Taylor, Foucault, and Otherness Author(s): William E. Connolly Source: Political Theory, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Aug.

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AN MICHELFOUCAULT: EXCHANGE

I. TAYLOR, FOUCAULT, AND OTHERNESS

WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY The Johns Hopkins University

OUCAULT, according to Taylor, identifies modes of subjugation poorly understood or thinly documented in previous critical accounts, but the Nietzschean perspective that governs this account, although supporting resistance to domination, severs the moral nerve of collective efforts to improve the modern condition. At a high level of generality, I concur with this judgment. And, as anyone would expect who has read his previous work, Taylor illuminates dark corners of social theory as he strives to dislodge the viable elements of Foucault's thought from a perspective that seems to depreciate a politics of social improvement. But I also contend, first, that the translation of Foucaultian rhetoric into Tayloresque formulations obscures distinctive features of Foucault's thought and, second, that once this obscurity is lifted, the success of Taylor's critique of Foucault will depend less on the claim that the theory is "ultimately incoherent" and more on Taylor's ability to defend his own affirmations from Foucaultian decomposition. Foucault's documentary studies are designed, I believe, to support an ontological thesis with political implications. The character of this thesis and the way in which it is advanced are the first questions to be posed in an engagement with Foucault. In "The Order of Discourse," while opposing the rationalist idea of a founding subject, the phenomenological enterprise, and the Heideggerian quest for Being, Foucault asserts: "We must not imagine that there is a great universal or a great unthought which runs throughout the world and intertwines with all its forms and all its
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events, and which we have to articulate or to think at last."1 And in opposition to any ontology that contains teleological elements,
We must not imagine that the world turns toward us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which predisposes the world in our favor. We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to things, or, in any case as a practice which we impose on them.2

What is the force of the "is" and the "must" in these statements? The claim-I use a Nietzschean term of art here with sufficient ambiguity to avoid being drawn immediately into the circle of epistemology within which critics strive to enclose Foucault's thoughtis that there is more to being than knowing and that the advance of the knowledge enterprise into new corners of life is the advance simultaneously of subjectification, normalization, and disciplinary control. The claim, in short, is that the will to truth that governs modernity is the will to extend discipline, to impose form over that which was not designed to receive it. And the "claim" is not simply a knowledge claim, although it is intimately connected to claims about knowledge. Foucault adopts two interlocking strategies to support this claim. First, there is, as in the chapter in The Order of Things entitled "Man and his Doubles," an archaeological account of how modern understandings of finitude-of life, labor, and language-eventually call transcendental and teleological perspectives into question from within. In modern discourse we witness "the interminable to and fro of a double system of reference: if man's knowledge is finite, it is because he is trapped, without possibility of liberation, within the positive content of language, labor, and life, and conversely, if life, labor, and language may be posited in their positivity, it is because knowledge has finite forms."3 In this setting every articulation of thought presupposes the unthought from which it draws nourishment and, conversely, that which nourishes thought must always escape full articulation. The perpetuation by thought of the unthought provides material from which foundational theories can be stripped of their foundational pretensions. Foucault's thought at this archaeological level does not seek to defeat an orientation such as Taylor's. Rather, it identifies the terrain upon which modern critics of epistemological foundationalism (such as Heidegger, Taylor, Foucault, Blumenberg, and Rorty) compete

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with one anotherfor hegemony.There are, indeed, several points of commonalitybetween Taylorand Foucault:
(1) An episteme sets (in Taylor's language) "the limits of the thinkable" for an age, even though those limits do not necessarily correspond to the limits of thought as such. (2) The correspondence theory of truth does not coalesce with modern understandings of finitude as those understandings find expression in theories of life, labor, and language. (3) The premodern mode of attunement to the world no longer is available to us, although Taylor seems to think that a new form of attunement between self-identity and the world might become available. (4) There Is more to being than knowing, or, in the formulation Foucault would prefer, there is more to life than knowing. (5) Language is impoverished if It is forced into a designative philosophy of language, and the prediscursive realm from which discourse is formed never can be drawn fully into discourse. (6) The strong theory of the subject as sovereign or universal no longer is sustainable. (7) The death of God does or would spread an infection throughout prevailing understandings of truth, the self, rationality, and morality.

It is because Taylorsharesso muchwith Foucaultat this firstlevel that he must struggle so valiantly against him at the second. For within these broadcommonalitiesreside fundamentaldifferencesin the orientationsof each to morality,politics, the self, and the entire modern condition; and the commonalities limit the ways in which each can legitimatelycriticize the contrary impulses governing the thoughtof the other. Taylor,findinghimself unableto prove his most fundamentalassumptionsto be true, seeks to draw us closer to the experience of attunementbetween the way humanbeings are at their best and the actualidentityavailableto the modernself. He seeks to transcendthe illusion of the sovereign self in commandof the world by situatingit in a world both largerthan it and partlyconstitutiveof it. He does this by strivingto articulatefor us those elements in the self and its circumstancesthatcome closest to expressingwhatwe are at our best. The most expressive articulations are not simply the creations of subjects, nor do they represent what is true in itself independentlyof humanarticulation: "They ratherhave the powerto move us because they manifest our expressive power itself and its relationto our world. In this kindof expression we are respondingto the way things are, ratherthanjust exteriorizingour feelings."4

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But Foucault, conceiving discourse as "a violence we do to things," cannot endorse this quest for attunement and selfrealization. He proceeds at the second level, then, as a genealogist, deploying rhetorical devices to incite the experience of discord or discrepancy between the social construction of self, truth, and rationality and that which does not fit neatly within their folds. And the recurrent experience of discord eventually shakes the self loose from the quest for a world of harmonization, a world in which the institutional possibilities for personal identity harmonize with a unified set of potentialities in the self, and the realization of unity in the self harmonizes with the common good realized by the social order. This quest for identity through institutional identification becomes redefined as the dangerous extension of "disciplinary society" into new corners of modern life. The rhetorical figures, to use a phrase of Nietzsche's, incite us to "listen to a different claim" rather than to accept the findings of an argument; and they proceed in this way because genealogy of the will to truth cannot present itself as a set of truth claims. Genealogy is not a claim to truth (although it functions in an episteme in which established theories of truth are called into question); it exercises a claim upon the self that unsettles the urge to give hegemony to the will to truth. The Foucaultian rhetorical strategy works, for instance, through displacement of the unifying or mellow metaphors governing Taylor's texts by more disturbing ones; and by the conversion of noun forms giving solidity to modern conceptions of truth, subject, and normality into verbs that present them as constructions; and by the posing of questions left unanswered in the text; and by the introduction of sentence fragments that communicate even though they do not fit into the conventional form that gives primacy to the subject; and by a mode of repetition in one text that exposes and counteracts the unconscious effect of repetitiveness on judgment in the cumulative flow of mainstream texts. These strategies are designed, I believe, simultaneously to express a view of the relation between social form and the material from which it is constructed at odds with that accepted by Taylor, to expose the subterranean role played by rhetorical configurations in texts by writers such as Taylor in gaining assent to their most fundamental convictions, and to excite in the reader the experience of discord between the social construction of normality and that which does not fit neatly within the frame of these constructs.

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Now if we read Foucault in this way, his texts can still be criticized and opposed. But I contend that those such as Taylor who seek to dismiss fundamental features of the project by showing it to be incoherent will find it more difficult to make that charge stick once they are not allowed to precede their critiques of Foucaultian genealogy by a translation of it into the very formulations it seeks to interrogate. Let me show how this is so by considering more specifically several charges Taylor makes against Foucault. I Foucault, says Taylor, "adopts a Nietzschean-derived stance of neutrality between the different historical systems of power, and thus seems to neutralize the evaluations that arise out of his analyses."5 It is true that Foucault refuses to endorse the life of one period over another, and it also is true that the endorsements he does make are not couched in the subject-centered moral vocabulary most familiar to us. But, first, the view that Foucault distinguishes between "hermetically sealed monolithic truth regimes" is greatly exaggerated. He explicitly denies such an assumption in his studies of punishment and sexuality. He speaks, for instance, of "this will to truth which has crossed so many centuries of our history"; he identifies affinities as well as differences between the religious confessionals of the medieval age and the modern confessional; and he emphasizes the importance of the mind/body dualism that has haunted the West since its inception. Foucault does refuse to endorse any settled way of life unambiguously because he claims that every such settlement involves imposition even while it may enable life to be in particular ways. But neither, then, is he neutral. He is not neutral, for example, about the will to truth and its effects. Informed by the Nietzschean maxim that "we have art so that we will not perish from the truth," he seeks to loosen (but not, I think, to eliminate) the hold the will to truth has over modem life. The will to truth cannot be eliminated, but its hegemony can and should be contested. Taylor's characterization of Foucault as a neutralist illicitly assimilates the Foucaultian assault on subject-centered normative judgment to a stance that depreciates evaluation altogether. It thereby misrepresents Foucault's interrogation of moder standards of normality prior to contesting it.

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II Taylor asserts that Foucault's theory of social "strategies without projects . . . makes no sense." Why? Because "purposefulness without purpose requires a certain kind of explanation to be intelligible . . . to be related to the purposeful action of agents in a way that we can understand."6 I agree with Taylor here in one respect, and his clarification of what a good explanation requires is superb. But it also attributes an intention to Foucault that is not his. Foucault does not seek to offer complete explanations because he knows that such an objective will draw him back into the discourse he seeks to unsettle, because he knows that in the modern episteme a coherent explanation will presuppose the very conceptions of truth and subjectivity he wishes to call into question. He does, though, seek through genealogy to create distance between the modem self and the discourse in which it is implicated. Genealogy, not explanation. Taylor, in reply, might insist that the genealogical project can have no presence even as a counterpoint to established modes of explanation. As alternative rhetorical strategies induce alternative effects, even they, he might say, must finally be subjected to epistemic evaluation. Even one who seeks to play the role of the fool to prevailing modes of discourse, it may be claimed, must be drawn back into the circle of epistemology. But these are not arguments Taylor has actually given in the text before us. He has not really tried, first, to ascertain what stance Foucault adopts with respect to the aspirations of the human sciences and, then, to ask whether such a stance can be sustained as a viable counterpoint to those aspirations. He merely assumes that Foucault intends to offer explanations contesting those that now have hegemony, and then he shows that if Foucault's texts do embody such intentions, they do not live up to the standard of good or coherent explanations. III Foucault, says Taylor, offers a theory of power that is not linked to freedom. It is a theory of "power without freedom or truth." And this will not work, for the "notion of power or domination requires some notion of constraint imposed on someone by a process in some way related to human agency."7 And, again, "power needs targets," but

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Foucaultwants to use the languageof power while refusingto accept the idea of subjects who have power exercised over them. Foucault agrees in part with this contention. But the target of power is not in his theorya subjectthatis repressedor constrainedby power. Powerproducesthe subjectthatbecomes not a merefictionof theory andlaw,but a realartifact.The subject,on Foucault'sreading, is not "dead": It is very much alive and very much the effect of moder disciplinaryinstitutions. But if power produces the subject, in what ways does power constrainor limitthe self? Subjectification, an effect of power, subjugatesrecalcitrantmaterialin an embodied self resistantto this form. Power producesand constrains, then, but the targetof constraintis not the self as agent, but thatin selves which resists agentification.Foucault'stheoryof power and subjectification is part of his assault on those teleological philosophiesthat continue to find disguised expression in the moder age. The theory of the essentially embodied subject, for instance, is a theory of selfrealization that treats the self as if it were designed to fulfill its potentiality throughperfectingits subjectivity;and to reject the residualteleological premiseinside that hope is to see the subjectas an artificialrealityimposed on materialnot designed to receive it. Freedom, in this perspective, is not reducibleto the freedomof subjects;it is at least partlythe releaseof thatwhich does not fit into the moldsof This is what Foucaultmeanswhen he subjectivityand normalization. says that "the soul is the prisonof the body"and when he supportsthe "insurrection subjugated of knowledges"that speak, althoughimperfectly and indirectly,to that which is subjugatedby normalization. Foucault also explicitly aspiresto a conception of rightsattachednot merelyto the self as subject,but especially to that which is definedby the normalized subject as otherness, as deviating from or falling below or failingto live up to the standardsof subjectivity. I agree with Taylorin saying that we should cherish some ideal of subjectivity,and Foucault seems to me, although there are counter tendencies in his work as well, to be too willing to dispense with the ideal of subjectivityaltogether.But Taylor's critiqueof Foucault on the subject through the medium of a critique of his conception of power misses its target. Foucault's theory of power may be exaggerated-human beings may,for instance, be more receptive to subjectificationthan Foucault'sontology of discord allows. But it is not an incoherent theory of power. And Taylor's failure to see that deflects him from a more fundamentalquestion: What implications

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might Foucault's documentary studies of otherness carry for established theories of the subject? IV "Foucault must presuppose truth in seeing truth as imposed."8 Hence, the ultimate incoherence in his project, an incoherence that spreads an infection into his theory of power, freedom, subjectivity, and order. Foucault needs to see truth as imposed by power, rather than a discovery that serves as a standard by which to assess power; but he cannot sustain a conception of truth as imposition. That is Taylor's charge. But I think there are a couple of rejoinders available to Foucault here. First, he can say that if his texts presuppose a theory of truth and subjectivity even while calling them into question this predicament merely inverts the one facing his critics. For they affirm conceptions of truth and subjectivity constantly called into question in the modern episteme. Taylor, for instance, cannot prove the theory of truth presupposed by his theory of subjectivity and Foucault cannot escape presuppositions at odds with his own project. We have reached an impasse to which there are alternative possible responses. If the limits of the modern episteme do not constitute the limits to possible thought as such, a case can be made in favor of Foucault's response to this predicament. Foucault's response, overtly informed by political considerations, is to refuse to constrain his discourse by these presuppositions. Rather, he strives to stretch the established limits of the thinkable by concentrating on how otherness appears when it is presented as the product of a subjectivity that is itself produced. This political project of estrangement from the identity given to us before we are in a position to appraise it critically is the obverse of Taylor's project, exemplified by the discussion at the end of his text, of drawing us into endorsement and perfection of the identity now given to us. Taylor insists that we "cannot" escape this identity; Foucault insists that we can go further than Taylor imagines if only we pursue the genealogical project relentlessly. Now Taylor could argue that there is no such impasse here, but he has not. That would require a more affirmative argument on his part. For only if Taylor shows first that he escapes this predicament with respect to truth and subjectivity can he conclude that Foucault's immersion in it provides sufficient reason to dismiss his project.

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There is a second response available to Foucault as well. He might acknowledge that although his archaeology of truth contains elements of an immanent critique-arguing that in the modern episteme the assumptions within foundational theories of subjectivity and truth constantly erode the solidity of the foundations themselves-his genealogy of the will to truth is not itself a claim to truth. It consists, again, of rhetorical strategies designed to incite the experience of subjugation in those areas in which the question of truth recently has been given primacy. That is what The History of Sexuality, for instance, is all about. It seeks to fix the connection between truth and sexuality in modernity-to expose the peculiar, modern character of the conviction "that it is sex itself which hides the most secret parts of the individual, the structure of his fantasies, the roots of his ego, the forms of his relationship to reality."9 And the intrusion of the will to truth into this sphere involves the extension of discipline into new frontiers of disciplinary society. The more modest side of this thesis-that the connection between truth and sex is now accentuated-is susceptible, even in Foucault's view, to documentary support and critique; but the politically more important claim about the disciplinary effects of this intrusion will carry conviction only if Foucault convinces us that "there is no prediscursive providence which predisposes the world in our favor," no true identity to be realized by unveiling the secrets of sex. And that latter conviction functions not as a truth claim but as a genealogical claim against the primacy of the will to truth. A Taylor critique of Foucault's view of truth must show why genealogy is incoherent even as a counterpoint to explanatory theory and, especially, why Taylor's ontology is more viable than Foucault's. If, as I believe, Taylor must acknowledge that his ontology is not susceptible to demonstration by epistemological means, he will find himself facing something like the predicament he attributes to Foucault: The theory of truth he endorses presupposes an ontology supportable only by indirect means. If Taylor affirms this feature of his own enterprise, it is not unreasonable to expect him to grant it to Foucault. Taylor, I have charged, seeks to evade the pressure Foucault exerts on his own theory of the subject by convicting Foucaultian theory of incoherence. I have also suggested, first, that Foucault is not as vulnerable to these criticisms as Taylor makes him out to be and, second, that even though that charge is inflated, there still is a

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case to be made in favor of the modern subject. Assuming that I have made progress in defusing the charge of incoherence, what theory of the subject remains defensible after an encounter with Foucaultian theory? Without trying to argue the case in detail, I wish to suggest that while established theories of personal identity inadequately cope with the ways in which the constitution of the modern subject spawns otherness, there is a case to be made for the subject as an essentially ambiguous achievement of modernity. 0 It is an achievement because without the emergence of self as subject, we could not sustain democratic citizenship or moral responsibility. But it is an ambiguous achievement because once we affirm that the self was not designed to be a subject, we are in a position to see that the formation of subjectivity must subjugate that which does not fit neatly within its confines. When we give up the residue of telos clinging to modern conceptions of the subject, we can adopt a different political stance to that which is other to subjectivity. We will see otherness to be less what mental instability, criminality, and perversity are in themselves and more what must be produced and contained if subjectivity is to be. If we understand the subject in this way, if we acknowledge that the subject is formed from material and not predesigned to fit perfectly into this form, we are in a position to reconsider the politics of containment that now governs institutional orientations to otherness. We will not be able to conceive an order in which otherness is eliminated, but we may be able to appraise more adequately the debt subjectivity owes to it. I have intimated one way in which the theory of the subject might be revised after an exploration of Foucault's genealogies of otherness to encourage Taylor to articulate more affirmatively what shifts, if any, seem to him to be required in his own theories of truth, freedom, order, and personal identity after engaging these texts. Specifically, there are three related areas in which clarification would be illuminating. First, given Taylor's previous critique of the primacy of epistemology, his apparent rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, his endorsement of the hermeneutic circle in social theory with its acceptance of persistent theoretic contestability, his commitment to an expressive philosophy of language in which the human capacity for articulation never exhausts the unarticulated material from which it is drawn, what theory of truth does he endorse against Foucault's view of truth as imposition of form upon material not designed to

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receive it? How is this theoryto be establishedandhow does it shuffle the Foucaultiantheory out of the sphereof viable competitors? Second, what modifications,if any,would Taylormake in his own theory of personal identity after a confrontationwith Foucault's histories of otherness? Does Taylor now endorse a theory of selfin fulfillment which the goal is to integrateothernessinto moreperfect forms of identification with the will of a rationalcommunity?Ordoes he now see somethingin the view thatwe shouldstriveto create more institutional space to allow otherness to be? What is the relation between subjectivity and otherness, and how should we respond politicallyto that relation? Third, to what extent does Taylor's opposition to Foucault embody a residual commitment to the sort of teleological philosophy Foucault'sgenealogiesare designedto huntdown anddestroy? If his theory of truthand subjectivityis nourishedby an ontology at odds with the one advanced by Foucault, how is this ontology to be sustainedin the modem age? These are large questions, and not all of them can be considered withinthe frameof this exchange. They are, however,questions one is driven to throughan engagementwith Foucaultiangenealogy.

NO TES
1. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," In Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 67. 2. Ibid., p. 68 3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), p. 316. 4. Charles Taylor, "Language and Human Nature" (Plaunt Memorial Lecture, Carleton University, 1978), p. 34. Later in the same essay Taylor says, to distinguish his position both from the enchanted view of the world prior to the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment itself, "The view of the universe as an order of signs is lost forever, at least in its original form" (p. 44). 5. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12 (May 1984), p. 162. 6. Ibid., p. 169. 7. Ibid., p. 172. 8. Ibid., p. 176. 9. Michel Foucault, Herculin Barbin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. xi. 10. I have tred to develop this conception, along with the allied conceptions of ambiguity, "slack in the order," and otherness in "The Politics of Discourse," in The

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Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd ed. (Prnceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); "Discipline, Politics and Ambiguity," Political Theory 11 (August 1983), pp. 325-342; and "Modern Authority and Ambiguity," Nomos: Authority Revisited (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).

William E. Connolly teaches political theory at The Johns Hopkins University and is editor of Political Theory.