What exactly does Michel Foucault, a long-dead French intellectual with a distracting enthusiasm
for tan turtlenecks, have to do with American politics?
Take a look at this picture.
It’s from recent protests at Bryn Mawr college, denouncing STEM as “the white man’s science.”
We've seen this kind of thing all the time, right?
Science denounced as a tool of oppression.
These self-styled revolutionaries are channeling the thoughts of Michel Foucault.
Foucault is the most cited scholar of his generation.
Professors have been pumping him into young minds for decades.
And he was a particularly powerful purveyor of this idea that science is not what it seems,
that it’s a nefarious conspiracy.
Foucault emerged from a mid-century European intellectual milieu primed to reject the enlightenment.
People had been promised that the steady application of science and reason could build a better
world.
But instead they’d just watched those tools be used to wage two epically murderous wars.
This is the point of the enlightenment?
To build better bombs to vaporize each other?
Foucault becomes one of the continent’s most charismatic purveyors of this skepticism.
And his dethroning of science starts with a rejection of its foundational assumption:
that humans can understand the external world at all.
That humans can even understand themselves.
"On the answer to the question: what is a human being?
This pretension, I think is something quite impossible."
To help us navigate this intellectual terrain, I’ve enlisted Helen Pluckrose, author of
the definitive guide to postmodern intellectuals.
"They don’t deny that a reality exists, but they are radically skeptical of our ability
to get at it.”
If we can’t actually access the external world, then that makes science just a story,
right?
An elaborate fiction that we’re telling ourselves.
And that fiction is continuously revised through history.
Foucault writes that “biology... [is just a] pattern of knowledge that has been familiar
to us for a hundred and fifty years [but it's] not valid for a previous period...”
Science is a “construct,” a human artifice that can tell us little, or maybe even nothing,
about the physical world.
Now, here’s where we get Foucault’s spicy spin.
Why make it up?
Science has been constructed in order to dominate.
"This addition to what is already known is not knowledge, it is a force."
What you think is science is really “the episteme,” a vast invisible social grid.
You can’t smell it or touch or taste it, but it shapes what you think is true.
Foucault says the episteme is “the rules of which [we are] largely unaware... the fundamental
codes of culture [that] establish... the empirical orders...”
"He says at some point there is just one episteme that controls any society.
A set regime of truth which operates in the service of the powerful."
The episteme dictates all the essential binaries used to understand the world.
Take "Sane" and "Crazy."
These categories don’t really exist, they’ve been constructed.
By whom exactly?
Foucault, he's a little vague.
But the category of “crazy” is just a social cudgel, a way to control and exclude
the unwanted.
There’s this same murky conspiracy underlying "Healthy" and "Sick."
Or "Man" or "Woman."
These binaries are raw power plays, disguised as truth.
"What we consider knowledge is what dominant forces in our society have decided is truth."
Foucault's episteme is built in discourses.
"Truth is not defined by correspondence to a reality, but by a force inherent to discourse."
It's a fancy way of saying “the way we talk about things.”
Our words, grammar, cliches, slogans about science, all serve to build and reinforce
this oppressive episteme.
"The importance of the master’s discourse...
The master has to give the discipline, the universal code of conduct."
These discourses about science can steadily shape people’s interior lives to the point
that they don’t actually need to be controlled by some external force.
They’ll regulate themselves.
"[There is] always a structure inside people who are governed, it makes them governable
by the others."
Foucault has an especially hypnotic way of articulating this point: "A stupid despot
may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more
strongly by the chains of their own ideas."
Now, imagine that in French.
If you want to break oppression, you need to break the discourse.
You can’t bring down the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Liberation requires new language, new ways of talking.
So the artificial oppressive gender binary, which funnels people into specific social
roles, can be broken with new words.
These are tools to pry open the binary, to crack the discourse, to throw off the master’s
episteme.
"To get rid of all bad habits, all forced opinion derived from the bad masters."
Now, you might suspect that Foucault is a little bit right.
Sometimes power plays do get disguised as “established scientific fact.”
Foucault was a gay man born at a time when homosexuality was still deemed a disorder,
a mental illness.
"For hundreds of years in the West it was considered a heinous sin.
It was abnormal and something that needed treating."
Being forced to hide his sexuality by the prevailing episteme drove Foucault into a
suicidal depression.
Now, the mistake Foucault makes is in universalizing that experience.
Science is not a story.
It’s a tool, an imperfect tool, but one that yields real results.
Now Foucault’s death serves as a tragic refutation of his own ideas.
In the late 70's, America’s gay community was overtaken by a terrible plague.
An immune disorder originally called “GRIDS Syndrome” that killed one out of every two
people it infected.
At the time Foucault was teaching at Berkeley and was an enthusiastic patron of San Francisco's
bath houses, which he continued to frequent even after it was clear they were AIDS incubators.
He described these visits as “limit experiences.”
Defiant acts against an episteme he said was pushing a “dreamed-up disease.”
By Foucault’s logic, AIDS was yet another tool of exclusion, the episteme’s enforcement
of anti-gay ideology.
Foucault contracted AIDS and died in Paris in June of 1984.
This is Dr. Sam Broder, who led a team of American scientists in a frantic search for
something, anything to beat back this plague.
"In ways that I cannot convey in a scientific presentation, these patients disturbed me
totally.
I was psychologically devastated, and I could not undertake the kind of clinical detachment
that is taught in medical school."
Dr. Broder cooked up a scientific miracle:.
It turned out that a twenty-three-year-old Leukemia treatment could trick the HIV virus into incorporating
booby trapped molecules that prevent its replication.
"Results that I could tell you my colleagues did not believe...
And the possibility that anything would work against a retroviral disease of this magnitude,
of this gravity, of this dire consequence, was for me a really astonishing event."
The introduction of AZT in 1987, just three years after Foucault dies, prompts a rapid
collapse in the disease’s death rate.
Foucault’s infinitely cynical conception of science has no room for such miracles.
Foucault’s ideas sprouted in the musky halls of the academy, but they have been steadily
seeping into the mainstream.
Here, from beyond the grave, Michel continues to shake our faith in science.