FOUCAULT AS EXPLAINED BY KOOPMAN

Foucault

This post is selfish, because it helps me but I have a strong hunch it will be gibberish to most of my readers.  It is about philosophy, about which I know very little because it is complex, arcane, and turns human thinkers into adjectives — one studies these guys and then refers to them as shorthand for their main theories.  They are all constructs using rational methods, logic but not research.  Therefore in the end their ideas comes from their life experiences, their context.  To know their stories is always my favorite means of understanding their ideas.  

Their lives dictate their “point of entry” into the field of thought and since most of them enter through academia as invented by Europeans, the path markers are degrees, articles and books.  Few, if any, consider my fav philosopher, who is Suzanne Langer — her point of entry is feeling.  She is part of a tissue of thought that I take to include Eliade, the new neurology research, the actor’s “Method” thought to be justified by Stanislavski, and so on.  This lets me consider the thought of indigenous people, poets, and sexual nonconformists, whether based on biology or not.  Once, I was interested in the “structure of the subconscious” as pursued by psychoanalysis, but it is a dying art, outdated by lack of time and money though there are still people fascinated by their own dilemmas.  Luckily, Lakoff’s ideas — which have a literary dimension through metaphor — have come along and I embrace all that.

Doesn’t this sound pretentious and learned?  I assure you my grasp is weak, but sometimes this stuff is actually useful.  Here’s the “cheater” provided by Colin Koopman in his Aeon essay called “The Power Thinker,” which is showing up in several publications.

Plato = forms

René Descartes = mind

John Locke = ideas

John Stuart Mill = liberty

Jacques Derrida = text

John Rawls = justice

Judith Butler = gender

Jacques Lacan = the unconscious is structured like a language

Richard Rorty + Jurgen Habermas = ‘grounding the social sciences in a theory of language’

Foucault = power

“Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences. His two most referenced works, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" (1975) and "The History of Sexuality, Volume One" (1976), are the central sources for his analyses of power.”

“Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.”

Foucault is fascinating right now for several reasons.  One is that his topics of prison and sex are so “hot” in several dimensions.  Another is that he paid no attention to boundaries, moving from one formal “discipline” to another and ignoring the conventionalities of them all.  And maybe one of the most intriguing attractions is that somehow he managed to escape his dominating and punishing father, the preoccupation with morbid self-destruction that seems characteristic of a “queer” man trying to justify himself at adolescence, and the ordinary forces of conformity.  It’s hard to know how he managed this.  Probably through a series of intimate and admiring relationships plus a huge capacity for work.  Some will want to know whether SF gay culture, the study of Zen, his practice of kindness to others, or some other “defined” context or practice was the source of his final serenity.  He did contract AIDS and died from it in the early wave of SF infections at the beginning of the Eighties.  His partner’s reaction was to start an organization to address the pandemic.

“The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorise and stigmatise not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome.

— Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004)”

It is a given among counselors that “power” in the sense of socially compelling people to behave in certain ways, believing that it is their only option, is not just a matter of forceful domination (sovereignty).  The underdog, the dominated, the co-dependent also have their power.  (Watch what happens on a rez, where sovereignty is being pursued on grounds of victimhood.)  An obvious example is that Trump, who seems so powerful and rich, is controlled by what Vaknin calls his praise stream, which to Trump is a product of media — mass sensational stories.  It appears this is also what creates the reality of the people who voted for him.

Foucault “queried” (as they say) hierarchy, its source and structure.  I take Trump et al as being driven by a desire for “status”, for being at the top of the hierarchy, but accepting indicators on the terms that North Korea would recognize: the power of weapons, inheritance, titles, and control.  Marked by vulgarity of display, poor persons' idea of sophistication.  In my life experience the hierarchical indicators of status my family accepted (education, helping others, and the middle class indicators: neatness, fashion, and possessions — matters of presentation) have been emptied by some social movements with a religious dimension, valuing simplicity and humility, living close to nature.  Hippies, granolas, Bioneers.

More painfully, my family’s respect for teachers, doctors, religious leaders, police, soldiers, has been challenged by removing the protection of secrecy over their mistakes and shortfalls.  The larger society now seems to value only power and status in terms of money and laws, esp. those controlling imprisonment and investigation.  The sexual revolution has meant not only that everyone is free to “sleep around” but also that things like abuse of children, hypocrisy among religious leaders, and betrayals of trust cannot be covered up.  I find all this so painful and confusing that I elect not to participate.  But not to deny the mess.  And not to become “a docile subject” in Foucault’s phrase.

Now the practice of data collection, the details of our ordinary lives, is becoming a surveillance with power.  One of the first studies, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” about the recorded sexual proclivities of people who used the internet to access pornography, was a challenge to realities of people who didn’t know much about conventional forms of interaction.  (Of course, those without access to computers remain unknown.) Recently, the makers of a device that translates telephone or computer code into genital stimulation were sued.  Each use of the codes was recorded — a little diary of where and how much stimulation with whom.  The lawsuit required the destruction of the records but there’s no way to use code without it being recorded.  And cyber records are never really wiped.

So the international use of code for spying has the same dimensions.  It’s a form of intercourse.  The conventional (weapons, money, oppression of the weak and needy) is right up front.  But what about “queer” intercourse among nations, especially the ones that are “deconstructing”.  Is the result disease?  Dissolving borders between nations?  Or is it an evolution towards a whole new reality, not yet negotiable because we can’t quite see it.  So far, we only feel it.


PS:  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124201-web-creator-tim-berners-lee-speaks-out-on-fake-news/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2017-1603-new-newtemplateGLOBAL&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS
This post discusses government use and misuse of data compiling.

TOO MANY KIDS

Sexual morality is not based on sex at all. It’s based on money and power, the same as everything else. Those two forces, which are two sides of the same thing which is economic survival, stay potent in human life as they have since evolution popped up the neocortex and the skull over it so that people had foreheads. But in the last hundred or maybe only fifty years, sex has suddenly changed.

For one thing, there are far more people -- so many that there are TOO many to support and you can buy a little boy in some places for less than the cost of a puppy in other places. For another thing, it’s far easier to move children around from a place where they have little or no value to a place where they have a high value; from a place where most children are at least snoopervised, to a place where no one cares or the child who is a different color is unsee-able.

For another thing, in the industrial world conception, gestation, birth and rearing are entirely different than they used to be and different from one place or one class to another so that the memes almost overpower the genes. This is changing the role of women in the world, though it’s more often doubling up than change. Another difference is that one part of the world can see what it’s like in other parts of the world -- even talk to people there. So a Manhattan reporter (Thomas Friedman) can go to a brothel in SE Asia, buy himself a woman, and re-define her life, "free" her, to suit his standards (maybe from prostitute to shop-keeper) -- sometimes with success and sometimes not.

Disease patterns are changing along with all the other patterns. Places which are losing major parts of their population plus major parts of their generational culture transmission (just the same as happened to the North American Indians two centuries ago) are tumultuous enough to become pirates preying on the cream of society in luxury liners. Food is also a force that acts almost like disease (even in America) except that diseases go from person to person without reference to class or education. Or do they?

Just now I’m thinking about questions like what difference scale makes: systems form in terms of large scale phenomena, so something like child trafficking is not profitable enough to maintain itself unless systems can develop, the same as drug systems: producers, distribution, consumers. When the population being drawn on is planetary, so that humans are produced on one continent to be consumed on another, the systems will be big and tied into politics in order to protect themselves.

We tend to think of the problem as one-at-a-time, this kid and this kid and this kid. This unwanted pregnancy and this unwanted pregnancy. This freak who consumes kids and then this other freak who consumes kids. What about the systems that one-by-one accretions feed into? What about the countries, mostly Asians, who have seen that too many kids can lead to disaster and have mercilessly stepped in to limit pregnancies. I say mercilessly. And with unintended consequences like the female babies adopted in the United States who now form a body of people, usually wealthy and educated like their adoptive parents, who are emotionally tied to their genetic origins as well as their adoptive country. Are they a bridge or a breach? Or the unintended consequence of too many young Chinese men with no access to women, no way to marry, no reason to settle down. Where will their restlessness go? What if they import women of another culture, like American rednecks importing Phillipinas?

What about the African lack of social maintenance which has allowed famine, destruction of human communities and cultures, destruction of the flora and fauna that supported life, mutilation of souls, collapse of nations. In both of these extreme national reactions the economics of survival through power and resources include sex. Sell yourself, sell your child, sell your willingness to do the unthinkable: meth in one pocket, viagra in the other.

“Civilized” cultures are more subtle, using sentimentality and romanticism to convert individuals into pawns in the economic system: women who will betray each other by replacing aging wives, men who will use women and then discard them, men who want to own their genetic children, women who will get pregnant to keep a relationship. Once the basis of wealth was inheritance and therefore sexual allegiance on the part of women was the guarantee that children were really one’s own and therefore a continuation of one’s self. Even the ruling of countries depended on inheritance. But now inheritance can be proven or disproven by genetics. There are no more mysteriously fatherless children.

And increasingly it begins to be clear that simple biological inheritance does not mean that a child will become like the parent. What if the throne is limited to male inheritors and the only child able to replace the parent is female? The likely preventative of female kings was the high possibility that pregnancy/birth would kill the queen. That doesn’t happen often now. But then later, with irony, it turned out that the urge to knit political systems together through family relationships became a genetic throttler that made royalty unable to produce any children at all.

Most of our moralities that have to do with sex have close horizons: what will it do to our lives in the next few years? Because who knows what will happen in the next decade? Sequential relationships have their impact on the emotions of the persons passing through them, but what happens to the children produced accidentally or on purpose? What about the stray men in the house? More sentimentality and practicality working against economics. Vocations -- locking people into jobs. War -- destroying the men, blowing their balls off. Careers -- preventing pregnancy until fertility is expired. One by one, they are maybe tragedies. Taken altogether, they are marketing opportunities. (Now the docs are saying it’s better not to implant triplets.)

What happens when the script changes quickly? I once had a conversation with a man who was enraged because he had played by the rules and been faithful to his wife, with some pain, but now discovered that he could sleep around with impunity -- if he had the ability. Maybe viagra saved him. But I hope he had his tubes tied first, since many babies with disabilities result from old sperm. The US with its prosperity and its sentimentality about people having babies “no matter what” and “saving” marginal babies is now burdened with huge costs and in danger of a reactive flip of sentiment that will make it morally acceptable to kill all “substandard” people. (And some only worry about abortion.)

Commodities, even children, can be made profitable in two different ways: one is dealing with whatever in terms of standard units: kid, kid, kid, qua kid. The other is by producing high quality unique whatevers. In terms of kids, that means health, intelligence, the ability to form relationships, curiosity, courage, etc. etc. etc. But kids are commodities that change daily -- they get better and they get worse. Kid by kid that’s all-absorbing. When it is a trend, throughout an entire country with many kids following some unforeseen pattern, it is world-transforming. Both better and worse. It begins with coitus.

IS KNOWLEDGE POWER?

First comes commodification, then comes status, and next comes equity. So first a town library is a commodity: worth a certain amount of money, supposed to help the children grow up to make money, and maybe to be a resource for community people who either need it to make money or need it because they have no money. An accumulation of books as wealth.

A library is a good middle-class sign of a prosperous community. People move to towns that have libraries -- I did. (It had a laundromat then, too. Even a car dealer.) High school kids use libraries. Story hour. We have no street people taking refuge in this library. I was very grateful to blog on the Valier library’s computers when mine broke. I’ve checked out books; I’ve given them books, as well as videos. They actually have my book about Bob Scriver on the shelf, but I’m not sure what they did with the Blackfeet history POD books I gave them.

For some reason, they broke up the Indian history section and distributed those books into the regular shelves. I think the issue was equity. When the state passed a law that all children in Montana would have to study Indian history, the previous librarian said to me, “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history!” I think that since then she has come to understand that at least in theory we are one people, so their history needs to be learned. But in a sort of revanchist spirit, that means the Indians get no “special” section because they’re “just like everyone else.”

The issue at last night’s meeting between the Conrad and Valier library boards was financial equity. The Conrad library, which sometimes sees itself as the Pondera County library, has decided that the way to solve their constant money problems is to revisit a split in funding that dates back to 1961. Half a century. But that wasn’t what really had tempers hot.

Some years ago the Conrad library lost their humanist, inclusive, progressive librarian. She was replaced by a woman who has made a good thing better by setting her salary at $34,000, which around here is teacher’s wages, more than the median income in Pondera County, $29,432 per household according to Google sources. Then, since she prepares the budget herself, she increases the salaries by 3% every year, without increasing her duties, her hours, or her qualifications. One employee was dropped. (Local teachers have been foregoing raises.) She has a bachelor’s degree in business management. She has no library degree. Montana requires librarians to earn credits. The Valier librarian just returned from a class in Indian education. She has an associate degree in business management. Clearly libraries here are in a business paradigm.

But my interest at this meeting was not the money. I wanted to rethink the whole ball game from the point of view of quality of services and inclusion of the whole county, if they really think of themselves as a county library with a county population as a monetary per capita base. They don’t. Their heads were firmly planted on charts, calculators, proportions, and monetary equity. FIRMLY. They didn’t want to think of the other small villages in the county, but were very aware of the Hutterite colonies. The word “Indian,” as in Heart Butte which is in Pondera County, froze them in their seats.

And yet now and then we came back around to glancing off of the real issue: hard feelings, mostly relating to the arrogance of this librarian. My opinion is contaminated. She gored my ox, the one with “Bob Scriver” painted on the side. I suggested that I do a reading of “Bronze Inside and Out” -- no. I’d bet you five dollars she hasn’t even bought a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” for the library. She’s got some kind of fantasy going because her doctor daddy used to stop by to see Bob Scriver and Bob would make a fuss over her to get her daddy’s checkbook out of his pocket. She thought it was personal. Bob Scriver was the same marker for middle class status as a library.

The previous librarian had found an old microfiche machine and installed it in the library. The backbone of “Bronze Inside and Out” was what I gained from reading all the microfiches the Montana Historical Society had of newspapers from the very beginning. In fact, the notes I took are on this blog and people have used them over and over. At the time, that far-sighted Conrad librarian understood that there are some materials that can only be accessed that way and the Montana Historical Society was willing to put the microfiches in the custody of the Conrad library where I could read them without driving the 200 miles to Helena. (I could read two years a day, which took about four hours plus the thirty mile drive for months.) She was a service-based librarian. And that library could have taken credit for the publication of the book. A reading there seemed natural. The present librarian would have nothing to do with it.

In my allotted 3 minutes at the meeting I spoke about bookmobiles, about that microfiche reader, about the arrogance and snubbing that I meet in the Conrad library now (People piped up to say I'm not alone.), and about the Choteau library as worthy of inquiry. (That librarian used to run a dress shop.) They objected to everything. “But those things will all cost MORE!” Their idea is to pinch and scrimp and drop services to match their budget, rather than think of ways to generate interest and energy -- which always leads to more money coming in.

But the most daunting and maybe typical aspect of this was that the Conrad board admitted that they had discouraged people from coming to the meeting, telling them that they couldn’t attend. That they wouldn’t be welcome. Hell’s bells. It’s a public meeting! Public business! It’s ILLEGAL to keep people out. It’s always a scandal if they are barred. What is the person who is told not to come supposed think about why he’s not welcome?

The more that come, the more that get invested in what’s happening. The Valier people came, but only the same ones, the previous board members. Both boards expressed surprise that the other board was, well, HUMAN! And maybe even REASONABLE! And some of the Conrad board members grew up in Valier!

The more people are kept out, the more they go underground and get more sore and have more fantasies and vote down all levies. The rumors fly. Pretty soon the Conrad/Valier “library money grab” could be on NPR, just like Choteau where the superintendent tried to cancel, suppress, control, deny, and otherwise consolidate power. It ALWAYS backfires.

I thought I had heard the Valier board recommend that Conrad drop Interlibrary Loan, because Valier had, and it saved money. So I had to do a little research this morning. Neither library has cut themselves off that way, but Valier has imposed a fee if more than five books a month are ordered.

Then the librarian took me out to the storage to show me Valier’s microfiche machine! I had no idea it existed. What’s that old library motto: “knowledge is power?” I sure could have saved gas if I’d asked. And the Valier library was happy to schedule a reading. They know that readings get people coming in. They might even get their checkbooks out.