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Log inChapter 14, Among Other Things
Chapter 14, Among Other Things
by jmsmith on Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:31 pm
Why are intellectuals fascinated by the concept of power? They are very clearly mesmerized by it, and intone its name with the reverence of priests in the temple of an awesome god. It is not because power is a powerful concept, as I will argue below. Rather, it is because intellectuals crave power and yet can’t get their hands on much of it. So they study power, theorize power, anatomize power, all in the vain and alchemistic hope of some day possessing it. I’m using the title intellectual here in the special but not unusual sense of practical philosophers, men and women who lead the life of the mind and wish to put their ideas into effect. Foucault and his followers clearly fall under this heading, as can be seen on the very first page, where we are told that knowledge is “strategic” and thinking a species of war.
We all know the philistine taunt, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich.” And I trust we all know how to answer it: “whatever smartness I have I’ve spent learning about things other than money.” Brilliant impoverished linguist is not, for instance, an oxymoron. But this taunt does begin to bite the closer one moves to economics, especially those branches of economics most directly concerned with capital investment. The same would seem to be true if we amend the philistine taunt, and ask “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you powerful.” It doesn’t have much bite so long as the challenged scholar’s smarts have been expended on medieval tapestries or the migratory habits of the gruffvoiced titmouse. But the question calls for an answer when it is directed at anatomists of power like Foucault and his followers.
The answer one can expect is that intellectual research into the nature of power shows that power is not, for insuperable “structural” reasons, easily annexed by intellectuals in any large quantity. I doubt that this is true. Rather, where intellectuals have failed to grasp the power they covet, I believe it is due to defective ideas about power. And intellectuals do not always failed to grasp power.
When intellectuals fail in their bid for power it is because they idealize it and treat the abstraction as a thing that can be known, possessed, mastered, and put to work. In other words they reify power and turn an abstraction into an explanation. Outside of idealism this is considered illegitimate because an abstraction is a generalization about how something behaves, and does not necessarily imply that it behaves in this way for the same reason in every case covered by the abstraction. Consider, for example, the abstraction “early riser,” meaning a person who starts his/her day earlier than most. This describes a behavior, but a behavior that is explained by heterogeneous factors: insomnia, a heavy work load, a love of solitary mornings, proneness to back pain after six hours recumbence, etc. The fact that someone is an early riser explains nothing, although careless thinkers may imagine they are saying something trenchant when they observe, “he gets up early because he is an early riser.”
Likewise, to attribute some change to “power” is simply to say that change occurred, for what is power but capacity to do work or effect change (when “power” is said to “prevent” change, it has in fact changed the outcome of some course of events that would have unfolded in the absence of this power). Indeed, since power means a capacity to do work, much of what is said in this book comes down to analytic, circular reasoning. The subject of the proposition, power, is the same as the predicate, work being done, so that what we are told, in effect, is that work is done when there is a capacity to do work. This is not to say that power is a useless word or a worthless concept. Capacity for work differs from person to person and group to group, and it is often convenient to describe this difference as differing quanta of power. But to explain this difference as differences in power is simply to translate one description (capacity for work) into another locution (power), and then imagine, or pretend, that one has made a synthetic statement.
Intellectuals do not invariably fail in their quest for power, though, however crippled they may be by their idealism and circular reasoning. They have a very hard time putting their hands on money, and the twentieth century taught us that they should be allowed nowhere near political power, but as a literate clerisy they do know something about the sources of rhetorical and discursive power. (The very high transaction costs of converting this rhetorical and discursive power into other forms might be taken as an indication that there is no common currency of “power.”) And because they know something about rhetorical and discursive power, they are good at constructing ideology. Three attributes of ideology are well illustrated in the chapter I agreed to discuss, Raffestin’s “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography (chap. 14). These are (1) speak as a maverick and an outsider, even when you are an insider voicing conventional wisdom, (2) employ critical language that is itself shielded from criticism, and (3) disguise policy proposals as philosophical inferences.
Foucaudian geographers represent themselves as mavericks and outsiders when they are, in fact, epigone of the new conventional wisdom. This is evident in the question that serves as the title to chapter 14, “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography?” I trust most people would agree that the question was answered long ago, when Foucault did revolutionize (or at least contributed to revolutionizing) geography in precisely the manner Raffestin recommends. Raffestin claims that geographers neglected to follow Foucalt’s lead and study the “gaze” of geographers, which is to say the part geographer’s practices, language, and intentions play in constituting or constructing the “object” of geographic study (i.e. landscape). He insists that they have instead continued to see the landscape as composed of “external material objects” (although he elsewhere says, incongruously, that “geographers have not understood that the landscape emerges as much from physics as metaphysics”). This is, of course, grossly inaccurate, since external material objects disappeared from Anglo-American human geography thirty years ago, and some version of the “philosophy of the relation” is now very nearly universal dogma. But because ideology always represents itself as a solution to a problem, it can never admit that it is the reigning orthodoxy.
The language of critical geography appears to be critical, but does not itself stand up to criticism. Consider this gnomic proposition by Foucault: “the rationality of life is identical to the rationality of that which threatens it.” Is this true? Does the biological life of a human, or of the pathogens that threaten it, have to it anything we can call rationality? No, they do not consider reasons, draw inferences, or render judgments. They have, to be sure, certain patterns of behavior; but what is gained by calling this pattern by the name of the wholly different pattern we know as rationality? What is gained is rhetorical effect, for here we see an appearance of critical bite created by the poetic use of philosophical terms. A poet using poetic diction would likely write about something like of the flower of life, or the song of life, and these we would recognize as metaphors. But “the rationality of life” is a metaphor that does not look like a metaphor because rationality is a term from philosophic diction. This is easy to do once you see how it works: “the inferences of love,” “the syllogism of violence,” “the past participle of excrement.” As the last example shows, it is always striking to couple a technical word with one tied to sex or bodily function, since this implies some cybernetic insight. Raffestin does this when he describes the geographical gaze as “the gaze of the voyeur mobilized by curiosity.” This sounds deep until one considers that voyeurs are not mobilized by curiosity, but by a desire to find living replicas of erotic fantasies they already have. Returning to the Foucault quote, let’s accept the metaphor of “rationality” and ask about the truth of the full proposition, that the rationality of the life of a human threatened by disease is identical to that of the disease by which he is threatened. If this means that both desire to live, it is true, but in a very sloppy sense, for the desire of a pathogen to live is only roughly analogous to the desire of a human to live--the pathogen is not afraid of dying, for instance. But “rationality” encompasses means as well as ends, and the fact that the pathogen means to live by killing me, and I mean to live by killing it, makes our rationalities very far from identical. Two countries at war do not have identical rationalities because both wish to win. Ideology does not make arguments; it sings lullabies.
To disguise a policy proposal as a philosophical inference is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of ideology. Raffestin does this in a manner so maladroit that it is impossible not to see. He describes the gruesome symptoms of an epidemic that ravaged the city of Rouen in 1769, and then infers from these that “the first task of the doctor is political and ‘must begin with a war against bad government.” Now this may, indeed, be the inference Raffestin draws, and it may make sense as an example of his “philosophy of relation,” but the logic is for most readers far from compelling. This is because nothing in the description of the epidemic indicates that the government of Rouen in 1769 was bad, or that any government of that era, no matter how good, could have averted or alleviated the epidemic. In order to make sense, in other words, Raffestin forces us into the habit of assuming that all governments are bad and every evil has a political solution. It is because we do grow into such habits that ideological writing seems to grow more persuasive the more one reads of it.
We all know the philistine taunt, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich.” And I trust we all know how to answer it: “whatever smartness I have I’ve spent learning about things other than money.” Brilliant impoverished linguist is not, for instance, an oxymoron. But this taunt does begin to bite the closer one moves to economics, especially those branches of economics most directly concerned with capital investment. The same would seem to be true if we amend the philistine taunt, and ask “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you powerful.” It doesn’t have much bite so long as the challenged scholar’s smarts have been expended on medieval tapestries or the migratory habits of the gruffvoiced titmouse. But the question calls for an answer when it is directed at anatomists of power like Foucault and his followers.
The answer one can expect is that intellectual research into the nature of power shows that power is not, for insuperable “structural” reasons, easily annexed by intellectuals in any large quantity. I doubt that this is true. Rather, where intellectuals have failed to grasp the power they covet, I believe it is due to defective ideas about power. And intellectuals do not always failed to grasp power.
When intellectuals fail in their bid for power it is because they idealize it and treat the abstraction as a thing that can be known, possessed, mastered, and put to work. In other words they reify power and turn an abstraction into an explanation. Outside of idealism this is considered illegitimate because an abstraction is a generalization about how something behaves, and does not necessarily imply that it behaves in this way for the same reason in every case covered by the abstraction. Consider, for example, the abstraction “early riser,” meaning a person who starts his/her day earlier than most. This describes a behavior, but a behavior that is explained by heterogeneous factors: insomnia, a heavy work load, a love of solitary mornings, proneness to back pain after six hours recumbence, etc. The fact that someone is an early riser explains nothing, although careless thinkers may imagine they are saying something trenchant when they observe, “he gets up early because he is an early riser.”
Likewise, to attribute some change to “power” is simply to say that change occurred, for what is power but capacity to do work or effect change (when “power” is said to “prevent” change, it has in fact changed the outcome of some course of events that would have unfolded in the absence of this power). Indeed, since power means a capacity to do work, much of what is said in this book comes down to analytic, circular reasoning. The subject of the proposition, power, is the same as the predicate, work being done, so that what we are told, in effect, is that work is done when there is a capacity to do work. This is not to say that power is a useless word or a worthless concept. Capacity for work differs from person to person and group to group, and it is often convenient to describe this difference as differing quanta of power. But to explain this difference as differences in power is simply to translate one description (capacity for work) into another locution (power), and then imagine, or pretend, that one has made a synthetic statement.
Intellectuals do not invariably fail in their quest for power, though, however crippled they may be by their idealism and circular reasoning. They have a very hard time putting their hands on money, and the twentieth century taught us that they should be allowed nowhere near political power, but as a literate clerisy they do know something about the sources of rhetorical and discursive power. (The very high transaction costs of converting this rhetorical and discursive power into other forms might be taken as an indication that there is no common currency of “power.”) And because they know something about rhetorical and discursive power, they are good at constructing ideology. Three attributes of ideology are well illustrated in the chapter I agreed to discuss, Raffestin’s “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography (chap. 14). These are (1) speak as a maverick and an outsider, even when you are an insider voicing conventional wisdom, (2) employ critical language that is itself shielded from criticism, and (3) disguise policy proposals as philosophical inferences.
Foucaudian geographers represent themselves as mavericks and outsiders when they are, in fact, epigone of the new conventional wisdom. This is evident in the question that serves as the title to chapter 14, “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography?” I trust most people would agree that the question was answered long ago, when Foucault did revolutionize (or at least contributed to revolutionizing) geography in precisely the manner Raffestin recommends. Raffestin claims that geographers neglected to follow Foucalt’s lead and study the “gaze” of geographers, which is to say the part geographer’s practices, language, and intentions play in constituting or constructing the “object” of geographic study (i.e. landscape). He insists that they have instead continued to see the landscape as composed of “external material objects” (although he elsewhere says, incongruously, that “geographers have not understood that the landscape emerges as much from physics as metaphysics”). This is, of course, grossly inaccurate, since external material objects disappeared from Anglo-American human geography thirty years ago, and some version of the “philosophy of the relation” is now very nearly universal dogma. But because ideology always represents itself as a solution to a problem, it can never admit that it is the reigning orthodoxy.
The language of critical geography appears to be critical, but does not itself stand up to criticism. Consider this gnomic proposition by Foucault: “the rationality of life is identical to the rationality of that which threatens it.” Is this true? Does the biological life of a human, or of the pathogens that threaten it, have to it anything we can call rationality? No, they do not consider reasons, draw inferences, or render judgments. They have, to be sure, certain patterns of behavior; but what is gained by calling this pattern by the name of the wholly different pattern we know as rationality? What is gained is rhetorical effect, for here we see an appearance of critical bite created by the poetic use of philosophical terms. A poet using poetic diction would likely write about something like of the flower of life, or the song of life, and these we would recognize as metaphors. But “the rationality of life” is a metaphor that does not look like a metaphor because rationality is a term from philosophic diction. This is easy to do once you see how it works: “the inferences of love,” “the syllogism of violence,” “the past participle of excrement.” As the last example shows, it is always striking to couple a technical word with one tied to sex or bodily function, since this implies some cybernetic insight. Raffestin does this when he describes the geographical gaze as “the gaze of the voyeur mobilized by curiosity.” This sounds deep until one considers that voyeurs are not mobilized by curiosity, but by a desire to find living replicas of erotic fantasies they already have. Returning to the Foucault quote, let’s accept the metaphor of “rationality” and ask about the truth of the full proposition, that the rationality of the life of a human threatened by disease is identical to that of the disease by which he is threatened. If this means that both desire to live, it is true, but in a very sloppy sense, for the desire of a pathogen to live is only roughly analogous to the desire of a human to live--the pathogen is not afraid of dying, for instance. But “rationality” encompasses means as well as ends, and the fact that the pathogen means to live by killing me, and I mean to live by killing it, makes our rationalities very far from identical. Two countries at war do not have identical rationalities because both wish to win. Ideology does not make arguments; it sings lullabies.
To disguise a policy proposal as a philosophical inference is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of ideology. Raffestin does this in a manner so maladroit that it is impossible not to see. He describes the gruesome symptoms of an epidemic that ravaged the city of Rouen in 1769, and then infers from these that “the first task of the doctor is political and ‘must begin with a war against bad government.” Now this may, indeed, be the inference Raffestin draws, and it may make sense as an example of his “philosophy of relation,” but the logic is for most readers far from compelling. This is because nothing in the description of the epidemic indicates that the government of Rouen in 1769 was bad, or that any government of that era, no matter how good, could have averted or alleviated the epidemic. In order to make sense, in other words, Raffestin forces us into the habit of assuming that all governments are bad and every evil has a political solution. It is because we do grow into such habits that ideological writing seems to grow more persuasive the more one reads of it.
