Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation

FOUCAULT AND SOCIAL DIALOGUE The notions of the ‘death of the subject’ or the ‘death of Man’ have deeply affected much ...

Author: Chris Falzon

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FOUCAULT AND SOCIAL DIALOGUE The notions of the ‘death of the subject’ or the ‘death of Man’ have deeply affected much of contemporary thought. We can attribute much of their influence to the work of Michel Foucault. At the same time, debates over these notions and criticism of Foucault’s work have often become mired in disputes over absolutism versus relativism, or foundationalism versus fragmentation. Are these extremes the only options open to those who wish to build political and ethical theory on constantly shifting ground? Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation is a compelling yet extremely clear investigation of these options that also offers a new way forward. Christopher Falzon argues that the proper alternative to foundationalism is not fragmentation but dialogue, and that such a dialogical picture can be found in the work of Michel Foucault. This reading of Foucault allows us to see the ethical and political position implicit in Foucault’s work and how his work contributes to the larger debate concerning the death of Man. Foucault and Social Dialogue also presents a rethinking of the important debate between Habermas and Foucault, and shows how Foucault’s work can be used effectively to challenge the position of Habermas. Christopher Falzon also links the notion of dialogue to contemporary French thought and the concept of otherness that is central to much of that work. Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation will interest all students of Foucault and anyone concerned with social, critical and political theory. Christopher Falzon is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian National University.

FOUCAULT AND SOCIAL DIALOGUE Beyond fragmentation

Christopher Falzon

London and New York

First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Christopher Falzon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Falzon, Christopher, 1957– Foucault and social dialogue: beyond fragmentation/Christopher Falzon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Foucault, Michel—Ethics. 2. Ethics, Modern—20th century. 3. Postmodernism—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. B2430.F724F35 1998 194–dc21 97–42948 ISBN 0-203-00318-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-17463-1 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-17044-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-17045-1 (pbk)

FOR SARAH, ELEANOR, SOPHIE, VANESSA AND ANTONY

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction: the death of Man

vii 1

1 Beyond metaphysics and fragmentation

14

2 Foucault and dialogue

31

3 Ethics, critique and enlightenment

49

4 Dialogue and the postmodern

67

Notes

84

Bibliography

88

Index

94

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is the result of a long process of reflection on Foucault’s work which began with my doctoral dissertation. Many people have helped in its formation. I am indebted to David Hoy, Clare O’Farrell and Paul Patton for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Winifred Wing Han Lamb, Genevieve Lloyd, Timothy O’Leary, John Quinn, Sarah Rice and Jon Simons also read drafts of the manuscript or parts of it, and I thank them for their comments and encouragement. I am grateful to Ros Diprose and Moira Gatens for suggestions that allowed me to refine my position; and to Penelope Deutscher, Natalie Stoljar and Udo Thiel for their advice and support. Finally, I would like to thank Kate Foord for making her editorial skills available at a crucial stage of the project.

INTRODUCTION The death of Man The second half of the twentieth century has been witness to a major shift in Western thinking, a shift that can be summed up in terms of the idea of the ‘death of the subject’ or the ‘death of Man’. In many areas of contemporary thought, this demise has been the subject of intense discussion and debate. At the same time, debates concerning the death of Man have often become mired in interminable disputes over absolutism versus relativism, foundationalism versus fragmentation. Increasingly, however, the idea that these are the only alternatives open to us has itself been questioned. It has been argued that we need to consider the possibility of going beyond these standard oppositions (Bernstein 1983:1–2). In this book I aim to explore this possibility. In particular, I will argue that the proper alternative to foundationalism is not fragmentation but dialogue; and moreover, that such a dialogical picture can be found in the work of one of the most important recent critics of foundationalism, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault, it is true, is not usually seen as a philosopher of dialogue, but reading him in these terms proves to be surprisingly illuminating. Indeed, it allows the ethical and political position implicit in his work to be clearly identified. And it makes it possible to see precisely how his work contributes to the larger debate concerning the death of Man. In this Introduction, I will sketch out the main themes and arguments that will figure in the forthcoming discussion. Metaphysics, fragmentation and dialogue To begin with, what precisely is meant by this notion of the death of Man? In the first instance, it involves scepticism concerning the modern notion of a transcendental self, a timeless, universal human nature which can provide an ultimate foundation for thought and action. More broadly, it is scepticism concerning the existence of any universal, permanent, ahistorical standpoint, framework or essence to which we can ultimately appeal in order to determine what counts as reason, knowledge or right action. It is also a questioning of the idea that philosophy’s job is to seek and to affirm the existence of such ultimate foundations and constraints, in terms of which to ground, comprehend or organise the totality of things. This contemporary scepticism concerning foundations and the traditional role of philosophy is the minimum defining feature of what I will refer to as a ‘postmodern’ philosophical position or way of thinking. Whatever else a postmodern position might involve is going to depend on what one takes the consequences of this scepticism to be. Claims that it is the role of philosophy to establish ultimate foundations might seem grandiose and extravagant, but they have been a feature of philosophical thinking for a long time—along, that is, with scepticism about them. In the past, many notions have

Foucault and social dialogue: beyond fragmentation

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been put forward as providing the ultimate grounds of thought and action: Platonic forms, the cosmic world-order of Stoicism, and the medieval God, amongst others. In general, I will refer to this foundationalist approach as ‘metaphysical’ thinking. And this kind of thinking is by no means confined to the past. In the modern period, from Descartes on, human beings themselves have been called upon to play the foundational role, taking the place of the medieval God. Thus we encounter the notion of ‘Man’, the God-like transcendental subject or essential human nature invoked to provide the ultimate grounds for knowledge and action. This is the self that Robert Solomon calls ‘unprecedentedly arrogant, presumptuously cosmic’ (Solomon 1988:4). I will refer to this modernist form of metaphysics as ‘metaphysical subjectivism’, or, to use the less precise but more common term, ‘humanism’. As mentioned, metaphysical forms of thinking have always provoked sceptical attack. As Richard Bernstein notes, every time someone comes up with what they take to be a firm foundation or a fixed categorial framework, others have challenged such claims and argued that what is supposedly fixed, eternal and indubitable is open to doubt and questioning. To this end, it is often argued that what has been taken to be fundamental is in fact culturally or historically specific (Bernstein 1983:9). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such sceptical attacks were launched against the medieval worldview, the idea of a God-given cosmic order. By the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche was able to make his famous pronouncement that God is dead, a spent force in European culture. And now, in the latter half of the twentieth century, there is news of another death, the death of the Man who was supposed to replace God. Scepticism has arisen concerning the notion of transcendental subjectivity and the effort to subordinate all thought and action to this figure. Here, once again, Nietzsche leads the way, in his questioning of all ‘metaphysical comforts’, including the transcendental subject. His criticisms, along with those of Heidegger, are important sources of this postmodern kind of scepticism. But it is in recent French thought that we find some of the most concerted attacks on the humanist subject. In France since the early 1960s there have been successive waves of anti-humanist or anti-subjectivist thinking.1 The initial vogue for structuralism, that ‘Kantianism without the transcendental subject’ which made structure the overall organising principle, quickly gave way to more thoroughgoingly anti-metaphysical forms of anti-humanism. It is here that we find the work of Foucault, along with that of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-François Lyotard. Through their critical interventions, the humanist outlook has been significantly challenged. At the same time, however, this critique of the foundational subject, this rejection of any absolute, overarching, unifying standpoint, has evoked two very different kinds of response.2 On the one hand it has been seen as a positive development. For too long, it is argued, different perspectives, ‘other’ voices, have been subordinated to a standpoint that claims to be universal and absolute but is in fact historically specific, being white, male, Western and so on. Its appearance of universality was in fact only made possible through the violent suppression of otherness and heterogeneity. Such totalising thinking is not only theoretically problematic, leading to dogmatism and intellectual intolerance, but also has a part to play in forms of social and political oppression. By freeing ourselves from the illusion that there is some absolute standpoint, and recognising that all our concepts

Introduction: the death of Man

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of knowledge, truth and right action are ‘local’ or historically specific, we will help open up a space for diversity, for otherness, for other forms of life. On the other hand, there are those who find the idea of abandoning the search for ultimate foundations or basic constraints deeply problematic. If we do so, it is claimed, we will face the kind of intellectual and moral chaos where ‘anything goes’. We will end up with a relativistic view of thought and action as fragmented into so many incommensurable world-views, forms of life or cultural practices, in which we can only speak relativistically of ‘our’ standards and ‘their’ standards. To view standards as merely specific and relative to a particular culture or time in this way is to deny ourselves the capacity to evaluate or criticise forms of life, to choose between them, or to give coherence to our cultural practices. And this account is not only theoretically inadequate but also politically dangerous. If rational thought and critical judgement withdraw from the scene, the field will be left open for all kinds of irrationalism and fanaticism. In the end, forces other than reason will determine which views hold sway and how society is organised. Faced with such considerations, there is a strong motivation to reject what appears to be a reactionary and dangerous postmodernism, and to reaffirm some sort of transcendental ground or foundation. The German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas is often seen as a thinker who has taken this path. It is in this manner that the idea of the death of Man has engendered the debates concerning foundationalism and fragmentation to which I alluded at the outset. The recent critiques of humanist foundationalism have undeniable force and cannot be ignored; yet there remains the anxiety that abandoning the metaphysical subject will leave us with a relativistic fragmentation, and the criticisms of this position cannot easily be dismissed either. But the crucial question here is, even if we accept these criticisms of the fragmentation vision, should we follow someone like Habermas and try to preserve some version of a transcendental, unifying ground for thought and action? It seems to me that it would be more useful and more interesting to ask whether the death of Man necessarily implies the fragmentation of thought and action in the first place. What I want to argue is that the alternative to a unitary metaphysical vision is not in fact fragmentation. The vision of fragmentation continues to embody a metaphysical understanding of the world. Genuinely to abandon metaphysics, to go beyond the philosophy of the subject, is to go beyond not only unitary metaphysics but also fragmentation. The death of Man does not mean that we are faced with a multiplicity of incommensurable world-views, but rather it opens the way to an understanding of ourselves as existing inescapably in the midst of dialogue. Structure of the book In order to give substance to this contention, I will begin in Chapter 1 by criticising the idea, associated with Habermas amongst others, that the radical postmodern rejection of ultimate foundations leads inevitably to fragmentation, relativism, a plurality of incommensurable world-views. I will discuss in more detail the contention that the fragmentation vision does not represent an alternative to metaphysics, but is rather a continuation of it. The argument here is that the fragmentation vision simply replaces a single totalising vision of the world with a plurality of such world-views, each complete


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and all-embracing, and precisely for this reason closed to and incommensurable with one another. What persists in both totalising metaphysics and the fragmentation vision is the essentially metaphysical idea that it is possible to have a complete, all-embracing worldview. This sets the scene for the discussion, in Chapter 2, of dialogue as the genuine alternative to metaphysics. I will argue that genuinely to abandon metaphysics is to abandon the idea, fundamental to metaphysics and present also in the fragmentation vision, that it is possible to comprehend and organise the world in its totality. This is not to deny that we engage in organisational activity, that we strive to impose order on the world. Indeed, human beings can perhaps be defined as form-giving beings. But we break decisively from metaphysical thinking when we recognise that, although we may struggle to domesticate and shape the world, the world can never be completely captured or wholly organised. It always resists and exceeds our grasp. In seeking to order the world, we inevitably come up against that which is other, that which eludes our categories and which is able to affect and shape us in turn. In other words, we inevitably engage in a dialogue. I will have more to say about my use of this term in a moment, but let me say at the outset that this encounter with the world is a dialogue in a minimal, ‘thin’ sense of the term. That is, it involves a reciprocity, a twoway, back and forth movement or interplay between ourselves and the world. In particular, I want to suggest, social interaction can be characterised in these terms. Social dialogue, so understood, does not preclude the possibility of overarching forms of social unity or organisation. A dialogical account need not deny that we live in a world characterised by various forms of order and hierarchy. What such an account means, however, is that these forms of order need to be understood as emerging out of the play of social dialogue, to the precise extent that one party is able to domesticate the other, to the extent that otherness is overcome, and the movement of dialogue is arrested. Relatively stable, hierarchical relations are thereby established. At the same time, however, social unities and forms of organisation remain secondary and derivative. That is, they both emerge out of dialogue and are continually challenged by new forms of resistance or otherness. They are destined to be transformed through continuing dialogue. In this context it is also possible to locate the phenomenon of domination. All forms of order overcome otherness and suppress dialogue to some extent. It is at those points where otherness is entirely overcome, where dialogue is entirely arrested, that states of domination emerge. Here, forms of life become all-embracing, closed and unchanging. Domination is thus the radical negation of dialogue. I am not suggesting, however, that such domination is ever completely successful, that otherness can be definitively overcome, or dialogue suppressed once and for all. It remains the case that all forms of order, even states of domination, are secondary and derivative. States of domination are at best temporary blockages to the movement of dialogue, states which are ultimately destined to be overcome through renewed forms of resistance, in the course of ongoing dialogue. Metaphysical thinking can be seen as a means of promoting this kind of political totalisation, of establishing and maintaining the ascendancy of particular forms of life, by presenting these forms as universal, necessary and obligatory. It is a dialogical picture of this sort, I will argue, that can be found in the work of Foucault. Foucault is well known as one of the key recent critics of metaphysical


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subjectivism. And, although he himself expressed some bemusement about the notion of postmodernity, it is clear that his questioning of the transcendental subject, and his suggestion in The Order of Things that the reign of the subject might be about to end, were key factors in the emergence of a postmodern philosophical sensibility (Foucault 1970:386–7; cf. Smart 1990:26–7). What I want to argue is that, in questioning the transcendental subject, he turns to a picture in which dialogue is fundamental. Some commentators have seen him as presenting an account in which human beings, no longer transcendental subjects, have become subordinated to a new kind of metaphysics, to an impersonal structural totality, or to domination conceived as a unitary, all-embracing principle which organises society in its totality.3 But a careful reading of works such as Discipline and Punish (1979a) and volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1978b) will show that what they make central is not structure or domination but our involvement in an open-ended ‘agonistic’ dialogue of forces. Out of this dialogue, forms of social order and entrapment emerge, and are themselves destined to be overcome in the course of ongoing dialogue. This dialogical picture is opposed not only to metaphysical subjectivism but also to any metaphysical vision of structural totality or all-embracing domination. In Chapter 3 this dialogical picture will be developed further by way of a consideration of its implications for ethics and for social critique. I will argue that this picture, as a rejection of metaphysical foundationalism, implies a different kind of approach to ethics. It implies the rejection of a foundationalist approach, i.e., ethics understood as a search for universal and necessary normative principles in terms of which all social practices can be grounded, ordered and justified. On the dialogical view, normative principles, along with the social forms they inform, emerge all the time out of the play of dialogue. A metaphysically based, prescriptive ethics, by presenting these principles as absolute, assists in the absolutisation of these social forms, the production of states of closure and domination. At the same time, however, I am not proposing as an alternative an ethical position which holds that we ought to engage in dialogue, that dialogue is an ideal we should strive for. That would be to continue to employ the traditional, prescriptive notion of ethics. Dialogue as I have presented it is not a normative notion, an ideal to be realised. Rather, it is a fact of life. We are inevitably, inescapably, caught up in dialogue. And it is in this dialogical context that ethics has to be understood. It ceases to prescribe how we should act, to be that which tells us, from ‘on high’, what practices we ought to engage in, and instead it becomes an instrument, a tool, a means of facilitating the movement of dialogue in which we are always involved. Traditional ethics, by absolutising certain forms of life, assists in the process of overcoming otherness, arresting dialogue and establishing states of domination. Dialogical ethics involves choosing to adopt an attitude of openness towards the other, being open to different perspectives and to ways of acting which challenge the prevailing forms. Such an attitude functions to assist contemporary forms of resistance, the contemporary challenges to prevailing social arrangements, and hence is instrumental in promoting continuing dialogue and social transformation. And it is an ethics of this sort, I will argue, that is implicit in Foucault’s work. That is, if we read Foucault as presenting a certain conception of dialogue, then his own ethical position, as it emerges in his later work, becomes intelligible as a dialogical


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ethics of the sort I have described. This reading will also serve to counter those criticisms which see his work as unable to sustain an ethical position. In the final chapter, Chapter 4, in the light of the anti-metaphysical, dialogical picture which I claim can be found in Foucault’s work, I will return to the discussion of Habermas and the vision of fragmentation begun in the first chapter. This will allow me to show in more detail how the dialogical picture represents an advance over both the fragmentation vision and Habermas’s own alternative. First of all, I will present a fuller account of Habermas’s position. Habermas is by no means an uncritical advocate of foundationalism. He also recognises the problematic character of the philosophy of the subject and wants to escape from it, and, moreover, he makes his own turn to dialogue in the form of what he calls ‘communicative intersubjectivity’. I will argue, however, that in the end Habermas only turns to dialogue in order to reformulate key themes of subjectivist metaphysics. The dialogical account I am presenting is intended, amongst other things, to rescue the notion of dialogue from Habermas’s reading of it, to formulate a genuinely non-metaphysical conception of dialogue. Second, I will turn to a consideration of the vision of fragmentation. Critics like Habermas are quite right to call into question a postmodernism conceived in terms of relativistic fragmentation. However, in so far as the vision of fragmentation is a continuation of metaphysics, this represents a superficial reading of postmodernism. I will argue that the dialogical alternative I am presenting makes it possible decisively to reject this superficial reading, and to formulate a more adequate, more authentic postmodernism. At this point, let me explain why I have chosen to employ a notion of dialogue in this discussion, and to formulate it in the way that I have. It might be argued that, in this account, the notion of dialogue has been transformed almost beyond recognition. Dialogue is no longer restricted to symbolic face-to-face oral or gestural communication. It becomes any kind of reciprocal interaction between ourselves and the world. It is certainly necessary to understand dialogue in this way if it is to encompass the kind of interaction between social forces which Foucault himself prefers to describe in terms of agonism or combat. But the question then is, why should we continue to employ the term ‘dialogue’ here? First of all, it seems to me that at the core of the concept of dialogue is precisely this notion of reciprocal interaction. Dialogue necessarily involves a mutual interplay between the participants, as opposed to a one-way imposition of one upon the other. And, by employing this notion to characterise our social situation, it is possible to stress the reciprocal character of our relationship with the other, in which we are both affected by the other and are able to affect it in turn, in a mutual combat or struggle. It might then be argued that this picture of reciprocal interaction, of combat or struggle, is still remote from dialogue, properly speaking. Isn’t dialogue something rather more exalted? One might not want to go all the way with Martin Buber’s quasi-mystical notion of dialogue as a deep communion springing from a meeting between persons, but, at the very least, it might be said, to participate in a genuine dialogue is surely to encounter the other in a special way, to be open to them, to take them seriously, to be willing to listen to what they have to say. And it is true that this is not the conception of dialogue I am presenting here. That is, I am not presenting a normative, ideal conception of dialogue, but what I have called a thin notion of dialogue, a non-normative notion of reciprocal interaction. At the same time, however, this minimal conception of dialogue makes it possible to go on to relocate the ethical attitude of openness, and to understand it


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in a new way. Openness is not necessary for dialogue between ourselves and the other, which will go on regardless. But it can be relocated as an instrument which we may choose to employ in order to facilitate the overcoming of blockages to dialogue and to promote its continuation. General themes I will conclude this introductory section by making some general comments about what is at stake in the turn from metaphysics to dialogue, the turn to dialogue which I take to be exemplified in Foucault’s work. First of all, as already noted, it allows us to go beyond those interminable disputes between foundationalism and fragmentation. Moreover, I want to suggest that with the turn to dialogue it becomes possible to do justice to history. The dialogue I am referring to, the play of dialogical relations, in which we are both affected by others and affect them in turn in a reciprocal interplay, is ultimately constitutive of our historical existence. And it is just this historical existence which cannot be fully comprehended from a metaphysical perspective. As long as we have a standpoint in terms of which everything can be explained and comprehended, we are unable to account for the emergence of this standpoint itself. We are unable to see it as having developed out of any kind of process. Instead, we have dogmatically to assert it, to see it as existing a priori. It is only if we reject metaphysics in favour of dialogue that we can account for the standpoint in terms of which we proceed, as having emerged out of historical dialogue. This is not all that is at stake, however. The turn to historical dialogue, I want to argue, also makes it possible for us to do justice to our humanness. It involves a turn to the concrete, embodied human being, involved in dialogue with others, existing in the midst of history. In the face of humanist metaphysics, the turn to dialogue is a rejection of every kind of ‘transcendental narcissism’, every attempt to see ourselves as having a privileged position above history, above time, a God-like standpoint from which we can exercise mastery over the world. This arrogant vision of the human being as ‘Man’, the sovereign, all-powerful author or source of its world, comes at the cost of a great blindness about ourselves, an inability to accept or acknowledge the finitude that is integral to our very humanity, the concrete historicity and embodiment that makes us recognisably human. It is in fact, ironically enough, an inhuman conception of human being. By the same token, to reject humanism and turn to historical dialogue is also to restore a human conception of human being as finite and embodied, as inescapably in the midst of history and subject to historical influence, change and transformation. To understand the human being in this way is by no means to dismiss our form-giving activity, through which we seek to impose order and stability upon the world, and to attain a degree of security from change and transformation. But it remains the case that no matter to what degree we impose ourselves on our surroundings, we can never entirely master them. They resist us, and affect and shape us in turn. We ultimately remain subject to the movement of dialogue, of history. Stable forms emerge to the extent that the other and resistance are overcome, but everything about us, even our most deeply held principles, beliefs, habits, social forms and institutions, remains ultimately subject to change and transformation through continuing resistance. Through such resistance and


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transformation, new forms of life are established. These in turn are destined to pass away, to be transformed, through new forms of resistance, and so the process continues. We are thus involved in an ongoing historical dialogue, in which no form of life persists indefinitely. This is what our finitude comes to. We are touched through and through by history. This recognition of the finitude and historicity of our existence and our forms of life stands opposed not only to modernity’s humanist metaphysics, but also to the accompanying, optimistic vision of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is the vision, so close to the modern soul, of human beings as able, in the long run, to rise above their historical circumstances, and to master and transform the social world in accordance with their rationality. Equally, it stands in opposition to those later, nineteenth-century accounts such as Hegel’s, which, whilst acknowledging our concrete existence in history, preserve the Enlightenment vision of total organisation. They do so by interpreting history itself as the working-out of a larger rational plan, in which particular individuals may pass away but humanity as a whole will triumph. Every such attempt to see history as having a larger order and an ultimate destination, of which Marxism is only the most recent example, is doomed to be refuted by history itself. There is no pre-ordained sequence of events in history, nor any guaranteed happy ending. We have to take our chances in the world without guarantees of any sort. All that we achieve is going to pass away, and in the long run, as Keynes pointed out, we are all dead. Now it might seem that this picture of ourselves as historical and finite represents a profound loss. It would be easy to paint this immersion in time, in history and dialogue, in melancholic or tragic tones, with human beings as poor creatures, doomed to pass away along with their works, condemned to a fleeting existence along with all other worldly things. We are familiar with this melancholy view of human existence from the medieval Christian world-view. Yet Christianity was still able to provide hope, with its vision of humanity’s ultimate transcendence of death (Carroll 1993:5). With the passing of the medieval God, and a question mark over the Man who would replace God, there would seem to be no alternative but the pessimistic realisation of our subjection to time and history without the possibility of redemption. A number of twentieth-century schools of thought, their faith in metaphysics exhausted, appear to have embraced versions of this view. It is arguably present in the existentialist notion of ‘absurdity’, the feeling that we have been abandoned by God and that our existence has been deprived of any larger plan, direction or meaning. Why are we born, asks lonesco, when we must die? It is arguably also at least part of what is involved in the bleak pessimism of the later Frankfurt School, a Marxism which no longer believes that history is moving towards a Utopian conclusion.4 But this negative, dismissive view of our historical existence, it seems to me, reflects a continuing underlying attachment to a metaphysical perspective, a persistent hankering after an ideal state, whether this is in the form of an unworldly Christian heaven or in its secularised, modernist form as a heaven on earth that emerges in the course of history. In both cases we have an ideal, unchanging, perfect state, a higher destination, which gives an overall meaning or direction to our historical existence. From this perspective, existing historical life appears in largely negative terms, as a lesser, ignoble realm in which nothing lasts, in which all our achievements remain subject to the sway of history, change and transformation. It is a realm which we have to overcome in some way, to rise above


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or bring order to in accordance with ultimate principles, if we are to redeem ourselves. And, as such, to lose faith in the possibility of such an ideal state does seem to leave us without hope, abandoned to an absurd, meaningless world. By the same token, however, decisively to abandon this hankering after an ideal order is to leave behind the corresponding dismissive view of our historical existence. It is to recognise that our mundane, transitory, historical world is the only one there is. And although existing finitely in the midst of history means that all things human, all forms of life, are destined to pass away, to be transformed, the other side of the passing of the old is the emergence of the new, that which is other, which is equally part of human existence. Human beings are unable totally to master their surroundings, and they remain subject to historical change and transformation, because of human beings themselves. Although various forms of social order are imposed on human beings, they are not content simply to reproduce the forms of life in which they exist. They are able to resist, to transgress imposed rules, create new forms of thought and action, and impose them in turn. These new forms of organisation, in their own turn, encounter resistance and transgression, and so the process is an ongoing, open-ended dialogue, through which forms of life both emerge and are transformed. The irrepressible transgressive activity which underlies the continuing emergence and transformation of forms of life can also be understood as human freedom. Again, this is not to invoke a normative notion, an ideal we ought to aim for. Human freedom refers to the fact of resistance, the perennially resistant character of human beings. And if this human freedom challenges the existing order and hierarchy, if it deprives human beings of lasting security and peace, if it introduces instability and risk and engenders all the uncertainties of history, it also means the permanent possibility of a renewal or revitalisation of life, through the transgression of imposed limits and the creation of new forms of thought and action. In this context it is the complete overcoming of otherness and of the possibility of transformation, the refusal of our historicity and finitude, the denial of death, that kills. Heaven, as the ideal state, the realm of the eternal and unchanging, would be intolerable, infinitely boring, utterly deadening. History is uncertain and risky, but it is by the same token vital and interesting. Let us not ask why we are born if we must die. On the contrary, it is only because we can die, because we can pass away, that there can be life. Given this conception of our dialogical, historical existence, it is not change but rather the total ordering of life, the overcoming of history, that becomes problematic. Complete mastery of the world would indeed protect us from change and transformation and give us complete security and stability. But in completely overcoming the other, organisational activity would suppress the resistance, the freedom, the creative transgression, out of which new forms of organisation emerge. It would cut off the very wellsprings of organisational activity, kill human creativity, leaving us imprisoned in existing forms of life, in sterility and repetition, in a kind of living death. It is no accident that the so-called ‘Enlightenment project’ of a world entirely mastered and organised in accordance with rational subjectivity is implicated in our entrapment in new forms of imprisonment and domination, in this case a subordination to conceptions of essential selfhood, to conceptions of ‘Man’, and to the modern kinds of social regulation that they inform.


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Our arrogant modernist view of ourselves as absolute and all-powerful, capable of rising above history and mastering the world, thus comes at a considerable cost. We not only become blinded to our finitude, to everything about us that makes us recognisably human. We also contribute to the suppression of that which is other, and consequently to imprisonment in our own forms of life. By the same token, the rejection of this totalising Enlightenment project, the sceptical challenge to notions of foundational subjectivity, the death of Man and the remembrance of our finitude and historicity, all of this is part of the process whereby these modern forms of social regulation and imprisonment are resisted. It should be added that this denial of Man need not amount to a denial of the Enlightenment, if we understand by enlightenment precisely the contesting of closed, dogmatic visions and the opening up of new, invigorating human possibilities. Enlightenment so understood stands opposed to the deadening Enlightenment project of a total ordering of life. At this point, let me respond to one possible criticism. It might seem that the dialogical picture being presented here, with its reference to an ordering of life which promotes security but is also stultifying, and a freedom that is unsettling but also revitalising, is in fact no more than a surreptitious revival of existentialism.5 It is true that certain themes that were explored by existentialism reappear in this new context, but there are also fundamental differences. Existentialism, as we have seen, retains a nostalgia for a Godgiven order, and makes much of our abandonment in an absurd, meaningless world. At the same time, it also stands firmly within the modernist tradition that seeks to replace God with the God-like humanist subject. It is an extreme form of modernist narcissism, a radicalised Kantianism (Murdoch 1970:9, 48; Warnock 1970:5). The existentialist subject eludes all forms imposed by others, but only because it is conceived of as standing completely above all historical influences, the unconditioned author of its existence. The result is a notion of freedom that is absolute, but also abstract and unworldly, failing to acknowledge the historical, concrete nature of human existence. The dialogical picture I am proposing breaks from this subjectivist picture and places human beings inescapably in the world, in the midst of history. Our freedom exists within this history, as the concrete freedom of worldly beings who are conditioned by forms of social order but who are also able to resist these forms and work actively to transform them. Thus, by departing from humanist metaphysics and turning to historical dialogue and concrete human existence, we leave behind a conception of freedom that turns on the idea of the metaphysical subject. And it is worth stressing that this is to leave behind an essentially inhuman and unattainable conception of freedom. The humanist conception of freedom would require superhuman strength to realise, and is beyond the reach of actual, concrete human beings. Existentialist freedom is the impossible demand that we detach ourselves from all worldly influences and make ourselves in our entirety. Equally grandiose is the Marxist ideal of freedom as the bringing of all history under rational control. Human beings are not gods who can rise above or master history. And freedom understood in terms of the enlightened mastery of history is also able to figure in the establishment of forms of domination, allowing them to be justified in the name of human liberation. Leaving behind the God-like transcendental subject and turning to history makes it possible to reconceptualise notions such as freedom in terms appropriate to finite human beings, as the concrete human struggles to transform existing forms of


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social order, including those which are justified in terms of metaphysical conceptions of freedom. Freedom now is the resistance that is the driving force of historical dialogue. Moreover, against this background, it is possible to give further content to the ethical position I referred to earlier, the ethics of openness to the other which promotes or facilitates dialogue. Unlike the foundationalist ethics which in its humanist form presupposes a legislating metaphysical subject, dialogical ethics is the form of ethics appropriate to finite human beings existing in the midst of history. Indeed it is precisely the remembrance of our finitude and historicity. Implicit in an openness to the other is a corresponding recognition that we and our forms of life are finite. This recognition is entirely opposed to the metaphysical, prescriptive ethics which presents certain norms as absolute and universal, which claims that a certain way of life is the only legitimate, acceptable one, and which demands that all practices conform to its principles. As I mentioned, this is an ethics which, in absolutising a certain form of life, is able to contribute to the overcoming of otherness, and to promote the establishment of states of closure and domination. By contrast, in being open to the other, in acknowledging that there are different perspectives and ways of action to ours, we implicitly acknowledge that ours is not the only way of proceeding, but only one particular way. We acknowledge, in short, that our existing way of life is finite and hence that it could be different. This implicit acknowledgement of our finitude becomes explicit as a form of ethicocritical reflection, a critical reflection which in turn promotes openness to the other. This is the critical reflection which questions the necessity of our prevailing ways of proceeding by showing that they have emerged out of a long series of encounters with the other. We recognise that present forms of life, far from being metaphysically necessary, universal and eternal, are the particular historical products of human activity, having arisen out of the play of dialogue. Foundational metaphysical notions such as ‘Man’ can themselves be seen as ‘things of this world’, as ‘human, all-too-human’. They are historically emergent, and instrumental in the efforts to impose and maintain particular forms of life by presenting them as metaphysically necessary. And to comprehend our forms of life as historical, finite human products, something we have made, is also to see them as able to be changed or transformed through continuing human activity, through resistance. This comprehension thus serves to assist and promote the work of freedom, concretely understood as the struggle to resist and transgress closed forms of life, to create new forms of life, to bring about a revitalising transformation of the social order. It represents enlightenment in the sense mentioned earlier, as the contesting of closed visions and the opening up of new human possibilities. It should be stressed once again that this is not an ethical position which holds that we ought to resist, that we ought not to put up with closure and domination. It does not recommend resistance. Resistance, the creation of new forms of thought and action, does not need to be prescribed. It is an inevitable fact of historical life, the manifestation of continuing human activity. Our form-giving activity can lead to the emergence of forms of domination and closure, where the other is effectively overcome. And this is human activity which has come to suppress the resistance, the creative, transgressive freedom, through which new forms of order emerge. In these cases, to use the phrase employed earlier, our organisational activity has come to cut off the very wellsprings of organisational activity, leaving us imprisoned in existing forms of order and doomed to


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sterile, deadening, repetition. Consequently, the ethico-critical reflection that assists resistance is a means of challenging this self-imposed imprisonment and of facilitating the continuation of human activity. It is that which is useful for life, a means of promoting life in the sense of continuing human activity. Broadly speaking, then, my claim is that the death of Man, understood not simply in negative terms as scepticism concerning humanist metaphysics but more positively as a turn to a dialogical picture, also means a return to a human world, to the concrete, finite human being existing in the midst of dialogue with others, in the midst of history. It thereby makes possible the formulation of notions of freedom, ethics and critique that are appropriate to such a being. This is by no means an original insight. The modernist rejection of an other-worldly medieval God was itself a turn back to the human world, the world of the here and now. Modernity’s subsequent elevation of the human being to the status of the God-like metaphysical subject has resulted once more in a denial of this world, and in an inhumanly abstract conception of human being. But at the margins of modern philosophy there remains the insight that the rejection of metaphysics is the restoration of this world. This insight now becomes the recognition that the restoration of this world, the human world, depends on modernity’s rejection of its own humanist metaphysics. This insight is manifest in the work of Hegel and Marx, in their own efforts to turn away from subjectivist metaphysics, and back to history and to concrete human existence in the midst of history, even if this turn is also compromised by their continuing attachment to humanist metaphysics. It receives one of its most emphatic and unambiguous expressions in the work of Nietzsche, who seeks to get rid of all metaphysical comforts not simply as a destructive gesture but in order to reject an outlook which debases this world, and in so doing to affirm this world as the only one (Nietzsche 1968:40–1). And I think that we can also find this insight in Foucault, who stands very much in the Nietzschean current of thought, carrying it into the contemporary context. His anti-humanism is not, as some have thought, an ‘inhumanism’, a denial of human being, but rather a return to the concrete human being existing in the midst of this world, an affirmation of human beings in their finitude. This is why Foucault’s work in particular serves to inspire these present reflections. At the same time, this discussion also offers a certain, and perhaps somewhat unorthodox, reading of Foucault himself.6 It is a reading that interprets him as presenting us with a certain conception of dialogue, a worldly dialogue between concrete human beings; as well as a dialogical ethics, an ethics which opposes the totalisation and domination that emerges out of and arrests dialogue, and which promotes revitalising resistance and continuing dialogue. It might be objected here that this is simply an interpretation which has been imposed on Foucault, and that my reflections on dialogue do no more than draw on a Foucault who has been interpreted in such a way as to provide support for them. It seems to me, however, that this dialogical interpretation of Foucault illuminates a good deal of what he is saying; and, moreover, that it makes possible a reading of Foucault which captures the spirit, the driving force, behind his work, his overriding concern to help challenge states of deadening imprisonment and to foster the emergence of new forms of thought and action.7


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I will come to the consideration of Foucault presently. First of all, however, let me begin by considering what I have referred to as the metaphysical position, and elaborate on the claim that the death of Man does not lead to the fragmentation of thought and action.

1 BEYOND METAPHYSICS AND FRAGMENTATION In this chapter, after questioning the claim that the alternative to foundationalist metaphysics is relativistic fragmentation, and arguing that the fragmentation view is in fact a continuation of metaphysics, I will go on to consider some of the problems associated with metaphysical accounts of the world in whatever form they appear. This will involve a brief consideration of the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. I will then argue that genuinely to go beyond metaphysics and its problems is, in the first instance at least, to conceptualise our situation in terms of a fundamental encounter with the other. Metaphysics and fragmentation Habermas, the Marxist critical theorist, provides a useful point of entry into these considerations. He is a major figure amongst those who want to say that, without some kind of transcendental foundation for thought and action, we will be left with a destructive, relativistic vision of fragmentation. It is not that Habermas simply wants to reinstate foundationalist metaphysics in the traditional sense. As Thomas McCarthy points out, Habermas has seen that ‘Philosophy [has] had to surrender its claim to grasp the totality of being from an extramundane position and on the basis of principles discovered in the very structure of reason’ (McCarthy 1982:59; cf. Habermas 1984:1–2). This project is still present in the modernist metaphysical subjectivism of Descartes and Kant. But the Cartesian and Kantian pictures have been transformed in the course of the nineteenth century, and via the work of Hegel and Marx, into a view of the subject as inherently social and historical. And in the present century, post-Wittgensteinian thinking and poststructuralism have reaffirmed the point. However, McCarthy goes on to argue, the problem is that this transformation has ‘left in its wake a variety of forms of relativism, images of irreducible pluralities of incommensurable language games, forms of life, conceptual frameworks, life-worlds, cultures etc.’ (McCarthy: ibid.; cf. Habermas 1992:115–16). Habermas’s response has been to argue that such relativistic fragmenta-tion is not inevitable; and that, without simply returning to the ahistorical transcendental subject, continuing to take the social and historical into account, we can still preserve something of the universal claims of transcendental philosophy through an analysis of our social and historical practices, and in particular of what Habermas calls ‘communicative intersubjectivity’.1 This is not an easy feat to bring off, as the well-documented tensions between the historicist and Kantian sides of his thinking show (Hoy 1979:93–4; Roderick

Beyond metaphysics and fragmentation

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1986:164–6). I will have more to say about Habermas’s position, and the problems associated with it, in the final chapter. But the question to be asked at this point is, do we in fact need to follow Habermas in his problematic path? Does an abandonment of the transcendental subject, of a metaphysically grounded conception of unity, necessarily lead to fragmentation in the first place? I want to suggest that it does not, and that it seems to do so only to the extent that we haven’t sufficiently let go of metaphysics. My point here is that there remains, in the vision of fragmentation, a continuing reliance on a metaphysical conception of unity. Metaphysical thinking is required in order to articulate the vision of fragmentation. As such, the vision of fragmentation, far from representing a break from metaphysics, is in fact a perpetuation of metaphysical thinking. There are a number of ways in which this is so. First of all, to see fragmentation as the inevitable consequence of the rejection of metaphysics is to continue to suppose that the only possible kind of unity we can have is that which is grounded metaphysically. If we cannot have an absolute metaphysical grounding to give order and unity to our existence, then there is no unity at all, and ‘anything goes’. In other words, the vision of fragmentation actually reflects a nostalgia for vanished metaphysical unities (Steuerman 1992:112). More than this, however, it is not possible to articulate the fragmentation thesis itself without continuing to employ some conception of unity. The force of the fragmentation thesis lies in the idea that, without an ultimate standpoint or standard, there will be a multiplicity of different, incommensurable forms of life, cultures, world-views, outlooks, and so on. But the very notion of a form of life or cultural outlook still implies some degree of unity and coherence. Strictly speaking, why should the process of fragmentation come to a halt at this level? Why shouldn’t fragmentation continue to the point where we are left with discrete, isolated individuals? Or even to the point where individuals themselves are fragmented? But the vision of fragmentation as it is usually articulated stops far short of this—and necessarily so. We need to preserve some degree of unity, to see the particular forms of life or cultural outlooks as themselves unified, in order to be able to talk of a multiplicity of these things. And most importantly, not only does the fragmentation thesis continue to depend on a conception of unity in its own articulation, but the unity that it relies on is itself ultimately a form of metaphysical unity. Consider the vision of fragmentation as characterised above by McCarthy. We are presented with the vision of a multiplicity of forms of life, world-views, cultures or life-worlds. Each of these is understood to be totally governed by its organising principles, closed and self-contained, and precisely for this reason incommensurable, unable to communicate with other forms of life. What this suggests is that, in the vision of fragmentation, a single, all-embracing metaphysical unity has simply been replaced by a multiplicity of local metaphysical unities, a series of little universes, each governed by their own deep rules or all-embracing principles, each speaking their own language. We end up, in other words, with a kind of metaphysical monadism, although without Leibniz’s prearranged harmony. In short, the vision of fragmentation continues to depend on a metaphysical notion of unity, unity based on all-embracing, fundamental principles. This means that any account which sees the rejection of foundationalist metaphysics as leading to fragmentation, and this includes any notion of postmodernity formulated in terms of fragmentation, is a superficial one. To truly reject foundationalist metaphysics, and to be genuinely


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postmodernist, we need to abandon not only the idea that there is a unifying metaphysical ground for thought and action, but also the idea that the alternative to metaphysics is a breakdown of thought and action into a multiplicity of incommensurable fragments. Self-enclosure Now, such a decisive break from metaphysics requires that we abandon its ruling principle. This ruling principle is the idea that we can capture the totality of being in a single, global account; the idea that there is an ultimate standpoint or set of categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised. Let us examine such totalising thinking in more detail. For totalising thinking, to understand something is simply to assimilate it, to absorb it into one’s framework of thought, to reduce it to a mere instantiation of one’s categories. And this is not simply an intellectual ambition. It finds concrete social and political expression as well in our cultural modernity, in the eighteenth century vision of a total enlightenment, in which the social order will be entirely made over in accordance with reason and human nature, in accordance with the dictates of the rational subject. The familiar postmodern criticism of such global, totalising thought is that, in its hunger to bring everything under its sway, it suppresses difference and otherness. In The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault presents modern, humanist thought as a totalising system which has no room for an exterior other, and which is only concerned with showing how ‘the Other, the Distant, is also the Near and the Same’. The Man of humanism only acknowledges otherness in so far as he can discern in it his own self (Foucault 1970:339; 1972:12).2 Similarly, Derrida, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, discussing Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of totalising thinking, speaks of Western reason as characteristically neutralising the Other, transforming the Other into the Same. In this, Derrida adds, thought makes common cause with oppression (Derrida 1976:91–2, 96). I will consider the postmodern response to metaphysics, and in particular Foucault’s alternative, in more detail in the next chapter. For now I want to continue with the consideration of metaphysical thinking, and this general idea of totalising thought as involving a suppression of the other. And, in particular, I want to explore the associated idea that a reason which transforms the Other into the Same is, as Derrida puts it, ‘a Reason which receives only what it gives itself, a reason which does nothing but recall itself to itself (ibid.: 96). The other side of the claim that there is an all-embracing standpoint or set of universal categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised is that we are unable to speak of anything that goes beyond these categories, anything outside, independent or other. We can only reduce everything we encounter to a function of these categories. As such, totalising thought falls into a kind of solipsism. Because it can only comprehend the world in terms of its own categories, it can only ever comprehend itself. It seems to grasp the totality, to be all-embracing and autonomous, but this is only because it is moving in a circle. Encountering itself at every turn, totalising thought is thereby condemned to a sterile, tautologous repetition or affirmation of its basic categories, categories which themselves remain entirely unquestionable within this


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system of thinking. Thought curls up and goes to sleep, so to speak. And this sleep is a dogmatic slumber. Undoubtedly, a closed system of thought like this provides a sense of security and stability. It provides a defence against that which is other, that which is new, unexpected, and beyond our control, which can introduce uncertainty and instability, and which can bring about transformations in our way of viewing the world. For the total vision, everything is under control, everything is ordered and accounted for in terms of that vision’s ruling categories. Nothing unexpected or different can enter into the picture to challenge or disturb its way of organising the world. But this control and security is acquired at the cost of falling into circularity, into a kind of claustrophobic, airless confinement in which everything is repetition, and nothing new can enter to break the spell. And this is thinking which no longer thinks, which in simply reaffirming its starting point has fallen into an unquestioning dogmatism. It is the tired wisdom which says that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’, and the comedy of those who, having worked it all out, are unaware of how little they know. It is true that, in the last analysis, it is not possible completely to shut oneself off from challenge in this way, for no way of thinking lasts forever. But it can be a dominating state at particular times. Such totalising, self-enclosed thinking is concretely manifest, amongst other places, in forms of religious fundamentalism or political fanaticism. Here we are dealing with world-views which claim to provide a total agenda for thought and action. They provide the security of being in possession of ‘the Truth’. And such views are characteristically closed, dogmatic and resistant to criticism. Everything is interpreted in terms of their ruling categories, and so functions only to confirm these categories. Even dissenting, questioning voices can be interpreted in this manner, and thus be used to reinforce the belief-system. A closed religious world-view, for example, may interpret all forms of questioning or dissent as no more than evidence of the influence of demonic forces. Forms of sexist or racist prejudice and stereo-typing also have this all-embracing and unshakeable character, a stone-like fixedness and impermeability which goes hand in hand with blindness and narrowness, with the refusal to acknowledge anything that stands outside or challenges one’s system of beliefs.3 We have no trouble finding these closed and narrow forms of thinking, these dogmatisms, racisms and sexisms, disturbing. But they cannot simply be marginalised as pure aberrations, somehow external to ‘thought proper’. Solipsistic self-enclosure can also be found in mainstream thinking, indeed in philosophy itself, supposedly the very paradigm of respectable thought, even if it is also recognised within philosophical reflection as being problematic. The notion of solipsism itself emerges explicitly as a philosophical problem at the beginning of the modern period, appearing along with the foundationalist self or subject that modernist philosophical reflection understands as the ground of thought and action. Totalising thought, and its solipsistic self-enclosure, are at the very heart of modern philosophical reflection, of metaphysical subjectivism. This subjectivism receives its initial articulation in the thought of Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’. Let us take a closer look at Descartes, and at some of those who came after him. Cartesianism itself emerges in the wake of the breakdown of the medieval world-view, the vision of a God-given, meaningful cosmic order in which all beings including human beings have their proper place. That world-view had engendered its own version of


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closure. Whilst providing an orderly vision of the world, its conceptual framework and hierarchy also became static and imprisoning. By the seventeenth century, as William Leiss notes, ‘the combination of Aristotelianism and Christian dogma in late medieval philosophy had become intellectually sterile, a system in which the repetition of established formulas was substituted for original thought’ (Leiss 1974:150). It had also become subject to increasingly effective forms of sceptical attack. But the waning of the medieval ordering of the world, the decline of old certainties, also meant that the world became a less secure, more risky and unpredictable place for human beings. It produced an increased sense of human finitude, of our existence in the midst of the world, our susceptibility to worldly forces and influences beyond our control, a heightened sense of human fallibility, all of which in turn fed a widespread scepticism about any attempt to comprehend the world. In this context, Descartes seeks to overcome scepticism and insecurity, and to establish a new, secure foundation for thought and action, an ‘Archimedean point’ as he puts it, from which to organise and master the world anew. And with Descartes there is a turn to human beings themselves in order to provide the ultimate reference point. Descartes’s strategy involves employing scepticism itself, but he is very far from being a sceptic. His is a scepticism that has become enlisted to the cause of a renewed foundationalism, to the project of the re-establishment of certainty. He transforms scepticism from a reminder of how much we are subject to and led astray by worldly influences into a means of breaking our connections with the everyday world and its influences, in order to place us decisively beyond their reach. Specifically, Descartes employs scepticism to destroy the idea that our experiences link us to a wider world. In the First Meditation, methodical doubt is used to raise the possibility that all our experiences are mere ‘delusions of dreams’, and that they tell us nothing about the world. At the same time, this destructive work opens the way to positive developments, to the establishment of a standpoint beyond doubt. First of all, if we accept that all our experiences may be deceptive, what remains beyond doubt is an ‘I’ that is required in order to have these experiences, to sustain them, however deceptive they may be. And second, from the standpoint of this Cartesian subject, it is possible to reinterpret our experiences subjectivistically, as ‘sensory perceptions’, mere sense impressions. By the Second Meditation they have become forms of ‘thinking’, and, subordinated to the self in this way, they too are entirely removed from doubt—‘I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false’ (Descartes 1986:19). In this manner Descartes establishes his secure standpoint beyond worldly influences, the thinking self, the first step in the construction of a ‘firm and permanent structure in the sciences’. But this secure standpoint comes at a cost, for the Cartesian self is also a trap. As long as we assume its standpoint, the egocentric or ‘first-person’ standpoint, we can only ever interpret our perceptions as sense-impressions. Everything we encounter is interpreted subjectivistically. This means that we cannot look to our perceptions without being continually referred back to our subjectivity. As such, thought is caught up in a solipsistic circle. Nothing in experience can shake the self’s faith in itself, but we are left wondering whether anything exists ‘outside of us’, independently of us, at all. Descartes himself does not want to deny the world, but to know it. Having turned away from the perceived world to the self, he seeks to go beyond the circle of the self by reflecting


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within himself, on the self’s innate ‘truths of reason’. However, with the Cartesian move, a great gulf has opened up between the self and the world. The self has become an obstacle that Descartes has to overcome in order to have knowledge of the world, and it becomes possible to imagine that the world beyond the self might not exist. Subsequent developments attest to the continuing power of this subjectivistic trap. The British empiricists take up the struggle to escape from the circle of the self, to regain access to the world. They aim to do so not by reflecting inwardly but by dispensing with supposedly innate ideas, turning away from the self to the world of concrete experience, and using this concrete experience to account for our knowledge of the world. However, their attempt to escape from the circle of the self does not get very far. The empiricists retain too much of the Cartesian baggage. In particular, the concrete experience to which they turn continues to be interpreted subjectivistically, in the form of sense-impressions (Stroud 1977:26). It should be stressed that there is nothing primitive or given about the notion of the sense-impression. It is a sophisticated interpretation of one’s experience, which Descartes introduces and which the empiricists continue to embrace. And so, instead of the world, the empiricists find only series of isolated subjective senseimpressions which, as Hume conclusively demonstrates, are insufficient to justify any kind of knowledge of the world. Thus, the empiricists remain caught in the egocentric predicament, and the existence of an external world remains uncertain. If empiricism remains trapped in the subjectivist interpretation of experience, Kant seeks to go beyond the limitations of the empiricist picture, to re-establish the possibility of knowing the world. However, he does not do so by questioning the subjectivistic interpretation of experience as sense-impressions, by questioning the subject. He retains that aspect of empiricism. Rather, he seeks to do so through an explicit reassertion of the foundational subject, only now in a vastly enhanced and expanded role. In other words, the subject itself is now employed to overcome the limitations of the subjectivist picture. In the form of the Transcendental Subject, the self actively organises its sense impressions, which Kant calls ‘empirical intuitions’, in accordance with the universal, a priori categories of the understanding. As a result we are no longer confined to immediate sense-impressions but regain access to a wider world, a world that goes beyond immediate subjective experience. Once again, however, the problem of solipsism emerges, now in the form of the selfenclosure of transcendental idealism. Kant might think of himself as having brought about a ‘Copernican revolution’ (Kant 1929:22, 25n) with the establishment of the idea of an organising subject of knowledge, but his version is not one of the great blows to human narcissism that Freud spoke of, a wounding realisation that we are not the centre of the world (Freud 1973:326). On the contrary, in Kant’s account the subject is emphatically reinforced in its central position. It becomes no less than the sovereign, God-like creator and source of the world, Solomon’s unprecedentedly arrogant transcendental self. With Kant we may have regained access to the world, but the world that we have regained access to is one that is entirely subordinate to the organising self. Experience is still interpreted from the standpoint of the subject, interpreted now in the extended sense that sense-impressions are shaped and ordered in accordance with the subject’s categories of understanding. This is mastery, but at the same time selfenclosure. The only world we can have access to is a world of ordered appearances, the


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phenomenal world that exists ‘for us’, and there now emerges the well-known Kantian problem as to whether there exist any noumenal ‘things in themselves’. The problem of history So, by seeking to bring everything under the sway of the foundational self and its categories, totalising modernist thought falls into self-enclosure. And not only is such thought imprisoned and constrained by its own ruling categories. A further kind of problem arises for any view of the world which claims to comprehend the world in its totality. Because its ruling categories are supposed to provide the ultimate basis for explanation and understanding, it is unable to account in any way for these categories themselves. To put this another way, an all-embracing, total account of the world means that there is no ‘outside’, nothing that could figure in an explanation of how our organising categories themselves come to be. In short, it is not possible for a totalising account to comprehend its ruling categories in their emergence, to comprehend them historically. To speak of our ruling categories as being ‘innate’ or ‘a priori’, as has sometimes been done, is not a solution to this problem. It is simply to turn our orienting principles into articles of faith which are not to be questioned, much like the Christian mysteries, and, in so doing, to conceal the embarrassment of being entirely unable to account for them. And to suggest in desperation that our starting point might somehow bring itself into existence is to invite the mockery that Nietzsche directed against the idea of the subject as First Cause, against the ‘desire to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one’s actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for them’, in so far as it implies that it could be possible ‘with more than Münchhausen temerity, to pull oneself out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair’ (Nietzsche 1973:32). The absence of a historical dimension is noticeable in the metaphysical subjectivism of Descartes and Kant. These thinkers are unable to explain how the subject might have emerged, to give any kind of developmental or historical account of it, and they have to posit it as ahistorical, pregiven, an absolute origin. And one of the key critics of the ahistorical, dogmatically asserted subject of early modern thought is Hegel. For Hegel, as Thomas McCarthy points out, the knowing subject cannot be construed as an absolute origin, a self-contained unity outside of or above the movement of history. The subject, and the forms of reason it employs, i.e. the categories of its understanding, have to be comprehended historically, in their historical development (McCarthy 1978:53–4). After Hegel, as Habermas himself notes, a philosophy of origins is no longer defensible, even in epistemological form (Habermas 1971a:646). Hegel’s historical apprehension of the self and its categories of understanding represents an escape from subjectivistic self-enclosure. It involves the process of questioning the claim of a categorial framework or form of understanding to be allembracing, complete or self-sufficient. This claim of a form of understanding to be complete is brought into question through the apprehension of a ‘something else’ that goes beyond it, that which is different and other. Our world-view is thereby revealed to be finite and partial, and this encounter with the other leads to a transformation of one’s organising categories. This process is ongoing. Our frameworks of thinking can thus be


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comprehended historically, as emerging and as being transformed in the course of an ongoing interplay with that which is other. However, although Hegel points the way beyond metaphysical subjectivism and solipsistic self-enclosure, he cannot bring himself to surrender entirely to historical interplay and transformation. He cannot let go of the idea of an ultimate, timeless standpoint or foundation from which to comprehend the totality of things. He preserves the foundational self, and he does so in the form of that most extravagant expression of modernity’s subjectivistic metaphysics, the all-embracing Absolute Subject. As such, he falls into a renewed solipsistic self-enclosure. Let me spell this out in a little more detail. Whilst recognising that which is other, Hegel also interprets this other from the standpoint of the Absolute Subject. From this standpoint, otherness is construed only in negative, derivative terms, as the alienated self, the pathological sundering of a larger whole. As such, the supremacy of the self is never decisively challenged or subverted by the encounter with that which is other. In the form of the Hegelian dialectic, the interplay between self and other is ultimately a onesided conversation in which the self takes back what it has lost, overcoming that which is other and returning it to itself. Hegel’s failure properly to acknowledge difference or otherness is a favourite theme in, and indeed the point of departure for, a good deal of French antihumanist thought. Foucault sums up the criticism in one of his early writings when he notes: In actuality, dialectics does not liberate differences; it guarantees, on the contrary, that they can always be recaptured. The dialectical sovereignty of similarity consists of permitting differences to exist, but only under the rule of the negative, as an instance of non-being. They may appear as the successful subversion of the Other, but contradiction secretly assists in the salvation of identities. (Foucault 1977a:184–5)4 Thus Hegel only appears to make room for the other, and he only appears to comprehend the subject and reason in historical terms. In actuality, both the other and history are subordinated to the standpoint of the Absolute Subject. From this standpoint, otherness is construed in negative terms, as the self alienated from itself. The movement of history itself becomes the process of the coming-to-be of the Subject, its dispersal in otherness and its overcoming of otherness, its return to itself out of alienation. In this manner, Hegel’s recognition of the other, far from subverting metaphysical subjectivism, only suffices to open the way to the extravagant metaphysical totalisation that is Absolute Idealism, in which the whole of reality, the whole of history, is comprehended in a systematic form. However, this triumph of totalisation is once again attained at the cost of the fall into self-enclosure. History only presents itself as the reassuring unfolding of a metaphysical subject in so far as it is construed in terms of this subject in the first place. This is why Hegelian reason, in comprehending history, inevitably ends up comprehending only itself. As Foucault puts it, such ‘transcendental-historical’ thinking ends up as a ‘tautology’ (Foucault 1978a:9). History is reduced to ‘a totality fully closed upon itself (Foucault 1984a:86). And because of this closure, the problem of history re-emerges in Hegel’s picture. Since the Absolute Subject is the principle by which history is to be explained, because it


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contains all reality and history within itself, it is itself ahistorical, without a history. It should be stressed that this is not to say that Hegel simply lacks an awareness of history. Rather, Hegel’s picture both recognises history and denies it. He is one of the most historically-minded of all philosophers, but at the same time he also subordinates history to the timeless Absolute Subject. In so doing, he presents us with an unhistorical conception of history, in which historical change and transformation are only tolerated to the extent that they are seen as manifesting the ‘grand historical plan’, and the historicity of events is thereby denied. And the totalising metaphysical standpoint which governs history cannot itself be comprehended in terms of history, so understood.5 The question of embodiment Thus, as the accounts of Descartes, Kant and Hegel demonstrate, totalising thought is unable to grasp its ruling categories historically, to comprehend them in their historical emergence. And this produces yet another problem for totalising thought. Because the standpoint from which such thinking proceeds is removed from and unconditioned by any concrete historical context, it is abstract and unworldly. Foundational standpoints, from Platonic forms and the medieval God to the modern metaphysical subject, all suffer from being abstract, cold, remote, unworldly and ahistorical. And in the case of the modern humanist foundationalism, this abstractness results in a supreme irony. The unworldly metaphysical subject, standing above history, is also remote from the actual human beings who exist in the midst of history. It has none of their concreteness, finitude or material existence. In short, the metaphysical subject lacks embodiment. And this means that the humanist subject is an inhuman conception of human being. Metaphysical subjectivism, humanism, necessarily requires this repudiation of our embodied existence. We simply cannot be the foundational subject, the secure, ultimate, unchanging ground of thought and action, and also be embodied. Being embodied here, it should be noted, emphatically does not mean ‘having a body’, being attached to a body that is distinct from us. This is an understanding of embodiment which is perfectly compatible with our being unworldly metaphysical subjects, as the Cartesian account makes clear. Rather, being embodied here means that we exist concretely and materially in the midst of the world, and, as such, it means that we are able to be influenced, affected and conditioned by history. To be embodied is to be a figure in the landscape, immersed in the stream of time, subject to worldly forces. Consequently, we can only be self-sufficient metaphysical subjects, standing above the historical world and its influences, if we also repudiate the embodied existence that places us in the midst of this world and its influences. The ironic and paradoxical result of this, however, is that humanist thought presents us with an inhuman conception of human being. To be a humanist subject, standing above the world and its influences, we have to deny, to downgrade, rise above or overcome, everything about us that is corporeal, everything about ourselves in so far as we are finite, socially and historically particular and situated beings. Humanism is the hatred of our finitude. And what this means is that, on the humanist account, to be fully human one has to deny one’s humanity. Humanism, which seeks to make the human being central, does so only at the cost of sacrificing everything about human beings that makes us


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recognisably human—our embodiment, our concrete humanity—and in so doing reduces us to inhumanly abstract, ghostly subjects. As we will see, the inhuman, disembodied character of humanism is another point of departure for recent anti-humanist thought, particularly that of Foucault. This denial of embodiment is manifest in both the Cartesian and Kantian pictures. When Descartes separates out the self from the world and its influences, he also separates it from ourselves as worldly, concrete beings. The Cartesian subject emerges as unworldly and abstractly disembodied, the ‘thinking thing’ distinct from the body, the ‘ghost in the machine’. Our concrete existence becomes the unthinking material body that is external to the thinking self, part of the external world in general, a world we are so removed from that we cannot even be sure it exists. Kant’s position is similar but more complex. Whilst Kant also invokes an unworldly subject, a transcendental subject, he does so in order to regain access to the world. In so doing, he also restores an apprehension of ourselves as concrete beings, as having a bodily existence in the midst of the world. At the same time, however, this body is the merely phenomenal body, which needs to be distinguished sharply from the noumenal self, the transcendental ego. Particularly in Kant’s moral thinking, bodily existence is something that we have to struggle to overcome or rise above, if we are to be truly human, to attain our true status as self-sufficient, rational subjects. To be subjects of this sort may be an appealing prospect to the extent that it allows us to be secure from worldly influences, and to be the autonomous foundation and source of our thought and action. This is a central appeal of Kant’s moral picture, the prospect of a radical autonomy, an unconditioned self-sufficiency in thought and action, the exhilarating Kantian vision of freedom which, as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘refuses to accept the merely “positive”, what history, or tradition, or nature, offers us as a guide to value and action, and insists instead on autonomous generation of the forms we live by out of our own self-activity’ (Taylor 1985:325). However, such freedom requires that we rise above our historical context and its influences, and also that we repudiate all merely corporeal influences, all drives, desires and inclinations. We are thus presented with an inhuman conception of freedom, a freedom for disembodied, abstract subjects, not one that is appropriate for concrete human beings. Let us look a little more closely at Kant’s picture. In his account, the abstractness of the subject is manifested first of all in the narrowly epistemological and theoretical way he conceives of it. He views the human being primarily as a knowing subject, engaging only in cognitive organising activity, a subject that is disembodied, disconnected from concrete human life and worldly involvement. And not only is this disembodied subject inhuman. The lack of embodiment also makes it difficult to understand how we can have the capacity to engage in cognitive, organising activity itself. In so far as the activity of knowing is divorced from all corporeal drives, capacities and desires, we are left with no real conception of what motivates us to know, of what ‘will to knowledge’ drives us to order and categorise the world. Moreover, in so far as the activity of knowing is undertaken by a disembodied subject, we are left with a highly abstract notion of action. Our organising and categorising activity is something purely theoretical, a pale reflection of corporeal activity, and abstractly detached from concrete human actions and involvements.


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It is true that, in Kant’s picture, as I have mentioned, one of the things we can know is ourselves as concrete, corporeal beings, beings who act in the world. And with this in mind Kant seeks to extend his picture in a practical direction, to formulate a morality, to give an account of the principles of right action. However, this does not mean that his account of the human being becomes any more embodied and concrete. The human being remains first and foremost the disembodied knowing subject. The turn to the practical preserves this disembodied self in the form of the Kantian moral agent, and in so far as we are concrete, corporeal beings, the subject now comes into conflict with embodiment. To be the autonomous moral agent, to act only in accordance with rational principles, requires a constant struggle to rise above the body and its influences. We have to engage in a universalising process, the aim of which is precisely to exclude that which is particular, specific and bodily from the picture. This means that the lack of embodiment which undermines our capacity to be knowing subjects is not overcome in Kant’s turn to the practical. On the contrary, Kant’s attempt to extend his account in a practical direction only serves to show that his abstract picture of the subject undermines the possibility of action in general. In particular, we cannot be the Kantian moral subject, the pure agent whose actions are determined solely by its own rationality, without undermining our capacity to be active beings. For Kant, to be such an agent requires that we deny or repress our corporeality, and this deprives us of our corporeal capacities and abilities, our energies and concrete motivations, leaving us with only a pale, enfeebled shadow of human desires and energies in the form of Kant’s ‘rational will’. Even if we are thereby completely sovereign over ourselves, there is too little left of us to provide motivation for action. Iris Murdoch alludes to this problem in The Sovereignty of Good, her critique of Kant and of the Kantian tradition in morality, particularly as manifest in the existentialist thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre and, in a more subdued, Anglo-Saxon form, in the work of Stuart Hampshire. She points to the unrealistic and implausible character of the existentialist self, a ‘highly conscious, self-contained being’, a solitary, detached, omnipotent agent who appears in the ‘quick flash of the choosing will’. Such accounts, she notes, are unable to provide a serious account of motivation, to tell us what prepares us for our choices (Murdoch 1970:35, 53).6 Moreover, to be a self-contained moral subject, completely sovereign over ourselves, also requires that we adopt a truncated notion of activity, one which is cut off from concrete worldly involvements. We cannot be too deeply involved in the world or we will once again be subject to its influences. Normally, when we act in the world, our actions can be affected by external factors beyond our control, and so Kant tries to avoid the impact of these worldly influences and contingencies by paring acts down to the inner act of pure will. On his account, the consequences of our actions are not morally significant, it is only our intentions that are.7 Once again we are insulated from worldly influences, since, whatever the outcome of our actions, our intentions remain under our control. But we are also left with a reduced, abstract conception of agency and action, understood in terms of these aethereal intentions or willings, the inner ‘actions’ that stand ‘behind’ concrete human activities and involvements, removed from social and historical practices. To sum up, the Kantian subject may indeed be the self-sufficient, autonomous rational self, the unconditioned author of its thought and action, standing above history and its


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influences. But we can only be this subject in so far as we are separate from embodiment and concrete historical involvement, and in separating this subject from embodiment and concrete activity, Kant undermines our capacity to act, even in the limited sense of organising the world in cognition. And although Kant seeks to extend his picture in a practical direction in his moral thinking, this does not give us a more worldly, embodied kind of subject. Rather, this turn to the practical only serves to underscore the problematic abstractness of the Kantian self. The Kantian conception of moral agency, which seems to be an account of agency in its purest, most emphatic form, turns out to be a picture in which the self has become so abstract and inhuman that our capacity to be active agents is severely undermined. Here, once again, Hegel points the way ahead. He rejects Kant’s abstract, selfenclosed conception of the subject, not only by comprehending the knowing subject in its historical development, but also by incorporating the moral and the social, the living mass of concrete human activities, into this account. Now it is concrete, desiring human beings in their practical involvements who come to the fore. We always act out of empirical inclinations, interests, drives and passions, and the subjective will is inescapably bound up with external deeds. It is these individual desires and passions which are the immediate source of historical movement, out of which emerge systems of social relations, the historical forms of life which transcend individuals and to which individuals must conform. Here, reason is understood not simply as theoretical but also as moral-practical, as embedded in actual social, moral and historical practices, in the form of the principles which constitute the forms of life within a given historical community, and which emerge and change historically.8 But, as we have seen, Hegel also ends up preserving a timeless, ahistorical standpoint, in the form of the Absolute Subject. From this standpoint, our subjection to external historical forms is seen in essentially negative terms, as subordination to our own alienated products. The movement of history is interpreted as the process of the Absolute Subject’s self-development and actualisation, through the various historical forms of life, in the course of which reason comes fully to govern social and moral practices. Here, Hegel employs the notion of the ‘cunning of reason’. Reason actualises itself through the actions of concrete individuals, pursuing their own particular desires and interests. Social development is thus a process which goes on ‘behind the backs’ of concrete individuals. In the same stroke, however, concrete, finite human beings cease to be the agents of history. They and their actions are reduced to mere means to the unfolding of the Absolute Subject which is the real subject of history. Humanity is thus able to overcome all historical constraints and attain sovereignty over history, but only in so far as it surrenders its finitude and is effectively absorbed into the transindividual Absolute Subject. Again, this kind of account may provide us with a sense of security. Whatever the fate of particular, finite human beings on the ‘slaughterbench of history’, history in general is the inexorable, overriding process of the coming-to-be of humanity, through which humanity will attain conscious sovereignty over historical processes. And this is also a vision of absolute autonomy, Kantian autonomy writ large, in which humanity, no longer subject to external historical forces, will become wholly free, wholly self-determining. But this remains a wholly inhuman picture of human beings, one that effectively denies their concreteness and corporeal existence. Humanity may attain its essence in Absolute


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Mind, but in so doing its finite, empirical character disappears without a trace. As Leszek Kolakowski puts it, ‘in the Hegelian system humanity becomes what it is, or achieves unity with itself, only by ceasing to be humanity’ (Kolakowski 1978:77). And Kierkegaard emphasises the Hegelian system’s distance from concrete human existence when he notes that Hegel is like someone who has built a magnificent palace, but continues to live alongside it in a hovel (Kierkegaard 1975:519). Beyond metaphysics: encountering the other We can leave this all-too-brief consideration of modern philosophy here. It would be possible, of course, to go on to consider Marx’s critique of Hegelian metaphysics, of Hegel’s idealistic interpretation of history as the self-movement of Absolute Mind, and his own reaffirmation of the priority of concrete social and historical practices. It would be possible, also, to see in Marx, or at least in Marx’s humanist Marxist successors the Frankfurt School and Habermas, the attempt to reformulate, in a historically selfconscious way, the claims of the foundational subject. Once again the turn to history will be compromised by the effort to preserve an essentially anti-historical, totalising standpoint. I will touch on these issues in the discussion of Habermas in the final chapter.9 But the positions already considered suffice to establish that the totalising metaphysical position is unacceptable. Imprisoned by its own ruling categories, it is unable to give any kind of historical account of their emergence, and we are left with a standpoint which is abstractly ahistorical and unconditioned. At the same time, as I suggested at the outset, to abandon this totalising metaphysical kind of thinking is not to fall into fragmentation. The vision of fragmentation, I have argued, continues to rely on a metaphysical notion of unity. This is borne out in so far as the same problems we have seen in connection with the totalising metaphysical view reappear in connection with the vision of the world as fragmented. In particular, the metaphysical claim which is implicit in the fragmentation account, that there are ultimate categories which can wholly organise thought and action, results once again in an inability to comprehend anything that stands outside those categories. This is manifest in the fragmentation account’s characteristic claim that different cultural groups are incommensurable with one another, that one cultural group is unable to understand or comprehend another cultural group. On this view, we can only comprehend the other group in terms of ‘our’ categories, which means that ‘their’ reality always eludes us—unless we somehow wholly abandon our entire way of thinking, and become one with them, entering into their form of life. We thus once again have a form of solipsism. In this case we have a series of solipsistically self-enclosed cultural groups, entirely unable to communicate with one another. And here, once again, the problem of history emerges. If a group is wholly governed by its ruling categories, if every aspect of its life can be accounted for through them, it is not then possible to provide any historical account as to how those categories came to be. These problems can be illustrated by once again considering various forms of religious fundamentalism or political fanaticism. As we have seen, these provide us with recognisable concrete examples of totalising, self-enclosed thinking. And, more accurately, they are forms of totalised thinking confined to particular groups in society.


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Such forms of thinking are characteristically incapable of recognising points of view other than their own. They are closed, solipsistic, blind to alternative ways of thinking. And they are also incapable of understanding themselves as having emerged historically, as having come to be in some way. Their rules and standards are characteristically taken to be set in stone, to be timelessly true and abstractly ahistorical. Once again, we have no trouble seeing these closed systems of thinking as problematic. But the fragmentation account presents such thinking as being the normal situation. It holds that socio-cultural life essentially takes the form of a plurality of such closed, incommensurable, ahistorical standpoints. So, in whatever form it appears, whether as an all-embracing world-view or in the form of a vision of self-enclosed, incommensurable fragments, the totalising metaphysical position shows itself to be untenable as it stands. The overall argument being put forward here is that a totalising account makes it impossible to speak of anything which goes beyond its categories, and because there is no ‘outside’, we are unable to give any kind of explanation of the categories in terms of which we comprehend the world. We are left trapped within a form of thinking, unable to reflect on its ruling categories. This kind of criticism is sometimes made, from the perspective of a self-satisfied modernity, of pre-modern, religious world-views. It is argued, amongst other things, that these ways of thinking are bankrupt because their claim to be able to explain the totality of the world in terms of an all-powerful creator only leaves us with the problem of accounting for a creator whose existence is itself mysterious and inexplicable. What I am suggesting is that the same kind of criticism applies when we invoke the modernist notion of a God-like transcendental self. And it should be added that we do not escape these problems even if we follow a more recent, twentieth-century trend and seek our ultimate categories not in the conscious subject but in language, in the manner of the early Wittgenstein, modern analytic philosophy or Habermas. The criticisms that have been made of subjectivist foundationalism apply with equal force to the linguistic version. It is more useful to see the totalised, self-enclosed way of thinking as representing a pathology of thought, in which thought has come to be trapped in, and blinded by, its own categories. It is pathological in the way that self-deception is pathological. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that self-affirming circularity is the very structure of selfdeception. Self-deception is not the paradoxical project of knowingly deceiving ourselves, of hiding from a truth that we must also at the same time be aware of if we are to hide from it. We may indeed seek initially to block out a particular unpalatable truth, but this can be achieved through the entirely positive project of interpreting the world in a way that is agreeable to us. Self-deception is the state which is able to emerge because, when we interpret the world in a totalising way, we blind ourselves to alternatives, and are no longer able to recognise any evidence to the contrary. Instead, everything that we experience only serves to confirm our starting point. As such, we are in an important sense not deceiving ourselves, because all that might contradict our reading of the world either fails to register or has been interpreted so as to support this reading. Within this world-view we can proceed completely in good faith, but only at the cost of becoming trapped in a sterile, rigid, closed system of thought. The racist, the anti-semite, the religious fundamentalist and the political fanatic all suffer from this disease.


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On this reading, metaphysical claims to be able to grasp the world in its totality represent a paradigm case of pathological self-deception. We blind ourselves to all that is other, all that goes beyond our view of the world, at the cost of becoming trapped in a closed form of thinking. This is the kind of pathology, the philosophical sickness, that Wittgenstein often alluded to, as a constant danger in philosophical thinking. He himself had felt the tyranny of a totalising perspective in the Tractatus, where he was dazzled by the idea of a single, essential logical form to which all language could be subordinated, and which could determine everything that could be said in advance of experience. As Richard Rorty points out, this was essentially a Kantian, foundationalist vision, from which the later Wittgenstein broke free (Rorty 1980:5–6). He came to say that, in such cases, a ‘picture held us captive’. And as long as such a picture holds sway, we are constrained, blinded, hypnotised by it. In his later work, Wittgenstein sought to find ways to overcome the kind of philosophical sickness to which he himself had once succumbed, in order to ‘shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’.10 It seems to me that, if we are in general to escape from this kind of patho-logical entrapment, we have decisively to reject the metaphysical project. We have to accept in principle that there is no fundamental standpoint which can capture the world in its entirety. On this view, the world is not in the first instance a function of our categories, reflecting our starting point back to us. Rather, what is fundamental, primary, is our encounter with the other, our encounter with that which does not simply yield to us, but which we encounter as different. Such difference is not relative or derivative, as it is for example in the Hegelian notion of an otherness which is merely the self alienated from itself, or indeed in any sort of picture where otherness is understood simply as deviance from, or perversion of, a norm. These relative understandings of difference preserve the priority of the initial standpoint, and we acknowledge the other only in so far as it points us back to that initial standpoint. Rather, the other is an absolute difference, a truly other, in the sense of that which is genuinely new, unexpected, unpredictable, something which comes from ‘outside’. It is that which has independence from us, which resists or eludes our efforts to impose ourselves upon it, and which can in turn influence us, affect and transform us. This kind of encounter is more than just a conceptual requirement. It is also a concrete, palpable experience. It is the experience of coming up, with a shock, against that something that is genuinely new or foreign. Early on, it is the child’s jarring recognition that it is not all-powerful, that it exists in the midst of a wider world which does not simply obey or fall in with its desires and fancies. And this experience is something we repeat whenever we come up against something that is beyond the horizon of our experience, whenever we are surprised by the world, shocked by the unexpected, forced to reckon with the new. It is particularly evident when the world eludes our existing understandings of it, when something we thought we were fully familiar with, something we thought we knew, suddenly shows a new, unexpected face or aspect. All of these experiences shake our existing beliefs, bring them into question, and amongst other things provide a prime source for the experience of doubt. Given the importance of doubt for the emergence of modernist foundationalism, its central role in Cartesian thinking, I will conclude this chapter by saying a few things about this.


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Such experiences, where the world exceeds or gainsays our understandings of it, can engender a global scepticism, a scepticism about the possibility of gaining any kind of knowledge at all. However, I would suggest, such global scepticism presupposes a continuing desire for the security of a complete, timeless, unchanging understanding of the world. In other words, it presupposes a nostalgia for metaphysical absolutes. From such a standpoint, only that which is entirely free of uncertainty, risk and unpredictability, only that which can never be revised or modified, is acceptable. And in the light of such a high demand, our ordinary experiences of being misled from time to time can be taken to show that we can never attain knowledge. That is one possible line of thinking, but I want to argue that it is profoundly wrong. What these experiences in fact show is that we can never have knowledge of this sort, knowledge in the sense of absolute certainty. They show that no human understanding is final or definitive, that there is always the possibility of revision. The demand for a kind of understanding that is utterly certain, complete and unchanging is an inhuman demand, one that does not recognise that we exist in a wider world which does not simply conform to our beliefs but can elude us and force us to rethink. The link between global scepticism and the metaphysical demand for complete certainty is manifest in the work of Descartes. Descartes employs the inhuman standard of absolute certainty to bring all of our existing beliefs into disrepute, to bring us to completely distrust our experience. For Descartes, as we have seen, this project of global doubt is itself undertaken with the further, positive aim of encouraging us to break our connections with the everyday world and its influences, and to establish a metaphysical standpoint that is beyond all possible doubt. We thus have the establishment of the secure, but also unworldly and self-enclosed, Cartesian subject, a subject that is itself inhuman. What I want to suggest is that the argument from doubt can be reversed. Properly understood, it implies the exact opposite of what Descartes imagines. Doubt is only possible in the first place because we are not unworldly Cartesian subjects, because we exist first of all in the midst of a wider world which can exceed or gainsay our understandings of it. I doubt, therefore I am necessarily in the midst of the world.11 And it is with this recognition that we are in the first instance part of a wider world, that it is our encounter with the other that is fundamental, that we will be able to escape decisively from the trap of modernist subjectivism. The encounter with the other is disturbing and unsettling, to be sure, but it is also stimulating and revitalising. It is disturbing because our narcissistic reveries are shattered, the circle of our solipsism is burst. We can no longer think ourselves autonomous and self-sufficient, completely inhabiting the world, and wholly secure from the unexpected, but instead we must recognise that there is an outside, that we have limits, that we are finite, and that we are subject to influences beyond our control. But the encounter with the other is not only disturbing or threatening. It also represents relief from claustrophobic self-enclosure and sterile repetition, from the nightmare of being confronted only with one’s own reflection. From outside, a breath of fresh air comes into the cobwebbed room. In encountering the other we encounter something beyond us, something new, and something which can influence and indeed transform and renew us.12 The notion of a fundamental encounter with the other takes us decisively beyond totalising metaphysics, both in the form of the unitary world-view and that of the vision of fragmentation. However, this encounter has not yet been fully characterised. If a key


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problem with metaphysics is what I have called the problem of history, it is not yet clear precisely how the encounter with the other, the acknowledgement of which takes us beyond the limits of the totalising metaphysical perspective, enables us to account historically for the categories in terms of which we organise the world. In the next chapter, in order to deal with this issue, I will explore in more detail what is involved in this fundamental encounter with the other. And this will bring us to the notion of dialogue.

2 FOUCAULT AND DIALOGUE In the preceding chapter, I argued that a decisive rejection of metaphysics, of totalising forms of thought, does not mean that we will be left with a relativistic, fragmented view of thought and action. Rather, it opens up the possibility of conceptualising our situation in terms of a fundamental encounter with the other. In this chapter I will explore the encounter with the other in more detail. In particular I will suggest that it can be more adequately understood as a dialogue; and that it is in the course of such dialogical encounters that categories of thinking, forms of thought and life, emerge, and also come to be transformed. Exploring this dialogical account will bring us to the work of Foucault. But, to begin, let us consider in more detail what might be involved in encountering the other. Dialogue The fundamental encounter with the other, as I have suggested, is an encounter with that which does not simply yield to us, which does not simply fall into line with our beliefs and fancies, but which has an independence from us, resists us, and is able to affect us in turn. At the same time, however, I do not want to suggest that in this fundamental encounter with the other we are completely passive, impotent, completely at the mercy of the other. This self-negating way of thinking is just as problematic as the attempt to reduce the other to a function of our standpoint. What is being suggested here is that, in so far as we know or apprehend the other, this knowledge is understood to come about not through any activity on our part but through a sheer ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ of the other to us. The other now imposes itself completely upon us. It becomes all-embracing, and we become wholly subordinated to it, completely under its sway. The problem with this picture is that once again thought comes to a halt. We can do no more than endlessly repeat our initial revelation, which is itself unquestionable. It is of course always possible to construe our situation in this manner, as is evident in the various forms of mysticism which hold that we can only truly comprehend the other in so far as we deny ourselves and allow ourselves to be ‘filled’ with the other, and that our organising activity simply distorts or misrepresents the other. Thus, in a pre-modern context, Eckhart holds that we can only know God if we annihilate ourselves, empty ourselves of our particular nature, in order that God might give Himself to us in the fullness of His being (Kolakowski 1978:31). And in the face of the modern humanist elevation of human beings themselves to the foundational status once enjoyed by God, the later Heidegger turns to such mysticism as a corrective. It is only through selfnegation that we can have access to the other, in this case Heideggerian ‘Being’. We are to wait, passively and patiently, for ‘the Word’ of Being, for Being to disclose or give


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itself to us (Solomon 1972:242). It should be stressed that this is in no way to deny the importance of Heidegger’s thinking. As noted in the Introduction, Heidegger is a key figure in the rise of postmodern scepticism regarding the humanist subject. And, in Heidegger’s case, the break from humanism and metaphysics takes the form of a negation of oneself in favour of a deferential attentiveness to the other. But just like the kind of thinking that reduces the other to a mere function of our organising categories, this negation of ourselves in the face of the other is also in the end an untenable position. If the claim to a total knowledge of the world, the claim to comprehend the world in its totality, means that we cannot account for how our organising categories come to be, the claim that we have to be entirely passive in order to apprehend the other means that we cannot explain how we can say anything at all about the other, how we can have any kind of access to the other at all. To speak of a mysterious revelation or disclosure by which the other manifests itself to us only serves to obscure the problem. In fact, I would argue, our knowledge of the other is never simply passively acquired. The idea that the other can simply reveal or disclose itself to us, without any work whatsoever on our part, is ultimately unintelligible. There can be no access to the other without our actively organising the other in terms of our categories. Even those positions which counsel self-negation find themselves, embarrassingly enough, having to impose themselves on the other in order to make claims about it. They still have to talk of the other, to bring it into categories, to make it in some sense an object of knowledge, even as they disavow such speaking. Hence there is a constant anxiety within these positions that they too are contributing to the misrepresentation and distortion of the other. At the same time, the more they seek to rid themselves of all organising activities regarding the other, the more they are reduced to gesturing impotently towards the other, or resorting to some non-philosophical, ‘poetic’ mode of articulation. This only serves to illustrate further the impoverished kind of position that results if we try to deny our own contribution.1 This is not entirely to dismiss these selfnegating approaches. It is indeed important to question the totalising thinking in which we seek to reduce the other to a mere function of our categories. But my claim is that the straightforward reversal of this position, the complete negation of ourselves in favour of the other, is not a viable alternative. This point can be made more positively. Encountering the world, I would suggest, necessarily involves a process of ordering the world in terms of our categories, organising and classifying it, actively bringing it under control in some way. We always bring some framework to bear on the world in our dealings with it. Without this organisational activity, we would be unable to make any sense of the world at all. As with totalising thought, the self-negating position is more usefully understood as a pathology of thought. Indeed, it is another version of the pathological totalisation I referred to earlier. In this case, we look to the other, the world, to provide a total explanation of our knowledge of it. If totalising thinking is thinking which in its hunger to master the world has become blind to anything other, the self-negating form of thinking is thinking which, in supposing itself to be entirely subordinated to the other, imagining that the other is all-powerful, has become blind to its own organising activity. And this failure to acknowledge our own contribution is not only intellectually problematic, but politically dangerous as well. It leaves us vulnerable to seduction by external forces.

Foucault and dialogue

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So, I am suggesting, we are not simply passive in our fundamental encounters with the other. In encountering the other, we actively assimilate it and transform it in terms of our categories of understanding. This does not, however, simply leave us back where we started. The crucial point that needs to be made here is that, whilst we actively organise the other, the other is not passive either. It is not simply whatever we make of it, whatever we want it to be. It also resists our interpretations, eludes them, and affects us in turn. To say this is to do justice to what Bernstein calls ‘the “primordial intuition” that there is a world that is independent of our beliefs and fancies that forces itself upon us willy-nilly and constrains what we can think, say or do’ (Bernstein 1983:4), but at the same time to do so without having to go so far as to suppose that knowledge is simply a matter of our passively mirroring this world. This is neither idealism nor naive realism, neither subjectivism nor objectivism. In knowing, we both interpret the world and are guided by it. In other words, there is interpretative activity on our part, through which we actively shape the world, positively constitute it, but the world is not simply passive, a mere product of our organising categories. It is not simply whatever we interpret it to be, but also goes beyond our interpretations, resists them, and affects us in turn, forcing us to revise our understandings of it. This is not to say that our earlier interpretations were false or even partial, a claim which presupposes that there is some absolute, definitive truth, but rather that all interpretations are provisional and none are final. Interpretations emerge and are transformed in the course of an ongoing interplay between ourselves and the other. As such, our encounter with the other involves in the first instance a to-and-fro movement, a combat, an interplay. In other words, what is fundamental is a dialogue between ourselves and the other. It should be stressed here that the notion of dialogue as I am using it does not in itself carry any of the usual normative connotations associated with the notion, such as the idea that dialogue involves a willingness to listen to what the other has to say, as well as a refusal dogmatically to absolutise one’s own point of view. Rather, it is what I have called a ‘thin’ notion of dialogue. I am invoking it to refer simply to the reciprocal, two-sided character of the encounter between ourselves and the other. This can serve as a general account of our being-in-the-world. As creatures who actively organise the world in terms of categories, we exist in the midst of a wider world which does not simply yield to us but influences us in turn. Let us now explore this in more detail. A picture of this sort, in which dialogue is primary, allows us to avoid once and for all the inhumanly abstract subject of traditional humanism. It means that we are not sovereign transcendental subjects, undisputed authors of our existence, secure and untouched by any external influences, and by the same token solipsistically isolated and wholly lacking any context, any concreteness. In this dialogical picture we are able to be touched, affected and transformed by external forces. In other words, it means that we exist in the midst of a concrete context, as located, finite, concrete beings, i.e. as embodied beings. To be embodied here, as I argued in Chapter 1, does not mean that one is an abstract Cartesian subject which has a body attached to it. It means that we exist concretely, materially in the midst of the world, and are thus wholly accessible to and able to be transformed by external influences. At the same time, as already noted, the dialogical view also means that we are not simply passive, yielding, at the mercy of these external influences. We are active beings, capable of organising and interpreting the world in turn. And this also reflects our


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embodied status. As I suggested in the previous chapter, it is only because we are embodied that we are able to act. I cannot be a detached, disembodied, purely knowing subject and still be active. Indeed, such a being would not even be able to know, for there would be no concrete motivation to know. Cognition is driven by concrete drives to impose order on the world; and this organisational activity is bound up with the whole range of our organisational and manipulative activities, inseparable from practice. To know the world is thus for us to be inescapably carried forward into the world, to be unavoidably involved in corporeal activities. It is precisely because we exist ‘in the world’ in this way that we are open to influence by other forces. But our embodiment also makes it possible for us to act upon the world, to influence and transform these other forces in turn. Dialogue is thus a corporeal dialogue. We organise the world not as unworldly knowing subjects but as concrete, embodied, active human beings, beings who can in turn be touched and influenced by the world. This is not to say that the world necessarily affects us in the same way as we affect it. We may know or interpret natural objects, but they cannot be said to know or interpret us. The process of interpretation here is unidirectional. None the less, natural objects are not simply passive, not simply whatever we interpret them to be. They resist certain interpretations, affect us in turn, and force us to revise our readings of them. So there is a dialogue to that extent between ourselves and the natural world, between ourselves and nature. What this picture still leaves unanswered, however, is the key question of how our encounter with the wider world might account for the emergence of our organising categories themselves, the particular forms in terms of which we think and act. In order to account for this, it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of an other like us, a knowing, interpreting being who knows or interprets us, and who can give shape and form to our organising activity. In other words, it is necessary to acknowledge that we are dependent on, and the products of, a process of education or acculturation through which our activities are given shape and direction. Only in this way can our ordering activity itself acquire a determinate form. This process of acculturation does not only provide us with categories in terms of which to comprehend and interpret natural objects. It also means that we ourselves are objects of ordering and interpretation for other ordering, interpreting beings. What has come into view here is the social dimension of our existence, and here we also acquire the forms of behaviour specific to that context, the forms that structure our conduct within the social context. Our social activities are ordered and organised by others in accordance with various socio-cultural forms and standards. This does not mean, however, that we are simply passive transmitters or reproducers of our culture, that we simply perpetuate existing cultural forms in our conduct. At the social level, also, a selfnegating picture is problematic. If individuals simply reproduced existing cultural forms in their activities, if they were simply whatever their culture directed them to be, culture would fall into closed, sterile self-repetition. And this is ultimately an untenable account, because it makes it impossible to understand how such all-embracing cultural forms could ever have emerged in the first place. So at the social level, as well, we must be active beings. Even if we are the objects of ordering and interpretation, we are ordered and organised as active beings. This means first of all that, even in the process of our early acculturation, where we are most at the mercy of the interpreting other, we are not simply passive. Acculturation is not a matter


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of shaping a body which is passive and yielding. In other words, we are not dealing here with a form of social determinism. Rather, it is a long process of training and regulation, which involves a struggle to tame an active, resisting body, to give a particular shape to its capacities, to impart a specific orientation or direction to its activities. And over and above that, because we are active, we are not simply shaped by our culture but are also able to shape it in turn. That is, although our activities may be shaped and directed in accordance with various socio-cultural forms and standards, we as active beings do not merely reproduce these forms but are also able to transgress their limits, redeploy acquired forms of thought and action in new, innovative ways, and transform those who imposed them on us in the first place, changing the culture into which we were born. It is out of this social dialogue or interplay that cultural forms emerge and, it can be added, are also transformed in the course of ongoing dialogue. It is this specifically social kind of dialogue that I want to focus on in this book, the dialogue in which embodied participants actively seek to give shape to or impose forms on each other’s activities in a fully reciprocal, ongoing interplay of interpretations. It seems to me that this is the uniquely human form of dialogue, if by human beings we mean those creatures who are capable of ordering and interpreting, and who are thus capable of ordering and interpreting other human beings, as well as of resisting and transgressing interpretations that are imposed upon them. As human beings we are both interpreted, shaped and organised by other human beings, and able to transgress imposed limits, to create new forms of thought and action, to shape and transform these others in turn. We are thus involved, right from the start and throughout our existence, in an openended social dialogue, a dialogue that is constitutive of history itself. And in the last analysis it is only because individuals can transgress the forms imposed on them by others and enter into a dialogue with their culture that it is possible for particular cultural forms to emerge, and for there to be historical change. Creative transgression is fundamental to the movement of historical dialogue. Of course, it is always possible for one to try to overcome all resistance and transgression, to try to impose oneself completely on the other. In other words, it is always possible to try to silence the other and to bring all dialogue to an end. As we have seen, to the extent that thinking, human activity in general, overcomes the other, it falls into solipsistic self-enclosure and sterile repetition, becoming imprisoned and limited by its own ruling categories. In so far as thinking always involves imposing one’s categories on the other, such states of self-enclosure are a constant possibility, a constant danger. And what is lost here, along with the other, is our contact with the very wellsprings of organisational activity, resistance as the transgression of imposed limits and the creation of new forms of thought and action. But it remains the case that such silencing of otherness is a derivative, secondary state, one that presupposes the dialogue it has arrested. To take this state as fundamental, to imagine that the other is indeed no more than a function of our categories, is a forgetting of the encounters with the other and of resistance, the dialogical interplay, out of which our ruling categories have emerged; and there remains the permanent possibility of being confronted by the resurgent voices of others, by resistance, transgression and the reopening of dialogue. To sum up, having considered in more detail what might be involved in encountering the other, we have now arrived at a fuller understanding of the alternative to totalising metaphysics. The alternative is not a fragmentation of thought and action into a


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multiplicity of isolated, uncommunicating monads, a position which only perpetuates metaphysical thinking in a monadological form. It is rather the conceptualisation of our situation in terms of dialogue, and most importantly, social dialogue, the fully reciprocal, open-ended interplay between ourselves and others. This dialogical alternative can also be formulated in connection with the issue of relativism. The fragmentation vision envisages a plurality of incommensurable, uncommunicating world-views, in which we are only able to speak relativistically of ‘our’ standards and ‘their’ standards. In the dialogical account, we can comprehend and judge the other in terms of our standpoint or framework of thinking. Indeed, we do so all the time. At the same time, however, on this view our orienting framework is not absolute. It has emerged out of a long dialogue with the other, and it is susceptible to transformation by the other in the course of ongoing dialogue. This dialogical alternative allows us to avoid the various problems associated with the totalising metaphysical perspective, whether in its unitary or its fragmented forms. As we saw in the previous chapter, because the metaphysical view claims to overcome otherness and to comprehend the world in its totality, it is unable to give a historical account of the emergence of its ruling categories, which leaves us with a standpoint that is abstractly ahistorical and unconditioned. On the dialogical view, our organisation of the world is never total but always encounters an other which can affect us in turn. The dialogical interplay of the one with the other, constitutive of history, gives rise to specific forms of thought and action, as well as making possible their transformation. Far from being abstract, unconditioned and disembodied, these forms are historically specific, having emerged out of the play of dialogue. And as historically emergent and specific, these forms of life are also capable of being transformed, through ongoing dialogue. In this context, the self-enclosure and sterile repetition characteristic of totalising views can be understood as a secondary, derivative state. It arises when the other is temporarily overcome and dialogue is halted; and it is destined to be overcome in the ongoing play of dialogue. It should also be stressed here that this dialogical picture is quite distinct from the kind of account which appears to acknowledge otherness and historical dialogue, but in fact remains essentially metaphysical. In other words, it is not to be confused with Hegel’s totalising dialectic, in which the other is conceived in essentially negative and derivative terms relative to the self, and the interplay between self and other leads inexorably to the subsumption of the other to the self. Hegel’s is a dialogue, a historical interplay with the other, which does not challenge totalisation, but remains subordinated to the standpoint of metaphysical subjectivism. This standpoint itself remains beyond dialogue, abstractly ahistorical. Dialogue as I am presenting it gives due weight to the otherness of the other, as that which absolutely exceeds the categories the self imposes on it, and is able to affect the self in turn. There is no position which stands above the movement of dialogue, and one side can only ever achieve a temporary victory over the other. In the end, both sides are subject to endless transformation. This is a non-totalising, open-ended dialogue or interplay, with no pre-ordained path, no predetermined moves, where moves never come to an end.


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Foucault and the dialogue of forces Against this background, let us now turn to the work of Foucault. As I mentioned in the introduction, Foucault is one of the most important recent critics of the pretensions of totalising thought, and in particular of the totalising thought of modern humanism. As we saw in the preceding chapter, Foucault, in common with other postmodernist thinkers, sees such totalising thought as suppressing difference or otherness; and he also calls into question Hegel’s version of humanism, as a picture that seems to acknowledge otherness but in fact subsumes it to a totalising dialectic. A good deal of recent French thought can be understood in these terms, as a reaction not just against metaphysical humanism but against Hegel in particular (Bogue 1989:2–3). In this search for an alternative to Hegel, Nietzsche has proved to be an important source of inspiration, especially by way of Deleuze’s interpretation of his work in Nietzsche and Philosophy. For Deleuze, Nietzsche provides a means of going beyond the Hegelian picture, because he replaces Hegel’s totalising historical dialectic with his account of power as a multiplicity of forces in relations of tension with one another.2 And this is an account which also informs Foucault’s efforts to escape from humanism. Foucault’s anti-humanistic and anti-Hegelian stance is already evident in relatively early works such as The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. The Nietzschean account of power becomes prominent as his anti-humanism develops in a political direction, in later works such as Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, and it is this political phase of his work which will be the main focus of consideration in this chapter.3 Here, Foucault rejects the idea of the abstract, ahistorical foundationalist subject as the indispensable basis for socio-political understanding, whether in the form of the liberal, Kantian individual or of the Hegelian Marxist class-subject. In the same stroke, it can be added, he also dispenses with the idea that power is to be understood in primarily negative terms. In the humanist tradition, power is construed as external social influence upon human beings, and consequently as that which stands in the way of our being fully self-determining, fully autonomous beings. Our task here is to rise above these external influences, as liberal subjects to disentangle ourselves from them, and as Hegelian subjects to overcome them in the course of the totalising dialectic. In contrast to this, following the Deleuzean interpretation of Nietzsche’s power as a relation of forces, Foucault conceptualises the social field in terms of a multiplicity of ‘force-relations’, of shifting, mobile, open-ended interplays of forces.4 Human beings are now seen as concrete, as wholly involved in their social practices, in these force relations. Power is no longer the external social influence that opposes our autonomy, but the force that is continuous with concrete human existence and social life. Foucault is best known for this ‘positive’ account of power. What I want to suggest is that it is possible to articulate Foucault’s account in terms of the notion of dialogue. Here, it is necessary to reject readings which see his notion of force-relations on the model of a mechanistic physics, and which see him as presenting a picture of impersonal forces engaged in mechanical interactions, from which human agency and purpose is entirely absent (Taylor 1984; Rorty 1982). This impersonal, ‘inhumanist’ reading of


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Foucault is entirely wrong. It continues to presuppose a humanist or subjectivist picture of human beings, i.e., the notion of a subject that stands ‘behind’ and explains the ‘merely external’ bodily movements and social practices, and consequently supposes that Foucault’s rejection of this humanist subject leaves us only with mindless, impersonal forces. Foucault does not deny the human being in this way. What he denies is the specifically humanist conception of human being which, as I argued in Chapter 1, is itself inhuman. The humanist conception of human beings is inhuman because, in seeking to separate the self from all worldly influences, it denies our embodiment and reduces us to ghostly, bodiless subjects, to feeble, colourless wills. And in so doing it actually undermines our capacity to be active agents. Thus, in his anti-humanism, Foucault is anything but ‘inhumanist’. In rejecting the inhuman idea of the human being conceived as a ghostly, disembodied will, he restores a human, concrete understanding of human beings as embodied, corporeal beings. We do not so much lose the subject as regain our embodiment. To be embodied is to be a corporeal being, to be wholly active and inescapably involved in the world. Human beings as concrete, active beings are conceptualised by Foucault in terms of the notion of ‘force’, where, to borrow Paul Patton’s formulation, force can be understood minimally as a power or capacity, inhering in an individual or body of some kind, to do certain things or make some kind of difference in the world (Patton 1989:286). We can thus think of Foucault’s human being, Foucault’s subject, as an ensemble or collection of corporeal forces. The result is a more plausible account of human agency. To be an agent presupposes not an abstract will but rather the corporeal power or capacity to act in various ways. It is in this spirit, I would suggest, that Foucault speaks in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality of the human being as the ‘active body’, as composed of corporeal ‘forces and capacities’ (Foucault 1978b:93; 1979a:25, 138).5 And the interplay of these corporeal forces can be understood in terms of dialogue. Foucault’s human beings are active bodies that exist in the midst of the world, and to be in the world in this way is to be wholly and inescapably open to influence and transformation by other forces, to be ‘totally imprinted by history’, as Foucault puts it (Foucault 1984a:83). At the same time, because forces are always imposed on other forces, this imposition requires the overcoming of those other forces, a subduing or taming of them; and there is always resistance, struggle against the limits such overcoming imposes, and the everpresent possibility of reversal (Foucault 1978b:95–6). It is in such resistance, I want to suggest, that what I have called the other or otherness makes itself felt, as that which does not just conform to the categories one imposes on it, but also eludes them, goes beyond them, and is able to affect one in turn. We are thus from the start involved in a social dialogue of corporeal forces, the interplay of forces affecting and transforming one another. In social dialogue, these forces can be seen as aiming to order, to give form to or interpret other forces. Here, it should be noted, interpretation is not just a matter of knowledge, of discursively categorising forces, but of concretely ordering, directing or harnessing those forces, imposing a particular orientation or direction upon them, a process in which the discursive categorisation and classification of corporeal forces plays a crucial part. This interweaving of the discursive and the non-discursive in processes of ordering and interpretation is reflected in Foucault’s use of the term ‘power/knowledge’.6


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We are presented, then, with a dialogical picture, in this concrete sense of an openended, reciprocal interplay or combat of corporeal forces. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault speaks of the social field as a field of ‘dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings’, and as a ‘network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity’, with ‘innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability’ (Foucault 1979a:26, 27). In The History of Sexuality, he gives a more extended account, characterising the social field as a multiplicity of mobile, shifting, unstable relations between forces, an ‘interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations’ (Foucault 1978b:92–4). And in the late article ‘The Subject and Power’, he speaks of the interplay between forces as an agonism, a ‘relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle’ (Foucault 1983a:221–2, 225).7 The notion of agonism stresses the strategic aspect of these encounters, their character as combat, offensive and counteroffensive, in which moves are not predetermined but continuously being made. Here too Foucault makes it clear that, despite the somewhat militaristic language of his earlier writings, these encounters or conflicts are not necessarily violent ones. He speaks of them in very broad terms as ‘actions upon the actions of others’, which can include a wide range of influences (ibid.: 220). For Foucault, history in general is made up of these encounters, this open-ended dialogue or interplay of corporeal forces. We can also refer to history so understood as ‘corporeal history’, to distinguish it from the subjectivistic history of Hegel. And, once again, this anti-humanist account does not represent a denial of human beings in favour of impersonal forces. Human beings do not disappear from corporeal history. On the contrary, it is only history so understood that is a genuinely human history, for it is made not by an abstract metaphysical subject but by concrete, corporeal human beings, through the material interplay of their actions. What disappears from the scene is the inhuman humanist subject, and along with it the totalising and unhistorical Hegelian vision of history as the progressive unfolding of the Absolute Subject. Foucault’s dialogical conception of history is the very opposite of Hegel’s closed vision. History becomes the mobile, contingent and open-ended dialogue or interplay of forces. As Foucault puts it in Power/Knowledge, ‘history has no “meaning”, though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent’. Rather, it is intelligible ‘in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics’. And he adds that the notion of dialectic ‘is a way of avoiding the open and always hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton’ (Foucault 1980d: 114–15).8 Social order, domination and metaphysics In Foucault’s account of social and historical existence, then, it is this hazardous, openended conflict or dialogue of forces that is fundamental. However, it would be wrong to suppose that we thereby exist in a world that is without any form or constraint, an indeterminate world in which there is uninhibited ‘free play’. On the contrary, clearly enough, we exist in an ordered, normatively organised world, a world in which the range of legitimate actions open to the various participants is delimited. In that sense, we always exist in a certain ‘present’, in the sense of the specific socio-historical order in


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which we live, a normative framework in terms of which we think and act, and which is relatively enduring over time. However, it is also the case that existing social forms are in no sense metaphysically necessary or grounded. There is no ultimate metaphysical ground, no central organising transcendental subject or class, that imparts order or unity to social practices. Our practices have unity, but it is not a metaphysically prescribed, grounded or necessitated unity. We do not need transcendental principles imposed ‘from above’ to explain or underpin the unity, order or coherence in our practices. It is out of the practices themselves, the interplay of corporeal forces, from ‘below’, as Foucault puts it, that specific forms of social arrangement and unity emerge. Corporeal forces impose order and organisation on themselves, and ‘constitute their own organisation’ (Foucault 1978b:92).9 Relatively stable and enduring systems of social order emerge to the extent that some forces or sets of forces come to be able to orient, direct or utilise others in a relatively constant way. Thus Foucault does not abandon the notion of social unity, but understands it non-metaphysically, as arising derivatively and contingently out of the dialogue of forces, the multiplicity of force relations. It both emerges from dialogue and, at least to some extent, arrests it. By no longer accounting for social order in terms of a foundational subject, Foucault is able to avoid the paradoxes of humanist accounts of social order which require superhuman feats from human beings, such as the liberal social contract model, in which isolated, asocial individuals are supposed to come together to decide what form their communal life should take; as well as the Hegelian vision, in which human beings are the organisers of society, but only in so far as they deny their finitude and subordinate themselves to a superhuman Absolute Subject. At the same time, Foucault also avoids replacing humanism with another kind of metaphysical totalisation, the hard-line structuralism that seeks to reduce all social phenomena to a function of impersonal social structures or forms. Such structuralism has been aptly described as a Kantianism without the transcendental subject. In other words, whilst structuralism is anti-humanistic it still preserves the totalising project of subjectivism, now in an impersonal, objectivistic form.10 Finally, despite the claims of many of his critics, Foucault is not himself introducing a new kind of totalising metaphysics, a metaphysics of power, in which power is posited as the unitary principle which organises society in its totality. As he puts it, ‘Power with a capital P—dominating and imposing its rationality upon the totality of the social body—doesn’t exist’ (Foucault 1983b:207). Once again, Foucault’s account is far from being ‘inhumanist’. For Foucault, social order becomes intelligible in human terms. It is the outcome of the activity of embodied, finite human beings, emerging out of the dialogical interplay of material human forces. Through this interplay, various elements in the existing social order come to be set in place, without the need for any overall controlling plan or project. To the objection that a complex social order could only be the result of some underlying plan or project (a humanistic version of the argument from design), it can be countered that it is the very complexity of the social order which puts it beyond the reach of any master plan. Something this complex, this intricate and labyrinthine, could only have emerged in an unplanned way, out of the multiplicity of concrete encounters, the dialogical interplay of corporeal history. Foucault captures this unplannedness when he speaks of our social forms as being ‘anonymous’. As Colin Gordon makes clear, Foucault is not saying here


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that history lacks agents, but simply that it does not have any master-plan (Gordon 1980:251).11 That these frameworks or social forms are historically and contingently emergent is not to suggest that they are somehow flimsy, or able to be lightly dismissed. They are historical, but they are not merely historical. To speak of things as being merely historical is once again to betray a nostalgia for metaphysical foundations, and to suppose that the only legitimate forms of order are those that are grounded metaphysically, which in the modern context amounts to their being grounded upon a metaphysical conception of ourselves as capable of assuming a foundational role in relation to society. On this view, a form of life that is not metaphysically grounded has no real hold over us and could easily be exchanged for another. But we are not superhuman subjects, able to stand above society and history, and to choose different forms of life as we might change our clothes. We are finite, embodied beings, wholly in the midst of history, and so we are subject to and profoundly conditioned by the forms of life that have emerged out of that history. They provide the very framework in terms of which we think, act and live. And any transgression or overcoming of these forms requires hard work and concrete struggle, as well as always carrying with it the risk of being destroyed in the process. Foucault thus presents us with a non-metaphysical, historical notion of social organisation or order, as emerging out of the interplay of corporeal forces, through the overcoming of forces by other forces. It should be noted that there is nothing here to suggest that social ordering should be viewed in purely negative terms, as nothing more than an external imposition on human beings. Human forces themselves seek essentially to order, organise and control, and forms of order emerge naturally out of the movement of corporeal history. And their effect is not to corrupt or distort other forces, to repress some ahistorical, essential human nature. That is, first of all, forces do not seek to repress but to make use of other forces, to organise, harness or employ them, which expands what it is possible to do. In Discipline and Punish, which focuses on ‘discipline’ as a particular technique for the organisation and regulation of individuals that has become widespread in modern European societies, Foucault notes that discipline made possible, amongst other things, the harnessing of labour power and an enormous increase in productivity at the beginning of the modern period (Foucault 1979a: 218–21). And second, being shaped and directed in accordance with cultural forms is part of the process by which human beings are historically constituted, by which they become what they are. Again, the effect is primarily positive. Various forms of training and education bring about the development and enhancement of forces. In Discipline and Punish Foucault stresses this enhancement in connection with disciplinary forms of regulation, but he also points out that in all cultures, bodies are subject to a ‘political investment’ of some sort, some process of training (ibid.: 25, 136). At the same time, however, it remains the case that this enhancement of human forces can only be achieved to the extent that those forces which are directed and utilised fall into conformity with imposed limits, their otherness is suppressed and dialogue is limited. And, as I have argued, to the extent that otherness is overcome and dialogue is arrested, there is the danger of falling into sterile self-enclosure. What this means here is that, to the extent that the dialogue of forces is arrested, an organisation of forces is in danger of becoming ossified, imprisoned by its own organising principles, doomed to sterile repetition and closed to innovation. This, I want to suggest, is how we can understand


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states of domination, which I will come to in a moment. However, to the extent that human beings continue to be active, to the extent that these forces continue to manifest their otherness by resisting, by transgressing imposed limits, going in new and innovative directions, and exercising influence in turn, dialogue between forces can continue. The organisation of forces thereby becomes susceptible to uncertainty, instability and transformation. But it is only through such resistance and transformation, only through dialogue, that forms of life can be renewed and revitalised. On this reading it is possible to see the historical dialogue of forces as characterised by an overall movement between order and innovation. On the one hand, forces aim to organise, direct and harness other forces, and in so doing extend what it is possible to do, but at the same time they also suppress otherness, arrest dialogue and become closed to the new. On the other hand, there is the ever-renewed pressure from these other forces for a reopening of dialogue through which these other forces transgress imposed limits and challenge the existing order, a process which, whilst unsettling and destabilising, also introduces new forms of life and makes possible the renewal and revitalisation of the social order. On this account, what is problematic for Foucault is not the production of forms as such, which goes on constantly, but rather the absolutisation of particular forms, and the consequent suppression of otherness, transgression and innovation through which new forms arise. And in this context it is possible to locate Foucault’s notion of domination. All organisations of forces overcome the other and arrest dialogue to some degree, but organisations may also remain more or less susceptible to otherness and innovation, to dialogue and hence instability and transformation. States of domination emerge when otherness is entirely overcome, when the mobile dialogue of forces is wholly arrested, and reversal and transformation are precluded. As Foucault puts it, they are states ‘in which the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing different partners a strategy which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed’ (Foucault 1988d: 3).12 Here, the ossification and imprisonment I spoke of earlier becomes manifest. One gets a sense of it in Foucault’s own descriptions of states of domination. Relations of power become ‘set and congealed’. There emerges a system of power that is ‘permanent, repetitious, inert and self-reproducing’ (Foucault 1978b:93). In such cases we have become ‘trapped in our own history’ (Foucault 1983a:210). In other words, we have become imprisoned in the forms of life that have emerged out of our own historical dialogue. Moreover, it is in the context of establishing such states of domination, I want to suggest, that the metaphysical thinking discussed in the first chapter ultimately finds its place. As we saw, metaphysical thinking suffers from internal problems of ahistoricality and abstractness. But it also has wider social and political implications, and these are in their own way problematic. Totalising metaphysical thought, in which we entirely subordinate the other to our organising principles, takes a concrete social and political form in those states of domination in which corporeal forces are brought into complete conformity, completely regulated, and all resistance and innovation is precluded. Metaphysical thinking enters explicitly into these forms of domination at the discursive level of the organising process. The control or regulation of forces involves forms of discursive categorisation and classification of behaviour, particularly in so far as techniques of control aim to bring forces into conformity with various normative


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categories or standards of right action. And a key tactic for imposing and maintaining such control is to present these normative categories as being universal, necessary and obligatory, principles to which all our practices must conform. In other words, a key tactic for imposing and maintaining social control is to present certain ways of acting, and more generally, certain social arrangements, as being metaphysically prescribed and necessitated, the only possible or legitimate ordering of practices we can have. The rigid, closed social system typically claims to be founded on absolute, universal and timeless principles. In this manner, forms of foundationalist thinking function as discursive elements in the imposition of particular forms of social arrangement. They play an instrumental role in helping to bring about and to maintain specific forms of social ordering. At the same time, the sterile self-enclosure of totalising metaphysical thought, its dogmatic, closed and repetitive character, is concretely manifested in the closed, ‘total’ institutions of domination which preclude all otherness and innovation, in which activities are entirely routinised and repetitive, and in which time, the very movement of history, has seemingly come to a halt. In these terms we can understand Foucault’s account of the political implications of modern humanist thinking. The modern, humanist form of metaphysics, which grounds all thought and action in a foundational subject or true self, can be seen to be implicated in the specifically modern forms of ordering and regulation, those which involve the proliferating disciplinary techniques. The modern philosophical effort to impose a new order upon the world, which Descartes and Kant grounded in the human being understood as a metaphysical subject, is taken up in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s demand for rational social governance, for the enlightened, disciplinary reorganisation of our social practices in accordance with norms that are founded on reason and human nature. And out of this Enlightenment demand, the modern knowledges of the individual, the human sciences, develop in order to articulate such a basis, to define scientifically what human beings essentially are, and in so doing to formulate the norms that are to inform the modern disciplinary practices of regulation. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes in some detail how disciplinary forms of regulation aim to bring the behaviour of individuals into accordance with norms and standards of various sorts, to ‘normalise’ individuals. The modern sciences of the individual present these norms and standards as being grounded in and as reflecting some notion of an essential human nature, such as a true sexual nature, and thus as ways of being to which human beings, if they are to be truly human, truly ‘normal’, ought to conform. These sciences thereby participate in the operations of a totalising, scientific administration of life in which normality is the rule of life for all, and in which otherness, that which resists and goes beyond prescribed forms of thought and action, is stigmatised as abnormality or deviance, in need of rehabilitation. Thus, in being subordinated to practices of disciplinary regulation, individuals are also subordinated to the various images of essential human nature or true selfhood that are bound up with disciplinary regulation (Foucault 1978b: 150–9; 1979a:177–84). In this manner, totalising thought in its modern subjectivist form attains concrete social and political expression, and metaphysical conceptions of human being and human nature come to play a key role in the operation of modern forms of disciplinary control and regulation.


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Resistance and freedom Foucault thus provides us with an account of domination as a relation of forces in which dialogue is arrested, in which reversal and transformation are precluded. However, although history is littered with examples of domination and oppression, it is not clear that total domination, absolute power over the other, could ever be achieved. It is true that in Discipline and Punish in particular, the emphasis is on forms of domination, and the overall impression the book gives is of the triumph of an inexorable, all-embracing system of social regulation. This has led some critics to see Foucault as painting a bleak and ultimately reactionary picture of society and history, as presenting the kind of metaphysics of power I spoke of earlier, in which domination organises society in its totality. But what becomes evident from a careful reading of Discipline and Punish, and is made more explicit in The History of Sexuality, is that what is fundamental in Foucault’s picture is not domination but rather the dialogical interplay of forces, of human powers and capacities. Power for Foucault is not primarily domination but rather ‘power to’, corporeal force, the capacity to act, to do certain things; and the social field is primarily constituted in terms of the mobile relations between these forces.13 As such, forms of social unity, organisations of forces in which some are able to exercise relatively constant power over others, remain essentially derivative and secondary, emerging as they do out of the historical dialogue of forces. And while all organisations constrain dialogue to some degree, it is not clear that even the most oppressive organisation could completely suppress it. To do so would amount to our rising above history and its influences, and bringing historical dialogue to an end. But that degree of sovereignty would only be possible for an inhuman, all-powerful, transcendental subject. The metaphysical vision of absolute control is ultimately a selfdeceptive fantasy, beyond the reach of finite human beings. Finite human beings always remain in the end subject to history, to the influence of the other and to the ongoing play of dialogue. And so, no matter how oppressive an institution, otherness will inevitably reassert itself through various forms of resistance and revolt, dialogue will continue, and forms of life will be subjected to re-examination. Historical dialogue, which continually gives rise to forms of order, also embodies the permanent possibility of their transformation. In short, what the primacy of dialogue in Foucault’s picture means in concrete terms is that no particular social ordering can ever be absolute or eternal. It means that there will always be resistance, revolt, struggle against socially imposed constraints, renewed dialogue and the transformation of social forms. The agent of change here is the concrete, resisting human being. In later writings such as ‘Questions of Method’ and ‘The Subject and Power’, Foucault also refers to this agent as the ‘subject of action’ and the ‘free subject’ (Foucault 1981a:13; 1983a:221). However, this is not, as some have claimed, a late reappearance of the humanist subject, which Foucault finally realised he could not do without. On the contrary, the subject of action he refers to is the concrete, corporeally active human being, the embodied subject of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. And this subject is free, in the minimal sense of having the capacity to act, to do various things. Disciplinary regulation presupposes this free subject, in so far as it seeks to capture and utilise the concrete human being’s freedom to act. It aims to produce


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a particular kind of subject, one whose activity is in accordance with disciplinary norms and standards. Minimally, then, freedom for Foucault is our capacity or power to act. So understood, our freedom is shaped, formed and directed by our social context, by the forms of life in which we exist. But, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, being an active human being also means not just passively reproducing socially imposed forms in one’s conduct, but also being able to revolt, to transgress existing limits. To go beyond socially imposed limits and constraints, limits imposed by others, is also to introduce the new and unexpected, to invent new forms of life, new ways of being and acting, and to be able to influence others in turn. So we can speak here of a further sense of freedom, freedom as the capacity to transgress socially imposed limits. Freedom so understood lies at the heart of the dialogical process whereby social forms of life are challenged and transformed. It should be noted here that, like the notion of dialogue in general, the notion of freedom which underlies dialogue does not in itself have any of the usual normative connotations. It is a non-normative notion of freedom, freedom understood simply as the human capacity for transgression.14 Now, in so far as the exercise of this transgressive freedom involves the influencing and bringing of other forces into conformity, i.e. the production of new forms of social ordering, it also means the generation of constraints on the freedom of others. In extreme cases, where the other is entirely overcome and reversal is precluded, freedom gives rise to states of domination. And it is certainly not unknown for movements of liberation themselves to establish new forms of oppression. Freedom unchallenged thus gives rise to a denial of freedom, the suppression of otherness and innovation, and the establishment of forms of closure. But this is not to say that all struggle is hopeless, that freedom is something unattainable, or that it is a fatally flawed goal. Rather, it is to say that freedom is not a once-and-for-all achievement, to be attained through the establishment of some ideal social order. It is the continual challenging of various forms of totalisation and closure, through which dialogue is reopened and the open-ended movement of history continues. In short, freedom is a permanent task (Foucault 1984d:245). This dialogical conception of freedom may be contrasted with the humanist notion of freedom, which rests on the metaphysical subject of humanism. Here, freedom is an ideal state, to be attained once and for all. It is a matter of rising above all external influences and socio-political constraints, in Kantian and liberal terms by proudly isolating ourselves, and in Hegelian terms by mastering society, in order to bring our thought and action into conformity with transcendental rules of some kind, with some conception of our essential nature. This remains a problematic conception of freedom, one that requires us to rise above all historical circumstances, and in the process to deny our own concreteness and finitude, to forget all that makes us human. Like the subject on which it rests, this is an inhuman notion of freedom, one that is quite beyond the reach of corporeal human beings. Moreover, it can be added, notions of a transcendental or essential nature to which we ought to conform have their part to play in forms of constraint that are imposed on corporeal human beings. In contrast, Foucault’s nonhumanist conception of freedom is the freedom of concrete, finite human beings, existing in the midst of history. It is not an ideal to be achieved by rising above our historical circumstances and establishing an ideal form of life. It is already present within history,


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as the concrete freedom of resistance and revolt against particular, socially imposed constraints, including those constraints supported by notions of a transcendental human nature, that drives historical dialogue.15 This concrete, dialogical conception of freedom needs to be borne in mind in the face of those humanist critics who argue that, in rejecting the transcendental subject, Foucault undermines the possibility of freedom by depriving resistance of any normative basis, and who see him as arbitrarily adding the notion of resistance to avoid a picture given over entirely to domination.16 Such criticisms turn domination into a metaphysical principle of social organisation and fail to recognise the primacy of dialogue in Foucault’s picture. All particular forms of life, including forms of domination, emerge derivatively, historically, out of human activity, out of concrete dialogue, and are only imposed on active human beings, and so they are always capable of being challenged and changed through the actions and struggles of human beings, through continuing resistance and dialogue. Such resistance does not need any explanation or normative justification. It is inevitable, an inescapable fact of historical life, being fundamental to the movement of historical dialogue. It is in fact the particular forms of social order, including forms of domination, being secondary and derivative, that need to be accounted for. To put this another way: if the human material upon which power is exercised were not irreducibly resistant and capable of questioning the social order, history itself would be unthinkable. We might even say, perhaps perversely, that resistance or revolt is the transcendental condition of history, for it is that without which history cannot exist. Revolt is that which makes history as dialogue, dialogical change and transformation possible. Foucault himself suggests as much in ‘Is It Useless to Revolt?’, where he notes: It is through revolt that subjectivity (not that of great men but of whomever) introduces itself into history and gives it the breath of life…it is due to such voices that the time of men does not have the form of an evolution, but precisely that of a history. (Foucault 1981b:8) Revolt, human freedom, is the animating principle, the driving force, of historical dialogue, giving motion to the interplay of forces out of which social forms emerge, whilst at the same time giving rise to the permanent possibility of contesting and transforming these forms in an ongoing dialogue. And this is a revitalising process, in that, through such revolt, fixed, congealed forms of life are overturned, and new forms of life emerge. It might at this point be objected that this idea of a fundamental revolt or resistance as the condition of history, this idea of the human being as constitutionally resistant, is no more than the surreptitious reintroduction of a new metaphysical ground or essentialist posture—which means that Foucault’s account is no real advance upon the humanistic picture it is supposed to replace. However, if by the notion of metaphysical ground is meant a firm standpoint or set of principles in terms of which to underpin, organise and unify thought and action, then this is not the case. Revolt is not a transcendental condition in the traditional sense of justifying or grounding particular forms of life and providing the limits beyond which thought and action cannot legitimately go. Resistance does not


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ground anything or establish limits of any sort. It is fundamental, but it does not found anything. It is precisely the activity of transgressing existing limits and creating new forms of thought and action. In short, it is the creation of difference, of otherness, the production of that which disturbs existing forms and opens up the possibility of their transformation.17 Furthermore, it is precisely because we are not metaphysical subjects in the humanist sense that we are able to be transgressive and creative in this manner. The humanist idea that we need to discover and conform to a pre-existing nature, and that our practices are the unfolding of a pre-existing subjectivity, is fundamentally opposed to human creativity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche asks, ‘What would there be to create if Gods—existed!’ (Nietzsche 1969:111). And Foucault might equally ask what there would be to create if the god-like transcendental subject existed. Creative activity is precisely, by its very definition, that which is not in conformity with any pre-existing standpoint or principles, which does not merely follow ready-made rules, but is instead the transgressive activity that cannot be prescribed in advance, the process of experimentation with different possibilities, the invention of something new and unexpected which goes beyond existing limits. It is out of this imprescribable creative activity that new forms of thought and action are able to arise and to be, in their turn, transformed. A final point to note is that there is nothing elitist or ‘aristocratic’ about this creative activity in Foucault’s account. It is not the province of the privileged few, of those who rise above the unthinking mass, the ‘herd’ of humanity, in order to attain a superhuman status. This is one point where Foucault differs markedly from Nietzsche. As he himself notes, he is inspired, not by Nietzsche as the herald of the Overman, but rather by what he calls the Nietzsche of the ‘geneses’, who looks to a multiplicity of mobile force-relations as the origin of prevailing values and forms. It is in this context that Foucault’s concept of creativity can be understood. Foucault’s is a human rather than a superhuman conception of creativity. It does not require that we surpass our humanity. It is a creativity that is present in all human beings in so far as they are active beings, and which manifests itself in their continual struggles to transgress socially imposed limits, to refashion forms of life, the creative transgression which drives the corporeal dialogue of forces. As Foucault puts it, it is not the revolt of ‘great men’ but of ‘whomever’ that gives the breath of life to history.18 Overall, then, Foucault provides us with an account in which dialogue, animated by freedom—by revolt and the creative transgression of limits—is fundamental. At the same time, it can be added, such revolt does not mean the denial of all social order or constraint, the leap into a Utopian, anarchistic form of life where no such limits or constraints exist. Transgression is not itself the basis of a way of life to be realised, or an ideal state that can be attained once and for all. Rather, it is something which is constantly present at the limits of our existing forms of life. Its fundamental status in Foucault’s picture is manifest in its being a permanent possibility, the permanent possibility of the irruption of the other, the new and unexpected, at the margins of our existence. That is to say, it is people’s constant refusal to remain confined within existing limits, simply to reproduce the existing forms of life, and the ever-resurgent willingness to experiment with new forms. It is this irrepressible human talent for creative


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transgression which both continually gives rise to new historical forms and makes possible their transformation, and which thus makes historical dialogue possible. What has not been touched upon as yet is what Foucault refers to as the practices of the self, the kinds of practices through which we relate to and act on ourselves, in which Foucault became increasingly interested in his later work. These practices have an important role to play in Foucault’s understanding of the ethical, which also becomes an explicit theme in his later work. It is to a consideration of these practices of the self and, more generally, of the question of ethics, that I would now like to turn.

3 ETHICS, CRITIQUE AND ENLIGHTENMENT The reading of Foucault presented in the previous chapter has made it possible to give some substance to the notion of dialogue, which can be understood in terms of the agonistic combat or interplay of corporeal forces. We have seen how the primacy of this dialogical interplay in Foucault’s picture is manifest in so far as no ordering of the world is ever absolute and all-embracing, no state of closure or domination ever complete. All forms of social ordering which seek to suppress otherness and to arrest dialogue are inevitably subject to resistance, to human freedom and transgression, and ultimately to transformation in the ongoing dialogue of forces, the continuing movement of history. In this chapter I will argue that there is another way in which this resistance to forms of ordering, through which dialogue is reopened, can manifest itself. As I have mentioned, historical dialogue also gives rise to forms of ordering in the first place. In other words, order is not simply something that is imposed from outside upon human beings who, as other, resist and transgress imposed limits. Human beings also seek to order, to organise the other, and are thus implicated in the emergence of the forms of order that suppress otherness and arrest dialogue. My suggestion is that, in so far as we are involved in maintaining closure and domination, resistance to these forms of closure and domination can also manifest itself in an indirect form. That is, it can manifest itself through our adoption of different attitudes towards the other, attitudes of openness towards the other which are opposed to domination, and which are instrumental in promoting ongoing resistance, creative transgression, dialogue and transformation. And I want to argue that this openness towards the other, which serves as an indirect means or instrument of resistance, is what the ethical comes to in a dialogical context. Exploring this idea will bring us once again to the work of Foucault. Having interpreted him as presenting a certain conception of dialogue, I will argue that the kind of dialogicallybased ethical position I am proposing is also present in Foucault. Ethics First of all, let us consider what might be involved in the notion of the ethical. An ethics involves, at the very least, a reference to normative principles, in terms of which we act and make judgements. Moreover, I would suggest, it involves some account of how these normative principles can be engendered, some account of the ‘principle of principles’. Now, we are accustomed to understanding ethics along Kantian lines, in terms of normative principles for behaviour which are universal, abstract, formal and capable of being grasped by the rational mind. The principle of principles for this ethics is the


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Categorical Imperative, which in Kant’s first formulation is the principle that moral principles are those which can be universalised. Through this process we exclude everything that is particular, specific and bodily from the picture, and establish moral principles on purely rational grounds. Ethics so understood presupposes that our behaviour originates in a unified mind or subject, and hence that the proper kind of behaviour is that which is in accordance with the mind’s universal principles.1 This is the ethics of metaphysical subjectivism. From the standpoint of a foundational rational subject, we are to organise all behaviour in accordance with its universal, allembracing principles. This is a picture which also exhibits the various problems associated with metaphysical subjectivism. In particular, we are unable to comprehend these normative principles in their historical emergence. Instead, they are held to exist abstractly and timelessly, in a social and historical vacuum. In the end, they presuppose a disembodied, unworldly, inhuman subject or mind. And, as is evident from the Kantian picture, there are the acute problems associated with a moral account that is founded on such an unworldly, abstract subject. It is an account that aims to prescribe normative principles for action, but at the same time one which rests on a disembodied conception of ourselves which actually undercuts our capacity to be active moral agents. In the last analysis, this is not an ethics appropriate for embodied human beings, involved in the world. It seems to me that, not only is ethics possible without a foundationalist standpoint, but that an ethics can only be formulated adequately if we abandon foundationalism. This means making the decisive break from metaphysical subjectivism, turning to a dialogical picture and to an understanding of human beings as embodied, active beings in the midst of dialogue with others. As has already become apparent, a dialogical picture does not preclude the normative organisation of our practices. It does not dismiss the idea that there are normative frameworks in terms of which we judge and act. What it means, however, is that there is no pre-existing, transcendental set of principles which forms the basis for a proper organisation of practices. Rather, normative principles and forms of practice emerge historically out of human activity, out of the play of dialogue, to the degree that some forces are able to bring others under control. A transcendentallyconceived ethics can arguably be relocated in this context, as part of the process of establishing such control, by presenting certain historically emergent principles of organisation as being universal, obligatory and inescapable. This was Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant, that in his moral thinking he merely sought to provide new grounds for the norms of Christian morality in order to help preserve their dominance in a postreligious context (Nietzsche 1973:122–3). An antihumanistic, dialogical ethics recognises that our normative rules are not transcendentally based, that they belong to this world, that they are human principles. It has no problem with the idea that moral codes are instruments of social order, bound up with concrete practices, and that they have emerged historically out of human action, out of the dialogical play of human practices. In short, for this kind of account, it is not a transcendental subject but dialogue that is primary. But we are not yet at the heart of this ethics. What is its ‘principle of principles’? Let us look more closely at dialogue. I have suggested that the animating principle of this interplay is concrete human freedom, one’s capacity to go beyond forms imposed by others, to transgress constraints imposed by other forces, to create new forms of thought and action, and to transform those other

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forces in turn. However, if one force comes to overcome and silence the other completely, if dialogue is arrested and states of domination are established, then social life falls into self-enclosure and ossification, imprisoned by its own organising forms. Without freedom, the transgression of limits, there is only sterile self-repetition. Here, escape from self-enclosure depends on continuing resistance, on the resurgence of the other, that which transgresses existing limits, introduces the new and unexpected, and reopens the dialogue through which social forms are renewed and revitalised. Now, one may remain within the perspective of the dominant organising categories and forms of life, and stand in opposition to that which transgresses existing limits. But one may also choose to adopt an attitude towards the other which serves to assist resistance. In other words, resistance to domination and closure can also be pursued in an indirect fashion, through the adoption of a different attitude towards the other. This new attitude is that of openness to the other, the refusal to reduce the other to a mere function of prevailing categories, to bend it to our purposes, and the willingness to respect the other, to listen to it, to take its claims seriously. In so far as human activity involves ordering and organising the other, such openness may seem on the face of it to be opposed to human activity. But it is not ultimately so opposed. What it opposes are the states of closure, of theoretical closure and political domination, into which such organising activity can fall, in which the wellsprings of human activity are suppressed, and in which our activity becomes imprisoned in its own organising categories, condemning us to a kind of living death. Openness promotes life, continuing human activity, in the form of the resurgence of the other, the transgression of existing limits, and the revitalising production of new forms of thought and action. This attitude of openness towards the other, it seems to me, is the principle of principles of a dialogical ethics. By this, I do not mean to say that it provides an ultimate basis for prescribing normative principles, in the manner of the Categorical Imperative. Dialogical ethics stands in direct opposition to the foundationalist, prescriptive ethics which seeks to establish ultimate, universal rules to which all practices must conform. A dialogical ethics does not prescribe any rules for right action. This is not to say, however, that it cannot engender normative principles and forms of organisation. It is in fact a foundationalist ethics that stands in the way of the production of normative principles and forms, in the sense that, by absolutising particular, historically emergent rules, it cuts them off from the creative activity and historical dialogue that gives rise to them, and instead promotes the sterile rigidity of a closed, dogmatic ethics. In contrast, an ethics based on openness to the other encourages the continuing production of normative principles and forms of life, because it promotes the transgressive, creative activity, the dialogue, through which normative principles and forms of life are produced as well as continually transformed. Openness to the other is the ethical principle that encourages this multiplication of principles and forms. With this anti-metaphysical, dialogical conception of ethics, it should be noted, there is a considerable shift in the way that ethics is to be understood. There is a rejection of the foundationalist understanding of ethics as being a matter of prescribing, from on high, universal rules and principles of behaviour. Ethics is not a matter of justifying or legitimating principles and forms of life. Normative principles, along with the social forms they inform, emerge out of the play of dialogue. Dialogue itself, as I am presenting it, is not itself a normative notion, an ideal to be realised. On the contrary, it is an


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inescapable fact of life, of our historical existence. We are inevitably caught up in the ongoing play of dialogue, the movement of ordering and resistance to ordering. And it is in this context that ethics can be understood. Ethics becomes an instrument, a tool, a means of facilitating the movement of dialogue in which we are always involved. More specifically, openness to the other is an instrument of resistance or freedom, a means of promoting the creative transgression, the invention of new forms, that is the driving force of dialogue. An implication of this view is that ethics, being open to the other, is not essential to historical life. Historical dialogue would go on without it. And clearly, most of history is bereft of ethical behaviour in this sense. But the attitude of openness remains as a possibility, an attitude that we can choose to adopt in order to facilitate that dialogue. Let me say a few more things about this attitude of openness to the other. As has been noted, it implies an attitude of respect towards otherness, a will-ingness to let the other speak and to listen seriously. By the same token, it also means an abandonment of the security, the comfort, that comes with an all-embracing view of the world where the other is completely mastered and predictable. It means promoting risk, instability, uncertainty, and the possible transformation of prevailing principles and forms of life. It is a dangerous exercise, and so it also requires a degree of courage. One can also say that it requires maturity, where maturity is not to be understood in the Kantian sense of complete rational self-possession, complete control over one’s practices, and the denial of all external influences. Rather, maturity here is understood as a matter of being able to acknowledge and be open to standpoints different to one’s own, and to the possibility that there may be different ways of doing things. It is in fact the desire for complete control that is immature. This is the childish refusal to acknowledge any differing point of view, the desire to see the world only in terms of one’s own standpoint and interests. Maturity is not this narcissism in which we seek to reduce all otherness to a mere function of our categories, but the recognition of the other’s right to speak and of the possibility that they may transform us. It might at this point be objected that the Kantian view also has room for a notion of respect for the other. After all, the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative enjoins us always to treat other people in keeping with their status as rational, selfdetermining agents, i.e. as ends in themselves rather than simply as means to our own aims and goals. However, the notion of respect for the other that I am arguing for needs to be sharply distinguished from Kant’s version. For Kant, the other is worthy of respect only in so far as it is a rational agent like us, an agent who will come to the same conclusions that we do about the principles of right action. It is what Seyla Benhabib calls the ‘generalised other’, nothing more than a mirror image of the self (Benhabib 1987:163–7; 1992:9–10). As such, Kant’s notion of respect for the other is in the last analysis an extended form of narcissism. This is evident also in the Kantian attitude to those others whose outlook and form of life differ significantly from our own. They are either viewed as being not yet fully rational, or they are denied the status of rational agents altogether. For the dialogical conception of respect for the other, in contrast, the other is respected precisely as that which is different, as that which presents a form of life and action that differs from our own, from the prevailing forms, and which is capable of challenging those forms.


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Openness to the other, then, promotes resistance, the transformation of prevailing forms of thought and action, the production of new forms. At the same time, it should be stressed that the attitude of openness to the other does not imply that we must completely abandon all of our existing forms of thought and action, that we should cease to organise our practices in certain ways, and that we should instead give ourselves over completely to transformation at the hands of an other. This would mean once again bringing dialogue to a halt, this time through self-negation and the totalisation of the other’s point of view. We would be entirely subordinate to the other, entirely at its mercy. But such selfnegation remains in the last analysis impossible. Without any organising principles or activity at all, as I argued in the previous chapter, we would be incapable of comprehending or coming to terms with the other in any way at all. We always have to proceed from some kind of organisational standpoint. What the attitude of openness opposes is not forms of order, not organisational activity, as such, but rather the absolutisation of particular forms of order, and the establishment of fixed states of closure and domination. In opposing totalisation and promoting resistance, the attitude of openness opens up the possibility of the modification of prevailing principles and forms of life, their transformation and renewal through ongoing dialogue. It is true that, because we in our activity always organise the world to some degree, there is the permanent possibility, the continual threat, of totalisation, domination and self-enclosure in our thought and action. But this simply means that being ethical, being open to the other, is not to be understood as an ideal state, something that we can attain once and for all. Rather, in the face of the perennial emergence of forms of closure in human history, it is an ongoing task. Like freedom, the ethics which is the instrument of freedom is a permanent task, and one that is also in keeping with the open-ended character of corporeal history. But if the ethical attitude of openness to the other does not mean the complete abandonment of existing organising principles, what it does imply is an at least implicit recognition that our prevailing moral outlooks are not absolute but finite. Acknowledgement of otherness, of perspectives, principles and forms of action different to our own, is also the recognition, however unthematised, that the normative principles and forms in terms of which we currently act are not universal and all-embracing but instead represent one specific, particular way of organising thought and action. In contrast to an inhuman, transcendentally-based ethics which presents its laws and principles as being absolute and timeless, and imposes them upon the world and concrete human life, it is a recognition of the finite, particular, worldly character of our forms of life. This translates into a refusal of the harsh, inhuman moral rigorousness of those who imagine themselves to be in possession of absolute moral principles. The metaphysical absolutisation of rules is a sure recipe for insensitivity and violence towards others. History is full of violence perpetrated in the name of some supposed absolute. Openness towards others demands that we reject such absolutisation, that without simply abandoning our standpoint we remain open to the possibility of learning something about how to live from those we judge. To sum up, the dialogical picture makes it possible to formulate an ethics which is not based on metaphysical subjectivism; and indeed one which stands opposed to the totalising thinking and practice which would deny or suppress the other. This ethics promotes the claims of the other in the face of forms of totalisation, closure and


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domination. An ‘ethics of the other’ in one form or another has been invoked by a number of the recent thinkers who have sought to challenge metaphysical thinking. Derrida, whose deconstructive strategy challenges the ‘hierarchical violence’ of Western reason, invokes as a motivating impulse of deconstruction the idea of an ethical responsibility to the other, a responsibility to affirm the otherness of the other.2 The postmodernist feminist Irigaray, who seeks to contest the egocentric reduction of the feminine to a function of a universalised male perspective, looks to an ethics based on a recognition of the radical otherness of the feminine.3 And in the face of Kantian ethics, other feminists of difference, such as Carol Gilligan, Sara Ruddick and Seyla Benhabib, have argued for an ‘ethics of care’ involving a posture of attentive care towards the other. As one commentator puts it, the exercise of such care involves an ‘injunction to listen’ to the other, ‘a willingness to hold open an intersubjective space in which difference can unfold in its particularity’ (White 1991:99).4 What I have argued is that an ethics of the other can be formulated on the basis of a dialogical picture, in the form of an ethical attitude of openness or respect towards the other which promotes resistance to closure, and facilitates the movement of dialogue. All of this seems to have taken us far away from Foucault, but in fact these considerations bear directly on his thought. In the previous chapter I interpreted him as presenting a dialogical account, a conception of the social field as a dialogue or interplay of forces. And I now want to argue that a dialogical ethics of the sort I have described is precisely what emerges in his later work. It is true that he himself does not formulate in any sustained way an ethical position regarding the other. None the less, it seems to me, the pervasive aim of his critical reflections on the present is to assist the other, to assist those who resist and oppose forms of confinement and imprisonment, the forms of theoretical and political closure that have emerged out of our history and in which we have become trapped. In other words he is concerned, in the face of forms of domination, of closed forms of life, to open up a space for that which is other, in order that the other might be heard and have transformative effects. He aims to foster the emergence of new forms of thought and action. Moreover, Foucault stresses at a number of points that his work has a purely instrumental function in relation to resistance. He says that what he is doing in his work is providing a ‘tool kit’, an ‘instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is’ (Foucault 1977b:208; 1980e: 145; 1981a:13). Its function is to act as a ‘multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action’ (Foucault 1984f:xiv). This is to be sharply distinguished from a prescriptive approach. Foucault pointedly refuses to prescribe courses of political action, to recommend forms of resistance. In other words, he refuses to play the traditional role of the intellectual, to be the ‘conscience of humanity’, to speak for others, and to subordinate their resistance to some revolutionary master-plan. Such a position runs the risk of contributing to the very forms of totalising closure and domination that he seeks to challenge, thereby limiting the possibilities for resistance. It does not help make it possible for others to speak, to resist and to transform existing social reality.5 And it is in this very connection that Foucault speaks explicitly of the ethical, in the form of what he calls the ‘ethics of the intellectual’. He characterises this ethical position, in part at least, in terms of a refusal to ‘tell others what to do’, a refusal to lay down the law for others, or to bury resistance under the weight of a ‘prescriptive, prophetic


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discourse’ (Foucault 1977c: 161; 1981a:13). Far from implying that there is an ethical vacuum in Foucault’s work, the consequence of his rejection of metaphysical subjectivism, what I am claiming is that this refusal to lay down the law for others is a principled refusal. It reflects a positive ethical position, precisely that which I have characterised in terms of a non-prescriptive, dialogical ethics, i.e. the ethical as an attitude of openness to or respect for the other, for that which resists. One place where it seems to me he explicitly embraces this attitude is at the end of ‘Is It Useless to Revolt?’ Here, Foucault rejects what he calls a ‘strategic’ ethic, which seeks to incorporate revolt into a general scheme, to subordinate it to some ‘great necessity of the whole’. His ethic, he says, is ‘anti-strategic’, the inverse—‘to be respectful when something singular arises…’. For his work it is always necessary to ‘watch out for something, a little beneath history, that breaks with it, that negates it…’ (Foucault 1981b:9).6 The intellectual work that Foucault engages in, through which a space is opened up for resistance, is a critical, historical reflection on ourselves and our present. I want to argue that the ethic of openness to and respect for the other can be understood as underlying Foucault’s very form of critical reflection, his critical interrogation of our contemporary forms of imprisonment. But before coming to Foucault’s conception of critical reflection, it will be useful to say something about his understanding of reflective activity in general, of what he calls the ‘practices of the self, in which he became increasingly interested in his later work. Practices of the self Thus far, we have considered the human being as a creature who seeks to order, to impose forms on and to establish control over the other. On this basis, through a consideration of Foucault, we have explored the social dialogue or interplay of forces, and the kinds of social regulation and forms of domination, that can emerge out of this dialogue. In his later work, Foucault turns his attention to a second dimension of this organising activity, the imposition of forms upon oneself, the activity of forming and shaping oneself as a certain kind of subject. This self-forming activity can be understood in the first instance as corporeal forces which have been turned back upon themselves in the course of various forms of training and acculturation. We are taught to regulate ourselves, to turn ourselves into particular kinds of subjects, and in Foucault’s account of the practices of the self there are clear echoes of Nietzsche’s account of the emergence of conscience in On the Genealogy of Morals. In the second essay Nietzsche puts forward the ‘hypothesis’ that, when the human animal found itself subject to the constraints of political organisation, the ‘old instincts’, unable to discharge themselves outwardly, turned inward. It is with the acquisition of this capacity for self-directed action that ‘man first developed what was later called his “soul”’ (Nietzsche 1987:84–8). In general, for Foucault, these practices of the self involve ‘techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, spiritual power’ (Foucault 1982:10).7 By means of these practices of self-transformation, one locates oneself in relation to a culture’s normative principles, and forms oneself into


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a moral subject. These practices of the self have taken many different forms in our history, but for Foucault they have a particular importance in the present context. As the first volume of The History of Sexuality makes clear, they have come to play a key role in the operation of modern forms of regulation, as practices which are required of individuals as part of their political subordination. In a moment we will see how they can also contribute to resisting and critically contesting these forms of regulation; and moreover, how they ultimately contribute to an understanding of Foucault’s own practice of ethico-critical reflection. But, to begin with, I will briefly sketch Foucault’s account of how these practices have come to be incorporated into modern forms of domination, as it appears in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality amongst other places.8 Foucault turns to the Greeks in order to examine the earliest forms of these practices of the self. In ancient Greek society, particular practices of the self, particular ways of relating to oneself, were required of the members of a small, powerful, male elite. These practices involved a struggle to give style to one’s existence, to master oneself, in accordance with the aesthetic criteria of ‘arts of existence’. This self-mastery was in turn bound up with forms of social domination, in so far as the members of the ruling elite mastered themselves in order better to master others. Foucault is far from simply endorsing or romanticising the Greek form of reflective activity. What interests him, however, is that in contrast to the present situation, these are practices of the self which are not required of individuals as part of the process of their political subordination (Foucault 1985:10–11). It is only with the advent of Christianity that reflective practices begin to be appropriated and harnessed as means of ensuring institutional control over individual behaviour. In the Christian context, the normative principles to be obeyed were held to be universal principles of divine law, grounded in the will of God and imposed in this world through the various pastoral institutions. In order to ensure each individual’s conformity to this authority, pastoral institutions appropriated and at the same time transformed the Greek practice of self-reflection. They imposed a permanent obligation on every individual to explore what was happening in themselves and to confess it to their spiritual director. Self-examination was no longer directed towards self-mastery but towards ascertaining the real nature of one’s thoughts and desires, and especially hunting out the forbidden yearnings of the flesh. By revealing what was going on within oneself to one’s spiritual director, one could then be effectively guided. The aim of these techniques of self-examination and spiritual guidance was to get individuals to renounce their worldly desires, in order to bring them to conform to God’s laws in this world, as well as to ensure their salvation in the next (Foucault 1981c:236–9; 1982:10–11, 15–16; 1984b:356–9). What distinguishes the modern period is that reflective activity comes to assume a central role in the establishment and operation of forms of social and political regulation. The religious basis of moral and social principles, increasingly called into question by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, was decisively destroyed by eighteenthcentury Enlightenment criticism. This was accompanied by a decline in the power of old ecclesiastical institutions. At the same time, the techniques of power that had developed within those institutions spread and multiplied, in a secularised form, throughout society. And self-reflection becomes crucial to the establishment of the new, post-religious forms


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of social ordering. Modernist thought turns to human beings themselves, to a foundational self or essential human nature, in order to ground the new forms of life and social practices. This turn to ourselves, inaugurated in modernist philosophical reflection from Descartes to Kant, becomes in turn the Enlightenment demand that the organising principles of moral and social life be grounded in reason and human nature, notions which are formulated through the modern sciences of the individual and imposed through various disciplinary practices and institutions. The modernist turn to the foundational self thus allows us to present certain organising norms of thought and action as being universal and necessary, as reflecting our essential nature. And, in so doing, it assists in the establishment of new forms of social regulation, totalisation and closure. The Enlightenment dream is that, through the rational, scientifically-based organisation of society, humanity will attain salvation, perfection and fulfilment in this life, in the worldly form of health, well-being and security. The cost is that human beings come to be subordinated to the organisational norms articulated by philosophy and the human sciences, and to the disciplinary practices that enforce these norms (Foucault 1978b:63; 1979b:19; 1983a:213–15). Self-reflection has a continuing, integral role to play in this process of subordination. In the modern context we are still required by various institutions and authorities to explore ourselves and to confess to others. However, self-reflection is no longer undertaken in order to achieve selfrenunciation, assisted by the spiritual director, so that we might conform to God’s law. It is now a matter of striving to discover our true selves, guided by various experts from the human sciences, in order to perfect ourselves by bringing our actions and social practices into conformity with those norms which reflect our essential nature. In so doing, we imagine that we are liberating ourselves. In fact, we are subordinating ourselves to the norms formulated by the human sciences, and to the disciplinary authorities that enforce them. We are actively participating in our own subordination (Foucault 1978b:58–70; 1984b:349–50, 353, 359, 362).9 This is not to say that human beings are incapable of resisting this modern form of power. On the contrary, human beings remain capable of resistance, of freedom in the sense of transgressing imposed limits, of creating new forms of life, of transforming their culture in various ways. What Foucault wants to say is that, in so far as the modern scientific administration of human beings depends crucially on bringing individuals to identify with scientifically prescribed norms and to order their lives accordingly, resistance to this specifically modern form of power is going to involve establishing a different kind of relation to ourselves. It will no longer be a matter of self-discovery, of trying to ‘become who we are’, through which we tie ourselves into prevailing systems of order. Instead, it is going to involve questioning our attachment to these norms, and ‘refusing who we are’, in order to create new forms of being and acting, new forms of life for ourselves. In short, it will be a matter of self-creation (Foucault 1983a:216; 1984b:351). The question that now arises is, what kind of specifically philosophical reflection or critical activity will assist or promote this process of cultural self-creation? This brings us to Foucault’s conception of ethicocritical reflection, his own understanding of philosophy.


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Critique Clearly, this is not going to involve the kind of modernist philosophical reflection which turns to the self, to a foundational subject, in order to formulate ultimate principles for thought and action. This foundationalist approach seeks to establish a metaphysics, to determine the limits to what we can legitimately think and do. As we saw in the previous section, this kind of philosophical reflection is complicit in establishing and maintaining forms of closure and domination, and in the overcoming of resistance and otherness. By presenting certain principles of thought and action as absolute and universal, as grounded in an essential human nature, it contributes to the overcoming of resistance and otherness, and helps preclude the possibility of other, different forms of life. A further point to note about this approach is that, by presenting certain norms of thought and action as absolute and universal, it also obscures the extent to which they are in fact finite and historical, having emerged historically out of the play of historical dialogue, in the course of a long series of struggles to regulate and bring order to human practices. The threat of contributing to political totalisation is present even when such reflection is avowedly critical of existing social forms and appears to contribute to liberation, i.e. when it seeks to remember the essential human nature that has been repressed and denied by the existing culture. Here, philosophy looks forward to the ideal form of human life in which repression will be overcome and human existence fully realised, and resistance becomes the means to the realisation of this ideal form of existence. However, those who are able to formulate the vision of a truly human form of life thus far denied, i.e. the ‘traditional intellectuals’, are in a politically and institutionally privileged position. The intellectual who speaks on behalf of others runs the risk of perpetuating the domination that prevents these others from speaking for themselves. Those on whose behalf the intellectual speaks become subordinated to the theoreticians, to the party. Popular forces have to await guidance from above, and forms of struggle that stand outside the parameters of ‘official’ opposition are marginalised and proscribed. In short, we once again have a philosophical approach which contributes to the establishment of forms of domination and the overcoming of resistance and otherness. And, once again, in defining certain forms of life as being properly human, in formulating what has been denied, hidden or repressed, there is the risk of taking up and absolutising features of the existing culture, and obscuring their finitude and historicity (Foucault 1974:173–4). In contrast to this, we can posit a kind of philosophical reflection that breaks decisively from the modernist project of seeking to discover a true self and absolute, timeless principles to organise thought and action in their totality. This alternative approach presupposes both the rejection of subjectivist metaphysics and, more positively, a conception of human beings as existing in the midst of historical dialogue, for which the emergence of forms of totalising order is the problem. Here, we do not reflect on ourselves in order to establish a standpoint for organising and dominating the world, and for subduing otherness. Rather, we reflect on ourselves in order to open a space for the other and thereby to assist resistance to the prevailing forms of social organisation. And here, I want to suggest, we are taking up the ethical attitude of openness to the other in a reflective form. As I mentioned before, the ethical attitude of openness to the other is


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also, at least implicitly, a recognition of the finite, particular, human character of our prevailing norms and forms of life. To take up the attitude of openness to the other reflectively is for this recognition of our finitude to become explicit; and in its extended form this becomes the apprehension that the forms and principles we live by have emerged historically, out of a whole series of encounters with the other, out of a long process of dialogue. Such a recognition opposes any attempt to present these norms and forms of life as being absolute and all-embracing. And to reveal them as being finite, as having emerged out of our history, is also to reveal them as being potentially changeable, and thus to open a space for the other, to assist resistance, transformation, the continuation of historical dialogue. This, I would argue, is how Foucault’s form of critical reflection can be understood, the form of reflection which he calls ‘genealogy’ (Foucault 1984a) and later, the ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ (Foucault 1984c). To begin with, it is a form of reflection that refuses to participate in the metaphysical, subjectivistic absolutisation of principles and forms of social order. Reflection is no longer a matter of reflecting on ourselves in order to discover an essential nature that will ground our forms of thought and action. Rather, it is a turn to history in order to comprehend ourselves, the principles we live by, our ways of acting, in their finitude, their historical emergence and specificity. It thereby strips our forms of life of any sense of necessity or inevitability. As Foucault puts it, his work is a historical analysis that aims to rediscover ‘the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of force, strategies and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary’ (Foucault 1981a:6; cf. 1984a:81, 1984c:45). Such reflection restores an awareness of the historical dialogue, the long interplay of forces, that has given rise to existing forms of life, and so undermines the seeming necessity and absoluteness of our current practices. This historicising reflection is undoubtedly unsettling and disturbing, in so far as it reveals our current forms of life as contingent, as being in a sense arbitrary. In Foucault’s words, it ‘serves to show how that-which-is has not always been’, but was formed in the course of a ‘precarious and fragile history’ (Foucault 1983b:206). It disturbs the sense that things, ways of doing things, are inevitable or self-evident. But in doing so it also opens up the possibility that things could be different. In other words, it opens up a space for the other, and this works to assist forms of resistance, forms of otherness, in which human beings seek to go beyond existing limits, to create new forms of life for themselves, to bring about dialogue with prevailing forms and engender cultural transformation. As Foucault puts it, we come to see that, since these things have been made, they can be unmade. Through ‘recourse to history’, it is possible to grasp how ‘that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is’, and thereby to ‘open up a space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e., of possible transformation’ (ibid.; cf. Foucault 1988a:11). The historicising reflection which promotes resistance as cultural self-creation can be seen as the philosophical correlate of this self-creative activity. By de-absolutising and problematising present forms of life, it fosters forms of cultural self-creation, in the sense of opening up a space for possible transformation. Foucault’s comments on the nature of critical reflection, understood as a historical interrogation of the present, are scattered throughout his writings, but it is only in his late works, especially in the essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, that he makes explicit the


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ethical spirit that informs his critical activity. He speaks there of the ‘philosophical ethos’, the kind of reflective attitude towards, or way of relating to, oneself and one’s present, which guides his historical and critical reflections, as well as informing the specific role of the intellectual as social critic. It is an attitude, an ethos, which does not seek to establish universal structures of thought and action, in order to fix the limits of what we may legitimately do, but instead seeks to determine, through historical investigations, to what extent what is given to us as being universal, necessary and obligatory is historically singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints. By problematising our prevailing forms of life, this critical reflection seeks to foster the possibility of going beyond present limits, thinking differently, creating different forms of life. As Foucault puts it, this is a critical reflection which ‘seeks to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’, i.e. the work of cultural self-creation (Foucault 1984c:39, 45–51). The ethos, oriented towards the problematisation of our prevailing forms of life in order to promote resistance and new forms of thinking and acting, is, for Foucault, central to the life of the philosopher, the thinker, the intellectual. He comes to define thinking itself as a process of reflective problematisation. It is what allows one to step back from a way of acting and reacting, to ‘present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, its goals’. Thought, he says, is ‘freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’ (Foucault 1984e: 388). And it is this idea of selfdetachment that is at the heart of Foucault’s conception of the ‘ethics of the intellectual’. The role of the intellectual is not to ‘tell others what to do’. Rather, one should ‘make oneself permanently capable of detaching oneself from oneself. That is, the specific role of the intellectual is to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to reinterrogate the obvious and assumed, to unsettle habits and ways of thinking, and to dissipate accepted familiarities. On the basis of this problematisation of existing forms, others directly involved in struggles, ‘citizens’, will be assisted in bringing about social and political transformation (Foucault 1981a:11–12; 1988e:265). Foucault sums up the meaning and goal of his intellectual work in terms of ‘the necessity of excavating our own culture in order to open up a space for innovation and creativity’ (Foucault 1988b:163). My general claim here is that Foucault’s intellectual ethos, the critical attitude towards ourselves and our present through which he ‘excavates’ our culture, can be under-stood as the reflective form of the ethical attitude of openness to the other. It is the form of reflection which opposes deadening, unthinking closure and domination, opens thought up to the other, assists those who resist, promotes the revitalising creation of new forms of thought and action, and ultimately fosters continuing dialogue. Critical versus traditional history We can gain further insight into Foucault’s notion of reflection by comparing it with alternative approaches to historical reflection. Foucault distinguishes his nonmetaphysical, historicising reflection, not only from forms of reflection which seek to establish or discover a foundational self and ultimate principles for thought and action,


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but also from forms of historical reflection which, whilst ostensibly turning to history, remain metaphysically based. This latter kind of historical account, which Foucault calls ‘traditional’ or ‘continuous’ history, takes its starting point as absolute, and seeks to subordinate the dialogical movement of history itself to this standpoint. Traditional history, he says, is ‘a form of history that introduces (and always assumes) a suprahistorical perspective’. Our ‘historical sense’ is mastered by a suprahistorical perspective, and is ‘bent to the demands of metaphysics’ (Foucault 1984a:87). From this suprahistorical perspective, history appears as a process of continuous development, the progressive revelation of one’s starting point. Hegel provides a definitive example of this. He turns to history but he also imposes a suprahistorical perspective on history, that of the Absolute Subject. And, having done so, Hegel discerns in the movement of history only the progressive, orderly, continuous unfolding of the Absolute Subject. I have suggested that such a picture involves a kind of self-enclosure. It reads history only in terms of its initial standpoint, and thus inevitably finds its starting point confirmed by history. Such historical thinking is profoundly uncritical, being unable to question its starting point. It presents a vision of history which serves only to reinforce its presuppositions, never to challenge them. It can be added that, by taking our standpoint as absolute, we obscure the extent to which our presuppositions are themselves conditioned by history, by the historical situation in which the account is formulated. In contrast, Foucault turns to history in order to free historical contents from the grip of the present standpoint. Rather than taking his starting point as absolute, and subordinating history to it, he aims, through recourse to history, to call his starting point into question. He seeks to restore an awareness of history as an open dialogue, as a multiplicity of encounters, offensives and counter-offensives. He is thereby able to comprehend the present in its historical emergence, as having emerged historically and contingently out of the dialogical interplay of forces. And, as such, it is something that can be transformed through ongoing dialogue. His is thus a historical reflection in which thought problematises its organising categories, and opens up a space for reinvention and transformation. At this point an objection might be raised to Foucault’s position as I have characterised it. The objection is that, in the very process of offering his accounts of the history behind the emergence of the present order, Foucault is failing to take his own historicity, his own involvement in historical dialogue, seriously. His histories are supposed to avoid the kind of thinking about history that simply reads history in terms of its starting point, as in the Hegelian picture of history as a continuous development towards the present. They are supposed to turn to history in order to call into question the present from which they proceed. But then, isn’t Foucault claiming to be able to speak of history in a way which is not conditioned by history or contaminated by his present, and to be able to speak of history as it ‘really is’? How can Foucault exempt himself from the historical process? How can he claim to speak of history in a way which is not conditioned by the historically emergent standpoint of his present? This objection is based on a misreading of Foucault’s position. Exploring this will further illuminate his account, and in particular the notion of dialogue. Accepting the primacy of dialogue, of history, means a recognition that we are always in the midst of history, a part of the history we are investigating. In other words, we always proceed from a historically emergent perspective. And, as such, we are not simply describing


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some objective past. The account we give of history is always an interpretation, a ‘fiction’ (Foucault 1980g: 193), not in the sense of a falsehood, a notion which implies some absolute truth, but in the sense of a particular ordering, construction or emphasis we place on the available historical materials. It is not the case, however, that history is always no more than a function of our present standpoint. This kind of view would leave us once again trapped in a circle, interpreting history in terms of the forms and identities of our starting point, our present, and so unable to escape from that standpoint. It is a deeply problematic picture because it makes it impossible to comprehend how this present, these identities and forms, came to be in the first place. This is not Foucault’s approach. He explicitly distinguishes between ‘a history of the past in terms of the present’ and what he is doing, namely a genealogical ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1979a:31). His historical accounts start from his present, but aim to challenge it by confronting its lack of historical self-awareness and challenging its selfserving interpretation of history. This means turning to the otherness of history, to that which the dominant interpretation seeks to suppress or marginalise. To interpret the past in terms of the present, as a smooth, unitary process of development towards the present, is also to marginalise or suppress all that is other, diverse and conflictful in history. Foucault in contrast seeks to open up a space for precisely those historical contents which have been disqualified and suppressed by traditional history. As he puts it, genealogy ‘corresponds to the acuity of a glance…that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements’ (Foucault 1984a:87). Accordingly, Foucault’s historical readings bring to the fore a whole range of ‘local’, ‘discontinuous’ knowledges, knowledges concerning humble, ignominious conflicts and struggles which have hitherto been disqualified, buried and disguised (Foucault 1980c:80–3). In other words, they bring out a suppressed history of dialogical interplay, the long series of contingent encounters, conflicts and dissensions out of which the present has emerged. And this reading of history has the effect not of affirming his present but of undermining it. If a dominant framework marginalises certain historical contents, in order to read the whole process of history as culminating in its emergence, then bringing these marginalised contents to the fore challenges that framework, and allows it to be comprehended in its historical development. In short, this reading of history challenges the present’s claims to absoluteness and necessity, and enables it to be comprehended as a contingent development. And, as a contingent development, our present could be different. Consequently it is a present that could be transformed through revolt, through ongoing conflict and dialogue. Thus Foucault’s historical accounts do not in fact presuppose a position above history. They do not claim to provide a complete, unconditioned, neutral account of the past. They are readings which are conditioned by their historical location, their present. At the same time they seek to contest the unhistorical absolutisation of the present, and the imposition of this present on the past. They seek to remain open to the otherness of the past. And to the extent that these readings, by opening to the past, historicise the present, they open the present up to the possibility of change and transformation by contemporary forms of resistance. In other words, they promote the ongoing dialogue which is constitutive of history. As such, Foucault’s historico-critical accounts are themselves entirely historical, both part of and encouraging the struggles and conflicts that go to make up dialogical, corporeal history.


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Enlightenment With Foucault, then, we have a body of work informed by an identifiable ethical position, one which underlies his critical reflections on the present. This reading stands in opposition to those humanist critics like Habermas who see Foucault’s rejection of the metaphysical subject as making ethically informed critique impossible (Habermas 1982; cf. Taylor 1986). As with the claim that Foucault’s rejection of humanism makes resistance impossible, what these critics fail to take into account is the primacy of dialogue in Foucault’s account. The notion of dialogue underpins not only his notion of resistance, but also his notions of ethics and critical reflection. Humanist critics tend to see Foucault’s critiques of the present as merely negative and destructive, and his failure to offer prescriptions for a better kind of life as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of his position. But this refusal to prescribe or lay down the law for others is perfectly consistent with a dialogical ethics which is oriented towards opening up a space for the other, for resistance, the creation of new forms of life and the continuation of historical dialogue. And Foucault’s work is not as destructive of existing standards and forms of life as first appears. He is not seeking to dismiss all of modernity’s norms, aspirations and forms of life. What he is questioning is their absolutisation in universal-transcendental terms, a move which protects them from any critical questioning or rethinking, and precludes ongoing dialogue.10 Many of these humanist criticisms of Foucault’s ethico-critical position are summed up in the claim, made especially by Habermas, that, in rejecting metaphysical subjectivism, Foucault is anti-Enlightenment and anti-modernity.11 For Habermas, some conception of foundational subjectivity is essential if we are to hold on to what he calls the ‘Enlightenment project’ or the ‘project of modernity’, i.e. the rational organisation of everyday life (Habermas 1981:8–9). I will have more to say about Habermas’s own position in the next chapter. But staying with Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault for now, the claim that Foucault is anti-Enlightenment can also be questioned. In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Foucault speaks of his ethos, his critical work, as being part of the Enlightenment tradition. However, this is not, as Habermas thinks, a late return to the ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’ that Foucault thought he could explode (Habermas 1986:108). It involves a rethinking of what is involved in the very notions of the Enlightenment and modernity, one which rejects the idea that the metaphysical subject is essential for the process of enlightenment. When Foucault speaks of his work as being in the Enlightenment tradition, this is clearly not the Enlightenment understood in humanistic terms as the project of totalising control, the vision of a rational transformation and ordering of social practices. It is not the Enlightenment which looks to timeless, metaphysical conceptions of reason or human nature to provide the foundation for the organisational norms of life, or understands maturity in terms of humanity’s obedience to universal rational norms. Rather, it is Enlightenment understood as a critique of frozen, dogmatic schemes of thought and action, a questioning which takes the form of a historical reflection on present forms of life, and which opens up the possibility of escaping from them, of creating new forms of life. The notion of maturity appropriate here is the non-foundationalist sense of maturity I referred to earlier, maturity as the courage to be open to new possibilities, which is equally the courage to give up reliance on dogmatic metaphysical absolutes and to


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subject one’s presuppositions to unflinching critical scrutiny (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986:110). So understood, Enlightenment embodies the critical ethos that Foucault sees at the heart of his own work—a reflective attitude towards ourselves and our present, a critique of what we are which is at one and the same time a historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. We thus have a conception of Enlightenment which, as Foucault himself points out, is in tension with the Enlightenment understood as a totalising project, founded on the metaphysical subject (Foucault 1984c:42–5). Indeed, far from presupposing a metaphysical subject, it represents a sharp break from metaphysical subjectivism. It is only if we escape from the spell of metaphysics that we will be able to reflect historically on our present forms of life and social order. If this notion of Enlightenment presupposes a notion of human being, it is a concrete, worldly, historical conception of human being as both subject to historical constraints and capable of going beyond them. This is the being who is threatened by the Enlightenment vision of a total organisation of social practices, in which our historical constraints come to be justified in terms of reason and human nature; and this is the being who is served by a historical reflection upon present forms of life, on the present limits to what we can think and do, a reflection which challenges claims that these limits are absolute, universal or necessary. Foucault finds this second understanding of enlightenment explicitly articulated by Kant, the very figure who plays such a key role in establishing humanist metaphysics. He notes that Kant’s little essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ does not define Enlightenment in foundational terms. Rather, Kant defines Enlightenment negatively, as an ‘exit’, a ‘way out’. It is an escape from reliance on dogmatic metaphysical authority in our thought and action, through the use of critical reflection. And Foucault also sees Kant’s essay as introducing a new mode of philosophical reflection, a form of critical reflection on ourselves which is opposed to the metaphysical absolutisation of forms of life. It is not concerned with discerning the universal and ahistorical, but is instead a worldly reflection that seeks to determine what is going on now, at this precise historical moment in which we are living. For Foucault, the essay links philosophy for the first time with the task of reflecting on its own historical moment, and begins a philosophical interrogation of rationality as to its history and place, its past and present actuality. And in so doing, Foucault argues, Kant introduces the ethos, the historico-critical attitude towards ourselves and our present, the ‘permanent critique of our historical era’, that Foucault sees as informing this second tradition of enlightened critical reflection (Foucault 1984c:39, 42, 50).12 In introducing this second understanding of critical reflection, Kant takes his distance from modernity’s metaphysical subjectivism, as inaugurated by Descartes. Whereas Descartes seeks to understand who we are as unique but universal and unhistorical subjects, Kant asks what we are, what is going on with us at this particular moment of history. It is this form of historical reflection that is taken up by Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, an analysis of ourselves and our present, of how we came to be who we are and to do what we do. Opposed to the notion of timeless, ahistorical foundations, it asks to what extent what is presented to us as essential, fixed and obligatory is in fact historically emergent and specific. But if this is so, if Kant does indeed introduce a way of thinking, a form of historico-philosophical reflection, which goes beyond and indeed stands in opposition to metaphysical thinking, it remains the case that he is also a key


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figure in the establishment of humanist metaphysics. Here, as we saw in the first chapter, he follows very much in the footsteps of Descartes. Like Descartes, he wants to preserve a foundational standpoint, in the modernist form of a metaphysical subject. As such, despite his historical turn, Kant can also be said to turn his back on history, on his own historical self-awareness, reaffirming timeless, absolute principles, grounding thought and action in the transcendental subject. It might seem artificial to posit such a reversal in Kant’s thinking, but this in fact seems to be a persistent pattern in modern thought. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hegel turns to history in order to question and subvert Kant’s metaphysical subjectivism, to comprehend the self and its categories of understanding in their historical development, but he also turns his back on history and subordinates history to a new version of the metaphysical subject. And, as Foucault points out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a similar fate has befallen the work of Marx and Nietzsche. Marx goes beyond Hegel precisely by once again making the historical dimension central to his thought, turning to reflection on the emergence of the particular social and economic arrangements in which we find ourselves. But this radical potential in Marx is captured and subordinated to a renewed subjectivism, in the form of Marxist humanism, a humanism which is perhaps already present to some extent in Marx’s own work, and is certainly something which develops afterwards in Marxism. Similarly, Nietzsche calls the metaphysical tradition radically into question, turning to a historical genealogy of our present forms of life, but he subsequently comes to be interpreted as a transcendental philosopher, a metaphysician of the will to power (Foucault 1972:12–14; cf. Barker 1994:56–7). Thus, historical self-awareness constantly reappears in modern thought, and functions to call dogmatic metaphysical subjectivism into question. But at the same time there is a constant effort to overcome it, to absorb it into totalising schemes, into modified forms of humanism and foundationalism. And it is not surprising that humanism is hostile to historical self-awareness. By its very nature the humanist vision, the raising of man to the status of a god, with Enlightenment as the transformation and reorganisation of social practices in accordance with an essential human nature, has to deny human historicity, our susceptibility to historical forces, our finitude. In doing so, we have a transcendental basis for ordering history and a defence against the other, against that which is beyond our control and which can introduce uncertainty and instability, bringing about transformation. Consequently a critical reflection which turns back to history calls into question the very idea of a foundational subject and reminds us of our finitude, threatens once again to undermine our security, to expose us once again to risk and uncertainty. But, as I have suggested at a number of points, this humanist overcoming of anxiety, the raising of the human being to the status of an absolute, standing above the vicissitudes of history, comes at a considerable cost to human beings themselves. We are unable to do justice to our own concrete humanity, to the finitude and historicity of our existence. And, moreover, the subjectivistic absolutisation of our forms of life promotes the denial of the other, of the new and unexpected, of the innovation and creativity through which human beings transgress established forms of life and bring about their transformation. Humanism thus contributes to our entrapment in states of closure and sterile repetition. Philosophy here is implicated in the establishment of domination. At the same time, at the margins, the limits of modern thought, historical self-awareness—what is in the broadest sense the remembrance of our finitude—continually resurfaces to problematise


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metaphysical claims. It is present not only in Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, but also in Weber, the Frankfurt School and Habermas. This is the subversive Enlightenment tradition of historico-critical reflection which is never entirely conquered or conquerable by humanism. A sense of the historical, a historical self-awareness, is an ineliminable, persistent and characteristic feature of modern thought (Bouchard 1983:173; Lloyd 1984:9–10). I have argued that this historical self-awareness, this recollection of our finitude, need not be seen simply as a negative, destructive kind of reflection. It certainly undermines the absoluteness of prevailing forms of life and calls attention to their finitude and historicity. But this need not be seen as a rejection of all principles, all order, all form. It is rather a challenge to the kinds of theoretical closure, as well as forms of social domination, associated with the subjectivist metaphysics which absolutises these forms. Here, Foucault rejects the kind of ‘blackmail’ which says that you cannot criticise the Enlightenment or its rationality without abandoning them and falling into irrationalism. Enquiries into the history of rationality, he argues, serve not to destroy reason but to show that the form of rationality which is presented as dominant, as the one and only form of reason, is only one possible form amongst others. And this is an insight which belongs as much to Weber and the Frankfurt School as it does to Foucault (Foucault 1983b:200–1; 1984c: 42–3; 1984d:248–50). Moreover, the effect of this historical work is the same in all cases. To call attention to the historical particularity of what we take to be absolute and universal opens up a space for different ways of thinking, different kinds of activity. And this represents the reassertion of Enlightenment in its anti-metaphysical sense, Enlightenment as the critical questioning of dogmatic limits and the opening up of the possibility of new forms of thought and action. Foucault’s thinking, with its genealogical turn to history, its historical critique of the present, its concern to open up new possibilities, can readily be placed in this subversive, anti-humanist tradition of enlightened reflection. The death of Man which he celebrates is a decisive break from subjectivist metaphysics, and the recognition of our finitude, the finitude and historicity of our prevailing categories and forms of life. It is the recognition that they exist in time and hence that they can pass away, that they are open to transformation and renewal. Foucault is thus able to locate himself in the tradition of Enlightenment. Certainly he is ‘postmodern’ in so far as he rejects the foundational humanist subject and totalising conceptions of Enlightenment. But he is not postmodern if by this is meant the radical denial of the Enlightenment and modernity. To put this another way, Foucault’s postmodernism is not the overcoming of modernity. It remains within the modernist, Enlightenment tradition to the extent that this tradition is understood also to incorporate a reflective historical self-awareness. Some have seen this historical self-awareness as part of a specifically ‘post-modern predicament’ (Lawson 1985). The argument here is that it is in fact a persistent, and indeed fruitful, feature of our modernity, continually challenging the modernist forms of theoretical and political closure that involve humanist thinking. And by taking up this historical self-awareness in his own thought, Foucault once again renews philosophy’s relevance as an instrument of liberation for human beings in their.historical situation.

4 DIALOGUE AND THE POSTMODERN I began in Chapter 1 by calling into question the view put forward by Habermas amongst others that the alternative to metaphysics is a destructive, relativistic vision of fragmentation. In the second and third chapters, I spelt out what I take to be the proper alternative to metaphysics, the dialogical alternative, drawing in the course of the discussion on a certain reading of Foucault. In this final chapter, I want to return to a discussion of Habermas and of the idea of postmodernism as fragmentation. This will allow me to show in more detail how the dialogical picture represents an advance over both the fragmentation picture and Habermas’s own alternative. I will turn first to Habermas, and in particular to Habermas’s attempts to go beyond the traditional philosophy of the subject by way of a conception of intersubjective dialogue. I will then turn to the notion of postmodernity understood in terms of fragmentation. Both Habermas’s positive position and a postmodernism of fragmentation, I want to suggest, represent false escapes from metaphysics. Beyond Habermasian dialogue In Habermas’s account of the specifically social dimension of life, as in the dialogical picture I have presented, we find an account which seeks to go beyond metaphysics, beyond the philosophy of the subject, an account which turns instead to dialogue, and which opposes dialogue to domination. However, I want to suggest, Habermas’s account of social dialogue does not represent a decisive break from subjectivist thinking. For all his concern with communication and dialogue, Habermas still remains caught up in a totalising metaphysics. He does not pass decisively beyond foundationalist subjectivism into genuine dialogue, but instead uses dialogue to reformulate key themes of foundationalist subjectivism.1 Certainly, as I noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, Habermas does not seek uncritically to reassert subjectivist metaphysics. As a thinker in the modernist tradition, he recognises that philosophy has to take history into account, that it must be historically self-conscious. He acknowledges the decline of the traditional, ahistorical notion of subjectivity, and the Hegelian and Marxian insight that the subject needs to be seen as inherently social and historical. And Habermas makes this his own starting point. He begins by questioning the ahistorical, self-enclosed subject of Descartes and Kant. He turns from the paradigm of individual consciousness in order to focus on intersubjectively shared linguistic practices, to examine what he calls ‘communicative intersubjectivity’. Moreover, he seeks to avoid an abstractly asocial conception of language itself, of the sort that is often to be found in analytic philosophy. He insists that language must be understood in a larger context of institutions, political relations and economic structures.


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In short, he makes a concerted attack on the traditional philosophy of the subject, on subjectivist foundationalism (Roderick 1986:5–13). Yet for all that, despite his critique of metaphysical subjectivism, his keen awareness of the social and historical, it seems to me that Habermas ultimately remains within the subjectivist metaphysical tradition. He argues that, although we have to take society and history into account, we also need to preserve something of the universal claims of transcendental philosophy. We need to hold on to some conception of the foundational subject if we are going to be able to continue to judge, to criticise and change our forms of life, and, more broadly, if we are to hold on to the ‘project of modernity’, the ‘Enlightenment project’ of the organisation of forms of life in accordance with human reason.2 In order to bring off this preservation of transcendentalism in the midst of history, Habermas resorts, broadly speaking, to the same kind of strategy employed by Hegel. He similarly turns from the self-enclosed Kantian subject to history, but only in so far as history is subordinated to the demands of subjectivist metaphysics. In this manner, Habermas turns against the historicist side of his own thinking, in order to hold on to the subjectivist vision of rational autonomy, as it has developed via Hegel and humanist Marxism, i.e. the vision of human beings as ideally exercising collective, conscious, rational control over social processes, as making their history with ‘will and consciousness’. The notion of rational autonomy or Mündigkeit is the fundamental value that orients Habermas’s work. From his earliest writings, he has sought to reformulate the vision of autonomous, rational social life in linguistic terms, to articulate a linguistically conceived subjectivism. The organising subject, the Absolute Subject or class subject, is now replaced by the speaking community, which is ideally to organise its practices in terms of rationally established norms, norms which are dependent on a consensus that has been arrived at through a genuine, unconstrained dialogue. And in the end this is a position that not only reformulates Hegelian themes in discursive terms, but also reaffirms the very Kantianism that Habermas started out by criticising. The metaphysical and, in particular, the Kantian aspect of Habermas’s picture emerges especially when he is discussing what he calls the ‘normative-theoretical’ foundations of his position. He argues in the appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests that the ideal of a rationally organised society and collective self-determination exists a priori. It is present as a deep structure in our language. Language is taken to be essentially oriented towards ‘universal and unconstrained consensus’, towards open dialogue and the reaching of collective agreement as to the norms that will govern social life. As Habermas puts it, all language inherently ‘anticipates’ the possibility of a rationally organised society, in which human beings will exercise fully their capacity for selfdetermination (Habermas 1972:314). Habermas’s later work in what he calls ‘universal pragmatics’ is designed to back up this claim. He argues in a very Kantian way that such unconstrained discussion and consensus, and thus a fully rational, domination-free social existence, are anticipated in every speech act, as the ‘quasi-transcendental’ condition of the very possibility of communication (Habermas 1979). On this basis, Habermas grounds his normative vision of an ideal society, one that is governed by universal norms arrived at through an open dialogue amongst its members. This in turn underpins his notion of social critique, the critique of existing social arrangements. But what kind of dialogue is being envisaged here? It is not a dialogue in

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the sense that I have been presenting it, a dialogue which is characterised by an ongoing, open-ended encounter with the other, in which difference constantly manifests itself and through which forms of life continually emerge and are transformed. On the contrary, it is a dialogue which is characterised by the overcoming of difference and the other, the overcoming of all partial standpoints and forms of life, a totalising kind of dialogue. The aim of Habermas’s dialogue is to establish, once and for all, a unified form of life based on social norms which are universal, norms which can be agreed to by, and are capable of governing the behaviour of, all its participants. Anything which is not moving in this totalising, universalising direction is not real dialogue at all. As McCarthy points out, this universalising process is strongly reminiscent of Kant’s moral philosophy (McCarthy 1978:325–9). In his vision of an ideal dialogue, Habermas is providing us with a version of Kant’s foundationalist ethics. It is true that Habermas differs from Kant in that he shifts attention from the individual consciousness to intersubjective communication. For Habermas the universalisability of a norm is not decided monologically, within a solitary reflecting consciousness, but in a shared public dialogue in which a community of speaking subjects engages in general reflection. And Habermas does not exclude desires and interests from the realm of rational reflection, from discussion, as Kant does. The aim of the shared dialogue is to come to a consensus as to which desires and interests are generalisable, and are thus able to be the basis of general norms of behaviour. None the less, Habermas preserves the Kantian focus on universalisability, and the corresponding hostility towards that which locates and particularises individuals, and differentiates them from one another. Although desires and interests can now enter into the realm of rational ethical reflection, they are only relevant in so far as they are not individual but common to all. There is no room in this ideal dialogue for specific desires and interests, or for ongoing conflicts between particular perspectives. Let us retrace some of the steps in the development of Habermas’s position. This normative vision of an ideal dialogue is already evident in early works such as Knowledge and Human Interests.3 Here, Habermas begins by criticising metaphysical subjectivism in favour of a notion of the subject as inherently social and historical, and in particular as existing in the midst of communicative practices. However, he also reformulates the Hegelian and humanist-Marxist notion of rational autonomy in communicative terms. For Habermas, the only acceptable form of social existence is that of collective rational self-determination through open, unconstrained dialogue, or, as he puts it in Knowledge and Human Interests, ‘an organisation of social relations according to the principle that the validity of every norm of political consequence be made dependent on a consensus arrived at in communication free from domination’ (Habermas 1972:284). The Hegelian character of Habermas’s account of dialogue is evident in his treatment of difference or otherness. To the extent that difference or otherness is present within the realm of Habermasian dialogue, it is understood in essentially negative terms. That is, in so far as we do not have complete control over our social practices, and there are forces outside of us, beyond our control which can sway or influence us, this is seen simply as representing the sundering of an ideal unity, as a pathological distortion of communication, the result of social domination. Domination itself is understood as wholly negative in its operation, as that which simply distorts. It is something that is


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essentially alien to the social order and the ideal dialogue. The role of critical reflection and political struggle here is to overcome the forms of social domination that alienate us from our ideal selves as the conscious makers of our way of life, i.e. to overcome all that prevents us from exercising collective rational control over our existence. Thus, although Habermas moves beyond the isolated Cartesian and Kantian subject, locating the subject in a context of dialogue with others, he also reformulates a totalising standpoint in dialogical terms. Otherness, the sway of external forces is interpreted purely as the distortion of an ideal unity, something to be overcome, and hence is sacrificed to a totalising vision. Dialogue, instead of taking us decisively beyond the self-enclosed subject, has become subordinated to subjectivist metaphysics. And this is a continuing pattern in Habermas’s thought. He seeks to escape from a metaphysical subjectivism, to locate the subject in the midst of a wider context of social and historical relations. But he also wants to preserve some sort of foundationalism, and he does so by subordinating this wider context to a metaphysical standpoint. The result is that Habermas, like Hegel, is able to preserve a foundational standpoint, but only at the cost of effectively denying his own concrete social and historical insights. And indeed, in so far as he reduces phenomena to a function of his ultimate standpoint, he falls into a self-affirming closure. This pattern of reversal, and the tendency towards self-affirming closure, is particularly evident in Habermas’s treatment of psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests. Habermas enlists Freud to augment his account of the speaking subject, the distorting effect of domination, and his notion of critical reflection. At the same time, however, Habermas’s Freud is no threat to the ideal of attaining total rational control over our existence. That is, there is absolutely nothing of the ‘wounding blow’ that Freud claims to deliver to human narcissism by revealing that the ego is not even master in its own house. This is because psychoanalysis has itself been reinterpreted in terms of Habermas’s linguistically conceived subjectivism. On his account, which leaves us with a very Hegelianised Freud, there is no dark realm of more or less permanently irrational structures, the ‘seething cauldron of the id’. Unconscious desires are seen in entirely derivative and negative terms, as purely pathological, no more than alienated portions of the ego. They represent a distortion or interruption of the speaking subject’s communication with itself, of the ideal state of ‘pure communicative action’, brought about by domination. Such distortion can in principle be overcome through critical reflection, and the subject’s access to and control over itself restored.4 In this manner Habermas turns to and draws on psychoanalysis, but only to the extent that he also subordinates psychoanalysis to his own position. And having been domesticated in this manner, the Freudian picture is also able to be incorporated without any difficulty into Habermas’s wider account of the social realm. On Habermas’s reading, institutionalised forms of domination bring about the repression of unacceptable desires, their exclusion from public communication, which thereby gives rise to unconscious mechanisms, obscure forces which can hold sway over consciousness. These forces can be restored to consciousness and open communication, and their power over us dissolved, through critical reflection (Habermas 1972:274–90). Once again, there is no fundamental threat to the priority of the rational subject. To the extent that we are subject to forces outside of our control in social life, this represents no more than a pathological situation, a deviation from the ideal of open dialogue and collective rational selfdetermination, a state of alienation which can in principle be entirely overcome.


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It is not only psychoanalysis that is subordinated to Habermas’s linguisticallyreformulated subjectivism. The same fate befalls non-discursive aspects of the social. As I mentioned earlier, Habermas wants to present a concrete conception of language, to see it as interwoven with social institutions and relations of political power. However, this linking of language with concrete power relations does not in any way bring his subjectivistic ideal of a pure dialogue into question. This is because he also tends to view social interaction as primarily discursive in character, as primarily a matter of communicative action. Relations of social power themselves come to be sublimated into structures of distorted communication. Thus, as Anthony Giddens puts it, the critique of domination for Habermas ‘comes to turn upon freedom of communication or dialogue, rather than upon material transformations of power relations’ (Giddens 1982:159). The critical practice that opposes domination is itself effectively reduced to the reflective dissolution of communicative distortion. Along similar lines, Karl-Otto Apel criticises Habermas as having succumbed to an ‘idealist illusion’, substituting a theoretical reflection for practical engagement in the sense of a ‘risky, politically effective “taking sides”’.5 Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests has thus been criticised for failing fully to take into account our involvement as speaking subjects in concrete social and historical practices, a failure which I have argued is ultimately the result of his concern to reformulate foundational subjectivism in linguistic terms. However, his response to these criticisms has not been to let go of the search for metaphysical grounds and to return to his original historicist intuitions. Rather, he has turned even more markedly away from the concrete and historical, and in an increasingly theoretical and transcendentalist direction. The later Habermas seeks, in a very Kantian manner, to establish the normative-theoretical foundations for his critique of domination, through the ‘rational reconstruction’ of the conditions of possible communication which he calls universal pragmatics. As David Hoy observes, the later Habermas ‘risks total surrender to Kantianism, and there is thus a question whether his recent transcendental turn removes him from the list of those who take history seriously’ (Hoy 1979:86).6 Habermas’s Kantian-style reflection on the necessary conditions of possible communication is designed to show that the aspiration towards open dialogue and universal, unconstrained consensus is inherent in language, and indeed is the condition of possible communication. His analysis concentrates on what he takes to be the fundamental form of language, communication oriented towards reaching understanding. He argues that, in so far as speakers speak, they must raise universal ‘validity claims’, and suppose they can be justified or redeemed if challenged. These include the claim that what is being said is true, and that it is right in the light of existing norms. Understanding rests on there being mutual agreement or consensus amongst speakers regarding these claims, and presupposes that if these claims become problematic it is possible to come to a consensus about them. And a genuine consensus regarding these claims is only possible in a situation where agreement is reached simply on the basis of ‘the better argument’, i.e. in a discourse free of constraint and domination, which Habermas calls the ‘ideal speech situation’. Habermas’s analysis of the conditions of possible communication thus establishes as inherent in speech the ideal of a pure, open dialogue in which rational consensus is possible. This ideal form of life is presupposed, however counterfactually, in


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every act of communication, and serves as the foundation for the critique of existing forms of social life.7 Although Habermas’s later work is deeply Kantian, it is true that he still wants to avoid an outright return to Kant’s unworldly transcendental standpoint, and to preserve a reference to the empirical and the historical. In his universal-pragmatic analysis of language, what he wants to establish is that there are ‘quasi-transcendental’ presuppositions of communication, i.e. universal features of communication that can be discerned through the empirical analysis of concrete speech acts (Habermas 1979:21–5). But, once again, he turns to the concrete only in so far as the concrete is also subordinated to the metaphysical, and thus falls into a self-enclosure. Habermas begins his analysis of language by considering the pragmatic dimension of language, where language is an act of communication, intersecting with social practices. In other words, he begins with a consideration of language as a concrete activity. However, he does not follow through the project of analysing concrete language games in actual speech situations. Rather, he is only concerned with communicative action in so far as it reveals an essential, universal orientation towards pure, unconstrained discourse, a transcendental ideal that underlies all actual performances (Poster 1984:31–2). Habermas thus considers language only in so far as it is reducible to a single, unitary model or essence, discourse as oriented towards a general and unforced rational consensus. This is not to say that he considers every actual instance of speech to be oriented to reaching understanding, but, as McCarthy notes, Habermas regards other sorts of speech as derivative, as parasitic on speech oriented to genuine understanding (McCarthy 1978:287). And this subordination of language to a single model blinds Habermas to the Wittgensteinian insight that there is no essential or fundamental thing that language does. In concrete practice, discourse performs many different functions. As Rüdiger Buhner points out, ‘one must not forget the important insight of Wittgenstein that the plurality of possible language games can only be grouped together in loose family likenesses’ (Bubner 1982:52). Despite Habermas’s numerous references to ‘language games’ and to the work of the later Wittgenstein, his own approach to language is ultimately more reminiscent of the Tractatus, with its Kantian vision of one logically correct ideal language, the model to which all language is to be subordinated. As in Habermas’s picture, the Tractatus attempts to grasp the universal structure or essence of language, in order to fix the limits within which meaningful propositions are possible. Once again, then, Habermas’s efforts to preserve a foundational standpoint result only in a denial of his own historical insights, and a tendency to fall into self-enclosure. And because he denies history in this way, he is unable to comprehend his standpoint in its historical emergence. The ideal of collective will-formation through constraint-free discussion, which guides his interpretation of discourse and social practices, cannot itself be comprehended or explained socially and historically. It has to be posited a priori, as a timeless ideal implicit in all speech acts. Habermas thus opens himself up to the charge that he is absolutising an ideal of social existence that is in fact a historically recent, and indeed specifically Western, invention (Geuss 1981:383). The ideal that Habermas wants to absolutise is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal of rational utopia, of rising above the sway of history and bringing all social practices under the direction of human reason. Where this project was formerly grounded in a rational subject, Habermas seeks


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to ground it anew in language, in a linguistically reformulated notion of rational subjectivity (Whitebook 1979:65). It can be added here that, in presenting an ahistorical ideal of rational selfdetermination in linguistic form, and in denying history, Habermas also presents us with an inhuman ideal, one which involves the denial of our own finitude, our concrete historical existence. As I mentioned before, the ideal, constraint-free dialogue, the properly human life that Habermas envisages, is Kantian in character. It is oriented towards the establishment of universal principles. And whilst it incorporates reference to desires and interests, it does so only in so far as these desires and needs are generalisable. It thus remains hostile to merely individual desires and interests which differentiate us from one another, which give us a specific character. Moreover, although Habermas refers to desires and needs, we are in no sense to be moved by them. We are to order our existence with complete lucidity and rationality, and even our desires are something to be discussed and argued over. Hence there is an overall sense of disembodiment in Habermas’s account. As Agnes Heller puts it, Habermas’s human being has ‘no body, no feelings…one gets the impression that the good life consists solely of rational communication and that needs can be argued for without being felt’ (Heller 1982:22). This is not a corporeal dialogue. Finally, not only is Habermas’s picture of the properly human life ahistorical and abstract, but it also, arguably, contains political dangers. This is not immediately apparent, because Habermas’s whole system assumes the status of guardian of the ideal of a properly human, enlightened life, the ideal of unconstrained dialogue and collective autonomy. As we have seen, this normative ideal is itself established through quasiKantian reflection on the conditions of possible communication, and in turn provides the basis for the critical reflection that is to overcome the various forms of domination which prevent us from attaining this ideal. Yet this account places those who formulate what counts as an ideal dialogue, a properly human life, in a powerful position. They are able to call to account all that falls short of true dialogue, all that deviates from the properly human life. Bubner asks whether this could not perhaps involve the exercise of a form of power that is all the more difficult to detect because it is so dissimilar to manifest power relations (Bubner 1982:51). Henning Ottman speaks of the possibility here of a new ideology for intellectuals who, in the name of freedom from power and authority, establish the new power of discussion and the written word (Ottman 1982:96). And Habermas’s Kantian conception of the ideal dialogue, with its emphasis on the establishment of universal norms, and its hostility to that which is partial and other, clearly contains the possibility of assisting in the establishment of a new regime of totalising domination, a domination which suppresses otherness and resistance. Overall, then, Habermas presents us with a conception of dialogue that is subordinated to an essentialist model of discourse, remote from concrete communicative practices, and participated in by abstract, disembodied speakers, as well as being politically problematic. Habermas’s turn from the abstract, ahistorical subject to dialogue, his move to the social and historical, has been frustrated by his own efforts to use dialogue to formulate a renewed form of metaphysical foundationalism. I will not pursue Habermas’s account of communication in its more recent developments, as represented by The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984). He has acknowledged and sought to mitigate the relatively strong foundationalism of his theory of universal pragmatics, stressing the


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non-transcendental, empirical character of his account. It is to be understood as an attempt to characterise universal features of communication in their structure and development in a way that remains open to empirical test and refutation.8 Yet, as Roderick points out, while Habermas has moved away from a transcendental approach to the problem of normative foundations, he has not totally ‘detranscendentalised’ his project. He is still concerned to find transcendental—in the sense of ‘universal and unavoidable’—foundations for thought, action and critique within concrete historical forms of communication. And it remains unclear how he can do so without continuing to come into conflict with the historical, anti-metaphysical side of his account (Roderick 1986:106–36, 163–6). We do not need, however, to follow Habermas in his problematic path. I suggested at the beginning of Chapter 1 that Habermas feels the need to preserve something of the transcendental project despite his own historical awareness because of the anxiety that a decisive rejection of ultimate principles will mean a fall into relativistic fragmentation. I have argued that the fragmentation vision continues to draw on metaphysical notions of unity, and so is not a genuine alternative to metaphysics. The decisive rejection of metaphysics leads not to fragmentation but rather to a certain conception of dialogue. And, moreover, it is not in Habermas but in an anti-humanist like Foucault that we find such a conception of dialogue. Foucauldian versus Habermasian dialogue Foucault’s conception of dialogue is of course very different from Habermas’s version. My positive claim here is that it is a more authentically dialogical conception of dialogue, a more adequate notion of dialogue. It is true that, in Foucault as well as in Habermas, there is a critique of the philosophy of the subject, a turn from the conscious subject to discursive and non-discursive social practices. But for Foucault there is no subsequent reversal, no problematic attempt to reassert metaphysical foundationalism.9 In other words, there is no attempt by Foucault to discern, in the multiplicity of concrete social interactions, any overall unifying principle or normative ideal, and thereby to restore the claims of a totalising metaphysics. For Foucault, the interplay of social practices does not permanently anticipate a unitary rational consensus in which we will attain complete, collective control over our social practices. Instead, Foucault stresses the agonism, the ongoing, open-ended combat of competing positions in social life, in which all positions are finite and partial, and none can prevail absolutely. Nor is there any attempt to reduce concrete social practices to linguistic ones. Discursive practices are seen as being bound up with—an element of—non-discursive ones, practices of power. Foucault thus makes a genuine move from unitary metaphysics and the foundationalist philosophy of the subject to the encounter with the other, to openended, concrete dialogue between self and other. His is a material conception of dialogue, the dialogue of finite, embodied beings engaged in concrete social interactions with one another. It is true that both Habermas and Foucault see dialogue as opposed to domination, but here too there are marked differences in their accounts. Foucault is able to conceptualise domination without invoking a subjectivistic and totalising conception of dialogue as a


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normative ideal. Social domination for Foucault is not something essentially external to dialogue, the corruption of an ideal discourse which prevents us from coming to a genuine agreement, a unified consensus. Instead, domination is something which emerges historically out of concrete, everyday dialogue itself, out of the interplay and combat of forces in everyday life, and something which is characterised precisely by the establishment of unities, the overcoming of the other. Similarly, resistance to domination does not presuppose the normative ideal of a true discourse, in which difference and conflict will be overcome and we will formulate our organising principles in a collective, consensual voice. It is rather the expression of other voices, new voices which have been buried under the historically and dialogically emergent forms of domination, and hence represents the reawakening of a dialogue, of the dialogical interplay and transformation, that was temporarily immobilised. With this, Foucault puts resistance and social transformation on a far firmer basis than that provided by any metaphysical normative ground (Foucault 1981b:5). For Foucault, social practices are in the first instance processes of dialogical interplay and combat, of forces and resistance to forces. Resistance is fundamental to this dialogue, its driving force. Without it, dialogue and history would be impossible. Forms of social order, and in particular forms of domination, are themselves only possible in so far as they emerge from this dialogue, through the arresting of this dialogue, and they are destined to be overcome through ongoing resistance and dialogue. So understood, resistance does not stand in need of any normative justification. It is a fundamental feature of our dialogical existence, something that constantly emerges to contest forms of closure and domination. Ethics and critical reflection in this context are instruments for facilitating this resistance and promoting ongoing dialogue. The aim of critical reflection here is not to help overcome the domination which prevents us from attaining an ideal form of life, consciously organising and unifying the social realm in accordance with universal norms. It is rather to comprehend unitary forms of social organisation in their historical emergence, to problematise existing forms, and thereby to open up a space for that which resists, that which is other or different. So understood, Foucault’s account does not carry the risk of subordinating resistance and arresting dialogue in the name of some totalising conception of ideal human existence. He does not aim to prescribe an ideal form of life, a true form of dialogue, but rather to promote openness to the other and the continuation of dialogue. At this point, however, let us turn the tables and consider a possible objection to this alternative account of dialogue. It is an objection, specifically, concerning the ethical attitude of openness to the other that is associated with this account. Even with the best will in the world, one might ask, how can we be sure that we are being genuinely open to the other, that we are really assisting resistance and promoting dialogue? How do we know that we are not in fact deceiving ourselves about being open to the other, that we are not surreptitiously, unknowingly, introducing new forms of oppression and closure under the guise of openness? And would this not represent the most pernicious and insidious form of domination? In response to this kind of objection, it is possible to make a number of points. First of all, as a matter of general principle, we cannot avoid being involved in dialogue, as I have defined the term. We are always in the midst of dialogue, whether we like it or not. And this means that we continually encounter the other, influence it, exert


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power over it, and at the same time are influenced by it in turn. Even states of domination, where the other is temporarily silenced and overcome, remain ultimately subject to dialogue, to the resurgence of buried voices, to ongoing dialogue and transformation. Despite our attempts to order the world, otherness persists as that which resists this ordering and affects us in turn. It is precisely that which escapes from our control, that which we cannot organise, predict or domesticate. It is that which is new and unexpected, that which shocks, surprises us, takes us aback, challenges our beliefs, and threatens us with transformation. In seeking to overcome otherness, to bring it under control, we also seek to insulate ourselves from this possibility of being challenged or surprised, to attain security and stability. And it is in ordering the world that we can fall into states of self-deception. As I suggested in Chapter 1, self-deception is a disease of organisational thought. We can deceive ourselves into thinking that we have wholly mastered the other, that we have completely organised the world in terms of our categories, if we become blind to all evidence to the contrary. What we cannot deceive ourselves about, however, is the resurgence of that evidence to the contrary, the encounter with an otherness that overwhelms our defences. Otherness is by definition that which we cannot domesticate or shape to our requirements, that which is beyond our control and which indeed illuminates the limits of our powers. It is precisely that which rudely awakens us from our selfdeceptive dreams of complete mastery, that which shocks or surprises us, and forces us to reconsider our position. We cannot fake this experience of shock or surprise, this sense of coming up against the unexpected, which depends on factors that are necessarily beyond our control. In the light of this, it is also possible for us to know that we are being genuinely open to the other, that we are promoting resistance and dialogue. We can know this because thinking that is open to the other does not simply confirm or reproduce its existing categories of thought and action. Instead, we find ourselves being confronted, surprised, shocked by the new, the unexpected and unpredictable. We find our prevailing categories being challenged and called into question. And this is why the attitude of openness to the other is difficult to achieve. It is not because we cannot tell when we are being genuinely open to the other, but because we know well enough that, in being open to the other and entering into a dialogue, we have to forsake security and stability and expose ourselves to risk and uncertainty. Being open to the other is a task which requires courage and maturity to undertake. In other words, the difficulty here is not an epistemological but a moral one. And on this basis, we can also clearly differentiate openness to the other from a pseudo-openness where, while appearing to make a space for the other, we continue to dominate the other, to subsume the other to our categories. In the latter case, we will not be exposed to challenge or surprise. Rather, there will be a confrontation with an other that we have already secretly domesticated, a ‘pseudo-otherness’ which allows us to experience a ‘safe shock’ and leaves our starting point unchallenged. An obvious example here is Hegel’s treatment of the other. Hegel only seems to acknowledge difference or otherness. He is able to contemplate that which is other without risk or challenge because he has subordinated it to his starting point, the Absolute Subject. The other becomes no more than the self alienated from itself, which will be reappropriated in


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due course. History is stripped of all drama and risk, and reduced to the orderly process through which humanity becomes what it is. Foucault, in contrast, seeks a genuine openness to the other. As we have seen, he is concerned, in the face of totalising thought and closed forms of life, to open a space for the otherness that will challenge prevailing categories. In its reflective form this openness to the other becomes the historical comprehension of prevailing forms which unsettles them and assists forms of resistance and transformation. His position here can be usefully compared with that of Irigaray. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray suggests that a genuine meeting with a sexually different being, where they are not reduced to a function of oneself but accepted and respected as other, will be marked by ‘astonishment’ and ‘wonder’ (Irigaray 1984:12–13). In this connection she draws, interestingly enough, on Descartes, who in The Passions of the Soul says that ‘when the first encounter with some object surprises us and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we supposed it to be, this causes us to wonder and be surprised’.10 It seems to me that what Irigaray is alluding to here through her discussion of Descartes is just that element of surprise which accompanies a genuine openness to the other. At the same time, it may be that this account does not go far enough, if the encounter with otherness also means a challenge to one’s existing categories. Then, accepting and respecting the other will mean exposing oneself to risk and uncertainty; although this also represents a challenge to closed thinking and an opening to the possibility of new forms of thought and action. And this possibility, I have argued, is what Foucault seeks to promote in adopting an attitude of openness to the other. He himself does not speak of ‘wonder’, but he does speak of another, perhaps not unrelated, passion which motivates his work. It is a ‘passion for knowledge’ which he calls ‘curiosity’. He is careful to stress that this is not a curiosity which seeks to assimilate otherness to a body of organised knowledge. It is rather a concern to seek out difference, a ‘readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd’, and a desire for that which ‘enables one to get free of oneself, i.e. for that which serves to unsettle habitual thinking and prevailing categories, and to open a space for their transformation (Foucault 1985:8; 1988g:328; cf. White 1991:91–2). As such, it involves a readiness to adopt that genuine openness in which one is willing to forgo the security of totalising forms of thought in order to promote the emergence of new forms of thought and action. Beyond postmodernism as fragmentation We come now to the second position to be considered, the idea of postmodernism as fragmentation. As has been noted at a number of points, Habermas sees the radical denial of subjectivist metaphysics, the post-modern scepticism concerning the foundational subject, the ‘death of Man’, as leading to a view of thought and action as fragmented, a multiplicity of incommensurable forms of life. And understood simply as a relativistic celebration of fragmentation and plurality, postmodernism is indeed problematic. It may seem to provide a solution to the problems of enlightened modernity and its totalising normative organisation of the world, promoting instead tolerance for otherness and diversity, but it has normative problems of its own. Such a view makes it difficult to understand how one can comprehend and make judgements concerning the other in any


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way whatsoever. Nor is it clear that mere tolerance of the other and of plurality provides a defence against the persisting processes of totalisation in our culture. So critics like Habermas are quite right in criticising this sort of view as being both theoretically problematic and politically dangerous.11 However, as I argued in Chapter 1, the postmodern questioning of metaphysical subjectivism and the recognition of the other need not automatically lead to the vision of relativistic fragmentation. To suppose that it does is in fact to remain caught up in metaphysics. Consequently, like Habermas’s own positive account, the fragmentation vision of postmodernism also represents a false escape from metaphysics. It is a superficial understanding of postmodernism. Let me conclude this discussion by contrasting the dialogical picture I have been presenting, and which I have suggested can be found in Foucault’s work, with this fragmentation vision of postmodernism. The positive claim I want to make here is that a Foucauldian, dialogical picture of the social world and ourselves is a more authentically postmodernist view than the fragmentation account. A postmodernist view will certainly break from metaphysical subjectivism and the idea that philosophy’s job is to establish ultimate foundations. It will certainly call into question the modernist idea of the foundational subject in all its forms, from the Kantian liberal subject to the Hegelian-Marxist class subject; along with the Enlightenment vision, which rests on this foundational subject, the vision of a total transformation of social practices in accordance with reason and human nature. It thus will also bring into question the contemporary, ‘enlightened’ scientific administration and totalising normalisation of life, conducted under the guidance of a multitude of ‘experts’, in which all forms of otherness are reduced to cases of deviance and abnormality, to pathologies that need to be cured. And it will bring into question those movements of liberation which seek radically to transform society in accordance with some conception of human nature and a properly human existence. In short, it will stand opposed to all oppressively totalising forms of thought, to all standpoints that claim to be universal but which are in fact historically specific, and whose universality is only made possible through the violent suppression of otherness and heterogeneity. To cite Lyotard’s well-known definition of postmodernism, there will undoubtedly be ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv–xxv).12 However, an anti-metaphysical, postmodernist philosophy which opposes totalisation in its various forms and acknowledges difference or otherness need not involve the exaggerated respect for the other which supposes that the other can only ever be understood on its own terms, that it has its own essential nature and rules, and that it cannot be comprehended in ‘our’ terms without violence, without the distortion or falsification of its essential character. This is the outlook of a postmodernism understood in terms of fragmentation. And, as I have argued, the relativistic vision of fragmented, incommensurable world-views, each with their own unitary and all-embracing form of thought and action, continues to rely on a metaphysical notion of unity. A single, allembracing metaphysical unity has simply been replaced by a multiplicity of local unities, each wholly governed by their own all-embracing principles, which is why they are unable to communicate with one another. It can be added here that a postmodernism of fragmentation is also strongly reminiscent of the liberal position, one of the positions that post-modernism aims to go beyond. If an all-embracing metaphysical vision finds expression in totalitarian Marxisms


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of various kinds, the fragmentation view of postmodernism has affinities with the exaggerated, atomistic individualism of liberal thinking. Indeed, understanding postmodernism in this way could perhaps be seen as a way of surreptitiously preserving the liberal outlook. The tolerance of difference and diversity that this view implies is remarkably similar to liberal tolerance. For liberalism, tolerance comes to the idea that autonomous individuals should be free to do whatever they want in the so-called private realm. No-one else has any right to interfere in this arena. Such interference would be an affront to the sovereign autonomy of the individual. Similarly, for a postmodernism of fragmentation, ‘other voices’ are beyond criticism. We cannot legitimately criticise or question other forms of life or cultural practices. To do so would be oppressively to impose foreign standards and to violate the self-contained purity of these alternative forms of life. In both cases, tolerance comes to no more than leaving the other alone. As I argued in Chapter 2, a proper rejection of metaphysical foundationalism, a properly postmodern philosophy of difference or otherness, makes central not fragmentation but dialogue. The dialogical view allows us to recognise that different social groups can and do influence one another, but without at the same time having to suppose that this is necessarily a matter of one group distorting or falsifying the other. There are two points to stress in this connection. The first point to stress is that contact with the other, dialogue, is going on all the time in the social realm. There is a constant, inescapable interplay in which groups affect and influence other groups, and are affected and influenced in turn. To imagine that we can completely purify ourselves of the tendency to order or categorise others, that we can practice a ‘pure tolerance’, is always self-deceptive. It obscures the reality of our dialogical existence. We cannot really insulate ourselves from our involvement in historical dialogue, from the process of influencing or from being influenced by others. This failure to acknowledge our existence in the midst of dialogical relations with others is the essential problem with both liberal tolerance and the notion of postmodern tolerance outlined above. To suppose that all we need to do is to tolerate the other, to leave the other alone in its splendid isolation, ignores and indeed helps conceal the real social relations in which we all exist, in which we are continually and unavoidably affecting the other, as well as being affected in turn by the other. It is to forget that, in a certain sense, we all have blood on our hands, that we all remain implicated in the practices of the present. The second point to stress here is that, on the dialogical view, there is no pure, authentic other whose essential nature can be separated out from what has been historically imposed on it. And, by the same token, if we abandon essentialist conceptions of an authentic, incommensurable other, then our imposition of categories upon the other is no longer automatically an oppressive falsification or distortion of the other. It is a real understanding of what the other is, part of what makes the other what it is. Imposing categories upon the other is part of the process by which the other’s meaning and nature are constituted, by which it comes historically to be what it is. More broadly, all who come into contact with a culture and its categories are shaped through and through by it. This is not a corruption of some pre-existing, ahistorical nature that persists despite everything. Those who have been socialised, or colonised, are irrevocably shaped, irrevocably transformed. At the same time, in a dialogical situation, the imposition of categories upon the other is not a final understanding of the other, but only the beginning of an open-ended process. The other is not simply what we make of it, what we take it to


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be. It is also that which resists, eludes, goes beyond our reading of it, and is able to affect us in turn. Those who are acculturated can change their culture in turn. The colonisers too can be changed by the colonised. To exist in a historical dialogue means that we are shaping the other but also being influenced or affected by it in turn. To put this point another way, the dialogical account being proposed here means that we are not caught in a relativism in which we are trapped in our own form of life and unable to know or judge the other legitimately. This is not a postmodernism of fragmentation in which we can no longer make moral judgements concerning the other. On the dialogical view we can do so, and indeed we cannot encounter the other without interpreting or judging it in some way. However, it also needs to be recognised that no perspective is absolute and all-embracing. The other also resists these impositions and can impose itself on us in turn. Rather than a relativism, this position might more aptly be described as a form of perspectivalism. We always come to the world from a certain perspective, a certain standpoint from which we can organise and interpret it, but at the same time we also encounter other perspectives and can be transformed in line with them. There is an ongoing dialogical combat of interpretations, of competing ways of interpreting and organising one another. Rather than there being no truth, for this position there are many truths, in competition with one another. Of course, even if we exist in a historical dialogue in which we do not simply affect the other but can be affected in turn, it is also possible for states of domination or oppression to emerge, for dialogue to be arrested, for otherness to be entirely overcome and assimilated into one’s own way of thinking. We then become imprisoned in forms of sterile enclosure, in fixed forms of life that are closed to the new. Given that we are organising beings, such closure is a constant possibility and a constant danger. And history is littered with examples of oppression and imprisonment of this sort. But the important point here is that such oppression is not a foregone conclusion. It is not the only kind of relation one can have with the other. On the contrary, in its one-sidedness and partiality, domination remains a derivative, secondary kind of relation. It is a relation that interrupts the more fundamental relation of dialogue with the other, and also one that is destined to be overcome through the resurgence of otherness, through continuing resistance and ongoing dialogue. Moreover, as I argued in Chapter 3, such dialogue can be promoted through the adoption of an ethical attitude of openness towards the other, an attitude which in its reflective form is the critical attitude towards oneself which acknowledges the historicity and finitude of one’s own point of view, which recognises that one’s point of view has itself emerged historically out of a long process of dialogue with the other. As I also argued, this form of critique is compatible with the modernist, Enlightenment tradition, where modernist thinking is understood as involving a critical-historical self-awareness. On this reading, postmodernity is not an overcoming of modernity, but rather its continuation and radicalisation, in which modernity brings into question its own forms of domination. For postmodernity so understood, the ethical and critical issue is not how we, existing in a fragmented world, can avoid imposing ourselves on the other, how we can avoid interpreting and shaping the other in our terms. It is not a matter of protecting the other from all contact with us. The issue is rather, given that such encounters go on all the time, given that we exist in the realm of dialogue, how the emergence of one-sided states


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of domination can be avoided, and how the possibility of a two-sided relation, a continuation of dialogue, can be promoted. This ethical and critical position does not imply that we have to reject all forms of order, unity or community, as oppressive, which would be the case for a postmodernism of fragmentation. On the dialogical view there may not be one ideal, transcendentally grounded form of life, but there are still forms of social order and unity. They emerge all the time, as contingent constructions, fabricated ensembles, arising out of dialogue to the degree that some forces are able to impose themselves on others. And, as I have argued, this imposition is not simply something to be rejected. It is not simply distortion or corruption of the other but a shaping that makes the other what it is; and to the extent that other forces can be overcome and utilised, there can be an overall enhancement of social capabilities. Given this dialogical account, the ethical and critical task is not to avoid all principles and all forms of social order but rather to avoid the absolutisation of particular forms of order, the establishment of forms of social and political closure. It is to avoid the resultant ossification of culture, the fall into a sterile repetition of cultural patterns, as manifested in the closed systems of domination. This is what I take Foucault to have in mind when he argues that the task of the present is to find ways of disconnecting the growth of capacities from the ‘intensification of power relations’ (Foucault 1984c:47–8; 1984d:248). In other words, without abandoning all existing forms of order and unity, we have none the less also to challenge states of domination, and to make it possible for otherness to reassert itself in forms of resistance and transgression, in the production of new forms of life. Such transgression will introduce cultural instability and change, but it will also make possible the production of new forms and the revitalisation of culture. Similar comments can be made about the movements of resistance to prevailing forms of life. A postmodernism of fragmentation would seem to preclude organised, unified movements of resistance and permit only purely local struggles. The dialogical position is that there is certainly a need to question the notion of a global, ‘revolutionary’ movement of liberation which, on the basis of some conception of human nature, establishes once and for all an ideal form of life. However, we do not need to give up on the idea of concerted, unified forms of struggle.13 In resistance also there is the possibility of unity and solidarity. Unified movements of resistance can and do emerge, bringing together disparate energies into a concerted, organised whole. They are contingent alliances, unions of forces that have been created, forged, negotiated out of the process of dialogue. These may be large-scale movements, and they can also be small-scale insurgencies, local struggles. Of course, such unions of forces, in whatever form they take, will themselves involve some degree of suppression of otherness, of dialogue, a suppression which is required in order for them to establish a united, powerful front. A group needs to put aside internal differences in order to be able to fight in a concerted and effective way and to bring about social change. Once again, the ethical and critical task is not to reject all order but to avoid producing or contributing to forms of domination. Movements of resistance are not exempt from this possibility. As Foucault notes, there are no essentially liberating practices. There are always ‘dangers’ (Foucault 1984b:343; 1984d:245). It is not unknown for movements of resistance to establish repressive orthodoxies within their own ranks, or to achieve success in their struggles only for they themselves to impose new systems of oppression. Nor are these forms of oppression somehow more acceptable because they are associated


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with resistance. One of the key problems with the traditional, metaphysical view of social liberation is precisely that it makes possible the justification of various forms of domination and terror, in the name of liberation and a truly human existence.14 On the dialogical view, movements of resistance have no special privileges in this regard. They are simply new moves in the ongoing interplay of social forces, and equally open to possible criticism if they establish forms of domination. Movements of resistance, if they are to proceed ethically and critically, have to balance the need for unity and organisation, required in order to present a strong front against prevailing forms of domination, and to bring about substantial social change, with an openness to the other which opposes the establishment of new forms of closure and domination at their own hands. This balancing of the requirements of both organisation and openness in the course of resistance is by no means an easy task, but it is an unavoidable one. We cannot simply dismiss all unity and organisation as oppressive. Indeed, a postmodernism of fragmentation which simply rejects all order as oppressive has a positively reactionary role to play in this connection. If unity and organisation are simply rejected, and if the possibility of establishing larger-scale forms of resistance is entirely precluded, movements of resistance are prevented from joining forces in order to challenge largescale forms of hegemonic domination, and they are also rendered more vulnerable to appropriation by these forms of domination. To insist that there can only ever be local, isolated, incommensurable movements of resistance is to frustrate the dialogue between these groups that makes it possible to form alliances of various sorts. It is to drive wedges between groups, to keep them weak and separate. And to embrace this fragmenting isolationism as a strategy of resistance is similarly problematic. That is, one might attempt to engage in a strategy of ‘separatism’, to announce one’s independence from the rest of the world, to insist that there is no master language, only a range of local languages, and that one’s own language is incommensurable and must be tolerated. But it is always self-deceptive to think that one can simply escape from one’s historical circumstances, pass beyond their influences, be completely self-contained. We always remain in the midst of social practices, influenced and shaped by our culture and in particular by persistent forms of totalisation and social hegemonies within that culture. Separatism, far from liberating those who resist from these totalising influences, only leaves them isolated and weak, and vulnerable either to easy colonisation or to dismissal as a ‘harmlessly marginal’ phenomenon. Either way, existing relations of social domination are not challenged. And the essentialist idea that one has one’s own language, one’s own way of thinking and acting, which can be separated from all external influences, is also problematic in that it can contribute to the establishment of new forms of closed thinking and domination within one’s own group. Resistance requires not separatism but engagement and struggle with the existing culture, through which the social practices in which we exist can be changed, and what Foucault calls a new ‘economy’ of social relations brought about (Foucault 1983a:210). At the heart of such struggle and transformation is not a ready-made, essential form of life which has been denied by the existing culture, but the creative, transgressive activity through which we go beyond existing social limits and produce new forms of thought and action. What resistance can usefully demand from dominant forms of cultural organisation in order to assist this struggle is not tolerance of one’s difference, but rather


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that the dominant cultural forms be aware of their finitude and historicity, that they recognise that theirs is not the only way of proceeding, and thus that they be receptive to the possibility that there might be different ways of thinking and acting. What I have also wanted to stress here is that this is not only a demand to be made of dominant cultural forms. To the extent that forms of resistance also need a degree of unity and organisation, in order to present a strong front against forms of domination and to be effective in bringing about social change, the ethical demand for openness to the other also needs to be a feature of these forms of resistance, if they are themselves to avoid the establishment of new forms of domination. To sum up, the ethical and critical task of postmodernity, which is a permanent and ongoing task, is that of ensuring in all circumstances that particular forms of life are not absolutised and that the other has room to speak, and in so doing to promote continuing social dialogue. Such social dialogue represents a direct challenge to all forms of theoretical closure and political domination. In particular it represents a direct challenge to the contemporary forms of hegemonic totalisation, to modernity’s ‘enlightened’, expert, scientific administration and normalisation of life. A genuine dialogue with the other implies not simply the appearance of new, different, other voices, but also that these voices are able to have real effects in the culture—which is to say that they have real power. So understood, dialogue is a ‘dangerous perhaps’,15 an open, risky, endeavour. It brings into question our existing forms of social order and stability, in so far as the other, that which is new and innovative, has a challenging, disruptive and transformative effect on existing forms of life. Consequently, the ethical and critical attitude of being open to these other voices and promoting this dialogue is something very different to the notion of postmodern toleration I spoke of earlier. It is not merely a matter of tolerating the other, of leaving the other alone, but rather of exposing oneself and one’s culture to the possibility of being challenged and even transformed by the other in a concrete dialogue. This is something that requires courage and maturity. But if this dialogue exposes us to uncertainties, risks and dangers, the effects are ultimately positive. The stability of hegemonic life comes at the cost of the suppression of the other, the innovative, the new. The other side of this destabilisation is that new forms of thought and action can emerge, and our culture can remain vital. The postmodern rejection of the metaphysical subject, and its historical critique of existing forms of life, are important steps in the process whereby modernity’s hegemonic forms of life are challenged. They open our thought to the other, and thereby assist in the renewal of dialogue. And, in the end, it is the possibility of such life-giving dialogue that the ‘death of Man’, properly understood, opens up.

NOTES Introduction: the death of man 1 For an account of this historical context, see, for example, West 1996, chs 6 and 7; and also O’Farrell 1989, ch. 1. 2 These alternatives are modelled on the formulation given in Brodsky 1987:291–2. 3 David Hoy provides an overview of critical responses to Foucault in Hoy 1986a. See also O’Farrell 1989:11–12, 114–15. 4 See Sartre’s discussion of the genesis of his notion of absurdity, his recognition that life has no ‘plot’, in de Beauvoir 1985:141. In relation to the Frankfurt School, an example is the profound pessimism of the later Adorno, as evident for example in Adorno 1974. 5 Charles Taylor argues that Foucault gives us a conception of freedom as a kind of quasiexistentialist voluntarism. See Taylor 1989:281. For Foucault’s own responses to the suggestion that he is simply reviving Sartre’s views, see, for example, Foucault 1984b:351. 6 At the same time, this is not an entirely unorthodox reading of Foucault. There are similarities between some of my theses and those of Clare O’Farrell, who sees Foucault as seeking to explore the interplay between the ‘Same’ and the ‘Other’ (see O’Farrell 1989, especially chs 2 and 3); and also some similarities with Romand Coles’s interpretation of Foucault (see Coles 1992, especially ch. 3). 7 The dialogical reading of Foucault I am presenting will call to mind the work of Gadamer, Bakhtin and Levinas, and there are clearly comparisons to be made here. The present work, however, will focus on establishing this reading of Foucault, rather than on exploring the connections between him and these other thinkers.

1 Beyond metaphysics and fragmentation 1 For this reading of Habermas’s overall project, see also McCarthy 1982:59–60; 1987:vii-ix; Giddens 1985:97–8; and Roderick 1986:9–10. 2 See also O’Farrell 1989:91; and Coles 1992:72–3. 3 See Sartre’s comments on the impermeability and unshakeability of the ‘global attitude’ of racism in Sartre 1975. 4 See also Foucault’s treatment of Hegel in Foucault 1970:327; and Foucault 1972:12. The importance of this theme in recent French thinking is noted in Descombes 1979:12–13, 136. 5 On the tension in Hegel’s thought between history and metaphysics, see, for example, Lloyd 1984:5–6; and Copleston 1963:239. See also Murphy 1984:191–2. 6 Sartre discusses motivation in Sartre 1958, pt 4, ch. 2, sect. 1. For Hampshire’s more muted Anglo-Saxon version of existentialism, see Hampshire 1959. 7 See the discussion of Kantian ethics in Nagel 1979. 8 For a useful summary of Hegel’s critique of Kantian ethics, see Laska 1974. 9 This is a problem for both the Frankfurt School and Habermas, i.e. the internal tension between a sense of the historical and the perceived need for a socially transcendent standpoint to ground critique. In connection with the Frankfurt school, see, for example, Jay

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1973:63; and Held 1980:371. As we see in Chapter 4, Habermas does not succeed in solving this problem. 10 See Wittgenstein 1976:§§114–15, §309. See also Kerr 1986, especially ch. 3, for a discussion of the later Wittgenstein’s interest in the urge to espouse some absolute, cosmic view. 11 Descartes himself has to come up with a special explanation, from within the standpoint of his subjectivism, for why we ever fall into error. See Descartes 1986:40–1. 12 There is something of this in Sartre’s account of the encounter with the other in Sartre 1958: pt 3, ch. 1. But Sartre’s position remains too strongly subjectivistic for this encounter to be seen as anything other than a threat to the subject.

2 Foucault and dialogue 1 Consider the development of Heidegger’s thought from the earlier to the later phase. For a more detailed discussion of Heidegger’s one-sided turn to the other, see White 1991, especially ch. 3. 2 See Bogue 1989, especially ch. 1, for a useful discussion of Deleuze and the Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche. 3 For convenience, leaving aside very early works such as Madness and Civilisation and The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault’s work can be divided into three main phases: an early phase focusing on language and forms of knowledge, with works such as The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge; a middle phase concerned with social practices and forms of power, represented by Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1; and a late phase concerned with ethics and ‘practices of the self’, represented by the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. This chapter concentrates on the second phase; Chapter 3 turns attention to the third phase. 4 Foucault indicates his debt to Nietzsche in Foucault 1984a. See also his remarks on Nietzsche in Foucault 1980a:53 and 1980c:91. See also Note 18 on p. 102. Mahon provides a detailed discussion of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism in Mahon 1992. 5 See also O’Farrell 1989:6, 29. This chapter develops a number of ideas presented in Falzon 1993. 6 Foucault discusses the notion of interpretation in Foucault 1984a and 1986b. For the notion of knowledge as bound up with power, see, for example, Foucault 1979a:27–8; Foucault 1980b:59; Foucault 1980c:102–3; Foucault 1980d: 118–19. 7 On the idea of the social field as a field of force-relations, see also Foucault 1980b:61; 1980c:89–91; 1980d:114–15, 123; 1980g:189; 1980h:200–1. 8 See also Foucault 1980b:56; 1980c:143–4; 1980f:164; Foucault’s critique of Hegelian, ‘traditional’ history in 1984a; and O’Farrell 1989:33–5. 9 Hence the need for an ‘ascending’ analysis of power. See Foucault 1978b:94; and 1980c:98– 102. 10 For Foucault’s criticisms of structuralism, see, for example, Foucault 1980d: 114. 11 On the explanation of social order without recourse to an organising subject, see Foucault 1978b:94–5; 1980b:61–2; 1980f:159; 1980h:202–4, 206–7. 12 On the notion of domination, see also Foucault 1988d:3–4, 11–12; and 1983a: 225. Patton gives a lucid account of Foucault’s views here in Patton 1989:268–70. 13 This point is made strongly by Patton 1989:272–4. An example of the ‘metaphysical’ reading of Foucault is Jameson 1984:57. Even O’Farrell argues that, during this phase of his work, Foucault lapses temporarily into a vision of totalising domination. See O’Farrell 1989:41, 107–8.

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14 For Foucault’s comments on freedom, see, for example, Foucault 1983a:221–2; 1983b:206; 1984c:46–7; and 1988d:12–13. 15 On the idea that Foucault presents us with a concrete, as opposed to an abstract, freedom, see Rajchman 1985:92–3. 16 On the criticism that Foucault’s notion of resistance is inadequate because it lacks a normative basis, see, for example, Fraser 1985. 17 Rajchman makes a similar point in Rajchman 1985:123. 18 On Foucault’s departures from Nietzsche, see, for example, Foucault 1989:77. See also Bernauer 1988:71; and Mahon 1992:2–3.

3 Ethics, critique and enlightenment 1 For this definition of traditional ethics, see Diprose 1991:65. 2 See Derrida 1984; and also Kearney 1993. 3 See Grosz’s discussion of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference in Grosz 1989, especially ch. 5. 4 White presents a general discussion of difference feminism and the ethics of care in connection with postmodernist ethics, in White 1991:ch. 6. 5 For Foucault’s account of the role of intellectuals, see, for example, Foucault 1980c: 84–5. For an overview of Foucault’s position here see Patton 1984/85. 6 See also Foucault’s comments on intellectual dialogue in Foucault 1984e:381–2. Here, Foucault refuses the attitude of the ‘polemicist’ who is ‘encased in truth’ and treats the other he confronts as an enemy to be destroyed. Instead we should recognise the other as a subject having ‘the right to speak’. Foucault’s concern to promote otherness is also stressed by Coles 1992:86–7. 7 Foucault gives a general account of practices of the self in Foucault 1985: ch. 3. See also Foucault 1984b:353–9. 8 The second volume of The History of Sexuality deals with Greek practices of the self, the third with Stoic practices. A projected fourth volume on Christian practices of the self was not completed, but see, for example, Foucault 1982; 1984b. 9 That confession should be seen as liberating is the supreme irony for Foucault. See Foucault 1978b:60, 159. 10 Rajchman makes a similar point in Rajchman 1985:93. 11 Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault in connection with the Enlightenment can be found in Habermas 1981:13; 1982:29; 1986; and 1987: especially chs 9 and 10. His overall position is similar to Charles Taylor’s in Taylor 1984. For a summary of the positions of Habermas and Taylor, see Hiley 1985. 12 For other accounts in Foucault’s work of Kant as the founder of this second tradition, see Foucault 1980i:52–4; 1983a:215–16; 1988c:95.

4 Dialogue and the postmodern 1 For a similar assessment of Habermas, see Steuerman 1992:113. 2 Habermas presents his own views on Enlightenment in a number of places, including Habermas 1972:284–8; 1974b:253–63; and 1981:8–9. See also Keat 1981:3.

Notes

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3 See Habermas 1972a:55, 284. For other early formulations of the ideal dialogue see Habermas 1971b:92–3; and 1974a. For simplicity, I have omitted discussion here of Habermas’s workinteraction distinction and his theory of knowledge-constitutive interests. 4 Habermas discusses psychoanalysis in Habermas 1972: ch. 10. For similar criticisms of Habermas’s reading of psychoanalysis, see, for example, Keat 1981:94–118; and Bocock 1983:77, 132. 5 Quoted in McCarthy 1978:97. 6 Habermas discusses the shift in his project in the introduction to Habermas 1974b. For a general account of the criticisms of Knowledge and Human Interests, and of Habermas’s response, see McCarthy 1978: section 2.5, and ch. 4. 7 For Habermas’s later account of communication, see Habermas 1972:360–6; 1974b:16–18; and 1979. Habermas introduces the idea of the ‘ideal speech situation’ in Habermas 1970, especially 371–4. McCarthy gives a comprehensive summary of Habermas’s account in McCarthy 1978:272–333. 8 For a summary of Habermas’s position in Theory of Communicative Action, see Roderick 1986:106–36. 9 Foucault comments on Habermas’s reassertion of foundationalism in Foucault 1983a:218; 1984d:250. 10 Quoted in Irigaray 1984:13. For a summary of Irigaray’s account of wonder, see Grosz 1989:176–7. 11 For a general discussion of Habermas’s criticisms of an ‘anything goes’ postmodernism of fragmentation, see Steuerman 1992. 12 I am not suggesting that Lyotard himself should be identified with the fragmentation view. See Steuerman 1992:110–13. 13 For a characterisation of Foucault as a ‘post-revolutionary’ thinker, see Rajchman 1985:61– 7. See also Foucault 1978b:95–6; and Foucault 1984c: 46–7. 14 To this extent, interestingly enough, a Foucauldian postmodernist view concurs with the liberalism of Isaiah Berlin. See Berlin’s critique of positive freedom in Berlin 1969. 15 The phrase is Nietzsche’s. See Nietzsche 1973:16.

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INDEX absolutisation 6, 13, 62, 68, 73, 74, 77, 86, 96 absurdity 10 acculturation 40, 94 agency 28–9, 44, 47, 52, 61 agonism 6, 7, 45, 57, 88 analytic philosophy 32, 80 anti-humanism 2–3, 14, 24, 26, 43, 44, 46, 87 Apel, K.-O. 84 Archaeology of Knowledge 18, 43, 76 autonomy 27, 30, 43, 80, 82, 86, 93 Barker, P. 76 Benhabib, S. 61, 63 Bernstein, J. 1, 2, 38 Bogue, R. 43 Bouchard, D. 77 Buber, M. 7 Bubner, R. 85, 86 Carroll, J. 10 Christianity 9–10, 59, 63, 65–6 confession 66, 67 creativity 11, 13, 55–6, 69, 70–1, 98 critique, critical reflection 13, 14, 67–78, 95, 96, 98–9; in Foucault 64, 67, 69–74, 89; foundationalist 67–8, 73 curiosity 91 death 9–11 Deleuze, G. 3, 43, 44 Derrida, J. 3, 19, 63 Descartes, R. 16, 20–2, 23, 25, 26, 33–4, 39, 66, 75, 76, 80, 82, 91 dialogue 1, 4–5, 7–9, 38–43; as alternative to metaphysics 1, 4, 41–2, 79, 87, 92, 93; versus dialectic 42–3; in Foucault 1, 5–6, 14–15, 44–6, 47, 51–2, 54, 57, 63, 69, 71, 72, 73, 87–89; distinguished from Habermas’s version 7, 79, 81, 87–9; not restricted to the discursive 7, 45, 88; and otherness 42–3; social 5, 41, 42, 45; thin notion of 5, 8, 39

Index

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difference 24, 33, 63, 82, 91, 93; see also other disciplinary power 48, 50–1, 52, 66–7 Discipline and Punish 6, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51, 52 domination 5, 11, 13, 41, 59, 62, 94, 95, 96–8; in Foucault 14–15, 48–52, 53, 54, 57, 64, 71, 88–9, 96 doubt 21, 33–4 Dreyfus, H. 74 Eckhart 37 embodiment 8–9, 25–30, 39, 44, 47, 58, 86, 88 empiricism 22 Enlightenment 9, 11, 13, 18, 50–1, 66, 73–8, 80, 86, 92, 95 essentialism 11, 48, 50, 51, 54, 66, 85, 87, 94, 97 ethics: dialogical 6, 12–14, 57, 58–63, 89–90; in Foucault 6, 56, 57, 63–4, 90–1; and Foucault’s notion of critique 64, 69–71; foundationalist 6, 12–13, 27–9, 58–9, 60, 61, 81; instrumental role of 6, 57, 60, 89; and postmodernism 95–7, 98 ethics of care 63 ethics of the intellectual 64, 70 ethos 70, 74–5 existentialism 12 fiction 72 finitude 8–9, 11, 13, 14, 26, 30, 47, 62, 68–9, 76–7, 78, 95 force 44 force-relations 44–45, 55 foundationalism 1–3, 6, 8, 16, 25, 33, 60, 66, 67, 74, 78, 80, 84, 87, 88, 92; see also metaphysics fragmentation 1, 3–4, 7, 16–18; as continuation of metaphysics 4, 7, 17–18, 30–1, 87, 92; postmodernism as 3, 7, 18, 91–3 Frankfurt School 10, 30, 77 freedom 11–12, 13, 59, 60, 62; in Foucault 52–6, 67, 69, 70; humanist 12, 53 Freud, S. 22, 83 genealogy 69, 72, 77; see also critique generalised other 61 Giddens, A. 84 Gilligan, C. 63 Gordon, C. 47

Index

96

Habermas, J. 3, 4, 7, 16–17, 24, 30, 77, 79–87, 88; criticisms of Foucault 73–4; notion of critique 81, 83, 84–5; notion of dialogue 7, 79–82, 83–7, 88; and domination 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89; and ethics 81–2; and history 30, 79–80, 82–3, 84, 85–6; and metaphysics 7, 16, 30, 79–80, 82, 84, 85, 87; and otherness 82 Hampshire, S. 28 Hegel, G.W.F. 9, 14, 23–5, 29–30, 42, 43, 46, 71, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 90 Heidegger, M. 2, 37 Heller, A. 86 historical ontology of ourselves 69; see also critique history 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 23–5, 30, 31, 76–7; in Foucault 45–6, 47–8, 54–6, 71–4; and Foucault’s notion of critique 69–70, 71–3; humanist conceptions of 9, 14, 23–5, 29–30, 71, 76, 77 History of Sexuality 6, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 65; later volumes mentioned 65 Hoy, D. 17, 84 human being 4, 8–12, 14, 25–30, 44–5, 50–1, 75 humanism 2–3, 9, 14, 25–6, 39, 47, 50, 53–4, 73–4, 76–8; Foucault’s criticisms of 14, 18–19, 43, 44; and freedom 12, 53; and history 9, 14, 23–5, 29–30, 71, 76, 77; notion of power 43–4; see also Man, metaphysical subjectivism human sciences 50, 51, 66–7 Hume, D. 22 imprisonment 11, 15, 49, 59, 63, 95 intellectuals 63–4, 68, 70, 86–7 interpretation 38, 40, 41, 45, 72, 94 Ionesco, E. 10 Irigaray, L. 3, 63, 91 Kant, I. 16, 22–3, 25, 26–9, 43, 58, 59, 61, 66, 75–6, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 92 Keynes, J.M. 9 Kierkegaard, S. 30 knowledge 37, 38, 39, 45, 50, 73, 91 Kolakowski, L. 30, 37 Lawson, H. 78 Leibniz, G.W. 18 Leiss, W. 20 Levinas, E. 19 liberalism 43, 47, 92, 93 life 11, 14, 54, 59, 99

Index

97

Lloyd, G. 77 Lyotard, J.-F. 3, 92 McCarthy, T. 16, 18, 23–4, 81, 85 Man 2, 8, 11, 13, 18; death of 1, 2–4, 14, 15, 78, 91, 99; see also humanism Marx, K. 14, 30, 75, 76, 77, 80 Marxism 9, 10, 12, 30, 43, 76, 80, 92, 93 maturity 61, 74, 90, 98 medieval world-view 2, 20, 31, 66 metaphysical subjectivism 2, 5, 6, 14, 20, 24, 26, 42, 58, 64, 68, 75, 79, 80, 82 see also humanism metaphysics 2, 4, 14, 16–35; and domination 5, 49–51; Foucault’s rejection of 5–6, 14, 18–19, 43, 46–7, 48, 54–5, 71; as foundationalism 2; and problem of history 23–5, 31, 34; and other 18–9, 43; as totalisation 4, 18; see also fragmentation modernity 14, 66, 74, 78, 92, 95, 98, 99 mysticism 36–7 Murdoch, I. 12, 28 Nietzsche, F. 2, 14, 23, 43, 44, 59, 65, 75, 76, 77 normative principles 46, 50, 58–9, 60 norms 50, 51, 52, 66, 67, 68, 80, 81, 82 normalisation 51, 92, 98 openness to the other: and dialogical ethics 6, 8, 12–13, 57, 59–63, 89–91; in Foucault 63–4, 90–1; and Foucault’s notion of critique 64, 68–9, 70–1, 90; and postmodernism 95–9 Order of Things 5, 18, 43 ordering activity 4, 37–8, 39–41, 45, 48, 57, 59, 62, 64, 95 order, social 5, 46–50, 55, 57, 59, 61–2, 77, 88–9, 95–7 other, otherness 3, 4, 18–19, 33, 34–5, 36, 41, 43, 57, 63, 94, 89–90, 92–3, 98, 99; and dialogue 42–3; domination as overcoming of 5, 11, 13, 41, 48, 49, 67; in Foucault 18–19, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55; subordination to 36–8, 61–2; see also openness to the other Ottman, H. 86–7 Patton, P. 44 perspectivalism 94 philosophy 1–2, 66, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78 politics 43, 68, 95–99

Index

98

Poster, M. 85 postmodernism 2, 3, 4, 5, 37, 78, 79, 91–9; and ethics 95–7, 98; and Foucault 5, 78, 92, 96; as fragmentation 3, 7, 18, 91–3 postmodernist feminism 63 poststructuralism 16 power: Foucault’s notion of 6, 44, 47, 51, 54; humanist notion of 43–4; see also domination Power/Knowledge 46 practices of the self 56, 64–7 present 46, 72, 73 psychoanalysis 83 Rabinow, P. 74 rationality 9, 24, 29, 50, 74, 75, 77 relativism 1, 3–4, 16, 42, 91, 93, 94; see also fragmentation repetition 11, 19, 41, 49, 50, 59, 96 resistance 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 33, 38, 40, 41, 57, 59, 60, 61, 95, 96–8; in Foucault 45, 52–6, 63–4, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 88–9, 96, 98 respect 59, 61, 63, 64, 92–3 revitalisation 11, 12, 13, 15, 34, 49, 54, 59, 60, 71, 96 revolt 54, 64; see also resistance revolution 96 risk 11, 33, 61, 90, 98 Roderick, R. 17, 87 Rorty, R. 32, 44 Ruddock, S. 63 Sartre, J.-P. 28 self-creation 67, 69–70 self-deception 32, 52, 90, 93 self-enclosure 18–23, 24, 25, 31, 34, 41, 48 separatism 97 Smart, B. 5 solipsism 19, 20, 24, 31, 34, 41 Solomon, R. 2, 22, 37 Steuerman, E. 17 Stroud, B. 22 structuralism 3, 47 subjectivity: Foucault’s notion of, 44, 52, 64–5; metaphysical or humanist notion of 2, 11, 12, 14, 21, 22, 23–4, 25–30, 34, 39, 43–4, 46, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58, 75, 76, 80 surprise 33, 89–90

Index

99

Taylor, C. 27, 44, 73 thinking 19–20, 70 tolerance 92, 93–4, 98 totalisation, totalising thought 4, 5, 18–19, 20, 23, 25, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 43, 50, 51, 53, 62, 68, 74, 74, 78, 88, 98; see also metaphysics Warnock, M. 12 Weber, M. 77 White, S. 63, 91 Whitebook, J. 86 Wittgenstein, L. 16, 32, 85

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