To use a term from Paul Klee, Foucault “rendered visible” certain aspects of our experience in profoundly new ways for a whole generation of thinkers….
In inventing the tools and the insights that made these relations visible, the very words themselves that are now so familiar – truth, knowledge, power, technology, discourse, practice – were given a new sense and made to do conceptual work that they had not done – that had not been done – before. And in anatomizing the detailed ways of thinking and acting that made up our present, and constituted ourselves in that present, Foucault asked us to consider the possibility that we might invent different ways of thinking about and acting on ourselves in relation to our pleasures, our labors, our troubles and those who trouble us, our hopes and aspirations for freedom.
Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Introduction – Foucault Today,” The Essential Foucault
My knowledge of Foucault has heretofore been sketchy and anecdotal. Something to do with power, especially in the settings of schools, mental hospitals, and prisons. I jumped at the chance to read some of his work via the Catherine Project’s summer session. It turns out that, although the subjects I was familiar with were an important part of his work, he also constructed a history of ideas and knowledge – from history itself to sexual attitudes and behaviors – that was considered his most substantial contribution.
Since the group only spanned five weeks, it was his shorter works – essays, lectures, interviews – that were the subjects, as collected in The Essential Foucault among other anthologies.
First up was the essay, “What is an Author?” This was written in response to Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and, in some measure, to questions raised by one Foucault’s prior works. The Barthes work wants to separate the text from the author; he argues against authorial intent as definitive, and against the tendency to use the author’s background as a means for literary analysis. It’s a concept I come up against a lot when Jake Weber and I blog about short stories; to me, the author’s intent may not be the only interpretation, but the work comes out of the author’s background and I don’t see how that context, how the context of any work of art – geographical, political, social, economic – can be ignored in considering its meaning. But I’m on the losing side here, at least in this time period.
Foucault proposes to “reexamine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance” as a way to understand the authorial function. I found individual pieces of this to be fascinating: how important is the author’s name? Does it matter – does it change the impact, the meaning of the work – if Shakespeare was the guy we think he was, or was someone else, or was a consortium? And what about Homer: the Iliad and Odyssey we have today is probably not what he wrote, does it matter? I’d bring up the Bible, but I could get into trouble that way. In a more contemporary sense, Elena Ferrante was a cipher until very recently, and one of the most fun games of the 90s was figuring out who wrote Primary Colors (forensic linguistics to the rescue). He also shows differences throughout history of how authors of fictional works were viewed differently from authors of scientific treatises, which depended far more, in the past, on a name to give a theory validity.
Much of Barthes’ essay had more to do with linguistic voices, such as free indirect discourse, which removes the author from the story entirely; in modernity, we can no longer assume the author is voicing through a narrator. I recalled how two recent works I’ve read – Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tahan’s The Man Who Counted – used a fictional character’s recounting of another fictional character’s discovery of a much older manuscript as a way of setting up narration, separating the author from the text on three different levels.
I also thought of the current surge of interest in AI, particularly in relation to this outtake of Foucault’s essay:
For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the singular relationship that holds between an author and a text, the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.
Beckett supplies a direction: ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking.’ In an indifference such as this we must recognize one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing….
The author—or what I have called the ‘author-function’—is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:
▪ ‘Who is the real author?’
▪ ‘Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?’
▪ ‘What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?’
New questions will be heard:
▪ ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse?’
▪ ‘Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?’
▪ ‘What placements are determined for possible subjects?’
▪ ‘Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?’
Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:
‘What matter who’s speaking?’
The legal and literary views on this might well differ. Right now one author – comedian Sarah Silverman – has filed suit against the companies that used her work, among others, as training material for their AI products; whether her suit succeeds or not may impact future AI projects. This is an issue that I wondered about when I first came across John Cage’s techniques of mesostics: rule-constructed poems based on an existing work. “Who wrote this?” I wondered: the person who wrote the seed text, Cage who wrote the rules, the person who chose the seed text and ran the program? And where does the reader fit into this, if, as linguists and philosophers claim, we construct meaning as we read? Can an interpretation be legally protected?
The second essay we discussed was “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” another essay-in-response. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the Nietzsche work, so was dependent on Foucault’s interpretation and quotes, as well as the comments of other group readers. In essence, Foucault is distinguishing between a teleological view of history, popular in both ancient and Christian analysis, not to mention early modern Germanic philosophy, where things unfold according to a plan set by nature or by God, tending to aggrandize the present as a preordained phase, and the more neutral view of events occurring as they do by happenstance:
Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.”
…
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes.
Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people . On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.
I kept thinking of my eighth-grade Civics class, where I first heard the term “Manifest Destiny.” This was a tenet of nineteenth-century American expansionism that gave great credence to a plan, and permitted whatever slaughter was necessary to extend the boundaries of the US across the continent. I don’t remember how the term was presented, but I always assumed it was a fact, rather than something James Meriwether just said in order to get what he wanted. This was the first instance I can remember where I later realized, just because a famous person says something, doesn’t mean it’s true.
“Subject and Power,” the third essay, finally got to what I thought would be Foucault’s main thesis of power – but I was wrong, as he points out clearly in the first paragraphs:
I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis.
My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.
The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.
In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call “dividing practices.” The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the “good boys.”
Finally, I have sought to study – it is my current work – the way a human being turns himself into a subject.
I found this very interesting, and a bit scary. One concept that particularly struck me was the evolution of pastoral power from the medieval Church to the modern State, and the shifts in that power. Another was the idea that we adopt institutionally generated notions of objectivization – what it is to be masculine, a good citizen, successful – and impose them upon ourselves quasi-voluntarily. It’s also interesting that Foucault sees it as only possible to exercise power over free subjects, that slavery is not a power relationship. I’m not sure I agree; it seems he has the ability to refuse as the key marker, but one always has the ability to refuse, even if one is a slave. It may result in death, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a choice. However, I’m not sure I’m fully understanding his distinctions here. Other participants raised the question of how individuation worked: dividing subjects into categories. We also had an interesting discussion on the two meanings of the word subject: one can be a subject of another, meaning under control, or the subject of action, meaning in control.
The interview titled “Truth and Power” was the fourth reading; I’m afraid I rather blanked out on this one, and I was ill the day of the meeting so I never got a handle on it.
Another interview, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” was our final reading. As can be imagined, this followed ethics from ancient Greece to modernity. One aspect that changed was the focus of ethics: initially, the Greeks saw morality as being aimed at the community and the state, but that changed with the Epicureans and Stoics who saw a more individual focus: the care of the self, in order to live the best life possible. This is more about training oneself in an almost Confucian way to take the high ground so that it becomes habit, the best life being not the most comfortable or the most enjoyable but the most moral.
Foucault sees a link, throughout history, of the moral and the sociopolitical:
For centuries we have been convinced that between our ethics, our personal ethics, our everyday life, and the great political and social and economic structures, there were analytical relations, and that we couldn’t change anything, for instance, in our sex life or our family life, without ruining our economy, our democracy, and so on. I think we have to get rid of this idea of an analytical or necessary link between ethics and other social or economic or political structures.
I see this playing out right now particularly in relation to gender: in cries about the destruction of the family, rather than the possibility of expanding definitions of the family; in defense of toxic masculinity as the historical precedent and necessary preamble for American rugged individualism that supposedly has blessed us with such success; in control of reproduction and, more broadly, education.
Another interesting aspect was that of aesthetics of morality, one’s life as a work of art.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?
This might relate back to the Epicurean/Stoic idea of living one’s best life as a moral process.
One of the most interesting points discussed in the group was the idea of the link between morality and truth: must one be moral to know Truth? Foucault shows how Descartes moved away from the affirmative answer to this, that all that is necessary is to “see what is evident.” This has some interesting implications, not the least of which is that Foucault himself had a dark side involving sex with young boys when he was in Tunisia, and his support of lowering the age of consent to thirteen.
Something I was particularly interested in was Foucault’s examination of the hypomnemata, personal notebooks. This conflicted with Socrates’ famed stance against writing and reading instead of memory and face-to-face learning, but Foucault sees it as a means of establishing “a permanent relationship to oneself – one must manage oneself as a governor manages the governed.” As someone who writes a great deal (obviously) and who has come to use writing as a way of thinking and processing, I can of course see great value in this. My blogging buddy Jake Weber has always described my short story posts as being in the style of devotionals; while I feel a bit hurt by this (and here I thought I was being analytical, but I’m just blathering), maybe it isn’t such a bad thing.
These were only five of the thirty-two pieces in the book, limited by necessity of time. I’ll continue to go through them, hoping to find other sources as guides now that the reading group has ended.
I started already with “What is Enlightenment?” a sort of response to Kant’s essay of the same title (Foucault seems to do this a lot, write responses). Whereas Kant saw Enlightenment as a way to pass from immaturity – accepting authority’s answers – to maturity – finding one’s own answers, Sapere aude, Dare to Know – Foucault is more interested in Modernity as an Attitude, most closely exhibited by Baudelaire.
As for the reading group, via Zoom itself: we started out with about 14 people, but the group shrank to about 9 by the end; this is, I’m seeing, fairly typical. We started with a centering moment of silence, to put away the cares of the day and focus on the works, as our facilitator Jacob put it, a great idea. Then we’d go around, in alphabetical order, offering any specific question, comment, or reaction to the piece of the week; Jacob would bring these in at appropriate moments during the 90-minute session. He’d start things off with a question or comment, and we’d be off to the races.
I continue to struggle with several aspects of participation in the Catherine Project. I’m just not a “jump in whenever you have something to say” type of person; some weeks I ended up rather silent. I also have a problem with intimidation; several of the participants are themselves teachers or ex-teachers, and often have read far more background than I have. These may not be resolvable issues, in which case I’ll just need to learn to live with them, as the benefits, at least now, outweigh the anxieties.
And what, in the end, is the gain for critical thought achieved by such a work of thought? For Foucault, this work is a mode of critique he terms historical ontology….
What faces us, then, if we are to take historical ontology seriously, is not a grand gesture of transgression or liberation, but a certain modest philosophical and pragmatic work on ourselves: “a historical-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves on ourselves as free beings.” A work, that is to say, which is both banal and profound, which we carry out upon ourselves in the very real practices within which we are constituted as beings of a certain type, as being simultaneously constrained and obligated to be free, in our own present.
Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Introduction – Foucault Today,” The Essential Foucault
When one signs up for a Reading Group at The Catherine Project website, we’re asked to include a few sentences explaining why that group is of interest. For this one, I wrote:
I would like to join the Foucault reading group because he’s someone I’m too intimidated by to read on my own. I’ve encountered brief summaries of his ideas about power and the restriction of knowledge in the interests of power via moocs, and I’d like to read more about him. This would be a good way to break the ice, and perhaps give me the confidence to read more on my own.
This was another successful course for me in that I met my objectives. I read material I wouldn’t have otherwise read – and, by the way, discovered I had something of a common misunderstanding about his work on power relations – and now have some elementary understanding of Foucault’s work, and I’m able to continue on my own. This was part of my “modest and pragmatic work” on myself. And so it continues.
A Just Recompense 