Abstract
Michel Foucault’s work is concerned with positioning knowledge in discourse and power. Despite being defined by multiple reorientations, an underlying focus remains the rejection of any transcendental or essentialist notion of the subject, truth, or meaning. Foucault’s efforts are driven by the aim to situate subjects, knowledges, and truths; experience is understood to be defined by specific settings. Yet if Foucault’s concern is thus the concrete positioning of our experience, the question arises how such positionings are themselves undertaken: from which discursive position is the reconstruction of discourses itself possible? And in which way is the analyst of power herself embedded in power practices, possibly engaged in acts of domination and objectification? In this essay I follow Foucault’s own (in the end problematic) attempts to answer these methodological questions. Through a careful reconstruction and engagement of Foucault’s efforts to define his approach as a pure description of discursive events, or to situate his genealogy alongside the oppressed and marginalized agents, the essay arrives at a hermeneutic grounding of discourse and power analysis which avoids the pitfalls of his own proposals. At the core of Foucault’s discursive view from somewhere, we shall find the hermeneutic potential for a dialogical reciprocity between theorist and agent. The new vision of a mutual perspective-taking between discourse analyst and social agent fuses both sides into the perspective of situated reflexive agency.
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Notes
- 1.
For a concise introduction to the central problematics of place within hermeneutics, see Malpas 2015.
- 2.
In this context, the proposal made by a “critical hermeneutics” is (a) to emphasize and defend the universal character of linguistic mediation as the ground of the interpretive process, and yet (b) to assert that we must take note within reflexive interpretation of the dimensions of conceptual schemes, social practices of power, as well as individual self-relations. Critical hermeneutics thus challenges the grounding of pre-understanding, interpretation, and dialogue in solely intentional or linguistic media and suggests the need to include an analysis of social structures and power within a theory of understanding. Different conceptions have been presented by Ricoeur, Thompson, Hoy, and myself, among others; see Roberghe 2011; Kögler 1999, 2008; Ricoeur 1974; Thompson 1984; Hoy 1979. See also esp. the related work by D. Healy, S. Zabala, W. Outhwaite, L. Zuidervaart.
- 3.
In turn, the integration of Foucault’s work into a hermeneutic context will also help address some tricky epistemic and methodological issues in Foucault’s work itself.
- 4.
Those who brush aside methodological reflections fail to acknowledge that Foucault’s whole project, if it is not to collapse into a series of more or less novel empirico-historical investigations, is premised on a new reflexive attitude, on an ethos of challenging one’s hitherto cherished beliefs and assumptions so as to allow for new and different ways of realizing one’s self.
- 5.
Those who brush aside methodological reflections fail to acknowledge that Foucault’s whole project, if it is not to collapse into a series or more or less novel empirico-historical investigations, is premised on a new reflexive attitude, on an ethos of challenging one’s hitherto cherished beliefs and assumptions so as to allow for new and different ways of realizing one’s self.
- 6.
The challenging nature of Foucault’s analyses consists in positioning agents in discourse, power, and ethics such that our own locations become uprooted and challengeable; his analyses are interventions with the aim to reveal the contingency of power-induced self-conceptions in order to allow a change for the better. Foucault’s refusal to present articulated definitions of truth, freedom or morality is thus not due to a dystopian acceptance of the status quo, but rather grounded in the concern that any substantive proposal could function in new discourse/power regimes. I intend to show that by arriving at a hermeneutic conception of reflexive agency, the epistemic and normative grounds of Foucault’s approach can be articulated without falling into the trap of a false representationalism of the true ad the good.
- 7.
In his introduction to his translation of Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault locates his own work in proximity to that of Ernst Cassirer, emphasizing the interest and role that symbolic forms or media play in the construction of reality. In The Order of Things (Foucault [1966] 1970), he introduces his influential concept of ‘episteme’ as that order which constructs, beyond and somewhat between the empirical level of immediate experiences and the abstract level of theories, the determinate order of knowledge formation.
- 8.
This means that a discourse always entails both true and false statements; the grounds that determine what can be truth or false is itself prior to truth or falsity.
- 9.
See previous footnotes for references, and also Foucault [1963] 2003.
- 10.
As one easily can see, distinguishing statements from sentences, propositions, and speech acts does little more than to enforce Foucault’s underlying pre-conviction about discourses as regional ontologies, as constituting “historical a priori” that cognitively predetermine how agents encounter certain realms of experience, and what can be a candidate of serious truth claims. For a good analysis of Foucault’s failure to avoid hermeneutic pre-assumptions, see Honneth 1993.
- 11.
“… a statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust.” (Foucault [1969] 1972a, 28); see also Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982. We should, however, be aware, as Bruce Janz rightly reminded me, that the view of hermeneutics that Foucault opposes, namely one based on meaning as generated by an individual or collective intentionality, has largely been overcome in the tradition stretching from late Dilthey to Heidegger and Gadamer. Indeed, their aim at the particular power of discursive world-disclosure shares a lot, despite all remaining differences, with Foucault’s own approach towards discursive mediation. See Kögler 1999 for the relation between the two perspectives.
- 12.
Foucault never thematizes this need, whereas hermeneutics always assumes the interpreter to be per se situated in a shared interpretive community within which one’s interpretive acts are but contributions to an ongoing and never concluded dialogue. See Kögler 2015.
- 13.
I take this view to be present in late Dilthey, early Heidegger, and also Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, to restrict our view to hermeneutics. A good developmental approach how agents acquire such language/knowledge configurations is found in Paul Harris’s view (Harris 2000) who emphasizes the constitutive role of imagination and perspective-taking in our linguistically mediated cognitive development.
- 14.
It is no objection, but rather an incentive for analysis, that such ‘everyday understanding’ is always already infused with more or less understood scientific concepts which trickled down through teaching and all sorts of media into the amalgam which defines one’s situated pre-understanding of the world.
- 15.
With this move Foucauldians can still stay clear of neo-evolutionary or progressivist meta-narratives like those found in Habermas’ theory of social evolution.
- 16.
Similarly, for Foucault’s important reconstruction of the conception of the sign in the classical age (enlightenment), Foucault asks: “What is the sign in the classical age?” (Foucault [1966] 1972, 58).
- 17.
The sequence in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (chapter 32) is about a steamboat explosion and reads: “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” (Aunt Sally); “No’m. Killed a nigger.” (Huck); “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. (Aunt Sally).
- 18.
The criterion for a successful analysis of another discursive perspective is therefore not the judgment of intra-discursive truth according to our own discursive order, as the aim is precisely to transcend this epistemic place for a new transformed position. The criterion is rather the intersubjectively shared possibility for others to follow one’s path, to reconstruct once more the discourse analyst’s reconstruction and deem it as truthfully earned and experienced through the encounter with the object of understanding, the other discursive formation.
- 19.
With regard to our prior discussion of discourse analysis, the relation between discourses and social power is of particular interest. The function of truth is now rendered more specific, more poignant. Truth is not only shown to receive its place in a discursive formation. Rather, the construction of social realities, specifically the constitution of selves in their various modes of existence and self-understanding, now becomes a function of truth. Truth becomes synonymous with authoritative scientific discourses that naturalize and thereby legitimize practices of population- and self-control. See also Foucault 1972b.
- 20.
Most famous became his use of Bentham’s idea of institutionalized inmate observation, the Panopticon, in which an invisible observer installs self-observation and thus self-objectification within subjects via their inescapable visibility towards such an observer. See Foucault [1975] 1979.
- 21.
In an introduction to a volume by Gilles Deleuze in France.
- 22.
See also Ian Hacking (2000) who emphasizes that the discourse on social constructions aims to undermine the sense of inevitability that inheres in such projections of identity.
- 23.
If agents are at all presented and confronted with these results, it is in the name of objective science and scientific authority that proclaims the truth about their identities and being; if agents come to accept these claims, they prolong the objectifications of their being by means of self-objectification, similar to the panoptic sense of self-observation in which the subjected subject internalizes the external and invisible control by becoming her own observer.
- 24.
This formulation evokes a direct link to late Foucault’s project of an existential ethics of self-government. While we are not taking up Foucault’s own way of addressing this issue, it shows that we find in Foucault himself an opening towards a new account of agency. See also footnote 29.
- 25.
If I bribe or threaten my senior colleagues to the effect to award me tenure and promotion, my work cannot claim to have earned their academic respect; if I falsify data and research results, I have not proven a theory or the existence of a state of affairs, even if my deception should achieve the desired outcome.
- 26.
Foucault’s answer to these challenges does not exist as an explicit response to these and similar claims, but he did reflect of his own epistemic stance in ways that are productive, as we will see later.
- 27.
It is here where we see most clearly the connection between the hermeneutics of place and the issue of Foucault’s epistemic position. Local knowledges are always tied to our experience of place, and Foucault provides us with the starting point for an account of the power relations inherent in this hermeneutic situation.
- 28.
The idea, I suggest, is to target the discourse/power regimes of objectification from two sides: one from within the academic field, with a genealogical account that mobilizes all epistemic resources to question empirical research paradigms that disempower agents; and the other coming from the objectified agents themselves, as they begin to speak out against these forms of objectification, oppression, and subjection.
- 29.
A further related concern may be that we already pre-select those agents and groups about whom we intend to speak about their own oppression and situational objectification, as we do not include marginal oppressed groups like white supremacists, for instance.
- 30.
Foucault himself searched for ways in which the agent’s self-understanding can be analyzed and built into a conception of social and historical analysis. Foucault continues, after a lengthy pause, his History of Sexuality, with a surprising shift: He envisions his work as defined by three axis of analysis, one oriented towards discourses (or the symbolic mediation of reality), one towards power (capturing the social practices which define and situate agents), and a third one oriented towards how agents understand themselves (Foucault [1983] 1990a; see also [1983] 1990b). Foucault acknowledges now that the reflexive self-relation—the capacity to take a position vis-à-vis oneself as an individual agent—had not received the ontological credit it deserves. The new three-fold ontology of discourse-power-self-relation remedies this insofar as, for instance, the discourse of sexuality is now thematized under the viewpoint how selves construct themselves on the basis of the environing historical, cultural, and social contexts. Foucault also envision an ‘aesthetics of existence’ in which the self relates to itself as an object of aesthetic formation. Finally, Foucault also rediscovers the early modern discourse on enlightenment as a productive source of reorientation. In provocative readings of Kant’s essay on enlightenment, Foucault sees the emergence of an entirely new way of philosophical reflexivity: To an ‘analytics of truth’ aimed at universal standards Foucault opposes an “ontology of the present” as an approach in which the concrete configuration of one’s time and place is put to a test.
- 31.
For an account reconstructing specifically agency form such intersubjective roots see Kögler 2012; A. Caillé and F. Vandenberghe develop an impressive genealogy of modern social theory as culminating in an intersubjective turn, the integration of which may best be achieved by a return to M. Mauss’ account of the gift; see Caille and Vandenberghe 2015.
- 32.
The agent here is treated as the resultant monad that reflects structurally the social situation from which she emerges—thus staying with the methodological approach of non-essentialism that defined Foucault’s outlook, albeit we are taking it to one more level of abstraction. Practical contexts and institutions can be conceived as fields within which situated agents receive their identity-formation; they are there ontologically shaped with specific outcomes. Of course the focus is precisely on those capabilities that can in turn critically assess and transform the very fields within which they emerge.
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Kögler, HH. (2017). A Discursive View from Somewhere: Foucault’s Epistemic Position. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_18
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