When not to take Foucault so seriously

The article starts with:

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The article ends:

For those of us who have never doubted that humans are socially constituted and that they use their socially and, thus, ideologically constituted habits of thought and praxis to enact and unwittingly constrain their lives, the post-structuralist proposition to turn this fundamental dilemma into a fixed and totalizing foundation of social life hardly constitutes a welcome breakthrough in the conversation about human agency, resistance, and struggle. What it does instead is to cut off the critical conversation about radical—that is, ideologically and structurally consequential—forms of social being. It does it by turning the question whether and under what historical circumstances humans can disengage from unwitting and ideological constraints that their societies impose on their social and cognitive life into a conceptual nonstarter. I end this article with this question in order to put it back on the historians’ agenda.

In between these two paragraphs, historian Anna Krylova provides the most forensically incisive critique I’ve read about this kind of historiographical analysis.

Anna Krylova (2024). ‘Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”’. Modern Intellectual History: 1–23 (accessed online on October 2 2024 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/foucault-poststructuralism-and-the-fixed-openness-of-history/EC9D3735BB7929416001A670E8C8601D)

(For other views on the more nuanced forms of contingency and human agency, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/19/what-if-the-root-cause-is-more-contingency/ and https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/05/08/human-agency-as-the-worlds-global-counternarrative-with-examples/)