Magazine: POLITICAL THEORY; AUGUST 1997
COMMUNICATION, CRITICISM, AND THE POSTMODERN CONSENSUS
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An Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are
not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what
kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged,
unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept
rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought
and trying to change it: to show that things are not as
self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as
self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing
criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.
-- Michel Foucault (1988b, 154)
This is an essay of criticism in the sense Foucault seems to intend. It
targets the postmodern consensus among political theorists. This
consensus consists of the view, common to both its admirers and
detractors, that postmodern political thought is corrosively skeptical,
that it relentlessly uncouples its critical pretensions from any
constructive normative commitment. Jacques Derrida once made a comment
which, by its very incongruity, highlights the postmodern consensus. He
confessed to an interviewer: "Indeed, I cannot conceive of a radical
critique which would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of
affirmation, acknowledged or not."[1] This remark should seem highly
discordant to anyone who has witnessed the persistent jousting between
critics and defenders of postmodernism.[2] The postmodern consensus
takes as primitive precisely what Derrida, surprisingly but rightly in
my estimation, deems inconceivable.
I hope to lend substance to Derrida's intuition by reconsidering the
work of Michel Foucault, specifically his "analytics of power," and the
fashionable reception of that work. I show that Foucault does not
confirm the expectations of theorists who subscribe to the postmodern
consensus. This strategy entails some pretty obvious perils. First,
Foucault's relation to "postmodernism" is not a simple one. He surely
does not articulate all postmodern themes. Nor do other postmodern
theorists share all of his preoccupations. It nevertheless seems hard to
address postmodern political thought in a way that fails to accord him
serious consideration.[3] I sympathize with those who complain about
critics who indiscriminately and dismissively have "lumped" Foucault and
others together as postmodernists. Yet, insofar as he confounds the
expectations of those who subscribe to it, Foucault himself can perhaps
help us see clear of the postmodern consensus.[4]
Second, Foucault was not only a prolific but -- due to his simultaneous
commitment to "genealogical researches" and aversion to "globalizing"
theory -- an enigmatic writer? I make no claim to have gotten him
"right" in any final sense. Nor do I seek to impose unwarranted
theoretical unity on his work.[6] Rather, I seek to highlight themes in
Foucault's work that are important and that are systematically neglected
by his critics and defenders alike.
Foucault's critics misconstrue his work. But they do so for reasons that
his postmodern defenders will be reluctant to accept.[7] To see why, it
is necessary to explore what Foucault means when he remarks, in an
apparently offhand manner, that for analytical purposes it "is necessary
... to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication
which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or
any other symbolic medium" (Foucault 1983, 217). Within his own
analytics of power, Foucault in fact sustains precisely this distinction
between power relations and relations of communication. Moreover, he
tacitly affirms the normative significance of communicative relations in
ways that illuminate otherwise perplexing aspects of his work.
My aim in this essay is not merely to prompt political theorists to
reassess Foucault, although I do hope to do that. I aim, in addition, to
challenge the postmodern consensus by suggesting why it is facile -- at
least in Foucault's case and in his sense -- and how it systematically
diverts political theorists in unfruitful directions. This critical
ambition, in turn, is animated by a further, affirmative goal. I hope to
reiterate the crucial importance of communicative relations for a
normative assessment of politics and to draw unlikely support from
Foucault for that purpose.
The remainder of the essay consists of four sections. In the next
section, I sketch the postmodern consensus as it has sprung up around
Foucault. I indicate why it may seem warranted by his own postures. I
then identify one particular version of the consensus which is most
clearly reflected in the complaint, regularly voiced by his critics,
that the source of Foucault's skepticism is his unwillingness to
properly accord normative force to communicative relations. I argue in
the remaining sections of the essay that this reading of Foucault is
seriously flawed.[8]
In the second section, I return to two now-familiar themes in Foucault's
work that political theorists regularly depict as affirmative anchors
for his critical enterprise.[9] I show how both Foucault's promise of a
dialogical ethics and his concept of resistance comport poorly with the
orthodox interpretation of his analytics of power. Each presupposes a
commitment to the normative force of communication of the sort which,
according to the postmodern consensus, Foucault refuses to make. This
conclusion poses a choice. Either hoist these potential affirmative
anchors or reassess the orthodox interpretation of Foucault.[10]
In the third section I pursue the second option. There, I examine
Foucault's analytics of power in some detail. I show how, for analytical
purposes, he differentiates communicative relations from relations of
power and how, having done so, he accords normative significance to the
former. In this way, I directly challenge the now-conventional
interpretation of Foucault. The interpretation I advance locates, in a
manner that the postmodern consensus forecloses, a source for the
affirmative themes in his work. It consequently holds out the
possibility of locating Foucault less problematically in the critical
tradition with which he explicitly identifies. Further, and at a more
basic level, it enables us to make new sense of Foucault's analytics of
power.
In the final section I briefly advance an interpretation of Foucault's
broader project that acknowledges the privileged status he grants to
relations of communication. I then suggest how, by attending to
relations of communication and the various ways that they can be
disrupted, political theorists might move beyond the impasse that the
postmodern consensus engenders.
THE ORTHODOX FOUCAULT
I heard someone talking about power the other day --
it's in fashion.
-- Michel Foucault (1980, 207)
There is an orthodox reading of Foucault, one shared by both his critics
and his defenders. Nancy Fraser captures the general tone of the
critics. She worries that "Foucault ... adopts a concept of power that
permits him no condemnation of any objectionable features of modern
societies."[11] William Connolly, writing from a position considerably
more sympathetic to Foucault, reiterates Fraser's concern. He offers the
following options: "We can be democrats or nihilists; we can criticize
the present from the perspective of alternative ideals or join Foucault
in repudiating every ideal imaginable today as the tyrannical extension
of 'our participation in the present system.'"[12] Here, then,
Foucault's critics and defenders converge. They both worry that he
subverts the very possibility of social and political criticism.
On first reading, at least, it appears that this common assessment is
warranted. Consider Foucault's remarks on power relations. "Power," he
tells us, "is everywhere" (Foucault 1978, 93). Insofar as it functions
in positive, pervasive, and insidious ways, "power produces ... reality"
(Foucault 1979, 194). I will return to Foucault's views on power
relations in some detail below. At present it is important only to note
the implications he draws from his position. "It seems to me," he
explains, "that power is 'always already there,' that one is never
'outside' it, that there are no 'margins' for those who break with it to
gambol in" (Foucault 1980, 142).[13] In these and other remarks on power,
Foucault seemingly confirms the postmodern consensus. It is difficult,
given the ubiquity that he attributes to power relations, to discern
what affirmative resources remain available to him, or how these might
inform his critical stance.
This portrait, while fashionable, is too stark. Foucault himself
intimates that this is so. In retrospect at least, he explicitly located
his work in the lineage of critical thought running from Kant and Hegel
to the Frankfurt School (Foucault 1988b, 95).[14] He also offers further,
more substantive, if still underdeveloped, indications in his fugitive
remarks on ethics and on resistance. Ultimately, however, both
Foucault's self-identification and his more substantive affirmations are
informed by the normative status that he confers on relations of
communication.
This claim may sound entirely implausible. Foucault (1980, 114), after
all, insists that he is concerned in his genealogies with "relations of
power, not relations of meaning." Thus, while he is centrally concerned
with the functioning of discourses, he does not analyze them in terms of
communication. Discourses instead are the medium within which "power and
knowledge are joined together," and they thereby are implicated
essentially in the ways that power relations are established and
consolidated (Foucault 1978, 100; 1980, 93).
Several prominent political theorists draw highly critical conclusions
from such remarks. Each, for his own ends, accuses Foucault specifically,
and postmodern theorists more generally, of trying to expunge
communicative relations, with their attendant normative import, from
social and political thought. Most notoriously, Jurgen Habermas charges
that Foucault's genealogical approach systematically depreciates
"categories of meaning, validity and value" and "deals with an object
domain from which the theory of power has erased all traces of
communication."[15] As a result, Habermas thinks that Foucault deprives
himself of the resources needed to effectively criticize modern social
and political arrangements. Similarly, Charles Taylor argues that, in
their haste "to delegitimize horizons of significance," Foucault and
other postmodern theorists ignore the necessarily "dialogical" bases of
authenticity. Again, the upshot is that postmodern theorists, Foucault
included, are disabled in the face of what Taylor sees as the persistent
"malaises" of contemporary Western democracies.[16] Finally, Richard
Rorty depicts "Foucault as a stoic, a dispassionate observer of the
present social order, rather than its concerned critic." In his
estimation, this aloof posture is symptomatic of the "lack of
identification with any social context, any communication" that Foucault
shares with other postmodern theorists.[17]
Foucault's remarks and the inferences that his critics draw from them
are both misleading. But while Foucault's remarks are, for reasons that
I sketch in the conclusion, intentionally misleading, the conclusions of
his critics are improperly so. Foucault not only provides the
theoretical resources necessary to elaborate critical principles, he
does so precisely by according normative weight to relations of
communication. In this way, Foucault himself helps us to see clear of
the postmodern consensus.
ANCHORING AFFIRMATION
I would like to say something about the function of any
diagnosis concerning the nature of the present. It does not
consist in a simple characterization of what we are, but
instead -- by following lines of fragility in the present --
in managing to grasp why and how that-which-is might no
longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must
always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual
fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a
space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation.
-- Michel Foucault (1988b, 36)
In his analysis of modern power, Foucault focuses on what he terms the
"micro-physics of power" and, in particular, on the "effects of
domination" that it induces. He claims that this power operates through
"techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation" which, considered
as a whole, constitute a "policy of coercions that act upon the body, a
calculated manipulation of its elements."[18] Nancy Fraser suggests that
this sort of language, this talk of domination, coercion, exploitation,
and so on, may betray an unstated affirmative stance. She finally
concedes, however, that Foucault's writings afford "no clues ... as to
what his alternative norms might be." And she concludes that his attempt
to sustain a critical stance on the basis of a totalizing analysis of
power is "normatively confused."[19] This judgment is too quick. In the
next section, I show that Foucault's analytics of power -- not just his
language, but the conceptual structure of his analysis--in fact harbors
a crucial, if understated, affirmative dimension. In this section, I
first want to explore two themes in his work that potentially afford
escape from the postmodern consensus.
Political theorists commonly present the promise of a dialogical ethics
and the notion of resistance to suggest how Foucault indeed does strike,
however tentatively, an affirmative stance. On this view, dialogical
ethics and resistance each occupy and extend the sort of "space for
freedom" that could facilitate a "possible transformation" of extant
practices and institutions. I argue that both themes comport poorly with
conventional understandings of Foucault's writings on power precisely
insofar as they exhibit the crucial value he places on relations of
communication. Consequently, both the promise of a dialogical ethics and
the concept of resistance prompt us to reexamine those conventional
understandings.
Dialogical Ethics
In his later writings, Foucault directs his efforts to "writing a
genealogy of ethics" (Foucault 1984a, 356). He defines ethics, somewhat
idiosyncratically, in terms of the subject's relationship to the self.
And he proposes a set of distinctions aimed at explicating the forms
that this relationship takes in various historical circumstances.[20]
The genealogy of ethics, then, amounts to inquiry into how, under
specific historical circumstances, "the subject constituted himself, in
such and such a form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a
certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of
power, etc." (Foucault 1988a, 10).
An obvious question arises concerning this endeavor.[21] I, of course,
grant that Foucault's genealogy of ethics was incomplete at the time of
his death. But recall his remarks, cited earlier, regarding the ubiquity
of power relations. If, as Foucault claims, his genealogical researches
first disclosed "a historical ontology in relation to truth," and then a
related "historical ontology in relation to a field of power," what
possible standpoint remains from which he might identify "a historical
ontology of ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral
agents"?[22] How, other than by persuasive definition, does Foucault
locate any domain of liberty within which such agency might operate?[23]
Some suggest that the space for ethical agency emerges from the
necessarily "dialogical" form of Foucault's ethics. But this simply
displaces the question. How do dialogical relations escape the pervasive,
insidious reach of power?[24] From this perspective, dialogical ethics,
it seems, tacitly "assigns a very important place to relations of
communication" at the same time that Foucault pointedly criticizes
others for so doing.[25]
Resistance
Even in his earlier writings, Foucault repeatedly insists that his
portrait of power is not so bleak as it might appear. He cautions us not
to underestimate the possibilities for resistance. For not only are
"there no relations of power without resistances," but "like power,
resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies"
(Foucault 1980, 142).[26] Indeed, in momentous circumstances, "it is
doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that
makes a revolution possible" (Foucault 1978, 96).
Resistance trades upon a number of affirmative possibilities. Foucault
locates these possibilities within a quite specific understanding of the
relations that obtain between intellectuals and political movements.[27]
As he explains:
If one wants to look for a non-disciplinary form of
power, or rather, to struggle against disciplines and
disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of
sovereignty that one should turn, but towards the possibility
of a new form of right, one which must indeed be
anti-disciplinarian, but at the same time liberated from the
principle of sovereignty. (Foucault 1980, 108; emphasis
added)
The essential political problem for the intellectual is ...
that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new
politics of truth. (Foucault 1980, 133; emphasis added)
Political analysis and criticism have in large measure still
to be invented -- so too have the strategies which will make
it possible to modify the relations of force, to co-ordinate
them in such a way that such a modification is possible and
can be inscribed in reality. That is to say, the problem is
... to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of
politicization. (Foucault 1980, 190; emphasis added)
Even a charitable reader might justifiably find these remarks puzzling.
Foucault does not develop them.[28] In each case they appear, almost as
an afterthought, at the very end of an extended lecture or interview.
This, perhaps, reflects Foucault's sense that they are, if not
completely at odds with his depictions of power relations, surely in
considerable tension with them.
It nevertheless is clear that Foucault sees contemporary social
movements as the bearers of those new political forms that resistance
might articulate. He holds out feminism, for instance, as an exemplar of
what he calls "movements of affirmation" (Foucault 1988b, 114 f; 1980,
219-20). Feminism, according to Foucault, resists extant definitions of
female subjectivity in terms of sex. On this interpretation, feminism
advances a "new politics of truth," one which resists accepted truths
about women, and which, consequently, suggests "new schemas of
politicization."[29]
Here, too, questions arise.[30] How do "movements of affirmation"
distance themselves from the insidious, ubiquitous, continuous, plural
functionings of modern power? Does power not ultimately set the agenda?
In short, how, given the way that he characterizes power relations, can
Foucault also insist that resistance is not "inexorably frustrated
through being a compatriot of power" (Foucault 1980, 142; 1978, 96)?
Finally, if Foucault can answer that question, what criteria might he
adduce for determining whether the "new" forms, schemas, and so on that
resistance potentially establishes are improvements in normative terms?
The postmodern consensus obscures the way that Foucault responds to
questions of this sort. He explains that various "forms of resistance
against different forms of power" have in common the feature that "they
attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with
others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself
and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way" (Foucault 1983,
211-2). Resistance, then, aims to defend symmetrical social relations
against the corrosive effects of power. Yet, this assertion surely
raises pressing questions. What sustains the "links with others" that
resistance aims to defend? How is the "community life" that resistance
seeks to preserve itself constituted? In his analytics of power,
Foucault suggests that relations of communication play a very important
role here. This claim, like my earlier claim that dialogical ethics
tacitly ascribes a crucial role to relations of communication, requires
that we reassess his views on power relations.
AN "ANALYTICS OF POWER" WITHOUT NORMATIVE COMMITMENTS?
Silence itself -- the things one declines to say, or is
forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between
different speakers -- is less the absolute limit of
discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a
strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the
things said, with them and in relation to them within
over-all strategies.
-- Michel Foucault (1978, 27)
Foucault traces the evolution and transformations of what he calls
"pastoral" power back from the present, through the Christian tradition
and Judaism, to the "ancient Oriental societies" of the Middle East. He
contrasts it on various dimensions with the sort of "political" power
characteristic of the classical and modern West. In short, "political"
power is "at work within the state as a legal framework of unity." The
role of "pastoral" power, by comparison, "is to constantly ensure,
sustain and improve the lives of each and every" individual. Here, the
"theme of keeping watch is important." This broad distinction, and
Foucault's preoccupation with the latter, positive or creative,
"modality of power" is no doubt familiar (Foucault 1988b, 67, 60, 62;
1983, 213-6).[31] Indeed, it is precisely this preoccupation, so
frustrating to his critics and so enthralling to his defenders, that
grounds the postmodern consensus.
Foucault locates "the threshold of our modernity" at the juncture during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where pastoral power extended
its reach and started to become rationalized into what he calls "bio-
power" (Foucault 1978, 139-48; 1979, 224). He explains that bio-power
coalesced around "two techniques of power." One is what he calls "the
regulation of populations." It consists of "comprehensive measures,
statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social
body or at groups taken as a whole." The other is what he calls "the
disciplines of the body." These function at the level of "micro-power"
to oversee, normalize, and thereby individuate the subject (Foucault
1978, 145-6; 1980, 125, 160; 1983, 215). In this section, I examine
Foucault's treatment of "regulative methods" and "disciplinary
techniques" in turn. My aim is to demonstrate how, within his own
analytics of power, Foucault identifies relations of communication
independent of power and tacitly grants normative import to those
relations.[32]
Regulative Methods
This technique of power operates on what Foucault refers to as the
"social body." It functions at the aggregate level, on what we might
call epidemiological or demographic variables -- "birth and death rates,
life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness,
patterns of diet and habitation" (Foucault 1978, 25, 139). The
particular effects of regulative methods appear most clearly in
Foucault's discussion of emergent doctrines regarding the "police"
functions of government (Foucault 1978, 23-5; 1988b, 77-83). In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he tells us, these functions
formed an expansive "governmental technology." Aside "from the army,
justice properly speaking, and direct taxes," in this period "the police
apparently sees to everything" (Foucault 1988b, 80). Most conspicuously,
according to Foucault, by the eighteenth century, police functions
included the regulation of sex (Foucault 1978, 24-5).[33]
Foucault draws upon several rather obscure utopian texts to illustrate
how this doctrine of police regulation emerged. He considers one,
written by Turquet de Mayenne in the early seventeenth century, to be
especially revealing. Foucault explains that, according to Turquet,
among its crucial functions, the police must "foster working and trading
relations between men, as well as aid and mutual help." He then remarks:
There again, the word Turquet uses is important: the
police must ensure "communication" among men, in the broad
sense of the word. Otherwise men wouldn't be able to live; or
their lives would be precarious, poverty stricken, and
perpetually threatened. (Foucault 1988b, 79)
Foucault obviously takes the word communication to be especially
significant. He goes on to explain why:
And here, we can make out what is, 1 think, an
important idea. As a form of rational intervention wielding
power over men, the role of police is to supply them with a
little extra life; and by doing so, supply the state with a
little extra strength. This is done by controlling
'communication,' i.e., the common activities of individuals
(work, production, exchange, accommodation). (Foucault 1988b
79)
Foucault sees Turquet's text as emblematic of a doctrine with wide
relevance. Even as, in the intervening centuries, the realm of proper
police activity has narrowed, the regulative function that Turquet
identifies persists in the ways that modern power relations impinge on
relationships of other sorts within the social body.
Foucault remarks that "what characterizes the power we are analyzing is
that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between
groups)" (Foucault 1983, 217). He insists that a proper analysis of
power relations requires that we distinguish them analytically from
social relationships of other sorts, even if the two "in fact always
overlap one another" (Foucault 1983, 218). Thus, while empirically they
"are interwoven with" or "combine with" relations of other sorts within
the social body, power relations are independent in the sense that they
"have nothing to do with" those other sorts of relation (Foucault 1980,
142; 1988b, 83). This implies, crucially, that the converse also holds;
other sorts of relation within the social body are independent, in the
same sense, of power relations. Indeed, power relations, on Foucault's
account, presuppose the existence of these other sorts of relation. As
he explains, power relations both "are the immediate effects of the
divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur" in these other
sorts of relation "and are the internal conditions of these
differentiations" (Foucault 1978, 94; 1980, 142). In short, power
relations ramify and proliferate by infiltrating and exploiting other
sorts of relation that, in principle, exist independently of power
within the social body?
It is in this context that Foucault, as I noted at the outset, affirms
the need to differentiate power relations, not just from other sorts of
relation within the social body generally, but from relations of
communication in particular (Foucault 1983, 217-8).[35] He does not,
however, simply insist on distinguishing relations of power and of
communication. He identifies relations of communication as an especially
important medium for the functioning of regulative methods. And, as I
now show, Foucault also attributes normative significance to
communicative relations.
Disciplinary Techniques
What Foucault (1988b, 83) calls the "art of government" deploys
regulative methods to bring various aggregate social relations within
the purview of power relations. So, too, it relies on the disciplines to
subvert extant relations of other sorts at the individual level. The
disciplines, according to Foucault, function through insidious,
continuous, ubiquitous mechanisms of surveillance and normalization.
"Discipline 'makes' individuals: it is the specific technique of power
that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of power"
(Foucault 1979, 170). It does so, as Foucault explains, not just by
continuously disrupting reciprocal social relations in general but, in
the paradigmatic case, by subverting symmetrical, reciprocal relations
of communication.
Foucault argues that "the development and generalization of disciplinary
mechanisms" during the eighteenth century "constituted the other, dark
side" of those enlightenment processes that generated liberal democratic
politics. In this sense, Foucault insists that the disciplines provided
the necessary, unavoidable "foundation" for the advent of political
"liberties" during that century (Foucault 1979, 222).[36] Consider how
Foucault depicts disciplinary mechanisms, first in historical and then
in theoretical terms.
At the level of historical description, Foucault observes that the
disciplines did not emerge smoothly. He explains that during this period,
disciplinary power "had to solve a number of problems" that, on his view,
other forms of power were ill equipped to address.[37] In particular, as
it emerges, discipline has to
master all the forces that are formed from the very
constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize
the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which
form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it:
agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations. coalitions --
anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence
the fact that the disciplines use procedures of partitioning
and verticality, that they introduce, between the different
elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible,
that they define compact hierarchal networks, in short that
they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity
the technique of a continuous, individualizing pyramid.
(Foucault 1979, 219-20)
Here, Foucault attributes the historical ascendance, the "political
takeoff," of disciplinary power to its prodigious success, relative to
extant juridical or political forms of power, at disrupting the sorts of
unrehearsed horizontal relations that nourish resistance.[38] It is
important to read this claim in the context of two points made earlier.
Recall, first, that for Foucault (1979, 95), "where there is power,
there is resistance." Recall, as well, that resistance aims to establish
and defend reciprocal, symmetrical social relations. From this an
obvious implication follows. Insofar as disciplinary mechanisms always
elicit resistances, the task of introducing asymmetries and subverting
reciprocities must be not just historical but ongoing and hence subject
to more general theoretical analysis.
Foucault quite famously claims that for theoretical purposes we
primarily should attend neither to the locus of power nor to the aims of
those who exercise it, but to its effects (Foucault 1980, 97). Perhaps
the most indispensable effect of disciplinary power is to produce
"docile bodies." Foucault provides a lengthy, exceedingly fine-grained
account of this phenomenon (Foucault 1979, 141-69). He recapitulates
that account in the following terms:
To sum up, it might be said that discipline creates out
of the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or
rather an individuality that is endowed with four
characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial
distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities),
it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is
combinatory (by the composition of forces). (Foucault 1979,
167)
Of these four disciplinary techniques, two contribute to the task of
"elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of
bodies" in ways that are especially relevant for present purposes.[39] I
consider, in turn, Foucault's account of how "spatial distribution" and
the "composition of forces" operate.
Discipline generates docility, Foucault explains, "in the first
instance" by distributing individuals spatially. It does this in at
least four ways: through "enclosure," through "partitioning," by
establishing "functional sites," and by specifying "rank" (Foucault 1979,
141-9). It is particularly important to notice how, in corollary
processes, discipline partitions individuals and distributes them across
functional sites. It accomplishes the former by dividing collectives
into "cellular" elements. In a spatial distribution,
Each individual has his own place; and each place its
individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up
collective dispositions; analyze confused, massive or
transient pluralities.... Its aim was to establish presences
and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to
set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able
to at each moment to supervise the conduct of each
individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its
qualities or merits. (Foucault 1979, 143; emphasis added)
Once this task is accomplished, or perhaps in tandem with it, discipline
demarcates architecturally functional sites in such a way that specific
"places were defined to correspond not only to the need to supervise, to
break dangerous communications, but to create a useful space" for, for
instance, medical or military purposes (Foucault 1979, 143-4; emphasis
added).
Here, then, the way that discipline simultaneously disrupts and
rearranges communicative relations emerges as crucially important to the
task of producing docile bodies. Foucault returns to this theme in more
graphic detail when he examines the ways that discipline applies "the
composition of forces" to the same task (Foucault 1979, 162-7). He
refers to this technique as "no doubt the highest form of disciplinary
practice" (Foucault 1979, 167). It aims, by drawing on the effects of
the other three disciplinary techniques, to maximize the functional
effectiveness of those aggregate entities (e.g., military units, the
labor force, etc.) that result when docile bodies are combined. Foucault
explains:
All the activity of the disciplined individual must be
punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacy rests
on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be
explained or formulated: it must trigger off the required
behavior and that is enough. From the master of the
discipline to him who is subjected to it the relation is one
of signalization: it is a question not of understanding the
injunction but of perceiving the signal and reacting to it
immediately, according to a more or less artificial
prearranged code. Place the bodies in a little world of
signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory
response. (Foucault 1979, 166; emphases added)
In short, through the composition of forces, discipline "insidiously
objectifies those on whom it is applied."[40] It does so precisely by
subverting reciprocal communication -- that is, relations of
communication that, as Foucault intimates here, revolve around
explaining aims or formulating requests in such a way that others might
understand them -- and instituting in its stead a hierarchical, unequal,
nonreciprocal, but exceedingly useful, "system of command."[41]
Foucault places his analysis of the specific mechanisms of disciplinary
power into relief when, in a subsequent chapter, he discusses the
disciplines in more general language. There, he depicts them in abstract
theoretical terms as "those systems of micro-power that are essentially
nonegalitarian and asymmetrical." And he goes on to explain that
disciplinary institutions -- not just prisons, but schools, the military,
factories, hospitals, mental health clinics -- "have the precise role of
introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities"
(Foucault 1979, 222; emphases added). Jeremy Bentham's panopticon is the
most telling example of the asymmetrical, hierarchical, nonreciprocal
nature of disciplinary power. It is, on Foucault's account, the
quintessential disciplinary institution.[42] There, "Each individual, in
his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the
front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into
contact with his companions. He is seen but he does not see; he is the
object of information, never a subject of communication" (Foucault 1979,
200; emphasis added).[43] Disciplinary mechanisms, then, do not just
render social relations less symmetrical and reciprocal but, crucially,
they do so by simultaneously disrupting the communicative relations that
nourish social and political agency and replacing them with patterns of
thoroughgoing objectification.
These passages are not terribly obscure. Indeed, they appear throughout
the central chapters of a canonical text.[44] Yet, while familiar, they
are difficult to reconcile with conventional interpretations of Foucault
that, without hesitation, his critics and his defenders both accept.
What Foucault seems to argue here -- and what the postmodern consensus
obscures -- is that disciplinary power is normatively objectionable
precisely because it imposes unequal, asymmetrical, nonreciprocal
relations and because, in so doing, it obliterates the sorts of extant
communicative relation that, potentially at least, could promote social
relations characterized by equality, symmetry, and reciprocity. Here, we
see clearly what Foucault leaves ambiguous in his treatment of
regulative methods. He does not just distinguish power relations and
relations of communication for analytical purposes. And he does not just
describe how power relations infiltrate and exploit communicative
relations. Within his analytics of power, Foucault portrays power
relations as objectionable because they subvert relations of
communication, relations of the sort that -- if more fully specified --
might sustain the vision of political agency that is implicit in his
commitment to resistance or dialogical ethics.
Those who subscribe to the postmodern consensus will no doubt object
here. They might concede that, as Foucault portrays them, disciplinary
mechanisms impose "insuperable asymmetries" by disrupting extant
communicative relations and rearranging them into more useful forms. But
they almost surely will balk at the conclusion that Foucault thereby
portrays disciplinary power as normatively objectionable. This
reluctance is, I think, misguided. Indeed, the trajectory of Foucault's
thought suggests that he found it impossible to evade such explicit
normative judgment.
Early on, Foucault sought to underscore the singular features of
relations established by disciplinary power by contrasting them with
contractual relations. He explains that "the way in which it is imposed,
the mechanisms it brings into play, the nonreversible subordination of
one group of people by another, the surplus of power that is always
fixed on the same side, the inequality of position of the different
'partners' in relation to the common regulation, all these distinguish
the disciplinary link from the contractual link" (Foucault 1979, 222-3;
emphasis added). The language Foucault uses here is important, for it
recurs when he subsequently clarifies his understanding of "power
relations" by differentiating them from what he terms "states of
domination" (Foucault 1988a).[45] He depicts power relations as
"changeable, reversible and unstable" and claims that "they can modify
themselves, they are not given once and for all." By contrast, in a
state of domination, "an individual or group manages to block a field of
relations of power, to render them impassive and invariable and to
prevent all reversibility of movement."[46] In light of this distinction
it seems clear that, at least on reflection, Foucault identified those
power relations induced by disciplinary mechanisms as states of
domination.[47]
Foucault explicitly recognizes the normative implications of his stance.
He concludes that the critical task of philosophy and of practical
politics is to challenge, and hopefully minimize, processes by which
power relations harden into states of domination (Foucault 1988a, 18, 20)
. Given the way Foucault characterizes disciplinary power -- not only in
its ideal or utopian panoptic manifestations but in the more mundane,
concrete ways its mechanisms operate -- this amounts to saying that the
critical task of philosophy and of practical politics consists in large
measure of challenging, and hopefully minimizing, those "insuperable
asymmetries" that disciplinary power imposes as it disrupts extant
communicative relations and rearranges them into more functional
configurations. In short, Foucault charges us with the task of defending
symmetrical, reciprocal relations of communication.[48]
COMMUNICATION AND CRITICISM
As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me to be a
very important one; I am well aware that I have never written
anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that
truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the
possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a
fictional discourse to induce effects of truth.
-- Michel Foucault (1980, 193)
Parties to the postmodern consensus, depending on their predilections,
either champion or decry an approach to political theory that Derrida,
as noted at the outset, deems inconceivable, and that Foucault, whatever
the claims of his defenders or the complaints of critics, belies in his
own practice. They thus misconstrue the range of options in contemporary
political theory and, in so doing, help to sustain incessant,
unproductive rounds of polemic surrounding "modernity," "postmodernity,"
and their vicissitudes? The irony, of course, is that Foucault himself
considered polemic of this sort substantively barren and normatively
objectionable (Foucault 1984b, 381-3). In this conclusion, I propose an
interpretation of Foucault's larger theoretical enterprise that makes
sense of the distinctive status he accords to relations of communication
in his analytics of power. I then indicate how that interpretation
suggests an alternative theoretical agenda that may prove at once more
fruitful and less objectionable than the postmodern consensus.
Foucault claimed that he had "never written anything but fictions." He
also insisted that those fictions could contribute to the production of
"truth." In light of these remarks, there are at least two ways to
interpret the critical impulse that animates his analytics of power. One
might argue that Foucault aims to disclose how the society we currently
inhabit, in fact, is infiltrated through and through by "bio-power." On
this view, his fictions are designed to dramatize this state of
affairs.[50] The problem with this line of argument is that it overlooks
the privileged role he attributes to relations of communication in his
analytics of power. It consequently generates difficulties analogous to
those that surround his treatment of resistance and dialogical ethics.
In short, this line of argument partakes of the postmodern consensus and
hinders any effort to see clear of it.
By contrast, one might argue that Foucault's fictions are purposeful
misrepresentations, that while they depict a world thoroughly permeated
by biopower, he knowingly presents that world as counterfactual.[51] On
this interpretation, Foucault adopts a rhetorical strategy of
exaggeration aimed at establishing a critical perspective from which to
assess modern social and political arrangements, one that might provoke
the sort of resistance or induce the sort of ethical attitude that could,
in practice, impede or perhaps actually foil intrusions of power in
diverse areas of social relations. This interpretation allows us to
characterize his enterprise, like he himself does in a late interview,
as an attempt to formulate questions, to pose problems, in a manner
"necessary to make the future formation of a 'we' possible" (Foucault
1984b, 384-5).[52] And in this respect, it underscores the crucial
practical task of fostering the sort of egalitarian, reciprocal
relations of communication of which we remain capable and upon which we
might draw to sustain vigilance against various encroachments of
power.[53]
By illuminating how Foucault conjoins criticism and affirmation, this
interpretation of his broader enterprise is a first, tentative step away
from the postmodern consensus.[54] It also clearly is an insufficient
one. For, spelled out in this way, his critical enterprise presupposes
both that we can more fully specify the ways that communication works --
how it coordinates social and political relations as well as how it
nourishes social and political agency -- and that we can identify the
distorting factors to which communication is susceptible. Yet,
Foucault's critical project is radically underspecified in this respect.
If it is difficult to reconstruct his views on power with any great
confidence, it is, I suspect, perhaps impossible to reconstruct how
Foucault understands relations of communication. Indeed, Foucault leaves
us very much in the position Dewey adopted when he observed that
communication "is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation
pales."[55] He surely fails to afford anything approaching an adequate
means to adjudicate the rival claims of, for example, postmodern
theorists who proclaim the "agonistic" character of all communicative
relations and critical theorists, like Habermas, who envision such
relations as a much more cooperative endeavor.[56] The difficulty
confronting contemporary political theorists is that even once we, as do
both Foucault and his critics, accord normative significance to
relations of symmetrical, reciprocal communication, considerable work
remains if we hope to extricate such relations from the realm of
miracles.
This predicament is intensified by the common but, I think, mistaken
presumption that analysis of communicative relations and their
vicissitudes is a narrowly philosophical concern. Political theorists
need to abandon this presumption. To justify a critical posture by
reference to relations of equal, reciprocal communication, we must treat
communication as something other than an enigma. Our task, in my
estimation, requires that we forge systematic, discriminating
connections between our philosophical pronouncements and the
contributions of the social sciences. Here, I give one brief, admittedly
underdeveloped example of how we might do so.
Studies of the pragmatics of language use disclose that "wherever some
convention or expectation about the use of language arises, there will
also therewith arise the possibility of some non-conventional
exploitation of that convention or expectation."[57] Political theorists
who aspire to anchor their criticism of modern social and political
arrangements in some vision of communicative relations need to trace the
implications of this unavoidable dynamic. Exploitation in the relevant
sense can be inadvertent and so carries no necessary pejorative
connotations. Yet, since it also may be intentional, it opens the
possibility that conventional expectations can be subverted or displaced
for purposes of strategic advantage.
Consider, in this regard, the austere, counterfactual world that game
theorists capture in their models.[58] This world is populated by
strategic agents who interact under circumstances unconstrained by such
things as social or political institutions. Game theorists explore this
world in hopes of discovering unique equilibrium outcomes generated
solely by the interaction of the agents who populate it. However, they
actually demonstrate three very different, though relevant and quite
remarkable, things. First, they show that strategic interaction in so
stark an environment generates rampant indeterminacy in the sense that
many games yield either no equilibrium outcomes or a multiplicity of
such outcomes.[59] Second, they show that under a wide range of
conditions, communication, even when uncoupled from the payoffs of
relevant players, can, if not entirely eliminate, significantly
constrain this indeterminacy.[60] Finally, they demonstrate how
strategic considerations, especially the extent to which their interests
diverge, can prompt relevant players to use language in novel,
surprising ways that undermine whatever salutary expectations
communication might otherwise establish. Game theorists, in short,
systematically show how communicative relations coordinate social and
political interaction in ways that -- at the same time -- are
unexpectedly robust and surprisingly vulnerable.[61]
Here, at the poorly understood nexus of expectation and exploitation
around which they pivot, communicative relations present social and
political agents a chance to generate and then replicate power
relations. Those agents need not seize this opportunity. Frequently, in
pursuit of strategic advantage, they do.[62] One of Foucault's virtues,
on the reading I advance, is that he reminds us, quite forcefully, of
this.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thanks to Joshua Clinton, Jack Knight, Richard Lynch, Tom
McCarthy, Kevin Olson, Andy Rutten, Tracy Strong, Stephen White, Juliet
Williams, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier
versions of this essay. All remaining errors and infelicities are my
own.
NOTES
1. Kearney (1984, 118).
2. For purposes of my argument, it is irrelevant whether Derrida
intended this remark sincerely, as another playful incitement to current
academic discourse, or otherwise.
3. In good postmodern fashion, Docherty (1993) confounds this assertion
precisely by failing to accord Foucault serious consideration. See,
however, Dews (1987), Megill (1985), and White (1991).
4. Here I have in mind Connolly (1993, 368). I borrow the felicitous
term in quotations from him.
5. For his comments on this commitment and aversion, see Foucault (1980,
81-7).
6. For warnings about the risks that such an attempt entails, see
Connolly (1985) and Gutting (1994). So, for example, I have very little
directly to say about Foucault's genealogical method per se or about his
relation to other members of the critical tradition with which he
explicitly identified.
7. I have in mind here, for instance, such writers as Dumm (1988), who
in an especially (to use a word he applies to others) "pungent" essay
advances an aestheticized interpretation of Foucault, and Keenan (1987),
who suggests that to fully appreciate the difficulty of Foucault's
postmodern politics we must overlook the extent to which that difficulty
is an artifact of his postmodern commitments.
8. Of necessity the argument of this essay is heavily exegetical.
Throughout this essay -- but especially in the third section -- I rely,
as much as is possible, on Foucault's books and essays. In this way I
hope to avoid the qualms of those who attribute some criticisms of
Foucault to misunderstandings created at least in part by his
"incautious statements in interviews" (Hoy 1986, 13).
9. I borrow the anchor metaphor from Shapiro (1988, 19-21), who notes
the presence of "hermeneutical anchors" in Foucault's writings.
10. Postmodern theorists such as Connolly (1991, 60) might find the way
that I pose this choice "amusing and strange." But if I am right, there
is perhaps more "coherence" to Foucault's normative project than such
theorists -- who celebrate the "code of paradox" they claim to find in
his work -- may wish to acknowledge. We might then ask what sort of
"anxiety" prevents postmodern theorists from recognizing that coherence?
11. Fraser (1989, 33). For similar assessments, see Benhabib (1989, 369-
70), Taylor (1984, 152), Walzer (1986, 64), White (1991, 18), and Wolin
(1988, 186, 193-4).
12. Connolly (1987, 107). See also Connolly (1984, 15-6). Connolly, of
course, goes on to wonder whether this opposition is overly austere.
Indeed, while his subsequent efforts to defend a "Foucauldian" ethic
seem to me to be a systematic effort to deflate it, his assessment of
the theoretical impasse nonetheless captures the postmodern consensus.
See Connolly (1991, 1993). For similar views, see Dreyfus and Rabinow
(1983, 206), Hiley (1984), Hoy (1986, 12-3), and Rouse (1994, 99).
13. It seems to me that Conholly seeks to identify precisely the sort of
"margins" whose existence Foucault denies. Connolly grounds his
"discursive ethic of cultivation" in a "capacity for ethicality" that
"exceeds the bounds" of discursively constituted "identity." And he
grounds that capacity, in turn, in the universal exigencies of"
'life'... that which exceeds the organization of a discourse nonetheless
unable to proceed without it." In this sense, Connolly's Foucauldian
ethic is animated less by the dialogic process -- the sort of agonistic
communicative relations -- in which it is embodied than by the sort of
self-reflection that is prompted by the universal pressure to
acknowledge "the tenacity of life and the contingency of death." What
Connolly characterizes as a discursively embodied "agonistic respect for
difference" follows from -- in the sense of being made possible by --
such reflection rather than providing the precondition for it (Connolly
1991, 166-8, 176, 171). I am grateful to Georges Borchardt, Inc. on
behalf of Editions Gallimard for permission to quote from Discipline and
Punish and The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1), both by Michel Foucault.
14. McCarthy (1991, 43-9) nicely draws out some commonalities and
differences between Foucault and other representatives of this
tradition. All quotes from Power Knowledge by Michel Foucault, edited by
Colin Gordon Copyright (c) 1972, 1975, 1976, 1977 by Michel Foucault,
collection Copyright (c) 1980 by Harvester Press, are reprinted by
permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House.
15. Habermas (1987, 286).
16. Taylor (1991, 66-7).
17. Rorty (1991, 173-4).
18. Foucault (1979, 26, 171,138; emphases added).
19. Fraser (1989, 29-31). Compare Taylor (1984, 1985a).
20. Foucault does not view individuals as literally inventing themselves
but, rather, as defining themselves in terms of, or in opposition to,
received social and cultural categories (Foucault 1988b, 11).
Understanding this process, on his account, requires that we trace the
connections and disjunctions between (i) "ethical substance," (ii) "the
mode of subjection," (iii) "self-forming activity," and (iv) "the telos"
at work within a historical ethical system. It is this framework that he
deploys in his history of sexuality (Foucault 1984a, 352-5).
21. My argument here parallels that made by Bernstein (1992, 152-66).
22. Foucault (1984a, 351).
23. This, of course, is what Foucault tries to do in his late
interviews. Even there, however, he insists that "in human relations,
whatever they are ... power is always present" (Foucault, 1988b, 11).
And, as I note below, his efforts in the same interview to differentiate
power and domination comport poorly with his earlier discussion of
disciplinary mechanisms. Thus, "Foucault not only fails to explicate
this sense of agency, his genealogical analyses seem effectively to
undermine any talk of agency which is not a precipitate of
power/knowledge regimes. Who or what is left to transgress historical
limits?" (Bernstein 1992, 164).
24. In an otherwise insightful essay, Coles (1992) conveniently neglects
to ask how what he calls "Foucault's dialogical artistic ethos" fits
with what Foucault terms his "analytics of power." This is questionable
insofar as, even in his later writings, Foucault continues to insist
that "[t]he analyses I have been trying to make have to do essentially
with the relationships of power" (Foucault 1988a, 3). The "discursive
ethic of cultivation" that Connolly (1991, 167) depicts is susceptible
to the same criticism insofar as it is predicated upon the possibility
that subjects can self-consciously reflect on the universal exigencies
of "life."
25. Foucault (1988a, 18).
26. See also Foucault (1983, 211-2; 1988b, 84, 122-3).
27. His views on those relations are not important for present purposes.
28. Keenan (1987, 19-28) lucidly explicates how Foucault simultaneously
criticizes and affirms "rights." Insofar as I understand the remainder
of his essay, he seems ultimately to concede that Foucault creates a
paradox for himself by simultaneously subverting and invoking the
language of rights. Keenan simply asks that we appreciate how
"difficult" are the postmodern politics that result from Foucault's
argument.
29. This is a special instance of the more general "political, ethical,
social, philosophical problem of our days" which is "to promote new
forms of subjectivity" (Foucault 1983, 216). From this perspective,
Foucault, it seems, sees his genealogy of ethics and his treatment of
resistances as related. The former, recall, is concerned with how, under
particular historical circumstances, individuals constitute themselves
as subjects. The latter, in turn, "question[s] the status of the
individual" in the sense that it challenges "a form of power which makes
individuals subjects" (Foucault 1983, 211-2).
30. For variations on these questions, see, for example, Dreyfus and
Rabinow (1983, 206-7), Fraser (1989, 29), and Habermas (1987, 283-4).
31. Weberman (1995) nicely presents these familiar themes. He stresses
the ways that Foucault depicts power (i) as productive rather than
repressive, (ii) as relational rather than an object that is possessed,
(iii) as not subjectively exercised, and (iv) as ubiquitous. I will not
rehearse these themes here.
32. To reiterate, interpreters uniformly overlook this point. See, for a
very recent example, Rouse (1994). He defends Foucault against critics
such as Fraser, Habermas, Rorty, and Taylor by advancing a "dynamic"
rendering of the power/knowledge relation. Yet, he pays literally no
attention to the crucial role of independent, normatively binding
relations of communication in Foucault's analytics of power. In this,
Rouse is not unique among recent writers. See, for instance, Haber (1994)
, Simons (1995), and Weberman (1995).
33. More specifically, Foucault (1980, 125) explains that "sex is
located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and
the control of the population." So too, he notes that police regulation
also relied upon disciplinary techniques (Foucault 1979, 213-5).
34. Here, of course, we encounter the notorious claim that power
relations operate in a way that is simultaneously "intentional and
nonsubjective" (Foucault 1978, 94). I will not explore this notion
except to note a subsequent remark. "For let us not deceive ourselves;
if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only
insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others"
(Foucault 1983, 217). See also Foucault (1979, 225; 1988b, 83).
35. If Turquet uses communication as an encompassing category, Foucault
himself explicitly understands it less expansively and sets it off from
relations of, for instance, sex, production, and exchange (e.g.,
Foucault 1983, 217-8; 1988a, 11; 1988b, 83).
36. The term "foundation" is important here. Insofar as liberties stand
in necessary relation to the sovereign state, Foucault leaves no doubt
that the latter is, in turn, necessarily dependent on disciplinary
power. "The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of
power networks." It "can only take hold and secure its footing where it
is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations
that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power."
In this sense, the disciplines provide "the conditions which make it
possible for" sovereignty to operate (Foucault 1980, 122, 105-6, 187).
37. The most striking example of such problems is the sort of
spontaneous solidarity that public punishments (whether by execution on
the scaffold or by condemnation to work on a chain gang) generated as an
unintended and uncontrollable by-product among the populace (Foucault
1979, 61-3, 68-9, 257 f). As I note below, on Foucault's account,
disciplinary power is efficacious precisely insofar as it proves adept
at obstructing the emergence of such solidarity.
38. Foucault (1979, 221).
39. Foucault (1979, 169). Foucault himself recommends that political
theorists attend to "the specificity of mechanisms of power" (Foucault
1980, 145). Yet, commentators by and large do not heed this advice. They
proclaim the creation of "docile bodies" without attending to the
specific mechanisms by which docility is generated. In short, political
theorists continue to take what Foucault (1980, 98) would consider "too
distant a view" of how power relations operate. See, for instance,
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, 153-60), Rouse (1994, 94-6), Haber (1994),
Simons (1995), and Weberman (1995).
40. Foucault (1979, 220).
41. Foucault depicts this as a system of "signals" arranged in such a
way that they elicit a measured behavioral response as they are
transmitted by superiors to the objectified occupants of subordinate
positions in the disciplinary hierarchy. Among the examples of this
phenomenon that he offers, the following is especially striking. "The
training of school children was to be carried out the same way: few
words, no explanation, a total silence interrupted only by signals --
bells, clapping of hands, gestures, a mere glance from the teacher, or
that little wooden apparatus used by the Brothers of the Christian
Schools; it was called par excellence the 'Signal' and it contained in
its mechanical brevity both the technique of command and the morality of
obedience" (Foucault 1979, 166).
42. "The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by
means of observation" (Foucault 1979, 170; emphasis added).
43. Compare the way Foucault summarizes the rules of quarantine
propounded in the seventeenth century to control outbreaks of plague. An
infected town is to be sealed off and divided internally. Inside each
district, stringent "surveillance" is to be imposed. "It is a segmented,
immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place." Even
food distribution is to be arranged in such a way as to allow "each
person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers
and other residents." Foucault claims that such measures, taken in
response to an "exceptional situation," emerge rationalized "at the
distance of a century and a half," as the "general model of functioning"
represented by the panopticon (Foucault 1979, 195, 205, 216; emphasis
added).
44. These chapters are central in theoretical terms. They occupy the
third and longest part of Discipline and Punish. In this sense, they
follow the chapters of the first two parts of the book in which Foucault
documents the general transition in modes of punishment and they lay the
theoretical groundwork for the chapters of the final pan in which
Foucault documents the disciplinary nature of the prison. In these
chapters of part three, Foucault addresses the "how" and the "why" of
the transitions he has earlier documented and identifies and examines
the disciplinary mechanisms that allow him to subsequently present the
prison as the paradigmatic disciplinary institution (Foucault 1979, 131,
194, 228, 249).
45. Foucault is at this point concerned with establishing a basis of
freedom or liberty that can inform his notions of resistance and ethics.
In the process, he makes a remarkable theoretical reversal. In the late
1970s he hypothesized that "power is coextensive with the social body;
there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network"
(Foucault 1980, 142). When, in the mid-1980s, he endeavors to
differentiate power and domination, however, he insists that "if there
are relations of power throughout every social field it is because there
is freedom everywhere" (Foucault 1988a, 12).
46. Foucault (1988a, 12, 3).
47. See also Foucault (1980, 95-6). The alternative would be to
completely revise the portrait of disciplinary power he offers in
Discipline and Punish.
48. Note that this conclusion implies nothing about the nature of such
communicative relations. Specifically, it does not entail that such
relations be "transparent" or that they be aimed at establishing
"consent." So, for example, I am not prejudging the qualms that Foucault
repeatedly expresses about Habermas's work (Foucault 1984c, 377-80;
1988a, 18-9).
49. For a recent but hardly unique example, see Villa (1992). See also
the subsequent comment by Johnson (1994a) on the fruitlessness of
polemic and the response by Villa (1994).
50. Megill (1985, 243-7, 342-6) and Rouse (1994, 99) endorse this
approach.
51. Hoy (1986, 13-4) advocates this sort of interpretation. Elsewhere,
however, he seems to embrace the first interpretation sketched above
(Hoy 1988).
52. Foucault claims to be "writing the history of the present" (Foucault
1979, 31; 1988b, 88-9). He sees his writings as continuing the tradition
of philosophical critique inaugurated by Kant that is preoccupied with
deciphering the present and our place in it (Foucault 1984d; 1988b, 86-
95). When they are framed like this, his fictions converge in quite
specific ways with the tradition of Western political thought. In this
tradition, political theories typically function to provide "a 'model'
for understanding the period, but a very inadequate guide in any depth."
They commonly are "both false and illuminating" in the sense that "such
theories, false even though in large part they may be, are an
indispensable means in enabling political agents to locate themselves
within their contemporary political landscape" (MacIntyre 1983, 33).
53. Foucault repeatedly claims that his intent is to alert us to the
dangers lurking in our present situation and thereby to provoke a
response (Foucault 1984a, 343; 1988b, 168). From this perspective, his
genealogies constitute less an accurate historical portrait than a
warning and, in reading them, "we must seek not a meaning, but a
precaution" (Foucault 1979, 139). Yet, this interpretation of his
enterprise has an important implication. "Foucault paints the picture of
a totally normalized society, not because he believes our present
society is one, but because he hopes we will find the picture
threatening. He could hope for this effect on us only if we have not
been completely normalized" (Hoy 1986, 14).
54. For example, this line of argument allows us to recognize the
rhetorical aspects of Foucault's work (Connolly 1985, 368-9) and to
concede that his rhetoric necessarily trades on established normative
commitments (Bernstein 1992, 153-7).
55. Dewey (1958, 166).
56. Neither position is articulated very persuasively. Foucault (1983,
22) and Lyotard (1984, 10, 15-7), for example, proclaim the agonistic
character of linguistically mediated social relations. But they do
little more than that. By contrast, Habermas has not established his
thesis that human language is animated by a telos of understanding, that
this telos is embodied in a system of criticizable validity claims, that
these represent the pragmatic presuppositions of human interaction, and
that, therefore, in social interaction communicative reason is prior to
strategic rationality (Johnson 1991, 1993). For a sense of where the
theoretical disagreements between these two views currently stand, see
Kelly (1994) and Hoy and McCarthy (1994).
Moreover, these two positions do not exhaust the available theoretical
possibilities. The field grows increasingly less tractable once we
entertain additional contenders such as the "expressivist" view of
language that Taylor (1985b) defends or the neopragmatist account of
language as a contingent achievement offered by Rorty (1989).
57. Levinson (1983, 112-3). Indeed, the ubiquitous possibilities for
exploitation have induced some to "conclude that there is no such thing
as language" if, by this, we mean that "we communicate by appeal to
conventions" (Davidson 1986, 446).
58. Postmodern theorists, in particular, might consider my suggestion
here rather preposterous. They should recall, however, that Lyotard
(1984, 60) quite explicitly classifies game theory as a "postmodern
science" precisely insofar as it reveals and helps analyze indeterminacy
in social and political life. I endorse a different interpretation of
game theory (Johnson 1993, 1994b). And I dispute the supposition, which
Lyotard seems to hold, that recognition of indeterminacy somehow entails
the abandonment of "metanarratives" of justice, emancipation, and so on.
Nevertheless, the results which I sketch here might, if they took them
seriously, afford postmodern theorists a powerful analytical resource.
In a remarkable, provocative essay, Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1989) traces a
number of connections between the concerns of game theorists and those
of postmodernism. Kreps (1990) is an excellent, accessible, brief survey
of game theory. The idea that game theoretic models are counterfactual
constructs is due to McCloskey (1987).
59. Kreps (1990, 72-7, 95-106).
60. This finding is reinforced by the social psychological research that
Orbell, Dawes, and van de Kragt (1988) report.
61. Crawford (1990) and Farrell and Rabin (1996) offer brief, accessible
surveys of the research described in this paragraph. Farrell (1993),
published after a prolonged career as a working paper, is a foundational
contribution.
62. On this one might usefully compare Schelling (1960) and Foucault
(1983, 216-26).
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~~~~~~~~
By JAMES JOHNSON
University of Rocheste
James Johnson teaches social and political theory at the University of
Rochester. His published work has appeared in Political Theory,
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, American Political Science Review,
and NOMOS. He currently is working on a book manuscript titled Symbol
and Strategy: On the Politics of Possibility.
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Source: Political Theory, Aug97, Vol. 25 Issue 4, p559, 25p.
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