Response by Jason Walker, The Atlas Society | Ayn Rand, Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " The Continental Origins of Postmodernism ."

Abstract: I make a number of observations about the way Foucault operates. I notice, first, a parallel between his view of history with Hegel and Rand. Next, I criticize the way Foucault writes in floating abstractions, and his consistent habit of referring to Western Civilization as though it were a monolith. I conclude with comments concerning Foucault as a postmodernist.

Введение

As I’ve never been involved in a CyberSeminar or anything like it before, I wasn’t sure how to go about writing this commentary. Obviously, trying to “refute Foucault” would be a bit of burden, not to mention beside the point, which as I understand it is more about discussion and understanding rather than a childish attempt to prove Rand was superior to all of the philosophers we’re studying combined. As such, I decided to simply list some general observations I made of the text, some in the form of criticism, some not. The criticisms I do offer here might already be answered by Foucault in another one of his works, but I fail to find anything dispelling them from within the assigned reading. My other main difficulty is my own lack of familiarity with Foucault as a thinker, so a lot of what I write here might merely spring from my own lack of understanding about his system. I wish I had been able to read other works by Foucault to better understand concepts he flings around in this text, like “power-knowledge.” William Dale wasn’t the only person who found understanding Foucault to be a difficult task.

Observations

First and foremost, I want to complement William on writing an excellent review of the material. I thought he did an excellent job of balancing the need to write in detail and the value of brevity, especially considering the subtlety of Foucault’s writing. And like William, I have to render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, and also give Foucault the benefit of being “an entertaining, sensually engaging writer.” While the concepts Foucault refers to are not always clear, his imagery usually is.

Second, in any study of Foucault, it should be mentioned that any claims of historical fact Foucault makes should always be taken with a grain of salt, even more than is normally warranted. This is a thinker who once remarked that, “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or ‘manufactures’ something that does not as yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth” (Power/Knowledge 193). Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian who wrote the anti-postmodernist tract The Killing of History, devotes an entire essay to Foucault alone, serving as an expose of some of Foucault’s sloppy historical research methodology.

Any claims of historical fact Foucault makes should always be taken with a grain of salt, even more than normal.

With that out of the way, I wanted to move on to something more positive, and point out a remarkable connection between aspects of Foucault’s theory of history and Rand’s. This connection is a Hegelian conception of history; all three thinkers look for the primary cause for events not in something strictly material, like the means of production, but rather in the ideas of a given time. Rand writes, “Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas” (Ayn Rand Lexicon 203). Note that in the passage that we read for the seminar, Foucault does not point to a single material factor in his explanation for the evolution of sex and related thought. Instead, Foucault is concerned primarily with the discourse of a given time period as being indicative of how a given society operates.

Of course, unlike Hegel, Foucault does not see a logical unfolding of history that will eventually give rise to the Absolute; but rather a more chaotic Heraclitian flux of power-knowledge and resistances. Rand, as an advocate of free will, similarly sees no reason why any given outcome is necessary, although associating her ideas with anything like flux would be misleading. The chief disagreement I think Foucault and Rand would face in this would be with the cause of the indeterminism. William Dale’s characterizations of Foucault, that “People as individual actors are basically irrelevant to Foucault; the ‘forces’ acting in a society act through people, but the people themselves are not actors,” is an accurate one as far as I can tell. There simply isn’t room for free will in Foucault’s system.

As a historian, Foucault leaves much to be desired, because we see very little in the way of specific concrete examples for his claims about history, and little in the way of cites (not that Rand herself wasn’t guilty of this too, but that’s another topic).

For example, on page 94, Foucault explains, “Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.” Fair enough. But to argue a point like this, Foucault needs to do a lot more than simply state it. It would be helpful conceptually speaking if we can see a real-world referent, perhaps from history or even literature, to this phenomenon. Foucault could show a specific example wherein, for instance, despite law-power being shared under a significantly different arrangement, the previous balance of power overall remained the same. Foucault could explain, for example, in drawing this distinction, how things would operate differently if power was indeed something that could be acquired, seized or shared. Otherwise, we are dealing with floating abstractions here, with no clear way to decipher what they mean for us.

Also, Foucault repeatedly commits a pet peeve of mine, when he refers to “society.” There were many instances where it was difficult to tell which society he was referring to; was he discussing Parisian, Western, American, Human? Fortunately enough, there are a few places where Foucault alludes to the society he intends to critique as the Western, such as near the bottom of page 7. But there is a huge difficulty here, in that Western Civilization, like its Eastern counterpart, is no monolith. The intellectual atmosphere (or discourse, if Foucault prefers) was far different in say 18th century Russia or Spain, which for all intents and purposes were still in the Middle Ages with no real Enlightenment to speak of, than it was in France and the US. And even here, the Enlightenments of these two nations had very different characters, as did their respective revolutions. Taking it one step further, we can even get into a specific nation, and talk, as good Objectivists do, of different subcultures. Foucault speaks of a society, “castigating itself for its hypocrisy...speak[ing] verbosely of its own silence” (8), when it would make much more sense to think of the situation as different warring subcultures (perhaps with their own “discourses”) rather than a single schizophrenic culture. Oddly, Foucault himself seems to recognize this in a different context: “Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case...” (96).

Why is this a problem for Foucault’s analysis of sex? To illustrate, I refer to Ben Franklin’s visit to France to negotiate an alliance in 1776. Franklin was a well-known international celebrity, and in particular was well known as being a lady’s man. He had several affairs with married women (many of whom were married to top government officials, like the Minister of the Treasury) while there, and the French reaction is mild amusement more than anything else. Imagining the very different reaction he would’ve received had he been in Madrid instead of Paris, and remembering that both countries are Catholic, it’s easy to see how a difference of locale from within so-called Western Civilization can radically alter things.

But the main point is that to speak of a Western society in such broad terms can not only lead to inaccuracies, but it can also weaken the philosophical strength of any meaningful critique. When he claims “society castigates itself for its hypocrisy,” I want him to name names, and give a few specifics. Describing the characteristics, as Foucault does here, of the nature of sex and the discourse of the entire Western civilization makes about as much sense as saying Eastern philosophers were all religious.

Concluding Thoughts

Based on everything here, I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that Foucault was a postmodernist, at least as Hicks conceives pomo. While he and Rand do share a conviction that history is determined by ideas, in every other branch of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, etc., Foucault fits the mold. Although (not having played an active role in the defining postmodernism discussion), I can only stress a general reluctance to even use the term in describing anyone, because ideas about what postmodernism is differ so widely, and it’s become this almost meaningless catch-phrase for the 90’s. Under Hicks’s definition, pomo could practically be described as Anti-Objectivism. Yet in a blurb on the back of Chris Sciabarra’s Russian Radical, we find Rand herself being described as a postmodernist by Douglas Rasmussen, who suggests, “Sciabarra shows that Rand is best understood as a postmodern thinker, for she was concerned with creating a culture that overcame the dichotomies of modernity...” So, if you must use the term, use discretion. It’s a bit overused, in my humble opinion.

Otherwise, I would like to hear others’ thoughts on things I’ve noticed here, especially the Hegel/Rand/Foucault connection.

Works Cited:
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vintage Books, New York: 1990.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Pantheon Books, New York: 1980.
Rand, Ayn. The Ayn Rand Lexicon. Ed. Harry Binswanger. Meridian Books, New York: 1986.
Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History. The Free Press, New York: 1997.

> Back to William Dale, "Foucault's Sexuality"