Magazine: Political Theory, November, 1996
'HOW IS IT, THEN, THAT WE STILL REMAIN BARBARIANS?'
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Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics
The wholesale aestheticization of society had found its grotesque
apotheosis for a brief moment in fascism, with its panoply of
myths, symbols, and orgiastic spectacles . . . . But in the post-
war years a different form of aestheticization was also to
saturate the entire culture of late capitalism, with its fetishism
of style and surface, its culture of hedonism and technique, its
reifying of the signifier and displacement of discursive meaning
with random intensities.
--Terry Eagleton,
The Ideology of the Aesthetic[1]
AESTHETICS AND ETHICS
Eagleton enunciates a widely held view. But what is meant here by
"aestheticization"? What conception of the aesthetic is invoked?[2] And
what binds the chain of associations that leads from aesthetics to
fascism, and then to fetishism, hedonism, and meaninglessness? How, in
short, has aesthetics come to be the other to ethics? In another text,
Eagleton suggests why aesthetics has been morally suspect from the very
start: "Aesthetics is born in the mid-eighteenth century as a discourse
of the body"; it concerned itself "with all that which follows from our
sensuous relation to the world .... with the way reality strikes the
body on its sensory surface."[3] Is the slide from aesthetics to
nihilism greased with bodily secretions?
In this essay, I explore the relationship between aesthetics and ethics
by examining the charge of "aestheticization" as it has been leveled
against Foucault by Eagleton and others. I do so in some small part to
defend Foucault, but more important, to make a case for the
indispensability of the aesthetic to ethics. Certain forms of the
aesthetic do pose ethical dangers, but the very possibility of enacting
worthy ethical ideals depends upon cultivation of an aesthetic
sensibility.
Like Eagleton, I too inflect aesthetics as a discourse of a sensuous,
responsive body. But I am wary of Eagleton's juxtaposition of the body
to a reality that "strikes" it. In figuring the body as a reactive
receptor, Eagleton's formulation tends to obscure how the body can
itself be inflected artistically: the body too can strike as a black
mood or with purple prose; as a whistle or a hymn; as flashing eyes,
tapping feet, or embroidered tales. And, more important for my thesis,
by figuring bodily responsiveness as automatic or involuntary in
function, as reflex, Eagleton's formulation obscures the possibility of
an experimentally cultivated responsiveness.
When Eagleton or, as we shall see, Richard Wolin or Christopher Norris
or Alex Callinicos accuse Foucault of "aestheticization," they tend to
imagine aesthetics as the province of a reactive, undisciplined
sensuality. To allow this aesthetics to mingle with ethical and
political life is to whet the appetite and impair thoughtfulness, or, at
least, it is to confine ethics and politics to their spectacular,
rhetorical, and dramatic dimensions.
It seems to me, however, that Eagleton et al. overlook/underfeel a third
term between a striking reality and a stricken body. I'll call this
third term sensibility: the quality or character of sensuous experience,
a character that is culturally encoded and temperamentally delimited,
but also educable (to some degree) through careful techniques of the
self. A sensibility is a disciplined form of sensuousness. This
aesthetics--aesthetics as sensibility-formation--has implications for
ethics that are irreducible to fascism, hedonism, or indiscriminateness.
For as a form of askesis,[4] a sensibility establishes the range of
possibility in perception, enactment, and responsiveness to others.
The connection between aesthetics and ethics, then, depends upon how
aesthetics is figured. It depends equally upon the model of ethics
employed. My point of departure here is Friedrich Schiller. In On the
Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Schiller ponders the disturbing
coexistence of rational enlightenment and ethical barbarism: if "our age
is Enlightened; that is to say, such knowledge has been discovered and
publicly disseminated as would suffice to correct . . . our practical
principles," and if "the spirit of free inquiry has . . . undermined the
foundations upon which fanaticism and deception had raised their throne,
" "how is it, then, that we still remain barbarians?"[5]
Schiller concludes that reason is ethically insufficient. Ethics
requires not only rational principles of behavior but the perceptual
refinement to apply them to particular cases and the disposition or will
to live them out. For Schiller, that will is an aesthetic product, to be
cultivated by disciplining and refining one's sensitivity to beauty.[6]
Schiller's central claim is that ethics is not solely a matter of a code
(criteria set out in advance of behavior to guide and judge it), but
also requires a sensuously engaged responsiveness to others. This ethico-
aesthetic sensibility is more crafted than uncovered, and its
cultivation is at least as crucial to ethics as are principles, reasons,
and their assemblage into a moral code. Although they diverge on many
other issues, Schiller and Foucault on this point agree.[7]
Also a partial critic of Enlightenment, Foucault too finds "code
morality" insufficient:
In short, for an action to be "moral," it must not be reducible to
an act or a series of acts conforming to a role, a law, or a value
. . . . There is . . . no moral conduct that does not [also] call
for the forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no forming
of the ethical subject without "modes of subjectivation" and an
"ascetics" or "practices of the self" that support them.[8]
In The Use of Pleasure Foucault examines one historical site where great
attention was paid to these latter ethical tasks. Whereas today "the
main emphasis is placed on the [ethical] code, on its systematicity, its
richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case," in Greek and
Greco-Roman antiquity "the strong and dynamic [ethical] element is to be
sought in the forms of subjectivation and the practices of the self."[9]
In the latter model "the necessity of respecting the law and the customs-
-the nomoi--was very often underscored, [but] more important than the
content of the law and its conditions of application was the attitude
that caused one to respect them." The real challenge, then, is to "keep
in mind the distinction between the code elements of a morality and the
elements of ascesis, neglecting neither their coexistence, their
interrelations, their relative autonomy, nor their possible differences
of emphasis."[10]
Foucault construes the self "as an object of a complex and difficult
elaboration";[11] "technologies of the self" are the means through which
humans effect "a certain number of operations on their own bodies and
souls, thoughts, conducts, and way of being, so as to transform
themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity,
wisdom, perfection, or immortality."[12] These formulations exhibit a
precise ambiguity with regard to the question of who or what is
directing these "elaborations" and "operations" and what ends they
serve. Is the transformation of self a matter of socially imposed
normalization? Or are techniques "of" the self normalizing pressures
internalized by the self and applied to itself? Or do such technologies
afford opportunities for reflective modification of the self by the
self?[13]
Foucault suggests that it is impossible to discern exactly the relative
weights of these three in the formation of any given self. Foucault's
early work accentuated the first two modalities of self-formation. The
discussion in Discipline and Punish of "bio-power," for example,
sensitized readers to disciplinary practices, like Schiller's "aesthetic
education," which write the law right into the body.[14] But Foucault's
later work also affirms a project of aesthetic inscription: sensibility
appears as susceptible, to some uncertain degree, to self-conscious
craft. Here Foucault foregrounds the last modality of self-formation,
that is, the reflective modification of the self by the self. If the
point of his early genealogies was to expose the project of
individuality as a ruse of power and to disrupt our association of self-
discipline with freedom, the point of his later work is to enunciate the
more complex thesis that there is no self without discipline, no
discipline that does not also harbor opportunities for artistic practice,
and no ethics without aesthetics.[15] A moment of "freedom" survives
within subjectivity after all, it seems.
But what kind of "freedom" can coexist with ubiquitous, productive
power? Foucaultian freedom is surely not the Kantian idea of an
autonomous rational will, and neither is it Schiller's romantic revision
of Kant wherein an aesthetic modulation of the psyche allows the
rational will to engage.[16] Like Schiller, Foucault refuses to reduce
ethics to a matter of reason, but unlike Schiller, Foucault proceeds
further to pluralize the notion of "reason":
I think that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought
since the eighteenth century has been, still is, and will, I hope,
remain the question, What is the Reason that we use? What are its
historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its
dangers?[17]
Foucault resignifies freedom by locating it in relation to a
historically situated rationality. He thereby refuses to define freedom
in opposition to a system of external constraints: his is a heteronomous
freedom. A subject can indeed experience "freedom"--can feel the
exhilaration of making a distinctive mark upon what one comes to be. But
this liberatory self-naming is not to be construed as a transcendence of
power. It consists, rather, in tentative explorations of the outer edges
of the current regime of subjectivity. These engagements with the
frontier foreground the possibility of new configurations of and for
identity. But these novelties are still a function of the institutional
matrix that helps to define them, they still are implicated in
historically contingent practices of power, and they still contend with
a recalcitrant body that is never entirely reducible to any practice of
subjectivity.
Foucault dissents from Schiller on reason and on autonomy,[18] but he
draws from him fragments of faith in the transformative capacity of
romantic ideals. Foucault acknowledges that the very experience of
freedom depends, again to some uncertain degree, upon the ardent wish
for individualized self-direction, upon the dream of a beautifully
designed subjectivity. Such efficacious fictions help to make the
freedom there is to be had havable.[19]
In sum, Eagleton is right that the aesthetic "marks the way in which
structures of power . . . become gradually transmuted into structures of
feeling."[20] But I would add that this transmutation is also
susceptible to reflective, experimental, counter-hegemonic forces. Or
such is my wager as I explore with Foucault the intersection of
aesthetics and ethics.
Eagleton et al., wary of this intersection, fear it to be the place
where violence and beauty conjoin. And the aestheticization of violence
is indeed a risk--to use an American example instead of the German one,
the Pentagon has presented annihilating weapons as sublime mushroom
clouds against a desert sky, as a meteor shower of lights over Baghdad,
as a sleek and elegant stealth bomber-bird. But why react to the
aestheticization of violence with an attempt to eradicate the aesthetic
dimension of ethics (or politics)? Such a project is itself morally
risky. It may also be self-defeating, for what if the very possibility
of enacting worthy ideals depends upon cultivation of an aesthetic
sensibility?
In what follows, I pursue this possibility by examining in detail the
various modalities of the charge of "aestheticization." Much turns upon
the conceptions of aesthetics and ethics first presupposed by the
critics and then mistakenly invested in Foucault. This investment allows
them to find Foucault deficient according to standards he contests. It
also retards more productive engagements between contending models of
ethics and aesthetics.
THE CASE AGAINST AESTHETICIZATION
Mixing the Three Realms
Richard Wolin begins his critique by invoking a Habermasian division of
experience into three spheres or realms. There is science, morality, and
art, each of which is independent and mutually exclusive of the
others.[21] Eagleton speaks of the cognitive, ethico-political, and
libidinal-aesthetic; Christopher Norris describes domains of "truth-
seeking rational enquiry," "ethico-political discourse," and "aesthetic
values."[22] From within such schemas, Foucault appears as an aesthetic
imperialist, a would-be colonizer of the other two spheres. Foucault,
writes Wolin, is a "pan-aestheticist" who "refuses to rest content with
aestheticism qua transcendent, supramundane spiritual activity,"
insisting instead that "the concern for beauty evinced in the artistic
sphere must be generalized throughout life." Foucault here follows
Nietzsche, for whom "the aesthetic attitude toward the world must
transgress the boundaries of the aesthetic sphere per se, and pursue a
course of conscious world-mastery." Nietzsche "refuses to respect the
separate 'inner logics' in differentiated realms of human
cognition."[23]
More generous than Wolin, Eagleton reads Foucault's aestheticism as a
misguided response to the modern eclipse of harmony among the spheres
rather than as the expression of his personal will to power. But
Eagleton agrees that the aesthetic can "interrelate" the spheres only by
"swallowing up the other two. Everything should now become aesthetic.
Truth, the cognitive, becomes that which satisfies the mind . . . .
Morality is converted to a matter of style . . . [of] turning oneself
into an artifact."[24]
For Wolin, Norris, and Eagleton, the aesthetic is an autonomous "realm"
whose criteria of value are nonrational, amoral, and apolitical matters
of beauty and style. Ethics and politics are aestheticized: the verb
form is to evoke a kind of sci-fi inhabitation of the body by an alien
and only apparently innocuous rome. Indeed, if there exist distinct
domains of human interest, each with distinct logics and hierarchies of
values, then Foucault's concern with care of the self must be an
aggressive universalization of the partial truths of one sphere. But
that "if" is precisely one of the issues between them and Foucault that
is suppressed by their redescriptions of his project.
What Foucault describes as processes of "subjectivation" or "ascesis" or
"technologies of the self" are here presented as merely "aesthetic"--
that is, concerning a pleasing, sensuous, and superficial style or
appearance--rather than seriously "ethical." For such critics, ethics is
a matter of identifying and justifying a code of behavior; it is a
matter of the other two spheres (the cognitive and the ethico-political)
engaging in a complex but mutually "respectful" interaction. These
critics do not recognize Foucault's heterodox conception of ethics as an
ethics, but see it rather as a pan-aesthetic attempt to eliminate the
practice of ethics. They do so despite Foucault's clear statements that
he understands ethics to include questions about the code: "I had to
keep in mind the distinction between the code elements of a morality and
the elements of ascesis, neglecting neither their coexistence, their
interrelations, their relative autonomy, nor their possible differences
of emphasis . . . . I am not supposing that the codes are
unimportant."[25]
The Micropolitics of Monads
Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner place their objections to
aestheticization in a slightly different frame, more Marxist than
Habermasian. For them, the aesthetic turn in ethics is a feeble response
to the cultural condition of capitalist colonization. Those like
Foucault--who have rejected "traditional rationalist politics based on
ideology critique, the overcoming of false consciousness, the
subordination of art to politics, and a pragmatic concern with the
serious business of seizing power"--can respond to the fact that we are
"libidinally bound" to capitalism only by analyzing the structure of
desire.[26] Having banished themselves from the politics of reason,
pragmatics, and seizure, they seek refuge in a "micropolitics of
desire."
But such an "aesthetic"--that is, concerning sensual images that while
superficial are also powerful and seductive--response to capitalist
hegemony has, say Best and Kellner, no counter-hegemonic force. Its
focus on individually desiring subjects deflects attention from the
shared economic and social conditions of colonization, the very
conditions that must be the target of collective reformation. Alex
Callinicos, in Against Postmodernism, concurs:
Foucault . . . asks why "everyone's life couldn't become a work of
art?" The answer, of course, is that most people's lives are still
. . . shaped by their lack of access to productive resources and
their consequent need to sell their labour-power in order to live.
To invite a hospital porter in Birmingham, a car-worker in San
Paolo, a social security clerk in Chicago, or a street child in
Bombay to make a work of art of their lives would be an insult--
unless linked to precisely the kind of strategy for global social
change which . . . poststructuralism rejects.[27]
Callinicos has a point about the prospects for universalizing an
aesthetics of existence. But Callinicos himself fails to offer a viable
"strategy for global social change." Moreover, I am not confident he is
sufficiently responsive to the impositions and violences that would be
engendered by such an ambitious project. These points help to explain
why Foucault brackets economic, occupational, and class considerations
from his discussions of arts of the self:
In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the
system of contemporary reality . . . has led only to the return of
the most dangerous traditions. I prefer the very specific
transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty
years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being
and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes,
the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even
these partial transformations . . . to the programs for a new man
that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the
twentieth century.[28]
Foucault also eschews the language of political economy because he does
not think that freedom is something that can be guaranteed by a
favorable set of material conditions--"I do not think that there is
anything that is functionally--by its very nature--absolutely
liberating. Liberty is a practice." But this is not to say, continues
Foucault, that "one may as well leave people in slums thinking that they
can simply exercise their rights there."[29]
Does Foucault grant the ethical necessity of working to reduce slums and
economic inequality, without making this project the central object of
his own theoretical concern? Is this because he believes that the means
to combat social and economic injustice are obvious and that what is
lacking is the aesthetic-ethical-political will to employ them? Foucault
says little that responds explicitly to these questions. And, Simons
points out, by the terms of his own philosophy, Foucault should have
offered an "analysis of the enmeshment of art in power relations."[30]
For Foucault's materialist critics,[31] a critical response to the
capitalist capture of our very identities, desires, and lived
experiences--a capture that itself can be described as an
aestheticization of politics--is surely not more aestheticization! It
must involve, rather, a "politics of alliances" and "coalition
building."[32] That kind of politics, however, is ruled out by Foucault
and friends who have abandoned hope of ever motivating action under a
common banner like "anti-capitalism." Eagleton describes this
abandonment as the Foucaultian return to "monadism": "Foucault's
vigorously self-mastering individual remains wholly monadic. Society is
just an assemblage of autonomous self-disciplining agents, with no sense
that their self-realization might flourish within bonds of
mutuality."[33]
There are two elements in this charge: first, Foucault's "monadic"
conception of the self and, second, his failure to recognize an internal
connection between self-realization, mutuality, and public or collective
action. The first claim is odd, given Foucault's insistence on the
impossibility of being outside a regime of power, which functions as the
condition of possibility of any form of subjectivity and which always
fails to achieve its goal of preventing intersubjective bonds likely to
disrupt the regime. The goal of Foucault's "aesthetics of existence" is
to shape oneself to the extent made possible within this web of
constraints (of social, historical, economic, and temperamental-bodily
circumstance). It is a matter "of showing how social mechanisms... have
been able to work, how forms of repression and constraint have acted,
and then, starting from there, it seems to me, one [leaves] . . . to the
people themselves, knowing all the above, the frontier possibility of
self-determination."[34] There is no escaping a regime of power, but
this does not mean that subjectivation is simply subjection, for there
is always the possibility of "practices of liberation, of freedom, as in
Antiquity, starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and
conventions that are found in the culture."[35]
With regard to the second element in Eagleton's charge, Eagleton is
right to note that Foucault rejects the idea of "self-realization within
bonds of mutuality." But it is the "self-realization" not the "bonds of
mutuality" part with which he takes issue.[36] Foucault does not share
an Aristotelian notion of politics or public discourse as the privileged
site of self-realization. He find this quest for self-realization to be
indulgent and implicated in otherwise unnecessary political violences.
But this does not mean that Foucault's aesthetic self cannot engage in
collective practices of mobilization for reasons other than self-
realization. An "aesthetics of existence" can be one of the means
through which we improve the quality and generosity of our connectedness
to others.[37]
Many of Foucault's critics seem to want to own the discourse of
mutuality, coalition, political resistance, and material conditions,
exiling any theorist who breaks with their specific conceptions to the
land of individualism, monadism, complacency, and style. Even Eagleton,
who is alert to the ethics-aesthetics link in others, fails to
acknowledge it sufficiently in Foucault. He instead identifies
Foucault's aestheticism with fantasy, free play, and the escapist dreams
of beautiful souls. Foucault's aesthetics of existence expresses,
according to Eagleton, a yearning for a life "blessedly free from the
shackles of truth, meaning and sociality."[38] For a "giddy" and
"apocalyptic" moment Foucault allows himself to "fantasize" about "what
it would be like to be emancipated from institutionality altogether."
This aesthetic dimension of Foucault's psyche coexists, continues
Eagleton, with a more analytical, realist element. This latter is
responsible for Foucault's theory of power as pervasive and as
productive of subjectivity. Thus while Foucault dreams of pure, negative
liberty, he doesn't ever believe "that human life could ever be anything
other than institutional life."[39] Eagleton concludes that it is this
combination of escapist fantasy and extremely pessimistic realism that
allows Foucault to excuse himself from the obligation to work macro-
politically.
Heteronomy and Hedonism
Related to the criticism that Foucault's aesthetics of existence is
individualistic is the claim that he construes the individual as a
peculiarly inefficacious entity, reducing subjectivity from "a multi-
dimensional form of agency and praxis . . . to a decentred desiring
existence."[40] Such a self is incapable of "autonomy," or willing on
the basis of a rational principle one gives to oneself. Foucault does
indeed fail to practice ethics in this way, rejecting the model of
ethics as the will's obedience to a command or "imperious injunction" of
Reason, Nature, or God. For Foucault an ethic based on obedience to a
command is not viable, for the morality of that command, not to mention
its existence, can never be established. Moreover, a command morality is
very likely to be blunt, harsh, inattentive to the complexities of
context, timing, and political possibilities. Ethics is for Foucault a
matter of reflective heteronomy, of the recognition of one's implication
in and dependence upon a web of social relations within which there
nevertheless remains room for the individual to carve out a space of
distinction, self-direction, or "liberty."[41]
Surely Best, Kellner, Wolin, and Eagleton have encountered similar
misgivings about morality as command. Why, then, do they invoke this
model in their critiques as if it were an unproblematic alternative?
Perhaps it is because they prefer the problems and dangers accompanying
a command morality to those carried by Foucault's ethics of reflective
heteronomy. One of these latter is hedonism. Inside the charge of a
threat to "autonomy" one can hear the concern that Foucault's
micropolitics of desire--which after all posits desire as a fundamental
unit of analysis and powerful force in political life--will subject us
not to Reason but to the body and its pleasures. In describing the self
as decentered, Foucault is sanctioning a life of unregulated bodily
impulses. Wolin makes this link between the defense of a neo-Kantian
ethic and a fear of the tyrannical body explicit. Within Foucault's
aestheticism is a morally suspect "vitalism":
"Art reminds us of states of animal vigor," Nietzsche announces.
"Becoming more beautiful as the expression of a victorious will!"
he gushes elsewhere--in a spirit that is not at all foreign to the
. . . sublimated vitalism Foucault endorses.[42]
If Foucaultian aestheticizers are "gushing" according to Wolin, they are
naked according to Best and Kellner: Foucault "strips the subject of
moral responsibility and autonomy."[43] Foucaultian aestheticization,
then, signifies bondage to the body, its cravings, emissions, and
obsessions. Foucaultian aesthetics is a dangerous discourse of the body;
"it concerns itself with all that which follows from our sensuous
relation to the world, and from that which takes root in the guts and
the gaze, with the way reality strikes the body on its sensory
surface."[44] Here Foucault's project of crafting a sensibility is
reduced to an unreflective submission to the body. Foucault's aesthetics
is thus stripped of its ascesis.
Theatricality
Wolin also associates Foucault's aestheticism with dandyism. Again
making the charge of pan-aestheticism, Wolin argues that Foucault
replaces the interest in collective action, rational consensus, and
social justice with a preference for the beautiful, the sublime, and the
tasteful. But "taste" cannot distinguish--or distinguish only
arbitrarily--between true and false consciousness, just and unjust
orders.[45] According to Wolin, Foucault claims that "normative
questions cannot be adjudicated rationally." (Foucault may say that he
is "fortunately committed to practicing a rationality,"[46] but Wolin
hears in Foucault's writing the conviction that "the Enlightenment
project of rational reflection . . . is not worth saving."[47]) Thus,
ethical judgment can for Foucault consist in no more than a willful
choice among his fancies.
This is not a rational choice but neither is it random, continues Wolin,
for there are criteria of value internal to the aesthetic realm. But
they concern not the content of the choice but its dramatic effect. In
rejecting a code-based ethic, in particular the one centering around the
principle of "respect for all rational nature as ends-in-themselves,"
Foucault is left with "a dramaturgical model of conduct, in which action
becomes meaningful solely qua performative gesture."[48] Foucault's
ethic is grounded upon what Schiller himself called "uncultivated taste,
" that is, a taste that seizes "upon what is new and startling--on the
colourful, fantastic, and bizarre, the violent and the savage . . . . It
fashions grotesque shapes, loves swift transitions, exuberant forms,
glaring contrasts, garish lights, and song full of feeling."[49] Thus,
in Foucault's ethic--and this is Wolin's point--others become mere means,
"material for my own personal aesthetic gratification; they are degraded
to the status of bit players in the drama of my own private aesthetic
spectacle."[50]
Once "provocative actions, gestures or spectacles" are deemed to be the
telos of Foucaultian aesthetics, it follows that his "ethical universe .
. . is a Hobbesian state of nature . . . with a flair for style."[51]
But Wolin need not define Foucaultian ethics thus. Even leaving aside
Foucault's affirmation of the necessity of a code, subjectivation has
more to do with "ascesis"--with self-discipline, self-restraint--than
with style as performance, which after all is only one of a wide variety
of possible techniques of the self that a Foucaultian ethics might
employ. Moreover, Foucault also displays admiration for the Greco-Roman
ideal of a well-balanced self, an artistic arrangement of its parts. Is
this too garish, whorish, girlish, or frivolous? Here Foucault follows
another Nietzsche, the one who said:
One thing is needful.--To "give style" to one's character--a great
and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the
strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an
artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason
and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second
nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been
removed--both times through long practice and daily work at it.
Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has
been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and
resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distance views;
it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable.[52]
Veiling Violence
The final element in the case against Foucault concerns his construing
of power as, in Eagleton's words, a "self-grounding, self-generative and
self-delighting" artifact. This presentation aestheticizes away the pain
and suffering involved in power. According to Eagleton, Foucault becomes
"entranced by the organicism of this splendid aesthetic construct, as
when he comments on power as 'an extremely complex system of relations,
which leads one finally to wonder how, given that no one person can have
conceived it in its entirety, it can be so subtle in its distribution,
its mechanisms, reciprocal controls and adjustments.'"[53] Eagleton here
makes the Schillerian assumption that the motivational power of the
aesthetic depends upon its ability to simulate, in the self or in the
appearance of the art-object, a kind of harmony: Foucault gets carried
away with the organicism of (his own construct of) power. Under this
spell, the "brutal violence"[54] of a regime of power fades from his
view, enabling Foucault's "latent preference for a power which is
evident rather than covert," a preference that brings him to the edge of
endorsing torture and "absolutist coercion" over incarceration and
"insidious techniques of subjection."[55] Because "splendid artifacts"
dazzle, Foucault too often forgets that they harm.[56] Eagleton makes an
interesting argument here. He uses "the aesthetic" in the sense of a
realm of false appearance, of veils used to prettify the ugly truths
they conceal, and he assumes that their veils work best when they are
organic wholes, "non-instrumental, non-teleological, autonomous, and
self-referential" artifacts. Eagleton has put his finger on the central
dilemma facing attempts to affirm the intersection of ethics and
aesthetics: the aesthetic is both ethically indispensable (it provides
an impetus to act well) and morally dangerous (it can cloak brutality,
cruelty, and inhumanity in beautiful and seductive forms).[57]
Eagleton takes his critique of Foucault's artifactual conception of
power a step further when he claims that Foucault links the exercise of
power to the pleasure of artistic self-expression. This linking
functions as a kind of endorsement of it. Although Eagleton identifies
the crime here as a "profoundly ambivalent" attitude toward power--the
productivity of power "is in one sense oppressive, generating ever more
refined techniques of subjection and surveillance, but . . . it is
productive in a rather more positive or creative sense too, a triumphant
Nietzschean growth, unfolding and proliferation"[58]--what seems to
trouble Eagleton most is the effect upon social behavior of Foucault's
highlighting of the tie between power and pleasure. Foucault cannot be
blamed for the fact that it is possible to take pleasure in exercising
power over others, but Eagleton does hold him accountable for
advertising the link, glamorizing it, and thus enabling the dangerously
amoral will-to-power to draw upon the "resolute will and ardour" of the
body. I shall return to the question of aesthetics and violence below.
THE POSITIVE ROLE OF ARTISTRY IN ETHICS
What has caused the most alarm about Foucault's entrance into the
discourse of ethics is his refusal to place the moral "code"--a
"prescriptive ensemble" of values, rules of action, and criteria of
judgment--at the center of ethics. Instead, Foucault focuses upon the
"manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting
in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code,"[59]
upon the processes through which one might become the moral subject of
one's own actions.[60] Why this focus? Because here he and Schiller
concur against Wolin and Eagleton, who fail to attend to the persistence
of barbarism in an age of reason.
Ethics, according to Foucault, is the intertwining of code and
subjectivation. Subjectivation is a complex process, both in terms of
agency and in terms of the tasks it must perform. Agency: subjectivation
proceeds via cultural hegemony as well as by means of individual
manipulations of and machinations within cultural limits. This is what I
refer to as Foucault's ethic of heteronomy: moral action is heteronomous
both with regard to the web of social, legal, institutional, and other
cultural constraints or regimes of power and with regard to the
recalcitrant materials within the "individual" body, for example,
desires, fears, the process of aging. Tasks: subjectivation serves
several functions. First, it must specify which part of the self
(behavior? dreams? secret thoughts?) is particularly salient for ethics;
second, it must determine which exercises and litanies are to install
the ethical code upon the body as a sensibility;[61] third, it must
generate a rationale for obedience to ethical disciplines and
principles;[62] and fourth, it must designate a telos for the ethical
subject.[63]
Foucault chose to be reticent about the "telos" he endorsed and about
the content of the code that is to work together with it:
The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what they must
do. By what right would he do so? And remember all the prophecies,
promises, injunctions and plans intellectuals have been able to
formulate in the course of the last two centuries and of which we
have seen the effects.[64]
Because of this he left himself open to charges like the one Eagleton
makes: "Does it all come down to a question of how . . . one 'stylizes'
one's conduct? What would a stylish rape look like, precisely?"[65]
Although this objection again reads Foucault's emphasis on the
subjectivation dimension of ethics as a repudiation of all need for a
code, and it ignores his explicit repudiation of rape, would it have
been better for Foucault to have filled out his heterodox and
heteronomous conception of ethics with a specific content, and to offer
it up for debate? I think so, even if one then courts another danger,
that of universalizing ideals that are class or race or gender specific
or of engaging in a morally suspect projection of one's self onto an
other.
Thoreau is for me exemplary here. It is not that he provides in advance
a set of criteria to determine which "ethical substances," "ascetic
techniques," "modes of subjection," and "ethical teloses" are acceptable
and which are not. Rather, he affirms both a particular code and
specific forms of ascesis, sometimes emphasizing one of them, sometimes
the other, in the hope that the combination will resonate with his
readers' predispositions, including the capacity for care and reasoned
persuasion. And Thoreau repeatedly juxtaposes his ethos with rival
"modulations of the psyche" and with alternative codes.[66]
I also agree with Foucault's critics that an artistic approach to ethics
should include a self-critical analysis of the relation between power
and aesthetics. The project of using an "aesthetic" sensibility to
oppose the barbarism of American life might here draw upon the Frankfort
school insight that labor too is a technique of self, and acknowledge
warnings about the commodity fetishism lurking in the shadows of the
aesthetic gaze.[67]
But I agree with Foucault when he says that while he used an aesthetic
vocabulary, a project such as his could with justice be discussed under
the rubric of moral philosophy.[68] For like the law or code dimension
of ethics, the processes of subjectivation concern the restriction or
governance of behavior. The difference is that techniques of
subjectivation respond to subtle norms of admirable behavior and
thought; they address the question of which sensibilities, attitudes, or
characters, and not simply which actions, are most laudable. It might
even be said that the former concerns make for a more resilient and
careful approach to ethics. For codes are always crude things, and much
behavior of ethical significance--that is, with the potential to cause
suffering--slips between its cracks. "What struck me about Antiquity,"
says Foucault, "is that the points around which reflection is most
active regarding sexual pleasure are not at all the points which
represented the traditionally received forms of prohibition. On the
contrary, it was where sexuality was the least restricted that the
moralists of antiquity questioned themselves with the most intensity and
where they succeeded in formulating the most rigorous doctrines."[69]
But if one is interested in ethics and morality, why choose to speak of
"aesthetics"? What is the value of representing ethics in the language
of art? I can name two such advantages, especially if one uses the
plastic arts as the model, rather than the visual-voyeuristic model
typically invoked by political critics of the aesthetic. First, the
constructed character of moral agents and principles comes to the fore
as they are likened to pieces of work like sculptures, carvings, pottery,
to things worked and reworked in ways never free from the mark or force
of prior embodiments, intentions, or accidents.[70] Second, insofar as
"art" is thought to call for a special mode of perception, that is, an
attention to things as sensuous ensembles (scenes, songs, stories,
dances), an artistic representation of ethics may reveal with special
force its structural or network character.
Why do so many of his critics nevertheless reduce Foucaultian ethics to
pan-aestheticization, or monadism, or a willful hedonism, or shock art
violence? Because, I think, their arguments are based on the underargued
presumption that if one does not endorse a "command" ethics one has no
ethics at all. Only a code-centered model can ensure a care for others,
limiting "provocative actions, gestures or spectacles" in the name of
some categorical imperative. They acknowledge some value for the
aesthetic but not in the sphere of reason, ethics, or politics. The
attempt to ban aesthetic from these spheres is based on a fear that not
to do so would open a Pandora's box of opportunities for manipulation
and propaganda. This is a reasonable fear, not only given the phenomena
of fascist and totalitarian art but also considering disturbing trends
in campaign and commercial advertising.[71]
The aesthetic dimension of ethics is clearly susceptible to misuse. So
is the commitment to rationality or to the scientific method or to the
exercise of authority. The first question, though, is whether the
aesthetic disposition is ethically dispensable. To state the hypothesis
boldly: code-only moralities have lost their hold on many people today,
and thus in search of an audience, they are devolving into
fundamentalisms of purity and self-certainty--and hatred and violence
against nonbelievers. "The idea of a morality as obedience to a code of
rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a
morality, one responds, or must respond, with a research which is that
of an aesthetics of existence."[72]
Regardless of whether or not Foucault himself did so, his artistry can
be used as part of a project to cultivate a care for the world not
conditioned on the fact that the world be legible to us. Foucault did
believe that the arts of the self, serving different ends in different
ethics, form a constitutive dimension of any morality. Foucault presses
critics of "aestheticization" to acknowledge how the perspective they
endorse needs the aesthetic element they want to expunge, he critically
examines the model of ethics as a code, and he asks us to think again
about the relation of rationality to barbarism.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Wendy Brown, Joan Cocks, Bill Connolly,
Tom Dumm, Kathy Ferguson, Regenia Gagnier, David Hoy, Ian Hunter, Martin
Jay, Sid Maskit, Paul Shepard, Tracy Strong, Stephen White, Linda
Zerilli, and an anonymous Political TheOry reviewer for their
contributions to this essay.
NOTES
1. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (New York: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), 372.
2. Martin Jay is right to insist that any discussion of aestheticization
"must begin by identifying the normative notion of the aesthetic it
presupposes" (p. 72). Jay's own survey of different uses of the term is
useful, although it does not include the sense in which I use it, that
is, the aesthetic-as-sensibility-formation. See Martin Jay, Force Fields
(London: Routledge, 1993).
3. Terry Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke," in Irish
Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Kenneally (Gerards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1992), 25.
4. Foucault "discusses practices of the self as askesis, in its Greek
sense of self-discipline rather than a Christian sense of self-denial."
Jori Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), 77.
5. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans.
Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 49-51.
6. Schiller's argument, in brief, goes like this: An aesthetic mood can
arise in the presence of a beautiful, inanimate object in Nature. What
is beautiful about such an object is the singularity of its thereness.
As one becomes practiced in experiencing natural objects in their unique
specificity, one in turn becomes more competent at recognizing other
selves for their own sake. Thus, the characteristic quality of the self
under the sway of the aesthetic mood is an appreciation of the freedom,
that is, self-determining potential, of others.
While I am enchanted by Schiller's account of the mutual dependence of
respect for persons and aesthetic sensibility, when I shake my head and
blink my eyes I remember how dependent his account is upon a contestable
and often oppressive ontology of harmony and wholeness.
7. Schiller and Foucault proceed from radically different ontological
presumptions. What makes possible an aesthetic sensibility, according to
Schiller, is the "play-drive," gift of beneficent Nature, the creation
of a God of grace. The experience of Beauty gives us a glimpse of the
harmony originally designed for us: in the enjoyment of beauty "the
practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite is thereby
actually proven" (Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 189).
According to Foucault, however, we must not imagine that the world turns
toward us a legible face. Although Foucault appeals to a standard of
artistic balance, this balance is not the restoration of an inherent
harmony but the skillful effect of an artist of the self who has subdued
the demand to discover intrinsic harmonies.
8. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 28.
9. Ibid., 29-30.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 41.
12. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the
Self, ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
13. What is the "source" upon which one draws in such a case? It
consists of fragments of subjectivity already formed by one means or
another.
14. Eagleton makes a Foucaultian point, then, when he warns that
Schiller's attempt to conjoin reason with sentiment has the effect of
inscribing power "in the minutae of subjective experience" (Ideology of
the Aesthetic, 20) and that it participates in the larger historical
trend whereby "power is shifting its location from centralized
institutions to the silent, invisible depths of the subject itself" (p.
27).
15. Foucault conceives of his analyses of the "limits that are imposed
on us" to be at the same time "an experiment with the possibility of
going beyond them." (Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 50)
16. According to Schiller, we shall remain barbarians as long as we fail
to recognize that Reason's "execution demands a resolute will and ardour
of feeling" whose source is not Reason but the aesthetic disposition (On
the Aesthetic Education of Man, 49).
17. Michel Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," in Foucault Live, trans.
John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989),
269.
18. "The relations between the growth of capacities and the growth of
autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed"
(Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 41).
19. I find support for this reading of Foucault as containing an
"idealistic" element in Simons's Foucault and the Political:
Greenblatt, whom Foucault cites . . ., argues that the freedom of
arts of the self consists not in self-creation itself but in the
experience of self-formation in the face of all the other forces
that fashion us. . . . There is an interaction of control
mechanisms that belies any belief that one is entirely what one
made oneself, though Greenblatt feels the need to sustain the
illusion that he is the principal maker of his identity: "To
abandon self-fashioning is to abandon the craving for freedom, and
to let go of one's stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood
conceived as a fiction, is to die." (p. 76)
20. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 26.
21. Richard Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," Telos 67 (1986):
73.
22. Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1992), 163.
23. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 73. Norris too roads the
aesthetic turn in political theory as a dangerous "over-extension of
aesthetic values or analogues," involving the attempt to conquer and
annex (Uncritical Theory, 167).
24. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 368.
25. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 31-2.
26. Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991), 290.
27. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989),
91. Eagleton too charges Foucault with an indifference toward the poor,
linking this indifference to his claim that them is no where outside
power: "It is the system itself, in a purely formalistic politics, which
is the enemy; but this enemy is quite ineluctable, and like the poor
will always be with us" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 386).
28. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 46-7.
29. Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," 264-5.
30. Simons, Foucault and the Political, 80.
31. Foucault, like Nietzsche, is a materialist too. Every social
formation, including the construction of the self, the structure of work,
the forms of the law, is a materialization. What Foucault denies is that
one set of practices is material and fundamental, while others simply
respond to them.
32. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 290.
33. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 393.
34. Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," in Foucault Live,
trans. John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),
1989), 312.
35. Ibid., 313.
36. According to Eagleton, Foucault's "ethical ideal . . . of an ascetic,
dispassionate mastery over one's powers . . . combines the best of
coercion--to produce oneself involves a taxing, punitive disciple--with
the best of hegemony: the subject has the autonomy of the hegemonic
subject, but now in a radically more authentic manner" (Ideology of the
Aesthetic, 391, my emphasis). But "authenticity" is not a Foucaultian
goal, given his critique of the "true" self.
Wolin makes the related error of reading Foucault's "art of the self' as
a decisionistic act of will. Once Wolin has done this, he can charge
that Foucault underestimates the complexity of the process of self-
individuation: "The appeal to the model of aesthetic self-fashioning
seems facile and implausible, especially in contrast with the elaborate
and painstakingly detailed descriptions of bio-power in Foucault's
preceding works. Can the complex problems of modern self-individuation
really be remedied, let alone solved, by way of a simple assertion of
will, by the 'choice of a beautiful life' . . . ?" Richard Wolin, The
Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
192.
37. William Connolly makes this case eloquently and in detail in "Beyond
Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political
Theory 21 (August 1993).
38. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 387.
39. Ibid., 386.
40. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 290-2.
41. One might reply to Best and Kellner that if "practices of
liberation" can only start "of course from a certain number of rules,
styles, and conventions that are found in the culture," then "autonomy"
is not quite the issue ("Aesthetics of Existence," 313).
Eagleton too misses the way in which Foucault advocates an ethics of
reflective heteronomy. Instead he reads Foucault's "art of the self' as
an attempt to combine "the concept of individual autonomy, which stands
relatively free of the law, with the pleasures of sado-masochistic power
such a law involves" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 392). Eagleton objects
that Foucault doesn't really "escape from the lures of traditional
hegemony," for traditional hegemony too required a certain amount of
"self-labour?' "It is only by implicitly caricaturing it as a passive,
docile receptivity to law that Foucault can effectively counterpose" it
to his own ethic. But what if traditional hegemony requires self-labor?
Foucault never claims to offer a radical escape from hegemony or
normalization. Moreover, the self-labor he invokes does differ from that
of "traditional hegemony": it is a deliberate and self-conscious labor
in accordance with an individualized artistic design understood as
operating within a system of externally imposed constraints.
Eagleton also objects to the fact that the self-hegemony of the ancient
Greeks, which Foucault uses as a model, worked in conjunction with the
hegemonic force of "a slave-based society" (p. 393). But there is
nothing inherent in the project of self-fashioning that is pro-slavery.
42. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192, my emphasis.
43. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 291.
44. Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke," 25.
45. In Norris's words, "History, philosophy, jurisprudence, sociology
and other disciplines [become] . . . so many optional 'kinds of writing,
' . . . remov[ed] . . . from the realm of determinate truth and
falsehood." Hence the danger of "mystified national-aestheticist themes,
including . . . Heidegger's endorsement of Nazi cultural propaganda." In
Derrida's case in particular, aestheticization "subtilize[s] issues of
real-world factual and ethical accountability" to the point where they
become "quite beyond reach of enlightened rational debate." See Norris,
Uncritical Theory, 166-7, and the afterword in Jacques Derrida, Limited
Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), for Derrida's
reply.
Eagleton, too, worries that Foucault's conception of power as ubiquitous
"dangerously elides the distinctions between, say, fascistic and liberal
capitalist forms of society" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 387).
46. Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," 268.
47. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 78.
48. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192.
49. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 211.
50. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192. Also: "Carte blanche is
accorded to forms of life that are manipulative and predatory vis-a-vis
other persons" (p. 84).
To his credit, Eagleton notes that in his later writings Foucault
explored the possibility of an "aesthetic working upon oneself [as] . .
. as a sort of self-hegemony?' But Eagleton reads this as a response to
the danger of conformity (coming "meekly under the sway of a
heteronomous decree") rather than as an attempt to mitigate the internal
urge to dominate and oppress others (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 391).
51. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 85.
52. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1974), 232, aphorism no. 290.
53. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 388. In other places, according
to Eagleton, Foucault resist his attraction to organism, as when in the
second volume of the History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980) he
attempts to replace "the mighty aesthetic organism of humanist hegemony,
in which all component parts are ruled . . . by a singular principle"
with a "multitude of little individual artifacts, each of them
relatively autonomous and self-determining" (p. 392).
54. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 388.
55. Ibid., 389.
56. Ibid., 390.
57. Paul de Man charges Schiller with concealing the violence required
by his totalistic project of aesthetic education. For a good discussion,
see Jay, Force Fields, 75-7.
58. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 390.
59. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 26.
60. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon,
1984), 352.
61. Ought one, for example, to engage in a long effort of learning,
memorizations? or seek a sudden and irreversible change in behavior? or
try to root out, down to the last hidden form, all forms of suspect
desire?
62. "You can see," says Foucault, "that the way the same rule is
accepted . . . [can be] quite different. And that's what I call the mode
d'assujettissement" ("On the Genealogy of Ethics," 354).
In one mode of subjection, for example, obedience might be grounded upon
divine law; in another, in a natural or cosmological order; in another,
in a rational principle. Or one might strive to conform "because one
acknowledges oneself to be a member of the group that accepts it," or
"because one regards oneself as an heir to a spiritual tradition that
one has the responsibility of maintaining or reviving," or because it
gives "one's personal life a form that answers to criteria of brilliance,
beauty, nobility, or perfection" (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 27).
This last rationale forms an important part of the Greco-Roman ethic
examined in The Use of Pleasure, and Foucault's positive portrayal of
this mode of subjection is perhaps most responsible for earning him the
epithet "aestheticizer."
I discuss a "mode of subjection" in relation to a Kafkaesque sensibility
in "Kafka, Genealogy, and the Spiritualization of Politics," Journal of
Politics (August 1994).
63. In other words, a response to the question, "What kind of being do
we aspire to when we behave in a moral way?" ("On the Genealogy of
Ethics," 355).
64. Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucault Live, trans.
John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lounger (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989),
305-6.
65. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 394.
66. I make this case in Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).
To insist upon an "aesthetic" element in ethics for Foucaultian or
Thoreauian reasons is not necessarily to affirm the practices and ideals
historically associated with visual, musical or performing arts, or with
their criticism. I hope in another essay to examine the means by which
one typically iterated oneself as a critic or artist, in order to assess
their contribution to the particular kind of sensibility I seek. I take
as my point of departure here Ian Hunter's "Aesthetics and Cultural
Studies," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula Treichler (London: Routedge, 1992), 347-72.
67. See, for example, Timothy W. Luke's "Art and Environmental Crisis:
>From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetic," Art Journal 51, no. 2
(Summer 1992). See also Regenia Gagnier, On the Market: A History of
Economics and Aesthetics (forthcoming). I am grateful to her for her
comments on an earlier version on this essay and for the contributions
of her seminar at Stanford in the fall of 1993 on the history of
aesthetics.
68. "I could have said, using rather current methods and schemes of
thought, that certain prohibitions were effectively posed as such, and
that others, more diffuse, were expressed in the form of morality . . .
. I don't think there is a morality without a certain number of
practices of the self" (Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," 298).
69. Ibid., 297.
70. Derrida describes this reworking as "iteration." Iteration "does not
signify simply . . . repeatability of the same, but rather alterability
of this same idealized in the singularity of the event . . . . It
entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and event,
concept and singularity." Limited Inc., 119.
In the plastic arts, "the aesthetic" is more a matter of crafting and
making than of looking and viewing: beauty as wrought product rather
than object of disinterested contemplation. Aesthetics is born in the
mid-eighteenth century as a discourse of the body, but its life has
involved a series of contests over which part of the body. Hegel, for
example, argued that "the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the
two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while . . . touch . . .
cannot have to do with artistic objects, which are meant to maintain
themselves in their real independence and allow of no purely sensuous
relationship" (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [Oxford: Clarendon,
1975], 49). With its emphasis on technologies of the self, Foucault's
aesthetic seems to be a matter of the hand even more than the eye or
ear.
71. The American nuclear industry has taken recently to presenting power
plants as integral parts of nature preserves and recreational sites. For
a good discussion of this, see Bill Moyers's "Politics, People and
Pollution," PBS Video, Public Affairs Television, Inc., 1992.
72. "An Aesthetics of Existence," 311.
~~~~~~~~
By JANE BENNETT, Goucher College
Jane Bennett teaches political theory at Goucher College, where she is
an associate professor of politics. Her books include Thoreau's Nature:
Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Sage, 1994) and In the Nature of Things,
coedited with William Chaloupka (Minnesota, 1993).
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Source: Political Theory, Nov96, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p653, 20p.
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