Right now, a graduate student’s desk in a sociology department has a stack of trading cards. Each one has a face on it — Bourdieu, Foucault, maybe Weber if someone was feeling ambitious — and a few cryptic numbers that suggest strengths, weaknesses, something. Nobody quite knows the rules. These were purchased by someone while they were a graduate student, and now the entire department is laughing at each other’s theories as if they were debating whether or not a defensive midfielder should be in the starting lineup.
It sounds like a joke. It is, in a sense. But the fact that these cards exist at all, and that people are using them to have arguments about social theory in a language that actually feels alive, says something worth paying attention to.
As these things frequently do, the origin story is almost embarrassingly informal. As a joke, a graphic designer with a twisted sense of humor created a phony Nietzsche card, which included three random numbers arranged to appear meaningful, a big-top radial burst in the background, and something assembled from Wikipedia. The card was then shared on a sibling’s Facebook page. She was a sociology doctoral candidate. She didn’t immediately clock it as fake. Her first question was simply: “Where did you find this?”
It’s interesting that she was momentarily duped. It’s why she was fooled. The card looked finished. It had color toning, drop shadows, lighting details, the kind of visual polish that signals something has gone through a real production process. Where the designer saw five quick aesthetic tricks to make something look complete, his sister saw evidence of an actual studio, an actual game, an actual cultural moment she had somehow missed. The difference between those two readings is instructive.
Something seems to be perceived by the mind as a game when it appears to be one. Especially among people who already exist in non-mainstream game culture — who know that weird, specific, lovingly designed card games do get made, often by small publishers, often for audiences of exactly this size. A convincing-looking fake raises questions in addition to deceiving. “Why doesn’t this exist?” And once that question is in the air, it tends to do something.
This matters because Foucault has always had an image problem. He’s brilliant, arguably, but he’s also dense, often deliberately so. His theories regarding the panopticon, biopower, and the political use of knowledge systems are genuinely insightful observations about how the world functions. Assange cited the panopticon explicitly in editorials about surveillance. The idea has outlived the scholarly writing. However, it is still difficult for many students to interact with Foucault on his terms through the texts themselves.
A trading card changes the terms. Giving someone a card with Foucault’s face on it and three numbers representing something like “epistemic disruption” and “institutional critique” is absurd, yes. However, absurdity serves as a gateway. You start arguing about whether his numbers are accurate. You begin to wonder what the numbers actually mean. You’ve begun doing theory at some point in that argument.
This may seem like a stretch—turning philosophy into a ploy to make it more palatable. That criticism is reasonable enough. However, the alternative—a thousand college students staring at Punish and Discipline and comprehending nothing—also undermines the concepts. There’s something to be said for meeting people where they are, even if where they are is a kitchen table with a deck of cards and a running argument about whether Bourdieu’s social capital stat is overrated.
The fake Nietzsche card, with its goofy one-liners and its borrowed Wikipedia portrait, accidentally became a proof of concept. Not for dumbing theory down. for giving the impression that it was something worth disputing.
That could be the most Foucauldian result imaginable: a piece of knowledge that was put together using borrowed components and gained authority only by its arrangement and presentation. That would probably make him laugh. or at least fascinating enough to research.
