Abstract
The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics.
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Notes
Opposition to ontology is also common in feminist theory. Ontology is understood to be either politically irrelevant or pernicious because it masks an effective ideology of oppression. See e.g., Fraser and Nicholson (1990).
A distinctive notion of the political was first developed in the context of German political thought by Carl Schmitt, who sought to differentiate the political from other domains of the social such as the economic or the aesthetic. The importance of the distinction has been particularly strong in French political philosophy (le politique, la politique) and has been developed in different ways in the work of such thinkers as Claude Lefort and Jean-Luc Nancy. The political has now also become a standard concept in Anglo-American political theory influenced by Continental philosophy and particularly by Heidegger’s thought. For an overview of the conceptual difference between 'politics' and 'the political', see Marchart (2007). On contemporary theorists in whose thought the distinction between politics and the political is crucial, see e.g., Lefort (1986, 1988, 2000), Nancy (1991, 1993, 2000), Laclau and Mouffe (1985).
Stephen White, for example, argues in his book Sustaining Affirmation (2000) that there is a broad ontological turn taking place in political philosophy, and he mentions Foucault as one of the thinkers who has helped to bring ontological reflection to the forefront. He claims that there is no sustained affirmation of a particular ontology in his work, however.
Foucault (2000a, p. 356).
Flynn (1992).
Foucault (1972, pp. 47–48).
Han (2002, p. 54).
Cf. Hacking (1984, p. 122).
In his analysis of Foucault’s ontological premises, Deleuze (1999) claims that Foucault’s central aim was to challenge the empirical dogma that we speak of that which we see and see that which we speak of. He denied any isomorphism or conformity between words and things, or in Deleuze’s terminology between the visible and the articulable. If a statement has an object, it is a discursive object unique to the statement and not isomorphic with any visible object. He emphasised that this thesis does not imply the erroneous interpretation that, for Foucault, everything is discursive. Foucault attributed epistemological primacy to statements as they are capable of determining visibilities, but he nevertheless insisted on the irreducibility of the visible.
Foucault (2000b, p. 9).
See Nietzsche (1976).
Foucault (2000b, pp. 6–7).
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 9–10.
Ibid., 12–14.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 9.
Foucault refers to The Gay Science, aphorism 109 as an example. See Nietzsche (1974, p. 168).
Foucault (2000b, p. 14).
Ibid., 13.
Foucault confirms the centrality of social practices in his thought on numerous occasions. He singles them out as the constant object of his studies: What unites and gives coherence to his always partial and local analyses is that they have the realm of practices as their homogeneous domain of reference. See, Foucault (1991a, p. 48). In one of his last interviews he mapped out his whole thought as studies of different aspects of practices. See, Foucault (2001, p. 1512).
Foucault’s late essays on Kant’s article “What is Enlightenment?” introduced his idea of philosophy as an ontology of the present or an ontology of ourselves. This critical ontology turns around Kant’s question of the necessary limits that knowledge has to refrain from transgressing and asks instead what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints in what is given to us as universal and necessary. The aim is thus to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a critique that seeks out the possibilities of change. See e.g., Foucault (1991a, 1997).
Veyne (1997, p. 168).
Foucault (1991b, p. 194).
Hacking (1984, p. 122).
Hacking (2002, p. 2).
Foucault (1972, p. 125) and (1989, pp. 303–344). In The Order of Thing Foucault argued that Kant’s thought marked the threshold of modernity and with him all traditional questions of metaphysics came to an end. All naïve metaphysical belief that our representations and reality—or words and things—simply coincided could not be upheld anymore, because all objectification required the transcendental organization of human thought in order to be understood as such. As the human being also becomes an empirical object in this same historical conjunction, however, the anthropological structure specific to modernity—Man as an empiro-transcendental doublet—was born. Man becomes “the fundamental disposition that has governed and controlled the path of philosophical thought since Kant until our own day” (Foucault 1989, p. 342). All modern philosophy, including Foucault’s own thought, is a necessary effort to deal with the paradoxes imbedded in this figure. As well as a vehement critique of phenomenology as a contemporary effort to solve it, The Order of Thing also contains a critique of naturalism as its inevitable complement. Since it is clear which side was the main enemy in the 1960s France, however, not too much ammunition is spent on the critique of naturalism: despite being post-Kantian, naturalism is pre-critical. It forgets the dependence of experience on transcendental determinations in its ontologization of empirical knowledge. For more on Foucault’s critique of naturalism and phenomenology, see e.g. Gutting (1989), Han (2002), Oksala (2005).
See also Oksala (2005).
Han (2002, p. 104). Han, however, like Hacking, raises the question of what extension should be accorded to Foucault’s claims. Her problem is with mathematical propositions, which seem to contradict Foucault’s thesis that it is impossible to define truth independently of power relations. She concludes that Foucault’s analysis shows a tendency to turn a particular case into a generality without enough justification. See Han (2002, pp. 140–141). See, e.g., Longino (1990, 2002).
Han (2002, pp. 142–144).
See e.g., Foucault (1990a). Foucault explicitly denied that the concepts of power and knowledge could be used to identify general principles of reality. “No one should ever think that there exists one knowledge or one power, or worse, knowledge or power, which would operate in and of themselves” (Foucault 1997, p. 52).
Han (2002, p. 102).
Foucault (2008, p. 19).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See e.g., Foucault (2007, p. 115). He explains that it refers, on the one hand, to a distinct logic and economy of power that emerged in the eighteenth century and that can be distinguished from both sovereign power and disciplinary power in terms of its rationality, its aims and its means. On the other hand, it also refers to the actual historical process through which Western societies became governmentalised: techniques of governmental management developed, spread and came to dominate our political landscape. Saar (2010) argues that the three-fold quasi-definition that Foucault offers in the fourth lecture must be understood as an ad hoc definition, since it is hard to see how something can meaningfully be said to be an “ensemble” of something, a temporal “tendency” and the “result of a process” at the same time, the latter only explained with the help of the term to be defined. He suggests that semantically the term aims at the whole sphere that can be said to be “gouvernemental”, i.e., relating to the instance and the act of government. See Foucault (2007, pp. 108–109).
After the 1978 lectures the meaning of the term ‘governmentality’ shifts slightly from a historically determined sense to a more general sense. Government and governmentality come to designate the general way in which the conduct of individuals or groups is directed. See e.g., Foucault (1982). See also Senellart (2007, pp. 388–389).
Foucault (2008, p. 77).
Saar (2010).
Foucault (2007, p. 277).
Saar (2010).
Foucault (2008, p. 18).
Ibid., 18.
Foucault (2007, p. 95).
Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics at the heart of which is dissent, rather than the search for consensus. William Connolly, Bonnie Honig and Chantal Mouffe, most notably, have argued for an agonistic account of the political. See Connolly (1991), Honig (1993), Mouffe (1993, 2000, 2005).
See e.g., Foucault (1988, 1990b, 1991c ). Foucault explains that in History of Madness the question was how and why, at a given moment, madness was problematized through a certain institutional practice and a certain apparatus of knowledge. Similarly, in Discipline and Punish, for example, he analysed the changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Foucault (1988, p. 257).
Foucault (1991c, pp. 388–389).
Ibid., 388.
Cf. e.g., Derrida (1978).
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Oksala, J. Foucault’s politicization of ontology. Cont Philos Rev 43, 445–466 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9153-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9153-6