Andy Blunden September 2005 Foucault’s Discursive Subject (continued)
1. Knowledge The epistemological problem of whether knowledge is entirely enclosed by the paradigm or discourse within which it exists is one that has received ample attention over the past century, and there is no need to recapitulate that debate here. A recent example is the question as to whether poverty exists and can be measured objectively or is on the contrary simply a construct of the setting of the ‘poverty line’ in welfare discourses. Foucault seemed on strong ground when he pointed out that the very concept of ‘sex’ is constructed from a multiplicity of pleasures, discourses, needs, and so on, and poverty researchers would do well to learn from this: both poverty and the concept of poverty are social constructs, differing in nature from one epoch or culture to the next, so if they are to be objective and socially relevant, measures of poverty must be constructed critically. It turns out in fact that poverty is subject to objective measurement (life expectancy, rates of psychiatric admissions, child abuse, imprisonment, etc.), even though such measures only present themselves as a result of a critique of the naïve/intuitive conception of poverty based exclusively on income and monetary wealth. And the line which asserts that on the contrary, the concept of poverty is simply a linguistic construct leads to profoundly reactionary conclusions. Natural science first took up this question on its own territory with Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of Pragmatism (1878) and Percy Bridgman’s Operationalism (1927), culminating in Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “paradigm” (1962). Ultimately however, the validity of a theory is tested on the ground of ethics, that is to say, on the domain of a whole form of life. This insight, which can be traced back to Hegel, was first formulated within the discourse of natural science by Jacques Monod, the 1965 Nobel Laureate for Biology. Critique of knowledge can find a firm ground only in ethics, and this is something that Foucault fails to provide. How is knowledge constituted then? Knowledge is the knowledge of a subject. The Cartesian conception of the subject as a thinking ego came under attack centuries before M. Foucault came on the scene. An individual with working nervous system and sense organs, can know nothing; in addition to the nervous and sensori-motor systems with which every human individual is endowed, knowledge presupposes that the individual is participating in some collaborative activity, engaging both systems, with other people, by means of which their needs a met. Collaborative activity connects people with the entire history of humanity through languages, symbols and images, artefacts, not to mention the human bodies and sense organs shaped by many generations of such activity. The knowledge a person has makes sense to them only to the extent that it is connected with their active use of their body in meeting human needs; but closer examination shows that the specific content of that knowledge is formed not by the individual themself but by the efforts of the individual to collaborate with others using and modifying the ideal entities which mediate their collaboration. The knowing subject therefore includes not only the (socially constructed) nervous and sensori-motor systems of the individual person, but also the concept and the material products (including words and images) embodying that concept, used to recognise and make sense of sense perceptions, and the system of human relations and institutions, through which the concept is brought into relation to the person. Let me be clear here: it is not my contention that an individual “uses” artefacts and other people in order to acquire knowledge. I am saying that the knowing subject is a specific dynamic combination of individuals, ideals and social collaboration. A “thought” unrelated to any social action or meaningful artefact (word, symbol, etc.) would be as absurd as a reflection without its object, the meaning of a nonsense word, or a nation with no citizens. Foucault directs his fire against the naïve/intuitive Cartesian conception of knowledge, in support of an idea of knowledge constituted by discourse; discourse is understood as the unity of an ideal conceptual structure and a real set of power relations between people. However, Foucault is seen not as describing a more concrete conception of the subject, but rather as “deconstructing” the subject, leaving us the absurdity of knowledge without a subject. On the contrary, knowledge is knowledge of some subject, some needy social agent. 2. Human Needs As Marx said at length in the 1844 Manuscripts, “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.” “The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.” [Private Property and Communism, Marx 1844] Both human capacities and human needs have been shaped by the historical development of the social cooperation and the division of labour. A person’s needs are not found in some inner personal world, but on the contrary in the social world in which both their needs and the means of their satisfaction are produced; and not just needs, but a person’s entire identity is produced through their activity with other people. The insight that the sense organs are the product of social development, and can sense only what is socially meaningful certainly undermines the idea of a sovereign individual subject, but it does not undermine the concept of subjectivity as such. Discourse shapes the sense organs, but equally, social relations acquire their sense organs in human individuals. Human eyes and ears are the sense organs of subjects, not of individual subjects, but of social subjects, structured around a division of labour and the social production of human life. So Foucault is right when he argues that there is no such thing as a pre-social ‘sex’ in the human organism, only a range of pleasures and stimuli, arbitrarily bunched together under a concept of sexuality which is a cultural-historical product; but it is equally evident that there can be no sexuality without those pleasures and stimuli which exist only in human bodies. It turns out that human needs are immensely malleable, more malleable than seems imaginable at first, but they remain, nevertheless, human needs. “all the organs of his individual being [are] the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, ... it is human activity and human suffering” [Private Property and Communism, Marx 1844] 3. Agency If it be granted that human knowledge and human needs are the labour of social subjects actualised by individuals, and that knowledge and needs are irreducibly the functions of real, individual, suffering human beings, it may still be doubted that it is in any way sensible to talk about individual agency. “Freedom is the understanding of necessity” said Hegel; an individual is free only to the extent that they can make an intelligent choice between real possibilities, rather than being governed by ‘blind necessity’. Hegel reserved real freedom for ‘world historic heroes’, like Napoleon, who directly express the World Spirit in their lives. Many who have rejected Hegel’s metaphysical conception of history would still grant that the idea of self-determination, or sovereignty, as applied to an individual is an absurdity. At the same time, most frequently when people use the word ‘subject’ they mean precisely that individual agent who is deemed, on the contrary to lack agency in any real sense of the word. So it is here surely that Foucault’s critique would seem to have the most purchase. It is worthwhile to pause and clarify what is meant by “self-determination.” Compare the definition given by Kant in his original definition of the subject of moral philosophy and the definition of sovereignty in the law of nations: A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. ... a person is subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself, either alone or at least along with others. (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals) and “sovereignty, the principle that each nation answers only to its own domestic order and is not accountable to a larger international community, save only to the extent that it has consented to do so.” (Bederman, International Law Frameworks, p. 50) The same parallelism is found in the “recognition” paradigm of sovereignty: “the relations of free beings to one another is a relation of reciprocal interaction throughintelligence and freedom. One cannot recognise the other if both do not mutually recognise each other.” (Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, p. 42) and “an unspoken assumption in the criterion for statehood ... that other nations are prepared to treat a particular entity as a member of the family of nations.” (Bederman, International Law Frameworks, p. 54) Thus we see that the concepts of sovereignty developed by the founders of modern moral philosophy (Kant and Fichte) align with the concepts of sovereignty still used in international law to this day. The meaning of the concept in the context of the law of nations is somewhat clearer than in the context of moral philosophy where the writers we have quoted, pioneers of bourgeois ideology, proposed the individual person as a sovereign subject. Clearly such a conception is idealistic; the individual as a sovereign subject is something that can only be imagined for a faraway future society: “... an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [The Communist Manifesto, 1848] Nevertheless, this conception of self-determination can serve as a norm against which the meaning of ‘subject’ as a ‘free being’ (to use Fichte’s terminology) can be measured. An individual sees themself in the action of others, where that action fulfils a person’s own aspirations and is the completion of the person’s own actions; people make a ‘psychic investment’ (to use James Coleman’s terminology) in other people. Thus we can see that individuals even today can exercise self-determination, that is to say ‘agency’, in and through their relationships with others. ‘Self-determination’ does not and never did imply infinite negative freedom, that is to say, to be able to determine one’s actions purely and simply without regard to the freedom of others. Rather, ‘self-determination’ implies being subject only to laws which the subject may be deemed to have set for themself, either alone or along with others like oneself. Implicit in this concept are norms of procedural fairness appropriate to subjects which recognise each other as moral equals. Thus an individual can enjoy self-determination to the extent that they can freely invest themselves in the actions of social subjects which enjoy self-determination in these terms. A number of issues bear on the question as to whether it is possible for individuals to enjoy self-determination through participation in social subjectivity. These include (i) the presence of ‘discursive heterogeneity’, that is, the presence of competing discourses which give individuals the opportunity to take a critical stance in relation to any given discourse before making a ‘psychic investment’ in it; (ii) if we allow that companies, that is, subjects whose self-determination is directly subject to the ‘laws of economics’ can allow only qualified access to self-determination, then (iii) the existence of relations of trust and solidarity between mutually independent subjects, which offer opportunities for individuals to participate in determining the conditions of their own lives, and (iv) people in general have some measure of real control over the products of their own labour. As it happens, the past couple of decades have seen the growth of social conditions in which the great mass of people are experiencing a ‘loss of agency’, as power becomes more and more concentrated in a relatively small number of great corporations, subject to the “laws of the market,” while all other forms of social collaboration are being destroyed and society atomised. This is where our attention needs to be focused. To theorise this as if subjectivity was only ever an illusion, or even, as some do, paint ‘the subject’ as an essentially oppressive entity anyway, only makes the situation worse. What Foucault can help us with though is this: in the modern world it is no longer plausible to conceptualise agency in terms of ‘social subjects’, understood as mutually independent institutions, organisations, social movements and so on. The notions of discourse and interpellation into subject positions within a multiplicity of narratives, actually give us a better approach to the conception of subjectivity and self-determination. The kind of mechanical field presupposed in both the above quotes defining the notion of sovereignty, needs to be replaced with a field of interlocking discourses in which each effects a kind of ‘matrix transformation’ on relationships in the others. This is a complex task, but offers a way forward. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All quotes from Foucault refer to The History of Sexuality. An Introduction. Volume I. Michel Foucault, translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books 1990. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
