Comments on: Bourdieu + Foucault Spell Trouble For Us All

By: Mark S.

Mark S. — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 22:22:41 +0000

As a social scientist, I see something of the opposite end of this spectrum. Large N Hypothesis testers, too many of whom eat away at the liberal arts because we now have the tools to find The Truth. I also don’t read Foucault for quite the same purposes (or maybe even quite the same parts of Foucault).

Yet, I have to admit that I sometimes slip into a ‘will to power’ mode where ethical claims and public goods are just things provided by the powerful and I can’t do anything but claim mine are better (for me? For others? unclear…). Even my non-academic wife notices it and gets frustrated with me on it.

By: CarlD

CarlD — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 20:34:04 +0000

First of all, you’re right about the setting. I’m friends with an old school chum on FB, and our conversations go like this a lot. He and his newer pals have a heavy dose of the white-boys-in-STEM syndrome, but they’re also legitimately angry that in school they were constantly under attack for their self-serving privilege, by people whose power to deliver this attack they could see damn well and by the same analysis was no less privileged and self-serving. I’m inclined to think that at least some of the bewailed recent attacks on university funding and autonomy is these chickens coming home to roost.

As for believing in ourselves, we may be coming around to that point. I’m seeing a little of that in a mellowing of some of the famously flaming academic blogs, for example. I think at least part of the problem was the slow process of diselitification of the schools, where several generations of working class kids / women / people of color / etc. infiltrated and eventually took them over. (This is also part of why the attacks, of course.) But if we could get clear on that fact, which is at this point obvious to everyone but us, we might get over all that impostor syndrome garbage that makes every failure to find fault feel like a failure of critical thinking. And then we could possibly even get less anxiously chippy and more generous about how we deploy whatever power the institution gives us.

Whatevs, even though I think Bourdieu and Foucault were right about all of it, I also think teaching and research are magnificent occupations under all but the most extreme discursive restrictions, and I have a few people around me who are pretty clear on that as well, and for the most part we just go about it and let the other stuff burble away as it will.

By: Greg Lastowka

Greg Lastowka — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 16:04:38 +0000

An emphatic “yes” to this.

By: Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 22:24:22 +0000

Hey, my scholarship (especially my monographs whose proofs I’m waiting on) is about as non-Foucauldian as one could want. Indeed, it’s got a fairly old-fashioned, empirical and non-theoretical focus.

(I suspect that it’s not entirely coincidental that I teach at a low-ranked school and have never had a campus visit north of the Mason-Dixon line.)