Talk:Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
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Foucault
What follows is a set of remarks about some key concepts developed in the assigned texts, all premised upon an acceptance of the particular coherence Foucault during the late 1970s and early 1980s tried to project upon his work. Other coherences were at play at other points in time, and there is a whole cottage industry making sense (and nonsense) of him in different ways, so this is just one vector along which the elements of his often delightful skirmishes with Marxists and humanists, left-Hegelians and Kantians alike can be arranged.
The storyline presented here is one in which his work revolves around the interpenetrations power and knowledge, and the ways in which different configurations of power/knowledge produce subjects and allow us to make ourselves subjects.
An idiosyncratic reading tip: I myself find it useful to read his texts as if he is always also out to provoke someone whenever he use a term with a significant amount of historical-philosophical ballast. Whenever he says ’object’, there is a good chance he will reveal that he really means processes of objectification. Whenever he talks about a ’subject’, it sure ain’t no phenomenological or Descartian self-grounded one, but always the temporarily stabilized point of relations of subjectification. As soon as he mentions the word ‘structure’, one should brace oneself for the point where he will make clear that it is of course a failed structure, and one that can only be understood with recourse to an ‘event’ that in turn can only be understood as marking simultaneously both continuity and discontinuity. And so on with rationality/rationalization, truth/truth-effects and what have you.
His conception of knowledge and truth is one place to start, and indeed where he did himself start his work in the late 1950s on madness. The essay ‘Truth and Power’ (p. 317) suggests that “’Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. ’Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it—a ’regime’ of truth.” For Foucault, then, knowledge and truth are not terms concerning a referential correspondence between a statement and something it refers to, but an effect produced within regimes infused with power, regimes that define both the production of statements and the criteria for judging them true or untrue. His early studies published in the 1960s focused on psychiatry, medicine, and the broader ‘human sciences’ as such regimes.
The question of how to understand the dynamics of such ‘productions’ leads to his conceptualization of power not simply as repressive (a power that says ‘no’), but also as productive. Power makes things, it does not only stop them, truncate, or perverts them. Power is constitutive, foundational in so far as any foundations are to be found. Turning to the question of how one can then understand its operations, Foucault again shift the terms of the discussion and suggests in ‘The Subject and Power’ (p. 137)”to give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself”. Analysis of power is distinct for him because it does not deal with relations or actions that act directly on subjects and objects themselves (which he terms relations of force or violence), but action on actions, the “conduct of conduct” (ibid: 137).
Having raised this problem, Foucault in the 1970s suggested that one consider the historical development of the conduct of conduct in western Europe through the notion of pastoral power (ibid: 131), originating in early Christianity, and the name for a practice of power that is simultaneously individualizing and totalizing, a power explicitly oriented towards the cultivation and care for both the believer and the congregation. In a set of lectures in the late 1970s, from where ‘Governmentality’ is taken, Foucault sketch out how this practice migrated from the Church and its heavenly orientation and into the state and an orientation towards secular time when the problem of the population and police emerged as political issues in the 18th century. Here, the emerging state began to take as its subject not only a the delineation of a territory and relations to potential recruits, individual crimes, and people in position of authority within it, i.e. individual points of contact with the surrounding ‘society’, but in a gigantic volte-face of the relation between politics and society began to consider both the individual and the population as such (parallel to the believer and the congregation) subject to the art of government.
This provides a way to bring into the discussion Foucault’s interest in ways of subjectification, the historical modes in which we become subjects. As he points out in ‘The Subject and Power’ (p. 130), “There are two meanings to the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.”
The totalizing side of governmentality addresses the first meaning; the production of totalized subjects, directly. The state-developed form of pastoral power has to do ”not [with] territory but, rather, a sort of complex composed of men and things” (Governmentality, p. 235). Through pastoral, police, and what he elegantly calls ‘diplomatico-military’ techniques, the idea of a population and its subjectification to the state is brought about.
Regimes of power/knowledge and the truth effects they produce are integral to the totalizing practices of governmentality (think demographics, early imperial ethnography, criminology, military science, public health, statistics, and so on). But in Foucault’s own more detailed works, they really reemerge center stage in the analysis of the production of individualized subjects. The taxonomies developed to bring his many studies together vary from text to text, lecture to lecture, interview to interview, but most can be captured under three headings, of which only the two first are at play in the analysis of the production of totalized subjects: his analysis of individualization are concerned with how we become subjects of knowledge, power, and of ethics (power should here be understood in a more concrete sense than in his more general discussions of it, with a heavier emphasis on the potentiality of violence and force). We operate in situations where we are offered certain truths about when we are mad and when we are sane, we maneuver in fields where practices of division differentiate space for us, and we have certain set of ‘technologies of the self’ at our disposal in our self-development of a personal ethics, a care for the self. I do not have the background to read the essay of this name particularly critically, so we might want to discuss it tomorrow.
Given the overall thrust of an argument about how our very individuality is deeply and fully a contingent historical construct, and analytical narratives populated by power, regimes, knowledge producing subjects upon which an understanding of what goes on cannot be based, an analytical narrative with preciously few human or even collective agents, how, and from what vantage point, can one even start the analysis? In ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault suggests one start with occurring practices of resistance, with empirical problematizations that disturb the order of things – it is when the regimes of knowledge are challenged within, when the practices of the exercise of power undergo dramatic change, and when we come to care about ourselves in new ways that the networks that had produced what for a moment, or a century, might have looked like a seamless, given, reality, function. Why do people resist? That is not clear, and one of the things we might discuss.
Points and quotes for discussion:
Is this a meaningful conception of freedom, one we would want to adopt? ”Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ’free’. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available.” (The Subject and Power, p.139)
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Even if we do, who can be free, if not subjects? ”One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis that can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.” (Truth and Power, p.306)
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Where does one go from there? Here, it may be worthwhile to open up again the possibility that there are more internal tensions between the different texts than the above narrative suggests. Here are two quotes six years apart.
Towards a new politics of truth? (Truth and Power 1976, pp.317-318) ”The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche.”
What is the vantage point from where such a politics can be thought and launched?
Resistance to pastoral, governmental power? (The Subject and Power 1982, p.134) ”Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. … The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
What does the ‘we’ refer to, and why would ‘we’ not be tied to our individuality in a way that would require anyone suggesting and pursuing an alternative to somehow suggest the value of forms of individuality that reject the link to the state?
How does the two go together?
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For those with ten minutes, ’An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment’, a short newspaper article that the first essay draw upon, is well worth reading if we are to discuss his appropriation of Kant:
http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/what-is-enlightenment.txt
--Rasmus Kleis Nielsen 15:18, 3 April 2007 (EDT)
Except where