FOUCAULT’S METHOD OF CRITIQUE IS POWERLESS TO CHANGE ANYTHING

FOUCAULT’S METHOD OF CRITIQUE IS POWERLESS TO CHANGE ANYTHING

1. RADICAL CRITICAL EXAMINATION ALONE DOESN’T PRODUCE ANY REAL EFFECTS

Andrew Sullivan, Editor of the New Republic, VIRTUALLY NORMAL, 1995, p. 88-91.

Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one for a minority‑and a small minority at that. Inevitably, the vast majority of the culture will be at best uninterested. In a society where the market rules the culture, majorities win the culture wars. And in a society where the state, pace Foucault actually does exist, where laws are passed according to rules by which the society operates, culture, in any case, is not enough. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. To achieve actual results, to end persecution of homosexuals in the military, to allow gay parents to keep their children, to provide basic education about homosexuality in high schools, to prevent murderers of homosexuals from getting lenient treatment, it is necessary to work through the, very channels Foucault and his followers revile. It is necessary to conform to certain disciplines in order to reform them, necessary to speak a certain language before it can say something different, necessary to abandon the anarchy of random resistance if actual homosexuals are to be protected. As Michael Walzer has written of Foucault, he stands nowhere and finds no reasons, Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home."

Sheldon Wolin, Professor Emeritus of Politics, Princeton University, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 197.

The futility that emerges as the key characteristic of Foucault’s politics is, I would suggest, not the consequence of an endlessly changing world constituted by mind, but its reflection. Foucault insisted that in adopting a genealogical method he was deliberately choosing to remain at the surface of things, a strategy that was universally applauded by sympathetic interpreters fatigued by the traditional talk about essence and logos. But Foucaldian genealogies - unlike, for example, the logical positivist attack on “metaphysics” - do not puncture linguistic illusions; they simply reduce metaphysical chatter to a historical instance of power/knowledge discourse, more feckless than psychiatry perhaps, but not necessarily its intellectual inferior.
3. FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE IS NOT A REASON TO REJECT TRADITIONAL PHILOSOPHY

Gary Gutting, “Reason and Philosophy,” CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL FOUCAULT, p. 43.

In my view, however, there is no reason to think that accepting Foucault’s reconception of philosophy requires giving up the sorts of investigations that have occupied traditional philosophers. For one thing, I do not see how the Foucaultian can rule out in principle the possibility of our someday actually finding answers to the great, ultimate questions. He cannot base his skepticism about traditional philosophy on anything other than the historical fact that philosophers have for centuries failed to solve the deep problems they have set themselves. To go further and suggest that there is some fundamental feature of the mind or the world that excludes ultimate philosophical truth in principle would be itself a philosophical claim in the traditional mode. Since success in answering traditional philosophical questions is not excluded (however unlikely it may be) and would surely be of immense value, an important lesson of our philosophical past is that such work, even when unsuccessful, has many positive side effects.
4. THE FOUCALDIAN MISTRUST OF “TRUTH” IS MISGUIDED

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, TRUTH, POLITICS, AND POSTMODERNISM, SPINOZA LECTURES, 1997, p. 38-40.

There is a point to this suspicion, but not, I think, to the distrust which many admirers of Foucault have for the sort of story which Hegel, Macauley and Acton told: human history as the story of increasing freedom. Foucauldians typically have the same suspicions about narratives of progress as they do about the Enlightenment political project. But both suspicions are unjustified. My own view of narratives of progress is that of Thomas Kuhn: there is no such thing as asymptotic approach to the Truth, but there is progress nevertheless ‑ progress detectable by retrospection. Scientific progress is made when theories which solved certain problems are replaced by theories which solve both those problems and certain other problems, which the earlier theories were unable to solve. On Kuhn's view, Einstein got no closer to the way reality is `in itself' than did Newton, but there is an obvious sense in which he progressed beyond Newton.

Freedom of Speech Responses

Introduction