The Allegory of the Cage
During the Fall 2009 semester, a few weeks before I was set to teach a cluster of texts including
Kant and Foucault’s essays on the Enlightenment, as well as Agamben’s essay ‚What is an
Apparatus?‛, I came across a minimalist art installation at the California Institute of the Arts
that seemed to capture not just something about each of these three texts, but also about their
dramatic relation.59 The installation consisted of a rectangular cage that was open in the back
but set up against a wall. The front of the cage and the right side of the cage were closed with
chicken wire. Although the cage was locked in its top right corner, the wire in the bottom left
corner was peeled up, suggesting the possibility of a way in or out. Inside the cage, a pink
neon light stood slanted against the left wall of the cage. Against the right side, there was a
small mirror reflecting (depending on the viewer’s position) either the pink light on the op-
posite side of the cage, or the chicken wire and the space outside the cage. Resting on top of
the cage was a white neon light. It turned out that this was a work by Photography and Media
student Lee Perillo, who was at that time taking my BFA upper-level philosophy course titled
‚What is Biopolitics?‛ Perillo’s work was part of a group show on ‚queer art.‛
Perhaps because I had the Enlightenment on my mind, this work made instant sense to
me within the constellation of essays about the Enlightenment that I have been discussing.
Couldn’t one think of the pink light inside the cage as Kant? Kant’s answer to the question
‚What is Enlightenment?‛ revolves around two mottos. The first is ‚Sapere aude!‛ ‚Have the
courage to use your own reason!‛60 For Kant, to become enlightened means to come ‚of age‛:
it means to move from being a minor, who can only walk with the help of a frame, to being a
58
On this point, see George Collins’ contribution on the figure of the samurai to the study group on the
‚Techniques de soi‛ organized by Ars Industrialis, available at http://www.arsindustrialis.org/petite-
annonce-pour-un-sous-groupe-de-travail-sur-les-cultures-de-soi.
59
A photograph of the installation is shown on the cover of this issue of Foucault Studies.
60
Kant, 29.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
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major, to walking ‚alone.‛61 Kant’s second motto, however, is: ‚Argue as much as you will,
and about what you will, but obey!‛62 It is this second motto—argue, but obey—that seemed to
justify Kant’s position inside the cage.
Although Kant’s text is clearly about a way out—‚Enlightenment is man’s release from
his self-incurred tutelage‛63—that way out comes with the necessary limitation of obedience
(the cage). The mirror standing against the right wall of the cage reflects this truth back to
Kant. It is for this reason that Foucault, at the beginning of his text about Kant’s essay, can (no
doubt partly as a joke) refer to Kant’s essay as ‚a minor text, perhaps‛64: from where Foucault
is standing, it appears that Kant’s enlightenment is not entirely enlightened yet. Kant’s own
text had not fully completed the process of ‚becoming major.‛ Foucault’s reference to Kant’s
text as a ‚minor‛ text can be read as a joke, given the emphasis that Kant puts on becoming
major, ‚of age.‛ Enlightenment is, for Kant, about growing up, about turning from a minor
into someone who can walk and think for her- or himself. And so Foucault sets out to ‚finish‛
this task—a completion that in Foucault’s essay never quite takes place, as I have already
discussed above. In Perillo’s work, the white light could thus be said to represent Foucault, or
Foucault’s understanding of the Enlightenment, which has worked its way out of the cage.
Nevertheless, even Foucault’s Enlightenment is not entirely freed of the cage. The
white neon light rests on top of the cage; it is supported by it. This relation between the white
light and the cage appears to draw into question the ‚completion‛ that Foucault’s text at first
sight might appear to provide. And indeed, the point of Foucault’s essay appears to be that
the process of Enlightenment might never be completed. It involves, rather, a ‚patient labor
giving form to our impatience for liberty.‛65 In other words, Enlightenment is not a perma-
nent state that can be achieved, but the very movement from inside the cage (the pink light) to
outside the cage (the white light) that Perillo’s work captures. It involves, in other words, a
patient work upon oneself—a turning back upon oneself and one’s limitations from a per-
spective that is gained through one’s labor for freedom. Might this not be why the titles of
both Kant and Foucault’s essays take the form of a question? Might this not explain why
Foucault’s essay exists in many different versions, all of them exploring the same question
from slightly different angles, with slightly different concerns?66 As the title of my essay sug-
gests, this understanding of Enlightenment also recalls Plato’s dialectic: the point of Plato’s
allegory of the cave is not simply to move outside of the cave and into the realm of the ideas,
where one is blinded by the sun; it is, rather, to return back into the cave after one has grasped
the ideas, and to try to explain them to those who can see only shadows.67 There is thus an
emphatically pedagogical dimension to Plato’s allegory, as Stiegler in his reading of the Kant-
61
Kant, 29-30.
62
Kant, 31.
63
Kant, 29.
64
Foucault, ‛Enlightenment,‛ 97.
65
Ibid., 119.
66
See Foucault, The Politics of Truth.
67
See Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 532a-533a.
Foucault Studies, No. 10, pp. 7-22.
21
Foucault-Agamben constellation has suggested.68 Perillo is staging a veritable allegory of the
cage here.
Perillo’s joke, of course, is that Kant is represented by the pink, ‚queer‛ (slanted) light
and Foucault by the white, ‚straight‛ light. Given that the work was part of a ‚queer art‛
group show, the play with colors is no doubt significant. By putting the pink light inside the
cage, the artist might want to evoke the ways in which queer identity is, as queer identity, still
very much caught up in the normativizing constrictions that a more radical, a more en-
lightened, queerness might instead aspire to subvert. To be identifiably pink might ultimately
be no more queer than to be identifiably straight. A radical politics of queerness would, per-
haps, undermine these identitarian constructions and draw out, instead, a more universal,
more enlightened, humanity.69 At the same time, however, the artist’s choice of the color
white to represent this enlightened humanity that has worked its way out of the cage draws
into question the use of the color ‚white‛ to represent this ideal. To what extent is humanity
still caught up in the moralizing color scheme—darkness is bad, sunlight is good—within
which Plato’s allegory of the cave already operated? It might be, and here is where the work
again captures the spirit of Foucault’s ‚What is Enlightenment?‛, that the white light—which
is still supported by the cage—might need to do some further work on itself. It might be that
its whiteness is not quite as ideal as one might have assumed.
Finally, and now we come to Agamben’s essay, there is the technical dimension of Pe-
rillo’s work. Perillo’s minimalist installation makes no attempt to hide the technologies on
which it depends: the work needs to be set up near a power outlet, and it leaves clearly visible
the electric cables connecting the lights to the outlets. Whatever thought the work enables,
thus explicitly depends on the support of technology. Technology is not Perillo’s enemy. In-
stead, the artist mobilizes it within the context of a radical Enlightenment project—a project
that goes beyond Kant and stages the dramatic relation of Kant to Foucault.
Perhaps Perillo’s work thus provides us with an example of what Agamben calls the
profanation of the counter-apparatus. Its bricolage-like assembly of the frame of the cage, the
chicken wire, the neon lights, and the lock on the cage, recalls Agamben’s memorable de-
scription, in a chapter from State of Exception, of a day when humanity ‚will play with law just
as children play with disused objects: not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to
free them from it for good.‛70 This practice is described by Agamben not as a destruction but
as a ‚deactivation‛ or rendering ‚inoperative.‛71 It is perhaps in this ‚inoperativity,‛ this
‚worklessness,‛ that the link between the profanation of the counter-apparatus and Fou-
cault’s understanding of Enlightenment—marked by their shared interest in potentiality—
becomes most clear. For as I remarked in a footnote earlier on, one should not confuse Fou-
cault’s theorization of Enlightenment as a technique of attending to oneself with the ‚Just Do
It‛ imperative that governs contemporary culture. Instead, both Foucault’s theorization of
68
See Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford UP,
2010), from Chapter Seven onwards.
69
See Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
70
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64.
71
Ibid.
De Boever: The Allegory of the Cage
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Enlightenment and Agamben’s theorization of profanation challenge such blind actualization
by insisting on a potentiality that precedes any actuality and marks actuality’s capacity of
being otherwise—what I have called in the second section of this essay, its contingency. It is
this powerful truth that a philosophy of technics and technology, of human beings’ uncanny
capacity to bring something from nonbeing into being, also entails.
In Perillo’s artwork, the incapacitating technology of the cage thus becomes the capa-
citating—understood here in the sense of potentializing—component of the work of art, enclo-
sing the slanted, pink light representing Kant’s Enlightenment, and supporting the straight,
white light of Foucault’s Enlightenment. As a work of profanation, it liberates the cage from
being an actualizing technology of government, turning it into a dramatic, playful staging of
Kant, Foucault, and Agamben’s answers to the question ‚What is Enlightenment?‛
Elena:
Plato's allegory is clear: return to the cavern and reveal it to others so that they too can leave it.
But leaving it for us is not going anywhere but being in it without being it. We are beyond Kant and Foucault in that the problem is not so much knowing that it is a cave but transforming it into the womb of freedom through conscious action.
In the transition people have tended to think that it is about non-action but the problem is not non-action, non-action allows for the status quo to reproduce itself, the problem is conscious action. The problem is not no laws but THE LAWS. The laws that we are willing to live up to because they guarantee our freedom, our evolution, our humaneness.
Knowing what is is not being. Being is becoming in action. Sculpting our selves through our daily lives. From one's self to our selves. From the individual to society, back and forth in an ever more human dialogue. That is "Life".
We do not need to be identified with "us" to work for our freedom, but if we take our selves away from the freedom, we've lost the power behind it.
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