[Marxism] Foucault's evolution

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i02/02b01201.htm

From the issue dated September 1, 2006
Foucault the Neohumanist?

By RICHARD WOLIN

In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that single-handedly 
reoriented scholarship in the humanities: Discipline and Punish and The 
History of Sexuality. Thereby, Foucault fundamentally altered the way we 
think about power.

For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity to deny 
or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a vertical axis. This 
view suited our modern conception of political sovereignty as a top-down 
phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted of a relationship between sovereign 
and subjects. It bespoke the capacity of rulers to censure or to control 
the behavior of those they ruled. That was the traditional model of power 
that Foucault vigorously challenged in these pathbreaking studies. As he 
remarked laconically: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not 
cut off the head of the king." By remaining beholden to an anachronistic 
notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault claimed, remained impervious 
to the distinctive modalities and flows of power in modern society, 
tone-deaf to the diffuse and insidious operations of "biopower": modern 
society's well-nigh totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and 
subjugate individual behavior ? via statistics, public-health guidelines, 
and conformist sexual norms ? down to the most elementary, "corpuscular" level.

What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a horizontal 
axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional vertical focus on 
sovereignty, governance, and law were diversionary, leading us to mistake 
power's genuine tenor and scope? What if power's defining trait were its 
productive rather than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that 
case, power's uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and 
mold the parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or 
corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been taught to 
conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom. But what if this 
autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent, underlying, and 
sophisticated mechanisms of domination?

That is the hypothesis Foucault sets forth during his later, "genealogical" 
phase. Just as Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, tried to show that the 
Western ideas of good and evil derive from an ethos of weakness ? 
specifically, from the "slave revolt" in morals against aristocratic 
society ? Foucault, in a similar vein, seeks to demonstrate the compromised 
origins of the modern "subject." In his view, the illusions of autonomy 
conceal a deeper bondage. The so-called subject is merely the efflux of 
what Foucault construes as a totalizing "carceral society." From early 
childhood, the subject is exposed or "subjected" to what Foucault labels 
the "means of correct training": an all-pervasive expanse of finely honed 
behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the institutional structure 
of civil society ? schools, hospitals, the military, prisons, and so forth.

In this way, Foucault boldly upends the modern narrative of progress. What 
we have customarily interpreted as evidence of expanding civic freedom ? 
that is, the triumph of rights-based liberalism ? when viewed in a 
Foucauldian optic has in fact produced more effective mechanisms of social 
control. Foucault audaciously stands the standard, Enlightenment view of 
the relationship between insight and emancipation on its head. Knowledge, 
which we traditionally thought would set us free, merely enmeshes us more 
efficiently in the omnivorous tentacles of "biopower." The popular 
Foucauldian coinage "power/knowledge" suggests that the modern ideal of 
value-free knowing is illusory. Instead, knowledge is perennially 
implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of power relations. The 
reign of biopower is buttressed and facilitated by the scientific 
disciplines of criminology, medicine, public administration, and so forth. 
In Foucault's view, moreover, the Enlightenment-inspired discourse of the 
human sciences is a prime offender. The so-called sciences of man function 
as the handmaidens of a nefarious "disciplinary society," furnishing it 
with data that serve the administrative needs of "governmentality": the 
Orwellian technique of turning citizens into pliable and cooperative 
"docile bodies." Little wonder that in The Order of Things ? a manifesto of 
French antihumanism ? Foucault unabashedly celebrates the "death of man" 
and implies that, in the aftermath of his disappearance, the world will be 
much better off.

Contra Hegel, truth does not yield "absolute knowledge." Instead, as 
Foucault maintains in a 1977 interview, truth must be reconceptualized "as 
a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, 
distribution, circulation, and operation of statements." As such, truth is 
"linked in a circular relation with systems of power, which produce and 
sustain it, and to effects of power, which it induces and which extends 
it." In his celebrated essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault 
carries this analysis a step further, claiming provocatively that "all 
knowledge rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is 
malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault raised the alarm concerning the 
perils of "normalization." The notion that one should possess a normal 
sexual identity, he suggested, testifies to the workings of biopower. It is 
a mechanism of social control that reinforces conformist sexual practices 
and criminalizes "deviancy." In Foucault's view, the 1960's ethos of sexual 
liberation, as prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, was merely 
another manifestation of normalization: Under the guise of sexual 
emancipation, we were instructed by "experts" to define ourselves in terms 
of having a positive and determinate sexual identity. Yet, as normative, 
all such conceptions are by definition limiting, exclusionary, and 
fundamentally repressive. The only way to counteract the pitfalls of 
"normalization," Foucault suggests (following the lead of Georges 
Bataille), is through an ethos of radical "transgression."

Yet, at times, the maw of biopower as described by Foucault seems so 
inescapable and totalizing that one is at a loss as to how one might combat 
it. After all, how can we ensure that a given instance of transgression is 
not merely a ruse on the part of biopower to further ensnare us? At The 
History of Sexuality's conclusion, all we are left with is a tantalizing 
yet frustratingly nebulous appeal to a "different economy of bodies and 
pleasures."

In North America, Foucault's innovative conception of biopower inspired new 
research models, above all in the areas of feminism, gender studies, and 
"queer theory." Auspiciously, The History of Sexuality appeared in English 
in 1978, just as the feminist and gay-rights movements had attained a 
measure of respectability and political prominence. That was also the 
moment when first-wave or rights-oriented feminism seemed to have run out 
of steam. Second-wave feminism, which embraced and affirmed women's 
"difference," emerged to fill the void. Although liberal political thought 
excelled at theorizing basic rights ? and thus well suited the needs of 
first-wave, egalitarian feminism ? it had little to say about trickier 
questions of female "self-realization": how women might fulfill themselves 
as women. Here, conversely, Foucault's bio-power paradigm, with its endemic 
suspicions of "norms" and "normalization," not to mention its manifest 
sympathy for "marginal sexualities," excelled, especially where 
considerations of "difference" were at stake.

In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has been 
venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh 
critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert 
normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the "death of man."

But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially 
true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself 
became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might 
describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French 
structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained 
considerable ethical and political value.

That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker. It 
stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one wishes to become 
an effective critic of totalitarianism, as Foucault certainly did, the 
paradigm of "man" remains an indispensable ally. After all, it is the 
totalitarians themselves who seek to quash or eliminate man. As 
antitotalitarian political analysts and actors, our responsibility is to 
spare him that fate.

It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later Foucault 
became a human-rights activist, a political posture that stands in stark 
contrast with his North American canonization as the progenitor of 
"identity politics."

The major difference between the two standpoints may be explained as 
follows: Whereas human rights stress our formal and inviolable prerogatives 
as people (equality before the law, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and 
so forth), identity politics emphasize the particularity of group 
belonging. The problem is that the two positions often conflict: Assertions 
of cultural particularism often view an orientation toward rights as an 
abstract, formalistic hindrance. Thus identity politics risks regressing to 
an ideology of "groupthink." Or, as a percipient German friend once 
observed with reference to the American culture wars, "Identity politics: 
That's what we had in Germany between 1933 and 1945." He correctly 
insinuated that unless multiculturalist allegiances are mediated by a 
fundamental respect for the rule of law and basic constitutional freedoms, 
the door will have been opened to fratricidal conflict.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault embraced the thesis of "soft 
totalitarianism" to describe the carceral system of the modern West. To his 
credit, he would eventually criticize with equal vigor the post-Stalinist 
variant of totalitarianism predominant in Eastern Europe. (Among 
left-leaning French intellectuals, a veritable turning point and awakening 
came with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's magisterial Gulag Archipelago 
in 1974.) If, during the 1960s, the heroes of the French left had been 
developing-world revolutionaries such as Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, 
during the late 1970s dissidence was in vogue. Václav Havel, Andrei 
Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and a cast of less-heralded oppositionists became 
the new standard-bearers for the figure of the engaged intellectual.

With acumen and enthusiasm, Foucault boarded the antitotalitarian 
bandwagon. Since his election to the prestigious Collège de France in 1970, 
he increasingly cultivated the persona of an intellectual activist. During 
the 1970s, Foucault justly inherited Sartre's mantle as the prototype of 
the intellectuel engagé. One of his first forays in this regard consisted 
of a vigorous defense of the so-called New Philosophers ? ex-Maoists, such 
as André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Guy Lardreau, who had finally 
seen the light and reinvented themselves as un-relenting critics of 
left-wing political despotism. In many respects, the New Philosophers were 
Foucault's intellectual progeny. Using conceptual tools he had developed 
such as "power/knowledge" and disciplinary surveillance, they merely 
extended his critical position to encompass the Soviet-dominated lands of, 
in Rudolf Bahro's words, "really existing socialism."

In 1977 Foucault took to the pages of the French weekly Le Nouvel 
Observateur to publish a ringing justification of Glucksmann's 
antitotalitarian screed, The Master Thinkers, for daring to speak truth to 
power. Undoubtedly, Foucault saw through much of New Philosophy's 
rhetorical histrionics and shallow posturing. In his view, what was 
primarily at stake was a larger political point: delivering a coup de grâce 
to the French left's naïve infatuation with Marxism. Previously, French 
intellectuals had developed a network of sophisticated rationalizations to 
justify left-wing dictatorships. However, in view of the 1968 Soviet 
invasion of Prague, the unspeakable depredations of Mao's Great Proletarian 
Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's gruesome reign of terror in Cambodia, 
such justifications were wearing increasingly thin. Wasn't a distinctly 
grisly and horrific political pattern beginning to emerge? In this way, 
Foucault sought to call the bluff of his fellow leftists. In his 
review-essay "The Great Rage of Facts," he pointedly mocked the idea, once 
popular among the left, that the historical necessity of socialism could 
ever trump basic human or moral concerns.

Far from being a one-time gambit, Foucault's spirited endorsement of the 
antitotalitarian ethos set the tone for many of his later intellectual and 
political involvements. In 1978, Bernard Kouchner, the human-rights 
activist and Doctors Without Borders founder, contacted Foucault to support 
the plight of the Vietnamese "boat people," who were fleeing persecution by 
the recently installed Communist government. As a result, the group "A Boat 
for Vietnam" was founded, with Foucault as one of its leading activists. 
Along with Glucksmann, Kouchner, Sartre, and Raymond Aron, the organization 
successfully lobbied President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to increase 
France's quota for Vietnamese refugees.

The alliance with Kouchner and Glucksmann transformed Foucault into a 
passionate advocate of humanitarian intervention, or le droit d'ingérance: 
the moral imperative to intervene in the domestic affairs of a nation where 
human rights are being systematically violated. In 1981, Foucault addressed 
a major conference held at U.N. headquarters in Geneva where these themes 
were debated and discussed. In his speech, Foucault eloquently praised the 
responsibilities of"international citizenship," which, he claimed, "implies 
a commitment to rise up against any abuse of power, whoever its author, 
whoever its victims." "Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and 
Médecins du Monde," he continued, "are the initiatives which have created 
this new right; the right of private individuals to intervene effectively 
in the order of international policies and strategies." If Foucault 
retained aspects of his earlier, antihumanist worldview, they were 
certainly undetectable in his moving Geneva speech.

Later that year, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, 
brutally suppressing Solidarity, Eastern Europe's first independent trade 
union. The response by most Western European statesmen was a deafening 
silence. They judged the matter to be a purely "internal" Polish affair. 
They feared fanning the flames of the cold war. (Ronald Reagan's presidency 
had begun earlier that year.) So much for international solidarity. Better 
that the civilian populations of Eastern Europe passively endure the yoke 
of authoritarian rule. The recently elected French Socialist government had 
an additional, domestic political motivation to look the other way. It had 
come to power in an alliance with the French Communists. A rift over the 
"Polish question" risked fracturing the alliance.

At the behest of Pierre Bourdieu, Foucault once again sprang into action. 
The two intellectual luminaries jointly drafted an impassioned statement 
urging the Socialists not to repeat the ignominious blunders of 1936 ? 
refusing to come to the aid of the embattled Spanish Republic ? and 1956 ? 
countenancing the Warsaw Pact's brutal invasion of Budapest. The statement 
was broadcast on French radio. Among its signatories were Glucksmann, 
Kouchner, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret. Thereafter, the French 
government enacted a sudden volte-face, vigorously protesting the 
declaration of martial law. President François Mitterrand released a 
statement in support of the oppressed Poles. Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy 
abruptly canceled a forthcoming diplomatic visit to Warsaw. Led by 
Foucault, French intellectuals had risen to the occasion. It was not quite 
the Dreyfus affair. But it was a worthy performance nevertheless.

During the late 1970s, Foucault became acquainted with Robert Badinter, an 
influential jurist who was an avowed admirer of the philosopher's work on 
prisons and punishment. In 1981, Badinter became Mitterrand's minister of 
justice. One of his first official acts was to abolish the death penalty. 
Other progressive legislative measures followed: A draconian 1970 anti-riot 
act was invalidated, police surveillance of homosexuals was forbidden, and 
the dreaded maximum-security wings of French prisons were shut down. 
Badinter and Foucault developed a deep friendship. Undoubtedly, many of the 
minister's ideas on progressive penal reform had been inspired by 
Foucault's teachings and doctrines.

But did Foucault's new political self-understanding as a human-rights 
activist have any repercussions on his philosophical views? Emphatically 
so. This theme is the centerpiece of Eric Paras's provocative new book, 
Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (Other Press). Paras deftly and 
painstakingly culls his evidence from Foucault's later Collège de France 
lectures, most of which remain unpublished. If his insights are correct, 
his study portends a veritable sea change in Foucault scholarship.

As Paras shows, in his later years Foucault had clearly become disenchanted 
with the research program he had honed during the mid-1970s in Discipline 
and Punish and The History of Sexuality. The treatment of "power" in these 
works proved too suffocating and monolithic. The idea of resistance to 
power seemed all but ruled out.

Two developments lend crucial support for Paras's hypothesis concerning 
Foucault's momentous paradigm shift, which, significantly, foreshadowed a 
rehabilitation of "man" and "subjectivity." First, Foucault abandoned the 
methodological tack he had outlined in The History of Sexuality, which 
focused on sexuality as a means for "power/knowledge" to extend its 
sinister hegemony. Instead, during his later years, he turned to a more 
positive concept of subjectivity, centered on the "art of living" in 
ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault had come to believe that such 
pre-Christian, pagan approaches to the idea of self-cultivation represented 
a valuable heuristic ? a means to overcome the deficiencies of modern 
conceptions of the self. Second, the term "power/knowledge" itself is 
entirely absent from his later lectures and texts ? a telling indication of 
how radically dissatisfied Foucault had become with the limitations of his 
earlier approach.

Paras's most radical and potentially controversial claim concerns 
Foucault's later re-evaluation of the idea of subjectivity. During the 
1960s, as a card-carrying structuralist, Foucault, along with Roland 
Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser, had celebrated the "death of 
the author" as a pendant to the fashionable postmodernist thesis concerning 
the "death of man." But as Paras remarks, if we know a great deal about 
Foucault's challenge to "the hegemony of 'man,' we are comparatively 
ignorant of the process by which he abandoned his hard structuralist 
position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: 
liberty, individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject."

The goal of Foucault 2.0, then, is to fill this void. In fact, given 
Foucault's avowed fascination with Greco-Roman techniques of self-formation 
in studies such as The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure, it would 
be entirely reasonable to speak of a return of the subject in his later 
work. As Foucault remarks in a late interview, "I think it is 
characteristic of our society nowadays, that subjectivity has the right to 
assert itself, and to say ... 'that I cannot accept,' 'that I don't want,' 
or 'that I desire.'"

The evidence for this return is copious. In several key later texts, 
Foucault demonstrates an avowed fascination with what he calls an 
"aesthetics of existence": an approach to the self-mastery predicated on 
considerations of "style" or "aesthetics." According to Foucault (here, 
closely following Nietzsche), the Christian idea of self-mastery culminated 
in self-renunciation or self-abnegation. Hence, it was disturbingly 
life-negating. Conversely, in the ancient world, care of the self focused 
on "the choice of a beautiful life." Here, the goal of self-rule or 
autonomy was primarily aesthetic ? hence, it was profoundly life-affirming. 
As Foucault enthusiastically remarks in a late interview, "The idea of the 
bios [life] as material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that 
fascinates me."

In Foucault's view, the Greco-Roman idea of aesthetic self-cultivation 
meshes with the central ideas of two main theorists of the modern self, 
Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Baudelaire's "dandyism" ? his idea of turning 
one's own persona into a veritable work of art ? became for the later 
Foucault a positive model of individual self-realization, as did 
Nietzsche's celebrated injunction in The Gay Science "to 'give style' to 
one's character ? a great and rare art!" As Foucault explains: "What 
strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which 
is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life. ... But couldn't 
everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be 
an art object, but not our life?"

Thereby, Foucault's work seems to have come full circle. Under the sign of 
aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the 
rights of subjectivity. As Foucault avows, his new normative ideal is "the 
formation and development of a practice of Self, the objective of which is 
the constitution of oneself as the laborer of the beauty of one's own life."

French critics have long pointed to the central paradox of the North 
American Foucault reception: that a thinker who was so fastidious about 
hazarding positive political prescriptions, and who viewed affirmations of 
identity as a trap or as a form of normalization, could be lionized as the 
progenitor of the "identity politics" movement of the 1980s and 1990sa 
movement that, as Christopher Lasch demonstrated, had abandoned the ends of 
public commitment in favor of a "culture of narcissism." Paras's case for 
the "neohumanist" Foucault is persuasive and well documented. One wonders 
how long it will take Foucault's North American acolytes to reorient 
themselves in light of Paras's impressive findings. That would mean 
abandoning the fashionable preoccupation with "body politics" ? the 
obsessive concern with a "different economy of bodies and pleasures" as a 
mode of transgression ? and, following the later Foucault, according the 
claims of humanism their due.

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature, and 
political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New 
York. His books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance 
With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 
2004) and The Frankfurt School Revisited (Routledge, 2006).


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