Dissent merging with Commentary

Smells like Dysentery

Michael C. Behrent | Department of History

Jesus Fucking Christ

Foucault has been embraced by the right, as a philosopher sympathetic to deregulation and free-market economic policy who foresaw how scientific expertise could be enlisted by governments — in the form of, say, mask and vaccine mandates — to control people and impinge on their freedom. 

The liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are ‘neoconservative’ for offering no consistent argumentation to move in one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or ‘pluralism’) also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.

The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of modern society as united by a control intentionality, a “carceral continuum” that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no good trying to find a ‘fundamental’, oppressive power to fight against. Modern power is insidious and “comes from everywhere.” Like God, it is everywhere and nowhere at once.

Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no ‘natural’ order at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault’s characteristically pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite difficult to see where such resistance might spring from, notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault reached a further dead-end in considering the relationship of power to knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked, directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out.

Castoriadis once referred to Foucault’s ideas on power and opposition to it as, “Resist if it amuses you — but without a strategy, because then you would no longer be proletarian, but power.” Foucault’s own activism had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory — and ideology — free approach, that of the “specific intellectual” who participates in particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only concretely, as ad hoc “tool kit” methods for specific campaigns. Despite the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable instrumental ‘tools’ not only refuses an explicit overview of society but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of alienation and domination