Michael McGee — that august and larger-than-life rhetorical critic and scholar who loved to stick it to me when he could — believed that the only root reality is the individual. Anything limiting the individual was oppression. He even (and I’m not kidding) cited his potty training experience as his mother’s first oppressive act in his life — starting the whole educational process (a.k.a. oppression). I think rearing him a Southern Baptist might have been her last oppressive act.
What McGee didn’t understand is probably the oppression started when his mom wiped his boogers. Eating them, I’m sure, would have been much more emancipatory. Before that, when she started him on solids, when she insisted on a good latch, and when he was limited to consuming only what came through that tether of an umbilical cord. Poor dear — the chumps were always trying to get him down even before his first breath.
McGee aligned himself with — hey, he even intellectually sired (his metaphor) — “critical rhetoric.” Critical rhetoric asserts that our disiplinary raison d’etre is to unmask oppression. The approach has jumped the shark really, resorting to the ying-yang conclusion: what you might think is emancipation is really oppression.
Robert Hariman and others have aptly pointed out that critical rhetoric’s downfall is its foundation on Michel Foucault. Foucault saw discourses of power in every conversation. The world was a linguistic Panopticon — a prison with no bars in which we inmates are disciplining ourselves. What Nietzsche relished, Foucault, his intellectual progeny, dismantled and Derrida would shrug off. The problem we rhetoricians have with whole mess is that there is no hope. Rhetoricians assume that our words can solve material problems, and Foucault explicitly admits that those solutions are simply more problems in disguise. We’re truly left with only Derrida’s conclusion of “Why bother?”
We Americans seem more obsessed with Foucault than his own countrymen who became bored with him decades ago. But just this week, I think I tasted a small bit of Foucault in an unlikely spot — parenting advice.
Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting and Taking Children Seriously are bringing Foucauldian theory to parenting practice. Alfie Kohn questions the very notion of authority and proposes a team work paradigm in parenting — “working with” is superior to “doing to.” There’s no Management Theory X or Y here; it’s all Z. And in TCS’s advice about carseat usage in a medical emergency, they actually deconstruct the parent’s “need” to have medical attention and scoff at the federal car seat laws.
Hmph. Like Foucault and McGee and Critical Rhetoric, these non-coercives’ striving for equality and teamwork and emancipation sounds so very lovely. But they also are painfully naive. In privileging teamwork and shunning “coercion,” these do-gooders forget that they are still the powerful ones with the money, the street smarts, and the louder voice. Hey — the parents can even speak in full sentences! Just like McGee forgot that his notion of the root reality in the individual carries with it its own kind of oppression and that the very conception of an individual is born out of an always already interpollated community, the non-coercives deny their own overwhelming power in the family dynamic. Utter freedom is never possible nor even desirable. Complete equality in the home is setting up both parents and children for failure.
McGee ignored the fact that his mama was giving him a certain kind of freedom when she emancipated him from diapers. Just like I’m giving Isaac a certain freedom when Daddy and Mommy fasten his car seat buckle and hold his hand in the parking lot. No, Foucault makes about as good a parent as he does a rhetorician.
For me, I’m still voting for Kenneth Burke‘s hopeful comedy. Both in my scholarship and in my parenting. That’s why I align with Grace-Based Discipline. There’s no tragic shame because Christ took that on Himself and conquered it. That’s how God parents me — with a kind of providential humor, accepting me as I am, gently correcting my flaws, and guiding me with His Grace.
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3 thoughts on “Foucault as Father”
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wow, that’s heavy! thanks, camille.
Wow, this is a tremendous connection of the world of the scholar with that of real life. As a scholar, myself, I am tremendously impressed with the way that you apply your critique of postmodernity to parenting. Fantastic writing, and good thinking. (Although ultimately, I think your writing is more of a critique of the early Foucault, who seemed to take from Marx the need to throw off oppression, as opposed to the later Foucault, who saw the monopoly on power as a source of cultural and social creativity).
I remember being intrigued with TCS and joining the email list a few years ago. I like a lot of their ideas, but when I unraveled them to get to the root, I found that I had foundational differences in the nature of children, I didn’t see the child as being born all good. I like grace-based parenting because it takes the best of TCS, but takes into account the sin nature, and the child’s immaturity, and therefore, the parent’s right to step in because they have more information. It seems to me to be the best of both worlds.