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(May 25, 2021) How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/opinion/michel-foucault.html?smid=tw-share
- And so the ideological shifts of the pandemic era, the Foucault realignment, tells us something significant about the balance of power in the West — where the cultural left increasingly understands itself as a new establishment of “power-knowledge,” requiring piety and loyalty more than accusation and critique.
- But left-wingers with those impulses have ended up allied with the populist and conspiratorial right. Meanwhile, the left writ large opted instead for a striking merger of technocracy and progressive ideology: a world of “Believe the science,” where science required pandemic lockdowns but made exceptions for a March for Black Trans Lives, where Covid and structural racism were both public health emergencies, where scientific legitimacy and identity politics weren’t opposed but intertwined.
(May 24, 2021) Review: How a California acid trip made Michel Foucault a neoliberal
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-05-24/review-how-a-california-acid-trip-made-michel-foucault-a-neoliberal
- His LSD trip reinforced his opposition to the “hermeneutics of the self,” i.e., interpreting the self as if there were some fundamental and fixed truth of one’s identity.
- Instead, Foucault believed in the notion of the “épreuve,” the ordeal, a technique that creates inner truth rather than uncovering it. A person’s identity, according to Foucault, ought to be built through personal trials untainted by external interference, including and especially that of a state. Foucault delved deep into the heart of American individualism and anti-establishmentarianism, but his subsequent realizations showed just how thin the line is between self-reliance and selfishness.
- just how thin the line is between self-reliance and selfishness
(Summer 2021) How We Forgot Foucault by Geoff Shullenberger
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/05/how-we-forgot-foucault/
- In his breakthrough 1966 book The Order of Things, Foucault proposed that historical periods operate under distinct “epistemes” that set the conditions of possibility for what can be thought and known; thus, what each period takes to be real or true is an effect of the “regime of truth” it is operating under. This relativism was seen to undermine the possibility of objective truth and any notion of the progress of knowledge.
- The idea that Foucault and other “postmodernists” viewed scientific objectivity as a myth that disguises structures of domination has even led some to trace right-wing science denial to their impact.
- In late 2020, however, some began to observe that Foucault’s citations, as reported by Google Scholar, had dropped precipitously over the course of that year, even as the global pandemic and the unprecedented political responses it generated would seem to make his account of biopolitics more relevant than ever.
- The simplest explanation of this omission is that while he is largely embraced on the political left, his account of biopolitics is at odds with many views now prevalent on that side of the spectrum.
- During the pandemic, the delegation of decisions to public health experts has entailed a dramatic expansion of state authority and abrogation of basic rights, most notably freedom of speech and assembly… Questioning the determinations of health experts is treated not as participation in a democratic decision-making process, but as tantamount to “literal murder.” … Thus, vesting authority in ostensibly neutral institutions can enable a massive covert expansion of unaccountable power.
- History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic: In societies that, in formal terms, were supposed to grant basic freedoms to all, madmen and delinquents could be deprived of their autonomy at the behest of these specialists… This was the logic of what Foucault called “discipline.”
- In the earlier era of “sovereign power,” in Foucault’s periodization, a state’s involvement with the biological life of its subjects was a forceful exception. With the rise of biopolitics, it becomes the rule.
- The notion of “vaccine passports” explicitly defines the unvaccinated as a danger to society, who can be excluded from a variety of spaces on this basis—a prospect many liberal observers appear to relish.
- The persistence of such language reveals that the most intense moral passions of today’s Democratic coalition are animated by the protection of what Agamben calls “bare life”—sheer biological existence. Whatever commitment to some vision of the good life exceeds that, it has been far less central to political messaging. When it does appear, it also heavily involves the agencies charged with biopolitical management. Consider the frequent proposals, over the past year, to replace police with social workers. Such proposals follow the logic Foucault identifies in the emergence of biopower, in which the criminologist and the psychiatrist came to enjoy greater prominence than the executioner. The implication here is neutral as to the advisability of the proposal: it is simply to note that it does not abolish power, but alters its operations.
- In the same period in which the lofty ideals of liberal education gave way to the nebulous raison d’être of the corporate university, the Foucauldian analysis of power has made many careers. It has also furnished a means of mythologizing professional activity as a mode of radical politics. Academic advancement strategies can be understood as modes of political contestation: peer-reviewed articles and conference papers as nodes of resistance, tenure committees as sites of nascent radical struggle, and so on. In this sense, Foucault’s influence did not undermine institutions so much as offer a new rationale for savvy operators within them. As sociologist Daniel Zamora remarks, Foucault “offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degree of subversion to be introduced without detracting from the codes of the academy.”
- …this cynicism is appropriate to an academic sphere that is at once rhetorically subversive and institutionally conservative. If all subversive energies ultimately feed into domination, it is unsurprising that the humanities and social sciences have become a space where overt ideological fervor coexists comfortably with covert careerist hypercompetitiveness, bourgeois professionalism, and the reproduction of elites.