Foucault!

ColoradoGuy

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I'm taking a break from a massive Twitter storm fight with anti-vaccine people, something I occasionally treat myself to, to mark the publication of the new Pleiade of Foucault. There's a long essay in the Times Literary Supplement about it. It may be behind a paywall but let me know if you want it and I'll download it and send it to you. As with most everybody I know, Foucault can tie me in knots. I know I should understand him, at least in translation because I don't read French, but I struggle. I read The Birth of the Clinic for a graduate school seminar and all of us were in the same boat. Essentially that this guy is famous, so we should grapple with his work, even though we find it alternately fascinating and silly. It was like reading Zen -- beautiful phrases (which of course were really the translator's) mixed into dense impenetrability. I do think I understood how much of his work was an analysis of power, and how special knowledge gives special power. His writings about mental illness remind us the power of defining things, of naming things, itself brings a special power. I've heard that called the "Rumpelstiltskin Effect": naming something can give power over it.

The essay is useful because it describes how his thought evolved over time. It was far from static, and he continued to build on similar notions his entire career. From the essay:


Taken as a whole, reading Foucault from start to finish is like reading the major works of Henry James consecutively as self-conscious historical fictions. It is a mildly disconcerting experience, seeing conscious evolutions and experiments in style; baroque, ornate, urgent, dyspeptic; the repetitions and modalities at various points and the stylized categorizations and oppositions – prudes and perverts, monsters and insanity, measures and tests, inquiries and examinations, bodies and boys, punishment, pleasure, asceticism, suicide; the going back over old themes in new ways; how the old becomes new but how the new can never entirely disown the old; the desire for both fidelity in the evocation of moods and worlds, but not necessarily strict historical accuracy, whatever that might in the end be taken to mean; and the desire to write all this up somehow as a history of the present.

That massive sentence is worthy of Foucault himself. Look at all the semicolons! It's worse than Gibbon.

Anyway, if anybody has any insight into the guy, or anecdotes of how and when you encountered him, I'd love to hear about it.
 

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Terry Eagleton, once you realize he really is serious about Marxist approaches, is pretty helpful in terms of understanding Foucault.
 

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The biographies by Didier Eribon, J. G. Merquior and James Miller. And Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, looking back at his relationship with Foucault.
 

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Anybody have strong opinions on the impact and importance of the guy? In the case of medical history I think he's been useful, although he wasn't the first to examine the importance of the knowledge/power dynamic in how physicians relate to patients. And of course with mental health that power can be quite stark -- the power to commit a person against their will and confine them. The courts are much more stringent in that now compared with decades ago.
 

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My favorite thing from Foucault (that to me summarizes the best points he made) is the third chapter of Discipline and Punishment, Panopticism. It shows how institutions, as well as other people, reinforce power dynamics; I like to think how I reinforce them as well. To Foucault, power is not intrinsically bad, but we should be aware of it: how it can be used by the use of certain words and how we name things, how institutions function, and how those inside the institutions can use knowledge as a form of power. Here is his writing on the Panopticon. https://foucault.info/doc/documents...foucault-disciplineandpunish-panopticism-html

My opinion of Foucault is somewhat strong.But I do think he stated a lot of obvious things.
 

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Anybody have strong opinions on the impact and importance of the guy? In the case of medical history I think he's been useful, although he wasn't the first to examine the importance of the knowledge/power dynamic in how physicians relate to patients. And of course with mental health that power can be quite stark -- the power to commit a person against their will and confine them. The courts are much more stringent in that now compared with decades ago.

He is absolute garbage. His philosophy is one of hate. He is a sad pathetic Marxist---now marxism has led to over 100 million murders in the 20th century. Post modernism grew out of marxism. Basically marxism was proved to be trash by what we saw in USSR. So the PMs (post modernists) wanted to attack truth and say there is no truth (so the facts about marxism's complete and utter failure could be argued since there is no truth).
The really sad and pathetic thing is it is based on hate and everything is all power. It says any issues suffered by members of a group are the fault of the powerful so no sense of self responsibility. It puts people into groups and that is all they are....hmmm...who thinks people all act the same way because they are in a certain group . . . who could that be? Oh RACISTS and BIGOTS! It pits one group against another, and says that hierarchies are based on power. They are not. We elect people up the hierarchy because they perform well.

PMs are bitter and resentful people, they are weak.

Here is Nietsche predicting the post modernists. Tell me this is not them to a T and that they are not pathetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbA9ALOrHaA
 

MindfulInquirer

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Anybody have strong opinions on the impact and importance of the guy? In the case of medical history I think he's been useful, although he wasn't the first to examine the importance of the knowledge/power dynamic in how physicians relate to patients. And of course with mental health that power can be quite stark -- the power to commit a person against their will and confine them. The courts are much more stringent in that now compared with decades ago.

yeah about that I've been meaning to ask, although perhaps this requires its own thread but, do you guys believe those post war philosophers were as genuinely interested in their philosophical field as is commonly thought, or were they rather motivated by an agenda ? I mean Foucault, Derrida and co., their ideas were very much about deconstructing and rethinking the world, the essence of their message had quite a political character to it despite being surrounded by philosophical buffer.
 

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yeah about that I've been meaning to ask, although perhaps this requires its own thread but, do you guys believe those post war philosophers were as genuinely interested in their philosophical field as is commonly thought, or were they rather motivated by an agenda ? I mean Foucault, Derrida and co., their ideas were very much about deconstructing and rethinking the world, the essence of their message had quite a political character to it despite being surrounded by philosophical buffer.

Well, I don't know about Foucault (despite having read some of his books many years ago), but philosophers tend to have agendas. Sometimes they change as they make progress -- my favorite case being Husserl, who started by trying to ground (and there's a thread-worthy topic -- what does "ground" mean?) mathematics in a non-psychological process of the mind (whatever that means -- thread needed) and ended up thinking about "the sciences" (warning -- another thread) being in some kind of symptomatic "crisis" (hmmm -- thread on "crisis"?). In a Weird way Kant has a similar shifty agenda (once he had his "crisis" with Hume), going from how does a "world" get built in the "mind" to "Can people learn to be nice?"
Derrida -- knowing what he did about Husserl (which is where he started his rethinking), I imagine he expected his agenda to be very shifty. It's this shiftiness of his agenda as much as anything else that makes Derrida interesting. I think after Husserl and Heidegger...ie after say 1955, philosophers at the cutting edge were interested in the shiftiness of agendas to the point that (to jump the rails entirely) historians of science and philosophy (and where else can you track shiftiness than in history -- day-to-day histories?) were addressing basically the question: Where do agendas come from and where do they go?
 
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Well, I don't know about Foucault (despite having read some of his books many years ago), but philosophers tend to have agendas. Sometimes they change as they make progress -- my favorite case being Husserl, who started by trying to ground (and there's a thread-worthy topic -- what does "ground" mean?) mathematics in a non-psychological process of the mind (whatever that means -- thread needed) and ended up thinking about "the sciences" (warning -- another thread) being in some kind of symptomatic "crisis" (hmmm -- thread on "crisis"?). In a Weird way Kant has a similar shifty agenda (once he had his "crisis" with Hume), going from how does a "world" get built in the "mind" to "Can people learn to be nice?"
Derrida -- knowing what he did about Husserl (which is where he started his rethinking), I imagine he expected his agenda to be very shifty. It's this shiftiness of his agenda as much as anything else that makes Derrida interesting. I think after Husserl and Heidegger...ie after say 1955, philosophers at the cutting edge were interested in the shiftiness of agendas to the point that (to jump the rails entirely) historians of science and philosophy (and where else can you track shiftiness than in history -- day-to-day histories?) were addressing basically the question: Where do agendas come from and where do they go?

I like your comparison between philosophers and historians of science regarding agendas. I spent a couple of decades running a molecular biology/cell biology lab and also have an MA in history of science and medicine. Believe me, scientists, as well as philosophers, and not naifs merely searching for truth. They have an agenda as well.

By the way, I recognize but can't place your avatar picture. I think I saw it in the TLS years ago. Some later famous French intellectual as a kid on the beach with his mother. Who is it?
 

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I like your comparison between philosophers and historians of science regarding agendas. I spent a couple of decades running a molecular biology/cell biology lab and also have an MA in history of science and medicine. Believe me, scientists, as well as philosophers, and not naifs merely searching for truth. They have an agenda as well.

By the way, I recognize but can't place your avatar picture. I think I saw it in the TLS years ago. Some later famous French intellectual as a kid on the beach with his mother. Who is it?

Yes, it was in a TLS article about the Cannes film festival. The people are Briget Bardot (in 1955) and an unknown boy (an autograph hound?). AS a photographic moment it seems to have caught their expressions in two different relaxed modes of self-satisfaction.

As for agendas, I think the recognition that agendas are complicated, heterogeneous things that can change in all kinds of ways, may be one of the greatest philosophical advances of the 20th Century. Unfortunately for the Big Thoughts status of philosophy, if agendas are often in flux and yet are important in some ways, the correct methodology for figuring out what people are up to and how they think is more or less in the realm of fine-grained history. The most noticible area (for me anyway) where this has a valuable impact is in looking at how the sciences (need a thread?) work.
I think most people who actively work with anything resembling science (need a thread?) now recognize the dynamic nature of scientific agendas and the importance of following them day-to-day to get a real idea of what goes on when people try to figure things out.