> I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-structuralist.
While I want to make some snarky comment about how maybe this tells you what you've heard about those 'fudging post-structuralists' is incorrect, what I'll say instead is that out of that group, which, incidentally, he did not consider himself a part of, Foucault is widely considered the least-fudgy.
Consider Chomsky, for example: his (silly and vapid, in my humble opinion) beef with many continental philosophers basically excluded Foucault: "I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression." I highly recommend watching the debate between the two of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 (and the five-second summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA )
Oh, you don't need to convince me one way or the other. I spent my undergraduate career in a philosophy department that was extremely continental-heavy, as well as dedicated to reading only primary texts. After having read many volumes of Frenchies, my opinion on the two most famous is that Derrida fudged beautifully, even if he was ultimately a one-trick pony, while Foucault cherry picked some history but built a system of questions that were and are worth exploring.
Hmm, what should I get from that debate? I just re-read the transcript [1], and seems they just had a minor disagreement over the notion of justice. (And a couple other little "differences" which we could consider clarifications.) I currently don't see why it's so heavily cited; some others (not you) seem to consider it some legendary heavyweight fight in the history of philosophy. But it was just... an interview.
As for his disagreements with certain philosophers... he makes a cogent point, that perhaps he simply doesn't understand it, but much of it seems to him written in a kind of gibberish, which can understandably lead to a lot of mistakes. [2]
Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have?
It's of particular interest to me because it really strongly illustrates the gulf between the two. It's a pretty solid introduction to both of their positions, and goes in interesting places.
> Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read
> and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have?
This is not the right analogy. The right analogy is a C programmer looking at some Haskell code, and complaining that they don't understand where memory is allocated, where the pointers are. I mean, after all, who can get real work done without pointers?
Let's examine his essay, but substituting in Haskell and C... actually, wait a minute. I know I've heard this before... ah yes, here: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky
Okay, so that's only kinda what I'm saying... what would you think about this paragraph?
> But from 50 years in this programming game, I have learned two things: (1)
> I can ask friends who work in object oriented areas to explain it to me at
> a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular
> difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I
> will come to understand it. Now functors, arrows, hylomorphisms, monads,
> etc. --- even first-class functions, whom I knew and liked, and who was
> somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't
> understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand
> can explain monads to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to
> overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new
> advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic
> mutation, which has created a form of "programming paradigm" that is beyond procedural
> programming, structured programming, etc., in depth and profundity; or
> (b) ... I won't spell it out.
You'd probably say "seriously, stop being an idiot. Haskell is hard, and strange, and weird, but it has value. If you like C just keep on writing C, no need to be such a jerk about it. But Haskell is for doing different kinds of programming than C."
Let's not take one throwaway analogy I made (to help illustrate someone's point), and base an entire post on highly leaky programming analogies. Why not actually help us understand the useful aspects of continental philosophy? I cited explanations, not shaky analogies. (I'm sorry for using an illustrative analogy, because they serve as good rhetorical targets.)
Why not pick a technology made by a charlatan, and see how it sounds? You're after all assuming that the philosophy he criticizes is Haskell. What if instead, it's some closed source, obfuscated "artificial intelligence" snakeoil which barely even compiles?
And why pick that one particular paragraph? How about the one where he mentions meeting some luminaries he criticizes, like Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva? Does the aggressively ignorant C programmer go so far as meeting the Haskell implementors, trying to understand their perspectives? Does anyone go around citing the ignorant C programmer's debate with a famous Haskell implementor, where they mostly agree?
What about when he requests these philosophers "to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make." Does anyone think Haskellers don't do this? Then as programmers, we need to focus some efforts on that. Because in the software world, that's a sign of charlatans!
> Why not actually help us understand the useful aspects of continental philosophy?
Sorry, I thought you were trying to understand what Chomsky is saying here, not get an introduction yourself.
> You're after all assuming that the philosophy he criticizes is Haskell.
I'm not assuming; I've read most of these people, or at least have a basic grasp of their ideas.
> And why pick that one particular paragraph?
I thought it was the one that was most illustrative.
> How about the one where he mentions meeting some luminaries he criticizes, like Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva?
Uhhh I replaced "Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault," with "functors, arrows, hylomorphisms, monads, etc. --- even first-class functions". I'm not sure how I could more directly engage there.
> What about when he requests these philosophers [explain themselves]
They do. There is a wealth of introductory literature. I think you're taking Chomsky too literally here; this is rhetoric.
> I'm not assuming; I've read most of these people, or at least have a basic grasp of their ideas.
Should you believe something I believe, merely because I claim it's right (with no evidence)? I likely believe some false things. People believe all sorts of weird things. The AI snakeoil salesman might believe in his own snakeoil.
> I'm not sure how I could more directly engage there.
By using the actual paragraph where he mentions actually meeting Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva. Or in general, try peforming the same trick on a passage where your point maybe doesn't look so hot. Or instead of Haskell, the aforementioned AI snakeoil.
> There is a wealth of introductory literature.
Here, I cite introductory literature on a non-mainstream programming language, on many levels: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038989). It took work, but I hope it helped a couple people.
(It's unhelpful to merely cite the existence of literature (rather than naming it), leaving people ignorant. After all, I demonstrated that I was willing to re-read the Chomsky/Foucault discussion. I'm not lazy.)
And I vouch for the literature I cite. That means if people have problems with it, I know places where people can go and ask away to their heart's content. Or I will sit down and help people understand, until they're satisfied (or no longer interested).
[Edit: I see you edited to offer youtube links. Thanks, will watch! If they're good and in-depth, then ignore my last point.]
I do think that Foucault's theories are quite applicable and expandable, though it's true that he can be pretty obscurantist. As the Chomsky essay notes, the history of French intellectualism that these guys come from is a very particular situation, something that even most of their non-French acolytes fail to appreciate. Most specifically, this whole generation of French theorists came of age around 1968.[1]
A whole lot can be deduced when you understand that France's intelligentsia at the time were largely structuralists who believed that history moved along rationally, according to an underlying structure. Post-structuralism as such was an attempt to reappropriate the happenings of 1968 as a "rupture", something that was new, unprecedented, unforeseen -- a real event. As Deleuze writes about it, the concept of an event is unintelligible in a structuralist sense, since a structuralist views an event as a mere surface-level phenomenon of a static underlying structure. I imagine if you went to Woodstock and told the hippies that nothing new was going on, but that their generation was the inevitable result of everything that went before them, they would similarly protest in the name of personal freedom.
It is unsurprising, then, that Derrida's work is much like the brooding of an intelligent teenager. All across the world, the Teenager came into his own in the late 1960s. Any adult of reasonable humility knows that a teenager can bring to light simple truths that the adult has grown accustomed to ignoring. And that is the value of Derrida. I agree with Chomsky that much of it is banal -- but so are most bits of wisdom.[2]
[2] The real shame of French Theory is more about the way it contributes to the already benighted state of humanities education in a professionalized capitalist society, which rewards specialization and competition and opens the way for obscurantist occultism as the easiest way to maintain a level of job security. Sigh...
While I want to make some snarky comment about how maybe this tells you what you've heard about those 'fudging post-structuralists' is incorrect, what I'll say instead is that out of that group, which, incidentally, he did not consider himself a part of, Foucault is widely considered the least-fudgy.
Consider Chomsky, for example: his (silly and vapid, in my humble opinion) beef with many continental philosophers basically excluded Foucault: "I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression." I highly recommend watching the debate between the two of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 (and the five-second summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA )