Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

FoucaultThe Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Power, subject or discourse?

• I had done nothing else, really, but a history of power.’

• it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research

• [My research] is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density.’

Domination or power?

• Domination is, in fact, a general structure of power (EW3: 347).

• ‘Domination is a particular case within the different possibility of power relations. You can have a power relation without this type of domination.

• When [Habermas] speaks about power, he always understands it as domination. And he translates “power” by “domination.” (1996: 417)

A history of exaggeration

• ‘I am not merely a historian. I am not a novelist. What I do is a kind of historical fiction. In a sense I know very well that what I say is not true. A historian could say of what I’ve said, “That’s not true.” I should put it this way. I’ve written a lot about madness in the early 1960s – a history of the birth of psychiatry. I know very well that what I have done from a historical point of view is single-minded, exaggerated. Perhaps I have dropped out some contradictory factors. But the book had an effect on the perception of madness. So the book and my thesis have a truth in the nowadays reality.’ (FL: 301)

Radical or neoliberal?

• ‘[Why this] notably positive assessment of neoliberalism, on the part of a philosopher known for his suspicion of power in all its forms’ (Behrent 2010: 17).

Betrayed!

• ‘We were astonished to find the intransigence of his flight from sovereignty. We were equally astonished at the speed with which he would discover new and different conceptions and forms of power relations from those of discipline to the forms of regulation envisaged by the American neoliberals.’ (Dean 2013: 150).

• ‘what kind of legitimacy does he hope to discover every time he finds and marks a new, post-sovereign power?’ (Dean 2013: 150)

State of exception

• Sovereignty: ‘the legal form of what cannot have legal form (Agamben 2005: 2), showing

• ‘the juridical significance of a sphere of action that is in itself extrajuridical’ (ibid: 11)

• ‘The sovereign exception (as zone of indistinction between nature and right) is the presupposition of the juridical reference in the form of its suspension.’ (Agamben 1998: 21)

Article 20 in the German constitution

• The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state.

• All state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive, and judicial bodies.

• The legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice.

• All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.

Dissensus and political community

• ‘dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a division inserted in ‘common sense’’ (Ranciere 2010: 69)

• [Political community is the] ‘notion that politics can be deduced from a specific world of equals or free people, as opposed to a [bare] world of lived necessity’ (Rancierre 2010: 39).

• ‘The People’ are ‘the supplement that disjoins the population from itself, by suspending all logics of legitimate domination’ (ibid: 33)

Hegemony vs. anarchy

• ’The authority of political institutions is not a question of consent but of the continuous acknowledgement of cives who recognize their obligation to obey the conditions prescribed in res publica.’ (Mouffe 2000:95).

• Political dispute is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police, which causes it to disappear either by purely and simply denying it or by claiming political logic as its own (Ranciere 2010: 36)

Foucault’s analytics

• ‘I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem….The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question…..becomes a problem’ (FS1983: 74).

• problematization refers negatively to the ways in which emerging practices (for instance neoliberalism) render problematic some old practices as no longer capable of effectively performing the work they once achieved

NOT POLITICIZATION:

• How can people with diverse, often opposed, values, interests, ideas and identities acquire free and equal access to and recognition in the political decision-making process and on its various arenas?

….BUT PROBLEMATIZATION:

• How are policies best to be articulated and performed, if they are to be acceptable to the population and recognized as necessary for doing that which has to be done to cope with the existential risks, challenges and problems that confront it?

A word about Foucault’s framework

Modern social science Foucault

Philosophy Essentialism/relativism Relationism

Metatheory Structure/actor Discursive practice

(system)

Theory Civil society/state Political freedom-

power

relationism

• Relationism means examining how the subject fits into a game of truth being played out in a specific discursive practice situated in time-space: how does the subject become ‘mad’, ‘liberated’, made into a ‘docile body’, ‘empowered’, and so on

discursive practice

• ‘[Political] ‘calculation gives way to multiple different, sometimes opposed tactics that may connect with, attract and propagate one another. These may end up with forming a system which is distinct from them all in the sense that: ‘the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one there has invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them’ (HIS:95).

power-freedom

• ‘The freer people are with respect to each other, the more they want to control each other’s conduct. The more open the game, the more appealing and fascinating it becomes.’ (EI: 300).

postfoundationalism

• Postfoundationalism = ‘a repeated staging of attention of foundations presupposed as self-evident’ (Marcharts 2007: 13).

Three aspects of political discourse

• Formal (Parrhesia)• Strategic (Madness)• Tactical (Discipline)

Not sovereign law

• ‘power already exists before it is regulated, delegated, or legally established’ (STP: 304).

Not the state

• The state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythisized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think

Not institutions

• ‘one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa’ (EW3: 345).

• ‘even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, [the fundamental point of anchorage of the authority relation] is to be found outside the institution’ (ibid).

Not the state of exception

• ‘If you try to analyze power not on the basis of freedom, strategies, and governmentality, but on the basis of the political institution, you can only conceive of the subject as a subject of law. One then has a subject who has or does not have rights, who has had these rights either granted or removed by the institution of political society; and all this brings us back to a legal concept of the subject.’ (1994:b 300).

Not ‘the people’

• ‘In the democratic game set up by the politeia, which gives everyone the right to speak, someone comes on the scene to exercise his ascendancy, which is the ascendancy he exercises in speech and action’ (CT: 175)

BUT…..Governmentality

• What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not the state’s takeover (étatisation) of society, so much as what I will call the “governmentalization” of the state.’ (STP: 109).

• ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor – all these problems, in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of [the] problematic of government[alization] in general.’ (EW3: 202).

….LOGIC OF ACCEPTANCE

• ‘What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.’ (PK 119).

……Policy cooperation

• The political authority relationship simply requires a minimal degree of cooperation between political authorities and laypeople in their political community for getting things done in face of unceasing risk, conflict and change. This is the political imperative for handling differences in any society or group of people, regardless of how much people hate politics or love democracy.

Inside the political 28

Politicalauthorities

Politicalcommunity

Political regime

Authoritative decisions and actions

Political regime

• The political regime is the immediate formal and informal political structure of meaning (values), support (norms) and resources (power), upon which political authorities and laypeople draw when articulating and performing collective decisions and actions in, and through, their multiple discursive strategies and tactics

Political authorities

• The political authorities refer to the occupants of political positions of authority. Their roles may be more and less formalized, and as authorities they need not be those who have actual control of the polity and with the production of outcomes. They are those few, who are directly involved in the systematic articulation and delivery of policy in day-to-day political affairs, and who are accepted and recognized by most as being those responsible for these tasks

Political community

• The political community binds people together as a group of persons who participate more or less actively in a political division of labor. They need not have a strong sense of community, nor do they need to assimilate to one and the same set of traditions or unifying identity. Strong divisions may prevail, and so may anarchy. However, as long as the majority accept and recognize that they share a political structure and set of processes, no matter how positively or negatively they identify with, and relate to, them, as long can they be said to part of the same political community for solving their common concerns

Parrhesia

• ‘Parrhesia [is] the very foundation of democracy, anyway its point of origin, its foundation stone. In order for there to be democracy there must be parrhesia. But conversely…..parrhesia is one of the characteristic features of democracy. It is one of the internal dimensions of democracy. That is to say, democracy is necessary for there to be parrhesia. For there to be democracy there must be parrhesia; for there to be parrhesia there must be democracy. There is a fundamental circularity.’

• (GSO: 155).

Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia

• ‘if the democratic institutions are unable to make room for truth telling and get parresia to function as it should, it is because these democratic institutions lack something - [namely a space] in which the right to speak, to give one’s views, to tell the truth, and the possibility of accepting the courage of this truth-telling were actually better realized than elsewhere .’ (CT: 35).

Modern politics: verticality and imbalances

• ‘What, then, is this confrontation beneath the language of reason? Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant verticality which confronts European culture with what it is not, establishes its range with its own derangement?’ (MC: xi).

• ‘What is essential is not the institution with its regularity, with its rules, but precisely the imbalances of power that I have tried to show both distort the asylum’s regularity and, at the same time, make it function (PP: 15).

Obedience as the condition of Aufklarung

• ‘We have precisely, through Frederick’s decision and his way of governing, that adjustment between, on the one hand, a government of self which will develop in the form of the universal (as public discussion, public reasoning, and the public use of understanding) and, on the other, the obedience to which all those who are part of a given society, state, or administration will be constrained. Frederik of Prussia is the very figure of Aufklarung….the agent who makes the right distribution in the interplay between obedience and private use, universality and public use.’ (GSO): 38

Psychiatry: undistorted communication?

• ‘1) The psychoanalysts has a preconception of the structure of nondistorted communication in ordinary language; 2) traces the systematic distortion back to the confusion of two developmentally separate stages of symbol organization, the prelinguistic and the linguistic; he explains the origin of the deformation with the aid of a theory of deviant socialization processes that covers the connection of early childhood interaction patterns with the formation of personality structures’ (Habermas in McCarthy 1978: 198)

Or political domination?

• ‘Psychiatric power is above all a certain way of managing, of administering, before being a cure or therapeutic intervention: it is a regime….it is a struggle against madness conceived as a will in revolt, as an unbounded will’ (PP: 173).

The rectangle of the good parrhesia (GSO: 173-174)

• ‘How does parrhesia function, in what does it consist, and how can we describe the good relationship between democracy and parrhesia?’

The formal condition

• In the first corner is the democratic constitution which accords equal freedom to all citizens, including their freedom to speak in favour or against, and thereby to take part in decision-making. ‘There will be no parrhesia without this democracy’ (2010: 173).

The de facto condition

• In the second corner is ‘the game of ascendancy or superiority’, referring to ‘the problem of those, who speaking in front of and above others, get them to listen, persuade them, direct them, and exercise command over them’

The truth condition

• In the third corner is truth-telling: ‘ascendancy and speaking must be exercised with reference to a certain truth-telling’ (ibid). The logos which exercises authority and ascendancy, and is delivered by those who govern the city, must be a discourse of truth.

The moral condition

• In the fourth corner is morality as courage: ‘since this exercise of the right to speak in which one tries to persuade through a discourse of truth takes place precisely in a democracy (first corner) it will therefore take the form of a joust, of rivalry, and confrontation, with the consequence that those who want to deliver a discourse of truth must demonstrate [moral] courage.’

Nelson Mandela

• ‘Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it.’

• ‘To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.’

• ‘If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.’

The classical cynicist

(CT: 339):• ‘[The cynic] has the insolent courage to show himself as

he is; he has the boldness to tell the truth; and in his criticism of rules, conventions, customs and habits, addressing himself off handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful, he reverses the functions of political parrhesia and dramatizes also the philosophical life.’

First thesis

• the transformative political capacity required for authorizing and normalizing policies under constantly changing conditions and in face of continuous conflict and risk implies a minimal degree of political cooperation between political authorities and laypeople in their political communities manifesting power, knowledge and freedom in both directions;

Second thesis

• the identification of political authorization and normalization with the exercise of centralized domination, command, disciplining and policing precludes the possibility of self- and co-governance inside the political by requiring that laypeople in their political communities freely and dutifully hand over their right and capacity to govern themselves to the state

Third thesis

• Politicization and conflict resolution on the input side of political processes must be connected politically to problematization and the handling of existential risks on the output side. This requires a shift in political logic from the one of conflict vs. consensus to the one of acceptance and recognition of difference, extending concerns for uncoerced communication and action to the output side

Fourth thesis

• A great challenge for late-modernity is how to create a new role for politicians as truth-telling parrhesiasts who address people ‘in complete frankness, using the language of reason and truth to persuade them’ (Foucault 2010: 206). The parrhesiast ‘opens the situation and makes possible effects which are, precisely, not known. [S/he] does not produce a codified effect; [S/he] opens up an unspecified risk’ (CT: 62)

Foucault’s political challenge

Old ‘politics-policy’ family

New ‘policy-politics’ family

Norm Duty Engagement

Identity Legitimating or oppositional

Project driven

Organization Strong, and unified Fluid and connective

Community Social and normative Political and action oriented

Sense of community Thick sense of common good or interest

Thin sense of common concerns and actions

Justificatory principle Intersubjective agreement, agonistic consent and multi-level authenticity

Intersubjectivation through mutual acceptance and recognition of difference

(FL: 301)

•‘My hope is my books become true after they have been written – not before’