The Enlightenment Gone Mad (II): The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism's Grand Narratives

Abstract

The Enlightenment Gone Mad (II) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives RAINER FRIEDRICH pancratism: foucault’s grand narrative “Humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized.” —Michel Foucault Nous devons à Bataille une large part du moment où nous sommes”—with these words Michel Foucault attests to his own and to post-structuralism’s intellectual indebtedness to Bataille. Foucault was first and foremost a self-confessed Nietzschean; he was also a Sadean and Artaudian, and a Bataillean to boot. From Bataille, Foucault inherited the themes that preoccupied him throughout his intellectual life and that gave his theorizing of modernity its peculiar air: transgression, limit-experience, madness, violence , cruelty, the denigration of reason and of its agent, subjectivity, with the concomitant extolling of unreason’s sovereign enterprise; his focus on corporality and his somatic materialism; his aversion to liberal democracy; and, above all, the centrality of sovereignty and power as the key terms of theorizing modernity. Much of this derives ultimately from Nietzsche and de Sade; yet it was Bataille who decisively shaped the poststructuralist reception of both. True to the postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives , Foucault rejected the totalizing grands récits, condemning “the tyranny of globalizing discourses” and “the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories.”1 He devoted himself to the petits récits of specific discourses and of arion 20.1 spring/summer 2012 local, particular critiques. His various concrete archéologies, histoires, and généalogies (of knowledge, the human sciences , the clinic and modern medicine, madness and psychiatry , sexuality) attest to this. Yet his Discipline and Punish 2 is something else. Ostensibly a petit récit, as the subtitle The Birth of the Prison modestly suggests, it is his most Nietzschean work, sold on Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power, whose operation it sets out to discern in modernity’s social and political institutions. While it is indeed about the birth of the prison and the penal process, it grows, propelled by the Nietzschean tenor of its discourse, into the grand narrative of modernity as it is shaped by the novel conception of the power-knowledge régime. It then evolved into the even grander narrative of pancratism: the metanarrative of the ubiquity and omnipresence of power that rivals its model, Nietzsche’s quasi-metaphysics of the will-to-power. My argument focuses almost exclusively on Foucault’s discourse on power, generally taken as his principal and most significant achievement.3 modernity’s power-knowledge régime foucault’s point of departure was Nietzsche’s genealogical unmasking of the disinterested quest for knowledge and truth as an unavowed and camouflaged form of the will-topower . From this Foucault derived the specifically modern form of power as the power-knowledge régime. The inextricable intertwining of the will to power and the will to knowledge is modernity’s hallmark: in modernity, “power and knowledge directly imply one another; there is no power relation without a correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (D&P 27). Witness the twofold usage of the term discipline: the scientific disciplines furnish power with the knowledge needed for the social and political discipline by which it exercises control and domination over individuals, groups, and whole the enlightment gone mad (ii) 68 populations. This twofold discipline originated in institutions such as the asylum, the hospital, and the prison—the sites where, through the nexus of knowledge and power, the mad, the sick, and the delinquent “became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination.” This has produced a new type of power, which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty . . . one of the great inventions of bourgeois society. It has been a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and of the type of society that is its accompaniment. This non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty , is disciplinary power.4 Sovereignty exists in modernity as the ideology of popular sovereignty. But as “this democratization of sovereignty was fundamentally determined by...