French Intellectuals and Revolutionary Sentiments - Why Foucault Works
Sartre: A Biography (1986)
Ronald Hayman
Barthes for Beginners (1997)
Philip Thody and Piero
1968: Marching in the Streets (1998)
Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins
How To Read Foucault (2007)
Johanna Oksala
I will get Hayman's 1986 biography of Sartre out of the way quickly. It has few real insights
into the man or his thoughts (except perhaps giving us some indication of his curious turn towards support for Zionism in later life) but it does have the virtue of laying out
the basic facts of his life clearly. One for the library as
reference text but not otherwise particularly recommended. We will lay Sartre aside for the moment.
Barthes for Beginners is equally unsatisfactory. It should have got three stars as a bog
standard basic introduction to the semiologist, Roland Barthes, but the
graphics really do let it down. Clear graphics are an essential element in
this series which sells itself on using imagery to help get across
complex ideas. The fact that Barthes was a philosopher not only
of language but of image makes this weakness doubly embarrassing. And
why is it so poor - other than looking as if it were little more than
scribbles on a page? Because of a strange obsession with penises and sex
that the artist, Ann Course, seems to have.
There is a natural point where sex comes into play but the interest here seems unnecessarily obsessive - not only in the insistence on five pages devoted to illustrating De Sade's range of perversity and the images of the homosexual Barthes buggering people but the repeated motif of willies on nearly every page in the first half, not a few of them clearly erect if clothed. Fine, nothing wrong with willies. Erect willies are a perfectly normal part of the human condition but the pictures and a strange leitmotif of a robot like creature with eyes on stalks add absolutely nothing to the argument.
The textual argument itself is fine as far as it goes (it is basically an hour's lecture) - although clearly Philip Thody isn't entirely convinced by his own subject (nor perhaps should he be) which becomes fairly clear by the end. The truth is that Barthes is a bit of a one-trick pony, fashionable in his day, but a foot note in intellectual history. Perhaps he will always have to be read by anyone curious about the shenanigans of the post-war French Left Bank and, yes, he adds his bit to the general sense of cynical libertarianism that was part of the culture of the Generation of 68 but, no, he does not really say anything that others have not said better or certainly more clearly.
The flaw in post-structuralism is the obvious one - the great, 'so what?' that it inspires. We are living in a world of codes and significations - so what? Humans need narrative and codes and significations to create narrative - so what? Do the post-structuralists posit truth? or just expose lies?
And then it hits you - these people are just Gallic moralists with their visceral and unfair hatred of the 'bourgeois' and often silly (and soon dropped) adulation of the masses with whom they have no serious contact. They invent both categories. There is certainly no consideration of the human right to be self-deluded as a means of psychic survival in a dangerous world nor of the fact that the deluded and the aware are to be found in all walks of life regardless of their relationship to the means of production. Willing suspension of belief or, indeed, of disbelief is how we get along - observe the normality of political hysteria over recent years.
And as for Barthes' 'obsession' - that we can be artistically moved by the non-existent. Again, so what? Diana's funeral is a great 'movement' of this sort and some lost themselves in the nonsense (which is their right) while others saw through it and chose to stay silent so as not to hurt the feelings of the insanely sentimental. But we did not need post-structuralists to tell us what was going on? We knew it or we chose subconsciously not to know it - that is what being human is all about.
These apparent 'knowers' are not morally superior to the apparently deluded - just different and with a rightful caution about what happens when the deluded capture the State and other forms of power over the undeluded. Fortunately one set of deluded usually dislikes the pretensions of the others enough to enable some degree of protection for those who can see the bones beneath the skin of society and culture. The more sets of deluded the better because their squabbles leave space for the undeluded. The danger point is when Constantine cuts a deal with the Church ...
In the end, we are left with another case of intellectuals discovering the bleeding obvious and then packaging it for a career. The squabbles between intellectuals in France in the 1970s about Racine seem to be mere repetitions in style (though not in content) of those between Catholics and Jansenists and not much better than the fisticuffs of monks in Jerusalem - futile grandstanding between egos and tribes. So much intellectual effort to so little purpose ...
There is a natural point where sex comes into play but the interest here seems unnecessarily obsessive - not only in the insistence on five pages devoted to illustrating De Sade's range of perversity and the images of the homosexual Barthes buggering people but the repeated motif of willies on nearly every page in the first half, not a few of them clearly erect if clothed. Fine, nothing wrong with willies. Erect willies are a perfectly normal part of the human condition but the pictures and a strange leitmotif of a robot like creature with eyes on stalks add absolutely nothing to the argument.
The textual argument itself is fine as far as it goes (it is basically an hour's lecture) - although clearly Philip Thody isn't entirely convinced by his own subject (nor perhaps should he be) which becomes fairly clear by the end. The truth is that Barthes is a bit of a one-trick pony, fashionable in his day, but a foot note in intellectual history. Perhaps he will always have to be read by anyone curious about the shenanigans of the post-war French Left Bank and, yes, he adds his bit to the general sense of cynical libertarianism that was part of the culture of the Generation of 68 but, no, he does not really say anything that others have not said better or certainly more clearly.
The flaw in post-structuralism is the obvious one - the great, 'so what?' that it inspires. We are living in a world of codes and significations - so what? Humans need narrative and codes and significations to create narrative - so what? Do the post-structuralists posit truth? or just expose lies?
And then it hits you - these people are just Gallic moralists with their visceral and unfair hatred of the 'bourgeois' and often silly (and soon dropped) adulation of the masses with whom they have no serious contact. They invent both categories. There is certainly no consideration of the human right to be self-deluded as a means of psychic survival in a dangerous world nor of the fact that the deluded and the aware are to be found in all walks of life regardless of their relationship to the means of production. Willing suspension of belief or, indeed, of disbelief is how we get along - observe the normality of political hysteria over recent years.
And as for Barthes' 'obsession' - that we can be artistically moved by the non-existent. Again, so what? Diana's funeral is a great 'movement' of this sort and some lost themselves in the nonsense (which is their right) while others saw through it and chose to stay silent so as not to hurt the feelings of the insanely sentimental. But we did not need post-structuralists to tell us what was going on? We knew it or we chose subconsciously not to know it - that is what being human is all about.
These apparent 'knowers' are not morally superior to the apparently deluded - just different and with a rightful caution about what happens when the deluded capture the State and other forms of power over the undeluded. Fortunately one set of deluded usually dislikes the pretensions of the others enough to enable some degree of protection for those who can see the bones beneath the skin of society and culture. The more sets of deluded the better because their squabbles leave space for the undeluded. The danger point is when Constantine cuts a deal with the Church ...
In the end, we are left with another case of intellectuals discovering the bleeding obvious and then packaging it for a career. The squabbles between intellectuals in France in the 1970s about Racine seem to be mere repetitions in style (though not in content) of those between Catholics and Jansenists and not much better than the fisticuffs of monks in Jerusalem - futile grandstanding between egos and tribes. So much intellectual effort to so little purpose ...
As for Oksala's introduction to Foucault. yes, it is a very good basic guide to the
French thinker. No, it does not easily escape the obscurities inherent
in the subject - but it is well worth persevering with. Friends know
that I have a fairly low opinion of attempts to
intellectualise existence into mere words. The post-structuralists are self-evidently a particular bete noire of mine (see above) .But a major exception must be Michel
Foucault who has made two major contributions to what really matters in
life - that is, not what we think the world is but how we think the
world through so that we can live in it better.
The first contribution was to seek to uncover the 'archaeology' (his term) and 'genealogy' (the term is derived from Nietzche) of institutions, social norms and techniques of control in society so that we are enabled critically to question why it is that things are as they are. This is not to be assumed to be (as a generation of Marxists or existentialists might have seen matters) the means to a necessary commitment to liberation or revolution in a utopian way. On the contrary, understanding how things have come to be is a way of coming to terms with facts on the ground as much as it is of changing them. The point of this is to be found in the second contribution.
Each person (in a sense this is a development of the existentialist mentality without accepting the existentialists' belief in total freedom of choice) is a potential creative process, a work of art in itself. Each of us is being made in a relationship between materials to hand (society) and our will to create ourselves. Questioning of social norms may mean a blank canvas but the canvas is there nevertheless, yet, without the canvas or other materials, even found materials, we can produce nothing. Both canvas (society) and our creative will are jointly necessary to 'become'.
The first contribution was to seek to uncover the 'archaeology' (his term) and 'genealogy' (the term is derived from Nietzche) of institutions, social norms and techniques of control in society so that we are enabled critically to question why it is that things are as they are. This is not to be assumed to be (as a generation of Marxists or existentialists might have seen matters) the means to a necessary commitment to liberation or revolution in a utopian way. On the contrary, understanding how things have come to be is a way of coming to terms with facts on the ground as much as it is of changing them. The point of this is to be found in the second contribution.
Each person (in a sense this is a development of the existentialist mentality without accepting the existentialists' belief in total freedom of choice) is a potential creative process, a work of art in itself. Each of us is being made in a relationship between materials to hand (society) and our will to create ourselves. Questioning of social norms may mean a blank canvas but the canvas is there nevertheless, yet, without the canvas or other materials, even found materials, we can produce nothing. Both canvas (society) and our creative will are jointly necessary to 'become'.
Our personal art is
to 'will' matters to a creative resolution that is all the better if the process has investigated and critiqued its own archaeology, its own origins, and is fully aware of its material (and social and personally chosen moral) constraints. Of course, we are in a curious period where conceptualism and commercialism have tried to detach 'art' from canvas (or stone or film stock or whatever) but this has just displaced apparent material constraints with the constraints of social norms and belief systems. Conceptual artists and merely thinking 'intellectual' subjects are no more free than Caravaggio or Leonardo (less so in my view but that is another debate). We really cannot escape our condition, we can merely work the materials, physical and social, to our advantage in order to become free. If we ignore them, they are in 'occult' command of us just as contemporary art is distressingly so much market-driven flotsam and jetsam.
Foucault is, in fact, offering us some startling stuff. Rationalist critics consider Foucault to
be offering us a narcissistic model of human development in which
self-regarding humans a-socially bend social norms to their own ends
wherever and as they can for what is implied to be pure
self-gratification.
In fact, the critics have missed the point. The narcissism lies in the critics' own belief that they can and should bend the world to norms that they refuse to question. This is largely because the critics have allowed themselves to become wholly identified with these norms (even the norms of rebellion and resistance to norms, let alone the theories of pure concept) - to the extent of ceasing to have any independent existence of their own. They have become their world, over-socialised into essentialism. Their narcissism lies in their identification with their world, a social ego vaster than that of any individual who is concerned with their own creative development in relation to significant others. The conceptual artist's apparent creative development (for example) is not that of the rounded individual but that of the thing-thinker in a market system and an instituionalised self-referential art world.
The paradox of Foucault's position is that a critical detachment from norms does not mean a war against norms but only the creation of the possibility that norms might not be taken as dogma, that they are norms that can create a framework for a liberation. This liberation comes from a personal assessment of the relationship between the creative individual and inherited structures of power that includes the power to define and so manage what power actually is. Best personal choices may, indeed, once many individuals engage in their own creation, be truly revolutionary in changing social norms - but not through a programme of work, only through a programme of being and becoming.
There is very much more to Foucault than this. As usual, I have elided his position with my own theft of his work - which I suspect would be precisely what he would consider appropriate. The wider interest in him is less in regard to his potential influence on personal liberation than on his sustained onslaught on inherited modes of defining persons into convenient essences, as well as his analysis of the social structuring of power in which the 'victim' is as complicit as the 'oppressor'.
In fact, the critics have missed the point. The narcissism lies in the critics' own belief that they can and should bend the world to norms that they refuse to question. This is largely because the critics have allowed themselves to become wholly identified with these norms (even the norms of rebellion and resistance to norms, let alone the theories of pure concept) - to the extent of ceasing to have any independent existence of their own. They have become their world, over-socialised into essentialism. Their narcissism lies in their identification with their world, a social ego vaster than that of any individual who is concerned with their own creative development in relation to significant others. The conceptual artist's apparent creative development (for example) is not that of the rounded individual but that of the thing-thinker in a market system and an instituionalised self-referential art world.
The paradox of Foucault's position is that a critical detachment from norms does not mean a war against norms but only the creation of the possibility that norms might not be taken as dogma, that they are norms that can create a framework for a liberation. This liberation comes from a personal assessment of the relationship between the creative individual and inherited structures of power that includes the power to define and so manage what power actually is. Best personal choices may, indeed, once many individuals engage in their own creation, be truly revolutionary in changing social norms - but not through a programme of work, only through a programme of being and becoming.
There is very much more to Foucault than this. As usual, I have elided his position with my own theft of his work - which I suspect would be precisely what he would consider appropriate. The wider interest in him is less in regard to his potential influence on personal liberation than on his sustained onslaught on inherited modes of defining persons into convenient essences, as well as his analysis of the social structuring of power in which the 'victim' is as complicit as the 'oppressor'.
The
implication of his work is that 'norms' are such that any 'formal'
revolution will merely shift the persons doing the oppression and the
victims into new roles of equal 'normality', unless both victim and
oppressor come to see their 'normal' practices as inappropriate,
inutile, uneconomic and/or socially unnecessary. In short, any real
change must be change in consciousness about power rather than in actual
physical control of systems of power. We are certainly far from that in our current culture. It is, of course, a variation on Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic.
The area of dispute I would have with him is the same as I would have with other post-structuralists. The analysis of language as creating persons so that persons and society are (to oversimplify) little more than language and codes is said to mean that there is no such thing as 'man'. To an extent, this is true - there is no quintessence of man nor indeed of anything else. All definitions are fluid so that nothing is fixed over time. But this has always led me to the 'great so what?' because the fluidity and the ability to participate in that fluidity, by manipulating and appropriating language and codes, restores 'personality' to existence by the back door.
If it is only through the manipulation of terms to define power relations, a fluid but very real sense of Man (meant non-sexistly) engaged in its own creation through the creative force of each and every one of its components, emerges. This more organic vision may seem dangerously essentialist but this would be a mistake.
The fluid self-definitional process of 'men operating within language systems' creates no point of fixed external essence. It is not derived from anything more than the accumulated transactions between creative individuals yet this provides the basis for the acceptance and destruction of the social norms that at any point in time serve to create a social definition of Man (meaning the accumulated and present but not future culture in which individual men exist). It is not that Society exists but that Man exists as social norms (which are more than just language but are relations, often unspoken, between persons) and that there is a positive dynamic potential relationship between this fact and the individual's ability to realise that resistance is possible in thought if not in deed. This can create a new but constantly contingent new Man out of the thinking, saying and doing of individual men and women. You might call this a form of anti-woke 'neo-woke' because you are awakened even to the absurdity of the creation of new norms explicit in woke thinking. It is, in this regard, a constant process which cannot ever be 'fixed'.
The area of dispute I would have with him is the same as I would have with other post-structuralists. The analysis of language as creating persons so that persons and society are (to oversimplify) little more than language and codes is said to mean that there is no such thing as 'man'. To an extent, this is true - there is no quintessence of man nor indeed of anything else. All definitions are fluid so that nothing is fixed over time. But this has always led me to the 'great so what?' because the fluidity and the ability to participate in that fluidity, by manipulating and appropriating language and codes, restores 'personality' to existence by the back door.
If it is only through the manipulation of terms to define power relations, a fluid but very real sense of Man (meant non-sexistly) engaged in its own creation through the creative force of each and every one of its components, emerges. This more organic vision may seem dangerously essentialist but this would be a mistake.
The fluid self-definitional process of 'men operating within language systems' creates no point of fixed external essence. It is not derived from anything more than the accumulated transactions between creative individuals yet this provides the basis for the acceptance and destruction of the social norms that at any point in time serve to create a social definition of Man (meaning the accumulated and present but not future culture in which individual men exist). It is not that Society exists but that Man exists as social norms (which are more than just language but are relations, often unspoken, between persons) and that there is a positive dynamic potential relationship between this fact and the individual's ability to realise that resistance is possible in thought if not in deed. This can create a new but constantly contingent new Man out of the thinking, saying and doing of individual men and women. You might call this a form of anti-woke 'neo-woke' because you are awakened even to the absurdity of the creation of new norms explicit in woke thinking. It is, in this regard, a constant process which cannot ever be 'fixed'.
Moving back to Foucault's contribution, his major
insight has transformed political thinking amongst critics
of the existing system that by-passes a professional political
class that is well embedded within the current system of power relations
- that is, the one that all those involved in a power relations are complicit
with it even as victims of it. This is held (rightly) as a powerful block to the
acceptability of Marxist socialism as a simple theory of liberation.
Similarly, the apparent liberation within identity politics (which emerged in the 1970s and is now coming to its apogee but also to its
probable end simply because it is socially dysfunctional) is more illusion than reality.
Identity politics merely disrupts the system to the point of bringing it to the brink of collapse but not because the identity politicians intend it to be brought to the brink (as in the accidental 'toxic' effects of the use of political pressure on banks to lend cash to African-Americans who could never have paid back the loans and which triggered the first serious 2008 crisis of late liberal capitalism), but because the identity politicians have worked within a system in which political pressure and lawfare have been given primacy despite being merely factors within a total system based on the free market management of money and historically embedded power. The rest is history and, indeed, may make the current political class history in the long run.
Foucault's potential for critique is neither of the Right nor of the Left in itself but is a tool for either or neither or something new. For those concerned with true redistribution of power and resources, it will help raise the question of how a black or female President can, in any real sense, make any fundamental difference to the liberation of anyone so long as the system and social norms remain as they are. To identify oneself primarily as gay, black, woman or indigenous white is to abnegate one's duty to creative personal development as a human. The embarrassing hunger of the DNC liberals in the US for a woman President is typical - whether a woman or a man has their finger on the nuclear button is irrelevant so long as there is a system underpinning a nuclear button.
Foucault is not the final word on anything. His arguments are merely persuasive and suggestive. His position is actually ethical rather than political - he suggests 'the permanent training of oneself by oneself' as Oksala puts it This does, indeed, 'resemble(s) the creation of a work of art' but it is not narcissism. It is the potential creation of a society of complexity and diversity through individual commitment to 'new fields of experience, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.' Instead of, say, being part of a politicised culturally self-referential gay community, you are someone who has sex with and/or feels love for persons of the same gender or all.
We can immediately see here why such thinking is revolutionary because it rejects the use of boxes to set in place our identities. It rejects the way that social norms and customs are used to constrain us - but it is not by any means a-moral. Assuming the right spirit in which the creative process is undertaken, liberation is equally liberatory of others, certainly non-exploitative and non-oppressive and creates (in theory) an ever-widening circle of negotiated freedom. Of course, 'life is not like that'. A more cogent criticism of Foucault is not one of narcissism but of bringing in either utopianism or conservative pessimism (depending on the extent of the revolution of consciousness implied) by the back door. Critics might say (not unreasonably) that the fakery of identity, for example, is the only way to transform life chances for many people - in other words their cultural identitarian self-oppression is the lesser evil to external social oppression. This is fair but it is not full liberation.
Identity politics merely disrupts the system to the point of bringing it to the brink of collapse but not because the identity politicians intend it to be brought to the brink (as in the accidental 'toxic' effects of the use of political pressure on banks to lend cash to African-Americans who could never have paid back the loans and which triggered the first serious 2008 crisis of late liberal capitalism), but because the identity politicians have worked within a system in which political pressure and lawfare have been given primacy despite being merely factors within a total system based on the free market management of money and historically embedded power. The rest is history and, indeed, may make the current political class history in the long run.
Foucault's potential for critique is neither of the Right nor of the Left in itself but is a tool for either or neither or something new. For those concerned with true redistribution of power and resources, it will help raise the question of how a black or female President can, in any real sense, make any fundamental difference to the liberation of anyone so long as the system and social norms remain as they are. To identify oneself primarily as gay, black, woman or indigenous white is to abnegate one's duty to creative personal development as a human. The embarrassing hunger of the DNC liberals in the US for a woman President is typical - whether a woman or a man has their finger on the nuclear button is irrelevant so long as there is a system underpinning a nuclear button.
Foucault is not the final word on anything. His arguments are merely persuasive and suggestive. His position is actually ethical rather than political - he suggests 'the permanent training of oneself by oneself' as Oksala puts it This does, indeed, 'resemble(s) the creation of a work of art' but it is not narcissism. It is the potential creation of a society of complexity and diversity through individual commitment to 'new fields of experience, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.' Instead of, say, being part of a politicised culturally self-referential gay community, you are someone who has sex with and/or feels love for persons of the same gender or all.
We can immediately see here why such thinking is revolutionary because it rejects the use of boxes to set in place our identities. It rejects the way that social norms and customs are used to constrain us - but it is not by any means a-moral. Assuming the right spirit in which the creative process is undertaken, liberation is equally liberatory of others, certainly non-exploitative and non-oppressive and creates (in theory) an ever-widening circle of negotiated freedom. Of course, 'life is not like that'. A more cogent criticism of Foucault is not one of narcissism but of bringing in either utopianism or conservative pessimism (depending on the extent of the revolution of consciousness implied) by the back door. Critics might say (not unreasonably) that the fakery of identity, for example, is the only way to transform life chances for many people - in other words their cultural identitarian self-oppression is the lesser evil to external social oppression. This is fair but it is not full liberation.
Oksala provides a good introduction to Foucault's thinking. It is not
always an easy read at times but worth it for the clear and useful final
chapters which may hit some people with the force of a revelation about
what could be possible for us without our seeking to change more than
can be changed. It might certainly stop futile attendance at political
meetings and street protests which have no fundamental effect on policy or society and so enable us to divert
our attention to more productive behaviour at those points in society
where we can have most direct personal effect.
Moving from theory to practice, Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins' book is a diary-like account of '68 by a radical
participant looking back alongside a contemporary feminist. The 68-ers
now seem to have won culturally (and in ways that may be as counter-productive as useful) but lost politically.
Yet what really
strikes home is just how profoundly evil US actions in Vietnam were and
just how physically brave early civil rights activists and student
demonstrators were. It was not long before some of these latter became
either terrorists or tortured - or both. A quick and sometimes
heart-breaking read about too much optimism of the will ... and the evil
that men do to halt other men's and women's aspirations