Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism

01/19/2023

Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism

It was toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1784. A Berlin journal asked a few worthy thinkers the question, "What is enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant answered, after Moses Mendelssohn.

I find the question more noteworthy than the answers. Because enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, was not news, was not an invention, a revolution, or a party. It was something familiar and diffuse, something that was going on-and fading out. The Prussian newspaper was basically asking: "What is it that has happened to us? What is this event that is nothing else but what we have just said, thought, and done-nothing else but ourselves, nothing but that something which we have been and still are?"
Should this singular inquiry be placed in the history of joumalism or of philosophy? I only know that, since that time, there have not been many philosophies that don't revolve around the question: "What are we now? What is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry that identity away with it?" But I believe this question is also the basis of the journalist's occupation.--Michel Foucault (1979) "For an Ethic of Discomfort," [reviewing Jean Daniel], in Power: Essential Works of Foiucault 1954-84: Volume Three, translated by Robert Hurley, p. 443

lt is probably well known that near the end of his life, Foucault got very interested in Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault engaged with it directly and circled around it on a number of occasions. A subset of these has, in fact, been collected in a volume edited by Sylvère Lotringer (who I long thought an invention of Chris Kraus) What is Truth? It contains a version of the same book review that I quoted above, but there it is translated beautifully by Lysa Hochroth.

My interest here is not to litigate to what degree Foucault's reading or appropriation of Kant does justice to the source material, or even is worth emulating. But I digress on some of Foucault's moves.

First, Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, 'what are we now?' To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not about reporting the news anymore, but we might say that what is thought or taken to be worthy to be reported must pertain to this kind of salience. What's interesting about this claim is that it prefigures, but also reminds us of what we already know, that 'All the News That's Fit to Print' reflects the question of (our potentially fleeting) identity. The expanding lifestyle pages, perhaps, suggest that the oblique mirror that contemporary journalism provides us with to answer this question is more suggestive of our desires and fantasies than anything else.

What journalism is perhaps not, however, is the initial record for law and (historical and social) science that can enter into any truth. It's orthogonal to establishing a public record that enters as facts into, say, a deliberative practice. It is, of course, so conceived not wholly irrelevant to public deliberation because in a non-trivial sense it defines and helps constitute the unity -- the we -- that deliberates and does so in virtue of some non-trivial identity. And while in the previous paragraph I satirized the pretentions of journalism so conceived, in this paragraph I point to the constitutive role of journalism to social life.

Evidently, this constitutive role to social life is also a task for the philosopher. In fact, Foucault tells us explicitly that nearly all philosophies he is aware of -- and while he has limitations, Foucault is nothing but well-read and he stakes a knowledge claim on it "I only know that"-- try to play this role, at least since Kant tried to answer the question. It's a bit of a shame that he doesn't hint at the exceptions, but Foucault's claim here is a nice way of capturing one way in which analytic philosophy, while conditioned by the ages in which it is produced, does not -- despite our advances in quantified modal logic -- generally (there are exceptions) answer the question, what are we now.

There is, of course, for all the play (Foucault clearly admires w the author of the book he is reviewing) a dethroning involved here. To speak crassly, philosophy is not in the business of truth as the law and science are, but it is much closer to the world of opinion (that is journalism) and this is a world of near-Hericlitan flux--the oft imperceptible instability of identity, when its self-evidentness cannot be taken for granted anymore, is the great theme of the review. *

As I have noted before, there is for all his nominalism and disciplined skepticism a historicism lurking in Foucault. Each fleeting now has its singular identity, and it takes occupations devoted to singular inquiry -- journalism, philosophy, and, of course, the arts -- to try to sketch a kind of repetition of that once diffuse identity; for after completion of the task, it turns out already to be "familiar" even if we see it afresh.

*And in invites us to rediscover in the title of the essay, Merleu-Ponty's philosophical task, 'never to consent to being completely comfortable with one's presuppositions.' (p. 448)

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