NP Foucault, Dewey, Pragmatism & the "Left"

[Terrance]

The Voice of Authority: Michel Foucault's Problematization of the
Intellectual 
Charlie Bertsch 
Bad Subjects, Issue # 52 , November 2000 

I'm posting this essay because it includes most of the excerpts from a
Foucault Interview I wanted to post but could not locate on the
internet. I've also posted some excerpts from an essay on John Dewey. 
 


It is within this context that Foucault developed the idea of the
"specific intellectual." Reacting to Jean-Paul Sartre, who played the
role of leading left-wing intellectual with self-confidence, if not
self-righteousness, Foucault tried to imagine an alternative to the
"star system" exemplified by Sartre. "For a long period, the 'left'
intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speaking in
the capacity of truth and justice. He was heard, or purported to
make himself heard, as the spokesman of the universal. To be an
intellectual meant something like being the consciousness of us all."
>From Foucault's perspective, this sort of intellectual vanguardism
had been thoroughly discredited by the 1960s. "Some years have
now passed since the intellectual was called upon to play this role.
A new mode of the 'connection between theory and practice' has
been established. Intellectuals have got used to working, not in the
modality of the "universal', the 'exemplary', the
'just-and-true-for-all', but within specific sectors, at the precise
points where their own conditions of life and work situate them
(housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university,
family and sexual relations)."

Foucault takes pains to point out that the rise of specific
intellectuals need not be interpreted as a reactionary development.
"I believe intellectuals have actually been drawn closer to the
proletariat and the masses, for two reasons. First, because it has
been a question of real, material, everyday struggles, and secondly
because they have often been confronted, albeit in a different form,
by the same adversary as the proletariat, namely the multinational
corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the property
speculators etc." Precisely because intellectuals of this new kind
devote their energy to the sectors in which they have the most
expertise, rather than spending it on broad pronouncements about
politics-in-general, they are more able to bring about tangible
change. At least, this is what Foucault believes.

http://eserver.org/bs/52/bertsch.html




For Dewey,  contemplation has no special privilege; the world which is
contemplated is in fact an incomplete world, a contingent world, one
that is essentially and not just apparently unfinished, and which can be
made better or worse. For Dewey, there is no "ultimate" or "higher"
reality beyond the given of experience. Experience is the "foreground"
of nature. Things as experienced are precarious and stable, moving,
changing, open to modification. Thus, for Dewey, the choice between
contemplation and action is no longer a choice between looking at a
superior world or changing an inferior one, but a choice between looking
at an imperfect world and making it better. Since no "eternal" plan or
design or destiny guides the movement of energies, it is up to human
beings to make their own plans, to decide which way things ought to go.
Thus, just as there are no unchanging essences or absolute structures,
there are also no "ends" or purposes decided in advance of human
endeavor. Practical idealism means not only taking action to modify
actual conditions, to improve things, but also devising the very ends or
purposes or ideals that direct and guide that action. And since it has
no eternal account to draw from, it has to fashion these ends and ideals
out of the negative and positive content of lived experience. It has the
ability to go "beyond" the actual, in that it can envision the possible
(possible existence) or "idealize" actual conditions by reordering them
imaginatively, so as to anticipate a better movement of energies and a
situation improved over the present one. Ideals are "superior" to facts,
only in the sense that they anticipate the possibility of new unity and
harmony. But, because they represent possible rather than actual
existence, they are inferior to hard and fast realities actually
experienced. Contemplation of ideals means looking at objects of
imagination, not eternal truths. Practical idealism is an attempt to
combine appreciation of real facts and acts with an imaginative vision
of their possibilities; it is not meant to be a retreat from facts to
imagination. 

 John Dewey's practical idealism is characterized by a "down-to-earth"
faith in the possibilities of human experience and an unflinching
optimism about the boundless capacities of ordinary human beings. It is
a working idealism, a hard-headed and practical enthusiasm, an American
brand of matter-of-fact aspiration, such as that of Whitman or Thoreau
or Emerson, that animates Dewey's thought. It is not content to
entertain itself with dreams of castles in the air. There is work to be
done; America is not yet finished; something is "broken" and needs to be
fixed. This "fixing" requires a vision of new possibilities, better ways
for Americans to live and work together, that captivate the heart and
yet bear fruit in hard efforts and gradual transformations. In fact, the
very projection of such new ends and ideals affords some peace in the
interim, a sense of being on the right track even in the midst of
crashing failures.