Nihil U.

Many practitioners of prevailing critical theory -- I have in mind specifically Michel Foucault and his disciples -- have, for several decades now, besieged the sovereignty of the individual to the point of its nearly disappearing altogether. Central to their contentions is the preeminence of discourse, the fiber and sinews of the episteme, over the agentive subject. The subject believes herself to be a nodal point of ingenuity, creativity, artfulness; but really she is animated both from within and without by the power discourse is. Here, however, it becomes a bit murky; Foucault never develops a physics per se of the power discourse exerts on the subject. Rather, Foucault leaves one with the blanket assertion that power is dynamic, never originating in the subject, nor entirely outside of her, and instead suffusing the entire milieu in which the subject moves and with which she is co-extensive.

I, for instance, believe as I write this that I am cleverly crafting this recondite weblog entry, when in fact I am nothing short of some automaton, my mind and fingers quickened by the discursive episteme (or should it read, "epistemic discourses?" I am never quite sure.) of which these words and phrases -- these syntagmata -- are but rearranged and reconfigured fragments. Nothing I write here, as any graduate student in humanities will tell you, is new. If, moreover, you were to parse my words with the aid of other texts bound up in the same episteme, as disciples of Foucault do, you would quickly see that any inventiveness you might find here would quickly disappear, taking with it any notions of me as an "author" as traditionally understood. To write this entry is to write my epitaph as some force above, beyond or behind these words. There is only lifeless text.

Essentially, the thought of Foucault and others derives from Nietzsche, who has enjoyed the posthumous glory he predicted for himself. And I should add that this mode of theoretical inquiry can be quite convincing, quite seductive -- even gripping -- as far as it goes. But who can live with this knowledge of himself? Can I? Can you? If we are all essentially ciphers, and what is worse, ciphers of ourselves, then have we not reached the end of history, the Hegelian World Spirit having sublated itself into itself in some strange convergence resulting in a singularity of always already elsewhere eidetic qualities? If Foucault and his ilk are correct, then all of human art and speculative thought has been nothing more than the futility of one attempting to see the back of his head.

I write all of this because I do not see anything supplanting postmodern theory, whose greatest single accomplishment may be that it has proven, perhaps unwittingly, its virtue as a bedfellow to the corporatization of the university, which to all outward appearances has consolidated it domain over institutions across the nation. To the victors go the spoils and devil take the hindmost, the devil in this instance being humanity itself.