The killing of history
For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attach from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction. Historians in classrooms from Berkeley to Paris have embraced these views, and an increasing number of literary critics and social theorists now feel free to define their own work as history and to call themselves historians. The result is revolutionary: historians have not only changed how history is taught, they are also increasingly obscuring the very facts on which the truth must be built. In The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle offers both a devastating expose of the absurdity of these developments and a defense of the integrity of Western intellectual traditions which are now so widely attacked. Windschuttle examines exactly what is being taught about Columbus' discovery of the New World; the history of asylums and prisons in Europe; the fall of Communism in 1989; and the Battle of Quebec in 1759.
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- Citations, please
This is a hilarious comment, given that Foucault's History of Sexuality contains almost no citations!
If you are interested in why Foucault ought to be a laughingstock, see Windshuttle's The Killing of History: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-History-Literary-Theorists-Mu... or the many essays Camille Paglia wrote on him. Her latest book has a reprint of "Review: Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf."
- I'm surprised Moyn doesn't mention Edge.org, whose founder John Brockman has explicitly talked about starting Edge and becoming a literary agent to offer alternatives to what he calls "book reviewers" dominating "intellectual" conversations. Incidentally, the Edge.org annual question books are excellent.
In addition, WRT this:
It seems as if, in roundabout ways, all of our current historiographical trend-followers finally agree with White, in the face of what they regard as a great crisis for historical writing today. But it is one thing to call for speculation for the sake of relevance, and another to bring about a new marriage of history and philosophy.
writers like Keith Windschuttle have been discussing these problems since The Killing of History, if not earlier, and Camille Paglia has been discussing them in essays since the 1990s.
Finally, the lack of jobs in the humanities has been acting as both a negative IQ test and a conformity test for decades. I wrote a little more about that in the context of English here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... . This may relate to the willingness of academic historians and other academics to speak to the public or avoid conformity more generally.
- quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment
Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... .
It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance
Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect us, and because it's hard for one voter to fix the problem. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter is very good on this subject. Most people (and voters) don't even know how many Senators their state has, or their terms, let alone why complex subjects like privacy are important. Based on Caplan's book, I think ignorance is a more reasonable explanation than a fear of being anti-authoritarian or an institutionalized mindset.
- >Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History
That critique is not even worthy of an answer -- it's basically a conservative "oh, all these new fangled lefty theorists have ruined our field" cry.
- Good comment.
Here is my take on deconstruction, based on an MA in anthropology from a good university and some further interest and reading
Here is my take, which is a "meta" idea about institutions rather than a direct comment on the merits of deconstruction; I'm writing this when I should be writing my dissertation in English Lit, but so it goes:
Since at least the 18th Century, writers of various sorts have been systematically (key word) asking fundamental questions about what words mean and how they mean them. Dr. Johnson is a good place to start with this. We eventually start calling such people "critics." In the 19th C this habit gets a big boost from the Romantics and then from people like Matthew Arnold.
Many of the debates about what things mean and why have inherent tensions, like: "Should you consider the author's time period or point history" or "Can art be inherently aesthetic or must it be political?" One can formulate others. Different answers predominate in different periods.
In the 20th C, critics start getting caught up in academia; the idea of the research university gets started in Germany, then spread to the U.S. through Johns Hopkins in the 19th C. Professors of English start getting appointed. In research universities, professors need to produce "original research" to qualify for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
So English professors move from being primarily philological in nature towards being critics. The first people to really ratchet up the research on original works game are the New Critics, starting in the 1930s. They predominate until the 1950s, when Structuralists seize the high ground. In the 1970s, Deconstructionists (otherwise known as Post-structuralists) show up.
In each case, newly-minted professors need to get PhDs, hired by departments (often though not always English), and get tenure by producing original research. One way to produce original research is to denounce the methods and ideas of your predecessors as horse shit and then set up a new set of methods and ideas, which can also be called "assumptions."
But a funny thing happened to the critical-industrial complex in universities starting around 1975: the baby boomers finished college. The number of students plummeted. Colleges had all these tenured professors who can't be gotten rid of. So they stopped hiring (see Menand in particular). And they never really did so en masse again.
At the same time, in the 1980s and 1990s court decisions struck down mandatory retirement (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/silver_lining/2011/04/ple...). Instead of getting a gold watch (or whatever academics gave), professors could continue being full profs well into their 70s or even 80s. Life expectancies lengthened too.
Consequently, the personnel churn that used to produce dominant new ideologies in academia. The relatively few new faculty slots went to people who believed in Deconstructionist ideals.
Deconstructionism itself has some interesting ideas, like this one: "he asks us to question not whether something is an X or a Y, but rather to get 'meta' and start examining what makes it possible for us to go through life assigning things too ontological categories (X or Y) in the first place" and others, like those pointing out that a work of art can mean two opposing things simultaneously.
The problem, however, is that its sillier adherents—who are all over universities—take a misreading of Saussure Deconstruction to mean that nothing means anything, except that everything means that men, white people, and Western imperialists oppress women and everyone else, and also capitalism is evil as long as we're at it. History also means nothing because nothing means anything, or everything means nothing, or nothing means everything.
There was some blowback against this (Paglia, Falck, Windschuttle), but the sillier parts of Deconstructionist / Post-structuralist nonsense basically won, and the institutional forces within academia mean that that victory has been depressingly permanent.
The people who would normally produce intellectual churn have mostly been shut out of the job market, or have moved to the healthier world of ideas online or in journalism (http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Economy-of-Letters/1412...), or have been marginalized as much as possible (Paglia).
The smart ones also go for MFAs, where the goal is to produce art that someone else might actually want to read.
Few important thinkers have emerged from the humanities in the last 25 or so years. Many have in the sciences (http://edge.org/).
Works not cited but from which this reply draws:
Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Paglia, Camille. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf.” Arion Third Series 1.2 (1991/04/01): 139-212.
Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. 1 ed. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Falck, Colin. Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism. 2 ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. 1st Free Press Ed., 1997 ed. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Star, Alexander. Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca. 1st ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2008.
