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- FOUCAULT PRECLUDES FEMINIST THEORY
Butler: Using FreudAnother critique of Foucault comes from the contemporary philosopher Judith Butler, writing in The Psychic Life of Power. She agrees with many of Foucault’s basic premises, but is able to come up with a different theory on how power interacts with individual subjects that allows for a more optimistic look into the future for change. With Foucault, individuality itself is lost; all actions are determined by a network of power that creates the human subject. When a stranger waves to someone on the street, and that person finds themselves automatically waving back before even thinking about doing so, that is evidence of a discourse in action. Instead of willing that they wave their hand, they do so almost unconsciously in reaction to a social symbol that means “greeting.” The power that such symbols possess exists in such a way that it problematizes the conception of the autonomous human individual. For Foucault, discourses are all-powerful in such a way that means there is no authentic self that can take actions on its own. Butler thinks that this is too pessimistic of a view of the subject. She believes that there does exist a kind of agency that is not completely controlled by external power relationships. Where Butler and Foucault differ is on how power interacts with the human mind. Foucault envisions it very simplistically: people's identities are created by the discourses they come in contact with. Butler, on the other hand, revives elements of psychoanalytic theory to explain how conflicting influences can combine to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts. If there was only one overriding consistent set of forces then Foucault would be correct. Things are much more complex, however. People come into many situations that influences them in ways that conflict with earlier ideas that they possess. The way that Butler explains the construction of the subject is that initially there is power exerted on the person, then that power becomes wielded by the subject in a self-regulating fashion. This is what a conscience is: an ideal that a person tries to inflict upon their self. When any kind of contradiction in thinking arises, the way a person deals with that is not to merely cancel one of the influences out but instead to make a self-reflexive turn and critically examine both sides. It is the depths of this self-reflexivity that permits the subject to be created, as well as to take some sort of control over the conflicting power at play on her/him. What all this means is that people are not merely at the whim of the discourses they come into contact with. The effects of power on individual has social implications, so that takes out Foucault’s theory that the relationship between power and knowledge can be a viable universal theory to explain social interactions and reactions. Conclusion Foucault is an important thinker, but there are a great many ways to approach his arguments. One can attack his credibility by saying that the research he does is Eurocentric, doesn’t take into account alternative perspectives, and is factually inaccurate. Also, there is the fact that he isn’t internally consistent, given the fact that he criticizes totalitarian thinking yet employs the very same thing in his criticism. Or one can use one of the larger critiques presented by post-Marxist feminists or Butler in their alternative visions of how power relates to society at large. BIBLIOGRAPHYAdorno, Theodor, THE ESSENTIAL FRANKFURT SCHOOL READER, New York: Continuum, 1982. Arac, Jonathan. Editor, AFTER FOUCAULT, London: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Blackmur, R.P., LANGUAGE AS GESTURE, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Bove, Paul, INTELLECTUALS IN POWER: A GENEALOGY OF CRITICAL HUMANISM, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul, MICHAEL FOUCAULT: BEYOND STRUCTURALISM AND HERMENEUTICS, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Foucault, Michael, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, New York: Pantheon, 1972. Foucault, Michael, THE ORDER OF THINGS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HUMAN SERVICES, New York: Random House, 1970. Lyotard, Jean-Fracois, THE POSTMODERN CONDITION: A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Megill, Allan, PROPHETS OF EXTREMITY: NIETZSCHE, HEIDEGGER, FOUCAULT, DERRIDA, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Racevskis, Karlis, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL FOUCAULT, New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 1999. Rorty, Richard, CONSEQUENCES OF PRAGMATISM, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. FOUCAULT PRECLUDES FEMINIST THEORY1. FOUCAULT’S THEORY MAKE S IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE PATRIARCHAL OPPRESSION Issac Balbus, Professor of Political Science at U Illinois Chicago, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 149-150. From a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, Foucault’s deconstruction of disciplinary discourse/practice betrays all signs of its masculine origin. His ban on continuous history would make it impossible for women even to speak of the historically universal misogyny from which they have suffered and against which they have struggled, and would appear to reflect the blindness of a man who so takes for granted the persistence of patriarchy that he is unable even to see it. His gender-neutral assumption of a will-to-power (over others) that informs true discourses and the technologies with which they are allied transforms what has in fact been a disproportionately male orientation into a generically human orientation, and obliterates in the process the distinctively female power of nurturance in the context of which masculine power is formed and against which it reacts. His critique of totalizing reason condemns as totalitarian the very awareness of the pervasiveness of male domination which women have so painfully achieved, and entails an equation of identity with loss of freedom that is but a conscious translation of the unconscious opposition that men experience between autonomy and identification with the (m)other. 2. HIS FAILURE TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN KINDS OF OPPRESSION PERPETUATES THEM Jana Sawicki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maine, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 161. Yet, as focused as Foucault was on domains of power/knowledge in which many of the bodies disciplined and the subjects produced and rendered docile were female, he never spoke of male domination per se; he usually spoke of power as if it subjugated everyone equally. As feminist critic Sanda Bartky, who is sympathetic to Foucault, rightly points out: “To overlook the forms of subjection that engender the feminine body is to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these disciplines have been imposed.”
Issac Balbus, Professor of Political Science at U Illinois Chicago, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 156-157. Feminist psychoanalytic theory is also committed to the concept of a heterogeneous totality. It is based on the assumption that the development of the self depends on an identification with the other and thus that community and autonomy are not only consistent but, in fact, mutually constitutive. It demonstrates that when the first significant other is a woman, the male experiences the very identification that is essential for a genuinely autonomous self as a threat to the self, and that the inevitable result is both a damaged self and a damaged community. And it is animated by the impulse to undo this damage by helping to create the conditions - namely co parenting - under which the identification with our initial significant others would be experienced not as an obstacle but, rather, as what it really is, an essential source of an authentic sense of self. The feminist mothering discourse makes explicit the implicit Foucaldian commitment to a heterogeneous totality and specifies the conditions under which this commitment can be fulfilled. It is, therefore, as militantly (and perhaps more realistically) antitotalitarian as the thought of Foucault.
Issac Balbus, Professor of Political Science at U Illinois Chicago, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 154. Surveillance, as Foucault understands it, recognizes individuals only as more or less interchangeable parts of the power machine; it robs them of any individuality that is not functional for the reproduction of society as a whole. It is, in short, a way of seeing the other that homogenizes the differences between it and any other, and thereby obliterates its autonomy. But this is not the only way of seeing the other. The other can be recognized as an other with whom we share connections - with whom we are identified - yet from whom we are nevertheless different. Thus the impulse to see the whole can be an impulse to recognize - and celebrate - the persistence of heterogeneity and autonomy within the context of community and identification.
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