Response by David Ross and Others, 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 ."

I am at a loss. I don’t understand how the sort of thing that Foucault writes has come to be regarded as serious thought. This, it seems to me, is an important question. Neither do I understand what Foucault meant to accomplish, and I find this disconcerting. I am familiar, of course, with the agenda of the postmoderns. While nothing in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (H.S.I.) contradicts that agenda, nothing in it seems to promote that agenda, at least not with any vigor. In “Philosophical Detection,” Ayn Rand says of bad philosophies: “The nonsense is never accidental. The elaborate structures in which it is presented are never purposeless.” I think that this is true, but in the case of Foucault, I cannot discern a purpose.

In that same article, Rand gives her advice, well-known to members of this list, for judging ideas: “You must attach clear, specific meaning to words, i.e., be able to identify their referents in reality. You must not take any abstract statement as if it were approximate. Take it literally. Take it straight, for what it does say and mean.” This advice has served me well, but it didn’t help with Foucault. I have no idea how to take “Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities” literally.

My assignment was to comment on David Potts’s review . I appreciated David’s account of Foucault’s philosophy, particularly his comparison of Foucault to Kuhn, and his discussion of the Borges example. David’s account of Foucault’s epistemology gave me something with which to integrate at least a passage here and there on a second reading of H.S.I. On the assumption that Foucault’s other writing are stylistically similar to H.S.I., David has my thanks and respect for gleaning such a clear account of Foucault’s basic philosophy.

David ended his essay with a question about Foucault’s historical accuracy. I don’t think this is an important question, since I don’t see that Foucault really used history as evidence. But it’s at least a question that emerges from H.S.I. that makes sense. I am no historian, but I will say that I find Foucault’s claim about sexual prudery arising in the nineteenth century to be odd. The Christian antipathy toward sex goes back to St. Paul (in a sense, back to Plato), and as I understand it has always played an important role in Christian practice. Also, it seems natural for taboos against sex to arise as a means of birth control. I have always taken the Victorian attitude toward sex to be an expression of the Christian attitude, but that attitude predates the nineteenth century by, well, nineteen centuries. And the practical reason for sexual taboos existed in all human societies prior to modern birth control. So I am skeptical about Foucault’s claim. I apologize for the thinness of these comments. I simply couldn’t make sense of Foucault.

David Potts wrote:

David Ross writes: “In ‘Philosophical Detection,’ Ayn Rand says of bad philosophies: ‘The nonsense is never accidental. The elaborate structures in which it is presented are never purposeless.’ I think that this is true, but in the case of Foucault, I cannot discern a purpose.”

I have not read enough by Foucault--or maybe I just haven’t read the right things--to feel able to sum up the meaning of his views. But I can try to say a couple of things.

First, I think the most significant aspect of his philosophy is his social constructionism. That is the key to interpreting most of what he says. It is also novel to the later 20th century. Modern philosophers before Foucault, such as Kant and the early Wittgenstein, may have set limits to this-worldly knowledge, they may have said that there is a mystical, higher realm to which reason has no access, but they never doubted that knowledge is a matter of finding truths about non-arbitrary, stable facts, that it is possible to find such truths, and that we do so all the time. To say that knowledge is constructed truth--i.e., that truth is constructed along with knowledge itself and that the “facts” are dependent upon knowledge structures, not vice versa--this is new.

There is a notable difference between Foucault and Kant in this regard. For Kant, as I see it, the “sense data” and the empirical world they comprise are organized by our “hardwired” cognitive categories. Empirical knowledge is knowledge of this world, and the truths of science consist in correspondence of propositions to this world. The enterprise of knowledge can succeed because the same hardwired principles by which experience is organized also inform our knowledge processes. For Foucault, on the other hand, there are no hardwired categories but an “episteme.” Like the Kantian categories, the episteme organizes experience, but unlike the categories the episteme emerges from the social structures and processes of knowledge itself. The social process of knowledge constructs its own truth.

Therefore, the effect of Foucault’s approach is to trivialize knowledge further than earlier philosophies have done. Knowledge (including truth itself) becomes not merely limited but socially arbitrary; it becomes relative to a given society and a given social epoch.

Second, Foucault is concerned to politicize knowledge. This comes out clearly in HSI. Sexuality has no basis in “fact” but rather is a sort of dirty trick “deployed” by the bourgeoisie first to set themselves above others (by having more refined and purer sexuality) and later to control others by making them conform to sexual norms. Foucault has said similar things about justice and punishment and about psychology and mental illness (makes you think of Szasz).

So if you’ve ever been annoyed by people who act as though all scientists, no matter how seemingly innocent, are really governed by more or less deceitful political agendas (e.g., they’re doing "male" science), you have one of their “road pavers,” to use Rand’s term, in Foucault.

Bryan Register wrote:

David Ross has “no idea how to take ‘Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities’ literally.”

Luckily, I have.

Neither power nor resistance comes from a single source or institution. Rather, power and resistance stem from many individual interactions, and institutions are organized and re-organized around power and resistance.

Here’s an example of a model wherein power and resistance each come from a single source.

The owners of capital have power with relation to the workers, because they employ the state as a means of exercising control. Likewise, the workers’ vanguard party is the sole source of resistance to the owners of capital, because only this party has consciousness of the nature of capital and the relations of power to which it, and the ownership of it, gives rise. The state is the institution from which all power flows, the party the institution from which all resistance flows.

Here’s an example of a model wherein neither power nor resistance comes from a single source.

There is an interlocking network of many parts which sustain our contemporary way of life and contemporary relations of power and resistance, but the network has never been designed or planned. Primary education, in a non-conscious and unplanned way, crippled the basic conceptual faculties of children. More advanced education teaches its subject matters in a non-systematic and non-hierarchical way, but with a vaguely altruist and statist twist to whatever the subject matters are. Meanwhile, the means of artistic production, especially the music and film industries, in an uncoordinated way, celebrate mediocrity, averageness, and even viciousness (Forrest Gump v. Pulp Fiction). Also, the two main political parties, while they have not agreed with one another to do this, have randomly split up the political playing field so that no coherent political positions can be seen to make sense; any coherent political position like socialism or libertarianism will seem to cut across the anti-conceptual boundaries the parties have arranged. Just as these cultural institutions, and many others, express many power relations (cultural elites v. ordinary people, teachers v. students, politicians v. constituents, etc.), resistance comes from many sources. Some people homeschool their children, other people sing songs about values (Rush), some people articulate coherent political positions in opposition to the dominant view. But when, e.g., romanticist art begins to dominate, the cultural elites and their political friends will create a new institution to preserve the old power relations, the NEH.

Not only is what Foucault says here subject to clarification, it turns out that you agree with it.

How shall I say this... Ayn Rand is virtually unintelligible when she formulates many of her key ideas. Any fan of Rand owes the postmodernists more than irritation.

Michal Fram-Cohen wrote:

First, I would like to state that my silence on Foucault so far does not imply agreement, only dumbfoundedness.

I found Bryan’s last post in reply to David Ross clear and intelligible, so I would like to comment on it. Bryan writes: “There is an interlocking network of many parts which sustain our contemporary way of life and contemporary relations of power and resistance, but the network has never been designed or planned.”

I tend to disagree. The network was certainly designed, planned, implemented, and sustained by all the individuals who advocated or enacted the ideas behind the type of education, politics, and art we have today. It was not done explicitly, not by a Committee for Irrational Culture, but each intellectual, bureaucrat, teacher, or artist contributed his share to the network. Since human society never had a period of total freedom or a culture of total rationality, it appears as if the network of power and resistance has existed from the dawn of time. It appears as though the members of society are only the network’s puppets. However, when history is examined more closely, it is apparent that the network can be changed or even replaced. Such a change is a Revolution, or a Renaissance.

For Foucault, there are no *entities* in relationships of power and resistance, only a network of relationships. Thus, there is nobody there to design, plan, implement, or sustain the network.

Bryan Register wrote:

Michal Fram Cohen says: “The network was certainly designed, planned, implemented, and sustained by all the individuals who advocated or enacted the ideas behind the type of education, politics, and art we have today. It was not done explicitly, not by a Committee for Irrational Culture, but each intellectual, bureaucrat, teacher, or artist contributed his share to the network.... For Foucault, there are no *entities* in relationships of power and resistance, only a network of relationships. Thus, there is nobody there to design, plan, implement, or sustain the network.”

If you wish to disagree with me about it, I could look up the passage wherein he says that the network is brought about by the intentions of actors, but that the actors do not intend that the network be brought about. I did not take Foucault to be suggesting that human beings are not independent entities with intentions and wills of their own, and I think that this would be a one-sided reading. This is rather like taking Rand to deny my free will because I’m none of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Rand.

[Moderator’s note: in this last, somewhat cryptic sentence I take Bryan to mean that as in some Objectivist analyses these four philosophers are the fundamental drivers of history, everyone else might in some sense be thought to effectively fail to choose a philosophy freely, and thus might be construed to lack free will. I suppose Bryan takes some of the comments in Leonard Peikoff’s “Fact and Value” as the model of such a view.]

Foucault and Rand (as I understand her) *agree* that there is a network of power relations which influence the behaviors of agents within the networks, and I don’t see any reason to believe that Foucault would deny the other half of the Randian coin, the part about how we’re in some ways independent of that network, or can become so. This is why he advocates a form of resistance to the contemporary power structure in other works. If you’re not there, you can hardly resist.

Michal Fram-Cohen wrote:

Bryan Register wrote: “If you wish to disagree with me about it, I could look up the passage wherein he says that the network is brought about by the intentions of actors, but that the actors do not intend that the network be brought about.”

I do not recall this particular passage, but I can take your word on it. The way you describe it, the passage is self-contradictory. What are the intentions of the actors, if they did not intend to bring about the network, but their intentions did bring about the network anyway? Are the actors in touch with their intentions? This severance of the agents from their actions is typical of Foucault. Things happen although nobody intended them to happen. Foucault avoids the possibility of foresight on the part of the actors as to the results of their intentions. He blurs the issue of a person’s accountability to his actions.

“I don’t see any reason to believe that Foucault would deny the other half of the Randian coin, the part about how we’re in some ways independent of that network, or can become so. This is why he advocates a form of resistance to the contemporary power structure in other works.”

Here I would like Bryan to quote the passage where Foucault says that we are or can be independent of the network. I think that resistance to the Law as such, which is what Foucault advocates, does not indicate independence of the network’s laws, only blind resentment toward the laws. Perhaps Foucault’s resistance to the laws of logic makes him independent of logic in his own mind, but there is no need for his readers to share his view.

Bryan Register wrote:

Michal Fram Cohen wrote: “I do not recall this particular passage, but I can take your word on it. The way you describe it, the passage is self-contradictory. What are the intentions of the actors, if they did not intend to bring about the network, but their intentions did bring about the network anyway?”

Well, one possible model for a similar system would be: One intends to act to one’s own economic advantage through exchange with others; others intend to act to their own economic advantage through exchange with still others and with one; nobody plans for a market to result, yet a market results.

I’ll make up a similar cartoon for some hyper-simplified relation of power. Og starts hitting his wife, just for the hell of it. Grog notices that Og’s wife is more obedient than his own, so he starts hitting his wife. Soon enough, lots of people are hitting their wives. There’s a whole system of wife-hitting. The men even sit around discussing how and how not to hit your wife; norms develop. Some men who are offended by the wife-hitters band together (probably with a few wives) and try to get the tribal elders to have the wife-hitting stopped. But the wife-hitters persuade the elders that it’s all-natural violence: the gods designed men to hit disobedient women and women to do what they’re told (and to be too stupid to figure it out without getting hit). Even many of the offended are swung around to this line of argument, and over time it becomes an accepted practice such that any wife trying not to be hit is formally punished by the tribe. Nobody intended for there to be legal sexism, and yet there it is.

William Dale was the first on this list to notice this feature of Foucault, in his intro essay, where he says: “He further characterizes power relations as intentional, but nonsubjective. While they are intentional in being directed in a particular ‘direction,’ they are not the intention of individual people. In this way, they are like Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ or Hayek’s notion of the coordination of the market through human action, but not by human design. Furthermore, the ‘points of resistance’ in the network of power relations are also everywhere, like resistors in a large electric panel.”

Nobody needs to design a network for the network to come into being out of the unintended consequences of the unintegrated actions of many agents.

Bryan Register wrote:

Michal [Fram-Cohen] continues: “Here I would like Bryan to quote the passage where Foucault says that we are or can be independent of the network.”

I haven’t got it on hand; I’ll ask a friend who’s a Foucault fan for guidance in this direction.

“Perhaps Foucault’s resistance to the laws of logic makes him independent of logic in his own mind, but there is no need for his readers to share his view.”

I don’t suppose you would care to cite the passage in which Foucault tells us that things aren’t what they are? Foucault never resisted logic, he resisted a set of what he thinks are artificial categories imposed on the world with no justification beyond the power relations the categories sustain.

To read this as resistance to logic is to read Rand as an irrationalist, too. When you tell someone that you reject the distinction between necessary and contingent truths, they’re liable to accuse you of being an irrationalist and rejecting logic. (Indeed, you *have* rejected modal logic.) The analytic-synthetic distinction was the buttress of scientific philosophy. The fact-value distinction was supposed to protect pluralist democracy. And so forth. Rejecting these things in front of an analytic philosopher is liable to get you an accusation of embracing irrationalism.

We need to cleanly distinguish logic from the logic of a particular ideology, system, culture, area of study, and so forth.

Michal Fram-Cohen wrote:

Bryan Register wrote: “Well, one possible model for a similar system would be: One intends to act to one’s own economic advantage through exchange with others; others intend to act to their own economic advantage through exchange with still others and with one; nobody plans for a market to result, yet a market results.”

This example does not include any rules or laws, only voluntary trade in a very primitive, or very free, society. What Foucault is concerned with is not a network of voluntary relationships but a network of rules and laws which elevate and protect some while oppress others. My point is that the rules and laws did not evolve on their own without the intentions of some individuals to create and maintain these rules and laws.

Bryan’s second example about the “wife hitting” custom that becomes a law actually proves my point. At one point, some tribe’s members had the clear intention of turning the “wife hitting” custom into a law, while other members intended to dismantle the custom. Here I can quote Bryan:

“The men even sit around discussing how to and how not to hit your wife; norms develop. Some men who are offended by the wife-hitters band together (probably with a few wives) and try to get the tribal elders to have the wife-hitting stopped. But the wife-hitters persuade the elders that it’s all-natural violence... Nobody intended for there to be legal sexism, and yet there it is.”

The ones who intended to turn the custom into law succeeded. The law could not be established without their intentions and effort. They certainly intended to establish legal sexism, even if they cannot understand such abstract terms.

Similarly, in another tribe, the ones offended by this custom may succeed and the elders would declare a new law punishing a husband who hits his wife. The custom will disappear because the ones offended by it intended it to disappear.

In the first tribe, the law in favor of wife-hitting cannot be maintained without the intentions of everybody to maintain it. Some members can question the validity of the argument that the gods designed men and women in this way. They may observe some evidence to the contrary, especially if they encounter the other tribe where wife-hitting is forbidden.

Bryan Register wrote:

Michal Fram Cohen has cast doubt on my cutesie examples. Since they were, after all, cartoons dreamed up in about thirty seconds, I would not wish to make these examples bear any real weight. Let me just ask this. When you write a post to this list, is it a part of your conscious intention to support (and not just adhere to) the conventions of the English language? Nevertheless, we support the conventions through our adherence to them, and they fade away when we remove that adherence either through common choice or widespread linguistic incompetence. Nevertheless, neither the support nor the fading away is very often the consequence of anyone’s choice or intention.

For instance, it is now virtually *ungrammatical* (and not merely allegedly sexist) in the academy--for good reasons or bad--to use the masculine pronoun to refer to a person of indeterminate sex. Things are that way now because the convention of using masculine pronouns to so refer was called into question and dropped, intentionally. Yet, when I speak in class and employ feminine pronouns as a matter of habit, it is not part of my intention to support the new grammatical rule of academia. Many other students never even intentionally dropped their old habits but merely picked up the new one without consideration; I opted for the new way intentionally, but I don’t intentionally opt for it again every time I use a feminine pronoun. Nor does the fact that I am encouraging others to adhere to the new convention enter my thoughts, though no doubt I am doing so just as others encouraged me earlier on.

Actually, my example about Og might not be in such bad shape. Og hit his wife because he liked to; he was a sadist. His nearby neighbors hit their wives because they thought they would end up with more obedient wives that way. People farther out in the community started hitting their wives to prove their masculinity. The tribal elders made the law that we must all hit our wives because they had a theory about human nature.

Og hardly planned all this. Nor did the guy who made up the theory realize that he had made it up not to establish justice but rather to rationalize an already existing custom. There are a wide variety of goals here, most of which are carried on in total ignorance of the other goals and all of which are distinct from the others in some ways and connected in others--often, the connections are things no one knows about, and the disconnections are things no one thinks about. But the network of actions, customs, and laws was never planned *as a whole*, even though various parts of it were introduced intentionally.

Or, the short form: Read your Hayek.

Back to David Potts, "Knowledge and Power in Foucault's History of Sexuality"