Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 7: October 25-October 31 Week 8: November 1-7

Stephen Hicks' Summary of our Discussion of Michel Foucault's "History of Sexuality, Volume I"

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 9:07 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: SH Foucault Summary

Michel Foucault and Postmodernism
Stephen Hicks

Despite the difficulties of grasping Foucault's overall agenda -- partly
because of its being so alien to that of Objectivism and partly because of
Foucault's obscurantist style -- I found the CyberSeminarians' posts to date
to be impressive: all of the major themes from Foucault have been nicely
laid out and discussed. At the same time I sensed that Foucault was often
being dismissed too quickly as either hopelessly confused or just wrong. He
is confusing and he is wrong -- but I would like to add to the discussion a
way of viewing Foucault that both clarifies his position and makes him seem
more worthy of our attention.

Foucault as Cynical Libertarian

Some libertarians with a subjective streak are sympathetic to postmodern
thought, and in many of those cases it is Foucault's thought that they find
attractive. So let's start by pretending for a few paragraphs that Foucault
is simply an extremely cynical libertarian.

Think of how many libertarians view Washington, D.C. Inside the Beltway,
they say, the reality of America is a distant phenomenon. To the beltway
mentality, what's going on in Idaho and Oklahoma is mostly unreal.
Washington is in fact a self-contained social world of power struggles.
Power is the coin of the realm, and the coin is spent to get more power.
The power struggles are a matter of who knows whom, who is cleverer than whom at
reading the shifting currents of alliances and enmities, and whose
spin-meisters are quickest to construct the truth of the week. Think "Wag
the Dog." Abstractions such as truth and rights and justice are
meaningless; power is the reality of life inside D.C.

For Foucault, what we call reality is just [this situation] writ large.

Switching back to the libertarian in Washington: Such a libertarian also
feels outrage that the power-players in Washington are playing their games
at the expense of the average citizens in Idaho and Oklahoma. Huge portions of
the Idahoans' lives are dictated by distant power structures over which they
have no control. And despite all the pious talk in Washington about free
speech and respecting the individual, the voices of the Oklahomans are
effectively silenced and their liberties squashed.

What is needed, then, is to unmask the hypocrisies and posturings to show
the naked power struggles for what they are, to subvert the institutions that
are oppressing individuals, to de-centralize the power that has been co-opted by
Washington, and thus liberate new voices and untold energies.

For Foucault, what we call modern Western civilization is just Washington
writ large.

Let's put the above "libertarian" perspective in more abstracted
philosophical language.

For human beings, knowledge is power. Human physical/biological power
matters less than intellectual power in determining our destiny.

And we are social animals. Human society's complex relations are
constructed and maintained by abstract intellectual beliefs and practices. The form
intellectual activity takes is linguistic: words are the tools we use in
constructing and maintaining those social practices.

If we add that the social realm is intensely competitive and marked by power
struggles along key social dimensions, it follows that the key power
struggles are going to be conducted by words.

If we add that some individuals and social groups have more power than
others, it follows, then, that in the social context the winners will be
those who get to define the terms, set the agendas, and put their "spin" on
events. Other individuals are going to lose the power struggles and be
oppressed. Being in the losing position, they won't have the voice or even
the language to defend themselves.

Finally, if we add that liberating the individual is good, it follows that
subverting the power structure is necessary to liberate the individual.

Foucault as Postmodernist

From the above to Foucault requires only a few radicalizing steps. To get
to Foucault we have to strip away any sense at all that we think in terms of
rational, objective, and autonomous individuals.

First, Foucault is more radical epistemologically. As several of the
CyberSeminarians have noted, Foucault's question is never whether discourses
are true or accurate in representing reality but rather what role they play
in the evolution of power.

Second, in metaphysics Foucault strikes me as radical but inconsistent. He
often sounds like an antirealist, holding that to speak of what reality
really is is meaningless. For example, a secondary source quotes Foucault
as saying: "[I]t is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason,
Truth, or Knowledge". At other times he offers a Nietzschean ontology,
holding that reality is a field of forces that flow into power relations.
For example, in our reading Foucault defines power as follows: "the moving
substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality,
constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable."
Here we have an ontological substrate -- forces -- which because they are
unequally distributed generate centers of power. Because the forces are
moving, the centers of power change and evolve too. Foucault is thus either
an antirealist or a process ontologist.

Third, the Nietzschean ontology fits Foucault's analysis of human nature:
Human beings are one of the power centers that emerge out of the flow of
forces. Human beings then generate linguistic forms of power --
"discourses." The discourses are both generated by humans and partly form
their social reality and also in turn formative of other humans and their
social reality. A standard example here of the social linguistic
construction of human beings is religion. A child born into a culture with
a given religion almost inevitably adopts his parents' religion. The parents
drill into the child certain words and phrases which structure the child's
thinking and practices; that thinking and those practices are reinforced and
added to by the child's other authority figures and peers; and when the
child becomes a parent the same process occurs again. The child is constructed
socially and linguistically and in turn contributes to the social and
linguistic construction of others. Here Foucault draws on and acknowledges
a Marxist social determinism.

Because the distribution of forces is never perfectly equal, the discourses
that are socially dominant evolve over time. But in any case the dominance
of a discourse is due to that discourse's usefulness in increasing or
maintaining the power of some over others.

Fourth: This connects us to Foucault's historical analysis of the modern
world. Since the Enlightenment, our discourse has privileged reason,
science, and technology. Here Foucault follows Heidegger's attack on those
dominant features of the modern world. (Foucault once said that his "entire
philosophical development was determined by [the] reading of Heidegger.")

In the name of reason, science, and technology, modern humans are raised and
constructed. Those thoughts and behaviors that can't be squeezed into the
powerful's preferred social framework are marginalized as "other."

For example, reason and science applied to education yielded the following:
students sit in their desks, the desks are organized in straight rows, the
teacher is the authority figure, the students listen and memorize the facts,
there is a set amount of time for each class and activity, the students are
given the same standardized tests, they are graded and ranked hierarchically,

and so on. When the students graduate and enter the economic world, reason
and science applied to production yielded the following: workers punch in
and out with time clocks, they stand before the machine, they are told what
to do and when; or they sit in the corporate version -- the cubicle farm.

Those who don't fit the mold are either deemed criminals, in which case they
are turned over to the legal system (the physical police), or they are
deemed insane, in which case they are turned over to the psychiatric system (the
mental police). In the legal realm, Foucault was struck by Bentham's
Enlightenment project the Panopticon, an ideal prison in which the prisoners
could be continuously monitored (omniscient reason), studied and analyzed
(science) and their behavior continuously shaped and rehabilitated
(technology and engineering). In the psychiatric realm, Foucault was struck
by how quickly slightly different behaviors -- women who liked sex,
homosexuals, and so on -- were defined by enlightened scientists of human
behavior as threatening aberrations and how wide a range of engineering
techniques were used on them -- confinement, shock therapy, drugs, and so on
(David Potts's mentioning of Thomas Szasz in this connection is right on
target).

Hence Foucault's remark about modern society: "in this society that has
been more imaginative, probably, than any other in creating devious and supple
mechanisms of power" (HS 86)

Fifth: As Heidegger and Foucault both put it, this
reason/science/engineering way of looking at everything is only one way of
doing so. It is not true or in any way superior. It is simply the one that
happens to have come to dominance. And for a variety of reasons, that is
the system they feel alienated from and which they wish to destroy.

For both, the strategy for subverting it is by focusing on that which has
been marginalized and made "other." For Heidegger, the Enlightenment
exalted reason and progressive optimism -- so he focuses on feeling, specifically
negative feelings of dread and dissolution. For Foucault, the Enlightenment
is defined by what it takes to be "normal," "sane," and "moral" -- so his
focus is on deconstructing the conceptual scheme that opposes "normal" and
"abnormal," "sane" and "insane," moral" and "criminal." Celebrating the
insane, the abnormal, and the criminal -- or at least making them equal
contenders -- is accordingly part of a philosophical strategy to undermine
oppressive modern Enlightenment society.

Is Foucault Right?

Several CyberSeminarians raise at this point the question of the accuracy of
Foucault's reading of history on several points and whether he is logically
consistent. Those are the right questions to ask and to hammer away at, and
Foucault's response illustrates the fundamental importance of the
epistemological issues. To all such questions, postmodernists have learned
from Foucault to respond as follows. In asking whether my reading is true,
you are missing the point: there is no truth, no fixed reality which my
theories have to mirror or correspond to; words are part of the power
struggle for dominance; so the question to put to my reading is not whether
it is true but whether it is effective in changing the social discourse.
For Foucault, the purpose of his writing is not to say something true but the
influence our conceptual framework. "Discourses are tactical elements or
blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different
and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy" (HS 102). As to
the lawyer who wants to win the case at any cost, the question isn't whether
his arguments are true or consistent but whether they are successful. That
Foucault and the lawyer both know that their opponents insist on reading
everything they say as either true or false only adds, from their
perspective, an amusing ironic element to their presentation.

The Philosophical is the Personal

Our reading focused on Foucault's presentation of sexuality as illustrating
his theory. In addition to the above-discussed themes, The History of
Sexuality also incorporates Freudian themes of unmasking non-rational sexual
energies. But I picked this reading also because it fits tightly with
Foucault's personal psychology. As postmodernist, Foucault would insist
that there is no distinction between the personal and the social, that everything
is political. So it is fitting that his personal life also illustrated his
philosophy.

There is a nihilistic streak that is characteristic of much of postmodernism, one

that exists in tension with postmodernists often-professed concern with liberating

the oppressed and empowering the marginalized. In Foucault one
finds that tension very markedly: Foucault is among those postmodernists who
emphasize the liberation and empowering themes, but in his writings one also
finds strong nihilistic themes.

In speaking of humans in general, Foucault sometimes speaks almost happily
of the erasure of the species. In Words and Things, for example, he writes:
"Man is not a stable thing, but a point where social, linguistic, economic,
psychological, etc. forces happen to converge for awhile. Man is a recent
invention that will soon disappear, like a face drawn in the sand." God is
dead, wrote Hegel and Nietzsche. The Enlightenment killed God and exalted
man, but man too will be dead, Foucault hopes.

In speaking more personally about his motivations for writing, Foucault
speaks about his desire to erase himself. In his "Introduction" to The
Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault speaks at one point in the first person:
By writing "I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never
have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to
have no face."

Finally, there is Foucault's preference for sado-masochistic gay sex. That
lifestyle certainly is an expression and stylization of social relations of
naked power. Whatever one's views of sado-masochistic gay sex, the
disturbing fact is that Foucault was diagnosed with AIDS in 1982, and after
learning of this diagnosis continued to frequent San Francisco's bathhouses
and sex clubs, realizing that he was probably passing the disease on to
others.

The connection of philosophy and practice doesn't get any clearer than that.

[Stephen Hicks]


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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

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