Stop Blaming Foucault

My doctoral adviser was a brilliant and intimidating scholar. Stern but often playful and mischievous, he emphasized an open-ended curiosity about the strangeness of our world. He was also a radical social constructivist who believed our academic mission was to interrogate our own taken-for-granted truths about the world and to show how our knowledge was a product of cultural and historical understandings. His magnum opus was a deconstruction of post-traumatic stress disorder that showed the diagnosis was neither timeless nor universal but had emerged out of specific developments.

Although his research speaks to the current fad of microaggressions and trigger warnings, he refused to editorialize and disdained moralizing. If pressed, the most he would grudgingly acknowledge is that if you held a mirror up to someone, they might not like what they saw. He was suspicious of the applications of academic work and allergic to academic activism. That is not our job, he would admonish. He believed that academic work should aspire to a quasi-Buddhist analytic detachment in which one’s own worldview, moral position, or ideological beliefs had no special privilege.

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rorty referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.

Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes. In other words, while epistemology was narrow and limited in its focus on human understanding, the new ontologists aimed to move “beyond the human,” forming part of a wave of “animal studies” that spread throughout the humanities. A key text of the “ontological turn” in anthropology argues “how forests think” (the short but confounding answer: in 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory).

While tendencies toward these kinds of abstract mystifications would lead more politically radical academics to accuse the new ontologists of—what else?—not being politically radical enough, ontologists themselves made a key contribution to the new polarization, especially in how their work translated to wider popular readings, by embracing binary logics—most notably, between so-called Western and non-Western (usually indigenous) ontological realities. Invariably, these dichotomies take on a moralistic dynamic: Western ontologies are bad because they are colonialist, ableist, capitalist, racist, misogynist, and so on and so on, invariably leading to planetary destruction. Non-Western ontologies are not only good but necessary for our salvation, often from, in increasingly apocalyptical tones, the perils of climate change. It goes unmentioned that the archaeological record is dotted by the collapses of non-Western societies that somehow managed to destroy their own environments.

The resulting generalizations and stereotyping become tailor-made for social media caricature rather than critical thinking, albeit often dressed up in the obscure vocabulary of Martin Heidegger, whose notoriously opaque work inspires much of this scholarship. For example, seeing “white privilege” as “ontological expansiveness,” feminist philosopher of race Shannon Sullivan writes in broad strokes that “white people often manifest a way of being in the world (often nonconscious) in which they presume the right to occupy any and all geographical, moral, psychological, linguistic, and other spaces.” Do “white people” really do that? How? Who are “white people” anyway? These are the types of questions that today’s scholars generally evade or refuse to answer, preferring wild generalizations about “groups” that have been declared a priori to be bad.

“Postmodernism” notably rejected these kinds of blanket explanations; its sensibility was defined by what philosopher Jean-François Lyotard termed a “demise of metanarratives.” Today, broad and reductive formulations like “white supremacy” explain all social phenomena from geopolitics to how certain kinds of people sit in chairs. While purporting to be politically radical, these beliefs firmly entrench what they are ostensibly denouncing as pervasive systems impossible to reform. “Structures of white supremacy” (upward of 224,000 Google hits for that phrase) demand a broad commitment to “dismantling structures of white supremacy” (a mere 8,000 hits).

For epistemologists, knowledge could be “deconstructed” so we could free ourselves from bad ideas like race. Ontological reality operates more like a prison. Social constructivists may have been overly idealistic in the belief that accepting race as a historical category with no biological basis would undo its evils. Certainly, we have trouble addressing the persistence of racist inequalities. Yet the alternative is to see that despite demonstrable advances on race, gender, and sexuality over the past decades, all progress is myth. To even speak of progress is to be denounced as upholding the tenets of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.

If all this points to sloganistic interpretations of complex phenomena, that is precisely the point. The rejection of “critical theory” is a conscious rejection of complexity. A landmark work in feminist studies, queer theory, and what would come to be known as “affect theory,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative readings” famously criticized the “hermeneutics of suspicion” of male critical theorists like Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault. Such interpretive approaches endeavor to mine hidden knowledge or unstated assumptions of their subjects. Labeling this “paranoid,” Sedgwick contrasts it with a more empathetic and feminist “reparative” approach. In this binary, a feminist ethics of care is a curative foil to a toxic masculinity of suspicion. Their penetrative and highly Freudian pursuit of deep meaning anticipates what is colloquially now known as mansplaining in pop feminist circles, dismissible as pointless intellectual muscle-flexing for cred and status. Rather than complicating our understanding of the world, this approach focuses on an ethical imperative of what needs to be done, i.e., “reparative practices.”

While one can argue that one cannot repair anything without knowing what is broken, diagnosis here is in fact unnecessary. Violence is manifest. Oppression is obvious. Victimhood is visible. We do not need to understand the world because everything is already understood. After all, we live, as Sedgwick wrote, “in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression.” Finding nuance, locating uncertainties, teasing out contradictions or ambivalences, even skepticism of received wisdom and truths, the heart of what was once academic pursuit, are anathema here. The lines are clearly drawn between who we should empathize with and whom we should not, often fetishizing a privileged understanding of experience centered around unnuanced victimhood categories. So when affect theorists argue that we need to be “cultivating a sensibility to the affective experiences of other corporealities,” it goes unstated that the popular text chosen is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and not , say, JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Although the left denounces rage on the right as a dangerous new “age of anger,” feminist affect theorists like self-described “feminist killjoy” Sara Ahmed sees anger as a positive and virtue value, even “world-making.” For Ahmed, who popularized the slogan “feminist killjoy,” happiness is a colonial construct, and civility is a social norm used to silence marginalized people.

Often filed under postcritique, these reductive approaches have become increasingly popular. In a widely cited 2009 article in the influential interdisciplinary journal Representations, literary critics Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus similarly argue for “surface readings” as opposed to plummeting the interpretive depths to unearth buried meaning. Deep-seated meanings are “superfluous,” they argue, because of the overt moral outrages of that era. As examples, they cite the Iraq War and the racism in the response to Hurricane Katrina. It goes unstated as to why this approach would not have been more appropriate to the prior era that birthed critical theory, which also witnessed the Holocaust, colonialism, racial segregation, criminalized homosexuality, or the atomic bomb.

A more plausible interpretation for “surface reading” is linked to social media superficiality, with its constant outrage, public shamings, and call-outs. Needless to say, “surface readings” took off during the Trump era and the post-George Floyd racial reckoning. Caught in this increasingly frenetic rhetoric of perpetual crises, academics increasingly see their mission in “radical transformation” with a moral imperative to “remake the world.” A focus on material conditions becomes untethered from reality and splintered, like the narrative of a comic book film, into a multiverse of multiple and competing “futures,” which forms another offshoot of ontology broadly known as the “speculative turn.”

Rather than concrete analyses, the futurologists and speculatists offer vague and open-ended musings on emergences, openings, hope, and other hopelessly nebulous possibilities. Merging densely packed and impenetrable, jargon-laden verbiage with simplistic political sloganeering, such scholars cast themselves as doyens in a survivalist postapocalyptic horror film leading the search to a new Garden of Eden, albeit an Eden that is still committed to upholding academic institutional norms of university press publishing and peer-reviewed articles, at least for those willing to conform. This rhetoric is also amenable to the neoliberal university’s emphasis on “innovation,” “transformation,” and “futures.”

Conducting boring old vigorous and empirical research is no longer sufficient, though; one must engage in “research creation” to “open up” new and emerging possibilities as acts of repair for our “broken” world. Social constructivist approaches are therefore misguided, because they are too committed to understanding the world as it is.

Hateful academic rhetoric about Israel also exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of these recent academic trends. The absolute moral certainty, the expressions of unabashed hatred, the lack of nuance, and the radical zealotry that views Israel as the embodiment of capitalist, colonial, and racist global evil are all logical consequences of current theoretical tendencies. For example, Texas Tech University professor Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, gained social media notoriety when he woke up to the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 and his immediate reaction was to justify Palestinian resistance writing, “Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories” and that “DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR.” Since then, he has become one of X’s more bombastic academic Israel-basher, whose social media interventions range from “Fuck Israel” to “Fuck the zionist settler colonial state and everyone who supports it or remains silently complicit!” Such public statements eventually got him suspended by his university, then reinstated in the name of academic freedom.

As to his academic credentials, Fúnez-Flores works in Latin America and has no academic expertise in the Middle East. He is a professor of curriculum studies and teacher education, ostensibly teaching teachers how to teach. However, his “real” expertise is in ontology; his notable academic publication is titled “Decolonial and ontological challenges in social and anthropological theory” in Theory, Culture & Society, one of the more influential journals in cultural studies. As to anyone attempting to understand the complexities of Israel, Fúnez-Flores characteristically offers, “everyone who has tried to offer ‘nuanced’ interpretations of Zionism is complicit with genocide.” 

If academic rage against Israel appears unhinged from what a sober academic analysis should offer, affect theory legitimizes Fúnez-Flores’ rantings as a viable academic position. Ghassan Hage, a well-known anthropology professor from the University of Melbourne, gained wider notoriety when the German Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology severed their association with him based on his public statements on the conflict. Yet Hage’s public statements were logical products of his academic work, which included a widely cited and anthologized article from 2009 taught in many undergraduate classes, “Hating Israel in the Field,” where he writes of his own process of coming to hate Israel with a passion that eventually surpasses that of his research participants during his field work in Lebanon. That an article like this would have no problem going through the peer review process is indicative of the larger state of academia.

We need not spend time imagining how an article titled “Hating Palestine in the Field” might fare with the editors of academic journals, for the same reason that we understand that experiences of antisemitism by Jewish students don’t matter. That’s because their affective experience is given no credence. This also explains why so many like-minded academics not only found Hamas’ atrocities “exhilarating” but felt emboldened to publicly proclaim their excitement and joy at mass murder. For them, the events of Oct. 7 were not a carefully planned genocidal horror but rather a concrete manifestation of alternative liberatory worlds. As a Palestinian “artist in residence” for the anti-Zionist periodical Jewish Currents tweeted, “‘from the river to the sea’ is merely a speculative act of imagining that holds a wide range of liberatory possibilities/promises within it.” Uh, sure.

In 1994, Michael Ignatieff asked Eric Hobsbawm if he would have rejected communism if he had known of Stalin’s atrocities during the 1930s. Hobsbawm infamously answered, “probably not” because such “sacrifices” could be justified and “the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.” Our new academic radicals appear willing to embrace Hamas’ atrocities to create a new world in the service of a speculative fantasy that imagines that the region might erupt in peace and harmony if Israel magically or not-so-magically ceases to exist. If the world is the horror they consider it to be, one readily understands what horrors they will countenance in order to transform it. And while it is tempting to dismiss the thinkers of these obscure theories as deeply unserious and not worth taking seriously, it is a mistake to underestimate their influence throughout academe.