At 12:04 25*10*99 +0100, you wrote:
>And that 'theory as toolkit' quote. Am i the only one who thinks that
>Foucault has (unintentionally) provided legitimation for a whole lot of crap
>scholarship?
>
I tend to agree. This particular legitimation for appropriating Foucault's
ideas is sometimes accompanied by eulogies regarding the remarkable
"productivity" unleashed by Foucault's historical analyses. While not all of
the resultant scholarship can be dismissed as "crap", I think such
legitimations often end up being problematic because they tend to focus in
on some particular idea derived from the Foucaultian archive, without much
care or concern for small or large-scale contexts, and then proceed to reify
it in isolation to the point at which it becomes somewhat blind, suspect and
worthless, an effect which the rapturous chords of the professed
"productivity" of the applicability of Foucault's ideas attempt to mollify.
Lets assume that Foucault actually did mean something else by this "theory
as toolkit" idea. What could that have been? I can only offer some very
vague ideas in this regard, though I doubt that anyone else could offer a
truly definitive (authoritative?) statement without encountering further
problems. I don't think it was simply to encourage scholars to latch on
(uncritically, as if every idea that Foucault generated contained an
unsullied redemptive potential just waiting for further critical
application) to a particular idea in isolation and then turn it to a
particular, self-serving end. Unintentionally (but, who knows...) this is a
potential outcome of the "toolkit" idea. To the extent that I give the
"toolkit" idea any credit it would be in the context of accepting that
Foucault never really developed a philosophical "system" for historical
analyses, but a series of elaborations and reformulations of what he was
doing in the process of doing it. How does one appropriate the ideas of a
thinker of this sort without falling victim to the compulsive rage to all
manner of "productive" applications which fail to do justice to Foucault
(even if he did not want to exist in that classical function of the author)?
This is perhaps a question which is posed to all appropriations but is given
a particular saliency in the case of someone like Foucault because the very
discontinuities of his body of work are so intuitively disposed to piecemeal
appropriations.
Perhaps the virtue of the "toolkit" approach would be in taking something
that in some sense inspires a related but new approach, that gives it new
life by opening up another though still in some way kindred context, and
perhaps in a configuration with other critical approaches derived from other
thinkers. Look at Foucault's work, it is itself composed in such a manner:
Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Mallarme, Roussel, Artuad, Bachelard,
Canguilhem, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. I still think that this may lead to either
good or bad scholarship, depending on the site and method of application,
and the particular sensibilities of the one doing the application. Although
I have not had occasion to deploy such an approach myself, it seems to me
that the kind of approach that seems to take place with writers such as Said
and Butler with regard to Foucault has elements of the "toolkit" approach
but without leading to the kind of reductive results it is disposed to. As I
said, some very vague thoughts...
cheers
sebastian
>And that 'theory as toolkit' quote. Am i the only one who thinks that
>Foucault has (unintentionally) provided legitimation for a whole lot of crap
>scholarship?
>
I tend to agree. This particular legitimation for appropriating Foucault's
ideas is sometimes accompanied by eulogies regarding the remarkable
"productivity" unleashed by Foucault's historical analyses. While not all of
the resultant scholarship can be dismissed as "crap", I think such
legitimations often end up being problematic because they tend to focus in
on some particular idea derived from the Foucaultian archive, without much
care or concern for small or large-scale contexts, and then proceed to reify
it in isolation to the point at which it becomes somewhat blind, suspect and
worthless, an effect which the rapturous chords of the professed
"productivity" of the applicability of Foucault's ideas attempt to mollify.
Lets assume that Foucault actually did mean something else by this "theory
as toolkit" idea. What could that have been? I can only offer some very
vague ideas in this regard, though I doubt that anyone else could offer a
truly definitive (authoritative?) statement without encountering further
problems. I don't think it was simply to encourage scholars to latch on
(uncritically, as if every idea that Foucault generated contained an
unsullied redemptive potential just waiting for further critical
application) to a particular idea in isolation and then turn it to a
particular, self-serving end. Unintentionally (but, who knows...) this is a
potential outcome of the "toolkit" idea. To the extent that I give the
"toolkit" idea any credit it would be in the context of accepting that
Foucault never really developed a philosophical "system" for historical
analyses, but a series of elaborations and reformulations of what he was
doing in the process of doing it. How does one appropriate the ideas of a
thinker of this sort without falling victim to the compulsive rage to all
manner of "productive" applications which fail to do justice to Foucault
(even if he did not want to exist in that classical function of the author)?
This is perhaps a question which is posed to all appropriations but is given
a particular saliency in the case of someone like Foucault because the very
discontinuities of his body of work are so intuitively disposed to piecemeal
appropriations.
Perhaps the virtue of the "toolkit" approach would be in taking something
that in some sense inspires a related but new approach, that gives it new
life by opening up another though still in some way kindred context, and
perhaps in a configuration with other critical approaches derived from other
thinkers. Look at Foucault's work, it is itself composed in such a manner:
Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Mallarme, Roussel, Artuad, Bachelard,
Canguilhem, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. I still think that this may lead to either
good or bad scholarship, depending on the site and method of application,
and the particular sensibilities of the one doing the application. Although
I have not had occasion to deploy such an approach myself, it seems to me
that the kind of approach that seems to take place with writers such as Said
and Butler with regard to Foucault has elements of the "toolkit" approach
but without leading to the kind of reductive results it is disposed to. As I
said, some very vague thoughts...
cheers
sebastian