A L S O_ T O D A Y

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zaur
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students

Comics
Keith Knight: Home for Thanksgiving

T A B L E_ T A L K

Humanities and social sciences graduate school survivors tell their tales of triumph and woe in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

Debunking the myths of the Puritans
By Maria Russo
A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist Puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves
(11/25/98)

It's all about parties -- and the bottom line
By Jason Zinoman
Every year the Radcliffe Publishing Course inducts another group of recent graduates into the glamour and drudgery of publishing
(11/23/98)

The breakdown of consciousness
By Paige Arthur
Confronted by the discoveries of artificial intelligence, some philosophers are questioning the very minds that keep their profession afloat
(11/20/98)

Historiographic revisionism
By Christopher Shea
DNA evidence shows that Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children, and his academic defenders are scurrying to cover their tracks
(11/18/98)

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More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches

Dear Camille:

I was just wondering if you happened to have a negative personal interaction with Michel Foucault at one time or another. The fact that you spend so much time and space trashing his (I believe) significant contributions to scholarship makes me wonder if there is something more to your feelings about him. I cannot believe that Foucault is the sole source of what you call the "downfall" of U.S. academia. I must inform you, by the way, that I am an African-American, feminist, Yale-educated graduate student of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin who does research on race and gender in mass media and popular culture within a British cultural studies framework. Although I tend to sympathize with the much maligned "postmodernist position," I do agree that it is limiting, and recognize that there is value in the tenets of the Enlightenment Project and modernism and am interested in exploring the discursive origins and social implications of both frameworks. I would like to know if you could either spend some time specifically discussing exactly what it is about Foucault that is so problematic, or in lieu of that, direct me to your writings in which you discuss this issue in more detail.

I do not wish to give the impression that I am dismissive of your perspective altogether; in fact, I greatly appreciate your views on "wimpy feminism" and that women need to take responsibility for their behaviors and complicity with patriarchy. However, I am perplexed at your wholesale dismissal of Foucault, whose work, especially on the nature of power and the power/knowledge framework, has been so instructive to social science epistemology in encouraging the questioning of positivism and simplistic objectivity.

Thanks for your time,

Rana A. Emerson
Graduate Student
Department of Sociology
University of Texas at Austin

Dear Rana Emerson:

No, I never met or saw Foucault in the flesh. (He died in 1984.) My low opinion of him is based entirely on his solipsistic, mendacious writing, which has had a disastrous influence on naive American academics.

I miss no opportunity to throw darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches because he is the last standing member of the Terrible Triad of French poststructuralists, whose work swept into American universities in the 1970s and drove out the home-grown radicalism of our own 1960s cultural revolution. I militantly maintain that the intellectual gurus of my college years -- Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Leslie Fiedler, Allen Ginsberg -- had far more vision and substance than did the pretentious, verbose trinity of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.

Derrida's reputation was already collapsing (thanks to the exposure of his ally Paul de Man as a Nazi apologist) when I arrived on the scene with my first book in 1990. Lacan, however, still dominated fast-track feminist theory, which was clotted with his ponderous prose and affected banalities. The speed with which I was able to kill Lacanian feminism amazes even me. (A 1991 headline in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera blared my Achillean boast, "I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America!")

Though much diminished with the waning of the theory years, Foucault still survives, propped up by wizened queer theorists who crave an openly gay capo in the canon. I base the rhetoric of my anti-Foucault campaign on Cicero's speeches in the Roman Senate against the slick operator and conspirator Catiline ("How long, O Catiline, will you continue to abuse our patience?"). Greek and Roman political history -- about which Foucault knew embarrassingly little -- remains my constant guide.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. What I hate about Foucault