What was Michel Foucault's writing process for building an argument?

Collection came first and the rule came after. His books read as though he sat in archives with case files, regulations, manuals and reports until a pattern would not go away, and only then wrote the sentence that named it, and the order shows in the finished prose, because the small descriptions arrive long before the general claim they support. There is a second piece of evidence for that sequence. He wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge after the three books it describes, as a method worked out backwards from what he had already done, which is roughly what most working writers find out about their own method. For your own process the useful split is strict. Gather, then arrange, then write. Doing all three at once produces prose that is either dry or foggy and rarely guided.

How does Michel Foucault structure a chapter without a story to tell?

Each paragraph does three things in order: a finding, a consequence, and the naming of a field in which something becomes possible. The finding is small and checkable. The consequence is uncomfortable and follows from the finding rather than from an opinion. The naming is the move that shifts the ground, and it is why the paragraph feels as though it went somewhere. Chapters then widen at the close instead of summarizing, so the object you have been examining turns out to extend well past the walls you were looking at. Try the pattern on a report at work and the effect shows up immediately, because a reader who gets one closed question and one opened question per paragraph keeps reading past the point where a summary would have released them.

How does Michel Foucault use history without writing a timeline?

He goes looking for the moments when a practice keeps its shape and changes its job. The leper houses of medieval Europe stood empty for a long stretch after leprosy receded, and later the same buildings and the same rituals of exclusion took in a different population, which tells you more about how confinement worked than a continuous chronicle of asylums could. Dates in his books are hinges. They mark where a function turned, and the years between hinges get crossed in a clause. None of this requires a historian's training. Pick two moments where your subject changed jobs while keeping its name, describe both, and refuse to fill the gap with the word progress.

How can a writer use Foucault's method in plain, non-academic prose?

Keep the operations, drop the syntax, and the method survives in short sentences. A piece about hiring can name the form, the person who fills it in, the box that decides, and the interview that exists in order to produce the sentence the form has room for, without one abstract noun in it. That is the whole engine: who classifies, by what test, into what record, with what consequence for the person named in it. Journalism does this constantly and rarely credits him for it. The syntax was not the transferable part, and a writer who takes the long sentences and leaves the procedure behind has copied the packaging.

Which Michel Foucault book teaches a writer the most?

Discipline and Punish, and the first few pages of it are enough to watch the method work. You get the paired documents, the level register over unbearable material, the refusal to bridge, and the delayed claim, in a stretch short enough to read standing up in a bookshop. After that, the chapter on panopticism shows the same withholding at chapter scale. The Order of Things is the better book for the opening move and the harder read. For the paragraph machine, take any chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality and mark where each paragraph turns from finding to consequence, because the turn usually sits in the same position.

What kind of evidence does Michel Foucault build an argument out of?

Documents, mostly, and mostly documents few people had treated as worth reading: prison regulations, school rules, medical reports, timetables, police records, the paperwork of an institution talking to itself. The choice is a craft decision as much as a scholarly one. A quotation from a form is hard to argue with and easy to check, and it makes a reader into a witness rather than a student, where a quotation from another theorist asks that reader to trust two people at once. There is a cost, and it is worth naming. Selection becomes the whole argument, since a writer who chooses the archive also chooses what the archive will prove, and the only protection is to keep the material specific enough that someone can go and find the rest of it.

Non fiction

Michel FoucaultWriting Style

Born 10/15/1926 – Died 6/25/1984

Chain small historical examples until common sense looks like a recent invention. No sermon required.

Write like Michel Foucault

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Michel Foucault: voice, themes, and technique.

Discipline and Punish opens twice. First comes the execution of Damiens the regicide in 1757, transcribed from the official account, with the pincers and the molten lead and the horses. Then, eighty years later, a timetable: Leon Faucher's rules for the House of young prisoners in Paris, hour by hour, from the first drum roll onward. Foucault sets the two documents down and walks away. He does not say what changed between them. The reader is left holding a gap that has to be closed, and closing it is the argument.

His pages are full of paper and almost empty of interiors. Rules, forms, floor plans, medical reports, school regulations, the posture a child's hand is supposed to hold while writing. Not one of them wants anything. In the chapter on docile bodies he sets the soldier of the early seventeenth century, recognizable by bearing and physical mark, beside the recruit of the late eighteenth, who is made rather than found, and the whole difference is carried by drill schedules.

The pressure comes from the flatness. He describes the torture of Damiens in the same even register as the source he took it from, and he handles a farm hand at Lapcourt, reported to the mayor over a few caresses bought from a village girl, in the register of the doctors who took the measure of his bones. The outrage is missing. The reader supplies it, then notices that the supply came from somewhere, which is roughly the experience these books are built to produce.

What transfers to writing that is not philosophy is the sequence, not the syntax. Describe a procedure until a reader can run it in their head. Hold your terms still. Put the conclusion late, and let a document do the work a paragraph of your own opinion would do worse.

How to Write Like Michel Foucault

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Michel Foucault.

1
Find the pair before you look for a thesis
Pick a practice your reader treats as settled: hiring, grading, credit scoring, admission, discharge. Then find two documents about it written decades apart. A policy and its replacement, two intake forms, two style guides, the job description from twenty years ago and the one for the same job now. Copy out the dull parts. Put them next to each other with no bridge, read what you have, and delete the sentence you wrote to explain the difference, because that sentence is doing work your reader will do better and will resent you for taking. Keep only the dating, so it stays clear what was in force when.
2
Cut the motives and write the procedure
Search the draft for wanted, believed, feared, hoped, intended, and cut the clause each one governs. In its place put what was done and by whom: who was tested, who wrote the result down, where the paper went next, what happened to the person whose name was on it. One test tells you whether the paragraph has arrived. Try to redraw it as a flow chart. If you can, you are describing a procedure, and if the chart comes out as a single box labeled attitude, you are still explaining people's insides.
3
Fix three words and move the frame instead
Choose the three terms your piece cannot do without and write them at the top of the file. Go through the draft and mark every place you reached for a synonym because the word had come round again. Put the term back in each one. Then do the compensating work, which is to change what sits around it: the norm as a measure, the norm as a tool, the norm as a result. A reader can follow a term whose job keeps shifting. A parade of near-synonyms leaves them holding three vague things where you meant one exact one.
4
Read it aloud and unnest the long one
Take the longest sentence in the draft and say it aloud at speaking pace. The place where you stumble is the bad place in the syntax, because the melody of a spoken sentence tracks its structure, and your mouth knows before your eye does. Find the clause you jammed inside another one, lift it out, and set it down beside its host as a second sentence or a trailing phrase. Read it again. Do this until the long sentences are long by addition, at which point you can leave one at fifty words without losing anybody.
5
Close the section on a harder question
Look at the question your section began with and ask whether the material you just laid out has made it a worse question. Usually it has. Why do we punish assumes that punishment is one thing with a purpose, and after four pages of timetables and drills the better question is what the punishment trains a body to become. Write the new question as your last line and leave it unanswered. Your reader carries it into the next section, which is how analysis gets forward motion without a plot. Do this only where the material has earned the shift, because a question your evidence did not produce reads as a mannerism, and a reader who feels handled once stops trusting the rest.

Michel Foucault's Writing Style

Breakdown of Michel Foucault's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

How does a fifty-word sentence stay readable? By adding rather than nesting. The sentence transcribing the punishment ordered for Damiens moves through the amende honorable, the cart, the pincers, the molten lead, the horses, one item after the next, and still arrives somewhere a reader can follow, because nothing was left open that had to be held. Grammarians call that shape right-branching. It is why a long Foucault sentence stays walkable while a long imitation collapses. The imitation nests instead. A clause opens, another opens inside it, a third qualifies the second, and by the time the main verb shows up the subject is gone. Then the blunt sentence arrives and takes the ground. It renames the thing he has described, or it fences off a conclusion the accumulation might have invited, and a four-word verdict after a long stretch of accumulation hits harder than any raised voice would. Watch the colons as well. He hangs a consequence off an observation with one, which lets the two stay two.

Vocabulary Complexity

Count the distinct terms and the number is small. Discipline, norm, examination, apparatus, discourse, confession. He keeps them and refuses their synonyms, which is why the terms behave like instruments by the third appearance rather than like decoration at the first. Kundera put the principle bluntly when he rejected the notion of synonym on the ground that each word has its own meaning and cannot be replaced. Foucault writes as though that were a working rule. The examination in Discipline and Punish stays the examination whether it happens in a hospital, a barracks, a school or a courtroom, and a reader can watch one procedure travel across four institutions because the noun kept its shape the whole way. Most of the vocabulary is borrowed rather than coined. He takes his nouns from the papers he is reading, so the prose sounds institutional because institutions wrote half of it. The qualifiers matter as much as the nouns. A claim arrives fenced by period, place and practice, and the fence is what keeps a strong sentence from being answerable by one counterexample.

Tone

Tuke opens the Retreat at York, Pinel unchains the inmates at Bicetre, and the sentences describing it stay exactly as level as the sentences that described the confinement before it. No relief arrives. The reform reads as a change of technique. That withheld verdict is the tonal instrument, and it costs him readers who want a side, but it buys the thing the rest of them stay for: the sense that this writer would report the opposite finding in the same voice. His irony runs on the same withholding. He sets what an institution says about itself beside what its procedure does, then stops, and the distance between the two lines does the work a sarcastic adjective would ruin. Try the sneer version and the authority drains out within a paragraph.

Pacing

He gets tension out of the order of delivery, which is the only source of tension available to a writer with no story to tell. The chapter on panopticism does not open with Bentham. It opens with the regulations for a town under plague, the partitioning, the roll call at the windows, the register, and beside that the older ritual by which the leper was put outside the walls. Two techniques, no thesis. Bentham's building shows up after the reader has already absorbed what it will be an instance of, and by then the annular cells and the central tower read less like an eighteenth-century proposal than like a diagram of somewhere the reader has been walking around inside since the chapter began. Newspaper editors say do not bury the lede, and he buries it on purpose, which is a real cost and worth knowing before you copy the habit. Some readers quit. The ones who stay get something a summary cannot give them, because they built the conclusion themselves out of parts handed over in a chosen order. The slow stretches are the procedures. The fast stretches are the centuries.

Dialogue Style

Scene dialogue is absent. What speaks is paperwork. The clearest case is the volume he assembled around Pierre Riviere, the Normandy farm boy who killed his mother, his sister and his brother in 1835 and then wrote out his reasons: Foucault printed the memoir alongside the medical reports, the legal opinions and the newspaper notices, and the book refuses to say which of them is right. The voices contradict each other in their own idioms and are left there. A psychiatrist and a magistrate describing the same afternoon disagree, and the disagreement shows a reader that each of them can only say certain things, which is the reason for printing both. The first volume of The History of Sexuality runs the same operation on the confession. Speech becomes a technique there, because it counts only when somebody is listening in an official capacity. The transferable move is a real quotation placed where its own vocabulary turns audible, followed by one flat sentence naming the rule the quotation obeys.

Descriptive Approach

What does a room do? That is the question his descriptions answer, and it explains why they contain so little weather and so much furniture. The Order of Things opens on Las Meninas and spends its first chapter walking around a painting: where the painter stands, what the mirror on the back wall returns, who is being looked at, and which position in the room is held by someone the canvas cannot show. Not one adjective of admiration. The description is an argument about who gets to be the subject, and it holds because every element in it can be checked against the picture. His prisons and clinics get the same treatment. Sightlines, thresholds, timetables, what is written down and by whom, which doors the same body may and may not pass through. Sensory detail appears rarely, and it appears where a rational-sounding practice needs its cruelty exposed. The habit worth stealing is the test he seems to apply to each detail before letting it stay: does this show a rule operating, or does it only set a mood?

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Michel Foucault uses across their work.

Genealogy instead of origin

The subtitle of Discipline and Punish promises the birth of the prison rather than its history, and that difference is a working method. In his essay on Nietzsche and genealogy he sets the search for an origin against the tracing of descent and comes down on descent: forks, borrowings, techniques picked up for one purpose and kept for another. On the page this buys compression. You can cross two centuries in a paragraph without claiming a clean line, because you are not obliged to say where anything began, only what changed function and when. The difficulty is that each shift has to name what became possible after it. Skip that and your reader has a pile of dates and no argument.

The taxonomy that fails

Before The Order of Things argues anything, its preface hands the reader a list of animals from a Chinese encyclopedia that Borges reports, a classification whose categories cannot be made to sit in one scheme. The reader laughs. Then the laugh turns awkward, because it is not obvious what makes our own filing better rather than merely ours, and the book goes to work inside that discomfort. As an opening this beats a thesis statement by a distance, since it puts a reader into the state the argument needs instead of describing the state to them. Two conditions apply. The example has to raise a real laugh, and it has to resist being sorted, or your reader sorts it in a second and the opening is spent.

Renaming by function

The Birth of the Clinic opens by setting one doctor's account of a patient, whose membranes peel away like soaked parchment, beside a later anatomist's flat measured description of a lesion. The body did not change between them. What changed is what a physician had been trained to see and was permitted to write, and the drier of the two descriptions is also the more powerful. Once you have shown that, you can rename a practice by what it does instead of by what it claims, and care starts to read as management, observation as examination. Two warnings. The renaming needs its documents in front of it, and it has to stay reversible, because a writer who can only ever discover that kindness is control has stopped looking.

The bridge sentence

Between the records and the rule sits one sentence, and it decides whether a reader trusts you. He earns his by keeping the record concrete and the bridge narrow. The school regulations of La Salle prescribe how a child holds a pen, how the body sits, where the fingers go, and out of that comes a claim about a power that works on the body in detail rather than on the soul in general. Notice how little the bridge does. It names the shared logic of the exhibits and stops, and everything larger arrives later, after more exhibits. Write the bridge last, and if you cannot write it without a word like all, your records have not earned it yet.

Name the products

Describing a prohibition fills a paragraph. Describing what a prohibition manufactured fills a chapter, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality does the second thing: in place of an account of silence it names four figures who were produced and then equipped with specialists, the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the perverse adult. Each one can be pointed at. Each has a literature, a treatment, an examination and a file behind it, which is why the argument survives the objection that repression did happen. This is the most portable tool here and the least used. Ask what your subject brought into existence, then name those things by the names their handlers used.

The impersonal instrument

Outside his prefaces, first-person pronouns are scarce. The procedure holds the subject position instead, and where an agent would only clutter a sentence it goes unnamed, which is the one job the passive voice does better than any other construction: it decides who occupies the reader's spotlight. Used that way it is a decision about attention. Used the way a committee uses it, to mislay responsibility, it produces the prose that gets complained about. The cost of the stance is dryness, and he pays it with exhibits. A page of pure apparatus talk is unreadable, so something concrete arrives every few paragraphs, and that alternation is what makes the coldness bearable.

Literary Devices Michel Foucault Uses

Literary devices that define Michel Foucault's style.

Parallel series

Sections named the same way do something a paragraph of explanation cannot. The chapter on docile bodies moves through the art of distributions, the control of activity, the organization of geneses and the composition of forces, four titles built to one pattern, so that a reader who has parsed the first is handed a template for the next three and spends attention on the differences between them rather than on the grammar. Parallel syntax is easy to read and hard to shake off for that reason. The cost is that the form promises a complete set. Break the pattern in the middle and the series stops being a series, so finish what you start, and put the item that changes your reader's mind last.

Antithesis with the trap set first

The turn most people quote is the not this but that construction, and in imitation it fails for a reason that has nothing to do with taste. A negation is easy to process only when the reader was already holding the thing being negated. Tell someone a herring is not a mammal and they wonder who ever thought it was. So the move has two parts, and the first part is the one imitators skip: he states the tempting explanation in his reader's own vocabulary, at enough length to be believed, and cancels it once it has been believed. Watch for the setup next time the turn lands on you. It will be sitting a sentence or two above, doing the unglamorous work.

The catalogue

One case is an anecdote and a run of cases is a climate, which is the whole reason he lists. The chapter on the great confinement puts under one roof the populations a modern reader would keep in separate buildings: beggars, the unemployed, the mad, the venereal, the blasphemous, the idle. Nothing in the list argues. The reader does the arguing, having noticed that a single institution once took all of them in and that someone decided the categories belonged together. Two rules make a catalogue work. Each item has to add a facet rather than repeat the mood, and the order has to be yours, because a list that could be shuffled without loss was decoration.

The file stands in for the person

He lets a document carry a relation that would otherwise need an essay. The examination puts a person into writing, and once written the person is a case, which means comparable, filed, and available to be measured against a norm. Say that with the register and the entry and the column, and the argument stays checkable, because a form is a thing two people can disagree about in public. Say it with human nature and the argument evaporates. The device holds his abstraction to the ground, and it travels further than metaphor for a plain reason: the metaphor would be his invention, and the register was someone else's.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Michel Foucault.

Turning the verbs into nouns and stacking them

The draft fills with words like problematization, subjectivation and normativity, and the writer feels the prose getting deeper as the actors disappear. What has happened is that a live verb was embalmed into a lifeless noun, and with the verb went the information about who did it. The 1990s Bad Writing Contest collected the results, sentence by sentence, from people who had read the same books he wrote. His own abstractions point somewhere. Behind the apparatus there is a form, a schedule, a room with a door in it, and the noun is shorthand for a procedure the reader has already been shown. Test each abstraction by asking it to name one thing someone did on one afternoon, and if it cannot, cut it and describe the afternoon.

Swapping description for a verdict

Imitation slides into a sneer inside a page: institutions become villains, reforms become tricks, and suspicion gets treated as though it were a finding. The costs are exact. If every practice comes out as control, then no distinction is worth drawing and no evidence is worth gathering, so your reader feels the conclusion arriving ahead of the proof and starts skimming for it. His own pages keep distinctions expensive. This practice, in this decade, in this kind of institution, done to this body. And most of the procedures he describes work without anyone wanting harm, which is the finding that makes them hard to argue with, where a villain would let a reader off.

Claiming every era at once

A big thinker sounds like someone making sweeping claims, so the imitation writes sentences that cover all periods and all societies and then defends them with three examples. Scope was the thing copied wrongly. His authority comes from fences, and the fences are visible in the prose: a period, an institution, a technique, sometimes one decade in one country. Take them out and you hand your reader a way to win. A single exception refutes an everywhere claim, and the piece turns into a debate you did not want, on ground you did not choose. Build the local proof so well that your reader reaches for the larger pattern before you offer it.

Ending on the construction punchline

The last line announces that the thing under discussion is a construction, and the piece stops there as though the announcement were the argument. A reader who followed you gets nothing to do with it. The claim earns interest only once the construction has been shown: who built it, out of what, under what pressure, and what it made possible that had not been possible before. His closings widen instead of dissolving. The end of Discipline and Punish moves out from the prison to the reformatory at Mettray and then to the schools, workshops and hospitals that share its techniques, so the object gets larger rather than vanishing. Leave your reader something they can go and look at.

Books

Explore Michel Foucault's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Michel Foucault's writing style and techniques.

What was Michel Foucault's writing process for building an argument?: Collection came first and the rule came after. His books read as though he sat in archives with case files, regulations, manuals and reports until a pattern would not go away, and only then wrote the sentence that named it, and the order shows in the finished prose, because the small descriptions arrive long before the general claim they support. There is a second piece of evidence for that sequence. He wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge after the three books it describes, as a method worked out backwards from what he had already done, which is roughly what most working writers find out about their own method. For your own process the useful split is strict. Gather, then arrange, then write. Doing all three at once produces prose that is either dry or foggy and rarely guided.
How does Michel Foucault structure a chapter without a story to tell?: Each paragraph does three things in order: a finding, a consequence, and the naming of a field in which something becomes possible. The finding is small and checkable. The consequence is uncomfortable and follows from the finding rather than from an opinion. The naming is the move that shifts the ground, and it is why the paragraph feels as though it went somewhere. Chapters then widen at the close instead of summarizing, so the object you have been examining turns out to extend well past the walls you were looking at. Try the pattern on a report at work and the effect shows up immediately, because a reader who gets one closed question and one opened question per paragraph keeps reading past the point where a summary would have released them.
How does Michel Foucault use history without writing a timeline?: He goes looking for the moments when a practice keeps its shape and changes its job. The leper houses of medieval Europe stood empty for a long stretch after leprosy receded, and later the same buildings and the same rituals of exclusion took in a different population, which tells you more about how confinement worked than a continuous chronicle of asylums could. Dates in his books are hinges. They mark where a function turned, and the years between hinges get crossed in a clause. None of this requires a historian's training. Pick two moments where your subject changed jobs while keeping its name, describe both, and refuse to fill the gap with the word progress.
How can a writer use Foucault's method in plain, non-academic prose?: Keep the operations, drop the syntax, and the method survives in short sentences. A piece about hiring can name the form, the person who fills it in, the box that decides, and the interview that exists in order to produce the sentence the form has room for, without one abstract noun in it. That is the whole engine: who classifies, by what test, into what record, with what consequence for the person named in it. Journalism does this constantly and rarely credits him for it. The syntax was not the transferable part, and a writer who takes the long sentences and leaves the procedure behind has copied the packaging.
Which Michel Foucault book teaches a writer the most?: Discipline and Punish, and the first few pages of it are enough to watch the method work. You get the paired documents, the level register over unbearable material, the refusal to bridge, and the delayed claim, in a stretch short enough to read standing up in a bookshop. After that, the chapter on panopticism shows the same withholding at chapter scale. The Order of Things is the better book for the opening move and the harder read. For the paragraph machine, take any chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality and mark where each paragraph turns from finding to consequence, because the turn usually sits in the same position.
What kind of evidence does Michel Foucault build an argument out of?: Documents, mostly, and mostly documents few people had treated as worth reading: prison regulations, school rules, medical reports, timetables, police records, the paperwork of an institution talking to itself. The choice is a craft decision as much as a scholarly one. A quotation from a form is hard to argue with and easy to check, and it makes a reader into a witness rather than a student, where a quotation from another theorist asks that reader to trust two people at once. There is a cost, and it is worth naming. Selection becomes the whole argument, since a writer who chooses the archive also chooses what the archive will prove, and the only protection is to keep the material specific enough that someone can go and find the rest of it.

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