Sam Vagenas <nologos@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
writes as follows, in response to the question I put to him concerning
why he has trouble with the possibility of "Fascist Foucaultians":
"It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every sytem of power (which
would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power
of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within
which it operates at the present time (Power & Knowledge/ed. Colin Gordon,
p. 133)."
This and hundreds of other similar quotes, I think, justify my skepticism
about Foucaultian fascism.
To which I respond:
We should not try, Foucault says, to emancipate truth from systems of
power. That can't happen, because truth is already power. [A notehere:
I think Foucault came to regret this reduction of truth to power.]
Instead, we should detach the power of truth from the forms of
hegemony, etc., within which it currently operates.
What's Foucault up to here? What, for instance, is the "it" that
he mentions at the beginning of the passage quoted by Vagenas?
"It is not a matter of . . . " *What* is "not a matter of . . . "?
One of the threads, if not the thread, that ran through his post-68
career was to argue for a reorientation in oppositional thoughtin
the West away from a reliance on "truth." In my last post (whcih
of course everyone remembers by heart) I quoted Lukacs on the
relationship between the proletariat's emergence in the West and
a notion of truth that was both partisan and *objectively* true.
We can locate Habermas in the same tradition. In _Knowledge and
Human Interests_ he identifies a kind of knowledge that is not
merely empirical and reflective but potentially liberatory. (See
Sections V and VI of the Appendix.) Access to a notion of "true"
human nature, human nature undistorted by the false interests
imposed upon it by dominant social forms is the crucial
oppositional step for critical Marxist thought, and indeed for all
sorts of oppositional thought. Once we have that we can use it
to oppose the world as it is with an effective "ought."
Foucault's comment quoted by Vagenas above should be thought of
in terms of Foucault's rejection of this reliance on truth for
oppositional efficacy. And so the "it" that I asked about
earlier can be thought of this way: "Achieving liberation." Let's
stick that in, and rewrite Foucault's comment:
"[Achieving liberation] is not a matter of emancipating truth
from every sytem of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already
power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of
hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates
at the present time."
But "liberation" here should not itself be understood in some
substantive way. Liberation should not be thought of as moving
towards some kind of utopia or "solution," rather it is a process
of moving away from one particular power-knowledge construct,
which thus makes possible new inventions, new power-knowledge
relations, new truths, new kinds of hegemony, etc.
And this task--freeing truth from particular systems of power in
order to construct new ones--is not only one that fascists
could, potentially, in the abstract, as an interesting thought
experiment, engage in. Instead, it could be easily argued that
fascists have been some of the best practitioners of the activity
of emancipating truth from a currently dominate social form,
thus delegitimizing it and making it possible to produce
something new in the twentieth century.
writes as follows, in response to the question I put to him concerning
why he has trouble with the possibility of "Fascist Foucaultians":
"It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every sytem of power (which
would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power
of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within
which it operates at the present time (Power & Knowledge/ed. Colin Gordon,
p. 133)."
This and hundreds of other similar quotes, I think, justify my skepticism
about Foucaultian fascism.
To which I respond:
We should not try, Foucault says, to emancipate truth from systems of
power. That can't happen, because truth is already power. [A notehere:
I think Foucault came to regret this reduction of truth to power.]
Instead, we should detach the power of truth from the forms of
hegemony, etc., within which it currently operates.
What's Foucault up to here? What, for instance, is the "it" that
he mentions at the beginning of the passage quoted by Vagenas?
"It is not a matter of . . . " *What* is "not a matter of . . . "?
One of the threads, if not the thread, that ran through his post-68
career was to argue for a reorientation in oppositional thoughtin
the West away from a reliance on "truth." In my last post (whcih
of course everyone remembers by heart) I quoted Lukacs on the
relationship between the proletariat's emergence in the West and
a notion of truth that was both partisan and *objectively* true.
We can locate Habermas in the same tradition. In _Knowledge and
Human Interests_ he identifies a kind of knowledge that is not
merely empirical and reflective but potentially liberatory. (See
Sections V and VI of the Appendix.) Access to a notion of "true"
human nature, human nature undistorted by the false interests
imposed upon it by dominant social forms is the crucial
oppositional step for critical Marxist thought, and indeed for all
sorts of oppositional thought. Once we have that we can use it
to oppose the world as it is with an effective "ought."
Foucault's comment quoted by Vagenas above should be thought of
in terms of Foucault's rejection of this reliance on truth for
oppositional efficacy. And so the "it" that I asked about
earlier can be thought of this way: "Achieving liberation." Let's
stick that in, and rewrite Foucault's comment:
"[Achieving liberation] is not a matter of emancipating truth
from every sytem of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already
power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of
hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates
at the present time."
But "liberation" here should not itself be understood in some
substantive way. Liberation should not be thought of as moving
towards some kind of utopia or "solution," rather it is a process
of moving away from one particular power-knowledge construct,
which thus makes possible new inventions, new power-knowledge
relations, new truths, new kinds of hegemony, etc.
And this task--freeing truth from particular systems of power in
order to construct new ones--is not only one that fascists
could, potentially, in the abstract, as an interesting thought
experiment, engage in. Instead, it could be easily argued that
fascists have been some of the best practitioners of the activity
of emancipating truth from a currently dominate social form,
thus delegitimizing it and making it possible to produce
something new in the twentieth century.