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Government in Foucault

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Barry Allen
Barry Allen*
Affiliation:
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, CanadaL8S 4K1
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Extract

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. (Foucault [SP, 224])

According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 421 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 References to Foucault’s work are parenthetically abbreviated as follows:

DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon 1979).

G ‘Governmentality,’ Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979) 5-21.

HS The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage 1980).

PF ‘Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,’ in Bernauer, J. and Rasmussen, D. eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press 1988) 1-20.Google Scholar

PK Power/Knuwledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Gorden, C. ed. (New York: Pantheon 1980).Google Scholar

PPC Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, Kritzman, L.D. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell 1988)Google Scholar.

QM ‘Questions of Method,’ Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981) 3-14.

SP ‘The Subject and Power,’ in Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 208-26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Habermas, Jürgen The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987), 249.Google Scholar Habermas cannot make up his mind. Elsewhere he says, ‘By contrast [to Nietzsche and Bataille], Foucault borrows his concept of power from the empiricist tradition’ (284-5).

3 Taylor, Charles ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth,’ in Hoy, D.C. ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell 1986), 93Google Scholar

4 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, W. (New York: Vintage 1967), III.27Google Scholar

5 Deleuze, Gilles Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988), 71Google Scholar

6 Megill, Allan Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 241, 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Merquior, J.G. Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 99, 142-3.Google Scholar Among the few who have objected to this assimilation, Gary Gutting points out that there is ‘no basis for moving from Foucault’s obvious admiration for Nietzsche to the conclusion that he espouses relativism or skepticism’ (Michel, Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989], 277).Google Scholar

8 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage 1974), 228Google Scholar

9 As the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals (1887) demonstrates, this interest in the question of truth’s value remained part of Nietzsche’s work throughout the 1880s. For earlier work on truth, see Breazeale, D. ed., Philosophy and Truth: A Selection from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1979).Google Scholar Clark, Maudemarie has studied the development of Nietzsche’s view of truth; see Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).Google Scholar

10 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Ill.27; emphasis addedGoogle Scholar.

11 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Kaufmann, W. ed. (New York: Vintage Books 1967), 1065Google Scholar

12 I develop this argument in ‘Nietzsche’s Question, What Good is Truth?’ History of Philosophy Quarterly (forthcoming 1992).

13 See Ullmann, Walter A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1965), esp. 15-18.Google Scholar

14 Even one of Foucault’s critics from the Left confirms that Marxism cannot easily claim to have broken with this representation: ‘When all the recent complications of Marxist political theory are taken into account the figure of the ruling class can still be discerned insistently playing the same unifying function with respect to what counts as political…[as the] Princes, Sovereigns, Legislators, etc. play in classical political theory’ (Jeff Minson, ‘Strategies for Socialists? Foucault’s Conception of Power,’ in M. Gane, ed., Towards a Critique of Foucault [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul1986], 111).

15 The endless comparison of Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ or ‘history of the present’ to Nietzsche’s argumentation in Genealogy of Morals overlooks the key difference: Nietzsche’s speculative anthropology terminates in a primal origin. In this it resembles Freud’s anthropology, yet has no more than an equivocal name in common with Foucault’s, approach to the history of thought, which explicitly aims ‘to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism,’ freeing the history of thought from ‘that circle of the lost origin’ (The Archaeology of Knowledge [New York: Harper & Row 1972], 203).Google Scholar

16 The basic analysis of this history is in Discipline and Punish, 170-94 and 293-308. The argument is elaborated at HS, 135-50, and in these three lectures: ‘Governmentality’; ‘The Dangerous Individual’ (PPC, 121-51); and ‘The Political Technology of Individuals,’ in Martin, L.H. et al., eds., Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988) 145-62.Google Scholar Crucial details are examined in ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’ (PI, 166-82). Also see Donzelot, Jacques The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon 1979).Google Scholar On pre-modern political ‘representation’ the earlier (1962) work of Habermas, (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989),Google Scholar section 2), confirms Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish, Part One. Canguilhem, Georges has shown how from its beginning psychological research into reaction time, motivation, learning, and the measurement of aptitudes aimed at results useful for the management of individual differences in industry, military, and public administration. See ‘What is Psychology?’ Ideology and Consciousness 7 (1980) 37-50.Google Scholar

17 Ian Hacking shows how from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the concept of ’the normal state’ wandered from pathology to populations in the work of Comte, Durkheim, and Galton, (The Taming of Chance [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990]).Google Scholar

18 See the studies collected in Haskell, T.L. ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984).Google Scholar

19 Beniger, J.R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986), vGoogle Scholar

20 Rouse, Joseph Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1987), 246-7.Google Scholar The term ‘technoscience’ is from Latour, Bruno Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1987).Google Scholar

21 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 290

22 Gould, Carol Marx’s, Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1978), 136Google Scholar

23 Deleuze, 30. This remark concludes the best pages of Deleuze’s study (24-30).

24 These are the points of the Second and Third Sections respectively of Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).

25 Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1934), 576;Google Scholar James, William Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1978), 97, 37;Google Scholar Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III.27. I elaborate on this criticism of James in ‘Work on Truth in America: The Example of Wm James,’ Studies in Puritan American Spirituality (forthcoming 1992).

26 Freud, ’Resistances to Psychoanalysis’ (1925) (Harmondsworth: Pelican Freud Library 1986), vol. 15, 271.Google Scholar On the ars erotica, also see Foucault, ’On the Genealogy of Ethics,’ in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 234-5. On the relation from truth and sexuality, besides the three volumes of Foucault’s, History of Sexuality one may now refer to Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990).Google Scholar A more specialized study is Brown, Peter The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press 1988).Google Scholar On post-Freudian developments, see the two papers by André Béjin, ’The Decline of the Psychoanalyst’ and ‘The Sexologists and Sexual Democracy,’ in Ariés, P. and Béjin, A. eds., Western Sexuality (Oxford: Blackwell 1985) 180-217.Google Scholar

27 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,History of Sexuality vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon 1985), 3Google Scholar

28 Plato, Laws 730; Republic 382

29 See my ‘Nietzsche’s Question, What Good is Truth?’

30 Wright Mills, C. ‘On Knowledge and Power,’ in Horowitz, I. L. ed., Power, Politics and People, Collected Essays of Wright Mills, C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963), 611.Google Scholar Originally published in Dissent (1955).

31 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 120, emphasis added; and QM, 8-9. He continues: ‘Of course this is a problem of philosophy to which the historian is entitled to remain indifferent. But if I am posing a problem within historical analysis, I’m not demanding that history answer it.. .it’s a matter of…a nominalist critique formulated elsewhere but by way of a historical analysis.’

32 I thank the Editors for constructive and encouraging criticism. Portions of this paper were read to the Canadian Philosophical Association at its 1990 annual meeting. I thank Kathym Morgan for commenting.