[lbo-talk] Chomsky on Foucault

[andie nachgeborenen]

Foucault wrote a  lot about a lot of things. Some of
his work was to make very vidid by a series of case
studies precisely how total sets of theoretical
presuppositions have varied over time. He does this by
looking at, e.g., the history of madness or prisons or
sex, and exploring the ineer logic of pre and post
modern frames of thought in great and precise detail. 

In my view, F's graetest work is Discipline and
Punish, nominally about the history of punishment, but
more generally about the mechaniism of bureaucratic
control in the modern world. He starts out with an
unforgetable discription of the horrible death of 
regicide, by way of making the point that back in the
premodern world most people lived off the radar of the
state altogether, no files, no dossiers, no lists,a nd
that when you got on that radar, it was often to makea
 spectacualr example of you. He then talks about the
birth of the prison not as an example of progress and
humanitarian reform, but as an instance of the needs
of bureaucrtic systems of managege laefe populations.
He chapter on The Examination is essential reading for
anyone who has ever taken a test. I think that D&P is
one of the immortal works of political philosophy, up
there with Capital and Mill's On Liberty and Hobbes'
Leviathan and Rousseau's Social Contract and Rawls'
Theory of Justice.

F's writing is not opaque. It is plain and
workmanlike. If there are differences in idiom, bear
in mind that he is French. If it is a bit difficult,
that is because it is very deep and he struggling to
say new and important things. You have to do some work
too. He is not as easy to understand as Chomsky, who
is not trying to say anything new or deep in politics,
but only to remind you of what you already knew.

jks

--- Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> > What exactly of Foucault's ideas did you
> > want to know somjething about? He wrote a lot
> about a
> > lot of topics? Was there something in particular
> that
> > puzzled you, or did you want the whole thing inm a
> > paragraph? jks
> 
> I don't know much about his ideas to begin with, so
> a specific request is
> pointless. I suppose I want someone to explain F's
> importance in language I
> can understand. I've watched his exchange with
> Chomsky several times, and
> each time F simply lost me. It seems he engaged in a
> form of techno-speak,
> understood by the Smart Ones or those otherwise
> "inside," but to me it
> sounds like verbal wanking.
> 
> DP
> 
> ___________________________________
>
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