I agree with a lot of this, but there's a background framing that's very blinkered. I think this quote demonstrates it well.
"No one ever stopped you from reading history books on US involvement in South America. No one ever stopped you from reading old reactionary texts. Are you upset because it wasn’t assigned to you in 11th grade? Grow up."
This is what I take as literally the point of an honest reckoning with the concept of ideas as influenced by power structures. It doesn't matter if one can access a history of the US in Latin America in the 20th century. Or even a true history of the US as opposed to whitewashed propaganda as mandated now in states like Texas and was all anyone learned until pretty recently. Round to no one reads 500 page history texts, popular or academic. If the power structures ensure that round to no one learns X, then the popular imagination and all the politics downstream of it will be dramatically different than if everyone learned X in high school.
I'm a PhD statistician. I couldn't agree more that questions about society should be as informed by data and reasoning and inference as possible. But with that training I'm also very aware of another thing you miss. The data we have, the questions we ask, and the research that gets funded are all powerfully influenced by the structure of society and our polity (ie power structures).
Take an example from recent politics. Centrist and right wing types like Hanania point to the fact that the research says more police equals less crime, so obviously defunding the police is doomed to failure. Smart proponents of defunding point out two things. First, crimes by the police are nearly 100% unmeasured (because power structures). So it's actually literally impossible to truly measure the relative crime rates with more versus less police presence. But even if you grant that more police results in less overall crime, the bigger point is that, especially since Reagan, as a country we have systematically dismantled or refused to build almost any social infrastructure other than the police to deal with the problems driven by poverty, addiction, mental health, economic dislocation, etc. So if you go from one public service dealing with a while raft of issues to none, it shouldn't be surprising lots of problems get worse. The real question is should we reimagine how to structure public services. I'm open to the kinds of things smart defund folks argue for being right or wrong. But those aren't things you can measure without large investments in making some attempts at fundamental reform. Reforms opposed by and suppressed by winners in the current structure.
Again, I think lots of critical studies are net negative masturbation. But you're showing big blind spots here too.
> The data we have, the questions we ask, and the research that gets funded are all powerfully influenced by the structure of society and our polity (ie power structures).
I actually do agree with you here. I think the challenge is while it's definitely true that power-structures inform knowledge as you say. It's really hard to employ that device, since it's remarkably hard (impossible?) to measure.
To your other points about police, I think I agree with you in the abstract about how power informs what we view and counterfactuals. In practice I think I probably disagree with your specific views :)
Fair. My challenge then would be not to conflate your (IMO) correct criticisms of Foucault-derived anti-fact lefty signaling/masturbation with evidence against ideas to the left of you, or the legitimacy of calls for bigger public policy experiments than can be strongly supported by existing evidence. That conflation was my impression from the post.
See this was nice. Can't we do politics as reasonable debate and compromise between center right and center left. I'm fully willing to grant my instincts are probably to the left of what would be required for maximum systemic innovation. As I ask folks more focused on that to consider my angles too. Maybe someday.
You say you’ve never gotten a dopamine hit from reading statistics, but it seems to me right-wingers fixated on race-and-crime stats are really into empirical data for precisely that reason. Steve Sailer or whoever is popular with the “dissident right” because he ALSO promises his readers “forbidden knowledge” that you become a dangerous free-thinker for learning.
I think the lesson is that people who are genuinely curious about the world — and not just ideologues with pre-determined conclusions — have to have respect for both data AND narrative-driven theories. You can test theories with data, but data also has to be understood in some sort of social context that looks honesty at existing structures of power and their history, etc.
My minor nitpick is that Nick Land's intellectual contributions aren't based on interpreting ideas as being downstream of power. (I'm not saying he doesn't or hasn't thought this way; he's certainly been influenced by both post-structuralists and Moldbug, who do -- merely that he's not developed that line of thought in his work.) Rather, Land interprets intellectual and cultural developments as being determined by a historical process, akin to the Christian doctrines of divine providence and millenarian eschatology and the Marxist theories of historical materialism. And Land's historical process places ideas over societal power structures. The idea of hyperstition means that things that don't have power (because they don't exist yet!) may still make themselves inevitable through the causal force of ideas. (Like Marxism, Land's view is compatible with thinking in terms of power structures for understanding how things work at any particular point in time; it's just that he emphasizes history over time-scales at which human power structures cease to matter.)
Oh interesting thanks for sharing, I didn't know that. Perhaps I was too quick to group Land in with the rest. I ordered Xenosystems from passage press, so maybe a closer reading will help fill me in there.
Arguing against myself, this is a distinction without a difference, because it still means that Land doesn't engage in empirical quantitative reasoning (unless you count his recent obsession with alphanumerical qabalah...).
Indeed, it's ironic that so many academics learn about power and epistime only to use the knowledge to reify their own ideas through power. In that sense they abandon Foucault - his main ideas are really just standard methods of historical critique.
I don't like when people throw out casual burns about people like Chomsky. I don't even know what your point is here, that he was accurate and precise in his analysis but naive in expecting the US to be any different, or for the popular mass to ever care. Chomsky is not a perfect person and perhaps frustrating in his failure to acknowledge other powers agency, but his stance has always had high integrity and courage. Not many people can stand up to hegemony in the way he has done and it's unfair to sully him with casual slurs.
Great essay! What you say about the lack of statistical literacy in social sciences reminds me a bit of the state of Marxism in academia.
Marxism is ultimately an economic system, so being a Marxist only really makes sense if you thoroughly understand economics. But most academic Marxists are not particularly focused on economics. Most are philosophers, sociologists, or political scientists who learn a few basics about Marxist economics, and then build social theory on top of it. But if socialism is not a preferable economic system, then it doesn't really matter how social conditions would hypothetically operate in a hypothetically successful socialist system. It's just constructing a building over an unstable foundation.
In the same way that you can't really assume economic literacy to be a Marxist, you can't really assume scientific literacy to critique science. Criticism of power relations in the history of science are useful if you can understand the flaws in the methodology. But if you jump the gun and assume science is inherently flawed with a flimsy understanding of the methodology, you end up with a very unreliable epistemology.
This seems completely wrong. Firstly, Marxism is not an economic system. It began as a critique (analysis) of capitalism.
Second, Marxist social theorists are largely interested in Marx's analysis of society, not in advocating for a socialist system. They draw from ideas like ideology, dialectical materialism, alienation, base/superstructure etc to think about how society works, and how it can be improved. You don't have to be a communist to use Marxist concepts in your analysis.
For example, one might wonder why Marxism is consistently made out to be something it's not in capitalist society. Is it human error, or are there power structures disseminating misinterpretations ...?
Marxism predicts that the inherent contradictions of capitalism will inevitably result in the transition to communism — i.e. capitalism will collapse and the working class will establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eventually wither away into stateless communism.
Marxism is premised on the idea that communism is not just inevitable, but also preferable for the working class. But what if communism is not inevitable? And if there's a choice between communism and capitalism, what if the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't perform as well as Marxists predicted? Then the shaky premises of Marxist economic theory make much of the social theory superfluous. Like, why does it matter how a hypothetically better education would work under stateless communism if it never happens?
Though to be fair, there are some parts of Marxism that aren't contingent on his greater theory of communist transition (e.g. workers' alienation). But then, there are other thinkers who had similar ideas that aren't within a Marxist paradigm.
I mean, you could say Marxism is a failed attempt at economics and social science. This feels more like a semantic argument though, like "Marxism isn't about economics because he did economics wrong."
I'm not disagreeing that his economic analysis was shoddy. The point is that since his economic analysis was shoddy, his social theory is weak, since it builds on top of his economic analysis.
Ok, now we’re close enough. Marxism is a political ideology, or philosophy if you prefer, that made claims about economics. But it was in no sense *scientific* on the economics.
Seriously, Marxist economics is less “social science” than *some* (by no means all, but *some*) grievance studies in social science departments today.
Not sure if we are agreeing or disagreeing, but as more “generic” social science, Marxism isn’t / wasn’t a “failed” attempt, IMO, it was in fact an extraordinarily “successful” attempt, despite delivering disastrous results for the lives of those not in the ruling class.
A few points: I realize that your point is about his popularity, so it is more subtle, but "There is an even more cynical view here, which is that Foucault is also a way to escape the fact that many academic theorists are innumerate. [...] This would probably be too uncharitable, if I hadn’t seen it first hand in the departments of sufficiently prestigious Political Science departments." verges on a fallacy, if we allow this to extend to Foucault himself, who was clearly a very skilled and subtle thinker, to my mind. I don't believe you are doing this, but I think this is a mistake that is often made by critics of Theory. That said, the deeper irony is that how his ideas are used might be inextricably bound with those ideas, given that institutional power is ultimately what gives cover to academic charlatanism.
More generally, this tangentially gets at a problem I identified very long ago, back when I was that immature kid who was pissed off that he didn't read the "dangerous ideas" in high school (re. your: "Grow up.") Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a foundational text for this sort of thing a generation ago (AJ in the Sopranos even read it!), and I remember being gripped by it like most young people thirsting for transgression. But there is a glaring problem: a vast majority of my youthful compatriots didn't really know the real history to dissent from in any depth. Zinn was the first history text that many of us really took to heart deeply enough to internalize, live with, accept and digest, and there is something deeply dysfunctional about that. This isn't to say Zinn's text isn't important or doesn't legitimately challenge status quo historical assumptions, but that from the perspective of the singular reader, the idea that it is an act of rebellion to read him as an individual orienting oneself to the world is a ludicrous bit of shallow vanity. As though that kid with the Jello Biafra spoken word records had been mainlining Burke and the Federalist Papers before he happened upon Zinn's lectures on Sacco and Vanzetti. Perhaps I am overstating the point, but there is something rather perverse in starting with transgression as self-orientation. The parallel to Foucault is pretty obvious. Just assuming "because power" out of the gate isn't wrong necessarily, but (1) it's immensely shallow and (2) ironically, to my mind, gets Foucault wrong in some interesting ways: we can't escape the trappings of power any more than those we purport to dismantle with Foucauldian tools. I've always found a kernel of humility in Foucault.
Last point - Deleuze gets a lot of flack as well, but his readings of figures of the tradition (Kant, Hume, et al) are immensely subtle and rich.
Well.. I’m no expert on or critic of Foucault himself…
…but yes, you have it exactly correct that that is how he is used by modern grievance studies leftists to justify their woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory claims.
The reason that work that's in this kind of so called continental style (that may be a pedantically incorrect description but it's often used) so appealing comes down to a couple factors imo
First, the people who are drawn to academics and especially the humanities often aspire to use their intellect to transform the world. In their fantasy they get to be Kant deriving deep truths from pure logic or the great wizard whose intelligence lets them banish the evil they see in the world. Unfortunately, if you reason with the kind of care and preciscion necessary to produce valid arguments [1] -- for instance in the way good analytic philosophers like Carnap might do -- you find that going even the tiniest distance beyond the assumptions you start with is hard to the point of impossible and even 'obvious' conclusions seem to be beyond these tools.
The amazing thing about writers like Foucault is they can reach huge conclusions with enough steps they take feel compelling (and others not feeling obviously false) it creates the feel of doing what they imagined/aspire to do. Of course, it's ultimately a trick accomplished in the usual means [2] but it's very emotionally satisfying.
Second, they often make the their content feel extremely hard to fully understand in a way that evokes the kind of difficulty you might have digesting group theory. This inclines us to assume that the content must therefore be of great value and of incredible insight when the truth is it's often relatively banal notions expressed confusingly. TBF Foucault is less guilty of this than many other thinkers.
Third, because the big picture isn't clearly conveyed the reader ends up engaging with the text to fill it in. Creative thought like this, especially in a less stressful context than math class, is often itself rewarding and because you have the experience of insight as you come up with interpretations that seem to fit it's easy to make the mistake of thinking the insight comes from the text not from you.
Even better, the text is often sufficiently ambiguous (Foucalt is less bad than others here, eg Derida) that you get to fill in views that you find appealing and we like little more than to hear our own ideas back from someone who is fetted as great. Of course, the fact that our interpretation often disagrees with others should be a clue that the insight often isn't coming from the work (not that Foucault doesn't have some good ideas too).
Finally, there is the pressure of status. We convince ourselves we are getting something deep out of it because it feels like the other option is to admit we're dumb or uncultured. It's the same way that when someone takes out an expensive fetted bottle of wine studies show people convince themselves they like it even though they often prefer the cheap shit in blinded trials.
And the great trick deployed here is the claim that if you haven't studied this author in depth -- musing over their work for many years -- you lack the authority to call it bullshit because you don't really understand it. That is basically a perfect defense from criticism because few people who don't buy the value in these works are going to waste the years of their life to study them -- critics like Carnap come along once and afterwards everyone else thinks that if he couldn't convince them Derida was bullshit how could I.
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EDIT: To be fair to Foucault I should say that he strikes me as someone with some interesting ideas trapped in a tradition that uses the kind of tricks I pointed out above. And that does explain what makes him attractive and some of the exhilaration in reading him but I think he could have taken those ideas and represented them in a different tradition and they'd still have some appeal but they wouldn't offer the same feeling of having seen the secret way of seeing the world. It would be some mild insights about psychology and society.
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1: Often the words we use have multiple connotations or seem precise but careful examination reveals they are anything but. For instance, that is what usually goes wrong when someone makes arguments that use concepts like objectification.
2: Defining a word in a way that doesn't quite match our standard usage and using the definition to do part of the work and appealing to our association with the word to do the rest (the way many proofs of god's existence actually prove something else exists they call god) or subtly slipping between multiple meanings or suggesting a claim is clear when one context is salient then applying it in another.
So here's the question. When I was writing the article, I assumed something like Foucault's ideology was common and anyone else could have gotten famous for talking about discourses and power structures and all the other nonsense that seems so ubiquitous today. From here, it sounds like perhaps all that stuff now seems to be everywhere because of Foucault, that he was actually pioneering a new kind of thought. In that case, it is logical to focus on his thought itself as key to his success, which I discounted. Is this right?
I'm not an expert on early poststructuralist thought (thankfully). But I think maybe it's a bit of both. I do think Foucault built off earlier foundations himself from guys like Marx and Hegel and other postmodernist types, so it is probably true that he was just the right guy, at just the right time in the 60s and 70s when this stuff was becoming fashionable, to bring it all together and present it as a coherent framework (right place/right time).
I think in some sense though his massive outsized influence was due to his thoughts, but not because they were so incredible. Compared to someone like Von Neumann, as a radical example of someone with lots of citations who is probably still underrated for his thoughts. It was because his thoughts were extremely useful for an activist academic class looking to dismantle existing scientific (and legal thought, like in your book).
“It was because his thoughts were extremely useful for an activist academic class looking to dismantle existing scientific (and legal thought…”
Ah, I see that buried in the comments here you *do* indeed make a similar point to the comment I just left.
A shame you didn’t make this point in your piece proper, as it seems to me to be *the* main reason he is so widely cited - more important than any of the other explanations you gave.
>Why did we spend the whole seminar reading Foucault rather than looking at any empirical statistics regarding crime in America?
When you ask BLM activists, they will say these statistics are useless, because arrest rates do not correspond to actual crime rates due to police racism. I don't know whether it is true, but this is precisely what Foucault would say about how power distorts knowledge.
The issue is, you really do think such statistics is as empirical and as reliable as an experiment in physics. Why do you think that? Soft sciences are soft and you know what Churchhill said about statistics.
Example: in Japan, an infant dying within 48 hours of birth is counted as stillborn. In America, an infant dying any time after birth counts as infant mortality. So Japanese infant mortality statistics are very low, but it says nothing about actual infant mortality.
And this is always like that.
This is not the same as saying there is no truth. It is saying that soft sciences should not pose as physics.
“Why are these ideas so incredibly popular and frequently cited given their content?”
Seems to me you get close to the Occam’s Razor obvious answer, but you don’t actually *say* it.
Foucault is the most cited because social science is now predominantly grievance studies, and leftists want something with any hint of intellectual patina to justify their decidedly illiberal, authoritarian assertions that they should have power.
Because woke / DEI / critical race theory / intersectionality ideology are all simply variants of oppressor/oppressed ideology, claiming that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in our zero-sum power world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
Hence the need to cite Foucault.
Or do you have data showing that he is widely cited by people outside of the grievance studies world, and that in fact as a percentage he is cited less now than he was 20 years ago? If so, I will apologize for my claim above.
> Foucault is the invocation that lets you dismiss the empirical ugliness and the dangerous implications of considering them. What if all knowledge is from power-structures, and it's imposed on us by an antagonist authority? Then the only real way to solve the issue is to come up with a new system from first philosophical principles (ideally the ones we think are good and true).
Foucault doesn't dismiss empirical evidence. In fact he goes through a lot of historical data in his work.
Ultimately though, data are understood through an interpretation framework. Even worse, often they are massaged and cherry-picked to fit one. Even even worse, they're collected based on one to begin with - as well as based on several power balances.
The "empirical" input could just be what power handed you down (e.g. state data prepared to make the government look good, or compiled to fit an official narrative) - in which case your empirical "science" is garbage results, based on statistical analysis and conclusions off of that shitty input.
And what about the questions you are asking to begin with? Or the outcomes you consider as good to begin with and want to use the data to research?
When the domain is not some inconsequential socially field, like Physics or Chemistry science rules the day.
In cases concerning social data and policy, things that touch ideologies and power interests, despite what the data say, even assuming they're pure and reflective of the underlying reality, some questions you can't even ask, and some conclusions you can not even arrive at, because you'll get no grants, or will be fired. All "empirical" scientists know about this too, and comform accordingly (or get maginalized).
> No one ever stopped you from reading history books on US involvement in South America. No one ever stopped you from reading old reactionary texts. Are you upset because it wasn’t assigned to you in 11th grade? Grow up.
Actually growing up would involve understanding that those things "not being assigned" while the other stuff "being assigned" already shaped your "totally empirical and scientific I promise you" frame of reference, and even worse, your understanding of History, politics, and social issues.
Which makes the point of "nobody stopping you" from reading those on your own moot. The person who would do the reading has already been given a set of beliefs - and in their most crucial developmental age.
“ Foucault doesn't dismiss empirical evidence. In fact he goes through a lot of historical data in his work.”
Sorry, it’s is *you* imo who is not getting the point.
The author didn’t say that *Foucault* dismisses empirical evidence. He said that “Foucault is the invocation that lets you dismiss the empirical ugliness and the dangerous implications of considering them.”.
“The invocation” - by grievance studies academics wanting to dismiss [various] empirical uglinesses - *is* the point!
Anti-empiricism? No, anti-positivism, and that is much earlier. That has been an explicit feature of German social science even in 1922:
"Sociology is ] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. *In neither case is the 'meaning' thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion.* "
— Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action 1922
So basically Weber was saying you can collect crime stats all you want, but they tell you nothing about what you really want to know: what is going on in the criminals head. What is the motivation? What is the meaning, the intent?
Plain simply in human action, causality is meaning, is intent. It is not enough to know that tall people more often steal basketballs. That is undigested data, not science. We want to know they intend to play basketball with it and that is the motivation, the meaning, the cause.
I agree with a lot of this, but there's a background framing that's very blinkered. I think this quote demonstrates it well.
"No one ever stopped you from reading history books on US involvement in South America. No one ever stopped you from reading old reactionary texts. Are you upset because it wasn’t assigned to you in 11th grade? Grow up."
This is what I take as literally the point of an honest reckoning with the concept of ideas as influenced by power structures. It doesn't matter if one can access a history of the US in Latin America in the 20th century. Or even a true history of the US as opposed to whitewashed propaganda as mandated now in states like Texas and was all anyone learned until pretty recently. Round to no one reads 500 page history texts, popular or academic. If the power structures ensure that round to no one learns X, then the popular imagination and all the politics downstream of it will be dramatically different than if everyone learned X in high school.
I'm a PhD statistician. I couldn't agree more that questions about society should be as informed by data and reasoning and inference as possible. But with that training I'm also very aware of another thing you miss. The data we have, the questions we ask, and the research that gets funded are all powerfully influenced by the structure of society and our polity (ie power structures).
Take an example from recent politics. Centrist and right wing types like Hanania point to the fact that the research says more police equals less crime, so obviously defunding the police is doomed to failure. Smart proponents of defunding point out two things. First, crimes by the police are nearly 100% unmeasured (because power structures). So it's actually literally impossible to truly measure the relative crime rates with more versus less police presence. But even if you grant that more police results in less overall crime, the bigger point is that, especially since Reagan, as a country we have systematically dismantled or refused to build almost any social infrastructure other than the police to deal with the problems driven by poverty, addiction, mental health, economic dislocation, etc. So if you go from one public service dealing with a while raft of issues to none, it shouldn't be surprising lots of problems get worse. The real question is should we reimagine how to structure public services. I'm open to the kinds of things smart defund folks argue for being right or wrong. But those aren't things you can measure without large investments in making some attempts at fundamental reform. Reforms opposed by and suppressed by winners in the current structure.
Again, I think lots of critical studies are net negative masturbation. But you're showing big blind spots here too.
> The data we have, the questions we ask, and the research that gets funded are all powerfully influenced by the structure of society and our polity (ie power structures).
I actually do agree with you here. I think the challenge is while it's definitely true that power-structures inform knowledge as you say. It's really hard to employ that device, since it's remarkably hard (impossible?) to measure.
To your other points about police, I think I agree with you in the abstract about how power informs what we view and counterfactuals. In practice I think I probably disagree with your specific views :)
Fair. My challenge then would be not to conflate your (IMO) correct criticisms of Foucault-derived anti-fact lefty signaling/masturbation with evidence against ideas to the left of you, or the legitimacy of calls for bigger public policy experiments than can be strongly supported by existing evidence. That conflation was my impression from the post.
Noted.
See this was nice. Can't we do politics as reasonable debate and compromise between center right and center left. I'm fully willing to grant my instincts are probably to the left of what would be required for maximum systemic innovation. As I ask folks more focused on that to consider my angles too. Maybe someday.
Yeah I wish man, I have no appetite for being mad online. Or mad in general. I guess other people like being mad, but I don't.
You say you’ve never gotten a dopamine hit from reading statistics, but it seems to me right-wingers fixated on race-and-crime stats are really into empirical data for precisely that reason. Steve Sailer or whoever is popular with the “dissident right” because he ALSO promises his readers “forbidden knowledge” that you become a dangerous free-thinker for learning.
I think the lesson is that people who are genuinely curious about the world — and not just ideologues with pre-determined conclusions — have to have respect for both data AND narrative-driven theories. You can test theories with data, but data also has to be understood in some sort of social context that looks honesty at existing structures of power and their history, etc.
Interesting point! You're right on that front.
I love this!
My minor nitpick is that Nick Land's intellectual contributions aren't based on interpreting ideas as being downstream of power. (I'm not saying he doesn't or hasn't thought this way; he's certainly been influenced by both post-structuralists and Moldbug, who do -- merely that he's not developed that line of thought in his work.) Rather, Land interprets intellectual and cultural developments as being determined by a historical process, akin to the Christian doctrines of divine providence and millenarian eschatology and the Marxist theories of historical materialism. And Land's historical process places ideas over societal power structures. The idea of hyperstition means that things that don't have power (because they don't exist yet!) may still make themselves inevitable through the causal force of ideas. (Like Marxism, Land's view is compatible with thinking in terms of power structures for understanding how things work at any particular point in time; it's just that he emphasizes history over time-scales at which human power structures cease to matter.)
Oh interesting thanks for sharing, I didn't know that. Perhaps I was too quick to group Land in with the rest. I ordered Xenosystems from passage press, so maybe a closer reading will help fill me in there.
Arguing against myself, this is a distinction without a difference, because it still means that Land doesn't engage in empirical quantitative reasoning (unless you count his recent obsession with alphanumerical qabalah...).
just wanted to say i love the phrase “distinction without a difference”
Indeed, it's ironic that so many academics learn about power and epistime only to use the knowledge to reify their own ideas through power. In that sense they abandon Foucault - his main ideas are really just standard methods of historical critique.
I don't like when people throw out casual burns about people like Chomsky. I don't even know what your point is here, that he was accurate and precise in his analysis but naive in expecting the US to be any different, or for the popular mass to ever care. Chomsky is not a perfect person and perhaps frustrating in his failure to acknowledge other powers agency, but his stance has always had high integrity and courage. Not many people can stand up to hegemony in the way he has done and it's unfair to sully him with casual slurs.
Great essay! What you say about the lack of statistical literacy in social sciences reminds me a bit of the state of Marxism in academia.
Marxism is ultimately an economic system, so being a Marxist only really makes sense if you thoroughly understand economics. But most academic Marxists are not particularly focused on economics. Most are philosophers, sociologists, or political scientists who learn a few basics about Marxist economics, and then build social theory on top of it. But if socialism is not a preferable economic system, then it doesn't really matter how social conditions would hypothetically operate in a hypothetically successful socialist system. It's just constructing a building over an unstable foundation.
In the same way that you can't really assume economic literacy to be a Marxist, you can't really assume scientific literacy to critique science. Criticism of power relations in the history of science are useful if you can understand the flaws in the methodology. But if you jump the gun and assume science is inherently flawed with a flimsy understanding of the methodology, you end up with a very unreliable epistemology.
This seems completely wrong. Firstly, Marxism is not an economic system. It began as a critique (analysis) of capitalism.
Second, Marxist social theorists are largely interested in Marx's analysis of society, not in advocating for a socialist system. They draw from ideas like ideology, dialectical materialism, alienation, base/superstructure etc to think about how society works, and how it can be improved. You don't have to be a communist to use Marxist concepts in your analysis.
For example, one might wonder why Marxism is consistently made out to be something it's not in capitalist society. Is it human error, or are there power structures disseminating misinterpretations ...?
Marxism predicts that the inherent contradictions of capitalism will inevitably result in the transition to communism — i.e. capitalism will collapse and the working class will establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, which will eventually wither away into stateless communism.
Marxism is premised on the idea that communism is not just inevitable, but also preferable for the working class. But what if communism is not inevitable? And if there's a choice between communism and capitalism, what if the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't perform as well as Marxists predicted? Then the shaky premises of Marxist economic theory make much of the social theory superfluous. Like, why does it matter how a hypothetically better education would work under stateless communism if it never happens?
Though to be fair, there are some parts of Marxism that aren't contingent on his greater theory of communist transition (e.g. workers' alienation). But then, there are other thinkers who had similar ideas that aren't within a Marxist paradigm.
“Marxism is ultimately an economic system”
No, it’s not.
For one good summary of why it’s not, I suggest reading this (it’s not by me):
https://substack.com/home/post/p-145620366
I mean, you could say Marxism is a failed attempt at economics and social science. This feels more like a semantic argument though, like "Marxism isn't about economics because he did economics wrong."
I'm not disagreeing that his economic analysis was shoddy. The point is that since his economic analysis was shoddy, his social theory is weak, since it builds on top of his economic analysis.
Ok, now we’re close enough. Marxism is a political ideology, or philosophy if you prefer, that made claims about economics. But it was in no sense *scientific* on the economics.
Seriously, Marxist economics is less “social science” than *some* (by no means all, but *some*) grievance studies in social science departments today.
Not sure if we are agreeing or disagreeing, but as more “generic” social science, Marxism isn’t / wasn’t a “failed” attempt, IMO, it was in fact an extraordinarily “successful” attempt, despite delivering disastrous results for the lives of those not in the ruling class.
This is really interesting.
A few points: I realize that your point is about his popularity, so it is more subtle, but "There is an even more cynical view here, which is that Foucault is also a way to escape the fact that many academic theorists are innumerate. [...] This would probably be too uncharitable, if I hadn’t seen it first hand in the departments of sufficiently prestigious Political Science departments." verges on a fallacy, if we allow this to extend to Foucault himself, who was clearly a very skilled and subtle thinker, to my mind. I don't believe you are doing this, but I think this is a mistake that is often made by critics of Theory. That said, the deeper irony is that how his ideas are used might be inextricably bound with those ideas, given that institutional power is ultimately what gives cover to academic charlatanism.
More generally, this tangentially gets at a problem I identified very long ago, back when I was that immature kid who was pissed off that he didn't read the "dangerous ideas" in high school (re. your: "Grow up.") Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a foundational text for this sort of thing a generation ago (AJ in the Sopranos even read it!), and I remember being gripped by it like most young people thirsting for transgression. But there is a glaring problem: a vast majority of my youthful compatriots didn't really know the real history to dissent from in any depth. Zinn was the first history text that many of us really took to heart deeply enough to internalize, live with, accept and digest, and there is something deeply dysfunctional about that. This isn't to say Zinn's text isn't important or doesn't legitimately challenge status quo historical assumptions, but that from the perspective of the singular reader, the idea that it is an act of rebellion to read him as an individual orienting oneself to the world is a ludicrous bit of shallow vanity. As though that kid with the Jello Biafra spoken word records had been mainlining Burke and the Federalist Papers before he happened upon Zinn's lectures on Sacco and Vanzetti. Perhaps I am overstating the point, but there is something rather perverse in starting with transgression as self-orientation. The parallel to Foucault is pretty obvious. Just assuming "because power" out of the gate isn't wrong necessarily, but (1) it's immensely shallow and (2) ironically, to my mind, gets Foucault wrong in some interesting ways: we can't escape the trappings of power any more than those we purport to dismantle with Foucauldian tools. I've always found a kernel of humility in Foucault.
Last point - Deleuze gets a lot of flack as well, but his readings of figures of the tradition (Kant, Hume, et al) are immensely subtle and rich.
So the classic “I reject your reality and replace it with my own.”
Well.. I’m no expert on or critic of Foucault himself…
…but yes, you have it exactly correct that that is how he is used by modern grievance studies leftists to justify their woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory claims.
The reason that work that's in this kind of so called continental style (that may be a pedantically incorrect description but it's often used) so appealing comes down to a couple factors imo
First, the people who are drawn to academics and especially the humanities often aspire to use their intellect to transform the world. In their fantasy they get to be Kant deriving deep truths from pure logic or the great wizard whose intelligence lets them banish the evil they see in the world. Unfortunately, if you reason with the kind of care and preciscion necessary to produce valid arguments [1] -- for instance in the way good analytic philosophers like Carnap might do -- you find that going even the tiniest distance beyond the assumptions you start with is hard to the point of impossible and even 'obvious' conclusions seem to be beyond these tools.
The amazing thing about writers like Foucault is they can reach huge conclusions with enough steps they take feel compelling (and others not feeling obviously false) it creates the feel of doing what they imagined/aspire to do. Of course, it's ultimately a trick accomplished in the usual means [2] but it's very emotionally satisfying.
Second, they often make the their content feel extremely hard to fully understand in a way that evokes the kind of difficulty you might have digesting group theory. This inclines us to assume that the content must therefore be of great value and of incredible insight when the truth is it's often relatively banal notions expressed confusingly. TBF Foucault is less guilty of this than many other thinkers.
Third, because the big picture isn't clearly conveyed the reader ends up engaging with the text to fill it in. Creative thought like this, especially in a less stressful context than math class, is often itself rewarding and because you have the experience of insight as you come up with interpretations that seem to fit it's easy to make the mistake of thinking the insight comes from the text not from you.
Even better, the text is often sufficiently ambiguous (Foucalt is less bad than others here, eg Derida) that you get to fill in views that you find appealing and we like little more than to hear our own ideas back from someone who is fetted as great. Of course, the fact that our interpretation often disagrees with others should be a clue that the insight often isn't coming from the work (not that Foucault doesn't have some good ideas too).
Finally, there is the pressure of status. We convince ourselves we are getting something deep out of it because it feels like the other option is to admit we're dumb or uncultured. It's the same way that when someone takes out an expensive fetted bottle of wine studies show people convince themselves they like it even though they often prefer the cheap shit in blinded trials.
And the great trick deployed here is the claim that if you haven't studied this author in depth -- musing over their work for many years -- you lack the authority to call it bullshit because you don't really understand it. That is basically a perfect defense from criticism because few people who don't buy the value in these works are going to waste the years of their life to study them -- critics like Carnap come along once and afterwards everyone else thinks that if he couldn't convince them Derida was bullshit how could I.
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EDIT: To be fair to Foucault I should say that he strikes me as someone with some interesting ideas trapped in a tradition that uses the kind of tricks I pointed out above. And that does explain what makes him attractive and some of the exhilaration in reading him but I think he could have taken those ideas and represented them in a different tradition and they'd still have some appeal but they wouldn't offer the same feeling of having seen the secret way of seeing the world. It would be some mild insights about psychology and society.
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1: Often the words we use have multiple connotations or seem precise but careful examination reveals they are anything but. For instance, that is what usually goes wrong when someone makes arguments that use concepts like objectification.
2: Defining a word in a way that doesn't quite match our standard usage and using the definition to do part of the work and appealing to our association with the word to do the rest (the way many proofs of god's existence actually prove something else exists they call god) or subtly slipping between multiple meanings or suggesting a claim is clear when one context is salient then applying it in another.
So here's the question. When I was writing the article, I assumed something like Foucault's ideology was common and anyone else could have gotten famous for talking about discourses and power structures and all the other nonsense that seems so ubiquitous today. From here, it sounds like perhaps all that stuff now seems to be everywhere because of Foucault, that he was actually pioneering a new kind of thought. In that case, it is logical to focus on his thought itself as key to his success, which I discounted. Is this right?
I'm not an expert on early poststructuralist thought (thankfully). But I think maybe it's a bit of both. I do think Foucault built off earlier foundations himself from guys like Marx and Hegel and other postmodernist types, so it is probably true that he was just the right guy, at just the right time in the 60s and 70s when this stuff was becoming fashionable, to bring it all together and present it as a coherent framework (right place/right time).
I think in some sense though his massive outsized influence was due to his thoughts, but not because they were so incredible. Compared to someone like Von Neumann, as a radical example of someone with lots of citations who is probably still underrated for his thoughts. It was because his thoughts were extremely useful for an activist academic class looking to dismantle existing scientific (and legal thought, like in your book).
“It was because his thoughts were extremely useful for an activist academic class looking to dismantle existing scientific (and legal thought…”
Ah, I see that buried in the comments here you *do* indeed make a similar point to the comment I just left.
A shame you didn’t make this point in your piece proper, as it seems to me to be *the* main reason he is so widely cited - more important than any of the other explanations you gave.
>Why did we spend the whole seminar reading Foucault rather than looking at any empirical statistics regarding crime in America?
When you ask BLM activists, they will say these statistics are useless, because arrest rates do not correspond to actual crime rates due to police racism. I don't know whether it is true, but this is precisely what Foucault would say about how power distorts knowledge.
The issue is, you really do think such statistics is as empirical and as reliable as an experiment in physics. Why do you think that? Soft sciences are soft and you know what Churchhill said about statistics.
Example: in Japan, an infant dying within 48 hours of birth is counted as stillborn. In America, an infant dying any time after birth counts as infant mortality. So Japanese infant mortality statistics are very low, but it says nothing about actual infant mortality.
And this is always like that.
This is not the same as saying there is no truth. It is saying that soft sciences should not pose as physics.
“Why are these ideas so incredibly popular and frequently cited given their content?”
Seems to me you get close to the Occam’s Razor obvious answer, but you don’t actually *say* it.
Foucault is the most cited because social science is now predominantly grievance studies, and leftists want something with any hint of intellectual patina to justify their decidedly illiberal, authoritarian assertions that they should have power.
Because woke / DEI / critical race theory / intersectionality ideology are all simply variants of oppressor/oppressed ideology, claiming that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in our zero-sum power world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
Hence the need to cite Foucault.
Or do you have data showing that he is widely cited by people outside of the grievance studies world, and that in fact as a percentage he is cited less now than he was 20 years ago? If so, I will apologize for my claim above.
> Foucault is the invocation that lets you dismiss the empirical ugliness and the dangerous implications of considering them. What if all knowledge is from power-structures, and it's imposed on us by an antagonist authority? Then the only real way to solve the issue is to come up with a new system from first philosophical principles (ideally the ones we think are good and true).
Foucault doesn't dismiss empirical evidence. In fact he goes through a lot of historical data in his work.
Ultimately though, data are understood through an interpretation framework. Even worse, often they are massaged and cherry-picked to fit one. Even even worse, they're collected based on one to begin with - as well as based on several power balances.
The "empirical" input could just be what power handed you down (e.g. state data prepared to make the government look good, or compiled to fit an official narrative) - in which case your empirical "science" is garbage results, based on statistical analysis and conclusions off of that shitty input.
And what about the questions you are asking to begin with? Or the outcomes you consider as good to begin with and want to use the data to research?
When the domain is not some inconsequential socially field, like Physics or Chemistry science rules the day.
In cases concerning social data and policy, things that touch ideologies and power interests, despite what the data say, even assuming they're pure and reflective of the underlying reality, some questions you can't even ask, and some conclusions you can not even arrive at, because you'll get no grants, or will be fired. All "empirical" scientists know about this too, and comform accordingly (or get maginalized).
> No one ever stopped you from reading history books on US involvement in South America. No one ever stopped you from reading old reactionary texts. Are you upset because it wasn’t assigned to you in 11th grade? Grow up.
Actually growing up would involve understanding that those things "not being assigned" while the other stuff "being assigned" already shaped your "totally empirical and scientific I promise you" frame of reference, and even worse, your understanding of History, politics, and social issues.
Which makes the point of "nobody stopping you" from reading those on your own moot. The person who would do the reading has already been given a set of beliefs - and in their most crucial developmental age.
“ Foucault doesn't dismiss empirical evidence. In fact he goes through a lot of historical data in his work.”
Sorry, it’s is *you* imo who is not getting the point.
The author didn’t say that *Foucault* dismisses empirical evidence. He said that “Foucault is the invocation that lets you dismiss the empirical ugliness and the dangerous implications of considering them.”.
“The invocation” - by grievance studies academics wanting to dismiss [various] empirical uglinesses - *is* the point!
Very interesting!
Anti-empiricism? No, anti-positivism, and that is much earlier. That has been an explicit feature of German social science even in 1922:
"Sociology is ] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. *In neither case is the 'meaning' thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion.* "
— Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action 1922
So basically Weber was saying you can collect crime stats all you want, but they tell you nothing about what you really want to know: what is going on in the criminals head. What is the motivation? What is the meaning, the intent?
Plain simply in human action, causality is meaning, is intent. It is not enough to know that tall people more often steal basketballs. That is undigested data, not science. We want to know they intend to play basketball with it and that is the motivation, the meaning, the cause.