Foucault and Post-Structuralism

[whowantsumadebo]

Greetings,

If anyone is involved in Religious Studies or anthropology, or sociology, or any of those human sciences for that matter, they're probably at least minimally familiar with Michel Foucault and the school of Post-Structuralism. They are the pillar of contemporary scholarship, as far as it seems from the university tower.

Well, I’m taking a graduate course on Asceticism and it’s begun with a discussion about the self, and that discussion has begun with Foucault and Post-Structuralism.
I don’t really understand. And in fact, the professors have a tough time explaining it.

What I’ve gathered consists of these premises:

1. There is no progress. One man is not better than another man, nor is one time, nor one society. Evolution is meaningless, as is technological development.
2. It’s meaningless because we give values to them that don’t exist on their own. Because the values are imposed, they are subjective. Because values are subjective, we cannot make any generalizations, at all. We can only describe what one person believes at one time.
3. Because of this, religion is meaningless. In fact, just about everything is meaningless. All there is, all there ever was or will be, is our subjective opinions on existence. This sounds like nominalism, and my professor agreed.
4. All history really revolves around power. This seems to be a lot like Marxist theory in which history revolves around economics.
5. The enlightenment was stupid. Man is irrational.
6. There is no epistimologically reliable language. Language’s meaning is arbitrary.
7. There is no personal identity. The human subject is a social construct, and we therefore can’t do anthropology. I don’t know why anthropologists do it then.
8. There is no signifier or even signified.

I hope this is understandable for some people. I am suspicious of some of these innovations, but I’m totally unprepared to deal with them. I’ve searched this forum and nobody discusses post-structuralism, although it is a huge force to be reckoned with.

Let’s discuss, no?

 

[Hastrman]

Outside a few academics, no, it isn’t a huge force to be reckoned with; Post-Modernism (of which post-structuralism is a part) is, more or less, dead. Not before it killed art, academic philosophy, and about half the social sciences, but the monster finally died.

Please God it shall not rise again.

 

[Mot_Juste]

Have you read G.K. Chesteron’s biography of Thomas Aquinas? It’s pretty short, but he has several interesting things to say about “modern” philosophy. Chesterton may pre-date Post-Structuralism (I don’t know), but I think he saw the direction things were headed.

–Bill

 

[ALotLessThumb]

Greetings,

If anyone is involved in Religious Studies or anthropology, or sociology, or any of those human sciences for that matter, they're probably at least minimally familiar with Michel Foucault and the school of Post-Structuralism. They are the pillar of contemporary scholarship, as far as it seems from the university tower.

Well, I’m taking a graduate course on Asceticism and it’s begun with a discussion about the self, and that discussion has begun with Foucault and Post-Structuralism.
I don’t really understand. And in fact, the professors have a tough time explaining it.

What I’ve gathered consists of these premises:

1. There is no progress. One man is not better than another man, nor is one time, nor one society. Evolution is meaningless, as is technological development.
2. It’s meaningless because we give values to them that don’t exist on their own. Because the values are imposed, they are subjective. Because values are subjective, we cannot make any generalizations, at all. We can only describe what one person believes at one time.
3. Because of this, religion is meaningless. In fact, just about everything is meaningless. All there is, all there ever was or will be, is our subjective opinions on existence. This sounds like nominalism, and my professor agreed.
4. All history really revolves around power. This seems to be a lot like Marxist theory in which history revolves around economics.
5. The enlightenment was stupid. Man is irrational.
6. There is no epistimologically reliable language. Language’s meaning is arbitrary.
7. There is no personal identity. The human subject is a social construct, and we therefore can’t do anthropology. I don’t know why anthropologists do it then.
8. There is no signifier or even signified.

I hope this is understandable for some people. I am suspicious of some of these innovations, but I’m totally unprepared to deal with them. I’ve searched this forum and nobody discusses post-structuralism, although it is a huge force to be reckoned with.

Let’s discuss, no?

It’s hard to argue against madness .

I haven’t read a whole heck of a lot in terms of post-structuralism- but it is awfully obscurant, and it does make it hard to engage when you have a background that is more classical. I know that in terms of Foucault, a lot of people cast doubt on his scholarship, which was very sloppy and lax. I am meaning to get around to reading some of his stuff- I suspect that he is more useful if approached as a “critic” than as a “philosopher.”

 

[Kaninchen]

I don’t really understand. And in fact, the professors have a tough time explaining it.

Perhaps you should suspend judgment for a while then - walk on the intellectual wild side for a bit?

I seem to remember Foucault, in the introduction to one of his books, talking about Borges ‘Chinese Encyclopedia’ on ‘animals’ “shattering the certainties” (or words to that effect) and a bit of certainties shattering is no bad thing.

 

[The_Barbarian]

The entire problem is the collapse of Logical Positivism, particularly the failure of Russel’s attempt to build a complete system of mathematics.

The fact is, we can make valid and accurate predictions about reality from evidence, even if we don’t accept the idea of revealed truth from God.

Philosopher to Scientist:
“Why do you persist in a system that cannot be proven from first principles?”

Scientist:
“It works.”

Philosopher:
“Why don’t you accept my carefully-honed and logical system?”

Scientist:
“It doesn’t work.”

Philosopher:
“Philistine”

Scientist:
“Weirdo.”

And so it goes.

 

[Kaninchen]

The entire problem is the collapse of Logical Positivism,

Surely, the idea that anything can be considered as being the ‘entire problem’ in epistemology rather questionable - it was, after all, part of a history of a root meta-problem: ‘the search for certainty’ and the idea that there was a demarcation between science and non-science that had to be maintained at all costs.

 

[JonW]

I read a couple of Foucault’s books a long while back. As a sometime armchair philosopher, I just don’t understand why Foucault, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the like, are ever really taken seriously in the first place. I understand what makes them attractive to the “modern” mind, particularly to the young “modern” mind, especially the scientifically illiterate, young “modern” mind, but can someone explain to me why any serious person should bother? I don’t mean to offend; I am honestly curious.

God Bless

Jon Winterburn

 

[Kaninchen]

I read a couple of Foucault’s books a long while back. As a sometime armchair philosopher, I just don’t understand why Foucault, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the like, are ever really taken seriously in the first place. I understand what makes them attractive to the “modern” mind, particularly to the young “modern” mind, especially the scientifically illiterate, young “modern” mind, but can someone explain to me why any serious person should bother? I don’t mean to offend; I am honestly curious.

God Bless

Jon Winterburn

I’ve always had in interest in Structuralism (through linguistics, have you read Barthes’ “Mythologies”, by the way?), so I’ve had a passing interest in some of the post-Structuralist writers. I found Foucault’s (particularly early Foucault) “archeology” of the Enlightenment and its effects interesting - in books like ‘The Birth Of The Clinic’, ‘The Order of Things’ and ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’.

A lot of post-Structuralist work is unreadable, I guess some of it is peculiarly French and French isn’t a language I can read books in.

 

[JonW]

Hi Kaninchen,

Thanks for the response. I have not read Barthe, but I read Foucault’s “Archeology of Kowledge” as well as “The Order of Things” years ago. I remember being confused, but slightly interested. Now though, I just don’t see the point of the inherent nihilism. Seemed like a form of destructive criticism that misses all of the salient points of any good philosophy. Just me?

Jon

 

[Kaninchen]

Hi Kaninchen,

Thanks for the response. I have not read Barthe,

I think Barthes is well worth the read.

but I read Foucault’s “Archeology of Kowledge” as well as “The Order of Things” years ago. I remember being confused, but slightly interested. Now though, I just don’t see the point of the inherent nihilism. Seemed like a form of destructive criticism that misses all of the salient points of any good philosophy. Just me?

Jon

Well, certainly not just you!

At the time I was wrestling with a particular set of problems (intellectual, not personal) and I got some valuable insights from Foucault - I wasn’t just reading him out of intellectual interest. That might well be an explanation for the difference in our experience - if something is useful, we tend to see a value in it.

As to the ‘inherent nihilism’, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you, other than that a bit of ‘inherent nihilism’ can be a valuable shock to the system, especially to those of us with a tendency to over-elaborate solutions (as I had when I was younger).

 

[Nullasalus]

1. It’s meaningless because we give values to them that don’t exist on their own. Because the values are imposed, they are subjective. Because values are subjective, we cannot make any generalizations, at all. We can only describe what one person believes at one time.
2. Because of this, religion is meaningless. In fact, just about everything is meaningless. All there is, all there ever was or will be, is our subjective opinions on existence. This sounds like nominalism, and my professor agreed.

If God had subjective values that were unchanging (if they’re eternal and unchanging, are they really subjective?), even if they were complicated values that could never be realized to a point of static perfection (As in, there would always be room for improvement and change), we’d have what would effectively function as meaningful, objective values. And if the values are effectively real, ours would be imbued with meaning upon the instant because they’d forever be able to be measured against (at least in part) that effectively objective standard.

Granted, it’s not like that settles the issue (onto the God arguments). But it’s one way out of the post-structuralist rationale; if the ultimate ground of all being is itself a Being with (where we are concerned) an eternal perspective, that’s extremely ‘real’ according to the standard. Doubly so if certain amounts of freedom in general (libertarian or not) and freedom with regards to finding meaning is part of those values we conscious beings are imbued with.

At least it’s kind of a funny view, since the mere fact it exists means someone had to formally draw it up and argue it. You’d think if anyone believed as much, no one would ever discover it. But any perspective offered by an individual is instructive, even if only to analyze and point out the flaws.

 

[DL82]

Foucault and other post-modern thinkers offer a valid criticism of modernism, that is, the set of beliefs associated with Russell and the logical positivists, with origins stretching back to Kant’s attempt to build a philosophy within the limits of ‘pure practical reason’ that said that we could construct a set of values and truths purely on the grounds of scientific observation and apriori logical rules. As Wittgenstein observed about the early development of psychology as a science, it is all experimental method and no philosophical underpinning, which means that the problem and the solution pass eachother by.

Modernism was doomed to failure from the start, because while things in the world do have a value that is not constructed by us, it is not a value that they possess of themselves either, there is no way that I can know what a wrench is for simply by looking at it, I need to know that there are such things as bolts, and that it’s a good idea to screw bolts into screws. Neither the screw, nor the bolt, nor any visible object composed of screws and bolts, will tell you of itself that it’s a good idea to use a wrench - some non-observable moral end-in-itself, ourselves, God, or some other mind, needs to make the decision that this use produces something good. If I don’t understand that it’s a good idea to screw bolts into screws, in other words, if I don’t understand the teleological ‘why’ behind this object, I will never be able to explain the value or purpose of the object, no matter how carefully I study its’ properties.

Foucault criticises our ability to know everything just by reference to the thing itself. That’s a valid criticism. Foucault, however, takes it too far, and criticises our ability to know anything by reference to anything at all.

A good post-post-modern Christian response to the deconstruction of knowledge comes from Catherine Pickstock’s After Writing: On the liturgical consummation of philosophy. Though an Anglican, her response seems quite orthodox in that she explores the relationship between knowledge as at once beyond time and only accessible to us as finite creatures in time. Pickstock’s book critiques Derrida’s deconstructionist model of post-modernism, though some of her ideas are also useful for showing up the flaws in Foucault, Bourdieu and other postmodernists.

 

[DL82]

If I can just add, Foucault’s critique began as a criticism of specific things - modern medicine and modern prisons - and on those issues, his early work, he is spot on.

His theories lay bare the ways in which scientific medicine, psychiatry and penal systems turn people into objects, interpreting them in the light of scientific ‘evidence’ which is supposed to be ‘objective’. A person becomes an illness, a pathology or a disorder, and only when ‘we’ decide that the illness is cured do they once again regain their status as a person.

The only problem with Foucault’s theory is the absence of God, the absence of a First Principle that can give those people an objective value that is based on their BEING not on their BEING KNOWN. Add that to the mix, and you have a critique of modernism that reasserts the value of the human person as an end in his/herself.

 

[Hastrman]

The only problem with Foucault’s theory is the absence of God, the absence of a First Principle that can give those people an objective value that is based on their BEING not on their BEING KNOWN. Add that to the mix, and you have a critique of modernism that reasserts the value of the human person as an end in his/herself.

I don’t know a whole lot about him specifically, but I’ll guarantee you there are more problems than that with any PoMo (as anthropologists call them). Mostly, admittedly, problems of basic logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.

 

[JonW]

DL82, thank you very much for your thoughtful response. It was very helpful for me. As well, thanks for the book recommendation. I shall give it a look. As a habitual analytic myself, I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of grossly overestimating the rightful purview of the analytic lense, ignoring any and all criticism along the way. I have no problem reading pre-analytic philosophy, but have been repelled by contemporary “continental” thought for what I perceived to be its almost systematic eschewing of rigour. I see now that there are valid criticisms within that stream, even about my most cherished analytic stream. Incidentally, from what little I know about Foucault, I think your analysis is spot on. I’m not sure how to respond to your criticism of modernism generally, however. I think you’re right about Kant, but I’m not sure how much that particular strain in his thought pervades most analytics.

God Bless

Jon Winterburn