[Lazzarone]

Question: You mean it will be possible to work with this government?

Foucault: We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.

that's from 'politics, philosophy, culture', p154. scu also seems not to have escaped from 'the dilemma of being either for or against', in repeating that "foucault opposed the state".

scu cites foucault's conversation with marxist 'popular justice' advocates in the first interview of power/knowledge. foucault is skeptical that so-called 'civil society' projects (in this case, informal methods of arbitration) will act any less unjustly than official state mechanisms: you create a community court, and yet you reenact the same statist scripts you believe you're leaving behind. as foucault explains it (ibid., p167-8),

Although the opposition between civil society and state may quite rightly have been greatly used in the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, I'm not at all sure that it is still operational. The Polish example in this respect is interesting: when one assimilates the powerful social movement that has just traversed that country to a revolt of civil society against the state, one misunderstands the complexity and multiplicity of confrontations. It is not only against the state-party that the Solidarity movement has had to fight.

The relations between the political power, the systems of dependence that they engender, and individuals are too complex to be reduced to such a schema. In fact, the notion of an opposition between civil society and state was formalized in a given context with a particular intention: liberal economists proposed it in the late eighteenth century with a view to limiting the state's sphere of action, civil society being conceived as the locus of an autonomous economic process. It was a quasi-polemical concept, opposed to the administrative power of the states at the time, in order to bring victory to a certain liberalism.

But there is something else that bothers me about this notion: it's that the reference to this antagonistic couple is never exempt from a sort of Manicheanism that afflicts the notion of "state" with a pejorative connotation while idealizing "society" as a good, living, warm whole.

What I am attentive to is the fact that every human relation is to some degree a power relation. We move in a world of perpetual strategic relations. Every power relation is not bad in itself, but is a fact that always involves danger.

Let us take the example of penal justice, which is more familiar to me than that of social security: a whole movement is at work at present in Europe and the United States in favor of an "informal justice" or certain forms of arbitration carried out by the group itself. To believe society capable, by mere internal regulation, of solving the problems that it is presented with is to have a very optimistic notion of society. In short, to get back to what we were saying, I remain fairly circumspect as regards a certain way of opposing civil society and state, and to any project for transferring to the first a power of initiative and decision that the second is seen as having annexed in order to exercise it in an authoritarian fashion: whatever scenario one takes, a power relation would be established, and the question would still remain of how to limit its effects, this relation being in itself neither good nor bad, but dangerous, so that one would have to reflect, at every level, on the way it should channel its efficacy in the best possible way.

again, one can see this simplistic opposition between "the state" and "civil society" in many claims to generically 'oppose the state'. to assume the state necessarily acts "in an authoritarian fashion" and to assume that non-problematic ways of resolving conflicts exist 'outside the state' - these two assumptions are explicitly criticized here by foucault. now, in the entire sweep of his career, to say that he opposed specific state actions, and even to say that he placed the invention of the state in a historical context of totalitarian and racist practices, still does not mean that he essentialized the state enough to oppose it in principle. as he suggests above, the state is neither good nor bad, but dangerous - same as all power relations. what colin gordon wrote - foucault's research assistant and translator (writing in 'the foucault effect: studies in governmentality', p4) - should send the point home,

Foucault acknowledged the continuing truth of the reproach [from his Marxist critics] that he refrained from the theory of the state, 'in the sense that one abstains from an indigestible meal'. State theory attempts to deduce the modern activities of government from essential properties and propensities of the state, in particular its supposed propensity to grow and to swallow up or colonize everything outside itself. Foucault holds that the state has no such inherent propensities; more generally, the state has no essence. The nature of the institutions of the state is, Foucault thinks, a function of changes in practices of government, rather than the converse. Political theory attends too much to institutions, and too little to practices.

even in foucault's more anarchistic moments (and we could cite some), this important distinction between institutions and practices holds. a clear message resonates throughout his career:

'don't oppose a given institution as such; examine the political practices that prop it up; because if you oppose the institution as such, you may find yourself ignoring the very practices and recycling the very assumptions that supported that institution, and you'll help to create new institutions which accomplish the old functions, only now they'll be less vulnerable to criticism/attack'. hence, don't 'oppose the state' - analyze and critique practices of governmentality instead (ibid., p103),

We all know the fascinations which the love, or horror, of the state exercises today; we know how much attention is paid to the genesis of the state, its history, its advance, its power and abuses, etc. The excessive value attributed to the problem of the state is expressed, basically, in two ways: the one form, immediate, affective and tragic, is the lyricism of the monstre froid we see confronting us; but there is a second way of overvaluing the problem of the state, one which is paradoxical because apparently reductionist: it is the form of analysis that consists in reducing the state to a certain number of functions, such as the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of production, and yet this reductionist vision of the relative importance of the state’s role nevertheless invariably renders it absolutely essential as a target needing to be attacked and a privileged position needing to be occupied. But the state, no more probably today than at any other time in its history, does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance; maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.

in sum, to say 'foucault opposes the state' gives in to the reductionist view criticized above, and that's the "cold monster" from which academic debate should immediately free itself.

_

this suggests a kritik of focusing too much on the state. as foucault warns,

However, one must avoid a trap in which those who govern try to catch intellectuals and into which they often fall: 'Put yourself in our place and tell us what you would do.' It is not a question one has to answer. To make a decision on some question implies a knowledge of evidence that is refused us, an analysis of the situation that we have not been able to make. This is a trap.

and this seems the trap that cj sets up by suggesting that one must choose between 'standard policy debate' and 'kritikal debate'.

let's assume you said to me in a coffee-shop one day, 'the u.s.a. military should intervene in sudan'. i may make many arguments against such a proposal; i may note its disadvantages, i may question its underlying assumptions, i may offer a better suggestion. one argument i would not make, however, is that such a policy hurts bush's political capital. why? because such a concern isn't intrinsic to the proposal itself. in typical policy discussions, no one assumes immediate passage. paradoxically, fiat was invented to focus the debate on the plan itself. that is, to argue that the u.s.a. military won't intervene in sudan doesn't mean it shouldn't. compare this statement by foucault in 1983 ('foucault reader', p377),

Let's take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of paratroppers, and we can't send armored cars to liebrate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, 'I protest,' but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take into account.

this is the essence of ethics as a kritikal practice. and it was (and remains) at the heart of this activity before wacky u.t. students invented the kritik proper. you cannot reduce policy discussions to the search for only practical solutions. that's what fiat itself commands: imagine the impossible! refuse to be strictly practical! ... this doesn't mean debaters have to be anything other than debaters - not legislators, not academics; they can still deploy an illusory recommendation in order to make a political phenomenon 'as substantial as possible'. that's ethos.


.k


p.s. i also don't think the negative need offer an alternative 'vision' (or a competing decision-making model). sometimes the impractical search for alternatives itself impairs our understanding, and they're within their rights to point this out. as foucault says,

I have never tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted.