Foucault and writing 2

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.

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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.

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‘Public Intellectuals 2.0′ (2008)

Daniel W. Drezner, ‘Public Intellectuals 2.0′, Chronicle of Higher Education, v 55 n12, Nov 2008, p. B5
My rating: ***

Link to article (word doc)

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the USA and has run his own blog for about seven years. His interesting and well referenced article lists some of the objections to academic blogging and systematically refutes them.

The first section is a brief history of public intellectuals in the United States. What I find interesting about (North) American discussions on this subject is that they rarely refer to intellectuals outside the United States and the effect is much like that curious phenomenon of American World Series baseball which imperiously seeks to render the local global.

This criticism aside, the second section on the blogosphere (although still American in its focus) as a new arena for intellectuals and for academics is an interesting read.

Drezner notes for example:

For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy – and expand beyond the academy. Rebecca Goetz observes, “Because I blog I now have contacts, online and offline, with a variety of scholars inside and outside my field. They don’t particularly care that my dissertation is not yet done; the typical hierarchies of the ivory tower break down in the blogosphere so that even graduate students can be public intellectuals of a kind.” Brad DeLong characterizes scholar-blogging as creating an “invisible college” that includes, “people whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well.” Provided one can write jargon-free prose, a blog can attract readers from all walks of life – including, most importantly, people beyond the ivory tower. Indeed, citizens will tend to view academic bloggers that they encounter online as more accessible than would be the case in a face-to-face interaction. Similarly, survey evidence also suggests that academics view blogs as a form of public service and political activism. This increases the likelihood of fruitful interaction and exchange of views about culture, criticism and politics with individuals that academics might not have otherwise met.

I might add here that intellectual activity in the public media outside the traditional circuits of academic publishing has long been regarded with more than a little ambivalence by universities. This is quite evident in France for example, which has a long and sometimes acrimonious history of a split between university academics and intellectuals active in the public media dating back to at least the eighteenth century. The blogosphere is perhaps the latest chapter in that struggle over the ownership and dissemination of knowledge and what counts as truth. And also, not to put too fine a point upon it, over modes of intellectual fame and reputation.

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Foucault and the disciplinary society

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

Quand je parle de société «disciplinaire», il ne faut pas entendre «société disciplinée». Quand je parle de la diffusion des méthodes de discipline, ce n’est pas affirmer que «les Français sont obéissants»! Dans l’analyse des procédés mis en place pour normaliser, il n’y a pas «la thèse d’une normalisation massive». Comme si justement, tous ces développements n’étaient pas à la mesure d’un insuccès perpetuel.

When I speak of a ‘disciplinary’ society, I don’t mean a ‘disciplined society’. When I speak of the spread of methods of discipline, this is not a claim that ‘the French are obedient’! In the analysis of normalising procedures, it is not a question of a ‘thesis of a massive normalisation’. As if these developments weren’t precisely the measure of a perpetual failure.

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1980] ‘La poussière et le nuage’ In Dits et Ecrits vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 15-16. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell

Random thoughts in response
Foucault takes issue with critics here who have described his idea of the disciplinary society as deterministic. They argue that Foucault describes a dreary and oppressive system from which we cannot escape.

But Foucault makes the excellent point that if populations were perfectly organised there would actually be no need to set up these systems of discipline. The ‘disciplinary society’ is a utopia dreamed up by nineteenth century reformers and bureaucrats who in a kind of mechanistic and obsessive fervour sought to organise the ways bodies behaved, how time and space were divided and the division of tasks amongst a hierarchy of individuals.

It is precisely the resistance of the unruly masses to attempts to organise them which engender the ever more finely detailed plans by the devotees of order at any cost to get them under control. There is a constant strategic interplay between the forces of order and those who wish to think and act otherwise. The constant failure of the disciplinary project leads those bent on its realisation to redouble their efforts which in turn engenders ever more creative efforts to sidestep these constraints.

Brutal methods of repression have been demonstrated to be largely ineffective in the long run and since the nineteenth century we have seen ever more subtle methods of ‘governmentality’ which use the very freedom of individuals to assist in their own enmeshment in these systems. Of course the increasing bureaucratisation of any number of organisations, including universities, is a daily demonstration of this process. One could also undertake an interesting analysis of current consumerist practices and communication technologies in this context.

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