The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
.pdf474 / Edward McGushin
the polis. Thus spirituality entailed multiple interconnected relationships of power and government – the government of the self by the spiritual director, the government of the self by her self, and the democratic government of other citizens in the political ield.
Foucault’s genealogies show that the spirituality of ancient philosophers was incorporated into Christianity and deeply transformed by this appropriation (see, for example, ECF-HOS, 10). Central to the development of Christianity was the formation of intense and permanent relationships of spiritual direction involving very precisely deined practices and forms of subjectivity. It is this effort at spiritual direction – the government of souls – that takes shape as the Christian pastorate, or what Foucault calls “pastoral power” (ECF-STP, 115-190). It is a ield of complex relationships of power and knowledge in which pastors govern the souls of the individual members of the lock. Pastoral power governed individuals in a way that was quite different from the simple enforcement of laws. The pastor did not wield power in the manner of a political sovereign who rules over subjects. Rather, pastors governed individuals through practices of spiritual direction geared toward the spiritual growth and salvation of the individual being directed. In other words, whereas sovereign power imposes the law on the anonymous totality of subjects, the pastor comes to know each individual intimately and customizes his efforts toward the speciic spiritual needs, temptations, habits, and traits of the individual. Pastoral power produced individualized knowledge of the thoughts, desires, and behaviors of individuals that it used to help guide individuals toward their own salvation. In pastoral power, the production of truth is central to the government of souls.
The growth of pastoral power gave rise to numerous forms of resistance. In other words, as individuals came to feel the increasing power of pastoral government in their lives and even in their own thoughts and desires, they revolted against it. But these revolts are not like the political revolutions that aim to overturn a sovereign or rewrite the law: “They are revolts of conduct” (ECF-STP, 196). They are what Foucault calls “counter-conducts” (ECF-STP, 201). They aim not to escape from government as such but rather to create other ways of governing oneself and others that run counter to the pastoral government of life. In other words, counter-conducts seek out a different way of practicing spirituality and spiritual direction, different forms of askesis, and different relationships to spiritual directors.
It is a crisis of conduct, then, that set the stage for Descartes and the rise of a modern era in which philosophy and science are detached from spirituality. “If Descartes’ philosophy is taken as the foundation of philosophy, we should also see it as the outcome of this great transformation that brought about the reappearance of philosophy in terms of the question: “How to conduct oneself’” (ECF-STP, 230)? In other words, Descartes’ philosophy can be seen as a form of counter-conduct insofar as it attempts to deine a form of the government of the self, the conduct of the mind,
Spirituality / 475
toward the truth. But Foucault notes that “the extraordinary thing in Descartes’ texts is that he succeeded in substituting a subject as founder of practices of knowledge for a subject constituted through practices of the self” (EEW1, 278). This brings us back to the point where we can see the rupture of philosophy and spirituality. In his effort to deine a form of self-government, a spiritual practice that will lead one to the truth, Descartes ends up displacing spirituality as the relationship of subjectivity and truth: “With Descartes, direct evidence is enough. After Descartes, we have a non-ascetic subject of knowledge” (EEW1, 279).
The implications of Foucault’s genealogy of spirituality for his diagnosis of our present actuality are profound. The most controversial aspect of these is apparent in Foucault’s reports from Iran during the period just before the overthrow of the Shah, about which Foucault wrote: “For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality?” (Afary and Anderson 2005, 209; FDE3, 694). This claim must be seen in light of Foucault’s analysis of spirituality as the transformative relationship between the subject and truth, and his genealogy of the rise and dispersal of Christian pastoral power. Since the time of Descartes and in the modern era, in which spirituality has been separated from the quest for truth in philosophy and science, the West has “forgotten” its own political spirituality. What fascinated Foucault about the Iranian Revolution was the way in which it was, he thought, a “revolt of conduct.” It suggested the possibility of a new coniguration of spirituality, a new form of the government of oneself and others. In other words, what made this revolution a political spirituality was not its commitment to Islamic doctrines so much as the way it gave expression to “the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up the true and the false – this is what I would call ‘political spirituality’” (EEW3, 233).
Foucault’s thought reminds us of the spiritual potential harbored in our literature, ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. He sought out revolts of conduct operating in the modern West – modern art and literature, prisoner rights movements, gay rights, women’s movements, and the Solidarity movement in Poland, to name a few. His genealogy of the relation between spirituality and philosophy suggested the possibility of a renewal of spirituality, and political spirituality, in our intellectual lives. This does not mean that he sought some sort of theocracy or faith-based politics. Nor does it mean that he was engaged in a retrieval of particular spiritual or political forms from the past. Rather it means that he was decidedly in favor of proliferating experiments in the transformation of subjectivity in order to gain access to the truth and to search for new forms of the connection between government (of self and others) and truth.
Edward McGushin
476 / Edward McGushin
See Also
Christianity
Conduct
Ethics
Revolution
Self
Truth
René Descartes
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.
Carrette, Jeremy. 2000. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality.
London: Routledge.
McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
81
STATE
For most of his career, Foucault said nothing in particular about the state.
He did not begin to relect on it until the mid-1970s. His interest in the concept intensiied in the late 1970s before again disappearing from view in the 1980s. In the short period of time that he wrote and spoke about the state, primarily in three courses at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1979, however, his relections developed signiicantly around his invention of the new concept of “governmentality”; that is, of variable “governmental rationalities,” discourses that shape
the state.
The lack of attention to the state before the mid-1970s is surprising inasmuch
as much of Foucault’s work before that point had already been political, from the
History of Madness in 1961 to Discipline and Punish in 1975. He dealt with political issues without thematizing the state as such, though of course he did not completely exclude the state, which would be all but impossible when discussing questions of public policy, as these works do (ECF-BBIO, 77). He neither ignored nor denied the existence of the state, nor refused to use its name, but he did not focus on it. Still, even this lack of thematization of the state was a relatively radical refusal, given a prevailing expectation that any political work had to address the question of the state. Foucault therefore deliberately chose to bracket the question. When he did come to address it, he did so in a way consonant with the earlier bracketing, by arguing that too much weight was given to the state in political theory and that this needed to be corrected by “cutting the head off the king.”
Beginning in 1976 with his lecture series “Society Must Be Defended” and the irst volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault put the state in its place, within the
framework of his radically novel account of power. Whereas earlier political theory had tended to see the state as the command center of social power relations, Foucault assigned power priority over the state, with the latter as “superstructural” in relation to the former (EPK, 151). For him, “the state is a codiication of multiple
477
478 / Mark Kelly
power relations which permit it to function” (FDE3, 151, my translation; cf. EPK, 122). Although the state may be an enormously important point for the organization of power relations (FDE2, 812), power relations preexisted the state and it is ultimately to them that we must turn to understand politics.
Foucault’s distinctive perspective means seeing the state, revolution, politics, and war as essentially the same, inasmuch as they are each different codiications of power relations. The obvious differences we see between war and peace are, for him, the products of the differential operations of power.
Foucault sees his position here as an outgrowth of a certain tendency in the history of the theory of the state. In Society Must Be Defended, he traces relection on
the state to a “historico-political discourse” that emerged once the state was established as such toward the end of the sixteenth century. The state had emerged via the expulsion of war to limit the state, ending the medieval situation in which the right of substate actors to use force was ended in favor of a state monopoly of violence (ECF-SMD, 49). A discourse then emerged, irst around the English Civil War, that argued that the state was not natural, as it had seemed before, but rather the tool for the domination of a class who had conquered the country as invaders centuries earlier, thus advocating the reopening of the concealed war and overthrow of that class (ECF-SMD, 50). Against this view emerged the view, most prominently exempliied by Thomas Hobbes, that the state mediates or subsumes the war that comes before, urging support for the state. Other accounts of the state followed. Around the French Revolution, a conception of the state as synonymous with the nation arose, identiied with Abbé Sieyès in particular, which Foucault (ECF-SMD, 219) sees as making a decisive break with all previous perspectives, including Rousseau’s supericially similar position. Thereafter, yet another perspective arises, which viewed conlict over state power as an attempt to produce a universal state (ECF-SMD, 225).
Foucault’s own perspective harks back to the oldest view of the state, as the product of a conlict that it does not reconcile, though his position is more complex than any earlier view: he does not see the conlict as between two groups, does not see any group as ever decisively capturing state power, and does not believe in the possibility of a universal state.
The different theories of the state have had powerful recursive effects, within a power-knowledge nexus, on the way politics was actually organized. This recursiv-
ity is at the heart of Foucault’s 1978 lecture series “Security, Territory, Population.” Society Must Be Defended effectively ends its account of the history of state in the
nineteenth century, with Foucault going on to study the actual constitution of the state after that point. Foucault’s next two years of Collège de France lectures (resuming after a hiatus in 1977) ill out this lacuna.
The explicit theme of the lectures of these two years is not so much the state as government. For Foucault, government is a very large area of discourse, encompass-
ing questions of personal conduct as well as statecraft, but here Foucault is in fact
STATE / 479
focused on government in the narrow sense; that is, the intersection of governmentality with the state, what he calls the “government of the state” (ECF-STP, 89). The
coincidence of government and state occurs initially through a theory of state that Foucault calls raison d’État. This term appears untranslated in the English version of
the lectures, though Foucault in his own lectures in English in the United States uses the phrase “reason of state” (EEW3, 406–407). This mode of governmental reason
took the state as the sole object of government, privileging it, making it synonymous with government or politics (ECF-STP, 287). Raison d’État for Foucault is the irst
self-conscious theoretization of the state form in history. It is more than a theory, however; it is a governmental rationality, which means it had a direct inluence on
the way the state was run in practice (see ECF-STP, 276–277). However, this does not mean that the state simply embodied the theory. Although raison d’État saw the
state as all-powerful, it could not make the state be all-powerful. It could only serve
to increase the state's prominence relatively. There were contrary tendencies, in practice and in theory. In particular, raison d’État could be said to have generated its
opposite, an eschatological revolutionary discourse that posited the complete disappearance of the state as its goal (ECF-STP, 356).
This way of thinking, though diametrically opposed to raison d’État, nevertheless for Foucault belongs to the same general conception of the state by according it much more importance than it should have. Here we see an instance of the overvaluation of the state that Foucault elsewhere calls “state-phobia” (ECF-BBIO, 76). He coined this phrase in relation to twentieth-century thought, but it was clearly already present in the nineteenth century. Foucault sees state-phobia as taking two forms. Most obviously, it takes the form of viewing the state as a “cold monster” (a phrase of Nietzsche’s that Foucault invokes here), which is anarchist in its implication that the state is generically evil. More subtly, there is a discourse that reduces the state to certain speciic functions. As Foucault notes, it is not obvious how such a view overvalues the state, since it sees the power of the state as distinctly limited. However, it does view the state as the crucial point in the power structure, the point both to be attacked and to be won in politics. This position is surely supposed to represent Marxism. Against all forms of overvaluation of the state, Foucault argues that “the state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think” (ECF-STP, 109).
Is not Foucault himself state-phobic in making such remarks? Not in the sense he means. Throughout his career, he is consistently hostile to the use of the notion of the state as a central concept in political theory, and what he calls state-phobia is part of the overvaluation he opposes. For Foucault, to hate the state is a mistake, if only because it makes the state more important than it is in reality.
480 / Mark Kelly
Relatedly, Foucault holds that it is not the étatisation (literally “state-isation”) of society that is the political problem in relation to the state today, “so much as
what I would call the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (ECF-STP, 109). It is not that Foucault thinks that étatisation has never been a problem – at least, he clearly claims in The Will to Knowledge that Nazism was an “unlimited étatisation” (FHS1,
197; cf. EHS1, 150), albeit one that served as a cover for what was going on in terms of micropowers (cf. ECF-BBIO, 77). Rather, he simply does not think that this is the current problem. Instead, the contemporary situation is marked by an opposite tendency, the hegemony of a state-phobic governmentality, which is the subject of his next series of lectures, 1979’s “The Birth of Biopolitics.” This governmentality is
neoliberalism.
Foucault argues that raison d’État’s focus on the state made the state autonomous but that other governmentalities can produce different state forms (ECF-BBIO, 6). In liberalism, the state is justiied solely by reference to its function of ensuring the freedoms of subjects outside the state, in civil society. The state is seen as a potential danger to these freedoms, requiring restriction. In neoliberalism, this vision acquires a particularly economic complexion: the state is justiied only to the extent that it helps an economy of private enterprise without impinging on it. Liberalism produces no theory of the state, only of government, argues Foucault (ECF-BBIO, 91).
Foucault suggests a three-stage account of historical state forms: irst the feu-
dal, sovereign state, followed by the administrative, disciplinary state, and then more recently the governmental state (ECF-STP, 110). Raison d’État is associated
with the second of these stages, which Foucault also refers to as the “police state.” Neoliberalism must be identiied with the third. That the state today is for Foucault peculiarly “governmental” does not, however, imply that he thinks that government is unique to this form of state. Rather, he thinks that the state today has been peculiarly “governmentalized,” that this governmentalization is essential to the state today, and indeed “has allowed the state to survive” (ECF-STP, 109). The reason government has been crucial to the survival of the state is that it straddles the boundary between the state and its outside, thus providing the means for the adjustment of the state in relation to external pressures. However, this is a matter only of a growth in prominence of government in relation to the state form: government is older than the state; “the state is an episode in Governmentality” (ECF-STP, 248). Indeed, the state is founded on government: the state as a concept is distinctive of “governmental reason” (ECF-STP, 286).
A point of dificulty and possible confusion here is how to link this description of the state back to the diagnosis of contemporary “biopolitics” in Society Must Be Defended. Foucault characterizes contemporary states as concerned with the “bioreg-
ulation” of populations (ECF-SMD, 250). He names the mechanism by which the life protected by biopolitics is differentiated from that which can be killed or allowed
STATE / 481
to die “state racism,” referring it explicitly to the state (ECF-SMD, 256). The reason that this is “state” racism, one can surmise, is that the state has a decisive role in relation both to the regulation of populations and to the use of force. Biopolitics ultimately, however, is rather indifferent to the division between the state and its outside, though it obviously requires some form of state. It is not a governmentality, and for Foucault it is instantiated in forms as diverse as Nazism and neoliberalism. Governmentality is, however, crucial to it, as the means of coordinating biopolitics across the boundary of the state, whether by focusing on the state or seeking to limit it.
Mark Kelly
See Also
Biopolitics
Governmentality
Power
Resistance
Suggested Reading
Jessop, Robert. 2006. “From Micro-powers to Governmentality: Foucault’s Work on Statehood, State Formation, Statecraft and State Power,” Political Geography 26, no. 1:
34–40.
82
STATEMENT
In THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, the statement initially appears as the basic, irreducible element that constitutes discourses, just as the atom is the basic unit that comprises all molecules: “At irst sight, the statement appears as an ultimate, undecomposable element that can be isolated and introduced into a set of relations with other similar elements ... [t]he atom of discourse” (EAK, 80). (Foucault’s use of an analogy to physics here is worth noting because he will use similar analogies in his later analyses of power relations.) However, Foucault explains, this atomic analogy is not entirely correct: although groups of statements do constitute discourses, the statement is not so much an element or unit as a function, which he terms the “enunciative function.” Foucault observes, in a passage giving his most
succinct deinition of the statement, that:
I could not deine the statement as a unit of a linguistic type (superior to the phenomenon of the word, inferior to the text); but that I was dealing with an enunciative function that involved various units (these may sometimes be sentences, sometimes propositions; but they are sometimes made up of fragments of sentences, series or tables of signs, a set of propositions or equivalent formulations); and, instead of giving a “meaning” to these units, this function relates them to a ield of objects; instead of providing them with a subject, it opens up for them a number of possible subjective positions; instead of ixing their limits, it places them in a domain of coordination and coexistence; instead of determining their identity, it places them in a space in which they are used and repeated. In short, what has been discovered is not the atomic statement ... but the operational ield of the enunciative function and the conditions according to which it reveals various units. (EAK, 106)
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STATEMENT / 483
Foucault arrives at this deinition irst by distinguishing the statement from a series of similar phenomena (propositions in logic, sentences in language, and speech acts in analytical philosophy). He then identiies a number of the statement’s characteristics, each again distinguished from a misunderstanding (which are noted in the series of “instead of” phrases in the preceding quotation). This procedure allows him to deine the statement as an “enunciative function” that constitutes discourses and can be analyzed with “archaeological” methods.
Although there are similarities and overlaps between these various concepts, a statement cannot be simply deined as or reduced to a proposition, a sentence, or a speech act. In the irst case, there may be multiple different statements – which are situated in different discursive groupings or discourses – which express only one proposition. For example, the statements “No one heard” and “It is true that no one heard” express only one proposition but are not equivalent. In a novel, the former could be “an observation made either by the author, or by a character,” but the latter “can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior dialogue” (EAK, 81). These two statements, in other words, have different enunciative characteristics, even if they are logically equivalent. Nor can statements be equated to sentences. Although ungrammatical statements like “Of course!” or “Hey, you!” can legitimately and correctly be called sentences, there are other statements that simply cannot be so described. Conjugation tables (such as, in a Latin textbook, “amo, amas, amat”), for example, are not sentences but are most deinitely statements (EAK, 82). Finally, statements are not reducible to speech acts either. To give but one example, some speech acts require multiple statements to be effective. The act of becoming engaged to be married requires both a proposal and an acceptance – two quite distinct statements. Foucault explains: “When one wishes to individualize statements, one cannot therefore accept unreservedly any of the models borrowed from grammar, logic, or ‘analysis.’ . . . Although the statement sometimes takes on the forms described and adjusts itself to them exactly, it does not always do so” (EAK, 84).
The next step toward a deinition of the statement is to bring out certain characteristics by contrasting them with common misconceptions. Foucault enumerates four such contrasts in the preceding deinition. First, “instead of giving a ‘meaning’ to these units, this function relates them to a ield of objects” (EAK, 106). Statements are correlated to a ield of objects, but (following the distinctions just made) not as names are correlated with their designees, propositions with referents, or sentences with meanings: “It is linked rather to a ‘referential’ that is made up not of ‘things’, ‘facts’, ‘realities’, or ‘beings’, but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are afirmed or denied in it” (EAK, 91). That is, statements’ referentials deine “the possibilities of appearance and delimitation of that which gives meaning to the