James Miller on Foucault and other things

Miller, in addition to writing good books, is an excellent teacher as well. He teaches at the Graduate Faculty of New School University, where he teaches poli sci and philosophy and runs the Liberal Studies department.

Reading the New Criterion Review of Miller’s biography that Mr. Lourier was a strange experience. The entire review seemed designed to play upon long established prejudices without really engaging any of Foucault’s ideas. I’m not sure what it’s conservative audience could gain from the review but a shallow confirmation of unexamined views. I’m not very familiar with New Criterion, but is that their usual style?

Reading the New Criterion Review of Miller’s biography that Mr. Lourier was a strange experience. The entire review seemed designed to play upon long established prejudices without really engaging any of Foucault’s ideas. I’m not sure what it’s conservative audience could gain from the review but a shallow confirmation of unexamined views. I’m not very familiar with New Criterion, but is that their usual style?

Miller is also the author of the classic history of the early New Left in the U.S., Democracy is in the Streets–a wonderful book. The fact that he turned from the SDS to Foucault (ending up, despite his own misgivings, rather sympahetic) might say something about the the history of the left after the sixties in the U.S.

I think it’s worth asking how relevant the biography genre is to engaging Foucault, who himself was pretty adamant about putting the focus on the ideas rather than on personalities (this being one of the sources of his contempt for psychoanalysis). I for one would rather see more people reading his work directly, since only about 3% of those who feel keen to comment on it seem to have gotten around to this. The Foucault Reader, an old collection from Pantheon (1984) is still indispensable for this purpose and a useful corrective to the great masses of silliness that are still flung around about Foucault (eg. that he was a “postmodern” thinker, that he was a “philosopher of discontinuity,” that he was “anti-Enlightenment” and so on).

I’ve always been a little puzzled by Foucault’s reputation as a difficult read. I can see it with other continental theorists, but Foucault has never struck me as being particularly unclear or as anything other than a rather methodical species of positivist. Maybe it’s because so many readers are coming to him through a fog of mumbo-jumbo about “postmodernism” or preconceptions about his “leftist” politics? It just really strikes me as odd.

“a rather methodical species of positivist”?

You’re kidding, right? Even Foucault’s greatest admirers don’t think of his genealogies as being very historically scrupulous. And to miss the more arcanely visionary aspects of his work you have to concentrate on a pretty narrow part of its spectrum. One of the nice features of Miller’s book, by the way, comes in how he shows that Foucault was in fact not all that “adamant about putting the focus on the ideas rather than on personalities.” Like just about everything else, he was maddeningly ambivalent and ambiguous on this issue.

Even Foucault’s greatest admirers don’t think of his genealogies as being very historically scrupulous.

Nor do I — by “methodical” I was referring to his prose style, not his research methodology. And I should hope it’s obvious that being wrong about certain things is not mutually exclusive with being a positivist.

If I said that Nietzsche had never struck me as anything other than a rhetorically ornate specimen of British empiricism, I might have a point, but you’d probably expect me to elaborate.

Actually, I don’t think that specific point would need much further elaboration (and I happen to agree with it), but I see what you’re getting at. As it happens, Paul Veyne makes the point at length in the admittedly somewhat fawningly-titled but still very perceptive article “Foucault Revolutionizes History,” which can be found in the 1996 collection Foucault and his Interlocutors.

I second McGruff’s comments. Of all the things one might legitimately say Foucault was (and I do not think it is silly or misinformed, even based on The Foucault Reader, my copy of which is thoroughly dog-eared, to say he was “anti-Enlightenment”), of all the things, you can’t possibly call him a “methodical positivist”. Both halves of that characterization are wrong no matter how you slice it.

I don’t find Foucault all that difficult to read compared to many of the canonical figures in critical theory. But I think one reason he is perceived as difficult is that he had a lifelong habit (very much on display in the aforementioned Foucault Reader) of contradictorily abjuring or repudiating common interpretations of his work. If you chart out all those statements, they often cancel each other out, leaving it not at all clear what he meant to say, leaving it possible that he did not mean, for very deliberate reasons, to be “clear” in the sense of provisioning a useful foundational body of theory.

One thing that makes Foucault so attractive, however, is the clear sense of engagement that runs through all of his work. He was a social critic, without a doubt; his work often gives the sense that he is exposing or revealing something hidden, shameful, suppressed, even when he goes to considerable lengths (as in The History of Sexuality) to reject the entire idea of an emancipatory or liberating project.

Responding to the Iranian Revolution, Foucault made a strong effort to disntguish between the Marxian theory and practice of revolution–which he disliked for the way it “constituted a gigantic effort to demosticate revolts within a rational and controllable history”–and what he called by contrast “the enigma of revolts.” To wit:

“The enigma of revolts. For anyone who did not look for the ‘underlying reasons’ for the movement in Iran but was attentive to way in which it was experienced, for anyone who tried to understand what was going on in the heads of these men and women when they were risking their lives, one thing was striking. They inscribed their humiliations, their hatred for the regime, and their resolve to overthrow it at the bounds of heaven and earth, in an envisioned history that was religious jut as much as it was political. . . . it was also a question of millennial sacrifices and promises.” All this, Foucault adds, is reminiscent of “old dreams that the West had known in times past, when people attempted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on political ground.”

I think it’s pretty clear from this and other writings that Foucault admired the Iranian revolution because, in addition to being a challenge to American imperialism, it did seem like an apocalyptic event. That seems a spiritual as much as a political interest to me.

Also, it’s true, Foucault does write wonderfully, but that doesn’t mean that he’s easy to read. Lucidity and beauty of expression are not inevitably the same thing and in the case of a writer who was often interested in being evasive or difficult, I’d suggest, could quite naturally pull in different directions.

Finally, since this thread began as a discussion of James Miller, it’s really quite unfair to suggest he exoticized Foucault’s life. It’s hard to imagine a book that makes a greater effort to be thoughtful and generous.

My point again isn’t that Foucualt made false claims, or even that he was speculative. It’s that he was more interested in telling provocative stories than in the difference between true and false claims–nor did his thinking leave him much ground for thinking the difference mattered. If he was a methodical positivist, he’d care a lot about evidence, wouldn’t he? He didn’t.

I think you’re wrong, too, Dr. Slack about my reading of Foucault’s reading of the Iranian revolution. And, though I find it an unattractive view, I’m not pissed off at Foucault for having it. The point of that passage, I think, is not just that the Iranians politicized religion, but that the event–like May ’68–was an enigmatic, non-rationalizable experience that transcended merely mundane political concerns. I suspect that it was for similar reasons that the Iranian revolution appealed more to him than other examples of resistance to American imperialism. But then, I also think that, in fact, he was ambivalent about medieval spirituality.

It’s an appealing view to say that Foucault “boils down to ‘history should be the study of specifics rather than overarching teleological themes'” (is that a quote?) but I don’t think it really fits the books Foucault wrote or the whole range of his concerns. It’s hard to conceive of how an “episteme” could be a specific, rather than an overarching theme–or how say, “panopticism” could be. I’m not saying those aren’t ineresting stories, but they don’t look like methodical postivism to me.

I’m not sure how positivism makes Foucault relevant either. After all, you could get that from plenty of sources. Foucault was exciting for other reasons, and I think Timory Burke is right that being anti-enlightenment is a good part of it. Why else would Madness and Civilization or Discipline and Punish be important? Granted there might be something fundamentally impossible about the stance, but it wasn’t like foucault to worry too much over that kind of thing.

You’re right, Dr. Slack. I’m not comfortable describing Foucault’ prose style as methodically positivist. First because I don’t think the notion makes sense. Can a prose style be positivist? Second, because I think it’s the wrong description. Foucault seems to me variously lucid, enigmatic, lyrical, obscure, and more. To describe his writing as methodical seems to me to narrow it beyond recognition.

I think likewise to call him a positivist historian is possible only if you narrow Foucault’s work to an unrecognizable thinness. (It’s hard for me to see “the refutation of what he thought of as false claims” as the “main jist” of his writing or that his work “boils down” to the claim that “history should be the study of specifics”; I don’t recall him saying that, and it seems to me a pretty narrow construal of his work.) Or, vice versa, if you so broaden the meaning of positivist as to strip it of much descriptive value. If positivist merely means that Foucault didn’t think his ideas came “from some supernatural source or divine order,” then there’ s not much to distinguish him from any other historian, or indeed from almost any modern intellectual. Who apart from believers and straw men aren’t positivists? Why would you need Foucault to represent such an attitude?

Saying that “the whole idea of the ‘episteme’ was that it was supposed to be a direct engagement with how the people of a specific period constructed and viewed their society” seems to me to be such a broadening of positivism. The point of the episteme, as I understood it, was that discovering it was not direct at all. No one in the Renaissance said, hey, I’m in the business of representing. Epistemes, I think, were rather supposed to be the unstated conditions of knowledge that historical actors depended on without being aware of their existence. I think (in what seems to me an anti-positivist line) Foucault said in The Archaeology of knowledge that his research at that point was aimed at discovering the horizon against which any individual datum is perceptible. There’s nothing direct about discovering a horizon that historical actors don’t know exists. (If I remember right, too, he begins that book by saying that discontinuity was exactly what he was interested in.)

If such a horizon is not an overarching, or underarching theme or category, I don’t know what would be. And it seems to me that the episteme—and, less dramatically, other Foucauldian concepts like panopticism—require no less taking on faith than the windiest form of historical explanation.

Where exactly did I get the idea that Foucault valued the Iranian revolution for the way it “transcended merely mundane political concerns”? Fair question. This way. Praising the Iranian revolution, Foucault went out of his way to contrast it to traditional leftist politics which he blamed for their effort “to domesticate revolts within a rational and controllable history”—precisely the path, he then went on to suggest, that was being forged by Islamic theocrats. Elsewhere he suggests (amazingly, I think) that social security and the welfare state do the same thing. And, far from contending that there was no such thing as mundane political experience, Foucault sometimes said as much about parties and electoral politics—all of which he disdains, saying at one point (Power/Knowledge, I believe), perhaps we have come to the end of politics and at another point (in the Foucault reader) that what interests him is much more morals than politics, or, politics as ethics and that he has particularly wanted “to question politics.” Around the same time, he laments that the “spontaneous” movement in which he had put his hopes had been a disappointment.

Through all these cases, I think, there’s a fairly clear pattern: ordinary politics (whether of the revolutionary left, of Islamic theocracy, or of representative democracy) are so administered, rationalized, and predictable as to be worthless. But sometimes there are spontaneous eruptions of resistance that make life worthwhile. These are inherently enigmatic and they recall a dream that once existed in the West. Add to that the fact that Foucault celebrated the Iranian revolutionaries, as he did those in Tunis and Paris, especially for the fact that they risked their lives, and it seems fair to me to say that he wasn’t just describing the Iranian moment as millenarian, he was praising the way its spiritual revolt amounted to an unusual and heroic politics absent from the rest of life.