The effect I think he and his fellow deconstructionists had on the real world was that they led a lot of otherwise intelligent people to believe that no effect on the real world was possible, and that even if one were, all change could only be for the worse. I hold Michel Foucault particularly responsible for the defeatism and quietism of a whole generation.
Early on in my coursework, I went to see the mentor who'd become my dissertation director (herein to be referred to as the Magisterial Presence) and asked her, "Am I on crack, or is Foucault's model of social power vastly more simplistic than Starhawk's?" The Magisterial Presence was doing a lot of work on biblical influences on literature by women, so she'd read widely in the field of feminist theology, including Dreaming the Dark, and she was very glad to find she wasn't the only person who'd seen through Foucault. You know how Starhawk talks about power-over, power-with, and power-from-within? Well, Foucault asserts that the only kind of social power is power-over, and any change a person might try to make in pursuit of social justice is illusory and, in fact, always already doomed to make the injustice worse, so we might as well stay home. Of course, he doesn't call it power-over, he just calls it power, because he thinks there's no other kind. This attitude's prevalent throughout his works, but is famously enunciated in the essay "Power/Knowledge." Apparently knowing stuff is, in itself, morally reprehensible, too.
Derrida doesn't make an elaborate case for this point of view, but regularly points to Foucault's work on the nature of power as if it were definitive. Derrida himself spends many, many pages of The Gift of Death working himself into a ridiculous tizzy over the following: If he is not able to feed every single stray cat on the planet, it's not only pointless to feed even one, it's actually unethical. I am not making this up.
If you want to know why so many otherwise intelligent, otherwise resourceful, otherwise politically aware people of my generation are sitting on their hands while the Constitution burns, well, in many of those cases, it's because in their early college days, when their zeal for social justice could have been reinforced by their professors and classmates, they were being deluged with deconstruction, which told them they only had the power to make things worse, and that total inaction was their most ethical option.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Caution: Post-Grad School Toxicity! Handle with Rubber Gloves!
Date: 2005-07-20 08:31 pm (UTC)Early on in my coursework, I went to see the mentor who'd become my dissertation director (herein to be referred to as the Magisterial Presence) and asked her, "Am I on crack, or is Foucault's model of social power vastly more simplistic than Starhawk's?" The Magisterial Presence was doing a lot of work on biblical influences on literature by women, so she'd read widely in the field of feminist theology, including Dreaming the Dark, and she was very glad to find she wasn't the only person who'd seen through Foucault. You know how Starhawk talks about power-over, power-with, and power-from-within? Well, Foucault asserts that the only kind of social power is power-over, and any change a person might try to make in pursuit of social justice is illusory and, in fact, always already doomed to make the injustice worse, so we might as well stay home. Of course, he doesn't call it power-over, he just calls it power, because he thinks there's no other kind. This attitude's prevalent throughout his works, but is famously enunciated in the essay "Power/Knowledge." Apparently knowing stuff is, in itself, morally reprehensible, too.
Derrida doesn't make an elaborate case for this point of view, but regularly points to Foucault's work on the nature of power as if it were definitive. Derrida himself spends many, many pages of The Gift of Death working himself into a ridiculous tizzy over the following: If he is not able to feed every single stray cat on the planet, it's not only pointless to feed even one, it's actually unethical. I am not making this up.
If you want to know why so many otherwise intelligent, otherwise resourceful, otherwise politically aware people of my generation are sitting on their hands while the Constitution burns, well, in many of those cases, it's because in their early college days, when their zeal for social justice could have been reinforced by their professors and classmates, they were being deluged with deconstruction, which told them they only had the power to make things worse, and that total inaction was their most ethical option.