Political Genealogy After Foucault

Savage Identities

Michael Clifford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135956561
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Combining the most powerful elements of Foucault's theories, Clifford produces a methodology for cultural and political critique called "political genealogy" to explore the genesis of modern political identity. At the core of American identity, Clifford argues, is the ideal of the "Savage Noble," a hybrid that married the Native American "savage" with the "civilized" European male. This complex icon animates modern politics, and has shaped our understandings of rights, freedom, and power.

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Introduction

From Noble Savage to Savage Noble

My native country, thee,

Land of the noble free,

Thy name I love;

I love thy rocks and rills,

Thy woods and templed hills;

My heart with rapture thrills

Like that above.

—Samuel Francis Smith, “America” (1831)

In 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind, whose purpose, in part, was to offer us a “history” of the origins of the modern political subject. It is in this work that Rousseau elaborates on his thoughts on the “Noble Savage,” the iconic figure that served as the focal point of the fateful distinction between “wilderness” and “civilization” through which the European imagination defined the new world.¹

Rousseau sought to retrieve something from the noble savage that had been lost with man’s “advancement” into civilized society. Thomas Hobbes had attacked the avarice and hostility that men displayed against their fellows in the state of nature, which compelled them to quit the state of nature and to join together under a civil government. Rousseau adamantly challenged this view. In fact, by asserting the nobility and purity of what he called “original man,” Rousseau sought to reverse the mechanistic and pessimistic view of political identity advanced by Hobbes. “But above all things let us beware of concluding with Hobbes, that man, as having no idea of goodness, must be naturally bad,” says Rousseau. “This author, to argue from his own principles, should say that the state of nature being that in which the care of our own preservation interferes least with the preservation of others, was consequently the most favorable to peace, and the most suitable to mankind; whereas he advances the very reverse. …”² Above all, perhaps, Rousseau wished to recover what he referred to as the “natural pity” of the savage, which he assumed had been the basis of man’s happiness and virtue prior to man’s transmutation into the avaricious, disingenuous, and “degenerate” being he had become in modern society. From “the force of natural pity,” contends Rousseau, “flow all the social virtues. … In fact, what is generosity, what democracy, what humanity, but pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general?” It is just this natural pity that is adulterated and repressed by our becoming “sociable.”³ Rousseau sought to reverse not only Hobbes’s pessimistic estimation of natural man, but also to reverse the trend toward degeneration in civilized man by recovering something of the nobility of the innocent savage.

Of course, not everyone on the Continent shared Rousseau’s admiration of the noble savage. In fact, the image came under attack by many of France’s leading philosophes, including Voltaire, who likened the life of Rousseau’s savage to that of the orangutan. And it didn’t help that Europe’s preeminent natural historian of the time, George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, applied his own theory of degeneracy to the real “savages” of the New World, the indigenous peoples whom Rousseau admired and whom he considered vestigial reminders of what European man no doubt had been in a long-forgotten past. Yet contrary to Rousseau’s estimation, Buffon declared that “the savage is feeble,” not noble in body, mind, or character, a description that gave an appearance of scientific legitimacy to prejudices and stereotypes that had been forming at least since the early 1600s.⁴ Compared to European man, asserted Buffon, the New World savage was “less strong in body … less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly.” Buffon even undermined the notion of natural pity Rousseau had assumed to be the very basis of the savage’s virtue; he described the New World natives as “cold and languid” and said that they “have no love for their fellow man.”

Nevertheless, Rousseau’s faith in the noble savage was vindicated to a large extent by Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Jefferson vigorously challenged Buffon’s contentions, and offered his own account of the American savage that largely reconfirmed all those noble traits that Rousseau had attributed to him, saying that “in contradiction to [Buffon’s] representation, [the New World savage] is brave … he meets death with more deliberation and endures tortures with a firmness unknown almost to religious enthusiasm with us; … he is affectionate to his children, careful of them, and indulgent in the extreme; … his friendships are strong and faithful to the uttermost extremity; … his sensibility is keen, even the warriors weeping most bitterly on the loss of their children, though in general they endeavour to appear superior to human events; … his vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours in the same situation; hence his eagerness for hunting, and for games of chance.”⁵

Jefferson’s description of the New World natives was later bolstered by the publication of John Heckewelder’s Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States in 1819, long considered to be “one of the most authoritative early sources on Native Americans.”⁶ Based on intimate experience, including living fifteen years with the Moravian Christian Indians and as government advisor in negotiations with the Iroquois, Heckewelder painted a picture of Native Americans that would challenge the prevailing attitudes dramatically, asserting “Those brutes, those savages, from whom, according to some men, no faith is to be expected, and with whom no faith is be kept … are susceptible of the noblest and finest feelings of genuine friendship.”⁷

However idealized they may have been, however at odds with actual practice (especially Jefferson’s), comments like those from Jefferson and Heckewelder are to be viewed as more than simple defenses of a mistreated and misunderstood group of people. Beyond that, they reflect a growing impatience with the whole European disdain for the New World. Europe itself was increasingly viewed as feckless and feculent. The American wilderness, as well as those hearty natives who inhabited it, on the other hand, were increasingly valorized and romanticized on both sides of the Atlantic. This shift in perspective was no doubt fueled by positive reports of encounters with Native Americans by such explorers as Meriwether Lewis and especially William Clark, who, as secretary of Indian Affairs under Thomas Jefferson, often spoke on behalf of those whom he called “civilized savages.”

By the 1830s a reversal of perspectives had taken place, confirmed in part by the popularity of such literature as the “Leatherstocking” tales of James Fenimore Cooper, in which native Americans played a prominent and often heroic role.⁸ Yet it wasn’t just that Rousseau’s noble savage had been revitalized. In the New World a form of political identity was taking shape that incorporated the savage, made it the basis of a new kind of nobility, one no longer defined by blood, heritage, power, or position, but a willingness to grapple with nature itself. As Cooper mentions in The Last of the Mohicans, “The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty.”⁹ In this passage, Cooper is not simply expressing an appreciation for certain qualities that are (stereotypically) attributed to Native Americans. In fact, according to Richard Slotkin, the narratives of Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and others reflect a dramatic change from the literature of the early Puritans, who characterized the native population as “devils” to be either converted or exterminated. The Puritans assumed a clear cultural divide between the colonists and Indians, but later we see the formation of a cultural figure who begins to take on those very traits that the Puritans so passionately feared and despised.¹⁰ Thus, the “emulation” of the Native American that Cooper describes in The Last of the Mohicans intimates an assimilation that is tantamount to a transmutation of Western identity itself, a form of identity characterized in part by a reconceptualization of personal virtue, of what it is to be noble.

Historically, we have recognized this “new” form of nobility in the guises of frontier spirit and rugged individualism. In fact, “the frontier is productive of individualism,” according to Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner describes a process through which the European colonist is, in effect, “transformed” into an American: “The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone on to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe. … The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”¹¹

The process of transformation that Turner describes occurs through an encounter, or engagement, with the wilderness, the success of which depends on the assimilation of traits and skills that are decidedly “Indian” in character. This encounter gives rise to a “product” that is perhaps best described as a new form of Euro-American nobility. Icons of this new nobility have been those with the courage to take on what Cooper calls “the toils and dangers of the wilderness” and to tame it. Besides Natty Bumppo there is a long line of such icons, which include figures both historical and fictional, and sometimes both in the same figure. We have already mentioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who preceded Bumppo historically but who have survived well after him in the American imagination; we should add Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed), Paul Bunyan, Henry David Thoreau, James Butler Hickok, William Frederick Cody, the American Cowboy generally, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Hawkeye, John Rambo, Mountain Jack, and the Lone Ranger.¹² These icons represent the enduring romance of individuality and personal autonomy—both now the measures of “nobility” in the New World. In fact, it wasn’t so much the noble savage that came to be revered, to be the central figure of a new American mythos, but rather a “hybrid” of sorts, a new form of identity that married the courage and robustness of the native American savage with the reason, culture, and civility of the white, European male—a form of identity that might be called the Savage Noble.¹³

This book conducts a genealogical critique of modern political identity. Methodologically, I rely on the work of Michel Foucault to trace out the transmutation of Rousseau’s Noble Savage into what I have called the Savage Noble. Specifically, I wish to reveal the mechanisms through which this form of political identity has been both constituted and subjugated. It is important to note, however, that for the purposes of my project the term savage noble is largely a trope for a form of political subjectivity—namely, autonomous individualism—that informs the texts of traditional political philosophy and animates modern politics. It is this form of political subjectivity, and the specific types of political identity to which it gives rise (and not so much the popular figures of the American mythos) that will be my primary object of concern.

By individual I mean the traditional notion of the political subject as “a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society.”¹⁴ Individuality is without doubt the principle and privileged register of political subjectivity in modern political philosophy, and of our own self-conception as political subjects.¹⁵ However, this juridical, rights-based notion of the political subject is a relatively recent development. It can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is only since the nineteenth century that “individualism” has been separated from the problem of absolute monarchy and conceived as a political philosophy on its own terms.¹⁶ Since that time the notion of the individual has become so entrenched in our culture that it is seldom even put into question. Of course, it goes without saying that the individual has received a great deal of attention in traditional political discourse, but it is usually in terms of a juridical project to define the rights, freedoms, power, and obligations of the political subject. In this study, by contrast, I will suspend the “givenness” of the individual, in order to see what happens to the necessity of such juridical projects. I want to show how this individual is not merely a symbolic representation of political subjectivity, but a fabrication by an anonymous technology that turns individuality into an instrument of domination and subjection.

Why undertake such a study? A genealogical critique of our history as political subjects cannot only help us to better understand the origins and character of our present political identities, but in so doing may cause us to reevaluate the way we presently understand the tasks of political philosophy. In particular, genealogical critique forces us to rethink the notions of political freedom and political power, and to examine the source and necessity of our ideological oppositions, which is the source of so much political conflict. This examination roots out the common genealogical origins of our various political positions, challenges the necessity of their oppositional character, and points toward the possibility of forms of political identity that might avoid (or at least alter in a way less polarizing and hence paralyzing) the fractious and agonistic structure peculiar to modern politics—not in the name of some utopian political brotherhood or sisterhood, but through artful experimentations with identity itself.

Outline of a Political Genealogy

Following Foucault, the guiding methodological question of this study is not, “What is the political subject?” but rather, “How are political subjects formed?” The first question is metaphysical; that is, it inquires into the essence of political subjectivity. The second question, on the other hand, is genealogical; it inquires into the contingent historical, discursive and non-discursive conditions of the emergence of political subjects. Genealogical critique, in fact, challenges the metaphysics of essence, which posits a substantive, given subject. As Foucault explains, “One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that is to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I call genealogy.”¹⁷ Genealogical critique is not only “different” from metaphysical inquiries, it puts into play a difference (a suppressed event, a marginalized practice, a forgotten desire) that undermines the necessity of certain metaphysical postulates such as those supporting traditional understandings of the human subject. In other words, genealogy “disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.”¹⁸ For centuries we have been enamored of the idea of a human subject as a self-identical being animated by spirit, consciousness, or will. This notion of a self-identical subject has been imported into the discourses of traditional political philosophy, which take this subject for granted in its projects to define rights and freedoms or to lay down principles of political justice.

“There is a history of the subject just as there is a history of reason,” says Foucault.¹⁹ The effect of much of his genealogical work has been to reveal a subject whose origins, it might be said, are humble, quotidian, “gray.” But there is another “history” to account for, the origins of the Western political subject, on which the juridical projects of the liberal tradition are (implicitly or explicitly) based. I am referring to the ostensible political subject of traditional political philosophy and ideology. A genealogical critique can render the historical emergence of modern political subjectivity intelligible by attending to the smallest discursive and nondiscursive gestures. For example, in Machiavelli’s The Prince, we might note that a simple gesture of capitalization distinguishes the Sovereign from his subjects. In this discourse, all of the attention is focused on the Prince, while political subjects are drawn as rather nebulous figures, a populous mass distributed more or less randomly across the Sovereign’s principality. The Prince attends to political subjects as potential nuisances; his patience for them displays itself rather narrowly, alternating between a reluctant benevolence and a fearful wrath. But no particular identity can be attributed to political subjects at this point. They are shadowy, ill-defined figures who carry knives and pay taxes. By some point in the seventeenth century, however, this situation is reversed. The spotlight then begins to shine most brightly on the political subject. Or rather, the Sovereign now becomes an illustrio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: From Noble Savage to Savage Noble
• Part 1: The Three Domains of Genealogy
• Part 2: Against Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index