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Agreed. I was introduced to his work by watching The Trap in a seminar on Michel Foucault, interestingly enough. I was surprised how much depth there was in Fou

by spenuke 13y ago

Agreed. I was introduced to his work by watching The Trap in a seminar on Michel Foucault, interestingly enough. I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-structuralist. Much of it complementary to Adam Curtis's work. One of the important things we find in both (as well as in the last in my trifecta of organizational theory -- The Wire) is that conspiracy theories are almost impossible, because people are mostly either too stupid or too petty and shortsighted to pull off a true Illuminati-style conspiracy. It might be tempting to call Adam Curtis a conspiracy theorist because his notion of how power is distributed and wielded is somewhat arcane -- for instance, it's at first odd to say that the populace is controlled by propping up freedom as the guiding ethos and removing arbitrary forms of control by implementing statistical guidelines, since these things are nominally in place to remove top-down control -- but such analyses, arcane though they may be, are not conspiracy theories, because a conspiracy requires a coordinated effort. Adam Curtis describes situations in which there is no coordinated effort, and no secret cabal. Just struggles of power and agreed upon fields of debate/combat which are then exploited after the fact by those who are able to do so.

steveklabnik 13y ago
> I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-structuralist. While I want to make some snarky comment about how maybe this tells you what you've heard about those 'fudging post-structuralists' is incorrect, what I'll say instead is that out of that group, which, incidentally, he did not consider himself a part of, Foucault is widely considered the least-fudgy. Consider Chomsky, for example: his (silly and vapid, in my humble opinion) beef with many continental philosophers basically excluded Foucault: "I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression." I highly recommend watching the debate between the two of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 (and the five-second summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA )
- spenuke 13y ago
  Oh, you don't need to convince me one way or the other. I spent my undergraduate career in a philosophy department that was extremely continental-heavy, as well as dedicated to reading only primary texts. After having read many volumes of Frenchies, my opinion on the two most famous is that Derrida fudged beautifully, even if he was ultimately a one-trick pony, while Foucault cherry picked some history but built a system of questions that were and are worth exploring.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    :) I'm currently making my way through Derrida now, though I've put him down to take up some Kafka...
- calibraxis 13y ago
  Hmm, what should I get from that debate? I just re-read the transcript [1], and seems they just had a minor disagreement over the notion of justice. (And a couple other little "differences" which we could consider clarifications.) I currently don't see why it's so heavily cited; some others (not you) seem to consider it some legendary heavyweight fight in the history of philosophy. But it was just... an interview. As for his disagreements with certain philosophers... he makes a cogent point, that perhaps he simply doesn't understand it, but much of it seems to him written in a kind of gibberish, which can understandably lead to a lot of mistakes. [2] Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have? [1] http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm [2] http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-pos...
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    It's of particular interest to me because it really strongly illustrates the gulf between the two. It's a pretty solid introduction to both of their positions, and goes in interesting places. > Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read > and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have? This is not the right analogy. The right analogy is a C programmer looking at some Haskell code, and complaining that they don't understand where memory is allocated, where the pointers are. I mean, after all, who can get real work done without pointers? Let's examine his essay, but substituting in Haskell and C... actually, wait a minute. I know I've heard this before... ah yes, here: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky http://byfat.xxx/chomsky Okay, so that's only kinda what I'm saying... what would you think about this paragraph? > But from 50 years in this programming game, I have learned two things: (1) > I can ask friends who work in object oriented areas to explain it to me at > a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular > difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I > will come to understand it. Now functors, arrows, hylomorphisms, monads, > etc. --- even first-class functions, whom I knew and liked, and who was > somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't > understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand > can explain monads to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to > overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new > advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic > mutation, which has created a form of "programming paradigm" that is beyond procedural > programming, structured programming, etc., in depth and profundity; or > (b) ... I won't spell it out. You'd probably say "seriously, stop being an idiot. Haskell is hard, and strange, and weird, but it has value. If you like C just keep on writing C, no need to be such a jerk about it. But Haskell is for doing different kinds of programming than C."
w_t_payne 13y ago
Many "conspiracies" do seem to require implausible, superhuman feats of coordination driven by Machiavellian malfeasance. These can be dismissed as improbable. However, many horrible things happen in the world that are not driven by a plot, but by dumb nature, stupidity, or the conflux of human biological urges -- ill suited to a technologically advanced world. Such "emergent" threats deserve greater consideration; particularly if the theory renders them (at first glance) plausible.

by spenuke 13y ago

steveklabnik 13y ago

> I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-structuralist. While I want to make some snarky comment about how maybe this tells you what you've heard about those 'fudging post-structuralists' is incorrect, what I'll say instead is that out of that group, which, incidentally, he did not consider himself a part of, Foucault is widely considered the least-fudgy. Consider Chomsky, for example: his (silly and vapid, in my humble opinion) beef with many continental philosophers basically excluded Foucault: "I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression." I highly recommend watching the debate between the two of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myy3vL-QKI4 (and the five-second summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA )

spenuke 13y ago
Oh, you don't need to convince me one way or the other. I spent my undergraduate career in a philosophy department that was extremely continental-heavy, as well as dedicated to reading only primary texts. After having read many volumes of Frenchies, my opinion on the two most famous is that Derrida fudged beautifully, even if he was ultimately a one-trick pony, while Foucault cherry picked some history but built a system of questions that were and are worth exploring.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  :) I'm currently making my way through Derrida now, though I've put him down to take up some Kafka...
calibraxis 13y ago
Hmm, what should I get from that debate? I just re-read the transcript [1], and seems they just had a minor disagreement over the notion of justice. (And a couple other little "differences" which we could consider clarifications.) I currently don't see why it's so heavily cited; some others (not you) seem to consider it some legendary heavyweight fight in the history of philosophy. But it was just... an interview. As for his disagreements with certain philosophers... he makes a cogent point, that perhaps he simply doesn't understand it, but much of it seems to him written in a kind of gibberish, which can understandably lead to a lot of mistakes. [2] Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have? [1] http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm [2] http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-pos...
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  It's of particular interest to me because it really strongly illustrates the gulf between the two. It's a pretty solid introduction to both of their positions, and goes in interesting places. > Imagine if I wrote hopefully useful code, but it was extremely hard to read > and poorly documented... What properties would we expect that code to have? This is not the right analogy. The right analogy is a C programmer looking at some Haskell code, and complaining that they don't understand where memory is allocated, where the pointers are. I mean, after all, who can get real work done without pointers? Let's examine his essay, but substituting in Haskell and C... actually, wait a minute. I know I've heard this before... ah yes, here: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky http://byfat.xxx/chomsky Okay, so that's only kinda what I'm saying... what would you think about this paragraph? > But from 50 years in this programming game, I have learned two things: (1) > I can ask friends who work in object oriented areas to explain it to me at > a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular > difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I > will come to understand it. Now functors, arrows, hylomorphisms, monads, > etc. --- even first-class functions, whom I knew and liked, and who was > somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't > understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand > can explain monads to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to > overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new > advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic > mutation, which has created a form of "programming paradigm" that is beyond procedural > programming, structured programming, etc., in depth and profundity; or > (b) ... I won't spell it out. You'd probably say "seriously, stop being an idiot. Haskell is hard, and strange, and weird, but it has value. If you like C just keep on writing C, no need to be such a jerk about it. But Haskell is for doing different kinds of programming than C."

w_t_payne 13y ago

Many "conspiracies" do seem to require implausible, superhuman feats of coordination driven by Machiavellian malfeasance. These can be dismissed as improbable. However, many horrible things happen in the world that are not driven by a plot, but by dumb nature, stupidity, or the conflux of human biological urges -- ill suited to a technologically advanced world. Such "emergent" threats deserve greater consideration; particularly if the theory renders them (at first glance) plausible.