FOUCAULT'S
GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY *
Nythamar de Oliveira
For the Portuguese version of this article, click 
here 
Introduction
"What
are we in our actuality?" You will find the formulation of this question
in a text written by Kant... a new pole has been constituted for the activity
of philosophizing, and this pole is characterized by the question, the
permanent and ever-changing question, "What are we today?" (Michel
Foucault, TS 145)
The
field of analysis which Foucault called "the formal ontology of
truth" has been dealt with by different thinkers of modernity, such as
Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, and the Frankfurterschule. As they examined the general framework of what
Foucault termed the "technologies of the self," they subtly shifted
away from the traditional, philosophical questions on the nature of the world,
man, truth, and knowledge, so as to inaugurate a new conception of rationality,
no longer based on an all-embracing, foundational metaphysics but on an
integrated view of human activities --living, speaking, working-- that allowed
for "man" to become "an object for several different
sciences."[1]
This was precisely what Foucault's archaeology aimed at, as we have seen,
although on a discursive level of the formation of knowledges (savoirs), whose patterns and
regularities were analyzed and reconstructed in Les mots et les choses and systematized, with the aid of linguistic
and semiological descriptions, in L'archéologie
du savoir. Now, although Foucault avowed that there was indeed a shift of
focus, say, from the archaeology of Les
mots et les choses (1966) and L'archéologie
du savoir (1969) to the genealogy of Surveiller
et punir (1975) and La volonté de
savoir (1976), and from these to the practico-social analyses of
subjectivation in the other two volumes of L'Histoire
de la sexualité (L'usage des plaisirs
and Le souci de soi, 1984), he also
insisted on the pervasive, interpretive meaning of his genealogical method.
Indeed, the one thing in common among Foucault's most important maîtres à penser, acknowledged in the
inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, was precisely
"historicity" --Georges Dumézil was a historian of religions, Georges
Canguilhem a historian of science, and Jean Hyppolite a Hegelian historian of
philosophical thought.[2]
It is well known that from 1970 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault taught
in the prestigious Collège de France. What has been perhaps overlooked is that
the name of this chair had been changed, following Jean Hyppolite's death in
1968. What used to be called "History of Philosophical Thought" (Histoire de la pensée philosophique)
became, on November 30, 1969, the chair of "History of Systems of
Thought" (Histoire des systèmes de
la pensée) to be occupied by Foucault.[3]
We
can thus speak of a Foucauldian conception of history that underlies his three
different ways of analyzing discursive and nondiscursive practices of savoir (archaeology), pouvoir (genealogy), and subjectivation (interpretive-analytics).
And yet, Foucault denied that he was ever elaborating on a new theory of
history, although he conceded that he was doing a different kind of history in
his main works. He went as far as to admit, in a 1982 interview, that he had
written "two kinds of books," namely, one "concerned with
scientific thought" (and he cites Les
mots et les choses as an example), and the other "concerned with
social principles and institutions" (e.g., Surveiller et punir). Neither should be identified with a
"history of science."(TS 14) Later on, he admitted that he was
writing still another kind of history, explicitly hermeneutic, a "history
of ourselves," for which he was planning a monumental seven-volume Histoire de la sexualité.[4] These "methods" must not, however,
be conceived as the overcoming of their previous counterparts, as if there were
epistemological breaks leading from one method to the other, but they are
complementary just as knowledge, power, and subjectivation presuppose and
determine one another. It has been, therefore, my contention in this
dissertation that Foucault's conception of history is precisely what accounts
for an apparent inflation of the power-genealogy axis, beyond the
epistemological task traditionally assigned to the interpretation of historical
events. As will be seen, Foucault's conception of history proves indeed helpful
to understand the tension between a critical
and a genealogical account of power
relations.
Foucault
was admittedly influenced by great contemporary philosophers, such as
Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, and by modern thinkers alike,
such as Kant, Hegel, and, above all, Nietzsche.[5]
As Foucault avowed in his last interview, published three days after his death
in 1984, if his "entire philosophical development was determined by [his]
reading of Heidegger," it was Nietzsche who "outweighed"
Heidegger --"c'est Nietzsche qui l'a
emporté".[6]
Deleuze has shown that Nietzsche's influence was decisive in Foucault's
rejection of the Heideggerian myth of the pre-Socratic paradigm of Ursprünglichkeit,
à la mode during the French reception
of Heidegger in the 1950s.(F 113)[7]
As early as 1961, Foucault wrote in the preface to Folie et déraison that he was conducting his inquiries "under
the sun of the great Nietzschean quest [sous
le solei de la grande recherche nietzschéenne]."(FD iv-v) In 1964,
when he delivered the now celebrated lecture on "Nietzsche, Marx,
Freud" at Royaumont, Foucault publicly consolidated his pact with the
Nietzschean daimon. The fate of the
genealogist of modernity was thus inscribed on the boundaries of critique and
hermeneutic. It was also by that time
that Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski published their seminal works on
Nietzsche, which Foucault regarded as the most valuable French contributions to
philosophy during the structuralist belle
époque.[8]
In
this study, I have tried to show how Foucault's reading of Kant and Nietzsche
are decisive for a full understanding of a Foucauldian genealogy of modernity,
where the term "genealogy" is understood lato sensu, as Foucault himself used it in his 1984 essay "On
the Genealogy of Ethics."(BSH 237ff.;FR 340-343) Like Aristotle's classification of the sciences
--which presupposes both a broad and a narrow conception of episteme[9]--,
Foucault conceives of genealogy as the most general conception of history, and
yet he also opposes this term to archaeology, on the one hand, and to critique,
on the other, in what seems to be a stricto
sensu use of the term. To be sure, there is no metaphysics underlying his
formulation of genealogy, though Foucault emphatically uses the word
"ontology" associated with it. Since my major concern in this study
has been with the question of method in philosophy, especially in ethics and
political philosophy, and with reference to the problem of history, I have only
signaled these points and will postpone them for a properly ontological
investigation. In brief, what I have termed Foucault's "genealogy of
modernity" can be expressed by the articulation of his archaeological and
genealogical analyses of the regimes of truth, power relations, and ethical
practices that have constituted modern subjectivity. I have deliberately
omitted a third dimension to this study, namely, the psycho-analytical approach
to subjectivation, which has been undertaken by several authors in the last two
decades.[10]
Following
this remise en scène of the
Foucauldian problematic, I will proceed to investigate the development of his
conceptions of critique and genealogy, so as to complement the exposés of his reading of Kant's
critique of metaphysics and Nietzsche's critique of modernity, in the first and
second chapters. Foucault's approach to the questions
de méthode, which translated the German Methodenstreit
into existentialist, Marxist, and structuralist strategies for the French intellectuels of the 1960's, will be
examined first, so as to address some of Habermas's criticisms. This chapter
has been structured, to a certain extent, so as to respond to Habermas's three
charges of relativism, Präsentismus,
and cryptonormativism, to be dealt with in the following sections on truth,
power, and ethics, respectively. The Foucauldian conception of modernity, his
answer to the Kantian question of the Aufklärung,
and Nietzsche's critique of modernity will lead us to what I understand to
constitute a Foucauldian response to Habermas's accusation of "transcendental
historicism." The overcoming of the homo
metaphysicus will operate the transition to Foucault's critique of power,
articulated with his Nietzschean-inspired conceptions of genealogy and the
hermeneutics of subjectivity. I will conclude this chapter with an account of
what Foucault has termed a "genealogy of ethics."
1. Foucault, Habermas and the "Questions of Method"
Entre l'entreprise critique et l'entreprise généalogique la différence
n'est pas tellement d'objet ou de domaine, mais de point d'attaque, de
perspective et de délimitation. (Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours 68f.)
In
this section, I will embark on my response to Habermas's critique of Foucault,
dealing with specific problems regarding the problem of method, in connection
with the latter's articulation of critique and genealogy. I will argue that the
problems of continuity and discontinuity, archaeology and genealogy, in
Foucault's works cannot be dissociated from his elaboration on new approaches
to history and a critique of power. As announced from the outset, it was by
taking Habermas's criticisms seriously that I was impelled to reexamine
Foucault's genealogy of modernity, so as to deal with the problems of
historicism and rationality which, according to Habermas, undermine Foucault's
critique of power. Since the purpose of this study is to analyze Foucault's
rather than Habermas's conception of power, I will use the latter's remarks and
criticisms only as a way of articulating Foucault's project. Before anything, I
would like to recall the background to Foucault's questions de méthode, namely, the debate that took place in postwar
When
Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1960 an essay-preface for his polemical Critique of Dialectical Reason[12],
the choice of the title "Question de Méthode," translated more than a
personal interest or the strategy of a fashionable existentialism. It came to
no one's surprise thus that, twenty years later, one of Sartre's archi-rivals,
contributed to a debate on penitentiary systems of
After
all, the French reception of Husserl's phenomenology and the Hegelian
renaissance constituted the common background of both thinkers, in their
response to Heidegger's and structuralist critiques of humanism. Foucault's
archaeological critique seems to aim as much at the transparency of Sartre's
subject as Husserl's transcendental subjectivity. In the OT, Foucault
undertakes the discursive analysis of how the different conceptions of method
in the classical age would pave the way for the Kantian critique understood as
method to rehabilitate metaphysics vis-à-vis the emerging sciences of nature.
One has only to recall all the scientific inquiries and investigations of Bacon,
Galileo,
As
Gérard Lebrun has shown, Foucault's archaeology in Les mots et les choses succeeds in showing how phenomenology failed
to do justice to Kant insofar as Husserl underestimated Kant's critique, by
placing it within the same rationalist field of "objectivism" where
Descartes, Leibniz, and Galileo belong.[14]
As Lebrun sums it up, "the essential point of the Critique is the advent of a subject who possesses a priori
knowledge to the extent that he is deprived of intellectual intuition; that is,
to the extent that he is finite."(MFP 44) Foucault speaks thus of the
phenomenological conception of "le
vécu" (alluding to the Lebenswelt)
as a prerequisite to the epistemic field and he appropriates Merleau-Ponty's
circularity between the transcendental and the empirical only to arrive at the
impasse of representational thinking after Kant's analytic of finitude.
Foucault's strategy aims, in the last analysis, at the undermining of the
transcendental subject, precisely by introducing the
representation-anthropology divide that problematizes post-Kantian attempts to
ground knowledge in a philosophical a priori. If Husserl's suspension of the
thesis of the world failed to provide us with a presuppositionless method,
Foucault's double suspension --i.e., the epoche
of reference and meaning (BSH 49)--establishes the historicity of every form of
cognition, a history of truth, as it were. This was indeed a radical attempt to
extend phenomenology so as to fill the gaps left by the structuralist attack on
the becoming of human subjectivity. For Foucault, structuralism was indeed the
most systematic of all efforts to "evacuate the concept of the
event,"(PK 114) an extreme case for history. In this sense, Foucault was
the self-proclaimed anti-structuralist and the radical hermeneute par
excellence.
Now,
I must remark in passing that it was also as part of the legacy of German
idealism that the Methodenstreit
opposing natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften)
and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)
emerged in the last century, and was renewed by the debate between Habermas and
Karl Popper, on the one hand, and between Habermas and the new historicism, on
the other.[15]
As we have seen in the first chapter, it was precisely in his earlier writings
that Foucault focused on the questions of method in his archaeology of knowledges
so as to establish the historicity of all truth. Although Habermas gives many
convincing reasons for his attack upon Foucault's systematic ambiguity, i.e.,
between what he sees as the critical and meta-theoretical claims of genealogy,
he is not justified in imposing a critical-theoretical framework on a thinker
who was not after all seeking to establish a social theory. That is why the
Foucault-Habermas debate will only profit us by recasting its intrinsic
problematic of historicity and power. Thus Habermas has discerned, for better
or for worse, a double role played by the Foucauldian staging of power, in the
ideal thought of a transcendental synthesis and the presuppositions of an
empirical ontology. While the empirical research of the genealogist carries out
the documentary interests of a positiviste
heureux in his unearthed archives, Habermas condemns Foucault's
"functionalist sociology of knowledge" for its implicit
"transcendental-historicist concept of power."(PDM 269) In effect, in
Foucault's own words, "[t]he forces operating in history are not
controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard
conflicts."(FR 88) The "concerted carnival" of Foucault's
genealogical method consists thus of an ongoing compilation and process of bodies
of power/ knowledge, the cultural productions of truth, which have been
marginalized by previous historiographies.
With
Foucault's discussion of regimes of jurisdiction and veridiction
("Questions of Method," L'impossible
prison), the genealogy of modernity comes full circle in its radical
critique of rationality and historicism, renewing the classical question of
freedom and necessity in Western thought. It also attests to Foucault's
lifelong concern with the historicity of scientific production, the history of
systems of thought, and its discursive discontinuities vis-à-vis other forms of
discourse and practices, such as literature, art, etc. Thus Kant and Nietzsche provide together the
critical-genealogical background against which Foucault's social analyses of
human discourses are effected. If the Kantian Grenzbegriff dualism of faculties leads to the Foucauldian
limit-attitude between law-abiding and its transgression, it is Nietzsche's
metaphorics of wahr-sagen that
provides Foucault with the problematic of truth, values, and the
self-overcoming of critical reflexivity. This "Nietzschean return to
Kant" guides indeed Foucault's social interest in the study of practices rather than theories or
ideologies. As he remarked on the question of method in history,
To
analyze "regimes of practices" means to analyze programmes of conduct
which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of
"jurisdiction") and codifying effects regarding what is to be known
(effects of "veridiction"). (FE 75)
Nevertheless,
Habermas contends that Foucault's "genealogy of knowledge" is
"grounded on a theory of power"(PDM 104), so that the latter will
inevitably lead to performative contradiction. I shall arrive at another
conclusion, with an alternative reading of Foucault's philosophical discourse
of modernity, which I think to be in accordance with his overall conception of
truth, power, and ethics. In my own attempt to address Habermas's threefold
critique of Foucault's supposed relativism, presentism, and cryptonormativism,
I will argue that the respective questions of truth, value, and norm are
implicitly met by the historical a priori of a genealogy of subjectivity. It
will be of fundamental importance to articulate Foucault's critique-genealogy
binomial with his knowledge-power-subjectivation triangle in such a way as to
deal with the problem of power without reducing it to an ontic category, not
even to an ontological concept à la Heidegger, since power relations, like
material relations of production, always already take place in history, in the
very "eventalizing" of social practices.
2. Truth, Archaeology, and Genealogy
There
is a battle "for truth," or at least "around truth"--...by
truth I do not mean "the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and
accepted," but rather "the ensemble of rules according to which the
true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the
true"... (Michel Foucault, PK 132)
Following
the methodological question that permeates my study, I proceed now to show how
Foucault's conjugation of the two approaches (i.e. the critical and the
genealogical) runs parallel to his articulation of archaeology and genealogy.
In order to reexamine Foucault's project in the methodological correlation[16]
it establishes between his critical conception of power and his genealogical
view of history, I decided to start from Habermas's charges that Foucault is
doomed to performative contradiction and relativism. The first thing that must
be pointed out here is that neither Foucault nor Nietzsche would question the
truth that is at stake, say, in truth games and their rules, such as modus ponens, or concluding 'Q' from the
premises 'P -> Q' and 'P.' In effect, suspicion only arises on the level of
referentiality, namely, on what 'P' stands for. Since for neither Nietzsche nor
Foucault truth can be naively reduced to an adaequatio
theory of sorts (i.e., the correspondence either between things and words, or
between facts and their posterior interpretations), the notion of "regimes
of truth" plays, for Foucault, the social, political role of the
"will to truth," as every society accepts certain types of discourse
and makes them function as true.(PK 132, PDM 270) According to Habermas,
Foucault
cannot adequately deal with the persistent problems that come up in connection
with an interpretation approach to the object domain, a self-referential denial
of universal validity claims, and a normative justification of critique. The
categories of meaning , validity, and value are ... eliminated...(PDM 286)
As
we shall see, the problem of truth refers us to the other problems of the
critique of power and ethical normativity, which will be dealt with in the next
sections. To a certain extent, Habermas has rightly framed his criticism of
Foucault in terms of the three genealogical axes. And yet, as I will argue, he
fails to correctly represent Foucault's genealogy of modernity as a historical,
practical critique of modern subjectivity. As Dominique Janicaud has shown, it seems
that "Habermas did not understand Nietzsche"[17]
and to the extent that he applies the same criticism of signification to that
of truth and value, he failed to do justice to Foucault's writings, which are
quoted only to be dismissed as an aporetic critique of power. To start with,
the Nietzsche appropriated by Foucault is not exactly the author of Zarathustra but the one of The Birth of Tragedy, of the Genealogy of Morals.[18]
In the same vein, Foucault's appropriation of Kant's critique, as we have seen,
departs from the Aufklärung ideal of
rationality but preserves its emancipatory interest and grounds it in everyday
history rather than in a transcendental freedom. Perhaps, to borrow Ricoeur's
formula, we find here "a Kantianism without a transcendental subject."
As Foucault writes in the preface to the Birth
of the Clinic,
For
Kant, the possibility and necessity of a critique were linked, through certain
scientific contents, to the fact that there is such a thing as knowledge. In
our time --and Nietzsche the philologist testifies to it-- they are linked to
the fact that language exists and that, in the innumerable words spoken by men
--whether they are reasonable or senseless, demonstrative or poetic-- a meaning
has taken shape that hangs over us, leading us forward in our blindness, but
awaiting in the darkness for us to attain awareness before emerging into the
light of day and speaking. (NC xv-xvi)
Thus,
while Habermas starts with the assumption that philosophy has articulated the
ideals critical theory must make practical, as John Rajchman remarks,
"Foucault starts with the assumption that ideals and norms are always
already 'practical;' the point of critique is to analyze the practices in which
those norms actually figure, and which determine particular kinds of
experience."[19] As we have seen in our exposés of Kant's and
Nietzsche's conceptions of knowledge and truth, the very critical task of
philosophy is radically diverse in these thinkers and that will certainly
reflect in both Habermas's and Foucault's conceptions of philosophy. Foucault
writes as a philosopher, and yet he is always solicited by the other of
philosophical inquiry as he sets out to think from the outside, as it were, la pensée du dehors:
But what is philosophy today, I mean
philosophical activity, if it is not work which is critical of thought itself?
And what is it, if instead of legitimizing that which we already know, it does
not consist in finding out how and how far it might be possible to think
differently? There is always something laughable about philosophical discourse
when it attempts, from the outside, to lay down the law for others, to tell
them where their truth really lies, and how to find it, or when it takes it
upon itself to make clear what it is in their procedures which can be seen as
naive positivity. Yet it is the right of philosophical discourse to explore
that which, in its own thought, can be challenged by the use of a form of
knowledge which is alien to it. (HS2 15)
Foucault's
conception of philosophy as askesis,
"un exercice de soi dans la pensée,"
reveals the archaeological-genealogical doublet that characterizes his
"history of truth." While the archaeological dimension accounts for
the analyses of the forms of problematization (les formes mêmes de la problématisation), the genealogical
dimension allows for their formation from practices and their changes (leur formation à partir des pratiques et de
leurs modifications).(HS2 17f.) Although this cross-fertilization of
archaeology and genealogy is only explicitly formulated towards the end of his
life, Foucault has applied it to earlier works, so as to suggest that there is
indeed a quasi-systematic, three-axial approach to his histoire de la vérité. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de
France, quoted above, Foucault opposes archaeology to genealogy so as to
contrast their complementary strategies in a radical attempt to avoid reducing
historical analyses to a theory of knowledge or to a theory of infrastructural
determinations.(OD 68-72) Thus, in the 1976 lecture at the same Collège,
Foucault defines archaeology as "the appropriate methodology of this
analysis of local discursivities," while genealogy "would be the
tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities,
the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into
play."(PK 85) In a 1984 interview conducted by Paul Rabinow, Foucault
situated his "history of problematics" between a "history of
ideas" and a "history of mentalities," since one must grasp
"problematization not as an arrangement of representation but as a work of
thought."(FR 390) And he defined thought as "freedom in relation to
what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it
as an object, and reflects on it as a problem."(FR 388) If Kant inspired
Foucault's interest in the subjective constitution of reflection and its
discursive, positive finitude, it was Nietzsche's unmasking of truth that
ultimately guided his archaeological and genealogical approaches to history.
Since
archaeology deals with discourses, "discourse" also acquires
different meanings for Foucault and Habermas. In a 1968 essay on "Politics
and the Study of Discourse,"[20]
Foucault presents the criteria of formation, transformation, and correlation of
discourses in the discursive analyses employed in the OT. He emphasizes then
his concern with the problem of the individualization
of discourses --always in the plural.(FE 54) And Foucault proceeds to
remind his readers that "the episteme
is not a sort of grand underlying theory,
it is a space of dispersion, it is an
open and doubtless indefinitely
describable field of relationships."(FE 55) The dissemination of
discursivity allows, at once, for the delimitations and displacements operated
by the different epistemic formations. This usage of the word is therefore to
be contrasted with Habermas's normative Diskurs,
which follows Kant's discursive-intuitive opposition, in that validity claims
are to be grounded in reason and reflective thinking. To be sure, both discours and Diskurs stem from the Latin discursus
and are related to the verb discurrere,
"to run hither and tither." As we have seen in the first chapter, the
limits of representation in the critique would eventually motivate Foucault to
replace the metaphoric of the discours
with that of the savoir, and the episteme with the dispositif. But we must bear in mind that Foucault is indeed
radicalizing the critique, under the sign of Nietzsche's genealogy, so as to
conceive of both discursivity and non-discursivity in his radical attempt to
overcome the Kantian opposition between theory and practice. Manfred Frank
reminds us that a common-sense definition would have that "a discourse is
an utterance, or a talk of some length (not determined), whose unfolding or
spontaneous development is not held back by any over-rigid
intentions."(MFP 126)[21]
In the OT, discourse stands for a symbolic order of a state of affairs which
makes it possible for all subjects who have been socialized under its authority
to speak and act together.(MFP 133) The word "discourse" is used thus
by Foucault's archaeological analyses as a second-degree order, situated
between the reversible order of "language"(langue) and the irreversible order of "word"(parole).(OT 12; FE 56-63) Contrasting
with the homogeneous ordering of the discourse in OT, the Archéologie du savoir and L'ordre
du discours emphasize the événements
singuliers ("specific events") which cannot be reduced to a
"linear schema," as they do not conform to "a single law, often bearing
with them a type of history which is individual to itself, and irreducible to
the general mode of a consciousness which acquires, progresses and remembers
itself."(AS 16) Discourses are therefore external to any totalizing,
universalizing concept. Discourses are broken down into "statements"
(énoncés), which are neither
propositions nor sentences, and account for the impossibility of subordinating
discourses to the "structure-becoming opposition" (opposition structure-devenir)(AS 20).
Foucault places them between structure and event: "The énoncé is obviously an event which
cannot be repeated; it has a situational singularity which cannot be
reduced."(AS 133) Foucault resorts to the metaphors of verticality and
horizontality in order to conjugate, on the same mobile, diagonal line, the
singular grouping of énoncés with the ordering of institutional conventions and
codifications. In the AS, Foucault already anticipates the nondiscursive
practices that will be shown to be interdependent and correlative to their
discursive counterparts: he speaks of an ordre
d'institution to which discourses are subject as elements identical to one
another and a champ d'utilisation in
which the énoncé is invested. (AS
136,137) The archive appears thus as the totality of all discursive
regularities, within a vertical system of interdependence.(AS 96) As Frank
remarks, Foucault claims in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France,
"that discourses are not ordered per
se, but through the intervention of a will to power."(MFP ET 113)[22]
Now, in opposition to a Hegelian semiology which, as we have seen, presupposes
the reconciliation of a conceptual logic of Aufhebung
with historical becoming, Foucault employs savoir
to replace the order of the discours.
At any rate, discourse is ultimately comprised by Foucault's later use of the
broader term "practices" comprising both discursive and nondiscursive
dimensions.
I
have sought to show how archaeology and genealogy are to be articulated in
Foucault's conception of regimes of truth and jurisdiction, at the heart of his
critique of power and ethics. In effect, truth already points to a questioning
of the status of knowledge, i.e., that the very possibility of knowledge is
regarded as a problem for philosophy. Hence Deleuze's allusion to Foucault's
"pragmatism"(F 81), insofar as truth appears as the outcome of
problematizations of savoir and
problematizations themselves are made from practices of saying and seeing.
Foucault sought "to make visible the unseen," that is, to unveil
"a change of level, addressing one self to a layer of material which had
hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognized as
having any moral, aesthetic, political or historical value."(PK 51)
Thus
Foucault's genealogical critique follows a Nietzschean overcoming of Kant's
critique, insofar as it brings to light a historically constituted subjectivity
that had been concealed and silenced by the correlated constitutions of
knowledge and power. The will to truth is always already an expression of a
will to power, even on a discursive level, as one of the dispositifs of
control, selection, and organization of discourse. It is this context that
Foucault proceeds to speak of a "true discourse" (le discours vrai), "incapable of
recognizing the will to truth that pervades it."(OD 22) Habermas
mistakenly quotes this passage to stress "the methodological paradox of a
science that writes the history of the human sciences with the goal of a
radical critique of reason."(PDM 248) To be sure, Habermas's point is that
a second-order truth, a mere effect of power relations, can neither account for
an archaeology nor stem from genealogy's positivism with the objectivity of
truth claims. However, just as Habermas accuses Foucault of imposing an
ontological reading of power into the concept of truth, he fails to realize
that it was this very "objectivism" that came under attack in
archaeology and genealogy. Furthermore, as it will be shown, there is no
ontology of power underlying Foucault's genealogy, nor is truth ultimately
subordinated to power, even though it remains an effect of power. It
seems that the same problem of a "performative contradiction" had
been raised in the Foucault-Chomsky debate around the problem of human nature.[23]
How can one articulate ethics and political philosophy without referring to a
presupposed conception of human nature and rationality? This problem, as I have
tried to show, dates back to Aristotle, but was only fully expressed in the
modern conception of freedom that is associated with German idealism and the
critical philosophy of Kant. Foucault qua philosopher is not concerned with
some social theory, "an ideal social model for the functioning of our
scientific or technological society." After all, this "will to
know" has only masked the real mechanisms of power relations that underlie
social, political theorizations:
It
seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to
criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and
independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence
which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so
that one can fight them.(FR 6)
Of
course there remain several questions to be addressed, such as, Why should one oppose
violence? Why should the oppressed resist? On which grounds should one social
group fight and stand for their rights and freedom? Nancy Fraser has formulated
this problem with a single question, "Why ought domination to be
resisted?," and she is approvingly cited by Habermas.(PDM 283)[24]
Foucault does not dismiss these questions, but he leaves them unanswered. For
Foucault, it is only by actually engaging in political struggles that one takes
part in processes that seek to subvert and alter power relations --but theory
and knowledge are not external to these practices, let alone above them.
3. Modernity and the Critique of Power
These
two questions --"What is the Aufklärung?
What is the Revolution?" --are the two forms under which Kant posed the
question of his own present. They, are also, I believe, the two questions that
have not ceased to haunt, if not all modern philosophy since the nineteenth
century, at least a large part of that philosophy. After all, it seems to me
that the Aufklärung, both as a
singular event inaugurating European modernity and as a permanent process
manifested in the history of reason, in the developement and establishment of
forms of rationality and technology, the autonomy and authority of knowledge,
is for us not just an episode in the history of ideas. It is a philosophical
question, inscribed since the eighteenth century in our thoughts. (Foucault,
"The Art of Telling the Truth," PPC 94)
I
have contended that Foucault's genealogy of modernity hinges on a critique of
power that combines his reading of Kant's response to the Aufklärung with his appropriation of Nietzsche's radical
philosophy. Foucault's own understanding of the Enlightenment as the modern,
philosophical response to that question (FR 32) reveals the genealogical thrust
of his approach. Like modernity itself, the Aufklärung
cannot be reduced to a past period in the history of ideas, but rather defines
a perennial challenge, a critical task, an ethico-political problem for our own
age. Rationality and freedom are indeed philosophical themes whose
nonphilosophical openings and implications have been accompanying the history
of Western civilizations since their first beginnings. And yet it is only in
modernity that reason is said to have come of age, so as to attain true
freedom. Foucault characterizes the modern attitude by four main features,
namely, its self-consciousness of the break with tradition, its will to
"heroize" the present, its self-relation to itself, and its
self-realization through art.(FR 39-42) Foucault invokes Baudelaire as the
epitome of modernity, just as Habermas sees in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man the aestheticist model
that influenced Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and all the generation of
post-modernists who in effect radicalize the fourth feature of Foucault's
account. We had seen that, for Foucault, the threshold of our modernity is
"situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of
man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which
was called man."(OT 319) Now, Foucault sets out to define the modern
ethos, first of all,in terms of a "permanent critique of
ourselves" that breaks away from
the "blackmail of the Enlightenment," as the only way to carry out
the practical intent of Kant's sapere
aude without falling back into dogmatic rationalism and humanism. Both are
caricatures of the Aufklärung, since
whatever is human about "human nature" is itself a human creation, a
historical invention that bears the stamp of its own time. To rid ourselves of
the for-or-against Enlightenment blackmail, we must "be at the
frontiers," so as to analyze and reflect on the limits of human
experience, "a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing,
through a historical ontology of ourselves."(FR 45) Since there is no such
a thing as a "golden age" of Enlightenment, neither past nor future,
the philosophical ethos of modernity is a historico-practical critique of
today. It is neither a theory nor a permanent body of knowledge, but only an
attitude, an ethos, "a philosophical life in which the critique of what we
are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond
them."(FR 50)
As
over against the modern humanist traditions that draws the line between
knowledge and power, Foucault sets out to show "a perpetual articulation
of power on knowledge and knowledge on power."(PK 54) It is largely
assumed that, following the May 1968 revolts in
Mechanisms of power in general have
never been much studied by history. History has studied those who held power
--anedoctal histories of kings and generals; contrasted with this there has
been the history of economic processes and infrastructures ... histories of
institutions, of what has been viewed as a superstructural level... (PK 51)[26]
In
order to make visible the constant articulation of power on knowledge and
vice-versa, Foucault resorted to the dispositif
metaphor.[27]
We have alluded to Deleuze's book on Foucault, where the latter's philosophy is
compared to a threefold (or fourfold, if we include the historical-time
coordinate) of dispositifs defining
the regimes of truth, mechanisms of power, and modes of subjectivation. As I
will argue in this section, the conception of power dispositifs in Foucault is a felicitous formula to respond to
Habermas's criticism. Habermas's systematic attack on the chimerical grounding
of philosophy apart from the social world has revived the great Marxian
tradition of "radical critique." Thus, his critique of Foucault
remains much too complex to be dismissed as lacking philosophical magnitude. If
I will be focusing on one single aspect of this "critique of power,"
namely the method that links micro-analyses to genealogical historiography, it
is only for the sake of preserving the communication between the genealogy of
power and critical theory. For Habermas, this link between the social order as Lebenswelt, on the one hand, and as System, on the other, is never
articulated in Foucault. Hence Habermas praises Axel Honneth for having worked
out this problematic feature of Foucault's social thought, namely the
elaboration of a model of strategic action that defies the State as a network
of power, that breaks away from the institutionally sedimented disciplines and
power practices already presupposed in his early writings. As Habermas sums it
up,
When, like Foucault,
one admits only the model of processes of subjugation, of confrontations
mediated by the body, of contexts of more or less consciously strategic action;
when one excludes any stabilizing of domains of action in terms of values,
norms, and processes of mutual understanding and offers for these mechanisms of
social integration none of the familiar equivalents from systems or exchange
theories; then one is hardly able to explain just how persistent local struggles
could get consolidated into institutionalized power. (PDM 287)
I
have pointed out that Habermas charges of presentism, relativism, and
cryptonormativism aim at Foucault's "attempt to preserve the
transcendental moment proper to generative performances in the basic concept of
power while driving from it every trace of subjectivity."(PDM 295) For
Habermas, the main problem with Foucault's concept of power is that it cannot
"free the genealogist from contradictory self-thematizations." Now,
the critical questions of signification,
truth, and value, raised by Habermas, are indeed critical in the context of
social practices. If what Foucault aims at is not the social struggles between
oppressors and oppressed (as in classical Marxism), but an asymmetrical
ensemble of tensions between disciplinary powers and tacit bodies, then to
invoke "the possibility of a new form of right," at once
antidisciplinary and liberated from the principle of sovereignty, betrays a
"value-free historiography" inherent in his genealogical method.(PDM
284)[28]
Nevertheless, as Foucault asserts in "The Subject and Power,"
Power
exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated
into a disparate field of possi-bilities brought to bear upon permanent
structures.(BSH 219)
Furthermore,
if instead of puissance Foucault
prefers to speak of pouvoir, he also
speaks more often of discours than of
rationalité, not to mention
"rationalization." He even goes as far as to say that "the word rationalization is dangerous. What we
have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoking the
progress of rationalization in general."(BSH 210) In this same context,
Foucault reiterates the Nietzschean view of power as the acting upon other
actions, "an action upon an action."(BSH 220) The metaphors of active
and reactive forces also points to the discursive mechanism that evaluates
their magnitude, the differential device that accounts for multiple forms of
rationality which are historically contingent discursive formations and
practices. In this regard, as Foucault said to Raulet, it would be unfair to
characterize his enunciation of the problematic of knowledge/power relations as
a "theory of power."(PPC 43; BSH 209) In effect, according to
Foucault, power is never substantive (le
pouvoir), since it cannot be reduced to a focus of possession or even
agency (e.g. the State, social classes, ideological apparatuses), but is itself
a diffuse complex of relations, involving thus both knowledges and modes of
subjectivation. As he remarked in a 1976 lecture in
Il existe une véritable technologie du pouvoir ou, mieux, des pouvoirs, qui
ont leur propre histoire ...Privilégier l'appareil d'État, la fonction de
conservation, la superstructure juridique, est, au fond, 'rousseauiser' Marx. C'est
le réinscrire dans la théorie bourgeoise et juridique du pouvoir...[30]
Foucault undertakes thus the writing of a "history of powers in the
West" (une histoire des pouvoirs
dans l'Occident), where the different mechanisms of power are analyzed in
light of their interactions with the diverse levels of power relations and
their correlative dispositifs of
truth and subjectivation. That is why Deleuze's model for power relations as dispositifs that at once constitute and
are constituted by a network of dispositifs
is indeed such a felicitous one. For, as Deleuze argues, the real boundary in
Foucault is that between constants and variables (MFP 193), so that the lines
which form the dispositifs only
affirm the continual variations, and all we are left with are the lines of
variation. And this is precisely the point of rupture between Foucault and
every form of historicism that prevails even in neo-Marxist systems of culture
like Gramsci's hegemony, in that Foucault leaves no room for teleology. In
contrast with Althusser, who maintained that there are no ideological
apparatuses that are not at the same time State apparatuses (appareils d'État), Foucault develops a
veritable "philosophy of practices" in his analyses of concrete
devices (analyses des dispositifs
concrets) that displace the foci and agency of power. Above all, the
Foucauldian device appears as a multilineal ensemble, composed of lines of
different nature forming non-homogeneous systems: each line is divided,
submitted to variations of direction, submitted to derivations. The énoncés which can be formulated are like
vectors or tensors. Thus the three fields that Foucault often distinguishes (savoir, pouvoir, subjectivation)
have no fixed contours, but are like chains of variables acting upon one
another. Hence the prison device, for instance, as a panoptical machine that
allows for the disciplinary agent to see without being seen. What accounts for
social movements are neither subjects nor objects but regimes of statements (régimes d'énoncés) that, in contrast
with nondiscursive devices, serve to determine new archives and new historical
media such as the seventeenth-century General Hospital, the eighteenth-century
clinic, the nineteenth-century prison, or Ancient Greek technologies of
subjectivation.
Habermas
fails thus to acknowledge that the reception of Nietzsche in
(a) the attack on
modernity's presentist consciousness of time;
(b) the attack on
hermeneutical methodology;
(c)
the attack on global historiography. (PDM 249-251)
From
Nietzsche's first essay on the Genealogy
of Morals, Foucault concludes that, since nothing lies at the origin of
things and there is no substratum, genealogy is the "union of erudite
knowledge and local memories which allow us to establish a historical knowledge
of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today."(PK 83)
It has been shown, and this cannot be overemphasized, how Nietzsche's influence
on Foucault accounts for a "technological," nonjuridical conception
of power. For Foucault regards Nietzsche as the
philosopher of power.(PK 53) Besides the two known texts on Nietzsche mentioned
above (NFM and FR 76-100), Foucault's 1973 lecture on "Truth and Juridical
Forms" (VFJ) delivered in
In
effect, Nietzsche's criticism of Paul Rée's utilitarian use of history (GM
Preface 4,7),[31]
as Foucault points out, was aimed not only at Rée's own evolutionary version of
historicism but at the entire suprahistorical, metaphysical traditions of
thought that preceded him. One of the greatest contributions of Nietzsche's genealogical
critique of Christianity and Western metaphysics lies precisely in the
unmasking of history as a transcendental standpoint from where everything else
can be understood. Just as Marx and Freud denounced masking structures of false
consciousness and conscious behaviour, Nietzsche shook the metaphysical
foundations of truth and reality so as to unveil the transvaluation of all
values in the historical self-overcoming of human becoming. Unlike the other
two "masters of suspicion," however, Nietzsche's hermeneutic is not
after a deeper, hidden structure of meaning but remains on the very surface of
appearances, where opposites always already operate the return of the same. As
in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, Foucault interprets the "return of the same" in terms of a
non-dialectical, differential interplay of forces.(NP 167-189) That is why,
contra Althusser, Foucault goes on to warn against the political marriage of
"hermeneutics" and "semiology."[32]
Foucault
not only appropriates Nietzsche's conception of genealogy but he also applies
it to Nietzsche's own corpus, thus betraying the double gesture of a
Nietzschean metaphoricity, an "interpretation of the interpretation"
(i.e. Foucault's and Nietzsche's interpretation of "facts") that
cannot be reduced to the "outside" it seeks to unmask as interpretation.[33]
In effect, the Nietzschean opposition of Entstehung
and Herkunft to Ursprung, Foucault points out, translates the true objective of
genealogy qua analysis of beginnings,
at once unveiling the intricacies of discursive formations and undermining the
illusion of self-identity in the very writing of history:
Where
the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the
genealogist sets out to study the beginning --numberless beginnings, whose
faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by a historical eye. The
analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and
displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events.
(FR 81)
Descent
implies also the inscription of historical events in the body, the domain par
excellence of Herkunft, the locus of
social manipulation, division, and reconstitution, the medium that records past
experiences and generates desires and errors as well. Foucault's interest in the articulation of
body and event becomes more explicit in his later writings, notably as an
effect of the power relations that act indirectly upon the body (subjecting it
to time, e.g., in Surveiller et punir),
but it is already expressed in this text, in the powerful language of spacing
surfaces:
The
body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by
ideas), the locus of a disso-ciated self (adopting the illusion of a
substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an
analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and
history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the
process of history's destruction of the body. (FR 83)
The
dissolution of self-identity, in the very decomposition of the body, shows that
Nietzsche's reversal of the Cartesian domination of the mind over the body, or
even his reversal of the Kantian noumenal rupture, is not a dialectical
solution to an old pattern of rationalist and idealist aspirations, but a
radical expression of a materialist, immanent critique. There is nothing above
human becoming that accounts for the fate of individuals and the social body in
their striving to preserve life and make it better or worse. In effect,
"[n]othing in man --not even his body-- is sufficiently stable to serve as
the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men."(FR 87f.)
Thus what Marx's reversal of Hegel's dialectic fails to accomplish in his social,
historical critique from below, Nietzsche's affirmation of Wirklichkeit operates a formidable return to the surface of
appearances (the real effects, for
there is no Ding an sich) that at
once are structured by and structure the social struggles effected by the will to power. The wirkliche Historie written by the genealogists is to be opposed to
traditional history in that the former defies the established relationship
between the eruption of events and a necessary continuity in the unfolding of
"historical facts." History becomes "effective" insofar as
it introduces "discontinuity into our very being," depriving
"the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature."(FR 88)
What used to point to a certain interpretation of a historical, natural process
manifest in the event, becomes now an
arbitrary moment in the yet-to-be-decided play of forces:
An
event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the
reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation
of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination
that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked "other."
The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative
mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. (FR 88)
The
three uses of history invoked by Nietzsche (monumental, antiquarian, and
critical) are inevitably recurrent in the genealogist's recast of historical
knowledge, for power and knowledge always operate in history and, as Foucault
maintains throughout, they cannot take place apart from each other. The
critical use of history leads thus to "the destruction of the man who
maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge"(FR
97), just as the veneration of monuments becomes a parody and the respect for
ancient continuities becomes systematic dissociation. The "concerted carnival" of this
genealogical method consists of an ongoing compilation and process of bodies of
power/knowledge, the cultural productions of truth, which have been
marginalized by previous historiographies. Now, the main theses of Foucault's
conception of power can be summarized as follows, in light of Surveiller et punir and his interviews
in Power/Knowledge. We have seen that
modernity is marked by the era of anthropology, following the analytic of
finitude of Kant's critique of metaphysics. Nietzsche's critique of Kant,
according to Foucault, has shown that modern man's awakening from the dogmatic
slumber has not evaded an anthropological sleep that characterizes our own age
of uncertainty. Foucault's main thesis in Surveiller
et punir is that the prison was linked to the transformation of
individuals.(PK 39) The analysis of the carceral society is also related to
other institutions of disciplinary power (the cell, the workshop, the
hospital), that provide it with three great schemata, namely, "the
politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model
of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and
normalization."(DP 248) Power is thus shown to be co-extensive with the
social body, as power relations play at once a conditioning and a conditioned
role.(PK 142) For Foucault, these relations are of multiple forms, besides
those of prohibition and punishment, and although their interconnections
delineate general conditions of domination, one cannot reduce it to a binary
structure opposing "dominators" to "dominated." For the
multiform "relations of domination... are partially susceptible of
integration into overall strategies," as power relations can indeed be
used positively as strategies and "there are no relations of power without
resistance."(PK 142) Bentham's panoptical device appears thus as a
paradigm of the modern disciplinary institutions of bio-power and normalizing
technologies of control. According to
Foucault,
In
this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex
power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of
"incarceration," objects for discourses that are in themselves
elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle.
And he hastens to add,
At
this point I end a book that must serve as a historical background to various
studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern
society.(DP 308)[34]
According
to Habermas's reading of this last paragraph (or footnote), confronted with
Foucault's initial remark that he would "study the birth of the prison
only in the French penal system," Surveiller
et punir aims at modern society as a whole, even though the study is indeed
confined to late 18th-, early 19th-century prison systems in France.(cf.SP 35
n. 1; ET: 309 n.3) I agree with Habermas's contention here, although I do not
think Foucault's genealogy implies that modern society is simply a Great
Confinement or that a local, microphysical analysis can be extended to a global
macropolitics of sorts. After all, as Deleuze puts it, we find two
complementary theses in Foucault's conception of a "local" power,
namely, that "power is local because it is never global" and that
"it is not local or localized because it is diffuse."(F 26) In brief,
I will argue that the problematic at issue is rather methodological than
textual-analytical, having to do with Foucault's overall genealogical project,
especially with his conception of a "new history" that allows for an
overlapping of the empirical and the transcendental in the very analysis of
facts said to be "historical"-- in full agreement with his earlier
formulation of the a priori historique.
As
we have seen, the State already presupposes other existing power relations,
precisely on the multiform, non-homogeneous levels of a "microphysics of
power."(PK 122) The complex of those power relations presuppose thus technologies
of power that relate individuals to the very normalizing techniques that make
them subjects within social groups such as the family, neighborhoods, local
communities, associations, schools, the workplace, hospitals, and diverse
religious, social, and political institutions, etc. As Paul Patton has shown,
there must be some way of making sense of Foucault's conception of power --even
if it does not provide us with a clear-cut theory of power-- so as to
understand how and to what extent we can believe, with Foucault, in the
inevitability of resistance to domination. As we have sought to show in this
study, Foucault's reading of Kant and Nietzsche has taken us beyond humanist,
traditional conceptions of political philosophy and human nature. And yet, as
Patton remarks,
This
human material is active; it is an entity composed of forces or endowed with
certain capacities. As such it must be understood in terms of power, where this
term is understood in its primary sense of capacity to do or become certain
things. This conception of the human material may therefore be supposed to
amount to a "thin" conception of the subject of thought and action:
whatever else it may be, the human subject is a being endowed with certain
capacities. It is a subject of power, but this power is only realized in and
through the diversity of human bodily capacities and forms of subjectivity.
Because it is a "subject" which is only present in various different
forms, or alternatively because the powers of human being can be exercised in
infinite different ways, this subject will not provide a foundation for
normative judgment of the kind that would satisfy Fraser or Habermas: it will
not provide any basis for a single universal answer to the question, "Why
ought domination to be resisted?"[35]
Foucault
himself has never denied human agency or that human beings are the subject of
power, although he radically refuses to hypostatize it or to reduce the subject
to the cause of human actions. In his essay on "The Subject and
Power," Foucault reiterates his commitment to a philosophical ethos that
takes seriously the task of a "history of today":
When
in 1784 Kant asked, Was heißt Aufklärung?,
he meant, What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world,
this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words:
What are we? as Aufklärer, as part of
the Enlightenment? (BSH 216)
Foucault
contrasts Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche's "engaged" attitude
("we") with Descartes's solipsist, a-historical ego ("I"). Habermas and Foucault agree thus on the
self-determination of the modern philosopher who can no longer remain
indifferent to the political, historical events of her own times. And yet, what
Habermas's charges of Präsentismus
completely miss is precisely the anti-historicist attitude of Foucault's
recasting the Kantian Antwort to the
question Was ist Aufklärung? Just as
Kant publicly addressed the readers of the Berliner
Monatschrift with an alternative philosophical discourse of modernity --for
Moses Mendelssohn had offered a different reply two months earlier--, so
Foucault published his interpretation of Kant's text two hundred years later,
in the Magazine littéraire, so as to
affirm "philosophy as the discourse of modernity on modernity."(PPC
88)[36]
The historical ontology of ourselves means, according to Foucault, that
although we still live under the sign of reason and revolution, we are no
longer within the same framework of truth, power, and moral coordinates that
shaped Kant's optimism, since there are no fixed stars above us or eternal laws
within. In effect, Foucault will argue that modern political philosophy itself
is a child of its own time, as the juridical conception of power will be
preserved from Hegel and Marx's dialectics of domination to the
psycho-analytical theories of repression. Power struggles cannot be thus
reduced to practices of domination (ethnic, social, religious) and forms of
exploitation (of individuals in function of production), but must also address
the problems of subjection and subjectivation.(BSH 212) Although Habermas has
rightly articulated the problem of values with normativity, he failed to
comprehend the political thrust of Foucault's genealogy of modern
subjectivity.
As
it will be disclosed in the next section on normativity, one of the greatest
merits of Foucault's critique of power lies in his revaluation of power
relations in their diffuse, non-reducible modes of human subjectivity. To be
sure, it was the Nietzschean conception of a history of bodily relations that
enlightened, as it were, Foucault's analyses of individualizing techniques of
power in SP. To begin with, we can conceive of both punishment and surveillance
as forms of discipline, both being historically constituted as
institutionalized, individualizing mechanisms of control within society that
allow for its self-regulation --in both liberal and socialist societies.
Needless to say, it is the dynamic ensemble of such techniques of control that,
for Foucault, determine discipline as a positivity within power structures that
can be analyzed, for instance, through disciplinary techniques of examination
and writing. Although there might be good and bad forms of discipline and
punishment, Foucault does not advocate some forms of discipline in detriment of
others, since his concern is strictly descriptive. Thus he has shown how
Bentham's Panopticon (1791) was devised as a technology of power to solve the
problems of surveillance.(DP 195 ff.; PK 148) The panoptical model is then
described as a "laboratoire de
savoir et de pouvoir", "une
manière de définir les rapports du pouvoir avec la vie quotidienne des hommes"(SP
201-207), "une microphysique du
pouvoir," "un pouvoir qui
s'exerce plutôt qu'il ne se possède."(31) Government thus appears as a
function of technology: the government of individuals, the government of souls,
the government of the self by the self, the government of families, the
government of children. That links the genealogies of the prison to the
genealogy of bio-power in the Histoire de
la sexualité, as Foucault takes a radical stand against "the
government of individualization," as totalizing techniques of disciplinary
power.(BSH 212) That the Roman patria
potestas granted the father of the Roman family the right to
"dispose" of the life of his children and slaves in modern times,
according to Foucault, is contrasted with the disciplinary politics of the
modern State, which no longer keeps the sovereignty relation that, for
instance, the medieval sovereign had over his subjects, but exerts a form of
power that is at once individualizing and totalizing. This "political
double bind," according to Foucault, is the direct legacy of the Christian
institution of pastoral techniques.(BSH 213ff.) If Hobbes saw power as the
transfer of rights from the prince to the natural right possessed by each
individual(HS1 177f.), Foucault contends that bio-power is no longer associated
with the new juridical being, the sovereign, but rather with the "power
over life and death," a conception of power as "a right of seizure:
of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the
privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it."(HS1 179; FR 259)
It is of fundamental importance to signal that Foucault draws a distinction
between société disciplinaire and société disciplinée, so that the
panoptical model, like the Grand
Renfermement, belongs to the "ordre
du discours" inasmuch as it unveils the "ordre des institutions." As Foucault remarks in an interview,
The
point is not to construct a system, but an instrument: a logic appropriate to the power relations and the struggles which
are going on around them; this sort of research can take place only one step at
a time, on the basis of reflections (which of necessity have to be historical
in some respects) on given situations.[37]
It
is only within the broader framework of this "economy of power
relations" that both the singular State and the pluralist society belong
together in the same analysis of social control. Michael Walzer concedes that
Foucault has succeeded in unveiling the complex mechanisms of discipline that
link macro- and micro-levels of social life, but remains skeptical about the
latter's claims to avoiding "anarchism/nihilism" or falling prey to
some form of conservatism. In a nutshell, Walzer does not think that local
resistance can ever be effected without the normative claims that in one way or
another refer us back to the State and/or its institutions.[38]
What makes all the difference, in the last analysis, is the form of government or
the political model at stake, namely, a liberal State as opposed to
authoritarian and totalitarian ones. I think Foucault would agree with part of
this contention, although he would immediately add that the very process of
subjectivation is precisely what accounts for the sedimentation of certain
regimes of veridiction and jurisdiction as certain power mechanisms prevail
over others in the formations of self-governance and government.[39]
What Walzer, like Habermas, fails to acknowledge is that Foucault's critique of
normativity does not ultimately deny the norm-subject relation but turns it
into a problematic correlation, inasmuch as subjectivity and normativity are
both established through power-related valuations of truth and moral values. It
is in this sense that Foucault assumes the diffusion of the norm through the
social body in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, operated according to
three main modalities, namely,
1. the functional
inversion of disciplines, which neutralize the dangers, to make the large
social groups play a positive role and increase the possible utility of
individuals;
2. the swarming of
disciplinary mechanisms, the massive, compact disciplines are decomposed into
flexible procedures of control, every institution becomes susceptible of
utilizing the disciplinary schema;
3.
the state-control of the mechanisms of discipline, through the organization of
a centralized police, permanent, omnipresent surveillance that renders
everything visible.(SP 211-213; DP 210-13)
Thus,
Foucault's overall concern with the writing of a history of the body, together
with the political technologies of the body, its strategies and tactics,
accounts for the formation of what he called the société disciplinaire.(SP 211) Foucault concludes his study on
power with the ironic question, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? [Quoi d'étonant si la prison ressemble aux
usines, aux écoles, aux casernes, aux hôpitaux, qui tous ressemblent aux
prisons?]"(DP 228; SP 229) What is at stake in this form of social
structure is what Foucault calls "the synaptic regime of power," an
invention of the eighteenth century, "a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than from above it." For Foucault it is
thus understandable that capitalism had to fabricate the mechanisms that would
secure the protection of wealth, through the moralization of the working
subjects, just like the institution of the police, based on the fear of the
criminal:
...it
was absolutely necessary to constitute the populace as a moral subject and to
break its commerce with criminality, and hence to segregate the delinquents and
show them to be dangerous not only for the rich but for the poor as well,
vice-ridden instigators of the gravest social perils.(PK 41)
4. Subjectivity and the Genealogy of Ethics
L'homme, tel qu'il est observé, démembré, décomposé par toutes les
biométries et les anthropométries du monde, atteste incontestablement
l'existence de l'Homme. L'objectivation normative de l'homme vient au secours
des droits de l'homme: les hommes sont tous égaux, manifestant tous les mêmes
qualités, à quelques différences près, accidentelles, nécessairement
accidentelles puisque ne renvoyant jamais à la consistance d'une essence. (François Ewald, "Michel Foucault et la norme," 217)
As
we undertake a close examination of Foucault's conception of power, we
immediately realize that it cannot be dissociated from his history of truth, on
the one hand, and from his genealogy of subjectivity, on the other. This
becomes particularly clear in the last writings, on the "hermeneutics of
the subject" and throughout the four volumes of the Histoire de la sexualité. In the 1980 lectures he delivered in the
Both
in the second and in the third volumes of the Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault explores the techniques de soi and the technologies de soi so as to thematize
the general genealogy of the rapports de
soi à soi.[42]
It is "the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself,"
says Foucault, "rapport à soi,
which I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to
constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions."(FR 352) As we
have seen in Foucault's reading of Kant, the critical genealogy of modernity
provides us with a new understanding of ethics as well, beyond the traditions
of ethical codifications and their moral practices. Once again, the self-overcoming
of morality announced by Nietzsche's genealogy is at full work in Foucault's dispositifs of sexuality and
normativity. In a nutshell, we realize that Foucault shifts away from the
traditional conception of a "human nature" as the outcome of normalizing
processes, imposed by the human sciences and practices of disciplinary power,
and espouses the concept of a bodily subjectivation, so as to devise new
technologies of the self that affirm the self without the exclusion of its
other, "as strategic games of liberty."(FR 50) By subjectivation
Foucault meant "the way a human being turns him- or herself into a
subject,"(BSH 208), that is, the ensemble of techniques through which
individuals act so as to constitute themselves as such. As I will argue here,
Foucault presents us with a self-overcoming, non‑universalizable ethics
that responds to the very charges raised by Habermas that the
crypto-normativism of genealogy was doomed to political nihilism. Although he
has been called "the founding father of our Kathedernihilismus,"[43]
Foucault's "return of morality" implies an ethics "against
ethics" --to paraphrase John Caputo,[44]--
on the level of the very ethical principle of transgression. In effect, as
Patton has remarked, according to this Nietzschean-Foucauldian ethic, values
are always already internal to types of individual and social being, hence the
absence of an articulated political theory does not preclude activism and
resistance.[45]
On the contrary, as Connolly has convincingly shown, Foucault attacks the
utopian dream of the "whole of society" insofar as it requires the
destruction, the exclusion, or the repression of the other.[46]
Precisely because it cannot promise universal liberation, an aesthetic
"ethic of care for the self" reminds us that "liberty is the
ontological condition of ethics" and that the freedom of the other
presupposes the imperative epimeleia
seautou,"care for yourself." (FF 4f.; FR 359 ff.; TS 19)[47]
Foucault
takes "norm" as an ontological category, as a characteristic of an
ontology of present, through the different institutions of a normative order in
his archaeological, genealogical analyses of the rise of psychiatry, medicine,
the human sciences, the penal code, and sexuality. The disciplines analyzed in
SP, as one of the main technologies of power of modern societies are in effect
defined as "pouvoir de la norme."(SP 186) La volonté de savoir institutes the dispositif de sexualité as normative power, on the level of the
State and the society thereby administered. I will follow François Ewald's
highly original study on the Foucauldian conception of normativity in order to
make sense of the ethical implications of his genealogy of the modern
subjectivity.[48]
Even before we proceed to understand such a conception of norm, it is important
to clarify what is meant by ethics in this context. In L'usage des plaisirs, the articulation between sex and ethics is
undertaken so as to investigate how patterns of sexual behavior become the
object of moral concern, for instance, how a moral reflection in Ancient Greece
--which was rather a question of stylizing freedom (HS2 111)-- gives way to a
moral problematization in later Christianity, or how the historical constructs
of sexuality and sex can be better understood against the framework of confessional
technologies for the discipline and control of the bodies.(HS3) Foucault speaks
of at least three different ways of approaching morality, namely:
1.
morals (morale) can denote a set of
values and rules of action which are proposed to individuals or social groups
through several prescriptive apparatuses
such as the family, educational institutions, churches, etc.; morality is
regarded here as a code;
2.
it can also be understood as "the
actual behavior of individuals in their relation to rules and values
that are proposed to them," that is, as a set of practices;
3.
and finally --as we have seen, this is the definition that interests
Foucault--it can be understood as the way one must conduct oneself, i.e.,
"the way one must constitute oneself as moral subject acting in relation
to the prescriptive elements that constitute the code [la manière dont on doit "se conduire," c'est-à-dire la
manière dont on doit se constituer soi-même comme sujet moral agissant en
référence aux éléments prescriptifs qui constituent le code]"(HS2
32-33) This field of historicity where human beings are constituted as subjects
of morality, through the relation of the self to itself, is precisely what
determines the field of Foucault's ethic of self-care. This field emerges thus
as a response to the Nietzschean challenge of nihilism:
When
all the customs and the morals on which the power of gods, priests, and
redeemers depend are finally reduced to nothing, when, therefore, morality in
the ancient sense of the word is dead: what will come?...Well, what exactly
will come? (M I 96)
Foucault
says in an interview that he views politics as an ethics (FR 375), in
accordance with the notions seen above of the philosophical ethos and of an
aesthetics of existence. At any rate, Foucault is interested in the
self-constitutive character of subjectivity rather than in a theoretical
formulation or calculus of ethical propositions. Foucault conceives of a
fourfold of subjectivity, or the four "causes" of "interiority"
in its relation to itself.(HS2 33-35)
The first "cause" is the "ethical substance" (substance éthique), such as passions,
feelings, sexual desire; for the Greeks, the ethical susbstance was not
sexuality (modernity) or the flesh (Christianity), but the aphrodisia, the works of Venus, at once acts, desire, and
pleasure.(FR 353) The second "cause" is the mode d'assujettissement of the moral subject, mode by which
individuals have to recognize the moral obligations imposed to them. In the
Greek aesthetics of existence, based on free choice, our work is indeed our own
life and ourselves --as opposed to an object, a text, a fortune, an invention,
or an institution. The third cause, analogous to the Aristotelian fourfold, is
the efficient: the elaboration of an ethical work that is effected on oneself
so as to transform oneself in the moral subject of one's conduct ("[le] travail éthique qu'on effectue sur
soi-même...pour essayer de se transformer soi-même en sujet moral de sa
conduite," HS2 34). In a word, a self-praxis or self-aesthetics of
moral existence. Asceticism is thus regarded as techne (a set of techniques, such as the technologies of the body,
marriage, love courting). And finally, the fourth teleological cause (la téléologie du sujet moral), what kind
of being should one become? That is how one can proceed then to situate the
questions of askesis, ascetic
techniques, as well as the enkrateia,
the dominion of oneself.
Now,
if there is a condemnation of normalizing power in SP, in that norms seem to
conform to rationalities, habits, and traditions of individualizing
panopticism, it is also the case that Foucault proposes no alternatives.
Foucault insists that he is not after "a history of solutions" and
that is the reason why he cannot even accept the word "alternative." Norms
may be said to be inevitable, as long as ethics and politics demand that habits
and modalities of human relations be codified. And yet, do we have to ground
them in a metaphysic of morals? Is the task of philosophy, after all, to ground
norms? For Foucault, if there is one norm, that must be freedom itself, the
only prerequisite of ethics. The critical ontology of ourselves requires indeed
"a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty."(FR 50)
Ethics, in this sense, implies commitment and yet no complicity vis-à-vis the
norm. The first difficulty arises, of course, with Foucault's usage of the word
"norm," which as Ewald shows, acquires a new philosophical thrust
that was not there before. The common-sense connotation is that of
"standard," "rule," and "mean," as opposed to the
abnormal, the pathological, the extreme. Thus Georges
Canguilhem remarks in Le normal et le
pathologique,
Quand
on sait que norma est le mot latin
que traduit équerre et que normalis
signifie perpendiculaire, on sait à peu près tout ce qu'il faut savoir sur le
domaine d'origine du sens des termes norme et normal.[49]
According to Ewald, Foucault takes the opposite procedure of the norm
when he makes the production of truth into an event, so as to challenge a
universal, general, a-historical conception of norm. For instance, that
sexuality was a social pleasure for both Greeks and Romans (FR 251) defies our
modern translation of sexuality into social relations. Foucault was interested
in the complex dispositif of sexuality that, in its three-axial constitution of
subjectivity, points to different normalizing mechanisms, making thus possible
a comparison that would be otherwise impossible.For Ewald, the norm is the
institutionalized reference for a social group that is objectified as an
individual: "La norme est au
principe d'une communication sans origine et sans sujet."[50]
Hence the asymmetry of comparing an Ancient, Greek homosexual to his or her
counterpart in modern societies can only be understood in terms of the normative
reference, which for each case is found in a complex ensemble of dispositifs
that combines both the normalizing insertion of the individual in a dense
social milieu and the normativity resulting from his or her moral technologies
of the self.
The
same applies to Foucault's conception of power. As Ewald remarks, Foucault did
not turn disciplinary society into a society of generalized confinement; on the
contrary, the diffusion of disciplines implies that confinement is no longer
segregating, but rather homogenizes the social space, as the disciplines
constitute society itself, with a common language to all institutions, or at
least, translatable between themselves.[51]
That includes the penitentiary systems, which are integrated into society and
whose administration of punishment is exclusive to and legitimized by the
disciplinary act. There is indeed an empty juridical split with the privation
of liberty that serves to mask disciplinary facts. The norm is precisely what
accounts for the transitions from discipline en bloc to disciplinary mechanism, from negative to positive
discipline, and the generalization of institutional discipline. The norm
articulates thus the disciplinary institutions of production, knowledge,
wealth, making them interdisciplinary and homogenizing the social space --if
not uniting it.[52]
In SP, Foucault describes three great disciplinary instruments, namely, the
hierarchical surveillance, the normalizing sanction, and the examination (Part
III, chapter 2: Les moyens du bon dressement, 172 ff). These are tools that
envisage to solve some traditional problems of power, to ordain multiplicities,
to articulate the whole and its parts, to put them in relation among
themselves. As we have seen, discipline fabricates individuals, it is the specific
technique of a power that is given to individuals: "le pouvoir disciplinaire, lui, s'exerce en se rendant invisible; en
revanche il impose à ceux qu'il soumet un principe de visibilité obligatoire."(SP
189) If power was traditionally conceived of as that which is seen (SP 189),
with discipline, according to the Foucauldian "logic" of the norm,
the subjects are the ones to be seen, allowing for the reversal of the
political axis of individualization ("le
renversement de l'axe politique de l'individualisation," 194) and the individualisation normative, without any
reference to a nature, a metaphysics, a substance, but as a pure relation,
purely comparative. The norm (la norme)
is the measure which at once individualizes, allowing for endless
individualization, and makes comparison possible.(209)
Un principe de comparaison, de comparabilité, une commune mesure, qui
s'institue dans la pure référence d'un groupe à lui-même, lorsque le groupe n'a
plus d'autre rapport qu'à lui-même, sans extériorité, sans verticalité.(209)
Normative individualization has no exterior, as normative space has no
"outside," so the abnormal belongs within, since the exception is
always already within the rule. And yet, of course, the abnormal is opposed to
the normal, but this is rather a matter of limits. When disciplines become
normative, disciplinary institutions become isomorphous. When society becomes
normative, institutions such as the army, school, prisons, become redundant
vis-à-vis each other. Hence one should not confuse "norm" and
"discipline": while the former is a common measure, the latter
envisages the body with a function of dressage.
That means that disciplines are not necessarily normative. That is why what
characterizes modernity, according to Foucault, is precisely the advent of
normative disciplines, the normalization of disciplines, and hence the
formation of disciplinary societies. Thus, both the rise of capitalism and the
emergence of a modern State embody this shift away from a juridical system and
from a system of personal power, toward the disciplinary technologies of
bio-power. In effect, all the analyses of social control in SP seem to converge
to the remarks on the "right to death and power over life," which as
we have seen, attest to the new mechanisms that inaugurate the era of
bio-power, "disciplines de corps et
contrôles régulateurs de populations."(HS1 177) As Foucault himself
remarks, "le développement du
bio-pouvoir, c'est l'importance croissante prise par le jeu de la norme aux
dépens du système juridique de la loi."(HS1 189) In this enigmatic
remark, Foucault does not mean that bio-power implies a process of the decline
of law, since the formation of a normalizing society will actually lead to a
legislative proliferation. And yet, as he hastens to add, in relation to the
seventeenth century we have entered an era of the regression of the juridical.
Ewald argues that it is not a matter of announcing an eminent disappearance of
right or doing a critique of bio-power in the name of right. Foucault is rather
concerned with the relations between the juridical and the political, right and
power, from the standpoint of an adequate analysis of the mechanisms of power.
Since the norm is opposed to the juridical mode of the law, which legitimizes
the power of the sovereign, the bio-power is expressed by the normative mode of
constitutions, codes, "toute une
activité législative permanente et bruyante."(HS1 190)
Thus
the normative and the juridical constitute two different modalities of the
exercise of power, as power is no longer confined nowadays to the traditional
forms of wars, struggles, interdits,
confrontations, but is above all the management of resources and of the lives
of entire populations. And Ewald sees here the contrast between the monarchical
State and the "Providence-State" (welfare State). What Habermas does
not acknowlegde is that for Foucault the norm is indeed a principle of
communication rather than confinement or incarceration.Thus, for Foucault, the
subject at stake is not the subject of right but the modern subject of the
norm. As Ewald points out, according to Foucault, "L'individu est toujours déjà normalisé."
The normative is therefore a power without outside (un pouvoir sans dehors) since there is
no human essence: all individuals are comparable, they are only differentiated
by differences of quantity.[53]
Foucault draws an important distinction between law and right, as he inscribes
the norm among the acts of judgment. The norm is rather characterized by its
logic, a "new economy of power," allowing for life to become the
object of power, by giving form to the bio-power.
By
way of conclusion, Foucault's response to the challenge of modernity
problematizes "the relations between the growth of capabilities and the
growth of autonomy"(FR 48), which seemed to be inevitably progressing
toward universal emancipation. The dark dialectic of the Aufklärung, in our very century, proved that power relations of
different forms and through diverse technologies have made efficient the most
inhuman procedures of normalization. If human beings have been made the
subjects of normalizing techniques of disciplinary power, they can also resist.
Because they are endowed with bodily capabilities for action, human freedom
appears not only as a precondition for the exercise of power but also as
resistance which can always take place out of power relations. "Power is
exercised only over free subjects," observes Foucault, "and only
insofar as they are free."(BSH 221) Hence we should conceive of an
agonistic ethic of freedom, according to which institutional, juridical
dispositifs that foster domination, exploitation, and normalization can be
subverted through concrete practices of ethical transgression, on different
microlevels of power relations. After all, far from being reducible to State
and political institutions, "power relations are rooted in the system of
social networks."(BSH 224) Foucault's aestheticist ethic of self-care,
together with his conception of individualization and normalization, betrays a
departure, as Connolly remarks, from morality to ethics, insofar as it
undermines the normative grounds of the good, human nature, the social
contract, or the useful. And yet, Foucault's refusal to resort to metaphysics
or hegemonic identities, as Connolly suggests, "is not to liquidate
ethics, but to become ashamed of the transcendentalization of conventional
morality. It is to subject morality to strip searches."[54]
In effect, Foucault's ethical articulation of subjectivity and normativity
betrays, in the last analysis, a skeptical ethos that one finds in Sextus
Empiricus and in every genuine philosophical skepsis vis-à-vis the concealed dogmatism of established theories.
Foucault avows that, in his permanent critique of the dire vrai, he has adopted "the radical but unaggressive
skepticism which makes it a principle not to regard the point in time where we
are now standing as the outcome of a teleological progression which it would be
one's business to reconstruct historically." And he adds, "that
skepticism regarding ourselves and what we are, our here and now, which
prevents one from assuming that what we have is better than --or more than-- in
the past."(PK 49)
E N D N
O T E S
* This text was originally written for my Ph.D. dissertation, "On the Genealogy of Modernity: Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault," defended before the committee composed of Professors Kenneth Baynes (Advisor), David B. Allison (President), Mary Rawlinson, and Herman Lebovics (External Reader), in the Philosophy Dept of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in December 1994. It was included as a chapter of a book, On the Genealogy of Modernity: Foucault's Social Philosophy, published by Nova Science, Hauppauge, NY, 2003.
