Part I The Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Foucault has been read and interpreted in multiple ways, which is no surprise, since he gives different answers over time as to what lies at the heart of his project. In an appendix to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982), printed in Essential Works , Vol. 3, he announces that (EW3: 326)

what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years ... has not been to analyze the phenomenon of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective instead has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.

According to this description, what is important to Foucault is to study how the speaking and acting subject has become objectivized in gram- maire générale , philology and linguistics. Focus is on the dividing practices in which the subject is chopped up in her relation to herself and others as rational and irrational, healthy and sick, sane and mad, and so on, and on how the human being transforms herself into a subject in the first place (EW3: 327, cf. May 2001, 2006, O’Leary 2003):

Thus, it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research.

No doubt it makes good sense to assess the whole of Foucault’s work from this vantage point of the subject. But in an interview from 1978 conducted by D. Trombardi, Foucault suggests another theme with another angle: that of power (EW3: 285, emphasis in original):

1 2 Foucault’s Political Challenge

In writing Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, I meant to do a genealogical history of knowledge. But the real guiding thread was this problem of power. Basically, I had been doing nothing except trying to retrace how a certain number of institutions, beginning to function on behalf of reason and normality had brought their power to bear on groups of individuals, in terms of behaviors, ways of being, acting, or speaking that were constituted as abnormality, madness, illness, and so on. I had done nothing else, really, but a history of power.

‘Power’ is probably also the word that most of Foucault’s followers and adversaries would attach to his whole life project, adding to it the word ‘resistance’ to stress that, in his conception, the exercise of power – and power, to him, does only exist in its application – presumes a speaking and acting subject capable of ‘making a difference’, however ‘small’ and ‘insignificant, this capacity may be’ (cf. Giddens 1979). Nevertheless, what is important to note here is that Foucault refuses to entertain the idea that there can be a theory of power, as revealing a simple circulation of an emerging power, meeting resistance, becoming a counter-power, leading to a new power (PK:198–199):

In reality power means relations. So the problem is not that of consti- tuting a theory of power ... If power is in reality an open, more-or- less coordinated (in the event, no doubt, ill-coordinated) cluster of relations, then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis of relations of power.

When Foucault approaches power as a complex network, the aim is to stress that the core in his analysis is not power ‘as such’ but, rather, the relationship in, and through, which it is put to use. He denies that power can be comprehended in its totality as an overarching structure, or that it manifests the ‘vital spark’ or elán vital of a constituent subject. Power is nothing but a complex relationship that must be studied in its various effects: political, economic, religious, cultural and so on (Bang 2011a, 2014). However, there is also a discursive dimension in Foucault’s thinking which is irreducible to subject and power. An example is his Archaeology of Knowledge from 1972, in which he examines how societal relations ‘are governed by rules that are not at all given to [our] consciousness’ (AK 1992: 211, cf. Gutting 1989). Statements like this were the reason why the younger Foucault was for many years labelled as a ‘structuralist’, like, The Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy 3 say, Althusser and Lacan, although all he did was analyze structures, not as ‘self-unfolding objects’ or ‘things in themselves’ but as properties of discursive practices. As he replies to his critics (AK: 208–209, cf. EW3: 239–298),

The positivities that I have tried to establish must not be understood as a set of determinations imposed from the outside on the thought of individuals, or inhabiting it from the inside, in advance as it were; they constitute rather the set of conditions in accordance with which a practice is exercised, in accordance with which that practice gives rise to partially or totally new statements, and in accordance with which that initiative is articulated (without, however constituting its centre), rules that it puts into operation (without it having invented or formulated them), relations that provide it with a support (without it being either their final result or their point of convergence). It is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density.

Evidently, the focus in Foucault’s discourse analysis is much more on the archeology of knowledge than on the genealogy of power – more on macro-rules and signification than on micro-power and domination. The philosopher Foucault is most visible in this discursive macro-mode, where meaning is put before hegemony, and the nonconscious before the conscious. These notions of formations, positivities, knowledge and discursive practices (AK: 199) are the dimension that has inspired post- Marxist discourse analysis and its development into a doctrine of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). It is also in this discursive mode that his method for identifying and following the consequences of diffe- rence is most clearly specified. As he puts it in response to the accusation that his discourse analysis is neglecting the subject (AK: 200),

If I suspended all reference to the speaking subject, it was not to discover laws of construction or forms that could be applied in the same way by all speaking subjects, nor was it to give voice to the great universal discourse that is common to all men at a particular period. On the contrary, my aim was to show what the differences consisted of, how it was possible for men, within the same discursive practice, to speak of different objects, to have contrary opinions, and to make contradictory choices; my aim was also to show in what way discursive practices were distinguished from one another; in short, I wanted not to exclude the problem of the subject, but to define the 4 Foucault’s Political Challenge

positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse.

There are no universal initial conditions or essential generative forma- tive mechanisms that govern Foucault’s discourse analysis (Flynn 2005, May 2006). However, from the fact that he explicitly rejects any kind of objectivism, it does not follow that he regards himself as a relativist. The latter would simply undermine his insistence on difference as the overarching methodological principle. Difference indicates that all facts and values are related to time-space, that is, they appear in a specific context. But difference does not mean under any circumstances that all ‘facts’ can be regarded as equally true or that all ‘values’ must be treated as equally valuable. Discourse, subjectivity and power are relational constructs and should therefore be studied in their connection with one another. This is what Foucault attempts to do when first relating his archeology to his development of a genealogy of power, then to the practice of freedom, and, finally, to government by truth. There is no opposition between the four, but, as we shall see, there are plenty of ambiguities and paradoxes. However, when ‘the multiple Foucaults’ often appear contradictory, this is because no one, to my knowledge, has approached them as elem- ents of a ‘big’ narrative about the political .1 Inside the political, subject, power, discourse and truth fuse and condense as evidence of an open, self- transforming, reproductive, communicative and interactive authority relationship between political authorities, as incumbents of authority roles, and laypeople as ordinary members of a political community. This is what I shall argue in this book. Political authority is Foucault’s ‘hidden hand’. It is never conceptualized, but it reveals itself as the basis of what I shall call his political logic of acceptance and recognition. It is the necessary contingency which guarantees that political decisions and actions can be authorized and normalized in time-space. But it could always have been articulated, performed, delivered and evaluated other- wise. Thus, Foucault breaks fundamentally with the identification of the political with state and government, and also with the equation of political power with a form of coercive (‘sovereignty’) or liberating (‘hegemony’) domination which is regarded as ‘valid’ if exercised legally and legitimately and as ‘invalid’ if employed illegally and illegitimately (cf. Giddens 1981, 1984). More than anything else, Foucault’s political challenge lies in his break with all democratic doctrines of conflict and consensus. The code for the political is to him neither legitimacy/illegitimacy (Bourdieu 1992, The Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy 5

Luhmann 1995) nor consensus/conflict (Habermas 2008, Lukes 2005, Mouffe 2000), but acceptance/non-acceptance of political authority (Easton 1955, cf. Bang 2011b, 2014a, b ). Political authority is contin- gent on practices of conflict and consensus and freedom and domina- tion, since one can accept and recognize oneself as bound by it and at the same time combat those who try to exploit it for their own purposes and for appropriating command and control over oneself and all others. Rancière, for example, would also reject all political narratives based on command and obedience as indicative of ‘true politics’. He dismisses the notion of political authority as sovereignty, hegemony, a policing regime or superpower for ensuring that laypeople in their political communities ‘are both united and hierarchized according to its prin- ciple of unity’ (Rancière 2010: 40). 2 Foucault would have agreed with this, but he would simultaneously have denied that true politics is but a feature of political community as ‘the operator of a particular dispositif of subjectivation and litigation through which politics comes into exist- ence’ (ibid.: 39). Anarchists are as much a part of the political authority relationship as are the representatives of the ruling truth regime that they are combating. The political authority relationship simply requires a minimal degree of cooperation between political authorities and laypeople in their political community to get things done in the face of unceasing risk, conflict and change. The exercise of political authority is imperative for handling differences in any society or group of people, regardless of how much people may hate politics or love democracy. Thus, Foucault rejects the idea that democratic political authority can come from combining hegemony and consensus at the level of insti- tutions, and community and conflict at the level of political practice. To him, the democratic problem is precisely how to prevent the real and necessary difference between political authorities and laypeople in their political communities from becoming either inverted as a superior/ subordinate relation or symmetrized onto the very same plane of polit- ical reality as the public reasoning of a collective subject. Political authority and democracy constitute a fundamental circle of reciprocal autonomy and dependence between: (a) political authorities, consisting of those few political actors who are capable of systematically speaking the truth about what has to be done; and (b) lay members of political communities, who are able more spontaneously to experiment with and innovate their political conduct in, and through, their various practices of freedom. The circle of parrhesia and democracy connects political authorities and laypeople with the exercise of government by truth and the practice 6 Foucault’s Political Challenge

Political authorities

Political Parrhesia community Government and (truth) (freedom) democracy

Laypeople

Figure 1.1 The circle of parrhesia and democracy of freedom in political community. I consider it the red political thread that runs through Foucault’s entire life project. Primarily, he wants to demonstrate how political authority and political democracy presume and rely on each other. Foucault argues that there is an irreducible duality of leadership and lay-membership inside any political system, network, domain or field, involving differentials of power, freedom and knowledge. However, this cannot take effect as long as the relationship between political authority and political community is identified with a circle of domination and resistance. Being a parrhesiastic political authority is not about exer- cising illegitimate or legitimate commands over others by imposing one’s particular or society’s general will upon them. Rather, it is about having the courage, in the face of all immediate risks and opposition, to The Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy 7 tell laypeople in their political communities the truth about what has to be done. This involves trying to persuade them that accepting and recognizing one’s message as true can help and direct them in solving their existential problems as well as in their ethical formation of them- selves (CT, FS, GSO, PT). Somewhat ironically, Foucault turns toward the cynic as his basic inspirational force: but not in the shape of the modern cynic who hates politics and mistrusts all politicians; rather, as the cynic political phil- osopher from classical Greece, who wanted to live a simple life in agree- ment with nature, and who believed that people could gain happiness from continuously training their practical faculties for assessing what is decisive and relevant to do in the situation. As he notes at the end of a manuscript assembled shortly before he died in 1984 (CT: 339, emphasis in original),

[The cynic] has the insolent courage to show himself as he is; he has the boldness to tell the truth; and in his criticism of rules, conven- tions, customs and habits, addressing himself off handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful, he reverses the functions of political parrhesia and dramatizes also the philosophical life.

Foucault’s own life, I think, is very much this political cynic’s life. It is about continuously problematizing and politicizing how policies are systematically articulated and performed in modernity, often taking it to the limit with his dramas about madness and discipline. He wants to problematize and recode the whole of the modern conception of political authorization and normalization for the sake of establishing a virtuous circle of political truth and political freedom that can continu- ously reinforce one another. This circle must be established not by nonpolitical instrumental and moral rationality (Habermas 1978); not by the exercise of political hegemony by a superpower (Mouffe 2013); and not by the cacophony of voices characteristic of free and equal citi- zens in their diverse political communities (Rancière 2010). It can only come into existence when one accepts and recognizes that there can be no political truth without democratic political community and no polit- ical democratic community without a truth-telling political authority.