We opened the discussion in the Foucault podcast with the question, “are we really free?” I’d just like to take a minute to clarify this question and to raise some problems for Foucault.
First of all, there’s certainly a sense in which Foucault never denied that we’re free. He even says that “freedom is the ontological condition of power,” meaning that power only works to motivate us toward a particular set of behaviors because we’re free to choose within a field of possibilities. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault points out ways in which we are less free than we thought, but it’s not power in general that makes us less free; rather, it’s a specific form that power takes. Discipline is a dominating form of power, one that creates asymmetrical relationships of power in which there is control over the minds and bodies of individuals. It’s this kind of power that Foucault is worried about precisely because it limits our freedom by influencing the choices we make and what we even take to be the field of reasonable possibilities. I think the question I should like to ask of Foucault is not whether or not we are free, but if there can be limitations placed on our freedom that are legitimate.
Charles Taylor criticizes Foucault on the basis that he advocates purely negative freedom. Foucault is rarely prescriptive, but occasionally, in his later works and interviews especially (see the collection, Foucault Live.)
At this point, you might be wondering, "what’s the problem with negative freedom?" Writing about this issue in Foucault once, I got a margin comment from my prof that just said, “Yuk. Sounds like bourgeois individualism.” It’s the kind of freedom you’re asserting when you say, “But Mom, I don’t want to!!” It’s just unreasonable to think that we can exist in an organized, cooperative society in which no one’s actions interfere with the actions of others. So what is it about disciplinary power that crosses the line and is no longer placing upon us acceptable limitations to our freedom? Keep in mind that we tend to think that there are even legitimate forms of domination, if domination is simply defined as an asymmetrical power relationship, as in the rearing and education of children. I think Foucault has pointed out some very real dangers to our freedom, but he hasn’t done enough to distinguish among legitimate and non-legitimate forms of power.
-Katie McIntyre
once we move with Foucault to a post-structuralist position is it really possible (or even desirable?) to try and come up with general rules/standards for judging what is or is not acceptable/legitimate? Wouldn’t that fall into the kind of critiques that Rorty and others rightly bring against thinkers like Rawls? And couldn’t we read Foucault’s later work on self-discipline and fearless speech as examples of freedom (via disciplined response-ability) to rather than just freedom from? Have you read Rorty on his private/public distinction?
I’m loving the thought of your likely tenured american research professor doling out criticism about bourgeois individualism. Really you could quite quickly distinguish all non-legitimate forms of power just by examining capitalist relations. It’s really too bad even the radicalists out of the preceding generation grew up with such massive unavoidable strawmen in their heads about the reality of socialist states, as have always been deliberately misdirected by foreign capitalist powers.
Foucault’s account of freedom is most definitely impoverished (if even coherent!). Good post.
Habermas says Foucault’s work shares with Heidegger’s work the characteristic of crypto-normativity, e.g., is the description of Dasein in the mode of authenticity and freedom given in Division II of Being and Time a purely descriptive account, as Heidegger seems to suggest, or does it not involve a prescriptive, normative stance from Heidegger on how one ought to think of freedom? The charge is that Foucault picks up this denial of a normative element in his work from the problems endemic to phenomenology.
Rorty’s criticism of Foucault is interesting too. Rorty thinks Foucault wants to retain the sense of being a metaphysician who is revealing to us a deep truth about ourselves hidden by layers of historical power, while at the same time claiming that all such intended projects in the past were mere inauthentic manifestations of structural powers by unwitting philosophers. For Rorty, then end of metaphysics means we have to accept the legitimacy of the liberal bourgeois way of life as an acceptable end of the road for the Western philosophy.
On this topic I would recommend Robert Pippin’s “The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath”. It’s a leftist critique of all the leftist social and political European intellectuals following Kant and Hegel that have wanted to find some new post-metaphysical stance from which to condemn the modern liberal bourgeois world. Pippin makes a more rational version of Rorty’s critique of the intellectuals: it’s time to stop trying to theorize the bourgeois world as inauthentic. Hegel had it right before everyone else got it wrong again: the modern bourgeois “spirit” or normative ideal of individual agency and responsibility through reason-giving is a result of Western history that we should appreciate, not condemn.
http://www.amazon.com/Persistence-Subjectivity-Kantian-Aftermath/dp/0521613043/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8
Harold Bloom was right about Rorty being the most interesting. Well I think so mainly because I can actually read his essays and enjoy them. I tended to agree with his assessment of Foucault. Having made these positive remarks, I will say Rorty on epistemology and truth I do not buy.
ha Harold would of course have liked the thinker in the bunch who employed aspects of his own thinking, Rorty is the most useful of that generation in the end but he learned and borrowed much from his continental interlocutors dead and alive.
Welll, yes people have viewed Bloom’s interest in Rorty as Bloom’s interest in himself.
Regarding your second point, Rorty said he was not original and merely had a talent for bricolage. He’s interesting in that way.
I haven’t read Harold Bloom, but it does seem Bloom’s notion of “the strong poet” has a lot to do with the ironism of Rorty’s “liberal ironist”.
I was gonna say here that this is fascinating stuff to me, Bloom’s strong poet and Rorty’s liberal ironist. I am intending now to go back and look at the concepts again and to re-read Rorty on Foucault.. It’s difficult being spread thin with time and energy and just trying “to make my way in the world”, getting disciplined and punished all the time, as a mere non-genius. Then attempting to understand what some genius philosophers were going on about! I tell you what. It’s probably hopeless. And they’ll be arguing about what so and so said thousands of years from now if there are still people (which there I’m sure wont be but that’s another topic more disturbing than anything Foucault was going on about).
Foucault himself (after reflection and back&forths with Derrida and others) moved away from hermeneutics/structuralism, seeing that say Madness is not the repressed Other to Reason, Rorty did not say that giving up on metaphysics means that we have to accept anything as legitimate just that he could see no truly worthy alternative on the horizon, nothing preferable with a proven track record. Is Pippin as you have him here so different from Brandom>
Simple observation here – it is really, really a shame Foucault died when he did. Obviously obsessed with evolving, who knows where he would’ve headed. He had much more work to do!
not so sure that Foucault was interested in evolving as much as he was just trying to make his way in the world but I would have been interested to see if he would have gone thru another period/genre of work or just gotten caught up in the details of his later work.
My hope is that he would have stayed actively engaged with Rabinow and helped us to shift into the Practice turn but that’s more about the Foucault I use for my own purposes than the flesh and blood man who seemed quite content with his own brand of archive-fever.
I’m curious as to what “just trying to make his way in the world” means. What does this mean, possibly for Foucault, and what could it possibly mean for people in general. And how does it differ from “evolving”. Foucault seemed interested in.. can I use the word – transformation? I’m interested in how Foucault’s research, his work, related to him personally — I mean what really drove him, what was he up to, why did he want to study sexuality, prisons, power systems, psychology, philosophy etc.
Um. Yeah. Just “making his way in the world” by teaching particular theoretical view of history intended to subvert. Y’know, just like any other soul making his way in the world.
not an uncommon academic pursuit in France around that time, he was actively and, often against the odds, a prof. and not a prophet.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/mai-68/3275482
not sure how you decided that of all the things going on in his life and work that “transformation” was a key factor/interest, we should be very careful about trying to reduce people to themes, life is complex and emergent.
No definitive way of saying what really drove him or anyone else for that matter. If you want to use his works/example(s) to amplify aspects of some theme that interests you than by all means but please don’t use his author-ity for such projects, better to own them.
Knew your response would be interesting. Sorry, been away from a computer -for a few days! which is weird experience now.
OK, I was influenced by some of the things Rorty wrote regarding Foucault. And came across quotes like this one I just cribbed from wikipedia:
“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.”
Well felt obliged to include the whole paragraph but the bit about becoming someone else that you were not in the beginning. That’s all I got at the moment. My eyes hurt from playing catch-up with my internet addiction.
Foucault was working against the current of thought which saw philo in terms of “know thy self” and perhaps against the idea of Philosophy as a Mirror of Nature to borrow from a Rorty title that might be a good read here. John Caputo took this a step further in his strong mis-reading of Foucault to think of a hermeneutics of not-knowing who we are:
http://books.google.com/books?id=fzlVdvX-3rAC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=caputo+foucault+not+knowing&source=bl&ots=0Vmfz7vPH2&sig=kcXq5mdD9htA1440pXOVDjGqB0k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=h3YyT_PIIuyAsgK26PXpBg&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=caputo%20foucault%20not%20knowing&f=false
Would it not be unfair to describe Foucault as another French Rousseau-ian romantic assuming the false idea that “man is born free” and yet finds himself in the “chains” of society? That is a Romantic Anarchist thinking a society without legitimate rules and laws is somehow possible?
well it would be inaccurate, Foucault was actually working against thinkers like Sartre.
This is why these kinds of off-the-cuff and far from the texts conversations are fine as long as we don’t ascribe our ideas/interests to other people.
I don’t think this is a very fair reading, his philosophy being almost entirely non-prescriptive, it’s more that we’re born in to a certain set of chains, but the ones control societies are bound by function differently. He doesn’t speak very much about what a non-control society would look like, or allow that they could possibly be. What he does do is completely tear apart our set of rules and laws, such that one is forced to wonder whether they ever could be legitimate.
chains doesn’t quite capture it, it’s more like Dewey’s idea of habits we couldn’t function without them but they can become binding/limiting and then hopefully we can develop new ones. Think of language acquisition, without adopting (even identifying with) some semblance of grammar we couldn’t be understood but than there are many complications that arise around issues of what can be said or not and how these decisions are made/enforced. Many Catholic thinkers have embraced these ideas (and related aspects of Heidegger) because they have a framework for thinking about existential freedom via submission/discipline and not as opposed to it, but there is also a kind of American/pragmatist/ zen line of thinking that talks about the relationship between practice, mastery, and improv where one might find examples in say jazz.
That’s actually a really nice way of putting it, thanks. I’ll just add that despite his attempts at remaining sterile in tone, I can’t help but feel an apocalyptic sense pervading Foucault’s style of writing. There’s some reason he’s not just Dewey ad nauseum, anyway.
glad it was helpful , not Dewey in many ways but also not ultimately of the Prison-house of Language crowd either.