3.3 - Schürmann, Reiner - On Constituting Oneself An Anarchistic Subject (EN)

OnConstitutingOneselfanAnarchisticSubject
OnConstitutingOneselfanAnarchisticSubject
byReinerSchrmann
Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3/1986,pages:294310,onwww.ceeol.com.

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FOUCAULT, THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL, AND HABERMAS
ON CONSTITUTING ONESELF AN ANARCHISTIC SUBJECT

Reiner Schrmann It is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my reserach.1 There exists a common opinion about the place of the human subject in Foucaults work, an opinion he himself has done much to enforce. So as to skirt both humanist and structuralist invariables, he proposes an archaeologygenealogy to trace shifting configurations of knowledge and power. To be sure, the human subject does appear in these configurations, but they are what assigns the subject its place: a variable in discursive regularities, a product of power strategies. According to this opinion, most definitely dislodged from inquiry is the practical subject: I constituting myself as an actor in the midst of other actors. Whatever variant of Foucaults archaeology-genealogy one examines, the practical I does not fare well indeed. As man in the modern episteme, it is greeted with a philosophical laugh2 and compared to a figure drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, soon to be erased.3 As the originary maker of events, it is dethroned by the discovery of epistemic and power arrangements in history that undergo incessant mutations. It has been an obsession typical of the nineteenth century to preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject. There can be no meaningful that is to say, linear history without the subject as its enduring agent and its synthetic bestower of meaning. Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject. Hence some tears are bound to be shed when thresholds and breaks are discovered in the formation of our past: What is being bewailed with such vehemence is not the disappearance of history, but the eclipse of that form of history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject.4 In his genealogies of institutions, Foucault attempts to show that the self-conscious subject has actually been produced by the conjunction of external powers such as solitary confinement, itself the result of economic conditions. In the first volume of his last project, the history of sexuality, the subject appears again as a product, this time of what Foucault calls bio-power. With tears and fears, then, the subject as reader discovers that this common opinion holds throughout all phases in Foucaults writing; he laughs while we discover that our presumed sovereignty as conscious agents not only arises from policed discourse and the glare of the panopticum, but also that it may soon be swept away. Whatever the archaeological-genealogical perspective, the subject is fabricated from without. This excludes any constitution from within, or self-constitution, be it
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transcendental (as in Kant, via the act of apperception as the pole of spontaneity in object-constitution), or otherwise. There is a second common opinion which Foucault has also done much to enforce. It has to do with the very status of man as a figure hardly three centuries old and already on the verge of disappearing. In what sense can man be called an invention of recent date?5 Foucault is following here, with more fanfare and playfulness, a claim that has been made before him.6 It has to do with the epochalization of Western philosophy according to discursive effects in each of the languages in which it has spoken. Each language-age would be determined by one postulated center of signification to which phenomena have to be referred if they are to make sense. In the Greek context, this supreme postulate would be nature, in the Latin and Medieval epoch, God, and in the modern context it would be man, that passing postulate.7 Only as an imaginary, yet ultimate focal point for the very constitution of phenomenality can the figure of man rise and fall. That figure is an invention of recent date inasmuch as prior to the seventeenth century the intelligibility of things had not been sought and construed in relation to the subject asserting its central position by saying I think. This second common opinion holds that only for the cogito can the world become objective. Only as represented to the ego do things turn into objects and can nature turn into the egos other that is apt to be mastered. Individuals, too, fall under that general process of objectification and mastery. One has thus to distinguish between man as the epochally organizing ultimate postulate, the ego as effecting that centering and mastering, and the individual as objectified and mastered (e.g. through the sciences of language, labor, and life, or through technologies of power such as those institutionalized in asylums, hospitals, and prisons). One has to distinguish, in other words, between the epochal, the transcendental, and the objectified subject. If Foucaults genealogy consists in laying bare the modes of objectification and mastery, it seems that through the very logic of his argument, he commits yet another exclusion from the arrangement called modernity, namely, the exclusion of the ethical subject. The latter remains indeed outside the three notions of the subject just mentioned, none of which can generate statements concerning the way one constitutes oneself as the performer of activities or practices. Yet the self-constitution of the practical subject in both its ethical and its political dimensions takes on an increasing importance in Foucaults thinking, even though more through hints and pronouncements than through methodic developments. Less than Foucaults ipsissima verba, what calls for an examination is the status of the question, What can I do?, as well as the nature of the I that puts it to itself, and eventually answers it in acting. That question differs from Kants What ought I to do? on two decisive points. From the standpoint of Foucaults light-footed positivism, the I does not designate in any way the autonomous moral agent, be it individual or collective (as when Lenin asks, What is to be done?). Rather the I appears always under the constraints that make up the apparatus (dispositif) of a period. The same positivism accounts furthermore for the impossibility to speak of an ought. Policed as we are by discursive formations and
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extra-discursive power effects, one can at the most inquire into the very finite place left for the practical subject to occupy at any given moment. There is little that can be done in any historical juncture. What ought I to do, then, is a question that presupposes too much autonomy in the subject, namely the autonomy of my giving to myself a universally obligatory moral law. Sheer structuralism, on the other hand, allows for too little autonomy in the subject; the early Foucaults philosophical laugh disowns the very question of practical self-constitution. With the recognition that his archaeology of epistemic orders remained steeped in the (structuralist) episteme of the day, there came a re-consideration of the many ways in which we say I and modify the I. It will be necessary first to inquire into the status of the question What can I do? within an archaeological-genealogical history. Then it will be useful to point out a few paradigmatic instances of self-constitution in the history Foucault has told. Lastly, it will have to be asked: What can I do in my/our own historical site? What can I do? in an archaeological-genealogical history In the introduction to Lusage des plaisirs, Foucault opposes his archaeological-genealogical method to what he calls a history of behaviors or of representations. These latter narratives inquire into positivities: observable data in recounting what people have actually done, imaginary data in recounting what they phantasized they were doing. There are good reasons for surmising that this twofold rejection is aimed at Marx and Freud. Foucaults own narrative is meant to trace the problematizations through which being gives itself as capable of being thought and asking to be thought. He wishes furthermore to trace the reflected and voluntary practices by which people seek to transform themselves, to modify themselves in their singular being, and to make of their lives a work (oeuvre). Having reframed his earlier archaeology, he now assigns it as its subject-matter proper those problematizations, and having reframed genealogy, he retains as its chief issue those practices. The stratum of Foucaults narrative remains that of a second-degree positivism: he tells the sequence, not of social or ideological givens themselves, but of the epochal webs within which they can appear at all. The archaeology is still meant to trace the discursive features of epochal apparatuses and the genealogy, their extra-discursive features. In his most recent project, Foucaults claim about epochal configurations is however stronger. To be sure, following up on the Greek configuration as it gives way to the Hellenistic and Roman, and this in turn to the Patristic, still reveals how problematizations and practices have joined together to impose on people varying systems of constraint. But the inquiry into that sequence is now expected to yield more than insights into the birth of epistemic rules and strategic norms. Archaeology and genealogy bring to the fore a history of truth.8 There are also good reasons for surmising that the resemblances with Heidegger s project of a history of being, traced through the epochal
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constellations of truth, is not fortuitous. Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher, he writes.9 The very term problematization recalls one of Heideggers technical terms in questioning transmitted positivities in this case, the branches of special metaphysics from a second-level vantage point, that is, in taking a step back from those received positivities. Even before attempting to draft a history of being, Heidegger indicated such a step back in his book title Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. To make metaphysics a problem, to problematize it, is to inquire into the conditions or grounds that make it possible. Likewise, for Foucault to step back from social and ideological givens to the level where they appear as problematic to their age, is to inquire into their constellational truth. He has no more than a rhetorical use, I believe, for the additional step back towards conditions in Heidegger, namely from truth as an epochal mesh in which things are given, to the giving itself. At least he does not follow up on his remark that through the received problematizations, being gives itself. But nor is the history he recounts the mere concatenation of material and representational facts. It is the history of the truth of facts, truth understood as formed by intersecting strategies of discourse and power. Their effects declare themselves discursively in what one finds not to go without saying in ones age; in what one finds problematic. Thus pleasurable acts become problematized in moral teachings. Effects of discourse and power also declare themselves practically in the way people use them to fashion their lives. Thus the same pleasurable acts enter the arts of living by which a man of the free class in antiquity conferred on his existence a certain style. The history of truth can be narrated to the extent that one discovers a sequence of problematizations and practices as well as displacements within that sequence. This refraining of the method brings the subject to the fore. Where constellational truth turns problematic and where that problematization translates into practice, it yields a history of the subject.10 As the bounds within which we stand inscribed become problematic and solicit a deliberate practice, the question, What can I do? is being answered. The status of that question in an archaeological-genealogical history is thereby made explicit: it is the question that deals directly with the limits imposed on an age by the prevailing apparatus of knowledge and power. The subject that says T here differs from man, the ego, and the individual as defined earlier. It also differs from the illusory I as author. The problematizing and practical subject renders manifest the enclosure in which it is placed. Recognizing this, Foucault has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. There is no deep originative self expressed in problematizations and practices. Probing the authoritative subject both as auctor or originator and as holder of auctoritas, responsibility and prestige loses its pertinence. What probings about the subject, then, are pertinent? Only those that thematize its insertion into an epochal order. One such inquiry has to do with the openings in which problematization and practice are at all possible: What are the places in [discourse] where there is room for possible subjects? This is the key question in any investigation into what could or can be done in a given age.
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The old topic of freedom, as well as the more recent topic of finitude are mere collaterals to the epochal topographies. Freedom and finitude paraphrase the subjects points of insertion in an apparatus. Another pertinent question has to do with making instances of discourse and power ones own: Who can appropriate [discourse] for himself? Or, in the Greek context of pleasurable acts: Who can possess, penetrate, whom without making his life unaesthetic, ugly (as happens when a freeman lies underneath a slave)? In the modern context, not everyone can speak as physician, psychiatrist or judge, nor perform the corresponding acts. Yet another question has to do with the latitude of the space left open for self-constitution to the fullness of the given confines, since that space varies according to ones own station in a dispositif: Who can assume these various subject functions?11 In an archaeological-genealogical history, the question, What can I do?, not only has the positivist status which implies that the answers given to it can be retrieved only through a (discontinuous) narrative. But furthermore the status of the question is heuristic. In the issues people raise about behavior that does not go without saying, the bounds of an age declare themselves. But its status is not an ontological one: no sooner made, Foucaults allusion to being is dropped. The bounds of an age are not determined by a destiny of being (Heidegger). Nor is its status transcendental, since that question inquires not about ought but about can. Yet it is a quasi-transcendental question inasmuch as it addresses the network of constraints that conditions an age, and investigates possible points of insertion. In asking, What can I do?, one then takes ones cue neither from factual beings nor from being as such, but from the intermediary realm where orders of things revealed in problematized behavior follow one another. Although Foucault calls that diachrony of orders a history of truth55, truth is nothing that endures. It is the mode of phenomenal connection that makes up an epochal net. But a subject can nevertheless constitute itself in agreement with its truth, synchronically opened. It can move into the space left for such self-constitution the way each epochal net allows for it. A subject can make current figures of discourse and effects of power its own or combat them; it can or cannot assume those subject functions. Through discursive intervention. it can also make its contemporaries feel the severe law of inclusion and exclusion. If the status of the question, What can I do?,55 is determined by the history of truth so understood, then one wishes to know whether or not perhaps at certain turns in history it would be possible not only to thematize, but to struggle against ones quasi-transcendental confinement to points of insertion in a succession of apparatuses. What are some past forms of self-constitution? Also, how can I constitute myself as a practical subject today? Could it be that todays situation allows us to contest in practice that very premise of insertion into an apparatus? Some past forms of possible self-constitution In his tightest commentary on a text on those lines dealing with madness in Descartes Meditations Foucault distinguishes between two textual
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webs: one demonstrative, the other ascetic. Without the demonstrative strategy, Descartes text could not form a system of propositions, just as without the ascetic strategy, it could not be called a meditation. According to the first way of reading, the subject is not implicated; to read, here, is to follow the sequence of discursive events, linked by formal rules, as they spell out an argument. According to the second, on the contrary, the subject passes from darkness to light. What subject? One that determines itself. In meditation, the subject is ceaselessly altered by his own movement; his discourse provokes effects within which he is caught; it exposes him to risks, produces states in him, and confers on him a status or qualification which he did not hold at the initial moment. In short, meditation implies a mobile subject, modifiable through the effect of the discursive events that take place,12 The discursive events here are text-events, but the motility they entail, if they form a meditation, is located outside the text, in the meditating subject. The two strategies, analytical and ascetic, intersect in me, as meditating. They are chiastic. The issue in Foucaults discussion is that madness makes it impossible for the subject to effect a demonstrative meditation and, more specifically, to constitute itself as universally doubting. What is pertinent for the question of the practical subject, however, is that the truth asserted by the sequence of discursive events must affect the reader in a concrete exercise. Madness is excluded in the progress of Descartes meditation since, if he were mad, he would not qualify as a subject undergoing the trial of doubt. This does not entail that madness is also excluded from the demonstrative web. But there it appears as an object of knowledge, not as a threat paralyzing the meditator in his itinerary from opinion to doubt to intuition. The distinction between system and exercise introduces the practical subject at that very juncture of history at which both the archaeology of discourse and the genealogy of power seemed to have unmasked it: the archaeology, as a mere variable in short-lived epistemic arrangements, and the genealogy, as an effect of equally short-lived technologies of power. At the very beginnings of modernity, then, when man is supposed to move to the epistemic center and objectify everything around him, including himself as individual, the practical subject asserts itself concomitantly. It does so not by chance, nor accidentally. The point of Foucaults reading of Descartes is precisely that the cogito, to be established in its supreme epochal role, requires a meditation. It requires a textual strategy that appeals to a mobile and modifiable reader, hence a subject constituting itself in an exercise (askesis) and in that sense as practical. What is the nature of the ascetic, practical I? Why is it necessary in establishing the supremacy of the I think? The nature of the practical I, just as the process of its self-constitution, plainly cannot fall under the Cartesian criterion for truth. It is in no way perceivable clearly and distinctly. It is not something given together with the intuition I think I am. In contra-distinction to the thinking I, the practical I is neither simple nor absolute, but mobile, which is to say that it cannot serve as a principle. The deductive method does not encounter it, be it as the starting point of an argument or as the conclusion. The practical subject is
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neither identical with nor derived from the primitive given the cogito nor is it really distinct from it the way the body is. It does not fall under the alternative of a thinking versus an extended substance. This results from the contrast, which Descartes adopts from non-philosophical usage, between dementia and insanitas. The first is a legal, the second a medical term. To be demented, i.e. to be without mind, disqualifies one from participating in a litigation. To be insane, without health, on the other hand, requires intervention on ones body. Only the demented are deranged as persons, that is, in their unio compositionis of thinking and extended substances. What Descartes excludes in order to pursue his meditation is dementia: But they are demented, and I would appear no less demented if I were to take their conduct as a model for myself.13 Once established in its sovereignty, the cogito serves as the point of departure for all demonstrations. But it cannot in turn be demonstrated. It can only be established via a series of exclusions. Who is the agent of such exclusions? Neither the I intuited with certainty nor the I composed of body and soul. The agent of exclusion can only be the meditating I. Its systematic necessity results from the way the cogito can at all be secured, namely through an intuition. Descartes trains himself toward that intuition. Hence the nature of the practical I: not anything given, but something self-given in the process of meditating I as constituting myself as in my right mind. The practical I is not a substance, nor a union of substances, but entirely an act, a practice. As such, its self-alterations not only accompany the demonstrative discourse, they free the terrain for the intuition I think I am to occur. Foucaults strategy in establishing the exteriority of madness (against Derrida14) satisfies, among other needs, a heuristic requirement. It reveals that the status of the question, What can I do?, as well as the practical subject that answers it in doing what it does, is one of extraterritoriality. The mobile and modifiable subject occupies a territory other than syllogistic reasoning. But reasoning is its very way of acting upon itself. Through his demonstrative meditation, Descartes constitutes himself a rationalist subject. It had been Foucaults project to analyze more recent ways of practical self-constitution. After his introductory volume to the History of Sexuality, he had planned to study in what ways what is today called sex became endowed with both boundless manifest power and unfathomable deep meaning in what way it became sexuality. This happens during the nineteenth century (since the word sexuality is itself a coinage of the early 19th century, the general title of the series was and remains as ambiguous as the earlier title History of Madness: Foucaults point in either case was to show that madness and sexuality are precisely not enduring essences). For the archaeologist of discourse, sexuality in the nineteenth century was a golden topic since no one spoke more about it than the Victorian schoolteacher and the father confessor. For the genealogist of power, it was an equally revelatory issue since it allowed him to challenge the received ideas about last centurys repression and our centurys liberation. Indeed, the technologies of sex suggest that in modern societies power no longer operates according to the model of monarchy and its law,, but as a productive agency, utilizing innumerable mechanisms, and
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through a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers. The genealogist was to conceive of sex without the law, and of power without the king.15 As to the particular technologies by which we constitute ourselves subjects of sexuality, they were to be four: the hystericization of women, child onanism and the tactics for fighting it, the psychiatrization of perversions, and the socialization of procreative behavior.16 The three volumes, two of which have been published, look entirely different. In these Foucault analyzes what in a recurrent phrase he calls the way one was to constitute oneself as a moral subject, [i.e.] to place oneself in the complex and mobile game of command and subordination.17 The self-constitution of the moral or ethical subject is traced, in as many volumes, through the classical Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian contexts. Foucault thus not only makes up for his previous neglect of anything pre-modern, he also expands the archaeological-genealogical method. It is used now to seek out the forms and modalities in which one relates to oneself, that is, in which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself as subject. 18 These three volumes, then, tell in detail how in antiquity, up to the Fathers of the Church, the self could shape itself through varying practices. They describe how the individual was able to situate itself within a discursive network and a power grid. For each of the three historical moments examined, they answer with much detail the question, What can I do? What strikes one right away is indeed the inadequacy of the generic concept of sexuality. For the Greeks, the guiding representation for self-shaping was rather that of the usage of pleasures (chresis aphrodision, Plato and Aristotle); for the Romans, a more severe learning of joy (disce gaudere Seneca); and for the early Christians, the flesh (sarx, Saint Paul). Foucault thus discards any unitary concept of sexuality. He seeks out changing relations between the subject as a sexual agent and the other domains of life in which he exercises his activity.19 For the Greeks, any answer to the question, What can I do?, remains inscribed among determinants such as the order of the household, the exigencies of dietetics, and the problematic choice of a sexual object three domains of power relations in which the agent must impose his mastery. The shift to the Roman context does not add any decisive factors to these three areas of the free mans supremacy, rather it concerns the way the individual must constitute himself as a moral subject. . . . The subject must assure himself of his domination, but the accent lies now more on the individuals weakness, his fragility.20 In the early forms of monasticism, those factors change again, as does the form of mastery. The one compelling struggle of the monastic subject seeking to constitute himself as moral, aims at perfect chastity. However, what strikes one furthermore in these volumes is Foucaults very concept of the self-constituting subject, which now turns into an invariable.21 There is the Greek, the Latin, the early Christian and one may add, the early modern, Cartesian mode of practical self-constitution. To be sure, the sexual determinant is not an enduring feature of the practical subject revealed by the archaeological-genealogical method (which Foucault is far from
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repudiating in his volumes on sexuality), but mastery certainly endures diachronically. From the Greek free citizens and the Roman magistrates dominion over their families and lovers, to the Church-Fathers command over the spirit of fornication (Cassian), to Descartes exclusion of madness, a clear line can be drawn that exhibits violence as an abiding trait in Western self-constitution at least from antiquity to early modernity. In addition, that line substantiates what appears like an unstated premise in Foucaults more recent writings, namely that the task as well as the possibility of shaping the self are constants. Despite the many instances of displacement, reorientation, and varying accentuation22 in the ways people have been able to act upon themselves, the subject as practical is not an epochal figure, one tied to a particular age in our history. Rather, it is always called upon to step into the narrow, shifting place left open by discursive constellations and power effects. Whether the violence of imposing mastery also characterizes what can be done in the age of closing modernity, namely our own, remains to be examined. At the risk of seeming overly systematic, in tracing the successive modes of practical self-constitution it is useful to speak of the ethical subject only in the Greek context. Originally ethos designates ones dwelling place. The three aspects by which Foucault describes the Greek self-practice dietetics, economics, and erotics amount indeed to as many emplacements of the self. Ones diet of pleasures places one with regard to ones body; moderation in ones authority over family members and slaves places one within the household; and ones respect for a courted ephebe or, in the converse relation, the ephebes self-control in giving in to a suitor determines the subjects reputation and places him within the city. This bodily, domestic, and political stationing is the one originally ethical issue. The term moral signifies strictly the way in which a Roman fashions his self. To speak of mores (customs, usages, conduct) indicates a greater anxiety about the place of pleasures, with an insistence on restraints and austerity in the medical and philosophical literature that the Greek term in no way connoted. Selfconstitution still means self-stationing, but the emphasis lies more on the sagacious cultivation of ones natural dispositions: on ones self-culture in the sense of colere, tending and attending to. Likewise, the ascetic subject is specifically the one that effectuates itself through the early Christian technologies of self-constitution. Lastly, if Descartes practice of a demonstrative meditation is at all to be read as paradigmatic for his age, then the rational subject is produced by a style of exercise proper to the beginnings of modernity. To be sure, this epochalization of the ethical, moral, ascetic, and rational figures of practice upon oneself must not be taken rigidly. On the other hand, and although Foucault does not set them apart, treating these terms as vaguely synonymous would result in blurring the very displacements in history all of his investigations were meant to dramatize. The term Foucault will reclaim for our own historical site is the most generic of the ones mentioned, namely, askesis, exercise or training. Augustine rendered it as exercitatio. In a society that tends towards global uniformity, asceticism will however designate something quite different from the mastery of appetites denoted by the Greek word; something quite
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different, too, from the cultivation of inwardness stressed by its Latin equivalent. Each of the phenomena designated by these ancient concepts entailed a specific anxiety. For the eromenos it was the anxiety of submitting sexually like women and slaves, while belonging to the class of free men; for the erastes it arose from the very fact of physical desire while teaching the soul. For an early Christian it originated, in Augustines terms, from the dialectics of rest: the heart would not feel restless if it had not already found what it seeks; yet, having found its peace, it remains restless still In our contemporary configuration, askesis will again be accompanied by an anxiety. Locating it will help us specify generic asceticism. That specification will appear as one describes the struggles through which subjects can constitute themselves today. What can I do in an isomorphic society? There exists not a single culture in the world in which it is allowed to do anything.23 From selected moments in our history Foucault has analyzed the ever-shifting limits of the arena that has marked out in advance what we have been able to do. He has mapped the discursive and extra-discursive forces that have assigned subjects to a restricted residence where they could constitute themselves. Those heteronomous forces circumscribe narrowly the field of autonomous self-constitution. One cannot help inquiring about todays constellation of heteronomy and possible autonomy: What do those forces allow us to do in our contemporary site? Foucault has not entirely neglected addressing this question, but he has done so in a rather programmatic tone. He states: We have to promote new forms of subjectivity.24 This implies a struggle that conjoins various strategies. In the subject, as Kant had already recognized, strategies of heteronomous and autonomous constitution intersect. The archaeologist-genealogist, however, no longer trusts that autonomous self-legislation can at all be universal. Therefore, he has to point out in the contemporary site possible modes of self-formation or subjectivation that are as positive as the modes of other-formation or subjection. The conjunction of constitutive strategies is more complex than transcendental criticism could descry since all forces of subjection are not imposed from outside the self, as are social domination and economic exploitation. To be sure, these have not disappeared from the Western world. But new forms of inner, although heteronomous modes of subjection have appeared as targets in todays struggles. These are the heteronomous voices that tell us our identity. To learn from the soft sciences who and what we are, and to recognize ourselves in their dicta, is to interiorize power in the form of knowledge. Indeed, in saying in acknowledging, confessing, This is what I am, the subject objectifies itself within itself. As cognitive objectification, interiorized heteronomy exemplifies the modern postulate of mans central position in the epistemic fabric; as subjection under power, it exemplifies the modern version of the quest for mastery, the one diachronically abiding trait in our history until now. Self-identity, endlessly invoked, thus results from interiorized,
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although heteronomous, subjection. Self-identity is self-objectification accepted and enforced as self-subjection. A comparable chiasma characterizes the possible self-formation or subjectivation. Outer yet autonomous subjectivation to Kant, a contradiction in terms lies at the heart of what Foucault has to say about the struggle for a new subjectivity. The free citizen of the Greek polis, the cosmopolitan Roman the member of the City of God in early Christianity, the protesting communities of the Reformation, Descartes as the spokesman for the early modern rationalist community (to which he proposes the exercise of meditation), Kant as the spokesman for the movement of Enlightenment25, all constitute their subjectivities in the public sphere. Their autonomy is a possiblity rendered concrete in institutions or networks: the bouleuterion, the comitium, the addressees of instructions or collations such as Cassians26, the assemblies of reformed churches, Descartes audience of correspondents (Mersenne, Brulle, Christina), Kants reading public. In none of these is the self-constituting subject a wordless one. It is not the decontextualized self of inwardness, but a self that becomes autonomous as it makes the possibilities that are held out in its narrow sphere of freedom, and epochally opened up, its own. As one discovers the sequence of foci in Foucault and follows him from the analysis of discursive practices to that of the techniques of power and lastly to the modes of subjectivation or self-formation, one should therefore not suspect any topical withdrawal to the inner life. For one, Christian and post-Christian interiority prove to have been determined by heteronomous although interiorized, as well as by exterior although autonomous, factors. But more decisively, as Foucault analyzes the contemporary constellation of possible modes of self-constitution, the self is entirely inscribed in public struggles. New forms of subjectivity, he writes, can today be promoted in struggles against power effects as such. He gives a few examples and spells out some traits they have in common. Examples are the opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. 27 Or, in a different enumeration of targets: Family authority, the impact of the police on ordinary life, the organization and discipline imposed by [schools], the passive role encouraged by the press.28 These lists describe particular and scattered forms of mastery. More decisive are the traits according to which subjectivity constitutes itself in these struggles. Here again it is necessary to go beyond Foucaults scant remarks and examine them from the perspective of the quest for mastery. From the Greek to the modern forms of self-constitution, this quest had appeared as a constant. Gaining and preserving ascendency over the household, over the body, over madness had turned out to be the prime feature of the various techniques for shaping the self. Power effects do not come in the form of universals. Taken abstractly, authority and mastery do not figure among them. Rather, one has to ask: Could it be that today mastery constitutes a leading trait, no longer of the goals of self-constitution but, on the contrary, of its obstacles? This hypothesis can be verified along the two lines of subjection and subjectivation.
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The struggles listed are aimed at distinctively contemporary modes of collusion between power and knowledge. In that sense, they exemplify a resistance, possible today, against subjection. What is being opposed are claims of cognitive ultimacy. The experts That is what you are thus stands paralleled with knowledge claims concerning the postulated standards, mentioned earlier, of which man may be the last. The educator, the psychiatrist, the physician, just like the speculative metaphysician, postulate evidence that, as evidence, can only be coercive. A truth from the mouth of an expert speaker Remember that you are a teenager, or a woman, or a neurotic imposes itself. Proof of its power lies in the degree of assent and interiorization these truths generate. Such was the very regime of epochally ultimate referents. They gave the city its order and the subject its center. An argument a contrario to demonstrate that formal affinity between expert knowledge claims and metaphysical postulates can be made from the fate of the most obviously heteronomous agent of subjection, positive law. Its fate is probably not the same today on the European and American continents. In the New World, a sentence like Its the law remains assured of a degree of interiorization and hence of fetishization that it has entirely lost in the Old. Few would disagree with Foucault that only a fiction can make one believe that laws are made to be respected . . . Illegalism is an absolutely positive element of social functioning whose role the general strategy of society includes in advance.29 Claims to ultimacy promote varying representations according to context. For the struggles in question, the elementary task consists, then, in detecting those fetishes artificially endowed with ultimacy, and to reveal how knowledge and power concur in them to subject the subject. What forms of subjectivation, i.e. self-constitution, are possible today? Foucault has been reluctant to name any, preferring to invoke the right to be different and to urge us to imagine and to build up what we could be.30 The general thrust of his reasoning is however not so difficult to point out. This can best be done by distinguishing between individualism and anarchism. The modern state, he writes, has placed its citizens in a double bind. Never in the history of human societies has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.31 Individualization designates not only the atomistic condition of life in modern societies, but more radically the immediate and intimate exposure of each to the state. The origin of the welfare state in the Christian cure of souls has been noted before Foucault. As the church was present to the conscience of each, so the state in liberal regimes is present to the life of each. With the institution of democracies, power of a sacerdotal type . . . suddenly spread out into the whole social body. The double bind consists in the states charge to unify its members into a whole while organizing their every dimension of private existence. Under these conditions that is, if the organizational-totalitarian bind accompanies necessarily the liberal-atomistic bind self-constitution cannot mean enhanced individualism. This is already apparent on the cultural level: there is no safer formula for social isomorphism than to appeal to everyones
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particularity. In chiming ones unique personality, feelings, tastes, lifestyle, and beliefs, one does exactly what everyone else does and so promotes uniformity in the very act of denying it. To individualism, then, Foucault opposes anarchism: The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the individual from the State and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the State and the type of individualization linked to it.32 Only on the condition of ceasing to dream about social mega-units will self-constitution be public and yet autonomous. To imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system . . . If you wish to replace an official institution by another institution that fulfills the same function better and differently then you are already being reabsorbed by the dominant structure. Reformism pertains to the same cluster of phenomena as individualism, liberalism, totalitarianism. Remembering what has been said about man, that passing postulate, one may have to add humanism to this cluster; and remembering the genesis of the modern state out of Christian techniques of controlling the soul, one may also add spiritualism. In all of these, self-constitution, although interiorized, remains heteronomous. What emerges as the gesture of a self-constitution that is possible today is the polymorphous fight against social totalities. The whole of society is precisely that which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed. 33 The struggles mentioned are anarchistic struggles. What makes them such is not only the intended break-up of totalities, but more essentially still their polymorphous, sporadic, transversal, immediate nature.34 Foucault is equally explicit about the philosophical discourse possible today, as well as about the status of his own writings. Of philosophy, if it is alive, he says that it amounts to an asceticism, an exercise of the self, in thinking. In other words, quite as in the case of Descartes, philosophizing would be the very activity of the thinking subject constituting itself. But, given the loss of the ego capable of centering the totality of phenomena upon its act I think, the subject that can shape itself today through an ascetic exercise will not be the rationalist subject. Nor will his thought-trains yield a meditation. They will rather yield an essay. This literary genus has to be understood as a modifying trial upon oneself in the play of truth. His own writings, Foucault adds, amount exactly to such an exercise. They have been a trial and have required asceticism inasmuch as they consisted in an attempt to think differently. He views, then, his entire body of studies, the ones on sexuality just like others I have undertaken before, as the ongoing protocol of an exercise. The philosophic-ascetic tradition so reclaimed is brought to bear on a new content, on one enduring issue: It has been a philosophical exercise whose issue has been to ascertain the extent to which, in the labor of thinking ones own history, one can enfranchise thinking from what it thinks silently.35 At stake is the struggle against the very premise of unquestioned insertion in the discursive and power plays of the day. What thinking has thought tacitly are the constellations of truth conjoined with the effects of power. We have been thinking all along what a given age
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has produced as its own heteronomous order; and we have been thinking that order silently, interiorizing it despite its heteronomy. If any autonomous philosophical exercise consists in thinking differently, then the required asceticism is a trial indeed not only an attempt or essay, but also an ordeal. The locus of that attempt and that ordeal, the locus of any speech that no culture can accept immediately and which is therefore transgressive,36 is writing. Therein lies the kinship Foucault claims with Descartes, an affinity that his earlier remarks on the rise and fall of the modern postulate man did not exactly foreshadow. Foucaults trial, undergone in writing, has consisted in displacing the boundary-lines tacitly taken for granted, such as between the normal and the pathological or between innocence and guilt. In his archaeological and genealogical writings, he has exercised both trained himself in, and carried out the constitution of himself as a transgressive subject. If in addition to those writings one takes into account the sparse remarks on the contemporary site, one may surmise that constituting oneself a transgressive subject is or has been an epochal possibility available to cultures other than ours. Socrates and many others have stood accused of thinking differently. But what is novel about todays order of truth and power is its trend toward world-wide homogeneity. The forms of struggle mentioned earlier pertain to that context alone. What can be done in such an isomorphic society, then, is to constitute oneself an anarchistic subject. Transgressions, Hegel said, are necessary essentially not epochally so that the law be possible. Anarchism, on the other hand, appears as a practical possibility only after the triumph of the modern state. The anarchistic subject shares, however, in the medium of struggle whereby both the rationalist and the transgressive subject have constituted themselves publicly: through writing or discursive intervention. Having studied the power effects of discourse, how could Foucault not have been deliberate about the displacements effected in the public sphere by his own utterances? The difference between transgressive and anarchistic struggles lies in their respective targets: for the transgressive subject, any law, for the anarchistic subject, the law of social totalization. That difference also points to the type of anxiety that accompanies the mode of practical self-constitution possible today. Our anxiety stems from the impossibility of postulating standards. In the concrete goals of his fights penal institutions, the collaboration between the medical establishment and institutionalized enforced interrogation (not only in South-American countries), etc. Foucault stayed in agreement with ideological organizations and movements. However, he did not endorse the rationale for action of any of these. Why did he join their fights then? Certainly not out of some moral imperative that would be universally valid. The search for a form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me.37 One is reminded of Luther: Here I stand, I can do no other. As opposed to nineteenth century anarchism, the one that is possible today is poorer, more fragile. It has no linear narrative to justify itself, only the history of truth with its attendant history of the subject. But these are fractured by breaks. The
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transgressive subject still fetishizes the law in daring what is forbidden. The anarchistic subject echoes Nietzsches Zarathustra: Such is my way; where is yours?... For the way that does not exist.38 Anarchism through discursive intervention is a possibility today, but it is not an ought. To be sure, there lies a prima facie paradox in claiming that constituting oneself an anarchistic subject amounts to contesting ones very insertion into a given arrangement of discourse and power: The target of these struggles lies in power effects as such. As such? Is it not contradictory to hold, on one hand, that there exists no Enemy Number One but only precise goals for skirmishes and, on the other, that the objective of contemporary struggles is to fight the principle of encroachment by which social totalities confine ones life to a pre-set locus in their over-all apparatus? The impression of paradox diminishes if it is understood that contesting power effects as such amounts to the strategy of exposing them where and as they occur. Thus the medical establishment needs to be denounced because it exercises uncontrolled power over peoples bodies, their health, and their life and death.39 Aiming dispersed interventions at heterogeneous targets does not imply that any and ail power effects could be excised, freedom fully appropriated, and everything enacted that until now40 had remained inhibited. To that liberation ideology Foucault opposes more modest tactics within reticular formations of knowledge and capillary strategies of power. Contesting power effects as such remains a piecemeal operation. It means intervening against ever new figures of mastery (which are not instances of any one Great Oppressor), starting over again and again, displacing coordinates of thinking as far as is strategically possible. The anarchistic subject constitutes itself in micro-interventions aimed at resurgent patterns of subjection and objectification. Does the project of drafting a history of the subject lend itself to the same essentialist misapprehension as the histories of madness and sexuality? Yes, if by subject one understands the bearer of qualities such as consciousness and the agent behind such acts as reflection; no, if that history is read as an instance of the history of constellational truth, with its many diachronic deaths and new beginnings. For a culture obsessed with what is deep inside the self hidden, unconscious, profoundly and unfathomably my own anarchistic selfconstitution means the dispersal of inward-directed reflection into as many outward-directed reflexes as there are systems of power to short-circuit, disqualify, and disrupt.41
NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 209. 2 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, transl. from the French (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 343. 3 Ibid., p. 387. 4 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 12 and 14.
5 The Order of Things, op. cit., p. 387. 6 In a lecture course of 1943, Martin Heidegger said: Modern man, who is barely three centuries old... Heraklit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 55 (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1979), p. 132. 7 M. Foucault, Historie de la folie lge classique, 2nd d. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 582. 8 M. Foucault, Lusage des plaisirs, vol. 2 of Histoire de la sexualit (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 16f. 9 Le retour de la morale (interview), Les Nouvelles, (June 28, 1984), p. 40. 10 Ibid., p. 37. 11 All quotes from What Is an Author?, The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 118-120. 12 M. Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, Geoff Bennington, transl. Oxford Literary Review, (Autumn, 1979) 4, p. 19. 13 In the sentence that precedes, Descartes describes madness and its causes in medical terms: ... those insane people whose brains are so befogged by the black vapors of the bile that they continually insist they are kings... As he excludes madness, he employs, however, the legal vocabulary. Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (AT VII, 19), transl. by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 58 (transl. modified). 14 Foucaults essay is a rejoinder to Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31-63. In this piece, Derrida criticized in turn three pages on Descartes in M. Foucault, Folie et Draison: Histoire de la folie lge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), pp. 5457, not included in the translation of the abridged version, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1965). 15 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 72 and 91. 16 Ibid., pp. 153 ff. These four elements together constitute a general theory of sex a phrase left out in the English translation, doubtless for its essentialist ring. 17 M. Foucault, Le souci de soi, vol. 3 of Histoire de la sexualit (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 115. 18 Ibid., p. 84. 19 Ibid., p. 49. 20 Ibid., pp. 84 ff. 21 Shortly before his death, Foucault stated: What was missing from classical antiquity was rendering self-constitution as a subject problematical, Le retour de la morale, op. cit, p. 4L This leaves one perplexed since in Lusage des plaisirs he reiterates that just such self-constitution as a subject was at stake in Greek ethics, op. cit., pp. 10f, 33ff, 45, 50, 56, 73, 96, 100-3, 123, 154, 193. 22 Le souci de soi, op. cit., pp. 84 f. 23 Histoire de la folie, op. cit., p. 578. 24 Why Study Power, op. cit., p. 216. 25 When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklrung? he meant, Whats going on just now? ... What are we? in a very precise moment of history, ibid. p. 216. One may object that Kants essay is more likely to raise the question of what is happening in Kants historical period, when read in French translation. Les Lumires (as well as the Italian Illuminismo) is a term that designates an age in modernity, while both the German Aufklrung and the English enlightenment (at least when not capitalized) denote primarily an intellectual project, not a century the eighteenth in intellectual history. 26 See Foucaults analysis of Cassians Institutions and Collations in Le combat de la chastet, Communications (XXXV, 1982), pp. 15-25.
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27 Why Study Power, op. cit., p. 211. 28 M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 218. 29 M. Foucault, Des supplices aux cellules (interview), Le Monde (Feb. 21, 1975), p. 16. 30 Why Study Power, op. cit., pp. 211 and 216. 31 Ibid., p. 213. 32 Ibid. pp. 215 f. (trans. modified). 33 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, op. cit., p. 233. 34 Why Study Power, op. cit., p. 211. 35 Lusage des plaisiers, op. cit., p. 15. 36 Histoire de la folie, op. cit., p. 578. 37 Le retour de la morale, op. cit., p. 41. 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 307. 39 Why Study Power, op. cit., p. 211. 40 Revolutionary undertaking is directed [...] against the rule of until now, Language, Counter-Memory, op. cit., p. 233. I take this ambiguous remark as a warning against utopianism, cf. ibid., p. 232. 41 Des supplices aux cellules, op. cit., p. 16.

3.3 - Schürmann, Reiner - On Constituting Oneself An Anarchistic Subject (EN)

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OnConstitutingOneselfanAnarchisticSubject

FOUCAULT, THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL, AND HABERMAS

ON CONSTITUTING ONESELF AN ANARCHISTIC SUBJECT

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