There is no easy way of dismissing the late twentieth-century concerns, associated most famously with Michel Foucault, about the constructed nature of “objective truth”, the emergence of discourses of truth from loci of power, and their usefulness for maintaining and nourishing that power. This is not a cat than can simply be put back in its bag. Science, its great rival within modern paradigms, is too stumbling in its conclusions and too restricted in its domain to fully satisfy. Philosophy and religion, grounding everyday truth in some deeper ontology and epistemology, are not, in any form, able to command the near-universal social adherence required for them to serve as a foundation that can make Foucauldian concerns seem petty sniping.
The result has been a partial hegemony of (an arguably debased) Foucauldian discourse itself, notably within swathes of academia and some domains downstream from universities. It is doubtful that Foucault et al. anticipated this outcome, that they foresaw or desired a world where the classical models of the good, the true and the beautiful which they so ruthlessly criticized would so largely succumb. They were not, after all, philistines. Yet it has turned out that their work dovetailed only too well with the philistinism of mass culture. “I can’t focus on Racine now that I have Tiktok” and “Racine’s beauty hides a subtle form of disciplinary prison” are two quite different propositions, but they can join in nourishing the question “why bother with Racine?”. Yet I don’t think Foucault himself wanted anyone to stop reading Racine.
It is doubtful that Foucault et al. foresaw or desired a world where the classical models of the good, the true and the beautiful which they so ruthlessly criticized would so largely succumb.
A further problem is that any institutional hegemony granted to Foucauldian discourse creates an instant, deadly loop. The sort of truth emanating from and serving power is now the truth of Foucault, or some vulgarized version thereof. The hegemonic discourse of truth is now that truth is a construct of the hegemon. How do you deconstruct an edifice from its top?
There seems to be no way out of this loop, but its emergence has led to two desperate, overlapping attempts at escape. The first is to deny the acquisition of hegemony, to continue to act and speak as if the old, classical canons and their backers still had the upper hand. One then postures as a revolutionary, speaking bold truth to the power of conservative forces. Alternatively, the equivalence of knowledge and power translates as an imperative to turn learning and teaching into political activism. If truth is constructed through institutional authority, then the proper, ethical role of those who hold that authority is to build forms of truth that lead to a better world.
How do you deconstruct an edifice from its top?
The hollowness of both these approaches was revealed, with gruesome comedy, in the recent historical episode where Foucault’s critique of constructed truth could have been most immediately pertinent and salutary—the Covid response. Foucault’s concept of “biopower” had never seemed more fruitful than when public health authorities declared openly that they would determine where we went and how we breathed and whom we touched, and governments implemented and augmented those authorities’ dreams. All this was done in the name of science and of saving lives: as Geoff Shullenberger observed in 2021, it played out, to an almost ludicrous extent, like a textbook demonstration of the accuracy of Foucauldian analysis of the disciplinary alliance of science, medicine and government.
Yet one can nearly count on one’s fingers, among the tens of thousands of professedly Foucault-influenced scholars and intellectuals, those who saw the Covid response as illegitimate. Some, to be sure, wrote clever sketches of how the response fit Foucault’s models, but still avoided any conclusion that could undermine the need to stay home, stay safe, mask up and vaccinate. Most, simply ignored the whole debacle, continuing to focus their application of Foucault to whatever was exercising them before the world went mad.
Those more hostile to Foucault will argue that this shows a slipperiness to his thought, which undermines any attempt at principled stands. More sympathetic readers will respond that his acolytes simply did not understand Foucault, or did not truly take him seriously. But perhaps the rot comes above all from the contradiction contained in the gaining of hegemony by an anti-hegemonic discourse. Successful Foucauldians had made their peace with power long before Covid, and so felt instinctively that Racine was fair game but vaccines were not. Rationalizing this was downstream from the alliance with power—a bitter demonstration that the sly old Frenchman’s notions of truth and power could apply as well to his own disciples as to anyone else.
