Foucault and the BIP

[Cain]

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.

[Honey]

Holiest Shit Cain!  I am friggin' beside myself reading this stuff!  Thanks & Respect big time!   

[rong]

interesting indeed - at work, so can't devote too much time to comprehension, but i took it to imply that freedom can only exist in the construct of governance.  i.e. if there were no rules, there'd be no freedom.  sort of like how creating order creates more chaos.

[LMNO]

rong raises an interesting point.

Of course, in a pragmatic functional sense, there is never a complete absence of rules or governance.  But would Foucault say there would be less freedom in a society with fewer restrictions on an individual's actions?

[AFK]

It would seem to me it would be much more difficult to appreciate freedom without some semblence of governance or rule.  Sort of like, you can't enjoy the "freedom" of young adulthood without going through the gauntlet of structure and control that is high school. 

(forgive me if this was well covered in the posted bits.  I'm having a hard time devoting ample time to digest it all.)

[Cain]

Unfortunately, my head is frazzled from days of little sleep, so I haven't really done any reading.

I shall answer questions tomorrow.

[rong]

after reconsidering, it seems, however, incorrect to say that more rules = more freedom.

[Manta Obscura]

after reconsidering, it seems, however, incorrect to say that more rules = more freedom.

Maybe it would be more apt to say that more rules = more opportunities to go beyond limitations? Ergo, more rules = more potential for freedom, perhaps.

[AFK]

At the very least, more rules would mean more appreciation of freedom.  although, I think at some point obviously the rules become too oppressive and crushing where hope is lost and freedom isn't even considered anymore. 

Then there's Stockholm Syndrome. 

[Honey]

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.

These are my favorite parts ^ & thanks again Cain.
The kind of freedom where, to get to it, you have to "fall or slip through the cracks." 

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.

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.

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.

Then Cain said:
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.

These too ^

& the last part about Zen?  I'm reading a new (for me) translation of I and Thou by Martin Buber.  It's very interesting & touches on some of the distinctions made here.  I just honestly wish I understood more German.  Some of the words are not simply translated into English. 

[P3nT4gR4m]

F'kinell this is heavy reading, but rewarding nonetheless. Props to Cain

My initial thoughts - "freedom" is not a thing, in and of itself, but rather the antithesis of restriction. It's a degree of lack of things. Therefore any act could be considered more or less free only my measuring the restrictions in place which oppose its completion.

I'm leaning toward thinking that any successful act would, therefore, be an expression of freedom, since an overwhelming set of restrictions would prohibit the act being carried out.

We cannot ask for freedom, only that the restrictions are lifted but you'll never be free to do anything until you've actually done it.

[Cain]

You may be on the right path, P3nt.  Here is something I hope will help.  The interlude chapter discusses a particular book, namely J.M. Coetzee's novel The Life and Times of Michael K (1985).  The author believes this provides an example of of Foucauldian freedom, in a "poignantly hyperbolic manner".

Throughout the novel Michael K traverses the harrowing landscapes of the civil war-torn South Africa without identification papers, is repeatedly detained in and successfully escapes from the 'camps' set up by the warring  parties for the purposes of the containment of the 'non-combatant' population.

Coetzee's 'camps' are diagrammatic spaces, in which 'bare life' is to be transformed into 'good life', spaces of order, positivity and identity, beyond which, on the outside, lies the disorderly space of civil war, in which the exception is the rule and life is indeed reduced to a fragile physical existence.

When Michael K finds himself in one of the camps, he is discreetly advised against an escape attempt by an inhabitant of the camp, who explicitly distinguishes it from a prison and asserts his voluntary choice for the security of the diagram over the risks of free existence on the outside.

'This isn't a prison', said the man. Didn't you hear the policeman tell you it isn't a prison? This is Jakkalsdrif. This is a camp. Don't you know what a camp is? A camp is for people without jobs. [...] They put all the people like that together in a camp so that they won't
have to beg anymore. You say why I don't run away. But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here? From soft beds like this and free wood and a man at the gate with a gun to stop the thieves from coming in the night to steal your money? [...] Where do you want to go anyway?' He dropped his voice. 'You want to go
to the mountains?' (Coetzee 1985, 86)

Eventually, Michael K does indeed end up in the mountains, at an abandoned farmhouse, subsisting on insects and roots before discovering pumpkin seeds and growing his own pumpkins. Despite deprivation and exhaustion that he underwent in this solitary period, Michael 'felt a deep joy in his physical being. His step was so light that he barely touched the earth. It seemed possible to fly; it seemed possible to be both body and spirit.' (Ibid., 102) The force of Michael K's flight from the camps is animated by the desire for freedom in its 'concrete' sense of the lightness of being outside the diagram of the camp, a lightness that may be 'unbearable' in the most direct, physical sense of starvation, but is at the same time the source of physical joy.

This desire for freedom is not accessible in terms of ideas or beliefs – it is not that Michael K opposes the 'ideology' of the camps or advocates a dissident conception of social order. Nor is his placement in the camp intended as a form of punishment or repression for 'inappropriate' behaviour. The only thing about Michael K that is inappropriate from the standpoint of the authorities of the camps is his being outside them, which is simultaneously his only desire. In Deleuze's terms, Michael K's flight is directed towards the line of the outside, '[a] terrible line that shuffles all the diagrams, above the very raging storms. But however terrible this line may be, it is a line of life, that can no longer be gauged by relations between forces, one that carries man beyond terror, where one can live and indeed where Life exists par excellence.' (Deleuze 1988, 122)

It is important to emphasise that Michael K's practice of freedom cannot be rendered in the teleological terms of a project: he did not flee the camp in order to live in solitude in an abandoned farmhouse and it is not clear whether he actually seeks solitude. The very figure of Michael K seems to epitomise non-identity: purposefully nondescript, never resorting to inner monologue, apparently not prone to reflection at all, Michael is indeed insignificant, obscure and simple, as Foucault's 'infamous men' tend to be. In his encounters with others he actively resists the 'confessional' incitement to narrate his existence to a compassionate audience excited about his 'authenticity': 'Everywhere I go there are people waiting to exercise their forms of  charity on me. [...] They want me to open my heart and tell them the story of a life lived in cages.' (Coetzee 1985, 181) When arrested and taken away to yet another camp, Michael K practically refuses to speak at all, which results in his 'identification' by camp authorities as 'Michaels', an identity bestowed by administrative mistake.

This erroneous identity is the only knowledge the camp doctor is able to extract from Michael K despite his incitement to discourse that echoes Foucault's analysis of the confessional technology:

We brought you here to talk, Michaels. [...] You see how easy it is to talk, now talk. Listen to me, listen how easily I fill this room with words. [...] Give yourself some substance, man, otherwise you are going to slide through life absolutely unnoticed. You will be a digit in the units column at the end of the war when they do the big subtraction sum to calculate the difference, nothing more. You don't want to be simply one of the perished, do you? You want to live, don't you? Well then, talk, make your voice heard, tell your story! We are listening! Where else in the world are you going to find two polite civilised gentlemen ready to listen to your story all day and all night, if need be, and take notes too? (Ibid., 140)

Although Michael K clearly has a desire to live, he refuses to confuse life with discourse (cf. Foucault 1989, 211), is disinclined to give himself substance through telling his life story and does not seem to mind 'sliding through life unnoticed'. Furthermore, since his life appears to consist solely in a series of confinements and escapes, he does not seem to have a story to tell, a self to 'express' or 'fulfil'. There is, in Michael K, nothing to confess. In the initial opinion of his doctor, 'he is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton [...] There is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people.' (Coetzee 1985, 141–42) His desires appear exhausted by the desire for freedom, not a freedom to pursue one's desires but merely a state of being 'out of the camps', a bare life of freedom that, in contrast to Agamben's thesis, no longer appears caught up in the sovereign ban that exposes it to death but rather is an act of exception that exposes itself to death in the flight from the camps. The following passage vividly asserts the possibility, pace Foucault's critics, of this desire for freedom that has nothing to liberate and is protective of nothing but its status of an infinite potentiality that, as we recall, must not pass into actuality to remain potential.

I was mute and stupid in the beginning, I will be mute and stupid at the end. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being simple. They were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else. Now they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for people they find living in storm-water drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can't add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate? I have escaped the camps; perhaps if I lie low, I will escape the charity too. (Coetzee 1985, 182. Emphasis added.)

[Cain]

I like to think I was edging towards this sort of thinking in this earlier post:

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=15054.0

Not anywhere near as complex, but nontheless, getting closer...

[Cain]

Further explanation:

One of Foucault's favoured modes of the affirmation of non-identitarian freedom of potential being against the diagrammatic abduction is the practice of anonymity. If governmental rationalities operate through the nomination and specification of a positive identity through a series of constitutive exclusions, rarefactions and restrictions (Foucault 1981), then the practices of freedom are enabled by withholding the knowledge of oneself, resisting the injunction to a 'confessional' self-expression, declining the incitement to active participation in the governmentally sanctioned discourse. Anonymity may then serve 'to encourage freedom by increasing the scope of actions not susceptible to official observation, records and interpretation' (Hooke 1994, 298). Reversing the clichéd opposition between the impersonal and anonymous modern existence and the authentic project of self-discovery and self-fulfilment, let us venture that it is a certain  de-specification of oneself, a certain self-effacing impersonality that permits the practices of freedom that we have been discussing (see Heiner 2003; Robinson 2003; Huijer 1999). Foucault's own stance and writing style are marked by this elusion of identity, as the following famous passage illustrates:

What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and reform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (Foucault 1989, 17)

This quest for anonymity, the unwillingness to be confined within even a 'self-chosen' identity, to be pinned down and constrained by what one allegedly is, is a strategy that need not be restricted to the domain of transgressive art or philosophical writing but can be generalised as a mode of 'nonpositive affirmation' of one's existence in the face of the diagrammatic subjection (see Foucault 1977c, 1987). To remain anonymous in the face of the diagram is to enact one's potentiality for being otherwise that is entirely heterogeneous to actually becoming someone else. Instead, a Foucauldian anonymity is closest to Agamben's notions of 'being-thus' or 'being-such', which have nothing to do with remaining in a positively determined mode of existence, but rather refer to the singularity of whatever being, which is irreducibly potential. It would certainly be a misunderstanding to read Agamben's affirmation of the 'irreparable' status of one's being-thus as an injunction to stick to a certain actual identity, to be thus and nothing other. Instead, in Agamben's formulation  the anaphora 'thus' 'no longer refers back to any meaning or any referent, [being an] absolute thus that does not presuppose anything but is completely exposed' (Agamben 1993b, 93). From the diagrammatic perspective, the anonymous subject is that, whose 'being-thus' literally can be anything, can be otherwise in relation to any identity due to the possibility of the infinite proliferation of homonyms that destroys
the ordering function of the name. Anonymity does not seek either to affirm any particular identitarian predicates against the diagram that attempts to efface them or to negate any of the predicates that the diagram attempts to install in the subject, but simply affirms itself as 'neither this nor that, neither thus nor thus, but thus, as it is, with all its predicates (all its predicates is not a predicate). [...] Such a being would be a pure, singular and yet perfectly whatever existence.' (Ibid. Emphasis original.)

Foucault has famously described the linkage between the passion for identity with governmental rationalities in his seminal analysis of the 'confessional technology' of subjectification. According to Foucault, the Christian practice of confession has been deployed in a secularised fashion at a variety of sites (most paradigmatically in psychoanalysis, but also in education, literature, intimate relations, etc.) as the primary 'technique of the self': 'Western man has become a confessing animal.' (Foucault 1990a, 59. See also Foucault 1988b, 1988d, 1988e; Bernauer 2005) What is crucial in this technology for our purposes is less the curious link it makes between sexual behaviour and the truth of one's being than the assumption it makes about this truth as residing within the depths of subjectivity, unbeknownst to the subject in question, always 'in hiding' and in need of extraction by hermeneutic experts. Thus, the path to the discovery and liberation of one's true self lies in active and voluntary participation in discourse, a verbal rendition of experience, which in itself is anticipated to liberate (cf. Giddens 1992).

The inhabitants of Foucault's limbo of non-identity are similarly unaware of their privation. Insofar as one renounces the interest in the authenticity of one's identity and the techniques of its actualisation, the promise of diagrammatic liberation begins to be received with a mild and somewhat uncomprehending amusement. Isn't the very discourse on identity, in all its varieties, beguilingly strange in its promise to deliver to the subject the truth of his individuality by subjecting him to the knowledge that is entirely alien to him or, conversely, tirelessly teaching him what he is presupposed to already know? Isn't there something ludicrous in the effort to extract the truth of being from the depths of subjective interiority by filling these very depths with a plethora of discursive constructions? Isn't the very notion of identity little more than an amusing artefact, which stops being amusing when one's entire existence becomes subjected to it, when it brands and penetrates one's very being?

[Honey]

Further explanation:

The inhabitants of Foucault's limbo of non-identity are similarly unaware of their privation. Insofar as one renounces the interest in the authenticity of one's identity and the techniques of its actualisation, the promise of diagrammatic liberation begins to be received with a mild and somewhat uncomprehending amusement.  Isn't the very discourse on identity, in all its varieties, beguilingly strange in its promise to deliver to the subject the truth of his individuality by subjecting him to the knowledge that is entirely alien to him or, conversely, tirelessly teaching him what he is presupposed to already know? Isn't there something ludicrous in the effort to extract the truth of being from the depths of subjective interiority by filling these very depths with a plethora of discursive constructions? Isn't the very notion of identity little more than an amusing artefact, which stops being amusing when one's entire existence becomes subjected to it, when it brands and penetrates one's very being?

1 word.  Yes.