"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." ~ Kay, Men in Black (1997)
The day I realized I wanted to get a PhD in rhetoric was the day that my wonderful rhetorical theory instructor at Ripon College, Professor Jody Roy, lectured about Foucault. It certainly wasn't a comprehensive overview of Michel Foucault's theories; she talked about his theory of the episteme, the cultural system of knowledge production which comes to tyrannize our systems of determining truth. There was something about this concept that rang true to me, as someone who grew up in a town where cultural assumptions about normal and abnormal, right and wrong, were very narrow and seen as objective, and who often felt people jumped to conclusions about what they "knew" far too rapidly. Quite frankly, my mind was blown.
I dove into reading about Foucault.I discovered Judith Butler and read Gender Trouble, and finished my undergraduate career with a seminar paper about identity, gender, and alternate-world roleplaying games. I was ready to show the world of rhetoric that truth depends on power and that when we think we might be free, we're most likely to be coopted by power at that very instant. I began the rhetoric-track communication PhD at Texas A&M armed with readings by McKerrow, McGee, and Charland.
Then I found out that rhetoric actually found out somewhere around 1988 that, yes, truth is created by power and all that. Not only was I informed by my colleagues that I was late to the poststructural party, but the very concepts that I had wanted to work with - individual subjectivities, a rejection of totalizing theories of history - might have been complicit in the present economic crisis which was materially affecting people I cared about, including my father, who lost his collective bargaining rights as a Wisconsin state employee during Scott Walker's reforms. A persuasive essay by Dana Cloud (pdf link) made the case that Foucauldianism was actually a dead-end, a complicit ideology that stripped academia of its relevance. On top of all of this, my first year in graduate school was also marked with calls from within academia as well as beyond it to make the work we do in universities more relevant and less "ivory-tower" - something which the in-depth analysis of minute cultural norms and obscure subcultures seems to elude.
So that's my personal story of discovering ambivalence about Michel Foucault. But today I'd like to make the case that Foucault is still relevant, and that just because we need to get out of the ivory tower and deal with some of the real issues of alienation that are manifesting in today's society. Without commenting on specific Foucauldian scholarship, or on Foucault's (rather contentious and heavily criticized) historiography, I think there are three central lessons that make it imperative to continue engaging with him.
#1. The dangers of consensus. Foucault entered into a debate with the Frankfurt school and scholars like Herbert Marcuse who were (justly) preoccupied with a militaristic and economically oppressive system run by particular elites - a system which, arguably, persists to this day. His critiques suggested that by focusing on ideal "end-states" of reform where society was more just, these theorists were actually masking new forms of oppression that they could create when they shifted social norms. Often reduced to the sort of simplistic "both-sides-do-it!" sort of argument favored by political pundits on network television, Foucault's critique is more accurately a reinforcement of Marx's advocacy for "permanent revolution" and never being satisfied with the status quo. This critique, I think, still needs to be reiterated when debating public dialogue and "citizenship" - a popular trend in rhetoric - because all too often it becomes tempting to create spaces for public debate that ignore the power relationships that exist outside of them.
#2. Oppression happens inside people as well as out in culture. Foucault's theories of biopower and panopticism, while perhaps not psychologically or historically rigorous, remind us that we can be complicit in actions that don't serve our own interests, without being actively deceived into buying into a singular hegemonic ideology like Capitalism-with-a-capital-C. So many of the habits we learn - including the use of social networking sites we use to spread posts like this one - serve any number of interests, and we modify our behavior to serve multiple interested parties.
#3. Identities are problematic, but they both divide and unify. What gets lost in a lot of the critiques of "identity politics" that I hear about these days - critiques which are often aimed at scholarship drawing on Foucault's work - is that we are identified as one thing or another by society, and this matters. Foucault didn't take the easy road out by arguing that we can just handwave away the labels society puts on us (or that we put on ourselves), and the answer to this isn't simply to pick a broader identity, like "worker," that we can all agree upon. Instead, we have to recognize the limits of the labels society puts on us, which are both arbitrary and essential at the same time.
I'm not sure that I've successfully managed to persuade anyone that Foucault is worth engaging in, but I hope I've at least conveyed why I still think he's important to read and cite. I'm very interested in intersecting his work with that of some of his harshest critics, including not only Habermas but also materialists like Bruno Latour, who would probably resent being lumped in with any sort of critical theory. More of this to come!
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