Yesterday, I spent darn near the ENTIRE day reading almost half of The Order of Things by Michel Foucault for my Comp Studies class. The foreword and preface were interesting, but the rest was more challenging… to say the least. I have to keep “scholarly notes” to turn in each week and I felt like the first part was worth sharing.
When I was in high school, I was kind of poor and went to a Catholic school, where most people were, if not kind of rich, then most definitely not kind of poor. At this time, I hated the rich kids because, as I saw it, they had done nothing to deserve their privilege, yet they owned it like they had. Like, they hadn’t just been pooped out into a world where they had an unfair advantage, an advantage (at least in my perception) that they perceived as the status quo, which therefore put those without the same advantages (namely me), in a lower class. And this lower class had not simply been born into their situation, but had actively done something wrong or something to deserve their station beneath the bourgeoisie. Clearly, I’m over this now, but as I read the foreword of The Order of Things, I thought, Foucault would tell those rich kids that they had nothing to do with their own privilege, that they could just suck it. Of course, he uses slightly more academic prose and does this in a sneaky way by studying the history of the sciences, but nevertheless, he, when discussing the “problem” of the subject says: “I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them” (p.xiv). It all just seems like happenstance to me. Foucault wants to study the conditions that made knowledge valued at a specific time, which seems to me that he sort of thinks that those ideas that became established were just lucky, sort of like the rich kids. Which, as it happens, also sounds like a very structuralist position to me, which would apparently provoke him to say I have a tiny mind, which I probably wouldn’t disagree with. I wonder, though, why he despises this term structuralist. Is it because he is trying to see the hidden structures? Would this make him a poststructuralist (I’ve heard he wasn’t fond of this term either)?
Anyway, around this same time in my life, I also held a contradictory belief that I did not acknowledge as contradictory. I believed that I could change my circumstances, that I could “succeed” (oddly enough by the rich kids’ standards) even though I had not been born into circumstances that may usually lead to inevitable “success,” like having a father who owned a prominent law firm. So, at the same time that Foucault’s words noted above make me feel redemption, they also make me feel like I also sort of got lucky. If we’re all just swimming in the stream of a combination of circumstances, then our individual trajectories (from privilege to privilege or from lack of privilege to privilege or any combination thereof) are not the result of our own agency, hard work, determination, or what have you, they are just happenstance… luck… that’s it. Of course, Foucault is talking about how knowledge gains validity and not meritocracy, but I think it has parallels. He does make a small caveat to say that he “doesn’t wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes” and goes on to say that he just wonders “whether these descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of the discourse” (p. xiii). So, maybe I had a bit to do with my own progression through the hierarchy of our society, but there’s more to it than that, and I can acknowledge that I worked hard, but was also sort of lucky.
PS- What exactly are “scholarly notes” anyway? I hope these count.
