Yes, this is a good question and one which is difficult to answer briefly
and conclusively. Nonetheless, I'll have a go...
I would say the main difference between Adorno and Foucault on Enlightenment
is how best to transgress its dominative dynamic. Both Adorno and Foucault
analyse our post-Enlightenment modernity as one characterised by a
proliferating "perversity" of Enlightenment reason. Their respective images
of this domination are both hyperbolic or exaggerated, much in the way
Orwell's "1984" presented an extrapolation of currently existing oppressive
regimes. Taken literally these images are ludicrous, but as images they
stand as warnings, calls to vigilance to the thin boundary that separates
them as representations from our present realities. For both, although in
different ways, Enlightenment reason, which once hoped to liberate, turns
into a force for domination.
As I said, the main distinction is in the way in which this dominative
regime of a perverse reason is to be transgressed and in the immediate
prospects for the success of such transgression. For Adorno this must be
done by turning Enlightenment rationality on itself to such an extent that
it begins to unravel itself and reveal its logic of domination - this is
done as a kind of performance of the conflicts within the very Enlightenment
reason which would like to be total in its control. For Adorno,
Enlightenment reason's desire to be total is a betrayal of the utopian wish
for wholeness or for a state of true reconciliation. In transgressing a
false totality, Adorno wishes to negate not only the present state of
society but keep open an indefinitely postponed utopian transformation of
society. Any image of such reconciliation is premature and likely to become
itself a tool of the false totality.
Foucault does not believe that the ensemble of dominative power relations
unleashed by Enlightenment reason any longer (if they ever did) form a
totality. The utopian hope for reconciliation is therefore as much an
illusion as the belief that there is a global capitalist order that is
somehow repsonsible for the current state of things. Power is all-pervasive
and tends toward dominative formations but because it does not form a
consistent whole, because it is itself a conflict of relations, it is seen
as basically anarchic, congealing in certain points but always prone to
fluctuations and displacements, especially when challenged. The best that
can be done is small-scale resistance actions that take up the anarchic flux
of power and channel it for a brief moment in some "critical" or disruptive
direction, before this deployment itself begins to congeal into a dominative
formation. Towards the end of his life Foucault partially sublates his
analysis of power into an aesthetics of existence, lived in his case as a
critical ethos which aims to preserve the best impulse of the Enlightenment
- permanent critique as a way of life. Transgression can succeed here and
now, but always in a perpetual present in which it must constantly be
renewed. Thats pretty much it though, a prospect which would not have been
enough for someone like Adorno who persisted with an image of an
indefinitely postponed utopian reconciliation that can only be glimpsed in
the present failures to achieve reconciliation.
It is possible, though difficult, to extract (through some vigorous
extrapolation) a political or social project out of this. Difficult because,
I believe, Foucault ultimately gives us an image of personal and existential
salvation that is highly skeptical about the prospects for wider
transformations and concerns. Foucault becomes so concerned to defend
particularity and difference that his field of vision ends up focusing only
on the present self's navigation and transgression of its own limits in
concrete situations. If a wider transformation is possible, it is best not
to attempt to chart it, nor even speak of it directly. Other like-minded
individuals may wish to take Foucault's example, to take up the permanent
critique of the present as a way of life or ethos. But there it stops. To
attempt to claim some special status for Foucault's ethos would be in danger
of turning it into a de facto universal, which as permanent critique it
could never allow itself to be. Nor should one attempt to manufacture
something out of it for a wider distribution, lest ethos become a self-help
commodity. Both these attempts would be foreign to Foucault's ethos, for as
a way of life it already presumes other ways of life with which it it must
co-exist, do battle, find friendships, etc.
The attempt to think through the limits that have been imposed on our own
existence and as to ways of transgressing these limits may be said its image
of wider reconciliation is something like an "unavowable" or "unworking"
community (as in Blanchot), a society reconciled to an absence of
reconciliation in which a "we" (let alone an "I") can never be presumed. As
a final point of comparison, I am inclined, at the moment, to follow
Jameson's view here that Adorno never relinquished the critical problematic
of totality while the movement to which Foucault belonged did (the movement
formerly known as poststructuralist). In this sense, Foucault's theoretical
moves having apparently thrown off any sense of a totality become sheer
unregulated positivities, mirrored in the singularities which would make up
an unavowable community.
Sebastian
At 15:03 4*5*99 +0200, you wrote:
>Excellent question. The main difference between Adorno and Foucault's views
on Enlightenment is that Adorno sees Enlightenment as a dialectic that
pushes us inexorably in the direction of an administered, anti-human,
one-dimensional society, while Foucault endorses Enlightenment insofar as it
promotes a critical analysis of the conditions and forces that make us up.
The primary feature of Enlightenment for Adorno is *domination* -- of man
over nature, of man over man. The primary feature of Enlightenment for
Foucault, on the other hand, involves probing the boundaries of our current
thrownness both to understand better what we are and to investigate the
possibilities of becoming something else.
>
>-- John
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Eun-joo Cho
> To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 1999 9:47 AM
>
>
> What's the main difference between Foucault and Adorno's view on
> Enlightenment?
>
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