The Rhetorician.
In Francis Bacon’s essay Of Truth, he paraphrases Lucretius’ elaboration of Epicurus’ philosophy, elevating mental pleasures above all others: ‘no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth [...] and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below’ [1]. Fulfilling the Ciceroean criteria of an eloquent man, that he must teach, delight, and persuade, Bacon holds that truth ‘which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature’ [2]. Michel Foucault, with his gifts of language and extensive lecturing, is a near match to Cicero’s ideal orator, or in the Greek vernacular, a rhetorician.
Foucault’s truth
Truth, for Foucault, is the status of truth. The discovery of truth is not an item of knowledge, but the detachment of the power to distinguish between true and false from the item of knowledge itself. Foucault rejects the notion that power is only negative, and blames the concepts of repression and ideology for this view. The idealised need for ‘a power without a bludgeon, and [...] knowledge without deception’ is blinding a better view on power, and by blocking out this wistfulness, almost like enhancing telescopic depth by blocking the sun, Foucault begins his search for power’s ‘missing matter’ [3]. Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality is the work that offers the most explicit outline of a theory of power, and it is accompanied by ‘rules’ on how to dissect power-knowledge nexuses. This section will focus more on Foucault’s methodology of power than on his actual postulates on power, as the former incorporates the latter. And since an understanding of human nature is sought, the methodology will delimit creativity more than would the postulates.
Discourse and power
Discourse, including all silences, is the joining of power and knowledge, and is what allows for an investigation of the status of truth. Tracing the proliferation of discourse, suggests Foucault, is understanding the application of power, as the rise in one results in the rise of the other.
[P]ower must be understood [...] as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which [...] transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another [...], or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect.
(My italics) [4]
Relations of power are inherent in every type of relationship. Sexuality, according to Foucault, is ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’ [5]. Throughout history such relations have combined with available knowledge to make objects of discourse ‘appear’ to form ‘matrices of transformations’ [6]. In the domain of sexuality, examples of vortices in its matrix are: the child and masturbation, the woman and birth control, the man and his sexuality.
The Rule of Immance
The emergence of objects in this structure is expressed by Foucault’s Rule of Immanence, which creates and destructs in equal measure. ‘Between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority’ [7]. The mutual dependences of power and knowledge allows for discourse to grow into ‘visible’ objects by the mutual consent of power and knowledge, whilst transcendence of one by the other is impossible. Exteriority is eliminated; absolute truth from the complete exhaustion of power by knowledge, or vice versa, cannot be attained.
The Rule of Continual Variations
Foucault’s Rule of Continual Variations dissolves the permanency of these power-knowledge objects, and highlights the dynamic form force relations take. This is perhaps his plea that to understand the process is more important than to recognise its products. What seems a long-term approach for the politically active individual has a faint echo of Ovid: ‘Spare the whip, boy, and pull harder on the reins’ [8].
The Rule of Double Conditioning
The Rule of Double Conditioning ties the small to the large and the large to the small. With terms borrowed from theatres of war, Foucault relates tactics to strategies: ‘one must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work’ [9]. Demanding continuity between power-knowledge objects of all sizes whilst stressing their heterogeneity, Foucault resurrects what he had laid to rest by his rejection of ideology. His rule that, by extension, draws up the scope of creativity in human nature, mirrors Marx’s deterministic view: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’ [10].
The Rule of Tactical Polyvalence of Discourses
The final rule of Foucault’s method is the Rule of the Tactical Polyvalence of Discourses. Discourse is the manifestation of both positive and negative power, as it ‘transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it’ [11]. In summary, Foucault’s methodology offers a set of tools to improve our ability to comprehend the dynamics of power relations on a small scale through the continuous construction of a power-knowledge grid, to which the transitory nature of the collection of discourses provides a blueprint.
Three-pronged attack
But with such an improved ability, were Foucault’s methodology to work, what are the guiding principles of how to make the right use of it? Is Foucault’s conception of power void of self-referential critique and therefore irresponsible? Ju?rgen Habermas’s three-pronged attack on Foucault’s theory of power charges him with presentism (the past understood in the context of the present), relativism (the rejection of absolute knowledge), and cryptonormativism (the reliance on values whilst claiming their absence). They combine to form the problem of modernity: ‘how to practice modern critique in a philosophical manner given its self-referentiality’ [12]. Rather than evaluating the actual charges made, it is worth looking at how the two adversaries attempt to escape this general crisis of philosophy. Michael Kelly, in Critique and Power, conjoins Foucault’s and Habermas’s description of modernity and thus defines the extent of their agreement: ‘modernity is critical toward its own present and [...] must perpetually create its own normativity’ [13]. Beyond this harmony, the value-laden term ‘normativity’ is where their disagreement begins, and can best be explained through their diverging views on what is worth ‘keeping’ from the Enlightenment. One of the universals to come out of this period is a method of critique, and whilst Habermas wants to preserve this, Foucault sees more value in retaining the critique of method that arose; the contest is seemingly between substance and procedure. With regards to human nature in the power-knowledge nexus, Foucault is not willing to separate critique from power in philosophical discourse, and a consequence of this according to Habermas is the redundancy of values. Foucault concurs: ‘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’ [14]. Toying further with Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence and schools of thought in closing, Habermas rejects the aesthetic for the ethical, and does so with Stoic zeal, as will become apparent in the next part.
(Interview with Jürgen Habermas)
Endnotes
- Francis Bacon, The Essays, Penguin, 1985, p. 62.
- Ibid.
- Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, The New Press, 2006, p. 151.
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1, The Will to Knowledge, Penguin, 1998, pp. 92-93.
- Ibid., p. 103.
- Ibid., p. 97.
- Ibid.
- Francis Bacon, The Essays, Penguin, 1985, p. 160: ‘Parce, puer, stimulis, et fortius utere loris’
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1, The Will to Knowledge, Penguin, 1998, p. 97.
- David McLellan (ed), Karl Marx Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 300.
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: 1, The Will to Knowledge, Penguin, 1998, p. 97.
- Michael Kelly, Critique and Power, MIT Press, 1995, p. 382.
- Ibid., p. 383.
- Ibid., p. 268.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }