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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-y

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.

steveklabnik 12y ago
Discipline and Punish was my first introduction to any of this kind of thought, and it was great. Highly recommended.
- tatterdemalion 12y ago
  For me, coming to understand Foucault was like coming to understand metaprogramming. It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. It is so disappointing that there are people who think of themselves as "hackers" being dismissive of Foucault (and associated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari). (This is not so much a response to you as my desire to wax more about Foucault.)
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    Agreed, strongly. D&G are my favorites, actually, as is Deleuze on his own.
    - tatterdemalion 12y ago
      I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right. Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?
      - steveklabnik 12y ago
        > he was right. The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid." It mostly makes me smile. :) > Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...
        AnimalMuppet 12y ago
        Do you mean that you're getting rusty? ;-)
      - thwest 12y ago
        I found "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" to be a great antidote to the Neo-Reactionaries' take on the contemporary immanence of capital. I'm extremely torn between "The Coming Insurrection"s call for drop-out politics and Marxist production reforms.
      - defen 12y ago
        > I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.
  - mturmon 12y ago
    I like what you've said. Here's the connection I made between my technical knowledge and Foucault's school. A C.S. professor of mine, when lecturing on semantics, i.e. the interpretation of texts, be they intended for computers or humans, remarked that "means" is a three-place relation: R(a,b,c) === a means b to c That is, a tuple is in the relation if the text "a" means "b" to an interpreter "c". Typically, the "c" part is left out. But introducing it allows one to model subjectivity and interpretation, which is one way to think about what the poststructuralist intellectuals were getting at.
    - tr352 12y ago
      This is a common technique in conceptual analysis. It reminds me of Castelfranchi's theory of trust. While trust was often modeled as a two place relation (X trusts Y) he turned it into a five place relation (X trusts Y for task T useful for goal G in context C).
      - mturmon 12y ago
        Thank you so much for the pointer. I had not considered the connection of explicitly accounting for subjectivity in interpretation (for semantics) to (as in your example) the theories of agents and trust. And I've got to say, really taking this in (the importance of subjectivity and context) can help in real-world situations as well.
  - baddox 12y ago
    > It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. I know nothing about Foucault, but considering the praise he's getting on this thread, there must be a heck of a lot more to it than this, right?
    - tatterdemalion 12y ago
      Well obviously you cannot sum up the work of any thinker in 1 sentence. But Foucault is actually more of an historian than a philosopher & he provides excellent histories of how many notions that we usually hold to be natural or inevitable are circumstantial and were constructed surprisingly recently, and how the construction of these notions corresponds to the activities of power in our society. Also probably some portion of his work has been itself naturalized and will seem less novel now that we all live in a world where many people have read Foucault.
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    Yes, I would urge all people with great curiosity, observation skills and desire to experiment and improve to take part in reading philosophy. I only caution people to be careful about rockstar-ifying any single philosopher or group thereof. The more you read, the more you learn the shape of philosophy. While any one philosopher might have a lot to say, it's really only the summary of them that makes it truly useful. It's easy to have your mind blown by one revealing thought from a paragraph or a book, like watching a one-line program execute. It's when all of the thoughts are put together and exercised that philosophy acts like a well-architectured object being designed in a well-architected program running on a well-architected operating system running on well-architected hardware which was developed using a well-architected program running on a ... And as this article points out, various groups of political interest in reframing any single philosopher's viewpoint.
- jsl 12y ago
  D&P is good, but I'd suggest as a first read the first volume of the History of Sexuality. It's a more concise introduction to his thought on the role of power in formation of subjectivity, rather than as something that is top-down. I've seen too many beginners in Foucault get wrapped up in notions like the panopticon in D&P and miss more substantial elements of his thought. I'd also recommend his essays such as "What is Enlightenment?" for beginners (online: http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault.whatisenlightenment.en.html http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault....). Even though it may require a few reads, it helps to consider his thought in relationship to thinkers like Kant (who heavily influence linguists such as Chomsky, and Chomsky's view of human nature), and perhaps more importantly it indicates the important role that he considers power to have in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    Yeah, the History is a very common introduction too. And the first part of D&P can be... distracting, as one of your siblings mentions. I also think you're right about What is Enlightenment?, which is a favorite too. You're right that it's important to situate him in history, which this does do well. But then requires that you read some Kant...
- mturmon 12y ago
  I also associate Foucault most strongly with Discipline and Punish. But the reason, I confess, is the simply astonishing first pages of the book. For people who have not read it, I recommend it very highly as an example of forceful writing style: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html . (It's not for the squeamish, and not good while eating.)
  - tatterdemalion 12y ago
    Aha my private motive in recommending D&P is uncovered. I don't think it is possible to find a more memorable and convincing display of the radical shift in the conception of sovereignty than in the comparison of those two passages.
deleted 12y ago
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- tatterdemalion 12y ago
  http://thenewinquiry.com/news/2015/04/22/in-memory-chris-chitty/ http://thenewinquiry.com/news/2015/04/22/in-memory-chris-chi... :(
trevelyan 12y ago
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.
- Crito 12y ago
  My favourite account of Plato involves one of his alleged interactions with Diogenes. As told by wikipedia: > "When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition."
tome 12y ago
With due reverence to his genius, surely Shannon is not of the same class as Wittgenstein?
- yarrel 12y ago
  You're right, Wittgenstein is distinctly second-rate in comparison to Shannon.
  - tome 12y ago
    A comment perfectly in keeping with the edginess of this entire comment page :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cromwellian 12y ago
How does this differ from Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism (or the later variants of Pan Critical Rationalism)? Seems to me that the idea that there are no unquestionable authorities or axioms that can be used to justify truth and everything can be held up to critique is a much saner, and clearer version than some of the gobble-dy-gook in post modernism.
- thwest 12y ago
  Do you care to cite the supposed gobble-dy-gook in the GP's recommended 'Discipline and Punish'?
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    I don't know about Discipline and Punish specifically, but you can read Chomsky for a critique in general of Foucault, Lacan, etc In general I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible. Like I said, Popper's concept of critical rationalism predates Foucault and makes the argument far more straightforward and clearly. Here's what Chomsky had to say, who can say it far better than I: "Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these 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 Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, 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 it 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 "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out. Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames. "

steveklabnik 12y ago

Discipline and Punish was my first introduction to any of this kind of thought, and it was great. Highly recommended.

tatterdemalion 12y ago
For me, coming to understand Foucault was like coming to understand metaprogramming. It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. It is so disappointing that there are people who think of themselves as "hackers" being dismissive of Foucault (and associated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari). (This is not so much a response to you as my desire to wax more about Foucault.)
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Agreed, strongly. D&G are my favorites, actually, as is Deleuze on his own.
  - tatterdemalion 12y ago
    I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right. Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?
    - steveklabnik 12y ago
      > he was right. The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid." It mostly makes me smile. :) > Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...
      - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
        Do you mean that you're getting rusty? ;-)
    - thwest 12y ago
      I found "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" to be a great antidote to the Neo-Reactionaries' take on the contemporary immanence of capital. I'm extremely torn between "The Coming Insurrection"s call for drop-out politics and Marxist production reforms.
    - defen 12y ago
      > I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.
- mturmon 12y ago
  I like what you've said. Here's the connection I made between my technical knowledge and Foucault's school. A C.S. professor of mine, when lecturing on semantics, i.e. the interpretation of texts, be they intended for computers or humans, remarked that "means" is a three-place relation: R(a,b,c) === a means b to c That is, a tuple is in the relation if the text "a" means "b" to an interpreter "c". Typically, the "c" part is left out. But introducing it allows one to model subjectivity and interpretation, which is one way to think about what the poststructuralist intellectuals were getting at.
  - tr352 12y ago
    This is a common technique in conceptual analysis. It reminds me of Castelfranchi's theory of trust. While trust was often modeled as a two place relation (X trusts Y) he turned it into a five place relation (X trusts Y for task T useful for goal G in context C).
    - mturmon 12y ago
      Thank you so much for the pointer. I had not considered the connection of explicitly accounting for subjectivity in interpretation (for semantics) to (as in your example) the theories of agents and trust. And I've got to say, really taking this in (the importance of subjectivity and context) can help in real-world situations as well.
- baddox 12y ago
  > It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. I know nothing about Foucault, but considering the praise he's getting on this thread, there must be a heck of a lot more to it than this, right?
  - tatterdemalion 12y ago
    Well obviously you cannot sum up the work of any thinker in 1 sentence. But Foucault is actually more of an historian than a philosopher & he provides excellent histories of how many notions that we usually hold to be natural or inevitable are circumstantial and were constructed surprisingly recently, and how the construction of these notions corresponds to the activities of power in our society. Also probably some portion of his work has been itself naturalized and will seem less novel now that we all live in a world where many people have read Foucault.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  Yes, I would urge all people with great curiosity, observation skills and desire to experiment and improve to take part in reading philosophy. I only caution people to be careful about rockstar-ifying any single philosopher or group thereof. The more you read, the more you learn the shape of philosophy. While any one philosopher might have a lot to say, it's really only the summary of them that makes it truly useful. It's easy to have your mind blown by one revealing thought from a paragraph or a book, like watching a one-line program execute. It's when all of the thoughts are put together and exercised that philosophy acts like a well-architectured object being designed in a well-architected program running on a well-architected operating system running on well-architected hardware which was developed using a well-architected program running on a ... And as this article points out, various groups of political interest in reframing any single philosopher's viewpoint.
jsl 12y ago
D&P is good, but I'd suggest as a first read the first volume of the History of Sexuality. It's a more concise introduction to his thought on the role of power in formation of subjectivity, rather than as something that is top-down. I've seen too many beginners in Foucault get wrapped up in notions like the panopticon in D&P and miss more substantial elements of his thought. I'd also recommend his essays such as "What is Enlightenment?" for beginners (online: http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault.whatisenlightenment.en.html http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault....). Even though it may require a few reads, it helps to consider his thought in relationship to thinkers like Kant (who heavily influence linguists such as Chomsky, and Chomsky's view of human nature), and perhaps more importantly it indicates the important role that he considers power to have in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Yeah, the History is a very common introduction too. And the first part of D&P can be... distracting, as one of your siblings mentions. I also think you're right about What is Enlightenment?, which is a favorite too. You're right that it's important to situate him in history, which this does do well. But then requires that you read some Kant...
mturmon 12y ago
I also associate Foucault most strongly with Discipline and Punish. But the reason, I confess, is the simply astonishing first pages of the book. For people who have not read it, I recommend it very highly as an example of forceful writing style: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html . (It's not for the squeamish, and not good while eating.)
- tatterdemalion 12y ago
  Aha my private motive in recommending D&P is uncovered. I don't think it is possible to find a more memorable and convincing display of the radical shift in the conception of sovereignty than in the comparison of those two passages.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tatterdemalion 12y ago
http://thenewinquiry.com/news/2015/04/22/in-memory-chris-chitty/ http://thenewinquiry.com/news/2015/04/22/in-memory-chris-chi... :(

trevelyan 12y ago

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.

Crito 12y ago
My favourite account of Plato involves one of his alleged interactions with Diogenes. As told by wikipedia: > "When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition."

tome 12y ago

With due reverence to his genius, surely Shannon is not of the same class as Wittgenstein?

yarrel 12y ago
You're right, Wittgenstein is distinctly second-rate in comparison to Shannon.
- tome 12y ago
  A comment perfectly in keeping with the edginess of this entire comment page :)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

cromwellian 12y ago

How does this differ from Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism (or the later variants of Pan Critical Rationalism)? Seems to me that the idea that there are no unquestionable authorities or axioms that can be used to justify truth and everything can be held up to critique is a much saner, and clearer version than some of the gobble-dy-gook in post modernism.

thwest 12y ago
Do you care to cite the supposed gobble-dy-gook in the GP's recommended 'Discipline and Punish'?
- cromwellian 12y ago
  I don't know about Discipline and Punish specifically, but you can read Chomsky for a critique in general of Foucault, Lacan, etc In general I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible. Like I said, Popper's concept of critical rationalism predates Foucault and makes the argument far more straightforward and clearly. Here's what Chomsky had to say, who can say it far better than I: "Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these 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 Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, 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 it 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 "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out. Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames. "