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I agree with John Searle on this one - it's unfair to Foucault (who despite his eccentricities is actually an engaging and lucid thinker IMO) to lump him together with obscurantists like Derrida:
"With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.
Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That’s very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether."
There's a bit of slight of hand in criticizing Derrida for not being clear. For example, computer science utilizes obscure notation and concepts and not understanding something is generally attributed to the mental acuity of the reader.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Close_Encounters_...
The common response is that with computer science you can easily find an expert who can explain the uncontroversial consensus interpretation of some CS notation, whereas with Derrida et al. you'll just get more confusion.
A consensus in Computer Science is that monads are like burritos.
I think a major difference is that when a professional has to coin new jargon, they are usually intending to achieve as much clarity as possible.
I've always thought of Derrida as some kind of shaman poet sorcerer who uses philosophy as the material for secretive experiments, which makes me not so upset when I can't understand him.
I think Derrida is treated rather poorly, even in taught philosophy. Just because a work has multiple possible interpretations, it doesn't mean it's obscurantist or bad.
Too right. And Foucault's conception of power allows this kind of non-scientific practice to be reasoned about.
My favorite introduction to Foucault is Hubert Dreyfus' essay on Being and Power: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_being.html
The key insight for me is the discussion of "the clearing". The clearing opens the way for new opportunities while suppressing other possibilities in exchange. This concept can be used readily to analyze the durability of certain new technologies and their effect on society. For example, Facebook clearly creates a new way to communicate, but that channel then eliminates other forms of communication in exchange.
The language of pervasive and hidden power is essential for a clear view of what the Silicon Valley is becoming.
Foucault has a lot of important insights. My problem with him is he seems to have no real idea of how things could ever be better, and hence no way to choose between the various available overall options. Society is just oppressive power, and the only course of action seems to just be endless vigilance and resistance.
Consider him to be one of the "butterfly collectors" of this kind of social power analysis. Not everyone has to be able to develop a field; for that to happen someone has to recognize and try to catalogue it.
If you're not familiar with the metaphor, it refers to one of the development phases of a scientific discipline: before there was a theory of physics, many people described and classified various phenomena. The term comes from biology; even before Linneus, people described and collected all sorts of species; then Linneus provided a taxonomy to fit them into; and now we have a theory of genetics.
Toward the end of his life, Foucault delivered a series of lectures in which he described the emergence of free-market/ neoliberal societies [1]. Many of his admirers are surprised when they learn that he seemed pretty enthusiastic about the prospects [2] (although he died too early to observe the power consequences of a highly marketized society, so we don't know what he would think today).
I think the problem here (and many critics) is that you read Foucault without taking into account the context of his work. Foucault was an active/socially commited philosopher who actively tried to do something to make things better. And his work is part of that.
How is that worse than offering a way forward that isn't based on solid reasoning? The world isn't driven by people like Foucault who strive for a complete understanding; it's driven by people who use reductive worldviews to find the "clear" way forward. No, I much more trust and find value in world views that don't offer a clear prescription. Skeptics are the best critics of reality.
Last night I had a dream that I was telling someone to check out Michel Foucault. I specifically remember spelling their name and telling them they should look him up.
It... it really doesn't, and this article makes that fact quite plain. Foucault's philosophies are nuggets of well-worn common sense extrapolated out into billowing collections of unnecessary text.
I wonder if anyone has done the kind deed of whittling his most oft-cited gaseous emanations down to their core common sense origins. That'd save a lot of time for those of us not interested in a career in academia.
The first page of "Discipline and Punish" is a very clear description of the drawing and quartering of a regicide. I am not sure what nuggets you are referring to. Citations, please. I think he is arguing against "whittling... down to their core common sense origins," because such origins are illusory.
Citations, please
This is a hilarious comment, given that Foucault's History of Sexuality contains almost no citations!
If you are interested in why Foucault ought to be a laughingstock, see Windshuttle's The Killing of History: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-History-Literary-Theorists-Mu... or the many essays Camille Paglia wrote on him. Her latest book has a reprint of "Review: Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf."
Power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Knowledge masks power relations between individuals and it always has a disciplinary function.
All discourses, including science, are rooted in their historical epoch. There are no transhistorical truths, but truth and justice are true relative to the field of power/knowledge they are embedded in.
Does that really sound like widely accepted common sense? Do you not agree that western societies are driven by a popular belief in either pure nationalist authority or in authority masked in terms of objectivity, scientific progress and justice?
> There are no transhistorical truths, but truth and justice are true relative to the field of power/knowledge they are embedded in.
Which is at least stated as if the quoted statement itself were a transhistorical truth. That is, the quoted statement, applied to itself, refutes itself. (Because if the statement itself is a transhistorical truth, then the statement itself is a counterexample to the claim of the statement. And if the statement itself is not a transhistorical truth, then there are transhistorical truths in other historical epochs and/or other fields of knowledge.)
My position as a materialist (and a practicing scientist) is that propositions are not magical transcendental objects. The idea of "refutation" rests on the presupposition of a given linguistic exchange being inside a self-consistent system of argument. In reality, language behaviors, including writing and argument, are always material, contingent and underspecified. Language is a "reef of dead metaphors". Utterances take place in a cultural and historical context, and their meaning, both at the level of reference and argument structure, is always dependent on that context, <i>including what I am writing right now</i>. You run into this kind of boring infinite recursion refrain when you remain attached to the idea that "proof" and "truth" operate at a metaphysical level above material. It's unfortunate that this is so widespread.
Isn't that what most of philosophy is about?
But of course, well-worn common sense is, and always has been, in perilous short supply.
I always hate appeals to commmon sense. Common sense is often wrong. It gives us things like "the world is flat".
Bit of a strawman. Common sense is not folk wisdom. Also common sense doesn't really have a place in "cold" scientific knowledge.
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to point out that "the world is flat" was a perfectly good theory that fit the fact for most observers. What is foolish is the refusal to change one's belief once it was proved to be wrong, or even to be closed to the possibility of an alternative.
My freshman year of college I took a Polish literature seminar and I had to give a presentation on the Foucault and the body applied to a short story I hadn't read from The Street of Crocodiles.
An important thought crashed into my head that froze me solid for about 30 seconds, "who the F cares?"
I thanked the professor for her time, told her I was done with her class and I walked out. I dropped her class and switched my major to applied math. She sent me a very nice email that wished me luck.
The thing that Foucault's thought misses is that there are many ways of seeing the world. You can see it in terms of power, but then confirmation bias may lead you to a place of deep social distrust not unlike our current zeitgeist.
Foucault wrote about many things - power, madness, social norms, the relation of words and things. Most of his books have a different theme.
Your summary is a bit reductive.
I think you misread the article. Foucault's point is that there are many ways of seeing power. "Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences."
Enumerating ways of seeing power can lead to an obsession with it. The fact that he has been cited by so many underscores this. When people are preoccupied with whether they are one-down or one-up you end up with perpetual status seeking among individuals and groups, where one's worth is perceived as tied to that status. Does that seem familiar?
It's been a while since I read Foucault, but I don't recall him being much concerned with marginal and fleeting differences of power in the add-out/deuce/add-in spectrum. The differences I recall are more at the scale of rights to commit violence and obligations to receive it. Such differences of power are in part sustained by the idea that it is common sense that things are that way because that is the way things are naturally ordered.
It does seem familiar, but it doesn't seem like Foucault. If power's everywhere, it can hardly be a bad thing in itself. The point isn't to oppose it, but to be cognizant of it, to play with it and to not get trapped in other people's usage of it.
I believe that's the "post" part of post-structuralist. Power is not a zero-sum game for Foucault.
For example?
Foucault? The physicist Foucault [1] responsible for the Foucault Pendulum and many other advances? Or the philosopher Foucault [2] responsible for some unfalsifiable fluff of great interest to philosophy department tea parties -- conversations that typically return to Jacques Derrida [3], the "show-stopper" who thought there was no basis for shared, objective truths, and whose views are regularly discussed as though their decoded meaning doesn't contradict the possibility of their productive discussion.
It's a sign of the times that, in Web searches, Foucault the philosopher completely buries Foucault the physicist.
(I got snookered into reading this because "power" has a meaning in physics apart from its meaning in philosophy -- the former of which actually means something.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Foucault
Ironically, your conveyance of your opinion in this dismissive register with no substance, just the affect of smug certainty, is a perfect example of why the relationship between language and power deserves attention today. Your post is a pervasive and automatic mental pattern, common in a population that has been raised to uncritically worship abstract philosophical notions like "objective truths", notions which no decent self-critical scientist would accept. Your post's voice assumes the appearance of a disciplinary authority without actually engaging substantively with the ideas under discussion. So, in effect you've provided the best possible support for the article's argument.
The proposition that there is no such thing as objective truth is itself a proposition of a supposed objective truth.
Postmodernism is therefore paradoxical and logically invalid, in a broad and categorical sense. Adhering to it is therefore irrational and no different than any other non-falsifiable religion that must simply be accepted on faith, without any logical proof or reasoning.
You did great up to
Postmodernism is therefore paradoxical ... Adhering to it is therefore irrational
All ideas are paradoxes, and yet we must adhere to some. The act of mapping reality to words necessarily creates lies. Imagining you have some ideas which aren't paradoxes is self delusion. And attempting to not have ideas is death. Therefore adhering to paradoxical ideas is rational.
I would say a hallmark of sanity is the ability to work within paradoxes.
The belief in self-consistent logical systems of argument must also be accepted on faith, without logical proof. There is no falsifiable theory that proves falsification as the final criterion for distinguishing science from non-science, etc. It's your faith-based attachment to the the falsifiability demarcation theory and to a metaphysically "laden" notion of logical validity that causes the impasse. All of these "defeater"-style logical arguments ultimately rest on a kernel of faith. Foucault, or any other decent theoretician, would recognize in this the expression of power that comes out of a particular historical tradition of knowledge rules. The empowered popular discourse they are rooted in is exactly what Foucault would call an "episteme". (Which again, few thoughtful practicing scientists would claim they "believe" in. Rules are always provisional frameworks for the complicated objectives of science, which themselves exist inside a sort of network or market. Nothing is simple or linear.)
See my other response above about the materiality and contingency of linguistic utterances. Like all other physical phenomena, the scientific approach views language as an event, a behavior, a material process that is always context-dependent and, at the "lowest" levels, pervaded by uncertainty, even in our best attempts to model it.
What postmodernist works have you read?
> Ironically, your conveyance of your opinion in this dismissive register with no substance, just the affect of smug certainty, is a perfect example of why the relationship between language and power deserves attention today. Your post is a pervasive and automatic mental pattern, common in a population that has been raised to uncritically worship abstract philosophical notions like "objective truths", notions which no decent self-critical scientist would accept. Your post's voice assumes the appearance of a disciplinary authority without actually engaging substantively with the ideas under discussion. So, in effect you've provided the best possible support for the article's argument.
Ironically, your conveyance of your opinion in this dismissive register with no substance, just the affect of smug certainty, is a perfect example of why the relationship between language and power deserves attention today. Your post is a pervasive and automatic mental pattern, common in a population that has been raised to uncritically worship abstract philosophical notions like "objective truths", notions which no decent self-critical scientist would accept. Your post's voice assumes the appearance of a disciplinary authority without actually engaging substantively with the ideas under discussion. So, in effect you've provided the best possible support for the article's argument.
> Ironically, your conveyance of your opinion in this dismissive register with no substance ...
How much substance is required beyond the fact that these ideas are unfalsifiable? To a scientist like myself, saying that places the burden of evidence on the other party, who can only respond with a basis for empirical falsification. But that's not possible in philosophy, by definition.
Am I obliged to prove that Bigfoot is a myth? No, I need only say there's no evidence. And I'm not under a burden to to prove a negative in such a discussion -- impossible in any case. That makes a statement about Bigfoot comparable to statements about philosophy -- it's unfalsifiable.
> Your post is a pervasive and automatic mental pattern, common in a population that has been raised to uncritically worship abstract philosophical notions like "objective truths"
It didn't require many words for you to establish your post-modern credentials. From here, assuming I were inclined, we would have an inconclusive-by-definition debate about whether there are objective truths ... we would philosophize.
Thanks ... I'll pass.
You should read some philosophy of science. Start with Karl Popper. He's the person whose work you're referencing when you talk about falsifiability, and I think you'll relate to his writing, but he'll also challenge you to think a little more deeply about what science is - and indeed, what truth is.
Foucault is not Derrida and his writing is crisp and clear and contains examples and research that empirically support his observations (in sense of empirical support one often finds in the social sciences and history). He dominates web searches for 'Foucault' quite meritoriously as Discipline and Punish is far more relevant today than 19th century work on the speed of light -- which unless I've missed the removal of the photon from current scientific explanations did not nail the coffin lid on corpuscular models of light despite the claims of the Wikipedia. I won't make a similar claim regarding the reasons a google for "foucault's pendulum" turns up more related to an Italian than a French...though personally I think Eco's work is more interesting and entertaining and informative.
> Foucault is not Derrida ...
Yes, that seems to be true, but from the standpoint of falsifiability, of empirical testing, they're equal.
The very fact that people feel compelled to draw a line between Foucault and Derrida, one that hasn't already been drawn by objective evidence, speaks for itself.
> ... and contains examples and research that empirically support his observations (in sense of empirical support one often finds in the social sciences and history ...
Please don't make this mistake. However strongly you feel about the present topic, don't try to fit philosophy into the science straitjacket. Philosophy's value lies elsewhere.
Why wouldn't power in the non-physics sense not have meaning? Why are you restricting meaning, and thus truth, to just physics? In order to even participate in this forum doesn't meaning, and thus, truth, require a broader definition?
> Why wouldn't power in the non-physics sense not have meaning?
Well, I didn't say that. I said it was an unfalsifiable topic.
> Why are you restricting meaning, and thus truth, to just physics?
Didn't say that either, and just as well, since there are no truths in physics. In science one can prove a theory false, but one cannot prove a theory true. All legitimate scientific theories remain open to falsification by new empirical evidence, in perpetuity.
Not so for philosophy, which was my point.
Where does the concept of "falsification" come from? Karl Popper was a philosopher. The concept you using to dismiss philosophy is a product of philosophy and wouldn't exist without philosophy.
> In science one can prove a theory false, but one cannot prove a theory true.
This statement concerns logic and epistemology, both branches of philosophy, not science.
Falsification came about as a solution to the demarcation problem and the problem of induction (both products of philosophy, not science).
You are right that most philosophical statements are not falsifiable, but that simply means they are not scientific according to a definition of science that assumes all scientific statements are falsifiable. In short, you haven't really said anything (our understanding of circular reasoning and begging the question also come from philosophy).
Please don't keep making the same point over and over. It gets boring after a while and then crosses into harangue, like someone at a dinner party with an idée fixe. If you want to make the point once and move on, that's fine, but then please let people who are interested in Foucault discuss Foucault.