Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Friday, June 17, 2005

 
For reasons that largely escape me, there has been a sudden surge of commentary on Michel Foucault's essays on the Iranian revolution;

"One thing must be clear. By "Islamic government," nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control. To me, the phrase "Islamic government" seemed to point to two orders of things... It is first and foremost about a movement that aims to give a permanent role in political life to the traditional structures of Islamic society. An Islamic government is what will allow the continuing activity of the thousands of political centers that have been spawned in mosques and religious communities in order to resist the shah's regime. "


Needless to add, Foucault's latching onto Islam as a putative alternative to the extremes of bourgeois and revolutionary democracy was horrifically misplaced. However, this should not be regarded as being especially surprising; it was probably inevitable that he would interpret the Iranian revolution in terms of resistance to power given what escaped him throughout his work. What is elided in Foucault and what is elided is any proper means of stepping outside the discourse of power in his work, since to seek to resist power is a act of power in itself. The result of this was the disagreement with Chomsky who described Foucault as the most amoral man he had met. Since Foucault saw the construction of the self as a function of power the only solution is the unfeasible one of the disappearance of the self, of oblivion. Needless to add, this is a rather dubious solution, as Zizek pointed out:

"The starting point of my book on the subject is that almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance. For example, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both agree that the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the case of Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics. Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here.

I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is inherently political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a piece of freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm substance, you are in an open situation."


I think this points a clear path; beyond the notion that 'subject' and 'subjection' are contingent. Without the individual self as a point of resistance totalitarianism is inveitable; since the self is constituted only through discourse, which only serves as an instrument of power Foucault permits no such point (Koestler's Darkness at Noon provides a powerful counter argument on this score). To a large extent, the quasi-fascistic view of power permeating all social relations renders Foucault as difficult to rehabilitate as Heidegger but perhaps also as unsettling and challenging to enlightenment assumptions as Nietzsche.

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posted by Richard 6:56 pm