If Mort Divine ruled the world

[rms]

Headline made me lol

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/glow-season-2-marc-maron-alison-brie

 

[Dak]

Sorry for the delay in responding, was in some intensive training.

Madness and Civilization is a study of the history of madness as an idea (a truncation of History of Madness). It's neither a defense nor a promotion of mythical imagery or whatever; it's simply a work that traces how society's notion of insanity changed over time.

Peterson's writing isn't a critical assessment of mythical imagery in society. It takes that imagery as a means to interpret some golden rule of social organization. It's basically like using the Bible to critique social behavior without asking oneself why/how/when the Bible was written in the first place.

The comparison was in that Foucault found what he wanted to find, and from single and/or dubious sources.

I find it funny that people who dislike critical theory take Foucault's comment as a serious censure of French academic writing around 1970. Never do we consider that Foucault was doing what Foucault did so often in other interviews and conversations: joking. I can just imagine a scenario in which Searle laments the odd style of French theory, and Foucault sarcastically saying "Well, you know, if you're not ten percent incomprehensible, you won't get published!" And knowing Searle, that cranky bastard would jump at any chance to slander continental theory.

But ultimately, whatever Foucault meant is beside the point. Writing falls in the purview of all who consider themselves publishing academics. No one faults Wittgenstein for his often idiosyncratic and aphoristic style in the Philosophical Investigations. Furthermore, competent and clear grammar isn't absolute or fixed; it evolves according to those reading. Different disciplines promote different kinds of rhetoric. When I read Derrida, I often find it clearer and more cogent than the proclaimed mathematical writing of positivist philosophers. Foucault and Derrida actually didn't like each other very much and had heated arguments. Foucault's interest in history and the treatment of bodies (biopower) aligns nicely with the concerns of Chomsky and Searle, and his later work in particular was quite liberalist in appearance. By contrast, Derrida was interested in language and meaning (not linguistics per se), and how writing itself often betrays the order it seeks to establish.

Critics of Derrida so often make the claim that all he wanted to do was dismantle the system or some such--break down social hierarchies, disrupt language, blah blah blah. This makes Derrida out to be some clandestine political activist, which is quite far from the truth. Derrida was fascinated by the discontinuities that already exist in language, not with advocating for discontinuity. He was fascinated in how, for example, the Greek word pharmakon meant both medicinal drug and poison/toxin, and how this took shape in Plato's writing. His essay "Plato's Pharmacy" is one of the most fascinating treatments of Greek philosophy that I've ever read, and it's not political at all! It's simply a study of language (and of Plato's suspicion toward writing).

Sure, he might have been joking, but it would be funny because it's almost certainly true. While I appreciate an explanation of differences between Foucault and Derrida, these explanations don't really answer my question. Maybe the work done can't be understood in terms of competencies.....yet there must be some idea of competency at least, because Searle isn't/wasn't going to be published in a Continental journal even if he bothered to try.

They're almost not even trying to hide it.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-and-build-wall-make-america-safe-again

They don't have to hide it anymore. It's what a lot of people want, sadly.

I find it important to recall Peter Watts's quote on Ray Bradbury:

"One of the things we tend forget about Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 is that the banning of books was not imposed against the will of the people by some tyrannical authority. The grass roots in that dystopian novel didn't want to read."

I'm a bit confused as to what about any of this was hidden. Trump opened up with Build the Wall, and it was his most popular campaign platform (although Lock Her Up came pretty close later on). Furthermore, I fail to see the tyranny in border enforcement.

 

[Dak]

 

[Mort Divine]

It isn't the illegal immigration or building of a wall that I was pointing out there, but the rather obvious neo-Nazi parallels.

We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children

Both starting out the same, both 14 words. Not enough for you? Could be coincidence?

On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.

Who uses 88 as a denominator? No one really. 88 is one of the more obvious neo-Nazi symbols though, 88=HH and all.

Both could have been coincidences on their own, but together? Nah. All dogs in the DC Metro area can hear those whistles loud and clear.

 

[Dak]

It isn't the illegal immigration or building of a wall that I was pointing out there, but the rather obvious neo-Nazi parallels.

Both starting out the same, both 14 words. Not enough for you? Could be coincidence?

Who uses 88 as a denominator? No one really. 88 is one of the more obvious neo-Nazi symbols though, 88=HH and all.

Both could have been coincidences on their own, but together? Nah. All dogs in the DC Metro area can hear those whistles loud and clear.

Now who looks like a crazy conspiracy theorist? Of course, when you do it it's not a conspiracy theory. It's REAL.

I remember when you thought it was absolutely absurd that there was any deeper meaning to the constant use of the same occult symbology in pop music, and said if anything it was simply trolling people like me. Well, consider yourself trolled.

 

[Mort Divine]

It isn't a conspiracy theory when the entire administration has been furthering the white supremacist agenda.

 

[Dak]

It isn't a conspiracy theory when the entire administration has been furthering the white supremacist agenda.

Like I said. It's not conspiracy theory when you do it.

Protecting the border is a basic, fundamental function of a national government, and enforcing immigration laws is a part of that.

I wonder how you're squaring the circle of a white nationalist agenda depending on a majority of Hispanic border patrol agents.

 

[Einherjar86]

The comparison was in that Foucault found what he wanted to find, and from single and/or dubious sources.

I don't consider this a serious criticism (and there's no evidence you can appeal to, since it demands that you access the author's intent). You could make this claim about any argument concerning any topic, regardless of methodology or data used. Comparing Foucault's and Peterson's methods, only one is truly critical. That's where I draw the distinction.

Sure, he might have been joking, but it would be funny because it's almost certainly true. While I appreciate an explanation of differences between Foucault and Derrida, these explanations don't really answer my question. Maybe the work done can't be understood in terms of competencies.....yet there must be some idea of competency at least, because Searle isn't/wasn't going to be published in a Continental journal even if he bothered to try.

Searle could publish wherever he wants to. He published in Critical Inquiry at the height of the poststructuralist rage; so despite what you think, the disparate writing and rhetorical styles of these thinkers didn't keep them from publishing in the same venues.

Competency goes through phases. There was a time when the rhetorical styles of French theory were in vogue, and people worked to be able to read that writing. In today's academic market, that kind of writing is no longer viewed as acceptable; but that doesn't mean those outside a particular discipline don't need to work to understand the writing. There's no such thing as unadulterated (or style-less) writing; that was the fantasy of the positivists, who ended up writing themselves in circles to try to try forge this fantasy (and the death knell of positivism was Wittgenstein's Tractatus).

There are passages in Derrida's work that aren't only clear, they're beautiful. So I don't agree with your position.

I'm a bit confused as to what about any of this was hidden. Trump opened up with Build the Wall, and it was his most popular campaign platform (although Lock Her Up came pretty close later on). Furthermore, I fail to see the tyranny in border enforcement.

I don't think it ever was hidden. Trump's never bothered to hide anything.

Also, it isn't tyranny (yet). For now it's just terrorism.

 

[Dak]

Comparing Foucault's and Peterson's methods, only one is truly critical. That's where I draw the distinction.

Being critical is in the eye of the beholder I guess, and usually comes with a pretty low bar. Foucault was as self-serving as any other thinker.

Searle could publish wherever he wants to. He published in Critical Inquiry at the height of the poststructuralist rage; so despite what you think, the disparate writing and rhetorical styles of these thinkers didn't keep them from publishing in the same venues.

Competency goes through phases. There was a time when the rhetorical styles of French theory were in vogue, and people worked to be able to read that writing. In today's academic market, that kind of writing is no longer viewed as acceptable; but that doesn't mean those outside a particular discipline don't need to work to understand the writing. There's no such thing as unadulterated (or style-less) writing; that was the fantasy of the positivists, who ended up writing themselves in circles to try to try forge this fantasy (and the death knell of positivism was Wittgenstein's Tractatus).

There are passages in Derrida's work that aren't only clear, they're beautiful. So I don't agree with your position.

My position was merely to ask what the competency or competencies in Critical Theory are/is. JP has been rightly criticized by steppingoutside of his competency, but it's an unfair fight when his opponents don't even have any defined competency to step out of. They just fire rhetorical bullets about whatever suits their fancy under the guise of "being critical".

For now it's just terrorism.

Is "terrorism" the new "nazi" or "hitler"? As in, people or policy or enforcement of such that I don't like is [this thing]?

 

[Einherjar86]

Being critical is in the eye of the beholder I guess, and usually comes with a pretty low bar. Foucault was as self-serving as any other thinker.

That's my point. If all thinkers are self-serving, then what's the point of the accusation?

My position was merely to ask what the competency or competencies in Critical Theory are/is. JP has been rightly criticized by steppingoutside of his competency, but it's an unfair fight when his opponents don't even have any defined competency to step out of. They just fire rhetorical bullets about whatever suits their fancy under the guise of "being critical".

I already listed Derrida's and Foucault's specific competencies on the previous page. "Philosophy of language" and "history of ideas" are competencies.

Is "terrorism" the new "nazi" or "hitler"? As in, people or policy or enforcement of such that I don't like is [this thing]?

That's always what it is, isn't it? The left just doesn't like things, and so it becomes terrorism.

I think the forced separation of families seeking asylum is terrorism. But that's just me.

 

[Dak]

That's my point. If all thinkers are self-serving, then what's the point of the accusation?

But here specifically Foucault's history was roundly criticized as almost grossly inaccurate. The attempt to jam square pegs into round holes in on this subject is easily understood as a not-all-that subtle defense of homosexuality, which at the time remained classified as a mental illness.

I already listed Derrida's and Foucault's specific competencies on the previous page. "Philosophy of language" and "history of ideas" are competencies.

Ok, I'll grant philosophy of language, but "History of ideas" is incredibly nebulous. We've already seen Foucault's history chops are poor, and that he was never trained as a historian. Rather as a Freudian and in philosophy.

I think the forced separation of families seeking asylum is terrorism. But that's just me.

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parents

There are also some cases in which immigrant families are being separated after coming to ports of entry and presenting themselves for asylum — thus following US law. It’s not clear how often this is happening, though it’s definitely not as widespread as separation of families who’ve crossed illegally. Trump administration officials claim that they only separate families at ports of entry if they are worried about the safety of the child, or if they don’t think there’s enough evidence that the adult is really the child’s legal custodian.

So maybe this happens, but if anything we can blame this on the stretched manpower and resources on the southern border due to cartel and illegal immigrant activity. Bureaucracy is inefficient enough in even optimal conditions. I'd point out again that the majority of BP agents are Hispanic. People who've never spent time around the border or haven't looked into the statistics act like there's a bunch of skinheads driving up and down the border in redneck trucks flying Confederate flags shooting or seizing everything that moves. Instead, it's a bunch of Hispanics in green uniforms driving government pickups and vans. These persons also run checkpoints on US roads demanding ID from citizens of all colors and professions. I had to show ID many times, and had my car selected for a drug scan a couple of times, despite having a DoD base sticker on my windshield and being very obviously white.

Considering what are claimed to be the conditions of both home countries and the networks which ferry persons north, being in these detention centers may indeed be a positive outcome for the children. They could be being saved from traffickers in any number of ways.

Illegal immigration is bad for the immigrants and bad for the US. Increasing the unpleasantness of the process acts as a "Con" in the pro/con calculation potential illegals must go through implicitly or explicitly. Decreasing the welfare state and ending the drug war would also change the calculation.

 

[Einherjar86]

But here specifically Foucault's history was roundly criticized as almost grossly inaccurate. The attempt to jam square pegs into round holes in on this subject is easily understood as a not-all-that subtle defense of homosexuality, which at the time remained classified as a mental illness.

How was his work "grossly inaccurate"??? If anything, there were questionable moments, but nothing even remotely close to a "grossly inaccurate" study.

Also, the last I remember you linked a SSC piece that criticized Foucault's reference to the ship of fools, which I then corrected.

Ok, I'll grant philosophy of language, but "History of ideas" is incredibly nebulous. We've already seen Foucault's history chops are poor, and that he was never trained as a historian. Rather as a Freudian and in philosophy.

History of ideas is a legitimate discipline. Additionally, this was a major part of Foucault's education and comprised the thesis he wrote to earn his doctorate (i.e. his History of Madness).

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parents

Citing the legality and/or practicality of what they're doing doesn't convince me it isn't terrorism.

I also don't think it's a bunch of skinheads on power trips or whatnot. I know that a lot of border patrol agents are Latino and Hispanic. This has no bearing on what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter who's doing it; what matters is what's being done.

I don't think policing the border is an easy job, and I don't think it shouldn't be done. I adamantly refuse to believe that it can't be done civilly.

 

[Dak]

How was his work "grossly inaccurate"??? If anything, there were questionable moments, but nothing even remotely close to a "grossly inaccurate" study.

Also, the last I remember you linked a SSC piece that criticized Foucault's reference to the ship of fools, which I then corrected.

History of ideas is a legitimate discipline. Additionally, this was a major part of Foucault's education and comprised the thesis he wrote to earn his doctorate (i.e. his History of Madness).

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2015/04/foucault-on-history-of-madness-critique.html

Here's one rundown of other issues, and then the conclusion:

People in the past were just incredibly ignorant about many things, and their science was weak. They made bad mistakes. We can easily apply this to the history of infectious disease, cancer and all other maladies from which human beings suffer. The fact that different ages classified diseases in different ways from us and had different explanations and cures for them hardly proves that modern scientific medicine is just a “narrative” or “social construct,” or that it has no strong claim to coming closer and closer to objective truth about disease.

I will agree that, in terms of mental disorders, there is some sociopolitical pressure in terms of what deviance is labeled a disorder (homosexuality being a salient example here, and pretty clearly Foucault's axe for grinding). But overall I agree with the quoted conclusion. Foucault's history is bad, and his conclusion predetermined.

Citing the legality and/or practicality of what they're doing doesn't convince me it isn't terrorism.

I also don't think it's a bunch of skinheads on power trips or whatnot. I know that a lot of border patrol agents are Latino and Hispanic. This has no bearing on what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter who's doing it; what matters is what's being done.

I don't think policing the border is an easy job, and I don't think it shouldn't be done. I adamantly refuse to believe that it can't be done civilly.

Well there's can and then there's can. I can train to be an olympic athlete, but I really can't. All resources are finite. Knowledge is imperfect. People are fallible. Rejecting an asylum seeker, or separating people arriving at the border under questionable circumstances is no where near the level incivility that is normally ascribed as "terrorism". There's been a recent study and subsequent swarm of associated writeups about how our perceptions of phenomena attempt to maintain consistency in rates of identification, with the outcome being that regardless of improvement in situations, we simply relabel things to maintain the prior base rates. So we wind up with things like not making eye contact being an aggression, and a slightly-worse than DMV-like experience being "terrorism".

 

[Oblivious Maximus]

Oh dang: https://penthouse.com/pages/asia-argento/Toxic-Femininity.php

 

[Einherjar86]

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2015/04/foucault-on-history-of-madness-critique.html

Here's one rundown of other issues, and then the conclusion:

I will agree that, in terms of mental disorders, there is some sociopolitical pressure in terms of what deviance is labeled a disorder (homosexuality being a salient example here, and pretty clearly Foucault's axe for grinding). But overall I agree with the quoted conclusion. Foucault's history is bad, and his conclusion predetermined.

I don't know why I keep bothering with this, but you're not doing your homework. Have you ever bothered to look up the rebuttals to Midelfort's work? Hell, I've educated you on Foucault's use of the "ship of fools" motif, yet you still trumpet around like it's an example of his being historically inaccurate. Read up on the criticism surrounding the work and the skeptical reception of it instead of just consuming wholesale the things that reaffirm your suspicions. That's bad scholarship.

Read, for instance, Colin Gordon's close treatment of the "misreadings" of Foucault by historians. Read what he says about the ship of fools:

Foucault, of course, knew and said that the literary ‘ship of fools’ of Brant’s poem and Bosch’s picture were allegories and not transcriptions from contemporary social reality. He did not say that there existed medieval social practices resembling a literal actualization of Brant’s or Bosch’s image: none of the evidence he presents is taken as documenting the existence of boats entirely occupied or manned by the insane, navigating seas or rivers of Europe at will or at random. What Foucault is saying, by saying that there were actual ships of fools in the Middle Ages, is that some mad people travelled, for various reasons, in boats along European rivers in the course of the Middle Ages. Some were being got rid of by towns which had expelled them, or sent back to their own; others (very probably, to judge from Foucault’s data, the most numerous category) were pilgrims journeying to shrines reputed to cure madness.

Midelfort thinks that Foucault wildly over-estimates the former categories of insane voyagers, since the three individual cases of riverborne transportations which Foucault cites apparently turn out to be the only ones ever known to have occurred. Foucault certainly seems to have thought there were more, and that his handful of known cases were samples of a more frequent practice, though (to reiterate a point) he does not say that it was a systematic or universal one, and in the case of Nuremberg he suggests it was relatively short-lived. On Foucault’s own showing, it is manifestly dubious exactly how ‘often’ Rhineland cities ‘must’ have found insane passengers disembarking on their quays. This ‘must’ is probably one of the kind which actually (rather as with Megill’s ‘sans doute’) conveys a less than apodictic certainty; there are many notes of tentativeness in the course of these few pages.

If Midelfort is right and (as every subsequent commentator appears to take for granted) his archival searches conclusive and exhaustive, then Foucault made a wong inference, and, incidentally but interestingly, the secondary nineteenth-century sources that Foucault used here would seem to have been more impressively thorough and exhaustive than Foucault himself possibly supposed.

Where Foucault is far less evidently off-target is on the matter of his other category of data, the pilgrimages of the insane, the ‘highly symbolic’ boats of mad persons en route to the indubitably real and frequented pilgrimage shrines of Larchant, Gournay, Besançon and Gheel. One may indeed concede to Midelfort that they did not go alone, or unsupervised, or only by river, or only in the Middle Ages. Still, they did go, they were real, and they seem to have been quite numerous. Midelfort’s 1980 paper does at one point—as LaCapra says—advert to their existence, but he unfortunately fails there to advert to any possible connection between their existence and Foucault’s text.

It may reasonably be said that Foucault, writing at the extreme initial margin of his theme and period, elaborates his material with a certain degree of poetic licence, at times blurring together the possible symbolic meanings of material practices and cultural motifs. Maher and Maher show how this led to enthusiastically over-the-top retellings of his story by anti-psychiatric readers, some of which Maher and Maher proceed to read back into Foucault himself (1982:751 ff.). Foucault’s actual ships of fools are (a rhetorician would say) a slightly hyperbolic usage of the latter term. But this does not mean, as Megill contends, that Foucault’s text is in some sense being radically ambiguous about the mad in the Middle Ages. Foucault was not saying something ambiguous, he was saying that something was ambiguous, or ‘liminal’: namely, the cultural and symbolic status of madness in late medieval society.

a slightly-worse than DMV-like experience being "terrorism".

I sometimes forget how differently you and I see things. Let's not talk about this anymore.

 

[Dak]

I don't know why I keep bothering with this, but you're not doing your homework. Have you ever bothered to look up the rebuttals to Midelfort's work? Hell, I've educated you on Foucault's use of the "ship of fools" motif, yet you still trumpet around like it's an example of his being historically inaccurate. Read up on the criticism surrounding the work and the skeptical reception of it instead of just consuming wholesale the things that reaffirm your suspicions. That's bad scholarship.

Read, for instance, Colin Gordon's close treatment of the "misreadings" of Foucault by historians. Read what he says about the ship of fools:

Well by all accounts Gordon is an apologist.

Gary Gutting is charitable to Foucault:
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/I'mnotcrazy!/foucaultmadness.pdf

What, then, should we conclude about what we might now, not entirely facetiously, describe as Foucault's Die Phdnomenologie des kranken Geistes. Granted, as I have just been arguing, that it is history, is it good or bad history? The easy answer is that it is good idealist history but bad empiricist history. That, however, is too easy, since a schema of historical interpretation may be so empirically deficient that even its most ingenious and exciting speculations are not worth pursuing. (In the same way, an empirically impeccable account may be so devoid of interpretative interest as to be hardly worth an historian's yawn.)
This, I think, is as far as philosophical kibitzing can take the discussion of Foucault's history of madness. I have argued that there is no good reason to place Histoire de la folie entirely outside the domain of history, immune to the critical norms of historiography. I have also maintained that neither of the two most important historical critiques of Foucault shows that his work is bad history. Midelfort's apparently decisive criticisms are mostly based on misunderstandings of Foucault's views. Porter's critique of Foucault's central views on confinement raises an important empirical challenge, but does not, in itself, undermine the interpretative power of Foucault's idealist history. So far there have been no decisive tests of the fruitfulness of Foucault's complex interpretative framework. What is still needed, it seems to me, is an assessment of his overall picture of Classical madness through detailed deployments of its specific interpretative categories. Is, for example, Jan Goldstein right in her suggestion that historians of the Enlightenment should pay more attention to Foucault's idea of a tension in the Classical experience of madness between man as a juridical subject and man as a social being? How much explanatory power is there in Foucault's claim that Classical confinement involved a reduction of all sexual offenses to the norms of bourgeois morality? What level of understanding can we reach by developing his account of the religious significance of Classical madness? To what extent is the nature of nineteenth-century psychiatry illuminated by thinking of it as constructed from the polar Classical conceptions of madness as innocent animality and as moral fault? The issue of Foucault's status as a historian of madness should remain open until historians have posed and answered questions such as these.

What I take away from this is maybe he had a couple of interesting observations, but engaged in a lot of unnecessary an unempirical writing and rhetoric in the process. That was my take after reading Madness more or less anyway.

On Midelfort separately, it looks like a motte-and-bailey tactic of argument https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey. Foucault advances strong position with scant or false evidence, is called on it, and then he (or apologists) retreats to only talking of ideas.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well by all accounts Gordon is an apologist.

Gary Gutting is charitable to Foucault:
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/I'mnotcrazy!/foucaultmadness.pdf

By your account Gordon is an apologist. All Gutting says is that he bucks the consensus.

What I take away from this is maybe he had a couple of interesting observations, but engaged in a lot of unnecessary an unempirical writing and rhetoric in the process. That was my take after reading Madness more or less anyway.

Foucault's writings aren't empirical in the first place. He's only tangentially referring to the actual treatment of real bodies in the real world. His primary focus is the representation of ideas--hence "historian of ideas." The fact that Foucault made inferences based on his readings of certain texts are just that: inferences. Inferences can be incorrect, but they're not the primary substance of an argument. When Foucault writes about the Ship of Fools, he mentions a few instances in which the literary trope appears to have become reality, and suggests that it may have happened even more. People like Midelfort criticize this comment as Foucault arguing that "ships of fools" were a common, actual institutional practice. But this isn't what Foucault is saying at all. It's not up for debate. Read the prose, it's not what he says. He never claims it.

All Foucault says is that it's likely there were more instances than the three or so documented cases. Whether that's true or not has no bearing on his argument, because that's not what he's interested in. He's interested in what the representation (i.e. discursive) of ideas says about them. That's the philosopher and critical theorist in him. If you don't see that as legitimate or valuable, then that's fine. But you're still misrepresenting him.

 

[Dak]

By your account Gordon is an apologist. All Gutting says is that he bucks the consensus.

Foucault's writings aren't empirical in the first place. He's only tangentially referring to the actual treatment of real bodies in the real world. His primary focus is the representation of ideas--hence "historian of ideas." The fact that Foucault made inferences based on his readings of certain texts are just that: inferences. Inferences can be incorrect, but they're not the primary substance of an argument. When Foucault writes about the Ship of Fools, he mentions a few instances in which the literary trope appears to have become reality, and suggests that it may have happened even more. People like Midelfort criticize this comment as Foucault arguing that "ships of fools" were a common, actual institutional practice. But this isn't what Foucault is saying at all. It's not up for debate. Read the prose, it's not what he says. He never claims it.

All Foucault says is that it's likely there were more instances than the three or so documented cases. Whether that's true or not has no bearing on his argument, because that's not what he's interested in. He's interested in what the representation (i.e. discursive) of ideas says about them. That's the philosopher and critical theorist in him. If you don't see that as legitimate or valuable, then that's fine. But you're still misrepresenting him.

re: talking about real bodies in the real world. Well this is where this runs into a problem. As per Gutting, Foucault is engaging in idealistic history, which as far as I'm concerned isn't in the realm of serious thought. Of course, I would define serious thought as such that is practically/empirically applicable and/or referable. Everything else falls under what I would call privileged pasttimes; western civilization is rich enough to afford people plenty of time for play, whether physical or cognitive. Not that that doesn't make it valuable in some way, because not everything can be serious. The problem is when things that are play are taken too seriously. Unfortunately, as society becomes richer this becomes an increasing problem. I'm willing to accept Gutting's characterization of Foucault's work (which remains on my shelf) while not allowing any slack due to the characterization. My perspective is that people like Midelfort have an issue with Foucault because Foucault's play transgressed (even if slightly) into a serious subject (History).

 

[The Ozzman]

Mort isn't even trying to hide that he drank the leftie rhetoric or SJW Kool-Aid anymore

 

[Einherjar86]

re: talking about real bodies in the real world. Well this is where this runs into a problem. As per Gutting, Foucault is engaging in idealistic history, which as far as I'm concerned isn't in the realm of serious thought. Of course, I would define serious thought as such that is practically/empirically applicable and/or referable. Everything else falls under what I would call privileged pasttimes; western civilization is rich enough to afford people plenty of time for play, whether physical or cognitive. Not that that doesn't make it valuable in some way, because not everything can be serious. The problem is when things that are play are taken too seriously. Unfortunately, as society becomes richer this becomes an increasing problem. I'm willing to accept Gutting's characterization of Foucault's work (which remains on my shelf) while not allowing any slack due to the characterization. My perspective is that people like Midelfort have an issue with Foucault because Foucault's play transgressed (even if slightly) into a serious subject (History).

I don't see it as a problem, and I suppose this is where we'll part ways.

"Idealistic history"--i.e. the history of ideas--is a serious field of thought, but it's become fashionable among certain circles to belittle it as an amusing pasttime. Many historians see Foucault's approach as an affront because he asked a question that no one else wanted to ask.

Historians typically look for archival or primary source evidence and assess the past state of the actual world based on that evidence. Foucault wasn't as interested in whether such evidence pointed to real-world activities, but in why things were represented the way they were.

I won't try to convince you that this is a legitimate inquiry because I know you won't agree. But this is what Foucault did, and it's what thinkers like Chomsky and Searle found impressive about his work. He realized that discursive representations weren't disinterested, passive, innocent depictions of real-world ideas, persons, and events. Representations impact the way that people think about history. That's what Foucault studied, and it's a fascinating and important field.