Quinn Cook

My sister, with some trepidation, once commented that I have “a lot of books about Marx.” Now, some of the books I have “about Marx” are not in agreement with him (e.g., Black Marxism), and I have many more books that are Marxist but not overtly so (e.g., The Prison Notebooks) and therefore were likely not the ones she was referring to.

The implicit question, though, was nonetheless clear: are you some kind of Marxist? It would certainly make sense given my proclivity towards the criticism of capitalism.

The implicit answer, though, was equally clear: Hell no! That’s merely a function of my proclivity towards criticism in general. I am not—could not be—a Marxist.

Now why is that? It’s certainly not because of any well-founded, informed position (like Popper’s complaint that Marx’s ideas were unfalsifiable). No, no, no: it’s just too darn simple, and too darn optimistic. That capital H History could be boiled down to simple cause and effect? Ha! That’s a salesman’s pitch if I ever heard one. I, being an educated fellow, must not settle for anything so clear (not to mention so old).

My preferences lean towards nuanced (opaque) argumentation such as Foucault’s. Cherry-picking evidence can be forgiven, and, being a young person in the world, I have already given up hope, so who cares if his defeatist ideas leave no route for resistance. It goes without saying that youth are also, generally, egoistic, which jibes quite well, too.

But.

As you may have been able to tell for yourself, I am not blind to Foucault’s (manifold) shortcomings—I merely find his ideas interesting. His main flaws were made apparent to me from the start, and I chose to proceed anyway. So sue me. But, reading a little bit of him, I come to hesitate on the merits of my own thoughts about him:

It seems that there is a split between an “inside” world and an “outside” world, a first and a third, etc. and so on, and that Foucault deals exclusively in the internal world—namely, the “Western” world (broadly construed). True, I already knew that Foucault’s knowledge was very concentrated on Europe, but his ideas betray this schism and lay it bare. Foucault is an occidental, bourgeois kind of deal.

Take, for example, the difference between biopolitics and sovereign power. Foucault doesn’t say biopolitics eclipses sovereign power completely (yes, yes, get it out: he actively says they both continue to work), but let’s get real: biopower is the property of modernity and Westernity.

In the external world, the primitivity of sovereign power not only continues to exist, but reigns supreme. Power is violent and material and real, not anodyne and ideal and discursive. It exists, further, not just in local worlds (I would not be so foolish as to buy into the same old horse excrement that the rulers of the outside worlds are necessarily cruder than those of the inside world—and I say “cruder” because yes, the implication is that one is more sophisticated than the other). No, it exists also as colonial and imperial projects executed by those in the internal world. Yes, a real shocker: the Western world is brutal, too.

Nonetheless, we get very little of the external world from Foucault: just the safe, gentlemanly, discursive power of Europe and North America and select others. Maybe his choices of intellectual excursions are, in this framework, unsurprising: hospitals and prisons are little bubbles of the external world still extant “on the inside,” the last refuges of raw and absolute power that must be kept in check. Prisons, for example, are forced to exercise a slightly different form of power (we no longer execute criminals as a rule of thumb, and those that we do have several formal procedures and appeals to undergo first) so as to maintain legitimacy. The fact that the vast majority of imprisoned people in the US are black and brown is, no doubt, a remnant of this; maybe it is only their geographic location that designates them as part of the inside world and restricts the exercise of power upon them to imprisonment (Guantanamo Bay, anyone?).

But I digress: the point being, maybe Foucault’s appearance as more “nuanced” and “advanced” is the result of a Western conceit. Maybe he is forgiven for his intellectual sins because he has never read the 10th thesis on Feuerbach and “the system” smiles upon this. Maybe there’s a reason he is so popular amongst college and college-aged kids, and is mildly nauseating to so many people of serious stature and intent. Maybe one day I’ll be less interested in peeling apart his words, but for now we persist.