At this early stage Heidegger holds that Dasein expriences its thrownness and groundlessness in anxiety. If it resolutely holds onto anxiety, that is, if it accepts its ontological limitations, it will give up rigid roles and identities and become sensitive to marginal practices from the past. So, for instance, resolute women will be able to be sensitive to gender practices left in our culture from pioneer days. As Heidegger puts it:
The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. (p. 435) [p. 383]
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Dreyfus commenting on Foucault quote
For Foucault, postmodern power is not an instrument of exclusion, but a pervasive pressure towards ever greater inclusion. It does not serve to objectify, exclude, coerce or punish, but rather to order and enhance life. Power creates docile bodies and self-absorbed, deep subjects so as to produce ever greater welfare for all. The resulting practices embody what Foucault calls disciplinary bio-power.
"It is a power working to incite, reinforce, ... optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains the way postmodern power is something entirely new. Unlike monarchical power, whose exercise was top-down, centralized, intermittent, highly visible, extravagant, and stable; postmodern power is bottom-up, diffuse, continuous, invisible, operating in the micro-practices, and constantly on the move colonizing new domains. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Foucault adds:
"Power's condition of possibility ... must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate ... Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
Just as for Heidegger the technological understanding of being, by treating everything as resources, levels being to pure ordering, and so gets rid of all onto-theology --the idea that some entity is the ground of everything -- so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says:
"At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty."
That is, just as total mobilization cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization works directly through new sorts of invisible, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person to person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power they are not micro-practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom up and the understanding of power as monarchical misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king (the equivalent of onto-theology) covers up an important change in how our practices are working.
[We can schematize the above relations as follows:
Heidegger: ontological: mode of revealing: (Gestell) enframing
style: challenging forth
ontic: the practices are so structured as to make beings show us as optimizable and flexible standing reserves, i.e. things show up not as objects but as resources.
Foucault: ontological: dispositive(apparatus) : subjugation/objectification
style = discipline
ontic: things are organized by the apparatus (e.g. exams) so that people show up as docile bodies to be managed and enhanced.]
Heidegger and Foucault are clear, then, that what is uniquely oppressive in our current practices is not that they are illegitimate nor that they cause ecological devastation. According to Foucault legitimacy is a red herring; our current society becomes more oppressive as it becomes more protective of rights and more permissive, and productive. Heidegger, on his part, distinguishes the current problems of technology -- ecological destruction, urbanization, nuclear danger, etc. -- from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems.
What threatens man in his very nature is the ... view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.
Their common critique of techno/bio-power does not, however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use of technological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heidegger is clear that it is the essence of technology -- the technological understanding of being -- not technology, that causes our distress. That the technological understanding of being can be disassociated from technological devices is clear if one looks at contemporary Japan where a traditional, non-technological understanding of being -- or, perhaps better, no single understanding of being at all, but a pluralistic understanding of multiple realities -- exists alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption.
When he was thinking of modes of resistance to the technological understanding of being, Heidegger came to think that there was an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Of course, he always realized that there would be an antagonism between the style set up by a cultural paradigm and things that could only be brought out in their ownness in a style different from the dominant cultural style. Such things would inevitably be dispersed to the margins of the culture. There, they will shine in contrast to the dominant style but will have to resist being considered irrelevant or even wicked. But if there is a single understanding of being even those things that come into their own in the dominant cultural style will be inhibited as things. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Given this tension, Heidegger abandoned in a late seminar what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self- enclosed local character of things. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s criticism of technology and still have a genuinely positive relationship to technological it.
The moral seems to be that, when one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to the dominant regime of power, rather than thinking of resistance as a new regime that is dawning or a new god that can save us, one should think of the marginal as what is outside power. It is precisely not power but things and selves which will be what one studies. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and of Foucault the discussion of epochal understandings of being drops out for Heidegger and discussion of the structure of regimes of power seem to drop out for Foucault.
Beautiful!
"It is a power working to incite, reinforce, ... optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains the way postmodern power is something entirely new. Unlike monarchical power, whose exercise was top-down, centralized, intermittent, highly visible, extravagant, and stable; postmodern power is bottom-up, diffuse, continuous, invisible, operating in the micro-practices, and constantly on the move colonizing new domains. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Foucault adds:
"Power's condition of possibility ... must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate ... Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere."
Just as for Heidegger the technological understanding of being, by treating everything as resources, levels being to pure ordering, and so gets rid of all onto-theology --the idea that some entity is the ground of everything -- so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says:
"At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty."
That is, just as total mobilization cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization works directly through new sorts of invisible, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person to person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power they are not micro-practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom up and the understanding of power as monarchical misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king (the equivalent of onto-theology) covers up an important change in how our practices are working.
[We can schematize the above relations as follows:
Heidegger: ontological: mode of revealing: (Gestell) enframing
style: challenging forth
ontic: the practices are so structured as to make beings show us as optimizable and flexible standing reserves, i.e. things show up not as objects but as resources.
Foucault: ontological: dispositive(apparatus) : subjugation/objectification
style = discipline
ontic: things are organized by the apparatus (e.g. exams) so that people show up as docile bodies to be managed and enhanced.]
Heidegger and Foucault are clear, then, that what is uniquely oppressive in our current practices is not that they are illegitimate nor that they cause ecological devastation. According to Foucault legitimacy is a red herring; our current society becomes more oppressive as it becomes more protective of rights and more permissive, and productive. Heidegger, on his part, distinguishes the current problems of technology -- ecological destruction, urbanization, nuclear danger, etc. -- from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems.
What threatens man in his very nature is the ... view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.
Their common critique of techno/bio-power does not, however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use of technological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heidegger is clear that it is the essence of technology -- the technological understanding of being -- not technology, that causes our distress. That the technological understanding of being can be disassociated from technological devices is clear if one looks at contemporary Japan where a traditional, non-technological understanding of being -- or, perhaps better, no single understanding of being at all, but a pluralistic understanding of multiple realities -- exists alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption.
When he was thinking of modes of resistance to the technological understanding of being, Heidegger came to think that there was an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Of course, he always realized that there would be an antagonism between the style set up by a cultural paradigm and things that could only be brought out in their ownness in a style different from the dominant cultural style. Such things would inevitably be dispersed to the margins of the culture. There, they will shine in contrast to the dominant style but will have to resist being considered irrelevant or even wicked. But if there is a single understanding of being even those things that come into their own in the dominant cultural style will be inhibited as things. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.
Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Given this tension, Heidegger abandoned in a late seminar what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self- enclosed local character of things. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s criticism of technology and still have a genuinely positive relationship to technological it.
The moral seems to be that, when one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to the dominant regime of power, rather than thinking of resistance as a new regime that is dawning or a new god that can save us, one should think of the marginal as what is outside power. It is precisely not power but things and selves which will be what one studies. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and of Foucault the discussion of epochal understandings of being drops out for Heidegger and discussion of the structure of regimes of power seem to drop out for Foucault.
Beautiful!
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