The Warden Will See You Now, Mr. Foucault

(X-posted from the Valve ... and speaking of disciplining and punishing, the person who has been leaving inappropriate comments; signing me up for every spam mailing list imaginable; and sending me emails of unquestionably threatening content—I would like that person to know that I've logged his address; have filters many and mighty to stem that tide; and laughed when I saw that the emails had been sent from a work account.)

Andrew Scull’s review of the new translation of Madness and Civilization is on more than a few people’s minds, and why not?  Its relentless criticism of Foucault’s shoddy historiography is meant to provoke:

[History], consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material.  Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, [history] demands relentless erudition.

Sorry, wrong window—that there is Foucault extolling the virtues of a rigorous genealogy, not Scull criticizing him for his “isolation from the world of facts and scholarship.” I quote it now to dispel the notion that minor historical inaccuracies in Foucault’s work are of little consequence.  Put bluntly, they matter; a little more argumentatively, they matter more than their counterparts in conventional histories, because the “effective history” Foucault champions in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” approaches “events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations.”

Foucauldian genealogy sweats the small stuff, as it’s in the minutiae that metahistory reveals the limits of its teleology.  To say—as some have and others surely will—that the questionable citations and historical inaccuracies in Madness and Civilization in no way challenge the larger theory built upon them is powerfully stupid.  Of course they do. Anyone who employs the Foucauldian theory of madness (however defined) must now seriously reconsider whether their work remains structurally sound.  Perhaps the evidence they cited meets evidentiary standards; they are not only safe, their work helps validate the utility of the Foucauldian account.  Even there, the problem of whether researchers found what they were looking for persists, i.e. had Foucault not coined his theory, they wouldn’t have found what they weren’t looking for.

Still, the most dire of Scull’s critiques is that

much of [Foucault’s] account of the internal workings and logic of the institutions of confinement, an account on which he lavishes attention, is drawn from their printed rules and regulations. But it would be deeply naive to assume that such documents bear close relationship to the realities of life in these places, or provide a reliable guide to their quotidian logic.

As anyone who’s read a blurb of Discipline & Punish knows, the difference between formal, institutional strictures and lived experience is of central importance to his thought.  As he writes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”

Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose.

Exactly right, Michel, which is why basing your first book on an idealization instead of the who and how of its enforcement is so problematic.  You know how a warden wanted his asylum run—or, perhaps more importantly, how he wanted other people to believe he wanted his asylum run—but that in no way reflects how it actually was.  This situation is similar to the one Simon Goldhill anatomizes in Foucault’s Virginity; namely, that for all his debasing of teleology, Foucault often runs roughshod over archival material in order to prove his world-historical point.  (Goldhill accuses him of being of an unsophisticated reader, perhaps unattuned to the subtleties of classical prosody, perhaps unwilling to listen, too eager is he to draw a “purposeful trajectory from Plato to the Church.")

I understand this is a cheap shot, uncleverly performed, but the lady-doth-protest-too-much feel of his anti-teleology complaints seems ever more important.  Moreover, a shot across the bow is a terrible way to close a post, yet here I am ...

Comments

[J.S. Nelson]

These comments confirm all my suspicions about diehard Foucault fans.

[sharon]

I've never read Madness and Civilization and probably won't have time to read the new edition. So I can't comment that much on Scull's review. But I do have one or two nagging questions about it.

Scull takes Foucault to task for his methodology and use of dated sources. Which would be no problem if we were talking about a book written recently. But this is a book from the late 50s/early 60s. It therefore predates much of the development of archival research for social-cultural history (much of the social history before the advent of the 'New' social history in the mid 1960s that I've read was based on printed sources). And I really find myself wondering: c.1960 what 20th-century historiography was there on the subject? There may be tons of it now (not least by Scull himself), but what was available to Foucault then? I can't think of anywhere in the review that Scull suggests what Foucault *should* have been reading instead of these outdated authors. We now know their deficiencies - but were they so apparent when Foucault was using them?

It's one thing to say that an old book's methods and sources have not survived the passage of time; that's the fate of many works of history. It's quite another to accuse the author of shoddiness and cynicism *at the time of writing*, without giving some evidence of what would have been not shoddy 50 years ago. In other words, I suppose I feel that Scull fails to historicise Foucault. And that's what's nagging at me.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I'm not entirely sure who the "his" is in your last paragraph, but the rest of it's pretty good. The only thing wrong with a "shot across the bow" is that it's a waste of good powder when you have a kill shot at hand.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

First, I apologize for the other comments, but I'm having some difficulties with my TypePad account and can't rid the thread of them.

Now, on to important matters:

Sharon, the problem with Foucault's reluctance to cite any twenty century sources is that it demonstrates his lack of engagement with contemporary historiography. This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that what his lack of citations actually entails is his refusal to engage the Annales school in any way, shape, or form. What we're dealing with here is a reluctance to reconceptualize. Granted, my sympathies lie more strongly with Braudel and his bunch, but I'm also a fan of Foucault, so this post was written with a more-than-normal amount of begrudgedness.

In other words, what I think Scull's failing to say is that there're a couple of traditions into which Foucault doesn't fit; and that, instead of countering them point-by-point, or even acknowledging their existence, he chooses to write his history as if none had ever come before. I'm as much for ex nihilo as the next guy, so long as it's legitimately from nothing ... and I'm increasingly convinced Foucault isn't.

I'm cheating here a bit, since I've read -- as I'm sure you have -- material not cited above pointing to the thinness of Foucault's historical researches, but you catch my disillusioned drift here. I'm a reluctant critic, all things considered, because I want to believe that I can produce the kind of account he describes, but, out of what I can only believe is laziness in the face of the genius pressures, he fails to live up to.

Jonathan, that's a terribly written final couple of sentences there, and if I could change them right now, I would; but I am referring to Foucault there (however ambiguously) ... so I think we ought to continue this conversation in more detail, as I think there's an interesting methodological discussion to be had. More later, as right now I need to deal with some obvious and loathsome hackers ...