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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Foucault+Heidegger « Previous | |Next »
April 5, 2006

In this article in Contretemps Timothy Rayner argues that it is possible to discern at least three lines of continuity between Foucault's biopolitical government and Heidegger's technological enframing as accounts of modernity. Rayner says:

First, we have a substantive continuity. Both biopower and technology address reality understood as a field of resource. In this respect, the difference between Foucault and Heidegger's accounts is merely a matter of scope. Whereas the viewpoint of technological enframing encompasses reality as such, biopolitical government is concerned with a limited field of reality-resource: the state population. Second, we have an instrumental continuity. In both these critiques, the process of objectification-commodification of the real is thoroughly mediated by technology, being inseparable from the deployment of technical concepts, structures, practices, and procedures, and governed by an overarching perspective on the world that would situate all forms of life within a domain of technical manipulation. Third, we have a strategical continuity. Both biopower and technology pursue the overall management of life. Reducing the forces of nature to raw material, both seek to set this material in order---implementing mechanisms to establish regular patterns of cause and effect, checks and balances to ensure the flow of energies into productive, self-enhancing systems, thus to achieve a heightened measure of mastery and control over this object-domain.

I've pretty much operated with the view that Heidegger provides the ontology of biopower. I enfold biopower into technological enframing as it were and leave it at that. But that's too crude and misleading.

Rayner is more sophisticated. He talks in terms of problematize the relationship between technology and biopower and figuring out how we might advance beyond these simple continuities:

To understand Foucault's critique of biopolitical government along the lines of a Heideggerian way of thinking, we first need to sharpen-up our conception of the interiority that we have associated with it. We have previously defined this interiority in its substantive, instrumental, and strategical dimensions. Let us now incorporate into this conception the specific forms of knowledge (connaisance) that Foucault has associated with biopolitical government.
.
Why so? Rayner argues that Foucault's critique of the present is particularistic. Rather than attempt to provide a general account of the 'essence’' of modern technology, Foucault 'simply identifies particular practices in the
present...and traces their lines of descent in a Nietzschean fashion'. Such questioning is not tantamount to prescribing an ontology,either anti-humanist or humanist.

Well now, there are such things aas ontological commitments or presupposition. Heideigger makes explicit Foucault's onolotcal presuppositions.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:30 PM | | Comments (4)
Comments

Comments

No doubt there are some interesting convergences between Foucault and Heidegger. But at some point, the comparison game becomes silly; anything can be compared with anything else.

In this case, the differences between Foucault and the later Heidegger strike me as much more interesting than the similarities. Nowhere in Foucault is there a nostalgiac longing for a time before the forgetfulness of being, or a messianic longing for Gelassenheit, "letting being be."

I'll admit that Foucault does share something of Heidegger's discontinuous historicity (with big "jumps" or "breaks" -- from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Scholastics to the moderns, etc.). But the explanations that Foucault provides for this breaks are either structuralist (in The Order of Things) or materialist (in the broad sense of the applications of power on bodies.)

In general, Foucault strikes me far more sensitive to the nuances of discourse and of embodiment than Heidegger is. But the price that Foucault pays for his empirical sophistication is that the normative and ontological commitments are fuzzy.

Dr Spinoza,
re your comment:

Nowhere in Foucault is there a nostalgiac longing for a time before the forgetfulness of being, or a messianic longing for Gelassenheit, "letting being be."

Agreed.
However, you can give 'letting being be' an ecological interpretation (ie recognizing biodiversity and environmental flows) and that lack of ecological awareness could be a criticism of Foucault and French philosophy.

I agree with you that 'that Foucault strikes me far more sensitive to the nuances of discourse and of embodiment than Heidegger is.' He is more Nietzschean than Heidegger.

But I would argue that Foucault's 'fuzzy ontological commitments' can be interpreted in terms of Heidegger's technological mode of being.

I would, if pressed, tend to disagree; for one, Heidegger's writng has a sort of Hegelian anti-humanist aspect--as QCT and "enframing" if not Dasein--(ultimately I think H's term for "Gott") indicate-- and Foucault is more the psychologist, humanist, historian. Heidegger quintessentially German in his idealism, his formality, his anti-psychological stance, and the hints of mysticism. QCT reads as profoundly mystical, and that mysticism poses a real problem for secularist readings does it not.

I am not so well-versed in Foucault but he is not religious or metaphysical in any conventional sense, and of course a libertine in thought and character. I don't think the comparison is so apt. However much I dislike much of Foucaults' writing I grant that as an alternative historian he was some interesting points; his writings on the panopticon, on prisons, on oppressive discourse are rather noble. But I dont think he is Nietzschean will-to-power sort of thinker either: certainly Nietzsche would have have rebuked MF, and probably the idealistically inclined Heidegger, violently I suspect. Nietzsche is aristo-, as well as physiologist; rarely a humanist; more like a failed doctor than filosophe.

Phred,
try this:
Hubert Dreyfus indicates in his "Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault" that:

Foucault's notion of power denotes the social aspect of...the [Heideggerian] clearing. By folding Foucault into Heidegger in this way, Dreyfus lends ontological substance to the claim that Heidegger and Foucault share "a common critique of techno-/bio-power." On Dreyfus' interpretation, the difference between these lines of critique is merely a matter of perspective. Heidegger's history of being, Dreyfus argues, gives us a perspective: "from which to understand how in the modern world, things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects." In "Holism and Hermeneutics," Dreyfus pushes this interpretation even further, arguing that, like Heidegger, Foucault seeks to recover the 'non-technological micro-practices underwriting the holistic apperception of ancient times. Dreyfus' unrepentantly syncretistic reading presents Heidegger and Foucault as united in the attempt to show that "an alternative [nonobjectifying and nonsubjectifying] understanding of human beings once existed and still continues to exist, though drowned out by our everyday busy concerns."

Food for thought huh?

That quote is from Timothy Rayner's Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heidegger?s Way of Thinking referenced above.

Rayner thinks that Dreyfus is wrong---'provocative, but ultimately untenable'. Still, it's food for thought.