Beyond Rorty and Foucault - Feb. 18, 2006

Beyond Rorty and Foucault
18 February 2006

From the standpoint of a hopeful marxist practice discussed from the previous entry, we are now ready to assess contemporary social perspectives.

At the forefront of contemporary intellectual thinkers is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. His ideas best reflect the social tensions that beset contemporary society. While he is a worthy heir to the critical tradition of social analysis that Marx pioneered, he departs from its political promise completely. Instead he locates his politics in a post-socialist era.

Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish may be seen as a contemplation of the dynamics of capital and the disciplinary mechanisms it deploys. Of course he would deny any direct attack against capital later on since he would disavow such a centered and top-down regard for power. Nevertheless, his insightful take on the regimented, panoptic operations of capital through the creation of modern subjectivities can be considered a continuation of the phenomenological and critical persuasions belonging to the Marxist tradition (C. Wright Mills, Berger and Luckmann). Like these contemplative thinkers, Foucault problematized how our hearts and minds are captured by social imperatives that are external to us. In his case, his lucid take on the materiality of ideas as they are channeled through social discourses is but one of his many insightful contributions to sociall analysis. However, unlike the promise of social liberation that always informs the analysis of the critical tradition, Foucault cynically concludes that all of us are inmates of a prison that is society and there is no escape.

What could possibly drive this cynicism which seems outrightly antithetical to the social hope that drives critical social philosophies? Foucault's writing became relevant at a period when many activists and academics were suddenly disillusioned with the apparent defeat of socialism (that is why we refer to this as the post-socialist era). Sensing no political future beyond capital, Foucault withdrew to a politics of the Self and used the arcane ideas of another German thinker who once gained a mistaken notoriety as a proponent of Nazism. The anti-philosophy of a self-absorbed Nietzsche was compatible with the new found preoccupation of many of these disillusioned marxists with the mysteries of their persons. Since they have eschewed the perfectibility of society, as a testament perhaps to bourgeois luxuries they enjoy, they turn instead to the practice of self-perfection. Foucault was similarly enamored by these poststructural sensibilities although with a more realistic pathos. Through his sisyphus-like ethos of transgression, Foucault presents a personal political ethic. We cannot change the world whom we are at odds with constantly (the notion of biopower). We can only escape it momentarily and without certain success by challenging its impositions through our futile solitary acts of resistance.

There are many variants to this political cynicism. Some of them even package their formulations differently employing a more amiable vocabulary that ultimately functions to pacify and accept capitalism as the end of history. Richard Rorty is one such thinker. Unlike Foucault whose pathos towards life was obvious in his philosophy and biography (he was one of the first gay celebrities to have died of AIDS), Rorty is an optimistic American who offers redescription as a recourse to personal and social troubles. He elides the individual-society dilemma by treating the public and the private as separate spheres. Of course, this idea is outrightly rejected by those who believe in the dialectical and inextricable link between individuals and society. The belief in the capacity of people to wield such public and private ethics presupposes the existence of strong social institutions made possible by dominant economies that protect the liberal agenda. These conditions are of course impossible in third world nations whose institutions and economies are weakened by patronage and imperialism.

So where do we draw our hope as individuals who are members of a society such as ours? You should also get out more often (To the streets! To the mountains!).