Silliman's Papers

Now now:
The present-ed post-politics of Foucault
By Daniel Silliman
December 9, 2003
For Dr. Peter Blum, Sociology of Knowledge

The question always comes – what good is it? One is reading Foucault, trying to corner his method and understand why he’s talking about ancient Greek sex or classic French madhouses and we have to know why, to know “what now?” to know what this tells us politically. And then Foucault turns away from that answer, saying that’s not what he’s doing at all, that he’s not giving us history, where history is the complete narrative with the present at the crux between the history we can learn from and the future.

“Yet surely we can learn something from it?” he is asked.

“I think there is no exemplary value in a period which is not our period,” he says.

We read Foucault, exploring the relationships of power, for example and what we want is a way out, something to oppose, something to escape, and something to work for.
Reading, say, George Orwell on power and totalitarianism – in his dystopian novels like 1984 or Animal Farm or in essays like The Politics of the English Language – we’re left with an aversion. The reader’s question of “what now” is answered, at every angle, with “oppose totalitarianism,” “escape totalitarianism,” and “work for truth in discourse.”

Reading Foucault on power we are given the past, permanently centered in the cycle of the present, denied a project for the future. Foucault doesn’t give the answer, doesn’t give the project for changing the future. He keeps telling stories but they have cycles instead of endings. Foucault avoids a politics and avoids eschatology. We want a political party, or at least a theory of action, but all we get is an invitation to a discourse.

“I have never tried,” Foucault writes, “to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted. I question it about the positions it takes and the reasons it gives for this; I don’t ask it to determine the theory of what I do. I am neither an adversary nor a partisan of Marxism; I question it about what it has to say about experiences that ask questions of it.”

Foucault isn’t working within a politics or towards a politics. Where and when he allows politics into the conversation it’s actually in a conversation and not as the end, not as the finalized theory in practice.

It’s easy, here, to out of hand reject Foucault as useless, to declare his work unfit since he can’t give us a vision to action, since he can’t give us a plan of movement. It’s easy to see Foucault as lacking a thesis 11 and to reject him since to accept him renders us unable to act or move. We bring questions of evil totalitarian governments or of rapists and Foucault’s just considering, and he’s not even distinguishing between Nazis and Democrats, between rape and marriage, so we move on to someone we can do something with, someone with a “practical” way of talking.

To frame this problem in a general way, how does one act without a meta-narrative? Yet this is too general, too Pomo 101 to seize the guts of our problem. Narrowing, how does one act without an overarching justification of an outlined history we learn from and a focused future we can work towards? How do we act when we only have the present?

Let us take a strange left turn here, into Christian eschatology. The vast bulk of eschatology is divided between talk of apocalypse and talk of utopia; the theme moving people to action is one of these two eschatological stories. The premillennial story is the story of a fast-approaching apocalypse – the coming apocalypse is the thing against which a premillennial moves, concerning which a premillennial justifies action and outlines why, where, and how he should act. It’s a story of avoidance and escape, a story of evil triumphing against all but the remnant. The postmillennial story is a story of successively remaking the world, working to utopia – the hope that stirs the postmillennial to action, that outlines the progress and the final triumph and dominion of right, that, again, outlines why, where, and how he should act. It’s a story of progress and success, a story of evil succumbing to right. The two stories see each other as polar, as opposites in direction and distinct in their call to action, divided in the way they see the world and they way they act towards and what they act for.

But to see these two eschatologies as two poles, as radically different in the way they each approach the world, is to overlook they way in which they’re identical. Apocalyptic and utopia visions aren’t polar; they mirror each other. The two systems operate in the same manner: establishing a history, foreseeing a future, instructing one to act now in such a way as to move from that history and to that future. Their themes vary, but their stories are the same.

With a strange third possibility, we have amillenialism with talk of cycles and an always-present eschatology. This a-eschatology eschews the overarching histories and the teleologies of eschatology and talks of apocalypse and utopia on in intensely localized and present-ed ways. Amillenialism gives us a history, but that history shows us the present, not the future. Amillennial is has a history that’s a history of another mold, a history that is only present, a history that is only about now. From the premillennial or postmillennial standpoint, it gives us a history that is worthless, never telling us where to go, never telling us how to escape or to conquer. Amillennial history shows us our world without allowing us to remake it and without allowing us to escape it. There is no rapture. There is no dominion. There is only now, only the cycle that is happening in the present.

Amillenialism is an eschatology of the present, in the present. With amillenialism we are perpetually present-ed, recentered on today. We don’t characterize the world around apocalypses or utopias but around the present. This is action but of an entirely different sort, action that is centered on now and on today, action that is localized.

Let us take another unexpected turn, and consider pop music. Pop music “draws no conclusions. It makes no comments. It proposes no solutions. It admits to neither past nor future, not even its own. This living in and for the present is what separates pop culture from traditional culture.” Other music thinks of itself as “doing something,” perhaps something socially oriented as Folk or musically like Jazz or culturally like Classic. Pop has no such prohibitions, and is nothing beyond a consideration of itself and its time. Where other music is conscience of its history and its future, pop is now.

Which isn’t to say it had no dealings with history, but rather to say that history as conceived by pop looks nothing like history as it is otherwise known to music. Early British pop looked towards history, but not as an overarching story to explain the present and advise us for the future, not as something definitive, but as something to be mined in interesting ways. Looking at the early pop tendencies towards taking history as fashion, George Melly in his book Revolt Into Style says pop is “treating history as a vast boutique,” where one shops for styles and where one picks up interesting tidbits. It’s easy to look at this as without serious merit, to dismiss it as rebellion without regards to anything, kids playing, but pop music alone in music is present-ing the listener. “What pop has so far achieved is the means of looking about us without deliberately locking up our cultural responses,” says Melly.

What pop achieved was a view of history that wasn’t progressive, a story of shaping and developing for the better future, or conservative, a story of golden pasts to be preferred and preserved. This is a view of history from now. This is a view where the present isn’t the preparation for something else or a losing of something else. The question, from serious music, is how pop can be music with only a view to the present, how it can be music if it doesn’t go somewhere. Pop may or may not stop from actually producing music to answer the charge of the serious, but if it did the answer is sure to run along the lines of “Music is my savior/and I was named by Rock and Roll,” or “Fuck art, let’s dance,” or “Never trust a revolutionary who can’t dance.” The pop world will shrug, “What do you mean this isn’t music?” and, “This isn’t important? Well, it’s important enough for us.” The need to answer such charges is, in fact, almost absent.

Going back to Foucault, let us reconsider the charges, knowing they are also leveled and answered by in eschatology by amillennialism and in music by pop. The brunt of the charge is that Foucault can’t answer the question “What now?” that he can’t outline or justify action since he refuses to take the present out of the center. Foucault, along with amillenialism and pop music, is charged with not saying anything important, with leaving us guilty of inaction, without any real answers.

What now? they ask. Now now, we say. For there is no escape, there is no conquering. Let us consider the problem of power in ancient Greece, but let us consider it for now. Let us consider the idea of prisons as it develops in history, but let us consider it for the present. Let us localize and present. We must move past the polemics and engage in discourse. We can lessen and restrict these dangers, but we cannot overcome them and we must not dismiss them.

Foucault isn’t working on a theory, but a conversation. He’s not planning a political movement but a discourse, a discourse that takes us through the past and meanders only to return us, re-set us, in the present. We want to deal with today, with the local, the present, the now. It’s a game of questions and a project of consideration. “Questions and answers depend on a game,” he writes, “a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.”

We have here a politics that is post-politics. Not a polemics, which is parasitic, but a discussion, not a meta-story but a present-ing. Foucault’s call to action isn’t a call to solve or end danger, but to mitigate it. What we have here isn’t, as charged, an inability to act, but the restriction of action to now, a move to act without visions of grandeur.

To consider an actual political movement that is post-political, let us look to New Urbanism. New Urbanism, the sibling of agrarianism, is remarkable as a political movement for a few reasons: 1) New Urbanism isn’t utopian. It doesn’t promise a golden future rid of human problems. 2) New Urbanism is local, focused on the street we live on and considering specifics about street design, or zoning laws. 3) New Urbanism doesn’t define itself by its enemies. There is no frightening story about the boogiemen, but talk about how we live and how it could be better. This is a post-political movement, a style of movement Foucault could work with – an always-present-ing consideration of the way we live. Here we recognize and face the dangers of urban living without a call for its wholesale destruction but considerations for mitigating, tweaking, the life to limit danger.

What now? Now now.