Foucault suggests to engage in Parresia a type of courageous talk, which forms part of techniques of self-discipline offered by the Stoics and Romans as a way to resist the order of things and live a more rewarding life, independent of institutional coercion. I just wanted to reach out to everyone with similar interests and see if we can spark a small discussion. — Giorgi

There's a lot of buzz about courageous talk now, e.g. #MeToo. It's been effective to an extent, and within positions of power.

I recall Colin Firth publicly berating himself for knowing about Weinstein and not speaking out against it. And that for the most part seems to have been the case: the people who spoke out were the victims. Why did so few who knew support them? Probably related to the fact that the would-be victims who resisted still don't have careers. No one's talking about the new Mira Sorvino movie, and she's an Oscar winner.

There is, or was, a campaign to get men to protest their own friends' misogynistic behaviour. I doubt that's fared much better, but I hope it had some impact. My feeling is that the majority of people prize validation from their peers more than they prize their own authenticity.

The danger as I see it falls in distinguishing that authenticity from the trappings of one's culture, which might be good, bad, or arbitrary. Foucault champions asserting one's truth at the risk of being a pariah within one's peer group. But the benefit of having a peer group is that it might temper bad apples. We only have to look west and back a few years to see how bad actors can emerge from the underground once bad actions are legitimised.

Appeals to one's sovereignty are always at odds with, or at least perpendicular to, our moral duties, which concern our own behaviour within a social group. The right balance of challenging the behaviours of others and challenging one's own beliefs seems like the win-win to me.

Excellent points. I wish I was more up to date with current events. Fortunately I am lucky enough to isolate and just do the research. In a way, this is also a technique of the self, having only to engage in struggles within Academia, but I am hoping to take this research and tackle real world problems. Here's one idea I've been messing with in my article Displacing the Confessional

But I think no less than cultural trappings we should address explicit institutional trappings (perhaps this still falls within your definition of culture), even Foucault said at one point that acquiring a gay identity and being recognized as a group, far from a final goal or a definitive victory, may turn out to be a bit of a quagmire, as it very often happens that it is precisely recognition or the acquisition of rights that places the subject onto a new plane of power-relations. One may also create a continuous and subversive field of alterity, resulting in a gradual takeover rather than a single decisive battle.

In terms of peer pressure or conformity, parresia is not even parresia if one's own status, social, financial or other, is not in danger of being undermined. I think we can distinguish various forms of parresia. We could imagine the parresia of a classical revolutionary who speaks truth to power at a certain point but in a way that brings about radical change, or we could conceive of a receding into the self and taking care of oneself and others through particular forms of self-training and self-discipline. The latter is a form of radical depoliticization of the public sphere.

My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. This is another important point for Foucault, the productive element of power.

My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. — Giorgi

I agree.I think that Foucault's turn to parrhesia was a way to represent his situation.
In parrhesia, the speaking subject's truth-telling has a double performative effect of
impacting others and transforming the enunciating subject himself. No doubt,
Foucault was effective in both dimensions. Yet, it looks like in our situation
accomplishing the successful parrhesiastic enunciation has become quite challenging.

Absolutely. Especially the pace at which Foucault's discourse is being appropriated and re-deployed by both governments and corporations. I see research being done in management and corporate governance, even cybersecurity where Foucaultian analysis is used to extend technologies of subjugation instead of resisting them. I am currently "fighting off" phenomenological appropriations where they try to integrate Foucaultian findings with Husserlian phenomenology. It's like fighting shadows, but hopefully it'll prove to be a good exercise.

Foucault's discourse is being appropriated and re-deployed by both governments and corporations. I see research being done in management and corporate governance, even cybersecurity where Foucaultian analysis is used to extend technologies of subjugation instead of resisting them. — Giorgi

In a broader perspective, we could see the processes of appropriation and redeployment
not just of Foucault's discourse, but of a vast spectrum of discourses of resistance. To better understand and deal with this situation, we can turn again to Foucault's parrhesia.
It was his way to defend himself against the accusation of killing
any hope for resistance: if power-knowledge is omnipresent and ubiquitous, there is no place
and discourse for resistance. Yet, Foucault's authentic parrhesia is not his story of himself, disguised as the research of ancient philosophers. It is his account on personal exposure to contemporary power relations. Implicitly, his texts on power combine both dimensions of truth-telling. Re-reading and re-interpreting Foucault's texts are not sufficient. Likely, to perform an act of parrhesiastic enunciation, one should discover how power impacts oneself and one's discourses, including what one considers parrhesiastic and resistant ones.

if power-knowledge is omnipresent and ubiquitous, there is no place
and discourse for resistance

I have often heard that criticism myself. Very common in these debates. I'm sure you know Foucault's answer, but it's good to re-iterate. Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom. And I might be wrong on this, but re-reading Foucault is very important. Because as Foucault notes, re-reading discursive texts (he was speaking of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche) means re-writing them. Re-reading Freud means inventing a new psychoanalysis, re-reading Marx a new critique of political economy etc. So I think we should re-read Foucault but not like Academics (i.e. elite bureaucrats), but in a way that re-creates the entire discourse. So in this sense, the answer could be closer and more obvious than it seems.

I am currently "fighting off" phenomenological appropriations where they try to integrate Foucaultian findings with Husserlian phenomenology. — Giorgi

Why would you want to do that? Just don’t combine Foucault with insufferable moralism like so much of the discourse of the left does.

That goes without saying, but you see, phenomenology posits a theory of the subject and that offers an epistemic framework for grounding morality later on. I even demonstrate how a phenomenological attitude can lead directly to liberalism. That was Foucault's problem, in France, phenomenology was institutionalized and become another (though quite profound) technique of discipline and governance.

But I think no less than cultural trappings we should address explicit institutional trappings (perhaps this still falls within your definition of culture) — Giorgi

Absolutely.

I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. — Giorgi

Precisely my thinking about #MeToo (and #TimesUp), which was largely a Hollywood thing. Surface changes made, but nothing structural. The victims remained victims, nothing much changed.

My point is that "speaking out" or "having an impact" may be a serious political trap unless we qualify these statements. I think the U.S. in particular has an ingenious political field which can create a powerful illusion of change and radical reform, while remaining perfectly within the confines of the status quo. This is another important point for Foucault, the productive element of power. — Giorgi

Precisely my thinking about #MeToo (and #TimesUp), which was largely a Hollywood thing. Surface changes made, but nothing structural. The victims remained victims, nothing much changed. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

Perhaps controversial, but the confinement of mass politics to discourse; politics as mass shitposting; isn't isolated to the US, UK, or even the political North. You can read the failure of the Arab spring uprisings and global climate strikes in the same context. Non-coordinated spontaneous disruption by an actor network is antithetical to any new institutionalisation of power by that network - the revolution's come to look like a corporate teambuilding event.

Even if it breaks shit, there's little to no plan. What comes in the space cleared by that breaking?

re-reading Foucault is very important. — Giorgi

I agree that under certain circumstances reading and re-reading Foucault's texts can become an act of resistance.

Precisely because power is everywhere, there are infinite forms of resistance and ways to obtain freedom. — Giorgi

Foucault's insistence
on the omnipresence of power can undermine his concept of resistance. Baudrillard, in his book 'Forget Foucault', claimed that Foucault expressed the new capitalist mode of production that knocked down and re-created every form of social communication: “This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated situation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining the body. It is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate, gravity and any fixed point must disappear…This is the form itself which the current realization of value takes. It is the form of capital, and sexuality as a catchword and a model is the way it appears at the level of bodies." Likely, Boudrillard capitalized on the Foucault’s assertion of the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power.
Since power is everywhere, any place could become the site of resistance. This claim may deprive the problem of resistance of its specifics and concretization. Since power is not repressive and ideological but productive, it could result in the inclusion of resistance into the dominating social order. Further, social actors usually do not experience their social engagements as shaped by power alignments. For example, newly created contemporary gender identities are commonly considered as the liberation movement, but not the effect of the power-knowledge complex of dispositif of sexuality. Foucault’s turn to techniques of self-discipline could be viewed as his answer to the problem of resistance. Yet, he could not foresee that the newest tendency of capitalistic biopolitical production is precisely the focus on one’s experiences where one’s subjectivity
can be intensified, bent, and re-tooled.

I think the objection from the omnipresence of power can only be used as an effective argument against Foucault, if we forget that for Foucault, power is not identical to domination. Power in itself is not something we want to avoid or neutralize, but something we want to appropriate and "condense" so to speak. The idea is not to get rid of power wherever we see it, but to operate as kind of shockwave which in fact reduces the intensity of a given set of power relations and how they act on subjects.

I am interested in alternative lifestyles and how they can offer resistance to consumerism — Giorgi

I assume you exclude the poor from this, ie. people who due to lack of money have to invent lifestyles that are alternative to consumerism and offer resistance to it?

phenomenology posits a theory of the subject and that offers an epistemic framework for grounding morality later on. I even demonstrate how a phenomenological attitude can lead directly to liberalism. That was Foucault's problem, in France, phenomenology was institutionalized and become another (though quite profound) technique of discipline and governance. — Giorgi

There are many versions of phenomenology. The forms of phenomenology that were institutionalized in France were bastardized interpretations , owing much more to Sartre than to Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology is not a ‘theory or the subject’.
Foucault is certainly an improvement over Sartre, but I think Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Foucault.

I'm afraid I'm not competent enough to talk about Merleau-Ponty just yet, I'm focusing on Husserl. But I do believe that an embodied subject is still a deeply territorialized subject. If I am not mistaken Merleau-Ponty also draws on developments in the natural sciences to boost his ontology of the body. But Foucault's claim would be that the experience of the body can be (is, in fact) as much a product of institutional training as any other. I think overall, phenomenology cannot escape essentialisms and that's Foucault's main bone of contention. Would you disagree? And why this privileging of Merleau-Ponty over Sartre? That's interesting.

That is precisely the type of resistance that I am interested in. I myself have refused many luxuries and comforts to investigate this on my own. Of course it's not the same, and I cannot say that I am poor, in fact, my financial difficulties are a result of the struggles that I engaged with, but it could definitely be the other way around where the financial difficulties are a direct cause and motivation for resistance and that's a more classical Marxian view of resistance.

Aha a fellow Belgian!

Foucault's claim would be that the experience of the body can be (is, in fact) as much a product of institutional training as any other. I think overall, phenomenology cannot escape essentialisms and that's Foucault's main bone of contention. Would you disagree? And why this privileging of Merleau-Ponty over Sartre? T — Giorgi

Sartre misread many forms of philosophy, as Derrida noted. He essentialized the ego , whereas Merleau-Ponty made the self out in the world. As far as the origin of the experience of the body, for MP body is a gestalt field , as is intersubjectivity. But that means institutions and other forms of conditioning only have their existence against a background of the body. If the body is nothing but these conditionings, the it is no longer a body and we can’t even talk about the socially determining conditionings. Each implies the other and this means that what conditions us is experienced from a point of view.
Each of us are conditioned by shared practices. that is the social gestalt. But those shared practices are not indentical practices. Each of us are conditioned differently
by those same practices. That is what it means to be embodied.

Focualt’s model of social interaction is too blunt and monolithic. It fails to discern differences within institutional forces, and as a result is inclined to act too violently.

I myself have refused many luxuries and comforts to investigate this on my own. — Giorgi

What have been some of your discoveries in these investigations?

I think the objection from the omnipresence of power can only be used as an effective argument against Foucault, if we forget that for Foucault, power is not identical to domination. Power in itself is not something we want to avoid or neutralize, but something we want to appropriate and "condense" so to speak. — Giorgi

It looks like you try to avoid the discussion of the problem of resistance by redefining it as a way of appropriation
and ‘condensation’ of power. May be, it fits Foucault’s personal experiment. Nevertheless, it does not eliminate a certain vagueness of his conceptualization of power.
For Foucault, power is not specifically localized and is not primerily located in the machinery of State or other distinguishable institutions; it is embedded within common social and every day practices, and it is immanent to the entire social field. Therefore, power becomes undetectable and unrecognizable. It can require a long-term effort and special skills to perform a task of genealogical work to identify particular effects of power alignments. On the contrary, those subjected to power submit to it as if it were a natural order, forming the horizon of sense. It is not clear how one could resist or modify the effects of
the omnipotent, omnipresent, and indiscernible power. For Deleuze, the question of resistance was one of the points of disagreement with Foucault. “ For myself, status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem, since lines of flight are primary determinations, since desire assembles the social field”. ( Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’). Instead of the program of resistance, he offers the project of re-investment of desire that can crash or seal off the dispositifs
of power.

I think the Foucaultian response would be "What body?". The body of the corporate establishment? Of the docile worker? The school-boy? The police officer? A woman's body? The body as constituted by the science of biology? Anthropology? But most of all, What body? So I would revert back to objecting against Merleau-Ponty's body-essentialism. And indeed I agree, it makes no sense to speak of A BODY as a universal. We can only address the body in a perspectival manner through an institutional lens.

Indeed! Deployed in Leuven. ^_^

That's super-general but I'll try to give you some kind of an answer. I just recently quit a job as a content writer in Scaled Access. It paid really nice for a student job. And several months in, I realized that they were no longer giving me any texts to edit (not that that job was dignifying), but they made me compile databases of their clients personal information, not to mention constantly keeping me "on the verge of getting fired" by blaming structural problems (incomplete databases) on me. So I took the chance and wrote a resignation letter to my boss letting them know that they were dishonest, manipulative and exploiting me (my immigrant status) to keep me docile and "productive". I worked with them for almost a year and they never raised my salary. I'm glad I did it, despite having to live off of canned food instead of takeaways. Generally, I found managerial jobs to be demeaning both to those in power and those at the bottom of the corporate ladder. In addition, I learned the true meaning of "purposefully distorted communication", where those at the top deliberately create gaps in communication to blame the ones on the bottom, that way they can always tell them they are not good enough to get a raise. I have several more stories like that and all I know, if I ever enter a corporate establishment again, it will be exclusively as a Trojan Horse.

I don't see how delving deeper into something is a way of "avoiding" it? Power is not an object, it is a force, a relation and context is everything. It is not "vagueness", I believe it is complexity. Power hides, but it is not undetectable, it is difficult to detect, these are not the same. Resistance in fact, is something that occurs spontaneously, it only needs to be recognized and monopolized, but once it turns into meaningful and conscious action, it is already a real struggle a positive force. In terms of Deleuze, I see a possible reconciliation. If we speak of "unconventional libidinal investments" as things that can occur either spontaneously or consciously we could say that in the first case we have resistance (unconscious deterritorializations) and in the second a determined struggle or movement.

We can only address the body in a perspectival manner through an institutional lens. — Giorgi

What institutes the institution, what establishes the establishment? What incorporates the corporation? What embodies the body? What is the irreducible basis of a relation of forces? If the body is created by the institutional and corporate conditions of its being, make damm sure you don’t essentialize whatever you think you mean by corporate or institutional lens. It may cause you to miss what is most important and relevant to behavior, the subtle and intricate creative
changes that are likely utterly invisible to a thinking that
begins from a glorified Skinnerian notion of conditioning.

Read this paragraph 10 times and notic how your sense of the meaning of it changes each time in subtle ways. Welcome to the origin of the social. Good luck trying to explain that by institutionalized forces. Only a much more nuanced understanding of affectivity, sense, feeling and significance will allow you to see a whole universe of change underlying the monolithic, generic and superficial
entities that you take to be the irreducible basis of meaning.

Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. It is not based on anything. I'm sorry, but I do not understand where you are going with this. But I feel the pathos! Excellent.

Power does NOT require a foundation. It operates effectively without a ground or an essence. — Giorgi

The same can be said of a more originary basis of ‘power, in temporality. Or to put it in Derrida’s terms: not power but force, and not simply force
but differences of force. This deconstructs
Foucault’s power.

“ The words "force" and "power" which I have just joined you in using, also pose, as you can well imagine, enormous problems. I never resort to these words without a sense of uneasiness, even if I believe myself obligated to use them in order to designate something irreducible. What worries me is that in them which resembles an obscure substance that could, in a discourse, give rise to a zone of obscurantism and of dogmatism. Even if, as Foucault seems to suggest, one no longer speaks of Power with a capital P, but of a scattered multiplicity of micropowers, the question remains of knowing what the unity of signification is that still permits us to call these decentralized and heterogeneous microphenomena "powers. " For my part, without being able to go much further here, I do not believe that one should agree to speak of "force" or of "power" except under three conditions, at least. A. That one takes account of the fact that there is never any thing called power or force, but only differences of power and of force, and that these differences are as qualitative as they are quantitative. In short, it seems to me that one must start, as Nietzsche doubtless did, from difference in order to accede to force and not vice versa. B. That, starting from this qualitatively differential thought, one opens oneself, in attempting to account for it, to this apparently perverse or paradoxical possibility: the ostensibly greater force can also be the "lesser" (or the "strongest" force is not "strongest" but "weakest, " which supposes the essential possibility of an inversion of meaning, that is to say, a mutation of meaning not limited to the semantics of discourse or the dictionary but which also "produces" itself as history). C. That one takes into account, consequently, all the paradoxes and ruses of force, of power, of mastery, as traps in which these ruses cannot avoid being caught up. I” (From Limited, Inc.)

I don't see how temporality constitutes power, but I do see the reverse. The power-relations in the present determine how we feel, perceive, understand and make sense of time. Resorting to time (or space) as originary pre-given forms or conditions of experience is just another Kantian move, and I think we've had enough of that in western philosophy. I think there is much less danger of obscurantism in Foucaultian conceptions of power-relations than the traditional universalisms or "unities" of meaning, experience, phenomena or space-time etc. Power is a partial-object and it is fragmented. It has no ontology (following the Heideggerian project of the destruction of ontology and western metaphysics), but it has a very specific effect. The fact that the teacher engages in a series of meta-actions to discipline a student is a concrete, observable and detectable effect, but it does not require thereby a foundation or a grounding of meaning or communication. I wouldn't say that there are "differences" but instead, there are relations of power and force and their purpose is to repress differences. And that's where Nietzsche began. But by undermining the relations we can liberate the difference (as with Deleuze, I do not see why we cannot reconcile Derrida with Foucault as well). As far as points B. and C. are concerned, I'm afraid I cannot follow.

Resorting to time (or space) as originary pre-given forms or conditions of experience is just another Kantian move, and I think we've had enough of that in western philosophy — Giorgi

We certainly have had enough of that, and that is why Heidegger and Derrida’s notion of temporality does nothing of the sort. Have you read these authors? There is nothing ‘pre-given’ about temporality. It is not a formal pre-conditon, but relationally itself , the in-between. It is Foucault who maintains a link to Kantianism in the structuralist basis of his forms of power.

It has no ontology (following the Heideggerian project of the destruction of ontology and western metaphysics), — Giorgi

Heidegger deconstructed traditional Western Ontology, and put in its place his own Ontology of Dasein.

I do not see why we cannot reconcile Derrida with Foucault — Giorgi

In order to do that it is necessary to deconstruct the idea of a centered structure , that is , an ensemble of elements united by a central force or identity. Can you do that with the notion of power as a partial-object? Define partial-object a bit further for me.

Alright so, 1. Foucault is not a structuralist. 2. Foucault goes beyond Heidegger (so not everything that Heidegger stood for is a given for Foucault) 3. That is precisely what power as a partial object implies. It is decentered.