Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/foucaults-addendum/

by benbreen • 11 years ago

124 131 11 years ago

thenewinquiry.com

jstanley• 11 years ago

Do people here generally have context on this? I've never heard of anything the article is talking about.

pjonesdotca2• 11 years ago

Anyone with formal or informal studies in critical theory will be well aware of Focault.

Everyone else should get up to speed.

Aushin4• 11 years ago

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.

jordan0day• 11 years ago

Everyone else should get up to speed.

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?"

uxhacker• 11 years ago

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.

whckns2• 11 years ago

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.

jlarocco3• 11 years ago

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.

carlob• 11 years ago

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.

jackmaney• 11 years ago

Agreed (and upvoted). After skimming through the article, I immediately came back and flagged it.

Go ahead and downvote as much as you want, but this belongs on some humanities blog, not on HN.

smutticus• 11 years ago

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.

e40• 11 years ago

Any recommendations?

JimmyM• 11 years ago

Here is one possible reason that Foucault might be popular amongst HN types.

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v7n2/gerrie.html

msutherl3• 11 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy)

formulaT2• 11 years ago

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.

tatterdemalion9• 11 years ago

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.

steveklabnik14• 11 years ago

Discipline and Punish was my first introduction to any of this kind of thought, and it was great. Highly recommended.

tatterdemalion9• 11 years ago

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.)

jsl3• 11 years ago

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.

mturmon3• 11 years ago

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.)

trevelyan6• 11 years ago

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.

Crito• 11 years ago

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."

thwest8• 11 years ago

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?

benbreen3• 11 years ago

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.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=zlULqJ70bDUC&q=executions#...

coldtea2• 11 years ago

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.

cromwellian4• 11 years ago

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.

thwest8• 11 years ago

Do you care to cite the supposed gobble-dy-gook in the GP's recommended 'Discipline and Punish'?

tome2• 11 years ago

With due reverence to his genius, surely Shannon is not of the same class as Wittgenstein?

yarrel• 11 years ago

You're right, Wittgenstein is distinctly second-rate in comparison to Shannon.

laurentoget• 11 years ago

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.

vixen99• 11 years ago

Scruton: The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

oniratea• 11 years ago

My favourite work of Foucault is Il faut défendre la société where he discusses the history of historical intelligibility.

EGreg• 11 years ago

I think his work went downhill after inventing the pendulum :-P

Did anyone see the Focault-Chomsky debate?

msutherl3• 11 years ago

Did you mean to say he's been on a downswing?

jccalhoun• 11 years ago

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.

aw3c2• 11 years ago

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Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)

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