Foucault versus the facts of reality

“Eventually the postmodern Theorists started to attract the attention of experts in the disciplines into which they had strayed. Linguists looked at their linguistics and found it littered with elementary errors. Derrida, for example, repeatedly confused the sign as a whole with the signifier and so have his many hundreds of thousands of obedient disciples. This error is one of the cornerstones of his work. Other linguists were amused by the Derrideans’ ignorance of linguistics outside of Saussure — this ignorance perhaps strengthening their confidence in their ability to pronounce on the whole of language. Historians have examined Foucault’s egregious versions of the history of thought and have discovered that even the miniscule and eccentric empirical base upon which his broad sweep theories are poised is grossly at variance with the documentary evidence. His periodisation — crucial to his vision of Western history and of man as `a recent invention’ — would, to take one small example, require Descartes to have lived sometime after he had died, in order to fit into the right episteme. Indeed, one does not have to be much of a scholar to demonstrate that Foucault’s epistemes and the so-called ruptures epistemologiques separating them — the central notions of the book (The Order of Things) that brought him his international fame — correspond in no way to any historical reality. Names that should fit into one of his periods are awkwardly active in others and disciplines that transcend his periods prove to be more numerous than he had thought. (One or two people did try to point this out to him while he was alive but you can’t tell a Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France anything.) Perhaps Foucault was speaking autobiographically when he described discourse as `the violence we do to things’. At any rate, it is striking how frequently postmodernist theorists, when their theories become accidentally contaminated with facts, get the facts wrong — so frequently that this cannot be fully accounted for by the party line contempt for `the empirical’ but must be the result of a determined endeavour to bend facts to theories. (It is interesting how contempt for facts goes hand in hand with a propensity for fabricating evidence. Perhaps there is a kind of consistency in combining hatred of truth — and the very notion of truth — with a love of error.) Some of the most detailed critical examinations have been carried out on postmodern theorists’ misrepresentations of philosophical ideas and the history of philosophical thought. Inspection of what postmodernists say about major figures such as Plato, Descartes, Husserl and Peirce, in support of their own theories — in which, not infrequently, isolated comments by major figures have been made to stand for huge chunks of `Western thought’ — have revealed an extraordinary mixture of genuine misunderstanding and strategic misquotation.”

(Thanks to Paul Steeper for the excerpt. Tallis’s full review here.)