When someone puts Foucault on the reading list for a seminar, there is a certain kind of silence that falls over the room. The students nod. They write down the title. Then, sometime between leaving the library and getting home, the goal quietly fades away. It takes place every semester at universities all over the world, and most teachers are okay with it.
So, when David Gauntlett, a media scholar at the University of Westminster, came up with the idea for what he called “Theory Trading Cards” about 20 years ago, it almost seemed too silly to be taken seriously. Twelve cards. Small enough to fit in your pocket. Foucault is on one, Barthes is on another, and there are a few others that round out the deck. Something like what you might find stuck between a coffee receipt and a bus pass.
They were still being looked for, though. When Gauntlett finally took down his older websites, theory.org.uk and newmediastudies.com, the emails started coming in almost right away. They didn’t ask about his books, talks, or even his identity research. Getting to know the cards. In the end, he posted the PDFs again within twelve hours. That’s not nothing.
It makes you think: what does it mean when a set of laminated summaries lasts longer than the website that hosted them, the homework that went with them, and maybe even the patience of anyone who tried to read Discipline and Punish cold?
It makes sense to say that trading cards can do something that textbooks really can’t. A textbook describes theory as a building: full, dense, and a little scary. It is shown on a card as a way in. Just one idea, boiled down to its bare bones, in your hand. The fact that it’s small seems to lower the psychological barrier. When a student holds something small enough to fit in their pocket, it might change how seriously or freely they read what’s on it.
This way of thinking isn’t completely new. Researchers who are working on Magic: The Gathering, a fantasy card game played by about 40 million people, have started to look at trading cards as a real form of print culture. The argument, which was shaped in part by Barthes and Foucault, is that the 2.5-by-3.5-inch card size doesn’t just make ideas easier to understand, it forces both the writer and the reader to pay different attention. A card can’t use footnotes to hide its main point. It needs to mean something right away, or it doesn’t mean anything.
Foucault’s “author function”—the idea that authorship is less about a person and more about the role that society gives certain names—is surprisingly easy to read on a card. When taken out of the context of a full text, the idea hits you in a different way. Maybe in a more direct way. It’s still not clear if being so direct helps students understand more or not, but the fact that they are reaching for the cards shows that something is working.
Books should not be moved, and they won’t be. There is no way around reading Foucault the right way, slowly and carefully, all the way through. But it seems like the trading card, which is a small, slightly silly, and easy to ignore format, has been doing educational work behind the scenes that no one asked it to do. It might be the point to get students interested enough in the book to open it in the first place.
