Create a problem where none exists, slice and dice humanity according to identity, divide society and turn people against one another, feed off the hatred, rationalize it all with the statement that everything is power and politics. It's a job for life. It's not a great age. At a time when the capital system ought to be on the backfoot, the leftist alternative is nowhere to be seen – leftists have gone insane. Given the embrace of anti-realism in the 1980s and after it was to be expected.
I've just seen Camile Paglia deliver a lecture containing this fantastic outburst against Foucault:
“I am also calling for an end to this insanity of excluding biology from gender studies. How in the world did this happen? How did Women's Studies and Gender Studies end up teaching about gender without any reference whatever to biology or to hormones? And right now poststructuralism dominates gender studies everywhere. I spend six months writing my dissection of Foucault twenty seven years ago. Anyone who thinks that Foucault is somehow the master of the universe has clearly not read my exposure of him in Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf (1991). The man was a fraud. I'm sorry. Compared to Freud? I mean, Freud is out and Foucault is in. The poststructuralists pose as Leftists but what where they doing in the past few decades with this crazy parasitic growth of this administrator masterclass that has taken over the universities in a period of an obscene rise in tuition costs, student debt that is crippling families and so on. Where were these Leftists, the great Leftists, on our college campuses? Were they resisting the administrators? Were they denouncing student debts? Were they lamenting the plight of adjunct teachers? No! They were all running to conferences, talking about Foucault with stupid elitist jargon. You think they thought that's Leftism? These post-structuralists are the worst, mercenary careerists in this country. The leading post-structuralists and new historicists are retiring as multi-millionaires. And they pose as Leftists. It is a scandal. Forget Foucault for Heaven's sake. I mean he's absolutely absurd.
So we have to bring biology and authentic study of medicine, of anthropology, and of history back into gender studies.
I'm on the warpath against the bureaucracy of the campuses.”
Boy oh boy oh boy, I feel emboldened to be almost condescending and patronising and shout “you go, girl!” Very loudly. I've always liked Camile Paglia, even if I've not always agreed with her. She is unafraid and forthright, contrarian and awkward. She's unpredictable. Which is something in an age of dreary, dull, repetitive and entirely predictable talking heads. You always know what most of these characters are going to say. Camile Paglia is someone who can take you by surprise. And she is someone who can speak out of turn. Something that annoyed me most of all when it came to the post-structuralists and postmodernists was their inflated, pompous, grandiloquent language. They would speak in favour of democracy in terms the 'ordinary' members of the demos could never understand. I used to kill myself laughing at the likes of Laclau and Mouffe criticising Marx and marxist sociaist in favour of democracy, but doing so by throwing Sausserian linguistics all over the place. Lacan was always a good one to throw into the mix, too. You had to work hard to find anything of merit that was indistinguishable from good old pluralism. I'll make no bones about it, I thought it was complete dreck. Many a time I sat there questioning the wisdom of my decision to embark on PhD research: I've given up a potentially lucrative life in the building industry for this rubbish?!
I was very well aware of swimming against the intellectual – and political – tide in the 1990s in academia. As I developed a conception of Rational Freedom based explicitly on an essentialist metaphysics I was engaged in a running-war with the post-structuralists and post-modernists who now dominated entire university departments. I hated reading the works of these thinkers. I reacted against post-structuralism and post-modernism instinctively and intellectually. I knew it to represent the end of the Left as a viable and meaningful political movement, I knew it to be a lucrative career option for intellectual posers, the kind of people who performed the remarkable psychic feat of opposing the establishing whilst being the establishment, I knew the supposed libertarians to be that most loathsome of creatures, the bureaucrat of knowledge and power, and I knew engaging with them was a waste of my precious time and money. I had some money saved up and was concerned to husband it well and wisely in pursuing my studies to PhD level. I wanted to write productively and creatively, offering an age an alternative to the fashionable but scarcely reasoned nihilisms and relativisms pouring out of the academy. I didn't want to waste time, talent, and money engaging with those various 'post' thinkers, many of whom refused the 'post' designation. It was institutional gaslighting of the highest academic order, like platting fog or mapping Scotch mist. I realised, of course, that a mode of thought that elevated surfaces, denied the existence of substances and necessary relations, advanced an explicit anti-realism, and exalted playfulness and plasticity would be well-nigh impossible to critique. The approach I took was to show that such normative and emancipatory political commitments as remained on the part of such thinkers were incoherent and arbitrary, rootless and therefore fruitless. I objected to having to subject post-structuralists and postmodernists to critical analysis, because more substantive work lay elsewhere. But I was told that in PhD research I had to 'earn my spurs.' So I bored myself rigid engaging in extensive critique from 1995 to 1997, and felt huge relief when at last I could move on. I knew such thinking to be a universal acid that would destroy the Left from within then, I knew it to be divisive, shallow, and superficial, I knew it to owe much more to David Hume's absolute scepticism and Nietzsche's aristocratic anarchism and elitism than to Marx and socialism, and I knew it to be a dead-end. I also knew it to be a good career move for marxist academics who, when the political going got tough as socialism and the working class came under neoliberal assault, discovered that they were academics first and marxists and socialists not at all. I said so as the Berlin Wall fell, and decades later, I feel vindicated. Sad at all the wasted time, sad that so many liberals and leftists have been taken in, sad that the working class has been abandoned – but vindicated. And I continue to hope that many more people will follow my path in saying goodbye and good riddance to the contemporary cultural Left, you will not be missed.
I would love to be able to avail myself of some plausible conspiracy theory here, along the lines of a ruling class at bay introducing an increasingly united and radical 'Occupy' opposition to the divisive delights of identity politics. If only things were so simple and straightforward! I'm afraid 'the Left' did this to itself. The reasons aren't hard to find. The ambivance that the politicians, activists, and ideologues/intellectuals of the Left always had for the working class became open and explicit with the political defeats suffered by the old Social Left in the 1980s and 1990s. In face of a concerted class war from above, Leftist ideologues took refuge in an expanding academy and abandoned the workers and their communities to their fate in an increasingly globalised, liberalised, and corporatised environment.
And if the obvious truth isn't obvious to you by now, then you are in on the scam – the contemporary Cultural Left that has supplanted the Social Left is not Left at all, but is the cultural wing of the economic neo-liberalism that swept the world in the 1980s, leading to the globalisation and corporatisation of the 1990s and after. This Cultural Left morphs very easily into a Corporate Left. Which is to say that they are 'progressives' riding the latest phase of capitalist development to advance and expand their own power and position. They perform quite the psychological feat in posing as radical outsiders fighting the establishment whilst being full bought and fully paid up members of the establishment. They have nothing in common with the people who make, move, build, and grow things, the people they slice and dice, divide within, then order and organize in an attempt at unifying social existence. Such people are not Leftists, they are 'progressives,' and they are concerned to unmask power only in certain forms, in furtherance of their own power. Those seeking to resist the progressive totalitarianism of the contemporary age should look to the proles. As Orwell told us in 1984: ““If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population ...”
A few years ago I was persuaded to submit some work of mine to Le Studium in France, in the attempt to obtain some research position or other. My work was rejected as “moralistic” and I was advised to read Foucault. I had, of course, read Foucault in my period of doctoral research and subjected him to lengthy and decisive criticism. It was clear to me that my critics, fully paid up members of the academy, felt that a condition of understanding Foucault is accepting Foucault. I didn't accept Foucault, I criticised him – and therefore must be mistaken. As I learned in the 1990s, such academic Foucaultians reject morality, absolute truth, law, community and such like as inherently repressive of 'otherness' and 'difference.' If the irony of the situation is completely lost on them, it has never been lost on me – they are bureaucrats of knowledge enjoying lucrative careers within the academy lecturing me, an unpaid and independent scholar on the margins, about 'moralism,' 'otherness,' and 'difference.' And I will never stop calling them out for their shallowness, mediocrity, and hypocrisy. This is how radical reformist Christians must have felt in face of the vast Church bureaucracy of the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century. A Reformation is most certainly required.
At last, though, some people have started to have some disquiting thoughts in light of experience, coming to ask why the overwhelming majority of those intellectuals and academics steeped in Foucault failed to raise objections to the imposition of Covid regimes across the world, or develop detailed critiques of the close parallels between the Covid response and Foucault's nightmare of the biopolitical panopticon. The critiques that have emerged have come from people who are entirely innocent of Foucault and post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Who why have the Foucaultian academics been so quiet? Because they are unmitigated phonies, that's why. Whilst I believe Foucault to have been misguided, I don't think he was a fraud. I think he was a libertarian who generated some powerful insights into the extension of a techno-bureaucratic managerialism over the whole of society. It shouldn't have been difficult to have applied those insights to the Covid policies of the past few years.
The Foucaultians, and the Cultural Left generally, are nowhere to be seen on this. Why? Because they are unmitigated phonies, that's why: phoney leftists and phoney libertarians. They are so-so academics, too. The one thing they excell at it is furthering their own careers. They don’t want to unmask power as such, only the power that is in the hands of people they dislike. From the safety and comfort of tenured positions of power, they luxuriate in the fantasy that they are brave unmaskers of power, fighting from the margins.
Do we use our critical capacities to unmask oppression and further individuality and uniqueness, as Foucault appears to want us to do. How? From where? We live in an age in which academics are not only educators but also ideologues and activists. Such academics are no longer weighing theories and testing hypotheses but advancing definite narratives based on their own normative and political commitments. This may be described as an applied postmodernism and seems to apply to any discipline that has the word “studies” in the title. In the application you come to see the destructiveness at work, with the object of study being condemned and deconstructed as inherently and systemically guilty of some crime or sin or other. This is quite distinct from determining the truth of any question but specifically concerns advancing pre-formed and pre-determined conclusions about the world in an attempt to have them enacted and implemented in various institutions governing society. Above, I criticised the extent to which educators have become ideologues and activists, but the situation is much worse than that – the ideologues and activists of the past were concerned with advancing claims and causes that were predicated on something that was true, or which they considered to be true. Present ideology and activism is predicated on nothing, it is insubstantial, nonsense, made-up, contrived nonsense that is designed to divide, incite hatred, stoke controversy.
The whole process is self-validating, self-sustaining, and self-referential. It works by way of selection, with those on the inside selecting the like-minded. Clearly, I was not one of them and so wasn't selected on the odd occasion I was persuaded to put myself forward. I got so far in academia on the basis of my academic work alone. I never sought academic position or publication because I knew from the get-go that I was not one of the 'like-minded.' I was a vehement critic of this world, and remain so. Those on the inside knew it. I can remember one interview I had for a lecturing position. I tried to impress my interviewer with my knowledge of Plato. By the expression on her face, you would have thought I had been extolling the virtues of Hitler.
How does it carry on? For the same reason that the corruptions in the medieval church carried on, despite repeated warnings and criticisms. I like this quote from Michael Shermer: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
How is it that intellectuals can be so stupid when it comes to practical reason, arguing things that 'ordinary' people know to be wrong by experience? Simple. Clever people believe stupid things on account of their superior ability to reason their way to bad conclusions. They persuade themselves of the truth of their conclusions by way of their skills at reasoning. And groups of clever people are better still at forming, believing, advancing, and reinforcing stupid conclusions. They recognize one another, support one another, select one another. The point applies beyond the academy to group-think in all its forms, in government, in business, anywhere. It is precisely because such people are clever that they are better at writing and arguing intellectually, politically, and morally fashionable positions, thereby reinforcing the dominant worldview and orthodoxy. They are immune from criticism and questioning, with the result there is a widescale adoption of stupid ideas. Hence the paradox of self-styled rebels and libertarians who are predictable and conformist to the core, and repressive to boot. There is a reward mechanism in place, with a job for life for the unquestioning and obedient. The same with respect to peer review. This is the biggest nonsense of all, utterly stifling radical and innovative thought. I'll stand correction on this, but I don't think peer review existed fifty years ago. Now it applies to publishing in all forms. It sounds like some kind of academic validation but, again, it is like-minded people selecting and promoting their own. Is there any evidence that the quality of ideas has improved? Does anybody go to the academy in search of solutions to the world's problems? Such people think of the world as nothing but power and narrative, with everyone pushing their own narrative in an attempt to advance their power. So when it comes to publication the basic idea is this – those advancing their own narrative and power want certain ideas and certain conclusiuons to extend into the culture. Those seeking publication need to write to the starting assumptions of those to whom they appeal. The world of academia and publication is completely rotten. I didn't learn this by hard experience. I saved myself a lifetime of constant rejection by judging the world to be rotten from the first. I didn't seel academic position and didn't seek publication. My years of working on my PhD told me that I was an outsider when it came to academia.
And the Foucaultians? Self-styled libertarians celebrating otherness and difference they may be, but they are very much within – and decidedly not against - the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power. They are part of its mechanism and hence silent when it comes to unmasking power in the real. They hide in the abstract.
After reading in some depth, it soon becomes apparent that there can be no freedom in Foucault's world, only an enless – and pointless – cycle of power/resistance. His language forms a seamless web, a cage every bit as steel-hard as Weber's, a psychic prison from which there is no escape. Once in that cage, you can't break out, and life can never break in. The mystery is why so many academics and intellectuals who claim to be leftist seem so content to choke in there with him. The answer, of course, is that that cage is a guilded cage. It pays to be on the inside. And it offers a political fantasy world in which bureaucrats and conformists can maintain a radical leftist pose. Foucault offers a generation of political refugees an activist cover for their passivity and futility, characterised by a pretence of resisting oppressions and injustices whilst doing nothing to shift them. The world remains unchanged. Foucault's critique is both the child and parent of despair and serves no end beyond ruminating on the objective meaningless and purposelessness of the world whilst giving intellectuals a reason to write and argue as if it all matters, when they know deep down that it doesn't. It's the perfect intellectual gloss for an age in which politics is asserted as everything, even as it changes nothing to no end. How do we know it? The complete silence of the academic Foucaultians in face of the totalitarian view that a repressive biopolitics is inevitable and irresistible. If this reveals one thing, it reveals how easily those on the side of resistance in the endless cycle of power/resistance join forces with the powerful. There may be irony in this, but no paradox. It should surely come as no surprise to learn that Foucaultians committed to the criticism of everything should come to luxuriate in their academic positions, salaries, and accolades so much as to become rank conformists. Despite certain insights, Foucault’s work is deeply flawed. Lacking a philosophical anthropology that enables us to identify and criticise dehumanisation, he effectively leaves us powerless and hopeless in face of a restatement of the most pessimistic aspects of Hobbes' endless strife and contention and expansion of power and Weber's incarceraration in an inescapable iron cage. Foucault's work thus comes to form a nodal point in a new nexus of power – within an unchanged system.
I wouldn't go so far as Paglia as to proclaim Foucault a fraud, although I do think his libertarianism is fraudulent, to the extent it raises certain emancipatory possibilities that it simply cannot realize. Foucault's condemnation of repression sounds radical, but really isn't, to the extent his lack of a philosophical anthropology renders it inescapable. That saud, of all the various 'post' thinkers I studied in the 1990w, Foucault was the only one I deemed substantial enough to make it into my PhD thesis, forming a very substantial section. I felt his work to be worth engaging with. I was critical and was concerned to established Foucault's endless power/resistance as a dead-end. But I felt that Foucault was worthy of criticism given his various insights on the problematic relation between reason and freedom. But I rejected him all the same. And a substantial part of my rejection was based on a very definite philosophical anthropology. Like others who write in the 'post' mode of thought, Foucault rejects the possibility of a philosophical anthropology. The limits become evident when, for instance, Rorty argues for the 'human betterment,' something he is not entitled to do given his rejection of notions of an essential humanity. My critique was concerned to force those embracing 'post' modes of thought to see that their normative and emancipatory claims and commitments could not be supported in the absence of a philosophical anthropology. I argued explicitly for an essentialist metaphysics, which is anathema to the 'post' thinkers. They are up a creek without a paddle; I am not. My point against Paglia and Kathleen Stock and all those other feminists who are now discovering that their anti-essentialist feminism has left them vulnerable to the encroachment of the trans-patriarchy is this: biology and biological sex is a step in the right direction, recovering reality in face of the inanities and insanities of the anti-realists, but is not enough. As I made clear in my own work, essentialism is not a biologism, still less is it a biological determinism. Those who asserted repeatedly that 'biology is not destiny,' elevating that most simple of truths to the highest principle, are really only in the foothills. I urge them to press on further. The same with respect to those who identify essentialism with timeless, fixed, and ahistorical essences. Such people are knocking caricatures over. It makes for an easy, but pointless, victory.
Comments