TRANSCRIPT OF FOUCAULT AND ANARCHY
28 July 2000
A recording of the famous BBC Documentary on Foucault was shown as a popular and accessible introduction to the ideas of this influential philosopher.
Debate
followed on the relevance and consequence of these ideas for
anarchism.
The following
items are a:
1) A transcript
of the content of the video, supported by some more detailed
philosophical and biographic background.
2) A record of
some key points in the subsequent debate.
An Outline of the ideas of Foucault
(as presented in BBC Doc 1992)
Interpretation
heavily influenced by Miller’s book The Passion of
Michael Foucault.
Foucault’s
Biographic details – Upper Middle Class background. Son
of Surgeon.
As a student
was tormented and suicidal, attributed to his emerging
homosexuality and Catholic upbringing (though by this time he had
rejected Christianity). Develops interest in suffering and
sadism. Briefly hospitalised after breakdown.
Formative
experiences seem to shape his subsequent philosophical quest.
Though it was noted that Foucault’s life defies
‘pseudo-Freudian’ biographies and remains enigmatic.
Seeking to
out radicalise the Satrean generation he becomes France’s
leading left wing academic. But constantly flees the limelight,
and attempts to give voice to the ‘mad’,
‘criminal’, ‘delinquent’ and
‘perverted’, to all ‘outsiders’ within
society (pun intentional, and very Foucauldian).
In late 1968
returned to Paris to take part in the political militancy of the
period.
His life also
becomes a philosophical experiment, a quest for limits and
what’s beyond them. Always feels on the edge of some
discovery or revelation but never quite achieves it.
Experiments
with narcotic, erotic, sadomasochistic and aesthetic experiences
and allegedly has a ‘Near Death Experience’, all of
which he says transgress the limits of normality and social
conditioning. Most powerful experiences said to be with SM, LSD
and NDE. This intensifies in last years.
In 1980
diagnosed as having contracted AIDS. With the lack of evidence of
that period, refuses to believe that AIDS exists thinking it an
hysterical, homophobic social construction. Refuses treatment and
allegedly carries on with unprotected sex after infection. Dies
in 1984.
Variously
claimed as most important post-war European philosopher or
charlatan.
Along with
Derrida and Barthes becomes the formative influence on
‘post-structuralism’ and its later development into
so-called ‘post-modernism’.
Philosophy
based on rejection of bourgeois notions of normalcy and
‘rationality’, which are seen as control mechanism
within society. Seeks to find the source of these notions and go
beyond them. Believes this can be done partly by analysis but
crucially requires empirical experience. Transgression can take
us beyond the constraints of normality, and perhaps allow us to
see it from a new angle.
The purpose
of this seems to be to explore the way we are, how our society
operates, whether this situation is desirable, and if not what we
can do to change it and ourselves. Academic philosophy had become
over concerned with concepts, logic and language and had
forgotten the questions of our place in the world and how we
should live. We need to analyse aspects of daily life not
concepts. In particular philosophy needed to be more politicised
and psychologicised. Freud and Marx were an early influence.
He becomes especially interested in ‘outsiders’ and disparaging of ‘experts’ within the system. He emphasises first hand experience. Attacking the Satrean school as elitist he attempts to use his influence less to publicise his own ideas and more to shine a light on the ‘victims’ of society: the mad, criminals, perverts and outsiders of all kinds. Outsiders who come as near as possible to standing outside the system and its conditioning, but are equally conditioned in the sense of being mirror images of the bourgeois European. Influenced by this insight, and structuralist notions, he attempts to analyse the categories of, and particularly the borderlines between, mad-sane, good-evil, healthy-sick.
His generation attempts to be more radical in its critique than Sartre and the Marxist Existentialists, while also incorporating an aesthetic and even ‘spiritual’ dimension to life. This generation was greatly influenced by the Surrealists. Especially the last performance of Artaud, which blurred the boundaries between art and insanity and emphasised passionate subjectivity over calm objectivity. Most importantly uncertainty became a guiding principle and the rejection of dogma.
Doctoral
Thesis – Madness and Civilisation. 1961-65
Debunks notion that there exists a referent of the category called ‘Mad’. What does it mean? There is no general definition. Some people may suffer from mental damage and harmful dysfunctions of various kinds, but does the popular notion of sane vs. insane mean anything? Is ‘sane’ just a European bourgeois mindset?
Was the exclusion of the ‘insane’ the price of creating modern civilisation?
Also rejects the liberal idea that the Mad were once treated badly and cast out and are now treated more humanely within caring institutions.
The Mad were
once seen as visionaries, geniuses or powerful people beyond good
and evil, but now stigmatised as disabled, powerless, and
rejected by mainstream society. In many ways the Mad are now
worse off. The more we care and intervene the more damage we do
it seems. Is this progress?
Perhaps
‘madness’ was, in part, a closer vision than
‘reason’ of the way things really were?
Archaeology
of Knowledge. 1966
He examines our normal concepts in terms of form of structuralist linguistics and the psychology of a conditioned mindset. Explores nature of culture.
The Power System (a web of political and social relations) shapes our civilisation and this shapes everything else.
But power is not (entirely) hierarchical anymore, it is local. An automatic, holistic system based on the interplay of patterns of power in and between Institutions: the Family, Work, Business, the State, Academia, ‘Culture’ etc. In contemporary society the influence of ‘science’, bourgeois professional experts and Academia is paramount (more so than Capital??). But ultimately no one is in control, every one is its ‘victim’. I some sense we are all inmates in a vast lunatic asylum.
At root this could be seen as founded in the social interaction of free individuals, and thus reformable. But Foucault is pessimistic, the individual (the subject or self) is a conceptual product rooted in language, which itself is a product of social power relations. There is no free self to act differently. We are caught in a loop!
Reason can’t help either, it is also a product of our language and so based on the order of our society. Is our society rational? If not where does Reason stand?
Was it just the mode of behaviour of those who had power in society (not least to lock up those who behaved differently).
To counter claims by materialists that ‘reality’ is the guarantor of Reason and Science (at least in part), he argued that material reality was shaped by our conceptual schemes, giving examples such as the effect on our physiology and bodies of our dietary and exercise habits, and the human impact on the planet, which were all determined by our ideas and their relations with each other.
In Tunisia
during May 68, but later returns. Advocating political militancy
and prison ‘reform’. At times jokingly(?) calls himself
a ‘nihilist’ or an ‘anarchist’ when asked his
political beliefs.
70’s
Modification of this View: the Genealogical Turn (even more
pessimism)
Rejects the
structuralist notions in favour of the post-structuralism for
which he is well known. Genealogy replaces Archaeology. Very
influenced by Nietzsche. We cannot stand outside of the structure
we want to analyse because we are part of it (be it society, our
selves or language and logic). Detached analysis, insight, free
thought are all impossible!
What’s more there is no question of foundational sources or origins to discover, or corresponding progress to implement (i.e. the political system is not, as some had claimed entirely a reflection of family relations. The opposite was also true).
There was not
even any purpose or meaning to it all. Everything was randomly
constructed by historical events some of these were
‘useful’ others not. Darwinian influence. A kind of
natural selection of concepts and values. But this didn’t
imply our civilisation was the most ‘evolved’ or
‘adapted’ (as some later conservative
‘post-modernists’ would claim) we may be in an
‘evolutionary’ cul de sac from which we need to escape.
But is this possible?
He still retains the desire for a better society however. A contradictory intellectual tension develops between the notion of the inescapably conditioned nature of society and his desire to transcend these limits. Perhaps Foucault’s disrespect for classical Reason allowed him to accept this contradiction.
His ‘transgressional experiments’ increase.
Turns his
attention from the Mad to the Criminal
His book
opens by contrasting the medieval torturing to death of a
criminal with with the mind-numbing and soul-destroying regime of
discipline, control and surveillance imposed in modern prisons.
He refuses either to support the latter or denounce the former.
Both are manifestations of resentment (as Nietzsche said) and
tell us something about human ‘nature’. Prisons are
about revenge not reform, the humanist myth of rehabilitation is
just a self-delusory rationalisation. If anything it shows we
have become more hypocritical as our surface ‘morality’
increasingly hides our deeper motives. Is this progress? As with
asylums is humanism humane?
Further more
the reason for both forms of revenge is punishment, which has the
aim of control. But underlying resentment is the
‘jealousy’ of someone who can escape the limitations
imposed on self and others in the name of order. The bourgeois
drive for order and control is exposed again.
But the thesis is widened. The Prison becomes a metaphor for society as a whole. At the same time that hierarchical power has declined local systemic power has increased.
We all live
in a prison. More concrete examples are given, as the regimes in
schools, factories and hospitals are compared to the prison
system. Foucault calls this Panopticism (the all seeing eye model
of the State) after Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian Panopticon
prison plan.
Dominant
cultural notions like ‘normal’, ‘healthy’,
‘good’, ‘right’ and ‘proper’ are
exposed as propaganda terms for imposing a bourgeois system of
order on society.
After writing
this escapes France and immigrates to America. Which he believes
to be one of the few places on Earth with any potential for a
better society.
He is warmly
welcomed in the States where his ‘libertarian’ ideas
are welcomed by radical academics. Sometimes authentically
(though perhaps sometimes as an instrument against Marxism). The
beginnings of American Post Modernism (which some see over
simplistically as recuperated Post-Structuralism).
Death Valley,
Spring 1975
Foucault and
a friend drive to Death Valley, the hottest desert on Earth,
listen to Stockhausen and take LSD. This is later claimed by
Foucault to be a turning point in his life and a major step
forward. The disorganisation of thoughts produced is said to give
him a perspective outside of all his social, linguistic and
rational conditioning.
At the same
time his philosophy shifts from a social critique to a radical
examination of the nature of mind, self, life and death.
He concludes
that everything is a socially constructed illusion. There is no
human nature or even a true personal self, no meaning to life, no
independent truth at all. Everything is constructed by us. We
need this contructedness to function at all. And we are all
unique and complex beings situated in our own unique and complex
set of relationships.
More
optimistically he also comes to believe we can stand outside of
this construction (even if only momentarily) under certain
conditions. Once we have done this we are never quite the same
again or see the world in the same way. This means we have the
potential to change our selves and our relations, and perhaps
eventually society too. Though later interpreters of Foucault are
more pessimistic seeing personal and close interpersonal reforms
as the only sort possible.
Foucault now
focuses on finding the conditions for ‘transcendence’
of constructions.
Experiments
in Gay Culture and SM practises.
Explores the
socially constructed nature of sexuality and its role in shaping
society in turn. Sex is seen as a powerful force in society (a
major link in the loop perhaps?), but he rejects conventional and
Freudian studies of it. He denies that sexuality is repressed
because this is essentialist, it is only constructed (and
constructive). There is no sexually repressed society (he claims)
only rigid or open societies.
Also develops
a wider interest in Californian counterculture. Its excesses,
frivolity and plurality of contradictory belief systems are seen
as liberating. Multiple belief meant you were no longer
imprisoned by any one ideology. These were the grounds for the
potential to liberation and self (re)creation.
His three
volume History of Sexuality starts as a description of the
cultural conditioning of sexuality and becomes a study of the
cultural conditioning of self.
In his final
years he promotes the Aesthetics of Existence. An
‘ideology’ based on the breaking away from all
conditioning through ‘transgressive practices’ , the
detachment from social convention (including morality, which is
seen as a form of oppression) and the subsequent creation of a
new self and pattern of relationships.
Life and self
becomes a work of art, and has many interpretations, all of which
are true. The net result is a culture of liberation and becoming,
leading to the invention of a new form of existence and self. But
despite this optimism this remained theoretical and a quest that
was never fully achieved. However he later claims, with wry
irony, that the nearest he came this was in the state of bliss
produced when he nearly dies in a car accident.
In the
80’s increases his immersion in the countercultural and
sexual underground.
His
explorations are halted by the contraction of AIDS and he dies in
1984.
DEBATE:
A Critique of
the video and its interpretation of Foucault – It makes him
look too much of a counterculturalist, or pop psychologist, when
in reality he was a serious intellectual concerned with language
theory and conceptual systems. It over popularised, trivialised
and simplified his ideas.
This was
acknowledged but allowances were suggested as it was only a
primer to the complex philosophical (and often technical)
theories of Foucault.
The critique
of Foucault’s ideas included the fact that he undervalues
‘reality’ and ‘material consequences’, his
defence against this is not convincing, material reality is not
(totally) socially constructed. A long, though sometimes amusing,
debate occurred about the nature of social construction and
whether our chairs existed.
Most of us
concluded he was too abstract and intellectualised, though he had
his defenders who claimed we were being over simplistic.
Similar he
may have taken his anti-essentialism a bit too far (most
dramatically in denying the existence of his AIDS).
Despite this
no other good arguments against his basic notions were raised
with people either agreeing or staying silent. Some offered first
hand testimony of the institutions Foucault describes confirming
his perceptions of them.
So what were
the consequences for anarchism?
It was
generally concluded that ideological forms of anarchism and
political ideologies in general (from Marxism to Fascism) were
redundant, if Foucault’s ideas were correct. They would do
more harm than good, even if they were successful, due to their
false universalistic concepts. There could be no general
solutions. Classical anarchism with its notions of an inherently
benign human nature, a revolutionary subject (usually the working
class) and grand revolutionary solutions was particularly at
risk.
Another
problem for classical anarchism was that it focused exclusively
on removing hierarchical power relations. If Foucault is right
then hierarchical power relations were on the way out anyway, and
being replaced by what he calls local power relations. So if
anarchism was successful it might just become part of this
process and lead to a society of totalised local power relations.
I.e. a ‘free’ but conventional and conformist
collective. This would explain the ‘conservative’
mindset of some anarchists. A few examples were given.
Those who
wanted to retain classical (or any ideological) anarchism, as a
credible belief system, had to refute these criticism or take on
the even harder task of refuting Foucault himself. No one put
themselves forward on this line unfortunately.
Though some
called for a showing of the debate between Chomsky and Foucault,
which we shall endeavour to find.
However some
of us thought Foucauldian theory strengthen a different, more
contemporary form of anarchism. What might be called
neo-anarchism (as in the movements around May 68),
‘Post-Modern’ anarchism or post-anarchism anarchy
(after Hakim Bey). This would involve a non-ideological form of
anarchism based on ‘suspension of (absolute) belief’
and driven only by the desire for freedom at any cost. A movement
towards political anarchy that was pragmatic and pluralistic in
all its methods, theories and solutions. Striving for an
anarchist society that was itself pluralistic and diverse rather
than uniform, with good intentions but no preplanning or
universal vision. And one that took the overthrow of local power
structures as seriously as hierarchical ones (something that has
indeed been the case since the 6o’s amongst enlightened
anarchists, and was not unknown to some traditional anarchists
such as Bakunin). Such an anarchism could be seen as the most
realistic political manifestation of Foucault’s thesis and
could take many of his ideas onboard. Which in certain respects
were similar to Situationism (though probably more intelligent).
In many ways its psychological constructivism is in fact more
encouraging for anarchists than faith in human benevolence.
It was
questioned whether Foucault was an individualist. The only reply
to this seems to be yes but not as we knew them. The later
Foucault believed the political focus was ourselves, and so the
individual, but didn’t really believe in the baggage that
normally goes with this: atomic egoism, free will, and
essentialism. The individual was more of an active node in
society for him, one that creates it but is also created by it.
Perhaps in some ways he was like Stirner, and believed in a
‘creative nothing’.
Foucault had
held that resistance was impossible from outside of the system,
an anti-system movement would either be impotent (if it could
really exist at all) or be recuperated back into it. He believed
resistance was possible within the system but only from situated
individuals who could only act in isolation.
Due to this
it was claimed that Foucault had refuted the possibility of
revolutions, utopias or anykind of large scale social change.
It was
retorted that Foucault did believe in social change (and perhaps
utopias) but through the agency of micro-relationships rather
than mass movements.
In some way
Foucault could be seen as reversing the Bookchinite chasm. For
him it is the ‘lifestyle anarchist’ that is the key to
revolution and the ‘social anarchist’ who is the
impotent counter-revolutionary!
The main
problem identified was that if this is so what overcomes the
isolated and local nature of such ‘reformist’ changes.
How do you get a revolution without large scale social action?
But this seems to be a relic of Marxist thinking. The key is the
original critique of Foucault. He forgets about ‘material
reality’ and its consequences.
The fact that
we are interconnected by sharing the same material world means
any local changes will have effects on the larger system.
Particular in light of complexity theory. All that then remains
is to achieve a consciousness of this. Or to put it another way,
to generate a culture, albeit a polychromatic, polyphonic one.
A degree of materiality also allows us to cautiously return to Reason. But perhaps of a different kind. Perhaps we need a neo-Hegelian reflexive concept of Reason, that explores the dialectical nature of the loops we are trapped in, and our points of agency within it. Perhaps even a heavily reconstructed ‘anarcho-marxism’ might appeal to some?
But even with
or without a evidence of a material basis there is plenty of
evidence of interconnectivity that indicates something is doing
the job (if not ‘physical laws’ then
‘synchronicity’, ‘the logos’ or just
‘the matrix’!).
A final
problem with Foucault is his exclusive concentration on local
power structures, the mirror image of the problem with classical
anarchism. He acknowledges that not everyone has equal power, and
that hierarchy still exists, but doesn’t address this
problem. Perhaps this is merely due to his desire to correct an
imbalanced view, or because he thinks hierarchies are dissolving
on their own. But a serious political movement can not be as
narrow or as optimistic as this. Hierarchies still need to be
challenged and so the more traditional modes of anarchism have
their place still. Though perhaps the nature and methodology of
‘Revolution’ needs to be modified somewhat. A million
insurrections rather than one?