Hatrack River Forum: Frustration and Pain

This is topic Frustration and Pain in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Eaquae Legit (Member # 3063) on :

Is there anyone who understands Michel Foucault, much less cares about him?!

[Wall Bash]

Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :

No.
But The Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge, and especially Power/Knowledge are worth reading, or at least worth reading summations of. [Smile]

It's my opinion that Foucault was very intellectually lazy, and that he justified this laziness by asserting that intellectual rigor was unnecessary for Truth; in fact, a lot of his work reads as a defense of un-reason. That said, I think he had a few good insights into the way communication can be used to shape power structures, and it's probably worth reviewing those for the few gems that aren't already immediately "obvious" or "common knowledge."

One MAJOR problem I have with Foucault is his assumption that the sort of "knowledge" used by the establishment to prop up its existence cannot be true, and that therefore the vast majority of "knowledge" out there is a false reflection of reality. While I think it's true that fundamental limitations of discourse and observation prevent any communication of knowledge from being perfect, I think Foucault's cynicism about the role of communicated knowledge is difficult to justify -- and, given his own extremely dense, jargonistic writing style, would seem to imply that he himself wrote as cryptically as he did to benefit from the same power structures he implicitly condemned.

Foucault fails to make what I consider the most important distinction in modern epistemology: that of context. He perceives correctly that humans share a perceptive context and retain private internal contexts, and asserts that a third external context of physical reality exists outside of both -- and I and a lot of real philosophers agree with him on that. But he doesn't recognize (oddly, IMO) that social conventions exist purely within the internal context, and that research into observed reality consequently requires a different epistemology than research into social conventions. Once you grant this, a lot of his most elaborate arguments drift away like chaff.