Reading Foucault is Like a Little French Man Making Love to You from Inside your Head
Each chapter opens with pages of tedious foreplay culminating in a gushing, euphoric climax in the last paragraph, as in the fourth chapter of The Achaeology of Knowledge:
(this quote is about the way in which social discourses, such as ‘psychopathology’ or ‘economics’, produce themselves and simultaneously produce the subjectivity of the individuals who take part in them)
“In the proposed analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his dispersion. To the various statuses, the various sites, the various positions that he can occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes from which he speaks. And if these planes are linked by a system of relations, this system is not established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the specificty of a discursive practice. I shall abandon any attempt, therefore, to see discourse as a phenomenon of expression — the verbal translation of a previously established synthesis; instead, I shall look for a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity. Thus conceived, discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed. I showed earlier that it was neither by ‘words’ nor by ‘things’ that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similary, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.”
- Michel Foucault, The Formation of Enunciative Modalities, from The Archaeology of Knowledge.
[I realize this may not be a popular post.]
Some things don’t change
Two-hundred forty-three years of choking on school-dust:
“O you his machine-like teacher, well do you need to suppress his healthy understanding with your school Logic; otherwise he would take your measure, repeat the gobbledygook you took an hour to trot out afterwards naturally but without school-cleverness in three words. He would despise you! But woe unto you; from a thousand heads who would have become men only ten will be bold enough to be wise; the rest are choked with school-dust — like the Egyptian midwife.”
–Johann Gottfried von Herder, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of People, 1765.
Atheist Advocacy
I’m becoming ever more interested in advocating the cause of atheism in America. Especially when I read quotes like this one from Katherine Harris:
We have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.
and when I see polls that report 53% of Americans say they would not vote for an atheist (10% more than the group that wouldn’t vote for a homosexual!). Maybe Obama knew about these figures when he joined Trinity United Church.
I acknowledge that being atheist is only like being a racial minority to the degree that intelligence is heritable. Regardless, I am starting to feel oppressed to the point that I think we need stronger atheist advocacy groups in this country. And with end times theology increasingly shaping American foreign policy, our safety may depend on it.
Prostrate Yourselves! (On religious self-indenture)
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes of “Unconditional Duties”:
All those who feel they need the strongest words and sounds, the most eloquent gestures and postures, in order to be effective at all…talk of “duties,” and actually always of duties that are supposed to be unconditional. Without that they would lack the justification for their great pathos, and they understand this very well. Thus they reach for moral philosophies that preach some categorical imperative, or they ingest a goodly piece of religion….Because they desire the unconditional confidence of others, they need first of all to develop unconditional self-confidence on the basis of some ultimate and indisputable commandment that is inherently sublime, and they want to feel like, and be accepted as, its servants and instruments.
Two years prior, in 1880, Dostoevsky published The Brothers Karamazov, whose famous chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” ruminates on a very similar theme. In this intensely ironic parable in which the Grand Inquisitor addresses Christ, Dostoevsky writes:
In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.
The Grand Inquisitor informs Jesus that the Church has had to perfect his work by adding to it the kind of spiritual bondage that allows people to live untroubled, in service to commandments that are — on the Church’s authority — inherently sublime.
These passages share a subtext, namely this: that religion functions primarily as a means to negate the fundamental freedom that comes with existence, because that freedom is too heavy for most to bare. By its simple imperatives, its categories of good and evil, it lifts from its adherents the burden of being arbiter of their own lives.
I agree that religion so functions, but is that necessarily cause for contempt? The inability of the average human to deal with the complex ambiguities of life is independent of religion; if he had not this mechanism of self-indenture, he would devise another. In light of this, it might be inevitable for there to exist various ways for us to indenture ourselves (indeed there are others besides religion, capitalism for one). But religion goes further. Not only does it enslave, it claims to exalt. It claims to empower as it thrives on subjugation. It demands respect for the ignoble task of making the feeble-minded absolutely certain of truths that do not exist.
I have to side with Nietzsche in contempt of religion; not only does it feed the “will to ignorance,” but it deceitfully claims to do the opposite. If we are going to throw ourselves into bondage out of some profound ennui, we should at least be honest with ourselves about it (cf. Heidegger’s Being & Time). Digging deeper into this honest interpretation of life may lead us to better understand the very condition in which we find ourselves — questions and answers over which religion pretends to have ultimate authority.
thank you bob scheer
Words of wisdom on Hil’s last stand from Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of truthdig.org (transcribed from KCRW’s Left, Right & Center):
“What really is at stake here is not whether she stays in. If she stayed in and had an honorable discussion about the issues and their policy differences — fine — we can applaud that and democracy needs that. But what’s happening here is that she’s…playing up the race and gender issues in a way that is not helpful. And to be campaigning that you are in fact the one who can swing unenlightened white voters…at a time when she should say, by the way, that if anyone votes for me because they can’t bring themselves to vote for a black man or a half-black man, that’s racism and I don’t want your support. She’s actually using code language to say that “I can bring over racists.” And one of the alarming things is that here you have Democrats, a significant percentage…saying they won’t vote for a black person. Well, why don’t we meet that head on? Just the same way…when we finally have a woman candidate that can carry the day, we’re going to have to meet sexism head on. But you don’t surrender to that, you don’t pander to that, and you don’t brag that you’re the candidate of uneducated, racist white voters.”
Karl Popper (Kpop!) tells it like it is
From logical fallacies of induction to evolutionary epistemology, Kpop’s like ‘Yo! the sun might not rise tomorrow’ and ‘Yo! Hume’s psychology is primitive’ and ‘Yo! sometimes we perish by our unconfirmed hypotheses’. Break it down Karl…
“Hume himself confused the problem of induction with the problem of the necessary connection between cause and effect; and Kant saw in the problem of the a priori validity of the causal law one of the most fundamental problems of metaphysics. But Hume must be credited with the formulation of the pure logical problem of induction and its solutions…He writes, for example, that we have no reason to believe ‘that those instances, of which we have no experience, [are likely to] resemble those, of which we have had experience’.
…All that is assumed is that we have empirical evidence of the truth of certain instances, and it is asserted that this does not entitle us to conclude to or extrapolate to analogous experiences at other instances (whether in the past or in the future).
This, then, in all its purity, is what I have christened ‘Hume’s [logical] problem of induction’.
Hume’s answer is as clear as can be: there is no argument or reason which permits an inference from one case to another, however similar the conditions may be; and I completely agree with him in this respect.
I believe, however, that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do in practice is to jump to a conclusion; that is to say, to quite inconclusive hypotheses to which we often cling, and with which we may perish, unless we are able to correct them, which is possible especially if, on the human level, they are formulated exosomatically in written form, and submitted to criticism.
The assertion that we have an irrational inclination to be impressed by habit and repetition is something quite different from the assertion that we have a drive to try out bold hypotheses which we may have to correct if we are not to perish. The first describes a typically Lamarckian procedure of instruction; the second a Darwinian procedure of selection. The first one is, as Hume observed, irrational, while the second seems to have nothing irrational in it.”
from Objective Knowledge, Ch. 2, §30: Muddles Connected with the Problem of Induction
random literary quote without interpretation I
“She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar, and to console one another, in the most maudlin fashion, over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey; to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class.
“If only it could take place — this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned — while drinking the delicious amber whiskey in a joint with a jukebox, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts. If it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion? Could he lay off the fashions of the day and leave his learning in his private entrepôt? Could he, that is, see the apple fall and not run madly to break the news to Newton and ask him what on earth it was all about? Could he, for her sake, for the sake of this pathetic rube all but weeping for her own pathos in the Metropolitan Museum, forget the whole dispute and, believing his eyes for a change, admit that the earth was flat?”
– Jean Stafford, Children are Bored on Sunday
