I was startled into guilt yesterday by reading Edmund White talking about Foucault... and I suddenly realized, with an unpleasant start, how long it's been since I read anything by Foucault – or anything substantial about him.
I have a lot of already-prepared guilt ready on this topic, because my postgraduate seminar on cultural theory has been disintegrating a bit over the past month – on the day we were to read/discuss Adorno and Benjamin, who are old favorites of mine, two of the four were sick; and then the following week the other two... and through it all I've been stumbling in my choices of what to give them to read. The articles I chose for the first weeks were pretty good, and the last weeks I think are well planned; but these middle weeks... I think I was hoping for inspiration to come to me, and to be frank it hasn't. Not to mention that this small group is already chaotically varied in their interests and backgrounds....
Yeah, yeah: kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.
Well, I've chosen three articles for the next class at the end of January; but one of them is not really cultural theory, even broadly defined, and the third isn't a great choice. Therefore I'm not quite happy, and haven't sent the assignments out. I was going to do so on Friday; but I suppose none of them are going to read anything in this holiday week, so if I take a few more days it won't much matter.
In light of the above... maybe I should give them some good classic cultural theory. Uh, Foucault, perhaps?... I do love and respect his work; for me, he's the most honest and productive of all the whole post-structuralist gang, with Lyotard and Deleuze close behind. (I'm also aware that next fall I have to teach similar topics to a large undergraduate class, which I haven't done for several years – so I'm going to have to think at a larger level about what I currently know, remember, and can teach, in any case.)
White reminded me of how many other theorists have criticized Foucault, although frankly most of them are people I trust less (for instance, Habermas – who I continue to think is only famous because he was Adorno's student; and why didn't Metzger become famous instead, as he was also a noted Adorno student? – well, because Metzger writes mostly about music, and also because he's gay). Silly old Baudrillard, who had one brilliant idea (the simulacrum thing) and spun it out into an entire career, complete with entire books restating a few things in admittedly seductive prose, published a book titled Forget Foucault – but here I think he overstepped his bounds, being jealously, resentfully nasty about his betters.
No: don't forget Foucault.
And I won't, either: I'll go look for some things for the students to read....
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