that shape us are likely to elude our comprehension. Discipline and Punish, for instance, is not an account of the whole of who we are. It is an account of only one aspect of who we are. The first volume of The History of' Sexuality is another, and the lecture series Foucault gave on governmentality (2007, 2008c) yet another. Moreover, who we are changes with the changes in our practices. So it is even more difficult to get a grasp on who we are at a particular moment. We always risk understanding who we just were, rather than who are now.
The upshot of this is that, for Foucault, freedom is a matter of experimentation. To open up "a space of concrete freedom" is not to figure out who we might be and then go there ; it is to try out different possibilities for our lives, different "possible transformations", to see where they might lead. To live freely is to experiment with oneself, not always knowing whether one is getting free of the forces that have moulded one, nor (and we will return to this in a moment) being sure of the effects of one's experimentation. It is to try to create a life from within a space of uncertainty, having some knowledge of how one has been made to be.
Our situation, then, is this. If we construct histories like Foucault's, histories which give us accounts of different aspects of the forces that have influenced us to be who we have become, then we have a partial knowledge of how we came to be that way. From there, we can decide which among those forces are acceptable to us, and which are, to use Foucault's term, intolerable. (Foucault's histories give accounts only of intolerable forces, since those are the ones we are most likely to want to change.) In seeking to overcome the intolerable forces, we must experiment with who we might become, not knowing entirely whether we are indeed escaping them. That is something we can only find out later, after our experiments are under way. We are, then, neither help less in the face of what moulds us nor certain of how and what we can do about it. We are somewhere in between. That is where our freedom lies, and indeed that is what our freedom is.
Since we can only experiment without certainty as to the results of our experiments, we must always be vigilant. We do not know in advance where our experimentation will lead us. We might wind up either re-creating intolerable forces or creating new ones. Therefore, we cannot stop doing the kinds of histories Foucault engages in, nor resting content with his. The history of who we are is an ongoing project. Oth erwise put, the effects of our freedom are as uncertain as our freedom itself. We must never assume that the "space of possible transforma tions" we exploit will necessarily lead us to a better situation. Freedom is not the same thing as liberation. Whether our freedom is liberating or
FOUCAULT'S CONCEPTION O F FREEDO M
not is something that is not guaranteed to us. It can only be approached through experimentation and historically informed reflection.
In order to get a better understanding of Foucault's conception of freedom, it might be useful to contrast it with that of a French philoso pher from the generation preceding Foucault's. Maurice Merleau-Ponty also has a notion of situated freedom, one in which we are free but not entirely free. Seeing the differences between the two conceptions of freedom may sharpen our grasp on Foucault's own approach.
Merleau-Ponty constructs his concept of freedom in contrast to that of his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's view of freedom is that we are radically free in the metaphysical sense. There is nothing that is not in our power to decide. Sartre, at least in his early works, rejects all notions of a psychoanalytic unconscious or hidden historical forces that make us be who we are. In pure existentialist fashion, Sartre posits that our choices are solely our own. We must take full responsibility for them. Merleau-Ponty does not embrace this radical view of freedom. For Merleau-Ponty, one of the forces that we cannot control but that makes us who we are is the body. Corporeality - which it is the core project of Merleau-Ponty to understand - gives us our first interactions with the world through perception, and our first understanding of the world. The living body, rather than being an inert substance through which sensations pass, is instead the source of our primal engagement with the world. We might be able to alter that engagement in certain ways, but our embodiment ensures that there will be aspects of our living over which we do not have complete control. There is a certain unconscious aspect to our lives that will always elude us, the aspect that runs through our corporeal interaction with the world. Further, as Merleau-Ponty points out, that interaction is not properly described in terms of a body on the one hand that interacts with a world on the other. It is more intimate than that. The interaction is instead better characterized as that of a body/world complex.
This position leads to a view of freedom far less radical than Sartre's. For Sartre, the body is simply an inert object manipulated by conscious ness. If consciousness is unconstrained, then freedom of consciousness would be absolute. Sartre, of course, recognizes that consciousness is in some way embodied, so that even if one freely decides, say, to fly, that does not mean that one will actually be able to fly. But the decision itself is radically free. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of corporeality erases Sartre's radical distinction between mind and body. As Merleau-Ponty shows, the body already engages in perceptual interpretation before one consciously reflects on it. (He uses examples of visual illusions to make his point. Illusions are already seen as something before conscious
MI CHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CO N CEPTS
reflection attempts to correct them.) If this is true, then there is no radical freedom. Embodied creatures are constrained by their body/ world engagement. This does not mean that one cannot reflect on that engagement. But one always does so as an already embodied being.
The freedom of that reflection and of one's behaviour is, for Merleau Ponty as for Foucault, a form of situated freedom.
We choose our world and the world chooses us . . . freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer . . . and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives. (Merleau-Ponty 1 9 62 : 454) Our freedom is had within and through the constraints set by our bodies and our world. Those constraints can allow greater or lesser room for action : greater or lesser tolerance. But without bodies and historically given institutional frameworks, there would be no freedom, because there would be nothing through which (i.e. the body) to enact it and nothing about which (the world) it would concern.
There are ways in which Merleau-Ponty's conception of situated freedom is similar to Foucault's. Both of them acknowledge the impor tance of our embodiment, and they recognize the body's exposure to the world and its practices. Moreover, in both approaches that expo sure opens out on to limitations on one's freedom. What distinguishes them is the level of analysis on which these recognitions rest. Merleau Ponty's situated freedom is a metaphysical freedom. He offers a general philosophical account of the human body in its intertwining with the world. That account shows how mind and body as well as body and world form a single whole. From that he derives the conclusion that, contra Sartre, all human freedom must be situated. There can be no radical freedom because there is no aspect of our being that can stand outside our encrustation into the world. All freedom is the freedom of an embodied consciousness embedded in the world and its history.
Foucault does not need to deny any of this. Neither, however, does he need to embrace it. His approach is constructed along a different register. His question is not the metaphysical one of what the nature of human freedom is. Rather, his question is the more political one of what freedom we might have under particular historical conditions, namely our historical conditions. The situated freedom he is interested in is not the freedom of one situated as a human body in the world; it is the freedom of our situation. In the citation above, Foucault empha sizes that a diagnosis of the nature of the present must characterize that
FOU CAULT'S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM
present in such a way as to show its fragility, its fractures. The fragility of the present is not due to humans' possession of metaphysical freedom, although, as we have seen, he does seem to assume some form of meta physical freedom. It is due, rather, to the contingent structure of history.
History does not unfold according to a pre-given or transcendental framework. It is largely the product of dispersed practices that intersect with and influence one another in ways that cannot be predicted in advance and that conform to no transcendent pattern. (This does not mean that one cannot find patterns within history; it means that one can only see them after they have created themselves through the interac tion of contingent practices.) Situated freedom arises as a result of this contingency of history. The issue for one interested in one's freedom, then, is not the metaphysical question of who one is and where one's freedom lies, but rather the question of where one's particular history has deposited one, and how that history might be intervened upon. For Foucault, in short, situated freedom is a historical and political concept rather than a metaphysical one.
Foucault's approach to freedom, then, like the approach of many aspects of his work, is at once philosophical and historical. As a philo sophically oriented concept, it takes history in a more sophisticated direction than most historians are capable of. As a historically inflected concept, it raises questions to traditional philosophical analyses. Foucault's writings ask to be read along both of these axes, each one in conversation with the other. If we allow ourselves to engage in this two-level conversation, we may become more aware not only of the particular philosophically inflected way in which we often view the world, but also of the historically contingent and malleable character of that way. In other words, we may come face to face with our freedom.
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