"In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to "awaken consciousness" that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A "theory " is the regional system of this struggle."
"The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth," "consciousness," and "discourse. ""
"Each struggle develops around a particular source of power (any of the countless, tiny sources- a small-time boss, the manager of "H.L.M.,"' a prison warden, a judge, a union representative, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper). And if pointing out these sources-denouncing and speaking out-is to be a part of the struggle, it is not because they were previously unknown. Rather, it is because to speak on this subject, to force the institutionalised networks of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets, is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against existing forms of power. if the discourse of inmates or prison doctors constitutes a form of struggle, it is because they confiscate, at least temporarily, the power to speak on prison conditions-at present, the exclusive property of prison administrators and their cronies in reform groups"
- Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze
"This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
- Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
- Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
- Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
- Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
- Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
- Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
- Do not become enamored of power.
Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Michel Foucault*
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I assume this is directed (from within class) at my contention that for Foucault, power is endemic to the social, and that it's not something to be fought against as such, since there's no social without power. Point taken---he says we ought to struggle against power in one place, forms of power another place, and sources of power in a third place.
ReplyDeleteFar be it from me to suggest that Foucault isn't completely consistent in his terms across his interviews, essays, books, and programmatic political statements. More to the point, I do NOT want to depoliticize Foucault; I just want to make sure that we're in his version of politics and power rather than in something else. There's frequently a sloppy use of Foucault which says: we must always struggle against power, power is everywhere, therefore my Foucault-inflected theoretical/critical/artistic production around X counts as Important Political Work. It is this particular form of "political action" that I think we need to work hard to avoid.
What it does is laminate some weird canonical version of what it might mean to struggle "against power" or, say, speak "truth to power." In which power is something some people have, other people do not.
Indeed, I'll follow Foucault when he says we must struggle against FORMS (or technologies) of power. And that this tactical struggle frequently doesn't look like "speaking truth to power" or fighting against individuals or institutions "with power."
Power creates its own resistance; it is everywhere, in ever social action and transaction. At stake in political struggle is at once to deconstitute the technologies, institutions, and forms of power which do violence in the world, while also amplifying the resistance to the working of power native to or latent in its field. It seems to me that inasmuch as power is endemic to the social, politics is also endemic to the social. (Much of his political writings stand very starkly against a Marxist notion of politics [and its relation to theory] which aims at The Revolution [and the vanguard intellectuals move the masses forward in this struggle through their analysis], Foucault's struggle is always ongoing, because there is and never can be an outside to power.)
As for the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, it's his summary of what Deleuze and Guattari are on about, not his own positive theorizing. I still haven't quite grasped the relation between Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault's ideas of what politics is and political struggle ought to be. We will, of course, return to these questions in the last four weeks of the course, when we do the contemporary politics of aesthetics.