7 ms·

That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van R

by rolux 13y ago

That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument. To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc). Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.

pistle 13y ago
Foucault is SmallTalk. Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice. Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation." That's your counter-argument?
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  If you're not familiar with the subject matter, it sounds just as odd as "Oh I love _why so I use hpricot instead of Nokogiri to parse my XML." Every discipline has technical terminology. It always sounds weird to those who aren't involved. Disclaimer: I'm moderately obsessed with Deleuze.
- eseehausen 13y ago
  This sort cherry-picking of "obtuse" quotes to attack high-level theory is pretty absurd. It's equivalent to somebody from the humanities putting down this formula: Y = λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)) and saying "I have difficulty understanding this, ergo computer science is absurd nonsense."
  - philwelch 13y ago
    And if "theory" or whatever the fuck you English majors call it were mathematically rigorous you'd have a point.
    - thenmar 13y ago
      I think you should apologize for making this post. There are a lot of important things that aren't mathematically rigorous but are nevertheless worth understanding.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        If you're making grand opaque abstractions without applying some form of logical rigor, how can you be sure you're saying anything that's true and meaningful? I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
        eseehausen 13y ago
        And yet, Wittgenstein goes on to write texts that are central pillars of contemporary theory. He also saw that laying out everything you can say in purely logical terms leaves a lot off the table.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      ... and a critique of that style of 'rigor' is a large part of 'whatever the fuck' they're talking about.
    - eseehausen 13y ago
      There are many things in this world/levels of perspective that benefit from a non-mathematically rigorous analysis- up to and including the question "what is the benefit of rigorous mathematical analysis". That doesn't mean they don't have their own kind of rigor or that you should be able to understand them right away without any background knowledge. The attitude you have is shared by folks in the humanities who think that because they're experts in their field, they should be experts in everything, but luckily, human knowledge is broad and diverse, and there's no single master key.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Foucault is SmallTalk. Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice. I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time. (And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day). >That's your counter-argument? No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn. In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not. What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).
  - Perceval 13y ago
    Calling Deleuze lucid is the opposite of the truth: his use of language is obfuscatory and arcane.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Deleuze by himself is actually very straightforward, I bet you're speaking of his work with Guattari.
md224 13y ago
Speaking of control, I think an interesting way to conceptualize what's happening here is a cybernetic/organicist model (a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hobbes). The nation-state can be thought of as a superorganism, and this requires complex systems of feedback and control. We have resource inputs, which are processed via the churn of economic activity (this is analogous to cellular respiration). This activity sustains the citizens (cells) while also providing resources via taxes to the government (the executive control / brain / etc). The government, in turn, uses those resources to sustain itself and exert control over the body-state, as well as powering the police/military for internal and external defense (somewhat analogous to the immune system). So this is all a very complicated machine, the nation-state feeding off resources and in turn providing for its own sustenance and protection. It is, as Hobbes noted, basically a giant form of life. Of course, this idea can be taken much further (the NSA is essentially a somatosensory system) but I'll just leave it at that for now.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  You might enjoy "Protocol: how control exists after decentralization" by Galloway. A lot of it is very similar to this, building on top of Deleuze's "Postscript."
  - md224 13y ago
    Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.
joe_the_user 13y ago
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc). I know that's satisfying to some people. But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace? To come back the original article, how the heck does "everything is power" illuminate a situation of Campus Security are using a fricken armored personnel carrier when their job is stopping underaged kids from drinking???
- scarecrowbob 13y ago
  "But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?" Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens? Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.
  - falcolas 13y ago
    > how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens? Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower. No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).

by rolux 13y ago

pistle 13y ago

Foucault is SmallTalk. Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice. Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation." That's your counter-argument?

steveklabnik 13y ago
If you're not familiar with the subject matter, it sounds just as odd as "Oh I love _why so I use hpricot instead of Nokogiri to parse my XML." Every discipline has technical terminology. It always sounds weird to those who aren't involved. Disclaimer: I'm moderately obsessed with Deleuze.
eseehausen 13y ago
This sort cherry-picking of "obtuse" quotes to attack high-level theory is pretty absurd. It's equivalent to somebody from the humanities putting down this formula: Y = λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)) and saying "I have difficulty understanding this, ergo computer science is absurd nonsense."
- philwelch 13y ago
  And if "theory" or whatever the fuck you English majors call it were mathematically rigorous you'd have a point.
  - thenmar 13y ago
    I think you should apologize for making this post. There are a lot of important things that aren't mathematically rigorous but are nevertheless worth understanding.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      If you're making grand opaque abstractions without applying some form of logical rigor, how can you be sure you're saying anything that's true and meaningful? I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
      - eseehausen 13y ago
        And yet, Wittgenstein goes on to write texts that are central pillars of contemporary theory. He also saw that laying out everything you can say in purely logical terms leaves a lot off the table.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    ... and a critique of that style of 'rigor' is a large part of 'whatever the fuck' they're talking about.
  - eseehausen 13y ago
    There are many things in this world/levels of perspective that benefit from a non-mathematically rigorous analysis- up to and including the question "what is the benefit of rigorous mathematical analysis". That doesn't mean they don't have their own kind of rigor or that you should be able to understand them right away without any background knowledge. The attitude you have is shared by folks in the humanities who think that because they're experts in their field, they should be experts in everything, but luckily, human knowledge is broad and diverse, and there's no single master key.
coldtea 13y ago
>Foucault is SmallTalk. Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice. I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time. (And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day). >That's your counter-argument? No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn. In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not. What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).
- Perceval 13y ago
  Calling Deleuze lucid is the opposite of the truth: his use of language is obfuscatory and arcane.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Deleuze by himself is actually very straightforward, I bet you're speaking of his work with Guattari.

md224 13y ago

Speaking of control, I think an interesting way to conceptualize what's happening here is a cybernetic/organicist model (a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hobbes). The nation-state can be thought of as a superorganism, and this requires complex systems of feedback and control. We have resource inputs, which are processed via the churn of economic activity (this is analogous to cellular respiration). This activity sustains the citizens (cells) while also providing resources via taxes to the government (the executive control / brain / etc). The government, in turn, uses those resources to sustain itself and exert control over the body-state, as well as powering the police/military for internal and external defense (somewhat analogous to the immune system). So this is all a very complicated machine, the nation-state feeding off resources and in turn providing for its own sustenance and protection. It is, as Hobbes noted, basically a giant form of life. Of course, this idea can be taken much further (the NSA is essentially a somatosensory system) but I'll just leave it at that for now.

steveklabnik 13y ago
You might enjoy "Protocol: how control exists after decentralization" by Galloway. A lot of it is very similar to this, building on top of Deleuze's "Postscript."
- md224 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.

joe_the_user 13y ago

To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc). I know that's satisfying to some people. But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace? To come back the original article, how the heck does "everything is power" illuminate a situation of Campus Security are using a fricken armored personnel carrier when their job is stopping underaged kids from drinking???

scarecrowbob 13y ago
"But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?" Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens? Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.
- falcolas 13y ago
  > how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens? Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower. No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).