Concluding
remarks
What is at stake, for those like us who are outside
of discourse and inside the word, outside of categories but inside linguistic
acts, for us who refuse to be reduced to objects and demand the power to produce
ourselves as subjects, maybe is this: to what extent can the exodus from a world
we don’t recognise as ours be not only resistance but also production? To what
extent can refusal and critique also be moments of invention for everyone? How
to speak a different language and still be understood? This is
‘communication’ but we might call it politics, or we might call it life.
This
research aimed to investigate what Foucault meant by ontology of the present and
what it would entail to posit the project of an ontology of the present as a
philosophical task for our times. This led us to follow several different paths:
one was the role of writing history.
The
Annales
School
was the movement that broke with the ‘order of discourse’ by problematising
the ways in which we approach the past in a search for continuity and causality.
Foucault’s genealogies follow the course opened up by the philosophical
reflection on periodisation and interdisciplinarity carried out by Annales
movement, in order to criticise the search for continuity as actually one for
necessity. Complementing their project of the criticism of philosophy of
history, he carries out a critique of the history of philosophy as one of the
progression of ideas in time. This leads him to the notions of discourse, the
episteme and the archive, which as we have seen are the grounding elements of
his project of historical ontology.
These
notions, whilst developing out of a reflection on history, also insert
themselves directly in the debate on language. Foucault and the Formalists
strongly criticised analyses of language that made recourse to notions of
genesis, origin and the subject, in order to bring the debate on language to the
level of concrete existence, which is only graspable outside of the framework of
unitary language. What is the constitutive function of language? How is it first
and foremost a practice? What autonomy can a reflection on language have with
respect to a reflection on ontology? The reflection on language is one on
philosophy and its role in relation to science and history. Foucault’s answer
to these questions in the notion of discourse and the archive is also a
political intervention that attempts to criticise notions of a founding subject,
philosophy of consciousness, originating experience and continuity that in
imposing an order on the said are productive of grilles of intelligibility as well as operative in practices of
power relations. The question of subjectivity and language is inevitably one of
the formation and practices of veridiction in their effects, but as the Subject
disappears in discourse, the ‘I speak’ needs to be reconfigured as the point
of convergence and departure for a new way of linking ontology and epistemology
whilst exorcising the dangers of a ‘rational psychology’. Kant thought that
this danger would lead to a substantialism that was ultimately tautological;
Foucault believed it to underlie the scientism that, in its circularity, had
great consequences for the ordering of modern society in the configuration of
the normal and the pathological. If the Subject was structurally presupposed in
the ‘I think’, in the modern episteme the notion of subjectivity stems from
the role of the ‘I speak’ which points to a relation of exteriority. Because
of this, through an analysis of the ontological dimension of language we
approach a notion of subjectivity bound to open up new questions on
philosophical anthropology. This comes to light in Foucault’s Commentaire,
where it is in the insertion of linguistic exchange in the reflection on man
that we find the only possible ground for thinking anthropology in terms of what
man makes of himself, in terms of an ontology of ourselves.
In terms of an ontology of our present, we have suggested, through the
exposition of the theories of Postfordism, how language today can be seen as
productive of subjectivity and forms of life, and have exposed some of the ways
in which, as the order of discourse goes to work, language operates in a field
that now more than in the past is open to recuperation and valorisation of
power, with no mediation. We have seen how this occurs in a realm that is much
wider than the communication industries. What since the explosion of mass
communication has been theorised in terms of the commodification of knowledge
and criticised from the consumer end, Postfordist studies see in terms of
production, albeit one that is antagonistic, conflictual and open and one that
we are involved in, not simply as receivers. To think language today entails
thinking subjectivity as production, and in this context Foucault has a stronger
power of diagnosis. Beyond the paradigm of domination and repression, practices
of transformation need to search for a different language, one that experiments
not only in resistance to discursive effects of interdiction and to incitements
to self-expression and confession, but one that is also capable of capturing the
constituent traits of subjectivity in autonomous practices of
self-transformation and self-valorisation, to use the postfordist lexicon.
As
we have pointed out, the questioning of the role of language in the production
of subjectivity also leads us to a reflection on the role of anthropology. In Anthropology
and Myth, Lévi-Strauss wrote:
The originality of
anthropology has always consisted in studying man by placing itself at what, in
each epoch, has been considered the boundaries of humanity. [...] As an
'interstitial' science devoted to the exploration of this mobile frontier
separating the possible from the impossible, anthropology will exist as long as
humanity and is, in this sense, eternal.
In his
engagement with Kant, Foucault regards this as the task of philosophy, but one
that needs to expose the epistemological constrictions of an analytics of
finitude as ontological limits placed on being: against a-historical ambitions
to scientism, they represent more than a problem confined to epistemology. In
this sense, the analysis of the role of the inner sense and its relation to
spontaneity and receptivity becomes central. It is Time as a form of the inner
sense that endangers the possibility of synthesising the unconditioned. In
Foucault’s rethinking of Kantian Dialectics Time invests the synthetic
activity, and the world presents itself as the domain, source and limit for Kunst,
exercise, épreuve, τέχνη.
Thus Dialectics becomes the study of rationality: not as the faculty productive
of principles with a regulative function, but as what produces codes for
practice as well as their justification. What is it to reason if not the attempt
to unravel the mechanisms effectively operating through the rationality of our
time? What happens when we take the paralogisms of reason and our finitude as
the point of departure from which to break these boundaries? For Foucault, the
study of rationality is the study of paradigms, of what constitutes something
whilst making it intelligible. Inserting an anthropological reflection in the
present, one for which ontology and epistemology remain inseparable from the
question of transformation, demands that we take modern subjectivity as the
field traversed by this rationality. Theorists of Postfordism have partly
carried out this research on the transformations of forms of subjectivity, ways
of living, working, communicating, in the changing mechanisms of subjugation and
resistance.
Antiquity
is revisited with the Enlightenment motto in mind, precisely to continue this
genealogy into the mobile frontiers established between ontology and
epistemology, philosophy and spirituality. Sapere aude is mutare aude:
for Foucault the ethical task was not one to be carried out in a progression
from knowing to being. For his ethics, to know is to change oneself.
Again, counter to the repressive hypothesis, the antidote to domination
cannot entail turning inwards for a hermeneutics of interiority in the search
for a truth that can save us, but demands for an opening of subjectivity to the
relational nature of knowledge and transformation. In an inversion of the
Enlightenment motto, knowledge stems from freedom rather than the opposite, for
ethics is the practice of freedom in the subjectification of truth and in the
infinite labour of critique. What is at stake is not the insertion of the self
as object in an epistemic discourse, but the insertion of the self in the world
as the field and condition of possibility for its épreuve.
In the endless accumulation
of knowledge produced by a modernity that relegated philosophy to the study of
epistemology and finitude, Foucault searches for those discourses that in their
time attempted to function as interventions in the changing forms of the
political and social world. There he finds the historicism of the war of races,
which is presented to us in its character as an event. We chose to analyse this
peculiar genealogy of the war paradigm because by pointing to the tactical
reversibility of the paradigm, Foucault is also trying to capture the elements
of this discourse that re-emerged at specific historical moments under different
guises. These are the discourses with an alternative understanding of political
crisis and strategy, which take struggle and control as the objects of analysis,
unlike the pacifying discourses of political formalism. We aimed to question the
process whereby the reflection on war is disqualified in a certain philosophy
that becomes in modernity the realm of syntheses and reconciliation, because as
a paradigm operative at the level of knowledge and practices it should not be
relegated to the political scientism of military studies. In fact, war always
seems to catch us by surprise.
It is in this spirit that we read Agamben’s intervention on the state of
exception as an update of Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula. We
have seen how the historical-political analysis that Foucault outlines in his
1976 lectures operates in the directions of domination on the one hand and
totalisation on the other. The latter is embodied in the discourse on
sovereignty, the former in the paradigm of war. Agamben’s political analysis
establishes the relation between the two in the state of exception, for it is in
the relation of sovereignty to biopower that political discourse attempts to
neutralise the fundamental biopolitical fracture, a discourse that has
historically developed from the register of military war to that of civil war
and today of ‘humanitarian’ war, whilst casting the debate on peace
respectively around the notions of political, civil and human rights.
The
studies of Operaismo had worked within the war paradigm in so far as they
saw antagonism as the very lever of innovation and social change. Following
Foucault and taking the analysis of contemporary forms of subjectivity to be
also one of the current modes of subjectivation, current studies of Postfordism
see power relations as always operating through struggle, which also determines
that element of freedom intrinsic to processes of subjectivation, social
determination and resistance.
Because
of biopolitical production, a critique of power today is inseparable from a
critique of labour. The social relations that emerged out of the crisis of the
welfare state on the one hand and the critique of the Labourist ideology on the
other, have given rise to phenomena that cannot be parcelled out into social,
political and economic spheres. In this lies the crucial import of Foucault’s
notion of biopower: the ability to diagnose a state of affairs where life is
invested by processes of capital valorisation. The control paradigm uses
technologies and instruments of appropriation that render the separation between
private and public space, free time and labour time, ethics of affect and ethics
of reason, state and civil society absolutely inadequate to capture the
conflicting modes of contemporary processes of subjectivation and valorisation.
The
import of Foucault’s work in philosophy is invaluable. He inverts Descartes
in one important respect: if in
Descartes the first rule of method that leads to the certainty of the ‘I think’
was immediate self evidence, for Foucault it is the breach of self-evidence
that constitutes the political and theoretical task of philosophical exercise.
The guiding thread of our research into his thought has been the notion of an
ontology of the present. This is a project in historical, linguistic, anthropological
and political theory that is grounded on an ethics of freedom. Philosophical
critique today could use this force of diagnosis in two ways: firstly in the
medical sense used by Foucault, where diagnosis is not a mere description, but
the process whereby we determine the nature of a problem from an observation
of its symptoms. Secondly, in its etymological sense, where diagnosis means
through knowledge, it operates in a sagittal relation to the present. In other
words, philosophical critique could open up problematisations that can transform
us.
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