Forget Foucault?

The Times Literary Supplement is the latest front in what might be termed the post-Theory’s Empire Theory Wars or the five-millionth battle in the Continental philosophy bash-athon or the dullest debate in the whole history of philosophy, depending on your perspective. Scull comes out with this piece on Foucault, yeah, talking all like shit about his lack of rigour in his historical scholarship, right, all that stuff like his sources are shit, yeh, saying shit like my man Michel is all like “cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers” and whatnot. Serious.

Weirdly, Scull says at the end of his piece “willing to trust in the ignorance and the credulity of his customers”. Is he suggesting that cynically Foucault wrote a controversal argument about the relation of reason to madness, packing it full of shoddy research with the intention of shifting units? Of making sure he hits the big seller list? One suspects that his own work on madness and the way in which the label madness, as Foucault suggests, is often used as a label even under the guise of ’science’ for those we find socially undesirable, and that ’scientific’ knowledge is used to secure claims to power and that ’science’ is often unchecked because it is ’science’, might well have only been published in the light of the work that he criticises as basically dishonest. Not that he should feel the need to genuflect too much, but a little caution might be neccesary. In addition, though the book Madness and Democracy by Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain who Scull quotes positively seems to offer, though contra-Foucault’s understanding of the great confinement, follows a Foucaultian line in relating power/knowledge and showing how something perhaps somewhat marginal, like the treatment of the insane, created some major change, like the understanding of the self and the world of the political in the establishment of liberalism. Working on madness, Scull seems unable to escape a Foucaultian paradigm as much as he would wish.

Meanwhile, Colin Gordon turns in a far fairer and less polemic review, that to be honest is far better and he does help run a sodding NHS trust. I’ll quote the conclusion at length, because it’s rather good.

After we have taken proper note of the descriptive and analytical richness, the subtlety and methodological resourcefulness, and the nuanced synchronic and diachronic discriminations in Foucault’s account of an epoch and its end, questions remain about the key connection which the narrative structure of the book is designed to powerfully articulate, the idea of a linkage between the self-affirmation of early modern philosophical reason and the social repression of unreason as identified in the form of disordered conduct. The connection would not appear to be always direct or straightforward. The same king who, in 1657, decreed the establishment of the Hôpital Général of Paris, decreed the 1671 ban on the teaching of Cartesian philosophy in French colleges and universities. What, if any, is, and what precisely did Foucault take to be, the logical or material link between the Cartesian cogito, reason of state and the subject-matter of Delamare’s Traité de police? Or alternatively, for the English historian, what are the linkages between Leviathan, Locke and Poor Law reform (James Tully has made useful progress on parts of this question)? One still dreams of a generation of professional historians prepared to grasp and willing to engage with such questions — as receptively, indeed, as the generation of French historians (Braudel, Mandrou, Le Goff) who were prepared to appreciate and engage with Foucault’s work as a cutting-edge contribution to their field, rather in the same way that an Irish historian, Peter Brown, was creatively engaging at about the same time with the anthropology of Mary Douglas. These questions are not answered to our — nor doubtless to his — full satisfaction in Foucault’s text. There is now a burgeoning academic sub-literature of complaint about the things which Foucault left undone, as though he had neglected his duty to write his readers’ books as well as his own. We are not, however, forbidden from attempting some of those uncompleted tasks ourselves. In any event, it is fitting, even from our latter-day vantage, to appreciate to what extent this was a book in which new, and still pertinent, forms of historical interrogation were being invented — a work which, at the cost to the reader of a modest effort, may still offer possibilities of access to ‘another figure of truth’.

SEK over at The Valve has waded in to the muddy and boring waters, The Valve being an institution whose love of Theory is extremely well know. His post, which notes Foucault’s own insistence on care with sources and critiques the review, and the comment thread is pretty interesting. Scott’s view might well be somewhat similar to my own: useful concepts, good ideas, possibly some suspect and occasionally shoddy execution. But as Gordon says, why don’t we attempt to finish the job?

Yet in all this, sanity must prevail among all this (History Of) madness in the form of Craig at theoria:blog, who points out that by the standards of people who actually study the work of Foucault (like I believe he does) History of Madness is considered to be outside the canon of his mature work and the periodisation of it. The considerable fuss this has all kicked up is strange considering that what they are essentially all critiquing is the man’s dissertation that few of his scholar believes is central. As someone calling themselves old points out on an earlier thread over there, chiding Foucault “for not refering criticizing the first part, written c. 1960, for only using one post wwII source is not a little like fulminating today over a long, groundbreaking article on Protestant Pietism referring to just one piece since the fall of the berlin wall”.

But more importantly why is scholar-gets-bad-review so unbelievably shocking anyway? Especially for a scholar whose work depends so much on history, history that so many people are able to challenge. In this way, critiques of Foucault remind me of those of Macintyre and Milbank: he read x wrong, y didn’t really influence that or that or that. These seem to be a rather dull avoidance of the ideas at stake, probably more so in the case of these other figures than Foucault, as they are probably less historical than he was at least attempting to be.

But isn’t this all very very old news indeed, that Foucault might be wrong on some of the historical points and that academic historians like Scull may contest him? The Journal of the History of Ideas published an article way back in 1987 by Allan Megill that statistically analysed the reaction to Foucault by historians. Naturally, their responses are a mixed bag. But is this news?

Foucault Blog will no doubt keep everyone involved up to date as this ‘debate’ rumbles on.