As a (human [cultural {critical?}]) geographer, I sometimes find myself relying on the works of obtuse theorists whose ideas generally make me scoff on first read.  Two in particular come to mind: Baudrillard and Foucault.  Not because they're wrong in any real sense -- who am I to argue with the greatness that is thousands of academics hailing them as theoretical gods?  They do the same thing with Marx.  Again, not wrong, just not my style.  But it's inevitable: I scoff, and not long after something happens to remind me that I shouldn't be so arrogant.

I first encountered Baudrillard in my geography MA program, at the insistence of a professor I adored (and still do).  I was writing about the ways that people mentally superimpose imagined ideas of the landscape over the existing landscape.  It occurred to one of us (I forget who) that I might have to differentiate my ideas theoretically from Baudrillard, or at least set them in relation to his work.  I had been aware of the existence and basic premise of Simulacra and Simulation, but I had been afraid to read it for fear I wouldn't understand it.  But I set that fear aside and dutifully read the first few chapters.

It took me weeks.  I won't lie.  I'm a slow reader, sue me.  But by the end of it, I think I got (more or less) what he was saying.  I remember thinking, Well, this is interesting, and it's also kind of ridiculous.  How can he be talking about media-related hyperreality in Vietnam when real people really died?  And with a great big sigh of relief, I decided that what he had to say wasn't really anything like what I was writing about and after a few carefully crafted paragraphs distancing my work from his, I got on with life.

I became acquainted with Foucault over the course of an independent study during my first year of my PhD program.  I'd been interested in queer theory.  Never having studied it, and knowing we have someone versed in it on our faculty, I decided to take a stab at it.  I was told to read Discipline and Punish and the first volume of History of Sexuality, which were followed up with a close reading of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble.  I found it difficult being the only student on a project like this one, and I probably didn't do as well with the material as I would like.  But you take what you can get.

Foucault perplexed me a bit.  It took me a while to get into the rhythm of reading him -- a task made easier once I realized that he typically spends thirty pages hammering the same point home and then sums it up with a paragraph beginning with the phrase "In short..."  It all made sense.  I won't deny that at all.  But there was something about the idea of discourse and discursive constructions that disturbed me.  I remember finishing Discipline and Punish and feeling the weight of a great invisible machine around me.  Just cogs on wheels, I thought.  This is all we are -- and sooner or later we'd all be crushed by it.

It took me a while to decide that what bothered me about Foucault was a twofold problem.  First, it was his attention to the social/cultural/national scale at the exclusion of the individual scale.  Second, and related, it was the complete lack of agency he afforded people to alter discourse.  Butler, of course, was supposed to answer this by marrying Foucault to psychoanalytic theory and presenting performativity as their healthy, bouncing theoretical baby.

But it wasn't enough agency for me.  I still felt trapped by the discursive machine.  I wanted something that could explain how discourses could change radically.  I wanted something that could explain how an individual could bust through the culturally-bound meanings of language and belief and step beyond it.  Performativity reinforces the status quo by subversion, inversion, parody.  I wanted more.  I wanted something else entirely.

This idea of a discursive machine has become my default descriptor for academia.  We talk about all the creativity and freedom we're allowed here, and to some extent that's true.  But each and every one of us is beholden to the standards and rules of our academic disciplines -- and the fact that we even label fields of study "disciplines" should tell us something in a Foucauldian sense.  There are expectations.  There are priorities.  And these expectations and priorities are set by forces that seem almost self-propelled, self-perpetuating, beyond our reach as professionals.  Step away from them, try to redirect the energies of our departments toward other models, other measures of success, and you risk being alienated, ostracized, regarded as a hack who just can't make it in academia.  (Why, for example, shouldn't activism or public scholarship count as much as professional publications on your CV?  Isn't that our job?  Not to generate useless and esoteric knowledge, but to disseminate knowledge, to offer different perspectives to people, to make a difference in the world?)

This brings me back to Baudrillard.

Baudrillard has been criticized by some for the position he takes in the final chapter of Simulacra and Simulation, "On Nihilism."  For those of you unfamiliar with the work, I'll just paste a bit here to give you a taste.  I think this should give you an idea of why people have had visceral reactions to this particular viewpoint:

Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.

Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight.

This, only terrorism can do.  (link to source)

The long and short of it is that people object to this because it blatantly endorses terrorism.  When I first read it, I was disturbed too.  Although it was written well before 9/11, I read it several years after.  I read Baudrillard with a slow-motion memory of live footage of the second Tower falling burned into my head.  I read it and I was horrified. 

What do you do with something so confusing, so disturbing?  Coward that I am, I set it aside.  It has haunted me ever since.

Fast forward a couple of years.  Here I am, in a doctoral program.  I love the work that I'm doing.  I love my community and I love my committee.  I've been lucky to find an advisor who is willing (once again) to take a chance on an unconventional student with an unconventional research project (though one far less unconventional than my MA thesis).  Yet I'm feeling trapped by the system.  It's no one's fault.  It is what it is.  It's out of my hands.  It's in the hands of university administrators, journal editors, tenured researchers with solid reputations.  For real change to take place, it has to come from all of them in concert.  The stars have to align.

Or, alternately, something catastrophic has to happen.  I return to Baudrillard.  That passage I quoted above?  I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  Suddenly, it's resonating.  It is the cry of someone despondent, desperate, trapped.  It is the cry of someone looking for agency in the machine of Foucauldian discourse.

I can't condone terrorism.  I can't condone the destruction of innocent lives for any reason, personal or political.

But I can condone other drastic measures -- the kind that equally demonstrate agency in what has become a world drenched in absurdity.  Art, activism, flash mobs, graffiti -- even suicide -- can be so effective at raising bringing change, or at least raising awareness.  It doesn't have to be one person's struggle.  It can be one shared by a handful.  But it has to be a choice, and it has to be something that shatters the box rather than reinforcing it.  It has to be real.

I'm looking for real agency.  Are you?