Magazine: American Behavioral Scientist, JUNE-JULY 1995
Record: 1
95080101230002764219950601
Title: The politics of critical description.
Subject(s): POWER (Philosophy); FOUCAULT, Michel -- Criticism &
interpretation; KNOWLEDGE, Theory of
Source: American Behavioral Scientist, Jun/Jul95, Vol. 38 Issue 7,
p1018, 24p
Author(s): Pels, Dick
Abstract: Analyzes the implications of Michael Foucault's genealogy of
power and knowledge to delineate a conception of knowledge politics.
Confounding of the idea of circular alliance between knowledge and
power; Characteristics of the projected relativistic circle;
Implications of circular logic of interpretation to critical
presentism.
AN: 9508010123
ISSN: 0002-7642
Full Text Word Count: 11973
Database: Academic Search Elite
THE POLITICS OF CRITICAL DESCRIPTION
Recovering the Normative Complexity of Foucault's pouvoir/savoir
The slogan that scientific knowledge is a form of politics "continued
by other means" harbors an intuition that, despite its disrespectful
content, can already pride itself upon a respectable intellectual
heritage. In our century, strong traditions of political correctness,
of both left-wing and right-wing origin, have dedicated themselves to
the demasque of avowedly disinterested products of science as ever so
many instances of a bourgeois, antinational, patriarchal, or racist
knowledge politics, and have engaged in drives to repoliticize science
from the standpoint of the "proletariat," "the people," "the race," or
various other allegedly exploited and excluded groups. Resistance
against such political rectification, as soon as it moved beyond
classical defenses of the value-free nature of science, has in turn
sought appeal to a "politics of science" or a politics of rationality.
Gouldner's "politics of the mind" was an ambiguous attempt to play in
both registers at once and to defend science against politics by
political means (Gouldner, 1973, p. 82ff). Bourdieu has placed a
rather similar bet in advancing his less rationalistic, more
interest-committed notion of a "Realpolitik of Reason" (Bourdieu,
1989, 1991; Pels, 1995).
In recent decades, this idea of knowledge politics has acquired a
distinctly more radical profile, while the analytical focus has also
been redirected more intensely from the external liaisons toward the
internal workings of science. As early as Marx and Nietzsche, and
certainly since Mannheim's work, the sociology and psychology of
knowledge have of course been attentive to quasi-political drives and
mechanisms governing the production of knowledge and science. Only
recently, however, programmatic research has been building up that
focuses on the myriad ways in which scientific claims themselves
become power-charged and turn into the prize of intrascientific
straggles. One example is provided by critical reassessments of the
"politics of theory" which has been invested in the demarcation work
of the Durkheimian school in sociology (Lacroix, 1981; Lukes, 1982;
Pels, 1983). Other instances are provided by the philosophical
critique of Enlightenment rationalism as conducted by Foucault,
Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, and others; by Bourdieu's agonistic field
theory of science; and by the epistemological writings of feminists
such as Fox Keller, Harding, and Haraway. Not least, the political
metaphor has made solid conquests in the constructivist social studies
of science as practiced by Bloor, Collins, Knorr, Woolgar, Callon, and
Latour. It is here that the Clausewitzean dictum most pointedly
sustains a strict refusal to disengage cognitive content and social
context, and a determined effort to grasp the shape and operation of
those "other means" with which science-as-politics is supposedly
continued (e.g., Callon, Law, & Rip, 1986; Latour, 1983, 1987).
It is hard to pinpoint with exactitude to what extent this new
analytical radicalism has been inspired by Michel Foucault's genealogy
of power/ knowledge, as he has developed it from the early 1970s to
his early death in 1984. Many of the radical approaches, to be sure,
acknowledge the diffuse but deep-reaching impact of his writings
(e.g., Latour, 1991; Law, 1986; Rouse, 1987; Shapin, 1994).
Notwithstanding such wide repercussions, however, Foucault's grounding
intuition about the irreducible mutual implication of power and
knowledge continues to pose a delicate epistemological riddle, which,
in one commentator's words, has often functioned "as a kind of
phantasmatic blank space, to be filled in with the hopes and desires
of the interpreter" (Keenan, 1987, p. 12). An impressive phalanx of
critics has meanwhile dismissed it as a "performative contradiction"
(Habermas, 1987), a "vicious circle" (Cohen & Arato, 1992), as
"normatively confused" (Fraser, 1989), and as "paradoxical and
ultimately incoherent" (Taylor, 1985, 1986). An equally impressive
line of supporters have countered such contestations by foregrounding
the critical energy and ethical sensibility of Foucault's genealogical
project (e.g., Bernstein, 1994; Connolly, 1985, 1993; Dreyfus and
Rabinow, 1982, 1986; Rajchman, 1985). What then to make of the
"difficult dash" (Keenan, 1987) that joins and separates knowing and
doing, cognition and force, truth and power?
My present attempt to reconstruct this intrigue departs from an
awareness that Foucault's inconsistencies and contradictions, as
publicized in recent debates, cannot satisfactorily be resolved
without distancing oneself from some of his formulations, whereas on
other points of contention he should be kept more strictly at his
word. While departing from Foucault, I will hence also turn (back)
against him; and contrary to the commodious prejudice that elevates a
lack of system into a principal virtue of Foucaldian style, I will
work my way toward a plausibly harmonious and rounded interpretation.
Far from claiming to present an hermetic solution to the
power/knowledge riddle, however, my aim is to propose a tolerably
consistent way of handling or using Foucault, which may be helpful in
delineating a more robust and empirically fruitful conception of
"knowledge politics." Such streamlining will become especially
apparent where I will reinterpret the genealogical intuition in an
"irreductionist" and "minimally normative" direction, in order to
transcend the classical divorce between facts and values, and to
suggest a normative complexity in the analysis of knowledge and power
which acknowledges the closeness, rather than the distance, between
their "good" and "evil" aspects.
FROM DUALISM TO DUALITY
Like all principles that make a difference, Foucault's principle of
pouvoir/ savoir, or of the indissoluble entanglement of knowledge and
power, harbors both a destructive and a constructive impulse. First,
it polemicizes against the venerable philosophical tradition extending
all the way from the "great Platonic divorce" between truth and power
to modern "humanism," which deploys both concepts as quintessential
antipodes (Foucault, 1972, pp. 218, 232; 1980, pp. 51-52). Second, it
counteracts an equally venerable tradition in political and juridical
philosophy, which preferably connotates the exercise of power with
repression, exclusion, submission, and censure. Put more
constructively, Foucault's pouvoir/savoir reconfigures the semantic
field by offering a new definition of knowledge and a new definition
of power. The idea of their intrinsic, constitutive, or circular
coalition initiates a dual conception of knowledge that emphatically
incorporates the inner ambiguities and dark underside of rationality.
Simultaneously, by highlighting its productive next to its repressive
functioning, a similar duality is installed in the conception of
power.
These two great Nietzschean themes of the repressive face of reason
and the productive face of (the will to) power immediately presuppose
and condition one another. It is precisely this epistemological double
play that has so far received insufficient notice in the extensive
literature that has been triggered by Foucault's work. It is
profitable, however, to consider them as a conceptual couple that
should be more intimately "thought together." Because the
desublimation of reason moves in step with a rehabilitation of the
traditional conception of power, their former hierarchical antinomy is
absorbed in a new epistemological and normative equilibrium. Truth and
power (its traditional "other") acquire comparable, if not equal
philosophical status and are much more closely intertwined. Although
(the quest for) truth reveals an intrinsic impurity, and is
"downgraded" through the direct complicity with its traditional dark
side, (the will to) power rises in epistemological prestige once it
acquires cardinal functions in the production of truth, reality, and
desire.
This simultaneous "evening out" of the epistemological balance and
contraction of the previous polarity work toward the same end:
duality. Duality refers to the tempering of the normative energies of
an established conceptual asymmetry in a generative coalition that
yields a new, and weaker, principle of discrimination (Pels, 1987,
1990, 1993). While the traditionally positive becomes less positive,
the traditionally negative also becomes less negative; positivity and
negativity are resettled in much closer vicinity, without losing their
normative tension. One of the most intriguing features of the
Foucaldian principle of pouvoir/savoir is perhaps that precisely by
breaking the dominant binary code and melting knowledge and power into
such a close coalition, the productive and repressive dimensions of
both power and knowledge are now considered mutually constitutive
rather than antithetical. This is enough to instill in both concepts a
radical epistemological and ethical complexity.
It is not hard to reap citations in order to illustrate this
equilibrating double play. In his 1970 inaugural lecture, Foucault
precisely articulates the dangerous and violent character of speech
and suggests that the order of discourse is characteristically
constituted by miscellaneous procedures of exclusion, rarefaction, and
misrecognition, which simultaneously exorcise and occlude these
intrinsic powers and dangers. What appears before our eyes "is only
the truth of wealth, fertility, and sweet strength in all its
insidious universality. In contrast, we are unaware of the prodigious
machinery of the will to truth, with its vocation of exclusion"
(Foucault, 1972, p. 220). Knowledge can no longer be conceived in
terms of a neutral, disinterested reflection of objective reality.
Interpretation equals conquest: Instead of uncovering objective
meanings, interpretation is "the violent or surreptitious
appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential
meaning." A reflexive, genealogical self-questioning of the work of
historical interpretation reveals that historical consciousness is not
free from passion or interest, but harbors an impassioned "will to
truth." That is to say that "all knowledge rests upon injustice (that
there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a
foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is
malicious." (Foucault, 1977b, pp. 151, 163). Discourse must be
conceived as "a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a
practice which we impose upon them" (Foucault, 1972, p. 229).
If truth is presently "a thing of this world" (Foucault, 1980, p. 131)
and has become something prosaic and commonplace, the traditional
mundanity of power in turn becomes less dirty and subterranean.
Foucault's criticism of transcendental views of rationality is
complemented by the idea that power interests exercise a productive,
perspective-constituting function in the formation of knowledge.
Rather than continuing the negative vocabulary of censorship,
prohibition, and distortion, we should recognize that "power produces;
it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth" (Foucault, 1977a, p. 194). What maintains power and makes it
acceptable is the fact that it does not only weigh on us as a
nay-saying force, "but that it traverses and produces things, it
induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse" (Foucault,
1980, p. 199). The lapidary statement that "far from preventing
knowledge, power produces it" (p. 59) may then be read as a
rudimentary "flashlight theory" of power, according to which objects
of knowledge are rendered accessible only because they are delineated
and illuminated by power drives and practices (Visker, 1990, p. 71).
It is arguable, however, that Foucault envisages something more
radical than such a "perspectivism of power," by suggesting a theory
of constitution according to which reality is performatively made
rather than merely "encountered" in its multifarious disorder. In this
constructivism of power, both reality and the knowledge of it are
produced in the course of and by means of the practical "violence that
we do to things."
At once I like to counter a double misapprehension to which Foucault's
own formulations give rise, but which is also triggered by reflexes of
the axiomatic split between knowledge and power, which he attempts to
subvert. This misunderstanding is fostered by a twofold reductionism.
The grounding rule that "truth isn't outside of power, or lacking in
power" is routinely interpreted in terms of a desire to reduce
knowledge, truth, and science to power practices, which ultimately
stages power as a transcendental demiurge or an ontological a priori
that is taken to be constitutive of all "true speaking." Likewise,
Foucault is suspected of an urge to replace the repressive or
juridical conception of power by its productive or disciplinary
counterpart. In both dimensions, he would supposedly be concerned to
effect a critical inversion of established models of the relationship
between knowledge and power and of the negative and positive
modalities of power exercise, without actually superseding the
dualistic framework itself.
It must be conceded that such misunderstandings are actively enhanced
by Foucault's intermittent tendency to reify notions of power,
domination, and discipline, and to assign them a transcendentally
constitutive function (e.g., Foucault, 1977a, p. 193; 1977b, pp.
150-151; 1978, pp. 158-159; 1980, pp. 59, 93; 1988a, p. 118). In
various contexts, he also appears to lend epistemological primacy to
the productive over the repressive theory of power (e.g., Foucault,
1978, pp. 73, 85-86; 1980, pp. 59, 119), whereas other passages, such
as the one cited above, place all emphasis upon the "malicious" rather
than the productive nature of the "will to know." In other words,
Foucault's genealogies regularly flirt with a critical methodology of
renversement or inversion (Foucault, 1972, pp. 229, 231; cf. Rajchman,
1985, p. 56). Criticisms such as those offered by Habermas (1987),
Dews (1987), Cohen and Arato (1992), or McCarthy (1994) of the
essentialist or ontological quality of Foucault's concept of power are
therefore definitely on target. However, there are also reasons to
suppose that Foucault intends to escape from this reductionist drift
and is groping toward "irreductionist" principles, which equally
discard the dualism of knowledge and power as that of repressive
versus productive (knowledge) power. Foucault sometimes bends the
stick in the other direction, but is also chased by the residual logic
of both traditional oppositions. Still, it is much more interesting to
interpret the "circular" coincidence of knowledge and power and that
of production and repression as an attempt to leap twice from dualism
to duality.[1] In both cases, this leap departs from the magnetic
poles to the middle reaches of the force field, reallocating
properties that were hitherto defined by the oppositional dualism.
With Dreyfus and Rabinow, I consider this view of the "simultaneity"
of knowledge and power, where neither can be explained in terms of or
can be reduced to the other, as constituting the most radical
dimension of Foucault's work (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, pp. 114, 194,
203; cf. Keenan, 1987, pp. 14-15).[2] Illumination of the seamy side
of rationality does as little to replace the traditional panegyric of
reason as does illumination of power's positivity substitute for the
idea of negative power. In his inaugural lecture, Foucault (1972)
already unravels the intrinsic link between the ordering of the world
by truthful discourses and the exclusion and rarefaction that they
inevitably bring in their train (cf. Visker, 1990, pp. 128-129). The
will to know is simultaneously part of the danger and a tool to combat
that danger (Rabinow, 1984, p. 7). In an interview from 1983, this
inner ambiguity of reason is signaled in the following terms: "If
intellectuals in general are to have a function, if critical thought
itself has a function . . . it is precisely to accept this sort of
spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to
its necessity, to its indispensability, and at the same time, to its
intrinsic dangers" (Foucault, 1984a, p. 249).
A similar spiraling connection between "indispensability" and "danger"
can be situated in the concept of power. In Gordon's interpretation,
the novelty of Foucault's approach is that he locates thinking about
power "beyond good and evil," that is, outside the force field that
extends between a positively benign sociological model of power as the
agency of social cohesion and normality and a more polemical
representation of power as an instance of repression, violence, and
coercion. In doing so, Foucault (1980, pp. 234-235) introduces a
methodological principle of neutrality or skepticism in the analysis
of power. It is not clear, however, in what sense neutrality and
skepticism precisely cohere. In my view, Foucaldian skepticism is not
exhausted by the neutralization of the dualism of enabling and
constraining power but carries a much wider significance, whereas also
the interconnection between productive and repressive power should be
conceived in a more intrinsic or constitutive fashion. The revolving
door of power is not only similar in shape to the revolving door of
rationality: It is one and the same door.[3]
That is to suggest that the principle of pouvoir/savoir, while indeed
passing beyond established distributions of good and evil, does so in
a very specific sense that does not signify an adieu to all normative
deliberation in favor of dispassionate scientific description.
Foucault's analysis is only neutral and agnostic in terms of the
classical dualisms that he singles out for attack, and does not per se
include a plea for normative neutrality or value-free naturalism.
Skeptical awareness of the paradoxal proximity between rationality and
irrationality and between productive and restrictive power, which
results from bracketing their unmixed antithesis, does not entail the
bracketing of all forms of ethical sensibility and purpose. Rather, it
suggests a novel minimal normativity according to which good and evil
no longer constitute transcendental antipodes but live together much
more closely than is accounted for in conventional ethical discourse.
If light and dark sides to some extent condition one another, positive
and negative dimensions are deployed much more ambiguously than either
a traditional sociological functionalism or a traditional ethics will
find palatable. I believe that the fundamental skepticism that exudes
from such an awareness of circular connections between good and evil
stands close to the heart of Foucault's philosophical ethos (Connolly,
1993; Rabinow, 1984, p. 47; Rajchman, 1985; Rochlitz, 1992).[4]
This talk of good and evil, to be sure, reinforces a normative reading
of the complexity that is instituted by the duality of the positive
and the negative, according to which sociological assessments of
indispensability and danger (or production and repression) are to some
extent taken as secularized and "scientized" recodings of much older
moral antinomies. When explaining that power does not operate through
prohibition and negation, but is productive of true speaking, of the
sexualizing of bodies or of the normalization of subjectivity,
Foucault usually employs a "cool" sociotechnical sense of
productivity, which appears to preclude a normative stance with regard
to the technologies or disciplines involved. If he insists that power
is much more than a negative instance but should be conceived as a
productive network that runs through the entire social body, or that
productive disciplinary power supplies the necessary basis for the
great negative or juridical forms of power, the linkage between
positivity and negativity appears to stand closer to the analytical
relationship between whole and part than to the normative relationship
between good and evil.
Nevertheless, I suppose there is interpretive room for a less neutral
or technological conception of the duality of enablement/constraint or
that of production/repression, both in the case of knowledge and in
that of power. In this conception, many apparently secular
sociological antinomies (authority vs. power, agency vs. structure,
subject vs. object, consensus vs. conflict, normal vs.
pathological[5]) retain significant residues of the religious and
moral distinction between good and evil and remain laterally connected
with its manifold contemporary representations, even though dominant
epistemologies actively repress or passively neglect such normative
resonances. The theorem about the proximity or duality of the positive
and the negative, in this particular sense, does not elevate
sociological concepts (such as knowledge and power) to a generic level
of abstraction ruled by moral indifference, but opts for a more
intricate and demanding interpretation according to which good and
evil cohabitate closely enough to put all naturalistic distinctions
into epistemological disorder.[6]
FACTS AND VALUES
Next to filing an analytic claim, the idea of the revolving door of
knowledge power thus also carries a normative point. This entails
that, in their turn, descriptive and normative judgments are much more
tightly ensnared than is acknowledged by standard conceptions in
philosophy and social-political theory (Pels, 1990; Root, 1993). Such
a claim to interpret the central intuition of pouvoir/savoir in terms
of a critical mixture of factual and value statements not only propels
us into the storm center of the Foucault debate (cf. Armstrong, 1992;
Kelly, 1994), but distances us even more pertinently from the image
that Foucault himself has irregularly upheld of the naturalistic
methodological import of his genealogical project. However, a
"minimally normative" amendment of Foucault appears called for if we
wish to cope successfully with some important objections that have
been leveled against the "descriptivism" and "crypto-normativism" of
his historical analyses. The most incisive and widely publicized
critique has of course been raised by Habermas, Foucault's great
sparring partner in the philosophical debate about the Enlightenment
(Habermas, 1987; cf. also Bernstein, 1994; Cohen & Arato, 1992;
Fraser, 1989; Honneth, 1994; Taylor, 1986). While acknowledging the
legitimacy of this line of critique, I also presume that a relapse
into the dualistic and universalistic (or "humanistic") framework from
which Habermas operates can and should be avoided; differently put,
that the principle of pouvoir/savoir generates an indigenous normative
criterion for a critical theory that does not lay claim to a
universally compelling or transcendental type of validation.
Foucault's genealogies have often been read (and liberally permit such
a reading) as products of an epistemological leap from normative
toward straight-forwardly descriptive theory (cf. Habermas, 1987;
Taylor, 1986). Normativity is usually interpreted as "normalization"
(Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. 296). Habermas has typically claimed that
Foucault systematically eludes value judgments and the more general
issue of the justification of critique in favor of value-free
historical explanations, and thus naturalistically reduces the
dimension of "ought" to that of "is." Genealogical historiography, he
has argued, confronts the mutually sealed discursive universes, which
permit only internal strife about norms and values, and their
underlying practices of power in a strictly descriptive,
nonparticipatory if not ascetic manner. It brackets normative validity
claims as well as claims to propositional truth and elopes the
question whether some discourse and power formations can be more
legitimate than others. Here Habermas gratefully fastens upon
Foucault's own characterization of the genealogical temperament as a
"felicitous positivism," and Paul Veyne's depiction of Foucault as the
historian "in a pure state," who desires nothing further than
stoically to announce "wie es wirklich gewesen ist" (Habermas, 1987,
pp. 275-276, 282). Such detachment, however, ensnares Foucault in a
major aporia. The cool facade of his radical historicism hardly
conceals the critical passions that rage underneath. Foucault's
normative engagement is palpable right down to his style and choice of
words, but can nowhere be explicitly acknowledged. His reductionist
naturalism fosters the same crypto-normativism for which he himself
has indicted the supposedly value-free human sciences. The idea that
there is something wrong with modern disciplinary knowledge power
presupposes the salience of particular normative standards, and such
standards are indeed subliminally present in Foucault's genealogies.
However, because they are not articulated as such, Foucault falls
victim to an "arbitrary partisanship" and an "unholy subjectivism"
(Habermas, 1987, pp. 276, 284).
Once again, it must be conceded that Foucault makes himself eminently
vulnerable to this reproach. The expression "positivisme heureux" from
his 1970 inaugural lecture does not fail to conjure up misgivings,
whereas the genealogical deconstruction of moral-utopian and
juridico-political discourses often exemplifies a strong historicist
and positivistic drift (cf. Dews, 1987, p. 180). Against totalizing
theories that unveil finalistic continuities of historical
development, genealogy intends carefully to "listen to history"
(Foucault, 1977b, p. 142) in order to study with minimal prejudice how
knowledge power actually functions. Foucault's critique does not say
that things are not all right as they are, but is out to show how and
why things have become what they are (cf. Visker, 1990, pp. 111-112).
The genealogical method performs this critical task primarily by
revealing the historical arbitrariness of the present by demonstrating
that that-which-is has not always existed but is the product of a
patchwork of contingencies (Foucault, 1983, p. 206; 1977b, p. 146;
1990/1994, pp. 74-75). Accordingly, the grounding rule of
pouvoir/savoir itself is introduced as an apparently neutral
proposition about its factual omnipresence. Consider the following
characteristic and by no means isolated statement:
The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely,
knowledge constantly induces effects of power. . . . Modern humanism
is therefore mistaken in drawing this line between knowledge and
power. Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there
is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend
on power; this is just a way of reviving humanism in a utopian guise.
It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is
impossible for knowledge not to engender power (Foucault, 1980, p.
52).
Suspicions raised by critics such as Habermas, Fraser, Taylor, or
Dews, that such statements represent somewhat more than mere
empirical-historical generalizations, certainly appear justified.
Foucault's "critical historicism" (Rabinow, 1984) does not simply add
critique to historical analysis, but appears to presume a much more
immediate and internal relationship between both types of endeavor.
From a traditional conception of the logical tie between facts and
values, it may indeed seem as if normative considerations are entirely
swallowed by empirical generalizations. Even Habermas, who refuses the
sharp heterogeneity between the discourses of truth and normativity,
without ceasing to assign them to separate domains (cf. Habermas,
1992), cannot react otherwise than by the familiar reflex of
reproaching Foucault for sliding into a naturalistic reductionism. It
would be more exciting, on the other hand, to inquire whether
Foucault, rather than reducing values to facts, pulls off a more
intriguing trick that positions him beyond the traditional playground
of the logical dualism itself. Foucault's genealogy, if so
interpreted, would once again effect a double epistemological leap
away from both objective statements of fact and universalistic moral
prescriptions in the direction of mixtures of facts and values whose
connection is so intimate that the descriptions necessarily bring
along their own normativity (and the other way around). Once again,
this "natural proximity" of facts and values must be interpreted in an
explicitly irreductionist sense (Pels, 1990).
That genealogy may be fruitfully seen as a project of "critical" or
"evaluative" description (cf. also Bernstein, 1994, p. 227; Kelly,
1994) is borne out by a number of important suggestions. Any diagnosis
of the present, Foucault asserts, must manage to grasp "why and how
that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is" by following "lines of
fragility" in the present; any description must hence always be made
in accordance with the possible spaces of freedom, the transformative
possibilities that the present offers (Foucault, 1984b, pp. 126-127).
The "ironic heroization" of the present, which is characteristic of
the ethos of modernity, its "trans figuring play of freedom with
reality," intends to transform it "not by destroying it but by
grasping it in what it is" --although this must not be taken in the
sense that prescriptions are derivable from descriptions (p. 127).
Modernity is an exercise "in which extreme attention to what is real
is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously
respects this reality and violates it" (p. 41). Even though Foucault
remains somewhat enigmatic, his injunction to follow "fractures" or
"lines of fragility" in order to discover "spaces of freedom" within
the real appears to experiment with an irreductionist notion of the
proximity of empirical facts and critical values, which draws both
terms much closer together than traditional epistemology will
allow.[7] Expressions such as "critical ontology of the present" or
"critical ontology of ourselves" (Foucault, 1984b, p. 50) only serve
to enhance this impression.[8]
Insofar as Foucault still tends to elope an explicit justification of
the normative implications of his genealogical reconstructions, he
remains vulnerable to critique. But this does not at all imply, as
Habermas and other critics demand, that Foucault is obliged to supply
transcendentalist foundations for his normative assumptions and that
everything that falls below this exacting standard can be written off
in terms of "arbitrary partisanship." Neither does it seem correct, as
Kunneman is concerned to argue, that such universalistic criteria of
justification are implicitly present in Foucault's oeuvre; that its
normative groundwork therefore exemplifies strong affinities with that
of Habermas's own theory; and that the latter inadequately attends to
the (good) reasons that Foucault might offer for renouncing a
systematic justification thereof (Kunneman, 1986, p. 367ff). Rather,
the most decisive reason for refusing such a justification is that
Foucault's critique of propositional truths and prescriptive values
precisely intends to undercut such presumptions of universalism; from
his perspective, the call for rationalistic foundations is a type of
"Enlightenment blackmail" (Foucault, 1984b, pp. 41-42; 1990/1994, p.
118). His own critical project no longer seeks to identify "the
universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action"
but fully recognizes the local, specific, and contingent nature of
critique (Foucault, 1984b, pp. 250, 46; 1988b, p. 11; 1991b, pp.
73-74).[9]
Habermas has complained about genealogy's "irritating double play" in
claiming for its concept of power the innocence of an empirically
based category, while simultaneously deploying it as a grounding
concept in a metaphysical theory of constitution (Habermas, 1987, pp.
270, 273-274; cf. also McCarthy, 1994). This transcendental quality,
he argues, is precisely what lends the empirical analysis of
technologies of power their significance as a critique of rationality,
and what secures for genealogical historiography its unmasking effect.
Although his intuition about genealogy's double role appears correct,
Habermas also appears to miss the very proximity between facts and
values that was identified earlier and that both relativizes the
claimed "innocence" of empirical inquiry and the metaphysical nature
of Foucault's grounding of critique in a transcendental priority of
power networks. Foucault's genealogical descriptions get by very well
without the pretense toward objectivity, which is supported by
functionalist sociology; neither must the synthetic coupling of
knowledge and power inevitably be conceived in transcendental and
aphoristic terms. The constitutive synthesis of knowledge and power is
not ontologically framed -- at least not in the conventional sense
(cf. Foucault, 1990/1994, p. 128) -- but assembles constative and
normative judgments in a critical mix, which, while renouncing
rationalistic strategies of validation, offers a perspective according
to which discursive formations and power practices can simultaneously
be redescribed and put to the ethical test. This enterprise does as
little require an external justification of truth claims as it does
pursue an external grounding of its normative assumptions.
THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
In order to see why this is not as paradoxical as Habermas and other
rationalists think it is, we may shift toward another corner of the
debate, in order to attend to the specific manner in which Foucault's
genealogical method mingles and balances "presentist" and
"anti-presentist" elements. His attempt to break free from the
customary prejudice that only values the past in terms of the here and
now, tends to approximate him to a value-free and relativistic
historicism that severs the epistemological link with the present in
that it undertakes to study the past in its own context and in its own
terms. Simultaneously, however, Foucault advocates a critical
perspectivism that rebuilds the bridge between present and past in
that it explicitly subordinates historical analysis to current
interests and problematics. At the close of the first chapter of
Discipline and Punish, for example, Foucault (1977a) wonders what is
actually at stake in the history that he aspires to write: "Why?
Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that
writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one
means writing the history of the present" (pp. 30-31). This
simultaneous yes and no concentrates the dilemma of Foucault's
"critical historicism." For how can the modest vocation to "listen to
history" be squared with the perspectival "violence" that is committed
in historical interpretation? What is the import of the "dedicated
boldness" or "studious audacity" that Foucault considers
characteristic for the critical style?[10] How can genealogy be
conducted as "anti-science" (Foucault, 1980, p. 83)?
We may encircle this dilemma a little more closely in Foucault's 1971
programmatic essay on "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." Here, the
genealogical method is primarily articulated in opposition to a
finalistic metaphysics, which depicts the development of history in
terms of singular continuities and closed totalities (Foucault, 1977b,
p. 140). Against the solemnity of this originary metaphysics, which
locates the essential identity and all true possibilities of things in
their first beginnings, genealogy prefers to "listen to history" in
order to uncover differences, deviations, discontinuities, and
dispersions. Then it is revealed that these pontifical essences mask
something totally different, something vulgar and mundane: Reason,
truth, and scientific method draw a veil over chance, passion, and the
will to power (pp. 142-145). For Foucault, presentism is equal to the
unreflected retrojection of contemporary interests, institutions, and
practices that are "lived" as absolute and universalistic ones, and he
resists a retrojective historiography that encourages such "subjective
recognitions." Knowledge does not depend on rediscovery and
emphatically excludes the "rediscovery of ourselves." True
historiography does no longer search for the roots of our identity but
"introduces discontinuity into our very being" (pp. 152, 154, 162). It
is no longer a question "of judging the past in the name of a truth
that only we can possess in the present; but risking the destruction
of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the
will to knowledge" (p. 164).[11]
It is highly improbable, therefore, that Foucault endorses a form of
historicism that contents itself with stoically detached descriptions
of history's capricious game of chance, with a meticulous study of the
origins of things that would at most elicit an indirect critique of
their ostensibly serene eternality. The genealogical project does not
entail a relapse into empiricism or positivism, but envisages an
anti-disciplinarian "anti-science," which is geared toward the
emancipation of disqualified and illegitimate knowledges and wishes
little by little to build up "strategic knowledge" (Foucault, 1980,
pp. 83-85, 108, 145). It is anchored in a philosophical ethos
according to which "the critique of what we are is at one and the same
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and
an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them" (Foucault,
1984b, p. 50).
The fine-grained but crucial difference between a "history in terms of
the present" and a "history of the present" does hence not concern the
practice of critical reconstruction or retrojection as such, which
even Foucault considers inevitable, but the absolutism or "apocalyptic
objectivism" that tends to transform this practice into a metaphysics
of origin and into finalistic grand narratives. Genealogy does not so
much aim at objective analyses of historical structures of meaning or
practices "in their own terms," but rather at reconstructive
interpretations that issue from a contemporary critical perspective
and that bend history to its will just like the grand totalizing
narratives, while refusing to commit itself to their totalitarian
foundationalist pretenses.[12] Indeed, Foucault does not hesitate to
characterize genealogy as perspectival, engaged, and, in this specific
sense, "malicious" and "unjust." The impulse to understand everything
without hierarchy, without judgment or preference, is nothing but
"sanctimonious objectivity," and stands squarely opposed to the
Nietzschean conception of reflexivity:
Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work
which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their
preferences in a controversy -- the unavoidable obstacles of their
passion. Nietzsche's version of historical sense is explicit in its
perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice. Its perception
is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation; it
reaches the lingering and poisonous traces in order to prescribe the
best antidote. It is not given to a discrete effacement before the
objects it observes and does not submit itself to their processes; nor
does it seek laws, since it gives equal weight to its own sight and to
its objects. (Foucault, 1977b, pp. 156-157)
By virtue of this reflexive historical sense, genealogy is also
capable of writing its own genealogy, in terms of a "vertical
projection" of its own position (pp. 156-157).
In this light it appears puzzling that Habermas both castigates
Foucault for his "transcendental historicism" and simultaneously
suspects him of an inadvertent presentism. In his view, Foucault
wishes merely to deliver a "stoical" analysis of meaningless
structures of power, dismissing the idea of a hermeneutic dialogue
between the historian and the past. But, as Habermas insists, the
explanation of technologies of power is only feasible from a
comparative perspective, which in turn presupposes a hermeneutic point
of departure that inevitably incorporates a diagnosis of its own time.
Foucault is therefore guilty of the same presentism from which he
claims to escape, in that he deploys a vertical projection of his own
position without the concomitant reflexive consciousness (Habermas,
1987, pp. 276-278).
However, as soon as it is recognized that Foucault self-consciously
lowers his genealogical sounding lead into the deep waters of history,
one can only wonder at this critique. Once again such
misunderstandings appear rooted in genealogy's unresolved tensions
between positivistic historicism and critical perspectivism. In my
judgment, such tensions are largely ascribable to the fierceness of
Foucault's resistance against the tyranny of globalizing grand
narratives, which leads him to identify their universalistic validity
claims rather immediately with their quest for an overarching,
unifying systematics. Historicization, for Foucault, always channels a
double intent: It undercuts allegedly necessary and eternal
foundations of truth and morality, while simultaneously uprooting and
pulverizing global systems of thought in favor of highlighting
discontinuities and differences. Hence "anti-foundationalism"
modulates into "difference thinking" without apparent transition. But
whereas the unmasking critique of transcendental foundations of truth,
morality, and method presupposes a critically presentist point of
view, the methodological preference for fragmentation, discontinuity,
and dispersal continually pushes toward a renewed severance of this
supply line between present and past. I see no principled reason,
however, why "differentialism" and its positivistic drift cannot be
cut loose from the critique of epistemological foundationalism. The
heightened attention to historical fortuities, contingencies,
thresholds, and coupures does not forbid the reincorporation of
miscellaneous differences into a new narrative of continuity that is
not a narrative of origins but is explicitly conceived as a
knowledge-political re-construction that departs from a critical
position in the present. In the absence of the solid anchorpoints and
the granite foundations of tall stories, it remains perfectly possible
to tell small stories that group differences and details into a
consistent narrative line.
IN THE CRITICAL CIRCLE
Small stories are not essentialist myths of origin but
knowledge-political retrojections that are launched from an unstable,
"uncertified" standpoint in the present. Because they depart from the
present and orbit back through a histo-riographic detour to their
point of departure, they are ensnared in a hermeneutic circle. Is this
circular movement by definition a vicious one? Does the axiom of
pouvoir/savoir escape the paradoxal relativism of a principle that
inevitably bites its own tail? We may repeat our crucial question: How
can the idea of an intrinsic coalition between knowledge and power
function critically?
Once again it is Habermas who deftly illuminates these problems
through the acuity of his formulations. With his radical critique of
rationality, it is argued, Foucault entangles himself in a reflexive
paradox. Genealogy is concerned to explicate the origins of knowledge
naturalistically in terms of practices of power, but this explanatory
baseline can be reached only because Foucault ceases to think
genealogically as soon as his own historiography comes into view. He
is unable to explain the provenance of his own objectivity claims.
When truth claims cannot transcend the discourse totalities in which
they are embedded, and the latter invariably function as
"protuberances" of power complexes, this naturally also holds for
Foucault's own discourse. If knowledge cannot break out of the
enchanted circle of power, and all counterpower inevitably moves
within the horizon of the power that it combats, how then is Foucault
able to sustain the superiority of his genealogy? Does it not exhaust
itself in a mere "politics of theory" (Habermas, 1987, pp. 247,
268-269, 276-281)?[13]
However, this classically toned critique of the alleged performative
"self-destruction" of relativism overshoots its mark. The reflexive
paradox that Habermas discerns is a projection of his own theoretical
preoccupations. "Theory politics" or "the politics of truth," for
Foucault, is far from being a dirty word (cf. Foucault, 1980, pp.
132-133; 1990/1994, p. 68): Nowhere does he claim a transcontextual
objectivity or seek a transcontextual foundation that negates the
principle of knowledge power itself. If the counterdiscourse of
genealogy implicitly claims a larger amount of validity than the
discourses it resists, this superiority is anyhow not derived from the
kind of anticipatory divorce between truth and power, which is still
upheld in the Habermasian utopia of the ideal speech situation. The
theory of knowledge power includes an immediate reference to its own
grounding; but this self-referentiality only "destroys" the validity
basis of its own critical analysis if one aprioristically claims a
type of validity that pretends to escape with all its might from the
context of power.[14]
Hence I forward the thesis that the cognitive and normative
superiority of Foucaldian genealogy is precisely accountable to its
refusal to divorce knowledge and power according to the "humanist"
recipe. Rather than abandoning itself to the relativistic destruction
of all truth rules, the principle of pouvoir/ savoir circularly
establishes its own criterion of legitimacy. This criterion cannot be
externally justified or anchored according to the prescriptions of
rationalistic epistemology, in that it does not extend beyond the
knowledge-political context of the genealogical discourse within which
it is raised. This does not issue in a form of agnostic, value-free
relativism that views historical formations of discourse and power as
closed systems and excludes any and all normative comparison between
them. On the contrary: Foucaldian genealogy offers a critically
normative vantage point that does not only apply the principle of
truth power to other discourses but also to itself, itself offering a
calibration point for historical comparison.
Consequently, Foucault does not oppose truth to power, but ranges one
form of knowledge politics against another (Foucault, 1980, pp.
132-133).[15] The foundationalist concept of truth, which sets power
and truth in energetic opposition, is replaced by a new relativizing
concept of truth that does no longer separate them. Different from
what Cohen and Arato (and many others) presume, critique is not
disempowered by an analysis that "equates discourse, reflection, and
truth with power strategies," nor is it disqualified by the skeptical
insight that successful resistance "merely" substitutes one strategy
of power for another (Cohen & Arato, 1992, p. 292). The estimation
that even an antiscience such as genealogy and the counterpowers that
it musters will inevitably generate new forms of demarcation and
exclusion, new elites of knowledge, and new complexes of power is the
very opposite of an invitation to cynicism and political apathy
(Foucault, in Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, pp. 231-232). Rather, it has
fully digested the skeptical intuition that resistance against the
established disciplinary powers, by the very need to challenge them,
cannot but invest in the conflict and is forced to adopt some of the
characteristics of its adversary. In this respect as well, the utopian
purity of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil,
and of the inevitable triumph of the good, is exchanged for an
appreciation of their unavoidable proximity. The movement that
crusades against the established knowledge powers in order to found a
new regime of truth does not offer an exception to this rule.[16]
Once again Foucault's formulations are ambiguous, so that consistent
interpretation necessarily borders on critical amendation. If he
insists that the problem does not consist in how to draw the
demarcation line between truth and untruth, but to analyze
historically "how effects of truth are produced within discourses
which in themselves are neither true nor false" (Foucault, 1980, p.
118; cf. 1990/1994, p. 78), genealogy itself offers an eloquent
exception to this agnosticist rule. Likewise, it demarcates between
truth and falsity, although not with the help of classical truth
rules, which demand sharp distanciation from power interests. The
critical description of the mechanisms of disciplinary power (e.g., of
"true speaking" as a product of confessional power techniques)
supports an alternative conception of truth that recognizes that the
power of (traditional) truth claims precisely issues from the
misrecognition of their power-infused character. Henceforth all
"truths" are rendered suspect that actively deny the social
enforcement by which they are constituted. Against the dominant regime
of truth, Foucault pleads in favor of a new regime, of new (and
weaker) rules of demarcation, of "ascertaining the possibility of a
new politics of truth." This does not entail its emancipation from
every system of power (which remains a chimerical option) but "of
detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social,
economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time"
(Foucault, 1980, p. 133).
In order to trace the path of this critical circle, we may go on to
examine Foucault's objection to the reductionist style of traditional
ideology critique -- an objection that is widely shared among
philosophers and social theorists who are routinely lumped together as
postmodernists. Foucault and others find this concept of ideology
fundamentally worrisome, because it is consistently erected against
supposedly transparent conceptions of truth or reality. The new
conception of the intrinsic alliance between truth and power, however,
does no longer permit us to think that the world is transparent and
immediately accessible to knowledge. Genealogy rejects the
naturalistic premise that "under power with its acts of violence and
its artifice, we should be able to rediscover the things themselves in
their primitive vivacity" (Foucault, 1988b, p. 119). Simultaneously,
however, Foucault regularly deploys the concept of ideology in a
critical context, and refers to an underlying (?) reality that is
being masked, distorted, or concealed (cf. Cohen & Arato, 1992, pp.
262-263; Dews, 1987, pp. 183, 190; Foucault, 1972, pp. 227-228; 1980,
pp. 105-108). Which new framework of truth operates as yardstick of
judgment? Or differently put: How is an antirealist critique of
ideology possible?
It is evident from the very outset that such a critique renounces all
capacity to unmask the knowledge position of the adversary as
"power-infused" or "interest-committed," while excepting one's own
position as untainted by such blemishes. The principle of truth power
sensitizes to the power orientation of all positions: It shifts the
epistemological balance between cognition and social interest and
suggests a different assessment of the function of social interests
themselves. This leaves only one logical possibility for locating a
workable criterion of ideology critique. This criterion can only be
posited by the principle of truth power itself, which is then licensed
to "unmask" all conceptual positions that are unable or unwilling to
respect this very same principle.
This turns ideology critique not only into a reflexive but also into a
circular enterprise.[17] On the one hand, such critique is capable of
"unmasking" all discourses that consider themselves interest-free and
conceal their commitment by knowledge-political maneuvering as
illusory and different from what they really are. On the other hand,
this very reduction of ideas to a context- and power-free factuality
is impossible, in that the critique cannot break loose from its own
normative point of departure. This is not an impossible paradox. One
may continue to thematize the discrepancy between distorted self-image
and reality, between what discourses say and what they actually "are"
or "do." However, such reality judgments and the attendant imputation
of "false consciousness" remain logically dependent upon a critical
outsider's perspective, which is established by the principle of truth
power itself.[18] Because objects of knowledge are invariably
constituted by means of specific patterns of symbolic power, the
occultation of "reality" can only be revealed from a
knowledge-political perspective that eschews all appeals to an
independent reality that transcends the circle. In this manner, the
disclosure and the occultation of reality necessarily co-produce one
another.
AGAINST OBJECTIVISM
This circular, strictly contextualist criterion of truth therefore
still permits the deployment of a "negative" or critical concept of
ideology. Examples of such denunciatory critique are found in the
destruction that Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1965) brings upon
the idealistic, positivistic self-image of psychology (cf. Visker,
1990, pp. 27-28) or in the analogous demasque, in The History of
Sexuality I, of sex as a correlate and product of the discursive
practice of the scientia sexualis (Foucault, 1978, pp. 67-70). The
principle of this critical analysis is generalized in Foucault's
inaugural lecture, where the "sly" nature of the procedures of
exclusion and rarefaction, which characterize discourses of truth,
turns out to reside in the very fact that they attempt to conceal
themselves as such. Precisely because the "exclusionary" will-to-truth
hides itself behind a mask of neutral objectivity and upholds an
appearance of disinterestedness is it able the more prosperously to
expand. The demarcation between true knowledge and power enables the
will-to-the-power-of-knowledge to parade as something different from
what it "actually is," so that it may press ahead more vigorously by
virtue of this very misrecognition (Foucault, 1972, pp. 219-220, 227;
cf. Habermas, 1987, p. 248).
In this light, it is fruitful to consider the amendation of Foucault
that has been proposed by Visker (1990), who has suggested a feasible
way to interpret genealogy immediately and consistently as critical
theory. Rather than allowing the disclosure of the constitutive
preconditions of orders of knowledge to degenerate into a critique of
all conceivable order, he argues that one may confront these orders
with the fact that they "objectivistically misrecognize their
conditions of possibility. Specific orders or systems are only capable
of functioning as a result of the mystification of the exclusionary
practices by which they are conditioned. Discourses are tempted to
deny their discursive character in order to distract attention away
from the fact that their objects are not immediately given by reality.
They feel threatened by their own selectivity and exclusivity and
hence have an interest in universalizing themselves, that is, in
blurring or erasing their own contextual boundaries (Visker, 1990, pp.
142-143).
One may conclude that, if the social sciences create order in human
relationships by offering propositions that claim general validity, it
is not so much this performative, ordering function itself that is at
issue, but the way in which this performative effect is "withheld" by
pretenses of general validity with which such ordering statements are
charged. Taken by themselves, orders are simultaneously productive and
repressive; their functions of enablement and constraint are
circularly correlated. Exclusion of alternative orders is therefore
inevitable and by itself does not constitute a reproach against the
order that is contingently produced by it (Visker, 1990, p. 166).
Objectivistic legitimations, however, yield an epistemological surplus
that enables a specific order to be depicted and lived as the only
feasible and imaginable one, thus promoting its naturalization or
reification.[19]
Foucaldian genealogy is primordially a machine de guerre against such
reifications and against the forms of disciplinary knowledge power
that are nourished by them. It studies history in order to trace
through how a certain order has become a self-evident one,[20]
presupposing ab initio that it is experienced as alien and is
approached from the outside. This also implies that genealogy does not
offer a methodology in the strict sense of a universalizable organon
of knowledge production or a toolbox that remains indifferent to its
various users. The "historical knowledge of struggles" that genealogy
strives to assemble rather requires the presence of a knowledge
subject that occupies a specific interest-bound position in the
contemporary knowledge struggle: the position of the stranger, who
cannot choose but to resist specific historically constituted
self-evidences and is motivated to trace their origins in order to
resist them more effectively.
Foucault explicitly conceives of this critical historization of
necessities, which are experienced as "strange" and superfluous, as a
direct continuation of the grand quest for freedom and autonomy, which
is inscribed in the Enlightenment project (Foucault, 1984b). A
typically modern critical subject is a person who consistently
inquires after the contemporary limits of the necessary and attempts
to invent himself in a permanent critique of our historical era.
Criticism is reflecting and working upon our limits (cf. Foucault,
1991a, p. 59ff). But there is no reason why it should not adventure
beyond the Kantian destruction of classical metaphysics. Critique is
not so much the stipulation of the universal and necessary conditions
of possibility of knowledge, but an investigation of the possible
transgression of limits, including those of Kantian rationalism itself
(Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1986). Hence the heritage of the Enlightenment
should not so much be sought in its doctrinal elements, in the defense
of something like an essential kernel of rationality, but instead in a
certain ethos, a certain lifestyle that is critically poised toward
the "contemporary limits of the necessary." Instead of having formal
structures with a universalistic tenor determine what we can and
cannot do, we ought to investigate the possibility "of no longer
being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think," in order to give
new impetus to "the undefined work of freedom" (Foucault, 1984b;
1988b, p. 10).
CONCLUSIONS
In this text I have made an effort to present a consistent user's
guide to Foucault, which in some respects violates the letter and goes
beyond the book(s), but which appears tolerably consistent with the
skeptical ethics of knowledge and life conduct, which occupy the
center of his philosophy. First I have accentuated the
epistemological-political double play of pouvoir/savoir, which extends
and complicates the idea of a circular alliance between knowledge and
power by that of a similar circularity between the productive and
repressive functions of both knowledge and power. From the outset, I
have taken care to disengage myself both from a reductionist and from
a normatively agnostic interpretation of Foucault's grounding
principle, in order to make overtures to a notion of"duality," which
not only cast aside the dualisms of knowledge and power and that of
production and repression, but which also pretended to escape from the
classical logical divorce between facts and values. The normative
complexity of knowledge and power that was thereby installed could
then be joined to a minimal skeptical ethic in which good and evil
were seen to cruise in close vicinity.
If the principle of truth power or knowledge politics exemplifies a
natural proximity between empirical and normative judgments, it is
more than a mere representation of the world, but actively intervenes
in it. The (re)description of the world co-produces reality itself.
Rather than supplying "ostensive" or indicative representations of
reality, the principle of knowledge politics introduces performative
representations that urge the transformation of reality in the
direction indicated by the definition itself (cf. Latour, 1986, pp.
272-273). "Performativity" is a convenient label for the
knowledge-political ordering effect that results from the simultaneity
and indigenous cohesion of empirical descriptions and normative
evaluations that do not require transcendental justification (Pels,
1990, p. 40).
The relativistic circle that is thus projected is not a vicious
one.[21] The principle of knowledge politics can only escape the
reflexive paradox and still serve as lever for a nontrivial critique
of ideology when it offers itself as a criterion of truth. Of course
one may shrug one's shoulders at what looks like a form of opportunism
that is supported by a self-proclaimed dogma. Doing so, one would fail
to notice that the principle of knowledge politics itself is cast as a
knowledge-political proposal that waives all claims for an obligatory
epistemological foundation precisely on account of its self-conscious
performativity, and that, in consequence, the opportunistic critique
of those who prove themselves unable to grasp the "truth" of this
principle does nowhere appeal to an independent reality that
transcends the interpretive circle itself. The critical distinction
between discourses or power complexes that "objectivistically
misrecognize" themselves and discourses that do not can only be
established from a knowledge-political perspective. This applies with
equal force to the critical difference between discourses that fail to
appreciate their own circularity and locality and discourses that
realize and accept it.
If applied to historiography, this idea about the circular logic of
interpretation suggests the legitimacy of a form of "critical
presentism." Because one cannot jump over one's hermeneutic point of
departure, the present remains in a sense epistemologically
privileged. But because our contemporary culture is categorized as
multiple and decentered, Whig history is avoided and ample room is
given to narrative pluralism. The "instability" of the knowing
subject, which can no longer base its historical narrative upon a
solidly grounded identity, is enhanced by its incapacity to experience
the present as a standpoint "outside of time." Historiography may then
adopt the posture of retrojective self-recognition--a view that tends
to run counter to Foucault's stated purposes. An essentialist
presentism produces tall stories according to which the past supplies
incontrovertible evidence for our present excellence and of the
necessity of our future calling. A relativist presentism narrates
small stories, which reconstruct the past in the light of local
problems and time-bound knowledge-political interests.
It is at this point that my user's guide departs most clearly from the
intellectual markers set down by Foucault himself. In the above, I
have already braced myself against expressions that could be
interpreted in an empiristic, historistic, and normatively agnostic
fashion. Instead, I have attempted to reconstruct genealogy as a
minimally normative, critical-presentist, reflexive, and
antiobjectivistic mode of analysis. These interpretative maneuvers
have enlarged the distance between my own alternative and the type of
differentialism that offers the most natural vehicle for Foucault's
empiricist and historicist leanings.
This differentialism and its pulverizing positivism remain ever at
odds with a skeptical life ethic that is not infused by neutrality but
by awareness of the normative proximity of good and evil. Genealogy's
critical reversal of values and truths should not issue in a simple
hurray for the opposite party, but should free the stage for new
strategies and a new type of mobility (Foucault, 1988a, p. 120). If
criticism ends in a mere reversal of pro and contra, things remain in
place and nothing moves. According to Foucault, the veritable work of
the "historian of the present" has only begun as soon as he can also
demonstrate the "false unity," the illusory nature of the "good" side,
the side with which he has taken sides. If "everything is dangerous,"
even the good side, we must not impassively leave things as they are,
because we have always something to do (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982, pp.
231-232). It is this "active relativism," this skeptical politics of
knowledge, which more than anything else defines the continuing
enchantment and intrigue of Foucault's work.
NOTES
1. Anthony Giddens has introduced this slogan in order to combat
another dilemmatic antinomy: that which separates action theory from
structural theory (e.g., Giddens, 1984, pp. xx-xxi). His idea of the
"duality of structure" sensitizes to the simultaneously enabling and
constraining effects of social institutions. My formulations also
acknowledge the influence of Latour (1990, 1993), who has suggested
the term "irreductionism" (Latour, 1984, p. 177ff).
2. Duality and coincidence are hence not equivalent with identity or
osmosis. Keenan speaks about the "difficult dash" that simultaneously
joins and separates knowledge and power; "the dash is not a sign of
equivalence, nor does it mark a covert dissimulation" (Keenan, 1987,
pp. 12-13). Foucault has remarked that "when I read the thesis . . .
'Knowledge is power' or 'Power is knowledge,' I begin to laugh, since
studying their relation is precisely my problem" (1983, in Kelly,
1994, pp. 132-133). That there is tension (residual?) and room (how
much?) between the two concepts is also suggested by the following
programmatic question: "How can the growth of capabilities be
disconnected from the intensification of power relations?" (Foucault,
1984b, p. 48). Cf. Barnes's view that knowledge and power are "one and
the same thing" (1988, p. 169).
3. While the vocabulary of ideology displays a nostalgia for a
transparent, uncontaminated form of knowledge, the vocabulary of
repression bespeaks of a similar nostalgia for a form of power
"innocent of all coercion, discipline, and normalization" (Foucault,
1980, p. 117).
4. Cf. Connolly (1993, p. 366): "To reach 'beyond' the politics of
good and evil is not to liquidate ethics but to become ashamed of the
transcendentalization of conventional morality."
5. This is an example offered by Foucault himself (Connoly, 1993, p.
367).
6. Connolly (1993) has precisely located the Foucaldian challenge to
conventional morality as residing in this destabilization of the fixed
transcendental dualism of good and evil, in pursuit of a higher, more
generous ethical sensibility that does no longer constitute difference
as evil, but is able to embrace it in relations of "agonistic
respect." Cf. more extensively, Connly (1991).
7. Cf. also Foucault's insistence that uncovering the conditions of
acceptability of a discursive system cannot be separated from
recognizing what made it difficult to accept it, "its arbitrariness in
terms of knowledge, its violence in terms of power, in short, its
energy" (1990/1994, p. 76).
8. Fraser finds Foucault's work normatively confused because he
"misunderstands . . . the way that norms function in social
description . . . (and) fails to appreciate the degree to which the
normative is embedded in and infused throughout the whole of language
at every level" (Fraser, 1989, pp. 30-31). But such a normative
embeddedness is quite compatible with the methodological import of
Foucaldian genealogy as I read it here. I agree with Dreyfus and
Rabinow's contention (1986, p. 115) that Foucault "does not propound a
normative theory but that his work certainly has a normative thrust."
Indeed, Foucault facilitates a more radical version of the value-fact
proximity than Fraser considers possible.
9. Connolly (1993, pp. 369, 373) employs terms such as "transcendental
egoism" and "transcendental narcissism" in order to critically
identify the "certification" of contingent identifies by their
transformation into naturalized or ontological necessities. Put more
simply: Critics such as Habermas fall prey to the (universal?)
temptation to universalize their own rationalized personal experience,
in order to escape its essential contingency. This, perhaps, is what
moralizing is all about: It normatively magnifies and "necessitates"
one's own life situation and its sociological and psychological
limitations, while simultaneously erasing this generative experience
from one's moral conscience. Moralizing hence implies both a
self-effacement and a self-magnification; both an escape from self and
a tendency to think that all others are essentially similar to oneself
(which spreads the moral costs of a difficult identity).
10. These renderings better capture what Foucault means by
"desinvolture appliquee" and "desinvolture staidest" than the present
English translation "studied casualness" (Foucault, 1972, p. 234).
They are also closer to the "relentless erudition" demanded of
genealogists in (Foucault, 1977b, p. 140).
11. "History protects us from historicism from a historicism that
calls on the past to resolve the questions of the present" (Foucault,
1984a, p. 250).
12. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) likewise underscore the "unequivocal
and unabashed contemporary orientation" of the genealogical method,
which at all times starts out with a diagnosis of the current
situation (pp. 119, 232, 253).
13. Cf. Dews (1987, p. 180ff) for a parallel critique. Cohen and Arato
(1992) likewise identify a vicious circle: "Either the norms and
projects articulated by social movements are strategies of
counterpower and as such have no greater normative claim than those of
other power seekers, or they simply reproduce the existing discourses
of power. For a critical theory with a partisan intent, as Foucault's
surely is, this is indeed a serious flaw" (pp. 295-296).
14. Cf. also Dews (1987, pp. 189-191) who opines that Foucault's
relativism is in tension with his political involvement, which
continually forces him to sever the intimate connection between
knowledge and power in order to be able to separate the illusory
knowledge that is allied to power from the authentic knowledge that is
allied to "resistance." In my interpretation such a break does not
exist. "Resistance thinking" does not cease to be authentic, even if
it in turn displays a (different, not less intimate) conjugation of
knowledge and power. Cf. Hiley (1988, p. 86ff) for a similar view.
15. "The problem is not of trying to dissolve [relations of power] in
the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give
oneself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the
ethics, the ethos, the practices of the self, which would allow these
games of power to be played with a minimum of domination" (Foucault,
1988b, p. 18).
16. On the proximity of the discourses of domination and liberation,
see also Foucault (1972; 1978; 1984a, 10p. 96, 156-157).
17. "Bad" knowledge fears and conjures away its own circularity;
"good" knowledge acknowledges and celebrates it.
18. In this sense, Foucault rejects all immanent critique, while
Habermas's accusatory identification of "performative contradictions"
typically presupposes its legitimacy. The idea of a performative
contradiction projects an exogenous standard of evaluation into the
adversary's work, which is subsequently exposed as riven by
self-contradiction. Through such fifth column infiltration, the
cognitive strength of the adversary is sapped from the inside. What
appears as an indigenous flaw is in fact insinuated from the outside.
The ventriloquist critic exonerates and absents himself from his
projection, in that the contradiction is not between himself and his
opponent, but between the opponent's own sayings and his actual
doings. In this fashion, performative contradictions are essentially
circular, but by their very grammar manage to conceal this
circularity.
19. Universalist claims, in my reading, are exaggerated attempts to
carry local claims a little further, to enlarge their field of
acceptance, to hold a broader audience. They are a power argument in
intellectual negotiations. Universalists systematically overstate
their case, because rights of maximum diffusion are claimed against
all the world. Universalism performatively anticipates what can only
be realized incrementally, contingently, practically, imperfectly.
20. What Foucault aims at is to write the history of the
"objectivation of objectivities" (Foucault, 1991b, p. 86).
21. By itself, the idea of a productive argumentative circle offers an
intriguing example of the proximity and interlacing of good and evil,
which I take to be a distinctive feature of a skeptical ethic of
knowledge politics.
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~~~~~~~~
By DICK PELS
University of Amsterdam
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Source: American Behavioral Scientist, Jun/Jul95, Vol. 38 Issue 7,
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