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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.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
There's been much discussion of late about this piece, arguing the case for regarding Foucault as a humanist:"Foucault abandoned the methodological tack he had outlined in The History of Sexuality, which focused on sexuality as a means for "power/knowledge" to extend its sinister hegemony. Instead, during his later years, he turned to a more positive concept of subjectivity, centered on the "art of living" in ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault had come to believe that such pre-Christian, pagan approaches to the idea of self-cultivation represented a valuable heuristic — a means to overcome the deficiencies of modern conceptions of the self. Second, the term "power/knowledge" itself is entirely absent from his later lectures and texts — a telling indication of how radically dissatisfied Foucault had become with the limitations of his earlier approach... Foucault's work seems to have come full circle. Under the sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the rights of subjectivity. As Foucault avows, his new normative ideal is "the formation and development of a practice of Self, the objective of which is the constitution of oneself as the laborer of the beauty of one's own life."
French critics have long pointed to the central paradox of the North American Foucault reception: that a thinker who was so fastidious about hazarding positive political prescriptions, and who viewed affirmations of identity as a trap or as a form of normalization, could be lionized as the progenitor of the "identity politics" movement of the 1980s and 1990sa movement that, as Christopher Lasch demonstrated, had abandoned the ends of public commitment in favor of a "culture of narcissism.""
I'm not sure this is quite the great revision that it is being claimed to be; certainly, Foucault's later work on the cares of the self does represent an overturning of his earlier wish to see the idea of the self washed away like a footprint in the sand and is perhaps accordingly the most 'engaged' period of his work (as evidenced for instance, in Halperin's Saint Foucault). Instead, of his customary work on the development of biology and psychology as controlling discourses on such areas as hysteria, his later work is something altogether more unexpected. In this sense, he certainly predates Zizek's idea that the subject, rather than being something constructed by controlling discourses, denotes a piece of freedom and a site of resistance to such discourses; as the article puts it, in that totalitarianism wishes to quash or eliminate certain conceptions of 'man' then it is evident that the concept is a useful one. Equally, it is true to say that Foucault was unusual in seeing how this could apply to Soviet totalitarianism, though the article does avoid mentioning his endorsement of the Iranian revolution.
Nonetheless, the difficulty I see with this is Foucault's earlier work had deprived him of any mechanism by which his rediscovered interest in subjectivity could find any accommodation with the mechanisms of a collective society (this being precisely what Chomsky found so disturbing about Foucault in their famous debate). The examples cited in the article of Foucault's activism are laudable but are essentially offered in lieu of any detailed account of how this realigned position could have manifested itself in his work. Questions of how the individual and society should interact are largely elided in the work of this particular Foucault, particularly since his history of sexuality is emphatically individualist. Ultimately, Foucault's work, regardless of its precise stance, is one that is of value for its critque of society and its institutions and not for its engagement with most social or political concerns. In this sense, his work is well described by Frederic Jameson's description of Zizek:"Philosophy is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm of ‘what is’. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its ‘truths’; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds."Labels: Philosophy
posted by Richard 11:13 am
