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Spectres of Freedom in Stirner and Foucault: A Response to Caleb Smith's
"Solitude and Freedom"
Saul Newman
University of Western Australia
snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
(c) 2004 Saul Newman.
All rights reserved.
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1. I am grateful to Caleb Smith for his response to my essay "Stirner
and Foucault: Towards a Post-Kantian Freedom," and I particularly
like the way he links my discussion of a post-Kantian freedom to
strategies of resistance against contemporary forms of
incarceration. Already, back in the early 1970s, in response to a
series of prison revolts in France, Michel Foucault was talking
about the emergence of a "carceral archipelago"--a network of
punitive institutions, discourses, and practices that had been
progressively spreading throughout the social fabric since the
late eighteenth century (297). It was as if the prison had become
a metaphor for society as a whole--with the same techniques of
surveillance and coercion appearing in schools, hospitals,
factories, and psychiatric institutions. Today, unprecedented
technological developments have made possible an intensification
of social control to levels beyond what even Foucault could have
imagined--the proliferation, for instance, of surveillance cameras
in public spaces indicates a blurring of the distinction between
the institution and life outside. Indeed, in light of the new
forms of incarceration that are appearing today--the extra-legal
detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for example--perhaps
we should take note of Giorgio Agamben's disturbing insight that
what is paradigmatic of modern life is not the prison, as Foucault
believed, but rather the /camp/ (20). The slogan posted above the
detention camp at Guantanamo Bay--"Honor Bound to Defend
Freedom"--is chillingly and ironically reminiscent of another
infamous slogan, the one posted above Auschwitz: "Arbeit Macht
Frei" ("Work Makes One Free").
2. Given this proliferation today of spaces of incarceration and
detention--which are, at the same time, becoming virtually
indistinguishable from everyday life--questions of freedom and
emancipation, always central to political discourse, are perhaps
more crucial now than ever before. It is here that Smith raises
some very interesting questions about how Stirner's and Foucault's
emancipatory strategies might be useful today in challenging
contemporary institutions, and practices of incarceration,
particularly solitary confinement. As Smith shows, solitary
confinement has been employed as a punitive tool since the
inception of the modern prison in the early nineteenth century,
and is now undergoing a massive resurgence in prisons in the U.S.
It was originally believed that if prisoners were isolated within
their own individual cells, not only could they be more easily
controlled and supervised, but their very "souls" could be
redeemed through a process of self-reflection. Solitary
confinement thus served as a sort of moral experiment upon the
subjectivity of the individual inmate--an experiment in which the
criminal's soul was constructed as a discursive object to be
corrected and reformed. A similar approach can be seen in
contemporary practices of solitary confinement in detention camps,
where the psyches of inmates are carefully monitored in an effort
to unlock their "secrets." Smith is right in suggesting, moreover,
that this has become a "postmodern" form of punishment--one that
relies on sophisticated and subtle techniques of psychological
manipulation, rather than clumsy physical coercion (though of
course, as we have been amply reminded by events in Iraq, the
latter has by no means been expunged from contemporary carceral
practice).
3. However, the question remains as to what sort of strategies of
freedom are effective in resisting these new postmodern regimes of
punishment? Smith suggests that the post-Kantian or "postmodern"
notion of freedom that I have theorized in my paper--one that is
derived from the interventions of Foucault and Stirner--is not
only somewhat limited in resisting "concrete" practices of
incarceration, but, because it is based largely on a notion of
individual autonomy that may be achieved even within oppressive
conditions, may actually sustain these very practices. There are
three separate, yet related, points that Smith is making here:
/firstly/, that, despite my emphasis on concreteness and
particularity as opposed to abstract universals, I have to some
extent ignored concrete practices or institutions--like the
prison--and have thus remained within the very abstract world I am
attacking; /secondly/, that my attempt to theorize a notion of
freedom and individual autonomy--"ownness"--that can be realized
even in conditions of oppression is of limited use against the
practice of solitary confinement, and may even sustain it; and
/thirdly/, that this notion of individual autonomy, developed from
Stirner and Foucault, has ignored a very important dimension of
their thinking that supports the idea of collective
insurgency--one that would be more relevant to the question of
prison revolt. I think Smith raises some very interesting points
here, and in answering his criticisms my aim is not simply to
defend my own argument but rather to expand the terms of the
discussion so that it may develop in new theoretical directions.
In this sense, I shall approach Smith's intervention in the spirit
of /agonism/, rather than antagonism--that is, as a theoretical
challenge that opens up new ways of thinking, new "lines of flight."
4. "Lines of flight" are exactly what we want here, after all. How to
construct new lines of flight, new strategies that will liberate
people from institutions like the prison, and, more broadly, from
the carceral/bio-political society we are living in today?
Concrete practices and institutions of coercion and surveillance
are all around us--not just in the prison, but, as I have
suggested, at all levels of the social network. Why, then,
resurrect Max Stirner, the thinker who was obsessed with ghosts,
"spooks," and ideological apparitions, and who claimed that we can
be dominated and oppressed as much by an abstract idea as we can
by a "real" institution or social relation? How useful is
Stirner's critique of the abstract world of universal ideals--the
spectres of humanity, rationality, and morality--in combating very
real practices and institutions of domination? How is Stirner's
diagnosis of a spectral world relevant to a world that seems ever
more frighteningly /real/?
5. Many people, including, most famously, Marx, have suggested that
because the target of Stirner's critique is the abstract world of
idealism, he neglects the "real" material world of concrete
relations and institutions. Indeed, Marx and Engels devoted the
largest part of The German Ideology to attacking Stirner, accusing
him of the worst kind of naïvety and idealism. They repeatedly
parody Stirner as "Saint Max" or "Saint Sancho"--as one who
mistakes illusions for reality. Stirner, Marx and Engels argue,
attempts to overcome religious alienation by condemning the
dominance of abstract "fixed ideas" but, in doing so,
overestimates the importance of these ideas in the real world,
thus falling into the idealist trap himself. In other words,
Stirner, in focusing on the way that abstract ideas dominate our
lives, sees these ideas as all-determining, thus neglecting their
basis in real material and social conditions. Stirner is therefore
characterized as an ideologist /par excellence/--one who ignores
the concrete material world and conjures up instead a word of
illusions and apparitions.
6. This idealist illusion is most apparent, Marx and Engels argue, in
Stirner's understanding of the State. Stirner sees the State as
itself an ideological abstraction, much like God--it only exists
because we allow it to exist, because we abdicate to it our own
authority, in the same way that we create God by abdicating our
authority and placing it outside ourselves. What is more important
than the institution of the State is the "ruling principle"--it is
the /idea/ of the State, in other words, that dominates us
(Stirner 200). The State's unity and dominance exist mostly in the
minds of its subjects. The State's power is really based on /our/
power, according to Stirner. It is only because the individual has
not recognized this power, because he humbles himself before
authority, that the State continues to exist. As Stirner correctly
surmised, the State cannot function only through top-down
repression and coercion, as this would expose its power in all its
nakedness, brutality, and illegitimacy. Rather, the State relies
on our /allowing/ it to dominate us. Stirner wants to show that
ideological apparatuses are not only concerned with economic or
political questions--they are also rooted in psychological needs.
The dominance of the State, Stirner suggests, depends on our
willingness to let it dominate us, on our complicit desire for our
own subordination. Therefore, the State must first be overcome as
an idea before it can be overcome in reality--or more precisely,
they are two sides of the same coin. According to Marx and Engels,
however, this ignores the economic and class relations that form
the material basis of the state: Stirner's "idealism" would
absurdly allow the state to be dismissed by an act of "wishful
thinking" (374).
7. Now this critique of Stirner's "idealist" approach to the State
goes to the heart of the debate between me and Smith. Indeed,
Smith's suggestion that I, in my critique (via Stirner) of
abstract universal ideals, fail fully to acknowledge or account
for the concreteness of institutions like the prison, uncannily
resembles Marx and Engels's attack on Stirner for not recognizing
the concreteness of institutions like the State. As with the
critique of Stirner, it is objected that my thinking in effect
proposes the existence of "abstract" prisons from which there can
only be "abstract" forms of escape. Like the unfortunate Saint
Max, who stumbles foggily through the world of illusions, I am
said to be gesturing toward the concrete world "as if toward
something half-real." Now my response to this is as follows:
Smith's objection, which so closely parallels Marx and Engels's
materialist critique of Stirner, is itself based on a sort of
illusory separation between discourse and reality, in which
"reality" is privileged as "concrete" and as having an immediacy
that ideas and theoretical concepts do not. However, I would
suggest here not only that "concrete" objects and practices are
meaningless outside discourse (that is, the linguistic, symbolic,
and ideological networks within which they are constituted) but,
more precisely, that these institutions and practices themselves
have a sort of spectral ideological dimension that gives them
consistency. In the same way, for instance, that Stirner argues
that the State cannot be understood, let alone resisted, without
an understanding of the abstract ideological systems that
legitimize it, I am suggesting that "concrete" institutions and
practices cannot be separated from the spectral ideological and
symbolic systems that give them meaning--and that, in order to
resist these institutions and practices, we have first to attack
their spectral underside. For instance, Foucault shows that the
"abstract" concept of the soul--which Smith himself has drawn
upon--has very real material effects, allowing a sort of
discursive cage to be constructed for the prisoner: as he
expresses it in his famous inversion of the traditional formula,
"the soul is the prison of the body" (30).
8. What I am suggesting here is that, paradoxically, in order for us
to perceive what is concrete we must go through the abstract, or
at least the symbolic. That is to say, we can only grasp
institutions and practices in their concrete materiality through
an "abstract" symbolic and ideological framework which constitutes
their meaning. They cannot be seen as somehow outside or separate
from this. As Slavoj Zizek argues, there is nothing more
/ideological/ than the belief that we can somehow step outside
ideological systems and see things for the "way they really are"
(60). The world of abstract ideas and ideological systems does not
somehow stand apart from and opposed to the world of concrete,
material practices and institutions, as Smith seems to suggest;
but rather, each can only be articulated through the other. While
it is true that I have not referred in my paper directly to
"concrete" institutions and practices, my contention is that they
can only be grasped through their spectral, abstract, "half-real"
dimension--and it is this dimension that I have focused on in
discussing Stirner's critique. It is a mistake to believe that
Stirner's critique of abstract universals implies that they can be
simply dismissed, and that a new world of reality and concreteness
will be revealed to us--it is more sophisticated than this. Just
because this world is spectral and ideological does not mean that
it is not, at the same time, very /real/--on the contrary,
ideology is all around us, materially present and deeply
entrenched in our psyches. And what Stirner is interested in
unmasking is the way that these abstract ideals, such as morality,
rationality, and human essence, find their logical expression in
concrete practices of domination--for instance, in punishment,
which Stirner sees as a form of moral hygiene (213). It is
precisely the abstract notions of morality and humanity that make
this new system of punishment intelligible--that form the
ideological and discursive apparatus that gives it meaning. That
is why the State, for Stirner, is as much ideological and spectral
as it is "real." Indeed, it is constituted in its materiality
precisely through this abstract, ideological dimension. This is
what Marx and Engels did not understand--and it could be argued
here that in neglecting the State's ideological dimension, and by
reducing it to the "materiality" of economic relations, they have
themselves failed to grasp its reality--that is, its political
specificity and autonomy. To suggest, as Smith seems to, that my
focus on abstract structures of idealism has obscured or neglected
the real, material world, is simply to repeat Marx's and Engel's
error.
9. The second point that Smith makes is that Stirner's idea of
"ownness" as a form of radical freedom that is possible even in
oppressive conditions may actually contribute to the practice of
solitary confinement. This is because solitary confinement is
based on the notion of a "cellular soul" that can be
self-correcting, and Stirner's notion of ownness, though it seeks
to throw off repressive moral constraints, nevertheless sustains
the idea of a soul that can be redeemed--this time in egoism
rather than morality. Smith raises an interesting point--that
because the egoist, for Stirner, creates his own forms of freedom,
he can maintain a Buddhist-like spiritual detachment from the real
conditions of restraint and coercion that he is subjected to, and
that this may actually sustain, or at any rate allow to be
sustained, the practice of incarceration in solitary confinement.
In other words, the implications of Stirner's theory of ownness
would seem to be that the egoist can be free even in a prison
cell. It is certainly the case that ownness is largely based on
the individual seizing for himself a radical autonomy through the
rejection of universal essences and fixed ideas. Moreover, Stirner
does indeed say that this form of autonomy can be experienced even
in the most oppressive conditions: "under the dominion of a cruel
master my body is not 'free' from torments and lashes; but it is
/my/ bones that moan under the torture, /my/ fibres that quiver
under the blows [...]" (143). What Stirner is suggesting here is
that even in conditions of abject slavery, in which the concept of
freedom as an ideal becomes meaningless, there is nevertheless a
more immediate form of autonomy or "self-ownership" available to
the subject. Moreover, this internal autonomy is something upon
which the concrete act of resistance and liberation can be based:
the egoist, Stirner says, bides his time while submitting to
punishment, and "as I keep my eye on myself and my selfishness, I
take by the forelock the first good opportunity to trample the
slaveholder into the dust" (143). So what Stirner is trying to
develop here is similar to the notion of positive freedom--a form
of /internal/ freedom or autonomy that goes beyond simple freedom
from external constraint. While it is usually the case that
positive freedom presupposes a basic negative freedom, in the case
of incarceration or slavery, there is no possibility of this prior
condition of negative freedom. Positive internal freedom must
therefore form the a priori condition for any act of resistance.
An example of this strategy of ownness in action might be found in
the film Cool Hand Luke. "Cool Hand" Luke, played by Paul Newman,
is a convict on a chain gang. In one scene the prisoners are
building a road with picks and shovels, and they are working at a
slow, monotonous pace that is regulated, not only by the enforced
generalized boredom of the task, but also by the watchful gaze of
the guards. The prisoners are languidly dreaming of their freedom,
of life on the "outside." Luke suddenly urges his fellow prisoners
to intensify the pace of the digging, saying all time "Go hard!
Beat the Man!" The building of the road becomes a frenetic
collective activity that causes profound consternation amongst the
prison guards. Here we see the convicts taking a kind of
self-ownership over their activity, an activity from which they
were hitherto alienated because it was seen as something that had
to be done for the authorities, for "the Man." By the convicts
owning their own labor, by making it /theirs/, it becomes an act
of resistance.
10. Stirner is also making another, more subtle point here: as well as
the act of resistance being based on a radical internal freedom,
the reverse of this is that practices and institutions of
domination actually rely on an internalized oppression, whereby
the subject is not only externally coerced and incarcerated but is
also tied, in more profound ways, to this very identity of
oppression. That is, institutions do not only oppress and coerce
the subject from the outside--they also dominate the subject
/inwardly./ In other words, they rely on an active
self-domination--the subject is tied psychologically to the very
institution that dominates him, and this might continue even after
the institution itself has disappeared. The subject is tied to a
kind of spectral shadow of the institution, precisely through an
internalization of the moral and rational norms upon which the
institution is based. This spectral shadow is precisely the hidden
"authoritarian obverse" that I have referred to. The State, for
instance, relies on certain forms of subjectification, so that the
individual comes to willingly submit himself to its authority--so
that, in the words of Stirner, "/its permanence/ is to be sacred
to me" (161). So, for Stirner, any concrete liberation from the
institution must begin with a sort of self-liberation--a
liberation of the self from the forms of subjectivity that are
tied to the institution. This is what Stirner means by "ownness."
My point is, therefore, that Stirner's theory of ownness--although
it would seem to mirror, as Smith suggests, a fantasy of
"corrective solitude"--can actually be interpreted in another,
much more radical way. It can be seen as a way of overcoming the
forms of self-domination and servitude upon which practices of
incarceration are ultimately based.
11. Although any act of liberation must begin with a personal
individual liberation, it will ultimately be ineffective unless it
incorporates a collective dimension--and it is here that I am
inclined to agree with Smith in his emphasis on collective
insurgency. I believe that notions of collective action and
identity are very much implicit in both Stirner's and Foucault's
politics, despite the way that they are usually perceived as
valorizing only individual acts of resistance. Elsewhere I have
insisted on a collective dimension in their thought, drawing on
Stirner's important notion of the "union of egoists," as well as
Foucault's writings on the Iranian Revolution (Newman). As Smith
points out, Stirner himself talks about the way that the prison
system, although designed to isolate individuals, actually creates
the conditions for a new kind of collective intercourse and
identity--one that constitutes a significant threat to the prison
system. So while in my article I have focused on the
individual--both in terms of the effect of abstract ideals and
ideological systems on the individual, as well as on different
forms of individual autonomy and resistance--there is no doubt
that, for Stirner at least, this can form the basis for a
collective insurgency. There is certainly nothing in either what I
have said, or what Stirner and Foucault have said, that rules this
out. How else can we hope to challenge the systems of power,
surveillance, and domination in which we are all increasingly
being inscribed?
Department of Political Science
University of Western Australia
snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Collected
Works Vol. 5. New York: International; London: Lawrence & Wishart;
Moscow: Progress, 1976.
Newman, Saul. "For Collective Social Action: Towards a Postmodern
Theory of Collective Identity." Philosophy and Social Action 27.1
(2001): 37-47.
Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Ed. David Leopold. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP: 1995.
Zizek, Slavoj. "The Spectre of Ideology." The Zizek Reader. Ed.
Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 55-86.