Avatar (2009)

NB: Spoiler alert!
My rating:**

Somewhat biased quick plot summary
A corporation supported by the military has its eye on a rare mineral called unobtanium which can be found in large quantities on a planet called Pandora. This planet is covered by primeval forest and inhabited by blue ‘noble savages’ with cultures reminiscent of those of indigenous North Americans. Scientists have also tagged along for the ride and have grown Pandoran bodies in vats to which they are able to transfer their human consciousnesses. The hero of the story, a disabled war veteran, is transferred into one of these bodies, is accepted into a tree tribe, falls in love with the daughter of the chief, ‘goes native’ and shows said natives how to rid themselves of evil Earth military industrial alliance.

Comments
I will take the opportunity to weigh in with the countless other comments on James Cameron’s new film Avatar. I will begin by saying that watching a film in 3D is a fun experience, blue is a lovely colour and plants that glow in the dark are great to look at. But all this visual expertise and burgeoning visual imagination is sadly let down by a story which is a rather pallid string of Disney cliches laced with highly questionnable social and political messages.

I always find American militarism in films extremely irritating. Militarism and nuking everything in sight is a common solution in American science fiction. As a variation on the theme, this film expresses moral outrage at these usual procedures and proposes another set of cliches in their place – a rather depressing set of cliches actually.Thus we are exhorted to all get back to nature and lose ourselves in the exotic Other, rather than trying to find a workable social solution to the situation in hand. Our science and knowledge is clearly useless and scientists are a bunch of ineffectual and effete individuals. The military industrial complex is populated by power and resource hungry psychopaths. It is far better to live in a dangerous jungle with no modern comforts, cinemas, libraries or modern medical science.

The protagonist completely loses himself in the Other, even to the extent of abandonning his clearly inferior and additionally disabled human body and the humans (described as ‘aliens’ at the end) are sent packing, back to their ‘dying world’ after being defeated by some stroppy armoured dinosaurs and bows and arrows mobilised by the human outsider. This outsider, in the fine tradition of other American films such as A Gentleman’s Agreement, Tootsie, Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai , demonstrates that the white American male is the only one who can show less powerful groups (Jews, women, Native Americans, fading Japanese warrior elites etc.) the way to salvation.

I personally would have liked to have seen the planet (which is clearly modelled on Gaia principles) come up with some nifty science fiction method of ridding itself of the humans. Giant trees uprooting themselves and joining the battle like the ents in Lord of the Rings, or a strange energy immobilising all the technology. Alternately (or additionally!) I would have liked to have seen the humans come to some kind of realisation and engage in the beginnings of social change and discussion rather than just a blanket self-destruct and expression of self-hatred.

It is hard to see why this film is described as ‘left-wing’ (or ‘liberal’ to use American terminology) – when its message is so conservative harking back as it does to hoary old myths of the noble savage and the purity of nature.

The Da Vinci Code (2003)

Dan Brown (2003). The Da Vinci Code. New York: Anchor.
My rating: **

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

What irritated me about this book was not so much the much fêted hilariously bad writing style, nor the erratic pacing which meant nothing much happened until the middle of this lengthy tome, but the presentation of fiction, myth and conspiracy theory as incontrovertibly true.

A friend recently sent me a link to a short series of most entertaining reviews in the New York Magazine of Dan Brown’s latest The Lost Symbol. One of the reviewers, Sam Anderson, makes the acute observation that perhaps one of the main attractions of Dan Brown’s novels is that readers feel as though they are learning interesting facts from his books. It is just somewhat unfortunate that a number of these facts aren’t – well – exactly true.

This same friend had also earlier sent me the links to linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum’s amusing blog posts here and here on Dan Brown’s writing style. As a result, I felt inspired to produce my own attempt at a Dan Brown opening sentence. As a bit of background here, over the last few years I have done rather a lot of housesitting.

Renowned housesitter, Clare, removed the bloodied claws of the ravening cats from her throat and kicked the snarling dog which had crushed her ankle between its hideous jaws across the room to join the writhing lizards she had plucked from her hair. Too late! With an awful groan the esteemed minder of houses, through the mists of galloping death, gazed longingly at the original Charles Blackman prints adorning the walls of the luxury mansion that was her latest and her last assignment. A last breath croaked from her torn throat as she helpless, turned to watch the silhouette of a brightly patterned and red eyed boa constrictor creep dangerously close from the distant end of the immense tree-lined drive.

Foucault and the neoliberal art of government

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

The art of government … which has now become the program of most governments in capitalist countries, absolutely does not seek the constitution of … [a] standardizing, mass society of consumption and spectacle, etcetera… It involves, on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises… An enterprise society and a judicial society, a society orientated towards the enterprise and a society framed by a multiplicity of judicial institutions, are two faces of a single phenomenon.

Michel Foucault, (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Course at the Collège de France. 1978-1979 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 149-50.

L’art de gouvernement … qui est devenu maintenant la programmation de la plupart des gouvernements en pays capitaliste [sic] … ce programmation ne cherche absolumment pas la constitution … [d'une] société uniformisante, de masse, de consommation, de spectacle etc… Il s’agit au contraire d’obtenir une société indexée non pas sur la marchandise et sur l’uniformité de la marchandise, mais sur la multiplicité et la différenciation des entreprises. … Société d’entreprise et société judiciaire, société encadrée par une multiplicité d’institutions judiciaires, ce sont les deux faces d’un même phénomène.

Michel Foucault, (2004) Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978-1979 Paris: Gallimard, Seuil, pp. 154-5.

Random thoughts in response
I have done a bit of chopping around of Foucault’s words here in the interests of succinctly summarising his argument. If the lecture (14 February 1979) these remarks come from is not amongst his best work and reads almost like a set of notes, or at least the first draft of empirical work to be worked over later, the enlightening insights and reversal of received ideas characteristic of most of his work are still in evidence. What I find fascinating about Foucault’s remarks here is how uncannily accurate they are (as was often the case in his work) in discerning emerging trends that some thirty years down the track we are now seeing in full flower – or perhaps in all their full horror.

Foucault takes to task standard – and usually Marxist – critiques of modern capitalist and liberal society which see it as a society of mass consumption. His argument is that we have moved beyond this into a governmental arrangement which incites the creation of multiple enterprises. With the existence of multiple enterprises and the inevitable friction between them, we also see the proliferation of endless forms of legal regulation to keep them all in balance.

As he says elsewhere in the same lecture, the homo Æconomicus that neo-liberal government is aiming to create is ‘not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production’. (p.152). There is now of course an enormous literature both inciting people to become entrepreneurs in every aspect of their existence – not just economic – and a perhaps less convincing literature criticising this goal. We are constantly invited to perform, to be ‘creative’, to ‘manage our own careers’, to be infinitely productive to the exclusion of both personal well-being and the well-being of others

Each one of us is also expected to be entirely responsible for administering the economic, health and other risks involved in our individual existences. As Foucault points out, according to this model, looking after members of the social body is not to be seen as a collective social endeavour, but as the personal responsibility of each individual. If for some reason you can’t acquire enough capital to take out the necessary insurance to guarantee your own survival, then you only have yourself to blame.

Neoliberal arts of government in the 21st century have engineered an unliveable society based on a combination of unending individual responsibility for ever increasing productivity and growth based on entrepreneurial principles, of individual responsibility for insurance against risk and an oppressive regulatory and legal apparatus which is necessary to manage the frictions between the ever increasing proliferation of individual enterprises. If one is not constantly creative, productive and entrepreneurial at both the economic and personal levels, one has no social visibility and no social value. This might go some way towards explaining the obsessive attachment to social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter where those involved are constantly producing and creating themselves in the most minute details of their daily existence and making that production of self visible to the rest of the social body.

For further discussion of this post see the Foucault blog

Professors as Writers (1990)

Robert Boice, Professors as Writers. A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, Stillwater: New Forums Press, 1990.
My rating: *****

Professors As Writers by Robert Boice

I have read quite a few books on writer’s block and Robert Boice’s work on this subject is by far the most helpful and practical. Even if this particular book is aimed specifically at academic writers, all other writers can benefit from its advice. Having said this, the problem of academic writer’s block is seldom addressed – with most manuals focusing on other types of writing.

In some ways, perhaps, academics are viewed as somewhat on the periphery of the general fold of ‘writers’. Academic writing is something that occurs without the romantic identity of ‘writer’ coming into play. There is an assumption, perhaps, that academic writing is merely reporting on research, rather than engaging in the creative craft shared by other writers.

There are rigorous and practical exercises in Boice’s book which include examining and changing the internal self talk that takes place when the writer thinks of writing. His plain, organised and painstaking academic approach is, for me at least, more helpful than some of the other new age and often slightly kitsch self help manuals available on the market.

The Singing Detective (2007)

Glen Creeber, The Singing Detective, London: BFI TV Classics, 2007.
My rating: ***

The Singing Detective by Glen Creeber

Television doesn’t always age well, but Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective more than twenty years later is still just as riveting and confronting. I saw the series when it originally aired in 1986 and was completely fascinated, even if I didn’t entirely understand it. Watching it at this remove, I have a better insight into what’s going on and the fascination remains.

It reminds me – as it did when I last saw it – of one of my favourite films, Alain Resnais’s 1977 film Providence. In this film, as in The Singing Detective, a seriously ill writer (played by John Gielgud) imagines a novel to keep himself sane and to distract himself from the pain. As in the later series, The Singing Detective, the narrative is fractured and layered and often interlaced with surrealist elements. The story is also continually interrupted by and affected by the real life plight of the author. Music is likewise centrally important.

The author of this BFI TV Classic book on The Singing Detective, Glen Creeber, notes that Resnais became a huge fan of Dennis Potter’s work and dedicated a film to him after his death: On connaît la chanson. There are many similarities between Renais’ approach and Potter’s, but the former has a lighter touch: a subtle humour and amusement pervades much of his work.

Creeber provides an interesting account of the series and makes the essential point that a television series is always a collaborative effort and it was not only Potter who made the series what it was. The director, Jon Amiel, who had a background as a script editor, insisted that Potter’s first draft of the series needed considerable changes. The actors – in particular Michael Gambon and Patrick Malahide were also crucial to the success of the series as was the incidental music in addition to the songs chosen by Potter.

Another interesting observation is Creeber’s report that Potter summarised the series as the invitation by Christ to the sick man in the gospels to ‘Pick up his bed and walk’.

Creeber’s treatment of The Singing Detective gives it a more recognisably ‘film studies’ treatment than do the authors of the BFI TV classics books on Doctor Who and Star Trek, making the book more skewed towards a purely academic audience. But arguably this is the type of audience The Singing Detective attracts in any case. One minor quibble I did have with his approach however is his reliance on Freudian and psychoanalytic approaches – but this might be just prejudice on my part as one could argue that the source material readily lends itself to this kind of treatment.

Star Trek (2008)

Ina Rae Hark, Star Trek. London: BFI publishing, 2008.

My rating: ***

Star Trek by Ina Rae Hark

The author of this book, Ina Rae Hark is a long-standing fan of the series, dating back to the original 1960s series. She is currently professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Carolina. In preparation for writing this short but detailed overview of a huge franchise, the author (re)watched a massive 700 episodes of all the Trek series.

She makes no bones about the fact that her two preferred series are the original and Deep Space 9. She also demytholigises Gene Roddenberry’s role in the series. It appears he was a womanising sex addict who stole other people’s work and was impossible to work with. Other sources indicate that he would change the canon of the series at a whim, at one stage saying that the original series was no longer canon and that Star Trek: The Next Generation was henceforth to be regarded as the true canon cancelling out earlier efforts.

Hark mounts some interesting arguments about some of the fears explored by each series. The original series she says, explored the contrast between embodied emotion and non-embodied intellect, coming squarely down on the side of the former. STNG demonstrated a fear of consciousness being invaded or taken over by another. Deep Space 9 expressed an anxiety about identity and its invasion, takeover or anihilation and the co-existence of multiple identities in one body or even bodies with no fixed identity like the shape changer Odo. Voyager played with themes of death and the afterlife in various guises. Enterprise exhibited fears of being held hostage or prisoner against one’s will. Hark argues that this latter fear may be as much the result of a post 9/11 American paranoia as the result of the writers and others involved in trying to perpetuate the Star Trek franchise under increasing pressure from changes in production companies and ratings requirements. (pp. 147-8).

I will take the opportunity to state my own preferences here. My preferred series is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Its critics lambast it for its too perfect characters, corporate overachievers, who avoid family entanglements and interpersonal conflict. Further, they inhabit a space ship which is always spotlessly clean and always luxurious – like the hotels preferred by the CEOs of 1990s corporations. As for myself, I found the overachieving calm orderliness soothing after a hard day at work. I also enjoyed the intellectual problem solving often presented in the episodes.

If there is one criticism I do agree with in relation to this series it is the use of the ‘reset button’ at the end of each episode. There is rarely any reference to previous episodes and nothing ever changes with a static status quo reigning from one episode to the next. This is obviously an artefact of the need to play the episodes out of order when the series went into American syndication, but it is very tedious for the long-term viewer and was already increasingly out of place in a world where fans could either cheaply tape the series or buy it on video. Incidentally, Hark seems to imply that the term ‘reset button’ was coined in response to Voyager (p. 130), but the context in which I personally first heard it was in relation to STNG. And it is obviously used extensively beyond Star Trek. It was Joss Whedon’s series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer which finally had the courage to adapt to changes in video recording technology and serialise mainstream genre television.

But even STNG is still not sufficient to tempt me to want to own the DVDs. I find I have generally exhausted my interest after one or two viewings of episodes. For all the elegance of the series and its interesting philosophical discussions, the characters are simply too bland and develop too slowly if at all. But I am less keen on the other series. The original I find unwatchably cheesy, and in spite of the mythology surrounding it, I find it too reflective of the imperialist, sexist and racist tropes of its time. The melodramatic acting also becomes tiresome.

As much as I would like to enjoy Deep Space 9, particularly after reading Hark’s account, I always stall in my viewing due to my general lack of interest in political intrigue involving struggles for territory and over the governmental or sovereign rule of populations. When these intrigues involve imaginary alien species my interest is even further diminished. This was also a stumbling block for me (apart from the endless tracts of pompous monologue) in relation to Deep Space 9’s rival space station series Babylon 5.

Voyager is depressing viewing as the lost spaceship becomes more and more isolated in its desperate adherence to Starfleet values at any cost, values which seem out of kilter with its surroundings and ultimately with the natural development of its crew members. Perhaps this feeling is generated by, as Hark interestingly explains, the lack of fit between the Star Trek status quo and the 1990s. She notes ‘The repeated rehearsals of disaster [with reset button at the end of the episodes in question] show a writing staff yearning to explore the grittier and edgier territory of 90s’ science fiction television. The repeated resets show the timidity about altering the status quo that was making the franchise increasingly irrelevant as it entered the twenty-first century.’ (p. 134)

The final series, Enterprise, is a ‘prequel’ to the other series and is notoriously the lowest rating of all the franchise. One of the problems, as Hark observes, was that the writers wanted to return to 1960s basics. She reports commercials for the show ran the line: ‘Experience a future when the Klingons were still bad guys, the women were green and the Captain got all the action’. After the cultural and gender diversity of the later series and their sometimes complex philosophical and ethical argumentation, this was not what the new millennium audience wanted to see. An even bigger mistake, Hark suggests, was turning the Vulcans into devious, manipulative racists (p. 145). Incidentally, this view of the Vulcans seems to have been taken up to some extent in J.J. Abrams 2009 ‘reboot’ film and is perhaps one of my major quibbles (amongst many) with this particular film

As a non-American viewer of Enterprise, I found the return to a certain chauvinistic American-ness and maleness – particularly emanating from the two leading male characters – rendered the series hard to watch. I have always felt more than a little ambivalent about the military and often imperialist framework of the entire franchise and its often unconscious assumptions of human (read American) superiority in the Trek universe. As the chorus of The Firm’s song ‘Star Trekkin” runs: ‘We come in peace. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill.’

I found T’Pol the Vulcan officer in Enterprise, the most interesting character with a wonderful performance by Jolene Blalock, who interestingly, as a long time Trek fan herself, voiced her dismay in an interview in The New York Times at some of the un-Trek like aspects of the new series (p. 140). The series did pick up and started to become more interesting towards the end before it was cancelled. Manny Coto, who created the first rate, but frustratingly cancelled, Canadian series Odyssey 5 for the cable channel Showtime in 2002, was brought in as executive producer for the last season and manage to engineer various improvements (p. 143).

To conclude this discussion, Hark’s book advances a number of interesting ideas and details about Star Trek which fans will no doubt be interested in discussing and picking apart and manages to pack a fairly detailed overview of the entire series into a fairly short space.

Doctor Who (2005)

Kim Newman, Doctor Who. London: BFI publishing, 2005.

My rating: ***

Doctor Who by Kim Newman

Kim Newman is a well-known and prolific author of genre novels, overviews on cult and horror film and TV and a reviewer for the film magazine Empire.

This book, an entry in the excellent BFI TV classics series, is an enjoyable if sometimes hastily written, short handbook. It manages to provide a nicely opinionated overview of ‘classic’ Doctor Who with a few references to the new post 2005 series with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.

There’s no strong argument unifying the book but there are a number of thought provoking tidbits, a few of which I will dip into below.

It is good to see Newman confirm my own long held prejudice that from ‘1963 to K9, Doctor Who was important and from 1977 to 1989 it wasn’t.’ (p. 7) Like Newman, I stopped watching not long after the introduction of K9, the metal robot dog, which Tom Baker would kick in frustration behind the scenes. I didn’t mind K9 so much as Baker’s increasing tendency to treat proceedings as all a bit of a joke. I was more interested in the serious science fiction offerings of the Troughton and Jon Pertwee eras. After around 1977, as Newman says, the series degenerated into failed comedy, pantomime and self-referential fan-fiction.

Newman also provides a number of other insightful observations. For example, in relation to the fixed (and ghastly) costumes of the later Doctor Who. These costumes he describes as a ‘comic-book invention … unsustainable in live-action where audiences wonder if the hero is wearing the same, never cleaned, never-worn-out clothes for years on end’ (p. 97) The earlier Doctors if they had a certain style (ie Jon Pertwee’s Carnaby St Edwardian style) they still had different sets of clothes to their wardrobe.

I also enjoyed Newman’s remark in relation to Who merchandising that it became difficult to be scared of monsters like the daleks that had been turned into soft toys. (Speaking of soft toys, there is an excellent blog at Live Journal titled Who_knits: Time and Double Pointed Needles in Space which details a variety of Dr. Who knitting projects. And this is by no means the only Dr. Who knitting site on the net.)

Newman also notes with a surprising ambivalence for someone who has been involved in cult genre and fandom for so long, ‘in the 1960s, fictional events were not obsessively covered by the national press. Now no popular television drama can surprise audiences by writing out a character through murder, marriage or act of God (or have them outed as gay or a serial killer) without a leak making the front page of the tabloids’ (p. 40) He is discussing here the lack of fanfare that heralded the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

It would have been interesting to see some further elaboration on why these changes have occurred. My own view is that this shift marks a welcome move away from the hide-bound stranglehold of the scientific and Hegelian world view where only the rational and the empirically visible had any value, returning to a much earlier view that there is more to existence than what we can see immediately before our eyes. This earlier view is described by French historian Jacques Le Goff in his book The Medieval Imagination. It is a view which didn’t draw a rigid division between the fictional and the non-fictional.

Another observation I thoroughly approved of was Newman’s comment about the propensity of American series not to understand that ‘viewers who enjoyed the adventures, didn’t want to listen to whining characters who only wanted to get home and lead boring lives’ (p. 20). The Wizard of Oz has long been an exemplary fan disappointment on this front – as was its ending – ‘it was all just a dream’, a generic resolution universally loathed by fan viewers whenever it appears in a series or film.

Unfortunately, Doctor Who was not entirely exempt from this irritating hankering after home theme. One of the later companions, Tegan, was particularly tedious in this respect. This is something that Russell T. Davies (a hater of The Wizard of Oz ending) has deliberately gone out of his way to counter in the new series of Doctor Who – even if I do find these new outings problematic on a large number of other fronts. The Outland Institute blog very aptly describes the new series as ‘Neighbours in Space’.

Also of interest in this book, is Newman’s broad knowledge of other cult and genre television which he is able to reference in his discussions which goes a long way to contextualising Doctor Who in the context of other contemporaneous cult TV and film.

Foucault and television

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

What bothers me is the quality of French television. It’s true! It is one of the best in the world unfortunately!…
What bothers and irritates me horribly in France, is that you are obliged to look at the program in advance to know what you can’t miss, and you have to arrange your evening as a result.
And then there is Le Pain Noir on Mondays. Result: every Monday is booked up … It is this which is the strength of television. People end up living according to its schedules. The news has been delayed by a quarter of an hour: well, you know that restaurants will see their diners arrive a quarter of an hour later.’

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1975] ‘A quoi rêvent les philosophes?’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. II. Paris: Gallimard, p. 705. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell

Foucault talks about having to program one’s life in terms of the television schedule. Of course he was saying this in the days when there were no cheap ways of recording television and there were only three television channels in France – all government run. Foucault also talks entertainingly about a trip to America where he was able to sample the vast range of ten channels on offer, all showing rubbish (‘it was somewhat degrading using your brain to watch that’) – but with the advantage nonetheless that he could pleasantly surf from channel to channel.

Foucault waxes lyrical in the best fan traditions about Le Pain noir – a lavish high quality historical miniseries with a cast of thousands, based on a multi-volume saga by Georges-Emmanuel Clancier. This series traces the life and times of a female rural peasant who is forced to become an urban worker. Her life plays out against the backdrop of a number of major historical events in France from 1880 to 1936.

In 2009, however, the musician and artist Brian Eno claimed, indeed militantly declared, that television was dead because its rigid programming had been superseded by the current possibilities for on demand delivery of content. In my view, however, the fixed schedule of television is precisely its advantage. It connects people through a shared sociability of common and simultaneous viewership. It also exposes the viewer to things they might never otherwise have come across locked within the confines of their own choices and opens their eyes onto a wider world. There is still a role for television as it currently stands in terms of these social functions.

Foucault and lolspeak

Lolspeak is the ‘pigeon’ language that is used to caption cats on the I can has cheezburger site. Lolcats, as I have mentioned earlier in this blog, have become an internet meme.

I suppose it’s inevitable that people have started making Foucault lolcats – given the popularity of both the cats and Foucault. I feel somewhat ambivalent about these as Foucault tended to be somewhat more articulate than the average cat.

You can see them here

Foucault and writing

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

No-one is forced to write books, or to spend years elaborating them or to claim to be doing this kind of work. There is no reason to make it obligatory to include footnotes, bibliographies and references. No reason not to choose free reflection on the work of others. It is sufficient to indicate well and clearly what relation one is establishing between one’s own work and the work of others.

***
Nul n’est forcé d’écrire des livres, ni de passer des années à les élaborer, ni de se réclamer de ce genre de travail. Il n’y a aucune raison d’obliger à mettre des notes, à faire des bibliographies, à poser des references. Aucune raison de ne pas choisir la libre réflexion sur le travail des autres. Il suffit de bien marquer, et clairement, quel rapport on établit entre son travail et le travail des autres.

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1983] ‘A propos des faiseurs d’histoire’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard, p. 413. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell

Random thoughts in response
In 1983 a scandal erupted in France around the publication of a book of popular history Histoire du Temps (Paris: Fayard, 1982) by then advisor to the president François Mitterand, Jacques Attali. Attali went on to become in 1991 the first president of the European bank for reconstruction and development (BERD) which was set up to help former soviet block countries in Europe integrate into the Western European economy. He is currently founder and director of PlaNet Finance a microfinance company and president of a commission appointed by the president Nicolas Sarkozy to relaunch French economic growth. Attali has also authored large numbers of essays and novels.

The scandal revolved around the discovery that if Attali included a list of references at the end of his book, he was less than careful about putting quotation marks around certain passages in his text. As Daniel Rondeau wrote rather amusingly in Libération, ‘[Attali] works, he says, every day from 4 to 7am. Let us try to imagine what these early morning work sessions are like. In the silence of the night, the sound of scissors is more to be heard than the nib of the pen…’

Foucault, of course, as a prominent intellectual was dutifully wheeled in by journalists to comment. After giving short shrift to the centre/right wing newspaper Le Matin, Foucault gave a more considered response to Didier Eribon in Libération the left-wing newspaper he had helped to found.

What I like about Foucault’s remarks here is how liberating I find them within the context of academic writing. Working within the university one becomes weighed down by the obligations of a certain type of work and loses sight of why one might originally have wanted to spend years painstakingly collecting and verifying every detail. What Foucault is suggesting here is that why do this unless you really want to? Nobody is forcing you. But at the same time he is saying that if one is writing a popular essay for public consumption in order to raise a few interesting ideas, one should make it quite clear that you are not writing a scholarly work. One must be careful to define what one’s work is doing and what it owes to the work done by others.

One might also raise here the question of the productivity requirements of the current university. Scholarly work takes time and effort. It is a slow process. One cannot turn out work in the same quantities as can be produced by journalistic processes. A minority of scholars are able to sustain combined levels of enormous quantity and quality (Foucault is a case in point) but for most it is a slow and difficult task of research, verification and organization of ideas.

Scholarly work is essential in order to guarantee certain standards of truth and accuracy, of value to the social body. But popular books are also essential to communicate ideas to a non-specialist general public. It is a matter of two different types of work and there have long been debates over the relative status of each. Popular writers heap scorn on dusty academicism and academic writers deplore the facility of popular writers. In the case of Attali’s work, however, it would appear the author was making claims to a scholarship that had in fact been undertaken by others.

Foucault is making the point that whatever one decides to write, from an ethical point of view, one needs to make its relation to other works quite clear and not try to pretend that it is something that it is not. A book does not stand alone, it is intrinsically bound up in a social network of work done by others.