Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos

I want to say a few words on Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015). The strong point of this book is that it grasps neoliberalism as more than an economic doctrine. It is a governing rationality that disseminates itself throughout the social body, transforming the states as well as individuals into images of the firm, thereby crowding out the image of human beings as citizens that is indispensible to democracy. 

Unlike Marxist critics of neoliberalism like David Harvey, she is comparatively uninterested in the economic effects of neoliberalism - widening inequality, commodification and so on. Inspired by Foucault and governmentality theory, she instead sees it as a rationality transforming every human domain - from education to dating and social media - so that they become “framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized” (p. 10). Her claim is not that neoliberalism necessarily privatizes or marketizes all spheres, but rather that the model of the market is dissemminated to all domains and activities. Supplanting concepts like citizen, political public sphere and democracy itself by market terms, neoliberalism becomes "profoundly destructive to the fiber and future of democracy” (p. 9).

A good example of the new practices of self-investment and attracting investors is the university. Universities turn into companies catering to consumers and investors, forgetting their role as providers of public higher education for citizens. Scholars have to be entrepreneurial and investment savvy while students are presumed to be oriented primarily to augmenting their human capital.

Brown's account is clearly useful. She provides the theoretical tools needed for understanding the subject's need today for continuous, compulsive self-investment. She also makes it eminently clear why the spread of New Public Management throughout the sector of public services is part and parcel of neoliberalization. Even if these practices of self-investment and pseudo-market behavior are not monetarized, they all orient themselves to the market as a model and site of truth or veridiction, as Foucault would say. Seeing them as part of the same process, it also becomes possible to diagnose a wide variety of protests - e.g. campus protests - as resistance against neoliberalization.

It's evident that Foucault is central to her account. Above all, she takes over his claim that neoliberalism's central trait is that it generalizes the enterprise form. This doesn't mean that she accepts Foucault uncritically. Above all, she criticizes him on two scores. Firstly, there are no citizens in his account. He lacks a concept of a “demos acting in concert”, making it seem that governing only emanates from the state. As a result, he never reflects on the effect of neoliberalism on democratic political life. Secondly, his aversion to Marxism made him neglect the role of capital (p. 73ff). It is tempting to see Brown as attempting to wed Marx and Foucault, but that would hardly be correct. The latter plays a far more predominant role than the former in her account. Despite her criticism that Foucault neglects the role of capital, capital is almost wholly neglected in her own analysis as well.

My major dissatisfaction with the books is that Brown says nothing of why neoliberalization happens. Why is the enterprise form generalized throughout the social body? Brown is very clearly issuing a sort of call for resisting neoliberalism and defending democracy, but to resist something effectively you need to understand its causes. All we get is a kind of negative delineation of what sort of explanation she rejects - mostly Marxist explanations focusing on economic causes such as Harvey's well-known thesis that neoliberalism should be understood as an attempt to restore class power to the capitalist class in the face of declining profitability. Brown empahsizes the new and revolutionary character of neoliberalism, but gives us few clues as to why this revolution occurs.

A final reflection. In these days it may seem as if the greatest threat to democracy is coming not from neoliberalism but from rightwing populism. Especially after the Brexit referendum and the "Trump shock" it may easily seem as if neoliberalism is defeated. I'm not going to repeat here the pertinent argument that neoliberal policy during the last decades has probably paved the way for these populist triumphs. Instead I'd like to add a thought that came to me the day that the results of the US election came in. I was doing some reading about a particular kind of neoliberal urbanism, namely the "entrepreneurialist" policy of attracting capital to a city by promoting its "brand", usually by creating an image of the city as clean, safe and creative. Here, incidentally, we have the enterprise form again - the city behaving like an enterprise. I asked myself while reading what rightwing populism on the level of urban policy would mean. Evictions of homeless people and penalization of begging? The adulation of "strongmen" mayors? And zero tolerance against graffiti? But these are things that that we've also been told characterize neoliberal urbanism. Isn't it precisely in order to promote the "city brand" that these policies of exclusion and so on are employed?

Neoliberalism may be associated with globalist elites and rightwing populism with the nationalism of "common" people, but on the level of city policies they mesh pretty well. Isn't this reflected in a surprising convergence between the subjectivities of rightwing populism and neoliberalism? The rightwing populist subject and the neoliberal subject both delight in excluding unwanted others. Both believe they have the right to things for which they have paid dearly and which they certainly won't share with freeloaders. The mad chant "Out with the immigrants" is the distorted echo of the neoliberal subject's irritated demand that nothing should be allowed to disturb his or her consumer experience. I have yet to see a rightwing populism that resurrects the idea of a citizenry or demos. What it does is to vent anger at unwanted competitors in a race that remains exactly as neoliberal as before. Urban policy helps us visualize what the rather abstract statement that neoliberalism paves the way from rightwing populism may mean. It is hard to see in what sense the latter implies a threat to the former.

Why reading Foucault-inspired research makes me long for dialectics

I've been interested for some time in the possibility of using the notions of governmentality and counter-conducts in the study of social movements. In the existing governmentality literature, I think it's a pity that so little attention has been given to protest and social movements.



The problem is that, while there's plenty to fetch in Foucualt's work for social movement scholars, there is also a tendency in much of his work and among his followers to belittle resistance. This tendency is admittendly weak and perhaps marginal to his work, but it is nevertheless (to be frank) annoyingly persistent.

Take the closing words of the first volume of the History of Sexuality. Speaking of the ruses and stratagems that have made us think and speak of sex as central and precious to us, he writes: “The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance” (Foucault 1990:159). What I find uncomfortable here is not at all the substance of his work on the basis of which he makes this statement. What makes me uncomfortable is its slight touch of nastiness, the malicious pleasure and perhaps sense of superiority I imagine it is supposed to produce in the reader.

Or take Carl Death's otherwise admirable article on how the notion of counter-conduct can be employed in resistance studies. Observing that summit protests produce subjectivities and identities, he draws the conclusion that the protests often fulfil an expressive function that serves to stabilize power. The “appearance of challenging power relation”, he writes, can “provide reassurance, a semblance of control and agency, and thereby re-legitimize established… forms of politics” (Death 2010:247). This conclusion may be correct, but surely it is also one-sided. Reading it, I again imagine hearing superior laughter, and again I feel uncomfortable.

How should I understand this tendency for Foucault-inspired research to gleefully restate how deluded protesters are? To begin with, let me spell out more clearly why I find this tendency troubling.

Firstly, this tendency seems to be utterly unecessary. It goes against the grain of what I take to be the main thrust of Foucault's writings, which stress the openness and unpredictability of the effects of power. Nothing says that the fact that power and resistance are mutually constitutive must necessarily mean that resistance always misses its target or that it is actually the victory of power in disguise.

I'm in sympathy with the attempts of Death and others to use Foucault’s ideas to develop an analytics of protest based on a governmentality perspective, in which freedom is not simplistically opposed to power but presupposed in governing. As Death points out, it's often preferrable in the analysis of protest to pay attention to how protest and government are mutually constitutive. Such a perspective captures the messiness of protest better than simple binary thinking. Sensibly, he also elsewhere claims not to be pessimistic about protest and states that he, like Foucault, instead tries to advocate an ethos of continual criticism. But ironical statements about how protests stabilize the establishment is not a way to escape the dichotomy of resistance and co-optation. Instead, they revive it by declaring the victory of co-optation. 

Secondly, the tendency to belittle resistance risks turning Foucauldian analysis into a straightjacket. Let me make a comparison with Hegel. Hegelian dialectics has long been criticized by so-called poststructuralists for the tendency to preclude escape from mediation, of being too watertight. Yet isn't Hegel actually sometimes more open to change and historical novelty than Foucault? Looking at the analyses in the Phenomenology one is immediately struck by Hegel's clear eye for how seemingly opposing forces can be mutually constitutive, the very fact that Foucault-inspired researchers like to stress so much. But unlike the latter, Hegel uses dialectics to show how established powers can be subverted by the very things they produce or “constitute”. The same, of course, goes for Marx: classes are mutually constituted, but the process of constitution itself undermines the system that constitutes them. The idea of mutual constitution is thus not new at all. It's old, and as Hegelian (or Marxist) dialectics show, it can be used in quite other ways than in Foucault.

The gesture which Hegel's critics like to criticize so much - that of gathering up opposing forces, of mercilessly running them through a dialectical round of "mutual constitution" before sending them onwards along a route foreordained by historical necessity - is of course foreign to the gist of Foucault's work. The latter nevertheless, unnecessarily, replicates this gesture in the repeted rhetorical relapses which he and his followers make into the ironic jargon of belittling resistance. 
Against this I think one needs to recall that, just as there is no law of necessary progress, there is also no law of necessary co-optation.

Against the "bad" Hegel and "bad" Foucault, I'd like to steer towards a synthesis of the "good" Hegel and the "good" Foucault. Does this sound surprising? But isn't there also a "good" Hegel - one whose dialectics isn't allergic to contingent imputs, to materiality or to a multiplicity of conflicts? I don't have the time to discuss him here. Let me just state that I think he is possible. As for the "good" Foucault, let me end by letting him speak for himself. The quote is from his discussion of whether it is right to revolt or not. He does not agree with those who say it is useless:

One does not dictate to those who risk their lives facing a power. Is it right to revolt, or not? Let us leave the question open. People revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it. (Foucault 2000:452)

References

Death, Carl (2010) “Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest”, Social Movement Studies 9(3):235-251.

Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1 An Introduction (tr. of La volonté de savoir by Robert Hurley), London: Penguin Books.

Foucault (2000) “Useless to revolt?”, pp 449-453, in J D Faubion (ed) Essential Works of Foucault 1954 - 1984,Volume 3: Power, New York: New Press.

Lukes on Foucault, Scott and false consciousness

The first edition of Steven Lukes' by now classic treaty Power: A Radical View (originally published in 1974) became famous for its discussion of a "third" dimension of power - the power to influence desires and beliefs - which existed next to the power to prevail in decision making and agenda-setting power. The new edition, from 2005, contains the entire original text plus two new chapters.  

One of the interesting additions is the confrontation with Foucault in chapter two. It is a pity that Lukes engages primarily with one particular foucauldian position, the “ultraradical” view that there is no escaping power and that the subject itself is entirely constituted by power, a position that would undermine any notion of freedom or rationality. Rejecting this position is fine, but Lukes would have benefitted, I think, from also engaging with Foucault’s other explorations in power, where there is much that I don’t think can be adequately captured by Lukes' classification of three faces of power. The idea of governmentality, for instance, led Foucault to theorize about the rise of a special kind of power, which he refers to as bio-power but which is perhaps better described as a regulation of self-regulation. This is a kind of power which is exercised over agents, institutions or systems, such as the economy, that are recognized to possess a relative measure of autonomy or freedom from direct intervention by outside agents. Lukes mentions governmentality in passing in order to claim that with these ideas Foucault somehow fell back into recognizing an autonomous subject (thus retreating from his ultraradicalism), but that's hardly a fair account of Foucault. The autonomy of the subject or of the systems which Foucault talks about is relative, itself a product of power, or, to be more precise, of the recognition by power-holders that things like the economy can only be indirectly steered if they are to produce the desired effects. What never appears to strike Lukes is that such a form of power doesn’t fit neatly into his three-fold classification.

I wonder if this does not point to a serious omission in Lukes’ classification. Apart from the rather sketchy “conceptual map” he provides in chapter two, he is concerned mainly with how power can make people agree or consent to domination. What seems to be missing here is the recognition that one important way in which power can be exercised is by inducing people to act in accordance with the aims or interests of power regardless of their conscious thoughts. Such mechanisms could for instance operate through the indirect steering described by Foucault. It can also operate through social mechanisms such as the “sorting” of young working-class lads described by Paul Willis in Learning to Labour. As Willis showed, power completely failed to produce “consent” among the unruly lads, but ironically this very failure steered them into low-paid working-class jobs. To put this in Marxist terms, the lads successfully resisted the hegemony of bourgeois values, but their very resistance turned out to have an ideological function. The possible objection that such an indirect mechanism of power is not real power since it is not - or at least is not openly admitted to be - intended or condoned by the powerful should hardly trouble Lukes, since he himself argues that the “third” form of power is often exercised to produce consent in such unintended fashion.

Speaking of ideology, I liked Lukes' provocative but refreshing defense of notions like “real” interests” and “false consciousness” near the end of chapter three. Notwithstanding his criticism of Gramsci and Lukács, Lukes ends up defending the possibility of what is essentially a (weak version of) ideology criticism. This is interesting considering how generally discredited the old jargon of “false consciousness” has become. Lukes makes ideology criticism palatable by pointing out, firstly, that employing a notion of “real interests” does not have to presuppose any privileged access to truth. What counts as “real interests” simply depends on the researcher's choice of theoretical framework. In a materialist explanation, “real interests” will be material interests, and so on. Speaking of “real interests” thus becomes a relative thing, subject to the same - ultimately hypothetical - status as all scientific theorizing. Secondly, he concedes that the “third” form of power is never more than partically successful. To use a simile, it might inebriate but it doesn’t produce cultural dopes. These two lines of defense seem quite sensible to me and also seem to be in line with the best Marxist theorizing. I think for instance of how ideology is theorized by critical theorists like Adorno who argue that the ideological Schein or semblance can never be total. Ideology must contain traces of the whole, of the real contradictions from which it springs.

Finally, I found myself agreeing with Lukes in his criticism of James Scott. Scott’s rejection of the idea of false consciousness in Domination and the Arts of Resistance probably fits those societies or situations best where coercion is overt and “free spaces” nevertheless exist where the oppressed can share their thoughts. “In societies and situations where coercion is less overt or absent, and inequalities more opaque, the question of how to interpret quiescence is all the more acute” (Lukes 2005:131). Lukes refers to Gaventa’s classical study of powerlessness as a useful study exploring this issue, and in relation to my own research I think that the trauma of defeat for a social movement may be one way in which such quiescence can be produced. Collective traumas can have as one of their effects what might be termed a discursive defeat that brings about a shattering of the subaltern narratives and discourses that Scott calls hidden transcripts. Trauma, then, may be one mechanism through which Lukes' "third" form power is exercised.

So let me sum up my harvest: Foucault is still fruitful to study. Ideology criticism is possible. Power may be exercised by traumatization.

Parrhesia: notes on the public sphere, power and death

Yesterday I reread Foucault's lectures on parrhesia (collected in Fearless Speech, a booklet published by semiotext(e) which is also available  here under the name "Discourse and Truth"). Rereading them I was struck by the penetrating light they throw on issues such as free speech, public speech and the public sphere in today's world.

Parrhesia means to tell the truth, or literally "to say everything". In particular, it means speaking truth in the face of power, even at the risk of your own life."Someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him or her in telling the truth" (Foucault 2001:15f). Parrhesia usually comes from below and is directed to those above. In Hellenistic times the parrhesiastes, or truth-speaker, was  a person who spoke the truth to the sovereign. To be sure, the use of free speech in the agora of Athenian democracy was also referred to as parrhesia, but the imagery informing Foucault's discussion seems Hellenistic rather than Athenian. In any case, the Athenian agora was hardly a space where speeking was without risk. As Arendt states in In The Human Condition, it was a place where "courage and even boldness" was needed for public speech (Arendt 1958:186).

Speaking truth in the face of power – who can help thinking that this sounds so much like Foucault? Especially in its late, Hellenistic version, the parrhesiast is also someone who appears fundamentally alone, left to his own devices in the confines of the sovereign's court and without help from any well-intentioned public sphere prepared to listen to reason.

Using parrhesia as a model for public speech may sound outrageous. Aren't we all today - at least in so-called democracies - free to speak of whatever we like without having to fear reprisals? However, the attitude of speaking truth even when you risk your own life is not so divorced from our understanding of the public and of public speech as we might think at first. One implication of reading parrhesia as a model of public speech is that making something public would be tantamount to declaring: "I know that speaking here might get me killed. Therefore, I speak only because I have already put myself in the position of someone who is dead. I am dead to my status and to the norms and obligations that define my place in society and bind me to it. I therefore speak as a person who has left society, as an outsider, or as a ghost".

The public, I would suggest, arises when we speak from the vantage-point of the dead. We might even go a step further and risk a definition of the place or standpoint from which public speech becomes possible. This space is a liminal space or no-man's-land. We might also call it a sacred space, because sacrality has usually been considered a property of spaces where the voices of the dead can be heard. With Amino Yoshihiko we can say that it is characterized by muen since it is a place in which we must behave as if our relations with the secular world had been severed.

Foucault's parrhesiast par excellence is Socrates. Apart from him, perhaps the court jester is the most famous figure of the parrhesiast in western tradition. In Japan, a similar role was played by children, whose “truths” according to Amino were tolerated since they were considered apart from humanity, sacred or, in a sense, dead. Foucault is quite right in seeing parrhesia as an important line in the genealogy of criticism. In Christianity it is picked up not only in the form of confessions, but also in the idolization of martyrdom. In the self-immolation practices that have become an established protest method all over the world truth is again linked to death or the readiness to die.

Parrhesia? (H. C. Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes, illustration by A. Rackham)

Just as truth is linked to death, it is also linked to ghosts. In literature, the fear of ghosts often seems to be linked to their ability of speaking the truth. Take the example of the ghosts visiting Richard III in Shakespeare's play: he fears them because they are the only ones who know the truth and can speak it.

In the Japanese Nô dramas, the standard pattern revolves around ghosts who tell the truth and by doing so finally become able to achieve liberation. Typically, a wanderer (the waki) encounters a strange person (the shite) who starts to tell a story about a tragic event ending in death. The shite then changes shape, becoming a terrifying demon who declares himself to be the story's tragic protagonist, now a ghost who is unable to leave earthy existence because of his lingering passions and desire for revenge. The film Seppuku (directed by Kobayashi Masaki, 1962) follows a basically similar pattern. The first half corresponds to the part of the Nô drama in which the background is recapitulated by the shite (here the hero played by Nakadai Tatsuya), who hasn't yet revealed his true nature. Then the crucial unmasking takes place and he transforms himself symbolically into the "ghost" of Motobe who confronts the assembled retainers with the truth, achieving a spectacular and bloody vengeance before finally succumbing to a "second" and final death. The film, by the way, is a masterpiece. The music is wonderful, composed for the biwa (or Japanese lute) by Takemitsu Tôru.

Nakadai Tatsuya in Seppuku (dir. Kobayashi Masaki 1962)

Perhaps it's not so strange that the early medieval "publics" in Japanese history were also places linked to death. The ikki (egalitarian leagues formed for military purposes) were formed by drinking "divine water" symbolizing the cutting of ties to the secular world. The rengakai (poetry gatherings), which were well-known for their egalitarian character, originated in poetry meetings held below blossoming cherry trees (hana no moto renga). Presided over by itinerant priests, these meetings would be attended by commoners as well as warriors or even retired emperors, all hiding or "bracketing" their secular identity behind straw hats or veils. These places, as the historian Matsuoka Shinpei points out, had the quality of muen. Cherry trees were thought to be passage-ways between the living and the dead, or even points of entry to the land of the dead which was thought to be located beneath them. Flower-viewing parties as well as these poetry gatherings in turn went back to the even older tradition of “Yasuraihana”, a celebration involving dancing and playing music that was a call for the flowers to stop falling and at the same time a pacification of dead souls that could bring disease.

To return to public speech, it goes without saying that holding up parrhesia as a model of public speech carries with it the risk of idealization. Foucault points out that, early on in Greek thought, doubts appeared concerning the negative aspects of parrhesia - is everybody entitled to use it, or should it be limited to people of a certain quality or education; and how about the possibility of parrhesiasts being mistaken about the truth (Foucault 2001:72)? Furthermore, parrhesia also poses the problem, from the parrhesiast's own point of view, of its limited efficacy. No matter how much the parrhesiast might hope that "dying" to the material circumstances that tie him or her down to a particular place in society will enable the voice to travel freely and reach the ears of everybody, in real life that voice may well be smothered. Nothing says that people will listen even if the parrhesiast forfeits his or her life. If you want a public, it’s not enough with courage and free speech. There must be people who can hear you, and who are willing to listen. And you must be willing to listen to them.

Using Habermas' expression, we could say that there can be no public speech without a public sphere. Still, Foucault does elucidate a fundamental dimension of that public sphere, namely the operation of bracketing. To participate in the public sphere you need to bracket your everyday dependencies, power-relations and status in real life. This is an aspect stressed by many of the theorists of the public sphere or public realm. Habermas points out how important it was for the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere that discussions could be conducted in the coffeehouses and salons without regard for rank or status. Arendt too stresses that bracketing, or "play-acting" is necessary in public in order to create arenas where all participants can participate as peers of equals. Speaking about the Greek isonomy (equality), she writes:

Isonomy guaranteed... equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which... would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. (Arendt 1977:21)

Bracketing is of course only a temporary operation. Once deliberation is over, the game of tolerance will end. What Foucault adds to the discussion of bracketing is again related to death and risk-taking: remember that when you leave the agora, you are back in the web of dependencies again, and then you might have to run for your life!  

For unlike isonomia (the equality of all citizens in front of the law) and isegoria (the legal right given to everyone to speak his or her own opinion), parrhesia was not clearly defined in institutional terms. There was no law, for example, protecting the parrhesiastes from potential retaliation or punishment for what he or she said. (Foucault 2001:72)

A striking image of the risks awaiting the parrhesiast once he or she has stopped speaking might be found in Zhang Yimou's film Hero (2002). This is a film that revolves around the dialogue between the emperor Shi Huang-di and the would-be assasin in which truth is finally disclosed. This dialogue, which takes place in the dark and totally empty courtroom of the emperor, can be seen as a compressed public sphere à deux in which deliberation drives the narrative forwards towards a gradual revelation of truth. Like all public spheres, it has the semblance of peace. Speech rather than violence becomes the centre of action, a fact epitomized by the assasin's decision not to kill the emperor. As he finally leaves the courtroom and descends the gigantic stairs down to the palace gate, he is outside the sacred circle of speech and ready to be sacrificed. The film ends with his death as he is nailed to the closed palace gate by a rain of arrows. What was bracketed is un-bracketed.

Public sphere (Hero, dir. Zhang Yimou, 2002)

That unbracketing must take place once speech is over has, of course, not been ignored in liberal political thought. Already Kant made the distinction between public speech, where one was free to make public use of one's reason, and activities in mundane life outside the public, where one had to "obey". What was needed to protect the speaker and facilitate the use of public speech was thus, firstly, the establishment of a "civil" public culture in which words would not be met by violence, and, secondly, to find institutional mechanisms for counteracting the unequal distribution of power (through checks and balances, procedures for anonymous voting, and so on). Already Athenian democracy came up with ways to prevent the centralization of power, such as lottery and anonymous voting (ostracism), that protected citizens from the danger of having to expose themselves publicly.

What distinguishes Foucault from liberal political thinking is his reluctance to rely on either on the presumed civility of modern publics or on institutionalized mechanisms for counteracting power. Like the parrhesiast, he clings to the "truth" carried forward by the word, by public criticism, even as he sees through the power relations operating through the public. His stance is therefore characterized by a very curious ambivalence in regard to public speech, which is on the one hand the carrier of explosive "truths", but on the other hand lacks the medium that would be required for these truths to be transmitted properly, namely a well-functioning public sphere. Lacking a medium in which truth can survive in disembodied form, it must take refuge in the body of the person who knows the truth. Parrhesia remains relevant to us today, because - as Foucault points out - that truth insists on being spoken, even at the cost of putting the body at risk. A paradoxical result of truth's embodiment is that the (potentially) dead body also becomes the logical position from which truth must be uttered.

Of course, I am not claiming that Foucault is trying to apply the idea of parrhesia directly to today's situation. What he claims is merely that it forms an important part of the roots of the "critical" tradition in Western philosophy - a tradition to which Foucault can surely be counted:

And I would say that the problematization of truth which characterizes both the end of Presocratic philosophy and the beginning of the kind of philosophy which is still ours today, this problematization of truth has two sides, two major aspects. One side is concerned with insuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a statement is true (or concern itself with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question: what is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them. With that side which is concerned with determining how to insure that a statement is true we have the roots of the great tradition in Western philosophy which I would like to call the "analytics of truth". And on the other side, concerned with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the "critical" tradition in the West. And here you will recognize one of my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in the Western philosophy.

In addition, nothing stops us from trying to recognize parrhesia as a theme of continued centrality even in today's world. The best and most liberating kind of protest often has the quality of parrhesia. We find it in the gays or lesbians who decide to come out in public. We find it in social movements, especially in their early stages when people decide that they must speak up. We find it in writers and intellectuals too, at least in those who are ready to face unemployment and risk their social standing. We find it in Mrs Poyser, when she finally decides she's had enough and, after years of humiliation, erupts in protest and gives her landlord a piece of her mind (see the lovely description in Scott 1990:6ff). The public of such courageous, decent people is also a liminal space, a space in which they have no longer anything on which to rely but themselves.

Walter Benjamin describes how, in moments of revolutionary upheaval, the dead will come to join the struggle. No wonder, once you stop trying to survive, you can speak freely. Your companions are now the dead, the comrades of the past who have returned to join you again to help you build a better future.


References

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah (1973) On Revolution, London: Faber and faber.

Foucault, Michel (2001) Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: semiotext(e).

Matsuoka, Shinpei (2004) Utage no shintai – Basara kara Zeami e (The Body of the Banquet: From Basara to Zeami), Iwanami shoten.

Scott, James (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Unnamed individualities

This won't be a long note. I just read a few pages in Eric Paras' book Foucault 2:0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. Interesting presentation of the turn to the subject in Foucault's later writings and lectures. Fascinating quotes, some with an existentialist ring. For instance, in 1981 he describes "the art of living" as the "art of killing psychoanalysis, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, beings, relations, qualitites. If one can't manage to do that in one's life, that life is not worth living" (quoted in Paras, p129). Stunning, isn't it? This (admittedly somewhat hackneyed) imperative takes on a seductive quality when one considers the sea-change in thought Foucault must have gone through in order to arrive at it.

Here's another seductive sentence: a task for study, he writes, is "research into styles of existence as different from one another as possible" in order to help us rethink how we might live (p131). Not bad as a task for sociology. The general relevance, combined with a focus on the singular way of living of people, on their ways of reaching their "unnamed individualities"?

Paras' book is well written. Lucid. It makes Foucault easily understandable, especially how his endorsement of the tradition of the Enlightenment, his enthusiastic support of the Iranian revolution, the advocacy of rights and other concerns, themes and interventions in his later years hang together with his new ideas of the subject and the care of the self. For me personally, it's been a wonderful read during moments when I've felt tired and in need of some relaxation. So, that's it for today.