The elaboration below is very helpful to me to open up an exploration of
Foucault's politics. There is much I want to consider before responding
directly. I would like to add, however, a dimension to "transcribing"
Foucault (if by that, I might imply a way of reading) that has less to do
with reading Foucault as an "author" with an intellectual biography and more
to do with reading him as an "interlocutor" in a conceptually and
historically variable field. For instance, when Foucault developed his
concept of "governmentality" he was working with political and social
theorists who were attempting to develop analyses of political power that
did not hold the "state" central to their analyses. One gets a different
reading of Foucault (such as switches in concepts and emphases) in his
lectures on governmentality from, say, his joint interview with Deleuze on
the relation of intellectuals and power. I do not wish my comments to be
taken as a disagreement with Sebastian, but only as an initial foray to
suggest that Foucault's politics were "local"--including the specific
disciplinary and intellectual intersections at which he was situated.
Lisa
At 01:43 PM 1/4/00 +1100, you wrote:
>I am glad that my earlier mail provoked some pre-christmas debate although I
>was not altogether satisfied with the partisan approach that emerged as a
>battle of scholarly camps. Beyond stating a critical remark regarding John's
>paper though, what I wanted to get to was the perspectives that have been
>taken with regard to a significant transition in Foucault's work. John does
>point toward some important difficulties encountered in attempts to extract
>a workable and sustainable oppositional political practice from Foucault's
>analytics of power but avoids dealing with the transition I'm talking about
>here: schematically, from the analytic of power which achieves a "highpoint"
>in D & P and HS vol 1, through the modifications which followed, the
>emergence of governmentality through to an ethics as aesthetics of
>existence. It seems to me that this transition has been a difficult one for
>those who were or are enamoured of Foucault's 1970s experiment for a
>post-Marxist theoretical/practical approach to radical political
>thinking/action. What sense can be made of Foucault's late emphasis on
>ethics from the perspective of his analyses of power and vice versa? I do
>not mean to suggest a rigid demarcation between periods here, merely a shift
>in the main focus of attention for a thinker that always claimed to be
>diagnosing the present. With this transition in mind and therefore without
>privileging his stated objectives during the 1970s, in what sense is
>Foucault's work as a whole political, what kind of politics is it, and what
>kind of politics does it make possible or discourage?
>
>Deleuze's difficult book on Foucault, with its combination of erudition and
>phantasmagoria, does seem to me to be more about Deleuze's own philosophy
>rather than Foucault's, even though Foucault does sometimes come to "haunt"
>the portrait. In raising vitalism though, Deleuze does address the issue of
>Foucault's aestheticism, which in my earlier mail I suggested was related to
>an exploration of performativity or reflexivity. What I mean by these terms
>does entail a space of freedom, but not such a clearly defined notion as
>"free-will", with all its historical philosophical baggage. A precarious
>space of freedom more suited for the experimental and experiential values of
>current thought than for an exhaustive account of how it is possible.
>Exhaustive accounts which rely on the relatively fixed descriptions of free
>agency such as the traditional notion of free will seem inadequate. It seems
>that this space of freedom remains largely unaccountable, its ultimate
>source or condition of possibility unnameable. Any attempt to fully account
>for it would in effect negate its very possibility if it weren't for the
>fact that freedom constantly evades being rendered accountable. A part of
>this experimentation/experience was the nominalist deployments in Foucault's
>books, the invention of vocabulary, neologisms, transposing familiar
>concepts into unfamiliar contexts, the difficult pleasures of style, etc.
>This is why it seems to me that quibbling over the finer points of
>Foucault's usage of concepts seems such an ambivalent exercise and misses
>the point if it does not pay attention to why Foucault deploys words in the
>way he does. This "dimension" of Foucault's work, only articulated late in
>his life, and perhaps within the context of a knowledge of how little life
>there was to live, was arguably a feature of everything he said and did
>before. Not so much a confession as a parting gesture perhaps, putting a
>final spin on what had already passed. But how is this political? Any takers?
>
>cheers
>
>sebastian
>
>
Foucault's politics. There is much I want to consider before responding
directly. I would like to add, however, a dimension to "transcribing"
Foucault (if by that, I might imply a way of reading) that has less to do
with reading Foucault as an "author" with an intellectual biography and more
to do with reading him as an "interlocutor" in a conceptually and
historically variable field. For instance, when Foucault developed his
concept of "governmentality" he was working with political and social
theorists who were attempting to develop analyses of political power that
did not hold the "state" central to their analyses. One gets a different
reading of Foucault (such as switches in concepts and emphases) in his
lectures on governmentality from, say, his joint interview with Deleuze on
the relation of intellectuals and power. I do not wish my comments to be
taken as a disagreement with Sebastian, but only as an initial foray to
suggest that Foucault's politics were "local"--including the specific
disciplinary and intellectual intersections at which he was situated.
Lisa
At 01:43 PM 1/4/00 +1100, you wrote:
>I am glad that my earlier mail provoked some pre-christmas debate although I
>was not altogether satisfied with the partisan approach that emerged as a
>battle of scholarly camps. Beyond stating a critical remark regarding John's
>paper though, what I wanted to get to was the perspectives that have been
>taken with regard to a significant transition in Foucault's work. John does
>point toward some important difficulties encountered in attempts to extract
>a workable and sustainable oppositional political practice from Foucault's
>analytics of power but avoids dealing with the transition I'm talking about
>here: schematically, from the analytic of power which achieves a "highpoint"
>in D & P and HS vol 1, through the modifications which followed, the
>emergence of governmentality through to an ethics as aesthetics of
>existence. It seems to me that this transition has been a difficult one for
>those who were or are enamoured of Foucault's 1970s experiment for a
>post-Marxist theoretical/practical approach to radical political
>thinking/action. What sense can be made of Foucault's late emphasis on
>ethics from the perspective of his analyses of power and vice versa? I do
>not mean to suggest a rigid demarcation between periods here, merely a shift
>in the main focus of attention for a thinker that always claimed to be
>diagnosing the present. With this transition in mind and therefore without
>privileging his stated objectives during the 1970s, in what sense is
>Foucault's work as a whole political, what kind of politics is it, and what
>kind of politics does it make possible or discourage?
>
>Deleuze's difficult book on Foucault, with its combination of erudition and
>phantasmagoria, does seem to me to be more about Deleuze's own philosophy
>rather than Foucault's, even though Foucault does sometimes come to "haunt"
>the portrait. In raising vitalism though, Deleuze does address the issue of
>Foucault's aestheticism, which in my earlier mail I suggested was related to
>an exploration of performativity or reflexivity. What I mean by these terms
>does entail a space of freedom, but not such a clearly defined notion as
>"free-will", with all its historical philosophical baggage. A precarious
>space of freedom more suited for the experimental and experiential values of
>current thought than for an exhaustive account of how it is possible.
>Exhaustive accounts which rely on the relatively fixed descriptions of free
>agency such as the traditional notion of free will seem inadequate. It seems
>that this space of freedom remains largely unaccountable, its ultimate
>source or condition of possibility unnameable. Any attempt to fully account
>for it would in effect negate its very possibility if it weren't for the
>fact that freedom constantly evades being rendered accountable. A part of
>this experimentation/experience was the nominalist deployments in Foucault's
>books, the invention of vocabulary, neologisms, transposing familiar
>concepts into unfamiliar contexts, the difficult pleasures of style, etc.
>This is why it seems to me that quibbling over the finer points of
>Foucault's usage of concepts seems such an ambivalent exercise and misses
>the point if it does not pay attention to why Foucault deploys words in the
>way he does. This "dimension" of Foucault's work, only articulated late in
>his life, and perhaps within the context of a knowledge of how little life
>there was to live, was arguably a feature of everything he said and did
>before. Not so much a confession as a parting gesture perhaps, putting a
>final spin on what had already passed. But how is this political? Any takers?
>
>cheers
>
>sebastian
>
>