The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

REASON / 425

methods and correctness criteria. Regarding his own interests, he focuses on communal or collective modes of reason, primarily historical, political, public, and scientiic ones. These modes are, respectively, reckoning and justiicatory practices in historical organization and narration; in political end-directed and validating activities; in social problem-solving and norm-setting practices; and in the structuring and doing of science.

The key question regarding Foucault’s understanding of reason is whether his historicization of reason means he rejects what I will call “basic” reason as a capacity, as essentially different from and as underlying historically or contextually conditioned practical reason. What is at issue is the traditionally fundamental conception of basic reason as the capacity to discern truth/accuracy and to gauge effectiveness and productivity in diverse circumstances, a capacity minimally characterized by disposition to relectively or unrelectively accept and apply what are considered the unconditional standards of rational thought: the law of noncontradiction, the principle of identity, and the law of excluded middle.

Whether Foucault countenances basic reason, even if he ignores it, or historicizes it, is a matter of major importance because if historicized, basic reason ceases to be universal and can no longer deine rational entities or designate a capacity that might be shared by human and nonhuman intelligent beings. More speciically, if basic reason is historicized and does not transcend contextually conditioned reckoning as the capacity exercised in such reckoning, then reason would be no more – though no less – than collections of temporally and contextually developed goal-attainment and validation procedures; procedures wrongly promoted by philosophers to the status of an ahistoric universal that human beings supposedly instantiate. If Foucault does historicize basic reason, as he seems to do, if he understands reason to be exhausted by modes of conditioned reckoning, then what most consider the grounds of rational thought and action ultimately dissolve into so many more consequences of power relations and, as he often insists, power and knowledge are indeed of a piece.

Additionally, if Foucault does historicize basic reason and makes reason entirely contingent on particular contextual and temporal circumstances and activities, reason cannot be universal and historical modes of reason or what we might call reckoning practices can be shared by different groups, and more so by different species, only by sheer coincidence. Historicization of basic reason, therefore, would effectively make the concept of a rational entity vacuous and in effect replace it with the unproductively inclusive concept of a goal-directed entity.

Despite occasional remarks apparently at odds with a historicist view of reason, the textual evidence is all but conclusive that Foucault does historicize basic reason and that he does not acknowledge the philosophical concept of basic reason as having a referent, rejecting the concept as a manufactured one. In The History of Madness,

Foucault implicitly introduces his historicist understanding by detailing how reason

426 / C. G. Prado

was conceived in the “classical” and modern periods and the isolation of the insane in asylums, and he uses madness to explore how the contemporary language of reason developed partly through efforts to redeine and stigmatize madness or “unreason” as the new leprosy in order to better control it (EHM, 46–47, 102, 109, 138–140, 242–243). But it is later, in “What Is Enlightenment?” where he responds to Kant’s view of enlightenment, that Foucault states in a key passage that the investigation of the limits of knowledge (i.e., the critique of reason) “is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects” (EFR, 45–46, 32–50).

This rejection of “formal structures” is historicization of Kant’s a priori and thus is, in effect, rethinking the categories of understanding as historically contingent. This rethinking is a irm closing off of conceptual room for reason as a universal and so it is a preclusion of ahistorical or transhistorical basic reason (EFR, 36, 38, 49–50). Foucault’s rethinking is also clear in his response to a question about how Kant’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason inluenced German thought and whether in his own work he offers “another fuller version of reason.” Foucault implicitly concurs that he does, answering: “I do not believe in a kind of founding act whereby reason ... was discovered or established.” He adds that there was no event that constituted “the bifurcation of reason.” Instead there was an “abundance of branchings, ramiications, breaks and ruptures” (EPPC, 28–29). Additionally, Foucault asserts that examination of reason’s history reveals that rather than being some Platonic form in which we participate, reason “was born ... from chance” and that it was historical compilations of complex practices that “slowly forged the weapons of reason” (EFR, 78). Again, Foucault states “that reason is selfcreated” (EPPC, 28).

These assertions not only manifest Foucault’s historicist understanding of reason but also explain his methodology in the sense of showing why he “tried to analyze forms of rationality: different foundations, different creations, different modiications in which rationalities engender one another, oppose and pursue one another” (EPPC, 28–29). That is, contrary to philosophical tradition, Foucault thinks that instead of seeking to better understand and perfect our application of ahistorically conceived reason, we instead have to work at “isolating the form of rationality presented as dominant, and endowed with the status of the one-and-only reason, in order to show that it is only one possible form among others” (EPPC, 27). It is by isolating given rationalities as the dominant ones in particular epochs, and in problematizing those rationalities by exploring marginalized alternatives or proffering new alternatives, that Foucault dismantles perception of them as instantiating universal reason.

Foucault appreciates how his historicization of reason is rejected by many; he responds to such rejection by saying that “every critique of reason or every critical

REASON / 427

inquiry into the history of rationality” faces a kind of “blackmail.” The blackmail is that when the question of critiquing reason arises, “either you accept rationality or you fall prey to the irrational.” Foucault holds that many see critiques of what I am calling basic reason as “impossible” because those critiques require application of precisely what is being critiqued (EPPC, 27). It is notable that Foucault also uses the charge of blackmail with respect to consideration of the Enlightenment (EFR, 42–43) and that it was at the core of the dispute he had with Derrida that kept the two apart for a decade (EHM, 550–574).

The trouble here is that critiques of basic reason do seem to be impossible because basic reason is necessarily presupposed and employed in the conduct of any such critique. To see basic reason as open to critique is already to understand reason as historical, but as Hilary Putnam argues, temporally and contextually contingent principles, standards, and practices cannot determine what basic reason is because basic reason is itself operant in the interpretation of those principles, standards, and practices. For Putnam and like-minded philosophers, what I am calling basic reason is regulative and therefore is and must be independent of all historically diverse conventions and practices it regulates. It is precisely because basic reason is independent of our conventions and practices that it enables us to evaluate and critique all of our activities and institutions.

Foucault also is too quick with his charge of blackmail because neither Putnam nor those who share his views automatically reject critiques of particular historical modes of reason; for instance, as employed by alchemists or lat-earthers. Those who reject critiques of basic reason do not thereby charge critics of historical modes of reasoning with falling prey to irrationality. The blackmail charge looks fair to Foucault only because, by including basic reason in his historicization of reason, he is disallowing the distinction Putnam and others assume between basic reason and proper and improper applications of reason.

If there were only historical modes of reason, only temporally and contextually limited reckoning practices, precluding critiques of reason would be in fact privileging one set of reasoning or reckoning standards and casting all critiques of it as irrational, so in Foucault’s view Putnam and company are defending a dominant rationality rather than basic reason. Unlike Putnam and most philosophers who conceive of us as rational entities and therefore as exponents of reason, Foucault conceives of us as makers of reason as we engage in the perpetual process of employing various end-achieving and justiicatory practices as well as knowingly and unknowingly – but purposefully – coloring and manipulating facts, intentions, and expectations in the course of achieving our goals. To this extent, and though their conceptions of reason vary importantly, Foucault and Hume agree that reason functions only to serve our “passions,” our arational and even irrational interests. For Foucault, then, rather than exercising a capacity in applying basic reason, we muddle through the myriad inluences, challenges, and obstructions that power relations and the physical world

428 / C. G. Prado

cascade on us and, in the process, bestow on our productive tactics and procedures the status of being the fruits of a transhistoric universal.

C. G. Prado

See Also

Archaeology

Language

Madness

Practice

Immanuel Kant

Suggested Reading

Braver, Lee. 2007. A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gutting, Gary, ed. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

May, Todd. 1993. Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster:.

Prado, C. G. 2000. Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO:

Westview Press.

430 / James Bernauer

of the death of man is the other side to Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death. Foucault’s thought is particularly open to the religious dimension of culture because it problematizes the identity of the secular person. The severe techniques he developed in his archaeological and genealogical practices were ways of breaking the spell humanism had placed on the modern vision. In doing so, Foucault reintroduced into the contemporary landscape of thought that negative theology that had “prowled the conines of Christianity” for a millennium (EEW2, 150). Although Foucault never elaborated on the analogy, he explicitly compared his own thought with negative theology, and his choice of the comparison is illuminating. It points irst of all to Foucault’s own experience of a fundamental personal conlict in his earlier intellectual interests as a “religious question” (ERC, 98). On the one hand, he was passionately involved in the new literary work of such writers as George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, which for him at the time displaced interest from a narrative of man to the being of language within which notions of the human are fashioned. On the other hand, Foucault said that he was attracted to the structuralist analysis carried out by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the historian of religion George Dumézil, both of whom dispersed human reality among cultural structures. That Foucault considers the religious problem as the common denominator for both interests indicates that all four thinkers, although in very different ways, unleashed styles of relection and forms of experience that overturned for him the modern identity of man. Foucault’s negative theology is a critique not of the conceptualizations employed for God but of that igure of human initude scattered in calendars of life, language, and labor. Is this religious sensibility not relected in his own customary refusal of identities? In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he spoke of his desire for anonymity:

I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. (EAK, 215)

This earlier search for anonymity found striking expressions. For example, Foucault says: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face” (EAK, 17). And in 1964 he compared the writer to the martyr: “Writing is now linked to sacriice and to the sacriice of life itself; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self”(ELCP, 117). The negative theology that characterized the asceticism of Foucault’s methods foreshadowed his mature conception of the philosophical life itself with its practices of spirituality. As Carrette has noted, the future of

Religion / 431

religion after Foucault is to deal with a terrain stripped of an ideal that is transcendent and normative. That emptiness is nevertheless an invitation for an embodied spirituality.

James Bernauer

See Also

Christianity

Literature

Outside

Practice

Revolution

Georges Bataille

Friedrich Nietzsche

Suggested Reading

Afary, Janet, and Kevin B. Anderson. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bernauer, James, and Jeremy Carrette, eds. 2004. Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Carrette, Jeremy. 2000. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality.

London: Routledge.

RESISTANCE / 433

This understanding of resistance as an effect of power, or as its self-subversion, has led commentators to conclude that the technologies of power that constitute forms of the subject are never completely successful. Judith Butler (Butler 1997, 93), for example, argues that for Foucault resistance inevitably appears in the course of subjectiication that exceeds the normalizing aims by which it is mobilized, or through convergence with other discursive regimes. This inadvertently produced discursive complexity undermines the teleological aims of normalization. Insofar as power always accidentally produces resistance, even the most disciplined subject can be engaged in it.

What still appears as a problem in Foucault’s account is how the subject is able to deliberately instigate resistance. For his critics, the main problem is not admitting that some strategies of power are too complex to always succeed and, inevitably, there will be failures. They would insist that these failures do not yet constitute resistance. Our idea of resistance implies an intentional strategy, a deliberate attempt to subvert power. On the basis of Foucault’s understanding of both power and the subject, it is not evident how the normalized subject, constituted by power, is capable of engaging in resistance and, furthermore, on what grounds such an attempt could be advocated or justiied.

Foucault’s late texts on power are important in this context. They should be read as a deliberate attempt to elaborate on his rudimentary account of resistance in volume one of The History of Sexuality and to answer the criticism that had been leveled against it.

In an interview given in 1984, shortly before his death, Foucault admitted that when he irst became interested in the problem of power, some of the concepts and ideas linked with it were poorly deined and unclear. It was only later that he acquired a clearer sense of the problem (EEW1, 299). He continues by distinguishing between power and domination. Although it is impossible to step out of the social ield structured by power relations, it is possible to effect changes in it. We can free subjects from states of domination – situations in which the subject is unable to overturn or reverse the power relation – and put them in a situation in which power relations are interchangeable, variable, and allow strategies for altering them. Foucault goes as far as to set this as an explicit aim:

I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible. (EEW1, 298)