Foucault and the Refusal of the Creative Self

 Sir,

I do not wish that during the television broadcast you want to devote to me, any biographical information be given any place. I consider indeed such information to have no importance for the subject matter at hand.

Yours sincerely,

Michel Foucault

— Fons Elders, Freedom and Knowledge

1. The Question Foucault Refuses

There is a revealing moment in the 1971 debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky when Fons Elders turns the discussion of creativity toward Foucault himself. Chomsky has been defending the importance of creative activity, while Foucault has questioned the tendency to explain innovation through the individual who produces it. Elders now asks what happens when Foucault himself discovers a new idea.

The question is explicitly personal. Elders asks whether, when Foucault develops what he takes to be a new fundamental idea, he experiences a sense of liberation: whether, “within your own personality, creativity and freedom are working together.”

Foucault's answer is immediate:

“I don’t believe that the problem of personal experience is so very important.”

Elders asks why. Foucault explains that even when he believes—perhaps wrongly—that he is saying something new, he is conscious that rules are at work in his statement. These are not only linguistic rules but also epistemological rules that characterize contemporary knowledge. Innovation, in other words, does not occur in a vacuum. What appears as a new statement is produced within a field of possibilities that precedes the individual who utters it.

Foucault then makes the point more explicitly. In the history of science and thought, he says, too much emphasis has traditionally been placed on individual creation, while the communal and general rules that operate through scientific discoveries, inventions, and philosophical innovations have been left in the shadows.

The exchange is striking because Elders is not asking Foucault whether creativity exists. He is asking what creativity feels like inside the person who creates. Is there an experience of freedom? Is there a moment when the individual recognizes himself as the source of something new?

Foucault declines to make that experience the problem.

The same refusal appears in Foucault's request that biographical information not be included in the television programme. His objection is not that biography is private or that his personal life should remain inaccessible. He says something more precise: such information has no importance for the subject matter at hand.

These two moments raise the same question from different directions. Why does Foucault resist explaining his thought through his personal experience, his biography, or his creative subjectivity? What is wrong with looking behind a philosophical work for the person who produced it?

To answer that question, we first have to examine what the personal is being asked to explain.

2. Why Is the Personal Irrelevant?

Elders's question contains a particular theory of explanation. An idea appears, and we look behind it for the individual who produced it. We then look inside that individual for the experience, personality, psychological impulse, or creative freedom that generated the idea. The movement is almost automatic:

work → author → personality → experience.

Foucault interrupts this movement.

His example of Bichat, given later in the debate, makes the point concrete. If we want to understand the emergence of pathological anatomy, we might investigate Bichat's personality or personal experiences. But that would not explain why pathological anatomy emerged when it did. Foucault instead directs attention to the place of disease and death in eighteenth-century society, to hospitals and medical surveys, to the institutionalization of medical knowledge, and to the relations between different forms of knowledge.

The issue is not whether Bichat had a personality. Of course he did. The issue is whether his personality constitutes the relevant explanatory level.

This distinction also clarifies Foucault's response to Elders's question about creativity. Elders locates innovation in the subject: something happens within Foucault, and this inner event produces a new idea. Foucault shifts the analysis outward, toward the rules that make the statement possible and recognizable as a statement within a particular field of knowledge.

He is therefore not replacing the individual with some impersonal mechanism. Nor is he denying individual agency. He is changing the direction of explanation. Rather than beginning with an already constituted individual and asking what experiences produced his thought, he asks what historical conditions make particular forms of thought, knowledge, and subjectivity possible.

This is why the distinction between biography and explanation matters. A biography can tell us what happened to a person. It may even illuminate aspects of that person's intellectual development. But it does not follow that personal history is therefore the best explanation of the historical emergence of a concept, a form of knowledge, or a philosophical problem.

The same applies to creativity. Foucault does not have to deny that he experiences discovery, excitement, difficulty, or freedom when he thinks. He only has to deny that such experiences constitute the privileged explanation of what he produces.

The personal is therefore not irrelevant because it is unreal. It is irrelevant when it is treated as the hidden origin of what needs to be explained.

This is the assumption that Elders's question makes visible. The philosopher appears as a creative self standing behind the philosophy, and the task of interpretation becomes one of moving from the work back toward that self. Foucault refuses that movement.

But this leaves a deeper question. If the self is not simply the hidden source from which thought and action emerge, how should we understand the self itself?

This is where Technologies of the Self becomes important.

3. The Self as Something to Be Known

In Technologies of the Self, Foucault examines practices through which individuals establish relations with themselves. What matters here is not the full range of his historical analysis, but one particular question: what does it mean to know oneself?

The question seems universal. Yet Foucault's historical examples show that it does not have one universal answer.

His discussion of Stoic practices of self-examination is especially important. In Seneca, examining oneself does not primarily mean penetrating one's inner depths in order to discover an authentic identity hidden inside. The individual reviews his conduct, compares what he has done with principles of conduct, recalls what he has learned, and evaluates his actions. Self-examination is therefore an activity governed by practices and rules.

Christian confession introduces a different relation to oneself. The problem increasingly becomes one of discovering and revealing something hidden within the subject: thoughts, desires, intentions, temptations, movements of consciousness. The individual is required to bring an interior truth to light and to interpret it.

The difference matters because it shows that “the self” is not simply one timeless object that human beings have always tried to understand in the same way. The relation to oneself changes with the practices through which that relation is organized.

What appears to us as an obvious distinction between an external life and an inner self is therefore not simply a fact waiting to be recognized. Particular practices make certain forms of interiority visible and significant. They teach individuals what to examine, what to reveal, what to remember, what to confess, and what to transform.

This gives us a different way of understanding personal experience. Experience is not necessarily a transparent expression of an already constituted self. The experience itself can be shaped by practices through which a person becomes an object for himself.

The point is not that there is no individual behind experience. It is that the individual cannot simply be assumed to exist, fully formed, before the practices through which he comes to know himself.

This provides the conceptual link to Foucault's refusal of Elders's questions.

Elders asks about the experience of creativity as though the creative individual were already there: a person who possesses a particular interiority and experiences freedom when something new emerges from within. Foucault's historical analysis complicates precisely this picture. The self is not simply a hidden interior source waiting to reveal itself. It is also something formed through historically specific practices of self-relation.

The distinction is subtle but important. Foucault is not refusing subjectivity, he is refusing to treat subjectivity as a transparent origin. The self can be experienced, examined, described, transformed, and interpreted, but this does not mean that looking inward will reveal the ultimate cause of what a person thinks or produces.

The self is therefore better understood as a relation than as a possession.

Once this is clear, Foucault's response to Elders becomes easier to understand. The question is not simply whether Foucault has an inner life. Of course he does. The question is whether that inner life should be treated as the explanatory key to his philosophy.

Foucault's answer is no.

4. The Creative Self

We can now return to Elders's question about creativity. He asks Foucault whether, when he discovers a new idea, creativity and freedom are working together within his personality. The question presupposes a particular image of the thinker: an interior self that experiences, creates, and expresses itself through thought.

Foucault refuses that image as an explanation.

His answer does not deny that something happens to him when he thinks. Nor does it deny that individuals can produce genuinely new statements. What it denies is that the subjective experience of innovation explains the conditions under which that innovation becomes possible.

This is why Foucault immediately speaks of rules. Even when he believes he is saying something new, he is aware that linguistic and epistemological rules are operating in what he says. The individual can innovate, but innovation takes place within a field that the individual has not created from nothing.

The same logic applies to biography. A philosophical work does not become intelligible simply because we discover the experiences of the person who wrote it. Personal history may be interesting, even illuminating, without being the explanation we are looking for.

Technologies of the Self allows us to see one further dimension of this refusal. The problem is not only that personal experience may be the wrong explanatory level. The very conception of a self that lies behind the question is historically questionable. The self is not necessarily an autonomous interior source that exists first and then produces thoughts, actions, and works. It is also constituted through practices by which individuals relate to themselves.

This changes the question we should ask about Foucault.

Instead of asking: What personal experience produced Foucault's philosophy?

we might ask: What practices and forms of self-relation are involved in the way Foucault works as a thinker?

The second question does not eliminate the individual. It does not turn Foucault into a mere effect of impersonal structures. It simply refuses to make the individual an unexplained explanatory origin.

This is what makes the phrase “creative self” so useful. Foucault is not refusing creativity. He is refusing a particular conception of creativity: creativity as the expression of an autonomous interior subject whose experience provides the hidden source of intellectual production.

His refusal of Elders's question is therefore not a refusal to discuss himself in any absolute sense. It is a refusal to accept the terms on which the question is posed.

Elders asks about the person behind the thought. Foucault asks us to look instead at the conditions, practices, and rules through which thought becomes possible.

And Technologies of the Self suggests that the same displacement must eventually be made with the self itself. We cannot simply assume that there is an inner subject behind these practices whose nature can be discovered by looking inward. The self is also something produced, examined, and transformed through practices of self-relation.

Foucault does not refuse the self, he refuses the creative self as explanatory origin.

That is why his answer to Elders can sound so evasive while being, in fact, methodologically precise. He is not withholding “the real explanation”. He is questioning whether the personal experience Elders asks him to provide is the kind of explanation that is needed.

The more productive question is therefore not what happened inside Foucault when he had an idea, nor what happened in his private life that made his philosophy possible. It is what kind of relation to knowledge, thought, and the self is enacted in the practice of philosophy itself.

Foucault does not simply decline to answer Elders, he changes the point of view

References

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). University of Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M., & Chomsky, N. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature (Elders, F., moderator). The New Press. (Original work published 1971)

Elders, F. (2015). Freedom and knowledge: The Chomsky-Foucault debate and its aftermath. New Press.