Agency and Institutional Rationality: Foucault's Critique of Normativity

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 51-71

  Schaff, Kory P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

agency; critique; Foucault; normativity; social practice

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845624020     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453704039398     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. ‘The Subject and Power’, in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 208.
2. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), esp. lectures 10 and 11.
3. In this way, I think it is fruitful to include Foucault in the circle of critical theorists (especially Marcuse) who are heavily indebted to post-Hegelian formulations of the social as developmentally dynamic, internalist, and structured by collectively shared sets of normative practices. For some striking parallels between early critical theory and Foucault's own later concerns, see Herbert Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, Collected Papers: Technology, War and Fascism, Vol. 1, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 41–65.
4. Citations of Foucault's texts will follow standard internal abbreviations from the following editions: CS: The Care of the Self, Vol. 3, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986);
5. DP: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977);
6. HS: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978);
7. PT: The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvia Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, 1997);
8. UP: The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985). Internal citations given by parenthetical page numbers without an abbreviation refer to the work specified in the prior abbreviated-title citation.
9. For another treatment of this topic, see Michel Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Power’ and ‘Pastoral Power and Political Reason’, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy Carrette (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), esp. pp. 128, 150. It is in some of these lectures, especially the Dartmouth lectures, that Foucault explicitly makes his interest known in texts of Polizeiwissenschaft, which began proliferating in the processes of modernization of the early nineteenth century.
10. In Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 208. In ‘The Subject and Power’ Foucault also states explicitly that ‘it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research’ (209).
11. It is important to examine these methodological reflections in various interviews and essays because they help to debunk traditional readings of Foucault that claim his central preoccupation is with power and that, in some sense, the subject and even knowledge formations can be reduced to power relations. As an example of these traditional readings, see Sheldon Wolin, ‘On the Theory and Practice of Power’, in After Foucault, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
12. It might be that Foucault's heavy emphasis on the material practices themselves leads him to de-emphasize the subject and its correlative concerns with which traditional philosophy occupies itself. In this respect, he is more of an historian, as he himself claims in some places, than a philosopher. For comments that distance him from traditional philosophical projects, see ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–84, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988).
13. For comments that commit him to a certain style of philosophy, which he regards as ‘a diagnosis of the present’ much like Nietzsche's, see ‘Who Are You, Professor Foucault?’, in Religion and Culture, p. 91.
14. Cf. ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp. 34–5.
15. Since Foucault's investigation is historically oriented, it is clear throughout that he accepts class analysis, but does not reduce all explanation to it. Cf. Discipline and Punish, pp. 61, 69, 85, 274–5 inter alia.
16. ‘On Power’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 105.
17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), esp. pp. 318–22, ch. 10.
18. For one of the few excellent reconstructions of Foucault's views on the subject-matter, see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
19. This does not mean that norms do not have a relative independence in relation to the practices within which they emerge. I shall examine this problem in more detail in the second section. Clearly, Foucault thinks that practices and ‘the methods used, right down to the way of conditioning individuals' behavior, have a logic, obey a type of rationality’ (‘On Power’, p. 105). Whether this means that normative practices have an internal logic of their own, or whether they merely replicate the kind of strategic logic of practices themselves, are questions I cannot answer at this point, although admittedly many important problems hinge on how those questions get asked and answered.
20. ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 36.
21. I have in mind here Hegel's concept of Sittlichkeit as a shared way of life characterized by norms of justification and publicly accepted and validated ways of making true claims. See, for example, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶439–41, etc. Foucault uses the phrase ‘ethical substance’ throughout to describe the way in which individuals constitute themselves (through the family and broader social relations) as subjects (UP 25–6). I thus think that Foucault's project follows the traditional problems and strategies of post-Kantian Idealism, especially its ongoing categorical development of Kritik, rather than opposing itself to that tradition and its defense of the possibility of modern freedom.
22. On the claims of ‘idealism’ and its culmination in Hegel's system, I follow the extremely helpful work of Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), although I disagree strongly with what seem to me to be his own ‘potted accounts’ of Foucault as allegedly anti-modern (cf. pp. xii, 158, 169, etc.). For example, take Foucault's own comments in ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’ where he makes claims that his own views are consistent with the modern project: ‘I am not prepared to identify reason entirely with the totality of rational forms which have come to dominate … in types of knowledge, forms of technique and modalities of government or domination. … So I do not see how we can say that the forms of rationality which have been dominant in the three sectors I have mentioned are in the process of collapsing and disappearing. I cannot see any disappearance of that kind. I can see multiple transformations, but I cannot see why we should call this transformation a collapse of reason. … So there is no sense at all to the proposition that reason is a long narrative which is now finished, and that another narrative is under way’ (35).
23. For a brief attempt to demonstrate Foucault's continuity with at least one aspect of the Enlightenment project's commitment to autonomy, see my ‘Foucault and the Critical Tradition’, Human Studies 25(3): 323–32.
24. The ‘space of reasons’ demarcates the domain of normativity that is not reducible to ‘natural’ explanations of the causal variety. See Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 76;
25. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6.
26. Foucault concedes a relative autonomy to ‘discourse’ early on in his (more structural) investigations of language, discursive practices, and conceptual formations in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), esp. ch. 5. This point was helpfully suggested to me by Jim Bernauer.
27. See Foucault, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’, Religion and Culture, pp. 158–81.
28. Foucault, Religion and Culture, Part III.
29. Foucault, ‘Who Are You, Professor Foucault?’, in Part III, p. 102.
30. This is the view of Nancy Frasier, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), ch. 1.
31. Cf. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, pp. xii, 158, etc.
32. ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 36.