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Chapter 11--Late Middle Foucault |
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Chapter Eleven
Late Middle Foucault
Unlike those who saw social democracy as a compromise between capitalism and Communism, and who then saw its decline as a consequence of the fall of Communism because once the threat of Communism ended capitalism no longer needed to compromise; I hold that social democracy declined because it was incompatible with the basic cultural structures of the modern world (Richards and Swanger 2007). Unlike those who believe that history has demonstrated the superiority of capitalist democracy (e.g. Friedman, Fukayama); I hold that history has demonstrated the desirability of social democracy, although not—at least not yet—its feasibility. Unlike those who see the task of increasing labor’s share of the social product as one of forging a powerful alliance of the majorities against the privileged minorities (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe; Laclau 2006); I see the task as one of transforming the logic of capital accumulation (Richards 2007). I do not see the interests of the privileged minorities as opposed to eliminating poverty or to achieving ecological sustainability, nor do I see their interests as incompatible with strengthening ethical norms in a world-system now driven not so much by the egoism of a privileged few as by the system’s intrinsic dynamics. To some degree, unlike those who take a pessimistic view of the economic future of the majority of humanity, as labor inevitably loses what little bargaining power it still retains while capital roams the globe in search of jurisdictions that offer lower costs and higher profits (e.g. Winters 1996); I am moderately optimistic about the prospects for local development and an economics of solidarity (Coraggio 2004). To achieve four ends my viewpoint suggests: to transform the basic cultural structures of the modern world as is required to recover, deepen, improve, and sustain social democracy; to increase of the social share of the social product; to mobilize for the common good the best in human nature while mitigating the violent iniquity of the worst; and to escape from the systemic imperatives of globalization; I recommend less power-talk, more rule-talk, and a realistic pragmatism.
At first glance, it might appear that Michel Foucault lived on some other planet where my recommendations are irrelevant because my questions are not asked. At second glance it might appear that if we are speaking of the classic Foucault; if we are speaking of the best-known Foucault; if we are speaking of the author of Surveiller et Punir (Foucault 1975) (“Discipline and Punish”); of the author of the first volume of a never-completed six volumes on the history of sexuality La Volonté du Savoir (Foucault 1976) “The Will to Knowledge”); of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the academic year 1975-76 that were transcribed and later published as Il Faut Défendre la Societé (Foucault 1997) (“Society Must be Defended”); of the Foucault who wrote a history of the birth of the prison, who saw the society we live in as a carceral society, as one large jail penetrated everywhere by disciplinary power and by its corollary normalization; then in at least in one respect we are not talking about a Foucault who lived on some other planet, but rather of one who lived on the same planet but chose to talk about it differently. In the later of the two books published in Foucault’s lifetime, La Volonté du Savoir (1976), Foucault writes the word “power” (pouvoir) 359 times in 211 pages; not even counting numerous sentences in which dispositif du pouvoir, or mécanisme du pouvoir, or technique du pouvoir, appareil du pouvoir, or strategie du pouvoir, is expressed in shorthand as dispositif, mécanisme, technique, appareil, or strategie --invoking pouvoir as a shadow word that the reader reads even though the writer has not written it. Each of the three books systematically attacks juridical thinking that associates power with law and with rules. It would seem likely that if Foucault were alive today, he would regard my recommendation to do less power-talk and more rule-talk not as irrelevant but rather as relevant but wrong.
My examination of Foucault’s use of the word “power” in 1975-76, will lead to a mixed conclusion, in which I modify my own views somewhat by learning from his, but in which I on the whole decline to see power as he saw it in 1975-76. In order to avoid possible misunderstandings, Foucault provides in the Introduction to Surveiller et Punir and in a section of La Volonté du Savoir a detailed explanation of exactly what he does and does not mean when he writes the word “power.” (Foucault 1975, pp. ; Foucault 1976 pp. 121-135). Before examining what Foucault says he means by it, I will first look briefly at how he uses it in the later of the two books. “Power” occurs 188 times in the 120 pages that precede its explanation.
Power makes its first appearance on page 12. It probably would have appeared earlier if so many of the initial pages of the book had not been blank. On page 12 the reader sort of learns that since the classical age (the 17th and 18th centuries) repression has been the fundamental link connecting power with pleasure and with knowledge. (Foucault 1976, pp. 11-12).
It is not surprising to find the word “power” in a text. It carries conventional baggage, presumed to be familiar to writer and reader, as any other word does. I would nevertheless add that in this particular case, that of “power,” the conventional baggage is itself unusual. “Power” along with its near-synonym “force” is a word among words. It is modernity’s characteristic root metaphor. (Richards 1995; Husserl 1926) It was the pivot of the paradigm shift from medieval scholasticism to early modern European philosophy. (Ibid.) It was (I claim) the pivot of what Richard Rorty describes as the project of the early modern thinkers to create a secular public discourse independent of theology. (Rorty ) What will be surprising is Foucault’s hyper-modernity; the sheer magnitude of the cargo of coal he brings to Newcastle; his proposed philosophical super-saturation of a culture that was already saturated with power-talk even before Michel Foucault put pen to paper. (Heidegger 1938)
On page 12 the reader only sort of learns that repression is what connects power with pleasure and knowledge. Foucault is writing in oratio obliqua. He is outlining not his own views but the Marxist repressive hypothesis of Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, which makes the Victorian repression of natural sexuality the companion and the consequence of the repression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. (He does not mention Marcuse and Reich by name in the book published in his lifetime, but he does name them in the corresponding Collège de France lectures (Foucault 1997)). One can describe the general aim of La Volonté du Savoir by saying that it is to refute the repressive hypothesis, not in the sense of proving it to be false, but in the sense of showing it to be part and parcel of a defective worldview. (“Worldview” is a term I chose, not one Foucault would have chosen.) The defective worldview to be aufgehoben is, as Dreyfus and Rabinow put it, one that simply takes it for granted that there are subjects, desires, and interdictions, and that these explain history and society. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986, p. 114) (I think the hegelian term aufgehoben is appropriate here, since rather than denying that there are subjects, desires, and interdictions Foucault is proposing what I am calling an allegedly better and more comprehensive worldview in which subjects, desires, and interdictions are talked about and seen in the light of genealogies tracing their origins.) The saturation of his text with power-talk makes it evident from the get-go that power-talk will be Foucault’s proposed better worldview’s constituting discourse. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether a given instance of power-talk in the book is Foucault speaking in his own voice; or whether the speaker is the seductive voice of the misleading and inadequate repressive hypothesis; or whether –a third possibility—the speaker expresses a juridical representation of power or some other analysis that Foucault evokes but does not agree with.
Power appears a second time on the same page in the course of describing what the advocates of the repressive hypothesis want. They want transgression of the laws, the lifting of prohibitions, the restoration of pleasure in reality. In sum, they want, “a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power.” (Foucault 1976, p. 12) Power, therefore, has mechanisms. Or mechanisms have power. There are some mechanisms that are “of power.” Since we know from the Collège lectures that Foucault construes power as a relation and not as a substance we must be careful, while noting that power and mechanism are somehow connected and associated, not to interpret power as a substance, one of whose qualities or accidents is mechanism.
On the next page, it appears that one thing the repressive hypothesis does is to formulate in terms of repression the relationships of sex and power. (Foucault 1976, p. 13). Therefore whatever else power may be, it is something that has relationships with sex. More remarkably, the speakers who dare to talk about repression, who dare to talk about the forbidden subject, by the very fact of violating prohibitions (prohibitions about what it is allowed to talk about) as well as by the fact of advocating violating prohibitions, enjoy the pleasure of placing themselves to a certain extent “outside power.” (Foucault 1976, p. 13) They are speaking “against the powers.” (Foucault 1976, p. 14) The charms of the repressive hypothesis are such that anybody who says the relationship of power to sex is not repression clashes with a generally accepted thesis strengthened by the discursive interest of its proponents in enjoying the pleasures of transgression. (Foucault 1976, pp. 15-16)
Foucault’s question, then, is not why people are repressed, but rather why they so passionately say they are repressed. Why do they speak of abuse of power as a sort of sin against sex? (Foucault 1976, p. 17) Why do they identify power with repression, and especially with the repression of useless energies, intense pleasures, irregular behaviors? (Ibid.) On the next page Foucault introduces the phrase, “the intrinsic mechanisms of power.” (Foucault 1976, p. 18). I am unable to discern whether this phrase here is in oratio obliqua or in his own voice. In any case, he soon ratifies “mechanics of power” as spoken in his own voice in the course of doubting whether power’s “mechanics” are really repression. (Ibid.) Is prohibition and repression really the form in which power is generally exercised? (Ibid.) Foucault’s answer to his own question will be negative. In the course of asking it he alludes to his view that “power” is something that is “exercised.” Power is exercised rather than possessed. (Foucault 1975, p. 35). It is not the privilege of a dominant class, but rather the effect of a “…set of strategic positions.” (Ibid.) He will continue to speak of power as exercised (e.g. Foucault 1976 p. 21, p. 45, p. 57) without specifying any person, any institution, any social class, or any group that is doing the exercising. The “intrinsic mechanisms of power” exercise themselves. Foucault frequently uses the French reflexive form of the verb: power “s’exerce.” (e.g.Id. pp. 18, 21, 45, 57)
Above I described Foucault’s general aim in the book as showing that the repressive hypothesis was part of a defective worldview and proposing a better worldview. Now I can rephrase my interpretation of Foucault’s general aim in Foucault’s own words: the general aim is to determine, in its functioning and in its rationale, the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains discourse about human sexuality in our culture. (Foucault 1976, p. 19) Foucault will not talk about a social class or any group of people wielding power, but rather about power itself “penetrating and controlling daily pleasure.” (Foucault 1976, p. 20) The polymorphous techniques of power determine the production of discourse and its (power’s) effects of power lead to formulating what is taken to be the truth about sex. (Ibid.) He will defend his way of talking as superior to the Freudo-Marxism of the repressive hypothesis and also as superior to a related way of talking about power and law that he will call juridico-discursive. (Foucault 1976, p. 109). Foucault says later, in a section called “Enjeu” that the mistakes he is correcting are not just about sex; they are also about political analyses of power, and are in general deeply rooted in the history of the West. (Ibid.)
The repressive hypothesis will not be refuted in the sense of being shown to be false. It will be shown to be a limited description of certain local tactics of power. Foucault will place it in a larger context in which power and discourse are produced. (Foucault 1976, p. 21)
On the same page, page 21, Foucault introduces the key idea of mise en discours, putting in discourse, and then in apposition to mise en discours, he writes technique du pouvoir, technique of power. Putting in discourse is a technique of power. Technique of power is virtually interchangeable with mechanism of power, dispositif of power, strategies of power, tactics of power, apparatus of power. When he needs to choose a general term to cover all these ways of saying more or less the same thing, Foucault tends to choose “mechanisms of power.” (e.g. Foucault 1976, p. 45) The most notable “mechanism” is mise en discours.
These rather abstract appearances of power in Foucault’s writing become concrete when Foucault discusses the practice of confession in the Middle Ages and later. (Foucault 1976, pp. 26-30, 78-94) Everything about sex had to be mise en discours. The father confessor had to know about the positions of the partners, their attitudes, who touched whom and how, the exact moment of pleasure, thoughts, desires, imaginary pleasures; all the movements of the soul, of the will, of the understanding; all the words, all the actions, all the dreams. Traditional penitence imposed the infinite task of saying over and over again, as often as possible, both to oneself and to another, everything about pleasure. Desire had to become discourse. (Foucault 1976, p. 30)
The Marquis de Sade and the anonymous 19th century English libertine who devoted eleven volumes titled My Secret Life to describing his sexual pleasures were “…governed by the same prescription.” (Foucault 1976, p. 31). Tell all. Scandalous writings too were part of the “…grand process of mise en discours of sex.” (Foucault 1976, p. 32)
But the techniques of power that penetrated and at the same time incited pleasure by verbalizing it might have remained matters of Christian spirituality and private sexual practice if the extension of mechanisms of power had not become a matter of public interest. (Foucault 1976, p. 33) Here Foucault names a specific “mechanism of power.” It is “population.” (Foucault 1976, p. 35)
It is the word “population;” the very idea of population; it is population-talk that is a mechanism of power. “Population” constitutes an economic and political problem. It is manpower. It is a matter of attaining equilibrium between population’s growth and the available resources. It is population-richesse. (Foucault 1976, pp. 35-36). It is not society; it is not a set of individual bodies. “It is the notion of ‘population.’” (Foucault 1997, p. 218). Talking about population is a strategy of power that leads to making the sexual conduct of the population both an object of analysis and a target of intervention. (Foucault 1976, p. 37) That sexual conduct should be controlled is independent of whether the policy is pro-natalist or anti-natalist; in either case, there are numbers to be calculated and optimized. There is an intensification of pouvoirs and a multiplication of discourses in which the population becomes more known and at the same time more disciplined. From the 18th century onward even the sex life of children and adolescents becomes an enjeu penetrated by innumerable institutional dispositifs and discursive strategies. (Foucault 1976, p. 42) Although they are diverse, the dispositifs and strategies have in common that they are constraining, contraignants. (Foucault 1976, p. 45); they are coercive, coercitives. (Id. p. 47) They are not outside power or against power; they are themselves exercises of power and means of its exercise. From the single imperative that commands everybody to make of her or his sexuality a permanent object of discourse, amplified to the level of the population, there grow multiple mechanisms of power in the fields of pedagogy, of medicine, and of justice. (Id. p. 45) But, contrary to the repressive hypothesis, power did not annul pleasure, nor did pleasure annul power. From the 18th century forward the mechanisms of power produced to be sure a certain amount of prohibition, but they also incited and excited. By producing a whole science of sex in which perversions were classified as botanists classify plants (Foucault 1976, pp. 71-98), they gave each a name and a social status. They produced profitable specialties in such fields as medicine, psychiatry, pornography, and prostitution. On page 66 the word “power” appears as the name of something that extends itself, and which by extending itself proliferates sexualities. (Foucault 1976 p. 66)
On page 108 Foucault considers a possible objection. He accuses himself, or imagines a reader accusing him, of having confused repression and law as if they were equivalent ideas. This is a far-fetched objection since Foucault has neither stated nor implied any such equivalence. Far-fetched or not, it gives Foucault an opportunity to make a gracious transition to a critique of what he calls a juridico-discursive representation of power, that it to a say: to a critique of errors concerning the relationship of power to law that he has accused himself of falling into or seeming to fall into.
Foucault outlines what he takes to be some of the principal features of a juridico-discursive view of power. (Foucault 1976, pp. 110-12) Like the repressive hypothesis it is negative. Power can only say no. (p. 110). On this view that Foucault articulates but does not agree with there is a general form of power: it is the law. The law is the voice of power. “Il parle, et c’est la règle.” (p. 110) (“Power speaks, and it is the rule.”) It is the same in the state and in the family; the same for a prince, a father, or a judge. Power punishes transgressions. On one side there is the power that legislates; on the other side obedience: the subject obeys the monarch, the child obeys the parent, the citizen obeys the state, the disciple obeys the master. (p. 112)
Foucault next asks why people so easily accept a juridico-discursive conception of power. (Foucault 1976, p. 113) His first answer to his question is a move that on Charles Taylor’s view is an admission revealing a weakness in Foucault’s case. The answer is: the juridico-discursive view, which views power as at once law and repression, which overlooks the fact that desires are themselves products of power, allows people to think they are free. Their desires are their own before the law to some extent represses them. The law performs the legitimate function of placing some limits on everybody’s freedom. In this way power becomes acceptable. If power were completely cynical, if it did not take the general form of tracing limits to liberty, then in our modern western societies power would not be acceptable. (Foucault 1976, pp. 113-14) (Taylor takes the view that Foucault’s one-sided denial of the power of humanitarian ideals cannot be true because power is not power, i.e. it does not succeed in imposing itself, unless it compromises with them to get itself accepted.) (Taylor 1985, pp. 163-166)
Foucault then provides, in addition, an historical explanation of why a juridico-discursive power seems natural to us. Our modern societies (of course he thinks first of France) are the successors of the monarchies of the classical age. Pace theories of law which would assert that the law is and always has been whatever the sovereign says it is, the so-called absolute monarchies of the West were in fact legal monarchies. Law constituted them. Their power was built on top of a series of forms of power which already existed before them: such as the possession of arms, and the arms-related power to extract the agricultural surplus as rent from those who cultivated the land. Monarchy gradually dominated aristocracy as it established order and hierarchy among pre-existing powers. The law (we learn from the Collège lectures that Foucault has in mind Roman Law) was not just an ideological weapon skillfully wielded by the monarchs; it was the mode of their appearance on the stage of history and the form of their acceptability. (Foucault 1976, p. 115) Since the Middle Ages, in western societies, the exercise of power has always been formulated in law. (Ibid.)
It is an error to take at face value the republican propaganda of the 17th to 19th centuries that associates royalty always with non-law, with caprice, with abuse, with exceptions, with government that is de facto and not de jure. It is an error that forgets the fundamental historical fact that the western monarchies were constructed as legal systems. (Ibid.) The royal mechanisms of power functioned as forms of law. The republican critique demanded the rule of law without the rule of the monarch. It did not question the underlying principles that law ought to be the form of power, and that power should always be exercised in the form of law. (Foucault 1976 p. 116)
It was not until the 19th century (Marx of course being the most famous example) that a more radical critique appeared: real power was something above and beyond the rules of law; and indeed the rules of law themselves were a form of violence exercised for the profit of some at the expense of others. But even this more radical critique at bottom conceived of power as in essence something that ought to be exercised (even though in the societies criticized it was not exercised) according to fundamental principles of right (droit). (Foucault 1976, p. 117) (Here Foucault implies that his own Nietzschean critique is more radical than the radical humanist critiques of the 19th and 20th centuries.)
The West is still haunted by the ghost of the juridical monarchy; its collective mind is still inhabited by power in the form of law. But today law represents power’s practice less and less. In practice power functions today not as law (droit) but as technique. (Foucault 1976, p. 118). Instead of law (loi), power relies on normalization. (Ibid.) Instead of relying on punishment mainly administered by the state, power proliferates in networks of control penetrating all institutions. (Ibid.)
The task that Foucault assigns himself is to build an analytic of power in its concrete procedures –one that no longer represents power as law. (Foucault 1976, p. 119) It is to think “…sex without law and power without king.” (Foucault 1976, p. 120)
It is at this juncture in La Volonté du Savoir, with these cards on the table, or, to vary the metaphor, with these balls in the air, that Foucault decides to devote ten pages to explaining what he, Foucault, does and does not mean by “power.” He does not mean by the term a set of institutions that guarantees the subjection of the citizens to the state. (Foucault 1976, p. 121). He does not mean that form of subjection which, unlike violence, takes the form of rules. In general he does not mean by “power” a system by which some group or entity dominates others. An analysis in terms of power should not postulate the sovereignty of the state; on the contrary, the sovereignty of the state should emerge, if at all, as a conclusion, as a terminal form, of the analysis. (Ibid.) Forms of law and domination should also be explained as conclusions of the analysis, not presupposed at its beginning. (Ibid.)
What Foucault does mean by “power” is: the multiplicity of relations of force (rapports de force) that are immanent to the domain where they are exercised (s’exercent), and which are constitutive of their organization; the game (jeu) that by way of struggles and confrontations incessantly transforms them, reinforces them, reverses them; the supports that the relations of force have with each other, so that they form a chain or a system, or, on the contrary, the slippages, the contradictions, that separate some from others; the strategies by which they take effect, and of which the general design is the institutional crystallization which takes form as the state apparatus, as the formulation of the law, as social hegemonies. (Foucault 1976, pp. 121-22)
This is a long definition but it has a short kernel: relations of force. The rest of the definition mainly talks about what the relations of force do. If we ask “As opposed to what?” i.e. “What other way of looking at power is rapports de force supposed to be an alternative to?” we will find an answer in Foucault’s lecture at the Collėge de France on 7 January 1976: power is not mainly about the maintenance of economic relationships. (Foucault 1997, p. 15). If we go on to ask what Foucault means by “force” we will find that he does not elaborate on it in any special or unusual way. (Philp 1983). We are left with the ordinary meanings of the term without any special senses peculiar to Foucault. What are, however, peculiar to Foucault, are his accounts of how strategic relationships of force are stabilized in institutions, reinforcing each other in ways that make institutions very difficult to change. (e.g Foucault 1982, p. 742)
By casting his thoughts in terms of power, and explicating power here in terms of force, Foucault shows himself here to be not guilty of the charge of painting a dark night in which all cows are black by simply using the word “power” to name everything, so that “power” no longer distinguishes anything from anything else. He does not see the same world everyone else sees, leaving everything the same while choosing to name it with different words. He chooses a vocabulary that entails seeing human relationships as some others see them, and as other others do not see them. By choosing to speak of human relations in terms of force and strategy, he reaffirms his decision to speak in broadly Nietzschean terms. He distinguishes his way of seeing and talking about human relationships from that of Jurgen Habermas, where Habermas says that when people speak to one another in everyday acts of communication they are involved in a reciprocal process of making and justifying three types of validity claims: a claim to the truth of what is said or presupposed, a claim to the normative rightness of the speech act in the given context or of the underlying norm, and a claim to the truthfulness of the speaker. For Habermas “reciprocity” offers an alternative to “strategy.” (Habermas 2003, p. 19) Jacques Derrida (echoing strands of Aristotle) explicitly offers “friendship” as an alternative to relationships of force. (Derrida 1994, p. 45). Nietzsche, Habermas, Aristotle and Derrida are, of course, just examples: there are many ways of seeing and talking akin to those of the Foucault of 1975-76, and many much different.
Whether we should follow Foucault and speak as he did at a certain point in his career is in part an empirical question and in part a pragmatic question. It is empirical insofar as it is a question of fact whether the world is as Foucault describes it. It is pragmatic insofar as his philosophy helps or hinders problem-solving. I do not want to say that these two categories, the empirical and the pragmatic, exhaustively list the reasons one might have for deciding to talk one way or another, for in the course of history philosophers have proposed many different kinds of reasons for deciding that one way of talking is preferable to another. I just want to organize the rest of what I have to say concerning early middle Foucault according to those two categories. I will assimilate into the pragmatic category the Austinian question whether there is sufficient reason for deviating from ordinary usage. (Austin places the burden of proof on those who want to change the meaning of a word, claiming that other things being equal we should leave the tried and true meanings of words alone. (Austin ))
Foucault acknowledges that facts are relevant to determining the merits of his way of talking about power when he claims that the adoption of his proposed power-talk is not a matter of choice, but rather an adoption compelled by a correct understanding of history. According to Gilles Deleuze, Foucault has demonstrated that the rule of law is not peace, but rather the result of winning a war; law itself is war. (Deleuze 1986, p. 38) In Foucault’s own words: “It is a matter in sum of orienting oneself toward a conception of power that in place of the privilege of the law substitutes an objective point of view… and that not because of a speculative choice or a theoretical preference; but because in fact it is one of the fundamental traits of occidental societies that the relations of force that have for a long time found their principal expression in war, in all the forms of war, are now gradually incorporated (investis) in the order of political power.” (Foucault 1976, p. 135)
The facts which Foucault here says compel the acceptance of his version of power-talk and compel the rejection of a juridico-discursive version of power-talk are presented in the Collège lectures. Carl von Clausewitz had famously said, “War is nothing but a continuation of political processes with a mixture of other means.” (Clausewitz 1853, p. 120) Foucault almost equally famously suggests that it is the other way around: that politics is the continuation of war (Foucault 1997 pp. 1-19; Foucault 1975 p. 197). He argues persuasively in his Collège lectures that the juridico-discursive (in his terms) theories according to which society is formed by a social contract are accurately viewed as ideological weapons in a continuing war. Social contract theory is not accurately viewed as a viable scientific alternative to Boulanvier’s view, endorsed by Foucault, that today’s institutions were established by yesterday’s wars. Instead of war being a relatively narrow concept subsidiary to a broader concept of political purpose, as Clausewitz would have it, politics becomes for Foucault a relatively narrow concept subsidiary to a broad concept of “...all the forms of war…” (Foucault 1976, p. 135) Sometimes he seems to suggest that all the multitudes of mechanisms of power found not just in military institutions but also in schools, factories and other civilian institutions have (or in the classical age had) at bottom a single double purpose: winning wars against foreign states and preventing domestic revolts. (e.g. Foucault 1975 pp. 197-8) But usually, perhaps when correctly interpreted always, his meaning is not so much that all disciplinary practices are in the last analysis military as it is rather that power is pervasive throughout human relationships and consists of rapports de force.
It is necessary to insist that evidence is relevant to determining the merits of Foucault’s claims because still in the mid-1970s Foucault is claiming Heidegerrian methodological privileges. His aim is still to dégager (Foucault 1976, p. 20), dégager being the French translation of Heidegger’s freilegen (Heidegger 1926), a term perhaps roughly rendered in English as to make the true nature (phusis) of the phenomenon (remember that for Heidegger the phenomenon is being showing itself not just a surface image) clear by writing philosophical poetry that effectively disengages it, sets it free, from the everyday surroundings in which it is obscurely rather than insightfully ordinarily embedded. Proceeding to dégager power as Foucault (and Hannah Arendt) does bypasses the usual processes of criticism of scientific work because everything that is discovered is supposed to be prior to science, presupposed by science; in Heidegger’s case it is ontology, presupposed because science presupposes being; in Foucault’s case it is first archaeology and then genealogy, presupposed because the analysis of the global discursive facts (Foucault 1976 p. 20, Foucault 1969) is supposed to be prior to any theories about causal explanation. Surveiller et Punir is a geneaology. (Foucault 1975, p. 30). Foucault is doing analysis, not theory. (Foucault 1976, p. 121). He is not offering causal explanations. (Foucault 1976, p. 125). If he were writing a scientific theory or explaining phenomena, he could be refuted with counterexamples; he could be asked to present a falsifiable hypothesis. One could argue that by the mid-1970s Foucault’s Heidegerrian methodological privileges are wearing thin; whatever he may say he is doing, he is in effect claiming that war and power generally is a causal force shaping history; the reader is entitled to judge his causal explanations of phenomena as the reader would judge the hypotheses of any other writer, notwithstanding Foucault’s claims to have no theories, to offer no explanations, and neither to make nor need hypotheses. One could. But one can also accept Foucault’s terms. “Power,” Foucault writes, “...is the name one gives to a complex strategic situation in a given society.” (Foucault 1976, p. 123). Foucault himself says he is naming. He says that accepting his names is not a plain choice, but a choice compelled by the historical evidence. We are entitled to say that we do not find the evidence entirely compelling, and that to some considerable extent we choose to name differently. As pragmatists and herd-moralists we are entitled to say, further, that we prefer to choose a vocabulary that functions to help solve the principal problems that humanity now faces.
Foucault’s historical evidence concerning the role of war in shaping institutions counts in favor of choosing to employ a vocabulary that centers on a number of variations on the theme of power understood as rapports de force. It counts in favor of such a generally Nietzschean outlook or way of talking even though the subject of the present book is sex and the historical evidence is about politics. It is both evidence in favor of conceiving power as Foucault conceived it in 1975-76, and also evidence in favor of the threshold premise that how to conceive power is the question we should be asking, because power is what we should be thinking about. It counts –so much I concede, not just because I am willing to concede the point but also because I believe it is true— even though in my mind other considerations count more and weigh in another direction. I still choose to talk about power less, and when I do talk about it I still attribute more of it to rules. I will not repeat here my reasons for thinking that war characterizes the evolutionary survival strategy of our species less than cooperation does; nor for thinking that “culture” more than “force” identifies our ecological niche; nor for thinking that if Weimar social democracy had succeeded there would have been no Hitler and no World War II; nor for thinking –generalizing the preceding point—that cultures of peace can be created by solving problems, and that consequently the wars and civil wars that plague our planet are not so much proof that war must necessarily be the ultimate arbiter as they are symptoms of our failure so far to learn how to solve our problems; nor for thinking that the Dutch succeeded in freeing themselves from Spanish rule at the end of the Thirty Years War not because the Dutch had more “power” whatever that might mean, but because the cultural structures of Holland had evolved to the point where the Dutch had superior means for financing wars; nor for saying –generalizing the preceding point—that nations organized by rapports de force tend on the whole and with notable exceptions to lose wars, while those with relatively humane institutions tend to win; nor for thinking that if even more humane institutions than any that have so far existed on earth (except perhaps before patriarchy) could be created they would be stable and could defend themselves; nor will I repeat my claim that the facts about war justify understanding the modern world in terms of cultural structures (or in Habermas’s language “symbolic structures”) more than they justify understanding it in terms of force. Culture creates power more than power creates culture. I will not repeat any of this, but will rely on evidence and argument submitted elsewhere, by myself and others, including that in the immediately preceding chapters (Chapters Eight, Nine and Ten) and that in the work of Jürgen Habermas cited four paragraphs ago (Communication and the Evolution of Society). I will make a case for denying that the historical facts justify Foucault’s (1975-76) philosophy. Having made such a case, I will nevertheless partly agree with that philosophy, i.e. with that set of decisions about how to talk. I will base my case, however, not on Foucault’s lectures on war, but partly on his book on prisons and partly on his account of the relationship between Roman Law and sovereignty.
I have been presenting an economic and cultural approach to social science and to history. Very briefly and schematically: The human body is the body of a cultural animal, therefore that of an ethical animal; humans are biologically coded to be culturally coded. Rules guiding behavior are at the center of cultural coding. Since most human behavior is conventional, large parts of the explanation of human behavior consists largely of accounts of the consequences of following certain rules. The classics of economics, the works of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Luxembourg, Keynes, Walras, von Mises, and others, are accounts of the consequences of following certain rules. (I make an exception for Piero Sraffa, whose work can be regarded not as saying what happens when certain rules are followed, but rather as saying that in principle a great many different sets of culture-created rules can guide behavior so that equivalent physical results are reached; that is to say, so that the required physical inputs are used to get the desired physical outputs.) Other large parts of human behavior are usefully described as deviance from rules, or as the immaturity of people not yet conventionally socialized, or as cultural performances by people who have social skills that enable them to use the rules creatively. The intersubjective framework of rules can be called cultural structure, and the basic cultural structure of the successor states of the Roman Empire we live in today is constituted by the principles of a market economy derived from the Roman jus gentium. Explanatory principles like supply and demand, comparative advantage, the marginal efficiency of capital, systemic imperatives, the logic of capital accumulation, and the need to establish a regime of accumulation function within the legal and ethical norms of the basic cultural structures of the modern world. From such a point of view, the last years of Michel Foucault were also the declining years of a regime of accumulation usually called Fordist/Keynesian and the initial years of the currently dominant regime of accumulation, which is usefully described as globalization and neoliberalism.
An important characteristic of the current regime of accumulation is the locational revolution which gives a bargaining advantage to capital vis-à-vis government and vis-à-vis labor. Another important characteristic is the end of the Age of Keynes which featured making business profitable by taking measures to create a large middle class and a well-paid working class. Keynes regarded full employment as desirable because, among other things, he considered it virtually equivalent to maximizing production. But the full employment policies he and others persuaded governments to adopt proved to be incompatible with the basic cultural structures of the modern world; they were in particular inflationary and in general unsustainable. Globalization and super-exploitation are the current ways to make business profitable. They imply the de-industrialization of the first world, growing inequality, stagnant or declining real wages, and chronic unemployment especially in areas like Western Europe that hang on to some of the labor-protecting features of the old Fordist/Keynesian regime. Two consequences can be drawn for prisons: Firstly, in conditions of declining employment and wages and rising inequality there will be more deviation from the norms prescribing that people should not steal other people’s property; more despair conducive to alcoholism and drug addiction; more illegal business opportunities in the drug business; and consequently more prisoners in jails. Secondly, in conditions where governments fear capital flight, governments must rely on regressive forms of taxation to sustain themselves because they increasingly lack the power to tax mobile wealth. Governments are increasingly called upon to pay for infrastructure and to provide other incentives to attract business to their locations. Simultaneously governments are called upon to pay health care and retirement bills no longer paid as fringe benefits of employment. There is a fiscal crisis of the state. It is impossible for prison construction and staffing to keep up with the need to take proper care of the prisoners. (In the extreme case, typical of the USA, prisons will be privatized: care of the prisoners will be handed over to firms whose objective is to minimize costs in order to maximize profits.)
Rather than claim that the worldview I have just briefly reiterated is an original invention of which I am the author, I claim that it is common; it is not much different, if it is different at all, from the common sense of our scientific and commercial modern societies. It is not much different, if it is different at all, from the accounts that economically-oriented historians and anthropologists give of the processes that led us to where we are. Foucault echoes many when he writes that one often says that the model of a society that has independent individuals as its constitutive elements is derived from contract and exchange. (Foucault 1975, p. 227) Exactly so. It is the very same society as the one whose wealth appears as a vast collection of wares. There rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham. The juridical framework of contract and exchange is the historical a priori that is the condition of the possibility of unemployment. It makes it possible to have formal equality and simultaneously to have poverty in the midst of plenty. “The commercial society,” Foucault continues, “is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects.” (Ibid.) Indeed, and I would add that the juridical subjects continue to be isolated even when formally united as citizens of a nation, unless there is great strength in older traditional institutions (like the family and the church), or great strength in newer social democratic institutions (like universal health care and social security), or both.
“Perhaps,” writes Foucault. (Ibid.)
Foucault acknowledges that it is common to see the culture of contract (meeting of minds, expression of common will, basis of obligation; and more importantly no meeting of minds, no common will, and no basis of obligation where there is no contract) as the foundation of economics (of the sale, of the price, and in the large of the market). It is common to see that individualism is produced by dissolving bonds as market exchange (exchanging without bonding) becomes dominant. But that is not Foucault’s point. His point in Surveiller et Punir is that when, in Sir Henry Maine’s terms, the West was changing from a status society to a contract society, “…there existed in the same time period a technique for effectively constituting individuals as the correlative elements of a knowledge (savoir) and a power.” (Ibid.) The individual is a reality “…fabricated by that specific technique of power that is called ‘discipline.’” (Ibid.)
Foucault downgrades the isolated juridical individual to the status of a fiction. He or she is the “fictive atom” (Ibid.) of a “representation” (Ibid.) of society that is an “ideological” representation (Ibid.) Foucault thus joins major strands of Marxism, and in a respect Marx himself, in regarding the market as appearance. As appearance that disguises reality. For Foucault the underlying reality is the physical production of docile bodies by disciplinary techniques, first in convents and monasteries, then in schools, factories, barracks and parade grounds, hospitals, and jails. Docility is produced by detailed surveillance, by systematically penalizing deviation from the norm, and by “the examination.” The examination, for example a test given to a student in a school, is simultaneously “..the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” (Foucault 1975, p. 217) It is pouvoir and it is the basis for a savoir. As medicine could become a savoir when the clinic was established as a place for examining patients (Foucault 1963), pedagogy could become a science based on testing (Foucault 1975, p. 219). And so it is with all the human sciences: when power expresses itself as disciplinary technique, an object of knowledge (of savoir) is created.
Foucault believes that he has demonstrated the superiority of his version of power-talk over the versions of rules-talk he criticizes because he has shown that power is productive. According to the juridico-discursive version of rules-talk that Foucault takes as his target, as according to the repressive hypothesis, power, “…excludes, it represses, it turns back, it censures, it abstracts, it masks, it hides.” (Foucault 1975, p. 227) This negative account of power as unproductive was more valid in earlier times when the aristocracy was more content to kill the peasants when they revolted and to extract the agricultural surplus from them when they did not, otherwise ignoring them, than it is now. Today, now that power has taken on the management of population, the management of life (Foucault 1976, pp. 181-82), it is more than ever true that power produces. “It produces the real; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge it is possible to have of the individual arise from that production.” (Foucault 1975, p. 227)
(For Marx the market was in a respect an appearance disguising reality because the formal equality of juridical subjects engaged in buying and selling disguised the reality of private appropriation of the social product. But only in a respect. He would not have written the second volume of Capital if he had thought that the circulation of money and commodities was illusory or unimportant.)
It is perhaps unnecessary to add that drawing the conclusion that rules-talk is inferior to power-talk from the premise that power is productive of individuals and of knowledge is only a valid inference if one has previously decided that rules do not produce individuals and knowledge. It is a valid inference if one identifies rules-talk with kings dictating laws whose violation will be punished by spectacular displays of royal power, with fathers terrifying little boys who want to sleep with their mothers and only refrain from doing so from fear that their fathers will kill them, and in general with giving orders that stop behavior but do not start behavior. But the way of thinking about power and its relationships to rules that according to Foucault “one must give up forever” (Il faut cesser de toujours) (Foucault 1975 p. 227) only has to be given up by those who previously held it. It need not be given up by developmental psychologists who study children’s acquisition of the capacity to organize cooperation according to rules in the tradition of Jean Piaget; nor by sociologists who study norms and customs (Brauchen) in the traditions of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber; nor by philosophers who develop the insights into the rules of language games provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein; nor by critical realists for whom the causal powers of rules generate much of social reality. Nor need it be given up by historians, economists, and political scientists who see the legal foundations of the systemic imperatives of capitalism as causal factors frustrating social democracy and driving neoliberal globalization.
In the very last paragraph of Surveiller et Punir, Foucault writes of a jail city (ville carceral) as present reality presciently described by an anonymous contributor to a Parisian newspaper on August 10, 1836. Listen “…moralists, philosophers, legislators, flatterers of civilization,” writes Anonymous, “here is your Paris put in order with all similar things united.” (quoted in Foucault 1975, p. 358). Anonymous describes a Paris where the jails are at the city center, together with hospitals for all maladies, hospices for all miseries, and asylums for the insane. For Foucault the image of a city with the prisoners and fools usually called marginal at the center is symbolic of our condition. There is no center of power, no king from whom all power emanates, no sovereign people acting as stand-in for an absent king. There are instead networks of diverse elements – walls, spaces, institutions, rules, discourses. Power is a strategic distribution of elements of different natures and levels. (Foucault 1975, p. 359) The jail is an emblematic institution. It demonstrates the tendency of all the others. When the whole city is named a ville carceral it is because the general characteristics of the whole are most clearly shown in the specific parts of the whole that are jails.
What the networks of diverse elements of power protect, what they punish transgressions against, is not a king or any central source of law. It is “…the apparatus of production –commerce and industry…” (Foucault 1975, p. 360) At first blush this resembles historical materialism. One might ask here if Foucault believes that homo sapiens sapiens like any other animal is first and foremost concerned to get the food and other necessities it needs to stay alive, and whether Foucault believes that given the basic cultural structures of the modern world this means first and foremost establishing and maintaining a regime of accumulation; and that for this reason the dispositifs of power organize themselves to punish transgressions against commerce and industry. One might ask this question, but it is not the question Foucault asks. The question he asks is rather whether there presides over all these mechanisms of power “…le fonctionnement unitaire d’un appareil ou d’une institution…” (the singular functioning of an apparatus or of an institution) (Ibid.) Marxisms tend to answer this question more or less in the affirmative and to say with appropriate reservations that the single apparatus is capital accumulation. Foucault answers it in the negative. At this point he votes for multiple powers and against singular power. But then he goes on to say that there is something that presides over all these mechanisms of power that are protecting commerce and industry. It is la nécessité d’un combat et les règles d’une stratégie. (Ibid.) (the necessity of a combat and the rules of a strategy) He goes on to say that behind all the complex relations of power it is necessary to hear the roar of battle. (Ibid.) From this he deduces a familiar conclusion: the negative ideas of repression, rejection, exclusion and so on do not adequately describe how power fabricates the disciplined individual. But without saying so he also implies an answer to the question suggested above that he did not ask. No, Foucault does not choose to say that what might be called the more feminine concern, the concern with meeting basic survival needs, first and foremost drives history. Instead, history is combat, battle. What at first blush resembled historical materialism now appears reframed as part and parcel of Foucault’s Nietzschean way of seeing and talking. A subsidiary point, which is consistent with Foucault’s larger points, which Foucault often makes and which he refers to here, is that a great deal of money-making is illegal. Both great fortunes and the livelihoods of society’s numerous relatively modest outlaws are made by what Foucault calls illegalismes. This point strengthens Foucault’s case because such phenomena are readily described in terms of combat and strategy, but not readily described in terms of an orderly logic of accumulation governed by legal and economic principles. (Ibid.) It strengthens his case but it does not rule out the orderly logic of accumulation as a major, and indeed often decisive, producer of historiccal trends.
There are cases cited by Foucault that are not test cases. Or, rather, even if they are test cases for the Freudo-Marxist and Reichan analysis that Foucault specifically combats, they are not test cases for the cultural structures analysis I am proposing. For example, Foucault several times asks the question why during several periods bourgeois society devoted enormous efforts to the impossible task of preventing children from masturbating. Reich must be wrong with respect to that case. He and others make the argument that for the bourgeoisie only production counts; therefore any activity that does not produce anything, such as masturbating, must be persecuted and eliminated. But that argument is not defensible, as Foucault shows. Indeed, “the bourgeois system could perfectly well support the contrary, (Foucault 1997, p 29), as it could perfectly well support either locking up les fous or turning them loose. (Ibid.) Foucault famously concludes that it is not the object pursued but the very exercise of power itself that explains… --itself. “It is the mechanism of exclusion, the apparatus of surveillance, it is the medicalization of sexuality, of madness, of delinquency; it is all of that, that is to say the micromechanics of power, that has been represented, that has been constituted, by the bourgeoisie, starting at a certain time, as an interest, and that is what the bourgeoisie was interested in.” (Ibid.) But as soon as one shifts to a cultural structures approach, thinking of markets constituted by rules as having causal powers, one sees that the bizarre phenomenon of the crusade against masturbation is not a test case logically compelling the adoption of a foucauldian vocabulary chosen to avoid saying that first economic forces shaped the family and then the family so shaped repressed sexuality. (See Foucault 1999 pp. 250-51) This bizarre phenomenon is compatible with thinking in terms of cultural structures that frame a different economic explanation (or partial explanation), one concerned more with buying and selling and less with production. It is an economic explanation also available to explain (or partly explain) other bizarre phenomena: What was a craze to some was a way to make money for others; it created services to charge fees for; it was a topic to write best-selling books about; it justified the manufacture and sale of gadgets (such as chastity belts to prevent children from touching their private parts). What works as a refutation of a production-centered view, is indecisive as a test case ruling out a circulation-centered view.
I will suggest, however, that there are at least two test cases, prisons and globalization. Foucault’s account of prisons plays a special role among the motivations and justifications of his philosophical choices. The prison is the concentrated figure of all the disciplines. (Foucault 1975, p. 297). It brings together political techniques of isolation and hierarchy, economic techniques of forced labor, and medical techniques of cure and rehabilitation. (Id. p. 288). In the prison there is supposed to be constant surveillance of each detainee, of his or her behavior, of deep dispositions, of progressive improvement. (Id. p. 289). The theme of the Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a prison building designed to make it possible for the warden to secretly observe each prisoner at all times); in which architecture serves control, safety, savoir, transparency, and isolation finds in the jail its realization. (Ibid.) The prison took on its present form about 1840 (Id. p. 343), and has persisted essentially unaltered into the carceral and panoptic societies of our times. (Id. pp. 296, 346, 347, 352, 356.)
The facts are otherwise. Fred Alford, citing extensive criminological literature and his own research, concludes: “There is no subtle way to put it. Each aspect of capillary power to which Foucault refers is absent in most prisons in the United States.” (Alford 2000, p. 133) There is no surveillance, no systematic normalization, no examination. What actually happens for the most part is that the inmates are warehoused and ignored. Alford describes a day in the life of a typical prisoner identified as Mr. Prior. He is in a block with forty or fifty others. Guards appear rarely, and when they do it is to take a head count to verify that nobody has escaped. He is careful to behave with extreme politeness because he knows that the least unintentional insult can cost him his life, not at the hands of the guards but at the hands of a fellow prisoner. Prison labor is unsupervised and disorganized; it is something to do whenever one feels like it to relieve boredom. The one thing Mr. Prior does regularly is to work out at the prison gym. He needs to keep his body in shape to maintain his prestige in what Alford calls the “physiocracy” of the prisoners. (Alford 2000)
At the one known place where a prison was actually built according to Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a Panopticon, the Statesville Prison in Illinois, the prisoners have covered the windows of their cells with blankets and cardboard. They have recovered the privacy Bentham sought to take away from them. (Alford 2000, p. 134)
Criminologists fault Foucault for basing his book on writings about prisons with insufficient observation of contemporary prisons. A more important point is that his analysis describes a world that does not exist; hence there must be something wrong, not with Foucault but with his analysis. A still more important point is that an economic and cultural approach starting with the legal framework provided by the constitutive rules of the modern world describes a world that does exist: In conditions of declining employment and wages and rising inequality there really is more crime and consequently more prisoners in jails. In conditions where governments fear capital flight, where they are increasingly called upon to pay for infrastructure and to provide other incentives to attract business to their locations, where governments are called upon to pay health care and retirement bills no longer paid as fringe benefits of employment, it really is impossible for prison construction and staffing to keep up with the need to take proper care of the prisoners. Viewing the problems in a more realistic light leads directly to finding ways to solve the problems: The dangerous classes need to be seduced into the law-abiding middle classes; they need to be lured into pro-social activities they find attractive and guaranteed means of meeting their basic needs. (Promoting sports and music, Corragio’s economics of solidarity, and social safety nets are steps in the right direction.) Governments need adequate sources of income and intelligent budget priorities to finance a humane welfare state. (Nationalization of natural resources and cutting military budgets are steps in the right direction.)
A similar point can be made with respect to globalization. For the Foucault of the mid seventies, “..sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies,…” (Foucault 1985, p. 95) This is a diagnosis of the way other people think; the West is allegedly obsessed with rules regarded as commands of the sovereign. Foucault’s own contribution is to map the microphysics of power; to show that the capillary power in the base of the social pyramid is the condition of the possibility of the more easily visible power of the state. In all of this he neglects another aspect of his own account of the decisive influence of Roman Law on the formation of the western monarchies. Pace theories of law which would assert that the law is and always has been whatever the sovereign says it is, Foucault’s historical research shows that the so-called absolute monarchies of the West were in fact legal monarchies. Law constituted them. Foucault discusses at length the implications of this finding for the controversies between the advocates of absolute monarchy, who relied on Roman Law, and the propagandists of the aristocracy, who relied on Germanic customs according to which kings shared power with nobles. He overlooks a crucial point: the legal monarchies of the West accepted the legal framework that framed commerce for the Romans as part and parcel of their own legitimacy. For this reason it was possible (and chronic) for monarchs to fall deeply into debt; if the law had been whatever the king said, the king could simply have ordered subjects to hand over wealth to him; but in fact in the legal monarchies of Western Europe, whose kings were conceived more or less as successors of the Caesars, monarchs borrowed money. Immanuel Wallerstein has shown that from the very beginning, that is to say from the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the nation-state has been part of an international system. The normative framework of that international system was private law.
Where public law is conceived from the beginning as framed in a context where private law is already established, globalization becomes intelligible. It is a story about markets; it is a story about markets governing states more than states govern markets. Stories about markets are stories about the rules that constitute them. It can be defined, and has been defined by the OECD, as the domination of the world economy by private networks organized by the norms of private law. In David Korten’s words, “Today’s borderless global economy pits every person, community, and firm in a relentless race to the bottom, as private economic power extends out and governments compete to attract jobs and investment by offering the biggest subsidies and the lowest regulatory standards.” (Korten 2006, p. 163) “Globalization” describes the recent evolution of what Immanuel Wallerstein describes as a European world-system now become a global world-system, a system which has from the beginning been governed by the basic constitutive rules of the modern world, a system in which states have always been partly defined by their roles in international trade. I regard globalization as a test case because it lends itself to explanation in terms of the systemic imperatives implicit in social structures defined by private law, but it does not lend itself to explanation in Foucault’s vocabulary.
The facts recounted by Foucault did exist and to a large extent do exist, even though for the most part they do not apply to prisons today, and even if they shed little or no light on the global world-system. It is really true that pseudo-science serves as a pretext for objectifying people and silencing le lyrisme de la deraison. It is really true as Foucault implies (Foucault 1976 pp. 181-82) that an inadequate form of social democracy (not yet sufficiently enlightened by Foucault and its other critics) has often been part of the problem instead of part of the solution. In trying to gerer la vie (manage life) social democracy has often generated more tyranny than joy. It is not that the mechanisms of power that Foucault describes do not operate; it is that they have been to a considerable extent overwhelmed by the logic of a political economy that Foucault does not describe. Foucault’s way of thinking can be credited with offering a solution to a difficulty he poses when he attacks the Freudo-Marxist repressive hypothesis and feels the need to put something in its place: If the prise (grasp) of power were merely on external behavior, then liberation would be possible as the Freudo-Marxists say. There would be desire that is not power, which is repressed by power; desire could be liberated by ending repression. But if the prise of power is both external and internal; if desire itself is already constituted by power, then we are trapped from the beginning; our so-called revolt is merely another way that power manipulates us. Foucault’s solution: a new economy of pleasures and bodies. We invent pleasures as we create ourselves. We should understand that with our desires, through them, we inaugurate new forms of relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation. Sex is not fate; it opens the possibility of entering into a creative life. (Foucault 1976, Foucault 1982) Thus to persist in rule-talk in spite of the reasons Foucault gives for doing less of it and for doing more power-talk is not to fail to appreciate Foucault’s contributions.
Followers of John Austin can nevertheless make a different sort of complaint against Foucault: that he has invented idiosyncratic meanings when there was no good reason to do so. Why describe the relation of doctor to patient as an effect of power, when we could perfectly well continue to say that doctors have legitimate authority in matters of health because of their special knowledge? Why rewrite history without persons as actors when the idea of “person” and the idea of “action” have so many tried and true uses in ordinary language and in science? Why recast the idea of “norm” as something “our modernity” invented as a tool of disciplinary power, in contrast to law, when anthropologists and sociologists are accustomed to thinking of norms as something even the earliest human groups had, and jurists are used to thinking of laws as legal norms? Why name as “discipline” and as “power” what we are used to calling “socialization” and “authority”?
I will not try to answer the questions I have attributed to Austinians, but I will discuss an unfortunate consequence of uncritically falling into the habit of thinking in Foucault’s terms. Foucault’s vocabulary is not only, as Austin might regard it, a matter of jettisoning patterns of speech we already have, to replace them with novel ones. It is also a matter of creating a new language in which a number of propositions appear to be self-evidently true, just because of the way Foucault has chosen to talk. On closer examination they turn out to be not self-evident. Like certain propositions (e.g. “if there were no war there would be no politics”) that appear as self-evident when couched in the terminology of Carl Schmitt’s political theory, they are indeed probably not true, and in any event capable of being plausibly described in a much different vocabulary. For example: Foucault asserts that the utility of making prisoners work in prison is not profit; it is not teaching useful skills; it is instead the constitution of a relationship of power, an empty economic form, a scheme of individual submission and adjustment to an apparatus of production. (Foucault 1976, p. 282) If we have fallen into the habit of thinking in Foucauldian language, this proposition appears to us as self-evidently true. What else could prison labor be? But if we then we follow Wittgenstein in examining particular contexts where language games including the words “prison labor” might be played, we might next think of Mr. Prior dropping into the workshop for a while, and then growing bored with it and moving on to the more important business of working out at the gym. And then we might think of private corporations running prisons for profit renting out their prisoners as agricultural laborers. We might think of any number of other contexts. Or we might think of prison labor being drafted in an emergency to shore up the dikes that are about to break and flood New Orleans. Conclusion: talking the way Foucault talks is more appropriate in some contexts than in others, and it is in any context a choice and not an obligation.
I have a larger pragmatic objection to Foucault. I find that “power” as Foucault employs the term functions more to discourage than to encourage a dynamics of inclusion. In some respects to be sure the opposite is the case. Foucault encourages in some respects the social inclusion of the mentally ill, of prisoners, and others frequently discriminated against. But if the sorts of views of the dynamics of capitalism that I am sympathizing with are “telling it like it is,” then even the prisoners and patients whose causes Foucault specifically espouses are prejudiced in the end because his conceptual apparatus overlooks a dynamic of exclusion that separates the haves and the have-nots. I distinguish here three layers of exclusion: first the reign of private property, dominus, which excludes those who own nothing, compelling them to sleep on the street because they own no real estate and have no money with which to rent a place to sleep; second the reign of the market governed by the law of contracts, exchange, which excludes those who have nothing of value to sell; and third the dependence of production on profit. The third is the key to the preservation over time of the other two, and it is the dynamic of exclusion properly so called. The first two create the distinction between haves and have-nots. The third cements it into place. (See Richards and Swanger 2006). But Foucault tells us that representing power as excluding is only a superficial way to think about power (e.g. Foucault 1976). He directs our attention to the disciplinary power that produces individuals, a pouvoir that is inseparable from the savoir of psychiatry, criminology and the other human sciences. Resistance replaces inclusion. Instead of seeing the world as one in which the have-nots are excluded and need to be included, he sees the world as one in which mechanisms of power produce docile bodies. (e.g. Foucault 1975 pp. ) The have-nots (not Foucault’s term, but a term which on the whole names the same people as the ones whose normalization is described in Histoire de la Folie and Surveiller et Punir) are encouraged to follow their natural bent toward unrule. They are implicitly and sometimes explicitly encouraged to resist becoming the docile bodies that disciplinary power wants to turn them into. Resistance to power is conceived as wanting out, not as wanting in. Meanwhile, the property-rule and market-rule based dynamic of exclusion continues massively to exclude the resisters from the principal benefits of social cooperation. Production depends on profits. Without production there is no employment, nothing to buy, and nothing to tax. Therefore whatever needs to be done to assure the making of profits will be done (in other words, a “regime of accumulation” will be established and maintained). Redistributing wealth to give the excluded more of it normally discourages production; it encourages capital flight; it shatters confidence. (Absent the social-democratic “steering” described by Habermas in The Legitimation Crisis which seemed to be working in France during much of Foucault’s life, but which normally does not work, and is not working now.) That production depends on profit is a legal fact; it is a fact about ownership, about dominus. A dynamic of inclusion would be a dynamic that succeeded in doing what social democracy tried to do after World War II: it would diminish inequality and embrace in a community of solidarity the entire population; and at the same time it would keep production going and even enhance production. It would not have to eliminate profit, but it would have to subordinate profit to its social functions. It would have to change laws. Change rules. Change constitutive rules. Without fundamental legal change it is hard to imagine an adequate shift from a dynamic of exclusion to a dynamic of inclusion. But the Foucault of the mid 1970s tells us that thinking in terms of law is only a superficial way to understand power. (e.g. Foucault 1976, pp. ) On Foucault’s view in the mid 1970s power is what we should be talking about, and we should not be talking about it in juridico-discursive terms.
Inclusion is also bonding. Promoting inclusion means encouraging a spirit of caring, a characteristically feminine spirit, that complements formal changes in rules. (Eisler 2007) It puts into practice the sorts of mutual obligations to meet each other’s needs, the sorts of reciprocity and partnership and gift-giving that anthropology and sociology show to be typical of the cultures of human groups. (Gouldner 1964) Inclusion is about tying heart to heart in all the charming ways that make homo sapiens sapiens such a storybook animal. But Foucault tells us that life is all about power and power is all about rapports de force. The story about Heidi’s rapport with her grandmother flies under his radar. Nevertheless much of Surveiller et Punir echoes, if one listens to it with an ear in love with bonding and repelled by cruelty, the protests Heidi might make against the inhuman treatment of human beings. In the 18th century Prussian army discipline took the spirit out of the body, making the body a target manipulated by new mechanisms of power. (Foucault 1975, pp. 181-82). All of society was conceived in military terms, as permanent coercion in which the entire population was treated as parts of a machine. (Id. p. 198) In schools people were treated as if they were machines. (Id. p. 208) And in orphanages, reformatories, at work, in convents, and of course in jails. (E.g. Id. p. 350). Foucault is naturally read, in spite of whatever he may say about how he wants to be read, as protesting violations of traditional religious and modern liberal and feminist ethics. He implicitly reverts to the humanistic principles of his first writings every time he goes into great detail depicting how human beings are objectified, made into objects, treated as objects to be manipulated rather than as creative subjects who are the authors of their own lives. The examination is a mechanism of objectification. (Foucault 1975, p. 220) Keeping files on people, written records, functions as a mechanism of objectification. (Id. p. 225) The normalizing power of today’s carceral societies utilizes techniques for objectifying human behavior that have been developed over several centuries. (Id. p. 356) One might have expected Foucault’s history of dehumanization to be followed by a Kantian affirmation that humans are not machines; humans ought to be seen and talked about as free rational beings endowed with a concept of moral law; they should be treated always as ends and never as means only. And indeed Foucault did move toward an ethics of autonomy in the 1980s. He revised his 1975 vision of the human soul as the prison of the body, as a soul created by external powers for the purpose of disciplining the body (Foucault 1975, p. 38); he made the soul instead a work of art created by persons whose project in life is to create themselves. (Chapter Ten) If Foucault had lived longer he might have reverted to his Heideggerian youth and affirmed that human being is always interpretive and geschichtliche, always made of stories. He might have returned to a point he made in the 1960s in Les Mots et les Choses: that thinking in terms of forces and machines only works for the simple sciences; that to understand history, language, political economy, and life it is necessary to think instead in terms of cultural codes. He might have gone a step further and conceived humans to be animals who live in and by myths. He then might have come to see his 1975-76 power-talk glossed in rapports de force as one code among many, a set of mythic metaphors, a Geschichte; a pattern that the culture he was part of fell into during a certain period of its history and that he himself fell into in the middle of the 1970s in an exaggerated way. He might have come to see thinking of human relationships as rapports de force as a defective pattern; its prevalence as a problem requiring a solution; its solution as a transformative paradigm shift; he might have come to see the purpose of a badly needed paradigm shift as building a world whose blueprint could be drafted by reading the counter-text implicit in the text of Surveiller et Punir. It would be a world in which people were not treated as machines, a world in which neither people nor the living plant and animal forms that share the planet with us were regarded as objects to be manipulated.
Even though such a world may never fully come into existence, it is nevertheless reasonable to believe that philosophical decisions to frame issues in ethical rather than mechanical terms will cause it come into existence more than it otherwise would. It is also reasonable to believe the converse: we can make ourselves and our planet worse by choosing worse ways of talking.
References
C. Fred Alford, “What Would it Matter if Everything Foucault Said about Prisons were Wrong? Discipline and Punish after Twenty Years,” in Theory and Society. Volume 29, number 1, February 2000. pages 125-146.
Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege. (second edition) Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchandlug, 1853. Volume III, part III.
José Luis Coraggio, La Gente o El Capital. Buenos Aires: Espacio Editores, 2004.
José Luis Coraggio, De la Emergencia a la Estrategia. Buenos Aires: Espacio Editores, 2004.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1986.
Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l´Amitié, Paris: Galilée, 1994.
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “What is Maturity?” in David Hoy (ed.) Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Riane Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations. San Francisco: BK Publications, 2007.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Michel Foucault, La volonté du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.
Michel Foucault, “Sex. Power, and the Politics of Identity,” an interview with B. Gallagher and A. Wilson, Toronto, June, 1982, published in The Advocate number 400, August 7, 1984, pp. 26-30 and 58, reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits. Paris : Gallimard, 1994, pp. 735-746. (1982)
Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la societé. Paris: Gallimard/Seuill, 1997. These are the posthumously published lectures from his course at the Collėge de France in 1976. Foucault made even stronger claims earlier in his as yet unpublished lectures from 1972-73, going so far as to say that the exercise of power in daily life can be considered an extension of civil war. See p.33 of the typewritten notes on these lectures by Jacques Lagrange, available at the Bureau de Mme. Marie Renée-Cazaban at the Site Cardinal Lemoine of the Collège de France. My source for this reference is Professor Marcelo Hoffman of Earlham College.
Michel Foucault, Power\Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77 New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Michel Foucault, Les anormaux: cours au Collège de France, 1974-75. Paris : Gallimard/Seuill, 1999.
Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat
Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man
Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
David Korten, private communication to Riane Eisler, cited by her at p. 163 of her book cited above. (2006)
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Mark Philp, “Foucault on Power: a Problem in Radical Translation,” Political Theory, Volume 11, number 1 (February 1983)
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
Howard Richards, Solidaridad, Participacion, Transparencia. Rosario: Fundacion Estevez Boero, 2007.
Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. pp. 152-184.
Jeffrey Winters, Power in Motion; Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
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