Critique of Ideology Without Truth and Freedom?

Ilana Arbel

Iarbel@netvision.net.il

[Ph.D. Dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2001]

(Supervisor: Marcelo Dascal)

Abstract

Allan Sheridan, one of the first to study Foucault's work as a whole, declared in his 1980 "Foucault: The Will to Truth", that Foucault managed to show that Marxist ideas belong to a way of thinking that is "coming to an end". Sheridan based his interpretation on a famous statement made by Foucault in his early work "The Order of Things", where he argued that Marx never had any "revolutionary" idea, since his theory was based on the ideas common in the 19th Century. And since the assumptions of that way of thinking have passed away - Marxism as well lost its validity as a science of society and history.

This statement, however, contradicts another statement Foucault made two years earlier, declaring that Marx is one among three thinkers who made the revolution in post modern Western thought. The other two, according to Foucault, were Freud and Nietzsche. Again, shortly after publishing "The Order of Things", Foucault re-stated his claim that Marx was the originator of a radical turn in Western thought, and even blamed as "superficial" those who viewed Marx's thought as irrelevant to the analysis of modern society. Moreover, after he became acquainted with the Marxism of some members of the Frankfurt School, he declared them to be "brothers with" the critique written in France today, meaning his own critique. On some occasions he even declared that if he knew the Frankfurt school before he started writing he would have avoided some of the "errors" and "stupid things" he said. Nevertheless, Foucault used to define his critical inquiry as a Nietzschean and "Leftist" alternative to Marxist ideas.

The intricate relationship between 242m125c Foucault's view and Marxism is the subject matter of the present work. I intend to show that Foucault's ideas are indeed essentially opposed to Marxism, in many ways. However, I shall argue that it is possible to interpret his critical inquiry in other respects as a continuation and enlargement of the idea of the Marxist Critique of Ideology. Thus, contrary to Sheridan and others, far from marking the end of Marxism, Foucault's theory brings it back to life again.

Here and throughout this work I present Foucault's objections to Marx as an organized argument, although Foucault himself never did so. His writing usually lacks the method of argument and his position against Marxism, as I present it, is drawn from pronouncements said or written by him on various occasions.

The essential opposition between Foucault and Marxism follows from Foucault's nominalistic-relativistic assumptions, from which he derives an extremely anti-humanistic political position. The principal tenet of this position is that man has no fixed nature or essence, but is wholly a product of socio-historical relations of power.

Foucault defines his theory of power as nominalistic - by which he means first, that political power is not a substance but a relation and, secondly, that its essence is not fixed, but historically contingent. Foucault presents his position on the power question as opposed to both Liberalism and Marxism: Both, he claims, perceive power as a substance, or a thing, possessed by some groups or institutions of society and absent in others; power, according to these theories, is that which enables whoever has it to achieve their own interests or fulfil their own desires, while preventing others from doing the same. Instead, he suggests to view political power as a "network" of relations which spreads like "capillaries" all over society, and which cannot be reduced to any one dominant factor, such as the State or the economically ruling-class. This network of power relations expresses neither groups' nor individuals' interests since it is what constitutes the very condition for the existence of these (rather than others) interests, as well as for the political institutions possible for any given society.

Foucault also objects to the view of Liberalism and Marxism according to which whenever power is used in a system of relations it is always characterized as inflicting restrictions, that is, negating liberties. Such a view, according to Foucault, ensues, in Liberalism (though not in Marxism) from identifying political power with law and the system of law-enforcement. However in his opinion this is just one of the forms that political power has taken in history but it does not adequately exhaust the ways in which the mechanisms of power actually work. The institutions of modern society, e.g., the prison and psychological or psychiatric therapy, which Foucault analyzed in detail, illustrate the multiple ways in which power is at work. Legal-political power is also unfit for the description of institutions such as the family, in which though relations of power do exist they are of a different kind altogether from those between citizens and their sovereign-legislator. Foucault proposes to define power as a relation in which all participants have the capacity to act and a range of possibilities to react, that is, as relations where all the participants enjoy a measure of freedom. According to this definition, power relations can exist in unbalanced situations such as when one participant restricts another, but also in relations of cooperation, and quite often power has a creative function, as for example in sexuality, which Foucault claims to belong not to human nature but to be the product of power-relations and as such to vary throughout history.

But not just sexuality, man as a whole, soul and body, becomes a product of power-relations that change throughout history. As is well known, Foucault tried to prove this thesis by showing that questions such as who is mad or delinquent and what is disease and how should society deal with these problems, were given different answers throughout history. Moreover, treating madness or sexuality, for example, as "problems" which society should solve scientifically or institutionally, is, according to Foucault, just a historical phenomenon that does not at all occur in every society.

Foucault presented his position as absolutely opposed to Humanism not just on account of its assumptions concerning Man, but rather because he considered it a "dangerous" position - to the extent that he even pronounced it to be "the heaviest toll bestowed on us by the 19th century" and therefore "the time has come to get rid of it". The danger in Humanism, according to Foucault, lies in the idea that Man has an essence, which although merely ideal - since it is not actually realized in any society - may nevertheless become actual - by means of discovering truths about it. This idea, when joined to the humanistic view of freedom as the actualization of humanness, may serve, according to Foucault, as the justification for forcing individuals to actualize their allegedly true nature. According to Foucault, this was the ideology accompanying coercion in the totalitarian Communist regimes and it also constituted the justification of all disciplinarian institutions created in western society since the 18th century. In his opinion, even the horror-regime of the Nazis stemmed from "bourgeois"-humanistic ideas taken to the extreme.

From the idea that there is no objective universal essence of man, Foucault deduced the impossibility of universal human interests and concluded, therefore, that the concept of universal justice is meaningless. This implies that all political struggle is necessarily a struggle of some group in society to achieve its subjective interest, which cannot in principle agree with the interest of the opposing group. This rule holds also in the case of the proletariat's interest of economical equality, which - contrary to what Marxism claims - does not express the idea of universal justice. One should not infer from this that Foucault opposed the very idea that the proletariat should strive to overthrow the existing capitalist bourgeois order. Foucault, as one of his interpreters remarked, did not leave the traditional view of bourgeois order as the "grand bogeyman" to be fought against and he often expressed his support of the working class. This - and the fact that his criticism referred society's handling of madmen, criminals and other oppressed groups - may be the reason why he defined his criticism as "Leftist". Nevertheless, he believed that the struggle of the working class, just like any other political struggle, is not a struggle for justice but rather it has all the characteristics of a war in which one side strives to destroy the other or, to put it in his own counter-paraphrase of Clausewitz, "politics is just war continued by other means".

Also, the Marxist hope that in a class-less society relations of power will be altogether cancelled, so that the conditions for human liberation will be created, is groundless. As a nominalist, who holds that particulars or individuals are the product of socio-historical relations of power, Foucault thinks that the very idea that a society without power is at all possible is a mere "abstraction" and therefore, "an empty dream". Hence, although he supports the struggle for the destruction of the existing relations of power, all he hopes for is a society where other relations of power will arise, for there is no way to eliminate power as the constituting principle of society. The Marxists' belief that the solution of the class conflicts is the solution to all the problems of society also prevents them from identifying foci of power-relations which are not subject to the economical relations, like the asylum and the prison. And so it happened that they completely missed one of the most important events for any contemporary Frenchman - the revolt of May '68 in Paris, whose interest was, among others, the problem of the treatment of the insane and the criminal. According to Foucault, the voice of Marxists was hardly heard at that time, since they did not manage to translate the problems then on the agenda to their own conception of struggle - and they are running out of power ever since.

From nominalism plus the thesis that Man does not have a fixed nature, which means that Man's laws of consciousness are not fixed either, Foucault deduces what he calls a "Nietzschean" position, according to which it is impossible to keep the distinction between power and knowledge. According to this position, every scientific theory is a human "construction" or "fiction", always expressing an arbitrary point of view which originates in social relations of power. In other words, it is an expression of subjective and selfish political interest. The question, therefore, whether a theory is true or false cannot be settled by objective criteria but only by struggle, which is essentially political - and this means that the thesis that it is possible to maintain an objective distinction between truth and falsity, is itself a political act, just as the distinctions between good and evil or between the guilty and the innocent are political. Since it is impossible to distinguish objectively between truth and falsity, Foucault rejects also the Marxian distinction between science and ideology. He therefore proposes to give up the critical questions of the Marxian tradition and instead to start struggling for "the essential political problem", namely, how to create new "Politics" and "Economics" of Truth.

So far concerning the objections to Marxism. As I said, my intention is to show that in spite of the attack of Foucault on Marxism many of his ideas are a continuation and development of the ideas of the Marxist Critique of Ideology.

In general, the Marxist Critique of Ideology can be defined as an attempt to answer the question of how is it possible that throughout history the enormous majority of society enabled a minority group to dominate the main body of economical resources and in that way to exploit it? This situation is especially intriguing in capitalistic economy, whose typical form of government is the democratic state, where the will of the majority is the decisive will. Marx thought, and so thought the tradition that followed him, that the social order of classes is not maintained only, nor even mainly, by those mechanisms of the state which are allowed to use violent force, such as the police or the army. According to Marx, the main factor that keeps the stability of class-societies is a belief in false theories, which he called "ideologies", and which present the social order either as a natural necessity, which can't be rebelled against; or, as the right and just order which serves the general interest - which ought not to be revolted against. Among these "ideologies", Marx included various political and economical doctrines, theories of morality and justice, and religion. All of these, according to Marx, share the characteristic of being false: firstly, because social order is a human creation and therefore it is not subject to necessity independent of man; and secondly, because a society based on exploitation cannot be a just society. However, in spite of their being false, ideologies have a highly important political function: the fact that they are the most influential anti-revolutionary factor serves the interest of the ruling class which - in a society based on essential inequality - is the only class who profits from the conservation of the existing order. This is why Marx placed ideologies within the "super-structure", which is the place of politics in his theory.

While the political function of ideologies is keeping the existing order, the function of the Critique of Ideology is revolutionary and liberating: by discovering the truth about society, the critique discovers also the possibilities of change inherent in it.

Most of these ideas of Marx, which are, to this day, the focus of a vehement controversy, were wholly taken in by Foucault, sometimes even as almost self-evident truths. Exactly like Marx, he held that political power is often, especially in modern capitalistic society, not a violent force, and he also accepted the idea that certain scientific theories as well as theories of justice and morality have the political function of keeping the stability of the existing order. However, the radical ideas of Marx became even more radical when Foucault incorporated and developed them within his theory, as I'll try to show later in this work.

According to Foucault, the most efficient power ever used up till now in history appears in modern western society, that is, in democratic capitalism. This power is characterized more than anything by not being violent. It rather acts "mildly", "discretely" and "subtly" and these characteristics make it practically invisible, "a secret more difficult to unearth than the unconscious". As such, this power arouses no resistance and this is the main reason for its extreme efficiency. The non-violent use of political power is, according to Foucault, "one of the greatest inventions of the bourgeois society", which managed to create a society in which people are more "docile and useful" than in any society ever.

Foucault attributes the huge success of the modern state to a great extent to the sciences of man, which have been created since the 18th century, the very period in which power was taken by the bourgeois class. Foucault rejects the presumption of these sciences to discover objective truths concerning man, because he rejects the humanistic assumption he views as their basis, according to which man does have a nature. But, although these sciences have nothing to do with the objective truth, they have a decisive political function: these new sciences of man are what enabled the creation of various institutions responsible for defining "normal" human beings in society and for enforcing "normality". Since man has no nature, the effort to make him normal means only to make him, under the guise of science, obey the ruling norm of society, that is to identify himself with the existing order. This is the objective of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, who gained enormous influence also in the legal and punishment systems of modern society, where politics aims not just at society and economics at large, as Marx held, but at each person individually.

According to Foucault, the political criticism that "unmasked" the human sciences by pointing out their sole function as the conservation of existing social relations of power and not at all as the discovery of any truths about man, also opened the way to consider new possibilities of change which never occurred to Marxism, owing to its humanistic doctrine: from now on man is going to realize that he is free to change not only society or economics but, also, his own self .

* * *

The first chapter of this work discusses the early ideas of Foucault (1961-1969) and is based mainly on his books "The Order of Things" and "The Archeology of Knowledge". In that early period, during which Foucault studied what he called "Archeological" history, his idea of power did not yet appear. In this chapter I exemplify his relativistic-historical thesis by presenting the description of the history of economical thought, as it appears in "The Order of Things". The last part of the chapter deals with the criticism of the Kantian concept of subject, which ends with his announcing "the death of man", that is, the end of modern humanistic thought in the western world.

The remaining three chapters of the work deal with Foucault's later writings, starting with 1975, which he defined as "genealogical" studies. These chapters are based on his books "Discipline and Punish" and the first volume of "The History of Sexuality" and also on the multitude of papers, lectures and interviews he gave.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to Foucault's idea of power, which became in his "genealogical" period the central concept of his theory. This chapter analyzes Foucault's criticism of the concepts of power of Marxism and Liberalism. At the end of that chapter I present some interpretative arguments according to which, in spite of the centrality of the idea of power in his theory of man and society, Foucault does not manage to give it any coherent meaning.

Chapter 3 deals with Foucault's anti-humanism, and the political conclusions he draws from it. It's main message, as I showed, is the idea that all talk about absolute justice, absolute good or absolute truth is impossible and, therefore - contrary to what Marxism, for example, claims - political struggle is always and necessarily a struggle for particular and selfish interests and is never a struggle for universal interests.

Chapter 4, which is the last chapter, focuses on a comparison between Foucault's notion of critique and the Marxian critique of ideology, emphasizing their shared aspects. In this chapter I argue that Foucault's anti-humanism undermines his critique and makes impossible to achieve what he defined as the most important aim of his critique: the discovery of the possibilities for change of man and society. The concluding part presents additional arguments for humanism, drawing from the writings of several thinkers.

* * *

Studies of the relations between Foucault and Marxism are relatively limited in number and scope. Most of the interpreters of Foucault - and his critics as well - emphasize the novelty of creating a political theory which draws its ideas from Nietzsche's theory of man, and do not largely discuss neither his controversy with Marxism nor his affinity with Marxism. This is the case with the three most important of his interpreters, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow and Gilles Deleuze. Though they do note that some of Foucault's ideas connect him to the Marxist tradition, they stop there and discuss that matter no further.

One of the first attempts to connect Foucault's critique to the Marxist critique of ideology was that of Dominique Lecour in 1969. In her book Marxism and Epistemology Lecour refers to Foucault's "archeological" period, in which, as was mentioned above, he did not yet develop his concept of power. As I said, I will show that Foucault accepted several important characterizations of the Marxist concept of power and this is what makes it possible to interpret his critique as an extension or enlargement of the Critique of Ideology.

Another discussion of the question of the connection between Marxism and Foucault's critique was made in 1983 by Barry Smart in his book Foucault, Marxism and Critique. Smart rejects any attempt to understand Foucault in terms of the Critique of Ideology since Foucault rejected the Marxist distinction between Science and Ideology, a distinction which presupposes the objective concept of truth. Smart does not refer to several very important ideas of the Critique of Ideology which were, as I will argue, adopted by Foucault.

The issue of the connection between Foucault's theory and Marxism is also the subject matter of Mark Poster's book Foucault, Marxism and History, published in 1984. Poster deals mainly with the disputes between Foucault and Sartre, whose philosophy is not the concern of the present study.

Michèle Barrett in her book of 1991, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, concentrates mainly on Foucault's criticism of Marxism. In her book, Barrett suggests Marxist Critique of Ideology to assimilate Foucault's idea according to which it is not possible to reduce all social struggle to class struggle, and this in order to saddle the critique of ideology to the feminist struggle. As I'll show, the inability to defend this reduction is accepted by many Marxist philosophers active today, of which the most prominent is G.A. Cohen, founder of the school of "Analytical Marxism".

The claim that it is possible to interpret Foucault in terms of the Critique of Ideology is the thesis of David C. Hoy in his 1986 article "Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes and the Frankfurt School" and also of Thomas McCarthy in a paper entitled "The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School " from 1994. However, I disagree with the reasons both of them give to their claim. Hoy, as I'll show in chapter 4, is not radical enough in his interpretation of both the Marxist and Foucault's critique, and therefore the comparison he draws between both theories is erroneous.

McCarthy relies in his article on the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, and claims that Foucault, towards the end of his life, retreated from the relativism and anti-humanism which had previously characterized his writings. In those books, which deal with ethics, Foucault characterizes Man as an intentional and free subject and also his criticism is done in terms of universal good. In this work I do not deal much with the second volume of The History of Sexuality and not at all with the third volume, since my concern is the political ideas of Foucault. Therefore, there is, in this work, no detailed argument against McCarthy's interpretation. Nevertheless, such a presentation of Foucault seems to me to be completely opposed to the spirit of his critique, as will become apparent through all the chapters of the present work. The spirit of Foucault's critique can be summed up in the words of one of Foucault's interpreters, Thomas Flynn, who attended a course given by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1984, the last year of Foucault's life. Flynn summed up his interpretation of Foucault's theory as follows, without even trying to evade its paradoxical character:

[Foucault] merely wants to bring to our attention the contingency of our epistemic necessities, not to settle any issue (except perhaps that of absolute knowledge) once and for all.