foucault

It was always cold in York. Ducks were always mating. The season was usually either dank Spring or damp Autumn. A peculiar kind of soggy, weeping willow beauty.

One day in one Summer it was hot. I sat in the fields behind the University and told N something I’d never told anyone. In the background was a red-brick place called The Retreat, which features in either Discipline and Punish or Madness and Civilisation, I don’t remember which.

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I’d decided to do philosophy as the secondary part of my degree for two reasons. I didn’t want to have to learn a language and I’d started reading Nietzsche and wanted an excuse to read more of him. However, on the whole, philosophy was either intimidating or tedious. The reading was hard going, and the seminars were dominated by individuals who weren’t scared of saying whatever came into their heads. Circular conversations that never seemed to go anywhere. Democracy and philosophy not necessarily the finest bedfellows.

I signed up for a course called Sartre and Foucault. Largely because of the lure of discovering what existentialism might mean. That was the Sartre aspect. They let us loose on Being and Nothingness and we swam around in it like brainless cod in the Atlantic. That ‘we’ includes the tutors.

Foucault was something else. I’d never heard of him before. Didn’t realise he was not long dead. One of the first to fall in the great Aids war. Aids was big in the eightees. When Foucault’s fate emerged, it only emblazoned the sense of charisma his books engendered.

Foucault wrote better prose than most philosophers. Some philosophers, including his arch rival Derrida, read like people who suffer language as a necessary tool of their trade. If they could find a way of mainlining their thoughts into the psyche, they’d much rather do that. Foucault seemed to take pleasure out of writing. There was an elegance and a wit to his prose.

That helped. Then you began to grapple with the ideas. Ideas you could grapple with. Although he writes about the death of man, his work is rooted in the analysis of those things that man does. The institutions and the ideas that those institutions embody. Madness, sex, literature, crime. Somehow Foucault took these mainstream, potboiling subjects, and used his alchemy to turn them into philosophy.

A lot of people mistrust Foucault. They claim the facts he used in Madness and Civilisation are inaccurate. They claim he invalidated the notion of truth. That he reduced all things to a fluxus where qualitive judgements were eradicated, where morality was something you manufactured, a world without absolutes or foundations.

I wasn’t looking for these things from philosophy. I wanted it to do one thing and one thing only. To explain to me why the world was as it was. Full of beauty and terror. Where the most beautiful things could become the most terrible. Why it seemed never to be as simple as it should be. How I should cope with this.

Foucault helped. Not a great deal, but he did. He explained, piece by piece, how we’d built up the structures we inhabited. Why I was at University. Why sex was not straightforward. Why literature could help you. Why there were edges to the world that we could cross. At our peril, if we so chose to do. He did it with a kind of rhetorical panache, with a playfulness, which suggested that he didn’t always know if he was right in every detail, but he knew he was onto something. The same rhetoric that probably gets him into trouble with the purists.

I find him hard to read now. You need the time and space of studenthood to wrap your brain around big ideas. A time when you can establish your aspirations before you project them into the world. Everyday culture doesn’t want its citizens thinking too much; it warps their effectiveness as citizens. When the time of struggle is over, and my dotage is approaching, I might have the time and space again. Assuming the cells are still working.