Sir Tedward Tevan Tevans-Britchard's straight-shooting challenge to the idea of the undefined work of freedom, answered in different ways by Dr Benway's reflections on Science Studies and Bremselhäcker's helpful remarks on extreme social constructivism in literary studies are replies, are occasioned by some enthusiastic correspondence from me about the concept of the undefined work of freedom. When I first read this phrase in Foucault I thought, "Exactly."
[This critique] will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom. ("What is Enlightenment?" in Foucault Reader p. 46)
He says this over and over. The statement of it in "Friendship as a Way of Life" is particularly dear to me.
There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings that Americans call "coming out," that is, showing oneself. The program must be open. We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. (Foucault Live p. 203)
I am forever a Foucaldian in spirit if not in method. This desire to find a way out, to find a way to be different, is for me the motivation for thinking. My sympathies with certain kinds of Christianity came out of my longstanding impression that there is something profoundly wrong with the world, some error so deep that it almost cannot be corrected without unmaking the world. It follows from this that what is wrong with the world is inside you and it seems to me that there is some deep error in me too. To be someone else, another me but still me.
This kind of thinking is what I like best in Nietzsche and Deleuze too; it reminds me of my favorite passage in A Thousand Plateaus, the one where Deleuze and Guattari give a definition of love.
What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. (p. 35)
You can see here some deep connections to Foucault that are especially visible in the "Friendship" essay. In Deleuze this being different comes in small parts, in bits, here and there, as the notorious becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-vegetable, which are not about acquiring a new identity, gender or species. I recently ran across a marvelous little example of this in Charlie Kaufman's film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) There's a delightful scene where Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore are deeply in love and a montage shows their happy life together in an apartment in New York City. At one point she's sitting on the edge of the bathtub putting on stockings and you can see him in the doorway watching her with intense affection and desire. She sees him, smiles, and the movie cuts to him rather ridiculously sitting in the same place on the edge of the tub pulling up his plain socks in an exaggerated manner. Becoming in D&G has more ontological uses and diverse roles in something like social and ontological construction, but like with the term "intensity" it's important that becoming is personal and accessible as well as technical.
There's a good example. The point is not the imitation of femininity, but becoming another person. We all know doubt know what this is in a thousand ways—but one is too modest to mention particulars, so there are books and movies as third parties. This is not just a personal modesty, but the keeping of secrets so that they don't become despoiled nonsense by being taken out of the lives in which they have meaning.
And there is an intellectual version of this process of expression and mediation through third parties that is for me very much alive in textual and visual jokes and forms part of the point of using movies, books and music in philosophy. Uh oh! is a good example of this, as are the Adorno christmas writings and other recognizably funny and sincerely unscholarly little writings. Speaking someone else's words, adding an image and making a variation for the sake of allying myself with some piece of thinking is a kind of becoming-different. This is not instead of any scholarship, science, social work, revolution or anything recognizably political but is unapologetically for me and other people who might come along. A shift in gears and not a complete conceptual break moves us from this kind of intimate theorizing, joking, sympathizing and quoting to recognizably philosophical, historical, literary and sociological thinking.
We can do it all again, this time in a logical register: "We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity." It's unfortunate that Foucault's influence on anthropology has landed it in a relativistic quagmire where anthropologists feel they must either grab hold of what they imagine is the steady hand of cognitive science or endlessly demonstrate that what appears as natural is actually contingent and socially constructed. Unfortunate because this kind of endless second-guessing and programmatic denaturalizing doesn't do justice to the constructive and connective process of writing histories, giving theories and doing studies that shift the modality of the background propositions against which things appear as obvious, normal, unquestionable and excellent from necessary to possible. What did it take, logically speaking, for Shapin and Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump to make Thomas Hobbes back into a rational defender of rational demonstration in science and not a backwards, medieval, confused anti-experimentalist? And what did it take—I mean, what kind of logical procedures—did it take there to make Boyle's experimental philosophy look as actually leaky and primitive as it was? To be sure, Shapin and Schaffer cannot take away the fact that hard science today is experimental by writing a book, but something healthy and good happens when you stop using your own history as one half of a triumphant tautology, stop using it as a justification for repeating what you already do.
To see the intelligible against a background of nothingness is to see the intelligible as the background, as itself ungrounded rather than as forming a foundation. Against the background, there is nothing. The background are those empirical propositions about the world that are the logic of our actual procedures insofar as they make what we actually do make sense through their relative immutability. Foucault's formulation need not imply that humans are blank slates. Rather we would like to have a look at the slate, at where it was mined and manufactured, at the chalk, the schoolroom and how it gets written on. But in order to foreground the background—to make the conditions of our lives appear as a final term, not a first term, as a result and not a base—you must shift them out of the necessary. We don't know what we can make; we'll find out after the fact. What, say, is silently shifted into the category of necessity as we slide into the background?
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