La falta de dialogo en la familia como afecta en el desarrollo del lenguaje

Art’s participation in anarchist retemporalization begins when Baudelaire meets Proudhon, historically and philosophically.Baudelaire admired Proudhon, writing to him while he served in the brief National Assembly formed after the 1848 revolutions, and addressed him in the last line of a draft of what may be Baudelaire’s most famous prose poem dealing with the problem of poverty, “Assommons les pauvres!” [Beat up the Poor!]

81 _{“Monsieur, d'après les immortels principes de 89, tous les hommes sont égaux en droits; donc je}

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Their philosophical alignment becomes apparent in Foucault’s demonstration of how Baudelaire’s art takes up a project complementary to Proudhon’s anarchism in “What is Enlightenment?”82

Foucault declares Baudelaire’s work emblematic of modernity as an attitude, “a form of relationship to the present” and “a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself” (41). Foucault explains: “For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it other than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is” (41). The relationship to the present takes the form of a transformative labor, a work of apprehending reality in its full exactitude, holding it up for critique, imagining how it might be otherwise, and through art displaying at one and the same time reality as it is and as it might become. Thus

“Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is

confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (41). As with Ziarek’s forcework, art instantiates a different mode of relationality in grappling with things as they are and freeing them from the constraints of the actual into other possible configurations. In this context the “precept” of Baudelaire Foucault cites—his insistence “You have no right to despise the present”—possesses the weight of an ethical imperative. Like Constantin Guys, a modern artist must grasp and transfigure the present, not dodge this task by taking refuge in a past whose fashions he prefers or taking flight into a future detached from present circumstances.

It is this attention to the present with an eye to the conditions necessary for its alteration that Foucault sees linking modernity to the Enlightenment: he posits “the thread

82 _{Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter. In The Foucault Reader, ed.}

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that may connect us to the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” [my italics] (42). Like forcework, which to impact the political realm needs “continuous reactivation,” critique is not only negative but positive, in the sense that it may be transformed “into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression” (45). This project of critique “will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think… [It will] give new impetus, as far and wide as

possible, to the undefined work of freedom” (46). The character Foucault attributes to this “historico-critical attitude” resembles that of anarchism in several significant aspects: both are experimental, wary of coalescence into “a theory, a doctrine,” or “a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating,” shy away from instantaneous revolution (Foucault calls for “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty”) and concerned with processual, local change (50). Foucault advises

this work done at the limits of ourselves must… put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the

historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions. (46)

Like anarchism, Foucault’s attitude of modernity shuns grand designs and unitary visions for society in favor of instantiating change at specific points where it is “possible and desirable.” It is in circumspection regarding the basis for and enactment of change that Foucault finds an affinity between the attitude of modernity and the approach of the Enlightenment in this minor text of Kant. Kant’s defining of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) “in an almost entirely

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negative way, as an Ausgang, an exit, a way out” of “our immaturity” does not attempt to locate origins, or discover some “internal teleology of a historical process,” or “seek… to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement”; Kant “deals with the question of contemporary reality alone” to answer the question “What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?” (34). In this pairing Kant’s Enlightenment and Foucault’s and Baudelaire’s modernity both take up tasks properly delimited historically and critically.

Foucault sees in this reading of Kant the Enlightenment posed as a political problem of the exercise of reason by individuals. I argue that Foucault poses this political problem for modernity in a recognizably anarchist formulation remarkably similar to Castoriadis’s conception of social self-institution83. Foucault begins with Kant’s conditions for exiting immaturity, distinguishing between realms of obedience and reasoning, and between public and private uses of reason. Kant states that reason must be submissive in its private use, free in its public use. Foucault first focuses on the conditions free public use of freedom entails: “The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible” (37). Foucault then examines what this means for the character of the Enlightenment: “Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is

83 _{Castoriadis writes: “The central idea realized by the [French] Revolution… is that of the explicit}

self-institution of society by collective, lucid, democratic activity. But at the same time the Revolution never freed itself from the grip of this key part of the modern political imaginary that is the state. I say expressly ‘the State’—a separate and centralized apparatus of domination—and not ‘power.’ For the Athenians, for example, there is no ‘state’—the very word doesn’t exist; the power is ‘we,’ the ‘we’ of political collectivity.” See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy. Trans. Anonymous.

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Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.” (37)

The Enlightenment possesses a collective dimension that interrelates individuals through the free exercise of reason: “Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a

process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally” [italics added] (35) and “Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining its history as humanity’s passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the

overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process” [italics added] (38). The Enlightenment, and by extension modernity, through the relation of similitude Foucault sketches between the two, “appears as a political problem” in a formulation that solicits anarchism for its solution. Foucault writes of the Enlightenment: “Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors” (35). Foucault writes of modernity in relation to the Enlightenment:

Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder if we might not envision modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern,’ I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, every since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity.’[italics added] (39)

The chief representative of countermodernity here seems to be humanism (in which Foucault includes, notably if partially, Marxism). Foucault opposes humanism, as “a set of themes” that have appeared in European societies and which are “always tied to value judgments,” to

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the Enlightenment-modernity project (44). Foucault claims that humanism “serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse” (44). Humanism limits the exercise of reason Kant proposes by foreclosing what it means to be human at a particular historical moment and confining options for action/practices to whatever value judgments a particular instance of humanism deems moral or otherwise acceptable.

Shifting to the second element comprising the attitude of modernity, the mode of relationship one has to establish with oneself, Foucault turns again to Baudelaire, noting: “To

be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme” (41). This ‘elaboration’ involves man revolting against himself and making “his very existence” into an artwork so that man can maintain the autonomy required to reason freely while participating fully in the public exercise of reason. Art furnishes the means for man to engage in reasoning—which is open-ended—and still

maintain the submission (to the public exercise of reason) Kant demands of the private use of reason. Thus “Baudelaire does not imagine that these [the “ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self”] have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a

different place, which Baudelaire calls art” (42). 84

To make life into art and to live the revolution (or anarchist alteration) overlap through a particular conception of art that privileges embodiment (of life in art) and

84 _{For affinities between Foucault and anarchism (and anarchism and other post-structuralist theorists),}

see Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) and Jesse S. Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Press, 2006).

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enactment (of the revolution in life) and makes art and life interdependent. Man produces himself, but only in art, where it is not a question of power but of the free, private exercise of reason. Art is active, not passive, its non-power offering a kind of spectral power, experience as it might become.