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Partisanship, polemics and politics
Hello, Long Sunday! The editors have kindly invited me to post here on an occasional basis. I maintain the Foucaultblog, an ongoing experiment to see whether it is possible to create a space where one does not already know the answers to questions and pose already as an expert. I welcome your comments either here on back at the entry on Foucaultblog.
Is it possible to be honestly partisan?
We hear a lot of talk these days about the need for bipartisanship (I'm thinking of statements coming out of Capitol Hill), and in light of the poll findings I posted yesterday about American's distrust of political bias in the university, you might be justified in concluding that the source of the problem is partisanship.
Foucault famously observed that he preferred "problematizations, not polemics" and defined the former:
Problematization doesn't mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn't exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 257.
So are problematizations and partisanship compatible? One might initially think not. Again from Foucault:
I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat … and I must admit that I rather like what they mean (Foucault 1997, 113). Foucault, Michel (1997) ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.’ In Paul Rabinow (Ed.) The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol. I. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. 111–19.
This is, you might say, the antithesis of partisanship as a political position: left, right, center--all as necessary, all desirable so that one remains mobile and tactical, not strategic.
The polls showing the distrust of political bias in the classroom were themselves strongly split along political lines. Fully 73.3% of Republicans thought there was a problem, but only 6.7% of Democrats. But overall 40% of respondents thought that political bias--partisanship--was a "very serious" problem. Again this implies that having a position that leads one to be biased is a problem.
I wonder why this is, and I wonder if it is possible as I said above to be "honestly" (for want of a better word) partisan? In Europe for example, it is well-known that certain newspapers hew to a political position (liberal, conservative), whereas in the US the news media is supposed to be "fair and balanced" (but is not). The US news media of course is frequently criticized for not actively doing journalistic investigation of the powerful, instead being rather smitten by them (criticism most vigorously from bloggers and authors such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Eric Boehlert in his book Lapdogs: How the Press rolled Over for Bush).
Contemplating this one could argue that partisanship has become polemic, and if so, this leaves little room for the honest partisan, the person who believes something and tries to vigorously pursue it. This does not mean however, that we should conclude that partisanship should be divorced from politics. Partisanship could be divorced from bias however.
I would like to operate under and suggest a more expansive notion of "politics" than "partisanship as bias" with which it is frequently conflated. We often hear it said that we don't want politics to enter into a decision, meaning bias. But if problematizations are the putting into play of the true and false and of constituting things as objects of thought, what other word might we want than politics? Politics--polis--is the art of deciding about where you live.
In this way I think that problematizations can be re-identified with partisanship. Partisan politics is the recognition of genuinely held positionalities which are neither polemics nor bias. I think this recovery of the meaning of politics is quite in line with the "continental" tradition of thought and of Foucault's "putting into play of true and false."
By Jeremy | July 13, 2007 in Polemics, Politics | Permalink
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Further complicating this, in his lectures on the French aristocracy in 'Society Must be Defended', Foucault spends a lot of time talking about politics and what would could call "partisanship" where the "truth" becomes limited to the "truth" of the group. A few passages:
"The law is not born of nature, and it was not born near the fountains that the first shepherds frequented: the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes; the law was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day.
This does not, however, mean that society, the law, and the State are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone's adversary." (SMBD, 5-1)
He continues a few lines later,
Because the subject who speaks in this discourse, who says "I" or "we," cannot, and is in fact not trying to occupy the position of the jurist or the philosopher, or in other words the position of a universal, totalizing, neutral subject. In the general struggle he is talking about, the person who is speaking, telling the truth, recounting the story, rediscovering memories and trying not to forget anything, well, that person is inevitably on one side or the other: he is involved in the battle, has adversaries, and is working toward a particular victory. Of course, he speaks the discourse of right, asserts a right, and demands a right. But what he is demanding and asserting is "his" right - he says: "We have a right." These are singular rights, and they are strongly marked by a relationship of property, conquest, victory, or nature. It might be the right of his family or race, the right of superiority or seniority, the right of triumphal invasions, or the right of recent or ancient occupations. In all cases, it is a right that is both grounded in history and decentered from a juridical universality. And if this subject who speaks of right (or rather, rights) is speaking the truth,that truth is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher. It is true that this discourse about the general war, this discourse that tries to interpret the war beneath peace, is indeed an attempt to describe the battle as a whole and to reconstruct the general course of the war. But that does not make it a totalizing or neutral discourse; it is always a perspectival discourse. It is interested in the totality only to the extent that it can see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own point of view. The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject himself.
This discourse established a basic link between relations of force and relations of truth. This also means that the identification of truth with peace or neutrality, or with the median position which, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has clearly demonstrated, was, at least from a certain point onward, a constituent element of Greek philosophy, is being dissolved. In a discourse such as this, being on one side and not the other means that you are in a better position to speak the truth. It is the fact of being on one side - the decentered position - that makes it possible to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors that are being used - by your adversaries - to make you believe we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored. 'The more I decenter myself, the better I can see the truth; the more I accentuate the relationship of force, and the harder I fight, the more effectively I can deploy the truth ahead of me and use it to fight, survive, and win.' And conversely, if the relationship of force sets truth free, the truth in its turn will come into play - and will, ultimately, be sought - only insofar as it can indeed become a weapon within the relationship of force. Either the truth makes you stronger, or the truth shifts the balance, accentuates the dissymmetries, and finally gives the victory to one side rather than the other. Truth is an additional force, and it can be deployed only on the basis of a relationship of force, of dissymmetry, decentering, combat, and war, is inscribed in this type of discourse." (SMBD 52-3)
And, finally, Foucault goes on to raise the stakes beyond polemics:
"The subject who is speaking is - I wouldn't even say a polemical subject - a subject who is fighting a war." (SMBD 54)
This raises a number of possible questions: is there a discourse of "race war" operating in the United States at present? if so, is Foucault's analytic useful? and, most importantly, where is the we?
Posted by: Craig | Jul 13, 2007 4:07:14 PM
It seems that others are picking up on this poll, as noted here. As I guessed, one obvious conclusion that people are coming to is that the public is fortuitously aware of, and rejects, political positionality in academia (see David French at NRO).
Who is the we? Good question. Richard Rorty used to say that it was the job of the ironized liberal to build solidarity by building up the community of the we. (One way was through reading more literature about other people's experiences and fears, eg, Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
Foucault's sense of "race" in SMD is problematic, but his ideas on conflict (taken from Nietzsche?) are being picked up across a broad range of writing and it would be foolish to say there wasn't a war of discourse and ideas right now. The conduct of this varies in quality and is not necessarily a recapitulation of the old culture wars, nor necessarily left-right, but perhaps we can at least get beyond the idea that political positionality is always problematic>
Posted by: Jeremy | Jul 13, 2007 5:34:35 PM
I think the only possible problematization is partisan--raised from a truth conviction.
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 14, 2007 2:27:57 PM
I think you're confusing 'partisanship' with 'bias.' Everyone's biased, of course, but not everyone is partisan, which, in the vernacular at least, implies speaking from a 'party' position and not simply the position of an individual. The problem we have with the idea of partisanship is that it supposes a prior investment in a set of "dictated" values, i.e. dogma. You might say, well, such is the case in any case, our dogmas are only implicit (or 'unconscious') but the idea of non-partisanship, and, I think, what Foucault is getting at, is that you enter into discussion and encounter problems as they arise, or as need be, rather than setting out to make people believe you are right (a pointless exercise, since we're all biased anyway). 'Partisanship' in the vernacular means that you come to situations already invested with ideas about what is true and how things should proceed (even Foucauldians are vested interests, let's not forget), which implies an intransigence towards meeting the 'truth' of subsequent situations which are, of necessity, 'new.' So, no, I disagree with you (LMAO). I don't think you can be partisan and contribute meaninguflly to the search for truth. This here 'disucssion' (LS) is just for shits and giggles, but when we set out to write our masterpieces, well, I don't know about y'all, but I'm not going to stake my career on the word of Marx or Foucault. I think anyone who identifies as a Liberal or a Marxist or a Foucaldian or, worst of all, Deleuzians, just don't get it and, as Augustine put it, "only their ashes will survive."
Posted by: Cornchops | Jul 15, 2007 10:17:08 PM
... although one does find it's generally those who pride themselves on their free-thinking independence who are the most blinkered & doctrinaire in practice.
Of course the right present their own views as natural common sense, nothing to do with politics, & so anyone who disagrees is biasing what was a simple description of reality. That's just part of what it is to be on the right (tho the US neocons do seem to be particularly good at it). It's troubling that this is being taken seriously to the extent that people are trying to use it to inform a debate about their own scholarly practice. The debate is certainly worth having, it just seems like a bizarre choice of starting point.
Posted by: tl | Jul 16, 2007 7:46:14 AM
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