Left Center Left

or, “Blame Poststurcturalists, part II”….

Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram has a good takedown of an Oliver Kamm post taking Michel Foucault’s professed admiration of the anarchic spirit of the Iranian Revolution as some evidence of the Left’s affinity with Islamo-fascism. As Bertram notes, the connection is preposterous:

Presumably Ketland’s mention of Foucault’s PCF [Communist Party] membership is supposed to support the identification of Foucault with “the Left”. But Foucault left the PCF in 1953 and wrote profoundly silly things about Iran over a quarter of a century later. By 1979 he was hardly a leftist on an sensible view of what that involves.

Not only that, but there’s no evidence that anyone in the Left, French or otherwise, ever shared Foucault’s enthusiasm or took it up in any organized way. Or that “much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy” borrows that from Foucault instead of other ideas they may find useful or insightful. The linkage Kamm intimates is the worst kind of intellectual history, a metastatizing connect-the-dots that willfully ignores the whole of peoples’ ideas or politics in order to erect strawmen… here namely the notion that lefty academics all secretly love Islamic/fascist regimes. Mind you, since Bertram’s post Kamm has appended qualifications on Foucault, but hasn’t abandoned the overall project of guilt by linkage.

I actually find one of CT’s commenters to be quite eloquent on the matter. Timothy Burke writes about the Foucault-as-Proof-of-Left-Islamofascism (FAPOLI) argument

It’s a stupid argument about “the Left” on many fronts.

But it’s not necessarily foolish to focus on Foucault’s sympathy for the Iranian Revolution and ask whether that was a structurally significant moment rather than a one-off eccentricity the way that some people are reading it. To me, that moment is pretty consistent with Foucault’s driving hostility to the Enlightenment, and the degree to which that posture led him to an interest in anything which seemed to be functionally anti-Enlightenment, regardless of its actual content. There are real connections between that sentiment and some of the positioning of postcolonial theory or the romantic anti-foundationalism of some postmodernism, and also between Foucault’s position and that portion of the Western left which became infatuated with Third World nationalisms in general.

Kamm, like many, is being lazy in identifying those quite specific intellectual strains with “the Left”. Moreover, I’m really sick of people slamming postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, Foucault, and so on without having even the vaguest idea of what it is that they’re attacking. I think that this particular moment in Foucault’s intellectual career is not an isolated or idiosyncratic one, and that it does connect to a larger strand in his thought and the thought of other Western intellectuals that I find intensely problematic and foolish. In the end, I really recoil from the anti-Enlightenment strain that swallowed up a whole range of intellectual positions, and particularly led to the fatal romance of a lot of Western intellectuals with Third World authoritarianisms. But that philosophical movement has to be taken seriously, and met seriously, because it had a lot of things to say that can’t just be waved away, any more than Nietzsche, the clear progenitor of a lot of this, can just be waved away. In fact, there’s nothing that is more a betrayal of the Enlightenment than failing to meet the anti-Enlightenment square on.

The interesting other issue here is to look at what has happened in the last five years to the Left that walked away from the back-door romanticism of postmodernism, poststructuralism, situationism and so on. This is the Left that Judith Butler criticized as “left conservatism”, and there’s some interesting forking pathways in the choices people in this camp have made on Iraq, 9/11 and a lot of other issues. I’m still waiting for someone perceptive to really chart out those branching choices.

Indeed. At some point, those approvingly quoting Foucault or Deleuze as normative thinkers against reason will have to come clean with how much reason they’re really willing to do without. (Scratch deep and you’ll find some “Foucauldians” are actaully quite humanistic in their politics.)

But this is almost beside the point for the conservative bloggers. Their obsession with the Left’s supposed love of Saddam (let’s face it… this is just intellectual window dressing for that charge) is a way of ignoring that more prosaic reasons - realism, belief in national self-determination, displeasure in the way it was done - have been behind resistance to the war. Like the writers for the New Criterion, these bloggers seem only want to study academic ideas to get the ‘gotcha’ quote that will prove the point they already had.