I wrote in the DN ( 18/12) on Edward Said’s ”Orientalism”, and about how the book, to our misfortune, formed school. With said judgment of the mellanösternforskningen is a deliberate parallel to Michel Foucault’s analysis of society. The method is best described as the opposite of Karl Poppers famous recipe on empirical research: ”Find the weakest points in your hypothesis, and bombarding them with counter-arguments”. Said, Foucault and their followers is not based on prövbara hypotheses, but from the opinions which in practice functions as axioms. Rather than rack them, they protect them from objections.
But beyond this, his external form had my article, also, another, occult trait, according to Stefan Jonsson ( DN 19/12): my criticism of Said’s old book legitimises the Hungarian regime’s eviction, recently, of the Central european university! Jonsson has not recognized the steps in this reasoning, so I can’t judge it. But I know one thing about CEU: Stefan Jonsson should not skruda in its colors.
CEU relate to him and his beliefs that black to white, and fire to water. The university, as I had a bit to do with when it came to, wanted to restore and uphold values that been trampled underfoot during the communism. Two libertarian intellectuals put together with George Soros up the drawings: Karl Popper, whose books on the open society made a powerful impression on Soros; and one of His, one of last century’s most versatile geniuses.
and merciless buy tickets today by Edward Said, which he regarded as a charlatan. He was also one of the first who clearly saw how dangerous postmodernism anarkiska methodology and its sectarian ältande of race, gender, and identity – would be for the free society.
the Mainstays of Soros, Poppers and Gellners vision was: market economy, ideologifri science and the full support of the western democracy. Stefan Jonsson has, to put it politely, navigated for other benchmarks. It is important, if we are to assess the legacy of the Said in relation to the CEU, to understand why the founding fathers put such emphasis on the way to conduct science. Research freedom is no gift from the state to the universities. It is the system’s linchpin and must be protected, for ideologistyrd research abound not only in dictatorships.
Foucault’s main thesis, that the western institutions modeled on the closed asylums as the insane asylum and prisons, have the boot apart by british and French historians
”the Knowledge of the other is (…) an exercise of power over the other”, writes Jonsson. (It is a real description of the Said position, fixed an incorrect description of the reality: the priest Ferette, who rediscovered the spoken aramaic in the village of Ma’alula, had no power over the villagers, on the contrary.) If knowledge is but a battle, no one has to dissemble the lens in their research. ”My book is pure ’fiction’; it is a novel,” declared Foucault about his ”Les mots et les choses” (1966).
gender studies and postcolonial cultural studies is not that its practitioners are so often ignorant fanatics, but that their methods do not generate any new knowledge. Open-ended studies, as Janice Perlmans of Rios favelas, or spouses Services of the bicultural Paraguay, can lead to conclusions that astounds also the researchers themselves. But you will never see the news: ”the University finds biological differences between women and men!”
Foucault’s main thesis, that the western institutions modeled on the closed asylums as the insane asylum and prisons, have the boot apart by british and French historians. Just as he had preached as the most scathing against the west were closed institutions down in their thousands, and the prisons humaniserades. It has not affected the cult of Foucault, since the ubiquity of subjectivity is now practiced by all institutions, not just individual.
A dear colleague of mine in São Paulo received his phd a year or two ago on Foucault. As I see there’s no better cure for the foucaultism than Brazil. I asked my friend, in all kindness: What is the most difficult of the objections raised against Foucault? I got no answer, and his face was clear: ”So, where can you well not to ask.”
