Blogger Book Club II: Something I Liked

By Matthew Guerrieri

This week's discussion of Hickey's book around these parts has been by and large skeptical-critical, which kind of gives the impression that the book was a chore. But (for me, at least) I had a good time disagreeing with it--I read the book a second time and had more fun disagreeing with it. So, just to say thank you for by far the highest-quality procrastination of the week, here's something I liked about the book: Hickey's defense of French Structuralism.

Somehow, the delicate instrumentalities of continental thought had been transmuted by the American professoriat into a highfalutin, pseudo-progressive billy club with which to beat dissenters about the head and shoulders.

... Foucault's ruthless, timely dismantling of the human sciences had simply vanished. It had, in fact, been surgically amputated and a dumbed-down travesty of Frankfurt School sociology sewn onto its place. Barthes's dead author walked the steppes as an avatar of ethnic and sexual identity, replete with neediness and aura. Foucault's Panopticon and Lacan's gaze were untidily bundled into one lumpy paranoid concept.... (p. xix)

Though I would say that the caricature of Continental thought came as much from outside as inside (my alma mater's former president, after all, was known for spitting about the Frankfurt School like John Lithgow in Footloose), the reminder that the original thinkers were more elegant, subtle, and even playful than you might get from their reputation is always welcome. I never dip back into them without feeling refreshed (even Foucault, who can be pretty heavy going in translation). So even though I didn't quite buy Hickey's application of the Bentham-Chardin divide from Foucault's Discipline and Punish (pp. 5-8), it was still my favorite part of the book, and put a lot of the rest of his criticism of institutions in a more complex and useful context. In some ways, disagreeing with someone who's read Barthes et al. can be more invigorating that agreeing with someone who hasn't.