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Monday, July 24, 2006
Future of the Book in the Chron of Higher Ed; Foucault on Enlightenment
The Chron of Higher Ed has an article (free link!) about GAM7R 7H30RY, the Future of the Book folks, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s work on their new Media Commons project, which I think sounds very interesting.
The answer, they have decided, is to start their own scholarly press. It’s a relatively modest step, as it will focus only on the discipline of media studies. The tentative name is Media Commons, and the plan is to publish more academic books like GAM3R 7H30RY, as well as scholarly articles, and even blogs — all of which will be subject to a public, open peer review. The institute unveiled initial plans for the project last week.
“We decided we’re going to publish really fabulous stuff, we’re going to let anybody comment, and the editorial board will take the responsibility of vetting commenters as peers,” said Mr. Stein, though he noted that the details are still being worked out. “We think we can do such a good job of publishing, and have such a high level of comments and discussion, that we think it will suddenly become prestigious to be published here. And that’s how precedent gets set."
I’ve discussed all this before so I’ll just say: I really hope this sort of thing works out. But you - you haven’t said your piece. What do you think?
In unrelated news, I’m reading Kant, “What is Enlightenment?" and Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?", preparing to teach both this semester. How typical. I sit down to write my first lecture and realize I don’t understand these texts at all. Let me be a bit more specific. Foucault slides from Kant’s text to more general discussion of what he terms ‘the attitude of modernity’. He asks “whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.” Then he says some plausible enough things, setting up Baudelaire as his iconic modern. Then: “I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century ... “
But surely no one would think that a thumbnail sketch of Baudelaire’s character and attitudes was a summary of the historical event that was the Enlightenment. This scrupulous warding off of confusion no one could possibly suffer from ... is very confusing. Because it takes up the room that should be occupied by Foucault saying what he does think he just did. Mind you, this failure doesn’t clearly undermine what Foucault goes on to say next - namely:
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation - one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject - is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude - that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
But it seems problematic that Foucault provides not even a sketch of an answer to his own title question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ He just talks about ‘modernity’. I am generally willing to grant that ‘modernity’ is rooted in the Enlightenment. (How not?) But unless you provide some sense of what at least semi-distinguishes ‘modernity’ from Enlightenment, the ‘rooted in’ relation just reduces to vague agreeability. He talks very briefly about a ‘limit-attitude’. This makes sense for Kant, but I don’t really think it makes sense for, say, Voltaire and Diderot and Condorcet. Also, now I don’t know what Foucault thinks ‘countermodernity’ means. (And I was so looking forward to talking about counter-modernity and the counter-Enlightenment.) Can you help me?
In other discipline and punish news, I’ve been reading a history of Wonder Woman. Good stuff.
Comments
Baudelaire and Modernity
Never underestimate the ability of certain people to make completely non-sensical connections.
A new ToS may have made his entry onto the stage of history before our very eyes.
Regarding Foucault, toward the end of his career he distanced himself from those of his early and middle works which “ontologised literature”, explaining that he had no idea what some passages meant. If “What is Enlightenment” is one of those works, you’re home free.
JH - are you aware of the context of the writing of “What is Enlightenment?”
JE - “What is Enlightenment?” is a final work (if not the final work) dating from the year he died. Where does Foucault disown previous works? I’m pretty sure I’ve read most of everything as of yet translated, but I don’t remember that!
It was in one of dozens of interviews I have in a little book. What he said certainly doesn’t apply to “WIE?”.
I don’t know much about the context, apart from the fact that it was very late. There was something about a non-meeting with Habermas, which didn’t happen because Foucault died. (If I recall the story right.)
You should also read Harpham’s “So . . . What is Enlightenment,” Critical Inquiry 1994. The story about the Habermas non-event is in Miller’s biography.
JE - if you remember it, I’d like to read the interview.
JH - the basic idea of the text was that Foucault, Habermas, Taylor and Dreyfus would get together to discuss their projects in relation to a common text. The text was suggested by Foucault and, as far as I know, he’s the only one who followed through. The text is generally read as his defense against Habermas’ charge of crypto-normativism. He certainly wasn’t putting forward a theory of Enlightenment or modernity forward in the essay, but, rather, attempting to articulate his own relation to each. Obviously, a complete argument would have required an extensive book, but, when you’re six months from kicking the bucket, a twenty-page essay is quite impressive.
Perhaps I misunderstand your post, but you seem to be asking too much from a short deathbed essay! You might be interested in comparing Foucault’s essay to Castoriadis’ essay, “Power, Politics, Autonomy” or, perhaps, Lefort’s essay, “The Question of Democracy.”
The book is in one of sixty 40-lb boxes in the basement. It wasn’t a formal reninciation of his ontologization of fiction, but he definitely distanced himself.
Geoffrey, thanks. I will go check out your article. (Glad to meet you.)
Craig, funny fact. Dreyfus was one of my dissertation advisors, so my version of the whole Foucault story came through the grapevine that way.
I’m not sure yet how critical I am of the essay, but it does seem notable that it presents nothing like an answer to its title question. It doesn’t seem like this has anything to do with it being only 20 pages. Saying what you think ‘Enlightenment’ means is a fine topic for 20 pages or less.
The crypto-normatism thing I get, but it doesn’t help because defending against Habermas’ charges would require the thing I say is missing: namely, some account of what semi-distinguishes Enlightenment/Modernity.
Isn’t that, in part, the distinction between Kant and Baudelaire? But your claim seems to suggest that the first paragraph of section II ultimately amounts to nothing. Although I think there is a difference between his gloss on Kant - “this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history” - and his gloss on Baudelaire - “modernity ... is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself.” Note also that he characterizes the Enlightenment as an “event” and modernity as an “attitude.”
Well, that’s sort of the question, isn’t it? What’s the distinction between Kant (as an Enlightenment thinker) and Baudelaire (no one would say he was an Enlightenment thinker) such that they can both still be exemplary, qua the ‘problem of modernity’?
As to Foucault characterizing Enlightenment as an ‘event’ and modernity as an ‘attitude’: I don’t think he does. “Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out.’” Foucault never says he thinks Kant is WRONG about this. I think Foucault thinks he is right.
We can restate my point in terms of this small bit. Foucault is not wrong that Kant characterizes Enlightenment negatively, but he exaggerates the negativity. Foucault leaves out the important fact that, for Kant, it is a RATIONAL way out - as opposed to, say, poetic way out. Not that it’s so simple, by a transcendental mile, but you see the point. The problem is really: how do you characterize the contrast between Kant and what his sort of thinking inspired? Which wasn’t really what Kant had in mind. Which gets us back to our problem. Modernity is, plausibly, an attitude of ‘exit from immaturity’, but there are radically opposed ways of conceiving the character of that exit. And you would think ‘Enlightenment’ vs. Baudelaire would signal attention to that opposition, whereas in fact Foucault seems to be doing more to blur it. (I really have no strong opinion about this. I’m just trying to think it through.)
Watch out, Craig, I sense a shift to Trilling in the works.
Actually, no. A significant factor here is that I am, indeed, working out my syllabus. This enforces a straightforwardness that is, ordinarily, inimical to my nature.
John, I didn’t know Dreyfus was on your committee (although I suppose I might have guessed). I’d love to hear what he said about your thesis (approved of, provided inspiration for, needed convincing of, continued to resist, failed completely to understand, etc.). I’m just now trying seriously to understand the phenomenological mindset (spurred by their odd criticisms of McDowell’s Wittgenstein), and an inside look at Dreyfus’s reaction to your reading of Wittgenstein might shed some light.
After you have finished with your syllabus, that is. (I’ll keep reading Dreyfus himself in the interim.)
As for the Enlightenment, the last paragraph of your 10:38 sounds right. To mark this I like to distinguish between “modernity” (broad) and “modernism” (narrow). So the story of modernity has Enlightenment and modernist chapters (among others, before and after). Obvious, yes, but it’s a way for students to get their bearings.
Thanks, Dave. Dreyfus didn’t really have too many Heidegger-inflected responses to my diss. He was my second advisor because he and I got along very well. I was his TA semester after semester. (I’m his only long-term student who never really got into the whole Heidegger thing. Obviously I didn’t TA, say, his Heidegger class. I TA’ed an intro existentialism class.) Anyway, gettng back to the diss. he sort of confined himself to making sure that it was intelligible to someone who wasn’t a specialist on the subject - early Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer. That is, when he didn’t understand what I was talking about, I had to make sure to make it clearer. What do the phenomenologists have against McDowell’s Wittgenstein? (What have you been reading?)
Geoffrey Harpham, I read your CI piece. Very interesting. Very useful for my module purposes, actually. You conveniently land on a number of points I need to land on. I’ll post a bit more later after I’ve given a second read and thought about a few things. If you are still out there, I wonder whether you could favor us with a sense of your understanding of ‘counter-Enlightenment’. You use the term without defining or explicating it. That’s fine. But how would you define/explicate it?
I would also like suggestions, if anyone has got them, of nice, compact, undergraduate-friendly (or at least not too hostile) Foucault readings that would plausibly exemplify the shift in his attitude towards ‘Enlightenment’. Something early where he sounds very negative. (I don’t really want to assign a big chunk of “The Order of Things” about the episteme of the 18th Century. Something clearer, if you please. But, then again, maybe there is some relatively extractable bit of “Order” I can use.)
John - aren’t you worried that your students are going to come out of your course with a mistaken understanding of Foucault? Mind you, I read the final section from OT (on the death of man and post-representational thinking) as being more or less in tune with the limit-attitude defended in “What is Enlightenment?” But, if you must distort Foucault, there are worse places to start than “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (written, of course, in homage to Jean Hyppolite) or the first couple lectures from 1975-6 collected in ‘Society Must be Defended’.
John - aren’t you worried that your students are going to come out of your course with a mistaken understanding of Foucault?
I find that question funny for at least three reasons, at least two of which I am confident you can discover for yourself, Craig. (And, to be fair, you yourself may, on reflection, be able to find the question funny for any number of personal reasons that I can scarcely imagine. So I stake no claim to the highest heights of finding your question funny.)
I’m teaching ‘recent continental philosophy’. I’ve decided, for no special reason beyond personal preference, that by way of imposing thematic order there shall be a focus on notions of ‘Enlightenment’. That shall be the red thread running through, and a fine thread it is. And I’ve decided that every ‘recent’ piece will get some old piece as counter-point, because the kids can hardly understand the recent stuff without knowing some serious post-Kant intellectual history. Ergo, Kant vs. Foucault. That’s where we start.
John, as always, you confuse me. Some, more naive than myself, of course, would think you are asking people to assist you in proof-texting Foucault. ("Something early where he sounds very negative” - my emphasis.) But, I’m sure I’m missing the joke. Indeed, the joke is likely on me.
For Foucault, my only suggestion is Michael Kelly’s Critique and Power, which includes Habermas on F’s Enlightenment essay. Good commentary too.
As for phenomenology (e.g. Dreyfus, Taylor, Sean Kelly), their main gripe with McDowell is his Kantian conceptualist attack on the Given (via Sellars). They think he, like most or all analytics, overlooks the dependence of cognition/representation of the world on a more primordial non-verbal interaction with it (you know, the way strong AI researchers do). They don’t actually single out his Wittgenstein, but I’m convinced that’s where the real issue lies. McDowell’s Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian gap between thought and world (citing PI §95: “When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this—is—so,” a fact which he (LW) warns may mislead us into thinking of thinking as having miraculous properties), and this thought is of course in TLP as well (e.g. 1: “The world is all that is the case."). (See Mind and World lecture II.) This means there is no question here of the pernicious sense of “representation” phenomenologists rightly reject. Seeing this requires reading more McDowell than MW and talking about other things besides perception (about which phenomenologists are naturally particularly touchy) to get a sense of the Wittgensteinianism of his position.
But let’s not get into it here. Dreyfus has a recent Presidential Address to a Pacific APA which essentially equates McDowell with strong AI. And I’ve gotten part way into Being-in-the-World. I don’t yet speak Heideggerian very well, but it is helping me see the appeal.
Dave, I should read some of Sean Kelly’s stuff because we were really great friends for years in grad school, but I haven’t talked to him for a while.
Craig, perhaps it wasn’t such a funny joke, but - just for starters - it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that at least some undergraduates are going to emerge from my module with mistaken notions about Foucault. (It is, after all, an undergraduate module, which at least some undergraduates will take, in which at least some Foucault will be taught. I’ll do my best and all. But what are the odds, really?) It also seemed funny that he were rather broadly hinting that I was proof-texting. (At least I thought you were hinting, and I thought that was funny.) And some degree of higher comedy is no doubt due to the fact that it’s Foucault we are talking about. (You think there is some pure, transparent, un-mistaken way to read him? What are you trying to do? Spin him in his grave?)
I’m not quite ready with a follow-up post to this one, but I did notice something today that I hadn’t before. In “Modernity as a Philosophical Problem”, Robert Pippin starts out by announcing: “Even though the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is often used to refer only to an eighteenth-century French movement, for reasons I hope will become clear in what follows, I shall use the terms ‘the Enlightenment,’ ‘modernity,’ ‘the modern sensibility,’ etc., interchangably” (p. 4). It’s funny. I’ve read both the Foucault essay and Pippin before, and I’ve never before noticed that I really disagree with this step. Pippin even goes on, promptly, to talk about Baudelaire. So he may just be following Foucault, even though he doesn’t actually have that much to say about Foucault in the book.
Here’s a link to PDFs of Sean Kelly’s papers. Bright guy.
John, obviously there is no way to account for the stupidity and laziness - natural or not, willful or not - that plagues many students (undergraduate and graduate alike). Pessimistically, we are often happy if we “get through” to a few students. This wasn’t my concern.
My concern, as you properly identify, is that you are proof-texting Foucault: you want to compare the late essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, with some earlier work that, as you put it, is “negative” about the Englightenment. In other words, you want to find a “break” in Foucault’s thought - where he went from being a stupid post-modernist (that is, precisely, a rabid anti-Enlightenment, anti-modern young conservative) to a respectable liberal or somesuch. (Although, incidentally, people do argue that he became a liberal sell-out around 1978, when he started talking about governmentality - but that has little to do with Enlightenment.)
My suggestion, and I’m certainly not alone in this (although that, in itself, proves nothing - there just might be people as dumb or silly as myself out there, as it were), is that there is more of a continuity in his thought, from The Order of Things through to “What is Enlightement?” than people are usually willing to consider. (Especially people of a certain sort.) The line running from the final pages of OT through the genealogical work to the “limit attitude” is pretty clear to me, at least. And it seems quite reasonable (again, to me) to read (at least) the middle works (DP, HSI) as a “politicization” of OT. (Recall: these works are about sovereignty and representation and the ostensible death of each - just as OT was about this insofar as ontology and epistemology were concerned.)
Reading Foucault in the way you proposed won’t bring them to an understanding of Foucault or an appreciation for Foucault - presumably what one wishes to impart in an introductory course on recent continental philosophy - but, rather, the usual crap that gets written by (especially) English language scholars about the French! (Of course, one could just as easily problematize your course in terms of the questioning of philosophy itself - as you certainly know, those good old anglo-american analytical philosophers look down on the philosophical credentials of the continentals and the continentals are always wondering what is they are doing - history? theory? philosophy? something else?)
Re: that other essay you mention - this is precisely the problem I was point to; that, perhaps, your demand was ill-conceived, if not unreasonable. Which is why, incidentally, I also suggested you take a peak at Castoriadis’ essay. As the phenomenologists say, modernity, democracy and Enlightenment are entangled. Pulling them apart isn’t particularly easy - and it isn’t clear that it is useful to even attempt it.
Craig, are you joking? If not, here is the joke you should have made by means of your comment:
“My concern, as you properly identify, is that you are proof-texting Foucault: you want to compare the late essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, with some earlier work that, as you put it, is “negative” about the Englightenment. In other words ...”
And of course what follows is ‘in other words’ by no means. You are proof-texting me in the crudest way. (Really, I hope you don’t teach your classes this way.) You have some comfortably potted notions of what ‘people of a certain sort’ (e.g. me) tend to do, and you are projecting them onto my inherently innocuous plan to teach “What is Enlightenment?”, while balancing it with some earlier text. (How do I know you are doing this? I haven’t said ANYTHING about what I’m going to teach concerning this text, so EVERYTHING you are saying is just complacent, negative presumption.)
You are also a bit too compacent about the study of ‘modernity, democracy and Enlightenment,’ if I may say so. For one thing, it’s relatively easy to separate ‘democracy’ from the other two. For another, there may be good reason to semi-identify modernity and Enlightenment, but that reason will hardly be the one you suggest - namely, pulling them apart isn’t particularly easy. This isn’t Pippin’s reason for identifying them. And it isn’t Foucault’s either. Unless you are willing to attend a bit more closely to the differences here, I don’t think you can really hope to understand ... well, Foucault, just for starters.
John, now and before I refer to your comment (which I’ll quote in full):
I would also like suggestions, if anyone has got them, of nice, compact, undergraduate-friendly (or at least not too hostile) Foucault readings that would plausibly exemplify the shift in his attitude towards ‘Enlightenment’. Something early where he sounds very negative. (I don’t really want to assign a big chunk of “The Order of Things” about the episteme of the 18th Century. Something clearer, if you please. But, then again, maybe there is some relatively extractable bit of “Order” I can use.)
This contrasts with the following (which you give in reply to my questioning of the above):
I’m teaching ‘recent continental philosophy’. I’ve decided, for no special reason beyond personal preference, that by way of imposing thematic order there shall be a focus on notions of ‘Enlightenment’. That shall be the red thread running through, and a fine thread it is. And I’ve decided that every ‘recent’ piece will get some old piece as counter-point, because the kids can hardly understand the recent stuff without knowing some serious post-Kant intellectual history. Ergo, Kant vs. Foucault. That’s where we start.
I’ll ask again for clarification - because Lord knows I already have - but, as I read it, you want to use “What is Enlightenment?” and you want to contrast it with earlier work of Foucault’s (preferably easily understood) in which he exemplifies a “negative” orientation toward the Enlightenment (or, if you will, Enlightenment as such).
My claim - with reference to OT, which you identify as a text that is “negative” toward the Enlightenment (or, again, Enlightenment as such) - is that OT and “What is Enlightment?” are not as contradictory as you believe and point to the “death of man” from OT and the “limit attitude” in “What is Enlightenment?” as an example.
In other words, the “thread” you are looking might very well not be there - it’s only there in the eyes of someone reading with bad faith and infelicity and a strong will to find what their looking for at all costs. Put yet again, you are looking to proof-text Foucault and pass off your proof-texting as scholarship to your students who will, it is most certain, come out with a rather poor understanding of Foucault (their inate laziness and stupidity notwithstanding).
It is ironic - well, not so much - that you, in turn, accuse me of proof-texting. But also understandable. Despite pretentions to the contrary, you are often more than willing to sidestep the issue at hand - smokescreens and diversions and mirrors. How pomo.
As for your comments regarding modernity and democracy - if not also Enlightenment - your thoughts are clearly preliminary and as of yet ill-conceived. Most certainly, feel free to describe me as complacent, but it does service to no one. Might I suggest stopping by Long Sunday where we are currently in the midst of problematizing this very association?
It seems to me, John, that you might consider some homework before continuing the conversation - how about the essay of Lefort’s I mention? or the one by Castoriadis? or, perhaps, some Foucault? Heaven forbid - how about Spinoza, Kant or Hegel?
John, most certainly I am sorry if I offend. Or, perhaps, I should say I am sorry that you find your own words offensive! As you well know, I have but your words to go on; my abilities to understand you end with your ability - or desire - to communicate.
Craig, you are behaving absurdly. My theme, my ‘red thread’, is ‘notions of Enlightenment’ - and you write: “the ‘thread’ you are looking for might very well not be there - it’s only there in the eyes of someone reading with bad faith and infelicity and a strong will to find what they are looking for at all costs.”
OK, I want you to defend that one, Craig. You must show me that finding that continental philosophy involves ‘notions of Enlightenment’ is presumptively an exercise in bad faith. Indeed, prove to me that one could only think that continental philosophy involves ‘notions of Enlightenment’ if you were wilfully determined to find such notions in the tradition, thereby flouting the texts themselves. Prove to me, specifically with regard to Foucault’s text, “What is Enlightenment?”; and Kant’s text, “What is Enlightenment?”; that there is no theme here of ‘notions of Enlightenment’.
How plausible is it that Foucault, in “What is Enlightenment?” and Kant, in “What is Enlightenment?” are not at all concerned with notions of Enlightenment?
Also, why assume - just because I’m teaching Foucault and Kant (which is really all you know about my module) - that I must be neglecting the teaching of Foucault and Kant (as you suggest near the end of your comment).
Also, how do you know that my “thoughts are clearly preliminary and as of yet ill-conceived.” Well, you know about ‘preliminary’ because I said so. How do you know about ‘ill-conceived’. All you know about my thoughts is this: I regard the simple identification of modernity and Enlightenment as problematic. And, apparently, you yourself agree that it is. (Hint: in order to establish that my thoughts are ill-conceived, you need to show something wrong - that’s the ‘ill’ part - about my conception.)
Is all this about my apparent hint that Foucault’s attitude shifts, from “Order of Things” to “What is Enlightenment?” I even qualify it with ‘sounds’. There is, at least apparently, a shift. If I were to have my students read only “What is Enlightenment?” they would come away with a wrong idea about what Foucault sounded like, on this theme, earlier in his career. They might write sentences like: ‘Foucault identifies his own philosophical project with that of the Enlightenment.’ In light of early texts like “Order of Things”, that sort of claim is ... problematic. As to the claim that perhaps there is a kind of unity, despite appearances. Well bloody OF COURSE there might be. Do you think I haven’t read these texts? (Do you really think I would try to teach a course without reading the texts I am going to teach? What do you imagine I’m going to do to fill up the dead air. Tell Derrida jokes and brag about how great analytic philosophy is? For 12 weeks?)
Look, Craig. Take a deep breath. Reread what you wrote. Laugh. The basis of the joke is your own remark that, “As you well know, I have but your words to go on.” The joke is: you haven’t based your criticisms of me AT ALL on what you have to go on.
I see now that Mao had the right idea vis-a-vis intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution.
John, it is clear that you haven’t bothered to read my comments. It is equally clear that you haven’t bothered to read your own. I fear - I honestly do - for your students.
Let’s go over the issues again.
First, we disagreed over your interpretation of Foucault on Enlightenment and modernity as he presents it in “What is Enlightenment?” In this disagreement, I provided reference to the essay under discussion; you did not.
Second, we disagreed on periodization of Foucault’s works. You solicited suggestions on texts of Foucault’s that were “negative” of the Enlightenment and you suggested that you would, if forced, use OT, but that you’d prefer something else. The point of disagreement here is your interpretation of Foucault; especially your claim that OT is “negative” of the Enlightenment while “What is Enlightenment?” is, in some sense, “for” the Enlightment. In order to demonstrate the continuity between these two texts, I pointed to, on the one hand, “the death of man” in the final sections of OT and, on the other hand, the “limit attitude” in “What is Enlightenment?” You, in contrast, provided nothing except vague references to jokes.
Third, when you introduced the Pippin essay, I suggested that it isn’t quite as easy as you think it is to separate Enlightenment, modernity and democracy as their entanglement is infinitely complex. You asserted the opposite. In this regard, I pointed to some other essays for your consideration; viz., “The Question of Democracy” by Claude Lefort and “Power, Politics, Autonomy” by Cornelius Castoriadis. For further evidence of this entanglement, I suggested you take a look at the present discussion ongoing at Long Sunday on this very topic. Your reply was to conflate this aside with the second disagreement.
Finally, the present disagreement is whether or not you read the comments left by your interlocutors and - worse - whether you read your own comments.
(A parenthetical comment in reply to your own parenthetical comments: John, I really don’t know, but, based upon you comments in this thread, it isn’t looking too good for you.)
Craig, the problem here is that I obviously haven’t said ANY of the things you have said I said. I haven’t offered an interpretation of Foucault. I asked a question about one detail of his essay. (And a perfectly reasonable question it was.) I haven’t ventured any view about the continuity, or lack thereof, of Foucault’s thought. I didn’t suggest it is easy to separate Enlightenment, modernity and democracy. You are (if I may borrow a phrase) “reading with bad faith and infelicity and a strong will to find what [you are] looking for at all costs.”
To save time, I am not going to respond to any further comments by you until you defend - or retract - your thesis that to regard notions of Enlightenment as a theme in continental philosophy and in Foucault’s essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, is an exercise in bad faith.
For what it’s worth--not that much, I think--decades ago I wrote a post identifying what I thought to be a fundamental break between early and late Foucault, centered around the essay “What Is Enlightenment.” I hestitated mentioning this earlier, for fear that my generally inadequate philosophical chops doomed me again ... but since the argument’s now turning on whether the divide between early and late Foucault is predicated on “bad faith,” I feel I can contribute.
As can CR, Matt, and the fifteen “anonymouse” commenters on that post. Craig, I think what rankles John is that the move to distinguish early from late Foucault isn’t necessarily anything, yet you insist that it’s not only something, but something really significant. Now, I know my credibility ain’t what it used to be, but I’d hope that I could at least bank on what it used to be and ask:
“Isn’t John’s question an important one? Isn’t the continuity and/or discontinuity in Foucauldian thought an important enough issue to debate? More to the point, isn’t it already a matter of debate, and thus something anyone who wants to consider Foucault seriously ought to take into account?”
Alright, that was a little too long, but you see my point.
I was really making a still more elementary point. Pace Craig, the mere act of ASSIGNING bits of Foucault, early and late, in a survey class on ‘recent continental philosophy’, is not tantamount to taking a wrong position on the relationship between early and late Foucault.
Thanks for the link, Scott.
Scott, there certainly is a break - or, at least, a discontuinity in Foucault’s thought - but that break isn’t between the “death of man” and the “limit attitude.” It’s that whole ethics business. (Mind you, Foucault does get confused and shift the limit attitude into an ethics instead of a politics, but that is another issue.) The real break, to use an ambiguous phrase, is found in his attempt to dissolve the political into the ethical. There are a few other places we might want to push him: for instance, the relation between archaeology and genealogy (and let’s not forget his extremely weird version of historical epistemology) or on sovereignty or even on the symbolic, but I don’t think you get too far on the OT/Enlightenment question. (For what it is worth, I don’t get much out of Foucault’s work from the eighties; OT is, by far, his most significant work.)
And, Scott, don’t let a lack of philosophical training get in the way. As mentioned above, the whole idea of philosophy is something problematized by Foucault (among others) to the extent that someone can write a lengthy book on Foucault wondering if he’s a historian or a philosopher! I’m most certainly not a philosopher.
John: I cannot retract a thesis I never made! More proof that you haven’t read my comments (or your own). Having dealt with that issue, I’d like to turn to a related issue: it is now up to you either defend your thesis about my non-thesis or retract it. Holbocrates, you sure do say a lot without saying anything.
John, again, the problem isn’t in the assigning, but your justification for it: you are looking for something, perhaps from OT (as you say), that presents a negative view of Enlightenment in contrast to the positive view presented in “What is Enlightenment?” That is, you are presenting a proof-texted Foucault in your selection of reading assignments. That is, an interpretation of his works that plays into what Foucault himself calls “the blackmail of the Enlightenment.”
Most certainly, there is an early and a late Foucault - there’s even a middle Foucault - but the relevant breaks aren’t problematized around the question of Enlightenment.
Very well, Craig, I will defend my thesis about your non-thesis. I said that my theme - my ‘thread’ - would be “notions of Enlightenment.” That is ALL I said about it. You objected, and I quote: “the “thread” you are looking might very well not be there - it’s only there in the eyes of someone reading with bad faith and infelicity and a strong will to find what their looking for at all costs.” Ergo, you committed yourself to the thesis that looking at continental philosophy with an eye for notions of Enlightenment is evidence of bad faith.
Of course, what I was really trying to cajole you into seeing is that you are imputing to me all sorts of specific claims about Enlightenment that I have not in fact made. (I apologize for being a bit socratic. It’s educational sometimes, but in this case you didn’t take my heavy hints.)
I take it that all this noise comes down to your insistence that I could only want to point out that “What is Enlightenment?” ‘sounds a bit different’ than, say, “The Order of Things” if I wanted to push some very specific, strong thesis about a break between early and late. But this is just a confusion about how the study of figures like Foucault gets done, frankly.
Of course very late Foucault ‘sounds a bit different’ than early Foucault. That’s not some mad attempt by me to foreclose debate on behalf of a tendentious view. That’s a vague, general observation to start us out. Next you hash out to what extent you think Foucault really has changed his mind; to what extend there is subterranean unity here, so forth. To what extent are changes best construed not as repudiations of former ideas but developments of them.
There are lots of figures concerning which these sorts of debates go on: Wittgenstein, Heidegger. I happen to be a strong partisan of the ‘deep unity’ view of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. But if someone told me that they were assigning both texts in a class, to get a sense of how early and late Wittgenstein ‘sound different’, I wouldn’t assume they were making a mistake. I would, first, appreciate that this is just a starting move. You start with how things seem, then proceed to examine whether appearances can be trusted. Second, this is an issue about which disagreement is possible. You say “the relevant breaks aren’t problematized around the question of Enlightenment.” But you have to be aware that others might disagree. Also, even if Foucault’s development isn’t DRIVEN by the question of Enlightenment, yet whatever is driving developments in his thought - however one characterizes them - may bear on his notion of Enlightenment. So in teaching a text like “What is Enlightenment?” it might be important to make students aware that there is an issue about whether Foucault’s notions and attitudes about this subject are constant.
Alternatively, we could argue about the communicative ethics of this thread. Someone might say: it’s wrong of Holbo to be a passive-aggressive pain, pinning all sorts of idiocies on Craig. But from where I am sitting, there is a sort of higher ok-ness to that procedure, because the possibilities of the pinnings all spring from the fact that Craig’s earlier comments inappropriately assumed that I was being an idiot about Foucault. So showing Caig that his words commit him to stuff that he obviously doesn’t think for a second is a form of immanent critique. The lesson, then, is that if you idiotically assume - strictly for entertainment purposes - that someone is an idiot, you risk being made out to be an idiot, for counter-entertainment purposes. You should weigh these pleasures against these pains considerately, and enter into future threads - or not - accordingly.
I sent this once but not sureit went through, then I saw some errors I wanted to correct, and so I repost. Sorry in advance.
For the kind of thing John is looking for I would recommend a bit from Madness and Civilization first. Very readable, plus mad people are intrinsically interesting and young people in undergraduate courses like that. And this is perhaps the clearest moment where Foucault criticizes the process and effects of rational thinking associated with the Enlightenment. You don’t need any special help to use this work, but Gutting in his book on Foucault has a great chapter on ‘Madness.’ To this you could add the opening pages of Discipline and punish, where Foucault shows his readers the regicide getting pulled apart by horses and tortured to death. The young people like that too. The surprise there is supposed to be that the death of Damiens is truly horrible, physically, but then it turns out that Enlightenment and rationalistic prisons are much worse for trying to get hold of our souls. If there’s enough room in the syllabus, you might include the “Truth and power” interview. I think that’s a lot easier to read than “Nietzsche, genealogy, history,” both available in _The Foucault Reader_, and probably _Power/Knowledge_ too. Then What is enlightenment is not a bad choice for the later Foucault.
John, your complaint about F not answering the question is insufficiently charitable. Foucault opens up by saying he wants to change the question to a broader one, that will include enlightenment but be broader. And the answer that Foucault provides to both questions—what is philosophy, and what is Enlightenment—happens so early that I’m surprised you missed it. He says (my paraphrase): “philosophy is the philosophy trying to answer the question raised two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklarung? The question is an attempt on part of philosophical thought, 33, to reflect on its own present.” (Page number refers to _Foucault Reader_ edition.)
Foucault then goes on to make common cause with one of Kant’s formulations about Enlightenment; namely, that Enlightenment means escaping from immaturity. Another paraphrase: “Immaturity can be defined as a state of our will making us accept another’s authority when use of reason is called for. The book replaces understanding; spiritual director replaces conscience; doctor determines diet. Enlightenment, then, modifies preexisting relation linking will, authority, use of reason, 35.” Foucault wants to link his own work on madness, prison, and subjectivity to this feature of Kant’s argument, the one about escaping immaturity by allowing external authorities to manage our lives and our thinking for us.
This point is deepened by Foucault at 42-45 of the _Foucault Reader_. That’s where Foucault rejects the blackmail of the Enlightenment: either you’re ‘for’ it and embrace rationality or you’re ‘against’ it and you try to ‘escape’ rationality.
Anyway, in addition to What is enlightenment, I would do excerpts from ‘subject and power,’ found at the end of the ‘beyond postmodernism and hermeneutics’ dreyfuss book. That’s the place where a ‘new’ Foucault is presented. But it’s not so much in terms of reason or Enlightenment: rather, he’s reworking some of his notions of resistance and power.
Thanks swifty, I do see what you mean about me being uncharitable. (I didn’t really mean my post to sound so critical, so I didn’t really make any attempt to sort of buffer it with charitable gestures. I took myself to be just asking a question, without especially prosecutorial overtones.) I do get it about the broadening. I see that you are right about what he is doing. And I don’t want to say he is wrong to make this move. In fact, I think he is probably right to do so. But the real question is HOW you are going to pull off the broadening. It seems to me that he is surprisingly silent about this. Take Baudelaire. If you wanted to say: oddly, the heir to the mantle of Voltaire is ... Baudelaire; that’s not wrong, but it is ... odd. Foucault doesn’t spend enough time considering why what he calls ‘the blackmail of Enlightenment’ might in fact look like a binding dilemma.
I’d suggest assigning the full French Histoire de folie à l’âge classique , because the English is an abridgement and doesn’t adequately represent his thought at that stage.
I wonder if Foucault gets the idea to use Baudelaire from Benjamin. (This is a sincere “wonder,” since I’ve never read “What is Enlightenment?” A simple fact-finding mission.)
Or in other words: Dude, Craig, calm down. I don’t see any evidence in this thread to suggest that John is deliberately trying to falsify Foucault. If he is in fact reading Foucault as English-language interpreters have tended to do, he can hardly be blamed for that! Nor can he be held responsible for delving into Foucault and duplicating your own reading of him, for the sake of what remains (despite everything) an undergraduate course.
I also see no prima facie evidence that this “enlightenment” thing is a Trojan horse meant to discredit continental philosophy in the eyes of John’s students. It would be possible to organize class in such a way as to do that—and perhaps “enlightenment” is a topic that someone inclined to teach the class in that way would want to pick. But until we see evidence that he’s definitely assigning Zizek’s On Belief, I think we’re going to have to be charitable and assume this isn’t a purposeful hit job.
History of Madness was translated and published in an unabridged edition this year by Routledge.
I don’t see any evidence in this thread to suggest that John is deliberately trying to falsify Foucault.
No, his game is far subtler, and far more dangerous, than that.
If it’s from Routledge, it’s probably riddled with misprints. Stick with the original.
As someone who used to repair books for a living, I can say that if it’s from Routledge, break the spine and scan all the pages now, ‘cause the ink’ll eat the paper, the glue will eat itself and if you sneeze while reading it, it’s likely to evaporate ...
You should also steam the pages before eating them, because they lose fewer nutrients that way.
Yes, John Emerson, on the surface it may appear that I merely want to introduce my students to recent continental philosophy, with a focus on the theme of ‘notions of Enlightenment’. But, on a deeper level, its strictly from ‘snakes on a plane’, syllabus-wise.