Not happy with Foucault

I’ve been reading a bit (and re-reading other bits) of Foucault lately. I’m less impressed than I was before, not that I was overly turned off or otherwise influenced beforehand.

I’ve also been checking into criticisms of Foucault’s work and if Andrew Scull’s criticisms are anything to go by, then English translations of much of Foucault’s work may be sheer rubbish.

“Any doubts that might surface about the book’s claims could always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far weightier and more solemn – a massive tome that monoglot English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have laid their hands on a copy.

None of this seems to have rendered the book’s claims implausible, at least to a complaisant audience. Here, indeed, is a world turned upside down.

…

If the highly sceptical, not to say hostile, stance it encapsulates came to dominate four decades of revisionist historiography of psychiatry, there is a natural temptation to attribute the changed intellectual climate, whatever one thinks of it, to the influence of the charismatic Frenchman. But is it so? There were, after all, myriad indigenous sources of scepticism in the 1960s, all quite separately weakening the vision of psychiatry as an unambiguously liberating scientific enterprise.

…

But what even a weak translation does not disguise is the kind of evidence upon which Foucault erected his theory. Those thousand and more untranslated footnotes now stand revealed, and the evidence appears for what it is. It is not, for the most part, a pretty sight.“

(Andrew Scull, 2007)

Now this reminds me of reading Windschuttle. Heavy on footnotes, but ultimately not understanding or using his sources in a sound, scholarly manner. Foucault erected his History of Madness, attacking psychiatry during a period when it was in-vogue to bag psychiatrists, Windschuttle erected his attack on Australian history when Howard made it in-vogue to lambast said history as black-armband.

Foucault had English readers who could not properly access the French texts to which he alluded. Windschuttle has a target audience who from my experience, by and large don’t actually read the texts he makes reference to.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely credulous to what Andrew Scull tries to say in his work. For example;

“More prosaically, a new generation of historians, abandoning their discipline’s traditional focus on diplomacy and high politics, were in these years embracing social history and “history from below”, and doing so in an intellectual climate of hostility to anything that smacked of Whig history and its emphasis on progress. The birth of the revisionist historiography of psychiatry was thus attended by many midwives.

Still, Foucault’s growing stature both in serious intellectual circles and among the luminaries of café society was not without significance.

…

Perhaps that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much of his information. He had access to a wide range of medical texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – English, Dutch, French and German – as well as the writings of major philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza.“

(Andrew Scull, 2007)

I think perhaps that like Windschuttle, Scull shows a bit much nostalgia for Whig history and an anti-Continental bias (although not to the same self-compromising degree). His pejorative allusion to “café society” is a bit of a give-away, as is his mention of Spinoza without due mention of Derrida’s famous condemnation of Foucault’s treatment of Spinoza. Scull briefly mentions that Foucault responds to Derrida, but not what about.

Derrida was making similar criticisms of Foucault that Scull does today, albeit he started making them back in the 1960s. But this would make Foucault’s (French) environment a tad more critical wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t confirm anti-Rive Gauche prejudice as did the Sokal hoax. Given that Derrida is a philosopher of choice amongst “café society”, this omission by Scull should be taken as a kind of outgroup homogeneity bias against aspects of post-modern philosophy.

“Café society” is and was far more diverse than Scull makes out. At least he didn’t start making group-think allegations.

But I digress. I concede that there are serious doubts about the validity of Foucault’s body of work. But conversely, I question the assertion that Foucault is as influential and hence as big a risk as people make him out to be.

Also influenced by Spinoza was Gilles Deleuze. During the Derrida-Foucault feud following Derrida’s criticism of Foucault’s treatment of Spinoza, Foucault famously referred to Deleuze by suggesting that one day the 20th Century would be called “Deleuzian”. Deleuze, in response to questioning, said that he hadn’t asked Foucault what he had meant specifically by the comment, and brushed it off as a joke to irritate their critics.

Light conversation, or gently spurned compliment? We’ll never know. Such is the conundrum of interpreting dead philosophers.

But just how influential is Foucault? How often is a piece of work predicated entirely on arguments by Foucault, where Foucault isn’t made redundant by references to more reliable sources?

With criticism of Foucault’s work only likely to increase (not that Foucault was ever given a free ride by his peers), just how much damage has Foucault done to theory within continental philosophy, rather than just its reputation?

~ Bruce