Abstract:In this paper, I confront a paradox at the center of Foucault's philosophy. On the one hand, Foucault's is a philosophy of freedom par excellence: it both presupposes that we are free agents and aims to expose actual patterns of thinking and states of affairs as contingent so as to allow for more such freedom. 1 On the other hand, certain of Foucault's central claims, if true, would seem to entail that human freedom is nothing more than an illusion. 2 In particular, Foucault's claim about the omnipresence and … Show more
“…But more damaging still is the way typical postmodern claims -that subjects are too unstable or fragmented in their identities, too opaque in their self-knowledge and too nonrational in their thinking to sustain personal commitments or collective identifications; that there is no essential inner self, repository of freedom, will, identity or autonomy; that subjectivity is merely an effect of power or performative iteration; that history has no overall meaning or direction -have made it extremely difficult to envisage what kind of political agency could even in principle materialise and what its motivations or ambitions might be. This has indeed been the gist of widespread concerns among postmodernism's opponents and has puzzled even friendly critics of poststructuralists like Butler or Foucault (for example, Hanssen, 2000;McNay, 1992McNay, , 2000Weberman, 2000;Lovell, 2003). For when the latter famously wrote that the 'individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an "ideological" representation of society, but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called "discipline" ' (Foucault, 1977, p. 194), he called the distinguishing marks of agency itself into question by redefining subjectification as synonymous with subjection.…”
Section: Context and Problematicmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…19, 33). But a better solution to the 'Foucault paradox' (Weberman, 2000) may lie in resisting temptations to seek an agent as responsible for subjective or political effects. Instead, Foucault would have been trying to describe variable agentic capacities that emerge (or not) within a field that is in principle complex, porous, productive and open (although vulnerable to closure through domination).…”
Section: Structural Logics: the Agentic Properties Of The Transpersonalmentioning
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre‐ personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency‐structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this.
“…But more damaging still is the way typical postmodern claims -that subjects are too unstable or fragmented in their identities, too opaque in their self-knowledge and too nonrational in their thinking to sustain personal commitments or collective identifications; that there is no essential inner self, repository of freedom, will, identity or autonomy; that subjectivity is merely an effect of power or performative iteration; that history has no overall meaning or direction -have made it extremely difficult to envisage what kind of political agency could even in principle materialise and what its motivations or ambitions might be. This has indeed been the gist of widespread concerns among postmodernism's opponents and has puzzled even friendly critics of poststructuralists like Butler or Foucault (for example, Hanssen, 2000;McNay, 1992McNay, , 2000Weberman, 2000;Lovell, 2003). For when the latter famously wrote that the 'individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an "ideological" representation of society, but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called "discipline" ' (Foucault, 1977, p. 194), he called the distinguishing marks of agency itself into question by redefining subjectification as synonymous with subjection.…”
Section: Context and Problematicmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…19, 33). But a better solution to the 'Foucault paradox' (Weberman, 2000) may lie in resisting temptations to seek an agent as responsible for subjective or political effects. Instead, Foucault would have been trying to describe variable agentic capacities that emerge (or not) within a field that is in principle complex, porous, productive and open (although vulnerable to closure through domination).…”
Section: Structural Logics: the Agentic Properties Of The Transpersonalmentioning
Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre‐ personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency‐structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this.
“…In Foucault, this positivism is reflected in the way he stages the subject–state relation as a contest over freedom: ‘power’, Foucault states,is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are ‘free’ … at the heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. (Foucault , 342; my emphasis; also see Weberman ; Kelly )…”
This paper develops the concept of negative governance, an idea that describes (1) a unique and specific modality of governance and (2) a way to think about the concept of governance in general. In terms of the former, negative governance describes a way of governing that works by refusing to govern. This refusal is not simply a denial of state provision (since this assumes a governing agent), but a denial of state management. Negative governance is a system of governing paradoxically predicated on the withdrawal of all positive procedures of state and a delegation of power to those forces that are by definition outside the state's capacities. It governs by allowing ‘life itself’ – life in all is chaotic unpredictability – to rule. In terms of the latter, negative governance raises questions about the origins of governance. Specifically, it asks ‘what is it that calls for governance?’ My answer is that the ‘call to govern’ emanates from a place wholly outside the state and the state's own representational logic. Expanding upon Levinas’ concept of the elemental, I argue that the state is not the agent that makes subjects vulnerable. On the contrary, vulnerability is a human condition: the body demands food, our loved ones come and go, death is always present. It is this basic vulnerability that calls for governance. And government is a response to this negative condition.
“…While the structural features of a subject—i.e., having beliefs and desires, having the capacity to choose and so on (Weberman , 258)—may result in the duplication of social relations whereby the individual is merely an effect of power, the insertion of a self in the process of subjectivation can offset such disciplinary and normalizing effects. By critically engaging the forces that affect her subjectivation, an individual can resist the imposition of identities that discipline her and thus allow new forms of subjectivities to emerge.…”
The authors take up Amy Allen's suggestion that while Foucault's work may be able to support a certain type of self-critique and self-development, it does not permit the kind of interpersonal relations that are necessary for the development of intersubjective meaning in struggles against imposed identities. The authors contend that for Foucault, relations of 'truth' play an important constitutive role in subjectivities, and that understanding the 'politics of ourselves' in the context of this truth shows not only an openness to meaningful interpersonal relations, but also that these relations are capable of generating the conceptual and normative resources necessary for resisting socially imposed subjectivities. The authors present such an account of intersubjective relations based on Foucault's discussion of parrhesia, and develop a model of collaborative political action that addresses the criticisms raised.In her recent book, The Politics of Our Selves, Amy Allen takes as her point of departure Foucault's remark at the conclusion of the 1980 lectures at Dartmouth College that the politics of ourselves is one of the main political problems today (1993, 223). Allen notes, however, that just what Foucault meant by the phrase 'the politics of ourselves' is ambiguous. For her, such a Russell Anderson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. His research focuses on the character of ethical agency, specifically the negotiation of constructivist and evolutionary approaches, and reads Foucault as a figure who is well-equipped to navigate this terrain and suggest new strategies for thinking about ethics and agents. Russell is particularly interested in how these debates bear upon concepts of freedom and empathy. He further maintains an interest in problems related to addiction and recovery, as well as naturalistic and anthropological approaches to philosophy. James Wong is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. His current research focuses on first, questions stemming from Michel Foucault's discussion of the 'care of the self,' with particular emphasis on matters about autonomy and relations with others; and second, on issues about epistemic pluralism and epistemic exclusion from the recent works of Helen Longino, Philip Kitcher and Miranda Fricker. 1
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