The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

THE VISIBLE / 535

system of reference. During the Renaissance, there was no difference in nature between words and things: “[L]anguage and the gaze intersect to ininity” (EOT, 39, translation modiied). The classical episteme established a speciic form of the visibilities of things by means of representation, whereas the modern episteme will anchor representation in the igure of man, the “gazed upon spectator” whose task is to know himself as well as nature, which stands over and against him. Obviously, Foucault’s concept of “regimes of visibility” is situated in opposition to the phenomenological tradition, and in particular to Merleau-Ponty, insofar as Merleau-Ponty wanted to rediscover, by means of a perception freed from the weight of the intelligible, “the conceptless language of things.”

This critique of phenomenology is, however, tempered by the third great principle structuring Foucault’s conception of the visible: the coimplication between the visible and the invisible. Whereas to Merleau-Ponty incarnate vision assumes the chiasmic interweaving between the visible and the invisible, the reversibility between the one who sees and the one who is seen, in Foucault the invisible is a visible that is so close that we do not see it. The visible and the invisible are “of the same material and of the same indivisible substance. Its invisibility, the visible has it only because it is purely and simply visible” (EDL, 104–105, translation modiied). The task of philosophy will consist precisely in showing what is invisible on the basis of the very fact of its extreme visibility, “to render visible what is invisible only because it is too much at the surface of things” (FDE3, 540, my translation). Moreover, despite the fact that Foucault has never valorized an ontology of vision (as Martin Jay has argued), some (such as Stefano Catucci) have called his thought “pictural” not only because of the strategic importance of his thought’s visual character but also because the image (as Michel de Certeau has said) seems to “institute” the text and thereby lead the reader to “see” his present differently (as John Rajchman has argued).

Thus, we can say that Foucault has studied the historicity of regimes of visibility by bringing to light, on the one hand, the relation between the visible and what can be stated, and, on the other hand, the relation between the visible and the invisible, and he has done this in three large domains: in the epistemology of psychiatry and medicine; in a relection on painting and its relation to the forms of knowledge; and in the study of modern strategies of surveillance and control. In the History of Madness, madness passes from its status of having an absolute and invisible existence in the night of the world to “a thing to be gazed upon” (EHM, 145, translation modiied). In the modern asylum, madness is then continually called forth by the psychiatric gaze to be the object of a spectacle. Thus we could say that the history of madness is that of its becoming progressively more visible for a medical gaze that objectiies it under the forms of a discourse. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault actually proposes to retrace an archaeology of the medical gaze. Foucault shows how the clinic, which is the new form of medical experience, which asserts itself near the beginning of the nineteenth century, does not derive from a return to the “conceptless” perceived that

536 / Luca Paltrinieri

the old forms of medical empiricism had imitated. The clinical gaze is constructed by a practice that is bound up with theory and thereby arises from a new relation of the visible to the invisible and from its articulation in relation to the division of the said and the nonsaid (EBC, Chapters VII–VIII). Foucault describes clinical experience as the “domain of the careful gaze and of an empirical vigilance receptive only to the evidence of visible contents. The eye becomes the [depositary] and source of clarity” (EBC, xiii). The “blink of an eye” of clinical medicine is directed always at what is visible in the illness, but this visible is no longer composed, as it was in the eighteenth century, of signs or symptoms that refer to an invisible essence of the illness. The real has the structure of a language that is nothing other than the “language of the things” themselves (EBC, 109). Since the condition of visibility of the illness is the mastery of a clinical gaze and a clinical language, the perceptual and epistemological structure that orders the clinic is that of an “invisible visibility”; the meaning is the surface of things, but the meaning remains invisible so that it cannot be read (EBC, 165). The givenness that the ininite task of rendering the invisible visible (by means of a language that adheres to the observation of things) confronts is this antinomy between a meaning on the surface and that is yet illegible. Even if this complete reversibility of the visible into what can be stated is destined to remain a utopia, the clinical antinomy excludes from the domain of possible knowledge all of what falls outside the gaze. The possibility of the clinic is located in this radical return of the regime of visibility that, on the one hand, depends on the potential ascent of the medical gaze “supported and justiied by an institution” (EBC, 89) and, on the other hand, on the transformation of the discursive structure of medicine.

The relation of language to the visible is also at the center of Raymond Roussel.

In the poem “La vue,” Foucault’s Roussel aims to bring to light “the irst openness of words and things” by means of the appearance of the everyday world in which the visible is somehow the world of “absolute language”: “[H]ere we have the enigmatic visibility of the visible and why language has the same birth certiicate as that of which it speaks” (EDL, 146–147, translation modiied). However, this pure language of things shows already the overcoming of the viewpoint of the observer who still remains at the center of the gaze described in The Birth of the Clinic. By the same centripetal movement that undoes language by means of literary language, Roussel also destroys the centrality of the subject in favor of a “gazeless visibility,” to which “the eye can no longer dictate its viewpoint” (EDL, 106). If, for Roussel, language “inclines toward things” and is continually reopened by a “prolixity internal to these things themselves,” Magritte’s canvases are “unmade calligrams” that show not only the slippage between plastic representations and linguistic representations but also the limits of this very distinction between images and language. The paradoxes of the visibility of Magritte’s canvases contest the division instituted by Western painting (the image implies resemblance, and resemblance is equivalent to an assertion) while

THE VISIBLE / 537

showing the limits of a mode of thought that revolves around the representation of things by images and the assertion of images by words (ENP, 32–33).

In this sense, painting shows the diagram of an epoch (i.e., the diagram of our epoch), exactly as Velasquez’s Las Meninas showed, by means of the play of visibility and invisibility, the kernel of the classical age. The characters in the picture gaze on a scene for which they are themselves the scene. The spectator is visible for the painter present in the picture, but his image is nowhere to be found in the picture itself. However, a mirror, in the back of the scene, lets us see the invisible and what is external to the picture. But, this mirror relects nothing that can be found in the same space as itself. The mirror makes visible what all the characters of the picture are gazing on, what orders the representation, but it is itself invisible to the characters of the picture. If this picture is, according to Foucault, “the representation of classical representation,” this is because “the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the one who sees – despite all the mirrors, relections, imitations, and portraits” (EOT, 16). Since “the profound invisibility” coincides with extreme visibility, one can assert that the visibility of things in the classical episteme is based on the invisibility of the knowing subject (here the spectator) who cannot be represented in the representation.

In Discipline and Punish, the relation between visibility and invisibility translates the asymmetry of power relations. The Panopticon, the carceral architectural apparatus (dispositif ) conceived by Bentham, is structured so that each individual is under permanent surveillance by a centralized gaze: the “actor is alone, perfectly individualized, and constantly visible” (EDP, 200). This permanent visibility must induce in the detainee the consciousness of being able to be under surveillance during every moment by a gaze with the result that the detainee interiorizes the gaze and starts to observe himself. The absolute visibility of each organizes the control of time, proceeds to a centralized individuation, and implies a punitive action being exercised on potential behaviors: the conduct created in this way assures a sort of automatic function of power (EDP, 201). But, the asymmetry between the one doing the surveillance and the one under surveillance is only apparent, since the oficials doing the surveillance are themselves under control of the principle of absolute visibility. Insofar as it is a model of disciplinary power, the Panopticon “becomes a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be controlled by society as a whole” (EDP, 207, translation modiied). Thus, “visibility is a trap”; it is a trap as much for the ones gazed on as for the ones doing the gazing (Roustang 1976, 187). Bentham has thus set up the principle that power must be visible but not veriiable, since at each moment the one doing the surveillance must be visible, whereas anyone whatsoever will be able to play the role of supervisor. In a regime of absolute visibility, the gaze of the system is, fundamentally, blind. The total visibility guaranteed by the Panopticon is complementary with the dram of a society completely transparent to

THE VISIBLE / 539

Painting (and Photography)

Phenomenology

Power

Xavier Bichat

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Raymond Roussel

Suggested Reading

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Roustang, François. 1976. “La visibilité est une piège,” Les Temps Modernes 33:1567–1579. Collected in Philippe Artières et al. 2010. Surveiller et punir de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1975–1979. Caen: PUC-IMEC, pp. 183–200.

Shapiro, Gary. 2003. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

WAR / 541

In the 1975–1976 lecture courses, published as Society Must Be Defended, Foucault conducts a genealogy of the epistemological use of “war” as a model for social relations. In Society, Foucault proceeds by inverting the Clausewitzian saying that “war is politics by other means,” or better, by showing that Clausewitz had himself inverted an older discourse whose formula “politics is war by other means” had put war as the model or “grid of intelligibility” for social relations (ECF-SMD, 163). In fact, Foucault inds that war as a grid of intelligibility has been “posited” for our historical discourse (ECF-SMD, 164). In other words, whereas a statement from an earlier discourse about, say, the Trojan origins of the Franks, would be neither true nor false for us, statements in the discourse in which the grid of intelligibility for social power is war would have a truth value for us: they could be demonstrated to be either true or false (ibid.).

The content of the war model has three aspects: (1) social power relations are anchored in a given historical war so that politics “sanctions and reproduces” the result of that war; (2) political struggles are continuations of that same war; and

(3) a inal decision that ends politics can only come in a inal battle (ECF-SMD, 15–16). These three aspects produce three novelties of the war model: (1) it is the irst historical-political discourse in postmedieval Europe; (2) it enshrines an explicit perspectivalism, in that the speaking subject must be on one side or the other of the social binary; and (3) as a result of the anchoring of politics in speciic historical sequences, there are singular rather than universal rights (ECF-SMD, 52).

What Foucault inds as the results of his genealogy of the war schema was most likely dismaying to him, for he inds one of its main origins in the “race war” theory of Boulainvilliers and the seventeenthand eighteenth-century French reactionary petty nobility, as well as the inal imbrications of it in contemporary state racism and biopower (ECF-SMD, 258–261). We must remember here that “race” for Boulainvilliers was not a modern biological racism but indicates a “people” like the Franks, Gauls, Romans, or Celts in struggle with another “people” (ECF-SMD, 77). Although the analysis of these peoples might certainly involve “physico-biolog- ical facts” (ECF-SMD, 54), “race” was not so much a biological object in itself as a discursive strategy in a social struggle (ECF-SMD, 61).

Foucault begins his genealogy of the war model by dismissing the “false paternity” of the social war discourse in Machiavelli and Hobbes. Rather than a political tactic as it was for Machiavelli (ECF-SMD, 164, 169) or a philosophical principle as it was for Hobbes (ECF-SMD, 89–99), “war” in the social war discourse is real historical war. There is thus a dual birth of the social war model, in the English revolutionaries in the 1630s, who point back to the Norman Conquest (ECF-SMD, 99–109), and in the French petty nobility in the 1690s, who point back to the victory of Clovis and the Franks over the Gallo-Romans (ECF-SMD, 144–155). In reading the English revolutionaries and the French petty noble Boulainvilliers, Foucault notes a paradox: it is with the defeat of the noble right to war, when war becomes

542 / John Protevi

the monopoly of the state, that the social war model arises (ECF-SMD, 49). For Boulainvilliers, history, or the clash of unequal forces, is always stronger than nature and its theoretical equality (ECF-SMD, 157). Thus we must focus on how the military institutions are integrated into the general political economy of each society, for this holds the key to the clash of unequal forces in war. Boulainvilliers can thus point out the difference between heavily armed warriors who support themselves via feudal land ownership and the king, who can afford an army of foot soldiers through his powers of central taxation (ECF-SMD, 159).

Moving out of the French Revolution and through the nineteenth century, Foucault traces irst how the notion of war as a grid of intelligibility of the social was overcome by the theme of “national universality” (ECF-SMD, 239). With characteristic panache, Foucault ties this overcoming to the birth of dialectical philosophy (ECF-SMD, 236–237). He then moves on to consider the relation of modern biological racism to the birth of modern “biopolitics” (ECF-SMD, 243). (It is beyond the scope of this entry to do more than note the strange absence of the Atlantic slave trade from Foucault’s account of modern biological racism, though it should be noted that he does appeal to “colonization” [ECF-SMD, 257].) First, Foucault notes how nineteenth-century revolutionaries transformed the race struggle (of “peoples” in conlict) into class struggle at the same time as “race” in the biomedical sense was born (ECF-SMD, 60–62, 254–255). Thus, as society came to be seen in the evolutionary sense of being engaged in a struggle for existence, it became seen as biologically monist, as a substance into which foreigners have invaded or iniltrated and in which deviants are produced within society as degeneration (ECF-SMD, 80–81). Racism thus introduces a “break” in the domain of life that biopolitics places under the control of the state (ECF-SMD, 255), and it thus allows a justiication of the “murderous function of the State” as the violence that is deployed to combat the biological threat to the race under its protection (ECF-SMD, 256). Thus the state plays a new role when biological racism is introduced; it is no longer an instrument of one race against another, as it was in the struggle of “peoples,” but in the birth of modern racism, the state becomes the protector of the integrity, superiority, and purity of the national race (ECF-SMD, 81) as well as being charged with regenerating the purity of the race under the crucible of war (ECF-SMD, 257). Thus we see racism as an inversion of revolutionary discourse; race discourse for Boulainvilliers had been a weapon against state (royal) sovereignty, but it is now used by the state to protect its sovereignty via medical normalization and eugenics (ECF-SMD, 81).

From there, Foucault traces twentieth-century transformations of racism, revealing why the most murderous states are those most immersed in biopolitics and hence racism (ECF-SMD, 258). First is Nazi state racism, which is reinscribed in the prophetic discourse from which race struggle once emerged, as we see in the Nazi myths of popular struggle: the Germans victimized by the Versailles treaty and awaiting a new Reich, which will usher in the apocalypse, the end of days (ECF-

WAR / 543

SMD, 82). The speciicity of the Nazis, however, comes not in their recycling of old myths but in their simultaneous unleashing of sovereign murderous power and lifeadministering biopower throughout the entire biological reality of the people under the control of the state, a combination that ultimately makes the state suicidal in its desire to expose the people to the purifying violence of constant and intense exposure to death (ECF-SMD, 259–260). Finally, Foucault treats Soviet scientiic racism, in which the class enemy becomes biological threat, and medical police eliminate class enemies as if they were a biological threat (ECF-SMD, 83, 261–262).

As a result of conducting his genealogy of the war model in Society, Foucault comes to nuance his use of “war” in volume one of The History of Sexuality, published in 1976, the year in which the “Society” lectures were delivered. In this volume, war is no longer seen as a grid of intelligibility that reveals a regime of truth governing a particular historical discourse. Rather, it is seen as a practical option for “coding” the multiplicity of force relations; that is, an optional and precarious “strategy” for integrating them:

Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded – in part but never totally – either in the form of “war,” or in the form of “politics”; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations. (EHS1, 93)

The context for this remark, we should recall, is subtle and ambiguous. It comes in the “Method” section of Part IV of the work, “The dispositif of sexuality.” The ambiguity of Foucault’s position is set up by his remark a moment earlier when he discusses power as decentered: “[P]ower’s condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise ... and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point” (ibid.). Here we see Foucault’s famous ambivalence toward Kant: no sooner does he say “condition of possibility” then he has to nuance it.

Thus, at this point, Foucault has “power” as the grid of intelligibility for social relations and “war” as an active strategy of political practice; looking at the social ield in terms of power lets us see war as a possible strategy for integrating a multiplicity of force relations, whereas power “itself” can only be seen if we look at it as such a multiplicity: “It seems to me that power must be understood in the irst instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (EHS1, 92). So, in volume one of The History of Sexuality the “multiplicity of force relations” is the grid of intelligibility