Acephalous

How to Police the Discourse (with Three Toothpicks, an Old Sock & Your Lies)

(last post on this subject, but sufficiently meta- to slap up here, as I'm thinking about these issues for that other thing)

To reiterate what I wrote in response to Eileen Joy's comment, what bothers me about Craig's serial dishonesty is that it restricts what I can write.  Knowing that anything I write about Foucault will be followed by another gross misrepresentation decreases the odds I'll write much about Foucault.  Craig knows this, so he responds to everything I write about Foucault with a gross misrepresentation of what I said and imputes devious intentions as to why I said it.  He mines for quotations with all the integrity of Hollywood publicist, yanking words with abandon and eliding with confidence: "Everyone ... should see ... this ... unbelievable piece of ... film!" 

In short, Craig wants to police the discourse.  If you desire a conversation about Foucault, you must talk about Foucault like he wants to talk about Foucault; if you refuse to do so, be prepared to have your work grossly mischaracterized in the service of his  ego.  That he resorts to misrepresentation to maintain this fiction is a nicety lost upon him.  (That the "interlopers" have no pretension of expertise is too.)  He will defend the illusion of his expertise at all costs ... and the possibility of debate will die on the table.  Because when the barrier of entry is that high, the sane will refuse to scale; and those who choose to will lose a little of their sanity. 

Still, all that self-congratulation must be fun.  I think I'm going to try to "do the Craig."  Regular searches for "Silas Weir Mitchell," "'Jack London' and 'atavism'" and "'evolutionary theory' and 'literary'" should cover it for now.  Anything pops up, I'll write a scathing indictment in which I "imply" the author's unfit to speak upon these matters with many "subtle" words and "clever" phrases.  I should be able to "police the discourse," I mean, "corner the market," I mean, "Craig" these topics in three weeks flat.  Here's hoping!

The Internet Stupid Report

Standing in front of a map of the Internet is a man with an indescribable comb-over and a smile white as it is wide.  As the curtain rises, a women who ends every sentence with a question tells a man named Skip to "throw it Kaufman."  He does.

Kaufman: Thanks Skip.  Today has been a particularly stupid day on the Internet.  As you can see from the map (points at map) the trouble began on Pharyngula (map zooms in), where the statement "it may be a little harsh" (points at map) and a bland clarification (points a little lower) precipitated a series of increasingly unhinged responses punctuated by yipping, yapping, hilariously unfounded charges of dishonesty and (waves hand over large swath of the map) general calumny.

Skip: Sounds rough, Scott. 

Kaufman: It was, Skip, it was ... but it wasn't the stupidest stupidity on the Internet today.  For that (map dissolves into pixels) we need to look over here (map returns), where some people are convinced it's opposite day. 

Skip: It isn't, is it?

Kaufman: No, Skip, 'fraid not.  But that didn't stop some people (points at map) from insinuating in a general way, the possibility that in some important respects, when a person says "I want to talk about this more" he maybe really means "I never want to talk about this again."  This stupidity is merely the remnants of that idiotic front (gesticulates wildly) that passed through here the other day, but don't let that fool you.  It still packs quite a punch ... back to you, Skip.

Skip: I wonder when Opposite Day is?  I bet beleaguered local businessman Milton Keeps does too ...

Inane chatter continues as the lights fade and the curtain slowly lowers.

A Taxonomy of Deceit: The Sanity Preserver

Circumstances have forced me to spend a good deal of time this past week thinking about lying—so much so that as I sit to write this, I feel equipped to present a taxonomy of deceptiveness, one able to account for everything from the Big Whopper to the Intentional Omission, the Unintentional Omission, the Unconscious Omission, and the prodigal son, the Sanity Preserver.  Yesterday, I discussed the academic variation of the Sanity Preserver, in which the time invested in learning the nuances of a particular body of thought leads to an irrational investment in the thought itself. 

I am convinced that this investment is different only in degree from the very bane of our existence: the student complaint that the effort put into writing a paper should determine its grade.  In both cases, the quality of the work is back-seated to the time invested in producing it—although in its more "mature" form, the time invested is more likely to approach the time the complainant claims to have invested.  Not that the outcome is altogether different.  The rigidity of thought and distortive perspective persist, only now bound to an insufferable academic identity.  More often than not, it is now that the Sanity Preserver passes the torch to the Intentional Omission.

One could argue that the Intentional Omission is as unconscious as the Sanity Preserver, that the intentionality is merely the byproduct of years of refusing to countenance uncomfortable facts and arguments in the effort to preserve sanity.  There may be something to that, inasmuch as the temper tantrum inevitably following any inquiry suggests some shoddy preservation. 

Once the stomping stops and the spittle dries, what remains is a picture of academic failure: intelligent enough to have mastered a complex body of thought but lacking the confidence to admit of its shortcomings, this "scholar" has no choice but to turn to the Intentional Omission.  This flaw may be summarily dismissed—the illusion of an openness to criticism must be maintained—but that one must never be acknowledged. 

And so the Intentional Omitter carefully builds the wall behind which his expertise will be expertly defended by himself, a noted expert.  As he slides in that last brick, His Expertness sighs a knowing sigh of relief.  At long last, he thinks to himself, I have my wall. 

That it is in his basement, and he behind it, matters little.  He will lord over these sad dolls, his only company.  Bricked in, he will be free.  Experto crede.

With Apologies, a Little More Foucault

(X-posted)

A few more brief notes about the discussion of Foucault are in order.  Far from being tired, as Alex suggests, I think we should have more such conversations, and more frequently.  As serious scholars, we should not concede the floor to sad spectacles of transparent cronyism, nor should we brook the claim that a frequently cited work—one whose title often appears to the immediate right of words like “seminal” and “magesterial”—is near-juvenalia.  Critics of Madness and Civilization are not members of a committee maliciously conspiring to torpedo the career of a promising graduate student, but members of a scholarly community which (ideally) can discuss the relative merits of a work considered important. 

Where Madness and Civilization fits into the Foucauldian corpus is, for the moment, irrelevant.  Point of fact, the desire to defend Foucault from his own work—cutting his nose to spite his face—suggests an irrational investment in its inviolability.  (This investment is made all the more irrational by the scapegoating by which its illusion is sustained.) If we ignore the historiographical problems with Madness and Civilization, Foucault remains for his acolytes what they desperately need him to be.  But what if we mention, as I did, the problems Simon Goldhill identifies in The History of Sexuality? Will it be jettisoned too?  I only ask because this reverential model leads to some supremely unintellectual waters, a frightful bilge we would do best to avoid.  This is not, however, a post about the inbred thought of oblivious sycophants. 

Following Foucault Blog‘s lead, this is a post about what I should have foregrounded in my initial one; namely, that I juxtaposed the Scull alongside “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” because I value the standards espoused in the latter, not to hoist Foucault by his own petard.  To claim that only an unserious, derivative hack—like those fools who populate English departments—could express a preference for one Foucauldian period over another is profoundly myopic.  Those who chose not to weld the blinders on can see where I’m headed here: Scull may not be able to differentiate methodology from the conclusions drawn through it, but we can; moreover, his review should compel us to question this issue as it relates both to Foucault’s work and our own.  Methodological reflection should be part and parcel of academic study; declaring it anathema will neither preserve another’s reputation nor allow us to do the quality work required to build our own.

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 ...