I don't know how calling you out for literally not knowing what you are talking about comprises 'low quality argumentation'. For instance, you seem to have now dragged in, out of nowhere, this equivocation between power and violence that not only simply doesn't exist in Foucault's work, but that he has at points explicitly dissociated ("In itself the exercise of power is not violence" cf. Discipline and Punish). And given that I've already quoted from Foucault explaining how power is not 'beyond' truth but part and parcel of it - a quote which you have simply ignored in order to continue to wrongly assert otherwise - one wonders what is left of any argument you have put forward whatsoever.

I could also mention that you have also ignored where I pointed out that the equivocation between argument and epistemes is something you also have not argued for (as I asked before, where does Foucault speak about argumentation as such? - it's not in the Archaeology which you off-handedly referenced), but I imagine it too will fall on deaf ears. And as for this: "But violence won't change the truth of words, their conclusion, nor the explanatory power which arises from a conscious use of grammar and logic." - again cite a reference where Foucault says that violence will "change the truth of words, their conclusion, etc". Show me evidence of your work beyond the charlatanism of these made-up charges.

So don't tell me that I'm not engaging you on substantive points - what would be nice is for you to actually make one with reference to the relevant source material. And if I'm being harsh it's because of the sheer hypocrisy of people like you. You harp on about the lack of coherence about postmodernism, while committing yourself to falsehoods, bad readings, a lack of attention to either detail or rigor, or even basic reasoning. It's a breathtaking lack of intellectual consistency.

One Foucault's major points is that an argument (or discourse) is itself an expression of power.

When we argue a case we do violence to other ideas, cordoned them off, make them unacceptable, believe they are meaningless and cause other to reject or denounce them within their own thoughts-- it's the ground of thought which sets-up the violence committed against particular people (e.g. the mentally ill, the criminal), to a point where it cannot even recognised as an act or violence and power), such as thinking the punishment of a criminal is just "inevitable" or that someone with a mental illness cannot make truthful (or "reasoned" ) comment or have honest motivation.

It's this awareness of power you are struggling with. Your problem is really not that Foucault somehow rejects truth or says some nonsense like "there is only power, not truth" (though your argument may claim that, as you can only think in terms of true/false, rather than a wider context of what is valued and how power is expressed), it is that he dares make power explicit.

If someone uses Foucault's method, they will know the context of the world and knowledge is bigger than whatever truth you are describing. They might go, "Well, yes that is true... but if we act in a way where that truth is worshiped, it will cause X,Y and Z violence against theses people, so we should reign in our excitement..."

The myth of The Truth no longer functions. We are cursed (blessed?) to recognise what our understanding, culture and actions do to others in the context of power. The blindness to the violence which accompanies our understanding of others and the world around us is lost.

Why does it bugger belief?

I don't think that it is common sense or obvious that political power influences the hard sciences. Many people seem to resist the idea.

The pomo bullies in this thread more or less prove the point I made on page one.

Why does it bugger belief? — Moliere

>:O He didn't quite say that....

haha! Yup.

One Foucault's major points is that an argument (or discourse) is itself an expression of power. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Sure, but powers beyond grammar, logic, and awareness are not part of, nor do they necessarily influence, the grammar, logic and truth of words from which the explanatory power of an argument arises.

When we argue a case we do violence to other ideas, cordoned them off, make them unacceptable, believe they are meaningless and cause other to reject or denounce them within their own thoughts-- it's the ground of thought which sets-up the violence committed against particular people (e.g. the mentally ill, the criminal), to a point where it cannot even recognised as an act or violence and power), such as thinking the punishment of a criminal is just "inevitable" or that someone with a mental illness cannot make truthful (or "reasoned" ) comment or have honest motivation.

It's this awareness of power you are struggling with. Your problem is really not that Foucault somehow rejects truth. . . — TheWillowOfDarkness

He also sneaks in powers beyond logic and grammar, recall. I doubt there exists a "ground of thought" of powers beyond or beneath thought. If it exists, would we not still be free to veto the outcome of our supposedly power-induced thoughts?

The myth of The Truth no longer functions. We are cursed (blessed?) to recognise what our understanding, culture and actions do to others in the context of power. The blindness to the violence which accompanies our understanding of others and the world around us is lost. — TheWillowOfDarkness

One does not have to explain away truth as a myth in order to understand and avoid bad effects of power, ignorance and so forth.

The salient point I think you are missing is that argumentation is not about truth, but about consistency. Argumentation seeks to draw out the entailments and implications of what is already assumed to be true (which is given in the unargued premises of the argument).

What is assumed to be true is very often mediated by power (social influences, individual flourishing and so on); I think if you look around you, and at your own motives for believing to be true what you do, this will become undeniable. The practical will always take precedence over the so-called pure.

How so?

Frustration is understandable. And even if frustration is expressed it doesn't draw away from the point -- that in order to criticize a text or group of texts it is fair to ask the critic to read them, or at least to not have an opinion on them until they do -- or, even if one has an opinion, it is fair to say that said opinion is not an informed one which is going to hit its mark.

This sort of requirement looks like a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill norm for rational understanding, discussion, critique, and debate. So I'd say no one here, at least, has rejected either truth or logic as tools of Western oppression.

it is fair to ask the critic to read them — Moliere

Sure. And I have, which means I feel justified in my judgment. If you asked me two years ago, I wouldn't have had much of an opinion, but I've had quite enough postmodernist claptrap crammed down my throat in graduate school since then to feel confident in my dismissal of it. Consider also that postmodernist texts are enormously unreadable, if not deliberately so (this is what initially raised my suspicions: what are they trying to hide in all this obscurity?). Roland Barthes, for example, quite literally argued against clarity in language and of having a natural prose style. Other postmodernists are less explicit about the degree to which they are poseurs pretending to sound profound and complex, but it's obvious to me now that that's what they're doing in many cases.

The basic point is this: they make seemingly wild and outrageous claims through the use of impenetrable jargon, which when pressed or upon further examination, turn out to be rather trivial claims that don't really need making. That, and they're all butthurt Marxists.

The ground is not beneath thought, it is the thought itself. It's "beneath" other actions-- e.g. the rejection of people, punitive measures taken, whether or not one realises power the are expressing over others. Power is not a predetermining force. It's an expression of freedom.

When one makes an argument, dismiss an idea, expresses power, it is done in collusion with freedom. The question of vetoing action is meaningless because the expression power is done with what people have freely chosen.

If I, for example, think of criminals as not people, but of objects who have brought their own suffering on themselves, it's the choice I have made. I am making the argument with my freedom, to (supposedly) make explicit the nature of criminals and what it means for them to be punished.

I want and have chosen to think in this manner. My freedom is directed to thinking this and expressing power in this way.

One is always free to veto any instance of these power inducing thoughts (by free will, anyone could choose to think otherwise), but the point is people are not doing so, and are so expressing power in that particular way.

One does not have to explain away truth as a myth in order to understand and avoid bad effects of power, ignorance and so forth. — jkop

No-one is doing so. What's being argued is that arguments express power. Whether true or false, right or wrong, the argument has an impact in the world. When we make an argument about truth, we aren't making an isolated statement which amounts to the entirety of the world. It also has impacts on what we think, on what ideas people choose to reject or accept, on the ways people are treated based on how they are understood.

The myth of "The Truth" is not truth. It is the idea of a single True idea being relevant or governing the world, such that if we talk about it, we have thought of everything that's important.

Like, when you say, for example, that the power expressed by an argument is irrelevant. That's a myth of The Truth. You've reduced, by choice, the horizon of our knowledge to only that particular argument. The idea it is, for example, important to consider the way you argument impacts on society, on how people are affected by the way you are arguing, is rejected.

In seeking Manifest Density, you will pillage and destroy indigenous communities, for nothing accept that argument is important. When running your factory and seeking profit, you will abuse your workers because the only truth that matters is maximising your profit. The history of human societies it littered with instances of abuse and ignorance chosen in favour of The Truth. Recognising it as a myth is critical to avoiding bad effects of power. It's how those in power avoid getting caught-up in their own visions and enacting destruction on those they rule.

Roland Barthes, for example, quite literally argued against clarity in language and of having a natural prose style. — Thorongil

I've been a professional writer most of my working life and pride myself on my clarity. Nevertheless I think there's something to be said for Barthes' argument, which in my opinion and slightly dim memory is not exactly as you put it. 'Clarity' for Barthes is one of those rhetorical tricks of 'realism' in fiction, used by the bourgeois novel and Soviet socialist realists alike: a pretense of fidelity to how life is, that sought through its very style to persuade its readership of the 'reality' of its portrayal. I've certainly used such rhetorical tricks in creating fiction. TV or cinematic realism, for instance, which I've scripted, apes the purported 'clarity' of the documentary or news genres to persuade the viewer of its fidelity to life as it's lived. But woven through such 'realism' is a web of lies, masked by the pseudo-clarity.

Once you've understood the tricks you can play with writing, what then? Oddly enough much analytic philosophy seems written in the way that Barthes himself sometimes seemed to argue for: that you should know how difficult the ideas are by making the very sentences difficult to read. Have a read of Robert Brandom, for instance, who often reads as if ill-translated from the German. I can't tolerate that myself. I gather Barthes came to advocate a version of the 'simple' later on, though I've never read whatever that's in. All the same, I think his analysis of clarity-as-rhetoric is illuminating, and not at all wild or outrageous. You can emerge from it a clear - or simple-sounding - writer all the same.

Part of the reason this debate has become fruitless is that 'truth' is considered of higher value than 'understanding.' Absolute truth is by nature tautological, and therefore of limited utility. Understanding the arguments is more important, as well as accepting the limits of the amount of 'truth' any one person can know.

Hi, I don't think we debate whether absolute truth exists. If you look at the premise of the archaeological method, there is an assumed ground for thought beyond logic, grammar, and beneath consciousness. I question whether such a ground for thought exists. What conditions satisfies its possibility?

Hi, I don't think we debate whether absolute truth exists. If you look at the premise of the archaeological method, there is an assumed ground for thought beyond logic, grammar, and beneath consciousness. I question whether such a ground for thought exists. What conditions satisfies its possibility? — jkop

My understanding would be that there is an assumed ground for understanding the history of thought beyond the rules of logic and grammar and beneath consciousness. This is Foucault and he later called it 'genealogy', but to me it amounted to the same thing, perhaps someone will correct me if there's a major difference.

Our existence, the actions we take, the understanding we hold, which expesses power. Life isn't just an argument, true or otherwise. The world always has more going on as we speak and act.

Strictly speaking, it is not so much beyond any grammar, logic and experience-- I am talking about its truth now-- but rather beyond the particular grammar, logic and experience of the argument.

Even for me, for as I make this argument for Foucault, there is an unstated (in my argument about what Foucault says) expression of power. When I defend Foucault's method, I am not just speaking a truth, but taking a stand in what we ought to think and do.

When someone tells a truth (or falsehood), there is always more going on in the world than them just saying what is true (or false).

Foucault's method is an understanding and observation about the relationship of our ideas to social structure and impact of culture on people's lives.

Manifest Density, — TheWillowOfDarkness

That's hilarious, gave me a good laugh! Sometimes I am so glad you don't bother correcting your posts too mulch (sic)!

I'm tempted to claim it as commentary on food and sugar industries putting the truth of profit above the health of the community, but it would be both approprative and a confusion of mass with density.

There's certainly a "manifest mass" out there! :)

I think it might be useful to consider the difference between material truth, on which the philosophy of science rests, separate from 'absolute truth.' Whether truth itself can be known a priori is a subject of debates on absolute truth, and not really pertinent to post modernism. The concern is more that there remains an idea of a posteriori truth by empirical examination of the material world.

Postmodernism managed to make a devastating critique to the Humanities notion or ability to get to Truth when Derrida ran over Structuralism. But the entire essence of that critique was the certain arbitrary notions of texts and readings. As it were the theoretical problems of distinguishing what constitutes more legitmate and better readings in theoretical principles.

But these criticisms just do not hold water in Science and everyday life...

The statements I need to put on a red shirt vs I need to stop at a red light....

do not declare the same kind of meaning through the use of the word need and one as an ethical/functional statement, one is matter of fact in import the other is not. Postmodernism assumes a false relativism of hypothesizing 'theory' can be applied as a Worldview and it can't....

If it did these people would treat turning on the television as an equal danger as putting metal in the microwave and scissors in plug sockets.... I wouldn't have a postmodern condition because an evolutionary principle would have taken over. The entire thing about postmodernism is it isn't interested in truth or sincerity at all.... Because everything in some sense or another is a game of language... Ironically taken out of context from Wittgenstein who was a person deeply concerned with sensitivity of language, talking passed people and so on.

So discussing how the critique of structuralism cannot be applied to Science at a base level of natural laws and quantification that is 7 yards not 7 miles and there is no real opinion on that which will change the factuality... All you will get from the postmodernist typically is the skeptical theory of signs and deconstruction that says something obscure but in English means.... Facts and Truths are only so because of their building parts...
Completely agree.... 7 yards is true because 7 cannot be 6 and yards cannot be inches or miles.... now back to my question of the unarbitrary nature of meter? The question goes nowhere instead the more successful attempts of postmodernism seem to ignore, deviate or best con the materialist into trying to defend 7 and yards in some platonic sense.... NOPE the language is not the thing I agree but the distance from point A to point B in the world of the phenomenon is a completely different order of truth than one's reading and opinion about Shakespeare...


It assumes all language is a game in a very arbitrary way to the idea a postmodernist wants to debate you fairly, has or is capable of sincerity or is interested in any way of defining themselves positively is already ascribing a kind of decency I have no reason to presume exists. I am not saying that genuine people who call themselves postmodernists exists... I am saying the position allows for these kinds of toxic shenanigans so rather than try and debate them the best thing you could do is put them in a dog house until they actually show they are somebody or a group of people who actually want to talk and reason like human beings. Because based on the descriptor postmodernist you can't be sure of really a much of anything.... unlike materialist it is safe to assume they believe in gravity, Copernican model of cosmology, an atom, a base 10 number system and so on.... A postmodernist.... can you really assume the same thing?

Being a science teacher and having to put up with this nonsense coming into my classroom I have seen the advocates of Michael Foucault and Derrida come in the form of 14 yr olds that don't know Michael Foucalt criticized Derrida of obscurantism more than Chomsky did.... I am also to skeptical to simply say 'these are kids' .... because I have seen adults as inexcusably ignorant on their own self ascribed position.... But in the post-truth and politically correct age where a duck cannot be a duck how can such a person be considered a shallow thinker?