The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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gaining control over large aggregates such as populations, sexuality, health, and even life itself.
The late Foucault organizes these emergent regimes under the rubric of “biopower,” but “control” is the related name that Deleuze appends to these lighter, more effective, and more diffuse methods of subject production in the present and future: “Control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies. ‘Control’ is the name proposed by [William] Burroughs to characterize the new monster, and Foucault sees it fast approaching” (Deleuze 1995, 178, Deleuze’s italics). Although Deleuze here insists that he takes the word “control” from Burroughs, he could just as easily have taken it from Discipline and Punish, where Foucault describes the “swarming [l’essaimage] of disciplinary mechanisms” that eventually reaches a tipping point in biopower, wherein “the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into lexible methods of control” (EDP, 211). Or perhaps Deleuze was inluenced by Foucault’s sense of the word in a 1984 interview, when he states: “The control of sexuality takes a form wholly other than the disciplinary form that one inds, for example, in schools” (FDE4, 662).
When power produces control in Foucault’s late work, that control is constituted less by a disciplinary mastery over speciic individuals or populations than it is characterized by power’s iniltrating ever more micrological parts of the socius, inally saturating even the subject’s relation to herself: the discourse of identity (or self-identity) becomes a means of control under the regime of biopolitics. Of course, discipline had its own investments in subjective identity. But people have long been able to resist or reinscribe the brand of control deployed by disciplinary forms of identity: you can escape being a soldier, a wife, or a factory worker by leeing from the army, the marriage, or the job. But it’s much harder to escape the brand of control deployed within the biopolitical ield. Take Foucault’s primary example of “sexuality”: whether you want one or not, everybody has a sexuality, which is to say a complex of self-understood sexual investments that are not necessarily tied to (or bound by) our more segmented, disciplinary roles. Not everyone has a shared disciplinary identity (mother, student, cop), but everyone does have something like a sexual identity. And this remains the case even if one attempts to resist the practices and discourses of sexuality altogether: asexuality is still a sexuality. In other words, postdisciplinary power maintains control not primarily through a training grid that is deployed and reinforced in myriad institutions but largely through reorganization of the ield in which any individual’s self-understanding takes place. The target of control shifts from training the subject’s actions at various institutional sites (the subject’s relation to the hospital, the family, the school, the army, the workplace) to working primarily on the subject’s relation to himself, which is at stake virtually everywhere, all the time.
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Paradoxically, Foucault shows us that the more open and lexible any given regime of biopolitical relations, the more effective the means of control. As Foucault suggests in his lecture series “The Birth of Biopolitics,” for example, something like neoliberal market capitalism (the market model by which we increasingly understand ourselves and our world) produces a society of control much more eficiently than a society of sovereignty, or a society of disciplinary surveillance. Neoliberal market capitalism is, in short, a much more effective means of social control than sovereignty or discipline ever was, precisely because of its supposed commitment to “openness” and lexibility. Control, like the power relations out of which it arises, can hold better and saturate a greater area of the socius when its grip is not merely negative (repressive) but positive (enabling) as well.
Foucault sums up this form of nondisciplinary control in the last lecture of his “Birth of Biopolitics” series in 1979, saying:
[Y]ou can see what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the ield is left open to luctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and inally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals. (ECF-BBIO, 259–260)
With changes in the dominant modalities, practices, and targets of power, the forms of social control are likewise transmogriied, made lighter and more intense, and simultaneously more individual and more global. The individual’s identity becomes the pivot of power for the late Foucault (just as the site of training in institutions had been the primary pivot and control mechanism for discipline). Our relations to ourselves constitute that place where we are most intensely connected to biopower’s modalities of social control. But precisely because of that fact, the ethical relation to the self is also a privileged place where we might effectively learn to resist biopolitical control. Where there is power, there is resistance. This helps us circle back to Deleuze’s notion that control is a Foucauldian watchword for our contemporary, postdisciplinary times.
Jeffrey T. Nealon
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See Also
Biopower
Discipline
Power
Gilles Deleuze
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2007. Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensii cations since 1984.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
17
CRITIQUE
Critique is the philosophical mode of relection that best characterizes
Foucault’s thought. To this effect, the Dictionnaire des philosophes entry on Foucault, pseudonymously self-authored at the end of his life, begins as follows: “To the extent that Foucault its into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical
tradition of Kant” (EEW2, 459, my italics). Since it designates the form of thought proper to Foucault’s philosophical project, critique thus provides a lens for viewing the coherence, stakes, and trajectory of his work as a whole.
It is signiicant that Foucault identiies the critical tradition to which he belongs with Kant, who plays an ambivalent but fundamental role throughout Foucault’s corpus. In his opening lecture at the Collège de France in 1983, Foucault marks this ambivalence by identifying Kant as the founder of “the two great traditions which have divided modern philosophy”: on the one hand, “the analytic of truth,” which follows the project of Kant’s three Critiques by interrogating “the conditions of possibility of a true knowledge”; and on the other, “an ontology of ourselves,” which, emerging from Kant’s more minor texts on the Enlightenment and French Revolution, calls into question the conditions that have constituted “the present ield of possible experiences” (ECF-GSO, 20–21). In other words, the opposition is between an epistemological critique that establishes the necessary and universal conditions that make legitimate knowledge possible and a political critique that uncovers the historically contingent and singular conditions that have delimited the range of what we can say, think, and do. According to Foucault, the irst tradition yields the positivism of “Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy” (ECF-GSO, 20), whereas the second issues into the “form of philosophy that, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, to the Frankfurt School, has founded a form of relection in which I have tried to work” (EPPC, 95).
This is neither the irst nor the last time that Foucault will counterpose these two Kantian traditions. Five years earlier, in a conference paper entitled “What
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Is Critique?” Foucault locates an analogous distinction in “this kind of slippage between critique and Aufklärung that Kant wanted to denote” (EWC, 382). Whereas the three Critiques inaugurate “an analytical procedure which could be called an investigation into the legitimacy of historical modes of knowing,” the question of the Enlightenment opens “a different procedure” addressed “not to the problem of knowledge, but to that of power” (EWC, 393). In Foucault’s view, the irst form of critical analysis, which is ultimately conducted in the service of securing true knowledge, gives rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a “scientiic positivism” that will become closely linked to the “science of the State” (EWC, 388). In other words, the analytic of truth will serve as a historical support for the techniques of governmental rationality of the modern period, by means of which a state system developed “which justiied itself as the reason and deep rationality of history and which, moreover, selected as its instruments procedures to rationalize the economy and society” (ibid.).
By contrast, the second strand of Kantian thought poses the question of the Enlightenment as a “call for courage” for humanity to lift the “minority condition” in which it has been “maintained in an authoritative way” – a condition that, whether in the domain of religion, law, or knowledge, is deined by humanity’s “incapacity to use its own understanding precisely without something which would be someone else’s direction” (EWC, 386). According to Foucault, this excessive authority that maintains humanity in its subordinate condition is a form of governmentalization, a complex set of strategies operating through and organizing the social, political, and economic institutions, relations, and practices by which the conduct of a population is managed and “through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth” (ibid.). Governmentalization thus designates a “nexus of knowledge-power” (EWC, 394) that functions through procedures of subjection to induce and control the behavior of individuals and groups. By analyzing the Enlightenment as the ongoing process through which humanity exits from this subordinate condition, Kant activates a second critical tradition, which Foucault characterizes here as a “critical attitude” (EWC, 383) that calls into question the governance of human beings with respect to what we are, think, say, and do.
Now, in Foucault’s view, governmentalization emerges historically in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a kind of secularization and expansion of the function of pastoral power according to which every individual is bound by a relation of absolute obedience to let themselves be governed in each of their actions for the entirety of their lives, and where this submission is mediated by a form of truth linking the self-knowledge of the individual to a dogmatic authority (EWC, 383). Once only the province of ecclesiastical institutions, this individualizing technique proliferates in every new area where the problem of governing is posed: “how to govern children, how to govern the poor and beggars, how to govern a family, a house, how
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to govern armies, different groups, cities, States and also how to govern one’s own body and mind” (EWC, 384). Governmentalization thus emerges as an individualizing and totalizing regime of power-knowledge that produces individuals as subjects in the double sense of being “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to [one’s] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (EEW3, 331).
However, according to Foucault, there develops in agonistic tandem with governmentalization a critical attitude that resists it, a practice or “art of not being governed quite so much” (EWC, 384). The three historical points of anchorage for this critical attitude anticipate the three areas where Kant calls for the courage of humanity to exercise its own understanding: in the religious domain, a biblical critique that contests ecclesiastical rule with respect to the truth of the Scriptures; in the legal domain, a juridical critique that asserts the rights of natural law so as to contest unjust political rule; and in the domain of knowledge, a scientiic critique that contests unjustiied authoritarian determinations of truth (EWC, 383–384). In each of these cases, critique functions to limit an excessive authority by challenging the production of knowledge through which the latter operates, thereby disrupting the techniques of subjection by which humanity is maintained in a minor condition. As “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth,” and thus as “the art of voluntary insubordination” and “relected intractability,” “[c]ritique would essentially insure the desubjectiication of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth” (EWC, 386).
For Foucault, it is this critical attitude that Kant reactivates when he poses the question of the Enlightenment as both a critical analysis of the present condition of humanity and a summons to no longer let what we say, think, and do be governed by dogmatic forms of authority. The two Kantian traditions are thus not merely distinct from one another but diametrically opposed: on the one hand, a positivist analytic of truth enlisted to support the governmental rationality of a state system, and on the other the critical attitude of a historical ontology of ourselves that would precisely resist this form of governmentalization.
Thus, when Foucault situates his own philosophical project within the critical tradition of Kant, it is on the side of the historico-political critique of power-knowl- edge and its individualizing techniques of subjection. When he returns four years later to Kant’s text on the Enlightenment, in “The Subject and Power,” stressing the increasing importance of the task Kant set for philosophy “as a critical analysis of our world,” Foucault writes that the most fundamental philosophical problem is “the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment....
[T]he political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is ... to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state” (EEW3, 336). In its most expansive role, then, critique will be a form of philosophical relection that, as an ethicopolitical practice oriented by its critical attitude
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toward governmentalization, aims to free human beings from the processes of subjection by which we have been maintained in a condition of excessive subordination to authority. Hence we see the signiicant stakes of that tradition of critical thought to which Foucault belongs: “In its critical aspect – and I mean critical in a broad sense – philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you” (EEW1, 300–301).
Further, in order to grasp the coherent trajectory of Foucault’s oeuvre through the window of critique, it is important to see how the basic opposition he draws between the two Kantian traditions is anticipated from the beginning of his work by a fundamental antagonism between the form of thought in which he lodges himself and the positivism of the human sciences. Here again, the igure of Kant plays a foundational and ambivalent role. If, in Foucault’s view, the emergence of Kant in the history of thought is decisive for the larger epistemic formation of the modern period, this is because of the critical reversal or Copernican turn whereby the inite conditions of the transcendental subject, rather than the ininitude of God, become constitutive for knowledge. Thus, as Gilles Deleuze (1998, 127) notes in his book on Foucault, the Kantian revolution, by which the thought of “constituent initude” displaces the idea of “original ininity,” marks the archaeological rupture with the God-form of the classical formation.
Kantian critique thereby establishes a new possibility for thought through its conception of constitutive limits. From this epistemic opening, two opposed forms of relection arise: on the one hand, an analytic of initude that provides the basis for the positivist sciences of man; and on the other, a limit-experience of initude that critically contests the status of the subject and the mode of individualization proper to the human sciences.
Foucault locates the emergence of the irst, anthropological strain of thought in a moment in “Kant’s Logic, when to his traditional trilogy of questions he added an ultimate one: the three critical questions (What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?) then found themselves referred to a fourth, and inscribed, as it were, ‘to its account’: Was ist der Mensch?” (EOT, 371). Indeed, Foucault’s chief interest in Kant’s Anthropology, which he translated and wrote an introduction to as his secondary doctoral thesis, consists in this slippage from critical to anthropological thought, whereby the three Critiques appear retrospectively to have taken as their “secret guide” “a certain concrete image of man” (EIKA, 19). If the Kantian critical turn displaces God and the idea of the ininite as epistemic foundation, “the Anthropology indicates the absence of God, and occupies the void that the ininite leaves in its wake” (EIKA, 120).
This movement in Kant from critical reversal to anthropological positivism thus relects, as though in germ form, the two moments of the broader transformation at the end of the eighteenth century, when the classical episteme grounded in God is
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supplanted by the modern episteme grounded in man. The epistemic formation of the modern period becomes circumscribed by the “anthropological circle” (EHM, 512), wherein man serves as both the starting point in the inquiry for truth and the end point to which this knowledge refers back (EOT, 342). Moreover, the anthropological mode of relection that Kant helps to inaugurate is one in which man becomes tied to his own identity as an object through a form of self-knowledge of which he is also the subject: anthropology “is the knowledge of man, in a movement which objectiies him,” and, “at the same time, it is the knowledge of the knowledge of man, and so can interrogate the subject himself” (EIKA, 117). As such, the anthropological circle and the human sciences it founds constitute precisely the kind of positivist knowledge that Foucault will later link to governmentalization and its individualizing techniques of subjection.
It is thus no surprise that the second form of relection emerging in the wake of the Kantian revolution, which Foucault himself champions, will be opposed to the anthropological positivism of the analytic of initude. Anticipating the famous inal pages of The Order of Things, which gesture toward the erasure of man “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (EOT, 422), Foucault concludes his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology by calling for “the death of man,” which would consummate the death of God irst made possible by the Kantian thought of constitutive initude: “Is it not possible to conceive of a critique of initude which would be as liberating with regard to man as it would be with regard to the ininite?” (EIKA, 124). This other form of critical thought, which Foucault here attributes to Nietzsche, conceives of constitutive limits not by reference to an anthropological question of man’s essence but in terms of a limit-experience that problematizes the very status of man qua subject.
Foucault’s early work can thus be understood as developing the second line of critical thought, beginning with his articulation of the tragic experience of unreason in History of Madness. Foucault describes this work, inspired by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, as a “history of limits,” or of the constitutive divisions through which a culture takes form by “reject[ing] something which for it will be the Exterior” (EHM, xxix). Foucault’s analysis thus takes as its chief object the “limit-experience” of unreason, the exclusion of which is foundational for the historical development of Western reason and culture (ibid.). Yet this experience of unreason is expressed by a broken lineage of tragic artists, running from Sade, through Hölderlin and Nietzsche, to Artaud, whose works, bearing witness to the arbitrary violence of “the division which gives a culture the face of its positivity” (ibid.), provide a privileged site of contestation against the dominant forms of social reality that organize the modern world (EHM, 352). In this way, the project in History of Madness to give expression to a constitutive limit-experience opens a historicopolitical critique of Western culture that doubles as an ontology of ourselves. Foucault thus follows “that form of thought to which Nietzsche dedicated us from the beginning of his
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works and ... that would be, absolutely and in the same motion, a Critique and an Ontology” (EEW2, 75).
The two forms of relection made possible by Kantian critique therefore oppose one another in the same manner as the two traditions of Kantian critical philosophy discussed earlier. Like the analytic of truth, the anthropological analytic of initude gives rise to a form of positivist science that binds the individual to herself as both object and subject of self-knowledge; indeed, historically, it will be the human sciences, such as psychiatry, medicine, political economy, and criminology, that are enlisted in support of the normalizing objectives of a state system to manage the conduct of individuals and groups. By contrast, like the critical attitude proper to an ontology of ourselves, the experience of constitutive limits contests these individualizing techniques of subjection, calling into question the historical conditions and dividing practices that have delimited what we can be, think, say, and do.
Thus, from his initial text on the Anthropology to his last relections on “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault’s critical project can be understood by reference to the two contradistinctive traditions of Kantian critique. Foucault never stops opposing, to those positivist forms of knowledge linked to government rationality, a critical ontology of the historical present. The properly Foucauldian form of critique, then, which aims to open new possibilities for what we can think and become through the desubjectiication of the subject, constitutes a mode of resistance against the processes of subjection that maintain human beings in a subordinate condition to an excessive authority.
Returning once more in 1984 to the question of Enlightenment, Foucault gives a inal account of his own conception of critique. What was articulated in the 1960s in terms of a limit-experience of the constitutive divisions of Western culture, and then in the 1970s as a critical attitude resisting governmentalization, now becomes formulated as “a limit-attitude,” which is to say, “a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying, thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves” (EEW1, 315). By contrast to the Kantian analytic of truth, which takes as its object the universal and necessary limits that make knowledge possible, the critical limit-attitude discloses the historically singular and contingent conditions that have delimited the present ield of possible experience. In other words, rather than an epistemological critique of the “limits knowledge must renounce exceeding,” Foucault proposes a historicopolitical critique that aims to “separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (EEW1, 315–316). Insofar as it both relects on our limits as so many mutable historical conditions and issues a call for courage to cross over these limits, “promot[ing] new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (EEW3, 336), Foucauldian critique can thus be characterized as a fundamentally transfor-
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mative mode of thought, one that constitutes an ethicopolitical practice of freedom through a historicocritical ontology of ourselves.
To the extent, then, that Foucault its into the critical philosophical tradition of Kant, it is the second, more radical form of Kantian critique, the “permanent reactivation” (EEW1, 312) of a philosophical ethos “in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (EEW1, 319).
Christopher Penield
See Also
Finitude
Genealogy
Governmentality
Human Sciences
Madness
Man
Philosophy
Resistance
Truth
Immanuel Kant
Suggested Reading
Butler, Judith. 2002. “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. David Ingram. London: Blackwell, pp. 212–226.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Han, Béatrice. 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans.
Edward Pile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veyne, Paul. 1997. “The Final Foucault and His Ethics,” trans. Catherine Porter and Arnold
Davidson, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 225–233.