The Premium on Disruption

At some points Foucault's way of emphasizing the "other" or underside of power, "that which responds to every advance of power by a movement of disengagement," seems to suggest the scope for change, for it "forms the motivation for every new development of networks of power."^[64] New forms of power emerge through the intransigence of freedom vis-à-vis the power relations that have crystallized so far. But rather than emphasize the scope for reconstructive action, Foucault insisted on leveling things out; whatever happens, the outcome will simply be another instance of power, which conflates with subjugation, domination: "Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most incalcitrant fibers of society." The construction or coming to be of the world necessarily entails "a multiform production of relations of domination."^[65] Wherever we look in history, then, we find only some particular power configuration that is subject to condemnation. Thus Rorty charged that "Foucault's work is pervaded by a crippling ambiguity between 'power' as a pejorative term and as a neutral, descriptive term."^[66]

Foucault's refusal to allow distinctions among crystallizations of power drew the criticism of both liberals and radicals. As liberals charged, he could not admit that the development of the liberal state over the past three centuries might have increased choice and decreased suffering.^[67] And Foucault's suggestions that all dominant forms of power are suspect encompassed even the dominant opposition. Marxism, too, had come to dominance through exclusion, subjugation, spurious claims to privilege. Thus radical critics from Fredric Jameson to Jean Baudrillard charged that Foucault offered only a futile neoanarchism, a useless protest.^[68]

Foucault's way of reducing everything to the same level precluded the measure of positive identification with something in particular that would afford a foothold for criticism to serve positive reconstruction. Seeking to pinpoint what was missing in both Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, Rorty referred to "the extraordinary dryness of Foucault's work[,] . . . a dryness produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any communication. . . . It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one

[64] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 138.

[65] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 226; Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 142. See also Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 188; and Mark Philp, "Michel Foucault," in Return of Grand Theory , ed. Skinner, 75–76, for indications of Foucault's way of conflating power with domination.

[66] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 195.

[67] See especially the influential critiques by Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," and Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," both in Foucault , ed. Hoy, 51–102. See also Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 194–195.

[68] See Bové, "The Foucault Phenomenon," xxix, for a good summary of these charges and references to several examples.

more metanarrative about the fortunes of 'the subject' that they cannot bring themselves to say 'we' long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong."^[69]

In the final analysis, Foucault seemed to allow only a grim, endless, ritualistic kind of resistance, a struggle against power itself, with its tendency to organize a world, to crystallize things into something in particular.^[70] Rather than portray his own effort as an exercise of power intended to respond to the challenges of his own time and contribute to the next moment of truth and reality, he found it necessary to subvert the whole ideal of truth and reality in our culture, as merely one aspect of this historically specific power configuration. Because even the notion of "objective reality" confirmed the extant order, he sometimes suggested that lying and rhetoric were necessary instruments in the ongoing struggle.^[71] And he insisted on the fictional nature of historical works—including, of course, his own—even while conceding that some fictions may function as "true."

I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or "manufactures" something that does not as yet exist, that is, "fictions" it. One "fictions" history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one "fictions" a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.^[72]

Up to a point, this passage usefully characterizes the element of creativity in historical truth and the broadly political role that historical accounts play in shaping the next moment. But because he had other axes to grind, Foucault gave the insight a particular spin, folding historical truth within politically inspired fiction. During his lifetime, at least, his dismissive characterizations of "objective reality" and historical truth led practicing historians to view his historical works with suspicion. Specialists in early modern Europe like Lawrence Stone and H. C. Erik Midelfort pinpointed what they found to be unacceptable license in Foucault's handling of the historical evidence.^[73] But while they

[69] Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity," in Habermas and Modernity , ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 172.

[70] Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 211–212, 221–223, 225.

[71] Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), 243–244, 252–254.

[72] Foucault, Power/Knowledge , 193. See also pp. 118, 131–132.

[73] H. C. Erik Midelfort, "Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault," in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter , ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 247–265; and Lawrence Stone, "Madness," New York Review of Books , 16 December 1982, 29–30. See also New York Review of Books , 31 March 1983, 42–44, for an exchange between Foucault and Stone occasioned by Stone's essay.

continued to put off many mainstream historians, Foucault's characterizations increasingly seemed to others to justify an overtly political element in the construction of historical accounts—or fictions.

But Foucault was not settling for this relatively familiar instrumentalist understanding of historical interpretations as effective fictions. He argued that the categories around which our mental life has come to be organized, and even what we take to be our intelligence itself, are historically specific and necessarily imply a precluded other that might be liberated: "by creating a space for the operation of truth and falsity, by situating the free supplement of error, categories silently reject stupidity. In a commanding voice, they instruct us in the ways of knowledge and solemnly alert us to the possibilities of error, while in a whisper they guarantee our intelligence and form the a priori of excluded stupidity." Much like Derrida, however, Foucault envisioned not simply a reversal that would make "stupidity" privileged instead of intelligence; nor was his simply a romantic emphasis on the superiority of feeling, sentiment, imagination, or some other "Other" of conceptual intellect. Rather, he wanted to keep the tension before us, to operate in the crease, thus endlessly resisting the imperious demands of intelligence. If anything, we might afford privilege to paradox: "The philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and error badly."^[74]

Derrida's premium on perversity paralleled Foucault's. As Caputo has emphasized, Derrida's dialectic was always negative, his praxis always disruptive.^[75] Even if it did not call simply for straightforward reversal, Derridean deconstruction explicitly afforded privilege to what has been marginalized, to uncanonical texts, to the blind spots or the margins of texts. And although Norris was surely right to deny that Derrida simply offered interpretive license, neither could Derrida consistently be made the reconstructive radical that Norris was seeking. Derrida's approach was ultimately too playful. Thus Rorty accented Derrida's refusal to take philosophy seriously and lauded the comic element in Derrida's mature work, which included a systematic evasiveness as Derrida played with the status of his own texts.^[76]

Rorty was prominent among those distinguishing the playful "later" Derrida from the earnestly philosophical Derrida of the works prior to Glas in 1974. But the more playful approach followed from the sense of the cultural situation that Derrida had already developed. As early as 1966, in "Structure, Sign, and Play," he explicitly welcomed the opening to a more playfully active interpretation that seemed to follow once we grasp that the language in which we are enmeshed is neither solidly referential nor solidly structural but endlessly

[74] Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice , 188, 190.

[75] Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics , 189–196, esp. pp. 189–190.

[76] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 113; see also pp. 117–118.

open, lacking a stable center or stable points of reference.^[77] As we interpret texts, there is no privileged authority that can either limit us or judge us, holding us responsible. We are free to read in an innocently active way, disseminating new meanings—even new truths—but without seeking even provisionally to close the circle by bringing understanding of the text back to the coherence of a unified—even "true"—account. Such reading even involves finding ways not to pretend to do so, to subvert any claims to do so.

The playful, endlessly disruptive thrust of Derridean deconstruction has prompted critics like John Ellis to emphasize that Derrida's thinking is antithetical to any constructive approach. It is incongruent, for example, with Marxism, or with the feminist attempt to unmarginalize women's voices.^[78] Such approaches seek to overcome a historically specific situation, putting something deemed superior in its place, but Derrida's accent on the instability of things was so extreme that it undercut the foothold necessary both for criticism and for constructive action. More generally, Ellis showed that Derrida's premium was on subversion itself, as opposed to replacing a subverted idea with a better one.

So the Foucault and Derrida currents converged in their mistrust of authority and their premium on disruption. In the final analysis, the sort of reconstruction Ellis had in mind was not the point for either thinker, and the question is why they wanted to do something else instead. But even critics like Ellis who effectively pinpointed the elements of extremity found it difficult to account for the priorities of deconstruction. Still thinking in terms of the "intellectual progress" through which better ideas supersede older ones, Ellis could not see the rationale for Derrida's way of keeping ideas in eternal purgatory. He was simply puzzled by Derrida's premium on endlessly putting the whole thing into question, on backing off from the finitude of particularizing language, on subverting the whole central/marginal dichotomy and thus the possibility of discerning/judging degrees of importance.^[79]

To explain such apparent extravagance, some, at least some of the time, repaired to reductionist categories, referring to the authoritarianism of the French university system, or to the uncertainties of radicalism after 1968, or to the resentments these particular individuals felt as intellectuals and outsiders.^[80] But others sensed that the extremity in deconstruction stemmed from deeper impulses, perhaps reflecting new preoccupations coming to the fore with the eclipse of metaphysics.

[77] Derrida, Writing and Difference , 292–293. Though helpful, Butler's account in Interpretation , 86, seems better to characterize the embrace of Derridean deconstruction by literary intellectuals than the basis for Derrida's own more playful response by the mid- 1970s.

[78] Ellis, Against Deconstruction , esp. p. 96.

[79] Ibid., 41–42, 53–54, 69–71, 73, 75, 78, 81–82, 87, 93–94, 140–141, 151.

[80] Ibid., 83–84; Butler, Interpretation , 88. See also Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 38–42.

In a brief but brilliant article, Rorty maintained that Foucault's enterprise mixed two purposes that were better kept separate. Foucault wanted to help people, but as an intellectual he was also seeking personal autonomy and self-creation. In his quest to help people he bent over backward to respect their autonomy, so he declined to take over their vocabularies or to relate them to the wider historical process. The extreme, anarchical tendency in Foucault was "the result of a misguided attempt to envisage a society as free of its historical past as the Romantic intellectual hopes to be free of her private past."^[81] Rorty was suggesting, then, that a loosely Nietzschean concern with self-creation, necessarily standing opposed to reconstructive, history-making action, undermined Foucault's desire to help people, to make a difference in the wider world around him. At issue was a tension between ways of relating to the world as historical, but though Rorty's discussion was especially suggestive, it left only a few indications of what those might entail.

Norris, as part of his effort to save Derridean deconstruction for radical reconstructive purposes, distinguished Derrida from "Foucault, Deleuze or the adepts of post-structuralist apocalyptic discourse," whom he associated with a leap into some unknown, beyond reason and critical thought.^[82] Norris was suggesting, then, that some quasi-religious concern had made Foucault too extreme to serve reconstruction.

Rorty was still more explicit in finding something "religious" at work in the vogue of Derridean deconstruction, although he considered Paul de Man far more responsible than Derrida for the mixture of elegy and polemic that set the tone for the movement in the United States. Reading literature in a de Manian mode became a kind of religious ritual for a postmetaphysical age. In contrast with scientific, philosophical, and everyday uses of language, literature always attends to its own relationship with reality; literary language always manifests the impossibility of the full presence, the oneness with things, that we desire. So by endlessly encountering the literariness of language, deconstruction offered what Rorty called "a way of mourning a Deus absconditus , of participating in a divine absence[,] . . . an ascetic practice that confronts one ever and again with 'the presence of a nothingness.'"^[83]

[81] Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 195–196.

[82] Norris, Derrida , 224–225. See also 216–217, 222, for Norris's effort to separate Derrida from Foucault.

[83] See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 113–118, for this reading of de Man and his influence; the quoted passage is on p. 114. On p. 116n, Rorty refers in a similar vein to "the worship of a Dark God, the celebration of perpetual absence." See also pp. 129–139, esp. p. 131, for Rorty's analysis "De Man and the American Cultural Left." In developing this point about deconstruction, Rorty draws partly on one of de Man's closest and most influential colleagues, J. Hillis Miller, in The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 41–59, esp. pp. 53–54, 57–58. Miller makes it clear that the "reading" at issue is a mode of human interaction with the world, not a delimited encounter with literary texts. See also Miller's much earlier The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), for his sense of the overarching religious issue. On pp. 9–12, he portrays historicism as the desolate outcome of the disappearance of God by the end of the nineteenth century. Rorty may be too quick to dismiss attempts like those of de Man and Miller to work through the ruins of the old to new forms of religiosity. But he argues convincingly that Derrida cannot serve de Man's project, because Derrida did not assume that our way of conceiving the dualism of language and reality is at last the right one, or that we have finally discovered what language and reading have been all along.

When he considered Derrida himself, Rorty accented Derrida's playful side. In Rorty's account, in fact, Derrida sought to make the whole philosophical tradition look enigmatic by treating it as a joke.^[84] Yet that response, too, seems to manifest preoccupations new to a world of nothing but history.

In any case, a premium on enigma, systematic evasion, or ritualistic participation in divine absence is utterly incongruent with an emphasis on endless reconstruction. The problem is how to account for these impulses and how to place the overall extremity of deconstruction in perspective.