Further thoughts on "Foucault"

One of the points I was attempting to make in my previous post was that it is somewhat hard, at least initially, to get excited about Foucault if you are interested in shaking things up in literary studies, my primary field of training and activity (I take this to be one aspect of TT T-B's initial salvo as well). Now, I do get excited about Foucault, but usually only insofar as I place myself at some distance from the general scholarly "conversation" of literary studies and resituate myself in other discursive fields (e.g the critique of neuroscience journalism or U.S. drug policy). As I indicated previously, at this point "Foucault" (I am using "Foucault" in scare quotes much the way we have used "Judith Butler" previously) might as well denote the hegemonic ideology of the humanities professoriat. The humanities seem to be the place where exciting modes of critique go to die, or at least go to become commodified. "Foucault" could also be shorthand for the product demanded by the most prestigious journals and university presses, at least those associated with English departments, which compose the dominant sector of the literary humanities (comp lit and foreign language departments are more fractured, and therefore somewhat less predictable, but they also enjoy far less prestige and funding within the university). My impression from the Brown English department was that a certain type of (sometimes but not always "stupid") "Foucauldianism" - generally consisting of: an understanding of literary discourse as producing rather than reflecting or describing power relations (by the way, I generally agree with this approach), some degree of attention to (or at least ritualistic invocation of) "the body," a vaguely liberationist rhetoric buffered by the claim that power invests and pervades (and therefore can be contested within) all fields, no matter how apparently obscure, "minor," and/or scholarly - was literally compulsory for any graduate student who wished to stay in the program. At the end of their six years or so, they all go off to compete for the handful of available jobs at the MLA armed with a shtick that sounds more or less like this: "I work on (discourses of) x [where x=some apparently marginal theme ideally associated with "the body": e.g. "hygiene," "nervousness," "orality," "embodiment"] in y [where y=a period, ideally designated by some at least faintly revisionist phrase, e.g. "early modern," rather than "Renaissance" or "Baroque," "long eighteenth century" rather than "Enlightenment"]. My dissertation shows that x subtends a cluster of rhetorical strategies permitting the y subject to contest/reimagine/naturalize submission to [insert relevant power structure]. This negotiation played a pivotal role in the reconfigurations of the [insert relevant area of power/knowledge] regime characteristic of y. Whereas previous scholarship on y has largely failed to interrogate x, I demonstrate that this silencing has perpetuated the naturalization of x as a function of [insert epistemic/sociohistoric shift relevant to previous scholarly reification of y]."

Now, I should make clear I am not dismissing scholarship in the mode I have just caricatured as worthless or pernicious. In fact, I find quite a bit of it cogent, powerful, and illuminating, often like reading it, and have learned a great deal from it. To a large extent, I believe I am primarily allergic to the academic environment itself and especially to the particular forms of commodification it requires of its would-be denizens, rather than to the particular formulae in vogue at this juncture. On the other hand, I think that both the enforcement of what I am calling the "Foucauldian" formula as a kind of academic rightthink and the very fact that certain propositions associated with Foucault have taken on such a stultifyingly formulaic quality are highly troubling given the way they coincide historically with the increasing disrepute and socio-political irrelevance of the humanities over the past two to three decades (a fact made painfully clear by the savage cuts enacted in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.). The problem, as Michael Bérubé recently demonstrated, is not a dramatic decline in enrollments, which apart from a blip in the sixties have remained largely stable around 10% throughout the postwar era, but rather a clear sense on the part of the power elite that the humanities have become expendable and even embarrassing (I would suggest that this sense is in no small part derived from the manner in which the culture industry has expanded to perform ideological functions that were previously to some extent the province of the academic humanities, but I would have to expand on this claim to make it more plausible). I suggested in my previous post that the main anxiety provoked among humanists by Foucault - put simply, his apparent claim that resistance feeds power rather than contesting it - allegorizes a highly justifiable, to varying degrees unconscious concern that their own endless lip service to resistance serves power by providing elite institutions with the convenient appearance of a commitment to equality, liberation, and other things ideologically important to the sectors of privilege they serve.

My point here is that if there is something specific to the kinds of inquiry carried out in the humanities that deserves preservation and perpetuation, I think the currently hegemonic "Foucauldianism" has probably not been helpful in making the case for them. There is, I would contend, a specific domain of experience that we can or even must talk about in terms of "the literary" or the aesthetic, and Foucault and his followers and fellow travelers have helped us understand how that experience might have been the product of specific, identifiable historical and political forces, and for this they deserve great credit. However, the gesture of unmasking implicit in this enterprise has as its potential consequence a leveling of that experience, and even a hollowing out of it. Let us formulate the basic proposition as follows: "literature is a social and historical construct linked to bourgeois white males' accumulation of symbolic capital at the beginning of the modern period; its proclaimed 'universality' masks the silencing of subaltern voices, just as the language of aesthetics that emerges with it becomes and persists as an exclusionary tactic by which hegemonic sectors mask their violence." Now, the question we must raise about this formulation (which I have little trouble accepting, in a broad sense) is where its emphasis lies. Is the point that "literature" is merely this, merely a mask or a shibboleth? This is certainly the lesson drawn by many, if not most, of the people whose work I am somewhat crudely lumping together.

Once this reading has been accepted, the necessary consequence appears to be that we are no longer interested in the literary object, or the kind of experience we might call "literary" or "aesthetic," and instead are interested in how and by whom and to what ends these kinds of objects and experiences are made. But my first question at this point is, what is the point of having this take place in a specific department dedicated to "English" or "literature"? British Marxist scholars' invention of cultural studies responded precisely to this problem, but it has never taken hold institutionally in the U.S., with the somewhat strange result that English Ph.D.'s still churn out endless dissertations on Shakespeare, but they make every effort to treat Shakespeare's plays in the same way as they do contemporary legal and medical discourses, let's say. There is nothing necessarily illegitimate about such an approach, but what is problematic is that it occurs in the absence of any attempt to redraw disciplinary boundaries (in part because humanists probably correctly assume that any such redrawing will come at their expense). Here is where I think the social constructivism of the humanities differs at least from the best of what seems to be happening in science studies: science studies people, even as they document their artifactuality and constructedness, do not at the same time cease to pay attention to the specific kinds of objects and experiences associated with, say, endocrinology or astrophysics - in fact, their central motivation seems to be to generate a more adequate account of those specific objects and experiences. My second question is: could there be a refocusing of humanistic inquiry in which regarding literature as a social construct does not imply regarding it as merely a social construct, that is to say in which charting the social forces which brought it into being as an object and an experience does not imply its hollowing out, its loss of specificity, or its reduction to a vehicle of identity construction?

Allow me to express a final ambivalence here: I am genuinely not certain if the institutional humanities deserve to be maintained in anything like their current form (particularly since I have decided that, on a personal level, I have little interest in continuing to participate in them in their current form, even though I will not deny that I gained a great deal from specific work done under their auspices). I also find most of the current efforts of humanists to defend their turf about as uninspiring and uninteresting as I found the sad recent riots of French youth desperate to maintain the retirement age at 63. On the other hand, the humanities do not deserve to be dismantled for the reasons that university administrators and politicians think they deserve to be dismantled. In any case, I am inclined to think that the apparently methodological questions I was posing above are, in fact, identical with these existential ones.