Foucault, Marx and Transcendental History

            Darwin's theory of Natural Selection was not only a scientific theory, but a theory of history. The support that the theory gave to English capitalism and its imperialist practices has been sufficiently, if not fully, documented. But Darwinism is only one of the theories of the meaning of history in the 19th century. Hegel, Marx, Fichte, Nietzsche and others also propounded theories of transcendentalist histories. Darwin's theory tries to make a virtue of predatory survival, as does Nietszche's. Marx's theory, hated by Nietzsche, and repellent to Darwin, is also a theory of power and transcendence, but from the 'bottom up', rather than the top down. It might be useful here to consider the some aspects of the history of these theories of Nietzsche and Marx in relation to the theory of knowledge/power of Michel Foucault. Foucault is somewhat out of place in the rough chronology I am following.  But it is necessary to bring Foucault into the discussion here because, though more ambiguous about power than Darwin, Nietzsche and Marx, his theory of power is also a theory of history. Like Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche,  he finds the locus of power to be centered in human consciousness. This is what I mean to question.  I differ from all three thinkers in that I think human rights and not power or knowledge should be the locus of determination concerning history and life.

            The genesis of this inquiry arose out of an extended study of religious  or transcendentalist systems of knowledge and their use as vehicles of the orchestration of social power. It  does not arise out of the work of Michel Foucault, who wrote extensively on the topic of knowledge/power, although Foucault later influenced me. But Foucault's work, while it is invaluable in delineating the  technologies of coercion and the cruel apparatus of knowledge/power in the domains of French social sciences, schools, universities, prisons, asylums and medical establishments, nevertheless carries with it certain problems.  Edward Said summarizes a major aspect of these difficulties very well. He observes that Foucault's "imagination of power is within rather than against it [power]".[1] Foucault appears to believe that knowledge/power conflicts are nearly endemic, irreducible or intrinsic parts of life, almost as if they are destined or fatalisticly determined.

              This results, I believe, from Nietszche's over-valuation of the will to power as the prime determinant of life. Like Nietzsche, who was Foucault's primary influence, Foucault advocates a regime of austerity and self creation which ultimately is yet another form of a  transcendentalist will to power. Nietszche's mature philosophy, while vehemently anti-Christian, has a  personal-mythological, or secularly religious, aspect which he summarized himself as "Dionysius versus the Crucified".  Nietzsche resembles Darwin in some respects. Nietzsche creates a religion of the will to power that takes an anti-religious stand.  He expresses poetically the will to power that is inherent in the religions while hating the religons themselves.[2]  The anti-religion that he creates is a religion of power that abjures institutional religion. "What is good", he writes, "all that hieghtens the feeling of power...what is bad, all that proceeds from weakness....[men should want] not contentment, but more power, not peace at all, but war". He loves rank, heirarchy and elite individuals. In works like Thus Spake Zarathustra,  The Antichrist or Ecce Homo he creates a virtual religion of the "overman" whose pursuit of personal power and transcendence allows him to create himself outside of history.  The overman will transcend history even while locked in the revolving iron cage of destiny. The image of the transcendent individual that results, like the image of Christ that Nietzsche opposes, like Walt Whitman's or Fichte's notion of the Universal Man, or Marx's notion of the state as the supreme Individual, is an image of knowledge/power, and it is this belief in the transcendent individual that stands in the background of Foucault's analysis.[3]

            Foucault writes that "one has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, in order to arrive at an analysis that can account for the constitution of the subject within an historical framework". [4] Dispensing with the subject, in an attempt to seize objectivity and define history merely replaces the ideology of god consciousness with 'man' consciousness, without addressing the deeper causes of atrocity, which is the belief that transcendent objectivity and dispensing with the subject is possible. Dispensing with the subject on the ideological level tends to result in dispensing with the subject, that is, real people, on the level of day to day life.

            The result of Foucault's belief is that man creates himself, and is the sole agent of himself and his society.  This, I believe, is the same mistake that Marx makes in believing that man is the self designing , millenarian god of history: Like the concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' , this is not a doctrine that supports a basic human rights democracy but another form of a will to power through knowledge. Like Foucault, Marx does not question knowledge/power itself, but only certain modalities of it. In the Manifesto, for instance, Marx explicitly relates the goal of the communist party to the ideology of conquest: "the immediate aim of the communists is the... formation of the proletariat into a class, [the] overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, [and] conquest of political power by the proletariat". [5] The  danger of this view is that it is likely to create yet another from of tyranny, as indeed it did, in both Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. However Marxism might have resisted capitalism and its need of world domination; and however it was justified in doing so, as it was in many places, Marxism was not innocent of a similar impulse and similar atrocities.

             There is no question that, at least in his early work, Marx was genuinely seeking justice for the poor and the exploited. For this he is to be praised as are many of his followers. But Marx's answer to the fact of poverty and exploitation is to envision the dictatorship of the proletariat, and this is merely another class obsession. The theory of historical materialism that results is virtually a religious system that replaces god with an abstract idea of History. History was then used by Stalin, Mao and others to excuse atrocities certainly as bad as those of Columbus and Himmler. Marxism can be largely assessed, I believe, as part of and not exempt from,  the project of Conquest that began  in 1492 and continues into the present. It appears to be the belief that many Marxists have concerning the 'objectivity' of Marxist analysis, with its elaboration of tactics and strategies, that seems to prevent some Marxist from seeing the role of Marxism in the continuation of conquest throughout the world.

            Man may be the victim of the 'history' of others or in protest and struggle, the agent of his own history, but cannot be the dictator of either his own or others histories, lest he betray the rights that belong to everyone. The dictators of history always need victims to complete their goals. The various doctrines of historical inevitability, be they American, Marxist, Chinese or capitalist share in common the belief that sacrifices must be made to accomplish the transcendent goal. The end comes to justify the means and this eliminates the belief that man has basic human rights which, because they are inherent and fundamental, cannot be infringed.

            Foucault's fascination with power led him, at times, to see power as an historically necessary  and inevitable dialectic built into the nature of things, and this resulted, for instance, in his original endorsement, later retracted, of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of  deaths.  It was also Foucault's 'anti humanist' stance that made this possible, since Foucault blamed  the humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment  for many current ills. This led Foucault, like other "post-modernists", to flirt with various aspects of the traditionalist world picture. However just or accurate Foucault' s view of knowledge/power may be concerning the modern world, and it is accurate in some ways while not in others, he does not seem to have grasped the roots of the knowledge/power equation which really lie in the traditionalist world view and the survival of aspects of the traditionalist views in the midst of modernism itself. This would lead him, for instance, in Discipline and Punish, to advocate for a return to medieval forms of public execution.

            Foucault claims that "power is always there, no one is ever outside it". [6] This practically divinizes power. Chomsky does something similar with knowledge. He wrote that no one has a crtique of knowledge,as if knowledge were transcendental. Neither knowledge nor power are transcendental absolutes, but rather are relations between humans and their environment, affected by what humans do, feel and think. Knowledge can change and power can be absent or abandoned: neither persist in the present and are ever present like rain, mountains or air, but change with human lives and perceptions. One can live outside systems of power and knowledge. One can question systems of knowledge, sciences and powers: whereas air and light and life are givens that cannot be altered. In this lies the hope that human rights and lives can be honored albove systems of knowledge and science such that the need of human rights would determine the use of science and power and not the other way around.

             Foucault writes that power is not merely repression and domination,  but a "force that says no, but [it is also a force] that traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse".[7] While Foucault's view that power is not merely a matter of domination, repression and punishment, but also a system of benefits and rewards, is surely accurate, he never quite draws the conclusion of the significance of the paradox of  the beneficially punitive nature of power.

             This is a very important point to this book, which seems to have been overlooked or misunderstood by those who have read it so far. Systems of knowledge/power benefit some while punishing others, and the infringement of human rights that results for those that are punished cannot be separated from the advantages and benefits that accrue to those who are legitimized by the knowledge system and the power it grants. The high ideals and ideas cannot be separated from the atrocities and benefits to the powers and people that hold the high ideas. The victims of Nagasaki directly implicate the hierarchy of academics, businessmen and government and military people that may have had no involvement directly with the atrocity. The atrocity was caused by abstractions like "manifest destiny", America's "world responsibility" or historical destiny, the American dream, the Christian notion of historical perfectibility or the abstract principle of infinite science and its mission of ultimate progress. The same can be said of slavery and the deadly invasion of the Americas. Einstein, unlike most of the current academic establishment, had the courage to admit, "we are guilty", as I will explain later.  But the point I wish to make here is that understanding what this book is about requires grasping the idea that knowledge/power operates as a system of benefits/rewards. In each area I consider am analyzing aspects of this paradox, in an effort to unravel it, critique and dismantle it, in an attempt to bring all systems of knowledge/power into question. I consider this essential to ending the tendency to create atrocities and violate human rights.

            But to return to Foucault, who wants to sacrifice the subject in view of gaining the power of knowledge. For instance, when Foucault writes that "where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge" [8] he does not seem to realize that in this formulation he has  invoked a religious strategy to go beyond modernism. As in Nietzsche, and to a certain degree in Marx, Foucault is doubling back into a religious formalism; a means of putting knowledge before real beings, with the result that real beings, "subjects", are willingly offered up for sacrifice on the altar of  knowledge.[9]

            This reversion to  a virtual religious consciousness leads Foucault into wanting to destroy the old idols, to create a 'new man', who would be achieved by  "the destruction of what we are, and the creation of something totally other- "a  total innovation" [10]and a kind of glorification of an anti-religious consciousness that has become a religion in its turn.  The need to totally transfigure man, be this though the mystical Eastern Orthodox concept of the 'Light of Tabor', the Revolution, Pauline Evangelism, occult science, genetics or an American New Jerusalem already implies a hatred of man as he is and a willingness to do violence to effect the utopian changes.  This aspect of Foucault's thought ties him closely to the millenarian roots of  world conquest by European and Greco-Christian culture, which, in its utopian zeal, a zeal that one finds in Columbus, Marx, Lenin, the third Reich and the Transnational corporations, inevitably has brought destruction. Cruelty in the pursuit of a transcendent ideal may bring pleasure and ecstasy to  those it benefits, but the pleasure of power has often left dismembered bodies as its momento. This zeal is at the basis of most, if not all, of the atrocities since Columbus. 

            Despite his prescient analyses of Institutional powers, schools, prisons and asylums, Foucault did not go deep enough into the mythical and apocalyptic basis of the Western cult of total knowledge. Something of this failure comes out in his analysis of the paintings of Bosch. He imagines that the hallucinogenic and surreal paintings of Bosch, stripped of their religious associations, picture the "secret nature of man" and the "pure appearances and secret destiny of the world-  madness here retains the primitive force of revelation- the revelation that the dream is real".  [11]Foucault fantasizes that Bosch's nightmare is reality, the anarchists dream of freedom and creation where "being and nothingness [join in the ] delirium of pure destruction"[12].  What Foucault fails to see in Bosch's paintings is that these are pictures of the world entirely distorted and terrorized by Christ-consciousness and original sin. The dominating and totalistic intellect sees all of creation as beneath its own dignity, and thus reduces all creatures to distorted monsters worthy only of the total need of reform, or if that fails, apocalyptic punishment. Bosch's paintings, like the fantasies of some of the Biotech industries of today, are dangerous perversions of nature, deformed for ulterior motives, be they power or profit.

            The eye of the Intellect, the gaze of the powerful, the Panopticon, the eye that desires total knowledge, wants total power. While Foucault delineated the relations of knowledge and power in many books, he does not seem to have realized that his own search for a total vision implicated his insights. Foucault's  belief that "power without limitation is directly linked to madness" resulted in his confusing power and freedom with limitlessness. There are different forms of madness and to classify the madness of Hitler or Constantine with that of homeless people or the fool in King Lear is a mistake. Nietszche's superhuman is inhuman because power has made him mad, whereas the homeless schizophrenic is mad not because he wants power but because power victimizes him. One writer remarks that Foucault "was a man deeply attracted to power in its most totalitarian forms, both politically and sexually"[13] and this may explain something of his ambiguity towards the paradoxes of power/knowledge.  The more Foucault studied the relations of knowledge and power, the more he wanted direct knowledge and total power.

            Foucault imagines that Bosch is somehow opposed in a binary pair against the Erasmus, the scholar of the 'humanism' of the Renaissance.  He longs for the chaos of Bosch's Last Judgment paintings, where every imaginable torture takes place in surprising beauty. He writes that the "Humanism of the Renaissance was not an enlargement but a diminution of man" . This implies that the totalist delusions of grandeur of medieval Christendom were somehow superior. But this analysis of Bosch's paintings  and the comparison with Erasmus is seriously flawed, with multiple levels of confusion. Firstly, Erasmian humanism is scarcely 'human' in the sense of it being concerned with human rights. Renaissance humanism was primarily an effort of upper class Christians who had a nostalgia for Roman imperialism and classical culture to acquire more power. Bosch's paintings are a depiction, in advance, of the basic mentality of the Conquest. They picture the deadly and logical result of Christian anti-naturalism, racism and moralism. They picture the mentality that would enforce the Inquisition, expel and murder many Jew and Moors, and launch a campaign against the Native Americans that would result in millions of deaths. It is not an accident that these paintings were eagerly sought out and bought by Isabella and Philip the II of Spain, both of whom were active in these persecutions. For Foucault to write positively of the voluptive destructiveness in Bosch's paintings, while ignoring that this destruction depends upon the transcendent presence of Christ as the embodiment of 'truth' and 'justice', is to completely misread the paintings and to identify himself with the worst aspects of the mentality that created the atrocities of the conquest. He seeks to erect irrationalism into another system of  power, not realizing, apparently, that his gnostic and romantic system of transgressive knowledge/power is no less potentially harmful than a system of 'humanist' or scientific knowledge/power. The philosopher's dream of total explanation and Mastery of knowledge becomes another form of oppression. The effort to transcend knowledge in a final antinomial flight of gnostic fantasy itself becomes another means of negating the world and thereby  a mode of support of the apocalyptic hatred of the world. [14]

            Foucault praises the possibility of transgression, which might not be so bad if it were done within the bounds of human rights. But, writing about another author, Foucault calls for a  "transubstantiation ritualized in reverse", where "real presence becomes the recumbent body".  Foucault's notion of inverting the transubstantiation rite was something that had already happened, with William of Occam and the Nominalists, as I discussed earlier in this book. Foucault seems to have merely dredged up earlier, pre-modern concerns, without questioning their origin. The doctrine of transubstantiation,  first defined in the Fourth Lateran Council under Innocent III, then codified at the Council of Trent[15], merely reverses the crucifixion; which is to say that it licenses the imposition of the totalizing intellect upon matter, which is the contrary movement  represented by the resurrection, which separates the totalizing intellect from matter.  The crucifixion symbolizes the separation of the intellect from matter, and the resurrection absolutizes this separation, conferring upon it an immortalizing power. The changing of the substance of the Eucharistic bread into the body of Christ and the eating of this body symbolizes a submission to a dominant ideology. This submission is internalized through an act of symbolic cannibalism. The spread of  Greek thought, Roman Imperialism and Christianity turns this totalizing drive for dominance outward, toward the world, and this is probably at the root of will to world conquest that obsessed Europe and the West.

            The intellectual effort to dominate matter, expressed symbolically in the Eucharistic rite, becomes a literal will to conquest through missionary activity, exploration, science and technological domination. The call for the reversal of  transubstantiation means that one seeks to totalize matter and impose it upon the intellect. This is hardly something that could be liberating, as indeed, this had already been done, with the creation of the atom bomb, which turned matter into mind and, ever since, has been an instrument of mental terror much more potent than Christian fables of the Last Judgment. The notion of apocalypse was always used, and not only in Judeo-Christian or Islamic societies, as a means of forcing correct behavior through fear of universalized and ultimate consequences.  But a symbolic Armageddon of Christ with his Book and his Sword, symbols of knowledge and power respectively, does not carry the psychological weight of mushroom clouds, nuclear night and  irradiated rain, which are actual manifestations of knowledge/power. The basic elements of nature- atoms and genes, for instance, have been co-opted into a system of technological control directed by political and economic forces. Nature, formerly independent, is forced to conform to man's will to power through knowledge. Knowledge of nature, fitlered through the scientific imagination, impoverishes nature.[16]

             Despite the sexual overtones of  "the real presence becoming a recumbent body", one is not seeing in these inversions of traditional spiritual doctrines any real questioning of the knowledge/power dialectic, but merely the erotization of knowledge/power. Foucault  does not  critique knowledge/power itself, but only certain modalities of it. He does not  address the inherent dangers nor answer the question of the apparent paradox of knowledge/power. He  merely displaces the problem in the manner of the Nietzschean "revaluation of all values".  Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault all make the mistake of merely inverting Christian transcendentalism without questioning the motive that lies at the basis of  the Christian  apocalyptic theory of history.  World destruction, purges, negations, asceticism, transcendental, mystical and revolutionary excess will not generate a  utopian promised land, a new man, a "total innovation" or a new world.  The apocalyptic urge is a sublimation of a destructive will to power through knowledge. Marx created a new system of knowledge, and with it, new justifications to pile up corpses. One cannot end atrocities  caused from the "top down" by replacing them with atrocities from the "bottom up".  Both remain atrocities

            Foucault wanted to go beyond what he called the "limit experience" and he implies that this would require a Nietzschean "revaluation of all values", a total transformation of man that would require cruelty. A similar apocalyptic is found in Marx, who  calls for the "production on a vast scale of this communist consciousness... because the class overthrowing [the  ruling class] can, only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew". [17]        Here is where Marx fails to uphold human rights, since he has reduced people to the "muck of ages" who stand in the way of "history", very much like Hegel, whom Marx despised, who said that  history is the "carrying out of God's plan...[and] that which does not accord with it is negative, worthless existence"[18] The effort of Marx to create a totalistic "consciousness" that would sweep the world off its feet is not different that the similar effort of Aquinas or Hegel to create and justify the absolute truth that would dominate the world.  Indeed, Hegel had written that one of his books, the Wissenshaft der Logic,  was the veritable word of god: "The Logic is to be understood as the System of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is Truth as it is without veil and for itself, It is therefore possible to say that its contents is the presentation of God as he is in his eternal being, before creation of nature and any finite thing". [19] This extraordinarily immodest statement is token of a limitless ambition. What Hegel tries to present is a total vision of supremacist consciousness. Stripped of religious garb and high flown metaphysics, Marx shares the same vaulting ambition for total consciousness and the exercise of power via this consciousness applied.  Marx inverted Hegel, as many have pointed out. What Marx learned from Hegel and Catholicism was how historical interpretations could be used as an agent for obtaining power. In this respect, Marx does not supersede Christianity, but develops the implicit historicism of Christianity into a new secular religion. The longed for future becomes a means to destroy the past, or those who represent the past.

            Marx, like Foucault, Aquinas and Hegel has a "transcendent purpose", and this predisposes all of them to a willingness to despise human rights and treat those who are the 'muck of ages', or "negative, worthless existence", as so many bodies to be purged, disciplined, punished, murdered or conquered. Marx inverted Hegel in many respects but his system retains a notion of transcendental history, as does Hegel's, and this concept had disastrous consequences when put into practice.  Millions were killed, and they were killed for history, just as, under Columbus, they were killed for god. Others were killed for and Manifest Destiny, or Civilization or Science: the causes are the same and the impetus and motivations appear to be similar.

            Marx's ethical concerns with social justice and human rights do not extend to questioning the justice of Marxism itself. This is a fatal flaw. Marx saw himself and his system as a means of competition with capitalism, which would eventually supplant capitalism. Marx was convinced, for instance, that Britain had "a double mission in India [and in the East generally] one destructive, the other regenerating, the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia". [20] Thus England laid the foundation for conditions whereby a Marxist revolution would come about. Marx's ethical concern with the plight of Asiatic peoples under British rule is duplicitous. He also sees Britain's role as preparing the way for a Marxist revolution "whatever may have been the crimes of England, she is the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution", Marx observes. [21]The result of these beliefs, once Marxism was put into practice in the East, were acts of conquest as bad as anything that England, Spain or the United States had accomplished. Millions were killed. Marxism proved itself to be yet another destructive system of knowledge/power.  It was not just a matter of bringing death to Chinese, Indochinese or Tibetans either. Tribal groups were eliminated or forcibly assimilated from Turkestan to Mongolia, from the Tibetan Plateau to Vladivostok. As Ward Churchill has observed. "in no marxist-leninist setting have the rights of any small people been respected, most especially those of land-based indigenous ("tribal") peoples". [22] Marxism has been an extension of and not a check upon the European will to empire through the imposition and dictatorship of a will to power through knowledge. Like Christianity, Marxism exploited the image of the victim, but became itself a victimizer in its turn. The victim/victimizer contradiction or paradox revolves around the paradox of Knowledge/power.  The victim who becomes a victimizer does so through a will to power through knowledge.

              Therefore, there are serious problems in my being able to accept the analysis of knowledge/power of either Marx or Foucault as accurate,  I cannot speak for others. Marx is accurate in many things, as is Foucault, and I do not wish to diminish his critique of power where it applies. For instance, Marx's theory of alienation, whereby the capitalist sees only profit value, and reduces beings, humans and things to their cash value, neglecting entirely the human value of even  non human objects, is an important insight.  The jeweler becomes alienated from the jewels he sells because he sees only their cash value: the insurance agent sees only the bottom line and not the people his policies force into ill health without medical care. But Marxism tends to produce another kind of alienation in its turn: the alienation from conscience and the free exercise of human rights, which Marxism has shown itself all too ready to infringe and violate in the name of 'history' and 'class consciousness'.

             Marx and Foucault are both accurate when it comes to the critique of the will to power of capitalist and modern institutions and their infringement of justice and human rights, but they do not question sufficiently, their own 'transcendent purposes' or their own will to power through knowledge. At least in the case of Marx, this had horrible consequences.  The atrocities of Stalin and Mao bring into question the Marxist concept of historical consciousness, The idea of the 'raising of consciousness'  is also in need of further questioning. instead of raising consciousness and building identities, as Marx and Foucault suggest, it might be time to question the ideology of identity and consciousness and to learn instead to raise human rights.

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