ebola?
Bluelight Crew
Here, I will try to construct a theory of social action, running through the work of several theorists, beginning with Marx and ending with Habermas.
Marx's central concept, the "stuff" of society and individuals, is laboring activity. Human laboring is also social (with few exceptions), either directly, or via mediating institutions like the market. We will begin, then, with two individuals working to transform the same object. Each individual acts on the object to transform it, at the same time perceiving that object. These individuals can also take each other, their own laboring activity, and parts of themselves as objects. We'll get to that soon. People guide their laboring with goals. This implies that individuals objectify their will by transforming their environment. For Marx, laboring is instrumental (evaluated in terms of the question of which means most efficiently realize given ends). In Habermas's terms, laboring occurs according to "systems-logic". Marx's ontology is monist. Laboring activity unites subjects and objects in a single complex. Finally, laboring is recursive. By laboring, humans (can) also perceive the laboring process.
This "second-order" perception effects a new level of complexity. Taking their own (collaborative) activity as an object (realizing some level of self-consciousness), under unproblematic conditions, laborers perceive a mutually held goal, at the same time acting in coordination with this shared goal. Here, mutual perception of the goal and coordinated action according to the goal relate reciprocally; neither is logically or causally primary. Here, language is often part of the laboring process, reflecting coordination and also functioning as a coordinating tool. Here, we have a picture like that of the symbolic interactionists and Pragmatist philosophers (eg, James and Dewey). Coordinated activity (and in turn perception) is the seat of meaning. Symbols mean insofar as the are situated within human collaboration.
I must also note that most mutually held perceptions and coordinated actions do NOT require linguistic exchanges. Rather, people assume (usually) unawarely a background of expectations of standardized perceptual reactions, behavioral roles, and appropriate goals. This system of meaning, ie culture, resembles closely Habermas's lifeworld, although Habermas gives special treatment to explicitly designed instrumental means (systems-logic). To complicate matters further, when coordinated action goes satisfactorily for all parties involved, the participants can perceive this coordination, recognizing the mutual realization of their wills, and thus the realization of human freedom. This is "third-order" perception of labor, and it anchors Marx and Hegel's conceptions of autonomy.
However, it is not always the case that human interactions go well for everyone involved. When there is disjuncture in the participants' actions (and perceptions, as linguistic disjunctures indicate), the participants subject the lifeworld to explicit examination and evaluation. It is here that Habermas adds to Marx's conception of laboring "communicative action". The very conception of the common good (and thus the constellation of viable goals) becomes an object of labor. For Habermas, critical reason (in contrast with instrumental reason) is the proper method to produce/agree upon the common good. Here, participants argue freely for particular conceptions of the good, but any participant may criticize any other's statements on logical and empirical grounds (criticisms also subject to open criticism). Instrumental reason, individual interests, status distinctions, and other social inequalities are suspended from the conversation. It is here that new goals, new meanings, may be authored.
However, often times (usually?), participants treat semiotic disjuntures "pathologically". It may be the case that one of the participants (p1) takes another participant (p2) as the object of his labor. Put otherwise, p1 transforms p2 (and in turn p2's activity in transforming the object of his labor) according to his unique goals. Employed as an instrument, p2 can no longer objectify his will through his labor. Accordingly, p1 sees p2 as an instrument, a means, not an end, undermining the realization of human freedom in collaboration. This situation bears marked similarity to Marx's description of exploitation and alienation, although Marx was (uneasily) forced to exclude the activity of the capitalist from "labor" to avoid analytical incoherence. I must also note that p1 may also be subject to the domination of external forces, namely the market. We will pick up on this later.
It could alternately be the case that the structure of the object of labor dictates the ways in which people may transform it. The object of labor, concretely bureaucratic machinery, dictates the goals and actions of those operating within it. If these participants are dependent on the bureaucracy to meet their needs, they are accordingly compelled to calibrate their perceptions to the requirements of the machine. As the participants are wielded as tools, they are atomized, precluding mutual recognition and creative coordinated action. Now, it might also be the case that an additional participant (p3) wields the bureaucracy and thus the participants within it as a tool. In this case, p3's domination of the officials within the bureaucracy appears as a practical necessity born of the structure of the bureaucracy. This situation mirrors Marcuse's indictment of (then) contemporary capitalism and also matches Habermas's description of the penetration of systems-logic into the lifeworld.
Under conditions where participants are "labored upon" as objects, used as means, participants reify their social relations (Lukacs). Put otherwise, participants, their activity, and its culmination appear as objects with essential properties, subject to natural laws (see Marx on alienation, exploitation, and commodity fetishism). The wider social context, the role of embedded social relationships, and the question of what ends these "objects" should be put to are concealed by the sphere of commodity exchange, where apparent (juridical) equality ensures that exchanges be fair. Under conditions of reification, participants will see no alternative other than the status quo:
if p1 "employs" p2 (puts p2 to use as an object which will serve as means), p2 will be relegated to a single, "efficient" use, as appears to be dictated by p2's essential properties and the "natural" laws of the market. Reification re-casts p2's alienation and exploitation as a condition of his or her personal qualities. To elaborate, the relational causes of this whole situation, causes which depend on the larger social context, are obscured. The very possibility of systemic change disappears for awareness. To return to our prior framework, goals are excluded from processes of social transformation, appearing given, natural, immutable.
Marcuse's analysis of advanced capitalism is at once similar to and distinct from Lukacs' analysis of reification under the veil of the market. To return to the prior description, even p3, who sets the bureaucratic apparatus in motion, does not necessarily act freely, nor does he or she necessarily express his or her will through command over the object, p1, and p2. p3 is subject to "organized, individual interests" (as Habermas would put it). Bureaucratic chiefs are most often subject to other bureaucracies, and other bureaucratic chiefs. The political representatives, for example, are subject to the vested interests that the party represents and the set of tactics necessary for the party to manipulate the will of the governed. Private firms are subject to organizational actors in the market, the organized representation of the individual interests of the shareholders, and the necessary tactics to manipulate the relevant consumer-base.
For Marcuse, bureaucratically organized advanced capitalism reifies insofar as the question of what measures will allow the bureaucracies to most efficiently execute given ends exclude the question of what these ends should be and how the bureaucracy could be restructured (in Habermas's terms, purposive rationality crowds out critical rationality, systems logic colonizes the lifeworld, etc.). Political questions appear technical. The question changes from, "What should we do?" to "How do we do this most efficiently?" The lynch-pin of technological rationality is its ideological function in making domination appear technically necessary. It becomes increasingly difficult to imagine how one would meet his or her needs outside of bureaucracies managed autocratically. The larger mass becomes "addicted to the machine", shaped by mass-media to behave and think in a way that fosters the smooth functioning of the status-quo bureaucracies, and atomized, fit into the bureaucracy's standardized roles, torn asunder from social solidarities that could serve as launch-pads for resistance.
Marcuse breaks from Lukacs insofar as domination is in no way concealed (we all are at least somewhat familiar with bureaucratic command). Domination persists not insofar as it is hidden by the market but rather insofar as people regard it as necessary.
What is to be done?
For Marx, alienated, exploitative labor under capitalism
1. Holds latent possibilities, namely through the wider system of collaboration through the division of labor could otherwise be put to use toward human freedom.
2. These possibilities are fettered by conditions of private ownership
3. Produces a revolutionary proletariat.
4. Produces discontent in the proletariat, under both normal and crisis-conditions.
5. Arms the proletariat with the tools to wage revolution.
6. Marx's communist utopia is a situation where all individuals have equal stake in structuring their relationship to the object of their labor.
For Lukacs, reified labor
1. Sets the floor of social consciousness as reification, whereby people see fair exchanges in the market but not social relationships of exploitation and domination.
2. For the bourgeoisie, reified experience IS the experience of the entrepreneur, buying low, maybe producing something with what is bought via employees (also objects of purchase), and then selling high. The entrepreneur needn't see past the commodity form to succeed.
3. The proletariat's interests lay, however, in seeing past the commodity form and transforming social relations (per Lukacs, into communism). Lukacs is soberly pessimistic and doesn't really have a plan for how this could happen...but discredited himself insofar as he believed in Soviet politics.
4. Lacks a theory of himself. How does he see how things "really" are from a petite bourgeois standpoint?
Marcuse:
1. Replaces the bourgeoisie with technocratic elites, replaces the industrial proletariat with the administered mass, and places ideology within the realm of material production.
1a. Thus, for Marcuse, the ideology of advanced capitalism is not a realm of illusion that "sits on top" of the logically primary social relationships of laboring. Rather, ideology is built into how people labor under advanced capitalism.
2. Lack a revolutionary agent. Advanced capitalism holds latent possibilities, but it is unclear who will unleash them and how.
3. Lacks a theory of himself. How can Marcuse function as a social critic within a system of bureaucracies that, supposedly, preclude imagination beyond the administration of needs under the status quo?
Habermas:
1. Adds to Marx's primarily instrumental conception of labor a theory of human interaction, built through communication and mutual understanding. I reconciled Habermas's addition with Marx's overall framework above, in my descriptions of 2nd and 3rd order interaction.
1. Recasts Marcuse's description as an account of how purposive rationality (choice of efficient means) superseded critical rationality (choice among ends), how systems-logic colonized the lifeworld.
2. Looks romantically to the bourgeois public sphere, a temporary space for critical rationality which appeared in society in transition (liberal/private capitalism), later undermined by capitalism as it developed.
3. Looks to social institutions and orientations toward action for possibilities for positive transformation, not particular substantive ends.
4. Could place himself in small, quarantined institutions that allow for limited critical rationality.
5. Again, lacks a revolutionary agent. This in part follows from his theory...in that Habermas focuses on institutional rules of discourse and labor, not the development of the subjectivity of a revolutionary agent. Still, as a political program, I am dissatisfied.
Onward to Foucault:
Foucault recasts labor as the (productive) exercise of power. Let us again create a hypothetical schematic, populated with p1 and p2, subordinates over whom power is exercised, and p3, who exercises power within this domain. p1 and p2 are subject to p3's surveillance over them, which is conducted according to specific metrics and enforced by punishment and reward. The latter are designed to shape the activity of p1 and p2 according to the ideal outlined by the metric. To the extent that p3's observation is panoptic, p1 and p2 cannot determine whether p3 is observing them, but p3 may be observing them at any moment. In the ideal panopticon, p1 and p2 are isolated from one another, precluding the creation of alternative mechanisms through which they may exercise power. Instead, p1 and p2 act as informants for p3, attempting to gain favor before him or her and assail themselves of surveillance by placing attention on someone else.
*Note: I am describing disciplinary power, the dominant form of the contemporary period. There are other configurations of social relationships.
Power-regimes are discursive. Discursive systems establish methods and justifications relevant to tactics of surveillance and behavioral modification. Through the lens of discourse, p1, 2, and 3 shape each other and themselves into particular types of subjects. It is only through such discursive regimes that particular types of knowledge are collected and particular understandings of the self (perhaps the self as such) are possible. Thus, discourse links inextricably the exercise of power and production of knowledge.
Accordingly, people exercise power over themselves. First, the exercise of power typically aims at the "soul" (or "mind", you might call it) but acts directly on the body. The body is the vehicle of discipline of the soul. At the same time, in the wake of surveillance, reward, and punishment, the soul observes and constrains the body. It is through this relationship between the soul and body, embedded in discursive regimes of power, that desires as such emerge, linked with particular types of self-hood. It is through discipline of the self that we make the self.
Finally, discursive regimes are multiple and nested. p3 himself is subject to external observation and evaluation. Entire discursive regimes are set within larger discursive regimes that monitor and evaluate them.
Like Marx and Marcuse, Foucault describes the ways in which human laboring and interaction are bound to processes of subjugation that undermine the possibility of autonomy. Indeed, for Foucault, production and interaction as such cannot occur outside the exercise of power-knowledge, so the whole project of establishing a utopia of human freedom is flawed from the outset. For Foucault, it is not the case that p3 possesses power over p1 and p2 and uses this power to meet his goals, as Marx describes the condition of alienated, exploitative labor. Rather, the participants' respective positions in discursive regimes of power (also involving spatio-temporal positions and physical instruments) shape who the participants are and what goals they will seek to attain. It is also fair to say that Foucault recasts Marcuse's conception of bureaucratic domination, filling in the micro-physics of the exercise of power within the bureaucracy. For Foucault too, domination appears as necessary, because discourse itself in-forms desire and subjecthood.
There is thus little room for imminent critique. Alternative perspectives are to be found only within alternative discursive regimes. First, the exercise of counter-power leads only to new discursive regimes of power. Second, outright defiance of the categories through which discursive regimes render intelligible activity and people leads only to negative evaluation and corrective tactics of normalization through the current disciplinary regime, or power exercised through 2nd-order discourses, which govern the discourse being resisted, categorizing resistance as "non-sensical".
Foucault most damningly undermines Habermas's vision of critical reason as producing human freedom through its operation in the public sphere. Discourse and its effects provide the very tools of thought. Knoweldge-powerful regimes provide the criteria according to which even critical discourse operates, indeed what constitutes valid "evidence" and which conceptual relationships are "logically valid". Any agreement over ends is from the get go "tainted" by the larger context of discursive power. What more, a new common good established through critical dialogue, once declared and implemented, becomes a new discourse that effects a new disciplinary-powerful regime. Put in Habermas's terms, because systems-logic (instrumental reason) gives form to the spheres where critical reason operates, critical reason is feeble to tame systems-logic.
A parallel may also be drawn between Foucault and Marx-Lukacs: just as market-relations among juridical equals conceal exploitation and domination in the laboring process, for Foucault, juridical relationships of equality conceal hierarchical relationships through which disciplinary power is exercised. Similarly, just as laboring relationships make possible the market, the exercise of disciplinary power makes possible modern mass-democracy.
Foucault, like the prior authors, also introduces a condition under which power is exercised "pathologically": the instrument effect. An instrument effect occurs when a discourse effects a disciplinary regime, but the exercise of disciplinary power fails by the criteria of its parent discourse, but the exercise of this disciplinary power also reinforces other concealed regimes of power and its parent discourse. The parent discourse can only interpret failure on its own terms.
An example: Ferguson's research in Lesotho Africa showed that the programs advocated by developmental organizations, including the World Bank, proved to be utter failures in pushing forward economic development in Lesotho, but these developmental projects reinforced the power of Lesotho's state bureaucracy over the populace at large (1994). Experts later interpreted the failure of Lesotho as stemming from a shortage of modern institutions, blind to the concrete obstacles in the region.
...Enough typing for now. We'll see what I add later.
ebola
Marx's central concept, the "stuff" of society and individuals, is laboring activity. Human laboring is also social (with few exceptions), either directly, or via mediating institutions like the market. We will begin, then, with two individuals working to transform the same object. Each individual acts on the object to transform it, at the same time perceiving that object. These individuals can also take each other, their own laboring activity, and parts of themselves as objects. We'll get to that soon. People guide their laboring with goals. This implies that individuals objectify their will by transforming their environment. For Marx, laboring is instrumental (evaluated in terms of the question of which means most efficiently realize given ends). In Habermas's terms, laboring occurs according to "systems-logic". Marx's ontology is monist. Laboring activity unites subjects and objects in a single complex. Finally, laboring is recursive. By laboring, humans (can) also perceive the laboring process.
This "second-order" perception effects a new level of complexity. Taking their own (collaborative) activity as an object (realizing some level of self-consciousness), under unproblematic conditions, laborers perceive a mutually held goal, at the same time acting in coordination with this shared goal. Here, mutual perception of the goal and coordinated action according to the goal relate reciprocally; neither is logically or causally primary. Here, language is often part of the laboring process, reflecting coordination and also functioning as a coordinating tool. Here, we have a picture like that of the symbolic interactionists and Pragmatist philosophers (eg, James and Dewey). Coordinated activity (and in turn perception) is the seat of meaning. Symbols mean insofar as the are situated within human collaboration.
I must also note that most mutually held perceptions and coordinated actions do NOT require linguistic exchanges. Rather, people assume (usually) unawarely a background of expectations of standardized perceptual reactions, behavioral roles, and appropriate goals. This system of meaning, ie culture, resembles closely Habermas's lifeworld, although Habermas gives special treatment to explicitly designed instrumental means (systems-logic). To complicate matters further, when coordinated action goes satisfactorily for all parties involved, the participants can perceive this coordination, recognizing the mutual realization of their wills, and thus the realization of human freedom. This is "third-order" perception of labor, and it anchors Marx and Hegel's conceptions of autonomy.
However, it is not always the case that human interactions go well for everyone involved. When there is disjuncture in the participants' actions (and perceptions, as linguistic disjunctures indicate), the participants subject the lifeworld to explicit examination and evaluation. It is here that Habermas adds to Marx's conception of laboring "communicative action". The very conception of the common good (and thus the constellation of viable goals) becomes an object of labor. For Habermas, critical reason (in contrast with instrumental reason) is the proper method to produce/agree upon the common good. Here, participants argue freely for particular conceptions of the good, but any participant may criticize any other's statements on logical and empirical grounds (criticisms also subject to open criticism). Instrumental reason, individual interests, status distinctions, and other social inequalities are suspended from the conversation. It is here that new goals, new meanings, may be authored.
However, often times (usually?), participants treat semiotic disjuntures "pathologically". It may be the case that one of the participants (p1) takes another participant (p2) as the object of his labor. Put otherwise, p1 transforms p2 (and in turn p2's activity in transforming the object of his labor) according to his unique goals. Employed as an instrument, p2 can no longer objectify his will through his labor. Accordingly, p1 sees p2 as an instrument, a means, not an end, undermining the realization of human freedom in collaboration. This situation bears marked similarity to Marx's description of exploitation and alienation, although Marx was (uneasily) forced to exclude the activity of the capitalist from "labor" to avoid analytical incoherence. I must also note that p1 may also be subject to the domination of external forces, namely the market. We will pick up on this later.
It could alternately be the case that the structure of the object of labor dictates the ways in which people may transform it. The object of labor, concretely bureaucratic machinery, dictates the goals and actions of those operating within it. If these participants are dependent on the bureaucracy to meet their needs, they are accordingly compelled to calibrate their perceptions to the requirements of the machine. As the participants are wielded as tools, they are atomized, precluding mutual recognition and creative coordinated action. Now, it might also be the case that an additional participant (p3) wields the bureaucracy and thus the participants within it as a tool. In this case, p3's domination of the officials within the bureaucracy appears as a practical necessity born of the structure of the bureaucracy. This situation mirrors Marcuse's indictment of (then) contemporary capitalism and also matches Habermas's description of the penetration of systems-logic into the lifeworld.
Under conditions where participants are "labored upon" as objects, used as means, participants reify their social relations (Lukacs). Put otherwise, participants, their activity, and its culmination appear as objects with essential properties, subject to natural laws (see Marx on alienation, exploitation, and commodity fetishism). The wider social context, the role of embedded social relationships, and the question of what ends these "objects" should be put to are concealed by the sphere of commodity exchange, where apparent (juridical) equality ensures that exchanges be fair. Under conditions of reification, participants will see no alternative other than the status quo:
if p1 "employs" p2 (puts p2 to use as an object which will serve as means), p2 will be relegated to a single, "efficient" use, as appears to be dictated by p2's essential properties and the "natural" laws of the market. Reification re-casts p2's alienation and exploitation as a condition of his or her personal qualities. To elaborate, the relational causes of this whole situation, causes which depend on the larger social context, are obscured. The very possibility of systemic change disappears for awareness. To return to our prior framework, goals are excluded from processes of social transformation, appearing given, natural, immutable.
Marcuse's analysis of advanced capitalism is at once similar to and distinct from Lukacs' analysis of reification under the veil of the market. To return to the prior description, even p3, who sets the bureaucratic apparatus in motion, does not necessarily act freely, nor does he or she necessarily express his or her will through command over the object, p1, and p2. p3 is subject to "organized, individual interests" (as Habermas would put it). Bureaucratic chiefs are most often subject to other bureaucracies, and other bureaucratic chiefs. The political representatives, for example, are subject to the vested interests that the party represents and the set of tactics necessary for the party to manipulate the will of the governed. Private firms are subject to organizational actors in the market, the organized representation of the individual interests of the shareholders, and the necessary tactics to manipulate the relevant consumer-base.
For Marcuse, bureaucratically organized advanced capitalism reifies insofar as the question of what measures will allow the bureaucracies to most efficiently execute given ends exclude the question of what these ends should be and how the bureaucracy could be restructured (in Habermas's terms, purposive rationality crowds out critical rationality, systems logic colonizes the lifeworld, etc.). Political questions appear technical. The question changes from, "What should we do?" to "How do we do this most efficiently?" The lynch-pin of technological rationality is its ideological function in making domination appear technically necessary. It becomes increasingly difficult to imagine how one would meet his or her needs outside of bureaucracies managed autocratically. The larger mass becomes "addicted to the machine", shaped by mass-media to behave and think in a way that fosters the smooth functioning of the status-quo bureaucracies, and atomized, fit into the bureaucracy's standardized roles, torn asunder from social solidarities that could serve as launch-pads for resistance.
Marcuse breaks from Lukacs insofar as domination is in no way concealed (we all are at least somewhat familiar with bureaucratic command). Domination persists not insofar as it is hidden by the market but rather insofar as people regard it as necessary.
What is to be done?
For Marx, alienated, exploitative labor under capitalism
1. Holds latent possibilities, namely through the wider system of collaboration through the division of labor could otherwise be put to use toward human freedom.
2. These possibilities are fettered by conditions of private ownership
3. Produces a revolutionary proletariat.
4. Produces discontent in the proletariat, under both normal and crisis-conditions.
5. Arms the proletariat with the tools to wage revolution.
6. Marx's communist utopia is a situation where all individuals have equal stake in structuring their relationship to the object of their labor.
For Lukacs, reified labor
1. Sets the floor of social consciousness as reification, whereby people see fair exchanges in the market but not social relationships of exploitation and domination.
2. For the bourgeoisie, reified experience IS the experience of the entrepreneur, buying low, maybe producing something with what is bought via employees (also objects of purchase), and then selling high. The entrepreneur needn't see past the commodity form to succeed.
3. The proletariat's interests lay, however, in seeing past the commodity form and transforming social relations (per Lukacs, into communism). Lukacs is soberly pessimistic and doesn't really have a plan for how this could happen...but discredited himself insofar as he believed in Soviet politics.
4. Lacks a theory of himself. How does he see how things "really" are from a petite bourgeois standpoint?
Marcuse:
1. Replaces the bourgeoisie with technocratic elites, replaces the industrial proletariat with the administered mass, and places ideology within the realm of material production.
1a. Thus, for Marcuse, the ideology of advanced capitalism is not a realm of illusion that "sits on top" of the logically primary social relationships of laboring. Rather, ideology is built into how people labor under advanced capitalism.
2. Lack a revolutionary agent. Advanced capitalism holds latent possibilities, but it is unclear who will unleash them and how.
3. Lacks a theory of himself. How can Marcuse function as a social critic within a system of bureaucracies that, supposedly, preclude imagination beyond the administration of needs under the status quo?
Habermas:
1. Adds to Marx's primarily instrumental conception of labor a theory of human interaction, built through communication and mutual understanding. I reconciled Habermas's addition with Marx's overall framework above, in my descriptions of 2nd and 3rd order interaction.
1. Recasts Marcuse's description as an account of how purposive rationality (choice of efficient means) superseded critical rationality (choice among ends), how systems-logic colonized the lifeworld.
2. Looks romantically to the bourgeois public sphere, a temporary space for critical rationality which appeared in society in transition (liberal/private capitalism), later undermined by capitalism as it developed.
3. Looks to social institutions and orientations toward action for possibilities for positive transformation, not particular substantive ends.
4. Could place himself in small, quarantined institutions that allow for limited critical rationality.
5. Again, lacks a revolutionary agent. This in part follows from his theory...in that Habermas focuses on institutional rules of discourse and labor, not the development of the subjectivity of a revolutionary agent. Still, as a political program, I am dissatisfied.
Onward to Foucault:
Foucault recasts labor as the (productive) exercise of power. Let us again create a hypothetical schematic, populated with p1 and p2, subordinates over whom power is exercised, and p3, who exercises power within this domain. p1 and p2 are subject to p3's surveillance over them, which is conducted according to specific metrics and enforced by punishment and reward. The latter are designed to shape the activity of p1 and p2 according to the ideal outlined by the metric. To the extent that p3's observation is panoptic, p1 and p2 cannot determine whether p3 is observing them, but p3 may be observing them at any moment. In the ideal panopticon, p1 and p2 are isolated from one another, precluding the creation of alternative mechanisms through which they may exercise power. Instead, p1 and p2 act as informants for p3, attempting to gain favor before him or her and assail themselves of surveillance by placing attention on someone else.
*Note: I am describing disciplinary power, the dominant form of the contemporary period. There are other configurations of social relationships.
Power-regimes are discursive. Discursive systems establish methods and justifications relevant to tactics of surveillance and behavioral modification. Through the lens of discourse, p1, 2, and 3 shape each other and themselves into particular types of subjects. It is only through such discursive regimes that particular types of knowledge are collected and particular understandings of the self (perhaps the self as such) are possible. Thus, discourse links inextricably the exercise of power and production of knowledge.
Accordingly, people exercise power over themselves. First, the exercise of power typically aims at the "soul" (or "mind", you might call it) but acts directly on the body. The body is the vehicle of discipline of the soul. At the same time, in the wake of surveillance, reward, and punishment, the soul observes and constrains the body. It is through this relationship between the soul and body, embedded in discursive regimes of power, that desires as such emerge, linked with particular types of self-hood. It is through discipline of the self that we make the self.
Finally, discursive regimes are multiple and nested. p3 himself is subject to external observation and evaluation. Entire discursive regimes are set within larger discursive regimes that monitor and evaluate them.
Like Marx and Marcuse, Foucault describes the ways in which human laboring and interaction are bound to processes of subjugation that undermine the possibility of autonomy. Indeed, for Foucault, production and interaction as such cannot occur outside the exercise of power-knowledge, so the whole project of establishing a utopia of human freedom is flawed from the outset. For Foucault, it is not the case that p3 possesses power over p1 and p2 and uses this power to meet his goals, as Marx describes the condition of alienated, exploitative labor. Rather, the participants' respective positions in discursive regimes of power (also involving spatio-temporal positions and physical instruments) shape who the participants are and what goals they will seek to attain. It is also fair to say that Foucault recasts Marcuse's conception of bureaucratic domination, filling in the micro-physics of the exercise of power within the bureaucracy. For Foucault too, domination appears as necessary, because discourse itself in-forms desire and subjecthood.
There is thus little room for imminent critique. Alternative perspectives are to be found only within alternative discursive regimes. First, the exercise of counter-power leads only to new discursive regimes of power. Second, outright defiance of the categories through which discursive regimes render intelligible activity and people leads only to negative evaluation and corrective tactics of normalization through the current disciplinary regime, or power exercised through 2nd-order discourses, which govern the discourse being resisted, categorizing resistance as "non-sensical".
Foucault most damningly undermines Habermas's vision of critical reason as producing human freedom through its operation in the public sphere. Discourse and its effects provide the very tools of thought. Knoweldge-powerful regimes provide the criteria according to which even critical discourse operates, indeed what constitutes valid "evidence" and which conceptual relationships are "logically valid". Any agreement over ends is from the get go "tainted" by the larger context of discursive power. What more, a new common good established through critical dialogue, once declared and implemented, becomes a new discourse that effects a new disciplinary-powerful regime. Put in Habermas's terms, because systems-logic (instrumental reason) gives form to the spheres where critical reason operates, critical reason is feeble to tame systems-logic.
A parallel may also be drawn between Foucault and Marx-Lukacs: just as market-relations among juridical equals conceal exploitation and domination in the laboring process, for Foucault, juridical relationships of equality conceal hierarchical relationships through which disciplinary power is exercised. Similarly, just as laboring relationships make possible the market, the exercise of disciplinary power makes possible modern mass-democracy.
Foucault, like the prior authors, also introduces a condition under which power is exercised "pathologically": the instrument effect. An instrument effect occurs when a discourse effects a disciplinary regime, but the exercise of disciplinary power fails by the criteria of its parent discourse, but the exercise of this disciplinary power also reinforces other concealed regimes of power and its parent discourse. The parent discourse can only interpret failure on its own terms.
An example: Ferguson's research in Lesotho Africa showed that the programs advocated by developmental organizations, including the World Bank, proved to be utter failures in pushing forward economic development in Lesotho, but these developmental projects reinforced the power of Lesotho's state bureaucracy over the populace at large (1994). Experts later interpreted the failure of Lesotho as stemming from a shortage of modern institutions, blind to the concrete obstacles in the region.
...Enough typing for now. We'll see what I add later.
ebola
Last edited:
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