> I'd be interested to know what was explicitly normative in Foucault's work.
>
>
> >The charge, from Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas), is
> >based on a confusion. Foucault could only be crypto-normative if he
> >were not explicitly normative. But he is explicitly normative.
> --------------------------------------------------------
I would not claim that the texts up to and including the Archaeology
of Knowledge are explicitly normative. On the other hand, the claim
that the texts of the 1980's (those concerning ethics and
enlightenment) are explicitly normative is too obvious to need any
justification. So I will take the question as relating to the
"genealogical" texts of the 1970's.
I am quoting from memory, but I believe in "Questions of Method"
(a.k.a. "Impossible Prison") Foucault says that he wants "to resituate
the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis
and political critique." I think that, more specifically, the
"normative" thrust of his genealogies of the 1970's is a critique of
various attempts to institute practices which use ostensible truths
about who or what we are to determine what ought to be done with us or
to us or for us.
Consider a characteristic evaluation:
"A form of justice which tends to be applied to what one is, this is
what is so outrageous when one thinks of the penal law of which the
eighteenth-century reformers had dreamed...." (1978).
There is, perhaps, an ambiguity in the word "normative". Are norms
prescriptions for how to act? In that sense, foucault is not
normative. But then he is not crypto-normative either. It seems to
me that in broadly philosophical discussions one sometimes uses
"normative" as a synonym for "moral" or something like
having-to-do-with-value-judgements. It is the latter mode of
normativity that I think is relevant to Foucault's work of the 1970's.
He tries to argue against the practice of deciding what to do to
people by appeal to what is true about them. He does so by showing
that the truths about people are arifacts of forms of manipulation and
coercion and so do not have the moral OR epistemic authority often
attributed to them. They are artifical truths, and having been
produced they can be changed. They don't add up to "anthropological
constants" or "natural" ways to be, distinguishable from "unnatural"
ways, and so on. So it is not a good idea to take them as
authoritative.
Is he explicit about this? I think so. He says, in 1976, that "a
genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical
knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of
opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical,
unitary, formal and scientific discourse [about human beings]" ("Two
Lectures"). Here he explicitly says that genealogies are directed
against the political/legal/ethical authoritativeness of scientific
discourses about people. In my sense, that is normative. More
exactly, it is explicitly evaluative. On the other hand, it is
manifestly not a specification of any alternative (a normative
prescription), except the alternative of using non-scientific ways of
deciding how to relate to people. But that is not AN alternative, any
more than a waiter saying "don't order the chicken" is a
reccomendation about what you SHOULD eat.
Steve
UofT
>
>
> >The charge, from Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas), is
> >based on a confusion. Foucault could only be crypto-normative if he
> >were not explicitly normative. But he is explicitly normative.
> --------------------------------------------------------
I would not claim that the texts up to and including the Archaeology
of Knowledge are explicitly normative. On the other hand, the claim
that the texts of the 1980's (those concerning ethics and
enlightenment) are explicitly normative is too obvious to need any
justification. So I will take the question as relating to the
"genealogical" texts of the 1970's.
I am quoting from memory, but I believe in "Questions of Method"
(a.k.a. "Impossible Prison") Foucault says that he wants "to resituate
the production of true and false at the heart of historical analysis
and political critique." I think that, more specifically, the
"normative" thrust of his genealogies of the 1970's is a critique of
various attempts to institute practices which use ostensible truths
about who or what we are to determine what ought to be done with us or
to us or for us.
Consider a characteristic evaluation:
"A form of justice which tends to be applied to what one is, this is
what is so outrageous when one thinks of the penal law of which the
eighteenth-century reformers had dreamed...." (1978).
There is, perhaps, an ambiguity in the word "normative". Are norms
prescriptions for how to act? In that sense, foucault is not
normative. But then he is not crypto-normative either. It seems to
me that in broadly philosophical discussions one sometimes uses
"normative" as a synonym for "moral" or something like
having-to-do-with-value-judgements. It is the latter mode of
normativity that I think is relevant to Foucault's work of the 1970's.
He tries to argue against the practice of deciding what to do to
people by appeal to what is true about them. He does so by showing
that the truths about people are arifacts of forms of manipulation and
coercion and so do not have the moral OR epistemic authority often
attributed to them. They are artifical truths, and having been
produced they can be changed. They don't add up to "anthropological
constants" or "natural" ways to be, distinguishable from "unnatural"
ways, and so on. So it is not a good idea to take them as
authoritative.
Is he explicit about this? I think so. He says, in 1976, that "a
genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical
knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of
opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical,
unitary, formal and scientific discourse [about human beings]" ("Two
Lectures"). Here he explicitly says that genealogies are directed
against the political/legal/ethical authoritativeness of scientific
discourses about people. In my sense, that is normative. More
exactly, it is explicitly evaluative. On the other hand, it is
manifestly not a specification of any alternative (a normative
prescription), except the alternative of using non-scientific ways of
deciding how to relate to people. But that is not AN alternative, any
more than a waiter saying "don't order the chicken" is a
reccomendation about what you SHOULD eat.
Steve
UofT