the minnesota review n.s. 58-60 (2003)Dominic BoyerThe Medium of Foucault in AnthropologyFoucault's pervasiveness is largely unparalleled in anthropology, almost to the point that, like oxygen, one takes his ethereal yet nourishing presence in everyday disciplinary life almost for granted. This is not to say that he is everywhere affirmed and celebrated; rather, that "Foucault" and an allied terminology including "biopower," "governmentality," "power/knowledge" and so on, are constant points of communicative departure and of reference, citational orienters, and anchors, if you will, in the everyday discursive networks of anthropological knowledge-making. Some view Foucault's expansive currency in anthropological discourse as a sign of hope and renewal, others as a sign of despair and decline. I am more interested in Foucault's discursive status as symptom and social fact; Foucault's currency is an index of changes affecting the social organization of knowledge-making within the diverse professional intellectual networks and institutions we practitioners identify as "anthropology." Foucault's pervasiveness signifies (to me) the attractiveness of his flexible analytics and evocative narratives for a particular kind of artisanal and subspecialized professional intellectual community like contemporary anthropology as it seeks to make sense of itself in a postindustrial ecology of knowledge-making that is increasingly encountered as systemic, mediated, and estranging. The "mediating" quality of Foucault has to do with the way the specific character of his writing speaks to a specific sociological situation and allows the situated artisanal intellectuals1 (like us) to cognize ourselves as agentive subjects through the mediation of his narratives. Orbiting planet Foucault2If one wants to get a sense of general theoretical currency in a discipline, it's not a bad exercise to listen to which citations job candidates carefully intercalate into their presentations. As most of us know from having experienced the ritual, the job presentation is a difficult speech situation in which one is expected to demonstrate, in its anthropological variant, both a richly woven fabric of immediate ethnographic knowledge and familiarity and facility with a wide range of theoretical dialects. Of course, the candidate also knows intuitively (if s/he has been appropriately professionalized in graduate school) that there is an economy of citationality at work in evaluation situations. One needs to perform competently not just any theory but the right theory, both for the project and for the audience. My point is that the job presentation is, if correctly prepared, a speech context that cultivates a highly neurotic relationship to theory, a context in which the expected social valuation of theory becomes a condition of its articulation. Interestingly, in my listening to job talks at Cornell over the past two years, only one of about a dozen candidates didn't mention Foucault. At times the references were somewhat superficial, at other times more lengthy critical or affirmative engagements. No other theorist, and certainly no other self-identifying "anthropologist," received such common citation. When it came time to speak of issues of the scale of "discourse," "power," or "knowledge," Foucault was predictably invoked to triangulate these problems, to serve as the point of departure for the candidate's own gymnastics of positioning. After his talk, I mentioned informally to the one candidate who did not cite Foucault that he distinguished himself by not having mentioned Foucault at all. He calculated my intention for a moment and then replied, looking somewhat worried, "But I did mention discourse." Theories do all sorts of things; they do what we commonly construe them as doing—that is, they provide paradigms of analysis, key interpretive categories, analogical tools, and sources of inspiration for the formation of expert knowledge about the research object under consideration. But theoretical dialects also fulfill other kinds of communicative tasks: like "trade languages," they allow specialists in different academic disciplines with highly variable commitments, horizons, and connotational dispositions to muddle through communication to one another. In anthropology, the presence of such trade languages is particularly vital as the discipline has aggressively subspecialized both geographically and thematically over the course of the twentieth century. Without transspecialized registers of "theory," I think there would be very little metapragmatic recognition of disciplinary "wholeness." In the 1960s and 1970s the dominant theoretical dialects that gave practitioners a sense of common investment and identity were still largely drawn from self-identifying anthropologists: the interpretivism of Clifford Geertz or the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss were still widely debated, emulated, and criticized, for example. But since the late 1970s, anthropology's spheres of theoretical interlocution have expanded to include, and have become recentered upon, the works of authors much more broadly engaged across the humanities (to name a few, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek). Still, although the coordinates have shifted, practices of theoretical communication and citation remain largely undisturbed. Citationality not only signifies the lineaments of disciplinary wholeness but also provides a medium of value fixture and transfer. In moments of communicative clarity, citations provide legitimacy to the citers' own knowledge works; and, even moments of opacity invite productive hermeneutic labors of challenge, clarification and elaboration. Of course, to conduct legitimacy, the "right" citations must be employed. And it is here that the exclusionary, connoisseurial, stratifying tendencies of theoretical dialects evince themselves. Theoretical expertise, like other kinds of professional expertise, necessarily involves cultivating sociolinguistic distinctions between those "in the know" and those "not in the know" (see my "Foucault in the Bush"). Since hermeneutic labors within economies of theoretical discourse tend to be gendered as elite forms of intellectual practice in anthropology (and elsewhere), competence in a wide range of theoretical dialects projects entitlement, status, and belonging in an elite discourse community. A theoretical dialect that was widely intelligible would be of little use to such a community of expert knowers—such a language is precisely a plain speech register of "common wisdom" that theory is meant (via my favorite deictics) to either "rise above," "look behind," or "penetrate below." In the end, to paraphrase Bourdieu, what is politically at stake in the practice of theoretical communication and citation is the right to voice and to envision the disciplinary whole "on behalf" of the many who are not acknowledged to have this right. It is not surprising that the most vulnerable members of our professional community, graduate students and recent PhDs, are hypersensitive to the contours and stakes of theoretical languages and entitlements. The job candidate's reaction, "But I did mention discourse," suggests the recognition that citing Foucault is a particular kind of speech act in anthropology now—it says something with an illocutionary force along the lines of "I'm in the know" or "I belong." Citing Foucault performs and mediates theoretical competence. But, communication being the refracted imperfect process that it is, he hadn't heard my intended message, which was an invitation to a different belonging. I was saying "it was nice to hear someone not talk about Foucault for once." Because the very conventionality of citing Foucault has made it into a kind of "common wisdom" in anthropology in its own right and, given the connoisseurial, capital logic of expertise, one finds value and pleasure in hearing something "new." But I did mention "biopower"The question remains: How is it that Foucault has become so much a part of the Zeitgeist of the discipline of anthropology? To guide my response, let me offer a brief discussion of why I think Foucault's analytics of "biopower" has captured anthropological imagination. "Biopower" has, in the past several years, become a fixed coordinate in anthropological discourse on the interfaces between technology, human bodies, and modern political and social relations. But its contribution has been less conceptual or theoretical than it has been analytical or methodological. Contrary to certain expectations and receptions, there is no "theory of biopower" in the History of Sexuality . Foucault discusses "biopower," succinctly and provocatively in the first volume of The History of Sexuality as the matrix of force relations that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (143). Foucault's language resists precisely a desire for a certainty of determining "cause." He writes quite explicitly that his investigations seek not a "theory of power" but rather an "analytics of power: that is ... a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis" (82). His project is to narrate the forms and effects which power produces in the world—to do so, he embraces nominalism as his method, "One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (93). In other words, power is what it names itself to be. Because there is no theory, Foucault’s category of "biopower" and his biopolitical analytics can thus be easily claimed for a diversity of theoretical projects. In this respect, "biopower" has proved itself an eminently flexible instrument for the composition of expert knowledge. The erotics of Foucaudian discourse in anthropology do not center on the appropriation of his (non-extant) theory of biopower but rather precisely on his elevation of analytics over theory. The locus of desire is the flexibility and open-endedness of Foucault’s writing rather than the particular paradigmatic settlements that Foucault might be interpreted to be articulating. This is also, I would add, the locus of revulsion from Foucault's language and exegesis on the part of many theoretically-committed anthropologists. I understand intuitively why my thesis advisor, Marshall Sahlins, composed the following bilious couplet in honor of Foucault, "Power, power, everywhere and how the signs do shrink // Power, power everywhere and nothing else to think" (20). Sahlins's own theoretical paradigm, although ethnographically complex and textured, has a very strong sense of the fundamental causality of cultural and political phenomena in bounded and structuring semiotic systems interacting with one another and with their environment. What I think frustrates Sahlins most about Foucault is the fact that Foucault's analytics never resolve themselves to a contestable theory of originary causes. Who can argue with "links"? To be sure, the phenomena Foucault condenses under biopoliticality are "linked" to bourgeois hegemony, who could disagree, but what kind of a critical knowledge is that, and, as "a theorist" where does one go from there? Paul Rabinow, on the other hand, perhaps Foucault’s surest medium into mainstream anthropology, is content to stay much in the realm of the analytics Foucault proposes. His recent book French DNA ends with a call to move anthropology and the rest of the social sciences toward a nominalist sensibility. Rabinow asserts the “conceptual ruins” of categories like "epoch, civilization, culture, and society" and argues instead that "happenings in the world" (like the production of French DNA) can no longer be explained by treating them as instantiations of epochs or of cultural systems. Rabinow writes, "so much effort has been devoted in the name of social science to explaining away the emergence of new forms as a result of something else that we lack adequate means to conceptualize the forms/events as the curious and potent singularities that they are" (180). Significantly, Rabinow's writing is very focused on the association of understanding and novelty. His rationale for advocating nominalism is principally that nothing "new" or innovative is being generated by the old social science. The last sentence of his book states that if "the goal of our labor is understanding, then our concepts and our modes of work must themselves be capable of making something new happen in a field of knowledge" (182). I find Rabinow's concluding imperative quite uncanny. His demand for innovative knowledge doubles precisely the public rhetoric of what until the Spring of 2001 confidently declared itself as the revolutionary "New Economy" of technological, communicative, and epistemic industries. If you read magazines like Fast Company, Business 2.0 or Wired at the time Rabinow was writing his book in the late 1990s, you remember some New Economic slogans like: Be your own brand! Think outside the box! Innovate or die!3 Over the past three decades the so-called "postindustrial" revolution of production from manufacture to services in western societies has been accompanied by a hitherto-unknown degree of capitalization, marketization and in some cases, industrialization of knowledge economies, both inside and outside of the institutional space of the university. Legitimated by the technolibertarian rhetoric of the "New Economy," myriad efforts in the 1990s attempted to accelerate a process (a process set in motion, one might add, no later than the eighteenth century in Europe) of the institutionalized capitalization of knowledge. This involved most importantly treating "knowledge" itself not as some qualitative capacity for knowing but rather as accumulable value-laden epistemic singularities, as commodities ready-made for exchange whose social value was anchored by intellectual property rights and patents. One could imagine, of course, that the explosion of knowledge industries would be a good thing for knowledge-specialists like academics. Indeed, a text like Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition suggests a certain boomtown utopianism as it cleverly connects the contemporary abundance of knowledge-making to the crisis of legitimacy of the old modernist "master narratives." The master narratives, simply put, can no longer contain or bound epistemic productivity and plurality. The paradigmicity of modernist social science seems doomed to fall victim to the same new regime of flexible, 'just-in-time' production practices eroding the basis of old industrial economies of scale. In other words, the old theory is just more modernist kitsch. Perhaps any theory-driven social-scientific enterprise is now kitsch insofar as it cannot help but seek to organize the phenomena it engages in predictable relations of cause and effect. In Foucault's writing, theory in this sense is rigorously resisted. Instead, it is in the continuously flexible and original analytics of singularities and modalities where, for Rabinow and Foucault, our future lies. Where the old productive apparatus of academic knowledge placed emphasis on the certainty of causes as a means of evaluating and legitimizing knowledge, the new nominalism will be focused on singular epistemic originality as an autolegitimizing end-in-itself. Alongside the New Economic fantasy of the intellectual as flexible innovator, one should not underestimate the anxious situation of artisanal intellectuals who are not willing or able to embrace the logic of the market in postindustrial knowledge economies. In our own academic context, the capitalization of academic labor is being increasingly identified and decried as the cancerous spread of corporate managerialism. And the phenomena seem to be familiar outside the U.S. context as well. Marilyn Strathern has recently written, for example, of the generalization of an "audit culture" in British universities where academics are increasingly being held accountable to abstract criteria of formal productivity and reputation in order to preserve their resources. Relatedly, audit cultures tend to veil their constitution of austere market environments within universities behind promises of the institutional cultivation of originality and excellence. Above all else, a scholar must be continuously original and productive under these labor conditions. In turn, such systemic pressures affect the way we categorize and evaluate our own work and those of our colleagues. A colleague once noted to me that as soon as the work of a job candidate can be compared with the work of another, more established scholar, s/he ceases to be a viable candidate. The speech act of (even friendly) comparison disturbs the pure and potent singularity that the academic economy demands of us and which we in turn demand of one another. No one wants a knock-off. Where Rabinow and others speak of an epistemological crisis for paradigm-driven social science, I hear the sense of loss and erosion of legitimacy of artisanal knowledge-making in economies of knowledge that are increasingly audited and mediated, demanding both continuously original products and attention to the dynamics of the market itself. To my mind, the popularity and intuitiveness of biopolitical analytics are effects of the transformation of our own labor power. I am entirely part of the problem and not part of the solution. I am delighted to theorize that Rabinow's writing instantiates a social crisis of knowledge-formation experienced more broadly by artisanal intellectuals. And, I consider his solution as, in effect, an embrace of our marketization. Forgetting Foucault as a theoristThis is what I meant at the beginning by the oxygenic quality of Foucault. One begins talking about Foucault and then suddenly one is somewhere, everywhere, else. Despite Foucault's cachet as "a theorist," I don’t think rigorous conceptualization is the strength of his writing. Foucault, as a writer, is instead a master of evocative contingent gestures, provocative partial associations, spiraling lists of verbs conditionalizing one another, the carefully placed "what if?" In addition he is a master of the passive voice we work so hard to discipline out of freshman writing students. But this is consistent with his project. How can one be certain of active verbalizations in the matrix of force relations? Foucault narrates a world of tangled webs and networks, where we are linked, contingent, singular. It is not surprising to me that many of us artisanal intellectuals easily recognize ourselves in this world. This is also, I have suggested, the often anxious, at times utopian and always polyphonic phenomenology of the contemporary artisanal knowledge-maker. That "we" are situated, networked, contingent, mediated as subjects is intuitive to the point of being unconscious. In the end, I believe what has helped Foucault attain the status of the theoretical lingua franca of anthropology is that his pleasing and flexible post-theoretical language of analysis is a beautiful medium for our fantasies of authorship and anxieties of epistemic contingency to resolve themselves through productive practices of reading, discourse, and writing. In Foucault's apparent sacrifice, for example, of the search for a "theory of biopower," he acknowledges the contingency of his own project of knowledge-formation, a contingency with which we readily find intimacy. Yet, happily, Foucault’s sacrifice of theory is, as sacrifices always are, the path to rebirth, to revitalization. Categories like "biopower," "governmentality," "power/knowledge," far from being technically specific operators, are analytical instruments that can be employed in virtually any context. They make "new" things happen. In his denial of strict causality in his writing, Foucault offers the example of an alternative kind of social-scientific authorship that is expansive, open to the singular and particular, and resistant to reductionistic economies of scale. He, and his exegetes like Rabinow, project boundless “new” boutique economies of intellectual labor, centered on the creative exposition, interpretation, and criticism of limitless singularities. In a time of profound anxiety about epistemic certainty that has dovetailed with intense social incentives for productivity policed by auditing procedures, this vision is enormously persuasive. But embracing this vision comes with a price. The boutique, connoisseurial orientation of academic labor elaborates precisely the trends of professionalism, subspecialization, and capitalization of knowledge work that are the source of our anxiety and epistemic uncertainty. Its "critical" labors are moreover largely self-referential and self-fulfilling. For anthropology, this is an especially unsettling trend, one that counteracts several decades of efforts to reframe the boundaries between professional researcher and research subjects into collaborative modes of exchange. Even if it is impossible to imagine anthropology without Foucault today, I think that anthropologists would do well to consider the stakes of recentering anthropology as a post-theoretical social science. Theory is not the kind of work that I feel particularly comfortable "outsourcing" to scholars, however brilliant, whose scholarly labors are uninvested in intense empirical engagement with human beings, their lives and their practices. Works Cited
Notes
Dominic Boyer teaches anthropology at Cornell University. His current research and teaching interests center on media and public culture, professionalism and expertise, and the social lives of intellectuals in Germany and the United States. |