Добавил:

Ravochking Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.

Вуз:

Кузбасский государственный технический университет

Предмет:

[НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]

Файл:

The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

.pdf

Скачиваний:

127

Добавлен:

29.10.2019

Размер:

8.36 Mб

Скачать

☆

<<< < Предыдущая 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 4041 / 7641 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 > Следующая >>>

384 / Judith Revel

to which Foucault will be strongly opposed while he is involved with the GIP. But, at the same time, there is always freedom, even where the power relations seem the most saturated and the most conining. The coupling – in the oppositional mode – between power and liberation therefore becomes the ternary and open structure of power/strategies of liberation/practices of freedom. This in fact opens Foucault’s political relection to another part of his investigations, which will be ethics.

The third consequence, inally, bears on the very nature of the relation between power relations and phenomena of resistance that Foucault evokes. We have already seen their reciprocal (logical) implication and their reciprocal (political) incitation. The theoretical danger – and Foucault is immediately aware of this danger – is that this reciprocal referential structure opens out onto a purely dialectical conception of the relation between power and resistance. Undoubtedly, this explains why Foucault never uses the term “counter-power.” It also explains why the term “counter-conduct” is only used briely and then is rapidly abandoned. If resistance is limited to being only an other of power (that is, in its own way, another power), and if, inversely, all power survives only because it is applied to liberties, this “perpetual reversal” is, literally, a dialectical circle (EEW3, 346). This is why it is necessary to insert, within the structure that connects the two terms and that renders them indissociable from one another, an element of radical dissymmetry.

This element, which is going to allow Foucault to assert what he will call “the intransitivity of freedom,” is of a qualitative nature. It summons a decisive notion, that of production. If we start in fact from Foucault’s deinition of power understood as “action on the action of humans,” the essence of power is of a managerial nature. What is at issue is to inlect, correct, and proitably administer conduct and therefore govern it. Power is applied; it reacts to freedom and governs it. It creates nothing in the strict sense. In contrast, freedom is translated – including when it appears right within the mesh of power – by what Foucault identiies as an irreducible capacity to invent, to inaugurate, and to experiment in relation to itself and in relation to others. In Foucault’s thought, freedom is the name of this abundant, permanent production to which the reproductive, secondary, and managerial essence of power is applied. The difference is therefore of an ontological nature. Even if power and freedom cannot be thought of in separation, nothing indicates that they are equivalent – because freedom alone is capable of inventing the world. It is this dissymmetry that even though it cannot entertain the idea of a total exteriority from the relations of power allows paradoxically for its intransitivity.

And, in fact, the word “production” (of subjectivity, of ways of life, etc.), once it is uprooted from the sole register of economic production (which is in reality the register of re-production of merchandise), will be placed by Foucault at the center of the ethical analyses that, in the last years of his work, will bear on the historical ways in which these “practices of freedom” appear. The ethical stake par excellence, to produce oneself, is in reality the primary political gesture – insofar as this invention

POWER / 385

unmasks the incapacity of power to be something other than the secondary, although inevitable, management of the ontological potency of subjectivities. It is in this sense that “ethics is the relective form that freedom takes” (EEW1, 284). From this viewpoint, the analytic of powers is a propaedeutic to the ethics, and, inversely, the ethics is the inevitable extension of the political interrogation of the reciprocal implication of power and freedom.

Judith Revel

Suggested Reading

Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Revel, Judith. 2010. Foucault, une pensée du discontinu. Paris: Fayard.

PRAC TICE

“Practice” is a key term for Foucauldians. One must be careful not to immediately equate Foucault’s focus on practices with some form of pragmatism or action theory. Instead, we must treat “practice” as a metaphys-

ical term, a word that expresses what there is in the world. Thus, “practice” is not to be immediately understood as the opposite of “theory.” As Gilles Deleuze says in his conversation with Foucault published as “Intellectuals and Power,” “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another” (ELCP, 206). What this means is that “theory” and “practice” are relative terms to each other: theory is a kind of practice (namely, the practice of evaluating practices) and practice is what follows from theory (namely, practices are the effects produced from arrangements of power/knowledge). In other words, we theorize because of practices, and there are practices because knowledge is not an inert, disinterested enterprise.

If one were to perform an ontological assay of Foucault’s philosophy, some would argue that everything that is would fall into three categories: statements, forces, and selves. Each of these ontological categories corresponds to a particular method of Foucauldian analysis: archaeology, “a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge”; genealogy, “a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a ield of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others”; and ethics, “a historical ontology ...

through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents” (EEW1, 262). Although the metaphysical categories might be treated as distinct, Foucault’s thought development suggests that his methodology became more and more uniied over time. At irst, in the archaeological period, the focus was on statements. As Foucault started adding nondiscursive forces into this purview, archaeology morphed into genealogy. Finally, toward the end of his life, Foucault moved past the power-knowledge dualism of his previous works and turned to what kinds of subjectivity are possible given

386

PRACTICE / 387

one’s place in the overall constellation of power and knowledge. Thus, even as the ontological categories increased, the methods for analysis did not. One reason for the continual methodological evolution of Foucault’s thought, I argue, is Foucault’s constant interest in analyzing practices.

Regardless of whether Foucault is doing archaeology, genealogy, or ethics (“problematization”), the “objects” of research are always practices. What are practices? We ask about practices in the plural because there are always many practices working together at any moment, the pinpointing of one of which is to abstract a practice from its overall constellation of practices. Foucault tells us in “Questions of Method” that practices are “places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and intersect” (EEW3, 225). Thomas Flynn writes that a practice, imagined by itself, is “a preconceptual, anonymous, socially sanctioned body of rules that govern one’s manner of perceiving, imagining, judging, and acting” (Flynn 2005, 34). Foucault’s theoretical task, then, is to strip otherwise plain historical affairs down to the practices that came to constitute the given scenario. What the practices will look like depends on the practices being analyzed and the Foucauldian method used to analyze them. Regardless of which method is used, however, Foucault seeks to ind two particular “effects” of the practice: “prescriptive effects regarding what is to be done (effects of ‘jurisdiction’) and codifying effects regarding what is to be known (effects of ‘veridiction’)” (EEW3, 225). In other words, practices determine both the way in which subjects will act and the truth claims those subjects can make. In Foucault’s later works, he will focus on how a given subject navigates between jurisdiction and veridiction by means of “games of truth” (cf. EFS and ECF-COT).

Foucault discusses the centrality of practices in his work in the pseudonymous essay “Michel Foucault.” There he tells the reader that his project, “a critical history of thought” (EEW2, 459), achieves its goals not by “proceeding upward to the constituent subject which is asked to account for every possible object of knowledge” but by “proceeding back down to the study of the concrete practices by which the subject is constituted in the immanence of a domain of knowledge” (EEW2, 462). By focusing on practices, on “what ‘was done’” (ibid.), one is able to break free from what Foucault calls “anthropological universals” such as madness, delinquency, and sexuality. This break from anthropological universals shows that Foucault is not interested in how people, individual and independent, begin to “practice” in particular ways. Instead, Foucault seeks to show how the practices themselves form people into the kinds of people who do certain things (jurisdiction) and hold certain things as true (veridiction). This focus on practices is how Foucault offers an alternative to the transcendental phenomenologist and the hermeneutist. Instead of constituting a transcendental, tradition-laden subject who then “looks at” states of affairs and interprets them, Foucault reconstitutes the very practices that made up both the “subject” and the “object” or state of affairs. As such, Foucault’s writings

388 / Brad Stone

are dry and impersonal: facts are presented, correlations made, and local examples given. There is no “spirit of its time” in Foucault’s work; his analysis is “grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary ... it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous inality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places” (EEW2, 369).

Having spoken of practices in general, we now move to the three main kinds of practices that Foucault analyzes: discursive practices, practices of power (also called dividing practices), and practices of the self. The study of discursive practices, although present in all of his works, corresponds to the archaeological method; similarly, and with the same disclaimer, dividing practices correspond to the genealogical method; and practices of the self correspond to the later works on problematization and ethics. I will discuss each kind of practice in turn.

Foucault states in The Archaeology of Knowledge that archaeology is a “task that consists of not – of no longer – treating discourse as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (EAK, 49). To treat discourse as a set of practices is to describe discursive practices. Foucault writes in his summary of the lecture course “The Will to Knowledge” that discursive practices “are characterized by the demarcation of a ield of objects, by the deinition of a legitimate perspective for a subject of knowledge, by the setting of norms for elaborating concepts and theories” (EEW1, 11). This deinition corresponds to Foucault’s description of “discursive formations” in The Archaeology of Knowledge: discursive objects, enunciative modalities, concepts, and strategies. For example, when Foucault analyzes madness, he is not interested in giving a commentary or to decipher old documents to igure out “what they meant.” He instead focuses on “what they said,” the very statements made. We can deine discursive practices as those practices that serve as the conditions for the possibility of statements. Consider a “madman.” It is not the case that there were (irst) “madmen,” therefore bringing about a discourse on “madness.” Foucault argues that “madness” (the idea of madness) comes irst, thus classifying certain people as “madmen.” This is, according to Foucault, the case for every object of scientiic discourse: the science (the connaissance) comes irst. After this discursive practice takes place, another practice, the determination of discursive objects, occurs. Therefore, one cannot speak of “madmen” independently of the discourse of madness. It is the discourse, not the “madmen” per se, that Foucault seeks to study. It is worth noting that one cannot look at discursive objects without also incorporating enunciative modalities (who gets to speak scientiically about madness?), concepts (the notion of “sanity,” for example), and strategies (the need to eliminate threats to societal order). All of these “activities” are the “practices” that Foucault studies when doing archaeology.

Genealogy, Foucault’s second phase, deals with dividing practices or practices of power. Johanna Oksala states that these “are practices of manipulation and examination that classify, locate and shape bodies in the social ield” (Oksala 2005, 3).

PRACTICE / 389

One type of dividing practice is “disciplinary practice.” Disciplinary practices are described in great detail in Discipline and Punish. First, there are the practices that create “docile bodies” by means of the spatial arrangement of individuals (distribution), the control of activity, the organization of genera, and the composition of forces. These disciplinary practices create individuals that can be arranged, trained, and organized into machine-like groups. The arrangement, training, and organization of individuals is brought about by means of correct training. How docile bodies are trained also constitutes disciplinary practices: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination.

There are also dividing practices that affect the entire population and not just individual bodies. These are called “biopolitical practices,” which deal with “a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on” (ECF-SMD, 242–243). This kind of practice includes the practices of government (including pastoral power), health codes, statistics, normalizing practices, and economic policies. Sexuality serves as a practice that straddles disciplinary and biopolitical spheres. It is disciplinary insofar as one’s sexuality is monitored and “trained”; it is biopolitical insofar as sexuality affects birth rates and infection rates (in the case of sexually transmitted diseases). Race similarly works between both ields, primarily owing to the role of sexuality in Foucault’s account of race.

In the genealogical works, practices seem more obvious given the work required to produce docile bodies and optimal populations. Of course, one can see a parallel between the words “practice” and “training.” Practices are commonly referred to when describing an apparatus (dispositif ) of power, so much so that Giorgio Agamben deines an apparatus directly as a “set of practices and mechanisms” (Agamben 2009, 8), although Foucault himself never describes apparatuses in terms of practices, preferring instead to describe them in terms of relations and strategies of power/knowledge (cf. EPK, 196).

The third phase of the Foucauldian project deals with a third kind of practice: practices of the self. These practices involve “the way a human being turns himor herself into a subject” (EEW3, 327). These practices differ from discursive practices, which objectify human beings as objects of science (archaeology); they also differ from dividing practices, which objectify human beings in terms of power arrangements (genealogy). The practices of the self are subjectifying; they “permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves” (EEW1, 225). These practices are covered in Foucault’s works from the 1980s prior to his death. Drawing primarily from Hellenic schools such as the Stoics and Cynics, Foucault analyzes a variety of ancient practices of the self and wonders what our current possibilities are for self-creation. There are four main

390 / Brad Stone

kinds of practices of the self that Foucault analyzes in his readings of the Hellenic thinkers: ascetic practices, self-examination (contrasted with disciplinary examination), the interpretation of dreams (oneirocriticism), and self-writing. Foucault also focused on the practices of the self that were revealed by the Enlightenment movement, which for our purposes we will call “practices of freedom” (namely truthtelling and philosophical critique). It is worth noting that the practices of the self seem more like “practice” in the sense of rehearsing and preparing, compared to the other kinds of practices, in which one is subjected instead of subjectifying.

Thus, regardless of which Foucauldian technique one uses, one is studying practices. One could say that for Foucault everything is the result of practices. It is practices all the way down. There are practices and counterpractices; nothing is simply “there” that becomes the “victim” of practices: even these “victims” are themselves a set of practices. To use an example from the irst volume of The History of Sexuality, there is no such thing as “homosexuals” who became discriminated against because of a heterosexist coniguration of power; the very heterosexist coniguration produces both “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals.” Similarly, the division of people into different races did not become “racist” one day; the very division of people into different races is the racism. This is why Foucault describes power as being everywhere: practices go all the way down. Foucault tells us that power requires resistance (EHS1, 95). This is true because any practice has to maneuver around other practices. Similarly, when one “ights the power,” one is simply enacting counterpractices to standing practices. These counterpractices, however, are nonetheless practices.

Unfortunately, other than the deinition of “practice” given by Foucault in “Questions of Method,” there are no other abstract deinitions in the other works. There are lots of practices analyzed in Foucault’s works, far too many to list here. However, I think we can conclude with some claims about practices, regardless of whether Foucault explicitly names them in his interviews and writings:

1. Everything of Foucauldian interest results from practices. In order to do any

Foucauldian analysis on a given state of affairs, practices must be available for analysis. One way to test if someone is being suficiently Foucauldian would be to explore whether the subject matter analyzed has been investigated as a practice instead of as a priori givens.

2. Practices connect discourse, power, and subjectivity. Given that one cannot cleanly separate archaeological, genealogical, and ethical aspects of a practice, there is something in the very practices themselves that crosses all three axes of Foucauldian interest.

3. Every practice is connected to a problematization. There is no practice independent of a greater problematization to which it responds. Of course, these problematizations are themselves the result of practices. Another way to say this is that every practice has a history, and the goal of genealogy is to produce that history.

PRACTICE / 391

4. For every practice, there could be a counterpractice. This is why the practices of freedom are so important. Philosophical critique explores which counterpractices might be possible in our ever-continuing quest to resist the domination of particular practices.

5. Practices themselves are neither “positive” nor “negative,” although they are all dangerous. Practices – even those that we might like – must be scrutinized and analyzed to determine how power operates through them. Foucault states in his interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus that “everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (EEW1, 256).

6. There are a i nite number of practices at any given time. Our clue comes from The Archaeology of Knowledge’s claim that there is a rarity of statements. Given the inite number of discursive practices inside of an episteme, I conjecture that there is also a rarity in nondiscursive practices. Since power is always local and from the “ground up,” there are only so many ways to move with power, so many ways to transgress in a given scenario, so many ways to make oneself, so many ways to critique, and so on.

Brad Stone