Discipline and Punish

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1. wolvesechoesApr 2026
   Good article, but I cannot help myself to not bring up lack of appreciation for humanities in tech circles.

   Article mentions Searle and Chalmers, but we literally have at least two centuries of critical thought that expressed itself through Nietzsche, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, Debord, Baudrillard, and many others (obviously I am mentioning those I am most familiar with). If you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, you'll find that slop isn't something that had arisen in last few years. If you read Discipline and Punish you'll find that surveillance and coercion isn't a problem that was born with internet or Palantir. And Baudrillard had few words to say about simulation and reality.

   But STEM crowds for decades cried we don't need such thinking, and science and technology are all that we need. Historians, philosophers, culture critics etc. supposedly have nothing to offer us. Who needs to read Marx or Marcuse if sci-fi novels offer all you need, maybe sprinkled with some PG essays and blogpost from you favorite tech blogger, and we happen to live in the best of possible worlds with the best of possible economic systems.

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2. PaulHouleNov 2025
   Foucault? In my mind he's a conservative. His early books (Discipline and Punish and Birth of the Clinic) are brilliant and cover the ground that anarchists like Murray Bookchin do, debunking them all the way. Clinic also explains why health care is never going to seem affordable because, even if Bill Gates could afford CABG surgery and you couldn't, he's got to get millions of people to get the surgery so that the techniques are developed enough that the survival odds are good.
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3. PaulHouleJul 2025
   One way to think about feminism is as a literary genre in the sense that texts are frozen in amber in the library at your nearest Uni.

   It follows the same track as anything (e.g. Twitter) in that the first feminists come across as much better than later feminists -- early adopters are "better" than people who come late, plus groups develop pernicious tendencies over time.

   Up to 1970 or so feminists writers are elite, but soon you start to get "zines" where women "bitch" about their problems after getting a good dose of Trotskyism (and later Americanized French Theory [1]) to derange their ability to communicate. By the late 1980s, realizing that they're not speaking to young women, they start to pander to young women so the mainstream is stuck acknowledging the "empowerment" of being an OnlyFans performers but not recognizing the downsides. There has been a conservative countercurrent of plain-speaking academics such as Eva Illouz but way too many academics speak to each other in the obscure gallicized language of American academia.

   [1] Oddly, French Theory is big in Japan like Freud is big in Japan, not just among academics but in wider popular literature. Translations from French run into the odd problem that quotidian (everyday) words like spectacle (show) and ensemble (group, as in a rock band or a meal bundle at a fast food restaurant) are $10 words in English. The writing and translation of early Foucault are great (drop what you're doing an read Discipline and Punish or Birth of the Clinic) and I've got a soft spot for Baudrillard between System of Objects and Simulacra and Simulation not to mention Alain Badiou's perfection of Derrida's strategy of Being and Event which spoke to me in my Ontology2 phase, but so much of it is unreadable. On the other hand, Japanese books like Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki make Lacan almost make sense.

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4. PaulHouleJul 2025
   Nice! I wouldn’t describe the early Foucault as ‘rebarbative’, the common translations of Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish are a pleasure to read although the volumes of The Uses of Pleasure are not —- he had a little too much exposure to Derrida. [1]

   But I’ve been saying that LLMs would bring a structuralist revival here for years, long before people started saying that on Just Wrong and we are seeing real ‘authors’ pick it up.

   As I see it, the idea that ‘X has a structure of a language’ collapsed when Noam Chomsky introduced the idea of poverty of the stimulus (you aren’t exposed to enough language to learn grammar from first principles) and the further failure of Chomsky’s theory to be the basis of language technology (40 years post Zork we have Inform 7 and Attempto Controlled English)

   We were all sure the language instinct was a peripheral added to an animal that already had a theory of mind and all that…. But all of a sudden you could train an LLM on a pile of text and it did what Chomsky said was impossible and all of a sudden language has the structure of a language and structuralism is back baby!

   [1] Hate Derrida? Try Badiou. He plays the same game but with impeccable precision, you can’t ever say that he doesn’t understand the texts that he deconstructs and boy does that make some people mad…

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5. temeyaJan 2024
   While Michel Foucault sometimes gets a bad rep, he does actually talk about this in length in his book "Discipline and Punish (1975)" [0], in which the prison ends up becoming the Blueprint for other spaces such as the school, the barracks, the hospital and the factory/workplace. While dense, I would still recommend the text.

   [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

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6. anigbrowlDec 2022
   If you're interested in the social history aspect of this then you should probably read Foucault's Discipline and Punish, a short book which examines the tension between different organizational models for society and.
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