rethinking michel foucault: the political circle of parrhesia and democracy

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Foucault The Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

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As part of SDN's seminar series, Professor Henrik Bang (University of Canberra) indicates perspectives on Michel Foucault that can inform our understanding of democracy. Michel Foucault has become an exemplar in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, linguistics and literary criticism. Ironically, he has never made much of an impact upon the political discipline, to which he first of all belongs, and in which he deserves a prominent position as one of the best political theorists and researchers of all time. In particular in his later strings of lectures from 1978 to 1984 he develops an empirical and normative approach to studying the political as governmentality.

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Page 1: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

FoucaultThe Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Page 2: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Power, subject or discourse?

• I had done nothing else, really, but a history of power.’

• it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research

• [My research] is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density.’

Page 3: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Domination or power?

• Domination is, in fact, a general structure of power (EW3: 347).

• ‘Domination is a particular case within the different possibility of power relations. You can have a power relation without this type of domination.

• When [Habermas] speaks about power, he always understands it as domination. And he translates “power” by “domination.” (1996: 417)

Page 4: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

A history of exaggeration

• ‘I am not merely a historian. I am not a novelist. What I do is a kind of historical fiction. In a sense I know very well that what I say is not true. A historian could say of what I’ve said, “That’s not true.” I should put it this way. I’ve written a lot about madness in the early 1960s – a history of the birth of psychiatry. I know very well that what I have done from a historical point of view is single-minded, exaggerated. Perhaps I have dropped out some contradictory factors. But the book had an effect on the perception of madness. So the book and my thesis have a truth in the nowadays reality.’ (FL: 301)

Page 5: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Radical or neoliberal?

• ‘[Why this] notably positive assessment of neoliberalism, on the part of a philosopher known for his suspicion of power in all its forms’ (Behrent 2010: 17).

Page 6: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Betrayed!

• ‘We were astonished to find the intransigence of his flight from sovereignty. We were equally astonished at the speed with which he would discover new and different conceptions and forms of power relations from those of discipline to the forms of regulation envisaged by the American neoliberals.’ (Dean 2013: 150).

• ‘what kind of legitimacy does he hope to discover every time he finds and marks a new, post-sovereign power?’ (Dean 2013: 150)

Page 7: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

State of exception

• Sovereignty: ‘the legal form of what cannot have legal form (Agamben 2005: 2), showing

• ‘the juridical significance of a sphere of action that is in itself extrajuridical’ (ibid: 11)

• ‘The sovereign exception (as zone of indistinction between nature and right) is the presupposition of the juridical reference in the form of its suspension.’ (Agamben 1998: 21)

Page 8: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Article 20 in the German constitution

• The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state.

• All state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive, and judicial bodies.

• The legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice.

• All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.

Page 9: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Dissensus and political community

• ‘dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a division inserted in ‘common sense’’ (Ranciere 2010: 69)

• [Political community is the] ‘notion that politics can be deduced from a specific world of equals or free people, as opposed to a [bare] world of lived necessity’ (Rancierre 2010: 39).

• ‘The People’ are ‘the supplement that disjoins the population from itself, by suspending all logics of legitimate domination’ (ibid: 33)

Page 10: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Hegemony vs. anarchy

• ’The authority of political institutions is not a question of consent but of the continuous acknowledgement of cives who recognize their obligation to obey the conditions prescribed in res publica.’ (Mouffe 2000:95).

• Political dispute is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police, which causes it to disappear either by purely and simply denying it or by claiming political logic as its own (Ranciere 2010: 36)

Page 11: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Foucault’s analytics

• ‘I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem….The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question…..becomes a problem’ (FS1983: 74).

• problematization refers negatively to the ways in which emerging practices (for instance neoliberalism) render problematic some old practices as no longer capable of effectively performing the work they once achieved

Page 12: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

NOT POLITICIZATION:

• How can people with diverse, often opposed, values, interests, ideas and identities acquire free and equal access to and recognition in the political decision-making process and on its various arenas?

Page 13: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

….BUT PROBLEMATIZATION:

• How are policies best to be articulated and performed, if they are to be acceptable to the population and recognized as necessary for doing that which has to be done to cope with the existential risks, challenges and problems that confront it?

Page 14: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

A word about Foucault’s framework

Modern social science Foucault

Philosophy Essentialism/relativism Relationism

Metatheory Structure/actor Discursive practice

(system)

Theory Civil society/state Political freedom-

power

Page 15: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

relationism

• Relationism means examining how the subject fits into a game of truth being played out in a specific discursive practice situated in time-space: how does the subject become ‘mad’, ‘liberated’, made into a ‘docile body’, ‘empowered’, and so on

Page 16: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

discursive practice

• ‘[Political] ‘calculation gives way to multiple different, sometimes opposed tactics that may connect with, attract and propagate one another. These may end up with forming a system which is distinct from them all in the sense that: ‘the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one there has invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them’ (HIS:95).

Page 17: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

power-freedom

• ‘The freer people are with respect to each other, the more they want to control each other’s conduct. The more open the game, the more appealing and fascinating it becomes.’ (EI: 300).

Page 18: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

postfoundationalism

• Postfoundationalism = ‘a repeated staging of attention of foundations presupposed as self-evident’ (Marcharts 2007: 13).

Page 19: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Three aspects of political discourse

• Formal (Parrhesia)• Strategic (Madness)• Tactical (Discipline)

Page 20: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Not sovereign law

• ‘power already exists before it is regulated, delegated, or legally established’ (STP: 304).

Page 21: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Not the state

• The state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is only a composite reality and a mythisized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think

Page 22: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Not institutions

• ‘one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa’ (EW3: 345).

• ‘even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, [the fundamental point of anchorage of the authority relation] is to be found outside the institution’ (ibid).

Page 23: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Not the state of exception

• ‘If you try to analyze power not on the basis of freedom, strategies, and governmentality, but on the basis of the political institution, you can only conceive of the subject as a subject of law. One then has a subject who has or does not have rights, who has had these rights either granted or removed by the institution of political society; and all this brings us back to a legal concept of the subject.’ (1994:b 300).

Page 24: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Not ‘the people’

• ‘In the democratic game set up by the politeia, which gives everyone the right to speak, someone comes on the scene to exercise his ascendancy, which is the ascendancy he exercises in speech and action’ (CT: 175)

Page 25: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

BUT…..Governmentality

• What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not the state’s takeover (étatisation) of society, so much as what I will call the “governmentalization” of the state.’ (STP: 109).

• ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor – all these problems, in their multiplicity and intensity, seem to me to be characteristic of [the] problematic of government[alization] in general.’ (EW3: 202).

Page 26: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

….LOGIC OF ACCEPTANCE

• ‘What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.’ (PK 119).

Page 27: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

……Policy cooperation

• The political authority relationship simply requires a minimal degree of cooperation between political authorities and laypeople in their political community for getting things done in face of unceasing risk, conflict and change. This is the political imperative for handling differences in any society or group of people, regardless of how much people hate politics or love democracy.

Page 28: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Inside the political 28

Politicalauthorities

Politicalcommunity

Political regime

Authoritative decisions and actions

Page 29: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Political regime

• The political regime is the immediate formal and informal political structure of meaning (values), support (norms) and resources (power), upon which political authorities and laypeople draw when articulating and performing collective decisions and actions in, and through, their multiple discursive strategies and tactics

Page 30: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Political authorities

• The political authorities refer to the occupants of political positions of authority. Their roles may be more and less formalized, and as authorities they need not be those who have actual control of the polity and with the production of outcomes. They are those few, who are directly involved in the systematic articulation and delivery of policy in day-to-day political affairs, and who are accepted and recognized by most as being those responsible for these tasks

Page 31: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Political community

• The political community binds people together as a group of persons who participate more or less actively in a political division of labor. They need not have a strong sense of community, nor do they need to assimilate to one and the same set of traditions or unifying identity. Strong divisions may prevail, and so may anarchy. However, as long as the majority accept and recognize that they share a political structure and set of processes, no matter how positively or negatively they identify with, and relate to, them, as long can they be said to part of the same political community for solving their common concerns

Page 32: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Parrhesia

• ‘Parrhesia [is] the very foundation of democracy, anyway its point of origin, its foundation stone. In order for there to be democracy there must be parrhesia. But conversely…..parrhesia is one of the characteristic features of democracy. It is one of the internal dimensions of democracy. That is to say, democracy is necessary for there to be parrhesia. For there to be democracy there must be parrhesia; for there to be parrhesia there must be democracy. There is a fundamental circularity.’

• (GSO: 155).

Page 33: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia

• ‘if the democratic institutions are unable to make room for truth telling and get parresia to function as it should, it is because these democratic institutions lack something - [namely a space] in which the right to speak, to give one’s views, to tell the truth, and the possibility of accepting the courage of this truth-telling were actually better realized than elsewhere .’ (CT: 35).

Page 34: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Modern politics: verticality and imbalances

• ‘What, then, is this confrontation beneath the language of reason? Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant verticality which confronts European culture with what it is not, establishes its range with its own derangement?’ (MC: xi).

• ‘What is essential is not the institution with its regularity, with its rules, but precisely the imbalances of power that I have tried to show both distort the asylum’s regularity and, at the same time, make it function (PP: 15).

Page 35: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Obedience as the condition of Aufklarung

• ‘We have precisely, through Frederick’s decision and his way of governing, that adjustment between, on the one hand, a government of self which will develop in the form of the universal (as public discussion, public reasoning, and the public use of understanding) and, on the other, the obedience to which all those who are part of a given society, state, or administration will be constrained. Frederik of Prussia is the very figure of Aufklarung….the agent who makes the right distribution in the interplay between obedience and private use, universality and public use.’ (GSO): 38

Page 36: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Psychiatry: undistorted communication?

• ‘1) The psychoanalysts has a preconception of the structure of nondistorted communication in ordinary language; 2) traces the systematic distortion back to the confusion of two developmentally separate stages of symbol organization, the prelinguistic and the linguistic; he explains the origin of the deformation with the aid of a theory of deviant socialization processes that covers the connection of early childhood interaction patterns with the formation of personality structures’ (Habermas in McCarthy 1978: 198)

Page 37: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Or political domination?

• ‘Psychiatric power is above all a certain way of managing, of administering, before being a cure or therapeutic intervention: it is a regime….it is a struggle against madness conceived as a will in revolt, as an unbounded will’ (PP: 173).

Page 38: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The rectangle of the good parrhesia (GSO: 173-174)

• ‘How does parrhesia function, in what does it consist, and how can we describe the good relationship between democracy and parrhesia?’

Page 39: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The formal condition

• In the first corner is the democratic constitution which accords equal freedom to all citizens, including their freedom to speak in favour or against, and thereby to take part in decision-making. ‘There will be no parrhesia without this democracy’ (2010: 173).

Page 40: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The de facto condition

• In the second corner is ‘the game of ascendancy or superiority’, referring to ‘the problem of those, who speaking in front of and above others, get them to listen, persuade them, direct them, and exercise command over them’

Page 41: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The truth condition

• In the third corner is truth-telling: ‘ascendancy and speaking must be exercised with reference to a certain truth-telling’ (ibid). The logos which exercises authority and ascendancy, and is delivered by those who govern the city, must be a discourse of truth.

Page 42: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The moral condition

• In the fourth corner is morality as courage: ‘since this exercise of the right to speak in which one tries to persuade through a discourse of truth takes place precisely in a democracy (first corner) it will therefore take the form of a joust, of rivalry, and confrontation, with the consequence that those who want to deliver a discourse of truth must demonstrate [moral] courage.’

Page 43: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Nelson Mandela

• ‘Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it.’

• ‘To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.’

• ‘If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.’

Page 44: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

The classical cynicist

(CT: 339):• ‘[The cynic] has the insolent courage to show himself as

he is; he has the boldness to tell the truth; and in his criticism of rules, conventions, customs and habits, addressing himself off handedly and aggressively to sovereigns and the powerful, he reverses the functions of political parrhesia and dramatizes also the philosophical life.’

Page 45: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

First thesis

• the transformative political capacity required for authorizing and normalizing policies under constantly changing conditions and in face of continuous conflict and risk implies a minimal degree of political cooperation between political authorities and laypeople in their political communities manifesting power, knowledge and freedom in both directions;

Page 46: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Second thesis

• the identification of political authorization and normalization with the exercise of centralized domination, command, disciplining and policing precludes the possibility of self- and co-governance inside the political by requiring that laypeople in their political communities freely and dutifully hand over their right and capacity to govern themselves to the state

Page 47: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Third thesis

• Politicization and conflict resolution on the input side of political processes must be connected politically to problematization and the handling of existential risks on the output side. This requires a shift in political logic from the one of conflict vs. consensus to the one of acceptance and recognition of difference, extending concerns for uncoerced communication and action to the output side

Page 48: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Fourth thesis

• A great challenge for late-modernity is how to create a new role for politicians as truth-telling parrhesiasts who address people ‘in complete frankness, using the language of reason and truth to persuade them’ (Foucault 2010: 206). The parrhesiast ‘opens the situation and makes possible effects which are, precisely, not known. [S/he] does not produce a codified effect; [S/he] opens up an unspecified risk’ (CT: 62)

Page 49: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

Foucault’s political challenge

Old ‘politics-policy’ family

New ‘policy-politics’ family

Norm Duty Engagement

Identity Legitimating or oppositional

Project driven

Organization Strong, and unified Fluid and connective

Community Social and normative Political and action oriented

Sense of community Thick sense of common good or interest

Thin sense of common concerns and actions

Justificatory principle Intersubjective agreement, agonistic consent and multi-level authenticity

Intersubjectivation through mutual acceptance and recognition of difference

Page 50: Rethinking Michel Foucault: The Political Circle of Parrhesia and Democracy

(FL: 301)

•‘My hope is my books become true after they have been written – not before’