Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Time for a @threadapalooza on Michel Foucault (1926-1984), historian of madness, archaeologist of the marginal, skeptic, existentialist, culture war touchstone, enfant terrible turned god of hipsters, and one of the most original and brilliant minds of the 20th century.

Whether you love or hate Foucault, whether you agree or disagree with him, his thought is THE thought of our time. You cannot study the humanities at an Ivy League school without reading him. 2

And even if you don't read him directly, his claims have trickled down into the reigning ideology of both elites and counter-elites. Foucault is intellectual napalm. 3

Before getting to the ways in which Foucault is new, we should highlight the ways in which he is old, part of a tradition, a Western intellectual tradition that many invoke Foucault to criticize. 4

It is a banal point and truism that Foucault would not be possible without Plato and Kant, without Epicurus and Heidegger, without Vico and Nietzsche. Read in a traditionalist light, Foucault is but a manifestation of a critical tradition consistent with philosophy itself. 5

Foucault was suspicious of grand narratives, suspicious of canons, suspicious of rules and norms, suspicious of "ideology"--he saw power everywhere--but Foucault is himself part of a grand narrative and a canon. He himself has become another dead white man. 6

Of course, he isn't the same as the others in that he adopted a handful of positions that were "radical" in his time (and possibly cancellable now). He was not only queer in sexual orientation, but knowingly spread AIDS. He also believed that youngsters could consent to sex. 7

Or more specifically, he resisted the state's right to define age of consent...Recent biographical studies suggest Foucault sought out underage prostitutes in Tunisia...8

Foucault also supported the Iranian Revolution and the Ayatollah. Foucault was no believer, but he preferred to support "The resistance" regardless of substance, so long as it was an instrument of sticking it to the man. 9

I think it's helpful to think of Foucault as the character "Joker" from the Chris Nolan film (not the Joker played by Joachim Phoenix, but maybe...). He's a chaos agent more than an ideologue. His goal is to question and upset. A Socratic gadfly on steroids. 10

You can't write about Foucault without being ad hominem, because he made his charisma and his example itself a part of his philosophy. He believed in living a great life and so we must evaluate his thought on the basis of our view of his "greatness" or lack thereof. 11

It's true, Foucault followed Barthes and other Frenchies is championing the "Death of the author": a view that says the author's intent is irrelevant to how we read or understand a work. 12

In this way, you can't be Foucauldian and care about what Foucault was trying to do. That's a category error. His life is a system of signs which we can interpret according to our needs and techniques, not a directive or manual. 13

You can't dismiss Foucault because you don't like the choices he made. Rather, they should serve as a caution for anyone considering the Foucauldian path. How radical are you willing to be? How contrarian in your morals and convictions? How anti-consensus? 14

It's easy to quote Foucault or Judith Butler or some trendy post-structuralist when you have a trust fund or a job at McKinsey lined up. (I think Foucault would acknowledge the sociological point, here). But what will you sacrifice to avoid capture by the boogie apparatus? 15

Foucault was a university professor. Many who love him have tenure and therefore are protected by institutions they criticize. At the end of the day, few really go whole hog system. For most it's a life of cognitive dissonance, LARPing, posturing...16

But Foucault, much as he advocates for "resistance" is aware that it's hard. And he's also aware that even when we think we're resisting we're not. The myth of me vs. the world as quaint, and reproduces a bad philosophy. 17

Like David Foster Wallace, who believed that awareness of irony does not make us any more absolved, Foucault didn't think that awareness of ideology exempted us from its infiltration. 18

There is no Benedict Option in Foucault. We are guilty. We are ideological subjects whether we like it or not. 19

But Foucault's pessimism is also an out. For where all are guilty, writes Hannah Arendt, none are. 20

Religious people have an answer to the question "Why be good"?

Either because God wants us to be. Or because we'll get a reward of some kind. 21

Aristotelians also have an answer. Goodness is consilient with human flourishing. To be evil is to suffer. Integrity is the only way. 22

Platonists have an answer: the soul is stained by evil.
Hindus have a similar answer: reincarnation ensures we will have to live with the karmic consequences of our deeds. There is no Exit. 23

Buddhists, even those who deny the reality of the self, have an answer: Compassion is truth and truth is compassionate. Joy and freedom come to those who drop the ego and drop the narrative, getting out of their heads and finding resonance with all things. 24

Does Foucault have an answer? Why be good, whatever it means? 25

For Foucault, the answer isn't to please god or to achieve happiness, nor is it deontological. There is no duty to be good. All reasons for being good imply a choosing subject. But Foucault doesn't really think that's what we are. 26

Foucault mostly doubts free will, seeing the self as an effect rather than a cause. And yet, his rhetoric to the contrary, Foucault is no determinist. Agency is found in certain moments, bubbling up in the breach. 27

Foucault found agency in marginal figures, outsiders, misfits, heretics. Whether sexual deviants, the mentally ill, the criminal, children, Foucault took their side. 28

He took their side the way RD Laing took the side of schizophrenics against the medical establishment. He took their side the way some homeopathic healers reject vaccines, hospital births, big Pharma. 29

He found in those whose stories were suppressed a sense of awareness of how things really are. Foucault knew what it was to be woke long before it became a movement or a slur. He was woke the way gnostics were or wanted to be. 30

He was woke the way it is woke to take Ivermectin. He was woke the way it is woke not to vote. He was woke the way it is woke to only listen to music you've never heard of. 31

Which is really to say that Foucault was not into the rightness or wrongness of the minority position, but into its importance qua being suppressed. 32

It is in being at odds with one's world that you are free, at least because you find an alternative point of view to the one promoted by official culture. Outwardly, you appear to be a subject, but in other ways you drop clues that you protest. It's a heroic quietism. 33

To answer why be good, Foucault would say there is no reason other than the self-evident fact that a good life is an aesthetic one, a life in which you rework your givens to do something new and interesting. 34

This part of Foucault, the amoral Nietzschean one, born from pessimism, a hail mary pass at living well even once you've taken the pill that reveals ideology and power to be everywhere, is sometimes called "neoliberal." 35

Whatever is meant by the term, secondary lit is replete with scholars who say that despite Foucault's ostensible philosophical radicalism, he's basically just an existentialist who thinks we should live and let live. 36

Maybe Foucault thinks we should be more "resistant" but he has no basis on which to shore up this claim without falling into ideology. Perhaps aesthetics is a way out of the problem. 37

The romantics after Kant found a similar solution. Having accepted that we aren't free in the phenomenal realm of appearances, they thought intuition could get us the kind of access to things in themselves Kant denies. 38

It's a tale as old as time. Politics is corrupt. Now vote for me. We can have no certain knowledge. Now convert to my religion. Its power everywhere. Now join me in my attempt to live a life free of these dynamics. 39

Transcendence is impossible, EXCEPT this way. 40

It's not unique to Foucault. It's human. I don't begrudge him the self-contradiction. I admire it. His misanthropy is belied by his need to elevate a certain way of being. His amorality is belied by his subtle moralizing that we not let society poison our minds. 41

I'm gonna launch into some positive assessment of Foucault for a bit. But first, I encourage you to check out the work of @blakesmithphd and @daily_barbarian who are writing good stuff on Foucault's timeliness. 42

Smith recently wrote a fascinating article comparing Foucault to cultural conservative Christopher Lasch.
city-journal.org/christopher-la… 43

I also want to note that I read on @DouthatNYT 's substack somewhere that he thinks continental philosophy more or less ended with Foucault, which is a sign of intellectual decadence. 44

I sometimes have to pinch myself that we are still talking about the French Postmodernists, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, etc. even though they were writing 40-60 years ago...45

"Theory," in other words, is remarkably low-fi as compared to advances in the world of bits. 46

Ok, so what's right with Foucault?? A lot! 47

First, Foucault is a hero in that he came to philosophy indirectly, through a study of history and psychology. He's really one of a kind in his cross disciplinarity. A rare scholar who transcends the trivial to make points of great import. 48

It's hard to have a sense of what's at stake when your work is painstakingly detailed. Most generalists lack for scholarship while many scholars miss the forest for the trees. Foucault saw forest and trees simultaneously. 49

We need more of this. More people who make sweeping arguments out of the pixels of the idiosyncratic. I take my hat off to Foucault for his ability to be a hedgehog and a fox. 50

Part of the reason Foucault could make the cross-over was that he was a historicist. He believed each age and culture has its own regime of meanings and values, and he sought to study the evolution of these. 51

Because Foucault was a skeptic and a pessimist, he didn't think the modern world had achieved its promise. Instead, he found that it had gotten better at controlling its subjects. 52

The horse-shoe theory of politics says that left and right eventually touch. Foucault is a good case study for this theory. 53

Foucault doesn't think modern liberal democracy got us out of tyranny, it just got us to be our own self-imposed tyrants. Strong leaders were replaced by "governmentality"--an intangible force of subservience coursing through the culture. 54

So while he doesn't long for monarchy or absolute despotism, Foucault doesn't think modern democracy did much to enfranchise us. Formal rights come with all kinds of strings attached. The masses were and are still sheep. 55

Ok so that's very progressive in the sense of "do better." But it's also kind of conservative in that it doesn't think we should have a sense of superiority to the past. In some ways, things are worse, precisely to the extent that we are arrogant. 56

In his famous study of prison reform, "Discipline and Punish," Foucault gives a mixed review of Bentham's Panopticon. The public spectacle of cruel and unusual punishment has been rationalized and privatized. On a utilitarian basis this is good. 57

On some other level, though, Foucault thinks it's sinister. Said brashly Reformicons protect us from the pain we ought to feel, the pain that would wake us up and cause to demand more radical change. Better to be tortured than anesthetized. I disagree, of course. 58

But I get it. In psychology, you have a similar fight between the naturalist approach and the drug-centric one. Is it compassion to improve a person's "Functioning" when that functioning is bought at the price of their personality, their sense of meaning? 59

These aren't questions to be discussed in the abstract. But Foucault asks us to consider the trade-offs we face in disrupting everything, even when we think it's an improvement. 60

Again, this isn't to say we should delete our facebook accounts (I did), and retvrn to meeting people without the help of dating apps, etc. It's just to say that we shouldn't necessarily celebrate the rationalization process as an unqualified good. 61

Btw, on this point, Foucault is not different than Heidegger and Arendt, not so different than Weber, who saw in modernity an "iron cage."

We live in a Silicon Panopticon. 62

Note that the problem with the panopticon is not the NSA is snooping on us. It's that we live differently when we think we are or could be spied on at any moment. Check out the film the Lives of Others. 63

It's not about Apple having your data. It's about living in a such a way that you relate to yourself as data. It's about living in a way where life is one big suggested for you shopping cart. 64

I do think the consequence of this gnostic worldview is the celebration of counter culture for its own sake. But there's an assimilationist attitude here. The goal isn't acceptance or inclusion; it's a sense of superiority in being an outsider. 65

Getting your agenda to become part of Halberton's mandatory training isn't making it. It's being co-opted. There's a kind of staunchness to the position of dropping out. 66

But as I've said above, nothing is pure or certain in Foucault, there isn't one right way to be part of the resistance. It's also possible to be what I like to call a "guerrilla in parliament." We all resist in our own ways. 67

If we take that approach, though, we have the opposite problem. The first turns society into a war between zealots and sell outs. The second turns life into one in which we're all just trying to get by. 68

I'm partial to the latter position. It actually seems quite liberal, very understanding. There's no sense of superiority in it (unless it's a false humility). But it also risks becoming meaningless. 69

Is the middle management clerk described in David Foster Wallace's Pale King really resisting when he looks at the clock, bored, waiting for the time to pass? 70

If resistance is everywhere, it's nowhere. If all are heroes, none are. There must be a middle ground between us vs. them hardliners and the kind of mushy complaisance that thinks we should all be on the 7 billion under 7 billion list.
71

But Foucault isn't going to be too prescriptive, b/c that would make him the man. That would ally him with transcendence and objectivity. That would make him too insistent, too ideological. The point is to be otherwise than a subject, to avoid the snares that makes us algos. 72

Look, it's a nice bohemian ideal, but what happens when everyone tries to be a bohemian. It's not practical. It's also naive and immature in a certain way to make a bohemian ideal out of life when someone else is picking up the tab. 73

At the same time, Foucault might be seen--and should be seen-as pro-liberty. It's my life and I'll do what I want, including trying to uproot and deprogram myself from what I've been indoctrinated into. 74

Foucault is Marxist in the way that Althusser was. He believes in a base/superstructure distinction.

Btw--it's hilarious to think that the internet slang term "based" (meaning un- or anti-woke) is from Marxist thought. 75

To recap: the base is the material position or class position, while the superstructure is the cultural frame that you live in and that hides the underlying dynamics. Ie religion as opiate of the masses. 76

This is an argument for the notion of false consciousness. But the question, then, is how you can ever get out of false consciousness (or why you should want to). 77

Foucault ends up in a weird position where we can't but have false consciousness, including thinking that we should esteem liberty, and yet because of his radical skepticism ends up celebrating as liberty any attempt to extricate oneself from the prison-house of the mind. 78

Hence, Foucault believes that madness is a social construct. 79

(Narrator: it is). 80

But is being more inclusive really being more inclusive, or is it just another form of domination, another form of exchanging the right to belong for the right to be oneself? This should, of course, remind us of Rousseau. 81

"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." For Foucault society is a kind of delusion. But so is the delusion of thinking that we can exist before or without society. Where I see Foucault ending up is in the positing of liberty as a kind of noble lie. 82

We need to believe in agency and resistance, because we do. It might be crazy to do so, but as the Woody Allen joke goes, we need the eggs. 83

It's tragic, but moving, that you have in one person someone who thought it was futile to burn it all down and someone who believed the best life was a life of complicated participation in the world. 84

He's an impractical pragmatist, a self-hating romantic, a mind in search of a north star that disappears at every glance. 85

Foucault is critically useful. He rightly understands that much in our life is the result of social processes, conventions. That things we believe are matters of convenience, and often produce social control (even when we are sincere truth-seekers). 86

The rationality movement might look to update priors and re-arrange one's beliefs in response to a probablistic method (Bayesian reasoning). Foucault's sense of self-deception goes deeper. 87

He'd say the entire framework of rationality is like re-arranging chairs on the Titanic. The problems lie not in the mind but in society, in culture, in government. 88

I really think Foucault ends up closer to the spirit of the Tea Party than to Leninism. He's a Marxist who distrusts systems and hierarchies. But the point isn't whether he would have supported a maximalist view of the right to bear arms. 89

The point isn't whether he would have seen Lockdowns as a negative form of "biopolitics"; or whether he would have been anti anything other home-school...90

The point is that Foucault believed that we should be skeptical at all turns. Skeptical of institutions, skeptical of mainstream ideas, and skeptical of ourselves. 91

He's Luther without God, Kierkegaard without faith, Marcion without Redemption, Kant without the noumenal. And yet he's a philosopher, an intellectual historian, a social critic. He clearly believed in something. 92

In some ways, Foucault remains traditional. His last writings were on the concept of speaking truth, especially speaking truth to power. Foucault saw power everywhere, and yet believed there was a difference between the quest for truth and the quest for domination. 93

Perhaps, in the end, he was a thinker who found solace from the world in his own mind, in spite of himself, the cry of a Jeremiah, the consolation of a Boethius. 94

Foucault is the last person I'd call a mystic, yet I have always found his claim that power is ubiquitous to be a kind of secularized form of pantheism, an argument for the indwelling of the divine in our world, albeit an indwelling of conflict rather than peace. 95

Foucault does not think power is a thing that we have. Rather, it's a force, like atomic energy, that rules all relations. The notion of redistributing power reflects an inability to comprehend what power is. 96

Foucault's conception of Power is dialectical and various; it's not one thing. Power moves in many directions, activating us. It's a kind of life force mixed with other forces, the force of thought and language, culture. It's all around and yet nowhere. 97

The result of this is not view is not one that leads to occupying wall street, but one that, like Solomon in Ecclesiastes, realizes that everything is in vain; it's lonely and hard at the top, the middle, and the bottom. 98

Foucault prefers, like Jesus, to hang with the lepers. Were he a consultant, he'd follow Adam Grant's advice, and interview the entry level employees, not the C-Suite. But this is a matter of temperament. 99

Foucault doesn't believe anyone is good or righteous. Being an outcast is not noble. It's just that you have more intimacy with society's blindspots, because you have less to lose. Wherever we are, we should be humble about what our position affords and what it doesn't.

End.