Essay:

Is Foucault’s ‘stylistics of existence’ a method or

a strategy or something else altogether?

Abdisalam M Issa-Salwe

June 1996

School of Social Science, University of Greenwich

 Content

1. Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1

2. ON SUBJECTIVITY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2
2.1 Discourses On Sexuality ----------------------------------------------------------------- 3
2.2 Foucault’s Analytical Objections
3. THE TRANSGRESSION OF LIMITS ------------------------------------------------------ 5
3.1 Affirmative Mood-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6
3.2 The Experience of the Outside ---------------------------------------------------------- 8
4. THE ART OF ORAL VERSE ---------------------------------------------------------------- 9
4.1 The Art of Oral Craft and the Somalis: A Brief Background -------------------------- 10
5. CRITICS OF FOUCAULT’S LIMITS ------------------------------------------------------- 11
6. CONCLUSION --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 13
REFERENCES -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14
 Is Foucault’s ‘stylistics of existence’ a method or a strategy or
something else altogether?

1. INTRODUCTION

Foucault’s ‘stylistics of existence’ is not a ‘stylisation of conduct, or more simply a

lifestyle’ but its main aim should be how to free the self from the shackles or limits of
life. Foucault’s work on aesthetics can be understood as an attempt to transgress the
limits of humanism which encourages the concept of man as tolerant and bearing a
guilty conscience.

To understand the conceptual argument of Foucault’s work on this matter we have to

explore his concept of subjectivity and his critique of the humanist’s theory about the
self. In this essay I will look at the basis on which Foucault rejected the subjectivity
and what solution he forwarded to counter this rejection.

Foucault’s work is a distinctive fusion of philosophy and historical investigations. On

one hand he theorised about relation between general history and the history of
thought; and on the hand about how individuals are constituted as knowing, knowable
and as self-knowing beings. Each of Foucault’s historical studies deals with the
intimate and sometimes morally confusing relationship between such knowledge and
social practice, techniques and power-relations through which these are developed and
applied (Deleuze, 1988:32).

While I was attempting to examine his notion of stylistic existence, I began to explore
how appropriate it would be to look at the context of Somali poetry (especially the
nomadic) ‘through this concept’. Art helps to transgress, according to Foucault, and it
‘can take us right up to the void, exposing what is absent’ (Simons 1995: 71). This is
precisely what Somalis do. By extending language to its limits, the pastoral Somalis
think of their verse as more than just an artistic enterprise whose aim is to enlarge the
imagination and to inspire men toward the lyrical and the beautiful (Samatar, 1982:55).

To make more meaningful my analysis, I shall attempt partially to examine with

Foucault’s work Somali poetry in general and how these helped these people as
mechanism to give meaning and sense to life. However, to attempt such a work would
require more in-depth analysis.

2. ON SUBJECTIVITY

To understand Foucault’s argument it is essential to understand the reasoning behind

his deduction and rational. He concentrates on subjectivity and how power operates
on it. He argues that people are still tied to the identity which identifies themselves as
belonging to an ethnic, national or racial group. This identity is tied firmly as people
participate in the process by exercising power over themselves (Simons, 1995:2).
Foucault refers the process of moral or scientific definitions as ethics.

To understand the question of power, Foucault analyses the types of power relations
which focus on the matters of states and sovereignty, freedom and will, rights and

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violence and so on. Power is still conceived of in terms of the juridical monarch, a
historical form.

In one of his later works, Foucault analyses a history of the different modes by which
in our culture, human beings are made subjects. With this conclusion, he deals with
three modes of objectification which turn people into subjects (Dreyfus et al.,
1982:146; Simons, 1995: 45). The first is through the process of scientific enquiry,
e.g. linguistics, political economic, etc. The second mode is dividing people from
others, socially, psychologically or spatially, thus involving the mediation of a science
or pseudo-science. This is seen in Foucault’s analysis in the asylum, clinic and prison.
The last mode of objectification which Foucault looks into is subjectivation. This last
mode differs from the previous two other modes in the sense that a human being turns
himself/herself into a subject. In the previous two modes people are passive or
constrained objects of knowledge, while in last one people are in the active process of
self-formation, with an external authority figure (e.g. a psychoanalyst). This third
mode of objectification is proudly analysed in Foucault’s work on sexuality, where he
looks how human beings arrive at recognising themselves as subjects of sexuality
(Dreyfus et al., 1982: 206-208; Simons, 1995: 67).

Like methods of punishment and internment, it is essential to understand sexuality as

the modern workings of bio-power, the power over life.

2.1 Discourses On Sexuality

Foucault enquires whether the supposed intensified sexual repression of the 17th
century onward is a historical fact, emphasising that, apart from the proliferation of
discourses on the subjects, concern with sexuality was in architectural design, e.g. of
institutions such as schools, prisons.

However, by talking about discourses on sexuality, Foucault avoids being trapped in

the repressive hypothesis by referring to a wide range of discourse including
demographics studies, psycho-medical analysis of sexuality, religious confessionals and
the work of educationalists and studies children’s behaviour. For Foucault sexuality is
not an unchanging historical reality, but a historical construct, and he takes the analysis
of sexuality away from an analysis done in terms of repression, prohibition, censorship
and non-recognition. Power relations are more subtle than this. He disputes the
theory of sexual liberation with political liberation as claimed by thinkers such as
Marcuse. To arrive at such conclusion of sexuality in term of repression is, says
Foucault, to trap oneself.

Foucault is attempting to trace the ‘genealogy’ of the repressive hypotheses and find
what is the dynamic interplay between truth and power (Foucault, 1978: 145). He
attempts to shed some light on the regime of ‘power-knowledge-pleasure’. Power
incites and produces, it is not merely seemingly repressive. Foucault argues that
repression is one of the effects amongst a complex set of power mechanism.

Foucault analysed the modern human science of the 19th century and the emerging
new systems of government and their political implications. Knowledge, as human or

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social science, and power relations complement each other by rendering the social
world into a form that is both knowable and governable, each being dependent on the
other (Foucault, 1978b: 98; Simons, 1995: 26-7).

Foucault says that a mistrust of pleasure, an emphasis on the consequence of its abuse
for the body and the soul, a valuing of marriage and marital obligations, a disaffection
with the spiritual meaning imputed to the love of boys, a whole attitude of severity was
manifested in the thinking of philosophers and physicians in the course of the first two
centuries.” (Foucault, 1985:39). It seems that the greater the apprehension concerning
the sexual pleasures, the more attention was given to the relation which it might arise.
However, according to Foucault, this was more a problem of aphrodisia (Foucault,
1985:39).

2.2 Foucault’s Analytical Objections on the Limits

In examining the issue of the limits of discourses, Foucault presents his theme in two
ways:
(i) by examining the historical discourses of science, such as medicine or economics,
and
(ii) throughout a philosophical critique of humanism (Simons, 1995. P.2). Foucault
objected the truths of the human sciences, as he believed they were ‘unbearable heavy’,
and their burden a heavy price (Simons, 1995:5). By focusing the limit of humanism,
Foucault’s looks at and denounces the modern humanist regime. There are sets of
presuppositions, which Foucault calls “epistemes”, which elevate perception to the
level of objective knowledge (Foucault, 1978: 24). The “epistemes” are historical,
changing over time. He identifies the system of relations between different elements of
discourse.

As mentioned above, Foucault’s philosophical critiques of humanism is described in

The Order of Things, where he examined the epistemes of the Renaissance and the
classical model periods. He argues that the modern “epistemes” which began at the
end of the 18th century and had started to disintegrate by the 1950s, have an
‘anthropological’ character.
By focusing on this he refers to Kant, with the notion of ‘inducing an anthropological
sleep’ in the thought of the modern system of knowledge by focusing on the question
of: what is Man? (Simons, 1995: 13).

The modern “episteme” functions on the understanding that it can reconcile Man as
subject and object, manifested in three doubles: the empirical and the transcendental,
the cognito and the untaught, and the retreat and return of the origin (Simons, 1995:
24-5). Unfortunately, these doubles are basically irreconcilable conceptions of what
Man, his history and his mind are.

According to Foucault, the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the
possibility of knowing, a challenge which induces man to overcome this limit. By
looking into the systematic arrangement of the elements of discourse, he arrives at the
conclusion that the figure of Man “was the effect of a change in the fundamental
arrangement of knowledge” (Simons, 1995:25).

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Foucault concludes that the failure of humanism as a philosophical project takes “Man
to be its foundation for knowledge, while he is one of its effects”, (Simons, 1995: 25).
Instead he concludes that Man cannot be seen to be the condition of the possibility of
discourse (Foucault, 1972: 206). For example, the subject of a discourse such as
veterinary is a function of criteria of competence, institutional relations, or professional
hierarchy. Veterinarians can only operate as the subjects of educational discourse if
they speak from the correct and particular institutional site. They should have different
roles depending on the object of discourse they speak about. Therefore, he concludes
that discourses of knowledge should not be analysed by reference to the opinions of a
particular person (Simons, 1995: 25-6).

3. THE TRANSGRESSION OF LIMITS

How can transgression be defined then? Transgression enlarges the limits by finding
itself what is possible. It is the illumination of limits and it is “like a flash of lightning
in the night which ... owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation” (Simons,
1995: 69). In its best form, transgression is a form of ‘non-positive affirmation’ as
Blanchot defines it. One proceeds ‘until one reaches the empty core where being
achieves its limit and where the limit defines being’ (Ibids., 70). As transgression is
relative to the limit it violates, it attempts to show what we are, as our being depends
on the existence of limits (Ibids.,).

He referred to the Enlightenment as a form of transgressing the limits, and as ‘an

analysis of the limits of our being not in the sense of an essential, unchanging being,
but contingent, plural and transformable ways of being human subjects” (Rabinow,
1984: 46; Simons, 1995: 68-9). Therefore, critical ontology is conducted as
genealogical analysis of the limits to subjectivity which are to be transgressed (Ibids.,).
Foucault often associates transgression with awareness of and proximity to a void or
an absence (Ibids.,).

3.1 Affirmative Mood

Foucault argued that humanist political theory could not promote modes of
subjectivation that are not simultaneously modes of subject, and could not determine
the limits that would allow for individualisation without totalisation (Foucault, 1978:
78). By rejecting this notion of subjectification, Foucault proposes a way out of it as
new forms of subjectivity or ‘affirmative mood’. This affirmative mood, generally
called “the stylistic of existence”, is a mode of ethical self-formation (Foucault,
1984:43). This is attained by loosening the ‘tight stranglehold of the triadic relation
within which we are subjected’ (Simons, 1995:72). Foucault’s ethical project is to go
beyond the limits to which humans are subjected to by taking the form of a possible
transgression. The ethical turn in Foucault’s work can be understood as his attempt to
transgress the limits of humanism through a critique of and an alternative to modern
self subjugation.

He insists that we should get rid of the idea which links between ethics and other
social or economic or political structure, which constrains us thus disable our capacity
and will. Foucault considered self-formation in the context of socio-political.

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He argues that the precept of the art of existence (or cultivation of the self) ‘takes the
form of an attitude, a mode of behaviour; it becomes instilled in ways of living’ where
it evolves into procedures, perfected and taught (Foucault, 1984: 44-5). He argues
that the cultivation of the self ‘would constitute an original response’ to the attempt to
form a new style of existence. Cultivation of the self is ‘characterised by the fact that
in this case the art of existence — the techné tou biou in its different forms — is
determined by the principle that says one must “take care of oneself” (Foucault, 1984:
43) to enable oneself to be free from mental contamination. The self-formation
becomes increasingly oriented towards knowledge (Ibids.,).

Foucault’s work on the aesthetics of the self is mostly inspired by the classical Greek
and Hellenistic aesthetics which treated life as material for a work of art (Simons,
1995:72). Foucault accepted the conceptual conditions of the Greek and Hellenistic
relation of self to self and the loose ‘connections between the three axes of
subjectification’, (Foucault, 1984: 67-9; Deleuze, 1988: 94-6; Simons, 1995:72)
namely power, truth and ethics. Foucault approves of Baudelaire’s ethos of modernity
is a mode of ethical formation which implies as an art of the self.

However, Foucault was hesitant to claim that the notion of “care of the self” could
become or usher a new philosophical thought which could create a new political order.
He was interested in an ethics or stylisation of life which is not repressed by political
power or scientific truth.

According to Deleuze, Foucault sought a third axis in addition to power and

knowledge as a way for us to get free of ourselves (Deleuze, 1988: 95).

Aesthetics of the self is not any particular beautiful subject but it is the process of
subjectification as an art. Burckhardt argues that
“the freedom of arts of the self consists not in self-creation itself but in
the experience of self-formation in the face of all the other forces that
fashion us. It is an irony of self-fashioning that despite its resonance of
autonomy, it includes being moulded by outside forces and attempting
to fashion others” (Simons, 1995: 76).

Self-fashioning leads to freedom, for Foucault admires the first and foremost the
burning need to create for oneself a personal originality. Foucault finds in Baudelaire a
model of self-invention and production that is undertaken in spite of the predominance
of subjection in the contemporary world.

3.2 The Experience of the Outside

Any purely reflective discourse, Foucault argues, leads the “experience of the outside
back to the dimension of interiority” as “reflection tends irresistible to repatriate to it
the side of consciousness and to develop it into a description of living that depicts the
‘outside’ as the experience of the body, space, the limits of the will, and the
ineffaceable presence of the other” (Foucault, 1990: 21). It must be directed towards
an outer boundary where it must continually contest itself.

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The possibility of transgression depends on recognition of the limitedness of the limit.
To make transgression happen, Foucault proposes to turn to self-reflective forms of
art, literature and philosophy as they “make transgressive move by revealing the limits
of language and thought without attempting to exist beyond them” (Simons, 1995: 69-
70).

Foucault associates modern art with transgression of limits. He regards avant-garde

literature as both a site of freedom and as a critical perspective. By referring only to
itself, he argues that its power derived from its self-referentiality and reflectivity.
According to him, transgressive literature reaches the “limits of what can be said,
without attaining the untrammelled freedom saying it” (Ibids.,).

When language matures and arrives at its own edge, what “it finds is not a positivity
that contradicts it, by the void that will efface” (Foucault, 1990: 22). Into the void it
must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of
what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where
words endlessly unravel (Ibids.,). Foucault goes further by arguing that a discourse
constitutes its own space as the outside toward which, and outside of which, it speaks.
This discourse, a speech from outside whose words welcomes the outside it addresses,
has the openness of a commentary: the repetition of what continually murmurs outside
(Ibids,).

From the moment that discourse ceases to follow the slope of self-interiorisation of
thought, addressing the very being of language, it returns thought to the outside; from
that moment, in a single stroke, it becomes a meticulous narration of experience,
encounters, and improbable signs — language about the outside of all language, speech
about the invisible side of words (Ibids,).

4. THE ART OF ORAL VERSE

Except for a few reservations on Foucault is theory on limit and transgression (which I
will discuss in the conclusion), I think it would helpful to apply and analyse Somali
poetry and how the oral verse became (and it is yet) one of the most important means
of mass communication.

A poem (or fragmented word), according to Blanchot, ‘calls upon us to surpass the
false dealing of scintillating ambiguity, then the torment of contrariety that opposes one
term to another, but not in order to arrive at a totality where the for and the against are
reconciled or merge...” (Blanchot, 1993: 309). He defines as a “verbal privilege given
to substantive, a condensation of images so rapid (a ravishment and uprooting) that the
most contrasted signs — more than contrasted, without relation — are in the least
space made contiguous.” (Blanchot, 1993: 309).

But before we dip into Somali poetry (or the Somali art of existence) in general; it
would be helpful to look briefly at the background of the Somalis’ love of poetry and
how they use it.

4.1 The Art of Oral Craft and the Somalis: A Brief Background

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Somalis give significance to the art of oral craft as it is one of the most extraordinary
features in their cultural and political life. They value oral verse as the "intimate
workings of people's lives" and cultivate it extensively. These characteristics have
been noted by all Somali scholars and those who have visited Somaliland. Somalis are
often described as a "nation of bards", as for them "language and culture take
precedence over material [wealth]" (Lewis, 1988: 54). For them, poetry is a means of
mass communication and a mechanism to give meaning to life.

The Somali nomads live in a demanding and dangerous environment, and ‘except in a
few places, drought and famine, disease and pestilence, predatory beasts, feuds and
war’ (Samatar, 1982:9) are a constant threat to their being. With lyrical verses they
interpret life's different faces, and leap in ‘to the void’ to ‘expose what is absent’.

The art of oral craft, poetry particularly, is not only a medium of mass communication,
but also is a tool for acquiring political power. This means was used by the Somali
nationalist Dervish movement leader, Sayid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan who fought for
two decades against three colonial powers — Britain, Italy and Ethiopia (1905 -
1929). Without this his political success can scarcely be explained.

Sayid Mohamed used the medium of poetry as high powered propaganda warfare. His
mastery of the art of poetry won him the reputation of being the greatest Somali poet,
and earned him the name "master of eloquence." In the opinion of Samatar,
Sayid appealed to a traditional code of ethics that he knew would strike a responsive
chord in the hearts of the stroked: the notion of unbending defiance in the face of
calamitous circumstances, a theme he often stressed in his poems... Yet these tactics,
he designed to hold the ranks of the faithful together, concealed the real shift in
strategy that the Sayid was initiating in the light of grim realities (Laitan and
Samatar, 1987:45).

This unbending defiance in the face of calamitous circumstances, which Sayid

Mohamed echoed in his poems, can be explained through Foucault’s proposal.
According to Foucault, power appears to become an unconfined or essential power of
resistance, power which may be manifested as “an unhindered capacity to make oneself
as a work of art” (Simons, 1995:4).

5. CRITICS OF FOUCAULT’S LIMITS

While giving us an insight, Foucault attempts to challenge a whole tradition of Western

thought, but without presenting a systematic body of theory. Foucault’s work has
been termed as ‘anti-humanism’ and ‘philosophy of discontinuity’. There are some
unconvincing aspects to Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis. He may be
right by challenging power mechanisms on sexuality as prohibition and negation, but he
seems to fail to take into account varying notions of social repression, for regimes of
course vary in their repressiveness, e.g. fascism, Stalinism. Repressive controls can be
rudely exercised, but Foucault seems to ignore such a point.

Foucault contests a whole tradition of Western thought, which considers the inner self
to be a realm of freedom, ultimately untouchable by power. This inner self can be
considered as the core of one’s subjectivity, or one’s authentic identity. Foucault

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denies that there is no inner self that can be safe from power. In this way he is denying
any possibility where can be any liberation or gain in freedom.

Most of Foucault’s thought is posed in oppositional modes, as he urges to oppose the

tied to which ties us to the identities to which we are subjected. Critics accuse him of
an unjustifiable and unreasonable resistance. Walzer is one of these critics and calls
Foucault’s resistance, “a resistance without cause or aim” (Simons, 1995: 59).
However, Walzer falters on Foucault’s approach highlights the costs of current
subjectivity and urges us to conceive of ourselves beyond our current limits (Foucault,
1978: 45; Simons, 1995: 65-6).

By citing Foucault say, “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial
part of itself” (Foucault, 1978: 89). According to some critics, Foucault is not relying
on a standard relation, and that his concept of power is incoherent as it rests on the
conviction that victims are dominated. Modern forms of power can empower without
imposing or victimising.

It is believed that Foucault’s work is guilty of a latent functionalism. His emphasis on

the process of normalisation are in danger, it is argued, of moving teleologically
towards a kind of Parsonian equilibrium. His emphasis to the institutional organisation
of sexuality is particularly suspicious for its functionalist overtones.

Foucault has been criticised on his work on sexuality as it has been accused of being
sexism. It has been emphasised that his work on the subject fails to pay particular
attention on the basically male definition and organisation of sexuality.

By underlining his argument, the author then passes on to examine Foucault’s

definition of power and its relations in Discipline and Punish. Discipline and Punish
contains a ‘genealogy of morals’ which suggests that punishment is a practice whose
meaning may change over time. Power and freedom are not seen as compatible.
Power, or in other words the act of inducing others to behave, is an inevitable social
act. Therefore, freedom is seen as a practice which can never be made safe by
institutional guarantees. Our task is to create modes of living which avoid the risk of
dominance, the one-sided rigidification of power-relations.

Foucault’s general principle is that every form is a compound of relations between

forces.

One of his theories is that nature and limits of the thinkable, both in theory and
practice, are never the same as we tend to suppose. Concepts such as normality or
sexuality, through which we now think of ourselves and our identity, are dependent on
potentially dispensable historical inspiration.

6. CONCLUSION

Foucault’s ‘stylistics of existence’ is not a ‘stylisation of conduct, or a lifestyle’ but it is

a method by which to free the self from the shackles or limits.

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Foucault assertion that stylistic of existence is the basis of truth, stretched my
imagination, and gave me meaning to the poetry.....

In spite of the fact that Foucault’s argument about limits and transgression gave a
theory me to ‘understand’ and make meaning of the Somali poetry, I found loss of
orientation. It was difficult for me to comprehend after the liberation.

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REFERENCES

Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation: Theory and History of Literature,

Volume 82; Trans. Susan Hanson, (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault, Trans. Seán Hand, (London: The Athlone Press, 1988)

Foucault, Michel; The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Trans. Robert Hurley,

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1978).

---------, The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, Trans. Robert Hurley,
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1986).

--------, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, Trans. Robert Hurley,
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Group, 1985).

-------, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside” in Jeffrey Mehiman and Brian
Massumi, trans., Foucault and Blanchot, (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

--------, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans, Alan Seridan, (New York: Pantheon,
1972).
Blanchot, Maurice; “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him” in Jeffrey Mehiman and Brian
Massumi, trans., Foucault and Blanchot, (New York: Zone Books, 1990).

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, (Brighton: Harvester, 1982)

Issa-Salwe, Abdisalam M.; The Collapse of the Somali State: The Impact of the
Colonial Legacy, (London: Haan Associates, 1994)

Laitan, David D., and Said S. Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State,
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987).

Lewis I. M.; A Pastoral Democracy, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).

------ A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa
(London: Longman, 1980).

------ Understanding Somalia: A Guide to Somali Culture, History and Social

Institutions, (Haan Associates 1993).

Ranibow, Paul; ed. “What is Enlightenment?” Trans. Catherine Porter in The Foucault
Reader, (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

Sagan, Eli; At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political

Oppression, and the State, (London: Faber and Faber, 1985).

Samatar, Said S.; Oral Poetry and Somali Nationalism: The Case of Sayyid
Mahammad ‘Abdille Hasan, (Cambridge: University Press, Cambridge, 1982)

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Simons, Jon; Foucault and the Political, (London: Routlegde, 1995).

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