21. As mentioned, Foucault was fascinated by revolution and was much occupied with the question of rethinking its meaning. Revolution is quite vital to his notion of social change because it ensures that no power however apparently irresistible is beyond resistance and revolt. In this sense, the possibility of revolution is the guarantee of the continuance of transgressions that break existing institutions, moulds, constraining and limiting shapes and values. It is worthwhile noting that Foucault went to Iran to report on the uprising there against the Shah. And it was there that he found confirmation of his ideas on resistance, “of the timeless drama in which power is always accursed” and of the fact that the modern understanding of revolution, that rationalised it into a rational and controllable history, was in fact the colonisation of an inexplicable, and therefore, truly historical event, by Realpolitik. He even continued to publicly support the revolution in the press even after its fundamentalist character became clear and it was in the process of murdering and persecuting its opponents. His justification of this stand is very revealing. Essentially he breaks the Iranian revolution into two realities. Most important to him is the revolt itself. Here is manifest the beauty of a collective will that is, for him, bent not just on a change of regime but on radically changing itself, its relations to things, others with eternity and God. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising as the self introduction of a subjectivity (no that of great men, but that of anyone) into history and life”. For Foucault, this radical will to change an entire way of life is the truly beautiful and memorable aspect of the revolution because it reaffirms that the human spirit is beyond even the most formidable power and beyond all calculation. He is not particularly concerned that this spiritual determination found its sources in Islam. Shi'ite Islam here appears to be simply the occasion for the expression of something deeper. The capacity to revolt, to overturn the thread of history, to risk death is the fundamental anchorage of liberty, it is a potentiality that cannot be explained. It must simply be accepted because there are revolts, sometimes, as in the Iranian case, against all the odds. The other level of the revolution is politics: this is the domain where the “will is multiple, hesitant, confused and obscure even to itself”; this is the domain of alliance, compromise and the deal. Despite his enthusiasm for the revolution, Foucault was also a defender of human rights and did challenge the new regime to live up to its absolute ethical responsibilities and ensure that its justice was open and transparent. But Foucault’s division of the revolution into these two realities revealed a degree of political romanticism that would horrify Weber. Foucault clearly has no taste for the the slow boring of hard boards but does have a real kinship with an insurrection by bare hands of whose who want to lift the fearful weight of the entire world order” that he says, “bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them” (F&IR, p. 222). Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, this account is hardly reassuring. Resistance and revolt for Foucault are shadowy figures -- the mere limit, as the other of power, as an undifferentiated will of the oppressed that is necessarily by its very unanimity unpolitical, their status appears nothing more than a theoretical postulate or an inexplicable brute fact. Given that Foucault made it his life's work to question all conventional facts and expose their historical conditions of possibility, his reticence is the face of revolt is troubling but not inexplicable. Perhaps this is the residual humanism in Foucault: one he refuses to call by its name, a humanism just as essentialist as those he critiques in the Western tradition. For Foucault, the phenomenon of revolt is a touchstone of hope, optimism, the dignity of primeval freedom expressed in the act of transgression. However, given his uncompromising repudiation of humanism, all we have is a glimmer called “resistance” that carries a heavy normative load but without any real normative credentials. Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible and untamable, almost immediately Foucault reasserts his sceptical guard in the expectation that even successful revolt that becomes revolutionary change will ossify and become another inhibition to liberty and barrier to transgression. Yet, it is hard to know how Foucault succeeds in distinguishing power from resistance: without normative credentials it would seem that resistance is in danger of being viewed as just another strategy of power.
22. Despite Foucault's theoretical bracketing of normative claims, he has repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He goes so far as to speak of his theoretical works as "only a function" of the local struggles in which he involved himself. We have already seen that he is convinced that we are all on one side or another in the battle that rages silently within stable civil existence. He also makes the point that there cannot be a neutral subject. Genealogy takes up the standpoint of the subjugated in these struggles and acclaims itself as an anti-science that attempts to remarshal the buried memories of conflict and the disqualified singular and local knowledges of the subjugated as a political/ideological challenge to the orthodox monopoly on scientificity, the existing regime of truth. This self-understanding is entirely in keeping with his idea of the specific intellectual who foregoes the universalising task of speaking the "truth" from above the contest, on behalf of mankind. The specific intellectual uses his/her expertise to develop strategies that recover suppressed knowledges, which raise the local to the threshold of scientificity and facilitate local struggles. Foucault’s embrace of the specific intellectual is at one with his whole rejection of the juridical model of sovereign power and the authority that accrues to the bearer of legitimacy. Foucault can challenge this by offering knowledges that claim not truth, but problemisation: he characterised his own works as a "toolbox", "fictions", as "fireworks". He seems to explicitly repudiate the claim to theoretical truth and positive knowledge in a way quite reminiscent of Adorno’s recourse to an aesthetic mode. He tells us:
The discourse that deciphers war’s permanent presence within society is essentially a historic-political discourse, a discourse in which truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, a discourse that is darkly critical and at the same time intensely mythical.
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the right of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, as mentioned, Foucault's explicit political self-understanding is supposedly bracketed from his genealogies. He claims to avoid the pitfalls of humanism by methodologically excluding subjective meanings, of identification with subjects or struggles. Such identification would signify a capitulation to the values of the enlightenment that already stand impeached on the charge of complicity in subjugation and oppression. Only extreme caution allows the engaged philosopher to avoid legitimating particular regimes of truth and the spectre of substitutionalism (the posture of the universalising intellectual who purports to speak for the oppressed and define their interests). Foucault repudiates identification as a refusal of joining some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. In his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Polish Trade Union Solidarity. Here Foucault employed "rights talk" and stressed the need for civic organisations to monitor rights independently of the state. Yet how this "rights talk" could be reconciled with his global critique of enlightenment values and bracketing of normative claims is not clear.
23. On what basis can Foucault advocate resistance to domination or why prefer struggle to submission? Clearly he has political sympathies yet how on the basis of his own theory can he distinguish between the forces of oppression and domination and those oppressed and dominated? By relinquishing the option of a normative foundation, Foucault may escape the totalising logic of the form of life and the type of theoretical discourse he finds complicit in a range of normalising practices. Without normative criteria, however, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only are they unable to articulate the forms of "otherness" or of action that diminish the inegalitarian logic of strategic power relations but he/she also becomes an indifferent alien merely bearing witness to the ceaseless, meaningless rotations of domination and resistance. The critics of Foucault's strategy argue that he deprives the modern rebel of any institutional or normative resources for constituting him/herself in terms other than those already provided by the prevailing dominant regimes. The difficulty of his position is exemplified by his later reversion to "rights talk". Foucault’s defenders, on the other hand, argue that his critique of modern humanism amounts to a rejection of traditional normativity. The best defence along these lines comes from Thomas Lemke. He argues that to focus on the question of norms and normativity is to miss the decisive characteristic of Foucault’s work. That is to see normativity as not outside the historical field of investigation. Norms are less a starting point than an object of an analysis and the result of conflict. Thus Foucault’s alleged weakness is a strength because it allows him to articulate the critique of the juridical model at the theoretical level by placing in question the orthodoxies of political thought and leftist critique that constrain the imagining of political alternatives; it rejects the proposition that every political intervention must compulsorily bind itself to a proof of justification by taking a position in an already fixed political system. Against this, Foucault is allegedly in the business of imagining and bring into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. ‘Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalisation’ Constellations Vol 10 no 2, pp174/75). While I find this a very plausible and consistent reading of Foucault’s theoretical intentions, it does beg vital theoretico-practical issues. One doesn’t have to argue that norms can be outside the historical field of investigation and conflict to insist that we still need normative orientation. What stops leftist political engagement degenerating into nihilism or positivism if it has no normative orientation. It is not necessary to cease reflecting upon operative norms and testing them against their practical consequences while employing them as critical standards. On the other hand, to abandon all normative orientation leaves the critique with no other compass than the theorist’s own moral and political sensibilities. And we know that these are not always as finely tuned as we would like.
24.However one decides this dispute between Foucault and his critics, it is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is very clear in his later work where he explores the idea of a non-normalising reconceptualisation of normativity associated with the idea of the care of the self within the paradigm of “governmentality” I spoke of a while ago. The key to this later model is that it obviates the requirement that the individual conform to a code of behaviour and thus engage in the repressive practices of self-sacrifice associated with Christianity. As Foucault tells us in his late lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982/3), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor obedience tout court can constitute a beautiful work. A beautiful work is one that conforms to the idea of a certain forma (a certain style, a certain from of life) (H of S, p424). And this followed from the fact that neither the nomos of the city -state nor its religion, its political structures or the form of law could dictate what concretely a citizen must do concretely throughout their life (H of S, p447). For Foucault such an ethics eliminates the externally prescriptive and regulatory modality of ethics by turning to an aesthetics of living where the ethical is focused primarily on the relation the self has to itself. Foucault finds the paradigm of the care of the self in Plato and more generally in classical society. On his reading, the moral problem is converted into the practice of liberty, the art of individual self-caring or self-formation. This process of self-cultivation requires the guide, friend, the master, the election of cultural patterns belonging to society and social groups. So it would be a mistake to understand this process of self-constitution as solely a self-self relation: it is a historically constituted social relation still implying inter-subjective relations of power. While it is clear that Foucault understands the historical conditioned character of this model, he still wants to insist that this is positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. However, it is very important to understand what he means by this. He wants to resituate the philosophical ideal of self-knowledge in the broader context of its original spiritual exercise as a practice of self-transformation through which the subject gains access to their ontological homeland of essence and truth. Again the basis of this model is Platonic: its elements are ignorance, the discovery of ignorance through an event, question or crisis, leading to the realisation of the need to care for the self which then takes the form of knowing one’s self. This knowing is that of reflexivity, a recollection where the subject rediscovers access to what is has already seen, its homeland (H of S, p255) But the practices involved in this are not those of knowledge per se but for the subject’s very being. This emphasis on spirituality implies that the truth is never given to the subject by right, it is not an act of knowledge but of transformation and that the truth is only given at the price of bringing the subject’s being into play: that is, there can be no truth without the transformation of the subject (H of S, p15) The whole point of this excursus into a positive notion of subjectivity as “care of the self’ is to demonstrate that contemporary notions of subjectivity are historical constructs, that there are alternative models that provide cultural resources that might assist us to avoid the problems of prescription, self-sacrifice and normalisation identified as deficits in later forms of the history of subjectivity.
25. Foucault has provided us with important critical insights into modernity. He has reminded us that although existing institutions speak a language of "rights" and mouth the principles of human dignity, public pronouncements can disguise a practice of unacknowledged administrative violence. However great the advances of democratisation and public scrutiny of administrative functioning, this not only does not always constrain arbitrary power nor generate a kind of power different from administrative control. Democracy and its administrative machinery have often been complicit in disguising and masking various normalising and marginalising practices and oppressions. He warns against the increasingly pervasive social surveillance exemplified in the growing incursions of "welfare" instrumentalities. He shows how the double idioms of law and medicine perform a duet that softens our reaction to administrative violence and lulls us into the political rationality of the carcarel continuum. He has revealed that, despite its advantages, the new reign of publicity means that all of society either directly or vicariously takes over the role of judge or engages in normalising judgements.
26. These are all undoubtedly important insights. Yet, it is possible to take them all on board without succumbing to sceptical myopia that results from a totalising, global critique of modernity. Foucault's vision of modernity largely ignores the contradictory aspects and lacks a certain discrimination of judgement. The democratic revolutions are occasionally mentioned, but usually only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. This emphasis might be justified by the novelty of Foucault's perspective and his desire to underscore the facts that had formally been swept under the carpet. Yet, strangely, Foucault's pervasive scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt despite is real costs in terms of life and human rights. But concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be matched by a Weberian sense of responsibility that doesn’t seem to come into Foucault’s calculations.
27. For most of his theoretical output Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno, remained content to be a negative critic with only gestures towards transgression. Only in his last incomplete work and interviews on the ethics of subjectivity does he reject his former exclusive concentration on the subjectivity of domination. He then takes a more positive direction using Greek and Roman models of care of the self not so much as contemporary paradigms but as demonstrations that there have been alternatives to the modern universal notion of subjectivity. Until this late turn that remained unelaborated and unfinished Foucault had sustained a vigil against the imminent domination of the contemporary regime of truth and modes of subjection. The great bulk of his work stands as a counter-discourse to humanism.
28. This total scepticism is backed by a reluctance to privilege any aspect of the present. Vigilance needs to be constant and danger is everywhere. Yet, there is reason to doubt whether such universal scepticism is sustainable not to mention ultimately productive. We have already mentioned Foucault’s uncritical appropriation of revolt and his late indulgence in "rights talk". These are instances where Foucault was compelled by his own political commitments and his own desire to resolve the theoretical impasses of his work in the seventies to move beyond universal scepticism. While it remains vitally important to know that in principle we can turn critical eyes to any aspect of our modern lives and that no value is beyond suspicion, it is practically just as relevant to acknowledge where we stand and what we value. Making choices involves discrimination. Foucault was right that such discrimination cannot occur outside of history but nor can we refuse to discriminate, rely on global scepticism or refuse to acknowledge the choices we make as real choices. We choose on the basis of what we hold to be essential and most valuable. While this was the practice of Foucault's own political life, this does not always receive its full theoretical acknowledgement.
