Hypothesis: every space where Michael Foucault discovered the operation of power is also a venue for creativity, collaboration, and a deepening of human subjectivity.

By way of background: I respect Foucault as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Although deeply influenced by other writers and activists, he made his own crucial discoveries. In particular, he found power operating in places where it had been largely overlooked, such as clinics, classrooms, and projects of social science. Further, he understood that power is not just a matter of A deliberately making B do what A wants. It rather shapes all of our desires, goals, and beliefs. Its influence on beliefs suggests that knowledge and power are inseparable, so that even our understanding of power is determined by power. Despite the skeptical implications of Foucault’s epistemology, he struggled in an exemplary fashion to get the theory right, revising it constantly. He traveled a long intellectual road, directed by his own conscience and experience rather than any kind of careerism.

So it is as a kind of homage to Foucault that I suggest flipping his theory upside-down. Just as close, critical observation of people in routine settings can reveal the operations of power, so we can detect people developing, growing, reflecting, and collaborating voluntarily. To be sure, social contexts fall on a spectrum from dehumanizing to humanizing, with prisons at one end (not far from office cubicles), and artists’ ateliers at the other. But it would be just as wrong to interpret a whole society as a prison as to view it all as a jazz band. And, I would hypothesize, even in the modern US prison system–swollen in numbers, starved of resources for education and culture, plagued by rape and abuse, and racially biased–one could find evidence of creativity as well as power.

The world grows more alike. Global culture is more uniform today than at any time in the past. Ecosystems are more similar, thanks to human interventions and the mixing of species. Although there are countervailing trends toward diversity, the pressure for similarity is palpable and powerful.

two explanations

I think two theories help to explain this pressure. The first is entropy. In nature, when unlike things come into contact, they become more alike. Likewise, when cultures interact through trade or conquest, they come to share features.

A natural system loses dynamism as entropy grows, to the point that a perfectly entropic universe would be a smooth and inert field of matter. If there were no differences, then time itself would end. Some of the anxiety about globalization derives from fear that cultural differences will disappear, and with them, human dynamism. Some of the impetus for environmentalism arises from fear that all ecosystems will become alike. (This is why biodiversity seems so precious and “invasive species” are such a concern.)

Entropy is fundamentally mindless. It is “noise,” the opposite of a meaningful “signal.” In nature, only intelligence can reduce entropy. For example, by sorting objects into separate piles, a person can make a heap less entropic. In the domain of culture, human beings can use their intelligence to wall themselves off from contact with outsiders, but such barriers always ultimately weaken. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies: the entropy of a closed system tends to increase. However, intelligent beings can also deliberately create new cultural forms in opposition to global averages. Even by the simple act of remembering the diversity of the past, we can make our own minds more complex.

The second explanation is Hegelian. Contrary to popular belief, Hegel never said anything about a thesis meeting its opposite (the antithesis) and generating a synthesis. His model is much more plausible. It starts with consciousness: naive thinking and doing. In a world of diverse people and cultures, a conscious person or group will sooner or later encounter and recognize alternative values and ways of being. At that point self-consciousness arises. This is an uncomfortable feeling, full of tension and doubt; but it is also generative and dynamic, and it can lead to what Hegel calls reason. Hegelian reason is the deliberate and informed creation of values and beliefs, based on the available alternatives. Reason will again become self-consciousness whenever, having built a satisfactory solution, a person or a group realizes that there are other available solutions. That new stage of self-consciousness can again become reason. The whole cycle is “dialectic.”

Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Hegelian dialectic leads ultimately to universal sameness, but it is a sameness deliberately constructed by human beings through the application of intelligence and will. Barring a catastrophe, world culture should become more uniform but also more sophisticated, because it will encompass more history and more awareness of alternatives. It will not be a static state of sameness, but a dramatic narrative leading toward consensus, recorded in the minds of the human actors.

Perhaps the most profound issue of our era is whether we will grow more alike through dialectic or through entropy. Since I am unable to think of any other way to explore this tension, I have made it the theme of a long narrative poem (only part of which is online so far).

consumerism and creativity

I suspect that entropy is connected to the problem of consumerism. Raw materials have been globally traded for a long time. However, the salient feature of “globalization” is the exchange of finished, consumer products. The volume of such trade has surely increased with deregulation and with new communications technology. As a result, people can choose from rapidly growing menus of cultural products. This choice increases as a result of market exchanges, but it is also something that we fight for–for instance, when people who favor “diversity” in education demand more choices in the curriculum, or when civil libertarians assert a right to purchase information from abroad.

Everyone who can choose from a global list of finished cultural products becomes more like everyone else: a phenomenon that Russell Arben Fox insightfully describes. This is a passive, detached, inert sameness. The only way to prevent it is to block people from exercising consumer choice, which restricts their freedom–and never works for long.

In contrast, when we make things, we put our own stamp on them. We thereby exercise Hegelian “reason.” Unlike restrictions on trade and communication, policies that support the local creation of cultural products expand freedom. And even if everyone’s creations turn out to be increasingly similar as history proceeds, at least the resulting sameness will be something that we human beings have made. Likewise, an environmentalism devoted to creativity (rather than preservation) would make the world less entropic even as we put a human stamp on nature.

[This post is being discussed on the Philosophy New Service “community” page]

Jacques Derrida died on Friday. All the obituaries I have seen have fundamentally mischaracterized his thought and the movement he inspired, ?deconstruction.? (The Times gets the biographical facts right but avoids defining deconstruction by stressing its obscurity.) I found Derrida annoying when, as an undergraduate, I watched him sign students? t-shirts and then cross out his name to put it ?under erasure.? I criticized him in my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (pp. 175-181). After I finished that book in 1992, I ignored him. So did many others, for he became increasingly irrelevant?a fate that may have bothered him much more than angry criticism. So I don?t think much of Derrida; but we ought to associate his name with views that he actually held, not with the vaguely Marxist (materialist and historicist) opinions that are often pinned on him.

Derrida claimed that certain prejudices, which he called ?logocentric,? are to be found in ?all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading or interpretation? [Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), p. 46.] These prejudices include a preference for the world over language, for reality over fiction, for sounds over letters, for the signified over the signifier, and for masculinity over femininity. A classic deconstructionist reading of a text involves (a) demonstrating that the text presumes these dichotomies and (b) calling the distinctions and value-judgments into question. For instance, one might very plausibly argue that Dante combines irrationality, verbosity, femininity, and falsehood in the figure of Francesca da Rimini, whereas God is male, rational, silent, and true. Drawing attention to this dichotomy would be deconstructionist criticism.

Derrida went beyond standard deconstruction, however?starting at the latest with Glas (1974). He knew that any argument against logocentrism would itself be logocentric, just because it would be an argument. He wanted to get outside a form of thinking that was, according to him, universal. To achieve ?exorbitant? effects (ones that went outside the normal orbit), he played with styles of writing. For example, Glas consists of two parallel columns, one inspired by Hegel and the other by Genet. Hegel was a great systematic thinker who could incorporate all alternative views within his comprehensive system. Criticizing Hegel would be playing the philosopher?s own game. So Derrida analyzed a completely different author in the same book, discussed disgusting bodily functions, stretched puns beyond any reasonable limit, and said, in effect, ?Philosophize this.?

Everything depends upon the universality of the ?logocentric? prejudices that Derrida identified. If they are omnipresent and important, then Derrida was engaged in a radical project of some interest (but of doubtful value). I think, however, that calling the West ?logocentric? was a massive oversimplification. There are binary oppositions in our thinking, but also trinities and unities. Some of us believe that written text is merely a representation of sounds, which are ?primary?; but others disagree. If the thinking of the West is deeply diverse, then there is no way out of its ?orbit.? In that case, Derrida invented a rather easy game for himself: escaping prejudices that plenty of people had always disagreed with. Some deconstructionist readings are trenchant and plausible, but Derrida?s own works mainly look ridiculous.

Jack Balkin has a nicer take, as does Michael B?rub?.

Ten to 15 years ago, when I first studied philosophy, the great divide was between the “analytic” and “continental” traditions. Some people wouldn’t talk to colleagues in the opposite camp, and departments fell apart as a result. I think the conflict is dying down today, partly because of the waning significance of the French postmodern thinkers. They were the figures in the continental canon who provoked the deepest contempt from the analytic side. Many analytic philosophers can understand why one would study Hegel, Nietzsche, or Husserl, but not Derrida or Baudrillard.

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