The Birth of the Clinic by Foucault Michel

Author:Foucault, Michel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

7

SEEING AND KNOWING

‘Hippocrates applied himself only to observation and despised all systems. It is only by following in his footsteps that medicine can be perfected’.1 But the privileges that the clinic had recently recognized in observation were much more numerous than the prestige accorded it by tradition and of a quite different nature. They were at the same time the privileges of a pure gaze, prior to all intervention and faithful to the immediate, which it took up without modifying it, and those of a gaze equipped with a whole logical armature, which exorcised from the outset the naivety of an unprepared empiricism. We must now describe the concrete exercise of such a perception.

The observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless. Observation leaves things as they are; there is nothing hidden to it in what is given. The correlative of observation is never the invisible, but always the immediately visible, once one has removed the obstacles erected to reason by theories and to the senses by the imagination. In the clinician's catalogue, the purity of the gaze is bound up with a certain silence that enables him to listen. The prolix discourses of systems must be interrupted: ‘All theory is always silent or vanishes at the patient's bedside’;2 and the suggestions of the imagination—which anticipate what one perceives, find illusory relations, and give voice to what is inaccessible to the senses—must also be reduced: ‘How rare is the accomplished observer who knows how to await, in the silence of the imagination, in the calm of the mind, and before forming his judgement, the relation of a sense actually being exercised!’3 The gaze will be fulfilled in its own truth and will have access to the truth of things if it rests on them in silence, if everything keeps silent around what it sees. The clinical gaze has the paradoxical ability to hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle. In the clinic, what is manifested is originally what is spoken. The opposition between clinic and experiment overlays exactly the difference between the language we hear, and consequently recognize, and the question we pose or, rather, impose: ‘The observer… reads nature, he who experiments questions’.4 To this extent, observation and experiment are opposed but not mutually exclusive: it is natural that observation should lead to experiment, provided that experiment should question only in the vocabulary and within the language proposed to it by the things observed; its questions can be well founded only if they are answers to an answer itself without question, an absolute answer that implies no prior language, because, strictly speaking, it is the first word. It is this privilege of possessing an unsupersedable (indépassable) origin that the Double expresses in terms of causality: ‘observation must not be confused with experience; the latter is the result or effect, the former the means or cause; observation leads naturally to experience’.5 The observing gaze manifests its virtues only in a double silence: the relative silence

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