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17. The Foucauldian notion of power
fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical notion that power as
something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place power
is conceives as a relation of forces:
Power must be analysed as something that circulates or rather as something
which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or
there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of
wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And
not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the
position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.
This dispersed conception of power makes it co-extensive with the social body.
As Foucault puts it in an interview: “all relations are at least partially
power relations”. Power is not localised in specific institutions but
imbricated and fused with all other relations including production, the family,
sexuality, knowledge and kinship. Power relations are both the internal conditions
and the immediate effects of all variety of divisions, inequalities and
disequilbria. They are localised, heterogeneous and dispersed, exercised
through a multitude of strategies and techniques while still accessible to
integration into more global strategies to serve economic and state goals. This
is why Foucault recommends as a methodological starting point that our analysis
of power should be ascending: rather than meeting power in its most global and
also domesticated form, the forms in which we most easily identify it. So if
Weber would try to identify political power with the monopoly of violence
exercised by the state, Foucault suggests beginning with the “infra law”, the infinitesimal mechanisms, which
have their own history, trajectory and tactics and see how they have been
invested, colonized, used, transformed and extended by increasingly general
mechanisms and forms of overall domination. (SMBD, P30)
18. Foucault concludes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces
everything, but because it comes from everywhere. This notion of de-centred and
dispersed power in turn rests on a strategic model of hostile, asymmetrical
relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality
of power, Foucault sometimes has recourse to the image of the endless battle:
changing alignments, dynamic resistances constantly recharged and eclipsed,
where victory is only a momentary respite. He is a little cagey as to how far
he is prepared to push the analogy between social life and battle. However, he
clearly views the paradigm of war as a more appropriate metaphor to get beyond
the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression
of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault’s hunch is the Nietzschean conviction
that behind the appearance of peaceful and stable civil society lies a constant
subterranean struggle of aggression, violence, servitude, oppression and fear.
This does not mean the society, the law and the state are like armistices that
put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law
is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the
mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind
institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret
war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on
beneath the peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with
one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and
permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the
other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably
someone’s adversary. (SMD pp50/51)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war within the counter official
historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians,
society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Race here need not stand as a
biological category but refers simply to differences between ethnic and
language groups, to differences in degree of force, vigour, energy and
violence. However, whether this opposition was articulated in terms of race,
religion or class, the most important point is that this clash ran through
society from top to bottom and forms the matrix of social warfare beneath every
of appearance civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not
Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a primal fact of
social existence. Marx views class struggle as the key to history while for Hegel
contradiction is the key to historical dynamics. Yet Foucault maintains that
the idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle
philosophically but rather transmogrifies them into mere moments with more
comprehensive rational logic. Thus, like the late Adorno, he argues that a totalising
logic rationalizes these struggles. War and social conflict are subsumed into a
universal subject, a reconciled truth and a right in which all particularities
have a pre-ordained place (SMD, p58). This is why Foucault views Nietzsche as
his kindred spirit.
19. Foucault puts special emphasis on the productivity of modern power. In fact
he introduce a distinction between disciplinary power and bio-power. The former
is a normalising power focused on the subjugation of the individual body
through the techniques of discipline. This includes devices to ensure their
spatial distribution, their individuation and their visibility, like separation
and surveillance as well as micro technologies like drill, inspection and
exercises aimed at taking control of bodies and making them more productive.
They also rationalise and economise power by internalising norms of control and
appropriate conduct. Bio-power, on the other hand, is applied to living man or
man as a species. This is more regulatory power in so far as it aims to control
the general conditions of birth, death, production and illness that impinge on
populations as a global mass. It concerns are town planning, public hygiene,
sexuality, life expectancy in general, the security, health and productivity of
the population. Its aim is to control the random event, to predict its
probability, compensate for its effects and preserve the homeostasis of the
whole. These two forms of modern power are not mutually exclusive and can be
articulated with each other; they constitute two poles around which the
productive organisation of power in modernity is deployed while each has its
own specific level, techniques and aims. Bio-power is a latecomer because
regulating the bio-sociological processes of the human masses implied more
complex systems of co-ordination and centralisation and therefore of a more
prominent role for a sophisticated bureaucratic state. However, together these
two powers, at the level of both detail and of mass, cover the entire surface
of modernity and take control of life.
20. In his self-criticism towards the end of his life, Foucault will suggest
that the work of the Discipline and
Punish period gave too great a priority to disciplinary power and had not
sufficiently theorised how the subject constituted itself through certain
practices and games of truth. His later solution to this shortcoming was to
move to a more comprehensive model that he called “Governmentality” where he
attempted to redress the balance. Government is here understood in the broadest
possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals
regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others. Foucault noted that
until well into the 18th century the term “government” was applied
not exclusively to political matters but also to management by the state or
administration but also addressed the problem of self-control, management of
the household and directing the soul.
If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in
their mobility, transformability and reversibility, then I do not think that
reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through,
theoretically and practically, the element of the subject defined by the
relationship of self to self…Quite simply, this means that in the type of
analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power
relations, governmentality, the government of the self and of others, and the
relationship of the self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it
is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question
of politics and the question of ethics. (H of S, p252)
This model has several implications. Firstly Foucault is now concerned to
prioritise the self relation as a care of the self, but incorporates the other
relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government
and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is
asymmetrically fixed. Foucault gives priority to the self-relation because he
maintains that an ethics of the self may be an urgent, fundamental and
politically indispensable task and that “there is no first or final point of
resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to
oneself”(H of S, p252). We shall to Foucault’s ideas on the “care of the self” and
its implications later. Somewhat before he settled on this priority, he was
also interested in exploring the emergence of liberal forms of government.
Interestingly, his concern here is not in liberalism as an economic theory or
a political ideology but as a specific art of governing human beings. And the
key to this understanding of liberalism was a new concept of nature that breaks
with its past meanings that viewed good government as part of a natural order—natural
law--, a cosmological continuum willed by god. This new concept of nature has
nothing to do with cosmological design. At the center of the new liberal
version is the idea of “second nature”. Political economy had emergence in the
course of the 18th century as an expression of the new bourgeois
order and stress the idea of the spontaneous self-regulation of the market. It
now becomes essential for government to respect the operations of this
spontaneous dynamism and the social laws embodied in it. This involves a
dramatic change to the principles of government. Its practices must now be in
line with the laws of nature so constituted by internal regulation. Government
must now be primarily concerned with success or failure in terms of the
exercise of its power rather with the issues of its own legitimate or
illegitimate power. The new art of government is no longer concerned to
maximise the power of the prince or the state but attempts to ascertain whether
government action is likely to be useful and necessary or superfluous and
harmful. So the liberal art of government takes society rather than the true
state as its stating point. However, rather than concluding that what follows
from this changed orientation is the reduction of state power, Foucault
concludes that this liberal interpretation of nature signifies not that nature
is a material substratum and limit to state intervention but a permanent
correlate. Knowledge of social facts is crucial because it opens up a series of
hitherto unknown possibilities for intelligent intervention. Rather than
dominating and prescribing, the proper role of government is to stimulate and
incite. We can see how this new emphasis is so completely attuned to the
productive dimension of power that is so central to his critique and renovation
of the sovereign notion of power already discussed. These new ideas on nature
are closely connected to the biological notions of self-regulation and
self-preservation that beginning to prevail over mechanistic explanations in
the early 19th century life sciences . Here a concept of inner
organisation whereby life functions as a dynamic and abstract principle common
to all living bodies finally gains the upper hand over theologically inspired
ideas of external design. This new understanding of government and its
liberalism provides a new perspective from which the questions that arise from
the dynamic constellation of bourgeois society like-- how subjects are to be
governed if they accredited both legal personhood and understood as living
beings—can be fully addressed. This perspective clearly allows for the
exploration of the connection between physical being and moral–political
existence. Such insights can now be accrued to the advantage of both subjects
and governments. At this point, I want leave Foucault’s attempt to amend his
early theory of power with the more comprehensive concept of government and
pick up one of the key consequences of his rethinking of power.
21. Where power is dispersed, so is resistance. De-centred power finds its own
inverse energy in a similarly dispersed resistance. The key to this conception
of the relationality of power is that neither power nor resistance can be
substance. The template of modern power relations, as we have seen, lies in the
post 68 politics of social movements. This appeared to Foucault as an explosion
of local, dispersed resistances to the totalising aspirations of the whole
range of institutional authorities in the bureaucracy, universities, schools,
hospitals and prisons. Foucault's ideas gave expression to this new
configuration of resistances. But on a theoretical level, Foucault’s
interpretation inflects these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of
the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general.
While Nietzsche chose to anchor the will to power in life itself, Foucault
prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He
therefore denied that he was offering an alternative theory of power. He
stresses that his ideas on power arise from the inadequacy of existing models
to explain the historical phenomena he confronted in his attempts to theorise
madness, prisons, sexuality and truth. Yet, his understanding of resistance
seems to inject these post-68 socio-political struggles with trans-historical
significance. Inflected in this vision, social life becomes a force field of
asymmetrical power relations, the binary battlefront referred to earlier,
dominated by purely strategic considerations. The dispersion of anonymous power
presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of
power. The result of all this is that resistance loses all historical and
sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous and
amorphous. Where there is a power relation there is the possibility of
resistance.
22. As mentioned, Foucault was
fascinated by revolution and was much occupied with the question of rethinking
its meaning. Revolution is quite vital to his notion of social change because
it ensures that no power however apparently irresistible is beyond resistance
and revolt. In this sense, the possibility of revolution is the guarantee of the
continuance of transgressions that break existing institutions, moulds,
constraining and limiting shapes and values. It is worthwhile noting that
Foucault went to Iran to report on the uprising there against the Shah. And it
was there that he found confirmation of his ideas on resistance, “of the
timeless drama in which power is always accursed” and of the fact that the
modern understanding of revolution, that rationalised it and transformed it
into a history that could be controlled by Realpolitik,
was in fact the colonisation of an inexplicable, and therefore, truly
historical event. He even continued to publicly support the revolution in the
press even after its fundamentalist character became clear and it was in the
process of murdering and persecuting its opponents. His justification of this
stand is very revealing. Essentially he breaks the Iranian revolution into two
realities. Most important to him is the revolt itself. Here is manifest the
beauty of a collective will that is, for him, bent not just on a change of
regime but on radically changing itself, its relations to things, others, with
eternity and God. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising
as the self introduction of a subjectivity (no that of great men, but that of
anyone) into history and life”. For Foucault, this radical will to change an
entire way of life is the truly beautiful and memorable aspect of the
revolution because it reaffirms that the human spirit is beyond even the most
formidable power and all calculation. He is not particularly concerned that
this spiritual determination found its sources in Islam. Shi'ite Islam here
appears to be simply the occasion for the expression of something deeper. The
capacity to revolt, to overturn the thread of history, to risk death, is the
fundamental anchorage of liberty, it is a potentiality that cannot be
explained. It must simply be accepted because there are revolts, sometimes, as
in the Iranian case, against all the odds. The other level of the revolution is
politics: this is the domain where the “will is multiple, hesitant, confused
and obscure even to itself”; this is the domain of alliance, compromise and the
deal. Despite his enthusiasm for the revolution, Foucault was also a defender
of human rights and did challenge the new regime to live up to its absolute
ethical responsibilities and ensure that its justice was open and transparent.
But Foucault’s division of the revolution into these two realities revealed a
degree of political romanticism that would horrify Weber. Foucault clearly has
no taste for the “slow boring of hard boards”(Weber) but does have a real
kinship with an insurrection “by bare hands of whose who want to lift the
fearful weight of the entire world order,” that he says, “bears down on each of
us, but more specifically on them” (F&IR, p. 222). Although Foucault
affirms the inevitability of resistance, this account is hardly reassuring.
Resistance and revolt for Foucault are shadowy figures -- the mere limit, as
the other of power, as an undifferentiated will of the oppressed that is
necessarily by its very unanimity unpolitical, their status appears nothing
more than a theoretical postulate or an inexplicable brute fact. Given that
Foucault made it his life's work to question all conventional facts and expose
their historical conditions of possibility, his reticence in the face of revolt
is troubling but not inexplicable. Perhaps this is the residual humanism in
Foucault: one he refuses to call by its name, a humanism just as essentialist
as the one he critiques in the Western tradition. For Foucault, the phenomenon
of revolt is a touchstone of hope, optimism, the dignity of primeval freedom
expressed in the act of transgression. However, given his uncompromising
repudiation of humanism, all we have is a glimmer called “resistance” that
carries a heavy normative load but without any real normative credentials.
Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible and untamable, almost
immediately Foucault reasserts his skeptical guard in the expectation that even
the successful revolt that becomes revolutionary change will ossify and become
another inhibition to liberty and barrier to transgression. Yet, it is hard to
know how Foucault succeeds in distinguishing power from resistance: without
normative credentials it would seem that resistance is in danger of being
viewed as just another strategy of power.
23. Despite Foucault's theoretical bracketing of normative claims, he has
repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He goes so far as
to speak of his theoretical works as "only a function" of the local
struggles in which he involved himself. We have already seen that he is
convinced that we are all on one side or another in the battle that rages
silently within stable civil existence. He also makes the point that there
cannot be a neutral subject. Genealogy takes up the standpoint of the
subjugated in these struggles and acclaims itself as an anti-science that
attempts to remarshal the buried memories of conflict and the disqualified singular
and local knowledges of the subjugated as a political/ideological challenge to
the orthodox monopoly on scientificity, the existing regime of truth. This
self-understanding is entirely in keeping with his idea of the specific
intellectual who foregoes the universalising task of speaking the
"truth" from above the contest, on behalf of mankind. The specific
intellectual uses his/her expertise to develop strategies that recover
suppressed knowledges, which raise the local to the threshold of scientificity
and facilitate local struggles. Foucault’s embrace of the specific intellectual
is at one with his whole rejection of the juridical model of sovereign power
and the authority that accrues to the bearer of legitimacy. Foucault can
challenge this by offering knowledges that claim not truth, but problemisation:
he characterised his own works as a "toolbox", "fictions",
as "fireworks". He seems to explicitly repudiate the claim to
theoretical truth and positive knowledge in a way quite reminiscent of Adorno’s
recourse to an aesthetic mode. He tells us:
The discourse that deciphers war’s permanent presence within society is
essentially a historic-political discourse, a discourse in which truth
functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, a discourse that is
darkly critical and at the same time intensely mythical.
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity can be explained as
a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and
the right of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action.
However, as mentioned, Foucault's explicit political self-understanding is
supposedly bracketed from his genealogies. He claims to avoid the pitfalls of
humanism by methodologically excluding subjective meanings, of identification
with subjects or struggles. Such identification would signify a capitulation to
the values of the enlightenment that already stand impeached on the charge of
complicity in subjugation and oppression. Only extreme caution allows the
engaged philosopher to avoid legitimating particular regimes of truth and the
spectre of substitutionalism (the posture of the universalising intellectual
who purports to speak for the oppressed and define their interests). Foucault
repudiates identification as a refusal of joining some new regime of
power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of
normative claims. In his last years he involved himself in a number of much
publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Polish Trade Union
Solidarity. Here Foucault employed "rights talk" and stressed the
need for civic organisations to monitor rights independently of the state. Yet
how this "rights talk" could be reconciled with his global critique
of enlightenment values and bracketing of normative claims is not clear.
24. On what basis can Foucault advocate resistance to domination or why prefer
struggle to submission? Clearly he has political sympathies yet how on the
basis of his own theory can he distinguish between the forces of oppression and
domination and those oppressed and dominated? By relinquishing the option of a
normative foundation, Foucault may escape the totalising logic of the form of
life and the type of theoretical discourse he finds complicit in a range of
normalising practices. Without normative criteria, however, the social critic
seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only are they unable to
articulate the forms of "otherness" or of action that diminish the
inegalitarian logic of strategic power relations but he/she also becomes an indifferent
alien merely bearing witness to the ceaseless, meaningless rotations of
domination and resistance. The critics of Foucault's strategy argue that he
deprives the modern rebel of any institutional or normative resources for
constituting him/herself in terms other than those already provided by the
prevailing dominant regimes. The difficulty of his position is exemplified by
his later reversion to "rights talk". Foucault’s defenders, on the
other hand, argue that his critique of modern humanism amounts to a rejection
of traditional normativity. The best defence along these lines comes from
Thomas Lemke. He argues that to focus on the question of norms and normativity
is to miss the decisive characteristic of Foucault’s work. That is to see
normativity as not outside the historical field of investigation. Norms are
less a starting point than an object of an analysis and the result of conflict.
Thus Foucault’s alleged weakness is a strength because it allows him to
articulate the critique of the juridical model at the theoretical level by
placing in question the orthodoxies of political thought and leftist critique
that constrain the imagining of political alternatives; it rejects the
proposition that every political intervention must compulsorily bind itself to a
proof of justification by taking a position in an already fixed political
system. Against this, Foucault is allegedly in the business of imagining and
bring into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. ‘Rereading
Foucault in the Shadow of Globalisation’ Constellations
Vol 10 no 2, pp174/75). While I find this a very plausible and consistent
reading of Foucault’s theoretical intentions, it does beg vital
theoretico-practical issues. One doesn’t have to argue that norms can be
outside the historical field of investigation and conflict to insist that we
still need normative orientation. What stops leftist political engagement
degenerating into nihilism or positivism if it has no normative orientation. It
is not necessary to cease reflecting upon operative norms and testing them
against their practical consequences while employing them as critical
standards. On the other hand, to abandon all normative orientation leaves the
critique with no other compass than the theorist’s own moral and political sensibilities.
And we know that these are not always as finely tuned as we would like.
25. It is interesting that Foucault himself continued to think about
these issues right up to his death. In his 1982/83 lectures at the College that
have just recently been translated into English as The Government of Self and Others he addresses the normative
question in the explicit context of political democracy and the essential
importance of Parresia or truth
telling. The specific context is a discussion of Percilean democracy and the
role of the political leader. The term “Parresia”
connotes the courage to speak truthfully or frankly. For Foucault, this
means more than a formal right granted to every citizen of a democracy that the
Greeks termed “isegoria”. Characteristically,
Foucault is less concerned with formal understandings of institutions and their
practices than with the social reality of their actual operation. While all in
a democracy may have the formal right to speak, he is interested in the
question of who does speak. And this is where the virtue or the courage for
fearless speech or truth telling comes to the fore. Beyond formal equality is a
struggle about who is to speak and exercise influence, an also, the
Tocquevillean question of how is the quality of public discussion to be
preserved against the democratic possibility of the “tyranny of the majority”.
To articulate these issues Foucault locates his discussion of Parresia in what he calls a rectangular
field of competing values. At one corner is democracy in the sense of the
formal equality he associated with the value of isegoria. In another corner is ascendency, or the struggle for
priority and influence in the actual hurly burly of real democracy. A third
corner is occupied by the explicitly normative value of truth that guards
against the reduction of democratic politics to the tyranny of the majority
opinion, while the final corner is occupied by risk as the empirical reality of
the uncertainty and contingency of real political outcomes and the need for
courage to confront such risks and the value of real political leadership in
fearlessly pursuing truth telling in conditions where this may not be popular
or risk free. The point to be made about this rectangle or forcefield of
conflicting pressures is that Foucault does not want to eliminate the question
of normativity from the theoretical discussion of politics but he does want to
view it in tension with the other ingredients of the political field. For him
the normative question can neither lie outside the terrain of legitimate
inquiry and critique and nor should it be isolated from the other factors that
constitute the absolute singularity of the specific event.
26. However one decides this dispute
between Foucault and his critics, it is clear that Foucault sees his task as to
bring into question conventional normativity. This is very clear in his later
work where he explores the idea of a non-normalising reconceptualisation of
normativity associated with the idea of the care of the self within the
paradigm of “governmentality” I spoke of a while ago. The key to this later
model is that it obviates the requirement that the individual conform to a code
of behaviour and thus engage in the repressive practices of self-sacrifice
associated with Christianity. As Foucault tells us in his late lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982/3),
“ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor
obedience tout court can constitute a
beautiful work. A beautiful work is one that conforms to the idea of a certain
form (a certain style, a certain from of life) (H of S, p424). And this
followed from the fact that neither the nomos
of the city -state nor its religion, its political structures or the form of
law could dictate what concretely a citizen must do concretely throughout their
life (H of S, p447). For Foucault such an ethics eliminates the externally
prescriptive and regulatory modality of ethics by turning to an aesthetics of
living where the ethical is focused primarily on the relation the self has to
itself. Foucault finds the paradigm of the care of the self in Plato and more
generally in classical society. On his reading, the moral problem is converted
into the practice of liberty, the art of individual self-caring or self-formation.
This process of self-cultivation requires the guide, friend, the master, the
election of cultural patterns belonging to society and social groups. So it
would be a mistake to understand this process of self-constitution as solely a
self-self relation: it is a historically constituted social relation still
implying inter-subjective relations of power. While it is clear that Foucault
understands the historically conditioned character of this model, he still
wants to insist that this is a positive model of active subjectivisation that
gives ontological priority to self-care. However, it is very important to
understand what he means by this. He wants to resituate the philosophical ideal
of self-knowledge in the broader context of its original spiritual exercise as
a practice of self-transformation through which the subject gains access to
their ontological homeland of essence and truth. Again the basis of this model
is Platonic: its elements are ignorance, the discovery of ignorance through an
event, question or crisis, leading to the realisation of the need to care for
the self which then takes the form of knowing one’s self. This knowing is that
of reflexivity, a recollection where the subject rediscovers access to what is
has already seen, its homeland (H of S, p255) But the practices involved in
this are not those of knowledge per se but for the subject’s very being. This
emphasis on spirituality implies that the truth is never given to the subject
by right, it is not an act of knowledge but of transformation and that the
truth is only given at the price of bringing the subject’s being into play:
that is, there can be no truth without the transformation of the subject (H of
S, p15) The whole point of this excursus into a positive notion of subjectivity
as “care of the self’ is to demonstrate that contemporary notions of
subjectivity are historical constructs, that there are alternative models that
provide cultural resources that might assist us to avoid the problems of
prescription, self-sacrifice and normalisation identified as deficits in later
forms of the history of subjectivity.
27. Foucault has provided us with
important critical insights into modernity. He has reminded us that although
existing institutions speak a language of "rights" and mouth the
principles of human dignity, public pronouncements can disguise a practice of
unacknowledged administrative violence. However great the advances of
democratisation and public scrutiny of administrative functioning, this not
only does not always constrain arbitrary power nor generate a kind of power
different from administrative control. Democracy and its administrative
machinery have often been complicit in disguising and masking various
normalising and marginalising practices and oppressions. He warns against the
increasingly pervasive social surveillance exemplified in the growing incursions
of "welfare" instrumentalities. He shows how the double idioms of law
and medicine perform a duet that softens our reaction to administrative
violence and lulls us into the political rationality of the carcarel continuum.
He has revealed that, despite its advantages, the new reign of publicity means
that all of society either directly or vicariously takes over the role of judge
or engages in normalising judgements.
28. These are all undoubtedly important insights. Yet, it is possible to take
them all on board without succumbing to skeptical myopia that results from a
totalising, global critique of modernity. Foucault's vision of modernity
willfully ignores the contradictory dimensions of modernity and therefore fails to exercise his capacity for judgement.
The democratic revolutions are occasionally mentioned, but usually only to
emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its
disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. This emphasis might be
justified by the novelty of Foucault's perspective and his desire to underscore
the facts that had formally been swept under the carpet. Yet, strangely,
Foucault's pervasive skepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort
of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols
elemental revolt despite is real costs in terms of life and human rights. But
concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be matched by a Weberian
sense of responsibility that doesn’t seem to come into Foucault’s calculations.
29. For most of his theoretical output Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno,
remained content to be a negative critic with only gestures towards
transgression. Only in his last incomplete work and interviews on the ethics of
subjectivity does he reject his former exclusive concentration on the
subjectivity of domination. He then takes a more positive direction using Greek
and Roman models of care of the self not so much as contemporary paradigms but
as demonstrations that there have been alternatives to the modern universal
notion of subjectivity. Until this late turn that remained unelaborated and
unfinished, Foucault had sustained a vigil against the imminent domination of
the contemporary regime of truth and modes of subjection. The great bulk of his
work stands as a counter-discourse to humanism.
30. This total skepticism is backed by a reluctance to privilege any aspect of
the present. Vigilance needs to be constant and danger is everywhere. Yet,
there is reason to doubt whether such universal skepticism is sustainable not
to mention ultimately productive. We have already mentioned Foucault’s
uncritical appropriation of revolt and his late indulgence in "rights
talk". These are instances where Foucault was compelled by his own political
commitments and his own desire to resolve the theoretical impasses of his work
in the seventies to move beyond universal skepticism. While it remains vitally
important to know that in principle we can turn critical eyes to any aspect of
our modern lives and that no value is beyond suspicion, it is practically just
as relevant to acknowledge where we stand and what we value. Making choices
involves discrimination. Foucault was right that such discrimination cannot
occur outside of history but nor can we refuse to discriminate, rely on global
skepticism or refuse to acknowledge the choices we make as real choices. We
choose on the basis of what we hold to be essential and most valuable. While
this was the practice of Foucault's own political life, his theoretical
writings do not always fully acknowledge it.
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