Michel Foucault, History, Genealogy, Counter-Conduct and Techniques of the Self
Hello everyone,
I specialize in Foucaultian studies. I am interested in alternative lifestyles and how they can offer resistance to consumerism and various forms of "productive identities" shaped under capitalism. We live in a punitive and disciplinary society, which uses totalizing meta-narratives to justify present relationships of domination and exclusion. Foucault suggests to engage in Parresia a type of courageous talk, which forms part of techniques of self-discipline offered by the Stoics and Romans as a way to resist the order of things and live a more rewarding life, independent of institutional coercion. I just wanted to reach out to everyone with similar interests and see if we can spark a small discussion.
Looking forward to meeting everyone.
I specialize in Foucaultian studies. I am interested in alternative lifestyles and how they can offer resistance to consumerism and various forms of "productive identities" shaped under capitalism. We live in a punitive and disciplinary society, which uses totalizing meta-narratives to justify present relationships of domination and exclusion. Foucault suggests to engage in Parresia a type of courageous talk, which forms part of techniques of self-discipline offered by the Stoics and Romans as a way to resist the order of things and live a more rewarding life, independent of institutional coercion. I just wanted to reach out to everyone with similar interests and see if we can spark a small discussion.
Looking forward to meeting everyone.
Comments (36)
There's a lot of buzz about courageous talk now, e.g. #MeToo. It's been effective to an extent, and within positions of power.
I recall Colin Firth publicly berating himself for knowing about Weinstein and not speaking out against it. And that for the most part seems to have been the case: the people who spoke out were the victims. Why did so few who knew support them? Probably related to the fact that the would-be victims who resisted still don't have careers. No one's talking about the new Mira Sorvino movie, and she's an Oscar winner.
There is, or was, a campaign to get men to protest their own friends' misogynistic behaviour. I doubt that's fared much better, but I hope it had some impact. My feeling is that the majority of people prize validation from their peers more than they prize their own authenticity.
The danger as I see it falls in distinguishing that authenticity from the trappings of one's culture, which might be good, bad, or arbitrary. Foucault champions asserting one's truth at the risk of being a pariah within one's peer group. But the benefit of having a peer group is that it might temper bad apples. We only have to look west and back a few years to see how bad actors can emerge from the underground once bad actions are legitimised.
Appeals to one's sovereignty are always at odds with, or at least perpendicular to, our moral duties, which concern our own behaviour within a social group. The right balance of challenging the behaviours of others and challenging one's own beliefs seems like the win-win to me.
But I think no less than cultural trappings we should address explicit institutional trappings (perhaps this still falls within your definition of culture), even Foucault said at one point that acquiring a gay identity and being recognized as a group, far from a final goal or a definitive victory, may turn out to be a bit of a quagmire, as it very often happens that it is precisely recognition or the acquisition of rights that places the subject onto a new plane of power-relations. One may also create a continuous and subversive field of alterity, resulting in a gradual takeover rather than a single decisive battle.
In terms of peer pressure or conformity, parresia is not even parresia if one's own status, social, financial or other, is not in danger of being undermined. I think we can distinguish various forms of parresia. We could imagine the parresia of a classical revolutionary who speaks truth to power at a certain point but in a way that brings about radical change, or we could conceive of a receding into the self and taking care of oneself and others through particular forms of self-training and self-discipline. The latter is a form of radical depoliticization of the public sphere.
My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. This is another important point for Foucault, the productive element of power.
I agree.I think that Foucault's turn to parrhesia was a way to represent his situation.
In parrhesia, the speaking subject's truth-telling has a double performative effect of
impacting others and transforming the enunciating subject himself. No doubt,
Foucault was effective in both dimensions. Yet, it looks like in our situation
accomplishing the successful parrhesiastic enunciation has become quite challenging.
In a broader perspective, we could see the processes of appropriation and redeployment
not just of Foucault's discourse, but of a vast spectrum of discourses of resistance. To better understand and deal with this situation, we can turn again to Foucault's parrhesia.
It was his way to defend himself against the accusation of killing
any hope for resistance: if power-knowledge is omnipresent and ubiquitous, there is no place
and discourse for resistance. Yet, Foucault's authentic parrhesia is not his story of himself, disguised as the research of ancient philosophers. It is his account on personal exposure to contemporary power relations. Implicitly, his texts on power combine both dimensions of truth-telling. Re-reading and re-interpreting Foucault's texts are not sufficient. Likely, to perform an act of parrhesiastic enunciation, one should discover how power impacts oneself and one's discourses, including what one considers parrhesiastic and resistant ones.
Why would you want to do that? Just don’t combine Foucault with insufferable moralism like so much of the discourse of the left does.
Absolutely.
Quoting Giorgi
Precisely my thinking about #MeToo (and #TimesUp), which was largely a Hollywood thing. Surface changes made, but nothing structural. The victims remained victims, nothing much changed.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:up:
Perhaps controversial, but the confinement of mass politics to discourse; politics as mass shitposting; isn't isolated to the US, UK, or even the political North. You can read the failure [hide=*](political voids filled by religious militantism)[/hide] of the Arab spring uprisings and global climate strikes in the same context. Non-coordinated spontaneous disruption by an actor network is antithetical to any new institutionalisation of power by that network - the revolution's come to look like a corporate teambuilding event.
Even if it breaks shit, there's little to no plan. What comes in the space cleared by that breaking?
I agree that under certain circumstances reading and re-reading Foucault's texts can become an act of resistance.
Quoting Giorgi
Foucault's insistence
on the omnipresence of power can undermine his concept of resistance. Baudrillard, in his book 'Forget Foucault', claimed that Foucault expressed the new capitalist mode of production that knocked down and re-created every form of social communication: “This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated situation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining the body. It is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate, gravity and any fixed point must disappear…This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies." Likely, Boudrillard capitalized on the Foucault’s assertion of the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power.
Since power is everywhere, any place could become the site of resistance. This claim may deprive the problem of resistance of its specifics and concretization. Since power is not repressive and ideological but productive, it could result in the inclusion of resistance into the dominating social order. Further, social actors usually do not experience their social engagements as shaped by power alignments. For example, newly created contemporary gender identities are commonly considered as the liberation movement, but not the effect of the power-knowledge complex of dispositif of sexuality. Foucault’s turn to techniques of self-discipline could be viewed as his answer to the problem of resistance. Yet, he could not foresee that the newest tendency of capitalistic biopolitical production is precisely the focus on one’s experiences where one’s subjectivity
can be intensified, bent, and re-tooled.
I assume you exclude the poor from this, ie. people who due to lack of money have to invent lifestyles that are alternative to consumerism and offer resistance to it?
There are many versions of phenomenology. The forms of phenomenology that were institutionalized in France were bastardized interpretations , owing much more to Sartre than to Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is not a ‘theory or the subject’.
Foucault is certainly an improvement over Sartre, but I think Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Foucault.
Sartre misread many forms of philosophy, as Derrida noted. He essentialized the ego , whereas Merleau-Ponty made the self out in the world. As far as the origin of the experience of the body, for MP body is a gestalt field , as is intersubjectivity. But that means institutions and other forms of conditioning only have their existence against a background of the body. If the body is nothing but these conditionings, the it is no longer a body and we can’t even talk about the socially determining conditionings. Each implies the other and this means that what conditions us is experienced from a point of view.
Each of us are conditioned by shared practices. that is the social gestalt. But those shared practices are not indentical practices. Each of us are conditioned differently
by those same practices. That is what it means to be embodied.
Focualt’s model of social interaction is too blunt and monolithic. It fails to discern differences within institutional forces, and as a result is inclined to act too violently.
What have been some of your discoveries in these investigations?
It looks like you try to avoid the discussion of the problem of resistance by redefining it as a way of appropriation
and ‘condensation’ of power. May be, it fits Foucault’s personal experiment. Nevertheless, it does not eliminate a certain vagueness of his conceptualization of power.
For Foucault, power is not specifically localized and is not primerily located in the machinery of State or other distinguishable institutions; it is embedded within common social and every day practices, and it is immanent to the entire social field. Therefore, power becomes undetectable and unrecognizable. It can require a long-term effort and special skills to perform a task of genealogical work to identify particular effects of power alignments. On the contrary, those subjected to power submit to it as if it were a natural order, forming the horizon of sense. It is not clear how one could resist or modify the effects of
the omnipotent, omnipresent, and indiscernible power. For Deleuze, the question of resistance was one of the points of disagreement with Foucault. “ For myself, status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem, since lines of flight are primary determinations, since desire assembles the social field”. ( Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’). Instead of the program of resistance, he offers the project of re-investment of desire that can crash or seal off the dispositifs
of power.
What institutes the institution, what establishes the establishment? What incorporates the corporation? What embodies the body? What is the irreducible basis of a relation of forces? If the body is created by the institutional and corporate conditions of its being, make damm sure you don’t essentialize whatever you think you mean by corporate or institutional lens. It may cause you to miss what is most important and relevant to behavior, the subtle and intricate creative
changes that are likely utterly invisible to a thinking that
begins from a glorified Skinnerian notion of conditioning.
Read this paragraph 10 times and notic how your sense of the meaning of it changes each time in subtle ways. Welcome to the origin of the social. Good luck trying to explain that by institutionalized forces. Only a much more nuanced understanding of affectivity, sense, feeling and significance will allow you to see a whole universe of change underlying the monolithic, generic and superficial
entities that you take to be the irreducible basis of meaning.
The same can be said of a more originary basis of ‘power, in temporality. Or to put it in Derrida’s terms: not power but force, and not simply force
but differences of force. This deconstructs
Foucault’s power.
“ The words "force" and "power" which I have just joined you in using, also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micropowers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena "powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under three conditions, at least. A. That one takes account of the fact that there is never any thing called power or force, but only differences of power and of force, and that these differences are as qualitative as they are quantitative. In short, it seems to me that one must start, as Nietzsche doubtless did, from difference in order to accede to force and not vice versa. B. That, starting from this qualitatively differential thought, one opens oneself, in attempting to account for it, to this apparently perverse or paradoxical possibility: the ostensibly greater force can also be the "lesser" (or the "strongest" force is not "strongest" but "weakest, " which supposes the essential possibility of an inversion of meaning, that is to say, a mutation of meaning not limited to the semantics of discourse or the dictionary but which also "produces" itself as history). C. That one takes into account, consequently, all the paradoxes and ruses of force, of power, of mastery, as traps in which these ruses cannot avoid being caught up. I” (From Limited, Inc.)
Quoting Giorgi
We certainly have had enough of that, and that is why Heidegger and Derrida’s notion of temporality does nothing of the sort. Have you read these authors? There is nothing ‘pre-given’ about temporality. It is not a formal pre-conditon, but relationally itself , the in-between. It is Foucault who maintains a link to Kantianism in the structuralist basis of his forms of power.
Quoting Giorgi
Heidegger deconstructed traditional Western Ontology, and put in its place his own Ontology of Dasein.
Quoting Giorgi
In order to do that it is necessary to deconstruct the idea of a centered structure , that is , an ensemble of elements united by a central force or identity. Can you do that with the notion of power as a partial-object? Define partial-object a bit further for me.
Could you elaborate on that a little more?
If I were to define a gestalt , wherein the parts have no existence outside of their relation to the whole , and the whole is nothing outside of the parts which constitute it , and furthermore, a gestalt is only a local, contingent production, constantly changing in changing contexts of social relation, is this somewhat like a ‘partial-object’?
Or perhaps like a Deleuzian object?
As regards temporality , I want to get back to my previous question. i am putting the letter ‘p’ here. Look at it and count to 3 while you are looking at it. Now I am going to tell you that in those 3 seconds that you looked at the letter ‘p’ you enters three different worlds. Let me out that a different way. Everything in your past background and history changed each of those 3 moments. You can back to yourself differently each time. It was as though there were three different selves. Now what about those institutionalized powers that are incorporated into the very essence of ‘self’? Well, they changed completely and totally each of those three seconds. Now this may seem ludicrous. I should add that this complete and total transformation of the meaning of ‘self’ and its history that took place , and continues to take place , every moment of time, is so subtle as to go unnoticed. This subtle it total shift in sense is what Derrida means by difference of force. The change from moment to moment (iterability) is a difference in force.
The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."
Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”
Quoting Giorgi
Ahh, but it does have a center. Deleuze’s corpus is loaded with forms, concepts, algorithms, which relate to other forms and patterns. Just because their identity depends on this relation to other forms and patterns does not mean that they are not centered. Center just means that at any point in time a series of elements are related in a certain way, as a certain structure.
As regards temporality , I want to get back to my previous question. i am putting the letter ‘p’ here. Look at it and count to 3 while you are looking at it. Now I am going to tell you that in those 3 seconds that you looked at the letter ‘p’ you enters three different worlds. Let me out that a different way. Everything in your past background and history changed each of those 3 moments. You can back to yourself differently each time. It was as though there were three different selves. Now what about those institutionalized powers that are incorporated into the very essence of ‘self’? Well, they changed completely and totally each of those three seconds. Now this may seem ludicrous. I should add that this complete and total transformation of the meaning of ‘self’ and its history that took place , and continues to take place , every moment of time, is so subtle as to go unnoticed. This subtle it total shift in sense is what Derrida means by difference of force. The change from moment to moment (iterability) is a difference in force.
The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."
Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”
Exactly where I'm planning to go to college! Beautiful place.
Quoting Giorgi
Quoting Giorgi
I do not think that there was a reconciliation between Foucault and Deleuze. As well known,
Deleuse declared in “Postscript on Control Societies” that we no longer live in a punitive and disciplinary society. When Foucault stopped writing on power, he probably felt a necessity to reformulate and redefine his conceptual framework. Our agency
and subjectivity are not anymore based primarily on panoptical, disciplinary, or biopower normalizing mechanisms. Foucault’s power is power-knowledge; there are two unseparated sides of Foucault’s power: bodily behaviour patterns and discursive formations. In any social interactions, there are no force-force relations without expressive reinforcements and fixations. (I think that you systematically omit the discursive dimension of Foucault’s power). In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault could not successfully show how panoptical – surveying disciplinary apparatuses are related to legal, juridical discourses of that time. Deleuze completed this task: “The abstract formula of Panopticism is no longer ‘to see without being seen but to impose particular conduct on a specific human multiplicity… a new informal dimension links the two variables of unorganized matter and unformalized functions… It is a diagram, a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine”.
(Deleuze, ‘Foucault’) There is no single, isolated exercise of power, it appears and acquires its effects and regularity in the field of strategic social unfolding, it belongs to dispositif. Foucault ‘s dispositif has three dimensions: force, subjective and discursive. There are interrelated, accumulating mutual effects and reinforcing each other. Deleuze’s diagram, an abstract machine, functions similarly to Foucault’s dispositif. Also, it shows how knowledge-power is immanent to the open whole of the unfolding social body. It strategically shapes societies and manages the field of social interactions independently from individual social actors. This conceptual framework allowed Deleuze to move to propose the existence of post-disciplinary societies of control.
It is the well known argument of Foucauldians. Yet, there are the unanswered questions regarding contemporary forms of resistance:
what makes it possible for neoliberalism to appropriate progressive leftist and liberal
discourses? Have big tech companies, mainstream media, and multicultural corporations become champions of the noblest and humanistic programs and goals? In fact, they primarily shape and manage the most
robust movements of resistance today. (“ Me too”, environmental, gender, and anti-racist
movements) Can Foucault's conceptual framework of power and resistance help to answer these questions?