Origin and Destination [Foucault]
I’ve often wondered what separated certain great thinkers from the academic disciplines of which they came. I’m thinking specifically of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Heidegger, although I suppose there are many more. I’m curious over what causes a break from tradition, and how a new framework for philosophy comes to be. It seems an incredible feat – and unfortunate, for such accomplishments rarely seem acknowledged during ones time. Nonetheless, they create new space in which future philosophers can operate. Foucault seems to provide some clarification to this end, for he posits a second pole of philosophical origins.
This second pole is not in competition with the first – which Foucault calls a “formal ontology of truth”- but a pole that is firmly situated in an ever-changing present. This second pole contains a different origin for philosophy – an origin that arises from the question of “what are we today.” The line of inquiry seems to be directed to a particular situation of the self vis-a-vis an indecipherable other, however that might manifest during ones era. What I mean, is that the ‘other’ seems to represent a particular problem that escapes the philosophy originating from the “formal ontology of truth”. For Foucault, it seems the problem was ‘modernity’: what does it mean? What does it represent? How can it be understood? How is it affecting us?
The imperative for the philosopher of the second pole seems to be to be how to comprehend the new phenomena; either how it can be situated into a traditional framework, or, if this isn’t possible, then to develop new ways of thinking or theorizing the new phenomenon. In this respect, I find that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault are similar, for they all go back through history in order to rediscover certain qualities that were missing from their contemporary culture, culled, as it were. Nietzsche returned to Dionysius in order to discover the will to power. Heidegger returned to the Presocratics in order to question being. Either way, the undertaking for any philosopher seems to present at the same time something unique and something similar: unique in that it tasks each philosopher with an uncut path, and similar in the sense that the motivation seems to be a return to the question of authenticity: or rather, to find out “what we are in our actuality.”
I like that Foucault introduces this notion of ‘actuality,’ for it begs the question of potentiality. What gives rise to a particular actuality? What were the particular conditions that enabled the emergence of the ‘mode of thought’ that characterizes the present? A cause-effect explanation can be provided historically, as Foucault demonstrates in Society Must Be Defended, but this explanation actually explains very little, as it is limited to interpreting the past by way of the present. This also makes it perfect for appropriation for political aims – the past can be imagined in a way that justifies a present orientation.
From what I understand, the value of history - examined through a philosophy that developes from the “second-pole” - is that it serves for an investigation of limits. If we pay close attention to when a particular sphere is delimited, we also find the relations of power between those limits. The power relation itself is a kind of struggle which plays out between limits. The limits are not to be confused with the limits of the law – Foucault makes it clear that he is not concerned with juridical law; in relation to power they serve merely as tactics. From what I understand, it seems useful to think of these limits as tactics that operate on/in grey areas. They limit out a good and bad, making certain spheres zones of reduced complexity, perfect for enabling an automatic productivity or efficiency that benefits the state.
What are the limits? Where did they come from? The limits are not explicitly found in historical struggle, for at that point the limits had not been set – the struggle was the process of limits being set. Foucault seems to say that limits were set when struggle seized; at that point the limits become codified into society. But even as a codification the relationship between those limits continues to persists as a struggle. Perhaps it is helpful to think of it as a gray area. I think maybe an example of this is the relationship between a liberal tradition and a republican tradition. Whereas the liberal tradition can be understood as privileging of individuality, the Republican tradition privileges community. Modern democratic nation-states seem to operate within a grey area, where political decisions are made based on the outcome of a struggle between the two traditions.
Limits therefore are codified into society by a process of subjectivation. Subjectivation arises through an imposition of power relations. A free individual experiences an imposition, and reacts either with struggle or becomes subjugated under the power relation. Limits are imposed and upheld according to various ‘technologies’. There exist direct technologies such as the police, as well as indirect technologies such as the ‘social norms’ used to marginalized ‘undesirable’ traits. It is “bad” to be a “deviant,” “pervert,” “criminal.” Identities are therefore constituted directly by “certain ethical techniques of the self” as well as are indirectly constituted “through the exclusion of some others.” (Power 404)
“Who we are in actuality” is therefore determined by the limits in which we operate. If I accept the limits of the insane, and I fall within those limits, I am, in actuality, insane. The incredible problem of this situation is that these limits were imposed on an individual not out of concern for himself but out of concern for the state. Further, the individual exists in multitude, much more than within the statistic of ‘mad’.
This provides new insight into what we are ‘in our actuality’, for our ‘actuality’ is found within the limits of our operation. That is to say, we may not have necessarily accepted these limits, but operate nonetheless within them. Our limits of actuality delimit our position in relation to a [society/history/state/nation/political economy.] Perhaps in some sense we can only fulfill our potential when we respond or react to the imposition of limits “with the full force of our being”.
The philosophers who seek an understanding of their own actuality are therefore forced to invent, or imagine, new ways to determine these ambiguous struggles, codified into the workings of society itself. This prerogative perhaps is best found in the “critical theory” tradition of the Frankfurt school. The problem is recognizing the significance of the work, since “the contemporary lacks the perspective needed for seeking the work’s significance, and lacks it necessarily since the perspective and its distance are not yet in place.” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, Sheed & Ward, p. 265) Such work cannot be read in a historical light.
The critical approach, and its second-pole origin, leads Foucault to inquire into how relationships of power manufacture subjects.
Beyond simply - or reductively - metaphysical beings, individuals exist in actuality under multiple systems of power. These systems work to manufacture individuals as subjects, citizens, members of a family, of a nation, even as statistics in a political economy. Individuals become constituted in multitude. I wouldn’t find it surprising if certain characteristics became directly in conflict with others; perhaps research in this area could prove lucrative.
Foucault claims that power relations have been progressively governmentalized under the auspices of state institutions, and that the rational that informs this process is one that derives from a liberal tradition. (Power 345) I think this is interesting for the liberal tradition is one that functions with the condition of individual freedom. In this sense, power relations that derive from the state are conditional on the freedom of the individual. Foucault explains this as such:
“There is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually exclusive facts, but a much more complicated interplay…. Freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power… The power relationship and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be separated… At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.” (Power 342)
Foucault claimed that the “’agonism’ between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is an increasingly political task”. (Power 343) This relationship may not be good; but it seems to works – in that, it produces. Power is exercised over a field in which free individuals exist. The power delimits the options available. The individuals ‘let’ themselves be subjugated insofar as they are free to oppose or reject such limits. When Foucault says this happens as “individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available” (Power 343) he is speaking of limits. Individuals become manufactured by way of accepting the available behavior limits, designed by a government whose rationality is based on achieving a productive and efficient state.
Those who are less capable or inclined to produce face certain ‘technologies’, and at some level, if they are not able to adequately able to contribute to the state, they become marginalized.
As complex power systems emerge through economic, political, and social differentiation, they impose normative limits on the respective fields of the individual. If the individual works within the imposition, then individual then becomes subjectivated accordingly. According to Foucault, this function of the modern state was developed with a “very sophisticated structure in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” (Power 334)
As more of the life of an individual becomes systematized within specific patterns (set by specific limiting norms), the more I think we can expect a certain type of individual freedom to erode. This may not be a constraint on freedom in an overt sense, but perhaps a constraint on a freedom nonetheless. What I wonder, is when patterns become too complex, could they overlap? Will individuals be caught inside and outside of limits through no action of their own? And further, how will one respond when ones identity becomes found in transgression?
I suppose the question we are to ask ourselves is how are we to have an active hand in shaping our own future, instead of merely having it actualized by systems in which individually we play an insignificant role. “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures”. (Power 366)
