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.
