Foucault is - _really_ - one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. This is not an audience for "critical theory" or "continental philosophy" or what-have-you, but everyone owes it to themselves to learn about Foucault's work, just as much as they owe it to themselves to learn about the work of say Ludwig Wittgenstein or Claude Shannon. There are continental philosophers who are not very impressive in my opinion (Louis Althusser comes to mind), but Foucault is not one of them.
Foucault's work is usually focused on trying to discern what things we take as natural, known, and unquestionable are actually constructed claims which can be questioned. I think Discipline & Punish is his most accessible writing; it is a history of judicial systems from the 17th century to the 20th century.
This article is not a great introduction to Foucault, and assumes a familiarity. I do not know why it is on Hacker News except that the author has recently passed.
There are some interesting ideas buried in his writing (panopticon) but Foucault's ideas aren't consistent and it isn't even clear that he takes them seriously himself. Discipline & Punish is also pretty elevated nonsense.
The book makes sense as a history of penal reform, and Foucault is right to point out that changes often served to better punish prisoners rather than reform them as the rhetoric of the day demanded. But pointing out public hypocrisy is hardly a sophisticated observation for a historian to make. And it is a weak base from which to launch the sweeping attack Foucault attempts on the idea that morality matters, or to insist that man's "soul" is nothing more than his position in power networks or that "power" itself is "knowledge" (not vice versa).
In order to support these points, Foucault is dishonest on so many basic historical points that it calls the honesty of his actual historical research into question. I have a ton of underlined passages in my copy of D&P which I made with increasing frequency as his claims started to contradict each other. In the interest of just picking one, look at Foucault's insistence that democratization had absolutely nothing to do with efforts to remove the death penalty. Really? And Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."
Well which is it? Are we truly to believe that the horrific demonstrations of torture which Foucault spends entire chapters chronicling (salaciously, like pornography) did not frighten anyone? Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion? And doesn't his own claim about the ineffectiveness of the punishment now contradict his earlier statements about the nature of knowledge, to say nothing of his earlier chapters which actually documented how people were, in practice, quite terrorized.
A lot of the dishonesty slides by in the sheer minutiae of death. And it all gives the impression that Foucault must be right, if only because he is able to a picture of humanity that would repulse most honest people and do so unflinchingly (the virtue of facing unpleasant truths!). But at a certain point, the discerning reader recognizes his sophistry for what it is and stops trying to make sense of it all. I'd encourage anyone on HN to go directly to Plato if they want real philosophy, or at least jump back to Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator) if they want an entertaining and tongue-in-cheek iconoclast whose ideas merit real thought.
I'm an early modern historian of science so I'm sympathetic to arguments about Foucault's ahistorical tendencies. My biggest gripe with him is that he tends to conflate "the world" or "the West" with what often seems to be Paris and its environs, when you look at what he's actually citing. But then again, that's a complaint you can lob against many 20th century French historians.
On the other hand, he really is an excellent historian of ideas and of early modern science; maybe a little less empirically grounded than historians from the "Anglo-Saxon" world like me might prefer, but you can't deny the usefulness of his ideas. He's also quite a good prose stylist in many passages, much more lively and original than the other names (like Derrida, who I find opaque and boring) with whom he's often lumped together. His opening description of Las Meninas by Velazquez in The Order of Things is one of the passages that made me want to study what I do.
To get a little pedantic though (because I'm enjoying this discussion), more recent historians of violence and executions basically support the specific claim you call into question (that executions typically didn't frighten early modern audiences). People like Edward Muir at Northwestern have done great original work in Italian archives to show just how different attitudes toward public violence were in the premodern world. [1] An execution was literally something you'd take your kids to and buy refreshments at, like a play. I don't see the conflict between that claim, which is quite robust on an empirical level, and Foucault describing gory details that shock his modern audience - just because we find it frightening doesn't mean our great-great-great-great-grandparents did.
And just because people took their kids doesn't mean they didn't find it frightening. The two claims have literally nothing to do with each other. It's like saying people pay good money to see horror movies so they aren't scared of being hacked to bits by psychopaths.
Native peoples in the Great Lakes region mostly enjoyed torturing prisoners of war to death in variously fairly horrible ways, often over days. The whole tribe participated and it had something of the carnivalesque atmosphere the link you provide mentions. Yet there is also evidence that fear of capture loomed very large in the minds of warriors because of the fate that awaited them.
One of the things the post-structuralists (especially Derida, who is really nothing but a troll) are good at is distraction and indirection. Foucault's bloodthirsty descriptions of torture in D&P have no scholarly value and could easily be replaced by a one-or-two-line sketch of the reality without loss of utility... except that people would then read the rest of the book in a less aroused state of mind, and would be more calmly critical of his unsupported and frequently implausible claims.
It seems to me that you're conflating too different manifestations of fear - the fear of the crowd that watched executions and a larger societal fear of governmental or judicial violence. No one who has read primary sources from the period we're talking about would argue that the latter didn't exist; as for the former, like Muir points out, it could manifest many different ways, from howls of fear to laughter and jokes. In the end we can never say definitively what was running through the heads of everyone in a crowd 400 years ago, but it's not just Foucault making stuff up or trying to trick his audience when he writes about attitudes toward early modern executions. It really is there in the original sources. Here's just one case in point, from the dairy of Samuel Pepys:
Saturday 13 October 1660
To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.
* who exactly is the subject of terror, the person executed or the crowd? At the start of his book Foucault seems to claim that the subject is the person being executed. But then he shifts to talking about the attitude of the crowd.
* we are probably meant to view them as equivalents because of class consciousness and the Marxist digressions about man having no "soul" except for his position in power networks. But... but... surely it was quite common that the crowd and the person executed had quite different attitudes towards the event.
* also, if capital punishment was really ineffective at inducing terror (in whom?), why were 19th century French penal reformers the first ones to notice? isn't it weird that this enlightenment corresponded with a public debate over morality if the two events are unrelated?
* more substantively, if Foucault is right and French penal reformers were the first ones to notice for whatever reason, doesn't his pointing this out imply the existence of an objective standard of knowledge that undermines Foucault his claims elsewhere about power being wisdom and truth being subjective?
Uggg... I could go on for a while. Enough Foucault.
>But pointing out public hypocrisy is hardly a sophisticated observation for a historian to make.
Actually it's a very useful role for a philosopher, one cherished from the time of Socrates down to Nietchze, Adorno, Christopher Lasch, and almost everybody else in between.
>Well which is it? Are we truly to believe that the horrific demonstrations of torture which Foucault spends entire chapters chronicling (salaciously, like pornography) did not frighten anyone?
Yes. And in fact you can find tons of sources stating that they were kind of public spectacles, with women, children and others participating -- even until down to the early 20th century.
>Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion?
This question does not follow from anything. You essentially ask "if they didn't frighten anything, why does he describe them in such detailed fashion" -- as if how detailed their descriptions are, is supposed to be affected by whether they frightened people. I, for one, fail to see any mystery or contradiction. You can describe in minute detail also stuff that doesn't frighten people.
The point has nothing to do with anyone's sexuality. It is that Foucault writes in a way designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader (distress at the graphic depiction of human suffering), and yet denies the existence of the same emotional reaction when it comes to attributing motives for penal reform.
As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
>* It is that Foucault writes in a way designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader (distress at the graphic depiction of human suffering), and yet denies the existence of the same emotional reaction when it comes to attributing motives for penal reform.*
He writes to elicit that emotion to readers many decades (or centuries, depending on the specific practice) removed from those practices. Doesn't mean the people back then had the same emotions or those were the ones that brought the reform.
Reading about the treatment of slaves in the South today will get a huge emotional response too, but that was not how slavery was abolished then -- it took a whole civil war (and decades of struggles with prejudice, Jim Crow laws, KKK and segregation).
>As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
Where's the contradiction? What some public figures and intellectuals said of the executions is not the same as what the public sentiment about them.
To continue with the same exampke, that's in the same way that there were several prominents pro-abolitionists in the South, but that was not the prevalent sentiment of the people there.
> Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."
That quote is the concluding sentence of a paragraph which cites at least three documents:
* Argenson, 241
* Hardy IV, 56
* Richet, 118-19
Does your copy have the parenthetical citations removed?
None of those references are relevant to the quote in question, which attributes very specific and cynical beliefs to 19th penal reformers in ways which explicitly conflict with their own writings.
Do you care to cite those conflicts? Are 18th century reformers beyond a mote of cynicism? That sentence isn't claiming to describe the entire world view of the reformers, but to specifically note that they would have been aware of the number of examples where the masses were not deterred by the spectacle of executions. (You seem to take offense with specificity in a claim?)
It is possible to declare the system of executions a travesty, while also observing that the lower classes are willing to phsyically intervene in them. Perhaps it is even possible that the reformers were made aware of the injustices by the lack of respect the lower classes demonstrated for them.
Perhaps a reformer with the goal of abolishing executions would pen a treatise that was justified in the moral terms of the ruling class, rather than based on the emotional state of the working class. One would look to address your audience after all. I'm not familiar with the cited reformers you claim are conflicting but it sounds more like aristocracy convincing aristocracy, rather than an aristocrat attempting to sway the masses with pamphlets.
I question whether you read this text in good faith, or are simply searching for bits you can pick out to summarize on a message board and construe as contradictions.
> I question whether you read this text in good faith...
What is good faith? You're picking a small (although perfectly valid -- re-read Part II for whatever quotes you need on the self-professed motives of penal reformers) objection pulled pretty much at random from my marginalia rather than addressing the more substantive complaints in my original post.
And even here your defense is speculative ("perhaps") and offered in a non-committal way that ironically conflicts with Foucault's own viewpoint by subsuming the problem in a moral framework ("travesty") rather than contextualizing it as a power struggle in an amoral Marxist context. So even if your defense is correct then Foucault's sweeping ontological statements are inappropriate and overbearing, which is part of my complaint.
If you want to focus on bigger ideas, I've posted four more major complaints in a post above. If you are able to explain what Foucault means without making his position sound absurd and/or contradicting his own writing, you'll have done a better job explaining his ideas than he did.
My favourite account of Plato involves one of his alleged interactions with Diogenes. As told by wikipedia:
> "When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition."
For me, coming to understand Foucault was like coming to understand metaprogramming. It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. It is so disappointing that there are people who think of themselves as "hackers" being dismissive of Foucault (and associated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari).
(This is not so much a response to you as my desire to wax more about Foucault.)
Yes, I would urge all people with great curiosity, observation skills and desire to experiment and improve to take part in reading philosophy.
I only caution people to be careful about rockstar-ifying any single philosopher or group thereof. The more you read, the more you learn the shape of philosophy. While any one philosopher might have a lot to say, it's really only the summary of them that makes it truly useful.
It's easy to have your mind blown by one revealing thought from a paragraph or a book, like watching a one-line program execute. It's when all of the thoughts are put together and exercised that philosophy acts like a well-architectured object being designed in a well-architected program running on a well-architected operating system running on well-architected hardware which was developed using a well-architected program running on a ...
And as this article points out, various groups of political interest in reframing any single philosopher's viewpoint.
I like what you've said. Here's the connection I made between my technical knowledge and Foucault's school.
A C.S. professor of mine, when lecturing on semantics, i.e. the interpretation of texts, be they intended for computers or humans, remarked that "means" is a three-place relation:
R(a,b,c) === a means b to c
That is, a tuple is in the relation if the text "a" means "b" to an interpreter "c".
Typically, the "c" part is left out. But introducing it allows one to model subjectivity and interpretation, which is one way to think about what the poststructuralist intellectuals were getting at.
This is a common technique in conceptual analysis. It reminds me of Castelfranchi's theory of trust. While trust was often modeled as a two place relation (X trusts Y) he turned it into a five place relation (X trusts Y for task T useful for goal G in context C).
Thank you so much for the pointer. I had not considered the connection of explicitly accounting for subjectivity in interpretation (for semantics) to (as in your example) the theories of agents and trust.
And I've got to say, really taking this in (the importance of subjectivity and context) can help in real-world situations as well.
I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right.
Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?
> I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition;
Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.
Ignoring your pithy insult of Deleuze's work (which is not math), I did not mean to imply that Deleuze preceded Shannon but that my understanding of Deleuze's work maps well to my understanding of information theory. It was a rehash _for me_.
Difference and Repetition, specifically, is concerned with absolute bullshit explanations and generalizations of the mathematical concepts of the derivative and integral, so I think it's fair to call it bullshit math.
I would also say that there is a zero percent chance that someone could use what is there to develop a mathematical basis for information theory which could actually be used to do anything useful, like data compression or error correcting codes.
Note that I am not saying philosophy needs to be useful to justify itself. Far from it. I'm just strongly disagreeing with your assertions that Difference and Repetition has any relevance or relation to information theory whatsoever.
The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."
It mostly makes me smile. :)
> Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee
I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...
> It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances.
I know nothing about Foucault, but considering the praise he's getting on this thread, there must be a heck of a lot more to it than this, right?
Well obviously you cannot sum up the work of any thinker in 1 sentence. But Foucault is actually more of an historian than a philosopher & he provides excellent histories of how many notions that we usually hold to be natural or inevitable are circumstantial and were constructed surprisingly recently, and how the construction of these notions corresponds to the activities of power in our society.
Also probably some portion of his work has been itself naturalized and will seem less novel now that we all live in a world where many people have read Foucault.
D&P is good, but I'd suggest as a first read the first volume of the History of Sexuality. It's a more concise introduction to his thought on the role of power in formation of subjectivity, rather than as something that is top-down. I've seen too many beginners in Foucault get wrapped up in notions like the panopticon in D&P and miss more substantial elements of his thought.
I'd also recommend his essays such as "What is Enlightenment?" for beginners (online: http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault....). Even though it may require a few reads, it helps to consider his thought in relationship to thinkers like Kant (who heavily influence linguists such as Chomsky, and Chomsky's view of human nature), and perhaps more importantly it indicates the important role that he considers power to have in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.
Yeah, the History is a very common introduction too. And the first part of D&P can be... distracting, as one of your siblings mentions.
I also think you're right about What is Enlightenment?, which is a favorite too. You're right that it's important to situate him in history, which this does do well. But then requires that you read some Kant...
I also associate Foucault most strongly with Discipline and Punish.
But the reason, I confess, is the simply astonishing first pages of the book. For people who have not read it, I recommend it very highly as an example of forceful writing style: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html . (It's not for the squeamish, and not good while eating.)
Aha my private motive in recommending D&P is uncovered. I don't think it is possible to find a more memorable and convincing display of the radical shift in the conception of sovereignty than in the comparison of those two passages.
How does this differ from Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism (or the later variants of Pan Critical Rationalism)? Seems to me that the idea that there are no unquestionable authorities or axioms that can be used to justify truth and everything can be held up to critique is a much saner, and clearer version than some of the gobble-dy-gook in post modernism.
I don't know about Discipline and Punish specifically, but you can read Chomsky for a critique in general of Foucault, Lacan, etc In general I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible. Like I said, Popper's concept of critical rationalism predates Foucault and makes the argument far more straightforward and clearly.
Here's what Chomsky had to say, who can say it far better than I:
"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.
Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames. "
No one will deny that there are charlatans and poets posing as philosophers in the continental tradition. Tatterdemalion's post even prefaces with that. There are also straight up falsifiers and a endemic of p-value smudgers in the hard sciences. A good rebuttal to this Chomsky quote are the lovely debates he had with Foucault himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
There is a plethora of writings of substance in the continental tradition. Writings that we should not ignore. 'Discipline and Punish' is one of them. I recommend 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' by Adorno as your complement to Popper's writings.
On another note, I don't generally see the value in antagonisms between paradigms or presentation forms. I find value from the analytical perspective and from critical theory, and being able to dance both dances is illuminating. I don't think the empirical process can reveal the entirety of the human experience. Steadfastly stumping for one paradigm over the other is no more useful than being a vim/emacs zealot.
If Deleuze or Foucault don't grok for you, it doesn't mean the authors are _wrong_ or lying to readers to obtain mystic status. Just like someone not caring to study Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shouldn't write off the entirety of mathematics.
I don't find that a convincing analogy. A more convincing analogy would be something like the theoretical treatise put forward by Shinichi Mochizuki to solve the ABC conjecture. He invented entirely new fields of mathematics so obscure, that no one can really be able to fully evaluate his theory yet, and it resists simple explanation even by experts in the field, or Shinichi himself.
Peer review relies on peers being able to predictably understand the terminology in a clear manner without ambiguity. You get this in traditional Western philosophy, even as people define new terminology, that adorn axioms and logical rules to buttress its meaning. But if you invent an entirely new terminology that most people don't understand, which is hard for any two people to come away with the same meaning, I'd argue you have not put forward a theory, you've put forward ideas dressed up in technical jargon giving the aura of precision.
This isn't a C programmer refusing to learn Haskell. This is a C programmer refusing to learn Brainfuck or INTERCAL.
Yet no one doubts Brainfuck's Turing completeness, and it can be easily demonstrated to anyone with a passing familiarity with the langauge.
The post-structuralists, on the other hand, are trolls. They claim grandiose results that fail Chomsky's simple personal test, and similar personal tests of many others, myself included, who have a demonstrated capacity to understand ideas across many fields, including in my case epistemology with a knowing subject, which comes close to some important post-structuralist or post-modernist ideas regarding subjectivity.
But the "critical theoretic" political program is so important to post-modernist program they they deliberatly distort their accounts and ideas for the sake of goals that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and results in the whole body of their work being incoherent nonsense with a few gems embedded in it. There are well-meaning people who see the gems and argue passionately that the rest of the mass simply must be meaningful and important, and there are people who correctly observe the incoherence of the mass and miss the gems.
These two groups then spend a great deal of time fighting with each other, while those of us who have picked up the gems and moved on are ignored by all.
But it does render its usefulness or utility lower than a simpler construct which offers all of the same benefits, but with lower logical depth.
I'm not saying Foucault's wrong, I'm saying that there are other philosophers who have put forward similar ideas in a much more straightforward fashion without the Brainfuck.
Holding philosophy to the standard of utility brings a lot of assumptions to bear on your reading. Conciseness is a virtue that one can overindulge.
Many philosophers aren't concerned with providing readers with ideas in the system of efficient exchange of language and labor hours. For many in critical theory the project is the opposite: to show how the systems of exchange and efficiency dominate our meaning-making.
I don't find that argument convincing. Chomsky makes it clear that if he was interested in understanding something, in this case C, he would make an honest effort at finding the people and resources necessary to reach that goal.
Continental philosophy and postmodern thought fall reasonably within the domain of Chomsky's interests. If a man of his knowledge and reputation cannot parse the arguments being made then really what is the utility of those arguments.
It would be one thing if Chomsky was rejecting the arguments being made. Instead he is basically saying there is no argument.
As a side note, there is definitely a trend in certain French academic circles consisting of using a hard-to-digest style (needlessly complex sentence structures, semi-obscure words where a more common one would have been just as good or better) to express not particularly complex. I suspect that they have a running "most over-the-top sentence" [1] contest.
1: technically known in French as "phrase la plus ampoulée", which "over-the-top" doesn't really translate correctly
>I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible.
bingo. That pretty much describes Kant for me (or may be only Russian translation of him? Will let you know when/if i learn German). Just compare him with simple and practical Hegel or Nietzsche for example! :)
It's just the same in German. Kant maintains that his only aim is to express the subject matter as precise as possible, without regard of accessibility (as stated in the Prolegomena). Personally, I cannot decide whether that claim has merits or not.
As much as I am sure the availability of this translation is interesting for english speaking Foucault scholars, I am not sure I buy the 'demolish the caricatures' angle. There was enough material to demolish those caricatures before this was available and, even if there was no published transcript of those lectures, there was no mystery about them and their content was known at least to those who attended those lectures.
Yes, I work as a programmer and bits of Foucault that I've read have been transformative for me. Most of my programmer friends are also at least aware of him.
The portion of his work that I'm familiar with was concerned with the insight that societies are organized by "technologies" of discipline and the "genealogy"[1] of these technologies in different institutional contexts i.e. hospitals, prisons, schools.
When I first encountered Foucault's work as an undergraduate, I wished I'd read it much earlier as it would have helped me decode the prison-like experience of school. The contradiction between imposed ideologies of "freedom" (via studying US history, the news, conversation with adults, etc.) and the total control exerted by the state over where I could go, what I could say, and what I was to do nearly every minute of my life resulted in a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. If only I'd learned earlier what "ideology" meant and that it was well-known that "freedom" is not an ethical, political, or ontological given. Foucault's work reveals that we always exist within power structures and illuminates much of how these structures operate.
This article is not that good, nor is the intended audience those unfamiliar with Foucault's work.
Foucault wrote about many different things. Mostly he was interested in the evolution of power and politics through western civilization. If you're interested in Foucault there are much better places to start than this article.
Postmodern philosophy is to progressive social politics as Marxism is to left wing economics. Both are theories that would be easily dismissed if they weren't written in highly obfuscatory language. Both serve the purpose of giving a political agenda the veneer of being based on solid theory.
That is why right wing writers sometimes refer to postmodernism as "Cultural Marxism". I don't like the term cultural marxism because it sounds conspiratorial, when really all that is going on is people using big words and the fear of appearing stupid to cow other people into submission.
Why? Admittedly, everything I know (not much!) about critical theory comes from hearing people talk about critical theory, and not from first sources, but I don't see why it's more compelling than philosophy in general?
So, really, I'm posing that question completely seriously. Why should I study critical theory in general, or Focault in particular? Keep in mind it's not "Why should I spend time studying critical theory rather than spend time doing nothing", it's "Why should I spend time studying critical theory rather than some other philosophy/science/technology/art?"
One example of where Foucault would be useful to technologists in particular is in understanding the role of discourses in perpetuating gender inequalities in technology.
Foucault talked about how we reinforce power relations through the internalization and mobilization of discourse. For Foucault, power is best understood by studying our everyday interactions, instead of examining decrees from those in authority. Power affects us so deeply that we often don't realize how our speech and actions reinforce systems of inequality. Working in software, I see exclusionary comments at least on a weekly basis that almost slip under the radar as being innocuous until you realize that this is exactly the form of power that Foucault analyzes in his studies.
So to answer your question, assuming since you're posting in HN that you're in the software field, you may be interested in reading Foucault if you're interested in obtaining additional analytical tools to understand and improve the currently horrible, exclusionary system that permeates the software world.
As a disclaimer, I'm not saying that Foucault is the only way to understand this phenomenon, nor even necessarily the best. Just trying to point out some concrete ways in which his concepts may be useful in certain scenarios.
If one is still able to use the framing of "inequality" and "exclusion" then it seems as if Foucault hasn't helped much.
"Gender" is a system of resource extraction. Women are not "excluded" in tech and elsewhere, they are literally defined as resources, as objects that have and produce value. Women are not "unequal" -- this implies that within the system of gender, both women and men are people who simply don't have the exact same capital. But men do not view women as people under gender. See Beatrix Campbell's "End of Equality". [0]
It is ultimately impossible to understand any microcosm of oppression through individualism. Women and men are social classes, with "gender" being the name referring to the process of securing class:Men's interests as a whole. Individual anti-woman comments do not "reinforce" "inequality", they are symptoms of gender itself. Noel Ignatiev's essay "The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To Abolish It" responds to attempts to understand oppression with individualist ideologies [1]:
> Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, so racial oppression is not the work of "racists." It is maintained by the principal institutions of society, including the schools (which define "excellence"), the labor market (which defines "employment"), the legal system (which defines "crime"), the welfare system (which defines "poverty"), the medical industry (which defines "health"), and the family (which defines "kinship"). Many of these institutions are administered by people who would be offended if accused of complicity with racial oppression. It is reinforced by reform programs that address problems traditionally of concern to the "left" - for example, federal housing loan guarantees. The simple fact is that the public schools and the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children than all the "racist" groups combined.
The difficulty with these claims is that nowhere is there a counter-example to any of the supposed systems of oppression that keep us in thrall. It is a purely utopian analysis that rest on the false belief that humans can be free of the structure that various discourses impose on our relations.
By focusing the analysis on the supposed binary oppositions within and between discursive identities, a great deal of practical, compassionate, utility is lost for the sake of smashing global industrial capitalism with the unrealizable dream of replacing it with some kind of utopian society.
Awareness is the first step and all that. It is absolutely not utopian because there is no cosmic requirement to supply a solution, which by the way is an authoritarian interpretation of the use of Foucault's analyses. There is also no implication that we can be free of discursive relations, and describing problematic (or even historical) aspects of human behavior toward one another does not saddle him with a responsibility to solve them.
In short, you appear to be rebuking Foucault for not doing something he wasn't trying to do anyway. I mean, his words remain, so any utility hasn't been lost and remains for any of us to pick up and...use. So, if you think he didn't take it far enough, feel free to take it where you think it should go!
"utility is lost for the sake of smashing global industrial capitalism with the unrealizable dream of replacing it with some kind of utopian society."
I wasn't really saying anything about capitalism. Analysis of gender, at least, as a system of resource extraction is possible without an axiom of the necessity of the abolition of global capitalism.
As a jew posting on race traitor, maybe he should focus on abolishing the jewish race rather than the white race. Let's replace white with jew in a few choice quotes shall we?
"Now that Jewish Studies has become an academic industry, with its own dissertation mill, conference, publications, and no doubt soon its junior faculty, it is time for the abolitionists to declare where they stand in relation to it. Abolitionism is first of all a political project: the abolitionists study Jewishness in order to abolish it. "
"We at Race Traitor, the journal with which I am associated, have asked some of those who think Jewishness contains positive elements to indicate what they are. We are still waiting for an answer. Until we get one, we will take our stand with David Roediger, who has insisted that Jewishness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. As James Baldwin said, 'So long as you think you are a jew, there is no hope for you.'"
"The jewish race is neither a biological nor a cultural formation; it is a strategy for securing to some an advantage in a competitive society. "
"The jewish club does not require that all members be strong advocates of jewish supremacy, merely that they defer to the prejudices of others."
I took classes in literary criticism during college, and I think they have given me mental habits and tools that have served me very well.
Essentially, it helps me see the hidden layer under what people say and (especially) write--the influences, desires, assumptions, etc. that create differences in how each person thinks and communicates.
This has been helpful as I have moved into a management role. Office politics often are the end result of unspoken agendas and wishes of coworkers. Critical theory helps infer those from the seemingly straightforward text of emails and what people say in conversation.
What people want and what they say are often two different things. Engineers and programmers, used to working with systems whose behaviors are explicitly and objectively defined, can find this frustrating. My opinion, it is reality, so might as well deal with it. I've found critical theory helpful in that.
Well, Foucault's work is about a lot of things, but here's one that should certainly interest technologists: what is power? How does it affect us? What does it do to shape societies? Etc.
Critical theory in general? Well, it depends on what you're trying to get out of your time with philosophy. I'm particularly interested in technology's affect on humans, so something like critical theory gives me useful intellectual tools. But if the human side of things doesn't appeal to you, you may not particularly care.
One application would be the deconstruction of the concept of "appropriateness" in tech. Many people hold an essentialist view, that for example, sexual comments are inappropriate in a professional setting. But a closer examinations shows that sexual comments are not always viewed as inappropriate, if they are seen as coming from a person who has proven they hold progressive political views, or are seen as furthering a progressive agenda.
Therefore, two men giggling about dongles is viewed as inappropriate[0], while the hackathon "Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas" was widely lauded on HN in spite of containing body shaming[1] and explicit sexual content. The latter was not considered inappropriate because it was critical of tech culture, which is seen as being dominated by White males, and therefore deserving of highly negative satire.
> Why should I study critical theory in general, or Focault in particular?
You should study Foucault to better see the prisons you live in. Foucault is postmodernist critical theory. Plain old Critical Theory you should study to understand how people today are subtly manipulated (the Hegelian dialectic is a good start). This is the tool that is systematically applied by our overlords to steer public perception.
The American (anglosaxon?) categorization of poststructuralist philosophy (like Foucault or Butler) as critical theory is curious to (mildly educated) European readers. The term was coined by Horkeimer, Adorno, Lukačs and other intellectuals around the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Those were all hardcore Hegelians (and Marxists more or less). Their ideas regarding Objectiveness, History or Truth are pretty much the contrary to what postmodern philosophy is suggesting. In fact as a postmarxist Foucault was revolting against the dominance of Hegelian thinking.
Every one of these attempts to categorize thinkers should have double-sized, bolded quotation marks around it. At best, some thinkers in some periods of their writing bear a family resemblance to one another.
"Critical theory" in English usually seems to mean "Not analytic philosophy" without the stigmatism or demonymism that "continental philosophy" has.
> is curious to (mildly educated) European readers.
I don't think it has to do with Europe, I think it has to do with the fact that the categories are fuzzy and unless you _really_ care about this stuff, you just let it go.
I almost replied below when it was mentioned that Foucault was "postmodern," but really, it's just not that important, in the end.
true, but i still think the case is special for the US: While in europe (germany at least) Critical Theory and Poststructuralism are pretty much antagonist concepts it seems to be bundled in the US as Continental/Critical Theory and that really means: everything but Analytical Philosophy.
I've never been able to understand a word of him. I've seen the famous Chomsky/Foucault debate. I understood Chomsky perfectly well. Many people have informed me that Foucault completely bested him. I couldn't tell because I had no idea what the heck he was saying.
For anyone who hasn't watched the actual, full video of the debate, you should do so. Watching them argue in two languages at the same time is super fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
Okay, here's what the video is saying, in slightly-longer form. The exchange in the video is basically Chomsky saying "human nature" and Foucault laughing.
This gets at the heart of the hour-long debate: do humans have some sort of nature? Foucault, and philosophers like him, think that the idea of 'human nature' is complete and utter garbage. So when Chomsky admits that his position boils down to an appeal of human nature, Foucault just laughs at him.
It's a great moment that really highlights the whole thing. I love it.
Thank you for this link; I've been meaning to watch this debate a long time but have never got around to it. I heard a rumor about how Foucault was paid years ago and didn't believe it, but according to at least one biography [1] it's apparently true! "Unbeknownst to Chomsky, Foucault had received, in partial payment for his appearance, a large chunk of hashish, which for months afterwards, Foucault and his Parisian friends would jokingly refer to as the 'Chomsky hash.'"
Much of Foucault's work is different from projects that you would find in thinkers like Plato or Kant. Kant for example treats cognition as the product of certain universal categories that exist apriori. Chomsky is heavily influenced by this sort of thinking, and for both Kant and Chomsky the product of starting from those premises tends to be an essentialist view of human nature.
Rather than starting with axioms that lead to a sort of universal knowledge, Foucault did studies that could be considered more sociological in nature to show how relations of power affect the way that we experience ourselves and others, i.e., how it fashions our subjectivity. This is what he terms his "archaeological" method in articles like "What is Enlightenment?" http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault..... Examples of these studies include his works Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
At the very least, Foucault's studies show how some of the most significant ways in which we experience the world and ourselves are socially constructed, rather than essential. Identity then becomes political, rather than something that is distinctly our own. In some of his work, he also directly takes on thinkers like Kant in an attempt to show their work as historically situated rather than universal.
There's a lot of different ways to tackle this problem, obviously, so I'll just point you in one of many directions. You'd have to consult the specific thinker's works to get their exact takes.
Okay, so the concept of 'human nature' in general needs some more definition, like you've said. Here's maybe a better phrasing of the problem: "Do humans have some sort of _innate_ properties that are shared amongst all humans?" This phrasing calls back to an old debate in philosophy: essentialism. This is a question of ontology, in other words, what kinds of things are there in the world, and how do we categorize them?
An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties, and then any entity which has those properties is one of those things. In other words, let's say something like "You're a human as long as you have a name." This is a position which is essentialist. And that might be a workable definition.
A non-essentialist may come along and challenge your ontology, though. "Ships also have names, but they are clearly not human." You may agree with this, and so you need to revise your set of properties. "Humans are things that have names, and walk on two legs." The non-essentialist may respond, "birds have names, and when they walk, they use two legs. Your ontology is incorrect.
You see where this is going. Those who take a position against essentialism claim that this approach to categorization is a folly. It's fundamentally broken.. To give you a counterpoint, I generally agree with a process philosophy, which means that I equate identity with _doing_, not with _being_. An example of a process philosopher's standpoint on ontology: "You're a Rubyist if you write Ruby code." This kind of categorization is more useful, because over time, my identity can change. I might be a Rubyist for a while, but at some point, I wasn't. And I might stop being one in the future, too. An approached based on do-ing includes things like a time component that an essentialist position never can.
So, returning to the original question, no, the question of an inherent nature doesn't make any sense, and therefore, neither does 'human nature'. So where do we go from there? Well, any claim that's reliant on an appeal to human nature is incorrect. For example, "Humans are inherently greedy."
Anyway, that's a hastily-typed overview of a concept in a HN comment, but hopefully that helps you get the gist of it.
How is that different than arguing over definitions?
In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
> How is that different than arguing over definitions?
Definitions are very important. For example, one of the defining movements from second to third wave feminism was a move from essentialism. Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals. (this is of course not the only thing that separates them, just one example)
These kinds of questions are full of real-world implications. This stuff matters when it comes down to questions like healthcare, and if some procedure is covered, for example. Any law which affects people based on some criteria. That's a lot of laws.
> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species.
Absolutely, which is an other example of where this issue raises its head. Ontology is very relevant to many, many fields.
"Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals."
What a dishonest attempt at a characterization. You took the opporunity of the readers' unfamiliarity with a topic to interject your own subjective and vague opinion ("Second-wave essentiallism couldn't handle" -- what function does this phrase even serve beyond emotional release for the writer? What does it even mean?), without providing any links or citations to the extensive existing material that exists.
If you valued actual discourse, you would link to some article like Michelle Goldberg's "What is a Woman?"[0] in the New Yorker to provide some sort of context on the conflicting ideas of feminism and queer theory. But time and time again my fellow men who cheerlead for queer theory and identity politics bring nothing to the table but opportunistic, ingenuine rhetoric bordering on non-sequitur. I don't even need to claim anything about second-wave or modern radical feminists -- the transparently anti-intellectual liberal male digs his own grave.
As always, everything is presented at a certain level of abstraction. I was alluding to TERFs, whose 'e' stands for 'exclusionary,' ie, they exclude trans women from their idea of 'woman.' As with any summary, it of course glosses over details, and is clearly biased by who is speaking. It seems a bit strange to have to state that in a thread about Foucault. You are totally correct that my bias lies with queer theory.
I did understand who you were alluding to. But for those unfamiliar, are you implying that modern and historical feminists who have a conception of the oppression of women that you and some people in Queer Theroy and some tumblr users disagree with, coined the name "TERF", rather than the latter group? An uninformed reader would possibly take away that some number of feminists actually, non-ironically, take on the label "TERF". In my time in reading dozens of writers on these issues, which has been at least a year now, I've never seen this. So hopefully that wasn't the implication.
If one's confidence in one's own bias is such that one can inject it into discourse without feeling the need to cite any material which asserts ideas which they are biased "against" ("Second-wave essentiallism", whatever that entails), or even import material supporting their own claims, would one not mind if another was to comment with some reading material for those who may be interested in this thread? For example, the 2013 letter "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of 'Gender'" written by 37 second-wave and modern radical feminists [0], or the essay "SSCAB/DSCAB: Reconsidering the Conversation" written by a black radical feminist [1], or glosswitch's "Beauty and the cis" [2]? Surely it shouldn't change anything to point out that these writings exist.
I didn't make any claims about the origin of the term. Your history is accurate, to my knowledge.
> without feeling the need to cite any material
This isn't a dissertation. It's HN. Not every last thing needs a citation.
And no, I don't 'mind' at all. I'm very sympathetic to many arguments made here. People should read second-wave stuff. I just come down on a different side of them, personally.
> In particular, delineating humans has the same problems as separating any species. You can have a group B that can interbreed with A and C, but A and C can't. Has anything useful come out of getting worked up over what to call species A, B, and C?
That assertion is a good illustration of the problem some Continental philosophers tried to address - what is a "species" and how is it defined? It's an arbitrary labeling we put on a collection of individuals that we perceive to have similarities.
This kind of thinking is exactly what lead Chomsky into the erroneous theories of Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device. Studying real neurons in actual brains is what got linguistics out of the generative grammar dead-end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_Wars
From what angle? Is this question "How do we differentiate between species" or "what stops us from killing anyone" or "what makes human life more valuable, if it even is, than an animal's?"
People believe there's a dog-nature, just as much as they believe there's a human-nature. Regardless of the philosophical position they profess.
(It is part of our nature to have constraints keeping us from being dogs. Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.)
In your argument against human nature, you stated: "An essentialist takes the position that we can form categories of things by defining some set of properties". But that's seems a strawman definition in this context, because no one can even define a chair. Much less a human. Fortunately, people who believe in the concept of human nature (virtually everyone) don't need to sit around making futile constructivist definitions.
> Anyone who wishes to prove otherwise is welcome to become a dog.
Saying that there's no essential dog-nature does not inherently imply that one can become a dog.
> (virtually everyone)
Yes, Plato and Aristotle were essentialists, and you can't possibly over-state their influence on Western thought. But, I would argue that your 'everyone' includes many non-philosphers, who haven't necessarily considered this problem in the depth that philosophers have. That doesn't mean that essentialism is disproven or anything! But rightfully, in my mind anyway, a number of schools of thought take issue with it, just like any other position.
That said, actually, it depends on who you're talking to.
> that's seems a strawman definition in this context
It's not! That's the problem itself: you're absolutely right that defining what is a chair and what is human is very difficult.
And from my little understanding, because they don't believe there's such thing as a human nature, since society, and other things from our surrounding affect us, and the "nature" could change in a different context, which would imply it isn't some kind of force behind us.
You could approach the problem from the opposite direction. How do you define human nature, and what evidence do you put in favor of that definition and your assertions about it?
It's sad that Foucault laughs at it, because it's essentially an argument by authority (his own) and not based on anything with scientific substance.
Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Oddly enough, this is a common ploy used by cult leaders.
My disdain for the pomo and Crit Theory people has no limits - because while academics have persuaded themselves that Foucault etc are geniuses who offered the humanities profound insights into culture and power etc, they've also been completely marginalised and screwed over by neo-capitalism, and have offered no useful resistance to it.
Somehow I can't help wondering if the two are related - because the whole nub of Critical Theory is the utterly mistaken assumption that deconstruction and tentative subjectivity have political power, when in fact they're the opposite of political power, and offer neither a useful insight into how power really works, nor any effective strategy for resisting its excesses.
I'm sorry that you ineptly pin the blame on the victim re: neo-capitalism.
What you call "the history of ethology" hopefully comprises the blunders that at different points in history "the scientific establishment" made regarding the "nature" of a) black men, b) women, c) gay people, d) irish people, e) jewish people, f)... you get the idea.
These observations of "animal behavior" are both extremely unsophisticated, always failing to control for critical variables, and very tied up to what the society of the day wants the conclusions to be.
Even today, ignorant people go around talking about how "human nature is selfish". I think Foucualt's contributions were pretty great re: this precise discussion we're having over here. Certainly more important than the vast majority of ethological work out there.
If you want to challenge me on this, just answer my question: What is human nature, and what do you claim to know about it in 2015?
Do you think human nature might consistently include an interest in power, and a not-entirely-unrelated interest in sex?
Are you going to try to explain the remarkable consistency of these interests across all political systems and historical periods as a purely political phenomenon?
If so, why are there clearly analogous interests in many primates and other animals?
I say you're wrong - and challenge you to provide solid observational evidence to prove conclusively that social and political traditions generate these interests.
> Do you think human nature might consistently include an interest in power, and a not-entirely-unrelated interest in sex?
No, I do not think so. There are vast, vast numbers of people who opt to teach and nurse instead of gunning for leadership, who opt to do salaried engineering instead of management, and I don't see why the latter in each case have a better claim on our "nature" as a species.
What do you mean by "interest in sex"? Human nature seems to also have an "interest in food", that in places like america is exacerbated into an obesity epidemic, but doesn't seem to say anything super meaningful about our relationship to eating. Isaac Newton died a virgin, I guess he wasn't human? Gay men have no interest in reproduction... is their humanity in question?
You should read stuff like UBC's "WEIRD" study, or how women were believed to have bigger sexual appetite than men at various places in time, before going off about observations "across all political systems and historical periods".
You seem to be obliquely pushing some notion that we are more dominant than cooperative, which is pretty ignorant in a thread about Foucault and Chomsky.
> Human nature seems to also have an "interest in food"
Indeed. And sex. And status in herd hierarchies.
That was my point. But it doesn't stop there. I'd also include symbolic abstraction, myth-making and narrative logic (as an efficient but flawed heuristic for passing on knowledge), persistent shared memory, embodied metaphors as per Lakoff - and so on.
It seems to me - and maybe to a lot of the Internet - that humans spend a lot of time and energy on these things.
Other species spend a lot of time on some of them, but not all of them.
There may be a reason for the difference.
So I have issues with the suggestion that they're always evidence of pathological socialisation - or that writing impenetrable books and laughing at and condescending to anyone who disagrees with their content is likely to make that socialisation any less pathological, where it does exist.
> It's sad that Foucault laughs at it, because it's essentially an argument by authority (his own) and not based on anything with scientific substance.
> Of course if you pretend that "Science is always a power play" you can say whatever you want, because you've elevated your opinion to a position above criticism.
Or at least to a position where science is not a valid source of criticism.
If I understand correctly, poststructuralists say that all truth claims are about power, and only that, because objective truth cannot ever be determined. That leaves them free to make ever-more-blatant power plays in their own claims.
This is becoming a widely held belief within the humanities via Accelerationism[1]. If anybody's interested, I know folks in the Bay Area organizing events around these ideas.
Perhaps you understand English better than French? You may not have noticed, but upon rewatching the video, my best guess is that Chomsky was speaking English and Foucault may have been speaking French. This may have made Foucault marginally more difficult to follow...
Joking aside, without taking away from Chomsky, at least in places I found Foucault surprisingly clear:
[O]ne of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me,
over and above anything else, is this: that we should
indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the
relationships of political power which actually control the
social body and oppress or repress it.
What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in
European society, to consider that power is localised in
the hands of the government and that it is exercised
through a certain number of particular institutions, such
as the administration, the police, the army, and the
apparatus of the state. One knows that all these
institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a
certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or
of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who
don't obey. But I believe that political power also
exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number
of institutions which look as if they have nothing in
common with the political power, and as if they are
independent of it, while they are not.
One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows
that the university and in a general way, all teaching
systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are
made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to
exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as
medicine, also help to support the political power. It's
also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain
cases related to psychiatry.
It seems to me that the real political task in a society
such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions,
which appear to be both neutral and independent; to
criticise and attack them in such a manner that the
political violence which has always exercised itself
obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can
fight against them.
This critique and this fight seem essential to me for
different reasons: firstly, because political power goes
much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and
invisible, little-known points of support; its true
resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't
expect it. Probably it's insufficient to say that behind
the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there
is the dominant class; one must locate the point of
activity, the places and forms in which its domination is
exercised. And because this domination is not simply the
expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it
is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition
which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is
achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.
Well, if one fails to recognise these points of support of
class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist;
and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after
an apparent revolutionary process.
Foucault believes that seemingly neutral institutions such as education and medicine act to preserve the power of one social class over another. While it's clear how the police and military maintain authority, it's less clear how topics like constant surveillance and attitudes toward sexuality would tilt the playing field. Foucault's philosophy offers a framework to analyze these different forms of power based on their effect rather than their apparent mechanism.
Which of his books or writings would I turn to if I want to hear him expound upon this in more detail (and if possible in an English translation of his own).
> One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Wasn't Foucault a professor? He just, essentially, refuted himself (because he's part of that teaching system, which appears to disseminate knowledge, and is really about maintaining a certain social class in power).
You pass over the word "simply" there: Foucault doesn't mean that universities do not disseminate knowledge, but that they do not _only_ disseminate knowledge, they also maintain a certain class system. I don't think he would exempt himself from that, but poststructuralism is not usually interested in the actions of individuals as much as the way societies are structured (such as, for example, having universities which are organized in certain ways).
Right, but that still leaves Foucault as part of that system. It's a biased system, not to be taken at face value or as objectively committed to truth as it appears or claims to be. But that applies to Foucault and his thought and teaching as much as it does to the rest of what the universities teach.
This is not profound. Human activity is imperfect. That's the case whether the human in question is a famous tenured professor or a hermit on a mountaintop. Perhaps politicians ought to pretend infallibility, but serious thinkers shouldn't. It's possible that we must consider many ideas that aren't true in any objective sense, in order to get closer to the the truth ourselves.
Foucault and other French Postmodern Philosophers are sometimes hard going. Foucault came up with lots of interesting ideas. My favourite is one of his concepts on power and knowledge. The idea is that one way the powerless can gain power is by creating knowledge, even in small bits. Twitter is probably proof of this.
I flagged it because I have no idea, and the linked to article gives no context (Foucault who?) and apparently has nothing to do with the topics usually on HN.
It seems a bit pretentious to flag something because you haven't heard of him. There is a bunch of stuff on HN daily that I don't know about, and often the article doesn't provide much context. However, I usually hit wikipedia and try to learn more rather than hitting flag.
Most of the time that's how I feel about it, too. I'd never flag an article about some framework or technology I had never heard of. But in this case I'm not seeing the connection to technology or startups or general interest; it just seems off topic. I'm sure it's a great article, I'm just not sure it belongs on HN, so I flagged it.
Not everything on the front page excites everyone's curiosity, but it doesn't need to. Avoiding monoculture is the main thing. This is good for technical work too.
Welcome to three years ago. Seriously, who thinks that humanities topics are outside of the discussion of HN?
This is a guy that's talking about how power transmits through societies. Do you think that's irrelevant when looking at who's funding companies? What different VCs project about their vision of the world when putting money down? What different business models project to the outside world?
Let's cut this crap of the hacker as an apolitical being. It's Hacker News, not tech/Unix/cracker News.
Fair enough. "Anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is vague enough that it can defend almost anything, though. On the other hand, I suppose lack of up votes will filter out articles targeting too small of a niche audience. Unflagged!
Whenever I've read a particularly dense section of Foucault (or anything originally written in a language other than English) I am always struck by the fact that translating things from one language to another is incredibly hard. I remember taking German during the summer to get my language requirement out of the way for my phd and my translations of German newspaper or magazine articles would be so disjointed and far away from the meaning that other people in the class had gotten from them. Translating something written for a much higher reading level must be very difficult.
Hey, sorry for this offtopic comment but I saw an older comment of yours that I would love to talk about. Could you mail me? I added an mail address in rot13 to my profile. Should be obvious once you see the domain. ;) Thanks!
Foucault's work is usually focused on trying to discern what things we take as natural, known, and unquestionable are actually constructed claims which can be questioned. I think Discipline & Punish is his most accessible writing; it is a history of judicial systems from the 17th century to the 20th century.
This article is not a great introduction to Foucault, and assumes a familiarity. I do not know why it is on Hacker News except that the author has recently passed.