Tag: Foucault

38. Foucault’s Hidden Concern with Ousia

One of Foucault’s signal doctrines, flagged as such by Lynch (see #37), is that power is intrinsically unstable. It is the enactment of force, i.e. of that which puts a body into motion (Lynch p. 32), and force becomes actualized as power when it encounters obstacles (Lynch p. 49). Such actualization can be described as a set of clashes or events, and power is thus

The moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.

Lynch p. 33

Beneath the institutions that constitute a society there thus roils an ever-changing ferment of power relations. But power can also be “institutionally crystallized” (Lynch pp. 31, 93) into a relatively stable site of hegemony or domination. So how does that happen? How do enduring structures arise from the multiple ferments of power relations?

Let us look at one Foucaldian example of such crystallization: the formation of a discipline. One condition for this, says Foucault, is “the constitution of a space, empty and closed, in the interior of which one is going to construct multiplicities” (Securié, Territoire, Population Paris 2004 18-19; my translation). Let us call that which encloses such a space a “wall.” Not all walls, in the case of a discipline, are physical. The psychological formulas which fix some people as “other” and thereby exclude them from a community are, on this reading, walls; but they are conceptual, not physical. So are the cultural differences which define some people as servants of others, even when they inhabit the same bounded space.

In addition to their exclusionary power, a wall ipso facto includes those to whom its structures will apply: to define some bodies as “other” is to define other bodies as “same.” Inclusion, like exclusion, has its evils: the Scots excluded from the Roman Empire by Hadrian’s Wall were freer than the people that wall included,who were subject to a multitude of disciplines exercised by the Roman army.

The construction of a specifically disciplinary wall, we may say, serves two functions with respect to what it includes:

  1. It entraps the bodies to be disciplined. Without the impediment to motion presented by a wall, those bodies could simply move away from the discipline, either from a conscious desire to escape or from some other motive. Without the installation of permanent psychological or social formulae of exclusion, the same could happen.
  2. Any social terrain, to be sure, is for Foucault traversed by a variety of force-relations (Lynch p. 33). In order for an enclosed space to serve as a terrain of domination, however, certain force-relations have to be privileged, so that they come to be exercised by a single, unified component of the whole—call it the “dominator.” Otherwise the force- relations within a given space would compete with each other, and domination would be impeached.

The crystallization of disciplinary power into an institution is thus the introduction of boundary and disposition, two of the three axes of ousiodic domination (# 8), into a field of human interaction. In disciplinary power, the dominator is a unified body of regulations and practices which governs the activities of people who are unable to traverse the wall.

Disciplinary power is not the only kind of power for Foucault, and the need for walls is present in other forms as well. In what Foucault calls “sovereign” power, for example, the dominator is usually a single person, and the wall-function is performed by the boundaries of the territory over which the sovereignty extends (STP 13-19, 94).

Biopower, or governmentality (Lynch pp. 123-126) is exercised, not over territory, but over a “population,” which is a multiplicity of individuals subject to a particular set of causal factors. These can be natural or artificial, and can range from climate and landscape to the layouts of population centers (STP 22-23). The territory on which a population lives is, then, looser and more porous than is the case with sovereign or disciplinary power. But it exists all the same, because the particular set of causal factors that defines a given population does not exist everywhere on earth: different populations are defined by the operation within them of a specific, indeed unique, set of causal factors. Governmental power is thus, like disciplinary and sovereign power, exercised over a limited spatial territory (or territories); and, like them, it crystallizes when a single unified agent—the government—assumes control over those multiple causal factors.

A final, attenuated form of territorial limit is found in pastoral power, which for Foucault is the ancestor of both disciplinary and governmental power. The shepherd’s flock, to be sure, does not occupy a fixed place—it is in movement (STP 146), and so the territory on which a flock finds itself at any given moment is a matter of indifference to the flock. But that does not mean that the flock itself has no boundaries at all. Keeping the flock together, i.e. policing its boundaries, is an important job which falls to a group of workers who are not mentioned by Foucault (or by the Christian texts he cites): sheepdogs. Any sheep who wanders off or falls behind is set upon by these tireless adjuncts, operating under the direction of the shepherd, and is nipped back to the rest of the herd.

In all four of these forms forms of Foucaldian power, then, we find boundaries of some sort, policed in different ways either by a single agent (a discipline or sovereign) or by a set of agents working in cooperation. This contrasts with Derrida, whose denial of boundary relegates his philosophy to textual matters (#36). Foucault, while he occasionally mentions boundaries, does not emphasize them. This prevents him, I suggest, from appreciating the value of his own thought as a series of contestations of social ousiai. Given the centrality of ousia to the history of Western philosophy, this means that Foucault also mistakes the relation of this thought to that history.

37. Foucault’s Post-Cold-War Paradigm

During the Cold War, which lasted for 40 years and has now been over for 30, Western political philosophy took a deeply abstract turn. Sartre attempted to ground radical freedom on the purely empty activity of “nihilation,” consciousness’ constant surpassing of its current situation. Habermas formulated his highly abstract “ideal speech situation.” In the US, Rawls articulated an “original position” defined by the ignorance of those in it of all the concrete facts of their lives.

This abstract turn, I suggest, was pushed by an aspiration to universalism, born of global struggle; it seemed urgent to find principles that everyone, East and West, should live by. But there was a still more urgent, and less philosophical, imperative: winning the Cold War. To that end, philosophers in the West, committed to and financed by their side of the global struggle, formulated a succession of “universal” truths that the Communist East could not accept. Thus, Stalinist societies could hardly accommodate the constant surpassing of present givens of Sartrean nihilation, or the unconstrained speech of Habermas’ ideal, or the centrality of rational choice presented in Rawls. Philosopically at least, they had to give in, refuted by philosophical argumentation. (In fact, of course, world events paid no attention to the philosophers. What refuted the East was not the West’s exemplification of universal truths, but its much higher standard of living and military prowess.)

“Cold War” philosophies, eager for universal validity yet rooted in partisan struggle, postulated a realm of thought unaffected by socio-political pressures—a realm styled a “space of reasons” or an “enclave of freedom.” Only in such an impartial arena could universal truth be won. But the philosophies that confronted each other in that arena all ran into the same problems.

First problem: the “space of reasons” doesn’t exist. We are not able to surpass all givens, or to occupy the Rawlsian original position for more than a few moments at a time. Habermas, perhaps anticipating this problem, insisted that ideal speech was, precisely, an “ideal;” it is not the space of reasons itself, but the idea of it, that grants us whatever objective knowledge and moral justification as we can obtain. But (as Kant would ask), what status can an admitted fiction have when it comes to determining moral behavior?

Second problem: committed to the fiction of an apolitical space of reasons, none of these approaches could reflect on its own origins in Cold War partisanship. The very existence of such origins, in fact, would make it path-dependent, and so call into question its claims to universality. That was why the “space of reasons” came to be postulated in the first place.

Third problem: universality must be purchased with abstraction, so these social philosophies had little to say about the concrete struggles of their time: matters of feminism, racial justice, the collapse of colonialism, and a long list of other struggles were met either with silence or with well-meaning common sense, for which we do not need philosophy. When the Cold War ended, and particular struggles like these replaced the one great global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as the driving forces of history, universality claims became nostalgic, and the space of reasons which was meant to vindicate them became vestigial.

Fourth and Final Problem: the universalism, for all its abstractness, was imperialistic. In the universalistic realm of the space of reasons, gender, color, and class were all bracketed out. The result was regression to traditional defaults: the inhabitants of the “space of reasons” turned out in fact to be, not universal humans (because universals can’t reason or, in fact, do anything), but white guys of a certain age.

The time was ripe for a thinker who denied the common root of these problems—the apolitical space or reasons—and moved philosophy into the center of the new struggles. That thinker was Michel Foucault, who can thus be called the most important political philosopher of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

The contretemps between Foucault and mainstream philosophy was not a debate, but a paradigm shift. As with paradigm-shifts in general, misunderstandings abounded. Adherents of the space of reasons often saw Foucault’s rejection of it as a rejection of knowledge and morality themselves. Foucault’s claim that power is present in all social relations was transmuted into the claim that all social relations can be reduced to power relations. He was then saddled with the view that that resistance to power is impossible, overlooking the fact that he accepts the classical definition of power—that it is the ability to overcome obstacles. Power for Foucault cannot exist without resistance.

The time was ripe for someone to cut through these misunderstandings and to show, in careful detail, why rejecting the space of reasons as Foucault did does not put an end to morality. This was Richard Lynch, on whose Foucault’s Critical Ethics much of the next section will be based.

For the moment, let us learn the lesson of these thinkers and admit that the quest for universality is one of humnaity’s less productive enterprises. What we really want from philosophy is guidance in our lives. For that we need philosophy to deal not in abstract truths, but in individual experiences. Philosophy should, therefore, be more an art than a science.