|
Fall, 2004 |
Ernesto Verdeja |
[
Introduction
] [ Assignment ]
[ Questions for
discussion ]
In the last three weeks we have studied Nietzsche and Weber, who offer accounts that cast a deeply skeptical light on the ideals of the Enlightenment, especially the moral and political visions of thinkers like Kant, Marx, and Durkheim. Foucault’s work continues and intensifies these skeptical concerns. His own background was the French intellectual community after WW II, which was dominated by Marxism; many, especially until 1956, were members of the Communist Party. But though Foucault was always committed to left-wing causes, he came to reject the Marxist program of total, revolutionary transformation of society in the direction of emancipation.
That program was rooted in Enlightenment. As we have seen, one key idea in that tradition is the conception of the person as a subject, capable of self-determining action based on rational goals and beliefs. The capacity for freedom as self-determination is the distinctive trait of a person, essential to what makes us human, and the realization of that capacity by creating a society in which oppressive social conditions are overcome has been the aspiration of progressive social theories and political programs.
This ideal underlies a number of social theories. Liberals stress rights which protect the capacity for agency, while Marxists stress collective freedom, empowering people to self-consciously create the conditions of their lives. But for everyone in this tradition, there is a deep connection between enlightenment and emancipation: the belief that we can more or less correctly understand ourselves and our situations, and use that understanding to regulate our actions and institutions. In short, we can speak truth to power. We can do so because we can come to understand our interests and needs, and recognize when they are illegitimately repressed. Irrational, unjustified regimes repress our needs by creating structures of domination which prevent us from acting on our interests, and by establishing ideologies that distort our understanding of our needs, so that we fail to recognize the ways in which we are repressed.
Foucault expresses a deep skepticism about this model, and humanism in general, particularly its core assumption about the idea of the person as a subject. Like Nietzsche, he argues that the very notion that we are subjects is itself a social construction, and involves its own forms of repression and control. More specifically, he argues, we can discover in society various clusters of practices, i.e., regular patterns of activity and discourses or languages (terms, images, concepts), through which people operate these practices. Foucault analyzes social practices as technologies of what he calls power/knowledge: techniques that function to shape and control human behavior. As he puts it,
in a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. (Power/Knowledge, p. 93).
The idea that discourse could be independent of, and serve to check and control, power is chimerical. It rests upon a view of power as essentially "repressive" – as something exercised by one party against another, in which powerful agents use their ability to dominate others to realize their own interests. For Foucault, however, power operates in much more subtle ways. Power might be said to constitute the web of social relations through which individuals "circulate." In Foucault's words, "individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application" (Ibid., p. 98).
Much of Foucault's work (at least in his later period from which our readings are drawn) is designed to set out these discursive practices and to show how they manifest the operation of power. He does this by redescribing practices and historical episodes in terms which make them appear strange, bringing out the ways in which they are contingent and, more significantly, arbitrary. He does this through a series of "genealogical studies," a kind of history which is intended to recover the sense that concepts and activities may have had in the past, or meanings which are currently submerged or subjugated, and so to bring into relief the concepts and self-understandings we currently accept or take as "natural.”
These studies focus on the "humanitarian" movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, movements whose ostensible purpose was to replace repressive and brutal practices by more humane ones. The creation of asylums for the mentally ill, places where they would not be thrown in with criminals but where they could get treatment for their problems, the abolition of slavery, the attack on repressive sexual practices and ideas, and prison reform are examples of such movements. Foucault examines these movements, redescribing them in very different terms, in order to bring out the ways in which they serve not to liberate us, but to create new forms of power/knowledge, new sets of discursive practices, which involve their own particular forms of subjugation and domination. As he puts it, "The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (211R). He continually asks how ideas come to be imposed on others, how truth is used as a weapon in these struggles. As he puts it:
knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. (88R)
Not surprisingly, he rejects the (originally Kantian) idea that a free and rational society will finally emerge from the brutal conflict and violence that has characterized human history. Rather, he insists that
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until is arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (p. 85 R)
We feel that we are more free than in the feudal and aristocratic societies that came before democracy, but in reality we have simply substituted one form of domination for another. For Foucault power permeates all relationships in society, and these power relationships cannot be established and maintained w/o the production of a certain social discourse. There can be no exercise of power w/o a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth (Power/Knowledge, p. 93).
More specifically, Foucault argues that the claim of modern society to legitimacy, based on its realizing the conditions necessary for freedom, is unfounded, since it fails to see how power is exercised in modern society to produce the very individual, the subject or agent, which modern society claims to liberate. Where traditional emancipatory theories like Marxism would argue that certain oppressive social practices need to be reformed or abolished, in order to liberate individuals, Foucault insists that in reality there is no individual. Modern social practices create the individual.
The modern individual is produced by the functioning of power employing methods of supervision and training. It involves controlling madmen, children at home and at school, Wesleyan students, the colonized, and those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. Above all, these techniques are born out of the "methods of punishment, supervision, and onstraint." On this the modern soul has been built, employing scientific techniques and discourses and the moral claims of humanism. But "The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body"(177R). Our conception of ourselves as selves, as possessing an essence which is private, inner, and mental, with capacities for thought, reflection, and choice is an illusion. In reality, our bodies have been subjected to a set of technologies of power, disciplined so as to make it seem natural to ascribe an individual, inner soul to them.
Still, towards the end of his life he seemed to acknowledge the idea that not all power relations are simply relations of domination, and that some (e.g., in education) may be in some sense legitimate (though he does not use the term), insofar as all parties to the relationships (e.g., student and teacher) share the same interest (e.g., learning, which is facilitated by accepting the authority of the teacher). Still, he cautions us: “The furthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality” (379 R). You might want to ask yourself how you can be against nonconsensuality without being for consensuality.
Assignment: Michel Foucault, selections from Foucault: A Reader: “Truth and Power” (51-75), “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History” (76-100), “Disciplines” (170-238), “Politics and Ethics” (373-80), and the “Introduction” by Rabinow (3-29).
1. Marx called for a kind of “critical theory,” which would provide the proletariat with a diagnosis of their situation and an account of the revolutionary transformation that their emancipation would require. Why does Foucault reject that idea (and the idea of the “universal” intellectual with which it is associated), and are his reasons cogent?
2. Critically assess Foucault’s claim that "Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men" (87-8R).
3. Contrast Durkheim’s and Foucault’s accounts of punishment.
4. How can one be against nonconsensuality without being for consensuality? And why not be “for consensuality”?
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