Foucault: criticism, judgment and assessment

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

Delacampagne But don’t the public expect the critic to provide them with precise assessments as to the value of a work?

Foucault I don’t know whether the public do or do not expect the critic to judge works or authors. Judges were there, I think, before they were able to say what they wanted. It seems that Courbet had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge, I want to judge.” It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it’s one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible.

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be a sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. . [trans. mod]

Random thoughts in response
I am currently buried in an enormous pile of marking – the volume of which can be attributed to one of the increasingly regular endemic and pandemic financial crises to which universities are globally subject at present. There is no money to pay already exploited and poorly paid part-time teaching staff, so full-time staff have to pick up the short-fall while somehow miraculously maintaining their expected research output at the same time.

One of the consequences of an increased marking load is that the volume of complaints from aggrieved and pained students convinced they were worthy of much better grades also increases. Providing more detailed feedback in response simply aggravates the situation in a culture where self-esteem is promoted at the expense of a realistic assessment of capacity to perform in a given area.

Given current staff student ratios, neither can these students be given the instruction that they need to genuinely improve their work. Much as the warm and fuzzy rhetoric produced by educational researchers would like to argue otherwise, assessment is not a teaching tool in the context of enormous student to teacher ratios – it can only be the simple grading of lemons – the disciplinary mechanisms of examination Foucault speaks of in Discipline and Punish aimed at assigning and fixing individuals to their designated social niches. A further problem is galloping credentialism which forces people to rely on the imprimatur of educational institutions to clamber up the social and career ladders. This is a firm requirement in a society based on performance and the expectation that every individual should be the ‘entrepreneur’ of their own lives and subjectivities as they stare bleakly down the barrels of ‘life-long learning’ and mandatory annual ‘professional development’ requirements.

Under these difficult institutional conditions, I cannot help but think of this passage from Foucault – only in my own case I wake from a nightmare of undergraduate essays, postgraduate dissertations and requests to referee journal articles stretching into the mists of an infinite horizon, yelling ‘I don’t want to judge! I don’t want to judge!’ I can only consider wistfully the utopian alternative that Foucault proposes and wonder if there is some practical way in which one could bring just a tiny element of this into the forced march of the endless assessment of one’s students and peers.

The introduction of these kind of resistances or elements of hope and human feeling into the system are increasingly difficult to imagine, let alone implement, in an environment where holes in the chain mail of the meshes of power, as described by Foucault, have become smaller and smaller. Lyotard argues that cracks in the system are papered over by terminally overloading people with busy work, allowing them no time to repair those cracks or to even become aware of their existence in the first place. Even more difficult is the option of tearing down the entire building to replace it with something more in line with some of the more positive aspects of what it means to be human. But it is essential that one keep trying, somehow. This is one of the great forces of Foucault’s work – that constant hope that in spite of everything and under difficult circumstances we can always do better.

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Ethics – Badiou (2001)

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. and intro. Peter Hallward. London: Verso.

I will say from the outset that I found this book opaque in its argumentation and fundamentally alien to my own philosophical stance. Thus I am happy to stand corrected on any of the points I make here. From my perspective at least, Alain Badiou comes across as an old-fashioned existentialist with a few postmodern trimmings around the edges. His other work enlisting esoteric mathematical and set theory in the discussion of philosophical problems does nothing to alter this impression.

I’ll begin by making a few points of comparison with another thinker with whom I’m more familiar, namely Foucault. Foucault is interested in how truth emerges in and through quite specific historical experiences and the historical complexities of the interaction of truth with power relations, whereas Badiou seems more interested in proposing a number of abstract and eternal ontological principles. Even if the latter are only able to manifest in history and in specific instances and through embodied subjectivities, they effectively transcend time and culture and are universal. As Badiou remarks: ‘I think there are truth-procedures everywhere and they are universal; that a Chinese novel, Arabic algebra, Iranian music … that all this is, in the end universal by right’ (pp.140-1).

Badiou mentions Foucault in his book to applaud his rejection of humanism in the 1960s. He notes that this didn’t mean that Foucault and other anti-humanists of the 1960s were amoral nihilists as they took an activist stance in favour of the oppressed. He doesn’t mention, however, the reasoning Foucault used to support his anti-humanist position. This was precisely that ‘humanism’ provided a very limited and abstract definition of what it was to be human, with the end result that large numbers of people were actually excluded from the ranks of the human. In short, humanism was not inclusive or ethical enough.

Badiou makes the assertion that if the human animal is certainly mortal, humans can transcend that limited animal condition and achieve a immortality through accessing the truth. This ‘immortality’ is guaranteed by the fact that the truths being accessed are eternal and exist across time – even if they still need to be historically embodied or brought into history in order to exist. So individual humans remain mortal, but the truth they bring into history transcends time and culture and makes them (metaphorically) immortal in general and in theory. Thus, we have immortality of some kind of abstract human spirit rather than the human individual.

Unfortunately, I can see no good reason to be convinced by these assertions or by the convoluted arguments around what constitutes an ‘event’, where truth somehow emerges in history and then persists through subjective practices of ‘fidelity’. Interesting ideas, but without any detailed historical or empirical grounding to provide some kind of real world purchase, I remain sceptical.

Badiou makes the interesting point that popular contemporary ethics makes the tacit assumption that Evil, rather than Good is primary. By this, he means that ethics doesn’t crank into gear unless it has an evil (oppression of minorities, discrimination etc) to rail against. This leads essentially to a loss of hope and a diminishment of truth. If we start from ideas of the Good or a Utopian stance against which to measure things then we have a more viable ethics. Fair enough, but again this is all terribly vague. Badiou firmly states that there is no God in his schema (p. 25), but he offers a range of abstract concepts which, it could be argued, do nothing but stand in as problematic substitutes requiring an equal amount of belief and whose power effects remain unclear, for all Badiou’s declared radical political stance.

For a more extensive and perhaps more sympathetic review see Andrew McGettigan on The Philosopher site (Interactive electronic incarnation of the Journal of the Philosophical Society of England)

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Foucault and the event

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

I shall sum up [...] the critical operations which I have undertaken [To question] these three themes of the origin, the subject and the implicit meaning, is to undertake – a difficult task, very strong resistance indeed proves it – to liberate the discursive field from the historico-transcendental structure which the philosophy of the 19th century has imposed on it [...]

There where one used to tell the history of tradition and of invention, of the old and the new, of the dead and the living, of the closed and the open, of the static and the dynamic, I have undertaken to tell the history of perpetual difference; more precisely to recount the history of ideas as the sum of the specified and descriptive forms of non-identity.

Michel Foucault, (1996) [1968]. “History, discourse and discontinuity” S. Lotringer, ed., Foucault live (interviews, 1961-1984) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), Translated by Anthony Nazarro, pp. 41-2. Translation modified.

Random thoughts in response
Foucault defines the event as something that has a beginning and an end. Every human experience, activity, idea and cultural form can be analysed as an event or as a series of events. Foucault uses this concept as a way of arguing against metaphysical essences in history. It is important to emphasise that his notion of the ‘event’ shares little in common with the event as it has been defined by other forms of philosophy which define it as the rare and earth shattering eruption of transcendence (or the eternal) into history.

If each event has a discrete beginning and end, it does not exist on its own, it can only exist in relation to other events and to other levels of events. An event when it begins, is already part of a history and a social and cultural structure. It both perpetuates and marks a break or difference – no matter how small – from those structures. It is both the Same and the Other.

Foucault also applies notions of the event, of difference, to his discussion of the formation of the self. The self is likewise an ‘event’. We are born into a language, culture and historical situation and we are trained by, and train ourselves, with the tools produced by our history and culture. At the same time, however, we have the capacity to modify how we belong, to make a unique contribution.

People are continually trying to tie things down and render them the Same so as to maintain social and other forms of order, but the Other, that which is different, keeps on dissolving these orders. One could argue, using worn out and questionable philosophical terms, that in Foucault’s work, this Other is ‘immanent’ rather than ‘transcendent’. Hence the Other is something that is constantly present and in dialogue with what is going on here and now and in ordinary lives. Continual difference pervades our existence, opening up the possibility for transgression at every moment, not just exceptionally. Of course, whether or not people take up the opportunities offered is another matter.

Thus one can oppose the terms ‘difference’ and ‘transcendence’. There is a vast tangle of moral judgment and elitism attached to the notion of ‘transcendence’, given only some people and some situations have access to it or are effected by it. Transcendence also reductively subsumes everything into itself and removes it from history. The term difference never operates this reduction and has far fewer grand pretensions. It doesn’t merely emerge in chosen moments but remains stubbornly historical and of this world. Transcendence has reductive and elitist overtones and is rare, whereas difference is multiple, common and accessible to everybody. Transcendence tends towards a gnostic rejection of the world, a removal to an eternal outside place (or non-place), difference tends towards an active engagement in history and the recognition of injustice.

For thinkers such as Arendt, Agamben and Badiou if the event is indeed singular, only certain events count and those events are rare. These events take on the status of crisis, revolution, exception, the extra-ordinary, the definitive break, wholesale political transformation, the departure from biological or animal necessity. Other occurences simply exist in the shadow of these rare or formative events.

Hannah Arendt, while eliminating the notion of causality and championing the cause of history, posits the idea of the division of action into two forms – one that is characterised as everyday and concerned with the mere maintenance of biological life and the social and cultural status quo and the other as ‘extraordinary action’, which has political and innovative effects. The second form of action is clearly more highly valued than the first.

The risks of elitism in proposing such a divide are high – as has of course been pointed out in various ways by Arendt’s critics. Some people become capable of producing worthy social and historical action, whereas others are condemned to spend their lives as anonymous drones. And disappointingly, especially given Arendt is a woman, those concerned with the biological continuation of the species rather than grand politics, often happen to be women.

Foucault, on the other hand, argues that all actions, thoughts, experiences and physical happenings are historical events which at one and the same time both maintain the status quo and depart from it to varying degrees. Every event by sheer virtue of the fact that it appears in time (history) both belongs to what has gone before and marks a departure from it. This departure or difference can be either virtually non-existent or large – but there is no division in what qualifies as an event and what doesn’t. There are no fundamental ontological differences between types of events, just differences in levels and strategic placement and degrees to which actions or events are transgressive (or not). And further, one has to think very carefully about how one valorises the transgressive.

So rather than a metaphysical reading of the event – where the transcendent comes down and erupts into history or negates history altogether in the maintenance of transhistorical essences, Foucault offers a historical reading where difference permeates everyday existence from moment to moment. This is not to say that the notion of difference is at a fundamental ontological level any more explicable than transcendence or less intriguing, but it is certainly far less pretentious in its ambit and a far more operable and empirically observable notion in terms of the analysis of micro-events and practices.

With thanks to Eduardo Duarte for starting the discussion which prompted these ideas.

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The death of the author revisited

A version of this piece was published in The Australian Higher Education Supplement on 4th April 2012 as ‘Credit where it’s due – but who deserves top billing?’ I posted this on my blog last year but have moved it up as I have made quite a few revisions.

We do not characterise a ‘philosophical author’ as we do a ‘poet’, just as in the eighteenth century, one did not construct a novelist as we do today. Still, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of author construction.

Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author? In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 110

Random thoughts in response

In the late 1960s, French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault famously pronounced the author to be, if not dead, then decidedly fragile. Foucault in his 1969 article ‘What is an author?’ drew attention to the considerable ambiguity surrounding contemporary and historical notions of the author, defining the author as the originator of certain socially agreed upon types of writing.

To explain what he means by the ‘certain constants’ referred to above, Foucault invokes the four criteria Saint Jerome used to determine whether a body of work had the same author, namely (1) consistent quality across works attributed to one author (2) conceptual and theoretical coherence (3) consistent style (4) references only to events which happened before the designated author’s death. (p. 113) While recognising that Saint Jerome’s criteria might appear very simplistic in the context of contemporary literary criticism, Foucault argues they are still descriptive of the basic processes used to attribute authorship.

What I want to do here is offer a few reflections on the idea of the author in the current university context. Authorship is perhaps one of the most highly prized commodities in the academic world. It is used as a measure of reputation and a measure by which individuals are judged worthy of promotion through the ranks of what remains an intricately feudal hierarchy. Being an author who has produced numerous works published by prestigious publishing houses and journals and which are cited and otherwise referred to by many others (‘impact’) is the nirvana of academic achievement. Other functions such as being a good teacher, a good administrator or engaging in community research and consultancy, still come in a remote second in this tacitly agreed upon academic pantheon, in spite of the best efforts of university administrations to valorise these latter roles.

But authorship does not function in the same way across all academic disciplines. The sciences, social sciences and the humanities all have different rules which govern what it means to be an author. In the sciences, the rules are complex. A paper often has numerous co-authors. This can reflect the notion that the paper or journal article tends to function more as a report or a write up of findings than a piece of argued writing and that everybody involved in conducting the experiments and theorising the empirical research should therefore be acknowledged as an author. Thus authorship becomes a category which is used to recognise the generation and ownership of certain research practices and theories rather than simply writing. The authors listed on a scientific paper might not always necessarily be the actual writers of that paper.

Further to this, sometimes attribution has more to do with the relative rank of the author in a hierarchy of power than the amount of actual work done by the named author(s). For example, a professor and supervisor may be given far more weight than a student – even if the student has done most of the work. This rather worrying practice is being imported into the social sciences and humanities and sees postgraduate students (a minority as yet) automatically listing their supervisor as co-author on papers for which the student has been solely responsible. Thus the Matthew principle begins to operate and the professor/supervisor accrues more power, adding items to their publication list at little cost. The student (perhaps) improves their chances of publication and the status of their work by the addition of a prestigious name to their work. One might also mention another practice, which is hopefully less prevalent than it once was, namely the publication by the god-professor of the work of anonymous research assistants and postgraduate students under his own name (and the gender attribution here is deliberate).

To deal with the problem of the order in which co-authors should be listed, there is now even a piece of software – Authorder – which is purportedly designed to simplify the process, using complex calculations of percentages in relation to work done. Theoretically at least, the order of authors listed should then reflect who has done the most work on the paper.

This situation in the sciences has long been recognised by those involved in the field as one fraught with dangers and wide open to corruption and abuses of power. Practices which have been observed to be highly problematic in their scientific disciplines of origin are now seeping through, without any apparent thought as to the consequences, into the humanities and social sciences. The adulation of science and scientific method as a benchmark of truth for all forms of knowledge, even after coming under heavy attack in the 1960s and beyond, is clearly reasserting its primacy in ever more sophisticated forms in the new millennium.

In the humanities however, the link between author and writing cannot be attenuated in this fashion. Humanities output is defined by the writing and argumentation itself: it is not simply a report on some other exterior ‘research’ activity. The problem of how others should be recognised in the production of this kind of writing, has usually been solved by the practice of acknowledgements, rather than by granting co-authorship. So, for example, research assistants, editors, typists, colleagues and friends who have read the writing and made suggestions, colleagues who have helped to write research grants and other institutional supports are thanked in footnotes or dedicated acknowledgements sections, they are not listed as co-authors.

But things are perhaps not so cut and dried in the social sciences where various types of empirical research such as statistical, interview and survey data are all reported on. Is the model of multiple authorship of papers, in the science style of recognising contributors to the research (or even supervisors), rather than solely those involved in the writing and conceptualisation of the paper valid here? This is an interesting question. Often a paper in the social sciences is more than a matter of mere reporting of findings: it includes an argument about the data. Given this is the case, should those merely collecting data be included as authors?

In some areas of social science there has been a trend towards granting co-authorship to the diverse categories of people involved in the infrastructure of producing a journal article. This is sometimes done in a democratic spirit of inclusivity, expressing a desire to help people accrue points in the struggle to achieve the holy grail of promotion. Laudable as this inclusive impulse may be, can this diversity of contributors be granted the title of ‘author’ without unduly attenuating what this is generally understood to mean?

Perhaps we could ask a further question from a slightly different angle. What is the general expectation of a reader when he or she sees an author’s name attached to a piece of published writing? I might specify that we are talking about the ‘author function’ here. As Foucault notes ‘A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer but not an author’ (pp. 107-8). The reader of an article in the social sciences or humanities usually assumes that the author of a published piece of work has been involved in some way in the actual drafting of the text and the construction of its arguments.

Foucault adds that the historical invention of the notion of ‘authorship’ marked a ‘moment of individualisation in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences’ (p. 101). One might be tempted to argue that once the number of listed authors has expanded beyond a certain numerical threshold, then there is a move away from this moment of individualisation. But this doesn’t take into account the fact that each listed author accrues another point on their CV which individualises them further both within the power structures of the institutional field of the university and that of the larger global academic community.

If a new model of authorship is going to be instituted in the social sciences, then in the interests of truth and transparency, there needs to be a far clearer delineation of just what the attribution of ‘author’ means. Or, perhaps to make things simpler, there needs to be a return to earlier and still existing models of acknowledgements with author status only being granted to those who have actually done the writing and arguing.

What is not in doubt in any of this, however, is that the notion of the author is, and has always been, shot through and through with complex relations of power. These need to be the subject of constant vigilance and critical consideration within the academic economy if the integrity of the research process and the value of its contribution to the wider social body is going to be maintained.

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The Good Book (2011)

The Good Book: A Secular Bible by A.C. Grayling

A.C. Grayling The Good Book: A Secular Bible, New York: Walker & Company, 2011.

AC Grayling is a British philosopher who forms part of an (un)holy trinity leading the British school of ‘new atheism’ along with Richard Dawkins and the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. This loose but reasonably coherent movement of thought has quite a few supporters – mainly an assortment of philosophers and science fiction writers: Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchet, Douglas Adams, Dr Who writers Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt, all espouse similar ideas. Recently, popular English philosopher Alain de Botton has offered a more balanced intervention into the discussion with his excellent book Religion for atheists, (Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

Leaving aside Alain de Botton, who provides truly enlightening and productive insights into religious practice as a cultural form, I am in general no great supporter of the British atheist movement for a variety of reasons. The fundamentalist belief in science and narrow materialism espoused by its members wears thin after repeated exposure as do their terrorist polemics whose main aim appears to be to reduce their targets/opponents to ridicule and silence. It is also perhaps no accident that many of the proponents of ‘new atheism’ are science fiction writers. The God they (don’t) believe in emerges as a powerful and inaccessible alien with super powers, a morally ambiguous and not particularly benevolent being who displays an inexplicable fixation with humans over and against the rest of His (and this God is irretrievably male) creation. The new millennium Dr Who has been irritatingly rendered as a version of this ambiguous divine figure to be alternately adulated and condemned (with high moral outrage) at every opportunity.

Another problem I have with this school is nicely summed up by Terry Eagleton. Speaking of Dawkins he writes:

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. [1]

The bottom line, perhaps, is that there is a severe dearth of non-partisan, non-sectarian intellectual or imaginative language to discuss a particular dimension of human experience in the contemporary era. This experience can be divided into three categories: the religious which provides, moral and psychological instruction, guidance, support and group rituals which aid social bonding, all within the framework of an institutional organization and hierarchy, the ‘spiritual’ which encompasses techniques of self formation and the relation to others, and finally the supernatural.

The best and most convincing attempt I have come across so far to provide a new contemporary language to discuss religion (as distinct from spirituality), framing religion as a cultural and historical practice worthy of serious consideration, is Alain de Botton’s new book. Foucault, of course, has developed useful and convincing frameworks for a rigorous discussion of the ‘spiritual’ (in the sense of an examination of historical techniques of self formation and how the individual relation to others is constructed). His discussions on religion tend to be more fragmentary – even if those fragments are extremely enlightening. On the supernatural front however, there is no language at all. The supernatural has become the domain of literature and fiction as the only viable contemporary language for its expression. A mainstream intellectual and non-partisan language to discuss this dimension of experience simply does not exist, if one discounts history of ideas approaches which simply detail what are usually regarded as odd beliefs and practices.

But to turn to AC Grayling’s book, the ostensible subject of this review essay: Grayling is perhaps less ferociously polemical than Dawkins or Hitchens, but he is still committed to the cause. The Good Book subtitled A Secular Bible is a strange exercise. It reads like a rather dull Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, and the format modelled on the King James Bible and the deliberately slightly antiquated language, to my mind at least, further add to the rather contrived and twee nature of the whole project.

My initial introduction to this book was through an elegantly structured talk delivered by Grayling to the Sydney Writers festival in 2011. I was particularly interested by a number of comments he made about wishing to make available to the contemporary reader a treasure trove of useful tools and ideas produced by people in the past. This echoes Foucault’s comments about the past providing a useful set of tools which people can use in various ways today to help them form themselves and ways of living. [2] Grayling also stated that he wanted to relegate authors to the background and anonymity so as to focus attention on the bare wisdom of their statements free of authorial constraints. Again, this echoes Foucault’s archaeological project in its examination of ‘statements’ and orders of discourse as an alternative to the examination of authors’ intentions and the subjectivities. One could argue perhaps, that Grayling is attempting to reactivate old notions of author attribution (or lack thereof) if we refer to Foucault here:

There was a time when the texts that we today call ‘literary’ (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of the author; their anonymity causes no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. [3]

But this surface appearance of a concordance between the two thinkers is just that – a surface appearance. Their renditions of how they delve into the treasure trove of the past are radically different. If Foucault’s approach is to carefully and meticulously locate ideas and thought in their historical setting and context – which then leads to a practical understanding of how these ideas operate and are transformed in quite different historical contexts, Grayling’s method is to remove the ideas completely from their historical and authorial trappings. And that is perhaps the main problem with this book – its lack of contextualisation of its content. Stripped of their historical trappings, the various extracts tend to come across as a series of rather bland platitudes and irrelevant and sometimes puzzling anecdotes and stories about dislocated historical doings.

If Grayling situates his project within the context of biblical studies and processes of ‘redaction’, he might more usefully and convincingly, in my view, have characterised it as an exercise in hypomnemata as described by Foucault, the Ancient Greek practice of keeping notebooks for administrative, public or personal use. Foucault notes:

Their use as books of life, guides of conduct, seems to have become a current thing among a whole cultivated public. Into them one entered quotations, fragments of works, examples, and actions to which one had been witness or of which one had read the account, reflections or reasonings which one had heard or which had come to mind [4]

Grayling explains that this is precisely the process he had followed for decades – finally culminating in The Good Book. It is surprising that given Grayling’s close familiarity with the Ancient Greeks, he didn’t frame his book in these terms. This kind of framing would have in fact considerably strengthened the claims he was making for the validity of his project and added force to his ambition to provide a real secular alternative to the Bible, as opposed to what emerges as a rather dubious analogue. But then perhaps his project might not have achieved the same succès de scandale.

Other reviewers have also offered the rather cynical observation that providing this compendium of non-attributed statements has saved the publishers a fortune in copyright payments and has also helped bolster Grayling’s reputation as a philosopher, as his own text and organizational strategies are woven into the arrangement of quotations in the book, in a way that makes it hard to draw the boundaries between his own interpretative framework and the citations.

The end result of all this, as I have already mentioned, is actually rather bland, which is not an accusation that even its most stringent critics can level against the Bible. On these grounds alone, it is doubtful that Grayling’s Good Book will have the same longevity or impact as its model for all its secular pretensions to the contrary.

References
[1] Terry Eagleton, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, London Review of Books, vol 28, no 20, 2006.

[2] ‘Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analysing what’s going on now – and to change it’. Michel Foucault, “On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 350.

[3] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 109. See also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. (London: Tavistock, 1972 [1969]).

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Foucault and the archive

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

The idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.

Michel Foucault [1967] “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 22-27.

Random thoughts in response

Foucault originally wrote this in 1967 arguing that the idea of the archive initially came to the fore in the nineteenth century. It is clear that we continue to live within these historical parameters. The desire for preservation extends far beyond the documentary archive with, for example, various heritage laws enacted to preserve housing (some of it not worth preserving in terms of its actual habitability). This operates in opposition to an ever increasing consumer disposibility. Objects such as cars, computers, home appliances are constantly and often needlessly updated and consumers are incited to buy the latest and greatest in an exhausting and overstimulating cycle that never ends. Redundancy is deliberately built into a number of these objects to perpetuate this process.

Both processes – the will to preserve every historical artefact and document from the ravages of time and decay and the ever more rapid cycles of the aquisition and disposal of consumer goods are no doubt opposite sides of the same coin – a desperate attempt perhaps to maintain some kind of cosmic equilibrium. The ever increasing and expanding dead weight of the archival past must be counterbalanced by a frenzy of consumer disposibility and the rapid and often counterproductive reconfiguration of consumer goods.

But if these goods are disposed of, examples of superseded items still persist in design museums and in the obsessive archives of private collectors. These collectors preserve in memory the most ephemeral and unaesthetic of objects – old packaging, broken down pieces of machinery, old advertising material.

Contemporary developed society and culture enact major anxieties around the passage of time and also the human relation to objects. In the contemporary era humans exist in highly uncomfortable and conflictual relation with objects. As in dystopian science fiction, they are increasingly expected to adapt to the machines they have created, rather than the machines being designed harmoniously with human comfort and the requirements of the body in mind.

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Cinéma et philosophie (2009)

Cinéma et philosophie by Juliette Cerf

Juliette Cerf, Cinéma et philosophie, Cahiers du cinéma, 2009

This is an interesting short book about the treatment of philosophy in film. It refers notably to Bergson, Deleuze and Godard, Bresson. It includes a photograph of Foucault as a judge in Moi Pierre Riviere as well as many other interesting photos. The author discusses the appearance of real life philosophers in film and films as philosophy – from the perspective of French philosophy (as opposed to the more common perspective of analytic philosophy when it comes to film). It is an interesting read on this front.

The book is not suitable as a textbook for undergraduate students or as an introduction to philosophy using film.

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Foucault: truth, language and philosophy

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

Describing notions of ‘the general form of the Greek conception of language’ in the context of Socrates’ discussions of truth and philosophy, Foucault notes:

‘words and phrases in their very reality have an original relationship with truth …. Language which is without embellishment, apparatus, construction or reconstruction, language in the naked state, is the language closest to truth and the language in which truth is expressed. And I think this is one of the most fundamental features of philosophical language … as opposed to rhetorical [discourse]. Rhetorical language, is a language chosen, fashioned, and constructed in such a way as to produce its effect on the other person. The mode of being of philosophical language is to be etumos, that is to say, so bare and simple, so in keeping with the very movement of thought that, just as it is without embellishment, it will be appropriate to what it refers to.

Michel Foucault, (2010) [2008]. The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982- 1983. Tr. Graham Burchell. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 374-5

Random thoughts in response
Foucault notes Socrates’ position that plain everyday speech which directly reflects one’s thoughts and that speaking from the heart or faith are manifestations of ‘true philosophy’. Thus plain language is closer to the truth of things than clever rhetoric: the more artifice that language involves, the more removed one is from the original purity of truth. One can see this long philosophical tradition emerging in analytic philosophy – which struggles to create a pure language to the point of attempting to distil it into mathematical formulae.

Foucault’s book The Order of Things is one long refutation of this philosophical position in relation to language. Foucault radically challenges the notion that language can be ever be a transparent tool for representing things. Language has its own materiality and solidity and its own patterns of order right from its original inception. If there appears to be a connection between words and things it is not one of a true and transparent representation but one of an analogous structure of order. Words can only resemble the order of things through a process of analogy. Neither is thought a pure entity which can be expressed, translated and mirrored by words. Thought cannot be divided from language and the other ways humans represent the world. We are always faced with degrees of fiction: human culture, language and thought are fabrications from the very outset. Culture, history and civilisation can never be stripped away to reveal the pure, naked and authentic truth. Instead it is these very things that help us access the truth about ourselves and our environment. They are the tools that we need to work with and constantly engage with for good or for ill.

To put all this another way: it is a question of the familiar idea that language is a transparent window onto ‘reality’ and that language can truly represent things. This belief has led to the idea that if you make language ‘pure’, then it will give you a clear window onto reality. A language that is full of artifice obscures what is real and fogs up the window. But Foucault argues that language – or discourse – is actually an object amongst other objects and should be treated accordingly. Hence a pure language is not going to get us closer to the truth. We can’t remove ourselves from language and culture – instead of removing ourselves a far more productive approach is to actively engage with them and use them to help us to determine how we can we can live in the present in relation to ourselves and others.

There is more I should add to this discussion. In Foucault’s description rhetorical language is characterised by Greek philosophers as an exercise of power (it is ‘constructed in such a way as to produce its effect on the other person’), whereas the language of ‘true philosophy’ that Socrates is advocating is not a deliberate exercise of power. It is not about manipulating people, it is about revealing the truth and allowing others to decide how to respond to what emerges.

Foucault has, of course, elsewhere in his work, extensively criticised the Platonic forumulation that power and knowledge (truth) are mutually exclusive. In short, the rest of Foucault’s work takes issue with some aspects at least of the way Plato and Socrates construct the parrhesiastic enterprise.

Reposted due to extensive additions and alterations. With thanks to Steve Shann for his comments on the original post.

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The social utility of art and scholarship

Links via Stuart Elden’s blog

Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes the following (citation via JJ Cohen at In the Middle)

[Research is] an immense undertaking in which countless people performing the most tedious small tasks are able, collectively, to liberate the modern world from the grip of doctrine, authority, and myth. The value of each contribution can, he says, be measured only in the aggregate, and in many cases only much later: many scholarly or scientific projects are like abandoned mines, awaiting rediscovery by future generations. … Redundancy is the price we pay for other, less measurable but very real benefits. But we should be concerned about the mind-set that sees the past as inert, the humanities as old knowledge, and scholarship as the problem. [1]

I find this a wonderfully inspiring and optimistic statement. Often one worries as a writer or researcher that one has nothing to contribute to an already massively overcrowded field and that neither can one ever hope to measure up to the standards set by major artists and scholars who stand out through their innovation and immense productivity. Further to this, are the problems of navigating the enormous bureaucratic and ideological pressures exercised on those teaching and conducting research in universities at present.

Harpham argues that every little bit counts and is worth the effort: an approach that one also finds in Foucault’s work. It is the optimistic view that every human action, every human investigation makes a difference, no matter how tiny. Certainly, at present, concerted mass efforts are required to resist the logic currently in evidence in every social sector: a logic which seeks to organise systems into immovable and well-oiled mechanisms which work well for a few, but less well for a great majority. A logic which also seeks to convince people that their contributions are of no value, reducing them to inaction and despair – a condition which makes them easily tractable – ‘passive and docile bodies’ indeed!

[1] Geoffrey Galt Harpham “Why We Need the 16,772nd Book on Shakespeare” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 20, Number 1, Fall/Winter 2011, pp. 109-116)

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Online vs paper publication

In a most interesting post titled Open access -for all?, Stuart Elden remarks:

We started the Society and Space open site as a partner to the print journal and the publisher’s site [...]

You would think that a quick – material goes up usually within a day or two of being delivered in final form – and open-access venue would be appealing. And certainly, some people have already taken advantage of it and we have more to come. But there has also been a very curious resistance. People have complained about ‘being relegated to the blog’ or suggested that they are ‘old-fashioned’ and want their book review in print.

In my view, this hesitation reflects the fear that publication online – even when through a reputable commercial press – is not as serious or as permament as paper publication. The written word is a solid and permament object in the physical world when it is on paper, but an ephemeral thing of light and energy online. There, it could disperse into the ether at any moment, leaving the author with no material possessions and no physical evidence of his or her accumulating presence as an author in the world. One could perhaps refer to Foucault’s notion of the materiality of discourse here – what does that materiality mean in digital form?

For another post which touches on these and related issues see the In the Middle blog (via Stuart)

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