Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault protesting as part of the Group d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), 1971.
Élection, piège à con (Elections, a trap for idiots).
–Protesters slogan, Paris May, 1968
It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair…
–Gilles Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power, 1971
When one talks so much about power, it’s because it can no longer be found anywhere.
–Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, 1977
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Democrats, ranging from deep blue to reddish purple in keeping with their various districts, will take back the House of Representatives this November.
If that happens, we may start to have a new ball game, one in which the US Congress starts to do its job as a co-equal branch, and the rogue President will find it much harder to cut through the norms of democratic governance like a hot knife through butter.
Needless to say, should this scenario play out, we should not expect this POTUS to behave like a normal President whose party just lost the midterm election. There will be no move to the center, toward compromise, no outreach to the loyal opposition. POTUS will just raise the stakes and begin maneuvering for a 2020 blowout—since he never stopped blaming Hilary Clinton, Obama, and the Democrats, and never will, nothing would suit him more. The only kind of governance he knows is a perpetual political knife fight.
Philosopher types aren’t generally the “go to guys and gals” for action plans and related tactics.
I don’t see it happening, however. It’s July, and the election is in November. This week, an African-American woman hit a 92-year-old man in the face with a brick and told him to go back to Mexico. A worker interviewed on the production line at Harley Davidson said that despite everything, he’s still for Trump.
As unbelievable as it sounds to most liberals and progressives, nothing has really happened to change any hearts and minds, not even separated children in cages. The economy is growing, unemployment is down, taxes have been cut, and a new (illiberal) political reality, having been ordered up, is duly being delivered. Putting aside (if you can manage it) his staggering emoluments problems, likely collusion with a foreign power and obstruction of justice, and now human rights violations, Trump has trampled moral, cultural, and political norms rather than having broken any laws.
Two weekends ago, I attended what turned out to be a rather dispiriting protest rally under the banner “Families Belong Together.” It was dispiriting because, if you think about it, families can belong together just fine in internment camps. It was dispiriting because, despite the real anger and pain, it felt so tepid. They told us to march only on the sidewalk, staying out of the road, and we did. When we arrived at the destination point, there were bongos and chants, but nobody asked for my contact information, and nobody sought to “organize me.” There were not apparent next steps, or calls to action, at least as far as I could tell. To be honest, I was also somewhat relieved (I dispirited myself, you see). After standing around for a while, we went out for coffee and pastry, and then back to our blue state lives.
As I have been reflecting on the liberal response to the plight of separated immigrant and asylum seeker families on our southern border in the days since, I have found myself going on a kind of an imaginative journey. In this thought experiment, I project myself four months into the future, and ask myself, “what do we do now that we’ve lost the midterms?”
What is to Be Done
The 2017 women’s marches were very encouraging. The scale of them. Their inclusiveness. The sense in which a large number of middle class white women, in solidarity with women of color and poor women and LGBT, had a clear-eyed sense of the assaults upon human decency that were to come, and were determined, individually and in organized coalition, to serve as a general American bulwark against indecency that would be very hard to shut down.
Perhaps the strongest imperative coming out of these marches was the activation of women to run for public office at all levels. If it turns out that there is a blue wave, we can point to the seeds planted at these marches. It is also true that lots of people got organized (myself included) to make regular phone calls to elected officials, give money to advocacy groups like the ACLU, and volunteering for House races.
Despite these very positive developments, it remains that case that the new found liberal anti-Trump activism is generally of the variety that Malcolm Gladwell has called “weak-tie activism.” As such, it is more akin to the social media sort than activism of the strong-tie variety, the “sit-in-and-get-arrested” kind.
There are a host of contributing factors for this, not the least of which is the deeply ingrained liberal democratic expectation that if either party “goes too far too fast” they will surely pay for it at the ballot box. As a result, despite having a very committed and deep well of anti-Trump passion, mobilization has largely focused on “taking back the House.”
But what if we don’t? Or what if we do, and it still doesn’t much matter? What if shutting down the most frightening displays of authoritarian tendency at home and abroad, in order to dry our liberal tears, does little to change the fact that the real problem is ultimately the corporate-owned Congress? Will taking back the House do anything, as the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul has recently written, “…to thwart the expansion of imperial wars, the bloated military budget, the dictates of global capitalism, the bailing out of Wall Street…and an electoral process that has cemented into place a system of legalized bribery?”
When Foucault talks about power/knowledge in this way, we deviants were all ears.
This post is not about how one party was successful in shutting down its economic populist wing in 2016, while the other didn’t even try, having spent many years crafting an ideology of complementarity between global neoliberal capitalism and resentful working-class identity politics.
Instead, in the three installments of this post, I’m trying to write about my personal coming-to-grips with the hard work that will be needed, likely over a long period of time, to organize grassroots center-left coalitions in this country that can win and hold power.
Livin’ the Vita Activa
Philosopher types aren’t generally the “go to guys and gals” for action plans and related tactics. You see, given the slightest opening, we start to think about action per se, and in doing so, if we’re not careful, we turn it from a practical, “doing thing,” to a theoretical “thinking thing.” Thinking about acting is pretty tricky. The medium is the message.
This is the primary reason, by the way, that lots of philosophy departments largely skip over the Renaissance when teaching the history of philosophy. Most of the good stuff is about theorizing virtù (action) in relation to fortuna (fate/luck/chance) and extolling the vita activa (the active life). It’s easy for the philosopher to want to skip it because, strictly speaking, there are “no ideas here.” These are not the droids you’re looking for. Move along!
This is not to say that philosophers are not sometimes interested in power. In antiquity, following Aristotle, there are reflections on entelékheia or the idea of natural potency; and analogies to the way that living things go from potency to actuality are central to the metaphysical tradition throughout the Middle Ages that justified the legitimate order of things.
The reflections on auctoritas and imperium (authority and command) in Roman antiquity are relevant even up to modern times, where we find Machiavelli, straddling these traditions from his perch in the late Renaissance and setting the pattern for the moderns. It broadens out further with modern political philosophy’s urgent ruminations on natural law and popular sovereignty from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau.
With the rise of social science in the 19th century, it all goes back through the washing machine, reaching a kind of apotheosis in Max Weber’s sociological reflections on domination and legitimacy. There is also Nietzsche. After that, there is the work of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and there is the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. In the immediate post-war era, there are the writings of the Frankfurt School.
Foucault & Power/Knowledge
For my part, I came of age in the 80s and 90s when we were all mesmerized by Foucault and the post-structuralist-postmodernist account of power/knowledge that emerged in Paris after the events of May 1968. The immediate attraction to Foucault arose out of the imperatives of the identity politics of that era. Foucault’s critique of the role of the social sciences in the development of institutional knowledge structures useful for the discipline and control of gay and lesbian bodies for example, was highly appealing to young social activists. Where Foucault talks about power/knowledge in this way, we deviants were all ears.
These days, and with some exceptions (ACT-UP for example) I tend to think of this 90s style of politics (identity politics backed by Foucauldian power/knowledge) as mostly a subversive aesthetic stance rather than a recipe for political radicalism in the true sense. I have the notion that this style of politics, with its underlying assumptions about power, may still be floating around out there. So before moving to the discussion of political power I actually have in mind, I’d like to start off by breaking through the thin sugar crust on this old crème brûlée found near the back of the fridge.
Nietzsche was an uncommonly good psychologist, but as a social theorist, not so much.
The first thing I want to say about Foucault here is that his milieu and his writings are a damn good read, an enticing stewpot of melded flavors including critical theory, structuralist linguistics and social theory, and Nietzschean historiography among other things.
This fact alone should be the first tip off that while Foucault has quite a lot to say about power, he is rightly locatable with in the space of what might be termed cultural criticism rather than that of political theory. This isn’t to say that there is something inherently wrong with an “ideology critique” that places the cherished notions of the Enlightenment that undergird and justify our commitment to a modern democratic politics also in the crosshairs.
The Frankfurt School, for example, did just that via their work on the so called “dialectic of enlightenment.” In the years immediately following WWII, they investigated the persistent interplay of rationality and irrationality in modern society and culture, and of the effects of bureaucratization and the culture industry on the modern psyche, and other similar things.
The Enlightenment told us that knowledge is power, and that human rationality, as productive of true knowledge, is the locus of sovereignty. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the imperative of critique was to explain how the political, social, and cultural project of the European Enlightenment could end up in National Socialism.
Foucault’s own version of the dialectic of enlightenment, by contrast, emerges in the late 60s and focuses not upon the twin midcentury catastrophes of fascist authoritarianism and Marxist totalitarianism, but rather on the way in which the liberal administrative/welfare state increasingly relies upon the deployment of social scientific knowledge across various institutions – ideas about mental health, normal and deviant sexuality, criminal rehabilitation, etc.–as cultural technologies for mass social control. As Michael Walzer has written, Foucault “focuses…on what he thinks of as the micro-fascism of everyday life and has little to say about authoritarian or totalitarian politics.”
What’s significantly different here, however, is the way in which, following Nietzsche, Foucault completely reverses knowledge/power in favor of power/knowledge, offering what amounts to a total critique of the enlightenment. As Axel Honneth has written, “…Foucault proposes…a model that attempts to translate Nietzsche’s theory of power into the framework of an [action-theoretic] account of society.” Wherever there is a will-to-knowledge, Nietzsche insists, there is also always will-to-power. Putting aside the question of what Nietzsche really means by will-to-power (I wrote a master’s thesis on it) the implication for Foucault is that the production and deployment of knowledge is always ultimately about what he calls “relations of power.”
Foucault’s Concept of Power
Foucault’s concept of power includes the insistence that power is both diffuse and diverse. In his later work on the history of sexuality, for example, he writes that “power comes from below…there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations…manifold relationships of force take shape and come into play in families, the machinery of production, groups, institutions, etc.”
As Michael Walzer has written in The Politics of Michel Foucault, “This is perhaps why Foucault does not want to call himself a political theorist. When the king’s head was cut off, the theory of the state died too; it was replaced by sociology, psychology, criminology, and so on.” Since for Foucault the political world has no effective center, Walzer continues, “there is no general will, and no effective coalition of interest groups; sovereignty works only when there is a physical sovereign.” In contemporary societies, therefore, power is dispersed. But it is not dispersed to “…citizens who argue and vote, and so determine the politics of the central government, despite the fact that the whole point of modern political theory…has been to account for these things.”
Where classical political science follows the model of a legal contract and sees the possession of power as a transference of rights, and Marxists, following a statist model, understand power and its possession as an acquisition of the state apparatus, Foucault is at a distance from both.
Power is not contractually regulated nor a forcibly acquired possession that justifies or authorizes a politically sovereign state in the exercise of the exclusive warrant for the use of force. Since he does not believe in a sovereign subject, he does not recognize the notion of ceding some portion of sovereign rights to the state. It is for this reason that “elections, parties, and assemblies are entirely absent from Foucault’s discourse on power,” Walzer writes. And since he does not believe in either the sovereign state or the ruling class, he therefore also does not believe in the seizure of the state, or the replacement of the class.
As Foucault says in Truth and Power: “I don’t want to say that the state isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state…the state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth.”
Foucault-Inspired Politics
It is not incorrect to point out that there are “mechanisms of disciplinary coercion which operate beyond the effective reach of the law,” to again borrow a phrase from Walzer, and that there are modes of subjection other than those created through political legitimation, which make those political subjects the bearers of rights.
The problem comes in when we realize how extreme a position he has taken from the standpoint of an action-theoretic model of society. Nietzsche was an uncommonly good psychologist, but as a social theorist, not so much. If it is the case that wherever we see discourses that constitute knowledge and related social practices, we also see, primarily and for the most part relations of power that are in need of unmasking, then we also end up with a significantly impoverished view of language and social action. Jürgen Habermas goes after this aspect with great effectiveness in his writings on Foucault. He takes exception to the idea that in discourses that specialize in truth, “validity claims consist only in the power-effects they have.”
Foucault’s de facto reduction of discourse and knowledge to diffuse relations of power (and the concomitant lack of appreciation of dimensions of language such as meaning, validity, and evaluation) is ultimately the basis of his anti-humanism and is the site of his total critique of Enlightenment, the anti-modernism that separates him from the Frankfurt School. Where there are only relations of power, as Foucault repeatedly claims, sovereignty becomes quite literally anarchic.
What sort of politics are Foucauldian politics, then?
What does one hope for where there has been the embrace of a total critique of enlightenment, where, as Nancy Fraser writes, “one is not content to criticize the contradiction between modern norm and modern reality, but rather continues on to criticize the constitutive norms of modernity, rejecting the very commitments to truth, rationality, and freedom that alone make critique possible?”
Where liberal humanism is seen as only just discipline concealed, it becomes difficult if not impossible to appreciate that while conventional truths of morality, law, medicine, and psychiatry are implicated in the exercise of power, it is also the case that these same truths, in a liberal democratic state, regulate the exercise of power. As Walzer writes, “they set limits on what can rightly be done. The truths of jurisprudence and penology, for example, distinguish punishment from preventive detention. And the truths of psychiatry distinguish the internment of madmen from the internment of political dissidents. Authoritarian and totalitarian states, by contrast, override those limits, turning education into indoctrination, punishment into repression, asylums into prisons, and prisons into concentration camps.”
What sort of politics are Foucauldian politics then? There would appear to be some sense that the disciplinary society is bad, and that exposing the historical rise of these practices provides an impetus for possible change; on what basis does Foucault account for his counterfactual normative commitments? Despite his anarcho-Nietzschean theory of power, there seems to be some sort of a vaguely Marxist emancipatory project as what Walzer calls a “distant underpinning.”
Repeatedly, when asked what it is that he is actually for, the answers he gives register approval of the widening of the field of our cultural possibilities in order to thereby enhance the terrain for potential political change. In so doing, he identifies himself, through his brand of culture criticism, as a first and foremost a champion of the faculty of productive imagination—Foucault gives what is essentially an aesthetic answer to a political question.
We always hear a lot about May, 1968. Less so about June.
It is also important to note that in eschewing the big questions, Foucault is not opting primarily for a stubbornly local politics. Despite his keen interest in the prison system, and his activism around it, it appears to be the case that Foucault was largely uninterested in specific programs of prison reform.
Foucault is unprepared (either unwilling or unable) to offer up a vision or blueprint for something better, because the assessment of better and worse would require him to step out of the cagey aestheticism he offers up whenever the question of the basis of his normative commitments arises.
I have more or less said what I wanted to say about Foucault. Think of it as a kind of an exorcism, something I needed to get off my chest before taking of the challenge of thinking about organizing for power in our present circumstances. It is my conviction that the style of politics Foucault’s thinking enacts is actually dependent upon the very liberal welfare state that it purports to critique. The dependency stems from the tacit assumption of this sort of state’s unquestioned persistence–because its only on this basis that the substitution of cultural criticism for the theory and practice of politics can really be seen to make any sense.
Foucauldian critique aspires to unmask the soft power at work in the culture and institutions of the administrative welfare state, the manner in which these discourses reflect the production of knowledge about modern subjects that shape who we are as part of an order of domination. There is certainly nothing wrong with this. But to the extent that it regards itself as free to do so on the basis of a total critique, it assumes that the liberal democratic order is not in any particular need of defending. This failure to recognize the looming shadow of out and out illiberalism is what gives Jürgen Habermas, Michael Walzer, and even Nancy Fraser, so many kittens.
As early as 1972, Foucault and Gilles Deleuze start to describe their theoretical work in interviews as the creation of a sort of a tool box. They do this, in part, to get around the fact that their critical work, while highly effective, tends to lack a desired level of theoretical coherence and completeness. What is striking is not that they don’t have all the answers, since nobody does. No, the striking and even scandalous thing is how little they struggle with it, saying instead that theory should not aspire to be totalizing.
Rather than having recourse to truth as a touchstone (how well the theory reflects reality) Foucault and Deleuze offer instead another standard for judging the relevance of their work. As a set of regional or local theoretical accomplishments, the box of tools should be judged functionally, based on the extent to which it is useful for real people engaged in struggle (not just the theoretician). If it is not, Deleuze adds, the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate.” We don’t revise a theory, he says, “…but rather have no choice but to make others.”
At the present juncture, and based upon these criteria, I would argue that it’s time to do just that.
Epilogue: June, 1968
We always hear a lot about May, 1968. Less so about June. After the extraordinary month of civil unrest, including student occupation of the universities and wildcat general strikes that effectively brought France to a halt, President Charles De Gaulle actually fled the country to Germany as police battled protesters in the Latin Quarter. Upon his return, De Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly, calling for June elections. In June, the protests evaporated, and workers went back to their jobs across France. Despite the participation of up to 11 million people, when elections were finally held, the Gaullist party emerged even stronger than before. Reflecting later on the significance of May, 1968 for French society, one of the student leaders Alain Geismar remarked that the movement had succeeded–but “as a social revolution, not as a political one.”
Up Next: Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals Revisited
In the second installment of this post about overcoming center-left timidity and organizing for power, I turn next to a consideration of Saul Alinsky’s famous 1971 work “Rules for Radicals” in order to reflect on what more practically oriented thinkers, the men and women of the vita activa, have to say about political power tactics.
