I will state it categorically at this point: Foucault is an ass who has done irreparable damage to our discipline. The misapplication of his nonsensical “theories” has led to too many attempts such as Howard’s to excuse academic laziness and mediocrity. But don’t let me try to persuade you; here’s a snippet from Richard Dawkins’ ”Postmodernism Disrobed”:
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
I recommend reading the remainder of the essay; it is hilarious, and you will come across some familiar names. Rather than relying solely on scientists, however, try the following from Joe Carroll’s Literary Darwinism:
By eliminating truth, poststructuralism yields epistemological and ontological primacy to rhetoric or "discourse," and it simultaneously delegitimizes all traditional norms. Since poststructuralism treats all norms as arbitrary, it has a convenient application within the field of radical political ideology. (16)
Theorists do not need to be abstruse and evasive, unless what they theorize lacks coherence or even common sense. We do not need to be ashamed for having once believed in an Oedipal complex, but we should be ashamed for believing it today or peddling variations of it (some feminist and Lacanian theories) when a whole body of scientific and social scientific evidence has soundly refuted Freud’s pseudo-psychology. Howard’s problem here is that she has tried to create a problem that only exists if one accepts postmodern premises that ignore scientific evidence to the contrary. Humans are social creatures; we are moral. We tend to expose cheaters because we have been designed (randomly by natural selection) to expose cheaters. Plagiarism is indeed a cultural phenomenon, but it is also a moral one. We were not designed specifically to address plagiarism; we were, however, designed to address instances of moral transgression. Plagiarism maps onto that moral algorithm quite nicely.
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A couple years ago, in response to a suggestion from an NIU professor whose opinion I respect immensely, I asked the following question (via email) of my best friend, an historian of science from Northwestern:
"If you had to recommend two works of Foucault as being essential, which would they be?"
This was his response:
"The Order of Things (the first chapter is actually useful for early modern ideas); just remember that when he doesn't completely understand something he MAKES THINGS UP. Also the Architecture of Knowledge. Both speak to the effect of cultural assumptions on the understanding of the past and the definition of veracity (or the organization of intellectual disciplines). Remember, like most postmodernists, he has a bad habit of defining away things he doesn't agree with (or know about, for that matter).”
And he's not the only historian in the world who would say this. So here's my question: Why have we literary critics and theorists so completely embraced Foucault? Why do we cling to Freud ideas have been so completely discredited? When science discredits an idea, aren't we as rational human beings obligated to reject it? Foucault had degrees in psychiatry and philosophy -- he was not a scientist, an historian, or a literary critic. So why should we give his ideas any more credence than we do anyone else's?
I'm not being rhetorical, I'd honestly love to know.
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