By Gordon Hull
In a previous post, I made the case for reading Foucault’s 1978 comments on Marxism (especially in the Yoshimoto interview) in the context of theory/practice questions raised by the re-evaluation of Marx’s 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach.” Here I want to flesh out that position a little more, starting with reference to another 1978 piece. Shortly after the Japan interviews, Foucault writes a response to the Italian communist Massimo Cacciari’s “Rationality and Irrationality of Politics in Delezue and Foucault” (the piece appeared in Italian; as far as I can tell, there is no translation of it). Much of Foucault’s response is dedicated to accusing Cacciari of using the tactics of Stalinism: “always having a unique adversary” (created in this case by amalgamating Foucault, Deleuze and the New Philosophers), of engaging in a trial-like procedure, of assimilating ‘the enemy’ and danger, of reducing thought immediately to a system, and so forth.
He then defends the argument of Discipline and Punish, in particular with reference to the understanding of power; Foucault says he “would like precisely to show this heterogeneity of power, that is to say how it is always born of something other than itself” (D&E #238, II, 651 (2 vol. ed, 2001]). He underscores that there is no metaphysics of power here, no “power with a capital P.” Rather, “it is necessary to put the relations of power back into the interior of struggles and not suppose that there is, on the one hand, power, and on the other, that on which it is exercised, and that the struggle unfolds between power and non-power” (632). In other words, Foucault’s entire effort is to resist the sort of abstraction that the Theses on Feuerbach warn against reifying. The goal is rather to write a text that does something, that constitutes an intervention or a tool. In language similar to that of the Japan interviews, and against the accusation that he is merely telling a story, Foucault proposes:
“In reality, what I am trying to do, and therein lies the difficulty of the attempt, is to work out an interpretation, a reading of a certain reality, which is such that, on the one hand, this interpretation is able to produce effects of truth and that, on the other hand, these effects of truth can become instruments at the heart of possible struggles. To speak the truth so that it can be attacked [dire la vérité pour qu’elle soit attaquable]. It is a reality of possible struggles that I seek to make appear.” (633)
A few sentences later, he argues that “the effect of the truth that I seek to produce resides in this manner of showing that the real is polemical” (633). However, “I do not speak of the current situation. I effect an interpretation of history, and the problem – but I do not resolve it – is to know what the possible utilization of these analyses in the current situation is” (633-4).
This then leads to a very clear statement of the role of the intellectual. “It is absolutely true that, when I write a book, I refuse to take a prophetic position which consists in saying to people: here is what you ought to do, or again, this is good, that is not.” Instead, the goal is to show in a general way “it seems to me that these things have happened, but I describe them in such a manner that views of possible lines of attack are traced. But in this I do not force or constrain anyone to attack” (634). What to actually do – and he refers to his own decisions about throwing himself into certain political actions - “is a problem of groups, of physical and personal engagement,” and not of books. Indeed, bossy Marxists are not radical: “one is not radical because one has pronounced some formulas; no, radicality is physical, radicality concerns existence” (634).
In other words, to return to the previous discussion of Marx’s “Theses,” if previous materialists have only interpreted the world, one should not simply invert that by making declarations of how to change it or how theory tells us how to change the world. Rather, one needs to develop interpretations that themselves can be agents of change – that can be weapons in struggles, without thereby dictating how those struggles transpire. In brief: Foucault is offering a subtle revision of the 11th Thesis (or at least, of a certain reading of the Thesis). It is not that we need to stop interpreting the world and start changing it; it is that we need to think about creating interpretations that enable change. But to do that, we need to stop understanding theory as something that dictates how to change the world. Instead, theory has to present the “truth” of the world as something that emerges in and through specific struggles. In case there was any doubt as to where he was going, Foucault immediately applies the point to the communists:
“To return to the communists, I would say that it is this radicality that they are lacking. They are lacking it because for them the problem of the intellectual does not consist in speaking the truth, because one has never asked of the intellectuals of the communist party that they speak the truth; one has asked of them to take a prophetic position, to say: here is what it is necessary to do, which is of course to adhere simply to the communist party, to do as the communist party, to be with the communist party, to vote for the communist party. In other words, what the communist party demands of the intellectual is to be the driving belt in the transmission of intellectual, moral and political imperatives that the party is directly able to utilize.” (634)
Here, then, very explicitly, is the collapse of party Marxism into abstract materialism: it turns out that they are trying to change the world by interpreting it, but by interpreting by way of applying abstract formulas, they do neither. The intellectual occupies a central role in this process because the intellectual is the agent through which this materialism is given credence and applied to the masses.
The communist intellectual, in short, is a bureaucrat, a term which I use because some of this language recalls, obliquely at least, Foucault’s objection to popular tribunals in a debate with a pair of Maoists in 1972. The debate is nominally over the possibility of tribunals as mechanisms of “popular justice” within revolutionary activity. The first part of the debate proceeds primarily by Foucault expressing doubt, on the basis of historical evidence of other revolutionary tribunals, that such tribunals could be genuinely revolutionary. The Maoists respond, essentially, that these objections apply to bourgeois revolutions but not to the communist one. There is a lot going on about the status of revolutionary entities – the Maoists think that the red army plays a central and necessary role in organizing the will of the masses; Foucault is skeptical that this will be what actually happens – but here I want to notice that Foucault is objecting to an image of power that he associates with the bourgeois revolutions. Foucault lays down the gauntlet as follows:
“Isn’t the establishment of a neutral proceeding [instance neutre] between the people and their enemies, which is able to establish the separation between the true and the false, the guilty and the innocent, the just and unjust, is this not a manner of opposing popular justice? A manner of disarming the real in the struggle, to the profit of an ideal arbitrage?” (D&E I, 1209 (2 vol. ed, 2001)).
The problem is that the entire image of the tribunal is itself a product of bourgeois ideology, and “the tribunal with its tripartition between the two parties and the neutral proceeding deciding the function of a justice which exists in itself and for itself, appears to me a particularly noxious model for the political elaboration of popular justice” (1230-1)
Four points by way of commentary. First, the language of abstraction precisely recalls Marx: the bourgeois revolutions, for Marx, failed because they were too abstract. Here, the model of the judge is particularly problematic, because they judge is supposed to produce a truth that is apolitical. The tribunal in this sense functions like the state bureaucracy. “There are two forms which this revolutionary apparatus should not obey in any case: the bureaucracy and the judicial apparatus … the tribunal is the bureaucracy of justice” (1229). Given the context of early Marx, it is probably worth recalling Marx’s critique of Hegel’s praise of the bureaucracy.
Second, the implied corollary: legal institutions are themselves agents of power and productive of power relations; there is no “non-political” way to organize justice. As the American legal realists emphasized against the abstract formalism of their predecessors, law does things. Political things. Tribunals serve to divide and conquer; “it seems to me that bourgeois justice has always functioned by multiplying the oppositions between the proletariat and the non-proletarianized masses [plèbe non prolétarisée]. The reference here is to the Maoist problem of how to unite the rural peasantry with the much smaller proletariat, but one can easily think of other ways that bourgeois justice can function to divide people who should be allies, as for example the ways that white supremacy in the U.S. has succeeded in convincing poor white workers that black workers are their enemies. In France, one of the immediate questions posed by the student uprisings in May 1968 was the relation between students and industrial workers as agents of revolutionary change.
Third, and this is by way of an aside, the complicity of tribunals in the failed bourgeois revolutions insistently reminded me of some remarks Adorno made to the effect that putting the Nazis on trial according to bourgeois norms would be to forget precisely the complicity of those norms in producing Nazism. (I mention it here because Foucault expresses his deep appreciation for the Frankfurt school in the Trombadori interviews, which are, of course, mainly about Marxism)
Finally, then, the role of the intellectual. The bourgeois tribunal form “reinforces the idea that, in order for justice to be just, it needs to be rendered by someone who is outside the struggle, by an intellectual, a specialist in ideality” (1232). This, he says, is a bad idea:
“The tribunal implies as well that there are common categories between the parties present (penal categories like theft, criminality; moral categories like honesty and dishonesty) and that the parties present accept them and submit to them. Now, it is just this that the bourgeoisie wants to make us believe a propos of justice, or its justice. All of these ideas are the weapons which the bourgeoisie has dished out for itself in its exercise of power. This is why the idea of a popular tribunal bothers me. Above all if intellectuals ought to play the roles of prosecutor or of judge in it, for it is precisely by the intermediary of intellectuals that the bourgeoisie has expanded and imposed the ideological themes of which I am speaking” (1229).
The communist intellectual, the bossy intellectual, embodies one of the most enduring ideologies promulgated by the bourgeoisie, that its own power is neutral and justified according to abstract norms. For that reason, the communist intellectual fundamentally misunderstands the lesson of Marx. In his 1972 conversation with Deleuze, where Deleuze leads by suggesting that “possibly we’re in the process of experiencing a new relationship between theory and practice” (205), Foucault put it this way:
“In the most recent upheaval [May 1968], the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion …. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge …. Intellectuals themselves are agents of this system of power – the idea of their responsibility for ‘consciousness’ and discourse forms part of the system” (207-8).
He adds: “in this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional … and not totalizing” (208). Several years later, in the first lecture of the Security, Territory, Population course, he emphasizes that “the dimension of what is to be done [la dimension de ce qu’il y a à faire] can only appear within a field of real forces, that is to say within a field of forces that cannot be created by a speaking subject alone and on the basis of his words.” The imperative Foucault wants to invoke is “conditional” and of the kind:
“If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages. In other words, I would like these imperatives to be no more than tactical pointers. Of course, it’s up to me, and those who are working in the same direction, to know on what fields of real forces we need to get our bearings in order to make a tactically effective analysis. But this is, after all, the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, of philosophical practice” (STP 3 [Fr. Ed. P. 5]).
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