What Hacker News says

nkurzMay 2019

It's a great quote, but having (tried) to read (some of) all of those authors (in English translation), I think Foucault is in a different class. I'd agree that the others are intentionally obscurantist, but Foucault is not. I'd put him at about the level of Chomsky himself --- complicated, possibly wrong, but insightful and striving for clarity.

"Discipline and Punishment" and "History of Sexuality" are short and clear. Foucault's basic idea of "power" is that one should pay less attention to the explanations and excuses that are given, and more attention to what actually happens. If despite their protestations, one side consistently ends up winning, and their opponents consistently end up losing, it's likely that they hold "power".

Which is to say, while you are welcome to skip Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and Kristeva, I think you should read Foucault.

thread

dmixDec 2013

I wish people would move beyond 1984 and quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment [1]. There is a much deeper-rooted problem in society than mass surveillance or militarization of police. It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance. We accept and welcome our controllers. Foucault wrote about the effects of prisoner mindset in society in the 1960-70s. Our subjugation and tolerance to authoritarianism is very widespread and not limited to just police.

We're not just afraid to be anti-authoritative, we're institutionalized since our birth in schools and the concept of control is in embedded in every aspect of life (such as in language found in politics, school work, or newspapers).

Mass-surveillance is just a more direct implementation of "panopticon" [2] applied to everyday life, existing at all times. Having committed a crime is no longer the requirement to be imprisoned, whether physically or mentally.

http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Birth-Prison-Vintage...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

thread

DiscourseFanMay 2023

So I mean, postmodernism is a pretty "diverse" field, and while there are some who would claim to be full relativists, they aren't usually taken very seriously.

What someone like Herbert Marcuse would claim is that there is something like a "definite negation," or Jacques Derrida would call a "trace;" that is, there, sitting behind every signifier (of de Saussure's structural linguistics) its negation of another signifier that defines its position in an ordered chain or a symbolic network. They would not argue that things are relative; rather, social life is regulated by these vast signifying networks that one becomes "subjectivated" in (begins to understand oneself as a subject), where one's "agency" also stands at the limits of this intelligibility: as they say, everything you "decide" is already pre-conscious; every notion of what is "possible," is limited by what is already "intelligible," i.e. what operates in the social-symbolic function as it, like an algorithm, constantly moves and exchanges its various symbolic orderings in what we call the "economy." To be a true agent means to do something which radically restructures this network and radically redefines all its terms: Foucault's "fearless speech," Badiou's "Event." The latter thinker actually explicitly rejects relativism (and is in some ways a platonist--actually many so-called "postmodern" thinkers, Whitehead among them, are considered platonists.)

The position you claim is from "post-modernism":

>"claims of truth are just assertions of power"

finds its origins in Nietzsche, who famously claimed that truth, morality, beauty, etc. were invented by the weak because they feared the powerful and they were jealous of the fact that they couldn't kill their enemies, eat fully, and have sex all the time (Master Morality, which was just doing whatever you wanted). So they rose up, took over, and invented these categories and systems of valuation in order to justify a new regime of power where nobody was able to do what they wanted, and everything was regulated by vast systems of control justified by these metaphysical notions (he refers to this as "Christian Morality.") He claims that Christian morality, after centuries of struggle, has finally won out in the Bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, but now "God" has been subordinated to "Science" while retaining all the metaphysical baggage of christianity "truth, beauty, morality," etc. This is from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, the argument from which was expanded in Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (the most widely read book from what most people would call "postmodernism").

>truth that is actually true, true in the old sense of corresponding to the reality of what is

The so-called "correspondence theory of truth" is considered a fallacy of the layman in academic philosophy. Truth has always been, in logic, a category: a value, specifically a boolean value. One can make claims about the structure and order of logic and the relation of that to psychological, social-processes (as Frege, Husserl, and many other "anti-psychologists" of the 19th and 20th centuries did); but to claim that language, a signifying act, somehow directly corresponds to the physical objects that it categorizes, can't really be valid: as Shakespeare said "a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." There is no reason why the words we use have any correspondence to experience--even if there is surely some reason why words can evoke experiences, emotions, like when one hears the name of a past-lover. But that can be attributed to what the "postmodernists" claim: the name evokes an entire symbolic structure and brings it to the surface of consciousness.

thread

throwawayjavaJan 2020

> ...we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened...

First, you're projecting.

Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".

Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.

> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.

This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.

The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.

And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.

Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.

You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.

thread

jseligerDec 2013

quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment

Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... .

It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance

Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect us, and because it's hard for one voter to fix the problem. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter is very good on this subject. Most people (and voters) don't even know how many Senators their state has, or their terms, let alone why complex subjects like privacy are important. Based on Caplan's book, I think ignorance is a more reasonable explanation than a fear of being anti-authoritarian or an institutionalized mindset.

thread