The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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MULTIPLICIT Y
The notion of multiplicity functions in several distinct ways in Foucault’s corpus. Multiplicity is a central theoretical tool in Foucault’s analyses of both power and knowledge and their concretization in practices and discourses.
Conceptually opposed to unity, it indicates his intent to describe and investigate difference, divergence, and discontinuity and thus contest presuppositions of identity, unity, and continuity. More generally, it is a category of analysis that makes the constitutive operation of relations central to understanding how a given phenomenon or event arises in the manner in which it does. In a more speciic and limited way, Foucault also places a certain value on multiplicity as a phenomenon of difference, inding the cultivation of multiplicity preferable to, and a mode of resistance to, the instantiation of unity, centralization, and totalization.
A multiplicity can be understood as a web of relations between elements. Singular points or events are linked in a complex system to compose a multiplicity. Thus, multiplicity not only signiies the undoing of the unity and the identity of a human subject, an object of knowledge, a discourse, a practice, and so on, but also, and more importantly, entails the discovery of the heterogeneous relations that condition, constitute, and give rise to these seemingly uniied forms. Via multiplicity, difference and diversity are thought apart from opposition, negation, and dialectical synthesis and in terms of conjunction, intersection, and interaction. Rather than stemming from a framework for meaning that is externally imposed (in the form of unities of theme, style of enunciation, concept, or object), the coherence of a multiplicity derives from the ways in which the elements work together and thus is immanent to their operation: “[W]hen one speaks of a system of formation, one does not only mean the juxtaposition, coexistence, or interaction of heterogeneous elements ..., but also the relation that is established between them ... by discursive practice” (EAK, 72). Thus, in accord with thinking in terms of multiplicity, Foucault’s
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archaeological method describes “systems of dispersion” and speciies the singular points that deine them, “the regularities of a practice,” in order to investigate the kinds of formative relations that exist between elements (EAK, 37).
Throughout his work, Foucault describes two general types of multiplicity, which enter into relation with one another: discursive and nondiscursive multiplicities are composed, respectively, of articulable elements (words) and visible elements (things), which together constitute “a multiplicity of relations between forces” (Deleuze 1988, 83). Words and things converge in relations of power and knowledge. Thus, multiplicity is integral to Foucault’s conception of power, which functions only through multiplicities. Indeed, power is simply “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate” (EHS1, 92). Because power operates throughout “that whole lower region” – is diffused throughout the social body – Foucault’s attention focuses both on multiplicity as diversity and on the domestication of multiplicities, the harnessing of their forces, and the various “mechanisms that analyze distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of relational and multiple power” (EDP, 208). An emphasis on multiplicity enables such an account of relational power. Disciplinary power in particular takes multiplicity as its object. For example, the organizing principle of “the table has the function of treating multiplicity itself, distributing it and deriving from it as many effects as possible” (EDP, 149).
Foucault, however, makes a distinction between this kind of ordered multiplicity and “a nomadic and dispersed multiplicity” that remains untamed, not subject to the hierarchizing structure of disciplinary power (ELCP, 185). The disciplines therefore are “techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities” and creating docile bodies and normalized subjects through such ordering (EDP, 218). Through diverse tactics and to serve particular ends, new ordered and calculated multiplicities are composed out of “the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces” (EDP, 170). To function effectively in and through multiplicities, disciplinary power must operate with the least expenditure (of money, energy, etc.) possible, must seek to extend its power as much as possible, and achieve an increase in both utility and docility. To tame the forces and elements that compose an unordered multiplicity – those of a population, for instance – and thus accomplish these aims, disciplinary procedures must order a multiplicity through relations that render it useful and eficient, reduce the forces that make a multiplicity unmanageable or set it at odds with the desired outcome, and master the new forces and capacities that arise in the organized multiplicity, thwarting resistance in advance (EDP, 219). The multiplicity is organized, managed, and enhanced so that it, as a whole, has greater utility than its component parts even as the utility and eficiency of each component is maximized by being individualized.
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Thus, because power operates in and through multiplicities, it is no longer a question of where power is but rather of how it functions. Since it is known “with reasonable certainty who exploits others, where the proit goes, between whose hands it passes and where it is reinvested,” we must seek to analyze and exhibit how “power is exercised, and by which relays and through which often insignificant instances of hierarchy, control, surveillance, prohibition, and constraint” (FDE1a, 1181). Not unlike how disciplinary power operates directly on multiplicities, arranging them anew in order to maximize utility, multiplicity is a deining feature of neoliberal society. Given the generalization of the “enterprise” form, the individual is located “within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other” and deines herself by her engagement with these enterprises (ECF-BBIO, 241). The individual is not merely situated within a larger multiplicity as a cog in a machine – like the soldier within the unit – but is individualized to an even greater extent as the agent-subject of a multiplicity of enterprises; the individual creates himself as a node within these multiplicities (ibid.). Neoliberal power relations are deined by “a multiplicity of points of view” and by “the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest” who conceive of themselves as operating within a network of power relations (ECF-BBIO, 282).
Yet, Foucault appears to ind unique value in the untamed, “nomadic and dispersed” multiplicity. Insofar as it implies an afirmation of difference, and thus the possibility for creativity and resistance, the idea of multiplicity is more than just a compelling category for analysis of the intricacies of power relations. In particular, multiplicity is understood as a countermovement in relation to totalization and centralization. Although resistance is possible from within organized multiplicities – which are simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, hierarchical yet decentralized, differentiating yet homogenizing – nomadic multiplicity, which is composed of unformed forces, presents a greater resource. Whereas organized multiplicities operate with an orientation to a particular end (eficiency, utility, docility, etc.), are constructed in order to achieve this end, and thus can only enter into speciied kinds of relations, nomadic multiplicities remain open to a diversity of relations and constituting myriad undetermined assemblages. Their potential for alteration is unrestrained by predetermined ends, patterns of relation, and organization.
Erinn Gilson
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See Also
Difference
Event
Power
Gilles Deleuze
Suggested Reading
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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NATURE
In a somewhat banal way, one can say that nature consists of what is produced independently of human action, what existed prior to humanity, and what will exist after humanity is gone. It would be what is independent from culture in which the object, the ideas, and the institutions created by humans participate. Nevertheless, these distinctions are in no way obvious, since a large part of the objects populating our environment are seminatural and semicultural, insofar as they are products of the ways humans transform nature. Moreover, ethnologists have shown that in nonEuropean cultures the nature-culture distinction does not have the same sense and often does not exist as such. The distinction is entirely cultural. Nature can therefore
appear as a universal only within our culture.
By deining itself as an “ethnology of our culture,” Foucault’s archaeology inspired Lévi-Strauss’s idea of regrounding anthropology on the universal codes of human cultures (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 33–34). Thus archaeology wants to bring to light the grammatical structure of a symbolic system that exceeds the activity of a subject, a subjectless transcendental or an “objective a priori” (Canguilhem 1975, 362). Nevertheless, Foucault precisely contests the anthropological pretension of knowing human nature objectively. The idea of a human nature restored by the sciences is for Foucault nothing but a “pious wish” (EOT, 379). In its philosophical or scientiic version, the anthropological project only reveals the weak point in the nature-culture distinction: the place of man, which is conceived at once as a natural being and as a product of culture.
From this point, two important consequences follow. First, Foucault considers the key to the nature-culture opposition to be the concept of human nature, and consequently that archaeology will have to detect all the different historical meanings of this concept, in particular, in the human sciences. Then, this attempt to open up the nature-culture opposition to a discussion will take on less the form of an ethnology of distant cultures than that of an archaeological history aiming at our system of
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beliefs, our conceptual conigurations. It is obvious that the problem with which this archaeological history is concerned lies less in discovering whether a human nature exists than in understanding the meaning of the constant reference to this nature within the framework of philosophy, the human sciences, and in ethical and political practices (Judith Revel 2008, 95–97). In order to do this, we must precisely avoid presupposing the invariant of a “human nature,” which would identify immediately with an origin or a “universal” (FDE2, 103).
Foucault’s three books of the 1960s bear witness to this antinaturalism, which is at the same time an antimetaphysics. In History of Madness, Foucault shows how the concept of “human nature” has been mobilized within the framework of the birth of modern psychiatry. Reason has been progressively identiied with the nature that is properly human, and in this way man is distinguished from animals. This identiication is made by excluding the experience of an unreason that in the classical age was identiied with animality. If this animality represented then a sort of counternature, an absolute danger of indifferentiation between man and animal “from the moment when philosophy became anthropology, and men decided to ind their place the plentitude of the natural order, the animal world lost that power of negativity, and assumed the positive form of an evolution between the determinism of nature and the reason of man” (EHM, 151). Madness “is the unperceived side of order,” but this order is at once Nature and reason. This is why the igure of the mad opens onto the question at once of the division of the reasonable and the unreasonable (or the “nature of reason”) and the division of the rational and the irrational in nature (or the “reason of nature”). Medical knowledge of the nineteenth century then constitutes madness as a nature that is not human. Instead, it reveals to man his relation with animals and his seminatural and semicultural condition. Madness “is no longer an absolute perversion within counter-nature, but the invasion by a neighboring nature” (EHM, 435), with the mad being unable to recognize his nature, that of being a rational animal. This is why the cure, before converting the mad into a reasonable being, is organized around myths of the “three Natures”: Nature as health, which can disappear; Nature as reason, which is latent; and Nature as truth, which presents itself by means of the correct use of reason. It is by the discovery that he is alienated from his truth that the madman will be able to restore Nature as reason and reestablish his Nature as health (EHM, 473).
In The Birth of the Clinic, illness takes over the ambiguous place of madness. In the eighteenth century, illness is discovered between “counter-nature” and “nature.” Thanks to Bichat, illness is placed between life and death and thereby loses its characteristic of being counternature (EBC, 153–155). By means of the archaeology of the human sciences, what is at issue then is to show the paradox of a reason that afirms the freedom of man as a fact of nature while turning man into the target for an objectifying knowledge that subjugates man to the necessary laws of the cosmos. This paradox discovers its classical formulation in The Order of Things. In this book,
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Foucault shows not only the historicity of human nature but also the speciicity of the relation that this historicity maintains with physical and biological nature in modernity. In the classical episteme, nature is present as a collection of things that one can read by means of the play of analogies and correspondences. Words and things (the French title of The Order of Things is Les mots et les choses, meaning Words and Things) are interwoven, and nature itself is given to knowledge by means of naming, which explains the importance in the classical episteme of the “well-made language.” However, the person speaking this language is absent from knowledge. Representation has no subject; it represents itself by means of the doubling relection of the picture. The concept of human nature exists, but only insofar as it assures the connection between imagination and resemblances in the order of representation (EOT, 71). Human nature is nothing but a “fold of representation over itself”; it is somehow entangled with the nature of things. In the modern episteme in contrast, man is detached from the great continuum of nature by assuming a speciic location: he is a being whose nature “would be to know nature and himself consequently as a natural being” (EOT, 310). Modern man no longer belongs to the same regime as the other natural beings since he is supposed to know an objective nature that is over and against him. The development of modern European science irst produced the distinction between humanity as subjects of knowledge and agents of the transformation of things and animals and vegetables, which are objects of a knowledge that must reveal the system of the necessary causes of their interrelation. All of modern science will try to explicate the laws of this “objective” nature (Hadot 2004). But this schema is complicated by the Kantian redeinition of nature as a system of laws based on the categories of human understanding and by the appearance of anthropology, the speciic knowledge of humanity, which appears as the subject and object of knowledge, this “strange empirico-transcendental doublet” (EOT, 318). Thus, modern philosophy will look for the key to all knowledge in an empirical knowledge of human nature, although this nature is itself only a particular coniguration of modern knowledge. It is this confusion that Foucault denounces through the phrase “the anthropological slumber”: “What Kant had ambiguously designated as ‘natural’ in that emergence [of the transcendental] had been forgotten as a fundamental form of the relationship to the object and resurrected as the ‘nature’ in human nature” (EIKA, 122).
In the works from the 1970s, Foucault pursues and radicalizes his historicization of the notion of “human nature.” When he presented Foucault’s candidacy for the Collège de France, Jules Vuillemin spoke of a history of systems of thought “without any human nature” (Eribon 1991, 218). In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault describes a model of history that “will leave nothing below the self”: historical conigurations replace the nature, the life and the body, for whom modern science describes the immutable biological and physiological laws. Genealogy “must expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of
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the body” (EEW2, 376). In an analogous way, the genetics of populations shows that we must not look for “raw and deinitive biological facts which, from the bottom of ‘nature,’ would impose themselves on history”; rather we must think of the “interference” between the movements of life and the process of history (FDE3, 97). The principle that Foucault reappropriated in his historical analysis of modern biopolitics is reasserted in the inal pages of volume one of The History of Sexuality: “[W]hat is needed is to make [the body] visible through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another ..., but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective” (EHS1, 152).
Thus the question of human nature is henceforth problematized within the framework of a historical analysis of practical conigurations in which it is presented at the same time as penetrable by a technology of power and as a support for and external limit of human action over its own life (since humans are living beings). In its dual version of being disciplinary and regulatory, biopower manifests this ambiguity of the discourse of human nature. The norm, introduced at once by the human sciences and the disciplinary apparatus, is a “mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution” (EDP, 304). In effect, the norm deines the way one belongs to a society by means of conformity to a nature: “The discourse of disciplines is about a rule: not a juridical rule derived from sovereignty, but a discourse about a natural rule, or in other words a norm” (ECF-SMD, 38). Nevertheless, the norm ascertains and prescribes a “natural” state of things: “[T]he norm is not at all deined as a natural law, but rather by the exacting and coercive role it can play in the domains in which it is applied. The norm, consequently, lays claim to power” (ECF-AB, 50). Therefore, the “natural” norm must be understood as a cultural construction that acquires its meaning only within a political technology, a technology directed at human “life” by establishing regularities of conduct imposed by disciplines as the truth of nature. The “human monster,” “the natural form of counter-nature,” incarnates the negative exception of this paradoxical political order for which human nature is both the model and the target. Excluded from the “authentic nature” of the man who enters into the social contract and is social, the human monster can be the object of a medical pathology (ECF-AB, 54–55). This intertwining of the juridical and the biological is the basis for the pathologization of criminal conduct. The juridico-penal knowledge of the infraction of the law is penetrated by a pathology of criminal conduct referring guilt to illness and illness to the disorder of the individual conduct. The “nature” of the dangerous individual (that is, a virtuality of criminal acts) becomes the true support of the crime and what allows one to decide the punishment for the act (EEW3, 187). The body of the “counter-nature” individual threatens society by provoking the degeneration of the entire species.
The construction of the concept of “human nature” is also analyzed within the framework of the birth of liberalism, understood as the technology of government
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that is directed at a population. From this viewpoint, liberalism itself is a certain kind of naturalism, for it must respect the “nature” of the objects being governed while intervening continually in them. If for the theoreticians of natural law nature designates immutable characteristics that the governors must absolutely respect, “nature” then becomes “something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality.... It is the other face of something whose face is visible, visible for the governors, in their own action” (ECF-BBIO, 16). To act politically means, for the irst liberals, to recognize the intimate correlation of the “physical order” and the “moral order” in order to adapt human action to natural reality (ECF-STP, 47). A population, as a set of individuals living in a territory, is the image of this “penetrable naturalness” that must be managed, while respecting its laws and mechanisms, by concerted interventions on the milieu, the architecture, the food, the mores, and so forth. The “nature” of the population is “such that the sovereign must deploy relected procedures of government within this nature, with the help of it, and with regard to it” (ECF-STP, 75). But here “nature” is not a sort of primitive, biological domain or a simple ideological product. It is constructed in the constant transition between the actions of the governors and those of the governed. Foucault shows inally that this “human nature” is less a “substrate,” less an order that precedes human actions, than a form of relation between humans. It is the permanent correlate of an action through which they construct their political reality.
In the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault underscores several times the importance of the concepts of “nature” and “counter-nature” in the deinition of a moral code concerning the rules of sexual conduct and, more generally, the rules of a dietetics in Greek and Roman antiquity. Between the “moral code” and the development of a nonuniversalist ethics of individual conduct, the concept of “nature” plays a particular role for the philosopher, who, according to different schools, must either make his behavior conform to nature or must know nature in order to modify his behavior (EHS3, 35). Let us emphasize, however, that here the concepts of “nature,” “counter-nature,” and “human nature” do not have the same meaning as in modernity. More than evoking a biological necessity, the object of a “knowledge,” they express the system of the permitted and the forbidden, the distinction between moderation and immoderation, or still the difference between man and woman (EHS2, 44, 159). Thus, “the opposition between the knowledge of things and knowledge of oneself can in no way be interpreted, in the Epicureans as well as in the Cynics, as the opposition between the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of the human being” (ECF-HOS, 243, translation modiied). Knowledge does not concern the “self” insofar as it is the object of a true discourse. The knowledge of things as “truths of nature” must be coordinated with an “art of living” that allows the being of the subject to be modiied. In the Epicureans, the knowledge of physis lets humans liberate themselves from worries and fears that paralyze their free existence. For the Stoics, the “vision that plunges into” the things of nature is irst
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a spiritual exercise by which the philosopher relativizes the importance of wealth, pleasures, and glory, and thereby he grasps his place in a universe ruled by rational laws (ECF-HOS, 271–279). In contrast, the Cynics completely overturn the theme of natural existence by transforming it into the scandal of a life that is lived entirely in public: “[N]o human prescription may be accepted in the Cynic life if it does not conform exactly to what is found in nature and in nature alone” (ECF-COT, 263). The exaltation of the naturalness of “right life” results in the positive evaluation of animality. Animality is no longer the point of absolute differentiation in relation to the human. It becomes a model of behavior, a challenge to face perpetually, an exercise that must lead to the manifestation of the truth directly in one’s own existence.
Does this reevaluation of the animality and of the “naturalness” of existence coincide with the reevaluation of a “nature-body”? Does it assure the overcoming of a dualism between a “hedonist vitalism” that, still in volume one of The History of Sexuality, is based on bodies and pleasures, and a “historicist constructivism” within which sexuality “would be entirely constituted” (Haber 2006)? In fact, Foucault does not seek to overcome the opposition between nature and history by adopting one term over and against the other. Rather, he tries to deconstruct the opposition historically by showing that it depends on cultural codes that have been historically formed. In Foucault, therefore, there is no “historicist” phase, then a “naturalist” phase. There is a permanent work of historicization showing the strategic functions of the concept of “nature” within several cultures.
It is in this sense that we can understand the 1971 debate that pits Noam Chomsky against Foucault (EFC, 133–198). According to Chomsky, the concept of “human nature” designates innate organizing principles in each human being, principles that determine his social and individual behavior. This “nature” can be redirected by an inventiveness and creativity that function by the same rules. The most important philosophical task then consists in reconstituting the connection between a concept of human nature that acknowledges the freedom and creativity of humanity and a humanitarian social theory. For Chomsky, the establishment of a solid concept of human nature could be the basis of a political action following a “true” notion of justice. In contrast, according to Foucault, “human nature” is not a scientiic concept but an “epistemological indicator,” an organizing concept that designates the space in which the discourses on man are lodged. Thus, Foucault does not think that the principle of regularities detected by the human sciences deines the mind or human nature. The notions of human nature, of the realization of the human essence, and of justice are created within our civilization, by our system of power/knowledge. It is impossible to ground a revolutionary political action on those notions, for they are formed in a politico-scientiic complex and what is precisely at issue is to overcome that complex. The task for political struggle is not to turn humanity into an object of knowledge so that it becomes the subject of its own freedom (FDE1, 663). The struggle responds solely to the will to take power.