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Foucault: Power is everywhere 
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Post Foucault: Power is everywhere
Just to provide a bit of balance to the forum regarding the powerful 1% controlling the world and its wealth, I thought I'd post this article regarding some of Foucault's thoughts on power. He didn't see power as being held just by one group in society but found that its social dynamic is everywhere, it can be a force for a good and bad.

He also demonstrates how certain discourses hold power for professionals - such as law and the medical profession, using words that not everyone is privy to, i.e knowledge = power equation. This reminds me of magicians and alchemists and pharoahs - magical discourse in a way held at the top of the pyramid. Kind of like black ops and not sharing their secrets with the rest of the world, i.e. free energy.

Foucault also looks at how people self regulate themselves and certain mechanisms that ensure this occurs, such as surveillance society and panopticans.

http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of ... verywhere/

I have always wondered though why Foucault could never add all of this up and see it as emanating from one powerful group in society. Anyhoo, he also asserted that power always seeks to reassert itself in a balance. This gives me hope but not sure his notion is valid when you look at what is happening in the world, as evidence.


Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:23 am
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Just to provide a bit of balance to the forum regarding the powerful 1% controlling the world and its wealth, I thought I'd post this article regarding some of Foucault's thoughts on power. He didn't see power as being held just by one group in society but found that its social dynamic is everywhere, it can be a force for a good and bad.

He also demonstrates how certain discourses hold power for professionals - such as law and the medical profession, using words that not everyone is privy to, i.e knowledge = power equation. This reminds me of magicians and alchemists and pharoahs - magical discourse in a way held at the top of the pyramid. Kind of like black ops and not sharing their secrets with the rest of the world, i.e. free energy.

Foucault also looks at how people self regulate themselves and certain mechanisms that ensure this occurs, such as surveillance society and panopticans.

http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of ... verywhere/

I have always wondered though why Foucault could never add all of this up and see it as emanating from one powerful group in society. Anyhoo, he also asserted that power always seeks to reassert itself in a balance. This gives me hope but not sure his notion is valid when you look at what is happening in the world, as evidence.


You always provide such thought provoking content NG. I am not a brainiac or a deep thinker, but I look at everything hoping that something will sink in.

Thank you for your provisions. Chewy food for thought.

Sincerely,

Mouse

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Tue Apr 17, 2012 4:50 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Thanks....

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Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:18 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Focault was one of my favorite thinkers. What people tend to forget is that as a historian this man's knowledge was fantastic whether one even agrees with the new school of post modernism that Derrida and Focault espoused....Let an ole college prof try to explain Focault's notion of power.

To Focault the occult (the hidden) is simply potential energy that becomes locked into social things...things like words and the different ways they signify meaning, institutions like the medical epistemology and the university system. It is not that Focault thinks that power is in these things, rather it is that the occult, i.e. the energy is hidden until we deconstruct it...which is why deconstruction figures so heavily into Post Modern philosophy.... or deconstructionism.

For example....the word disinformation..... the use of the word belies any linguistic roots because the word is occult...why? because it has a hidden set of meanings. Disinfo is the evil disruptor, the deliberation at the act of destruction of information for a cause....we have given the word that significance and only see it when we deconstruct it.

Jordon Maxwell is a good example of Focault's thinking in action. Words are deconstructed by Maxwell based on occult meanings all the time. And while words have this property to Focault and Derrida they see themselves as disruptors that make people see these qualities in our social institutions....hence to Focault things like mental illness, curing a disease, etc are all social processes devoid of any objective truth......when we look at a painting of the Marque De Sade decaying away (while alive) in a bath from a skin condition there is a noble beauty to the act of his skin inflamed by his passions, a resignation, equanamity, stoicism, as he bears the mark of his perversions (veneral disease) and then we choose at some point to label this disease, and label the social process to arrest this as medical epistemology as we classify skin alterations as dis-ease when compared to normal skin.

The roots of Focault are probably (believe it or not) first in Durkheim (the sociologist) who famously said that religious activity was in fact the social efforvescence of many human beings coming together and creating an effect in exess of simply the combined total of energy. Then we come to the influence of Freud who taught us that we must deconstruct all phenomena as it appears to the subconscious to understand our social motivations.....Then Sartre, because like Sartre the father of French philosophy, all meaning is socially created, there is no objective truth, meaning to speak of is purely a social act and requires the burden of consciousness.

Finally we have the master....Husserl (the French school not the German) and his student Heidegger!!! one of my favorites. For Husserl and Heidegger one could analyze the pure act of acquiring a concern for certain things and a pure method (for Husserl) of knowing something.

Also keep in mind that in addition to Husserl Heidegger Focault like all the masters studied the Greeks Kant, spit at Hegel studied Nietzche etc. He was a dynamic presence who was the best historical philosopher since Hegel.


Tue Apr 17, 2012 7:47 pm
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Philosophers are just what the doctor ordered when we need proof that we know we don't know.

That's the philosopher in me speaking.

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Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:50 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Aw thanks Mouse, it's a pleasure to come here and chew over stuff with people who are interested, most people I meet on a day to day basis are the walking dead!

Quote:
when we look at a painting of the Marque De Sade decaying away (while alive) in a bath from a skin condition there is a noble beauty to the act of his skin inflamed by his passions, a resignation, equanamity, stoicism, as he bears the mark of his perversions (veneral disease) and then we choose at some point to label this disease


Beautiful way of deconstructing the argument of deconstruction! Reminds of how pain works, how we label pain in the West, you must be familiar with Melzack's book on pain, where certain tribes would hang the chosen one from a hook via their back muscles. To be chosen was on honour and as such, during the process they did not feel pain on euphoria and their wounds completely healed and quickly healed. I like also how Foucault points out that the term Homosexual is a common phenomenon, coined in the 21st C, before than it was more of a preference rather than a category but people did not think in such reductionistic terms as homo or heter.

Please Dsimon, any books that could recommend would be cool. One caveate - not Derrida! WTF was he going on about! Does anyone really know??


Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:05 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Aw thanks Mouse, it's a pleasure to come here and chew over stuff with people who are interested, most people I meet on a day to day basis are the walking dead!

Quote:
when we look at a painting of the Marque De Sade decaying away (while alive) in a bath from a skin condition there is a noble beauty to the act of his skin inflamed by his passions, a resignation, equanamity, stoicism, as he bears the mark of his perversions (veneral disease) and then we choose at some point to label this disease


Beautiful way of deconstructing the argument of deconstruction! Reminds of how pain works, how we label pain in the West, you must be familiar with Melzack's book on pain, where certain tribes would hang the chosen one from a hook via their back muscles. To be chosen was on honour and as such, during the process they did not feel pain on euphoria and their wounds completely healed and quickly healed. I like also how Foucault points out that the term Homosexual is a common phenomenon, coined in the 21st C, before than it was more of a preference rather than a category but people did not think in such reductionistic terms as homo or heter.

Please Dsimon, any books that could recommend would be cool. One caveate - not Derrida! WTF was he going on about! Does anyone really know??


Sure, first Derrida, his game was to disrupt a narrative. He would to that end do some strange things like emphasize parts of a text others barely looked at. He also would also do a class analysis on an author's critique...If you like this analysis more clean cut, jump to the Germans and read some Gadamerian Hermeneutics. Gadamer was a historian and famously asked whether an author's work belongs to the author or to the social deconstructive forces that recieve the text and give it meaning....us the reader in plain english.

Ok for Focault, read his "the order of things." also he wrote some short pieces about prisoners and how the penal system historically was based on Greek notions before eventually being based on punishment...the name of this work escapes me presently, most of my library is still in San Francisco.


Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:30 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Thanks DSimon, Gadamer will be a good starting point.

I have analysed a bit of Foucault, as a student but that was a while ago now. I do have two of his books on my bookshelf that I have never ever read, time to dust them off!


Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:56 pm
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Thanks DSimon, Gadamer will be a good starting point.

I have analysed a bit of Foucault, as a student but that was a while ago now. I do have two of his books on my bookshelf that I have never ever read, time to dust them off!


Also if you want to get to the real meat the philosophy of language post wittgenstein is aLgreat sailing off point. You will find that unlike modern philosophy (1700's til around 1920) Post modern thinking uses language for so many things. Again Post wittgenstein.

In fact many deconstructionalists are really Marxists who believe in language as the evolution of consciousness as opposed to history in changes of a dialectic.... To Focault class consciousness is part of human nature, so that in theory a black man and white man could be totally unaware of racial divide, human beings can never escape the ball an chain of class warfare. A woman can become a man but Jack London could not move freely among upper class California intellectuals when he became a famous journalist and eventual author.

To these guys if you are poor and destitute, the way you pick up a soup spoon on the bread line will give you away....it will tell the deconstructor everything from the way you were tiolet trained, to the education of your great grandfather. Hence the hatred and contempt that the rich Bourgasie had for French intellectuals with a social conscience, men like the amphetimin snorting "Being and Nothingness" Sartre, the social activist Michelle Focault and the Algerian Jew with the need to incite people to think Derrida. By the way many people feel like the Marquis desade was also a great contributor to this class of French philosopher...if you get a chance read a guy George Bataille...very interesting dude.


Thu Apr 19, 2012 2:05 am
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Post Re: Foucault: Power is everywhere
Thanks DSimon.

Quote:
language as the evolution of consciousness


Coming from an evolutionary psychological point of view, Julian Jayne's theory consciousness being a by product of language comes to mind.

JJ also looks at historical consciousness and points out how it seems to be different to ours, especially when we look at ancient art and the writings of the Illiad.

The art of the ancient Egyptians and Mayans is also so radically different, I think it suggest differing levels of consciousness. Only when you are on that level can you perhaps decipher it. Much like you cannot access memories of early childhood - I think this is to do with a different level of consciousness.


Thu Apr 19, 2012 10:12 am
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