Comments on: Foucault, theocracy, fascism

By: Jimmy Doyle

Jimmy Doyle — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 17:25:39 +0000

D2: There are such things as literal meanings. We all know this. Invoking Quine, Foucault and Derrida in support of the opposite view doesn’t change these facts. As for your example: I could cast the sentence “The Nazis were evil” in bronze and hit a nice German over the head with it. This wouldn’t alter the fact that the sentence is true.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 05:23:05 +0000

All joking aside I find it odd that the choices offered here are between those who like Foucault and who therefore try to find ways to make him sound logically consistent, and those who do not like him, and feel the need to do the same. I find that odd, and worse, I find it silly. The modern world brings with it a number of conflicts. Foucault responds to these and tries to face them. By the logic put forth here, Shakespeare would be deemed a failure because he did not offer a logically consistent vision. But oh yes, Foucault was an ‘intellectual’ and Shakespeare merely a playwright.

By: mitch p.

mitch p. — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 22:09:20 +0000

The Iranian-American futurist Sam Ghandchi thinks that the technocrats who keep the practical institutions of contemporary Iran running are "postmodernists". Here is an Iranian-American postmodernist, Hamid Dabashi, writing (in 2000) against the regime - although he seems to be investing his hopes in Khatami's reformists, who have been rejected as just another face of the system, if the boycott of the elections earlier this year is anything to go by.

By: Eve Garrard

Eve Garrard — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 21:35:58 +0000

Chris: Sure, you’re right, apply the sarcasm operator, so to speak, and the meaning gets reversed. But the operator wasn’t in the situation as Dsquared described it (which is why I emphasised that condition); and if it had been, then the original insult wouldn’t have been available. And furthermore, we’re not going to be able to describe what’s going on in sarcasm without appeal to literal meaning. But I think you’re right, the phil of lang excursion isn’t going to get us much further.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:13:24 +0000

Not sure how helpful this excursus into phil lang has been, but a distinction between sentences and utterances might have come in handy. Anyway, Eve writes After all, in the situation as you describe it, we can’t use the sentence ‘stoning women is good’ as an insult, but we can use the sentence ‘stoning women is bad’ as an insult. Really? Heavily sarcastic tone: “_Yeah Hussain_ , stoning women is good, really good .” Insulting? I’d have thought so.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:21:28 +0000

But now all your point appears to amount to is that one has to communicate using words and sentences. Which is not something Foucault would ever have denied; what he would have denied is that the limited sense and meaning which you’re referring to as the “literal meaning” is the smallest and least interesting part of the actual meaning of a particular sentence-token.

By: Eve Garrard

Eve Garrard — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:14:22 +0000

Dsquared: As I’m sure you know, there isn’t uniform acceptance of the Quinean strictures on meanings. But I wasn’t intending to raise deep issues of ontological commitment. Whatever meanings amount to, we’re going to need to deploy some notion of literal or sentence meaning, as opposed to speaker’s communicative intentions. After all, in the situation as you describe it, we can’t use the sentence ‘stoning women is good’ as an insult, but we can use the sentence ‘stoning women is bad’ as an insult. How can we explain this difference without adverting to the fact that the two sentences have different meanings?

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:38:32 +0000

I have to agree with Eve’s two comments. A type/token distinction doesn’t resolve the problems we are discussing because it doesn’t fix the frame of reference.

Or to put it another way; a stone hitting a woman is a physical fact; there’s no arguing with it because in general, one can’t argue with stones. The proposition “Stoning women is bad”, however, is something that only makes sense in a particular context. If it is true that physical events of that kind are morally bad, then there is some Platonic realm in which the sentence “Stoning women is bad” is true.

This doesn’t really explain the problem at all. Is the proper physical reference stones touching a woman’s body, striking a woman’s body, striking a woman’s body with enough force to do damage, striking a woman’s body with enough force to kill, or some other physical event? Your appeal to ‘context’ only removes the judgment by one step. Instead of saying ‘stoning women is bad’ you would say that ‘stoning women in a particular context is bad’. But that doesn’t help you if you use Foucault’s style of analysis, because now you must judge the individual facts of the context. What is their context? Over many interations of analysis eventually you bootstrap up to the general societal context and then you are really fucked because his analysis never really allows you to say distinguish between a bad context and a good context. And that is the whole problem. He appeals to context for every possible level of generality. He offers no way of discriminating between a good context and a bad one. He offers no way of determining a good point of view from a bad one. In fact the effect of his attempts is to undermine the idea that such a determination could possibly be made. And that is bad. But this is funny:

But you still seem to be operating on a view of the world which has things in it called “meanings”. Quine ended up concluding that there weren’t any such things, and some of the best bits in Foucault and Derrida involve trying to analyse the damage caused by the assumption that there are.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:13:02 +0000

Re the (lame) “stoning of women” line: Actually, i’m not too proud of it neither. I found it unnecessarily snarky as i was writing it, but couldn’t find a convenient replacement at the time. A weakness the little bugger promptly took advantage of, morphing into something else and vaguely messy. Note for later : harness the snark! But for most in the humanities today, it’s the later M.F. (say, Discipline and Punish, History of Sex) that holds more interest. Sometimes unfortunately even in the news. There is something of a panopticon in the open cages of gantanamo, isn’t it?

By: CR

CR — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 15:10:27 +0000

Re the (lame) “stoning of women” line: I suspect that the Foucault of Discipline and Punish would have something like this to say: “The stoning of women was (is) one thing; but things really started to get going when women learned to stone themselves, automatically like, from inside.” Short version of Discipline and Punish: old-fashioned (state) violence (punishment) against the body was replaced by more efficient, self-running systems of Discipline in modernity. I.e. catching people and putting them to death is a lot less efficient than creating systems that implant the prison, the jail, the gallows in the mind of the subject. Reprogramming is cheaper than enforcement, and more effective. The notes on here seem stuck on the poststructuralist, antifoundationalist, Foucault. Epistemology and the like. But for most in the humanities today, it’s the later M.F. (say, Discipline and Punish, History of Sex) that holds more interest. I think this is for sure the case with Judith B., since I took a seminar with her in which we read History of Sexuality…

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:58:36 +0000

But you still seem to be operating on a view of the world which has things in it called “meanings”. Quine ended up concluding that there weren’t any such things, and some of the best bits in Foucault and Derrida involve trying to analyse the damage caused by the assumption that there are.

By: Eve Garrard

Eve Garrard — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:31:33 +0000

Brian, Dsquared: Brian points out that:’If Foucault wants to stress the importance of considering both what is communicated (or speaker meaning) as well as truth conditions (or sentence meaning) then he’s making a correct and important point.’ This is true, but hardly novel – we don’t need Foucault to tell us that (Brian certainly didn’t). The point I was trying to make is that speaker meaning is dependent on sentence meaning, and hence the latter can hardly be dismissed as less important. (However, Dsquared is quite right to note that the uttering of true statements can sometimes be discriminatory, depending on context – I’ve been arguing this point myself on normblog with respect to anti-Zionist discourse.)

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:16:51 +0000

I haven’t read any Foucault, so I can’t weigh in on how relevant this is to anything he ever wrote, but I just wanted to make one small point on Dsquared’s side. It’s a commonplace these days that there is a big difference between the truth-conditions of the sentences we utter and what we manage to communicate by a particular token sentence. To take the cliched example, a reference letter that just says “X is always punctual and his handwriting is very neat” is pretty insulting if it’s a reference for an academic job. Of course it’s not part of the (literal) meaning of that sentence that X is a lousy academic, but that’s pretty clearly communicated. If Foucault wants to stress the importance of considering both what is communicated (or speaker meaning) as well as truth conditions (or sentence meaning) then he’s making a correct and important point. On the other hand, I wouldn’t take the upshot of that distinction to be that sentence meanings are irrelevant. I think that sentence meanings are interesting as well as speaker meanings, but then I’m paid to think that so take what I say with a grain of salt.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:39:10 +0000

Eve; what do you mean by a “literal meaning” and how does it differ from a “meaning”? I suspect that “literal” here is doing the work of “unproblematic, exactly what I say, with all the dfficult issues raised by Foucault automagically resolved”.

By: Jimmy Doyle

Jimmy Doyle — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:36:46 +0000

D2: The trouble with Foucault is that deprived of context, it’s hard to convince oneself that he’s not trying to be ironic. (I’m reminded of Peter Cook’s crack that Hitler’s speeches take on a whole new light when you realise that he’s being sarcastic).