Rimi Khan
School of Media Communication and Culture
Murdoch University, Western Australia
rimikhan@hotmail.com
Because there is commonly such a buzz of contradictory comment going on around him–as his friends and enemies push him to the left, right, and centre or sometimes off the political spectrum altogether–Foucault could assert that it proves what he contends: conventional categories really don’t fit him; he is posing an entirely new and different set of questions about a whole range of sometimes unthought of matters. . . . The academic effort to appropriate, correct, or dismiss Foucault has gone on even more intensely–sometimes brilliantly, sometimes stupidly , and sometimes with troubling seriousness.
Paul Bové, “The Foucault Phenomenon” viii
In a commentary on cultural studies’ “theoretical legacies,” Stuart Hall describes the field as “a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name” (“Legacies” 278). Proclamations of this sort are easy enough to find throughout cultural studies’ accounts of its own history–they serve as a generalized reference to its self-image as an interdisciplinary, and, consequently, self-reflexive set of pedagogical and investigative practices. Given the currency that such thinking still carries within cultural studies, it is important to continue to ask what it is actually possible to say and do in cultural studies’ name.1 In particular, I want to consider, after Meaghan Morris, “how it comes about that people keep posing problems at a level of generality where you simply can’t solve them” and, in doing so, to point toward less burdened modes of analysis that enable cultural studies to be politically significant in new ways (Hunter, “Aesthetics” 371).
On these questions, I have found Foucault’s work–and a review of the ways in which his work has been received within cultural studies–to be particularly instructive. Deleuze writes that “Foucault is not content to say that we must rethink certain notions; he does not even say it; he just does it, and in this way proposes new co-ordinates for praxis” (30). This article considers some of the ways these investigative possibilities have been put to use within cultural studies. My aim is, in part, to document encounters that precede and enable this present set of counterpoints, but also, I hope, to intervene in this awkward intellectual terrain.
Relatively little has been written on the history of appropriations of Foucault within cultural studies.2 Some works–for example, Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham’s Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering and Tony Bennett’s Culture: A Reformer’s Science–have examined secondary readings of Foucault, commenting generally on cultural studies’ attempts to use Foucault’s insights on power within a broadly Gramscian framework. Both of these works are concerned to demonstrate the problems involved with early Foucauldian influence. As Bennett contends,
in effect, Foucault was admitted into the cultural studies roll-call only on the condition that he brought no troublesome Foucaultian arguments with him. The role accorded his work was not that of reformulating received problems so much as being tagged on to arguments framed by the very formulations he questioned. . . . Quoted extensively, he was used very little. (Culture 63)
I go on to elaborate on such arguments by detailing some of the more revealing moments of this fraught history.
Structure, Power and the “Marx Problem”
In his recitation of the “story” of cultural studies, Hall notes that cultural studies’ adaptation of Marxism involved a certain degree of friction:
There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. . . . There was always-already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism–the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. . . . That is to say, the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem–not a theory, not even a problematic. (“Legacies” 279)
Procuring a theory of “culture” from Marxism requires that these gaps or “great inadequacies” be resolved. In his Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, Dennis Dworkin provides a historical account and details the political and intellectual climate surrounding some of these revisions of Marxism within the cultural studies tradition. E.P. Thompson’s brand of social humanism, for instance, is largely described as a product of the prevailing modes of party politics and their relationship with intellectuals, and an attempt to work against the rigid economism characteristic of leftist orthodoxies of the time. The terms of such debates have not been displaced, however; the discursive limits that defined the intellectual controversies that Dworkin describes should figure significantly if we are to make sense of cultural studies’ eventual uptakes of Foucault.
Raymond Williams is, of course, another crucial figure in this reconstitution of “culture” within British postwar sociological analysis. Williams’s influences vary, and the development of his thought cannot be reduced to a deliberate, straightforward “reworking” of Marxist cultural thought. Williams’s intellectual work carries an urgency informed by his experiences of English working-class life. In the face of this sense of immediacy, the “levels” of culture and various categories of Marxist analysis appear abstract. In this framework, the concept “culture,” as Williams argues in Culture and Society, is conceived within the context of a weak use of “superstructure.” Here “culture” refers to a “general social process” or “whole way of life” and allows for a more ready inclusion of the category of experience (273). By enabling a more pragmatic and quotidian meaning of and use for “culture,” Williams’s quasi-anthropological delineation of “culture” as a “whole way of life” opens up an important analytical space for British cultural studies.
Williams’s later work gives the fluidity implied by this formulation a more theoretical substantiation and speaks in more decisively Marxist terms. For instance, in his momentous “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Williams explains at length the dilemmas raised by a literal use of the base-superstructure metaphor. By suggesting the possibility of a synthesis between mechanisms of production and “ordinary” forms of consumption and cultural practice, he attempts to account for “deep contradictions in the relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships” (5). What Williams proposes, then, is a revaluation of the concepts of “base,” “superstructure,” and “determination” to include some consideration of “social intention,” while retaining the notion of “social being determining consciousness” (7).
For Williams, Gramsci’s work goes some way toward resolving this tension by offering a useful stylization of Marxism and a new theoretical dimension to his earlier positions. It is especially his notion of “hegemony” that mitigates a rigid Marxist reductionism and guarantees the necessary element of “intention.” “Hegemony” must “continually be renewed, recreated and defended,” so that domination is seen to occur only through the negotiation and shaping of popular consent (“Base” 8). It is this “productive” aspect of power that facilitates cultural studies’ examinations of the contradictory relationships between commodities, meaning, and pleasure–a question that “classical” Marxism can barely pose, let alone answer.
However, as John Frow and Meaghan Morris point out, the apparent merging of idealist and materialist positions that informs Williams’s concept of “culture” entails a certain theoretical paradox. It is premised, they argue, on an “opposition (between culture and society, between representations and reality) which is the condition of its existence but which it must constantly work to undo” (xx). So Williams cannot attempt to reconfigure the relations between “art” and “society” or “culture” and “society” without reifying these very dichotomies. These are well-worn debates, and I do not wish to suggest that the diversity of cultural studies work today–in its various geographical and interdisciplinary inflections–can be traced back to Williams’s work as a single point of origin. But the contours of these debates linger; this alignment between “culture” and “representation” generates an anxiety that continues to have a bearing upon efforts to theorize a material, determining structure and its relationship with an agential, representing subject.
Foucault, it turns out, is situated by cultural studies in a space created by a Gramscian understanding of domination and informed by this structure/agency problematic. John Fiske argues that Foucault “shares with ideology theorists the attempt to account for the crucial social paradox of our epoch–that our highly elaborated social system of late capitalism is at once deeply riven with inequalities and conflicts of interest yet still manages to operate smoothly enough to avoid the crises of antagonism that might spark revolution” (161). Dworkin indicates the degree to which, within the British New Left of the 1970s, the work of figures like Althusser, Barthes, and the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School is conflated under the heading “Western Marxism.” Despite the varied positions these continental cultural Marxisms actually occupy, they have been regularly perceived as belonging to a relatively cohesive intellectual tradition and as constituting a singular alternative to the prevailing frameworks of British cultural inquiry. Accordingly, even if Foucault’s divergences from Marxism were to some extent acknowledged, he has, by and large, been deemed to be Marxist in his concerns.3
So it is apparently only by refracting Foucault, particularly his writing in Discipline and Punish, through this Marxist prism that his work is made palatable for certain formations of cultural studies. Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato, and Jen Webb, for example, in Understanding Foucault, remind readers that “all these disciplinary procedures, and the panoptic gaze, emerged at an historic moment when it had become necessary to produce a pliable, healthy and sober workforce to service the factories of the Industrial Revolution” (57). But by positing “the factories” as a primary determinant for the techniques employed in other domains of discipline, Danaher, Schirato, and Webb engage in what Foucault calls the “simple activity of allocating causality” (“Politics” 58). They invoke a reductionist logic, incommensurate with Foucault’s aim to “render apparent the polymorphous interweaving of correlations” (58). It may be that his description of political technologies as a disparate set of methods prompts cultural studies to account for the incoherent, often contradictory workings of power to some degree. However, if Foucault’s contention that power relations are “not univocal” is to be taken seriously, then any coherence between prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories must be regarded as material patterns of effects of domination. These regularities cannot finally be ascribed to some overall systematicity or generalized source of “ideological control.”
In fact, Foucault’s work can be read to suggest that power exists only as “effects” that are “manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated” and that are constituted by a range of techniques and maneuvres “that one should decipher in a network of relations, constantly in tension” (Discipline 26-27). These relations “are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations” (27). Given this instability, power, for Foucault, must be apprehended in its local instantiations or as it exists as particular regimes of practice. Moreover, Foucault asserts that these regimes are not “governed by institutions” or “prescribed by ideologies . . . but, up to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence and ‘reason’” (“Questions” 5). “Economic” formations, then, do not determine, but are preceded by, and are just one effect of, these rationalities.
Cultural studies’ concern with popular-cultural sites and “everyday” texts is regularly legitimated–often with Foucault’s concept of “micro-power” as a key reference point–by claiming their connection with “macro” structures of domination and subordination.4 In his discussion of “micro-power” in Discipline and Punish, however, Foucault is wary of lapsing into any straightforward equation of reproduction with systems of rule (27). Rather, according to Hall, Foucault
adopts so thoroughgoing a scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him . . . as deeply committed to the necessary non-correspondence of all practices to one another. From such a position neither a social formation, nor the State, can be adequately thought. (“Paradigms” 71)
However, there are many examples one can cite to suggest that the kinds of associations that exist between manifold instantiations of power were, in fact, at times central to Foucault’s concerns:
The problem that now presents itself . . . is to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dominance exists between them . . . in what distinct totalities certain elements may figure simultaneously. (Archaeology 10)
What this indicates is a desire to investigate and describe unities, regularities, continuities, and discontinuities as they appear in their positivity; to respond to Hall, then, it is not the “necessary non-correspondence” but the non-necessary correspondence of practices that Foucault is committed to. And this does not constitute a theorization of determination that assumes the nature of the relationship between “micro-powers” and state power and then posits this as proof of the revolutionary potential of “micro-struggles.”
It is worth acknowledging that cultural studies’ turn to Gramsci was, to a large degree, precipitated by what Dworkin describes as “the failures and disappointments of the late 60s and early 70s” (141). He explains that the critical left began to enjoy an unprecedented visibility within British humanities departments, particularly within newer universities and former polytechnics, as part of what appeared to be a process of more general cultural upheaval during the 1960s. But any promise of a serious and enduring political reorientation toward the left was hampered by the kinds of economic and institutional restructuring entailed in the shift toward conservative, liberal governance in the late 1970s. For Hall, Gramsci’s work helps account for these contradictions and disappointments, and it is Gramsci, rather than Foucault, who provides a pertinent framework for understanding and contesting Thatcherism as a cultural and political force.
It is interesting to note, though, that despite Hall’s reservations, expressed in his “Two Paradigms” article, about the ability of Foucault’s work to intervene usefully in contemporary British politics, his work had begun to be used by some at the time (or what has since been referred to as the “governmentality school” of social and political inquiry) to do precisely this. Articles that appeared in journals such as I&C in the late 1970s and early 1980s and later in Economy and Society, (some of which were collected in the influential anthology, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality) by figures such as Colin Gordon and Nikolas Rose reframed the liberal state by tracing the mobile systems of relationships that provided the conditions of possibility for different orders of knowledge–and in doing so, enabled an analysis of how “governed individuals are willing to exist as subjects” (Gordon, “Governmental” 48). And rather than noting a kind of disabling scepticism in Foucault’s work, the contingent nature of the relations of knowledge described by Foucault is cited as a source of optimism. It indicates the “strategic reversibility” of power relations and the possibility of political counterdemands rather than conceiving of such relations as the inevitable historical outcomes of the liberal state (Gordon, “Governmental” 5). While I go on to discuss some further implications of the “governmentality school” later, I think that this alternative intellectual trajectory indicates that cultural studies’ turn to Gramsci was not a necessary or inevitable response to the political conditions of the time. In fact, this Gramscian reading of Foucault elaborated a Marxist cultural politics, the very terms of which Foucault’s work sets out to question.
From Discourse To Ideology
In order to facilitate a textuality crucial to its examination of cultural forms, cultural studies’ stylization of Marxism has also involved what Hall labels a turn to the “linguistic metaphor” (“Legacies” 283). The contribution of Barthes, Althusser, and Lacan to British cultural studies in the late 1970s could be seen, for example, in the film journal Screen, and in a more general centering of “ideology” and “representation” within the project’s theoretical landscape. In “Two Paradigms,” Hall famously describes how the infiltration of (post)structuralism into the cultural studies toolbox overcame a previous inability to theorize the symbolic as a site of power and identity. This weakness is exemplified for him in the work of Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P. Thompson–broadly termed “culturalism”–and their emphases on empiricism and human agency. But while Hall argues that structuralism’s advantages lie in its critique of humanism, he also points out that it risks abstraction and a lack of historicity (“Paradigms” 67). Hall thereby poses the need for a “method which takes us outside the permanent oscillations between abstraction/anti-abstraction and the false dichotomies of Theoreticism vs. Empiricism which have both marked and disfigured the structuralism/culturalism encounter to date” (68). But these two paradigms are not as internally homogeneous as Hall supposes, and it is his very postulation (and reification) of this binary between structure and agency that produces an ongoing indeterminacy in cultural studies.
Foucault’s notion of “discourse” offers one resolution to this dilemma. The operation of this concept is two-fold. On the one hand, it is aligned with a more general structuralist endeavor–Foucault’s account of regulating and regulated discursive formations is apparently comparable to “some of the classical questions which Althusser tried to address through the concept of ‘ideology’–shorn, of course, of its class reductionism, economistic and truth-claiming overtones” (Hall, “Introduction” 11). On the other hand, there is some recognition of the degree to which Foucault’s notion of “discourse” is deployed to think about non-linguistic mechanisms. As Foucault suggests,
discourse is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said. The discursive field is, at a specific moment, the law of this difference. It thus defines a certain number of operations which are not of the order of linguistic construction or formal deduction. . . . It consists of a whole group of regulated practices which do not merely involve giving a visible outward embodiment to the agile inwardness of thought. (“Politics” 63)
Consequently, Foucault’s singularity is seen to rest on his effort to place textual analysis in its social and historical context.5 Or, as Frow and Morris put it, Foucault provides a more “institutionally anchored model of discursivity than [is] available in other, language- and text- centred notions of discourse” (xxvi). But while these differences are acknowledged, the belief that Foucault is interested in the realm of the symbolic remains. The result of this bifurcation is that “discourse” is regularly mobilized, not simply to analyze practices, but to turn practices into texts. This translation of “discourse” from a strategic ensemble of practices into a site of formal analysis is exemplified by Danaher, Schirato, and Webb, for whom the term “generally refers to a type of language associated with an institution, and includes the ideas and statements which express an institution’s values” (x). It is this presumed imbrication of “discourse” with processes of signification (and as an expression of “values”) that brings it under the rubric of ideology.
However, Foucault’s notion of “discourse” circumvents the series of binaries–that is, between truth and falsity, reality and representation, and the symmetrical relationship between self and other–from which the concept of ideology derives its potency.6 “Discourse” entails a necessary relation of knowledge and power that means it cannot be employed to describe the false distortion and masking of a putatively “true” configuration of power. Nonetheless, the concept is routinely invoked and enlisted in cultural studies to make sense of the interplay between cultural practices, power, and meaning.
In Frow’s analysis of The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels’s study is not read as an empirical account but reinscribed as a semiosis of working-class districts in nineteenth-century Manchester. By claiming that “ideology” does not have to resort to an equation of “truth and error” or to an objective, extra-discursive reality, Frow attempts to reconcile his approach with Foucault’s writing on “discourse.” He suggests that by relativizing any critique “to the position of power from which it is enunciated,” “ideology” can be conceived as a “function” or “state” of “discourse” (“Discourse and Power” 194). To arrive at this solution, however, Frow contends that “the signifieds of discourse . . . are generated not from an extra-discursive real to which we may appeal as a final authority but within specific processes and practices of signification”(199). In order to argue against a “dichotomous conception of a ‘material’ economic base and an ‘immaterial’ superstructure,” Frow declares that “all social systems are semiotic systems producing significations realised in material sign-vehicles” (201-2). So everything is seen to be contained within the text, and “discourse” is used to describe these relations of signification.
Yet, Frow’s subscription to an approach in which the social is understood by way of the text potentially involves an indeterminacy, characteristic of what Foucault calls “commentary”:
By a paradox which it always displaces but never escapes, the commentary must say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said. . . . [It] allows us to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense completed. (“Order of Discourse” 58)
“Discourse,” for Foucault, refers to a strategic field of practices, procedures, and operations “not of the order of linguistic construction or formal deduction” (“Politics” 63). But instead of defining “discourse” as a finite practical domain, Frow puts it “at the disposal of the signifier,” resulting in endless acts of interpretation that are, inevitably, a form of repetition (“Politics” 66). And this apparent epistemological dead-end is characterized by Hall as a theoretical drive that provides a defining impetus for cultural studies work:
until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with . . . other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, cultural studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. (“Legacies” 284)
The corollary of this “displacement of culture” is that questions of “theory” and “politics” are held “in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension” (284). For Hall, it seems, this tension fuels cultural studies’ sense of historical urgency–it is a “necessary displacement” and one that must be respected and embraced. Both Hall and Frow’s remarks are symptomatic of a search for what Foucault calls a
locus of a discourse . . . whose tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both; a discourse that would make it possible to analyse man as a subject, that is, as a locus of knowledge which has been empirically acquired but referred back as closely as possible to what makes it possible. (Order 320)
For Foucault, attempting to work outside what he calls the “empirico-transcendental doublet” involves analyzing discourses and their conditions of existence by supposing only the fact of their historical appearance.
However, it is in the gap between these conditions or systems of emergence and the desire to map discourses in their historical specificity that there appears some ambiguity in Foucault’s work. This tension goes some way toward explaining the appropriation and “aestheticisation” of his ideas in cultural and literary studies. Foucault’s early interest in literary figures such as Roussel and Artaud lends itself to such a reading. Simon During’s Foucault and Literature, for example, assesses the implications of Foucault’s work with respect to theorizing the relationship between language and subjectivity. Foucault’s “literary phase” is said to evince a belief in writing that “aims to clear an ideological space; a space for action, experimentation, chance, freedom, mobility” (7). And while it is Foucault’s later work that has most currency in cultural studies, even this, according to During, displays a “residual or manifest aestheticism” and can be put to use in a study of the transgressive possibility of texts (10).
During’s reading relies on the ambiguity in Foucault’s texts concerning the function of the term “discourse.” In his analysis of the concept, Hunter describes the local and non-systemic nature of the relations between institutional operations, surveillance mechanisms, economic imperatives and other regulatory regimes, described in Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation. He contends that these groups of relations are later rendered systematic and formal through Foucault’s delineation of them as “discursive formations” (“Dispositif” 44). Hunter argues that by subjecting these positive descriptions to a “‘critical’ reflection” and attempting to recover their underlying rules or “so-called conditions of possibility,” Foucault displays “the symptoms of an incomplete struggle to expel structuralism rather than its calm supersession” (43). The point is that these hesitations and inconsistencies–conveniently enough for cultural studies–enable “discourse” to “reappear as the general mechanism for the articulation of . . . otherwise contingent relations–as the synthetic medium of their systematicity and necessity” (45). Importantly, as Hunter shows, Foucault later shifts his focus from accounts of discursive formations to localized descriptions of dispositifs or apparatuses involving a more dispersed array of organizational forms.
The effect of this shift in Foucault’s work and his own remarks against “commentary” and textualism is that the products of “discourse” (or what Foucault sometimes refers to as “statements”) belong to the order of “events,” rather than to that of language.7 Foucault explains the approach he calls “eventalisation”:
It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all. . . . A breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences and practices rest. . . . Secondly, eventalisation means rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on, that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary. In this sense, one is indeed effecting a sort of multiplication or pluralisation of causes. (“Questions” 6)
This multiplication of causes involves allowing for the interaction of forces of transformation, regularity, discontinuity, and dependence that constitute an event. It requires a certain “polymorphism”–in the elements that are brought into play, of the kinds of relations described, and in its domains of reference (7). An account of this multiplicity of processes must recognize the unpredictability of their interrelation and avoid ascribing objects “to the most unitary, necessary, inevitable and (ultimately) extra-historical mechanism or structure available”–the most common of which are, Foucault suggests, “an economic mechanism, an anthropological structure or a demographic process” (7).
Foucault requires his notion of “discourse,” then, to consider the historicity of the organizational forms that it describes. As I have indicated above, and as Dennis Dworkin’s account of the development of British cultural Marxism shows, disputes over the role of “concrete” historical inquiry within cultural studies have traditionally been split according to the structure/agency binary. So empirical historical work is censured for its naïve humanism and formal analysis attacked for its abstraction from “everyday” struggles.8
The polarity informing these narratives seems to be irreconcilable with Foucault’s notion of the “event.” For Foucault, the “event” is always manifest at the level of materiality but is nonetheless “an effect of, and within, a dispersion of matter” (“Order” 69). Foucault’s work does not set out to “overcome a ‘conflict’ or ‘opposition’ between structure and historical development” (Archaeology 11). Rather, the “event” is intended to dissolve the binary–to account for historical transformations that operate outside the dialectic of the empirical and transcendental. For cultural studies, it seems, there may be genuine practical restraints that preclude this kind of historical work from taking place; the kind of intellectual work Foucault envisages requires “a knowledge of details and . . . depends on a vast accumulation of source material” (“Nietzsche” 140), but, as Morris contends, “methodological desire alone is rarely enough to carry amateurs through thick textual slabs of detail” (“Introduction” 5). Yet, there remains a need to reconstitute “history” so it is not relegated to the role of mere scene-setting. Foucault raises the question of whether the concept of “discourse”–the very tool that is used to facilitate a critique of empiricism–can be mobilized to perform a descriptivist mode of analysis. As we will see, the problems that this incitement, to “restore to discourse its character as an event,” poses for cultural studies are considerable (Foucault, “Order” 66).9
Agency and Butler’s Foucault
Into the 1980s, the elaboration of cultural studies’ critical framework that enabled it to move to the various avatars of identity politics also accorded Foucault’s insights a renewed significance. Reflecting on the pertinence of the concept of “identity” to cultural studies, Hall intimates the dilemma that it presents. The notion of a unitary or originary subject has, as he suggests, undergone an important destabilization, but remains crucial “to the question of agency and politics”; it is “in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive practices that the question of identity recurs” (“Introduction” 1-2). It is in respect of this oscillation–that is, both the necessity of “identity” and the danger of its drive toward essentialism–that Foucault’s work is mobilized by cultural studies.
What cultural studies requires, and what, according to Hall, Foucault is seen to provide, “is not an abandonment or abolition of ‘the subject’ but a reconceptualisation” (“Introduction” 2). In an overview of Foucault’s work, Lois McNay, for example, is anxious to show how Foucault informs “feminist and postcolonial critiques of Enlightenment thought as a highly gendered and ethnocentric construct that implicitly naturalises a white, masculine perspective,” thereby clearing a space “for radically ‘other’ ways of thinking and being” (4-5). But the apparent ease with which Foucault is written into this discourse obscures some of the underlying inconsistencies this formula actually entails.
Judith Butler’s contribution to feminist cultural studies is substantially indebted to her reading of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. An example is her work on the transgressive potentiality of gender performativity, where the assumption of a “sex” occurs through significatory practice.10 However, its reception has been marked with a kind of ambivalence–as Vicki Bell points out, “the temporal performative nature of identities as a theoretical premise means that more than ever, one needs to question how identities continue to be produced, embodied and performed, effectively, passionately and with social and political consequence” (2). The challenge for Butler, here, is to ensure that her framework is not a merely speculative one and to “think” agency while retaining the constitutive nature of gender relations.
The apprehension surrounding the deployment of a subject exposes Butler (and poststructuralist feminisms in general) to accusations of theoreticism–where conceptual sophistication is said to compromise a capacity to engage with “concrete” political struggles and the concerns of “real” women. The central problematic for Butler in Bodies that Matter is that if, as Foucault argues, “sex” is a “regulatory ideal,” how is it possible to understand the materiality of “sex”? And, crucially, if norms of sex, gender, and desire are simply performed (that is, they are deliberately or consciously enacted), then how can one avoid a latent version of humanism?
It is in the effort to locate the source of authentic resistance that Butler considers this statement from Foucault:
It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim–through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality–to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (History 157, qtd. in “Revisiting” 11, 13-14)
But this injunction presents Butler with a number of obstacles, largely concerning the ontological status of “bodies and pleasures”:
These bodies, these pleasures, where do they come from, and in what does their agency consist, if they are the agency that counters the regime of sex-desire? . . . From where does this break emerge? Is it a break that is performed by a subject? Is it a break in the subject as it were, a certain constituting hiatus on which the subject nevertheless draws? And who are the “we” who are said to exercise this agency against the agency of sex? What are the resources that counter the regulation of sexuality if they are not in some sense derived from the discursive resources of normative regulation? (“Revisiting” 14)
So Butler rehearses the terms of the now-familiar structure/agency binary–again, it involves a movement between the subject, what it is that makes the subject possible, and what in the subject can be said to be genuinely agential. As far as Butler is concerned, Foucault leaves these questions unanswered. She must resign herself, then, to this futile vacillation. Hence, Butler charges Foucault with utopianism: by apparently positing a time when “disordered and non-gendered pleasures abound,” he risks making both “sexual difference and homosexuality strangely unspeakable” (“Revisiting” 15, 12). His work, particularly his introduction to Herculine Barbin is said to harbor an “unacknowledged emancipatory ideal” and indulge in the liberatory discourse he purports to displace (Gender 119).
If we are to take Foucault’s ideas in their broader context, however, we notice that they do allow for the prospect of making tangible interventions into the strategies of domination that constitute regimes of sexuality. Discourses must be conceived as “tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations” that make up a particular strategy (History 101-02). As Foucault contends, “there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy, [or] they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy” (102). This instability and mutability of discourse enables Foucault to account for the way discourses of homosexuality can undermine a certain normativity. He writes that “homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” (101, emphasis added). “Resistance” does not necessarily entail an obvious discursive rupture or change in vocabulary. It also does not assume a singular form: “there is no single locus of great Refusal,” but “a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent” (History 95-96). So mobilizing Foucault does not, as Butler seems to think, demand a disavowal of the analytical category of gender but enables a description of the shifting relations between particular discursive fields, disciplinary technologies, and (gendered) subjects.11
In Butler’s schema, certain types of representational practice are deemed less legitimately “resistive” than others and, consequently, evidence of “agency” must continually be problematized in order to disclose any perceived complicity with “the discursive resources of normative regulation” (“Revisiting” 14). So we are in a situation where any instance of transgression is always potentially not transgressive enough. Butler cannot reconcile her insights with “concrete” struggles, in part, because she overlooks the unstable and differentiated relation of discourses to power. According to Butler’s logic, “It seems crucial to question whether [any particular instance of] resistance . . . is sufficient as a political contestation of compulsory heterosexuality” (Bodies 106). But within the trappings of this symbolic politics, who is to decide when the contestation of a regulatory strategy is sufficient?
If Butler, following Foucault, conceives of domination as a subjectifying as well as objectifying force, she cannot aspire to a total structural displacement of “compulsory heterosexuality.” As Foucault suggests, power relations depend “on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations” (History 95; emphasis added). Given this inherent instability, it is not possible to define power as a unidirectionally negative and totalitarian entity, against which it is continually necessary to mobilize “resistance.”12 Yet the opposition between structure and agency that Butler presumes requires “domination” ultimately to be, as Colin Gordon describes, that which “falsifies the essence of human subjectivity” (“Other” 30). And “agency” must then somehow be reclaimed, although in Butler’s case without resorting to the category of an originary subject. So despite appealing to a Foucauldian reconfiguration of power and subjectivity, it is still “the subject” that Butler seeks but must never actually find. It is, in her own words, possible only “to promote an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary” (Bodies 91).
This impasse characterizes Butler’s attempt to theorize agency and attests to the more general difficulty involved in using Foucault selectively within identity politics as it exists in its present orthodoxies. However, to the extent that any incongruity between the approaches is acknowledged, discussion within cultural studies seems to focus on relatively peripheral issues. In his reflections on postcolonial theory, for instance, Robert Young tries to account for the fact that Foucault’s ideas seem “particularly appropriate to the colonial arena, and yet colonialism itself does not figure” as a specific topic of research in Foucault’s analyses (60).13 But such disparities do not provide any substantive reason why Foucault’s insights cannot be usefully extrapolated and applied to these novel areas of inquiry.
There is usually some attempt to assuage these sorts of anxieties by locating evidence in Foucault’s work of his interest, however fleeting, in a range of research topics. This tendency has imbued his more minor essays and articles, and, in particular, his many interviews, with a renewed significance. It is exemplified in Foucault’s role in some lesbian and gay studies. One article quotes David Halperin to suggest that “‘as a madman . . . as a left-wing political extremist . . . [and] as a sexual pervert,’ Foucault had good reason to want to expose the ways by which normalizing discourses both produce and silence ‘social deviants’” (Halperin 130, qtd. in Taylor 6). But narrativizing Foucault’s ideas by using his private life as an interpretive tool does little to patch over the underlying epistemological inconsistencies between his and Halperin’s critical agendas.14 Significantly, this approach supposes that a shared interest in matters of sexuality or race permits the use of Foucault’s work for these very particular forms of critique. It is assumed that Foucault’s concepts can be unproblematically applied because both Foucault and cultural studies are doing the same thing.
Morris is aware of these points of friction (and her caution would extend to those situated along the various other axes of identity politics): “any feminists drawn in to sending Love Letters to Foucault would be in no danger of reciprocation. Foucault’s work is not the work of a ladies’ man” (“Pirate’s” 152). Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, her provocation is, I think, ultimately a positive one. Foucault’s work enables a study of technologies of subjection at the same time as he speaks of the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” and thereby manages to bypass the problematics of humanism versus anti-humanism (159). Certainly, such a discourse holds considerable promise for a kind of feminism.
For in a perspective in which bodies and souls are seen as not simply constituted but also invested and traversed by relations of power-knowledge (and that unevenly and inequitably–it is not a question of a uniform distribution or a stable “effect”) what becomes possible in relation to “women . . . is something more than a history of a ‘construction’: it is rather the possibility of a history of a strategic specification . . . and at the same time, a history of that in women which defies specification, which escapes its hold; the positively not specific, the unwomanly in history” (159).
But Foucault is interested in “how” these situations arise rather than in arriving at an immediate account of “why.” To use Foucault in the way that Morris suggests requires the inclusion of an empiricism that dissolves the opposition between structure and agency.
Identity, Identification
A politics founded on the notion of “identity”–and as conceived by some formations of cultural studies–turns (unsurprisingly) on a consideration of the activity of “identification.” That is, according to Hall, any description of disciplinary regulation must be complemented “with an account of the practices of subjective self-constitution” (“Introduction” 13). Hall positions himself within a distinctly Althusserian problematic–one that came to prominence in cultural studies through feminist screen criticism in journals such as Screen and M/F in the late 1970s but, in Hall’s case, was also inflected by Butler and Lois McNay’s work. Hall worries that Foucault does not “engage with the unconscious” or theorize “the psychic mechanisms or interior processes by which these automatic ‘interpellations’ might be . . . resisted or negotiated” (“Introduction” 14, 12). That these are regarded as significant absences is indicative of the supposed need for psychoanalysis in any explanation of “identificatory practices” and their link with power. The considerable number of works that attempt to supplement Foucault’s findings with psychoanalysis attests to this perceived need.15
However, as Nikolas Rose comments, “a genealogy of subjectification takes this individualised, interiorised, totalised and psychologised understanding of what it is to be human as delineating the site of a historical problem, not providing the grounds for a historical narrative” (“Identity” 129). Foucault’s attention to processes of subjectification is not aimed at reconstituting “the subject” as a coherent source of volition. Rather, Foucault aims to investigate the “complex field of historicity in the way the individual is summoned to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct” (Use 32). This is achieved only by regarding the self as a relational and not a substantive entity. “Identity” can only be understood by examining the practical fields in which our relations with ourselves are circumscribed. As Rose further points out, these relations assume particular forms because they are the target
of more or less rationalised schemes, which have sought to shape our ways of understanding and enacting our existence as human beings in the name of certain objectives--manliness, femininity, honour, modesty, propriety, civility, discipline. . . . The list is as diverse and heterogeneous as it is interminable. ("Identity" 130)
It is only through a consideration of these technologies–rather than a theorization of what Hall labels “interior processes,” or an appeal to the “imaginary”–that one can comprehend how modes of self-relationship are defined and elaborated.
So while Foucault’s work actually opens up a space of historical inquiry into the multiplicity of rationalities that traverse the self, Hall reads this reworking of “agency”–particularly Foucault’s account of “techniques of the self”–as an incomplete attempt to establish a theory of resistance. Hall regards the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality as a rethinking of the notion of power deployed in Foucault’s earlier work:
The more well established critique . . . has to do with the problem which Foucault encounters with theorising resistance within the theory of power he deploys in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality; the entirely self-policing conception of the subject . . . and the absence of any attention to what might in any way interrupt, prevent or disturb the smooth insertion of individuals into the subject positions constructed by these discourses. . . . [T]he subjects which are constructed in this way are “docile bodies.” There is no theorised account of how or why bodies should not always-for-ever turn up, in place, at the right time. (“Introduction” 11-12)
But Hall overlooks the inherent conflict between the various practices that constitute regulatory programs–or as Jeff Malpas and Gary Wickham suggest, that governance always falls short of its target, that it “is necessarily incomplete and as a necessary consequence must always fail” (40). To illustrate this point, it is worth dwelling on Foucault’s own account of his analysis of prisons:
the rational schemas of the prison, the hospital or the asylum are not general principles which can be rediscovered only through the historian’s retrospective interpretation. They are explicit programmes. . . . I tried to show that the rationality envisaged in penal imprisonment wasn’t the outcome of a straightforward calculation of immediate interest . . . but that it arose out of a whole technology of human training, surveillance of behaviour, individualisation of the elements of a social body. . . . [T]hese programmes don’t take effect in the institutions in an integral manner; they are simplified, or some are chosen and not others; and things never work out as planned. . . . [I]n fact there are different strategies that are mutually opposed, composed and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects that can perfectly well be understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don’t conform to the initial programming. (“Questions” 10)
Foucault is interested in revealing that aspect of chance, or aléa, that exists in excess of a particular rationality but that is always potentially reducible to the operations of that rationality. And this respecification of power and agency is at odds with the liberalistic conception of domination on which Hall appears to insist.
Governmentality, “Policy,” and the Intellectual
As I noted earlier, Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” has motivated a relatively distinct body of work that can be broadly characterized by its interest in redefining “the cultural” as a series of instrumental or administrative measures that are subject to historical investigation. This includes relatively recent scholarship in and around cultural studies that employs a Foucauldian descriptivism in its exposition of cultural phenomena. Such work examines “everyday” cultural phenomena in their mundanity and historical particularity. Eating practices, self-help and etiquette literature, sport, and so on are granted a local and instrumental character.16 Of the array of studies concerned with the governmental organization and specification of “culture,” I focus here on examples that have had some currency in cultural studies debates (particularly within Australia), and which implicate the role of the cultural studies intellectual.
Tony Bennett’s work is indebted to the “governmentality” school and to a definition of “culture” explicable via Hunter’s analysis of the historical emergence of literary education. In Hunter’s schema, the school is not, as is commonly assumed, the “social realisation of the ideal values of culture and criticism,” but “a governmental apparatus able to achieve a certain ‘humanisation’ of the population according to a (supervisory) ‘rationality’ supported by the apparatus itself” (Culture 3). In order to arrive at a historical logic that is capable of describing this rationality, the domain of the “cultural” is reconceived as a sphere of “piecemeal” administrative measures and programs that are not determined by “the dialectics of ‘totality’” (Culture 20).
Bennett proposes, similarly, that it is not possible for cultural studies to comprehend the relationships between cultural practices and power without describing the specific technologies and kinds of knowledge by which populations are managed. Bennett’s historical work on museums at the turn of the century, for example, is careful to consider the multiplicity of administrative objectives that museums pursue and the diversity of programs that comprise them. So rather than cast the museum as an “ideological” instrument whose work is simply analogous to the ideological work carried out within other cultural sites, such as the school or the factory, Bennett is interested in the nineteenth-century museum as one of a series of discrete operators of social reform. And he is interested in how this “multiplication of culture’s utility” is associated with the development of liberal forms of government (Culture 107). Such a study necessarily involves orienting itself toward an examination of government policy, and it is this emphasis that subsequently became the source of considerable controversy within cultural studies debates.
Bennett’s revisionist program involves a reappraisal of the institutional and discursive conditions which “define the limits and forms of the practicable” within cultural studies (“Towards” 42). As Tom O’Regan explains, Bennett’s work calls “for the double reconstitution of policy: both as an object of study in its own right and as a political site for activity and analysis” (411). By way of authority, Bennett cites Foucault’s suggestion that “to work with government implies neither subjection nor global acceptance. One can simultaneously work and be resistive. I even think that the two go together” (“Useful” 395). Such a practice requires, at the very least, an acknowledgement of cultural studies’ institutional moorings and an acceptance of its own imbrication with administrative programs with specific normative goals.
Bennett’s proposal has exposed him to accusations of reformism from the quarters of cultural studies that see disciplinization as a political compromise and “institutionalisation as a moment of profound danger” (Hall, “Legacies” 285).17 Such a view stems from a narrative of cultural studies’ history that defines cultural studies by its position of marginality–both in relation to the rest of the humanities academy and to the mechanisms of the state. And it is from such a position that cultural studies is said to derive its radical, political edge. However, Bennett provides powerful reasons why this history should be reconceived, through his reading, for instance, of Raymond Williams’s work.18 In Culture: A Reformer’s Science, Bennett suggests that Williams’s claim that “culture is ordinary” includes mundane processes such as the administration of cultural resources, on which considerations of cultural policy have a direct bearing.
But while Bennett’s position is provocative, it has been suggested that his mobilization of Foucault’s work is unduly narrow. This is particularly apparent, O’Regan argues, in Bennett’s assessment of what constitutes “useful” cultural analysis:
Here work is to be regarded as “relevant” insofar as it participates in and extends administrative processes. . . . “[S]ocial relevance” is radically limited, narrowed to policy practice: that which can be made governmentally or corporately actionable, can be publicly endorsed, and can be institutionally sanctioned and found useful by government, tribunal, policy-makers and interest-group lobbyists directly involved in forming policies. (414)
By construing “relevance” in such restricted terms, Bennett advocates a direct participation in regulation “as if that were the only socially forceful position to take” (O’Regan 415). But, as O’Regan points out, Foucault is not interested in making such rigid decrees:
he argued that his work should be regarded not so much as providing answers but as providing resources that certain sorts of activists–like prisoners’ rights groups–might find useful in their own practice. It was up to such groups to make Foucault’s work “useful”; he would not legislate how that use should occur. (415)
Bennett’s reconfiguration of cultural studies in terms of its technical administration can be read with reference to the “empirico-transcendental doublet” described earlier. Bennett seeks to terminate the dialectic simply by “cancelling out” the transcendental side. Whether such a move–that is, to operate with half a binary–is useful, or indeed, possible is difficult to say.19
Moreover, Bennett’s position construes “government” as encompassing only the specific administrative technologies collectively referred to as “policy.” Foucault’s work on “governmentality” is aimed at refuting precisely this assumption–he shows us, in fact, that “there are several forms of government among which the prince’s relation to his state is only one particular mode” (“Governmentality” 91). The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality document how regulation of Greek morality occurred not merely through explicit codification and legislation, but through a range of techniques of the self that situate one as the subject of moral action. So “policy” does not regulate “culture” single-handedly. As O’Regan suggests, policy is not “the structural engine room which powers everything else” but “a particular kind of information practice with its own limitations, potentialities and linkages to other kinds of public discourse, including cultural criticism and journalism, over which it holds no necessary pre-eminence” (416). “Government,” then, describes a complex system of relays and is, accordingly, a more dispersed set of processes than Bennett’s focus on policy would suggest.
It is this reading of “government” that informs Nikolas Rose’s investigations into the organizational character of the “cultural.” Rose is concerned with tracking relations of force “as they flow through a multitude of human technologies, in all the practices, arenas and spaces where programmes for the administration of others intersect with techniques for the administration of ourselves” (Powers 5). So he is prompted by Foucault to pursue, among other things, an investigation of the complex assemblages that circumscribe our relations with ourselves–for example, in the domains of psychology or liberal government–and the various rationalities that traverse these practices. Such a project exemplifies the possibility of an analytics that is concerned, significantly, with historical precision and amenability to practical action, but which has limited currency within dominant formations of cultural studies.
Rose’s reading of governmentality is bound up with a particular way of conceiving the critical intellectual; indeed, the uncertainty surrounding the function of the intellectual underlies, to a large degree, controversies about the role of “policy work” within cultural studies. The seeming political detachment of Foucault’s core historical works indicates that Foucault eschews the kind of teleological critique that is fundamental to certain formations of cultural studies. As Colin Gordon remarks, Foucault’s objective is not, “to arrive at a priori moral or intellectual judgements on the features of our society produced by . . . forms of power, but to render possible an analysis of the process of production itself” (“Other” 29). A question arises, then, regarding the kinds of social inquiry that can be derived from what Gordon calls Foucault’s “rigorous insistence on this particular kind of neutrality” (“Other” 29).
Gayatri Spivak has described Foucault’s purported “neutrality” as that of “the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (292). What prompts Spivak’s disparagement is that Foucault’s supposed neutrality allegedly masks his own ideological allegiances. This neutrality supposedly allows the “complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional) to disguise itself in transparency” (294). So Spivak sees Foucault’s unwillingness to judge as “interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges of power bestowed on the subject” that neglects “the critic’s institutional responsibility” (280). Similarly, albeit in this case crediting Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” Hall also alludes to the “responsibility” of the critic. For Hall, this involves transmitting ideas and knowledge “through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class” (“Legacies” 281).20
But Foucault does not imagine the intellectual as part of the vanguard, placed “somewhat ahead and to the side” and expressing the “truth of the collectivity” (“Intellectuals” 207-8). He rejects the programmatic nature of this task:
critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. . . . It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in programming. (“Questions” 13)
Foucault’s “specific intellectual” derives from a particular understanding of the relationship of the intellectual to power. The specificity of intellectuals comes from their situation “at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them,” but is also linked to “the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies” (“Truth” 126, 132). So the problem for the intellectual is not to change people’s consciousness, but to facilitate the processes of confrontation that engage with and potentially de-valorize regimes of truth-production. Doing so requires, as Deleuze suggests, a “diagram” or “a display of the relations between forces which constitute power,” and the role of the intellectual is envisaged, above all else, as that of a “cartographer” (36, 44). In other words, it is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive: to provide a map of a particular regime without determining in advance what it will be used for.
At the center of this debate lies a methodological question regarding the supposed conflict between critical and descriptive imperatives. For Foucault, the two always implicate each other:
In truth these two tasks are never completely separable: . . . any critical task, putting in question the instances of control, must at the same time analyse the discursive regularities through which they are formed; and any genealogical description must take into account the limits which operate in real formations. The difference between the critical and the genealogical enterprise is not so much a difference of object or domain, but of point of attack, perspective, and delimitation. (“Order of Discourse” 71-72)
As we have already noted, Hunter, following Foucault, characterizes this binary between “empirical recognition” and “transcendental reflection” as a “permanent and unresolvable feature of the figure of ‘the subject’” of modernity (Culture 272). This subject is a projection of a certain rationale or “analytic of finitude” that is the condition of existence for the human sciences. It demands, according to Foucault, that man “is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (Order 318). This impulse toward “finitude” intimates the need for a structuring or delimitation of the self, which we have observed so far as various manifestations of the structure/agency binary. As Hunter argues, these “debates . . . are quite literally interminable because they simply reproduce the ambiguous space in which the human sciences come into being” (Culture 206). If Foucault is right, then any claims to theoretical openness or interdisciplinarity “do not indicate the permanence of an ever-open question; they refer back to a precise and extremely well-determined epistemological arrangement in history” (Order 346). And it is within the constraints of this framework that we must situate cultural studies’ critical armature.
This compulsion to transcend empirical conditions in order to explain them is described as a practice of the self, central to the formation of cultural studies intellectuals. As Hunter proposes, “the act of theoretical clarification . . . is in fact inseparable from the normative imposition of a certain aesthetico-ethical obligation (to complete the self)” (Culture 25). It is contended that, despite expanding the nineteenth-century conception of “culture” to include political, economic, and “popular” spheres, cultural studies remains caught within the ambit of idealism. It merely grants a materialist ontology to the same dialectical fashioning of an exemplary subject. Hunter suggests that it is not possible to “politicise aesthetics” simply by subsuming this narrow ethical practice within culture “as a whole way of life” (“Aesthetics” 347-48). He arrives at this position by way of Foucault’s inquiries, in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, into the techniques of self-problematization that enable individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a particular normative code. Hunter argues that the political activity of the cultural critic is just one such site of self-problematization, whose objective is the complete development of “society as a whole” (Culture 70). This depends on an historical thinking–or what Hunter calls a “philosophico-historical projection”–that relates the incompleteness of the self to the figure of the “alienated society” (70). This state of social fragmentation is supposedly eventually overcome, and the ethical division of the subject reconciled, through the intellectual action of the critic.
However, the indeterminacy of textual critique–as we have noted above in terms of the structure/agency dialectic–guarantees that the goals of reconciliation and “complete development” are unattainable. Hunter points out the upshot of this deferral:
the objectives of the aesthetic ethos are not to be found in its official goals but in the entrance to a state of permanent “readiness” or ethical preparation. At the center of this ethic lies a powerful technology for withdrawing from the world as a sphere of mundane knowledge and action. In fact the aesthete does not pursue knowledge of “worldly” activity as such, having subjected them to a problematization that makes them ethically worthless. Instead, he or she seeks to prepare or cultivate the kind of self that will be worthy of enlightened knowledge and action in an indefinitely deferred future. (“Aesthetics” 354)
So cultural studies’ insistence on these critical vacillations means that there is an “imperative to abstain from direct political activity until the reconciliatory movement of the dialectic brings the time to ripeness” (“Aesthetics” 355). But this reconciliation, and the political conditions supposedly ushered in by this moment, can never actually arrive, preventing such intellectual work from solving substantial problems of social fragmentation.
This is not to say, however, that Foucault didn’t describe what he did as “critique” or consider his work to have a “critical” function. In fact, some of Foucault’s musings on “resistance” seem to implicate him in precisely the kind of aesthetico-ethical impulse that he purports to displace. To see this, we only have to look to his assertion that “critique”
should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. . . . It is a challenge directed to what is. (“Questions” 13)
How does such a challenge claim legitimacy without some authoritarian recourse to notions of truth and falsity? And how can this be reconciled with what I have described as Foucault’s explicit efforts to respecify this philosophically fraught space–to configure non-programmatic “maps” of cultural relations?
Of course it is not possible for “critique” to operate unproblematically outside the bounds of normativity and, indeed, that is not what I am advocating. Rather, a “map” describes the disciplinary practices, political technologies, and points of confrontation and instability that constitute “what is.” If we then decide to “challenge” certain of these practices and procedures, and the relations of contingency through which they function, it is possible to do so by mobilizing, where necessary, particular ideals in order to invent provisional strategies of inquiry and criticism. By reconstituting the question of “critique” and “resistance” in this way–and by acknowledging what Foucault describes as the “very tight-knit, very coherent outlines” that form “the immediate space of our reflection” (Order 384)–the door is opened for a pragmatics that can hope to circumvent the problematics of the “empirico-transcendental doublet.” And it permits a discourse that avoids what cultural studies sets up as the anxious opposition between “theory” and “politics.”
Conclusion
The last five years have seen the publication of at least two books that serve as potential cultural studies instruction manuals while claiming a specifically Foucauldian pedigree. One of them–Danaher, Schirato, and Webb’s introductory text, Understanding Foucault–is an exegetical work that filters Foucault’s work through the critical agendas of, to name some key sources, Butler, McNay, Said, and de Certeau. Foucault’s insights are clarified via a selection of secondary texts and examples from popular culture, present-day political events, and everyday phenomena.
We are shown, for instance, how Foucault’s work on subjectivity is readily applicable to issues of identity: Princess Diana’s various personas of mother, style icon, and “people’s princess” are said to exemplify “how our identities are played out within the complex ensembles and discursive flows that produce a multiplicity of subject positions” (43). Foucault’s point, it is argued, is to “problematise the question of truth, and to show the extent to which it is an effect of the work of discourses and institutions, rather than being absolute or essential” (41-42). In another example, Foucault’s notion of “descending individualism” enables a discussion of the class politics of contemporary news media–that is, “how populist newspapers . . . devote coverage to suspected cases of welfare fraud among the poor, naming the perpetrators of such ‘outrages’ . . . while ignoring the more costly fraudulent activities of very wealthy groups and people” (58). Such technologies of surveillance are also said to come in the form of the “male gaze” and can be located in the relations of power that regulate, for example, sporting fields and beauty regimes (54-55). So the book provides us with an overview of Foucault’s work in which his concepts are deemed to complement a cultural studies vocabulary and adhere to the protocols of its critical project.
Kendall and Wickham’s Understanding Culture reproaches this “dominant” version of cultural studies by refusing what the authors call cultural studies’ “obsession” with meanings, power, and resistance. They contend that such a framework assumes that “power, oppression, class and exploitation” are everywhere, without any rigorous investigation into whether this is actually, empirically, the case (15-16). Cultural studies’ very concern with “the control of meanings and their dissemination,” it is argued, requires that it is “frequently anti-empirical” (14). Any such empirical work “would get in the way of this grand theorising, this relentless induction and deduction” that is necessary for the ubiquity that cultural studies grants the “political” (14).
The book’s authors propose, instead, cultural studies as the study of “ordering.” Their conceptualization of “ordering” is premised on a Foucauldian notion of governance that they use to examine the management and control of cultural objects. This involves describing how cultural objects and practices appear in their mundanity, and the authors detail a procedure for such a description. It is in the effort “not to rush to an explanation of the things,” then, that this descriptivist Foucault is given precedence over the speculative one we encounter in Danaher, Schirato, and Webb (56).
For a more dramatic account of this distinction, it is worth reciting a quotation Kendall and Wickham take from Thomas Osborne. His Foucault
is not perhaps the usual, erstwhile trendy one. The sort of Foucault that appeals to [Osborne] is not, anyway, the Foucault that appears in the cribs; the subversive continental philosopher, the arcane prophet of transgression, the iconoclastic poststructuralist, the meta-theorist of power, the functionalist theorist of social control, or the gloomy prophet of the totally administered society. These sorts of Foucault can all safely be forgotten. The Foucault that motivates much of this book . . . is a much more buttoned up animal . . . a good modernist rather than a faddish postmodernist, a rigorous and not so unconventional historical epistemologist. . . . This, then, is not the naughty, transgressive Foucault, but rather . . . Foucault with his clothes on. (1-2 quoting Osborne x)
This conflict, marked by the radical Foucault depicted in Danaher, Schirato, and Webb’s book and this other, more modest Foucault, is, as we have seen, broadly indicative of the tensions that characterize cultural studies’ relationship with Foucault. And what may be a study of culture along identifiably Foucauldian lines is not necessarily identifiable as “cultural studies.” Indeed, Kendall and Wickham’s book prompts us to ask what is going on when a carefully formulated study of “culture” does not feel like “cultural studies,” and can barely plausibly call itself such. Danaher, Schirato, and Webb’s deployment of Foucault is a revealing one–it enables cultural studies to theorize areas that certain versions of Marxism could not, while traversing the interests of the various axes of identity politics.
Of course, it has been necessary to limit my study to a few key readings of Foucault, and I recognize my comments are restricted to those formations of cultural studies that are informed by these intellectual traditions. In much of the work I have discussed, Foucault’s concepts are deemed to adhere to the requirements of cultural studies’ critical agenda and to a methodology marked, as we have seen, by the dialectics of structure and agency. However, to evaluate these positions in the way that I have is not to argue that certain readings of Foucault are not “accurate” because they do not conform to some authoritative, authorial “intention.” My analysis, instead, offers ways of reconceiving some important theoretical problems within cultural studies. And I am arguing that it may not be sufficient for cultural studies’ analyses to gesture toward Foucault’s ideas without acknowledging that these necessarily entail a much broader reconceptualization of cultural studies’ theoretical armature. If cultural studies is to start engaging more meaningfully with specific institutional spheres and material operators of power, then it must do so by describing and analyzing cultural phenomena as they appear within realms of contingency rather than as products of generalized systematicities. This would allow for the present to be reconceived, as Rose suggests, as “an actuality to be acted upon and within by genealogical investigation, to be made amenable to action by the action of thought” (Powers 11). By taking effect in this way within a historical domain, cultural analysis can offer a means for involving oneself practically in the world.
Notes
1. I will not attempt the uncertain task of defining cultural studies here, although Bennett (“Towards” and “Reluctant”) offers some good reasons–mainly regarding the institutionalization of the discipline–why it is possible to do so.
2. See Frow (“Versions”), Bové, and Miller (173-80) for a review of the reception of Foucault within the “history of ideas” tradition coming out of American graduate schools–an intellectual field that, importantly, as Frow points out, “Foucault’s own work has done so much to undermine” (“Some Versions” 145).
3. Michael Sprinker contends that Foucault is interested in “a familiar historical problem: the emergence of modern society and its characteristic instruments of political and ideological control” (4). Similarly, Colin Mercer suggests that both Foucault and Gramsci illustrate how systems of domination are “simultaneously coercive and productive” (51).
4. There are other theorists who figure significantly here. Bourdieu’s characterization of the relation between everyday practices of consumption and broader configurations of power via his notion of “reproduction” has been extremely influential. Also important are de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life and Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life–see Drotner for a summary of their reception in media ethnography.
5. For example, Callinicos distinguishes between two currents of poststructuralism and suggests that Foucauldian genealogy is preferable to Derridean “textualism” for its inclusion of extra-discursive elements in its analysis of power (86). See also Said’s “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” for a similar positioning of the two theorists.
6. A good example of this is in Said’s formative work, Orientalism. Here, “discourse” is used to describe the construction and administration of the non-European world in terms of a kind of semiotics. He contends that orientalism is not merely a text but “a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” (2). But despite this attempt to grant “discourse” some kind of extratextual materiality and historicity, Said is primarily concerned with orientalist texts “as representations, not as ‘natural’ depictions of the Orient” (21). In studying the production of orientalist knowledges and their connection with imperialist power, he conceives of the relationship between the orient and the occident in terms of a “complex hegemony” (5).
7. In “Truth and Power,” Foucault proclaims, “I don’t see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself” (114). There are many examples in Foucault’s work–see particularly pages 64-73 of “The Order of Discourse” and the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge–that attest to his effort to “find a way around the primacy of representation” (Order 364).
8. E.P. Thompson’s disparagement of Althusser’s synchronicity and supposed depoliticization of history in The Poverty of Theory is probably the most famous example of this conflict.
9. The new historicism offers a good point of comparison here for its attention to historical detail, and is notable for its influence on Foucault’s later work. See The Use of Pleasure (11). However, while During (198), describes it as a “non-mimetic paradigm,” it is still accused by Steedman of harboring an underlying formalism.
10. Bell presents a survey of recent scholarship concerned with “performativity and belonging,” including the implications for discussions of race and ethnicity. Such work involves a consideration of the “ways in which technologies, discursive deployments and power/knowledge networks produce the lines of allegiance and fracture in the various orders of things within which people and objects move” (1). See also Probyn’s Outside Belongings for an example of an attempt to use Foucault to work against rigid notions of identity and determination–it is particularly his concept of “heterotopia” that is said to function
against a certain logic of identity which proceeds through division and designation, ultimately producing polarization. . . . The concept of heterotopia provides an analytic space in which to consider forms of belonging outside of the divisiveness of categorising. (10)
In contrast, Probyn, who is also motivated by Foucault’s work on food, wishes to use it in order to contest the limits of identity politics. She wants to arrive at a “new ethics of existence” that no longer posits sex as a privileged site in the theorization of identity (“Food” 215). Probyn purports to be pointedly Foucauldian in her hope that “through food we may begin to formulate an ethics of living that works against the logics of categorization that now dominate much of the politics of identity” (224).
11. See The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self for historical analyses that deploy the category of gender. Both of these texts consider the ways sexual behavior, the relations between men and women, and instances of masculine privilege came to concern moral experience and regulation in Greek antiquity. For example, the problematization and prohibition of certain behaviours are described as being largely “an elaboration of masculine conduct carried out from the viewpoint of men in order to give form to their behaviour” (Use 22-23).
12. McNay’s reading of Foucault in Foucault: A Critical Introduction is exemplary here. She contends that, even when revised as a “positive phenomenon,” Foucault’s notion of power is “a unidirectionally imposed monolithic force,” leaving no scope for “the possibility of social change and the dynamic and relatively autonomous nature of social action” (3). “The idea that all thought is in the service of dominatory regimes,” she argues, “cannot adequately explain how conflicting perspectives may arise in the same regime” (64).
13. Young suggests that “Foucault’s few explicit writings in these areas are sometimes curious: take his comments on the revolution in Iran, where he discusses the Iranian Revolution in terms of what he considers to be its expression of ‘an absolutely collective will’ which he contrasts to the more mediated forms of European revolutions” (57). Spivak also worries about what she regards as an imperialist tendency in Foucault’s work:
sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault’s analysis of the centuries of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heterogeneous phenomenon: management of space–but by doctors; development of administrations–but in asylums; considerations of the periphery–but in terms of the insane, prisoners and children . . . all seem to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism. (291)
14. Many examples can be cited exemplifying Foucault’s aversion to this obligation to serve as a personal source of authority for his ideas. This one is found in his explication of the “author-function”: “the author is asked to account for the unity of the texts which are placed under his name. He is asked to reveal or at least carry authentification of the hidden meaning that traverses them. He is asked to connect them to his lived experiences, to the real history which saw their birth” (“Order” 58).
15. Homi Bhabha’s Freudian analysis of the colonial stereotype, for example, is appended onto Foucault’s dispositif. In a more extreme example, Christopher Lane argues that using Foucault with psychoanalysis is justified if one considers that Foucault concludes The Order of Things, in which he is apparently “heavily indebted to Jacques Lacan,” by “supporting Freud’s account of the unconscious” (164-65).
16. I am actually abbreviating a diverse body of work here. For some examples see Arditi, Coveney, Rimke, Miller and McHoul, and Wickham for their varying political imperatives and degrees of “criticalism.”
17. See particularly Fredric Jameson’s “On ‘Cultural Studies.’”
18. See pages 35-38 of Bennett’s Culture: A Reformer’s Science.
19. See Gibson and McHoul for a more sustained analysis of this question.
20. Hall goes on to qualify this statement by suggesting that the “organic intellectual” is only a “hope” rather than an actuality in much cultural analysis (292). Frow and Morris, however, make a strong case to suggest that this Gramscian model is still the prevailing one within much cultural studies work, at least in Australia (xxiv-xxvi).
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