The remains of unquestionably the greatest intellect of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, are buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. I recently tossed a red rose on the site. I doubt whether Judge Gerard Hogan, to whom I have addressed previous articles in this series, or any other legal positivist, would do likewise.
While positivists often engage, though disagree, with rights-based -thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin, most exhibit a level of incomprehension, and often outright hostility towards certain forms of Radical Jurisprudence. No doubt the often unclearly expressed ideas of late Marxism, structuralism and post structuralism often are a factor, but that is only a partial excuse.
Noam Chomsky – himself a linguistic positivist – once made a comment to the same effect on these authors, exempting Michel Foucault. He had developed a rational understanding of Foucault, but none for example of Derrida, who many including myself regard as largely intellectually fraudulent. Indeed, many Cambridge University philosophers objected to the conferring of an honorary degree on him, although I believe there is an element of truth to his babbling on relative truth or foresight.
This plan of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.
Panopticon
It is, nonetheless, easy to see why, as far as my harsh assessment of post-structuralism Foucault is exempted. Foucault makes very relevant contributions to Jurisprudence and the practice of law.
First, the transplantation of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon – the all-seeing surveillance prison such as Kilmainham in Dublin – is in Foucault’s view a depiction of modern society, where a uniform doctrine is enforced in schools, law courts and hospitals, leading to blind conformity.
Foucault presaged the age of Surveillance Capitalismand 24-hour data surveillance in Ireland, achieved in camera in the Quirke Case through the representations of the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Thus, we have a global panopticon wherein the value of privacy and freedom is thrown to the wolves.
Now our judges aside from Hogan, most recently in the Dwyer Case restricting the privacy right, ignore ECHR and EU law. This undermines an ideal of liberty, at least as old as J.S. Mill in modern times, and in fact going back to the Greeks. So, Foucault’s insight is not about postmodernism. It translates into the destruction of rights under Article 3 of the Irish Constitution and 8 and 5 of the Convention.
The second of Foucault’s contribution is his book on madness in the age of reason. The fundamental tenet is that the Enlightenment / Age of Reason involved the necessity, intellectually and then institutionally, to confine the unreasoned – those who were called mad – into asylums. Well, who is mad and who is clinically insane?
The recent US Democrat convention, with the rather wonderful Mr Walz speaking from the heart on middle-class US conservatism about banning books and depriving choice stands against that Twitter conversation between Musk and Trump.
The problem of reason and madness is also clear earlier in Ken Kesey’s masterpieces ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1962). What happens when the lunatics have taken over the asylum and a dissident voice says no? What of when the man or woman of reason, the pursuer of nuance and grey, the boy who cries wolf, the creature of the Enlightenment is locked up by those who are in fact self-interestedly insane.
Foucault was apparently not on the UCD Jurisprudence syllabus in the late 1970s. A short journey to the Arts block to encounter Richard Kearney’s expertise in Continental Philosophy would have been beneficial.
Marx and Engels in the printing house of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. E. Capiro, 1895.
The Crucial Figures
The crucial figures of radical jurisprudence are not the structuralist, even Foucault, but the great Marxist theoreticians. For Marx law was a mirage, an ideology upholding the interests of the bourgeoisie, He considered it a mere superstructure determined by the economic base. Law, he observed, served the interests of the ruling class.
Thus, in Marxist terms Hogan’s analysis of Kelsen is a form of intellectual masking or ideology justifying a form of state authoritarianism, which Marx would surely have interpreted precisely as the Populism of the petit bourgeoisie. No judicial deferral should be granted to the popular sovereignty of the mob.
Marx though is not consistent about law. He argues that in the properly ordered Communist society there would be no need for laws, as we would spontaneously co-operate in our Communist Nirvana. But at times he concedes, inconsistently, that law is not always bad, and a close textual analysis of his views on property rights, and the freeing up of the alienation of estates to facilitate greater capital, shows that sometimes the superstructure can influence the base, and thus influence economic relations.
So, what of Ireland controlled by a landlord class achieving nothing and facilitating careers going nowhere except to Microsoft and criminal banks, or the legal service class who act like vultures preying on the vulnerable on behalf of the powerful?
The legal realist Oliver Wendell Holmes in his famous rebuke to unregulated free market economics in Lochner (1905) said the Fourth Amendment does not enact Mr Herbert Spencer’s social statics, and nor should the Irish Supreme Court enforce the interests of the commercial fat cats of Aran Square or elsewhere.
Many Marxists, such as Lenin, saw the necessity for rules in a never-ending interregnum on the way to a Communist Utopia, which is never to be achieved. More pragmatically, the fundamental question for any judge which the Marxists pose is: whose interests do the rules serve?
The Marxists influenced the critical legal studies movement, which to some extent educated me, adopting the radical indeterminacy thesis, an idea borrowed at one level from the legal realists. They argue that given the plasticity and malleability of rules, legal outcome can be very unpredictable and in fact subjective.
There really is no such thing as a ‘plain fact’ or literal interpretation of almost any legal text. To avoid nihilism we should invoke moral principle as a corrective.
Alienation
The term alienation coined by Marx more generally to describe exploitation of workers serves as a warning as to how our government is destroying both the working and middle classes,
Subsequent Marxist have been more approving of law. The legendary Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by Mussolini, adopted the phrase ‘hegemony’ to suggests as necessary a form of co-operation in law, politics and culture between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Now this coalition argument suggests law can be used as an instrument of social change. That depends on a desire to change for the good.
One wonders whether the new, petite bourgeoisie-aligned Keir Starmer government in the U.K. should be a source of optimism or seen as a false dawn? More taxes on the wealthy, or further savage austerity for the poor?
The Rule of Law is a central concept in jurisprudence, though hotly contested, and Marx aside, it has dominated the thinking of some of the main Marxists thinkers of recent vintage.
In his codicil to Whigs and Hunters (1975), E.P. Thompsonexpressed a view on the Rule of Law as an unqualified good, which at times could check arbitrary authority. That of course assumes the Rule of Law exists in an ethical polity. It is not that evident in Ireland today as core principles are violated or improperly implemented.
Thus, the independence of the judiciary is not obvious in Ireland, the use of in camera proceedings, akin to the promulgation of secret laws, is a cardinal violation of the notion that justice must be carried out in public. We also find an apparent tolerance of police corruption, the abandonment of substantive rather than formal equality, and indeed the abandonment of constitutional rights.
Thompsons argument is premised on the idea that the judges are willing to enforce the rule of law, often with the effect of unsettling vested interests, as in the recent, painfully prolonged, Assange case. Irish judges are more likely to do the opposite.
Jürgen Habermas
Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is, as ever, a crucial contemporary thinker, and, with all due respect to Gerard Hogan’s veneration of Kelsen, he is not just the world’s leading intellectual figure but the towering German intellect along with Thomas Mann and Kafka of the 20th century.
Since Habermas abandoned the Frankfurt school, and thus post-structuralism, he has become, for over fifty years, one of the great proponents of the Rule of Law and legalism. He stresses the importance for judges not to subvert rights and parliamentary laws protecting civil liberties including the right to protest, viewing civil disobedience as central to revitalizing democracy.
In contrast, the knee jerk reaction in Ireland and the UK has been to give more powers to the police to regulate dissent.
Habermas’ other idea of communicative action, borrowed at one level incidentally from the arch positivist Austin, is the elaboration of the idea of ideal speech. His ideal for the vindication of speech rights is the eighteenth century salon. The ideas of communicative action in legal and judicial terms blends into the ideas audi alterum partem (‘listen to the other side’), and the obligation not to be either subjectively or objectively biased.
Ideology, a term adopted by Marx, has been reinterpreted by Slavoj Žižek, drawing on another Marxist in Lacan, as ideological misidentification. In both instances, and applied to law, there is the sense that the bureaucratic class are engaged in false consciousness or deceptive ideas.
Lon L. Fuller, who is not a Marxist but a natural lawyer, argued that once a legal system has not a tinsel of legality left, but enforces barbarism, it is no longer a legal system.
To round the series off, a Marxist would fully understand the rage of Populism, but not necessarily approve of it. Of course pure Communist societies do not work, but nor does pure neo-liberalism. Indeed, Ireland is not working except for the landlord class.
What does work legally ethically and morally is a social democratic Just Society advocated by the master John Rawls. What does work is Sweden, Denmark, Norway and much of northern Europe, where people are not in Marxist terms commodified and viewed as product, but in the moral Kantian sense things in themselves.
John Rawls intellectually speaking would never have existed but for Karl Marx and a difficult thing for a legal positivist practitioner to realise is that Marx is in fact the greatest of all legal, political and economic philosophers. This is not to say he is entirely correct or a model to be followed in overall societal regulation, but a useful corrective to interpret laws and asses whose interest they serve and, if necessary, to bend rules to achieve socially just outcomes.
Dworkin in fact argued that the South African judges during Apartheid should potentially have lied about the content of a racist law. I also agree or rather at the very least that they should have interpreted it to bring about socially just outcomes.
Marxism at its best focuses on civil and in particular social and economic rights, and the judiciary responsibility to enforce them into the law and the Constitution, to the extent that this is consistent with the Rule of Law.
Through Fernando Pessoa the flesh was made word. Reminiscent of the renowned Chinese painter Wu Daozi, who, as legend has it, vanished into one of his own landscape paintings, Pessoa (1888-1935), the great Portuguese poet, appears to have disappeared bodily into his written works. Dispersing himself into the many lives of others through the medium of writing, Pessoa became nobody and many others simultaneously.
Pessoa called these many others ‘heteronyms’ (other names). These distinct others who discovered a voice through Pessoa have left behind a treasure trove of philosophically charged poetic works. Their wide-ranging and diverse works created by the ‘secret orchestra’ of Pessoa’s soul have given rise to a choral symphony whose resonance intensifies over time.
One is left in a state of silent wonder and awe at the sheer scale and brilliance of what Pessoa managed to achieve while semantically composing the soul. The challenge for his readers is to break this silence and put into words what it is that Pessoa accomplished, thereby naming precisely his significance for how we humans understand ourselves, the way we see things, and how we dwell upon the earth.
Astute Philosophical Experimentation
A new book, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, and Antonio Cardiello (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, U.S, 2021) takes on this challenge with gusto.
Its aim is to bring to light Pessoa’s in-depth knowledge of philosophy and his ability to engage in astute philosophical experimentation, and at the same time highlight his capacity to confront, appropriate, synthesise, and strip bare complex ideas into art. Additionally, by focusing on Pessoa’s writings through different philosophical lenses the chapters included in this volume seek to reveal novel ways of interpreting some of the seminal problems of philosophy.
Bartholomew Ryan alerts us to the relevance and urgency of this task in his Introduction, where he claims that if ‘philosophy is to survive the various crises of human civilization ahead of us, to respond and open up new pathways of thought’ we will need the assistance of ‘experimenters in literature, in order to help us reconnect with ourselves, others and all living species on the planet.’
Structurally, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy consists of an Introduction, Exordium, Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, fifteen essays dedicated to Pessoa and philosophy, a detailed appendix, and a critical bibliography. The wide range of elements that make up this volume come together to create a joyous banquet of a book.
Ryan opens this feast for the soul with a fast tempo-ed, polyphonous introduction, entitled ‘An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher’. He notes how it is the task of the philosopher not to read a poet in order to appropriate an idea for her/his own purposes. Instead, the philosopher is prompted to engage with literature so as to learn how to dwell in an uncomfortable and uncontrollable region.
For in this strange region where philosophy and poetry meet something innovative can occur. As Ryan writes: ‘It is in this encounter between the philosopher and poet a vulnerability is opened on both sides to inspire the creating of a new concept in the philosopher and a new form and linguistic gesture in the poet.’
One of Pessoa’s astrological charts from 1916.
A Sense of Journey
By entering into such an encounter with Pessoa, the philosopher has a lot to explore and discover. As a poet animated by philosophy Pessoa prioritises a sense of journey over notions of progress, development and evolution, as he writes: ‘I don’t evolve, I JOURNEY’.
Besides his emphasis on journeying, the heteronym Álvaro de Campos shares a similar vision for both the philosopher and artist when he notes in his futurist manifesto ‘Ultimatum’, how the philosopher should contain ‘the greatest number of other people’s personal philosophies; and that the artist should write ‘in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.’ These insights offer rich food for thought for the philosopher.
The Exordium and Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro come after the Introduction. These two marvellous sections are comprised of words from Pessoa and four of his heteronyms, namely, Alexander Search, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. They serve to attune and acclimatise the reader to the mood and atmosphere of Pessoa’s writings.
Some sentences shine luminously in the Exordium, for example, ‘There is for me – there was – a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door-key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fulness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road.’
Notably, the Exordium and Campos’s Notes also reveal the humour and irony of Pessoa’s writings. Campos writes in his Notes of the fictitious nature of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa: ‘Even more curious is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking.’
And when humorously critiquing the work of the great 19th century writer Giacomo Leopardi, Pessoa claims Leopardi’s philosophical pessimism and overemphasis on suffering stems from a shyness with women. Pessoa remarks: ‘“I am shy with women: therefore there is no God” is highly unconvincing as metaphysics.’
Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos seen by José de Almada Negreiros.
Four Sections
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy is then divided into four sections: Spiritual Traditions, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, Philosophies of Selfhood, and Contemporary Problems and Perspectives. Each section has three to four chapters. The volume has been arranged by philosophical themes which are both central to Pessoa’s work and to philosophy itself. The first section, Spiritual Traditions, focuses on Neopaganism, Daoism, Indian, and Islamic philosophy.
The first chapter by Antonio Cardiello, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s vision of Neopaganism as Life’s Supreme Art’ explores Pessoa’s project of reawakening polytheism and the Hellenic model of civilisation. Cardiello observes how Pessoa, using his orthonym, calls for a ‘superior paganism’ for modern times in which ‘all protestantisms, all Oriental credos, all paganisms, dead and alive become Portuguesely fused.’
In addition to a ‘superior paganism’ Pessoa makes reference to a ‘superior art’ that can ‘lift the soul above everything narrow, above all instincts, moral or immoral concerns.’, and liberate us from ‘life itself.’ Merging a superior paganism with a superior art, Cardiello claims it was Pessoa’s task to denounce two millennial of moral interpretation and substitute it for an aesthetic one that glorifies human life, thereby dispensing with unhealthy values for healthier ones that encourage humans to flourish.
Paulo Borges’s ‘Fernando Pessoa, Daoism and the Gap: Thought of Insubstantiality, Vagueness and Indetermination’ is the second chapter in this section. It closely examines emptiness and the ‘gap’ in the writings of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa and the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, comparing these themes with Daoist principles.
According to Daoist thought, emptiness allows the emergence of the ‘ten thousand beings’ or the infinity of possibilities and the possibility of an authentic life lacking self-centredness. Borges highlights how in Pessoa, the overabundance of becoming other and the experience of heteronymy emerges from that insubstantial emptiness of self and of everything.
While the abyss of being prior to defining oneself by naming oneself, surfaces as the ‘gap’ that ‘is between’ the self and itself. Towards the conclusion he identifies a wonderfully apt quote from Tchouang Tseu to describe Pessoa. Tseu writes that ‘the perfect man is without any I, the inspired man is without work; the holy man leaves no name.’
Marketplace in Goa, as depicted in Jan Huygen van Linschotens Itinerarium.
Imaginary India
The third chapter, ‘Pessoa’s Imaginary India’, by Jonardon Ganeri, looks at Pessoa’s understanding of the ‘Indian ideal’ which he interprets as signifying the transcendence of the illusion that is living a human life.
Pessoa regards the Indian ideal as ‘inhuman’ and speaks of ‘the principle, which we already know to be absurd, that the universe is an illusion.’
Ironically, Hindu thinkers writing at the same time as Pessoa, such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan share Pessoa’s critical sentiments towards this ideal. Borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, Ganeri acknowledges an ‘ironic affinty’ between Pessoa’s position that he occasionally assumes as his own contraposition to the ‘Indian ideal’, and the ideas of his contemporaries in India that he never knew.
In the final chapter of this section, ‘Pessoa and Islamic Philosophy’, Fabrizio Boscaglia, brings to light Pessoa’s engagement with Islamic philosophy and its impact on his writing. Boscaglia draws attention to Pessoa’s interest in the philosophical thought of Omar Khayyām, through Edward Fitzgerald’s translations, and the possible connections of Sufism in Pessoa’s poetry.
Boscaglia also demonstrates how Pessoa’s makes several references to the Islamic civilization as the keeper, interpreter and transmitter of Greek culture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissnance.
In the second section of this book, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, the topics of time, nihilism and the nothing, transcendentalism, immanence and becoming-landscape take centre stage. João Constâncio opens the section with ‘Nihilism and Being Nothing in “The Tobacco Shop”’.
The chapter seeks to respond to two significant questions: 1. What is the meaning for Pessoa, particularly in the masterpiece ‘The Tobacco Shop’ (by Álvaro de Campos) of ‘being nothing’ and 2. How can the study of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s philosophical writings contribute to the understanding of such a paradoxical way of being, which consists of ‘being nothing’?
Constâncio delves into Campos’s despair for ‘being-nothing’ and reveals it to be tantamount to despairing for having to be a mask, for not being able to avoid adopting an identity that is a mere linguistic construction, regardless of whether it implies some ultimate metaphysical purpose implicit to life within society.
Furthermore, Constâncio shows how Campos’s ‘conscious consciousness’ makes him envy those who, living by way of an ‘unconscious conscious’, manage to believe in an identity that is intersubjectively attributed to them.
‘Pessoa and Time’ by Pedro Duarte is the second chapter in this section. For Duarte, it is possible to grasp the individuality of each of the three heteronyms Caeiro, Reis and Campo, by studying their different approaches and responses to time.
But Duarte also includes Pessoa, the orthonym, in his analysis. For Pessoa the past needs to be rediscovered, and not set aside, because it summons the present to build the future. Caeiro takes time out of things, through detachment and unlearning and to see without thinking. Caeiro writes ‘I don’t want to think of things as being in the present; I want to think of them as things’.
Reis believed that ‘we pass like the river’ through life. For Reis, existence was all about adhering to this passage. Aging should be accepted. On the other hand, Campos desires to feel everything in every way, and find the beauty of the present moment, a beauty unknown to the ancients, hence electric lamps and factories are to be celebrated. Campos says ‘I who love modern civilization and kiss machines with all my soul.’
Walt Whitman aged 35.
American Transcendentalism
Benedetta Zavatta’s chapter entitled ‘Pessoa and American Transcendentalism’, investigates the link between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Pessoa. Emerson’s influence on Pessoa had not received scholarly attention prior to Zavatta’s essay.
Zavatta convincingly hypothesises that Pessoa was drawn to Emerson and Whitman by the notion, repeatedly articulated by these two authors, that every individual latently contains within herself/himself the seeds of an infinite number of different personalities.
This in turn enables an individual to foster an empathetic connection with other humans, to the point where they ‘become them’. Enlarging this empathetic connection allows one experience how the whole world is seen and felt as these others see it and feel it.
In the chapter ‘Bernardo Soares’s Becoming-Landscape’, José Gil explores the use of landscape in The Book of Disquiet. Gil’s philosophical approach to The Book of Disquiet opens up this impossible book for the reader, by revealing that each of its fragments is ‘a veritable landscape-state of emotion’, providing it with ‘both skeleton and flow’.
Gil’s deft analysis of Bernardo Soares’s becoming-landscape culminates with an enquiry into what occurs when the plane of the landscape clashes with the plane of emotions. Gil suggests ‘all distances disappear, and the “I” itself, which functioned like a screen between sensations and the landscapes, explodes, disappears and ceases to exist’.
What remains is the pure landscape of event-sensations. A ‘sensation-universe’. Literary description ceases, and ‘sensations attach themselves to the flow of the landscape because they result from them: it is no longer the sky yonder, or the I, here, like this sky: it is the sensation-sky or the sensation-light.’
The third section, Philosophies of Selfhood, examines the dissolution and plurality of the self and subject in Pessoa’s writings. It commences with Bartholomew Ryan’s chapter ‘Voicing Vacillation, Logos and Masks of the Self: Mirroring Kierkegaard and Pessoa’.
Ryan argues that, in the journey of forging the human self or subject into writing, the achievements of the poet Pessoa and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard remain unsurpassed. Through Pessoa and Kierkegaard, Ryan investigates the making and unmaking the elusive self through vacillation, logos and masks.
At the core of this study lies doubt, which Ryan claims both writers see as the sickness and heartbeat of modernity. Pessoa and Kierkegaard voice doubt and despair, as the poetic-philosopher and philosophical poet.
According to Ryan, Pessoa delights in aesthetic melancholy and being allied to no one or no thing except literature. Describing Pessoa as an Argonaut of Modernity or the Argonaut of true sensations, Ryan envisages him journeying ‘to the abstract chasm that lies at the depths of things’ and questioning the philosophical problems of selfhood by voicing its vacillation, logos and masks. Buffeted by this tormenting journey, Pessoa vacillates between knowledge and faith, and experiencing the elusive moment.
In ‘The Difference between Othering Oneself and Becoming What One is’, Maria Filomena Molder states that the dictum of ‘becoming what you are’ is nowhere to be found in Pessoa, and the concept of ‘othering oneself’ belongs in other waters.
Drawing support from Nietzsche’s insight in Twilight of the Idols that the ‘I’ has become a fairytale, a fiction, a play on words’, Molder proposes that Pessoa has no need for a theory of the subject. Molder then shows how Pessoa coined the term ‘othering oneself’ in order to account for the multiplicity of writers who are born out of his way of writing.
According to Molder, othering oneself, ‘proceeds not from the plurality of the subject but from a precocious, childlike inclination to imagining oneself as multiple characters, a succession of dramatic scenes secreted by creative play.’
This incisive and succinct chapter draws to a close with the claim that Pessoa and his heteronyms are not liberators. What is he, then? Molder asks, and answers through the mouthpieces of Ricardo Reis and Pessoa.
The answer from Reis is: ‘I am merely the place/Where things are thought or felt’. And Pessoa responds: ‘I look at them. None is me, but I am their ensemble’. Not done yet, Molder asks: What does Pessoa want? And this time Pessoa replies: ‘I want to be the creator of myths, which is the highest mystery achievable by a member of the human race.’ And so Molder reveals the undecipherable mystery of the many in one, of the one in the many.
Gianfranco Ferraro’s chapter ‘A Hermeneutics of Disquiet: Approaching Pessoa through Foucault’ concludes is final one in this third section. Ferraro tends to Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet through the ‘toolbox’ provided by Michel Foucault’s in The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
Why Foucault? For Ferraro, Foucault’s terminology, specifically in relation to ‘technologies of the self’, greatly assist us in interpreting Pessoa. These technologies highlight, in Ferraro’s own words, ‘practices which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being,’ so as to ‘transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.
Consequently, approaching The Book of Disquiet through Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self allows us to see how Pessoa recovered many of the ancient practices and technologies of writing and how modernity adopted them again.
Borrowing from Foucault’s hermeneutic toolbox Ferraro reaches the conclusion that we can observe in The Book of Disquiet a work that summons one to oneself and to experimentation of oneself in revealing the many beings that lie dormant in our forms of life.
"lacking Yeats’s ‘grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long."https://t.co/mMvVZAmM5F
The fourth and final section Contemporary Problems and Perspectives concentrates on value theory and secular capitalist modernity; the logic of seeing, ecological thought, and the fundamental relationship between poetry and some contemporary philosophers.
‘Pessoa’s “The Anarchist Banker” and the Logic of Value’, by J.D. Mininger offers a thorough reading of Pessoa’s short story ‘The Anarchist Banker’, which in part is supplemented by Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’.
Anarchism strives to vanquish all social conventions and fictions, and is thus in a sense morally and politically motivated. Yet it could also be understood as signifying the freedom from such conventions and fictions.
In this story the anarchist achieves his own freedom by becoming a banker. According to Mininger, the essential politics of this story does not lie in the author’s construal of anarchism, but in the silent relation between philosophy and literature, between algebra and story, between proposition and performance, between constraint and freedom.
For Mininger, Pessoa’s story is an anarchistic act to the extent that it expresses freedom through constraint – a paradox made possible by the literary surplus value that is both the story’s cause and effect.
The second chapter in this section ‘For Your Eyes Only: The Logic of Seeing in Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry’, by Bruno Béu, opens with the words of the artist Kazmir Malevich, ‘I have transformed myself in the zero of form’ found on a leaflet distributed at the exhibition Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (zero-ten).
One of Malevich’s most famous works is his 1918 painting entitled White on White, showing a white square against a white background. As a work of art it calls into question the very possibility of form and representation.
Bèu in this chapter draws connections between Malevich’s paintings, and Caeiro’s poetry, in which language is being forced to reach its zero ability to signify things, while our experience of things is ‘freed’ from any re-presentation that we make of them.
Bèu demonstrates how Caeiro’s tautological discursive and logical performance is a radical negation of all possible predicates. This linguistic process leaves each thing absolute, indescribable and indefinable. As Bèu poignantly remarks ‘It is as if, through this process, each thing revealed itself and spoke from the top of Mount Sinai pronouncing the tautological and biblical words: ‘I am that I am’.’ As such no-thing is said for things to be seen, and ‘Poetry turns white on white’.
Image (c) Daniele Idini.
Ecological Dimensions
In the chapter ‘Where Does Fernando Pessoa Dwell? The Economy and Ecology of the Heteronyms’, Michael Marder illuminates some of the ecological dimensions to Pessoa’s work. This is attained through an analysis of what Pessoa called ‘disquiet’, to outline what Marder names a new ‘economy and ecology of the heteronyms’.
‘Disquiet’, in the sense of being unsettled, describes the possibility that dwelling and the dweller no longer exist, or, perhaps, never have.
For Marder, Pessoa is the place where dwelling might be reimagined, or, the placeholder for the lives of others. Turning his focus to Caeiro, Marder asserts that he wants to dwell in a world unspoiled by the ideal and idealising system of co-ordinates.
For Marder, Caeiro’s poetic project is to liberate the ‘innocent’ green and flourishing earth from the imaginary lines that have divided its surface through social and political conventions.
‘So where does Pessoa dwell?’ Marder asks at the close of this chapter. Marder’s response: ‘Between economy and ecology, between nowhere and everywhere’. Pessoa’s heteronyms outline an ‘economology’, where dwelling and unsettlement are not formally opposed to one another, a place where it is possible to dwell in the very unsettlement that acknowledges the impossibility of dwelling.
Giovanbattista Tusa’s ‘The “Pessoa Event”: Notes on Philosophy and Poetry’ concludes this section. Tusa’s text articulates the fundamental relationship between poetry and philosophy through Fernando Pessoa and the works of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Badiou in particular takes on a hugely significant role in this chapter, for it is he who notes that the poem far from being a form of knowledge, is the instance of thought subtracted from everything that sustains the faculty of knowledge.
Tusa also cites Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he claims to be contemporaries of Pessoa is ‘a philosophical task’, and through the reading of his work, philosophy could experience its own incapacity or perhaps its own impossibility.
After these four sections, Jerónimo Pizarro provides an appendix to the book called ‘Pessoa and Philosophy: Texts from the Archives’. This is a collection of selected Pessoa texts alongside images from the Pessoa archive referencing philosophy and various philosophers.
Pizarro’s fine scholarly research gathers editions and studies on a series of documents from Pessoa’s archive to help with future comparative research. The volume ends with a critical bibliography of Pessoa’s own works published in English, books on philosophy that he owned and secondary works on Pessoa and philosophy.
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy sheds a remarkably illuminating spotlight on the wonderous writings of Pessoa, but most importantly it instils in the reader a sense that sections of his ‘secret orchestra’ have yet to be heard, and that future exploratory journeys await.
Feature Image: José de Almada Negreiros, Retrato de Fernando Pessoa.
L’histoire naturelle, ce n’est rien autre que la nomination du visible. Michel Foucault – Les mots et les choses
Walking with my dog this morning, I was struck by the various rewilding projects which certain aspects of my local community have been embracing. For example my twelve-year-old daughter’s primary school, in its wisdom, has decided to carve out niches in its grounds for ‘Managed Wildlife’, otherwise known as rewilding projects.
What does this mean? Well, whereas previously the grass would have been meticulously trimmed like a tight haircut, thus permitting no wildlife to blossom or bloom, be it wildflowers or grass, the latest trends is to encourage the wild to grow again.
Any botanist will tell you that in the absence of wild flowers and long stemmed grasses the biodiversity of our green spaces suffer. An absence of flowers lead to less insects and less insects to less birds, and on and on.
Now, instead of regimented green empty spaces a profusion of wild flowers and grasses grow, roped off so school children cannot run amok, and destroy the phenomenal growth on display. I also noticed that the local council has adopted similar rewilding practices along the green spaces by the roadsides. This has increased bird song all around, which is really quite wonderful.
While Argo, my Jack Russel of four years seemed quite content sniffing the blossoming flowers, and as I extracted the biodegradable poop bag in anticipation of his morning’s delivery, I couldn’t help but think how our own culture would benefit from a similar rewilding process.
The Wild Ones
When was the last time that you read a book that was described as ‘Wild?’ Yeah, that’s what I thought. We never read such an adjective alongside a work of contemporary literature any longer. And why is that? Why are there no more Flann O’Briens, Thomas Bernhards or William Burroughs? Where are all the wild men and women of literature?
William S. Boroughs
You don’t hear about them anymore. Why is that? And more importantly, what does this say about contemporary society? These are just some of the questions that I considered while looking at the rewilding projects this morning.
One of the things you will read about, on a similar topic, in both the mainstream media and on social media sites is the apparent decline of Western culture. There is a lot of rhetoric, particularly promoted in far-right media that are waging a cultural war against what they see as the fundamental destruction of Western values by what they perceive as the inexorable rise of political correctness or ‘Woke’ culture. Why is this? And could there be any truth in what they are saying?
Having completed the paragraph above, I now enter the political minefield of the culture wars. This article could be dismissed as yet another text advocating a far-right agenda, but hear me out, as I can assure you that I am not a Populist, and have nothing to do with exclusionary ideas, Yet nether am I an apologist for the political left. So, what am I then?
I am, first and foremost, a Writer. Yes, with a capital W. And that means that I am a champion of free speech. This is extremely important as it seems to me that we are at a cultural impasse in the West because publishers are so afraid of the negative feedback that they refuse to publish anything deemed offensive,
As a result, these days, there is practically nothing of any interest going on in contemporary literature. This probably sounds very polemical, but I ask the question again; when was the last time that you read anything remotely Wild lately?
I am reminded of Rabelais, now, particularly. His bawdy sense of humour which was to cause so much shock, and yes, offence to some. That was the whole point! There was a time when to publish meant shocking people out of their comfort zones.
If literature or writing could ever be described as having a function then it is to shock people out of their day-to-day existence, and get them to sit up and question it. That is to say, question the society in which they are living.
But that is not the case today because there are no wild writers any more. They have all been silenced. The great blanket of fear has gently stolen over a whole civilisation, and now everyone is looking over their shoulders. Nobody has the guts to say anything difficult or troubling, without necessarily believing in it, any more, as no publishers has the guts to publish it for fear of a backlash from the politically correct ‘Woke’ brigade.
How did we get here?
It is a particularly disturbing phenomenon for me as an Irish writer who grew up in Cork during the 1980s, which was a period of incredible repression, mainly due to collusion between Church and the State.
Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)
I eventually escaped the awful cultural conformity and went to live in Paris like so many writers and artists before me. Globalisation and the boom eventually blew away that culture of fear, and I returned to live in Ireland on the eve of the millennium in order to experience first hand the most historic cultural shifts that have taken place on this island since independence one hundred years ago.
The boom years had an enormous effect on every single aspect of Irish life, in particular the influence the Church which gave way to a newfound secularisation.
But what has happened in the intervening years? Consider education and the huge changes that have happened there. I remember while studying for a PME in one of Ireland’s leading universities a few years ago being advised to drop history as a subject if I wanted to have any real chance of getting a job. Instead I was encouraged to train to become a religious teacher. It was as if we had come full circle!
As an Irish writer, with over ten publications behind me, I seriously worry about the future. In the last couple of years, I have had to reject offers of working with commercial publishers, both here and abroad, who wanted me to make major changes to books that I had written as they were too scared to take them on in their current form. My best selling book, for example, More Micks than Dicks despite selling a thousand copies in its first year of publication remains out of print as the content is considered to ‘wild’ for current tastes.
This is sad. The satirical book is a send up of academia in the spirit of Beckett and yet remains out of print as it may ‘offend’ certain sensibilities. On that basis, I ask the question: would Beckett have had a single one of his books published today? This question must be considered not only by the world of literature but society at large, if there is to be any significant change.
Recently, I was looking at a European website offering courses for teachers and students alike which were being financed in part by the European Union. I found the contents of the majority of the courses truly shocking, as they amplified these newfound sensitivities. A lot of buzz words, without any real substance. You know you have a serious problem when your system of education is actually offering you nothing of any real substance.
Of course, gardens and ideas, more specifically philosophical systems, have been around for as long as man has been cultivating nature.
Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
One only has to think of the exquisite formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham here in Dublin. These formal gardens, the only ones of their kind on the island, are a beautifully ornate reconstruction of the gardens one would fine typically anywhere in Europe during the period of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The gardens, rather like the rational mind, were symmetrically ordered into very carefully refined partitions, labyrinthian yet clearly purposeful and well-defined, so that in the botanical body we can find man’s most elaborate and refined expression of his development of order in nature.
The grasses and hedges are so neatly trimmed, so tidy are they that a team of gardeners are required to keep on top of the work, ensuring that an apparently disorderly nature does not predominate. Indeed, one merely has to peer over the walls of the garden and look onto some of the common land that surrounds the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham to be reminded of a wilder nature when she is not maintained by man.
And there you have a prefect illustration of the mind body duality characteristic of the Enlightenment. Nature on her own is chaotic and man, being a part of nature, must keep a firm hold on himself, subduing his wild passions. Such was the moral instruction, at least, behind the formal gardens at the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.
But we should remember their historical origins also: the gardens were to be a place for peaceful contemplation for reposing soldiers recuperating from the various wars they had borne witness to. Indeed, one only has to visit the Hospital grounds and walk along its carefully laid out lanes to appreciate the solace and contentment that the gardens must have brought to the poor, suffering men.
However, the appreciation of gardens and nature is a very subjective experience. What may bring clarity and peace to one – the formal garden for example – may be the stuff of nightmares for others.
To get a better demonstration of the multiple facets of human personality, I would recommend a stroll through your nearest allotments like where my wife spends the greater part of her days. There, here again in Skerries, you can see the very rich profusion of plants in some of the organic plots.
She cultivates numerous species of tomato growing in her polytunnel: Black Russian, Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Cherry, Hillbilly, Jubilee, Ukrainian Purple and Old German each one as distinctly ornate and tasty as the next. The very diversity of nature, cultivated or otherwise, is simply remarkable. Surely a similar form of diversity should be reflected in our nation’s literature? Yet is it?
And so I ask the question again. Where are all the wild women and men of literature gone? The truth of the matter is we are killing our Western Culture, just as we killed our environment. This is one of the principle reasons why the West is in decline, and it is in decline. You can see the evidence everywhere; it is in our schools, in our work places, it has even crept into our pubs, the places of our supposed relaxation.
I shall leave you with a question: if you don’t have any freedom worth speaking of, any real freedom to speak your mind, what freedom are you actually fighting for? This is a very serious question and its importance, as far as I can see, is only going to grow in stature over the coming months and years.
Here is another: where were YOU when it died? And another: what did you do exactly to protect her?
I wrote what follows prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and have been prompted to re-read all of Michel Foucault’s work, including his lectures and digressions. It seems to me that the following is worth emphasizing:
The concept of the Panopticon, Foucault borrowed from Jeremy Bentham is increasingly prominent in the wake of this virus that has accelerated the introduction of a system of mass surveillance.
Inappropriate behavior is being re-defined to encompass ordinary sociability, while once cherished liberties are easily forgotten. A state of derealisation is upon us.
Madness may now be redefined, leading to detention under draconian (anti-terror) laws for anyone perceived as deviant, subversive or even non-conformist in an ever-narrowing consensus. People who do not behave, act or dress in a specific way are now labelled ‘mad’. People who oppose draconian laws are ‘mad’. Maybe even human rights lawyers will be locked up.
The media and other vectors of public opinion manage the message to ensure compliance and control.
The concept of punishment has been internalized as a regime of prolonged social distancing and self-isolation undermines humanistic instincts. An ever more compliant and fearful population will welcome the Panopticon.
David Langwallner, July, 2020.
Introduction
I have previously quoted a passage from Noam Chomsky, which acutely surveys the post-structuralist origins of our present Post-Truth condition. These words are worth recalling once again:
There are lots of things I don’t understand – say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of ‘theory’ that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.[i]
A point worth emphasis from the thinly disguised contempt he displays towards this deceitful movement is Chomsky’s regard for Michel Foucault as “different from the rest” – a superior calibre of intellect to the rest. A hedged concession admittedly, but one I happen to share.
Alone among Post-Modernists, Foucault’s methodology was empiricist and historicist. Rather than relying on incomprehensible prose and bizarre generalisation he adopted inductive reasoning. As an historian of ideas, we don’t simply find him inventing absurd abstractions, but analysing real, existing data.
Foucault’s ‘critical philosophy’ undermines universalist claims by exhibiting how they are the outcome of contingent historical forces, and are not scientifically grounded realities
Madness and Civilisation
In Madness and Civilisation, (1961, Librairie Plon) Foucault examines conventional understandings of mental illness, arguing madness and reason are categories first developed in Enlightenment thought. He sees madness as a product of the Age of Reason, the excluded ‘Other’ against which reason defines itself.
His thesis is that the practice of confining the mad is a transformation of the medieval practice of confining lepers in lazar houses, an institutional structure of confinement already in place when the modern concept of madness as a disease emerged, even if confining those defined as such to institutions was a break with the past.
Focusing on this transitional period, Foucault argues that in its infancy, or nascence, reason is a concept that defines itself in opposition to an ‘other’ of madness.
As he explains:
What is originate is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, derives explicitly from this point.
Thus truth of reason is found where madness arrives in place of non-reason, and differences are defined in terms of oppositions. Thus, the meaning of reason is defined by the meaning of madness.
Foucault argues that if we are to insist upon reason we must not be mad, and so protect ourselves from what we are not. He notes that the confinement of the mad in asylums is a product of the mid-seventeenth century, and that it is no coincidence that the process of confinement developed in conjunction with the Age of Reason. Thus madness operated as an ‘other’ to reason, and as products of Enlightenment thought.
For Foucault: ‘[M]madness was an invention, a product of social relations and not an independent reality.’[ii]
Of course that point can be expanded to our present age, with concepts of rationality and ideas on mental health shifting, augmented by social media, message management and outright thought control. The paradigm shift is towards an all-consuming neo-liberalism, and conformity reconfiguring human identity itself. Soon, I fear, even moderate liberalism might be deemed mad, recalling Chile in the 1970s, or even 1930s Germany.
In my practice as a London-based barrister, increasingly, I find clients in disassociated and decrealised states. Social alienation is leading many to perceive themselves as passive onlookers in lives not truly their own. The ills of social dissatisfaction and structural curtailment of achievement leading to moderate or even severe depression.
The unrealisable expectations of consumerism and its unattainable objects is creating individual neurosis and psychosis. In essence, pervasive neo-liberalism fosters madness.
Forms of social sanitation and indeed sexual sanitation coupled with an excessive political correctness are thus criminalising deviant behaviour. We live at a time when judgment on those who are essentially normal is handed down by deviants; a spectator democracy where people have lost ownership of their lives. It’s as if we are in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre of Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Discipline and Punish
In his other crucial text Discipline and Punish, (Gallimard, 1975) Foucault examines punishment through the ages, arguing that torture has simply been reconceived.
He raises ever more pressing doubts about the hidden costs of a penal style that avoids visible coercion, instead seeking to transform ‘the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.’ Thus efforts to institute ‘less cruelty, less suffering, more gentleness, more respect, more humanity,’ have, according to Foucault, had the perverse effect of reinventing the entirety of modern society along the lines of a prison, imposing ever subtler, and insidiously punishing discipline. Not just on convicts, but also on soldiers, on workers, on students. Even the various professionals trained to supervise disciplinary institutions are not spared its effects. Corrective technologies of the individual have been refined, producing a double effect: a soul to be known and a subjection to be maintained.
At the core of Foucault’s picture of modern ‘disciplinary’ society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation; normalising judgment; and the examination. Thus, to a great extent, control over people is exerted merely by observing them.
Further, modern disciplinary control is often concerned with a person’s failure to meet a required standard and in order to correct deviant behaviour. The impetus is not revenge, but reform, encouraging the individual to live by the dominant norms of society. Thus the phenomenon of normalisation is intrinsic to our society, e.g. national educational standards, standards-driven approval for drugs et al. It is encountered especially in control over whatever is perceived as excessively libertarian, including sexually ‘promiscuous’ lifestyles.
The norm itself may of course be perverse.
Foucault contends that as people are examined in schools and hospitals control is exercised over them in hierarchical fashion, with the application of normalising judgment. This is what he terms power/knowledge, which combines into a unified whole: ‘the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.’
Further, force or control elicits ‘truth’ from those undergoing examination in conjunction with exercising controls over their behaviour. Knowledge is thus an instrument of power, and the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated from knowing we control, and in controlling what we know.
Yet the problem often lies with the knowers who know, but do not turn the lens on themselves.
Google and Facebook now exercise control, not in top down fashion, but through a levelling user-generated mediocrity, where personal data is mined in order to influence consumer and political choices in a networked society, as they remould what it means to be an individual.
The Panopticon
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault is heavily influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon. Bentham imagined a glass prison in which prisoners were under continuous surveillance, and argued that by applying perpetual inspection to prisons, schools, factories and hospitals one might harmoniously co-ordinate self-interest and social duty. To Bentham this would lead to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ even if are turned into automatons: ‘Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines: so they were but happy ones, I should not care.’
Bentham’s Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model for modern disciplinary power in that each inmate is visible to a central power, and can be seen at any time. With inmates assuming their every act is witnessed, control is exercised internally.
Foucault suggests that Bentham’s ideas, rather than being fanciful, have become paradigmatic in modern society. Unlike the power of sovereignty, which was often exercised violently, the power of discipline is mild, insidiously humane as it is exercised through discreet surveillance rather than overt coercion. Such supervision, according to Foucault, dissociates power from the body, leaving us compliant and normalised – ready to take orders from above. The effect was an ‘automatic functioning of power’ – ‘A perfection of power’ that tended, paradoxically, to render its actual exercise useless.
Foucault elaborates on this in a 1978 interview:
In my book on the birth of the prison I tried to show how the idea of a technology of individuals, a certain type of power, was exercised over individuals in order to tame them, shape them and guide their conduct as a kind of strict correlative to the birth of a liberal type of regime. Beyond the prison itself, a cerebral style of reasoning, focused on punishable deviations from the norm, thus came to inform a wide variety of modern institutions. In schools, factories, and army barracks, authorities carefully regulated the use of time (punishing tardiness, slowness, the interruption of tasks) activity (punishing inattention, negligence a lack of zeal); speech (punishing idle chatter, insolence, profanity); the body (punishing poor posture, dirtiness, lack in stipulated reflexes) and finally sexuality (punishing impurity, indecency, abnormal behaviour).
He concludes Discipline and Punish with the view that:
In a system of surveillance there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by internalising to the point that he is his own supervisor, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.
Bentham’s idea for a prison was only occasionally adopted and ultimately found to be inhumane. Kilmainham in Dublin stands as an isolated example. To penetrate its inner sanctum is to see how, from every vantage, the prisoner is being watched. This time of domination by (anti-)social media is not so very different.
Truman Show
Now even a propensity for mildly deviant behaviour is under the overarching supervision of Big Brother – the virtual reality Truman Shows of our daily existences. We have become pieces on a chessboard controlled by the all-powerful corporate influencers, the ultra-rich and the bureaucratic state. These are the worst of times that Foucault saw coming.
For Foucault the exercise of power in modern societies is complex – domination and rights are not only derived from the power of a sovereign institution of subjects, but are also the product of the lines of force arising from social relations. Subjects are not just determined from above, but are constituted within the system. Thus he explicitly rejects the positivist/sovereign as the source of all-encompassing authority in our society:
My aim has been to give due weight … to the fact of domination to expose but its latent nature and its brutality. I then wanted to show not only how right is, in a general way, the instrument of domination – which scarcely needs saying – but also show the extent to which, and the forms in which, right, (not simply the laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions and regulations responsible for their application) transmits and puts in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination. Moreover, in speaking of domination I do not have in mind that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over another, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society. Not the domination of the king in his central position, therefore, but that of his subjects in their mutual relations: not the uniform edifice of sovereignty, but the multiple forms of subjugation that have a place and function within the social organism … In other words, rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to use in lofty isolation. We should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts … We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects. This would be the exact opposite of Hobbes project in Leviathan, and of that, I believe, of all jurists for whom the problem is the distillation of the single will – or rather, the constitution of a unitary, singular body, animated by a spirit of sovereignty … I would say that we should direct us researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the state apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilisations of their localised systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and state institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination.
Critical Appraisal
William Davies applies this to an understanding of law and politics:
Foucault suggests that we abandon the juridical analysis of power, which has emphasised the notion of sovereignty. If we think about law as something which is in itself powerful, something which supplies the answers to disputes and orders social behaviour according to the intentions of a powerful body of lawmakers and judges, we are, perhaps missing an important point. This is simply that many other systems of power, many other systems of meaning and value in society, interact with the legal system. It is not just institutionalised law which says no, or which orders behaviour, or which punishes us for our transgressions. There are, for instance, a multitude of social prescriptions, which order behaviour and the way, we think about the world. Social norms cannot be ultimately distinguished from institutionalised law. The way that a law is applied depends on the interpretation of facts in a case, and therefore, ultimately on the social values and assumptions which go into making that interpretation. Power in the legal system cannot therefore be described simply in terms of hierarchy of people with authority to make decisions, or of laws with the potential to determine disputes: though both the hierarchy of people and that of laws certainly exist, they are shot through with social meanings and systems of relationships which cannot be reduced to one-dimensional descriptions.
Thus what find now is no longer a top-down state leviathan, but micro-management, corporate and internet brainwashing, the regulation and management of behaviour and expectation, which is re-defining ‘appropriate’ conduct We the wretched of the earth, the ordinary citizen, the disengaged are reduced to surviving under controlled conditions in a spectator democracy. ‘We the many’ are the collective other. ‘They the few’ powerful watch over us, deciding our fate in ever subtler and more insidious ways.
This leads to political parties becoming increasingly contorted and nugatory, and NGO’s dispersed and un-coordinated. It is not so much a democratic deficit as a democratic void, as we are reduced to deciding who watches over us.
Foucault saw all of this clearly. His individual response was to embark on personal hedonism, which accelerated his self-destruction – a personal cri de coeur in favour of libertarianism. But this should have been tempered by greater self-discipline, as his excesses diminished his achievements and led to an early grave.
Solipsistic Sexuality
Nonetheless, his contextual analysis of sexuality is also of great relevance to the present age. In effect neo-liberalism leads us to focus on private development, awakening sexual libertarianism to negate the political and accentuate further disengagement. He also saw the possible return of fascism.
But at least, as Foucault points out, social institutions and structures, being contingent, are susceptible to change. Current trends will surely will pass eventually, albeit saving oneself in the meantime is a necessity. Our existences are finite after all.
The other option is to migrate to Iceland, before being compelled to do so:
If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a sub centre- preferably to Iceland.[iii]
[i] Noam Chomsky, ‘On Postmodernism, Theory, Fads, Etc’ no date (probably 1996), at http://199.172.47.21/lbbs/forums/ncpmlong.htm>
[ii] James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon and Schuster, New York, p 103.
[iii] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chatto and Windus, London, 1932 p.85
