Objects seem to determine our behavior, but our practice determines its own objects in the first place. Let us start, then, with that practice itself, so that the object to which it applies is what it is only in relation to that practice (in the sense that a "beneficiary" is a beneficiary inasmuch as I cause her to benefit from something, and that, if I guide someone, that person is the guided party). The relation determines the object, and only what is determined exists. The governed is too vague a term, and it does not exist as an entity; there exists only a flock-people, then a child-people to be coddled. This is simply another way of saying that at one time the observable practices entailed guiding and at another they entailed coddling (just as being guided is only a way of saying that someone is guiding you at the moment: one is not a guided party in the absence of a guide). The object is only the correlative of the practice; prior to the practice there exists no eternal governed that could be targeted more or less accurately and with respect to which one could modify one's aim so as to improve it. The prince who treats his people like children does not even conceive of the possibility of behaving differently: he does what goes without saying, things being as they are. The eternal governed does not exceed what one makes of it, it does not exist apart from the practice that is applied to it; its existence, if there is such a thing, is not indicated by any concrete aspect. (The flock-people did not have social security, and no one dreamed of providing it, nor did anyone feel guilty for failing to do so.) A notion that is connected to nothing in practice is only a word.
Such a word has only an ideological – or rather idealist – existence.
Let us consider the leader of the flock, for instance. He gives the animals
in his charge free bread, because his mission is to lead the entire flock to
its destination without leaving too many starved corpses behind: a thinned-out
herd cannot defend itself against wolves. This is the actual practice, as
it emerges from the facts (and from the following fact in particular: free
bread was given not to destitute slaves but only to citizens). It is true
that ideology offered a vaguely noble interpretation of that cruelly precise
practice: the Senate was exalted in proclamations declaring it to be the
father of the people and affirming that it sought the good of the governed.
But the same ideological platitude is repeated about very different practices:
the sovereign who takes over a fish pond and exploits it for his own profit
by levying a tax is also viewed as a father who makes his subjects happy,
whereas in fact he lets them cope as best they can with nature and the seasons,
for better or for worse. And the conservation agent is yet another benefactor
of his subjects, someone who regulates natural fluctuations not for the fiscal
benefits that he can draw from them, but for the proper management of nature
itself, of which he has taken charge. We are beginning to see what ideology
is: a noble and vague style, apt for idealizing practices while appearing
to describe them. Ideology is an ample cloak that dissimulates the crooked
and dissimilar contours of the real practices that succeed one another in
history.
But where do these practices come from, each with its own inimitable contours?
From historical changes, quite simply, from the countless transformations of
historical reality, that is to say from the rest of history, like everything
else. Foucault has not discovered a previously unknown new agency, called "practice";
he has made the effort to see people's practices as they really are; what he
is talking about is the same thing every historian talks about, namely, what
people do. The difference is simply that Foucault undertakes to speak about
practice precisely, to describe its convoluted forms, instead of referring to
it in vague and noble terms. He does not say: "I have discovered a sort
of historical unconscious, a preconceptual agency, that I call practice or discourse,
and that provides the real explanation for history. Ah yes! but how am I going
to manage to explain this agency itself and its transformations?" No:
he is talking about the same thing we talk about, for example, the practical
conduct of a government; only he shows it as it really is, by stripping away
the veils.
Nothing could be stranger than to accuse Foucault of reducing our history to an intellectual process that is as implacable as it is irresponsible. Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why his philosophy is difficult for us to grasp: it does not look at all like Marx's or Freud's. Practice is not an agency (like the Freudian Id) or a prime mover (like the relation of production), and moreover for Foucault there is no agency nor any prime mover (there is matter, however, as we shall see). That is why there is nothing wrong with calling practice, provisionally, the "concealed base of the iceberg," in order to indicate that it presents itself to our spontaneous sight only heavily veiled, and that it is largely preconceptual; for the concealed base of an iceberg is not some agency that is different in nature from the exposed tip; it is made of ice, like the rest. Nor is it the motor that moves the iceberg along; it is below the line of visibility, that is all. It is accounted for in the same way as the rest of the iceberg. Foucault has only one thing to say to historians: "You may continue to explain history as you have always done. But be careful: if you look very closely, if you peel away the banalities, you will notice that there is more to explain than you thought; there are crooked contours that you haven't spotted.
Excerpt from "The Final Foucault and His Ethics" by Paul Veyne:
What is at stake here is the goal of philosophy; what does it serve? To reduplicate what men are only too ready to believe? Despite what the justificatory or self-protecting philosophers assert, the spectacle of the past brings to light no reason in history other than the struggles of men for something that is undoubtedly neither true nor false but that imposes itself as truth to be told. If this is so, a philosophy has only one possible use, which is making war: not the war of the day before yesterday, but today's war. And for this, it has to begin by proving genealogically that there is no other truth of history but this combat. "Yes" to war, "no" to patriotic brainwashing.
Here one sees a little-noticed characteristic of Foucault's work, a philosophically grounded elegance that was apparent in his private conversation, from which anger was not excluded, but indignation was. Foucault never wrote, "My political or social preferences are the true ones and the good ones" ("true" and "good" being one and the same, as we know thanks to Heidegger); nor did he write further, "My adversaries' preferences are false." All his books imply rather the following: "The reasons my adversaries give for their claim that their preferences are the truth rest genealogically on nothing." Foucault did not attack the choices of others, but the rationalizations that they added to their choices. A genealogical criticism does not say, "I am right and the others are mistaken," but only, "the others are wrong to claim that they are right." A true warrior, lacking indignation, knows anger, thumos. Foucault did not worry about justifying his conviction; it was enough for him to hold to them. But to ratiocinate would have been to lower himself, with no benefit to his cause.