Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:04:03 -0800 (PST)
From: MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER <mattw-AT-sfsu.edu>
Subject: Re: wittgenstein, lyotard, foucault



> This is interesting. (I remember reading a short piece by Deleuze who 
> was suggesting this perspective too, somewhere)  My reading of Foucault 
> is different to this.  It seems to me that power _is_ finally and 
> ultimately constructive for Foucault (and I would priviledge Nietzsche 
> over all other 'personal' influences his work).  The normative effects 
> of modern society, as I read Foucault, are not normative effects of 
> power per se, but rather the effects of a certain form of society, or 
> the group of micro-political mechanisms that make up a society.  It's 
> not the power that normalises, but certain forms of power mechanisms 
> that do so.  

I'm not sure I agree with you.  Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Foucault
recognized the disciplinary character of some expressions of power (in
Nietzsche this is will to power turned in upon itself in the production of
the bad conscience and consciousness; in Foucault it is the techniques of
normalizing--discipline and punishment over centuries to organize and
produce a particular kind of body in the social realm).  I'm also not sure
I agree with your distinction between the institutions that express power
and the power they produce: this seems to posit a doer behind the deed,
and Foucault repeatedly said power is not a possession one holds but
something one practises.  He is deliberately vague when he speaks of
"doers", and those who does power changes all the time.  At best they are
producers of discourses, of new knowledge, trainers of the body.  One
could almost dispense with the "grid" of interdisciplinary institutions
and speak only of power; as you know Foucault dismissed resistance against
this exchange of power since any resistance only confers greater force to
that which it is struggling against. 

Which to me is fairly grim.  But power as the production of new discourse
("There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of
discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this
association" (Two Lectures; Power/Knowledge)) is something hopeful, not in
a teleological way as if there were some end to this condition, but as
constantly emerging, critical ways of viewing these associations of power. 
Political action then would always be something individual, brief, and
without a theory to accompany it. 

>
> For my money, all this leaves Foucault very much out of the Marxist 
> scheme of things, because ultimately, for Marx, power is seen in a 
> substantive, oppressive manner.

I think with Marx, whom Foucault had a love/hate relationship with,
power was a property held by those who hold the means of production,
the proletariat.  Marx's model inverts the sovereign model of power which 
had held power to be the property of a king.

> Yes, I agree with you here.  Nietzsche in many ways sunk the boat of the 
> Enlightenment.  One thought I have, though, is part of what I've just 
> written in a post to Eric:  it seems to me that part of the 
> enlightenment tradition we can keep, and in fact a part which is 
> inherent to Lyotard's celebrated statement about the metanarrative, is 
> the stringently critical mode of thought, a la Kant.

I tend to think of a hermeneutics of suspicion when it comes to the
questioning of metanarratives and of theories that are meant to accompnay 
political action.  I also think of the Jewish tradition, or rabbinic
commentary, as that "Other discourse" which also accompanied the
Tradition and critiqued it.  Kant's focus on law and the language of
critique is more "Jewish" or judaic in this sense than Greek (Nietzsche
amongst many others have suggested that).  But maybe not Jewish enough!

Ascertaining the limits of what we can know still upholds a belief in 
the possibility of knowledge which post-structualism would find serious
fault with.  Kant was very good at defining the limits of what we can
know.  But he still retains the idea of a subjectivity, a belief in
reason (that can be defined by what it is not and separated from what it 
is not), the presumption of universalisms, and the retaining of the
distinction from the Greeks of a difference between figurative and
proper language.  Lyotard, along with Derrida and Foucault, would surely 
accept that even in the language of legality we are being
perspectival--that there is no such thing as a distinction between
figurative and proper speech.  Because language defers and "never 
arrives" with a meaning which is timelessly true, anything I
suggest will be contigent and provisional, even when I talk of
law.  Maybe Lyotard's heart is with Kant and the gesture to
recognize limits (the sublime is certainly about limits) but his
understanding of language would be closer to that of Hamann?

I agree with you about retaining the language of legality and law, which
I think again stems from Judaism and not from the Enlightenment, (which
it can be said "forgot" legality at a very important point in our recent
history).  Lyotard would be with Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe in this
regard, following Levinas and Benjamin.  

> 
> I think that the way forward is to leave aside metanarratives, and seek 
> new ways of going about things that aren't based on the 'practice out of 
> theory' model.  The details of this, unfortunately, escape me at the 
> moment!

I don't know either!  Foucault though was a very active person through
his short life--he participated constantly in political actions, from
protesting Franco's regime in Spain to advocating prison reform.  But as
you point out he never tried developing a theory to explain or guide
these actions.  I think groups like Act-Up (at least at one time) were
very influenced by his work, avoiding the trap of theorizing their own
actions.

Anyway, interesting discussion.

Matt Wettlaufer