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I Think Foucault Is Basically Wrong and Bad
- jfengel 3y agoI find it odd to call out Foucault as being insufficiently materialist compared to Marxism. Popper famously called out Marxism in particular for its unfalsifiability. Not that Popper's critique is beyond reproach. But much of this paper seems to be, "The Marxist criticism of Foucault is that Foucault is not Marxist". It stresses the assumptions of Marxism, while failing to reckon with Foucault's critique. Marx sought to make a science of history. The postmodern program says that it's not so simple. Both are right: the further away you get from fundamental physics, the more convoluted your science inevitably becomes. That doesn't mean you can't try: we do biology despite it being so insanely complex. Popper will always struggle with the fact that he can't perfectly tell the difference between scientific hypothesis revision and pseudoscientific goalpost moving, because there isn't one. That leads to the worst of postmodernism's abuses, but you can't solve that by sticking your head in the ground and pretending that you've got it solved. So this author is will within his rights to dislike Foucault. Postmodernism has been co-opted by intellectual laziness to give us a post-truth society. And there may be no solution to that. But if there is one, it's forward, not backwards. We have to admit what we don't know about the structures of power -- of which class is one, but it's not as simple as a biological taxonomy, which the author wants it to be.