Question, ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment

This art icle was downloaded by: [ t he Bodleian Libraries of t he Universit y of Oxford] On: 29 July 2014, At : 08: 53 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Economy and Society Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ reso20 Question, ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment Colin Gordon Published online: 24 May 2006. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Question. ethos. event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Colin Gordon This was one of the last pieces which Foucault published; it was also the first time since his inaugural lecture given in 1970 that an excerpt from one of his Colltge de France lectures appeared in print in France.' The place of publication was in a dossier of articles edited for the Magazine litttraire by Foucault's former assistant Fran~oisEwald, on the occasion of the appearance of the two further volumes of Foucault's Histo y of Sexuality. The topic of the lecture was one which Foucault had long felt to be close to the heart of his work. The published transcript is itself only a fragment. The closer reading of Kant's essay on Enlightenment which Foucault promises is missing here; the gap is filled, however, by another related essay by Foucault entitled 'Vdhat is Enlightenment?', in Paul Rabinow's American Foucault R e ~ d e r These .~ two pieces are best read together. Foucault had discussed Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' on more than one previous occasion: among these were his Prefaces to L'Ere des ruptures, a book of memoirs by Jean Daniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, and to the English translation of The Georges Canguilhem's The Normal and the Path~logical.~ theme reappears in some interesting later texts published in , an interview America: the essay 'The Subject and P ~ w e r ' ~and with Gerard Raulet (notable for some fresh and stimulating remarks on the course of twentieth-century philosophy and the intellectual antecedents of his own work), published in Telos under the inappropriate title 'Structuralism and Post-str~cturalism'.~ A point which emerges in several of these discussions is Foucault's recognition that the affiliation on his own work to the theme of Kant's historic question has been shared by a group of contemporary thinkers with whom he feels a paradoxical kinship: the Frankfurt School. Foucault expressed a lively regret that their work had been ignored or unknown in France during the earlier part of his career. In his later years of teaching in America he undoubtedly became forcibly aware of the unfavourable view taken of his own Economy and Society Volume 15 Number 1 February 1986 O R.K.P. 1986 0308-5147/86/1501-0071 82.00 Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 72 Colin Gordon work by later Frankfurt thinkers such as Jdrgen Habermas. A number of his later occasional essays and interviews document Foucault's desire to explain himself in such a way as to dissipate these misunderstandings and t o facilitate a more open philosophical dialogue with his American colleagues; this effort of explanation converges, in turn, with the later evolution of his own studies and preoccupations. The present piece became, within a few weeks of its publication, the principal theme of an obituary article by Habermas which showed an unaccustomed sympathy and (within certain limitations) understanding for the intentions of Foucault's thought. Foucault remarks that Kant's reflections on the philosophy of the present centre on two objects: Reason or Enlightenment, and Revolution. Foucault's own developments on Kant's theme share this double focus, even if the meaning of each, of their connection, and of the respective resonances of Kant's originating insights are altered - and this not only or mainly through an effect of ironic distancing, but with a sense of tellingly apposite recurrence. In his preface to Canguilhem, Foucault views the differing repercussions of Kant's question of Enlightenment as developing along diverging paths in German and French philosophy: in the former, as dialectical philosophy, sociology and Marxism, and in the latter through positivism and the philosophy of science; but these trajectories issue in a parallel preoccupation of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and the epistemology of Bachelard and Canguilhem with 'examining a reason, the autonomy of whose structures carries with it a history of dogmatism and despotism - a reason, consequently, which can have an effect of emancipation on condition that it manages to liberate itself from itself. Reflection on the impact of technology, the fate of revolutions and the twilight of colonialism prompt converging doubts on the meaning of Western rationality. 'Two centuries later, the Enlightenment returns: but now not at all as a way for the West to take cognizance of its present possibilities and of the liberties to which it can accede, but as a way of interrogating it on its limits and on the powers which it has abused. Reason as despotic enlightenment.'6 Foucault writes here of Kant and Mendelssohn as inaugurating by their articles on Enlightenment a modern genre of 'philosophical journalism'. In his preface t o Jean Daniel's book, he comments on the experiences of a political journalist of the independent Left encountering the events and upheavals of the last two decades and the changes of thinking, opinion or attachment which these have inspired. The generational experience which Foucault singles out most strikingly is not that of the floridly histrionic spectacle of doctrinal conversions and decon- Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 73 versions, but rather a mutation in the problem of political identity as such. The independent Left made up of those who had left the Communist Party, whose dissenting convictions needed to be defined and sustained without effective recourse to a bureaucratic or doctrinal apparatus, represented in the 1950s a choice inseparable from the imperative of struggle for a basis of collective existence and expression. By the 1970s, Foucault suggests, the imperatives had changed: the pressing question was no longer 'how can we exist?', but 'who are we?' 'The heroism of political identity has had its day. What one is has now become a question one poses, moment by moment, to the problems one encounters. Experiments with, rather than engagement in." The moral issue which Foucault is raising here is not that of whether we should change or remain unchanged, but rather that of how it is possible for us to hold on to liberty and truth in our ways of changing and not changing. The point is surely well taken. What is more ethically debilitating in the habitus of the orthodox left that the ways real change is covered up by a show of perpetual consistency, or (what is more frequent) immobility face-lifted by a noisy charade of fundamental critique and iconoclasm. Foucault's interests in the linkages between thought, conduct and event posed in Kant's essays are, among other things, a way of continuing this reflection. The ways in which he reads the Kantian texts presents them as speaking, explicitly or implicitly, to the political experiences of our recent past. Around 1970 Foucault was involved in discussion of what a desirable revolution could be like and how it might be possible. This already signified an awareness - t o put it in the terms Foucault cites here from Kant - that some revolutions have not been worth repeating; and a sense of the contradictory nature of the will to a revolution which would only be a repetition. Around 1980 he seems - in common with many of his contemporaries - to have reached a profound scepticism as to whether any possible revolution could, at least in our own societies, be a desirable one. Publicly laconic or reticent though Foucault generally preferred to remain about these matters, to ignore them entirely would surely be to deprive the present lecture of a good part of its point. Take the passages in Kant which Foucault singles out for quotation: never mind whether the revolution succeeds or fails, never mind if a sane person would never try to repeat it, what matters about the revolution is something other than the revolution itself, namely the 'wishful participation bordering closely on enthusiasm' of its audience: their enthusiasm, and not the gesticulations of the revolutionaries; and the question which, for Foucault, becomes thus bound up for a part of modern Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 74 Colin Gordon philosophy with the question of Enlightenment: what is to be made of the enthusiasm for revolution; what is to be made of it, more particularly, if the revolution itself is not desirable? This latter question can be read as stating a constant, rather than a variable factor of recent political experience. The political consciousness which announced itself in 1968 - that of what one might call a free Left, something not quite to be identified with the New Left - and for which in France Foucault became, in effect, the representative philosopher, amounted in its essence to nothing more or less than a confronting of that question. The euphoric paradox of May 1968 was, precisely, that of a 'revolution' consisting ultimately in nothing beyond or other than 'enthusiasm for revolution'. All the struggles of the following decade were, in so far as they escaped the Leninist or Maoist mould, attempted liberations of the energy of revolution from revolution as plan, general staff, strategic totalisation: signs, if one may thus borrow Foucault's paraphrase of Kant, of a 'disposition' towards liberty unguessed at by politicians. 'No matter whether all this was Utopian; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at its face value and turned back against the system which was bent on controlling it.'8 The question concerning these experiences which Foucault's last discussions continue to address, with due prudence and sobriety, at a time when much may seem to have 'fallen back into the former rut', is: can they still provide the basis of a consistent political rationality which is distinct from - even, in a sense, the opposite of - the traditional ethos of revolution? Kant's own answers to his question about Enlightenment command Foucault's attentive interest and respect, but it is in the question itself that Foucault finds the most precious clue for his own thinking. The pertinence today of the question of Enlightenment follows, in part, from a questioning of a hope of Revolution which had itself been 'borne by a rationalism of which one is entitled to ask what part it may have played in the effects of despotism in which that hope lost itself .g Hence the Enlightenment, considered as a decisive event, choice or tendency in human history, becomes for us, as did the Revolution for Kant, an ambiguous undertaking, liable to succeed or t o miscarry, or t o succeed at unacceptable cost. Kant distinguishes between revolution as event and the enthusiasm for revolution which is the true and sure sign of progress. Foucault distinguishes between an Enlightenment of sure identity, conviction and destiny, and an Enlightenment which is question and questioning, which is cornmitment t o uncertainty. Foucault reads in Kant's original formulation Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 75 of what Enlightenment is a permanent possibility of questioning what subsequently comes of Enlightenment: conversely, he discards from Kant's inaugural perception of specific philosophical meaning in the content of the present moment the decisive valorising judgement of that content as portentous of a definitive and unambiguous event in the history of humanity, man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. What Foucault recognises and retains in this perception is something rather different: a reflexivity of the contingent and the inessential in the time and in ourselves. Nearly two decades ago Foucault published a laudatory review of Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Enlightenment in which he wrote that all modern thought is, in a sense, neo-Kantian.I0 In The Order of Things, the special significance attributed to Kant's philosophy is its coordination of critique with anthropology." The critical philosophy is designed as an education of reason towards enlightenment and release from its self-incurred tutelage. The questions addressed in his Critiques lead, Kant tells us, t o a further question which recapitulates them: What is Man? 'What is our present? Who are we, as beings in and of our present?' 'What is man?' Must the former questions still lead us to the latter one? May they modify the meaning we accord it? It would be a gross simplification to represent Foucault's attitude to the configuration of these questions in Kant's thought as a pure polemical refusal. Foucault objects to the identification of Enlightenment - in general, and so by implication in Kant - with humanism. He sees in Kant's 'pragmatic' anthropology a hint of possibilities beyond what had been dreamt of in the critical philosophy and quite different from the paths followed after Kant by the human sciences.12 Foucault himself remained profoundly attached throughout his career to the development of a cert?in notion of critique: some of his last comments on this theme formulate his agreement and disagreement with Kant in a way which also clarifies his attitude t o the questions of anthropology. 'Criticism indeed consists of analysing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must abstain from transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what part is taken up by things which are actually singular, contingent, the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression . . . criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the pursuit of formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us t o constitute ourselves and recognise Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 76 Colin Gordon ourselves as subjects of what we do, think and say.'13 Such a critique 'will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce, from the form of what we are, what it is possible for us to do and t o know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, or do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking t o give new impetus, as far and as wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.'14 Or, as Foucault puts it in 'The Subject and Power', 'maybe the point nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.'15 So large a part of the New Left generation has become accustomed over the years to support its positions by reference to a discourse of identity - whether in a recovered memory of class, a Freudian 'theory of the subject', or a pure parade of doctrinal conformity - that it is advisable to emphasise the otherwise obvious point that an ethic of 'refusing what we are' does not mean a mere leap into the void, an immoralism of the gratuitous act. In the first place, the form of freedom which Foucault envisages requires a form of knowledge obtainable only by means of exacting historical and political investigation: tasks to which Foucault himself devoted a certain effort. To interpret the relation between freedom and knowledge in Foucault as antinomic is a symptom of anorexic thought. 'What we are' nearly always connotes in Foucault's discussion the component of the taken-for-granted in our thoughts, actions and selves: the questioning of 'what we are' in the name of a principle of permanent contingency demands that vigorous appetite for facts which Ian Hacking so justly recognises in Foucault.16 In the second place, the question of 'what we are' enfolds within its apparently naive simplicity a rich complex of historicopolitical issues, a vast knot of recurrences and relativisations. The passage quoted above reminds us of the mutual implication in Foucault's thinking of the question of the present and the 'history of the present', the term which he employs in Discipline and Punish to describe his own dtmarche and which has sufficiently often been seen as the motto-theme of his work for scholarly trouble to have been taken to document instances of its prior use by others. And these latter findings are themselves of more than anecdotal interest because, firstly, the history of the question of the present (or, t o use Nietzsche's word, of 'genealogy') is itself a significant element in the history of the present, and secondly, the investigation of what we are by recourse t o a history of the present has become itself one of the traditions of modernity, a significant institution of our culture. The history of the genealogical genre Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 77 has yet t o be written. Without Foucault we might not even have become aware of its lack; this blind spot of our intellectual culture may be one of the reasons why so much difficulty is still being found in placing Foucault's work relative to other, more familiar landmarks. This problem cannot be adequately dealt with here; but the topic of the present note demands that it be paid at least a cursory glance. The genealogical connection considerably intensifies the paradoxes entailed in Foucault's ability to recognise his own problems in Kant's question. At the same time, the content of that recognition only becomes evident in its full singularity when note is taken of Foucault's highly distinctive relationship to the genealogical tradition. The relationship between the practice of genealogy and the question of Enlightenment has of course always been charged with polemic. The genealogical attitude is almost synonymous with mistrust of Enlightenment; genealogical narration is an inverse, a post-mortem, a satire of the Enlightenment's prospectuses of progress. Moreover, in contrast to what Foucault remarks on as an element of novelty in Kant's mode of reflection on the meaning of the present time, it has the effect of replacing the theme of Enlightenment within a style of historical questioning which the question of Enlightenment had thought to supplant: Augustinian exegeses of the time for signs of an impending event, or of the end of all things; debates on the ruin of empires; disputes on the meaning of modernity as prosperity or decadence. On the whole it may be said that the specific genre of genealogy, of a question of the present linked to a history of the present, seldom coexists with revolutionary thought. Its representatives tend, where politically classifiable at all, to belong within a broadly liberal tradition or, if of the Left, to represent a heterodox minority standpoint. In their different ways both Foucault and the Frankfurt School are exceptions who confirm this rule. By far the most brilliant and concentrated outburst of genealogical thought in the present century would seem to have been due to the German and Austrian emigration of 1933 and after. The history of the present here assumes the most compelling of all its modern forms as reflection on the causes of present catastrophe. Cssirer in Gothenburg with TheMyth of the State, Hayek in London with The Road to Serfdom, Adorno and Horkheimer in America with Dialectic of Enlightenment, Karl Polanyi in England and America with The Great Transformation, Benjamin in Paris with the 'Theses' and the Passagenarbeit, Riistow in Istanbul with Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart are among the lastingly significant thinkers for whom the German disaster compels, on the one hand a new forensic edge in the interrogation of the past for evidence of the negation of progress, Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 78 Colin Gordon and on the other a harsher judgement on present, undiagnosed trends and propensities, even within the surviving democracies, which prepare or facilitate the totalitarian dkbacle. But at the same time it must be noted that, especially within the liberal tradition, this semiology of catastrophe (linked, as its preventative counterpart, to a prophylactic fundamentalism) is not the sole or overriding version of all genealogical thought. Alongside it and sometimes overlapping with it is the different and more classical mode represented by Tocqueville, Weber or Schumpeter, which might instead be called a permanent pragmatics of survival, oriented to the longer-term identification of historic trends which may be irreversible in character and may impose inescapable costs and intrinsic, though finite risks. The difference, not so much in political partisanship as in ideological tonality, between the conclusions adduced by a Weber or Schumpeter on the one side, and a Hayek on the other, may be related, at least in part, t o this difference in genealogical style. Weber, for all the ethical and polemical vehemence of his contemporary diagnoses, writes within an overall perspective such that the probable future of capitalist bureaucracy promises to be only marginally more appealing than that of a socialist bureaucracy. The later Schumpeter judges that the requirement for the survival of a rational economic system imposes the grave but, in the last analysis, bearable necessity of a transition to socialism. In either case, the analysis addresses the endogenous hazards and necessities of a system, not the unrecognised incursions of an alien, pathological mutation. The neo-liberal Friedrich Hayek performs, on the other hand, a tour de force in the paradoxicalprophetic genre by warning the British that their wartime recourse t o a kind of state-socialism may eventually lead them involuntarily to repeat the political fate of Germany and Austria. This (doubtless partial and oversimplified) contrast may help us t o specify the particular style of genealogy practiced by Foucault. What has just been said may already indicate one obvious singularity of Foucault's work, namely that it is one of the relatively few contributions to genealogical thinking to have been produced since the great generation of the German-Austrian exiles. It may well be that the sceptical view often taken of genealogical discourse in recent decades has to do with the sense that it has been too exclusively bound up with the experience of political catastrophe, itself symptomatic as well as diagnostic of the cultural traumas of totalitarianism and exile, too lurid or unbalanced in its conclusions to minister acceptably to the concerns of more stable polities. Some of the English-speaking critical response to Foucault's work may be a reflection of these views. Another contributory factor which cannot be explored here is Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 79 the coincidence of Foucault's later work with the curiously delayed peak of impact on Western thinking of the testimony of exiled witnesses of another great political catastrophe of the twentieth century: the Soviet and East European dissidents. The description of a seventeenth-century 'Great Internment' in his Histoire de la Folie (1961) seems likely to have evoked undesirable modern associations for Foucault's French Communist readers. The Gulag Archipelago began to appear in 1973 ;Foucault's Discipline and Punish coined the term 'carceral archipelago' to characterise certain institutions of nineteenth-century French society. But Foucault himself was always both scrupulous and lucid in circumscribing the proper ways in which the (re)discovery of the facts of Soviet history can and should be a proper object of moral and political reflection in the West.17 Despite the violent counter-literature which his own diagnostic conclusions have provoked from some quarters, it needs to be emphasised that they actually issue from a genealogical approach which is in many ways closer (if I may once again be permitted for a moment t o abstract from these thinkers' respective political commitments) t o that of a Weber or Schumpeter than t o that of aHayek. Foucault is not a Cassandra; his works do not warn of an impending catastrophe or the repetition of an accomplished catastrophe. Foucault is not writing in external or internal exile but, at worst, in conditions of limited political adversity. The potential point of issue in reality for his analyses is not constrained to the vast detours of ethical conversion and reconstruction prescribed by the reflections of the German exiles, but lies in the possibility of existing and proximate forms of political action: specifically, the 'local struggles' current during the 1970s. One can see here how Foucault's celebrated 'microphysical' method of analysis goes hand in hand with a modification of previous genealogical approaches: the possibility of focussing powerful analytical resources on detailed, localised problems demands an ability to interrogate the present without recourse to apocalyptic meta-narratives, a more sophisticated and discriminating means of dissecting the contradictions of rationality than traditional dialectic has generally allowed. In this respect, and more particularly in terms of our understanding of his interest in Kant's question of Enlightenment and his attitude to philosophical anthropology, Foucault's sense of affinity with Weber may, as Pasquale Pasquino has recently suggested, reward further scrutiny.'' One of Foucault's few direct comments on Weber was made in the course of an exceptionally interesting series of lectures in 1979 on the history of liberalism and neoliberalism.19 Weber's decisive contribution to twentieth-century thinking is Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 80 Colin Gordon seen here as the creation, in place of the Marxian theme of a contradictory logic of capital, of the problematic of an 'irrational rationality of capitalist society'. The present condition of society and its prospects of future survival are, that is to say, evaluated in the light of a historical analysis of processes of rationalisation which are multiple, specific and potentially discordant. Foucault departs from many received views of recent intellectual history by tracing a parallel filiation with Weber's ideas of two opposed schools of thinkers in subsequent German intellectual history: the Frankfurt School (whose basic concern is, according to Foucault's avowedly over-schematic formula, with the possibility of constructing a new social rationality capable of eliminating the irrationalities of the capitalist economy) and the neoliberal economists and jurists of the Freiburg school, also active in Germany during the Weimar period, mostly exiled during the Third Reich and profoundly influential in the early years of the Federal Republic, whose objective was, on the contrary, t o establish or recover a (capitalist) economic rationality capable of eliminating the social irrationalities hitherto known to capitalism. This double destiny, as Foucault puts it, of Weberianism in Germany ends with the street battles of 1968 in which the last disciples of the Frankfurt School confront the police of a government inspired by the teachings of the Freiburg school.20 Foucault's main reason for drawing attention to the rather neglected contribution of the Freiburg school (called in the postwar years, after the title of the journal in which they collaborated, the Ordoliberalen) was undoubtedly the desire to contribute towards a more informed reflection on the recent, impressive and disconcerting political successes scored in both Germany and France by neoliberal methods of government. For our present purposes, two features of the German neoliberals' version of Weberianism are worth briefly singling out because of the respectful and even allowances being made for a degree of Weberian irony on his part - sympathetic treatment accorded them by Foucault. The first feature is a Weberianism turned militantly against the conclusions of the later Schumpeter; the second, a Weberianism purged of the contamination of certain ideas propagated by Sombart. The Ordoliberalen take sides against Schumpeter for what they regard as an invalid historical deduction of the inevitable failure of liberalism. They argue that the disasters of German history are not proofs of the consequences of a market economy, but consequences of the consistent frustration in modern Germany of liberal economic policies. The market system has not been tried and found wanting, it has been denied a trial. This contention is Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 81 linked to what foucault describes (attributing it in part to a Husserlian influence on some members of the Freiburg school) as a rigorously antinaturalistic conception of the market itself, which is considered not as a quasi-autonomous given of developed economies but rather as a reality which can exist and be maintained in existence only by virtue of activist policies of political intervention: by legal measures designed to safeguard the game of free competition, and by socio-legal measures designed to propagate and diffuse throughout the social body, and not only within the narrowly conceived limits of strictly economic activity, an ethos of enterprise. Alexander Riistow gave this latter set of objectives the significant title of Vitalpolitik. On this view, a capitalist system is by no means inherently doomed to destruction but its survival depends on a capacity for inventive responses t o the more or less aleatory structural hazards and blockages to which is it inevitably liable. The Ordoliberalen take issue, secondly, with what Foucault terms Sombart's thesis: the idea, developed in his sociological writings on Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, of an ineluctable tendency of the modern economy to produce a 'mass society' which impoverishes human relations and replaces true community with the false gratifications of, as Foucault phrases it, 'signs, speed and spectacles'. The neoliberals' answer to this is that it is not so much the market economy as such'which is at the root of these evils as, on the one hand the methods of planning and bureaucracy which have been adopted by enemies of the market system (the National Socialist experience providing the definitive objectlesson of a regime, conceived as a Sombartian restitution of national community, which evolves into the most avid exponent in modern times of the culture of 'signs and spectacles'), and on the other hand by the narrow and over-abstract conception adopted by an older, 'palaeo-liberal' political economy, of the nature and meaning of economy and enterprise.. Foucault shows no sign of endorsing the neoliberals' doctrines but he quite clearly shows a degree of temperamental affinity (albeit for slightly different motives) for these parts of their approach: anti-naturalism; the stress on history as the analysis of contingent hazards, not ineluctable destinies; the taste for a politics of invention; the interest in the Weberian theme of the ethical conduct of life; the suspicion of a certain genre of cultural criticism. These themes are developed in an interesting manner in the interview with Gerard Raulet. Foucault distinguishes here between the analysis of the formation and mutation of a plurality of different forms of rationality and the prognosis -which he repudiates - of an impending or actual collapse of rationality in general. Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 82 Colin Gordon 'Here, I think, we are touching on one of the forms - perhaps we should call them habits - one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought, in modern thought even; at any rate, in post-Hegelian thought: the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, of high point, of completion or of a returning dawn, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who engages in philosophical discourse reflects on his own time strikes me as a flaw. I can say so all the more firmly since it is something I have done myself; and since, in someone like Nietzsche, we find this incessantly - or, at least, insistently enough. I think we should have the modesty to say to ourselves that, on the one hand, the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental irruptive point in history where everything is completed and begun again. We must also have the modesty to say, on the other hand, that - even without this solemnity - the time we live in is very interesting; it needs to be analysed and broken down, and that we would do well to ask ourselves, "What is the nature of our present?" I wonder if one of the great roles of philosophical thought since the Kantian "Was ist Aufklarung?" might not be characterised by saying that the task of philosophy is to describe the nature of the present, and of "ourselves in the present". With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is one of total perdition, in the abyss of darkness, or a triumphant daybreak, etc. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time which is never quite like any other.'21 Thus it is as much necessary to be nominalist about the present as about power. Foucault's approach further implies a carefully defined way of posing questions about 'modernity'. He indeed remarks in this same interview that he has 'never clearly understood what was meant in France by the word "modernity" ', and confesses to being 'not up to date' on what is meant by 'postmodernity'. His own views are stated most fully in the essay 'What is Enlightenment?' Foucault proposes here an understanding of modernity as meaning not an epoch but an attitude (a distinction which may correspond obliquely with one made by Kant: we are not living in an enlightened age, but only in an age of enlightenment). By 'attitude' Foucault means here 'a mode of relating to contemporary reality', a 'voluntary choice made by certain people', a way of thinking and feeling, of acting and behaving: an ethos. Foucault gives a gloss on Baudelaire's celebrated writings on this theme.?? Modernity is not a quality in the course of things, but a specific attitude t o their process, 'a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom'. Modernity is a discipline, an asceticism, a specific culture of the self: 'modern man, Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 83 for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself'. But all these modern options are limited, in Baudelaire's thought, t o the life and the world of art. There is certainly a note of sympathy in Foucault's citation of the Baudelairian precept: 'You have no right to despise the present.' Cultural critique and genealogy have often been allied pursuits. Nietzsche is, after all, the patron saint of both genres in our century. In Foucault's case the association is, by and large, a misleading one. Foucault is a genealogist but not a cultural critic. He does not lament a loss of human values, a decay of community; he is not impressed by the Sombartian bogies of mass consumption, signs, speed, spectacles (a set of codewords aptly suited, of course, to evoke the more recent French neo-Sombartian exponents of situationism and post-modern prophesy: Baudrillard, Virilio, de Bord). 'I do not believe in the old dirges about decadence, the lack of good writers, the sterility of thought, the bleak and foreboding horizons ahead of us. I believe, on the contrary, that our problem is one of overabundance; not that we are suffering from an emptiness, but that we lack adequate means to think all that is happening.'23 In some ways the themes of Foucault's last books appear, despite the historical remoteness of their material, wholly in tune with a prevailing contemporary mood. The interviews in which he discusses their objectives centre on the idea that the sphere of personal life and relations is ceasing in our societies to be regulated through a morality of imperative or prohibitive codes and that the space thus being vacated can be filled only by a different kind of ethical practice, that of what he calls'an aesthetic of existence'. 'Why should not each individual be able to make of his life a work of art?'24 Foucault sees one of the uses of his last books as being to document forgotten options of this kind (which is not to say that the particular practices described are presented as worthy of admiration and imitation; on the contrary2'). Meanwhile, in the years Foucault spent writing these books, the idea of a promotion of new 'lifestyles' has increasingly found its way, in a similar sense if not in identical terms, into some orthodox political agendas. Foucault's brief discussion of Baudelaire's views on the modern 'way of life' acquires an added interest when one notes his reference in his last books to Walter Benjamin's study of Baudelaire as one of the few analyses of the modem history of the practice of the self.26 Benjamin's recent political popularity seems t o owe less t o these explorations than to his more readily digestible pronouncements such as the dictum, quoted with Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 84 Colin Gordon platitudinous frequency by New Left writers, on the contrast between the politicised aesthetics of communism and the aestheticised politics of fascism. It is not clear that this particular distinction suffices to unravel the issues which Foucault has posed. On the one hand, the very idea of an 'aesthetics of existence' may entail that (as Foucault has argued) the relations between ethical and political practices are variable and contingent2': there may thus be some reason for doubting the political value of the idea of making one's life into a political work of art, a reincarnation of the militant ideal in the form of a 'lifestyle'. A different option would be to regard the possibility of a space of indetermination in personal existence as a value and a necessity: an idea which it is certainly possible to translate into practical political terms. Foucault has described this question as standing at the centre of the current socalled crisis of the Welfare State: in the initial period of welfare institutions it proved necessary and acceptable to sacrifice a degree of individual autonomy for the sake of individual security; in recent years this quidproquo has become an object of massive dissatisfaction, creating a new demand for a system capable of simultaneously maximising security and autonomy. Foucault emphasises that this objective can be achieved only by a major new effort of collective and institutional invention, reform, negotiation and compromise, involving the confrontation of difficult ethical choices.28 One may be reminded here of Foucault's remark on Kant's account of Enlightenment as the coincidence of the free and public uses of reason, that it does not explain the political means whereby that use of reason can be assured.29 But no doubt Foucault would also think that problem too narrowly stated: it would have to be enlarged at least so as to include the means of ensuring adequate scope for the free private use of practical reason. One may be reminded also of an aspect of Weber's thought which has been brought to attention by the valuable recent articles of Wilhelm Hennis: the sociological appraisal and evaluation of collective powers, and the practical evaluation of existing conditions and choices in terms of their impact on Lebensstil and Lebensfuhmng, the style and conduct of individual life (a theme later to be vigorously developed in the neoliberals' ideas on V i t a l p ~ l i t i k ) .Weber ~ ~ also sometimes refers to this preoccupation as a 'characterological' criterion. One may well wonder whether Weber would have viewed the modern success of the idea of lifestyle (or the American-led subsumption of the notion of 'way of life' by ideological propaganda) with unalloyed favour, any more than he did the hunts after Erlebnis which he saw as the cultural vice of his own day. One of his harshest 'characterological' studies Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Question, ethos, event 85 of Wilhelmine Germany ends with the reflection that it is difficult to invent a value or a style.31 Foucault might not have disagreed. One would have liked, as well, to have heard his comment on another passage from Weber cited by Hennis, on 'the perception that a human science, and that is what political economy is, investigates above all else the quality of the human beings who are brought up in those economic and social conditions of e ~ i s t e n c e ' . ~ ~ It has been suggested of late that Foucault may have come to change his views about the merits of philosophical anthropology or the 'theory of the subject'. This seems to indicate a misunderstanding of what his later work is about. There is no ground for supposing that Foucault would have wanted to embrace, either as a means or an outcome of an ethic of 'changing what we are', an 'anthropological' criterion of Weber's kind. On the other hand, in order for his question of 'what we are' actually to be a question at all, it may be vital to retain a margin of uncertainty or underdetermination regarding the ethical status of anthropological categories, or whatever terms occupy their place: a possibility of knowing that we do not know what we are: 'L'histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes d'une meme vocable. Y contredire est un devoir.'33 Notes 1. Foucault had previously authorised publication of three lectures in translation: Foucault (1980a) and (197913). See also note (19) below. 2. Foucault (1980~1,p 32-50. 3. Canguilhem (1980); Daniel (1979). 4. Foucault (1984a). 5. Foucault (1983a). 6. Foucault (1980c). p. 54. 7. Daniel (1979), p. 12. 8. Foucault (19794, p. 145. 9. Foucault (1980~).p. 54. 10. Foucault (1966). 11. Foucault (19701, Chapter 9. 12. These themes are developed in the unpublished commentary on Kant's Anthropology which formed, together with his (published) translation of that work, Foucault's these complementaire for the doctorat es lettres. See also Foucault (1970). 13. Foucault (1984a1, p. 45-6. 14. Ibid. p. 46. 15. Foucault (19821, p. 785. 16. Hacking (19811, p. 32. 17. Cf. especially Foucault (1980b). 18. Cf. Pasquino (1984). 19. Regrettably, none of this material has been published, except for a short extract in an obituary number of Lib&ation (Foucault 1984e). The College de France has an archive of recordings and transcripts of Foucault's 86 Colin Gordon Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 courses. For a general introductory survey of this research and a series of essays on related themes by other authors, see Burchell e t a / . (1986). 20. These and the following points are drawn chiefly from Foucault's lectures of 29 March 1979 and 4 April 1979. 21. Foucault (1983a), p. 206. 22. Foucault (1984a). p. 39-42. 23. Foucault (1980d), p. 16-17. 24. Foucault (1984b), p. 90. 25. Foucault (1984~).p. 38. 26. Foucault (1984d1, p. 17. 27. Cf. Note (24). 28. Foucault (16: 1983b). p. 41. 29. Foucault (4: 1984), p. 37. 30. Hennis (1983), Hennis (1984). My (1986) discusses Hennis's views and their bearing on some points of connection between the thought of Weber and Foucault. 31. Weber (1948), p. 437. 32. Weber (1980), cited in Hennis (1983). p. 164. 33. RenC. Char, cited by Foucault (19844). References Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. eds. (1986), The Foucault Effect: Essays on Governmental Rationality, Brighton. Canguilhem, G. (1980) The Normal and the pathological, with a preface by Michel Foucault: cf. Foucault ( 1 9 8 0 ~ ) . Daniel, J. (1979) L'Ere des Ruptures, Paris, with a Preface by Michel Foucault (also published as 'Pour une morale de I'inconfort', Le Nouvel Obsewateur 23/4/1979). Foucault, M. (1966) Review of French translation of E. Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Quinzaine littkraire 1/7/1966, Paris. (Reprinted in ibid., July 1984.) Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things, London. Foucault, M. (1979a) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 : An Introduction, London. Foucault, M. (1979b) 'On Governmentality', I&C 6, 1979; 'La "Governamentalita" ', Aut/Aut 167-8, Sept.-Dec. 1978. Foucault, M. (1980a) 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge, Brighton. Foucault, M . (1980b) 'Powers and strategies', in Power/Knowledge. Foucault, M. ( 1 9 8 0 ~ 'Georges ) Canguilhem: philosopher of error', I&C 7. Foucault, M . (1980d). 'Le philosophe masquC', (anonymous) interview with C. Delacampagne, Le Monde 6 / 4 / 1 9 8 0 ; translation in M. Foucault, Von der Freundschaft als Lebensweise, Berlin 1984 (reference above is t o this edition). Foucault, M. (1982) 'The Subject and Power', Critical Inquiry 8, p. 777-795; also in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault- Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton 1983. Foucault, M. (1983a) 'Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault' (with G. Raulet) Telos 55 p. 195-211. Foucault M. (1983b) 'Un systbme fini face h une dernande infinie', interview with a R Bono in Securitk Sociale: I'Enjeu p. 39-63, editions TENSyros, Paris. Foucault, M. (1984a) A Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York. Foucault, M. (1984b) 'Le sexe comme une morale' (interview with H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow), Le Nouvel Observateur no. 1021, Paris June 1984. Foucault, M. ( 1 9 8 4 ~ 'Le ) retour de la morale' (interview with Gilles Barbedette and Andre Scala), Les Nouvelles, Paris 28 June 1984. Foucault, M. (1984d) L'Usage des Plaisirs, Paris. Foucault, M. (1984e) 'La phobie d'Etat' (excerpt from a lecture given at the College de France, 31 January 1979). Libtration 30 June 1984, p21. Gordon, C. (1986) 'The Soul of the citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Rationality and Government', in Lash S. and Whimster S. eds. Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, London. Habermas, J . (1984) 'Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present', University Publishing 1 3 p. 5-6, Berkeley. Hacking, 1. (1981) review of M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York Review of Books Vol XXVIII No 8 p 32-7, 14/5/ 1981. Question, ethos, event Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 08:53 29 July 2014 Hennis, W. (1983) 'Max Weber's "Central Question" ', Economy and Society Vol 12 No. 2. Hennis, W. (1984) 'Max Weber's Thema' Zeitschrift fur Politik J g 31 p 11-52 (translation forthcoming in Lash S. and Whimster S. eds, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity). Pasquino, P. (1984) 'De la modernitt', Ma azine litteraire no. 2 0 7 , June 1984. Wefer, M. (1984) From Max Weber, Gerth and Mills eds. Weber, M. (1980) 'The National State and Economic Policy'. Economy and Society Vo19 p . 428-49.