{"id":2756,"date":"2017-12-14T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=2756"},"modified":"2017-12-14T11:48:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T16:48:00","slug":"john-rajchman-foucaults-turning-point-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/john-rajchman-foucaults-turning-point-and-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"John Rajchman | Foucault\u2019s Turning Point \u2013 and Ours"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Rajchman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is it useless to revolt \u2013 to \u2018rise up\u2019? Foucault asked this question in 1979, responding to storm of criticism unleashed by his newspaper reports on the events unfolding in Iran.<\/p>\n

Is it useless now, when, faced with new forces, we rise up again against the powers that be? And what would it mean to think of our \u2018uprisings\u2019 today (with their ways of assembling, occupying, mobilizing) outside \u2018the wondrous and daunting promise\u2019 of Revolution which, in Foucault\u2019s words then, had served to classify and domesticate the real forces unleashed by them, organizing our sense of time, popularizing our hopes, telling us in advance how they should unfold and \u2018appear in truth\u2019?\u00a0 What would it mean to view them instead so many other \u2018singular\u2019 moments of revolt, insurrection, dissidence, disobedience, \u2018occupation\u2019, calling for new ways of thinking, a new kind of \u2018critique of the present\u2019, carried now on in the 21st<\/sup> century?\u00a0 In re-opening the \u2018Iran dossier\u2019 Behrooz Ghamari poses such questions in a striking way, writing at a moment born of attitudes formed by attitudes to 9\/11 attacks and the \u2018failure\u2019 of the Arab Spring, suggesting how Foucault\u2019s question might apply not only at the time, but also today in a much altered geo-political and media context.<\/p>\n

In Foucault\u2019s question 40 years ago, there were two further inter-related elements: a principle of political refusal and a principle of historical singularity. An irreducible element in all \u2018uprisings\u2019, he thought, is a refusal of existing power \u2013 \u2018we don\u2019t want to be governed like this any more\u2019 (for some now an apt motto for Black Lives Matter).\u00a0 It is always a matter of \u2018refusing and rising up\u2019. At the same such refusal\/uprisings, while they come from a specific history, are yet not simply \u2018of\u2019 them \u2013 they are thus \u2018singular\u2019, outside usual ways of predicting, explaining, narrating, requiring us to re-examine our thinking (what used to explain things, now itself needs to be explained). The question then becomes: is it useless to refuse and to rise up, if we don\u2019t already have the \u2018framework\u2019 or \u2018script\u2019 in which to place its uprising, a \u2018promise\u2019 as to where it all will end up? Foucault\u2019s question as thus a complex one, and as such, formed part of a larger attempt to rethink the very nature or critique, descending from Kant, as a kind of politics of truth. How then can we \u2018speak truly\u2019 about and in uprisings, regarded as singular disruptions no longer contained in anything like the grand narrative of Revolution \u2013 in particular, the great promise of \u2018World Revolution\u2019. How can we then talk about uprisings in many different places, as with Iran, at once in and outside the old imperialist European \u2018center\u2019?<\/p>\n

Foucault\u2019s question thus brought together a cluster of elements we can now see formed part of a larger series and changes and new investigations in his work. How then did the question of uprisings\/revolutions of arise? The publication of his Writings and Courses now helps us to better answer this question: the idea \u2018uprising\/revolution\u2019 arose at a kind of turning point in Foucault\u2019s own work, from 1978-80, giving rise to new sorts of investigation, broken off by his untimely death. It was then that he made his turn from its earlier focus on modern Europe (and the constitutive role of Revolution in this \u2018modernity\u2019 \u2013 we haven\u2019t yet cut off the King\u2019s head in political theory) in favor of a \u2018trip\u2019 back to Greek antiquity to find alternative story of \u2018subjectivization\u2019 and \u2018techniques of self\u2019, their relations with truth and spiritual techniques, before coming back to the question of politics in his last Course. We now have a fuller picture of this turning point, itself broken off, left unfinished, the questions of Revolution taken up again in terms of ways of \u2018speaking truly\u2019 he was raising in his last Course, adding cynical parrhesia<\/em> to prophesy, prediction, and established science \u2013 in the case of Revolution, to be found in anarchism, nihilism, Dadaism, the militant \u2018way of life\u2019. We now see how much the question was intertwined in his mind with the question of the art of \u2018speaking truly\u2019 in and about uprisings \u2013 for example, the one in Iran that he \u2018witnessed\u2019.<\/p>\n

Earlier Foucault had associated the idea of Revolution with a kind of coalescence (and coding) of multiple \u2018struggles\u2019 in a great \u2018battle\u2019 for which theory would serve as a kind of critical tool-box \u2013 at the time, conveyed through enqu\u00eates <\/em>and endless r\u00e9unions <\/em>of GIP, the group at the time least like a Party, in Deleuze\u2019s retrospective view.\u00a0 But what happens when this great battle, bringing together many \u2018struggles\u2019, itself no longer seems to mobilize a Revolution, its earlier \u2018solidarities\u2019 undone, indeed, where the \u2018disciplinary society\u2019, against which it was directed, itself seems to be, in Foucault\u2019s words, \u2018in crisis\u2019, confronted with new forces it can no longer contain? It is in this context that the question of Revolution assumed a new form, and became part of a larger attempt to re-think or re-invent Critique itself and its relation to politics. A key \u2018methodological\u2019 formulation of the problem is to be found \u2018La Table Ronde, May 20, 1978\u2019 (known in English as \u2018Questions of Method\u2019), in which, responding to the objections of social historians, Foucault contrasts his attempt to \u2018eventalize\u2019 history from their own search for a \u2018unique necessity\u2019. In this discussion, before his trip to Iran, we already find a striking formulation of the question of \u2018political spirituality\u2019 and its relation to the larger question of a new \u2018politics of truth\u2019<\/p>\n

It is in the interviews and writings in Japan that Foucault begins to work out the implications and questions of the question (one day great to publish and translate them as group, adding some not included in Dits et \u00e9crits<\/em>). It is in then that he declares that, following the death of Mao (in 1976) there are no real \u2018Marxist movements\u2019 anymore to mobilize and give shape to revolt, leading to an \u2018impoverishment of political imagination\u2019. It is rather the Marx of historical writings like 18 Brumaire or Civil War in France that inspire us in this new juncture. He then adds:<\/p>\n

\u2018As for the future of Euro-communism, the important question today is not about its future, but instead concerns the idea and theme of revolution. Since 1798, Europe has changed in function of the idea of revolution. European history has been dominated by this idea. It is precisely this idea that is in process of disappearing in this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

One had thus had to pose the whole question outside the grand scheme of anti-imperialist, then third world (or guerilla) Revolution, found, of course, as well in Europe. As he puts it in a Zen monastery: \u201cIf a philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe\u201d.\u00a0 It is precisely with quote that Behrooz begins his own book. Perhaps indeed we now live in a world where there are uprisings in many places, re-casting (or \u2018decentering\u2019) the old relations with imperial modern Europe, without a single \u2018world Revolution\u2019 to bring them all together. Iran is the actual uprising Foucault tried to look at with this in mind, though of course, much has happened there after.<\/p>\n

In these years, Foucault was also interested in \u2018spiritual practices\u2019, both in and out of Europe \u2013 in Japan, found, for example, in Mishima\u2019s suicide as \u2018Japanese way of death\u2019, drawing on many \u2018Asian\u2019 traditions going back to China, Confucianism, Buddhism, which Foucault hoped to discuss with his Japanese interlocutors. In particular, he was interested in the ways \u2018refusal\u2019 inherent all uprisings was connected to a willingness to die \u2013 as with \u2018martyrs\u2019 in other traditions. At the time, he was investigating these same questions in Europe. It is after all to religious authorities that \u2018not wanting to be governed like this any more\u2019 would lead Kant to speak of an emancipation of Reason from its self-incurred tutelage. But the problem goes back earlier to the striking analysis of the anti-ecclesiastic \u2018counter-conducts\u2019 he was analyzing in Security Territory, Population<\/em> at the time, and their relation to what he had hoped to develop in a book on \u2018Pastoral Power\u2019, never in fact published, but which, was connected to his larger investigation of \u2018Western\u2019 political rationality, and how it had led to the formation of the modern \u2018welfare-warfare\u2019 state, which, in effect, was what had kept Revolution out of Europe.<\/p>\n

But what then of this sort of \u2018spiritual \u2018revolt\u2019, elsewhere, outside European modernity or with another relation to it \u2013 for example in Iran? Behrooz now elaborates this question for today, arguing that it problematizes the great modern European \u2018binary\u2019 of secular or laique<\/em>\/religious. It was Foucault\u2019s own view at the time that in the un-scripted situations of \u2018uprising\u2019, religions are often called upon to offer mobilizing symbols or rituals, of which Shiriati was one source at the time. Behrooz now proposes we see this early phase as part a larger battle of \u2018dissent\u2019 groups at the time, unleashed in opposition to the Shah, before the current Islamic Regime took hold, leading to his own imprisonment as a young \u2018Marxist\u2019 activist. Against the \u2018failure\u2019 or \u2018confiscation\u2019 narrative of the Revolution, he thus wants to restore something of the \u2018virtualities\u2019 of this early phase from the official story of a Revolution, that would lead to his own incarceration, which he describes in a striking fictive autobiography, published at the same time as his study of Foucault. It is now, after the fact, through these means at once artistic and scholarly, that he himself tries to \u2018speak truly\u2019 about what happened to him, opening up new questions in the present, for the present.<\/p>\n

As such, his work forms part of the much larger group of retrospective views of what Foucault was calling \u2018Marxist movements\u2019 at the time. How now do we look back at Communist Revolution, its failures and outcomes in many places? Perhaps, instead of thinking of Communism as a single great \u2018hypothesis\u2019, residing in the mathematical skies, ever waiting to be \u2018actualized\u2019 (in a world that necessarily includes the States that actually resulted from those revolutions and the new problems they posed), it is more useful to talk of Communisms and Revolutions in the plural, in which in particular, Communist China is a very \u2018singular\u2019 case, unlike, say, Cuba or Russia.\u00a0 In any case, it seems we now raising all these questions against the background of the attempt, after 1989, to present \u2018neo-liberalism\u2019 as a kind of grand counter-narrative to the Communist Revolution, leading to a \u2018globalization\u2019 at once in labor and wealth, with which, in many different ways and places, we are now contending. Is it then \u2018useless to rise up\u2019 today? How, with whom, where?<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to add a few reflections about that. Perhaps today it is useful to ask in what ways the question of \u2018uprising\/revolution\u2019, the long history of relations between the links between the two, was from the start also an \u2018aesthetic\u2019 and \u2018media\u2019 matter \u2013 a matter of how to make an uprising visible, of talking truly about it, when it happens or after the fact. For uprisings are also moments of upheaval in sensibility, explored by writers, artists, intellectuals meeting freely together outside their usual institutions. Indeed, the question of uprising\/revolution is already to be found in 1789 \u2013 to see, to read, the storming of the Bastille as a Revolution, the very idea of Revolution had itself to be invented. From the start, Revolution was thus a \u2018historiographic\u2019 or even \u2018hermeneutical\u2019 question as well as an historical one, as Jean-Claude Milner has recently argued in his fresh attempt to \u2018read\u2019 the Revolution. But with Milner, we are at some distance from the idea of \u2018past-futures\u2019 or \u2018horizon of expectation\u2019 once associated with the idea \u2013 from its \u2018wondrous and daunting promise\u2019, in Foucault\u2019s words. Milner, for his part, now wants to \u2018read\u2019 the Revolution without the Belief in it and its assurances about the new Future. In many ways now, we are trying to find a \u2018virtuality\u2019 in Revolutions that goes beyond the eventual outcome and official story, which was their \u2018real\u2019 future. We are thus close to the time Foucault was calling \u2018the present\u2019 or l\u2019actuel<\/em>, going back to Kant: a time without the \u2018promise\u2019 of any already scripted or given future, any \u2018horizon of expectation\u2019, even a \u2018messianic\u2019 one (or ghost of a messianic one), or a pure \u2018to come\u2019 outside anything to be found in our present arrangements.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the arts have something to tell us about this kind of time \u2013 not so much a \u2018poetry of the future\u2019, as a role of poets and poetry in the present and aftermath of singular \u2018refusal-uprisings\u2019 as with the remarkable role of Farsi poetry readings to which Behrooz draws attention in Iran. (One day, it would be great to study more closely the key role poets and poetry played in the long history of uprisings\/revolutions). For the role of art in revolutions was not at all restricted to the familiar heroic iconography of leaders and masses or peoples, marking together towards a grand future. They often explore and document ideas or potentials, taken up later in other ways, creating \u2018complex\u2019 times of montage and juxtaposition, even if eventually closed off by Armies and resulting States. The question of uprising\/revolution has thus, in other words, always, at the same time, been an \u2018aesthetic\u2019 matter, not simply in poetry, but also in film, photography, today with social media, installation, performance. We see this in a striking way in the way cinema accompanied and figured in the changing relations with Revolutions \u2013 in the same years as Foucault was writing, for example, in Chris Marker\u2019s remarkable documentary, Le Fond de l\u2019air est rouge<\/em>. It\u2019s great that this 13\/13 sequence has involved artists and activists, as well as scholars, together with an accompanying film program.<\/p>\n

Jacques Ranci\u00e8re has especially insisted on the ways, since Kant at least, \u2018aesthetics and politics\u2019 have become inseparable from one another; and in several recent writings, he takes up the issue with respect to the question of \u2018uprising\/revolution\u2019. Indeed, he thinks that a key feature of the \u2018times we are living in\u2019 is a kind of \u2018voisinage ind\u00e9cis<\/em>\u2019 \u2013 an unsettled adjacency \u2013 between artists and artist groups and our activism: its \u2018indignations\u2019, its ways, sometimes using social media, of mobilizing, assembling, often raising questions of inequality and corruption, new forms of exclusion, yet, seemingly, without a common \u2018program\u2019 to deal with them, in this sense, without a clear or agreed \u2018politics\u2019.<\/p>\n

In his contrition to an exposition called \u2018Uprisings\u2019, Ranci\u00e8re worries that this \u2018activist\u2019 side of images of uprisings has been lost, reduced to the same aesthetic role as the \u2018pathos-formel\u2019 in Warburg\u2019s Atlas, which had inspired the show\u2019s curator, Georges Didi-Huberman. In his catalogue essay, he says that the attempt to connect uprisings, with their new questions, debates, dreams, imaginings, with armed take-over of a State was the \u2018impossible dream\u2019 of Marx, adding that \u2018it is true that the impossible of politics is frequently possible in art\u2019. In En quel temps vivons-nous?<\/em>, he takes up theme again with more recent cases (like role of the Army in the Arab Spring) in the process, expressing some doubts about the whole idea of \u2018insurrection to come\u2019, still, to his mind, hostage to Marx\u2019s \u2018impossible dream\u2019.<\/p>\n

In Foucault\u2019s case, these aesthetic and media questions about how to make visible or invent new ways of talking, in and about uprisings were part of the larger, abandoned project of a \u2018reportage d\u2019id\u00e9es<\/em>\u2019 to be carried on outside European universities and media (and related already to his analysis to the question of \u2018the public\u2019 in Kant\u2019s own journalistic writings). Perhaps we see this question of a new \u2018journalism of ideas\u2019 in terms of the kind of \u2018documentary aesthetic\u2019 found in the arts today, for which Foucault\u2019s own great historical art, mixing archive and \u2018fiction\u2019 in a new truthful sort of \u2018fabrication\u2019 might serve as an inspiration. I\u2019ll break off these admittedly inconclusive and entangled remarks with this suggestion\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0John Rajchman Is it useless to revolt \u2013 to \u2018rise up\u2019? Foucault asked this question in 1979, responding to storm of criticism unleashed by his newspaper reports on the events unfolding in Iran. Is it useless now, when, faced with… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1874,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38959],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-6-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1874"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}