Foucault -bring on the love/hate

He is the thinker though who most influenced the way i think, what i believe, and how i act...he must be remembered as enomoursly practical in a realpoltik way. He is much more readable then anyone else in that circle, and is a handsome prose stylist...I really do want to give out copies of the Birth of the Clinic to people, because it foregrounds a huge chunk of problems i have with the beurcratic structures of helping, and how (emascualting?) they are, and are intended to be

his work on iran in the 70s was massively duddish, as was his tendecy towards long history--he was less and less likely to be on the front lines w. the SI folx, which bothers me a bit.

i still have some worries about him wrt women.

S: The Birth of The Clinic, The History Of Sexuality, Lectures at the College ot Medicine, Discipilne and Punish

He is the thinker though who most influenced the way i think, what i believe, and how i act...he must be remembered as enomoursly practical in a realpoltik way. He is much more readable then anyone else in that circle, and is a handsome prose stylist...I really do want to give out copies of the Birth of the Clinic to people, because it foregrounds a huge chunk of problems i have with the beurcratic structures of helping, and how (emascualting?) they are, and are intended to be

his work on iran in the 70s was massively duddish, as was his tendecy towards long history--he was less and less likely to be on the front lines w. the SI folx, which bothers me a bit.

i still have some worries about him wrt women.

S: The Birth of The Clinic, The History Of Sexuality, Lectures at the College ot Medicine, Discipilne and Punish

He is the thinker though who most influenced the way i think, what i believe, and how i act...he must be remembered as enomoursly practical in a realpoltik way. He is much more readable then anyone else in that circle, and is a handsome prose stylist...I really do want to give out copies of the Birth of the Clinic to people, because it foregrounds a huge chunk of problems i have with the beurcratic structures of helping, and how (emascualting?) they are, and are intended to be

Perfect example, today i had a job interview, and at the end of it there was a 108 question pysch test, the way the questions were structured, the way if you wanted employment you had to answer, the questions of loyalty and honesty, all of it was a kind of electronic paropticon--and the fact i did it, made me complicent, (sp)

his work on iran in the 70s was massively duddish, as was his tendecy towards long history--he was less and less likely to be on the front lines w. the SI folx, which bothers me a bit.

i still have some worries about him wrt women.

S: The Birth of The Clinic, The History Of Sexuality, Lectures at the College ot Medicine, Discipilne and Punish

I'm a huge fan. I think he's read wrong, though, in the US context like a lot of French theorists seem to be, I can't quite put my finger on it but it's cultural... Please to read beyond "We other Victorians" in Theory 101.

Tell us more about how he's "read wrong" in the US. Often this has to do with the translations, which are rarely done in chronological order (one of the problems with Bourdieu's work).

We alsso have a bad habit of thinking that the word "power" means the same thing in Foucault's work that it did to us before we read Foucault.

We often treat him as sui generis, without considering his relationship with Kant, Hegel, and (even? especially?) Sade.

We fail to recognize the complicity - indeed the necessity - of resistance in the operations of power. Or if we recognize it, we accuse Foucault of political quietism. Both cases are symptoms of "City On A Hill" refusal to acknowledge the dirt on our own hands. (Habermas is probably guilty of this as well.)

(Alfred, I understand your anger but I have to stop short of naming Michel Foucault an evil man. He did good in his life as well, especially in his work with prisoners.)

Search
The Discourse on Language (1970, marks the break between "early Foucault" (archaeology) and "late Foucault" (geneology)
Power/Knowledge
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
Discipline and Punish (this is the keystone work)
The Birth of The Clinic
Madness and Civilization
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

You're right, roger, and perhaps "evil" is too strong (it's certainly not an adjective I use often). I'm also contemptuous of biographical criticism; but in Foucault's case, living up to his own insights transformed him into a rather loathsome inversion of Lord Henry Wotton.

rogermexico OTM, and yes, Discipline and Punish is prob key.

We often treat him as sui generis, without considering his relationship with Kant, Hegel, and (even? especially?) Sade.

I should know about this, having studied all these people, but I can't remember any of it clearly, and I have some paper on Kant & Sade sitting around that I've read probably ten times. I need to practice an art of memory or something. It just doesn't stick. How do you remember these things?

dar1a, is that Lacan's "Kant With Sade"? Good stuff...

How do you remember these things?

I blame grad school.

can someone recommend me a good translation starting point wrt kant--ive read a bunch of glosses (my favourite being the one published by October (?) about kant & duchamp) but i havent touched the original (and by reading in translation i wont, mea culpa)

Can we talk about him wrt Iran--that seems to me to be the biggest stumble and has been the one least talked about...

this has to do with the translations, which are rarely done in chronological order (one of the problems with Bourdieu's work).

you could always read them in chronological order, if you wanted to.

Coming from MF this made me go ouch.

You're right re: Iran, anthony. Foucault didn't exactly cover himself in glory. But he was very prescient on the rise of Islamism as a political force.

No, it's def. not Lacan, I haven't read Lacan (pure stubbornness on my part). I think it's just a random academic paper that I happened to have photocopied back in undergrad for some philosophy seminar - Kant got on my nerves something fierce & then I happened to run across an essay arguing that when you took that way of thinking as far as it would go, you got Sade.

I read some of this in grad school as well, I just can't seem to keep it all straight - but then, the majority of my courses were literature & not theory, and a lot of times what you get in literature courses is this hodgepodge of fashionable theorists without any hint of the philosophical tradition they're connected to or how they relate to it. So things get kind of sloppy; I used to end up twisting my brain in knots trying to get a handle on this while other fellow grad students who hadn't formally studied philosophy had a much easier time using theory in their work.

This reminds me, one cultural issue would be that most/all of the well known French theorists were trained in philosophy & in a very clear tradition and context, so where they are alluding to other philosophers' work in a way that would be clear to their audience (ie philosophers), once their writings get transposed to a US academic context all those references aren't typically picked up, and thus the work reads very differently.

CLASSIC

Maybe. I think in the US we do a decent job of acknowledging the way that Foucault picks up certain threads from Nietzsche. We even pay lip service to his debt to Marx and Engels, though we tend not to look too closely.

We tend not to look as closely at why the 18th century was so important to Foucault. It's partly a question of French history of course, but he also contends pretty directly, in Discipline and Punish and after, with Kant's notion of freedom as equivalent with internalization of the law. Similarly, his struggle with the inevitability of dialectic drives the definitions of big-P vs. little-p pouvoir that he starts to develop in History of Sexuality v1.

Also worth noting that much of what we take for Nietzsche in Foucault can be better ascribed to Sade, who Foucault read well and took very seriously. His greatest debt to Nietsche is probably his discovery that philosophers don't have to write like Kant and Hegel, and may in fact borrow the poet's license.

It is perhaps more helpful to say 'I' or 'x set of people' than 'we', at least in this case.

I agree with Anthony about MF as a writer, though as said before Barthes will always be le maitre pour moi from that generation. But yes, for me MF is up there behind RB as the best of them; the rest no longer interest me so much. Maybe in truth I never made much headway with them.

The interviews can be readable, it's true (so are Barthes': terrific).

And yet isn't there a sense in which all of the "geneology" work is informed precisely by deep thinking about 1969?

Your frustration sounds not unlike the charge of quietism that comes from the Habermas/Rorty/Critical Theory set. (And don't get me wrong here, it's a charge that's worth considering and Habermas and Rorty are both smart and deeply sympathetic.) How can Foucault see oppression so clearly and then throw up his hands (or do one of those gallic shrugs) and say, "meh. mais la resistance est inutile."

Or, worse than inutile, a collaborator and fellow-traveler in the operations of power. And yet in his life Foucault did not behave as if this were so. He advocated strongly for the rights of some of the most genuinely oppressed, people locked away in prisons and mental institutions, utterly silenced. And, unlike most intellectuals, he did so with a rigorous care not to speak for those people, but to find ways to make their own voices heard. Even though intellectuals might in actual fact know better what was good for them. Even if all they demanded was cable TV.

So where's the disconnect? How can resistance be both futile and vital? That would be a brutally long post, but the short version would distinguish between local and categorical goods, and accept that "pouvoir" is no more "resistable" than "Wille zur Macht."

dar1a, this frustration is exactly what drove me to become one of those theory-jock types back in the day. "using" or "applying" "theory" without a sense of its context seems like pounding nails with half a hammmer.

I will probably give him another go at some point, though, to see if that reading holds up.

i am really interested in yr discussion, you could email it if the post is too "brutal and long"

(I won't be able to send anything til tonight though, since I'm currently, y'know, at work and stuff)

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I appreciate his interviews most of all, especially with Hubert Dreyfus. Some casually fascinating insights into earlier experiences of the unconscious as palimpsestic--particularly the relationship between classical greeks and their hupomnemata (the diaries of the day, regarded much differently than contemporary diaries). also, history of sexuality vol. 3, the care of the self, features interesting summaries of debates about the preadolescent boy as the aesthetic foundation of human beauty (in a nutshell, boys don't have to try as hard to look good--more active, no make-up, tousled hair, etc.) that effectively place the reader in a different cultural mindset

At least Lacan and Foucault were great showmen, but I would not wanted to be a patient of the former.

i'm not sure that Lacan thought of his analysands exackly as patients

Yeah, but most of them thought of him as their therapist! :)

yeah chomsky is such a butt head

The funny thing about that debate is that, while I am one of those naive people who believe in the existence of something like a human nature, in a post Marxist/ Nietzschean perspective Foucault was cogently right.

i don't think of it as naivety so much as superstition ;)

I would prefer to call it a religious penchant :)

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kvxx785bVK1qa9oryo1_500.jpg

has anyone read the unabridged madness and civ, history of madness? the routledge thing?

― markers, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 2:58 PM

The dutch tv programme of the Foucault Chomsky debate is in full on youtube complete with subtitles(turn on captions)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

Love the moment when Foucault gets annoyed at the moderator

apparently Foucault got paid for that interview with a big bag of weed.

Sorry but can't read this thread without wanting to post this (full title: "Our Retried Explorer [Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961]")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rvKD2PDeik

has anyone read the unabridged madness and civ, history of madness? the routledge thing?

Madness and Civilisation - yes, it's really good, talks about how different stages of society viewed 'madness' in totally different ways

In medieval period you have Ships of Fools, Wild men of the forest, the giving of freedom to the 'mad' by casting them out of society altogether, a strange combination or dialectic between exclusion and respect.

The later designation of 'mentally ill' implies an illness with a treatment, which implies keeping the subject in lockdown, within a special designated part of society (asylums, etc).

i.e. disturbs the safe narrative where we used to send mad ppl off into the woods to fend for themselves but now we look after them

what markers was asking about was the full version, now titled History of Madness in the English translation. Madness and Civ was heavily abridged from the original French edition of Folie et Déraison, the newer edition is the first full English edition of the text, i think.

still haven't read it, need to get me one of those ebook readers, i have some awesome pdfs i want to get round to.

Oh. How embarrassing.

Also: I'm aware that lots of critics of foucault accused him of not supplying evidence that the trends in thought he outlined were actually widespread - is there a handy article that sums up such critiques on him?

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview

that was a good read. i have always been resistant to foucault, who seemed conspiratorial to me. i don't get the sense that he believes human relations can operate otherwise except as a complex system of power relationships, as the will to dominance is as fundamental for him as it is for nietzsche. the most progressive, humane states, he is careful to argue, actually exert the deepest, most insidious type of control over their subjects. if this is so, what are we supposed to fight for? politics becomes completely symbolic, the struggle for individuals to narrate their oppression.

thinking this way was obviously helpful in bringing certain forms of oppression to light, and many people are happy that he gave them a vocabulary to express a discontent that was otherwise vague. however, he basically reifies individualism so his views are completely in line with neoliberalism. consumerism's false choices are as authentic as anything else we've ever had, or will have, as for foucault power goes all the way down to the very core of each subject. we are either subconsciously reinforcing norms or actively resisting them. we are never cooperating, or building better institutions that will serve human welfare.

this is just my perspective. i admit up front i am not an expert, and maybe he is less nihilistic than i interpreted from reading the handful of texts i was assigned as an undergrad.

strongly recommend jeffrey nealon's Foucault Beyond Foucault for anyone interested--i think in some ways he gets past (or at least deepens) the morass of power you describe.

treeship: im no expert either, but i think what you are describing--ie, that there is no "outside" to power, is how i'd phrase it, or more generally that F remains skeptical of contemporary leftist accounts of communal action as potentially emancipatory--is actually one of the more interesting things about his work. i think the first thing that comes of this is that a term like "oppression" doesn't have an absolute contrary--and thus what we are "fighting" for is not necessarily against something as broad and abstract as "emancipation" (over against the equally abstract "oppression") but something more relational/situational/pragmatic. there being no "outside" to power doesn't mean that we aren't engaging in constant negotiations and renegotiations with it.

sorry that was a bit garbled. hopefully the point comes across.

in other words, id argue for F that politics becomes the exact opposite of symbolic.

ryan otm. think this is exactly the problem i was working through upthread back when i was smart.

but something more relational/situational/pragmatic. there being no "outside" to power doesn't mean that we aren't engaging in constant negotiations and renegotiations with it.

after the utter failure of international socialism, i understand this perspective. but in 2014, isn't it ceding too much to the status quo? in a world without the soviet union, shouldn't we dare to imagine alternate paths to a qualitatively different world?* especially since our current economic system seems to be not just exploitative, not just too willing to abide suffering, but utterly suicidal, especially in ecological terms.

if "power" is your god term it seems you are proposing a master-slave dialectic that is always in deadlock. this certainly undoes enlightenment progressivism in a jarringly literal way, but it also settles into a cynicism that seems very close to conservatism. honestly i don't know why saying there is no "outside" power is any different than making overreaching claims about human nature. here, i think, foucault fails not only to be an attractive progressive voice, but even in what i assume to be one of his main goals, resisting metanarratives by affirming difference.

*don't ask me what this would look like. i just like the idea of holding out for a utopian possibility, which i think even derrida argued was crucial in specters of marx

utopia aside, we don't need to kid ourselves we're the good guys to struggle for good

you would think. and yet.

well i said "need"

it's almost a cliche in studies of foucault to point out that power isn't only repressive but productive. power is what makes things happen, gives them shape and social meaning. outside of power, in utopia say, you have what is essentially a nihilist, absolute, or non-social space that, really, has nothing to do with political struggle. there's a long tradition of political thought (reinhart kosselleck being one of my favs) that sees utopian thought this way as essentially a moral critique of politics--but while bringing morality into politics can be useful because it provides an absolute position from which to launch a critique of the political order it also carries risks because politics is not good vs evil or even right vs wrong but how societies choose to organize themselves. put differently, I think the burden is on the utopians to show how what they are saying is different from totalitarianism or moral authoritarianism. but in any case I think the ethical gesture of keeping morality and politics distinct is an important one. (this is not to say that morality has nothing to do with politics, it has a lot to do with it of course, but that we must be mindful of the distinction.)

aiui "power" for foucault isn't really a master/slave dialectic b/c it operates in a network and flows multidirectionally between points

i also think foucault, or foucauldian thought or w/e at least, doesn't foreclose on utopia/the idea of alternative futures since imo the first step to imagining alternative futures is imagining alternative pasts, i.e. that the current state of things is not the eternal natural order. and i think a big part of foucault's project is describing how the current order of things and our way of thinking about it ("episteme", right?) wasn't always so, and how it came to seem natural

Foucault also did write about 'heteropies', different spaces, spaces outside of, and different, from normal society. Whether or not that could actually transform society from outside, or if it would just be a place to park malcontents, I never really found out. But it was very interesting. Kinda the spatial version of Bakhtin's temporal carnivals, I've always thought.

Bakhtin's carnivals are just temporary inversions of the status quo that work as a release valve, ultimately strengthening hegemony

Yeah, exactly ;)

Well, no, not exactly, connected to the centrifugal and the novelesque, which is not temporal, but the criticism 'release valve' is equal for both carnival and heteropy.

This is an interesting thread. I hadn't thought about foucault as a realist or pragmatist like Kosselleck. For me, it seemed like he embodied this radicalism-as-cynicism point of view i see so often among cultural studies people -- faith neither in institutions or resistance, revolution or reform. Principled reformism is different from this and really where I'd place myself.

Btw this new book is making strange waves http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/10/concerned-leftists-rediscover-michel-fou

ah reformism, the endless quest for fluffier jackboots

Well that's why I argued for holding out a utopian thesis -- the idea that things could be otherwise, that oppressive forms of social organization are not natural but historically conditioned -- while going about the work of everyday politics.

anyone read s4m b1nkley's '3nt3rpris3 as h4ppin3ss'?

(anyone got an electronic copy i could 'inspect' for purposes of course adoption?)

Who wants Foucault jokes? _You_ want Foucault jokes!

woh, this foucault biopic looks off the chain pic.twitter.com/ljiU39KjJk

— Jeremy Poxon (@JeremyPoxon) January 22, 2018

well it's about god damn time

https://www.thelocal.fr/20180206/confessions-of-the-flesh-french-philosophers-book-to-finally-be-published-in-france

Hmm, I wonder why they waited so long to publish it?

On a semi-related note, I'm reading this interesting book that further develops Deleuze's "society of control" post-script and elaborates on his theorization of the mutations in power from disciplinary societies to societies of control. It tries to look at the different ways this has found expression in the last 20 or so years both individually and collectively. It's written more in a polemic style which is unfortunate because it doesn't seem to suit the author well (repetitive, suffers from reductive generalizations, etc.) but it nonetheless seems to offer a useful way of thinking about how some of these new technologies have been put to use/operate.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2505-psychopolitics

If I could cast a Foucault biopic, I would cast Paul Scheer as MF and make it more zany.

Hmm, I wonder why they waited so long to publish it?

I would say this doesn't bode well but then again they've been publishing his seminars pretty regularly so maybe it was just in the queue.

The table of contents (via Progressive Geographies:

https://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/toc.jpg?w=1168

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/44744851_10160887945895304_5763661247249645568_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=72937a157cec7e268dfe67d3aa7b4564&oe=5C46922E

There's a quote somewhere where Foucault makes a joke about going through Nietzche's papers and finding a shopping list with eggs, milk, etc. And he asks, Does this belong in the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche? I'm wondering if anybody can point me to where this quote comes from.

i don't know but weirdly enough i'm a few pages into thus spoke zarathustra for the first time.

hmm i wish i had my books with me so i could dig that one out!

The collected letters of Eça de Queirós (seminal Portuguese realist novelist) have some documents he drew up as consul in London, it's because the ppl whose paperwork he's processing are also important names in Portuguese culture but still felt borderline shopping list-y to me.

Isn't there a Woody Allen piece about somebody's laundry lists?

Metterling's dislike of starch is typical of the period, and when this particular bundle came back too stiff Metterling became moody and depressed. His landlady, Frau Weiser, reported to friends that "Herr Metterling keeps to his room for days, weeping over the fact that they have starched his shorts."