Foucault and Power

Ken Taylor
Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

Josh Landy
Michelle Foucault and Power

Ken Taylor
What does it mean to have power?

Seinfeld
I’m very uncomfortable. I have no power. Why should she have the upper hand? Once in my life I would like the upper hand. I have no hand, no hand at all.

Josh Landy
Is power a matter of top -down control?

Ken Taylor
Or is it, as Foucault thinks, distributed across society?

Josh Landy
Is power everywhere you look?

Seinfeld
How do I get the hand? We all want the hand. Hand is tough to get. You gotta get the hand right from the opening.

Patti Smith
People have the power, people have the power

Ken Taylor
Power can be used for positive social ends.

Josh Landy
That’s good!

Ken Taylor
But it can also be used for control.

Josh Landy
That’s bad.

Ken Taylor
But resistance is always possible.

Josh Landy
That’s good!

Ken Taylor
But resistance is also part of power

Josh Landy
Oh, come on!

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Gary Gutting from the University of Notre Dame.

Josh Landy
Foucault and Power—coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
What is power?

Josh Landy
Who has power?

Ken Taylor
And can we ever escape its clutches?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the philosophy and literature initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, we’re talking about Foucault and power.

Ken Taylor
So Foucault’s a great guy to think about it when you want to think about power and power relations.

Josh Landy
Right, I mean, you know, take his idea that power is everywhere, all over, but even even places you wouldn’t expect it. And you might think you’re doing something really benevolent, like coming up with humane punishment for criminals, but very often, you’re just exercising control.

Ken Taylor
That’s part of it. But power isn’t just a matter of getting other people to do what you want them to do. It’s not just a matter of control. It’s a matter of like ontology of getting people to be what you want them to be. I think Foucault thinks that power somehow determines what kinds of people there are.

Josh Landy
How can power do that? I mean, I mean, there are tall people, and there are short people, they’re straight people, and there are gay people, white people and black people. What’s that got to do with power?

Ken Taylor
Well, take one of your examples being gay, or any of them would do but think being gay. That’s not just a matter of, you know, like biology or behavior, or whatever to be gay is to be located in a whole nexus of power relations.

Josh Landy
What are you talking about?

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on. Go back to ancient Greece. There were lots of men who do the things we think of characteristic of gays. They slept with other men, for example, but you know what? There weren’t any gay people.

Josh Landy
How can you say that men were in relationships with other men, but there weren’t any gay people?

Ken Taylor
Because back then, gay was not a social category. Nobody could possibly think of themselves or organize themselves or think of anybody else as gay.

Josh Landy
Okay, but even if I grant that, what’s it got to do with power?

Ken Taylor
Well, it’s because it’s power that decides what social categories they are, how do they function who belongs to them? Josh power does this.

Josh Landy
So you mean that if the powers that be say all literature, professors are aloof, tweed jacket wearing aesthetes, I’m suddenly going to start thinking myself that way?

Ken Taylor
Yeah well, Josh, you’re wearing a tweed jacket right now.

Josh Landy
Okay, you got me there. But still, even if we do fit ourselves into existing categories, that doesn’t have to be limiting. I mean, plenty of people see their identities as sources of pride.

Ken Taylor
Maybe they do. But the point is, that these identities, these socially given categories, they tell you what to think and how to think.

Josh Landy
That’s definitely not true.

Ken Taylor
No it is. Bear me out. think about Ancient Greece. Why would the Greeks asking questions about say, gay rights, what kinds of jazz they couldn’t possibly have done that, that wouldn’t have made any sense? That’s not even a possibility within their cultural framework, or what Foucault likes to call their episteme

Josh Landy
Episteme. He really did like his fancy new words. And so what does that one mean exactly?

Ken Taylor
Not that fancy. It’s something like a paradigm. It’s all those background assumptions that we may not be even aware of frequently aren’t aware of. But nonetheless, they guide and control and constrain I thinking in every single area of life.

Josh Landy
Okay, so they guide our thinking, and they don’t tell us what to think.

Ken Taylor
No, you underestimate the power of the episteme, Josh, Rhe episteme can lock us into a way of thinking.

Josh Landy
If that was true, no one would ever disagree with each other like, like you were not right now. I’m besides, besides, Foucault, somehow magically came up with this unprecedented idea. How did he do that? Can if his mind was totally enslaved to power?

Ken Taylor
Because thought does not change thought power changes thought you see, you just want to reject fucose entire theory of power, that’s your problem.

Josh Landy
Oh not the entire theory, just the loopy parts, Ken. Look, I’ll tell you one thing, I think is really brilliant in there. And that’s the idea that we need to stop thinking about power as us versus them. We need to start thinking about on the model of, you know, a tyrant oppressing the people or a ruling class exploiting the work.

Ken Taylor
So you’re getting with it. You like his idea, his rejection of Marx, it sounds like.

Josh Landy
I do. I mean, I think he had this really interesting thought that, you know, Marx just isn’t going to cut it for the modern age, because there’s no center of power anymore, that there’s no one person or one class telling all of us how to live.

Ken Taylor
No, there’s no center about are you really denying that there’s no, you want to say there’s no top down power these days? He does even Foucault want to go that far.

Josh Landy
Well, you know, however much being oppressed from the top that’s nothing compared to what we’re doing to each other. We’re all acting as enforcers, you know, every hour of every day we we internalize the norms by society and we end up reproducing them willy nilly. Every single one of us whether we know it or not, is a conduit of power.

Ken Taylor
And that’s the thing you like in Foucault. That’s the thing youlike? I find that part a little like troubling and depressing.

Josh Landy
Oh, no, no, you got it wrong. It’s empowering Academy once you realize that injustice isn’t always a matter of bad people exerting power over good people, but that it can be systemic. That’s a game changer.

Ken Taylor
Well, I see your point there. I mean, think about the Black Lives Matter and other its representatives have fully taken on board, the Foucault an idea that it’s the system that’s unjust is no matter. It’s not a matter of individual consciousness of our individual intentions and thought, I mean, even people with perfectly goodwill are usurped by the system.

Gary Gutting
Exactly. And quite a few activist movements today are inspired by Foucault actually. And we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, to find out just how theory becomes radical practice. She files this report.

Mark Bamuthi Joseph
There are some things that aren’t on the ballot that I would like to vote for.

Liza Veale
This is Mark Bamuthi Joseph, an artist and curator with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He spoke at a summit right before the 2018 midterm elections.

Mark Bamuthi Joseph
I would like to vote for black beauty as an aspirational standard. I would like to vote for black health as a civic priority and for black life as something that matters. Yeah, I would like to vote for the feeling that I get when I hear Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway sing “The Closer I Get To You.” That to me would be a hell of a democracy.

Liza Veale
The title of this summit was “Reimagining Political Power.” A lot of people there were frustrated with the institutional political process, he looked for hope elsewhere. And though no one talked about Foucault, you could draw a straight line from his ideas to the political role that Joseph sees for cultural spaces like his

Mark Bamuthi Joseph
We begin with the premise that culture precedes policy that we’re here to generate culture, so that the most number of people feel the most kinds of agency because they were inspired by a place like this.

Liza Veale
It’s not hard for people in social justice spaces today to see what culture has to do with power. It’s been almost 50 years since the slogan the personal is political was coined. Foucault is a big part of why these ideas make sense to us today.

Bruce Robbins
Foucault never encouraged anybody to plunge into politics in the old fashioned sense, parties and Congress and all that stuff.

Liza Veale
This is Bruce Robbins from Columbia University.

Bruce Robbins
The single most famous thing that he said is that in political theory, we still haven’t cut off the Kings head, we still think of power in other words, as a pyramid, and if you can have an impact at the top of the pyramid, you know, it’s gonna make a difference.

Liza Veale
But today, that might not be so true for a lot of people. Now, the Kings head is off, meaning elected officials are seen as only as powerful as the system that props them up a system we’re all a part of.

Bruce Robbins
Foucault gave a lot of people concerned with a lot of different issues, the sense that they could, and should do something exactly where they are. And this is, you know, the funny thing about his concept of power, that it’s kind of everywhere,

Liza Veale
It is everywhere, it’s not somewhere way up there. And people have taken this to mean a lot of different things. You can fight power, for example, on your Facebook feed.

Speaker 6
So I may be going on a little bit of a rant, which is something I don’t normally do.

Liza Veale
Or at your Thanksgiving dinner table.

Speaker 8
As much as I’d like to discuss how African Americans and people of color have been marginalized throughout history resulting in the normalization of their oppression and mistreatment through laws and social norms meant to uphold white supremacy, these sweet potatoes aren’t going to eat themselves,

Liza Veale
Or on the football field.

Speaker 6
We’re talking about Colin Kaepernick. He’s the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, and he’s been refusing to stand for the national anthem.

Liza Veale
Bruce Robin says you can trace all this to Foucault’s idea that power

Bruce Robbins
works through generating norms. And that I think, has really gotten into a common sense.

Liza Veale
It’s a contribution that has served social justice movements and tangibly improved people’s lives.

Bruce Robbins
People have gotten very, very sensitive to the words they use and the categories they put people into and ways of trying to keep people out of categories. That really has raised the level of civilization in the country.

Liza Veale
But Robin’s problem with Foucault is he doesn’t have a useful vision for how all of this fits together.

Bruce Robbins
There’s no kind of guarantee that what you do over here will be connected somehow to what they’re doing over there. And you know, that it really is all one system.

Liza Veale
Some organizers and activists outright reject Foucault.

Jeremy Gong
I think people see differentials in power between themselves and their friends, their co workers, their clients. Those are real, but at the same time, there’s a much more significant force that socialists recognize as being powerful in our society, and it’s the power of the ruling class the power of the capitalist class.

Liza Veale
This is Jeremy Gong, an organizer with the national leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Jeremy Gong
There are three men in this country, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, who control half the wealth of the country.

Liza Veale
For Gong, you can only challenge that kind of power with a mass movement of the working class.

Jeremy Gong
If they can get together overcome their differences across race and gender lines and other divisions, they can create a movement that’s powerful enough to transform our society. And that means joining organizations taking part in politics, organizing your workplace, and that is the only way that working people have ever won things that they need.

Liza Veale
This isn’t a new critique. Foucault was writing in France at a time when Marxism defined intellectual thought, even though fucose on self is adding to not against Marxism. Many in the workers movement saw his ideas as undermining or distracting from the cars, kind of like Jeremy Gong does today.

Monty Python
I thought we’re an autonomous collective. You’re fooling yourself—we’re living in a dictatorship.

Liza Veale
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that powerful piece on Foucault and power. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy, and today we’re talking about Foucault and power.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Gary Gutting, Professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Foucault: A Very Short Introduction” and editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Foucault.” Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Gary.

Gary Gutting
Glad to be here.

Ken Taylor
So Gary, what first got you interested in Foucault And Foucault and power in particular? I mean, I know we academic philosophers, I have almost no power. So was it like our envy or something?

Gary Gutting
Well, I like puzzles a lot. And Foucault’s books are very puzzling. They’re written in a difficult academic language. And I came to enjoy very much decoding that language. And once it was decoded, Foucault turns out to challenge much of our conventional wisdom. And another thing was, I was also intrigued by his puzzling claim that he took on a new identity with each of his books, that he never wanted to be pinned down as this particular author.

Josh Landy
So you claim to have decoded Foucault, which is excellent for our purposes. What do you what do you think he actually means by power?

Gary Gutting
Well, when you talk about power with from code, you cannot talk about it apart from knowledge. That’s the key point. Let me illustrate that with an example. Suppose you, you go to a hot you go to a hospital, because they have the power to cure you. Right. So they’ve got that power. But the power to cure you. Why is in doctors and the doctors themselves? Well, they’re not just medical experts. They’re also part of the hospital as an organization. And that social organization or even business organization has goals that go considerably beyond merely taking care of you. It has to think about meeting its payroll, satisfying government regulations, covering up failures that could hurt its reputation. So as you can’t really be sure that the tests, for example, that your doctor is ordering are really medically necessary. They may actually be to get more money from insurance companies, or to protect against malpractice suits. So the hospital’s power to heal depends on knowledge that’s embedded in an institution that has its own agenda.

Ken Taylor
Okay. I get that. That seems right. That’s hard to deny. But I tell I didn’t hear an analysis or, or metaphysical account or anything in what you just said, of what power is especially this normative power that that according to our roving report, I mean, does he have a metaphysics of power?

Gary Gutting
He’s not really interested in a theoretical analysis. He he will talk about power in a particular context in a particular time in history, nowadays, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and he’ll key a key is discussion to that particular situation.

Ken Taylor
So that’s like that we have an analysis of power relations without a metaphysics of power. But you know, I we’re gonna come back to this, these kinds of questions, because I’m still a little bit puzzled, but I’ll remind our listeners, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Foucault and power with Gary cutting, author of “A Very Short Introduction to Foucault.”

Josh Landy
How does power relate to knowledge? Is all power at the top or is it distributed throughout society? And how can we resist the control of power?

Ken Taylor
Power, knowledge and resistance—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Snap
I’ve got the power!

Ken Taylor
I’ve got the power, you’ve got the power and she’s got the Power—is power really everywhere you look? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
… except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and today we’re thinking about Foucault and power. Our guest is Gary Gutting from the University of Notre Dame, author of “A Very Short Introduction to Foucault.”

Ken Taylor
So Gary, I kind of get what you were saying in our last segment, but I want you to expand on and I’m going to give you an enigmatic quote that I have a hard time making sense of a cause I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a definition of the nature of power and its relationship to knowledge, or some contingent fact or whatever. So here’s a here’s just one example. It is not possible, he says, not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. I’m not quite sure what all that means and how it relates to what you were saying about the hospital, for example. Can you help me think about that?

Josh Landy
Good luck, Gary.

Gary Gutting
Yeah, well, let me tell you about that, in terms of examples are important for Foucault. And that’s the prison. prisons were introduced in the 18th 19th century, as a more humane way of treating offenders. The idea is to move beyond the violence of earlier days, the branding, torture, constant executions, but Foucault has his doubts, saying that the point of modern imprisonment, he thinks, is not so much to punish less, but certainly to punish better. The old violence hurt the body, but prison controls every last detail of convicts lives, and imposes a whole new identity on them. In other words, not only does it control with its power, it transforms the meaning of what they are, it gives do knowledge about what they are, in fact, Foucault would go so far as to say that the modern prison creates criminals. You go in, you’re convicted. And once you’ve been to prison, you are from then on known as a dangerous individual. And there’s no way you can ever again, have a normal role in society.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I kind of get I kind of get that point. Gary, I kind of get that point that’s related to the thing I was saying. To Josh, I think it’s kind of related in the opening that, you know, even though there were men who behaved in a certain way, slept with other men in ancient Greece, there weren’t gay people, as we understand gay co there weren’t criminals back then. Right. Exactly. So there wasn’t because there wasn’t this whole social network. There. This whole Ness nexus of power relations and locations within that whole network of thing. I kind of get that. Yeah, okay. Right. But I don’t get I don’t get what that has to do with knowledge. Exactly. What does that what how does knowledge—

Gary Gutting
Because think about it, surrounding all of this criminality, that we’ve got a whole bunch of so called at least sciences like criminology, various sorts of social psychology. And they take the criminal mind as an object, they talk about it. They also you get a lot of this in education, where we’re looking for the early signs, through our feet for our understanding our knowledge of when a student who has only just missed a few classes or taken hooky or something. doesn’t, doesn’t. We suspect that he’s, he’s got a criminal inclination. I got it. And so he gets tracked and watched and followed.

Ken Taylor
So can I see if I could see if this is a fair summary. I mean, it to be a provocative summary. But I think it’s fair that scientists have criminology and all that stuff. bound up in a whole system of power relations actually creates the thing it purports to study. Right, it doesn’t just find that it creates that.

Gary Gutting
Yeah, that’s right. And he actually goes even further than that, because he thinks that the prison in particular, the techniques to control like constant surveillance, record keeping have become a model. In many other modern institutions, like schools, hospitals, business offices, factory floors, you start to think about any of those places in Zuccotti in terms, and you suddenly realize wait, they’re set up to keep track of people to keep them under surveillance. wants to keep records about them, and to categorize them into different kinds of, of people. The good student, the poor student, the normal student.

Josh Landy
This is a very French way of thinking about things, right. You know, you think people are being nice to you. Bah! They are just trying to control you!

Gary Gutting
Well, they are.

Josh Landy
Come on, does it really—Foucault has that line, we’re living in a carceral real society, right? It’s not just the prisons, the schools, anytime anyone looks like they’re being nice to you—

Ken Taylor
You sound skeptical, Josh.

Josh Landy
Right. Is it really true that every time in every interaction between, for example a teacher and a pupil, it’s all it’s all just in the service of this record keeping, control exerting power system? That just seems like it’s going too far.

Gary Gutting
I think there’s Foucault is aware of that, in fact, he’s got a great line that I always keep in mind in working with him. He says, it’s not that everything is bad. It’s that everything is dangerous. It doesn’t necessarily It can even be the power can be very constructive. Because it can, in terms of its own interests, realize that it has to make things better, I mean, that the doctor gets a lot of credit for actually curing you right hospital. That’s a that’s a feather in its cap. So it can be a drive towards improvement in things in the world. But at the same time, there’s always that danger that it can go the other way, you can be productive, it can be destructive.

Ken Taylor
So I want to I want to I was reading some Foucault the last couple of weeks, trying to get ready for this show. One of the things that struck me is that Foucault I, I don’t know if this is quite the way you put it. Foucault thinks that, let’s go back to our Marxists in the roving report. I think Foucault thinks that guy is confused, because he thinks power equals domination. I mean, power can become domination. Yeah. But But Foucault was talking about power requires freedom, and all that and kind of wide ranging freedom. Tell me about that. Because that’s connected to Josh’s stuff about the distributed power?

Gary Gutting
Yeah, I think what’s going on there is he he’s got a phrase, the micro physics of power. You guys had mentioned before, that he doesn’t want to think power about power, and it just a hierarchical top down way. Where there’s one center from which the power comes down. He thinks that at any society, there are a lot of different locations, schools, factories, families, clubs, universities, where there, all of these things are centers of power, right. And they operate individually, but they interact with one another. So he’s got a constant back and forth between all sorts of many power sources. But what about the for a very complicated picture?

Ken Taylor
What about the individual though? And is there power? Not in the school? Or but in the teacher? Or in the pupil? There’s power in the pupil, there’s power in the student, the teacher? There’s power in the janitor? What about the individual Africa himself? Didn’t he? I mean, what does he go that far or not?

Gary Gutting
Well, yeah, I think there’s power in any individual that there are always relationships. Well, I mean, think about the student in the school. On the one hand, the student is supposed to be just learning and getting everything from the teacher who’s in total control. But we all know that the students can be very disruptive. In our world, they can give bad teacher evaluations, they can get it they can make accusations of sexual harassment, they have lots of resources for exercising counter power against the teacher.

Ken Taylor
So that’s the question. So Foucault I think, was accused of not having like room for resistance by some people. But it sounds to me like the possibility of resistance is built into only a thing they can’t resist, right? But a human being that’s in next Nexus have a power relation if they have any degree of freedom. And he seems to require it think that freedom requires power. There’s always the possibility of resistance. Is that how he saw it or not?

Gary Gutting
Yeah, he does think that he thinks that he thinks that his ultimate goal actually would be human freedom, human liberation. That’s what he wants to help people achieve.

Ken Taylor
So you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Foucault and power with Gary Gutting. We’d love to have you join this conversation. And William from Belvedere, what’s your brief comment or question, William?

William
Yeah. Thank you very much. I’m glad that you finally said something about the individual. Because I’m glad that there is no prerequisite to take part in the discussion forever having read a single word. I think you would have very few callers However, I think that the average individual is looking about what can they do tomorrow to try to enact the things that they wish would exist in society? And I have a suggestion, may I offer it?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, if you can do it briefly.

William
Okay, I think that our society functions on economic power. And therefore, for instance, when I hear that the Koch brothers donated $400 million in the recent election to conservative candidates, I know that I should not buy brawny paper towels, for instance, because they own the company that produces them. And therefore every dollar I spend on this case, brawny paper towels, a part of it is going to support causes to which I strongly object. People want to know what they can do tomorrow.

Ken Taylor
Okay, well, am I gonna put that to Gary. Gary, what did what would go say people can do tomorrow, to as it were, fight the power or whatever.

Gary Gutting
Right, he doesn’t propose any general program for a lot of philosophers who do ethics and political stuff, do that they say, Now, here’s the way to reform the world, he thinks every problem is different, every situation is different. And you might need different tools at different times, to engage in the proper way with it. And he produces a lot of those tools. But he’s not giving you some general approach. It says, here’s how to do it. It’s not not like a Marxist analysis that would say, here is how you change the world. It’s rather, you might use this idea, you’ve mentioned about that notion of an episteme. He’s got other ideas about nature of knowledge and nature of, of power, and so on, that can be applied in different contexts. But he just is giving you the general scaffold that he builds a scaffolding that can be moved around, used in different ways, different parts of it.

Josh Landy
That seems right. But um, you know, I, I still wonder about this question, to what degree Foucault is actually building into his philosophy, the idea that we as individuals, really have the power to change things, if so much is driven by systems that are independent of individuals and even even of groups of individuals. I mean, think about that line of is that you know, that any given moment, there’s always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge. I mean, if you take that seriously‚

Gary Gutting
I think it’s a mistake—that’s the impression he gives, especially in “The Order of Things. That’s really not true. He doesn’t really think that

Josh Landy
Is it that he doesn’t really think that or that he changes his mind as it goes on. Because, of course, he’s famous for having taken a lot of things back in the late work

Gary Gutting
Yeah, his his way of taking it back. It’s usually to say, No, I never meant that. But yeah, that’s the following book. After that, where he comments in detail on and develops further, that notion of an episteme is perfectly clear that there are epistemes these for these pair cooling and paradigm type things are all over different locations in a given society. It’s this not global, he doesn’t think that.

Ken Taylor
Okay, he doesn’t think that but it seems to me so, I’ve been teaching Simone de Beauvoir this quarter as part of another of a course I’m doing. And I love this thing in the ethics of ambiguity. She says, it’s a speaking world from so from which solicitations rise up from every corner. It’s and solicitations are rising up from individual subjects. And nothing can stand over against the well there are all kinds of things that stand over against the individual subject, but the individual subjects should be should resist and like this deal with his ambiguity of pure internality and Bababa. Foucault seems really, really, really to downplay this internality thing to subjectivity, to consciousness.

Gary Gutting
He doesn’t like that existentialist is an emphasis on the self and self scrutiny. He’s not he’s against that. Yeah. And it’s also true, the individuals can do things. But I think he thinks the real locus of resistance to power has got to be the actual marginal groups who are being exploited, mistreated, in that, that if people want to help, the best, he had an organization that worked with prisoners and tried to give prisoners themselves the voice to express their views and get out on the table what they needed, because he didn’t think you could speak for others. You could only maybe make a path so they could get get heard by the authority.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, wait a minute, doesn’t have doesn’t that push us back on unto the work to be done by the subjectivity of the marginalized. So aren’t we bringing back subjectivity here in a deep way? I’m gonna I mean, isn’t that a contrary to the centrality his claims about the non centrality of subjectivity? Just give me a brief answer that then we go to a break.

Gary Gutting
Subjectivity is a very big thing for him. He doesn’t want to understand it the way the existentialist do. Where it’s a matter of introspective analysis. But subjectivity is a very positive category for him. And he ties it up closely with truth and the telling of truth to others.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk.We’re thinking about Foucault and power with Gary Gutting, author of “A Very Short Introduction to Foucault.”

Josh Landy
How can today’s activists make use of Foucault’s ideas about power? What can we do when injustice is systemic?

Ken Taylor
How to fight the power—Philosophy Talk continues.

Public Enemy
Fight the power, we got to fight the powers that be.

Ken Taylor
Can you really fight the power or is resistance futile, as the Borg would say? I’m Ken Taylor and d this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and our guest is Gary Gutting from the University of Notre Dame. Today we’re thinking about Foucault and power.

Ken Taylor
So Gary, I want to take you back a step to what you said about subjectivity. I think I got it, I think but I’m going to try out a thought on you the difference between say, existentialist celebration of subjectivity and fucose taken subjectivity. Here’s one thing I guess you might think, like, you might think, like a Cartesian that the subject in his or her pure subjectivity is prior to all this stuff, right, and then encounters all this stuff. And then But then I put and I guess there’s a kind of thing sort of like that in the existentialist, but the existentialist encounters this externality and has to deal with it. Foucault seems to think the subject itself is somehow as the subject is somehow constructed somehow by the system of power relations. Is that a plausible thought?

Gary Gutting
Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it. A good example that we haven’t mentioned before, but I think it’s worth it within this context, is his views about sex. He was deeply suspicious, in particular, of the 1960s Sexual Revolution. Revolution presents itself as a liberation from repressive Victorian prudery as you would call it. But Foucault maintained that we are just new sorts of Victorians, right? We endlessly scrutinize our sex lives, going over the minute Lee thinking about them, talking about them, getting advice about them, to be sure that we’re living up to the new standards of tolerant boundary expanding sexuality. I mean, think about magazines like Playboy Cosmo, with their constant insistence on, you’d have to have new experiences, you have to develop new techniques, you have to become a better lover, you have to get rid of your old hang ups. And he says that shows that we are so devoted to not being prudes in the Victorian sense that we come prudish in another way about demands to be open to be more tolerant and to push ourselves falling Joshy quite uncomfortable for carry.

Ken Taylor
You can’t see how is shaking his head in disgust—not at you, at Foucault.

Gary Gutting
Yeah, that sexual ethics is just as confining as the old family values. One is great line, as he says, ever gets faced with the whole discussion. The irony is that anyone thought the sexual revolution had anything to do with liberation?

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, he thought that for a moment, and then he changed his mind. I mean, like this was this was the kind of French Foucault’s kind of hip cynicism that as you as you say, in your in your book, you know, he can’t he comes to California, he and he writes a very different kind of book and of course, gives some other interviews, where all of a sudden he’s saying, You know what, some of these practices of self fashioning aren’t bogus. They aren’t just matters of You know, buying into a new set of restrictive social norms. They’re actually genuinely liberating. So even Foucault didn’t believe this throughout his career.

Gary Gutting
But he goes back when he talks when he gets to that stage, you’re right. He goes back to models from ancient Greece and Rome, interestingly.

Josh Landy
Sure, but so what I mean, it, you know, the fact that they existed once is evidence that they can exist. And so why why should it be the case that, that, you know, sexual liberation was not liberating, maybe just made a mistake?

Ken Taylor
So Gary, why don’t you answer that, then I’m going to take a call. You got something to respond to that.

Gary Gutting
Well, I think he would have said that if we look at the modern situation in 19, in the 20th and 21st centuries, his analysis would hold true, but it’s true. He thinks that there are ways of having legitimate this would be legitimate subjectivity, right? Where you can fasten your own life. Well, of course, he was trying to do that, with this project of saying, I be I write my books become a different person every time Right. Right, that’s built in from the beginning,

Ken Taylor
We’ve got to caller Al from somewhere in the Bay Area on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, out in the Bay Area.

Al
Hello, Ken. Hello, everybody. They’re just curious what anyone would say. Foucault would say, or any of you would say about how words bind us to the power when we’re in society? If, if, obviously, if you’re not in society, I don’t know how it would work there. But in society, you’re a master at something. So you’ve got the power as a police state, to, to correct, whatever is deviant from what you feel is right. Yeah. Is there power in there that foco? Or any of you would like to jump in on?

Ken Taylor
Well I have, I could, I could say a lot to say about that. But I’m gonna focus your question on language because you’ve started out talking about words. And Foucault has a lot to say about how language shapes this stuff. So can you give us a like, just a really brief account, Gary, of Foucault.

Gary Gutting
That’s very big for him that especially his earlier work, it was all even talked about doing what he called an archaeology, which was really an archaeology of language. And different, different societies, different cultures have a whole different set of words they use, and things that seem perfectly obvious. 200 years ago, seemed totally ridiculous to us now. And so there’s a there’s a foreignness to the past. That’s actually makes it very useful for us, because it can help us broaden our horizons. But language was really important. All along. He also thinks that whatever it is, it’s beyond language. He has a he does have that fascination with the irrational. In the artist on the bore borderline of insanity. I like to talk about Nietzsche a lot, and Van Gogh and people like that. He thinks that there’s this early on, especially I think that drops off a little bit more later on, but he thinks there is even a non linguistic nother dimension. But language is utterly important, especially in the social level.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, this is something we could go on and on about it is a big topic in Foucault. And when I find, at times fascinating and that time, frustrating, I disagree with a lot and I agree with some, but that’s a really big topic, but I want to ask you, some kind of forward looking thing. I’m thinking about today’s activist movements. Going back to the piece, I mean, you can have different views about the relevance of Foucault today’s activist movements, what do you think? How should today’s activist movements from Black Lives Matter to meat to to all these different things to think about?

Gary Gutting
Yeah wll, one thing about Foucault has attracted almost everybody is he has a really fertile theoretical mind all sorts of ideas that keep coming, coming and coming. And he offers intriguing ideas about nature, knowledge, structure, power, role of truth and politics, many, many things. But what many readers do is think that what he’s given them is a universal account in general theory, that will apply everywhere. That is what’s least in his mind, he does not mean that as I said before, like the analogy of scaffolding, he will build a theory, you will build a theory about sexuality or about prisons and he will develop it for the sake of understanding this particular phenomenon in this particular book, but he doesn’t ever commit himself to a general picture or method. So I think we should follow his lead. This here, I would bring up the the metaphor that he uses constantly. He says that the results of his work are really just a toolbox, that it’s not a, not a machine for producing definite results, but a whole set of different tools that can be used to and intolerable ways of treating marginal groups like prisoners, immigrants, ethnic minorities. And so his primary audience is people who are working in what you might call the social trenches, the people who are leaders of movements, like Black Lives Matter.

Josh Landy
I like this idea of the toolbox. And it made me think I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Black Lives Matter and other of today’s crucial activist movements. And thinking that, you know, black lives matter really is chemists saying earlier, they really seem to have put into practice this recoding idea of, of distributed power. And I can trust that I’m not sure if you would agree with this in contrasting it with talk these days about cultural appropriation. That I think is, is I mean, it’s equally important as a topic. But I worry sometimes that talk about cultural appropriation has a more kind of vertical picture of us. Yeah, hegemonic ACEN and oppressed them as opposed to a more, you know, a picture of circulation of power to be more full codium? What, what do you think about that?

Gary Gutting
Yeah, yeah, I don’t know if he would, I don’t think the mere notion of appropriation cultures do interact, they learn from one another. I think he’s all for that. But it is true, that there are many ways of marginalizing the people that that you don’t care about in your society.

Ken Taylor
That’s true. So but I, I take I see if I can, he said he doesn’t have any general method or theory. But I wanted to draw a general lesson at least. And that’s tell you tell me if you think I could draw this lesson. So when you’re in a moment, in a historical moment, you have to analyze the concrete particularity of your situation. And its unfolding, it’s coming to be the structure of power relations. And that’s so don’t look to Marx and his forever standing class analysis or Hegel, in the dialectic of history, look, to analyze your situation and find out what the concrete power structures are and all that.

Gary Gutting
Look, well, there is really interesting, because what he wants to do when he wants to understand a contemporary problem is say, Look, we have a restricted viewpoint, we’re just within our own particular episteme, if you like, our own paradigm, but we can get out of that, at least to a serious extent, by looking at the past and seeing how differently they thought and trying to come to terms with that way of thinking. So he actually uses the analysis of the past as a way of breaking us free of our own prejudices, our own limitations.

Ken Taylor
Well, Gary on that now, this has been an empowering conversation. And I’m really glad and thankful to you for joining us.

Gary Gutting
Thank you. I was excited to be here.

Ken Taylor
Out guest has been Gary gutting. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, my beloved alma mater. He’s author of “Foucault: A Very Short Introduction,” and he’s also editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Foucault.” So Josh, do you have any empowering, newly empowered, Foucaultian thoughts?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s so hard with Foucault because you’re some of it is unclear. And some of it’s kind of extreme on the negative side, and it takes a bunch of back. But you know, some of it’s very powerful, I think, in particular, of the part of his thinking that’s been picked up by black lives matter. I think that’s, that’s really important.

Ken Taylor
You know, I used I have all kinds of ideas about normativity and stuff, and I used to be accused of being Taylor really just to Galeon And lately, I’ve been accused of Taylor, you really Foucault. I suppose I have some internal affinity for somebody that’s just power speaking through you. Okay. I’ve started Foucault a fair number of times. And I’ve never been able to get to this exhausting kind of way. But it is. There is a lot of fascinating things to it. But you know what this conversation continues, and philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is, with apologies to Descartes, Cogito ergo Blogo, I think therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in that community just by visiting our website and clicking around a bit at philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
and if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on our blog. Now, since Knowledge is power is speed, let’s hear from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… As a wannabe avant garde guy in college I read the Theater and Its Double by the poet Artaud, a huge influence on alternative theater. He wrote, “If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” Being a young man, I thought, that’s cool! Not cool enough to ignite myself onstage, of course, but cool enough to cite at parties. Somewhere I read that Foucault had read Artaud, which led me to his book, MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION. About how the insane of the Middle Ages were once allowed to wander in the villages, but then put on ships for the ships to wander. The so-called Ship of Fools. This book fit right into one taxonomy of the seventies, you know, the who are we to say who’s crazy in this crazy world genre. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, KING OF HEARTS, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz. So I went on to read THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC, and THE ORDER OF THINGS. And then Foucault got a bit too dense for me. I would get to the end of a sentence and not know where I had been. So I moved on to the Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, as God intended. You can see Foucault’s appeal to the post-hippie college-educated Boomer. He’s like Marxism without the Marxism. He’s like Chomsky only he leaves the house sometimes. In black leather. He’s all about power. What is it, how it works. Can you get out of the way? Well, no, he wasn’t about advice. Archeology is what he called what he did. A Foucauldian claim made insouciantly back in the day was that biology itself was an instrument of power. Power is in taxonomy, nomenclature, species and genuses; the very act of description. Looking at something through a microscope is a way to gain control over the thing viewed, how it was viewed, and who got to view it. The person with the lenses and the binomials was the person with the power. I had never thought of it that way before. How you structure information is a source of power. Nothing to be done about it, at least Foucault didn’t offer any microscopic revolutions, with little tiny barricades. But Foucault did not dispute the truthiness, if you will, of these structures. Microscopes and naming did give us the names for diseases and led to cures. And yet, there does seem to be a kind of social Darwinist spin on Faucault. Some people opt out of vaccinations because they’re perceived as a power play by big pharma to… I dunno what? Give our kids autism? Low level paranoia may be an appropriate response to a Foucauldian view of the world. The will to power is also behind the will to knowledge. Real life app? Deregulation of the airwaves allowed drugmakers to advertise an explosion of mysterious nostrums. They have names like Incivek, Adcetris, Yervoy, Viibryd, Zytiga, Xgeva. These are targeted at real ailments, and even self diagnosed diseases that match your self observed symptoms. As the ads say, “Ask your doctor if Rocepnid is right for you.” In some ways it’s a brave new world of small medical miracles. In others, it’s a Foucauldian dystopian nightmare. Or Uber. It’s a bold new direction in capitalism. You are your own boss, you make your hours. But you are a slave to the algorithms. Meet the new boss, meaner than the old boss, because he’s a robot. You carry your own panopticon with you, on your smart phone. I just read that Foucault is being read in business management classes. The importance of taxonomy. Just a small example. How do you convince people to store all their information on other people’s computers? That sounds kind of scary. Well, you just call it the Cloud. Driving people into bankruptcy and despair. Let’s call that disruption. It’s why we have Facebook today. And we are as victims burning at the stake, signaling through the flames. Or maybe we’re trying to hail a cab? Silly martyr. Put your hand down. Use the Uber app on your smart phone. You got the power, darling. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of K LW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Tina Pamintaun.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o RG where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

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