"We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity." (Foucault Live p. 203)
This is a helpfully direct statement of what the course I've been TAing is arguing against, so I'm going to sort of parrot it for a second because it's a counterargument that I think is important. Bear in mind that this all tends to look a bit different if your main social engagements are anthropology seminars, because it often does feel like anthropologists' only trick has become "Hey! See this thing you thought was natural? Well I am going to show you that it is in fact cultural and contingent". So it does become a bit tiresome and brings about the final relativisation of the discipline etc etc.
But the thrust of the anti-Foucault argument (or at least, anti-Foucault as represented by the quotation) is that making 'the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness" seems to necessarily imply a blank slate view of human cognition, which would obviously be wrong. Because the human brain does have limits, or something like a structure, or maybe tendencies. And this is important for anthropologists because without some account of the tendencies of human cognition we have no way of accounting for the remarkable cross-cultural similarities in ritual practice, kinship, witchcraft etc etc. Obviously I don't think Foucault believed in a blank slate, but the implication does seem to creep in all over the place, which makes his radical freedoms just look like radical divorcing of thought form any grounding in humans as a biological species. The starting point here is that it is obvious that eg. gender, sexuality, mountains are historically constructed, but that they are also something else, and that there is no fundamental discontinuity between the part that is culturally constructed and the part that has some sort of intrinsic, significant difference.
I'm quite torn over this, since if your aim is to explore the limits of the thinkable, then setting out as if there were no limits seems like a brave and liberatory thing to do. And assuming limits on human possibility, particularly given the manifestly unsound state of many of cognitive science's current propositions, always seems to end up being politically creepy as well as empirically misguided, and they somehow always turn out to have their basis in common sense. But it's still just wrong to make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and I sort of assume the reason we all take such a healthy interest in neurosymbology is because we recognise this; not because we are against cognitive sciences, but because we are against stupid cognitive sciences.
Which is a sidepoint because I personally think UWF is an awesome title. Although it seems like for Foucault the line between being someone else and fucking someone else was also fairly undefined also. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind.
1 comment:
I've posted an edited and amended (click the "Read More" link) version of my original email.
I'm curious whether you think that this kind of thinking must imply a "blank slate?" I struggle, I confess, to see what's so troubling about Foucault, no doubt because I'm not in your field. I don't want to add science back to the humanities—that's a poor strategy because it's a raw deal for the human sciences and also makes for mediocre biology. Don't add it back, but get rid of the categories that cause you to break things up according to nature and culture and use a different method.
Also, suppose—who could deny it!—that witchcraft had as its condition certain biological facts. Now what of this analogy: does not architecture have as its condition certain physical facts? Do we need to at last make architecture a science by reintroducing the latest experimental results from physics, by having architects be up on their evidence? Obviously this is ridiculous. Then might the drastic and uncomfortable division between sociology, philosophy, literature and anthropology on one side and biology on the other have a source other than the inherent alethic failures of the humanities? It cannot be that Foucault was simply incorrect. What made these Judith-Buter-esque radical constructivists if it's not just that they got it all wrong?
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