CHAPTER I FOUCAULT AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT This chapter is a study of Foucaults project of critique and its

Kantian lineage. It is a discussion of how Foucault understood the problem, task, and role of the contemporary intellectual, and how these are rooted in Kants critical philosophy. Moreover, the chapter argues for a reading of Foucaults thought as one primarily concerned with how human beings are made subjects at the present. The chapter has five sections. The first section outlines what Foucault identifies as the problem posed by truths relation to the formation of the subject. This problem holds

particular importance in that it marks the general orientation of

14

Foucaults thought. It introduces a point of reference with which Foucaults different historical inquiries, i.e., the various

schematizations he employs and the diverse conceptual tools he uses, can be understood as forming a coherent whole. In the meantime, the second section delves into Foucaults

reconstitution of the intellectuals role in the wake of Marxisms decline as the pre-eminent form of critique, and of a new problematic confronting critical philosophy. For Foucault, the intellectual must cease to be a prophet and the arbiter of truth. Rather, the intellectuals role is to problematize the present, that is, to investigate the often unseen ways individuals become subjects. The third section traces the origins of Foucaults proposed transformation of the intellectuals role, in Kants essay on the Enlightenment; while the fourth section

demonstrates the kind of critique entailed by Kants reflection on the Enlightenment. Finally, the last section presents Foucaults adoption of that form of critique into a political task. A. TRUTH AND SUBJECTIVITY

15

It was late in his career that Foucault came to define and identify what he had implicitly been grappling with for so long. It was not the problem of power as was commonly assumed. Rather it was the problem of the subject and truths relation to it. In the essay The Subject and Power, Foucault gave an extended clarification of his works aims: 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. . . . Thus, it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research.1 Similarly, in an interview conducted in January 20, 1984, a few months before his passing, Foucaults reply to the question of whether his current philosophical approach [was] still

Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 2000), 326-327. This essay originally appeared in 1982 as an afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinows Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.
1

16

determined by the poles of subjectivity and truth reiterated his previous declaration. In actual fact, I have always been interested in this problem [of the subject and truth], even if I framed it somewhat differently. I have tried to find out how the human subject fits into certain games of truth, whether they were truth games that take the form of a science or refer to a scientific model, or truth games such as those one may encounter in institutions or practices of control.2 In addition, he substantiated this claim by citing his 1966 opus, The Order of Things, as already an attempt to study how the human subject defined itself as such through and in the discourses of life, labor, and language. Or in other words, how human beings came to assume a certain subjectivity through the truths of those discourses. Moreover still, he points out that in his courses at the prestigious Collge de France [he] brought out this problematic in its generality.3

Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom, in Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 281.
2 3

Ibid.

17

Subjectivity for Foucault did not pertain to a substance. It is a form, and this form is not primarily or always identical to itself.4 Subjectivity is a type of relationship to oneself that is established. It is not the only kind of relationship one can have with oneself, however. As Foucault pointed out, subjectivity . . . is of course only one of the given possibilities of organization of a self-consciousness.5 Hence, subjectivity or to be a subject is only one form of identity the self can assume; this means there are other options in constituting the selfs identity. Accordingly, to be a subject is to be the object of knowledge and at the same time, to be the ground or foundation of that knowledge. It is to be a self whose identity is tied to being objectively comprehensible, not as object, but as subject. In other words, to be a subject is to have a relation to the self wherein knowledge and truth mediate that self-relation. It is to be a self whose identity is linked to truths about oneself.
4

Ibid., 290.

Michel Foucault, The Return of Morality in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 253.
5

18

Admittedly, the concern for subjectivity was not apparent in Foucaults earlier works. At times, it even appeared that such a concern was opposed to Foucaults philosophical project. What was obvious, however, was his incessant interrogation of what is considered the truth. Nietzsche was his influence in this regard. Like the 19th century German philosopher, Foucault sought to problematize truth in terms of its coercive force. Thus, his questions were not what is truth or how do we distinguish the true from the false. Instead, they were: Why, in fact, are we attached to the truth? Why the truth rather than lies? Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? . . . [H]ow is it that, in our societies, the truth has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall?6 For Foucault as well as Nietzsche, truth and its power required analysis.

Michel Foucault, On Power, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 107.
6

19

This analysis underwent various stages in Foucaults career. For a time, Foucaults analysis took the form of a history of truths production and circulation as in the cases of The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. Later, his inquiries were directed towards truths power, that is, its obligatory character, and the mechanisms that effect that obligation. Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: Introduction were

examples of this. Lastly, there was his study of how it contributed to the fashioning of human subjectivity. The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are his researches of this sort. Such a schematization must not appear contradictory to Foucaults statement on his perennial interest in the problem of the subject. On the contrary, it sits well with his claim. For what this really connotes is that the long-standing regard for truth is at bottom a concern for truth inasmuch as it is linked to the problem of the subject. This is to say that Foucaults affair with truth was prompted by his latent interest in the subject.

20

According to James Bernauer, Foucault came to explicitly treat of the problem of subjectivity and truth when he was prompted to study what the former termed the Christian experience.7 Researching for his then current pre-occupation, the multi-volume The History of Sexuality, Foucault was led to dwell on the moral problematizations of fourth century Classical Greece, of the early Greco-Roman period, and of the early Christian era. The study of these periods was a departure from his previous historical inquiries that were almost always set in the modern period. Nonetheless, this departure proved

propitious. His examinations of antiquitys and of the imperial periods sexual ethics, and of Christianitys practice of

confession as a form of ethical practice provided the occasion with which the link between truth and subject-formation was elaborated on. Bernauer points out that Foucaults analysis of the history of biopolitics or biopower involved a detailed study of the
James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1990), 161.
7

21

different

morphology

of

governance

or

governmentality.

[Foucault] became preoccupied with the problematic of governance that appeared in the sixteenth century and that showed itself in the development and dissemination of

discourses on personal conduct, on the art of directing souls, and on the manner of educating children. . . . The exploration of the knowledge-power relations involved in governance directed him to an analysis of the Christian pastorate, and thus to a confrontation with the ethical formation critical to its way of obtaining knowledge and exercising power.8 In a text that was supposed to be part of the unpublished book on Christian sexuality, Foucault examines John Cassians discussions on the battle for chastity, i.e., the battle against the spirit of fornication. In this rather detailed study of some sections in Cassians Institutiones and Conferences, Foucault brings to light a form of asceticism, of self-formation, that characterized monastic life during the early Christian era. This

Ibid., 162.

22

asceticism is one where the self appears as a text to be continuously deciphered for its truth, the self to confess that truth, and also, for the self to assimilate the truths of the faith be they in the form of beliefs or prescriptions. Foucaults study reveals an adoption of the theory of the subject in Christianitys appropriation of morality, a process not present during classical antiquity as well as the imperial period. In this chastity-oriented asceticism one can see a process of subjectivation which has nothing to do with a sexual ethic based on physical self-control. But two things stand out. This subjectivation is linked with a process of familiarization which makes the obligation to seek and state the truth about oneself an indispensable and permanent condition of this asceticism; and if there is subjectivation, it also involves an indeterminate objectivation of the self by the selfindeterminate in the sense that one must be forever extending as far as possible the range of ones thoughts, however insignificant and innocent they may appear to be. Moreover, this subjectivation in its quest for the truth about oneself, functions through complex relations with others and in many ways. One must rid oneself of the power of the Other, the Enemy, who hides behind seeming likenesses of oneself, and eternal warfare must be waged against this Other, which one cannot win without the help of the Almighty, who is mightier than he. Finally, confession to others, submission to

23

their advice and permanent obedience superiors are essential in this battle.9

to

ones

Foucault remarks that it is characteristic of every culture to have truth and its obligations to be significant either for the constitution of, or the transformation of, the self.10 Selfformation has always required truths or what passes as true, although this requirements intensity and form have varied for different cultures and periods. It is, however, the case that in Christian societies this relation between truth and the self constituted as a subject at this point in historyacquired a deeper significance and extensive validity. Foucault concludes that in Christian societies the

confession of the truth is a two-fold obligation. There is the confession of ones faith, what Foucault identifies as the practice of exomologesis, that is, the act of professing a truth
Michel Foucault, The Battle for Chastity in Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 195.
9

Michel Foucault, Sexuality and Solitude in Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 177-178.
10

24

and ones adherence to that truth.11 And then there is the confession of truth about ones self, soul, heart; the confession of ones sins. This is the practice of exagoreusis, the

examination of ones thoughts and their occurrence, of probing their origins, of sorting them out, and of confessing these things to an elder or teacher with the view of being directed by him in regard to them.12 This two-fold obligation to truth has extended beyond the confines of the Christian religion. In his 1979 lectures at Stanford University, and in his essay The Subject and Power, Foucault discussed how these particular practices have been appropriated in the political technology of individuals, in the governance of peoples.13 Society at large is being governed

Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living in Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), 81-82.
11 12

Ibid., 83-84.

See Michel Foucault, Politics and Reason in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 67-73. See also The Subject and Power, 333-334.
13

25

through these practices in very subtle ways. The government of peoples is done not only through the delimitation of behaviors but also through the formation or creation of distinct selves or identities. Truth has not only an ethical significance in so far as it is crucial in the formation of identities; it has also assumed a political significance since the production and circulation of this truth involves power. The power to effect truth, and the power of truths effect. It is thus that the problem of truth and subjectivity leads to a project of critique. It is a project that seeks to criticize the Truth not in terms of ideologya Marxist ploybut in terms of its history, of its genealogy. Foucaults project of the critique of Truth is to scrutinize its claim to absoluteness, naturalness, and timelessness. It is to inquire into those truths that bind, govern, and constitute us, and to reveal their historical character. And in the process change them, as well as our selves.

26

For Foucault, this task requires a new persona for the intellectual who has been for the longest time truths guardian. This critical project entails a reconstitution of that role of the intellectual, a role drawn from those of the Greek wise man, the Jewish prophet, the Roman legislator. In their lieu, the new intellectual must be truths critic and historian. The next section focuses on this new type of intellectual Foucault proposes. B. THE SPECIFIC INTELLECTUAL The gradual collapse of Marxism after the events of May 196814 as the dogmatic framework with which cultural and political analyses were conducted in France proved to be pivotal for its intellectuals. When the proletariat failed to support the then on-going student uprisings and general strike, the revolution that the demonstrators had hoped to be the harbinger of the changes they sought, did not materialize. This
For the events of May 1968, see Britannica Book of the Year 1969, s.v. France. For a discussion of the anti-Marxist reaction that followed after these events, see Lawrence D. Kritzman, Introduction: Foucault and the Politics of Experience in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), ix-xvi.
14

27

eventually led to an anti-Marxist reaction that was made manifest in the questioning of Marxist dogma. In the end, Marxism as a political and critical tool of analysis became suspect. As a conceptual tool, it was adjudged inadequate. For Michel Foucault, Marxisms decline as a heuristic tool coincided with the disappearance of a type of intellectual figure, what he called the universal intellectual. In an interview of June 1976, Foucault broadly traced the history of this

disappearance. He remarked that the left intellectual had been cast, for some time, as master of truth and justice and assumed the role of being the consciousness/conscience of us all.15 Like the proletariat who acted as the mythological revolutionary vanguard, the left intellectual embodied the ideals of Marxist utopia and was its prophet. The left intellectual was the bearer of the universal, that which is just-and-truefor-all. In a word, he has functioned as the universal intellectual.
Michel Foucault, Truth and Power in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 126.
15

28

Speaking from the context of May 1968 events in France, Foucault observed that this notion of the left intellectual or the intellectual in general was an idea transposed from Marxism, from a faded Marxism.16 Since Marxism could not anymore offer a tenable report of reality, the intellectual who had been its prophet needed to rethink his role in society. The intellectual needed to reprise his function outside the ambit of Marxist critique. The figure of the universal intellectual, however, did not derive solely from Marxism. In fact, Foucault argued, this figure who remained eminent during the nineteenth and early twentieth century originated from the person of the jurist or the notable of the eighteenth century. He was characterized as the man of justice, the man of law, who counterpose[d] to power, despotism and the abuses and arrogance of wealth the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.17 Voltaire epitomized this figure.
16

Ibid. Ibid., 128.

17

29

At any rate, this personification of the intellectual has since then started to dissipate. In its wake, a new kind of intellectual has taken its place: an intellectual that Darwin and the post-Darwinian evolutionists would pre-figure,18 while

Oppenheimer and the atomic scientists of the Second World War would later typify.19 This was the person of the savant or the expert; this was the specific intellectual. The function of the specific intellectual was opposed to that of its precursor. Instead of essaying the role of the prophet and the conscience what of society, the specific intellectual and

problematized

was

considered

self-evident

acceptable; his role was that of the critic whose task was to mak[e] facile gestures difficult.20 His task was to provoke the rethinking of the things glossed over as obvious or natural. Moreover, instead of trying to provide an over-all theory of
18

Ibid., 129. Ibid., 127-128.

19

Michel Foucault, Practicing Criticism in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 155.
20

30

reality or a global strategy, the specific intellectual dealt with specific struggles that were often different from those of the proletariat.21 His arena was the specific sectors where his life or work situated him, and not the grand stage of world history as Marxist praxis would have it. The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what they have to do. By what right would he do so? . . . The work of an intellectual is not to shape others political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb peoples mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this re-problematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play).22 [emphasis mine] Foucault called himself a specific intellectual.23 As a specific intellectual, he engaged in the kind of critique dictated by that identification; his task was not to prescribe

21

Foucault, Truth and Power, 126.

Michel Foucault, The Concern for Truth in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 265.
22 23

Foucault, On Power, 108.

31

solutions to problems but to raise questions that cannot be easily answered or dismissed: I have absolutely no desire to play the role of a prescriber of solutions. I think that the role of the intellectual today is not to ordain, to recommend solutions, to prophesy, because in that function he can only contribute to the functioning of a particular power situation that, in my opinion, must be criticized. . . . My role is to raise questions in an effective, genuine way, and to raise them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum complexity and difficulty so that a solution doesnt spring from the head of some reformist intellectual or suddenly appear in the head of a partys political bureau.24 As a specific intellectual, Foucault practiced critique differently from the Marxist universal intellectual whose mode of analysis was in terms of ideology and class interest. In contrast, Foucault acted as a critic who sought to mak[e] conflicts more visible, . . . making them more essential than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional

immobility.25 For in lieu of an analytical matrix based on

Michel Foucault, Interview with Michel Foucault in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 2000), 288.
24 25

Foucault, Practicing Criticism, 156.

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Marxist categories, he developed and made use of the triadic axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity as the means of conducting critique. Foucault used history in practicing critique. He employed a form of history-writing that shows the contingency of

supposedly absolute and necessary truths. This importance of history to the practice of critique has suggested that the specific intellectual should also be an historian of the present. The specific intellectual must be an historian of how the present came to be. For it is as an historian that a politically concerned intellectual . . . [can] assist ones society in grasping the long perspective on its formation,26 and by so doing, effect a critique of societys present configuration. I would say also, about the work of the intellectual, that it is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is. . . . It is also why, in my opinion, recourse to historyone of the great facts in French philosophical thought for at least twenty years is meaningful to the extent that history serves to show how that-which-is has not always been; i.e., that the
26

Bernauer, Michel Foucaults Force of Flight, 150.

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things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history. . . . It means that they reside on a base of human practice and human history; and that since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was that they were made.27 The kind of critique the specific intellectual practices is the critique of the present. The kind of questions he raises are those that concern the present: questions that seek to reexamine the truth we hold with regard to ourselves; questions that aim to shed light on the power relations that helped constitute that truth; and questions that endeavor to change who and what we are. [T]he task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something that is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.28
Michel Foucault, Structuralism and Post-structuralism in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, vol. 2, ed. James D Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 450. This interview also appears in the anthology Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 as Critical Theory/Intellectual History, 17-46. This citation is on pages 36-37.
27

34

For Foucault, the intellectual of today must concern himself or herself with the present; the intellectual must make the present problematic and subject to critical reflection. The intellectual of today must engage the problem posed by truth and subjectivity. C. FOUCAULT, KANT, AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT Foucault describes his project as a critical history of

thought, and himself as belonging to the critical tradition of Kant.29 This description appears unwarranted given the

depiction accorded to Foucault as a nihilist or irrationalist. Still, his interest in the distinct link between truth and ones subjectivity, in critique, in freedom and power, is a

28

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 336.

See Maurice Florence, Foucault in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 459. The name Maurice Florence is a pseudonym that Foucault used in the said piece. The article was commissioned by Denis Huisman to Franois Ewald, Foucaults assistant at the Collge de France, as an entry on Foucault in the new edition of the Dictionnaire des philosophes. As it turns out, Ewald wrote just the first sentence; Foucault himself wrote the rest.
29

35

manifestation of his kinship with the tradition associated with Kant. More specifically, that kinship makes itself evident in both thinkers shared concern: that of the present. Both Kant and Foucault confronted the question posed by the nature of the present. Both understood the importance of that question for philosophy. It was in retrospect, however, that Michel Foucault attempted to locate his work along the path that Immanuel Kant took with the latters Was ist Aufklrung?. In his later years and on several occasions, Foucault wrote and lectured on his relation to Kant, to the Enlightenment, and to modernity.30 And

See Michel Foucault, What is Critique? in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); the said essay is a transcript of a lecture given at the Sorbonne on 27 May 1978 and is first published as Quest-ce que la critique /Critique et Aufklrung/ in Bulletin de la Socit franaise de Philosophie 84 (1990): 35-63. The English translation is by Kevin Paul Geiman.
30

See also Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 86-95. This article is an excerpt from Foucaults lecture at the Collge de France on January 5, 1983.

36

on these occasions, his reflections yielded a different, if not a dissident, but still a decidedly Kantian understanding of modernity and of the Enlightenment. One such reflection was how Kant inaugurated a form of philosophizing: the

problematization of the present. Doubtless, Kant is not the first thinker to make references to the present. Foucault points to Descartes, specifically to the latters Discourse on Method where the reference to the present is made as a historical situation in the order of knowledge, of the sciences in his own time.31 According to Foucault, however, it is in Kants text on the Enlightenment where the present becomes a problem of philosophical reflection for the first time. To ask the question on what the Enlightenment is, is to ask what the present is. Thus the problem that emerges is not how

See also Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50. This translation of Was ist Aufklrung?, an unpublished French manuscript by Foucault, is by Catherine Porter.
31

Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth, 87.

37

the present can bear upon a certain philosophical issue; rather, the problem is the present itself. The question that seems to me to appear for the first time in this text by Kant is the question of the present, the question of what is happening now: What is happening today? What is happening now? And what is this "now" within which all of us find ourselves32 In a later text which he dares to entitle Was ist Aufklrung?,33 Foucault singles out Kants description of the Enlightenment as an Ausgang, an exit or a way out, as original and a breakthrough.34 Far from characterizing the Enlightenment as an epoch, or as a momentous event, or even as the telos of humanity, Kant views it as a process of exiting our status of immaturity. Kant defines immaturity as a certain state of our will which makes us accept someone elses

32

Ibid.

Perhaps not too daring enough for it remained unpublished in French. It was only upon its translation to English as What is Enlightenment? that it later appeared in The Foucault Reader. This observation is made in view of Foucaults remark in an earlier text, What is Critique, that had he been daring enough the title of this said lecture/essay would have been What is Aufklrung?. See Foucault, What is Critique?, 398.
33 34

Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 34.

38

authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for.35 Enlightenment, as it were, is the process where humanity is removing its shackles of unthinking docility and is proceeding outside its dark prison. This rather Socratic description is made complete by a depiction of the Enlightenment as both a phenomenon that humanity is collectively caught in, and at the same time a task and obligation of every individual.36 Foucault believes that it is with this interpretation that Kant initiates an altogether novel manner or attitude towards the present. For by defining Enlightenment negatively as a way out, Kant has marked a path that leads towards the critique of the present. D. ENLIGHTENMENT, MODERNITY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT How has the question of Aufklrung implicated a critique of the present?
35

Ibid. Ibid., 35.

36

39

For Foucault, Kants text on the Enlightenment stands at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. 37 The coupling of critical reflection and reflection on history lies in what Foucault holds to be the necessary connection existing between Kants Was ist Aufklrung? and his three Critiques. This necessary connection is critiques role in determining the conditions for humanitys legitimate use of its reason. Critique serves reason its limits, it confines reason to what is reasonable. Enlightenments injunction of Aude sapere (i.e., Dare to know) requires critique in order to establish reasons legitimacy in ascertaining what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped for. Colin Gordon, one of Foucaults editors, underscores this point when he writes: Foucault notes [that] the boldness of Kants concept of enlightenment was balanced by the caution of

37

Ibid., 38.

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his agenda for critique: daring to know will mean, in philosophy, understanding the limits of our capacity to know.38 Foucault argues that Kant has problematized the present by reflecting on the Enlightenment of which he was a part. Writing then to respond to the question posed by the German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift on November 1784, Kant understood that what the query was asking was: what is this Enlightenment of which we are a part? For the Enlightenment was that ongoing phenomenon of Ausgang of which Kant was caught up in. To ask what it was, is to ask: what is happening now to us? At the same time, to inquire about the present is to maintain the posture of a critic who seeks to find out the conditions when, where, and how reason can be legitimately exercised. Moreover, his search entails an analysis of who or what exercises this reason and how the present is a major factor in that analysis. For what is occurring in the present
Colin Gordon, Introduction in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 2000), xxxix.
38

41

time is something which critically affects, implicates, or concerns our own identity as rational and reflective beings; a process which may also involve, or provoke, our own

participation in the reinvention or redefinition of what we are.39 John Ransom explains that Kants prescription of Ausgang is interpreted by Foucault as an instruction to exit our immaturity which consists in our inability to shape our own subjectivities in the face of the silent and invisible work of the disciplines.40 It is thus that Kants recognition of the question of what is Enlightenment as an investigation on who, what, and how we are at the present, inaugurated a type of philosophical interrogation one that simultaneously problematizes mans relation to the present, mans historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject.41 It linked the questions of history, of knowledge, and of the self in a

39

Ibid., xxxv.

John S. Ransom, Foucaults Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 143.
40 41

Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 42.

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manner never before done. By interpreting the question in that fashion, Kant initiated philosophy into an ethos, one that Foucault has construed to be a critical attitude towards the present. It is an attitude that Foucault identified as modernity. Thinking back on Kants text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by attitude, I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt, a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos.42 Modernity as critical attitude is a departure from its understanding as an epoch or a set of characteristics of an epoch. It departs from the attempts to specify a period to be modern, pre-modern, or even post-modern. Instead, modernity understood as such, involves an ethos that

constantly and incessantly asks, how is it that we are who we are right now? In other words, modernity, Enlightenment and its critique of the present involve a critical ontology of ourselves; it entails the historical analyses of how we have been
42

Ibid., 39.

43

constituted into who and what we are today. In Foucaults words, modernity as critique of the present takes the form of a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.43 Foucault outlines this attitude of modernity by drawing from Charles Baudelaire. He draws from Baudelaire three characterizations of modernitys attitude: the ironic heroization of the present; the transfiguring play of freedom with reality; and, the ascetic elaboration of the self.44 According to Baudelaire, to be modern is to heroize the present; that is, to recapture something eternal in the present, something that is not beyond or behind it but is within it. To will to heroize the present means to value it for its own sake and not because of the future to which it appears to herald. It is to admit that the present is important in itself and is not valuable

43

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 39-42.

44

44

in terms of some future for which it will act as the doormat. 45 The attitude of modernity consists in relating to the present in a way that the latters importance is recognized for its own sake. This heroization of the present, however, is ironic. For the passing moment is not construed as sacred, and therefore, must be maintained or perpetuated.46 The heroization of the present is not an idealization. Foucault warns that this idealization of the present is one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought. [It is] the analysis of the present in history [as] a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn, and so on.47 The heroization of the present is for its transformation. The point of heroizing the present, of acknowledging what it is, of seizing hold of it, is not to preserve it; it is to imagine it otherwise than it is. It is to change the present reality into something different from what it is. Thus the irony: despite its
45

Ransom, Foucaults Discipline, 7. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 40. Foucault, Structuralism, 449.

46

47

45

valuation of the present in itself, the attitude of modernity seeks to change the present into what it is not. Reality is to be confronted by freedom and be transformed by it. Foucault has expressed this same view in an interview conducted by Grard Raulet in 1983. Replying to a query about the nature of today and the posing of that very question, he remarks: I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning what today is. It does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are but, instead by following lines of fragility in the presentin managing to grasp why and how that which is might no longer be that which is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is, of possible transformation.48[emphasis mine] Meanwhile, aside from a kind of relation with the present Baudelairean modernity also involves a manner of relating to oneself. It entails an asceticism, a self-forming activity.

Modern man seeks to invent oneself, and not to discover any hidden truth about oneself. The relation to oneself is one of

48

Ibid., 450.

46

invention and not of discovery. To form oneself is at once a task presented to the individual. Thus, the critical attitude that is modernity compels [man] to face the task of producing himself.49 Finally, Baudelaires account of modernity ends with a remark that this attitude of ironic heroization and confrontation between liberty and reality can only occur in what is called art. Modernity, for Baudelaire, remains within the

confinement of art. Foucault disagrees with him here. The ethos of modernity cannot be and should not be restricted to the realm of art alone. Instead, he sees this ethos as precisely a practice of thought formed in direct contact with social and political realities.50 More positively, Foucault takes account of this ethos in a threefold manner. First, this ethos which takes the form of a

49

Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 42.

Paul Rabinow, Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought in Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997), xxxii.
50

47

critique of the present is transgressive. Critique figures as a transgression. It consists in analyzing and reflecting on the limits made on our way of doing, thinking, and saying; in identifying which limits are socially, politically, and arbitrarily given us. And ultimately, in transgressing those limits. Transgression is an action that involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its trajectory, even its origin [T]ransgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line that closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. . . . Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognize itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall.51 It is this transgressive quality of critique, of modernitys ethos, which points to the spiral of the ever recurring event of limit and transgression. And hence, the never-ending task of critique.

Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 2, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 73.
51

48

The second of Foucaults

account of the

ethos of

modernity is that it is experimental. This means it must open up a realm of historical inquiry and . . . put itself to the test of reality, contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take.52 This entails concrete and specific points of analyses that are aimed at creating spaces of freedom. Such an ethos consequently distances itself from any global or radical strategy in effecting change. It rejects any form of totalization, be it in theory or in practice. Consequently, even its own analyses, reflections, and criticisms, must be viewed as partial and incomplete. Foucault makes it clear that this is not a weakness. By being partial and incomplete, his critique acquires a flexibility that makes it possible to begin again in ones problematization of the limits and confinements of the present by drawing from the initial investigations made. The critique of our limits can

52

Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 46.

49

never be total; it can only exceed them and then later, be confronted with new forms of limits. Hence, the exigency of commencing once more. Foucault eschews grand narratives of any sort that purport to provide the answers to the ultimate questions. He prefers the partial transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.53 He prefers the limited conclusions critique provides to any definitive, over-all theory of the world. In his mind, that manner of theorizing leads to the ossification of thought, and eventually, to the unthinking docility and immaturity Kant inveighed against. The third description of this ethos is that it has its stakes, homogeneity, generality, and systematicity. In other words, the critique of the present has a definite form by which it proceeds. Notwithstanding its partial and limited conclusions, Foucaults

53

Ibid., 47.

50

critique is not haphazard, abstractly employed, or devoid of rigor. Rather, it has a well-defined scope and, as will be demonstrated later, precise targets. What then is at stake in this ethos born of Kants understanding of the Enlightenment? Foucault declares that it is freedom: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?54 How can the freedom and autonomy of the individual be safeguarded against the domination often inherent in power relations? Hence, what is at stake in critique is the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.55 Here appears one of critiques targets: power, or to be more specific, power relations. Foucault has been known for his analysis of power, and this interest in power makes itself
54

Ibid., 48.

Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 2000), 110.
55

51

understandable in light of what he recognizes to be at stake in his work. Power is both productive and repressive; it is not inherently evil. Rather, it is dangerous. Power can endanger freedom and autonomy if it is left to its own dynamics to confine and restrict them. Paradoxically enough, power cannot operate without freedom and freedom cannot be effective without power.56 The Enlightenment ethos bears with it the task of securing our freedom from all forms of needless authoritarianism. It carries out its task in a singular domain that comprises the homogeneity of this ethos. That domain is what could be called practical systems: the practices that people do and the manner with which they do them.57 These systems which are the object of the Enlightenment ethos historico-critical analyses have technological and strategic aspects. The former refers to the rationalities that organize practices, while the latter

56

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 342. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 48.

57

52

pertains to the freedom of individuals as they act and/or react to these practices. The generality constitutive of the ethos stems from the perennial character of what it investigates. The objects of study by ethos historico-critical analyses continue to impinge on the present time. The questions of madness, of sickness and health, of crime and the law, of sexual relations, of who and what we are, are queries that have never been completely laid to rest ever since they were first broached.58 In their continuing significance to the present, critique or the Enlightenment ethos finds its generality. Finally, this ethoss systematicity refers to the three broad areas from which practical systemsthe homogenous domain of critiquestem: [the] relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, [and] relations with oneself.59 Critiques systematicity lies in the specificity and preciseness with which it will conduct its analyses of practical systems. Its
58

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 48.

59

53

analyses of these have three axes, those of knowledge, of power, and of ethics. To wit, the questions critique asks are: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?60 These three serve as the questions through which his interrogation of the present is conducted. They act as Foucaults analytical matrix. They point out the targets of Foucaults critique of the present. Towards the end of his first lecture of 1983 at the Collge de France, Foucault outlined what he took to be the two great critical traditions that Kant had founded, and between which modern philosophy was divided. The first of these was the tradition where the conditions and possibility of knowledge have been at issue. It was the tradition that gave birth to an analytic philosophy of truth. Its question was: what are the conditions of possibility for human knowledge? The second

60

Ibid., 49.

54

tradition was of another type, although no less critical and no less Kantian. Its concern was an ontology of the present. Its question was of a different sort from the first in that it asked: what is our present? Foucault claims that the philosophical choice confronting us today is the choice between these two traditions. It is a choice between these two questions, between an analytics of truth and an ontology of the present. Foucault, for his part, chooses the latter: [O]ne may opt for a critical thought that will take the form of an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present; it is this form of philosophy that, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School, has founded a form of reflection in which I have tried to work.61 Still, one may suspect that the question of truth did not remain far from the gaze of Michel Foucault. Albeit not of the analytic sort, the problem of truth nonetheless has exercised Foucaults mind. Its problematization, however, remained

entrenched in the question of the present. The question of truth

61

Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth, 95.

55

as Foucault posed it was no less epistemological as it is ethical and political. For the question of what the present is, is in more ways than one the question about the truth of ourselves. And, as it will be shown later, that truth is essentially political. E. GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE POLITICS OF THE

SUBJECT For Foucault, human beings are made subjects through three modes of objectivization. The first is through scientific classification. It refers to the modes of inquiry that try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the

objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire gnrale, philology, and linguistics . . . [or] the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or . . . the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.62 It is this mode through which human beings become subjects by constituting themselves as objects of their own knowledge.

62

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 326.

56

The second mode of objectivization is through dividing practices. Here, the subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him.63 For through such divisions or separations, a certain identity or subjectivity is imprinted on the individual. This mode refers to power relations in which power is exercised on the bodies on human beings that cause identities to be inscribed on their souls. Lastly, subjectification or subjectivation is the process by which individuals become subjects through their own actions. This mode of objectivation is manifested in the relationship one has with oneself and takes the form of a practice of self-formation consistingamong othersin the knowledge of the self, that is, the adherence to forms of truth about the self. Each of these modes function with some relation to truth, i.e., they operate through the compelling power of truth.

63

Ibid.

57

Objectivation, the process where subjectivities or identities are constituted, requires knowledge. To paraphrase Foucault, to form the self is to equip oneself with truths.64 For the formation of identities necessitates adherence to truths and prescriptions. The self as subject is a result of a process of self-knowledge, that is, it is a consequence of the obligation to seek and state the truth about oneself.65 Therein lies the link between subjectivity and truth. And it is this link between them that has exercised Foucaults mind throughout his career: I have always been interested in the problem of the relationship between subject and truth. I mean, how does the subject fit into a certain game of truth?66 Similarly, the three modes of objectivation operate

through power: the first two objectify through a disciplinary power that categorizes, distributes, and manipulates on one
64

Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self, 285.

Michel Foucault, The Ethics of Sexuality in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 240.
65 66

Ibid., 289.

58

hand

(dividing

practices); of ourselves

while on

providing the

scientific (scientific

understanding

other

classification). The last objectifies through the power of truth that compels the individual to be a meaning-giving subject. But whereas in the first two, disciplinary power is exerted on passive and constrained human beings (prisoners, the insane, the sick, for example), in the third, power is willingly exerted on the self by the self through the adherence to a truth about oneself. Foucault describes this power that is operative and constitutive of these modes of objectivation as thus: This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to.67 [emphasis mine]

67

Foucault, The Subject and Power, 331.

59

Foucault uses the term government to identify this form of power or power technique. Government so understood means a conduct of conducts and a management of possibilities, where conduct is taken to mean both as lead[ing] others (according to mechanisms of coercion that are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities.
68

Foucaults

employment of the term government harks from its usage and understanding during the sixteenth century. Then, it did not necessarily pertain to political structures or management of the state, but rather indicated the manner in which the conduct of groups and individuals are to be ordered. Thus, government not only meant political or economic subjection but alsoand more importantly modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people.69 Government as the conduct of conducts is to define the possible fields of actions of
68

Ransom, Foucaults Discipline, 341. Ibid.

69

60

individuals, and consequently, to dispose them to become certain types of subjects. Foucaults objectivation; it critique is is aimed against at these modes of For

aimed

governmentality.

critique, he says, is the art of not being governed so much.70 As a task, it is to initiate forms of counterconducts. It is to refuse the identities that have been imposed on us for so long. Inasmuch as the constitution of the self is linked to truth, with truth being the product of power, the critique of the present appears to be a political task. For power is first and foremost the concern of politics, of political theory.71 Hence, the political is implicated in the critique of the present. And this is why Foucault is interested and involved in politics. Thus for him, the question of why one should be interested in politics is both trivial and self-evident.72

70

Foucault, What is Critique?, 384. Ransom, Foucaults Discipline, 11.

71

61

Now, the kind of politics that obtains in the critique of the present is a politics of the subject. It is a politics where the process of objectivationas influenced, although not

determined, by power relationsis made subject to analysis and possible intervention. It is a politics whose task is to problematize our current subject-ion and to create new possibilities of self-hood. It is a politics that is transgressive of boundaries made and imposed on who and what we are. It is a politics that opposes the prevalent governmentality of societies. One can remark in passing that this kind of politics can be seen practiced in Foucaults 1975 historical study of prisons, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison73. There, he demonstrates how a history of the prison and the penal system exposes the correlation between truth, disciplinary power, and the creation of the self. By turning institutions such as
Paul Rabinow, Introduction to The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 5.
72

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, Pantheon Books, 1977). It is a translation of Surveiller et Punir; Naissance de la prison that was first published in France on 1975 by Editions Gallimard, Paris.
73

62

the prison into objects for reflection and rethinking, the politics of the subject figures as a problematization of the truth about and of prisons. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes: Discipline makes individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.74 He explains that disciplinary power creates

individuals by producing truths that judge and compel them to be particular subjects. Power produces truth, which in turn induces regular effects of power.75 This insight is crucial. Through it, Foucaults historical study enables possibilities for the transgression of certain truths and for the effective opposition of certain power relations. In particular, by presenting the prison and Jeremy Benthams ingenious device, the Panopticon, as prime examples of mechanisms through which the individual or the subject is manufactured by disciplinary power, Foucault calls into question
74

Ibid., 170. Foucault, Truth and Power, 131.

75

63

the truth of prisons as instruments of rehabilitation, of normalization. He makes problematic the very concepts of rehabilitation and normalization. In turn, this forces a reexamination of the truth of normalcy. It is a reexamination that prompts a transformation of that truth. And with that transformation, a modification in the power formations which make prisoners a particular subject, a type of individual. The politics of the subject employs genealogical history for its method of critique. Foucault makes use of genealogy as the method and form of history-writing that problematizes the governmentality found in institutions such as prisons, and in discourses surrounding penology. Genealogy provides a critical analysis of how human beings are made subjects, through an empirical study of historical materials documenting practices and discourses. It belongs, however, to the task of the next chapter to demonstrate how genealogy effects its critique.

-0-

64

Michel

Foucault

has

recast

for

us

the

problem

of

contemporary society in terms of an analytics that sought to complement if not supplant Marxist analysis. He has provided us new ways of seeing; and as a consequence, new ways of being as well. His analysis of contemporary reality has revealed endemic and constant processes of objectivation which turn us into particular subjects. The proliferation of these processes has made governmentality, the conduct of our conducts, the paramount threat and problem. Foucauldian critique attempts to confront this danger through a politics of the subject, through a politics of refusal to be governed as such. Prior perhaps to Foucault, that refusal had not been possible. Prior to Foucault, the government of our selves had been concealed under the guise of what was acceptable, of what was natural, of what was normal. Prior to Foucault, the trap that was our identity had been an inescapable prison. To refuse what we are: this is the political task Foucault espouses. It is to refuse the present as the conclusive and

65

definite form of our present. It is to refuse the boundaries and limits imposed on us by others and by ourselves. It is to refuse the truth of ourselves as final and absolute. To refuse what we are. This is Foucaults critique of the present.