Drew Ninnis Tpr
Drew’s Thesis Proposal Back to Drew Ninnis
Or read a complete version of this Thesis proposal here - http://members.iinet.net.au/~drew.ninnis/TPR.pdf
The aim of my thesis is to provide a coherent philosophy of the subject in extremis; to interrogate the structure of the totalitarian subject and the possible states of totalitarian subjection.
Contemporary theories on the formation of subjects and their imbued subjectivity tend to focus predominantly on power relationships or the act of an individual binding themselves to what is fundamentally ‘Other’. This can be understood in terms of Louis Althusser’s understanding of ‘interpellation’ in which the subject ‘comes into being as a consequence of language, yet always within its terms’ [Butler, The Psychic Life of Power], such as through his seminary scene of ‘the call’ taking place between an individual and the State or ‘the Law’. Similarly, Butler remarks that ‘what ’one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependant on that very power’ and that in ‘following Foucault, we [can] understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire’. However one chooses to interpret the status of the subject, any detailed analysis needs to come to terms with the sometimes paradoxical role that power relationships have in both forming a subject and a state of subjection. Frequently, attempts are made to permanently codify a structure of subjectivity or selfhood in an attempt to generate a philosophia perennis, and as Jerrold Seigel remarks:
—>But what is this self whose understanding seems to promise so much? Many practically minded people hardly think the question worth posing, knowing well enough who they are for their purposes, thank you, while those who offer answers to it often do so for expedient or self-interested reasons: to support a political program, validate a religious belief or practice, foster or oppose some social policy, justify failings or pretensions, or establish a claim to therapeutic power. The nature and meaning of the self are subject to constant redefinition, as it is ever-again taken up on behalf of some partisan aim or project. And yet the question does not lose its force from being appropriated in these ways. [Seigel The Idea of the Self].
Seigel highlights two critical points: firstly, that any philosophical analysis of selfhood or subjecthood becomes inevitably politically invested; and secondly, he draws attention to the fluidity of such terms when exposed to critical analysis, without us being able to shake the feeling that we have a fundamental understanding of what these terms mean. It strikes a parallel to Heidegger’s own introduction to the study of being, in which he writes that to ask such questions is to rekindle a ‘gigantomachia peri tēs ousias’ [Heidegger, Being and Time]. Between the terms of Being, self and subject there are many differences that have already been heavily politically invested, yet all simultaneously appeal to common experience. The point to be carried here is twofold; considerations of the structure of the subject are imbued with considerations of power and the politics that drive them, yet the very status of the subject itself remains highly ambiguous and in need of an investigation that resists the temptation to appeal to a presumed shared experience.
From this, one might be led to believe that before work can be begun on the status of a subject within a particular context (as is proposed here), a universal theory of subjectivity needs to be investigated and deployed. Yet to proceed in such a way is to implicitly assume that a universal a priori structure of the subject exists ’ a dangerous assumption considering the menagerie of theories competing for the honour. Alternatively, I propose to use the work of Michel Foucault to outline a philosophical theory of the totalitarian subject drawn from the context of historical analysis, in this particular case from the Nazi regime. Foucault’s approach differs from others in that he does not begin with an assumption of a persistent structure of the subject to be discerned within specific historical engagements; rather, Foucault traces the changing nature of the subject and highlights both the web of power relations in which the subject is inevitably caught, and the political uses to which such a structure of subjectivity is put. ‘My [Foucault’s] objective, instead has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’ [Foucault,in Power] Further, Foucault divides his work into three differing modes of inquiry; an analysis of modes of inquiry that ‘try to give themselves the status of sciences’ and entail ‘the objectivizing of the productive subject’ or tellingly ‘the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive’, secondly the ‘objectivizing of the subject in what I [Foucault] shall call ’dividing practices’,’ and finally ‘the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject.’ Here, fundamentally, is a different way of doing philosophy, in which the implicit political aims of a redefinition of subjectivity are transformed into an explicit critique of the power and political forces that motivate the construction of the subject; an analysis that is conscious of the uses to which such an analysis, of the subject, can be put.
Given the driving influences of subjectivity laid out above ’ interplays of power, political motivation, innate and changing historicity ’ is seems natural to move such an analysis into the context of totalitarianism, in an attempt to explicate the phenomena of excess that have marked such regimes. That Foucault’s work never ventures into this area, despite laying the foundations for such an analysis, is pointed out by Giorgio Agamben, who seeks to use Foucault’s work to continue such an analysis. Agamben remarks:
—>Despite what one might have legitimately expected, Foucault never brought his insights to bear on what could well have appeared to be the exemplary place of modern biopolitics: the politics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century. [Agamben, Homo Sacer]
Agamben’s Homo Sacer marks the one of the few attempts to bring Foucault’s thought into contact with the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, and it remains an controversial one. Agamben summarises Foucault’s work as the tracing of two lines of thought destined to intersect:
—>’ in his final years Foucault seemed to orientate this analysis [of power] according to two distinct directives for research: on the one hand, the examination of the political techniques (such as the science of the police) with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals into its very centre; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of the self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power. Clearly these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault’s work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common center.
In relation to this summation, Agamben outlines the trajectory of his own work (in Homo Sacer) as follows:
—>The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridicio-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original ’ if concealed ’ nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.
It will be argued here that while Agamben actively engages with Foucault’s work, he does not make use of the very distinction that he highlights between ‘political techniques’ and ‘technologies of the self’. Agamben is interested in the production of a biopolitical body and how that relates to the forms which sovereign power takes. The analysis is carried out on many fronts; arguing, through Carl Schmidt, that ‘sovereign is he who decides the state of exception’ and that sovereign power represents the interiorised exterior of the law, yet also that the totalitarian state represents a continuing state of exception in which the law is constantly in force without signifying any content. Essentially, Agamben argues that one is at the mercy of sovereign power, the contentless nature of the law in the state of exception making this power all the more pervasive. There are many problems with this analysis, it will be argued, for while represents one possible reading of the intersection of the political techniques described by Foucault with the bare life of the individual (‘the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive’ [Foucault, Power])it neglects to address the other major element of Foucault’s thinking, in technologies of the self, and in doing so discards all of the significant advances that Foucault makes in rejecting traditional analyses of sovereign power and outlining the truly modern form of disciplinary or normalising power. What disappears from Agamben’s discussion is a consideration of the ‘processes of subjectivization [that] bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power’ [Butler, Psychic Life of Power]. A psychic account of the subject, which has traditionally formed the entire content of its analysis, is entirely missing and it seems inevitable that only bare life is left to the individual in an engagement with political power. While Agamben addresses the means by which power binds the individual to its own ’ in which the necessity of life and the right to death becomes ‘killing or letting live’ [Foucault, History of Sexuality V1] - he fails to address the technologies of the self by which individuals come to bind themselves to their ‘own identity and consciousness’. Similarly, questions remain about the fundamental difference between conceptions of power in Foucault and the way in which Agamben uses this understanding of power.
This omission by Agamben opens up an avenue for original engagement with Foucault’s work in relation to studies of totalitarianism and the totalitarian subject. Further, Agamben’s study falls short of a complete analysis; while at an abstract level he engages with the entire population of subjection under totalitarian rule, in specific cases Agamben seeks to engage and explain the situation only of those contained within the death camps (which he argues to be the paradigm of the modern biopolitical, and so perhaps reflective of the situation of the larger population under subjection). In this he fails to completely explicate the preconditions of industrialised killing on such a scale; explaining how these homines sacri can come to be killed but not sacrificed, but not examining how the agents of such an action can be authorised and motivated to do so in the execution of such a power. Simultaneously, how do the individuals who are victimised allow themselves to be so? In short, it remains to come to terms with how ‘processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power’.
In pursuing this avenue of though, and its connection to Foucault’s work, one is led to consider the analysis provided by Judith Butler in The Psychic Life of Power. Butler describes subjection as ‘paradoxical’, the domination by an external power being ‘familiar and agonizing’ yet recognising that ‘what ’one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense dependant on that very power’. In exploring the ‘double-bind’ outlined in Foucault’s work, she remarks:
—>‘Subjection’ signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject. Whether by interpellation, in Althusser’s sense, or by discursive productivity, in Foucault’s, the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power.
In providing an analysis of subjection, Butler outlines three key goals:
—>A critical analysis of subjection involves: (1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place; (2) recognition that the subject produced as continual, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inadmissible remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation; (3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.
While one can see how the political technologies described by Foucault, and taken up by Agamben, may move through Butler’s analysis, what is essential for this thesis is the light thrown upon the other facet of Foucault’s investigations into the nature of the subject ’ namely the technologies of the self lacking in Agamben’s own analysis. Butler draws upon figures from a rich philosophical tradition, such as the ‘lord’ and the ‘bondsman’ from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and the echoes of this structure to be found in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. While Foucault does not explicitly cite Hegel, the philosophical influence of such an analysis is obvious when one considers Foucault’s work in terms of the tracing of a division, the ‘objectivizing of the subject’ in “dividing practices”, such as the great confinement in his History of Madness. It is important to note that while neither Butler nor Foucault write in an explicitly totalitarian context, their analyses are immediately amenable to just such an application ’ the totalitarian states represent the culmination of both the use of the politics of division (such as anti-Semitism, the V’lkish mentality or alternately within the Russian context the persecution of kulaks and NEP men, the saboteurs and enemies of the proletariat) and the politics of unification (under nationalist banners, through the concept of motherland, party membership, the State). An analogy can be drawn between the Lord and the State, as well as the supplantation of the bondsman with the contemporary citizen; in this way Butler’s analysis takes on an explicitly political dimension and intersects with Agamben’s analysis. Simultaneously, the individual is cut off from the State as potentially ‘erased’ in the face of the power deployed against it, and recouped in the great movement of the spirit that accounts for the fervour of such regimes.
This becomes particularly important when we consider the questions that naturally flow from the proposed analysis above; to what degree can the perpetrators of such crimes be held responsible for their agency, in so far as such an agency is only ever constituted by the structure within which it acts? Butler recognises that in such situations the formation of the subject, and the ability to act, is not a mere transference of power from institution to individual but a complex ‘turning back’ in which the individual becomes subject, and in which the subject may imperfectly reiterate or be transformed by such power. The question is moved beyond one of simple resistance or compliance;
—>’the formulation of the subject at issue resonates with a larger cultural and political predicament, namely, how to take an oppositional relation to power that is, admittedly, implicated in the very power one opposes. [Butler, Psychic Life of Power]
If we are to consider ‘Foucault’s formulation of the problem of assujetissement’ in relation to this period and the possibility of the Holocaust, then we must also give consideration to the problems that Butler raises within her study. To what extent can the totalitarian subject be said to have agency within the totalitarian state? Holocaust scholarship, and more broadly analyses of totalitarian regimes, have tended to apply standards of Western liberalism which either condemn the members of these regimes as perpetrators of horrible crimes, or else excuse them as helpless functionaries caught up within systems of power. Foucault’s consistent work to undermine the foundations of such a presumption of agency, and to cast suspicions on the motivations of such a view of agency, when combined with Butler’s intelligent study of the paradoxical nature of subjection allow us to take a more sophisticated approach in interrogating the structures of totalitarian subjectivity, and will hopefully allow us to move beyond a discourse of attributing or relieving blame. The relationship of power, particularly absolute power, to the acting subject is a complicated one and there is a great deal to be gained in investigating the ways in which regimes encode subjects within these relationships of power, and how they modify or politicise the ‘turning-back’ of subjecthood that is essential both to the political technologies and the technologies of the self that are explored by Foucault, and elaborated by Agamben and Butler.
While much has been said about Agamben and Butler’s use of the thought of Foucault, little in the way of the specifics of Foucault’s thought have been elaborated. Key published works of Foucault, as well as relevant lectures and articles, remain the focus of the task at hand, in conjunction with a consideration of the historical material offered up by the Nazi regime. Ideally, it would be preferable to engage in a detailed historical critique both of the Nazi period and the correlative Communist state in Russia under Stalin. Such a project is barred by the necessarily limited scope of this thesis, and the project described remains primarily a philosophical one. Reference will be frequently made to the chronology of the period, as well as use of prescient examples of the period that augment and moor the philosophical argument of this thesis. However, the thesis remains at its core an exploration of Foucault’s work in terms of the impact it has in offering an analysis of the totalitarian subject and states of totalitarian subjection, as well as a consideration of how subsequent thinkers (Agamben and Butler) make use of this thought to further their own critiques of subjectivity and docile bodies (or bare life).
While using Foucault’s work to explore the totalitarian subject, and totalitarian states of subjection, it is important to bear in mind three key threads of thought and how these threads intersect with the political techniques and technologies of the self highlighted above. These four threads are:
Subjectivity as a ‘turning back’, the ‘figure of consciousness turned back upon itself’ as Butler describes it, which repeats throughout the work of Foucault and is drawn from Hegel and Nietzsche, among others. Particularly, how this ‘turning back’ is a product or expressive of a relationship of power.
The social ‘inclusive-exclusion’, a political technique by which what is excluded or marginalised from a particular community is brought to the heart of it and confined in a gesture of inclusive-exclusion, as Agamben relates in the case of the law ‘the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion’ an exceptio’
The opening up of new spaces and dividing practices, which frequently seems to correspond in Foucault’s thought to the second point above, yet at other times diverges from it. Both concern what Foucault describes as ‘dividing practices’ in which the ‘subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivises him.’ While point (2) concerns political practices, historical events (such as confinement), and the operation of processes of power, this point refers more specifically to discursive practices (which are inextricably linked to the former) and the way in which individuals encode these operations of power/knowledge into their consciousness.
An excess of signification, such as that found within sovereign power, which forms sites of resistance to power. With the development of the ‘new’ power that Foucault forwards in The History of Sexuality, resistance comes from the point to point operation of power. However, as shown in the History of Madness and Discipline and Punish, often the lingering remnants of such a resistance to power persist and manifest themselves within the realm of literary representation. If, for Foucault, representations are the way in which power ‘gain[s] control of the individual’ then the counter narrative of literary and cultural representations can offer us ‘this art of living counter to all forms of fascism’ [Foucault, ‘Introduction’ to Anti-Oedipus].
All four points overlap and intersect, however for the purposes of our analysis they can be made sufficiently distinct in order to gain philosophical import from the often overwhelming historical detail of Foucault’s work. It is important to note that Foucault does not identify these threads explicitly within his published work; however, he often reflects, during his lectures at the Coll’ge de France and elsewhere, upon these interests as a site of return for his work. Of the published works by Foucault considered in this thesis, two are notably missing ’ The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. These works find Foucault at his peak as ‘a philosopher of the disappearance of the subject’ , and are not relevant to our inquiry ’ although reference will be made to them within the context of the other works. As Agamben remarks, ‘it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power’ and considering the intimate connection in Foucault’s thinking between power and subjectivity it may well be the case that the same would apply to the subject. However, before the case can be made against any particular reading of the subject into Foucault’s work (and it still remains open to this thesis to argue for a polyvalent description of the totalitarian subject) a reading must first be given to discern these possible structures of the subject.