That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
I know that's satisfying to some people. But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?
To come back the original article, how the heck does "everything is power" illuminate a situation of Campus Security are using a fricken armored personnel carrier when their job is stopping underaged kids from drinking???
"But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?"
Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?
Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.
> how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?
Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower.
No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).
This is one aspect of sort of complicity with power that's being discussed. Sometimes, people decide en masse that a certain way of life is worth dying for, so we know there are other responses to armed pacification.
Not that this is always a bad thing. It's pretty great that most of us obey the state's injunction to not wantonly kill each other.
I find it extremely distasteful to describe backing down in the face of slaughter as "complicity." If that's the sort of thinking that follows naturally from the model of power dynamics being discussed here, then I think the model is likely intensely flawed.
On one hand, you are correct that it's an ethical problem.
But on the other hand I think it's more salient to understand that, say, the students shot down at Kent State were murdered and the general population of the country was on the side of the National Guard.... that's the kind of complicity that most people live under, the same complicity that believes people executed by police for non-compliance deserve their fates.
On one hand, it probably really is a good thing that we are generally aligned toward lawfulness, but at the same time it does make us complicit when the people charged with upholding that law use it towards criminal ends-- which is quite common in the US.
But on the other hand I think it's more salient to understand that, say, the students shot down at Kent State were murdered and the general population of the country was on the side of the National Guard.... that's the kind of complicity that most people live under, the same complicity that believes people executed by police for non-compliance deserve their fates.
If you actually read the thread up your position on it, you'd know that you were equating an unwilling to challenge tanks rolling through your streets due a fear of getting shot with an approval of such tanks rolling through your streets.
It seems to me that intellectuals spouting this kind of nonsense wide-up complicit to power and not in a it's-OK-cause-everyone-is, kind of way.
Complicity is a loaded term, so I can see why you'd feel that way. Perhaps it'd be better to say that such behavior enables the slaughterers to do what they do. As for the ethical question of whether a particular instance of backing down was right or wrong, hopefully our analysis of power dynamics avoids answering such questions and focuses on, well, the dynamics of power. That's not to say that such questions are irrelevant, they're just a different field, like the quantitative differences between the light emitted by configurations of dyes and the feeling evoked by a certain painting.
The recent regime changes termed "Arab Spring" provide some evidence that killing some of the population can sometimes further inflame the populate rather than intimidating them.
When the state has access to nukes and the populace doesn't, how can this statement not technically be true? It seems like the ability literally wipe cities off the face of the earth means that you have the permanent upper hand, in terms of power.
Further, what you call "cooperation" I think would largely would be a lack of organization. The ability to organize can grant immense power, and when people talk about the power of large crowds like this I think there's usually an unstated assumption of "if they were to spontaneously act in great--or at least adequate--coordination." I don't think it's fair to assess power in terms of something like a body count, and to ignore the power granted by organization.
> When the state has access to nukes and the populace doesn't, how can this statement not technically be true? It seems like the ability literally wipe cities off the face of the earth means that you have the permanent upper hand, in terms of power.
Because that's not a credible threat. Nuclear weapons are antithetical to the goals of a government in conflict with it's own people.
No, it's not true. The state has vastly inferior power compared to the populace at large, at least in the U.S. However, the state is able to, in most cases, choose when and how it engages it's enemies so that it faces an inferior force on it's own terms.
Personally, I am looking more and more towards sadism and masochism as explanations for such things, and am wondering if sadism isn't the primary drive to attain power in the first place.
Speaking of control, I think an interesting way to conceptualize what's happening here is a cybernetic/organicist model (a tradition that goes at least as far back as Hobbes).
The nation-state can be thought of as a superorganism, and this requires complex systems of feedback and control. We have resource inputs, which are processed via the churn of economic activity (this is analogous to cellular respiration). This activity sustains the citizens (cells) while also providing resources via taxes to the government (the executive control / brain / etc). The government, in turn, uses those resources to sustain itself and exert control over the body-state, as well as powering the police/military for internal and external defense (somewhat analogous to the immune system).
So this is all a very complicated machine, the nation-state feeding off resources and in turn providing for its own sustenance and protection. It is, as Hobbes noted, basically a giant form of life.
Of course, this idea can be taken much further (the NSA is essentially a somatosensory system) but I'll just leave it at that for now.
You might enjoy "Protocol: how control exists after decentralization" by Galloway.
A lot of it is very similar to this, building on top of Deleuze's "Postscript."
>Foucault is SmallTalk. Tangentially inspirational, but mostly useless in modern practice.
I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time.
(And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day).
>That's your counter-argument?
No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn.
In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not.
What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).
This sort cherry-picking of "obtuse" quotes to attack high-level theory is pretty absurd. It's equivalent to somebody from the humanities putting down this formula: Y = λf.(λx.f (x x)) (λx.f (x x)) and saying "I have difficulty understanding this, ergo computer science is absurd nonsense."
There are many things in this world/levels of perspective that benefit from a non-mathematically rigorous analysis- up to and including the question "what is the benefit of rigorous mathematical analysis". That doesn't mean they don't have their own kind of rigor or that you should be able to understand them right away without any background knowledge. The attitude you have is shared by folks in the humanities who think that because they're experts in their field, they should be experts in everything, but luckily, human knowledge is broad and diverse, and there's no single master key.
So here's the operative difference: I can explain to a non-technical person what the Y-combinator gets you in terms of results. I could make a physicist or mathematician or mechanical engineer or even an analytic philosopher understand the significance, and then it's just a matter of notation.
And I really wish postmodernists would stop hiding behind the banner of "the humanities". Analytic philosophy, history, classics, religious studies, and art history are all capable of making meaningful and even true statements from time to time, and most of them can be made comprehensible to the typical person.
If you read the other comments on this thread, a number of people have clearly explained the significance of the theory.
As for the humanities thing, yes, I agree. Just as physicists can make many clear statements that resonate with people who don't even know math, there are many aspects of the humanities that are accessible and clear to people who have never studied theory. Your disdain for higher level theory would also make it difficult for you to enjoy certain texts by people like Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, none of whom are "postmodernists".
I think you should apologize for making this post. There are a lot of important things that aren't mathematically rigorous but are nevertheless worth understanding.
If you're making grand opaque abstractions without applying some form of logical rigor, how can you be sure you're saying anything that's true and meaningful?
I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
And yet, Wittgenstein goes on to write texts that are central pillars of contemporary theory. He also saw that laying out everything you can say in purely logical terms leaves a lot off the table.
To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).
Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.