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Chapter 6--Foucault's Nietzschean Turn |
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Chapter Six
Foucault’s Nietzschean Turn
In the course of replying to questions posed by the readers of Esprit, a French magazine expressing a Christian left perspective, Foucault formulated the hypothetical question, “…whether I am a reactionary, or … whether my texts are (in themselves, intrinsically, through a certain number of coded signs).” (Foucault 1968, p. 683)
The question Foucault was replying to was:
“Does not a way of thinking that introduces the constraints of the system together with discontinuity in the history of the mind (esprit), take away all grounds for progressive political action? Does it not lead to the following dilemma:
---either accept the system,
---or call for a savage event (événement sauvage) , an eruption of external violence, the only thing capable of crashing the system?” (p. 673)
Foucault acknowledges (in 1968) that this question accurately characterizes his writings. He recognizes himself in the question almost completely. “…you have arrived at a definition of my work that I cannot avoid signing,” but which leads to consequences no reasonable person would agree with. (Id.) “Suddenly I feel all my weirdness.” (Soudain, je sens toute ma bizarrerie.) (Id.)
Foucault writes a long reply to Esprit’s question. (pages 673-695). In it, and in a similar reply to a similar question posed by the Cercle d ‘Ēpistemologie of Paris (Foucault 1968A) at about the same time (the summer of 1968, which was also the time of tumultuous political events in France), he previews what he will publish as a book the following year (Archeologie du Savoir, 1969). Everything is dispersion. There is no system. There are only systems, better described as practices. There is no knowledge in general. There are only knowledges, better described as discursive formations. The same Michel Foucault who a year earlier (in April of 1967) in an interview in Tunisia had described himself as “the choir boy of structuralism,” (Foucault 1967 p. 581); the same Michel Foucault who had explained to the Tunisians the tenets of structuralism as if he were its ambassador; is now emphatically not a structuralist.
Foucault does not answer the hypothetical question whether he is a reactionary; he answers instead another question he conceives to be more legitimate and to be the question the readers of Esprit are really asking: the question of the relationship of his philosophy to political practice. (p. 683) The answer is that his philosophy leads to progressive political action to change particular practices. For example, his research on the history of medicine supports progressive action to curb the abusive power exercised by doctors in modern society. (pages 688-692). To be counted as a progressive one need not (and one ought not) believe any of the totalizing philosophies of history of the 19th century, nor any of their untimely prolongations into the 20th; nor (in particular) need one follow Louis Althusser in trying to save Marx by separating him from Hegel. In 1967 in Tunis Foucault had praised Althusserian structuralist Marxism as “…an effort to analyze all the conditions of human existence, an effort to understand, in its complexity, the ensemble of relations that constitute our history, an effort to determine in what historical conditions (conjoncture) our actions are possible today.” (Foucault 1967 p. 583) Now, in the summer of 1968, he endorses dispersion. If that made him a reactionary then yes he would be a reactionary, but distancing himself from structuralist Marxism does not make him a reactionary because there are better ways (more particular and detailed ways) to relate scientific research to social practice and political action.
I do not think Foucault’s answer to the questions posed by the readers of Esprit is satisfactory. When in their question they posed as one horn of a dilemma “accept the system” I believe, reading between the lines, that they had in mind saying, “We find the system unsatisfactory; it has an inherent tendency to exclude and to generate violence; indeed as Christians we cannot help but notice that it generates each and every one of the seven deadly sins; we want to contribute to changing the system, but the results of your historical inquiries discourage us, for they seem to say that the course of the history of knowledge, which seems to have some bearing on the course of history in general, is determined by epistemes, impersonal structures nobody can control, which ordinary people do not know about; and which even scholars did not understand until you published your book (Les Mots et les Choses).”
I would paraphrase Foucault’s reply to the charge that his philosophy of history discourages those who want to make a difference for good in the world as follows: “Tu me prends pour un autre. (You take me to be somebody else). You identify me with those old-fashioned philosophers of history who wrote big theories claiming to explain what has happened and to predict what will happen based on what they took to be history’s great determining causes. But I am a modest scholar, devoted to noticing in the sources that I study their great variety of discourse and practice; I am averse to great embracing theories, and incredulous in the face of those who imagine there is some great system determining events. Far from discouraging your good intentions, I encourage you to undertake modest political projects to deal with particular discerned evils.”
The readers of Esprit, it seems to me, are left approximately where they were before they received Foucault’s answer. They had feared that he was telling them they could not change the system because it was beyond the power of human mind and will to change it. Now they learn that they cannot change the system for a different reason: because “the system” is not a legitimate concept. The term does not refer to any entity that a person who has accepted the method and the conclusions of Foucault’s studies, as they are about to be published in Archéologie du Savoir, would set out to change.
In response to the questions of the readers of Esprit Foucault develops a vocabulary that acquits him of the charge of regarding history as a single monolithic all-powerful and all-pervasive system. But in the course of doing so he confesses several times that he feels that his questioners will not be satisfied by his answers. Indeed. They had something in mind when they asked about “the system” as Immanuel Wallerstein has something in mind when he writes about “the modern world-system.” Neither they nor Wallerstein will be satisfied if Foucault answers them in terms that invoke what J-F Lyotard calls “incredulity toward meta-narratives” if that means that what they wanted to say when they asked a question about “the system” cannot be said. I suggest that the concept of rules developed in Chapter One leads to a useful way to interpret the phrase “the system.” -- a way which grants meaning to the concerns I think the readers of Esprit had in mind. It offers guidance for social activists.
“The system” can be identified with the basic constitutive rules concerning contracts and property rights discussed in Chapter One and Chapter Two, especially in connection with Marx’s account of the buying and selling of commodities, and especially because the logic of accumulation and the corresponding need for a regime of accumulation (see below) follow from them as corollaries. I do not agree with Foucault, with Marx, nor with Foucault’s interpretation of Ricardo, insofar as they claim that it is at the level of production that the keys to understanding political economy are to be found. I agree with Karl Polanyi and others who attribute to markets (to what Marx called the sphere of circulation) a leading role. “The system” is about who owns the means of production, yes, but it is also about owning in general and about commodity exchange in general. To say with the readers of Esprit that we do not want to accept the system, that we want to change it, is to be like John Dewey a thoroughgoing pragmatist, a consistent pragmatist who is willing to consider moving whatever parameters need to be moved to solve concrete problems. The readers of Esprit wisely regarded an événement sauvage as one horn of a dilemma of which both horns are unacceptable.
The readers of Esprit wanted to know, I believe, at least two things more about the system: (1) why it is so hard to change, and (2) how to change it. With respect to these two questions, also I think rules-talk helps.
The basic constitutive rules of modern society (employing ideas of “constitutive rules” developed by Charles Taylor and John Searle, with roots in Wittgenstein and Kant; and adding the idea of “basic,” i.e. concerned with satisfying the basic needs of life) set up the systemic imperatives of capitalism. (Ellen Wood 2004) The concept of “systemic imperatives” helps to explain why the system is so hard to change. In addition to social inertia, apathy, ignorance, reluctance of people with vested interests to give up privileges, superstition, dualism, military institutions organized to defend the status quo, traditional ethnic hostility, inexperience with new practices, fear of the unknown, and other factors, the system is hard to change because of its systemic imperatives. In the language of the French regulationist school of economics, the imperatives of the system require that there be some regime of accumulation, some set of economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that make it possible for the accumulation of capital to proceed. (Aglietta 2002) To the extent that such a set of institutions is lacking, for example when a progressive government imposes taxes that discourage investment, the system does not function; its failure to function sets in motion forces that tend to restore the conditions it requires to function. (See e.g. Richards and Swanger 2006.)
Among the reasons why the system is hard to change, another that rules-talk plays a useful role in illuminating is the crisis of authority. It is associated with the lack of adequate cultures of solidarity and social responsibility. People do not pay their taxes. They ignore environmental regulations. They prefer stealing to working. They do not do volunteer for community service or show up for meetings of civic organizations. These common failures can be expressed in terms of rules-talk by saying: it does not matter what the stated rules (or norms, or expectations) of a culture are if people do not follow them. I submit that this is sometimes a better way of talking than talking of social capital, as if there were some sort of thing, a kind of capital analogous to financial capital and human capital, which can be subdivided into bridging capital and bonding capital, and which can exist in a greater or lesser quantity. One of the advantages of using rules-talk here is that it suggests neatly dividing the difficulties into two parts: one sort of difficulty occurs when the norms are dysfunctional even if followed; another sort of difficulty is a crisis of authority, a tendency not to follow norms at all.
An answer to the question how to change the system is: change the rules. In particular, change those rules that set up the systemic imperatives that make the system hard to change. This is a practical and pertinent answer: it suggests that rather too much time and energy is spent in protest demonstrations, when the cause of the evils protested could more effectively by addressed by nurturing alternative practices organized according to different rules. Protests generally require an existing rule, whose violation is protested. They are because good existing rules are often violated. Social change also requires organizing institutions that do not exist yet, which will function according to new rules; or according to old rules like those of solidarity which half-exist in the sense that people have heard of them, but which do not exist as rules according to Hart’s definition of “rule” because they do not yet describe and guide practice.
I have been suggesting that rules-talk is rooted in common sense, and that there are systemic reasons why in the 20th century, and beginning with Nietzsche and others in the 19th century, there have been heavy trends toward attacks on common sense. Common sense can only lead to Marx, not to Marx in the sense of endless bla bla, but to Marx in the sense of modifying the rules that govern property ownership and markets.
Having replied to the readers of Esprit in terms that he himself doubted they would be happy with, and having explained “archaeology” in terms that led him ultimately to stop calling his research archaeological, Foucault also became uneasy with the relationship of his approach to history to the traditional (Aristotelian and Kantian) category of cause and effect. In a research proposal submitted to the Collėge de France, he announces that he will take up again a group of problems concerning “la causalité dans l’ordre du savoir.” (causality in the order of knowledge) (Foucault 1969 p. 845)
High time. Foucault had come perilously close to falling into what Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow call “the illusion of autonomous discourse.” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983) Unless the world is very different from what Kant thought it was; unless it is not a world where patterns of phenomena follow regular laws so that like causes produce like effects; then the stories Foucault has been telling us about discursive formations changing their patterns over time for no discernible reasons are not about history wie es eigentlich gewesen war. (as it really happened). In La Naissance de la Clinique Foucault came close to saying that political and economic events that were not just discourse caused changes in medical discourse. Non-talk caused talk. But he backed away from his drift into materialism when he wrote Les Mots et les Choses and Archeologie du Savoir. Nonetheless, he always denied that he simply wanted to erase and deny the category of causality. He usually said that what he was doing was not determining which causes produced which effects; he was doing something else; but the something else he was doing, the archaeology, was not entirely unrelated to causes and effects. In late 1969, he decided to take another look at how it was related.
For Kant the relationship of concepts to causes had been reasonably clear. There were two realms: the a priori, which did not depend on experience; and the a posteriori, which did depend on experience. The concept of cause was given a priori. It did not depend on experience. The mind brought it to experience. It was a condition of any possible experience.
The realm of experience, of phenomena (which Kant sometimes called “intuitions" or “percepts”) was necessarily a world governed by causal laws. Concepts without percepts were empty, because the a priori form only said what an experience would have to be. Percepts without concepts were blind because no sense could be made of experience without ordering it in categories.
Nearly two hundred years later for the Foucault of late 1969, who told the Collėge de France that he was going to reexamine causality, Kant’s clarity was muddled. Kant’s eternal and universal a priori had been replaced by an historical a priori. “Conditions of the possibility of experience” continued to play a role, but they played a different role. They changed from one century to another. They had left the eternal realm of Kant’s a priori that does not depend on experience and had joined the hurly burly of time; but they had not made it all the way across the divide that separates a priori from a posteriori. They were still not full citizens of Kant’s a posterioiri realm where they, like everything else, would be explained and predicted by determining what causes had produced them. Two different but interrelated sets of questions emerged:
1. What causes the changes in the concepts that determine what experiences are possible? This is a question difficult to separate from questions about what moves history in general, and the related question whether nothing moves history in general, but rather a series of diverse causes; or whether however history might be moved it is necessarily impossible to scholars to determine the cause or causes of its movement.
2. How do cultures of different times understand cause and effect?
Foucault could simply have answered these questions by adopting the realistic viewpoint of the realist (mainly economic) historians he discusses at the beginning of Archeologie du Savoir and then devotes the book to offering an alternative to. He could have simply changed his mind and decided that homo natura is not a bad idea after all. Given that now we know about demographic processes; we know about climate change and other ecological causes; we know how markets work and how capital accumulates once certain institutional conditions are given; and given that we know, going a bit beyond the expertise of the economic historians, how myths organize cultures; and so on; we can now read our own scientific culture’s understandings of cause and effect backwards into time to explain what happened in the past, albeit not in terms the people then would have understood. It would be fair enough to add into the list of causal factors the terms they did understand (their belief-systems) to the extent that we can now understand how they thought and felt. Our understanding of their belief-system helps us to explain what they did, which is part of our explanation of what happened.
But Foucault did not want to go there. He remained reluctant to continue in the direction he had been going in La Naissance de la Clinique, toward realist historical explanations. (I collapse the distinction Anthony Giddens makes much of in A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism between political explanations and economic explanations, counting them both as realist explanations.)
But we are not free to simply disregard causality, pretending to know nothing about it on the pretext that we know nothing certain about it. (Here, again, I am speaking, not Foucault) Causality requires attention if one is to have any ethical life at all. To behave in even a minimally responsible manner; even to have an intention (and a fortiori to have good intentions); one must have some expectation of what the results of one’s actions will be. We are causes. Our actions have effects. There is no responsible way to avoid explaining and predicting. Explaining why events happen and predicting what will happen presuppose identifying the causes at work; they presuppose ideas about what produces what. Following Rom Harre and critical realism, I have been developing the view that rules have causal powers. Norms are at the heart of causal explanation. They often explain why people did what they did; and they often predict what people will do. For example, the social psychologist Michael Argyle predicted that the passengers who got on Oxford city busses would pay the fare. He sent out his students to collect data. The data verified his prediction. The explanation of the observed phenomenon was that the conventional norms in Oxford, England, prescribe that when one gets on the bus one pays the fare. Interpreted in the light of the principle thus illustrated, that rules are causes, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Capital, and John Maynard Keynes General Theory can be read as books about what happens when certain rules are followed. (As I said three chapters ago, Keynes reference to “the psychology of the community” should be read as a reference to “the norms of the community”) (Keynes 1936 p. 27) Since most human action is conventional, social change consists mostly of changing conventions. A culture of solidarity is equivalent to a culture with norms of solidarity. Choosing an option with regard to how to understand cause and effect is part and parcel of choosing an option with regard to how to be a social change activist.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Foucault chooses a Nietzschean option. He had long admired Nietzsche; he reports that he started reading him in 1952 or 1953, (Foucault 1984, p. 703). It appears that he admired Nietzsche and identified with him even before he read him. In retrospect, in an interview given in 1980, Foucault reflected that when he briefly became a member of the Communist Party in 1950-53, it was not because his sentiments were Marxist but because they were Nietzschean. Nietzsche and Georges Bataille were the means of access that led to Communism; Communism was understood as another form of rejection of the world we are living in. Of course it was ridiculous to be a Nietzschean Communist, but he was (Foucault 1980, p. 50). (His biographer Didier Eribon does not credit this interpretation by Foucault of his own past; Eribon finds that he was for a time a marxist and became a Nietzschean later (Eribon 1989, p. 72)). Foucault reports that when he did read Nietzsche he read him with a life changing passion He had felt trapped. Nietzsche helped him feel he could escape and change his life. He did. He quit his job. He left France. (Foucalt 1982, p. 780)
Foucault came to believe that there was no single philosophy to be found in the works of Nietzsche, but rather a series of somewhat disparate ideas which subsequent thinkers could draw on and develop. He came to rely on some of them to resolve his dilemmas regarding causality in history. (Foucault 1971A, Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983) From now on (roughly from his essay on Nietzsche and history published in 1971) Foucault would be free of the illusion of autonomous discourse. He had never completely fallen into it. Although he sometimes seemed to say that languge creates the world and all that is in it, he never literally accepted the absurd consequences that would follow from such a proposition taken literally. Now he found a way to talk about the world outside language that allowed him to avoid the kinds of materialism and naturalism that he wanted to avoid. There would be something nameable outside discourse that determines what discourse will be. Namely: power.
Formerly, when Foucault wrote what he called “archaeologies” in Les Mots et les Choses and elsewhere, he was writing about the culturally determining forms of knowledge of European modernity, putting the objects (as distinct from the forms) of knowledge at a distance. Henceforth, as Foucault writes what he now calls (borrowing the term from Nietzsche), “genealogies,” the way he writes social history will be organized around the objects he studies: the ways in which social power is exercised. (Honneth 1994, p. 157) (1991) There will be a dehors, an outside, and it will be about force. (Deleuze 1986, p. 92)
Jurgen Habermas makes what I take to be the same point in slightly different terms: In Les Mots et les Choses Foucault had led himself and his readers to the strange result that regularities regulate themselves. Foucault escapes this difficulty by giving up the autonomy of knowledge and instead finding the foundation of knowledge in power. (Habermas 1994, p. 81)
Power (a polysemic term that over the years Foucault came to employ in unusual and controversial ways) becomes available to Foucault to provide plausible causal explanations concerning why over time some discourses burgeon while others wither away and disappear. (The word “causal,” however is more at home in my vocabulary than his, since in spite of his declaration that he would look more closely into it, he continued to shy away from it. Indeed in 1980 he said he had been misunderstood or had failed to explain himself if power is taken to explain: Power is, he then says, not what explains but what needs to be explained. (Foucault 1980 p. 83)) It makes it possible to avoid reducing the social to the natural without seeing their relationship as a Kantian one; that is to say without seeing nature as a realm of laws whose social parallel is, again, named as law; but rather seeing nature as a realm of power whose social parallel is, again, named as power. (Nietzsche 1886, part 1, paragraph 22; Foucault 1971, 1971A) But “power” is not, as Foucault employs it and develops it, a term that commits him to the implausible proposition that the principles of physics, chemistry, and other advanced natural sciences are generally determined by social struggles for power. (Foucault also thinks of linguistics as an advanced science). He is saved from being committed to this implausible proposition because he now specifies that his field of study is savoir. Savoir is no longer appropriately translated as “knowledge.” It refers rather to the particular sorts of knowledge claims found in the rather dubious human sciences, such as economics and psychiatry, which Foucault particularly studies. “…between opinion and scientific knowledge (connaissance scientifique) one can recognize the existence of a particular level, which one proposes to call that of savoir. This savoir is not embodied (ne pas prend corps) only in theoretical texts and research instruments, but in a whole set of practices and institutions…” (Foucault 1969 p.844). With respect to savoir social struggles for power generally are constitutive in the historical evolution of concepts. Social struggles are, not completely without influence even in the shaping of the concepts of the most rigorous and advanced of the natural sciences.
Foucault’s Nietzschean turn drew him closer to some strands of Marxism and distanced him from others. He drew closer to Marxism as a philosophy that exposes the falsity of bourgeois ideology and the power of the class interests that drive its production. Marx and Nietzsche can be interpreted as agreeing that social life consists of a series of conflicts, in which the rules that govern the conflicts are made by the winners to serve their own interests, against the interest of the losers. Foucault became closer to those who place Marx beside Nietzsche and Freud in the Hall of Fame of thinkers who unmask middle-class hypocrisy. (Some also include Karl Mannheim in the Hall of Fame as the founder of Wissenshaftslehre, that branch of sociology which studies the biases introduced into knowledge by the social conditions of its production.) Marxists are thus distinguished by what they do not believe. They are classed together with others also distinguished by their unbelief. Marx is drafted to be a combatant in the attack on common sense.
His Nietzschen turn drew Foucault even further away than he already was from the deuxiėme naivetė of Paul Ricoeur; from those who find in some religious and communitarian folk traditions cultural resources that function to improve the material conditions of life; away from willingness to draw in practice on any surviving elements that can be found of the traditional “moral economy” described by E.P. Thompson in his history of the working classes of England, whose principles were not greatly different from those declared in Unto This Last by the Victorian moralist John Ruskin; and away from a Gramsci-influenced concept of a gradual moral and intellectual reform, a long term war of position with shifting alliances and opportunistic educational strategies, in which elements of cultural advance toward solidarity, including but not limited to the legalizing and civilizing ideals of the bourgeoisie itself, and those of its organic intellectuals like Benedetto Croce, will eventually lead to the hegemony of socialist values in the realm of ideas, and to social democracy in practice. (Gramsci 1979)
Nietzsche also helped Foucault to further his anti-humanist agenda without relying on structuralism. I will try to explain why, and will add some remarks about what is at stake.
To the extent that it is persuasive, Foucault’s dissolution of the human subject (however accomplished, whether by an alliance with structuralism that emphasizes system, or by an alliance with avant-garde literature that emphasizes dispersion (Megill 1985); or by an alliance with Nietzsche that emphasizes that the death of God entails the death of man) effectively undermines not only the existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, but also any democratic ideology that proposes to extend freedom and rights on grounds taking as a premise that humans have an essential dignity as rational beings. It effectively undermines socialism conceived as radicalized liberalism. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001) But Foucault’s attack on liberal humanism does not dissolve social democracy conceived as the never-ending perfecting of institutions to make them more effective in meeting everybody’s needs. On the contrary, Foucault is an ally of social democracy so conceived. In the process of dissolving the Kantian ethical subject he also dissolves the Kantian juridical subject, the owner of property, the maker of contracts. Foucault clears the path for cultural creativity, for the invention of new selves better adapted to physical reality.
Some qualifications: My statement that Foucault’s anti-humanism (to the extent that it is persuasive) effectively undermines revolutionary socialism of a Sartrian type and democratic socialism conceived as radicalized liberalism needs some expansion. In the first instance, whether the undermining of these positions is effective depends on whether their advocates care whether their premises have transcendental justifications. When Sartre takes as a starting point an existentialist neo-Husserlian conscious individual; who, like the natives in Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (for which Sartre wrote an introduction) becomes an individual with revolutionary consciousness; or , who, like the individuals in Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique gradually acquires revolutionary commitments to a group, Sartre is indeed presupposing l’homme of Kant’s Anthropology (of which Foucault was the translator for a French edition). Similarly, to the extent (if any) that Laclau and Mouffe take the individual human being to be endowed by nature with inalienable rights that make democracy a transcendentally valid ideal, then the argument that political democracy should be extended to become also social and economic democracy, also depends on an Enlightenment doctrine of natural rights. But revolutionaries and democratic socialists can reply to Foucault: We don’t care. We can do without Kant’s transcendental argument for human dignity. We do not need the stand-in for God that Jean Jacques Rousseau called “nature.” It is enough that conscious human individuals endowed by social convention with dignity and rights exist historically. They are elements of existing culture that we can appeal to and build on.
But this “we don’t need no transcendentals” defense of humanism does not escape Foucault’s critique. Foucault has another line of argument. Since Nietzsche the role of the philosopher can be thought of as opening up new paths for thought (like Heidegger) or (like Nietzsche) as diagnosing what is happening in culture. (e.g. Foucault 1966 p. 536; 1967 pp. 581-2). What happened is that humanity died. What is happening now is that the powers-that-be in the bureaucracies East and West, and charlatans like Albert Camus, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Antoine de Saint Exupery are feeding on its corpse. (Foucault 1966A p. 541). The 19th century figures most responsible for 20th century humanist frauds are, evidently, Hegel and Marx. (Ibid..) The social conventions endowing conscious human individuals with dignity and rights are dissolving before our eyes. L’homme is not an element of existing culture; he does not historically exist.
My statement that Foucault’s critique of humanism makes him an ally of realist social reconstruction also requires qualification. Foucault finds in the literary works of Maurice Blanchot “l’érosion invincible de la personne qui parle” (the invincible erosion of the person who speaks) and irreparable dispersion. (Foucault 1966B p. 536) But when he transposes his literary experience into asserting that progress in the human sciences is eroding day by day the philosophical myth of the unitary subject, he can legitimately be answered with the reply, “yes and no.” Yes, some people have very little of what Jane Loevinger and other psychologists call “ego development,” but no, some people score high on that variable according to elaborate mental measurement instruments that she and others have developed. (Loevinger 1976) The integrated and integrating ego exists in varying degrees and in diverse ways in our culture and in others. Jacques Lacan, whom Foucault originally cited as one of the leading scientists who confirmed for him that the literary discovery of subjectlessness was being validated scientifically by hard research reported in books to be found on the non-fiction shelves of libraries, helpfully observed in a dialogue with Foucault: “…I would like to remark that with or without structuralism it seems to me that there is nowhere any question, in the field vaguely marked by that label, of the negation of the subject. It is a matter of the dependence of the subject, which is extremely different; and particularly, at the level of the return to Freud, of the dependence of the subject with respect to something truly elementary, which we have tried to isolate under the name ‘signifier.’” (Lacan 1969 p. 820) Foucault is an ally of the realist insofar as he shows that nothing social is fixed or eternal. He is not an ally of those who believe in choice and construction insofar as he holds that willy-nilly we must accept a Nietzschean diagnosis of contemporary culture whether we want to or not; and he is not accurate to the extent that he underestimates the continuing vitality of humanistic ideals. (See Lipovetsky 1992) Foucault recognizes where the key issues are: in questions about how subjects are in fact constituted in modern society. His further research (from about 1970 on) will focus on creating “…a history of different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” (Foucault 1983 p. 208) Nietzsche provides Foucault with a guiding concept without which, in Kant’s terms, the percepts gathered in Foucault’s thousands of hours spent reading books in the libraries of Paris would have been blind: in different modes human beings are made subjects by power.
To say that Foucault took a Nietzschean turn is not to say that thereafter he consistently described himself as a Nietzschean nor that he thereafter found a single message in Nietzsche’s writings. (See Foucault 1985, pp. 53-54) It is to say that thinking in terms of will-to-power enabled him thereafter to reframe epistemology in a different perspective; which was, moreover, a perspective he desired. Concerning Marxism (taking it not only as an example, but also as a central example, since for Foucault, as for many others, it was a central theme), his Nietzschean turn enabled him to say that seeking to demonstrate that Marxism is a rational science is seeking to invest Marxism with power. (Foucault 1980, p. 85) It is something altogether different from demonstrating that Marxism’s propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures. ( Id. )
His Nietzschean turn enables Foucault to transform himself several times: from the anti-Marxist of Les Mots et les Choses, to the radical fellow traveller of the Marxists of the early 1970s, to the radical non-Marxist of a few years later, and then back to being a radical anti-Marxist, this time with an even more sophisticated discursive practice, outdoing even the sophisticated anti-Marxism of Les Mots et les Choses. By 1976 Foucault can refer to Marxism and psychoanalysis together as “the enemy” because they are “unitary theories.” (Foucault 1976 pp. 25-26) A Nietzschean Foucaldian can pass for a while among Marxist-Leninists as just one more comrade: “Yes, comrades it is all about struggle, all about power. Yes, comrades, the reason why the prison system arose when and as it did was that capitalism required it at a certain moment of its history. Yes, comrades, there is nothing more despicable than a reformist, a humanist, a social pacifist, a class collaborationist.” But it turns out that the Nietzschean Foucauldian discourse is not in the end Marxist-Leninist at all; it locates itself to the left of the Marxist-Leninists. The Soviet Union is just one more bourgeois state. Foucault in his radical period works with the Maoists (although it is a question what relationship there was between the Maoists of Paris and those of China). The labor unions are conservative organizations. The Communist Party is a conservative party. The conceptual move that makes it possible simultaneously to chime in with the most radical of the radicals and nevertheless to locate oneself to the left of them is the replacement of humanist ideals by power. As Foucault makes abundantly clear in a debate with Noam Chomsky, the proletariat (according to Foucault) is not fighting for justice. It is simply fighting to win. (Foucault and Chomsky 1974) But it follows from this Nietzschean premise that the bourgeoisie, or the rentier class, or a military cabal, or anybody who fights, is also fighting to win. Nobody has any more right to win than anyone else. The Nietzschean turn served to dissolve the traditional arguments reformers had made in favor of social justice, and to reinforce the sophist’s proposition that might makes right. “I am radically on the side of the sophists.” (Foucault 1974, p. 632) “Capitalism” is renamed and generalized as “power;” it is reduced to being just one form of “power” among others; and then, in a further development, it turns out that “power” is not bad after all: exercising power gives people pleasure; power is creative. (e.g. Foucault 1974 p. 642)
Following this line of thought, as he sometimes did –and I do not think he always did, I do not think he was consistent—Foucault sometimes comes to the conclusion that it does not matter what side one is on. Let me do a brief and evanescent flash-forward here to quote an incident Paul Veyne reports: “In 1982 or 1983, in Foucault’s apartment, we were watching a televised report on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; at one point one of the combatants (which side he was on is utterly unimportant) was invited to speak. Now this man spoke in terms quite different from the ones ordinarily encountered in political discussions. ‘I know only one thing,’ this partisan said, ‘I want to win back the lands of my forefathers. This is what I have wanted since my teens. I don’t know where this passion comes from, but there it is.’ ‘There we have it at last,’ Foucault said to me, ‘everything has been said, and there’s nothing more to say.’ Each valorization of the will to power, or each discursive practice (more scholarly types will spell out the relation between Nietzsche and Foucault on this point) is a prisoner of itself, and universal history is woven of nothing but such threads.” (Veyne 1997 pp. 225-6)
I do not know what Nietzsche would have thought, had he lived on into the 21st century, about proposals like mine to reduce dependence on the logic of capital accumulation by organizing nations and local communities with different rules; such as, for example, the three principles of permaculture (1. Love the earth, 2. Love its people, 3. Share the surplus) (Mollison 2005) Nietzsche might be read as saying that I am completely wrong: one cannot solve problems by formulating better rules and principles and persuading people to cooperate and share according to them, because rules are made by power. They do not make power. I will consider this perhaps Nietzschean objection to building non-authoritarian cultures of solidarity by cooperating to solve concrete physical problems in two ways. In the next chapter I will reflect on some of the roles ideas related to “power” have played in international and domestic politics. Later I will further examine power-talk in Foucault and Nietzsche.
References
Michel Aglietta, Regulación y Crisis del Capitalismo. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2002.
Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Philosophe,” interview with M-G Foy, Connaisance des Hommes, Autumn 1966, page 9. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “L’homme est-il Mort?,” interview with C. Bonnefoy, Arts et Loisirs, 15-21 June 1966, pages 8-9. (1966A) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “La Pensée du Dehors,” Critique, June 1966, pages 523-46. (1966B) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “La Philosophie Structuraliste Permet de Diagnostiquer ce qu’est ‘Aujourd’hui’,” in La Presse de Tunisie 12 April, 1967., p. 3. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Réponse a une Question,” in Esprit, May 1968. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Sur L’archéologie des Sciences, Réponse au Cercle d’épistemologie,” Généalogie des Sciences, Summer 1968. (1968A) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Titres et Travaux,” Paris: Plaquette, 1969. (Proposal submitted to the Collėge de France) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du Discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, La Généalogie, L’histoire,” 1971. (1971A) Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume II. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “La Verité et les Formes Juridiques,” 1974 (Lectures in Rio de Janeiro). Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume II. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Lecture One: 7 January 1976,” (from lectures at the Collège de France) reprinted in Michael Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995.
Michel Foucault, Interview with D. Trombadori, published in Italian in 1980. Translated and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Michel Foucault, “Le Retour de la Morale,” an interview with Andre Scala and G. Berbadette on May 29, 1984. published in Les Nouvelles Littéraires for 28 June – 5 July 1984. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 696-707.
Michel Foucault, Truth Power and Self,¨¨ an interview with R.Martin at the University of Vermont 25 October 1982. published in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, University of Massachussetts Press, 1988. pp. 9 15. Translated into French and reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Volume IV. pp. 777-783.
(1982)
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Michel Foucault, Power\Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, “Human Nature: Justice vs. Power,” a debate on Netherlands television in 1971, published in F. Elders (ed.) Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. London: Souvenir Press, 1974.
Antonio Gramsci, Note sul Machiavelli. Rome: Riuniti, 1979.
Jurgen Habermas, “Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” in Michael Kelly (ed.) Critique and Power. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. (first published in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987)
Alex Honneth, “Foucault’s Theory of Society: A Systems-Theoretic Dissolution of the Dialectics of Enlightenment.” In Michael Kelly (ed) Critique and Power. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994. (first published in English in 1991)
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936.
Jacques Lacan, remarks at a meeting of the Societé Française de Philosophie, February 22, 1969. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ēcrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Pages are cited to the latter source.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 2001.
Jane Loevinger, Ego Development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976.
Gilles Lipovetsky, Le Crépuscule du Devoir, l’éthique indolore des nouveaux temps démocratiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.
Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture: sustainable agriculture and human settlement. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publishers, 2005.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft. (1886) reprinted in Friedrich Nietzsche Gesammelte Werke volume 15. Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1925.
Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and his Ethics,” in Arnold Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital. London: Verso, 2004.
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