Table Of ContentLECTURES BY
Howard Richards
FOLLOWED BY DIALOGUES AMONG
Evelin Lindner
Howard Richards
Catherine Odora Hoppers
Following Foucault – The Trail of the Fox
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i
THE TAPROOT SERIES
A “taproot”, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, “is a straight root, of circular
section, thick at the top, and tapering to a point, growing directly downwards from
the stem and forming the centre from which subsidiary rootlets spring.”
The metaphor is chosen to suggest a unity that draws nourishment from diversity,
a visible world supported by the power of an invisible world, a living connection
between the algebraic geometry of modernity and the non-modern rhizomes that are
the conditions of its possibilities.
Differing from previous efforts to articulate a central core for the multitudinous
discourses of the human species and its academic faculties, the Taproot Series draws
its agenda equally from epistemology and from ethics. It reconsiders metaphysics
as the matrix of both. It calls for respect for the metaphysics of the other as an
indispensable requirement for fruitful intercultural dialogue.
This book is book two of the taproot series, sponsored by the South African Research
Chair in Development Education, hosted by the University of South Africa.
CONTENTS
Explanatory Note .................................................................................................................................... v
Foreword .......................................................................................................................................... 1
Crain Soudien
Prologue: Power and knowledge in multi-paradigmatic science ........................................ 5
Magnus Haavelsrud
Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 15
Lecture One 3 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 17
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 29
Lecture Two 4 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 33
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 41
Lecture Three 6 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 45
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 51
Lecture Four 8 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 57
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 63
Lecture Five 8 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 71
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 79
Lecture Six 9 May, 2013 ................................................................................................................ 85
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 93
Lecture Seven 18 May, 2013 .............................................................................................................. 99
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 109
Lecture Eight 20 May, 2013 .............................................................................................................. 117
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 127
Lecture Nine 21 May, 2013 .............................................................................................................. 135
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 143
Lecture Ten 22 May, 2013 .............................................................................................................. 153
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 161
Lecture Eleven 23 May, 2013 ......................................................................................................... 169
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 177
Lecture Twelve 26 May, 2013 ......................................................................................................... 187
Discussion ................................................................................................................................. 195
Lecture Thirteen On Discipline and punish ............................................................................... 205
Commentary ............................................................................................................................ 217
Evelin Lindner
Lecture Fourteen Mainly on The First Volume of Foucault’s History of sexuality;
Le volonté de savoir (The will to knowledge) ............................................................. 219
Commentary ............................................................................................................................ 235
Evelin Lindner
Lecture Fifteen Evaluating the power perspective .............................................................. 235
Epilogue As the Objects begin to have Voice .......................................................... 251
Catherine Odora Hoppers
References ............................................................................................................................................257
v
EXPLANATORY NOTE
In May of 2013, I gave a series of twelve lectures titled “Against Foucault” in
Pretoria, South Africa, under the auspices of the South African Research Chair in
Development Education hosted at the University of South Africa. Catherine Hoppers
is the incumbent of the Chair. Evelin Lindner was then a visiting scholar invited by
the Chair. Subsequently, three more lectures have been added. The lectures inspired
the discussions that in turn inspire the title Following Foucault: The Trail of the Fox.
The composition of the lectures that form the core of this book was driven by a
passion to defend moral authority, especially the authority of ideals that prescribe
cooperation and sharing. Although I am not the first to read Foucault as a conservative,
albeit a very clever one, when it comes to economic issues, I believe I have provided
some details to add to the evidence for that case. The lectures were not written to be
read in Africa, but as it has turned out they were. The ensuing discussions raised, but
did not adequately consider, questions about the implications of Foucault’s oeuvre for
African thought and for indigenous knowledge systems. Hopefully, others will join
me in taking up such questions in a later companion volume. Such a sequel would
also provide an opportunity to consider numerous writings by and about Foucault
that have been (and will be) published between the time when these lectures were
composed and the time of the writing of the sequel; as well as an opportunity to pay
more attention to Foucault’s final phase (1977–1984).
Many thanks to Emily Vosloo, Wikus van Zyl, Natasha Van Niekerk, Anina Joubert,
Jaime Ribeiro, Gianna Devoto and especially many thanks to Na-iem Dollie, without
whose efforts this book would not have been possible.
Howard Richards
1
FOREWORD
Crain Soudien
In the very first lecture in the series of talks that have come to constitute this book,
Following Foucault, Howard Richards poses an important question. The point of the
question is to help those of us listening to him understand what he is seeking to do:
“If you ask me what kind of philosophy would help humanity to achieve the ‘non-
authoritarian authority’ that would give our species the cohesion we need to solve
our main problems, my first answer would be that it should not be a divisive one.”
The point is critical. It provides Following Foucault with its ethical raison d’etre. It is
to this that I seek to talk in this brief foreword.
This book is about many things. It is, of course, a dialogue between three key global
social scientists about French philosopher Michel Foucault and his significance for
understanding the constituted nature of dominant thinking in the world, particularly,
the dominance of modern European thought. But it is also, at another level, very
related to the idea of “second-level indigenisation” raised by Catherine Odora
Hoppers. Hoppers, in talking about “second-level indigenisation”, means having
the voiceless and excluded, those who are bearers of suppressed and marginalised
knowledges, not only being present in the world of meaning-making, but actively
participating in defining the rules governing meaning-making. In terms of the first
of these two points, the book demonstrates Richards’s remarkable insight into the
mind of Foucault. His exposition is, on its own terms, a tour de force. He provides all
of us with a lesson in deep reading. In it he shows us how Foucault actually shifts
position around the question of power, from a totalizing view in his earlier texts to a
completely dispersed view later. His closeness of reading is exemplary.
But there is much more to the text. In listening to Richards, I was struck (and
this is the more significant second feature about this text) by the urgency in his
attempt to make it clear to us all what a philosophical project might consist of that
is not “divisive”, as he says. It is this to which I now turn. Before I do that, a single
observation which bears, I hope, on the discussion below about Richards’s geist in
approaching this task of Following Foucault is necessary. In delivering these lectures,
Richards is almost without conceit. His purpose, exemplarily, is to shed light. Only
that. And so he does in these lectures what he has to do: to show in response to
Hoppers’ engagement with Foucault, and to us all, what he himself is seeing in the
Foucault oeuvre. That he does so, without pretence and artifice, and, most notably,
in the context of talking about subjugated knowledges, without any patronising
concessions to ideas of inclusion, is remarkable in its own terms. The way in which
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox
2
he listens and responds to Catherine Odora Hoppers and to Evelin Lindner is in itself
an important lesson for all of us, because at no point does he either patronise or take
them for granted. His approach is to approach the major point Hoppers seeks to
make with and about Foucault, namely that he has helped her come to understand
the constitutive nature of dominant knowledge – and thus her question to Richards
very early on in the text, “then why are you speaking ‘Against Foucault’ instead of
‘For Foucault’” – entirely on its merits. The purpose of his engagement with Foucault
is to bring to the surface more clearly what he is actually meaning.
A divisive philosophy. What does Richards mean? What does he mean particularly
in relation to Hoppers and Lindner’s probing interpolations that follow each of his
lectures? He is primarily driven to make clear how the powerful idea of power used in
Foucault’s writing ultimately comes down to something that is exercised rather than
possessed. He says that Foucault spoke of power not as the privilege of a dominant
class, but rather as the effect of a set of strategic positions: “He will continue to speak
of power as exercised … Without specifying any person, any institution, any social
class, or any group that is doing the exercising. The ‘intrinsic mechanisms of power’
exercise themselves” (Richards, Lecture Fourteen). He continues to quote Foucault
who says that power is “the multiplicity of relations of force (rapports de force)
that are immanent to the domain where they exercise themselves or are exercised
(s’exercent) and which are constitutive of their organization; the game (jeu) that by
way of struggles and confrontations incessantly transforms them, reinforces them,
reverses them … Is the institutional crystallization which takes form as the state
apparatus, as the formulation of the law, as social hegemonies.” These, says Richards,
provide us with the illusion that we are free. Invoking a juridical-discursive view that
Foucault appeared to be ambivalent about, says Richards, which views power at once
as law and repression, in which we imagine ourselves to be autonomous bearers of
power before the law represses us, or more benignly plays the function of placing
limits on our freedom, leads us to legitimize the law. It is here that Richards makes his
own move. That move is to try to explain rule and law in another way.
He takes the core Foucauldian unit of analysis – the “complex strategic situation”
– and proceeds to work with it differently. “We should be entitled”, he says, “to
assert the existence of facts that are more distorted than depicted when we essay
to look at them through the lenses of Foucault’s power perspective. As pragmatists
and herd-moralists (‘pragmatists’ because we want solutions that work, ‘herd-
moralists’ because we mean here by ‘work’, ‘work for the good of all’) we are entitled
to say, further, that we prefer to choose to do more rule-talk and less power-talk
because we find that understanding human institutions in terms of the norms
that constitute them helps us to solve the principal problems that humanity faces”
(Richards, Lecture Fifteen). As opposed to Foucault’s essentialisation of a conception
Foreword 3
of power as animating the world of the everyday, Richards offers the idea of culture
and co-operation.
It is not my purpose in this Foreword to do a comparison of the value of the two
positions put forward here. It is sufficient to say that Richards comes to his position
through a careful appraisal of Foucault’s thinking. In doing so he is mindful of and
acknowledges the importance of many of the crucial contributions Foucault makes.
But he is deeply critical of the Foucault who talks of power as a technique, a technique
which emanates from a multiplicity of forces that are imminent to the domain where
they find themselves. He shows how, in this, Foucault affirms his debt to Nietzsche
and in particular Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power. But, asks Richards in
bringing his lectures to a close, is this the only way in which one can speak of
power? What about, inter alia, the Derridean way, which holds Aristotle’s alternative
idea of power, of power as friendship, alive? It is here that the point about divisive
philosophies is brought to a fine point. Should, asks Richards, “we follow Foucault”?
The question is pivotal for the great project defined by Hoppers, the project about
the inclusion of subjugated knowledges. What Richards does, and it is seen best
in his closing fifteenth lecture, is show how the “facts” Foucault uses to justify his
approach to power – which amount to the idea about relational forces, war in the
main, constituting human beings’ evolutionary survival strategy – can easily be
discounted. Co-operation and culture count in the empirical archive from which
Foucault mines, Richards argues, for a deeper historical genealogy of law and its real
obeisance to the laws of capital. The regularity and the logic of this form of power
are dismissed by Foucault. Richards says:
I have a larger pragmatic objection to Foucault. I recommend choosing to
talk as if inclusive human relations were possible as a step in the direction
of bringing more of them into existence. I find that the word ‘power’ as
Foucault employs the term functions more to discourage than to encourage
a dynamic of inclusion. In some respects, to be sure the opposite is the case,
and insofar as the opposite is the case, I want to encourage Foucault and his
followers. Foucault encourages in some respects the social inclusion of the
mentally ill, of prisoners, and others frequently discriminated against. But
if the sorts of views of the dynamics of capitalism that I am sympathizing
with are ‘telling it like it is’, then even the prisoners and patients whose
causes Foucault frequently espouses are prejudiced in the end because his
conceptual apparatus overlooks a dynamic of exclusion that separates the
haves and the have-nots. (Richards, Lecture Fifteen)
It is here that Richards makes clear that he is for a different philosophical project.
Some of us, he says, want to encourage a spirit of caring, “a characteristically
feminine spirit that complements formal changes in rules. It puts into practice the
sorts of mutual obligations to meet each other’s needs, the sorts of reciprocity and
