Chapter 2: The Problem of Truth

The central rub—what really brought contemporary critical theory to its knees—was the problem of truth. For the Frankfurt School, and for those who believed in class struggle, there was always ultimately a notion of genuine interests, of real class interests, that grounded ideology critique. But with the anti-foundationalist challenges, the rug was pulled from under that consensus.

Many critical thinkers tried to soften the tension—and I would include myself here, regretfully.36 But none of those efforts could truly overcome, in the end, the breach that anti-foundationalist critical theories introduced into the debate. Critical theory was born of an Enlightenment drive to separate truth from falsity—of the critical impulse to seek the limits of reason and perform the work of discrimination at the root of the Greek term, krinein, that is at the base of both critique and crisis.37 Criticism, as Koselleck demonstrated, was fundamentally “the art of arriving at proper insights and conclusions via rational thought.”38 The anti-foundational critique went to the heart of that. And to date, the critical tradition has not been able to reconcile the chasm.

I.

“This great myth needs to be dispelled. It is this myth which Nietzsche began to demolish by showing that, behind all knowledge, behind all attainment of knowledge, what is involved is a struggle for power. Political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it.”

— Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” (1973)39

It is crucial here to get a full sense of the chasm. The tension between the traditional critical framework and its anti-foundational challenges is illustrated best by the confrontation between the method of ideology critique and that of regimes of truth. The conflict, at heart, always came down to questions of knowledge, truth, and falsity.

At one end, the critique of ideology constituted itself as a particular form of knowledge that rested on a specific epistemological conception tied to the facticity of class interests. Ideology critique was a cognitive enterprise that produced a kind of knowledge intended to lead to enlightenment and emancipation.40

At the other end, Foucault’s theory of knowledge-power, of savoir-pouvoir,41 amounted to a radical critique of knowledge. It aimed to unmask precisely that “great Western myth,” the illusion that it is possible to sever knowledge from power or achieve objectivity.42 That myth, Foucault declared, had to be, in his words, “liquidé”—liquidated, a far more forceful expression than “dispelled” as in the official English translation. Foucault’s was a searing critique of the possibility of powerless knowledge.

To be more concrete, in the early 1970s, Foucault directly challenged the idea of class interests and proposed, instead, that social relations be modeled on the matrix of civil war. That matrix would call for a constant reexamination of how power circulates through society, always questioning the categories through which we even analyze power, always reexamining the ways in which power and subjectivity are transformed. As he explained in December 1972, a month before launching into his lectures on The Punitive Society, his project was to study power relations on the basis of “the most criticized of all wars: not Hobbes, nor Clausewitz, nor class struggle, but civil war.”43 At the time, and focusing on early nineteenth-century France, what he developed—in contrast to those other three approaches—was the idea of a generalized civil war involving the production of a “criminal-social enemy” that facilitated a disciplinary form of power permeating society and transforming the entire time of life and subjectivity into a productive force.44 Foucault’s matrix of civil war did not rest on a binary or stable structure, but sought instead to upend our conventional ways of thinking about knowledge in a realm he himself characterized as power-knowledge.45

It was precisely this tension that motivated Steven Lukes’s radical theory of power, and his defense of the idea of false consciousness,46 in which Lukes emphasized that “there is truth to be attained,” a “correct view that is not itself imposed by power.”47 Lukes argued that on Foucault’s view, by contrast, there can be no normative judgment because there is power all the way down: for Foucault, Lukes wrote, “there can be no liberation from power, either within a given context or across contexts; and there is no way of judging between ways of life, since each imposes its own ‘regime of truth’ . . .”48

In an earlier essay, challenging Lukes, I tried to reconcile these differences, but in hindsight I realize that I did not do justice to the fundamental tension between the Frankfurt School’s epistemology and Foucault’s critique of knowledge.49 I should not have dismissed the inexorable chasm so quickly.

This is evident if we return to the passages in which Foucault explicitly engaged the question of ideology and proposed certain revisions to (what he understood as) the concept of ideology. The passages occur at the end of Foucault’s Rio lectures from May 1973, Truth and Juridical Forms—and so the context is important. As we all know well, Foucault frequently used the concept of ideology as a foil to his own thought.50 He often insisted that our ways of thinking about madness, delinquency, and sexuality were not mere ideological fabrications; that his own project was not to demonstrate that these categories were no more than “ideological products that must be dissipated in the light of reason.”51 Foucault maintained that these categories—the mad, the delinquent, the abnormal—were the product of a whole series of practices and discourses that gave birth to something that did not exist beforehand and ultimately still does not exist—a complicated idea—but has a real presence (and does not fit within the rubric of ideology).52 The categories, Foucault emphasized, could not fully be captured by the notion of ideologies.53 And so, in Truth and Juridical Forms, Foucault explored various ways in which different legal forms—for instance, the practice of testing the accused or the evidence (what he refers to as épreuve), of inquiring into the facts (what he calls enquête), or of examining witnesses, oneself, or one’s conscience (what he calls examen)—function as ways of producing truth in resolving disputes, as forms of veridiction through jurisdiction. The Rio lectures thus represent a frontal assault on the idea or the possibility of objective knowledge.

At the conclusion of the Rio lectures, Foucault discusses the theory of alienated labor—the claim, which he attributes to Hegel and Marx, that “man’s concrete essence is labor.”54 Foucault does not provide a pin cite, but we could point to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx defines what is quintessentially human, as opposed to animal, as precisely laboring freely and productively.55 Foucault critiques the claim that man’s essence is labor, arguing first that this is by no means true (“labor is absolutely not man’s concrete essence,” Foucault declares),56 but second that we come to believe in its truth by means of certain practices that are intimately connected to capitalist relations of production themselves. These are the practices, Foucault argues, that shape the body, that render bodies docile. Foucault refers to them in Rio as “infrapower”: “a set of political techniques, techniques of power … by which people’s bodies and their time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effectively used and thereby transformed into [surplus value]”;57 a “web of microscopic, capillary political power … at the level of man’s very existence …”; “the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest level,” in contrast to the state or even to a notion of class.58 Marx’s theory of capital accumulation, on Foucault’s reading, depends on these disciplinary techniques (which are themselves intimately connected with capitalist production) to shape bodies and render workers docile.

Foucault develops this insight two years later in Discipline and Punish where, specifically citing Marx’s Capital (Vol. I, Chap. XIII), he argues that the economic revolutions that made possible the accumulation of capital during the nineteenth century cannot be separated from the production of these docile bodies—or what he refers to as “the methods for administering the accumulation of men.”59 These methods are the disciplinary techniques at the heart of Discipline and Punish, which replaced “the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.”60 On Foucault’s view, these methods were as important to capitalist production and the exploitation of surplus value as the modes of production.61 And, drawing on Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (1939)—published under the auspices of the Frankfurt School—Foucault transforms traditional Marxist political economy into a “political economy of the body,” effectively into “a history of bodies” that focuses on the “political investment of the body” and the “political technology of the body.”62 These disciplinary forms—themselves embedded in relations of production—rendered docile the modern body, simultaneously making possible factory workers and the idea that free labor is man’s essence. As he would say in Psychiatric Power, “we can say that disciplinary power, and this is no doubt its fundamental property, fabricates subjected bodies; it pins the subject-function exactly to the body. It fabricates and distributes subjected bodies; it is individualizing [only in that] the individual is nothing other than the subjected body.”63

Foucault could not have been clearer—or more challenging to ideology critique: the idea that “man’s concrete essence is labor” is itself fabricated, alongside these docile bodies, by disciplinary techniques that are embedded in relations of production and that themselves make those relations of production possible. These techniques also bring about feelings of alienation because they deprive us of the rich, substantive meaning that our lives could have. These techniques of power give rise to knowledges—such as the idea that labor is “the essence of man,” but more broadly the idea of man as an object of science. In Rio, Foucault specifically proposes that this infrapower “gave rise to a series of knowledges—a knowledge of the individual, of normalization, a corrective knowledge—that proliferated in these institutions of infrapower, causing the so-called human sciences, and man as an object of science, to appear.”64 This rehearses the argument at the end of Les mots et les choses (1966)—the image of man written in sand, disappearing under the waves.

As Foucault explains: “If what I have said is true, it cannot be said that these forms of knowledge [savoirs] and these forms of power, operating over and above productive relations, merely express those relations or enable them to be reproduced.”65 The reason is that ideologies themselves are made possible by relations of production that are themselves made possible by knowledge-power; there is no priority to relations of production that would privilege or place first production as the driving force of history. Ideas are necessary to enable political economy. The relations of production are themselves shaped by conceptions of the self that enable docile bodies to man the factories. These are interlocking: relations of production/knowledge/relations of power. Foucault writes:

In order for the relations of production that characterize capitalist societies to exist, there must be, in addition to a certain number of economic determinations, those power relations and forms of operation of knowledge. Power and knowledge are thus deeply rooted—they are not just superimposed on the relations of production but, rather, are very deeply rooted in what constitutes them.66

From a regimes-of-truth perspective, then, it is not possible to speak of interests that are, in some sense, foundational. Instead, stated interests and conceptions of self are shaped by relations of power and are historically situated; they are interwoven with and make possible the modes of economic production within which they find themselves; they are not exterior, in any way, to relations of production. It is possible to show how they are born and maintained and evolve, and to what effect. And, despite all that, they have real force and staying power. They cannot just be lifted, like a veil. They have real effects—des effets de vérité. They are real. They cannot simply or easily be proven wrong. They are not susceptible to demonstrations of falsity. And it may take a whole series of complex techniques of power and knowledges, deeply embedded in relations of production, for other beliefs to form.

In both critical approaches, to be sure, there is a form of enlightenment—but enlightenment by different means. On the first view, access to truth, to true facts—and thereby emancipation from illusions—is achieved by acquiring the right social theory.67 On the second view, there is no access to powerless knowledge; there can be at best an unveiling of current forms of oppression or relations of power, achieved through the denaturalization of dominant ideas. On this second view, we do not achieve an end-state, but reach another place from which we will again need to emancipate ourselves. We do not escape relations of power; we never do. We are always embedded in them. We may make progress, perhaps on the basis of an aesthetics of existence, but at best we bring about a new condition that will itself need to be reassessed and reexamined, so that we can understand how power recirculates. When we shed illusions, when regimes of truth shift, we are merely at another place where power relations are thickly at play, may be problematic, may become entrenched—and where we will need to revalue how we are governing and being governed.

II.

The anti-foundational critique jabbed at the heart of traditional critical theory, and to date, the critical tradition has not been able to recover.

The effects are especially acute today. The critical tradition, mired in tribal politics and internecine struggles for influence among its different offshoots—Deleuzian, Lacanian, post-colonial, queer, Foucauldian, feminist, Derridean, to name a few—has struggled to elaborate a coherent contemporary critical theory. With class struggle no longer a unifying theme, and the prospect of a proletarian uprising faded, especially in the absence today of robust self-consciousness among workers or students, the core of traditional critical theory evaporated.

At this point, the critical question becomes: What should critical theory sound like in these fragmented theoretical times? What does critical theory look like when the underlying theoretical structure of the dialectical imagination is so fractured?