|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: joanna bujes
||
|| At 07:25 PM 01/09/2002 -0500, you wrote:
|| >By "Posties" I guess you mean "postmodernists"..so you
|| >are discounting a rather broad category of people.
|| >Does this mean you think this about Derrida,
|| >Baudrillard, Foucault and others unnamed? Or is it
|| >that you have not read them at all and just want
|| >to categorically dismiss them ALL and EVERYTHING they
|| >say?
||
|| I have read Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida, and in the
|| original. And
|| yes, I think this about them. Do I dismiss EVERYTHING they say? No. I
|| remember there was some stuff in Baudrillard's critique of
|| Marx's concept
|| of use value that was interesting. Derrida never struck me as anything
|| other than a very long-winded belle-lettrist with just a little
|| frisson of
|| Marxist analysis. (...)
||
|| Joanna B.
||
I admire your resilience. I can't stand more than a page or two of their ad lib obscurantism. Here's an old Paglia comment from Salon:
MORE DARTS AT FOUCAULT'S SCRAWNY HAUNCHES | PAGE {1}, 2 - - - - - - - - - -
Yes, I have indeed written at length about my objections to the grossly overpraised Foucault, in a 78-page review-essay, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf," published in 1991 by the classics journal Arion and reprinted in my first essay collection, "Sex, Art, and American Culture." One of my observations was that Foucault's works are oddly devoid of women. Shouldn't that concern you as a feminist? It is simply untrue that Foucault was learned: He was at a loss with any period or culture outside of post-Enlightenment France (his later writing on ancient sexuality is a garbled mishmash). The supposedly innovative ideas for which his gullible acolytes feverishly hail him were in fact borrowed from a variety of familiar sources, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim and Martin Heidegger to Americans such as sociologist Erving Goffman.
Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid and simply does not work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is Foucault's analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original -- except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What most American students don't know is that Foucault's commentary is painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of Saussurean linguistics (which I reject). As I have asserted, James Joyce's landmark modernist novel "Ulysses" (1922) contains, chapter by chapter, far subtler and more various versions of language-based "epistemes" inherent in cultural institutions and epochs.
I'm afraid I bring rather bad news: Over the course of your careers, your generation of students will slowly come to realize that the Foucault-praising professors whom you respected and depended on were ill-informed fad-followers who sold you a shoddy bill of goods. You don't need Foucault, for heaven's sake! Durkheim and Max Weber began the stream of sociological thought that still nourishes responsible thinkers. And the pioneers of social psychology and behaviorism -- Havelock Ellis, Alfred Adler, John B. Watson and many others -- were eloquent apostles of social constructionism when Foucault was still in the cradle.
A massive work like W.E.B. DuBois' "The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study" (1899) shows the kind of respect for empirical fact-gathering and organization of data that is completely missing from Foucault, who selectively tailors his material to fit a monotonous, rigidly dualistic a priori thesis. For those in the humanities, where anti-aesthetic British cultural studies (shaped by the out-of-date Frankfurt School) has become entrenched, I recommend "The Social History of Art" (translated into English in 1951), an epic work by the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser that influenced me in graduate school. No one in British or American cultural studies has Hauser's erudition, precision and connoisseurship.
Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again -- in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt and Brown's Robert Scholes -- one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today's journalism on current events).
When I pointed out in Arion that Foucault, for all his blathering about "power," never managed to address Adolph Hitler or the Nazi occupation of France, I received a congratulatory letter from David H. Hirsch (a literature professor at Brown), who sent me copies of riveting chapters from his then-forthcoming book, "The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz" (1991). As Hirsch wrote me about French behavior during the occupation, "Collaboration was not the exception but the rule." I agree with Hirsch that the leading poststructuralists were cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents' generations in Nazi France.
American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems. Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs! SALON | Dec. 2, 1998