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History as an Antidote to the Myth of Conformity: Foucault’s Theory of History
This paper is one component of a project that looks at theories of the subject in modern
Western philosophy and how certain constructions of the subject have repeatedly contributed to a
divide between concrete and specific theories of the self in opposition to vague and indeterminate
notions of the masses. I use the term “the masses” here to indicate a collection of ideas including
the Other, society, the herd, conformity, and the modern phenomenon of collective but atomized
and alienated individuals within society. It seems to me that political philosophy’s focus on the
question of the subject has, to the detriment of its possibilities for politics, left these “other”
notions unquestioned and under-theorized. Despite there being available theories capable of
undermining the myth of “the masses,” political philosophers too frequently suggest that the
primary obstacle facing the self-conscious and self-constituting subject is some sort of spectre of
conformity and alienation that absorbs the masses of modern society. This suggestion of the
masses is at times explicit, as with Nietzsche, and at times subtle, as with Foucault. My
challenge is to show that explicit or not, even anti-humanist philosophers have given life to the
idea of the modern masses by theorizing a free subject capable of escaping them.
This tension has its roots in Descartes’ cogito, with the original separation of the “I” from
the “Other”, where only the “I” can be the source of authentic knowledge.
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My project, however,
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One problem unresolved by phenomenology was the “problem of the other.” This problem, which confronted
Foucault similarly, is that because knowledge of the world is based in the distinctive consciousness of oneself and
one’s own experience, knowledge of others’ consciousness and therefore existence remains ambiguous. This
problem of consciousness exists with the Cartesian cogito, and was not overcome by the phenomenologists. Because
perception is individually experienced, having knowledge of others’ perceptions and the heterogeneity of the
multiple experiences is in question. Phenomenology does not accept any theory of an unconscious and so every
subject is a complete unity. Phenomenology seems to assume that by pluralising the experience of “I” can
characterize the experience of “we”, and yet this homogenizes these experiences.
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The legacy of the mind/ body
split is that an understanding of others’ consciousness as reality is in question if not impossible. These repeated
doubts about the existence of “otherness” are in many ways a source of the problem of the concept of the masses. If
only the individual can be a free, rational, and conscious subject, the implication is that all others must be something
other, including irrational and unfree.
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Convention