Normative Embodiment. The Role of the Body in Foucault's Genealogy. A Phenomenological Re-Reading

ABSTRACT

In Foucault's later works, experience and embodiment become important for explaining the normative constitution of the subject: for norms to be effective, discourses are insufficient – they must be experienced and embodied. Practices of “discipline” inscribe power constellations and discourses into subjective experience and bodies. In his lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, he turns this “violent” form of normative embodiment into an ethical perspective by referring to the Stoic tradition. Even though Foucault never developed a notion of experience and embodiment himself, his ideas can be re-read and complemented from a phenomenological perspective.

The article tries to investigate the role of bodily experience and practice in Foucault's Genealogy and to bring it into dialogue with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of the lived body. It will attempt to show that concepts like sedimentation and habituality can help to explain how cultural norms not only influence the way we think about, but also how we perceive and are affected by the world. This operation of norms happens already at the lowest stages of experience, where embodied experience leaves its traces, in sedimentation and habitualization. These passive layers of experience are permeable to historical discourses, so that norms are literally inscribed in the body. These are the foundations for what I seek to define as normative embodiment.

Notes

1. See the interview with Foucault in: Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 231–32; see also Foucault's essay “What is Enlightenment” (Rabinow, The Foucault Reader). Here Foucault emphasizes that every time and society has its specific problems and dangers, caused by local relations and fixations of power. Therefore, it makes no sense to search for an alternative or ideal state or time beyond “power”. Instead, what Foucault aims to do is a genealogy of those specific and local problems. In this sense, modern times are characterized by a tendency towards normalization: that means there is a certain intertwinement of power and knowledge (or the sciences) that sets the norms for normality and forces us to constantly identify ourselves with these norms or be classified according to them. In this sense, normalization expresses itself as a sort of standardization. That there is no state beyond those relations of power, according to Foucault, does not mean that “everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous”. This must lead (at least in Foucault's vision of “enlightenment” or the ideal philosopher) to a “hyper- and pessimistic activism”, whose aim it is to uncover the dangers and problems of the times we live in.

2. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 97–99, 527–29; from now on referred to as PP in the text, followed by page reference.

3. This can be seen in analogy to the development of Foucault's concept of “power”, which is not merely repressive but also productive. Norms in that sense not only have an excluding function (excluding certain “subjects” from the existing discourses) but also an enabling function, in that they create discourses in which people can participate. This formal interpretation was first stated by Foucault in the Archeology of Knowledge and is elaborated and initially combined with genealogic elements in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, The Order of Discourse. In Discipline and Punishment, power is productive in the sense that it produces a useful and efficient body, the body of a soldier, a patient, or a pupil. However, here this productiveness is clearly interpreted as negative by Foucault, namely as a more sophisticated notion of repression. In the History of Sexuality, power is productive in a more “positive” sense in that it has to bring about a true sex, which is constituted in techniques of “confession”. Here, power is not dangerous because it represses discourses on sexuality. Quite to the contrary, it is dangerous because it actually produces discourses and sexual selves. We are constantly forced to talk about our desires, confess our sins and identify our true (sexual) selves.

4. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136; from now on referred to as DP in the text, followed by page reference.

5. “These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called ‘disciplines’” (DP, 137).

6. Foucault refers here to the educational literature of Ferdinand La Salle (DP, 147).

7. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 91.

8. Visker, Michel Foucault, 122. Visker argues further that, instead of casting suspicion on every order of bodily technique only because they function in a selective and exclusive way, it is better to investigate how orders relate to this process of constitution (cf. 130). This is what (genetic) phenomenology might be able to offer with its descriptions of habitualization, i.e. the habitual body.

9. At least one gets this impression when he speaks of bodies and pleasures as a “rallying point for a counterattack” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 1, 157). Foucault's usage of the body seems ambivalent or even paradoxical: as pre-discursive, natural and resistant on the one hand and as culturally constructed and subjected on the other. As Butler rightly points out, if one argues that norms are inscribed into bodies, one gets stuck with the assumption of something pre-discursive, material or natural, one has to imply that something receives inscriptions (Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscription”). Whether Foucault falls short of this critique or even holds such a social inscription model cannot be discussed here. I would argue for a more dynamic concept in the sense of a constant embodiment of norms. In this sense, a body can never be purely “natural”, but the norms it embodies and the way it embodies these norms can change, and is changing constantly. Further, social orders and relations of power too must change all the time.

10. Husserl introduces “Leib” in contrast to the merely extended and material body in his Ideas II (Husserl, Ideas II, 151–70). Maurice Merleau-Ponty further developed this concept in his Phenomenology of Perception. Here the lived body (corps propre) is no longer constituted by a transcendental ego or hierarchically dependent on the dimension of spirit. Rather, the lived body itself has the status of a subject. It expresses our practical relations towards the world and our situatedness in the very same world, which is at once natural, cultural and social.

11. PP, 527. Here again, we find the ambiguity or double-sidedness of the bodily subject, as spontaneity and habituality, freedom and determination. This situatedness has to be understood in the sense of a motivation. Freedom is then only possible by means of those motivations and not in spite of them (cf. 529).

12. Cf. Moran, “Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus”.

13. Merleau-Ponty describes the body schema as a pre-logical unit (PP, 270), which is not reducible to the physical limits of the body, but can reach beyond it and include technical extensions (176). Habits, like bodily skills, can in this respect be understood as an extension of our bodily possibilities, while perceptual habit, i.e. the way we are used to perceiving, is interpreted as a process of familiarization, as a “coming into possession of a world” (176). Husserl speaks in this respect of an individual or cultural pre-givenness, a familiar style of perception. The lifeworld is in this sense never experienced as new or neutral, but given as familiar, as something already known by former experience or intersubjective guidance (Husserl, Die Lebenswelt, 53, 55ff).

14. Fuchs, “Das Gedächtnis des Leibes”; “The Phenomenology of Body Memory”: body memory is a form of implicit memory. It can be considered as a “concrete expression of the effectiveness of retained and sedimented experience” that shapes actual experience (Summa, Spatio-Temporal Intertwining, 295).

15. “I am a psychological and historical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and even a philosopher's thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is” (PP, 529). Husserl speaks in this regard of a Ur-historicity (Husserl, Die Lebenswelt, 53).

16. Cf. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 32, 138; idem, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 207ff.

17. Husserl, Formal and transcendental Logic, 318; idem, The Crisis, 148ff.

18. Husserl, The Crisis, 51.

19. One can even argue that lower and more fundamental levels of experience, as Husserl's passive synthesis, are influenced by such discourses and/or existing social norms. The formal temporal synthesis of Retention–Impression–Protention is, as Husserl himself states, nothing without content (Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 73; Dahlstrom, “The Intentionality of Passive Experience”, 14f). In concrete perception, i.e. listening to a melody, protention thus receives a qualitative aspect. The “how” of protention will be relative to “what” we have experienced before, e.g. if we have already heard that melody. This is even more true for the passive synthesis of association. Categories of similarity and contrast guide association, and both are relative to former experience. That means we tend to associate in a “typical” way, namely in the way that is concordant with what we are used to. We expect the same things and circumstances we were repeatedly exposed to in our social and cultural environment.

20. The term “second nature” can be somewhat misleading. It would be better say that norms become a part of our bodily subjectivity, which means our perception, movement and behaviour. There is no such thing as a first or second nature. This bodily subjectivity as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes is our only “nature” and it is necessarily always already cultural.

21. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 106.

22. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1, 157.

23. With every new skill, we gain new possibilities for movement. So in a concrete sense, even in Husserl the actual body with its kinaesthetic possibilities and horizons has to be accompanied by a habitual body, concrete skills and an operative “know-how”. Merleau-Ponty too observes every motor habit leads to an “extension of our existence”, which means an extension of our concrete possibilities within a given situation. In the same sense, this is valid for our perceptions of the world or the object-related side of perception. Here, Husserl speaks of a continuous sedimentation process of sense (constitution). After we once grasped the sense of scissors as something to cut with (in a so-called primal instituting [“Ur-Stiftung”]), this sense will from now on be implicitly applied or associated automatically to every new experience of the type “scissors” (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 111). This comes close to what Merleau-Ponty terms a perceptual habit, which allows us to “come into possession of the world” already in a pre-conceptual sense and pre-predicative sense (PP, 176).

24. From now on referred to as HS in the text, followed by page reference.

25. Foucault himself would of course not formulate it that way. He emphasizes that he is not looking for an alternative because it is not possible to find “the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people” (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 231). The practices of the self and the paradigm of a care of the self were, in their historical context, only an ethical possibility for a small and preferential (male) group or milieu (HS, 31). Nonetheless, he argues that this is an example where the constitution of the self is not just a means to the end of recollecting the truth (as in the Platonic model) nor to self-exegesis and self-renunciation (the Christian model), but tends to make the self the objective to be attained (257). In the Hellenistic model, ethics were not related to social or legal institutions or pre-established and universal norms. Therefore, Foucault sees a similarity with our current situation, “since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 231). Furthermore, he states that it is an “urgent and politically indispensable task” to establish an ethics of the self because the “first and final point of resistance to political power” are to be found in the “relationship one has to oneself” (HS, 252).

26. Foucault introduces the care of the self as an Ancient theme (heautou epimelesthai or epimeleia heautou) further developed by Romans (cura sui), cf. Foucault, History of Sexuality 3, 43–63; HS, 84. The care of the self is understood as the dominant principle of a “cultivation of the self” or an “art of existence” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 2, 43).

27. While the exercises of Christian austerity serve the aim of losing oneself in order to come closer to god, the Ancient, especially the Roman, practices of self-mastery aim at establishing a relation to oneself (HS, 312).

28. F. Gros, Commentary in HS, 523.

29. Interview with Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 249.

30. Foucault, History of Sexuality 2, 99ff.; History of Sexuality 3, 51, 56ff.

31. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 99.

32. According to Foucault, Platonism plays a double role: it provides the roots of the care of the self and at the same time the foundation for the modern paradigm of rationality, which no longer asks for spiritual work or transformation of the subject (HS, 109).

33. Interview with Foucault, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 235.

34. Ibid., 230.

35. Foucault, “The Ethics of Care”, 11.

36. F. Gros, Commentary, in HS, 526.

37. Interview with Foucault, in Dreyfus, Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 236.

38. Ibid., 243.

39. Here one can critically infer that not only a solipsistic autonomy but also an openness towards the other and the alien could provide us with a more primary form of freedom in the sense of non-determination. Inspired by Levinas, B. Waldenfels develops such a responsive ethics or phenomenology of the alien, which provides us with an alternative between external determination and individual autonomy. Although Foucault emphasizes that a care of the self can only be exercised with the help of others, it is hard to imagine how a positive concept of intersubjectivity or relation to the alien can be thought within his approach (Waldenfels, Sozialität und Alterität).

40. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 99.

41. Han, Foucault's Critical Project.

42. Husserl, Ideas II, 152.

43. Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch.

44. Visker, Michel Foucault, 130.

45. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 209.

46. Failure and pain can also be expressed in the lack of identity and recognition, as social minorities or homo-, inter-, and transsexuals experience it within a normalized and/or heterosexual matrix, cf. Butler, Bodies that Matter.