FOUCAULT VIOLATES HIS OWN CRITIQUE

FOUCAULT VIOLATES HIS OWN CRITIQUE

1. FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF TRUE DISCOURSES VIOLATES ITSELF AND IS TOTALIZING

Issac Balbus, Professor of Political Science at U Illinois Chicago, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 151-152.

The totalizing reason against which Foucault inveighs is likewise present in his work. Despite his explicit repudiation of “all forms of general discourse” and his insistence on the “specificity of mechanisms of power,” he speaks of disciplinary power as an “integrated system,” of the “spread [of disciplinary mechanisms] throughout the whole social body,” of an “indefinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism,” the “omnipresence of the mechanism of discipline [and] the judges of normality,” and the “formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.” Here we are a long way from the pluralist Foucault. As Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, a concept of the disciplinary society “is nothing if not the product of a totalizing theory of society.” Indeed, we should scarcely expect otherwise. To hold, as Foucault does, disciplinary technologies responsible for the very constitution of the modern-individual-as-object-and-subject is necessarily to attribute to them a totalizing power that only a totalizing theory can name. And, if these technologies lacked this totalizing power - if they were less globally and dangerously determinative - what would be the point of Foucault’s prodigious effort to dismantle the true discourses that sustain them? The point is that the mere identification of the object against which the genealogist struggles requires the very concept of totality which the genealogist would unambiguously condemn.

Sheldon Wolin, Professor Emeritus of Politics, Princeton University, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 186.

In a curious way, therefore, Foucault seems to have repeated the same error of totalistic thinking with which he taxed classic theory. Foucault’s error may have had its own troubling consequences. Not only does he give us a vision of the world in which humans are caught within imprisoning structures of knowledge and practice, but he offers no hope of escape. Every discourse embodies a power drive and every arrangement is repressive. There is no exit because Foucault has closed off any possibility of a privileged theoretical vantage point that would not be infected by the power/knowledge syndrome and would not itself be the expression of a Nietzschean will-to-power. “[I]t is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak.”
3. FOUCAULT’S ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT BENT MERELY PROPS UP REASON

Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, TRUTH, POLITICS, AND POSTMODERNISM, SPINOZA LECTURES, 1997, p. 35-6.

Many writers who use the term `post‑modernism' without the scare quotes in which I prefer to enfold it think that the new philosophical world‑view ‑ the one which has emerged from the work of such neo-Nietzschean philosophers as Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault ‑ has political implications. This new world‑view is supposed to have shown that the last two centuries' worth of attempts to achieve a heaven on earth were somehow misguided, or somehow bound to fail. I cannot see the purported connection. So I shall be defending two theses in this lecture. The first is that the twentieth‑century project of treating Nature and Reason as unneeded substitutes for God is continuous with Enlightenment antiauthoritarianism. Getting rid of our sense of being responsible to something other than, and larger than, our fellow human beings is a good idea. Insofar as the terms `Nature; `Reason' or `Truth' are used to refer to something of this sort, we should drop these terms from our vocabulary. We should follow through on the Enlightenment's scepticism about non‑human powers. Abandoning the last vestiges of 18th‑century rationalism in favor of 20th‑century pragmatism would be good for our self‑confidence and our self- respect. My second thesis is that abandoning Western rationalism has no discouraging political implications. It leaves the Enlightenment political project looking as good as ever. The only reason we could have for abandoning that project would be that we had dreamed up a better one. But we have not. Nothing should be allowed to displace utopian political hope except the glimpse of an even better utopia than the one previously imagined. Dismissive attitudes toward bourgeois liberal politics persist, I think, for no better reason than force of Marxist habit.

FOUCAULT’S ASSUMPTIONS ARE INCORRECT

1. FOUCAULT ONLY CONSIDERS EUROPEAN VIEWPOINTS

Edward Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 9.

On the other hand, his weaknesses were quite marked even though, I think, they did not seriously mar the quality and power of his fundamental points. The most striking of his blind spots was, for example, his insouciance about the discrepancies between his basically limited French evidence and his ostensibly universal conclusions. Moreover, he showed no real interest in the relationships his work had with feminist or postcolonial writers facing problems of exclusion, confinement, and domination. Indeed his Eurocentrism was almost total, as if history itself took place only among a group of French and German thinkers. And as the goals of his later work became more private and esoteric, his generalizations appeared even more unrestrained, seeming by implication to scoff at the fussy work done by historians and theorists in fields he had disengaged from their grasp.

Barry Allen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON MICHAEL FOUCAULT, p. 75.

Foucault shares philosophy’s traditional bias in favor of a unit of knowledge that is logical, propositional, statement like, and valued for its truth. His conception is completely biased toward knowledge discursively articulated, as statement, definition, measurement, classification, and so on. He cannot see nondiscursive knowledge except as translated into discourse. He admits there is something more to knowledge than statements, mentioning “institutions, techniques, social groups, [and] perceptual organizations.” Yet only discourse synthesizes these into a coherent discursive formation and gives them formal value as knowledge. “[The] prediscursive is still discursive...One remains within the dimensions of discourse.”
3. FOUCAULT’S INFORMATION REGARDING INSTITUTIONS OF POWER IS INCORRECT

Marie-Rose Logan, Assistant Professor of French, Italian, and Humanities at Rice University, AFTER FOUCAULT, p. 103-104.

When reading the essays devoted respectively by George Hupert to The Order of Things and by H. C. Midelford to Madness and Civilization, one is tempted to quip with Allan Megil: “Foucault was an animal of a sort that Anglo-American historians had never seen before.” They perceive Foucault as a fashionable Left Bank thinker whose criteria for historical research were at best questionable; they are quick to point out errors in his information. For instance, Huppert - quite rightly - states that several quotations including those from Belon and Montaigne are “garbled up.” Conversely, Midelfort summons evidence to prove that in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, “many of the mad were in fact confined to small cells of jails or even domestic cages, and not just gate towers as Foucault suggests.” Since he is writing nearly twenty years after the publication of Madness and Civilization, Midelfort has to contend with a wealth of cross-disciplinary responses to Foucault’s book. This he does by taking a harsh stance: “Indeed, in his quest for the essence of an age, its episteme, Foucault seems simply to indulge a whim for arbitrary and witty assertion so often that one wonders why so much attention and praise continue to fall his way.” In his 1973 condemnation of Foucault, Huppert had already anticipated Midelfort’s criticism: “He claims, within the chosen stratum, to understand not this or that idea, movement, or school: he claims total understanding.”