It is the task of a Foreword to commend a work to you the reader, and to say why this work matters. I shall endeavor to fulfill this task, one which is at once easy and somewhat difficult. It is easy because Christopher Watkin’s Foucault is a highly commendable venture; it is difficult because our times, and the common configuration of our Christian practice within them, are disinclined to entertain such ventures.
We live in modernity, in the modern West. Modernism, the prevailing pattern of thought and culture beginning perhaps most obviously in the 1600s and still growing in trenchancy, strongly inclines us to the pragmatic and away from the useless. It deems philosophy and philosophical awareness useless, unpragmatic, and thus suspect. It imagines that it is something one might opt out of. It blinds its children to the ironically philosophical nature of this claim. Modernism is a philosophical outlook that is compulsively antiphilosophical.
Modern Western Christian practice bears the same marks: we are pragmatic about the Gospel and its dissemination. We can be something like the reverse of the emperor in his imagined clothes: we imagine that we are free of philosophical commitments when all the while the child can plainly see that our very selves have been woven into the warp and woof of the philosophical fabric. Such Christians are disinclined even to open such a book as this. Or if we do, it is only to vindicate the Christian religion in rejection of the world.
However, you have opened it! Good! Indeed there should in fact be a deeper reality that is calling you; for there is one thing you need to be philosophical, and that is to be born. To be human is to ponder deep questions of wonder, something dogs, for example, just don’t do.
Also, you know that there are Christian doctrines which commend a wider outlook, a profounder grasp of life and thinking. To name a couple here: To love God is to love also his works, and that includes the stuff of reality, and our own times. God is Lord, humans are image bearers. Although human personal and structural sin warps our understanding (case in point: modernism—thus it’s worth joining Foucault in combating it), truth happens in every corner of the earth, and where it happens, it is the Lord’s. Another: the Gospel of Jesus Christ should be the transformative, subversive center of everything, even (especially) our deepest philosophical commitments. David Kettle, following in the missiological vision of Lesslie Newbigin, describes the Gospel and conversion as the hospitable approach of God to “break in and break open” our world—what Watkin calls diagonalization, and the cruciform reversal. The Gospel both honors the world and also transforms it, welcoming it into its coming. These Christian truths situate and heighten the import of this little book on Michel Foucault, and the value (nonpragmatic—but pragmatic as well) of the listening to Foucault that it models and commends.
Foucault, it turns out, voices modernism deeply, helping us to understand it and humbly to notice our own clothes. Give philosophical awareness a chance (philosophical friendship, too!), and you will find that you love it, and love it as loving God and his (also our) world.
Foucault understands and propounds some things about power in modernity: that it is pervasive, internalized, bodied, and that it’s really helpful to discern and be responsible about the power-knowledge connection, that it may not look like what we moderns have been touting, that our blindness typifies modernism, and that modernism needs to subverted if we are going to survive.
I am an educator: the impinging world of my work is one of standards, assessments, data, and scantrons with a-to-e options, and most prized: results. No one, it can seem, even sees the actually pretty high-handed power nexus here. Only five options? Whose universe are scantron people in? Sadly—they are in the modernist one. Who determines what those five options are? How is it that we acquiesce blithely to such an anonymous, two-dimensional but commodifiable version of reality and of ourselves as educated?
I now make my home in Aliquippa, PA. At one time, Pittsburgh was corporate capital of the world, and Aliquippa was home to the world’s largest steel mill, sprawled seven miles along the Ohio River here. The stories of the mills are of vast wealth in exchange for personal bondage and addiction: a self-chosen participation in dangerous work, in which on-the-job deaths and disability were rationalized to be the price of progress. Foucault somewhere argues that capitalism requires the kind of internalized discipline that typifies modernity.
I am a woman. In my admittedly few PowerPoint slides devoted to Foucault in my humanities lecture on postmodern thought, I include, in addition to a photo of a panopticon, of a scantron, and of actor Jack Nicholson as Randal Patrick McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a picture of Mammy tightening the strings of Scarlet O’Hara’s corset as Scarlet grabs the bedpost and yells, “Tighter!” Surely such body reshaping devices count as expressions of our willingness to conform our bodies to the power-laden ideals of the times. While we are at it, who is compelling so many people to live their lives enroute to or from their body work-outs?
Finally, of course our lives on Facebook would offer supreme grist to the mill of Foucauldian analysis. Mea culpa.
The point is that Foucault helps us see what is there. It doesn’t have to be all that is there (as per a reductivist account) to be worth understanding and understanding about ourselves and our time. It doesn’t have to be an account that is free of a kind of base-level incoherence, to be listened to—especially if the incoherence should be noted to be endemic to the milieu it voices and in which we ourselves participate (as I do Facebook). And especially if the incoherence itself cries out for diagonalizing resolution that only Christianity effects.
But in my humanities PowerPoint I also have a slide or two on Christianity and Pomo, including the matter of power. Christians of all people should understand in all humility the power-knowledge nexus, good and evil (discipleship, formation, justice (and injustice), mercy, also spiritual and psychological abuse, domestic violence, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo), and the surpassing aptness of subversive gamechangers (the Cross).
So I myself have been pursuing Watkin’s agenda, which he carries out admirably in this book. The agenda predates both of us by millennia. Early Christian believers read the pagan philosophers and said (something like), “Hey, this stuff is amazing!” They also said, “Hey, the Christian religion actually helps the pagan philosophers better their philosophy.” Christianity makes for a better Platonism, a better Aristotelianism. This isn’t meant as a contest, but as a dignity-conferring affirmation and consideration, and a generously hospitable collaboration. Truth is simple, but it’s also more complex and profound and inexhaustive and objective than modernity has misled us to imagine.
As the Pevensies came to understand the existence of a deeper Magic, Scripture opens our eyes to a deeper power. “One greater than Solomon is here.” It’s not a matter of more power, but power of a qualitatively different kind. It does not arm; it disarms—double meaning intended. Whatever the power of power in modernism, the power of Christ breaks in and breaks open, doing it transformatively, freeingly, better. One of my favorite parts of Watkin’s treatise is his list of the Bible’s reversals! “My soul doth magnify the Lord!!”
Victor Hugo understood this: Les Miserables famously begins with Jean Valjean’s theft of the altar candlesticks. When police capture Valjean and force him before his “accuser,” Bishop Myriel says to them, “You misunderstood—I gave them to him.” Myriel understands that this courageous gesture of regard and love so subverts Valjean’s being that his soul has now been claimed for God. Our lives may be blessed to be agents of such subversions! As Watkin’s clearly understands and models, one key subversion is to listen and therein accord dignity to the other. Truth must be invited hospitably. In fact, don’t you see how just this little assertion gently and winsomely dis-arms the internalized dominance nexus that typifies modernity?
Take up and read. Follow Christopher Watkin’s good example of listening, having your eyes opened, your philosophical awareness deepened, your sense of the Gospel, your own need of it and the strategically joyous gesture it is in our time. Jesus is the answer to your sins; he’s also the subversively healing answer to modernism—yours along with everyone else’s.
Esther Lightcap Meek
Professor of Philosophy, Geneva College
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania
September, 2018
