The CIA reads French Theory

June 26, 2017 7:49 AM

"It is often presumed that intellectuals have little or no political power. Perched in a privileged ivory tower, disconnected from the real world, embroiled in meaningless academic debates over specialized minutia, or floating in the abstruse clouds of high-minded theory, intellectuals are frequently portrayed as not only cut off from political reality but as incapable of having any meaningful impact on it. The Central Intelligence Agency thinks otherwise."

Gabriel Rockhill in The Philosophical Salon on how the CIA examined "the French intelligentsia and its fundamental role in shaping the trends that generate political policy".

CIA's research paper from 1985, "France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals". [pdf]

posted by Pyrogenesis (39 comments total)

The CIA reads this stuff? They must be looking into it's use as a torture device.
posted by jonmc at 8:00 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

The CIA must be even better at parties than I thought
posted by The Gaffer at 8:01 AM on June 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

FTA: "...the Agency went behind the back of the McCarthy-driven Congress in the postwar era in order to directly support and promote leftist projects that steered cultural producers and consumers away from the resolutely egalitarian left. In severing and discrediting the latter, it also aspired to fragment the left in general, leaving what remained of the center left with only minimal power and public support (as well as being potentially discredited due to its complicity with right-wing power politics, an issue that continues to plague contemporary institutionalized parties on the left)."

Hey, kinda like how the democratic party operates today!
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 8:32 AM on June 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Of course the CIA reads French theory, and the IDF reads Deleuze and Guattari, and I am sure there are many others.

The main article linked had much more depth than I expected; a good read, thank you.
posted by jrb223 at 8:40 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Just skimmed it. It's more a report on the rise of figures like BHL and Andre Glucksmann than 'the CIA reads French Theory', alas, although it does call Foucault 'France's most profound and influential thinker' and correctly notes that he was a critic of doctrinaire Marxism.

It's basically a shrewd and well-written overview of the state of the French intellectual left in the mid-1980s, which makes me think 1) that the CIA probably was quite good at parties, and 2) that it wasn't wholly a bad thing that all these young Ivy Leaguers fought the Cold War by secretly funding weird atonal music, abstract expressionism, literary magazines and so on.
posted by Mocata at 8:41 AM on June 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

it also aspired to fragment the left in general

You don't need the CIA for this, certainement.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:43 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

The CIA must be even better at parties than I thought

It's a party in the CIA.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:55 AM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't know. This approach seems to avoid putting, like, any actual blame on the French left, and to minimize why one might be plausibly and justly skeptical of, eg, Maoists.

There's a super interesting article that I don't have time to google at work, but it's in, IIRC, Modern Intellectual History and it's about the late seventies move by Foucault, etc, toward a sort of weak embrace of neoliberalism. Which was the wrong move, yes, but it was a response to actual failures of the French state.

Similarly, the rejection of Maoism and Stalinism by the radical left was a response to actual things done in China and Russia and actual things done by Western Stalinists and Maoists. Once all that stuff about the big CR started coming out of China, it started to get difficult to cheerlead for Mao, and very properly so.

Should the French left have just, like, sucked it up? Maybe. But here's the thing: when liberals tell the left to suck it up and vote for the lesser evil, liberals get eviscerated. What then is the justification for telling the French left to accept the failures of the French state and the failures of the Maoist left?

Foucault and them were not stupid. They weren't puppets of the CIA, they had lots of experience on the ground as political activists, and they made their arguments based on what they'd lived through in the sixties and seventies. Larger forces were in play than "oh, the CIA believed that their ideas were awesome" - the economy was changing in ways that were difficult for the post-war left to respond to, the left itself was full of real dissention and real conflict, global communism was in what you might call a pretty bad patch, behavior-wise, the RAF and the Red Brigades were considerably ahead, to say the least, of what the masses actually looked for in revolutionary movements.

If your response to the seventies is "everyone should have kept beating exactly the same socialist drum that they'd been beating since the thirties, and anything other than that is just CIA-puppetry", your politics are pretty terrible. I'd like to believe that there was another way - a fourth way, let's call it - that could have been possible, but it would have required not just Foucault and them shutting their bad old postmodern mouths but all kinds of changes on the parts of socialist and communist organizations, changes that would have had to happen fairly fast and in complex ways, under the gun of capital.

The IDF reads Delueze and Guattari because Deleuze and Guattari provide a useful way of understanding the world. "Don't understand the world, that's what the IDF does" is not a valid critique.

Also, this article is all "the CIA praises the efforts of the French universities to push students into business courses". Now, I am not, like, a scholar of le continental theory, but my reading of Foucault has nowhere suggested that he urged his students into business school. It also seems to conflate left intellectuals with center-right, former left and pro-capitalist intellectuals.

This is just such a stale move to me. "Complicated thinking is destroying the left, when what we really need is [the anarchism of 1905, or possibly the communism of 1921]" is just silly. Whatever we need now, it's going to be a new formulation. The communism of 1921 came into being because of the needs of 1921, not because people were all "if only we could return to 1848, that's how we make revolution!"
posted by Frowner at 9:03 AM on June 26, 2017 [46 favorites]

"Because they prophesy the ruin of the world. If anyone stood in a public square in Paris and declared that men must live like human beings, that plants live like plants and it’s about time men had a right to do the same, he would disappear under a black heap of policemen."

-Paul Nizan
posted by clavdivs at 9:11 AM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I don't know. This approach seems to avoid putting, like, any actual blame on the French left, and to minimize why one might be plausibly and justly skeptical of, eg, Maoists.

Maybe, but I think it's worth countering in some way the widely-accepted narrative that all failures of the left are solely due to intrinsic factors. There are a lot of people who believe that the only reason that left groups haven't gained more traction is some kind of completely organic rejection in an idealized marketplace of ideas, and who totally disregard state repression like the Palmer Raids, etc. as a factor (if they are even aware of those things).

I don't think the CIA and the other apparatuses of the state try to squash left movements for fun; I think they try because often it works, and I think it's worthwhile to document that. I don't think that means that "everyone should have kept beating exactly the same socialist drum that they'd been beating since the thirties."
posted by enn at 9:21 AM on June 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Slightly off topic but can anyone recommend a good primer on Foucault et al? I had to read some for my historiography course last semester and now that I have some time over the summer I would like to try again. I have been earnestly trying to understand but I think I am lost.
posted by shield_maiden at 9:24 AM on June 26, 2017

Yeah Frowner I meant the CIA report, not the article, which as you say isn't very good and scolds everyone who rejected Moscow-line communism as tools of the CIA.
posted by Mocata at 9:39 AM on June 26, 2017

In re Foucault primers: I think it's important to remember that Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, etc, were all super different in their approaches. This is something it took me a long time to figure out - there isn't just "continental theory" in a big lump. This is even more of a thing than if you were reading two different historians of the same period.

As very, very much a non-expert, I found that Samuel Delany's essays on postmodernism in "Longer Views" were helpful, also the Semiotexte book of interviews, "Foucault Live".

About the OP: I feel like there's a kind of magical thinking that we all subscribe to on the left - the idea that if we were thinking right we would have had the revolution by now, and that this failure of thinking is the prime driver of the failure of the left. So naturally the goal should be to figure out just who is the intellectual fraud, puppet or dupe, and expunge their ideas, and then we'll proceed correctly to the revolution. Also the idea that the people we dislike don't really think their thoughts - Foucault could not possibly be an intelligent person who experienced and observed a lot of world upheaval and whose theorizing attempts to answer some difficult questions raised by that upheaval; no, he must be some kind of CIA puppet.

Here, too, we assume that the CIA is super smart and philosophers are super-dumb. That is, instead of "the world changed, problems existed, philosophers responded, the collapse of the left was about global economic and political currents", it becomes "philosophers are stupid, the CIA manipulates them and then, despite the stupidity of the philosophers, their work corrupts the left". So philosophers are simultaneously really influential and really stupid, and ordinary people are extra double plus stupid, and the only people who understand this are the CIA.

This is the same CIA that couldn't seem to understand that China and Russia were not buddies during the Cold War, who missed the stuff leading to the collapse of the USSR, who seem to have missed a ton of things about the Middle East - but now they're all puppet-master geniuses. It's enough to make me almost have some enthusiasm for abstract expressionism.
posted by Frowner at 9:40 AM on June 26, 2017 [28 favorites]

Here, too, we assume that the CIA is super smart and philosophers are super-dumb.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a good cure for this line of thinking. After reading it I'm not sure I'd trust the CIA to be able to tell me what time it is, let alone be the Secret Masters of the World.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:49 AM on June 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

I read Legacy of Ashes. It seemed to me like a pretty thoroughgoing indictment of the basic competence of the whole enterprise. A friend of mine who read it reacted differently: In his view, it was a whitewash, because it made them look like clueless buffoons where they had quite successfully fucked up the world in all sorts of ways, and ascribing all the upfuckery to simple malicious idiocy was letting the malice part off the hook for everything it had accomplished.

I still have no idea which view is correct here. I suppose there's room for some of both.
posted by brennen at 10:02 AM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think it's often overlooked that French Theory (for all possible meanings) was written during the post-WWII proliferation of welfare states and the global liberal regulation of capitalism. Our current late capitalist (I know it's an imprecise term but it's useful) dystopia doesn't even have a passing resemblance to 1968-era critiques of capitalism. My telephone knows more about me than my wife, so it can advertise products to me. We might as well be living on another planet. French theory arose as a critique of a social environment (technocratic postwar liberal democracy) that barely exists anymore. I read Anti-Oedipus recently and all I could think about was how much worse the capitalist/fascist machine has gotten since then; it's almost quaint.

That is not to say that continental theory is not useful, but that it is neither the cause of nor the cure of all society's ills. It's helpful but also woefully outdated in some contexts (Both Derrida and Foucault's influence wanes by the day).

Personally, I think Deleuze/Guattari most accurately describe the way we live now. Even more contemporary is the early work of Nick Land (before he became a neoreactionary shithead). He really seems to nail down the cybernetic capitalist death machine that is eating us all.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 10:03 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Both Derrida and Foucault's influence wanes by the day

Quite rapidly too. The people I know who study political theory/philosophy don't give two shits about Foucault, and think Derrida was a fraud. I always thought Foucault was interesting to read and calling him a 'theorist' didn't do him justice--he work was also empirical in important ways. But its simply not as fashionable as it once was to study Foucault.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:08 AM on June 26, 2017

So now we know who's responsible for the death of the author.

(As usual it's not the crime, it's the cover-up...)
posted by chavenet at 10:08 AM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

it was a whitewash, because it made them look like clueless buffoons where they had quite successfully fucked up the world in all sorts of ways

Clueless buffoons can do a lot of damage, especially with enormous secret power coupled with no oversight and unlimited resources, malice or no.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:14 AM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think Foucault died with Queer theory which is kind of shame because of his important work regarding structures of power. Derrida is harder to nail down because he seems to be stuck in 1968 for most people; it's like he stopped existing after his famous Johns Hopkins lecture.

These days it seems like if anyone is interested in theory at all, it's all about Deleuze and non-human stuff, especially since a lot of the theory canon has trickled down into mainstream liberalism (cultural analysis, feminism, gender self-determination, etc.). Although, the return of Marx and the Frankfurt School via the scumbag left is a very real, very nascent thing.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 10:16 AM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Have fun with Lacan, boys!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:54 AM on June 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

So, the GRU was reading Baudrillard, I take it?
posted by tobascodagama at 11:21 AM on June 26, 2017

Lacan, that's number 34, left wing, New York Islanders.

(For the record, I never read any of these guys. I tried, I really did, but that academic buzzword laden writing style gives me a headache.
posted by jonmc at 11:56 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Although, the return of Marx and the Frankfurt School via the scumbag left is a very real, very nascent thing.

This is a pretty offensive thing to say. It's not even true, assuming you're not intentionally tarring the many academics in multiple disciplines who work with concepts from Marx or Frankfurt as scumbags too.
posted by polymodus at 1:06 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

When I think of all my studies of various French philosophers, and then I think about the way most people scoff at French philosophers, the thing that jumps to mind is that there is often a fundamental disconnect between what different groups think philosophy and literary criticism are for (if, indeed, they are for anything).

Is the goal of a philosopher to effect change? To start a political revolution? An intellectual revolution? To begin a new school of thought? To combat ideological evil? To get published? We often assume that the effects imply intent, and that failure to achieve avowed intentions somehow allows us to view the discussions at hand as “passé” or “disproven”.

I had a formative teacher who, despite his wisdom in many fields, used to sometimes say that the USSR had “disproven” Marxism. I remember thinking— “really? is it that simple? If you put your philosophies in the hands of flawed people who implement them in the worst possible way, does that mean your philosophy was flawed?” I mean, you can certainly argue with the tenets of Marxism, but doing so by pointing to the grotesqueries of its corrupt adherents seems fundamentally dishonest. And perhaps this is true of every political system, and management style, and every new fad diet. Some people will turn any system into a weapon. Does that fact mean that systems should not be discussed or proposed? Does CIA interest in those systems mean that they are interested whenever new potential weapons enter the marketplace of ideas? I would say maybe so.

When I think of Foucault, of Derrida, of Lacan, of LeFebvre, of Barthes, one thread that ties them all together in my mind is the way that they are examining systems of meaning, and therefore, systems of power. For that reason, it doesn’t surprise me much to know that one such system of power (hi, CIA operatives tracking this convo!) would be interested in how theories of power are shaping discourse worldwide.

I really think that reading these authors and understanding their claims can reshape your mental landscape, even if you disagree with their ultimate conclusions (assuming they make any in the first place). And yes, I think that makes their ideas “dangerous” to people who want our plebeian minds to be filled with with subsistence-level concerns and pleasure-seeking and little else.

Whenever I see another article about “millennials don’t care enough about money/buying houses/diamonds/eating cereal/bars of soap!!!!!!!!!!!!” anxiety, I think about how fundamental changes in even the most insignificant things that people want (cereal? really??) are viewed as actual destabilizing forces by a huge number of people. When we begin to lose collective cultural certainty about larger precepts than our Cheerios, the potential ramifications are enormous.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:09 PM on June 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

I can't speak to the more detailed critical arguments, but we've seen pretty clearly in our own times how easily propagandists like Luntz can corrupt perfectly good ideas like "welfare" and how easily by not aggressively defending the integrity of certain ideas the narrative can slip away and actively be turned against us. Luntz really never struck me as any sort of rhetorical genius either. He wins by keeping the ideas and framing simple to the point of inanity. That works. People just get frustrated by info overload when they have to grapple with too many subtle, complex ideas, especially when the baseline info load so much higher in every day life than it's ever been before.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:13 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Followup—Oh I see now. Although, the return of Marx and the Frankfurt School via the scumbag left is a very real, very nascent thing. The term is Dirtbag Left and refers to a specific group of Americans in the media.
posted by polymodus at 1:30 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Intellectuals are ideological arms manufacturers.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:57 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

What field are you in, re:the lack of influence and Derrida? BEcause I still find him quite read?
posted by PinkMoose at 1:57 PM on June 26, 2017

I had a formative teacher who, despite his wisdom in many fields, used to sometimes say that the USSR had “disproven” Marxism.

Perhaps he was thinking of claims that the Science of dialectical materialism demonstrates with certainty that World Communism will inevitably prevail. But then, he should know that the USSR gave up on that by the 30's.
posted by thelonius at 2:36 PM on June 26, 2017

Pinkmoose, I'm in English/comp lit. I'm just a grad student, but I try to keep my fingers on the pulse and don't really see much of him. Also, I know 2 scholars, 1 queer and 1 feminist who constantly complain about the lack of interest in Derrida. But perhaps I'm reading too much into that and not reading enough good work on Derrida
posted by R.F.Simpson at 3:42 PM on June 26, 2017

i do qt and theology, and find quite a bit of derrida. what frustrates me is how little barthes their is, considering how useful he is in terms of memory, autocritique and desire.
posted by PinkMoose at 4:50 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Another English professor here. In my particular line of work (Victorian studies), Derrida was never very popular at all--Foucault was, and, to a lesser extent, Jacques Lacan. There were some important deconstructionist articles in Victorian studies, but it was really among Romanticists where Derrida had a huge purchase, in large part thanks to the influence of Paul de Man. It's noteworthy that at my undergraduate alma mater, UC Irvine, which was Derrida Central at the time I was there--I used to see him trotting about campus, smoking his pipe--the deconstructionist faculty have almost completely gone; the last time I looked, there were a lot of historicists, postcolonial theorists, etc.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:37 PM on June 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

That would explain why they did not see the collapse of the USSR coming.
posted by ocschwar at 6:25 PM on June 26, 2017

> Both Derrida and Foucault's influence wanes by the day

In my experience Derrida is vanishing, certainly, though in a complex way, cause there's great swathes of Of Grammatology that are sort of conventional scholarly wisdom now. The bits that haven't been taken up more broadly are the bits that were always sort of outlandish — which means that when you revisit him today you just find a lot of stuff that seems obvious (the bits that were taken up) and a lot of stuff that seems nuts (the bits that weren't). I'm confused by people talking about Foucault's influence waning, though. Specifically the stuff from the College de France lectures seems like it's frickin' everywhere right now; his earlier material might have gotten subsumed into queer theory, but you can't swing a dead cat in a cultural studies department without hitting someone earnestly discussing biopolitics.

Every time the world gets weirder I'm tempted to revisit Baudrillard to see if his writing has stopped seeming crap to me, and every time I revisit Baudrillard I find myself frustrated by how it's still sort of crap. One of my longstanding "gosh I wish I could pull a concrete project out of this" projects has been to somehow reframe Baudrillard's precession-of-simulacra biz in terms that are a bit less mournful of the loss of the real. Like, if Bill McKibben could write a book about how we've got to get used to living on Eaarth instead of restoring Earth, someone should be able to write a book about figuring out a cultural system of continually evolving/precessing simulacra that we can actually live with rather than just being sad about not having access to reality anymore. (was this what Baudrillard was really up to? it's what I want him to have been up to, but...)
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:32 PM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm in education policy studies and still find both Marx and Foucault useful - and Foucault's later thinking on governmentality & biopwer in particular. Perhaps my field is less theoretically trendy (and I am not using "trendy" in a negative way at all) than other academic fields because we deal with constant externally imposed policy changes that are mostly economic in nature?
posted by quixotictic at 10:33 PM on June 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

you can't swing a dead cat in a cultural studies department without hitting someone earnestly discussing biopolitics.

This is a really good point, and an oversight on my part. It seems like people are really using the bio- in biopolitics as a jumping off point for interesting non-human stuff. I'm thinking specifically about Catherine Malabou and her science studies/ontological stuff that seems to be all the rage right now in continental circles.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 12:31 AM on June 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

11. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
posted by numberstation at 5:47 AM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think you should use trendy in the negative sense as a way of critiquing academic "shop talk". The habit of reducing ideas to names and who's who and schools of thought in isolation, versus thinking about relationships and connections, for example. And that's consistent with the broad messages that Foucault, Marx, and other post-Enlightenment thinkers had been getting at.
posted by polymodus at 11:25 AM on June 27, 2017 [2 favorites]