Comments on Chapter 24: Apologetics for Forgetting?

[wendy je]

This chapter cover considerable intellectual territory (from Said thought the complexities of Subaltern Studies, Gramsci, and Governmentality); I would be remiss to present some pithy analysis of every point for each topic that made me cringe or shake my head in confirmation. So, I will attempt to develop one argument: Chapter 24 is an apology for the absence of colonialism in Foucault's writings.

Legg writes, there is a "haunting presence of colonialism" in Foucault's geographical imaginary - the "absent presence" of Europe's periphery. Colonialism is absent in Foucault's writing, as an explicit topic of analysis. As Peter Jackson notes, Foucault is interested in difference within societies, focusing on the local and national scale. Indeed, he rarely acknowledges extra-European of colonial realities of state power and techniques of management and exploitation. There is a "massive forgetting" of the colonial project beyond Europe. But, as Legg includes, there is what seems to be an absence of seeing the colonial world within Europe, through the imperial spaces of European capitals, urban spaces, and even rural idylls. The empire strikes back, so to speak, as cultural, political and social forms, geographies, as ideas made "their way back to the metropole and relayed a symbolic and material reworking of the European Self" (Legg, 267). This imperial reworking of Europe is, as Legg states, implicit but invisible to Foucault's analysis of peripheral space and population in the core. Colonialism (or post-colonial theory) is present, at least in the minds of those who read and contemplate Foucault's analysis of institutions and power and, yes, governmentality. The chapter deftly identified those that have spoken (or apologized for) his massive forgetting. To summarize: (1) Legg writes "Spivak justly claims that Foucault's analysis actually produced a miniature version of colonialism, one that is replayed the management of space and periphery populations through the screen of allegories of doctors, prisons, and the insane."(p 267); (2)Ann Stolers work on sexuality shoed that "though Eurocentric, Foucault was not blind to race and its potential imperial connections" (268); (3) Homi Bhabha writes that within the massive forgetting, lies a "metaleptic presence of colonialism"; (4) Mitchell excused this absence by arguing that Foucault's writings pursued and dismantled the discourses and discipline of Europe and colonial states, thus preserving "the potential to mobilize counter-discourses of modernity" (268). The colonial present, then, is what Legg calls "the epistemologically constitutive outside" - where it is accepted that while Foucault articulated the means and perspective (through the archeaological model of discourse analysis) to dismantle colonial cultural, economic and political discourses and power. This impressive list of post-colonial intellectuals props up the apology, that well, sounds like a means to get around a presentist reading of his work, an intellectual double-speak (seriously, an "absent presence"?).

Rather than challenge this contradiction, Legg supports it, and that is what I object to the most in this chapter. Legg slips into an analysis of the criticism Said leveled against Foucault (re: agency and power). The focus of the review of colonialism becomes centered on Said, his interpretation (good or bad) of Foucault. Legg missed the opportunity to delve deeper into Foucault's own Orientalism and accept the absent presence, according to the post-colonial theorists cited above. I am troubled by the failure to explore the debate over Foucault's own complict or sympathetic view of the Iranian revolution as a journalist there during the Revolution - which one could read as "orientalist." What about his work in Tunisia? It is unsatisfying to simply gloss over the connection or lack of connection between his travels outside Europe and not question why this has not appeared in his analysis. I would argue that there is a failure to examine Foucault's writing on security, population etc. using Orientalism as a guide and question more intently on the question of "massive forgetting" rather than rely on the apologetics.

So, while brief, the chapter succeeds in making clear that there is a gap in his writings re: European colonialism, but fails in explaining this absence, and moreover, avoid any analysis of his own possible complicity in reinforcing Orientalist project.