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.
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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.