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Foucault, Michel
The modernist social structure was aggressively questioned in the 20th century, first by the Frankfurt School and later by post-structuralism, and collapsed under both external and internal pressure. A philosophical renaissance was begun by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Manuel De Landa, Thomas Metzinger and Karen Barad with The Death of Man as a starting point – which can be compared with how 18th century philosophers launched the project The Death of God – and with this development a fundamental shift from the anthropocentric to the universocentric world view was initiated, which is being realised by the post-structuralists’ heirs in the 3rd millennium, with empirical support from experimental metaphysics.
Since it is Kant’s philosophical contributions that pave the way for the death of humanism and the individual, it is scarcely wrong to regard Kant as the last humanist. When Hegel and Nietzsche arrived on the scene in the 19th century, the anti-humanist revolution was already in full swing. With Nietzsche and his concept of The Death of God – which Michel Foucault half a century later finally accomplishes by also proclaiming The Death of Man – nothing whatsoever remains any longer of the humanist paradigm. Hegel’s religiosity is found in Atheos while we place Nietzsche’s spirituality with Entheos in the syntheological pyramid.
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
The shift from the human to the universal centre is the necessary and correct manoeuvre. In the oscillation between Pantheos and Entheos, Barad finds the new divinity that replaces the human being that had been declared dead by her predecessor Foucault, namely the universal subject as a kind of Bohrian supraphenomenon. It is important to point out that the purpose of Barad’s anti-anthropocentrism is not to eliminate the human being from all equations. Instead, it is concerned with giving the human being as agent her onto-epistemologically correct place in the greater phenomena that existence is comprised of, and this occurs only when the Universe is held up as primary and the human subject is reduced to something secondary. The Universe is not some transcendental category in Man’s orientation through existence, which Kant imagines in his autistic phenomenology. The Universe is instead real and expresses itself in and through the many billions of human subjects that it produces among other things, rather than the other way around. The Universe lives, thinks, speaks, creates, feels pleasure and multiplies through us. Nor is this all: through us the Universe dies and leaves room for constantly new phenomena. All this taken together is supreme motivation for naming Barad’s book Meeting The Universe Halfway a syntheist manifesto.
Baradian phenomenology is based on a constantly ongoing intra-activity within phenomena rather than an inter-activity between various distinct subjects and objects. Every individual phenomenon is both a fundamental building block in existence and concurrently intra-acting, filled with internal activity in all directions. Barad wants to kill off Kantian representationalism and its fixation with the patriarchal reflection. Representationalism is an obvious by-product of Cartesianism. Representations have constantly been prioritised at the expense of what they are presupposed to represent. By instead building first from Foucault’s and later also Latour’s and Butler’s post-structuralist ideas of performativism, we open the way for a philosophy that shifts its focus to direct engagement in material reality. All phenomena are constantly affected by the performativity of their environment. Large quantitative differences in performativity create phenomena with radically different properties.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
We seek the answers to these questions for example in the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s pragmatist ethics: If the transparentisation begins from the top down – that is, if it is the rulers who have all of their secrets exposed first – it can be implemented painlessly throughout the entire power structure from the top and all the way down. On the other hand, if the transparentisation begins from the bottom up, the consequence will no doubt be a capitalist police state, and thereby – apart from all the other misery that such a development would entail – the ecological apocalypse would soon be unavoidable. It is the citizens who must first know everything about the activities of the nation state and the major corporations rather than the statist-corporatist establishment being allowed to bug and register the citizens’ opinions and preferences.
There is seldom or never any social change without articulation. Under capitalism, the new literate nation state replaces the old illiterate Church as the common arena, and the statist articulation says that society is a body. But the body metaphor – which statism obviously borrows from the ecclesiastical articulation that says that the congregation is a body – must be exposed. For society as a body never generates any narrative for increased cohesiveness, as Michel Foucault points out, but instead functions as a latent threat to the deviant person in the nation state. It is perfectly possible to be an individual, but it is only acceptable to be exactly the individual who maximises her own frustration, alienation and consumption, and who pays for all this by maximising her production for the capitalist power structure, moreover in the shadow of the prevailing phantasmic behavioural imperative: Whatever you do, blend in!
Relativist metaphysics attacks the classical idea of truth. There is nothing strange about that. Throughout history we see time after time how yesterday’s established truth is phased out to be replaced by a new and soon equally established, alternative truth. The intensity in this process increases when the new elite takes over a society in conjunction with a paradigm shift and prioritises completely different ideals from those of the displaced elite. Relativist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michael Foucault confront these historical shifts with a pragmatist attitude to truth production: truths are produced first and foremost by the prevailing power structure for the purpose of confirming and consolidating the power of the powerful. Nor is there anything strange in that; the opposite would be extremely remarkable. A truth can only become and remain a truth as long as it stays within the sociocultural paradigm that is embraced by society, which means that various and conflicting truths are pitted against each other during every transitional phase. The truths are therefore always relative. They should and must be able to endure constant criticism. When they no longer hold their own against this criticism in the light of new information, they must be phased out and replaced.
Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.
A necessary component in hypercapitalism – and its infiltration and colonisation of the human, existential experience – is the hypersexualisation of the social arena. Capitalism must commodify even the most sensitive and most intimate of human experiences in order to consummate itself. And capitalism cannot get there without first being liberated from both responsibility and shame concerning its own ruthless exploitation. This freedom from responsibility occurs through the creation of the sexualist ideology, not to be confused with sexual liberation, which in its capacity as a cultural predecessor to informationalism’s relationalist view of humanity strives in the exact opposite direction. The problem is in fact that hypersexualisation requires a fundamental and deep-seated self-hatred, an all-encompassing conviction of inadequacy of the self, what Foucault calls “the internalised police”, a kind of turbo-driven superego that arises as a necessary by-product to hyper-Cartesian self-centredness.
philosophy.html">Process philosophy is fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive. Nietzsche builds a genealogy, Foucault compiles an archaeology, Derrida calls his method deconstruction, we ourselves describe our own work in previous volumes as a meteorology since we – as do the weather forecasters – study the future as a gigantic information complex that is difficult to grasp as a whole. The background to philosophy.html">process philosophy’s descriptive methods is that Nietzsche sees through his predecessor Kant when he traces an even deeper will to fabricate behind the latter’s stated will to truth. Nietzsche does not see any other possibility at all for the writing of history than fabrication, even among philosophers. The difference thus does not lie in a will to fabricate pitted against a will to truth, but rather in the varying level of quality of different attempts at fabrication. All truths are a kind of myth, but all myths are not equally functional in the recurring confrontation with existence around us. Some myths are truer than others, which can and must be tested in the interaction with the surrounding world.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58