Per Caritatem

Under the pseudonym Maurice Florence, Foucault writes that if it is possible for him to find a “home in the philosophical tradition,” then his at least semi-comfortable dwelling place is “within the critical tradition of Kant, and his undertaking could be called A Critical History of Thought.”[1] “Florence” then explains what comprises a Foucauldian critical history of thought. To begin with, such a history must not be equated with a history of ideas; rather, if we understand thought as “the act that posits a subject and an object in their various possible relations,” then Foucault’s project is “an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, to the extent that these relations are constitutive of a possible knowledge.”[2] Clearly, with his choice of terminology, Foucault is evoking Kantian resonances. Reference, for example, to “conditions” in conjunction with what constitutes “possible knowledge,” brings to mind Kantian concerns; yet, as “Florence” continues his explanation, we realize that the Kantian terminology has been infused with new meanings. For example, in contrast with Kant’s focus upon stable, transcultural structures of the human mind which make possible and intelligible the objects of our experience, Foucault’s critical history of thought is not concerned with “defining the formal conditions of a relation to objects”; nor is it “a matter […] of determining the empirical conditions that at a given moment might have permitted the subject in general to become conscious of an object already given in reality.”[3] Rather, with an emphasis on historical specificities, local context, and the contingent, mutable nature of our existence, Foucault is interested in how a subject comes to be a particular kind of subject at a particular moment in history.  As he explains,

the question is one of determining what the subject must be, what condition is imposed on it, what status it is to have, and what position it is to occupy in reality or in the imaginary, in order to become the legitimate subject of one type of knowledge or another. In short, it is a matter of determining its mode of “subjectivization.”[4]

Correlative to this process of subjectivization is the process of objectivization. That is, the subject itself, as the result of the emergence of various truth games—the rules structuring discursive fields and practices and thus creating the context for statements to be seen as true or false—becomes an object of possible knowledge. Here the idea is to analyze why, for instance, certain practices, institutions, and disciplines give rise to specific objects of knowledge.   The principal objects in view are, of course, subjects. As “Florence” explains, “Foucault also tried to analyze the constitution of the subject as it might appear on the other side of a normative distribution and become an object of knowledge—as an insane, ill, or delinquent individual.”[5] Since institutions along with established disciplinary practices tend to produce and to articulate norms, Foucault’s study of the subject-turned-object of knowledge involves examinations of psychiatric practices, the penal system, and other related fields which problematize subject-objects. Determining a subject’s mode of objectivization thus entails “determining under what conditions something can become an object of a possible knowledge, how it could be problematized as an object to be known, to what procedure of division it could be subjected, and what part of it is considered pertinent.”[6] In short, such an approach once again recalls Kantian themes, but themes reharmonized, transposed, and translated in order to address post-Kantian philosophical concerns.

In addition to his Kantian lineage, others emphasize Foucault’s Nietzschean heritage. Often when his Nietzschean notes are stressed, a dissonant and somewhat sinister Foucault emerges, one whose portrayal of power relations is more or less a postmodern variation on the will to power and the death of “Man” themes, both of which in some sense presuppose the death of “metaphysics.”[7] For example, in his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault opposes the genealogist to the metaphysician or at least to the historian whose account depends upon metahistorical criteria. The task of the genealogist it not “an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities”;[8] nor does it presuppose the “existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.”[9] Rather, the genealogist attentive to the contours, fissures, fractures, and rugged topography of various historical landscapes must, for the sake of accurate analyses, recoil from placing his “faith in metaphysics.”[10]  If he does so, he will find that not only do the purported static essences “behind things” not exist as assumed, but likewise “their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”[11] As if these claims are not sufficiently scandalous, Foucault continues,

[e]xamining the history of reason, he [the genealogist] learns that it was born in an altogether “reasonable” fashion—from chance;[12] devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition—the personal conflicts that slowly forged the weapons of reason.[13] Further, genealogical analysis shows that the concept of liberty is an “invention of the ruling classes”[14] and not fundamental to man’s nature or at the root of his attachment to being and truth.[15]

With this passage it appears that not only does reason itself have a history, a narrative of its various emergences and culturally contingent instantiations, but freedom is a ruse and is in no way constitutive of what it is to be a human.  For those who have not condemned at least some shared, universal human capacities to the flames, these statements paint (or seemingly paint) a rather bleak and despairing picture.  However, one of the difficulties with this passage and the essay as a whole is discerning precisely where Nietzsche ends and Foucault begins.  In other words, is every conclusion voiced in the text an expression of Foucault’s own position, or is he offering a detailed, sympathetic reading of Nietzsche? If the latter is the case (and I tend to favor this suggestion), then one need not equate every aspect, perspective, and stance articulated therein with Foucault’s own position, much less with his later views on freedom, resistance, and the interrelation between freedom and thought.

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), engaging in deconstruction before deconstruction began, calls Western Enlightenment to account for its uncivilized practices and its inability to deal with the concrete, existentio-political concerns of people “on the ground.” That is, European “Western civilization” for all its claims to Enlightenment and progress has proved “incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”[1] Unlike the white Marxists, including Sartre, Césaire and other black Négritude writers could not separate the class problem from the race problem, nor did they overlook the connection between capitalism and colonialism. As Rabaka observes, “Césaire understands European civilization to rest on the colonization of non-Europeans, their lives, labor and lands. His Negritude, like Du Bois’s and James’s discourse, was a revolutionary humanist enterprise,”[2] attuned to the sufferings of all those exploited by the machinery of colonialism and slavery. Although appreciative of Marx, the Négritude movement (and Fanon as well) sought to expand and revise Marxist teachings not only to include but also to give top priority to “race”-based economic exploitation.[3] As Césaire puts it, the Communists “acted like abstract Communists” in their failure to address the “Negro problem.”[4] In contrast, the colonized and enslaved, given their concrete experience of racialized existence past and present, do not have the option to overlook the race question; thus, concludes Césaire, Négritude has a crucial role to play in the ongoing reformation of Marxism. “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.”[5]

Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, one of its chief goals is the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent. Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of blacks and non-European others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of humans to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.”[6] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[7]

In his writings, Fanon also highlighted the damage inflicted upon humankind as the result of colonizing practices. Like Césaire, Fanon was convinced that when humans, through repeated acts of self-deception, eventually habituate themselves to treat other humans as animals and objects, they perform a violence on themselves that has a tendency to produce ripple effects throughout the entire social body, including the “white” part of the body politic.[8]

I am currently working on a small but fascinating writing project, sketching various dimensions and expressions of the philosophy of music. Two twentieth-century theorists, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Attali, have captivated my imagination, as both foreground the socio-political dimensions of music. Theorists in this vein raise questions concerning the essence and value of music as limited to the realm of musical art. That is, if the nature of music involves something beyond the sphere of musical art itself—and is by nature implicated in socio-political activities and in shaping the cultural consciousness—then by what criteria do we establish the strictly musical versus the strictly social aspects, which count as purely musical and which political, and does music’s value somehow become obscured or diminished by emphasizing social and political dimensions as essential features of music?

For Adorno, music possesses a unique ability to awaken our soporific social consciousness. Music must resist commodification in order to be a powerful force for socio-political change; thus, Adorno lays stress upon unconstrained, unique, autonomous musical structures—structures that evidence originality and highlight individuality, which is the exact opposite of mass produced, commodified music. Likewise, Adorno’s position recognizes that musical compositions, unlike traditional philosophical texts, can impact and occasion social change by performative and other means wholly unavailable to philosophy construed as a “purely” rational enterprise. For instance, atonal music such as twelve-tone serialism calls into question the naturalness of music and thus argues that music’s form, content, harmonic structures, scales, and so forth are conventional; they are non-absolute human practices that change over time and differ within a society, as well as across social, cultural, and historical boundaries. Similar to the way that innovative musical structures and contents can create extreme dissonance and unsettle a listener bodily, music’s socio-critical function can likewise unsettle our cultural complacencies and dulled moral sensitivities. His strong stance on the objectivity of musical value, which has been highly criticized, does not sit well with his insistence on music’s conventional and progressive nature.

For Attali, the relation between music and power is brought front and center. Music is a site of struggle in which voices are always fighting to be heard. The mass production of music—its commodification—slowly eradicates the human elements of music. Paradoxically, the excess of musical products and the resultant repetition and “sameness” of commodified music both silences music and deafens society. Consequently, Attali calls for a return to the humanity of music, to its communal, personal, and difference affirming origins. Likewise, we must recover the activity of attentive listening, of hearing the complex timbres and tones of the world and the other. If we would but listen, music has much to say about how to establish harmonious, difference-affirming relations between individuals and collectives, freedom and constraint—themes central to social and political theory and practice.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno make an interesting and somewhat unexpected connection between the structure of Kantian philosophy and culture industry. According to Kant, the transcendental subject constitutes objects of experience. This means that we provide the laws structuring reality. In other words, given that we bring a priori the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding to the chaos “out there”and thus constitute the objects of possible experience, it turns out that the experience of the transcendental subject is in a sense circular. Here Horkheimer and Adorno see a parallel with culture industry.  For example,Hollywood film producers present us with images bestowing meaning. That is, the producer endows the images with certain structures, thus constituting them as does the Kantian subject. Prior to the film being made, the producer and his colleagues get together and decide what precisely people will want to see. Thus, in our movie experience, we encounter objects of experience pre-constituted by the director and his/her team based on perceived cultural values (in this case, cultural values/interests that sell). So the system of the Enlightenment (a system of theoretical thought) and the “system” of culture come to be self-contained. Consider how this cultural constitution or, in more poststructuralist language, construction of social reality and subjectivities impacts our daily life. From the construction of the “terrorist-other” whom we are supposed to fear and hate to what it is to be “feminine” or “masculine,” we are constantly bombarded with competing discourses, social customs, and practices, all of which shape our perceptions of ourselves, our relation to the other, our roles, the “place” of others, and so forth.

Revisiting the theme of enlightenment rationality as “purely functional,” Horkheimer and Adorno explain that this is a logical end.  Why? Because with the de(con)struction, dismissal and death of a telos connected to rationality, reason becomes functional or instrumental.  As a result, enlightenment does away with difference or alterity. Interestingly, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analyses and conclusions are very much in harmony with insights foregrounded by postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Heidegger. Because reason no longer has any goals outside itself, pure reason moves increasingly toward unreason as there is nothing regulating this “emptied out” rationality. (Of course, Foucault would not claim that this is a necessary movement). This is part of the dialectic of enlightenment; it drives its self-critique such that the basis of its own rationality is destroyed. Only after enlightenment has eliminated all, then (according to enlightenment theory), we have acceptable meaning. This is reminiscent of certain—not all of course—expressions of analytic philosophy, wherein philosophy becomes completely irrelevant to human existence.  Here thought is meaningful only after the sacrifice of meaning. The result of this formalization of reason means that since there are no external criteria (but only internal criteria), this hollowed-out rationality can then be used positively or negatively. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, this is the kind of rationality employed for example, in fascism, as well as Marquis de Sade. De Sade, as Horkheimer and Adorno would be quick to emphasize, is not illogical, but rather thinks with amazing clarity and has understood that enlightenment thinking accepts no tradition or external values; thus, it can come up with its own rationality and can eliminate pity, compassion, and the like. So de Sade can set up narratives of dissoluteness, engage in violence against women and others, and at the same time can present a “coherent” system. Examples such as these support the authors’ thesis that with the ushering in of instrumental, hollow enlightened rationality, “pure reason becomes unreason.”

In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, on the one hand, that enlightenment emerges from myth, and on the other hand, that enlightenment  can (and does) return back to myth.[1] “Myth” in this context refers to something like Homeric myth. As the authors explain, “[f]alse clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once.”[2]With “false clarity” they point to the idea that reason alone is insufficient, always falling short, and when reason fails to recognize its short-comings, we then revert back to myth. Stately slightly differently, myth or regression in tradition consists in “false clarity,” which is in essence inadequate reflection.  Thus, on Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s account, it seems that to revert to myth necessarily involves some kind of failure of reason.

The core thesis of the book is a kind of Foucauldian power/knowledge thesis. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, reason was invented from myth (it emerged in Homer) and is used to control nature. Critics of this view, such as Louis Dupré, would agree that modern reason has indeed been downgraded to a mere calculative, instrumental reason; however, on Dupré’s reading, this devolution occurred in the historical period we call the Enlightenment. Thus, we have two different analyses of the Western tradition: (1) Dupré view, which is the “traditional” position or “rupture theory” and (2) Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s thesis, which is often called the “continuity thesis (Nietzsche and Heidegger hold variations on the “continuity thesis”).  The latter interpretation says, in effect, “don’t stop with modernity; rather, one must go all the way back to Homer and to the Greeks. Of course, different variations of the story point to different villains as the culprits leading us astray. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the ancient Greeks are more manipulative and destructive (i.e., “mastering”) than one might think. In addition, the authors claim that the “turn to the self” did not come about with Descartes, but rather it emerged with myth; thus, the “self” concept has been increasingly strengthened over time. Those disagreeing with this variation of the continuity thesis might counter by pointing to a Greek figure such as Aristotle and claiming that his desire to obtain knowledge is driven by admiration and wonder rather than in a desire for power and mastery over nature. However, someone else might point to Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery and his negative (i.e. extremely misogynistic) view of women and mount a convincing argument that knowledge and power were in fact intimately connected in Aristotle’s mythic views of the “inferior” others in Greek society.

A second thesis of the book is that with enlightenment (as understood in this text) we fine a kind of embedded tendency towards self-destruction. For example, in the historical period called the Enlightenment, every established view that has not yet justified itself through reason is challenged. For example, Descartes with his methodological doubt proclaims that we must wipe away all past views, established traditions, and so forth in order to begin anew and eventually found a system upon some “solid,” indubitable foundation. With Kant we likewise find similar sentiments, as he makes the bold claim that prior to him metaphysics did not exist!

By the time the positivists come along, this ethos in particular, in reference to God is basically, “if you cannot define God, then don’t talk about him.” Given this analysis, Horkheimer and Adorno say that rationality becomes functional. In Kant, “pure reason” has no content and exemplifies functional, calculating rationality. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, we end up with a “self-castration” of reason. Reason deprives itself of all power with the result that all it can do is describe “facts.” Once the content is emptied, there is no basis for critique. Enlightenment, then, is a relapse into myth and now we just describe the “facts” and have statistics. Summing up this picture, Horkheimer and Adorno write,

In the authority of universal concepts the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties. For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.[3]

Thus, we have a kind of totalitarianism applied to thought. That is, enlightenment is totalizing as only a function can be. Numbers and quantities are the name of the game.

For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.[4]

Functionalized instrumental reason has no content; the demythologizing, however, as postmodern thinkers highlight repeatedly, creates its own mythologies. “False clarity is only another name for myth.”[5]

Is it possible to overcome the dialectic of enlightenment? First, Horkheimer and Adorno point to the necessity of enlightenment to reflect on itself.[6] The problem is that the Enlightenment itself is characterized by a spirit of critique; yet, it fails to critique itself. So first we must subject the Enlightenment to its own critique. A second problem with the Enlightenment is that it swallows up particularity. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that reality itself (as well as the language we use to discourse about reality) is composed of irresolvable tensions.[7] Here they employ a Hegelian idea, viz., if one analyzes a concept, it can first come into existence only by denial (negation). The concept is the beginning of the dialectical process, not the endpoint. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectic of enlightenment is a problem, but dialectic itself is not. After all, dialectic subjects language and rationality to critique and causes it to recognize its own shortcomings and limitations.

Of course, the Enlightenment itself was not a homogenous movement.  There were non-traditional and marginalized voices, figures such as Frantz Fanon whose critique of the false and exclusive narratives of the Enlightenment have much to add to this conversation. (For more on Fanon’s critical engagement with Enlightenment thinkers and his notion of a “new humanism,” see this series.).

Lastly, given the current state of affairs politically and economically in the West and this country in particular, I shall leave you with this passage as “food for thought.” Does anyone hear Foucauldian (or other) resonances here? If so, which? Is a similar situation playing itself out at present? If yes (or no or yes and no), please elaborate, as I would love to hear your thoughts.

The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in the face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them.[8]