Michel Foucault 9780754628200, 0754628205

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Michel Foucault

International L ibrary of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought Series Editor: Tom Campbell Titles in the Series: Hannah Arendt Amy Allen

Thomas Paine Bruce Kuklick

James Madison Terence Ball

Max Weber Peter Lass man

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu David Carrithers

Mary Wollstonecraft Jane Moore

Emile Durkheim Roger Cotterrell Vilfredo Pareto Joseph Femia Jean Bodin Julian H. Franklin David Hume Knud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore Edmund Burke Iain Hampsher-Monk Talcott Parsons John Holmwood Thomas Aquinas John Inglis Jurgen Habermas, Volumes I and II Christian Joerges, Klaus Guenther and Camil Ungureanu Aristotle George Klosko G.W.F. Hegel Dudley Knowles

T.H. Green John Morrow Martin Heidegger Stephen Mulhall Jean-Jacques Rousseau Timothy O ’Hagan Michel Foucault David Owen John Rawls David A. Reidy Immanuel Kant Arthur Ripstein Jeremy Bentham Frederick Rosen Theodor Adorno James Schmidt Thomas Hobbes Gabriella Slomp Friedrich Nietzsche Tracy Strong

Michel Foucault

Edited by

David Owen University o f Southampton, UK

O

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © David Owen 2014. For copyright of individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Wherever possible, these reprints are made from a copy of the original printing, but these can themselves be of very variable quality. Whilst the publisher has made every effort to ensure the quality of the reprint, some variability may inevitably remain. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934485 ISBN 9780754628200 (hbk)

Contents A cknowl edgem ents Series Preface Introduction PART I

M ETHODOLOGY

Archaeology 1 Ian Hacking (1979), ‘Michel Foucault’s Immature Science’, Nous, 13, pp. 39-51. 2 Richard Rorty (1986), ‘Foucault and Epistemology’, in D.C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 41^19. 3 Thomas E. Wartenberg (1984), ‘Foucault’s Archaeological Method: A Response to Hacking and Rorty’, Philosophical Forum, 15, pp. 345-64. Genealogy 4 David Owen (2002), ‘Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 216-30 5 Raymond Geuss (2002), ‘Genealogy as Critique’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 209-15. 6 Martin Saar (2002), ‘Genealogy and Subjectivity’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 2 3 1 ^5 . PART II

3 17 27

47 63 71

FREEDOM AND POW ER

7 Charles Taylor (1984), ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory, 12, pp. 152-83. 8 Paul Patton (1989), ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom’, Political Studies, 37, pp. 260-76. 9 Charles Taylor (1989), ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom: A Reply’, Political Studies, 37, pp. 277-81. 10 Paul Patton (1994), ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, Political Theory Newsletter, 6, pp. 60-71. PART III

vii ix xi

89 121 139 145

CRITIQUE AND NORMATIVITY: THE FOUCAULT-HABERMAS DEBATE

11 Thomas McCarthy (1990), ‘The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, Political Theory, 18, pp. 437-69.

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12 James Tully (1999), ‘To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory’, in Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (eds), Foucault contra Habermas: Continuing the Debate, London: Sage, pp. 90-142. PART IV

ON ENLIGHTENM ENT

13 Colin Gordon (1986), ‘Question, Ethos, Event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment’, Economy and Society, 15, pp. 71-87. 14 Amy Allen (2003), ‘Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal’, Constellations, 10, pp. 180-98. PART V

193

249 267

ON POLITICAL REASON

15 Pasquale Pasquino (1993), ‘Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modem Political Theory’, Economy and Society, 22, pp. 77-88. 16 Barry Allen (1991), ‘Government in Foucault’, Canadian Journal o f Philosophy, 21, pp. 421-39. 17 Barry Hindess (2005), ‘Politics as Government: Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Political Reason’, Alternatives, 30, pp. 389^113. 18 Bob Jessop (2007), ‘From Micro-powers to Govemmentality: Foucault’s Work on Statehood, State Formation, Statecraft and State Power’, Political Geography, 26, pp. 34^10. PART VI

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347

357 395 425

ON ETHICS, THE AESTHETICS OF EXISTENCE AND PARRHESIA

22 Christoph Menke (2003), ‘Two Kinds of Practice: On the Relation between Social Discipline and the Aesthetics of Existence’, Constellations, 10, pp. 199-210. 23 Thomas R. Flynn (1985), ‘Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault’, Journal o f Philosophy, 82, pp. 531^10. 24 Jakub Franek (2006), ‘Philosophical Parrhesia as Aesthetics of Existence’, Continental Philosophy Review, 39, pp. 113-34. 25 Nancy Luxon (2004), ‘Truthfulness, Risk, and Trust in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault’, Inquiry, 47, pp. 464-89. Name Index

301

ON LAW

19 Alan Hunt (1992), ‘Foucault’s Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval’, Law and Social Inquiry, 17, pp. 1-38. 20 Victor Tadros (1998), ‘Between Governance and Discipline: The Law and Michel Foucault’, Oxford Journal o f Legal Studies, 18, pp. 75-103. 21 Nikolas Rose and Mariana Valverde (1998), ‘Governed by Law?’, Social and Legal Studies, 7, pp. 541-51. PART VII

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439 451 461 483 509

Acknowledgements Ashgate would like to thank the researchers and contributing authors who provided copies, along with the following for their permission to reprint copyright material. Blackwell Publishing for the essay: David Owen (2002), ‘Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 216-30. Copyright © 2002 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Elsevier Limited for the essay: Bob Jessop (2007), ‘From Micro-powers to Govemmentality: Foucault’s Work on Statehood, State Formation, Statecraft and State Power’, Political Geography, 26, pp. 34^10. Copyright © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. Journal o f Philosophy for the essay: Thomas R. Flynn (1985), ‘Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault’, Journal o f Philosophy, 82, pp. 531^10. Copyright © 1985 The Journal of Philosophy Inc. Oxford University Press for the essay: Victor Tadros (1998), ‘Between Governance and Discipline: The Law and Michel Foucault’, Oxford Journal o f Legal Studies, 18, pp. 75-103. Paul Patton for the essay: Paul Patton (1994), ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, Political Theory Newsletter, 6, pp. 60-71. SAGE Publications for the essays: Charles Taylor (1984), ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, Political Theory, 12, pp. 152-83. Copyright © 1984 SAGE Publications, Inc.; Thomas McCarthy (1990), ‘The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School’, Political Theory, 18, pp. 437-69. Copyright © 1990 SAGE Publications, Inc.; James Tully (1999), ‘To Think and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory’, in Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (eds), Foucault contra Habermas: Continuing the Debate, London: Sage, pp. 90-142. Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications, Inc.; Barry Hindess (2005), ‘Politics as Government: Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Political Reason’, Alternatives, 30, pp. 389^113; Nikolas Rose and Mariana Valverde (1998), ‘Governed by Law?’, Social and Legal Studies, 7, pp. 541-51. Copyright © 1998 Sage Publications. Springer for the essay: Jakub Franek (2006), ‘Philosophical Parrhesia as Aesthetics of Existence’, Continental Philosophy Review, 39, pp. 113-34. Copyright © 2006 Springer. Taylor & Francis for the essays: Colin Gordon (1986), ‘Question, Ethos, Event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment’, Economy and Society, 15, pp. 71-87. Copyright © 1986 Routledge and Kegan Paul; Pasquale Pasquino (1993), ‘Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modem Political Theory’, Economy and Society, 22, pp. 77-88. Copyright © 1993 Routledge and Kegan Paul; Barry Allen (1991), ‘Government in Foucault’, Canadian Journal o f Philosophy, 21, pp. 421-39; Nancy Luxon (2004), ‘Truthfulness, Risk, and Trust

Michel Foucault

in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault’, Inquiry, 47, pp. 464-89. Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. for the essays: Ian Hacking (1979), ‘Michel Foucault’s Immature Science’, Nous, 13, pp. 39-51. Copyright © 1979 by Indiana University. Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd; Richard Rorty (1986), ‘Foucault and Epistemology’, in D.C. Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 41^19. Copyright © 1986 Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Thomas E. Wartenberg (1984), ‘Foucault’s Archaeological Method: A Response to Hacking and Rorty’, Philosophical Forum, 15, pp. 345-64. Copyright © 1984 Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Raymond Geuss (2002), ‘Genealogy as Critique’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 209-15. Copyright © 2002 Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Martin Saar (2002), ‘Genealogy and Subjectivity’, European Journal o f Philosophy, 10, pp. 231^15. Copyright © 2002 Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Paul Patton (1989), ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom’, Political Studies, 37, pp. 260-76. Copyright © 1989 Political Studies; Charles Taylor (1989), ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom: A Reply’, Political Studies, 37, pp. 277-81. Copyright © 1989 Political Studies; Amy Allen (2003), ‘Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal’, Constellations, 10, pp. 180-98. Copyright © 2003 Blackwell Publishers Ltd; Alan Hunt (1992), ‘Foucault’s Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval’, Law and Social Inquiry, 17, pp. 1-38. Copyright © 1992 American Bar Foundation; Christoph Menke (2003), ‘Two Kinds of Practice: On the Relation between Social Discipline and the Aesthetics ofExistence’, Constellations, 10, pp. 199-210. Copyright © 2003 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Publisher’s Note The material in this volume has been reproduced using the facsimile method. This means we can retain the original pagination to facilitate easy and correct citation of the original essays. It also explains the variety of typefaces, page layouts and numbering.

Series Preface The International Library of Essays in the History of Social and Political Thought brings together collections of important essays dealing with the work of major figures in the history of social and political thought. The aim is to make accessible the complete text with the original pagination of those essays that should be read by all scholars working in that field. In each case, the selection is made from the extensive available literature by an established expert who has a keen sense of the continuing relevance of the history of social and political thought for contemporary theory and practice. The selection is made on the basis of the quality and enduring significance of the essays in question. Every volume has an introduction that places the selection made in the context of the wider literature, the historical period, the contemporary state of scholarship and the editor’s particular interests. TOM CAMPBELL Series Editor Centrefor Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) Charles Sturt University Canberra

Introduction This introduction performs two roles. In the first, and longer, part, I provide an overview of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory that draws attention to, and elucidates, its main features. In the second part, I offer an overview of the organization of the volume and the essays selected.

I The work of Michel Foucault is characterized by an ethos of self-critical reflection and conceptual experimentation which continually seeks to transform the limits of its thinking and to develop its understanding of its own activity. This ethos is given early expression in The Archaeology o f Knowledge when Foucault comments: Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our police and bureaucrats to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (1972 [1969], p. 17)

This refusal of a fixed identity continues to pervade the development of Foucault’s philosophy. From his early work on configurations of knowledge concerning madness, medicine and the human sciences to his explorations of power-knowledge relations in respect of practices of punishment, constructions of sex and sexuality, and governmental rationalities to his final reflections on formations of ethical subjectivity in ancient Greek and Roman society, Foucault’s ‘philosophical exercises’ continued to develop their form of analysis and to recontextualize the philosophical problematics in which they engaged. Reflecting on this feature of his work in the introduction to The Use o f Pleasure, Foucault remarks: There is irony in these efforts one makes to alter one’s way of looking at things, to change the boundaries of what one knows and to venture out a ways from there. Did mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. (1985 [1984], p. 11)

Given these comments, this overview will address Foucault’s work from the vantage point of its final self-understanding, using Foucault’s late reflections on his activity as our guide to grasping the meaning and purpose of his ‘philosophical exercises’. We can begin by attending to Foucault’s reflections on the character and tasks of modem philosophy. What is Enlightenment? Kant’s essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, published in the Berlinische Monatschrift in November 1784, exercises a remarkable pull on Foucault’s thinking, being addressed on three occasions from 1978 to 1984 (Schmidt and Wartenberg, 1994). In the third of his lectures on this essay, Foucault asks us to imagine that the Berlinische

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Monatschrift still exists and poses for its contemporary readers the question 4What is modem philosophy?’ Foucault suggests the following response: ‘modem philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist AufklaungT (1984a, p. 32). On Foucault’s account, this question haunts modem philosophy; neither answered nor exorcized, it calls on us to return to it. Perhaps then it should not surprise us that it is in taking up the question of Enlightenment that Foucault provides us with his clearest statement of his own philosophical work and of his understanding of the tasks of modem philosophy. The starting point of Foucault argument is that Kant’s text involves a form of reflection on the present which cannot be captured by reference to the three main forms of such reflection within the philosophical tradition. Each of these dominant modes of reflection on the present ‘involved the positing of an objective totality that oriented the task of thinking’ (Rabinow, 1994, p. 200): 1

2 3

The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic event. [An Age] The present may interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming event. [A Threshold] The present may ... be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. [An Achievement] (Foucault, 1984a, pp. 33-34; Rabinow, 1994, p. 200)

By contrast, Foucault argues, Kant’s text on Enlightenment does not seek to grasp the present in terms of an objective totality but rather in terms of difference: ‘What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (1984a, p. 34). For Foucault, it is this performance of a relation to the present located ‘at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history’ which marks the character of Kant’s text. Consequently, although Foucault enters into a brief analysis of the argument of Kant’s text in terms of its understanding of Enlightenment as a way out of our self-imposed immaturity (through the reliance of individuals on their own understanding), what primarily engages him about this text is not what it says about Enlightenment but what it shows: ‘It is in the reflection on “today” as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie’ (1984a, p. 38). The character of the form of reflection on the present exhibited in Kant’s text can be specified in terms of three axes: 1 2

3

An historical account of the present in terms of the practical conditions of possibility of producing ourselves as autonomous subjects. A critical account of the present in terms of the potentials for transforming the practical conditions of possibility of producing ourselves as autonomous subjects which are immanent in the present. An act performed on the present which transforms the practical conditions of possibility of producing ourselves as autonomous subjects and exhibits Kant’s activity of producing himself as an autonomous subject.

While the first two axes highlight the historical-critical dimension of Kant’s text, the third points out that Kant’s words are also deeds - that is, that Kant’s activity is both an intervention

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into the public sphere which acts on the constitution of the present and a form of transformative philosophical labour on himself as an individual situated in this present. At this point, Foucault reveals the significance of this form of reflection for his concerns by suggesting that this way of analysing Kant’s text allows us to ‘recognize a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity’ (1984a, p. 38). This reconceptualization of modernity as ethos rather than as epoch is elaborated by juxtaposing Kant’s reflections on the question of Enlightenment and Baudelaire’s reflections on modernity as an attitude of ironic heroization towards the present. For Baudelairean modernity, Foucault argues, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (1984a, p. 41)

Moreover, the expression of the attitude of modernity in the practice of transforming the reality of the present does not simply disclose itself in terms of the exercise of individual or collective agency on a more or less intransigent world; on the contrary, Foucault suggests that this ethos involves a certain rapport a soi, a relation of the self to itself, in which the individual acts on him- or herself as a piece of present reality: ‘it is to take oneself as the object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme’ (1984a, p. 41). In juxtaposing Kant and Baudelaire, Foucault is not asserting the identity of their positions; on the contrary, he is simply proposing that their modes of reflection exhibit a common ethos which can be characterized in terms of ‘the attitude of modernity’. Schematically, one might suggest that the ethos of ironic heroization involves a repetition of the ethos of criticalhistorical reflection by locating our relationship to the present and to ourselves in terms of a specification and transformation of the conditions of possibility of producing ourselves as autonomous subjects. The salience of this juxtaposition, on Foucault’s account, is to suggest that our relationship to the Enlightenment does not consist in faithfulness ‘to its doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude [of modernity] - that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’ (1984a, p. 42). Foucault draws two consequences from this reading of our relationship to the Enlightenment which frame his own philosophical activity. The first point towards which Foucault directs our attention is to suggest that this understanding of our relation to the Enlightenment entails a disjuncture between the topics of Enlightenment and humanism. On the one hand, the Enlightenment is an ensemble of events and historical processes which is situated at a certain juncture in European history and involves a multiplicity of elements with regard to which Foucault is drawing our attention to one element, a certain manner of doing philosophy. On the other hand, humanism is a thematic which has emerged at various times through European history in a plurality of forms. Moreover, Foucault suggests that since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science, or politics. Humanism serves to colour and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse. (1984a, p. 44)

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In this context, it is not a question of rejecting humanism as such, but of noting the tension between recourse to ‘conceptions of man’ and the ethos of the Enlightenment in which the attempt to determine the essential nature and necessary limits of man’s being is opposed ‘by the principle of critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 44). Thus, it is neither a question of being either for or against humanism - it is too historically diverse for such an either/or to be meaningful - nor a question of being either for or against Enlightenment - this either/or confuses an ensemble of events and processes with a commitment to humanism - rather it is a question of both rejecting a form of analysis predicated on recourse to a conception of man One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework (Foucault, 1984b, p. 59; see also Foucault, 1988a, p. 50)

- and adopting the philosophical ethos of Enlightenment as ‘a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy’. With this clarification of the topics of Enlightenment and humanism in place, Foucault draws out the second consequence of his understanding of our relationship to the Enlightenment in terms of the attitude of modernity by reference to its implication for the project of critique. The form of the philosophical ethos which Foucault has been sketching is specified in terms of a principle of critique which is ‘oriented towards the “contemporary limits of the necessary,” that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’ (1984a, p. 43). In other words, the character of this philosophical ethos is that of a 'limit-attitude' in which criticism takes the form ‘of analyzing and reflecting upon limits’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 45). However, insofar as this critique dispenses with the constituent subject, it must be distinguished from the form of critical reflection on limits practised by Kant in his three Critiques'. if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge had to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. (Foucault, 1984a, p. 45)

Thus the purpose of critique is not to provide an answer to the question ‘What is Man?’ and the related questions which animate Kant’s project in the three Critiques'. What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for? Rather it is directed to the question of how we can be otherwise than we are, of locating what are given to us as limits and calling these boundaries into question. As such this practical critique takes the form of a critical ontology o f ourselves which seeks to call what we are into question by reflecting on how we have become what we are in order to open the possibility of being otherwise than we are. As Tully comments: ‘For Foucault, it is an important convention of the practice of freedom that we are able to call into question what is given as a bound of reason’ (1989, p. 188); for in calling a convention or boundary into question, we are both exercising freedom (a reflective transgression which takes the form of a practical critique) and opening a space for the exercise of freedom (a possible transgression and transformation of what we are). Consequently, Foucault characterizes the

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philosophical ethos which is immanent in a critical ontology of ourselves as 4a historicopractical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ (1984a, p. 47). In summary, then, it is through this location of his work in relation to the philosophical ethos elaborated in Kant and Baudelaire that Foucault connects his philosophical exercises to the Enlightenment and to our modernity, and clarifies the relationship between his conception of critique and human freedom, in terms of 4a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (1984a, p. 50). However, at this juncture, we should note that the understanding of the activity of critique which Foucault elaborates in terms of an experimental calling into question of the bounds of reason entails an abandonment of the project of total critique and, concomitantly, the radically utopian aspirations, the longing for total revolution, characteristic of this project. The relevant point to bear in mind is simply that a genealogical investigation as an exercise in the critical ontology of ourselves calls a convention (or related set of conventions) which is partially constitutive of our being in the present into question through a historical analysis of its emergence, entrenchment and effects; it does not call all conventions into question (such a project is, strictly speaking, unintelligible) and it recognizes that the transgression of a convention typically involves the emergence of a different convention. As such, there neither is nor can there be any total or final critique: It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again. (Foucault, 1984a, p. 47)

For Foucault, no doubt, reflection on the practical effects of various projects of total critique in the twentieth century provide pertinent reminders of the character of such enterprises; not least in their necessary claim to provide the form of critical practice and, consequently, to exclude other voices within the republic of practices of critical reflection (Tully, 1989). However, while it is certainly the case that Foucault’s own practice does not involve any claim to be the only form of critical reflection available to us or, indeed, to be a privileged form of critical reflection in any a priori sense, the point I want to draw attention to at this juncture is simply that, for Foucault, humanity’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity involves the recognition of the situated partiality of its critical reflections; the maturity of critique is disclosed in its recognition that it is always already beginning again. The Idea o f a Critical Ontology o f Ourselves What is the character of a critical ontology of ourselves? How does Foucault sketch this 'practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression’? It is a consequence of Foucault’s transformation of the Kantian concern with necessary limits into a practical questioning of the necessity of certain limits ‘that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects

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of what we are doing, thinking, saying’ (1984a, p. 46). This historical investigation will be ‘genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 46). We will take up the topics of archaeology and genealogy in the following section, but we can give this form of critique some further specification by attending to what Foucault refers to as the stakes, the homogeneity, the systematicity and the generality of this practice of critical reflection: 1

2

3 4

Its stakes refers to the ‘the paradox of the relations of capacity and power’ and poses the question: ‘How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 48). Its homogeneity refers to its focus on practices of human beings in terms of ‘the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things ... and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 48). Its systematicity refers to the three axes of its analysis, namely knowledge, power and ethics. Its generality refers to the enduring significance of certain topics (for example, madness, health, crime and sex) in the history of Western societies and locates ‘[the] study of (modes of) problematisation ... [as] the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 49).

Given these features, we can identify the tasks of clarifying Foucault’s conception of critique as the following: 1

2

3 4

The relationship between the study of ‘problematizations’ and the archaeological method and genealogical design of the critical ontology of ourselves as attending to the history of our practices. The clarification of the axes of this investigation of how we become what we are through an analysis of our practices which is articulated through the concepts of power, knowledge and ethics. A focus on Foucault’s account of the paradox of power and capabilities in the present. An examination of the possibilities for disconnecting the growth of capabilities from the intensification of power relations which are immanent in the present - and the relationship of such possibilities to Foucault’s practice of critical reflection.

It is these specific tasks which are taken up in the following four sections. Archaeology, Genealogy and Problematizations An initial specification of the methodological structure of Foucault’s critical project is provided by the description of this activity already cited as ‘genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method’ (1984a, p. 46): Archaeological - and not transcendental - in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will

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be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. (1984a, p. 46)

To clarify what is involved in Foucault’s invocations of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’ and their relations to one another is the task of this section. However, to do this, we need to introduce a further concept, that of ‘problematization’. The significance of the concept of problematization for Foucault is given initial expression in a review essay on Deleuze entitled ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ published in 1970: The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence; affirmative thought whose instrument is disjunction; thought of the multiple - of the nomadic and dispersed multiplicity that is not limited or confined by the constraints of similarity ... What is the answer to the question? The problem. How is the problem resolved? By displacing the question ... We must think problematically rather than question and answer dialectically. (1977a [1970], pp. 185-86)

This concern with ‘thinking problematically’ returns to the forefront of Foucault’s work in the early 1980s both in terms of his focus of thinking ‘today’ as difference in history and, more specifically, in terms of a focus on ‘the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought, - and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed’ (1985 [1984], p. 11). The role of the archaeological method of critique is to facilitate an analysis of the form of a given problematization by attending to discourse that is, the constitution of ‘an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)’ (Foucault, 1988b [1984], p. 257) - while the purpose of the genealogical design of critique is to enable an analysis of the discursive and non-discursive practices which act as the conditions of formation of a given problematization and the ways in which the formation of a problematization acts to modify the practices out of which it emerges (Foucault, 1985 [1984], pp. 11-12). To clarify this distinction in relation to the analyses carried out in Madness and Civilisation (1965 [1961]), The Birth o f the Clinic (1973 [1963]), The Order o f Things (1970 [1966]) and Discipline and Punish (1977b [1975]), Foucault offers the following gloss: There was the problematization of madness and illness arising out of social and medical practices and defining a certain pattern of ‘normalization’; a problematization of life, language, and labor in discursive practices that conformed to certain ‘epistemic’ rules; and a problematization of crime and criminal behavior emerging from certain punitive practices conforming to a ‘disciplinary’ model. (1985 [1984], p. 12)

Given this overview of his project, how does Foucault articulate the archaeological method and genealogical design of his practice of critical reflection? The specific character of Foucault’s archaeological method, which was given formal, methodological expression in The Archaeology o f Knowledge (1972 [1969]) remains a matter of controversy (cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Gutting, 1989). The crux of this debate concerns whether or not Foucault’s work at this juncture fails to adequately think through the relationship of discursive and non-discursive practices; thus, for example, Dreyfus and Rabinow argue that Foucault appears both to agree with Heidegger and Wittgenstein that ‘the

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nondiscursive practices provide the horizon, background, or element in which the choice of the discursive strategy is intelligible’ and, simultaneously, to come to the opposite conclusion by holding to the autonomy of discourse and arguing that ‘the nondiscursive practices are elements which discursive practices take up and transform’ (1982, p. 77). However, fascinating though this debate is, it need not concern us in this introduction since Foucault’s genealogical work from the mid-1970s onwards aligns itself with the arguments of Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982) and consequently respecifies archaeology in terms of a focus on ‘the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do’ (Foucault, 1984a, p. 46). In this context, archaeology attends to the form of a problematization, while genealogy attends to the formation of a problematization and the transformative effects which it engenders. In other words, archaeology is concerned with the form of ‘games of truth’ (jeux de verite), an analysis articulated through the concepts of episteme and archive; while genealogy analyses the relationship between les jeux de verite, the ways in which we conceptualize the real (discursive practices) and the conducting of our conduct (power and ethics) - that is, the ways in which we govern the real (non-discursive practices), which is articulated through the concept of dispositif However, before we turn to the notions of episteme, archive and dispositif we need to note and clarify the central roles played by the concepts of ‘discourse’ and ‘practices’ in this mode of analysis. The concept of discourse deployed by Foucault can be grasped by reference to Heidegger’s usage (as neatly glossed by Mulhall): Discourse, understood as the articulation of intelligibility, is what permits the disclosedness of entities within-the-world and thus founds the comprehending perception of entities as ready-to-hand; it is the necessary structure of the field of meaning and so of comprehending something as something. (Mulhall, 1995, p. 70)

Grasped in this light, discourse reveals the form of the subject and the object of knowledge. By contrast, Foucault uses the concept of ‘practices’ in a way analogous to Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language-games’ to refer to ways of doing things - that are more or less regulated, more or less conscious, more or less goaloriented, through which one can grasp the lineaments both of what was constituted as real for those who were attempting to conceptualize and govern it, and of the way in which those same people constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analyzing, and ultimately modifying the real. (‘Florence,’ [Foucault], 1994 [1984], p. 318)

Understood in this way, it is a focus on practices ‘understood simultaneously as modes of acting and of thinking’ - ways of thinking, saying and doing things - which render intelligible ‘a correlative constitution of the subject and the object’ (‘Florence’ [Foucault], 1994 [1984], p. 318). Bearing these concepts in mind, let us turn to the concepts of archive, episteme and dispositif The relationship between the concept of archive and the concept of episteme can be grasped in terms of the relation between the totality of discursive relations and a specific set of discursive relations. Thus, Foucault defines the archive as ‘the general system o f the formation and transformation o f statements' (1972 [1969], p. 130); in characterizing this concept, Foucault comments:

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We are now dealing with a complex volume in which heterogeneous regions are differentiated or deployed in accordance with specific rules and practices which cannot be superposed. (1972 [1969], p. 128)

By contrast, the episteme attends to specific regions within this complex volume in terms of ‘the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalised systems’ (Foucault, 1972 [1969], p. 191). Both of these concepts are related by Foucault to that of ‘historical a priori\ by which slightly paradoxical phrase Foucault refers to the historical specificity of particular forms of epistemic ‘grammar’ which govern the realm of what may intelligibly be up for grabs as true or false. The position Foucault elaborates can be elucidated by reference to Wittgenstein’s discussion of similar issues in On Certainty insofar as we can grasp the episteme in terms of ‘the inherited background against which I distinguish true and false’ (1969, §94) - wherein this ‘inherited background’ consists in a ‘totality of judgements’ (1969, §140) which act as principles of judgement (1969, § 124). Foucault’s insistence on the historical specificity of these judgements which act as principles of judgement - that is, their formation and transformation over time - is captured by Wittgenstein’s river metaphor: The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of the rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid. (1969, $95-96)

Whereas the episteme refers to that part of our mythology concerned with the true-or-false, the archive refers to our mythology as a whole. However, whether or not one identifies Foucault’s argument with that of Wittgenstein, it seems reasonable to suggest that the river metaphor elucidates the apparently paradoxical character of the idea of a ‘historical a priori’ in terms of its role in Foucault’s philosophy. However, if archaeology attends to discourse by simply attempting to identify the ‘grammar’ of discourse via the concepts of episteme and archive, it is precisely for this reason that it cannot give us an account of the practices on the basis of which this ‘grammar’ is formed and transformed over time. To elucidate this aspect of his analysis, we can attend to Foucault’s concept of dispositif, which can be specified as a heterogeneous multilinear ensemble of discursive and non-discursive elements - that is, a practice or regime of practices (Deleuze, 1992). By introducing this concept, Foucault’s point is simply that our ways of reflecting on the world are rooted in our ways of acting in the world - that is, the giving of grounds for propositions comes to an end not in an ungrounded proposition, but in an ungrounded way of acting (Wittgenstein, 1969, §110). Thus, by contrast to the concepts of archive and episteme, the concept of dispositif analyses practices as ways of thinking and acting in order to grasp the formation of problematizations and to illuminate their effects. But what is involved in such an analysis? In ‘Questions of Method’, an interview from 1980, Foucault offers the following remark:

Michel Foucault To analyze ‘regimes of practices’ means to analyze programmes of conduct which have both prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of ‘jurisdiction’) and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of ‘veridiction’). (Foucault, 1991 [1980], p. 75)

Consequently, insofar as it is the analysis of practices that makes intelligible the correlative constitution of the subject and the object, it is by attending to the ‘veridicative’ and ‘jurisdicative’ aspects of our practices - and their relations - that this correlative constitution can be disclosed. It is to accomplish this genealogical task that Foucault operates his analysis along three axes: knowledge (how we recognize and reflect on ourselves and others), power (how we conduct the conduct of others) and ethics (how we conduct our own conduct). Thus, it is to the clarification of this conceptual apparatus that we now turn. Knowledge, Power and Ethics Foucault often frames his engagement with questions of knowledge in terms of the phrase ‘the politics of truth’ by which he refers to the types of discourses which [a society] accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (1984b, p. 73)

Whereas archaeology attends to the ‘grammar’ of our discourses of true and false, Foucault’s genealogical concern with the ‘politics of truth’ draws attention to the ways in which forms of knowledge are constituted through practices of knowledge-production, our epistemic language-games or discursive practices. In this respect we can point to two aspects of Foucault’s concern with knowledge: 1

2

The ways in which a given epistemic field structures consciousness (our capacity to recognize and reflect on others) in terms of criteria governing what is constituted as an object of knowledge, how we reflect on objects of knowledge and what is the telos of the forms of knowledge which emerge within this epistemic field. Thus, for example, in analysing the modem episteme which governs the discourses of life, labour and language in The Order o f Things, Foucault notes the emergence of ‘Man’ as an object of knowledge wherein reflection is structured in terms of the ‘analytic of finitude’ and this reflection is oriented to thinking ‘the identity and differences of the positivities, and their foundation, within the figure of the Same’ (1970 [1966], p. 315). The meaning of this claim concerning the character of this modem episteme will be taken up in the following section; however, for the moment it is simply relevant to note the threefold structure of epistemic discourses. The ways in which the production and reproduction of an epistemic field involves criteria governing the authorization, status and role of those who are charged with speaking the tmth. Thus, in analysing punitive practices in Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes how the development of the human sciences involved the emergence of professionaldisciplinary criteria of authorization, the status of ‘expert’ and the role of judging normality.

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How do these aspects of Foucault’s analysis of knowledge relate to the analysis of power and ethics? Foucault presents his concept of power as 4a mode of action on the actions of others’ which seeks to govern the conduct of others - that is, ‘to structure the field of possible actions of others’ (1982, p. 221). This conceptualization of power entails ‘there cannot be a society without power relations’ which is not to say ‘either that whose which are established are necessary, or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 221). This is not least since Foucault also points out that power, in the sense in which he uses the term, can be exercised ‘only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free’ (1982, p. 221) - that is, exercises of power can only act to modify the actions of human subjects insofar as they have the capacity to act in various ways, including that of resisting the modification of their actions (Patton, 1994, pp. 62-63). We should note with respect to power relations that Foucault introduces the concept ‘domination’ to refer to the establishment of ‘stable and asymmetrical systems of power relations’ in which ‘the possibility of effective resistance has been removed’ (Patton, 1994, p. 64) - that is, where those who are subject to constraints cannot transform the system of constraints to which they are subject, and resistance is possible only as the limit-gestures of refusal. If this account sets out Foucault’s concept of power, what of his concept of ethics? I have focused on the concept of power because the concept of ethics simply refers to the exercise of power over oneself rather than others and, thus, does not require a separate conceptual specification beyond this point. The relationship between power, ethics and Foucault’s analysis of knowledge becomes apparent when we ask what is involved in exercises of power over others or oneself. The crucial point for clarifying this relationship is that insofar as relations of ethics are simply relations of power exercised by the self over itself, Foucault’s ‘analytic’ for disclosing the structure of ethical relations applies equally to power relations. This analytics involves four elements: 1 2 3 4

A determination of the object of power or ethical relations. The mode of recognition of a practical rule and of reflection on one’s relationship to it (ethics) or on the other’s relationship to it (power). The self-directed or other-directed performance of a set of ascetic practices. The telos of power relations or relations of ethics. (Foucault, 1985 [1984], pp. 26-28)

With respect to the first aspect of Foucault’s analysis of relations of knowledge in terms of their epistemic grammar (that is, object, mode of reflection and telos), this analytics illustrates that power relations and ethical self-relations involve an immanent relationship with an epistemic field with respect to (1), (2) and (4) - that is, the object, mode of reflection and telos of power relations or ethical self-relations. In other words, ‘there is no power [or ethical] relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power [and ethical] relations’ (Foucault, 1977b [1975], p. 27). With regard to the second aspect of Foucault’s analysis of relations of knowledge in terms of the production of an epistemic field, this analytics illustrates that power relations and ethical self-relations involve an immanent relation to (3) - that is, the ascetic practices which express (2) in working on (1) in order to accomplish (4) - since the authority

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of the claim of particular ascetic practices to perform their task is predicated on the practical judgement of those who are authorized to speak the truth. Thinking through this relationship of knowledge, power and ethics, we can summarize Foucault’s position as giving us an account of the formation of a problematization at the level of discourse and the effects of this problematization on our practices predicated on a general recognition that the actual forms of knowledge through which we recognize and reflect on ourselves and others as subjects of knowledge governs the possible ways in which we act on ourselves (ethics) and others (power), while the actual ways in which we act on ourselves (ethics) and others (power) governs the possible ways in which we can recognize and reflect on ourselves and others. Genealogy traces this interplay of possibility and actuality in terms of the complex articulation of knowledge, power and ethics - the ways in which we think and act - within our social practices. There are three further points we should introduce in this context. First, the relationship of truth and the exercise of power over ourselves and others is dynamic (Rouse, 1994). It involves the continuing elaboration of forms of knowledge and exercises of power/ethics both in terms of the interest in ever more complete forms of knowledge and more effective technologies of power/ethics and in terms of the changing conditions of worldly activity which are, at least partly, the products of the success or failure of ascetic practices to achieve their ends. Second, given the immanent relation between power and knowledge, the establishment and maintenance of stable and asymmetrical system of power relations (that is, a state of domination) over a given domain entails the stable production and reproduction of a field of knowledge and, concomitantly, of the authority of those charged with the production and application of truth. The final, related, point is that since the maintenance of a state of domination requires the maintenance of a ‘regime of truth’ within which those subject to domination reflect on themselves in particular ways that make possible their domination, it follows that critical reflection on the regime of truth which supports a state of domination provides conditions of possibility for ‘effective resistance’ to this state of domination. Such critical reflection can operate at three levels: 1 2 3

The problematization of the ascetic practices through which the power relations which constitute a state of domination are practically exercised. The problematization of the forms of knowledge through which the power relations constitutive of a state of domination are articulated. The problematization of the epistemic grammar through which the power relations constitutive of a state of domination become possible.

The movement from (1) to (3) marks the increasing depth of critical reflection and, concomitantly, the development of the transformative potential of the resistance for which such reflection acts as conditions of possibility. Foucault’s own concern with exemplifying the third of these levels of critique is expressed in the essay ‘Practicing Criticism’ published in 1981:

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A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept r e s t... In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation. On the other hand, as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible. (1988c [1980], pp. 154-55)

Thus, whereas the first and second levels of critique remain within a regime of truth and call for new and better ascetic practices and new and better forms of knowledge respectively, it is the calling into question of the regime of truth itself which opens up the possibility of transforming the grammar of our being. At this juncture, let us turn to the regime of truth (scientific humanism) and the modality of power and ethics (bio-power) which characterize our present and exhibit the paradox of capabilities and power which Foucault seeks to call into question. Aspects o f a Critical Ontology o f the Present In Discipline and Punish and The History o f Sexuality: Volume 7, Foucault presents two exemplars - the panopticon and the confessional - of an emerging modality of power which conducts the conduct of individuals and collectivities through a scientific discourse of norms. Foucault locates the constitution of panoptic and confessional technologies as exemplars of modem power in terms of the development of a political rationality which combines a secular individualizing principle of pastorship (the shepherd-flock game) with a rational totalizing principle of statehood (the city-citizen game), wherein this political rationality is identified as developing in the context of a problematic of governance which characterizes the emergence of the modem state (1982, 1988d [1979], 1991b [1978]). In order to clarify the problem posed by bio-power and scientific humanism for human autonomy, we can begin by focusing on these exemplars and the kinds of practices and discourses they involve. To initiate this discussion we can note that panoptic and confessional technologies link individualization and totalization at the level of knowledge through the construction of ‘types’ such as the delinquent and the hysterical woman by reference to a norm, where the construction of such types marks the intersection of tactics of individualization (for example, the case history) and of totalization (for example, statistics). It may be noted further that the construction of types through these technologies itself allows for an ever-increasing refinement of these technologies through the proliferation of types of types, for example Ferrus’ classification of types of delinquent (Foucault, 1977b [1975], pp. 253-56). This ‘feedback’ feature of panoptic and confessional technologies emerges when we note that, through the construction of types, both of these technologies link individualization and totalization at the level of practice insofar as they function as ‘laboratories of power’ instituting regimes of discipline through which regulatory controls are articulated, while these regimes themselves re-articulate the domain of regulation. However, the constitution of the panopticon and the confessional as exemplary diagrams of power within the political rationality which Foucault terms ‘bio-power’ should not cause us to overlook their differences in terms of the relationship between the forms of disciplinary practice

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through which they operate and the forms of knowledge they generate (and which articulate their operation). In the case of panoptic technologies, the disciplinary focus is provided by the body as subject to causative processes such that abnormal or dysfunctional elements within the constitution of an individual’s nature may be overcome or re-aligned through regimes of training. In other words, this technology operates through the external environment of the individual and constitutes a form of knowledge that specifies the individual as a determined object. In the case of confessional technologies, the disciplinary focus is provided by the self as the site of meaning such that abnormal or dysfunctional elements within the constitution of an individual’s identity may be overcome or re-aligned through regimes of interpretation. In other words, this technology operates through the internal environment of the individual and acts to produce a form of knowledge that specifies the individual as a free subject. Thus, the figure of knowable man is constituted as (determined/known) object and (free/knowing) subject through panoptic and confessional technologies respectively; while the institutional entrenchment and elaboration of these technologies provide the loci of emergence of the structural and interpretive human sciences respectively. On this account, the practices and techniques of bio-power serve to constitute the epistemological grammar of scientific humanism, yet we must also note that the development of scientific humanist knowledges secures the spread of bio-power. This reciprocal relation becomes apparent when we reflect on the scientific humanist question ‘What is Man?’ as providing an epistemic imperative which is simultaneously an ethical and political imperative. The epistemic imperative manifests itself in the paradoxical task of modem thought as the attempt to think ‘the identity and difference of the positivities, and of their foundation, within the figure of the Same’ (Foucault, 1970 [1966], p. 315). In The Order o f Things, Foucault suggests that this task is articulated through three doubles - the transcendental/empirical, the cogitolunthought, the retreat and return of the origin - which repeat in turn the epistemic instability of the figure of ‘Man’. Yet the attempt to think the transcendental/empirical double in which ‘Man’ both constitutes the phenomenal world and is himself constituted as phenomenon is also the attempt to think ‘Man’as both lawgiver and subject of law; the epistemic imperative to reconcile the transcendental and the empirical is refigured as the ethical and political imperative of realizing autonomy - that is, overcoming heteronomy. Similarly, the attempt to think the cog/fo/unthought double in which ‘Man’ both appears as ‘an experiencing subject and the never fully understood (indeed, always somehow misunderstood) object of the experience’ (Gutting, 1989, p. 203) is also the attempt to think ‘Man’ as both authentic and alienated (inauthentic); the epistemic imperative to think the unthought is refigured as the ethical and political imperative of overcoming alienation. Foucault comments: the whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the unthought - of reflecting the contents of the In-itselfin the form of the For-itself of ending man’s alienation by reconciling him with his own essence, of making explicit the horizon that provides experience with its background of immediate and disarmed proof, of lifting the veil of the Unconscious. (1970 [1966], p. 327)

In both cases, the political correlate to the epistemic imperative involves an account of power. In recognizing ‘Man’ as both lawgiver and subject of law, the political imperative towards autonomy is articulated through a juridical understanding of power as illegitimate (that is, heteronomous) constraint. In situating ‘Man’ as both authentic and alienated, the political imperative towards autonomy is articulated through a radical understanding of power

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as alienating (that is, heteronomous) constraint. Moreover, we may also note that in both instances the relationship between epistemic imperative and its political correlate involves a commitment to the radical disjunction of truth and power insofar as both accounts predicate truth on autonomy and identify power with heteronomy. How though does this epistemicpolitical conjuncture (and the accounts of power which emerge within it) articulate and entrench the practical technologies of bio-power? On Foucault’s account, the two central features of scientific humanism as an epistemicpolitical project are, first, that because it posits the radical disjuncture of truth and power, scientific humanism elides those exercises of power that operate through truth or, more precisely, through the human sciences and, second, that because scientific humanism identifies truth and autonomy, it elaborates ethical relations in which the achievement of autonomy is tied to obedience to the authority of truth and, concomitantly, the reduction of political judgement to the technical deliberation of experts. The consequences of this ‘double bind’ are made manifest in Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. In this hypothesis, the identification of power as that which represses our authentic (sexual) identity produces a politics of resistance which takes the form of an endless desire for liberation which, in turn, calls for ever deeper and more refined confessional techniques; yet it is precisely these techniques for constituting ourselves as authentic beings which enable the normalization of our conduct - that is, the conducting of our conduct through scientific norms. Thus the dilemma posed by scientific humanism is that precisely insofar as it seeks to elaborate an ethics and politics that is grounded in a determination of the ‘truth’ of ‘Man’, it ties the development of our capacities to the intensification of power relations - yet the epistemological grammar of scientific humanism rules out by fiat any alternative form of ethics or politics. As Foucault comments: Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. (1984c, p. 343)

On this reading, the epistemological grammar of scientific humanism and the practical grammar of bio-power secure each other’s hegemony. As Dreyfus and Rabinow acutely note: Bio-power spread under the banner of making people healthy and protecting them. Where there was resistance, or failure to achieve its stated aims, this was construed as further proof of the need to reinforce and extend the power of experts. A technical matrix was established. By definition there ought to be a way of solving any technical problem. Once this matrix was established, the spread of bio-power was assured, for there was nothing else to appeal to: any other standards could be shown to be abnormal or to present merely technical problems. We are promised normalization and happiness through science and law. When they fail, this only justifies the need for more of the same. (1982, p. 196)

In the context of this identification of bio-power and scientific humanism as the practical and theoretical articulations of a reduction of the political to the technical in modem culture, genealogy confronts the question of how the relationship between the development of our capacities and the intensification of power relations which is entrenched by bio-power and scientific humanism can be breached.

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A New Economy o f Power and the Exemplarity o f Critique It is this ‘double-bind’ of scientific humanism and bio-power which Foucault locates as the stakes of his critique and which provides the impetus for his call for a new economy of power - that is, ‘the possibility of a different articulation of the forms of social and political domination, the forms of reversible or non-coercive exercise of power over overs, and individual or collective capacities’ (Patton, 1994, p. 65). This new economy of power which Foucault recommends is given expression in his comments on the attitude of modernity expressed by Baudelaire as involving a certain form of ethical self-relation: Modem man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself. (1984a, p. 42)

Thus, against scientific humanism’s ethics and politics of truth, Foucault proposes an ethics and politics of invention as ‘detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ (1984b, p. 75). This point is significant with respect to the common criticism that Foucault’s critique can provide no answer to the question ‘why fight?’ (Habermas, 1987, pp. 266-93) since as Patton comments: Modernity understood as an ethos of permanent self-criticism presupposes the existence of possible subjects of such activity. Such subjects will necessarily be free in the sense that their possibilities for action will include the capacity to undertake this self-critical activity which Foucault calls ‘work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’ ... To the extent that individuals and groups acquire the meta-capacity for the autonomous exercise of certain of their own powers and capacities, they will inevitably be led to oppose forms of domination which prevent such activity. (1994, p. 68)

Of course, critics such as Habermas are no doubt correct to note that Foucault provides no grounds on which to legislate this form of ethical self-relation; however, such criticisms miss the point, not least insofar as such a legislative act would involve a performative contradiction. The relevant feature of Foucault’s recommendation of this ethics of criticalinventive self-government is that, as expressions of the ethos of modernity, his critical ‘exercises’ are exemplifications of this form of ethical self-relation. Indeed, as with Kant’s essay on Enlightenment, Foucault’s philosophical exercises are precisely that, namely the ascetic exercises that he performs on himself as a philosopher in producing himself as an autonomous being and the non-coercive and reversible ascetic exercises of power (that is, recommendation) that he addresses to the public - that is, his potentially transformative interventions into the public sphere. To conclude this section, we can take up the type of exemplarity and intervention that Foucault offers us. The theme of parrhesia - ‘truth-speaking’ - as a direct mode of truth-telling in conditions of risk or danger to the speaker emerges in Foucault’s last lectures in terms of a concern with distinguishing the parrhesiast from other exemplars of truth-telling: the prophet, the sage and the teacher-technician. Rabinow provides a clear account of Foucault’s specification of these types: The prophet is concerned with truth as destiny. He does not speak in his own name. He attempts to mediate the present and future. He does not speak directly but in words that ‘require a certain

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interpretation because typically they cover even as they unveil what is hidden.’ Prophecy seeks to collapse aletheia (truth), politeia (civilisation), and ethos as it focuses on the production of truth concerning the future. The sage is concerned with truth as being. He may well hold his wisdom within or speak only in terms of general principles. Wisdom claims to teach the basic unity of truth, power, and ethics. The teacher-technician possesses techne, skill learned by apprenticeship, which he is expected to transmit clearly without risk. The teacher-technician seeks to define the irreducibility and distinctiveness of different domains. The parrhesiast focuses on the present. Parrhesia ‘seeks the political conditions and ethical differences at work in the question of true discourse, in other words, it underscores the impossibility of thinking without thinking all three poles, while insisting on their irreducible distinctiveness.’ (1994, pp. 205-206)

At various times, philosophers have adopted each of these roles, often in combinations, however it is the role of the parrhesiast that Foucault adopts in his philosophical exercises (although in his commentaries on these exercises he often adopts the role of the teacher-technician) - that is, it is in calling into question the bounds of reason in the name of freedom that Foucault’s intellectual risk-taking runs the danger of dismissal as nihilist, neo-conservative, neo-Marxist, irrationalist, anarchist and other categories of contemporary intellectual abuse which serve as substitutes for a thoughtful thinking through of the challenge his work poses. Yet insofar as Foucault does take up the role of parrhesiast - the engaged truth-teller who speaks from within a field of power - this must be grasped not simply in terms of philosophy but also in terms of the relation between philosophy and politics, the relationship between the vita contemplativa (bios theoretikos) and the vita activa (bios politikos), which is the question of that apparently paradoxical enterprise which is political philosophy. It is as a practice of critical-historical contemplation which is also an ethical and political activity that Foucault’s truth-telling, his disturbing redescriptions of what is all too close at hand and familiar, offers a form of philosophical reflection whose judgements (what is the main danger?) are embedded in the domain of political activity which it calls into question and whose exemplary character entails that it offers its own political activity up for public judgement. Thus, it is as a philosophical reflection which calls into question our political activity and as a political activity which offers itself to philosophical reflection that Foucault’s work negotiates the paradox of political philosophy, calling on us to take up a stance of passionate heroic engagement and sober ironic distance in confronting the demands of the day - and giving patient expression to the impatience of our freedom.

II

Given the range of Foucault’s work, the essays collected here seek to represent the most significant features of his philosophical engagements across seven areas: methodology, freedom and power, critique and normativity, enlightenment, political reason, law, and ethics. In this section, I provide a brief overview of these areas and the essays within them. Methodology Part I addresses the two forms of enquiry for which Foucault is best known: archaeology and genealogy. Two of the earliest Anglo-American philosophers to seriously engage with Foucault’s work were Ian Hacking and Richard Rorty. In Chapter 1, ‘Michel Foucault’s

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Immature Science’, Hacking usefully situates Foucault in relation to work in Anglo-American philosophy (Putnam, Quine) and history of science (Kuhn) in giving an account of Foucault’s archaeology as ‘depth knowledge’ - that is, as laying out the ‘historical a priori’ of the forms of knowledge that characterize the immature sciences such as biology, economics and psychology. By contrast, in Chapter 2 Rorty rejects the thought that Foucault contributes to the theory of knowledge. Sketching three approaches to knowledge - the Cartesian, the Hegelian and the Nietzschean - Rorty presents Foucault as a Nietzschean opponent of both Cartesianism and Hegelianism, arguing that Foucault is best seen as an anti-theorist who offers brilliant redescriptions but does not - indeed, cannot, given his commitment to perspectivalism - offer a theory of knowledge. In responding to both of these characterizations, Thomas Wartenberg (Chapter 3) insists that they go awry in failing to notice - or dismissing - Foucault’s rejection of a picture of the field of knowledge as autonomous and of knowledge itself as a neutral instrument. Foucault’s account, Wartenberg insists, focuses on the framework principles that structure what count as knowledge claims and the kinds of knowledge that emerge and on the ways in which the assumptions, presuppositions and so on embodied in these framework principles are bound up with social relations. Foucault’s distinctive value for epistemic enquiry lies in providing a philosophical analysis capable of making clear the ways in which knowledge is shaped by social relations of power. Archaeology, on any of the views thus canvassed, is not obviously a form of critique, whereas Foucault’s shift to a genealogical form of enquiry is taken to have critical intent. The following three essays turn to consider how Foucault’s work on genealogy, which should be seen as developing rather than rejecting his archaeological approach, stands up to critique. My own contribution (Chapter 4) focuses on the question of how genealogy can function as critique by distinguishing two kinds of captivity to which humans can succumb - ideological and aspectival - and arguing that the process of getting free from these forms of captivity (the process of self-critical enlightenment) involves different approaches, ideologiekritik and genealogy, respectively. A somewhat different, but arguably complementary, route is taken by Raymond Geuss in Chapter 5, where he distinguishes three kinds of critique: the reasoned rejection of a position, the delimitation of the bounds of reason and the putting into question or problematization of something which is taken as a limit. Geuss identifies genealogy with the third of these pictures of critique and, more specifically, with a problematization of an apparently self-given identity, where the effect of taking this identity as fixed is, in some respect or other, a source of danger. In Chapter 6, Martin Saar argues that any account of genealogy - in Nietzsche or Foucault - must hold in mind that it combines three elements a mode of writing history or historical method, a mode of critical evaluation and a specific style - and that these three elements all involve a constitutive relationship to subjectivity: genealogy gives a historical account of how we become what we are in which the subjectivity of the genealogist, as a member of this ‘we’, is engaged in critical reflection on itself and whereby this process is designed to affect and effect an audience that are constituted through the recognition and problematization of themselves in the historical account provided. The question of Foucault’s relationship to critique, of how coherent or successful his efforts to articulate a distinctive form of critical reflection are, returns in Parts II and III - that is, in the context of Taylor and Patton’s debate about freedom and power in Foucault’s work and again as a central part of the Foucault-Habermas debate, which is given its most sophisticated treatment, on each side, in the essays by Thomas McCarthy and James Tully.

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Freedom and Power Charles Taylor’s essay ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’ (Chapter 7) gave perspicuous expression to a concern that while Foucault’s historical investigations disturb in a way that seems to align them with the idea of critique as an unmasking of the ideological effects of illicit power, Foucault rejects the appeal to freedom and truth that would ground such a critical project. In a detailed and, in part, sympathetic analysis, Taylor comes finally to argue that Foucault’s Nietzscheanism renders his project incoherent because it requires that he have ‘power’ without ‘freedom’ or ‘truth’ and that this apparent requirement is a symptom of a deeper problem, namely the rejection of the very idea of liberation from power. ‘Power’, Taylor insists, only makes sense as a concept if we invoke the notion of constraint on, for example, our desires and purposes and in this respect belongs to the same semantic field as the concepts of ‘freedom’ (for example, acting on our desires and purposes) and ‘truth’ (for example, knowing what one’s real/authentic desires and purposes actually are). This incoherence in Foucault’s position (on Taylor’s reading) is tied to another, namely Foucault’s refusal to evaluate different orders of social life (for example, classical and modem practices of punishment) which betrays his Nietzschean inability to escape moral relativism. Because, Taylor argues, Foucault cannot see any change as a move towards truth and, therefore, freedom, he has no basis from which to discriminate between different orders of power. Paul Patton’s response to Taylor acknowledges that the question of the sense in which Foucault’s work is critical has been a source of puzzlement and proposes a way of dissolving this puzzlement by elucidating the differences between Taylor’s and Foucault’s uses of the concepts of power and freedom, and drawing out the distinctive implications of Foucault’s uses for the coherence of his histories as forms of criticism. Patton (Chapter 8) focuses on the point that Taylor, like most Anglo-American theorists, uses the terms ‘power’ and ‘domination’ interchangeably and, in this respect, as necessarily opposed to freedom because it sets limits to the self-realization (positive freedom) or space for action (negative freedom) of the agent. Patton’s argument hangs on two central points. The first is that whereas Taylor’s analysis takes it that people’s relationship to themselves and their desires and purposes are, barring the exercise of power over them, to be taken as givens for the analysis, Foucault is concerned with the ways in which power is involved in, to borrow Hacking’s phrase, ‘making up people’ - that is, the social production of various kinds of people (the mad, the delinquent, the homosexual and so forth) and so takes the formation of relations to self and of desires and purposes as something to be subject to historical analysis. The second point is to draw attention to the distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’ (and the ways they can be related to one another) in order to show that whereas Taylor is focused on the latter, Foucault is focused on the former and, consequently, distinguishes ‘power’ from ‘domination’, where the latter refers to a situation of asymmetrical power relations in which the ‘power to’ of a subject who is subject to ‘power over’ relations is unable to transform effectively the situation to which they are subject. For Foucault, as Patton points out, ‘power over’ is distinct from ‘force’ because it attempts to shape the subject over whom it is exercised (for example, someone who is tortured is subject to power only insofar as the torture has a purpose that it is trying to realize such as gaining a confession) and in this way ‘power over’ is linked to freedom as ‘power to’ - that is, power can be exercised over subjects only insofar as those subjects have the power to act, and resist (effectively or not), the exercise of power over them.

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With these distinctions in hand, Patton argues, we can see that the critical thrust of Foucault’s genealogical work is to unmask, make visible, forms of domination that are able to function as forms of domination only because we fail to see them as such. In his response to Patton, Taylor (Chapter 9) argues that Foucault’s position is characterized by an ambiguity towards his moral stance that obfuscates, rather than clarifies, the grounds of this moral stance. In Patton’s elaboration of his argument (Chapter 10), he responds to this charge (albeit without directly referencing Taylor) by drawing on Nietzsche’s conception of will to power as a way of clarifying Foucault’s understanding of human agency. Critique and Normativity The question of Foucault’s relationship to Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School is complex. On the one hand, as Charles Taylor had already noted (in Chapter 7), Foucault arguably provides Critical Theory with a better account of the relationship of power and subjectivity than that tradition had managed to develop itself. On the other hand, Foucault’s work did not easily fit with the understanding of critique developed within that tradition. Although the debate concerning Foucault and Habermas (as the leading proponent of Critical Theory) began unfortunately with Habermas’ highly critical and uncharitable reading of Foucault in his The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity, a more nuanced discussion did gradually emerge on both sides and the essays by McCarthy and Tully demonstrate this dialogue at its best. For Thomas McCarthy, in Chapter 11, there are significant continuities between Foucault’s approach and that of Critical Theory: both aim to radicalize Kantian critique by attending the impurity of reason (its embeddedness in social and cultural relations of power and interest, its historical situatedness and so on); both similarly take the knowing and acting subjects to be historically and socially situated and shaped, and both give primacy to the practical over the theoretical; knowledge and the activity of theorizing itself are understood as historically and culturally situated practices. Critical reflection is always a view from somewhere. On McCarthy’s view, the differences between them have overshadowed these continuities in part because there are real differences between them, most notably with regard to the concern of Frankfurt School theorists to reconcile contextualism with universalism through a context-transcending form of critical activity that helps to realize more rational (where this entails more free, just and truthful) social relations. McCarthy’s argument is that Foucault’s genealogical practice is a rich resource for critical theory but that his theorization of his own practice is either not fully coherent (in his work up to the late 1970s) or coherent but not adequate (in the work after volume 1 of The History o f Sexuality). In the first period, McCarthy argues (in a way that is broadly continuous with Taylor’s criticisms) that Foucault’s work is unable coherently to ground its own critical activity because it is committed to an ontology of power that offers no resources for discrimination and critique of the subject which as an effect of power (read: domination). In the second period, McCarthy suggests, Foucault acknowledges these shortcomings and develops, first, a view of power relations as strategic games, distinguishing open and symmetrical games from states of domination, and, second, an ethical stance (in terms of the idea of an aesthetics of existence) which allows him coherently to articulate criticism. McCarthy’s charge is that although coherent, the analytical resources provided by the ethical turn aren’t sufficient for contemporary purposes because, in

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contrast to Habermas’ work, they don’t adequately incorporate differences between strategic and communicative interactions on the one hand, and discriminate between questions of the right and the good on the other hand. In response to criticisms such as those advanced by Habermas and McCarthy, James Tully (Chapter 12) outlines a set of reciprocal objections from Foucault’s stance which also counter these criticisms. Tully identifies four main lines of criticism of Foucault’s position on the part of the Frankfurt School: (a) that it involves a form of presentism, (b) it violates universal validity claims, (c) it is context-bound rather than context-transcending and (d) it cannot account for the normative dimension of its analysis. Tully argues that Foucault’s late work offers cogent responses to these criticisms and develops four reciprocal criticisms of Habermas’ work: (i) it is uncritical of its own form of reflection and less effective as a critique of limits in the present, (ii) Foucault’s historical approach is not unreasonable whereas it is questionable whether Habermas’ universalism of the decentred subject is reasonable, (iii) Habermas’ decentred subject is a historically contingent juridical form of the subject that, when taken as a regulative ideal, obstructs the analysis of how we constitute ourselves and are constituted as subjects, and (iv) Habermas’ normative analysis is utopian, whereas Foucault’s is not. Tully’s careful and considered construction of this dialogue offers a riposte to McCarthy’s equally considered objections and the two essays provide a basis for a genuine exchange between critical thinkers working in these two traditions. On Enlightenment Foucault’s various late reflections on Kant and Enlightenment have been an important locus for approaching his work. Colin Gordon, one of Foucault’s most meticulous readers and translators, was early to provide an account of these writings. In Chapter 13, ‘Question, Ethos, Event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment’, Gordon contextualizes Foucault’s reflections on Kant and Enlightenment in relation to his work and his political and intellectual engagements in order to show how Foucault finds in Kant’s text on Enlightenment a view of Enlightenment as a permanent possibility of questioning, of questioning limits of thought, of questioning forms of governance - in sum, a critical attitude. Of particular note to Gordon are, first, the way in which Foucault’s relation to this text helps him articulate a rejection of the motif of the present as crisis and catastrophe, which is emblematic of much modernist political theory in favour of a more modest stance towards our present, and, second, the links that emerge between Foucault and other traditions of political thought, not least Weber, in the course of his reflections. Foucault’s reflections on and repositioning of himself in relationship to Enlightenment also shifted the reception of his work in those working in traditions of criticism distinct from his own. Thus, for example, McCarthy’s essay (Chapter 11) takes Foucault’s late reflections on Kant on Enlightenment as marking a significant turning point in his work. Another theorist working primarily within the tradition of the Frankfurt School, Amy Allen, reviews in Chapter 14 the varied reactions to Foucault’s essays on Kant and Enlightenment in order to argue that there is considerably more continuity in Foucault’s attitude to Kant from his earliest writings on Kant’s anthropology to his late essay on Kant on Enlightenment than is credited and, contra Habermas, there are not ‘two Kants’ in Foucault’s work, but only one. Allen attempts to show that such a reading reveals Foucault’s project as a serious and coherent alternative

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reconstruction of Kantian critique to Habermas’ own. Reconstructing Foucault’s relationship to Kant and showing its continuous concern with the immanent critique of Kantian critique, Allen argues, shows how a concern with the subject is not a later addition to Foucault’s work but a stable locus of reflection, and, consequently, the arguments by Habermas and McCarthy fail to appreciate the extent to which Foucault’s identification of himself with a certain picture of Enlightenment as a critical ethos is the explicit expression of a commitment that is implicit to the whole trajectory of his thought. On Political Reason Foucault’s work involved an important effort to rethink questions of political order in ways that are consequential for the history of political thought. In Chapter 15, ‘Political Theory of War and Peace’, Pasquale Pasquino focuses on Foucault’s distinction between agonistic (conflictual) theories of politics exemplified by Machiavelli and anti-agonistic (pacific) theories of politics illustrated by Hobbes, not in order to highlight their relationships to the discourses of war and of peace, but rather to show that they involve two different approaches to the question of political order. Pasquino then goes on to illustrate the significance of this distinction for the history of political thought and its relationship to Foucault’s late work on govemmentality. It is this thread that Allen, Hindess and Jessop pick up. In Chapter 16, ‘Government in Foucault’, Barry Allen has two concerns. The first is to reconstruct Foucault’s rejection of the juridical representation of power as adequate to contemporary practices of conducting conduct and his turn to the notion of government. Rather than see the state as the source of power, Foucault argues that power relations have become increasing govemmentalized (in the restricted sense tied to the state) such that they are elaborated and rationalized in and through the state. The second is to address Foucault’s focus on power and government in terms of his concern with truth - that is, the way in which what passes for truth functions to support relations of power and government. In ‘Politics as Government’ (Chapter 17) Barry Hindess similarly focuses on Foucault’s turn to government but by reconstructing Foucault’s sketch of a genealogy of governmental thinking as political reason and, in particular, his account of liberalism as a form of govemmentality that systematically links government and the practice of freedom. Hindess’ concern is that Foucault’s account of liberalism is incomplete in that it doesn’t attend sufficiently to, first, the demarcation of which (kinds of) individuals can best be governed through freedom and which can or should not be at liberty in this way and, second, the government of states within the international system of states and the relationship of this governance to government within the state. The concern with the state is also central to Bob Jessop’s analysis of Foucault’s governmental turn (Chapter 18) in which he tries to show how Foucault’s work reconstructs the state as a relational ensemble of practices and offers a historical account of the governmental (narrowly construed) in terms of sovereignty, disciplinarity and govemmentality marked by the movement from juridical to disciplinary to governmental forms of power. While Foucault, on this account, maintains his long-stated rejection of ‘state theory’, he does offer something like a genealogy of (domestic) statecraft.

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On Law Foucault’s rejection of the view that political power is adequately captured in terms of laws issued by a sovereign that command us to perform or not perform certain actions raises the question of how law is conceptually placed in his work. Certainly Foucault points to the development of bio-power in which norms centred on life are the locus of a range of technologies of power (for example, disciplinary practices), but how do judicial institutions fit into this picture? In Chapter 19, ‘Foucault’s Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval’, Alan Hunt argues that Foucault is committed to a meta-historical thesis that law constituted the primary form of pre-modem power but has been undermined and supplanted by discipline and government in modem society. Taking Foucault to identify law and the juridical, Hunt proposes to show that one can retrieve law by showing that it plays a constitutive role in governance and the political field, for example the ways in which rights discourses may both limit and generate social and political struggles. Thus, rather than counterposing law and discipline, as he takes Foucault to do, Hunt proposes that we consider law as a mediating mechanism in relation to the normative and normalizing dimension of disciplinary practices. In contrast to, and criticism of, Hunt, Victor Tadros, in Chapter 20, proposes a reading of Foucault that distinguishes the terms ‘juridical’ and ‘law’, with the former referring to an arrangement and representation of power rather than the law. Tadros’s argument is that by ‘juridical’ Foucault refers to a particular conception of power relations as commands that prohibit or permit (and, hence, which might be called Austinian by legal theorists) but that it is not the case that law need be juridical in this sense or that juridical power need be manifest as law. This raises the question of the relationship of law and the primarily non-juridical forms of power characteristic of modem societies. Tadros situates law within the context of Foucault’s reflection on bio-power as marked by the poles of discipline and govemmentality, arguing that law operates as a field through which techniques of governance intervene in disciplinary networks, as an interface between the two poles of discipline and govemmentality, which both enables their mutual adjustment and masks the operation of, and need for legitimation of, bio­ power. Nikolas Rose and Mariana Valverde, in Chapter 21, continue this line of argument by drawing attention to the fact that Foucault’s argument involves two thoughts. First, that the coding of power through ideas such as the absolute rights of sovereign power, the monopoly of the legitimate use of force and so on do not adequately grasp the ways in which power or law function in our societies. Second, that the ‘legal complex’ is composed of a motley assemblage of diverse practices, techniques and knowledges which have become pervaded by non-legal (for example, psychiatry) and quasi-legal (for example, criminal psychiatry) forms of knowledge and the practices and techniques that attend them. It is not the rejection of law as power that marks Foucault’s work on this view but rather a reconfiguration of how law and power are related to one another. In other words, for Rose and Valverde, the question is how law functions within governmental (and countergovemmental) strategies of rule. They argue that we can discern four foci for any such investigation: subjectifications (the diverse constitution of legal subjects, for example the delinquent), normalizations (the embedding of legal relations as elements within a structure of regulation through norms, for example the construction of legal standards that encode norms), spatializations (the various constitutions of governable space and of conduct with such spaces, for example shopping

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malls) and authorizations (the distribution of authority in respect of the regulation of conduct, for example to social workers). On Ethics, the Aesthetics o f Existence and Parrhesia In his final work on ethics, Foucault paid particular attention to two themes: the aesthetics of existence (shaping one’s life as a work of art) and parrhesia (frank/truthful speech). In Chapter 22, ‘Two Kinds of Practice’, Christoph Menke takes up the little-noticed point that Foucault identifies practice as central both to disciplinary techniques and to the aesthetics of existence, thereby raising the question of what the difference is between disciplinary and aesthetic practices of self-formation. Menke notes that common to disciplinary power and the aesthetics of existence is an insistence on the praxis of practice - that is, that subjectivity consists in the twofold power of being able to carry something out and of self-direction that is acquired through practice. Given this commonality, the distinction between the two lies in how they understand and perform the process and praxis of self-reference in practice. In contrast to the disciplinary model, which construes autonomy as the self-disciplined subjection of self to a self-chosen norm - that is, the normalization of the individual according to self-determined norms - the aesthetics of existence conceives autonomy as standing in a relationship to oneself in which the norms in relation to which one acts cannot be specified independently and in advance of the activity itself (the activity of self-overcoming) and precisely because this performance has no concept for its determining ground (in Kant’s terms) gives expression to one’s individuality - that is, it is through one’s activity that one becomes (creates and discovers) what one is. This fundamentally Nietzschean account of autonomy stands in stark contrast to the self-determination view construed on the disciplinary model and it is this difference between the forms of relation to self, the attitudes towards oneself in one’s activity, which Foucault takes to be pivotal - attitudes that cannot simply be chosen but must be cultivated through practice. In adopting a disciplinary attitude towards oneself, one conceives of, and acts on, oneself as an example, as a type of subject. In adopting an aesthetic attitude to- wards oneself, one conceives of, and acts on, oneself as an exemplar. In a slogan, we might say that Foucault’s distinction between the models provided by disciplinary practices and the aesthetics of existence is the difference between the normalization of the individual (according to self- or other-determined norms) and the individualization of norms. Thomas Flynn’s ‘Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault’ (Chapter 23) helps illustrate Foucault’s concern with this distinction in his work on Greek and Roman sexuality and on parrhesia. Flynn provides a brief but analytically valuable overview of this work and how it links the themes of government, subjectivity and truth in Foucault’s thinking. Particularly important here is Foucault’s investigation of parrhesia, which is taken up by Jakub Franek in ‘Philosophical Parrhesia as Aesthetics of Existence’ (Chapter 24) and by Nancy Luxon in ‘Truthfulness, Risk, and Trust in the Late Lectures of Michael Foucault’ (Chapter 25). Franek’s essay offers a reading of Foucault’s work on parrhesia in which this work plays three roles. First, it links practices of the self to the government of self and others through practices of truth-telling - and, thereby, links ethics and politics. Second, it provides Foucault with a way of understanding his own genealogical practice as a practice of parrhesia - and hence defending himself once again from the criticisms of nihilism, relativism and so on that were directed at his work without having to appeal to foundational moral principles. Third, it

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elucidates an exemplar of an aesthetics of existence in the form of a life practising philosophical parrhesia. Luxon develops this line of argument further in proposing that Foucault’s late work on parrhesia offers a three-stage model for evaluating those ethical authorities that claim to speak truthfully - and derive their authority from this claim. The first stage is one in which the truth-teller is established as prima facie independently authoritative in virtue of his practice (rather than any expertise). In the second stage, this claim is tested through risk. The speaker’s ‘courage of truth’ (that is, their willingness to speak truthfully even at the cost of potentially risking friendship, standing or even life) is tested by the audience. In the final stage, the parrhesiatic encounter, insofar as the speaker has passed the test, can be seen as one which generates bonds of trust between speaker and audience. Like Franek, Luxon sees this practice of parrhesia as an exemplification of an aesthetics of existence but, equally importantly, she goes on to contrast this figure with other paradigmatic figures of authority such as those whom Foucault identified with the rise of disciplinary power. •k itit

There are thinkers whose work one can know in the way that one knows a mathematical proof and then there are thinkers whose work one knows in the way that one knows a city - one can navigate one’s way around but there is always more to discover. Michel Foucault exemplifies this latter kind. Even now, as his lecture courses continue to be released, our understanding of Foucault is developing and changing. More generally, his own trajectory was one of perpetually reworking his relationship to his work, and while there is, in my view, a unity in this work, it is not the unity of a single question so much as of a mode of questioning, of testing, of critical self-reflection that he expresses first one way then another over the course of his intellectual career. Foucault’s influence across the social sciences continues to grow not because of theses or theories that he elaborated but because his work sparks reflection and encourages his readers to take up his dream of curiosity. References Deluze, G. (1988), ‘Foucault’, trans. Sean Hand, London: The Athlone Press. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘Florence, M .’ [Foucault, M.] (1994 [1984]), ‘Foucault, Michel, 1926-’, trans. C. Porter, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 314-20. Foucault, M. (1965 [1961]), Madness and Civilisation, trans. R. Howard, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1970 [1966]), The Order o f Things, trans. unidentified collective, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1972 [1969]), The Archaeology o f Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1973 [1963]), The Birth o f the Clinic, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1977a [1970]), ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon, ed. D.F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 165-96. Foucault, M. (1977b [1975]), Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1982), ‘The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 208-26.

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Foucault, M. (1984a), ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 32-50. Foucault, M. (1984b), ‘Truth and Power’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Harmonds worth: Penguin, pp. 51-75. Foucault, M. (1984c), ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, in The Foucault Reader, Harmonds worth: Penguin, pp. 340-72. Foucault, M. (1985 [1984]), The Use o f Pleasure: The History o f Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (1988a), ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, trans. A. Sheridan and others, ed. L.D. Kritzman, London: Routledge, pp. 47-53. Foucault, M. (1988b [1984]), ‘The Concern for Truth’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, trans. A. Sheridan and others, ed. L.D. Kritzman, London: Routledge, pp. 255-67. Foucault, M. (1988c [1980]), ‘Practicing Criticism’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, trans. A. Sheridan and others, ed. L.D. Kritzman, London: Routledge, pp. 152-56. Foucault, M. (1988d), ‘Politics and Reason’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, trans. A. Sheridan and others, ed. L.D. Kritzman, London: Routledge, pp. 5785. Foucault, M. (1991), ‘Questions of Method’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govemmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73-86. Foucault, M. (1991b), ‘Govermentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govemmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87-104. Gutting, G. (1989), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology o f Scientific Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mulhall, S. (1995), ‘Remonstrations: Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein’s Hand, Journal o f the British Society o f Phenomenology, 26, 1, pp. 65-85. Owen, D. (1994), Maturity and Modernity, London: Routledge. Patton, P. (1994), ‘Foucault’s Subject of Power’, Political Theory Newsletter, 6, pp. 60-71. Rabinow, P. (1994), ‘Modem and Countermodern: Ethos and Epoch in Heidegger and Foucault’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197-214. Rouse, J. (1994), ‘Power/Knowledge’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 92-114. Schmidt, J. and Wartenberg, T. (1994), ‘Foucault’s Enlightenment’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Critique and Power, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 283-314. Tully, J. (1989), ‘Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy’, Political Theory, 17, 2, pp. 172-204. Wittgenstein, L. (1969), On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell.

Part I Methodology

[1] Michel Foucault’s Immature Science I a n H a c k in g

Most philosophers who write about systematic knowledge have come to restrict themselves to what they call “m ature science,” although they display a certain uneasiness. T hus Putnam says, “physics surely counts as a ‘m ature science’ if any science does.” ([ 11]:21.) What, we w onder, if nothing counts as m ature? I suspect that the distinction between m ature and im m ature is, although not ill founded, at least ill understood. Putnam needs it because he wants the m ore established sci­ ences to be about som ething, to refer. He sensibly thinks that most early speculation got things wrong. Similarly, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions K uhn’s m any-faceted word “paradigm ” almost implied “maturity,” because an individual or g roup achievem ent (one sense o f the term “paradigm ”) had to set the standards to which a “norm al science” would con­ form . H e owned that he could not tell w hether sociology, economics, o r psychology had paradigm s. Likewise Putnam counts some and perhaps all o f these am ong the im m ature sciences. N either Putnam nor K uhn has m uch to tell us about im m aturity. Alongside Putnam ’s and K uhn’s analyses o f systematic knowledge we have a quite different enterprise: epistemology. It is, roughly speaking, Erkenntnistheorie as opposed to Wissenschaftslehre. It is a theory o f the facts and events with which we are acquainted, the theory o f sense perception, belief, grounds for belief, and the analysis o f “I know that p.” An eth n o g rap h er studying Am erican philosophers would have to suppose that the electron and Jo n es’ Ford are almost the only objects o f knowledge hereabouts. T oday I shall consider w hether there may be anything o f a theoretical sort to say about the vast dom ain o f speculative and com m on knowledge that falls between electrons and furniture. O u r doctors treat us, ou r bankers house us, o ur

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magistrates ju d g e us and ou r bureaucrats arrange us accord­ ing to such systems o f knowledge; even on the side o f pure speculation far m ore o f it resembles sociobiology than q u an ­ tum mechanics. Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is all about some im m ature sciences—chiefly those whose foci are “life, labor, and language” ([4]).1 He writes o f the biology, economics and philosophy o f one era, and o f the natural history, analysis o f wealth o r general g ram m ar that preceded them . He has a new critique o f o u r contem porary hum an sciences. T h e book is im portant at all sorts o f levels. T h ere is a radically challenging reorganization o f the way we think about these disciplines. T h ere is a dazzling but instructive plethora o f newly chosen facts that give content to this reorganization. (He also cheats, or at least cuts corners on some o f the facts). T h e book is philosophical because life, labor, language and “M an” are am ong the topics o f philosophy. It is also philosophical be­ cause it exem plifies a theory o f know ledge, in both the theoretical and practical term s. His archaeology, as he calls it, is a way o f investigating the groundw ork o f bodies o f knowl­ edge. T h e book is also a polemic about the kinds o f enquiry that are appropriate for ou r time. The Order of Things is incredibly rich both in historical detail and speculative suggestion. T h ere is nothing like it in English. B ut that is no reason not to bring it down to (our) earth. I shall imagine that I am answ ering an exam ination question: “C om pare and contrast Foucault’s archaeology to c u rren t Am erican theory o f knowledge.” This forces me to proceed in a m anner that is both pedestrian and abstract. I shall set out certain hypotheses with which Foucault starts his enterprise. These range in status from proposals which he would be willing to m odify to assum ptions that he would never give up. T hey are starting points for enquiry. T h e first hy­ pothesis is simply this: systems o f th o u g h t in the im m ature sciences exhibit quite definite laws and regularities. W here K uhn had been inclined to throw u p his hands and call Ba­ con’s natural histories a disorderly “morass,” ([9]: 16) Foucault finds an organization, although one d ifferen t in kind from anything that K uhn was looking for. G eneral gram m ar o f the seventeenth century, o r nineteenth century labor theory o f value provide examples, but so do altogether inchoate d o ­ mains such as what we now call iatrochem istry (which has been succeeded by real knowledge) or phrenology (which hasn’t).

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Such examples are m isleading because they make us think o f some specific theory and then m odel that on m ature science with well articulated postulates that lead, almost d e­ ductively, to a rich display o f testable hypotheses. O n the contrary it is Foucault’s second conjecture that we are con­ cerned not with a corpus o f theses but with systems o f possi­ bility. Certain questions arise in general gram m ar, and are m et by a batch o f com peting answers. These questions and answers appear to have been quite inconceivable in Renais­ sance thought, nor do they occur in subsequent philology. It is Foucault’s hypothesis that what it is possible to say in a body o f discourse such as general gram m ar is vastly m ore rulegoverned than we have commonly im agined. By “what it is possible to say” I do not ju st m ean actual doctrines, such as propositions about the copula or about labor. It is p art o f this second hypothesis that what counts as reason, argum ent or evidence may itself be part o f a system o f thought, so that modes o f “rationality” are topical and dated. T h a t offends o u r sensibilities that have been so firmly fixed by Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, who took as their models the m ature or m aturing sciences o f their day. It is wise to ease the pain o f the idea that “what counts as a reason” may be tem po­ ral and not timeless, by attributing it to “im m aturity.” C u rren t philosophy makes the hypothetico-deductive style o f reason­ ing the essence o f science, adulterated at most by some adm ix­ ture o f induction. Not all the historicizing o f K uhn and Lakatos has dislodged this opinion one whit: perhaps they are the fiercest hypothetico-deductionists o f all. Despite occa­ sional program m atic rem arks that one reads from time to time, the early chapters o f my own Emergence of Probability are perhaps the only detailed study in English o f a changing style o f rationality ([8]). Those chapters learned m uch from The Order of Things. Allow me to re-emphasize that the systems o f thought to which Foucault addresses him self are not constituted by a unified set o f beliefs advanced by a person or a school. Indeed he has a teasing device that I call Foucault’s fork, which su r­ prises us by stating that com peting bodies o f belief have the sam e u n d e rly in g rules o f form ation. O nce th e re was a m em orable contrast between the taxonom ic System o f Lin­ naeus and the Method o f Adanos. We now have little difficulty in supposing that these antagonistic enterprises are p art o f the

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same web o f possible alternatives, but some o f us are m ore startled to read that positivism and phenom enology are equally constituted by a com m on underlying organization.2 Evidently neither overt hypotheses n o r w ritten out ded u c­ tions are critical to the systems o f thought that Foucault p ro ­ poses to analyze. T h e exam ples o f L innaean taxonom y o r C om teian positivism are m isleading in a n o th er way: they focus on p ro p er nam es and fam ous philosophies. Foucault’s third hy­ pothesis is that systems o f thoug h t are both anonym ous and autonom ous. T hey are not to be studied by reading the final reports o f the heros o f science, but ra th e r by surveying a vast terrain o f discourse that includes tentative starts, wordy prologomena, b rief flysheets, and occasional journalism . We should think about institutional ordinances and the plans o f zoological gardens, astrolabes o r penitentiaries; we m ust read referees’ reports and exam ine the botanical display cases o f the delletanti. Many o f these examples o f things to read and exam ine are quite literally anonym ous. Foucault believes that even the g reat positive achievem ents w ithin a system o f thought characteristically merely fill o r elaborate certain preestablished uniform ities. A typical phrase will convey how he uses historical personalities, “T h e fig u re w hom we call H um e.” T h e familiar p ro p er nam e serves as a ready reference to a text, but we are not trying to analyse his oeuvre. Foucault suspects all concepts that focus on the consciousness and in­ tent o f an individual. Much literary criticism, especially in France, shares this them e. Foucault him self has done his best to obviate even the concept o f “literature” and “author.” A fourth hypothesis is that the regularities th at determ ine a system o f thought are not a conscious p art o f that thought and perhaps cannot even be articulated in that thought. Foucault has variously used words such as episteme, savoir and archive in this connection. I once translated savoir as “d ep th knowledge” and connaissance as “surface knowledge,” with an obvious allusion to Chomsky. ([7]: 166-70.) In the Archaeology Foucault uses connaissance to refer tp particular bits o f belief wittingly accepted. Savoir denotes his conjectured uncon­ scious u nderlying stru ctu re th at sets o u t the possibilities throug h which connaissance may ru n its course. T h e allusion to Chomsky is to be taken lightly, for gram m ar obviously is rule-governed and an hypothesis o f d ep th gram m ar is im-

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mediately plausible. T he im m ature sciences are not m ani­ festly regular, and the supposition o f “rules” is m ere conjec­ ture. Yet after twenty years o f eager research we are not m ore in possession o f a widely applicable “d ep th g ram m ar” than o f clearly stated episteme. Levy-Strauss’s structure o f kinship re ­ lations is perhaps the only proposal o f this sort that has come near to delivering the goods. F u rth er detailed com parison o f Foucault and structuralism are empty; they would lum p us with “those mimes and tum blers who debate w hether I am structuralist.” A m ore insightful com parison is m ade by Georges Canguilhem , the distinguished historian o f science. In an essay that is better than anything else written about The Order of Things, he concludes with well-docum ented allusions to Kant ([3]). Foucault has half-jokingly accepted that he has a notion o f an “historical a priori.” W here Kant had taught that there is a fixed body o f synthetic a priori knowledge that determ ines the bounds o f possibility o f coherent thought, Foucault has in­ stead an “historical a priori.” T he savoir o f a time, a place, a subject m atter and a com m unity o f speakers determ ines what may be said, there and then. W hat is the “surface” of which the archive is the “d e p th ”? Foucault’s fifth hypothesis is that the surface is all that is actually said, and (with qualifications) nothing else. It is not what is m eant, intended, or even thought, but what is said. Systems o f thought have a surface that is discourse. He gropes about for a definition o f enonce that is not quite sentence nor statem ent no r speech act nor inscription n o r proposition. It is not an atomistic idea, for enunciations are not isolated sen­ tences that add up to a whole, but entities whose role is u n d e r­ stood holistically by a set o f inter-relations with o ther bits o f discourse. T h e same “sentence” about the bone structure o f hum an hands and birds’ talons is not the same enunciation in a Renaissance text as it is in a post-Darwinian com parative anatomy. N or is the enonce restricted to sentences: it will in­ clude tables, maps, diagram s. It includes m ore than even inscriptions, not ju st because Foucault is often m ore con­ cerned with specific types rath er than concrete tokens, but also because it takes in some tableaux, displays, carvings and decorated windows. B ut having m ade such qualifications the w ord “sentence” rem ains the best one to denote the elem ents o f discourse. It rem inds us that Foucault’s discourse is consti-

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tuted by fairly tangible or audible or legible hum an p ro d u c­ tions, and not by what these artifacts mean. Much recent French writing shares and indeed antedates Q uine’s hostility to meanings. T he objects o f a reading are texts: both “reading” and “text” are code words that show one is ideologically pure, and writes only o f relations between in­ scriptions and never o f a m eaning beneath the words. With such an audience, and with no French w ord th at m eans “m eaning” anyway, Foucault has no need to argue that sen­ tences are the object o f study. His notion o f discourse and Q uine’s “fabric of sentences” are cognate ideas. But the re ­ semblance soon falters. One reason is ju st that Q uine is ahistorical. His im age o f revisin g a c o n c e p tu a l schem e is N eurath’s: it is like rebuilding a ship at sea, plank by plank. Foucault’s intricate histories provide one m ore lesson that change is not like that. It is not ju st that K uhnian revolutions intervene, but also that in the most norm al o f science the free wheeling form ulation o f models and conjectures has none o f the character o f a tidy ship’s carpenter. A m ore fundam ental difference is that Q uine’s fabric of sentences is d ifferen t in kind from Foucault’s discourse. Q uine’s is a body o f beliefs, a “lore,” partly theoretical, partly practical, but such as could be entertained as a pretty consist­ ent whole by a single inform ant. Foucault’s discourses are what is said by a lot o f people talking, writing and arguing; it includes the pro and the con and a great many incompatible connaissances. M oreover Q uine’s “conceptual schem e” is thoroughly im pregnated by the hypothetico-deductive model. T h ere is a “core” and a “periphery.” T h e logical consequences o f the “core” pervade the peripheral “fabric” which is m ore localized in its ramifications. A “recalcitrant experience” is one that is reported by a sentence inconsistent with the total “corpus.” Recalcitrance dem ands revision. Revision, we are told, m ust conform to logic, but revisions are chosen not by the dem ands o f logic but a desire for simplicity. Now if we exam ine the im m ature sciences we shall find nothing like this at all. O ne is led to an image quite different from N eu rath ’s: it is as if these bodies o f discourse exist in a conceptual space o f possibilities, and as if the discourse is a play upon these possibilities. Since the word ‘herm eneutics’ is now showing signs, in some quarters, o f having an attraction for analytical philoso-

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phy, let me say that despite o u r concern with “reading” and “texts,” Foucault’s archaeology is the very opposite o f h e r­ meneutics. T o recall an etymology, H erm es is the winged m essenger o f the gods, and herm eneutics is the art o f in ter­ preting what H erm es brought. H erm eneutics tries to find what m eaning lives beneath the sentences that have been w ritten, if not by God, at least by the past. We are to relive that past to see w hat can have been meant. Archaeology is quite the opposite; it wants not to in terp ret the texts but to display the relationships between sentences that explain why ju st these were u ttered and those were not. “W hat counts in the things said by m en is not so m uch what they may have th o u g h t o r the extent to which these things represent their thoughts, as that which systematizes them from the outset.” ([5]: xix). Doubtless the able herm eneuticist will, thanks to his sensibility and learn ­ ing, teach us much, but his m ode and motivation is entirely d ifferent from that o f Q uine or Foucault. T o re tu rn to American points o f reference, Foucault’s sixth hypothesis is like K uhn’s: an expectation o f discon­ tinuity. In France this is a commonplace, thanks partly to the M arxist background but also due to the historiography o f science. T h e work which Koyre did in the 1930’s is K uhn’s acknow ledged predecessor: it aim ed at showing, contra D uhem , that Galileo effected a radical break with the past. In the 20’s Gaston Bachelard had already begun to elaborate a theory o f “epistemological blocks” and ensuing “ru p tu res”.3 Bachelard has, in recent years, been far m ore widely read than Koyre while, in a m ore scholarly way, Georges Canguilhem has systematically elaborated the details o f scientific revolu­ tions over the whole panoply o f science. So K uhn was a sensa­ tion for us, but rath er old hat in France. W hen we tu rn from a belief in revolutions to an attem pt to analyze their structure there is little agreem ent between K uhn and Foucault, but possibly this is because K uhn is less concerned with im m ature science. K uhn’s revolutions start with crises (that are by no means easy to docum ent) and proceed th rough climax to an achievement. They are fol­ lowed by norm al science in which certain exam plars are codified in textbooks and used as the norm s o f successful research. M oreover by showing how to solve particular p ro b ­ lems they serve as the bridge between abstract theory and practical technique. This is an em inently accurate description

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o f some science but the whole emphasis on achievem ent as setting the rules o f the game is the opposite o f Foucault’s quest for inarticulated structures that regulate im m ature science. K uhn m ade us expect a kind o f history using m uch o f the m ethodology o f cu rren t A m erican social science. Few histo­ rians o f science do what he seemed to suggest and even the sociologists o f knowledge profess kinship at a distance rath er than actually operate from this point o f view. N or is this the way K uhn him self does history. K u h n ’s account o f “achievem ents” and o f research groups o f one h u n d re d individuals seems better fitted to many o f the lesser trium phs that occur within the special sciences but seems a far cry from those events, such as “th e ” scientific revolution o f the seventeenth century, even if that event is in p art com posed o f K uhnian revolutions in optics, dynamics, iatrochem istry and so forth. Foucault has no such modesty o f focus. A lthough he writes o f discontinuities in psychology, psychiatry, economics, linguistic theory, and bi­ ology, the ru p tu res conveniently coincide with the two nodes of history em phasized for French schoolboys, Descartes and 1789. Only m ore recent work on the prison, sex, and a French equivalent o f Lizzie B orden (who serves to illustrate a trans­ form ation in medical jurisprudence) gives us oth er dates, other themes. Foucault’s “revolutions” (he does not use the word) are, on the surface, spontaneous events that are so w idespread, and so lacking in individual models, that we come to fear that his enquiries will degenerate into vague and unexplanatory waffle about the spirit o f the times. This fear leads to my next contrast with K uhn, who m ade us fix o u r attention on revolution. Who bu t the most pedest­ rian scholar could now trouble him self with “norm al science”? Such disdain for the norm al is neither K uhn’s view n o r his practice but it is what philosophers seem to have learned from him. The Order o f Things is, in contrast, a study o f several overlapping and successive “norm al” im m ature sciences. T h a t a break intervenes, suddenly, is illustrated by one o f the most pow erful o f Foucault’s stylistic devices, the b efo re-an d after-picture whose quotations o r descriptions perm anently fix in the m ind o f the read er the fact th at some upheaval in thought has occurred. Crisis is not offered as the explanation o f change (no loss: real crises are h a rd e r to find in K uhn’s own examples than he implies). Foucault’s explanations o f change

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are com plex and program m atic, but for two reasons I am not troubled by this. First o f all the events o f The Order o f Things are sim ultane­ ous with m ore familiar revolutions that historians will never fully explain, although each generation will lay on fu rth e r discoveries that all add up to som ething like understanding. T h ere can never be a finished story o f why the scientific revo­ lution occurred. W hen we tu rn to m ore specific and ch rono­ logically isolated m utations, like that in French medical ju ris­ prudence m entioned above, then Foucault’s im plied expla­ nations are m ore pointed, and each is linked to strongly ex­ ternal factors o f the time as well as to events internal to the knowledge itself. Secondly, for all his talk o f “irruptions” and so forth, Foucault, unlike Bachelard, is preoccupied with norm al sci­ ence. This is not due to any conservatism: his heros are the conventional French ones (Nietzsche, Bataille, A rtaud) who break u p the organization o f norm al discourse, if only th rough a seem ing m adness (Quixote, Sade). B ut he is fasci­ nated by the fact that norm al discourse does get a grip on us, and he finds that, in all but the most exceptionally troubled o f times, this grip is a m ore potent tool o f repression than force o f arms. Such a conception is already implicit in his first well known book, Madness and Civilization, and is at the fo refront o f his c u rre n t preoccupations with knowledge and power. The Order o f Things is a much less overtly political work. It is directed at the forms that underlie the content o f sciences that followed a discontinuity in knowledge. His “before and after pictures” are such tours deforce that it is too easy for us to read his books as about K uhnian revolution. I f we are to use K uhn’s categories, these books are instead about norm al science. It is now time to list these six hypotheses. (1) In the im m ature sciences there are definite regularities for which the hypothetico-deductive m odel is irrelevant. (2) These reg u ­ larities determ ine systems o f possibility, o f what is conceived o f as true-or-false, and they determ ine what count as grounds for assent o r dissent, what argum ents and data are relevant. (3) T h e im m ature sciences are not pre-em inently m odelled on definite achievements and are to be studied th ro u g h the anonym ous mass o f m aterial they have left behind, rath er than thro u g h a few spectacular successes. (4) T h e regularities that determ ine such a system o f possibilities are not articu-

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lated within a system o f thought but constitute a sort o f “dep th knowledge.” (5) T he surface o f a system o f tho u g h t is what is actually said. N either meanings nor intentions are to play any central role in the analysis. (6) T h ere are sharp discontinuities in systems o f thought, followed by sm ooth periods o f stability. T he “revolutions” are o f interest because they are beginnings, and we can see right at the start the regularities that set out the norm al science. But it is the “norm ality” th at is o f interest if we are to try to understand how systems o f possibility can get a grip on how we think.4 Now what are the consequences o f entertaining such hypotheses? O n the one hand are the detailed analyses o f knowledge such as one finds in The Order of Things. I have tried elsewhere to sketch what is done there, but it cannot be fu r­ th er abbreviated. ([6].) I wish only to repeat that the preceding paragraphs are my account o f what Foucault is doing and not an exam ple o f what he does. O n the basis o f Structure some readers forget that K uhn is also a distinguished historian whose theories are the consequence o f real encounters with old science. It would be a far worse mistake to in fer Foucault’s style from his m eta-book Archaeology which, like my exposition here, quite fails to convey the intensity and originality o f Foucault’s m ajor works. Aside from his own applications in detail, Foucault’s hypotheses seem to me to bear on a good m any questions that have recently exercised American philosophy. I have space only for two, “incom m ensurability” and “natural kinds,” the form er a ra th e r exhausted philosophical notion, the latter a perennial one. K uhn makes m uch less use o f the w ord “incom m ensura­ ble” than is commonly thought, and indeed the first edition o f Structure does not display the views on m eaning commonly attributed to him. (Probably we owe the dust-up over incom ­ mensurability to the co-inventor o f this use o f the word, Paul Feyerabend). Kuhn says subsequently that he w anted to use “incom m ensurable” with a m inim um o f m etaphor, m eaning “having no com m on m easure.” Discussion o f the idea has become so divorced from familiar experiences th at I shall begin by recalling two com m on sense bits o f data. First, the N ewtonian celestial mechanics when w ritten up by Laplace aro u n d 1800 is perfectly intelligible to the m odern student o f applied mathematics. (This is tru e even when, in

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Book V, it treats o f caloric in fascinating detail: the intelligibil­ ity is not to be attributed, as some would have it, to an agree­ m ent on the reference o f key terms.) T h e most frequent borrow ers from the Stanford Library were m arked by the Librarian’s code as in the “Aero and A stro” departm ent. O f course the linear accelerator people d o n ’t borrow Laplace because his theory is not even roughly tru e o f small fast objects. But it is a plain fact that no one feels any incom m en­ surability here, and not all the philosophical sophistry in the world will make a w orking physicist feel it. Secondly tu rn to the many volumes o f Paracelsus. T o ­ day’s physician, if she has im agination, can perhaps empathasize with those bizarre writings which were, in their day, so m uch m ore influential than Copernicus. T h e historian who seeks origins has found in Paracelsus predecessors and antici­ pations o f all sorts o f m ore recent chemistry and medicine. T he herbalist can still comb this work for plant lore that we have forgotten. But the tone o f Paracelsus is b etter suggested by interm inable passages that go like this: N ature works through other things, as pictures, stones, herbs, words, or w hen she makes com ets, similitudes, haloes and other unnatural products o f the heavens. ([10]: 460.)

We can come better to understand this world o f similitudes but there is, in a fairly straightforw ard way, no com m on m easure between these writings and ours. O ne cannot butfeel the incommensurability. Foucault’s hypotheses help one u n d erstan d these ex­ trem e phenom ena exhibited by the texts o f Laplace and Paracelsus. It is not theories that are incom m ensurable, but bodies o f discourse, systems o f possibility. O ne recent but by now discredited philosophical idea was that theoretical term s get their m eaning from conceptual relations expressed in the laws o f the theory: if new theory, then new laws, so new concepts and new meanings, hence, no translation. Since there are hardly any laws o f the hypothetico-deductive sort in Paracelsus, it is hardly surprising that such a m odel does not speak to the real incom m ensurability one finds in im m ature science. T h e incom m ensurability between Paracelsus and m odern medicine has another root. Paracelsus’ system o f possibility is quite different from ours. W hat he had up for grabs as true-or-false does not enter into o u r grid o f pos-

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sibilities, and vice-versa. This is not due to different articu­ lated theories or systems o f conscious belief, but because the underlying d epth knowledge is incom m ensurable. This idea lessens the m etaphor in the very word: we cannot lay some num ber o f Paracelsus’ possibilities alongside ours and have two sets that m atch at the end. This is not to say we cannot understand him. O ne has to read a lot. T h e opening chapters o f The Order of Things set out, for me, a structure which helped me understand much Renaissance writing. O ne can even go some way towards talking Paracelsan in English, once one has articulated concepts that, perhaps, Paracelsus was unable to. T ranslation is largely irrelevant. “C harity” and maximizing tru th are worse than useless (I d o n ’t believe a word in all seventeen volumes o f Paracelsus). “Benefit o f the do u b t” about what Paracelsus was “referrin g to” seldom helps. W hat counts is m aking a new canvass o f possibilities o r rather, restoring one that is now entirely defunct. Now I shall conclude with a few words on a m ore lively topic than incom m ensurability: this is the m uch discussed notion o f natural kinds. We may suppose that the natural kinds in the m ature sciences usually match kinds o f things found in nature, but even Putnam rejects such optimism in im m ature science. W hat indeed are the objects o f im m ature science, when we later find that the objects once proposed “do not exist”? Two philosophical tendencies have appeared. T here is straw realism, which holds that natural kind term s either pick out essential properties or else refer to nothing (almost “m ean nothing”). T h en there is a straw idealismcum -nominalism holding that all natural kind term s are fea­ tures o f o u r “conceptual scheme,” hum an artefacts that float freely on the surface o f the world. Not enough good sense has yet been inserted between these straw extrem es and I find Foucault’s archaeology points in directions that we would do well to explore. In scholastic times ‘realism ’ contrasted with nominalism, while Kant m ade it contrast with Berkeley’s idealism. In either sense we m ust be, to abuse K ant’s words, empirical realists. T here is o f course a rich plethora o f things aro u n d us, really existing anterior to any thought. M oreover we cannot help but sort many things as we do: we are, it seems, m ade to sort things much as we do. Not only translation and m utual u n d erstan d ­ ing but also o u r sheer existence seem to d epend upon this fact.

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But som ething else happens when we engage in reflective discourse. One o f Foucault’s projects is to u n d erstan d how “objects consitute themselves in discourse.” All o u r experience with im m ature science suggests that any chosen body o f thought will define for us only some sorts o f “objects” entering into only some sorts o f “laws,” falling u n d e r only some kinds of “kinds.” A bout these we cannot fail to be “nominalists,” but the “ism” is not what m atters. Since most, if not all, knowledge is “im m ature” in this way, attem pting to u n d erstan d how objects constitute themselves in discourse m ust be a central topic o f the theory o f knowledge. R [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

eferences

Gaston Bachelard, Essaie sur la connaissance approachee,, (Paris: Vrin, 1928). ,Le Materialisme rationnel, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1953). G eorges C anguilhem , “Mort de l’hom m e ou epuissem ent du Cogito?” Critique (1967): 600-18. Michel F oucault,LesMots et les choses, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated as The Order of Things, (London: Tavistock, 1970). , The Birth of the Clinic, (London: Tavistock, 1973): 199. , “A rchaeology o f the H um an Science; A Scetch o f a History,” forthcom ing. Ian Hacking, Review o f The Archaeology of Knowledge, Cambridge Review (1972). , T h e E m ergence o f Probability, (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1975): Chaps. 2-6. T. S. K uhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: T h e University o f C hicago Press, 1962). Paracelsus, Sammtliche Werke, Vol. 12, (Munich: O. W. Barth, 1922). Hilary Putnam , Meaning and the Moral Sciences, (London: R outledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). N

otes

1A n article about Foucault to appear in Colliers Encyclopedia 1979, provides a summary o f Foucault’s books and interests. It will be distributed at the APA Session or may be had by sending a stam ped and addressed envelope to me at Stanford U niver­ sity, Stanford, CA 94305. 2Eg. [5], p. 199. For another “fork” in econom ics, see [4], p. 190-1. 3In [1] through nine other books on the history and philosophy o f science, concluding with [2]. 4In a marvellously hostile footnote on Foucault, Laurens Laudan castigates him for not trying to explain why m utations in hum an thought occur. I think that he has m isconstrued Foucault’s program, which is about certain conjectured constraints on normalcy, not about what causes the breakdown o f normalcy. See p. 241 o f Progress and its Problems, California, 1977.

[2] Foucault and Epistemology RICHARD RORTY

Does Foucault give us a sketch of, or a basis for, something like a new theory of knowledge? O r should we perhaps conceive of his ‘archae­ ology’ as a sort of successor discipline to the theory of knowledge, or perhaps a supplement to it? It seems to me that Foucault says a lot of things which suggest that he wants such a theory, and a lot of other things which suggest that he doesn’t. My own hunch is that, whatever he may want, he has set things up so that he cannot have such a theory. Ian Hacking says in his ‘Michel Foucault: Immature Science’ that The Order o f Things exemplifies a theory of knowledge.1 However, the six hypotheses that he goes on to list are hard to hook up either with Erkenntnistheorie or with Wissenschaftslehre. Rather, they look like warnings to the young historian who might be tempted to imitate Macaulay or Hegel or Engels or Acton. To put it another way, they are suggestions to the historian who would like to take Foucault himself as a paradigm. But if one wants to work these concrete suggestions up into a theory of knowledge, or ground them upon a theory of knowledge, it is hard to know where to start. One might try, however, by looking for a theory of ‘how objects constitute them­ selves in discourse’. When Foucault uses such phrases as this, I think he is offering the following account of his relation to the epistemological tradition: ‘Whereas Descartes and Locke and Kant and the positivists and the phenomenologists have assumed that the job of signs was to represent pre-existent reality (even if This essay is a slightly revised version o f a response to Ian Hacking, read at the Western Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in 1979. I have not attempted to update it by taking account either of Foucault’s later work or of the changes in my ow n view of him which that later work induced. (Footnote added in 1985.)

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only phenomenal reality, constituted by consciousness), I will show you a new way to look at what people say. From this new perspective, you will not see words as linked to things by relations like ‘‘impression” or “symbolization” or “synthesis” or “reference” or “truth”. Instead you will see them as nodes in a network of texts, and this network as making up “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak”.2 As a new sort of theory of knowledge I shall give you a theory of such practices, one which has nothing to do with the traditional epistemological question of the accuracy of representation.’ Some such prospectus as this is common to Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Hayden White, and many others who, as Hacking says, think that ideological purity requires us to speak of texts rather than facts. But it is not clear that they have a constructive theory to offer, as opposed to simple polemic against traditional notions. Further, it is tempting to give a deflationary interpretation of this insistence on texts. One might simply take Foucault to be saying, in the manner of Wittgenstein, that we should remind ourselves of something we already know quite well: namely, that the way people talk can ‘create objects’, in the sense that there are lots of things which wouldn’t exist unless people had come to talk in certain ways. Examples of such things are universities, contracts, governments, international monetary exchange mechan­ isms, traditions of historiography, revolutions in philosophy, and so on. When we want to know how we know about such objects as these, we do and should turn not to the epistemologist but to the intellectual historian. O ur curiosity about such matters is not about how to answer the epistemological sceptic, but about how practices of talking in certain ways came into being. On this deflationary interpretation, however, ‘attempting to understand how objects constitute themselves in discourse’ is not, pace Hacking, a ‘central topic of the theory of knowledge’. For we already know quite well, without benefit of theory, how this trick is turned. We have examples of such constitution around us all the time, ranging from the way in which faculty gossip constitutes a new pecking order among the deans, to the way in which the discourse of Hacking himself, his critics and his admirers, has constituted an event called ‘the emergence of probability’, to the way in which the talk of our students in the sixties constituted objects called ‘the environment’ and ‘life-styles’. We not only know how the trick is turned, we are engaged in performing it ourselves a good deal of the time. It seems doubtful that anything remotely like a theory of knowl­ edge could help us understand better how we manage it.

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Foucault would not accept this deflationary interpretation of the notion of ‘constitution’. He appears to think there is something philosophical and theoretical to be done with the notion of ‘discursive practices’ which will be more useful than what Hegel or Husserl did with the notion of ‘consciousness’. The Archaeology o f Knowledge, which strikes me as his least successful book, does seem to be trying to sketch a ‘successor subject’ to epistemology. As far as I can see, however, Foucault never quite decides what that subject is. Thus he says he wants a ‘general theory of discontinuity’,3 yet that very phrasing is prima facie self-contradictory. He sounds much like Husserl when he talks about a ‘project of a pure description of discursive events as the horizon for the search for the unities that form within it’.4 Yet he mocks Husserl’s enterprise of ‘pure description’ in terms which would apply equally to his own. He seems to be unconsciously imitating Descartes, another of his betes noires, when he describes his own methodological scrupulousness and rigour as follows: ‘I have undertaken, then, to describe the relations between statements. I have been careful to accept as valid none of the unities that would normally present themselves to anyone embarking on such a task. I have decided to ignore no form of discontinuity, break, threshold, or limit’.5 In such passages, Foucault writes like a contented inhabitant of the ‘system of possibilities’ offered by French academic philosophy, a system which forbids you just to settle for being clever enough to have found interesting new descriptions to replace boring old ones. Instead, it commands you to exhibit your discovery of such unities as the application of a rigorous method, an illustration of a general theory, the result of having adopted the right starting-point. Nevertheless, notions of ‘method’, ‘starting-point’ and ‘theory’ are, officially, anathema to Foucault. He insists that he wants to ‘question our will to truth, to restore to discourse its character as an event, and to abolish the sovereignty of the signifier’.6 So he seems caught in the following dilemma. On the one hand, he wants to give up all the traditional notions which made up the ‘system of possibilities’ of a theory of knowledge. On the other hand, he is not content simply to give a genealogy of epistemology, to show us how this genre came into being (something he does very well). Rather, he wants to do something like epistemology. In what follows, I want to spell out this dilemma more fully. Let me begin by dividing the possible attitudes towards the idea of a ‘theory of knowledge’ into three clumps: the Cartesian, the

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Hegelian and the Nietzschean. The Cartesian attitude is the source of the traditional academic preoccupation with epistemology. It says that we can divide up culture into the areas in which we have ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ - the hard or mature sciences - and softer areas such as religion and morals and art in which we have discourse which may not count as ‘knowledge’. We then study the general sorts of relations between statements and objects found in the hard sciences, isolate thereby the secret of the success of such sciences in corresponding to reality and thereby isolate ‘the nature of knowl­ edge’. With this in hand, we divide up soft areas into immature sciences which want objectivity but haven’t yet got it, and noncognitive, non-scientific areas which will never have it. Whenever anyone suggests that rationality is not the same thing in all ages, the Cartesian replies that this historicist suggestion throws doubt on the independence of thought from its object, and thus is ‘idealistic’ and ‘relativistic’. Rational inquiry, the Cartesian says, is the process of insuring that representations correspond to reality - so a fixed reality means a fixed method. The Hegelian attitude, on the other hand, takes for granted that rationality is to be viewed sociologically and historically. From this angle, the phrase ‘objective reality’ is no more than an automatic and empty compliment that any discipline will pay the objects it has just finished constituting. For the Hegelian, the satisfaction the Cartesian takes in correspondence and accurate representation is replaced by the thrill of being up-to-date, of being in touch with the latest developments of the Spirit in its march towards larger syntheses and more inclusive discourses. The Hegelian praises our culture for its superiority over the past, rather than for its tighter fit to an ahistorical reality. He does not see the hard sciences as more objective than the soft, or as having a methodological secret of success which Wissenschaftslehre may reveal. He pooh-poohs the idea that knowl­ edge has a ‘nature’ to be studied by a philosophical discipline called Erkenntnistheorie. When the Cartesian charges him with relativism, he replies that the progress of thought, its convergence to the end of inquiry, should take the place of the dubious Cartesian notion of ‘correspondence’ in underwriting our struggle for ‘objectivity’ and our intuition that Truth is One. He sees scientific progress as of a piece with social and moral progress - all of these exhibiting the same dialectical character and the same achievement of even larger, more fruitful syntheses. He sees history as doing what the Cartesian thought epistemology should do - exhibiting the superiority of the

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present to the past, and giving helpful hints to backward areas of culture as to how they might catch up with the more progressive areas. Given this rough distinction, we can put Carnap, Hempel, Chisholm and the like on the Cartesian side, and Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Sellars, Harre, Hesse and the like on the Hegelian side. Foucault too might seem to be on the Hegelian side. He spends a great deal of his time making anti-Cartesian historicist points. His attack on the ‘sovereignty of the signifier’ can easily look like a Wittgensteinian attack on the notion of language-as-picture. His attention to discontinuities between discourses looks Kuhnian, allowing for the difference Hacking notes between concentrating on paradigmatic achievements and concentrating on anonymous ban­ alities. His refusal to see any neat distinctions between the hard sciences, the soft sciences and the arts sounds Deweyan. A lot of what he says can be read as an extension of Sellars in the direction of Goodman and Cassirer. So one is tempted to think of him as a somewhat twitchy and overwrought member of the Hegelian team. Doing so, however, is a mistake - one produced by an illusion of distance and a narrow education. It is a mistake I made when I first read Foucault. Most of us are products of postwar Anglo-Saxon training in philosophy, and so Hegelian historicism looks to us about as far out as one can go. It takes us a while to grasp a point that Hacking has patiently tried to teach us - that historicism is as old hat on the Continent as positivism is over here. For philosophers brought up (as most of us were) to smile condescendingly at the mention of Collingwood and Croce, the suggestion that there is no such thing as an ahistorical nature of knowledge or of rationality to be discovered by philosophical analysis is so titillating that we assume that Foucault must be getting the same kick out of it that we are. But in fact Foucault thinks of historicism as just a variation of Cartesianism. He sees the mighty opposites in contemporary Wissenschaftslehre as both so completely subservient to the ‘will-to-truth’ that their differences count for nothing. Whereas we think it daring to suggest that Hegelian history of ideas might replace Cartesian epistemology, Foucault thinks that Hegelian ‘progressive’ histories are just a self-deceptive continuation of the original Cartesian project. What binds the Cartesians and the Hegelians together - Chisholm with Dewey, Hempel with Kuhn - is the conviction that there is a way of rising above the present and viewing it in relation to inquiry in general. The Cartesian does this by discovering the ahistorical nature

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of rational inquiry. The Hegelian does it historically by contrasting the present state of inquiry with the Peircian convergence towards the true and the real which we would expect given both the ‘ideal speech situation’ and unlimited grant money. The Cartesian purports to have views about representation or reference or corre­ spondence. The Hegelian purports to have views about progress and synthesis and the self-correcting character of the scientific enterprise. Both, however, say something general and optimistic about the way things have been going for the last few centuries. Foucault’s Nietzschean attitude towards the idea of epistemology is that there is nothing optimistic to say. To question, with Nietzsche, the ‘will-totruth’ is to reject the common motive of Cartesian epistemology and Hegelian eschatological historiography. The Nietzschean wants to abandon the striving for objectivity and the intuition that Truth is One, not to redescribe it or to ground it. To see Foucault as a Nietszchean enemy of historicism rather than as one more historicist enemy of Cartesianism, we need to see him as trying to write history in a way which will destroy the notion of historical progress. His aim, he says, is to ‘introduce into the very roots of thought’ the notions of ‘chance, discontinuity and materiality’,7 and thereby to help us drop the notion that later and more inclusive thought is automatically closer to the real. This aim comes out most clearly, perhaps, in an essay called ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’.8 There he describes genealogy (Nietzsche’s term for non-eschatological, non-edifying historiography) as follows: Genealogy must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history - in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to isolate the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles.v

Foucault says he is interested in ‘the historical sense’ only insofar as it can evade metaphysics and become a privileged instrument of gen­ ealogy . . . Given this, it corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates and disperses - the kind of disassociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of men’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty to the events of the past.10

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For Foucault, as for Heidegger and Derrida, Carresianism and Hegelianism are simply varieties of ‘metaphysics’, of the desire to rise above human activities and to see them as instances of a type, or as approximations to an ideal. Or, equivalently, they are varieties of ‘humanism’, a term that Foucault defines as ‘everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power'. 11 He sees the desire for power as contrasting with the will-to-truth. He sees the whole Western project of philosophical reflection on the nature and pros­ pects of human activity as part of a vast organization of repression and injustice.12 He sees his own historical work as of a piece with his anarchist politics - as exposing the subtlety of the repressive mechan­ isms which the ruling classes have installed.13 In presenting Foucault’s Nietzschean attitude I am not com­ mending it. I have no wish to do so, especially since much of Foucault’s so-called ‘anarchism’ seems to me self-indulgent radical chic. Rather, I am contrasting his Nietzschean attitude with the Cartesian and Hegelian attitudes towards ‘theory of knowledge’ in order to emphasize the difficulty Foucault must face in attempting to offer a ‘theory of discursive practices’ or, indeed, a theory of anything. Whereas the Hegelian wants history to substitute for theory of knowledge and for philosophical theories generally, a Nietzschean must not want any substitute for theories. He views the very idea of ‘theory’ as tainted with the notion that there is something there to be contemplated, to be accurately represented in thought. So, once again, I would question Hacking’s suggestion that Foucault has something analogous to a theory of knowledge to offer. As far as I can see, all he has to offer are brilliant redescriptions of the past, supplemented by helpful hints on how to avoid being trapped by old historiographical assumptions. These hints consist largely in saying: do not look for progress or meaning in history; do not see the history of a given activity, of any segment of culture, as the development of rationality or of freedom; do not use any philosophical vocabulary to characterize the essence of such activity or the goal it serves; do not assume that the way this activity is presently conducted gives any clue to the goals it served in the past. Such purely negative maxims neither spring from a theory nor constitute a method. Setting aside all the anarchist claptrap about repression and all the Nietzschean bravura about the will-to-power, isn’t there something worth preserving in Foucault’s claim that the Hegelian reaction against the Cartesian idea of epistemology still doesn’t go far enough?

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It seems to me there is, and that it lies in his claim that we ought to write history, and do philosophy, in the light of the possibility that the Peircian idea of convergence or the Habermasian idea of an ‘ideal speech community’ may be a fake. It may be a fake because the vocabulary any community —even an ideal one - uses is just one more vocabulary, and may be as incommensurable with its predecessors as ours with Paracelsus’s. Hegelian, Peircian and Habermasian eschatology may be a fake because the movement of thought may be just too jerky, the distance between successive human self­ descriptions too wide. Maybe we cannot put together a history of thought which is both honest and continuous. Foucault might just possibly be right in saying that the stories we tell about how our ancestors gradually matured into ourselves are so ‘Whiggish’, so anachronistic, as to be worthless. One can develop this unpleasant possibility in another way. The urge to tell stories of progress, maturation and synthesis might be overcome if we once took seriously the notion that we only know the world and ourselves under a description. For doing so would mean taking seriously the possibility that we just happened on that description - that it was not the description which nature evolved us to apply, or that which best unified the manifold of previous descriptions, but just the one which we have now chanced to latch onto. If we once could feel the full force of the claim that our present discursive practices were given neither by God, nor by intuition of essence nor by the cunning of reason, but only by chance, then we would have a culture which lacked not only a theory of knowledge, not only a sense of progress, but any source of what Nietzsche called ‘metaphysical com fort’. 1 do not know what such a culture would be like, and I am uncertain about both its possibility and its desirability. But 1 sometimes think that Foucault has caught a glimpse of it. A culture that had genealogies but no eschatology, that actually did ‘accept the introduction of chance as a category in the production of events’, 14 would be so utterly unlike ours that the very notions of ‘the constitution of objects’ or of ‘discursive practice’ would hardly make sense. So we should not expect Foucault to give us a philosophical theory that deploys these notions. Still, philosophy is more than theories. We can be grateful to Foucault for doing another of the things that philosophers are supposed to do - reaching for speculative possibilities that exceed our present grasp, but may nevertheless be our future.

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Notes 1

Published in Nous, vol. 13, 1979.

2 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 49. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 229. 7 Ibid., p. 231. 8 Published in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 9 Ibid., pp. 139-40. 10 Ibid., p. 153. 1 1 Ibid., p. 221. 12 Cf. ibid., p. 164. 13 Cf. ibid., pp. 205-34. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 231. 3 4 5

[3] FOUCAULT’S ARCHAEOLOGICAL METHOD: A RESPONSE TO HACKING AND RORTY THOMAS E. WARTENBERG

Over the last twenty years, Michel Foucault has produced a body of his­ torical-philosophical work of great significance. In a series of remarkable books, he has undertaken a bold reinterpretation of Western Society since the Renaissance. As a result of its sweeping scope and penetrating analyses, his work has been the focus of a great deal of attention and controversy. Recently analytic philosophers1 have begun to notice Foucault and to assess the importance of his work for that tradition. Thus Ian Hacking, in “ Michel Foucault's Immature Science"2 sees The Order o f Things3 as a by and large successful attempt to articulate a theory of the structure and devel­ opment of sciences that have not yet achieved a full degree of methodo­ logical maturity. While he admits that Foucault intends to achieve more than a theory of immature science, Hacking sees such a theory as the central point of Foucault's work, a piece of philosophy readily assimilable by the Analytic Tradition. Richard Rorty, in his comments on Hacking's paper,4 despite the fact that he takes a dimmer view of the success of Foucault's enterprise, sees that enterprise as a grander one: the attempt to establish a “ new sort of theory of knowledge."5 Rorty believes, however, that Foucault has not suc­ ceeded in his project and posits a fundamental inconsistency in his approach. In this paper, I shall argue that neither of these attempts to “ place" Foucault gives an adequate assessment of the nature of his view. Both Hacking and Rorty see knowledge as a domain whose existence in a social structure is purely accidental. Knowledge remains for them “ pure," a-social. But this assumption is one that Foucault's work seeks to under­ mine. For him, knowledge—or, more carefully, the discursive practices whose product is knowledge—is necessarily embedded in a framework of

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social practices. The object of Foucault's research in The Order o f Things is to expose this framework of discursive practices and to show how they result in the formation of a certain sense of humanness. The argument of this paper will proceed as follows. In the first two sec­ tions, I will show that both Hacking and Rorty fail to give an adequate understanding of Foucault's view. In the third section, I will give an alter­ nate account of Foucault's understanding of knowledge. The following sec­ tion will show how this account is embodied in The Order o f Things, the work Hacking and Rorty seek to interpret. I conclude with some brief criti­ cisms of Foucault's view. Before entering into the actual discussion, however, let me highlight a cen­ tral problem with one of its terms. When we think of knowledge, we usually think of statements that are the product of research in a given discipline or else a common sense version of such a statement. Both general statements— “ Disease is caused by germ s"—and particular ones—“ The earth's period of rotation around the sun is 365 Vi days"—qualify as knowledge in this sense. Foucault, however, is concerned with the sorts of assumptions that structure the possibility of such first-level knowledge statements. For example, he is concerned to illucidate the sorts of assumptions about the nature of objects that make evolutionary theory a possible science. Although these assump­ tions seem like knowledge claims in that they speak about the nature of things, they function as background assumptions for the actual theories which express knowledge of objects. Although these statements themselves, then, do not constitute empirical knowledge, philosophical discourse about them is a source of knowledge. These distinctions need to be borne in mind, even if at particular times, it seems as if they are not being heeded.

I Let us begin, then, by considering Ian Hacking's interpretation of Foucault. It is Hacking's explicit purpose to force a somewhat unwilling Anglo-American audience to take Foucault seriously as a philosopher. Hacking feels that analytic philosophers have a good deal to learn about the structure of certain fields of knowledge from Foucault, but he also recog­ nizes that there is much in Foucault’s work that would put them off. Since he believes that this slightly irritating material can be excised without much loss to the core of insight he sees in Foucault, Hacking proposes to present just that: a reworked, domesticated version of Foucault's project. Hacking's ver­ sion of Foucault takes the form of six hypotheses which are supposed to 346

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form a theoretical reconstruction of the philosophic theory embedded in The Order o f Things. While Hacking realizes that these theses seem slightly bland (“ pedestrian and abstract" he says) when compared to the richness of Foucault’s work itself, it is Hacking’s explicit hope that this very blandness will make them suitable feed for philosophers unused to the richness of a French intellectual diet. These six hypotheses are put forward as the essential principles of a theory of immature science, a term Hacking borrows from Putnam .6 The distinc­ tion between mature and immature sciences is between those sciences whose theoretical terms refer and those whose terms do not. Roughly, the idea is that outmoded theories do not tell us the truth about the real world, so their terms, unlike the terms of our nice, up-to-date sciences—of which physics is the prime example—do not tell us how things stand in the real world. Hacking’s use of this distinction is problematic. Although he registers a sense of the imprecision of the distinction, he puts his qualms aside and uses it to distinguish Foucault’s work from that of philosophers of science like Putnam or Kuhn. For the moment let us do the same. What emerges is that whereas analytic philosophers of science have been primarily concerned with physics, the mature science, Foucault is concerned with the disciplines of biology, economics, and linguistics as well as their predecessors. What Hacking takes this to reflect is a difference in the objects of which the two theories are theories. Kuhn and Putnam he takes to be concerned with the philosophy of mature science, while Foucault’s six hypotheses become the core of a philosophy of immature science. Hacking’s strategy, then, for making Foucault’s work palatable to ana­ lytic philosophers is to find a place on the analytic philosophic landscape for it to occupy. Out of the rich itinerary of The Order o f Things, Hacking ab­ stracts one essential item, namely a theory of the development of immature science. Although this results in a small shift in our perception of the philo­ sophic landscape itself, it is nothing much to worry about. We only need to keep clear the boundaries in our division of philosophic labor and Foucault’s work will fall neatly into place. Previously, Hacking tells us, the field of empirical knowledge was assumed to be the domain of two philosophic disci­ plines: Erkenntnistheorie and Wissenschaftslehre. What Foucault has discovered is an ambiguity in our previous conception of the scientific. For biology is as much a science as physics, even if, as Hacking claims, its struc­ ture and history are not amenable to say, a Kuhnian treatment. What we find in Foucault’s work is a framework for a new philosophic theory of knowledge in the immature sciences to accompany the two standard philo­ sophic disciplines. Thus, on Hacking’s view, while Chisholm attempts an analysis o f common sense perceptual knowledge, and while Kuhn and 347

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Putnam discover certain exciting features of mature science, Foucault—standing midway between these two—worries about “ the vast domain of speculative and common knowledge that falls between electrons and furniture."7 So let us look at the theory of immature science that Hacking has uncovered in Foucault’s work. Hacking summarizes its basic claims as follows: It is now time to list these six hypotheses. (1) In the immature sciences there are definite regularities for which the hypothetico-deductive model is irrelevant. (2) These regularities determine systems of possibility, of what is conceived of as true-or-false, and they determine what counts as grounds for assent or dissent, what arguments and data are relevant. (3) The immature sciences are not pre-eminently modelled on definite achievements and are to be studied through the anonymous mass of material they have left behind, rather than through a few spectacular successes. (4) The regularities that determine such a system of possibili­ ties are not articulated within a system of thought but constitute a sort of “ depth knowledge.” (5) The surface of a system of thought is what is actually said. Neither meanings nor intentions are to play any central role in the analysis. (6) There are sharp discontinuities in systems of thought, followed by smooth periods of stability. The “ revolutions" are of interest because they are beginnings, and we can see right at the start the regularities that set out the normal science. But it is the “ normality" that is of interest if we are to try to understand how systems of possibility can get a grip on how we think.8 The surprising thing about this list, as Rorty points out, is that, although it is supposed to articulate the basis of a new philosophic discipline, it seems sur­ prisingly bland and inconsequential. Rather than encapsulating a bold, new theoretical framework for understanding the structure and development of immature science, Hacking’s six hypotheses sound more like advice to grad­ uate students interested in writing history dissertations. (Go forth and “ read referees’ reports and examine botanical display cases," not just “ the final reports of the heroes of science.")9 Clearly such methodological advice cannot constitute the grounds for a bold new philosophy of science. Now I think that Hacking does recognize that his description of Foucault’s work won’t do. At one point, he describes his own task in this regard as “ to bring it [Foucault’s theory] down to (our) earth.’’10At another point, while painting a quick sketch of the French intellectual landscape, he comments on Foucault as follows: 348

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But he is fascinated by the fact that normal discourse does get a grip on us, and he finds that, in all but the most exceptionally troubled of times, this grip is a more potent tool of repression than force of arms. Hacking has his finger on something here, a sense of Foucault’s understand­ ing of the power of knowledge that is different from that he has just attrib­ uted to Foucault by means of the six hypotheses. But the category of the “ overtly political" enters his mind and he turns away from this so-called “ preoccupation" of Foucault's as non-essential to an understanding of his theoretical works. But it is just this failure to integrate such “ preoccupations" into the central body of Foucault's theory that causes Hacking's attempt to under­ stand Foucault to go awry. Because Hacking tries to plug Foucault's work into the received tradition of analytic epistemology and philosophy of sci­ ence without reflecting on the basic categories he uses, he winds up pre­ senting a sanitized version of Foucault's work, one purged of its main insights. We can see how Hacking's acceptance of received categories of analysis blinds him to the real nature of Foucault's work if we return to the question of whether Foucault would be willing to adopt the mature-immature science distinction that Hacking employs as his central interpretive device. For the answer is that this is precisely the sort of distinction Foucault is trying to counter in The Order o f Things. While he does admit that he is trying to show that “ the history of non-formal knowledge had itself a system "12—a claim that Hacking may have in mind as the grounds for his own view— Foucault also specifically claims that the human sciences have a mode of rationality that is distinct from that used by the formal sciences not because of any immaturity in their development or methodology, but rather because of a fundamentally different organization of knowledge. And the same was true for the human sciences: it was the retreat of mathesis, and not the advance of mathematics, that made it possible for man to constitute himself as an object of knowledge.13 Since the advance of the physical sciences is tied to their employment of a mathematical model, what Foucault states in this passage is that the human sciences have a fundamentally different structure than the physical sciences and don't simply differ in their degree of sophistication. Hacking's uncritical acceptance of the mature-immature science distinction as the central tool of his analysis blinds him to Foucault's claim that different types of science have different structures. 349

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Hacking’s view is all the more surprising in light of Foucault’s explicit claim that he is not doing what Hacking says he is. Discursive formations [i.e. the object of Foucault’s archaeological re­ search] are not, therefore, future sciences at the stage at which, still un­ conscious of themselves, they are quietly being constituted: they are not, in fact, in a state of teleological subordination in relation to the ortho­ genesis of the sciences.14 Here, Foucault is quite explicit that the sort of knowledge he seeks to expose cannot be assimilated to the model of an immature science. Hacking’s view simply fails to account for this. Thus, Hacking fails to provide an account of Foucault’s claims that does them justice. His account of Foucault as the philosopher of immature sci­ ences is an inadequate attempt to understand the object of Foucault’s view of knowledge in The Order o f Things.

II Let us turn our attention to Rorty’s attempt to characterize Foucault’s project. Rorty does face Foucault’s challenge more squarely than Hacking. Unlike Hacking’s attempt to domesticate Foucault into the Kuhn of middlesized objects, Rorty does not ignore Foucault’s claim (or sometime claim) to provide in archaeology—Foucault’s name for his own method of historical research—a rival to traditional theories of knowledge. It is Rorty’s aim, however, to show that, on Foucault’s own ground, he cannot provide us with such a rival. Instead, Rorty counsels, we have to adopt a “ deflationary inter­ pretation” of Foucault’s project, an interpretation that assimilates any posi­ tive insights Foucault has to Wittgenstein’s talk of linguistic practice and dis­ card the rest—the talk of “ discursive practices,” “ a general theory of dis­ continuity,” “ the constitution of objects in discourse,” etc.—as the inflated verbiage of “ French academic philosophy.” 15 Focusing on Hacking’s claim to find a general theory of immature science in Foucault, Rorty attempts to show that, given Foucault’s general attitude toward epistemology, he cannot himself produce any general theory of knowledge, even one as domesticated as that which Hacking attributes to him. In order to do this, Rorty attempts to provide us with a survey of “ the three possible attitudes towards the idea of a ‘theory of knowledge’: the Cartesian, the Hegelian, and the Nietzschean.” 16 The idea is that, once we 350

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see that Foucault is a Nietzschean, we will see that his project of producing a general theory of knowledge contradicts his basic standpoint. Let us see how Rorty’s argument proceeds. The first attitude towards epistemology that Rorty outlines is the Car­ tesian one. It accepts a fixed reality to which knowledge, in order to be genu­ ine, must correspond. Epistemology is then the study of the statements of different regions of discourse to see if they measure up to the standard of knowledge. As Rorty points out, the mature-immature science distinction Hacking employs is based upon the presupposition of this stance that only those sciences that can guarantee correspondence give us grade-A, certified knowledge of reality. The Hegelian is characterized as more generous in granting the status of knowledge to different disciplines, since “ rationality is to be viewed soci­ ologically and historically.” 17 Every discipline carries standards of rationality within it and they progressively reform their practices in order to achieve “ even larger, more fruitful syntheses.” 18 Rather than seeking a guar­ antee of correspondence, a guarantee he sees as in principle not forthcoming, the Hegelian opts for progress as the criterion of truth. More systematic renderings of previous theories are then certified, with no pretensions of giving any criterion of truth external to the system itself. Finally, Rorty tells us, there is the Nietzschean attitude. While the Hegel­ ian saw the notion of “ correspondence” as an illusion at the heart of the Cartesian attitude, the Nietzschean sees the notion of “ progress” as just as vital a flaw at the basis of Hegelianism, Just as there is no way for the Cartesian to justify belief in correspondence, there is no way for the Hegelian to justify belief in progress according to the Nietzschean point of view. Rorty interprets this to entail that the Nietzschean must limit himself to talk of differences rather than progress. Different institutions and practices succeed one another in history, but to characterize such difference as progress is to interpret and hence to impose a structure upon history that it does not have. Replacement of one framework by another cannot be seen as progress. Rather, we need to see the discontinuity involved in such changes. History is not a story marching to a clear goal, but a series of fits and starts. It is this discontinuity that Rorty sees as the key to the Nietzschean attitude. It is Rorty’s contention that Foucault shares this Nietzchean attitude and that we must therefore acknowledge “ the difficulty Foucault must face in attempting to offer a ‘theory of discursive practices’ or, indeed, a theory of anything.. .a Nietzschean must not want any substitute for theories.” 19 Insofar as Foucault follows the temptation of claiming to provide a theory that challenges traditional theories of knowledge, Rorty sees him as contra-

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dieting his general point of view. For if one accepts the claim that thought is discontinuous, then no general theory can avoid reading its own assumptions into the past. A general theory of discontinuity would fall victim to the very temptation the Nietzschean tries to expose: the temptation to see all change from a uniform point of view. Rorty attempts to place Foucault in the bind of either denying the Nietzschean claim that all attempts at theory building are possible only within a given theoretical framework—what Foucault calls an “ episteme” —or else giving up his own claim to articulate an archaeologi­ cal theory to replace traditional theories of knowledge. But we need to be careful in assessing the validity of Rorty’s challenge to Foucault. Rorty argues that, as a Nietzschean, Foucault must eschew the use of a theoretical vocabulary that includes terms such as “ constitution” as well as ones like “ theory of discursive practices.” However, as a Nietzschean, all that Foucault must avoid, at the pain of self-contradiction, is claiming to attain the sort of non-perspectival standpoint that is the common link between the Cartesian and Hegelian positions. So while “ a general theory of discontinuity” is a term that Rorty might have good reason to challenge, I don't see that his reference to the perspectival nature of the Nietzschean position shows that Foucault’s entire philosophic vocabulary is suspect. Indeed, Rorty’s schematic structuring of possible philosophic posi­ tions proceeds at such a level of abstraction that most of Foucault’s distinc­ tive claims do not even emerge, let alone come in for discussion. In order to show just how problematic Rorty’s own categories are, I want to consider how Kant would fare under Rorty’s gaze. Kant’s central contri­ bution to the theory of knowledge involved his analysis of the role that cer­ tain special concepts and principles played in the justification of empirical knowledge claims. These concepts are the categories. Whereas previous philosophers—both empiricists and rationalists—had treated the categorial principles as items of metaphysical knowledge on a par with empirical knowledge, Kant argued that these judgments played a constituting role in regard to the possibility of empirical knowledge. Instead of viewing the cate­ gorial principles as items of metaphysical knowledge that could be proved or disproved on dogmatic grounds, Kant argued that the categorial framework as a whole provided a set of background assumptions in terms of which the possibility of empirical knowledge first became established. If we attempt to categorize Kant on the basis of Rorty’s trichotomy, how­ ever, none of this would come out. Kant would simply appear as another Cartesian because he held that only a certain region of discourse measured up to the standard of rational knowledge. Instead of seeing Kant as a truly revolutionary philosopher whose theory of categories provided a new under­ standing of the logic of empirical knowledge, Rorty would see him as a con352

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servative Cartesian, working with a single model of what constituted genuine knowledge. The problem with such a characterization of Kant's philosophy is that it bypasses the interesting and revolutionary insights Kant has to offer con­ cerning knowledge. While it may be important for certain purposes to ab­ stract from them and discuss the limits of Kant's theory, it is clearly prob­ lematic simply to deny that Kant has anything interesting to say about epistemology by focusing on his acceptance of what Rorty calls the Cartesian attitude towards scientific knowledge. My claim is that Foucault's view of knowledge suffers a similar fate in Rorty's hands. While Rorty attacks Foucault's claims about the validity of his view, he does not even pause to notice the actual nature of Foucault's view of knowledge. Whatever one makes of the validity of Rorty's critique, its lack of attention to the specific nature of Foucault's view functions to divert attention from the genuinely insightful parts of that enterprise. By considering only the most abstract, metatheoretical level of question con­ cerning the studies of the knowledge Foucault has attempted to provide, Rorty bypasses the real object he claims to be investigating, i.e. Foucault's conception of knowledge as presented in The Order o f Things. Even if Foucault's account of the epistemic status of the theories embodied in that work is exaggerated in certain ways, this fact would not affect the theoretical claims themselves. Rorty fails to distinguish between the nature of Foucault's actual account o f knowledge and the metalevel theory he gives of the status of that account. Recall the distinction I made at the beginning of this paper between em­ pirical knowledge, framework assumptions, and philosophical knowledge concerning these assumptions. A satisfactory account of what knowledge is needs to provide an adequate view of the nature of each of these types of statement and how they are possible. Each type of statement is, however, distinct from the other and an account's failure at one level does not neces­ sarily entail a failure at another. For example, a critique of Kant's transcen­ dental psychology as a means of legitimating the a priori status of frame­ work principles for empirical knowledge does not invalidate the insights con­ cerning those framework principles themselves. Knowledge is a many-tiered structure. We need to do justice to its complexity. Rorty, in his critique of Foucault, ignores these distinctions. Because he finds Foucault's account of the validity of the inquiry that exposes frame­ work principles problematic, Rorty simply rejects all the philosophic cate­ gories Foucault is using to articulate his view as “ verbiage." In so doing, Rorty fails to honor the sorts of distinctions that need to be maintained in giving a careful account of the nature of knowledge. While Foucault may not 353

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have a fully successful justification of his own enterprise, and while this may be a serious problem for his overall theory, Rorty's sweeping and total rejec­ tion of the entire set of Foucault’s categories is simply too crude. The result is that Foucault’s actual conception of knowledge never emerges as a distinct object for inquiry. In order to remedy this situation, I will now attempt to provide an account of that view.

Ill Neither Hacking nor Rorty is able adequately to characterize Foucault’s conception of knowledge because he fails to question his own assumption about the relation of knowledge to social practice. For each, knowledge is a domain whose rules of formation have primarily an internal significance. If we consider the relation between knowledge and social structure on this view, knowledge is seen as a neutral instrument, with no specific entailment regarding the social realm. For Foucault, however, knowledge is no such neutral item. On the con­ trary, he sees knowledge and social structure as standing in an intimate rela­ tionship. In a recent discussion with Noam Chomsky, Foucault clearly states that, for him, knowledge is something that has a necessary relation to its own social embodiment. Perhaps the point of difference between Mr. Chomsky and myself is that when he speaks of science he probably thinks of the formal organization of knowledge, whereas I am speaking of knowledge itself, that is to say, I think of the content of various knowledges which is dispersed into a particular society, permeates through that society, and asserts itself as the foundation for education, for theories, for practices, etc.20 Foucault’s point here is that knowledge is not simply an abstract system of rules. Knowledge is also something that makes possible particular types of social institutions and thus particular ways of structuring society. It is this dimension of knowledge (or theories) that is missing from Hacking’s and Rorty’s accounts and which causes them to misunderstand the nature of Foucault’s view. One way in which the difference manifests itself is Rorty’s rejection of cer­ tain “ political” aspects of Foucault’s claims. We have already seen Hacking’s dismissal of such concern on Foucault’s part as “ preoccupa­ tions.” Rorty, too, finds Foucault’s concern with repression irritating. He claims that Foucault’s aim of “ exposing the subtlety of the repressive 354

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mechanisms which the ruling classes have instilled” 21 is “ mere self-indulgent radical chic” and proposes that “ we set aside all the anarchistic claptrap about repression and all the Nietzschean bravura about the will to power.” 22 Although it is tempting to classify Rorty’s impatience with Foucault as simply a political disagreement, this is a mistake, for there are deeper theo­ retical differences that are reflected in the political ones. What seems to Rorty an irritating political presence is in fact a central feature of Foucault's view of knowledge. For Foucault is attempting to demonstrate that knowl­ edge should not be treated as an autonomous domain, a domain whose explicit or internal rules of use convey a full understanding of its nature. Foucault himself is explicit about this aspect of his work. I am supposing that in every society once controlled, selected, organized, certain number of procedures, whose dangers, to cope with chance events, materiality.23

the production of discourse is at and redistributed according to a role it is to avert its power and its to evade its ponderous, awesome

This is precisely the sort of view that is embodied in The Order o f Things, a view that both Hacking and Rorty fail to acknowledge as a legitimate part of Foucault's enterprise. What Foucault is here pointing to is the need to see knowledge itself as subject to hidden assumptions, assumptions that struc­ ture knowledge in a way that allows for the creation of coercive social institu­ tions. Rather than accepting knowledge as “ corresponding” to the real or as the result of an “ ever progressing rationality,” Foucault is trying to expose knowledge as itself making possible a particular form of social control. This structuring of the social world occurs at a “ hidden” level, for knowl­ edge both creates our sense of what constitutes the world and then conceals its own role under the guise of rationality. W hat Foucault is attempting to do is to lay bear the manner in which certain assumptions are contained in the very form of knowledge that a given society accepts. Since Foucault stresses that normally we are unaware of “ the prodigious machinery of the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion,” 24 the aim of his archaeological method is precisely to expose this aspect of knowledge to our view. In order to help clarify this view of knowledge, we need to return to our understanding of Kant. As we saw, Kant's transcendental philosophy at­ tempted to demonstrate the validity of certain basic theoretical assumptions we make about the world by showing that these very assumptions had to hold if empirical knowledge itself was ever to be possible for us. His argument was that we are so constituted as subjects of experience that only under certain a priori conditions of order, i.e. the validity of the principles of the under355

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standing, couid we experience the world itself. The switch in perspective from the Cartesian standpoint of demonstrating the truth of a specific form of knowledge to the Kantian one of investigating conditions of its possibility is central to understanding Foucault’s position. For what emerges is that knowledge requires, for its very possibility, the validity of certain basic assumptions about the world of which we seek to gain knowledge. Foucault’s position can be seen as based on two explicit criticisms of this transcendental standpoint. First, the idea that we can base our knowledge of the world on a knowledge of ourselves as subjects of experience is one that Foucault cannot accept. Although Kant made a large step in the direction of denying privileged status to our self-knowledge and, of thereby freeing us from the dominance of the Cartesian model, his philosophic method still allows certain privileged access to our mental functioning. As we shall see in the next section of this paper, denying the primacy of our own knowledge of ourselves as subjects is a key item on Foucault’s agenda. Indeed, his basic idea is that what a certain age counts as knowledge entails a specific view of what human beings are for that age. The second major divergence from Kant, is that Foucault does not accept the idea that there is a single, fixed set of principles that determine our basic assumptions about what constitutes an order of nature. Indeed, the agenda of The Order o f Things is to demonstrate that there have been three different sets of such first principles in Western culture since the Renaissance. And, as Rorty points out, Foucault’s account of these changes of basic assumption are more Nietzschean than Hegelian in that Foucault does not accept a model of ever progressing rationality behind these shifts. Indeed, his argument points to the hidden values behind our current sense of orderliness. The view that emerges from this modified Kantian position is one that places knowledge firmly in a social setting. In The Archaeology o f Knowl­ edge, Foucault attempts to specify the nature of his conception of knowledge by situating it within a general framework of social relations. Thus a space unfolds articulated with possible discourses: a system of real or primary relations, a system of reflexive or secondary relations, and a system of relations that might properly be called discursive.25 By specifying that primary relations are relations “ which, independently of all discourse or all object of discourse, may be described between institu­ tions, techniques, social forms, etc.” 26 Foucault clearly states that discursive relations—the sort of relations that articulates knowledge claims—need to

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be viewed as having a social framework. Indeed, he goes on to say that this view of discursive practices or knowledge is one that is able to show that its role among non-discursive practices is [not] external to its unity, its characterization, and the law of its formation. They [i.e. such roles] are not disturbing elements which, superposing themselves upon its pure, neutral, atemporal, silent form, suppress its true voice and emit in its place a travestied discourse, but, on the contrary, [are] its formative element.27 The point of this discussion has been to show that the account of knowl­ edge presented by Foucault is of a fundamentally different type than that recognized by Hacking and Rorty. The “ socialized” and “ dehumanized” version of transcendental philosophy presented by Foucault is neither a theory of immature science nor a self-contradictory attempt to provide a general theory of discontinuity. It is an attempt to provide an alternative to the Cartesian assumptions of privileged subjectivity and fixed rationality. By situating knowledge in a setting of social practices, Foucault is able to pro­ vide a framework that makes discontinuity a possible fact and subjectivity a constituted item. It is this alternative conception of knowledge that is Foucault’s true contribution to epistemic theory.

IV At this point, let us consider an objection to what I have been saying. “ While your account of Foucault’s view of knowledge seems reasonable, I don’t see how it shows that Foucault sees knowledge as intimately related to social practice. Of course, he is concerned with society and its institutions in his accounts of madness, the clinic, and prisons. However, your account does not show why we should view The Order o f Things as itself concerned with the same argument. Doesn’t Hacking’s recent characterization of Foucault’s current work as exhibiting a ‘new concern with relations of power, rather than relations of meaning, 528 give substance to the charge that The Order o f Things cannot be seen as having a concern with the social dimensions of knowledge analogous to that embodied in his other, more concrete writings? “ Consider,” the objector might continue “ Foucault’s own description of his work on the clinic. He states:

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It is not a question, then of showing how the political practice of a given society constituted or modified the medical concepts and theoretical structure of pathology; but how medical discourse as a practice con­ cerned with a particular field of objects, finding itself in the hand of a certain number of statutorily designated individuals, and having certain functions to exercise in society, is articulated on practices that are exter­ nal to it, and which are not themselves of a discursive order.29 While it is clear in this case that medical discourse is seen by Foucault as necessarily conditioned by its place within a larger institutional practice and that, as a result, its knowledge needs to be revealed as taking place in that larger social and institutional context, the same cannot be said of Foucault’s work in The Order o f Things. There it is ‘meaning’ that forms the object of his investigations and this is why the human sciences are presented in the absence of any larger social context. Can you produce an account of that book which shows explicitly how the knowledge it considers has a social role?” It certainly is true that the immediate object of Foucault’s investigation in The Order o f Things—those disciplines known as the human sciences—is a more theoretical one than that investigated in his more concrete studies of social institutions such as the prison. Nevertheless, this does not justify the claim that the two concerns are not related at a fundamental level. Indeed, as I shall now try to show, both investigations are parts of a unified attempt to demonstrate the social dimensions of knowledge. Roughly, Foucault’s investigations of knowledge and social institutions need to be seen as resulting in a two-stage argument. In the first stage, Foucault demonstrates that the human sciences are constitutive of a particu­ lar sense of what it is to be a human being. The next stage shows that this sense of humanness is central to our acceptance of certain social institutions as involving “ rational” modes of handling human beings. If this argument is successful, we can see that all of Foucault’s work is of a piece, seeking to demonstrate how knowledge has a necessary role in the legitimation of social institutions. In order to see how this goes, let us look in more detail at The Order o f Things. That work is subtitled, “ An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.” Surprisingly, however, the human sciences make their appearance very late in that study. Only after we have waded through some three hundred pages concerned with the structure of philology, biology, and political economics as well as their predecessor disciplines, do we find the human sciences on the scene. Before we encounter the human sciences, we have been led through the ways in which words, life, and labor have been conceptualized in the six358

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teenth century, in the Classical Age, and in modern times. Foucault’s claim is that each age has a distinctive sense of order that characterizes how it investigates these areas. What seems at first a peculiarity is, however, a central point of Foucault’s study. For what he wants to emphasize is that the emergence of the human sciences requires the particular constellation that makes up the empirical sciences, a constellation that came into existence only during the nineteenth century. Foucault argues that underlying all the sciences of an age is a par­ ticular episteme, a basic approach to understanding the world, that is exposed as grounding each of the particular sciences of an epoch. By tracing the evolution of the constellation of knowledge about life, language, and labor, Foucault shows the evolution of three fundamentally different epistemes, with the human sciences capable of being constituted only in the last. The point of the story then is this: W hat we consider the positive sciences of our age are conditioned by a set of assumptions as to what constitutes knowledge, the episteme. But unlike traditional theories of knowledge, Foucault argues that these assumptions govern not just knowledge of objects, but also our knowledge of ourselves. We can therefore say that the nature of the human being itself is an object constituted by the basis prin­ ciples of order that make up an episteme. The rich itinerary of The Order o f Things is intended to make us see how M an30—the particular view of human beings prevalent in the Modern Age—fits into the constellation of sciences that constitute the modern episteme. The rationale behind such a view is fairly clear. Although Descartes inau­ gurated a philosophic tradition that took our knowledge of ourselves to be of a different order than our knowledge of external objects, that tradition is radically in error. In this respect, Foucault does share a Wittgensteinian per­ spective. The human being is not a privileged object. Our ways of talking about ourselves are just as dependent upon certain assumptions we make about order as are our ways of talking about things. Both self and its objects are constituted by the current episteme. This is, however, only half the story. The other half requires that we see that this understanding of what it is to be a human being conditions our acceptance as rational of those social institutions within which we live. As we have seen in Foucault’s own description of his work on the clinic, the claim is that a particular form of knowledge makes a certain social institution emerge as a mode of regulating human life because it legitimates that mode of regu­ lation as a rational way to treat people. It is the burden of Foucault’s argument in his particular studies to show how our modern social institutions—from the clinic to the prison—embody 359

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specific techniques for controlling human beings whose “ rationality” depends upon the human sciences. Indeed, he even argues that the success of these sciences depends upon their institutionalization. I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a spe­ cific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful.31 Foucault is claiming that the human sciences and their embodiment in the prison mutually support one another. The central idea, from our point of view, is that the human sciences con­ tain a particular manner of conceiving what human beings are. Foucault talks of Man as a particular object whose being is constituted by the modern episteme. But our assumptions about what human beings are plays a crucial role in legitimating social practices. Only because we view Man as a certain type of creature are we willing to accept certain modes of conduct with respect to him as reasonable. Foucault’s claim is that, behind this surface of reasonableness, there is an entire structure of social control that we are unaware of. Because our attitudes are structured by our episteme, we have a blindness to the ways in which our social institutions structure and limit human interactions and behavior. Our limited sense of the nature of human beings—as Man—gives rise to a limited awareness of how society structures the nature of our lives—as Men. In Volume One of The History o f Sexuality, Foucault gives an example of how this works. He reports that a “ somewhat simple-minded” farm hand was put away in an asylum for life because he had “ obtained a few caresses from a little girl.” Foucault comments: The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.32 Foucault’s use of this incident demonstrates the way in which he sees knowl­ edge and social structure as working together in a repressive manner. Only in a society in which “ sexuality” is an object of knowledge and an element in a set of social practices, Foucault argues, could such an event as this take place. And it is only in the presence of Man as a being constituted by the 360

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human sciences that this object—sexuality—can be constituted and regulated. But now we can see that Foucault’s invocation of repression in speaking of knowledge and the human sciences is not the intrusive “ political” presence Hacking and Rorty take it to be. Rather, it springs from deep theoretical roots in Foucault’s conception of the human being as a creature that gains a sense of its own nature from the society in which it exists and the sorts of language that society uses to describe it. Once this view of both the discontinuity of knowledge and the role of knowledge in making possible certain social institutions is seen, we can understand why Foucault sees his investigation of the human sciences as liberating. It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that Man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form .33 The sense of freedom comes from realizing that the particular form of social organization embodied in the human sciences and the social institutions they make possible is but a transient one. Although knowledge’s pose of objec­ tivity conceals the historical nature of Man from our normal view, Foucault’s archaeology is intended to provide a clear perception o f this truth, one that allows us to see the entire framework of social institutions tied to the human sciences as a transient historical development. Foucault’s view of the repressive nature of modern society makes this awareness of transience a liberating one.

V So far, I have been attempting to present a coherent conception of Foucault’s view of knowledge as articulated in The Order o f Things. If my argument has been successful, it will be clear that the views presented by Hacking and Rorty are simply off the mark. Foucault’s conception of knowledge and his view of its relation to social practice is simply more orig­ inal and interesting than his two critics allow. Giving such an account is, of course, different from providing a full-scale defense of it. My aim has been a more limited one, namely to show that Foucault does have a coherent conception of knowledge that is different from that attributed to him by either Hacking or Rorty. Since we have now 361

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seen what the nature of this conception is, let me briefly attempt to sketch a problem I see in this view. My central reservation concerning Foucault’s argument is his seeming assumption that the human being’s existence can be totally structured by the assumptions that a given form of knowledge makes about the nature of being human. While Foucault’s archaeological research does uncover a cer­ tain sense of humanness, that sense is a sense present to discourse only. Foucault seems to think that this sense is all that there is to human beings in a given age. But human beings living in a particular society are not fully constituted by the assumption reigning in that society. Whereas Hegel taught us to be suspi­ cious of the assumption that the for-itself gives us an accurate guide to the structure of the in-itself. Foucault seems to ignore that idea. Human beings are creatures whose existence is less pliant than Foucault thinks. By treating the human being as a being whose existence is totally consti­ tuted by the forms of discourse or knowledge used by an age, Foucault is also left without a criterion to use in assessing the degree of domination that a particular society embodies. Although Foucault’s argument that Man is a creation of the modern episteme has a great deal of force to it, one is left feeling that there is more that is common to human beings than Foucault allows. Just as our physical natures make us more than creations of dis­ course, our spiritual nature cannot be reduced to a set of assumptions that a particular age has about it. At the political level, this problem asserts itself in Foucault’s failure to dis­ tinguish different types of repressive societies. While it may be liberating to see that our own social institutions have concealed forms of power that restrict us in ways we have trouble seeing and that other societies have had greater rationality in their mode o f organization than appears at first glance, one is left feeling that there are ways to assess the violence done to human beings by a social system. Though all social systems do exist by means of a structuring of human beings to meet the needs of that system, we need to have a way to talk about how much pain such structuring inflicts upon the creatures for whom it exists. Even if previous efforts to conceptualize this in terms of repression or exploitation have proven to be inadequate, this does not entail that we should give up the project. Only an unjustified belief in the total constitution of the human subject by the forms of a given social struc­ ture press us towards Foucault’s view. So despite the tremendous insights gained from Foucault’s masterful study of the human sciences, I am left with a fundamental reservation about its success. Though much of our sense of our own humanness may be a result of the social world we live in, I remain unconvinced that human beings are 362

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totally constituted by the words they use to describe themselves or the social practices within which they live. Thus, although I think we have a good deal to learn from Foucault’s con­ ception of the human being in society, I do not think his account fully suc­ ceeds. My attempt in this paper has been to push forward the dialogue con­ cerning his work in a manner that allows his most central and insightful ideas to emerge.34 Mount Holyoke College

FOOTNOTES 1 Despite the problematic nature of this term, I use “ Analytic philosophy” to characterize the particular mode of philosophical analysis that has been dominant in American Universities since the 1950’s. 2 Ian Hacking, “ Michel Foucault’s Immature Science/’ Nous , Vol. XIII, No. 1 (1979), pp. 39-51. 3 Michel Foucault, The Order o f Things (New York: 1970). 4 Richard Rorty, “ Comments on Hacking’s ‘Michael [sic.] Foucault’s Immature Science,” read at the Western Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, April, 1979. 5 Ibid., p. 2 6 Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: 1978), p, 21. 7 Hacking, “ Michel Foucault’s Immature Science,” p. 39. 8 Ibid., p. 47-78. 9 Ibid., p. 42. 10 Ibid., p. 40. 11 Ib id , p. 41. 12 Foucault, The Order o f Things, p. X. 13 Ibid., p. 350. 14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge and the Discourse on Language trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), pp. 180-81. 15 Rorty, “ Comments,” p. 4. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 5, 18 Ibid., p. 6. 19 Ibid., p. 9. 20 Ayer, A. J., et aL, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns o f Mankind , ed. Fons Elders (London, 1974), p. 160-61. 21 Rorty’s characterization of Foucault’s “political preoccupations” is actually inaccurate in that it has a particular class exercise its power by “installing” a form of repression. Foucault parts company with the Marxist tradition on precisely this point. 22 Rorty, “ Comments,” pp. 9-10. 23 Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge, p. 216.

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24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. Ibid., p. 68.

29 30 31 32 33 34

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Ian Hacking, “The Archaeology of Foucault,” The New York Review o f Books , May 14, 1981, p. 36. Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge p. 164. I use the term “Man” instead of “ human being” in this paper, following Foucault's usage, in an attempt to avoid confusion. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: 1977), p. 305. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume One: Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: 1978), p. 31. Foucault, The Order o f Things, p. xxiii. An earlier version of this paper was read at the National Humanities Center and at Amherst College. The present version benefitted from comments received at those places and from the anonymous referees at The Philosophical Forum .

[4] Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory David Owen

The aim of this essay1 is to elucidate the logical structure of genealogy as a prac­ tice of critical reflection and, in doing so, to illustrate, dispel and account for the confusion concerning this practice which has characterised its reception, perhaps especially among philosophers working within the tradition of the Frankfurt School. The essay advances five claims which can be stated in summary as follows: 1. Setting aside the cases of contingent error and of ignorance, we can note that there are (at least) two logically distinct forms of self-imposed, non-physical constraint on our capacity for self-government: being held captive by an ideol­ ogy (i.e., false consciousness) and being held captive by a picture or perspec­ tive (i.e., what one might call 'restricted consciousness'). 2. Critical Theory as ideologiekritik2 is directed to freeing us from captivity to an ideology; genealogy is directed to freeing us from captivity to a picture or perspective.3 3. Philosophers working within the tradition of Critical Theory have typically misinterpreting genealogy as a (empirically insightful but normatively confused) form of ideologiekritik. 4. This category mistake is the product of an illicit generalisation of ideological captivity as the only form of self-imposed, non-physical constraint on our capacity for self-government. 5. Once this 'craving for generality' is dispelled, we are able to grasp both geneal­ ogy and Critical Theory as addressing distinct aspects of enlightenment and involving distinct kinds of dialogue.4 The argument of this essay is presented in five parts, each corresponding to one of the theses summarised above.

I

Let us consider the class of types of self-imposed, non-physical constraint on our capacity for self-government. The argument advanced here is that we can distin­ guish at least two members of this class, namely, being held captive by an ideol­ ogy and being held captive by a picture or perspective, which I'll refer to as

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'ideological captivity' and 'aspectival captivity' respectively. Let us take each in turn. The primary feature of ideological captivity can be elucidated by reference to the concept of 'false consciousness'. This concept refers to the condition of hold­ ing beliefs that are both false and compose a world-picture (where 'picture' refers here to a more or less coherent collection of beliefs) which legitimatizes certain oppressive social institutions, where this condition is a non-contingent product of inhabiting a society characterised by these social institutions (Geuss 1981: 59-60).5 As Raymond Geuss has pointed out in his classic study of Critical Theory, it is not difficult 'to see in what sense the 'unfree existence' from which the agents [char­ acterised by false consciousness] suffer is a form of self-imposed coercion': Social institutions are not natural phenomena; they don't just exist of and by themselves. The agents in a society impose coercive institutions on themselves by participating in them, accepting them without protest, etc. Simply by acting in an apparently 'free' way according to the dictates of their world-picture, the agents reproduce relations of coercion. (Geuss 1981: 60) Hence, ideological captivity is characterised by self-imposed coercion because the agents concerned are subject to 'a kind of self-delusion', where the power of this coercion 'derives only from the fact that that the agents do not realize that it is selfimposed' (Geuss 1981: 58). The main, contrasting, feature of aspectival captivity is that, whereas in the case of ideological captivity, the condition of captivity is necessarily tied to the falsity of the beliefs held by the agent, in the case of aspectival captivity, the condition of captivity is independent of the truth or falsity of the beliefs held by the agent. This can be drawn out by reference to the concept of being held captive by a picture (Wittgenstein) or a perspective (Nietzsche/Foucault). We can eluci­ date the sense of this concept in four stages. First, the concept of a picture and the concept of a perspective (in the technical senses with which I am concerned) are co-extensive in that the former refers in a passive mode to what the latter refers in active mode. A picture refers to a system of judgments in terms of which our being-in-the-world - or some feature of it takes on its intelligible character; a perspective refers to a system of judgments as a system of judging in terms of which we make sense of ourselves (or some features of ourselves) as beings in the world. Thus, a picture or perspective refers, in Foucault's terms, to a way of conceptualizing the real. Expressed through and embodied in practices, 'they open up a field of experience in which subject and object alike are constituted' ('Florence' 1994: 318). Second, there are two necessary features of such systems of judgm ent/judg­ ing. On the one hand, such systems govern what is intelligibly up for grabs as true-or-false. They do not determine what is true or false, but rather what state­ ments or beliefs can count as true-or-false. This is why Foucault characterizes such systems as 'games of truth (jeux de verite)': 'the games of truth and error through

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which being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can and must be thought' (Foucault 1986: 6-7). Or, as Wittgenstein puts it while making essentially the same point, a picture 'is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false' (Wittgenstein 1969: §94). On the other hand, such systems are 'partial' in the sense that they involve pre­ judgments (i.e., judgments which act as principles of judgment), which are themselves not grounded in more basic judgments but, rather, in (nothing more or less than) our ways of acting in the world. This is why Foucault takes pains to focus his accounts on 'the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought - and the practices on the basis of which these prob­ lematizations are formed' (Foucault 1986: 11), where 'problematizations' refer to the specific ways in which a topic is constituted as an issue for reflection and action within particular systems of judgment. Third, the value of a picture or perspective is dependent on its capacity to guide our reflection such that we can make sense of ourselves in the ways that matter to us. In Foucault's terms, this is the question of the extent to which the self-problematising of subjects (that is the actual practices of self-understanding in which a form of subjectivity is grounded) exposes or occludes the forms of power to which they are subject. The crucial point to note here is that a picture or perspective formed under, and in response to, one set of conditions of worldly activity may cease to be a good way of orienting our thinking under different conditions of worldly activity. Ways of problematizing ourselves as agents which were appropriate, for example, to enlightening us to the operation of certain forms of power may come to occlude the exercise of other forms of power. Hence the importance of being able (a) to free oneself from captivity to the picture or perspective in question by seeing it as one picture or perspective among many possible pictures or perspectives and (b) to assess the value of this picture or perspective in relation to, and through a process of comparison with, other pictures or perspectives.6 Such an assessment will include, but not be reducible to, reflection on the truth value of the 'principles of judgm ent' char­ acteristic of the picture in question. Fourth, to be held captive by a picture or perspective is to be captivated such that one cannot re-orient one's reflection and, hence, one 'thinks that one is trac­ ing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely trac­ ing round the frame through which we look at it'(Wittgenstein 1953: §114). This is a state of unfreedom. The exercise of our capacity for self-government qua agency is blocked by our captivity to a picture or perspective because the exer­ cise of our capacity for self-government qua judging is obstructed by our capti­ vation by this picture or perspective: we are enslaved because we are entranced. In such cases, we are subject to the picture or perspective as a limit in either of two senses: A 'lim it' can mean either the characteristic forms of thought and action which are taken for granted and not questioned or contested by partic­ ipants in a practice of subjectivity, thereby functioning as the implicit

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background or horizon of their questions and contests, or it can mean that a form of subjectivity (its forms of reason, norms of conduct and so forth) is explicitly claimed to be a limit that cannot be otherwise because it is universal, necesseary or obligatory (the standard form of legitima­ tion since the Enlightenment). (Tully 1999: 93) Thus, to repeat, what m atters in this context is (a) our capacity to free ourselves from our captivation to the ways of thinking in question - to recognize and loosen the grip that the picture or perspective expressed by these ways of thinking has on us - in order (b) to evaluate the value of this picture or perspective relative to other possible pictures or perspectives. Hence, as Foucault remarks, the point of his philosophical work consists in 'the endeav­ our to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently' (Foucault 1986: 7). At this stage, it should not be difficult to see that the 'unfree existence' to which those held captive by a picture or perspective are subject is a form of selfimposed constraint on their capacity for self-government. It is a constraint on their capacity for self-government because it prevents those subject to it from exercising their powers of judgment concerning the value of such and such a picture or perspective by presenting this picture or perspective as the only way of reflecting of the topic in question. This constraint is self-imposed because it is held in place by our practices - and, more generally, the relations of power and domination that govern our ways of reflecting and acting in the world.7 To adapt Geuss' remark concerning false consciousness, we might say that simply by acting in an apparently 'free' way according to the dictates of their worldpicture (where 'picture' refers here to a system of judgments), the agents repro­ duce their condition of subjection and that the power of the subjection to which agents are subject derives solely from the fact that they do not realize that it is self-imposed. Now we might be tempted to say that in a certain respect this kind of self-imposed captivity does, like ideological captivity, involve a false belief but that it does not involve a false first order belief, rather it involves a false second order belief (i.e., a false belief about one's beliefs). This way of reflecting on aspectival captivity would lead us the following claim: aspectival captivity involves the agents holding the false belief that the range of possible beliefs (whether true or false) open to them are the only possible range of beliefs open to them. But to accept this conceptualization of aspectival captivity would be misleading and mistaken for the following reason: an agent held captive by a picture cannot have such a second order belief about the range of first order beliefs available to him or her; there is, as it were, no logical space for such a belief to arise for the agent. The point can be put this way: it is a necessary condition of the agent having such a false second order belief that the agent recognizes the possibility of such a second order belief being true-or-false but to be held captive by a picture or perspective is just to fail to recognise this possi­ bility as a possibility.8 This is why it is appropriate to refer to this condition as one of 'restricted consciousness'.

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This section will establish the claim that just as ideologiekritik is directed to freeing us from ideological captivity or false consciousness, so genealogy is directed to freeing us from aspectival captivity or restricted consciousness. As in the preced­ ing section, I will briefly summarise the relevant points concerning ideologiekritik in order to focus primarily on the more interesting - since more controversial case of genealogy. In so far as ideological captivity is characterised by agents both holding false beliefs which legitimize oppressive social institutions and being blocked in some way from recognizing the falsity of the beliefs that they hold, the aim of the prac­ tice of ideologiekritik - as its very name proclaims - is to enable them to recognize this fact. As Wittgenstein put it: One must start out with error and convert it into truth. That is, one must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won't do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth. (Wittgenstein 1993: 119) Hence, the key feature of ideologiekritik is to produce a form of self-reflection within the agents subject to ideological captivity which facilitates recognition of the falsity of the beliefs that they hold. The nature of the self-reflection involved in this process - and hence the form of the critical theory - will hang on the account of the mechanism through which they are currently blocked from achiev­ ing such recognition; what is certainly the case is that this process of self-reflec­ tion will involve not only liberation from the false beliefs in question but also, and immanent to this process, a recognition of how they came to be held captive by these false beliefs. Hence, as Geuss puts it, 'a critical theory has its inherent aim to be the self-consciousness of a successful process of enlightenment and emanci­ pation' (1981: 58). The form of this process of self-reflection within the tradition of the Frankfurt School has been specified by Geuss as follows: a critical theory criticizes a set of beliefs or world-picture as ideological by showing: (a) that the agents in the society have a set of epistemic principles which contain a provision to the effect that beliefs which are to be sources of legitimation in the society are acceptable only if they could have been acquired by the agents under free and uncoerced discussion; (b) that the only reason the agents accept a particular repressive social institution is that they think that this institution is legitimized by a set of beliefs embedded in their world-picture; (c) that those beliefs could have been acquired by these agents only under conditions of coercion.

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From this it follows immediately that the beliefs in question are reflec­ tively unacceptable to the agents and that the repressive social institution these beliefs legitimize is not legitimate. (Geuss 1981: 68) In other words, through a process of self-reflection, agents come to recognise the falsity of their false beliefs and an integral part of this process is that these agents are brought to see that their failure to recognize this fact prior to this process of self-reflection as part and parcel of the oppression to which they were subject and to which, at the level of social institutions, they are still subject. Hence, ideolo­ giekritik is successful if and only if the agents subject to ideological captivity are enabled to free themselves from this captivity and, through this process of enlightenment, become motivated to engage in a process of emancipation, i.e., to fight against the oppressive social institution in question. The state of unfreedom described by the concept of aspectival captivity is, as we have seen, logically distinct from that described by the notion of ideological captivity, most notably in that aspectival captivity is independent of the truth-orfalsity of the beliefs held by the agent. Hence, too, the kind of practice of criticism required to address this condition of unfreedom, namely genealogy, is also logi­ cally distinct in kind from ideologiekritik. Genealogy, as will become clear, also has as 'its inherent aim to be the self-consciousness of a successful process of enlight­ enment and emancipation', albeit one of a somewhat different kind.9 In so far as aspectival captivity is characterised by agents reflecting and acting on themselves as subjects in terms of a given picture or perspective as the only possible picture or perspective open to them, the initial aim of genealogy is to enable them to free themselves from aspectival captivity by exhibiting the possi­ bility of other pictures or perspectives. As Gordon Baker puts it, commenting on Wittgenstein's discussion of aspectival captivity: The cure is to encourage surrender of the dogmatic claims 'Things must/cannot be thus and so' by exhibiting other intelligible ways of seeing things (other possibilities), that is, by showing that we can take off the pair

of spectacles through which we now see whatever we look at. . . . To the extent that philosophical problems take the form of the conflict between 'But this isn't how it is!' and 'Yet this is how it m ust be!' .. ., they will obviously be dissolved away once the inclination to say 'm ust' has been neutralised by seeing another possibility. (Baker 1991: 48-9) Hence, as Jim Tully notes, Foucault's genealogical exercises consist 'of historical studies undertaken to bring to light the two kinds of limit: to show that what is taken for granted in the form of the subject in question has a history and has been otherwise; and to show 'in what has been given to us as universal, necessary and obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints'. These studies enable us 'to free ourselves from ourselves', from this form of subjectivity, by coming to see that 'that-which-is has not always been', that it could be otherwise, by showing how in Western cultures

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people have recognised themselves differently, and so to "alter one's way of look­ ing at things'" (Tully 1999: 94). However, what motivates genealogy is not simply the condition of being held captive by a picture or perspective but that this captivity prevents us from making sense of ourselves as subjects or agents in the ways that matter to us. In other words, whereas ideologiekritk seeks to disclose a contradiction between our beliefs and our epistemic principles, genealogy aims to elucidate a disjuncture between the ways in which we are intelligible to ourselves with respect to some dimension of our subjectivity or agency, on the one hand, and our cares and commitments, on the other.10 This disjuncture is not a matter concerning our beliefs but of the relationship between a picture or perspective and our capacity to experience ourselves as subjects or agents in the ways that matter to us. Two examples may clarify this point. Nietzsche's concern is this: we are held captive by a picture of morality - which he refers to as the ascetic ideal - that renders us increasingly unable us to make sense of ourselves as moral agents. This concern has two dimensions. The first, given dramatic expression in section 125 of The Gay Science, is that we fail to recognise that, following the death of God, the conditions of intelligibility of many of our moral concepts no longer apply and, hence, continue to use our moral words as if they expressed the concepts which, prior to the death of God, they expressed.11 The second is that as we come to acknowledge the meaning of the death of God, i.e., that our moral words no longer express these moral concepts, we will recoil into a condition of nihilism - God is dead and hence everything is permitted. This latter point becomes clear if we take, as Nietzsche does, Kant's moral theory as an expression of this picture and recall Kant's famous argument in the 'Critique of Teleological Judgement' that morality requires certain matters of faith and that without the res fidei there is only nihilism, where nihilism can be glossed as the condition of being unable to make sense of ourselves as moral agents. Nietzsche agrees that this picture of morality does generate the requirement for such matters of faith - but the point of his efforts to enable us to free ourselves from this picture of morality is to free us from the entailment of Kant's view that, once we acknowledge the death of God, nihilism is all that remains. Hence, Nietzsche's task is to free us from captivity to this picture; a task that he takes up by providing a genealogical account of how we have become subject to it. There are three stages in this genealogical process of self-reflection. First, by providing an account in which two types of morality stand in relation to one another, Nietzsche unsettles the view that what he refers to as 'slave morality' is the only type of morality. Second, by giving an account of the emergence and development of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche shows us both how our moral concepts are interwoven with a particular form of life and how we have become captivated by this picture of morality as well as how this captivation leaves us open to the threat of nihilism. Third, in devaluing this picture of morality by showing that it entails our becoming obscure to ourselves qua moral agency, Nietzsche's account motivates us in terms of our own commitment to making

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sense of ourselves as moral agents to engage in the practical task of revaluing our moral values.12 In other words, Nietzsche's genealogical account attempts to articulate a way in which we can make sense of ourselves - and, in particular, make sense of our current failure to make sense of ourselves - as moral agents which guides us to engage in the revaluation of our moral values. The second example is provided by Foucault's work in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1. Here, Foucault's concern is based on the thought that we are held captive by a picture of politics fundamentally shaped by discourses and practices of sovereignty - and which leads us to assume that sovereignty is the pre-eminent locus of political reflection. As he puts it: At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the represen­ tation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty . . . To conceive of power on the basis of these problems is to conceive it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. (Foucault 1978: 88-9) Foucault's concern is that our captivation by this sovereignty-based picture of politics means that we fail to make sense of our political agency. The substance of this concern is, thus, that in being so captivated we are blind to the operation of forms of domination articulated through relations of power that are not disclosed by this picture. His task is, thus, to enable us to free ourselves from this picture such that we may begin to make sense of ourselves as political agents in ways that support, rather than undermine, our capacity for self-government. Again, there are three stages to the process of genealogical self-reflection. First, Foucault provides an account of two types of political relations, those organized around sovereignty and those organized around bio-power, and their relation to each other in order to unsettle the grip of the sovereignty-picture on our political imaginations. Second, by giving an account of the emergence and development of bio-power, Foucault shows us how we have remained captivated by the sover­ eignty picture and how this captivation leads us to fail to make sense of ourselves as political agents in so far as we fail to make sense of our own unfreedom as political agents. Third, by enabling us to make sense of ourselves as 'unfree' polit­ ical agents and, in particular, our current failure to make sense of our own polit­ ical unfreedom, Foucault's account motivates us in terms of our own commitment to self-government to engage in the practical task of overcoming this condition of unfreedom through a re-orientation of our political subjectivity expressed in experiments with altering our games of government to minimize the degree of domination within them (Foucault 1997: 298). In the cases of both Nietzsche and Foucault, then, starting from an incohate sense that some feature of our subjectivity, of our ways of problematising our experience, is a problem of the type described by the conflict between 'But this

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isn't how it is!' and 'Yet this is how it m ust be!', the kind of self-reflection that genealogy aims to produce has the following form: (a) it identifies a picture which holds us captive, whereby this captivity obstructs our capacity to make sense of ourselves as agents in ways that matter to us, (b) this account involves a redescription of this picture which contrasts it with another way of seeing the issue in order to free us from captivity to this picture, (c) it provides an account of how we have become held captive by this picture which enables us to make sense of ourselves as agents and, more particularly, to make sense of how we have failed to make sense of ourselves as agents in ways that matter to us, (d) and in so far as this account engages with our cares and commitments, it motivates us to engage in the practical working out of this re-orientation of ourselves as agents. It is in this way that genealogy performs its inherent aim to be the self-consciousness of a process of enlightenment and emancipation. As Foucault puts it, geneal­ ogy 'will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think .. . seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom' (1997: 315-6).

Ill It is hard to overlook the contrast between the account of genealogy provided in the preceding section and the readings of genealogy which have been characteristic of writers working within the traditions of the Frankfurt School. For such authors, genealogy is predominantly seen as failed or botched form of critique. This is a picture of genealogy presently most famously, and most bluntly, by Jurgen Habermas (1987) and endorsed in its central claims by numerous others, even where, as with Nancy Fraser (1989), they write with more sympathy and subtlety. What is most noteable about these criticisms of genealogy, however, is that they share a common assumption concerning the demands of critique or responsible criticism. There are two ways of elucidating this unquestioned presumption. The first way is to frame genealogy in terms of critique. It goes like this: Genealogy is an attempt at critique. Critique involves adequately satisfy­ ing certain specific demands, not the least of which is the articulation of normative criteria concerning the justification of moral norms an d /o r the legitimacy of social institutions and practices. Genealogy, it is argued, lacks the resources to satisfy this immanent demand of critique for normative criteria - and, thus, fails to achieve its ambition of being an adequate form of critique.

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The second way is to frame genealogy in terms of responsible criticism. It can be put like this: Genealogy is an attempt at moral or ethical or political criticism. Such criticism, if it is not be irrational, nihilistic, relativist, etc. (insert whatever 'boo'-word comes to mind) must involve the articulation of normative criteria concerning the justification of moral norms an d /o r the legitimacy of social institutions and practices. Genealogy cannot do this and so must be seen as irrational an d /o r nihilistic a n d /o r relativist, etc. Thus we can see that the unquestioned presumption is that genealogy needs to articulate normative criteria and can't do so. Consequently, there are two ways of responding to this line of argument. The first is to argue that genealogy can generate normative criteria in the appropriate way. This seems unpromising and I won't pursue it here. The second kind of response is to say that responsible crit­ icism does not require the articulation of any such normative criteria. This is the more radical response and it strikes me as the right one. Let me explain why. The first point to note is that to say that genealogy does not provide normative criteria is not to say that it isn't motivated by specific normative interests. Foucault is explicit about genealogy being motivated by an interest in freedom or, more accurately, self-government which is one reason why he makes the follow­ ing remark: a system of constraint becomes truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don't have the means of modifying it. This can happen when such a system becomes intangible as a result of its being considered a moral or religious imperative, or a necessary consequence of medical science. (Foucault 1988: 294) Becoming 'intangible' here refers just to the condition of aspectival captivity sketched in the opening section of this paper. The second point to which we need to draw attention is that Foucault takes it that the audience which he is address­ ing is committed to the value of self-government; as he puts it: 'we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies, the acquisition of capabilities and the stuggle for freedom have been permanent elements' (Foucault 1997: 317). This is one reason why he remarks that in 'cases of domination, be they economic, social, instutitional, or sexual, the problem is knowing where resistance will develop' (1997: 292) rather than whether or not it will develop. The final point to note is that, given the first two points, all that Foucault needs to do in order to provide responsible criticism is to enable us to free ourselves from our condition of aspectival captivity so that we are able to see the forms of power, government and domination to which we are subject as forms of power, government and domination which we can and will seek to challenge, modify or minimize in accordance with our own commitment to self-government. This is why he refers to genealogy as seeking to give new impetus to the undefined work of freedom.13

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Consequently, it is clear that on the first framing of the issue, Foucault can and should simply deny that genealogy is a form of critique and on the second fram­ ing he can and should deny that responsible criticism requires the articulation of normative criteria. Both of these equivalent responses provide a cogent riposte to his Frankfurt School critics by undermining the unquestioned presumption which frames their critical attacks.

IV If the argument thus far is cogent, we confront a puzzle: why has the reception of Foucault's practice of genealogy within the tradition of Critical Theory taken the form that it has? One could with reasonable plausibility suggest that Foucault was not always very clear about what he was doing himself, but this is does not seem adequate as an explanation of the phenomenon which we are concerned. A more plausible explanation, I'd suggest, is that precisely insofar as these writers are working from within the tradition of Critical Theory, their focus generates a blindspot concerning the issue of aspectival captivity which genealogy addresses. Or, to put it another way, they are held captive by a picture. We can approach this suggestion by reference to the following question: what are the conditions which would legitimate the claim that responsible moral or political criticism m ust articulate normative criteria for the justification of moral norms and/ or the legitimation of political institutions and practices? Whence this despotic demand (to borrow Wittgenstein's phrase)? It would seem that a neces­ sary condition for the legitimacy of this claim is that the only threat to the exercise of our capacity for self-government which requires critical reflection (as opposed to action) is the existence of false beliefs concerning the justifiability of our moral norms or the legitimacy of our political institutions and practices, where such false beliefs are the products either of ignorance and mistakes or of ideological captivity. If this is so, a condition of the legitimacy of this 'm ust' is that ideologi­ cal captivity is the only form of non-physical, self-imposed condition which is a threat to the exercise of our capacity for self-government. Hence, in so far as the tradition of Critical Theory is committed to this claim concerning responsible crit­ icism or critique - and this is, I think, the case - so it is also committed to the latter claim concerning ideological captivity. Consequently, it should not surprise us that adherents to this tradition have systematically misunderstood the philo­ sophical character of genealogy because, precisely in so far as they are committed to a central tenet of this tradition, they will also be blind to the kind of non-phys­ ical, self-imposed captivity which genealogy is designed to address.

V The aim of this paper has been to elucidate the philosophical structure of geneal­ ogy and in so doing to illustrate and dispel the systematic confusion surrounding

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the reception of Foucault's practice of genealogy among philosophers working within the traditions of the Frankfurt School. Having given this my best shot, it is useful to reflect on the upshot of this argument for thinking about enlightenment and the ethics of dialogue. The first, and most obvious, point to make is that on the argument offered here, critical theory and genealogy are both practices directed to enlightenment and emancipation - but they are directed to distinct aspects of enlightenment and emancipation in that they involve distinct forms of self-reflection designed to address different threats to the exercise (and development) of our capacity for self-government. The second, and more interesting, point is that these practices call forth different kinds of ethical dialogue. Let me try to elucidate this.14 If you think of yourself as correcting an ideological mistake, then you see your­ self as presenting something like an undistorted view, that is, something like the truth of the matter. If this is correct, then one's attitude to the dialogue that follows from presenting this undistorted view is to defend it against the objec­ tions that are raised to it by one's interlocutors. And this is the correct attitude to take to this type of case, dialogue is a 'means' to an end: namely, to getting to the non-distorted view, and so can be seen as the exchange of yes / no speech acts. But if you think of yourself as freeing a person from the limitations of a picture and of presenting another one (also limited), which does the freeing by juxtaposition, then one's attitude to the dialogue that follows is completely different. One actu­ ally needs others to present rival pictures in order to see the limitations of one's own picture and the ways in which it inhibits self-government. We are dependent on the dialogue for enlightenment just because pictures are partial but we are never completely self-aware of their partiality (or they wouldn't be pictures). So, on this view, we have to take a Nietzschean stance to dialogue: namely that the exchange of pictures or perspecives (often masquerading as comprehensive accounts) is the condition of our getting clear about the partialities of our picture and the pictures of others. This is why we value dialogue as 'reciprocal elucida­ tion'. In such a dialogue of reciprocal elucidation, the question is not 'Who is Right?' or 'Who has the truth?' Rather, the question is: 'What difference does it make to look at the problem this way rather than that? What difference does it make to approach the problem under this picture rather than that?' And the answer will be that different pictures bring to light different aspects of, or ways of, self-government and its constraints, possibilities, purposes, goods, etc. If we are to engage in the ongoing quest for enlightenment and emancipation, we will need to participate in both of these kinds of dialogue.

Conclusion This essay has defended the claim that genealogy is best understood as a practice of critical reflection directed to enabling us to free ourselves from a condition of aspectival captivity. Understood as such, it is a form of self-reflection directed to enlightenment and emancipation. Although I have not explored it here,15 it

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should be noted that this defence helps to account for Foucault's late concern with enlightenment and practices of criticism. However, be that as it may, if the argu­ ment presented in this essay is cogent, it follows that the confused and critical reception of Foucault's genealogical work by philosophers working within the traditions of Critical Theory may be accounted for in terms of their own captivity to a picture of criticism which cannot acknowledge the point of genealogy. I hope that this essay has gone some way to dispelling this confusion.16 David Owen

NOTES 1 The issues raised in this essay have been discussed over several years with Aaron Ridley and Jim Tully who also gave me detailed comments on an earlier draft and I am most grateful to them. I am also grateful to Jane Bennett, Chris Brown, Tom Dumm, Rainer Forst, Jocelyn Maclure, Gregor McLennan, Denis McManus, Tom Osborne, Peter Niesen, Paul Patton and Jon Simons for their helpful remarks. This paper was first presented at a conference on Foucault at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in September 2001 and I am grateful to my co-panellists Raymond Geuss and Martin Saar for their comments on my argument and to the other participants, notably Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler, for their remarks. On a later occasion, it was also given to the Postgraduate Political Theory Group at Balliol College, Oxford and I owe thanks to Monica Mookerjhee, Michael Frieden and the postgraduate students present for pressing me on some of my formulations. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for the journal who pushed me to clarify some important features of my argument. 2 In specifying Critical Theory as ideologiekritik I do not mean to suggest that critical theorists limit themselves to this kind of criticism; on the contrary, as Peter Niesen and Rainer Forst have both pointed out to me (forcefully and rightly), theorists such as Habermas and Honneth also engage in Gesellschaftskritik (roughly, social criticism). I restrict my attention to ideologiekritik in this essay simply to present as clearly as possible the contrast between this form of criticism and genealogy. For consideration of the debate between Foucault and Habermas across a wider terrain of issues, see Ashenden & Owen (1999) and Kelly (1994). 3 I made this case elsewhere in respect of a focus on Wittgenstein in two related essays (Owen 2001 and 2002). The first of these was presented to the Philosophy Society at the University of Aarhus and I am grateful to them for helping me to clarify my views, partic­ ular thanks are due to Morten Raffnoe-Moeller for his comments. The second was occa­ sioned by an invitation from Cressida Hayes to contribute to a collection on Wittgenstein and political philosophy and I am also grateful for her comments. 4 I have addressed the contrasting form of enlightenment and dialogue at stake in the contrast between Habermas' universal pragmatics and Foucault's historical pragmatics more fully in an earlier essay (Owen 1999).

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5 A referee for this essay has suggested that it is not a condition of an ideological belief being ideological that it is false. This may well be the case but within the tradition with which I am concerned here, falsity has been taken as a central feature of ideological beliefs and so I will abide by these terms for the purposes of this essay. 6 Such an assessment will include, but not be reducible to, reflection on the truth value of 'principles of judgment' that compose the picture in question. 7 It may seem slightly strange to characterise both ideological captivity and aspectival captivity as 'self-imposed' in that both conditions are tied to the prevalence of asymmetri­ cal relations of power; but in respect of our collective social condition of being subject to either of these forms of captivity, they are held in place by our ways of reflecting and acting, and in this respect are 'self-imposed'. 8 I am grateful to Denis McManus for discussion and clarification of this point. 9 For further reflection on critical theory and genealogy in relation to enlightenment, see Owen (1999). It should be noted that in advancing this argument concerning geneal­ ogy, I am not only rejecting the view of genealogy as ideologiekritik but also the view advanced by Raymond Geuss in relation to Nietzsche that, for example, his genealogy of morality is simply an attempt to be better history than that which the (Christian) moralists can provide, where the fact that his genealogy provides a better history indicates the supe­ riority of his perspective. This view is mistaken on two counts in my view. First, it misses the sense in which genealogy attempts to accomplish a re-orientation of our thinking. Second, it makes the claim of genealogy hang on its truth or, more broadly, its satisfaction of the norms of historical inquiry; but while the historical truth of Nietzsche genealogy may contribute to its perspicuity, it does not in any way follow that its perspicuity is dependent on its historical truth. For Geuss's position, see his essay 'Nietzsche and Genealogy' (Geuss 1999:1-28). 10 A theme which has also been significantly discussed by Stanley Cavell (1990) in his remarks on Nora in Ibsen's play A Doll House; remarks whose drift supports the basic claim of this essay. 11 On this point, see Conant (1995). 12 An important element of this devaluation is given in Nietzsche's attempt to persuade us that the idea of a view from nowhere is an error, not because it is false but because it is incoherent - and as a consequence of its incoherence gives rise to false beliefs. 13 It is, of course, the case that Foucault does not seek to provide a justification for why we should be committed to self-government but, given that we are, there is no compelling reason why he should be required do so. 14 For the comments that follow I am much indebted to Jim Tully. 15 I have said more on this topic in an ealier essay (Owen 1999) and it has also been addressed in am important essay by Jim Tully (Tully 1999). 16 In the panel discussion of this essay, my co-panellists Raymond Geuss and Martin Saar both suggested that this account of genealogy failed to acknowledge the centrality of power to Foucault's genealogy and the sense in which a genealogy provides a historical ontology of ourselves. This suggestion is based on a confusion for which I am no doubt responsible. It should be clear, first, that to be subject to captivity by a picture is to exhibit a particular form of subjectivity, a mode of being in the world, and, second, that the picture is held in place by our practical ways of going on in the world, where these are signifi­ cantly shaped by power relationships. I did not emphasise these features here because my concern was with genealogy as a practice of critical reflection; but it is of course the case that part of giving such a genealogical account is tracing the ways in which our captivity - our being what we are - is held in place and this involves, obviously enough, attending to

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power relations. Nothing I say in this essay is in tension with these points and I have explored this issue at length elsewhere (Owen 1994 and 1996).

REFERENCES Ashenden, S. and Owen, D. (eds.) (1999), Foucault contra Habermas, London: Sage. Baker, G. (1991), 'Philosophical Investigations Section 122: Neglected Aspects' in R. Arrington and H-J. Glock (eds.) Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations', London: Routledge. Cavell, S. (1990), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conant, J. (1995), 'Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility' in T. Tessim and M. von der Ruhr (eds.) Morality and Religion, New York: St. Martins Press. 'Florence, M.' (Foucault, M.) (1994) 'Foucault, Michel, 1926-' in G. Gutting (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1978), Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1986), The Use of Pleasure, New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (1988), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-84 (ed. L.D. Kritzman) London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1997), Ethics: The Essential Works: Vol.l (ed. P. Rabinow), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Fraser, N. (1989), Unruly Practices, Cambridge: Polity Press. Geuss, R. (1981), The Idea of Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (1999), Morality, Culture and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Kelly, M. (ed.) Critique and Power, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Owen, D. (1994), Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, London: Routledge. Owen, D. (1996), 'Foucault, Habermas and the Claims of Reason', History of the Human Sciences 9 (2): 119-38. Owen, D. (1999), 'Orientation and Enlightenment' in S. Ashenden and D. Owen (eds.) Foucault contra Habermas, London: Sage, pp. 21-44. Owen, D. (2000), 'Wittgenstein and Genealogy', Sats (Nordic Journal of Philosophy) 2 (2): 5-29. Owen, D. (2002), 'Genealogy as Perspicuous Representation' in C. Heyes (ed.) Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming. Tully, J. (1999) 'To Think and Act Differently' in S. Ashenden and D. Owen (eds.) Foucault contra Habermas, London: Sage, pp. 90-142. Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Invesitigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittenstein, L. (1969), On Certainty, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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[5] Genealogy as Critique Raymond Geuss

I should like to address the issue of 'genealogy as critique' in terms of the ques­ tion about the relationship between theory and praxis, between knowledge and its supposedly binding power. In the context of modern philosophy we can distinguish at least three basic types of critique which effectively correspond to three senses of the word 'critique' itself.1 In an everyday sense the term 'critique' describes a specific form of conduct, with two characteristic features, which I may adopt with regard to someone or something. In the first place, the term in this sense possesses unambiguously negative connotations. I am not criticising a specific position if I merely ask for further clarification, for example, or if I offer additional arguments for the rele­ vant position, but only if I assume a negative stand towards the latter. In the second place, I cannot be said to 'criticise' a certain position if all I do is simply repudiate or oppose it. In order to exercise criticism I should also have to be able to say what I am objecting to and why, i.e. to provide reasons for my repudiation. But demanding, proffering and accepting reasons, or repudiating them as the case may be, is a specific social language game, which may assume this or that particular form, and may be institutionalised with various degrees of strength. What counts as a valid 'reason' or 'ground' for something in a legal-juridical context may be quite irrelevant in the context of a literary or philosophical discus­ sion. In the language game of proffering grounds and reasons the processes of justification and critique usually function as reciprocally and internally related acts; they are, as it were, miror-images of each other. Justification implies the presentation of positive and convincing grounds and reasons; critique implies the effective presentation of negative ones.2 For centuries philosophers have attempted to generalise 'critique' in this everyday sense. This development reached an initial culmination in the Enlightenment, and most particularly in the philosophy of Kant. And this brings us to the second sense of the concept of 'critique'. Kant speaks repeatedly of the 'Tribunal of reason' before which all the 'conflicts' of theoretical and practical reason alike are to be properly addressed. The juridical metaphor, the idea that the quest for authentic knowledge resembles a legal process of some kind, origi­ nally goes back to Plato3 and characteristically permeates the entire Kantian argu­ ment. As in the case of juridical procedure, the conclusion of this trial aimed at discovering truth is a verdict that claims binding force.4 This kind of legal process conducted before the Tribunal of reason is essentially understood as something that possesses universal and absolute validity and binding force. At the same time 'critique' for Kant signifies the investigation of the limits involved in the

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proper use of reason, and thus the self-legitimation of reason in its juridical func­ tion within the limits as so determined.5 One should not underestimate the signif­ icance of Kant's concept of systematicity for the entire structure of his theory: all experience is accommodated within a single system that is subject to the legiti­ mate competence of the Tribunal of reason itself.6 Critique in the first everyday sense is therefore a way of denying or saying no to something. For this reason it is implausible to suggest that Foucault under­ stood his own works as 'critical sciences' (in this everyday sense). We should rather assume that he intended to adopt the Nietzschean posture that finds expression in a remark from the Gay Science: 'Let looking away be my only nega­ tion! . . . for I wish only, one day, simply to be a Yes-sayer'.7 But how can we really entertain general reservations about saying no? Is not this capacity so fundamental and indispensable that such 'objections' can never be ultimately convincing? Whatever the case in this respect, the most powerful objection is surely this:8 to deny or reject something (at least in certain contexts) is to participate in a language game of proffering and accepting reasons and grounds, for negation or denial is a specific move in such a game. But what if one already harbours certain fundamental doubts concerning the language games of grounding, critique and justification? What if one attempted to avoid, or under­ mine them, to call them into question, or perhaps suspend them? Kant believed that there was nothing of relevance outside the competence of pure reason, that it was impossible to undermine reason itself by calling it into question; or more precisely: that the very attempt to do so would logically lead to the sort of tran­ scendental reflection that reveals the absolute and universal validity of the ratio­ nality implied in science, morality and the associated language game of grounding and justifying. But what if this Kantian claim itself were nothing but another example of dogmatism? Perhaps there is simply a historical variety of different games of justification that do not constitute a single unified system? How can I escape the jurisdiction of such processes of justification, or assume a position outside or beyond this realm? One possibility is the utopian activation of fantasy and imagination. If I compose some utopian novel or utopian piece of theatre, then I do not necessarily have to get involved in a discussion of knowl­ edge claims and their justification etc. Aristophanes's play 'The Birds' (Aves) is not a systematic or scientific work but a Nietzschean 'turning away' from the contemporary reality of Athenian life. This is a way of 'thinking differently' (penser autrement), though it is one whose practical implications are very hard to determine.9 There is a passage where Foucault speaks of the 'ethos of enlightenment' and interprets it precisely as the questioning of all givens. To question something is naturally not necessarily to reject it. Foucault distinguishes this 'ethos' very sharply from the Kantian attempt to define and determine an all-encompassing, self-grounding realm of legitimate competence for pure reason. While we can and should preserve the ethos of enlightenment, the programme of transcendental grounding is obsolete and should therefore be abandoned. A comparison with Husserlian phenomenology may help to clarify the theo-

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retical situation as I see it here.11 Simplifying matters considerably, we may distinguish two fundamental elements in phenomenology. In the first place Husserl presupposes, like Kant, that human experience forms an infinite but unified field for potential investigation, one which has the transcendental ego as its intrinsic correlate. In the second place Husserl develops a method designed to encompass this field effectively in epistemic terms. The heart of the method is the so-called epoche, the systematic and universally applied procedure of bracketing, neutralising, or suspending all reality claims in a specific domain precisely in order to facilitate the pure description of the phenomena that thereby remain for inspection. Foucault wants to reject the first element of Husserl's programme entirely. There is no transcendental ego, nor is there any valid realm of pure reason capa­ ble in principle of encompassing the whole range of empirical experience in a unified fashion. But he does wish to preserve the second element, namely the epoche, in a modified form. He has no intention of introducing his epoche in strictly universal fashion within the framework of an abstract philosophical investigation of the foundations of knowledge, but only intermittently and precisely, always in the context of a specifically defined project of historical investigation, although the word 'historical' must be interpreted broadly enough to include the present in its purview as well.12 The impossibility of providing a self-grounded legitima­ tion of reason in no way implies a nihilistic view of our own cognitive resources. Language games of justification are themselves various and contingently produced forms whose emergence and disappearance must be identified and traced historically. In no way does it follow from this that they are somehow 'invalid'. What is more, the critical ethos of enlightenment, as it is understood by Foucault, is better seen as a tireless encouragement to go beyond the alleged limits of reason than as an attempt somehow to limit the exercise of the latter. And this also suggests another reason why any closure or systematicity in the Kantian or the Husserlian sense is already ruled out as impossible. Art, and espe­ cially literature, can contribute to the enhancement and consolidation of this ethos, but the transgression of limits attempted in Foucault's work is also intended to raise a potentially cognitive claim. These reflections thus yield our third sense of 'critique': critique as putting into question, or as a way of problematising something. What does such a critical process of problematising concretely look like, and how does it effectively proceed? The principal targets of this problematising approach are the apparently self-evident assumptions of a given form of life and the (supposedly) natural or inevitable and unchangeable character of given identities. The existing language games of justification and legitimation are never entirely isolated and autonomously self-contained practices. On the contrary, they inter­ sect with other language games, they perhaps harbour a certain potential for further reflection, and they are embedded in broader sets of practices. The latter sometimes facilitate the process of critique, but not every potential for reflection that is given in principle is actually realised in every particular case.13 Any given language game of justification and legitimation rests upon a

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complex structure of practical habits and routines. The regulated exchange of argument and counter-argument, of reasons for and against, proceeds all the more smoothly the more the self-evident rules are tacitly observed by the partic­ ipants, and the more the participants are acting in the context of well-established, pre-given and apparently secure variables. Here I should like to offer a deliber­ ately extreme example, and one that Foucault did not explicitly discuss in his own writings: that of an ecclesiastical court of the Middle Ages. The successful func­ tioning of such a court presupposes a range of beliefs then regarded as selfevident, like the absolute truth of the Christian gospel and its saving message, the necessary division of all human beings as orthodox Christians (or proper Catholics), heretics and pagans, etc. The traditional philosophical discussion of Christianity, whether critical or apologetic, primarily investigates the truth of the Christian doctrine, or the poten­ tial justification of the Christian faith. These traditional investigations tacitly presuppose that something like Christianity already exists as a unified, internally coherent, given phenomenon that presents itself as an object for possible discus­ sion. Genealogy is designed to render precisely this presupposition problematic. To offer a genealogy is to provide a historical dissolution of self-evident iden­ tities. If we remain with our example, it is to place in question both the identity of the ecclesiastical court and that of the parties presented before the court (as 'sinners' for instance). The genealogy of Christianity is a historical analysis of the processes through which Christianity resulted from the interplay of forces in time. Genealogical attention to the role played by contingent relations of power in the genesis of Christianity, including Christian dogma, for example, intrinsi­ cally serves to destroy the semblance of self-evidence and immediate givenness that attaches to it. A genealogy is obviously not a critique in the everyday sense mentioned above, that is to say, it does not automatically imply the rejection of what is subjected to genealogical analysis.14 Genealogical critique is not directly concerned with the binding truth or falsity of a first-order claim or proposition. It is therefore not interested in knowing, for instance, whether sinner George feels due contrition for his transgressions or not. To ask that question is to conceal the relevant genealogical question. What we want to know is: how do concepts like 'contrition', 'sin', 'punishment', and 'church' come to be binding and universally applied at all? This is a question for which neither an empirically or hermeneutically oriented theory of knowledge nor any mere historical analysis of concepts can provide a relevant answer. The concept of 'sin' relates perhaps to a clearly iden­ tifiable complex of modes of behaviour and hum an reactions. It may be that George actually does feel 'sinful'. 'Sin' therefore possesses a certain fundam entum in re which survives normal empirical critique. George may well be deceived in falsely believing that the ecclesiastical court will pardon him, but he is not deceived in the same sense when he feels himself to be a 'contrite sinner'. This latter identity is constructed, but it is not purely imaginary. 'Sin' and 'contrition' can thus possess an eminently somatic reality which cannot simply

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be dissolved into a variety of concepts, convictions, attitudes and perspectives. The genealogical question asks: how has a specific historical process led hum an beings to develop and embody this sort of identity? Such a process is more than a series of episodes in which external forces shape the passive hum an being ab extra. For the emergence of a historically effective identity also requires certain processes through which hum an beings 'freely'15 shape themselves. The genealogical task is directed towards narrating this history as completely as possible, that is to say, with due attention to as many of the relevant aspects as possible. Genealogy involves an indispensable historical element,16 but one may well ask why such genealogical enquiry demands fresh historically detailed and specific analysis in each case. Why is it not sufficient simply to offer a single deci­ sive abstract argument for theses like 'everything is contingent', 'there is no intrinsically necessary identity', 'everything self-evident requires a prior frame­ work' etc. To see why that is not enough we must understand the internal rela­ tionship between genealogy and praxis correctly. As we have seen, genealogy is not conceived as critique in the everyday sense. It is not meant to encourage human beings to repudiate what is subjected to critique or even to regard it simply in a negative light. In a late interview Foucault says he was concerned with claiming not that 'x is false' or 'x is bad', but rather that 'x is dangerous'. The dangerous is what we must pre-eminently concentrate attention upon, what we must before all else take care to consider. The dangerous can indeed be attractive or even valuable, but in cases of acute danger the aforementioned Nietzschean attitude of 'looking away' is not always the best strategy. Genealogy as pursued by Foucault, on the other hand, is a way of concentrating attention on a given situation in the context of an imminent danger. The discrimination of what is more dangerous from what is less demands detailed historical presentation of the specific case. Nietzsche speaks of the philosopher as law-giver. Genealogy does not lay down the law, nor is it a policing discipline. Rather it is a summons to develop an empirically informed kind of theoretical imagination under the conditions of perceived danger. In contemporary philosophical discussion the concept of normativity (along with the now almost automatically raised question concerning the 'normative implications' of every theoretical proposal) is surely the most important 'selfevident' notion that must be put in question. Foucault's work can be interpreted as an initial contribution to a genealogy of normativity17, and his writings will remain highly relevant until such time as the task is fulfilled.18 Raymond Geuss Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA UK

Translated by Nicholas Walker

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NOTES 1 The word 'critique' derives etymologically from the Greek verb 'krinein', meaning to distinguish, separate, or divide. In the ancient world the substantive 'kritike' was used in a very broad sense to designate a considerable range of cognitive abilities and accomplish­ ments. 'Critique' in this original sense therefore signifies 'analysis' or 'the (theoretical) break­ ing down of a given phenomenon into its elements'. Cf. Liddell, Scott and Jones 1968, Ritter 1971, Wissowa 1980, for the relevant entries under 'krinein' and 'kritikos'. 2 Apart from the developed language game of justification familiar in the legal-juridical context, there is also the different but related usage encountered in aesthetic discussion. As a 'critic' I may review a play without coming to a negative verdict. I may find it excellent and lavish extravagant praise upon it, etc. My evaluation need not therefore be remotely nega­ tive, but it must, if it would be taken seriously, be supported with reasons. The language game involved in demanding, proffering and accepting reasons is rather differently struc­ tured in this area compared with the legal-juridical context. For I may analyse the positive aesthetic characteristics and the weaknesses of the piece without actually coming to a straightforward definitive conclusion like 'the piece is good/ is bad'. 3 Plato 1961:170d, 201 b/c. 4 Cf. Kant 1933: B241 /2, where the objectivity of knowledge is defined explicitly in rela­ tion to the idea of 'compulsion'. 5 The 'judging function' consists, remarkably enough, precisely in acting legislatively here. 6 This summary account ignores the fact that for Kant there are actually two different realms of validity involved and therefore two Tribunals of reason as well: that of theoretical reason responsible for adjudicating empirical experience in general and that of the natural sciences, and that concerned with pronouncing the moral verdict of pure practical reason. It is not possible to pursue this complex of issues in the present context. But in both cases we are presented with internally unified and comprehensive realms of validity. 7 Nietzsche 2001:157 (§276). 8 There are also two other possible grounds for scepticism in this respect. In the first place, one may raise objections to the negativity of this approach per se. One can thus claim that it is unattractive, fruitless and exhausting to assume simply negative responses, i.e. that such negative activity only fetters human energies rather than releasing them. Nietzsche's arguments in this general direction often possess a slightly biologistic flavour, but one can easily imagine alternative versions in which this is not the case. The writings of Alain Badiou would represent a good example here (as in Badiou 1998). In the second place, there are certain objections with characteristically Hegelian rather than Nietzschean overtones. Someone whose sole purpose is the negation of an existing given can easily become entirely fixated on the latter. Negation can render us dependent upon what is negated and is there­ fore not always compatible with the pathos of total liberation from the experience of oppres­ sive positivity. Since Foucault has little sympathy for projects of 'radical liberation' it is rather improbable that objections of this sort carry any weight with him. 9 This is not equally the case with all of Aristophanes's comedies. Thus I presume that one would have to evaluate the relationship to praxis implicit in works like The Acharnians, The Birds and The Frogs in a different manner in each case. 10 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres?', in Foucault 1994: 571-578. 11 'L'intellectuel et les pouvoirs', in Foucault 1994: 750. 12 The term 'historical' signifies both (a) 'singular' (in contrast to 'universal') and (b) 'related to the past (and not the present)'. At the beginning of the western tradition of

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historiography, in Herodotos for example, the first sense is actually the principal one. The Greek word 'historia' generally simply signifies 'research' or 'enquiry' into something. Thus alongside investigations that are purely historical (in the modern sense), the historiographi­ cal writings of Herodotos also contain geographical studies, ethnological materials, myths, fragments of a theological character, political observations etc. In the following discussion 'historical' is understood in this broadly classical sense. 13 One should not interpret 'reflection' here in a narrow idealist sense of the term. Over and beyond the pure and exclusively self-related movement of spirit itself, 'reflection' can also signify the revision of our accustomed modes of thought in the light of new attitudes to life and fresh empirical knowledge. 14 Some other remarks of Nietzsche seem particularly appropriate in this context. In Book Five of The Gay Science (§345) he writes: 'These historians of morality (particularly, the Englishmen) do not amount to much [...] Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among peoples, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral prin­ ciples, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me - or, conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are neces­ sarily different, and infer from this that no morality is binding - both of which are equally childish'. (Nietzsche 2001: 202-3) Nietzsche was therefore perfectly aware of the false step involved in what is generally called the genetic fallacy, and we can safely assume the same level of insight in Foucault too. 15 Like Nietzsche, Foucault is firmly convinced that the concept of freedom, and any actual ascription of freedom, is always dependent upon some specific context. 16 Cf. footnote 12 above. 17 Such a genealogy would naturally represent the exact opposite of Korsgaard's under­ taking in Korsgaard 1996. 18 I am particularly grateful to my Cambridge colleague Zeev Emmerich for some illu­ minating discussions of the questions explored in this essay.

REFERENCES Badiou, A. (1998), L'ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mai. Paris: Editions Hatier. Foucault, M. (1994), Dits et Ecrits, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard. Kant, I (1933), Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Korsgaard, C. (1996), The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddell, H. G, Scott, R. and Jones, H. S. (1968), Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001), The Gay Science. Translated by J. Nauckhoff and A. Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1961), Theaetetus. Translated by F.M. Cornford. In : Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ritter, J. (1971-00), Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Wissowa, P. (1980), Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, neue Bearbeitung begonnen von Georg Wissowa, fortgefiihrt von Wilhelm Kroll und Karl Mittelhaus, unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgenossen, herausgegeben von Konrat Ziegler. Miinchen : A. Druckenmuller.

[6 ] Genealogy and Subjectivity Martin Saar

Introduction: Three Dimensions of Genealogy In philosophy, conceptual difficulties are sometimes invisible in the bright light of the obvious. Michel Foucault's well-known appropriation of Nietzsche's concept of genealogy may give rise to few objections and doubts in certain circles and theoretical contexts. But the new use of an older concept may pose more problems than it can solve, especially when the very terms and conditions of its adoption are neglected. So sometimes the specific power of a concept is lost in its excessive and unquestioned circulation. In the case of genealogy this situation is made even more difficult by the fact that Foucault himself in his famous Nietzsche essay from 1971, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', apparently subscribed to this concept without reservations and modifications whereas it is far from being a neutral and easy notion.1 But the use of the concept in Nietzsche is already complex and not easy to understand and his use of it varies through­ out his texts. Commentators on his work especially during the last ten years have tried to elucidate this problem and have proposed a variety of interpretative suggestions but none of them has systematically and reconstructively put an end to the debate. But the sense that genealogy is a central category in Nietzsche's works persists. A perfectly analogous situation holds true for Foucault; everyone is convinced of the operative function of genealogy for his critical methodology but none of the suggested reconstructions seems convincing enough to suppress alternative interpretations.2 What, then, for Foucault, is genealogy? It would be easy to quote several phrases and quasi-definitions from Foucault that show that his use of the concept is rather loose and varies quite remarkably.3 At times, Foucault uses the term as a specific methodological term or title for a critical historical-philosophical project (namely his own), in other passages it is used rather broadly and synonymously with 'history' or 'genesis'. And if the survey includes the books he himself called genealogical, i.e. mainly Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, and some of the shorter texts of his 'middle' period (ca. 1970-1976/77), this ambi­ guity is not resolved here either. Even the many interviews centering on method­ ological questions in which Foucault tries to outline his historical and critical method, as for example the important interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow from 1983, 'The Genealogy of Ethics', are caught up in this oscillation. For Foucault himself, it seems, genealogy comprises several conceptual elements and it includes various theoretical and practical gestures, and he seemed not to be embarrassed about this fact. So, whatever genealogy turns out to 'really' be, it

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seems to be a multiple or differentiated concept or a multi-layered conceptual practice. Every reconstructive and systematic interpretation of genealogy has to identify a conceptual core and has to differentiate between major and minor traits, even if it unifies the concept against the explicit and variable fagons de parler of Nietzsche and Foucault themselves. In the following I will try to develop some suggestions towards an interpretation of genealogy that is based on two main ideas. First, it is important to identify three different, but interwoven aspects or levels of geneal­ ogy. Genealogy - in Nietzsche and Foucault - consists of an interlocking ensem­ ble of these three levels, and it is important not to lose sight of any of them, even when for the sake of highlighting a certain element, they can be discussed on their own terms. These three aspects are: genealogy should be understood as a mode of writing history or a historical method; it should be seen as a mode of evalua­ tion, i.e. as critique; and it should be grasped as a textual practice or a style specific for a genre. Second, on all of these three levels, there is a decisive and constitutive relation between genealogy and subjectivity or a 'self that comes into play in different ways and forms. As the story goes, Foucault played a notorious role in the discussion around anti-humanism and a radical critique of the subject during the second half of the 1960s, but he nevertheless near the end of his life said (or confessed) that the question of the subject was always at the 'center' of his theoretical efforts.4 However one may view this retrospective mise au point in general, I will try to argue that for the genealogical elements in his works this is indeed the case. Genealogy in an interesting and constitutive way always does concern subjects or selves, i.e. something that is concerned about itself in its very being (to para­ phrase Heidegger's quasi-definition of Dasein). Genealogy always deals with rela­ tion to self and with (however abstract) reflexivity. In opposition to other attempts to reconstruct the very project of genealogy I therefore stress a triple relation between genealogy and the subject and, accordingly, I will discuss genealogy in the following as history (§1), as critique (§11), and as a kind of writing (§111).

I. Genealogy as History or Historical Method - Questions of Method Since Nietzsche introduced the term 'genealogy' into philosophical discourse, the most obvious thing to say about it is that it is a way of writing history. Nietzsche's interest in genetic and evolutionary reflection on the 'origin of morality' in the middle of the 1880s was born out of an interest in a potentially critical historicization of something that until then wasn't historicized, namely moral attitudes and values, ideals, norms and institutionalized modes of thinking and acting. A 'genealogy of morality' worthy of its name for Nietzsche is a thoroughly histori­ cal version of a radical critique of morality; the other two he elaborated earlier are a psychological and a linguistic critique. Genealogical motifs therefore are not restricted to his later works that go under this title; they can also be found every-

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where where with a critical intention something - by demystifying, denaturaliz­ ing, and desubstantializing - is historicized. The direction of Nietzsche's programmatically so-called genealogical works such as Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals is already laid out or contained in his second Untimely Meditation with the revealing title On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life ; for this reason Foucault in his Nietzsche essay could restrict himself more or less exclusively to this text in order to develop his own understanding of Nietzsche's critical impetus and in order to develop the elements which were most interesting to him.5 But, of course, also almost all of Foucault's own books from the early Madness and Civilization on (which was originally called Folie et deraison, but later Histoire de la folie) excluding the (arguably insignificant) excep­ tion of The Archaeology of Knowledge are eminently historical books. The method at work in The Order of Things is a historical analysis of discourse, the theses on power in Discipline and Punish are historical claims, and the shocking effect of History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 comes from its historical narrative spanning from the 18th and 19th century to our very present, according to which our contemporary concepts of repression and emancipation can and should be seen as intimately linked to a specific type of subjectivizing power. What exactly is historicized by a genealogy, what are its objects? It historicizes things that had no significant history before; the field of the historical is expanded (cf. Veyne 1978). Nietzsche subjects the allegedly eternal human or moral truths to historical contextualization. Foucault historicizes the allegedly natural or social 'facts', discursive institutions and (following Georges Canguilhem) the normativeepistemic oppositions that govern the differences between the 'normal' and the 'pathological' or the conventions that rule out what falls outside the intelligible, diagnosable, and controllable.6 This revealing of historical shifts and therefore the variability of epistemic conventions and social norms is initially neutral and in a certain sense 'positivist', but revealing contingency can never be fully neutral.7 The early theories of discourse and 'episteme' as well as the later 'analytic of power' are historical exercises. But historicization is not an end in itself and its objects are not irrelevant; it can only develop its force when it turns to objects whose 'meaning' and validity is affected by revealing their historicity. As a first step this just means that present and actual validities and (self-) conceptions have to be - at least potentially - changed. The recounting of the genealogical prehis­ tory of medical concepts in The Birth of the Clinic aims at the heart of 'our', i.e. present idea and practice and institutionalization of medicine; Discipline and Punish is an indirect attack on 'our' penal system; and History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 affects our urge for liberation and self-expression by exposing the historical sources and the emergence of this very vocabulary of emancipation. This is the sense of Foucault's well-known formula about his histories being 'histories of the present'. These histories become critical because they expose the historical condi­ tions of our very being. Following the archaeological and genealogical assump­ tions he laid out in his historical books, the present constitution and intelligibility of the human is affected by the very regimes of truth (or 'episteme') and power (or what Foucault calls 'dispositives' or apparatuses of power) that have brought

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them about. It was Foucault's spectacular (and, roughly put, Heideggerian) thesis in The Order of Things that this constitution is a rather recent phenomenon, and that man is a rather 'recent invention'.8 But this thought can be formulated more simply: Foucault claims that epistemic frames and the conditions of power shape and structure the ways in which individuals understand and express themselves, relate to themselves, but also how they can be seen, described and counted on by others. To claim that the subject was always at the 'center' of his works for Foucault therefore means that even the fundamental and radical critique of the subject was part of a redescription or reconceptualization of subjectivity (and never its abandonment). The histories of the discourses and forms of power fram­ ing and shaping subjectivities were chapters in the history of the constitution of modern 'm an' (or humanity) who has a complex but stable intelligibility (medical, psychological, socio-moral, etc.). A first answer to the question 'what is genealogy?' can therefore be given: it is a form of writing history. It is a specific writing of history of certain objects. This historiography accounts for 'our' history, i.e. the processes of constitution and construction of present morality, mentality, or 'soul' in all its discontinuities, functional transformations, and contingencies. To account for these stories is the task of an 'other' writing of history called genealogy. So, on the first level, it is a different and radicalized historicism of the self.9

II. Genealogy as Critique or Evaluation - Questions of Value But even if there is a merely methodological level of historicization, its intention and aim is, as I said, certainly not purely neutral. The terms contingency and denaturalization already give an indication of the critical and evaluative dimen­ sion. Only objects whose internal structure or whose meaning is altered by historicity are proper objects of genealogies. But does this already prefigure the question of their value or worth? W ouldn't this kind of reasoning fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy? Again, looking back to Nietzsche proves helpful. In the preface to the Genealogy of Morals, commenting on the attitude underlying his earlier works and especially Human, A ll Too Human, he confesses: 'Even at that time my real concern was something much more important than hypothesis-mongering, whether my own or other people's, on the origin of morality (or more precisely, the latter concerned me only for the sake of a goal to which it was only one means among many). What was at stake for me was the value of morality.'10 Genealogical histo­ ries pose the questions of value and clear the ground for questions of value because only the degrees of freedom opened up by revealing historical variabil­ ity and contingency make these questions possible. All substantializing religious, moral or (in the dogmatic sense) scientific talk about the 'essence' of man, or madness (as attacked in Madness and Civilization), or of the allegedly 'eternal' meaning of punishment (as denounced in the second part of the Genealogy of Morals) means questions of value are excluded.

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But the fact that whatever is as it is could also be otherwise doesn't devalue what is as it is tout court. Something else has to be said and done about it. For Nietzsche, the questions of value interestingly already seem to be answered the moment they are posed. When you look closely at the kind of 'stories' he gives, you'll see that the revelation of contingency (it could have happened and devel­ oped otherwise) almost always already turns into evaluative, value-bearing descriptions: the cultural evolutions in question are processes of violation and subjection, of struggles between strength and intellect, between brutality and deceit. The grand tropes and figures are in a way innocently and directly norma­ tive: the opposition between the 'weak' and the 'strong' or of the 'slave revolt' in morality, the pessimistic and proto-Freudian description of the emergence of culture as the renunciation of drives and the 'taming' of wild man, and the emer­ gence of modern societies as the destruction of 'great' individualities. The entire description and vocabulary are fed by a pathos and a contempt that have already become part of the very perception and representation of these cultural and historical processes. In other words, in a rather puzzling way the description and representation, for Nietzsche, already are the however implicit evaluations. The semantic shift that is called for in genealogical writing from a naive and unquestioned moral talk (with its terms 'good' and 'evil', 'guilt', 'responsibility', etc.) toward a cold anthropological-descriptive language is not a search for alter­ native normative foundations nor a plea for more or other 'sources' of morality than acknowledged before. This is a longing that is obviously seen as fundamen­ tally dogmatic and veiling other hidden motivations by both Nietzsche and Foucault. What they try is to counter the moral perspective with a different one.11 The empirical and (in a way) naturalistic description of individual suffering, weakness and submission is a protestation against their moralistic exploitation. On the other hand, Nietzsche himself sometimes seems to be trapped in his (in itself rather exploitable) language in a quite coarse and unreflected way. Foucault is more cautious in this respect and - maybe with the exception of Madness and Civilization 12 - he seems to achieve his aims without a naturalistic counter-vocabulary. But the entire enterprise of an 'analytics of power' that, as Foucault says, he doesn't want to find confused with a 'theory of power' (cf. Foucault 1980: ch. IV.2) is nothing else than a rather sophisticated descriptive vocabulary. Its function lies in describing social phenomena to reveal and signify their malleability and instrumentalizablity and in constructing legible constella­ tions between relations of force and power on the one hand, and norms, facts and systems of belief and knowledge on the other.13 Reading or deciphering these constellations is defamiliarizing and performative. It constructs and enacts textually the hidden violence behind the only allegedly natural state of certain social and historical arrangements. This mechanism is as obvious as it is implicit; for this reason only philosophers (and only much later) can actually be surprised by the fact that Discipline and Punish and, to a lesser degree, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, were in their time immediately read and understood as contributions to a fundamental critique of present life and institutions. It is clear that seen from a more classical point of view there are many deep

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philosophical problems with such an enterprise. And these problems were exemplarily highlighted during the long-standing critical discussion of Foucault's work among the later representatives of the Frankfurt School. What are the stan­ dards and criteria of a critical devaluation of certain forms and mechanisms of power? When is power to be fought, or, to put it as elegantly as Nancy Fraser: why resist?14 These questions haven't been answered even after more than 20 years of discussion. But obviously Foucault himself had no general answers for them and maybe didn't even look for them. Maybe at least in this question he was, to a certain degree, a 'post-modern' philosopher (a term he is said to have despised) who is simply the wrong type of theorist to ask these questions. But I want to at least indicate a different perspective or direction in which I think the problem of a mode of critique and its standards should be asked and formulated, which may shed some light on the question of why genealogical accounts evidently possess an enormous normative potential without laying out or constructing normative foundations. All genealogies have in common a structural reflexivity, a self-implication in the fact that whoever enacts a genealogical criticism does this by criticizing aspects and elements, maybe even 'images', metaphors, patterns of interpretation or 'ideologies' of his or her own culture or background. A genealogical account can only be given of your own culture, your milieu, your family, your genus.15 Genealogical criticism is therefore always self-criticism; and this seems to be one of Foucault's implicit objections to ideology critique in the neomarxist sense, on the basis that the more classical modes of social critique miss this point and try to take a view from the outside or from an allegedly anthropological neutral ground.16 But this self-implication in every genealogical critique of a certain form of power comes from the very complicity and implicatedness with your 'own' culture and its power. For power to arise and be effective requires the participa­ tion of the subjects it acts on. Power can only exert its force in subjectivation and individualization when roles and norms are actively enacted, taken over, incor­ porated.17 Doing genealogy then is: telling the subject the story of the powers working on him, telling it the story of its own becoming. But in order to actually tell these stories to the one affected by it, an 'analytics' or a minimal, descriptive 'theory of power' is needed (even if Foucault didn't like the term). This is nothing but a set of premises, operative concepts and a set of more or less heuristic rules of application. But this 'theory' only realizes itself in concrete historical descriptions. In that it is 'local' or contextual, which is not to say non-generalizable nor relativist. Its applications are restricted to all the places, sites, and fields in which identities, subjectivities and reflexive categories are formed and constituted, i.e. where what Ian Hacking has called 'hum an kinds' emerge.18 There is then, an intimate link, between the critical edge of genealogy and a certain historicist social constructivism. Histories of construction become critical when they expose power effects in the constitution of subjectivity, iden­ tity, and mentality, in other words, aspects of self. A 'genealogical imperative' or a 'm anual' for a genealogy could then be formulated as such: 'Tell me the story of the genesis and development of my

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self-understanding (using the notion 'power' [or related notions, such as strategy, hegemony, or interest, subjection, submission, exploitation, etc.] in such a way that hearing you talk, I don't want to be as I thought I have to be, and that, hear­ ing you talk, I realize that this isn't necessary'. In more classical terms: there is a conceptual itinerary from necessity via contingency to relative or hypothetical freedom as possibility. To see it and reach it there has to be a space cleared by a sense for the possible, a 'Moglichkeitssinn', as Robert Musil has put it. Genealogies open up this space. Critique, then, means creating a 'field of open­ ings' (Brown 2001:103), a sense for the non-necessary, i.e. for that which might be otherwise because it is as it is now only because a certain power is in play.19 The critical aim of genealogy does not consist in creating new or neutral norms but in installing a devaluating, delegitimizing vocabulary within genetic descrip­ tions of existing norms and values. In the background of this lies the assumption that the subjectivities affected by norms only constitute themselves in a web of material and discursive practices and processes and that there is no neutral ground from which to evaluate and measure these incorporated norms. This theoretical assumption about concrete processes of subject constitution, i.e. a certain constructivism of the self, is the background of genealogical historicizations. Maybe this is the point where it becomes important to distinguish between two broad options, between a (roughly put) 'analytical' and a 'poststructuralist' understanding of Foucault and genealogy. Whereas the first version tries to reveal contradictions or distortions in world-views and life-forms, the second, philosophically more ambitious, tries to reveal ontological effects. This leads to a concern with how bodies and subjectivities are constitutively dependent on discourse and power, and which technologies, institutions and norms produce effects of social inclusion/exclusion, intelligibility/invisibility, w orthiness/ depravity.20 It is true and it has often been pointed out that this latter type of inquiry is rather ambitious and creates a whole set of methodological questions that go to the very heart of social ontology. And it is also true that one might be skeptical whether Foucault himself had enough theoretical resources to realize these objectives. This may be the reason why so many theorists who, in my understanding, practice something like a genealogical critique or similar enter­ prises have recourse to complementary theories or theorems, be they psychoana­ lytic (as in Judith Butler), materialist (as in Louis Althusser) or head-on ontological (as in Gilles Deleuze or Giorgio Agamben), or a combination of all these. The risk of what I call the analytic version is that it gives up the level of consti­ tution too quickly and neglects the deep implications for a theory of the subject that are part of the genealogical programme.21 Both versions agree on a similar view of how to articulate the critical potential of genealogy. Genealogies project delegit­ imizing, denaturalizing perspectives on the processes of subject constitution and construction. But only the second version subscribes to a deep constructivism that not only tries to elucidate beliefs, self-understanding and agency but also the mate­ rial or ontological processes governing how these come into being at all.

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III. Genealogy as a Kind of Writing or Genre - Questions of Style After reflecting on the object and the critical content of genealogy I want to turn to a third aspect. In opposition to several other proposals of how to reconstruct genealogy (and, I think, also in contrast to the suggestions made by Raymond Geuss and David Owen in their papers for this symposium), for me the question of form is decisive. In my view, every attempt to account for the functioning of geneal­ ogy as a critical method has to take this formal dimension into consideration. Even if there were a unitary answer to the question what kind of critique genealogy is, the question how is it practiced is not settled by answers to the former question. To take this aspect seriously means to claim that genealogy is an irreducible genre of critique, but this also means that genealogical criticism can only be exercised in a certain way. But, then, genealogies are sui generis, i.e. they follow the rules and conventions of a certain textual genre and they cannot be reduced to other forms of philosophical texts. On the contrary, they are stylistically more similar to other rather unusual and highly idiosyncratic works in which the encounter of the histor­ ical and the critical creates a unique combination of arguments and descriptions (as in the Dialectics of Enlightenment, some works of Walter Benjamin or even Max Weber, maybe also Georg Simmel and Sigmund Freud).22 The first formal characteristic is that genealogical accounts are highly rhetori­ cal and irreducibly hyperbolic. Genealogies take their critical force from the dramatizing gesture, from the alarming and overpowering representation of scenarios of power; this trait has struck many readers of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, and it has sometimes been criticized as manipulative. The narrative or rhetorical tone of genealogies is in general tragic or (stylistically) catastrophic, in some cases even nostalgic.23 The truly Nietzschean or Foucauldian genealogies are calculations and tales of cost and loss, not necessar­ ily histories of decay.24 Its theoretical elements are the theory of subject constitu­ tion discussed above and the concrete, highly local description of specific cases of 'powerful' subject construction. But the critique is only performed or enacted, it becomes an act, a performance of critique, only in the concrete act of description. There is, then, no genealogical critique outside this very form of representation. The combination of historicization, theories of power and the subject and a diag­ nosis of the present does not necessarily lead to such an critique; certain formal requirements obviously have to be fulfilled to achieve a certain effectiveness and plausibility that is not reducible to the truth-value of its propositions. This, of course, is an argument that has been made about other philosophical texts as well, most notably in the case of Wittgenstein (and David Owen has developed a plausible Witt gens teinian account of genealogy published in this symposium). But the only analogy I here want to draw from Stanley Cavell's famous statement that the writings of Wittgenstein cannot be reduced to the propositions they artic­ ulate, is the following thought: The 'truth' of genealogy, if it has one, is not one pertaining to the truth of its statements and set of propositions alone; the 'truth effect' these texts try to achieve only materializes in the fusion of certain histori­ cal hypotheses and a drastic and dramatizing mode of representation.25

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This does not imply the devaluation of other, and formally more conventional and strictly sociological attempts to do quasi-Foucauldian critical social science (e.g., the highly successful and productive 'gouvernmentality studies'). All I mean to say is that without taking these formal aspects into account the effec­ tiveness of Nietzsche's and Foucault's texts cannot be fully grasped. You cannot understand what Discipline and Punish as a text 'does', how it works, what it starts off. Genealogies are a specific kind of text and textual practice. Their rhetorical-narrative tools are: hyperbole and exaggerating gesture, the theatrical effect; the thick description on the level of material, almost technologi­ cal and systemic processes; the construction of broad historical lines and devel­ opments (the emergence and fall of institutions, practices, norms etc. over a span of time); finally the contrastive and often surprising periodization, the construc­ tion of 'primal scenes' and paradigmatic moments that can take the form of a chronological and rather artificial distinguishing of certain dates and moments or even individual biographies.26 Only stories told this way release the explosive power contained in the revelation of processes of power and forceful construc­ tion. In this sense, genealogies are textual shocks and momentous negative world disclosures.27 They expose single configurations of the social to the blinding light of analysis, where the artificiality of the allegedly natural and the hidden violence behind norms gets cast into sharp profile. But their effectiveness and sense of urgency is also due to a second formal trait, namely their directedness or 'address'. Genealogical accounts are constitutively directed towards an audience, addressing a virtual readership that is supposed to recognize themselves in them however defamiliarized or estranged, because it is their cause, or the cause of each one, that is addressed and of concern. The reader is supposed to understand him- or herself as the subject and object of those very processes of subjectivation that are being recounted. This second trait is also essentially rhetorical. It cannot be reduced to the explicit propositions of genealogical texts.28 The 'object' or theme is the subject that is at the same time affected by the story as it is addressed by it and is therefore a part and implica­ tion of the account itself. Again, this is an implication of 'self' or subject, here on the most formal level. This trait distinguishes genealogies from two other highly performative textual genres they are quite close to it in other respects. The first, confessional autobiography (mainly) implicates the author as the author-subject and textual object; the second, religious or moral tracts are most strongly directed towards an audience as the target of religious or moral admonition, but it relates the very authority of the account to a third, extra-textual instance (eternal laws of morality, divine authority, etc.). This is not to say that there cannot be hybrids between these subgenres that incorporate some elements of the autobiographical (as in Rousseau) or of the moralistic/didactic (as in Kierkegaard). This implicating of the addressee is a third way of implicating the self: the story is told to the one (the subject) that it is about. This relation again ties geneal­ ogy to self or to the subject as does the historicization of the self, discussed in part I of this paper, and the critical questioning of the self, discussed in part II. Genealogies are 'histories of the present' exactly for the inhabitants of our

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present, for a 'we'. But who is the 'we'? They are the unspecified, presupposed, and in a weak sense 'constituted', called-for audience, the addressees for and to whom the genealogical author, often hiding behind the 'mask of the philosopher' writes. He supposes that they are hit, affected and concerned by his historical account, that they are provoked and shocked, struck by the lightning of instanta­ neous insight into what they are, how they have become and what they might not want to be. He may hope (sometimes in vain), that their having become what they are appears scandalous to them when it is seen in the bright light of historical analysis. He is successful when his readers take over the writing and start off projecting their own versions of the present.29 M artin Saar Institut fu r Philosophie Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Grilneburgplatz 1 D-60629 Frankfurt am Main Germany [email protected]

NOTES 1 Cf. Ansell-Pearson 1991, Mahon 1992, and Brown 2001: 99. 2 Cf., for Nietzsche, the many articles in Schacht 1994, and especially Ridley 1998 and Risse 2001; for Foucault, Visker 1995, Gutting 1990, Mahon 1992, Clifford 2001, and Brown 2001 .

3 Cf. the following passages in Foucault 1994, vol. I: 595, 599, vol. II: 753, vol. Ill: 145, 147, 165-167, 173, vol. IV: 170-171, 541. As to the rather usual heuristic periodization of Foucault's oeuvre, I'm following the suggestions made, e.g., in Davidson 1994. But these phases should be seen together with Foucault's talk of 'three domains of genealogy' (Foucault 1982: 237), of 'three axes' or 'three fundamental elements' of experience (Rabinow 1984: 336, 387) which cuts across a mere chronological order. In other words, the practice of genealogy was not confined to one phase of his thought. It could be shown that in all of his works since the 1970s it was a continuous methodological register. 4 Cf. Foucault 1982: 243, 275. For a recent overview of the various forms of a critique of the subject cf. Vedrine 2000. 5 Cf. Foucault 1971, Foucault 1979, and Foucault 1980. Interestingly, the motif of historicity in Foucault is quite persistent. In one of his earliest writings at all, an overview article on the history of psychological research from 1957, alluding to Heidegger, MerleauPonty and Marxism, he claims that psychology has lost its function and that it needs to return to the question of 'what is the most human in man, namely his history' (Foucault 1994, vol. I: 137, my transl.). On the rather complicated affinities to Heidegger cf. Saar (forthcoming). 6 For Foucault's important relation to the French tradition of history and theory of science, notably to the works of Georges Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard cf. Gutting 1989, Dews 1995, and Davidson 2002.

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7 Cf. Foucault 1972: 192. 8 Cf. Foucault 1973: ch. X. 9 Cf. Veyne 2001. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), in Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari, vol. 5, Munchen, 2nd edition: d tv/de Gruyter, preface, sec. 5, 251. 11 This formulation is inspired by Christoph Menke's excellent discussion of Nietzschean genealogy as an evaluation ('Abschatzen') of the consequences social and moral arrangements have for the individual. See the chapter 'Dekonstruktion, Genealogie, Kritik' in Menke 2000: 49-86. Cf. also Wendy Brown's remarks on 'genealogy's strategy of reversal' (Brown 2001: 98-99). 12 This was one of the points of contention in the much discussed 'debate' between Foucault and Derrida on Descartes and madness. The relevant point is whether Foucault in this book tries to restore a certain 'immediacy' to the pre-and anti-rational 'experience' of madness. This, of course, is also a distant echo of early Nietzsche's appraisal of the dionysic states of mind in The Birth of Tragedy. 13 For an interesting reading of Foucault in the context of other conceptions of constel­ lation as a concept fundamental to critical social theory cf. Lewandowski 2001. 14 Cf. Fraser 1981 as one of the first and classical texts; for more recent perspectives on the discussion on Foucault's heritage among his followers on the one hand and the repre­ sentatives of Critical Theory on the other, see the essays in Kelly 1994 and Owen/Ashenden 1999. 15 In this sense, genealogical critique is similar to 'immanent critique', given that this is understood to mean that there are no 'external' criteria or what Hegel called 'MaSstabe' (or yardsticks) of critique in his discussion of the Kantian problematic of a self-critique of reason at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For a recent discussion of immanent critique and genealogy in the context of early Critical Theory cf. Honneth 2001. Being 'immanent', however, doesn't rule out that the genealogical description undertake the uncanny and de-familiarizing enterprise of picturing what is known and familiar as if seen from the outside in order to achieve what Brecht called a Verfremdungseffekt. For a thought like this that has been stressed by many commentators cf., for example, Kogler 1992. 16 Cf. David Owen's contribution to this discussion in this symposium, Geuss 1994 and the remarks on Nietzsche in Geuss 1981. For me, this hypothetical rejection of Ideologiekritik follows from Foucault's rejection of the 'repression hypothesis' (in Foucault 1980) and from his general historicist and constructivist suspicion towards any anthropol­ ogy or universal theory of man. 17 Cf. the crucial text 'The Subject and Power' (Foucault 1982). Judith Butler may be the commentator who has given this line of thought the most acute formulation: '(...) the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as a condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency. (. ..) what is enacted by the subject is enabled but not finally constrained by the prior working of power. Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled' (Butler 1997:14-15). This point was also given some elaboration in Butler 2001. 18 This thought is powerfully elaborated in Hacking 1986; cf. also Hacking 1999 for a more sceptical view on Foucault's role as a godfather of contemporary social construc­ tivism. 19 My discussion has certain affinities to Michael Clifford's recent and instructive methodological suggestions about genealogy as what he calls (borrowing Tracy Strong's term) a 'politics of transformation' (Clifford 2001: 142-147). Concerning the appellative

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character of genealogical accounts that I have tried to capture in the suggested imperative, see also Aaron Ridley's discussion of Nietzsche's 'seduction' (Ridley 1998: 149-155). 20 The main and rather disparate examples I have in mind are Althusser 1971, Agamben 1998, Butler 1997. All of them would, of course, need to be discussed in detail. 21 For this second strand, I'm thinking in particular of the essays of Alexander Nehamas, Bernard Williams, and Raymond Geuss in Schacht 1994. 22 These questions were already discussed in debates on Foucault in the 1980s and have played a quite important role in the German reception. Cf. as an example the discus­ sion between Axel Honneth and Walter Seitter (1989) and the essays by Peter Burger and Wolfgang Welsch in Ewald/W aldenfels 1991. 23 Cf. Hayden White's tropological and rhetorical analyses and especially his treat­ ment of Foucault's historiographical style, e.g. in White 1978. 24 This doesn't exclude the possibility that there can be 'white', i.e. legitimizing and stabilizing genealogies. One should keep in mind that this is what the term meant in the first place before Nietzsche took it up. In philosophy, Charles Taylor's reconstruction of the 'sources of the self' and Hans-Georg Gadamer's historical hermeneutics, that is at its core a theory of tradition, seem to be something just like this. All I want to suggest is that these attempts step out of the range of Nietzsche's and Foucault's subversive intentions, they might even be called 'monumental' histories to use the language of the Second Untimely Meditation. Cf. also Alasdair MacIntyre's provocative theses in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Maclnytre 1985), and Williams 1994 who suggests a mediating, half destructive, half constructive reading of genealogy. 25 Cf. Cavell 1979: preface, xv-xxvi. 26 The well-known examples for this are the chapters on the ship of fools and the fight against leprosy at the beginning of Foucault 1978, and the Damien episode at the begin­ ning of Foucault 1979. Similar temporal paradigmatic constructions can be found in works as diverse as Deleuze/Guattari 1987, Negt/Kluge (1981) or even H ardt/N egri (2000). More classical examples from the history of philosophy are Rousseau's second Discourse and Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. 27 The question of the 'truth' or adequacy of genealogical accounts hasn't been answered by these suggestions. Foucault's confession that his works are 'fictions' is not an answer to it (cf. Foucault 1994, vol. I: 591, vol. Ill: 40, 44-45). Since his early text On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense Nietzsche is haunted by the well-known philosophical prob­ lem: If there is to be a 'truth effect' to the very act of exposing truth to be, in a certain sense, a 'lie' or a 'mere' construction' or 'effect of language', how can you account for this story itself being true or 'truer' than the first? As I see it, neither Nietzsche nor Foucault gives a plausible general or philosophical answer to this question but they try to circumvent it by the means of several conceptual manoeuvers most of which have to do with the concept of perspectivism. And practising genealogy is one way of not doing (ordinary) philosophy. For an introduction to the discussion and reconstructions of perspectivism cf. de Man 1979, Nehamas 1985, Nehamas 1994, and Clark 1990. 28 My discussion of the 'address' and the (implication of the) audience of genealogy obviously takes some cues from Derrida's remarks on 'addressing' at the opening of his Force of Law (1990) and on the 'teleopoietic' constitution of a future audience in the Nietzschean text in The Politics of Friendship (1997), ch. 2. On the audience of genealogy and the role of the genealogical author, respectively, see also MacIntyre 1990: 45-49, 232-233, and 205-206, 214-215. 29 A German version of this essay was presented in the workshop 'Genealogy as Critique' during the Foucault Conference in Frankfurt, September 27-29th, 2001. I am

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grateful to the other speakers, Raymond Geuss and David Owen, whose contributions are published in this journal, to Axel Honneth who was chairing the session, and to the partic­ ipants in the discussion for their comments and suggestions.

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, L. (1971), Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 127-88. Ansell-Pearson, K. (1991), 'The Significance of Michel Foucault's Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory', Nietzsche-Studien 20: 267-283. Brown, W. (2001), Politics Out of History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (2001), 'Eine Welt, in der Antigone am Leben geblieben ware', interview with Carolin Emcke and Martin Saar, Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophic 49: 587-599. Cavell, S. (1979), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clifford, M. (2001), Political Genealogy After Foucault: Savage Identities, New York/London: Routledge. Davidson, A.I. (1994), 'Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought', in Gutting 1994: 36-67. Davidson, A.I. (2002), The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. de Man, P. (1979), Allegories of Meaning: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1990), 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" ', Cardozo Law Review 11: 919-1045. Derrida, J. (1997), The Politics of Friendship, London: Verso. Dews, P. (1995), 'Foucault and the French Tradition of Historical Epistemology', in The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy, London: Verso, 39-58. Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (1982), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eribon, D. (2001) (ed.), L'infrequentable Michel Foucault. Renouveaux de la pensee critique, Paris: EPEL. Ewald, F. and Waldenfels, B. (1991) (eds.), Spiele der Wahrheit. Michel Foucaults Denken, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Foucault, M. (1971), 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', reprinted in Rabinow 1984: 76-101. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon.

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Foucault, M. (1973), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1978), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1980), The History of Sexuality: Volume I, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1982), 'The Subject and Power', The Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress', in Dreyfus/Rabinow 1982: 208-226, 229-252. Foucault, M. (1994), Dits et ecrits. 1954-1988, edited by D. Defert/F. Ewald, 4 vols., Paris: Gallimard. Fraser, N. (1981), 'Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions', reprinted in Fraser 1989:17-34. Fraser, N. (1989), Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Geuss, R. (1981), The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (1994), 'Nietzsche and Genealogy', European Journal of Philosophy 2: 274-292. Gutting, G. (1989), Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutting, G. (1990), 'Nietzsche's Genealogical Method', Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15: 327-343. Gutting, G. (1994) (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Michel Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994. Hacking, I. (1986), 'Making up People', in Heller/Sosna/Wellbery 1986: 222-236. Hacking, I. (1999), The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heller, P., Sosna, M. and Wellbery, D. (1986) (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Honneth, A. (2001), 'Reconstructive Social Critique with a Genealogical Reservation: On the Idea of Critique in the Frankfurt School', Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 22: 3-11. Honneth, A. and Seitter, W. (1989), 'Foucault = Kant minus x? Ein Gesprach uber den Gestus der Theorie, die Ethik und den Krieg', Spuren 26/27:19-26. Kelly, M. (1994) (ed.), Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kogler, H.H. (1992), Die Macht des Dialogs: Kritische Hermeneutik nach Gadamer, Foucault und Rorty, Stuttgart: Metzler. Lewandowski, J.D. (2001), Interpreting Culture: Rethinking Method and Truth in Social Theory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. MacIntyre, A. (1985), Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Mahon, M. (1992), Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject, Albany: SUNY Press. Menke, C. (2000), Spiegelungen der Gleichheit, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Negt, O. and Kluge, A. (1981), Geschichte und Eigensinn, Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins. Nehamas, A. (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nehamas, A. (1994), 'The Genealogy of Genealogy: Interpretation in Nietzsche's Second "Untimely Meditation" and in "On the Genealogy of Morals" ', in Schacht 1994: 269-283. Nietzsche, F. (1988), Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols., Munchen, 2nd edition: d tv /d e Gruyter.

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Owen, D. and Ashenden, S. (1999) (eds.), Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, London: Sage. Rabinow, P. (1984) (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books. Ridley, A. (1998), Nietzsche's Conscience: Six Character Studies from the 'Genealogy', Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Risse, M. (2001), T he Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin of the Bad Conscience', European Journal of Philosophy 9: 55-81. Saar, M. (forthcoming), 'Heidegger und Foucault: Einfluss ohne Zentrum', in Thoma (forthcoming). Schacht, R. (1994) (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, History: Essays on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley: University of California Press. Thoma, D. (forthcoming) (ed.), Heidegger-Handbuch, Stuttgart: Metzler. Vedrine, H. (2000), Le sujet eclate, Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Veyne, P. (1978), 'Foucault revolutionne l'histoire', in Comment on ecrit I'histoire, Paris: Seuil. Veyne, P. (2001), 'L'archeologue sceptique', in Eribon 2001: 19-59. Visker, R. (1995), Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, London: Verso. White, H. (1978), 'Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground', in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 230-260. Williams, B. (1994), 'Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology', in Schacht 1994: 237-247.

Part II Freedom and Power

[7] FOUCAULT ON FREEDOM A ND TRUTH C H A R LE S T A YL O R

OUCAULT DISCONCERTS. In a number of ways perhaps. But the way I want to examine is this: certain of Foucault’s most interesting historical analyses, while they are original, seem to lie along familiar lines of critical thought. That is, they seem to offer an insight into what has happened and into what we have become, yet at the same time offer a critique, and hence some notion of a good unrealized or repressed in history, which we therefore understand better how to rescue. But Foucault himself repudiates this suggestion. He dashes the hope, if we had one, that there is some good we can affirm as a result of the understanding these analyses give us. And by the same token he seems to raise a question of whether or not there is such a thing as a way out. This is rather paradoxical, because Foucault’s analyses seem to bring evils to light; and yet he wants to distance himself from the suggestion that would seem inescapably to follow, that the negation or overcoming of these evils promotes a good. More specifically, Foucault’s analyses, as we shall see in greater detail, turn a great deal on power / domination and on disguise/ illusion. He lays bare a modern system of power, which is both more allpenetrating and more insidious than previous forms. Its strength lies partly in the fact that it is not seen as power but as science or fulfilment, even liberation. Foucault’s work is thus partly an unmasking. You would think that implicit in all this was the notion of two goods that need rescuing and that the analyses help to rescue: freedom and truth—two goods that would be linked deeply granted the fact that the negation of one (domination) makes essential use of the negation of the other (disguise). We would be back on familiar terrain with an old Enlightenment-inspired combination. But Foucault seems to repudiate both. The idea of a liberating truth is a profound illusion. There is no truth that can be espoused, defended, or rescued against systems of power. On the contrary, each such system defines its own variant of

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truth. And there is no escape from power into freedom, for such systems of power are coextensive with human society. We can only step from one to another. Or at least, this is what Foucault seems to be saying in passages such as the following: Contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits . . . nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.1

Is there confusion and contradiction here or a genuinely original position? The answer I want to offer cannot be put in a single phrase, but roughly I think that there is some of both. The nature of the combination, however, is not easy to understand.

/ I would like to examine this issue in connection with some of the analyses of Foucault’s recent historical works, Surveiller et Punir and the Histoire de la Sexualite. For the sake of my discussion I want to isolate three lines of analysis, each of which suggests or is historically connected with a certain line of critique, but where in each case, Foucault repudiates the latter. I have ordered these analyses so that the argument arising from them moves toward more radical repudiations. That is at first sight, analysis 2 will seem to offer a reason for repudiating the good suggested by analysis 1, and 3 will seem to offer a reason for rejecting the good implicit in 2, only to be rejected in turn. Or so it would seem. (1) The first that I want to take up is the contrast drawn in Surveiller et Punir (SP) between modes of punishment in the classical age and today. The book opens with a riveting description of the execution of a parricide in seventeenth century France. The modern is appalled, horrified. We seem to be more in the world of our contemporary fanatical perpetrators of massacre, the Pol Pots, the Idi Amins, rather than in that of the orderly process of law in a civilized, well-established

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regime. Obviously something very big has changed in our understanding of ourselves, of crime and punishment. Bringing us up against this evidence of radical historical dis­ continuity—this is what Foucault does superlatively. For our eyes, the details of the execution of Damiens bespeak gratuitous cruelty, sadism. Foucault shows that they had another reason then. The punishment can be seen as a kind of “liturgy” (“la liturgie des supplices”).2 Human beings are seen as set in a cosmic order, constituted by a hierarchy of beings that is also a hierarchy of goods. They stand also in a political order, which is related to and in a sense endorsed by the cosmic one. This kind of order is hard to explain in modern terms, because it is not simply an order of things but an order of meanings. Or to put it in other terms, the order of things that we see around us is thought to reflect or embody an order of Ideas. You can explain the coherence things have in terms of a certain kind of making sense. Certain kinds of crime—parricide is a good example—are offenses against this order as well as against the political order. They do not just represent damage done to the interests of certain other individuals or even of the ensemble of individuals making up the society. They represent a violation of the order, tearing things out of their place as it were. And so punishment is not just a matter of making reparation for damage inflicted, or of removing a dangerous criminal, or of deterring others. The order must be set right. In the language of the time, the criminal must make “amenda honorable.” So the punishments have a meaning. I find Foucault convincing on this. The violence done to the order is restored by being visited on the wrong-doer. Moreover this restoral is made more effective by his participation in (to us) the grisly scenario, in particular his avowal. As Foucault puts it, one of the goals was to “instaurer le supplice comme moment de verite.”3 Moreover, since the order violated includes the political order—royal power in this case—and this order is public, not in the modern Benthamian sense of touching the general interest, but in the older sense of a power that essentially manifests itself in public space; the restoral has to be enacted in public space. W hat to us is the additional barbarity of making a spectacle of all these gruesome goings-on was an essential part of what was being effected in the punishments of that age. L’atrocite qui hante le supplice joue done un double role: principe de la communication du crime avec la peine, elle est d’autre part l’exasperation du

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chatiment par rapport au crime. Elle assure d ’un meme coup l’eclat de la vfcrite et celui du pouvoir; elle est le rituel de Fenquete qui s’acheve et la ceremonie ou triomphe le souverain.4

It is clear that one of the things that makes us so different from the people of that epoch is that the whole background notion of order has disappeared for us. This has been connected to—is in a sense the obverse side of—the development of the modern identity, the sense we have of ourselves as free, self-defining subjects whose understanding of their own essence or of their paradigm purposes is drawn from within, and no longer from a supposed cosmic order in which they are set. But this is not the whole story; it is not just that we have lost their background rationale. It is also that a new notion of the good has arisen. This is defined by what often has been called modern humanitarianism. We have acquired since the eighteenth century a concern for the preservation of life, for the fulfilling of human need, and above all for the relief of suffering, which gives us an utterly different set of priorities from our forebears. It is this and not just our loss of their background that makes them seem so barbaric to us. What lies behind this modern humanitarianism? This is a big and deep story. No one can claim to understand it fully. But I have to go into it a little, because his interpretation of it is central to Foucault’s position. I think one of the important factors that underlies it is the modern sense of the significance of what I want to call “ordinary life.” I use this as a term of art for that ensemble of activities that are concerned with the sustaining of life, its continuation, and its reproduction: the activities of producing and consuming, or marriage, love, and the family. While in the traditional ethics that came to us from the ancients, this had merely infrastructural significance (it was the first term in Aristotle’s duo of ends: “life and the good life” [zen kai euzen]; a career [bios] concerned with it alone put us on a level with animals and slaves); in modern times it becomes the prime locus of significance. In traditional ethics, ordinary life is overshadowed by what are identified as higher activities—contemplation for some, the citizen life for others. And in mediaeval Catholicism something like this overshadow­ ing of ordinary lay life occurs relative to the dedicated life of priestly or monastic celibacy. It was particularly the Protestant Reformation with its demand for personal commitment, its refusal of the notion of firstand second-class Christians (unless it be the distinction between saved

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and damned), its refusal of any location of the sacred in human space, time, or rite, and its insistence on the biblical notion that life was hallowed, which brought about the reversal. This reversal continues through the various secularized philosophies. It underlies the Baconian insistence on utility, and partly in this way feeds into the mainstream humanism of the Enlightenment. It has obviously leveling, antiaristocratic potential. But more than this, it has come, I would claim, to inform the entirety of modern culture. Think for instance of the growth of the new understanding of the companionate marriage in the seventeentheighteenth centuries, the growing sense of the importance of emotional fulfillment in marriage—indeed the whole modern sense that one’s feelings are a key to the good life. This is defined now as involving certain emotional experiences. If I can use the term “the good life” as an absolutely general, ethic-neutral term for whatever is considered good/holy/of ultimate value on any given view, then I would want to say that the Reformation theologies with their new stress on the calling made ordinary life the significant locus of the issues that distinguish the good life. Euzen now occurs within zen. And modern culture has continued this. This I believe is an important part of the background to modern humanitarianism. Because with the ethics of ordinary life arises the notion that serving life (and with later, more subjectivist variants, avoiding suffering) is a paradigm goal in itself, while at the same time the supposed higher ends that previously trumped life—aristocratic honor, the sustaining of cosmic order, eventually even religious orthodoxy itself—are discredited progressively. This perspective would make one envisage the change in philosophies of punishment since the seventeenth century as a gain; perhaps in other respects also a loss, but at least in this one respect as a gain. In other words, it seems to contain a critique of the older view as based on a mystification, in the name of which human beings were sacrificed, and terrible suffering was inflicted. At least that has been the Enlightenmentinspired reaction. But Foucault does not take that stance at all. Ultimately, as is well known, he wants to take a stance of neutrality. Here are just two systems of power: classical and modern. But at first blush, there seems to be a value reason for refusing the Enlightenment valuation. This lies in a reading of modern humanitarianism as the reflection of a new system of domination, directed toward the maintenance and increase of “bio­ mass.” This is the second analysis, which I would like to look at briefly.

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(2) The picture is drawn in both Surveiller et Punir and Histoire de la sexualite (vol. 1) of a constellation combining modern humanitarianism, the new social sciences, and the new disciplines that develop in armies, schools, and hospitals in the eighteenth century, all seen as the formation of new modes of domination. In an immensely rich series of analyses, Foucault draws the portrait of a new form of power coming to be. Where the old power depended on the idea of public space and of a public authority that essentially manifested itself in this space, which overawed us with its majesty and relegated the subjects to a less visible status, the new power operates by universal surveillance. It does away with the notion of public space; Power no longer appears, it is hidden, but the lives of all the subjects are now under scrutiny. This is the beginning of a world we are familiar with, in which computerized data banks are at the disposal of authorities, whose key agencies are not clearly identifiable, and whose modus operandi is often partly secret.5 The image or emblem of this new society for Foucault is Bentham’s Panopticon, where a single central vantage point permits the surveil­ lance of a host of prisoners, each of whom is isolated from all the rest and incapable of seeing his watcher. In a striking image, he contrasts ancient to modern society through the emblematic structure of temple and panopticon. The ancients strove to make a few things visible to the many; we try to make many things visible to the few. “Nous sommes bien moins grecs que nous ne le croyons.”6 The new philosophy of punishment thus is seen as inspired not by humanitarianism but by the need to control. Or rather humanitarianism itself seems to be understood as a kind of strategem of the new growing mode of control. The new forms of knowledge serve this end. People are measured, classed, examined in various ways, and thus made the better subject to a control that tends to normalization. In particular, Foucault speaks of the medical examination, and the various kinds of inspection that arose on its model, as a key instrument in this. The Examination, he says, is at once “le deploiement de la force et l’etablissement de la verite. ” Far from explaining the rise of this new technology of control in terms of the modern identity of man as an individual, Foucault wants to explain the modern notion of individuality as one of its products. This new technology brings about the modern individual as an objective of control. The being who thus is examined, measured, categorized, and made the target of policies of normalization is the one whom we have come to define as the modern individual.7 There is another way of contrasting modern power with the classical. Foucault touches on it in SP but sets it out more explicitly in later work.8

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The classical understanding of power turned on the notions of sovereignty and law. Much of early modern thought was taken up with definitions of sovereignty and legitimacy. In part these intellectual efforts were deployed in the service of the new centralized royal governments, which built up toward their apogee in the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century. In part they were concerned with the opposite movement, a definition of the limits of rightful sovereignty, and hence the rights of resistance of the subject. At the limit this line of thought issues in the post-Rousseauian definitions of legitimate sover­ eignty as essentially founded on self-rule. But in either case these theories present an image of power as turning on the fact that some give commands and others obey. They address this question in terms of law or right. Foucault’s thesis is that, while we have not ceased talking and thinking in terms of this model, we actually live in relations of power that are quite different and that cannot be described properly in its terms. What is wielded through the modern technologies of control is something quite different, in that (a) it is not concerned with law but with normalization. That is, it is above all concerned with bringing about a certain result, defined as health or good function, whereas relative to any such goal, law always is concerned with what Nozick calls “side-constraints.” In fact what has happened is a kind of infiltration of the process of law itself by this quite alien species of control. Criminals are treated more and more as “cases” to be “rehabilitated” and brought back to normal.9 This change goes along with two others. First, (b) where the old law/ power was concerned with prohibitions, with instructions requiring that we in some way restrict our behavior to conform to them, the new kind of power is productive. It brings about a new kind of subject and new kinds of desire and behavior that belong to him. It is concerned to form us as modern individuals.10 Second, (c) this power is not wielded by a subject. It is essential to the old model that power presupposes a location of the source of command. Even if no longer in the hands of the King, it now will be located in a sovereign assembly or perhaps in the people who have the right to elect it. In any case the orders start from somewhere. But the new kind of power is not wielded by specific people against others, at least not in this way. It is rather a complex form of organization in which we are all involved.11 We still live in the theory of the old power, understood in terms of sovereignty/obedience. But the reality we have is the new one, which must be understood in terms of domination/subjugation. In political theory, we still “need to cut off the king’s head.”12

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Now this second analysis may remind us of another important theme of critical political theory, indeed a central theme of Critical Theory (in capitals), that of the link between the domination of nature and the domination of man. This is set out in perhaps its clearest form, and in one of its most influential formulations in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education o f Man (especially letter 6). But it was taken up and continued in a variety of ways, and emerges as an explicit theme in the writings of the Frankfurt School. The basic notion is a critique of mainstream enlightenment humanism with its exaltation of instrumental reason and an instrumental stance towards nature, both within and without us. To objectify our own nature and to try to bring it under the control of reason is to divide what should be a living unity. It introduces a master within, in Schiller’s language, a relation of domination internal to the person. The proper stance of reason to nature is that of articulator. In expression—in Schiller’s formulation, in beauty—nature and reason come to reconcil­ iation. The relation of domination within man, which is part of a stance of domination toward nature in general, cannot help engendering a domination of man by man. What goes on within must end up also happening between men. Schiller’s account of this connection is via the breakdown of a true consensual community among atomic individuals that necessitates a regime of enforced conformity to law. But Foucault seems to offer to the Schillerian perspective another connection (supplementing, not replacing the first). The objectifying and domi­ nation of inner nature comes about in fact not just through a change of attitude but through training in an interiorization of certain disciplines. The disciplines of organized bodily movement, of the employment of time, of ordered dispositions of living/ working space—these are the paths by which objectification really takes place, becomes more than a philosopher’s dream, or the achievement of a small elite of spiritual explorers, and takes on the dimensions of a mass phenomenon. But the disciplines that build this new way of being are social; they are the disciplines of the barracks, the hospital, the school, the factory. By their very nature they lend themselves to the control of some by others. In these contexts, the inculcation of habits of self-discipline is often the imposition of discipline by some on others. These are the loci where forms of domination become entrenched through being interiorized. Seen in this way, Foucault offers the Frankfurt school an account of the inner connection between the domination of nature and the domination of man that is rather more detailed and more convincing

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than what they came up with themselves. It is the measure of the great richness of his work that this gift is not at all part of his intentions. On the contrary, Foucault will have nothing to do with this Romanticderived view of the oppression of nature and our “liberation” from it. Once again, this seems ultimately to be a matter of his Nietzschean refusal of the notion of truth as having any meaning outside a given order of power. But once again, there looks to be a more immediate, value-related reason. This comes out in the third analysis, which is the subject of the Histoire de la Sexualite . (3) Central to the Romantic notion of liberation is the notion that the nature within us must come to expression. The wrong stance of reason is that of objectification and the application of instrumental reason: The right stance is that that brings to authentic expression what we have within us. In accordance with the whole modern rehabilitation of ordinary life, of which the romantic movement is heir, one of the crucial aspects of this inner nature that must be articulated is our nature as sexual beings. There is a truth of this; an authentic way for each of us to love. This is distorted by custom or by the demands of power external to us; in more modern variants, it is distorted by the demands of the capitalist work-ethic or by the disciplines of a bureaucratic society. In any case, whatever the distorting agent, it needs to be liberated, and coming to true expression is both a means and a fruit of this liberation. Foucault aims to dismantle this whole conception, and show it to be thorough-going illusion. The idea that we have a sexual nature and that we can get at it by speech, by avowal—perhaps with the help of experts—Foucault sees as an idea with deep roots in Christian civilization. It links together earlier practices of confession through counter-reformation practices of self-scrutiny (and also reformed ones, naturally; but Foucault tends to be more familiar with French Catholic sources) to Freudian psychoanalysis, the “talking cure.” We live in “une societe singuilierement avouante. ”13 But this idea is not the statement of a deep, culture-independent truth about us. It is rather one of these “truths” that are produced by a certain regime of power. And in fact it is a product of the same regime of power through the technology of control that we just have been examining. Foucault’s idea seems to be that the notion that we have a sexual nature is itself a product of those modes of knowledge designed to make us objects of control. Our acceptance that we have such a nature makes us an object of such control. For now we have to find it and set our lives to rights by it. And finding it requires the help of experts, requires that we put ourselves in their care, be they the priests of old or the

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psychoanalysts or social workers of today. And part of putting ourselves in their hands is our avowal, the requirement that we go on trying to say what we are like, what our experience is, how things are with us. This whole idea turns out to be a strategem of power. It helps the cause of control partly in that it presents us as enigmas who need external help to resolve ourselves; and partly in that it has created the very idea of sex—not of course, the desire, the instinct, but the understanding of sexuality as the locus of a crucial fulfillment for ourselves as human beings. This self-understanding in terms of an enigmatic nature requiring expression has made us into modern sexual beings, where a key element of the good life is some kind of sexual fulfillment. The question of the meaning of our life is bound with the authentic nature of our sexual longing. “La question de ce que nous sommes, une certaine pente nous a conduits, en quelques siecles, a la poser au sexe. Et, non pas tellement au sexe-nature (element du systeme du vivant, objet pour une biologie), mais au sexe-histoire, ou sexe-significant, au sexe-discours.”14 And this makes us objects of control in all sorts of ways that we barely understand. The important thing to grasp is that we are not controlled on the old model, through certain prohibitions being laid on us. We may think we are gaining some freedom when we throw off sexual prohibitions, but in fact we are dominated by certain images of what it is to be a full, healthy, fulfilled sexual being. And these images are in fact very powerful instruments of control. We may think of the contempo­ rary wave of sexual permissiveness as a kind of “revolt of the sexual body.” But What is the response on the side o f power? An economic (and perhaps also ideological) exploitation of eroticisation, from sun-tan products to pornographic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by represssion but that of control by stimulation. “Get undressed—but be slim, be good-looking, tanned!”15

The ruse is diabolic. The whole idea that we are generally too sexually repressed and need above all liberation, that we need to be able to talk more freely, that we need to throw off taboos and enjoy our sexual nature: This is not just another of those illusions that makes us see power always in terms of prohibitions. In fact the self experience whereby we have a sexual nature that is held down or confined by rules and taboos is itself a creation of the new kind of power/control. In going for liberation, we see ourselves as escaping a power understood on the old

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model. But in fact we live under a power of the new kind, and this we are not escaping; far from it, we are playing its game, we are assuming the shape it has molded for us. It keeps us tied to the whole “dispositif de sexualite.”16 The very idea of modern sexuality thus develops as part of technologies of control. It is at the hinge where two axes of such development join. On one hand, it is related to the disciplines of the body; on the other, to the regulation of populations. It serves the preservation and extension of life as the “biomass,” which is the overriding direction of much modern policy.

II

Let me try to sum up the discussion of the three analyses of Foucault. I have been trying through them to get to the point where we can see the break in Foucault’s thought, the point that disconcerts, where he adopts a Nietzschean-derived stance of neutrality between the different historical systems of power, and thus seems to neutralize the evaluations that arise out of his analyses. In analysis 1, he opposes the classical liturgical idea of punishment to the modern humanitarian one. And refuses to value the second over the first. But this refusal is overdeter­ mined, in a sense. It does not seem to depend only on the bottom-line Nietzschean stance of neutrality, but also on his concrete reading of this humanitarianism, which is seen as a growing system of control. And so we have analysis 2, which seems to give us an evaluational reason for refusing the evaluation that issues from analysis 1. But the evaluation on which this depends would be something akin to the Schillerian/Critical theory notion that modern discipline has repressed our own natures and constituted systems of domination of man by man, and this evaluation also is repudiated. Once again we seem to have an overdetermined judgement. It is not a pure case of Nietzschean neutral­ ity. For there is another reason to refuse this whole Romantic-inspired notion of liberation from the domination of nature within and without. And that is that the ideology of expressive liberation, particularly in connection with sexual life, is itself just a strategy of power. This is analysis 3. And so we come to the bottom line. What about the evaluation that seems to flow from 3? This would offer us some idea of a liberation, but not via the correct or authentic expression of our natures. It would be a liberation from the whole ideology of such expression, and hence from

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the mechanisms of control that use this ideology. It would be a libera­ tion that was helped by our unmasking falsehood; a liberation aided by the truth, then. In short, it would be something that had certain parallels to the Romantic-originating notion. We would achieve a liberation from a system of control that operates in us largely through masks, disguises, and false pretenses. It operates by inducing in us a certain selfunderstanding, an identity. We can help to throw it off partly by unmasking this identity and the manner of its implantation, and thus cease to be accomplices in its control and shaping of ourselves. This would be a notion of liberation through the truth, parallel to the Romantic-derived one, but different in that it would see the very notion of ourselves as having a true identity to express as part of the dispositif of control rather than as what defines our liberation. Now the official Nietzschean stance of Foucault would refuse this value-position as well. And here at last we would be at the pure case, where the refusal was not overdetermined, but depended purely on the Nietzschean stance. But can he doit? Does he really do it? What does it mean to do it? These are the central questions that arise about Fou­ cault’s repudiation of the goods that seem implicit in his analyses. And this is the right place to pose these questions, where no extraneous considerations, no other possible value-positions muddy the waters. Does he really do it? Even this is not so clear. There are moments where some notion of liberation seems to peek through. It is true (?) that he repudiates the notion of liberation through the truth in Histoire de la Sexualite : “La verite n’est pas libre, ni l’erreur serve.”17But later there is the hint of a possible point d’appui for at least a relative freeing: “Contre le dispositif de la sexualite, le point d ’appui de la contre-attaque ne doit pas etre le sexe-desir, mais les corps et les plaisirs.”18 What exactly this could mean I want to discuss later. But here I just want to point to the implication that once one has rejected the false idea of a liberation through the truth of one’s natural sexual desires (le sexe-desir), there remains something else it can be founded on. In this connection, we also might mention the passages in Power/ Knowledge where Foucault talks about the need for a kind of revolutionary practice that did not reproduce just the forms of control that exist in the structures against which they are rebelling. But the question I would like to explore here is this: Can he do it? By that I mean this: What can be said coherently in this domain? Just how much sense does a Nietzschean position make? Before I do this, I just want to mention another line of critique that one could take up against Foucault, but that I do not want to pursue

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here. Foucault’s analyses are terribly one-sided. Their strength is their insightfulness and originality in bringing usually neglected aspects to light. The weakness is that the other aspects seem denied altogether. We can see this with the three analyses above. I already mentioned with 1, how Foucault reads the rise of humani­ tarianism exclusively in terms of the new technologies of control. The development of the new ethics of life is given no independent signifi­ cance. This seems to me absurdly one-sided. In the second analysis the rise of the new forms of discipline is seen exclusively in its relation to domination. Once again I think there is a mine of valuable historical insights here. Foucault has filled in, as I mentioned above, some of the background that critical theory always supposed, but did not work out adequately. But Foucault has missed the ambivalence of these new disciplines. The point is that they have not served only to feed a system of control. They also have taken the form of genuine self-discipline that have made possible new kinds of collective action characterized by more egalitarian forms of participation. This is not a new discovery. It is a truism of the civic humanist tradition of political theory that free participatory institutions require some com­ monly accepted self-disciplines. The free citizen has the “vertu” to give willingly the contribution that otherwise the despot would coerce from him, perhaps in some other form. Without this, free institutions cannot exist. There is a tremendous difference between societies that find their cohesion through such common disciplines grounded on a public iden­ tity and that thus permit of and call for the participatory action of equals on one hand, and the multiplicity of kinds of society that require chains of command based on unquestionable authority on the other. Aside from the moral differences, there are also differences in effi­ cacy, which Machiavelli examined, particularly military. Modern his­ tory has been shaped by striking examples of the citizen military, from the New Model Army to the Israeli Defense Forces. This is really too big a phenomenon to ignore. The point is that collective disciplines can function in both ways—as structures of domination and as bases for equal collective action. And they also can slide over time from one to the other. It can be argued that some of the disciplines that helped to found the societies based on contract and responsible government in earlier times, which represented a great leap forward in egalitarian politics, are now serving bureaucratic modes of irresponsible power that are sapping our democracy. I think that there is a lot in this. Undoubtedly the feeling that something like this

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is happening adds plausibility to Foucault’s analysis, at first blush. But on reflection we can see that Foucault’s notion of modern power inca­ pacitates us from understanding this process. That is because we cannot understand modern bureaucratization unless we see how collective disciplines can function both for and against despotic control. The threatened degeneracy of modern mass democracies is a slide from one of these directions to the other. We will never see what is going on if we think of the disciplines as having their exclusive historical and social significance in forms of domination. Foucault’s attraction is partly that of a terrible simplijicateur. His espousal of the reversal of Clausewitz’s aphorism, which makes us see politics as war carried on by other means,19 can open insights in certain situations. But to make this one’s basic axiom for the examination of modern power as such leaves out too much. Foucault’s opposition between the old model of power based on sovereignty / obedience and the new one based on domination/ subjugation leaves out everything in Western history that has been animated by civic humanism or analo­ gous movements.20 And that means a massive amount of what is specific to our civilization. Without this in one’s conceptual armoury, Western history and societies become incomprehensible, as they are for that reason to so many Russians (like Solzhenitsyn). In the third analysis, Foucault is certainly on to something in the claim that sexual desire has been given exceptional importance in Wes­ tern civilization, even in the very attempts to control it, neutralize it, go beyond it. He is certainly right to point to the Christian roots of this. Again we can appreciate the force of the point that we somehow have been led to place a tremendous weight of significance on our sexual lives and fulfillment in this culture, more than these can bear. But then to understand this simply in terms of technologies of control (I am not sure whether or not Foucault really does this. I await eagerly the second volume on sexuality to find out) leaves out its roots in the theologies/ ethics of ordinary life, in the Christian concern for the quality of the will, which Foucault himself rightly sees as basic to this.21 And to reduce the whole Western, post-Romantic business of trying to say oneself to an artifact of such a technology of control approaches absurdity. That the aspiration to express one’s true nature can become a mechanism of control is indeed true, and Foucault can offer insights on this. But just as in the case of bureaucratization above, you incapacitate yourself to understand this becoming if you conceive it from the beginning as essentially being control.

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III

But I am less interested in hammering this line of critique than in seeing what can be said coherently in this area. I think Foucault’s position ultimately is incoherent, but that this escapes detection because the points at which it falls into contradiction are misidentified as new and deeper formulations of what many would recognize as valuable insights. I would like to explore this under three headings. (1) First, the idea of power without a subject. There are a number of interesting ideas here, of which two are especially important for this discussion, (i) Foucault is setting aside the old model where power is a matter of one person (group) exercising sovereign control over another, where some give orders and others obey, where some impose their wills on the others. This is usually conceived as a relation alongside the others, social, economic, familial, sexual, and the like that people stand in with each other; conditioned by and conditioning the others, but distinct from them. On the contrary, the power Foucault is interested in is internal to, intrinsic to these other relations. One could say that it is constitutive of them, that built in to the very understanding of the common activity, or goods sought, or whatever forms the substance of the microrelation, are forms of domination.22 Thus the doctor-patient relation is defined by a supposed common goal, constituted by a stance of helper on the part of the professional and a recognition of need on the part of the patient. But this coming together in a common goal is inseparable from a relation of power founded on the presumption that one know s , and that the other has an overwhelming interest in taking advise. The relation of force is integral to the common goal as defined. This is a relation of power, but it cannot be conceived on the Hobbesian model. It is rare that a doctor can or wants to wreak his arbitrary and unrestrained will on his patient. Both parties are constrained in a sense by the common understanding, the common activity. But within this there is a domination on the part of the doctor. This helps us to understand another difference from the Hobbesian model: Frequently, in this kind of situation, the dominated cooperate in their subordination. They often come to interiorize the norms of the common activity; they go willingly. They are utterly unaware of a rela­ tion of domination. Foucault’s example is the ideology of sexual libera­ tion, where we play along unwittingly with a technology of control, even as we are “letting it all hang out.” And we can see from this also how this kind of relationship can permit reversals. There is not necessarily a continuing identity of domi-

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nators and dominated over time. There was for instance an ensemble of father, mother, educator, and doctor constituted in the 19th century around the control of the child’s sexuality. The original relation puts the doctor on top, offering “advice” to parents, who are in turn controlling their children. But later the relation of psychiatrist to child is the basis on which the adult’s sexuality is called into question. (ii) But Foucault also is putting forward another thesis under this head, one about the relations of micro- to macrocontexts of power. It is not entirely clear what this thesis is, because it is stated somewhat differently in different places. But the baldest statement is perhaps this: “que le pouvoir vient d ’en bas.”23 This seems to mean that we cannot hope to explain the local “rapports de force” in terms of some global relation of dominators and dominated. This is not to say that there may not be identifiable classes or groups of those who are “on top” or “on the bottom ” at any given time. But we have to explain this division in terms of the combinations, alignments, mutual effects, oppositions, sideeffects, and the like, which the microcontexts of domination produce on each other and with each other. Or perhaps better, we have to allow for a circular relation, in which the grand alignments, which become concre­ tized in political or military institutions, both result from and reverber­ ate back on the micro-rapports de forces. The grand strategies of the macrocontexts—state, ruling class, or whatever—form the context in which the microrelations come to be, modify, or reproduce themselves; and reciprocally these provide the soil and point of anchorage for the grand strategies. Thus more than saying that power comes from the bottom, we should say that there is endless relation of reciprocal conditioning between global and microcontexts. Foucault’s target in this thesis is plainly Marxism, even as he rejects the Hobbesian model with the other. It is a mistake to take the relations of opposition at one level as explanatorily basic. That is what Marxism does. It is the global class struggle and its exigencies that are used to explain the way people square off in the microcontexts of family, factory, professional association, and so on. Foucault gives an example of the kind of account he disagrees with in chapter 5 of Power j K now ­ ledge. There is a widely accepted view that we ought to explain, for example, the incarceration of the mad in the 16th century or the repres­ sive interest in infantile sexuality in the 19th century, in terms of the requirements of the rising bourgeois economy. Foucault rejects this. Rather the relation was that these contexts of domination developed in their own fashion, and then were taken up and used by the macrocontext of domination. They “came to be colonized and maintained by the

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global mechanisms and the entire state system,” in which the bourgeoi­ sie was hegemonic.24 So far, so clear. Indeed we might be tempted to say: so far, so true. But now there is a third thesis under this head that Foucault also seems to be propounding. Perhaps this is a good statement of it: “que les relations de pouvoir sont a la fois intentionnelles et non subjectives.”25 W hat Foucault seems to be affirming here is that, aside from the particular conscious purpose that agents pursue in their given context, there is discernible a strategic logic of the context itself, but this cannot be attributed to anyone as their plan, as their conscious purpose. As he puts it in Pow er/K now ledge, talking of the kind of history he writes, “the coherence of such a history does not derive from the revelation of a project, but from the logic of opposing strategies.”26 Strategies without projects, this would be a good formula to describe Foucault’s historiography. Besides the strategies of individuals, which are their projects, there is a strategy of the context. The whole constitution and maintenance of the modern system of control and domination is an example. Foucault speaks of its growth and self­ maintenance in strategic terms. He speaks of power using certain strategems or certain points of purchase. Thus in describing the reversals that occur as power and the resistance to it each take up each others’ instruments, he gives this example: Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body. Do you recall the panic of the institutions of the social body, the doctors and politicians, at the idea of non-legalized cohabitation (l’union libre) or free abortion? But the impression that power weakens and vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power can retreat here, re-organize its forces, invest itself elsewhere . . . and so the battle continues.27

This notion of global strategies is essential to Foucault’s reverse Clausewitzian thesis that we are engaged in perpetual war. This is not just the banality that there is much strife and rivalry among individuals. It is the thesis that there is a continuing struggle traversing the context in which we are all caught up. The use of the term “strategy” in Foucault recovers its full original etymological force. It is this third thesis that makes no sense in Foucault’s version. I stress this last phrase, because it would be quite wrong that no thesis of this kind makes sense. On the contrary, we can think of good examples where it makes sense to attribute a “purposefulness without purpose” to history, or at least a logic to events without design. Let us look at some examples in order to see what is required by this kind of explanation, (a) We can recognize a certain purposefulness in people’s action where their

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motivation and goals are unacknowledged or perhaps unacknowledgeable. An example would be the (I think profound) Dostoyevokian analysis of modern political terrorism in terms of projected self-hatred and the response to a sense of emptiness. These purposes are not only unacknowledged, they could not be acknowledged without undermining the whole enterprise, which depends crucially on the notion that one is acting out of purely political-strategic considerations. But they might explain certain systematic features of terrorism better than the overly avowed goals, (b) Then there are theories of unintended but systematic consequences. Such as “invisible hand” theories, that is, theories where the situation is so constituted that individual decisions are bound to concatenate in a certain systematic way. The best known example is the (malign) invisible hand account of capitalism by Marx. The structure of a capitalist economy is that individual decisions have to concatenate toward an ever-greater polarization, immiseration of the masses, concentration of capital, falling rate of profit, and so forth, (c) There are unintended consequences theories that touch on the results of collective action and not just the combination of individual actions. As an example, we perhaps can see a certain pattern in Leninist politics whereby the possibilities of devolution and a move toward participation are more and more restricted. This is a consequence unintended by Leninist parties at the outset. But it perhaps could be shown that it follows ineluctably from their model of mass mobilization, which systematically ends up destroying the bases for devolved power. The tragedy would be that a movement aimed at liberation and radical democratization should end up destroying these more effectively than predecessor regimes. The point of citing these types and examples is to illustrate my main point, which is that purposefulness without purpose requires a certain kind of explanation to be intelligible. The undesigned systematicity has to be related to the purposeful action of agents in a way that we can understand. This is a requirement that the above kinds of explanation try to fulfill. The reason for this requirement is that the text of history, which we are trying to explain, is made of purposeful human action. Where there are patterns in this action that are not on purpose, we have to explain why action done under one description on purpose also bears this other, undesigned description. We have to show how the two descriptions relate. A strategic pattern cannot just be left hanging, unrelated to our conscious ends and projects. It is a mistake to think that the only intelligible relation between a pattern and our conscious purposes is the direct one where the pattern is consciously willed. This is a hangup that did come down to us from

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classical Cartesian-empiricist views of the mind. Foucault is right to ridicule it. “Ne cherchons pas l’etat-major qui preside a sa rationalite” (sc. du pouvoir).28 But this must not be confused with the explanatory requirement outlined above. It is certainly not the case that all patterns issue from conscious action, but all patterns have to be made intelligible in relation to conscious action. Now Foucault not only does not meet this requirement; it is difficult to see how he could without abandoning some or other part of his declared position. We could explain the constitution of the growing system of technologies of control, if we could understand it (oh model a) as meeting the (largely unacknowledged) purposes of some group. But this Foucault could not do without going back on his thesis (ii), that there is no priority here of explanation in terms of the interest of some dominant class. The system has to arise out of the microcontexts in which people act and react. It would be even worse for his case, if the group whose interest of purposes was the m otor of change was coterminous with society at large or at least widely distributed within it; for then the changes would be thought of as largely self-wrought, and a problem might arise about interpreting these as relations of domination. The same difficulty with thesis (ii) rules out explanations on model c, in terms of the unintended consequences of collective action (which might itself be motivated by partly unacknowledged purposes). In order to stick by (ii) in this case, we would need some account on model b, where microreactions concatenate in this systematic way. I do not say something like this cannot be found, but I am at a loss to say even where one should start looking for it. And Foucault does not even feel the need to start looking. This is not to say that there is a difficulty with Foucault’s thesis (ii) in principle. On the contrary, there are obviously lots of aspects of social life in which this reciprocal play of micropractice and global structures, each producing (largely unintended) consequences for the other, is the right explanatory model. The problem arises only when one combines this with Foucault’s very strong claims to systematicity, in the idea that there are pervasive strategies afoot that condition the battle in each microcontext, that “power” can “retreat” or “reorganize its forces.” These can only be combined via some account of how actions concatenate systematically some model of type b. But Foucault does not even try. He leaves us with a strange kind of Schopenhauerian will, ungrounded in human action.25 One of the most important reasons why Foucault does not feel a need to offer an account here is the confusion that has afflicted the republic of letters these last decades about the supposed “death of subjectivity.” This had its epicentre in Paris. Foucault took part in it.30 Hacking31

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praises Foucault for having stepped beyond the old conception of subjectivity, which required all purposefulness in history to have a purposer. The confusion lies in not seeing that there not only can be but must be something between total subjectivism on one hand, holding that there are no undersigned patterns in history, and the strange Schopenhauerianism-without-the-will in which Foucault leaves us. Much play is made of the discovery (which structuralists did a lot to put in vogue) that any act requires a background language of practices and institutions to make sense; and that while there will be a particular goal sought in the act, those features of it that pertain to the structural background will not be objects of individual purpose. That my declarations in this article are all made with uninflected words has nothing to do with what I have decided, and everything to do with the fact that the medium of my thought is English (and I did not really choose that either). No one can deny that this is an invaluable point to have in mind in studies of power. The utter sterility of the view popular a while ago in American political science, that one could analyze power in terms of A’s ability to make B do something he otherwise would not or some such thing, illustrates this. The approach is sterile, just because acts of power are so heterogeneous; they absolutely do not admit of being described in such a homogeneous medium of culturally neutral makings and doings. The power of the audience over the star craving approval is utterly incommensurable with the power of the general, which is incommensur­ able with the power of the elected minister, and that in turn with the power of the guru, and so on. Power can be understood only within a context; and this is the obverse of the point that the contexts only in turn can be understood in relation to the kind of power that constitutes them (Foucault’s thesis). But all this does not mean that there is no such thing as explaining the rise and fall of these contexts in history. On the contrary, this is one of the major tasks of historiography. And that is the issue we were talking about in connection with Foucault’s system of modern technologies of control. How does it arise? Of course you do not explain it by some big bad man/class designing it (who ever suggested anything so absurd?), but you do need to explain it nevertheless, that is, relate this systematicity to the purposeful human action in which it arose and in which it has come to shape. You cannot evade this question by talking of the priority of structure over element, of language over speech-act. What we want to know is why a language arises. Indeed for purposes of such diachronic explanation, we can question whether or not we ought to speak of a priority of language over act. There is a circular relation. Structure of action or languages are

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maintained only by being renewed constantly in action/ speech. And it is in action/speech that they also fail to be maintained, that they are altered. This is a crashing truism, but the fog emanating from Paris in recent decades makes it necessary to clutch it as a beacon in the darkness. To give an absolute priority to the structure makes exactly as little sense as the equal and opposite error of subjectivism, which gave absolute priority to the action, as a kind of total beginning. This helps explain why Foucault feels he can be evasive on this issue, but not why he feels the need to be. Here we touch the question of his motivations, which I would like to adjourn until later (if I dare take it up at all). In the meantime I turn to the second head under which there is incoherence.

IV

(2) “Power” without “freedom” or “truth.” Can there really be an analysis that uses the notion of power and that leaves no place for freedom or truth? I already have raised the question of whether or not Foucault really does away with freedom. But this uncertainty of utterance is just the symptom, I believe, of a deeper problem. The Nietzschean programme on this level does not make sense. This is because of the very nature of a notion like power or domination. True, they do not require that we have one agent who is imposing his will on another. There are all sorts of ways in which power can be inscribed in a situation in which both dominators and dominated are caught up. The first may see himself largely as the agent of the demands of the larger context; the second may see the demands on him as emanating from the nature of things. But nevertheless, the notion of power or domination requires some notion of constraint imposed on someone by a process in some way related to human agency. Otherwise the term loses all meaning. Power in the way Foucault sees it, closely linked to domination, does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim. It cannot be a “victimless crime,” so to speak. Perhaps the victims also exercise it, also victimize others. But power needs targets.32 Something must be imposed on someone if there is to be domination. Perhaps that person also is helping to impose it on himself, but then there must be an element of fraud, illusion, false pretenses involved in this. Otherwise it is not clear that the imposition is in any sense an exercise of dom ination.33 But now something is only an imposition on me against a background of desires, interests, purposes, that I have. It is only an imposition if it

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makes some dent in these, if it frustrates them, prevents them from fulfillment, or perhaps even from formulation. If some external situation or agency wreaks some change in me that in no way lies athwart some such desire/purpose/aspiration/interest, then there is no call to speak of an exercise of power/domination. Take the phenom­ enon of imprinting. In human life, it also exists after a fashion. We generally come to like the foods that have assuaged our hunger, those we are fed as children in our culture. Is this an index of the domination of our culture over us? The word would lose all useful profile, would have no more distinctiveness, if we let it roam this wide. Moreover the desire/purposes and the like have to be of some significance. The trivial is not relevant here. If something makes it impossible for me to act on the slight preference that I have for striped over unstriped toothpaste, this is not a serious exercise of power. Shaping my life by imposition in this respect would not figure in an analysis of power. This is recognized by Foucault in his thesis that there is no power without “resistances.” Indeed Foucault sometimes dramatically is aware of the force and savagery of the imposition. Take this passage about knowledge but illustrating its close connection to power: Its development [sc. of knowledge] is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject: rather it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. Where religion once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.34

But this means that “power” belongs in a semantic field from which “tru th ” and “freedom” cannot be excluded. Because it is linked with the notion of the imposition on our significant desires/purposes, it cannot be separated from the notion of some relative lifting of this restraint, from an unimpeded fulfillment of these desires/ purposes. But this is just what is involved in a notion of freedom. There indeed may be all sorts of reasons why in certain situations certain impositions just cannot be lifted. There are empirical obstacles, and some very deep lying ones in m an’s historical situation. But that is not Foucault’s point. He wants to discredit as somehow based on a misunderstanding the very idea of liberation from power. But I am arguing that power, in his sense, does not m ake sense without at least the idea of liberation. It then may be shown that the specific liberation, defined in a given context as the negation of the power wielded therein, is not realizable for this or that reason. But that is another, quite different issue into which Foucault does not even enter.

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The Foucaultian thesis involves combining the fact that any set of institutions and practices form the background to our action within them, and are in that sense irremovable while we engage in that kind of action, with the point that different forms of power indeed are constituted by different complexes of practice, to form the illegitimate conclusion that there can be no question of liberation from the power implicit in a given set of practices. Not only is there the possibility of frequently moving from one set of practices to another; but even within a given set, the level and kind of imposition can vary. Foucault implicitly discounts both these possibilities. The first because of the fundamentally Nietzschean thesis that is basic to his work: The move from one context to another cannot be seen as a liberation because there is no common measure between the impositions of the one and those of the other. I want to address this in the next discussion (3 below). And he discounts the second, because of his over-simple and global notion of the modern system of control and domination, which I have already touched on above. So “power” requires “liberty.” But it also requires “truth”—if we want to allow, as Foucault does, that we can collaborate in our own subjugation. Indeed, that is a crucial feature of the modern system of control, that it gets us to agree and concur in the name of truth or liberation or our own nature. If we want to allow this, then truth is an essential notion. Because the imposition proceeds here by foisting illusion on us. It proceeds by disguises and masks. It proceeds thus by falsehood. C’est a la condition de masquer une part importante de lui-meme que le pouvoir est tolerable. Sa reussite est en proportion de ce qu’il parvient a cacher de ses mecanismes. Le pouvoir serait-il accepte s’il etait entierement cynique? Le secret n’est pas pour lui de l’ordre de l’abus: il est indispensable a son fonctionnement.35

Mask, falsehood makes no sense without a corresponding notion of truth. The truth here is subversive of power: It is on the side of the lifting of impositions, of what we have just called liberation. The Foucaultian notion of power not only requires for its sense the correlative notions of truth and liberation, but even the standard link between them, which makes truth the condition of liberation. To speak of power and to want to deny a place to liberation and truth as well as the link between them is to speak coherently. That is indeed the reason why Foucault seems to be contradicting himself in the passages I quoted earlier. He just does not slip into these formulations, which seem to allow for the possibility of a

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liberation, and indeed one founded on a puncturing of illusions, a defense founded on “les corps, les plaisirs, les savoirs, dans leur multiplicity et leur possibility de resistance.”36 He is driven into them by the contradictory position he has adopted.37

V

(3) Nietzschean relativism. In the end, the final basis of Foucault’s refusal of truth and liberation sems to be a Nietzschean one. This is not all of Nietzsche; there is more, and not all of it compatible with this part. But at least in the Frohliche Wissenschaft we have a doctrine that Foucault seems to have made his own; there is no order of human life or way we are or of human nature that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life. There are only different orders imposed by men on primal chaos, following their will to power. Foucault espouses both the relativistic thesis from this view, that one cannot judge between forms of life/thought/valuation, and also the notion that these different forms involve the imposition of power. The idea of “regimes of truth,” and of their close intrication with systems of dominance is profoundly Nietzschean. In this relationship Foucault sees truth as subordinated to power. Let me quote that passage again more fully: Each society has its regime o f truth, its “general politics” of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.38

If this is so (true?) in general, it is even more emphatically so in our society: There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. This is the case for every society, but I believe that in ours the relationship between power, right and truth is organized in a highly specific fa sh io n .. . . I would say that we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to function: we must speak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess to or discover the truth. Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth;

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it institutionalizes, professionalizes and rewards its pursuit. In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth.39

This regime-relativity of truth means that we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime. There can be no such thing as a truth independent of it, unless it be that of another regime. So that liberation in the name of “truth” could only be the substitution of another system of power for this one, as indeed the modern course of history has substituted the techniques of control for the royal sovereignty that dominated the 17th century. This position is easy enough to state baldly, but difficult—or impossible—actually to integrate into the logic of one’s analytical discourse, as I just have been trying to show in 2 above. The truth manufactured by power also turns out to be its “masks” or disguises and hence untruth. The idea of a manufactured or imposed truth inescapably slips the word into inverted commas, and opens the space of a truthoutside-quotes, the kind of truth, for instance, that the sentences unmasking power manifest, or that the sentences expounding the general theory of regime relativity themselves manifest (or paradox). There has to be a place for revolt / resistance aided by unmasking in a position like Foucault’s, and he allows for it. But the general relativity thesis will not allow for liberation through a transformation of power relations. Because of relativity, transformation from one regime to another cannot be a gain in truth or freedom, because each is redefined in the new context. They are incomparable. And because of the Nietzschean notion of truth imposed by a regime of power, Foucault cannot envisage liberating transformations within a regime. The regime is identified entirely with its imposed truth. Unmasking can only destabilize it; we cannot bring about a new stable, freer, less mendacious form of it by this route. Foucault’s Nietzschean theory only can be the basis of utterly monolithic analyses; which is what we saw above in his failure to recognize the ambivalence of modern disciplines, which are the basis both of domination and self-rule. And so for him unmasking can only be the basis for a kind of local resistance within the regime. In chapter 5 of Power/ Knowledge, he speaks of rehabilitating subjugated and local knowledges against the established dominant truth. He uses the expression “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” The term bespeaks his basic idea: There is no question of a new form, just of a kind of resistance movement, a set of destabilizing actions, always local and specific, within the dominant

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form. One of Foucault’s historical paradigms seems to be the popular riots and uprisings that occurred in the former regimes at some of the execution scenes. Plebean resistance is a kind of model. No doubt it would be mistaken to conceive the plebs as the permanent ground of history, the final objective of all subjections, the ever smouldering centre of all revolts. The plebs is no doubt not a real sociological entity. But there is indeed always something in the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some sense escapes relations of power, something which is by no means a more or less docile or reactive primal matter, but rather a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge. There is certainly no such thing as “the” plebs; rather there is, as it were, a certain plebian quality or aspect. There is plebs in bodies, in souls, in individuals, in the proletariat, in the bourgeoisie, but everywhere in a diversity of forms and extensions, of energies and irreducibilities. This measure of plebs is not so much what stands outside relations of power as their limit, thek underside, their counter-stroke, that which responds to every advance of power by a movement of disengagement.40

We can see at least some of the motivation for this espousal of local insurrections. Foucault is deeply suspicious of “global, totalitarian theories” that claim to offer the overall solution to our ills. The target, as it must be in the world Foucault inhabits, is of course principally Marxism. And one can have a great deal of sympathy for this reaction in face of the destruction wrought by such global revolutionary schemes. There is a great deal to be said on the Left for a politics that stays close to the local, to lived experience, to the aspirations that groups spontaneous­ ly adopt. But this by itself does not determine one to adopt the Nietzschean model of truth with its relativism and its monolithic analyses. Just because some claims to truth are not receivable, we do not need to blow the whole conception to pieces. Something else drives Foucault to Nietzscheanism. I think it will come out if I try to grapple with the central issue around this position. What does this combination of relativism between forms and monolithism of forms leave out? It leaves out—or better, it blocks out—the possibility of a change of life form that can be understood as a move toward a greater acceptance of truth—and hence also in certain conditions a move toward greater freedom. But in order to conceive a change in these terms we have to see the two forms as commensurable; the form before and the form after the change cannot be seen as incommensurable universes. How can this come about? Biographically, we see examples all the time. After a long period of stress and confusion. I come to see that I really love A, or I really do not

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want to take that job. I now see retrospectively that the image of myself as quite free and uncommitted had a merely superficial hold on me. It did not correspond to a profound aspiration. It just stood in the way of my recognizing the depts of my commitment to A, or the picture of a career that that job instantiated, which seemed before so powerful, so nongainsayable, turns out to be a model that my entourage was pressing on me, but that I cannot really endorse. What makes these biographical changes of outlook/life possible, which seem to be steps toward the truth? Our sense of ourselves, of our identity , of what we are. I see this change as a discovery of what I am, of what really matters to me. And that is why I do not see this as a kind of character change, what a lobotomy might produce for instance. Rather I see it as a step toward truth (or perhaps better put, it is a step out of error), and even in certain conditions as a kind of liberation. Is there nothing comparable in politics/ history? There is. There are changes that turn on, that are justified by, what we have become as a society, a civilization. The American revolutionaries called on their compatriots to rise in the name of the liberties that defined their way of life (ironically as Englishmen). This kind of claim is always contested (there were Tories, there were Loyalists, as is well known where I come from). But is it by its nature not receivable? Is it always sham? Foucault would have us believe so. But it seems clear to me that there is a reality here. We have become certain things in Western civilization. Our humanitarianism, our notions of freedom—both personal independence and collective selfrule—have helped to define a political identity we share; and one that is rooted deeply in our more basic, seemingly infrapolitical understandings: of what it is to be an individual, of the person as a being with inner depths—all the features that seem to us to be rock-bottom, almost biological properties of human beings, as long as we refrain from looking outside and experiencing the shock of encountering other cultures. Of course these elements of identity are contested; they are not articulated neatly and definitely once and for all, but the subject of perpetual revisionist strife. And worse, they are not all easily com­ patible—the freedom of independence is hard to combine with that of self-rule, as we constantly experience—and so we fight among ourselves in the name of incompatible weightings. But they all count for us. None of them can be repudiated simply in the political struggle. We struggle over interpretation and weightings, but we cannot shrug them off. They define humanity, politics for us.

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This means that we can look at the kind of change Foucault described, from 17th century punishments to our own, in a way that renders them partly commensurable. It is not for nothing that we are the descendants and heirs of the people who so tortured Damiens. The makings of our present stress on the significance of life were already there in that Christian civilization. One of the important features of their world, which made them act so differently, was their sense of belonging to a cosmic order in which the polity was set. But this difference cannot be seen purely in a relativist light. One of the reasons why we no longer can believe in this kind of order is the advance of our civilization of a scientific understanding of the natural world, which we have every reason to believe represents a significant gain of truth. Some dimensions at least of the disenchantment that helps share modern culture represent an advance in the truth. To the extent that this change is operative, we can understand our difference from them as a change that denizens of Western Christendom have undergone under the impact of a stronger dose of truth. Of course , this is not all. We also can discern losses. Indeed Foucault perhaps ought best to be interpreted as having documented some of these losses. The growth of modern control has involved in some respects a dehumanization, an inability to understand and to respond to some key features of the human context, those that are suppressed in a stance of thoroughgoing instrumental reason. That is why there is such a malaise in our civilization: so much groaning and travailing to recover what is lost, all the way from the Romantic period down to the most recent battles over ecology. But the point is that the sense both of gain and of loss depends on comparability, on our understanding of our identity, of what we now realize more fully, or are betraying and mutilating. Gains and losses do not tell the whole story. There are also elements of incomparability. The reality of history is mixed and messy. The problem is that Foucault tidies it up too much, makes it into a series of hermetically sealed, monolithic truth-regimes, a picture that is as far from reality as the blandest Whig perspective of smoothly broadening freedom. Monolithism and relativism are two sides of the same coin. One is as necessary as the other to create this total incomparability across the changes of history. Foucault’s monolithic relativism only seems plausible if one takes the outsider’s perspective, the view from Sirius; or perhaps imagines oneself a soul in P lato’s myth of Er. Do I want to be born a Sung dynasty

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Chinese, or a subject of Hammurabi of Babylon, or a 20th century American? W ithout a prior identity, I could not begin to choose. They incarnate incommensurable goods (at least prior to some deep com­ parative study, and conceivably even after this). But this is not m y/our situation. We have already become something. Questions of truth and freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project. In short we have a history. We live in time not just self-enclosed in the present, but essentially related to a past that has helped define our identity, and a future that puts it again in question. And indeed in his major works like Les M ots et Les Choses and Surveiller et Punir, Foucault sounds as though he believed that, as an historian, he could stand nowhere, identifying with none of the “epistemai” or structures of power whose coming and going he impartially surveys. But there are signs that this is not his last word. It would appear that Foucault is going to elaborate in forthcoming publications his own conception of a good life. From certain indications41 this would seem to be based, as one would expect, on a rejection of the whole idea that we have a deep self or nature that we have to decipher. Foucault thinks that Christianity introduced this false turn into Western culture. Where the ancient “care of the self” was concerned with self-making and self-mastery, Christian spirituality was preoccupied rather with purity and self-renunciation. “From that moment on the self was no longer something to be made but something to be renounced and deciphered.”42 Foucault’s project seems to be to return to these ancient sources, not in order to revive them—even if this were possible, he believes there is lots to criticize in ancient culture on other grounds—but as the point of departure for a different line of development. This would bring us to a conception of the good life as a kind of self-making, related in this way to the ancient “aesthetic of existence”43 that one would make one’s own life a work of art. “The principal work of art one has to take care of, the main area to which one has to apply aesthetic values is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence.”44 It is understandable how Foucault, from the standpoint of an ethic of this kind, should want to distance himself from the banners of freedom and truth, since these have been the key terms in the view he is repudiating, that we ought to bring to light our true nature or deep self. And the affinity with Nietzsche in the stress on self-making is very understandable also. But this in no way lessens the paradox involved in the attempt to avoid these terms altogether. Indeed in offering us a new

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way of reappropriating our history and in rescuing us from the supposed illusion that the issues of the deep self are somehow inescapable, what is Foucault laying open for us, if not a truth that frees us for self-making? Perhaps Foucault will now be able to free his position of this paradox, seemingly linked with the impossible attempt to stand nowhere. Perhaps he will acknowledge his sources like the rest of us, and identify the moments when these sources were lost or obscured (the rise of Christian spirituality), what we have to undo to rescue what needs saving. At that point, the really interesting debate can begin on the issues that count, that Foucault’s mode of expression up to now has obscured. There are two such issues, which it is worth tabling for future discussions: (1) Can we really step outside the identity we have developed in Western civilization to such a degree that we can repudiate all that comes to us from the Christian understanding of the will? Can we toss aside the whole tradition of Augustinian inwardness? (2) Granted we really can set this aside, is the resulting “aesthetic of existence” all that admirable? These questions are hard to separate and even harder to answer. But they are among the most fundamental raised by the admirable work of Michel Foucault.

NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 131. 2. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 53. 3. Ibid, p. 47. 4. Ibid, p. 59-60. 5. Cf. the ancient idea of tyranny as power hiding itself, as in the myth of Gyges. 6. Foucault, 1975, p. 219. Thus in explaining the unplanned rise of this new form, Foucault says: “Take the example of philanthropy in the early nineteenth century: people appear who make it their business to involve themselves in other people’s lives, health, nutrition, housing: then, out of this confused set of functions there emerge certain personages, institutions, forms of knowledge: public hygiene, inspectors, social workers, psychologists” (Foucault, P ow er/ Knowledge, 62). Foucault is precisely not claiming that there was a plot laid by anyone. The explanatory model of history here seems to be that certain things arise for a whole host of possible reasons, and then get taken up and used by the emerging constellation. But what is clear is that the dominating thrust of the constellation which uses them is not humanitarian beneficence but control. I will discuss this understanding of historical change below. 7. Foucault, 1980, p. 98. 8. For example in Foucault, 1980, ch. 5.

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9. Foucault, 1975, p. 224. 10. See the references to Marcuse in Foucault, 1980, pp. 59 and 120. 11. Foucault, 1980, p. 140, points out the close link between b and c. 12. Foucault, 1980, p. 121. 13. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualite, Volume 1: La volonte de savior (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 79. 14. Ibid, p. 102. 15. Foucault, 1980, p. 57. 16. Cf. the reference to Wilhelm Reich in Foucault, 1976, p. 173. This analysis obviously has parallels to Marcuse’s about “repressive de-sublimation,” and this just underlines the point above about the possible utility of Foucault’s analysis for Critical Theory. But the crucial difference remains, that Critical Theory remains within the notion of liberation through true expression, while Foucault denounces this. Hence the critique of Marcuse in Foucault, 1975, p. 59, for thinking of power still purely in terms of repression. 17. Foucault, 1976, p. 81. 18. Ibid, p. 208. 19. See Foucault, 1980, p. 90. 20. The sovereignty model is meant to cope with the rebellion against despotic power and the rise of representative institutions. But in fact, it can onlv illuminate its Lockean aspect. The civic humanist aspect precisely cannot be put in terms of who is giving orders to whom. The concept of sovereignty can not be integrated without strain in this form of thought. 21. Michel Foucault, London Review o f Books (May-June, 1981), p. 5. 22. Foucault, 1976, pp. 123-124. 23. Ibid, p. 124. 24. Foucault, 1980, pp. 99-101. 25. Foucault, 1976, p. 124. 26. Foucault, 1980, p. 61.

2). Ibid, p. 56. 28. Foucault, 1976, p. 125. 29. Hacking, New York Review o f Books (May 14, 1981) already has pointed out the Schopenhauerian overtones of the title vol. 1 of HS, La Volonte de Savoir. But even Schopenhauer would not do as a theoretical background for Foucault, for that would give an account in our “nature.” He has to be more evasive than this. 30. This set of doctrines is sometimes called “structuralist,” or “poststructuralist,” but the aspiration to overcome subjectivity goes well beyond people who hold some structuralist model or other. Foucault is a case in point. 31. Foucault, 1981, p. 35. 32. Foucault, 1980, p. 98.“[Individuals] are not only its [sc. power’s] inept or consenting target: they are also the elements of its articulation.” But this means that they are targets. 33. I indicated above how heedless Foucault is of this boundary, in which the self­ disciplines of freedom are distinguished from the disciplines of domination. This all turns in whether or not and how they are imposed. 34. Michel Foucault, in Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (eds.) Language, Counter-M emory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 163. I take this quotation from Mark Philip, “Foucault on Power: A Problem in Radical Translation?” Political Theory (February, 1983), pp. 29-52.

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35. Foucault, 1976, p. 113. 36. Ibid, p. 208. 37. Of course, there is a question of whether or not Foucault is not trying to have it both ways with his notion of a resistance founded on “les corps et les plaisirs,” on something quite inarticulate, not on an understanding of ourselves, or an articulation of our desires/ purposes. But does this make sense? Can we “faire valoir contre les prises du pouvoir les corps et les plaisirs” (ibid) without articulating them for ourselves, and affirming the truth of that articulation against the specious claims of the system of control? I do not see how. Foucault seems to be talking here out of both sides of his mouth. 38. Foucault, 1980, p. 38. 39. Ibid, p. 39. 40. Ibid, p. 40. This idea of political resistance without a positive new vision is parallel to the notion o f resistance to the dominant sexuality based on the essentially unarticulated “bodies and pleasure.” In both cases, the question very much arises of whether or not Foucault can have it both ways. Is there a plebian resistance that does not at least po in t to an alternative model, even if it may for some reasons be unrealizable in practice? Or if there is, if we can find mindless insurrections in history, do they really offer us models for our political action? 41. Cf. the new chapters in the second edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow: M ichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 42. Ibid, p. 248. 43. Ibid, p. 251. 44. Ibid, p. 245.

Charles Taylor teaches politics and philosophy at M cGill University. His m ost recent book is Hegel. A collection o f his essays on social theory will soon be published by Cambridge University Press.

[8 ] Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom P a ul P atton

Introduction

The sense in which Foucault’s work functions as criticism has long been a source of puzzlement to his readers and the concept of power a focal point for their concern. His apparently neutral accounts of techniques of power lead to complaints that he is normatively confused or that he deprives himself of any basis for criticism of the social phenomena he describes.1For most critics, power is an irreducibly evaluative notion and moreover one which is negatively valued. Since it sets limits to the free activity and self-expression of the individual, power is that which must be opposed. This humanist consensus is neatly summed up in David Hoy’s remark that ‘the antithesis to power is usually thought to be freedom’.2 The argument of this paper is that Foucault uses concepts of both power and freedom which do not conform to this view: his descriptive analyses are based upon a concept of power which is neither evaluative nor antithetical to freedom. To show this, I take as a basis for comparative discussion Charles Taylor’s article, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’.3 This provides a useful point of comparison because Taylor is such a strong exponent of the humanist approach which Foucault eschews. He also goes further than most critics in turning the differences between Foucault’s approach and his own into criticisms, charging him with an incoherent theory of power. Others have argued that Taylor’s criticisms do not always fully address Foucault’s position.4 In what follows, I try to advance this argument by bringing to the surface some of the underlying differences in their respective concepts of power, freedom and subjectivity. My aim in doing so is not only to refute the charge of incoherence but also to restore 1 Richard Rorty, for example, suggests that it would not take much to see Foucault as a cyncial observer o f the present social order rather than a critic to whom that order is important. See his ‘Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity', Praxis international, 4:1 (1984). For other criticisms of Foucault on power, see Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault on modem power: empirical insights and normative confusions’, Praxis International, 1:3 (1981); Mark Philp, ‘Foucault on power: a problem in radical translation?’, Political Theory, 11:1 (1983). 2 D. C. Hoy, ‘Power, repression, progress: Foucault, Lukes and the Frankfurt School’, in D. C. Hoy, (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 137. 3 C. Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, Political Theory, 12:2 (1984), reprinted in D. C. Hoy, (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986). 4 W. E. Connolly, ‘Taylor, Foucault and otherness’, Political Theory, 13:3 (1985); M. J. Shapiro, ‘Charles Taylor’s moral subject’, Political Theory, 14:2 (May 1986).

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some of the consistency and force of Foucault’s own philosophical vocabulary. It is true that Foucault only offered a systematic account of his approach to power well after the publications to which Taylor refers.5 Moreover, it is only at this point that he begins to speak at all of freedom. Nevertheless, I shall argue, he does not so much change his position in this and other later essays and interviews, as render explicit some of the presuppositions of his earlier work. Taylor on Power and Freedom

Taylor claims that Foucault’s concept of power is incoherent, because he uses the term in a way which does not oppose it to freedom: He wants to discredit as somehow based on a misunderstanding the very idea of liberation from power. But I am arguing that power, in his sense, does not make sense without at least the idea of liberation.6 Taylor uses the terms ‘power’ and ‘domination’ interchangeably, arguing that the exercise of power or domination requires that some form of constraint be imposed on someone. He agrees with Foucault that the exercise of power need not suppose any conscious intention on the part of the agency so doing, since power relations are not confined to situations in which someone imposes their will upon another. However, he does think that power requires a human agent as its target: ‘something must be imposed on someone if there is to be domination’.7 Understood in this sense, power stands in direct opposition to freedom, in the manner suggested by Hoy’s remark. Liberation from power then, is just the removal of the constraint imposed on the agent. Freedom, on this view, is simply the absence of such an exercise of power. Given that the idea of exercising power must admit the possibility of its not being exercised, Taylor can quite correctly claim that power does not make sense without the idea of liberation. The question remains whether Taylor has adequately characterized Foucault’s conception of power, as he must if the charge of incoherence is to be proved. I shall argue that he has not, but first, since this objection depends upon introducing a concept of freedom which Foucault is supposed to ignore, it is worthwhile examining more closely the concept of freedom involved. In claiming that Foucault’s concept of power requires a concept of freedom, it is clearly negative freedom that Taylor has in mind. Freedom in this sense, to paraphrase Berlin’s classic statement,8 refers to the area within which a person can act without obstruction or interference by others. The emphasis here is on the absence of external constraints to an agent’s actions. What counts as a constraint or an imposition, may be construed more or less broadly. For example, a person may be frustrated in the fulfilment of their desires as much by lack of access to resources as by explicit or even tacit prohibitions on certain kinds of behaviour. 5 Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, Afterword to H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982). 6 Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, p. 173 (Hoy, ed., Foucault, p. 92). 7 Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, p. 172 (Hoy, ed., Foucault, p. 91). 8 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two concepts o f liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969).

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Taylor shares the view, defended by Lukes and others,9 that the exercise of power must involve some significant effect on those who are its targets. It only makes sense to talk of imposition, he suggests, against a background of preconstituted desires, interests or purposes on the part of the agent. Moreover, it is only when morally significant desires, interests or purposes are frustrated that we can speak of an exercise of power and a corresponding loss of freedom. Being prevented from satisfying a preference for a particular brand of soap powder does not restrict one’s ability to lead a fully human life in the way that being prevented from visiting one’s family does. However, to the extent that we see freedom as curtailed only by such external constraints, we locate it outside the agent, as subsequent to the agent’s decisions and choices. But there are also internal constraints: the psychological effects of insecurity, dependence or trauma may impose limits to the courses of action upon which a person is capable of deciding. More generally, the structure of interests, desires and purposes to which Taylor refers as the necessary background to any imposition, that structure of affects which makes up a particular kind of person, will also determine the kinds of decision of which the person is capable. To the extent that such internal features of a person’s intellectual and moral constitution may limit the class of actions capable of being undertaken, these may also be regarded as constraints upon freedom. Moreover, since we are here concerned with the agent’s own capacity to act, whether or not there are any external constraints, we may refer to these as positive constraints on freedom. In doing so, we need not claim that there are different concepts of freedom involved - a positive and a negative freedom - but only that there are two ways in which an agent’s capacity to act may be constrained: by external limits to the kinds of act which may be carried out or by internal limits to the kinds of action the agent is capable of undertaking. In using the term ‘positive freedom’ in this way, I am giving it a different emphasis to that given in Berlin’s account. The point is not to deny the importance of the desire for self-government or personal autonomy which, he suggests, lies behind the tradition of theories of positive freedom. Rather, it is to insist upon the importance of individual capacities as preconditions for the exercise of freedom in either sense. His own definition of negative freedom indeed presupposes, on the part of the agent, the existence of such capacities to act, since it refers to the degree to which the agent is left ‘to do or be what he (she) is able to do or be’.10 Clearly, the use that can be made of a given degree of negative freedom will depend upon the capabilities of the agent, on the agent’s positive freedom in the sense in which I am using this term. Positive Freedom: Taylor

Taylor is well aware of this further dimension to the concept of freedom. In an earlier paper, ‘What’s wrong with negative liberty?’,11 he argues that freedom, if it is to sustain the moral importance attached to it within post-Romantic thought, must include effective self-determination. Thus, he includes among the 9 Steven Lukes, Power; A Radical View (London, Macmillan, 1974). t0 Berlin, T w o concepts of liberty’, p. 6. 11 Charles Taylor, ‘What’s wrong with negative liberty?’, in A. Ryan (ed.), The Idea o f Freedom (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979). Reprinted in Charles Taylor, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), Vol. II (subsequent references are to this edition).

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conditions of freedom the ability to recognize and act in accordance with those desires and purposes which are constitutive of a person’s individual character. Lack of self-awareness or weakness of will, for example, may impair a person’s ability to act in ways which will advance their essential projects. Once we think of freedom in terms of self-realization, he argues, then we plainly have something which can fail for inner reasons as well as because of external obstacles. We can fail to achieve our own self-realization through inner fears, or false consciousness, as well as because of external coercion.12 Throughout his discussion of positive constraints on freedom, Taylor proceeds as though these were largely independent of any social context. While he mentions as examples such things as false consciousness or the inability to override less important but destructive feelings in a relationship, these are presented only as exhibits in an ahistorical moral psychology, without reference to the ways in which they might be themselves effects of the social relations within which individual lives are played out. Taylor points out that positive freedom must involve secondorder judgements about desires. It requires discrimination between those desires which we value and regard as part of ourselves and those which we devalue and might wish to reject as acceptable motivational factors. He does not, however, discuss the historical context of such evaluations. One important way in which distinctions are drawn between desires or purposes which individuals have and those which they come to regard as their own is in the context of criticism of, and challenge to, social constraints on the forms of individuality. In this manner, for example, in the context of re-examining assumptions about masculinity, a man might reject certain conscious or unconscious second-order judgements about what kinds of behaviour were consistent with a normal sexual identity; or a woman might reject the kinds of second-order judgements about the sentiments appropriate for ‘virtuous’ women which abound in Rousseau’s discussion of Sophie.13 Such judgements, along with the beliefs, fears and other emotional responses which accompany them, will typically be supported by external social arrangements, by legal, administrative or education practices and even by bodies of ‘scientific’ knowledge. For an individual to change his or her own secondorder judgements about matters bearing on their identity will normally require, if not actual changes in these external arrangements, at least a belief that such changes are possible. In the examples above, it might require conviction that existing forms of the sexual division of labour and associated affective differences between the sexes are not immutable. Such beliefs may occur in isolation but they are more likely in the context of a movement for change in the relevant area of social life. The literature of resistance to racial or sexual oppression provides many examples of this phenomenon. Positive Freedom: Foucault

While Taylor does not consider this historical dimension to the discovery of limits to freedom, Foucault explicitly links his own work to the discovery of such 12 Taylor, ‘What’s wrong with negative liberty?1, p. 212. 13 See the passages cited in Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Rousseau on reason, nature and women’. Metaphilosophy, 14 (1983).

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limits. In recent years, there have been a number of movements reacting against ways in which individuals are categorized or constructed as certain kinds of people: as men and women, as consumers with unlimited capacity to acquire new needs, or as clients of administrative, therapeutic and penal practices. The starting point for the analysis of mechanisms of power and bodies of knowledge, Foucault suggests, should be precisely these forms of resistance.14Such claims, of course, do no more than signal an external connection between his analyses and certain current political and ethical concerns. Foucault is not a philosopher of consciousness concerned to describe or to theorize the experience of attempting to overcome internal limits to freedom. Rather, his concern is with the external supports of the forms of social consciousness and being. He attempts to chart some of the institutions, practices and bodies of knowledge which help to define and to maintain particular kinds of individuality. The real objective of all his work, he claims, has not been to elaborate a theory of power but ‘to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects*.15 Now whether or not this is an accurate characterization of all of his work, it has been one of Foucault’s constant theses since Discipline and Punish that power creates subjects. Power, he argues, should not be understood only as something which operates in a negative fashion on preconstituted subjects. Rather, ‘it is one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires come to be identified and constituted as individuals’.16 This thesis may be understood in at least two ways. First, it may refer to the way in which particular educative, therapeutic or training procedures are applied to individuals in order to make them into subjects of certain kinds. The disciplinary techniques described in Discipline and Punish provide one set of examples: to the extent that these are successfully applied to inmates, the result will be obedient subjects, persons with honest habits and a due respect for the law. To say that this was the objective is not to suggest that these techniques were always effective or that they did not sometimes produce results other than those expected. Secondly, this thesis may be given an historical sense: new techniques for examining, training or controlling individuals, along with the new forms of knowledge to which these give rise, bring into existence new kinds of people. In this sense, neither delinquents nor habitual criminals existed before the penal institutions and criminal anthropologies of the nineteenth century produced them as identifiable modes of social being. Similarly, while acts contrary to nature may have long been practised, sexual perverts as identifiable types of person did not exist before the latter part of the nineteenth century. Multiple personalities, Ian Hacking claims, were invented around 1875.17 Foucault’s thesis is not confined to the objects of specialized social sciences such as criminology and psychiatry, for it applies as well to our everyday experience of ourselves as sexual beings. Sex itself is no less an historical product, a multi­ layered residue of the different ways in which bodies and their behaviours have 14 Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power*. 15 Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, p. 208. 16 Michel Foucault, ‘Two lectures*, in C. Gordon (ed.), Powerj Knowledge (Brighton, Harvester, 1980), p. 98. 17 Ian Hacking, ‘Making up people’, in T. C. Heller et al. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 223.

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been regulated and interpreted over the centuries. Far from being an auto­ nomous agency, he argues, sex is no more than the most speculative most ideal and most internal element in a dispositif of sexuality organised by power in its hold on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.18 Hacking calls this historical process of inventing new ways of describing and dealing with human actions ‘making up people’, in order to emphasize the fact that it involves the creation of new kinds of people. Conversely, the advent of new categories and new ways of describing human actions opens up new possibilities for intentional action, since this is always action under a description of some kind. The result may be to alter the limits of positive freedom, to change what it is possible for individuals to do or to become. In this sense, Hacking suggests, making up people ‘changes the space of possibilities for personhood’. He points out that this is not just a homogeneous space within which individuals are free to choose particular identities. Rather, there is a continuum between those forms of individuality which may be freely adopted, such as gargon de cafe, member of a religious sect or popular subculture, and those forms which are imposed upon individuals, such as split personality or juvenile in moral danger. A range of penal, quasi-penal and therapeutic agencies in modern society practise this sort of identification of people, imposing identities which serve not only to discriminate between kinds of people, but to fix some in subordinate relations to particular authorities. In this sense, Foucault argues, there is both a government of individuality and a form of government by individualization.20 For those caught on the imposed identity end of the spectrum, there is a straightforward loss of freedom in the negative sense and often a loss of positive freedom as well. More generally, however, the spectrum of existing forms of individuality will set limits to what people may do or become in a given society at a given time. Taken together, these will delimit the overall space of possibilities for personhood, thereby fixing the boundaries within which self-realization can occur. The historical and moral dimension to such limits means of course that they are subject to change, and it is here that Foucault locates the strategic aim of his own genealogies: to determine the contemporary limits of our social being. The task of critical thought, which is for him the task of philosophy, is to assist existing movements for change by distinguishing between those elements of present social reality which remain necessary and therefore unchangeable from those which are open to change. Genealogical criticism does this by representing phenomena assumed to be inevitable or inescapable, such as the confinement of the insane or the techniques of disciplinary punishment, as the result of the contingent historical circumstances, as arbitrary or no longer defensible from present standpoints. Feminist analyses of the historical and conceptual bases of sexual difference might also be regarded as engaging in this kind of critical activity; one which ‘works on’ the present limits of our social being, both in the 18 Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (London, Allen Lane/ Penguin, 1978), p. 155. 19 Hacking, ‘Making up people’, p. 229. 20 Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, p. 211-12.

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sense of investigating those limits and in the sense of contributing to the attempt to overcome them. Such criticism, Foucault suggests, will separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think... it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and as wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.21 Freedom here has the status of an abstract principle, realizable in both critical thought and practical activity alike. We shall see shortly the manner in which Foucault installs freedom at the heart of human action. Here, he uses the term to denote the internal dynamic of a certain ethos, a way of being which can include a certain practice of philosophy; the ongoing attempt to problematize aspects of our present ways of being, thinking and acting; the attempt to disengage from them and so open up the possibility of new ways.22 Freedom in this sense is a process without a subject but one which nevertheless has consequences for individual freedom. The ‘work of freedom’ may be regarded as a process of cultural self-creation, one which seeks to expand the space of possibilities for personal identity. It is not just a question of increase in the kinds of individuality available but also of dissociating these as far as possible from the forms of domination within society: an enlargement of the possibilities for self-determination and a new economy of power. The political problem, in Foucault’s view, is not to liberate the individual from the state but to liberate us from certain forms of state power and certain kinds of individuality linked to that power: ‘we have to promote new forms of subjectivity’.23 Accordingly, it is insufficient to represent Foucault’s work as concerned with expanding the sphere of negative freedom open to individuals. Rather, it is directed at enlarging the sphere of positive freedom in the sense in which I am using the term. The Subject of Freedom

There remains a fundamental difference between positive freedom as it is conceptualized by Taylor and positive freedom as this applies to Foucault’s work, a difference which has to do with what each of them presupposes as the bearer or subject of positive freedom. We can see this most clearly in relation to another distinction Taylor draws in his earlier article between ‘exercise’ and ‘opportunity’ concepts of freedom. He argues that the concept of positive freedom requires more than just the absence of internal obstacles to action. To be free in this sense the agent must already be a certain kind of person, one which exercises effective control over its actions. A free person must already practise the 21 Michel Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, Pantheon, 1984), p. 46. 22 In a 1984 interview, in the context of redescribing his history o f thought as a history of problematizations, Foucault offers the following redefinition: ‘Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.’; ‘Polemics, politics and problematizations’, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, Pantheon, 1984), p. 388. See also John Rajchman’s account of Fmicault as a ‘philosopher o f freedom* in Michel Foucault - The Freedom o f Philosophy (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985). 23 Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, p. 216.

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kind of self-understanding and moral discrimination involved in ‘strong evaluation’. Positive freedom, Taylor argues, requires an ‘exercise concept’, in contrast to notions of negative freedom which typically rely upon an ‘opportun­ ity concept’ of freedom. For theorists of negative freedom such as Berlin, being free is just a matter of what we can do, ‘of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise those options’.24 Now it is true that if freedom is defined simply as the absence of external constraints upon action, then an opportunity concept is all that is required. But there is a sense in which positive freedom, even in Taylor’s sense, still depends upon an opportunity concept. Exercise concepts and opportunity concepts of freedom are not a disjunctive pair. Rather, the exercise of certain capacities presupposes the opportunity to do so, whether these are capacities for selfexamination or for action in the world. Prior to both concepts of freedom then, is the notion of capacity, of what we are able to do, whatever kind of person we are. To be a person at all is to be a certain kind or kinds of person; in Foucault’s terminology, it is to be various determinate kinds of subject. As such, there will always be some internal limits to action. The kinds of discrimination between motives, the kinds of self-awareness and self-control that Taylor regards as essential to positive freedom, can only be practised in relation to those aspects of the self for which the capacity to do so exists. As we have seen, there will be an historical and moral dimension to the presence of such capacities. Which aspects of our social being are matters for decision and which simply given or unchangeable will vary over time. Nevertheless, what we might call the degree of freedom open to individuals in a particular culture is increased if what were previously taken to be necessary limits are no longer so. In this case, the space of possibilities for personhood has changed, regardless of whether or not a given person has actually exercised any new options. It is in this sense that Foucault’s work bears on positive freedom, albeit in a manner that does not require an exercise concept but only an opportunity concept of freedom. Unlike Taylor, he is not concerned with the full range of conditions which must be satisfied before we would call someone a free person but rather with the forms of social being within which individuals may be more or less free. At this point, we can begin to see more clearly the fundamental difference between Foucault’s project and the conceptual structure which supports it, and those of Taylor and other humanist critics. For Taylor, the subject of freedom is an agent capable of ‘strong evaluation’. That is, an agent capable of judging and differentiating between its own desires and motivation, and of taking respons­ ibility for its actions. This is a moral subject, both in the sense that it is a subject to which moral judgements may apply and in the sense that it is a moral ideal. For Taylor, it is an achievement of western civilization which we cannot ignore, if only because it is part of our present moral and political identity. Once power is conceived in terms of imposition upon this subject, it inevitably acquires a negative value. Power is that which sets limits to self-realization of the subject. It is therefore antithetical to freedom. Foucault’s theoretical anti-humanism, by contrast, consists in the refusal to privilege any such a priori conception of the subject. He writes on the basis of the 24 Taylor, ‘What’s wrong with negative liberty?*, p. 213.

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anti-naturalistic assumption that the forms of subjectivity through which individual human lives are lived are not natural but constructed from an underlying and undetermined reality. He refuses to endorse any ideal of human nature. Instead, in later writings, he advocates an open-ended ethics of self­ creation. ‘From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art’.25 Such a view clearly presupposes the existence of a human capacity for active selftransformation. Similarly, Foucault’s genealogies presuppose some conception of the human material to which the techniques of individualizing power are applied, and some conception of that which resists the operations of power. What Foucault relies on, however, is much less than the determinate kind of person assumed by Taylor. It is no more than the very thin conception of a subject of action: a being capable of acting, capable of responding in one way rather than another to a given situation. There is a sense in which the critical strategy implicit in Foucault's writing has always presupposed the existence of such a capacity for action outside the text. Thus, if his genealogy of the modem power to punish offered no proposals for prison reform, this was in part because the problem ‘is one for the subject who acts - the subject of action through which the real is transformed’.26Only in later essays does he relate this subject of action to the concept of freedom. In effect, the acting subject is a subject of freedom but only in so far as the latter is defined by a certain capacity or power to act. Far from being antithetical to power, the concept of freedom as it applies to Foucault is very close to the concept of power, in the primary sense of that term. Power Etymologically, the word ‘power’ is derived from the latin potere , to be able, the ability to do or act. In this sense, power is something which inheres in an individual or body of some kind. We may think of it as a potential or capacity to do certain things or to make some kind of difference in the world, even if this is only that which is entailed by existing as a certain kind of being. For relatively complex beings such as ourselves, the power of an individual will include the ability to develop certain specific capacities, such as those involved in intellectual, aesthetic or moral judgement and action. For this reason, C. B. Macpherson proposes the term ‘developmental power’ for that part of human nature which a truly democratic society should allow to flourish. The development of human capacities may well require the presence of convivial relations with like beings. Nevertheless, the power of an individual or body at any given moment is logically independent of any relation to others. Modern political theory, by contrast, has tended to concentrate upon power which is exercised over others or power which is exercised in cooperation with others. One influential tradition defines power in terms of the ability of some 25 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics*, Afterword (1983) to H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 237. 26 Michel Foucault, ‘Questions of method*, / A C , No. 8 (1981), 13. 27 C. B. Macpherson, ‘Problems o f a non-market theory o f democracy’, in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973).

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individuals, groups or institutions, to significantly affect the actions of others. The problem then arises of deciding exactly which kinds of significant affecting properly involve the exercise of power. Another tradition defines power in terms of the ability to act in concert with others, in the pursuit of collective goals. For Hannah Arendt, for example, ‘power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’.28 In both cases the concept of power essentially involves a relation to others, thereby establishing its difference from the non-relational concept of power outlined above. Hanna Pitkin makes this difference the basis for a distinction between two concepts of power: One man may have power over another or others and this sort of power is indeed relational, though it is not a relationship. But he may have the power to do or accomplish something all by himself, and that power is not relational at all.29 Since Taylor clearly belongs to the tradition which sees power as power over others, I shall leave aside the views of Arendt, Parsons and others to concentrate on this distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’. While the conceptual distinction between these two senses in which we speak of power is clear and unambiguous, in practice we find them closely interrelated. For example, one person’s power over another may derive from his or her own personal capabilities - to cajole, seduce or beat the other into submission. Ultimately, we could say that every successful exercise of power over others requires that the one doing so had the power to carry it off. We can see that this is not just a definitional requirement but a real one in those cases where a person is unable to exercise power successfully in a situation which calls for it: say, a teacher unable to control an unruly class. Conversely, a person’s power to do certain things may be derived from their power over others. The enslavement of some by others allows the masters to assign them to subordinate tasks, which assist in the conduct of the master’s own enterprises. In view of the historical importance of this effect of the exercise of power over others, Macpherson coins the term ‘extractive power’ for the ability which some acquire to make use of and derive benefit from the capacities of others. Extractive power involves the transfer to one body of part of another’s power to do things. It depends upon the exercise of power over another. In these terms, Macpherson is able to suggest that the purpose of political power in class societies is to maintain the extractive power of the dominant class.30 Armed with these distinctions, we can define domination in turn as a further, more concrete result. Domination is the effect of a relatively stable system of extractive and political power, the result of an established set of asymmetrical power relations, where the possibility of reversal has been removed. Relations of domination may of course be established between individuals as well as between 28 Hannah Arendt, ‘On violence*, in S. Lukes (ed.), Power (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 64. 29 Hanna F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley, University o f California Press, 1972), p. 277. Arendt draws a parallel distinction between ‘power’, which for her is relational, and ‘strength’, which is ‘the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things and persons, but is essentially independent o f them’, in 'On violence’, p. 64. 30 Macpherson, ‘Problems o f a non-market theory o f democracy’, p. 47.

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groups or social classes. Everyday domestic economy in patriarchal societies involves domination in this sense. What is crucial is the exercise of power over another in order to maintain a form of capture of the other’s own power or capacities. Domination cannot therefore be identified with ‘power over’ or with imposition upon a subject, as it is by Taylor. Rather, like repression, it is a particular effect of some modes of action upon the actions of others, just as political power is a specific form of power over others. Presupposed by all of the relational forms of power and their effects, however, is the non-relational concept of power. ‘Power to’ is the primary term in this progression from the abstract to the concrete. The power of an individual or body to act in certain ways is logically independent of relations to others and empirically the precondition of any action upon other bodies. In this sense, ‘power to’ is conceptually prior to ‘power over’. It should also be apparent that this distinction between two senses of power parallels the distinction made earlier between two kinds of freedom. Negative freedom corresponds to the absence of an exercise of power over the agent, which may or may not be implicated in a relation of domination. Positive freedom corresponds to the agent’s power to act in certain ways or to achieve its own ends independently of any benefit derived from power over others. Discussions which stress the moral importance of positive freedom or personal autonomy often do so in language which is very close to the concept of power in its primary sense. What is emphasized is the ability to control, direct or author one’s own life. T. H. Green is explicit on this point: ‘When we speak of freedom as something to be highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying’.31 The importance of these distinctions is that they enable us to clarify the conceptual structure of Foucault’s discussions of power. In particular, I shall argue, his successive formulations always presuppose the primacy o f ‘power to’. Critics of his work generally fail to recognize this and proceed to draw a variety of reactionary political conclusions from his remarks. They complain that he paints a bleak picture of the inescapability of power, meaning ‘power over’ or domination, or that he provides no grounds for thinking that resistance is possible. Taylor’s claim that Foucault’s concept of power is incoherent is based on similar confusions. In his criticism of Foucault, he does not distinguish between power and domination, much less relational and non-relational concepts of power, and he refers only to negative freedom. As a result, his criticism largely misses its mark. Foucault on Power and Freedom

In ‘The subject and power’, Foucault provides a definition o f ‘power over’ or at least a definition of the domain in which such power relations are established. Moreover, he does this in a way which establishes a conceptual link between relational power and power in its primary sense, but the term he uses for what we have been calling ‘power to’ is freedom in the positive sense. Thus, we can find in this definition a response to Taylor’s charge of incoherence. Here, Foucault 31 T. H. Green, ‘Lecture on liberal legislation and freedom of contract’, in Works, Vol. Ill, edited by R. L. Nettleship (London, Longmans, Green, 1899-1900), p. 371.

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defines power in a manner which gives it an essential relation to freedom, but it is not the same freedom, nor the same relation, as those envisaged by Taylor. Foucault’s definition of the domain in which relations of power occur is extremely broad. Power is exercised wherever there is action upon the actions of others. The situation described by Taylor in which there are restrictions placed upon an agent’s ability to realize significant desires or aspirations would evidently constitute an exercise of power in these terms, but so would many other situations not covered by Taylor’s characterization. Foucault makes no mention of imposition, nor of the presupposition which this requires, namely a preconstituted set of desires, interests or purposes on the part of the agent on whom power is exercised. The very constitution of such a set, the formation of certain kinds of person, may involve an exercise of power in Foucault’s terms. He suggests that power may perhaps best be understood in terms of the sixteenthcentury notion of government: to govern is to ‘structure the possible field of action of others’.32Clearly, government can take many forms over and above the simple repression or inhibition of an agent’s ability to realize their significant desires or aspirations. What distinguishes an exercise of power from other kinds of action upon the actions of others, such as communication or violence, is that it treats the other as an acting subject. The exercise of physical force, which treats the other as an object, does not therefore constitute a power relation, although the threat of violence may. Relations of power exist only when they involve forms of action upon the actions of others which leave open a range of possible responses. Foucault’s definition agrees with Taylor’s in supposing that power is only exercised over agents but it is not the same concept of an agent in each case. For Foucault, it is only the thin conception of agency which is involved in the idea of a being free to act, in the minimal, positive sense of the term ‘free’. In this sense, Foucault says, power presupposes freedom: ‘power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free’.33 The power here is ‘power over’ but the freedom referred to is not negative freedom. It is not the sphere of possible actions which is reduced by the exercise of power but the sphere of possible actions which must remain if the relationship to the agent is to be a power relation. In other words, Foucault defines ‘power over’ in terms of the positive freedom of the agent on whom it is exercised. To do this is not to deny the connection between ‘power over’ and negative freedom on which Taylor insists. It still follows that negative freedom is the counterpart to ‘power over’, or at least to some forms of action upon the actions of others. Foucault’s definition however, places the emphasis on freedom in a different sense, the one which we have seen is equivalent to power in its primary sense. That is why the relationship between power and freedom is not one of opposition or antithesis, as it is in the case of ‘power over’ and negative freedom. Rather, freedom in the positive sense is both a condition of power being exercised and its precondition. It is the condition or ‘permanent support’ of the exercise of power in the sense that if the agent to whom a relationship of some kind is established does not remain free to act, then it is not a relationship of power we are dealing with. It is the precondition of any exercise of power in the sense that the agency 32 Foucault, T he subject and power’, p. 221. 33 Foucault, T h e subject and power’, p. 221.

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exerting power must also be free to act: ‘freedom must exist for power to be exerted’. Foucault thus counterposes power not to freedom which would result from its absence, but to the freedom of the agent on whom it is exercised. As a result, a more complex relation between them emerges. At the very heart of the power relationship and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism* [a combat] - of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face to face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation.35 Power and Force

It is true that Foucault’s earlier discussions of power made no mention of the will or the freedom of those on whom power was exercised. In Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History o f Sexuality, it is the bodies of individuals rather than free subjects which are the protagonists in the power relations which he describes. Nevertheless, while he does introduce a different language in defining power in ‘The subject and power’, the underlying conceptualization of power remains the same throughout. ‘Power to’ was always the primary notion, at once both the basis for and opponent o f ‘power over’. In those earlier books, however, the distinction was registered by means of a terminological difference between power and force. Consider the analysis of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish. The disciplinary techniques involve forms of exercise of power over individual and collective bodies, a technology of power which acts in the first instance upon bodies. The body which is the target of these techniques is not, however, a mere passive surface as some critics have supposed.36 It is not an inert body which is given inactivity as well as form by the operations of this power. Rather, it is a body composed of forces, and the objective of discipline is to ensure the docility of that body and at the same time enhance its forces, to produce ‘subjected and practised bodies’.37 Discipline was supposed to improve some of the capabilities and therefore the ‘power to’ of those on whom it was exercised. For at least some of the techniques involved, there was no necessary connection with ‘power over’, since they were taken over from monastic practices of self-discipline which ‘although they involved obedience to others, had as their principal aim an increase in the mastery of each individual over his own body’. 8 Disciplinary power was also a means of establishing and maintaining relations of domination and subordination within a range of newly developed or transformed institutions. Its attractiveness to those exercising power lay precisely in its multivalent applicability and in its manner of combining the objectives of economic and political efficiency. The same techniques of spatial distribution 34 Foucault, ‘The subject and power', p. 221. 35 Foucault, T he subject and power’, p. 222. 36 Scott Lash attributes to Foucault a conception of'bodily passivity’ and a ‘pessimistic vision of agency’ in ‘Genealogy and the body: Foucault/Deleuze/Nietzsche’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2:2 (1984). 37 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London, Allen Lane/Penguin, 1977), p. 138. 38 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 137.

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and of the routinization and training of actions could enhance the military, educative or productive forces of collections of bodies, while maintaining strict coercive control over them. Discipline was thus a means of reinforcing the capture of individual capacities while increasing their productivity. The coexistence of each of these three aspects of Foucault’s analysis of discipline - the enhancement of bodily forces, the exercise of power over bodies, the maintenance of domination - can be seen in the following passage. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes those same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a capacity which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection.39 There is a proliferation, even a confusion, of terms here: force, power, aptitude, energy, subjection. What stands out, nevertheless, is the way in which the concept of discipline as a specific form of ‘power over’ presupposes another concept of power, power as a quantity of force or energy which inheres in the body, and which discipline then seeks to transform into, on the one hand, various kinds of useful capacity, and on the other, a relation of subjection, turning back the body’s force against itself. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault restates this same conception of power in more abstract form, but in a way which still makes explicit the secondary character of ‘power over’. He defines power in this sense as derivative of the more fundamental concept of force. ‘Power’s condition of possibility. . . is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power’.40Power in the relational sense is here defined in terms of an underlying conception of the social field as composed of centres of force, rather like a Boscovitchian physical universe.41 It is the difference between these point-centres of force, their quantitative inequality, which permits the stronger to exercise power over the weaker. ‘Force’ here does not carry its everyday sense of a synonym for violence. Foucault does not, as some critics suppose, base power relations on a propensity for violence or indeed on any other supposed universal characteristic of human nature 42 Rather, he defines power relations as effects which result from these primary inequalities of force, where ‘force’ is itself an abstraction. The force in 39 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 138. 40 Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Vol. /, p, 93. 41 Ruggiero Boscovitch (1711-87) developed a theory of matter in which the individual, rigid atoms o f earlier theories were replaced by dimensionless point-centres o f force. Nietszche read Boscovitch and adapted his ideas in extending his theory o f the world as will to power. He also rejected atomism in favour of a world in which there are only ‘dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta’; see W. Kaufmann (ed.), Will to Power (New York, Vintage, 1968), paragraph 635. Gilles Deleuze draws upon passages such as this from Nietzsche’s notebooks in developing his account of the will to power and its relation to active and reactive forces in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London, Athlone Press, 1983). Deleuze’s theorization o f power is acknowledged by Foucault as having been important for his own understanding o f the concept; see ‘Intellectuals and power’, a conversation between Foucault and Deleuze, in D. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977). 42 Philp, ‘Foucault on power’, p. 39.

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question should be understood as prior to any determinate modality of action, prior even to bodies themselves in so far as individual bodies may be regarded as complex arrangements of forces. The force in question here is no more than a capacity to act or to be acted upon, a capacity to effect and be affected. Since power is always exercised over other forces, the possibility of resistance to it is never entirely eliminated. This is the point of referring to the primary force field as a ‘moving substrate’: to allow that the differential relations between forces may change, new alliances may form and old ones break up. A power relation in one direction may be turned back or redirected. The same points which serve as adversaries, targets or supports of particular power relations may in turn become points of resistance. Foucault suggests that ‘where there is power there is resistance’.43 Finally, while power relations are themselves secondary effects, dependent on the primary differences between forces, the relatively stable forms of domination exercised by some social forces over others are derivative in a further degree. Power in this extractive sense, Foucault suggests, is an overall effect: ‘it is the name that we attribute to a complex strategic situation in particular society’.44 Clearly, the terms in which Foucault discusses power in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality are not the same as those employed in ‘The subject and power’. Nevertheless, what remains common to both the earlier and the later conceptualizations is the way in which ‘power over’ is counterpoised in an adversarial relation to ‘power to’. The relationship between power and force in the earlier texts parallels that between power and freedom in the later. Despite their differences, all these texts conceive of the object on which power is exercised as a power or set of capacities. That which exercises power must also be a power in this sense, a superior force, not necessarily of the same kind. It is not bodily forces, for example, which impose discipline, but political, economic or institutional forces. Despite these differences in kind, the forces exercising power and those on which it is exercised engage in constant struggle, in mutual incitement either to resist or to introduce new measures to counter resistance. In doing so, they thereby establish at least their common nature as forces. Throughout Foucault’s writing on power, whether it is described as a relation­ ship to forces or a relationship to freedom, the form of the ‘power over’ relation remains the same: an agonistic relation between centres of power in the primary sense, ‘power to’. In this sense, the definition of power relations in ‘The subject and power’ introduces no departure from the earlier accounts. Concluding Remarks

Apart from showing the inappropriateness of certain kinds of criticism, what follows from the fact that Foucault uses concepts of power and freedom unlike those assumed by critics such as Taylor? One consequence is that understanding the conceptual structure of Foucault’s talk of power enables us to appreciate better the critical strategies deployed in his work. Consider his analysis of sexuality as an historically constructed dispositif of power and knowledge. T aylor admits that to accept his argument that our very constitution as sexual beings is 43 Foucault, The History o f Sexuality. Vol. /, p. 95 44 Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Vol. /, p. 93

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an effect of power, undermines the romantic idea of liberating a natural but repressed sexuality. Such an idea might lead us to believe that we gain freedom by throwing off sexual prohibitions, Taylor says, when in fact we remain ‘dominated by certain images of what it is like to be a full, healthy, fulfilled sexual being’.45 In other words, we might conclude, this is not an exercise of power on the relational model. The constraints upon our freedom as sexual beings are not merely negative, external constraints but positive, internal conditions of our present nature as subjects of a sexuality. One of the important obstacles to change in this area, in Foucault’s view, is the very belief that there is a natural or authentic sexuality, something which can be normal or abnormal, healthy or pathological. Taylor concludes, however, that Foucault’s account supports a second-order liberation, a liberation from the ‘ideology’ of an authentic sexuality waiting to be expressed, and eventually a liberation from the constraints imposed on us by the whole apparatus of sexuality. In addition, he argues that this conclusion is inconsistent with Foucault’s ‘Nietzschean’ conception of truth. For such a second-order liberation from the whole ideology of a natural sex would still be a form of liberation through access to the truth. It would work by rejecting as false the idea that there is an authentic sexuality underneath our repression. But, Taylor argues, Foucault’s relativism in regard to truth would not allow him to accept such a liberation. Foucault’s epistemology is not something I can go into here. It would require another paper to discuss adequately the differences between him and Taylor on this point. In any case, one does not need to go very far into the issue to see that the objection depends upon a contradiction largely of Taylor’s own making. In the first place, it is only his own underlying humanism which allows him to draw this conclusion in the terms in which he does. His humanism, in the precise sense that he remains committed to the idea that there is an inner self on whom power is exercised, allows him to conclude from the argument that our sexuality is an effect of power relations and that this must be imposed on something. In this way, what might otherwise be understood as restrictions on our positive freedom created by our character as sexual beings, become conceptualized in terms of negative constraints upon this inner self. Only by thinking in these terms does it make sense to talk of a second-order liberation. Who or what is being liberated here? Secondly, it is not clear that Foucault would need to reject entirely the conclusion which Taylor draws, even if he would not describe it in the same terms. He does want to undermine the idea that human sexual behaviour and desire is something about which there could be a single, ahistorical truth. He wants to discredit the idea that our being sexual subjects of a certain kind is, or should be, a matter of truth at all, rather than a matter of choice. To think that sexuality is a matter of truth implies that there is something objective and necessary about it, whereas Foucault wants to depict it as an effect of arbitrary and contingent historical forces and therefore open to change. The basis for this critical strategy in Foucault’s writing however, is not the appeal to another truth but his nominalism; that is, his assumption that such categories of human, social being are constructed out of an underlying reality - bodies and their pleasures in the case of sexuality.46 45 Taylor, ‘Foucault on freedom and truth’, p, 161 (Hoy, ed., p. 79). 46 Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Vol. /, p. 157.

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The point of a genealogy of sexuality as an apparatus of power and knowledge is not to claim that this falsifies or distorts a true mode of being but rather that the claims to truth produced by or within the terns of this historical construct are not justified. Far from being ruled out by Foucault’s ‘Nietzschean’ conception of truth, this approach is entirely consistent with it. Such an historical relativism would, of course, be inconsistent with the more familiar critical strategy which denounces error from the standpoint of truth but that is not a strategy which Foucault adopts. The same historical relativism is also consistent with the more positive strategy which Foucault adopts in the later volumes of his History of Sexuality. Here, it is a matter of proposing another truth, of showing that we can find within the European cultural tradition itself other ways of being subjects of a sexual experience. A Nietzscheanism which refuses to countenance absolute Truth is not thereby debarred from accepting any truths. The sexual ethics of classical Greek men which Foucault describes in The Use of Pleasure is of interest precisely because it is not one which seeks to justify itself by reference to truth. It does not claim any foundation in nature but is rather recommended for political and aesthetic reasons to those who would adopt it. As such, Foucault claims, this is an ethic which presupposes a freedom on the part of the men to whom it was addressed, a positive freedom in relation to their own character as sexual beings. It is this which he suggests may be of interest to present ethical concerns in the Greek ethics of self-mastery: not an alternative ethic of sexual conduct but another way of seeing ourselves as sexual subjects, as beings who can, in this respect at least, create themselves. Adopting such a conception of ourselves might be described as liberation, in the sense that it involves an awareness of possibilities for change where there were none before. But awareness of possibilities is not change itself and it would be inappropriate to describe the transformation involved in becoming such a person as ‘liberation’. For this term remains tied to the idea of power as an imposition upon a preconstituted subject, as that which sets negative limits to freedom. As such, it is a reactive conception of change. Moreover, we have seen that in the case of sexuality the constraints are constraints on positive freedom. Power is involved at the level of our constitution as sexual beings. It is implicated in our beliefs, desires and our capacities for pleasure. Change at this level is not a matter of the subject becoming free of such effects of power but of becoming a different kind of subject. It is an active and not a reactive process. In this way, we can understand Foucault’s overall critical strategy, his work on the contemporary limits of our social being, as amounting to the recommendation that we regain the power of self-definition and self-constitution, individually and collectively, that is, as a culture. Far from being a liberation from power, this process is better described as one of empowerment, as an increase in freedom in the full, positive sense of the term.

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[9] Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom: a Reply C harles T a ylor

I found, as I read Paul Patton’s very interesting paper, that I agreed with much in his interpretation of Foucault. The difference seemed to lie mainly in how we respectively wanted to formulate it, and I am still unsure how important an issue this is. My own tentative view, to put it bluntly, is this: I think we can agree, because Foucault towards the end of his life began to make his own moral position fairly clear. I think there is some unease on each side about how the other frames this position, because Foucault had an ambiguous stance towards what we are all tempted to identify as his moral position. This came out in the indirectness and sometimes evasion which marked his writing, and even more the bewildering range of seemingly contradictory interviews he gave. Foucault had a tendency to cover his tracks, but this was not just out of a spirit of mischief. There is something in the position itself which pushes towards this ambiguity. I suspect that the main difference between Patton and myself is that he tends to value this element, whereas I find that it merely obfuscates. It adds a patina of false consciousness, which has the effect of making the position look deeper and less challengeable than it really is. Patton helps to advance the debate very considerably in distinguishing different kinds of power. I have no doubt that he is right and that Foucault in fact related more than one in his complex theory of power. What I am still not entirely convinced of is that he related them in a coherent fashion. Patton distinguishes, following Berlin, between negative and positive freedom. There is one obvious relation of one kind of power to negative freedom, the one which receives most of the attention by people who propound theories of power, particularly political scientists. This is the interpersonal relation, whereby the power of A over B restricts B ’s freedom. A gets what he wants by restricting B ’s options. When B avoids such constraints, he increases his negative freedom. But besides this freedom from interference, there is also the dimension of ‘positive’ freedom, which is concerned with our capacity to act. We can be incapacitated from action by all sorts of things. These can include ‘internal’ factors, neuroses, ‘hang-ups’, which at first sight may not seem to involve others at all. But since we acquire our whole language of self-understanding from our family and society and we in a sense ‘negotiate’ its application to ourselves, there is obviously a complex relationship between interpersonal relations and positive freedom. This is the area in which Foucault’s theory falls. Writers like Fanon have explored one kind of relation between domination and the interiorization of

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an incapacitating language by the dominated. Many feminist writers have analysed the historic condition of women in similar terms. We are obviously well outside the simple relation of power as an interpersonal relation proposed by negative freedom models, where A through threats or the power of command can reduce B's options. But just as clearly, power is still bound up with domination in theories like that of Fanon or the feminist writers who use similar notions. There are, by contrast, interpersonal theories of power as productive of positive freedom which do not involve relations of domination. Such for example is Hannah Arendt’s conception of the power which comes to be, in a society of equal citizens, the capacity to act collectively. This did not interest Foucault. I say this not just on the basis of his writings but also as a result of a long conversation (the basis of the interview which appears in Rabinow’s Foucault Reader), where a number of us questioned him at length on his political views. I specifically raised the issue of his attitude towards Arendt but what we were driving at was his stance towards the whole tradition of thought which looks towards a transformation of power relations, which would aim to some degree to substitute for relations of domination the Arendtian power of citizen self-rule. Foucault would have none of it. We were left in no doubt that he saw this kind of project as based on an illusion, and moreover on a dangerous illusion, in the sense that the hopes placed in such a ‘free’ regime could easily lead one to ignore or gloss over and hence to exacerbate its effects of power/domination. The example of gulag, erected in the land of really existing socialism, was always uppermost in his mind. Arendt can clearly be left to one side for the purposes of interpreting Foucault and I propose to follow Patton in doing this. But I would like first to enter a gentle protest. Patton implies that he will ‘leave aside the views of A rendt.. .’ (p. 269), because of my alleged lack of interest in them (‘since Taylor clearly belongs to the tradition which sees power as power over others’). Nothing could be farther from the truth. The central political good that I have written most about, as well as the one I would most like to have furthered in political action, is exactly the one defined by Arendt’s concept of power. Foucault’s disinterest in it is one of my principal grounds of disagreement with him. That is why, for instance, I sharply criticized Foucault’s one-sided historiography in my article, for his identification of modern discipline with the facet evident on the Prussian army parade ground and never with that which emerges, for example, in Puritan self-governing communities. To attribute the disinterest in Arendt’s theory to me is to turn things upside down. The important point for our purposes is that Foucault’s theory of power is bound up with domination. It is very definitely a theory of ‘power over’. That is why power is always correlative to resistance. Power always has victims. Here I think Patton has fallen into confusion. We are all perhaps a little bemused by Foucault. I accused him of incoherence and Patton claims that this charge is itself based on confusion. In my criticism, ‘[Taylor] does not distinguish between power and domination, much less relational and non-relational concepts of power, and he refers only to negative freedom’ (p. 270). But this seems to miss the point of Foucault. My argument was that power for Foucault required targets, or more dramatically ‘victims’. Patton seems to be taking this as equivalent to the claim that Foucaultian power is the kind which restricts negative freedom. But why make this inference? It is clear on all hands that there are kinds of power/

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domination, such as those widely discussed in the above-mentioned con­ temporary feminist theory, which fall clearly outside the negative freedom model and which nevertheless definitely have targets/victims. I even thought we all agreed that Foucault’s theory is at least a close relation of this type. So whence this notion that a theory of power with victims ‘refers only to negative freedom’? Perhaps Patton’s point is this: it would be a mistake to think that Foucault’s theory offers only a picture of domination because he also sees power as enabling. This is true and important but it does not get Foucault off the hook, as Patton thinks. Let me try to argue this point a little more clearly. We saw above how relations of domination bound up with positive freedom can arise where some hegemonic group, class or sex is supported through the perpetuation of a language which in its mode of self-application weakens or incapacitates the dominated group, class or sex, or makes certain possibilities inconceivable for them. But this is never the whole story because for human beings to become human requires language. We would not be doing the dominated a favour if we just denied them the going language of their society, because they would not have any human life at all. In this sense, languages always empower. The same can be said of forms of discipline. They enable us to mobilize our powers to do things, as Foucault frequently argued. These points were not original with Foucault. That language enables was seen, for example, by Herder and Hegel. The idea that we are empowered by discipline is the oldest commonplace of our moral theory. One of Nietzsche’s most important contributions was to show how these enabling languages can also be crippling; that a language and a discipline can both make possible a ‘self-overcoming’ and also be based on a self-rejection which is profoundly debilitating. This set for Nietzsche the task of attaining an empowering language and discipline which would not be self-rejecting, a language o f ‘yea-saying’. Foucault, I would argue, has to be seen as a neo-Nietzschean. In this he has a certain affinity with a number of his contemporaries on the French scene. Like them, he takes up a truncated Nietzsche, without the ‘yea-saying’, and is acutely aware of the Janus-nature of all languages and disciplines. They both empower and victimize, and victimize by the very fashion in which they empower. In a society dominated by patriarchy, women and men are given their respective languages of the emotions, and this allows both of them to achieve some kind of human fulfilment in relationship. But this same language closes certain possibilities to women, and lays certain burdens on them. What empowers here oppresses. This, I would submit, is the important relationship between ‘power to’ and domination in Foucault’s theory, rather than the one that Patton mentions: that ‘power over’ presupposes free agency, which is true enough but relatively uninteresting (p. 270). So Patton is right to point out that Foucault’s theory of power is not simply a theory of domination; it is also one of empowerment. But since the theory precisely makes the two aspects inseparable, it does not allow for a facet of power without victims. On the contrary, the same thing which empowers also victimizes. Power always has targets. It may not have a subject but it has to have objects, in Foucault’s usage. But this was the basis of my charge of incoherence against Foucault. My point was that to identify someone as a target of power, one has to have some

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background understanding of what is significant to them. My being given lemon pie as a child has a lot to do with my finding it near irresistible today but that is not an effect of power; whereas my being inducted into a discipline of unquestioning subordination to socially constituted authority would be so classified. What allows us to make the difference is a rich, largely implicit, and of course inherently contestable understanding of what the important meanings and purposes of human life are. But it is exactly this same rich background which designates certain alternative possibilities as freer than others. Hence, I wanted to argue, there is no concept of power-with-targets, without some correlative concept of more or less freedom. To claim one without the other is incoherent. Perhaps, rather than pursuing this line, it would be more helpful to try to place Foucault’s actual theory. If one accepts the post-Nietzschean notion that our historic languages have both empowered and victimized, there are roughly three ways one can go: 1. One can take a position, roughly like that hinted at in the early Frankfurt school, where the oppression/distortion of the existing language points to an undistorted one, even though one may be very pessimistic about its attainment, coming close in the case of Adorno to seeing integral liberation as involving incompatible conditions. But however up or downbeat, this view understands the existing culture as going against the human grain in a specific way and hence defining a conceivable path to ‘liberation’. 2. One can argue that any possible language must involve its oppressive dimension; that one only has a choice between rival packages of empower­ ment/oppression. Further, there is no standard to choose between them because they offer incommensurable forms of enablement and victimization. There is no ‘human grain’ by which they can be discriminated. Truly to understand is to lose all grounds for judgement. This is contemporary neoNietzscheanism in its most truncated form. 3. One can take a variant of (2), which still allows for incommensurable packages but now sees different existential possibilities within each package. We can live within a given one, totally absorbed and captured by its language, giving it our uncontested credence and allegiance; or we can live within it with a critical distance, have demystified it precisely thanks to the neo-Nietzschean insight that nothing, and hence not our dominant language, espouses the human grain. This allows for a second variant of (3) - call it 3' - which gives us a ground to distinguish between packages, to the extent that some inherently give more space for, or are less actively inhospitable to this kind of critical distance. This, of course, will still be quite different from the ‘humanist’ discrimination of (1). Now most people would probably agree today that Foucault was a passionate enemy of (1); that although he sometimes sounded as though he espoused (2) he was actually closer to (3) - and I would say to 3'. The notion (quoted by Patton) that ‘we have to create ourselves as a work of art’ (p. 268), offers a picture of freedom which is not defined by a human grain, nor thus identified with any particular language, but with a certain stance towards the languages that form our inescapable horizon. This is, anyway, my reading of Foucault but it would appear that Patton is not entirely in disagreement. ‘It is not clear that Foucault would need to reject entirely the conclusion which Taylor draws, even if he would

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not describe it in the same terms’ (p. 275). In other words, Patton seems to agree in ascribing to Foucault the aspiration to take a critical distance from regnant languages through seeing their humanly arbitrary nature, but he wants to justify Foucault’s reluctance to describe this as ‘a form of liberation through access to the truth’ (p. 275). I confess that the real differences now seem to me to be vanishingly small. Moreover, they seem to arise more from a residual prudery about the historical associations of the disputed terms, rather than from any substantive considerations. ‘Liberation’ has, indeed, been a buzz word for position (1), for example, for the Marcusean variant of the Frankfurt school. But there is another, voluntarist, strand of thought and culture about freedom in our tradition, running from medieval nominalism, through Hobbes, which was transformed by Nietzsche and renewed again on an original basis by Sartre. This from its inception has been a declared enemy of all concepts of a ‘human grain’. Foucault stands somewhere in this stream, as Peter Kemp saw in his astute paper on this subject. To go on denying the applicability o f ‘freedom’, once one has made the anti­ humanist point, is to obscure this important affinity. What is gained by this? Only something rather strategic and discreditable, in my view. The whole position looks rather deeper, more mysterious and less challengeable, as long as it can go on denying on one level what it affirms on another. In particular, the weakness and potential destructiveness of western voluntarism can be kept out of the debate, as long as these affinities remain invisible. An irreligious anti-humanism can seem so much deeper than all humanisms, whereas the question ought to be pressed whether it is not incomparably shallower. But the great pity of this obfuscation is that it stops us even asking what ought to be the central question emerging out of Foucault’s empirical work. If historic languages oppress while empowering, is this a fatality, or can we hope to elaborate languages which no longer victimize, or at least victimize less grievously? This is a question which Nietzsche seems to have faced. The impoverishment of neo-Nietzscheanism consists in the assumption that this question should not be raised, as though the connection between empowerment and oppression were a priori, and not an historically established truth. Needless to say, no one has even begun to establish so strong a conclusion, least of all Nietzsche, whose authority is here abused; certainly not Foucault, whose greatest contribution lies in his historical work. Playing games with ‘freedom’ and ‘truth’ forecloses without illuminating the issue of this work’s significance.

[10] Foucault’s Subject of Power* Paul Patton

Three centuries ago certain fools were astonished because Spinoza wished to see the liberation of man, even though he did not believe in his liberty or even in his particular existence. Today, new fools, or the same ones reincarnated, are astonished because the Foucault who had spoken of the death of man took part in political struggle.*

Criticism of Foucault returns constantly to two themes: first, his descriptive analyses of power provide us with no criteria for judgment, no basis upon which to condemn some regimes of power as oppressive or to applaud others as involving progress in human freedom. As Nancy Fraser puts this objection, ‘Because Foucault has no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of power that involve domination from those that do not, he appears to endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such ... Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power’.2 Second, critics complain that he offers no alternative ideal, no conception either of human being or of human society freed from the bonds of power. The lack of recourse to any philosophy of the subject is often taken to explain the political weakness of Foucault’s position: thus, Habermas argues that it is because there is no conception of the properly human subject in his work that Foucault is left with only the ‘arbitrary partisanship of a criticism that cannot account for its normative foundations’.3 For such critics, Foucault offers only a bleak political horizon on which the subject will always be an effect of power relations, and on which there is no possibility of escape from domination of one sort or another. For others, such as Ian Hacking, the problem is not so much that Foucault is pessimistic, it is that ‘he has given no surrogate for whatever it is that springs eternal in the human breast’.4

* ^ ^ ^

An earlier version of this paper was published in French in Sociologie et Societes, Vol. XXIV, no.l, April 1992. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, I am indebted to Moira Gatens, Barry Hindess, and the anonymous readers for Sociologie et Societes. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p.90 Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions’, in Unruly Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp.32-3. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, p.276. Ian Hacking, T h e Archaeology of Foucault’, in David C. Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986, p.40* Similar criticisms of Foucault are

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Despite the anti-humanism of Foucault’s approach, I wish to argue that his work does presuppose a certain conception of human being, and that he does offer a surrogate for hope. What he offers is an analogue of the grounds for K ant’s belief in the possibility of human progress, that is an historically grounded belief in the human capacity to transcend limits to the autonom ous use and developm ent o f human powers. After all, his analyses of knowledge, pow er and sexual ethics are all concerned with these modalities of cultural experience insofar as they affect human social being. These analyses are undertaken with the aim of producing critical effects upon present ways in which social reality is understood. Foucault’s characterization of these studies as contributions to political struggles against individualizing technologies of power5 would be paradoxical, along the lines suggested by Deleuze’s remark quoted above, in the absence of some such belief. It is true that Foucault makes no use of the traditional humanist forms of critique. He argues that when philosophers invoke 'm an ’ as the basis for their moral and political judgments, they invoke no more than their own or others’ concepts of human nature, which are themselves the products of particular, historically constituted regimes of truth. His refusal to rely upon concepts of an essential human nature is evident in his reluctance to use terms such as ‘ideology’ or ‘liberation’. Nevertheless, his genealogies do presuppose a conception of the human material upon which power is exercised, or which exercises power upon itself. This human material is active; it is an entity composed of forces or endowed with certain capacities. As such it must be understood in terms of power, where this term is understood in its primary sense of capacity to do or become certain things. This conception of the human material may therefore be supposed to amount to a ‘thin’ conception o f the subject of thought and action: whatever else it may be, the human subject is a being endowed with certain capacities. It is a subject of power, but this power is only realised in and through the diversity of human bodily capacities and forms of subjectivity. Because it is a ‘subject’ which is only present in various different forms, or alternatively because the powers of human being can be exercised in infinite different ways, this subject will not provide a foundation for normative judgm ent o f the kind that would satisfy Fraser or Habermas: it will not provide any basis for a single universal answer to the question, ‘Why ought dom ination to be resisted?’.6 However, the theory o f power which frames this conception of the human subject does provide a means to distinguish domination from other forms of power. Moreover, given certain minimal assumptions about the nature of human being, and about the particular capacities which human beings have acquired, Foucault’s conception of the subject does provide a basis on which to understand the inevitability of resistance to domination.

Foucault’s subject of power In Discipline and Punish and The History o f Sexuality, vol. I, Foucault describes strategies of power whose object or target is primarily the human body. Contrary to the view of

^

^

made by a number of the contributors to this volume, including Hoy, Walzer, Dreyfus and Rabinow and, of course, Habermas. Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Afterword to M ichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and H erm eneutics, by Hubert L, Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp.208-16. Fraser, Unruly P ractices, p.29; cited approvingly by Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity, p.284.

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critics such as Peter Dews, this body is no mere inert matter upon which power is exercised and out of which ‘subjects’ are created.7 It is a body composed of forces and endowed with capacities. In Discipline and Punish, it is precisely in order to dress these bodily forces that the techniques of discipline are deployed. In The History o f Sexuality, v o l I, the body which has come to be constituted as the bearer o f a sex, during the course of European history, is a body explicitly described as one capable of pleasures. The strategy of pedagogic control o f children’s enjoym ent of such pleasures is one essential moment in the elaboration of the modem ‘experience’ of sexuality; the classification of adult pleasures into normal and pathological is another. The two other grand strategies which Foucault discusses also involve specific capacities of the fem ale body, chiefly those connected with reproduction and childbirth. The elaboration of what we have come to take for granted as human ‘sexuality’ thus may be understood to have involved a certain classification, ordering and finalisation of this range of capacities for being and doing certain things. It is precisely because there is nothing natural about this construction, and because it was fabricated upon an active body, a body understood in terms o f primary capacities and powers, that it was accompanied by resistance. Similar remarks may be made about the disciplined body. How did so many critics manage to overlook this conception of the body as subject of power? Perhaps because Foucault’s writings during the 1970s tended to employ a language of bodies and forces in place of the traditional terminology of political critique. Power relations were characterized in terms of conflict or alliance between forces, engendered on the basis of ‘the moving substrate of force relations"8 which constitutes the social field. While this language appeared to de-humanize the social field entirely, abstracting from any notion of human agents or agency, Foucault nevertheless sought to address the kinds of historical phenomena which would ordinarily be regarded as the effects of human agency by means of an impersonal, non-subjectivist language o f strategy and tactics. ‘Strategy’ referred to the operationalisation of the social field in particular ways, such as the attempt to produce an orderly, obedient and productive population; ‘tactics’ referred to the disposition of forces employed to achieve strategic ends. Later discussions such as ‘The Subject and Pow er’ appear to revert to a more familiar language of human agency: power relations are said to arise whenever there is action upon the actions o f others? In other words, power relations are conceived here not simply in terms of the interaction of impersonal or inhuman forces, but in terms of action upon the action of ‘free’ agents. However, ‘free’ means no more than being able to act in a variety of ways: that is, having the pow er to act in several ways, or not being constrained in such a fashion that all possibilities for action are eliminated. Here, too, the subject of power relations according to Foucault is defined as a being endowed with certain capacities or possibilities for action; in effect, a subject of power. Nor are these two ways of conceptualising power relations as different from one another as they might at first appear. Ordinarily, what distinguishes an action from a mere bodily ^

% ^

See Peter Dews, Logics o f Disintegration, London: Verso, 1987, p.156, where Foucault is represented as proposing ‘that subjects are entirely constituted by the operation of power’; also Scott Lash, ‘Genealogy and the Body: Foucault/ Deleuze/ Nietzsche’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2:2, 1984; and Nancy Fraser, ‘Foucault’s Body Language: A Posthumanist Political Rhetoric?’, in Unruly Practices. Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Allen Lane, 1979, p .93. Foucault, T h e Subject and Power’, p.221.

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movement is the fact that it is voluntary rather than involuntary motion, and that it is intended to serve some purpose. Actions are intentional, goal-oriented movements or dispositions of bodily forces. Strategies are likewise intentional, goal-oriented movements or dispositions of forces. Strategies need not be the work of a single strategist, but can just as well be the product of more or less collective processes of calculation. Nothing that Foucault says about the subject of pow er suggests that human agency is in principle radically different. Nothing commits him to a voluntarist rather than a Hobbesian or a Nietzschean notion of the will. But Foucault is com m itted to the view that social relations are inevitably and inescapably power relations. On his view, there is no possible social field outside or beyond power, and no possible form of interpersonal interaction which is not at the same time a power relation: ‘ ... to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible— and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an ab stra ctio n ’. 10 This view is sometimes taken to imply that domination is inevitable, according to Foucault, or that there is no possibility of progress in human affairs in the sense that social relations may become less oppressive. Such conclusions are based upon misunderstanding Foucault’s use of the concept of power. One source of confusion is the failure to make the necessary distinctions between power, power over and domination. In his later discussions of power, Foucault does make these distinctions explicit, and in doing so refutes the charge that his approach is incapable of distinguishing forms of power that involve domination from those that do not.

Power and Domination In order to make sense of Foucault’s use of the term, ‘pow er’ must be understood in its primary etymological sense, as the capacity to become or to do certain things. Power in this primary sense is exercised by individual or collective human bodies when they act upon each other’s actions; in other words, to take the simplest case, when the actions of one affect the field of possible actions of another. In this case, where the actions of A have succeeded in modifying the field of possible actions o f B, we can say that A has exercised pow er over B ,11 T ow er over’ in this sense will be an inescapable feature of any social interaction. Moreover, characterised in these terms, with reference only to Foucault’s thin subject of power, it is a normatively neutral concept. It involves no reference to action against the interests of the other party. After all, there are many ways in which agents can exercise pow er over other agents, only some of which might be detrimental to the ‘interests’ of the one over whom power is exercised; I can affect the actions of another by providing advice, moral support, or by passing on certain knowledge or skills. All of these will involve the exercise of power over the other, but not necessarily in ways that the other will find objectionable. The exercise of power over others will not always imply effective modification of their actions. Precisely because power is always exercised between subjects of power, each with their own distinct capacities for action, resistance is always possible: ‘where there is power, 10 ibid., p.222, ' * I have argued for the necessity of distinguishing between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, in order to rescue Foucault’s remarks on power from the charge of incoherence, in Paul Patton, ‘Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom’, Political Studies, vol.XXXVII, no.2, June

1989.

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there is resistance’.12 For this reason, it is only in exceptional circumstances that A can be sure of achieving the desired effect on B. Only when the possibility of effective resistance has been removed does the power relation between two subjects of power become unilateral and one-sided: ‘A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries) when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions. Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others’.13 In such cases, we have something more than the exercise of power over another, namely the establishment of a state of dom ination: in these cases, the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing different partners a strategy which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed’.14 Bentham ’s Panopticon provides a model of such mechanisms for controlling the conduct o f others: the asymmetrical structure of visibility which is the key to the architectural design maps onto the fixed asymmetrical distribution of power which defines every system of domination. Traditional family relations provide Foucault with another illustration of the same structure o f fixed and asymmetrical power relations. Within the eighteenth and nineteenth century institution of marriage the wife was not entirely deprived of power; she could be unfaithful to the husband, steal money or refuse sexual access: ‘She was, however, subject to a state of domination in the measure where all that was finally no more than a certain number of tricks which never brought about a reversal of the situation’.15 Foucault is not the first to identify domination with stable and asymmetrical systems of power relations. His definition does, however, make it clear that such systems are always secondary results, achieved within or imposed upon a primary field of relations between subjects of power. M oreover, as with the definition o f ‘power over’, his concept of domination is non-normative. Domination allows more or less predictable control of the actions of others. Beyond that, little is said about the purposes for which such states are established and maintained. One frequent purpose served by states of domination is to enable some to extract a benefit from the activity of others: economic exploitation in all its forms, from slavery through to the system of extraction of suplus value which Marx identified as the secret of capital, depends upon such systems of domination. C.B. Macpherson coined the useful term ‘extractive power’ in order to describe the capacity that some people acquire to employ or make use of the capacities of others. He argues that the system of private property and a free market in labour operates as a mechanism for the continuous transfer of part of the power of the class of non-owners to the class of owners.16 In Foucault’s terms, the exclusive ownership of means of production amounts to a system of domination which underpins the extractive power of a social class. However, while extractive power may always presuppose some system of domination, states of domination may occur in situations where the flow of capacities or benefits is non-

1 ^ Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, vol. I, p.95. 1 ^ Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p,225. 1^ Foucault, 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, Philosophy and Social C riticism, vol. 12, no.23, Summer 1987, p. 114. 35 ibid., p. 123. * ^ C.B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, essay III, ‘Problems of a Non-Market Theory of Democracy’.

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extractive. For example, Hobbes presents the relation of subjects to sovereign power as one of domination, since the sovereign m ust have ‘the use of so much Power and Strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills o f them all, to Peace at home and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad5.17 In Hobbes’s account, the relationship o f domination which obtains between State and citizens is a condition o f maintaining the rule of law. In this case, the transfer o f power precedes domination since it is the conferral o f power by parties to the social contract which constitutes sovereign power. The purpose of this system o f dom ination is not further extraction but the enhancement of the powers of its subjects. Pedagogic relations are another sphere in which a measure of domination may be acceptable, at least during some part of the educational process. Foucault uses this example in order to suggest that asymmetrical power relations are not in themselves evil: ‘The problem is ... how you are to avoid in these practices— where power cannot not play and where it is not in itself bad— the effects of domination which will make a child subject to the arbitrary and useless authority of a teacher, or put a student under the power o f an abusively authoritarian professor, and so forth’.18 The qualifying clauses attached to the objectionable cases o f dom ination in these rem arks suggest that other ‘effects of dom ination’ may not be objectionable. This indeed appears to be Foucault’s general position: the exercise of power over others is not always bad, and states of domination are not always to be avoided.

Resistance, autonomy and freedom Foucault does believe that the fact of widespread resistance to forms o f individualising power is evidence of the need for ‘a new economy of power relations’.19 But what is meant by this phrase, and what is the basis for such a recommendation? In global terms, to call for a new economy o f power relations is to invoke the possibility of a different articulation o f the forms of social and political domination, the forms of reversible or non-coercive exercise of power over others, and individual or collective capacities. It implies that, contrary to the experience of European modernity, the enhancement of collective capacities need not be linked to increase of domination. At the individual level, a person’s power to do or be certain things will also be the result of a certain ‘economy’, comprising relations to oneself, relations to others, and relations to forms of discourse and modes of thought which count as truth. These are in effect Foucault’s three axes of subjectification, and they serve to remind us that a minimal concept of persons should refer to a body that is trained or cultivated in certain ways, a set of relations to oneself and one’s capacities (an ‘ethics’), and a set o f relations to modes of interpretation o f one’s relations to self and others. Different powers may result from change along any of these axes, or from changes in the larger networks of social relations within which these personal capacities are exercised. Recommendations such as this bring us back to the problem of the lack of normative criteria in Foucault’s work. To suggest as he does that we need new forms of articulation of personal capacity, power over others and mechanisms of domination appears to imply the

1 7 T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 227. 1 ^ Foucault, ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom5, p. 129. 1 ^ Foucault, T h e Subject and Power’, p.210.

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possibility of principles which might legitimize one ‘economy* of power relations as better than another. Could Foucault adopt such principles while remaining consistent with his theoretical anti-humanism? Rather, as the critics have argued, he does not and cannot provide such criteria. It seems that by confining himself to the very thin notion of human being as a subject of power, Foucault deprives himself of the means to provide such normative criteria. It does not follow from this, however, that he has no basis upon which to distinguish between forms of power that involve domination and those that do not. Nor does it follow that Foucault’s thin conception of human being cannot be filled out in a manner which explains both resistance to domination and the possibility of transforming existing economies of power. I suggest that Foucault does employ such a robust conception of human being in his later work. However, far from providing universal criteria which would allow us to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of action upon the action of others, his approach exposes the limitations of the demand for such criteria. In order to show how it does this, it will be helpful to pursue the comparison with Macpherson. Macpherson contrasts his concept of extractive power with another concept which he calls ‘developmental power’. The latter refers to an individual’s ability to use and develop his or her "essentially human capacities’. He then uses this concept in order to define a truly democratic society as one which maximizes the conditions for the exercise of developmental power* In other words, a truly democratic society is one which seeks to maximize the ability of all to use and develop their essentially human capacities. Leaving aside the question what capacities are to count among the ‘essentially human’, it is clear that the concept of developmental power has a normative content. In effect, it provides Macpherson with an ideal standard by which to judge the ‘democratic quality’ of any society. For he argues that the degree of deveopmental power can be measured by reference to the presence or absence of impediments to the use and development of human capacities by all members of the society. On this basis, he is able to show that the structure of social relations which gives one class extractive power in relation to another class is incompatible with maximizing the developmental power of those who are exploited in this way. More generally, Macpherson’s concept of developmental-power democracy provides a moral basis on which to reject any system of domination which sustains a form of extractive power. Any such system is incompatible with all being able to maximize their ability to use and develop their own powers. In fact, Macpherson’s principle of maximizing developmental power excludes systems of domination other than those which sustain forms of extractive power. In order to show this, we need to reconsider his concept of ‘essentially human capacities’. While he does provide a list of human capacities likely to be included among the essentially human (capacity for rational understanding; for moral judgment and action; aesthetic creation and contemplation etc.), Macpherson is reluctant to specify a determinate set of capacities which define human being. In part, this is because he has a conception of human being as essentially capable of development. The concept of developmental power refers to the ability of individuals to use and develop their capacities. This implies that new capacities might be developed, or that existing ones might be developed in ways that cause revisions in what is considered to be essentially human. Macpherson writes: ‘ ... the full development of human capacities, as envisioned in the liberal-democratic concept of man—

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at least in its most optimistic version—is infinitely great. No inherent limit is seen to the extent to which ... human capacities may be enlarged’.20 Foucault’s conception of human being in terms of bodies (differentially) endowed with capacities for action is similarly open-ended. He allows in the manner of Nietzsche that new human capacities may come into existence as effects of forms of domination, only to then become bases of resistance to those same forms of domination. Deleuze takes this Nietzschean thought a stage further in suggesting that the forces which defined ‘man’ have already begun to connect with new, non-human forces: ‘Spinoza said that there was no telling what the human body might achieve, once freed from human discipline. To which Foucault replies that there is no telling what man might achieve ‘as a living being’, as the set of forces that resist'.21 However, Foucault’s analyses of the different ways in which human beings are made subjects expose one further form of domination which Macpherson does not address, perhaps because of his focus upon extractive power. Determinate forms of subject may arise as a result of historical processes not directly connected with extractive power, as Foucault argues with regard to modern sexuality in The History of Sexuality, vol. L Once established, such forms of subjectivity, or at least the forms of knowledge, social relations, legal and other administrative arrangements which sustain them, may amount to more or less fixed modalities of power over individuals. As such, they constitute impediments to the ability of some individuals to use and develop their human capacities in particular ways, notably those identified as abnormal or deviant in a social, medical or psycho-sexual sense. In this manner, the ways in which certain human capacities become identified and finalized within particular forms of subjectivity—the ways in which power creates subjects—may also amount to a modality of domination. In order to see that Macpherson is equally committed to including such impediments among the limits to developmental power, we need only consider the further capacity that he adds to his list of the essentially human capacities, almost as an afterthought, namely the suggestion that the exercise of human capacities, 4to be fully human, must be under one’s own conscious control rather than at the dictate of another’.22 The loss of an individual’s ability to use his energies humanly, ‘in accordance with his own conscious design’,23 plays a significant role in his account of the power which is lost when individuals are forced to work under the control of others in order to exercise their capacity for productive activity. In effect, the capacity for relatively autonomous use and development of one’s capacities is a meta-capacity, a means of directing and experiencing the exercise of the other capacities of a particular body or determinate subject. Examples of its employment might include inventing and regulating one’s use of a different economy of pleasures, or self-consciously developing the attributes necessary to operate effectively in a given political environment. As these examples suggest, there is no reason to expect that such degrees of autonomy will be developed by individuals acting alone rather than in the context of movements for change in certain aspects of social life. Foucault invokes the same meta-capacity for autonomous use and development of human powers in his characterization of the ethos of modernity in ‘What is 20 21 22 23

Macpherson, p.62. Deleuze, Foucault, p.93. Macpherson, p.56. Macpherson, p.66.

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Enlightenment?1. Drawing on Kant's characterisation of enlightenment as a process voluntarily embarked upon by some and aimed at the removal of limits to the exercise of the human power of rational self-determination, Foucault describes ‘modernity’ as involving a similarly self-critical attitude towards our present forms of social being. Moreover, just as Macpherson suggests that increases in developmental power may be negatively measured by the removal of limits to its exercise, so Foucault’s account implies that progress in this critical task may be measured by the degree to which present limits to what it is possible to do or be have been overcome. Criticism, both theoretical and practical, he says, ‘will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’.24 Modernity understood as an ethos of permanent self-criticism presupposes the existence of possible subjects of such activity. Such subjects will necessarily be free in the sense that their possibilities for action will include the capacity to undertake this self-critical activity which Foucault calls ‘work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings’.25 So long as human capacities do in fact include the power of individuals to act upon their own actions, we can see that Foucault’s conception of human being in terms of power enables us to distinguish between those modes of exercise of power which inhibit and those which allow the self-directed use and development of human capacities. To the extent that individuals and groups acquire the meta-capacity for the autonomous exercise of certain of their own powers and capacities, they will inevitably be led to oppose forms of domination which prevent such activity. In this appeal to human autonomy, Foucault affirms a belief in human freedom which appears to contradict his suspicion of modern humanism. How then does his position differ from that of humanists such as Macpherson, who treats the capacity for autonomous action as a defining property of essentially human being, or the Critical Theorists, who advocate the commitment to autonomy as a universal moral ideal? This apparent contradiction disappears once we take into account two features of Foucault’s position: first, the fact that the suspicion of humanism is motivated above all by mistrust of the attempt to set limits to human freedom, ‘What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom’.26 Second, the fact that Foucault’s appeal to a principle of autonomy is not grounded in a metaphysical conception of human being as essentially free but in an analytics of power. From at least ‘The Subject and Power’ onwards, Foucault suggests that freedom is the ontological precondition of politics and ethics. However, this is an historical rather than a transcendental ontology. Freedom here is not the transcendental condition of moral action, as it is for Kant, but rather the contingent historical condition of action upon the actions of others (politics) and of action upon the self (ethics). Just as for Foucault political power exists only in the concrete forms of government of conduct, so freedom exists only in the concrete capacities to act of particular agents. As a result, the subject of freedom is in effect a subject of power in the primary sense of that term. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, p.43. 25 ibid., p.47. Foucault, ‘Truth, Power, S elf, Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin et a!., The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 15.

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In this perspective, autonomy must be understood as a capacity to govern one’s own actions which is acquired by some people, in greater or lesser degree, and in respect of certain aspects of their bodies and behaviour. However it has been acquired and in whatever manner it is distributed, this capacity for autonomous action is sufficient to explain resistance to forms of domination. To the extent that domination enables the direction of the actions of others, or even simply establishes more or less fixed limits to the ways in which human capacities may be exercised, then states of domination will always constitute limits to the autonomy of those subject to them. In the attempt to exercise their capacity for autonomous action, those subject to relations of domination will inevitably be led to oppose them. It is not a question of advocating such resistance, of praising autonomy or blaming domination as respective exemplars of a good and evil for all, but simply of understanding why such resistance does occur. Foucault does not think that resistance to forms of domination requires justification. To the extent that it occurs, such resistance follows from the nature of particular human beings. It is an effect of human freedom.

Power and agency

The fact that human beings have acquired this capacity at all presupposes the kinds of internal division within the self which Nietzsche saw as resulting from the human will to power turned back against its subject. The kinds of self-regulation of one’s own body and its sexual relations with others described in The Use of Pleasure are evidence of the existence of such autonomy, however partial and restricted in scope. The freedom of the subjects of the Greek ethics of moderation and self-mastery was, Foucault suggests, more than just an emancipation from external or internal constraint: ‘in its full, positive form, it was a power that one brought to bear on oneself in the power that one exercised over others’.27 Here, as in many places, Foucault’s language recalls the Nietzschean origins of his conception of human being in terms of power. In order to appreciate the more robust conception of human being which informs Foucault’s later work, and in order to see why this leads him away from rather than towards normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power, it is useful to look more closely at Nietzsche's conception of will to power. Earlier, I suggested that the root concept of Foucault’s concept of power is the notion of capacity. For bodies with the complexity and specific powers of human beings, power is the capacity for various kinds of action upon oneself and others. What kinds of action a human body is capable of will depend in part upon its physical constitution, in part upon the enduring social and institutional relations within which it lives. But the kinds of action of which a human body is capable will also depend upon the moral relations which define its acts. Moral interpretations of phenomena are among the most important means by which human subjects act upon themselves and others: it is by such means that one can arouse pity in others, or experience one’s own actions as cowardice or humility according to whether one lives in the moral culture of ancient Greece or European Christianity. By examples such as these, Nietzsche draws attention to the interpretative dimension of human action. The systems of knowledge and moral judgment which Foucault studied in relation to mental illness, punishment and sexuality are no less elements of the interpretative 27 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans, Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, p. 80.

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framework within which Europeans have acted upon the action of others. In this sense, Foucault’s history of systems of thought involves a thought which ‘can and must be analyzed in every manner of speaking, doing or behaving in which the individual appears and acts as subject of learning, as ethical or juridical subject, as subject conscious of himself and others. In this sense, thought is understood as the very form of action ... ’28 However, the peculiarity of human action is that it is not only conscious but selfconscious: we are happy or sad according to whether our actions produce a feeling that our power is enhanced or a feeling that it is diminished. In other words, our own actions, and the actions of others upon us, produce affective states and these affective states in turn affect our capacity to act. In effect, there is a feedback loop between the success or otherwise of one’s attempts to act and one’s capacity to act, Nietzsche drew attention to the importance of this self-reflective dimension of human action in insisting upon the primacy of the ‘feeling of power’ in his analysis of willing in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys the increase of power that accompanies all success’.29 On the basis of such remarks, Mark Warren argues that Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power must be understood primarily as an account of the conditions of the human experience of agency. This is an historical rather than an a priori account: given the emergence of self-consciousness in the human animal, and given the relative weakness of this animal, Nietzsche claims that the striving to achieve the feeling of power has become humankind’s strongest propensity: ‘the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture’.30 Nietzsche’s historical account of the human experience of power also functions as an argument for the overriding importance of this experience. As Warren suggests, ‘In being conscious and self-conscious, humans increasingly strive less for external goals than for the self-reflective goal of experiencing the self as agent’.31 This has important consequences for our approach to politics: if the experience of autonomy depends upon the larger networks of practice and social relations within which individuals act, but also upon the interpretative frameworks in terms of which they judge the success or failure of their acts, then maximizing autonomy requires practices of government of self and others which effectively enhance the feeling of power. If we assume that Foucault’s conception of human being as a subject of power also includes the interpretative and affective dimensions of agency as these are defined by Nietzsche, then some of the background assumptions of his later work become clearer. First, his reliance upon the experience of limits to freedom as the basis for social change. In ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault takes as the starting point for the analysis of power relations the existence of resistance to current structures of domination: ‘opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of Foucault, ‘Preface to The History of Sexuality, vol. II\ in P. Rabinow ed„ The Foucault Reader, pp.334-5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth; Penguin, para. 19. 3® Nietzsche, D aybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, para. 23. 3 * Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988, p. 138.

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medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live’.32 No doubt, the fact of resistance provides evidence that there is a capacity for relatively autonomous action by individuals with respect to certain areas of social life. However, Foucault’s ‘thin’ conception of human being as a subject of power provides only the conceptual minimum required to describe the capacities of particular situated, corporeal subjects. These will result from the techniques of formation applied to the bodies of such subjects, as well as from the social relations within which they live and act. In order to account for the experience of these systems of power as forms of domination, as limits to individual’s capacities for action, Foucault must presuppose the existence of particular forms of self-interpretation and the existence of something like the feeling of powerlessness. In other words, he must suppose a fuller conception of human subjectivity which takes into account both the interpretative and the self-reflective dimensions of human agency. Such a conception is needed in order to explain both the feeling of power and the lack of a sense of agency that is so often recorded as part of the experience of oppression. Second, if we accept Nietzsche’s claim that forms of moral judgment are among the most important means of self-interpretation, and his view that what is important for human beings is the experience of the feeling of power, or what Warren calls experiences of agency, then it follows that effective moral values are dependent upon the conditions of such self-experience. In other words, values are internal to types of individual and social being, not independent of them. That is why Foucault does not seek to provide universal moral norms or criteria of evaluation, but instead offers a cautious recommendation of the Greek practice of an ‘ethics of existence’.33 This might be read as a proposal for a different economy of power with respect to our sexual being: an economy different from that of the ancient Greek men, for whom self-mastery and moderation in the use of pleasures was both conditioned by and predicated upon relations of domination over others, notably women and slaves; but also different from the modern regulation of sexual conduct by means of legal and other institutional obligations, and by means of discourses of truth about sexuality. It is a proposal for a non-universalizable ethics whose importance in the present context lies in the possibility that it might provide a ‘practice of freedom5 which enhances the feeling of power in a way which other liberated lifestyles do not. Foucault’s problem is not that of formulating the moral norms that accord with our present moral constitution but rather the Nietzschean problem of suggesting ways in which we might become other than what we are.

32 Foucault, The Subject and Power’, p.211. 33 Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in M ichel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp.229-37.

Part III Critique and Normativity: The Foucault-Habermas Debate

[11] T H E C R IT IQ U E O F IM P U R E REA SO N Foucault and the Fran k fu rt School

t h o m a s M cCa r t h y

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Following Foucault’s own example, commentators have generally paid much more attention to his break with previous forms of critical social theory than to his continuities with them. It is not surprising that a thinker of his originality, having come intellectually of age in postwar France, would eventually come to assert his intellectual identity in opposition to the varieties of Marxism prevalent there. But for purposes of developing a critical theory adequate to the complexities of our situation, focusing only on discontinuities can become counterproductive. In fact, viewed at some remove from the current debates, what unites Foucault with neo-Marxist thinkers is as signif­ icant as what divides them. This is particularly true of the group of theorists loosely referred to as the Frankfurt School, to whom he did not address himself in any detail. Let me begin by noting certain broad affinities between Foucault’s genealogy of power/knowledge and the program of critical social theory advanced by Max Horkheimer and his colleagues in the early 1930s and recently renewed by Jurgen Habermas.1 1. Both Foucault and the Frankfurt School call for a transformation cum radicalization of the Kantian approach to critique. The intrinsic “impurity” of what we call “reason” —its embeddedness in culture and society, its entanglement with power and interest, the historical variability of its catego­ ries and criteria, the embodied, sensuous, and practically engaged character of its bearers —makes its structures inaccessible to the sorts of introspective survey of the contents of consciousness favored by early modem philoso­ phers and some twentieth-century phenomenologists. Nor is the turn to language or sign systems an adequate response to this altered view of reason; all forms of “linguistic” or “discursive idealism” rest on an indefensible

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abstraction from social practices. To explore the “nature, scope, and limits of human reason,” we have to get at those practices, and that calls for modes of sociohistorical inquiry that go beyond the traditional bounds of philosoph­ ical analysis. The critique of reason, as a nonfoundationalist enterprise, aims at grasping structures and rules that transcend the individual consciousness. But what is supraindividual in this way is no longer understood as transcen­ dental; it is sociocultural in origin. 2. Correspondingly, both Foucault and the Frankfurt School reject the Cartesian picture of an autonomous rational subject set over against a world of objects which it seeks to represent and, through representing, to master. Knowing and acting subjects are social and embodied beings, and the products of their thought and action bear ineradicable traces of their situa­ tions and interests. The atomistic and disengaged Cartesian subject has to be dislodged from its position at the center of the epistemic and moral universes, and not only for theoretical reasons: It undergirds the egocentric, domineer­ ing, and possessive individualism that has so disfigured modern Western rationalism and driven it to exclude, dominate, or repress whatever is dif­ ferent. Thus the desublimation of reason goes hand in hand with the decenter­ ing of the rational subject. 3. More distinctive perhaps than either of these now widely held views is that of the primacy of the practical over the theoretical that Foucault shares with the Frankfurt School. A reversal of the traditional hierarchy was already proposed by Kant, only to be retracted by Hegel; it was then reinstated by the young Marx but soon faded into the background of scientific socialism. Once we have turned our attention from consciousness to culture and society, however, there is no good reason why knowledge and representation should enjoy the privilege over values and norms that Western philosophy has accorded them. Moreover, if knowledge is itself understood as a social product, the traditional oppositions between theory and practice, fact and value, and the like begin to break down, for there are practical, normative presuppositions to any social activity, theorizing included. Like other prac­ tices, epistemic practices too have to be comprehended in their sociocultural contexts. In this sense, the theory of knowledge is part of the theory of society, which is itself embedded in practical contexts, and in rather distinctive ways. It is in recognition of the peculiarly reflexive relation of thinking about society to what is being thought about that leads Foucault to characterize his genealogy as “history of the present.” Situated in the very reality it seeks to comprehend, and relating the past from the practically interested standpoint of an anticipated future, it is anything but a view from nowhere. And though Western Marxism has repeatedly succumbed to the siren calls of a scientific

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theory of history or a speculative philosophy of history,2it has usually found its way back to a similar notion of practical reflexivity. In this version of critical social theory, there is an essentially prospective dimension to writing the history of the present in which one is situated; and the projected future, which gives shape to the past, is not a product of disinterested contemplation or of scientific prediction but of practical engagement; it is a future that we can seek to bring about. 4. With suitable changes in terminology, much of the foregoing could be said of philosophical hermeneutics as well. It, too, takes seriously the fact that reason, in its cognitive employment as well, is embedded in sociocultural contexts, mediated by natural languages, and intrinsically related to action. It, too, maintains that speech and action occur against immeasurable, takehfor-granted backgrounds, which are historically and culturally variable and which can never be brought fully to conscious awareness. And yet genealogy is as distinct from hermeneutics as is critical social theory. Despite some very real differences on this point, neither wishes to leave to the participants and their traditions the final say about the significance of the practices they engage in. Both see the need for an objectivating “outsider’s” perspective to get beyond shared, taken-for-granted meanings and their hermeneutic re­ trieval. Foucault’s way of creating distance from the practices we live by is to display their “lowly origins” in contingent historical circumstances, to dispel their appearance of self-evident givenness by treating them as the outcome of multiple relations of force. From the start, critical social theory was also based on a rejection of what Marx viewed as the specifically “German ideology,” and Horkheimer called “the idealist madness,” of un­ derstanding ideas solely in terms of other ideas. It has insisted that the full significance of ideas can be grasped only by viewing them in the context of the social practices in which they figure, and that this typically requires using socio-historical analysis to gain some distance from the insider’s view of the participants. Genetic and functional accounts of how and why purportedly rational practices came to be taken for granted play an important role in both forms of the critique of impure reason. 5. In neither perspective, however, does this mean simply adopting the methods of the established human sciences. Both Foucault and the Frankfurt School see these as particularly in need of critical analysis, as complicitous in special ways with the ills of the present age. There are, to be sure, some important differences here, for instance, as to which particular sciences are most in need of critique and as to how total that critique should be.3But there are also a number of important commonalities in their critiques of the epistemological and methodological ideas in terms of which we have consti-

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tuted ourselves as subjects and objects of knowledge. Furthermore, both are critical of the role that the social sciences and social scientifically trained “experts” have played in the process of “rationalization.” They see the rationality that came to prevail in modern society as an instrumental potential for extending our mastery over the physical and social worlds, a rationality of technique and calculation, of regulation and administration, in search of ever more effective forms of domination. Inasmuch as the human sciences have assisted mightily in forging and maintaining the bars of this “iron cage,” to use Max Weber’s phrase, they are a prime target for genealogical and dialectical critique. 6. As ongoing practical endeavors rather than closed theoretical systems, both forms of critique aim at transforming our self-understanding in ways that have implications for practice. It is true that Foucault persistently rejected the notions of ideology and ideology-critique and denied that gene­ alogy could be understood in those terms. But the conceptions of ideology he criticized were rather crude, and the criticisms he offered were far from devastating to the more sophisticated versions propounded by members of the Frankfurt School. It is, in fact, difficult to see why Foucault’s efforts to analyze “how we govern ourselves and others by the production of truth,” so as to “contribute to changing people’s ways of perceiving and doing things,”4 do not belong to the same genre. On this reading, in both genealogy and critical social theory, the objectivating techniques employed to gain distance from the rational practices we have been trained in afford us a critical per­ spective on those practices. Making problematic what is taken for granted — for instance, by demonstrating that the genesis of what has heretofore seemed to be natural and necessary involves contingent relations of force and an arbitrary closing off of alternatives, or that what parades as objective actually rests on prescriptions that function in maintaining imbalances of power —can weaken their hold on us. Categories, principles, rules, standards, criteria, procedures, techniques, beliefs, and practices formerly accepted as purely and simply rational may come to be seen as in the service of particular interests and constellations of power that have to be disguised to be advanced, or as performing particular functions in maintaining power relations that would not be subscribed to if generally recognized. Because things are not always what they seem to be, and because awareness of this can create critical distance —because, in particular, such awareness can undermine the author­ ity that derives from presumed rationality, universality, or necessity —it can be a social force for change. Whether or not this is so, and the extent to which it is so, is, in the eyes of both Foucault and the Frankfurt School, not a question of metaphysical necessity or theoretical deduction but of contingent

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historical conditions. That is, the practical significance of critical insight varies with the historical circumstances. If the foregoing comparisons are not wide of the mark, Foucault and the Frankfurt School should be located rather close to one another on the map of contemporary theoretical options. They hold in common that the heart of the philosophical enterprise, the critique of reason, finds its continuation in certain forms of sociohistorical analysis carried out with the practical intent of gaining critical distance from the presumably rational beliefs and practices that inform our lives. This would certainly place them much nearer to one another than to other varieties of contemporary theory, including the more influential varieties of textualism. Why, then, have the oppositions and differences loomed so large? At least part of the explanation (but only part) is that the disagreements between them are no less real than the agreements. Though genealogy and critical social theory do occupy neighboring territo­ ries in our theoretical world, their relations are rather combative than peace­ able. Foucault’s Nietzschean heritage and the Hegelian-Marxist heritage of the Frankfurt School lead them to lay competing claims to the very same areas: 1. W hile both seek to transform the critique of reason through shifting the level of analysis to social practice, Foucault, like Nietzsche, sees this as leading to a critique that is radical in the proper sense of that term, one that attacks rationalism at its very roots; whereas critical social theorists, following Hegel and Marx, understand critique rather in the sense of a determinate negation that results in a more adequate conception of reason. 2. W hile both seek to get beyond the subject-centeredness of modern Western thought, Foucault understands this as the “end of man” and of the retinue of humanist conceptions follow ing upon it; whereas critical social theorists attempt to refashion notions of subjectivity and autonomy that are consistent with both the social construction of individual identity and the situated character o f social action. 3. W hile both assert the primacy of practical reason and acknowledge the unavoidable reflexivity of social inquiry, Foucault takes this to be incompat­ ible with the context-transcendence of truth claims and the pretensions of global social theories; whereas the Frankfurt theorists seek to combine contextualism with universalism and to construct general accounts of the origins, structures, and tendencies of existing social orders. 4. W hile both refuse to take participants’ view s of their practices as the last word in understanding them, critical social theorists do take them as the first word and seek to engage them in the very process of trying to gain critical distance from them; whereas the genealogist resolutely displaces the participants’

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POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1990 perspective with an externalist perspective in which the validity claims of participants are not engaged but bracketed. 5. W hile both are critical of established social sciences and see them as impli­ cated in weaving an ever tighter web of discipline and domination, Foucault understands this to be a general indictment of the human sciences (genealogy is not a science but an “anti-science”); whereas critical social theorists direct this critique against some forms of social inquiry, while seeking to identify and develop others that are not simply extensions of instrumental rationality. 6. Finally, while both see the critique of apparently rational practices as having the practical purpose of breaking their hold on us, Foucault does not regard genealogy as being in the service of reason, truth, freedom, and justice — there is no escaping the relations and effects of power altogether, for they are coextensive with, indeed constitutive of, social life generally; whereas Frank­ furt School theorists understand the critique o f ideology as working to reduce such relations and effects and to replace them with social arrangements that are rational in other than an instrumentalist sense. //.

With this broad comparison as a background, I would like now to take a closer and more critical look at Focault’s radical critique of reason and of the rational subject in the context of the theory of power he developed in the 1970s. For purposes of defining what is at issue between him and the Frankfurt School, I shall use Habermas’s attempt to renew Horkheimer’s original program as my principal point of reference. As noted above, Foucault’s genealogical project can be viewed as a form of the critique of reason. Inasmuch as modem philosophy has understood itself to be the most radical reflection on reason, its conditions, limits, and effects, the continuation-through-transformation of that project today re­ quires a sociohistorical turn. What have to be analyzed are paradigmatically rational practices which cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerge and function. Foucault is, of course, interested in the relations of power that traverse those practices and their contexts. He reminds us repeatedly that “truth is not the reward of free spirits” but “a thing of this world” that is “produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.”5Analytical attention is redirected to the rules, prescriptions, procedures, and the like that are constitutive of rational prac­ tices, to the relations of asymmetry, nonreciprocity, and hierarchy they encode, and to the ways in which they include and exclude, make central and marginal, assimilate and differentiate. This shift in focus makes us aware that there is something like a politics of truth and knowledge already at this level of analysis.6 Irrationality, incompetence, deviance, error, nonsense, and the

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like get marked off in various ways from their opposites; people and practices get valorized or stigmatized, rewarded or penalized, dismissed or vested with authority on this basis. But genealogical analysis does not confine itself to the political aspects of rules and regulations “internal” to discursive practices. It also examines the “external” relations of theoretical discourses—espe­ cially the discourses of the “sciences of man” —to the practical discourses in which they are “applied” —the discourses of psychologists, physicians, judges, administrators, social workers, educators, and the like —as well as to the institutional practices with which they are interwoven in asylums, hospi­ tals, prisons, schools, administrative bureaucracies, welfare agencies, and the like. As soon as one tries to comprehend why a particular constellation of rules and procedures should define rational practice in a given domain, consideration of the larger sociohistorical context becomes unavoidable. “Each society,” as Foucault puts it, “has its regime of truth,”7 and geneal­ ogy is interested precisely in how we govern ourselves and others through its production. Focusing especially on the human sciences —the sciences of which “man” is the object —he examines the myriad ways in which power relations are both conditions and effects of the production of truth about human beings. In areas of inquiry ranging from psychiatry and medicine to penology and population studies, he uncovers the feedback relations that obtain between the power exercised over people to extract data from and about them —by a variety of means, from observing, examining, and inter­ rogating individuals to surveying and administering populations —and the effects of power that attach to the qualified experts and licensed professionals who possess and apply the knowledge thus gained. According to Foucault, the sciences of man not only arose in institutional settings structured by hierarchical relations of power, they continue to function mainly in such settings. Indeed, what is distinctive of the modern disciplinary regime, in his view, is just the way in which coercion by violence has been largely replaced by the gentler force of administration by scientifically trained experts, public displays of power by the imperceptible deployment of techniques based on a detailed knowledge of their targets. From Foucault’s perspective, then, the human sciences are a major force in the disastrous triumph of Enlightenment thinking, and the panoptical scientific observer is a salient expression of the subject-centered, putatively universal reason which that thinking promotes. By tracing the lowly origins of these sciences in struggle and conflict, in particularity and contingency, in a will to truth that is implicated with dom­ ination and control, genealogy reveals their constitutive interconnections with historically changing constellations of power: “[P]ower and knowl­ edge directly imply one another. . .. The subject who knows, the objects to

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be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations.”8 Although Habermas agrees with Foucault in regarding truth as “a thing of this world,” he distinguishes between fundamentally different cognitive approaches marked by different configurations of action, experience, and language.9 He does this with the aim of resisting the identification of instrumental and strategic rationality with rationality tout court. To construe sociocultural rationalization merely as the growing hegemony of techniques of power and control, of domination and administration, is not so much erroneous as partial. That reading does not grasp the selectivity of capitalist modernization, its failure to develop in a balanced way the different dimen­ sions of rationality opened up by the modern understanding of the world. Because we are as fundamentally language-using as tool-using animals, the representation of reason as essentially instrumental and strategic is fatally one-sided. On the other hand, it is indeed the case that those types of rationality have achieved a certain dominance in our culture. The subsystems in which they are centrally institutionalized, the economy and government administration, have increasingly come to pervade other areas of life and make them over in their own image and likeness. The resultant “monetarization” and “bureaucratization” of life is what Habermas refers to as the “colonization of the life world.”10 This picture of a society colonized by market and administrative forces differs from Foucault’s picture of a disciplinary society in, among other ways, targeting for critique not the Enlightenment idea of a life informed by reason, as such, but rather the failure to pursue it by developing and institutionalizing modalities of reason other than the subject-centered, instrumental ones that increasingly shape our lives. The two pictures do overlap in a number of areas. For instance, both focus on the intrication of knowledge with power that is characteristic of the sciences of man. But Foucault regards this analysis as valid for all the human sciences, whereas Habermas wants to distinguish objectivating (e.g., behavioral) approaches from interpretive (e.g., herme­ neutical) and from critical (e.g., genealogical or dialectical) approaches. The interests that inform them are, he argues, fundamentally different, as are, consequently, their general orientations to their object domains and their characteristics logics of inquiry. From this perspective, only purely ob­ jectivating approaches are intrinsically geared to expanding control over human beings, whereas other approaches may be suited to extending the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding or to promoting reflective distanciation from taken-for-granted beliefs and practices.

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There is a broad agreement between Foucault and Habermas that the expansion of the welfare state is increasingly dependent on the genera­ tion and application of expert knowledge of various sorts. In this regard, Foucault’s account of the interrelation between social institutions geared to normalization, on one hand, and the growth of knowledge suited to that purpose, on the other, parallels Habermas’s account of the interconnection between the administrative colonization of the lifeworld and the rise of objectivating social science. Here, too, the differences have chiefly to do with how all-inclusive this critical perspective can claim to be. Foucault extrapo­ lates the results of his analyses of knowledge generated in the more or less repressive contexts which he singles out for attention to the human sciences in general. One consequence of this is his clearly inadequate account of hermeneutic approaches; another is his inability to account for his own genealogical project in other than actionistic terms —genealogy ends up being simply another power move in a thoroughly power-ridden network of social relations, another intervention meant to alter the existing balance of forces. In the remainder of this section, I would like to make clear the price that Foucault pays for his wholesale critique of impure reason by taking a closer look at two key elements of his metatheory of genealogical practice: the ontology of power and the representation of the subject as an effect of power. Power: Ontology versus Social Theory

The differences between Foucault’s genealogy and Habermas’s critical social theory are misrepresented by the usual opposition between the nominalistic particularism of the former and the abstract universalism of the latter. In his Nietzschean moments, Foucault can be as universalistic as one might like, or dislike. While he insists that he wants to do without the claims to necessity typical of foundationalist enterprises, he often invokes an ontology of the social that treats exclusion, subjugation, and homogenization as inescapable presuppositions and consequences of any social practice. And while he targets for genealogical analysis social institutions that are clearly marked by hierarchies of power, his own conception of power as a network of relations in which we are all, always and everywhere, enmeshed, devalues questions of who possesses power and with what right, of who profits or suffers from it, and the like. (These are questions typical of the liberal and Marxist approaches that he rejects.) What we gain from adopting this conception is a greater sensitivity to the constraints and impositions that

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figure in any social order, in any rational practice, in any socialization process. In this expanded sense of the term, “power” is indeed “a productive network that runs through the whole social body.”11 Giving this insight an ontological twist, one could then say with Foucault that “power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth,”12or, alternatively, that “truth is not the product of free spirits” but is “produced by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.”13 It is undeniable that any “regime of truth” involves privileging certain types of discourse, sanctioning certain ways of distinguishing true from false statements, underwriting certain techniques for arriving at the truth, according a certain status to those who competently employ them, and so forth. In this sense, there is indeed a “political economy” of truth, as there is of any organized social activity; this insight is the principal gain of Foucault’s generalization of the concept of power. There are also losses incurred in generalizing and ontologizing the con­ cept of power: Having become more or less coextensive with constraint, it becomes all too like the night in which all cows are black. Welcoming or denouncing someone, putting someone at ease or into prison, cooperating with or competing with someone—these are all equally exercises of power in Foucault’s conceptualization. If his aim is to draw attention to the basic fact that patterned social interaction always involves normative expectations and thus possible sanctions, this is a rhetorically effective way of doing so. But the costs for social theory of such dedifferentiation are considerable. Distinctions between just and unjust social arrangements, legitimate and illegitimate uses of political power, strategic and cooperative interpersonal relations, coercive and consensual measures —distinctions that have been at the heart of critical social analysis —appear only marginally, if at all. If there were no possibility of retaining the advantages of Foucault’s Nietzschean move without taking these disadvantages into the bargain, we would be faced with a fundamental choice between different types of social analysis. But there is no need to construe this as an either/or situation. We can agree with Foucault that social action is everywhere structured by background expecta­ tions in terms of which we hold one another accountable, that deviations from these are sanctionable by everything from negative affective responses and breakdowns of cooperation to explicit reprimands and punishments, and that our awareness of this differential accountability is a primary source of the motivated compliance that characterizes “normal” interaction.14And we can agree with him that the modern period has witnessed a vast expansion of the areas of life structured by instrumental, strategic, and bureaucratic forms of social interrelation. None of this prevents us from then going on to mark the sociologically and politically crucial distinctions that have figured so cen-

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trally in the tradition of critical social theory. Nancy Fraser has stated the issue here with all desirable clarity: The problem is that Foucault calls too many different sorts of things power and simply leaves it at that. Granted, all cultural practices involve constraints. But these constraints are of a variety of different kinds and thus demand a variety of different normative responses. . . . Foucault writes as if oblivious to the existence of the whole body of Weberian social theory with its careful distinctions between such notions as authority, force, violence, domination and legitimation. Phenomena which are capable of being distinguished via such concepts are simply lumped together. . . . As a consequence, the potential for a broad range of j ormative nuances is surrendered, and the result is a certain normative one-dimensionality.15

The Subject: Deconstruction versus Reconstruction

Foucault has related on various occasions how “people of [his] generation were brought up on two forms of analysis, one in terms of the constituent subject, the other in terms of the economic-in-the-last-instance ”16 As we have seen, he worked himself free of the latter by, among other things, drawing on Nietzsche to develop a “capillary” conception of power as coextensive with the social. In working free of the former, he was able to call on the assistance of structuralist semiotics to argue for the priority of systems of signification over individual acts thereof. Even after he distanced himself from structuralism by taking as his point of reference “not the great model of language and signs, but that of war and battle,”17 he retained this order of priority in the form of the “regimes,” the interconnected systems of dis­ courses, practices, and institutions that structure and give sense to individual actions. From the perspective of the genealogist, the subject privileged by phenomenology is in reality not the constituens but the constitutum of history and society; and phenomenology itself is only a recent chapter in the long tradition of subjectivism. At the core of that tradition is a hypostatization of the contingent outcome of historical processes into their foundational ori­ gin—not in the sense, typically, of a conscious creation, but in that of an alienated objectification of subjective powers, which has then to be con­ sciously reappropriated. This latter figure of thought is, for Foucault, the philosophical heart of the humanist project (including Marxist humanism) of mastering those forces, without and within, which compromise “man’s” autonomy and thus block his true self-realization. Like Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault sees this as inherently a project of domination, a project that defines modern Western man’s domi­ neering relation to otherness and difference in all forms.

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Foucault’s reaction to this perceived state of affairs is, I shall argue, an overreaction. Owing in part to the continued influence of structuralist motifs in his genealogical phase, he swings to the opposite extreme of hypostatizing wholes —regimes, networks, dispositifs, and the like—over against parts, thus proposing to replace an abstract individualism with an equally abstract holism. To argue that “the individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom,” it is not necessary to maintain that the individual is merely “one of the prime effects of power.”18 One might defend instead the less radical thesis, that individuation is inherently linked to socialization: We become individuals in and through being socialized into shared forms of life, growing into preexisting network of social relations. To this, one might want to add the equally familiar idea that the forms of individuation and individuality characteristic of the modern world are not to be found at all times and in all places, but have come to be historically in conjunction with changes in the structures of social relations. From this perspective, Foucault’s claim that the individual who is an effect of power is at the same time “the element of its articulation” or “its vehicle,”19 might be construed as advancing the common sociological view that social structures are produced and maintained, renewed and transformed only through the situated actions of individual agents. But this view entails that agency and structure are equally basic to our understanding of social practices, and that is decidedly not Foucault’s approach. He wants to develop a form of analysis that treats the subject as an effect by “accounting for its constitution within a historical framework.” If this were only a matter of “dispensing with the constituent subject,” of avoiding all “reference to a subject which is transcen­ dental in relation to the field of events,” the disagreement would be merely terminological.20 It is not, however, only the constituent, transcendental subject that Foucault wants to do without; he proposes a mode of inquiry that makes no explanatory reference to individual beliefs, intentions, or actions. Genealogy, he advises us, “should not concern itself with power at the level of conscious intention or decision”: It should refrain from posing questions of the sort: “Who has power and what has that person in mind?” The focus should instead be on “how things work at the level of ongoing subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes” through which “subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted.”21 Again, if this were merely an argument for the need of supplementing an internalist view of social practices with an externalist one, of balancing an account of agency with an account of structure, of integrating a microanalysis of social practices with a structural analysis of persistent patterns of interac­ tion, or with a functional analysis of their unintended consequences, or with

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an institutional analysis of the normative contexts of individual action, there would be no incompatibility in principle between genealogy and approaches operating with some concept of agency. But Foucault does not want to supplement or balance or integrate; he wants to replace. And the results of this either/or thinking are no happier here than in the traditional theories he criticizes. There is no hope of arriving at an adequate account of social integration if the only model of social interaction is one of asymmetrical power relations and the only model of socialization is that of an intrusion of disciplinary forces into bodies. Nor can we gain an adequate understanding of most varieties of social interaction by treating agents simply as acting in compli­ ance with preestablished and publicly sanctioned patterns —as what Foucault calls “docile bodies” or Garfinkel calls “cultural dopes.” We have to take account of their own understandings of social structures and their own reflexive use of cultural resources for making sense. This is no less true of the types of setting that most interest Foucault; as Goffman and others have made so abundantly clear, interpreting social situations, understanding what is expected in them, anticipating reactions to conformity and deviance, and using this knowledge for one’s own strategic purposes are basic elements of interaction in disciplinary settings, too.22 These elements open up space for differential responses to situations, the possibility of analyzing, managing, and transforming them. Furthermore, the same competence and activity of agents is required for an adequate analysis of the rule-following practices central to Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge regimes. Social rules are neither fully spelled out nor algorithmically applicable; what they usually call for is not mere conformity but competent practical reasoning to deal with contingencies as they rise. Since rules do not define their own application, rule-following is always to some degree discretionary, elaborative, ad hoc. Each new application requires the agent’s judgment in the light of the specifics of the situation.23 One could go on at length in this vein. The point is simply to indicate how deeply the conceptual framework of agency and accountability is ingrained in our understanding of social practices. Foucault cannot simply drop it and treat social practice as anonymous, impersonal processes, for even normal­ ization makes no sense apart from agents who have the possibility, at least in principle, of resisting it. To be sure, Foucault does insist on the interdepend­ ence of the notions of power and resistance;24 but he refuses to link the latter to the capacity of competent subjects to say, with good reason, “yes” or “no” to the claims made on them by others. As a result, he is hard put to say just what it is that resists; most often he alludes to something like “the body and

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its pleasures.”25 But that only plunges us deeper into just the sorts of conceptual tangles he wants to avoid. For it is Foucault, after all, who so forcefully brought home to us just how historical and social the body and its pleasures are. But when the need arises, as in the present context, he seems to conjure up the idea of a presocial “body” that cannot be fitted without remainder into any social mold. This begins to sound suspiciously like Freud’s instinct theory and to suggest a refurbished model of the “repressive hypothesis” that Foucault so emphatically rejected.26 If treating the subject merely as “an effect of power” —which must itself then be conceptualized as a subjectless network—undercuts the very notions of discipline, regime, resistance, and the like that are central to genealogical “theory,” it raises no less havoc with genealogical “practice.” Who practices genealogical analysis? What does it require of them? What promise does it hold out to them? If the self-reflecting subject is nothing but the effect of power relations under the pressure of observation, judgment, control, and discipline, how are we to understand the reflection that takes the form of genealogy? Whence the free-play in our reflective capacities that is a condi­ tion of possibility for constructing these subversive histories? Foucault certainly writes as if his genealogies advanced our self-understanding, and in reading them we repeatedly have the experience of their doing just that. Can we make any sense of this without some, perhaps significantly revised, notion of subjects who can achieve gains in self-understanding with a liberating effect on their lives? Charles Taylor captured this point nicely, when he wrote that 'power’belongs in a semantic field from which ‘truth’and ‘freedom’cannot be excluded. Because it is linked with the notion of imposition on our significant desires and purposes, it cannot be separated from the notion of some relative lifting of this restraint.. . . So ‘power’ requires ‘liberty’, but it also requires ‘truth’ —if we want to allow, as Foucault does, that we can collaborate in our own subjugation. . . . Because the imposition proceeds here by foisting illusion upon us, it proceeds by disguises and masks.. .. The truth here is subversive of power.27

This metatheory, deriving from our Enlightenment heritage and shared by the Frankfurt School, seems to make better sense of Foucault’s practice than his own. If that is so, we may learn more from inquiring, as Foucault himself finally did in the 1980s, how his work develops and enriches the critical tradition extending from Kant through the Frankfurt School than from insisting that it has brought it to an end.

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in ;

In his first lecture of 1983 at the College de France, Foucault credited Kant with founding “the two great critical traditions between which modem philosophy is divided.” One, the “analytic philosophy of truth in general,” was a target of Foucault’s criticism from the start. The other, a constantly renewed effort to grasp “the ontology of the present,” he acknowledged as his own: “It is this form of philosophy that, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School, has formed a tradition of reflection in which I have tried to work.”28 This belated affirmation of what he calls the “philosophical ethos,” of the Enlightenment signals important changes in Foucault’s understanding of his critical project.29 In this final section, I want briefly to characterize those changes in respects relevant to our discussion and then critically to examine their consequences for Foucault’s treatments of the subject and power. Perhaps the clearest indication of Foucault’s altered perception of the Enlightenment tradition can be found in his reflections on Kant’s 1784 essay concerning the question: Was ist Aufklarung P30 He regards that essay as introducing a new dimension into philosophical thought, namely, the critical analysis of our historical present and our present selves. When Kant asked “What is Enlightenment?,” writes Foucault, he meant, What’s going on just now? What’s happening to us? What is this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words, WTiat are we? as Aufklarer, as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question, Who am I? as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? For Descartes, It is everyone, anywhere, at any moment. But Kant asks something else: What are we? in a very precise moment of history?31

From Hegel to Habermas, Foucault continues, this question has defined a way of philosophizing which he, Foucault, has adopted as his own. What separates this way from a universally oriented “analytic of truth” is an awareness of being constituted by our own history, a resolve to submit that history to critical reflection, and a desire thereby to free ourselves from its pseudonecessities. As I argued above, Foucault could and should have said the same of the genealogy he practiced in the 1970s; but it became clear to him only in the 1980s that his form of critique also belongs to what Taylor called the “semantic field” of Enlightenment discourse. “Thought,” he later tells us, “is what allows one to step back from [a] way of acting or reacting, to present it

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to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.”32 Freedom, in turn, is the condition and content of morality: “What is morality if not the practice of liberty, the deliberate practice of liberty? ... Liberty is the essential condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty.”33 By releasing us from a state of “immaturity,” critical thinking makes possible a “practice of freedom,” oriented toward a “mature adulthood” in which we assume respon­ sibility for shaping our own lives.34 To be sure, behind all these Kantian formulae there lies a considerably altered critical project. Foucault stresses that faithfulness to the Enlighten­ ment does not mean trying to preserve this or that element of it but attempting to renew, in our present circumstances, the type of philosophical interroga­ tion it inaugurated —not “faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude, that is, of a philosophical ethos which could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.”35 Since the Enlightenment, this type of reflective relation to the present has taken the form of a history of reason, and that is the form in which Foucault pursues it: “I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope, remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects?” Of course, in our own day, we have to add: “What are its limits and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dan­ gers?”36 As noted earlier, Foucault’s genealogical histories stress the local and contingent aspects of prevailing forms of rationality rather than their universality. In one way, this is continuous with Kant’s linking of enlighten­ ment and critique: When we dare to use our reason, a critical assessment of its conditions and limits is necessary if we are to avoid dogmatism and illusion. On the other hand, genealogy is a very different way of thinking about conditions and limits: [I]f the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression. . . . [C]riticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as an historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing,

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thinking, saying. . . . [I]t will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science, it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom/37

As this passage suggests, Foucault’s critical histories of the “practical systems” of rationality that “organize our ways of doing things”38 are at the same time genealogies of the subject of these rational practices, investiga­ tions into the ways in which we have constituted ourselves as rational agents. And their point is not to reinforce established patterns but to challenge them. Genealogy is “practical critique”: It is guided by an interest in the “possible transgression” and transformation of allegedly universal and necessary con­ straints. Adopting an experimental attitude, it repeatedly probes the “contem­ porary limits of the necessary” to determine “what is not or no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.”39 Let us turn now to the two topics on which we criticized Foucault’s earlier self-understanding: the subject and power. This will enable us to focus our account of the theoretical shifts in his later work and to determine more precisely where they leave him in relation to Habermas. Power Again: Strategic and Communicative Action

My criticisms of Foucault in part II of this article turned on his one­ dimensional ontology: In the world he described, truth and subjectivity were reduced in the end to effects of power. He escapes this reductionism in the 1980s by adopting a multidimensional ontology in which power is displaced onto a single axis. Referring to Habermas in his first Howison Lecture at Berkeley in Fall 1980, he distinguishes three broad types of “techniques”: techniques of production, of signification, and of domination.40 To this he adds a fourth, namely, techniques of the self, which subsequently becomes the principal axis of analysis in the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality. These same four dimensions are distinguished (as “techno­ logies”) in the seminar he conducted at the University of Vermont in Fall 1982,41 and the first three of them are elaborated (as “relations”) in the Afterword (1982) to Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, where, referring once again to Habermas, he notes that they are not “separate domains” but analytically distinguish­ able aspects of social action that “always overlap” in reality.42 Thereafter, Foucault settled on a three-dimensional ontology, not unlike Habermas’s

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tripartite model of relations to the objective world, to the social world, and to ourselves. In volume II of the History of Sexuality, for example, he works with a distinction between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity, with three correlated axes of analysis: discursive practices, relations of power, and forms in which individuals recognize themselves as subjects.43 What immediately strikes one in comparing this scheme with Habermas’s is that normatively structured social relations are, as a matter of course, construed as relations of power. Earlier, when rules and norms constitutive of rational practices were regarded simply as technologies for “governing” and “normalizing” individuals, this is what one would have expected. But now we have to wonder what has been accomplished by distinguishing the three ontological dimensions if we are still left with a reduction of social relations to power relations. Part of the answer, I think, is a shift of attention from relations of domination to strategic relations. I want to suggest, in fact, that Foucault’s final ontology tends to equate social interaction with strategic interaction, precisely the equation that Habermas seeks to block with his concept of communicative action. The most elaborate explication of his later notion of power appears in Foucault’s Afterword to the first edition of the Dreyfus and Rabinow study. There, he construes the exercise of power as “a way in which certain actions modify others,” a “mode of action upon the action of others,” which “struc­ tures^] the possible field of [their] action.”44 The relationship proper to power is neither violence nor consensus but “government,” in the very broad sense of “guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.”45 Viewed in this way, says Foucault, power is “coextensive with every social relationship,”46 for “to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible and in fact ongoing.”47 Foucault’s matter-of-course treatment of social relations as power rela­ tions is less startling once we realize that he now defines the latter in more or less the same terms that the sociological tradition has used to define the former. What makes actions social is precisely the possibility of their influ­ encing and being influenced by the actions and expectations of others. On Foucault’s definition, only actions that had no possible effects on the actions of others —that is, which were not social —would be free of the exercise of power. What is at stake here? Is this merely a rhetorical twist meant to sharpen our awareness of the ways in which our possibilities of action are structured and circumscribed by the actions of others? In part, perhaps, but there is also a metatheoretical —or, in Foucault’s terms, ontological —issue involved. His conceptualization of social interaction privileges strategic over consensual

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modes of “guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcomes.” To see how this is so, we must first take a brief look at his distinction between power and domination. Whereas earlier, situations of domination — asylums, clinics, prisons, bureaucracies, and the like —were treated as para­ digms of power relations generally in the panoptical society, now they are clearly marked off as a particular type of power situation: When one speaks of “power”, people think immediately of a political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the master facing the slave, and so on. That is not at all what I think when I speak of “relationships of power.” I mean that in human relations, whatever they are —whether it be a question of communicating verbally ... or a question of a love relationship, an institutional or economic relationship —power is always present: I mean the relationships in which one wants to direct the behavior of another___These relations of power are changeable, reversible, and understandable.. .. Now there are effectively states of domination. In many cases, the relations of power are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is extremely limited.48

Thus Foucault now distinguishes “relationships of power as strategic games between liberties” in which “some people try to determine the conduct of others” from “the states of domination . . . we ordinarily call power.”49 The idea of a society without power relations is nonsense, whereas the reduction to a minimum of states of domination —that is, fixed, asymmetrical, irrevers­ ible relations of power —is a meaningful political goal. “Power is not an evil. Power is strategic games___To exercise power over another in a sort of open strategic game, where things could be reversed, that is not evil. . . . The problem is rather to know how to avoid . . . the effects of domination.”50 In short, whereas “games of power” are coextensive with social relations, “states of domination” are legitimate targets of political struggle aimed at freeing up space for open strategic games. “The more open the game, the more attractive and fascinating it is.”51 It is difficult to judge just how far Foucault would have been willing to take this line of thought. It leads in the end to conceptualizing social relations as strategic relations and social interaction as strategic interaction. It would be ironic indeed if his wholesale critique of modern social theory should finally end in an embrace of one of its hoarier forms.52 But rather than rehearsing the standard criticisms of game-theoretical approaches to the general theory of action, I shall remark only on one key issue that separates Foucault from Habermas. There are, at least on the face of it, ways of influencing the conduct of oth­ ers that do not fit very neatly into the model of strategic games. Habermas’s

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notion of communicative action singles out for attention the openly intended illocutionary effects that speech acts may have on the actions of others.53 Establishing relations through the exchange of illocutionary acts make it possible for speakers and hearers to achieve mutual understanding about their courses of action, that is, to cooperate rather than compete in important areas of life. Foucault, however, treats even the consensus that results from raising and accepting validity claims —claims to truth, rightness, sincerity, and so forth —as an instrument or result of the exercise of power.54Though he avoids any direct reduction of validity to power in his later work, his definition of power ensures that every communication produces it: “Relationships of communication,” he writes, “produce effects of power” by “modifying the field of information between parties.”55 Of course, if producing effects of power amounts to no more than influencing the conduct of others, we have here a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Habermas’s notion of noncoercive discourse was never intended to refer to communication that is without effect on the behavior of others! Foucault comes closer to the real issue when, in an apparent reference to Habermas, he criticizes the idea of dissolving relations of power in a “utopia of a perfectly transparent communication.”56 He elaborates: “The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth could circulate freely, without obsta­ cles, without constraint, and without coercive effects, seems to me to be Utopia.”57 This takes us back to our discussion of rational practices in part II, and particularly to the idea that “truth is produced by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.” As we saw there, the point at issue cannot be whether there are “games of truth” without the constraints of rules, procedures, criteria, and the like. And it does not seem to be whether constitutive constraints could possibly obligate participants in a symmetrical and recip­ rocal manner.58 Thus the problem must arise at the level of the “networks of practices of power and constraining institutions” in which socially estab­ lished “games of truth” are always embedded.59Foucault allows that the link between games of truth and relations of power need not, in and of itself, impair the validity or efficacy of what results from them.60 So the question appears to be whether what Habermas calls communication free from dom­ ination, in which claims to validity are decided on the basis of the force of the better argument, can actually be realized in practice. And that seems to be a matter of more or less rather than all or nothing. If this is so, Habermas’s idea of rational discourse would make as much sense as a normative ideal as Foucault’s notion of a level playing-field. It would be utopian only in the sense that the full realization of any regulative ideal is utopian.

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The Subject Again: Autonomy and Care of the Self

Foucault’s growing emphasis on the “strategic side” of the “practical systems” that organize our ways of doing things —the freedom we have to act within, upon, or against them —is not the only way the individual comes to the fore in his later thought.61 His balancing of the “technological” with the “strategic” in conceptualizing power is accompanied by a shift of attention from “subjectification” via “individualizing power” to “self-formation” via “care of the self.” This shift occurred between the publication of volume I of the History of Sexuality in 1976 and the publication of volumes II and III in 1984. As Foucault explains it, earlier, in Discipline and Punish and similar writings, he had been concerned with “techniques for ‘governing’ individu­ als” in different areas of life. When he turned his attention to the genealogy of the modem subject in the History of Sexuality , there was a danger of “reproducing, with regard to sexuality, forms of analysis focused on the organization of a domain of learning or on the techniques of control and coercion, as in [his] previous work on sickness and criminality.”62 And this is indeed what we find happening prior to his work on volumes II and III. In volume I he could still describe the aim of his study: The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world___ What is at issue, briefly, is . , . the way in which sex is ‘put into dis-course’. . . . [M]y main concern will be to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual mode of behavior.63

In the Tanner Lectures delivered at Stanford three years later (1979), one still finds a treatment of individuality in relation to “individualizing power,” that is, to “power techniques oriented toward individuals and intended to rule them in a continuous and permanent way.”64 What Foucault calls “pastoral techniques,” from Christian examination of conscience and cure of the soul to contemporary methods of mental health, are analyzed there as instruments for “governing individuals by their own verity.”65 And “governmentality” apparently continued to serve as the general perspective on individualization in the years immediately following.66 By 1983, however, the perspective had clearly shifted. In an interview conducted by Dreyfus and Rabinow in April of that year, Foucault, hard at work on the later volumes of History of Sexuality, announces that “sex is boring,” and that he is interested rather in techniques of the self.67 Clarifying that remark, he goes on to draw a clear distinction between technologies of

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the self geared to normalization and ethical techniques aimed at living a beautiful life.68 What the Greeks were after, he says, is an aesthetics of existence: “The problem for them was “the techne of life . . . how to live ... as well as [one] ought to live,” and that, he tells us, is his interest as well: “The idea of the bios as material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me.”69 Accordingly, he now characterizes the third axis of genealogical-archeological analysis as directed not toward modes of normal­ izing subjectification but toward “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport a soi, which I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to conduct himself as a moral subject of his own action.”70 Elsewhere, this is described as a shift from the investigation of “coercive practices” to the study of “practices of freedom,” “exercises of self upon self by which one tries... to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being.”71 And this “care of the self,” which establishes a form of self-mastery, is now said to be a sine qua non of properly caring for others, that is, of the art of governing.72 According to Foucault, the search for an ethics of existence that was stressed in antiquity differed fundamentally from the obedience to a system of rules that came to prevail in Christianity. “The elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed certain collective canons, was at the center, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the will to morality in Antiquity; whereas in Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of the Will of God, and the principle of obedience, morality took on increasingly the form of a code of rules.”73 To be sure, there are “code elements” and “elements of ascesis” in every morality, prescriptive ensembles of rules and values as well as ways in which individuals are to form themselves as ethical subjects in relation to them.74 Nevertheless, some moralities are more “code oriented” and others more “ethics oriented.” In the former, the accent is on code, authority, and punishment, and “subjectivation occurs basically in a quasi-juridical form, where the ethical subject refers his conduct to a law, or set of laws, to which he must submit”75; in the latter, the main emphasis is on self-formative processes that enable individuals to escape enslavement to their appetities and passions and to achieve a desired mode of being, and “the system of codes and rules of behavior may be rather rudimentary [and] their exact observance may be relatively unimportant, at least compared with what is required of the individual in the relationship he has with himself.”76 Whereas histories of morality have usually focused on the different systems of rules and values operative in different societies or groups, or on the extent to which the actual behavior of different individuals or groups were in conformity with such prescriptive ensembles, Foucault’s History of Sexuality

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focuses on the different ways in which “individuals have been urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct,” on the different “forms of moral subjectivation and the practices of the self that are meant to ensure it.”77 This choice is motivated in part by his diagnosis of the present state of morality: “If I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of morality as disobedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.”78 Thus the problem of our present, and of our present selves, to which Foucault’s later work is oriented is an “etho-poetic” one: how to revive and renew “the arts of individual existence.” This certainly constitutes a major shift from his earlier emphasis on networks or field of power in which individuals were only nodal points, and his methodological injunction to do without the subject and modes of analysis that rely on it. Both the ethical subject and the strategic subject are now represented as acting intentionally and voluntarily79—within, to be sure, cultural and institutional systems that organize their ways of doing things. But they are not simply points of application of these practical systems; they can critically and reflectively detach themselves from them; they can, within limits, modify them; and they can, in any case, make creative use of whatever space for self-formation they permit or provide. This model now enables us to make sense of the possibilities of resistance and revolt which, Foucault always insisted, are inherent in systems of power. It corrects the holistic bias we found in his work of the 1970s. The question I would now like to raise is whether he has gone too far in the opposite direction and replaced it with an individualistic bias. Although the later Foucault refers appreciatively to Kant’s ideas of matur­ ity and autonomy, he gives them a very different twist. In “What Is Enlight­ enment?,” for example, his analysis of Kant’s notion of Mundigkeit is immediately followed by a discussion of Baudelaire’s attitude toward mo­ dernity: “Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to dis­ cover himself, his secrets, his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’: It compels him to face the task of producing himself.”80 In this respect, Baudelaire’s attitude is Foucault’s own; but it is certainly not Kant’s.81 The representation of autonomy as aesthetic self-invention eliminates the universality at the heart of his notion —the rational Wille expressed in laws binding on all agents alike. This is, of course, no oversight on Foucault’s part. As we saw, he distinguishes code-oriented moralities, in which a quasi-juridical subject refers his or her conduct to a set of laws, from ethics-oriented moralities, in which

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general rules of behavior are less developed and less important than individ­ ual self-formation. There can be no doubt as to how he ranks them: “The search for styles of existence as different from each other as possible seems to me to be one of the points on which particular groups in the past may have inaugurated searches we are engaged in today. The search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody, in the sense that everybody should submit to it, strikes me as catastrophic.”82 In the context of his history of sexuality, it is Christianity that serves as the paradigm of a code-oriented morality: “The Church and the pastoral ministry shared the principle of a morality whose precepts were compulsory and whose code was universal.”83 And this, it seems to me, is what motivates the either/or approach expressed in the lines quoted earlier: Universal morality is construed materially and not formally, that is, in a pre-Kantian manner. Contemporary neo-Kantians treat justice and the good life as complemen­ tary not opposed concerns. Thus Habermas differentiates the type of practical reasoning proper to questions of what is morally right from that concerned with what is ethically prudent.84 If questions of justice are involved, fair and impartial consideration of conflicting interests is called for; when questions of value arise, deliberation on who one is and who one wants to be is central. Like Kant, Habermas regards matters of justice, rather than matters (specif­ ically) of the good life or of individual self-realization, to be the proper domain of universalistic morality. This is not to say that ethical deliberation exhibits no general structures of its own; but the disappearance of valueimbued cosmologies and the disintegration of sacred canopies have opened the question “How should I (or we, or one) live?” to the irreducible pluralism and individualism of modern life. To suppose that it could be answered once and for all, that moral theory could single out one form of life right for everyone, is no longer plausible. This does not, however, eliminate the need for a general theory of a more restricted sort: A theory of justice that re­ constructs the moral point of view from which competing interest and valuebased claims can be fairly adjudicated. Like Kant, Habermas understands this type of reasoning to be universal in import; however, he replaces the categorical imperative with the idea that for general norms to be valid they have to be acceptable to all those affected by them, as participants in practical discourse. I cannot go into the details of that approach here, but enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate that Foucault’s representation of universal morality, geared as it is to substantive codes, misses the point of formal, procedural models: namely, to establish a general framework of justice within which individuals and groups may pursue differing conceptions of the good or

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beautiful life. Although Foucault does not address himself to this most general level of morality, he cannot do without it. When asked on one occasion if the Greek arts of existence present a viable alternative to contem­ porary conceptions of the moral life, he responded that “the Greek ethics were linked to a purely virile society with slaves, in which the women were underdogs whose pleasure had no importance.”85 That is to say, Greek ethics were tied to unjust practices and institutions. And when asked on another occasion whether consensus might not serve as a regulative principle in structuring social relations, he replied: I would say, rather, that it is perhaps a critical idea to maintain at all times: to ask oneself what proportion of non-consensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of non-consensuality is necessary or not, and then one may question every power relation to that extent. The farthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against non-consensuality.86

And, as we have seen, Foucault proposes as a goal for political practice, the transformation of states of domination into open and symmetrical (fair?) strategic games. In these and other contexts, it is clear that Foucault conceives the “elaboration of one’s life as a personal work of art” to be limited by considerations of justice: I should not make the misery of others the condition or consequence of my happiness, their want of my plenty, their degradation of my elevation, their unfreedom of my freedom, the ugliness of their lives the basis of the beauty of mine. This is the unmistakable orientation of Foucault’s analyses, and it is an orientation that calls for its own reflective elaboration. In that form, universalistic morality is not opposed to, but is a presupposition of, the search for a personal ethics, if that search is to be open to everyone. A similar case could be made for Sittlichkeit, or shared ethical life. The overly individualistic optic of Foucault’s later work brings culture and society into view primarily as constraining networks of imposed rules, prohibitions, values, standards, identities, styles, and so forth. He does, of course, recognize that self-invention is not a creatio ex nihilo, that it works with material from the sociocultural environment. But community and tradi­ tion, shared forms of life and collective identities, common fates and the common good play no central role in the practice of liberty as he presents it. The problem, it seems to me, lies precisely in his antithetical conceptualiza­ tions of individual freedom and social interaction. Whereas Kant’s autonomy consists in a deindividualized respect for universal law, Foucault’s liberty appears to consist in a desocialized aesthetics of individual existence. As any operation of the other upon the self is conceived to be an exercise of

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power —in which the other governs my conduct, gets me to do what he or she wants —liberty can only consist in operations of the self upon the self —in which I govern or shape my own conduct. The one-dimensional view of social interaction as strategic interaction displaces autonomy outside of the social network. There are, of course, post-Kantian alternatives to this in which individual freedom includes reasoned agreement to the norms of common life, individual identity is formed and maintained in reciprocal relations with others, and group memberships contribute to self-fulfillment. Foucault’s aesthetic individualism is no more adequate to the social dimen­ sion of autonomy than was the possessive individualism of early modem political theory. The same problem turns up in a different form in Foucault’s views on the relation of ethics to politics and society: “The idea that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation to the juridical per se, to an authoritarian system, a disciplinary structure,” he tells us, “is very inter­ esting.”87 “For centuries,” he continues, we have been convinced that between our ethos, our personal ethics, our everyday life, and the great political and social and economic structures there were analytic relations, and that we couldn’t change anything, for instance, in our sex life or in our family life, without ruining our economy, our democracy and so on. I think we have to get rid of this idea of an analytical or necessary link between this and other social or economic or political structures. 88

And a bit further on, he asks rhetorically: “But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?”89 In his earlier work, Foucault himself gave us ample grounds for answering that question in the negative under existing social, economic, and political conditions. The problem is not with “analytic and neccessary links” but with de facto empirical interdependencies between structures and events at the personal and societal levels. The existence of such interconnections does not, of course, mean that “we couldn’t change anything” in our individual lives without changing society as a whole. But it does mean that the conditions of individual existence will be different at different locations in the social system, and that the possibility of making one’s life into a work of art will be differently distributed. As Hans-Herbert Kogler has put this point: The sociocultural resources and opportunities for developing an autonomous personality are inequitably distributed, and this cannot be evened out by an ethical choice of self___ That approach leaves fully unanswered the question of how we might possibly criticize contexts that themselves render impossible [autonomous] modes of subjectivation.90

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Viewed from the perspective of critical social theory, Foucault’s later framework of interpretation lies at the opposite extreme from his earlier social ontology of power. Then, everything was a function of context, of impersonal forces and fields, from which there was no escape —the end of man. Now, the focus is on “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct but also seek to transform themselves . . . and to make their life into an oeuvre"91—with scant regard for social, political, and economic context. Neither scheme provides an adequate framework for critical social inquiry. The ontology of power was too reductive and one-dimensional for that purpose; the later, multidimen­ sional ontology still depicts social relations as strategic relations, thus forcing the search for autonomy, so crucial to the critical tradition, onto the private path of a rapport a soi. On the other hand, there is the undeniable power of Foucault’s historical-critical studies themselves. Their strengths are often weaknesses of previous critical social theory, their nominalism, descriptivism, and historicism not only a complement but a counterweight to its emphasis on the general, the normative, and the theoretical. However uni­ versal critical theory may be at the level of concepts and principles, it must, if it is to pursue its practical interest, reach finally to the variable, contingent, “transformable singularities” that so occupied Foucault. Abstract concep­ tions of justice and the good life remain just that —abstract conceptions — until they take on the flesh and bone of concrete historical existence. And while critical theorists have long recognized that the critique of impure reason has to eventuate in sociohistorical studies of specific “practical systems,” there have been far too few studies of that kind. In this regard, Foucault’s investigations into the cultural and historical contexts in which the sciences of man arose and developed, and his studies of the formation of the moral-rational subject are a valuable counterpoise to the globalizing discourses about rationalization that have tended to preponderate. Moreover, his relentless scrutinizing of the impositions, constraints, and hierarchies that figure in the emergence and functioning of rational practices challenges critical theorists to go further than they have in detranscendentalizing the guiding conception of reason, truth, and freedom. Genealogical histories have proved to be an extremely effective means of problematizing what is taken for granted, of re-turning attention to what has long been neglected, of raising politically relevant questions about matters that are usually viewed apolitically. In shaping that approach, Foucault devoted himself single-mindedly to issues about which he cared a great deal. Too often his single-mindedness found expression in an either/or stance toward existing frameworks and modes of critical inquiry. I have tried to

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suggest that the strengths of genealogy are better viewed as complementary to those of classical critical theory. The point is not to choose between them but to unite them in constructing theoretically informed and practically interested histories of the present. NOTES 1. See Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture (1931) as Director of the Institut fur Sozialforschung, “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,” in S. Bronner and D. Kellner, eds., Critical Theory and Society (New York, 1989), 25-36; and his contributions to the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung from the early 1930s, some of which have been collected in Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, 1972) and Horkheimer, Selected Essays (MIT Press, Forthcoming). Habermas’s renewal of this program is elaborated in The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. I and II (Boston, 1984, 1987). The comparison that follows would look quite different if its reference point were the version of critical theory developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s, particularly in their Dialectic of Enlighten­ ment (New York, 1972), which is very close in spirit to the genealogy of power/ knowledge Foucault practiced in the 1970s. It is that period of Foucault’s work, by far the most influential in the English-speaking world, which is the other point of reference for the comparison in this section. The ethic of the self, which he developed in the 1980s, will be discussed in part III. I will not be dealing with the first phase(s) of his thought, which came to a close around 1970-71 with the appearance of “The Discourse of Language” (printed as an appendix to The Archeology of Knowledge [New York, 1972], 215-237), and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Countermemory, Practice (Ithaca, 1977), 139-164. 2. This includes the early Horkheimer. 3. The differences are as great among the various members of the Frankfurt School at the various stages of their careers. 4. M. Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 100-117, at 112. 5. M. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York, 1980), 109-133, at 131. 6. The application of sociological and ethnographic approaches to the natural sciences has led to similar conclusions. 7. “Truth and Power,” 131. 8. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, 1979) 27-28. 9. See J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971). 10. See. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II. 11. M. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 119. 12. Discipline and Punish, 114. 13. “Truth and Power,” 131. 14. Cf. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, 1984). 15. N. Fraser, “Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” in Fraser Unruly Practices (Minneapolis, 1989), 17-34, at 32. 16. “Truth and Power,” 116. 17. “Truth and Power,” 114.

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18. “TWo Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 78-108, at 98. 19. Ibid. 20. Cf. “Truth and Power,” 117. 21. “Two Lectures,” 97. 22. See Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York, 1961). 23. See John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, 1984), 103-134. 24. See, for instance M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I (New York, 1978), 95-96. 25. Ibid., 157. 26. For a discussion of this problem, see David Michael Levin, The Listening Self{London and New York, 1989), 90ff. 27. Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in David Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, New York, 1986) 69-102, at 91-93. 28. A revised version of part of the lecture was published as “The Art of Telling the Truth,” in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York, 1988), 86-95, at 95. Foucault sometimes writes as if the analytic of truth in general —that is, the traditional concerns with knowledge, truth, reality, human nature, and the like—should be abandoned as a lost, but still dangerous, cause. At other times, he represents it as a still viable research orientation, which, however, he chooses not to pursue. See, for example, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, 1988), 145-162, at 145. In either case, the fact that he pursues his “ontology of the present and of ourselves” in separation from any (explicit) “analytic of truth” constitutes a major difference from Habermas, whose diagnosis of the present is linked to a continuation of the critical project Kant inaugurated with his three Critiques. I will not be able to explore that difference here. 29. In emphasizing the changes in Foucault’s self-understanding in the 1980s, I am taking issue with commentators who stress the continuity with earlier work, usually by treating Foucault’s later redescriptions of it as accurate accounts of what he was “really” up to at the time. The frequent (and varied) redescriptions he offers are, in my view, better read as retrospectives from newly achieved points of view. Foucault himself was often quite open about the changes. See, for instance, the three interviews conducted in January, May, and June 1984: “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault, James Bemauer and David Rasmussen, eds. (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 1-20; “The Concern for Truth,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, 255-267 (at 255 he says, “I changed my mind” after the publication of vol. I of The History of Sexuality); and “The Return of Morality,” in Philosophy, Politics, Culture, 242-254 (where he says essentially the same thing at 252-253). From his published writings, see, for instance, the introduction to vol. II of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (New York, 1985), especially “Modifications,” 3-13.1 find this straightforward acknowledge­ ment of a “theoretical shift” hermeneutically more satisfactory than any of the attempts to read his earlier work as if it had been written from the perspective of the 1980s. For an overview of the development of Foucault’s thought and the distinctive features of the last phase, see Hans-Herbert Kogler, “Frohliche Subjektivitat. Historische Ethik und dreifache Ontologie beim spaten Foucault,” in E. Erdmann, R. Forst, and A. Honneth, eds., Ethos derModerne—Foucaults Kritik der Aufklarung (Frankfurt, 1990). For a somewhat different view, see Arnold I. Davidson, “Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, 221-233. 30. Translated as “What Is Enlightenment?” in Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant on History (New York, 1963), 3-11. Foucault’s fullest treatment can be found in a posthumously published text with the same title, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 32-50. In the 1980s, he repeatedly expressed his appreciation of Kant’s essay. In addition to text just cited, see his Afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond

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Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), “The Subject and Power,” 145-162, at 145; and “Structuralism and Poststructuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Telos 55 (1983); 195-211 at 199,206. 31. “The Subject and Power,” 216. 32. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” in The Foucault Reader, 381-390, at 388. Compare Foucault’s remark in the introduction to vol. II of the History of Sexuality that the object of these studies is “to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (p. 9). 33. “The Ethic of Care for the Self,” 4. 34. The concept of “mature adulthood” (Kant’s Miindigkeit) is discussed in “What Is Enlightenment?,” 34-35, 39. Dreyfus and Rabinow deal with this topic in “What Is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, 109-121. But their representation of Habermas’s position is misleading on key points, for example, as regards his views on “phronesis, art, and rhetoric” (p. Ill), on authenticity (p. 112), and on reaching agreement (pp. 119-120). 35. “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42; see also “The Art of Telling the Truth,” 94-95. 36. “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, 239-256, at 249. 37. “What Is Enlightenment?,” 45-46. Foucault sometimes takes a line closer to Habermas’s, for instance, when he explains that “singular forms of experience may perfectly well harbor universal structures,” in the original preface to The History of Sexuality, vol. II, in The Foucault Reader, 333-339, at 335. But, characteristically, he immediately goes on to say that his type of historical analysis brings to light not universal structures but “transformable singularities” (p. 335). As we saw in part II, it nevertheless relies on an interpretive and analytic framework comprising universalistic assumptions about the structure of social action. As I shall elaborate later, the same holds for his later investigations as well, but the framework has been altered in important respects. 38. “What Is Enlightenment?,” 48. 39. Ibid., 43. Foucault explicitly gives preference to “specific” and “partial” transformations over “all projects that claim to be global or radical” and “any programs for a new man.” (pp. 4647). Cf. Habermas’s remarks in Knowledge and Human Interests, 284-285. There are many similarities between the Foucault of “What is Enlightenment?” and the earlier Habermas, who pursued “an empirical theory of history with a practical intent.” Cf. my account of this phase of Habermas’s thought in The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA, 1978), chaps. 1, 2, and 3. 40. Manuscript, 7. He is apparently referring to the scheme that Habermas proposed in his inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University in 1965 (printed as the appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests, 301-317) and subsequently altered. On page 313 Habermas characterized his three dimensions of analysis as labor, language, and domination (Herrschaft). 41. Technologies of the Self 18-19. It is clear, however, that he has not yet fully disengaged from the power ontology, for all four types of technologies are said to be “associated with” domination, and he characterizes his new field of interest as “the technologies of individual domination.” One year later, he would no longer talk that way. See nt. 66. 42. “The Subject and Power,” 217-218. 43. The Use of Pleasure, 4. A version of this appears already in his discussions with Dreyfus and Rabinow at Berkeley in April 1983, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, 340-372, at 351-352. It is elaborated in the original preface to vol. II, 333-339, as a distinction between fields of study, sets of rules, and relations to self. 44. “The Subject and Power,” 219-221. 45. Ibid., 221.

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46. Ibid., 224. 47. Ibid., 222. 48. “The Ethic of Care for the Self,” 11-12. 49. Ibid., 19. The categories of power, domination, and strategy are of course used earlier as well, but not with the s?me meanings. In vol. I of The History of Sexuality, for instance, “states of power” are said to be generated by virtue of the inequality of force relations (p.93), and power is said to be exercised ;n nonegalitarian relations (p.94); “major dominations” arise as the hegemonic effects of wide-ranging cleavages that run through the social body as a whole (p. 94), while strategies are embodiments of force relations (p.93, with example on pp. 104-105). 50. Ibid., 18. 51. Ibid., 20. 52. Foucault’s three-part definition of “strategy” in “The Subject and Power,” 224-225, is conventional enough. It is said to designate (a) means-ends rationality aimed at achieving some objective, (b) playing a game with a view to gaining one’s own advantage, and (c) the means to victory over opponents in situations of confrontation. 53. See “What Is Universal Pragmatics?,” in Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979), 1-68, esp. 59-65; and The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I., 273-337. 54. See “The Subject and Power,” 220. 55. Ibid, 218. 56. “The Ethic of Care for the Self,” 18. 57. Ibid. 58. See Foucault’s discussion of the “morality that concerns the search for truth” in “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” 381-382, where he describes what are essentially symmetry conditions among dialogue partners. See also his account of the role that communi­ cation with others played in the care of the self, in The History of Sexuality, vol. Ill, 51-54. The reciprocity of helping and being helped by others which he describes there hardly accords with his official view of social relation as strategic relations. 59. “The Ethic of Care for the Self,” 17. 60. Ibid, 16. It is not clear, however, what validity means in this context, whether, for example, it means more than being produced according to the constitutive rules of the games and thereby fulfulling the intended function of the game. 61. Foucault draws a distinction between the “strategic” and “technological” sides of “practical systems” in, for instance, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 48. 62. The original preface to The History of Sexuality, 337-339. 63. The History of Sexuality, vol. I, 11. 64. “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. II, Sterling McMurrin, ed. (Salt Lake City, 1981), 225-254, at 227. 65. Ibid, 240. 66. For example, in his Howison Lectures delivered at Berkeley in Fall 1980, he describes his project as an investigation of the historical constitution of the subject which leads to the modem concept of the self (manuscript, lecture I, 4) and goes on to say that he is now focusing on the “techniques of the self’ by which “individuals effect a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their souls, on their own thoughts, on their conduct” (p. 7). But though he clearly distinguishes such techniques from “techniques of domination,” they have to be under­ stood precisely in relation to them (p. 7). The “point of contact” between the two is government: “When I was studying asylums, prisons, and so on, I insisted too much on the techniques of domination.. .. But that is only one aspect of the art of governing people in our societies.. . . [Power] is due to the subtle integration of coercion technologies and self technologies.. . .

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Among [the latter], those oriented toward the discovery and formulation of the truth concerning oneself are extremely important” (p. 8). Accordingly, in the closing passage of his lectures, he asks rhetorically whether the time has not come to get rid of these technologies and the sacrifices linked to them (lecture II, 20). In the first part of “The Subject and Power,” 208-216, which was delivered as a lecture at the University of Southern California in Fall 1981, the way in which we turn ourselves into subjects is described as an element in the “government of individualiza­ tion” (p. 212). At the same time, however, Foucault notes the increasing importance of struggles against “forms of subjection” through “individualizing techniques” (p. 213), against shaping individuals to ensure their integration into the modem state (p. 214). And he concludes with a line that could serve as the epigraph of his last studies: “[T]he political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (p. 216). But he does not yet have the categories that later make sense of this project. In the seminar on “Technologies of the Self’ offered at the University of Vermont one year later (Fall 1982), “govemmentality is still identified as the point of “contact between the technologies of domi­ nation and those of the self.” The new focus is characterized as “technologies of individual domination!” (p. 19). In a lecture on “The Political Technology of Individuals” presented on the same occasion, however, Foucault distinguishes questions concerning how “we directly consti­ tute our identity through some ethical techniques of the self’ from questions concerning “the political technology of individuals,” but this thought is not developed there. 67. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 340. The subordination of his interest in sexuality as such to a broader problematization of techniques of self-formation is clearly stated in those volumes. It is, he writes, with sexual behavior as a “domain of valuation and choice,” with the ways in which “the individual is summoned to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct” that the later studies are concerned (vol. II, 32). Thus his analyses of “prescriptive discourses” about diatetics, household management, erotics, and so forth focus on the mode of subjectivation presupposed and nourished in the corresponding practices. Very briefly: the genealogy of “desiring man” as a self-disciplined subject” is Foucault’s key to the genealogy of the “subject of ethical conduct” (vol. II, 250-251); and this is itself an element in a more comprehensive “history of truth” (vol. II, 6). Similarly, in analyzing parrhesia, or truth-telling, in Antiquity, Foucault conceives of the genealogy of the parrhesiastic subject, the truth-teller, as part of the “genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy.” Discourse and Truth: The Pro­ blematization of Parrhesia, transcription by Joseph Pearson of a seminar given at the University of California, Berkeley, Fall 1983,114. These connections suggest the continuing relevance of Foucault’s work to what I referred to as the critique of impure reason. 68. Ibid, 341. 69. Ibid, 348. 70. Ibid, 352. 71. “The Ethic of Care for the Self,” 2-3. 72. Ibid, 6-7. The connections between govemmentality, care of the self, and strategic interaction are suggested on pages 19-20 of the same interview: “[I]n the idea of govemmentality I am aiming at the totality of practices by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other. It is free individuals who try to control, to determine, to delimit the liberty of others, and in order to do that, they dispose of certain instruments to govern others. That rests indeed on freedom, on the relationship of the self to self and the relationship to the other.” On the relation between self-mastery and the mastery of others in antiquity, see The History of Sexuality, vol. II, 73ff.

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73. “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Philosophy, Politics, Culture, 47-53, at 49. Foucault’s later studies abound in comparisons between ethical practices in Antiquity and in Christianity. See, for example, The History of Sexuality, vol. II, 92, 136-139, and vol. Ill, 68, 140ff., 165, 235ff. These comparisons, so patently unfavorable to Christianity, bespeak Foucault’s own commitment to an ethopoetics of existence. In my view, an analysis of the normative and evaluate presupposition underlying Foucault’s later work —carried out along the lines of Fraser’s analysis of his earlier studies (see n. 15) —would reveal them to be more or less the ones he openly espoused in the lectures, interviews, and methodological asides of the last period. In neither phase should the absence of explicit value judgments in his sociohistorical studies obscure the presence of implicit value orientations underlying them. (Cf. Weber’s distinction between Werturteile and Wertbeziehungen.) But the large gap between the official and the operative frameworks of evaluation in the 1970s was considerably closed in the 1980s. 74. The Use of Pleasure, 25-26. 75. Ibid., 29. 76. Ibid., 30. 77. Ibid., 29. 78. “An Aesthetics of Existence,” 49. See also “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 343; and “The Concern for Truth,” 262-263. 79. See The Use of Pleasure, 10. 80. “What Is Enlightenment?,” 42. 81. Nor, for that matter, is it Socrates’, Plato’s, or Aristotle’s. There is more than one way to take issue with Foucault’s notion of an ethics of self-invention. I will be stressing Kant’s connection of autonomy to a rational will, but problems could also be raised from the standpoint of the ethics of community, character, virtue, and the like. 82. “The Concern for Truth,” 253. 83. The Use of Pleasure, 21. 84. See his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA, 1990) and The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, 92-111. 85. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 44. The masculinist and dominative orientation of Greek ethics is stressed throughout vol. II of The History of Sexuality. See, for example, 82-86,146-151, 69-77, 215-225. 86. “Politics and Ethics: An Interview,” in The Foucault Reader, 373-380, at 379. 87. “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 348. 88. Ibid., 350. 89. Ibid. 90. “Frohliche Subjektivitat,” manuscript, 29. 91. The Use of Pleasure, 10.

[12]

TO THINK AND ACT DIFFERENTLY Foucault's Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas' Theory fames Tully

Habermas and other critics raised four objections to Foucault's work up to 1977: Foucault studies underlying practices rather than what agents say and do and thereby generates a kind of presentism; his approach is unreasonable because it violates universal validity claims; it is contextbound rather than context-transcending; and he does not account for the normative dimension of his analysis. Foucault reformulated his philosophy and reinterpreted his earlier work in response to these sorts of objection from 1978 to 1984. He replied that practices are to be understood as the way agents themselves problematise the forms of knowledge, power and ethics in accordance with which they are consti­ tuted and constitute themselves as subjects; a genealogy is reasonable because it tests the universality of a given, specific validity claim; it transgresses rather than transcends limits in the present; and the norm­ ative dimension of his work is a novel conception of freedom within relations of power (PDM 276; Kelly, 1994; Owen, 1996). While Foucault was reformulating his approach he was also working on the classic humanist authors of the Greek and Roman world. He came to see the status of his own philosophy as akin to theirs: not as a theory to be elaborated and defended against its critics but as a practical activity, a permanent and critical exercise of thought on thought. Thus, he saw his own reformulation as an ongoing critical dialogue or 'reciprocal elucidation' of his current research relative to rethinking his earlier work and responding to his best critics (UP 9-14; FR 336, 381-3; Hadot, 1996). He writes that his philosophy is 'a long and tentative exercise that needed to be revised and corrected again and again' and, in the light of later studies and objections, it was necessary 'to go back through what I was already thinking, to think it differently, and to see

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what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light' (UP 9, 11). In this reflection on his activity of reformulation Foucault applies his philosophical approach to his own philosophy. His philosophy aims to free us from habitual forms of thought and action in the present, enabling us to experiment with thinking and acting differently. He is now saying that his own philosophy is subject to this kind of critique by means of permanent reciprocal elucidation and reworking of it in relation to his new research and to the objections of his critics. Since this dialogical elucidation and reformulation is always reciprocal it cannot but throw critical light on the thought it works against: his early work (in reinterpreting it) and the work of the critics to whom he is responding (Habermas' philosophy). Foucault's elucidation of his philosophy in critical comparison to Habermas' objections gave rise to four reciprocal objections to Habermas' work and reasons for preferring his own: (1) Habermas' approach is less critical: it is uncritical of its own form of reflection and it is a less effective critique of limits in the present; (2) Foucault's historical approach is not unreasonable and it is ques­ tionable whether Habermas' universalisation of the decentred under­ standing of the world is reasonable; (3) Habermas' decentred subject is a historically contingent juridical form of the subject which, when taken as a regulative idea, tends to hinder the analyses of other ways we are constituted and constitute ourselves as subjects; and (4) Habermas' normative analysis is utopian whereas Foucault's is not. The aim of this chapter is to present these four reciprocal objections to Habermas' approach and reasons for preferring Foucault's in hopes that a defender of Habermas will reply and thus keep the work of reciprocal elucidation going. I lay out what the two philosophies have in common in section I and the specifics of Foucault's in section II and Habermas' in section III. These descriptive sections provide the basis for the com­ parison that follows. Section IV is a brief transition to the analysis of Foucault's four objections in sections V to VIII. The conclusion is that the four objections are sound. Foucault's philosophy is not only defensible, it provides a critical and effective test of limits in the present, including the limits that Habermas claims are universal. I Two Philosophies of Critical Reflection on Limits in the Present: What They Have in Common According to Foucault, he and Habermas work within a general problematisation of the present comprised of, first, philosophical reflection on and analysis of the apparent limits of thought and action in the present and, second, reflection on and analysis of the forms of reflection one prac­ tises and their relation to the present. This type of modern philosophy can be seen to derive from the Enlightenment and to have one of its clearest formulations in the work of Kant. Although they share this

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common problem space, in which the specific aspects of experience that are brought to reflection and called into question in this distinctive way are limits in the present, they engage in two sharply contrasting forms of philosophical reflection on these limits. This comparison and contrast is presented in 'What is critique?', 'What is enlightenment?' and 'The art of telling the truth'. Foucault's form of reflection can be seen to derive from Kant's formulation of an Enlightenment 'attitude' or ethos in What is Enlighten­ ment?, an attitude that is 'at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself' (WE, 44). It has been exhibited by Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Canguilhem and several members of the Frankfurt School. Foucault has made an original contribution to this critical tradition by clarifying its distinctive features, applying it in unique ways and differentiating it from the closely related yet distinct form of philosophical reflection derived from the Enlightenment and practised by Habermas. Whereas Foucault's approach is associated with Kant's Enlightenment attitude, Habermas' is derived from Kant's concept of 'critique' in his more formal philosophy. It is a critical 'theory' or 'analytics of truth' rather than a critical 'attitude' (PP 95). Habermas has made an equally original contribution to this neo-Kantian tradition of modem philosophy and clarified its distinctive features by defending it against Foucault, Nietzsche, earlier members of the Frankfurt School, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and other more contextual and historical philosophers whom he sees as working within the other orientation to the present (JA 19-113). For both authors a 'limit' is any given 'form of the subject' or 'form of subjectivity': that is, any of the multiplicity of ways of speaking, thinking and acting, of being conscious of ourselves as human subjects. A form of the subject is, in the terms of North American philosophy, similar to a 'practical identity' (Korsgaard, 1996: 6-7). Like many twentieth-century philosophers such as Judith Butler, Rorty and Wittgenstein, Habermas and Foucault agree that there is no a priori form of the human subject and, as a result, any form of the subject, including the autonomous subject, must be analysed by reference to processes of constitution or socialisation. 'I had to reject', Foucault explains in a manner similar to Habermas, 'a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships that can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so forth' (FF 10). Foucault came to this view through criticism of subject-centred phenomenology and existentialism, dissatisfaction with his earlier recourse to structuralism, and his reading of Nietzsche (PP 49-50). The lecture 'What is enlightenment?' is the most polished synopsis of his type of analysis of the constitution of the subject. Habermas developed his view through a somewhat similar criticism of subject-centred philosophies and dissatisfaction with his earlier work,

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which was based on an a priori conception of the human subject as the bearer of knowledge-constitutive interests. In 'An alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative versus subject-centred reason', he situates his analysis of the constitution of the subject in processes of communication in relation to other non-subject-centred philosophies from Kant to the present and he refers with approval to Foucault's 'What is enlightenment?' as a complementary genealogy (PDM 294-327). It follows that the study of limits consists in the analysis of the procedures through which we are constituted as subjects; processes of subjectivisation (assujettissement) or, in Habermas' terms, the practices of 'socialisation' through which 'subjects are constituted as individuals' in the 'lifeworld' (MC 199-200). 'Subjectivisation', Foucault clarifies in his last interview, is 'the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject, or more precisely, of a subjectivity, which is of course only one of the given possibilities of organization of a self-consciousness' (R 12). They also agree that a form of the subject comes to be recognised as a 'limit' through processes of subjectivisation, and so the object of reflec­ tion and analysis, in two distinct ways. A 'limit' can mean either the characteristic forms of thought and action which are taken for granted and not questioned or contested by partici­ pants in a practice of subjectivity, thereby functioning as the implicit background or horizon of their questions and contests, or it can mean that a form of subjectivity (its form of reason, norms of conduct and so forth) is explicitly claimed to be a limit that cannot be otherwise because it is universal, necessary or obligatory (the standard form of legitimation since the Enlightenment). Both philosophers believe that humans can develop the capacities of thought and action to call into question and contest both types of limit, albeit in different ways, as for example in their two different philosophies. Yet, neither claims to hold that such capacities constitute a third-order or transcendental subject, for, as we have seen above, the second requirement of their shared type of modern philosophy is to explain this form of reflection on present forms of subjectivity and their types of reflexivity just as it explains any other - as a 'historical result' as Habermas puts it (MC 208) - just as, say, an ornithologist explains 'ornithology' like any other word. Finally, both associate freedom and autonomy with the development and exercise of these capacities in practice, yet they advance sharply contrasting concep­ tions of freedom and autonomy. Once the two approaches are seen as two forms of rendering problem­ atic and reflecting on limits in the present since the Enlightenment their similarities come to light, as recent commentators have stressed (Ingram, 1994: 215-62). However, their dissimilarities are just as important and it is these I wish to examine. The dissimilarities are not those of humanism and anti-humanism. This influential misinterpretation of the Habermas/ Foucault debate has obscured rather than clarified the differences

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and similarities between them, as Foucault's interpretation of his and Habermas' philosophies in relation to the Enlightenment is designed to expose. Humanism is neither a critical ethos nor a critical theory derived from the Enlightenment but a 'set of themes' tied to 'value judgements' that have reappeared over time in European societies. It stands, and was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to stand, in 'a state of tension' with the Enlightenment and the critical traditions derived from it (WE 43-5). The relations between their two forms of modem critical philosophy and the older themes and values of human­ ism can be understood by keeping them separate and noting specific connections in the course of our independent comparison of the two philosophies. II Foucault's Approach Although both approaches reflect on and analyse limits in the present they do so with sharply contrasting aims and techniques. The telos of questioning a limit of our thought and action in the present - a form of our subjectivity - in Foucault's philosophy is to open up the possibility of thinking and acting differently. It comprises two distinct exercises. The first consists of historical studies undertaken to bring to light the two kinds of limit: to show that what is taken for granted in the form of the subject in question has a history and has been otherwise; and to show 'in what is given to us as universal, necessary and obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints' (WE 45). These studies thus enable us 'to free ourselves from ourselves', from this form of subjectivity, by coming to see that 'that-which-is has not always been' (PP 37), that it could be otherwise, by showing how in Western cultures people have recognised themselves differently, and so to 'alter one's way of looking at things'. 'The object', Foucault underscores, is 'to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently'. The role of philosophy today for Foucault as for Wittgenstein is 'the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently' (UP 9). These historical studies begin with a form of subjectivity that the philosopher bears, or with which he or she is closely associated, and which has become problematic in practice and the focus of reflection (SP 211-13). It is analysed or 'reproblematised' under three aspects: practical systems, three axes of subjectivisation and the generality of a problematisation (WE 48-9, b,c,d). First, the abilities or competencies that constitute a form of subjectivity are acquired and exercised in practice, in 'practical systems'. In response to Habermas' objection, these systems are not 'conditions that determine' subjects 'without their knowledge' but,

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like Wittgenstein's language games and Habermas' forms of com­ municatively mediated interaction in the lifeworld, 'what they do and the way they do it' (WE 48). Practical systems should be analysed from two different perspectives: 'the forms of rationality that organise their ways of doings things' and 'the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point'. The 'forms of rationality' include Habermas' 'relations of communica­ tion'; the dimension of 'signs, communication, reciprocity, and the pro­ duction of meaning' (SP 218). In general there are four matrices of practical rationalities: the organisation of the production of things, the use of sign systems in communication, relations of power which govern the conduct of subjects, and the means by which individuals or groups work on their bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being to transform themselves ethically (TS 18). Turning to the second per­ spective, Foucault calls the freedom with which subjects act in a form of practical rationality definitive of a subjectivity ('citizen' say) 'strategic games of liberty'. He does not mean 'strategic' in the contrastive sense in which Habermas uses it (as opposed to 'communicative') but the various ways in which subjects act self-consciously in accord with, or in contesta­ tion of, their form of rationality, whether these ways are communicative or strategic (SP 224-6). Secondly and famously, the forms of rationality and strategic games of freedom in which a form of the subject is constituted can be analysed along the three axes of knowledge, power and ethics, and, most import­ antly, the relations among them. These 'ontologies of ourselves' are analyses of the forms of knowledge in accordance with which we recog­ nise ourselves and are recognised by others, constitute and are consti­ tuted, and question and are questioned as a specific subject of knowledge ('games of truth'); the relations of power or governance in which we are guided by others and guide ourselves by various means to recognise and conduct ourselves in accord with or in contestation of a specific subject of governance; and the practices of self-formation we use to recognise, constitute and transform ourselves in accord with a specific ideal of the ethical subject. The phrase 'constitute and are constituted' and the like in the descriptions of the three axes are meant to bring into prominence Foucault's presumption that forms of subjectivity are not imposed on passive subjects, but (even in the extreme case of the 'mad subject') on free subjects who take a self-conscious part (to varying degrees) in the acquisition, learning, exercise and modification of the subject-specific competencies. 'I believe', Foucault clarifies, 'that the subject is consti­ tuted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation' (PP 50). Practices of liberation refer either to the strategic games of liberty agents play together in a practical system or to the more individual 'practices of the self' an agent applies to himself or herself. Yet, even here, a subject does not invent the arts

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of self-fashioning he or she employs. They are 'proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group' (FF 11). The analysis of the forms of knowledge in which we identify ourselves and are identified by others as subjects of a certain kind was originally conceived by Foucault along quasi-structuralist lines with a largely determined role for the speaking subject (Gutting, 1989). He abandoned this flawed approach and reconceived analysis in terms of a historical pragmatics of the rules - conditions of 'acceptability' (WC 394) or 'validity' (FF 17) - in accordance with which die subjects themselves problematise an aspect of their identity and propose solutions (what he calls 'games of truth'). He explains in 'The subject and power' that the formation, stability and transformability of the relations of power which govern our conduct in accord with a specific knowledge of the subject, and against which strategic games of liberty are played, can be analysed along five principal dimensions (SP 223-4). Discipline and Punish is the classic example of this form of analysis. Practices of the self are the multiplicity of ethical practices in Western culture in which one takes up a reflective 'relationship to oneself' (rapport a soi) which is not only an awareness or recognition of oneself as an ethical agent under some strong evaluation but also the practical formation of oneself under this ideal through exercises (askeses) such as self-interpretation, consciousness raising, dialogue, dieting, memorisation, working out, confessing, dis­ ciplining oneself to act in accord with natural law, and so forth. To illustrate with an example that anticipates Foucault's third objection to Habermas (that his form of reflection overlooks ethical practices of subjectivisation), Foucault interprets Kantian ethics as enjoining that, 'I must recognize myself as universal subject, that is, I must constitute myself in each of my actions as a universal subject by conforming to universal rules'. So, even in the case of Kant 'the self is not merely given but is constituted in relationship to itself as subject' (FR 372). Ethical practices can be analysed along four main lines (UP 25-30). The axes of knowledge, power and ethics form a 'practical system' in the sense that they cannot be reduced to one another (neither knowledge nor ethics is, for example, constituted by power as many critics and followers have erroneously suggested) or treated in isolation (knowledge and ethics are never entirely free of connections to relations of power). They always exist in complex relations to one another. It is the objective of the historical study to clarify the complex relations among the three axes because these reveal what in our mode of being is 'the product of arbitrary constraints' and so is capable of being otherwise (SP 217-19). Thirdly, since a form of the subject is not a priori but historical, Foucault suggests that we analyse its 'generality' rather than its 'uni­ versality', as Habermas does. To do this we need to come at forms of the subject from yet another perspective, as 'forms of problematisation'. Recall that a form of subjectivity is not a limit outside the experience of

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the subjects themselves; it is the limit of their experience as thinking subjects from the inside, the characteristic way they think through the forms of knowledge, relations of power, and practices of the self through which an aspect of their experience is brought to self-consciousness (their 'sexuality', say). 'Thinking' in this remarkably reflective sense is 'free­ dom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem' (FR 389). The activity of reflective thought is not found only in philosophy and science. It 'inhabits' every practical system of subjectivity; 'every manner of speaking, doing, or behaving in which the individual appears and acts as a subject of learning, as ethical or juridical subject, as subject conscious of himself and others' (FR 334-5). Practical systems of sub­ jectivity are studied only 'in so far as they are inhabited by thought' in this sense (FR 335). This account responds to Habermas' claim that Foucault studies the structures that underlie thought and it challenges Habermas' assumption that there is a fairly clear distinction between relatively unreflective everyday thought and the reflective activity of questioning a limit (practical discourse). A form of subjectivity can be seen, therefore, as a 'form of problematisation': a general manner in which subjects render an aspect of their experience problematic, in response to difficulties and obstacles in practice, reflect on it along the three axes and present diverse responses to it over a period of time. Accordingly, Foucault locates his studies of 'the history of systems of thought' on the narrow path between the economic and social processes studied by social historians on one side and the universal categories and formal structures of thought and action studied by Habermas on the other (TS 10). Given, then, that a form of subjectivity is grounded in the actual practices of self-understanding or, more precisely, 'self-problematising' of the subjects themselves, one can ask the empirical and comparative question of how general, historically or cross-culturally, this way of being in the world is or has been. It is not a transcendental limit against which practice is analysed but a practical limit against which subjects analyse themselves. Most of the forms of subjectivity or problematisations Foucault studied, solely in 'the Western societies from which we derive', are quite general. They have 'continued up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity [Madness and Civilization], or sickness and health [The Birth of the Clinic], the problem of sexual roles [the three volumes on the history of sexual­ ity]; and so on' (WE 49). To mention another example, the philosophical reflection on limits in the present that Foucault and Habermas share is seen by Foucault as a general problematisation deriving from the Enlightenment (whose genealogy he sketched in 'What is critique?' and 'The art of telling the truth'). The second exercise of Foucault's approach is for the specific intellec­ tual as a citizen to circulate her or his genealogical knowledge in the

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public and local discussions of and struggles around the form of sub­ jectivity from which the historical study began and to participate in democratic will formation (PP 265): The work of an intellectual is . . . through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as selfevident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions, and on the basis of this reproblematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play).

The aim of this civic responsibility is not only to help to enlighten us with respect to the horizon and historical contingency or arbitrary constraints of our way of thinking and acting and to imagine how life might go on differently. It is also to see if there are citizens who can develop the reasons and will to form a 'community of action' to experiment with the 'transgression' of this specific limit in practice, by challenging the perhaps universal claims to truth or rightness which legitimise it, by contesting the relations of power that guide us to act in accord with it or to change the ethical practices involved (FR 385). In short, not only to think differently but to act differently as well. By 'transgression' he does not mean a total revolution or another view of the world but the cautious experimental modifications of our specific forms of subjectivity. As examples he mentions the 'specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness' (WE 46-7). Although the reasons for engaging in this activity of 'concrete free­ dom' (PP 36) are as various as the limits in the present, and even those engaged in any given struggle will have, for Foucault as for Rawls, a plurality of reasons, a general second-order reason for any specific transgression will be to enable the participants to engage in the specific game or practice of subjectivity with 'a minimum of domination': that is, where this agonic activity in relation to knowledge, power and ethics is not unnecessarily or arbitrarily constrained (FF 18). Thus, the discovery that a form of the subject is not universal, necessary or obligatory certainly enables and encourages us to think differently but it does not by itself constitute a reason for modifying this discovery in practice. Citizens may decide to affirm the form of the subject. Further reasons are required for change, such as arbitrary or unnecessary constraints. In summary, the two activities of intellectual and citizen comprise an 'attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them' (WE 50).

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In reply to Habermas' objection that Foucault's approach is 'contextbound' we can say that it is 'context-transgressing' in two ways without being 'context transcending' (as Habermas claims his approach is). First, the historical studies cause us to transgress the context-bound ways of thinking about a form of subjectivity. Take Foucault's historical study of prisons, Discipline and Punish, for example, which he wrote in the context of his involvement in prisoners' reform activities in the early 1970s. The study brings prisons and reform activity into critical reflection; it reproblematises them. The prison was shown to have a history and to be a much more recent phenomenon than was commonly supposed. The unexamined assumptions about its normative legitimacy were thrown into question by arresting contrasts with prior forms of punishment and alternative forms that lost out and were forgotten in the establishment of modern prisons as we know them. Even more striking, the practices of knowledge and power employed to observe, discipline and reform prisoners were shown to be dispersed throughout many other processes of subjectivisation in modern societies, such as schools, universities, bureaucracies, factories and armies, in which our subjectivity is shaped without our being fully aware of it. Furthermore, the human sciences were shown to be more closely involved in these practices of discipline and surveillance than most practitioners had been aware. These effects did not 'transcend' the context in the sense of presenting a higher or more comprehensive ideal against which the prison could be judged; rather they transgressed the context by causing us to look at practices of discipline and surveillance in the prison and in other practical systems in different ways and from different perspectives, from the inside. The second way the historical studies transgress the context concerns how they are taken up by citizens and used in contemporary struggles to modify existing relations of power or ethics. Here they do not provide a normative ideal in accordance with which citizens measure their prac­ tices and act. Although a genealogy certainly frees citizens from false legitimising beliefs about their practices, they are left to develop the reasons and shared will to act themselves. A genealogy provides a tool kit for understanding the relations of knowledge, power and ethics in which they think and act, the contingent and arbitrary aspects of these arrangements, the possibilities of modifying them and the effects of modification in practice. The modification in practice provides in turn a test against which the original conceptual tools are assessed and re­ formulated and put into practice again, thereby forming a 'permanent critique'. This non-transcendent and non-dialectical but nevertheless scarcely context-bound view of the reciprocal relation between critique and practical activity embodies an 'experimental attitude'. It links 'as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institutions and knowledge, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality' (FR 374).

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III Habermas' Approach

In contrast, the aim of Habermas' approach is just the opposite: to determine in that which is given to us as a limit what is really a limit necessary, universal and obligatory. Such a limit is legitimate because it cannot be otherwise. To try to transgress it is to think irrationally, to act immorally, or in general to commit a contradiction in the very perform­ ance of the violation of the conditions of knowledge or normative conduct (an objection Habermas raises against Foucault). Habermas' objective is, as Foucault puts it, to reconstruct the universal conditions of knowledge and action (WE 46). However, in order to elaborate and defend his research project against the objections raised to this kind of Kantian philosophy from Hegel down to contemporary contextualists and neo-Aristotelians (as he calls them) such as Foucault, Taylor and Rorty, who have emphasised the contextual, historical and contingent character of human understanding and action, he has reconceived Kant's approach in a number of fundamental ways. Once these legitimate criticisms of Kant's philosophy are taken into account it is still possible to generate a universal theory of action, reason, truth and morality, albeit one that is dialogical rather than monological, grounded in actual intersubjective practices of communication and socialisation rather than in a metaphysical philosophy of individual consciousness, context-dependent in a number of ways rather than independent, quasi-transcendental rather than transcendental, fallible rather than foundational, dependent on hypotheses generated in the empirical and reconstructive social sciences rather than free-standing, and open to revision rather than certain (MC, ]A). I will now summarise the major features of his universal theory of communicative action, communicative rationality and morality (discourse ethics) in turn and then his three main types of argument for them. Habermas' form of critical reflection begins with a type of universal pragmatics: a reconstruction of the universal communicative com­ petencies that make possible practical processes of reaching mutual under­ standing and agreement (Verstandigung). The German word Verstandigung is polysemic: it means 'understanding' and 'agreement' as well as the process of reaching understanding or agreement, and Habermas uses it in these different senses in different contexts. Although his aim is to reconstruct the universal conditions of knowledge and action of any form of subject, as Foucault's notes (WE 47), like Foucault he must begin from within the forms of intersubjectivity moderns bear - 'what they do and the way they do it' (WE 48). For Habermas this hermeneutic starting point is 'the community of those who speak and act with one another' (MC 19). Everyday communication among any form or forms of subjects involves two ways of coordinating communicatively mediated inter­ action: by consensus (Einverst'dndnis) or by influence (Eirtflufi). The former, communicative action, is claimed to be fundamental and primary relative

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to the latter (strategic action) and the 'only real alternative to exerting influence on one another in more or less coercive ways' (MC 19). 'Communicative action' is a universal form of interaction in which humans coordinate their plans of action through the exchange of com­ municative speech acts oriented towards reaching mutual under­ standing and agreement (Verstandigung) or (interchangeably) consensus (Einverstandnis). This mode of linguistic action (communicative action) is oriented to understanding and agreement by the validity claims reciprocally raised and acknowledged or declined. The successful uptake of a speech act of communicative action turns on the ability of the hearer to respond to the claim by answering 'yes' or 'no'. To put this in a slightly different way (for purposes of comparison below), there is always the possibility that the validity of an utterance of com­ municatively mediated interaction will be contested. Speaker and hearer are placed in a reflective relation of reciprocal obligation: the speaker to support her claim with reasons if challenged and the hearer either to accept the claim, to say yes, or to prepare to give reasons if he says no and so questions the claim. The communicators are accordingly obliged, if challenged, to enter an intersubjective and dialogical game of exchang­ ing reasons to (re)gain intersubjective recognition of the contested valid­ ity claim, or, put differently, they are oriented to reaching understanding and agreement with respect to the validity claim in question by the exchange of reasons or 'argumentation'. Communicative action is there­ fore internally related to reason-giving through the unavoidable raising of validity claims. According to Habermas, communicative speech acts raise three types of claim concerning their validity: propositional truth, normative right­ ness (justice) and truthfulness of the speaker. The three validity claims are universal and correspond to three attitudes (objectivating, normconformative and expressive), three worlds (objective, social and sub­ jective) and three areas of modern societies (science, law and morality, and aesthetics and ethics). Although every communicative speech act in any society raises these three validity claims, they are separated in this way only in 'modern' societies (or areas of modern societies). Following Piaget, Habermas calls the process of separation 'decentring' and, follow­ ing Weber, he associates it with modernisation. Participants in com­ munication who develop this form of subjectivity, in which they take up these three attitudes towards the world and exchange reasons in the way appropriate to each of the three validity claims, are said to have a 'decentred' consciousness or understanding of the world. I will refer to this as the 'decentred form of the subject' or the 'decentred subject'. 'Communicative rationality' refers to the 'forms of argumentation' by which the three types of validity claim contested in communicative action are reflectively redeemed through the intersubjective exchange of reasons aimed at reaching understanding and agreement. Practices of communicatively mediated interaction will be rational just in so far as

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the norms of coordination have been or could be agreed to by the communicators themselves through the appropriate forms of argumenta­ tion or 'practical discourses'. Each validity claim is internally related to a corresponding form of argumentation or rationality oriented to agree­ ment. However, only the validity claims to propositional truth and normative rightness are internally related to the idea of universal agree­ ment on the universal validity of what is agreed. That is, the test of truth and rightness is doubly universal: everyone in the discourse should agree that the proposition or norm is valid for everyone (Cooke, 1994: 10). Conversely, rational ethical argumentation, associated with the third validity claim, is always context-dependent and non-universal. It is a form of argumentation around the good rather than the right, evaluation rather than oughtness, and always takes place against a background structure of strong evaluators shared by the participants. So, for example, Taylor's and Nietzsche's philosophies, in which there is always a horizon of strong evaluation behind any critical reflection (including Habermas' reflection on normative rightness according to Taylor), or John Rawls' philosophy, where citizens reach overlapping agreement on norms of justice from within, rather than apart from, their different background conceptions of the good, are ethical not moral, and non-universal (JA 26-30, 69-76; RR 119-22). The rational form of argumentation to redeem a validity claim is based on the universal and idealised presuppositions rooted in the structures of all communicative action. These presuppositions can be reconstructed as the rules that constitute the universal, necessary and obligatory procedures of rational communication and action. The idealised pre­ suppositions that Habermas has reconstructed as argumentation rules to date can be divided into two kinds: conventional and post-conventional (Cooke, 1994: 29-51; Johri, 1997: 71-82). The conventional rules include logical-semantic rules of consistency, such as every speaker who applies predicate F to object A must be prepared to apply F to all other objects resembling A in all relevant respects and different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings; rules of mutual recognition among participants, such as every speaker must assert only what she really believes and a person who disputes a proposition or norm not under discussion must provide a reason for wanting to do so; and rules of reciprocity, such as no relevant argument is suppressed or excluded, no force except of the better argument is applied and the participants are motivated by concern for the better argument. Communicative action, as we have seen, is a form of interaction coordinated consensually by the participants, who are under an obliga­ tion to suspend the play of power or influence and give reasons, if necessary, for and against the validity of a norm of coordination. In normal circumstances of communicative action validity claims are not questioned in an open-ended way. A background horizon or consensus

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on facts, shared norms and values provides the conventional ground against which inter subjective reflection and exchange of reasons in the course of action coordination take place. That is, this conventional consensus provides the two types of limit (what is taken for granted or seen as universal, necessary and self-evident) (MC 58-9). The first or conventional kind of argumentation is undemanding enough (with the qualifications discussed below) to be a rough idealisation of a wide variety of human forms of conventional communicative action and rationality across most known cultures, since what counts as a 'relevant argument' is, in the context, given by the conventional consensus. It is generalisable, one might say, in Foucault's sense of being a fairly general feature of forms of human organisation. The second or 'post-conventional' idealised presuppositions of com­ municative action are more demanding and more specific. They define three further procedures of argumentation that 'burst asunder' and 'transcend' any conventional consensus by opening all validity claims to critical evaluation by all involved (PDM 322). Only these fully operation­ alise the 'element of unconditionality' that is 'built into the structure of action oriented toward reaching understanding'. It is this 'unconditional element that makes the validity that we claim for our views different from the mere de facto acceptance of habitual practices' (MC 19). Although they are universally implicit in all forms of communicative action (MC 100), they are acted on only at the stage of post-conventional communicative action where validity is explicitly related to universality. These stronger idealised presuppositions include: that every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in discourse (the principle of universal moral respect); everyone is allowed to question and introduce any assertion whatever and express his or her attitudes, desires and needs (the principle of egalitarian reciprocity); and no speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercis­ ing these rights (the principle of non-coercion). They entail that no claim is immune to critical evaluation in principle by anyone in accordance with the conventional and post-conventional procedures, whereas in a conventional discussion what count as a relevant argument and a relevant participant constrain the discussion. Accordingly, communicative rationality, as Cooke concludes, 'gains its critical thrust only in' the 'practices of modern lifeworlds in which all ultimate sources of validity external to human argumentation [of the post-conventional kind] have been called into question' (Cooke, 1994: 34). Finally, Habermas derives two principles of argumentation from the two types of universal presuppositions of communicative action that complete communicative rationality with respect to claims of normative rightness. Principle D is a dialogical reformulation of the Roman legal maxim that what affects all must be approved by all: 'Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse'. Principle

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U is more specific and is derived from the post-conventional presupposi­ tions. It states that a norm is valid only if 'all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be antici­ pated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation)' (MC 65-6, original emphasis). Principle U is a reformulation of Kant's categorical imperative in terms of dialogical argumentation plus the addition of (non-Kantian) interests and consequences (MC 65-7): the categorical imperative needs to be reformulated as follows: 'Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm/

Principle U, in conjunction with the other rules of argumentation, ensures impartiality by compelling each participant to think about the given situation and anticipated consequences from the perspective of every other participant, a process of ideal role-taking Habermas calls 'reversibility'. As the discussion proceeds the participants gradually criticise partial descriptions of the situation and work up to a 'we perspective' in terms of the core of 'generalisable interests' acceptable to all (RR 118). The form of argumentation (communicative rationality) over the rightness of a contested norm defined by the conventional and postconventional rules and principles U and D is called 'discourse ethics' (or, more correctly, a 'discourse theory of morality'). It is a universal pro­ cedural theory of morality or 'justice', for a norm agreed to under these conditions is 'just' (JA 29): That a norm is just or in the general interest means nothing more than that it is worthy of recognition or is valid. Justice is not something material, not a determinate Value', but a dimension of validity. Just as descriptive statements can be true, and thus express what is the case, so too normative statements can be right and express what has to be done.

It is a narrow theory of morality since it deals only with questions of justice (rightness) in the Kantian sense: that is, questions of the justifica­ tion, not the application, of norms of justice that are capable of being formulated in ought propositions (normative) without reference to any conception of the good and agreed to by the procedures of open-ended questioning. Moreover, unlike conventional argumentation over a norm, discourse ethics requires that all the participants accept the decentred worldview over all others and so conduct themselves in accord with this decentred form of subjectivity.

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Habermas is aware of course that the vast majority of dialogues about norms of coordination in morality and politics fall outside this narrow range, into the spheres of ethics, pragmatics, application and, especially, dialogues in which issues of morality, ethics and pragmatics are insepar­ able. Nevertheless, it is necessary to restrict universal morality to this narrow range, for only questions of this kind can be answered in an impartial manner (JA 151, original emphasis): If we do not want to settle questions concerning the normative regulation of our everyday coexistence by open or covert force - by coercion, influence, or the power of the stronger interest - but by the unforced conviction of a rationally motivated agreement, then we must concentrate on those questions that are amenable to impartial judgment. We can't expect to find a generally binding answer when we ask what is good for me or for us or for them; instead, we must ask what is equally good for all. This 'moral point of view' throws a sharp, but narrow, spotlight that picks out from the mass of evacuative questions practical conflicts that can be resolved by appeal to a generalizable interest; in other words, questions of justice.

This form of philosophy is critically related to practice in the following ways. First, as we have seen, the validation of contested norms is performed by the agents affected. Secondly, Habermas realises that only a very few, highly abstract norms could meet the demanding conditions of discourse ethics, perhaps some propositions phrased in terms of universal human rights and duties. Nevertheless and thirdly, there is a need for such a universal and procedurally neutral morality given the increasing demand to coordinate action by consensus among humans with diverse value orientations. Finally, the universally valid forms of argumentation of the decentred understanding of the world can also be used as a 'regulative idea' in morality and politics to guide the evaluation of existing practical systems of communicative action or forms of subjectivity and so bring to critical light degrees of irrationality, disrespect, inequality, coercion and lack of autonomy in the present - the traditional aim of critical theory (JA 51; Cooke, 1994: 1). Now, I want to sketch briefly the three arguments Habermas advances to lend plausibility to the universality of this form of communicative action, rationality and morality: a transcendental-pragmatic argument and two logic-of-development arguments, one relating to individuals and the other to societies. Recall that his theory is not based on a Kantian transcendental deduction and it is not certain. It is fallible and finds support in various kinds of philosophical arguments and research in the social sciences. The first line of defence is a form of transcendentalpragmatic argument developed by Kar1-Otto Apel (1987) which aims to show that any competent communicative actor entering into communica­ tion already presupposes the validity of all the rules and principles of communicative rationality. An actor who rejects any of them (the 'sceptic') can be shown to perform a contradiction. 'A "performative

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contradiction" occurs when a constative speech act k(p) rests on non­ contingent presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition' (MC 80). I will discuss this further in section VI. Habermas recognises that his transcendental-pragmatic argument is inconclusive. He buttresses it with two further lines of argument that the decentred view of the world is the highest stage of individual and social development (that is, to recall, the differentiation of the world into three domains of validity, corresponding to the external, social and subjective dimensions of reality, with their own standards of validation, and the recognition that no claim is in principle immune to criticism within the appropriate forms of argumentation). The first is a reconstruction of Lawrence Kohlberg's stages theory of individual moral development and Piaget's stages theory of cognitive development that purports to show that the stages are internally linked by a logic of development with the post-conventional rules and principles of discourse ethics at the apex (MC 116-94). Kohlberg's transition from adolescence to adulthood, for example, is interpreted as the transition from conventional (ethics) to post-conventional argumentation (morality). 'Viewed in terms of a progressively decentred understanding of the world, the stages of interaction express a development that is directed and cumulative' (MC 168, original emphasis; Johri, 1997: 119). The second is a parallel set of arguments about the internal logic of world-historical development of societies or 'worldviews' from primitive or neolithic through traditional and developed to modem societies with a decentred worldview (MC 127). These ambitious logic-of-development arguments aim to show that individual and social evolution moves through progressives stages of development, the stages can be ranked hierarchically by neutral criteria, and the decentred worldview Habermas associates with modernity represents the highest stage. These kinds of developmental argument have been used since the late seventeenth century to try to establish the superiority and universal significance of European ways and they have often been employed to legitimise European imperialism. They have come under sustained criticism in this century on two main counts. First, do the data manifest a progressive development or are they arranged in accord with a developmental framework which is only one among many possible interpretations of the data? Wittgenstein famously raised this objection to Frazer's Golden Bough (1993) [1890]. 'The historical explana­ tion, the explanation as an hypothesis of development/ Wittgenstein writes, 'is only one way of assembling the data' (Wittgenstein, 1993:131). Carol Gilligan has raised a similar objection to Kohlberg and Habermas, pointing out that the empirical evidence suggests that the postconventional procedures are not impartial but exhibit a male partiality (Gilligan, 1982; Benhabib, 1993: 148-78). This debate cannot be settled by recourse to the evidence, for the evidence is gathered and assembled partly in light of the hypothesis. Accordingly, Habermas and defenders of developmental logics have

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sought to establish analytically neutral criteria for objectively assessing different stages (forms of consciousness or worldviews) and this has given rise to a large literature on rationality and cross-cultural under­ standing. The problem with this line of defence, as Rorty and Foucault have pointed out, is that it is prone to circularity, to Eurocentrism or, to use Habermas' own term, 'presentism': the stages are described and ranked by criteria that are not neutral but partial in some way to the purported highest stage (Schmid, 1982). Habermas is well aware of this problem (MC 210): An ethics is termed universalist when it alleges that this (or a similar) moral principle, far from reflecting the intuitions of a particular culture or epoch, is valid universally. As long as the moral principle is not justified . . . the ethnocentric fallacy looms large. This is the most difficult part of ethics.

In response to this second well-known objection to developmental logics Habermas argues, on the basis of a lengthy analysis of articles in the rationality debate in cross-cultural anthropology, that worldviews can be compared neutrally in terms of their capacity to solve similar problems reflexively and that the greater 'openness' and 'capacity for learning' of the decentred worldview show it to be cognitively superior to, and the rational development of, other worldviews (TC I 62-8). The line of argument that these criteria are hypothesis-neutral, like his earlier arguments, is 'suggestive' but far from conclusive. As Mira Johri con­ cludes in her careful analysis of Habermas' developmental arguments, the problem of presentism remains unresolved. Habermas 'extracts from the articles studied certain elements that could be construed as support­ ing' his position. 'However, they certainly need not be construed as so doing, and were not in fact so construed by their authors' (Johri, 1997: 214). In short, the claims to universal validity of his theory remain, as he readily acknowledges, suggestive, inconclusive and fallible. IV Transition to Foucault's Four Reciprocal Objections Although both approaches work within the general problem of limits which has characterised two schools of European philosophy since the eighteenth century, they take up very different orientations towards limits. Foucault's approach aims to enable us to think and act differently by means of critical histories that exhibit the singularity, contingency and arbitrary constraints of our forms of subjectivity. Habermas' approach aims to discover a universal form of the subject, the decentred subject, implicit in our forms of subjectivity, by means of universal pragmatics and developmental logic and to use it as a regulative idea to evaluate existing practices. These two philosophical orientations are not neces­ sarily opposed. They could complement one another; one clearing away

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the contingent and the other explicating the universal so, as Foucault puts it, obedience would be 'founded on autonomy itself'. On Foucault's interpretation, Kant saw the two critiques in this complementary way. 'It would be, I believe, easy to show that for Kant himself, this true courage of knowing that was invoked by the Aufklarung [the Enlightenment ethos], this same courage of knowing consists in recognizing the limits of knowledge [the Kantian theory]; and it would be easy to show that for him autonomy is far from being opposed to obedience to sovereigns' (WC 387). Things have fallen out rather differently over the last two hundred years. As Foucault illustrates in 'What is critique?', the relations between these two types of critical reflection have taken a variety of forms. In the posthumously published draft introduction to the second volume of the The History of Sexuality, he entertained the possibility that they could coexist as two different and more or less disengaged research orienta­ tions (FR 333-9). However, this would occur only if they agreed on which limits are historical and which are universal. No such consensus exists. Each claims the same limits as either universal or historical. Consequently, in the published introduction he takes the view that we see in 'What is enlightenment?' There is a relation of critical engagement between them over the character of limits in the present that is unavoid­ able and should be elucidated reciprocally. This relation of critical engagement is manifested in the comments of Habermas and Foucault on each other's work and it runs throughout the humanities and social sciences in the tension between general and universal approaches. Foucault seeks to show that the limits Habermas puts forward as universal, necessary and obligatory are singular, con­ tingent and the product of arbitrary constraints, and hence can and should be transgressed in the name of freedom. Habermas seeks to show that, in transgressing them, Foucault is caught in 'a self-referential denial of universal validity claims' (PDM 98). As David Owen states, it is not enough to say that Habermas fails to demonstrate the universality of his theory of communicative action, rationality and morality, and so we can carry on our genealogical studies, or that Foucault fails because he violates universal rules of rationality in his studies, so we can carry on our universal pragmatics, for neither denies these claims (Owen, 1996: 32). Habermas' approach is a fallible research project that exists in a space of serious objections and the very aim of Foucault's approach is to transgress rules that are claimed to be untransgressable. On either Foucault's or Habermas' conception of reason we have an obligation to respond to the challenges each approach raises to the claims of the other. Several commentators have either elaborated on Habermas' criticisms of Foucault or defended Foucault against them. I would now like to examine the strength of Foucault's four objections to Habermas' approach and his reasons for preferring his own.

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V Objection One: Habermas' Approach Is Less Critical

Foucault's first objection is that Habermas' sharply contrasting aim and technique render his approach less 'critical' than the Enlightenment attitude. This is not an objection to the search for universal structures of thought and action by means of transcendental-pragmatic arguments and the reconstructive sciences, but only to the claim that this tradition of philosophy furnishes an effective critique of limits in the present. He has two different reasons for this objection. To see Foucault's first reason, recall that Habermas' philosophy aims to clarify and substantiate a universal form of the subject, the decentred subject. A person who recognises herself as a decentred subject has accepted and internalised the decentred view of the world, the view that 'reason has split into three moments'. She understands the world to be differentiating into a 'totality' of three domains of validity corresponding to the external, social and subjective dimensions of reality, and these to the three moments of 'modern science, positive law and posttraditional morality, and autonomous art and institutionalised art criticism'(MC 17). She sorts questions into one of these three compartments, corresponding to claims of truth, justice and truthfulness, and validates or invalidates them in accord with the forms of rationality uniquely appropriate to each. These are procedures of intersubjective argumentation within which the exchange of reasons for and against proceed until agreement is reached, except in the third, subjective dimension where a horizon of shared values is not questioned. She sees this organisation of conscious­ ness as the apex of individual and historical development. It is both the standard against which other forms of self-consciousness and cultures are judged as less developed and the three categories of 'cognitiveinstrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive' against which trends in modernity are judged as pathological or emancipatory (MC 17-20). The decentred form of subjectivity is accepted as universal without certain proof, which is unobtainable, or philosophical justification. The 'eminent trends towards compartmentalization' into the three worlds, 'constituting as they do the hallmark of modernity, can do very well without philosophical justification'. The roles of the philosopher are, rather, to provide 'description and analysis' of their defining features; to act as a 'mediating interpreter' who guards against the 'isolation' of 'science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures' and the 'colonisation' of the moral-practical and artistic-aesthetic by the cognitiveinstrumental, and who works towards 'a new balance between the separated moments of reason . . . in communicative everyday life' (MC 17-19). Habermas' approach is 'critical' in the sense that it describes and analyses a 'regulative idea' (JA 51) - the decentred subject - against which limits in the present can be judged as to their level of freedom and

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autonomy. However, Foucault's objection is that it is not critical of its own standard, the decentred form of the subject, and so fails to meet the second condition of a modem critical philosophy, that it reflect critically on its own favoured form of reflection. One of the more provocative ways he put this is the following (UP 9; my italics): In what does it [philosophy today] consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how tofind it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity.

This is the sort of objection that Habermas raises against conventional theories: they presuppose a conventional horizon and so legitimise what is already known. He tries to avoid it by advancing a dialogical and procedural theory in which subjects themselves reach agreement on what is true, just and good. Nevertheless, his approach legitimises 'what is already known' by accepting the processes of decentred subjectivisation as given and self-evident; in Foucault's terms, what we 'silently think' (UP 9). 'Since the dawn of modernity in the eighteenth century', Habermas states, 'culture has generated those structures of rationality that Max Weber and Emil Lask conceptualised as cultural value spheres. Their existence calls for description and analysis, not philosophical justification.' The 'sons and daughters of modernity have progressively learned to differentiate their culture tradition in terms of these three aspects of rationality such that they deal with issues of truth, justice and taste discretely rather than simultaneously' (MC 17). Discourse ethics also legitimises what is already known in the sense that it will at best, according to Habermas, justify some 'basic human rights' (MC 105, 208), one of the most familiar features of the present. Moreover, Habermas' philosophy tells people 'where their truth is and how to find it'. It tells them to sort their questions into three types and to exchange reasons in accord with the three forms of argumentation, on the ground that this is simply a description and analysis of the universal rationality implicit in how they already tend to think and act. In so doing, the approach starts from, rather than questions, modern processes of subjectivisation. We have seen that this initial disposition to legitimise rather than question the decentred subject is further reinforced by the aim and techniques of Habermas' approach. He sets out to develop a genuinely critical form of philosophy, one which would not take any particular form of the subject for granted. Although he accounts for the decentred subject in terms of intersubjective processes of individual and societal development, and so avoids a 'subject-centred philosophy' in the sense of an ahistorical and monological philosophy of consciousness, the account is designed to describe and defend, rather than question, this form of the subject. Arguments are presented for it being the common element

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implicit in any form of the subject, the highest stage of development of communicative action and rationality, and the regulative idea against which other forms of the subject are evaluated. The transcendentalpragmatic, developmental and reconstructive arguments are employed to support and defend its presumed universality. As many commentators have noted, the arguments for the universality of the decentred subject are structured in a way that insulates it from criticism. An interlocutor who questions using the decentred worldview as the standard against which to judge forms of reasoning that anthro­ pologists describe in other cultures, for example, is characterised as an irrational relativist (a position Habermas ascribes to Winch). The reason for this appears to be Habermas' belief that only modern societies have developed 'second-order concepts' (forms of reflection on their own cultural practices) and this achievement leads to a 'decentred under­ standing of the world' that 'demands similar processes of learning and adaptation of any culture that crosses it' (JA 157, original emphasis). If these developmental and convergence hypotheses are true, then 'we must take account of an asymmetry that arises between the interpretive capacities of different cultures in virtue of the fact that some have introduced "second-order concepts" whereas others have not' (ibid.). As a result Habermas confesses that he cannot take seriously those con­ textual critics who remain unconvinced of the developmental hypotheses and so engage in more symmetrical forms of cross-cultural dialogue and reciprocal judgement (JA 157-8): According to the contextualists, the transition to postmetaphysical concepts of nature and posttraditional conceptions of law and morality [the 'decentred understanding of the world'] is characteristic of just one tradition among others and by no means signifies that tradition as such becomes reflexive. I don't see how this thesis could be seriously defended. I think that Max Weber was fundamentally right, especially in the careful universalistic interpretation that Schluchter has given his thesis of the universal cultural significance of Occidental rationalism.

The problem with this non-serious attitude to his critics is that it presupposes what should be open to testing, that the developmental hypotheses are 'fundamentally right', thereby shielding his preferred second-order concepts from criticism. Furthermore, participants in practical discourses cannot question the procedures of argumentation appropriate to the three validity claims because to do so would be to commit a performative contradiction. Simone Chambers and Seyla Benhabib deny this last point. They suggest that the claim that reason has split into three moments may itself be challenged in practical discourses (Benhabib, 1992: 29-38; Chambers, 1996: 158-9). However, if the categories and procedures can be chal­ lenged from within then, by definition, they are not universal. The

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'performative' contradiction is just a good old non-metaphysical contra­ diction of a rule of one type of argumentation or one set of categories among others. To concede this is to agree with Foucault, Toulmin, Taylor and other contextual rationalists. Benhabib acknowledges this (by aban­ doning U) and Chambers treats the decentred worldview as one 'inter­ pretation' of modernity, thus implying that it can be compared to other interpretations rather than providing the standards of comparison (Chambers, 1996: 43-56). If, conversely, the categories and procedures cannot be challenged without committing an irrationality, a performative contradiction, which is surely Habermas' own view, then there is no place within the theory to take up a critical stance towards this form of the subject. At the centre of Habermas' form of reflection is a form of the subject which is taken for granted at the outset and protected from, rather than opened to criticism by the forms of analyses characteristic of his philosophy. This is not only a failure to be critical in the sense above but also in Habermas' own terms. His philosophy remains 'context-bound'. The three categories and forms of argumentation of the decentred subject can be employed to 'burst asunder' the 'provinciality' of other forms of the subject (PDM 322). Yet this decentred worldview is not transcended: it provides the taken-for-granted background against which questioning takes place in practical discourses as well as in Habermas' philosophy itself. From Foucault's perspective, therefore, Habermas' theory is of the same general kind as other subject-centred philosophies, such as phenomenology and existentialism, even though the form of the subject is procedural rather than substantive. Foucault was highly critical of this kind of philosophy, especially when the form of the subject that is defended as universally valid and beyond the need for justification is the product of the very processes of European modernisation that are 'so universalizing, so dominating with respect to others' (WE 47). These are precisely the processes of subjectivisation that philosophy ought to take the most critical stance towards and enable us to free ourselves from, at least in thought (TS 11): The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are a part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them any more. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people think are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

This line of argument would not be a sound objection to Habermas' philosophy and a good reason to prefer Foucault's ethos if the decentred

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subject could be shown to be universal. Habermas concedes that its universality cannot be proven with certainty. The arguments he marshals are, at best, suggestive, supportive and fallible. As we have seen, they are highly contentious and widely doubted hypotheses about the nature of truth, meaning, understanding, consensus, justice, modernisation, moral psychology, human cultures and much else. Be this as it may, it is not the tendentious status of Habermas' decentred hypothesis that constitutes the reason for Foucault's scepticism here, although it is a factor. It is not 'ludicrous' to defend a dubious hypothesis against many critics. Rather, it is the inability to think against what is given and defended as universal in this decentred 'game of truth'. After stating his objection to the legitimising kind of philosophy, Foucault explains what he thinks philosophy should do (UP 9): [philosophy] is entitled to explore what might be changed in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. The 'essay' - which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication - is the living substance of philosophy.

The objection is that there is no means of testing the decentred subject - the 'most familiar landscape' of modern subjectivity - internal to Habermas' philosophy. This is what is uncritical about it. Foucault suggests that the way to test it is through 'a knowledge that is foreign to it'; for example, through the historical study of different forms of subjectivity, as Foucault and the Cambridge School do, or through inventing different forms of subjectivity as objects of comparison, as Wittgenstein and analytical philosophers do. Such a test would deter­ mine which features of decentred subjectivity are universal and which are contingent. It is difficult to see how Habermas would build such a critical test into his approach. When a philosopher looks at different forms of the subject and their rationalities through Habermas' categories the decentred form of representation of the data strongly predisposes her to disregard what is 'foreign' (different, historical, contingent) and to look for what is presumed to be universal (the three validity claims) implicit in the 'confused' practices. For example, Habermas illustrates this methodo­ logical disposition in his interpretation of Peter Strawson's famous analysis of Freedom and resentment (1974). In contrast to the approach of Foucault, hermeneuticists and Strawson himself, when confronted with a moral or political struggle, Habermas tells us to look beneath the actual terms in which the conflict is problematised by and has significance for the agents involved and discern 'the violation of an underlying normative expectation that is valid not only for ego and alter but also for all members of a social group or even, in the case of moral norms in the strict sense, for all competent actors. It is only their claim to general

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validity that gives an interest, a volition, or a norm the dignity of moral authority' (MC 48-9, original emphases). Here, his deontological form of problematisation is not held provisionally as an initial way of inter­ preting the conflict, to be tested dialogically against how the participants themselves problematise it as a conflict with moral dignity, but pre­ supposed as the universal form of problematisation that underlies their non-universal 'ethical' characterisation of the conflict and gives it what­ ever moral dignity it has. Again, when presented with a form of rationality foreign to the three decentred forms (as, for example, Winch's understanding of a primitive society) or to one category of them (as, for example, Gilligan's different interpretation of moral development), Habermas does not distance him­ self from his own hypothesis, provisionally holding it as one among other forms of rationality and testing it by means of, say, Foucault's reciprocal elucidation, Taylor's perspicuous contrast, Rawls' reflective equilibrium or Putnam's internal realism. Rather, he judges the foreign rationality relative to the decentred hypothesis as a regulative idea, so the foreign rationality is, by hypothesis, irrational or in the wrong category (TCAI 43-74; MC 179-81). He replies that he cannot do other­ wise without performing a contradiction (MC 81). This begs the critical question. To return the charge Habermas levelled at Foucault's earlier writings, there appears to be an uncritical 'presentism' in Habermas' philosophy. Richard Blaug, after a broad survey of the work of Habermas and his followers, corroborates Foucault's objection (1997: 109): We are thus redirected in our efforts towards an exploration of the sense in which our existing political order is legitimate. This is, of course, an entirely valid project, and is presently being fruitfully pursued by both Habermas and a number of his commentators. But the study of a political order's extant legitimacy is a far cry from using the theory in order to design legitimate democratic institutions which may be quite different than those we currently have.

The second reason Foucault thinks that Habermas' approach is less critical than his own is that if, for the sake of argument, we accept rather than test the decentred subject, we then find that its 'abstract' character renders it less effective as a critique than a specific and historical approach (PP 83): experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism. For centuries, religion couldn't bear having its history told. Today, our schools of rationality balk at having their history written, which is no doubt significant.

Many contextualists have raised objections to the abstractness of Habermas' philosophy as well as to the Kantian tradition in general, and

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Habermas has replied to some of them (MC 205-7). Foucault's objection is complementary yet distinct, since it gains its rational force through the reciprocal contrast with his own approach. In Berkeley in 1983 Foucault recounted an earlier conversation with Habermas in Paris where Habermas mentioned how disappointed he was to find that one of his professors who was an illustrious Kantian had nevertheless written articles in support of the Nazis in the 1930s. Foucault mentions a similar experience with Max Pohlenz, a great stoic who also supported the Nazis. What this illustrates, according to Foucault, is the 'tenuous "analytic" link between a philosophical concep­ tion and the concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it'. The '"best" theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes such as "human­ ism" can be used to any end whatever' (FR 374; TS 15). The lesson to be drawn from this experience is to make critical philosophy less abstract by tying it as closely as possible to specific struggles (FR 374): a demanding prudent, 'experimental' attitude is necessary; at every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, with what one is. . . . I have always been concerned with link­ ing together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analysis of power relations, institutions, and knowledges, to the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality.

There is considerable evidence that Foucault's specific approach does provide an effective critique in a number of specific struggles in contem­ porary societies (Barry et al., 1996; Burchell, 1991; Hekman, 1995; Peterson and Bunth, 1997). The price of this commitment to 'partial and local inquiry or test' Foucault acknowledges is that 'we have to give up ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits' (WE 47). Conversely, in Habermas' case, there is some evidence that the cost of elaborating a more abstract theory in order to provide a compre­ hensive sketch of our universal limits has been to lessen its critical effectiveness. In their survey of the application of critical theory to empirical work, Ruane and Todd conclude (1988), as Ricardo Blaug summarises, that it takes place at 'a vertiginous level of abstraction' and 'tends to generate something that in fact yields yet more theory, rather than anything practical (Blaug, 1997: 106). In a more sympathetic survey, Blaug (1997) suggests that discourse ethics is more effective when used to interpret and evaluate deliberative democratic practices and the normative con­ tent of constitutional law, as Habermas suggests in Between Facts and Norms and as Benhabib (1986), Chambers (1996), Cohen (1991) and Ingram (1993) have argued. Yet, as Blaug comments, 'something rather strange is happening here. For all this talk of the public sphere never quite comes down to earth. Having spent many pages unpacking the

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nuances of his normative argument, a quite extraordinary number of books and articles on Habermasian theory end with a somewhat nebulous benediction to its political promise.' He goes on to cite a number of examples of 'praise . . . heaped on the public sphere' and observes that there seems 'to be a kind of missing tier of theory - this being an account of what normatively grounded institutions might be like and how they might actually function'. He concludes, just as one might expect from Foucault's lesson above, that 'the limits placed on the theory, and its abstract and universal nature, combine to restrict its practical implications' (1997: 112). True to form, Foucault sketches a genealogy of this difference between them. He associates the drive towards abstract and universal theory with the 'universal intellectual' and the specific, practice-based critique with the 'specific intellectual' (FR 67-75). The universal intellectual seeks to speak about society as a whole and what is 'just and true for all' on the model of 'knowledge and legitimation' whereas the specific intellectual speaks about singular games of truth, relations of power and ethics of the practical systems in which she is engaged, their historical formation and possibilities of modification. The universal intellectual derives from the jurist and the juridical tradition in the West (FR 70). Specific intellec­ tuals have become fairly prominent since the Second World War, with natural and social scientists speaking out against nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, medical abuse, cultural survival and the like (FR 71-2). Notwithstanding, as Foucault explains in 'What is critique?', the specific intellectual derives from the early modern humanists and natural lawyers who wrote critical histories of specific oppressive institu­ tions of governance, such as the Church, monarchies, unjust constitu­ tions and the governance of women by men. Their aim was not so much to elaborate a universal theory of justice as to criticise the excesses and arbitrariness of specific forms of governance and so to practise an 'art of not being governed so much' or of 'not being governed in such and such a manner' (WC 384). This early modern humanist tradition of critique tied to the modification of specific forms of governance provided the background to Kant's Enlightenment attitude in 'What is enlighten­ ment?' and thus initiated the tradition in which Foucault places his own work (WC 385-98). The universal-juridical tradition furnished the back­ ground to Kant's formal critique of the limits of knowledge and so con­ stitutes the basis of the tradition in which Habermas works (WC 393). The point of the genealogy is to provide an historical account of the constitution of himself and Habermas as philosopher-subjects and, sec­ ondly, to introduce another reason why Habermas' approach tends to be ineffective as a critique. The universal intellectual, in so far as she derives from the jurist and the juridical tradition, abstracts and universalises from specific juridical practices of morality and politics and their tradi­ tions of interpretation in the West, especially the natural law tradition. Habermas acknowledges this historical point. As a result, her language

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of description - the language of universal norms and procedures definitive of the decentred worldview - is ineffective not only because it is abstract but also because it tends to misrepresent other, non-juristic forms of knowledge, relations of power and practices of ethics in which we are constituted and governed as subjects (see section VII). Finally, the genealogy also exposes and frees us from the conventional understanding of Habermas as a humanist and Foucault as an anti­ humanist. If we follow the conventional meaning of 'humanism' today, namely a theory that takes a form of the subject in the present as a normative ideal to be defended against all comers, then, as we have seen, the conventional understanding is accurate. The decentred subject, although a juridical subject, plays exactly this role in Habermas' theory. This is what Foucault means by 'humanism' or the humanist 'Man' of the modern human sciences when he criticises it throughout his writings (TS 15; FR 44-5): Through these different practices - psychological, medical, penitential, educa­ tional - a certain idea or model of humanity was developed, and now this idea of man has become normative, self-evident and is supposed to be universal. Humanism may not be universal but may be quite relative to a certain situation. This does not mean that we have to get rid of what we call human rights or freedom, but that we can't say that freedom or human rights has to be limited at certain frontiers. . . . What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom.

If, alternatively, we look at 'humanism' historically and critically (as Quentin Skinner (1996) and John Pocock (1975) have done), it derives from the singular tradition of thought and practice called 'classical humanism' which was developed during the Renaissance by writeractivists and based on the classical authors of the Roman world, such as Seneca, Cicero and Quintilian. In relation to classical humanism, the conventional understanding of Habermas as a humanist and Foucault as an anti-humanist is the wrong way round. Classic humanism developed in opposition to the universal natural law tradition. The humanists criticised natural lawyers for their 'abstractness' and their inaccurate and anachronistic universalisations from the peculiarities of current juridical practices and traditions of Roman and canon law. In opposition, they put historical, contextual and interpretive studies at the centre of their educational system, the 'humanities', and used them comparatively to gain a critical distance from their own legal and political institutions and traditions and to make generalisations. They derived this philosophical exercise of disengagement from the present by means of comparative historical and cultural studies from their interpretation of the classic authors, Seneca in particular, similar to the way in which Foucault derived his philosophical exercise of 'freeing oneself from oneself' and 'thinking differently' from the same authors (UP 9-10). Finally, they

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turned their humanist studies to the criticism of specific forms of governance and ethics in their Italian city-states and North European monarchies, in opposition to the abstract treatises on natural rights and duties of the natural law tradition, and developed a conception of concrete civic liberty in opposition to the abstract freedom of the natural lawyers (Skinner, 1978, 1996). These humanist studies are in their turn, according to Foucault himself, an early part of the tradition in which he writes and they provided him with an alternative to the juridical conception of the subject and power (govemmentality), just as the classical authors provided him with an alternative to the juridical conception of morality (ethics).

VI Objection Two: Foucault's Approach Is Reasonable Foucault's objection that Habermas' approach is uncritical of the de­ centred subject would be stronger if he could test it critically himself and show in what Habermas gives to us as 'universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints' (WE 45). This would not only enhance the criticism of Habermas' theory but also illustrate the effectiveness of Foucault's. He does this by using his approach to show that some allegedly non-contingent presuppositions of communicative rationality are historically contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints. To do so he must first respond to Habermas' claim that it is irrational to challenge the presuppositions of communicative rationality by showing that it is reasonable to look on the three forms of rationality definitive of the decentred worldview, not as identical to reason itself, but as three forms of rationality among others. Any form of communicative action involves presuppositions that are conditions of its possibility. A large part of research in the human sciences is concerned with making conditions of possibility explicit. Foucault's approach, for example, makes explicit the presuppositions of different problematisations (of Greek sexuality, nineteenth-century language, labour and life, madness in different periods, and so on). This kind of historical pragmatics consists in the analysis of the specific presuppositions of different modes of discourse in so far as they consist in solutions to a general problem. As he summarises (FR 389), the work of a history of thought would be to rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions the general form of problematization that has made them possible - even in their very opposition; or what has made possible the transformation of the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions. This development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to

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produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought.

Now, Habermas associates this kind of analysis with R.G. Collingwood, Wittgenstein and their followers in England (such as Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School), who, like Foucault and Canguilhem in France, developed a form of analysis of the presuppositions one is committed to in virtue of raising and answering a specific intersubjective range of questions (MC 83). Habermas' transcendental-pragmatic analysis of conditions of possibility differs from the family of historical forms of analysis of Foucault, Collingwood and others in two crucial respects. First, he is concerned exclusively with the procedural presuppositions of forms of argumentation, rather than with whatever the presuppositions of a specific form of problematisation or language game might be and thus he is closer, as he notes, to Stephen Toulmin than to Collingwood or Foucault (MC 50-7; Toulmin, 1984; Toulmin and Jonsen, 1988). Secondly, and more importantly, he is not concerned with the (contingent) pre­ suppositions specific to this or that form of argumentation, as Toulmin, Collingwood, Foucault and the Cambridge School are, but with the non­ contingent presuppositions common to all rational forms of argumenta­ tion. For the presuppositions to be 'non-contingent' and so universal they must meet two conditions: they must be such a general feature of human life that they cannot be replaced by a functional equivalent and they must be shown to be unavoidable. The transcendental-pragmatic reconstruction aims to show that the conventional and post-conventional rules and principles D and U are the non-contingent presuppositions of communicative rationality, in the sense of being 'irreplaceable' and 'unavoidable', and therefore the transgression of any of them would, by definition, constitute a 'performative contradiction' (MC 85; Johri, 1997: 59). The way in which the historical pragmatics of Foucault, Collingwood and Toulmin raises an objection to Habermas' type of transcendental pragmatics has been somewhat obscured by the manner in which Habermas sets up the debate between himself and his opponents. He advances his argument against a 'sceptic' who rejects all the rules, conventional and post-conventional, and principles U and D, and he appears to believe that Foucault is this kind of universal sceptic (MC 76-109, 99). Foucault, he says, is caught in 'a self-referential denial of universal validity claims' (PDM 286). However, as we have seen in the earlier exposition of Foucault's object of study - forms of problem­ atisation - it is no part of his approach (or those of Toulmin and Collingwood) to deny that communicative speech acts involving non­ prudential 'ought' propositions commit the actors to some form or other of reason-giving and, eo ipso, of mutual recognition and reciprocity. Relations of communication involve 'reciprocity', Foucault states in explicit agreement with Habermas (SP 218). In virtue of exchanging

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speech acts of this kind, humans are willy-nilly under what Foucault calls an 'obligation of truth', to search for the truth by exchanging reasons fairly (FF 15). Historically, this obligation of truth 'has taken on a variety of different forms' and Foucault sees his entire work as a history of how the human subject enters into and plays these obligatory 'games of truth' (FF 1-2; UP 6). Foucault does not deny that there may be some non-contingent rules common to all games of truth. He writes that 'singular forms of experi­ ence', such as historically different practices of communication, 'may perfectly well harbour universal structures'. To study what is singular and historically contingent about a communicative practice 'does not mean that it is deprived of all universal form, but instead that the putting into play of these universal forms is itself historical' (FR 335). But the innumerable attempts to deduce or reconstruct these universal forms in a set of necessary and sufficient transhistorical rules have so far not succeeded: 'what has always characterised our society, since the time of the Greeks, is the fact that we do not have a complete and peremptory definition of the games of truth which would be allowed, to the exclu­ sion of all others'. It follows from this obvious feature of our world that there 'is always a possibility, in a given game of truth, to discover something else and to more or less change such and such a rule and sometimes even the totality of the game of truth' (FF 17). Foucault's approach is simply a conceptual tool kit to test this 'possibility' in Habermas' or any other peremptory definition of the games of truth. Consequently, Foucault's enlightenment attitude is a 'specific' scepti­ cism (agains the claims of a specific limit), not the universal scepticism Habermas argues against in his mock dialogues. The obligation to pursue the truth by exchanging reasons under general conditions of reciprocity, which Foucault and other contextual rationalists do not doubt, possibly could be explicated in terms of rules something like Habermas' list of conventional rules. Recall that on Habermas' account these are pro­ visional and exemplary, not definitive, and simply borrowed from R. Alexy for purposes of illustration (MC 87). However, these are compatible with a wide variety of historical and cultural forms of communication and rationality, as well as with a wide variety of accounts of rationality from Plato to Wittgenstein. Agreement on some such conventional procedures satisfies conditions of mutual recognition and reciprocity but does not entail agreement on the post-conventional procedures (this is the main theme of Cooke, 1994). The one objection Foucault would probably raise to Habermas' list of conventional rules is to rule 1.3 that different speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings. It is difficult to see how this is compatible with forms of argumentation that move us around to a different point of view, as a genealogy and Habermas' role-taking are designed to do. This movement is achieved by showing that the meaning - the sense, reference or illocutionary force - of the shared evaluative

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vocabulary we use to characterise any form of the subject can be altered by argumentatively or redescriptively challenging the habitual criteria for the application of the terms in question (Skinner, 1988a; 1996:138-80). Discipline and Punish, for example, modifies the sense, reference and illocutionary force of 'discipline'. If this is correct, then it seems that any exercise of challenging habitual forms of thought involves using the same expression with different meaning. Apart from rule 1.3, the limit-specific scepticism of the 'enlightenment attitude' raises an objection when Habermas makes the controversial claim that any communicative action presupposes as well the irreplaceability and unavoidability of the specific forms of argumentation defined by the post-conventional rules and principles U and D; that these are definitive of the three and only three moments of reason. Several of Foucault's historical studies aim to show that some of these rules and the centrality of the decentred game of truth itself are contingent. As a consequence, it is possible to think differently and experiment with acting differently without committing a performative contradiction: that is, without thinking and acting irrationally. In testing the non­ contingency of the post-conventional rules of the decentred game of truth, therefore, Foucault is not engaging in an irrational activity, as Habermas would have it, but questioning them from within the context of the conventional rules of rationality - accepting one limit (conven­ tional) in order to test another (post-conventional). This enables him to do within reason what Habermas himself does not do: break the circle of presentism surrounding the decentred subject and open it to critical enquiry. All that Foucault does here to render his historical critique of forms of rationality reasonable is just to refuse to enter into the form in which Habermas structures the debate or (in Foucault's terms) 'problematises' reason; that is, by identifying reason with three contemporary forms of rationality (cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical and aestheticexpressive). If that problematic is accepted, it becomes, as we have seen in the previous section, a debate between the 'guardian of rationality' and the irrational sceptics and relativists. As Foucault explains in a discussion of Habermas, 'that is not my problem, in so far as I am not prepared to identify reason with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate' (PP 35). This first step of de-identifying 'reason' with the dominant forms of rationality - in order to avoid being forced into an either/or debate and to get himself in a position to reflect on and analyse those forms - is, Foucault further explains, neither a new technique nor one derived exclusively from Nietzsche's perspectivism. It is the con­ tinuation of the critical task of the broad Enlightenment tradition in which he works (PP 27): I think that the blackmail which has very often been at work in every critique of reason or every critical inquiry into the history of rationality (either you

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accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational) operates as though a rational critique of rationality were impossible, or as though a rational history of all the ramifications and all the bifurcations, a contingent history of reason, were impossible . . . I think that, since Max Weber, in the Frankfurt School and anyhow for many historians of science such as Canguilhem, it was a question of isolating the form of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others.

I have presented this defence of the reasonableness of Foucault's critical approach to forms of rationality as if the burden of proof lies with him because the quotations suggest that Foucault saw the engage­ ment with Habermas in this way. Perhaps the rhetorical influence of Habermas' claim that he is the guardian of rationality and defender of cognitivism against the irrational Foucault forced this defensive stance on him. Whatever the cause, this timid response leaves Habermas' approach in a non-reciprocal position of dominance, as if anyone who is not prepared to enter the debate on Habermas' terms needs to justify the reasonableness of their approach, whereas the reasonableness of Habermas' identification of reason with three contemporary forms of rationality does not require validation, only description, analysis, recon­ struction and mediating interpretation. We can put Foucault's argument that his approach is reasonable on equal footing if we go on the offensive by reversing the burden of proof and asking if Habermas' approach is reasonable. The analogous question would be, is it reasonable to argue that reasonable people engaged in communicative action should come to accept the procedures of rationality definitive of the decentred view of the world? As we have seen, Foucault always politely accepted the legitimacy of Habermas' project, denying only that such universal forms of rationality have yet been discovered and universally agreed to. However, John Rawls raises this bolder question and answers in the negative. Like Foucault, Rawls understands Habermas as putting forward a comprehensive and metaphysical philosophy of the nature of human reason. In contrast to his own non-metaphysical philosophy of justice: Habermas' position, on the other hand, is a comprehensive doctrine and covers many things far beyond political philosophy. Indeed, the aim of his theory of communicative action is to give a general account of meaning, reference and truth or validity both for theoretical reason and for several forms of practical reason. . . . Habermas' own doctrine, I believe, is one of logic in the broad Hegelian sense: a philosophical analysis of the presuppositions of rational discourse (of theoretical and practical reason). . . . His logic is metaphysical in the following sense: it presents an account of what there is. And what there is are human beings engaged in communicative action in their lifeworld. (Rawls, 1995: 135-7)

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Like Foucault, Rawls believes that it is perfectly reasonable for philosophers to work on theories of this comprehensive kind, to derive theories of justice from them, and to try to convince others of their validity. It is also reasonable for individual citizens and moral agents, when they have given public reasons for or against a proposed norm of coordination or individual action, also to embed these public reasons in their own background comprehensive theories. But, the presupposition of Habermas' approach is, in addition, that it is reasonable to expect and argue that all citizens and moral agents in a fair system of social co­ operation, in so far as they are reasonable, will come to accept the decentred view of the world as their comprehensive theory and reason in accord with its three forms of argumentation. This, on Rawls' account, is unreasonable. Habermas' presupposition that reasonable communicators will come to agree on the decentred worldview is 'unreasonable' because there will always be reasonable disagreement over highly complex and abstract doctrines of this general kind. Rawls carefully lists six 'sources of the difficulties in arriving at agreement in judgment, sources that are com­ patible with those judgments being fully reasonable' (Rawls, 1993: 56-7). These sources are not 'prejudice and bias, self- and group-interest, blindness and wilfulness' but features intrinsic to reasoning over highly complex and comprehensive matters. It follows from these sources that it will always be unreasonable to expect agreement on a comprehensive doctrine like Habermas'. Rather, it will be reasonable to accept that there always will be a plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines in any free society, just as there will be a plurality of reasonable value orienta­ tions, and for similar reasons (1993: 58). Therefore, it is reasonable to accept the 'burdens of judgment': to recognise that fully reasonable agents seeking to coordinate their interaction by the force of the better argument alone will always embrace an irreducible plurality of back­ ground comprehensive doctrines (one of which may reasonably be the decentred doctrine) and so relate to each other on this understanding, not on the understanding that one comprehensive doctrine can ever provide the ground of their deliberations. If Rawls is correct, Habermas is unreasonable. He has failed to accept the burdens of judgement that follow from the six sources of difficulties in reaching agreement that are intrinsic to reason itself. Foucault, on the other hand, is fully reasonable in taking Habermas' comprehensive theory as one among others. Moreover, both Rawls and Foucault draw a similar kind of lesson from the 'tenuous' character of complex and abstract reasoning. Foucault turned to a more specific analysis, tied closely to practice, and Rawls turned towards a political philosophy tied to the way citizens themselves problematise their communicative inter­ action in existing constitutional democracies: namely, as free and equal subjects engaged in a system of social cooperation and willing to accept

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the burdens of judgement that a plurality of both comprehensive doc­ trines and value orientations entail (See Laden, 1997 for an excellent comparison of Rawls and Foucault). In conclusion, it is not unreasonable to see the decentred under­ standing of the world as one (peremptory definition of a) limit in the present among many, to free ourselves from it and to analyse its alleged universality critically and historically, either in whole or in part, as long as this critical attitude is specific rather than the universal scepticism against which Habermas defends it. Moreover, Habermas should approve since it provides a test of the claims he advances concerning the decentred subject, something he has so far not done himself.

VII Objection Three: A Genealogy of the Decentred Subject We are now in a position to see how Foucault's historical method might be used to bring out what is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints in the decentred limit. It enables us to see it as one form of the subject among many and not as the regulative idea against which all forms are to be described and categorised. Foucault did not write a genealogy of Habermas' conception of the decentred subject. Rather, he wrote a number of genealogies of the juridical form of the subject, several of these before he read Habermas' work. However, Habermas' conception of the decentred subject is clearly a major re­ interpretation and defence of the juridical form of the subject, one of the greatest in a long line from Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf through Kant to late twentieth-century juridical moral and political philosophies. Theories of the juridical subject are standardly, as Habermas says of his own theory, deontological, formal, cognitive and universal. Foucault's genealogies of the juridical subject run through his major writings: Discipline and Punish, Power/Knowledge, The History of Sexuality, 'What is critique?', 'The subject and power', 'Govemmentality', and 'Politics and reason'. From the beginning Foucault was concerned to show that this way of organising moral and political action in practice and reflecting on and analysing it in theory, which seems so self-evidently universal and legitimate to us moderns who are the subjects of it, is in reality much more limited than it appears. While its characteristic forms of knowledge are partially accurate representations of juridical practices (since the forms of knowledge are historically woven into the exercise and contest of power in these practices) they tend to be taken as a normative representation of moral and political practices in general and, as a result, misrepresent and occlude other non-juridical processes of subjectivisa­ tion. The aim of his historical studies is not to do away with this important and valuable form of subjectivity in the present, but to show its limitations.

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The juridical subject is the individual or collective subject of rights and duties. Juridical subjects coordinate their moral and political action by means of laws or norms. The laws are legitimate or just in so far as they are universal and based on the agreement or consent of those who subject themselves to them. The juridical practical systems are the legal and political institutions of European societies in which power is exer­ cised through the law in a primarily prohibitive manner by and over agents who are constituted as law-governed bearers of rights and duties. Juridical forms of knowledge are the law-centred theoretical, juris­ prudential and legislative codes and their traditions of interpretation, modes of application, systems of punishment and theories of revolution against unjust constitutions. This 'juridical ensemble' of discursive and non-discursive elements began to be pieced together in Europe in the twelfth century with the revival of Roman law and the development of canon law in practice and the schools of natural law, political and moral philosophy in theory (Thomist and conciliarist). It has come to be such a major form of the subject in European societies as the result of four roles. Initially it represented fairly accurately a mechanism of power that was effective under feudal monarchy: that is, the exercise of power through the law by a sovereign who stood more or less above the law. Secondly, the claim to universality has been its method of legitimation since the beginning, first against the particularity of local customs and ways, and later to justify the construction of large centralised administrative states against the crazy quilt of feudal, confessional, regional and manorial particularity during the wars of religion. Thirdly, it was used in theory and practice throughout the early modem period to justify resistance to royal power and to establish limited constitutional rule. Fourthly, in the form of popular sovereignty, it served to justify resistance to administrative monarchies in the eighteenth century, the constitutional revolutions of the nineteenth century and the construction and operation of parliamentary democracies and constitutional republics (PK 103). At the centre of this system has been the problematisation of the 'mode of subjection': the conditions of legitimate obedience and disobedience. In general, the people are understood to subject themselves to this system of action-coordination by means of laws under two conditions of legitimacy: the laws are universal or impartial (in accordance with universal or natural principles of justice) and they are based on the agreement of the people. Although the consent condition was always present in the form of the Roman legal maxim that 'what touches all must be approved by all', it is only since the late sixteenth century that it has taken the procedural form so familiar today. When the locus of sovereignty shifted from the monarch to the people and confessional pluralism was resolved by granting the right priority over the good, the test of agreement was reconceived as some form of procedure, either hypothetical or real, which the sovereign people go through themselves,

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individually (Locke) or collectively (Rousseau) in order to reach agree­ ment on a constitution and subject themselves to it. From the early modem 'state of nature' theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke to the influential social contract theories of Rousseau, Paine and Kant and down to the more recent deliberative theories of popular sovereignty, such as Habermas' discourse ethics and discourse theory of law and democracy, diverse solutions have been offered to this remark­ ably constant problematisation of legitimacy and obedience. This can just as well be seen as a problem of 'sovereignty', as Foucault often describes it, for the central concern is that the people are, like the monarch before them, sovereign - free of power - in the procedures that give rise to and legitimise the juridical system and protected in their individual or collective sovereignty by the rights (of the ancients and modems) they acquire by subjection (PK 105). As he famously wrote in 1975, 'what we need . . . is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory this still has to be done' (PK 121). Several philosophers have cut off the king's head. Charles Taylor has shown that the juridical tradition hides its own prior good from itself (autonomy) and so is really one 'ethical' orientation among others, not a 'morality' categorically separate from and more universal than ethical systems (Taylor, 1989). Rawls has made a similar point with respect to Habermas, arguing that any procedural account of justice will contain substantive elements (1995: 170). In an historical and analytical manner, Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck and John Pocock have shown how juridical thought and practice developed in competition with civic humanism, reason of state, utilitarianism and so on, how the juridical subject gained a certain prominence in Protestant countries in the early modern period and again after the Second World War, but the multi­ plicity of forms of legal, political and moral subjects remains. In showing that the decentred worldview is (one interpretation of) one singular and historically contingent form of the subject among many and reconstruct­ ing the historical struggles around its recent rise to relative prominence, these genealogies loosen its hold on our moral and political selfconsciousness and enable us to think and act differently. Here Foucault joins hands with Skinner, Pocock and Taylor (Skinner, 1988b; Burchell, 1991). Foucault's contribution to the quiet subversion of the universal pretensions of the juridical is distinct in the following respects. Foucault's central argument is that the juridical, by focusing our attention on the problem of the mode of subjection and the elaboration of a universal code, causes us, as both theorists and participants in juridical games, to overlook processes of subjectivisation in politics and, in an analogous fashion, practices of ethical self-formation in morality, precisely what a 'critical' philosophy should concentrate on. It is not too much to say that his elaborate approach to processes of subjectivisation

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is designed to bring us round to seeing our politics and ethics from nonjuridical points of view. The first example is Discipline and Punish. He argues that juridical practices and the juridical representations of coordinated forms of human interaction have, inter alia, served historically, and continue to serve, to hide and legitimise a specific process of subjectivisation called 'discipline'. 'Discipline' is a form of knowledge organised around a statistical norm of individual and collective behaviour (the objectifying disciplines of the social sciences) and a form of power relations (dis­ ciplining techniques of developing capacities to think and behave in accord with a statistical norm immanent in any activity and of con­ tinuously monitoring and reforming such processes of normalisation). Here communicatively mediated interaction is coordinated by means of norms of behavioural regularity that, as he explains in the central passages of Discipline and Punish, are 'completely heterogeneous' in relation to the universal norms of juridification. That is, we will mis­ understand these practical systems, their specific rationality and what subjects are struggling for in contesting them in the present if we approach them through a deontological framework or through the ready­ made categories of cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, aestheticethical, pragmatic and strategic. We need rather to reconstruct 'what they do and the way they do it'. Following Marx, Weber and Oestreich, he shows that since the Dutch army reforms of the sixteenth century normalising processes of sub­ jectivisation have spread throughout the communicative practices of European societies and, in particular, within juridical practices. The abilities to think and behave in the ways presupposed by complex procedures of reflection (such as Habermas' forms of argumentation) and to exercise the rights and duties of juridical subjects are acquired and mastered through processes of discipline at school, work, prison, court, in the legislature and so forth (PK 105): the theory of sovereignty, and the organisation of a legal code centered upon it, have allowed a system of right to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as to conceal its actual procedures, the element of domination in its techniques, and to guarantee to everyone . . . the exercise of his proper sovereign rights. The juridical systems - and this applies to both their codification and to their theorization - have enabled sovereignty to be democratized through the constitution of a public right articulated upon collective sovereignty, while at the same time this democratization of sover­ eignty was fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.

In The History of Sexuality he wrote a genealogy of a second process of subjectivisation misrepresented by juridical theorists. Here the subjectify­ ing social sciences, such as psychiatry, interpretation, counselling and the caring professions, treat us as subjects with an inner meaning or truth

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that can be revealed through practices of confession, dialogue and consciousness raising (such as Habermas' practice of reaching mutual understanding). These 'confessing' practices of knowledge and power are also dispersed throughout modern European societies and juridical institutions (HS 59): Confession plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relations, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn of rites - one confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts, and one desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell.

In the later volumes he expanded these studies by showing the astonish­ ing variety of techniques of ethical self-fashioning by which we impose on ourselves objectifying and subjectifying practices of discipline, con­ fession and so forth. Once he had freed himself from the juridical form of reflection with these first two studies, he went on to write various genealogies of forms of the subject, especially those organised around problems of the repro­ duction of 'life' (biopower) rather than 'right', which he came to see as far more important, in which we are constituted and led to recognise ourselves both as individuals and as members of communities, nations and populations. As he puts it in 'What is enlightenment?', these enquiries 'may be multiplied and specified as much as we like' but they will all address the three axes of knowledge, power and ethics and the relations among them that this form of reflection brings to light (WE 49). The reason why these genealogies are effective, according to Foucault, is not only that they show the wide variety of specific forms of sub­ jectivity we bear at the level of a history of ideas but, more critically, because they describe the actual processes of subjectivisation through which we acquire and exercise the capacities to communicate, act and contest the norms in each. They analyse the training as a result of which we become masters of the techniques definitive of games of subjectivity. Juridically derived forms of reflection, by focusing on the mode of subjection and questions of legitimation, disregard or downplay these practical systems. For example, while juridical theories focus on the justification and universalisation of rights they fail to describe the systems of knowledge, power and ethics through which we acquire, exercise and contest the validity of rights through strategies of freedom (FF 19-20). In the cryptic 'stakes' argument in 'What is enlightenment?' he presents this as the central justification for the enlightenment attitude in contrast to the Kantian tradition in which Habermas writes. During the Enlightenment, or at least on one interpretation of it, Foucault writes, the 'great hope' lay 'in the simultaneous and propor­ tional growth of individuals with respect to one another'. That is, the

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historical development of human capabilities to communicate, co­ ordinate activities, control things and to reflect on them would, it was hoped, coincide with the growth of autonomy and freedom. However, the relationship between the mastery of techniques and autonomy has not been 'as simple as the eighteenth century might have believed'. If we examine the historical development of capacities (here he refers to his historical studies of the development of capacities through processes of subjectivisation) we see not the parallel growth of freedom and auton­ omy but a 'paradox of the relations of capacity and power'. The paradox is that the growth of capabilities has led to the 'intensification of power relations'. As a result, the question for the enlightenment attitude today has to be quite different from the eighteenth century: 'how can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?' (WE 47-8). One could imagine Habermas replying that it is his question as well. But Foucault's point is that Habermas' approach fails to address this question. It continues the tradition of enlightenment philosophy that studies capacities and autonomy in abstraction from underlying and concurrent processes of subjectivisation and the resulting intensification of power relations. As we have seen in objections one and two, it predisposes the theorist to look beneath these practical systems and the way subjects act in them for underlying validity claims and idealised forms of argumentation that are free of power or to characterise them in abstract terms. This is why Foucault refers to his own work on processes of subjectivisation in the centre of the argument - only it has been able to bring the relations between the actual development of capabilities and power relations into critical view. If we continue to work within Habermas' approach, therefore, we will continue to be determined by the intensification of power relations behind our critical gaze. Alternatively, if we pursue Foucault's approach, we will be able to analyse the power relations and processes of subjectivisation connected to the growth of capabilities in any form of the subject, experiment with disconnecting them, and so answer the question our present asks of us. Consequently, the stakes are extremely high, and anyone with a general interest in freedom and autonomy will choose Foucault's approach over Habermas'. There is no doubt that Foucault meant the 'stakes' paragraph to be read in this way, as advancing a principal justification for his approach relative to Habermas'. The preceding paragraphs elucidate the two approaches and state that we should pursue his, but no reason is given. The stakes between them are then laid out. The paragraph that follows the 'stakes' argument begins with the connecting phrase, 'This [referring back to the question that ends the previous paragraph] leads to the study of . . .' (my italics) and goes on to lay out his entire approach in three parts with emphasis on the analysis of relations between capacities and powers (as in section II above). The clear implication is that if one wishes

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to address the new enlightenment question of the present one must choose his approach.

VIII Objection Four: Utopia versus Communication-PowerFreedom The final objection is that Habermas' approach is utopian whereas Foucault's is not. This critical contrast explains the rather enigmatic references to freedom and autonomy in the 'stakes' argument and so the normative dimension of his work. My discussion of this contrast is indebted to and builds on the fine analysis by Hindess in Discourses of Power (1996: 130-40). In an interview conducted shortly after he wrote 'What is enlighten­ ment?', Foucault commented (FF 18): I am interested in what Habermas is doing. I know that he does not agree with what I say - I am a little more in agreement with him - but there is always something which causes me a problem. It is when he assigns a very important place to relations of communication and also a function that I would call 'utopian'. The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth could circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects, seems to me to be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free oneself. I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behaviour of others.

Foucault is wrong to imply that Habermas believes in a society with­ out relations of power. Practices of communicative action coordinated by discourses of communicative rationality are rooted in and surrounded by strategic struggles around the prevailing form of recognition of the subjects involved. As Habermas puts it in a passage that could have been written by Foucault and that illustrates just how much agreement there is between them on this point (MC 106): Practical discourses cannot be relieved of the burden of social conflicts to the degree that theoretical and explicative discourses can. They are less free of the burden of action because contested norms tend to upset the balance of relations of intersubjective recognition. Even if it is conducted with discursive means, a dispute about norms is still rooted in the struggle for recognition.

However, instead of developing a form of analysis that can explicate the practical system in which the struggle takes place (the processes by which the actors recognise themselves under the contested form of the subject) and the strategies of freedom to think and act differently

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available to them, Habermas takes a 'utopian' turn. Even though prac­ tical discourses are rooted in strategic relations, they can nevertheless be thought of as separable from them: practical discourses resemble islands threatened with inundation in a sea of practice where the pattern of consensual conflict resolution is by no means the dominant one. The means of reaching agreement are repeatedly thrust aside by the instruments of force.

From this distinction he goes on to conceptualise the practices of coordinating communicative action by processes of argumentation as games in which claims to truth and rightness 'circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects'. Habermas' defence would surely be that it is not utopian but a strongly idealised regulative idea against which actual games inundated by relations of power can be evaluated in the name of freedom. The lesson Foucault drew from his genealogies was that this regulative idea is yet another instance of the juridical presupposition that there is some place or procedure in which subjects are 'sovereign' - free of power and autonomous - and in which they agree on the conditions of their subjection. It is 'utopian' according to Foucault first in the strict sense that there is 'no place' where humans communicate and dispute norms without putting into play relations of power. His genealogies provide example after example. Even islands, one might note, are shaped and formed by the surrounding sea. Secondly, it is 'utopian' in the sense of the first objection above, the abstract and ineffective objection. To approach communicative games in accord with such a utopian regulative idea is to abstract oneself from what is really going on and the possibil­ ities of concrete freedom within them, the only kind of freedom available to humans. In contrast, Foucault claims that his approach does the opposite (FF 18): The problem is not of trying to dissolve them [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of the self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.

Foucault conjectures that what drives Habermas to build his theory on such a utopian foundation is the assumption that power is bad in itself and one must free oneself from it. This is a fair conjecture. It is difficult to imagine a more widely held assumption of contemporary moral and political thought than that freedom consists in either the freedom from power or the freedom to act in accord with power exercised through norms validated in conditions free from power (the two conceptions of freedom in Habermas' theory). Of all the criticisms Foucault's work has incited, the first and foremost is that he challenged this orthodoxy and

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turned it around, claiming scandalously that we could be free and rational within the relations of power that constitute us. He says that we can make sense of this radically different way of thinking about knowl­ edge, communication and freedom always in the context of relations of power if we understand relations of power as the 'means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behaviour of others'. And he adds by way of illustration an example of the acquisition and trans­ mission of communicative competencies: 'I don't see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him'. Power 'cannot not play' a role here and 'it is not evil in itself'. The problem is not to free oneself from the pedagogical relation of power, as the orthodox conception of autonomy would demand, but only to discover what is 'arbitrary' and 'useless' in it (FF 18). He is certainly correct to say that the plausibility of his argument turns on this understanding of power. When he discovered that the forms of knowledge he was studying were always related in some way or another to relations of power in the mid-1970s he had difficulty developing a satisfactory language of description. He realised that the forms of power were not juridical (derived from a sovereign, exercised through the law, prohibitive in effect and based on consent) since they were dispersed throughout social relations, exercised apart from the law or used law as a means, productive and constitutive in effect, and distantly related to consent. His first hypothesis was that forms of knowledge were intern­ alised and that relations of power operated directly on the body without the mediation of the subject. The subject was seen primarily as passive, almost as a tabula rasa, and power was barely distinguishable from violence and force in what he called the 'war' or strategic model in The History of Sexuality. This formulation disposed him to conceive of prac­ tical systems as overall strategies without a strategist that determined subjects behind their backs. However, this description made no sense of the other side of what he was studying: the ability of subjects to resist forms of knowledge and relations of power and to think and act differently. Critics such as Habermas pointed out the irresolvable difficulties and Foucault criticised his own work for taking the perspective of power almost to the exclusion of the side of strategies of resistance. He reformulated his approach and earlier works in response (see introduction and section II of the present chapter). He began to see that he could make sense of both power and resistance only if human subjects were active. The acquisition and acceptance of a form of knowledge under which we are recognised as subjects presupposes subjects who 'think': that is, who play an active and reflective role in learning and questioning. The exercise of power in turn presupposes active subjects who act in accord with or go against any

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relation of power, even in the most tightly regulated practical systems such as military training. This entailed shifting the characterisation of what he was studying (practical systems) from the background to the foreground, 'not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it'. The relations of knowledge and power in which subjects are engaged are understood in the terms in which they themselves 'problematise' their experience. The consequent hermeneutic 'risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control', which his Marxist and structuralist critics immediately pointed out, is accepted without regret (WE 47). The focus of analysis consequently shifted from the background 'strategy without a strategist' to the foreground of those who exercise power and those over whom power is exercised. He quietly announced this profound shift in 1978 in 'The subject and power': 'let us not deceive ourselves; if we speak of the structures or mechanisms of power, it is only in so far as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others' (SP 217). The problem was to introduce these aspects of agency without introducing a subject that transcends constitutive relations of power: that is, without undermining his central insight that subjects always act in relations of power just as they think in relations of knowledge (Patton, 1994). His solution is a revolutionary conception of power-in-relation-to-freedom. Power, he explains, is not juridical in nature. It is not 'a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few'. Power is not 'a function of consent' or 'the manifestation of a consensus' (SP 220). This is not new. However, he immediately goes on to reject his earlier hypothesis of power as a strategic 'relationship of violence' that directly 'acts on a body or upon things'. The 'relationship proper to power would not be sought on the side of violence or struggle'. It is 'neither warlike nor juridical'. The bringing into play of power relations often involves the use of violence and the obtaining of consent, but violence and consent are the 'instruments and results' of power, 'they do not constitute the principle or basic nature of power' (SP 220-1). Rather, the exercise of power is 'a mode of action upon the actions of others', the 'way in which certain actions modify others' (SP 219-21). Unlike violence, two features of agency must be present: that the ' "other" (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recog­ nised and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up' (SP 220). The exercise of power, then, 'consists in guiding the possibility of conduct' of others by various means, which can be strict or relaxed, imposed by others or exercised on ourselves by ourselves, in order to constitute relatively regular and predictable forms of 'conduct' (forms of the subject).

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As we might well expect, Foucault presents a genealogy of this concept of power. A relation of power is best understood in terms of the early modem concept of 'government' developed by humanists such as Guillaume de la Perrier in France and Thomas Elliott in England (G 91). 'Government' did not refer only to the ways in which the conduct of subjects is governed in political relationships ('government' in the nar­ row sense) but in any relationship among partners. It 'designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick', in all 'modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people' (SP 221). As he explains in 'Govemmentality', these practical systems of government have continued to develop and spread throughout Euro­ pean societies up to the present (as his genealogies show) but the concept of government has come to be applied almost exclusively to 'govern­ ment' in the modern, narrow sense of the juridical institutions of the state. Thus, in construing relations of power in the broad terms of govemmentality and seeing these as 'co-extensive with every social relationship' that involves 'the possibility of action upon the action of others' (SP 224), he not only transgresses contemporary assumptions about power and freedom and distinctions between public and private so that he can study a broad range of contemporary struggles (SP 211-12). He also revives and adapts the specific language that has been used historically to describe and problematise these processes of sub­ jectivisation. He underscores this genealogical point in 'What is critique?' by locating one origin of his critique in early modern practices of govemmentality and the forms of critique that developed in contestation of them. He then redescribed his study of discipline, pastoral power, biopower and so forth in the language of 'forms of government' (FR 338). Turning now to the two features of agency in any relation of power, freedom is defined in relation to power as the range of possible actions available to those over whom power is exercised (SP 221): Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.

Just as in any game of truth there is always the possibility of raising a question and thinking differently to some extent, so too in games of power there is always the possibility of contesting a rule and acting differently. If there is no possibility of action, as when a person is in chains, then there is no freedom and also no power. It is a physical relationship of constraint. Power and freedom, then, are correlative on this modified Nietzschean account. Freedom is the precondition of power, 'since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its

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permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination'. He characterises the relationship between power and freedom as 'agonic' (SP 221-2): At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom . . . an 'agonism' . . . a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less a face to face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.

What he means is that in any relationship of power one is able through various mechanisms to guide the conduct of others or to guide others to conduct themselves in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable predictability. There is a range of possible ways in which subjects can act yet still be governed. For instance, in educational institutions students and teachers can learn, study, attend classes, raise questions, seek the truth, modify the curriculum or strike in a wide variety of ways and still 'conduct' themselves as this form of the subject, as 'students' and 'teachers'. Given that power acts on the mental and physical 'actions' of agents, there will always be some range of free play even in the most tightly regulated regimen. Accompanying the agonic free play in any game of power, by which the rules of the game are modified en passant, is always the possibility of insubordination, of challenging the relation of power itself by escape or confrontation. This more radical possibility is the condition of 'permanent provocation'. When a direct confrontation does occur, as in a revolt, one side is unable to guide the conduct of others and the relation of power and freedom between governors and governed is transformed into a face to face 'relation of confrontation' between 'adversaries' (SP 223-5). A relation of confrontation continues until a new or restored relation of power is established. Accordingly, the 'intensification of power relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power'. Either the intensification is successful and the insubordinate is reduced to inaction (then 'victory over the adversary replaces the exercise of power') or the intensification causes a 'confrontation with those whom one governs and their transformation into adversaries'. The more free play is restricted and the more the radical possibility of insubordination is a distant one, the more the relation of power and its means of support approximate a 'structure of domination' (SP 226; FF 12). The agonic interplay between power and strategies of freedom exists, therefore, in the range of possible thought and action between these two extremes of 'domination' and adversarial confrontation. (SP 225; FF 12). With this understanding of power and freedom Foucault returned to Habermas' concentration on relations of communication. Although com­ municating is 'always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons' this is not what he means when he claims that Habermas is

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wrong in holding that games of truth could circulate free of power. Relations of communication, which 'transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium' are dis­ tinguishable from relations of power which guide the conduct of others. Nevertheless, relations of communication always overlap in complex ways with relations of power and with the acquisition and exercise of human capacities or techniques in any practical system. The application, for example, of technical capacities in work implies both relations of communication and of governance among the workers, managers, owners and so forth. Relations of communications in turn imply the exercise of capacities (at least the linguistic competencies to use signs) and, 'by modifying the field of information between partners', 'produce effects of power'. They 'can scarcely be dissociated' from training techniques, processes of domination or the means by which obedience is obtained. To illustrate the relations between communication, power and capacities, Foucault presents a remarkable sketch of an educational institution which we can use as an exemplar of a genealogy of the relations among communication, power and abilities in a practical system (SP 218-19): there are also 'blocks' in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted sys­ tems. Take for example an education institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organised there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character - all these constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communication (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedi­ ence, differentiation marks of the value of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).

Any real or imaginable island of communication and dispute resolution will involve a sea of relations of these and similar kinds. To acknowledge, analyse and call into question these sorts of relations among knowledge, communication and power is not to conflate them or to invalidate the knowledge acquired and tested in the practical system (FF 16): We can show, for example, that the medicalisation of madness, i.e. the organisation of medical knowledge around individuals labeled as 'mad' has been linked, at some time or another . . . to institutions and practices of power. This fact in no way impairs the scientific validity or the therapeutic efficacy of psychiatry It does not guarantee it but it does not cancel it out either.

'The subject and power' and its elaboration in later writings con­ stitutes an adequate and effective account of freedom in relation to power without positing a utopian position, procedure or subject free of

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power. It is the normative dimension of Foucault's approach. To illus­ trate, let us imagine and analyse from Foucault's agonic perspective specific subjects who contest a rule by which their conduct is governed and enter into negotiations over its validity. Let us further imagine that you and I are members of the plural 'we' who have constituted ourselves as a community of discussion and action in the course of the contesta­ tion, as Foucault describes democratic will formation (FR 385, section II). First, as Foucault puts it and as David Owen has gone on to explore in great depth, calling the rule into question in dialogue and contesting it in practice will not be the prolegomenon to freedom but the practice of freedom, the enlightenment ethos, itself: 'the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence' (SP 223; Owen, 1995). We will not look immediately for an underlying deontological norm of expectation that has been violated but always for the way we subjects problematise the rule, for this will be the language in which we are led to recognise and conduct ourselves as this specific form of subject, the form of recognition and subjectivity that we are in fact contesting. We will be aware that a great deal of alteration in our thought takes place in virtue of the modification of the rules within a specific language of the subject rather than by translating it into one of the three decentred forms. For example, the great changes brought about by the ecology movement have arisen from challenges within dominant scientific language 'con­ cerning nature, the equilibrium of processes of living things, and so forth'. It was 'not by playing a game that was a complete stranger to the game of truth [in the natural sciences today] but in playing it otherwise' (FF 15). We will take the same attitude when examining the forms of argu­ mentation used to resolve the dispute. We will not evaluate them relative to the peremptory definition of the conventional and post-conventional rules and principles D and U in order to find the truth. The processes of argumentation we use and the questions we raise both within them and about the processes themselves will be our focus, recognising again that there is always a possibility in any game of negotiation to alter the rules of the game. Moreover, we will compare these forms of argumentation with others, as Foucault and Toulmin have done, to free ourselves from their seeming unavoidability and irreplaceability. That is, we will analyse them just as in this chapter we have analysed the ways Owen, Taylor, Rawls, Gilligan and others have questioned Habermas' decentred under­ standing of the world as the meta-norm with which we ought to govern our conduct: by questioning rules and principles and the arguments employed to legitimise them. We will take this as a reasonable procedure. If the disputed rule is claimed by one of us to be a norm of the kind stipulated by discourse ethics we will treat this form of argumentation as any other, looking for the possibility of questioning some or all of the

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procedures, as we have done in the previous sections. Fashioning our­ selves into subjects capable of testing and acting in accord with universal laws will of course be one recommendation and we will treat this interlocutor with equality and reciprocity in our obligation to the truth. The questioning this proposal receives will be a good critical test of its claim to be universal. We will also listen to and learn from the reasons of those who wish to submit to a spiritual tradition, have cultural or gender differences recognised, or speak from other modes of subjection, ethical orientations and comprehensive doctrines. We will not seek consensus at this abstract level of what Foucault and Rawls call a comprehensive 'vision of the world'. We will look on such an idea as unreasonable and 'dangerous' (WE 46). In so doing we accept the postmodern burdens of judgement (Connolly, 1997). Reaching an overlapping consensus in light of our background differ­ ences will be an important consideration but, as Foucault explained to Taylor in a discussion of Habermas, even this kind of agreement can­ not function as a regulative idea or 'regulatory principle': that is, the unquestioned form of reflection on processes of argumentation and coordination of communicative action (FR 379). Consensus can function only as a 'critical idea', as one heuristic form of reflection among others whose limitations must always be open to question. Consensus is 'a critical idea to maintain at all times: to ask oneself what portion of nonconsensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of nonconsensuality is necessary or not, and then one may question every power relation to that extent' (FR 379). There are, as we have seen, two reasons for this critical stance to consensus-centred analyses of politics. First, there is the possibility in any game of truth of challenging the consensus and thinking differently, so there is always the possibility of reasonable disagreement. Any consensus will be a negotiated or agonic consensus all the way down, recognising and accommodating reasonable disagreement or failing to do so. Secondly, consensus is not the basis of a power relation, but, at best, its instrument or result, so it cannot itself guarantee our freedom from arbitrary power. The only 'guarantee of freedom is freedom itself' (FR 245). Foucault means that there will be a tenuous connection between any agreement and its application in practice. Hence, we must be just as concerned with the second half of his ethos: to tie the negotiated agreement as tightly as possible 'to the test of concrete practices', to the practice of freedom (WE 50). Implementation, then, will not be seen as a separate and secondary category but as part and parcel of the permanent critique. Most importantly, we will analyse historically the relations between the contested rule, the forms of negotiation and relations of power. Genealogies of the processes of subjectivisation under the contested description of the subject and of historical strategies of freedom in

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relation to it will be written and circulated in the discussions, as Foucault did in relation to struggles around the rules of psychiatry, prisons, medicine and sexuality. The same will be done for the relations of power involved in the games of negotiation and implementation, exposing the obstacles, arbitrary constraints and unnecessary coercive effects, and designing mechanisms to modify or compensate for them. We might, to take one among many examples, explore the extent to which the pro­ cedures of yes-no positions, reversibility and universalisation in Habermas' forms of negotiation are related to male power and elite forms of argument that silence and intimidate culturally and classdifferent others, aim at victory over the adversary rather than mutual understanding and exclude more conciliatory genres of reaching under­ standing and agreement. These sorts of connection to relations of power in Habermas' model are suggested by Iris Marion Young in her sketch of a genealogy (1996: 123): The deliberative model of communication derives from specific institutional contexts of the modern West - scientific debate, modem parliaments, and courts (each with progenitors in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and politics, and in the medieval academy). These were some of the aspiring institutions of the bourgeois revolution that succeeded in becoming ruling institutions. Their institutional forms, rules, and rhetorical and cultural styles have defined the meaning of reason itself in the modem world. As ruling institutions, however, they have been elitist and exclusive, and these exclusions mark their very conceptions of reason and deliberation, both in the institu­ tions and in the rhetorical styles they represent. Since their Enlightenment beginnings, they have been male-dominated institutions, and in class- and race-differentiated societies they have been white- and upper-class dominated. Despite the claim of deliberative forms of orderly meetings to express pure universal reason, the norms of deliberation are culturally specific and often operate as forms of power that silence or devalue the speech of some people.

These studies will enable us to see our island of disputation and negotiation as it is, in the rough and agonic sea of relations of power, rather than from the point of view of a utopia free of power. With this tool kit in hand we will be in a position not only to think differently but to begin the cautious experiments in acting differently, in modifying our rules of interaction and practices of self-formation in such a way that the specific game in question can now be played with 'a minimum of domination'. In so doing we may overlook something universal beneath what we are thinking and doing and we will always find that we have to begin again. This is a risk Foucault recommends we take in exchange for this 'patient labor' on actual existing limits in the present by means of an approach that gives 'form to our impatience for liberty' (WE 50).

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Notes 1 The five principal dimensions of the analytics of relations of power are (1) the systems of differentiations which permit one to act on the actions of others; (2) the types of objectives pursued by those who act on the actions of others; (3) the means of bringing power relations into being: by arms, words, economic disparities, complex means of control, surveillance, customs, consent and so on; (4) the forms of institutionalisation; and (5) the degrees of rationalisa­ tion (SP 223-4). For an excellent exposition and explanation see Mitchell Dean, Govemmentality (1999). 2 The four main lines of analysis of ethics are the determination of the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, the form of ethical work, and the telos of the ethical life (UP 25-30).

Glossary of Abbreviations FF FR

G HS JA MC PD M PK PP R RR SP

TCAI TS UP

WC

WE

The Final Foucault, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984. 'Govemmentality' in G. Burchell et al., eds, The Foucault Effect, Hemel

Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1991, pp. 87-104. The History of Sexuality, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979. Justification and Application, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Power/Knowledge, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Press, 1980. Politics, Philosophy, Culture, New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988. 'Final Interview', Michel Foucault, Raritan, 1 (Summer 1985): 1-13. 'Reconciliation through the public use of reason', Journal of Philosophy, 92(3): 109-31. 'The subject and power' in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 214-32. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Technologies of the Self, London: Tavistock, 1988. The Uses of Pleasure, New York: Vintage Books, 1985. 'What is Critique?', in J. Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?: EighteenthCentury Answers to Twentieth-Century Questions , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 382-98. 'What is Enlightenment?', in FR, pp. 32-50.

References Apel, K.O. (1987) 'The problem of philosophical foundations in light of transcend­ ental pragmatics of language', in K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy (eds), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 250-90.

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Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (1996) Foucault and Political Reason. London: University College London Press. Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics . Cambridge: Polity Press. Blaug, R. (1997) 'Between fear and disappointment: critical, empirical and political uses of Habermas', Political Studies, 45 (1): 100-17. Burchell, G. (1991) 'Peculiar interests: civil society and governing the system of "natural liberty"', in C. Gordon, G. Burchell and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 119-50. Chambers, S. (1996) Reasonable Democracy: Jurgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohen, J. (1991) 'Deliberation and democratic legitimacy', in A. Hamin and P. Pettit (eds), The Good Polity. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 17-34. Connolly, W. (1997) 'Refashioning the secular'. Paper presented at Research of the Social Sciences seminar Australian National University, September 1997. Cooke, M. (1994) Language and Reason: a Study of Habermas' Pragmatics. Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press. Dean, M. (1999) Govemmentality. London: Sage. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Develop­ ment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutting, G. (1989) Michel Foucault's Archeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, J. (TCAD (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (RR) (1995) 'Reconciliation through the public use of reason', Journal of Philosophy, 92 (3): 109-31. Hadot, P. (1996) Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Hekman, S. (ed.) (1995) Rereading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Foucault. Pittsburgh: Penn State University Press. Hindess, B. (1996) Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell. Ingram, D. (1993) 'The limits and possibilities of communicative ethics for democratic theory', Political Theory, 21 (2): 294-321. Ingram, D. (1994) 'Foucault and Habermas on the subject of reason', in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-61. Johri, M. (1997) 'On the universality of Habermas' Discourse ethics'. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, Department of Philosophy, Montreal. Kelly, M. (ed.) (1994) Critique and Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Korsgaard, C. (1996) The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. Laden, A. (1997) 'Constructing shared wills: deliberative liberalism and the politics of identity'. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Owen, D. (1995) Nietzsche, Politics, Modernity. London: Sage. Owen, D. (1996) 'Foucault, Habermas and the claims of reason', H istory of the Human Sciences, 9 (2): 119-38. Patton, P. (1994) 'Foucault's subject of power', Political Theory Newsletter, 6 (1): 60-71.

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Peterson, A. and Bunth, R. (1997) Foucault: Health and Medicine. London: Routledge. Pocock, J.G.A. (1975) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism . New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. (1995) 'A reply to Habermas', Journal o f Philosophy, 92 (3): 109-78. Ruane, J. and Todd, J. (1988) 'The application of critical theory', Political Studies, 36: 533-8. Schmid, M. (1982) 'Habermas' theory of social evolution', in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates. London: Macmillan, pp. 162-80. Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. One: the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (1988a) 'Language and social change', in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 119-34. Skinner, Q. (1988b) 'A reply to my critics', in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 231-89. Skinner, Q. (1996) Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, P. (1974) Freedom and Resentment. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toulmin, S. (1984) An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: Macmillan. Toulmin, S. and Jonsen, A. (1988) The Abuse of Casuistry: a H istory of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1993) [1890] 'Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', in J. Klage and A. Nordman (eds), Philosophical Occasions. Indianapolis: Hackett. pp. 118-55. Young, I.M. (1996) 'Communication and the other: beyond deliberative democracy', in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Bound­ aries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 120-36.

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Part IV On Enlightenment

[13] Question, ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment Colin Gordon

This was one o f the last pieces which Foucault published; it was also the first time since his inaugural lecture given in 1970 that an excerpt from one of his College de France lectures appeared in print in France.1 The place of publication was in a dossier of articles edited for the Magazine litteraire by Foucault's form er assistant Francois Ewald, on the occasion of the appearance of the two further volumes of Foucault’s H istory o f S exu ality . The topic of the lecture was one which Foucault had long felt to be close to the heart of his work. The published transcript is itself only a fragment. The closer reading of Kant's essay on Enlightenment which Foucault promises is missing here; the gap is filled, however, by another related essay by Foucault entitled ‘What is Enlighten­ m ent?’, in Paul Rabinow’s American Foucault R eader} These two pieces are best read together. Foucault had discussed K ant’s ‘What is Enlightenm ent?’ on more than one previous occasion: among these were his Prefaces to L ’Ere des ruptures , a book of memoirs by Jean Daniel, the editor of Le N ouvel Observateur, and to the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The N orm al and the Pathological .3 The them e reappears in some interesting later texts published in America: the essay ‘The Subject and Power’4 , and an interview with Gerard Raulet (notable for some fresh and stimulating re­ marks on the course of tw entieth-century philosophy and the intel­ lectual antecedents of his own work), published in Telos under the inappropriate title ‘Structuralism and Post-structuralism ’.5 A point which emerges in several of these discussions is Foucault’s recogni­ tion th at the affiliation on his own work to the theme o f K ant’s historic question has been shared by a group of contem porary thinkers w ith whom he feels a paradoxical kinship: the Frankfurt School. Foucault expressed a lively regret th at their work had been ignored or unknow n in France during the earlier part of his career. In his later years of teaching in America he undoubtedly became forcibly aware of the unfavourable view taken of his own

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work by later Frankfurt thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas. A num ber of his later occasional essays and interviews docum ent Foucault's desire to explain himself in such a way as to dissipate these misunderstandings and to facilitate a more open philosophi­ cal dialogue with his American colleagues; this effort o f explana­ tion converges, in turn, with the later evolution of his own studies and preoccupations. The present piece became, within a few weeks of its publication, the principal theme of an obituary article by Habermas which showed an unaccustomed sympathy and (within certain limitations) understanding for the intentions of Foucault’s thought. Foucault remarks th at K ant’s reflections on the philosophy of the present centre on two objects: Reason or Enlightenment, and Revolution. Foucault’s own developments on K ant’s theme share this double focus, even if the meaning of each, of their connection, and of the respective resonances of K ant’s originating insights are altered — and this not only or mainly through an effect of ironic distancing, but with a sense of tellingly apposite recurrence. In his preface to Canguilhem, Foucault views the differing repercus­ sions of K ant’s question of Enlightenment as developing along diverging paths in German and French philosophy: in the former, as dialectical philosophy, sociology and Marxism, and in the latter through positivism and the philosophy of science; b u t these trajec­ tories issue in a parallel preoccupation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the epistemology of Bachelard and Can­ guilhem with ‘examining a reason, the autonom y of whose struc­ tures carries with it a history of dogmatism and despotism — a reason, consequently, which can have an effect of emancipation on condition th at it manages to liberate itself from itself. Reflec­ tion on the impact of technology, the fate of revolutions and the twilight of colonialism prom pt converging doubts on the meaning of Western rationality. ‘Two centuries later, the Enlightenment returns: but now not at all as a way for the West to take cogni­ zance of its present possibilities and of the liberties to which it can accede, but as a way of interrogating it on its limits and on the powers which it has abused. Reason as despotic enlighten­ m ent.’6 Foucault writes here of Kant and Mendelssohn as in­ augurating by their articles on Enlightenm ent a modern genre of ‘philosophical journalism ’. In his preface to Jean Daniel’s book, he comments on the experiences of a political journalist of the independent Left encountering the events and upheavals of the last two decades and the changes of thinking, opinion or attach­ m ent which these have inspired. The generational experience which Foucault singles out m ost strikingly is not that of the floridly histrionic spectacle of doctrinal conversions and decon-

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versions, bu t rather a m utation in the problem of political iden­ tity as such. The independent Left made up of those who had left the Communist Party, whose dissenting convictions needed to be defined and sustained w ithout effective recourse to a bureaucratic or doctrinal apparatus, represented in the 1950s a choice inseparable from the imperative of struggle for a basis of collective existence and expression. By the 1970s, Foucault suggests, the imperatives had changed: the pressing question was no longer ‘how can we exist?’, but ‘who are we?’ ‘The heroism of political identity has had its day. What one is has now be­ come a question one poses, m om ent by m om ent, to the prob­ lems one encounters. Experiments with, rather than engagement in.’7 The moral issue which Foucault is raising here is not th at of whether we should change or remain unchanged, b ut rather th at of how it is possible for us to hold on to liberty and truth in our ways of changing and not changing. The point is surely well taken. What is more ethically debilitating in the habitus of the orthodox left th at the ways real change is covered up by a show of perpetual consistency, or (what is more frequent) immobility face-lifted by a noisy charade of fundam ental critique and iconoclasm. Foucault’s interests in the linkages between thought, conduct and event posed in K ant’s essays are, among other things, a way of continuing this reflection. The ways in which he reads the Kantian texts presents them as speaking, explicitly or implicitly, to the political experi­ ences of our recent past. Around 1970 Foucault was involved in discussion of what a desirable revolution could be like and how it might be possible. This already signified an awareness — to put it in the terms Foucault cites here from Kant — th at some revolu­ tions have n o t been worth repeating; and a sense of the contradic­ tory nature of the will to a revolution which would only be a repetition. A round 1980 he seems — in common with many of his contemporaries — to have reached a profound scepticism as to whether any possible revolution could, at least in our own societies, be a desirable one. Publicly laconic or reticent though Foucault generally preferred to remain about these matters, to ignore them entirely would surely be to deprive the present lec­ ture of a good part of its point. Take the passages in Kant which Foucault singles out for quotation: never mind whether the revo­ lution succeeds or fails, never mind if a sane person would never try to repeat it, w hat m atters about the revolution is something other than the revolution itself, namely the ‘wishful participation bordering closely on enthusiasm’ of its audience: their enthusiasm, and not the gesticulations of the revolutionaries; and the question which, for Foucault, becomes thus bound up for a part of m odern

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philosophy with the question of Enlightenment: what is to be made of the enthusiasm for revolution; what is to be made of it, more particularly, if the revolution itself is not desirable? This latter question can be read as stating a constant, rather than a variable factor of recent political experience. The political con­ sciousness which announced itself in 1968 — th at of what one might call a free Left, something not quite to be identified with the New Left — and for which in France Foucault became, in effect, the representative philosopher, am ounted in its essence to nothing more or less than a confronting of th at question. The euphoric paradox of May 1968 was, precisely, th at of a ‘revolu­ tio n ’ consisting ultim ately in nothing beyond or other than ‘enthusiasm for revolution’. All the struggles of the following decade were, in so far as they escaped the Leninist or Maoist mould, attem pted liberations of the energy o f revolution from revolution as plan, general staff, strategic totalisation: signs, if one may thus borrow Foucault’s paraphrase of Kant, of a ‘dis­ position’ towards liberty unguessed at by politicians. ‘No m at­ ter w hether all this was Utopian; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at its face value and turned back against the sys­ tem which was bent on controlling it.’8 The question concern­ ing these experiences which Foucault’s last discussions continue to address, with due prudence and sobriety, at a time when much may seem to have ‘fallen back into the former ru t’, is: can they still provide the basis of a consistent political rationality which is distinct from — even, in a sense, the opposite of — the traditional ethos of revolution? K ant’s own answers to his question about Enlightenment command Foucault’s attentive interest and respect, but it is in the question itself th at Foucault finds the m ost precious clue for his own thinking. The pertinence today of the question of Enlightenm ent follows, in part, from a questioning of a hope of Revolution which had itself been ‘borne by a rationalism of which one is entitled to ask w hat part it may have played in the effects of despotism in which that hope lost itself’.9 Hence the Enlightenment, considered as a decisive event, choice or tendency in hum an history, becomes for us, as did the Revolution for Kant, an ambiguous undertaking, liable to succeed or to miscarry, or to succeed at unacceptable cost. Kant distinguishes between revolu­ tion as event and the enthusiasm for revolution which is the true and sure sign of progress. Foucault distinguishes between an Enlightenm ent of sure identity, conviction and destiny, and an Enlightenm ent which is question and questioning, which is comm it­ m ent to uncertainty. Foucault reads in K ant’s original form ulation

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of w hat Enlightenment is a perm anent possibility of questioning w hat subsequently comes of Enlightenment: conversely, he dis­ cards from K ant’s inaugural perception of specific philosophical meaning in the content of the present m om ent the decisive valoris­ ing judgem ent of that content as portentous of a definitive and un­ ambiguous event in the history of hum anity, m an’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. What Foucault recognises and retains in this perception is something rather different: a reflexivity of the contingent and the inessential in the time and in ourselves. Nearly two decades ago Foucault published a laudatory review of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy o f Enlightenm ent in which he wrote th at all modern thought is, in a sense, neo-Kantian.10 In The Order o f Things , the special significance attributed to K ant’s philosophy is its coordination of critique with anthropology.11 The critical philosophy is designed as an education of reason to ­ wards enlightenm ent and release from its self-incurred tutelage. The questions addressed in his Critiques lead, Kant tells us, to a further question which recapitulates them : What is M an?'W hat is our present? Who are we, as beings in and of our present?’ ‘What is man?’ Must the former questions still lead us to the latter one? May they modify the meaning we accord it? It would be a gross simplification to represent Foucault’s attitude to the configuration of these questions in K ant’s thought as a pure polemical refusal. Foucault objects to the identification of Enlightenment — in general, and so by implication in Kant — with humanism. He sees in K ant’s ‘pragm atic’ anthropology a hint of possibilities beyond what had been dream t of in the critical philosophy and quite different from the paths followed after Kant by the hum an sciences.12 Foucault himself remained profoundly attached throughout his career to the development of a certain notion of critique: some of his last comments on this them e form ulate his agreement and disagreement with Kant in a way which also clari­ fies his attitude to the questions of anthropology. ‘Criticism in­ deed consists of analysing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was th at of knowing what limits knowledge m ust abstain from transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what part is taken up by things which are actually singular, contingent, the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform critique conducted in the form of necessary lim itation into a practical cri­ tique th at takes the form of a possible transgression . . . criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the pursuit of formal structures with universal value, b ut rather as a historical investigation into the events th at have led us to constitute ourselves and recognise

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ourselves as subjects of what we do, think and say.’13 Such a critique ‘will be genealogical in the sense th a t it will not deduce, from the form of what we are, what it is possible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency th at has made us w hat we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, or do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics th at has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and as wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom .’14 Or, as Foucault puts it in ‘The Subject and Power’, ‘maybe the point nowadays is n ot to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.’15 So large a part of the New Left generation has become accustom­ ed over the years to support its positions by reference to a dis­ course of identity — w hether in a recovered memory of class, a Freudian ‘theory of the subject’, or a pure parade of doctrinal con­ form ity — th at it is advisable to emphasise the otherwise obvious point that an ethic of ‘refusing w hat we are’ does not mean a mere leap into the void, an immoralism of the gratuitous a c t In the first place, the form of freedom which Foucault envisages requires a form of knowledge obtainable only by means of exacting histori­ cal and political investigation: tasks to which Foucault himself devoted a certain effort. To interpret the relation between free­ dom and knowledge in Foucault as antinomic is a symptom of anorexic thought. ‘What we are’ nearly always connotes in Fou­ cault’s discussion the com ponent of the taken-for-granted in our thoughts, actions and selves: the questioning of ‘what we are’ in the name of a principle of perm anent contingency demands th at vigorous appetite for facts which Ian Hacking so justly recognises in Foucault.16 In the second place, the question of ‘what we are’ enfolds within its apparently naive simplicity a rich complex of historicopolitical issues, a vast k not of recurrences and relativisations. The passage quoted above reminds us of the m utual implication in Foucault’s thinking of the question of the present and the ‘his­ tory of the present’, the term which he employs in Discipline and Punish to describe his own demarche and which has sufficiently often been seen as the m otto-them e o f his work for scholarly trouble to have been taken to docum ent instances of its prior use by others. And these latter findings are themselves o f more than anecdotal interest because, firstly, the history of the question of the present (or, to use Nietzsche’s word, of ‘genealogy’) is itself a significant elem ent in the history of the present, and secondly, the investigation o f what we are by recourse to a history o f the present has become itself one of the traditions o f m odernity, a significant institution o f our culture. The history of the genealogical genre

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has yet to be written. W ithout Foucault we might not even have become aware of its lack; this blind spot of our intellectual cul­ ture may be one of the reasons why so much difficulty is still being found in placing Foucault’s work relative to other, more familiar landmarks. This problem cannot be adequately dealt with here; b u t the topic of the present note demands that it be paid at least a cursory glance. The genealogical connection considerably intensifies the paradoxes entailed in Foucault’s ability to recognise his own problems in K ant’s question. A t the same time, the con­ ten t of th at recognition only becomes evident in its full singularity when note is taken of Foucault’s highly distinctive relationship to the genealogical tradition. The relationship between the practice of genealogy and the ques­ tion of Enlightenment has of course always been charged with polemic. The genealogical attitude is almost synonymous with m istrust of Enlightenment; genealogical narration is an inverse, a post-mortem, a satire of the Enlightenm ent’s prospectuses of pro­ gress. Moreover, in contrast to what Foucault remarks on as an element of novelty in K ant’s mode of reflection on the meaning of the present time, it has the effect of replacing the theme of Enlightenment within a style of historical questioning which the question of Enlightenment had thought to supplant: Augustinian exegeses of the time for signs of an impending event, or of the end of all things; debates on the ruin of empires; disputes on the meaning of m odernity as prosperity or decadence. On the whole it may be said th at the specific genre of genealogy, of a question of the present linked to a history of the present, seldom coexists with revolutionary thought. Its representatives tend, where politi­ cally classifiable at all, to belong within a broadly liberal tradition or, if o f the Left, to represent a heterodox m inority standpoint. In their different ways both Foucault and the Frankfurt School are exceptions who confirm this rule. By far the m ost brilliant and concentrated outburst of genealogical thought in the present cen­ tury would seem to have been due to the German and Austrian emigration of 1933 and after. The history of the present here assumes the m ost compelling of all its m odern forms as reflection on the causes of present catastrophe. Cassirer in Gothenburg with The M yth o f the State, Hayek in London with The Road to S erfdom , Adorno and Horkheimer in America with Dialectic o f Enlighten­ m en t , Karl Polanyi in England and America with The Great Trans­ form ation, Benjamin in Paris with the ‘Theses’ and the Passagenarbeit, Riistow in Istanbul with Ortsbestim m ung der Gegenwart are among the lastingly significant thinkers for whom the German disaster compels, on the one hand a new forensic edge in the interrogation of the past for evidence o f the negation of progress,

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and on the other a harsher judgem ent on present, undiagnosed trends and propensities, even within the surviving democracies, which prepare or facilitate the totalitarian debacle. But at the same time it must be noted that, especially within the liberal tradition, this semiology of catastrophe (linked, as its preventative counterpart, to a prophylactic fundamentalism) is not the sole or overriding version of all genealogical thought. Along­ side it and sometimes overlapping with it is the different and more classical mode represented by Tocqueville, Weber or Schumpeter, which might instead be called a perm anent pragmatics of survival, oriented to the longer-term identification of historic trends which may be irreversible in character and may impose inescapable costs and intrinsic, though finite risks. The difference, not so much in political partisanship as in ideological tonality, between the con­ clusions adduced by a Weber or Schumpeter on the one side, and a Hayek on the other, may be related, at least in part, to this differ­ ence in genealogical style. Weber, for all the ethical and polemical vehemence of his contem porary diagnoses, writes within an overall perspective such that the probable future of capitalist bureaucracy promises to be only marginally more appealing than that of a socialist bureaucracy. The later Schumpeter judges that the require­ m ent for the survival of a rational economic system imposes the grave but, in the last analysis, bearable necessity of a transition to socialism. In either case, the analysis addresses the endogenous hazards and necessities of a system, not the unrecognised incursions of an alien, pathological m utation. The neo-liberal Friedrich Hayek performs, on the other hand, a tour de force in the paradoxicalprophetic genre by warning the British that their wartime recourse to a kind o f state-socialism may eventually lead them involun­ tarily to repeat the political fate of Germany and Austria. This (doubtless partial and oversimplified) contrast may help us to specify the particular style of genealogy practiced by Fou­ cault. What has just been said may already indicate one obvious singularity of Foucault’s work, namely that it is one o f the rela­ tively few contributions to genealogical thinking to have been produced since the great generation of the German-Austrian exiles. It may well be that the sceptical view often taken of genealogical discourse in recent decades has to do with the sense th at it has been too exclusively bound up with the experience of political catastrophe, itself sym ptom atic as well as diagnostic of the cultural traumas of totalitarianism and exile, too lurid or un­ balanced in its conclusions to minister acceptably to the concerns of more stable polities. Some of the English-speaking critical res­ ponse to Foucault’s work may be a reflection of these views. A nother contributory factor which cannot be explored here is

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the coincidence of Foucault’s later work with the curiously delayed peak of impact on Western thinking of the testim ony of exiled witnesses of another great political catastrophe of the tw entieth century: the Soviet and East European dissidents. The description of a seventeenth-century ‘Great Internm ent’ in his H istoire de la Folie (1961) seems likely to have evoked undesir­ able m odern associations for Foucault’s French Communist readers. The Gulag Archipelago began to appear in 1973; Foucault’s Discipline and Punish coined the term ‘carceral archipelago’ to characterise certain institutions of nineteenth-century French society. But Foucault himself was always both scrupulous and lucid in circumscribing the proper ways in which the (re d is ­ covery of the facts of Soviet history can and should be a proper object of moral and political reflection in the West.17 Despite the violent counter-literature which his own diagnostic conclusions have provoked from some quarters, it needs to be emphasised th at they actually issue from a genealogical approach which is in many ways closer (if I may once again be perm itted for a m om ent to abstract from these thinkers’ respective political commitments) to th at of a Weber or Schum peter than to that of aHayek. Foucault is n o t a Cassandra; his works do not warn of an impending catas­ trophe or the repetition of an accomplished catastrophe. Foucault is not writing in external or internal exile but, at worst, in condi­ tions of lim ited political adversity. The potential point of issue in reality for his analyses is not constrained to the vast detours of ethical conversion and reconstruction prescribed by the reflections of the German exiles, but lies in the possibility of existing and proxim ate forms of political action: specifically, the ‘local struggles’ current during the 1970s. One can see here how Fou­ cault’s celebrated ‘microphysical’ m ethod o f analysis goes hand in hand with a m odification of previous genealogical approaches: the possibility of focussing powerful analytical resources on de­ tailed, localised problems demands an ability to interrogate the present w ithout recourse to apocalyptic meta-narratives, a more sophisticated and discriminating means of dissecting the contra­ dictions of rationality than traditional dialectic has generally allowed. In this respect, and more particularly in terms of our understanding of his interest in K ant’s question o f Enlightenment and his attitude to philosophical anthropology, Foucault’s sense of affinity with Weber may, as Pasquale Pasquino has recently suggested, reward further scrutiny.18 One of Foucault’s few direct comments on Weber was made in the course of an exceptionally interesting series o f lec­ tures in 1979 on the history of liberalism and neoliberalism.19 Weber’s decisive contribution to tw entieth-century thinking is

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seen here as the creation, in place of the Marxian theme of a contradictory logic of capital, of the problem atic of an ‘irra­ tional rationality of capitalist society’. The present condition of society and its prospects of future survival are, that is to say, evaluated in the light of a historical analysis of processes of rationalisation which are multiple, specific and potentially dis­ cordant. Foucault departs from m any received views of recent intellectual history by tracing a parallel filiation with Weber’s ideas of tw o opposed schools of thinkers in subsequent German intellectual history: the Frankfurt School (whose basic concern is, according to Foucault’s avowedly over-schematic formula, with the possibility of constructing a new social rationality capable of eliminating the irrationalities of the capitalist economy) and the neoliberal economists and jurists of the Freiburg school, also active in Germany during the Weimar period, m ostly exiled during the Third Reich and profoundly influential in the early years of the Federal Republic, whose objective was, on the contrary, to establish or recover a (capitalist) economic rationality capable of eliminat­ ing the social irrationalities hitherto known to capitalism. This double destiny, as Foucault puts it, of Weberianism in Germany ends with the street battles of 1968 in which the last disciples of the Frankfurt School confront the police of a government in­ spired by the teachings of the Freiburg school.20 Foucault’s main reason for drawing attention to the rather neglected contribution of the Freiburg school (called in the post­ war years, after the title o f the journal in which they collaborated, the Ordoliberalen) was undoubtedly the desire to contribute to ­ wards a more informed reflection on the recent, impressive and dis­ concerting political successes scored in both Germany and France by neoliberal m ethods of government. For our present purposes, tw o features of the German neoliberals’ version of Weberianism are w orth briefly singling out because of the respectful and even — allowances being made for a degree of Weberian irony on his part — sym pathetic treatm ent accorded them by Foucault. The first feature is a Weberianism turned m ilitantly against the con­ clusions of the later Schumpeter; the second, a Weberianism purged of the contam ination of certain ideas propagated by Sombart. The Ordoliberalen take sides against Schumpeter for w hat they regard as an invalid historical deduction of the inevitable failure of liberalism. They argue that the disasters of German history are n o t proofs of the consequences of a m arket economy, but con­ sequences of the consistent frustration in m odern Germany of liberal economic policies. The m arket system has not been tried and found wanting, it has been denied a trial. This contention is

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linked to what foucault describes (attributing it in part to a Husserlian influence on some members of the Freiburg school) as a rigor­ ously antinaturalistic conception of the m arket itself, which is considered not as a quasi-autonomous given of developed econo­ mies b u t rather as a reality which can exist and be maintained in existence only by virtue of activist policies of political interven­ tion: by legal measures designed to safeguard the game of free com petition, and by socio-legal measures designed to propagate and diffuse throughout the social body, and not only within the narrowly conceived limits of strictly economic activity, an ethos of enterprise. Alexander Rustow gave this latter set of objectives the significant title o f Vitalpolitik. On this view, a capitalist system is by no means inherently doom ed to destruction but its survival depends on a capacity for inventive responses to the more or less aleatory structural hazards and blockages to which is it inevitably liable. The Ordoliberalen take issue, secondly, with what Foucault terms Som bart’s thesis: the idea, developed in his sociological writings on Gesellschaft and G em einschaft , of an ineluctable ten­ dency of the m odern economy to produce a ‘mass society’ which impoverishes hum an relations and replaces true com m unity with the false gratifications of, as Foucault phrases it, ‘signs, speed and spectacles’. The neoliberals’ answer to this is that it is not so much the m arket economy as such which is at the root of these evils as, on the one hand the m ethods of planning and bureau­ cracy which have been adopted by enemies of the m arket system (the National Socialist experience providing the definitive objectlesson of a regime, conceived as a Sombartian restitution of national comm unity, which evolves into the m ost avid exponent in modern times of the culture of ‘signs and spectacles’), and on the other hand by the narrow and over-abstract conception adopted by an older, ‘palaeo-liberal’ political economy, of the nature and meaning of economy and enterprise. Foucault shows no sign of endorsing the neoliberals’ doctrines b u t he quite clearly shows a degree of tem peram ental affinity (albeit for slightly different motives) for these parts of their approach: anti-naturalism; the stress on history as the analysis of contingent hazards, n ot ineluctable destinies; the taste for a poli­ tics of invention; the interest in the Weberian them e of the ethical conduct o f life; the suspicion of a certain genre of cultural criticism. These themes are developed in an interesting manner in the interview with Gerard Raulet. Foucault distinguishes here between the analysis of the form ation and m utation of a plurality of dif­ ferent forms of rationality and the prognosis —which he repudiates — of an impending or actual collapse of rationality in general.

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‘Here, I think, we are touching on one of the forms — perhaps we should call them habits — one of the m ost harmful habits in contem porary thought, in modern thought even; at any rate, in post-Hegelian thought: the analysis of the present as being pre­ cisely, in history, a present of rupture, o f high point, of completion or of a returning dawn, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who engages in philosophical discourse reflects on his own time strikes me as a flaw. I can say so all the more firmly since it is something I have done myself; and since, in someone like Nietzsche, we find this incessantly — or, at least, insistently enough. I think we should have the m odesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundam ental irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We m ust also have the m odesty to say, on the other hand, th at — even w ithout this solemnity — the time we live in is very interesting; it needs to be analysed and broken down, and th at we would do well to ask ourselves, “What is the nature of our present?” I wonder if one of the great roles of philosophical thought since the Kantian “Was ist Aufklarung?” might not be characterised by saying th at the task of philosophy is to describe the nature of the present, and of “ ourselves in the present” . With the proviso th at we do n o t allow ourselves the facile, rather theatri­ cal declaration th at this m om ent in which we exist is one of total perdition, in the abyss of darkness, or a trium phant daybreak, etc. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time which is never quite like any other.’21 Thus it is as much necessary to be nominalist about the present as about power. Foucault’s approach further implies a carefully defined way of posing questions about ‘m odernity’. He indeed re­ marks in this same interview that he has ‘never clearly understood what was m eant in France by the word “ m odernity” ’, and confes­ ses to being ‘n o t up to date’ on w hat is m eant by ‘postm odernity’. His own views are stated m ost fully in the essay ‘What is Enlighten­ m ent?’ Foucault proposes here an understanding of m odernity as meaning n ot an epoch but an attitude (a distinction which may correspond obliquely with one made by Kant: we are no t living in an enlightened age , but only in an age o f enlightenm ent). By ‘attitu d e’ Foucault means here ‘a mode of relating to contem por­ ary reality’, a ‘voluntary choice made by certain people’, a way of thinking and feeling, o f acting and behaving: an ethos. Foucault gives a gloss on Baudelaire’s celebrated writings on this them e.22 M odernity is n ot a quality in the course o f things, bu t a specific attitude to their process, ‘a difficult interplay between the truth of w hat is real and the exercise of freedom ’. M odernity is a dis­ cipline, an asceticism, a specific culture o f the self : ‘m odern man,

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for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden tru th ; he is the man who tries to invent him self. But all these m odern options are limited, in Baudelaire’s thought, to the life and the world of art. There is certainly a note of sym pathy in Foucault’s citation of the Baudelairian precept: ‘You have no right to despise the pre­ sent.’ Cultural critique and genealogy have often been allied pur­ suits. Nietzsche is, after all, the patron saint of both genres in our century. In Foucault’s cas£ the association is, by and large, a mis­ leading one. Foucault is a genealogist b u t n o t a cultural critic. He does n o t lam ent a loss of hum an values, a decay of comm unity; he is n o t impressed by the Sombartian bogies of mass consump­ tion, signs, speed, spectacles (a set of codewords aptly suited, of course, to evoke the more recent French neo-Sombartian ex­ ponents of situationism and post-modern prophesy: Baudrillard, Virilio, de Bord). ‘I do not believe in the old dirges about decadence, the lack of good writers, the sterility of thought, the bleak and foreboding horizons ahead of us. I believe, on the contrary, th at our problem is one of overabundance; n o t th at we are suffering from an emptiness, b u t that we lack adequate means to think all th at is happening.’23 In some ways the themes of Foucault’s last books appear, despite the historical remoteness of their material, wholly in tune with a prevailing contem porary mood. The interviews in which he discusses their objectives centre on the idea that the sphere of personal life and relations is ceasing in our societies to be regulated through a m orality of imperative or prohibitive codes and th at the space thus being vacated can be filled only by a different kind of ethical practice, th at of what he calls‘an aesthetic of existence’. ‘Why should n o t each individual be able to make of his life a work of art?’24 Foucault sees one o f the uses of his last books as being to docum ent forgotten options of this kind (which is not to say th at the particular practices described are presented as w orthy of admiration and im itation; on the contrary25). Meanwhile, in the years Foucault spent writing these books, the idea of a prom otion o f new ‘lifestyles’ has increasingly found its way, in a similar sense if n o t in identical terms, into some orthodox political agendas. Foucault’s brief discussion of Baudelaire’s views on the m odern ‘way of life’ acquires an added interest when one notes his reference in his last books to Walter Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire as one o f the few analyses o f the m odern history of the practice of the self.26 Benjamin’s recent political popularity seems to owe less to these explorations than to his more readily digestible pronouncem ents such as the dictum, quoted with

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platitudinous frequency by New Left writers, on the contrast between the politicised aesthetics of communism and the aestheticised politics of fascism. It is not clear that this particular distinc­ tion suffices to unravel the issues which Foucault has posed. On the one hand, the very idea of an ‘aesthetics of existence’ may en­ tail th at (as Foucault has argued) the relations between ethical and political practices are variable and contingent27: there may thus be some reason for doubting the political value o f the idea of making one’s life into a p o litica l work of art, a reincarnation of the m ilitant ideal in the form of a ‘lifestyle’. A different option would be to re­ gard the possibility of a space of indeterm ination in personal exis­ tence as a value and a necessity: an idea which it is certainly pos­ sible to translate into practical political terms. Foucault has des­ cribed this question as standing at the centre of the current socalled crisis of the Welfare State: in the initial period of welfare institutions it proved necessary and acceptable to sacrifice a degree of individual autonom y for the sake of individual security; in re­ cent years this quidproquo has become an object of massive dis­ satisfaction, creating a new demand for a system capable of simul­ taneously maximising security and autonom y. Foucault emphasises that this objective can be achieved only by a major new effort of collective and institutional invention, reform, negotiation and compromise, involving the confrontation of difficult ethical choices.28 One may be reminded here of Foucault’s remark on K ant’s account of Enlightenment as the coincidence of the free and public uses of reason, th at it does not explain the political means whereby th at use of reason can be assured.29 But no doubt Foucault would also think th at problem too narrowly stated: it would have to be enlarged at least so as to include the means of ensuring adequate scope for the free private use of practical rea­ son. One may be reminded also of an aspect of Weber’s thought which has been brought to attention by the valuable recent articles of Wilhelm Hennis: the sociological appraisal and evalua­ tion of collective powers, and the practical evaluation of existing conditions and choices in term s of their impact on Lebensstil and Lebensfuhrung , the style and conduct o f individual life (a them e later to be vigorously developed in the neoliberals’ ideas on V italpolitik ).30 Weber also sometimes refers to this preoccupation as a ‘characterological’ criterion. One may well wonder whether Weber would have viewed the m odern success of the idea of life­ style (or the American-led subsumption of the notion of ‘way of life’ by ideological propaganda) with unalloyed favour, any more than he did the hunts after Erlebnis which he saw as the cultural vice of his own day. One of his harshest ‘characterological’ studies

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of Wilhelmine Germany ends with the reflection th at it is difficult to invent a value or a style.31 Foucault might not have disagreed. One would have liked, as well, to have heard his comm ent on an­ other passage from Weber cited by Hennis, on ‘the perception that a human science, and th at is w hat political economy is, investigates above all else the quality o f the human beings who are brought up in those economic and social conditions of existence’.32 It has been suggested of late that Foucault may have come to change his views about the merits of philosophical anthropology or the ‘theory of the subject’. This seems to indicate a misunder­ standing of what his later work is about. There is no ground for supposing th at Foucault would have wanted to embrace, either as a means or an outcom e of an ethic of ‘changing what we are’, an ‘anthropological’ criterion of Weber’s kind. On the other hand, in order for his question of ‘w hat we are’ actually to be a question at all, it may be vital to retain a margin of uncertainty or under­ determ ination regarding the ethical status o f anthropological cate­ gories, or whatever terms occupy their place: a possibility o f know­ ing th at we do n o t know what we are: ‘L ’histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes d’une m€me vocable. Y contredire est un devoir.’33 Notes 1. Foucault had previously authorised publication of three lectures in trans­ lation: Foucault (1980a) and (1979b). See also note (19) below. 2. Foucault (1980c)f p 32—50. 3. Canguilhem (1980); Daniel (1979). 4. Foucault (1984a). 5. Foucault (1983a). 6. Foucault (1980c), p. 54. 7. Daniel (1979), p. 12. 8. Foucault (1979c), p. 145. 9. Foucault (1980c), p. 54. 10. Foucault (1966). 11. Foucault (1970), Chapter 9. 12. These themes are developed in the unpublished commentary on Kant's Anthropology which formed, together with his (published) translation of that work, Foucault's these comp/ementaire for the doctorat es lettres. See also Foucault (1970). 13. Foucault (1984a), p. 45—6. 14. Ibid. p. 46. 15. Foucault (1982), p. 785. 16. Hacking (1981), p. 32. 17. Cf. especially Foucault (1980b). 18. Cf. Pasquino (1984). 19. Regrettably, none of this material has been published, except for a short extract in an obituary number of Liberation (Foucault 1984e). The College de France has an archive of recordings and transcripts of Foucault's

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courses. For a general introductory survey of this research and a series of essays on related themes by other authors, see Burchell e ta l. (1986). 20. These and the following points are drawn chiefly from Foucault's lec­ tures of 29 March 1979 and 4 April 1979. 21. Foucault (1983a), p. 206. 22. Foucault (1984a), p. 3 9 -4 2 . 23. Foucault (1980d), p. 1 6 -1 7 . 24. Foucault (1984b), p. 90. 25. Foucault (1984c), p. 38. 26. Foucault (1984d), p. 17. 27. Cf. Note (24). 28. Foucault (16: 1983b), p. 41. 29. Foucault (4: 1984), p. 37. 30. Hennis (1983), Hennis (1984). My (1986) discusses Hennis's views and their bearing on some points of connection between the thought of Weber and Foucault. 31. Weber (1948), p. 437. 32. Weber (1980), cited in Hennis (1983), p. 164. 33. Rene Char, cited by Foucault (1984d).

References Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. eds. (1986), The Foucault Effect: Essays on Governmental Rationality, Brighton. Canguilhem, G. (1980) The Normal and the pathological, with a preface by Michel Foucault: cf. Foucault (1980c). Daniel, J. (1979) L ’Ere des Ruptures, Paris, with a Preface by Michel Foucault (also published as ‘Pour une morale de l’inconfort’, Le Nouvel Observateur 23/4/1979). Foucault, M. (1966) Review of French translation of E. Cassirer’s The Philosophy o f the Enlightenment, Quinzaine litteraire 1/7/1966, Paris. (Reprinted in ibid., July 1984.) Foucault, M. (1970) The Order o f Things, London. Foucault, M. (1979a) The History o f Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, London. Foucault, M. (1979b) ‘On Governmentality’, I&C 6, 1979; ‘La “GovernamentolitSL’" , A u t/A u t 1 6 7 -8 , Sept.-D ec. 1978. Foucault, M. (1980a) ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge, Brighton. Foucault, M. (1980b) ‘Powers and strate­ gies’, in Power/Knowledge. Foucault, M. (1980c) ‘Georges Canguil­ hem: philosopher of error’, I&C 7. Foucault, M. (1980d). ‘Le philosophe masque’, (anonymous) interview with C. Delacampagne, Le Monde 6 /4 /1 9 8 0 ; translation in M. Foucault, Von der Freundschaft als Lebensweise, Berlin 1984 (reference above is to this edi­ tion). Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry 8, p. 777—795;

also in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault- Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton 1983. Foucault, M. (1983a) ‘Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault’ (with G. Raulet) Telos 55 p. 1 9 5 -2 1 1 . Foucault M. (1983b) ‘Un systeme fini face a une demande infinie’, interview with a R Bono in Securite Sociale: VEnjeu p. 39—63, editions TENSyros, Paris. Foucault, M. (1984a) A Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York. Foucault, M. (1984b) ‘Le sexe comme une morale’ (interview with H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow), Le Nouvel Observateur no. 1021, Paris June 1984. Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘Le retour de la morale’ (interview with Gilles Barbedette and Andr£ Scala), Les Nouvelles, Paris 28 June 1984. Foucault, M. (1984d) L ’Usage des Plaisirs, Paris. Foucault, M. (1984e) ‘La phobie d’Etat’ (excerpt from a lecture given at the Col­ lege de France, 31 January 1979). Libera­ tion 30 June 1984, p21. Gordon, C. (1986) ‘The Soul of the citi­ zen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Rationality and Government’, in Lash S. and Whimster S. eds. Max Weber, Ration­ ality and M odernity, London. Habermas, J. (1984) ‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present’, University Publish­ ing 13 p. 5—6, Berkeley. Hacking, I. (1981) review of M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York Review o f Books Vol XXVIII No 8 p 3 2 -7 , 14/5/ 1981.

Michel Foucault Question, ethos, event

Hennis, W. (1983) ‘Max Weber’s “Central Question” Economy and Society Vol 12 No. 2. Hennis, W. (1984) ‘Max Weber’s Thema’ Zeitschrift fur Politik Jg 31 p 11—52 (translation forthcoming in Lash S. and Whimster S. eds, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity).

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Pasquino, P. (1984) ‘De la modernite’, Magazine litteraire no. 207, June 1984. Weber, M. (1984) From Max Weber, Gerth and Mills eds. Weber, M. (1980) ‘The National State and Economic Policy’, Economy and Society Vol 9 p. 4 28—49.

[14] Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal Amy Allen

In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklarung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School,” a form of philosophy in which Foucault, perhaps surprisingly, situates his own work.2 In another late essay, Foucault explains in more detail the sense in which he views his work as a continuation of the Kantian critical tradition. Foucault claims that what is central in Kant’s discussion of Enlightenment is not “a theory, a doctrine, or a permanent body of knowledge” but instead a distinctively modem attitude, an ethos, one in which “the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.”3 And although he insists in this essay that it is not the case that “one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment,” he nevertheless once again positions his own work in the Kantian Enlightenment tradition as he understands it, “conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”4 From this perspective, Foucault offers a retrospective of his oeuvre, now understood as a modified form of Kantian critique. Foucault’s critical project no doubt departs significantly from the letter of Kant’s philosophy, but not, or so he claims, from its spirit: criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological - and not transcendental - in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And... genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the

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contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.5

Foucault’s remarks in these late essays about the Enlightenment tradition in general and about the Kantian version of the Enlightenment project in particular have per­ plexed his critics and his supporters alike. After all, Kant had seemed to be the great villain of Foucault’s account of the rise of the human sciences in The O rder o f Things. In that work, as James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg have put the point, “Kant had the dubious honor of awakening philosophy from its ‘dogmatic slumber’ only to lull it back into what Foucault dubbed ‘the anthropological sleep’__ Kant’s legacy... was viewed as decidedly problematic: a philosophical anthropology caught in the bind of treating ‘man’ as both an object of empirical inquiry and the transcendental ground of all knowledge.”6 Moreover, although Bentham was perhaps the more obvious target of Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary power in D isciplin e and Punish , Kant’s moral philosophy can just as easily be seen to be implicated in one of the central claims of that book, namely, that “the soul is prison of the body.”7 So what could Foucault possibly have had in mind when, in these late essays, he invoked Kant’s critical project and situated his own work within the Kantian Enlightenment tradition? One possibility, suggested by Jurgen Habermas, is that Foucault actually has two very different Kants; to put it crudely, there is the Kant that Foucault likes and the one that he doesn’t.8 As Habermas puts it: In Foucault’s lecture, we do not meet the Kant familiar from The Order o f Things, the epistemologist who thrust open the door to the age of anthropological thought and the human sciences with his analysis of finiteness. Instead we encounter a different Kant - the precursor of the Young Hegelians, the Kant who was the first to make a serious break with the metaphysical heritage, who turned philosophy away from the Eternal Verities and concentrated on what philosophers had until then considered to be without concept and nonexistent, merely contingent and transitory.9

Habermas goes on to argue that these two very different readings of Kant map onto a fundamental contradiction in Foucault’s own thought. The question, as Habermas presents it, is “how such an affirmative understanding of modern philosophizing... fits with Foucault’s unyielding critique of modernity. How can Foucault’s self-understanding as a thinker in the tradition of the Enlightenment be compatible with his unmistakable critique of precisely this form of knowledge, which is that of modernity?”10 In Habermas’s view, Foucault cannot have it both ways; the contradiction between Foucault’s critique of modernity and his embrace of (an admittedly idiosyncratic interpretation of) the Enlightenment tradition is inescapable. Thus, Habermas concludes his remembrance written on the occasion of Foucault’s death by suggesting that perhaps Foucault recognized and, in a characteristically veiled way, admitted as much in his final reflections on Kant. As Habermas puts it, “perhaps it is the force of this contradiction that

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drew Foucault, in the last of his texts, back into a sphere of influence he had tried to blast open, that of the philosophical discourse of modernity.”11 In response, Schmidt and Wartenberg have warned against too hasty a dis­ missal of Foucault’s late embrace of Kant and the Enlightenment tradition. They suggest, rightly, I think, that Foucault’s “invocation of Kant should neither be written off as simply an ironic gesture nor turned into a deathbed concession of defeat. It is instead a remarkably productive interrogation of a thinker who never ceased to inspire and provoke Foucault.”12 However, despite their insistence that Foucault’s embrace of the Kantian version of the Enlightenment project was no passing fancy but instead was a persistent theme in Foucault’s writings over the last decade of his life, and despite their serious attention to Foucault’s different interpretations of this tradition in these relatively late works, Schmidt and Wartenberg seem to agree with Habermas that Foucault has two Kants. As they put it, “the Kant we meet in Foucault’s essay differs markedly from the thinker Foucault confronted two decades earlier in The Order o f Things__ If the Kant of The Order o f Things marked the advent of an ultimately empty humanism, the Kant of ‘What is Enlightenment?’ was a good deal more interesting and pro­ vocative.”13 Thus, although they are, I think, completely right to say that Foucault’s “stance toward the enlightenment remained a good deal more nuanced and complex than his critics would lead us to believe,” they nonetheless leave Habermas’s charge of a fundamental contradiction in Foucault’s thought unanswered.14 Whereas Schmidt and Wartenberg’s defense of Foucault focuses on his proximity to one of his two Kants - Kant the thinker of his own present - David Hoy’s defense of Foucault focuses on his distance from the other, Kant the epistemologist. Hoy argues, contra Habermas, that Foucault is not an enemy of reason and enlightenment, though he is, in the end, a postmodern rather than a modem thinker. Although the jumping off point for Hoy’s argument is an account of Foucault’s late essays on Kant and the Enlightenment, much of his argument is devoted to substantiating the claim that the trajectory of Foucault’s thought is a process of breaking free from Kant-qua-epistemologist. While Foucault’s claims about archaeological methodology in The Archaeology o f Knowledge look to Hoy, regrettably, “like Kantian transcendental philosophy” inasmuch as Foucault “posits an a priori that can be deduced or at least indirectly inferred by this one particular method,” by the time he writes Discipline and Punish, Foucault has seen the error of his ways and his postmodern “pastiche emulates Nietzsche more than Kant.”15 Both archaeology and genealogy are, according to Hoy, attempts to think the unthought, which Hoy takes to be the task of both modem and postmodern thought. But whereas archaeology, with its “pretensions to epistemology (in the traditional sense of the privileged discourse about the conditions for the possibility of any and every form of knowledge),” remains caught in a modem way of thinking the unthought, genealogy, with its recognition that it is just one among many possible ways of thinking the unthought, an unthought which is itself also multiple,

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moves beyond Kantian modernism into Nietzschean postmodernism.16 As Hoy puts it, in the shift from archaeology to genealogy, Foucault “moves from a mod­ ernist, quasi-transcendental neo-Kantian stance to a postmodern, neo-Nietzschean stance.”17 To my mind, the significant drawback of this interpretation of Foucault is that it makes his late embrace of Kant even more mystifying than it was before. If Foucault spent his whole life trying to break free of Kant, why would he return to him in the end? How could this return be understood as anything other than the capitulation that Habermas understands it to be, Hoy’s reading? Not only does Hoy not answer this question, he doesn’t even seem to recognize the need to reconcile the two prima facie incompatible versions of Foucault’s relationship to Kant that are present not only in Foucault’s work, varied and wide-ranging as it was, but also in the pages of Hoy’s own essay. Once again, Habermas’s charge against Foucault is left unanswered. In the remainder of this essay, I shall attempt to answer this charge. Foucault’s admiration for Kant in his late work is quite explicit; thus, it seems to me that Habermas’s charge of contradiction can best be met by a reconsideration of Foucault’s early work on Kant. In what follows, I shall focus on this early work, in particular on Foucault’s these complementaire on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point o f View and the closely related account of Kant in The Order of Things. Contra Habermas, I do not think that Foucault has two Kants; rather, a careful reading of the these and the related early texts will demonstrate that Foucault’s stance toward Kant in his early work was never as rejectionist as has been supposed.18 Thus, I also dispute Habermas’s claim that Foucault’s seem­ ingly contradictory stance on Kant is indicative of a deeper, more fundamental contradiction in Foucault’s thought.19 Indeed, I shall argue that when Foucault’s later work is viewed from the perspective of his early work on Kant, a striking con­ tinuity emerges, namely, a central and abiding interest in and critical engagement with philosophical anthropology. Foucault’s interpretation of Kant treats the Anthro­ pology as a central rather than a marginal text and puts the anthropological question - what is man? - at the center of Kant’s philosophical work. Whether or not this is the best interpretation of Kant, I shall leave to Kant scholars, who are in a much better position than I to decide. However, I shall argue that Foucault’s early discussions of Kant demonstrate clearly that it is the question of subjectivity that is central for Foucault’s project from the very beginning.20 The line of interpretation that I shall pursue in what follows not only affords us with a more plausible and coherent interpretation of Foucault’s work as a whole, it also reveals Foucault’s project as a rich, subtle, and defensible alternative to Habermas’s own way of taking up and transforming the Kantian critical project. I shall argue that Foucault, like Habermas, offers us a continuation-through91 transformation of the Kantian critical project. Thus, to the extent that the Foucault/Habermas debate has been understood as compelling us to choose between rejecting the Kantian Enlightenment project or taking it up in a trans­ formative way, it has been misunderstood.22

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I shall proceed as follows. In the first section, I examine closely Foucault’s treatment of Kant in his these com plem entaire , focusing on the complex relationship between the empirical and the transcendental. In the second section, I re-examine Foucault’s account of Kant in The O rder o f Things and, drawing on my reading of the Kant thesis, suggest a new way of understanding that text’s often-misunderstood call for the end of man. In the third section, I address some problems that arise for my reconstruction of Foucault’s transformation of Kantian critique and defend Foucault’s version of continuation-through-transformation of the Kantian critical project. 1. The Em pirical and the Transcendental

Foucault’s first extended discussion of Kant occurs in his these com plem entaire , which consisted of a translation into French of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point o f View and a substantial introduction to the text. In his introduction, Foucault returns again and again to two related themes: the tension between the empirical and the transcendental in the account of man offered in the Anthropology itself, and the relationship between the A nthropology and the critical philosophy. Both themes ultimately return to the same problematic: the relationship in Kant’s thought between the human being as historically constituted, on the one hand, and the structures of the human mind as constitutive of all possible experience, on the other. These themes set the stage both for Foucault’s later discussion of Kant in The O rder o f Things and for my reading of Foucault’s work. With respect to the tension between the empirical and the transcendental within the A nthropology itself, the first point to notice is that Foucault returns repeatedly to Kant’s claim that pragmatic anthropology takes as its object “what man as a free agent makes, or can and should [kann und soil] make, of himself.”23 For instance, Foucault notes that, for Kant, “man is not simply ‘what he is,’ but ‘what he makes of himself.’ And is this not precisely the field that the Anthropology defines for its investigation?”24 Foucault views the conjunction of the descriptive account of man (what man makes of himself) and the normative account (what man can and should make of himself) in Kant’s A nthropology as absolutely essential to an understanding of the text, and he draws the following implication from it: “man, in the A nth ropology , is neither homo natura , nor pure subject of liberty; he is caught in the syntheses already brought about by his liaison with the world” (43). In other words, Kant’s pragmatic anthropology studies human beings as they are, that is, empirically, but it also makes constant reference to the use and misuse of the various cognitive powers around which Kant organizes his empirical discussion. But even to talk of the use and misuse of those powers is to presuppose a normative notion of humanity (else what sense could be made of the notion of misuse?), and to presuppose a normative ideal for humanity is to pre­ suppose that human beings are autonomous, that is, free either to live up to that norm or not.25 On Foucault’s reading, then, although pragmatic anthropology is

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presented as a straightforward empirical study,26 in reality, its empirical conception of humanity is only articulated with reference to the normative/transcendental conception, with which it stands in an uneasy tension. A similar tension emerges from Foucault’s discussion of the second theme mentioned above, that of the relationship between the A nthropology and the critical philosophy. A central argument of Foucault’s thesis is that the Anthropology, rather than being a marginal text, occupies a central place in Kant’s thought. He notes that, even though the text was only published after Kant retired his professorship in 1797, Kant began lecturing on pragmatic anthropology some twenty-five years earlier, in 1772. Thus, all the while that Kant was developing and refining his critical project, he was also lecturing every winter on pragmatic anthropology. Foucault suggests that this is more than mere coincidence; rather, he maintains that Kant’s thoughts on anthropology are conceptually bound up with his critical philosophy. At the very beginning of his introduction, he asks, Was there from 1772, and subsisting perhaps all through the Critique , a certain concrete image of man... which is finally formulated, without major modification, in the last of the texts published by Kant? And if this concrete image of man was able to gather together the critical experience... is it not perhaps because it has, until a certain point, if not organized and commanded, at least guided and secretly oriented that experience. (3-4)

In other words, Foucault maintains that a concrete or empirical conception of humanity haunts the critical philosophy, only to step out of the shadows in Kant’s A nthropology. Conversely, he suggests that at the heart of Kant’s anthropological analysis of man lies the subject of the critical philosophy, the transcendental subject: “it is also possible that the A n thropology had been modified in its major elements to the extent that it developed the critical enterprise: would not the archaeology of the text, if it were possible, permit us to see the birth of a 4homo criticu s ’ ... ?” (4) Of course, these questions are not meant to suggest an exact equivalence between the A nthropology and the critical philosophy. On the contrary, Foucault clearly recognizes the significant differences between these two parts of Kant’s system. Unlike the First Critique, the A n thropology is a strange amalgamation of empirical observations on everything from relations between men and women to dinner table etiquette to physiognomy and its relationship to character. As such, Foucault admits that the A nthropology apparently has no “contact” with the main theme of the First Critique, namely, the “reflection on the conditions of experi­ ence” (56). However, this lack of contact is only apparent; in fact, Foucault suggests that there is a close relation between the two texts inasmuch as we might view the A nthropology as “the negation of the Critique” (56). For instance, the conception of man in the Critique is that of the transcendental subject; the “I” is presented not as an object, but as the transcendental unity of apperception that

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serves as the general condition for the possibility of the experience of any object whatsoever. By contrast, the conception of man in the A nthropology is empirical; the A n thropology is, at first glance anyway, a study of “the region in which observation of the self has access neither to a subject in-itself, nor to an pure ‘I’ of synthesis, but to a ‘me’ which is object, and present solely in its phenomenal truth” (24). By viewing the human being as an object rather than a subject, the A nthropology negates or inverts the structure of the First Critique. However, Foucault insists that the empirical conception of humanity is “not... a stranger to the determining subject...” (24). In the A nth ropology , the “I” “is not given at the start of the game to man, in a sort of a priori of existence, but when it appears, inserting itself into the multiplicity of a sensible chronicle, it offers itself as already-there...: it is in this ‘I’ that the subject will recognize its past and the synthesis of its identity” (57). The subject of the A nthropology is both empirical and transcendental: empirically generated rather than transcendentally given “at the start of the game”; but once generated, it presents itself to itself as always already there. Foucault also suggests that the interrelationship between A n th ropology and the critical philosophy can be seen in Kant’s claim that pragmatic anthropology is both popular and systematic. The A n th ropology is popular in that it is “a knowledge of man that man himself could immediately understand, recognize, and indefinitely prolong...” (92). Indeed, the A n th ro p o lo g y' s strange combin­ ation of anecdotes, advice, and examples renders the text quite accessible to a popular audience. Yet the A n th ropology is also systematic insofar as it repeats the structure of the critical philosophy; according to Foucault, each of the three books in the first part corresponds to the three Critiques, with the second part echoing the texts on history and politics. But this is a repetition with a difference: “The A n th ro p o lo g y ... repeat[s] the a priori of the Critique in the originary, that is to say, in a truly temporal dimension” (89). By repeating the a priori of the Critique in a temporal dimension, the A n th ropology balances the a priori forms of possible knowledge on the one hand, and the principles of an empirically constituted and historically developed knowledge on the other (121). Thus, Foucault suggests, the A nthropology (perhaps unwittingly) breaks open the framework of the critical philosophy, revealing the historical specificity of our a priori categories, their rootedness in historically variable social and linguistic practices and institutions.27 Foucault’s reading of Kant’s A nthropology thus suggests that Kant’s system itself contains the seeds of its own radical transform­ ation, a transformation that Foucault will take up in his own work: namely, the transformation from the conception of the a priori as universal and necessary to the historical a priori; and the related transformation from the transcendental sub­ ject that serves as the condition of possibility of all experience to the subject that is conditioned by its rootedness in specific historical, social, and cultural circumstances.

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2. The E nd of M an

In the tension between the empirical and the transcendental, which Foucault claims is both at the core of Kant’s A nthropology and at the core of his critical philosophy as a whole, Foucault sees “the problematic of contemporary philosophy” (105). He suggests, moreover, that “it will be good one day to envision the whole history of post-Kantian and contemporary philosophy from the point of view of this maintained confusion, that is to say, from this exposed confusion” (106). Viewing the whole of post-Kantian Continental philosophy from the point of view of the tension between the empirical and the transcendental is perhaps as good a way as any of describing the closing chapters of Foucault’s archaeological locus classicus , The O rder o f Things. Indeed, Foucault never published his thesis on Kant. What was a 128-page typescript became a three-page historical preface to Foucault’s translation, which ended with this final note: “The relationship between critical thought and anthropological reflection will be studied in a later work”;28 that later work was The O rder o f Things. In its closing chapters, Foucault spells out the implications of the tension between the transcendental and empirical sides of the modem subject. Here, this tension which Foucault had first diagnosed in Kant’s A nthropology becomes the defining characteristic of the modern episteme: what is distinctive about the modem age is the concept of man “as the difficult object and sovereign subject of all possible knowledge.”29 The transition to the modem era is marked by the appearance of man “in his ambiguous position as the object of knowledge and as a subject that knows.”30 This tension also informs each of the three of man’s doublets, most obviously, the empirical/ transcendental doublet, in which man “is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible,” but also the cogito/ unthought doublet (in which man tries to think his own unthought and thus get free of it) and the retreat-and-retum-of-the-origin doublet (in which man is viewed as both the source of history and an object with a history) as well.31 Although Foucault is clearly critical of Kant in these closing pages, he also makes two points that are all too often overlooked. First, Foucault credits Kant with opening up the possibility of the modem episteme, which marks a great event in the history of European culture, insofar as it reveals the classical thought that preceded it to be a dogmatic metaphysics. Of course, in the end, Kant’s critical philosophy sets up its own metaphysics, a metaphysics of the subject which takes transcendental subjectivity to be the unquestioned ground of all possible knowledge, but that doesn’t change the point that Foucault considered the deathblow that Kant dealt to the classical episteme to be of vast importance. Foucault makes this even clearer in the essay “A Preface to Transgression,” written at around the same time as The O rder o f Things', there, Foucault clearly credits Kant with having “opened the way for the advance of critical thought.”32 Although he goes on to criticize Kant for closing off the very opening that he had created, by substituting a metaphysical notion of the subject for the dogmatic metaphysics

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that he so effectively demolished, he nonetheless indicates Kant’s importance inasmuch as Kant’s critical philosophy inaugurates the modem episteme and, in so doing, reorders our very ways of thinking about things. Moreover, in this essay Foucault also notes that Kant gives expression to “an essential experience for our culture... the experience of finitude and being, of the limit and transgression,” an experience that Foucault was himself very interested in examining.33 This leads me to the second point about Foucault’s analysis in The O rder o f Things that we must take care not to overlook: as Foucault empha­ sizes again and again throughout that text, inasmuch as we are in the modem episteme, and inasmuch as Foucault takes Kant’s thought to be paradigmatic for that episteme, we can’t help but think within a Kantian framework.34 Foucault describes our episteme as “the thought that is contemporaneous with us, and with which, willy-nilly, we think.”35 Our episteme is our historical a priori. As historical, it is contingent; thus, he notes, “there is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially at least) than the process of establishing an order among o z: things.” But as a priori, the episteme delimits the (historically specific) conditions of possibility for being a thinking subject in our time, conditions that are necessary in the sense that they are binding upon us whether we want them to be or not (thus, “willy-nilly”). We cannot simply reject these conditions without at the same time surrendering our ability to be intelligible. As Foucault puts it in his description of archaeology: “What I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility.”37 When this sentence is read against the background of Foucault’s earlier work on Kant’s A nthropology , Foucault’s claim that the aim of archaeology is to interrogate conditions of possibility for knowledge takes on added significance. Although he still hopes at this point for the coming of a new episteme, and indeed hopes that his work might help to bring it about (hopes that he later views as overly romantic), Foucault also recognizes that, for now, his only choice is to think with the Kantian tools that he has. His articulation of the historical a priori is perhaps the best example of his early attempt to take up Kantian categories in a transformative way; and this attempt must be understood against the background of his own reading of Kant’s Anthropology , which locates the possibility of just this sort of radical historicizing and contextualizing transformation in Kant’s own work. In light of these facts, however, the interpretation of The O rder o f Things as a straightforward rejection of Kant seems overly simplistic. Thinking along these lines permits us to rethink the infamous heralding of the end of man with which The O rder o f Things ends. Although Foucault emphasizes that we cannot know what the next episteme will be like or how the transition will come to pass, he nonetheless hopes that posing questions about it “may well open the way to a future thought,” and he hopes that this opening will take us beyond “man,” that “man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its

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end.”38 This statement is well known; the question is, how should we interpret it? Foucault’s Kant thesis sheds some light on this question, since the call for the “end of man” at the end of The Order o f Things echoes Foucault’s call for a “true critique” of the “anthropological illusion” in the closing pages of his these complementaire (127). Foucault characterizes the anthropological illusion as the illusion that anthropology is liberated from the “prejudices and inert weights of the a priori” (123). A “true critique” of this illusion involves the recognition that, as I discussed above, anthropology is from the beginning caught up in the tension between empirical and transcendental. The model for this “true critique” is Nietzschean; thus, the closing line of his thesis on Kant is as follows: “The trajec­ tory of the question: what is man? in the field of philosophy is achieved in the response which challenges it and disarms it: the Ubermensch” (128). However, I want to suggest that the choice of the word “critique” here is extremely significant; for what Foucault calls for here is a critique of critique, which means not only a criticism of Kant’s project for the way in which it closes off the very opening in thought that it had created but also a critique in the Kantian sense o f the term that is, an interrogation of the limits and conditions of possibility of that which Kant himself took as his own starting point, namely, the transcendental subject itself. Such an account is, in a sense, “transcendental” inasmuch as the historical a priori sets the necessary conditions of possibility that are constitutive for being a thinking subject in a particular episteme, and, as such, are indirectly the conditions of possibility for all of that subject’s experiences. However, such an account is obviously not transcendental in the same sense in which Kant uses that term, inasmuch as our understanding of those “necessary” conditions is grounded empirically, in an analysis of the contingent historical conditions that give rise to them and in which they remain embedded. The end of man thus amounts to the revelation that human subjects are always embedded in contingently evolved (and thus transformable) linguistic, historical, and cultural conditions. This revelation is, contra many of Foucault’s critics, perfectly consistent with the project of reconceptualizing subjectivity, to which Foucault turned in his later work. Foucault’s critique of critique, his interrogation of the conditions of possibility of subjectivity itself, leads him to explore throughout his work first the modes by which the subject is constituted via language (archaeology) and social practices (genealogy) and later its modes of self-constitution through practices or technologies of the self (ethics). This shift from genealogy to ethics is thus a shift in emphasis and perspective, but not a radical break. As Foucault conceives it, the subject is constituted by forces that can be analyzed empirically in the sense that the discursive and socio-cultural conditions of possibility for subjectivity in a given historically and culturally specific location can be uncovered through an analysis of power/knowledge regimes. But the subject has always to take up those conditions and it is in the taking up of them that they can (potentially) be transformed. An episteme, a set of rules for discourse formations, or a power/ knowledge regime sets the limits within which I can think, deliberate about ends,

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and act, but it does not prescribe the specific content of any particular thought or of any particular action (except perhaps in the most extreme cases of domination).39 The subject takes up these conditions and in and through that taking up constitutes itself as a subject through what Foucault later comes to call technologies or practices of the self.40 This line of interpretation suggests that Foucault’s critique of critique is an immanent rather than a total critique of modernity. If this is the case, then Habermas’s charge that “from the point where he gave a threefold analysis of the compulsion to an aporetic doubling on the part of the self-referential subject, Foucault veered off into a theory of power that has shown itself to be a dead end. He follows Heidegger and Derrida in the abstract negation of the self-referential subject, inasmuch as, put briefly, he declares ‘man’ to be nonexistent” can be seen to miss the mark.41 To say that Foucault offers an abstract negation of the self-referential subject is to suggest that he rejects the Kantian subject tout cou rt , but in point of fact remains unwittingly caught in the very same aporias and paradoxes that he himself had diagnosed as endemic to Kantian thought in par­ ticular and to the modern era in general. I would argue that instead of abstractly negating the self-referential subject, Foucault interrogates its conditions of possibility. That interrogation is designed to show the historical and cultural spe­ cificity, and thus contingency, of this conception of subjectivity, which in turn opens up the possibility of new modes of subjectification. In carrying out this interrogation, Foucault does not reject the Kantian critical framework; instead, he takes it up in a radically transformative way. As he puts it in “What is Enlightenment?”: Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression 42

Moreover, as I argued above, Foucault seems to find inspiration for this trans­ formative project in Kant’s own work, specifically in the A nthropology , which on Foucault’s reading contains the seeds for just such a radical transformation of the Kantian critical project. Foucault’s critical transformation of Kant, which is based in the recognition that Kant set the terms of the debate within which philosophy still moves and which has its roots in Foucault’s early reading of Kant’s A n th ropology , informs the whole of Foucault’s oeuvre. The following passage from “What is Enlighten­ ment?” offers an excellent characterization of the guiding impulse of Foucault’s work as a whole:

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We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the “essential kernel of rationality” that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the “contemporary limits of the necessary,” that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.43

In other words, Foucault’s works offer historically specific analyses of the present - of our experience of madness, health, punishment, sexuality, and so on. These histories of the present are designed to lay out the contingent conditions of possibility of our modem selves; pointing out the contingency of these conditions, moreover, harmonizes with the practical aim of making it possible for us to transform ourselves. For Kant, the courage to know that was characteristic of the Enlightenment was, as Schmidt and Wartenberg put the point, “ultimately the courage to recognize the limits of our consciousness.”44 For Foucault, the courage to know is ultimately the courage to recognize the contingency of those limits, and to begin to think beyond them.

3. The Impurity of Reason and the Possibility of Critique The interpretation of Foucault’s relationship to Kant that I have defended thus far, if it is convincing, offers a response to Habermas’s criticism of Foucault discussed at the outset. Contra Habermas, Foucault does not have two Kants; his early work is misunderstood if we interpret it as a straightforward rejection or abstract negation of Kant’s conception of the transcendental subject. The early work is better understood as a critique of critique, an interrogation of the conditions of possibility of that which Kant took as his starting point, namely, the transcendental subject. If this is how we interpret Foucault’s early work, then Habermas is also wrong to suggest that Foucault’s relationship to Kant points to a fundamental contradiction in Foucault’s own thought. Instead, I would argue the converse: Foucault’s relationship to Kant suggests a way of viewing Foucault’s work as a continuous whole. One might even suggest that Foucault spent his entire career reworking Kant’s famous four questions, historicizing and contextualizing them as he went.45 “What can I know?” becomes, in Foucault’s archaeologies, “how have discursive structures positioned me as a speaking and knowing subject?” “What ought I do?” becomes, in Foucault’s genealogies, “how have norms functioned insidiously to position me as a normalized, disciplined individual?” “What may I hope?” becomes, in his late work, “how can I attempt to turn myself into an ethical subject and my life into a work of art via practices and techniques of the self?” And, as with Kant, it is the fourth and final question - “what is man?” which we might recast in Foucauldian terms as “what has human subjectivity

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been and what might it become?” - that sums up the first three and provides the guiding thread that links all of Foucault’s work together. However, these general similarities between Foucault and Kant’s projects not­ withstanding, one might push Habermas’s point by arguing that Foucault’s transformation of Kantian critical philosophy is so radical that it might as well be a negation. In other words, what sense can be made of transcendental inquiry that locates the grounds of our subjectivity in historical, social, and cultural contin­ gencies? Why doesn’t such a move void the concept of the transcendental and, in so doing, constitute a negation rather than a continuation of Kantian critical philosophy? In one sense, as I mentioned above, Foucault’s move to this historical a priori does void Kant’s conception of the transcendental, inasmuch as Kant’s use of this term is exclusively tied to non-empirical reflection on the limits and conditions of possibility for experience, whereas Foucault’s account of the conditions of possibility for subjectivity is decidedly empirical. However, I have also argued that Foucault arrives at this account by a distinctively Kantian move: namely, by asking after the limits and conditions of possibility of subjectivity itself, which, in turn, serves as the condition of possibility for subjective experience. In so doing, Foucault no doubt radicalizes the Kantian approach to critique by presenting the subject as constituted by historical, social, and cultural conditions. As I have argued above, given the development of Foucault’s thought, I think that this move is best understood as a transformation of rather than a negation of Kantian critical philosophy. Moreover, and this is the important point for my argument, on this point about the embeddedness of the subject in historical, social, and cultural conditions, Habermas and Foucault are actually largely in agreement. For, as Thomas McCarthy has convincingly argued, both Foucault and Habermas accept what McCarthy calls “the impurity of reason”: “its embed­ dedness in culture and society, its entanglement with power and interest, the historical variability of its categories and criteria, the embodied, sensuous and practically engaged character of its bearers... .”46 As such, both thinkers “call for a transformation cum radicalization of the Kantian approach to critique.”47 More­ over, as McCarthy points out, for both Foucault and the Frankfurt School trad­ ition of which Habermas is the most prominent contemporary member, this “desublimation of reason goes hand in hand with the decentering of the rational subject.”48 Thus, if historicizing and contextualizing Kant’s transcendental sub­ ject makes Foucault is guilty of negating rather than transforming (or negating by radically transforming) Kant’s critical project, then Habermas would seem to be equally guilty. At the end of the day, what I am most concerned with is showing that Foucault and Habermas are both engaged in a radicalization from within of the Kantian critical project; it is this basic similarity that Habermas seems unwilling to recognize when he interprets Foucault’s early position on Kant as straight­ forwardly rejectionist and, on the basis of this reading, claims to uncover a basic contradiction between this reading of Kant and Foucault’s late embrace of the Kantian project of Enlightenment.

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In the end, McCarthy, too, seems unwilling to recognize the depth of the similarity between Habermas’s and Foucault’s critical projects, despite his recognition that both are attempts at a transformation-cum-radicalization of the Kantian notion of critique. He characterizes the key difference between Foucault and Habermas with respect to their accounts of subjectivity as follows: While both approaches seek to get beyond the subject-centeredness of modern Western thought, Foucault understands this as the ‘end of man’ and of the retinue of humanist conceptions following upon it, whereas [Habermas] attempt[s] to recon­ struct notions of subjectivity and autonomy that are consistent with both the social dimensions of individual identity and the situated character of social action.49

However, as I argued above, Foucault’s call for the end of man is best understood as the call for a critique of critique, and thus as the revelation that human subjects are always embedded in contingently emergent (and thus transformable) linguis­ tic, historical, and cultural conditions. As such, the end of man is not at all incon­ sistent with the project of reconstructing subjectivity and autonomy. As a matter of fact, this is precisely the project with which Foucault concerned himself in his late account of practices of the self, which are defined as “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.”50 Now, obviously, there are crucial differences between Habermas’s intersubjective and communicative account of subjectivity and autonomy and Foucault’s aestheticized account. However, my point is that the differences between Habermas’s and Foucault’s projects have tended to be over­ stated, with Habermas cast as the pro-Enlightenment heir to the Kantian critical tradition and Foucault cast as they anti-Enlightenment, anti-modern, antiKantian. To the extent that the Foucault-Habermas debate has been presented in this way, the possibilities for articulating a middle ground between Foucault’s and Habermas’s critical projects have been obscured. Even if we grant this response to the reformulated version of Habermas’s charge, nonetheless it might seem that this reading of Foucault has raised more questions than it has answered. Assuming that Foucault’s aim is an interrogation of the conditions of possibility of subjectivity, how is such a project even possible? From what perspective can he claim to have access to these conditions? Doesn’t the claim that he can have access to them require Foucault to jump over his own shadow? Ex hypothesi , wouldn’t Foucault himself, qua individual who has been conditioned by the current power-knowledge regime, necessarily be influenced (perhaps even determined) by these conditions to such a degree as to make critical reflection upon them impossible? Where exactly does the Foucauldian archaeologist or genealogist stand?51 If he purports to stand outside of his own episteme regime, then he seems to contradict his own claim that the episteme sets the necessary

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conditions of possibility for being a subject in a particular time and place. If, on the contrary, he admits to standing inside his own episteme, then he no longer seems able to achieve the kind of critical distance that makes reflection on one’s own episteme possible, thus, his claims about it and how it sets conditions of possibility for subjectivity are called into question. Foucault himself vacillated on this issue over the course of his career. In his early work, he seems to have assumed that it was possible for the archaeologist to stand outside of her own episteme and reflect on it - whence his characterization of himself as a happy positivist. However, by the time he wrote “What is Enlight­ enment?,” he offered a different response: It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again.52

In other words, Foucault now recognizes that the genealogist stands within the power/knowledge regime that she analyzes; thus, Foucault himself and, by extension, his thought are conditioned by the very conditions of possibility for subjectivity that he is trying to elucidate. While this way of thinking saves Foucault from the contradiction in which he seemed to be stuck when he assumed that it was possible to step outside of one’s own episteme, it does so at the risk of undermining the critical force of Foucault’s interrogations. However, this difficulty need not be intractable. Perhaps it is the case that epistemes or power/knowledge regimes are more open and supple than Foucault’s rhetoric (particularly with respect to the former) tended to suggest. If this were the case, then it was a mistake to think that the only available options were being either wholly inside or wholly outside the episteme in question. Perhaps epistemes or power/knowledge regimes even contain within themselves resources that enable their own critique and transformation, which once again suggests that they are not completely closed inasmuch as they point beyond themselves.53 This would explain the possibility of a critical perspective that is grounded in a particular episteme or power/knowledge regime, though the conception of critique that results would of necessity be local, histor­ ically and culturally specific, and pragmatic rather than universal and ahistorical.

Conclusion I have endeavored to establish three interrelated points. First, Foucault does not have two Kants; his early work is misunderstood if it is interpreted as a straight­ forward rejection of Kantian thought. Instead, I have argued that Foucault’s relationship to Kant is remarkably consistent throughout his life; from his earli­ est work on Kant up to and including his late essays on the Kantian version

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of the Enlightenment project, Foucault is engaged in a continuation-throughtransformation of Kantian critical thought. Second, clarifying his stance vis-a-vis Kant reveals a fundamental continuity in Foucault’s philosophical project as a whole: as Foucault himself acknowledged, the subject is the general theme of his research. There is no inconsistency between his early call for the end of man which is indicative not of a rejection of subjectivity tout court but of an interrogation of its conditions of possibility - and his late reconceptualization of subjectivity and autonomy in his account of practices of the self. Third and finally, if the previous two points are convincing, then Foucault can no longer be positioned as the counter-Enlightenment foil to Habermas’s Enlightenment hero, or vice versa, depending on your views on “postmodernism.” Foucault and Habermas no doubt offer two different ways of completing the project of the Enlightenment, two alternative continuations-through-transformation of the Kantian critical project, but there is much more common ground between their philosophical projects than has up to now been recognized by either side of the Foucault-Habermas debate.54

NOTES I am grateful to Nancy Fraser, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Johanna Meehan, Martin Saar, Sally Sedgwick, Thomas Tresize, and audiences at the 2000 Critical Theory Roundtable at the University of Kentucky and at the 2001 Conference on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague for their comments and questions on earlier versions of this paper. I also wish to thank the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for the summer research grant that made possible the initial research for this article. 1. Michel Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 146. 2. Ibid., 147-48. 3. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 50, 41. 4. Ibid., 43, 50. 5. Ibid., 46. 6. James Schmidt and Thomas Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self” in Kelly, ed., Critique and Power , 283. 7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison , tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 30. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since Discipline and Punish is clearly inspired by the second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy o f Morals, the main target of which is Kantian moral philosophy. 8. Foucault, for his part, offers support for Habermas’s reading in the essay entitled “The Art of Telling the Truth” when he distinguishes Kant’s two different legacies - the ontology of the present and the analytics of truth - and embraces the former while remaining critical of the latter. However, in “What is Enlightenment?” he stresses the fact that Kant’s answer to the question “Was ist Aufklarung?,” which centers on what Foucault calls an ontology of the present, is integrally related to Kant’s critical philosophy, and he specifically suggests that it is at the intersection of these two concerns that we can find the attitude of modernity that Foucault wants to embrace. See Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, 37-38; cf. Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth.” 9. Jurgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Kelly, ed., Critique and Power , 150. 10. Ibid., 152.

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11. Ibid., 154. Christopher Norris suggests a similar reading of Foucault’s relationship to Kant when he writes: “Foucault came around to a viewpoint [on Kant] strikingly at odds with his earlier (skeptical-genealogical) approach, and . . . one major consequence. . . was a radical re-thinking of the subject’s role in relation to issues of truth, critique, self-knowledge, and practi­ cal reason.” (Christopher Norris, “What is Enlightenment? Kant according to Foucault” in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 179). 12. Schmidt and Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment,” 287. 13. Ibid., 283. 14. Ibid., 303. 15. David Hoy, “Foucault: Modem or Postmodern?” in Jonathan Arac, ed., After Foucault: Human­ istic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 32. See Foucault, The Archaeology o f Knowledge and The Discourse on Language , tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 16. Ibid., 26-27. 17. Ibid., 32. 18. On this point, see also Norris, “What is Enlightenment?” I wholeheartedly agree with Norris’s argument that Foucault’s work is neither a simple return to Kant nor a straightforward post­ modern repudiation of Kantian ideas, but disagree with the sharp contrast that Norris draws between Foucault’s early and late views on Kant. 19. This is not to say that there are no contradictions in Foucault’s thought, just that his stance vis-a-vis Kant is not indicative of a contradiction. 20. Thus, my argument lends support for Foucault’s own claim that it is the subject, not power, that is the general theme of his research. On this point, see Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , 2e (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209. For the argument that power is the general theme of Foucault’s research, see Hubert Dreyfus, “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault,” International Journal o f Philosophical Studies 4, no. 1 (1996): 1-16. 21. Here I borrow a phrase that Thomas McCarthy often uses to describe Habermas’s critical social theory. See, for example, David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), 2. 22. At the very least, Habermas seems to have understood it this way. See the two chapters on Foucault in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity, tr. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 23. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point o f View , tr. M.J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 3. 24. Foucault, Introduction a L ’anthropologie de K ant , these complementaire. Xerox copy of typescript available in the Centre Michel Foucault, Paris, 52; hereafter cited parenthetically. All translations are mine. For other references to Kant’s use of the terms kann and soli to describe the object of pragmatic anthropology, see also ibid., 39-40, 55, 63. 25. For helpful discussion of this point, see Gregor’s introduction to the English translation of Kant’s Anthropology. (Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point o f View, xvii-xviii). 26. On this point, see Kant’s division of ethics into the empirical part (pragmatic anthropology) and the rational part (metaphysics of morals) in Kant, Grounding fo r the Metaphysics o f Morals, tr. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 1-2. 27. Here Foucault is clearly pushing Kant in the direction of Hegel. Indeed, one might suggest that as soon as Foucault begins to think of the a priori as historical, he sounds much more Hegelian than Kantian. I would not disagree that Hegel as well as Kant had a profound influence on Foucault’s thought. However, Foucault seems interested in exploring the ways in which Kant’s own thought can be seen, when viewed from a certain perspective, to move in the direction that Hegel later took. In any event, it seems worth taking seriously Foucault’s self-understanding as an heir to the Kantian Enlightenment tradition, even if his own contribution to that tradition is influenced by post-Kantian philosophical developments. I am grateful to Sally Sedgwick for pushing this point with me.

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28. Foucault, Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Yrin, 1994), vol. 1: 26. 29. Foucault, The Order o f Things: An Archaeology o f the Human Sciences , tr. A. SheridanSmith (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 310. 30. Ibid., 312. 31. Ibid., 318. 32. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in D.F. Bouchard, ed., Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 36; see also 38.1 am grateful to Dianna Taylor for pointing out the importance of this essay for a consideration of Foucault’s relationship to Kant and also for helpful and interesting discussions about Foucault’s reading of Kant. 33. Ibid., 40. 34. On this point, see also Norris, “What is Enlightenment?,” 184. 35. Foucault, The Order o f Things, 250. 36. Ibid., xix. 37. Ibid., xxii. 38. Ibid., 386, 387. 39. Here I agree with David Hoy, who makes the same point in Hoy, “Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School,” in David Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1986), 128, 132-33, 142. 40. A fuller discussion of Foucault’s account of practices of the self and how this account can be integrated into Foucault’s earlier work is beyond the scope of this paper. However, I do think that what I have said here lays the groundwork for such a discussion. What I am most concerned with establishing is that there is no conceptual reason why Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical insights cannot be integrated with those of his ethics. The claim that they cannot be so integrated a common claim in the critical literature on Foucault, particularly among Habermasians - typically rests on the claim that Foucault’s ethical notion of practices of the self relies on the very notion of subjectivity that he himself spent so much time rejecting. (For a version of this argument, see Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).) I am suggesting that this claim is based on a misunderstanding of Foucault’s early work. 41. Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative vs. Subject-Centered Reason,” in Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse o f Modernity, 296. 42. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 45. 43. Ibid., 43. 44. Schmidt and Wartenberg, “Foucault’s Enlightenment,” 290. 45. In his introductory lectures on logic, Kant writes: “The field of philosophy... may be reduced to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is Man? The first question is answered by Metaphysics, the second by Morals, the third by Religion, and the fourth by Anthropology. In reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last.” Kant, Introduction to Logic, tr. T. Kinsgmill Abbott (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), 15. Other commentators have also noted the similarity between Foucault’s philosophical projects and Kant’s three questions, though they have interestingly neglected to mention Kant’s fourth question - what is man? - which is, I think, the most important of them all for understanding Foucault’s relationship to Kant. See, for example, James Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Ecstatic Thinking” in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 46-47; and Norris, “What is Enlightenment?,” 169. 46. McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason,” 43-44. 47. Ibid., 43. 48. Ibid., 44. 49. Ibid., 48. 50. Foucault, The Use o f Pleasure: Volume 2 o f the History o f Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 10-11.

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51. This is another of Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault. See Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject.” 52. Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” 47. 53. I am grateful to Nancy Fraser for suggesting this point to me. 54. Thus, I would agree with Dreyfus and Rabinow when they describe Foucault and Habermas as “the two thinkers who could legitimately be called the heirs to [the eighteenth-century debate over Enlightenment], because they embody two opposed but equally serious and persuasive ways of reinterpreting the philosophic life through understanding the relation between reason and the historical moment.” (Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “What is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader, 109.) However, I think they overdraw the contrast between the two thinkers when they go on to claim that Foucault’s and Habermas’s understandings of society, critical reason, and modernity are incompatible.

Part V On Political Reason

[15] Political theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modem political theory Pasquale Pasquino (Translated by Paula Wissing and revised by the author) Abstract Starting from the course given by Foucault at the College de France in 1976 (‘II faut defendre la societe’) the discussion considers the division between binary or conflictualist conceptions (Machiavelli) and monist or pacifist conceptions (Hobbes) of politics. Accepting Foucault’s point of departure the essay tries to show that what is important is not so much a question of the opposition between the discourse on war on the one side and discourse on peace and order on the other, but rather different conceptions of the source of disorder and of conflict in the city and therefore of two ways of thinking political order. This leads to a reflection on the genealogy of liberalism (and the theory of the limitation of the power of the state) and the role played by Hobbes at the heart of this genealogy.

In the spring of 1984, a few months before his death, Michel Foucault asked me to work with him in a research center devoted to the study of modern theories of government that he was to lead at the College de France. His project on the history of sexuality, which had occupied him for much longer than he had originally anticipated, was coming to an end. All that remained was a final revision of the fourth volume - Les aveux de la chair1- which he had written several years earlier and now hoped to complete during the coming summer.2 For those who attended his courses at the College de France, Foucault’s intention to study modern political thought is not at all surprising. It was an opportunity, and this is something his readers may not know, to return to research begun before he had made his long excursion into classical antiquity and which he had presented during the courses he gave from 1975 to 1980.3 It was during this same time, and thanks to Foucault, that I myself began to concentrate on modern political thought and, more specifically, on the doctrine and organization of the territorial-administrative state in the German-speaking countries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I say

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‘thanks to Foucault’, for when I met him in the early 1970s, my training and specialization were in a completely different area: Greek philology and philosophy. After defending my thesis on the ontology of Parmenides,4 in Naples, I had begun work with Jean Bollack in Paris on the pre-Socratics and was writing a French thesis on the logic of Greek stoicism under the direction of Pierre Hadot - whose candidacy for a position at the College de France Foucault would support a few years later. So my encounter with Foucault led me away from philosophy. This autobiographical detail would have no importance at all and not even be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the fact that it has something in common with Foucault’s own intellectual trajectory. For, indeed, if one takes the term ‘philosopher’ to apply to the practitioners of the discipline taught in Anglo-American universities, and not as a synonym for intellectual, or to refer, as the French do, to someone who has studied philosophy,5 Foucault’s contribution to the field is found essentially in a long (130 typed pages) and remarkable introduction (which unfortunately has never been published) to his translation of Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology .6 From that day onward, several years after he had read Nietzsche, Foucault often said, at least in our conversations, that it seemed to him that in matters of philosophy he had nothing to add to what the author of The Genealogy o f M orals had written.7 It is interesting to note that in the Plaquette written for his candidacy to the College de France for a chair in the History of Systems of Thought, to which he was elected in 1970, he used these terms to describe his plans for teaching: Today perhaps the history of thought requires some readjustment. . .; between the sciences (whose history is often written) and phenomena of opinion (which historians know how to deal with), the history of the systems of thought ought to be written.8 I do not intend to discuss what Foucault called, in the definition of his intellectual project, ‘the history of the systems of thought’; I simply would like to show how his teaching led me to reflect on the history of political theories by following a route that, although it never lost sight of the history of ideas, nevertheless has departed from it to at least some degree. A route that was to lead me first to the works of the great German constitutionalists of the Weimar Republic (H. Heller, E. Kaufmann, C. Schmitt, R. Smend) and then to those of my colleagues at Cambridge University.9 The research that led Foucault from the analysis of discursive formations (from Les mots et les choses to L ’drcheologie du savoir) to that of apparatuses of power is for the most part well known. Surveiller et pu n ir reflects this shift in perspective and the discovery of disciplines as the privileged focus for the study of what had been termed the microphysics o f pow er.10 It was in 1975, after the publication of his work on the history of penalty, that Foucault began to think about the emergence of political theories tied to the birth of the modern state.

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In those days my intellectual exchanges with him were the most intense, and I decided to work on the modern history of political and constitutional thought. It became clear during our discussions of the second half of the 1970s that the discourse on disciplines had reached an impasse and could go no further. That it threatened above all to lead to an extremist denunciation of power envisioned according to a repressive11 model - that left both of us dissatisfied from the theoretical point of view. If a close analysis of disciplines opposed the Marxist thesis of economic exploitation as a principle for understanding the mechanisms of power,12this analysis by itself was not enough and required the investigation of global problems of the regulation and ordering of society as well as the modalities of conceptualizing this problem. Hence the question of government - a term that Foucault gradually substituted for what he began to see as the more ambigiuous word, ‘power’. Beyond the issue of the disciplines, one encountered in the modern West the science of the state, which in the German-speaking countries I was studying was called Statistik and P olizei-und Cameralmssenschaften .13

In 1976 Foucault gave his course the title ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (see note 3). It was actually a series of comments on what I will refer to here as the political theory of war. Based on a large and at first glance disparate body of texts - from the Levellers to Boulainvilliers - the discourse of war and conquest appeared as the ‘principle of analysis’ (DS 30 and 42) that would account both for the development of history and the reality of power relations. To shed light on his subject, Foucault focused on the contrast between the discourse of war and what he called the ‘juridico-political theory of sovereignty’ (DS 36)14 - for which in his opinion the exemplary text was Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. It seemed to Foucault that this theory was unable to account for the concrete relations of domination for two reasons: on the one hand, because the theory of sovereignty ought to have the essential role of‘establishing the legitimacy of power’ (DS 32); on the other, because it presupposes individual subjects and rights and tries to justify the fact of sovereign power on that basis. It was exactly this presupposition that the analysis Foucault undertook in this course was intended to question. By reversing what he saw as classical theory approach to the problem he focused his attention on ‘the fabrication of subjects rather than the genesis of sovereignty’ (DS 33-4, 41-2). It seems to me that Foucault was mistaken, at least up to a certain point, in his location of this contrast, especially in the case of Hobbes.15 Nevertheless, he had the merit and the extraordinary intelli­ gence to question one of the most assured certainties of our political thought16 and to reveal, as I am going to try to indicate, the economy of one of the conceptual structures that governs it. But first of all, what does this discourse o f w ar say? It says, I quote: . . . contrary to the claims of philosophico-juridical theory, that political power does not commence the moment war ends. The organization, the

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juridical structure of power, of states, monarchies, and societies, does not find its beginning the moment the clamor of arms dies away. War is never averted.. . . Law is not bom of nature, law is bom of real conflicts: massacres, conquests, victories that have their dates and their horrifying heroes. (DS 44) It says, and this is even more important, that ‘war is the very sum of peace’, the sole reality and concept that makes it possible to understand the forms as well as the existence of peace and order. It says that there is no neutral subject. And that one is necessarily someone else’s adversary. And up to that point it says what Friedrich Nietzsche will repeat much later.17To which I must add what for Foucault is central in this discourse, something I wish to stress at this point. The discourse of war claims that ‘a binary structure traverses society. . . that there are always two groups, two categories of individuals, two armies confronting one another’ (DS45).181 will return in a moment to this binary structure, which reappears much later in the doctrine of the class struggle. In the same course Foucault devoted a few pages, which I continue to find striking even fifteen years later, to a position that for him exemplified a perspective contrary to that of the discourse of war: the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. At first, this way of presenting the political theory of the author of Leviathan may seem surprising, so powerful is the accepted notion of Hobbes as the thinker who saw humanity’s natural state to be one of war. Foucault tried to show, correctly, I think, that this is not the case. And this is why I would now like to follow his discussion a bit more closely. At first glance Hobbes appears to be the one who posited the outcome of war as the foundation and principal of power relations (DS 66). Against this traditional interpretation, Foucault raised the following points. Firstythis previously existing war, found at the origin of the constitution of the state, is not a conflict of weak versus strong or, in any case, of one group versus the other;19 thus it does not arise from a difference in nature but quite the contrary, from equality: from a lack of difference or insufficient difference. A marked and obvious difference would render war useless and result in the form of peace that consists of the stability that ensues when the weaker or less powerful is subordinate to the stronger. Instead, in the state of equality or near equality that Hobbes imagines, the weak one is never weak enough to accept subordination, nor the strong one ever sure enough of supremacy to feel spared the threat of the other.20 Hence the fact that the potential for war depends on the ‘haphazard relationship of the strength of origins’ (DS 67). I say potential for war, for as Foucault notes - and as Leo Strauss had observed before him21 - this state of war ‘is not that of direct confrontation of forces marked by blood, battles, and corpses - but rather a certain state of representations, which are played off against each other’ (DS 69). This is the permanent basis for human relations, and it does not truly disappear inside the commonwealth.

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Hence, second, the following question: How can this state give rise to the Leviathan? Looking beyond the distinction Hobbes established between a republic by institution (one born out of a contract) and a republic by acquisition (born out of force and conquest),22 Foucault is well aware that the same conceptual pattern makes it possible to understand the generation of sovereignty in Hobbes’s thought.23 For, in fact, in Hobbes’s acquisitive republic armed conquest is not the true foundation of the sovereign’s power. It is not the fact of the victory that establishes the conqueror’s power, but the recognition of the conqueror by the vanquished as their political representative. Which means that even after actual warfare it is the pactum repraesentationis establishing the exchange between obedience and the protection of life that is supposed to be the basis for the sovereign power’s legitimacy (just as in the republic by institution). Thus it is not defeat [Foucault was saying] that forms the basis of a society under domination. .. but what takes place after the battle, after the military defeat and in a certain sense independently of it. It is something like fear; it is the act of abandoning this fear and the risk of one’s life that brings one into the order of sovereignty and the juridical regime of absolute power. The will to choose life rather than death is the foundation of a sovereignty that is juridically as well founded and legitimate as the one constituted on the basis of institutions and reciprocal agreement [among those who recognize themselves as subjects of the same sovereign representative]. (DS 70)24 Sovereignty always is formed from the bottom up, based on the will of those who are afraid [of death]. Which leads him to the conclusion that fundamentally, far from being the theoretician of the relations between war and power, it is as if Hobbes wished to eliminate war as a historical reality; it is as if he wished to eliminate it from the origin of sovereignty. (DS 71) On the basis of that conclusion Foucault arrived at another question, which we now have the habit of calling contextualist and which could also be called polemical,25

Given that in the preceding juridical theories of power war never had the function that Hobbes stubbornly denies it, against whom or what 26 is this elimination of war addressed? . . . I believe that Hobbes’s words are not directed against a precise and defined theory .. . what Hobbes wished to eliminate was conquest, or rather the use of the discourse of conquest in political discourse and practices. The invisible adversary of Leviathan is conquest. (DS 71-2) This opposition between the discourse of war and that of peace and order has intrigued me for a long time, as well as the idea of a threat that must be

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dispelled by the political theory of peace and, as Foucault used to say concerning the subject of Hobbes, ‘placed on the borders’. Thus it gradually seemed to me that the starting point of any political theory is the problem of disorder and threat and the need to overcome them both. Thus it would be necessary to set against the classical theory of forms of government a typology of the forms of conceptualizing threat, a conceptualization that determines the variation of the theories of political order. It seems to me that this question of disorder and threat must replace the issue of domination and power and that it alone is capable of accounting for the problematic of the government of others. For without the threat of disorder, there simply would be no reason for imagining power or government - if not in the terms that Foucault himself ended up completely rejecting: I mean repression (or domination, which here amounts to the same thing.) Since the birth of political thought in Greece and at least up to Machiavelli, the source of disorder has been systematically envisioned in the ontological character, so to speak, of social division, in the unavoidable heterogeneity of the parts that make up the city. Therefore, it is in the premodern (pre-Hobbesian) theory of politics that one sees the emergence of the same binary structure of which Foucault saw a later and singular manifestation in his course,27 one linked to the thematics of conquest conceived as the foundation of power or the reason for the struggle against power. This impossible homogeneity among citizens in the very body of society, whether they are rich vs poor (Aristode)28, grandees vs people (Machiavelli),29 has determined the content of political theory, which took the form of the constitutional doctrine of mixed government, which Machiavelli interprets as a directed (constitutionalized) form of conflict and civil war.30 Whether in the Aristotelian politeia (the mixture of an aristocratic and a democratic consti­ tution) that recognizes positive qualities in both constitutive parts of the city or the Machiavellian form that accepts that it is impossible to get rid of the desires/appetites (umore) of the grandees for, even if one killed them all, they would grow back again like mushrooms - independendy of these important differences, classical political theory has found its last word in the idea of constitutional compromise31 among the different social forces constrained to live together inside the city. Constitutionalized conflict or Machiavelli’s institutionalization of conflict is the very mechanism that produces order, peace, civilization, and the greatness of the republic.32 It could be pointed out that the civil war of the Roman republic, which Machiavelli praised in his Discourses, is not just a secret or hidden war, it is a war with neither dead nor weapons;33 and it is for this reason, moreover, that the Florentine secretary praises it.34 But one could also point out that it is for this very same reason that the discourse o f w ar that Foucault attempted to analyse during his 1976 course is situated after all, outside of political discourse, for the discourse of politics must be able to join conflict and the order, peace, and security of the members of the city. The discourse of war

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obviously cannot accomplish this, for it is caught between resignation and violence, its dead, its bodies, and the old millenarist dream of the ‘last battle’ that ‘would be the end of politics’ (DS 28), a proposition in which it is difficult to see anything but a bad, a negative, utopia. Foucault presents Hobbes as ‘the one who has circumvented this discourse of permanent struggle and civil war . .. thereby saving the theory of the State’ (DS 73). One may wonder whether this estimation, which is not completely false, is not somewhat limited. It can be said schematically [and this is Foucault speaking] that the traditional question of political philosophy could be posed in these terms: How can the discourse of truth, or philosophy understood as the discourse of truth par excellence, set the juridical limits o f power ? (DS 30; emphasis mine) Even schematically [when put this way] the traditional question cannot refer to just any kind of philosophy or political theory. Rather, as Foucault himself later said,35 it refers to liberal political philosophy, that of 1789, for example, as can be seen in this text by the abbe Sieyes: In a great society, individual liberty has three types of enemies to fear. The least dangerous are citizens of ill will. Ordinary authority is sufficient to check them. . . . Individual liberty has much more to fear from the actions of Officers entrusted with exercising any ofthe parts o f public power. Simple, isolated public officials, entire legal bodies, the government itself as a whole, can cease to respect the citizen’s rights. Long experience proves that Nations are not sufficiently forewarned against this type o f danger . Such is the spectacle of an authorized public official who turns against the citizenry the weapons and power he has received to defend them, and who. . . dares change the means entrusted to him for common protection into instruments of oppression. Hence the idea that ‘separation , and a good constitution of public powers, are the only guarantee that can preserve Nations and Citizens from this extreme Misfortune’.36 This liberal preoccupation with the limitation of the power of the state, whose exhorbitant power now represents the essential threat and will become the object of politico-constitutional theory, are to be sought in vain at the heart of Hobbes’s and Machiavelli’s political theory. Instead, the Florentine is attentive to the order and stability of the political body, while beyond that the author of Leviathan displays a concern with the life and identity of individuals that culminates in the need for the protective power of the state. Which leads to my conclusion that another of Foucault’s points is unacceptable: that Hobbes would have wished to view the sovereignty of the state as based on individual rights. For, in fact, in my opinion Hobbes seemed to have intended quite the opposite. Without going into the detail37 here needed to support my argument, I would say that his effort consists in having thought of guaranteeing the minimum individual right, the right to live , and it is Leviathan that serves as its instrument and guarantee. For Hobbes it is less a

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matter of envisioning the creation (by means of the contract) of the sovereign representative than its rationality - by this I mean its capacity to produce conditions that enable individuals to avoid this condition of terror, this unavoidable obstacle to the construction of their identity, the condition that Hobbes terms the state of nature. I say terror, for it prevents all possibility of an ongoing, stable identity for one and all. As a result, in contrast to the individualistic interpretation of Hobbes that Foucault seems to share,38 Leviathan as state makes it possible to think about individuals and their rights; it is not individual rights that lead to the birth of Leviathan. It is known, at least since the work of F. Maidand, that for Hobbes power is always a de facto matter. What should be pointed out here, even beyond this good old interpretation, is that this defacto power, which could equally be the result of conquest or civil war, can only be maintained to the degree that it sets itself up as a guarantee of internal peace, natural right and the life of its subjects. And if it is not in a position to establish rights and equal security for all its subjects, it ceases to be de jure and moves defacto into what no longer exists, at least within the order of rationality. Hobbes does not simply want to avoid the discourse of war and conquest, as Foucault has justly noted, he also wants to be rid of the fact of continuous civil war. To do so, he does not stop at inserting the metaphor of the contract at the heart of his theory in order to set it against the invocation of war, he also wishes to banish from the mental horizon the dream of the ‘last batde against politics’. He wishes to show that in order to ensure self-preservation each individual (and a fortiori each group inside the city) must abandon the claim to self-government.39 It is certainly out of this denunciation of civil war that the entire genealogy of modern politics has arisen. The muffled noise of war continues all around us. Which leads one to believe that there are still good reasons for following the worn-out paths of juridico-political theory - if one wishes to call it that - the paths of law, order, and peace. With Foucault’s death, the opportunity to continue our discussions was forever lost. As he demanded of everyone who attended his courses, I have followed him in my own way. And this, perhaps, is the paradox of Foucault’s teaching: while he affected each one of us very deeply, he kept those closest to him from remaining faithful. I know at least that he taught me to take the theories of law and the state seriously - not to mention this passion and will for knowledge that for so many years was a bond between us. I believe I can say of him and his extraordinary courses at College de France what he once said about the philosophy of the Enlightenment: Leave them their pity those who want to keep the heritage of theAufkldrung alive and intact. This pity is certainly the most touching of betrayals.40 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Centre des Recherches en EpistemologieAppliquee, Paris

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Notes This article reproduces the text presented in October 1991 at the University of Chicago on the occasion of a Colloque on Foucault. This explains in part the personal character of the remarks at the beginning of the text. 1 The manuscript of this work, which has never been published, can now be consulted at the Centre Michel Foucault at the Bibliotheque du Saulchoir, 43 bis, rue de la Glaciere, 75013 Paris. 2 This center was to have functioned in relationship with the University of California at Berkeley, where Foucault used to say he learned about the pleasures of teaching. 3 The summary of these courses, written by Foucault for the Annuaire du College de France, was later published in a small volume: M. Foucault, Resume des cours (Paris: Juillard, 1989). The courses I refer to bore the following titles: 1975-6, ‘Society Must Be Defended’; 1977-8, ‘Security, Territory, and Population’; 1978-9, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’; 1979-80, ‘On the Government of the Living’. An Italian translation exists for the course given in 1975-6: Difendere la societa (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990), which I will refer to below as DS, followed by a page number (I have retranslated the quotations taken from this course, as I was unable to consult a French transcription of the course.). The first two lectures of this course had already been published in Italian in Microfiscia delpotere, cited below in note 10. 4 ‘Ontologia e salvezza nella rivelazione di Parmenide’, Faculte de Lettres et Philosophic, 1971. 5 A former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure on the rue d’Ulm in Paris, Foucault in fact was an agrege in philosophy. 6 This introduction served as his ‘complementary’ thesis written to fulfil the requirements for the degree ot'doctorate d’etat. The commentator on this ‘small thesis’, Jean Hippolyte, called it ‘a historical introduction that is the outline of a book on anthropology, inspired more by Nietzsche than Kant’; this remark is recorded by Henri Gouhier, who was the president of the jury when Foucault defended his thesis, in his report of 25 May 1961. See D. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 2nd edn (Paris, 1991), 138. 7 On the subject of Foucault and philosophy, see Foucault’s article in the Dictionnaire des philosophes (Paris: PUF, 1984), 941-4, which is signed Maurice Florence but was actually written by Foucault. The first sentence of this article seems pertinent and persuasive even today: ‘It is undoubtedly still too early to judge the change that Michel Foucault, professor at the College de France (chair in the History of Systems of Thought), has brought about since 1970 in a philosophical landscape that up until then had been dominated by Sartre and which the latter called the unsurpassable philosophy of our time, Marxism.’ I am unable to pass judgment on the philosophical importance of a book such as L ’archeologie du savoir (1969). In the 1970s Foucault said no more about it and made no reference to it in his article in the Dictionnaire des philosophes. 8 Eribon, Foucault, 365; see also the first report made to the College de France by J. Vuillemin on the creation of a chair in the History of Systems of Thought (366-71). 9 I am thinking above all ofj. Dunn, Q. Skinner, and R. Tuck. 10 The title of a collection of articles that I had suggested to the publisher Einaudi in Turin and which was to appear in 1977, in collaboration with A. Fontana and G. Procacci. 11 See the important and, to a certain extent, self-critical considerations on this concept in DS 28-9 and 39. 12 Cf. DS 26. 13 See the old but still helpful book by A. Small, The Cameralists (Chicago, 1909), as well as, H. Maier, Die altere deutsche Stoats- und Verwaltungslehre (Polizeimssenschaft),

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2nd edn (Munich, 1980); G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modem State (Cambridge University Press, 1982); and my own articles: ‘YSutopia praticabile. Governo ed economia nel cameralismo tedesco del settecento’, in Quademi della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli 20 (1982): 69-98; ‘Polizia celeste a polizia terrena. D. Reinkingk e V. L. von Seckendorff, in Annali delVIstituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 8 (1982): 325-55 (a French translation of this article is scheduled to appear in a volume entided, Gouvemement et raison d ‘Etat, ed. C. Lazzeri and D. Reynie (Paris: PUF, 1991)); ‘Politisches und historisches Interesse. Statistik und historische Staatslehre bei Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772)’, in Aufkldrung und Geschichte, hrsg. byH. Bodeker u.a. (Gottingen, 1987), 144—68. 14 These could also be called theories of contract as opposed to theories of conquest. 15 It would simply be unfair of me to fail to mention that Foucault presented this hypothesis in a course that he never would have wished to be published, for he regarded his courses as simple attempts at reflection, working hypotheses, that he offered to ‘all who might be interested in the research or believe they have any reason to devote themselves to it’. He added, ‘I don’t consider these Wednesday sessions only as a teaching activity, but rather as a kind of [public control] of work that I am free to pursue as I wish - or nearly so’ (DS 19). 16 On this point see the important article by A. Pizzomo, ‘Foucault et la conception liberate de l’individu’, in Michel Foucault philosophe (Paris, 1989), 236-45. 17 The reference to Nietzsche is, moreover, explicit in Foucault’s course; see DS 28 where he contrasts Reich’s hypothesis, which attempted to account for the mechan­ isms of power in terms of repression, with that of Nietzsche, in which ‘the base of the power relationship would be the bellicose confrontation of forces’. Now, without sharing Foucault’s enthusiasm for Nietzsche, I am also unable to understand those of my French colleagues who are simply afraid of him. That one can make something of the political philosophy of the author of the The Genealogy of Morals, taking Foucault as a starting point, is what Bernard Williams is demonstrating in his current work. 18 Cf. DS 65. ‘On the base of this analysis the social body is not composed of a pyramid of orders or a hierarchy, or does not constitute a coherent and unitary organism, but is the composite result of two groupings that not only are perfectly distinct but even opposite. The oppositional relation that exists between them, which constitute the social body and work to form the state, in reality is a relation of war, permanent war. The state, in turn, is nothing but the modality by which these two groups continue to conduct, in apparendy peaceful forms, their war.’ 19 This idea appears, in reality, at the end of Elements o f Law 2.14.5 (1640), but can no longer be found in the De cive or in Leviathan; see on this point, P. Pasquino, ‘Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind’, Cahiers du CREA (1992). 20 Foucault is perfectly right to stress that the possibility of war depends, in Hobbes’s state of nature, on the equality of individuals. It seems to me none the less that the absence of natural inequality alone is not enough to account for the condition of terror that characterizes this state for Hobbes; this is what I have attempted to show in the article cited above in note 19. 21 Cf. ‘Anmerkungen zu Carl Schmitts Begriff des Politischen’ [1932]; French translation in C. Schmitt, Parlementarisme et democratic (Paris, 1988), 196. 22 See Leviathan, chs 19-20. 23 Q. Skinner comes to the same conclusion in his most important article devoted to this author: ‘Thomas Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty’, Transactions of the Royal Society, ser. 5, vol. 40, pp. 121-51; cf. p. 149 and note 177. 24 The Latin edition of Leviathan reads: ‘Non ergo a Victoria jus Dominii, sed a Victi Pacto nascitur; neque eo obligatur quod captus est, sed quod voluntati capientis se submisit.’ In his analysis of chapter 20 of Leviathan, Foucault pauses, jusdy, on the third form

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of sovereignty that Hobbes traces back to a contractual type of relationship: that of a parent, or rather, a mother for her children. Once again, Foucault’s commentary on the text is striking: ‘Between the child’s consent (which does not take the form of an expressed wish or a contract) and the mother’s sovereignty, which has the goal of preserving life, and the consent of the vanquished in the twilight of their defeat there is no substantial difference’ (DS 70-1). This sovereignty of the mother in the state of nature does not seem to trouble Carole Pateman who, all the while recognizing that Hobbes represents an exception (!), does not hesitate to write that ‘the classic contract theorists have a crucial feature in common. They all tell patriarchal stories’ (The Sexual Contract (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988), 40-1). Now, if Pateman means that Pufendorf or Rousseau ‘tell patriarchal stories’, I willingly agree; but it must be clear that this has nothing to do with the conceptual structure of modem natural law, which was invented by Hobbes; consequently it is difficult to see how Hobbes could represent an exception. The statement on page 48: ‘Hobbes states that in civil society the husband has dominion “because for die most part commonwealths have been erected by the fathers, not by the mothers of families” ’ obscures the thought of Hobbes, who in chapter 20 of the Latin version of Leviathan (1668) - the work that presents the last stage of his political thought and which had the greatest influence on the European continent - writes: ‘In the cities civil law prevails, there it is the man, where men rule, and the woman, where women rule, who are entrusted with the government of the royal children’ (following the French translation of Fr. Tricaud, Leviathan (Paris, 1971), 209). The Latin text reads: ‘In Civitatibus obtinet Jus Civile. Itaque ubi Mas regnat, ibi Mari, ubi Foemina, ibi Foeminae Dominum tributuir in filios regios.’ 25 Cf. on this question of method, J. Tully’s introduction to the book Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988). In fact it was Carl Schmitt who was the first to insist on the polemical character of political texts and concepts. 26 Emphasis mine. 27 Not the last, however, if one thinks of its extremist reactivation in the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of the class struggle. 28 Aristotle, Politics 1291b 7ff. (4.4.19); 1297a 5ff. (4.12.6); 1279b 20ff. (3.8.3-8). Cf. in addition, G. J. D. Aalders, Die Theorie der gemischten Verfassung im Altertum (Amsterdam, 1968), 55ff.; W. Nippel, Mischvetfassungstheorie und Verfassungrealitatdt (Stuttgart, 1980), 52ff.; P. Accattino, L'anatomia della cittd nella Politica diAristotele (Turin, 1986), 71ff. 29 N. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 9. ‘In each city are found these two different desires.. .the man ofthe people hates being ordered and oppressed by those greater than he. And the great like to order and oppress the people’; Discorsi 1:5: ‘there is among the first [the great] a great desire to dominate; and among the second [the people], the desire only not to be dominated’; Histoires florentines 3:1. 30 Robert Filmer’s remarks on the subject should be recalled here, from his The Anarchy of Limited and Mixed Monarchy (1648), ed. Sommerville (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 134: ‘Machiavelli is the first in Christendom that I can find that wrote of a mixed government.’ Montesquieu, in his Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence [1734], in chapter 8, ‘Des divisions qui furent toujours dans le Ville [de Rome]’, takes up the Machiavellian analysis of the Roman Republic: ‘While Rome was conquering the Universe, there was a hidden war going on within its walls; there were fires like those of the Volcanoes that emerge as soon as any material adds to their ferment.’ 31 One could even say, ‘forced by the constitution’. 32 On the analysis of the political thought of Machiavelli I must refer the reader to my article ‘Concordia discors: Machiavelli’s Theory of Mixed Government’, to be published in Studi in onore di Ettore Lepore. 33 Cf. Discours 1:4: ‘Ne si possano per tanto giudicare questi tomulti nocivi, ne una

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republica divisa, che in tanto tempo per le sue differenzie non mando in esilio piu che otto o dieci cittadini, e ne ammazzo pochissimi, e non molti ancora ne condanno in

danari., 34 It is in this way that Machiavelli contrasts the deathly conflict in his city, Florence, with the conflict in Rome that was directed and appeased by its political institutions (cf. Histoiresflorentines, 3:1, and the Discursusflorentinarum rerum [1519-20]). 35 Cf. Resume des cours, 110-16 (this is the 1978-9 course, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’). 36 Preliminaire de la constitution frangaise, 3rd edn (Paris, 1789), 29-30, emphasis mine. The third enemy of liberty mentioned in the text is possible foreign enemies. 37 Which I have treated elsewhere; see P. Pasquino, ‘Hobbes on the Legal Condition in the Commonwealth’, Cahiers du CREA (1992). 38 Cf. DS 33. See on this point the remarks, which I find thoroughly convincing, of L. Dumont in his Essais sur Vindividualisme (Paris, 1983), 90-5. 39 This seems to me to be the central kernel of Hobbes’s political philosophy. 40 Course given at the College de France in 1983 and published by the Magazine litteraire (May 1984), 39.

[16] Government in Foucault BARRY ALLEN

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. (Foucault [SP, 224])1

I Introduction: Foucault contra Nietzsche According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpreta­ tion of power as Wille zur Macht, 'will to power/ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, 'Nietzsche's authority, from which this [Foucault's] utterly unsociological concept of power is

1 References to Foucault's work are parenthetically abbreviated as follows: DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon 1979). G 'Govemmentality/ Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979) 5-21. HS The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage 1980). PF 'Care for die Self as a Practice of Freedom/ in J. Bemauer and D. Rasmussen eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press 1988) 1-20. PK PowerIKnowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, C. Gorden, ed. (New York: Pantheon 1980). PPC Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, L.D. Kritzman, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell 1988). QM 'Questions of Method/ Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981) 3-14. SP "The Subject and Power/ in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 208-26.

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borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage/2Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche 'a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own/ viz., that 'there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life. There are only different orders imposed by men on primal chaos, following their will to power/3Here Taylor actually makes two points about Nietzsche. On the one hand, he notices the suspension of reference to 'nature' or 'human nature' as specifically preferring one against another ethos or practice. This indifference to a traditional relationship between nature and the good belongs together with something Nietzsche describes as an 'experimental' suspension of truth's claim to the highest value.4Yet on the other hand, there is what appears to be a new Truth: a mythopoesis of primal chaos and will to power. But instead of noticing the independence of these two lines in Nietzsche's work — for there is no compelling link between them—Taylor overlooks it, and then can't see the difference between Nietzsche and Foucault. This tendency to assimilate Foucault and Nietzsche via the equivocal term 'power' is confirmed elsewhere. Deleuze describes Foucault's interpretation of power as 'a profound Nietzscheanism.'5Allan Megill thinks There need be no mystery where Foucault's assertion of the productivity of power comes from or to what internal dynamic it re­ sponds —for commitment to the productivity of power is the supremely Dionysian insight, well known to "that Dionysian monster," Zarathustra.' Foucault's 'preoccupation with "power"...[is] a reprise of Nietzsche's notion of the will to power/6J.G. Merquior believes Disci­ pline and Punish should 'be called the first sustained attempt at offer­ ing..^ Nietzschean reduction of forms of action or knowledge to will-to-power configurations'; also that like Nietzsche, Foucault holds the individual's will to power as a datum which is also an unavoidable

2 Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987), 249. Habermas cannot make up his mind. Elsewhere he says, 'By contrast [to Nietzsche and Bataille], Foucault borrows his concept of power from the empiricist tradition' (284-5). 3 Charles Taylor, 'Foucault on Freedom and Truth/ in D.C. Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: BlackweU 1986), 93 4 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1967), UI.27 5 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988), 71 6 Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 241,191

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fatum'; and that 'there is no way of minimizing the Nietzsche connection in Foucault's work. The latter is arguably the prime instance of neoNietzscheanism in contemporary Western thought.'7 One has to wonder why these critics are determined to assimilate when differentiation is equally possible. Is the putative sameness more essential and true, the difference secondary and accidental? But there is nothing of the kind. It is entirely up to readers to perform this juxtapo­ sition, and to make of it what they can. With Nietzsche, my preference is for difference: 'Seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes.'8 To an interlocutor Foucault remarks, 'My relation to Nietzsche, or what I owe Nietzsche, derives mostly from the texts of around 1880, where the question of truth, the history of truth and the will to truth were central to his work' (PPC, 32).9Certainly there is more to Nietzsche than this; for instance, there is everything that has to do with primal chaos and will to power. But as Foucault also observes, there is 'a perceptible displacement in Nietzsche's texts between those which are broadly preoccupied with the question of will to knowledge and those which are preoccupied with will to power' (PPC, 33). This seems to me an acute observation and a clue to the difference between these two philosophers. On one hand, Nietzsche tenaciously questions the Platonic-Christian evaluation of truth's value. Addressing his 'unknown friends,' he demands, 'What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem/10 It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for Foucault to associate Nietzsche with a number of critical questions concerning truth's claim

7 J.G. Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 99,142-3. Among the few who have objected to this assimilation, Gary Gutting points out that there is 'no basis for moving from Foucault's obvious admiration for Nietzsche to the conclusion that he espouses relativism or skepticism' (Michel Foucault's Archae­ ology of Scientific Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989], 277). 8 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1974), 228 9 As the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals (1887) demonstrates, this interest in the question of truth's value remained part of Nietzsche's work throughout the 1880s. For earlier work on truth, see D. Breazeale, ed., Philosophy and Truth: A Selection from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1979). Maudemarie Clark has studied the development of Nietzsche's view of truth; see Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990). 10 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 111.27; emphasis added.

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to superior value. 'Doesn't science produce "truths/" an interlocutor asks, 'to which we submit?' — Foucault: Of course. Indeed, truth is no doubt a form of power. And in saying that, I am only taking up one of the fundamental problems of Western philosophy when it poses these questions: Why, in fact, are we attached to the truth? Why the truth rather than lies? Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? And I think that, instead of trying to find out what truth, as opposed to error, is, it might be more interesting to take up the problem posed by Nietzsche: how is it that, in our societies, "the truth" has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall? (PPC, 107; emphasis added)

These are indeed fundamental questions for a philosophy of truth, though for all that they are not traditional ones: they do not appear prior to Nietzsche. This line of questioning, more than any answer, is Nietzsche's strongest contribution to the work on truth in philosophy. To follow Nietzsche at this point is not to repeat any 'neo-Nietzschean' doctrines about will or power. It is to take up the question of truth's value, of its relation to practice and politics, where Nietzsche left it: 'one of the fundamental problems of Western philosophy.' But I think it cannot be denied that Foucault found his own way to work on truth, and 'will to power' was one thing he had the good sense to ignore. Where Nietzsche forsakes the askesis of truth for the music of Dionysus — 'waves of forces at the same time one and many...etemally self-creating...eternally self-destroying'11— Foucault becomes austerely nominalistic: One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name one attributes to a complex strategical relationship in a particular society. (HS, 93)

From this perspective Nietzsche seems almost laughably to misunder­ stand what concretely there is to mean by the words 'exercise of power' or 'relationship of power' for human life. Power apart from social formations, intersubjective dependencies, political controls, and ethical practice is a miserable abstraction.12

11 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann, ed. (New York: Vintage Books 1967), 1065 12 I develop this argument in 'Nietzsche's Question, What Good is Truth?' History of Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming 1992).

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What is at stake here is not influence. It is a question of how best to understand the power whose exercise makes actions and relationships 'political.' One argument in Foucault's later work is a revisionary inter­ pretation of this power. Another is an assessment of the present which motivates the revision, and it is with this that I begin. II 'Political' Control: Theory and Practice We have the idea of a power whose exercise makes actions and relation­ ships political. Foucault contends that since medieval times, Western political thought has represented 'political' power on a juridical model: such power limits freedom (individual or corporate) by imposing a will, issuing a command, laying down the law and exacting obedience with threats. Modem politics would eventually seem to coincide with State action, while 'political' philosophy is preoccupied with questions of sovereignty and justifiable coercion, framing its answers in terms of rights, obligations, procedures, and juridical persons. This theoretical architecture is the invention of medieval political thought, which was dominated by the question of sovereignty.13Foucault claims that for all the difference in Western societies since then, this 'juridico-discursive' model of power has dominated political interpretation. Despite the differences in epochs and objectives the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty7 (HS, 88-9).14 His objection to this approach is practical, based on a historical analysis ('genealogy')15of contemporary practice. The price of persisting

13 See Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin Books 1965), esp. 15-18. 14 Even one of Foucault's critics from the Left confirms that Marxism cannot easily claim to have broken with this representation: 'When all the recent complications of Marxist political theory are taken into account the figure of the ruling class can still be discerned insistently playing the same unifying function with respect to what counts as political...[as the] Princes, Sovereigns, Legislators, etc. play in classical political theory7(Jeff Minson, 'Strategies for Socialists? Foucault's Concep­ tion of Power,' in M. Gane, ed., Towards a Critique of Foucault [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986], 111). 15 The endless comparison of Foucault's 'genealogy7 or 'history of the present7 to Nietzsche's argumentation in Genealogy of Morals overlooks the key difference: Nietzsche's speculative anthropology terminates in a primal origin. In this it

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in a juridical representation of power is a growing discrepancy between what thought can identify as political and a widening control of conduct by historically new instruments and relationships of power. 'We have been engaged for centuries in a type of society in which the juridical is increasingly incapable of coding power, of serving as its system of representation/ Historically recent instruments for the control of con­ duct have altered the field of power relations, of government or political control, in a way that undermines 'a certain image of power-law, of power-sovereignty, which was traced out by the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution/ For 'while many of its forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are probably irreducible to the representation oflaw' (HS, 89-90). What are these new mechanisms? Western societies have experienced a proliferation of instruments and social relationships that individuate people and populations as objects of scientific or quasi-scientific control. Foucault calls these configurations of knowledge and power 'disci­ plines/ and he has shown how since the late eighteenth century they have penetrated and profoundly reorganized justice, health, education, production, warfare, and the family. As a result, our contemporary political government includes forms of control which make no threats or even presume to legislate. 'Our historical gradient carries us further and further away from a reign of law/ Foucault explains, 1 do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulator/ (HS, 144). In contrast to the representation of sovereignty in pre-modem Europe, where power would 'display itself in its murderous splendor/ modem disci­ plinary knowledge-power 'has to qualify, measure, appraise, and heirarchize/ It 'does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm' (HS, 144). The modalities and scope of intervention are continuously redefined and rationalized in the discourse and prac-

resembles Freud's anthropology, yet has no more than an equivocal name in common with Foucault's approach to the history of thought, which explicitly aims 'to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism,' freeing the history of thought from 'that circle of the lost origin' (The Archaeology of Knowledge [New York: Harper & Row 1972], 203).

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tice of medicine, psychiatry, economics, pedagogy, advertising and what calls itself 'the media.'6 One effect of this history is a lower threshold of tolerance to interven­ tion against what can be represented as abnormality in an expanding range of conduct, experience, and organic functioning. Another effect is the construction of what Foucault calls a disciplinary continuum: trans­ gressions of law and social danger are assimilated to a deviation from a norm. Spectacular and inhumane practices, which persisted late into the eighteenth century, once made legal punishment an extraordinary de­ parture from everyday experience. Punishment today, however, even in the intense and compact form of the penitentiary, is continuous with disciplinary or normalizing interventions that form a regular part of people's experiences back and forth across society. At the same time, crimes today are less actions to be punished according to the law than signals or symptoms of dangerous abnormalities in the social body; the objects of judicial attention are less the actions of agents in violation of law than abnormal individuals more or less dangerous; legal punish­ ment does not exact the price of illegality, but only tries to regulate dangerous sub-populations. Foucault's analyses in Discipline and Punish show how close this brings punishment to therapeutics, pedagogics, and public health. Abnormal conduct is assimilated to social danger, while, like more and more forms of governmental intervention, legal punish­ ment becomes continuous with regulatory and therapeutic responses to a departure from the norm.17

16 The basic analysis of this history is in Discipline and Punish, 170-94 and 293-308. The argument is elaborated at HS, 135-50, and in these three lectures: 'Govemmental­ ity'; The Dangerous Individual' (PPC, 121-51); and The Political Technology of Individuals/ in L.H. Martin, et al., eds., Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988) 145-62. Crucial details are examined in The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century' (PK, 166-82). Also see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon 1979). On pre-modem political 'representation' the earlier (1962) work of Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989], section 2), confirms Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish, Part One. Georges Canguilhem has shown how from its beginning psychological research into reac­ tion time, motivation, learning, and the measurement of aptitudes aimed at results useful for the management of individual differences in industry, military, and public administration. See 'What is Psychology?' Ideology and Consciousness 7 (1980) 37-50. 17 Ian Hacking shows how from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the concept of 'the normal state' wandered from pathology to populations in the work of Comte, Durkheim, and Galton (The Taming of Chance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990]).

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A further unintended effect is the construction of historically new networks of control of conduct across diverse sites of social relationship: positions of power from which emanate judgments that lay no claim to being 'sovereign' but only true. Instead of commands that may or may not be legitimate, we face complex and interconnected patterns of uncoerced submission to what might be called 'the government of truth.' By this I mean the power over conduct which Western societies have always extended to those authorized to speak from a position of knowl­ edge and in the name of truth, but a power we experience today above all as the truth of norms and of chances: the expert's truth concerning what is average or deviant, safe or dangerous, same or different. A massive discourse of disciplinary expertise concerning these matters contributes to the government of conduct as never before, yet not by contract, conquest, or divine right.18 Marx was no doubt right to think that the circumstances under which we labor and produce surplus-values condition our consciousness. But the same should be said of the conditions under which we consume and communicate knowledge, acquire information, and submit our coitduct to what passes for true, probable, expert, etc. Knowledge and truth have been increasing professionalized, commodified, and to an unprece­ dented degree made to enter into the control of belief, desire, and action. For example: In education: in what is taught, by whom, to whom, how the whole experience is organized, how teachers are trained and licensed and schools administered. There is virtually no man or woman in any modem society whose behavior and expectations are not to a degree controlled by this experience, the general conditions of which are determined by the diverse lines of expertise that inter­ sect at the public school. In labor: large numbers of people now work at jobs that in one way or another are part of the use of knowledge for the government of conduct: in the media, opinion research, and advertising technol­ ogy; in medicine and everything associated with health; in infor­ mation services, data processing, and symbolic analysis. In fact, as Beniger notes, In the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, the bulk of the labor force now works primarily at informa­ tional tasks, while wealth comes increasingly from informational goods such as microprocessors and from informational services

18 See the studies collected in T.L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984).

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such as data processing...information, embracing both goods and services...has come to dominate the world's largest and most ad­ vanced economies.'19 In the administration of justice: there are numerous complex rela­ tions between expertise and knowledge in psychology, medicine, psychiatry, criminology, and penology, and these regularly and massively enter into the disposition of those who come into the system of courts, police and prisons. In the post-literate audience for electronic media: here we have a complex interaction between all sorts of expertise and knowledge, from the technology of satellite transmission to advertizing, as well as the information, and the truth, we still expect from electronic journalism. In global technoscience: Joseph Rouse has argued that, quite apart from any ideological contamination or extrinsic manipulation, even the most 'hard' and rigorously experimental scientific prac­ tice contributes to the political control of behavior by modifying 'the practical configuration within which our actions make sense, both to ourselves and to one another.' This shaping,' Rouse says, 'occurs most directly through their [the sciences'] effects upon the kinds of equipment available to us, the skills and procedures required to use that equipment, the related tasks and equipment that use imposes upon us, and the social roles available to us in performing these tasks.' Through this the sciences 'reconfigure the style and interconnectedness of what we do.' These effects define what is 'politically at issue in our scientific practices...it is the effect of these practices upon us and our form of life that need to be understood in terms of power.'20 These are a few examples of how the government of conduct happens differently from before the age of scientific and democratic revolution. It is organized at sites neither strictly juridical nor economic (hospitals, schools, laboratories, bureaucracies), and works by means more subtle than occlusion, censorship, threat, or outright violation. There has to be

19 J.R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Informa­ tion Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986), v 20 Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1987), 246-7. The term 'technoscience' is from Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).

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a place for the productive work of advertising and media, the therapist and psychiatrist, the statistician, geneticist, pharmacologist, and foren­ sic chemist. Because they claim no sovereign legislative authority, but only the authority of knowledge and truth, this entire field of politically sensitive control slips through the interstices of a juridical, top-down analytic of power. The tactics, targets, instruments, and even the ration­ ality of political control have changed. Foucault's revisionary interpre­ tation of power is a response to this. Ill Government Habermas accuses Foucault of an 'uncircumspect levelling of culture and politics to immediate substrates of the application of violence.'21But there is nothing of the kind. Power can be violent, of course. But that is not the truth of power, not its essence or privileged instance. In a conversation conducted five months before his death in 1984, Foucault remarks, 'I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others' (PF, 18). Elsewhere he elaborates: In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action that does not act directly or immediately upon others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future.... The exercise of power...is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions. (SP, 220)

On this view, 'the exercise of power consists in guiding the possibili­ ties of conduct and putting in order the possible outcomes,' and viewed in this way 'power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government/ This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or states might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not cover only the legitimately constituted forms of political or

21 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 290

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economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calcu­ lated, which were designed to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of others. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. (SP, 221)

This is a key term in Foucault's work, marking his contribution to our contemporary understanding of the power that makes actions and relationships political. It is the power to modify the way a subject symbolizes what it experiences subjectively as options, occasions for choice, liberties anticipated, repudiated, actually taken, or denied. A 'power relationship' is an asymmetry by virtue of which one subject acts upon the significant space of possibilities in which another interpretively situates its future, thereby to a variable degree governing the tetter's conduct. A 'power structure' is any more or less solid complex of asymmetrical relationships through which the control of choice and conduct may be regularly and reliably effected. The means by which control may be effected are very heterogeneous; they by no means reduce to the common denominator of violence or coercion. 'In general terms interdiction, the refusal, the prohibition, far from being essential forms of power, are only its limits, power in its frustrated or extreme forms. The relations of power are above all productive' (PPC, 118). Foucault therefore recommends one 'cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth' (DP, 194). For Marx, the proximate effect of domination is to modify the condi­ tions of production. The exercise of power is in the first instance control by one class over the necessary conditions or requirements of another's productivity.22Foucault can agree that the effect of power is to govern the conditions of action, but this would not apply preeminently to surplus production; neither would it be essentially inhibitory or repres­ sive, nor consolidated in the hands of a ruling class. He criticizes a certain realism in political ontology: that power is a property, that like a property it belongs to a substance-subject, can be accumulated or lost, and in these exchanges openly or secretly serves the interests of a class. Power is not 'a phenomenon of one individual's consolidated and homogeneous domination over others, or that of one group or class over

22 Carol Gould, Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1978), 136

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others'; it is 'never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a com­ modity or a piece of wealth' (PK, 98). As 'a total structure of actions brought to bare upon possible actions,' power sustains a polymorphous politics of control, with 'no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead, there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case' (HS, 95-6). Gilles Deleuze observes, It is as if, finally, something new were emerging in the wake of Marx.'23 Tou are far removed from Sartre,' observes another, 'who used to tell us 'Tower is evil.'" 'Y es/ Foucault replies, 'that idea has often been attributed to me, which is very far from what I think.' Relations of power 'are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free one's self (PF, 18). Neither is power the antithesis of freedom, which is not its victim so much as its presupposi­ tion. The government of conduct presupposes subjects situated in a space of options and lines of response, which is precisely what an exercise of power modifies. 'Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.' By this, Foucault says he means individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint). (SP, 221)

Power does not exist apart from practical liberty: actual choices and strategic positions from which occasionally to reverse or neutralize the effects of those who would govern others' conduct. 'At the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom' (SP, 225). Resistance is therefore not 'a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed' and not 'doomed to perpetual defeat' (HS,96). Here is a philosophy of politics that does not insist upon situating the most important and problematic instances of political government at the level of legal (or perhaps nominally legal) action by a State. 'We all know the fascination which the love, or horror, of the State continues to exercise today; we know how much attention is paid to the genesis of the State, its history, its growth, its power and abuses, etc.'

23 Deleuze, 30. This remark concludes the best pages of Deleuze's study (24-30).

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The excessive value attributed to the problem of the State is expressed [in]...the form of analysis that consists in reducing the State to a certain number of functions, such as for instance the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of production, and [as an]...absolutely essential...target to be attacked and a privileged position to be taken over. But the State, probably no more today than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality nor, to speak frankly, this importance; maybe, after all, the State is no more than a composite reality and a mythical abstraction whose impor­ tance is a lot more limited than many of us think. Maybe what is really important for our modem times...is not so much the State-domination of Society, but the "govemmentalization" of the State. (G, 20)

Elsewhere he explains this last point: It is certain that in contemporary societies the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of power — even if it is the most important — but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it. But this is not because they are derived from it; it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word government, one could say that power relations have been progressively govemmentalized, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of or under the auspices of state institutions. (SP, 224)

I think Foucault might agree that Kant was wrong to oppose inter­ ested, partial, heteronomous action to properly ethical action, and wrong to align this contrast with the difference between what merely feels free and what really is.24He models the ethical difference between good and bad acts on that between legal and despotic monarchy, repre­ senting free self-government as action subordinating desires contrary to the law that ought by nature to be sovereign. This demonstrates Kant's determination to represent freedom as intrinsically good, its value inde­ pendent of what agents actually do with their freedom (provided, of course, that it is 'real' freedom, i.e., action according to moral law). One should be more nominalistic about freedom, which is nothing apart from the situated liberties, themselves nothing but historically contin­ gent asymmetries, by which one is able to a variable extent to govern one's conduct and that of others. Instead of being good or bad in themselves, these effects and relationships (indifferently power or lib­ erty) define the space of practice (indifferently ethical or political).

24 These are the points of the Second and Third Sections respectively of Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

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IV Truth in Politics Foucault is not a Pragmatist, any more than Nietzsche was. However critical of the (European) tradition, the Pragmatic philosophy of Peirce and James only reconfirms the Platonic-Christian idea that it is always good to have the truth—the more truth the better. Peirce writes, Truth, the conditions of which the logician endeavors to analyze, and which is the goal of the reasoner's aspirations, is nothing but a phase of the summum bonum which forms the subject of pure Ethics.' James was so sure that 'the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the pos­ session of valuable instruments of action' that he made this 'working7 the very criterion or practical, pragmatic meaning of truth. He himself understood this to imply that 'the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.' Yet he evades the plain implication, which is that by dis­ rupting the connection to a predetermined order of Being or Nature, which props up truth's claim to the highest value in Greek and Christian thought, this serpent's trail divides truth, making it problematic, not intrinsically or essentially liberating or empowering or good. Had James pressed his criticism of the tradition a little farther, he might have seen what Nietzsche did: since there is no practical difference between the truth 'itself' and what passes for the truth, and since there never has been one unified and consistent set of interests or goods which transcends the differences that divide us, there is no reason to suppose that truth tends of its nature toward the good or toward freedom. With this, as Nietzsche said, 'the will to truth' — the demand, the desire or preference for it; the value, the good of it — 'becomes conscious of itself as a problem/25 In The History of Sexuality Foucault makes a detailed argument against what he calls 'the repressive hypothesis.' This is partly the idea that there existed a Victorian regime of restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality; that we continue to be dominated by it even today; and that were the repression undone and sexuality liberated all would be well (Marcuse), better at least (Freud). But this is not the only idea Foucault's argument brings into question: the repressive hypothesis has as much to do with truth as with sexuality. The supposed good of liberating sexuality is more accurately the good of undoing what represses it, getting rid of the falsity,

25 C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1934), 576; William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1978), 97, 37; Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 111.27. I elaborate on this criticism of James in 'Work on Truth in America: The Example of Wm James/ Studies in Puritan American Spirituality (forthcoming 1992).

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the error, the distortion of our human nature this repression seems to entail. How could it not be good, to be free of that? Freud says 'psychoanalysis proposes that there should be a reduction in the strictness with which the instincts are repressed and that corre­ spondingly more play should be given to truthfulness.' There must then be a 'truth' of sexuality; a true logos or account must be attainable and, attained, would be of the highest practical value, liberating what is repressed of our human nature. The claim to have the truth of sexuality is a theme in variation from Hippocrates to Galen, from Esquirol to Krafft-Ebing, from Freud to Masters and Johnson. The peculiarity of the West is to have constituted sexuality 'as a problem of truth': to have 'the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable' (HS, 56). 'On the face of it at least,' Foucault remarks, 'our civilization possesses no ars erotica. In return, it is undoubt­ edly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power' (HS, 58). If sexuality has come to be seen as something repressed, some piece of our human nature that is falsified or distorted, this is because it has more fundamentally insinuated itself as something about which there is a truth in the first place — a truth at once elemental to our being or nature, yet difficult, elusive, protean. This combination of features ra­ tionalizes our uncoerced submission to those whose specialized posi­ tion in the economy of knowledge empowers them to determine what from case to case passes for the psychological or medical truth of 'normal' sexuality.2 Foucault's project for a history of sexuality was emphatically not 'a history of sexual behaviors and practices, tracing their successive forms, their evolution, and their dissemination; nor was it to analyze the scientific, religious, or philosophical ideas through which these behav­ iors have been represented/27But what else is historical about sexuality?

26 Freud, "Resistances to Psychoanalysis' (1925) (Harmondsworth: Pelican Freud Library 1986), vol. 15,271. On the ars erotica, also see Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics/ in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 234-5. On the relation from truth and sexuality, besides the three volumes of Foucault's Flistory of Sexuality one may now refer to Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990). A more specialized study is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press 1988). On post-Freudian developments, see the two papers by Andr£ Bejin, 'The Decline of the Psychoanalyst' and The Sexologists and Sexual Democracy/ in P. Ari&s and A. B£jin, eds., Western Sexuality (Oxford: Blackwell 1985) 180-217.

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Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller once objected to Foucault: 'sexuality isn't historical...through and through from the start.... There isn't a history of sexuality.' Foucault replies, 'there is one in the sense that there is a history of madness, I mean of madness as a question, posed in terms of truth, within a discourse in which human madness is held to signify something about the truth of what man, the subject, or reason is.' Referring to his earlier work on the asylum Foucault says, 'my problem was to find out how the question of madness could have been made to operate in terms of discourses of truth, that is to say, discourses having the status and function of true discourses. In the West that means scientific discourse. That was also the angle from which I wanted to approach the question of sexuality...what I'm concerned with, what I'm talking about, is how it comes about that people are told that the secret of their truth lies in the region of their sex' (PK, 210-14). If there is a history of sexuality (of the thing itself) it is because a domain of knowl­ edge and truth has been historically constructed and unified around the predicate 'sexuality.' The history of sexuality is a history of how under this predicate a number of fairly recent disciplines (psychoanalysis, sexology, gynecology, the psychiatry and criminology of perversion, etc.), and correlated possibilities of making determinately true-or-false statements, came to govern what passes for the truth on a range of questions concerning sensations, pleasures, desires, dreams, somatic functions, and public health. Sexuality 'itself is nothing but the dense pattern of discursive and interventionist relationships that prevail among these otherwise heterogeneous circuits of knowledge and prac­ tice. Sexuality is nothing—it does not exist—apart from this contingent history. 'Of all things good/ Plato says, 'truth holds the first place among gods and men alike.' Conversely, 'deception in the soul about realities, to have been deceived and to be blindly ignorant and to have and to hold falsehood there, is what all men would least of all accept and...loathe it most of all.'28This evaluation of truth's value is widely shared among pagan and Christian thinking throughout later Antiquity; one might trace the variations down to the present time.29In opposition to what Nietzsche describes as 'that famous truthfulness of which all the philosophers have so far spoken with respect,' Foucault maintains that 'truth is not by nature

27 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, History of Sexuality vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon 1985), 3 28 Plato, Laws 730; Republic 382 29 See my 'Nietzsche's Question, What Good is Truth?'

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free — nor error servile—but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power' (HS, 60). 'Contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power' (PK, 131). 'My problem/ he says elsewhere, 'is to see howmen govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth...I would like in short to resituate the production of truth at the heart of historical analysis and political critique' (QM, 8). C. Wright Mills once defined intellectuals as 'those who profession­ ally create, destroy [and] elaborate...symbols/ He explains why this is a politically sensitive position: 'ideas, beliefs, images — symbols in short — stand between men and the wider realities of their time, and...accordingly those who professionally create, destroy, elaborate these symbols are very much involved in all literate men's very images of reality. For now, of course, the live experience of men falls far short of the objects of their belief and action.' Mills exemplifies the hope that something about truth (its nature or essence) makes it antithetical to the ethically prob­ lematic exercise of power. He seems to believe that domination may be limited or controlled by 'maintaining an adequate definition of reality/ and responsibility for this falls to the intellectual: 'As a type of social man, the intellectual does not have any one political direction, but the work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality.' Since 'much reality is now officially defined by those who hold power/ the politically responsible intellectual must be 'absorbed in the attempt to know what is real and what is unreal/ to 'find out as much of the truth as he can, and to tell it to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way.'30 Two assumptions stand out from this account of truth and politics: 1.

Power prefers to hide; hidden, it is stronger. To show itself is a risk to be avoided wherever possible.

2.

Power does not only dissemble (when it can): it also distorts; it makes error and myth pass for true and falsifies our conscious-

30 C. Wright Mills, 'On Knowledge and Power/ in I. L. Horowitz, ed., Power, Politics and People, Collected Essays ofC. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963), 611. Originally published in Dissent (1955).

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ness. This point should be distinguished from the first one: to hide is not the same thing as to lie. One might even guess that an asymmetry of power may be all the more stable without the liability of a lie. Of the two assumptions, I believe Foucault would accept only the first. He does say 'power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substan­ tial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms' (HS, 86). Yet he qualifies this in a way that contradicts the second assumption, since truth can and regularly does serve this very function: 'the history of the West cannot be dissociated from the way its "truth" is produced and produces its effects. We are living in a society that...produces and circulates discourse having truth as its function, passing itself off as such and thus attaining specific powers' (PPC, 112). Nothing about truth's nature or essence precludes its being strategically aligned against select subject-positions or the bodies that labor there. The distribution of truth-values over statements, their routine penetra­ tion of practical reasoning through private consultation and public communications, and the effects of this (whether global or carefully focused) on how subjects envision their options and choose and act, are instruments and effects of political government. What passes for true has 'a value...not only in the economy of discourse but, more generally, in the administration of scarce resources...as an asset — finite, limited, desirable, useful...an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only in its "practical applications"), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.' 'My problem,' Foucault says, 'is to see how men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth...I would like in short to resituate the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis and political critique/31 This does not entail a cheerless condemnation of truth as a lie or a ruse; 'neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth' (SP, 212). But it does militate against the assumption that truth 'itself' (the real article) has no political axis; that it takes something external or accidental to the essential nature of truth to situate it in a field of political differences; that the only 'truth' that might function in the political

31 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 120, emphasis added; and QM, 8-9. He contin­ ues: 'Of course this is a problem of philosophy to which the historian is entitled to remain indifferent. But if I am posing a problem within historical analysis, I'm not demanding that history answer it—it's a matter of...a nominalist critique formulated elsewhere but by way of a historical analysis/

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exercise of power is a mere passing-for-true which is really false. To the contrary. From the moment that it exists, under the only conditions that it does exist, without falsifying its nature or becoming what it essentially is not, truth itself is originally and irreducibly situated in a field of social, historical, political differences of power. To Nietzsche's question, What good is truth?' Foucault suggests an answer that must seem anti-climactic to those who still like to think as much hangs on having the truth as Plato and Augustine did. In itself, truth is neither good nor wicked. In this it is exactly like power and exactly like freedom. Considered in abstraction from what truth is in question, for whom it is passing true and to what effect, truth 'itself' has no more value than coins apart from their circulation. It should be no more surprising to hear that truth can be used badly or be a source of disorder or political control than to hear the same said of money. The question What good is truth?' can and must therefore be divided into many smaller, local questions, and these questions touch directly upon the practice of all who (to recall Mills's description) 'professionally create, destroy, elaborate... symbols.' Concluding a discussion of Truth and Power,' Foucault writes: It is necessary to think of the political problems of the intellectuals not in terms of "science" and "ideology" but in terms of "truth" and "power".... The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct scientific ideology, but that of ascertaining the possi­ bility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses — or what's in their heads — but the political, economic, institu­ tional regime of the production of truth. It is not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself. (PK, 132-3)

Hence the importance of Foucault.32 Received: March, 1990 Revised: November, 1990

32 I thank the Editors for constructive and encouraging criticism. Portions of this paper were read to the Canadian Philosophical Association at its 1990 annual meeting. I thank Kathym Morgan for commenting.

[17] Politics as Government: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason Barry Hindess

This article considers M ichel Foucault’s work on the rationality o f governm ent and the practices in which it has b een im plem ented. Specifically, it develops a critique o f F oucault’s analysis o f p oliti­ cal reason in relation to the govern m en tal sign ifican ce o f e le c ­ toral politics, to liberal com m itm en ts to the p rom otion o f in d i­ vidual liberty, and to the focus on governm ent within states to the n eg lect o f the in tern ation al system and the p roblem o f sover­ eignty. K e y w o r d s : political, governm ental, partisan politics, lib­ eralism, states-system

W hen, in the conclusion to his T anner Lectures on H um an Values, Michel Foucault tells us th at political rationality “has grown and im posed itself all thro u g h o u t the history of W estern societies,”1 his use of the word political clearly invokes the classical understanding set o ut in, for exam ple, A ristotle’s The Politics, w here political m eans, quite simply, pertain in g to the governm ent of the state— th at is, o f the polis. A ristotle tells us th at “the state is by n atu re clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the p a rt” and that it is “a body of citizens suf­ ficing for the purposes of life.”2 Politics, the governm ent of the state, seeks to prom ote the com m on interest, and political science, Foucault’s political reason, considers how that end m ight best be pursued. In his writings on governm ent, F oucault norm ally uses the term political in precisely this sense— that is, to refer to aspects of the governm ent of a state. Thus far, it m ight seem, there is no th ­ ing particularly unusual, or even interesting, here: politics, political, and related term s are frequently used to refer to the work of gov­ erning the population and territory of a state, and Foucault’s usage appears to be in line with this conventional practice.

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Such an im pression could hardly be m ore misleading. First, as the subtitle of his T anner Lectures— “Towards a Criticism of ‘Polit­ ical R eason’”—suggests, F oucault’s concern is n eith er to endorse this conventional usage n o r to criticize it on the basis of an alter­ native view of how politics itself should be understood. Rather, it is to investigate and, at least in these lectures, to criticize a type of reason that, in his view, has been particularly influential in “the his­ tory of Western societies” and that, following the usage ju st noted, could well be described as “political.” It is a type of reason th at treats the state as “the highest o f all” form s of com m unity,3 and consequently aims to recruit the governm ent of all lesser com m u­ nities and, most especially, the governm ent of oneself to its partic­ u lar purposes. Thus, while recognizing that this political reason has often been criticized for its totalizing effects, Foucault insists that its prioritizing of the state also leads to individualizing effects th at are no less problem atic: political reason can be criticized, in his view, on the grounds that it operates as an oppressive principle of subjectivation. While Foucault directs his critique at political reason in gen­ eral, his analyses are particularly concerned with its early m odern and m odern m anifestations— that is, with the rationality of gov­ ern m e n t of the m o dern state. H ere he shows th at “go v ern m en t” was once u nderstood m ore broadly than is usually now the case, and he suggests, in effect, th at this early m o d ern u n d erstan d in g can serve as a particularly revealing device for analyzing m ore recent developm ents. As a result, his use of political to refer to the governm ent o f a state also carries a somewhat critical and u n co n ­ ventional weight. He insists, in particular, that the work of govern­ ing the population and territory of a state is not perform ed only by the state itself, that it may be dispersed throughout the population and p erfo rm ed by a variety of public and private agencies. This claim opens up for exam ination a sphere of practices th at are clearly governm ental, in F oucault’s expanded sense, but that have been neglected by m ore conventional form s of political analysis. Foucault’s approach has been taken up by students of govern­ m ental rationalities who have thus explored the various ways in which, in the governm ent of contem porary W estern states, state and society, the national population, and the individuals, groups, and organizations within it have been understood both as posing problems that governm ent has to address and as providing resources for dealing with those problem s. The prom ise of this approach is nicely captured by the title of Nikolas Rose and P eter M iller’s “Political Power Beyond the State: Problem atics of G overnm ent.”4 The suggestion here—that the state is neither the only, no r always

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the m ost consequential, cen ter of political power at work within the state’s population and territo ry —offers a new perspective on the traditional liberal concern that the state may be governing too m uch, and it thereby opens the way for a powerful and innovative account of liberalism as a rationality of governm ent. In his writings on governm ent, F oucault’s interest is less in the question o f how “politics” and related term s should be used— although, as noted above, he does offer some tactical suggestions— than it is in investigating the character of “political re aso n ” and the practices in which it has been im plicated. This article follows Foucault’s lead in this respect, but, since it also offers a critique of Foucault’s analysis of political reason, it does so at a certain remove. It begins by outlining the Foucaultian treatm ent of governm ent and its im plications for our u n derstanding both of political reason in general and of liberalism as a specific rationality of governm ent. Such a powerful new perspective on political analysis can hardly avoid raising issues that have yet to be properly addressed, and this article focuses on three of them . O ne involves the governm ental significance of electoral politics and o th er form s of what W eber calls “politically oriented action,” which m ust surely be regarded as occupying a central place in the m o d ern governm ent of popula­ tions. We shall see that politically o rien ted action is a m ajor con­ cern of liberal political reason. A nother concerns governm entality’s treatm ent of liberalism, alm ost in its own terms, as com m itted to governing through the prom otion of suitable form s of individ­ ual liberty. A third issue is raised by Foucault’s description of politi­ cal reason itself, and especially the sense in which m odern political reason can be said to treat the state as “the highest of all.” The dif­ ficulty here concerns governm entality’s focus on governm ent within the state and its relative neglect of the international system of states and the problem of sovereignty.5 I conclude by suggesting that this issue, too, has im portant im plications for our understand­ ing of liberal political reason.

Government In The Politics, Aristotle uses the term government prim arily to de­ note “the suprem e authority in states,”6 which suggests th at gov­ ern m en t should be seen as em anating from a single center of con­ trol, and contem porary political analysis generally follows this usage. But he also writes of the governm ent “of a wife and children and of a h o usehold”7 and the governm ent of a slave, two form s of rule th at he is careful to distinguish from the governm ent of a

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state. In yet an o th er usage, governm ent may refer to a rule that one exercises over oneself. Foucault notes that, for all the many differences between them , these distinct practices of governm ent nevertheless share a concern with “the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups m ight be directed. . . . To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field o f action of others8 or, indeed, of oneself. Thus, while it will often act directly to determ ine the behavior of individuals, governm ent also aims to influence their actions indirectly, by acting on the m anner in which they regulate their own behavior and the behavior of others. Governm ent, in this sense, is a special case of power: it is a way of acting on the actions of others, and even of oneself.9 N evertheless, while noting such differences and continuities, Foucault pays particular attention to one form of governm ent that, from the early m odern period onward, has been seen as “special and precise”; namely, “the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a w hole.”10 His concern here is both to distinguish this m odern art of governm ent from the rule exercised by feudal m agnates, in d ep en d e n t cities, the church, and various others over the populations of late-medieval E urope and, m ost especially, to show that this m odern understanding of governm ent follows the classical view in treating the state “as the highest of all.” He notes, for example, that while those who wrote of the art of gov­ ern m e n t in the early m o dern p eriod “constantly recall that one speaks also of ‘governing’ a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, a family,” they also treat these “o ther kinds of governm ent as in tern al to the state or society,” thereby always giving the governm ent of the latter a superior status.11 Foucault’s account of the em ergence of the m odern art of gov­ ern m en t thus refers back to the Aristotelian view that the govern­ m ent of the state has its own distinctive telos, a telos that requires th at it should have “a regard to the com m on in tere st.”12 It also points forw ard to the peculiar secularism of the liberal state. He notes, on the one hand, th at those who pro m o ted the art of gov­ ern m ent were careful to distinguish it from “the problem atic of the P rin ce,” the view that the aim of governm ent is to secure “the Prince’s ability to keep his principality.”13 Rather, they argued, the state should be “governed according to rational principles which are intrinsic to it.”14 On the o th er hand, he is careful to distinguish the political rationality of governm ent, which treats the state as the “highest of all,” from the reasoning one finds in theological accounts of rule. W hen he notes, for exam ple, th at Aquinas seeks to derive the ord er of governm ent from the order of nature that is ordained by

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God, n o t from principles th at are intrinsic to the work of govern­ ing a state, his point is to show that A quinas’s “m odel for rational governm ent is not a political o n e.”15 W hat particularly distinguishes the political art of governm ent, as Foucault describes it, from such theological rationalizations of rule is not the view that religion has no place in the governm ent of a state; rather, it is the insistence that the place of religion in the governm ent of the state should be d eterm in ed by the interests of the state, n o t by theology. It is on such grounds that Thom asius and Pufendorf, both of whom were deeply religious, argued in favor of a lim ited degree of religious toleration. T heir concern was th at if the state took on the task of im posing religious doctrine, it would place itself at risk o f being taken over by one of the m ore powerful contending sects and that the co n sequent pursuit of sectarian objectives would u n d erm in e the interests of the state itself.16 In its prom otion of a certain kind of secularism, this early ver­ sion o f the m odern art of governm ent can be seen as one of the precursors of the m odern liberal state. It differs m ost obviously from what we now take to be the liberal view of governm ent in rest­ ing its case for toleration on the interests of the state, n o t on the rights of the individual. But it also differs from liberalism in a sec­ ond, perhaps m ore fundam ental respect: it takes a broader view of governm ent itself. The art of governm ent, Foucault tells us: has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, its longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain those ends are all in some sense imma­ nent to the population itself; it is the population itself on which government will act either directly, through large scale campaigns, or indirectly, through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the stimulation of birth rates, the directing of the flow of population into certain regions or activi­ ties, and so on.17

This passage suggests not only that the population will often be “ig n o ran t of what is being done to it”18 by governm ent b u t also th at the work of governing the state is n o t confined to the direct action of the state itself. Much of this work will also be perform ed by agencies of o ther kinds, by churches, employers, voluntary asso­ ciations, legal and m edical professionals, financial institutions, and so on; in short, by elem ents of what is now called civil society. Gov­ ern m en t of the state can thus be seen as a pervasive and heteroge­ neous activity that is undertaken at a variety of sites within the ter­ ritory and population of the state concerned.

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The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century E uropean science of police u nderstood the governm ent of the state in precisely such term s: its am bition was to prom ote the happiness of society by deploying state and nonstate agencies to bring all forms of behav­ ior u n d e r some appropriate kind of reg u latio n .19 W hen Foucault cites police science as an im portant early version of the m odern art of government, his point is to show that, while later perspectives on the governm ent of the state may seem to have adopted m ore m odest regulatory ambitions, the governm ental use of both state and n o n ­ state agencies has continued. Govem m entality, he argues, “is at once internal and external to the state”: [I] t is the tactics of government which make possible the contin­ ual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, etc.20

Thus, far from em anating directly from the agencies of the state itself, as liberalism tends to suggest, the m odern art of governm ent treats these agencies as one set of instrum ents am ong others. This last point brings us to perhaps the most influential aspect of Foucault’s work on governm ent; namely, his analysis of liberal­ ism as a specific rationality of governm ent. W hat particularly dis­ tinguishes liberalism, as Foucault describes it, from earlier versions of the art of governm ent is not the view, which is also shared by the science of police, that nonstate agencies play an im portant part in the life of the population. R ather it is, first, the concern th at the state may be “governing too m u ch ,” th at th ere may be cases in which “it is needless or harm ful for [the state] to in terv e n e.”21 1 re tu rn to this issue in a m om ent. Second, and no less im portant, is liberalism ’s m ore restricted usage of the term government, which is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agen­ cies.22 This liberal usage involves a m ajor redefinition of the term: where governm ent was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regula­ tion p erform ed by a multiplicity of agencies thro u g h o u t the popu­ lation, it now comes to be identified m ore narrowly with the work o f the state and its agencies. G overnm ent is no longer regarded as a field of activity th at constitutes and m aintains the social o rd er from within, but rather as acting on this order from without. “The happiness of society” rem ains of fundam ental concern, as it was in the era of police, but since governm ent is now identified with the activities of the state, it is no longer seen as som ething that is nec­ essarily best served by the actions of governm ent itself. Foucault’s recuperation of an earlier understanding of the gov­ ern m en t of the state thus enables him to offer a fresh perspective

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on the fam iliar liberal critique o f governm ent. Liberalism is re­ vealed, n o t so m uch as seeking to reduce the size and the scope of governm ent in its broadest sense, bu t ra th e r as aim ing to change its form: it is a tactics of governm ent that operates by shifting the work of governm ent from state to nonstate agencies. Liberals often present themselves as em bracing a norm ative doctrine that regards the m aintenance of liberty as an end in itself and therefore sees it as setting limits to both the ends and the m eans of governm ent. Individual liberty plays an im portant part in F oucault’s account of liberalism, too, but it is seen now in a very different light: the sig­ nificance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty, he suggests, is intimately related to a prudential concern that the state m ight be governing too m uch, that the attem pt to regulate certain kinds of behavior through state agencies m ight in fact be c o u n terp ro d u c­ tive. A ccording to this account, liberal political reason sees indi­ vidual liberty as a limit, if n o t to the legitim ate reach of the state then certainly to its effectiveness. Foucault argues that the image of the m arket plays “the role of a ‘test’” in liberal political thought, “a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive govem m entality.”23 In fact, Foucault goes further to suggest that liberalism also sees individual liberty as a resource: like other forms of political reason, it aims to recruit the governm ent of oneself to its own larger p u r­ poses, but, unlike the others, it claims to do so in the nam e of lib­ erty. As Nikolas Rose puts it: The im portance of liberalism is not that it first recognized, defined or defended freedom as the right of all citizens. Rather, its significance is that for the first time the arts of government were systematically linked to the practice of freedom.24

Thus in Foucault’s view, what particularly distinguishes liberal­ ism from governm ental rationalities of o th er kinds is its com m it­ m ent to governing as far as possible through the prom otion of cer­ tain kinds of free activity and the cultivation am ong the governed of suitable habits of self-regulation. According to this account, the image of the m arket is emblem atic: it is seen by liberalism as a de­ centralized m echanism of governm ent that operates at two rath er different levels. At the first and most im m ediate level, individuals are thought to be governed, at least in part, by the reactions of oth­ ers with whom they interact and, at least am ong m ore civilized peo­ ples, th eir interactions are norm ally expected to take a peaceful form —the m arket itself providing the most obvious example. This view suggests that, while the prom otion of suitable form s of free interaction may be an effective way of dealing with the governm ent

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o f civilized populations, it is likely to be less successful in o th er cases. Secondly, over the longer term , interaction with others is th ought to influence the internal standards that individuals use to regulate their own behavior—by affecting, for example, their sense of good and bad conduct, of what is acceptable or unacceptable in particular contexts, and so on. At this level, m arket interaction itself is seen as a pow erful in stru m en t of civilization, inculcating such virtues as pru d en ce, diligence, punctuality, self-control, and so on.25 This view suggests that, if only suitable forms of property can be set securely in place and nonm arket forms of econom ic activity reduced to a m inim um , then m arket interaction itself may function as a m eans of improv­ ing the character of less civilized peoples. In this case, au th o ritar­ ian state intervention to reform property relations and impose con­ ditions that would enable widespread m arket interaction to take off may be seen as a liberal move toward a situation in which individ­ uals may be governed through their free interactions. G ovem m entality scholars have adapted and ex ten d ed this account of liberalism to produce a powerful and innovative analy­ sis of contem porary neo- or advanced liberalism ’s uses of m arket and audit regim es and of the m ore general prom otion of individ­ ual choice and em pow erm ent in the governm ent of dom ains p re­ viously subject to m ore direct forms of regulation.26 Nevertheless, I will suggest that in spite of its many achievem ents this Foucaultian view of liberalism as com m itted to governing through freedom is far too restricted. A lim itation of a different kind is that Foucault’s own account of liberalism and the govem m entality accounts th at have followed his lead have focussed on the rationality of the gov­ ern m en t of the state—that is, on the governm ent of state agencies and of the population and territo ry over which the state claims authority. Thus, while eschewing political th eo ry ’s norm ative p re­ tensions, the govem m entality approach nevertheless shares its view th at liberalism is co ncerned prim arily with the field o f intrastate relations, and it therefore shares also the lim itations entailed by that view. Before proceeding to discussion of these issues, however, we should note that the practice of liberal governm ent, as Foucault describes it, creates conditions for the em ergence of a partisan pol­ itics that liberalism has generally perceived as posing a serious threat to the work of governm ent itself. The significance of partisan politics for liberal reflections on governm ent is hardly acknowl­ edged in Foucault’s account of liberalism, or of the m odern art of governm ent m ore generally, and in this respect, too, I suggest that his analysis must be regarded as seriously incom plete.

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Government and Partisan Politics Perhaps the m ost curious absence from F oucault’s various discus­ sions of the governm ent of the state concerns the im plications for governm ent of electoral politics and o th er form s of what Max W eber calls “politically o rien ted ac tio n ”— th at is, of action th at “aims at exerting influence on the governm ent of a political orga­ nization; especially at the appropriation, redistribution or alloca­ tion of the powers of governm ent.”27 Weber goes on to explain that he uses the term politically oriented action in order to distinguish this kind of action from “political action as such”28— that is, from the action of the state itself. T here is a considerable degree of overlap between the work of governm ent and politically o rien ted action, b ut they must nevertheless be regarded as distinct. Political reason, in F oucault’s sense, addresses the problem of how best to govern the p o p ulation and territo ry of the state, but the calculations involved in politically oriented action are concerned with a rath er d ifferent problem ; namely, how best to influence the m an n er in which the work of governm ent is perform ed. W here the one focuses on the pursuit of the interests and the welfare of the state and the population ru led by the state, the o th er focuses on the partisan prom otion of sectional interests and values, including disputed conceptions of the com m on interest itself. T here is an obvious sense in which such politically o rien ted action m ight be said to involve a kind of political reasoning, and the same m ight be said of the M achiavellian “problem atic of the P rin ce” or A quinas’s m odel of governm ent. However, my p o in t is n o t th at F oucault’s discussion of political reason should be extended to include the rationality of politically oriented action— th at is, to “politics,” in what is perhaps the m ost conventional of contem porary senses of the term . Having set itself one task, the Foucaultian analysis of governm ent can hardly be blam ed for no t perform ing another. Rather, it is that the consequences of parties, and of partisan politics m ore generally, for the governm ental p u r­ suit of the com m on interest have always been am ong the central concerns of the m odern art of governm ent. Its failure to exam ine the problem th at politically o rien ted action poses for m o d ern political reason is thus one of the m ore striking lim itations of the Foucaultian analysis of governm ent. This failure is especially significant for ou r u n d erstan d in g of liberal political reason. While we m ight expect politically oriented action to appear u n d er all forms of governm ent, we should expect it to flourish u n d er conditions of liberal rule, where governm ent itself is concerned, at least in certain respects, to prom ote and to

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work through the freedom of m em bers of the subject population. The next section of this article disputes the view that liberalism is always com m itted to governing through the prom otion of various kinds of free activity. For the m om ent, however, we should note two rath er different ways in which the prom otion of liberty and politi­ cally oriented action may be connected. The first and most obvious is simply th at free individuals will som etim es use th eir liberty in attem pts to influence, or to resist, the actions of the state—as they will, of course, the actions of nonstate agencies of governm ent. Second, to prom ote m arket interaction and o th er form s o f indi­ vidual liberty is to prom ote not only the individual pursuit of pri­ vate interests—that is, of interests that are different from, and some­ times indifferent to, the com m on interest (however that m ight be un d erstood)—but also the image of the individual as one who can be expected to pursue such interests. Liberal rule thus encourages and anticipates the pursuit of pri­ vate interests, and it provides conditions in which individuals can band together both for this purpose and to pursue their own con­ ceptions of what the com m on interest requires, sometimes thereby putting the work of governm ent itself at risk. The ability of m em ­ bers of the subject population to freely pursue their private in ter­ ests or their own conception of the com m on interest thus poses a problem for the governm ent of the state, in part because it threat­ ens to subvert the state’s own attem pts to prom ote the com m on in terest and even, in extrem e cases, the institutions of the state itself. This raises a distinctly liberal version of the problem of legit­ imacy: how to govern a population of free individuals so that its m em bers accept the legitimacy of the work of governm ent itself. The problem here is not, at least in the first instance, how to prevent opposition to governm ent program s or how to get these program s through a parliam ent or congress; rather, it is to ensure that expression of such opposition does not substantially interfere with the governm ental work of state and nonstate agencies—to ensure, in o th er words, that direct action am ong the populace is contained within severe limits and that organizations willing to em ­ brace such action (like Greenpeace) have only limited support. It is the problem of what H erbert Marcuse calls “repressive tolerance,”29 or, as Ian H unter and Denise M eredyth describe it in a rath er dif­ ferent context, “of equipping citizens with the capacity to exercise rights with some m o d eratio n .”30 It is precisely this effort to com ­ bine freedom with constraint in its exercise that underlies the co ncern in contem porary W estern states with citizenship educa­ tion, voter disaffection, and social exclusion. W hile these states appear to have addressed such issues with some considerable de­ gree of success, quite how they have m anaged to achieve this result

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“rem ains poorly u n d ersto o d ”31—and, we m ight add, rem ains of lit­ tle concern to m ainstream political science. It is tem pting, never­ theless, to suggest that the com petitive party system of m o d ern democracy plays an im portant p art here, both in providing a space in which legitimate opposition m ight be expressed and in directing its energies into relatively harm less channels. T here are im p o rtan t and difficult questions to be addressed here, but this article focuses on a different set of issues: those asso­ ciated with the liberal problem of corruption. W here the problem of legitimacy concerns the possibility of active disaffection from the governm ental work of the state, or even from the state itself, that of co rru p tion concerns attem pts to recru it the governm ental work of the state to the pursuit of private purposes. The fear that parti­ sanship m ight c o rru p t the governm ent of the state has been a p er­ sistent feature of W estern political thought. Aristotle tells us th at while true forms of governm ent have regard to the com m on inter­ est, “those which regard only the interests of the rulers are all defective and distorted form s.”32 This and the m ore general fear th at individuals banding to g eth er for th eir own purposes m ight co rru p t the work of governm ent has always had a particular reso­ nance for liberal reflections on governm ent. David H um e, for example, observes that parties are plants which grow most plentifully in the richest soil; and though absolute governments be not wholly free from them, it must be confessed, that they rise more easily, and propagate themselves faster in free governments, where they always infect the legislature itself, which alone could be able, by the steady application of rewards and punishment, to eradicate them.33

The most interesting features of this com m ent are its suggestions first, that partisan politics is a dam aging infection of governm ent, and secondly, th at governm ent itself should be able to keep it u n d er control. It is for this reason th at H um e describes “the founders of sects and factions [as deserving] to be detested and hated. . . . Factions subvert governm ent, ren d er laws im potent, and beget the fiercest animosities am ong m en of the same n atio n .”34 Similarly, Jam es Madison proposes to defend governm ent from the “dangerous vice” of faction by m eans of a system of rep resen ­ tative governm ent that prom otes the lim ited involvem ent of the people in their governm ent through periodic elections alongside “the total exclusion of the people, in th eir collective form , from any sh are” in the work of governm ent.35 T he classical fear of dem ocracy reflects a concern th at the com m on in terest will be poorly served by a governm ent that is dom inated by the poor and

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poorly educated, who constitute a clear m ajority of all citizens.36 Representative governm ent addresses this concern by carefully sep­ arating the work of governm ent from the people themselves and placing it in the hands of elected representatives and unelected public servants. It seemed, in M adison’s view, to prom ise the best of all governm ental worlds: avoiding the specific form s of c o rru p ­ tion associated with governm ent by the one or the few while also defending the state from the dangers of arbitrary rule by the peo­ ple themselves. M adison and the o th er fram ers of the US constitution m ain­ tained that the elected representatives of the people would be drawn from am ong the better class of persons—that they would be cultivated and intelligent m en of clearly superior character.37 Be that as it may, the m ore im portant point to notice here is that while the design of representative governm ent addresses the traditional fear of popular corruption, it leaves the m ore general problem of the co rru p tio n of governm ent by faction and self-interested con­ duct relatively untouched. There are mom ents when Madison seems to be aware of this problem . He acknowledges, for exam ple, that the people “may possibly be betrayed” by th eir representatives,38 and it is partly to address this issue that he advocates the separation of governm ental powers. His suggestion is that the risks of c o rru p ­ tion in one p art of governm ent will be m inim ized if it is overseen by other parts of governm ent. This view of the role of intragovernm ental oversight and o f checks and balances m ore generally in co u n tering political co rru p tio n has played an im p o rtan t p art in m odern understandings of democracy. W estern states are not what they were in H u m e’s or M adison’s day: their military and administrative apparatuses are substantially larger and political parties and organized interest groups are now regarded as necessary com ponents of representative governm ent. The problem their presence is now thought to pose is not, as Hum e suggests, how to eradicate them , but ra th e r how to m anage their interactions, both with each o th er and with the state, w ithout too m uch dam age to the work of governm ent itself. T here is an im por­ tan t study to be w ritten of liberal attem pts to control the new sources of the corruption of governm ent that have em erged within the fram ework of representative governm ent. For our purposes, however, it is sufficient to note that liberal reflections on govern­ m ent have continued to em phasize the danger that the people as a whole, sm aller groups within the whole, or professional politi­ cians and public servants may conduct themselves in such a way as to divert the state from its pursuit of the com m on interest.

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This, indeed, is one of the ways in which the Foucaultian char­ acterization of liberal governm ent—that is, as focusing on governing through the decisions of autonom ous individuals—m ust be re­ garded as seriously incom plete. It is precisely because its prom otion of individual autonom y is th o u g h t to foster conditions in which individuals are able to band together for their own purposes that liberalism is so fundamentally concerned to defend the governm ent of the state from the im pact of partisan politics. O ne of the aims of the neoliberalism that becam e so influential in the latter p a rt of the tw entieth century was to take this defense of the work of gov­ ern m en t fu rth er by privatizing or corporatizing im portant areas of state activity in the West and blocking their developm ent elsewhere, prom oting m arket and quasi-m arket relations between and within governm ent agencies and deliberately insulating central banks from political control by elected governments. In practice, of course, these reform s were pursued for a host of d ifferent reasons, bu t two conflicting aspects of this neoliberal developm ent are particularly w orth noting here. O n the one hand, they were often prom oted as serving to limit the influence of polit­ ical parties, pressure groups, and public officials—effectively by excluding substantial areas of public provision from the realm of political decision and relying instead on provision through suitably organized form s of m arket interaction. In term s of the broad understan ding of governm ent n o ted earlier, however, this should be seen less as a m atter of restricting the overall size of governm ent or of preventing its expansion than of regulating the m an n er in which governm ent is exercised: forms of governm ent th at work through the administrative apparatuses of the state are displaced in favor of those that work through the disciplines im posed by others in m arket and quasi-m arket interactions. On the o th er hand, of course—and precisely as the above analysis would suggest— they were im plem ented by political parties and other agencies with clear factional interests of their own. For this reason, those who were not persuaded by the neoliberal case for such reform s—and even many of those who were—could see am ple scope in their im plem entation for the pursuit of new forms of partisan advantage.

Governing Liberty Political theorists commonly describe liberalism as a normative polit­ ical doctrine that treats the m aintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle

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both to the objectives of governm ent and to the m anner in which those objectives m ight be pursued. I no ted above that, while no t perceiving the issue of individual liberty in norm ative term s, Fou­ cault nevertheless accords it a central place in his account of liber­ alism as a rationality of government: the significance that liberalism attaches to individual liberty, he suggests, is intimately related both to the aim, which it shares with political reason m ore generally, to recruit the governm ent of oneself to its own larger purposes, and to a p ru d en tial concern that the state m ight be governing too m uch, that state regulation of certain kinds o f behavior m ight in fact be counterproductive. In practice, however, it is clear th at au th o ritarian rule has always played an im p o rtan t p art in the governm ent of states th at declare themselves to be com m itted to the m aintenance and d e­ fense of individual liberty—as it has, of course, in the governm ent of states that do no t make that com m itm ent. N ineteenth-century Western states restricted the freedom of im portant sections of their own populations and im posed au th o ritarian rule on substantial populations outside th eir own national borders. Even now, long after the collapse of W estern colonialism, coercive and oppressive practices of governm ent continue to play an im portant part, not only in the independent states that took over the old im perial domains, but also in Western states themselves: in systems of crim inal justice, the policing of Romany people, im m igrant com m unities and the urb an poor, the provision of social services, and the m anagem ent of large public and private sector organizations. A uthoritarian rule has also been invoked as a necessary instrum ent of economic liber­ alization in m uch of Latin America, parts of Southeast Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. How do such authoritarian practices relate to the liberal gov­ ernm ent of freedom? C ontributors to the literature inspired by Fou­ cault’s analysis of the m odern art of governm ent have, like many contem porary liberals, tended to treat authoritarian rule as playing no significant p art in liberal political reason.39 Nikolas Rose, for example, acknowledges that coercive and oppressive practices are clearly still employed in the governm ent of W estern societies.40 He goes on to argue, however, that the significance of liberalism here is to be seen, not in these practices themselves, but rather in the fact that such practices m ust now be justified on the liberal grounds of freedom . Perhaps so. Yet, even in contem porary W estern states, liberal­ ism will also be concerned with the governm ent of num erous indi­ viduals and significant areas of conduct that seem not to be amenable to available techniques of governing through freedom. Indeed if, as

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Foucault suggests, the m arket plays “the role of a ‘test,’” then it is a test th at surely cuts both ways, indicating no t only that some peo­ ple and some fields of activity can best be governed th ro u g h the p rom otion of suitable form s of free behavior, bu t also th at there are o th er cases in which m ore direct regulation by the state will be required. In this respect, the description of liberal political reason, considered as a rationality of the governm ent of “the state as a w hole,”41 as being concerned with governing through the prom o­ tion of certain kinds of liberty m ust be regarded as incom plete. It will also be concerned with determ ining which individuals and which areas of conduct within the state can best be governed in this way and which cannot, and with deciding what, if anything, can be done about governing the latter.42 I have made this point in relation to the Foucaultian analysis of liberalism , but it would apply equally well to m ore conventional accounts of liberalism as a norm ative political theory or ideology com m itted to the m aintenance and defense of individual liberty. To the ex tent that it is co n cern ed with the governm ent of actual states and populations—to the extent, we m ight say, that it is seri­ ous about politics—liberalism can hardly avoid the question of what to do about individuals and areas of conduct th at seem n o t to be am enable to governm ent through the prom otion of suitable forms of individual liberty. Thus, rath er than describe liberalism as com m itted to governing th ro u g h freedom , it would be m ore appropriate to present it as claiming only that there are im portant contexts in which free interaction m ight be the m ost appropriate m eans of regulation: that certain populations, or significant indi­ viduals and groups and activities within them , can and should be governed through the prom otion of particular kinds of free activ­ ity and the cultivation of suitable habits of self-regulation, and that the rest ju st have to be governed in other ways. Indeed, many of the historical figures who have described themselves as liberals or who, like Jo h n Locke, Adam Smith, David Hum e, or Im m anuel Kant, have been posthum ously recruited into the liberal cam p43 were clearly concerned to distinguish between what can best be governed through the prom otion of liberty and what should really be governed in other ways.44 Liberals have drawn the line in very different places and rationalized their decisions by means of correspondingly diverse argum ents, but they have done so most commonly in historicist, developm ental, and gendered terms. They have argued, in other words, that the capacity to be governed as a free agent is itself a product of civilization, or “im provem ent,” to use one of Jo h n Stuart Mill’s favorite expressions, and therefore that it will be developed most fully am ong people like themselves,

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the highly cultivated inhabitants of civilized societies, and devel­ oped less fully elsewhere. While such narcissism has provided liberal thinkers with p ar­ ticularly congenial foundations on which to erect their distinctions between what can be governed through the prom otion of liberty and what cannot, it would be m isleading to suggest that liberalism is necessarily com m itted to a developm ental view of hum an capac­ ities.45 It is the capacity to make such distinctions that is necessary to the liberal governm ent of populations, n o t the particular historicist or other grounds on which they m ight be m ade.46 The gov­ ernm ental prom otion of a sphere of religious freedom in parts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe could also be said to represent a kind of liberalism. However, the decision in this case to tolerate a lim ited range of religious observances did not reflect a com m itm ent to inalienable rights of the individual: It arises, as noted earlier, from a pressing concern to protect the state from the consequences of religious dispute. Nor did the corresponding deci­ sion to suppress observances that fell outside the range of toleration need to draw on any historicist view of the differential developm ent of hum an capacities in the religious communities concerned.47 This example suggests that the historicist and developm ental view of hum anity that played such an im portant role in the era of liberal imperialism should not be seen as an indispensable feature of liberal political reason. If we treat liberalism as com m itted to the m aintenance and defense of individual liberty, then the active involvement of liberal political theorists and adm inistrators in the practice of imperial rule m ust appear to be incom prehensible, at least in liberal term s.48 J o h n MacMillan, for example, asserts that J. S. Mill’s argum ent in favor of authoritarian rule in India is inconsistent with his liberal­ ism. Pierre M anent’s discussion of Tocqueville’s liberalism com ­ pletely ignores his defense of and practical involvement in French rule in Algeria, while Jennifer Pitts and Melvin Richter insist that it can only be regarded as an aberration, as som ething to be ex­ plained away by reference to his nationalism and other nonliberal factors.49 In response to such claims, it has to be said that the diffi­ culties that these com m entators seek to address arise not from the actual writings of Mill or Tocqueville, whose argum ents in favor of au thoritarian rule in certain cases are generally fairly clear,50 but rather from the lim ited understanding of liberalism that they bring to their analysis. Thus, if we take a bro ad er view of liberalism , if we treat dis­ tinctions of the kind noted above as necessary elem ents of any seri­ ous liberal reflection on the governm ent of states and populations,

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then the fact of liberal complicity in the practice of imperial rule appears in a very different light. Tocqueville’s nationalism may help to account for his enthusiastic defense of the French takeover of Algeria, but it tells us nothing about the reasons for his recom­ mendations concerning how the subject population should be gov­ erned. With regard to this last issue, their arguments for the neces­ sity of authoritarian rule should be seen not as evidence of Mill’s or Tocqueville’s inconsistency, but rather as part and parcel of their liberalism.

Government and the System of States Rob Walker and others have noted that the m odern system of states is associated with a powerful, and powerfully restrictive, divi­ sion of intellectual labor, a division that places the study of rela­ tions that develop between states in one category and relations that develop within them in another.51 Foucault’s treatment of the mod­ ern art of government falls squarely within the latter category and therefore exhibits both the strengths and the weaknesses of the division of labor on which it rests. He proposes to analyze the mod­ ern art of government as pursuing ends, and adopting means to those ends, that are seen as being “in some sense immanent to the population” of the state in question.52 While the achievements of this approach are undeniable, I argue that its state-centered focus represents a serious limitation, both of Foucault’s own studies of government and of the more general govemmentality school that has taken up and developed his work in this area. Few commentators would deny that geopolitical conditions have played an im portant role in the development of m odern states. The standard view nevertheless remains that government is something that operates essentially within states. As a result, rela­ tions between states tend to be seen as largely ungoverned, as a kind of anarchy that is regulated to some degree by treaties, a vari­ ety of less formal accommodations, and the occasional war between them. This state-centered view of government has been brought into question by influential figures in the disciplines of public administration and international relations, who have used the notion of “governance” to describe the recent development in West­ ern states of forms of governing that cannot be seen as emanating from a supreme authority; that is, to the emergence of “governing without government.”53 They argue that the work of government within states is increasingly being conducted by public/private part­ nerships and by formal and informal networks involving state and

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nonstate agencies, while, in the international sphere, states and other actors are regulated by an expanding web of conventions, treaties, and international agencies, all of which operate without the backing of an overarching Hobbesian power. Where Foucault understands government in the broad sense noted earlier, the governance literature starts from the conventional identification of government with the state and sets out to address the recent development of forms of governing that, in both the domestic and the international arenas, are not directly performed by states themselves. For all their differences, the “governance” and the “govemmentality” literatures both suggest that we are governed in ways that cannot properly be grasped by the state-centered view of government noted above. There are, however, important respects in which both might be regarded as incomplete. Against the governance literature, we might note that government without the direct involvement of the government is hardly a new development within Western states. It was, in ambition if not in practice, all-pervasive in the police states of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe,54 and nonstate agencies have played a major role in governing the populations of their successors.55 If there is anything distinctive about recent developments within Western states, it lies less in the fact of “governing without government” than in the novelty of some of its forms—especially its extensive reliance on commercial and semicommercial enter­ prises—and its displacement of established, directly hierarchical, forms of state control. As for the international arena, the governmentality view that the ends and means of the government of a state can be seen as immanent to the state’s own population cer­ tainly captures an influential m odern understanding of govern­ ment. Yet it also raises im portant questions, which are rarely addressed in the govemmentality literature itself,56 concerning how it is that states have been able to assume a substantial role in the government of these populations, and thus about the govern­ mental character of the modern division of humanity into the pop­ ulations of states. Conventional accounts of the m odern states system suggest that it has its origins in seventeenth-century European attempts to bring destructive religious conflict under some kind of control, and particularly in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and other agree­ ments that brought the Thirty Years War to an end. They sought to contain the political problems resulting from the existence of pow­ erful religious differences between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists by granting territorial rulers supreme political

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authority within their domains, leaving it to rulers and their sub­ jects to reach some accommodation in matters of religion. These political arrangements, designed to pacify warring populations, effectively transformed the condition of the Western part of Europe. Populations that had been subject to a variety of overlapping and conflicting sources of authority were assigned to rulers who were themselves acknowledged as having the primary responsibility for the government of the populations within their territories and who related to each other as independent sovereign powers.57 This view of the formation of the modern system of states has fundamental implications for our understanding of government, both within the member states themselves and more generally. Indeed, if government, in its most general sense, aims “to structure the possible field of action of others,”58 then the modern system of states should itself be seen as a regime of government, albeit one that operates, like civil society and the market, with no controlling center. Thus, where the classical view treats the state as “the high­ est of all” forms of community,59 the m odern system of states reflects the emergence of a more complex form of political reason. The state clearly retains its privileged position with regard to its own population, but there are also im portant governmental con­ texts in which the system of states and the population it encom­ passes is now regarded as “the highest of all.” The modern art of government has thus been concerned with governing not simply the populations of individual states but also the larger population encompassed by the system of states itself. It addresses this task first by promoting the rule of territorial states over populations, and secondly by seeking to regulate the conduct both of states themselves and of members of the populations under their control. States are expected to pursue their own interests, but to do so in a field of action that has been structured by the over­ arching system of states to which they belong. Liberalism, perhaps the most influential contemporary version of the art of govern­ ment, should be seen in similar terms; that is, as focusing on gov­ erning both the populations of particular states and the population (which now incorporates the whole of humanity) of the system of states more generally.60 Where contractarian political theory tends to present the state as constituted internally, by real or imaginary agreements between its members, this governmental perspective suggests that the sov­ ereignty of a state is in part a function of its recognition as a state by other members of the system.61 This, in turn, suggests that effec­ tive government within the member states of the Westphalian sys­ tem is thus predicated in certain respects on political conditions

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that operate above the level of the individual states themselves. Not only is the order that obtains within the more successful states dependent on the order that prevails in the relations between states, but so, too, is much of the disorder that affects less success­ ful states. Contrary to Foucault’s account, not all of the means that the government of a state uses to attain its ends are “immanent to the population” of the state itself. The European system of states and the sovereignty that interactions within that system secured for participating states provided conditions in which the modern art of government within states could take root and develop. However, to close the discussion at this point would be to sug­ gest, like the English school,62 that the contemporary states system is simply an expanded version of the original Westphalian system. Con­ sideration of the manner in which this expansion took place suggests a less anodyne view. The Westphalian states system was specifically European, imposing few constraints on the conduct of participating states toward those who inhabited territories not covered by these agreements and who were thought to possess no sovereign states of the European kind. Thus, while European states were consolidating their rule over their own populations, some were also engaged in imperial adventures elsewhere. Perhaps the most striking result of these adventures was that much of humanity was brought within the remit of the modern system of states through direct imperial rule, while the remainder were brought into the system indirectly; that is, through the complementary and interdependent deployment of a standard of civilization in the dealings of member states with inde­ pendent states elsewhere,63 the imposition of elaborate systems of capitulations that required independent states to acknowledge the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states,64 and also, of course, through “the imperialism of free trade.”65 Most discussions of Western imperialism focus on the subordi­ nation of substantial non-European populations to rule by particular European states. No less important, however, was the incorporation of those populations and the territories they inhabited into the European system of states. Direct or indirect imperial domination was the form in which the European system of states first became global in scope. The achievement of independence throughout much of the Americas during the nineteenth century and its achieve­ ment or imposition elsewhere during the twentieth dismantled one aspect of imperial rule while leaving the other firmly in place. Polit­ ical independence in the modern sense both expanded the mem­ bership of the system of states and set in place a radically new way of bringing non-Western populations within its governmental regime.66 As a result, these populations found themselves governed both by modern states of their own and by the overarching system of

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states within which their own states had been incorporated. The sec­ ond, twentieth-century wave of independence marks the point at which all of humanity comes to be governed through the medium of independent states and citizenship within them. These last points are hardly new, but they do establish the lim­ its of a conception of the government of the state that sees it as relying on means that are “immanent to the population” of the state in question. I bring this article to a close by suggesting that this focus on the governmental character of the modern states sys­ tem and its continuities with the states system of the colonial era can help us to understand the emergence of neoliberalism in both the domestic and the international spheres. What unites the many late-twentieth-century projects of neoliberal reform—the corpora­ tization and privatization of state agencies, the promotion of com­ petition, individual choice, and autonomy in health, education, and other areas of what Western states once regarded as the proper sphere of social policy, and so on—is the attempt to introduce not only market and quasi-market arrangem ents but also empower­ ment, self-government, and responsibility into areas of social life that had hitherto been organized in other ways. Related developments can be observed in the international arena. Where liberalism could once rely on the decentralized despo­ tism of indirect rule over colonial subjects,67 it now has to treat most of those who it sees as being in need of considerable improvement as if they, too, like the citizens of Western states, were endowed with “the capacity to exercise rights with some m oderation.”68 The old imperial divisions between citizens, colonial subjects, and noncitizen others has been displaced by a postimperial globaliza­ tion of citizenship, and indirect rule within imperial possessions has been superseded by a less direct system in which the inhabi­ tants of the old imperial domains are governed through sovereign states of their own, a system that is reminiscent of the older com­ bination of capitulations and the imperialism of free trade. Indi­ rect rule now operates, in effect, through national and inter­ national aid programs that assist, advise, and constrain the conduct of postcolonial states, through international financial institutions, and also, of course, through that fundamental liberal instrum ent of civilization, the market—including the internal markets of multi­ national corporations. It is tempting, then, to place these domestic and international developments together and conclude with the suggestion that the problem of how to govern the postcolonial system of states may be one of the more important sources of liberalism’s vastly increased emphasis on the governmental uses of the market and of nonstate agencies more generally.

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Notes 1. Michel Foucault, “‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in James D. Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Fou­ cault, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane; Penguin, 2001), pp. 298-325, at 325. 2. Aristotle, The Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1253a 19-20; 1275b 21-22. 3. Ibid., 1252a, 4-5. 4. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (1992): 173-205. 5. Some of the exceptions can be found in Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds., Global Govemmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004). 6. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 27. 7. Ibid., 1278b, 37-38. 8. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Faubion, note 1, pp. 326-348, at 341. 9. Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995). 10. Michel Foucault, “Govemmentality,” in Faubion, note 1, pp. 201— 222, at 206. 11. Ibid., p. 205-206. 12. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 17. 13. Foucault, note 10, pp. 204-205. 14. Ibid., p. 213. 15. Foucault, note 1, p. 315 (emphasis added). 16. Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 17. Foucault, note 10, pp. 216-217. 18. Ibid. 19. Mark Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1699-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20. Foucault, note 10, p. 221. 21. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 73-79, at 74-75. 22. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess, introduction to their Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1-19. 23. Foucault, note 21, p. 76. 24. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 68. 25. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Con­ straints: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 26. Rose, note 24, is the most ambitious elaboration of this account of liberalism; Mitchell Dean, Govemmentality: Power and Rule in Modem Soci­ ety (London: Sage, 1999) is a useful survey of the field.

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27. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 54. 28. Ibid., p. 55. 29. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Abacus, 1972). 30. Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth, “Popular Sovereignty and Civic Education,” in Denise Meredyth and Jeffrey Minson, eds., Citizenship and Cultural Policy: Statecraft, Markets, and Community (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 68-91, at 88. 31. Ibid. 32. Aristotle, note 2, 1279a, 19-21. 33. David Hume, “Of Parties in General,” in his Essays: Moral, Politi­ cal, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 54-63. 34. Ibid., p. 54. 35. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1987), nos. 10, 63. 36. Jennifer T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 37. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sover­ eignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988) argues that this naive view was soon undermined by the coarse realities of US political life. Perhaps it was in some contexts, but in others it seems to have survived the challenge of empirical refutation remarkably well. 38. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, note 35, no. 63. 39. But see Dean, note 26, Christine Helliwell and Barry Hindess, “The ‘Empire of Uniformity’ and the Government of Subject Peoples,” Cultural Values 6, no. 1 (2002): 137-150, and Mariana Valverde, “‘Despo­ tism’ and ‘Ethical Liberal Governance,”’ Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996): 357-372. 40. Rose, note 24. 41. Foucault, note 10, p. 206. 42. Barry Hindess, “The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,” Alterna­ tives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93-111. 43. The term liberal was not used to denote political allegiance before the early years of the nineteenth century; see Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies (Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell, 1995). 44. Helliwell and Hindess, note 39. 45. Nor is my point that this view of human development should be seen as merely an ideological support for Western imperialism. It provided J. S. Mill with an important part of his argument for increased public par­ ticipation in politics and, in the hands of the new liberalism of late-nineteenth-century Britain, it served to support a powerful case for the pro­ motion of liberty by the state—through intervention in labor-market contracts and working conditions, as well as in housing, education, and other areas of social policy: Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in Britain, 1880—1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Liberal imperialists, of whom there were many among the new liberals, have commonly seen such historicist views as justifying what they liked to think of as a civilizing mis­ sion, but many liberal opponents of imperialism—from Adam Smith to J. A. Hobson—have held equally historicist views. 46. Hindess, note 42. 47. Hunter, note 16.

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48. Various aspects of this involvement have been amply documented in the British case by, for example, Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 49. John MacMillan, On Liberal Peace: Democracy, War,; and the Inter­ national Order (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2000): 295-318; Melvin Richter, “Toc­ queville on Algeria,” Review of Politics 25 (1963): 362-398. 50. Although there are obvious difficulties of interpretation presented by the draft dispatches that Mill prepared as part of his duties in the East India Company. The careful examination in Zastoupil, note 48, shows that Mill’s own views can often be clearly discerned. 51. See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52. Foucault, note 10, p. 217. 53. R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, Eng.: Open University Press, 1997); J. N. Rosenau and E.-O. Czempiel, eds., Gov­ ernance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 54. Raeff, note 19. 55. Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Lib­ eral Governance (London: Routledge, 1991); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon, 1979). 56. But see note 5. 57. There is an extensive literature on the emergence of the West­ phalian system and its geopolitical effects; see, for example, Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York, Telos Press, 2003); Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopoli­ tics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the Inter­ national Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Walker, note 51. 58. Foucault, note 8, p. 34 59. Aristotle, note 2, 1252a, 5. 60. Barry Hindess, “Liberalism: What’s in a Name?” in Larner and Walters, note 5, pp. 23-39. 61. Cf. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 62. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1984). 63. Gerrit W. Gong, uThe Standard of Civilization ” in International Soci­ ety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 64. David P. Fidler, “A Kinder, Gentler System of Capitulations? Inter­ national Law, Structural Adjustment Policies, and the Standard of Liberal, Globalized Civilization,” Texas International Law Journal 35 (1999-2000): 387-413.

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65. This phrase derives from John Gallagher and Roland Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 6, no. 1 (1953): 1-15, an influential (and still controversial) interpretation of nineteenthcentury British policies. It has an obvious relevance for us all today. 66. Sanjay Seth, “A ‘Postcolonial World’?” in Greg Fry and Jacinta O’Hagan, ed., Contending Images of World Politics (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 214-226. 67. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 68. Hunter and Meredyth, note 30, p. 88.

[18] From micro-powers to govemmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power

Bob Jessop Institute for Advanced Studies, County College South, Lancaster University, Lancaster LAI 4YD, UK

Foucault is renowned for his criticisms of state theory and advocacy of a bottom-up approach to social power as well as for his hostility to orthodox Marxism and communist political practice. Yet there have always been indications in his work that matters are not so sim­ ple, especially in his work during the mid-to-late 1970s. The recent publication in full of his lectures on govemmentality and biopolitics in Society Must be Defended (1975—1976), Securite, territoire, population (1977—1978) and Naissance de la biopolitique (1978—1979) cast new light on this topic. For they mark a decisive turn, especially those on govemmentality, to interest in changing forms of statehood and statecraft and their subsequent role in guiding capitalist repro­ duction. They cast new light on Foucault’s alleged anti-statism and anti-Marxism and offer new insights into his restless intellectual development. To show this, I review Foucault’s hostility to Marxism and theories of the state, consider his apparent turn from the micro-physics and micro­ diversity of power relations to their macro-physics and strategic codification through the govemmentalized state, and suggest how to develop an evolutionary account of state formation on the basis of these new arguments about emerging forms of statecraft. This intervention does not aim to reveal the essence of Foucault’s interest in govemmentality but to offer another reading along­ side conventional accounts of this stage in his work.

Foucault and the “crisis of Marxism” Foucault’s work reveals the paradox of an outspoken opposition to official and vulgar Marx­ ist positions and an implicit appropriation and development of insights from Marx himself. May 1968 was a major turning point in this regard, according to Foucault himself, because it signalled a crisis in official Marxism and serious ruptures in a modem capitalist society.

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In criticizing Marxism, Foucault rarely identified specific theorists, preferring general prob­ lematization to detailed critique (Fontana & Bemati, 2003: 287). At different times he rejected vulgar Marxism; Freudo-Marxism; academic (or university) Marxism; para-Marxism; treat­ ments of labour as man’s concrete essence; ‘endless commentaries on surplus value’; abstract interest in ‘class’ rather than detailed studies of the subjects, stakes, and modalities of ‘class’ struggle; the grounding of power in the economy and/or class relations; the reduction of the state to a set of functions, such as managing productive forces and relations; concern with con­ sciousness and ideology rather than the materiality of the body and anatomo-politics; epiphenomenalist analyses of infrastructure and superstructure relations; the sterility of dialectics and the logic of contradiction; the ‘hypermarxification’ of social and political analyses; Marxist hagiography and ‘communistology’; and Marxist claims to scientificity to the exclusion of other forms of knowledge (see especially the articles, lectures, and interviews in Foucault, 1994). Despite this, “Foucault maintained a sort of ‘uninterrupted dialogue’ with Marx, [who] was in fact not unaware of the question of power and its disciplines” (Fontana & Bertani, 2003: 277). While he maintained that Marx’s analysis of value stayed within the classic epis­ teme of Smith and Ricardo, Foucault praised Marx’s epistemic break in the fields of history and politics. This is reflected in increasingly sympathetic but often covert references to some core themes in Marx’s critique of political economy and, even more importantly, his histor­ ical analyses, some of them deliberately and provocatively undeclared (Balibar, 1992; Elden, 2007; Kalyvas, 2004; Lemke, 2003; MacDonald, 2002). Thus, Foucault began to argue that capitalism has penetrated deeply into our existence, especially as it required diverse tech­ niques of power to enable capital to exploit people’s bodies and their time, transforming them into labour power and labour time, respectively, to create surplus profit (Foucault, 1977: 163, 174-175; 1979: 37, 120-124, 140-141; 2003: 32-37; see also Marsden, 1999). This prompted Balibar to suggest that Foucault moved from a break to a tactical al­ liance with Marxism, [with] the first involving a global critique of Marxism as a “theory”; the second a partial usage of Marxist tenets or affirmations compatible with Marxism. ...Thus, in contradic­ tory fashion, the opposition to Marxist “theory” grows deeper and deeper whilst the con­ vergence of the analyses and concepts taken from Marx becomes more and more significant (Balibar, 1992: 53). The analytics of power versus state theory In addition to his general antipathy to Marxism, Foucault also claimed that “I do, I want to, and I must pass on state theory —just as one would with an indigestible meal” (Foucault 2004b: 78, my translation). This is reflected in his well-known hostility to general theorizations about the state —whether juridico-political, Marxist, or realist —and his grounding of power and control in the modem state, to the extent that the latter exists, in social norms and institu­ tions and distinctive forms of knowledge rather than in sovereign authority. Foucault stressed three themes in his ‘nominalist’ analytics of power: it is immanent in all social relations, artic­ ulated with discourses as well as institutions, and necessarily polyvalent because its impact and significance vary with how social relations, discourses and institutions are integrated into dif­ ferent strategies. He also focused on technologies of power, power—knowledge relations, and changing strategies for structuring and deploying power relations. In developing this analytics

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of power, Foucault rejected attempts to develop any general theory about state power — or power more generally —based on a priori assumptions about its essential unity, its pre-given functions, its inherent tendency to expand through its own power dynamics, or its global stra­ tegic deployment by a master subject (see especially Foucault, 1979, 1980; cf. 2003: 27—31; 2004b: 79, 193-194). Based on his early comments, which were largely recapitulated in his courses at the College de France on biopolitics and govemmentality from 1975 to 1979, Foucault’s analytics of power can be summarized as follows. The study of power should begin from below, in the heteroge­ neous and dispersed micro-physics of power, explore specific forms of its exercise in different institutional sites, and consider how, if at all, these were linked to produce broader and more persistent societal configurations. One should study power where it is exercised over individuals rather than legitimated at the centre; explore the actual practices of subjugation rather than the intentions that guide attempts at domination; and recognize that power circulates through net­ works rather than being applied at particular points (Foucault, 1979: 92—102; 2003: 27—34). However, following this initial move, Foucault also began to emphasize that, whilst starting at the bottom with the micro-diversity of power relations across a multiplicity of dispersed sites, two further interrelated issues required attention: first, how do diverse power relations come to be colonized and articulated into more general mechanisms that sustain more encompassing forms of domination and, second, how are they linked to specific forms and means of producing knowledge? It is in this context that Foucault developed the problematic of government to explore the historical constitution and periodization of the state and the important strategic and tactical di­ mensions of power relations and their associated discourses. For, in rejecting various essentialist, transhistorical, universal, and deductive analyses of the state and state power, Foucault created a space for exploring its ‘polymorphous crystallization’1 in and through interrelated changes in technologies of power, objects of governance, governmental projects, and modes of political calculation. Indeed, he argued that “the state is nothing more than the mobile effect of a regime of multiple govemmentalities” (Foucault, 2004b: 79). For Foucault, this does not mean that one needs a transhistorical, universal notion of the state before deconstructing it in and through an interrogation of historically specific, concrete practices. He avoids this paradox by asking how one might explore history if the state did not always-already exist (2004b: 4—5). For example, Society Must be Defended shows how the modern idea of the universal state emerged from a complex series of discursive shifts and the eventual combination of disciplinary and biopolitical power within a redefined framework of sovereignty (2003: 37—39, 242—250). Let us see what it means to explore the historical emergence of ‘state effects’ as revealed in the last two series of lectures of interest here. Foucault as a genealogist of statecraft Although Foucault often refers to the state, he refused to take its existence for granted and rejected any state theory based on this assumption. The current texts reiterate that the state has no essence, is not a universal, is not an autonomous source of power. Instead it is an emergent 1 The concept of ‘polymorphous crystallization’ was introduced by Mann (1986) to highlight how specific configu­ rations of the state apparatus and state power derive from the differential articulation of various elements of the state under the dominance of four alternative political projects — economic, military, democratic, or ideological.

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and changeable effect of incessant transactions, multiple governmentalities, and perpetual statizations (Foucault, 2004b: 79). An analysis in terms of power must not assume that state sovereignty, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination, is given at the outset; rather, these are only the ter­ minal forms power takes. ... power must be understood in the first instance as the mul­ tiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and that constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or, on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions that isolate them from each other; and, lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in various social hege­ monies. Power’s condition of possibility [and its role as a] grid of intelligibility of the social order must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and derived forms might emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly en­ gender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. ... Power is every­ where; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere (2004b: 92—93, my translation). In this context, the art of government, or govemmentality, is said to involve “the ensemble constituted by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that permit the exercise of this quite specific, albeit very complex form of power, which has, as its principal target, population; as its main form of knowledge, political economy; and, as its essential technical means, apparatuses of security” (Foucault, 2004a: 111, my translation). Thus, Foucault regards the state as a relational ensemble and treats govemmentality as a set of practices and strategies, governmental projects and modes of calculation, that operate on something called the state. This something is the terrain of a non-essentialized set of political relations, however, rather than a universal, fixed, unchanging phenomenon. In this sense, while the state is pre-given as an object of governance, it also gets reconstructed as government prac­ tices change (2004b: 5—6). In short, to study govemmentality in its generic sense is to study the historical constitution of different state forms in and through changing practices of government without assuming that the state has a universal or general essence. This is why Foucault criticized analyses of the state (and/or states) as a juridico-political instance, a calculating subject, an instrument of class rule, or an epiphenomenon of production relations. Nonetheless, whilst eschewing any general the­ ory of the state, he certainly explored emergent strategies (state projects, governmentalizing projects) that identified the nature and purposes of government (as reflected in alternative forms of raison d’etat) in different contexts and periods. In particular, his College de France lectures from 1975 to 1979 argued that disciplinary power was later supplemented by the emergence of biopolitics and security as new forms of ratio gouvernmentale. While disciplinary power could compensate for the failure of sovereign power at the level of individual bodies, the harder task of controlling the population was only resolved with the development of biopolitics. This was a core theme of the last two sets of lecture considered here. They studied changing theories and practices about the art of government as well as the changing institutions and insti­ tutional ensembles with which such practices were linked. Thus, Foucault identified three forms of government: sovereignty, disciplinarity, and govemmentality. The first is associated with the

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medieval state based on customary law, written law, and litigation and concerned with control over land and wealth; the second with the rise of the administrative state of the 15th and 16th century based on the disciplinary regulation of individual bodies in different institutional con­ texts; and the third with the increasingly governmentalized state, which dates from the late 16th and came to fruition in the 19th century, when state concern was henceforth focused on con­ trolling the mass of the population on its territory rather than controlling territoriality as such (Foucault, 2004a: 221; cf., with the same sequence but other dates, 2003: 37—39, 249—250). Ex­ panding this account, Foucault traced governmental concerns back to 16th century interest in the administration of territorial monarchies; to 16th and 17th century development of new analyses and forms of ‘statistical’ knowledge, i.e., knowledge of the state, in all its elements, dimensions, and factors of power; and, finally, to the rise of mercantilism, cameralism, and Polizeiwissenschaft (2004a: 212). Accordingly, the governmental state arose from the govemmentalization of the state rather than the statization of society and was based on continual (re)definition of state competences and the division between public and private (2004a: 220—221). With Foucault beyond Foucault Some of the ambiguities and confusions surrounding Foucault’s analyses of power and its significance in social life can be resolved if we distinguish three moments in the development of power relations. These are variation in the objects, subjects, purposes, and technologies of power; selection of some technologies and practices rather than others; and retention of some of these in turn as they are integrated into broader and more stable strategies of state and/or class (or national or racial) power. These three moments overlap and interact in real time but Foucault tended to come to them (or, at least, elaborate them) separately in his work, focusing first on genealogical variation, then on the emergent convergence and selection of various technologies of power to delineate general conditions of domination as they are seen to have economic or political utility for an emerging bourgeoisie, and finally on the strategic codification and retention of these practices of government to produce a global strategy oriented to a more or less unified objective. The first step in this trajectory introduces the familiar notion of genealogy — which many observers see as a central contribution of these and earlier texts, building on, but never superseding, his archaeological analyses. Far more interesting, however, is the marked extent to which its second and, even more, its third step re-introduces state power. Foucault now treats state power as a crucial emergent field of strategic action and connects it both to issues of capitalist political economy and to the interests of an emerging bourgeois class; but he never regards the state, capital, or the bourgeoisie as pre-constituted forces, treating them instead as emergent effects of multiple projects, practices, and attempts to institutionalize political power relations. Foucault’s refer­ ence to capitalist and bourgeois forces is often noted but few commentators identify its crucial relevance for an anti-essentialist, non-teleological, ex post-functionalist explanation of capital­ ist development and state formation. Three points are worth noting here. First, following his more general rejection of attempts to provide a totalizing account of social events, Foucault typically rejected any a priori assump­ tion that different forms of power were connected to produce an overall pattern of class dom­ ination. He noted that the modern state’s disciplinary techniques originated in dispersed local sites well away from the centres of state power in the Ancien Regime and well away from emerging sites of capitalist production and had their own distinctive disciplinary logics. Thus, disciplinary normalization focused on the conduct of persons who were not directly

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involved in capitalist production (e.g., in asylums, prisons, schools, barracks). Nonetheless, sec­ ond, Foucault recognized that some technologies and practices were selected and integrated into other sites of power. Thus, while Discipline and Punish (1977) mostly emphasized the dis­ persion of power mechanisms, the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1979) began to ex­ plore how different mechanisms were combined to produce social order through a strategic codification that made them more coherent and complementary. In this text and a roughly con­ temporary lecture series, Society Must be Defended, Foucault links this explicitly to bourgeois recognition of their economic profitability and political utility (Foucault, 1979: 114, 125, 141; 2003: 30—33). Third, he explored how existing power relations were not only codified but also consolidated and institutionalized. Thus, Foucault notes how the immanent multiplicity of relations and techniques of power are “colonised, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, ex­ tended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination ... and, above all, how they are invested or annexed by global phenomena and how more general powers or economic benefits can slip into the play of these technologies of power” (2003: 30—1). This codification and consolidation occurred in quite specific historical conditions that, ac­ cording to Foucault, cannot be derived from the functional needs of the economy but have their own pre-history and developmental dynamic. For example, Foucault argues that only a post­ sovereign state could consolidate the new forms of government insofar as the emergence of the problem of population enabled power to be refocused on the economy rather than the family writ large (Foucault, 2004a: 214—215). The articulation of the economic and political should not be explained in terms of functional subordination or formal isomorphism (2003: 14). In­ stead it should be studied in terms of functional overdetermination and a perpetual process of strategic elaboration or completion. The former occurs when “each effect —positive or neg­ ative, intentional or unintentional —enters into resonance or contradiction with the others and thereby calls for a readjustment or a re-working of the heterogeneous elements that surface at various points” (1980: 195). In describing the strategic elaboration or completion of a general line, Foucault invoked concepts such as ‘social hegemonies’, ‘hegemonic effects’, ‘hegemony of the bourgeoisie’, ‘meta-power’, ‘class domination’, ‘polymorphous techniques of subjuga­ tion’, ‘sur-pouvoir’ (or a ‘surplus power’ analogous to surplus value), ‘global strategy’, and so forth. He also gave a privileged role to the state as the point of strategic codification of the multitude of power relations and the apparatus in which the general line is crystallized (e.g., 2003: 27, 31-35; cf. 1980: 122, 156, 189, 199-200; 1982: 224). For example, it was the rise of the population—territory—wealth nexus in political economy and police created the space for the revalorization and re-articulation of disciplines that had emerged in 17th and 18th century, i.e., schools, manufactories, armies (2004a: 217—219). In approaching Foucault’s work in these terms, we can escape the dichotomy of micro- and macro-power, the antinomy of an analytics of micro-powers and a theory of sovereignty, and the problematic relation between micro-diversity and macro-necessity in power relations (cf. Jes­ sop, 1990; Kerr, 1999: 176). The idea of government as strategic codification of power relations provides a bridge between micro-diversity and macro-necessity and, as Foucault argues, a focus on micro-powers is determined by scale but applies across all scales. It is a perspective, not a reality delimited to one scale (Foucault, 2004b: 193; cf. 2003: 244). Introducing the concept of biopolitics requires Foucault to say more about the global strategies of the state and the “gen­ eral line of force that traverses local confrontations and links them together” (1980: 94). In this way, we can move from the analysis of variation to the crucial issues of selection and retention that produce a distinctive articulation of the economic and political in particular historical contexts.

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Conclusions Foucault always rejected attempts to develop a general theory and changed direction and ar­ gument according to his changing interests and the changing political conjuncture. This is why we should not seek an ‘essential Foucault’. Nonetheless, the three lecture courses on governmentality (Foucault, 2003, 2004a, 2004b) indicate increasing interest in complex and contingent problems of political economy and statecraft. Foucault certainly rejected crude ‘capital-logic’ ar­ guments about socio-economic development and state-centric accounts of the state. But his ‘crit­ ical and effective histories’ were increasingly brought to bear in the mid-to-late 1970s on questions of political economy and the historical constitution of the state from the 16th to 20th centuries. His novel and highly productive approach also showed how the economy and the state were increasingly organized in conformity with key features of capitalist political econ­ omy without ever being reducible thereto and without these features in turn being fully pre-given. In this sense, generalizing from Marsden’s re-reading of Marx and Foucault on capitalism (1999), it seems that, while Marx seeks to explain the why of capital accumulation and state power, Fou­ cault’s analyses of disciplinarity and govemmentality try to explain the how of economic exploi­ tation and political domination (on the importance of ‘how’ questions for Foucault, see his 1982). There is far more, of course, to Foucault’s work in this period but this re-reading shows that there is more scope than many believe for dialogue between critical Marxist and Foucauldian analyses. References Balibar, E. (1992). Foucault and Marx: the question of nominalism. In T. J. Armstrong (Ed.), Michel Foucault, Philos­ opher (pp. 38—56). London: Routledge. Elden, S. (2007). Rethinking govemmentality. Political Geography, 26(1), 29—33. Fontana, A., & Bertani, M. (2003). Situating the lectures. “Society must be Defended”. Lectures at the College de France 1975—1976. New York: Picador, pp. 273—293. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of a prison. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality, vol. 1. An introduction. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1980). Power!knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972—1977. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1982). How is power exercised? In H. L. Dreyfus, & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond struc­ turalism and hermeneutics (pp. 216—226) Brighton: Harvester Press. Foucault, M. (1994). Dits et Ecrits. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2003). “Society must be defended”. Lectures at the College de France 1975—1976. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2004a). Securite, territoire, population. Cours au College de France, 1977—1978. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2004b). Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au College de France, 1978—1979. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Jessop, B. (1990). State Theory: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place. Cambridge: Polity. Kalyvas, A. (2004). The stateless theory. Poulantzas’s challenge to postmodernism. In S. Aronowitz, & P. Bratsis (Eds.), Paradigm lost: State theory reconsidered (pp. 105—142). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kerr, D. (1999). Beheading the King and enthroning the market: a critique of Foucauldian govemmentality. Science and Society, 63(2), 173-202. Lemke, T. (2003). Andere Affirmationen. Gesellschaftsanalyse und Kritik im Postfordismus. In A. Honneth, & M. Saar (Eds.), Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption (pp. 259—274). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. MacDonald, B. J. (2002). Marx, Foucault, genealogy. Polity 34(3), 259—284. Mann, M. (1986). The sources of social power, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsden, R. (1999). The nature of capital: Marx after Foucault. London: Routledge.

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Part VI On Law

[19] Foucaults Expulsion of Law: Toward a Retrieval Alan Hunt This essay argues that there is an important sense in which Foucault gets law wrong— that the pursuit of Foucault's own objectives had the unintended consequence of inhibiting a fruitful interrogation of the place of law in moder­ nity. His immediate concern was with the emergence of distinctive manifes­ tations of modem power that constitute a new configuration the disciplinary society. The most distinctive feature of his account of the historical emer­ gence of modernity was his expulsion of law from modernity. This “expulsion of law " is found in his metahistorical thesis that law constituted the primary form of power in the premodem era, and that although law lingers on in the doctrine of sovereignty, it is supplanted by discipline and government as the key embodiments of modernity. The essay proposes an exercise in retrieval, a “retrieval of law ,” to recuperate much in Foucault's thought that is suggestive for our understand­ ing of law's role in the constitution of modem society. It rejects Foucault's opposition of law and discipline and makes use of his treatment of govern­ ment and govemmentality toward that end. It argues that a more ade­ quate g?asp of the place of law in modernity can be developed by establishing that law and discipline are complementary and characteristically combine in the ubiquitous presence of regulation as the mark of the modem condition.

L FOUCAULTS EXPULSION OF LAW Amidst the great stir caused across a wide range of intellectual inquiry by the writings of Michel Foucault surprisingly little attention has been paid to the implications of his work for an understanding of the role of law

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LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY in modern society.1 This essay engages with Foucault’s writings on law; it is a partial engagement in that I attempt no exhaustive exegesis of Foucault’s writing on law. My project is to draw attention to and to problematize one of the most distinctive features of Foucault’s account of the historical emergence of modernity, one that I will term his expulsion of law from modernity . By “expulsion of law” I designate his metahistorical thesis that law constituted the primary form of power in the classical or premodern era, for although law lingers on, especially in the doctrine of sovereignty, it is undermined and even supplanted by the discipline(s) and government as the distinctive manifestations of power in modern society.2 Foucault’s expulsion of law is a direct result of his pervasive concern to break with two closely related ways of posing the problem of power, both of which he views as endemic to Marxism. The first treats power as primarily a question of state-power and the second equates state-power with repression.3 The expulsion of law is the effect of Foucault’s strategy; his own intention was to resist the privileging of law that is characteristic of many modern political discourses. Foucault’s expulsion of law is exemplified when he writes: “We shall try to rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty and sover­ eignty. . . . We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king.”4 His most general formulation of the expulsion of law is the following: In short, it is a question of orienting ourselves to a conception of power that replaces the privilege of the law with the viewpoint of the objective, the privilege of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple 1. The significant and early exception, among the now voluminous literature that Fou­ cault’s work has generated, to this neglect of Foucault’s treatment of law was Nicos Poulantzas; much of the course of the argument to be developed in this article owes much to Poulantzas. I seek to flesh out Poulantzas’ seminal thesis that “law is a constitutive element of the politico-social field.” Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978) (“Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism”). 2. The use of “discipline(s)” catches Foucault’s double usage of “discipline” as a dis­ tinctly modern form of domination and of the plurality of the modern “disciplines” rooted in the medical and human sciences. 3. Foucault’s relationship with Marxism is complex; for discussion see Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (London: Tavistock, 1980); Mark Poster, Foucault, Marx­ ism and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique (London: Routledge, 1983). Politically he made an early breach with the French Communist party. Theoretically he treated Marx­ ism as a tradition irretrievably marked by economic reductionism. The paradoxical result was that in the 1960s and 1970s when Western Marxism was undergoing its most fertile development and breaking, among other things, with a narrow equation of power, state, and repression, we find Foucault invoking what we might call “Marxism at its worst” as the intellectual spur driving forward his reconceptualization of power. 4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: vol. 1, An Introduction [1976] 90-91 (New York: Pantheon, 1978) (“Foucault, 1 History of Sexuality”).

Michel Foucault

Foucault’s Expulsion of Law and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced. The strategical model rather than the model based on law .5 (Emphasis added)

My project is to move beyond criticism of Foucault (although there is, as I will argue, much to criticize) to propose an exercise in retrieval, in particular a “retrieval of law,” to recuperate much in his thought that is suggestive and illuminating for our understanding of the complex role of law in the constitution of modern society. I will argue that in place of some generalized opposition between “law” and “discipline,” through which Foucault seeks to characterize that which is distinctive of modern society, a better grasp of the modern can be secured by positing that “law” and “discipline” complement each other and combine in the ubiquitous presence of “regulation” as the mark of the modern condition. I will argue that an appreciation of both the quantitative and qualitative expansion of law is a necessary precondition to an adequate grasp of modernity. Since much that I have to say will be critical of Foucault I want to start by entering a caveat: I do not wish to be read as mounting an attack on Foucault. My purpose is to use, or even exploit, Foucault to help sharpen my formulation of an alternative understanding of the place of law in the project of modernity. This alternative is not an exercise in unreconstructed positivism that believes that it is possible to get law “right.” Rather I seek only to throw a different focus on the interpenetration of law, discipline and regulation than that offered in Foucault’s original ex­ pulsion of law. It is central to my strategy that I will deploy Foucault him­ self as a major component of the “retrieval” that I propose. In brief, there is a “later Foucault,” one who passes beyond the preoccupation with the disciplines to focus on an expanded conception of “government” and “govemmentality.” I will make use of this strand in Foucault’s own work and relocate it within a focus on “regulation,” which while not part of his own theorization, is compatible with his concerns. Foucault’s work, like all important social theory, is marked by an at­ tempt to hang onto both structure and agency, and as a result there is a certain oscillation toward one or the other of these poles. This expresses itself in a tension between, on one side, his radical relativism with its bleak succession of forms of domination and, on the other side, his political concern to ground an alternative emancipatory project that his relativism 5. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 102 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980) (“Foucault, Power/ Knowledge”). One of Foucault’s most elusive concepts is his notion of a “field of force rela­ tions”; it is linked to his diagrammatic metaphor of power relations, but he never explicates the connection between “force” and “power”; for discussion see Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory 110-11 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

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LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY always tends to undermine.6 One expression of this dilemma is exempli­ fied by his aphorism: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.”7 My own view is that these tensions within Fou­ cault’s work are not resolvable, but far from undermining his significance, they rather attest to his emblematic significance as an expression of the intellectual and political angst of the late 20th century. My immediate interest is to explore Foucault’s treatment of law. It is important to stress that I make no claim to “discover” a Foucauldian “the­ ory of law” because law was not one of his explicit objects of inquiry. Nevertheless he had a very considerable amount to say about law. The question of law not only figures significantly but persistently returns in his texts. Law comes to the fore in a group of major texts from the late 1970s.8 It forms a central motif during that stage of his work which is marked by the shift that takes place within what should be read as his unified project from “power,” via “discipline,” to the “subject” that oc­ curs between Discipline and Punish (1977)9 and The History of Sexuality (1978).10 Indeed law plays such a key role in The History of Sexuality that it would not have misdescribed this work had its English translation been “The History of Law,” the text being, in important respects, as much about law as it is about sexuality. There is a third key text that explicitly engages with law. The second of his “Two Lectures” is centrally preoccupied with the distinction that he wishes to sustain between “law” and “discipline.”11 When I first read “Two Lectures” I was struck by certain pronounced echoes of Marx’s fa­ mous 1859 “Preface,” the text in which he summarizes the “guiding thread for my studies” and proceeds to give the much quoted condensed summary of what came to be called historical materialism.12 Both pieces are self-reflective and offer overviews of their respective positions; Marx’s “guiding thread” is mirrored in Foucault’s “guiding principle” and “meth6. Peter Dews, “The Return of the Subject in the Late Foucault,” 52 Radical Philosophy 37 (1989). 7. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in H. Dreyfus