Ghost of a flea

Irréductibles Gaulois

Michel Foucault is said to have been worried about the translation of his works into English. Having been written in opposition to "the know-it-all leftism of the Communist Party", it would be difficult to anticipate how his writing might be made sense of by readers unfamiliar with that context. Having worked as an academic in primarily English-speaking contexts, this is one of the most sensible things I have ever read Foucault to have said about his own work. A funny observation about authority and authorship can be credited to Foucault (and on a related note to Roland Barthes). Names like Freud, Marx or, in a telling irony, Foucault are often used to summarize a set of philosophical, political or epistemological assertions at variance with some or all of the writings of the people to whom the names had once been attached.

And academics are probably the worst offenders. I believe Foucault's thinking has suffered particularly from interpretation both literal and intellectual. I cannot say how many academics I have met who will spout this or that ostensibly Foucauldian line having never read the man even in translation, content instead to rely on the work of Judith Butler to guide them (she makes an even bigger mess of Jacques Lacan). It is a situation precisely analogous to so many in RPG fandom who, thanks to Chaosium, are conversant with the precise stats of unknowable entities such as Yog-Sothoth or Hastur but who have never cracked the spine of an H.P. Lovecraft short story collection.

Foucault's writing on sexuality has probably been the most influential facet of his work to this point (Butler is much better on this material) but sadly has been almost universally read, at least in English-speaking North American contexts, by people without the vaguest clue of the classical sources on which Foucault's line of reasoning is based. Worse still, people do not seem to consider this sort of ignorance a barrier to understanding let alone a difficulty that might usefully be addressed. Say what you like about French foreign policy but the French education system appears still to give weight to a shared resource in the metaphors of antiquity. Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra! This is perhaps the reason French scholarship finds less need to cite every little detail than is typical of English-language scholarly publication. It would insult the reader, and waste the writer's time, to explain this or that joke as an allusion to Plato. English-speaking academics, crippled by the lack of a decent education in history and an ever dwindling pool of shared myth beyond The Simpson's, have read their own cultural and moral relativism, their own sneering dismissal of meaning, into Foucault's writing. As if a street preacher with a second or third order translation of Scripture could be expected to make sense of the gematria of a priestly writer of the post-Babylonian exile.

Foucault's writing on "governmentality" suffers even more from translation. I once attended a lecture by Alain Touraine* on culture and society where, having watched French neo-fascists equate "culture" with nation and authenticity, he reversed some of his early '70s critiques of "society". The other Canadians in the audience were scandalized Touraine dare criticize "culture", a concept that has been enshrined as a blurry, mythic touchstone of Canadian political thinking. Inevitable charges of "racism" were levelled. Well, of course the Canadians had not only got it precisely backwards but had somehow contrived to get it sideways. In their insistence on the sacrosanct Being of culture they repeated the neat academic trick of having a disagreement with someone about an argument he had not made (a not entirely unfamiliar habit in the blogosphere). Quite simply, when a French academic is talking about "society" or "the State" they do not mean anything remotely like an Anglosphere complex of representativeness, precedent or the reasonable person. It is not just the words in which French theory is written that require translation for exclusively English-speaking readers but the ideas the words represent and the context in which they were representing, unfamiliar to people raised in an English-speaking polity. It seems people need to earn a PhD in order to miss a point that is so blindingly obvious.

It is with these concerns in mind that I am hesitant to express strong opinions about Foucault's writings about Iran and Islam. Jonathan Rée's "The Treason of the Clerics", source of Foucault's observation about the perils of translation, reviews Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson's book about Foucault's brief adventure in political journalism in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Rée's summary is a credible critique of Afary and Anderson's collection, one I will read regardless, but is I think more important for demonstrating an inevitable difficulty of a philosophy of uncertainty faced with an absolutist ideology. This latter way of thinking sometimes finds its expression in Marxist or feminist thought.

As they have since the triumph of the Islamists in the Iranian revolution. I am extremely sympathetic to much of Foucault's way of thinking if not with regard to the Iranian revolution. But I have become convinced these last several years it is much easier for people who have at least some sense of moral absolutes to comprehend the seriousness of the men who are trying to kill or convert us all. For all Foucault's talk of a "political spirituality" it is far from clear to me what the phrase might mean. But then I suppose that was his point. I can only hope the folks who bastardize Foucault's writing in their wicked pursuit of an absolutist relativism do not contrive to get us put to the sword for fear of offending the cultural distinctiveness of the men who wield them.

*Here is an example of Touraine's recent thinking about community, society and globalization. Interesting stuff and plenty to disagree with.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at July 30, 2005 09:14 AM

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