Strange Predecessors: Some Stray Thoughts on Foucault

Michel Foucault's list of influences and predecessors is fairly well established, in part because he has named his predecessors repeatedly, presenting an account of his origin that is more history than genealogy. His "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" essay is canon. His final remarks on Heidegger, while surprising to many, are no less well known. The only question mark is perhaps his relation to Marx, which vacillates between the citations "without quotation marks" and utter repudiation, like his famous remarks about fish in water. To me that continues to be the more interesting connection, and I should mention that I am currently reading Stéphane Legrand's Les Normes Chez Foucault, a book that I really should have read awhile ago, definitely before his book on Ayn Rand, and should have more to say about that soon.

What I would like to do now, in honor of Foucault's birthday, is give some less likely predecessors. As Borges once wrote, every writer creates their own precursors, and Foucault is no stranger to Borges references. In this case I am thinking less of precursors than the way in which two of Foucault's central points, even his polemics with the western Philosophical tradition, the productive nature of power, and the inadequacy of the law as a figure or concept of power, were in some sense prefigured by that very tradition. These prefigurations take the form not so much as outright statements or doctrines, but points of tension, aporias, and tensions, the sort of points of heresy that Foucault was fond of.  In other words, now that Foucault exists it is possible to see his theories in the tensions and contradictions of the traditions of political theory that he in some sense broke with. 

The first of these is Spinoza, who, as I have remarked before, Foucault never showed much interest in despite the fact that those around him, Deleuze, Althusser, etc. were, but as Deleuze wrote in his little book on Foucault, philosophers seldom recognize their own bedfellows, failing to see the similarities in their work to other philosophers. As I have mentioned in this blog and elsewhere, I was prompted to think about this from Machereys remarks that Spinoza's understanding of obedience prefigures Foucault. 

I have become increasingly obsessed with the two revisions that happen in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The first, and most well known, is the Machiavellian correction that Spinoza offers to his version of the social contract. As Spinoza writes, 

"The picture presented in the last chapter of the overriding right of sovereign powers and the transference to them of the individual’s natural right, though it comes quite close to actual practice and can increasingly be realized in reality, must nevertheless remain in many respects no more than theory. Nobody can so completely transfer to another all his right, and consequently his power ” 

The difference between theory and practice turns out to be power, the power which can not be transferred or alienated. It is for this reason that rulers fear their subjects. This revision, or correction, which replaces right with power is coupled with a second correction, one that moves in the opposite direction. The first, in keeping with the idea of a social contract, differentiates between subjection and liberty by considering the motives or reason underlying one’s actions, searching for the rational core of obedience. That one obeys the rule of a sovereign is not enough to consider that action proof of obedience. As Spinoza argues, “the reason must enter into account.“ There are times when are obedience to the law is nothing other than rational behavior, stopping at a stop light is as much about self-preservation in the face of oncoming traffic as it is obedience to the law. Obedience, servitude is then restricted to those moments when we do something that is not in our interest.  

This is revised in Chapter Seventeen. It is in that Chapter that Spinoza offers his own anticipation of the "productive nature of power." Power does not just subtract, does not just threaten with a stick, it also promises and provokes with a carrot. As Spinoza writes, 

“However, for a proper understanding of the extent of the government’s right and power, it should be observed that the government’s power is not strictly confined to its power of coercion by fear, but rests on all the possible means by which it can induce men to obey its commands. It is not the motive for obedience, but the fact of obedience, that constitutes a subject. Whatever be the motives that prompt a man to carry out the commands of the sovereign power, whether it be fear of punishment, hope of reward, love of country or any other emotion, which it is he who makes the decision, he is nevertheless acting under the control of the sovereign power. From the fact, then, that a man acts from his own decision, we should not forthwith conclude that his action proceeds from his own right and not from the right of government. For whether a man is urged by love or driven by a fear of threatened evil, since in both cases his action always proceeds from his own intention and decision, either there can be no such thing as sovereignty and right over subjects or else it must include all the means that contribute to men’s willingness to obey. whenever a subject acts in accordance with the commands of the sovereign power, whether he is motivated by love, or fear, or (and this is more frequently the case) a mixture of hope and fear, or by reverence—which is an emotion compounded of fear and awe—or whatever be his motive, he acts from his ruler’s right, not from his own.”

If Hobbes political anthropology was in part predicated on seeing freedom even in fear, then Spinoza's can be understood insisting on seeing obedience even in desire.  It is this same tendency we find in Foucault, just because we get pleasure in something, in confessing our desires, defining ourselves by them, as in the History of Sexuality, does not mean that they are not implicated with power, even products of power. Of course seeing power at the center of desire is not limited to Foucault, and in some sense it is Deleuze and Guattari (and Lordon) who are the most directly influenced by the connection between desire and power. 

Foucault, Spinoza, and Bento. 

Back to Spinoza's text for a minute, what I am referring to as the two "corrections" of Chapter Seventeen, the assertion of the inalienability of power (which is also the inalienability of right) and the expansion of the techniques of obedience to include love and "reverence," would seem to go in opposite directions; the first reducing the power of the sovereign, while the second expands it. However, and this would seem to me to be the Foucauldian point, it is precisely because power is inalienable, that it remain with the body and mind, as an inalienable expression of one's capacity, that the sovereign must use more techniques than "subtractive" ones, must elicit as much as it forbids. On this point I have often thought of Foucault's "power is everywhere" to be more akin to the ubiquity of Starbucks, at least a few years ago. I read somewhere that the ubiquity came from the fact that Starbucks had very weak brand loyalty, if people had to walk a few blocks to get to a Starbucks they would just as soon go to a local coffee place. Foucault's idea of power is like that, if there is power permeating all sorts of social relations, it is because that power is always contested always facing opposition. 

My second precursor is even more strange and tenuous, and that is John Stuart Mill, or rather John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, co-authors of On Liberty. While I think it is possible to place Spinoza in an expansive dimension of the materialist tradition, as Negri and Althusser have done, Mill and Taylor belong more to the liberal tradition. However, in this case it is tensions and the aporias that matter more than the theses.  One of the most pervasive tensions concerns one of the other thesis of Foucault's, that law is always a limited way to understand power, power exceeds law, and sovereignty is more than legality. Or as Mill and Mill put it, 

"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."

Everyone who reads On Liberty, or is familiar with its thesis from an introduction to ethical theory course, knows about the supposed "harm principle," the idea that we are free to do anything up to the point where it harms others. However, what is talked about less, and does not make it basic introductions to utilitarianism is how much Mill and Mill also worry with the tyranny of the majority, of the coercive force of custom and habit, and the power of opinion. At times this assertion takes a dark, Foucauldian turn, "enslaving the soul itself" seems like a version of Foucault's famous passage from Discipline and Punish:

"The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." 

The similarity is not just confined to rhetorical flair. One of the central arguments dedicated to this theme of the "tyranny of the majority" is that the shift from overt repression to more covert social intolerance might not progress, but a perfection of the powers of repression. Out and out repression was perhaps never as effective as we were lead to believe, the open persecution of disobedience produced its own fascination. To cite Mill and Mill again, 

"But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them. Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its illumination over the whole intellectual firmament. Christians were cast to the lions, but the Christian church grew up a stately and spreading tree, overtopping the older and less vigorous growths, and stifling them by its shade. Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light."

This, to some extent is very different critique of the repressive hypothesis. Repression was never as effective as we are lead to believe, it creates martyrs and generates attention. Far more effective is what Mill and Mill call social intolerance, the tendency to make silencing itself quiet and thus less notable. 

I had a professor in undergrad who once said that she did not teach Foucault because once people read him everything becomes Foucauldian, power/knowledge, discourse, dispositifs, etc., I know because I was one of those people, for a good two to three years Foucault was the answer to every question. I eventually moved away from that. However, I am trying to resist "the blackmail of Foucauldianism," of being for or against Foucault. It seems that one way to do this is to generalize Foucault, to think other sites in which the productivity of power and its changing nature are acknowledged, even if it is only in the points of tension and contradiction. It seems to me that thinking Foucault before Foucault, as I have tried to do here, is perhaps also a way of thinking Foucault after Foucault. It seems to me that we need to move the analysis beyond the institutions of the school, the family, and the prison that defined Foucault's studies, into the spaces of control, to use Deleuze's term, that are all the more pervasive for being all the more virtual.