Foucault: criticism, judgment and assessment

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

Delacampagne But don’t the public expect the critic to provide them with precise assessments as to the value of a work?

Foucault I don’t know whether the public do or do not expect the critic to judge works or authors. Judges were there, I think, before they were able to say what they wanted. It seems that Courbet had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge, I want to judge.” It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it’s one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible.

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be a sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. . [trans. mod]

Random thoughts in response
I am currently buried in an enormous pile of marking – the volume of which can be attributed to one of the increasingly regular endemic and pandemic financial crises to which universities are globally subject at present. There is no money to pay already exploited and poorly paid part-time teaching staff, so full-time staff have to pick up the short-fall while somehow miraculously maintaining their expected research output at the same time.

One of the consequences of an increased marking load is that the volume of complaints from aggrieved and pained students convinced they were worthy of much better grades also increases. Providing more detailed feedback in response simply aggravates the situation in a culture where self-esteem is promoted at the expense of a realistic assessment of capacity to perform in a given area.

Given current staff student ratios, neither can these students be given the instruction that they need to genuinely improve their work. Much as the warm and fuzzy rhetoric produced by educational researchers would like to argue otherwise, assessment is not a teaching tool in the context of enormous student to teacher ratios – it can only be the simple grading of lemons – the disciplinary mechanisms of examination Foucault speaks of in Discipline and Punish aimed at assigning and fixing individuals to their designated social niches. A further problem is galloping credentialism which forces people to rely on the imprimatur of educational institutions to clamber up the social and career ladders. This is a firm requirement in a society based on performance and the expectation that every individual should be the ‘entrepreneur’ of their own lives and subjectivities as they stare bleakly down the barrels of ‘life-long learning’ and mandatory annual ‘professional development’ requirements.

Under these difficult institutional conditions, I cannot help but think of this passage from Foucault – only in my own case I wake from a nightmare of undergraduate essays, postgraduate dissertations and requests to referee journal articles stretching into the mists of an infinite horizon, yelling ‘I don’t want to judge! I don’t want to judge!’ I can only consider wistfully the utopian alternative that Foucault proposes and wonder if there is some practical way in which one could bring just a tiny element of this into the forced march of the endless assessment of one’s students and peers.

The introduction of these kind of resistances or elements of hope and human feeling into the system are increasingly difficult to imagine, let alone implement, in an environment where holes in the chain mail of the meshes of power, as described by Foucault, have become smaller and smaller. Lyotard argues that cracks in the system are papered over by terminally overloading people with busy work, allowing them no time to repair those cracks or to even become aware of their existence in the first place. Even more difficult is the option of tearing down the entire building to replace it with something more in line with some of the more positive aspects of what it means to be human. But it is essential that one keep trying, somehow. This is one of the great forces of Foucault’s work – that constant hope that in spite of everything and under difficult circumstances we can always do better.

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The Addiction (1995)

Warning spoilers

My rating: ****
imdb link

While on things vaguely religious, I thought I would post up another item from my now defunct film website. I originally wrote this review in 2002. I have made some very minor updates.

Plot
A New York doctoral student in philosophy, Kathleen (Lili Taylor), gets bitten by a female vampire in evening clothes and becomes one herself. Drifting aimlessly and neglecting her thesis, Kathleen stumbles across an ancient vampire called Peina (Christopher Walken) who promptly sucks all her blood and gives her a lecture on philosophy and literature which inspires her to finish her thesis. A post-doctoral party becomes a vampire feeding frenzy and Kathleen, having already infected the rest of her philosophy department, ends up in hospital. There she repents of her addiction to evil, dies and is saved. The film’s dialogue consists mainly of heavy duty quotations from, and discussions of, pre-1960s philosophy, mostly of the existentialist and Jansenist variety.

Review
This is not a movie for the faint hearted. But then Abel Ferrara‘s films never are. This bizarre and intense film operates at a number of levels: first of all, as a suitably blood-festooned vampire flick (although the word vampire is never mentioned). Secondly, it operates as a philosophical and religious reflection on human evil and redemption and finally as an amusing take on certain aspects of university life, probably best appreciated by those directly involved in that venerable institution.

To comment first of all on its vampire credentials. It helps if one has more than a passing familiarity with the vampire genre in order to stomach the gore. The action is filmed in black and white which helps distance the viewer from the more graphic elements. Indeed in colour, the effect would probably have been unintentionally comic, evoking the lurid excesses of Hammer horror in its hey day. Even so, a vampire feeding frenzy at Kathleen’s post Ph.D party looks amusingly like some avant-garde actors’ workshop. Having said this, if there were such a thing as vampires, this would probably have to be the most realistic depiction of the sheer mechanics of their practices in all their repulsiveness. No romantic sparkling vampires of the Twilight variety here! But in the end it is probably the documentary images of the piles of bodies in concentration camps at the end of World War II which form the most disturbing visual material of the film. As for sound, the most disgusting scene must surely be the evil vampire Peina sucking Kathleen’s blood.

But the core of this film is its philosophical and religious reflection on evil. Clearly writer Nicholas St. John has been reading some heavy duty philosophy of the most gloomy existentialist kind: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire and theologians such as Calvin and J.C. Sproul are referred to and quoted at some length by the characters. It seems he wrote this film and Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996) after his son’s death. No-one has a mundane or even a remotely cheerful conversation in this film and certainly no-one refers to any philosophy produced more recently than 1960. No Foucauldian, structuralist, or postmodern vampires here! The tone is reminiscent of such Catholic pre- and immediately post-war novelists as Graham Greene, Shusaka Endo, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac – all heavily influenced by a bleak angst ridden Jansenist outlook. One is also reminded of the French film maker Robert Bresson’s approach -  another atheist/Catholic film maker who was concerned with showing how evil people could be and the grace of God that could save them in extremity.

The only people in the film able to resist the lure of the vampire are a priest and a young man handing out religious pamphlets in front of the building where the post-doctoral gore fest is about to occur. Kathleen, after having her vampire advances rebuffed by the young man, goes inside and starts screaming hysterically ‘I will not submit!’, an obvious reference to Lucifer’s ‘non serviam’. The whole premise of the film seems to be that if one does not recognise and face the evil within oneself and the rest of mankind and accept the saving grace of the Christian God, then one is controlled by evil, becomes addicted to it and is compelled to pass it on to others.

The nausea of existence à la Sartre is also much in evidence – quite literally as the newly made vampire Kathleen sits in a café and toys digustedly with her food. Nonetheless, for all its references to the philosophy of another era, this is very much a film of the 1990s with its passing references to AIDS and its view of postmodern social detachment and disconnection.

The philosophical dialogues and pronouncements of the various characters are anything but naturalistic and it helps to have some philosophical background to follow what is being said and the links between the action and the talk are not always clear. This produces a similar, but perhaps less extreme effect, to the one produced in Luis Bunuel’s film The Milky Way where characters from different periods in history conduct sword fights, drink in taverns, sing at school fêtes, all the while discussing the finer points of medieval Catholic doctrine or arcane heretical deviations. But the radical disjunction between words and things or actions is an attractive one and serves to emphasise the non-naturalness of all human words and actions.

Along the way Kathleen meets an evil and corrupt vampire who tells her his name is Peina and who is able to control his hunger and pass as human through a kind of asceticism of evil – a Nietzschean will to power. He has managed to make his evil mundane and almost invisible and he is able to control it for his own purposes which makes it far worse than Kathleen’s. Peina achieves a kind of perverse evil enlightenment and asceticism through the management of his addiction. Kathleen is more classical in her salvation but is far less interesting because we don’t see her involved in anything like the 12 steps to get to that point. All we see is the addiction and then the miraculous salvation. Peina on the other hand has a whole ascetic practice which is much more intriguing – but it is an asceticism in the service of darkness rather than light.

I would suggest that any postgraduate student who is having trouble finishing their thesis would probably benefit from Peina as a supervisor. He roars at Kathleen frighteningly: ‘You are nothing! You know nothing!’ gives her a reading list of French and German philosophers and Beckett then sucks all her blood. Prior to running into this vampire she had been neglecting her thesis. Afterwards she gets on and finishes it. Amusingly, by the end of the film Kathleen has turned most of the philosophy department into vampires. Some academics would no doubt feel quite at home with the whole notion of postgraduate students sucking their blood.

This is not a big budget production and the filming is rough and ready but it is the ideas that carry this work. Watching this flawed film, if not always a pleasant experience, is certainly a challenging and thought provoking one and as such well worth the effort.

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The death of the author revisited

A version of this piece was published in The Australian Higher Education Supplement on 4th April 2012 as ‘Credit where it’s due – but who deserves top billing?’ I posted this on my blog last year but have moved it up as I have made quite a few revisions.

We do not characterise a ‘philosophical author’ as we do a ‘poet’, just as in the eighteenth century, one did not construct a novelist as we do today. Still, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of author construction.

Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author? In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 110

Random thoughts in response

In the late 1960s, French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault famously pronounced the author to be, if not dead, then decidedly fragile. Foucault in his 1969 article ‘What is an author?’ drew attention to the considerable ambiguity surrounding contemporary and historical notions of the author, defining the author as the originator of certain socially agreed upon types of writing.

To explain what he means by the ‘certain constants’ referred to above, Foucault invokes the four criteria Saint Jerome used to determine whether a body of work had the same author, namely (1) consistent quality across works attributed to one author (2) conceptual and theoretical coherence (3) consistent style (4) references only to events which happened before the designated author’s death. (p. 113) While recognising that Saint Jerome’s criteria might appear very simplistic in the context of contemporary literary criticism, Foucault argues they are still descriptive of the basic processes used to attribute authorship.

What I want to do here is offer a few reflections on the idea of the author in the current university context. Authorship is perhaps one of the most highly prized commodities in the academic world. It is used as a measure of reputation and a measure by which individuals are judged worthy of promotion through the ranks of what remains an intricately feudal hierarchy. Being an author who has produced numerous works published by prestigious publishing houses and journals and which are cited and otherwise referred to by many others (‘impact’) is the nirvana of academic achievement. Other functions such as being a good teacher, a good administrator or engaging in community research and consultancy, still come in a remote second in this tacitly agreed upon academic pantheon, in spite of the best efforts of university administrations to valorise these latter roles.

But authorship does not function in the same way across all academic disciplines. The sciences, social sciences and the humanities all have different rules which govern what it means to be an author. In the sciences, the rules are complex. A paper often has numerous co-authors. This can reflect the notion that the paper or journal article tends to function more as a report or a write up of findings than a piece of argued writing and that everybody involved in conducting the experiments and theorising the empirical research should therefore be acknowledged as an author. Thus authorship becomes a category which is used to recognise the generation and ownership of certain research practices and theories rather than simply writing. The authors listed on a scientific paper might not always necessarily be the actual writers of that paper.

Further to this, sometimes attribution has more to do with the relative rank of the author in a hierarchy of power than the amount of actual work done by the named author(s). For example, a professor and supervisor may be given far more weight than a student – even if the student has done most of the work. This rather worrying practice is being imported into the social sciences and humanities and sees postgraduate students (a minority as yet) automatically listing their supervisor as co-author on papers for which the student has been solely responsible. Thus the Matthew principle begins to operate and the professor/supervisor accrues more power, adding items to their publication list at little cost. The student (perhaps) improves their chances of publication and the status of their work by the addition of a prestigious name to their work. One might also mention another practice, which is hopefully less prevalent than it once was, namely the publication by the god-professor of the work of anonymous research assistants and postgraduate students under his own name (and the gender attribution here is deliberate).

To deal with the problem of the order in which co-authors should be listed, there is now even a piece of software – Authorder – which is purportedly designed to simplify the process, using complex calculations of percentages in relation to work done. Theoretically at least, the order of authors listed should then reflect who has done the most work on the paper.

This situation in the sciences has long been recognised by those involved in the field as one fraught with dangers and wide open to corruption and abuses of power. Practices which have been observed to be highly problematic in their scientific disciplines of origin are now seeping through, without any apparent thought as to the consequences, into the humanities and social sciences. The adulation of science and scientific method as a benchmark of truth for all forms of knowledge, even after coming under heavy attack in the 1960s and beyond, is clearly reasserting its primacy in ever more sophisticated forms in the new millennium.

In the humanities however, the link between author and writing cannot be attenuated in this fashion. Humanities output is defined by the writing and argumentation itself: it is not simply a report on some other exterior ‘research’ activity. The problem of how others should be recognised in the production of this kind of writing, has usually been solved by the practice of acknowledgements, rather than by granting co-authorship. So, for example, research assistants, editors, typists, colleagues and friends who have read the writing and made suggestions, colleagues who have helped to write research grants and other institutional supports are thanked in footnotes or dedicated acknowledgements sections, they are not listed as co-authors.

But things are perhaps not so cut and dried in the social sciences where various types of empirical research such as statistical, interview and survey data are all reported on. Is the model of multiple authorship of papers, in the science style of recognising contributors to the research (or even supervisors), rather than solely those involved in the writing and conceptualisation of the paper valid here? This is an interesting question. Often a paper in the social sciences is more than a matter of mere reporting of findings: it includes an argument about the data. Given this is the case, should those merely collecting data be included as authors?

In some areas of social science there has been a trend towards granting co-authorship to the diverse categories of people involved in the infrastructure of producing a journal article. This is sometimes done in a democratic spirit of inclusivity, expressing a desire to help people accrue points in the struggle to achieve the holy grail of promotion. Laudable as this inclusive impulse may be, can this diversity of contributors be granted the title of ‘author’ without unduly attenuating what this is generally understood to mean?

Perhaps we could ask a further question from a slightly different angle. What is the general expectation of a reader when he or she sees an author’s name attached to a piece of published writing? I might specify that we are talking about the ‘author function’ here. As Foucault notes ‘A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer but not an author’ (pp. 107-8). The reader of an article in the social sciences or humanities usually assumes that the author of a published piece of work has been involved in some way in the actual drafting of the text and the construction of its arguments.

Foucault adds that the historical invention of the notion of ‘authorship’ marked a ‘moment of individualisation in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences’ (p. 101). One might be tempted to argue that once the number of listed authors has expanded beyond a certain numerical threshold, then there is a move away from this moment of individualisation. But this doesn’t take into account the fact that each listed author accrues another point on their CV which individualises them further both within the power structures of the institutional field of the university and that of the larger global academic community.

If a new model of authorship is going to be instituted in the social sciences, then in the interests of truth and transparency, there needs to be a far clearer delineation of just what the attribution of ‘author’ means. Or, perhaps to make things simpler, there needs to be a return to earlier and still existing models of acknowledgements with author status only being granted to those who have actually done the writing and arguing.

What is not in doubt in any of this, however, is that the notion of the author is, and has always been, shot through and through with complex relations of power. These need to be the subject of constant vigilance and critical consideration within the academic economy if the integrity of the research process and the value of its contribution to the wider social body is going to be maintained.

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The New Academic

A version of this piece was originally published as ‘Conformity blunts creativity’, The Australian. Higher Education Supplement, Dec 12, 2007.

I have added a few minor tweaks to bring it more up to date. But unfortunately not a lot has changed since 2007!

Up till now there have been two dominant images of the humanities and social sciences scholar. The first picture is of a dry-as-dust individual obsessed with arcane pursuits far removed from the run of everyday life. A more attractive model, emerging from the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s, can be found in the ‘library militant’. This is the academic who uses scholarship to expose long standing social injustice and to give new value to knowledge sidelined by mainstream institutions and mechanisms of power.

Both cliches still survive of course, but we are now seeing the advent of a third model of scholarship in universities. This new scholarship is a dreary and miserable process of conforming to the straitjacket of multiple rules laid down by endless committees deliberating on ‘productivity’ and ‘standards’. Academics are exhorted to be ‘innovative’ and ‘original’ but only so long as their work fits into normalising Government guidelines or that new byzantine labyrinth of bureaucratic regulation which is the metricisation of research output (formerly the RQF, now the ERA in Australia). Failure to comply relegates all rogue work to hobby status.

So what actually happens when an academic is deemed to be non-productive on the research front, either through misrecognition of their work or failure to produce due to unmanageable teaching and admin workloads? Said academic may be threatened with ‘disciplinary action’ (a phrase previously only ever heard in the most extreme of circumstances: murder, madness or scandalous sexual misdemenour). Or, alternately the offending individual is subjected to the dire punishment of being ‘mentored’ until he or she can meet benchmarks of corporate productivity.

But publication is not all: there is the anxiety ridden, and now virtually obligatory, process of applying for grants. It is an exercise which is time consuming, onerous and often unproductive (when the application is rejected) and again, only research which addresses set government and industry priorities need apply. The days of the university as an independent and self-determining contributor to the general social body are long gone indeed.

A whole new taxonomy of academic and scholar has likewise arisen. We find the eager, fresh, and often not so young, early career researchers (ECRs or ECARDs in bureaucratic speak), delicate flowers who must be carefully nurtured through a strictly designed cursus of mentoring and specially targeted grants. Then there are the more traditionally named ‘Professors’, often appointed more for their administrative and networking talents than for any major contribution to their field. (Of course, to be fair, there are still many Professors who have earned their position through notable scholarship). And lucky last, we must not forget the middle ranks of anonymous ‘B’ and ‘C’ ranked lecturers eking out an existence with limited promotion prospects, crushed under the drudgery of impossible teaching loads and of increasingly strident demands to produce the requisite minimum of two refereed publications a year. Of course these are just the staff with permament jobs. There is also an entire underclass of poorly paid casual and part time labour in the form of sessional tutors.

To compound matters, there is scant respect from other sectors in the social body for the kind of work academics do. The political furore over a disregarded 2007 University of Sydney study of the impact of Prime Minister John Howard’s Industrial Relations package is a case in point, providing a striking example of the cavalier disregard for the expertise of those working in universities.

The net is littered with blogs describing the impossibilities of teaching and writing in the new university, the career and promotion dead ends, the impossibility of even getting a job and any number of other woes. Amazon helpfully offers solutions in the form of books with titles such as Write to the Top: How to be a Prolific Academic and A PhD is not enough!: A Guide to Survival in Science.

This is a bleak scenario indeed and doom and gloom reign supreme. There is very little mention in this landscape, beyond mere lip service, of how exciting research and scholarship can be, the positive contribution it makes to human knowledge and culture and the possibilities for present and future freedoms it opens up for everybody. Creative ideas (even down to the word ‘creative’) are forced into a corporate mould and it becomes a matter of quantity not quality. How many refereed articles did you publish this year? How many dollars in research grants did you receive? This is a point that has been made so many times before that it has become a mantra, but in a society where the quantifiable exchange of goods is all, nobody is listening.

So what is the solution to all this? I would like to make three modest proposals. To begin with, there should be more of a refusal to play along. Academics often comply unnecessarily with the frequently counter-productive rules which are handed down from on high every week in universities. A healthy passive resistance, a polite and nodding agreement while waiting for it to go away, works wonders when practised en masse.

Secondly, academics might take back some control of their own sociability and organise informal networks in addition to participating in the carefully structured and monitored ones on offer by the corporation. These informal networks could encourage an atmosphere of mutual support rather than one of relentless competition and ostentatious display.

A third strategy might involve seizing back some minimum enjoyment of the scholarly process of reading, research and writing. This could be undertaken as a desperate counter measure to deal with the stressful necessity of adding yet more metrics shaped notches to the CV in an attempt to satisfy the demands of increasingly invasive performance reviews.

Small suggestions perhaps, but in a situation where there is very little room for manoeuvre, one has to start somewhere.

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Online vs paper publication

In a most interesting post titled Open access -for all?, Stuart Elden remarks:

We started the Society and Space open site as a partner to the print journal and the publisher’s site [...]

You would think that a quick – material goes up usually within a day or two of being delivered in final form – and open-access venue would be appealing. And certainly, some people have already taken advantage of it and we have more to come. But there has also been a very curious resistance. People have complained about ‘being relegated to the blog’ or suggested that they are ‘old-fashioned’ and want their book review in print.

In my view, this hesitation reflects the fear that publication online – even when through a reputable commercial press – is not as serious or as permament as paper publication. The written word is a solid and permament object in the physical world when it is on paper, but an ephemeral thing of light and energy online. There, it could disperse into the ether at any moment, leaving the author with no material possessions and no physical evidence of his or her accumulating presence as an author in the world. One could perhaps refer to Foucault’s notion of the materiality of discourse here – what does that materiality mean in digital form?

For another post which touches on these and related issues see the In the Middle blog (via Stuart)

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Foucault and the academic author

I have moved this post to here

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Blogging and the Republic of Letters

I was interested by this comment by Rhiannon Bury in an interview on Henry Jenkin’s blog

Let me close by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way I disseminate research on fandom. The norm in academia is to analyze our data behind closed doors and not report on it until we have a finished “product” in the form of a conference paper, a journal article, a book chapter, etc. With the use of blogging and microblogging technologies, I plan to informally report on findings as I work my way through the data in the coming months. I hope this will provide opportunities for dialogue with fans and fan scholars, and in turn provide feedback to inform my analysis.

Christian Callisen and Barbara Adkins have written an interesting paper (to be published in New Media and Society) arguing that the academic blogosphere is actually a contemporary rendition of the early modern ‘Republic of Letters’.

The Mapping the Republic of Letters project, describes the Republic of Letters as follows:

When early modern scholars (from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment) described the broadest community to which they belonged, they most frequently called this international community of scholars the “Republic of Letters.”

The Republic of Letters was an intellectual network initially based on the writing and exchange of letters that emerged with and thrived on new technologies such as the printing press and organized itself around cultural institutions (e. g. museums, libraries, academies) and research projects that collected, sorted, and dispersed knowledge. A pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed, it was the ancestor to a wide range of intellectual societies from the seventeenth-century salons and eighteenth-century coffeehouses to the scientific academy or learned society and the modern research university. Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.

I very much like the idea of the academic blogosphere as a continuation of these utopian ideals of intellectual community and the free sharing of ideas in an environment which minimises institutional hierarchy (although one can certainly debate how far this latter ideal can actually ever be realised). It is a way for academics and other intellectuals to sidestep the increasingly regulated and corporatised institutional environment of the university and continue their collaborations, work and outreach to other sectors in the social body.

Incidentally, for an amusing and, alas, all too accurate a take on this issue of academic versus corporate university culture see Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan’s opinion piece: ‘Invasion of the Aca-zombies’

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Foucault and philosophy

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? … The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy.

Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. 327. Translation modified.

Random thoughts in response
‘What is philosophy?’ This is a question that Foucault raises on numerous occasions in various forms throughout his work. For all the variations in his response to this question, he always insisted that philosophy operated firmly within a historical context and could only manifest itself through quite specific historical practices and events and the way we engage historically with ourselves and others.

Philosophy, for Foucault, is not a question of stripping away historical accidents so that we can discover what is absolutely true for all time, rather it is a way of examining the ways in which people and systems of knowledge have made a division between the true and the false in very specific historical contexts. These divisions directly impact on the ways people conduct themselves in relation to themselves and others. Philosophy should also, in Foucault’s view, deal with the question of what is happening right now and with what our responsibilities are in relation to this very specific conjuncture.

And speaking of the current conjuncture specifically as it relates to the discipline of philosophy… Like other humanities disciplines, philosophy is under threat in that it is unable to produce the kind of ‘outcomes’ that are valued by neo-liberal systems of thought. Neo-liberalism (for those who came in late) is a form of thought which reduces all social relations to economic relations. As Foucault remarks: ‘It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’. [1]

Much ink has flowed on the pernicious and all pervasive effects of neo-liberalism with, it seems, only a limited success in stemming its diffusion through all areas of social and cultural existence. The crisis over the announcement of the closure of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and undergraduate programs in philosophy at Middlesex University in London on 26 April 2010 raises the problem of neo-liberal management culture yet again with particular acuteness. The suspension of staff and students and disciplinary hearings in reaction to their protests at the closure also have worrying implications for the continued existence of necessary social spaces for intellectual dissent and academic freedom. [2]

Academic culture and corporate culture are two very different entities and attempts to meld the two over the last twenty years in particular have had disastrous effects in terms of the maintenance of a healthy academic culture which can only make a worthwhile contribution to the social body precisely because it has different goals from the business, government and service sectors. A healthy society requires a balance between all four sectors. The university cannot be conveniently assimilated into the service sector, a currently popular strategy which seeks to reshape it primarily as an institution which ultimately focuses on providing ‘education services’.

The university is not simply about teaching and training people to engage in the work force and be compliant economic citizens or to serve the interests of industry and the maintenance of a healthy population with ‘useful’ forms of research. In addition to this, theoretical research aimed at pushing the boundaries of knowledge or questioning the structures of received knowledge serves the general community in other ways than the maintenance of economic relations. Criticism and analysis of social practices also keep repressive and questionable systems which seek to micromanage populations ‘for their own good’ in check. Philosophy sits (or ought to sit) squarely within this area of social critique and intellectual insight into the human experience.

But neo-liberalism is not the only problem that is faced by the discipline of philosophy in the current conjuncture. There are struggles over the definitions of what constitutes philosophy. Such definitional struggles as Pierre Bourdieu points out are struggles for power ‘over a vision of the natural and social world’[3] One of the most salient struggles in the English language world is the struggle between analytic philosophy and its ‘other’ which it describes as ‘continental’ philosophy.

To all appearances, analytic philosophy has over a long period of time and long before the current crisis, completely colonised the term ‘philosophy’ in university and other educational settings in the English language world. Philosophy departments in the UK, North America and Australia are almost unilaterally dedicated to this form of the discipline and any academics practising so-called ‘continental philosophy’ within those institutional settings are usually there as a grudging token concession to a style of thought that, it has to be recognised, has found immense popularity elsewhere. The very term ‘continental philosophy’ is constructed as the obverse of analytic philosophy. Even those using the term to describe their own practice do so by referring to analytic philosophy as the norm. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of non-analytic and non European practices of philosophy, which are usually relegated to departments of religion.)

Those who have disputed analytic definitions of philosophy have been forced to work in any other department except philosophy or have been forced to secede and create new departments. The scandalous split in philosophy at the University of Sydney into General Philosophy and Traditional Philosophy in the 1970s is a case in point, as is Eugene Kamenka’s secession from Philosophy at the Australian National University in the late 1960s to create the now sadly defunct History of Ideas unit. Middlesex was one of the very few departments labelled ‘philosophy’ which practised almost exclusively European style philosophy which makes its fragmentation and semi-demise even more of a loss.

‘Continental philosophy’ is something that clearly can only be treated with suspicion by ‘more rigorous’, ‘more scientific’ and less ‘politicised’ practices of analytic philosophy. In general, given this unfriendly reception, practitioners of post-War European styles of philosophy are more commonly found outside of philosophy departments in the English language world.

In a recent work, eminent analytic philosopher Michael Dummett while recognising this important and destructive fracture in the discipline of philosophy and calling for reconciliation, does nothing but add further fuel to the fire with the blurb on his book declaring that ‘Philosophy is a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience. It is an armchair subject, requiring only thought.’[3] It is a statement guaranteed to outrage the socially and historically oriented philosophers working in the wake of post War structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.

This definition, if nothing else, draws attention to fundamental disagreements over what constitutes the proper subject matter and method of philosophy. In the analytic tradition, the categorisation of language practices and their rigorous logical deployment are paramount. Statements and concepts are rigidly sorted into a variety of categories – eg ethical statements, metaphysical statements, epistemological statements, mind versus body debates and so on and so forth. One then examines how chains of reasoning operate within these categories (often by reducing them to quasi-mathematical formulae). The ultimate goal is to arrive at an orderly system untainted by historical and political concerns which allows one to get to the ‘truth’. Only then after one has carefully ordered one’s categories can one make rigorous interventions from this elevated platform into matters of political and social concern. Analytic philosophy allows for difference in how truth might be interpreted in typical fashion by grouping activity in this area into different categories, for example: ‘the correspondence theory of truth’ or ‘the perspectivist notion of truth’. This fits in perfectly with the post Enlightenment model of science with its rigorous and rational methods (superior to all other methods) of uncovering a knowledge and truth independent of historical circumstance.

The methods of analytic philosophy also bear remarkable similarities to the eighteenth century project (as described by Foucault in The Order of Things) which sought to classify all knowledge into tables and to find a way to transparently match representations and things. If one could just get those tables right – then we could have true knowledge about and a true representation of things. These methods also resonate with the bureaucratic ideal of everything placed in an orderly manner in its right place, in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.

Analytic philosophers criticise ‘Continental philosophy’ for its adulation of ‘great names’ and close textual studies of a variety of philosophers but it is unclear how far this differs from obligatory references to the ‘great names’ and the employment of ‘methods’ developed by thinkers in the analytical tradition. These great figures include the Greek philosophers of course, selected other European philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, Wittgenstein, Frege, Locke, Quine, Moore, Ryle, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Dennett as well as others.

Further, analytic philosophy arguably divorces the notion of philosophy from what is popularly and commonly understood by the term. Undergraduate students embarking hopefully on courses in philosophy departments are all too often disappointed by the rigidity and decontextualised nature of the offerings – with pre-prescribed and highly contrived set pieces for reflection operating somewhat like mathematical formulae. It is small wonder that students have turned en masse to psychology to provide them with the forms of reflection they crave, thereby regrettably further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control. This is not to say, however, that there are not notable efforts by philosophers working within the analytic tradition, such as Alain de Botton, to try and make philosophy more publicly accessible. But I would argue that de Botton is the exception rather than the rule.

Students no doubt, also cannot help but notice a gender landscape that is overwhelmingly male in the delivery and practice of any kind of philosophy. Women are all too often relegated to the feminist ghetto away from the ‘serious’ work. One could further usefully embark on a discussion of the specific forms of masculinity that are represented in philosophy – and this applies to all forms of philosophy of whatever persuasion. Plato’s vision of the practice of philosophy as being the province of bearded males over 50 remains well and truly alive today.

I hasten to add, of course, that for all its pretensions to occupy the whole of the territory, analytic philosophy and the university departments which support its dissemination are under serious threat everywhere in the English language world. Departments have been merged with other humanities schools or have disappeared altogether. I welcome Dummett’s call for disciplinary reconciliation in order to make philosophy once again an institutional and intellectual force to be reckoned with. On the other hand, given the definitions he offers, it is more than clear that there remains much work to be done in persuading certain sectors (not all of them analytical) to adopt a far broader and more inclusive notion of the territory philosophy might cover. [5]

To be continued…

[1] Michel Foucault, (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Course at the Collège de France. 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 148.

[2] For ongoing up-to-date information on this situation see the Save Middlesex philosophy site and Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog

[3] Pierre Bourdieu (1987) Choses Dites, Paris: Minuit, p.171.

[4] Michael Dummett (2010) The Nature and Future of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.

[5] I refuse under any circumstances to use the ghastly and ubiquitous term ‘philosophical enquiry’ so fondly used by analytical philosophers.

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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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