11. The birth of the prison ushers in a new age where the economy and society require a new form of individual subordination. The systemic demands of this new dynamic social ensemble geared to order and productivity engendered a whole range of disciplinary mechanisms and professionals whose principal task it was to ensure the normality of the population. The imperatives of the new political economy required productive service from individuals in the interstices of their concrete lives. The regime has to gain access to the bodies of individuals and exercise control over attitudes and acts; to be most productive power had to be internalised. This degree of control was obtainable only when the teacher, the social worker and the factory manager complemented the network of penal institutions. These are all agents of an overarching, yet de-centred and anonymous system of normalizing power that was able to supervise and judge the individual from the cradle to the grave, shaping body, gestures, aptitudes and behaviour to become orthopaedists of individuality. Modern society is a complex, de-centred matrix of many mechanisms that somehow interlock without any designer or controller. The nascent human sciences prove indispensable at this junction by conjuring a whole arsenal of theories, therapies and techniques especially crafted to assist in the production of the required new shape of subjectivity. In conjunction with the subjecting disciplinary practices, these new sciences objectify this subject in a whole range of scientific discourses (cases, management files, reports, investigations, knowledges) that become indispensable organs of a new social power whose domination is infinitely productive, de-centred and inescapable. In this new regime, the position of the professional and the administrator may be enhanced but they do not control the workings of the whole. The judges of normality are nevertheless ubiquitous. They are like tentacles of a normalising power, all the more effective as a result of its radical dispersion.
12. While both the Frankfurt School and Foucault paint uncompromisingly
harrowing portraits of the extent and depth of modern domination, neither entirely relinquishes the possibility of resistance. I have already underscored the weaknesses of Horkheimer and Adorno's emancipatory outlook. Nevertheless, while they see no sociologically significant addressee for their revamped negative critical theory, their message itself implies the possibility of resistance. Secondly, at various points in their exposé of the history of instrumental rationality they indicate that there have been opportunities to reverse the march of domination. Domination is thus a contingent fact of history not its necessary and irreversible meaning. Finally, the theories of non-identity and mimesis hint at a residue of nature that remains non-compliant to the requirements of domination. Here is another minimal platform for resistance.
13. Foucault builds resistance into his account of modernity at a more fundamental theoretical level. While his description of the “carceral” creates the impression of a pervasive discipline infiltrating every pore and crevice, resistance remains a vital element of his novel theory of power. He says in Discipline and Punish “this does not mean that it (the prison system) cannot be altered, nor that it is once and for all indispensable in our kind of society” (D&P, p.305). His works presuppose and articulate the resistance in modernity of those marginalised groups like the mentally ill, the deviant and prisoners. He conceives “resistance” itself as dispersed in accord with the multiple struggles that characterises the post-68 political terrain. Yet, Foucault provides this empirical resistance with a theoretical supplementation. He renews the Nietzschean inspired assertion that all social life is constituted by struggle and that all discourses carry a hidden power and derive from the practices of power.
14. This renewed interest in power required a rethinking of its available understandings. Foucault wants to depict and analyse the forms and techniques of a modality of power that is uniquely modern. At first glance he pursues a line of argument not unlike Marx. Those who did the first part of this course will recall that Marx views the democratic and legal forms of bourgeois society as a veneer that both masked and facilitated the oppression of workers. So the core categories of civil society--law, rights, autonomy, personhood, plurality, publicity, and parliament--rather than articulating the limits of domination instead support it. The classic example here is the labour contract: ostensibly a reciprocal exchange of equivalents amongst autonomous agents, in reality it encodes and conceals the asymmetrical power relations that exist in the economic sphere resulting from unequal control of the means of production. Foucault universalises this critique to the social contract in general and argues that bourgeois rights and forms obscure a deeper level of asymmetrical relations, deeper control and oppression associated with the disciplines. But he wants to radicalise this critique by revisiting the mechanisms of oppression involved and linking them to the new power relations that now pervade social life. It was not the 19th century bourgeoisie that invented and imposed relations of domination. The relations of production signify a complex level of reality that is only relatively independent. The power relations inscribed in them were inherited from the disciplinary technology of earlier times and simply modified and intensifying for their own purposes. These power relations do not emanate from a single source like the new economy and its labour relations. Rather the extension of disciplinary technology and norms make it possible to organise labour in a way the facilitates capitalist efficiency and domination.
15. This brings Foucault to a more fundamental challenge what he calls the juridical model of power. The legal edifice of Western societies operates with a discourse of sovereign power. Even after the challenge to monarchical rule, legal right is that of sovereign power. Sovereignty is defined in juridical terms. Power is viewed as the legitimate right or possession of the sovereign when it is lawfully constituted. Legality also allows power to be put in question and see its prerogatives challenged when it is not the legitimate expression of that unified will. This juridical model articulates a specific conception of the way power is exercised. It effaces the domination intrinsic to power by legitimising it: sovereign power is the rightful expression of a lawful form of violence. Foucault argues that while the judicial model has not been completely superseded, it lacks the flexibility to capture the new modalities of power. It may have corresponded to the way power functioned under absolutist monarchies but it is now outdated. Foucault views it as merely repressive; it has only one force, the force of denial, it is the power of negation and limits. It is expensive, poor in resources, methods, monotonous in tactics, unproductive.
16. Foucault's thesis is that a new type of power began to emerge in the late 18th century that becomes global and perfected in the 19th and 20th centuries. As should be already clear, he refuses to equate this new type of power with the democratic struggles against absolutism and limited suffrage. Liberal political theory established the contractarian illusion that power issues from discreet primitive elements like subjects, that it can be made visible, localised and restricted to the political state whose authority issues and is delimited and regulated by the free social community. Here Foucault's radical scepticism regarding enlightenment and its values of rationality and progress is clearly evident. He suggests that the idea that democracy, reformist humanitarianism and human rights have restricted power, made it the servant and the instrument of a genuinely common will is an illusion produced by entrapment within the juridical model of power. This is because new forms of power cannot be comprehended in juridical concepts as relations between sovereigns and subjects or in terms of the opposition between state and society. They in fact predate these relations and oppositions and were absolutely crucial to their emergence. Before personhood was the disciplinary technology and normalising processes that shaped the modern subject as such a bearer of bourgeois right. For Foucault, the state is not sole or even primary source of these relations. They emerged beneath the visible struggles over sovereignty in the revolutions of the bourgeois period within the grid of disciplinary institutions (convent, army, the clinic, the school, hospital, the factory and the prison). Because these institutions emerged almost silently within the womb of the old society, their essential shape is not constrained by the new forms of state legitimacy and the sphere of bourgeois publicity. They remained largely outside the specific projects of liberalisation and democratisation. One of Foucault's major points is that the public, impersonal, rule-bound character of the administrative power of state bureaucracies and agencies does nothing to restrict or limit the reach or scope of disciplinary power. Remember this is counter-law. Rather, the lawyer and the bureaucrat legitimate the free scope to a whole other tier of power: that of the teacher, doctor, judge, social worker, psychiatrist and warden that renders the multiple processes of discipline and normalisation more effective and efficient. Simultaneously, they soften the very idea of punishment rendering it not only just but also humane and constructive.
17. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical notion that power as something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place power is conceives as a relation of forces:
Power must be analysed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.
This dispersed conception of power makes it co-extensive with the social body. As Foucault puts it in an interview: “all relations are at least partially power relations”. Power is not localised in specific institutions but imbricated and fused with all other relations including production, the family, sexuality, knowledge and kinship. Power relations are both the internal conditions and the immediate effects of all variety of divisions, inequalities and disequilbria. They are localised, heterogeneous and dispersed, exercised through a multitude of strategies and techniques while still accessible to integration into more global strategies to serve economic and state goals. This is why Foucault recommends as a methodological starting point that our analysis of power should be ascending: rather than meeting power in its most global and also domesticated form, he suggests beginning with its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, trajectory and tactics and see how they have been invested, colonized, used, transformed and extended by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination. (SMBD, P30)
18. Foucault concludes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. This notion of de-centred and dispersed power in turn rests on a strategic model of hostile, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, Foucault sometimes has recourse to the image of the endless battle: changing alignments, dynamic resistances constantly recharged and eclipsed, where victory is only a momentary respite. He is a little cagey as to how far he is prepared to push the analogy between social life and battle. However, he clearly views the paradigm of war as a more appropriate metaphor to get beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault’s hunch is the Nietzschean conviction that behind these primitive elements of peaceful and stable civil society lies a constant subterranean struggle of fear, aggression, violence, servitude and oppression.
This does not mean the society, the law and the state are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath the peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. (SMD pp50/51)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war within the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Race here need not stand as a biological category but refers simply to differences between ethnic and language groups, to differences in degree of force, vigour, energy and violence. However, whether this opposition was articulated in terms of race, religion or class, the most important point is that this clash ran through society from top to bottom and forms the matrix of social warfare beneath every of appearance civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a primal fact of social existence. We have already seen the figure of class struggle as the key to history in Marx and the role of contradictions as the key to historical dynamics in Hegel. Yet Foucault believed that the idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but codified them within a comprehensive logic . This means they are actually totalised into a rationality that was more basic and irreversible. War and social conflict is subsumed into a universal subject, a reconciled truth and a right in which all particularities have a pre-ordained place (SMD, p58). This is why Foucault prefers Nietzsche as his closest predecessor.
19. Foucault puts special emphasis on the productivity of modern power. In fact he introduce a distinction between disciplinary power and bio-power. The former is a normalising power focused on the subjugation of the individual body through the techniques of discipline. This includes devices to ensure their spatial distribution, their individuation and their visibility, like separation and surveillance as well as micro technologies like drill, inspection and exercises aimed at taking control of bodies and making them more productive forces. They also rationalise and economise power by internalising norms of control and appropriate conduct. Bio-power, on the other hand, is applied to living man or man as a species. This is more regulatory power in so far as it aims to control the general conditions of birth, death, production and illness that impinge on populations as a global mass. It concerns are town planning, public hygiene, sexuality, life expectancy in general, the security, health and productivity of the population. Its aim is to control the random event, to predict its probability and compensate for its effects and preserve the homeostasis of the whole. These two forms of modern power are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other; they constitute two poles around which the productive organisation of power in modernity is deployed while each has its own specific level, techniques and aims. Bio-power is a latecomer because regulating the bio-sociological processes of the human masses implied more complex systems of co-ordination and centralisation and therefore of a more prominent role for a sophisticated bureaucratic state. However, together these two powers, at the level of both detail and of mass, cover the entire surface of modernity and take control of life.
20. In his self-criticism towards the end of his life, Foucault will suggest that the work of the Discipline and Punish period gave too great a priority to disciplinary power and had not sufficiently theorised how the subject constituted itself through certain practices and games of truth. His later solution to this shortcoming was to move to a more comprehensive model that he called “Governmentality” where he attempted to redress the balance. Government is here understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others.
If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility, then I don not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self…Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and of others, and the relationship of the self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics. (H of S, p252)
This model prioritises the self relation as a care of the self, but incorporates the other relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is asymmetrically fixed. Foucault gives priority to the self-relation because he maintains that an ethics of the self may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task and that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself”(H of S, p252)
21. Where power is dispersed, so is resistance. De-centred power finds its own inverse energy in a similarly dispersed resistance. The key to this conception of the relationality of power is that neither power nor resistance can be substance. The template of modern power relations, as we have seen, lies in the post 68 politics of social movements. This appeared to Foucault as an explosion of local, dispersed resistances to the totalising aspirations of the whole range of institutional authorities in the bureaucracy, universities, schools, hospitals and prisons. Foucault's ideas gave expression to this new configuration of resistances. But on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation inflects these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general. While Nietzsche chose to anchor the will to power in life itself, Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He therefore denied that he was offering an alternative theory of power. He stresses that his ideas on power arise from the inadequacy of existing models to explain the historical phenomena he confronted in his attempts to theorise madness, prisons, sexuality and truth. Yet, his understanding of resistance seems to inject these post-68 socio-political struggles with trans-historical significance. Inflected in this vision, social life becomes a force field of asymmetrical power relations, the binary battlefront referred to earlier, dominated by purely strategic considerations. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. The result of all this is that resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous and amorphous. Where there is a power relation there is the possibility of resistance.
Donnerstag, 20. September 2007
Donnerstag, 13. September 2007
Lecture 8: Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
1. Towards the end of my discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno I emphasized the theoretical and political cul de sac into which they were led by their final version of critical theory. Having maligned reason as a contaminated instrument of civilisatory barbarism, they are forced to abandon positive knowledge in favour of art and negative critique which, nevertheless, as the self-criticism of reason cannot escape the domain of conceptuality all together. At the same time, the idea of the "totally administered society" and the "end of the individual" is a totalising and oversimplified vision. The result is the practical impasse of their work: an audience reduced to the isolated survivors and an unspecified future. Now we shall turn to Michel Foucault who, although he offers an equally radical and unrelenting critique of modernity, does so from a very different standpoint. I said earlier that the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity from the perspective of the missed revolution. "Revolution" is also a vital theme for Foucault. However, for him the problem has been drastically transformed. His question is how are we to think revolution after the demise of revolutionary Marxist politics and its emancipatory view of history. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, Foucault marshals radical historical scepticism. He announces not the "end of the individual" but the "death of man": this slogan proclaims Foucault's determination to avoid humanist values and expose their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination. However, in terms of revolutionary hopes and prospects he suggests that today is no better nor worse than any other time. In place of what he will call the “empty shell of universal revolutionism”, he prefers the project of experimentation on limits: “to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take”, (W is E?, Pol of Truth) p114.
2. Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. From that time he spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while writing his early works. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties he become a Professor at Vincennes and was elected to the College de France in 1972 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France) where he taught until his death from AIDS in 1984. The lectures Foucault gave during those years are indispensable to understanding the evolution of his thought but are only now in the process of translation. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography. As a young man he experienced great difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. He personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. These studies, followed by first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, led him to a distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism as to the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psycho-analysis, political economy, criminology and sociology. What distinguishes Foucault's accounts from the more orthodox historians of science was his fascination with the other side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of these discourses that mask domination behind a white coat, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this control and register it as crisis. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason".
3. From the seventies Foucault became an international figure. He threw himself into a whole series of radical social and political causes around prisons, schools, reformatories and psychiatric clinics. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed: these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist. Yet, like most radical intellectuals of his generation, he was brought up on the leftist notion of the revolution. From 68, he began to question the orthodox Marxist scenario of revolution and became suspicious that the theoretical framework behind this idea served totalitarian and exclusionary purposes. Foucault developed a critique of globalising political strategies and movements. This notion of a once and for all radical transformation reproduces the totalising logic of domination against which it purports to struggle. It imposes an impossible global scenario on a diverse range of struggles against oppression requiring the subordination of their demands to long term global political goals and strategy. Foucault came to feel that accepting the revolutionary strategy of transforming society was an endorsement of the logic of modern society that inevitably inhibited the autonomy, interests and strategic flexibility of particular struggling groups. Such a totalising political perspective also abstracted from the vast domain of mundane, supposedly "unpolitical" struggles, of oppression and social conflict not reducible to class struggle and economics--sanity, insanity, illness, crime and sexuality.
4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to focus on his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen with Weber and the Frankfurt School that with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern individual subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by sceptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” slogan signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing it as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. These traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant: as we have seen with the Enlightenment, it becomes the essential origin and final court of legitimisation for all knowledge claims and values-both of rationality and morality.
5. Foucault stands at the junction of a number of trends of modern thought, which have questioned the humanist notion of the subject. Firstly the historicist tradition, including Hegel and Marx, that questioned the invariance of the humanist subject and underlined its historico-social constitution but still remained within the humanist camp by viewing this historically shaped form of subjectivity as the bearer of critical universal values. More radically, Foucault takes over Nietzsche’s view that the modern subject is an ascetic prejudice both serving and distorting the multiple and unconscious, instinctual drives. Finally, in his early work Foucault aligns himself with structuralism, one of the anti-subjectivist currents coming from the new disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. Structuralism displaces the human individual from the favoured position as the action-determining subject. Human intentions are subordinated to an external linguistic order of signs. This order is not the product of meaning bestowing acts of subjects but the product of an arbitrary arrangement of linguistic elements. Here the linguistic structure or its equivalent becomes the real bearer of action-events. Foucault speaks of episteme or discourses that designate the patterns of thought that determines a society as a whole for a specific period. It is the state of this system of signs, forms or unconscious presuppositions that governs the meaning humans are capable of expressing in their understanding and experience. His early archaeological method involved the excavation of the hidden rules and regularities of mentalities. These are inaccessible to consciousness yet make it possible for subjects to say what they do. This approach will later be supplemented in the works of his middle period by a genealogical method that excavates not just the subterranean discursive rules but traces the historical constitution of these in non-discursive practices and relations of power. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the regimes that create subjectivity by connecting governing mentalities to the relations of power. The force of both these approaches is the claim that the human subject is not the experiential centre or creator of a course of action. It can no longer be viewed as instigating and overseeing but is reduced to the arbitrary effect or a point of application of a network of events produced by the rules of language or disciplinary practices and out of which there is no overriding commanding centre or logic. From this, follows that it is necessary in the human sciences to break with the search for meaning. Until the last phase of his work where he began to talk about subjectivation as a process of the subject’s own wilful and reflective self-constitution, Foucault disdains subjectivist meanings and the subject as a positive moral agent.
6. The merging of all of these trends produces Foucault's wholesale repudiation of the humanist notion of subjectivity.The universality and unity of this specific historico-cultural construct is illusory; furthermore, it is an instrument of social repression and subjugation. There is no coherent or constant human being or condition that could sustain such a notion. For Foucault, the individual subject is a product of historically changing practices and discourses. Subjection is not a process aimed at generating subjects of law as the Enlightenment claimed, but obedient subjects principally characterised by their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. Thus subjectivisation is always a specific historical mode of subjugation. This takes a variety of historical forms but Foucault views the Enlightenment version as especially oppressive because it coincides with the new disciplinary modalities of power. The modern subject is a 'fictive atom of an ideological representation of society, a product of overlapping discourses and disciplinary practices':
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis a vis of power: it is, I believe, one of its prime effects (History of Sexuality).
7. One of Foucault's principal aims is to peel away the historically imposed, fictive forms of individualisation, stripping subjectivity of everything that limits it. The source of this anti-subjectivist rhetoric is what I shall call Foucault’s experimental emancipatory project. He understands this project as the elimination of all limitations on human possibility. Foucault has abandoned not just all holist strategies of total transformation but also all historically created emancipatory values as complicit in oppressive regimes. He favours multiple experimental transgressions that test the limits of our historically created, but apparently necessary, conditions and forms. When critique reveals these all to be a contingent historical construct-- even our received forms of subjectivity -then, Foucault tells us, it becomes clear that almost nothing has to be the way it is. Identity may be nothing more than a received straitjacket that constrains the individual by imposing selected characteristics, desires and gestures. When it is recognised that such identity is contingent, contemporary social struggles can more uninhibitedly assert the excluded claims of difference. Clearly the sources of Foucault's suspicions against modern subjectivity lie in his continued sympathy and empathy of the insane and marginalized (prisoners, patients, gays, oppressed Third World peoples) his early experience of modern psychiatry both as a student and as a patient, his own marginalisation as a homosexual before the era of gay liberation. First-hand experience of the violence and coercion involved in modern socialization and institutional practice leads him to profoundly question this society and the constellation of values that perpetrates this continuous violence, repression and marginalisation. This leads us to the heart of the negative image of modernity that characterises Foucault's middle work --what I will call the carceral society.
8. We have seen that in one decisive respect Foucault goes much further than Weber or Horkheimer and Adorno in his critique of modernity. Despite the Frankfurt School misgivings about the self-preservative instrumental core of modern subjectivity, they could still uphold the ideal of the autonomous modern subject as an everywhere endangered critical standard and a potential ally in the struggle against the increasingly rationalised, administered totalitarian society. Foucault by comparison can see here only another shape of oppression. In fact, he argues that this depth of oppressive control is intimately connected to the pervasive character of modernity, to the unique reach, sophistication, and intensity of its disciplinary regime of normalization that reaches into the core and shapes the very sense of the modern subject. Despite his general hostility to the notion of totality as it presents itself in revolutionary rhetoric and philosophy of history, the description of modernity in his major works often has a totalising character. For example, in one interview, Foucault says “ industrial capitalism…is the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’ (Dialogue with Bequir Parham’ F&IR, p.183).
9. For him, like Weber, modern western society is a unique historical constellation that has achieved an accidental yet ominous success in constituting itself as an interlocking system of requirements, norms, techniques, strategies, knowledges and practices of power. The early critique of the deformed rationality of the human sciences that remained an undertone in his histories of madness and the clinic take center stage in the works of his middle period. This now becomes a critique of the once peripheral institutions of correction and internment, their technologies and disciplines that have now moved to the center of a whole network of institutions that shape and correct individuality in modern society. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by asserting that he is not merely writing academic history of the past but the "history of the present". His portrayal of the evolution of disciplinary techniques, juridical judgements, criminology, psychiatry and penal institutions from the end of the classical age (18th century) through into the 19th century--a supposedly descriptive but implicitly critical narrative -- expands into a comprehensive condemnation of the modern disciplinary society. Foucault wants us to look at the major institutions of modern society and of the values they have advances in a new more critical way. Foucault maintains that the rapidly expanding network of disciplinary institutions of the 19th century provided the answer to the problem of organisation, administration, surveillance and control of large populations that emerged at this time with massive populations increase and the lift-off of the bourgeois economic system.
10. These were the problems becoming constitutive for modern politics. In Foucault's mind the "carceral network" is a microcosm prefiguring the whole range of new techniques, instruments, attitudes, powers and institutions that now dominate modern society. This network has both temporal (stages of life) and spacial (variety of institutional locations and types) dimensions and manifests a range of micro-technologies of coercion. The experts, technocrats, administrators, managers and social workers preside over a comprehensive and closed system of supervision and control that is really not essentially different from the institutions of correction:
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. It might be said that nothing really distinguishes them any more except the singularly "dangerous" character of the delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating.
2. Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. From that time he spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while writing his early works. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties he become a Professor at Vincennes and was elected to the College de France in 1972 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France) where he taught until his death from AIDS in 1984. The lectures Foucault gave during those years are indispensable to understanding the evolution of his thought but are only now in the process of translation. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography. As a young man he experienced great difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. He personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. These studies, followed by first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, led him to a distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism as to the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psycho-analysis, political economy, criminology and sociology. What distinguishes Foucault's accounts from the more orthodox historians of science was his fascination with the other side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of these discourses that mask domination behind a white coat, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this control and register it as crisis. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason".
3. From the seventies Foucault became an international figure. He threw himself into a whole series of radical social and political causes around prisons, schools, reformatories and psychiatric clinics. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed: these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist. Yet, like most radical intellectuals of his generation, he was brought up on the leftist notion of the revolution. From 68, he began to question the orthodox Marxist scenario of revolution and became suspicious that the theoretical framework behind this idea served totalitarian and exclusionary purposes. Foucault developed a critique of globalising political strategies and movements. This notion of a once and for all radical transformation reproduces the totalising logic of domination against which it purports to struggle. It imposes an impossible global scenario on a diverse range of struggles against oppression requiring the subordination of their demands to long term global political goals and strategy. Foucault came to feel that accepting the revolutionary strategy of transforming society was an endorsement of the logic of modern society that inevitably inhibited the autonomy, interests and strategic flexibility of particular struggling groups. Such a totalising political perspective also abstracted from the vast domain of mundane, supposedly "unpolitical" struggles, of oppression and social conflict not reducible to class struggle and economics--sanity, insanity, illness, crime and sexuality.
4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to focus on his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen with Weber and the Frankfurt School that with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern individual subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by sceptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” slogan signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing it as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. These traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant: as we have seen with the Enlightenment, it becomes the essential origin and final court of legitimisation for all knowledge claims and values-both of rationality and morality.
5. Foucault stands at the junction of a number of trends of modern thought, which have questioned the humanist notion of the subject. Firstly the historicist tradition, including Hegel and Marx, that questioned the invariance of the humanist subject and underlined its historico-social constitution but still remained within the humanist camp by viewing this historically shaped form of subjectivity as the bearer of critical universal values. More radically, Foucault takes over Nietzsche’s view that the modern subject is an ascetic prejudice both serving and distorting the multiple and unconscious, instinctual drives. Finally, in his early work Foucault aligns himself with structuralism, one of the anti-subjectivist currents coming from the new disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. Structuralism displaces the human individual from the favoured position as the action-determining subject. Human intentions are subordinated to an external linguistic order of signs. This order is not the product of meaning bestowing acts of subjects but the product of an arbitrary arrangement of linguistic elements. Here the linguistic structure or its equivalent becomes the real bearer of action-events. Foucault speaks of episteme or discourses that designate the patterns of thought that determines a society as a whole for a specific period. It is the state of this system of signs, forms or unconscious presuppositions that governs the meaning humans are capable of expressing in their understanding and experience. His early archaeological method involved the excavation of the hidden rules and regularities of mentalities. These are inaccessible to consciousness yet make it possible for subjects to say what they do. This approach will later be supplemented in the works of his middle period by a genealogical method that excavates not just the subterranean discursive rules but traces the historical constitution of these in non-discursive practices and relations of power. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the regimes that create subjectivity by connecting governing mentalities to the relations of power. The force of both these approaches is the claim that the human subject is not the experiential centre or creator of a course of action. It can no longer be viewed as instigating and overseeing but is reduced to the arbitrary effect or a point of application of a network of events produced by the rules of language or disciplinary practices and out of which there is no overriding commanding centre or logic. From this, follows that it is necessary in the human sciences to break with the search for meaning. Until the last phase of his work where he began to talk about subjectivation as a process of the subject’s own wilful and reflective self-constitution, Foucault disdains subjectivist meanings and the subject as a positive moral agent.
6. The merging of all of these trends produces Foucault's wholesale repudiation of the humanist notion of subjectivity.The universality and unity of this specific historico-cultural construct is illusory; furthermore, it is an instrument of social repression and subjugation. There is no coherent or constant human being or condition that could sustain such a notion. For Foucault, the individual subject is a product of historically changing practices and discourses. Subjection is not a process aimed at generating subjects of law as the Enlightenment claimed, but obedient subjects principally characterised by their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. Thus subjectivisation is always a specific historical mode of subjugation. This takes a variety of historical forms but Foucault views the Enlightenment version as especially oppressive because it coincides with the new disciplinary modalities of power. The modern subject is a 'fictive atom of an ideological representation of society, a product of overlapping discourses and disciplinary practices':
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis a vis of power: it is, I believe, one of its prime effects (History of Sexuality).
7. One of Foucault's principal aims is to peel away the historically imposed, fictive forms of individualisation, stripping subjectivity of everything that limits it. The source of this anti-subjectivist rhetoric is what I shall call Foucault’s experimental emancipatory project. He understands this project as the elimination of all limitations on human possibility. Foucault has abandoned not just all holist strategies of total transformation but also all historically created emancipatory values as complicit in oppressive regimes. He favours multiple experimental transgressions that test the limits of our historically created, but apparently necessary, conditions and forms. When critique reveals these all to be a contingent historical construct-- even our received forms of subjectivity -then, Foucault tells us, it becomes clear that almost nothing has to be the way it is. Identity may be nothing more than a received straitjacket that constrains the individual by imposing selected characteristics, desires and gestures. When it is recognised that such identity is contingent, contemporary social struggles can more uninhibitedly assert the excluded claims of difference. Clearly the sources of Foucault's suspicions against modern subjectivity lie in his continued sympathy and empathy of the insane and marginalized (prisoners, patients, gays, oppressed Third World peoples) his early experience of modern psychiatry both as a student and as a patient, his own marginalisation as a homosexual before the era of gay liberation. First-hand experience of the violence and coercion involved in modern socialization and institutional practice leads him to profoundly question this society and the constellation of values that perpetrates this continuous violence, repression and marginalisation. This leads us to the heart of the negative image of modernity that characterises Foucault's middle work --what I will call the carceral society.
8. We have seen that in one decisive respect Foucault goes much further than Weber or Horkheimer and Adorno in his critique of modernity. Despite the Frankfurt School misgivings about the self-preservative instrumental core of modern subjectivity, they could still uphold the ideal of the autonomous modern subject as an everywhere endangered critical standard and a potential ally in the struggle against the increasingly rationalised, administered totalitarian society. Foucault by comparison can see here only another shape of oppression. In fact, he argues that this depth of oppressive control is intimately connected to the pervasive character of modernity, to the unique reach, sophistication, and intensity of its disciplinary regime of normalization that reaches into the core and shapes the very sense of the modern subject. Despite his general hostility to the notion of totality as it presents itself in revolutionary rhetoric and philosophy of history, the description of modernity in his major works often has a totalising character. For example, in one interview, Foucault says “ industrial capitalism…is the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine’ (Dialogue with Bequir Parham’ F&IR, p.183).
9. For him, like Weber, modern western society is a unique historical constellation that has achieved an accidental yet ominous success in constituting itself as an interlocking system of requirements, norms, techniques, strategies, knowledges and practices of power. The early critique of the deformed rationality of the human sciences that remained an undertone in his histories of madness and the clinic take center stage in the works of his middle period. This now becomes a critique of the once peripheral institutions of correction and internment, their technologies and disciplines that have now moved to the center of a whole network of institutions that shape and correct individuality in modern society. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by asserting that he is not merely writing academic history of the past but the "history of the present". His portrayal of the evolution of disciplinary techniques, juridical judgements, criminology, psychiatry and penal institutions from the end of the classical age (18th century) through into the 19th century--a supposedly descriptive but implicitly critical narrative -- expands into a comprehensive condemnation of the modern disciplinary society. Foucault wants us to look at the major institutions of modern society and of the values they have advances in a new more critical way. Foucault maintains that the rapidly expanding network of disciplinary institutions of the 19th century provided the answer to the problem of organisation, administration, surveillance and control of large populations that emerged at this time with massive populations increase and the lift-off of the bourgeois economic system.
10. These were the problems becoming constitutive for modern politics. In Foucault's mind the "carceral network" is a microcosm prefiguring the whole range of new techniques, instruments, attitudes, powers and institutions that now dominate modern society. This network has both temporal (stages of life) and spacial (variety of institutional locations and types) dimensions and manifests a range of micro-technologies of coercion. The experts, technocrats, administrators, managers and social workers preside over a comprehensive and closed system of supervision and control that is really not essentially different from the institutions of correction:
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. By means of a carceral continuum, the authority that sentences infiltrates all those other authorities that supervise, transform, correct, improve. It might be said that nothing really distinguishes them any more except the singularly "dangerous" character of the delinquents, the gravity of their departures from normal behaviour and the necessary solemnity of the ritual. But, in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating.
Donnerstag, 6. September 2007
Lecture 7: Horkheimer &Adorno (cont)
Critique of Instrumental Reason (cont) and My Critique.
13. This paradox is the core of the authors' famous idea of the dialectic of enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno employ the concept of enlightenment to designate not just a specific historical epoch but the whole civilisatory process. Enlightenment does not mean the process whereby mankind comes to approximate some ideal standard of reason, truth, autonomy and social progress. Enlightenment is not understood as the antithesis of myth but as the perpetuation of its innermost logic. The ancient myths were interpretative schemas that eternalised the present by making it the basis of an ideal order. They were a first version of enlightenment--they were intellectual products of man's need to subordinate the world to his own categories of order, regularity and explanation. Myth initiates a process of intellectualisation whereby the world is controlled in its cognitive appropriation. But myth eventually falls victim to this same process. Intellectualisation turns back on myth in a destructive, critical spirit. Eventually myth and other great religious explanations of the world are submitted to critique by more sophisticated--scientistic--versions of enlightenment and found wanting. From this time, enlightenment takes on the meaning it usually has for us: it is understood as the critical exposure and overcoming of all vestiges of myth--all previous worldviews which rely on superstition and faith without being able to rationally account for themselves. The program of enlightenment is thus the destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, for which enlightenment had stood and fought. The central values of the historical enlightenment--truth, reason, freedom and justice-- eventually succumb by not being able to meet the new standards of contemporary rigorous scientific analysis. Under stringent analysis these values are revealed as illusions and demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth correspondence to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary thought reveals that the former is a variable cultural construct without substantive content: the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey; truth is reduced to a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world. Freedom and justice are value concepts without any legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism--presumes not to be subject to this dialectic. Scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of ideological limitation and weakness. It signifies that even this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias and as such is just another form of myth. Positivism presupposes the "facts" of the existing world as the natural, eternal substratum of all human experience. It ignores the self-consciousness of its own historical preconditions and invests formal rationality--devoted to the discovery of efficient means rather than ends-- and existing social powers with an absolute status. It abstracts this rationality and isolates it from its sociological underpinnings in the bourgeois totality. This is a status identical to that claimed by the old metaphysical truths and myths. This lack of self-consciousness is a perpetuation of myth at one with the complete lack of critical energies characteristic of the totally administered society. This society equates itself with science and rationality.
14. There is a real question about the theoretical intentions behind Horkheimer and Adorno critique of civilisatory reason. Clearly their argument is that the civilizatory process has ultimately produced a catastrophic imbalance between the instrumental and reflective elements of rationality that were originally thought of as constituting a unity. But they go further and in places and specific formulations seem to condemn reason in toto. Whether these statements are to be viewed as an exaggerated critical image: the result of redoubled critical energies in the face of deteriorating historical circumstances or as literal truth is open to interpretation. I only want to offer a few critical remarks on their view of modernity. If one takes the theoretical framework as a whole--the twin ideas of instrumental reason and the totally administered society--the first thing to be said is that as a theory it is far too indiscriminant and extreme. The identification of civilisatory rationality with domination is both too totalising and aporetic. The authors subsume all knowledges, irrespective of their methodological and substantive peculiarities, under the category of instrumental reason aimed at control. While the examples they draw from technical and administrative knowledge are plausible, this case is much harder to prove across the broad spectrum of knowledges. However, even if their account is accepted, this is not the end of their difficulties. If reason itself as expressed in science and philosophy is complicit with barbaric domination then what is the status of Adorno and Horkheimer's own works? To the extent that even philosophical thought is contaminated as just another manifestation of instrumental reason, no form of conceptual operation or discursive thought can be immune from being tarred with the brush of domination. In an effort for consistency, our authors retreat from any positive claims to knowledge. Especially in Adorno's latter view, philosophy is reduced to the negative function of the self-criticism of conceptual thought and autonomous art takes on a normative status as a non-conceptual approach to nature that exemplifies a sort of self surrender equivalent to real freedom and emancipation. Yet, this defensive position is clearly unsatisfactory. To conceive philosophy as negative self-criticism does not escape the horizon of conceptual thought which is indispensable for communication and determinant clarity. Furthermore the downgrading of positive scientific knowledge of society was to have disastrous consequences in the post-war period when these thinkers felt no need to adjust their theory of the totally administered society in the light of the later evolution of liberal-democratic regimes. If we view this totalising critique of rationality from the standpoint of the possibility of a self-grounded modernity, we can see that Adorno and Horkheimer have placed themselves in an almost impossible position. We have already seen how philosophical reflection on the collapse of traditional world views and their replacements has gradually eroded all potential candidates for the position of emancipatory bearers: the Kantian transcendental subject, Hegel's spirit, Feuerbach's humanity and Marx's proletariat, Tocqueville's freedom, Nietzsche's Übermensch and Weber's individual personality. Horkheimer and Adorno appear to rule out humanity, history, reason and philosophy. With them the promise of an emancipated modernity as the bearer of real cultural freedom and social emancipation cannot be addressed to any concrete addressees. Their hopes retreat to the non-conceptual domain of autonomous art and they address their negative philosophy to an audience of isolated survivors and the future.
15. If we turn more directly to the notion of state capitalism and the totally administered society, with hindsight it is obvious that Horkheimer and Adorno exaggerate trends, which appeared common to all advanced industrial societies in the late 30's and 40's. They did not pay sufficient attention to the real and very substantial differences. They took totalitarianism as their general model of late capitalism and this was ahistorical insofar as it ignored many of the specific features of the so-called liberal democratic systems. The general analysis is rooted in a radicalized version of Western Marxism tailored to account for the impasse of revolution in the West. On this account, the historical delay of revolution is explained by the integration of the proletariat into the system as a result of the inducements of bourgeois ideology. This means that their general diagnosis-- while very insightful and disturbing in many ways--is far too one-sided and pessimistic in so far as it almost ignores the potentialities for social change and social resistance to the oppressive aspects of liberal capitalism. Habermas, a second-generation critical theorist, makes the point that Horkheimer and Adorno almost overlooked the great historical contribution made by bourgeois society to the project of human emancipation. And this is quite strange given the real nostalgia for 19th century competitive capitalism that appears in their diagnosis. In other words, Habermas challenges the totally negative assessment of bourgeois rationality and science as instrumental and repressive. Aside from its enormous extension of human productive forces in terms of science and technology, bourgeois society also has an important cultural and political legacy even if it is everywhere flawed and in need of supplementation and improvement. Bourgeois society is an order that served as fertile ground for the establishment of democratic decision-making processes, individualist patterns of identity formation, autonomous aesthetic experiences and for an institutional structure founded on universalistic notions of morality and law. These survivals of bourgeois rationality in the liberal-democratic societies of late capitalism provide both an arena and a source of social struggle and contradiction within present society which offers at least the prospect of future gains for democratic and emancipatory forces.
16. Obviously, rejection of the idea of a totally administered society also has important implications for the idea of the cultural industry. It is simply untenable to defend the original simple version that viewed the culture industry as a system of domination and manipulation of the masses, as the instrument for the realisation of "false needs" which enable the continued reproduction of late capitalism. The theory of the culture industry thus overburdens contemporary culture with a sense ineradicable guilt that it has served as a sort of cement for s system of inhuman and impersonal domination and absolves the theoretician of the task of analyzing its inner diversity and differentiation. Nor was it convincing to assert that such manipulation was omnipotent. I have already mentioned the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno paid far too little attention to those other agencies contributing positively to individual socialisation beyond the allegedly weakened family. This neglect of the wider sphere of social interaction like sub-cultures and the public sphere as co-operative creations of group specific horizons of orientation and values meant that our authors were reluctant to concede that administrative manipulation was subject to limits and other potential sites of resistance. Moreover, this view of culture as a part of an "iron system" denies the complexity and autonomy of the cultural domain even in late capitalism. The idea of the totally administered mass society where all tastes, desires, views and interests are homogenised and made as uniform as the mass individual of the Frankfurt School nightmare is an exaggerated image of a short post-World War II period. From our perspective, what emerges is not only a fair degree of standardisation and uniformisation of consumption but also an enormous pluralisation of tastes, practices, enjoyments and needs. What is clear is that Horkheimer and Adorno's position not only leads to a politics of despair (lack of concrete emancipatory vision and analysis), it also cannot account for the actual struggles against advanced capitalism in the sixties. It presupposed a traditional intellectual suspicion of mass culture that was dominant before post-Second World War era of youth culture and also the maintenance of an ideological consensus that may have existed in period they are working in but which was subsequently undermined at least in part by the very agencies of mass culture. In part, this over-emphasis on culture in large measure stemmed from the absence of effective social-political options in the epoch after the victory of Fascism and the sense that “culture” seemed the sole accessible terrain of critical activity for radical intellectuals. Thus Horkheimer and Adorno probably attributed too large a role to the cultural industry as an agent of social control and underestimated the complexities of its potential effects. This simply compounded their equally significant neglect of the other typical agencies of socialisation. A more plausible view is that contemporary culture including the mass media along with other elements of the public sphere actually mediates social conflict and serves as a mechanism that helps to negotiate social change. In this constellation, contemporary culture reflects, expresses and articulates social reality in a mediated fashion. While not ignoring potential for mass culture to serve as an instrument of conformity and ideological hegemony of powerful vested interests, we must also acknowledge that contemporary culture also remains a theatre of social conflict and an instrument of social reflection and ideological diversity.
13. This paradox is the core of the authors' famous idea of the dialectic of enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno employ the concept of enlightenment to designate not just a specific historical epoch but the whole civilisatory process. Enlightenment does not mean the process whereby mankind comes to approximate some ideal standard of reason, truth, autonomy and social progress. Enlightenment is not understood as the antithesis of myth but as the perpetuation of its innermost logic. The ancient myths were interpretative schemas that eternalised the present by making it the basis of an ideal order. They were a first version of enlightenment--they were intellectual products of man's need to subordinate the world to his own categories of order, regularity and explanation. Myth initiates a process of intellectualisation whereby the world is controlled in its cognitive appropriation. But myth eventually falls victim to this same process. Intellectualisation turns back on myth in a destructive, critical spirit. Eventually myth and other great religious explanations of the world are submitted to critique by more sophisticated--scientistic--versions of enlightenment and found wanting. From this time, enlightenment takes on the meaning it usually has for us: it is understood as the critical exposure and overcoming of all vestiges of myth--all previous worldviews which rely on superstition and faith without being able to rationally account for themselves. The program of enlightenment is thus the destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, for which enlightenment had stood and fought. The central values of the historical enlightenment--truth, reason, freedom and justice-- eventually succumb by not being able to meet the new standards of contemporary rigorous scientific analysis. Under stringent analysis these values are revealed as illusions and demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth correspondence to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary thought reveals that the former is a variable cultural construct without substantive content: the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey; truth is reduced to a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world. Freedom and justice are value concepts without any legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism--presumes not to be subject to this dialectic. Scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of ideological limitation and weakness. It signifies that even this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias and as such is just another form of myth. Positivism presupposes the "facts" of the existing world as the natural, eternal substratum of all human experience. It ignores the self-consciousness of its own historical preconditions and invests formal rationality--devoted to the discovery of efficient means rather than ends-- and existing social powers with an absolute status. It abstracts this rationality and isolates it from its sociological underpinnings in the bourgeois totality. This is a status identical to that claimed by the old metaphysical truths and myths. This lack of self-consciousness is a perpetuation of myth at one with the complete lack of critical energies characteristic of the totally administered society. This society equates itself with science and rationality.
14. There is a real question about the theoretical intentions behind Horkheimer and Adorno critique of civilisatory reason. Clearly their argument is that the civilizatory process has ultimately produced a catastrophic imbalance between the instrumental and reflective elements of rationality that were originally thought of as constituting a unity. But they go further and in places and specific formulations seem to condemn reason in toto. Whether these statements are to be viewed as an exaggerated critical image: the result of redoubled critical energies in the face of deteriorating historical circumstances or as literal truth is open to interpretation. I only want to offer a few critical remarks on their view of modernity. If one takes the theoretical framework as a whole--the twin ideas of instrumental reason and the totally administered society--the first thing to be said is that as a theory it is far too indiscriminant and extreme. The identification of civilisatory rationality with domination is both too totalising and aporetic. The authors subsume all knowledges, irrespective of their methodological and substantive peculiarities, under the category of instrumental reason aimed at control. While the examples they draw from technical and administrative knowledge are plausible, this case is much harder to prove across the broad spectrum of knowledges. However, even if their account is accepted, this is not the end of their difficulties. If reason itself as expressed in science and philosophy is complicit with barbaric domination then what is the status of Adorno and Horkheimer's own works? To the extent that even philosophical thought is contaminated as just another manifestation of instrumental reason, no form of conceptual operation or discursive thought can be immune from being tarred with the brush of domination. In an effort for consistency, our authors retreat from any positive claims to knowledge. Especially in Adorno's latter view, philosophy is reduced to the negative function of the self-criticism of conceptual thought and autonomous art takes on a normative status as a non-conceptual approach to nature that exemplifies a sort of self surrender equivalent to real freedom and emancipation. Yet, this defensive position is clearly unsatisfactory. To conceive philosophy as negative self-criticism does not escape the horizon of conceptual thought which is indispensable for communication and determinant clarity. Furthermore the downgrading of positive scientific knowledge of society was to have disastrous consequences in the post-war period when these thinkers felt no need to adjust their theory of the totally administered society in the light of the later evolution of liberal-democratic regimes. If we view this totalising critique of rationality from the standpoint of the possibility of a self-grounded modernity, we can see that Adorno and Horkheimer have placed themselves in an almost impossible position. We have already seen how philosophical reflection on the collapse of traditional world views and their replacements has gradually eroded all potential candidates for the position of emancipatory bearers: the Kantian transcendental subject, Hegel's spirit, Feuerbach's humanity and Marx's proletariat, Tocqueville's freedom, Nietzsche's Übermensch and Weber's individual personality. Horkheimer and Adorno appear to rule out humanity, history, reason and philosophy. With them the promise of an emancipated modernity as the bearer of real cultural freedom and social emancipation cannot be addressed to any concrete addressees. Their hopes retreat to the non-conceptual domain of autonomous art and they address their negative philosophy to an audience of isolated survivors and the future.
15. If we turn more directly to the notion of state capitalism and the totally administered society, with hindsight it is obvious that Horkheimer and Adorno exaggerate trends, which appeared common to all advanced industrial societies in the late 30's and 40's. They did not pay sufficient attention to the real and very substantial differences. They took totalitarianism as their general model of late capitalism and this was ahistorical insofar as it ignored many of the specific features of the so-called liberal democratic systems. The general analysis is rooted in a radicalized version of Western Marxism tailored to account for the impasse of revolution in the West. On this account, the historical delay of revolution is explained by the integration of the proletariat into the system as a result of the inducements of bourgeois ideology. This means that their general diagnosis-- while very insightful and disturbing in many ways--is far too one-sided and pessimistic in so far as it almost ignores the potentialities for social change and social resistance to the oppressive aspects of liberal capitalism. Habermas, a second-generation critical theorist, makes the point that Horkheimer and Adorno almost overlooked the great historical contribution made by bourgeois society to the project of human emancipation. And this is quite strange given the real nostalgia for 19th century competitive capitalism that appears in their diagnosis. In other words, Habermas challenges the totally negative assessment of bourgeois rationality and science as instrumental and repressive. Aside from its enormous extension of human productive forces in terms of science and technology, bourgeois society also has an important cultural and political legacy even if it is everywhere flawed and in need of supplementation and improvement. Bourgeois society is an order that served as fertile ground for the establishment of democratic decision-making processes, individualist patterns of identity formation, autonomous aesthetic experiences and for an institutional structure founded on universalistic notions of morality and law. These survivals of bourgeois rationality in the liberal-democratic societies of late capitalism provide both an arena and a source of social struggle and contradiction within present society which offers at least the prospect of future gains for democratic and emancipatory forces.
16. Obviously, rejection of the idea of a totally administered society also has important implications for the idea of the cultural industry. It is simply untenable to defend the original simple version that viewed the culture industry as a system of domination and manipulation of the masses, as the instrument for the realisation of "false needs" which enable the continued reproduction of late capitalism. The theory of the culture industry thus overburdens contemporary culture with a sense ineradicable guilt that it has served as a sort of cement for s system of inhuman and impersonal domination and absolves the theoretician of the task of analyzing its inner diversity and differentiation. Nor was it convincing to assert that such manipulation was omnipotent. I have already mentioned the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno paid far too little attention to those other agencies contributing positively to individual socialisation beyond the allegedly weakened family. This neglect of the wider sphere of social interaction like sub-cultures and the public sphere as co-operative creations of group specific horizons of orientation and values meant that our authors were reluctant to concede that administrative manipulation was subject to limits and other potential sites of resistance. Moreover, this view of culture as a part of an "iron system" denies the complexity and autonomy of the cultural domain even in late capitalism. The idea of the totally administered mass society where all tastes, desires, views and interests are homogenised and made as uniform as the mass individual of the Frankfurt School nightmare is an exaggerated image of a short post-World War II period. From our perspective, what emerges is not only a fair degree of standardisation and uniformisation of consumption but also an enormous pluralisation of tastes, practices, enjoyments and needs. What is clear is that Horkheimer and Adorno's position not only leads to a politics of despair (lack of concrete emancipatory vision and analysis), it also cannot account for the actual struggles against advanced capitalism in the sixties. It presupposed a traditional intellectual suspicion of mass culture that was dominant before post-Second World War era of youth culture and also the maintenance of an ideological consensus that may have existed in period they are working in but which was subsequently undermined at least in part by the very agencies of mass culture. In part, this over-emphasis on culture in large measure stemmed from the absence of effective social-political options in the epoch after the victory of Fascism and the sense that “culture” seemed the sole accessible terrain of critical activity for radical intellectuals. Thus Horkheimer and Adorno probably attributed too large a role to the cultural industry as an agent of social control and underestimated the complexities of its potential effects. This simply compounded their equally significant neglect of the other typical agencies of socialisation. A more plausible view is that contemporary culture including the mass media along with other elements of the public sphere actually mediates social conflict and serves as a mechanism that helps to negotiate social change. In this constellation, contemporary culture reflects, expresses and articulates social reality in a mediated fashion. While not ignoring potential for mass culture to serve as an instrument of conformity and ideological hegemony of powerful vested interests, we must also acknowledge that contemporary culture also remains a theatre of social conflict and an instrument of social reflection and ideological diversity.
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