What can make doubtful a "savoir" concerns the political sovereignty, which a ’savoir" attempts to benefit. Michel Foucault tried to hunt down some of these cases.
This short text, in french, tests the use of a transversal notion - ‘savoirs douteux’- likely to mark both the specificities of the ‘good cases’ studied by Michel Foucault and the possibilities of continuing thinking politics of knowledge with Foucault with other ‘good cases’. What is doubtful does not concern a scientific content as regarded by a demarcation principle. What is doubtful concerns the political sovereignty, which those ‘savoirs’ attempt to benefit, and that is in return reinforced by their will to make science.
? Les g?n?alogies, ce sont tr?s exactement des anti-sciences ? (1) . Michel Foucault interroge la psychanalyse, la s?miologie, le marxisme. En revanche, il ne touche ni ? la physique th?orique, ni ? la chimie organique (2) . Le projet g?n?alogique ne concerne que les sciences des soci?t?s humaines, et semble ne pas pouvoir convenir aux sciences de la nature. Certains lecteurs de Foucault clament que la politique n’est possible qu’? cette condition : la s?paration stricte entre le royaume des objets et le royaume des humains. D’autres la d?plorent, targuant que la constitution d’un monde commun exige la prise en compte de tout ce qui l’habite, humains et non-humains (3). D’autres encore s’en nourrissent, prolongeant les g?n?alogies dans les sciences de la nature (4). Pourtant ces interpr?tations ne rendent pas compte du champ singulier des savoirs dans lequel Foucault a construit sa pens?e. Les bons cas d’?tude de Foucault se caract?risent d’abord en ce qu’ils sont des ‘savoirs douteux’. Cette notion transversale permet-elle de penser, ? partir des travaux de Foucault, les contraintes du politique, par del? la distinction entre humains et non-humains ? C’est cette question qui est ici test?e.
Les g?n?alogies sont des anti-sciences. Elles stimulent les insurrections des savoirs assujettis contre les effets concrets de domination produits par le pouvoir du discours scientifique quand il incarne le mod?le souverain de v?rit? dans nos soci?t?s occidentales. Les g?n?alogies combattent ces effets de pouvoir dont b?n?ficient les pratiques caract?ris?es par leur volont? de faire science, par leur soumission ? la souverainet? ?pist?mologique -qui ne reconna?t qu’un unique mode l?gitime de production de v?rit?- et ? la souverainet? juridique - qui ne reconna?t qu’une seule source de pouvoir : ces pratiques participent ? la production des ‘savoirs douteux’. Les dispositifs de savoir/pouvoir sont les instruments construits pour rendre compte de ces techniques sp?cifiques de production d’?nonc?s de v?rit?. Ils d?ploient leur efficace en prenant acte du fait que la t?te des souverains, juridique et ?pist?mologique, est coup?e. C’est ? ce prix qu’une politique des savoirs est pensable.
Les savoirs douteux de Foucault ont ceci de commun avec les pratiques modernistes d’Isabelle Stengers, qu’ils transforment la sp?cificit? conquise par les sciences modernes en mode de faire souverain, seul appel? ? trancher quel que soit le cas qui lui est soumis. Foucault utilise les dispositifs de savoir/pouvoir exclusivement ? propos des savoirs douteux, afin de laisser voir par o? ils tiennent mal, par o? les savoirs assujettis peuvent s’insurger. Les pratiques modernistes, parce qu’Isabelle Stengers (5) les pose en contraste avec les pratiques modernes, explicitent d’autant mieux cette transformation indue. Lorsqu’elle fait le r?cit de l’invention des sciences modernes autour de la figure du dispositif exp?rimental de Galil?e, il s’agit de mettre en sc?ne les contraintes propres ? ce mode de production de v?rit? sp?cifique. La r?ussite dont nous sommes h?ritiers, l’?nonc? vrai produit par le dispositif, concerne la conqu?te de cette sp?cificit?.
Les savoirs douteux, Foucault les d?non?ait dans le champ des sciences humaines. Autre pouvoir, autre savoir (6). Les effets de pouvoir sont ?galement ? l’œuvre dans les situations d’expertise o? l’on demande aux sciences assistance, fondation et justification de la d?cision politique. Mais aujourd’hui, des controverses publiques, notamment autour des OGMs, montrent des savoirs assujettis se d?sassujettir en s’invitant en politique. Pied dans la porte, ils produisent les contraintes susceptibles de forcer les souverainet?s ? les accueillir. Couper la t?te de nos souverains, tel est le prix d’une politique des savoirs. La phrase pr?sent?e dans cette nudit? est choquante, parce qu’elle fait penser ? des histoires o? il y a "mort d’homme". Pour autant, la souverainet? dont il s’agit de se passer est relative ? des modes d’organisation des pouvoirs, des puissances des savoirs. De fa?on rapide, il s’agit des modes d’organisation hi?rarchique des pouvoirs. Est-ce donc cela dont nous parle Foucault lorsqu’il utilise le terme politique, le difficile probl?me de la composition des puissances , cultiv?es et non r?duites par une hi?rarchie?
NOTES:
(1) Foucault M. (1997). ? Il faut d?fendre la soci?t? ?. Cours au Coll?ge de France. 1976. Paris. Gallimard-Le Seuil, coll. Hautes ?tudes. p. 10.
(2) Par exemple, dans Foucault M.(1994). ? Entretien avec Michel Foucault ?. Dits et ?crits. Vol. III. 1976. n?192. Paris. nrf-Gallimard. p.141.
(3) Latour B. (1993). “An interview with Bruno Latour”. Configurations. 1.2: 247-268.
Latour B. (1999). Politiques de la nature. Comment faire entrer les sciences en d?mocratie. Paris. La D?couverte.
(4) Rouse J. (1993). “Foucault and the natural sciences”. In Caputo J. And Yount M. Foucault and the critique of institutions. Pennsylvanis State University Press. pp. 137-162.
Gutting G. (1999). Michel Foucault’s archeology of scientific reason. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
(5) Stengers I. (1996) Cosmopolitiques. Vol. 1. La Guerre des sciences. Paris. La D?couverte/Les Emp?cheurs de penser en rond. p.126
Stengers I. (1997). Cosmopolitiques. Vol. 7. Pour en finir avec la tol?rance. La D?couverte/Les Emp?cheurs de penser en rond. p.13 et svtes.
(6) Foucault M. (1975). Surveiller et Punir. Naissance de la prison. Paris. Gallimard. p.263.
? Autre pouvoir, autre savoir ?. Foucault utilise cette formule lorsqu’il marque un contraste entre les sciences de la nature et les sciences humaines. Deux points importants m?ritent d’?tre soulign?s. Premi?rement, Foucault indique que la sp?cificit? conquise par les sciences de la nature concerne leur d?tachement de la proc?dure inquisitoriale o? historiquement elles se sont enracin?es. Si l’enqu?te est la matrice de savoir-pouvoir commune ? une technologie politico-juridique et ? une technique form?e pour les sciences empiriques, ces derni?res ont gagn? l’autonomie de leur savoir par rapport ? ce pouvoir d’enqu?te qui les a rendues possible. En revanche, les sciences humaines n’ont pas encore conquis l’autonomie de leur savoir d’examen. Elles restent enti?rement au service du pouvoir disciplinaire o? historiquement elles se sont enracin?es. C’est en cela qu’elles sont douteuses. Foucault signe donc la r?ussite d’un savoir ? sa capacit? de se d?tacher du pouvoir qui l’a rendu possible. Si les g?n?alogies des imbroglios de savoir-pouvoir sont men?es, ce n’est pas au nom de l’in?vitable confusions des savoirs et des pouvoirs. C’est bien plut?t au nom des autonomies gagn?es par certains savoirs, contre les autonomies usurp?es par d’autres. Deuxi?mement, Foucault cite la figure historique de Bacon pour rendre compte de cette autonomie gagn?e par les sciences de la nature. Or les travaux de Bacon sont incapables d’expliquer les libert?s prises par les sciences de la nature. Foucault n’a pas pens? les sciences de la nature. C’est un fait commun?ment admis. Mais cette utilisation mal pens?e de la figure de Bacon est peut-?tre ce qui a permis certaines continuations des travaux de Foucault dans les sciences de la nature sur un mode exclusivement d?nonciateur, d?non?ant toute forme d’autonomie des savoirs au nom des imbroglios ind?passables de savoir-pouvoir. Faire travailler la pens?e de Foucault dans les sciences exp?rimentales autour de la notion de g?ne implique d?s lors de faire vivre ce contraste entre autonomie gagn?e et autonomie usurp?e, entre pratiques modernes et pratiques modernistes. ? Quelles sont les g?n?alogies de vos autonomies ? ?
Dear Nathalie,
I always find very interesting your thoughts on Foucault’s work, that I donot master as you do. I like to add some thoughts on the legal aspects of the matter.
The call to behead our epistemological and juridical sovereigns rings some bells with me. The regicide (French Revolution) replaced royal sovereignty with the intolerant sovereignty of ’the people’, leading to states of emergency for the sake of restoring order etc.
Instead of bringing in the guillotine, a relational conception of law follows Montesquieu and others in reconceptionalising sovereignty: building into its core the possibility to refute its claims, while this possibility is actually backed by sovereignty itself. This is what we like to call the paradox of the ’rechtsstaat’: it means that the state is NOT the only source of the law (as positivist legal theory will have it, and many modernist lawyers), but that the state lends its authority to the other sources (like legal doctrine, constitutive principles and legitimate expectations between those who share jurisdiction). Without that authority legal principles would not get very far, while they at the same time limit the legitimate exercise of power: a circle yes, but not a vicious one.
Cordialiter
Mireille
Dear Mireille,
I had to think about your comment, and again, as very often with our cross-disciplinary exchanges, it makes me think where I did not, and to be specific, it forces me to think what I was talking about by using the substantives "sovereignty" or "sovereign" and the adjective "sovereign".
Here is an attempt to make clearer what I had in mind in writing this text, hopping that is shows how ours points of view are not in contradiction, even if they ask for some tuning of our disciplinary acceptation of those terms. Points of view not in contradiction, but however starting from different problems and then deploying them on different ontological grounds, required by the questions they ask. What it is certain, now, and which your comment forces me to think about, it is the necessity to make this ontological ground explicit. And so, let’s try to do so.
The problem of Foucault, at the epochs he talks about sovereignty, is to explore how it is possible to resist to certain forms of power when those forms of power produce resistance. Telling so is a way to avoid giving features to what would be the right or the wrong power, the legitimate or the illegitimate ones, to avoid giving a normative definition of power.
That induces that he does not defend or criticize the model of sovereignty as such.
But it is also starting from the acknowledgement that the sovereignty model is putting to the test, putting in crisis. This statement of fact is not so far from this other one taking into account into our IAP: the crisis of the representational principles. If the reconceptualization of the sovereignty by Montesquieu allows refuting the sovereignty in the name of this sovereignty itself, it is difficult for me to keep this conception straight on its legs while the representational principles are putting into questions.
But let’s go back to Foucault.
Then, the guillotine is not firstly directed against the sovereignty model, nor against what or who incarnates this model, but mainly against what it makes impossible to think when it is kept as the only source of power.
What does it make impossible to think? All the other forms of powers that are strategically produced beside and through sovereignty. Foucault designates some of them (disciplines, biopouvoir,?), but the list is not exhaustive.
Then, in order to think those other forms of power (economical, ?), that we can see at work in our IAP transversal themes (GMOs, correlated humans,?), in order to understand where their power (puissance, capacité de produire des effets) come from, it is effective to ontologically pull out any productive power (puissance) to sovereignty, and direct the light to other part of the process.
Let’s take a very easy image, perhaps maybe in default because too much simplistic. But enough striking to be tried.
There is a pretty little chalet built three centuries ago. The building is not bad. The upkeep has been good. The place was chosen for the space, the view, the calm, the beautiful environment, the river at the bottom of the hill. The housekeepers take care of the chalet as "bon père de famille". The propriety is granted, official. But, years after years, motorways are constructed, trees are destructed, factories are built, the river is polluted. The life in the chalet has been changed. Whatever the material quality of the house, whatever the official property, the occupants do not have the same life than before. They do not have the same power of living they have before.
What to do? Keeping eyes and ears closed to the environment and still being the ’bon père de famille’ for the house? Or looking how this living has been changed because its environment has been change, even if the house seems to be as beautiful as ever, to understand how those new relations and the power they get to change this life have been produced? Then the housekeeper leaves the housekeeping of the house and goes out.
I agree, it’s a very childhood example.
Foucault looks outside the house of sovereignty to try to understand how the adding of other ones beside it has changed its color.
Now, let’s move to a more technically level.
What I did not do in my short text was to make a difference between forms of power and sovereignty. I took the bad slide to induce that sovereignty and hegemony was synonymous and identified them as obstacles of the made of politics. The clarifying here done avoids this risk. It helps me to make a distinction between ontological powerlessness of the sovereignty, in order to deploy another level of understanding, and an effective powerlessness of the sovereignty, acknowledged or desirable, that is not the point of the text, neither of the analyze.
Other forms of power, as devices of disciplinary powers or devices of biopolitics, have not replace the form of sovereignty, but acting with it, they displace its function. In order to see how do work those others forms of power, Foucault lays out another ontological level which is the one of the micropowers: all the relation of forces through which relations of power are drawn. The power to which Foucault redirect his analyze are the ones that are not directly addressed to individuals but the ones that integrate relations of force between individuals, groups, non-humans as well. "Integration" that means that those powers gain their power (puissance) from the coordination and the finalization of already existing relations of force. That means that those new forms of power are not the source of their proper power (puissance), but gain it always from others than them.
Those others can be the relations between the State and the Scientists at universities, as shown by the GMO creation for the profit of other powers than State or Scientists or University. The life patenting can be seen as an enterprise of capture through which new forms of powers, capitalistic, has made do things to Sates. Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre, in a forthcoming book about "Sorcellerie capitaliste", talk about the interesting articulation "étatico-capitaliste", where powers of the State has been captured on a double level: capitalism makes do the State and the State lets do capitalism.
But on a more micro level, those others relation of forces are also each of the ones between a bike and the cars in town, between the researchers, between lovers, between parents and children,?
Any form of power between humans (patriarchy, hierarchy at work place, economical hegemony, Sate, ?) is always the effect, the integration, the coordination, the finalization of already existing relation of forces that are not reduced to relations between humans.
And even, maybe, a same relations can be seen as a power - gaining its power (puissance) from other relations of forces, and having stabilized those relation of forces in precise types of relations of power - or as a relation of forces - through which other relations of powers could be produced. This is a matter of angle of view, of macro or micro level, and precisely of the effects expected from it: description- understanding and transforming.
Sovereignty, as posed by principle, and as organized around the fact that it is the only source of power, can not help to understand and even more to transform others forms of power that exercise themselves by carrying on regardless.
If Foucault tried to think how to resist, in this genealogical period, he took the risk to be locked in a general frame of resistance and domination, where the war and the strongest would have had the last word. Being free would have meant being able to resist with the same weapons.
He offered another issue in what is identified as the third part of his work, the ethical part, which I prefer to identify as the ethico-political part, because relation to the self is a political relation in his view. "The private is politic", said feminists.
There another strategic point is used: the subject. But warning, not the subject of law, or the political subject, or the philosophical subject, all of them being the sovereign (of their will, of their acts, of their destiny). The subject on light is the point where relations of forces are crossing, making this subject as well. But this time, those relations of forces are not crossing as producing the subject only as effect. This time, the subject itself can use those relations of forces, crossing at its corner, in order, by transforming itself, to transform the way those relations are crossing at its corner and at the corner of others. To think it, Foucault needs to re-define power, to enlarge its acceptance: from strategic power to governmental technologies as the practices where are defined, organized, constituted the strategies that individuals, as free, can have to each others, that means to themselves as well. Governing the soul is re-appropriated by the subjects themselves from the biological and disciplinary power. From the government of ourselves and of others, as linked, any strategic relation of power can be produced as domination, institutionalized asymmetrical relation, or as an open and reversible relation of power where new subjectivation (process) can be created that means invented. Governmentality as a new generic definition of power (puissance).
It seems that I left the premise question at stake: sovereignty as by seen by law.
But the move is the same: create another ontology, as a new way of putting light of what exists, in order to understand how relations of power work. The mean used by Foucault is to put sovereignty apart, giving it an ontological powerlessness, to see what happens through other glasses, through another lighting. And the problem and the mean is the same whatever the sovereignty is: legal, political, epistemological, psychological?
I hope those propositions, still in process in my own work, can help. However, having to respond to your question, already clarifies it for this work. Thanks.
Kind regards,
Nathalie