By Gordon Hull
Foucault thinks Marxism is bossy. In Society must be Defended, he lays down the gauntlet clearly enough: totalizing theories get in the way of useful things at the local level. As he notes, one should beware of:
“the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least – what I mean is – all-encompassing and global theories. Not that all-encompassing and global theories haven’t, in fairly constant fashion, provided – and don’t continue to provide – tools that can be used at the local level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level only when, and this is the real point ,the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing approach always has the effect of putting the brakes on” (SMD 6).
That is, when you insist on your theoretical unities, you get in the way of actually doing anything. What we need are to unearth “subjugated knowledges” and specific histories, and such activity requires the “removal of the tyranny of overall discourses” (SMD 8). In his 1978 interviews with the Italian Communist Duccio Trombadori, Foucault underlines that “I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions. I hold that the notion of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws or proposing solutions or prophesying, since by doing that one can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to my mind must be criticized” (Remarks on Marx, 157).
He similarly says at the end of an earlier 1978 interview in Japan that “I think that the role of intellectuals, in reality, absolutely does not consist in playing [the role of] prophets or legislators” (D&E #236; Vol II, 264-5 (2 vol, 2001 ed.)). Marxism is theological, as he says in his 1979-80 Collège de France Lectures:
“With Marxism, it’s the same thing. You have the model of the fall, alienation and dis-alienation. You have the model of the two ways: Mao Zedong. And you have, of course, the problem of the stain of those who are originally soiled and must be purified: Stalinism. Marx, Mao, Stalin; the three models of the two ways, the fall, and the stain” (Government of the Living, 108)
At one level this is clear enough. But Foucault also of course is an advocate of social change, and he wants his works to be picked up and used in local struggles, as he also says repeatedly. Here I want to add a little specificity to the question about Foucault’s relation to Marxism (at least as he understands it around 1978) by picking up on his remarks in the Japan interview. Immediately after saying that intellectuals should not be prophets or legislators, he adds that: “for two thousand years, philosophers have always spoken of what we should have done [de ce qu’on devait faire]. But this always led to a tragic end. What is important is that philosophers speak of what is currently happening, but not of what could happen” (624). The first thing to note is the implicit reference to Lenin, at least in the context of a discussion of Marxism: Lenin’s What is to be Done is translated into French as Que Faire (the French rendering is correct: the book is Что Дълать, literally “What to Do”). More significantly, the connection to prophetic discourse is something Foucault repeats in his slightly earlier interview with Yoshimoto, where he says that:
“Marxism, insofar as it is a science – in the measure where it is a matter of a science of history, of a history of humanity – is a dynamic of coercive effects about a certain truth. Its discourse is a prophetic science which diffuses a coercive force onto a certain truth, not only in the direction of the past, but towards the future of humanity. In other terms, what is important is that the historicity and the prophetic character function as coercive forces concerning the truth” (600).
Here I want to leave aside Foucault’s interest in discourses of truth to notice that the language here reads like a response to Marx’s 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach,” which reads that “the Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is [es kömmt darauf an] to change it” (Early Writings, 423). The Theses are important not least because they play a pivotal role in French Marxism of the period: Althusser’s Reading Capital read Marx’s thought as being marked by an “epistemological rupture” between the early and late works, with the date of this rupture being set somewhere near the Theses. The early works were relegated to a Feuerbachian humanism.
It would however be a mistake to think that Foucault is simply inverting Marx; after all Foucault is interested in both interpreting and changing the world. Marx’s text is also problematic: when Engels has it printed, he inserts a separating “but” into the clause: “es kömmt aber darauf an” – “but the point is to change it.” Such an insertion allows for a simple theory-practice inversion. As Georges Labica emphasizes in his book on the Theses, this doesn’t make a lot of sense as a reading, not least because the 11th Thesis seems to refer back to the second, which says that “man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question” (EW 422). So thought is meant to be integrated with practice.
As Labica points out, this general point is what the better Marxist theorists got out of the Theses. Marx himself applies it in the first chapter of Capital; in it, Marx “inaugurates a scientific enterprise, a process of discovery that he naturally leaves unfinished …. It induced a complete restructuration … of knowledges and of practices” (Karl Marx: Les Thèses sur Feuerbach, 126). He adds that this is the announcement of a “rationality which lets go of the categories of philosophy and science that are familiar to our understanding” (127). This is not, in other words, some sort of materialist restarting of philosophy. Labica discusses various interpretations of this point, including of course by Gramsci, but interestingly, he begins by quoting Lenin, who characterizes Marx’s critique of earlier materialism as follows:
“it regarded the “human essence” in the abstract, not as the “complex of all” (concretely and historically determined) “social relations”, and therefore merely “interpreted” the world, whereas it was a question of “changing” it, i.e., it did not understand the importance of “revolutionary practical activity.””
Lenin seems on solid ground here, at least insofar as he is pointing to abstraction from concrete social relations as the problem, and that avoiding this abstraction appears to collapse the distinction between interpretation and change into the category of “revolutionary political activity.” One might note that there’s evidence that this was Marx’s view all along (so the idea of an epistemological rupture needs to be questioned); as Marx writes in an 1843 letter:
“Nothing prevents us … from taking sides in politics, i.e. from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are merely folly; let us provide you with the true campaign slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire, whether it wishes or not …. This is a task for the world and for us …. What is needed above all is a confession, and nothing more than that. To obtain forgiveness for its sins mankind needs only to declare them for what they are [braucht die Menschheit sie nur für das zu erklären, was sie sind]” (Early Writings, 208-209).
From a Foucauldian point of view, two points are glaring. The first is that Marx here is trying to reject taking on a prophetic voice. Foucault has a lot to say in the Yoshimoto interview and elsewhere about how and whether to link Marx and Marxism, but he is fully on board with the general point that state/party communism has relatively little to do with Marx; “the communist party is no longer Marxist” (D&E II, 623).
The second point is the appearance of confessional language. By about 1980, Foucault is taking confession to be one of the central organizing characteristics of the West, at least the Christian West. The prequel of that language is already in the “Zen” interview, where Foucault remarks that he thinks that Christian mysticism is always an “individualization” (621). Marx’s comments in the letter suggest the sense in which he is liminal within the West as Foucault understands it. Rancière provides one way of navigating the passage in the letter, arguing that “all of the method is contained in the erklären. It signifies both to declare and to explain. This means that the exposition [exposé] of facts for that which they are (für das was sie sind), the exposition of the human experience as it gives itself, is already their explanation” (Le concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique…, 10)
This reading precisely complicates Marx’s use of confessional language by treating it as an explanation. Foucault leans toward thinking of it as a declaration. Thus, if, as Foucault says, Marxism is wrapped up in the “crisis of Western thought,” which includes the “crisis of the Western concept of man and society” (623), Marx is implicated in this crisis; this is perhaps why Foucault consistently (from Order of Things onward) locates Marx in the nineteenth century. Yoshimoto asks Foucault about this dating of Marx, and after first noting that “if I were to write Order of Things now, the book would take a different form” (599), he both squarely locates Marx in the nineteenth century and characterizes Marx as a “historical event” (600; recall the language of Marx as an “instaurateur” in the “What is an Author” essay).
Following this thread, then, underscores the extent to which Marx is a liminal and enigmatic figure for Foucault, both the product of the 19th century and somehow also beyond it, distinct from Marxist discourses tied to his name and somehow never quite beyond them. To Yoshimoto, Foucault proposes that the Marx texts that attract him are the historical works: the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and the writings on the Paris Commune. Foucault suggests that these texts end in a prophetic voice, and that “socialist discourse of the time was composed of two concepts, but never arrived a sufficient dissociation of them.” One is a “historical consciousness,” according to which things happened by historical necessity and that in the future, things will come to pass prophetically [advenir prophétiquement]. The other is that the discourse of struggle has “for its objection the determination of a target to attack” (612). It is this ambivalence that runs through Marx’s 11th Thesis, in the alternation between “interpret” and “change;” it is one that is already elided by Engels’ insertion of “aber,” and it completely disappears into the bossy prophecies of the 20th Century communists that Foucault so consistently opposes. Foucault understands his own texts as weapons and tools, even as they function as interpretations.
Recent Comments