Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:42:29 -0500
From: "edward p. kazarian" <epkaz-AT-netreach.net>
Subject: RE: theory and critique


Regarding "What is Critique?" and the Frankfurt school, I suspect that it
is going a bit far to say that Foucault is agreeing with the Frankfurt
school.

>From pp. 36-47 of the Semiotext(e) edition of What is Critique? (The
Politics of Truth) Foucualt gives a kind of capsule history of the
development of the critical enterprise in the wake of what he calls the
"gap between Aufklarung and critique that Kant wanted to indicate" (36).
And it is here that he directly addresses the Frankfurt school, in a way
that intitially seems very positive.  He claims that in Germany one finds a
"suspicion that something in rationalization and maybe even in reason
itself is responsible for excesses of power..." (38) and argues that "from
the Hegelian Left to the Frankfurt School, there has been a complete
critique of positivism, objectivism, rationalization, of techne and
technicalization, a whole critique of the relationships between the
fundamental project of science and techniques whose objective was to sho
the connections between science's naive presmptions, on one hand, and the
forms of domination characteristic of conteporary society, on the other.
(38-39).

He goes on to argue that the development took place differently in France,
but that this "situation ... has changed in recent years...an era has
arrived where precisely this problem of the Aufklarung can be re-approached
in significant proximity to the work of the Frankfurt school"  (40-41). And
he not surprisingly argues that Phenomenology is the link between the
French philosophers of science and the German left, though I will leave
this aside to consider his conclusion.

Somewhat further on he argues that "whether it be the research on the
constitution of meaning with the discovery that meaning is only constituted
by the coercive structures of the signifier or analyses doen on the history
of scientific rationality witht he effects of constraint linked to its
institutionalisation and the constitution of models,...all this historical
research has done, I believe, is break in like a ray of morning light
through a kind of narrow academic window to merge into what was, after all,
the deep undertow of our history for the past century.  For all the claim
that our social and economic organization lacked rationality, we found
ourselves facing, I don't know if it's too much or too little reason, but
in any case facing too much power"  (42-43)

All of this seems positive, and Foucault is being very careful to pay a
debt to the Frankfurt school throughout all of this.  But when one turns to
his program, it begins to become very clear that the his approach will be
radically different from thiers--and when I make this claim I AM taking
into account the substantial methodological sophistication one finds in the
immanent critiques as practiced by some of these authors.

The essential bone that Foucault has to pick with the Germans (even those
on the left) centers around the issue of legitimacy.  On this score, let me
quote a bit more:

"I would simply like to say and suggest the following:  it seems to me that
this question of the Aufklarung, since Kant, because of kant, and
presumably because of this separation he introduced between Aufklarung and
critique, was essentially raised in terms of knowledge, thatis, by starting
with what was the historical destiny of knowledge at the time of the
constitution of modern science.  Also, by looking for what in this destiny
already indicated the indefinite effects of power to which this question
was necessarily going to be linked through objectivism, postivism,
technism, etc., by connecting this knowledge with the conditions of the
constitution and legitimacy of all possible knowledge, and finally, by
seeing how the exit from legitimacy (illusion, error, forgetting, recovery,
etc.) occured in history.  In a word, this is the procedure of analysis
that seems to me to have been deeply mobilized by the gap between critique
and Aufklarung engineered by Kant.  I abelieve, from this point on, we see
a procedure of analysis which is basically the one most often followed, an
analytical procedure which could be called an invesitgation into the
legitimacy of historical mdoes of knowing...Still, more simply put:  what
false idea has knowledge gotten of itself and what excessive use has it
exposed itself to, to what domination is it therefore linked." (48-49)

Since this is already getting very long I won't go into the details of what
Foucualt proposes as an alternative.  Suffice it to say that it turns out
to be a "ain examiantion of "eventualization" (49) which he elaborates as a
combination of archaelolgy, geneology, and what he calls in this essay
"strategics."  But lest anyone think that he believes this to be equivalent
to the procedure followed by the Frankfurt school and its inheritors, I
will finish with the following sentence, which follows the long passage I
cited in the paragraph above:  "Well now!  Rather than this procedure which
takes shape as an investigation into the legitimacy of historical modes of
knowing, we can perhaps envision a different procedure.  It may take the
question of the Aufklarung as its way of gaining access, not to the problem
of knowledge, but to that of power" (49).

So perhaps someone can interpret this differently than I have, but it seems
to me a pretty stark repudiation of the Frankfurt school.



___________________________________________
ed kazarian
      epkaz-AT-netreach.net
"two things that were left out of the bill of rights:  the right to leave
and the right to change one's mind"
     -- 'Veronika' from John Eustache's *The Mother and the Whore*