Foucault, Methodology and The Archaeology of Knowledge

[R_P_A_S]

Someone recommended me a book by Michel Foucault, 'The Archaeology of knowledge.' Before i picked it up I decided to research a bit about it and what I've encounter seems to me like a puzzle. It's like he's trying to discuss very simple things and turn them upside and make them complicated, run around in circles and end up with the same shit. I know this is probably not the best analysis for his work. I don't claim to be right but I am confused as I have a hard time understanding Him and the whole Methodology thing. I was hoping someone could refer me to something easier to grasp on Methodology or any enlightenment what so ever. Forgive me if I make no sense but My brain just took a shit after I attempt to read that stuff.

[EscapeFromSF]

This tends to be true of many theorists. I am not a theorist. Unfortunately, I am in a graduate program that has changed, since I entered it, to expect me to be a theorist. I hate theory.

I have now taken three classes from three different professors in my department on theory, at the junior, senior, and graduate levels. I am still mystified as to how theorists such as Foucault add value to scholarship.

Actually, that's not true. I have reached the conclusion that they do not in fact add value to scholarship, that certain preferred theorists, such as Foucault, form the nuclei of academic cliques that serve to shelter their members from critical review by obscuring their ideas--or the lack thereof--through astonishingly dense prose. Because the members of these cliques all agree with each other, their only remaining task in a "publish or perish" environment is to produce a volume of such prose as needed to satisfy tenure-related academic expectations. This is why you (and I) find it difficult to read.

This does not even require what would normally be considered research. One paper I saw was about a professor's experience of Asian reactions to his beard while on a trip to Asia. Yes, he apparently got it published. It is an autoethnography, entirely honorable among some theorists. No, I am not joking.

That does not mean all theory is bad. I haven't managed to make it through Das Kapital; a copy sits on my reading pile, barely opened. Nonetheless, Karl Marx is revered among sociologists as one of their founding fathers; his contributions to our understanding of society are cited even by conservative (yes, there are a few) academics. Further, theorists have correctly pointed out what I see as fatal flaws in the positivist model, which assumes that reality can be precisely known and that human reality can be tested through experimentation.

The trouble is that if you are as critical of their theories or their "research" as they are of positivism, you will be savaged for your lack of comprehension, your disrespect for "people who obviously know much more than you do," and you will be labeled as "incoherent." Notice that in this counterattack, there is no explanation of what they really meant or how the words they used come to represent exact opposite meanings. (This happened to me in the graduate-level class.)

Unfortunately, academia seems largely split along this dichotomy. Either you very much admire theorists and fall in with one of the cliques or you despise them and carry on with fundamentally flawed positivist research. I'm still looking for something else.

Does that help?