Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason

237 Pages·2020·2.86 MB·English

by  Laurence Barry

Foucault and
Postmodern
Conceptions
of Reason
Laurence Barry
Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason
Laurence Barry
Foucault and
Postmodern
Conceptions
of Reason
Laurence Barry
ISBN 978-3-030-48942-7 ISBN 978-3-030-48943-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4
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P a
reface and cknowledgments
The context of this work is the ongoing political debate around the socio-
logical fact of multiculturalism in Western societies, and the criticism of
reason and rationality it entails. The novelty of the present-day debates
comes from a specific voice heard in the literature, a voice sometimes
called postmodern, that questions the very basis on which political answers
were traditionally built—reason as a warrant of the possibility to resolve
issues of the common good. Liberal thinkers such as Rawls and Habermas
intend to rescue from these postmodern attacks a form of modern ratio-
nality that preserves the achievability of consensus in the multicultural
public sphere. But postmodern criticism counter-questions the very
attempt to define common norms, arguing that these thinkers are trying
to “commensurate the incommensurable”. In this strand of thought, rea-
son is no longer perceived as the source of the good, but rather as an ille-
gitimate urge to unify, that itself propels injustice.
All the questions raised in this debate on the nature of modern rational-
ity also impact on the conception of what social criticism should or could
be today. Traditionally, it indeed relied on the assumption that a rational
and universally valid standpoint exists together with common norms, an
assumption that no longer holds. The postmodern criticism of reason that
led to this predicament owes much to Foucault’s early inquiries in modern
rationalities and their intertwinement with techniques of power, but
usually ignores the recently published later texts on the Greco-Roman
and early Christian techniques of the self. This book proposes to follow
Foucault’s analyses of reason and rationality in order to show how, in his
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
later studies, he strove to establish a critical rationality that leads to “the
constitution of the self as an autonomous subject” (TFR 42). This critical
attitude is neither a radical criticism of reason, nor an attempt to reach
consensus. It can thus offer an interesting answer to the contemporary
absence of an ethical standpoint.
This work benefited from the insights of many. My deep gratitude goes
first to Dan Avnon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bruno
Karsenti, at the EHESS in Paris, without whom nothing would have hap-
pened; to Nicole Hochner and Christoph Schmidt, who took part in the
early stages of the crafting of this project. Some have become friends over
the years, and I am grateful for their friendship, the suggestions, and
encouragement all along.
In this journey, I also had the chance to meet angels on the way;
they do not even know how a single positive word, as well as their conver-
sations, was significant in moments often rife with uncertainties. I am
particularly grateful to Eran Fisher, Judith Revel, Orazio Irrera, Ilana
Kaufman, Guillaume le Blanc, Zeev (Andy) Rosenhek, Nancy Luxon,
Guilel Treiber, and Anat Ben-David. At Palgrave Macmillan, my gratitude
goes to Phil Getz for his enthusiasm, and an anonymous reviewer whose
remarks and comments were particularly insightful. As a non-native
English speaker, I owe special recognition to Diana Rubanenko, who
helped transform my awkward French English into English.
I wish to also thank the library staff at IMEC, where I had the privilege
to stay twice; to spend time in an ancient abbey, reading Foucault’s manu-
scripts and listening to his lectures in a church turned into a library, was an
unforgettable, inspiring experience.
Finally, I would like to thank Michel Foucault; he asked us to read his
texts as experiences, in order to transform who we are and the way we live.
They certainly had this effect on me. I thus hope to have been faithful to
his words.
Laurence Barry
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Background: Post-truth and Justice 1
Foucault and the Reconstruction of Reason 3
Chapter Headings 10
References 15
2 Early Critiques of Modernity: The Human Sciences
Between Knowledge and Discipline 21
The Human Sciences in the Modern Episteme 22
Knowledge and Discipline 29
Foucault’s Paradox 39
Conclusion 45
References 46
3 Governmentality as a Turning Point 51
The Order of Things’ Division into Epistemes and the
Omission of Probability 53
Modernity in the History of Governmentality 58
Modernity, Political Economy, and the Archaeology
of Probability and Statistics 62
Conclusion 68
References 69
vii
viii CONTENTS
4 From Government to Subjectivity 73
Power/Knowledge and the First Reading of Homer, 1970/71 75
Jurisdiction and Veridiction 77
The Second Reading of Homer, 1981 86
Conclusion 89
References 90
5 Forms of Subjectivity: Subjection/Subjectivation? 95
Subjectivity and Truth 97
Subjection/Subjectivation 103
Conclusion 114
References 116
6 The Genealogy of the Modern Subject 119
From Christian Acts of Truth to Greek Care of the Self 121
Veridiction in Contemporary Societies 132
Conclusion 140
References 141
7 The “Return to Kant” and Autonomy 145
Autonomy Reconsidered 146
Greek Subjectivation as Autonomy? 158
Conclusion 169
References 171
8 Foucault, Kant, and Critique 175
Kant and the Public 176
The Role of the Critical Thinker 185
Conclusion 198
References 200
9 Concluding Remarks: Foucault and Contemporary Social
Criticism 205
Diagnoses of Modernity: Foucault Versus Horkheimer and
Marcuse 206
Critical Attitudes: Foucault and Habermas 213
Concluding Remarks 222
References 225
Index 229
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Background: Post-truth and Justice
The Enlightenment project aimed to found a new political order based on
universal principles of justice. According to Kant, it summons citizens to
“emerge” from intellectual immaturity, defined as “the inability to use
one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” For Kant,
reason could be considered a universal tool, “the use [of which] anyone
may make as a man of learning,” that would free mankind from injustice
(Kant 1784, emphasis added). Yet today, modern reason with its claims for
rationality and universalism is no longer seen as universal, but as solely
representing—at best—the values of one particular culture (Gray 1995,
123–125; Habermas 1992, 8; Taylor 1995, 27): multiculturalism is a fact.
It has recently become sadly commonplace to speak of our contemporary
era as one of post-truth, where what is presented as truth by some is
attacked by others as a specific cultural opinion at best, or as fake news in
the worst of cases.
Such a criticism undermines the very foundation of the modern polis.
In this limited sense, we are now in a postmodern era. Indeed, once we
admit a multiplicity of worldviews, moral guiding norms also become
multivocal. As a result, the articulation of an ethical standpoint “that does
not shy away from knocking down the ‘parish walls’” (Benhabib 1992,
228) seems to be beyond reach. Paradoxically, the criticism of the modern
paradigm of reason seems to end in the impossibility of any constructive
social criticism. The treatment of this problem in the literature is twofold.
© The Author(s) 2020 1
L. Barry, Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48943-4_1
2 L. BARRY
In the first strand of thought, that adopts the “multicultural vision,”1
modern “universal reason” and rationality are criticized for imposing a
coercive “norm of intelligibility” (Butler 1991, 162; 2006, 23–24), for
forcing “behavioral norms of respectability,” for ranking people into hier-
archical categories (Young 1990, 122–155), and for serving as an exclu-
sionary tool that proceeds through categorization and essentialism
(Mouffe 2000, 29–30). This strand of thought also defends the abandon-
ment of an external ethical point altogether, since it is always a particular
viewpoint falsely posited as external and objective (Fish 1997, 2258).
Within such a perspective, the ethical standpoint, if it exists, remains
embedded within each culture, that is it is never external to the specific
community it guides but solely relative to it (Walzer 1988, 20, 33–34;
Taylor 1991, 96). This form of cultural relativism is comparable to the
current mistrust of science which, for the sake of my argument, is consid-
ered just another viewpoint (Latour 2004, 227; Habermas 1992, 49).
However, while this position claims to be more inclusive, it thwarts social
criticism along the lines of a culturally transversal inquiry that depends on
the possibility of abstracting contextual occurrences into broader patterns
of injustice (Fraser and Nicholson 1989).
The second strand of thought aims to accommodate the multicultural
predicament without abandoning some form of universal rationality
(Habermas 1998; Rawls 2005). Habermas specifically tackles postmod-
ernism which he defines as “the radical criticism of reason” (1987, 86).
He proposes instead to contextualize the modern concept (Habermas
1992, 142), noting that the move from traditional to post-metaphysical
philosophy means that, instead of reason, contemporary philosophical
currents “converge towards the point of a theory of rationality” (Habermas
1984a, 2, emphasis in the original; see also Schnädelbach 1998, 5–6).
Besides instrumental reason, he also tries to present as evidence what he
defines as “communicative rationality” (Habermas 1992, 50, 139; Cooke
2003, 283) and its capacity to achieve a context-transcending truth, yet
immanent in the inter-subjective experience and in specific social interac-
tions (Habermas 1992, 139–142). Habermas indeed argues that
1 I use here the term “multicultural” in the broad sense proposed by Yonah and Shenhav
(2005): in their typology, multiculturalism can be summarized by three main strands: liberal,
communitarian, and postmodern (which they further divide into postcolonial, post-national,
and feminist). All share the criticism of the Enlightenment developed above (see for instance
Benhabib (1992)).