"How is it, then, that we still remain barbarians?" Foucault, schiller, and the aestheticization of ethics

Political Theory

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 653-672

  Bennett, Jane ^a  

^a Coucher College ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21444448029     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591796024004003     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 372.
2. Martin Jay is right to insist that any discussion of aestheticization "must begin by identifying the normative notion of the aesthetic it presupposes" (p. 72). Jay's own survey of different uses of the term is useful, although it does not include the sense in which I use it, that is, the aesthetic-as-sensibility-formation. See Martin Jay;Force Fields (London: Routledge, 1993).
3. Terry Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke," in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. by Michael Kenneally (Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), 25.
4. Foucault "discusses practices of the self as askesis, in its Greek sense of self-discipline rather than a Christian sense of self-denial." Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), 77.
5. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and Irans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 49-51.
6. Schiller's argument, in brief, goes like this: An aesthetic mood can arise in the presence of a beautiful, inanimate object in Nature. What is beautiful about such an object is the singularity of its thereness. As one becomes practiced in experiencing natural objects in their unique specificity, one in turn becomes more competent at recognizing other selves for their own sake. Thus, the characteristic quality of the self under the sway of the aesthetic mood is an appreciation of the freedom, that is, self-determining potential, of others. While I am enchanted by Schiller's account of the mutual dependence of respect for persons and aesthetic sensibility, when I shake my head and blink my eyes I remember how dependent his account is upon a contestable and often oppressive ontology of harmony and wholeness.
7. Schiller and Foucault proceed from radically different ontological presumptions. What makes possible an aesthetic sensibility, according to Schiller, is the "play-drive," gift of beneficent Nature, the creation of a God of grace. The experience of Beauty gives us a glimpse of the harmony originally designed for us: in the enjoyment of beauty "the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite is thereby actually proven" (Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 189). According to Foucault, however, we must not imagine that the world turns toward us a legible face. Although Foucault appeals to a standard of artistic balance, this balance is not the restoration of an inherent harmony but the skillful effect of an artist of the self who has subdued the demand to discover intrinsic harmonies.
8. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 28.
9. Ibid., 29-30.
10. Ibid., 31.
11. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 41.
12. Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18.
13. What is the "source" upon which one draws in such a case? It consists of fragments of subjectivity already formed by one means or another.
14. Eagleton makes a Foucaultian point, then, when he warns that Schiller's attempt to conjoin reason with sentiment has the effect of inscribing power "in the minutiae of subjective experience" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 20) and that it participates in the larger historical trend whereby "power is shifting its location from centralized institutions to the silent, invisible depths of the subject itself (p. 27).
15. Foucault conceives of his analyses of the "limits that are imposed on us" to be at the same time "an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them." (Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 50)
16. According to Schiller, we shall remain barbarians as long as we fail to recognize that Reason's "execution demands a resolute will and ardour of feeling" whose source is not Reason but the aesthetic disposition (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 49).
17. Michel Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," in Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 269.
18. "The relations between the growth of capacities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed" (Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 41).
19. I find support for this reading of Foucault as containing an "idealistic" element in Simons's Foucault and the Political:
20. Greenblatt, whom Foucault cites.... argues that the freedom of arts of the self consists not in self-creation itself but in the experience of self-formation in the face of all the other forces that fashion us... . There is an interaction of control mechanisms that belies any belief that one is entirely what one made oneself, though Greenblatt feels the need to sustain the illusion that he is the principal maker of his identity: "To abandon self-fashioning is to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one's stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die." (p. 76)
21. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 26.
22. Richard Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," Telos 67 (1986): 73.
23. Christopher Noms, Uncritical Theory (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), 163.
24. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 73. Noms too reads the aesthetic turn in political theory as a dangerous "over-extension of aesthetic values or analogues," involving the attempt to conquer and annex (Uncritical Theory, 167).
25. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 368.
26. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 31-2.
27. Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford, 1991), 290.
28. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989), 91. Eagleton too charges Foucault with an indifference toward the poor, linking this indifference to his claim that there is no where outside power: "It is the system itself, in a purely formalistic politics, which is the enemy; but this enemy is quite ineluctable, and like the poor will always be with us" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 386).
29. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 46-7.
30. Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," 264-5.
31. Simons, Foucault and the Political, 80.
32. Foucault, like Nietzsche, is a materialist too. Every social formation, including the construction of the self, the structure of work, the forms of the law, is a materialization. What Foucault denies is that one set of practices is material and fundamental, while others simply respond to them.
33. Best and Kellner, Postmodem Theory, 290.
34. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 393.
35. Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," in Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 312.
36. Ibid., 313.
37. According to Eagleton, Foucault's "ethical ideal... of an ascetic, dispassionate mastery over one's powers . .. combines the best of coercion-to produce oneself involves a taxing, punitive disciple-with the best of hegemony: the subject has the autonomy of the hegemonic subject, but now in a radically more authentic manner" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 391, my emphasis). But "authenticity" is not a Foucaultian goal, given his critique of the "tnie" self.
38. Wolin makes the related error of reading Foucault's "art of the self ' as a decisionistic act of will. Once Wolin has done this, he can charge that Foucault underestimates the complexity of the process of self-individuation: "The appeal to the model of aesthetic self-fashioning seems facile and implausible, especially in contrast with the elaborate and painstakingly detailed descriptions of bio-power in Foucault's preceding works. Can the complex problems of modem self-individuation really be remedied, let alone solved, by way of a simple assertion of will, by the 'choice of a beautiful life'...?" Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 192.
39. William Connolly makes this case eloquently and in detail in "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory 21 (August 1993).
40. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 387.
41. Ibid., 386.
42. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 290-2.
43. One might reply to Best and Kellner that if "practices of liberation" can only start "of course from a certain number of rules, styles, and conventions that are found in the culture," then "autonomy" is not quite the issue ("Aesthetics of Existence," 313).
44. Eagleton too misses the way in which Foucault advocates an ethics of reflective heteronomy. Instead he reads Foucault's "art of the self as an attempt to combine "the concept of individual autonomy, which stands relatively free of the law, with the pleasures of sado-masochistic power such a law involves" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 392). Eagleton objects that Foucault doesn't really "escape from the lures of traditional hegemony," for traditional hegemony too required a certain amount of "self-labour." "It is only by implicitly caricaturing it as a passive, docile receptivity to law that Foucault can effectively counterpose" it to his own ethic. But what if traditional hegemony requires self-labor? Foucault never claims to offer a radical escape from hegemony or normalization. Moreover, the self-labor he invokes does differ from that of "traditional hegemony": it is a deliberate and self-conscious labor in accordance with an individualized artistic design understood as operating within a system of externally imposed constraints.
45. Eagleton also objects to the fact that the self-hegemony of the ancient Greeks, which Foucault uses as a model, worked in conjunction with the hegemonic force of "a slave-based society" (p. 393). But there is nothing inherent in the project of self-fashioning that is pro-slavery.
46. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192, my emphasis.
47. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 291.
48. Eagleton, "Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke," 25.
49. In Morris's words, "History, philosophy, jurisprudence, sociology and other disciplines [become] ... so many optional 'kinds of writing,' . . . remov[ed] . . . from the realm of determinate truth and falsehood." Hence the danger of "mystified national-aestheticist themes, including . . . Heidegger's endorsement of Nazi cultural propaganda." In Derrida's case in particular, aestheticization "subtilize[s] issues of real-world factual and ethical accountability" to the point where they become "quite beyond reach of enlightened rational debate." See Noms, Uncritical Theory, 166-7, and the afterword in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), for Derrida's reply.
50. Eaglcton, too, worries that Foucault's conception of power as ubiquitous "dangerously elides the distinctions between, say, fascistic and liberal capitalist forms of society" (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 387).
51. Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," 268.
52. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 78.
53. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192.
54. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 211.
55. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism, 192. Also: "Carte blanche is accorded to forms of life that are manipulative and predatory vis-a-vis other persons" (p. 84).
56. To his credit, Eagleton notes that in his later writings Foucault explored the possibility of an "aesthetic working upon oneself [as]... as a sort of self-hegemony." But Eagleton reads this as a response to the danger of conformity (coming "meekly under the sway of a heteronomous decree") rather than as an attempt to mitigate the internal urge to dominate and oppress others (Ideology of the Aesthetic, 391).
57. Wolin, "Foucault's Aesthetic Decisionism," 85.
58. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 232, aphorism no. 290.
59. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 388. In other places, according to Eagleton, Foucault resist his attraction to organism, as when in the second volume of the History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980) he attempts to replace "the mighty aesthetic organism of humanist hegemony, in which all component parts are ruled... by a singular principle" with a "multitude of little individual artifacts, each of them relatively autonomous and self-determining" (p. 392).
60. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 388.
61. Ibid., 389.
62. Ibid., 390.
63. Paul de Man charges Schiller with concealing the violence required by his totalistic project of aesthetic education. For a good discussion, see Jay, Force Fields, 75-7..
64. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 390.
65. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 26.
66. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 352.
67. Ought one, for example, to engage in a long effort of learning, memorizations? or seek a sudden and irreversible change in behavior? or try to root out, down to the last hidden form, all forms of suspect desire?
68. "You can see," says Foucault, "that the way the same rule is accepted ... [can be] quite different. And that's what I call the mode d'assujettissement" ("On the Genealogy of Ethics," 354).
69. In one mode of subjection, for example, obedience might be grounded upon divine law; in another, in a natural or cosmological order; in another, in a rational principle. Or one might strive to conform "because one acknowledges oneself to be a member of the group that accepts it," or "because one regards oneself as an heir to a spiritual tradition that one has the responsibility of maintaining or reviving," or because it gives "one's personal life a form that answers to criteria of brilliance, beauty, nobility, or perfection" (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 27). This last 'rationale forms an important part of the Greco-Roman ethic examined in The Use of Pleasure, and Foucault's positive portrayal of this mode of subjection is perhaps most responsible for earning him the epithet "aestheticizcr."
70. I discuss a "mode of subjection" in relation to a Kafkaesque sensibility in "Kafka, Genealogy, and the Spiritualization of Politics," Journal of Politics (August 1994).
71. In other words, a response to the question, "What kind of being do we aspire to when we behave in a moral way?" ("On the Genealogy of Ethics," 355).
72. Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucaull Live, trans. John Johnston and ed. Sylverer Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 305-6.
73. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 394.
74. I make this case in Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).
75. To insist upon an "aesthetic" element in ethics for Foucaultian or Thoreauian reasons is not necessarily to affirm the practices and ideals historically associated with visual, musical or performing arts, or with their criticism. I hope in another essay to examine the means by which one typically iterated oneself as a critic or artist, in order to assess their contribution to the particular kind of sensibility I seek. I take as my point of departure here lan Hunter's "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), 347-72.
76. See, for example, Timothy W. Luke's "Art and Environmental Crisis: From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetic," Art Journal 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992). See also Regenia Gagnier, On the Market: A History of Economics and Aesthetics (forthcoming). I am grateful to her for her comments on an earlier version on this essay and for the contributions of her seminar at Stanford in the fall of 1993 on the history of aesthetics.
77. "I could have said, using rather current methods and schemes of thought, that certain prohibitions were effectively posed as such, and that others, more diffuse, were expressed in the form of morality.... I don't think there is a morality without a certain number of practices of the self (Foucault, 'The Concern for Truth," 298).
78. Ibid., 297.
79. Derrida describes this reworking as "iteration." Iteration "does not signify simply ... repeatability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event. ... It entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and event, concept and singularity." Limited Inc., 119.
80. In the plastic arts, "the aesthetic" is more a matter of Grafting and making than of looking and viewing: beauty as wrought product rather than object of disinterested contemplation. . Aesthetics is born in the mid-eighteenth century as a discourse of the body, but its life has involved a series of contests over which part of the body. Hegel, for example, argued that "the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while.-.. touch... cannot have to do with artistic objects, which are meant to maintain themselves in their real independence and allow of no purely sensuous relationship" (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [Oxford: Clarendon, 1975], 49). With its emphasis on technologies of the self, Foucault's aesthetic seems to be a matter of the hand even more than the eye or ear.
81. The American nuclear industry has taken recently to presenting power plants as integral parts of nature preserves and recreational sites. For a good discussion of this, see Bill Moyers's "Politics, People and Pollution," PBS Video, Public Affairs Television, Inc., 1992.
82. "An Aesthetics of Existence," 311.
83. Jane Bennell teaches political theory at Coucher College, where she is an associate professor of politics. Her books include Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Sage, 1994) and In the Nature of Things, coedited with William Chaloupka (Minnesota, 1993).