So…this Foucault fellow
About a year ago, I read a book called Searle and Foucault on Truth by C.G. Prado, and it opened my eyes to the way continental and analytic philosophy engage similar questions differently. I won’t rehash that particular topic here, but since my current reading is indebted to Foucault, I thought it’d be worth talking about what he’s done (apart from staring down the abyss with Wittgenstein).
One of the assigned readings for Sharon Welch’s class this summer is an interview with Foucault, conducted in 1984. Below are some useful snippets, that will help with what I hope to write about here–both in terms of postcolonialism and gender studies.
- What is a “history of problematics”? Foucault says that he’s attempting to “rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions [to difficulties] the general form of problematization that has made them possible…This development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems…this is what constitutes the point of problematization.”
- On polemics and why Foucault avoids them: Polemics can be understood as religious, judiciary or political, and out of these models no new ideas arise, but rather ideas are sterilized, discourse is quashed.
- “in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary privilege that the adversary has neglected…and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing”;
- “in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case, it isn’t dealing with an interlocuter, it is dealing with a suspect”;
- “[in the political model] polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an emey….against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.”
- On what his work is focused upon: Foucault is famous for writing about madness, delinquency and sexuality. These analyze 1) establishing “objectivity” and a game of truth in deciding who is mad; 2) political government of the self, relations of power in judging the delinquent; 3) practice of ethics in relation to oneself and others in sexuality. Thsese three elements (objectivity/truth games, relations of power, self-regulation) are interwoven in all three subjects, but given a special emphasis in each one.
One thing Foucault makes clear in this interview is that he’s not a deconstructionist. Instead, he’s doing critical analysis of human thought, of the way we generate concepts and representations. At stake for Foucault is “the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other.” Prado makes the point that when reading Foucault, “truth” is a difficult term to interpret, but I’d hazard a guess that he’s talking about the experiential use of truth, where our perspective bumps up against the perspective of another. This limit-experience is rational and emotional, engaging with another individual in a game of dialogue that is “at once pleasant and difficult.”
I’ll admit that I have the brown bag brouhaha in the back of my mind during the reading I’ve been doing, because it’s made me want to understand the perspective of those who think the name change was a good idea, and because I think this perspective-engagement is precisely what is missing in the name change. (How’s that for convoluted? I’ll try to explain a bit.) Foucault writes,
“In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation.
The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given to him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, etc. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of the other.
Questions and answers depend on a game–a game that is at once pleasant and difficult–in which each of the two partners take pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue.“
It is after this point that he makes the contrast with polemics. What I am concerned with in what little I am learning about anti-racist and anti-oppression work in the UUA (which is not much, I readily admit!) is how past grievances are interpreted as a reason to shift the game from give-and-take to polemics. It seems to fit the description of the judicial model (for reasons you can find in this lecture), which is worrying, given the UUA’s supposed emphasis on the inherent worth and dignity of all people. That worth and dignity leads me to hold other experiences as potential perspective-shifters, but also to assume that my conversation partner has reason to offer me–which I can ask for and receive or reject.
Interview with Foucault found in The Foucault Reader, Ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Image: “The Madhouse” by Goya, from the Web Gallery of Art.