Giorgio Agamben

"What is a Paradigm?"A lecture by Giorgio Agamben,August 2002

Agamben:

This title "What is a Paradigm" seems to suggest that my presentation willfocus on epistemological and methodological questions. I do not feel at all it is aboutthese questions, I don’t like these kind of problems, I always have the impression, as onceHeidegger put it, that we have here people busy sharpening knives when there is nothingleft to cut. But in the life of a scholar there comes a time when methodological premises become necessary. As a matter of fact, in two recent books I have analyzed figures and phenomena such as Homo Sacer in Roman law or der Musslemen in Auschwitz which areobviously propositive historical phenomena. However, in my books they were treated as paradigms whose function was to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems.This brought about some misunderstanding, especially amongst those persons who ingood or in bad faith seemed to think that I was illegitimately acting as a historian, usingfacts as metaphors and vice versa. Anyway we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in the human sciences, or even in art? These are the questions I will try toanswer today. Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is itsEntvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. Itis something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfoldedand worked out. By the way I think this is a very good definition of philosophy.Philosophy has no specificity, no proper territory, it is within literature, within art or science or theology or whatever, it is this element which contains a capability to bedeveloped. In a sense philosophy is scattered in every territory. It is always a diaspora,and must recollected and gathered up. In any case this is the way I like to work, to try todiscover this philosophical element, this Entvicklungsfahigkeit, in the work of the author I like. This philosophical element, to use Benjamin’s words, is similar to the fragment of messianic time scattered and disseminated in the profane time. This is the only meaning Ican give to Schleiermacher’s famous hermeneutic principle: to understand an author better than he has understood himself. To me this can only mean to find theEntvichlungsfahigkeit in his work. But then you must never forget the hermeneutic principle that Coleridge states in chapter twelve of his "Biographia Litteraria": until youunderstand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.Ignorance stands here as what the author had to leave unsaid, undeveloped, or as a potential. This ignorance names the supreme art of writing, to allow something to remain

as a potential so the reader can develop it and eventually bring it to actuality. MichelFoucault uses the word "paradigm" many times in his writings, but without ever definingit. On the other hand, in the "Archeology of Knowledge", and in subsequent books, henames the objects of his investigation, in order to distinguish them from the objects of historians, "knowledge embedded in a practice". The analogy between these concepts andwhat Kuhn in his book on the structure of scientific revolution calls "paradigms" hasalready been observed. Even though Foucault never thematizes the function of the paradigm, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow

"it is clear that his work follows anorientation which makes use of these notions. His method consists in describing adiscourse as historical articulations of a paradigm."

Yet Foucault who declares that heread Kuhn’s book, which he describes as

"admirable"

and

"definitive"

, very rarely refersto it, and seems even explicitly to keep a distance from it. So we have then first to check if this apparent analogy between these two methodologists corresponds in reality todifferent problems and different strategies. Kuhn acknowledges having used the term"paradigm" in two different meanings. In the first one, "paradigm" designates what themembers of a certain scientific community have in common, that is to say, the whole of techniques, patents and values shared by the members of the community. In the secondsense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton’s Principia,which, acting as a common model or an example, paradigm means simply "example", asyou know, stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation. Thus the question is for Kuhn to investigate by means of the paradigmwhat makes possible the constitution of what he calls a "normal science". That is to say,the science which can decide if a certain problem will be considered scientific or not. Normal science does not mean at all a science guided by a coherent system of rules, onthe contrary, the rules can be derived from the paradigms, but the paradigms

can guidethe investigation also in the absence of rules.

This is precisely the second meaning of theterm "paradigm", which Kuhn considered the most new and profound, though it is intruth the oldest. The paradigm is in this sense just an example, a single phenomenon, asingularity, which can be repeated and thus acquires the capability of tacitly modeling the behavior and the practice of scientists. So in writing that the paradigm can guide theinvestigation also in the absence of rules and laws, Kuhn probably refers implicitly to theKantian doctrine of the example in the third Critique, in paragraph eighteen. This is thefirst example I make of a philosopher trying to define the example. Kant refers to theexemplarity of the aesthetic judgment which needs the agreement of all men in the judgment, and which can be seen as a example of a universal rule which cannot be stated.So the example is the example of a rule which cannot be stated. The example, accordingto Kant, refers to an absent or unsayable law, and yet it does not dare to free completelythe example from the empire of the law, of the rule. That’s why in the "Critique of PureReason" he writes that

"examples are the crutches and the leading strings of a weak judgment. By a judgment I mean that which can only understand the universal inabstractum and is unable to decide whether a concrete case is covered or not by the law."

So here you have the bad side of Kant. I think that the concept of law is really the weak point in Kant’s thought. Remember Deleuze showing how Kant has this obsession withinstituting tribunals, making the law function. What I will try to do, on the contrary, is toshow that the logic of the example has nothing to do with the universality of the law.Let’s go back to Foucault. It has often been observed that Foucault deliberately ignores

the traditional approach to the problems of power founded on juridical and institutionalmodels in order to concentrate on the analysis of the positive device through which power gets into the very bodies of the subjects to govern and form their forms of life. Theanalogy with Kuhn again is striking. Just as Kuhn dismisses the investigation of the ruleswhich constitute a normal science in order to focus on the paradigms which guide the behavior of scientists, Foucault seems to reject the primacy of the juridical andinstitutional models to emphasize the techniques by which the state takes upon itself thecare of the life of individuals. So why then does Foucault seem to carefully avoid notonly Kuhn’s name but also the term "paradigm" when he is reflecting on epistemologicalquestions? Did he have some personal reason for it? As a matter of fact, in 1971,someone wrote in the New York Times an aggressive review under the title "TheMandarin of the Hour, Michel Foucault". It was probably a very stupid enterprise, but theauthor was no stupid man, being none other than George Steiner. But sometimes evenintelligent men make mistakes or faux pas, and this was certainly a big mistake. AnywayFoucault who at the time ignored even the name of George Steiner and thought he was just a journalist, wrote an ironic and equally aggressive reply. George Steiner wrote inturn his reply, which was followed by even more ironic response from Foucault. Steiner accused Foucault of not having mentioned Kuhn’s name in his book. Foucault explainedthat he read Kuhn’s book in winter of ’63-’64 after having written it. In the preface to his book Kuhn acknowledges his debt to two French epistemologists, Courier and Meyerson,his never mentions Kandellam. This is just a hypothesis, but it is possible that Foucault,who was closely linked to Kandellam, avoiding any reference to Kuhn’s name wassimply paying him back for his impoliteness. But although Foucault was certainlysensible to personal and friendly motivations, it is evident that the reason for his silencecannot be only of this kind. So let us have a closer look at the way that the paradigmfunctions in Foucault. Let’s take the panopticon. What we have here is first of all a singlehistorical phenomenon, a peculiar architectonic model described by Jeremy Bentham published in Dublin in 1791, under the title "Panopticon, or the Inspection House,Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction…etc, etc," I suppose you arefamiliar with the panopticon which will then become a kind of archetype of institutionslike prisons. Foucault describes the panopticon and then says you have only to put aguard or a watchman in the central tower, and in each cell a prisoner, a madman, or evena student, and you will produce a kind a theater where a single person can watch andcontrol a multitude of men. So, the panopticon is a concrete, singular, historical phenomenon, but for Foucault at the same time the panopticon is, as he writes,"panoptism". That is so say, a model of functioning which can be generalized, whichallows the definition and establishment of new sets in the relationship between power andthe everyday life of man. From this point of view the panopticon is no more simply adreamlike building but also the diagram of a mechanism of power in its ideal form. Thismeans that the panopticon functions as a paradigm, as an example which defines theintelligibility of the set to which it belongs and at the same time which it constitutes.Foucault always works in this way. There is always a concrete phenomenon - theconfession, the juridical inquiry, etc, which functions as a paradigm, because it willdecide a whole problematic context which it both constitutes and makes intelligible. Thisis what distinguishes Foucault’s work from the work of a historian. It has often beenobserved that Foucault as a historian has shown the superiority of contexts created