Colin writes:
>Sean,
>
>Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I am glad you have used the essay 'Concern
>for Truth@ since I once used a quote from this essay as a signature on this
>list and it was pointed out by various members that they knew better than I
>what Foucault meant. You also seem to present Foucault's words as self
>evidently true and neglect the fact that i may have a different reading of
>them.
>
Colin, there always can be other interpretations of any text, so I do not
take my reading of that passage to be the only one. I cannot possibly
articulate every possible reading, including yours, and furthermore I
cannot give a better reading of your account than you can. So, I will
leave it to you to articulate your interpretation.
>
>>"Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in
>>>order. At least spare us their morality when we write."
>
>Leave me alone, ask not who I am and what I do, just let me do it eh? A
>perfect fascist line.
>
Maybe. But given your above claim to the possibility of different readings
and my understanding of the number of possible readings of a text to be
indeterminate, to interpret that comment as strictly fascist certainly is
not the only possible one. I reject this reading because I find nothing
in Foucault to support his being a fascist. In fact, in his preface to
Deleuze's and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ he concurs with the authors'
rejection of fascism, "and not only historical fascism, the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini--which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the
masses so effectively--but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in
our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire
the very thing that dominates and exploits us." (AO, xiii) So Foucault,
like you Colin, and myself among others on this list, does find fascism to
be a dangerous problem. But he does not think the problem of fascism is
exclusively to be found in explicit fascist declarations (such as one might
find on the newsgroup). To silence the newsgroup is also a form of fascism
just as possibly dangerous as the potential effects caused by the
newsgroup.
>>Foucault: The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what they have
>>to do.
>
>I agree, who said otherwise? BUT!
>
>By what right would he do so? And remember all the prophecies,
>>promises, injunctions, and programs that intellectuals have managed to
>>formulate over the last two centuries and whose effects we can know see.
>
>Is not Foucault himself guilty of this after all, the assertion that as
>intellectuals we should not tell others what to do is an assertion of what
>intellectuals should or should not do? Non? He is at least telling
>intellectuals what they should do.
Foucault never declared that intellectuals should not tell others what to
do, how to live, etc. He only responds to the concerns that people
themselves do not need intellectuals anymore to tell them what to do; that
"they know perfectly well, without illusion." The role of the traditional
intellectual's discourse was
"that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected.
...The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when
the facts became incontrovertable, when it was forbidden to say that the
emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had
yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth;
he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence." ("Intellectuals and
Power", 207)
But then after 1968, according to Foucault:
"the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him in order to
gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far
better than he and they are perfectly capable of expressing themselves."
(I&P, 207)
So he's not telling intellectuals, or anyone else, what they should be
doing, because he knows he can't anymore. If he does not offer an explicit
ethical committment, an ethical program for people to follow, it is because
people in their everyday lives do not want to be told how they should live.
Foucault, recognizes and acknowledges this and lets other intellectuals
interpret his work the way they see fit, knowing fully well that there will
be those who still demand of him that he tell them how to act. Should he
be held accountable for this?
>
>>The work of an intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is
>>through the analyses that he carries out in his field, to question over and
>>over again what is postulated as self-evident, that to disturb people's mental
>>habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and
>>accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this
>>reproblematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an
>>intllectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which
>>he has his role as citizen to play)."
>>
>
>Ditto, Foucault in telling us what intellectuals should not do is in fact
>telling us what they should do. But more than this there is the very
>impossibility, that Foucault sees, of separating the role of the citizen
>from that of the intellectual (if only because intellectuals are also
>citizens. And of course, this itself makes clear how untenable is your claim
>that:
>
>>The confusion lies not in Foucault, but in those
>>>such as Habermas and Colin who refuse to set aside (provisionally, of
>>>course) their moralities in order to examine the rationality of the
>>>unintended effects of their moralities.
>
>Is totally ant-Foucautian. Again, and this really is getting tedious. How is
>such a miraculaous event to be effected. You are simply buying into some
>very extreme form of positivism here. It is naive. Rationality distinct from
>the morality that frames it, I wish?
Obviously there is no committed intellectual who is not also a committed
citizen. One of the differences between these committments is that the
intellectual's interest in questioning the assumed beliefs of the citizen
is an examination of how these beliefs come to be accepted by people (also
called genealogy). That does not mean s/he abandons these beliefs, though
s/he may see them differently than before by finding new problematics. To
provisionally set aside one's morality is a testing of it against its own
rationality, not to separate the rationality from the morality. It may go
like this: Despite the citizen's demand that the intellectual no longer
tell him/her what to do, because he/she knows it perfectly well, there is
the issue of the background of largely unarticulated beliefs that the
citizen is not aware of in its everyday activity (how the citizen's actions
affect other actions). The contemporary citizen's everyday activities do
not require him/her to articulate these beliefs in order to do what s/he
does. And that is why the intellectual's committments today may be less
about informing the citizen of what s/he should do, and more about
explicating the background of largely unarticulated beliefs, including
contemporary moralities. It is this critical activity which, I think, can
only enrich one's self-understanding as a citizen, but it certainly is not
a requirement of being a citizen. Is this naive? Is it fascist?
>
>>
>>F: Nothing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent
>>to truth; but nothing is more dangerous than a political system that claims
>>to lay down the truth.
>
>Oh, and does this latter clause not perfectly describe Fascism, which we now
>might describe in Foucaultian terms as the "most dangerous of political
>systems"
>
The traditional intellectual was always affiliated with a political regime,
or at least served as the representatve of the "truth", as it did for
instance in Lenin or Gramsci. I think Foucault, after 68, finds the
political function of traditional intellectuals to be oppressive to people
and so he rejects that function, and he subsequently does not tell people
how to think or act, ethically or otherwise. But that does not mean that
these same people could not find something useful or even dangerous in his
work if they read him that way. That choice, or whether to read Foucault
at all, is up to them.
>The function of "telling the truth" must not take
>>the form of law, just as it would be pointless to believe that it resides
>>by right in the spontaneous interplay of communication. The task of
>>telling the truth is an endless labor: to respect it in all its complexity
>>is an obligation which no power can do without -- except by imposing the
>>silence of slavery.
>
>But the truth is (as I understand many on this list to argue) something that
>is a construct and not alethiac! That is, things are not true in and of
>themselves. Hence, discursive idealism does reign. If truth is constructed
>and not of things then the truth that the Nazi's construct is as ethically
>valuable as any other. And if not why not? What makes it untruth? (what we
>once upon a time used to call lies.)
>
Your notion of truth seems to be unnecessarily objectivist and the
deconstructionists are far too relativist. The phenomenological requirement
of transparent access to the "things themselves" assumes that there is a
truth to be obtained from the things and it is the phenomenologist who has
that access. This is only partially acceptable. Unlike discursive
idealsim, which like you I too reject, truth cannot be separated from the
background in which it has meaning. However, this background is never
fully known, and is always changing. So meaning is not something we
construct, nor is it embedded deep within the things themselves. It lies
somewhere between and never remains the same. Against this background of
shared meanings it is easy to reject Nazi idealogy as untrue without having
to ground our rejection in some unhistorical idea of morality.
This response is already way too long so I will stop here and continue it
later. And Colin your insights are very strong and rattling my brain,
which I can only thank you for.
Sean
>Sean,
>
>Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I am glad you have used the essay 'Concern
>for Truth@ since I once used a quote from this essay as a signature on this
>list and it was pointed out by various members that they knew better than I
>what Foucault meant. You also seem to present Foucault's words as self
>evidently true and neglect the fact that i may have a different reading of
>them.
>
Colin, there always can be other interpretations of any text, so I do not
take my reading of that passage to be the only one. I cannot possibly
articulate every possible reading, including yours, and furthermore I
cannot give a better reading of your account than you can. So, I will
leave it to you to articulate your interpretation.
>
>>"Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in
>>>order. At least spare us their morality when we write."
>
>Leave me alone, ask not who I am and what I do, just let me do it eh? A
>perfect fascist line.
>
Maybe. But given your above claim to the possibility of different readings
and my understanding of the number of possible readings of a text to be
indeterminate, to interpret that comment as strictly fascist certainly is
not the only possible one. I reject this reading because I find nothing
in Foucault to support his being a fascist. In fact, in his preface to
Deleuze's and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ he concurs with the authors'
rejection of fascism, "and not only historical fascism, the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini--which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the
masses so effectively--but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in
our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire
the very thing that dominates and exploits us." (AO, xiii) So Foucault,
like you Colin, and myself among others on this list, does find fascism to
be a dangerous problem. But he does not think the problem of fascism is
exclusively to be found in explicit fascist declarations (such as one might
find on the newsgroup). To silence the newsgroup is also a form of fascism
just as possibly dangerous as the potential effects caused by the
newsgroup.
>>Foucault: The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what they have
>>to do.
>
>I agree, who said otherwise? BUT!
>
>By what right would he do so? And remember all the prophecies,
>>promises, injunctions, and programs that intellectuals have managed to
>>formulate over the last two centuries and whose effects we can know see.
>
>Is not Foucault himself guilty of this after all, the assertion that as
>intellectuals we should not tell others what to do is an assertion of what
>intellectuals should or should not do? Non? He is at least telling
>intellectuals what they should do.
Foucault never declared that intellectuals should not tell others what to
do, how to live, etc. He only responds to the concerns that people
themselves do not need intellectuals anymore to tell them what to do; that
"they know perfectly well, without illusion." The role of the traditional
intellectual's discourse was
"that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected.
...The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when
the facts became incontrovertable, when it was forbidden to say that the
emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had
yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth;
he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence." ("Intellectuals and
Power", 207)
But then after 1968, according to Foucault:
"the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him in order to
gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far
better than he and they are perfectly capable of expressing themselves."
(I&P, 207)
So he's not telling intellectuals, or anyone else, what they should be
doing, because he knows he can't anymore. If he does not offer an explicit
ethical committment, an ethical program for people to follow, it is because
people in their everyday lives do not want to be told how they should live.
Foucault, recognizes and acknowledges this and lets other intellectuals
interpret his work the way they see fit, knowing fully well that there will
be those who still demand of him that he tell them how to act. Should he
be held accountable for this?
>
>>The work of an intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is
>>through the analyses that he carries out in his field, to question over and
>>over again what is postulated as self-evident, that to disturb people's mental
>>habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and
>>accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this
>>reproblematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an
>>intllectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which
>>he has his role as citizen to play)."
>>
>
>Ditto, Foucault in telling us what intellectuals should not do is in fact
>telling us what they should do. But more than this there is the very
>impossibility, that Foucault sees, of separating the role of the citizen
>from that of the intellectual (if only because intellectuals are also
>citizens. And of course, this itself makes clear how untenable is your claim
>that:
>
>>The confusion lies not in Foucault, but in those
>>>such as Habermas and Colin who refuse to set aside (provisionally, of
>>>course) their moralities in order to examine the rationality of the
>>>unintended effects of their moralities.
>
>Is totally ant-Foucautian. Again, and this really is getting tedious. How is
>such a miraculaous event to be effected. You are simply buying into some
>very extreme form of positivism here. It is naive. Rationality distinct from
>the morality that frames it, I wish?
Obviously there is no committed intellectual who is not also a committed
citizen. One of the differences between these committments is that the
intellectual's interest in questioning the assumed beliefs of the citizen
is an examination of how these beliefs come to be accepted by people (also
called genealogy). That does not mean s/he abandons these beliefs, though
s/he may see them differently than before by finding new problematics. To
provisionally set aside one's morality is a testing of it against its own
rationality, not to separate the rationality from the morality. It may go
like this: Despite the citizen's demand that the intellectual no longer
tell him/her what to do, because he/she knows it perfectly well, there is
the issue of the background of largely unarticulated beliefs that the
citizen is not aware of in its everyday activity (how the citizen's actions
affect other actions). The contemporary citizen's everyday activities do
not require him/her to articulate these beliefs in order to do what s/he
does. And that is why the intellectual's committments today may be less
about informing the citizen of what s/he should do, and more about
explicating the background of largely unarticulated beliefs, including
contemporary moralities. It is this critical activity which, I think, can
only enrich one's self-understanding as a citizen, but it certainly is not
a requirement of being a citizen. Is this naive? Is it fascist?
>
>>
>>F: Nothing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent
>>to truth; but nothing is more dangerous than a political system that claims
>>to lay down the truth.
>
>Oh, and does this latter clause not perfectly describe Fascism, which we now
>might describe in Foucaultian terms as the "most dangerous of political
>systems"
>
The traditional intellectual was always affiliated with a political regime,
or at least served as the representatve of the "truth", as it did for
instance in Lenin or Gramsci. I think Foucault, after 68, finds the
political function of traditional intellectuals to be oppressive to people
and so he rejects that function, and he subsequently does not tell people
how to think or act, ethically or otherwise. But that does not mean that
these same people could not find something useful or even dangerous in his
work if they read him that way. That choice, or whether to read Foucault
at all, is up to them.
>The function of "telling the truth" must not take
>>the form of law, just as it would be pointless to believe that it resides
>>by right in the spontaneous interplay of communication. The task of
>>telling the truth is an endless labor: to respect it in all its complexity
>>is an obligation which no power can do without -- except by imposing the
>>silence of slavery.
>
>But the truth is (as I understand many on this list to argue) something that
>is a construct and not alethiac! That is, things are not true in and of
>themselves. Hence, discursive idealism does reign. If truth is constructed
>and not of things then the truth that the Nazi's construct is as ethically
>valuable as any other. And if not why not? What makes it untruth? (what we
>once upon a time used to call lies.)
>
Your notion of truth seems to be unnecessarily objectivist and the
deconstructionists are far too relativist. The phenomenological requirement
of transparent access to the "things themselves" assumes that there is a
truth to be obtained from the things and it is the phenomenologist who has
that access. This is only partially acceptable. Unlike discursive
idealsim, which like you I too reject, truth cannot be separated from the
background in which it has meaning. However, this background is never
fully known, and is always changing. So meaning is not something we
construct, nor is it embedded deep within the things themselves. It lies
somewhere between and never remains the same. Against this background of
shared meanings it is easy to reject Nazi idealogy as untrue without having
to ground our rejection in some unhistorical idea of morality.
This response is already way too long so I will stop here and continue it
later. And Colin your insights are very strong and rattling my brain,
which I can only thank you for.
Sean