Marx, Foucault, and the Secularization of Western Culture

Abstract

Although Marx’s critique of capitalism, especially his theory of fetishism, requires experiential knowledge (my term for “spirituality”), his framework does not leave any conceptual room for such knowledge. The idea that spirituality is (perhaps the better) part of religion is a deeply held assumption of secular Western thought. Only in Michel Foucault’s late lectures do we find a Western thinker realizing that what opposed spirituality, and subsequently suppressed it, is not science but religion. This essay reconstructs Foucault’s reasons for making that startling claim and then explores how Marx’s early insight into the secularization of European culture can be deepened with the help of Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the disappearance of spiritual knowledge in the West. Equipped with a framework to understand the secularization of Western culture in a radically different way, the essay then tackles the question of reformulating Marx’s theory of reification with the resources provided by experiential knowledge (spirituality).

Key Words:

• Experiential Knowledge
• Michel Foucault
• Karl Marx
• Secularization
• Spirituality

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Anjan Chakrabarti, A. P. Ashwin Kumar, and Serap Kayatekin for their responsive criticism and for pressing me to clarify my arguments. If obscurity still remains, it is entirely due to my obduracy.

Notes

1 I put it this way rather than saying “European culture” for a reason that will become clear later on.

2 Foucault (2005, 179) is emphatic about this point:

While having trouble with the word and putting it in inverted commas, I think we can say that from the Hellenistic and Roman period we see a real development of the “culture” of the self. I don’t want to use the word culture in a sense that is too loose and I will say that we can speak of culture on a number of conditions. First, when there is a set of values with a minimum degree of coordination, subordination, and hierarchy. We can speak of culture when a second condition is satisfied, which is that these values are given both as universal but also as only accessible to a few. A third condition for being able to speak of culture is that a number of precise and regular forms of conduct are necessary for individuals to be able to reach these values. Even more than this, effort and sacrifice is required. In short, to have access to these values you must be able to devote your whole life to them. Finally, the fourth condition for being able to talk about culture is that access to these values is conditional upon more or less regular techniques and procedures that have been developed, validated, transmitted, and taught, and that are also associated with a whole set of notions, concepts, and theories etcetera: with a field of knowledge (savoir).

What we see in this work is how the “culture of the self” enables the sociality of the period, which in turn sustains the care of the self or helps experiential knowledge to flourish. My own formulation of the relationship between culture and sociality owes much to an exchange with Balagangadhara (1994) on a series of insightful notes he produced to clarify his proposal to look at culture as a configuration of learning.

3 Greek ethics worries about whether it is appropriate to do certain things: for example, when to assert self-mastery, when to give in to the erotic approaches of young boys, or to take an example from the domain of dietetics, whether eating certain things is conducive to one's well-being. Such worries are termed “problematization” by Foucault. This contrasts with what Christian morality does to actions: it begins to norm them—that is, make them “wrong.” The early Christians begin to classify a whole range of activities as morally wrong (Foucault 1985).

The most difficult problem here is the relationship between truth and norm. Can that be investigated philosophically? It is clear that part of the reason for Foucault's rejection of philosophy in favor of genealogy has to be that the philosophical route to that question will lead back to theology. Instead, he thought he could show how the ethical reflections of Greek and Roman schools and their exploration of the condition of spirituality as access to truth had nothing in common with the universally binding property of Christian morality (or its secularized versions) or with the Christian concept of Truth. Whereas the secularized version of Christian morality is relatively easy to track (think of Nietzsche's work), the secularized version of truth has posed a far more difficult challenge. Although Foucault did not always formulate his earlier inquiry as tracking secularization, this tracking was evident, for example, when he discussed vertical or in-depth Christianization (as distinct from its horizontal spread through proselytization) or when discussing the welfare state as a pastoral form of power; however, once he began his inquiry that produced the volumes on the history of sexuality, it was clear that he was indeed explicitly investigating the relationship between truth and norm as that which structures the secularization process.

4 If the direction I am suggesting is persuasive as well as illuminating, we will have a coherent alternative to the current ways of thinking about the secular, secularization, and secularism (which have found expression in a spate of recent books and anthologies discussed with great fanfare on the website of the American Social Science Research Council).

5 This may seem enigmatic but only if we fail to see that “class” itself is a product of normativization. Although sexuality is the fully worked-out example of a normativized entity in Foucault's mature work (Dhareshwar 2014), he had opened up other inquiries that we can retrospectively see as attempts to demonstrate how “race,” “nation,” and “class” too emerge as products of normativization (Foucault 2003). The implication is clear: “class” is a theoretical term that cannot be used in social-scientific explanation everywhere in the world.

6 Foucault does not always distinguish governmentalization as a mechanism from government as a domain. It is quite clearly the former that is of crucial importance for understanding secularization. Perhaps the only place where Foucault does explicitly use the term secularization to designate the phenomenon of governmentalization is in his lecture “What is Critique” (Foucault 2007, 44).

7 In Capital, the analogy is turned into a relationship of “fitting”: “For a society of producers, whose general social relations of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e., in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion” (Marx 1976, 172).

8 This is what is taking place in non-European and nonreligious contexts, such as in India. Concealed just beneath the superficial problem of terminology lies the biggest problem, which has gone unnamed. While taking the tolerant policy of “let's ignore what people mean by religion so long as we know what they are referring to,” we pass over the problem of saying what exactly happens in this move. We repeat the way secular-religious culture (the state) treats spiritual traditions by misconstruing them as religions, thereby initiating at least one major way of liquidating them.