Reading Foucault is Like a Little French Man Making Love to You from Inside your Head
Each chapter opens with pages of tedious foreplay culminating in a gushing, euphoric climax in the last paragraph, as in the fourth chapter of The Achaeology of Knowledge:
(this quote is about the way in which social discourses, such as ‘psychopathology’ or ‘economics’, produce themselves and simultaneously produce the subjectivity of the individuals who take part in them)
“In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his dispersion. To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the specificty of a discursive practice. I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression — the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed. I showed earlier that it was neither by ‘words’ nor by ‘things’ that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similary, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.”
- Michel Foucault, The Formation of Enunciative Modalities, from The Archaeology of Knowledge.
[I realize this may not be a popular post.]
Some things don’t change
Two-hundred forty-three years of choking on school-dust:
“O you his machine-like teacher, well do you need to suppress his healthy understanding with your school Logic; otherwise he would take your measure, repeat the gobbledygook you took an hour to trot out afterwards naturally but without school-cleverness in three words. He would despise you! But woe unto you; from a thousand heads who would have become men only ten will be bold enough to be wise; the rest are choked with school-dust — like the Egyptian midwife.”
–Johann Gottfried von Herder, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People, 1765.
Prostrate Yourselves! (On religious self-indenture)
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of “Unconditional Duties”:
All those who feel they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all…talk of “duties,” and actually always of duties that are supposed to be unconditional. Without that they would lack the justification for their great pathos, and they understand this very well. Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion….Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.
Two years prior, in 1880, Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, whose famous chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” ruminates on a very similar theme. In this intensely ironic parable in which the Grand Inquisitor addresses Christ, Dostoevsky writes:
In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.
The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the Church has had to perfect his work by adding to it the kind of spiritual bondage that allows people to live untroubled, in service to commandments that are — on the Church’s authority — inherently sublime.
These passages share a subtext, namely this: that religion functions primarily as a means to negate the fundamental freedom that comes with existence, because that freedom is too heavy for most to bare. By its simple imperatives, its categories of good and evil, it lifts from its adherents the burden of being arbiter of their own lives.
I agree that religion so functions, but is that necessarily cause for contempt? The inability of the average human to deal with the complex ambiguities of life is independent of religion; if he had not this mechanism of self-indenture, he would devise another. In light of this, it might be inevitable for there to exist various ways for us to indenture ourselves (indeed there are others besides religion, capitalism for one). But religion goes further. Not only does it enslave, it claims to exalt. It claims to empower as it thrives on subjugation. It demands respect for the ignoble task of making the feeble-minded absolutely certain of truths that do not exist.
I have to side with Nietzsche in contempt of religion; not only does it feed the “will to ignorance,” but it deceitfully claims to do the opposite. If we are going to throw ourselves into bondage out of some profound ennui, we should at least be honest with ourselves about it (cf. Heidegger’s Being & Time). Digging deeper into this honest interpretation of life may lead us to better understand the very condition in which we find ourselves — questions and answers over which religion pretends to have ultimate authority.
The End of the Return of History
…and the Death of the Throwback to Positivism.
Robert Kagan has been all over the media promoting his new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (dun dun dun…!). Based only on hearing him speak, I think I agree with the central thesis of his book, which is totally contra his earlier thought and pronounces a shocking death sentence to neoconservatism. Turns out democracy is NOT the inevitable manifestation of the perfect movement of history. (!) What a hilarious revelation, ironically reached five years after the inevitable movement of history accidentally moved the American military into Iraq! Mr. Kagan has finally realized, after founding the Project for the New American Century with William Kristol and laying various other groundwork for the divine global democratic nirvana that he envisioned after the Cold War, that we’re not living in 1880s Europe and history is not driven by teleological forces. “The End of Dreams” is apt — indeed, history has ended his.
Congratulations to Mr. Kagan for catching up with 1960s social theory. What he thinks of as “The Return of History” is, to me, the end of the return of history. Namely, it is the end of that return to the positivism of the Modern period — called neoconservatism — in which history was considered a science and liberal democracy as a force akin to gravity in the holy evolution of society. While the rest of the neocons continue on in their solipsistic worlds, at least Kagan is a realist enough to see the failure of his experiment in the science of history and accomodate his worldview accordingly.
Karl Popper (Kpop!) tells it like it is
From logical fallacies of induction to evolutionary epistemology, Kpop’s like ‘Yo! the sun might not rise tomorrow’ and ‘Yo! Hume’s psychology is primitive’ and ‘Yo! sometimes we perish by our unconfirmed hypotheses’. Break it down Karl…
“Hume himself confused the problem of induction with the problem of the necessary connection between cause and effect; and Kant saw in the problem of the a priori validity of the causal law one of the most fundamental problems of metaphysics. But Hume must be credited with the formulation of the pure logical problem of induction and its solutions…He writes, for example, that we have no reason to believe ‘that those instances, of which we have no experience, [are likely to] resemble those, of which we have had experience’.
…All that is assumed is that we have empirical evidence of the truth of certain instances, and it is asserted that this does not entitle us to conclude to or extrapolate to analogous experiences at other instances (whether in the past or in the future).
This, then, in all its purity, is what I have christened ‘Hume’s [logical] problem of induction’.
Hume’s answer is as clear as can be: there is no argument or reason which permits an inference from one case to another, however similar the conditions may be; and I completely agree with him in this respect.
I believe, however, that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do in practice is to jump to a conclusion; that is to say, to quite inconclusive hypotheses to which we often cling, and with which we may perish, unless we are able to correct them, which is possible especially if, on the human level, they are formulated exosomatically in written form, and submitted to criticism.
The assertion that we have an irrational inclination to be impressed by habit and repetition is something quite different from the assertion that we have a drive to try out bold hypotheses which we may have to correct if we are not to perish. The first describes a typically Lamarckian procedure of instruction; the second a Darwinian procedure of selection. The first one is, as Hume observed, irrational, while the second seems to have nothing irrational in it.”
from Objective Knowledge, Ch. 2, §30: Muddles Connected with the Problem of Induction
