With
Hegel, we talked about reality as a social construct. While Hegel
believed that reason could build the objective system as sum of
subjective positions, more skeptical thinkers such as Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Wittgenstein, as well as Feyerabend and
Latour argue that our constructed systems are open and evolving. Today,
we will look at Structuralism and Poststructuralism, examining thinkers
who are concerned with how and why we construct our reality the way
that we do. Next time, we will conclude with covering Postmodernism, a
close relative of Poststructuralism.
Structuralism
is a movement and method that focuses on social constructs, language
games and forms of life, much like late Wittgenstein. Cultures, such as
science and philosophy, are sets of people and things, but more than
this they are networks, systems of relationships. Hegel argues that we
compose our thinking very much in terms of Self and Other, an idea
Sartre develops in criticism of nationalism and racism. Structuralism
sought to understand the life of cultures as a construction of language
and system of relationships, influenced by Phenomenology and reacting
against Existentialism. Like the Phenomenologists, Structuralists tried
to give a scientific account of the human experience. Unlike the
Existentialists, Structuralists seek the set and stable order that
underlies all cultures. While Existentialism emphasizes the free
individual creation of meaning, Structuralism emphasizes the social
determination of meaning, such that the individual is largely, if not
entirely, determined by the structure in which they participate. In
France, Sartre and Levi-Strauss’ disagreement over human freedom became
symbolic of the fight between Existentialism and Structuralism.
Two of Popper’s favorite thinkers to hate, Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) and Sigmund Freud
(1856 - 1939) had a profound impact on Structuralism. Marxism and
Psychoanalysis, which unlike Popper still consider themselves to be
sciences, argue that individual life is largely determined by underlying
systems, for Marx the economy and modes of production, for Freud the
unconscious mind and core drives. Both Marx and Freud argue, like
Structuralists, that individuals are largely unaware of the systems by
which their actions are determined, like Spinoza argued, believing they
are free in their behavior when in fact their behavior and its meaning
has largely been predetermined.
We
will not extensively cover Marxism or Psychoanalysis in this class, nor
delve into the work of Marx or Freud, as each alone could span several
class periods, but we will consider Marxist and Psychoanalytic concepts
that are relevant to Structuralism. Marx, who took Hegel’s system and
turned it upside-down, argued that history is the process of class
conflict, of the dialectic between the rich owners and the poor
laborers. Society is largely concerned with protecting the property of
the owners and maintaining it through control of the laborers by the
middle class. Freud, who marveled at the similarities between his own
work and the work of Schopenhauer, argued that behavior is the process
of subconscious conflict, of the dialectic between satisfaction and
repression. The Ego or Self is the result of the conflict between the
Id, which seeks gratification, and the Superego, which seeks to put the
Id in check and delay gratification. Notice that both Marx and Freud
see a basic opposition painfully and tentatively resolved by a mediating
central component, for Marx the middle class who go to college and then
work in various careers, for Freud the Ego that forms individual
identity by various tactics of compromise. Like Fichte’s Ich, Freud’s
Ego is a negotiation of self-assertion and self-denial, much like
Schelling and Hegel’s syntheses as compromise of affirmation and
negation.
The third theorist who served as the basis of Structuralism is Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857 - 1913), the Swiss linguist whose work on Semiology, the study of
meaning, became very important for later European thought. His
lectures between 1907 and 1911 were later published as A Course in
General Linguistics. Saussure argued that words stand for concepts,
which are sets of things, “apple” standing equally for each thing we
gather into our conception of apples. Saussure argued that words are
sets of sounds that are defined in terms of difference. ‘Cat’ and ‘hat’
are very similar words, only one of three sounds being different, but
cats and hats are very different. We could far more easily confuse the
words ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ than we could a cat for a hat (although, as Oliver
Sacks well knows, sometimes a man can confuse his wife for a hat).
For
Saussure, a sign, like the roadsign of Wittgenstein and the turn-signal
of Heidegger, is both a signifier, the sound, image or media as
physical component, and a signified, the idea or concept as mental
component. Notice that just as Hegel and others argue that the
objective is the subjective and the mind is the world, both the physical
and mental components are inseparable in the sign. If they are
separated, and one or the other isn’t present, we can say that it no
longer is the same sign with the same meaning. A road sign on someone’s
bedroom wall no longer means what it used to, though if we put it back
in its place again it would.
Saussure’s
major principle is the Arbitrariness of the Sign. Just as we would
have little trouble distinguishing a cat from a hat but more trouble
with the words, for the most part words have no resemblance to the
things they represent. The word ‘cat’ is nothing like a cat in shape or
sound. Because of this, words that resemble each other can represent
things that have little to do with each other, just as things that
resemble each other can be represented by words that have little to do
with each other, such as ‘cat’ and ‘tiger’. Also, because words can
change in a language, as well as things can change in an environment,
there is no fully fixed signification. There is no fixture of the
system even though the system is the fixture, like the Pragmatists argue
such as Peirce, who along with Saussure is considered one of the
founders of Semiology.
There
are exceptions of signs that are not arbitrary, which Saussure calls
‘motivated’. Onomatopoeia, words that imitate sounds, are motivated,
such as ‘meow’, ‘zip’, and thus ‘zipper’. In English, there are few or
no words (I cannot think of any) that look like what they represent, as
English and many other languages are derived via Roman Latin from the
Phoenician alphabet. While scholars accept that the letters of the
Phoenician alphabet are derived from picturing individual things, they
are in debate over what things inspired which letters, as the alphabet
evolved to the point that many of the original correspondences are long
lost. Some scholars agree that ‘A’ likely came from the head of a cow
or ox, and ‘B’ likely came from a house, both significant to early
civilization. Notice that an upside-down ‘A’ resembles a horned animal,
and a ‘B’ on its side resembles a building with a flat roof and a
doorway in the middle. Similarly, in Chinese entire words can resemble
the things they represent, but like the Phoenician based alphabet
ancient Chinese has evolved so thoroughly that there is often little
resemblance that can be recognized easily. All of this seems to confirm
Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness.
Another
type of exception of signs that are not arbitrary are portmanteau,
words that are composed of multiple words. While ‘cat’ and ‘nap’ don’t
look or sound like cats or naps, a ‘catnap’ does resemble the short naps
taken by cats. The word ‘portmanteau’ was itself coined by Lewis
Carroll in his book Alice in Wonderland, a text I cover in the
Introduction to Philosophy and Logic classes in terms of late
Wittgenstein, who in a footnote of the Philosophical Investigations
writes cryptically, ““Compare to a remark of Lewis Carroll’s”, which
seems to refer to the poem Jabberwocky. It is near this poem of
Carroll’s, as Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice how to read the poem, that
Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say, “It’s like a portmanteau”. In French,
‘porter’-’manteau’ means ‘carry’-’cloak’, and the French conjunction had
already in Carroll’s day been borrowed in English to refer to another
portmanteau, the suitcase.
Regardless
of these exceptions, Saussure argued that the mind generates systems by
association and disassociation of similar and dissimilar things. In
this way, we create systems of signs that direct the ordering of
society. There is little room for individual creativity, however.
Consider that there is little room on the street for creative use of
turn-signals. In an art gallery, there is more room for creative
reappropriation, and with the Dada movement this became a staple of
modern art.
The father of Structuralism, however, was not Saussure but the French Anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss
(1908 - 2009), not to be confused with the inventor of blue jeans who
shares the same hyphenated last name. Levi-Strauss said that his three
loves were Geology, Marx and Freud. All three seek the hidden layers
below that determine the formations above. In 1934 Levi-Strauss and his
wife became professors in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and he would often venture
into the jungle to meet Amazonian tribespeople, finding their cultures
to be more elaborate and complex than he had expected. After the end of
WWII, he returned to Paris where he merged the work of Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Freud and Saussure into a new Philosophy of Anthropology he called
Structuralism, the search for the universal underlying patterns of
human behavior.
Like
William James, Levi-Strauss was very much a functionalist, who argued
that primitive and modern people share the same mind and behaviors, and
that all human behavior is rooted in some utilitarian value. James is
considered one of the founders of Psychology just as Levi-Strauss is
considered one of the founders of Anthropology. Both are similar to
Feyerabend and Latour in their denial of exclusive differences between
ancient cultures and modern cultures. However, unlike James,
Levi-Strauss argued that there are some behaviors which have a merely
symbolic and not material value, the benefits being mental rather than
physical. For Freud, the symbolic, like fantasy, is a strategy of the
ego for releasing repressed drives, reenacting the repressed by other
means, acting in a way that one wishes to act but cannot. This is
similar to Nietzsche, who argued that philosophy is a personal
confession of the author.
Levi-Strauss
argued that human beings do not establish absolutes, but form
relationships. For example, while a parent might not be perfect or
always right, they are in a relationship with a child such that they are
in the position of authority. Levi-Strauss’ work was focused on
examining the relationships of relationships. A family or culture is a
relationship of relationships. While earlier anthropologists argued
that identity is a matter of linear descent from a single patriarch,
Levi-Strauss argued that identity is a matter of the relationship
between families that intermarry, a relationship between two sets of
relationships.
Levi-Strauss
sought to understand the universal patterns underlying the similarities
and differences of sets of relationships. For example, what impact or
connection does the relationship of father and son have on mother and
daughter, or the relationship of mother and father have on daughter and
father or daughter and son? Levi-Strauss noted that these always varied
by culture, finding numerous variations between the Brazilian tribes he
studied, but he argued that these variations must have an underlying
pattern, such that a more relaxed relationship between mother and father
might correspond to a more disciplinary relationship between mother and
son. While much of these correlations have been called into question
by both the psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic communities,
Levi-Strauss’ work stimulated further investigations that were
foundational for many anthropologists.
The
title of Levi-Strauss’ most famous book, La Pensee Sauvage (1962), is
often translated as “The Savage Mind”, but because, like Feyerabend and
Latour, Levi-Strauss argues that there is no savage mind or primitive
thinking, it’s title is better translated as “Thinking in the Raw”, or
“Raw Thinking”. While many think of primitive people as children who
have undeveloped minds, Levi-Strauss argues that primitive tribespeople
are quite capable of sophisticated systematization, and that modern
people are quite capable of foolish fetishes and totemism. Like
Moderns, as Latour would say, tribespeople use logic to classify plants
and animals in sophisticated systems and put these systems into evolving
practice. Modern corporations have found these “primitive” practices
to be quite valuable. In the Logic class, we study the anthropologist
Malinowski’s argument that primitive tribespeople have all of the
operations of modern Logic in their languages, and put them into
practice with success.
Levi-Strauss
borrowed Saussure’s conception of the sign, Freud’s conception of the
symbolic, and Marcel Mauss’ theory that primitive culture, like modern
culture, is founded on gift giving, which is not only practical but
symbolic. Consider the modern act of marriage being established in a
husband giving an expensive diamond ring to his wife, practical as she
carries thousands of dollars with her on her hand and symbolic as she is
expected to be faithful and is trusted with this wealth. Note that the
symbolic is not impractical, but an extension of the immediately
practical. Levi-Strauss extended Mauss’ theory to the exchange of
words, as well as women in primitive and modern cultures. The
patriarchal nature of the diamond ring example here is appropriate.
Levi-Strauss later replied to feminist critics who saw this as sexist
that matriarchal tribes have similarly exchanged men but that
patriarchal exchange of women was unquestionably predominant. It is
also possible to imagine women and men equally exchanged by varying
tribes. The daughters and sons of the wealthy and powerful are still
encouraged to intermarry today.
In
his book Totemism (1962), Levi-Strauss argued that totemism, like that
of primitive tribespeople who identify with a particular animal as
spiritual kin, is very human, as the human mind is metaphoric by nature.
We have seen this same idea before with Merleau-Ponty, Lakoff and
Rorty. An individual or tribe may value strength or speed, and so
relate to similar abilities in the bear or wolf. Totems, as central
cultural metaphors, are aids to the social process of thought. Just as
the word ‘wolf’ serves as a handle for the concept of wolves, the word
can be used metaphorically to extend to things that are not wolves, such
as a rogue pack of financial advisors. Consider the trickster animals
of Native American mythology, such as coyote or crow, who bring the
world into existence in spite of their deceptive and playful nature.
Levi-Strauss
analyzed mythology in terms of such metaphors in his massive
four-volume work, Mythologiques (1964 - 1972). Myths show us metaphors
that are symbolic extensions of reality. This is beneficial but also
problematic, as it is still today according to Rorty. Metaphors can be
used to establish patterns and themes via narratives, what Levi-Strauss
called “mythemes”, and this communication of meaning can serve to
solidify dogmatic understandings or support skeptical inquiries.
Consider the lion as the animal symbolic of both British empire and
Buddhist wisdom. Levi-Strauss, like Freud, argued that myths are often
used by cultures to overcome or understand contradictions, a symbolic
act which may be conscious or unconscious.
In
the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, a famous psychoanalytic favorite,
Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, and this
expresses the contradiction of hating and loving one’s family, friends,
culture, and humanity. In the ancient Greek myth of Antigone, Oedipus’
daughter, Antigone’s brothers fight for the throne, one slays the other,
and Antigone chooses to bury her brother rather than obey the law, and
this expresses the contradiction of obeying the universal law and
loyalty to the familiar. As Nietzsche argued, this is displayed as a
tragedy, as a rational strategy for putting what cannot be resolved by
reason on display. Levi-Strauss attempted to systematize the
similarities of world mythology using these as central examples. We
construct mythology as messages to those who will understand in the
future, to those who will face similar problems and contradictions.
Reacting
against the open Existentialism of Sartre and his circle, Levi-Strauss
was joined by Lacan, Foucault and Barthes as Structuralism rose to
prominence in French thought. This was immortalized in a 1966 cartoon,
The Structuralists’ Lunch Party, which showed the four philosophers
sitting on the ground wearing grass skirts. The Structuralists, like
the Existentialists, were pessimistic about modern society, but rather
than endorse free individual transformation, they chose to critically
seek the patterns of systems in pre-modern people. We will consider
each of these, starting with Lacan. As we turn to Barthes and then
Foucault, we will be passing from Structuralism to Poststructuralism.
While Poststructuralism continued to be influenced by Levi-Strauss’
critical examination of systems, it gave up on revealing universal
underlying patterns.
Jacques Lacan
(1901 - 1981) was mentioned already with Hegel, Heidegger and Bataille.
He even married Bataille’s estranged wife. Lacan studied Nietzsche,
Hegel, Heidegger and Jaspers while studying medicine. I mentioned that
Lacan attended Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel with Bataille and that he
tried to systematize Nietzsche using Freud. Lacan became a psychiatrist
in the 1920s, while he was involved with the Surrealists in Paris. His
thesis, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relations to the Personality, was an
influence on many Surrealists, such as Dali and Breton, both friends of
Lacan. He was also a contributor to Surrealist journals and Picasso’s
personal physician.
Lacan
is most famous for his theory of the mirror stage and self-image, that
we form a stable image and conception of ourselves by looking at others
and our own reflection, then cling to it in the attempt to resolve the
flux and contradictions of our thoughts and feelings, and then repress
or redirect whatever does not conform to this image. Much of
Continental thought has been influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis, and
Lacan became the central interpreter of Freud for French thought and
those influenced by and involved with French thought, such as the
Slovenian philosopher Zizek, already mentioned several times.
Lacan’s
work centers on narcissism, not merely self-love, as it is often
described, but self-obsession. Both the body and the mind are composed
of many parts which cooperate. After the young child forms an image of
self and begins to cling to it, the child forms narcissistic complexes,
forms of excluding self from other that attempt to establish stability
in an inevitably insecure situation. The ego is always an “inauthentic
agency”, concealing its own unstable lack of unity. Note the Heidegger
speak, and how we are always inauthentic no matter how relatively
authentic we become. Freud had wondered why narcissism develops early
in children but is not present from the beginning, and Lacan believed he
had solved this problem with his mirror stage and the formation of self
image. I mentioned with James that Freud believed religion was an
attempt to regain the oceanic existence of infancy. Recall that
Nietzsche said that maturity is regaining the seriousness of a child at
play.
Narcissism
fragments the world. The fear of self-disunity becomes anxiety, and
anxiety becomes paranoia. Disunity and contradiction are projected onto
the world and others, away from the self and social selves in which the
self participates and with which the self identifies. Just as in
metaphor, where one term is substituted for another, the other is
substituted for the self. The contradictions of the self becomes the
contradictions of the other. The self establishes its place relative to
others. This placement of the self becomes the Real to the self, much
involved with the They of Heidegger. Language is the primary tool by
which the self alienates and articulates to fashion the Real. This Real
is, of course, not the entirety of reality, much as the thought is not
all of experience for Heidegger. The Real is merely a preferred image
which is insecure, just like the self-image situated in the Real. Lacan
believed that making this transparent to the self is therapeutic,
dissolving paranoid narcissistic delusions and obsessions that entrap
the static images of self, other and Real.
Roland Barthes
(1915 - 1980) balanced both Existentialism and Structuralism even as he
was one of the four great French Structuralists, in spite of the feud
between Sartre and Levi-Strauss. Barthes, who was mostly concerned with
the critical analysis of literature, is famous for his pronouncement of
“the death of the author”, which is also “the birth of the reader”.
Just as Nietzsche argued that life, self and meaning are an open matter
of interpretation, Barthes argued that texts can be read in any variety
of ways, without fixture of its meaning by the author, the text’s
authority. As we read a text, we are not only connecting it to our
personal life experience and within our cultural and ideological frame,
but we are also critical of the author, reinterpreting their work in
light of what we glean about them from the text.
Like
Foucault, Barthes was a critic of the idea of the natural. Barthes saw
in his own day older religious pronouncements about what is “natural”
and thus objectively true being replaced by political and scientific
claims about the “natural”, as well as countercultural calls to return
to the “natural”. Barthes argued that there are no set facts, no
objective truth, no natural pure states, but networks of signification
that can be revealed as historical processes and cultural practices.
Barthes was loyal to Saussure and his notion of the sign as signifier
and signified, and he examined “texts” such as advertisements for
clothes and food products, noting that certain fashions were meant to
signify luxury, happiness or freedom and certain food products meant to
signify health, decadence or satisfaction.
Barthes’
book Mythologies (1957), widely considered to be his best work, is a
short set of critical essays focusing on modern day production of
mythology and meaning. In the first essay, The World of Wrestling,
Barthes argues that wrestlers, not athletes but the entertainers seen on
American television derived from Mexican luchadores, are
personifications of good and evil and wrestling is a “spectacle of
excess”. Barthes is not attacking wrestling, but examining it as a
human expression of meaning, a modernday self-conscious mythologizing.
The signs and signification are clear, even exaggerated. Barthes
writes, “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion
itself”. The crowd wants purified, mythologized justice, and they would
rather watch a wrestling match or a detective show than an actual court
trial. The symbolic crime and punishment satisfies the displaced need
for justice that is not purely obtainable in society, in line with Freud
and Levi-Strauss. Barthes notes that, in American wrestling, the bad
guy is often associated with Communism. When I was young, many of the
villains in wrestling were associated with Islam.
In
my favorite essay, Operation Margarine, which I discuss in the Ethics
class when covering lies and propaganda, Barthes compares a margarine
commercial to propaganda for the French military and colonialism. Very
much like a wrestling match, in which the bad guy cheats and seems
victorious, only to be bested by the good guy, successful propaganda
often puts criticized faults on display, and then has the faulty
triumphantly rise over its faults. The Established Order (Barthes’
capitalization) admits to being flawed, but argues that only it can save
us all from these flaws. Barthes is critical of American movies in
which the main character, a likable guy with whom the viewer can
identify, joins the army or police, rebels against its conformity, but
then, against a greater evil, leads it to victory in the name of good.
Only the army can protect us from destruction and war, thus the need
for slight confession followed by grand redemption. Barthes compares
this to a margarine commercial, in which one housewife is appalled that
another has made a mousse not with butter but with margarine, a new
product at the time which was trying to gain household acceptance. The
second housewife replies, “Here, try it!”, and the first says, “Wow,
that is good!”, clearly rid of her old irrational prejudice, wealthier
and wiser for using a cheaper product. This is similar to scientists
who reacted against critics of science, arguing that if people were more
aware and informed about the sciences they would not be critical.
In
the final essay, Myth Today, Barthes lays out his theory of modern
mythology after summarizing the semiology of Saussure For Barthes, much
of meaning that is circulated in modern times is ideology which can
serve as a mask for social contradictions, much as Rousseau wrote that
polite society is a mask that conceals brutality and oppression. As a
left leaning intellectual, Barthes was particularly concerned with
nationalist messages of peace, freedom and equality that conceal class
and colonial domination. The famous example of this is Barthes’
scornful analysis of the cover of an issue of Paris Match, the French
equivalent of Newsweek or Time, that he finds waiting in a barbershop.
Clearly, Barthes argues, this is propaganda for French colonialism, the
young black soldier’s salute signifying not only loyalty to France, but
that the French government and military are loved and supported by
Africans, that “all her sons, without any colour discrimination,
faithfully serve under her flag”. The boy’s faith signifies the
faithfulness of France to liberty, equality and community, as “Liberté,
égalité, fraternité” is the national motto of France.
For
Barthes, myth is depoliticized speech. This means that only political
and revolutionary speech is non-mythological. Barthes, a Marxist, is
here in line with Marx’s view that there is objective and scientific
understanding, which is Communist and materialist, and there is
ideological fiction, which is everything else. In this, Barthes fails
to see Marxism or Communism as incapable of mythology or mythologizing,
and yet he writes, “the press undertakes every day to demonstrate that
the store of mythical signifiers is inexhaustible”. Barthes saying that
only revolutionary political thought is non-mythological is very
similar to Positivists saying that only mathematical science is rational
or meaningful.
Michel Foucault
(1926 - 1984) is now a celebrated and well studied thinker, not only in
philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. In
his final years he taught at Berkeley, a reason he is particularly
popular in this town. His books are critical historical studies of
social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric
hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a Nietzschean
and Heideggerian, and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of
the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while
marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil. Foucault went on
vacation to the French Riviera and then stayed in his hotel room the
entire time reading Nietzsche, whom he had not yet read, overcome with
his criticism of all institutions. Foucault was already a psychiatrist
and gay at a time when psychiatry considered homosexuality to be insane,
calling it gender identity disorder, which is still applied to
transexuals but no longer homosexuals. Foucault became fascinated with
the complexity of good and evil Nietzsche unearthed, not merely as
morality but as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ in the history of psychiatry, of
‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the history of sexuality, of ‘legal’ and
‘criminal’ in the history of justice and prisons.
Foucault
is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge,
distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false,
opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle
between competing forces, institutions and interpretations. Like
Barthes, Foucault argues that truth is complex and historical, but
ideology attempts to mask this by presenting clear exclusive divisions
between opposites. Institutions must support binary divisions to
maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine
knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the
dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified
with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of
thought is obscured. On one side, giving an institution the right to
distinguish the sane from the insane is quite sane and sober. On the
other, when one looks at the complex history of uses and abuses of these
categories, one can find much that is outright insanity. Are the
institutions sane or insane, just or unjust? How can we know so simply,
when these institutions determine their own sanity, their own ability
to be good or embody justice and truth?
For
Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for
Nietzsche truth is always involved with serving desire. We have all
heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge
is not only enabling power, it is at the same time repressive
domination, a contradiction we and the institution would often like to
ignore. Truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world. Just
as for Nietzsche, institutions and their systems of thought grow and
thrive on opposition and problems. Foucault held a chair in “History of
Systems of Thought”, a position created especially for him and one that
I quite admire.
As
mentioned last time, science, such as psychiatry, serves powerful
interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and
the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing
what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the
complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete
with each other. Foucault believes that we should push for what we want
and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are
naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant. Power is not
just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the
form of the good. One can see the influence of Nietzsche and a
philosopher who is “beyond good and evil”. Thus, communists who declare
themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel
oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through
their own individual fear and desires. Human nature is neither good nor
evil, but the two together.
Foucault
studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power,
knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances
change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization
people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the
authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and
independence. Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional
Man. The famous metaphor Foucault uses is the Panopticon, a prison
designed by the philosopher Bentham, teacher and friend of the
utilitarian John Stuart Mill. The Panopticon is a prison designed so
that everyone can see that they are possibly being watched, but they can
see little other than this. Never knowing when they are being watched,
never seeing their observers, they learn to behave as if they are
always being watched, and thus even without any guards they learn to
police themselves and be constantly in self-conscious anxiety. Consider
current legal issues with police filming everything but opposed to
being filmed themselves.
Foucault is concerned with showing the structures of power as they grow from what he calls the capillary level, the tips of the branches, the experiences of individuals, up through the dominant institutions, cultures and identities. While this is quite Structuralist, very much a description of history and sociology that presents itself as the record and truth, Foucault seeks to constantly subvert our perspectives and the institutions, to show that what we try to marginalize consequently becomes quite dominant. The insanity, brutality and evil that we seek to overcome, that we try to lock away in the asylums and prisons, that we try to barricade against through walls and warfare, becomes the new manifestation of contradiction and chaos, the new complex that continuously strives to overcome itself while simultaneously remaining blind to its own actions.
