Michel Foucault anyone?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Not quite. I did a lot of work on literary theory, half as general background, half as assigned reading. I have, I would argue, read most of the major players, and am familiar with almost all of the big guns of criticism.

Anyway, when you deal with academics, they tend to try to groom you to fit their opinion. They seem to like the conversation, yet at the same time want you to see the world through their lens. They instinctively seem to have a desire to teach, and in the academic world, teaching is turned into quoting very easily.

So much so, I would argue, in the 90s everyone had basically read Foucault and others and they were required. Every chapter of a book needed to begin with a long post-modern epigraph. Theoretical lenses and gendered language (meaning, expressing the world in terms of phallus and vagina) became a must.

So, when I got my big starting kicks, I guess I was groomed to fit into that groove, especially by some of the Japanologists I studied under. The scholars of English I generally studied under tended to be historians for the most part not concerned with theoretical nonsense - a Spenser specialist, and Chaucerian, an Eliot authority, and a Canadianist. I had one professor from Berkley (a specialist on Joyce) lecture about nonsense, mixing in theoretical crap, and then ranting how she was not being rehired for the next term and that we should petition. The majority of my theoretical background actually came from professors in their late 30s, who seemed so preoccupied with their theoretical perspectives that they lost track of their own work - it became reading Foucault in Salman Rushdie, or Edward Said reads Jamaica Kincaid.

I think my big break seems to have come from the Eliot specialist, who really groomed me, I guess, and a historian I did research under specializing in modern Korean History, and researching domesticity. He I think was the first person to tell me not everyone is a post-modernist, and not everybody subscribes to this theoretical stuff.


As for the chicks, well, for the theory girls, they all seemed groomed and ready to drop names whenever they could. They always seemed to smoke, pretend to be political, have dark senses of irony, and, ironically, have boat loads of money from their parents. It is a form of snobbery in the worst sense, these girls who would sit their ranting about the world and gender issues, meanwhile exploiting the system that their parents worked so hard to ruin. Who really cares if someone can understand Zizeck - he is not actually relevant outside of a very small community of a certain type of reader.

The historian girls are more fun anyway, they are far more down to earth, and they don't smoke. I am more interested in talking, or going out with women who I can talk to about something other than education-related, or theory-related material. In the end, the people one likes best are those they can get along with outside of a fixed environment. Theory people always seem to have something to prove, and offer the most bland form of conversation that makes you wonder if you are arguing with them, or their reading list.

Man, I know exactly the kind of people you're talking about, but I haven't encountered many. Maybe it's because I go to a smaller, cheaper school, but there really aren't many theory advocates among my fellow students. A lot of classes I've had turn into discussions on why the theory we read was BS, and that includes the professor's perspectives. It's not that we write off the theory, just that we're allowed to see it from both sides.

Maybe that's a good thing about cheap state schools; the English professors don't have to suck up to some sort of establishment. Most professors I've had care more about the text than the theory.

[dark desire]

JBI

That was ... something. I had been feeling much too pressurized mentally about assimilating theory. Trying to adapt too much to it. I was not realizing that it was exhausting and the effort was not a pleasurable experience. Because I had been going quite passionately (due to personal reasons) about increasing my scant knowledge about the field, I got too entangled in things that I did not enjoy much and did not realize that I was not enjoying this.

Your post did something that often books are not able to do. I feel relieved from a lot pf pressure that I was exerting on myself. Art is art, a form of deception to reveal some truth. I remember the end of Dorian Gray's preface - All art is quite useless. I don't know much about what theorists do. As I am new to the field I like the newer perspectives they bring to my thinking. Even though I have not encountered the kind of people you mentioned I can imagine the frustration.

I want to flatter you with more words but I do not really have much to say (uneducated as I am :-D). To your possible annoyance I'd still like to come back to you after reading Foucault - either frustrated or impressed. I have read people praising you across different threads. Now I have an idea why.

[Drkshadow03]

I think a good approach to Critical Theory is to treat it like more traditional philosophy, but a philosophy that is particularly interested in language, discourse, power, and politics, especially as these phenomena intersect. I think Plato for example is worth reading, but that doesn't mean I need to buy into everything he says or necessarily agree with him. I would suggest treating Foucault, Derrida, and their ilk the same way.

I took an entire course on Foucault in Grad School. I'm actually glad I took the course, even though, I'm not a huge Foucault fan. As others have already stated a lot of his work is smoke and mirrors with dubious methodology.

His basic points can be summarized:

1) All discourse reflects certain dominant themes that preoccupy a time period. History shouldn't be seen as a linear story moving forward where one event leads to the next, but as a series of vertical breaks defined by their unique discourses (epistemes). A person from one era thinks of prison/sexuality/whatever in radically different way than someone from another era to the point where they wouldn't be able to truly understand each other's conception of the topic even when speaking the same language.

2) Every time you speak or think or write you're using discourse. Knowledge and power are intimately intertwined. Any thought you have is a discourse, any idea you can articulate is a discourse, and any thought or idea you're capable of having in the first place is limited through your episteme (the dominant ideas of your historical period). Therefore since discourse is such a defining a feature it is a type of power. Power circulates through discourse.
As discourse changes with one episteme to the next so do power relationships associated with those discourses. Discourses have the power to shape a person's personality and thoughts. Knowledge about a person or type of people set down in books, newspaper articles, etc. literally defines the person or type of people (hence it exerts power over them by defining them). It also means power is everywhere. It isn't just something from the top down like traditional theories of power, but flows from the bottom up too since power is associated with speech, thoughts, ideas, and books. After all, everyone uses discourse the moment they open their mouths to speak.

3) Knowledge through power shapes our subjectivity by defining us and limiting what we can and cannot think in the first place. Instead of being a unique little snowflake, my personality and thoughts are a product of various discourses that exist during my episteme. My identity has been shaped by various cultural discourses and the power structures associated with them. Therefore, any idea you have, any word you speak, is really just a mechanism for continuing the flow of power through discourse, which then circulates to define and shape other people via the discourse. Every thought and idea from the most fundamental parts of your worldview to the type of clothes you wear to your deepest sexual desires is literally a product of power as it infiltrates us via knowledge.

4) In his final phase, Foucault looks back at the Ancient Greeks and the Care of the Self and Parrhesia (truth-speaking) as a method of developing some personal space to create our own subjectivity like a work of art by drawing on the margins of society (things that are part of the power structures, but small part) and being self-reflective and letting others who are less powerful speak hard truths to us.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I think a good approach to Critical Theory is to treat it like more traditional philosophy, but a philosophy that is particularly interested in language, discourse, power, and politics, especially as these phenomena intersect. I think Plato for example is worth reading, but that doesn't mean I need to buy into everything he says or necessarily agree with him. I would suggest treating Foucault, Derrida, and their ilk the same way.

This is probably the best suggestion made when it comes to reading theory. Before knowing otherwise, I always put theory and criticism in the same category, but now know how completely different the two are. Theory really is often more like philosophy--it's just the thoughts of someone, usually ambiguous and dubious, and one can't help but notice when reading theory nothing is ever cited. When you read criticism it's completely different. Citations abound, the thoughts and points are often direct, or at least more direct, and criticism will actually deal with literature--there's plenty of "literary" theory that barely mentions any literature at all, and sometimes none.

I can't help but also notice that what Drk says above is pretty easy to understand, unlike actually reading Foucault.

[cafolini]

I think that when the Freemasons won in 1945, the Fabians like Foucault and Bernard Shaw became obsolete, although the ulterior Masons encouraged Fabianism more than vaguely since the times of the defeat of the Spanish armada, when the important bankers moved from Spain to England and never went back.

[OrphanPip]

Foucault isn't always as dense as people make him out to be. His main problem is that you have to read 20 pages of rambling before he gets to 1-2 pages where he lays out his actual point.

[Kafka's Crow]

Great to see that theory is still alive and kicking up controversies left right and centre, a sure sign of vitality. I re-returned to University in 2000 after a hiatus of almost a decade. This was all the rage then. I thought it would not last and would be superseded by something else in near future. The Fashionable Nonsense had dealt the death-blow to theory only recently and people believed that it was game over. You folks are still studying all that. Amazing! I was 'groomed' by theorists who were still wringing their hands after the infamous 'Sokal affair'. Well, nothing is changed since then, eh?

As far as Foucalt is concerned, take what makes sense to you and leave what doesn't. I picked his ideas on Power and dominant discourse and it made sense to me. The rest is verbosity in my humble opinion. I would not say he was not important. He provided this crowbar to pry open and deconstruct the discourse which will always come handy. The story behind every story, the real story.

[OrphanPip]

I'm not sure the Sokal Affair is all that relevant, it is more evidence of poor editorial practice in the humanities than evidence of the weakness of theory. There is an unfortunate tendency for certain people working in the humanities to overreach and try to speak to disparate fields of knowledge which they have no expertise in, which should be a no-no for any serious academic. There have been more than a few cases of bad or nonsensical science getting past editorial boards in science journals as well though.

Edit: It is difficult in general for anyone trying to assure the quality of academic work in the humanities because of the lack of an agreed upon universal methodology. In the sciences there are strict procedures that have to be followed, and conditions which have to be met, for an article to be published. This means that usually when something gets past the editors of a science journal it is because they fudged some numbers, the worst cases are when shoddy methodology is used but the editors still let it through. There's no easy answer to quality control in the humanities, ultimately the measure of worth comes down to citation and influence.

[Shevek]

I took a sociology course called "Work, Industry and Occupations" that I thought would intersect with my interest in labour history. Unsurprisingly (at least in hindsight), it was basically a theory course. The obligatory Marx, Weber and Foucault were there, but rather than study the lives of workers the professor wanted the class to read chapters from neo-Marxist theory books. I found the only interesting applications of theory were from authors who actually used evidence to outline why they arrived at their theory. Most of them, however, seemed more concerned with disentangling (and in many cases, further entangling) theoretical webs spun by their fellow academics.

My experience in the course suggested to me that theory itself is not nonsense, but most theoreticians insist on being nonsensical. The professor barely questioned the over-saturation of theory in his field -- the exams and papers prompted students to "compare" various theories in a few paragraphs. No actual research was required to get a good grade. I am still longing for an interesting labour history course at my university, but for now I'll wade through journals for the odd article on Canadian working-class culture that does not use Marx as a lens to see everything.

[Anton Hermes]

Foucault isn't always as dense as people make him out to be. His main problem is that you have to read 20 pages of rambling before he gets to 1-2 pages where he lays out his actual point.

I agree. I read The Order of Things and found it pretty clear, although at times he belabored points I didn't feel warranted so much attention. But he's a much more interesting writer than Derrida, whose writing I find insufferable.

I'm not sure the Sokal Affair is all that relevant, it is more evidence of poor editorial practice in the humanities than evidence of the weakness of theory.

True. Sokal was opposed only to theory trespassing into scientific territory, which has its own protocols. Literary theorists have no business discussing scientific matters they can't understand, and Sokal exposed their presumption.

[Kafka's Crow]

I agree. I read The Order of Things and found it pretty clear, although at times he belabored points I didn't feel warranted so much attention. But he's a much more interesting writer than Derrida, whose writing I find insufferable.

If you think Derrida is difficult, try Deleuze and Guattari. Derrida is one theorist I can't get enough of. I have read many, many books by him yet there is so much more to be read. I, usually, don't read whole books by theorists, I rather pick and choose what I can make sense of (as in case of Foucalt). Alain Badiou is another theorist I don't find unreadable.

[Anton Hermes]

If you think Derrida is difficult, try Deleuze and Guattari. Derrida is one theorist I can't get enough of.

I don't necessarily find him difficult. I just don't get a lot out of his word salads.

I guess I have a low threshold for frogwash.

[dark desire]

If you think Derrida is difficult, try Deleuze and Guattari. Derrida is one theorist I can't get enough of. I have read many, many books by him yet there is so much more to be read. I, usually, don't read whole books by theorists, I rather pick and choose what I can make sense of (as in case of Foucalt). Alain Badiou is another theorist I don't find unreadable.

I don't necessarily find him difficult. I just don't get a lot out of his word salads.

I guess I have a low threshold for frogwash.

Derrida tries to tell that words don't mean what they mean and he is trying to say this through words. This is what I have understood of him. While starting Derrida was fascinating, I guess I am not that interested in this theory. I don't want to chase the elusive ghost that language cannot catch. I am happy with the ghost's ghostly presence.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Isn't Derrida the guy all about how words are just signals to our minds that tell us to think of a certain thing and the words themselves are just meaningless? I don't know, I was probably dozing during that class.

[Calidore]

Isn't Derrida the guy all about how words are just signals to our minds that tell us to think of a certain thing and the words themselves are just meaningless? I don't know, I was probably dozing during that class.

Did you tell the professor that you were simply preventing his meaningless words from influencing your mind?