Chapter 3: The Politicization of the Critique of Anthropology and the Politics of Truth
3.4 The Task of the Philosopher in the Politics of Truth
How does the philosopher practice the politics of truth, given their position within discourse? Foucault’s interviews and essays abound with commentary on how intellectuals can take up a political position in discourse that allies itself with struggles of desubjection. Foucault denounces the figure of the “general intellectual” who declares the universal truths of man as an anthropological archaism. (LCP, 207-8) In its stead, he affirms the emergence of the “specific intellectual,” who takes up a position in local struggles. The specific intellectual refers to any intellectual with professional expertise in a certain domain of knowledge and practice, as when Foucault states:
One of the essential sociological features of the recent evolution of our societies is the development of what might variously be called technology, white-collar workers, the service-sector, etc. Within these different forms of activity, I believe that it is quite possible, on the one hand, to get to know how it works and to work within it, that is to say, to do one’s job as a psychiatrist, lawyer, engineer, or technician, and, on the other hand, to carry out in that specific area of work that may properly be called intellectual, an essentially critical work…of examination that consists of suspending as far as possible the system of values to which one refers when testing and assessing it. In other words: “what am I doing at the moment I’m doing it?” (PPC, 107)
An exemplary case of the specific intellectual, understood along these lines, would be someone like Chelsea Manning, who asked that very question of herself as a military intelligence analyst, and risked the most extreme consequences in the struggle against the neoliberal security state. Yet what about philosophers? Do they retain a degree of privilege from the times when they desired to be kings or the embodiment of absolute knowledge? Hardly. The philosopher who studies the history of thought from a universal standpoint is largely irrelevant qua philosopher when it comes to struggle. This is why Foucault, in identifying himself as a philosopher, and in identifying philosophy with the politics of truth in Security, Territory, Population, insists on the value of critical philosophy to consist in tracing the history of the knowledge effects of power, which is to say, to trace the historical relation of knowledge to its own groundlessness. This is what allows him to offer “hypothetical imperatives” in the form of “tactical pointers” in his opening remarks to that lecture course.91 (STP, 3)
In the remainder of this chapter, then, I will focus on the task of the specific intellectual
qua philosopher, which is to say that I will focus on how Foucault conceived of his own
philosophical practice. In a 1976 interview, Foucault identifies three conditions of the role of the intellectual in the politics of truth:
[T]he intellectual…occupies a specific position…that is tied to the general functions of the apparatus [dispositif] of truth in a society…[T]he intellectual bears a triple specificity:
90 In “The Masked Philosopher” interview from 1980, Foucault views the “intellectual” label as suspect, since it
tends to both mark out an object of judgment, which creates a paranoid cultural atmosphere, and because it leads to a fetishistic and uncritical relationship to the authorial name. (EF1, 322) However, I use this term in the sense of a “local intellectual,” who operates within a local domain of knowledge and whose political agency is restricted to that domain, as opposed to the “global intellectual,” who tries to speak universally. (LCM, 205-208)
91 Foucault also places himself in the category of the specific intellectual in a remark from 1977 where he states, “I
dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidence and universalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of the present, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of power, who incessantly displaces himself, doesn’t know exactly where he is heading nor what he’ll think tomorrow because he is too attentive to the present.” (FL, 225)
the specificity of their class position…the specificity of their…intellectual condition (their domain of research…the economic or political requirements to which they submit themselves or against which they revolt in the university, in the hospital, etc.); and finally, the specificity of the politics of truth in our society. And this is where their position can
take on a general significance, that the local or specific combat that they lead carries with it its effects…[T]hey struggle at the general level of this regime of truth…[around]
the ensemble of rules according to which we untangle the true from the false and attach to the true some specific effects of power. (DE2, 159)
More decisive than the philosopher’s class position and their “work conditions” is their engagement with their archaeological and genealogical conditions, that is, the apparatus that grants them a subject position in discourse and the capacities to use it.92
Throughout all of Foucault’s comments on intellectuals and the politics of truth, there are two elements that mark out the critical task of the intellectual vis-à-vis the apparatus. They are: (1) connecting to the desubjection of subjected knowledges in which those excluded from a
discursive regime force themselves into it and thereby alter its rules; and (2) “political aesthetics,” or the mutation of sensibilities and thresholds of tolerability regarding forms of exercising power. There is a third element to add here, and that is the practice of philosophical writing and its
connection to the aesthetics of existence—or the askēsis—that characterizes the philosophical life for Foucault.93
Starting with the intellectual’s connection to subjected knowledges, his most concise formulation comes in Society Must Be Defended:
[S]ubjugated [assujettis] knowledges…[refer] to…knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges…[I]t is the reappearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible… Compared to the attempt to inscribe knowledges in the power-hierarchy typical of science, genealogy is, then, a sort of attempt to desubjugate [désassujettir] historical knowledges…94 (SMD, 7-10)
Subjected knowledges primarily refers, of course, to the strategic knowledge of those who
struggled in the hunger strikes and prison revolts that sprung up across France between 1970 and 1972, along with Foucault’s activity with Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, which
92 One of the first definitions of “strategy” in Foucault is archaeological. The Archaeology of Knowledge defines a
strategy as a theme or theory made up relations between conceptual orders, series of statements, and groupings of objects. A discursive formation is characterized to a large extent by the different theories or themes that it make it up and whose divergences or exclusivity from one another exist as strategic choices. Consequently, one’s intellectual condition includes the specialization of knowledge, the kinds of problems and struggles one can engage, and the types of conceptual resources it can generate for struggle.
93 I will also examine parrhēsia in the following chapter in the context of neoliberalism, since parrhēsia is, de facto,
Foucault’s last development of the politics of truth.
94 Subjugation and desubjugation here translate what I have been discussing as subjection and desubjection
respectively (assujettir and désassujettir). While Foucault here refers to the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, concrete examples of the desubjection of subjected knowledges on Foucault’s radar also include the anti-psychiatry movement and Iranian Revolution. Foucault discussed his reporting and his refusal to condemn the Iranian
Revolution in terms that draw upon the desubjection of subjected knowledges in one of his reports for Le Nouvel
Observateur, where he declares, “One must assist in the birth of these ideas and in the explosion of their force…it is
not in books that they announce these ideas, rather it is in events that they manifest their force…”94 (DE2, 706). The
mobilized around those resistances and lasted into the beginning of 1973.95 His attachment to these knowledges grew alongside his engagement with the French Maoist “Truth and Justice Committees,” which soon became a source of his disenchantment with ultra-leftism. One could also add his role in founding the newspaper Libération as an instance of the desubjection of subjected knowledge as well.96
Yet the GIP was the most inventive of this trio. Its goal was to make public the hidden— and often only imagined—material conditions of prison-life, in large part by making a space for prisoners to address the public. In Foucault’s words, the GIP responded to “the necessity to keep public opinion informed about what goes on in the prisons.” (Eribon 1991, 231) This took the form of questionnaires, interviews, and relaying secret messages and demands from prisoners, which then appeared in various GIP publications, press releases, and pamphlets. The GIP also organized support networks consisting of prisoners’ families and allies in addition to staging demonstrations outside of prisons where revolts or hunger strikes were taking place.
Desubjecting subjected knowledges is a strategy for intervening in the enunciative modalities of discourse by opening up subject positions to those excluded from knowledgeable speech. One contests the rules for producing truth by challenging who has the right to speak and establishing material and discursive connections with those whose exclusion is necessary
according to the current regime of knowledge. Because the politics of truth plays out at the level of force-relations that determine the assemblage of bodies and the granting of subject positions to some while denying them to others, acting on discursive conditions is not a matter of disabusing a class of people of their ideological illusions. Instead, desubjection starts when the excluded themselves corporeally contest the material order of their existence. For the historian of the present, it is a matter of forming concrete alliances with those whose exclusion is necessitated by apparatuses of power so as to increase their power to act and speak without subjecting them to an apparatus that captures and recuperates their activity.
Consequently, the main task for the intellectual, according to Foucault’s early 70s work, is to de-individualize their subject position by sharing it with the excluded.97 As he states in a 1975 interview, “I do not want to speak any more in the name of others and pretend to say better
95 Foucault was particularly involved in committees that sprung up in response to the racist murder of a young
Algerian (the Djallili Committee), the Bruay en Artois affair, which involved the murder of a 16-year-old working class girl by a corporate lawyer and his wife, and a fire at a dance club that claimed the lives of 150 people. See Didier Eribon’s chapter “Popular Justice and the Worker’s Memory” in Michel Foucault. (Eribon, 1991, 238-262)
96 For the fledgling paper, Foucault proposed a column on “workers’ memory” that would feature stories from rank
and file workers. It would prioritize stories of experiences of revolt omitted by the official histories of the unions, left parties, and the press. In the Libération that dealt with this topic, Foucault pointed out how many of the great workers’ struggles derived their energy and momentum from going beyond the dictates of union leaders, which sought to coopt them in turn. (DE1, 1267-8) In a later Libération interview, Foucault explains this by stating that the most radical forces in the working class tend to be “illegalist” (whereas unions seek compatibility with the existing order), since “the law has always been made against [them].” (Ibid., 1290) As for the intellectual’s role in relation to working class experience, then, Foucault states that it is “not to form the consciousness of the worker, since that already exists, but to allow this consciousness, this worker knowledge [savoir], to enter into the system of
information, to broadcast and help it, and consequently get it to other workers or other people who are not aware of what is happening.” (Ibid., 1290)
97 It almost goes without saying that the capacity of the intellectual to be a force in discourse depends on their status
and the cultural value attributed to the type of intellectual that they are. This is assuming that the effect of allying with prisoners is in part measured by public opinion. Philosophers, especially those aligned with the left, enjoy a visibility in France that they do not in many other countries. Nevertheless, to the extent that the intellectual has access to a capacity for knowledge that is attached to their institutional affiliation, specialization, and training, the politics of truth suggests that forces can be increased by making connections that break the barriers of the university.
what they have said. My critique has, as its objective, permitting others to speak without putting limits on their right to speak.”98 (DE1, 1683) The form of desubjection here is rooted in how
Foucault understood the Nietzschean mode of questioning discourse à la “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” and The Order of Things, which asks “Who speaks?” in order to determine who or what forces have appropriated the right to speak. The GIP’s rallying cry was “prendre la parole,” which literally means “take speech,” but is idiomatically used to mean “speak up” or “take the floor;” the phrase thus plays on the act of appropriation necessary for making a public discourse from a position of marginality.99
The Groupe d’information sur les prisons operated on the basis of a tactical reversal of the disciplinary power of the prison. The latter consists, in part, of removing prisoners and their conditions of life from the common order of visibility, along with the cellularized space of the prison that individualizes them and regulates their capacity to communicate about the conditions of their existence. As Michael Welch argues, if discipline finds its paradigm in panoptic
surveillance, the GIP consisted of a counter strategy of “counterveillance.” (Welch 2011, 301) The GIP’s success consisted of creating a heterotopic space that traversed the boundaries of the prison, one where the prison’s rules for the assembling of bodies and the production of
statements was effectively suspended so that a new subject of enunciation could emerge:
[W]hen the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice….[a] counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents…[T]o force the institutionalized 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. (LCP, 209, 213-4)
98 The rest of this quote from this interview refers the act of speaking for other to the legacy of exoticism and French
colonialism: “Since the epoch of colonization, there existed an imperialist discourse that spoke about others with a great meticulousness and transformed them into exotics, people incapable of discoursing on themselves. To the question of revolutionary universalism one could add this problem. For Europeans, and perhaps more still for the French than for others, revolution is a universal process. The French Revolution of the end of the 18th century thought to bring the revolution to the entire world, and up to today, they have not been released form this myth. Proletarian internationalism has replayed this myth in another register. However, in the second half of the 20th century, there has been no other revolutionary process outside of the frame of nationalism. Whence the malaise in certain theoreticians and militants of universal revolution; so they adopt a certain exoticism.” (DE1, 1683-1684) In 1978, perhaps with an ear to Iran, Foucault reiterates himself, but this time with respect to the boundaries of philosophy: “It will be necessary to destroy the idea that philosophy is the only normative thought. It is necessary that the voices of an incalculable number of speaking subjects resonate and it is necessary to make an unnamable experience. It is not necessary that the speaking subject always be the same. It is not necessary that only the normative words of philosophy be allowed to speak. It’s necessary to have all sorts of experiences speak, to lend an ear to the aphasics, to the excluded, to the moribund. Because we find ourselves on the outside while it is they who effectively face the somber and solitary aspect of struggles. I believe that the task of a practitioner of philosophy living in the West must lend an ear to all of these voices.” (DE2, 615-6)
99 Cecile Brich has argued that it is inaccurate to claim that the GIP’s work was about making it possible for
prisoners to speak for themselves and that the discourse of prisoners in the GIP was the product of a dialogical relation with “the intellectuals’ investigative methods and editorial decisions.” This casts doubt on Foucault’s intent to not limits on the prisoners’ rights to speak, or at least requires that that statement function as a heuristic goal. (Brich 2008)
The pragmatism of the politics of truth does not consist of advancing principled policies, but by the creation of schemas of politicization. Schemas of politicization—such as “tactical reversal”— are ways of empowering subjected groups, polarizing them against their own subjection, and weakening the apparatuses of power in which they exist. (FL, 211) Such schemas are composed of strategies (such as making visible society’s invisible spaces of domination) and tactics (like aiding in the self-organization of subjugated groups). What this looks like concretely depends on the apparatus of subjection in question and its strategies for making the power to act come at the cost of subjection and the reinforcement of the apparatus that captures the powers of bodies.100
The local aim of a schema of politicization is to establish an irreconcilable and heterogeneous force vis-à-vis the prevailing modes of normalization and knowledge
production—and to thereby point out their contingency and vulnerability. This is measured neither by public consciousness, nor by the political-economic consciousness of the proletariat. The intellectual is not in the business of “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence” (à la Sartre), as Foucault once said. (LCP, 207) Instead, it consists of making the attitude of non-acceptance
and indocility “a political fact.” (DE2, 1405) It is only on this local basis that a schema of
politicization can spread and achieve a general significance of changing the rules of discourse. The creation of an attitude of refusal as a political fact is tied to the second feature of the intellectual’s role in the politics of truth, namely, the political aesthetic. The desubjection of subjected knowledges implies a political aesthetic because the attitude of refusal and indocility is based on a perception that connects sensibility and sociability. For Foucault’s understanding of the GIP, this attitude is the subjective correlate of what is (and is to be) refused: “the intolerable.” In a statement preceding their first inquiry in March of 1971, the GIP wrote, “Last January’s hunger strike forced the press to speak. Let us profit from this chink in the armor: the intolerable, imposed by force and silence, must no longer be accepted…Let us become intolerant of prisons,