Foucault on intellectuals

In ‘Truth and power’ (1980), Michel Foucault elaborates on different kinds of intellectuals – the ‘universal’ and ‘specific’ intellectual, respectively – in the context of the question regarding the political status of science and its potential ideological functions, especially within universities. The issues raised by this are summed up by Foucault in ‘two words: power and knowledge’. The ‘political significance’ of science has to be seen against the backdrop of what he says about propositions (scientific or otherwise) being ‘governed’ by a ‘discursive régime’ – broadly speaking, the implicit rules according to which certain utterances may be accepted as being legitimate and meaningful. For example, within patriarchal discourse certain utterances, such as those predicated on the autonomy of women, do not make any sense.

It is essential that Foucault’s understanding of ‘discourse’ be grasped, otherwise his distinction between the ‘universal intellectual’ and the ‘specific intellectual’ cannot be understood, in so far as each is situated within a different ‘régime of discourse’. Moreover, he believes that the ‘régime’ relevant to the universal intellectual has made way for a different discursive ‘régime’, within the ambit of which such intellectuals no longer have a place.

So what is discourse, for Foucault? The simplest way to explain it is to say that it is language, in so far as power and knowledge invariably converge wherever meaning is generated by linguistic utterances. In other words, language is not anything innocent or innocuous for Foucault; on the contrary, in contrast to other thinkers who situate humans as ‘speaking beings’ within the model of language, Foucault claims that it is the model of ‘battle’ or ‘war’ that casts more light on the actions of humans:

‘Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no ‘meaning’, though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible to analysis down to the smallest detail – but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts. ‘Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and ‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.’

Small wonder that Foucault has inverted Clausewitz’s famous formula concerning the relation between politics and war to read: ‘Politics is the continuation of war by other means’! (And think of the implications of this for recent political events in South Africa!) It is clear from the above citation that he does not separate meaning and power-struggles, however – as I said above, ‘discourse’ is, for him, the place where meaning and power come together. A ‘discursive régime’, then, refers to the implicit rules which govern a specific discourse – as soon as someone no longer uses language according to these rules (for example patriarchal, or perhaps management discourse), she or he has to be understood in a different discursive register. When I say ‘humankind originated 150 000 years ago’, instead of ‘mankind originated’… etc., I signal that I have opted out of the exclusivist function (regarding feminine interests) of patriarchal discourse, in favour of a more encompassing function that includes women as well. When a manager addresses workers as ‘fellow employees’, instead of as ‘staff’, or ‘labour’, it signals a conciliatory discursive position that deviates from the standard hierarchical discourse used by representatives of management (as if they are not also ‘employees’ of a company or institution!)

Hence, the two types of intellectual that he distinguishes correspond to different ways of using language in the promotion of specific interests (that is, specific power). The ‘universal intellectual’, in the guise of the individual ‘writer’, corresponds at the collective level, according to Foucault, to the Marxist figure of the proletariat, or worker-class, as the collective historical subject or ‘bearer of the universal’ – the people who shape the course of history. In other words, it is (was, really) through the moral, political and theoretical choices made by the writer in his or her writing, that the proletariat as inchoate, immediate embodiment of the universal (the dialectical telos or goal), is (or was) individualised and made conscious. The ‘universal intellectual’ (Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Franz Fanon and Edward Said, among others) was therefore in principle the spokesperson for the whole of humanity, whose interests were universally represented by such writers.

Foucault believes that this can no longer be believed to be the case. Instead, the ‘specific intellectual’ may be regarded as having taken the place of the ‘writer’ (its ‘universal’ counterpart). The ‘universal intellectual’ was appropriate to a certain historical situation, where a specific, broad distinction between different classes of people existed. This was inseparable from the kind of scientific, technological and cultural principles and practices which comprised a distinctive system of mutually cohering and corroborating concepts and propositions. But this historical context, within which the universal intellectual functioned, no longer exists, according to Foucault, with the consequence that today, we witness the functioning of ‘specific intellectuals’ who can no longer claim to be writing, speaking or acting on behalf of all humans, but at best to be the spokesperson for specific, clearly demarcated domains of social activity.

He gives one an important insight into this where he says that one should not think of the ‘political problems of intellectuals’ in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’. This is linked with his conception of ‘specific’ intellectuals as working within circumscribed domains – such as social or political theory, computer science, immunology, pharmacology, psychoanalytic theory, zoology or political geography, and even nuclear physics – where ‘truth’ has a clearly specifiable meaning. ‘Truth’ means something very different in physics as opposed to political theory, for instance, and therefore each discipline requires different procedures for verification, or what Popper called ‘falsification’ (‘testability’).

However, in the elaboration of truth within the confines of each domain, or even interdisciplinarily, the political effects of this specific truth may surpass the domain of its own provenance and make themselves felt at a level of general significance. Imagine a pharmacologist and a political geographer collaborating on a study concerning ways of combating the spread of HIV/Aids in densely populated areas, for example. Foucault’s own work (which is simultaneously philosophical, historical, theoretical, discursive and political), exemplifies the way in which the work of a specific intellectual may have an impact on a wide intellectual, scientific, social and political terrain. One way in which this becomes apparent is in the many interviews that were conducted with Foucault during his lifetime – where the interviewers’ questions elicit responses from Foucault that cover precisely such a variegated terrain. Another is via the biographies written on him.
His own reference to the role that the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer played in the development of the first nuclear bomb may also serve as a telling example of what it means to be a ‘specific intellectual’. It is not difficult to understand why this should be the case. Oppenheimer’s specialized, specific research, with its decisive role in the construction of the atom bomb gave it immediate, concrete military and political significance. Standing as it did at the juncture that separated the Second World War and the Cold War, the development of the nuclear bomb is a paradigmatic instance of Foucault’s claim, that politics (here, the Cold War), is war by other means.

One need not, of course, look at such obvious instances of research on the part of certain specific intellectuals, located in fields of conspicuous military importance, to understand what is at stake in the role of such intellectuals as characterized by Foucault, however. In South Africa, no less than in other countries, it frequently happens that the ‘truth’ of a specific intellectual’s work within his or her domain surpasses its disciplinary confines and asserts its wider political significance. When, near a coastal city in South Africa, zoologists are commissioned, for instance, to investigate the impact of the construction of a deep water harbour on the marine ecology in its immediate vicinity, and they report on the probable negative, if not devastating consequences of the shipping routes into and out of the harbour, on the daily migratory trajectories of foraging seals and penguins whose habitat happens to be near the proposed harbour on several islands, such a zoological report instantiates ‘specific intellectuals’ work with far-reaching cratological (power-related) or social-political significance of an ecological nature.

How does one know that this is the case? By the rejection, on the part of a development company, of these findings in the report, evinced by the fact that they simply ignored it. The need for such a harbour is justified by interest groups in ostensibly unassailable, discursively self-evident economic terms (framed to display the supposed benefit of the development to the region as far as employment opportunities for workers are concerned, but in fact far more beneficial to investors and shareholders in the companies concerned), while the ecological argument or discourse against it seems far from self-evident. And yet, given the increasingly apparent, complex interconnectedness of ecosystems on planet earth, the long-term folly of willfully inflicting damage on any of them – in the process injuring the entire, planetary ecosystem – may be seen as gaining social, economic and political significance proportional to the degree that the general awareness of the eco-political relevance of limited resources is becoming increasingly evident.

This illustration of the purchase that specific intellectuals’ discipline has on what one may call ‘universal’ political (that is, power) relations, also explains what Foucault means when he says that such intellectuals have moved closer to the proletariat and the ‘masses’, even if the specific, ‘non-universal’ problems they grapple with are often far removed from those of the masses. He gives two reasons for this: that the struggles in which specific intellectuals are engaged, are of a ‘real, material, everyday’ nature, and that such intellectuals frequently have to confront the same adversary as the proletariat, namely ‘the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the property speculators, etc.’ Clearly, the example, above, of zoologists submitting a report which goes against the grain of the dominant discourse of ‘regional economic development’, is a case in point: their work is in the long-term interest of the working classes, even if it seems to undermine their short-term employment interests.

Foucault has therefore contributed significantly to an understanding of what it is that intellectuals of the ‘specific’ variety do in and through their intellectual work, namely something that is commensurate with the complexity of contemporary society. It remains a constant challenge to academics in universities to step outside of the ‘ivory tower’ in this manner.