Paul Rabinow: The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Nancy Fraser: “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” Praxis International. Volume 1 (1981).
Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Bernstein, and Nancy Fraser criticize Foucault for excessive ‘negativity,’ for failing to provide some criterion for his critique of modernity. I shall consider Fraser’s objections—aphorizing my way along, lest some Foucaultian accuse me of concocting a totalizing discourse.
1. Fraser summarizes Foucault’s description of the modern ‘power/knowledge regime’: local, continuous, productive, “capillary,” exhaustive. The modern regime is godlike but fully human, the mighty Leviathan without the monarch. Everything in it has been ‘leviathanized’ or politicized, made into a ruly practice.
2. “The liberal framework understands power as emanating from the sovereign and imposing itself upon the subjects. It tries to define a power-free zone of rights, the penetration of which is illegitimate” (Fraser, 26). Yes, with the following refinement: liberalism sees as clearly as Foucault that power can be socially persuasive. Popular sovereignty undergirds modern liberalism but, as Foucault sees (along with John Marshall, Tocqueville, many others) popular sovereignty can be tyrannical. Pre-historicist liberals solve this problem by pointing to natural rights, which then receive legal protection from, and political support from, popular sovereignty. hence the care liberals take in defining limits even to “capillary” power; Leviathan’s blood must be judiciously channeled—confined to the right capillaries.
3. Historicist thought denies natural right. ‘Natural right,’ according to historicists, is an historical construct like any other belief. Foucault is in the line of thinkers who want to look at what happens when you jettison the God of the Bible and the god of the philosophers.
4. Fraser describes Foucault as “normatively confused” (Fraser, 31). Foucault fails to differentiate clearly among different kinds of power (cf. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 7). Why is ‘domination’—capillary or other—bad? With no moral theory, with no way to distinguish good and bad regimes, good from bad policies, Foucault cannot tell the difference between a Salvadorean torture cell and a bureaucratic welfare state. (Similarly, Heidegger could not distinguish between the Soviet Union and the United States.) Foucault fails to relieve the potential nihilism—or, at best, the final silence—of Heidegger’s radical historicism.
5. Foucault might reply: Even as Nietzsche whispers to conservatives that their task is impossible because historical flux permits no lasting conservation, so I, Foucault, whisper to progressives: There is no norm to get confused about. The moment you erect one, genealogy will demolish it. Otherwise, you will totalize human life, whether gently like liberals and social democrats or ham-handedly like Leninists. History is war. It has no meaning. Dare to fight!
6. Why do I resist such totalization? (Foucault continues). Because my fatum is freedom. The slogan of the modernity, of the Enlightenment, is ‘Dare to know!’ Modernity is “the will to ‘heroize’ the present” (Foucault 40) by transforming it via the most rigorous rationalism, opposed to slack superstition. In philosophy this leads to the full-blown rationalist historicism of Hegel and his followers. In practice it yields the thousand tyrannizing microtechnologies of modern rationalism. “How can the growth of capabilities”—individual and collective—”be disconnected from the identification of power relations?” (Foucault 48). He answers, ‘By opposing sacrifice to the axis of knowledge, parody to the axis of power, and dissociation to the axis of association. Marx wanted to ‘concretize’ Hegel, but was insufficiently radical: still too ‘dialectical,’ too ‘scientific,’ too rationalistic. A true praxis-critique of modernity will unleash Dionysus, engage in creative destruction, that joyful evidence of the irrepressible power of human beings who oppose life-energy to the dead hand of structure. The philosophers of the future will heed the Nietzschean command not to know yourself but to be yourself.
7. To which Fraser might reply: But Monsieur Foucault, you charming and vigorous bounder, you tell me ‘how.’ You even tell me ‘Why not.’ But you still do not tell me ‘Why.’
8. Why? Because the world is motley, like Nietzsche’s fool. The stable identities of the Enlightenment are impossible to sustain. Human beings are radically formless, pure energy; they will not, ‘finally,’ conform to even the most cleverly-designed structures because they cannot. “It can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom…. Liberty is a practice.” (Foucault 285). To say so is neither to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ Enlightenment. To say so is rather to find the only genuine enactment of the modern heroizing impulse. Freedom is the only non-totalizing universal, precisely because it is always heroic, always empty of structuralizing-tyrannizing-bourgeoisifying content—unlike equality and fraternity, to take two notable examples.
9. But does this gallant invitation to sip wine with Sartre at a sidewalk café really get us beyond the humanist horizon? (Fraser asks). Does not the critique of domination depend, for its effect, indeed its power, upon the reader’s modernist sensibility—her care for human rights, compassion for the unfortunate, the whole Enlightenment pantheon of virtues?
10. Yes, but only initially. I am out to transform the reader. To do so, I must start with what the reader is: a modern. I will appeal to ‘human rights’ to bringer her in, but soon I shall use the Enlightenment against itself by my genealogical demonstration of the microcruelties of the compassion industry. The modern world has no moral excuse for itself, yet. “How can the modern world, in which ethics is divorced from religion, acquire an ethical status?” (Foucault 343) Not by returning to religion. Not by returning to pre-modern rationalism. Not by following Kant, either. Kant had reintroduced ethics as an applied form of procedural normativity, as “the universal subject” guided by the categorical imperative. He tried to formalize, to legalize freedom. Ruly-all-too-ruly.
Instead, can we develop a sensual Kantianism, an “ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take account of the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something which can be integrated in our pleasure, without reference either to law, to marriage…?” (Foucault 346) Finding limits here involves physical transgression, experimentation with science, living on the margins of pain and pleasure, death and life; finally, it involves dying in bliss, the reward of pure negativity-of-the-body.
11. But, Fraser objects, what is this ‘body-talk’? If the body talks, what can it say? Is this not simply “bizarre” and “jejune”? (Fraser 62-63). It may make sense (at least in California) to pay someone to be a “Professor of the History of Consciousness,” but what would anyone pay for an unconscious professor? The “muckraking, Socratic Foucault” (65) has been fruitful, but can one really be the Socratic midwife via Dionysus, via Nietzsche, that resolute anti-Socratic? If you say that Nietzsche is to Hegel as Plato should have been to Socrates—that Diogenes the Cynic, that “Socrates gone mad,” is the superior philosopher—will masturbating in the marketplace really revolutionize the marketplace? Or will it merely become another freak show for the consumers to gawk at? Granted, the attempt to absolutize equality risks tyranny. But does the attempt to absolutize freedom not merely end in some new fatality? Can there be an unruly practice? (Even, maybe especially, of the body—which, even if thoroughly engraveable, is far from infinitely malleable.)
12. Foucault could only reply, “Amor fati.” Could not Fraser then ask, once more, ‘Why?’ She is right: this lovers’ quarrel can never end in pleasure for both dialogic partners. Foucault can defend himself, but only at the cost of failing in his effort at seduction.
13. Further, Fraser might say (pressing her advantage), how can there be a Nietzschean democrat? Why will the will to power not result in a strict order of rank, some new version of the Laws of Manu imposed by the philosophers of the future?
14. Because Nietzsche is dead, along with God and man, in one respect. As I, Foucault, learned to my embarrassment with the Maoists and the ayatollites, the megacruelties of strong men now only vulgarize, destroy without creating, reduce men to last men as surely as liberal microtechnologies do. A renewed will to power must truly pervade everyone, but in resistance to the current power-grid.
15. A war of all against all? What is this preoccupation with ‘power’? Genealogical research will locate this term in Hobbes, that disciple of Bacon, the technosystematizer of Machiavelli. Where is the freedom?
16. Once again, I use the term ‘power’ to bring the moderns in. They will come out postmoderns, having a revised sense of power. The new power will resist on the ‘micro’ level—the only level at which we can defeat liberalism’s confinement. Tocqueville of boudoir and bathhouse, I, Foucault, want to defeat liberalism’s confinement because I seek power not in some magnificent new tyranny but in the only way it can be had in democratic modernity: not in decadent liberalism, not in bourgeois libertarianism, but in radical libertinism. If, as Aristotle says, the principles of democracy are equality and liberty, then Taylor and Rawls can pick up the egalitarian strand whereas I pick up the libertarian, but really libertine strand (cf. Aristotle, Politics V. ix. 1310a1). Comprehensively, though never systematically, I negate the ‘positive,’ all-pervading spirit of egalitarian self-tyrannizing.
17. Nietzsche with the superman subtracted? (Fraser muses). I am reminded of a Nietzschean critique: “One no longer becomes poor or rich; both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.” Have you not produced a photographic negative of the Last Man, Michel?
18. I’m sure I have, but only because the shameless toad who has written this dialogue gives you all the best lines, and makes me a mere shadow of my former self!
19. Now, now, in a Nietzschean, ressentiment is not becoming. Amor fati!
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