Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 - Softcover

Nealon, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080475702X ISBN 13: 9780804757027

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

In Foucault Beyond Foucault Jeffrey Nealon argues that critics have too hastily abandoned Foucault's mid-career reflections on power, and offers a revisionist reading of the philosopher's middle and later works. Retracing power's "intensification" in Foucault, Nealon argues that forms of political power remain central to Foucault's concerns. He allows us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that have taken place since the philosopher's death in 1984. In this, the book stages an overdue encounter between Foucault and post-Marxist economic history.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), and The Theory Toolbox (2003).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOUCAULT BEYOND FOUCAULT

Power and Its Intensifications since 1984By Jeffrey T. Nealon

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5702-7

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................viiIntroduction: Foucault Today................................................................................1Chapter 1 Foucault Beyond Foucault..........................................................................7Chapter 2 Once More, with Intensity: Foucault's History of Power Revisited..................................24Chapter 3 Genealogies of capitalism: Foucault, with Deleuze and Jameson.....................................54Chapter 4 Foucault's Infamous ethics; or, Biopower, Globalization, and ethical Scarcity.....................74Chapter 5 Resisting, Foucault...............................................................................94Notes.......................................................................................................113Works Cited.................................................................................................127Index of Names..............................................................................................135

Chapter One

Foucault Beyond Foucault

The task of philosophy is to describe the nature of today, and of "ourselves today." With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is one of total perdition, in the abyss of darkness, or a triumphant daybreak, and so on. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other. -Foucault, "Structuralism and Poststructuralism"

This book has two related aims. The first is constituted by my sense that, while Foucault has been dead for more than two decades and the world has changed quite substantially over those years, his work continues to offer us a set of valuable tools for intervening within today's discourses of power. In short, Foucault's work (especially his mid-career work on power and his late work on biopower and governmentality) still has much to teach us about the singular imbrications of practice, subjectivity, resistance, and power that saturate our present-"a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other." If one takes seriously the Foucaultian provocation that theories are toolboxes, conceptual schemas that function primarily within their transversal linkages to other archives, then there would seem no more "Foucaultian" project than one that attempts to take "Foucault beyond Foucault," into domains that he never could have analyzed.

In mobilizing that project, however, it became clear to me that such a trajectory also committed me to a second, related task: to perform a different or counterreading of the relation between the "middle" ("genealogical") Foucault and his "late" work on ethics and subjectivity. this second project-retracing Foucault's conceptual path from 1969's Archaeology of Knowledge to his death in 1984-became necessary precisely because of the exigency of the first. In short, it became clear to me that if one wants to read Foucault as something other than an apologist for the present, for the increasing "privatization" of economics, subjectivity, resistance, and power since his death in 1984, then one has to counter (or at least nuance) what has become the dominant sense of "the late Foucault": the sense that after the mid-1970s, he largely abandoned his work on the social interpellations of power and became instead a thinker of individual, artistic self-creation as a mode of resistance.

A concise version of this consensus concerning the late Foucault can be found, for example, in Understanding Foucault, which gives us the following gloss on Foucault's "later writings, where he shifts his focus from the effects of power to the ways in which human beings become 'subjects'":

An important concept that comes out of his work is that the self can be "authored" by us, the subjects, and that we can produce these selves and our lives as works of art. Foucault's early work on subjectivity effectively debunked the idea that identity is inherent or natural, but it failed to explain how and why individuals can in fact act autonomously, or resist the power of disciplinary forces and institutional discourses. In his later work he argues that individuals can in fact "cultivate" themselves through what he calls "arts of existence" that not only allow us to become self-determining agents, but also provide the grounds for us to challenge and resist power structures.

Although I'll try to provide a critique of this line of reasoning throughout the text, here at the beginning I'd simply like to mark the hegemony of this reading of the late Foucault. According to the consensus constituted by the secondary literature, Foucault's early and middle work culminates in a kind of totalizing theoretical cage (of which "discipline" is the highest manifestation) that in turn constituted a kind of crisis or dead-end for Foucault's thinking by the mid-1970s. As Fredric Jameson puts it, Foucault seems to have constructed a nearly iron "'winner loses' logic": "the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic-the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example-the more powerless the reader comes to feel." Hoping to reinvigorate a discourse and practice of resistance, Foucault turns in his late work-after Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (early 1976)-toward a more positive rendering of the formerly "docile" subject, highlighting the individual's potentials for subversive agency. In short, Foucault's late work performs a 180-degree turn away from the (too-totalizing and demoralizing) "power" discourse of the early and mid-1970s and culminates in a renewed appreciation of the enlightenment subject, the ethical arts of the self, and resistance to normalized totalization through individual action.

On this line of reasoning, the 1984 essay "What Is enlightenment?" becomes the central theoretical text where one can see Foucault overtly thematizing this softening of his earlier stances toward truth, subjectivity, reason, and the enlightenment itself. As Lois Mcnay puts it, Foucault's late work turns to an "'ethics of the self'":

Through the formation of a "critical ontology of the self" it is possible to formulate an alternative ethical standpoint from which individuals can begin to resist the normalizing force of the "government of individualization." The idea of an ethics of the self redefines Foucault's relation with a tradition of enlightenment thought, which he rereads through the figures of Kant and Baudelaire. From this reinterpretation, Foucault is able to deploy the concepts of autonomy, reflexivity, and critique and thereby overcome some of what have been regarded as the nihilistic implications of his earlier work on discipline. The idea of ethics of the self partially overcomes some of the difficulties ... arising from Foucault's insistence on individuals as docile bodies rather than as agents with the capacity for autonomous action.

Foucault's work does of course consistently shift its targets and interests as it discovers new objects and problems, and as part of his peripatetic research agenda, he clearly does become increasingly interested in the subjective regimes of biopower from the mid-1970s onward. The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality are certainly quite different from the first; however, the question is whether that difference comes about through an abandonment or dialectical sublation of Foucault's earlier itinerary, or through a transformative intensification of that very agenda. The dominant reading in the secondary work suggests the former rather than the latter, thereby allowing Foucault to become a pioneering figure in what Amanda Anderson calls "a new subjectivism" in contemporary theory:

The most telling example here would be the dramatic late turn in the work of Michel Foucault, which set aside the far-reaching examination of modern power and modern institutions to explore the "care of the self" within antiquity and, to a lesser degree, within modernity, as well. While Foucault's previous work had been interested in the forms of subjectivity engendered by modern disciplinary power, the later Foucault was interested in the manner in which individuals understood, conducted, and therefore in some sense owned, their moral, social, and physical lives.

Here I'll want to argue vigorously against this "180-degree turn" critical consensus concerning the middle and late Foucault, specifically against the idea that the late Foucault abandons his research on the social canalizations of power and becomes cozy with a kind of liberal individualism. I'll even try to challenge the sense that his late work "represents a substantial departure from his earlier writings (that the self is a docile body, produced by dominant discourses and institutions)." Rather, it seems to me that in Foucault's work after 1969 there is a continuous experimental research itinerary, as opposed to the picture found in so much of the secondary work: a neo-Hegelian developmental narrative where Foucault's theoretical "mistakes" (most pointedly, the "nihilistic" or "totalizing" discourse on power developed in Discipline and Punish and in History of Sexuality, volume 1) are negated and sublated in the name of developing a higher truth about the liberal subject and its developing abilities to resist the imperatives of a normative culture.

Eric Paras's Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge is probably the most extended book-length elaboration of this Bildungsroman thesis, although the thrust of the argument is already contained cleverly in his title. "Foucault 1.0" was the old, clunky operating system of power and knowledge which Foucault moved "beyond" in his late work, finally embracing the substantially more user-friendly, "2.0" humanist agenda he had once so savagely critiqued. Richard Wolin sums up Foucault 2.0 in "Foucault the neohumanist?" by arguing that Paras shows us how Foucault "abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject.... under the sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the rights of subjectivity."

For the record, although I do think that such readings are demonstrably "wrong," for me that's not the major problem with them (of course, they're demonstrably "right" as well). I do not undertake this rereading project primarily in the name of a "better understanding" of Foucault; rather, I do so in the name of reactivating his analyses and conceptual vocabulary for use in the contemporary situation. Because if indeed the late Foucault is what most secondary work says he is-a booster of individual ethico-aesthetic self-creation as resistance to the totalizing, normalizing imperatives of disciplinary culture-then that secondary work's final judgment on Foucault is also, it seems to me, inexorably correct. As Mcnay writes, summarizing another chestnut of Foucault criticism, such a supposedly "ethical moment amounts in fact to little more than a fetishization of a notion of aesthetic practice." On the dominant reading, the late Foucaultian turn to the self-creating subject and its artistic agency can only remind us of present-day American military recruiting posters ("Become an army of one") or the corporate slogan of Microsoft: "Where would you like to go today?" Whatever one may have thought of "artistic self-creation" as an imperative resistant to the dominant culture of the "Moral Majority" 1980s, it is now ubiquitously familiar to us. Not so much from avant-garde art practices or difficult ethical imperatives, but largely from advertising: "Saab: choose your own Road," "outback Steakhouse: no Rules, Just Right." Or the ad agency's constant helpful reminders concerning the links between authentic cultural rebels and the products by which we know them: Jack Kerouac wore khakis; Ghandi would have used a Macintosh computer; cadillacs are all about rock 'n' roll, and so on.

In short, if in the end Foucault is a thinker of artistic self-fashioning as ethical resistance, then Foucault would seem to have very little critical to say about the present, especially the economic present, as it seems supersaturated with these practices of endless, fetishized self-creation. Get a tattoo and/or a Humvee, and "normative power" will shudder. as tom Frank writes about the corporate truisms of today's so-called new economy:

Consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference." ... It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock 'n' roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from "sameness" that satiates our thirst for the new with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-eleven. ... However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information age business theory.

In short, the cultural and economic imperatives lauded by much secondary work on Foucault-the endless, self-creative project of making yourself and your life a work of art-are imperatives that have, in the short span since Foucault's death, become wholly "normative." Post-cold war, American-style neoliberal consumption capitalism has become the driving force behind "globalization" in the past decades, and as Frank wittily argues, that brand of new-age discipline performs its hegemonic or totalizing work not through some notion of cultural standardization or repression, but precisely through the cultural/economic imperative to become a flexibly specialized individual, resistant to the normalizing influence of the government, the "Man," or the herd. As Foucault himself writes about "American neo-liberalism" of the "Chicago school," it was "developed in reaction against the 'excessive government' exhibited in its eyes ... by the new deal, war-planning, and the great economic and social programs generally supported by postwar democratic administrations."

The project of contemporary neoliberal economics, in other words, shares quite a lot with the dominant critical picture of "the late Foucault": each is supposedly dedicated to the project of throwing off the subjective "docility" inevitably created by powerful social forces and schemes, thereby freeing up individual agency through some notion of authentic self-creation. In his 1982 course on "the Birth of Biopolitics," a set of lectures delivered in the historical infancy of the neoliberal political and economic regime that we increasingly live under, Foucault comes to a rather unsurprising conclusion about such thinking, at least it will seem unsurprising to those of us living on after Foucault, in the economics-saturated world of "freakonomics": "American neo-liberalism seeks ... to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic. For example, the family and birth policy, or delinquency and penal policy." Or, one might add, neoliberalism is dedicated to the economization of artistic self-creation as a strategy for resisting normativity: that style of subjectivity has in fact become american-style neoliberalism's primary engine and product line. In any case, it is from this fate as a thinker of creative, resistant individualism-quite literally as a neoliberal theorist-that I will need to dislodge the late Foucault, if indeed his work is to be useful as any kind of critical wedge to intervene in the world that has configured itself in the years since Foucault's death.

What Is "What Is enlightenment?"

Much of the critical consensus concerning the late Foucault takes its inspiration directly from his 1984 essay "What Is enlightenment?" where it seems that Foucault definitively softens his stance toward the enlightenment imperatives of autonomy, rationality, liberty, and subjective self-determination. Insofar as volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's History of Sexuality are primarily practical analyses rather than theoretical treatises (not to mention the fact that those volumes are tightly focused on examining societies between 1,000 and 2,400 years past), the enlightenment essay becomes a crucial site for the secondary literature's modernizing of Foucault's "subject-centered" turn. The enlightenment essay is important for suggesting, in other words, that the late Foucault's turn toward studying ancient self-creation techniques may have some ready relevance for us (post)moderns. Perhaps we become "other Greeks and Romans" for the late Foucault, rather than the (more historically plausible, though less immediately appealing) "other Victorians" who we seemed to be in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality.

Leaning heavily on Kant's 1784 response to the question "What is Enlightenment?" and Kant's insistence on the enlightenment slogan "dare to know," Foucault argues that what connects us today to the enlightenment is not so much a question of doctrinal content (the truth or falsity of this or that enlightenment argument), but the infinite yet everyday task of such daring "knowing." In other words, the legacy of the enlightenment is the call to think critically about the present, to emphasize becoming over being, and to practice what Foucault calls "a permanent critique of our historical era." "Modern man," Foucault writes citing 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." Insofar as Foucault emphasizes Kant's conception of enlightenment as Ausgang (an exit, escape, or "a way out" of darkness, ignorance, or servility), Foucault is taken here to be endorsing the practices of enlightenment subjectivity as a mode of resistance to the present; which is to say, the task of permanent, everyday self-fashioning also harbors "the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think." Compelled by the early 1980s theory debates to take up a position concerning what he calls "the blackmail of the enlightenment" (for it, or against it?), Foucault finally comes around to embracing what he had so long resisted: a positive endorsement of the enlightenment project, "our impatience for liberty." This, at least, is what I take to be the dominant reading of "What Is enlightenment?" and by metonymy, the whole of "the late Foucault": he shifts his emphasis from the subject's sociopolitical docility (thumbs down on the enlightenment) to its creative, norm-busting individual agency (two thumbs way up).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from FOUCAULT BEYOND FOUCAULTby Jeffrey T. Nealon Copyright © 2008 by Board of trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080475702X
• ISBN 13: 9780804757027
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 146