This is the problem with Foucault. Foucault's world seems to change itself, automatically. It also does so in a peculiarly teleological fashion, always mutating so as to preserve a maximum amount of oppression. Any seeming escape is deceptive. It's like a horror movie, where the monster keeps coming and coming, stronger and stronger, no matter how many times you shoot it in the head, and then you have the obligatory scene at the end where the hero thinks he's safe and then gets his head ripped off from an unexpected quarter.
It's as if he thought the world was one huge gothic BDSM fantasy. If Clive Barker were a philosopher, he would be Foucault.
--- On Wed, 4/1/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah yeah yeah. I've read Foucault, a fair amount in fact.
> And I admire a lot of it a lot. But really, you can use this
> sort of formulation to say pretty much whatever the fuck you
> want. You never have to prove anything - you just say "the
> episteme made me do it." You never have to contend with the
> facts that SA brought up, like the trajectory of crime rates
> - or the fact that other societies didn't have the same
> crime or incarceration booms as the U.S. Why?
>
> Tell it to the judge, man.
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