
Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013) - benbreen
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/foucaults-addendum/
======
tatterdemalion
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.

~~~
trevelyan
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.

~~~
benbreen
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#...](https://books.google.com/books?id=zlULqJ70bDUC&q=executions#v=snippet&q=executions&f=false)

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

~~~
benbreen
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.

[http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/10/13/](http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/10/13/)

------
laurentoget
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.

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

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

Everyone else should get up to speed.

~~~
jordan0day
> 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_?"

~~~
jsl
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.

~~~
detcader
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.

[0] [http://www.troubleandstrife.org/2014/04/the-end-of-
equality/](http://www.troubleandstrife.org/2014/04/the-end-of-equality/)

[1]
[http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html](http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html)

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

~~~
detcader
"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.

------
vixen99
Scruton: The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to
believe him. So don't.

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

------
jccalhoun
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
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!

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

Did anyone see the Focault-Chomsky debate?

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

