7. We have already seen that he was much
occupied with the question of rethinking its meaning. Revolution is quite vital
to his notion of social change because it ensures that no power, however
apparently irresistible, is beyond resistance and revolt. In this sense, the
possibility of revolution is the guarantee of transgressions that break
existing institutions, moulds, constraining and limiting shapes and values.
Foucault went to Iran twice in 1978 both immediately before and then later to report
on the uprising against the Shah. There he found confirmation of his ideas on
resistance, “of the timeless drama in which power is always accursed” and of
the fact that the modern understanding of revolution, that rationalised it into
a lawful and controllable history, was in fact the colonisation by Realpolitik of an inexplicable, and
therefore, truly historical event. He even continued to publicly support the
revolution in the press even after its fundamentalist character became clear
and the theocracy began murdering and persecuting its opponents.
8. His justification of this stand is very revealing. Essentially he breaks the Iranian revolution into two realities. Most important to him is the revolt itself. Here is manifest the beauty of a collective will that is, for him, bent not just on a change of regime but on radically changing itself, its relations to things, others with eternity and God. This is the process of self-transformation he spoke of in relation to the Enlightenment but in a less conscious form. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising as ‘the self introduction of a subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of a people) into history and life”. For Foucault, this radical will to change an entire way of life is the truly beautiful and memorable aspect of the revolution. It reaffirms that the human spirit is beyond even the most formidable power and beyond all calculation. He is not particularly concerned that this spiritual determination found its sources in Islam. Shi'ite Islam is simply the occasion for the expression of something deeper. The capacity to revolt, to overturn the thread of history, to risk death is the fundamental anchorage of liberty: it is a human potential that cannot be explained. It must simply be accepted because there are revolts, sometimes, as in the Iranian case, against all the odds. The other level of the revolution is politics: this is the domain where the “will is multiple, hesitant, confused and obscure even to itself”; this is the domain of alliance, compromise and the deal. Despite his enthusiasm for the revolution, Foucault was also a defender of human rights and did challenge the new regime (unsuccessfully) to live up to its absolute ethical responsibilities and ensure that its justice was open and transparent. But Foucault’s division of the revolution into these two realities reveals a degree of political romanticism in his thinking. He aligns himself with the insurrection by bare hands of whose who want “to lift the fearful weight of the entire world order” that he says, “bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them” (F&IR, p. 222) Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, the revolutionary romanticism of his account is hardly reassuring. Furthermore, for Foucault, resistance and revolt are mere limit concepts, the other of power. They signify the undifferentiated will of the oppressed that in its very unanimity is volatile, amorphous and therefore necessarily unpolitical.
9. For Foucault, the phenomenon of revolt is a touchstone of hope, optimism, the dignity of primeval freedom expressed in the act of transgression. However, given his uncompromising repudiation of humanism, all we have is a glimmer called “resistance” that carries a heavy emancipatory load but without any real normative credentials. Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible character of resistance, Foucault almost immediately reasserts his sceptical guard in the expectation that even successful revolt that becomes revolutionary change will ossify and become another inhibition to liberty and barrier to transgression. Yet, it is hard to know how Foucault succeeds in distinguishing power from resistance: without normative credentials it would seem that resistance is in danger of being viewed as just another strategy of power.
10. We have seen that Foucault repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He understands his genealogies as anti-sciences that attempt to remarshal the buried memories of conflict and the disqualified singular and local knowledges of the subjugated as a political/ideological challenge to the orthodox monopoly on scientificity, the existing regime of truth. This self-understanding is entirely in keeping with his idea of the specific intellectual who foregoes the universalising task of speaking the "truth" from above the contest, on behalf of mankind. Foucault offers knowledges that claim not truth, but, as we have seen, problemisation. He tells us:
The discourse that deciphers war’s permanent presence within society is essentially a historic-political discourse, a discourse in which truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, a discourse that is darkly critical and at the same time intensely mythical. (SMD?)
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity as the carceral society in Discipline and Punish (1976) can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the cause of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, Foucault's explicit political self-understanding is supposedly bracketed from his genealogies. He claims to avoid the pitfalls of humanism by methodologically excluding subjective meanings, of identification with subjects or struggles. Such identification would signify a capitulation to the values of the enlightenment that already stand impeached on the charge of complicity in subjugation and oppression. Only extreme caution allows the committed philosopher to avoid legitimating particular regimes of truth and the spectre of substitutionalism (the posture of the universalising intellectual who purports to speak for the oppressed and define their interests). Foucault repudiates identification as a refusal to join some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. As I mentioned, in his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Vietnamese boat people and the Polish Trade Union Solidarity and even wrote in favour of human rights. Foucault employed "rights talk" but was reluctant to connect it to national or post national political or legal arrangements. In keeping with his stress on “not be governed too much” he wanted to rely instead on the international public sphere and of civic organisations to monitor rights rather than the state. His general scepticism in regard to power sees him puts more faith in unregulated civic action than in agreements guaranteed by authorities, in attempting to construct postnational legal and political architecture.
11. But on what basis can Foucault advocate resistance to domination or why prefer struggle to submission? Clearly he has political sympathies yet how, on the basis of his own theory, can he distinguish between the forces of oppression and domination and those oppressed and dominated? By relinquishing the option of a normative foundation, Foucault may escape the totalising logic of the form of life and the type of theoretical discourse he finds complicit in a range of normalising practices. But, without normative criteria, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only is the critic unable to articulate the forms of "otherness" or of action that diminish the inegalitarian logic of strategic power relations, but he/she also becomes an indifferent alien merely bearing witness to the ceaseless, meaningless rotations of domination and resistance. The critics of Foucault's strategy argue that he deprives the modern rebel of any institutional or normative resources for constituting him/herself in terms other than those already provided by the prevailing dominant regimes. The difficulty of his position is exemplified by his later reversion to "rights talk". He affirms rights but is unwilling to anchor it in political or legal authority; it is supposed to float freely supported only by the international public sphere and opinion. Foucault’s defenders, on the other hand, argue that his critique of modern humanism amounts to a rejection of traditional normativity. The best defence along these lines comes from Thomas Lemke. He argues that to focus on the question of norms and normativity is to miss the decisive characteristic of Foucault’s work. That is to see normativity as not outside the historical field of investigation. Norms are less a starting point than an object of an analysis and the result of conflict. Thus Foucault’s alleged weakness is a strength because it allows him to articulate the critique of the juridical model at the theoretical level by placing in question the orthodoxies of political thought and leftist critique that constrain the imagining of political alternatives; it rejects the proposition that every political intervention must compulsorily bind itself to a proof of justification by taking a position in an already fixed political system. Against this, Foucault is allegedly in the business of imagining and bringing into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. Constellations Vol 10 no 2, pp174/75). While I find this a very plausible and consistent reading of Foucault’s theoretical intentions, it does beg vital theoretico-practical issues. One doesn’t have to argue that norms can be outside the historical field of investigation and conflict to insist that we still need normative orientation. What stops leftist political engagement degenerating into nihilism or positivism if it has no normative orientation. It is not necessary to cease reflecting upon operative norms and testing them against their practical consequences while employing them as critical standards. On the other hand, to abandon all normative orientation leaves the critique with no other compass than the theorist’s own moral and political sensibilities. And we know that these are not always so finely tuned.
8. His justification of this stand is very revealing. Essentially he breaks the Iranian revolution into two realities. Most important to him is the revolt itself. Here is manifest the beauty of a collective will that is, for him, bent not just on a change of regime but on radically changing itself, its relations to things, others with eternity and God. This is the process of self-transformation he spoke of in relation to the Enlightenment but in a less conscious form. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising as ‘the self introduction of a subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of a people) into history and life”. For Foucault, this radical will to change an entire way of life is the truly beautiful and memorable aspect of the revolution. It reaffirms that the human spirit is beyond even the most formidable power and beyond all calculation. He is not particularly concerned that this spiritual determination found its sources in Islam. Shi'ite Islam is simply the occasion for the expression of something deeper. The capacity to revolt, to overturn the thread of history, to risk death is the fundamental anchorage of liberty: it is a human potential that cannot be explained. It must simply be accepted because there are revolts, sometimes, as in the Iranian case, against all the odds. The other level of the revolution is politics: this is the domain where the “will is multiple, hesitant, confused and obscure even to itself”; this is the domain of alliance, compromise and the deal. Despite his enthusiasm for the revolution, Foucault was also a defender of human rights and did challenge the new regime (unsuccessfully) to live up to its absolute ethical responsibilities and ensure that its justice was open and transparent. But Foucault’s division of the revolution into these two realities reveals a degree of political romanticism in his thinking. He aligns himself with the insurrection by bare hands of whose who want “to lift the fearful weight of the entire world order” that he says, “bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them” (F&IR, p. 222) Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, the revolutionary romanticism of his account is hardly reassuring. Furthermore, for Foucault, resistance and revolt are mere limit concepts, the other of power. They signify the undifferentiated will of the oppressed that in its very unanimity is volatile, amorphous and therefore necessarily unpolitical.
9. For Foucault, the phenomenon of revolt is a touchstone of hope, optimism, the dignity of primeval freedom expressed in the act of transgression. However, given his uncompromising repudiation of humanism, all we have is a glimmer called “resistance” that carries a heavy emancipatory load but without any real normative credentials. Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible character of resistance, Foucault almost immediately reasserts his sceptical guard in the expectation that even successful revolt that becomes revolutionary change will ossify and become another inhibition to liberty and barrier to transgression. Yet, it is hard to know how Foucault succeeds in distinguishing power from resistance: without normative credentials it would seem that resistance is in danger of being viewed as just another strategy of power.
10. We have seen that Foucault repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He understands his genealogies as anti-sciences that attempt to remarshal the buried memories of conflict and the disqualified singular and local knowledges of the subjugated as a political/ideological challenge to the orthodox monopoly on scientificity, the existing regime of truth. This self-understanding is entirely in keeping with his idea of the specific intellectual who foregoes the universalising task of speaking the "truth" from above the contest, on behalf of mankind. Foucault offers knowledges that claim not truth, but, as we have seen, problemisation. He tells us:
The discourse that deciphers war’s permanent presence within society is essentially a historic-political discourse, a discourse in which truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, a discourse that is darkly critical and at the same time intensely mythical. (SMD?)
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity as the carceral society in Discipline and Punish (1976) can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the cause of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, Foucault's explicit political self-understanding is supposedly bracketed from his genealogies. He claims to avoid the pitfalls of humanism by methodologically excluding subjective meanings, of identification with subjects or struggles. Such identification would signify a capitulation to the values of the enlightenment that already stand impeached on the charge of complicity in subjugation and oppression. Only extreme caution allows the committed philosopher to avoid legitimating particular regimes of truth and the spectre of substitutionalism (the posture of the universalising intellectual who purports to speak for the oppressed and define their interests). Foucault repudiates identification as a refusal to join some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. As I mentioned, in his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Vietnamese boat people and the Polish Trade Union Solidarity and even wrote in favour of human rights. Foucault employed "rights talk" but was reluctant to connect it to national or post national political or legal arrangements. In keeping with his stress on “not be governed too much” he wanted to rely instead on the international public sphere and of civic organisations to monitor rights rather than the state. His general scepticism in regard to power sees him puts more faith in unregulated civic action than in agreements guaranteed by authorities, in attempting to construct postnational legal and political architecture.
11. But on what basis can Foucault advocate resistance to domination or why prefer struggle to submission? Clearly he has political sympathies yet how, on the basis of his own theory, can he distinguish between the forces of oppression and domination and those oppressed and dominated? By relinquishing the option of a normative foundation, Foucault may escape the totalising logic of the form of life and the type of theoretical discourse he finds complicit in a range of normalising practices. But, without normative criteria, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only is the critic unable to articulate the forms of "otherness" or of action that diminish the inegalitarian logic of strategic power relations, but he/she also becomes an indifferent alien merely bearing witness to the ceaseless, meaningless rotations of domination and resistance. The critics of Foucault's strategy argue that he deprives the modern rebel of any institutional or normative resources for constituting him/herself in terms other than those already provided by the prevailing dominant regimes. The difficulty of his position is exemplified by his later reversion to "rights talk". He affirms rights but is unwilling to anchor it in political or legal authority; it is supposed to float freely supported only by the international public sphere and opinion. Foucault’s defenders, on the other hand, argue that his critique of modern humanism amounts to a rejection of traditional normativity. The best defence along these lines comes from Thomas Lemke. He argues that to focus on the question of norms and normativity is to miss the decisive characteristic of Foucault’s work. That is to see normativity as not outside the historical field of investigation. Norms are less a starting point than an object of an analysis and the result of conflict. Thus Foucault’s alleged weakness is a strength because it allows him to articulate the critique of the juridical model at the theoretical level by placing in question the orthodoxies of political thought and leftist critique that constrain the imagining of political alternatives; it rejects the proposition that every political intervention must compulsorily bind itself to a proof of justification by taking a position in an already fixed political system. Against this, Foucault is allegedly in the business of imagining and bringing into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. Constellations Vol 10 no 2, pp174/75). While I find this a very plausible and consistent reading of Foucault’s theoretical intentions, it does beg vital theoretico-practical issues. One doesn’t have to argue that norms can be outside the historical field of investigation and conflict to insist that we still need normative orientation. What stops leftist political engagement degenerating into nihilism or positivism if it has no normative orientation. It is not necessary to cease reflecting upon operative norms and testing them against their practical consequences while employing them as critical standards. On the other hand, to abandon all normative orientation leaves the critique with no other compass than the theorist’s own moral and political sensibilities. And we know that these are not always so finely tuned.
12. It is interesting that Foucault himself
continued to think about these issues right up to his death. In his 1982/83
lectures at the College that were published in English as The Government of Self and Others only a couple of years ago he
addresses the normative question in the explicit context of political democracy
and the essential importance of Parresia
or truth telling. The specific context is a discussion of Periclean democracy
and the role of the political leader. The term “Parresia” connotes the courage to speak truthfully or frankly. For
Foucault, this means more than a formal right granted to every citizen of a
democracy that the Greeks termed “isegoria”.
Characteristically, Foucault is less concerned with formal understandings of
institutions and their practices than with the social reality of their actual
operation. While all in a democracy may have the formal right to speak, he is
interested in the question of who does speak. And this is where the virtue or
the courage for fearless speech or truth telling comes to the fore. Beyond
formal equality is a struggle about who is to speak and exercise influence, an
also, the Tocquevillean question of how is the quality of public discussion to
be preserved against the democratic possibility of the “tyranny of the
majority”. To articulate these issues Foucault locates his discussion of Parresia in what he calls a rectangular
field of competing values. At one corner is democracy in the sense of the
formal equality he associated with the value of isegoria. In another corner is ascendency, or the struggle for
priority and influence in the actual hurly burly of real democracy. A third
corner is occupied by the explicitly normative value of truth that guards
against the reduction of democratic politics to the tyranny of the majority
opinion, while the final corner is occupied by risk as the empirical reality of
the uncertainty and contingency of real political outcomes and the need for
courage to confront such risks and the value of real political leadership in
fearlessly pursuing truth telling in conditions where this may not be popular
or risk free. The point to be made about this rectangle or force-field of
conflicting pressures is that Foucault does not want to eliminate the question
of normativity from the theoretical discussion of politics but he does want to
view it in tension with the other ingredients of the political field. For him
the normative question can neither lie outside the terrain of legitimate
inquiry and critique and nor should it be isolated from the other factors that
constitute the absolute singularity of the specific event.
13. It is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is also clear in other dimensions of his later work where he explores the idea of a non-normalising reconceptualisation of normativity associated with the idea of the care of the self within the paradigm of “governmentality” I spoke of a while ago. The key to this later model is that it obviates the requirement that the individual conform to a code of behaviour and thus engage in the repressive practices of self-sacrifice associated with Christianity. As Foucault tells us in his late lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981/2), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor mere obedience can constitute a beautiful work. A beautiful work is one that conforms to the idea of a certain forma (a certain style, a certain from of life) (H of S, p424). And this followed from the fact that neither the nomos of the city -state nor its religion, its political structures or the form of law could dictate what a citizen must do concretely throughout their life (H of S, p447). For Foucault such an ethics eliminates the externally prescriptive and regulatory modality of ethics by turning to an aesthetics of living where the ethical is focused primarily on the relation the self has to itself. Foucault finds the paradigm of the care of the self in Plato and more generally in classical society. On his reading, the moral problem is converted into the practice of liberty, the art of individual self-caring or self-formation. This process of self-cultivation requires the guide, friend, the master, the election of cultural patterns belonging to society and social groups. So it would be a mistake to understand this process of self-constitution as solely a self-self relation: it is a historically constituted social relation still implying inter-subjective relations of power. While it is clear that Foucault understands the historical conditioned character of this model, he still wants to insist that this is a positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. But the practices involved in this are not those of knowledge per se but for the subject’s very being. This emphasis on spirituality implies that the truth is never given to the subject by right, it is not an act of knowledge but of transformation and that the truth is only given at the price of bringing the subject’s being into play: that is, there can be no truth without the transformation of the subject (H of S, p15) The whole point of this excursus into a positive notion of subjectivity as “care of the self’ is to demonstrate that contemporary notions of subjectivity are historical constructs, that there are alternative models that provide cultural resources that might assist us to avoid the problems of prescription, self-sacrifice and normalisation identified as deficits in later forms of the history of subjectivity.
13. Foucault has provided us with important critical insights into modernity. He has reminded us that although existing institutions speak a language of "rights" and mouth the principles of human dignity, public pronouncements can disguise a practice of unacknowledged administrative violence. However great the advances of democratisation and public scrutiny of administrative functioning, this not only does not always constrain arbitrary power nor generate a kind of power different from administrative control. Democracy and its administrative machinery have often been complicit in disguising and masking various normalising and marginalising practices and oppressions. He warns against the increasingly pervasive social surveillance exemplified in the growing incursions of "welfare" and security instrumentalities. He shows how the double idioms of law and medicine perform a duet that softens our reaction to administrative violence and lulls us into the political rationality of the carcarel continuum. He has revealed that, despite its advantages, the new reign of publicity means that all of society either directly or vicariously takes over the role of judge or engages in normalising judgements.
14. Yet, isn’t it possible to take all these important insights on board without sacrificing explicit critical orientation. Foucault’s global scepticism of the present seems to ignore his own strictures against “global revolutionism”. In his urgency to focus on overlooked and previously unacknowledged oppressions, to “not be governed too much” or “in that way”, he purports to ignore or at least bracket the emancipatory gains achieved by the bourgeois, democratic revolutions only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. Yet, Foucault's global scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. His critical perspective does have unacknowledged normative presuppositions. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt as a primitive expression of emancipation and a nascent subjectivity despite its ultimate costs. But to make this explicit would be to drop the sceptical guard and accept, at least in some form, the blackmail of the enlightenment. The champion of experimentation and testing limits is not prepared to concede this. But to my mind concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be balanced by both an acknowledgement of where the critic him/self stands and a sense of political responsibility.
13. It is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is also clear in other dimensions of his later work where he explores the idea of a non-normalising reconceptualisation of normativity associated with the idea of the care of the self within the paradigm of “governmentality” I spoke of a while ago. The key to this later model is that it obviates the requirement that the individual conform to a code of behaviour and thus engage in the repressive practices of self-sacrifice associated with Christianity. As Foucault tells us in his late lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981/2), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor mere obedience can constitute a beautiful work. A beautiful work is one that conforms to the idea of a certain forma (a certain style, a certain from of life) (H of S, p424). And this followed from the fact that neither the nomos of the city -state nor its religion, its political structures or the form of law could dictate what a citizen must do concretely throughout their life (H of S, p447). For Foucault such an ethics eliminates the externally prescriptive and regulatory modality of ethics by turning to an aesthetics of living where the ethical is focused primarily on the relation the self has to itself. Foucault finds the paradigm of the care of the self in Plato and more generally in classical society. On his reading, the moral problem is converted into the practice of liberty, the art of individual self-caring or self-formation. This process of self-cultivation requires the guide, friend, the master, the election of cultural patterns belonging to society and social groups. So it would be a mistake to understand this process of self-constitution as solely a self-self relation: it is a historically constituted social relation still implying inter-subjective relations of power. While it is clear that Foucault understands the historical conditioned character of this model, he still wants to insist that this is a positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. But the practices involved in this are not those of knowledge per se but for the subject’s very being. This emphasis on spirituality implies that the truth is never given to the subject by right, it is not an act of knowledge but of transformation and that the truth is only given at the price of bringing the subject’s being into play: that is, there can be no truth without the transformation of the subject (H of S, p15) The whole point of this excursus into a positive notion of subjectivity as “care of the self’ is to demonstrate that contemporary notions of subjectivity are historical constructs, that there are alternative models that provide cultural resources that might assist us to avoid the problems of prescription, self-sacrifice and normalisation identified as deficits in later forms of the history of subjectivity.
13. Foucault has provided us with important critical insights into modernity. He has reminded us that although existing institutions speak a language of "rights" and mouth the principles of human dignity, public pronouncements can disguise a practice of unacknowledged administrative violence. However great the advances of democratisation and public scrutiny of administrative functioning, this not only does not always constrain arbitrary power nor generate a kind of power different from administrative control. Democracy and its administrative machinery have often been complicit in disguising and masking various normalising and marginalising practices and oppressions. He warns against the increasingly pervasive social surveillance exemplified in the growing incursions of "welfare" and security instrumentalities. He shows how the double idioms of law and medicine perform a duet that softens our reaction to administrative violence and lulls us into the political rationality of the carcarel continuum. He has revealed that, despite its advantages, the new reign of publicity means that all of society either directly or vicariously takes over the role of judge or engages in normalising judgements.
14. Yet, isn’t it possible to take all these important insights on board without sacrificing explicit critical orientation. Foucault’s global scepticism of the present seems to ignore his own strictures against “global revolutionism”. In his urgency to focus on overlooked and previously unacknowledged oppressions, to “not be governed too much” or “in that way”, he purports to ignore or at least bracket the emancipatory gains achieved by the bourgeois, democratic revolutions only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. Yet, Foucault's global scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. His critical perspective does have unacknowledged normative presuppositions. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt as a primitive expression of emancipation and a nascent subjectivity despite its ultimate costs. But to make this explicit would be to drop the sceptical guard and accept, at least in some form, the blackmail of the enlightenment. The champion of experimentation and testing limits is not prepared to concede this. But to my mind concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be balanced by both an acknowledgement of where the critic him/self stands and a sense of political responsibility.
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