, perhaps, the most lasting presence. Two of Foucault's first publications were written (arguably) from phenomenological points of view. However, the leading philosophical interpreters of Foucault's work concur that Foucault's critique of phenomenology, once it did emerge, was both fundamental and enduring. This was a critique that focused specifically on the phenomenological conception of the human subject.

The emergence of Foucault's critique occurred between the years of 1954 and 1962.² At this time, Foucault's publications evidence a decisive turn away from phenomenology, one that was articulated, perhaps, most explicitly in the final chapters of his first bestselling text, Les Mots et les choses (1966b), translated into English as The Order of Things. After this critical formulation, Foucault began to develop his archaeological and, later, his genealogical methods of investigating the social production of knowledge, and continued, in one way or another, to move away from phenomenological orientations, particularly those of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Although his work later took a number of theoretical, disciplinary, and philosophical twists and turns, and although Foucault was, by some accounts at least, "haunted" by Hegelian phenomenological discourse long after he overtly moved away from it (Macey 1993, 150-151),³ Foucault was never to return to either the mainstreams or the margins of phenomenological investigation. Even at the end of his life, when his views on the self and its experience began to move in new and strikingly different directions from those that defined his earlier theoretical critiques, phenomenology was never to be reviewed, rethought, or reassessed—let alone redeemed—by Foucault, at least not explicitly. His early rejection, particularly of the phenomenology that had dominated French intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1950s, stood the test of time in the evolution of his own thought. As philosopher Todd May has commented, "It is not an exaggeration to say that although Foucault's work goes through methodological changes, it always defines itself against phenomenology" (2005, 285, emphasis in the original).⁴

It is the first task of this essay to review Foucault's initial rejection of the phenomenological subject. Foucault's specific reasons for this rejection—his dissatisfaction with the phenomenology in which he was initially so immersed, as well as the precise direction of the new course he set in having made it—are both at issue here. The second task of this essay is to consider what the implications might...