Equality as a Foucaultian Value

Abstract

It has long been noted that there is a certain normative tension in the work of Michel Foucault. On the one hand, he was always reticent to offer a normative framework for his writings. Aside from the cryptic comment about "bodies and pleasures" in the first volume of his history of sexuality, one would seek in vain for positive political or ethical suggestions or claims. On the other hand, his work is undoubtedly normatively driven. The genealogical works have a strong undercurrent of critique and the ethical works of alternative frameworks of living. There can be no doubt that he means these works to intervene upon our current situation in a normative way. One way around this tension is to refer to Foucault's idea that what he provides are tools for those who seek to struggle. This approach displaces the normative weight of his works to the side of the readers. What he provides are genealogies that tell us how we have come to be where we are; the outrage and the will to change, if there is to be any, must come from those who encounter these works and through them find our situation, in Foucault's word, "intolerable." There is something to this idea, particularly when it is coupled with Foucault's reticence to speak in the name of the oppressed, to succumb to the common temptation to be a "universal intellectual." However, there is also something unsatisfying about this response. To be engaged, for instance, with Discipline and Punish, is not only to read a history upon which one can place one's own normative framework. It is also to encounter one in the text. In essence, Discipline and Punish offers a critique of the practice of penal rehabilitation and the entire disciplinary apparatus in which it arises. This critique does not stand outside a normative space; it is deeply normative. But to see things this way seems to invite another dilemma. How are we to trace a normative framework in Foucault's writings without betraying his idea that intellectuals should not dictate the terms to those who resist? It is at this point that Jacques Ranciere's work on equality becomes relevant. Ranciere offers a politically charged normative framework that allows us to embrace, at the same time, a normative framework for critique and a recognition that the terms of struggle are in the hands of those who are engaged in struggle. I would like briefly to trace that response, and then to consider how it might fare in the folds of Foucault's thought. For Ranciere, the core concept of politics is equality, an equality that is presupposed among those who act. In other words, politics has nothing to do with what is given to people; it is not a matter of distributive justice. "Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police,.'" In contrast, he says, "I propose to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration-that of the part that has no part."2 The presupposition of the part that has no part, the part that has been left out of the political and social order, is the presupposition of equality, of the equality of everyone with everyone else. To act according to the presupposition of equality is to act in accordance with a particular norm: that everyone is capable of constructing a meaningful life for himself or herself alongside others, and that communities should be arranged to ensure recognition of that capability. Moreover, what goes under the name of politics is an effort by those who have not been covered by that norm to make it apply. …