Messages

I've seen bots PM before.  We had one on here, actually.

But if they have only been sent to one person, then I err on the side of human.  Not least because I'd be interested to know how the Principia is going down in sub-Saharan Africa.

No worries.

Actually, according to Ashe!, which is apparently a "Journal of Experimental Spirituality", Foucault was in fact deeply interested in Zen Buddhism and had spent several days in Japan living the life of a Zen monk.  I'll transcribe:



In the spring of 1978, Foucault travelled to Japan intending to be initiated into Zen Buddhism.  At the suggestion of his master Omori Sogen, head of the Seionji Temple in Uoenhara, Foucault spent several days living the life of a monk.  Foucault's discussions with the priests of the temple were published in the Japanese review Shunju and later, the Fench journal Umi.  Foucault acknowledged his interest in Buddhism but admitted what interested him most "is life itself in a Zen temple, that is to say the practice of Zen, its exercises and its rules.  For I believe that a totally different mentality to our own is formed through the practice and exercises of a Zen temple."  During the course of these discussions, Foucault emphasized the principle difference he saw between Zen practice and and the Christian practice of individualisation:

As for Zen, it seems all the techniques linked to spirituality are, conversely, tending to attenuate the individual.  Zen and Christian mysticism are two things you can't compare, whereas the techniques of Christian spirituality and that of Zen are comparable.  And, here, there exists a great opposition.  In Christian mysticism, even when it preaches the union of God and the individual, there is something that is individual.  The one is he who loves and the other is he who is loved.

Edit: reading through the rest of this book (Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty), there seems to be a convergence between the ontologies of Foucault and Carl Schmitt, a very unpleasant character I remember from my PolSci days.  Schmitt's an odd one, and while he is not incredibly hard to understand, coming at him from this almost diametrically opposed angle (Schmitt was your classic Prussian authoritarian, distrustful of everything created after the 12th century) is going to take some time to get around. 

However, the good news is the following chapter promises practical applications.  In particular, I think they are looking to contrast Foucault's work with another recent political-philosophical treatise, that of Negri and Hardt's book, Empire.  Presumably this will be the section of most interest to people.

So in answer to the question, the mods mostly bump old threads as part of an ongoing info-terrorist campaign against ordinary forum members.

I feel the same way.  Trust me, I'm done with philosophy for today at least, and possibly until Monday.  I've decided I'll only do one of those sort of posts a day.

Sorry to get semantic on this, but I gotta be me.

It sounds a bit like there are two things being described by "freedom" here.

1) The ability to act as one sees fit.
2) A relative marker of "positive degree of autonomy": That is, one is more-or-less "free" depending on the degree of autonomy.

That is to say, while one can be Free₁ by attempting to do as they see fit, that may not mean they are allowed to carry it out, due to Freedom₂.

Does that make any sense?

It does.  In fact, I think that comes very close to how it is viewed, in that label one is used to describe the process of label 2.  if you see what I mean.

Argh, language.

Not as such, no.  Its more related to the concept of a created heretopia than individual acts of noncomformity .  While those acts may be of your choice, they do not fundamentally resist the diagram.

I'm trying to think of a concrete example, though its hard.  Pozorov suggests the character of Michael K in The Life and Times of Michael K, the novel by J M Coetzee could be an example of such freedom.  To be honest, I'm still working through the book myself though, and it works from theory to practice.

So to fundamentally resist the diagram, we might look to people like Emperor Norton, or was that also acts of choice within the diagram?

How does the diagram get defined?

This is really interesting stuff Cain! Thanks for digging through it.

A good question.  As I understand it, the diagram is a spatial metaphor for the workings of governmentality, as explained further here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmentality.  This following link may either help to explain, or confuse more http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/2005/11/diagram.html

As for Norton, it would depend on how serious he was.  If he was serious, then he was positing a form of governmentality, though in actuality of course it was participated in freely by the people of Frisco.

Another question:

How would Foucault's position respond to the concept of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (ala Bey)? It would seem that those might exist outside the diagram... or are they simply an implementation of another diagram?

Funnily enough, I was thinking the same thing.  The TAZ may well be another name for a heretopia, though I'll have to think a bit more depth on that idea.

Not as such, no.  Its more related to the concept of a created heretopia than individual acts of noncomformity .  While those acts may be of your choice, they do not fundamentally resist the diagram.

I'm trying to think of a concrete example, though its hard.  Pozorov suggests the character of Michael K in The Life and Times of Michael K, the novel by J M Coetzee could be an example of such freedom.  To be honest, I'm still working through the book myself though, and it works from theory to practice.

That sounds like some really quite perverted sex act more than an assault.

Though the two are not mutually exclusive.

This is really mindblowing stuff, Cain. If you don't mind, I'd like to try to re-word it, just to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

By saying

this notion of freedom is entirely divorced from any assumption of originary authenticity and the correlate projects of self-discovery or self-actualisation that are central to the epistemic regime of liberal government. As a number of studies have demonstrated, liberal governmental rationality synthesises the mobilisation of human desire for freedom with the specification of its content, so that one is incited to discover and liberate one's 'inner self' through following an externally devised model of e.g. an 'active citizen', an 'enterprising employee' or a 'caring mother'

Resistance, instead, must be against such identities, against this attempt to uncover a "pure" but hidden subject who can then be liberated and moulded into its ideal self (through careful help by trained "experts" of course).  Resistance is therefore located within a gap, the subjects resists purely as a human being, not for any particular reason or cause.

is this implying that "freedom" is not, in Foucault's conception of it, an active state of being, such as being hungry or happy, but is, instead, an action that we make to reject the attempts by outside agencies to program us?

If the above statement is what you meant, then an analogous example would be the "freedom from suffering" goal of the buddhistic mindset. The classical interpretation of "freedom from suffering" sees the liberated individual as someone who has transcended suffering and has taken on an identity of "buddhahood," whereas the more progressive thinkers (e.g. Thich Nhat Hahn and others) might say that the freedom from suffering is the constant choice of the individual to exercise mindfulness rather than the habits that have been imposed on them.

Please ignore the obvious religious overtones of my example; that was simply the first analogy I could think of. Am I close to the mark of what Foucault was trying to say?

I think it is close, though it is not exactly the same.  If suffering were to be replaced with freedom from capture (in the sense that governmental diagrams and agencies "capture" subjects via identities or less advanced systems of control) then it could come pretty close.  Hopefully, my above post also illuminates the subject somewhat.

[In contrast, in the exteriority of the diagram, this 'lack' rather points to the plenitude of meto-homonymous 'being beside itself', an unnameable excess of being that can never be incorporated into any identity.]

So Foucault differs from traditional liberal theory, as well as government practice, in seeing freedom as not something inherent within the individual, nor as something granted by a constitutional authority, but instead as emerging from the confrontation between the subject and the diagram.

The problem here is this: if the subject exists within the diagram, and freedom is extra-diagrammatic, then how can this work?  What are the possibility of practicing freedom while inside the diagram, the location of our existence?

Gilles Deleuze, who reconstructed Foucault's thought, suggests that there are three essential parts of the diagram.  The strata, or grids, are allegedly

the discursive forms of enunciability and visibility that form the archive that archaeology addresses

(now do you see the sort of shit I have to put up with?).  By this, I think he means control of the discourse and methods of interpretation deemed acceptable by the diagram, the theory of knowledge and history that is in place.  Then there is strategies, which are

non-stratified 'knots' of power relations disentangled by genealogy

I think this means the actual operating methods of power, prisons, laws, mental asylums and the like, some of which Foucault analyzed historically and genealogically (rather like Nietzsch in his Geneaology of Morals).  Then, finally, we have 'savage' forces which are not integrated into either strata or strategies.

These forces are, for Deleuze, literally unnameable, since they not intergrated either into strategies of the diagram, nor identifiable identities.  This is therefore "outside", the sea in which diagrams are formed and created.

It is from the outside that a force affects, or is affected, by others. The diagram, as the fixed form of a set of relations between forces never exhausts force, which can enter into other relations and compositions. [...] In this way, the outside is always an opening to
the future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed. In this sense, force displays potentiality with respect to the diagram containing it. [...] Moreover, the final word on power is that resistance comes first, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside from which diagrams emerge. (Deleuze 1988, 89–90)

So freedom does not exist "out there" in this void of savage forces, as something we can access Platonically, but instead, on the boundary between the border of the diagram and this outside, there are opening or cracks where freedom is possible in its concrete sense.

For Deleuze, nothing can be said of the outside forces since we always exist in a diagram and thus can never experience it.  In fact, all that can be said is that this outside exists, but that existence is very important within Foucault's ontology.

The significance of the outside for the affirmation of freedom lies precisely in its function of demonstrating that the diagram is not all there is, that it can never attain the self-immanence that it attests to.

Ontologically prior to all forms of power relations, all regimes of truth and all positive identity, there  is a barren space of living being, lacking any positivity or identity. Abducted by the diagram as the 'living material' of all forms of knowledge and all strategies of power, these 'savage forces' nonetheless remain unsubsumed under its positivity and thus form the necessary excess of the diagram, permanently testifying to the non-identity of being with its positive form. 'The diagram stems from the outside, but the outside does not merge with any diagram.'

So, while there is an outside, of a sort, it is not one which can be inhabited or captured, nor can it present an alternative system of governance without falling back into the same traps of diagrammatic government.  Concrete Freedom instead is an act of transgression against the diagram, of engaging with the limits of the diagrammatic model. 

Therefore, what is at stake for Foucault is the possibility to be different from what one is, to be rid of the routines of thougt and action which make up one's identity, one which has occasionally been mirrored in certain heretical religions, In Hinduism and Taoism.  For more, look into negative theology or Apophasis.  One does not have to change, there does not have to be a project to change, only the potential is necessary.

Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it achieve its purpose through mockery or by upsetting the solidity of foundations. [...] Transgression contains nothing negative but affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps
as it opens this zone of existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it. Perhaps it is simply an affirmation of division, but only insofar as division is not understood to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment of a separation or the measuring of a distance, only retaining that in it which may designate the existence of difference. (Foucault 1977a, 35–6)

This transgression itself can never coalesce into a positive identity of its own.

Transgression is only meaningful as an engagement with a concrete limit and exhausts itself in trespassing it. For this reason, a 'transgressive lifestyle' can only indicate a pseudo-transgression, a complacent posture of confronting the limit that does not actually exist – witness the degeneration of 'transgressive' forms of art during the late twentieth century, when cultural censorship in most liberal-capitalist societies has all but evaporated. Any transgression worthy of the name may never be sedimented into a positive form, as it always remains contingent upon the presence of a concrete limit for a concrete subject, so that any given practice may or may not be transgressive for different subjects in different contexts.  A transgressive identity is therefore a logical impossibility, as what is at stake is ultimately a transgression of our own limits and thus of our own identity. Thus, for Foucault, transgression has identity and lifestyle as its objects not as its forms.

So if acts of trangression do not "free" the subject, do not give them access to this outside space or create a better lifestyle, what does it do instead?

According to Foucault again, acts of transgression cause disruption and disorder in the diagram, turning it into a heretopia.  All diagrams are utopian in their construction of space and domain.  Heretopias, by contrast, are fundamentally disorderly, revealing the contingent form of utopianism the diagram is based on, and the disorderly nature of outside which surrounds the diagram, causing the diagram to be seen as a container and limit to freedom instead of its possible site.

There is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous [...] the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension of the heteroclite: things are laid, placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them. [...] Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that [...] because they destroy syntax in advance. [...] Heterotopias desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source, they dissolve our myths and sterilise the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault 1970, xvii)

The heterotopia is a space, in which words and things are out of joint, in which discourse is pressed against its limits and the meaningful and transparent diagrammatic order is revealed as merely an illusory attempt of evading the brute meaninglessness of the outside. 'The heterotopia shows the constant impossibility of closure that follows from the rise of an open and infinite space and hence the terms through which we might learn how to resist the utopian. [...] The heterotopia is distinguished from other spaces in that it is the very expression of transgression.' (Dumm 1996, 44)

Freedom therefore exists by inhabiting the diagram as a heretopia, by locating oneself at the limit of the diagram, next to its outside void and externalizing those effects inwards.  Because of this, freedom is both scarce and ever present.  It can only exist momentarily, in those acts of transgression, but its possibility always remains open, irrespective of the postitive form of order which is being resisted.  In short, we all much freer than we feel and think. 

Equally, there is the notion in Foucauldian thought of "being beside oneself".  While Foucault is untrusting of ideas of finding "one's true self" in any form of identity, he argues for

a passion that is infuriated at the reduction of human being to any identity and asserts the permanent excess of being to any of its forms. 'It is the philosophy for a practice in which what one is capable of being is not rooted in a prior knowledge of who one is. Its principle is freedom, but a freedom, which does not follow from any postulation of our nature or essence.'

In the absence of any knowledge about who one is, Foucault believes that freedom takes shape in the cultivation of an aesthetic style.  To explain this, Foucault talks about how love was treated by the Socratic philosophers, how it was buried under a discourse of knowledge by thinkers like Plato to such an extent that it becomes a part of metaphysics, a defined weapon to be deployed in the name of this argument or that.  Freedom is equally threatened by discourses that attempt to define it and tie it down with particular characteristics, such as what diagrammatic governmentality does.

For Foucault, freedom cannot be tied in with ethics.  To do so would be to draw it into metaphysics, to subordinate it to a rule and thus make it part of a system of power, as is the case with all forms of "freedom" currently offered by governments.  Freedom is messy, in the words of that philosopher, Donald Rumsfeld (who by now should really be sainted, for both grasping the essence of freedom and Black Swan events a long time ago).

The Foucauldian aesthetics of existence does not attempt to recover the underlying truth of one's subjectivity in a 'hermeneutics of the self', but rather focuses on active self-fashioning, 'those intentional and voluntary actions by which men [...] seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria' (Foucault 1990b, 10).

For Foucault, this can in theory apply to any aspect of one's personal life.  This work is seen almost in the Greek conception of a "work of art", where the artist is first and foremost an artisan and the work is first of all a work.  The idea is not to reduce life to art, but rather to expand the space of possibilities inherent in human existence and resist the reduction of existence to any positive project. As a work of art that is permanently 'in progress', human existence exceeds all identification, always retaining the capacity to be other than what it is.

This work is therefore somewhat dangerous and very open-ended, quite different from the cultish devotion to artistic excellence and creativity we have seen in certain movements of the past 100 years.  This aesthetic sense thus displaces the ethical sense which can be the foundation for identity politics.  It defeats meaning and replaces it with nothing, almost.

If meaninglessness were a fact, then the theological solution to this situation would make sense; it would be the very making of sense, the redemption of meaning in a meaningless world. [...] However, the situation would seem to be precisely the opposite: the world is overfull with meaning and we suffocate under the combined weight of the various narratives of redemption – whether they are religious, socioeconomic, political, aesthetic or philosophical. What passes for the ordinary is cluttered with illusory narratives of redemption that conceal the very extraordinariness of the ordinary and the nature of its decay under conditions of nihilism. [...] But what remains after we have been saved from salvation, redeemed from redemption? What remains? Nothing? Almost. (Critchley 1997, 179–80)

Or

A Foucauldian version of this 'almost' is precisely the aesthetic stylisation of one's own existence that grants one's being a dimension of lightness, and thus freedom, in the face of the omnipresent gravity of the diagrammatic ordering of existence. In contrast to the normative foundationalism of Foucault's critics, which exemplifies what Nietzsche called 'incomplete nihilism', a deceptive invention (Hinzulügnung) of new foundations when existing ones are put in question (Nietzsche 2001, 39), Foucault's aesthetics of existence exemplifies an  active response to nihilism, a 'pessimistic activism in the face of ultimate meaninglessness' (Flynn 1994, 313).  This disposition, which we have termed 'existential decisionism' (Prozorov 2007b), exemplifies what Paul Veyne terms the 'fulfilment of nihilism', a commitment to a position that openly recognises the impossibility of its ethico-epistemic grounding but no longer requires such grounding to practice one's freedom

Here is where the jailbreak could come in.  Sorry, but this needs to be another, fairly long quote, in order to make the point it does.  The bold highlights are mine.

Against all misrecognised affinities, the Foucauldian subject of freedom is  therefore entirely distinct from today's 'postmodern subjects', cosmopolitan 'frequent travellers' (Calhoun 2003), who are engaged in the play of multiple identities, permanently 'reinventing' themselves in accordance with both the imperatives of the market and New Age ethics, the latter being the perfect correlate of the former (see Zizek 2006, 383–4). What is at stake here is the opposition between plenitude and lack: while the 'postmodern' resistance to diagrammatic identity targets its restrictive character and finds the pathway to freedom in the multiplication and hybridisation of identities, the Foucauldian gesture is the exact opposite, i.e. the affirmation of one's fundamental non-identity with oneself, the ontological negativity that renders impossible even one identity, not to speak of their multiplicity. Yet, the relation between plenitude and lack is not a simple opposition: the ontological negativity of the subject is of course only a lack or a privation from an intra-diagrammatic perspective, as it points to the impossibility of closure, thus depriving the diagram of ontological consistency. In contrast, in the exteriority of the diagram, this 'lack' rather points to the plenitude of meto-homonymous 'being beside itself', an unnameable excess of being that can never be incorporated into any identity. From this dual affirmation of internal lack and external plenitude follows not the desire for the proliferation of identities, but the effacement of the desire for identity as such. The subject of freedom may thus be formalised as S (S), a being beside its own diagrammatic identity that it brackets off precisely by its minimal exteriority to it. At the same time, this formula reminds us that one may never dwell in the pure outside, dispensing with the diagram in its entirety. Instead, diagrammatic identity is not eliminated but, strictly speaking, bracketed off, 'retained' only in the sense of being set aside. This formula demonstrates that the subject of concrete freedom fashions itself through a homonymous difference from its own diagrammatic identity and a metonymic displacement from it, thereby emerging as one's own meto-homonymous double at the exterior limit of the diagram.

I dunno, I think "julie" has probably dodged a bullet there.

Unless she wants to be stuck with an illiterate who cannot remember her phone number, and makes marriage proposals by text message.

I had a lot of help from Sergei Pozorov, without whom I'd be just as lost as everyone else.

The possibility for a different conception of a "jailbreak" is coming up, hopefully in this next section.

Oh BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMP!

OK, I'm going to try and organize my thoughts on this, but it somewhat tricky because

a) Foucault is a notoriously hard to read writer
b) I've only just read the books and I'm still grappling with the implications
c) I had another reason, but I forgot it.

Anyway.  Foucault is not so much interested in the biological aspects of conditioning and control as he is concerned with social and political methods of control.  This features highly in his works on, for example, madness but also applies to his thinking on government.  Foucault is instensely anti-essentialist - this is essential (heh) to understanding his viewpoint.  He considers all form of government, in its ideology, its outlooks on history and knowledge and ethics, and its methods of enforcing such views, as a kind of diagram, what he calls a diagram of govermentality.

These diagrams create and promote certain forms of socially acceptable identity, in order to get their citizens to act in correct ways (according to their outlook).  In societies such as ours, according to theorists of govermentality, the promise of the government is essentially this: we will assist you in the practice of your freedom, so long as you practice it our way.  Through the manufacture of identities, the government supplies authoritative templates for the exercise of freedom.  According to one particular theorist, this subverts the idea of the private realm, free from government influence.  In fact, that very same realm is increasingly mobilized for government ends, creating the enjoyment of 'freedom' as almost a kind of duty (I'm not sure exactly what this would qualify as, but I can guess.  Going to Church, consuming more during economic crisis periods etc).  Because 'freedom' becomes recast as a government injunction, it no longer acts as a limit on government powers.

Here is a better example of "you must enjoy your freedom".  A quote:

One of titles of self-help manuals, cited by Nikolas Rose (1990, 242) in his brilliant study of the liberal government of subjectivity, urges the subject 'to be that self which one truly is'. It is at the moment of the presupposition of the existence of a 'true self' that is contrasted with one's 'empirical self' that the injunction to freedom becomes equivalent to the subjection to external expertise.

The problem is neatly summed up as thus:

Government increasingly impinges upon individuals in their very individuality, in their practical relations to themselves in the conduct of their lives; it concerns them at the very heart of themselves by making its rationality the condition of their active freedom.

And the other problem is that locating freedom as belonging within any sort of government diagram is just undermining the universiality of freedom as an idea, as well as that of resistance to such a bleak outlook.  Therefore, freedom must exist in some sense outside of the diagrammatic govermentality, outside of the political arena.

Incapable of being firmly established or guaranteed by any institutional structure of the political order, concrete freedom consists in a momentary act rather than a permanent state of affairs: 'It is occasion, spark, challenge. It is risk, it is not guaranteed, backed-up or assured: it always remains without an end.' Concrete freedom is thus simultaneously political and extra-diagrammatic.

But this desire for liberation must be divorced from the trap of essentialist thought, or else it will fall back into the same old traps of diagrammatic governmentality.

this notion of freedom is entirely divorced from any assumption of originary authenticity and the correlate projects of self-discovery or self-actualisation that are central to the epistemic regime of liberal government. As a number of studies have demonstrated, liberal governmental rationality synthesises the mobilisation of human desire for freedom with the specification of its content, so that one is incited to discover and liberate one's 'inner self' through following an externally devised model of e.g. an 'active citizen', an 'enterprising employee' or a 'caring mother'

Resistance, instead, must be against such identities, against this attempt to uncover a "pure" but hidden subject who can then be liberated and moulded into its ideal self (through careful help by trained "experts" of course).  Resistance is therefore located within a gap, the subjects resists purely as a human being, not for any particular reason or cause.

'It is not a question of advocating such resistance, of praising autonomy or blaming domination as respective exemplars of a good and evil for all, but simply of understanding why such resistance does occur. Foucault does not think that resistance to forms of domination requires justification. To the extent that it occurs, such resistance follows from the nature of particular human beings. It is an effect of human freedom.'

Resistance does not, therefore, protect freedom, shield it from danger and make it possible.  Instead, it is an act of freedom, in and of itself.  Freedom, in short, involves the diagram, but in confrontation, without being reducible to its operations and systems of control.

For the next post, I will try to delve further into the diagram, notions of identity and non-essentialist resistance.