5. For the early Foucault, subjectification
is a process aimed at generating obedient subjects principally characterised by
their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. The
Enlightenment version is especially oppressive because it coincides with the
new more pervasive regime of rationalisation and the disciplinary modalities of
power.
6. This is not to say that Foucault is simply a critic of the enlightenment: far from it. Although he believes we need to escape from the illusions tied to the above idea of a universal foundational subject, he also views Enlightenment as the basis for a new understanding of the task of philosophy. From him, this ambiguity is already at the very centre of the Kantian project. For Foucault, Kant is the founder of two great traditions in modern philosophy. The first associated the three critiques, concerns the exploration of modern scientific rationality and especially the conditions under which true knowledge is possible. It is this project that developed the idea of the transcendental subject as the abstract, logical foundation from all knowledge and morality. This is the model that Foucault now rejects. However, some of Kant’s occasional essays offer another philosophical project. In Kant this assumes a form that was primarily concerned with the immediate present, with the question of our actuality. (PT, 94) This second version of the task of modern philosophy comes to the centre in the late Foucault as the basis of his own final understanding of philosophy and of his interpretation of critique that had its origins in the ancient tradition of philosophy as the “care of the self’ that since Christianity and especially the scientific revolution had been marginalised within the Western tradition. These ideas are developed in his late lectures at the College and a number of then contemporary essays, the most important of which is ‘What is Enlightenment?’
7. Here Foucault reflects on Kant’s famous contemporary attempt to explain the general cultural significance of the enlightenment. But he uses these ideas as the basis for formulating his own contemporary vision. Firstly, Foucault underlines the centrality of the Enlightenment. As he sees it, modern philosophy itself can be viewed as an attempt to answer the question: What is Enlightenment? But this means that we need to rethink our traditional understanding of Enlightenment. He maintains that for Kant this is neither an historical era nor the dawning of an accomplishment or an effort to locate the present in a philosophy of history. Rather, Kant is primarily interested in what distinguishes the present from the past, what is different about his today. The key to this actuality, according to Foucault, was the contemporary sense both for authors and the public of being part of a process that was releasing contemporaries from an inherited status of immaturity, where they were content to accept the authority of others in the use of reason. What is involved here is a shift from the government of others to the government of the self, a fundamental modification of the pre-existing linkage between will, authority and the use of reason. In the past, the use of reason and will is subordinated to the authority of others. Foucault suggests that in the new configuration the ethical task is to wilfully assert rationality against the authority of convention and thus confirm individual autonomy. The motto of this new configuration is: Dare to know! This motto exemplifies the fact that the contemporary individual is set before a task demanding a courageous attitude. S/he can no longer be passive and obedient but must assume agency in a process of personal change. S/he will only escape immaturity if they assume responsibility for him/herself and become the agents of their own self-transformation. It should be underlined that Foucault is not just describing the process of “enlightenment”, he is prescribing what is required for maturity to be attained. We could say that he views this process in dialectical terms: he makes it clear that men are at once both elements and agents within this process. It is not purely incidental that its was the historical actors of this time that recognised their own epoch as that of “enlightenment”. It is worth noting here that Foucault now explicitly repudiates the simple dichotomy that characterised his earlier rejection of the phenomenological subject and emphasised structuralist determination. The contemporary individual occupies both positions in the polarity as both conditioned and agent. However, this latter must also not be viewed in teleological terms but as completely open-ended. That he characterises this as a “way out” underlines the indeterminacy that surrounds it. Foucault emphasises experimentation of the limits, as a possible transgression and expression of the creative potential and freedom of the individual but not as a teleological endpoint.
8. In keeping with this dialectical conception, the obligation to escape immaturity has both an ethical and political dimension. To distinguish between these dimensions requires that a distinction be made between private and public uses of reason. Kant renders this distinction in terms that are the opposite of contemporary usage. For him, the distinction does not apply to a ream of things but to uses. The private use of reason is a submissive one where the context renders the agent a mere cog in a machine. In such a private context, the appropriate usage involves obedience to the dictates and requirements externally imposed. On the other hand, the public use of reason emancipates the actor from these dictates so that they reason as a rational and potentially universal being. Reasoning as a member of a rational community requires the unconstrained exercise of reason. However, the free exercise of reason involves for Kant more than the absence of any challenge to its free use. This is more than an ethical problem conceived either individually or universally. Because the individual is a political subject, the question of their free employment of reason always remains precarious. They stand before a challenge to overcome laziness and cowardice. They cannot rely on maturity being delivered to them on a plate by a sage or a philosopher. Long before his own critique of the universal intellectual who speaks for others, Foucault acknowledges that Kant had already recognised that revolutions easily turn bad and eat their children under ever new regimes of authority. At this point this problem remains unresolved. Kant could only offer the prospect of a contract with rational despotism that delivers obedience on the part of the rational actor on condition that the dictate be in conformity with universal reason. However, as this condition is breached at least as much as it is honoured, Foucault puts a premium on the responsibility of the individual to engage in fearless speech. Parrhesia (truth telling) remains a perpetual task involving courage before political power.
9. Foucault maintains that that critique is indispensable in those moments when humanity exercises its reason without subjection to authority. This defines the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate. He locates critique at the outer limits of philosophy, very close to it, up against it, at its expense (PT. p.42). This is a very interesting formulation. It indicates Foucault’s ambivalence towards the modern philosophical tradition. It is this relation of tension between philosophy and critique that takes us back to Marx’s own critique of philosophy and his own genuine ambivalence towards it which is apparently shared by Foucault. He, too, seems to recognise that he has arrived at the point of transgression and limit. The challenge is to experiment towards a future philosophy (The philosophy of the present.) or towards something that occupies the enticing space now looming beyond it. He often denies he is a philosopher while, at the same time, he is also prepared to designate his own work a place within at least the second tradition stemming form Kant. Foucault clearly believes that critique strains to go beyond the limits that the other tradition of philosophy has imposed on itself. Critique only exists in relation to something other than itself, that is, the non-discursive regimes of institutional knowledge/power. It serves as an instrument of a truth it will not know nor happen to be. According to Foucault, critique is a means towards an undefined future. This makes this tradition of philosophy a discourse of, and about, modernity, of ourselves. But just because it occupies the present in its essential diversity and dynamism, it is ‘condemned to dispersion, dependency and heteronomy. However, this is only because it exists in relation to something other than itself. The “something other” seems to stand for power, contingency and the future, which it might want to police but its regulation is simply beyond all capacities. One key aspect of this future orientation we have already seen in Marx’s understanding of praxis and Horkheimer’s emphasis on will as a decisive dimension of truth. This re-emerges here in Foucault’s suggestion that critique involves something akin to virtue. It is clear from this formulation that Foucault wants to see a philosophy with more than the cognitive task of eradicating error. What is required is not just a critical attitude in the present, to existing power but self-transformative spiritual process that is directed at limits and the future. Foucault suggests teasingly, perhaps in lieu of all possible philosophy.
10. Beyond this tortuous and ambivalent relation to philosophy, Foucault defines critique more simply as the counter discourse to that of governmentality or the art of not being governed too much. In Foucault’s late work the notion of governmentality is understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others. Governmentality is a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility. In this model self -relation as a care of the self has priority. But it also incorporates the other relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is asymmetrically fixed. This model was conceived as a way of incorporating a positive, active concept of subjectivity seemingly missing in Foucault’s earlier work. For that reason, the self-relation understood as an ethics of care of the self is especially prominent and vital to the project of critique. However, when Foucault refers to critique as the counter discourse to governmentality, as the art of not being governed too much, the notion of governmentality has an emphatic negative connotation of those dimensions of government (strategic relations and technics of government) where the danger of domination is ever present.
6. This is not to say that Foucault is simply a critic of the enlightenment: far from it. Although he believes we need to escape from the illusions tied to the above idea of a universal foundational subject, he also views Enlightenment as the basis for a new understanding of the task of philosophy. From him, this ambiguity is already at the very centre of the Kantian project. For Foucault, Kant is the founder of two great traditions in modern philosophy. The first associated the three critiques, concerns the exploration of modern scientific rationality and especially the conditions under which true knowledge is possible. It is this project that developed the idea of the transcendental subject as the abstract, logical foundation from all knowledge and morality. This is the model that Foucault now rejects. However, some of Kant’s occasional essays offer another philosophical project. In Kant this assumes a form that was primarily concerned with the immediate present, with the question of our actuality. (PT, 94) This second version of the task of modern philosophy comes to the centre in the late Foucault as the basis of his own final understanding of philosophy and of his interpretation of critique that had its origins in the ancient tradition of philosophy as the “care of the self’ that since Christianity and especially the scientific revolution had been marginalised within the Western tradition. These ideas are developed in his late lectures at the College and a number of then contemporary essays, the most important of which is ‘What is Enlightenment?’
7. Here Foucault reflects on Kant’s famous contemporary attempt to explain the general cultural significance of the enlightenment. But he uses these ideas as the basis for formulating his own contemporary vision. Firstly, Foucault underlines the centrality of the Enlightenment. As he sees it, modern philosophy itself can be viewed as an attempt to answer the question: What is Enlightenment? But this means that we need to rethink our traditional understanding of Enlightenment. He maintains that for Kant this is neither an historical era nor the dawning of an accomplishment or an effort to locate the present in a philosophy of history. Rather, Kant is primarily interested in what distinguishes the present from the past, what is different about his today. The key to this actuality, according to Foucault, was the contemporary sense both for authors and the public of being part of a process that was releasing contemporaries from an inherited status of immaturity, where they were content to accept the authority of others in the use of reason. What is involved here is a shift from the government of others to the government of the self, a fundamental modification of the pre-existing linkage between will, authority and the use of reason. In the past, the use of reason and will is subordinated to the authority of others. Foucault suggests that in the new configuration the ethical task is to wilfully assert rationality against the authority of convention and thus confirm individual autonomy. The motto of this new configuration is: Dare to know! This motto exemplifies the fact that the contemporary individual is set before a task demanding a courageous attitude. S/he can no longer be passive and obedient but must assume agency in a process of personal change. S/he will only escape immaturity if they assume responsibility for him/herself and become the agents of their own self-transformation. It should be underlined that Foucault is not just describing the process of “enlightenment”, he is prescribing what is required for maturity to be attained. We could say that he views this process in dialectical terms: he makes it clear that men are at once both elements and agents within this process. It is not purely incidental that its was the historical actors of this time that recognised their own epoch as that of “enlightenment”. It is worth noting here that Foucault now explicitly repudiates the simple dichotomy that characterised his earlier rejection of the phenomenological subject and emphasised structuralist determination. The contemporary individual occupies both positions in the polarity as both conditioned and agent. However, this latter must also not be viewed in teleological terms but as completely open-ended. That he characterises this as a “way out” underlines the indeterminacy that surrounds it. Foucault emphasises experimentation of the limits, as a possible transgression and expression of the creative potential and freedom of the individual but not as a teleological endpoint.
8. In keeping with this dialectical conception, the obligation to escape immaturity has both an ethical and political dimension. To distinguish between these dimensions requires that a distinction be made between private and public uses of reason. Kant renders this distinction in terms that are the opposite of contemporary usage. For him, the distinction does not apply to a ream of things but to uses. The private use of reason is a submissive one where the context renders the agent a mere cog in a machine. In such a private context, the appropriate usage involves obedience to the dictates and requirements externally imposed. On the other hand, the public use of reason emancipates the actor from these dictates so that they reason as a rational and potentially universal being. Reasoning as a member of a rational community requires the unconstrained exercise of reason. However, the free exercise of reason involves for Kant more than the absence of any challenge to its free use. This is more than an ethical problem conceived either individually or universally. Because the individual is a political subject, the question of their free employment of reason always remains precarious. They stand before a challenge to overcome laziness and cowardice. They cannot rely on maturity being delivered to them on a plate by a sage or a philosopher. Long before his own critique of the universal intellectual who speaks for others, Foucault acknowledges that Kant had already recognised that revolutions easily turn bad and eat their children under ever new regimes of authority. At this point this problem remains unresolved. Kant could only offer the prospect of a contract with rational despotism that delivers obedience on the part of the rational actor on condition that the dictate be in conformity with universal reason. However, as this condition is breached at least as much as it is honoured, Foucault puts a premium on the responsibility of the individual to engage in fearless speech. Parrhesia (truth telling) remains a perpetual task involving courage before political power.
9. Foucault maintains that that critique is indispensable in those moments when humanity exercises its reason without subjection to authority. This defines the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate. He locates critique at the outer limits of philosophy, very close to it, up against it, at its expense (PT. p.42). This is a very interesting formulation. It indicates Foucault’s ambivalence towards the modern philosophical tradition. It is this relation of tension between philosophy and critique that takes us back to Marx’s own critique of philosophy and his own genuine ambivalence towards it which is apparently shared by Foucault. He, too, seems to recognise that he has arrived at the point of transgression and limit. The challenge is to experiment towards a future philosophy (The philosophy of the present.) or towards something that occupies the enticing space now looming beyond it. He often denies he is a philosopher while, at the same time, he is also prepared to designate his own work a place within at least the second tradition stemming form Kant. Foucault clearly believes that critique strains to go beyond the limits that the other tradition of philosophy has imposed on itself. Critique only exists in relation to something other than itself, that is, the non-discursive regimes of institutional knowledge/power. It serves as an instrument of a truth it will not know nor happen to be. According to Foucault, critique is a means towards an undefined future. This makes this tradition of philosophy a discourse of, and about, modernity, of ourselves. But just because it occupies the present in its essential diversity and dynamism, it is ‘condemned to dispersion, dependency and heteronomy. However, this is only because it exists in relation to something other than itself. The “something other” seems to stand for power, contingency and the future, which it might want to police but its regulation is simply beyond all capacities. One key aspect of this future orientation we have already seen in Marx’s understanding of praxis and Horkheimer’s emphasis on will as a decisive dimension of truth. This re-emerges here in Foucault’s suggestion that critique involves something akin to virtue. It is clear from this formulation that Foucault wants to see a philosophy with more than the cognitive task of eradicating error. What is required is not just a critical attitude in the present, to existing power but self-transformative spiritual process that is directed at limits and the future. Foucault suggests teasingly, perhaps in lieu of all possible philosophy.
10. Beyond this tortuous and ambivalent relation to philosophy, Foucault defines critique more simply as the counter discourse to that of governmentality or the art of not being governed too much. In Foucault’s late work the notion of governmentality is understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others. Governmentality is a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility. In this model self -relation as a care of the self has priority. But it also incorporates the other relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is asymmetrically fixed. This model was conceived as a way of incorporating a positive, active concept of subjectivity seemingly missing in Foucault’s earlier work. For that reason, the self-relation understood as an ethics of care of the self is especially prominent and vital to the project of critique. However, when Foucault refers to critique as the counter discourse to governmentality, as the art of not being governed too much, the notion of governmentality has an emphatic negative connotation of those dimensions of government (strategic relations and technics of government) where the danger of domination is ever present.
Lecture 11:
Knowledge, Power, Resistance, the “Care of the Self” and the Problem of
Normativity
1. If we are to fully understand Foucault’s theoretical motivation completely, we need to return to his fundamental understanding of social existence mentioned early as a ceaseless battle in which everyone is a combatant at least in the sense that they are always engaged in strategic games of power. It is at this point that Foucault’s reliance on Nietzsche is especially strong. Let’s briefly consider two key dimensions of this: Firstly in respect to his conception of knowledge and then power.
1. If we are to fully understand Foucault’s theoretical motivation completely, we need to return to his fundamental understanding of social existence mentioned early as a ceaseless battle in which everyone is a combatant at least in the sense that they are always engaged in strategic games of power. It is at this point that Foucault’s reliance on Nietzsche is especially strong. Let’s briefly consider two key dimensions of this: Firstly in respect to his conception of knowledge and then power.
2. In his 1970-71 Lectures on the Will to Know Foucault tells us that knowledge is
not an operation that opposes appearance to being or essence, by lifting the
veil to expose the object behind appearances. Rather, knowledge is the breach in appearance, it
maliciously destroys appearances by putting them in question and extracting
their secrets. Thus knowledge that remains at the level of appearance would not
be knowledge at all. So the process of unmasking should give rise not to
essence but to ever-new appearances. Previously all philosophers had viewed
themselves as truth seekers: this is a long historical process, a groping that
accumulates in time. But the relation finally established between truth and
knowledge is assumed from the outset as one that existed by right, just as knowledge
was founded on a pre-established relation between subject and object, and the
philosophers sole concern had been to bring subject and object closer together.
In this traditional scenario, to will the truth means to make way for the
truth, to allow it to express itself and to erase any impediments in the knower
that might distort or deform the presence of the object. At the heart of this
quest for truth is freedom: The truth must be free from determination by the
will and the will must be free to give access to the truth. (W to K, 215) But
in the Nietzsche counter narrative, instinct, interest, struggle and play are
not impediments that knowledge must tear itself away from, they are not
shameful motifs but the permanent, inevitable and necessary supports for
knowledge creation. Knowledge is not discovered but created, always perspectival
and incomplete. For Nietzsche,
knowledge is not preceded by any complicity or guaranteed by any power (W to K,
207). Neither is it the product of
a simple abstract wanting to know. Rather Nietzsche’s knowledge is a corporeal
knowledge prior to any truth, born of life, struggle, and rivalry and governed
entirely by need and the desire for mastery. For Nietzsche the knowledge that suppresses the body and
usefulness, erases partialities and limits, and wants to see everything without
prejudice is a secondary formation parasitical upon these more primal realities
(W to K, 209). The result is the
opposition between the violent and wicked knowledge that serves life and
another, which may be historically effective but is also illusionary,
paradoxical and ascetic. Nietzsche contends that to wonder about the original
value of knowledge is to accept the premise of a certain type of relation
between subject and object. Yet he maintains that this presupposed relation is
not the foundation of knowledge but the reality produced by it. (W to K, 210)
Against this, Nietzsche argued that knowledge rests upon a network of
relations, an inter-play of differences, multitudinous in form. A group of these relations impose
themselves through violence. Such a will to power is the necessary foundation
of any given social reality. As such the world is essentially a world of
relations unknowable in themselves. Thought is not a form of consciousness but
an effect of extra-thought, a result of violence and illusion (W to K, 211). A
similar Nietzschean emphasis on relationality, embodiment, productivity and the
illusions of transcendence and impartiality are all repeated in Foucault’s
understanding of power.
3. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates
itself from the juridical or sovereign notion that power as something to be
possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place he conceives power as a
relation of forces:
Power must be analysed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.
This dispersed conception of power makes it co-extensive with the social body. As Foucault puts it in an interview: all relations are at least partially power relations. Power is not localised in specific institutions but imbricated and fused with all other relations including production, the family, sexuality, knowledge and kinship. Power relations are both the internal conditions and the immediate effects of all variety of divisions, inequalities and disequilbria. They are localised, heterogeneous and dispersed, exercised through a multitude of strategies and techniques while still accessible to integration into more global strategies to serve economic and state goals. This is why Foucault recommends as a methodological starting point that our analysis of power should be ascending: rather than meeting power in its most global and also domesticated form as say state power, he suggests beginning with its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, trajectory and tactics and see how they have been invested, colonized, used, transformed and extended by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination. (SMBD, P30)
4. Foucault concludes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. This notion of de-centred and dispersed power in turn rests on a strategic model of strategic, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, as I’ve already mentioned, Foucault sometimes has recourse to the image of the endless battle: changing alignments, dynamic resistances constantly recharged and eclipsed: where victory is only a momentary respite. He clearly views the paradigm of war as a model that gets beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault endorses Nietzschean belief that behind these primitive elements of peaceful and stable civil society lies a constant subterranean struggle of fear, aggression, violence, servitude and oppression.
This does not mean the society, the law and the state are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath the peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. (SMDI pp50/512)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war in the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Here “race” signifies not a biological category but refers simply to differences between ethnic and language groups, to differences in degree of force, vigour, energy and violence. However, whether this opposition was articulated in terms of race, religion or class, the most important point is that this clash ran through society from top to bottom and forms the matrix of social warfare beneath every appearance of civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a key dimension of social existence. We have already seen the figure of class struggle as the key to history in Marx and the role of contradictions as the key to historical dynamics in Hegel. Yet Foucault believed that the Hegelian idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but transmogrified them into a logic of contradiction. This means they are actually totalised into a more basic and irreversible rationality. The primal fact of war and social conflict is subsumed into a universal subject, a reconciled truth and a right, in which all particularities have a pre-ordained place (SMD, p58). This is why Foucault prefers to view Nietzsche rather than Hegel as his closest predecessor.
5. It follows from Foucault’s reading of social relations as permeated by a ubiquitous power that resistance always shadows power. De-centred power finds its own inverse energy in a similarly dispersed resistance. The key to this conception of the relationality of power is that neither power nor resistance can be fundamental or substance. The template of modern power relations, as we have seen, lies in the post 68 politics of social movements. This appeared to Foucault as an explosion of local, dispersed resistances to the totalising aspirations of the whole range of institutional authorities in the bureaucracy, universities, schools, hospitals and prisons. Foucault's account of power expresses this new configuration of resistances. Yet, on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation goes further by inflecting these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general ultimately grounded in life itself. Admittedly Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He denied that he was offering an alternative theory or metaphysics of power. He stresses that his ideas on power arise from the inadequacy of existing models to explain the historical phenomena he confronted in his attempts to theorise madness, prisons, sexuality and truth. However, his understanding of resistance seems to inject these post-68 socio-political struggles with trans-historical significance. Inflected in this vision, social life becomes a force field of asymmetrical power relations, the binary battlefront referred to earlier. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. However, in this light resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous. Where there is a power relation there is also the possibility of resistance.
6. Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, his account of it troubling. On the one hand, his empirical resisters are obvious: the oppressed and downtrodden in a variety of shapes--the mad, the prisoner, homosexual, women, various third world communities that provided the specific occasions, contexts and inspirations for his works. But more than these concrete oppressed actors, resistance and revolt are, in Foucault, merely limit concepts, the other of power. Their status is nothing more than a theoretical postulate or an inexplicable brute fact. Given it was Foucault’s life's work to question all conventional facts and expose their historical conditions of possibility, his reticence in the face of revolt is troubling but not inexplicable. As we know, he is sceptical of the notion of the unified subject and accuses humanism of complicity in many crimes associated with modern power. Resistance must be therefore the other of this power. This could be called the “residual humanism” in Foucault: one he refuses to call by its name, a humanism every bit as essentialist as those he critiques in the Western tradition. An example of this is to be found in Foucault’s fascination with revolution.
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