La Trahison des images, René Magritte
Of all the writers on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus, few are as misunderstood and routinely misappropriated as Michel Foucault. That should come as a surprise, given that Foucault is one of the most frequently cited academic authors of all time, his work offering an unavoidable—and to many, irresistible—dose of skepticism to most surveys of 20th-century European philosophy, social theory, intellectual history, cultural studies, and anthropology. Many on the left, especially, have seen in Foucault’s work a profound and debilitating critique of the Enlightenment and the liberal pretensions of progress to which it gave rise, including the supposedly ‘humane’ treatment of the incarcerated and mentally and physically ill, as well as the increasingly-rigid routinization of sexuality, education, and other forms of social reproduction. Yes, Foucault’s account of a pluralistic modernity governed (but underdetermined, in the last instance) by numerous mutually-reinforcing but decentralized power structures lacks the clarity or generality of a Marx or Weber. But in a messy and contorted world where the traditional dichotomies of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ or of ‘rational-legal’ and ‘charismatic’ authority no longer seem descriptively sufficient, an acknowledgment of the irreducible complexity of social relations may be called for. Foucault’s enduring popularity suggests that many agree.
Foucault was a self-described Nietzschean, and during the second semester of Contemporary Civilization, the two thinkers are often treated in parallel, with Foucault’s critical-historical practice of ‘archaeology’ serving as an elaboration of Nietzsche’s genealogical method. It helps that the two texts of theirs which appear on the CC syllabus—Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals—are paradigmatic of how each author theorized and problematized the practice of historical inquiry. Both saw traditional, self-congratulatory narratives of the past as suffused with—and distorted by—relations of unequal power, of unspoken violence, of abortive struggle. To put things in a vulgar shorthand: if Churchill was right, and “history is written by the victors,” why should we ever trust history? Both Nietzsche and Foucault proclaimed that we shouldn’t; instead, they developed and promoted an alternative, subversive approach to the study of the past that Paul Ricœur later dubbed the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’—by tracing the contested origins of modern concepts, values, and institutions, they showed that things are rarely as clean and coherent as appears on the surface; and that moral and social ‘progress’ always comes with a price attached.
Many of these once-radical proposals have become commonplace in the academic humanities and social sciences, especially beyond the United States and United Kingdom. But both critics and admirers often make the further claim that Nietzsche and Foucault subscribed to a more disconcerting family of views: that history is not just suspect but meaningless and indeterminate; that all moral systems are equally valid; that the concept of truth itself should be discarded. These assorted positions fall under the buzzwords of ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism’, terms often applied unthinkingly to both Nietzsche and Foucault, as if to cast their skeptical approaches towards historical narrative and liberal progress as irredeemably cynical or patently irrational. Foucault’s claim that power is not bad, per se, but merely dangerous; his view of ‘madness’ as socially constructed (to a degree); and his choice to diagnose modern structures of unfreedom without offering positive solutions, are partly to blame. But while both Nietzsche and Foucault wanted to undermine traditional views of history, morality, rationality, and truth, they abandoned none of these concepts. Instead, they argued that individuals were imbued with agency and freedom to escape the meanings these concepts had been given by repressive institutions—in Nietzsche’s case, the Church; for Foucault, the ‘carceral archipelago’ of modern disciplinary society. In our escape from the totalizing language of modern ‘humanism’, the old truths would have to be discarded, yes, but replaced with new ones, all the more valuable for having been created under conditions of liberatory self-actualization. It is a baffling and uncompromising vision, and not always an appealing one. Yet it is anything but nihilistic.