Foucault's 85th birthday by guest blogger Lydia Fillingham

Foucault's 85th birthday would be today, and alas because of AIDS he will not see it.

I thought I would take the opportunity of this day to say a few words about what matters to me about Foucault, what led me to write Foucault for Beginners, and still draws me to his works.

Foucault was a French philosopher and historian who worked particularly to understand the workings of power and knowledge and how people are regulated within society.  He thought we should look beyond narrow definitions of government to a "wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men."  He looked for instance in The Birth of the Prison at how social science around criminology worked to develop prisons, starting in the 18th century, where the prisoners were subjected to ever greater discipline, and were made ever more visible to the eye of the guards.  This was happening at a time when the same could be said of the new position of workers in factories as they developed.  He thought that the views of people developed in social science had significant power over how people live their lives. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 he proposed that the very existence of people called homosexuals is a result of developments in social science, again mainly in the 19th century.  Prior to that there were homosexual acts, which the church might disapprove of, but not a separate kind of person, different from others.

I also deeply enjoy reading Foucault, and always find it mind-expanding, leading me to look at things in a new way.  I hope that my book might make that experience a little easier to understand, by giving a general framework of Foucault's thought.  On his birthday, we can look around us and speculate at what he would have made of matters since his death.  I think, for example, he would have had a fascinating understanding of the interplay of knowledge and legislated non-knowledge involved in the Don't Ask Don't Tell regime, for instance, where any knowledge about a person could get him or her expelled from the army, and the soldier had to fight to keep no knowledge the official stance--and what that said about the kind of people the army defined "homosexuals" as being.  I would love to hear other practices people think he might have been interested in, through comments on this blog.