Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
What is Enlightenment?
In What is Enlightenment?, Foucault talks about modernism as the attitude of self-reinvention, of the remaking of the historic moment, after analyzing Baudelaire. He links this to Kant’s idea of the Enlightenment as both a historical moment that calls for free critique and the unfettered use of reason and the correct practice of this type of reason that leads to such a historic moment. Both are stressing an attitude of remaking, of historic struggle for a “higher” ideal. Enlightenment tied the progress of truth with that of liberty (42).
The answer to the Enlightenment today is to stop trying to figure out what’s necessary, universal, eternal—a limit attitude, or what knowledge cannot transgress—but to conduct an archaeological or genealogical exploration of what we are doing, how we are living, etc. Metaphysics is out, “the undefined work of freedom” is in (45). He links modernism to the programs for a new man (i.e., fascism and communism). He links postmodernism to the specific transformation of the cultural and sexual revolution (46).
In carrying out his “big digs,” he did not mean to say that because there is no hope of discovering necessary and universal structures, that therefore the work has to be carried out in “disorder and contingency.” There are in a way “universal” aspects of the forms and processes of human society. Foucault doesn’t address this “contradiction” because he doesn’t have to: it isn’t his aim. The critique probably wouldn’t phase him; his goal is to explode limits in the name of freedom, not to stake out their boundaries (42). In the end he feels his method is the true inheritor of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment (49).
Power/Knowledge Interviews
Foucault explores the intersection of science and politics. He says it’s harder to use theoretical physics and organic chemistry for political purposes, but something vaguer like psychiatry is much more susceptible. He links this to Lysenkoism as an example (52). Marxism (modernism) couldn’t assimilate this; it took the 1968 revolutions (postmodern ones) to open this space (53). His work shows that a continuist theory of how scientific knowledge progresses is wrong; instead, there are changes in the very rules that determine what conclusions are possible. There are “regime,” or paradigm shifts (53). This should be scary to the Enlightenment because science is supposed to be the one constant rock of faith. Not so much that power is imposed from outside, but an “internal regime of power” takes shape (53).
Analysis is more like war than language: trace the genealogy, the lines of power and causation, not the systemic and symbolic couching of events: “relations of power not relations of meaning” (56). He refers to 1968 as a watershed (57).
Modernism (prior stuff) focused on superstructures or the transcendental subject. Genealogy shows how the subject is constituted in history (58). These things can obscure the workings of fundamental power, which is not to be conceived of only as prohibition or repression, but as a productive force of discourse and various rewards as well (60). And the state is only the most visible instantiation of power—there is a whole tangle of unarticulated power relations on which it rests and to which it is somewhat subordinate (63).
Politics is the continuation of war by other means (inversion of Clausewitz’s formula) (64). Foucault is also concerned with surveillance as a manifestation of control because of the new bureaucratic nature of the state from the 16th century on (66). Before the early 20th century, there was the “great intellectual,” usually a writer. He descended from the jurists and notables, typified by Voltaire, and proclaimed the universal truth to power. Now, however, beginning with the physicists, we have the “specific intellectual,” who is more the expert or savant. He is actually closer to people and to real life because of the concreteness of his knowledge. Foucault says his role is more nuanced than the great intellectual but just as political [but in a postmodern way]. He is arbiter not of the knowledge of good and evil, but of life and death (67-72).
He ends by summarizing that truth is basically a system in any given society for regulating statements. It operates in a circular fashion with coercive or monopolistic entities, which form and are formed by it. This all leads to the idea that political “liberation” is not in finally achieving a powerless truth, or one denuded of the supposed corrupting effects of such power, but in changing around the hegemonies truth is currently linked to (assuming they are unsatisfactory) (74). And thus Nietzsche (75).
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
With Nietzsche, he says there is no primordial, eternal truth that external events are just so many masks for: instead, “truth” is invented through the discourse that arises from conflicts, passion, jealousies, and the accidents of history. Sameness is not the essence of history—disparity is (78). [This could be linked to Derrida’s différance]. All of the preconceptions must be exploded: the origin is not some moment of purity and brilliance in comparison to the accreted present. This is why Foucault extols historical excavation of ideas or genealogy: it is precisely in the vicissitudes of history that reality, impassable and irrational, lies, not in some Eden we have fallen from and to which we must return (79-80). Genealogy exposes the contradictions, inconsistencies, and general heterogeneity, rather than essential unity or orderliness, of all it is applied to (82). The purposes of an idea or phenomenon are not present at conception—the purpose changes with the changing needs of the moment. Foucault gives punishment as an example—adjudging it as “intended” in some original sense for any of the purposes it has been used for throughout history—revenge, compensation, warning—is not genealogy (83).
The consolidation of a thing is nothing more than a never-ending bloodbath between competing wills (84). Laws are not the final détente of exhausted warring parties, a balancing of forces—but the culmination of violence, wherein violences can be inflicted unceasingly by a new rule. Until, that is, the mechanism is turned against its creator by a new will, and the process continues (85-86).
The unity of a suprahistorical metaphysical view of history is in the final analysis only possible from a religious, dogmatic viewpoint (which modernism is) (86). “Knowledge is not made for understanding: it is made for cutting” (87). Foucault opposes traditional history with “effective history,” which aims to suck the metaphysical presuppositions out of “theological or rationalistic” history and instead deliver a “differential knowledge” of all the contradictions, reversals, and incongruities that mark human behavior (88-90).
The historian is himself a high-priest under modernism: he engages in a kind of asceticism so as to purify himself of himself and thus channel the forces of past peoples and events, seemingly acting as a medium for the dead. Nietzsche and Foucault mean to smash this idolatry and erect over it embodied, anti-Platonic history, a history that is “messy.” It’s easy to see how this type of history led to things like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US (90-2). Modernist history was a history of discovering precedents, the consolidation of history, and of scientific knowledge of the past. Effective postmodern history is a history, alternatively, of identity as parody, the dissolution of origins, and of honest, passion-filled narrative (93-7).
“What is an Author?”
The notion of authorship itself is subject to a genealogical investigation of sorts. Foucault takes certain deconstructionist tendencies in literature even further (103): it is not enough to remove the author and declare the work itself the object of study: we must also analyze the “function” the author’s name itself plays in the text (106). A message written on a wall doesn’t have an author—it merely has a writer. An author limits and defines a text in subtle ways. Knowing a play is by Shakespeare colors my reading of it. In turn the concept of the author “Shakespeare” is delimited and instantiated by the characteristics of the corpus we know as Shakespeare’s works (107). The author function allows attribution of works for purposes of punishment, it allows validation (scientific works in the pre-modern world; literary ones now), it allows categorization of works by style, quality, time period, coherence (because obviously one author’s work would be unified across all those categories, of course), and it creates several personae based on the work the text is trying to do (preface writer, explicator, demonstrator, etc.) (110-113). Authorship, however, should not be limited to people who have written books. In a much greater sense is there an author function among “originators of discursivity,” such as Marx and Freud (116).
He concludes by reemphasizing the author as a limited function; or checks on the proliferation of meaning. He predicts the fading away of this function, but its replacement by another: absolutely free literature is difficult to imagine (118). But he certainly deals a death blow to the image of the sagacious author, depositing endless multiplications of meaning into a work, imbuing it in a transcendental way with his inner light. Instead we can approach a text with less fear and trembling and ask: how is it used? Who can use it? What space does it open up for appropriation? In other words, what is its subjective value? (119)
“The Great Confinement”
Foucault performed his famous genealogical analysis of confinement to demonstrate these principles. He shows how the idea of healing the insane or criminal in prisons, as we have today, derives from earlier ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries of healing the poor and indigent through forced labor in the great houses of confinement like Hôpital Général in Paris. The attitude at the time took beggary to be a moral failing. Rather than see the proliferation of landless poor as the result of structural economic changes, those with power viewed the insane apocalyptically, as a vast collapse in morals. The unemployed violated the social compact of that society which Foucault says had lately “derived an ethical transcendence from the law of work” (135). He calls this one of the first times that the “law of nations” shifted to “no longer countenance the disorder of hearts” (138). In this, the treatment of idleness and then madness—two forms of social existence that violate the bourgeois imperative to be productive—he uncovers the utopian and tyrannical nature of the Enlightenment project, and demonstrates the utility of “effective history” to blast through ideological blindspots and show the hypocrisy of neutrality.
“The Birth of the Asylum”
Foucault’s most penetrating analysis is of the treatment of mental illness. Theory and practice around this issue changed dramatically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to reformers across Western Europe who pioneered a seemingly kinder and gentler approach to the insane (compared to whippings and dungeons). These reformers took the former means of oppression and internalized them in the patient. Through subtle methods, patients were taught to accuse and surveil themselves: guilt could make a madman a perpetual object of punishment to himself (145). In all this Foucault unearths the prevailing bourgeois social values at work, enfleshed in the patient-doctor relationship (161). The doctor here is merely an omnipotent father figure rectifying a moral defect in his child. Foucault points out that this has become the more obscured as Enlightenment positivism slowly cloaked the field of psychiatry with a veneer of scientific objectivity in the 19th century (162). Nowadays the roots of psychiatry and psycho-analysis are never supposed to be those of quasi-religious treatments for the insane in the 18th century. Here Foucault brilliantly exposes the value-based blindside of positivism: even science, which by Enlightenment lights, is the universal key to all truth, has been unmasked: it’s just another value-based powerplay. Values imposed by an authority figure deputized by our society, inflicted on the recalcitrant in the prison of the mind.
“The Body of the Condemned”
Foucault has a preoccupation with the human body as the locus of political struggle in society. There are a web of interrelations (rather than straightforward privileges or demerits) that enfold bodies and both reproduce and are reproduced by the social system (174). These pressures, tensions, tactics, etc., provide the basis for his ideas about power and knowledge. That is, that the two are inextricably bound together. He therefore advocates abandoning the pursuit of disinterested knowledge, which has been the Enlightenment’s watchword, in favor of analyzing the symbiosis of power and knowledge (175).
“Docile Bodies”
The Enlightenment, so famous in the eighteenth century for its talk about a primeval social compact, fundamental rights, and the democratic will, also held within it the impetus, initiated by the Napoleonic state, toward the militarization of society through the optimizing and disciplining of the human body. It is the various ways this facet of that age has been papered over and rationalized that Foucault wants us to understand (186).
“The Means of Correct Training”
Foucault traces the formation of these disciplinary techniques through the processes of standardization that modernity has become saturated with. It is commonly assumed that the culture of “penality” we now labor under (wherein conduct is surveilled, regimented, curtailed, and punished) is simply the result of applying rationality to the criminal justice system and institutions. Foucault, in characteristic fashion, explodes this myth, however. Rather, it is linked to the expanding concept of the norm, which makes desirable ever-growing vistas for quantification, categorization, and regulations. The penalization of society results from “the disciplinary technique that operated these new mechanisms of normalizing judgment” (196). So in the face of Enlightenment “progress,” or the inevitability of ascendant Reason, we have somewhat less noble characters lurking in the shadows. As always things are not quite what they seem.
This pageantry is illustrated excellently by the phenomenon of the examination. The modernist would have us believe something fairly straightforward is going on here—an examinee is undergoing a test of knowledge, which he will either pass or fail. Foucault steps outside this, as it were, and illumines it from a different angle, as if observing some indigenous ritual in a foreign land. This innovation, this ritual, is ubiquitous in schooling, obviously, but also in hiring, in psychiatry, in medicine (166).
The Examination is the mechanism by which the clinicization of society has occurred. It is the transfer of the display of power from the figure of the king, at something like a coronation, to the exercise of the parade, or review. Exterior display is traded for interior (in the bodies of those reviewed), and thus eclipses the overt displays of power (199). But this power of discipline working its way into the reviewees, unlike that of the show of force, knows no bounds. This is the power that operates in our world, and it is enabled by something very anti-climactic—simple methods of examination, of categorization, of averaging, etc. (202). It is the secret power that is so ubiquitous we can’t even see it. The examination is the pinning down of the individual differences of a subject that allow him to be classified, measured, assessed, and monitored (204). Foucault grants that the Enlightenment certainly brought with it the idea and foundation of the atomized individual, but what he calls “discipline,” enshrined chiefly in the examination, allowed the “fabrication” of this solitary individual (204).
“Panopticism”
Discipline is contrasted with the older, more showy displays of power—where these fell short because of lack of resources or over-extension, discipline thrives because it inculcates the dictates of authority into the very bodies of its subjects (207). Foucault says that these techniques of “accumulating men” have been symbiotic with those that made possible the accumulation of capital—neither could’ve occurred without the other (210).
Foucault uses this expose of the phenomenon of discipline to indict the Enlightenment once again. Despite an egalitarian judicial framework, popularly the Enlightenment’s crowning achievement, society is riven with class conflict because of the techniques of discipline that actually undergird it. If the sacrosanct “contract” is the foundation of the law for the classical liberal, the disciplines are the dirty secrets that govern the distribution of power on a microlevel (211). Power is always balanced unevenly astride these mechanisms (212). [It is this concept that our day and age has hit on with “microaggressions.”] Though equality is formally legally enshrined, there are still seemingly innocuous social cues that intimate a half-conscious adherence to systems of hierarchical classification of people and traits. These unspoken codes have as much or more influence on our daily behavior than do the great legal “equalities” we live under.
“Complete and Austere Institutions”
Foucault is deeply interested in the phenomenon of the penitentiary because of its relation to the society-wide techniques of discipline he has uncovered. The deprivation of one’s liberty in a “liberal” society logically follows as the most appropriate punishment: supposedly a fair and equal punishment of all alike, unlike the fine (215). Yet reformers in the 18th and 19th centuries were desirous of making it corrective as well because of the emerging science of criminology and new ideas about delinquency. Such ideas set the delinquent within his social context and background seeking to categorize, measure, and modify him as an instance of social pathology. This concept of delinquency, opposed as such to former notions of the criminal’s status as an offender against the law who must be punished, allowed the “objectification,” or that medicalizing, psychologizing, standardizing process central to the Enlightenment’s unfolding, to blossom in line with similar trends throughout Western society discussed earlier (224).
“Illegalities and Delinquency”
Foucault shows convincingly that the point of the carceral system is not to eliminate crime, or anything that straightforward (226). Rather, the point has been to isolate delinquency as an object of knowledge. The prior system produces delinquency through a thousand cuts (corruption by association, cruelty, reduction of families to penury, learned behaviors, etc.) (228), but that’s fine—the point is that it strips illegality of its chaos and unknowability and makes it another scientific object for rationalism to study (231).
“The Carceral”
Foucault links the beginning of the creep of the power of normalization into all institutions with the opening of the Mettray Penal Colony for boys in 1840 in France (234). Through observation, regimentation, and swift punishment, the totalizing system on display there perfectly captured and united the separate strands of “scientification” y [my term] and universalist legalism spawned by the Enlightenment (236).
Space, Knowledge, and Power
Discipline in political science even acquired a spatial dimension in the 18th century, with architecture and urbanism becoming political problems (240). All this rationalization has culminated in somewhat of a backlash, however—in our time the idea of a totalizing rationalization of society through the police power has been discredited—the recognition of the complexity of human society leads us to balk at direct control, though other forms less overt naturally arise… (242).
For Foucault, the guarantee of freedom is freedom, and the state of liberty is only the practice of liberty—in other words, no project or architecture is liberating in itself. To this end he is unwilling to condemn modernist architecture, exemplified by Le Corbusier, as inherently repressive (245). This is a consistently relativistic postmodern understanding of phenomena. He envisions a community of “unlimited sexual practice” as a potentially non-oppressive adaptive reuse of old workers’ quarters, presumably because of the non-judgmental orientation of such a commune (as opposed to the normal bourgeois orientation towards standards in the original workers’ community) (246). So what is intended by one for liberation can be distorted by another for oppression. For Foucault, nothing is fundamental in any of these structures—rather they “are only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between intentions in relation to each other” (247). [A more succinct exposition of the postmodern faith has not been given!] What is community and connection in one conception is surveillance and social pressure in another (247). He is not, though, in favor of dumping all pretense to rationality—he instead thinks we have to continually interrogate what this thing we call rationality is. After all, it was “flamboyant” rationality that “proved” scientific racism at the turn of the 20th century, which fed into Nazism (249). Postmodernism embraces history, not nostalgically, but out of an eschewing of the false dichotomy between history and reason that modernist architects and modernist philosophers (liker Habermas) posit in their attempt to embrace “transcendental” rationality. History can inoculate against historicism in a way that transcendental reason cannot, believing as it does that its reason can be purified through intentionality of the errors of irrationality (250).
His work in the history of sexuality reiterates the idea that ideas about homosexuality were modified with the advent of the Church. In ancient Greece and Rome, sexual and social relational spheres were not coterminous. E.g., private homosexuality did not necessarily imply consequences for the public, social sphere (251).
Foucault eschews simplistic either/or, this over that explanations—rather, how are phenomena interconnected? What is the play between them? (253)
Architecture can encode and reproduce social hierarchies, but it is not this only, in a reductionistic way—human imagination is involved. And the question of whether architecture is an exact or inexact science is less interesting to him. Instead, architecture as techne, a “practical rationality governed by a conscious goal,” is potentially a much more fruitful investigation (255). So once again Foucault busts the usual channels of dichotomous thinking in favor of nuance and context.
“Right of Death and Power over Life”
The popular wisdom is that we have rejected the death penalty because we are more humane. Foucault explodes this interpretation by painting a different picture: as society transitioned after the Enlightenment away from the state’s power of life and death over individuals being a function of the defense of sovereignty to the protection of the state’s right to “administer life” (the whole process of disciplinization that has quietly transformed society). Death then becomes the end of the state’s power and thus something of a failure of the state’s disciplinary purpose (259). The flip side is that wars have become more totalizing in this era: as organizer of life, wars are now fought on behalf of life: war is not a matter of the rule of a sovereign, but of the existence of everyone. As organizer of life, the state now has the prerogative to wipe out life (259). The power of life and death evolved a dual right of bio-power: of creeping discipline and optimization of bodies through institutions, and in parallel over bodies through vital statistics and the large-scale regulation of physical health (261).
This state whose business was no longer death but life was granted room to ply its trade by the advances in human mortality rates seen by the 18th century: as plague and starvation became less threatening, attention was turned towards the optimization of the species (264). Biopower was the push towards the enlightened administration of the species, toward a society of “the norm” as opposed to one of the law. Indeed, the law gradually evolved into just another regulatory function, along with medicine, the academy, work, etc. (266) The political struggle against this juggernaut has thus, in the main, been about life itself—satisfaction, health, fulfillment of one’s potential, etc. (267) We see in this the post-modern reaction.
With this in mind, it is not hard to see why Foucault focuses on sex as the locus of this bio-power. He maintains that ancient society was one of blood, of war, of disease, of kinship—all represented by the symbol of blood. But we have gone with the coming of biopower from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sex (268). Sex is the perfect conjuncture between the discipline of the body and the management of the race. And speaking of race, part of the overlap of these two systems was in the scientific racism that spoke both languages—that of the purity of blood and the eugenic administering of marriage and procreation (270). Psychoanalysis, another manifestation of the pivot towards sex, opposed Nazism but grounded sex still in older forms of power, namely law: taboos, the sovereign father, etc. (269)
“The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century”
Foucault shows how our understanding of “the poor” has evolved with the changing needs of power over time. What was once an undifferentiated mass of paupers—the sick, the unemployed, orphans, the mad, etc.—increasingly was boiled down to its constituent elements for the needs of production—the deserving poor vs. the willfully idle, for instance (276). This process accompanied the state’s evolution from the minister of life and death to the administrator of bio-function. The hospital, naturally, was key to all this. With the newly defined family as the locus of hygiene and the moral duty towards such, it formed the focal point of knowledge accumulation for controlling the vital statistics of society (283). The hierarchical prerogatives of doctors date from this period (287). Thus we see the influence of power on a matrix of institutions we regard as quite neutral and natural today.
“We ‘Other Victorians’”
Foucault does not tacitly accept the “repressive” theory about sex: that, from the 17th century on, bourgeois sensibilities mandated the repression of sexual instinct and the silencing of sexual discourse (294). Rather, he makes an analysis of the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that our ideas about sex are ensconced in (299).
“The Repressive Hypothesis”
Instead, Foucault traces a different line of development. Rather than increasing repression and a driving underground followed by a liberating counterreaction typified by the sexual revolution, he shows how sex has become discussed and exposed at ever intensifying levels in the modern period. From post-Trent Catholic practices of confession that encouraged graphic articulation and cognizance of the spiritual-physical manifestations of the sexual faculty (304) to the first efforts at youth sex education of the Philanthropium in 1776 (311), the trend, while encompassing certain modifications and restrictions on acceptable language and discourse, has been one of widening proliferation of sexual knowledge and study across all the disciplines and society itself (315). Even the narrative of the sexual revolution, which recounts how we are ever in the process of throwing off our Victorian shackles, is another symptom of this trend—by calling it the “last taboo,” the incitement to expose and explore it further in the name of freedom is thereby introduced (316).
Foucault links this to the pursuit of bio-power, again showing how power infects all areas of culture and sentiment (313). It is not because bourgeois society was against sex that the vast apparati of surveillance, observation, and categorization of sex and deviant sexuality exploded into being in the 19th century, but for precisely the opposite reason: because it was obsessed with sex. Foucault posits that power and pleasure mutually reinforced one another: power was tantalizing and excited by the tracking down and pinning down of pleasure, while pleasure took sadistic glee in alternately fleeing and scandalizing power with its own blandishments (324). Therefore we see how the current obsession with sexual liberation is a natural outgrowth of the whole modern trajectory of the pursuit of control of sex.
Preface to The History of Sexuality, Vol. II
Foucault supports my theory of thought being a historical and social driver. Again, this does not mean that philosophy and thought are independent of the economic and political (or structural) order; no, they just have complex relations with them (335). Thought determines what the rules are for determining “truth,” what is the nature of the subject, and how subjects relate to one another (334). It is the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. History is indispensable because it reveals the concrete form that thought assumes (335). There is a curious interplay with the concept of universality—thought is universally historical, and therefore the only absolute is that there are no absolutes.
“On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” (Interview)
From his work in the history of sexuality, Foucault uncovered how ethics in each historical epoch really constituted a “technique of the self” (341). He points out how recent liberation movements can’t seem to find “any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics—the former answers of religion and science no longer work (343). Looking at the ancient Greeks, he locates their techne of the self as a techne tou biou, of life. Their ethics were “justified” by reference to the “beautiful life” and were therefore not juridical, but aesthetic (348). They didn’t consider deviants and those given over to pleasure evil, but ugly (349).
Foucault’s idea is similar to Nietzsche’s that a person’s relation to himself is what determines his creative activity, and not the other way round, as the existentialists would say (351).
Ethics is not concerned with what the laws about right behavior are so much as what the individual’s relationship to himself is. The thing that this relationship concerns itself with, Foucault calls the ethical substance. For Kant it was intention, for the Christian, desire, and for us today, it’s feelings (352). This substance forms the material that ethics acts on, the main concern of the ethical person depending on the age. The ethical substance is modified through self-forming activity, or asceticism (354). Based on our goal, these techniques vary. An ancient Greek says, I want mastery of myself, a beautiful existence—so I won’t cheat on my wife. The Christian says, I want purity, immortal life with God, so I won’t cheat on my wife. The postmodernist says, I want to be true to myself (for which feelings are the main guide), so I might cheat on my wife.
Foucault points out how with Christianity dropping off, the supernatural restraint removes, and all that’s left is the juridical, which explains the scientific and juridical elaboration of ethics that modernism touted (356).
To sum up, Foucault smashes again the Enlightenment’s facile idea that our ethics have evolved to a higher pitch—rather, they’re just different.
The ancients, as stated earlier, had a technique of the self, and it was aesthetic, artistic. The obsession with the self today—what Foucault calls the “Californian conception of the self”—is not like this. Between us and them was Christianity, which preached renouncing the self (362). Thus postmodernist man’s mad quest to discover this self using feelings.
Techniques for understanding the self remain constant even while the symbolic systems which determine why one uses them change. This is evident in the use of hypomnemata, or small notebooks. They’ve been used since ancient Greece, but at that time they fed the goal of aesthetic self-constitution—writing little snippets helped one remember them and then integrate them into one’s lifestyle. For the Christian, the jotting down of phrases and the notation of mental states and desires aided in renouncing the flesh and the ego in the pursuit of God (366). So the symbolic systems always change, but certain technologies stay the same (369).
Modernity differed from all preceding epochs in that, with the advent of Descartes’ cogito, Western man abandoned the idea that to reach knowledge one first had to be purified. In ancient Greece as well as Christian Europe ascesis, asceticism, made one worthy or receptive to truth. Descartes instead says you come in contact with the truth through your relationship to yourself, as subject: “I think, therefore I am.” The mere fact of being a subject opens up the horizon of reality (370). Kant follows this with his universal subject that therefore could ground its ethics in universal rules—basically founding ethics in rationality rather than reason in ethics, as the ancients had done (372). This is one of the foibles postmodernism has reacted against: we see a revulsion now among people of trying to deduce ethics from reason: people want something mystical, primordial. This is the distrust of reason. We even see certain ascetical themes gaining currency, as in the widespread acceptance of exercise as a key to mental health. However grounded in empirical science such a belief may be, it still represents a rejection of the notion that we could bio-engineer through medicine or technology our way out of physical and psychological problems.
Politics and Ethics: An Interview
Foucault is more worried about ethics and morals than politics, but inevitably his ideas have political consequences. He is seen as an enemy by both the left and the right, liberals and Marxists: his ideas don’t tend toward enfleshing some predetermined political project but toward opening up concrete problems within politics and culture (375). This dovetails with Lyotard’s postmodernism as rejection of all these metanarratives. He has been criticized by classical liberals for reducing every relationship to power and domination. Some have said this will lead to reactionary and dystopian results. And those more sympathetic say, even if an equal, consensual politics is impossible, cannot the goal be sought anyway and result in a freer, healthier society? Foucault says yes, we can use that as a critical principle, and we can question whether so-called power-less and equal arrangements are better than some hierarchical ones (student-teacher, for instance), but ultimately the power relations and their inherent relations of domination remain, however small or benign, and we must reckon with them (379-80). [Here we approach metamodern pragmatism.] The idea that powerless relationships are possible will only lead to more blindness toward domination.
Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault
Foucault does not accept political straightjackets. That is because his work is of a different order. Polemics are useless to him: they are nothing more than crusades (383). He prefers questioning politics, rather than seeking for an answer in it. He links his methods with the revolts of May 1968: people were making unorthodox challenges to politics that Marxism had not foreseen (386). He analyzes the relations among ethics, politics, science, but more to the point, he wants to find out how these processes may have “interfered with one another in the formation of a scientific domain, a political structure, a moral practice” (386). In confronting problems, society unknowingly establishes a certain objectivity, a politics or government of the self, and an ethics related to the self. These are the aspects Foucault uncovered in his genealogies of madness, delinquency, and sexuality (387). At the end of his life, he wanted to pursue a history of thought, or “problematization.” This is the transformation of a problem into a question, which entails certain obstacles and parameters to which diverse solutions can be proposed (389). It would have been philosophy at its best: thinking about thinking in hopes of revealing thought’s inner structure.