Big paper on Foucault’s historical method for my Historiography class this semester, so look for more of this sort of thing to come.
Scott Moore, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, states in the first page of his essay, “Christian History, Providence, and Michel Foucault,” that he is not historian, but rather a philosopher. Reading the rest of the article makes this statement completely superfluous, as Moore’s presentation of Foucault’s historical methodology evinces no real first-hand knowlegde of primary sources. The article depends exclusively on a few secondary sources and some works in which Foucault forthrightly comments on his method. This does not help to lend credibility to Moore’s thesis, which, as he himself admits, is a pretty crazy one.
In it, Moore hopes to appropriate Foucault in a manner superficially similar to James K.A. Smith’s reading of Lyotard on metanarrative. There, Smith successfully reads Lyotard not as a critique of any story that explains all of existence (ala Middleton and Walsh in Truth Is Stranger than it Used to Be), but rather as critiquing any such story that would pretend to be divorced from any grounding in a particular epistemological stance (i.e. Kant grounding morality in a universally accessible categorical imperative). For Smith, this only opens up room for faith – for the forthright declaration that the Christian view of the world is wholly contingent upon the particular narrative of God’s dealings with a small, near-eastern nation, particularly in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Moore similarly argues for a reading of Foucault’s method that would mitigate against the modernist hostility towards particularity. Summing up his view of Foucault’s contribution, he writes, “the historical observer is not only epistemically entitled to view the facts of history from a communally constituted present, she must of necessity do so.” Ironically, Moore attempts to use Foucault’s undermining of the myth of the epistemologically-neutral, objective standpoint of modern historiography in order to validate the particularly Christian perspective of God’s providential presence in history (whether or not Moore’s quite abstract formulation of providence (God prior to, and hidden behind his actions in history) is or ought to called “Christian” is a real problem). Ironic because perhaps Foucault’s chief enemy in all of his work is any sort of teleological framework forced onto the datum of history. Moore recognizes this as a problem, and only leaves it there, as though it were simply a matter of offending Foucault’s personal taste. But its much more drastic than that, because Foucault’s entire method rises and falls on teleology. The space for particularity is made by only by unveiling the present structures’ pretensions to inevitability. This is the only way Foucault’s method can be effective. If there is any necessity, any teleological movement towards a whole, then there is no fellowship with Foucault, and any service his method may have been to Moore is negated.
But we can leave that aside for now, since it should be self evident to anyone who has read Foucault. One last note, then: perhaps the most frustrating thing about Moore’s thesis his assumption of a discontinuity between God’s providence and Foucault’s “historical nominalism.” He writes, “Foucault did not like abstract concepts, and he usually sought to reinscribe those concepts in the form of some particular and individual manifestation of the issue at hand.” True enough. But to say that “in principle, he was committed to a methodological nominalism which would be hard to square with my notion of God as an actor in history” is only necessary in regards specifically to Moore’s notion of God as an actor in history. There are plenty of theological traditions, Martin Luther’s Theology of the Cross, for one, which would have no problem with the Foucauldian prohibition of speaking of meaning somewhere hidden behind or prior to the actual events of history.
Yet even though Moore ultimately fails in his attempt to conscript Foucault, he nevertheless has landed on an interesting issue. Is it possible to embrace a Foucauldian perspective of history, and yet affirm God’s presence in history? The teleological Hegelianism of process theology is out, and along with it the abstract conception of the unmoved-mover of classical theism. The task of constructing an account of God and history after Foucault needs resources. Two that come to mind for me are Martin Luther and Alan Lewis. You?
