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January 1, 2006
This quote is an extract from the Introduction to Johanna Oksala's book Foucault on Freedom. She says:
The charges against Foucault's thought in contemporary debatesoften focus on the question of the freedom of the subject and the notions that are understood as intrinsically tied to or dependent on it: autonomy, authenticity, responsibility, political agency. According to many of Foucault's critics, the denial of an autonomous subject leads to the denial of any meaningful concept of freedom, which again leads to the impossibility of emancipatory politics. When there is no authentic subjectivity to liberate, and power, as the principle of constitution, has no outside, the idea of freedom becomes meaningless. Since we are always the products of codes and disciplines, the overthrow of constraints will not free us to become natural human beings. Hence, all that we can do is produce new codes and disciplines.
These charges have always puzzled me. Why retain 'the foundational assumption of the 'natural subject'? Are not human beings historical beings or political animals? Why retain the negative conception of liberty (freedom from restraint) as the only conception of freedom. Shouldn't that assumption also be questioned?
It has always puzzled me why the categories of natural human beings and negative liberty are taken as absolutes. It has struck me as liberal dogma of a fundamentalist liberalism. Dsogma's that do not account with the way that a neo-liberal mode of governance shapes us as enterprising market beings.
To her credit, Oksala argues that postructuralism (of Foucault) needs to be taken seriously and engaged with rather than simply dismissed.
She says:
I will argue that, rather than dismissing post-structuralist thinking as politically dangerous and trying to hold on to the autonomous, humanist subject for political or simply conservative reasons, it is more fruitful
to take seriously the major impact post-structuralist thought has had on our ways of thinking about the subject, and also to try to rethink freedom. The post-structuralist understanding of the subject clearly makes problematic many of our traditional and accepted ways of conceiving of freedom. It cannot be understood as an inherent capacity or characteristic of the subject. We cannot say that we are born free. Neither can freedom be linked to emancipation: it does not lie in finding our true or authentic nature and liberating it from the constraints of power or society. For Foucault, freedom is not the freedom of protected rights that must be safeguarded. Neither does there seem to be much point in arguing that it is the ability to choose between different courses of action and to govern oneself autonomously, if our choices themselves are culturally constituted. Freedom cannot be conceived of negatively either: it cannot be linked to the ability to think or act despite external constraints, when the external constraints are understood as the condition of possibility of subjectivity. I will show that Foucault's thought, however, opens up alternative ways of thinking about freedom. It providesus with important tools for trying to answer the question, perhaps more burning than ever: what is freedom?
That sure does open up new ground where we can begin to rethink freedom freed from the dogmas of Berlin's Two concepts of Liberty that are endlessly repeated as if they were some sort of mantra.
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thanks for posting this, and for adding part of this recent book which I was not aware of. It seems that adds a further spin to a major issue in Foucault's thought. Freedom is related to the emergence of a new modality of power, which for Foucault, is not to be conceived in negative terms -constraining, neither as an enabling capacity for classes, but as productive of the new subjects, their behaviours and even penetrates their bodies. So, if we are always bearers of the non-sovereign, Foucaultean concept of power, then it seems -in a rather dark conclussion- we can never be really free, there is no really outside of regulation. (All this, for example, should be seen as Foucault's counter-reaction to the so-called emancipatory discourse of sexuality during the 60s and earlier on). Well.. I'm gonna spend some time to see what Oksala argues. Regards