Waiting for Foucault, Still (Paradigm (Chicago, Ill.), 1.) 1st Edition

As Expected

When I bought "Waiting for Foucault, Still" from a co-op bookstore in Hyde Park, the young woman at the counter looked at the title, made a contorted expression, and exclaimed "Foucault? Can't we just get past him already?" I can't help but sympathize with her sentiment. Ironically, "moving past" Foucault, and the post-Modern ossification of the social sciences in general, is exactly what University of Chicago Anthropological theorist Marshall Sahlins aims for in this collection of aphorisms and short essays. It seems as if the title "Waiting for Foucault" is nothing more than a rhyming pun on "Godot." Throughout this collection, Sahlins uses his off-beat wit for seemingly no purpose at all. These writings constitute a scatter-brained critique of "culturism," bourgeois political philosophy, Foucault's theory of bio-power, American imperialism, and the fads which dominate modern academia. "Waiting for Foucault, Still" was originally presented as a speech for a group of anthropologists, which may be a sufficient explanation for Sahlins' strange intermittent use of humor in an otherwise academic work. However, I suspect that Sahlins' rhetorical goofiness, in conjuction with his conversational style, is itself something of a response to the jargon-laden and boring anti-language of academic post-modernism.If there is one unifying theme throughout this work, it is Sahlins' disdain for reductionism in the social sciences. Post-modernists and post-structuralists, with Derrida and Foucault corresponding to each of these schools, each take on a pretense of opposing "reductionism," in the forms of Enlightenment philosophy and Marxism. However, Sahlins argues that these post-whatever ideologies are themselves alarmingly reductionist in their interpretation of human cultures. Post-modernists tend to interpret everything as "discourse," basically, that all human life is a determination of a grouping of language conventions ("narratives"). Post-structuralists tend to interpret human life as an eternally hostile power-play between individuals and the reigning "hegemony," with culture being just another mask for the expression of power. For Sahlins, this ignores the actually-existing reality of cultural communities. There may always be elements of narrative and power within any culture, but the post-X worldviews fail to say anything meaningful about human originality, or the economic life of any society. Sahlins pins the blame for this reductionism on a deeper tendency in Western philosophy, of which post-modernism and post-structuralism are only the latest permutations. According to his critique, both "posts-" adhere to the divide between the individual and the Leviathan originally injected into Western culture by Thucydides, and reawakened by Hobbes in the Enlightenment era. In this tradition, human beings are seen either as blank-slates which are filled-in by the reigning Leviathan, or as individuals who are eternally stuck in a war of all against all in order to ensure their personal interests. To Sahlins, Foucault and his followers clearly fall into the latter camp. Foucault's theory of bio-power sounds suspiciously similar to Hobbesian rationalism, but Foucault desperately tried to argue that his notion of the war of all against all was not Hobbesian. Sahlins clearly believes that Foucault ultimately failed to transcend Hobbes. Meanwhile, Sahlins criticizes post-modernism's myopic obsession with "narrative" as the determinate force behind human life. Post-modernists traditionally claim that their philosophy is anti-hegemonic (against a domineering political language) because it supposedly focuses on the fractured nature of discourse. As Sahlins points out, this only replaces the Leviathan with "a pod of Leviathans." Human beings are still stuck in hopeless slavery to already-existing discourse.I particularly appreciate Sahlins' observations here, mainly because I still vividly remember my own frustrating encounters with this aspect of post-modernism back in college. In a religious sociology class, we read "Go Tell It on the Mountain" by James Baldwin, the story of a curious, intelligent young black boy who is forced by his community to suppress his yearning for knowledge and his own latent homosexuality in order to avoid total rejection by his family. Baldwin makes it self-evident that the boy had to subject himself to intense spiritual violence and unhappiness in order to survive. When my professor asked the class what we thought of the boy's plight, the overwhelming opinion of the liberal arts students was that "we" weren't allowed to criticize the community because "it was a different narrative," and that it's impossible to say that there was anything actually objectionable about the boy's treatment- despite the self-evident fact that Baldwin wanted to inspire sympathy with those who are tormented into conformity, and the fact that he himself was a homosexual. The point being, this single-minded post-modernism turns everything into a war of every narrative against every narrative, closely paralleling the right-wing notion that power and sovereignty are the ultimate realities of any culture.As a positive example in support of his anti-reductionism, Sahlins points to the spread of capitalism around the world as contradictory to the thesis of post-modernism/structuralism. Post-structuralists who insisted that capitalism is equivalent to Western cultural dominance (the fake Marxism of Hardt and Negri) cannot explain why capitalism is so skilled at integrating into local cultures and regions with wildly different histories. For Sahlins, this is only possible because cultures are just as capable of adapting to capitalism as capitalism is of adapting to them! Languages may be divided by gulfs, but human beings are perfectly capable of building bridges, and in fact, constantly do so. In emphasizing the divisions language creates, modern academia has forgotten that culture is always in flux, and thus is always capable of working through these linguistic and historical divisions. Sahlins says that the mistake of Western universality isn't that it aimed for a common understanding between humans, but that Western thinkers attempted to circumvent the actual work of creating mutual understanding through metaphysical arguments.Despite how much I enjoy Sahlins' critiques, I think he falls into the traps of the post-structuralists and post-modernists at times by succumbing to reductionism. He celebrates human cultures' ability to adapt to capitalism (more as an example of adaptability, not out of love for capitalism), but he then treats capitalism as if it is a purely cultural construct, and that the motions of value themselves are entirely culturally subjective. This leaves out the fact that any mode of production imposes a materially grounded relationship with the Earth onto its host culture, and thereby imposes a certain type of metabolism onto the human body. Culture may be incredibly dexterous, but it must always confine itself to the structure imposed by this regime of soil and body, and can only affect real political change by confronting the materiality of its existence, whether it does so consciously or not. If one sees all human life as a matter of language, then of course they will view modes of production as a mere product of language- how can you see what you blind yourself to?

A small gem, demonstrating Sahlins' wit - read it before your next public speech...