What I hate about Foucault Camille Paglia I never met or saw Foucault in the flesh. (He died in 1984.) My low
opinion of him is based entirely on his solipsistic, mendacious writing,
which has had a disastrous influence on naïve American academics. I miss no opportunity to throw darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
because he is the last standing member of the Terrible Triad of French
poststructuralists, whose work swept into American universities in the
1970s and drove out the home-grown radicalism of our own 1960s cultural
revolution. I militantly maintain that the intellectual gurus of my
college years -- Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler,
Allen Ginsberg -- had far more vision and substance than did the
pretentious, verbose trinity of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and
Michel Foucault. Derrida's reputation was already collapsing (thanks to the exposure of
his ally Paul de Man as a Nazi apologist) when I arrived on the scene
with my first book in 1990. Lacan, however, still dominated fast-track
feminist theory, which was clotted with his ponderous prose and affected
banalities. The speed with which I was able to kill Lacanian feminism
amazes even me. (A 1991 headline in the Italian newspaper Corriere della
Sera blared my Achillean boast, "I and Madonna will drive Lacan
from America!") Though much diminished with the waning of the theory years, Foucault
still survives, propped up by wizened queer theorists who crave an
openly gay capo in the canon. I base the rhetoric of my anti-Foucault
campaign on Cicero's speeches in the Roman Senate against the slick
operator and conspirator Catiline ("How long, O Catiline, will you
continue to abuse our patience?"). Greek and Roman political
history -- about which Foucault knew embarrassingly little -- remains my
constant guide. 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 Sussurean 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 |
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