Some Foo-ko

The last quote is by far my favorite.

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“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
― Michel Foucault

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky – Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based… To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault

“The first task of the doctor is … political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated…”
― Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”
― Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”
― Michel Foucault

“power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault

“Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”
― Michel Foucault

“We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is
good-and that is the real theater-to
transcend them in the manner of play, by
means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,
to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put “in
play,” show up, transform and reverse
the systems which quietly order us about.”
― Michel Foucault

“Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”
― Michel Foucault

“Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy”
― Michel Foucault

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Skip to the twenty minute mark and listen for a few minutes
to him talk about Obama

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Billy_T wrote:

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So Bernays and company figured if they can just make women believe it’s a great show of “freedom and emancipation” to be just like men and smoke yourself to death..

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fwiw, i get the impression Bernays was a huge self-promoter. He liked to brag about getting women to smoke, etc — and i’m sure his ‘work’ contributed to the upswing in women-smokers, but i also think he exaggerated the effect of his campaign.

But yeah, corporate-capitalism sucks.

Its here though, and we gotta live it out. 🙂

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Zooey wrote:

I agree with the point about networking. I believe that is probably the most important outcome of the March. Not just creating contacts, but the expansion of awareness of related issues. There is no way to educate people on all of these issues efficiently. The best way is through conversations that take place when people’s interest is aroused, like these marches. So hopefully a lot of the Marchers who aren’t socialist feminists had their eyes open to a wide range of issues. That’s the best outcome of all of these demonstrations in my opinion.

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Well, it couldn’t hurt.

But my own experience at marches is that there
aint much ‘education’ goin on. There’s speeches, and walking, and goofing around, and smiling, and laughing and gawking, and people-watching, and chatting, some music… maybe some drugs maybe some alcohol. Some painted faces. Some signs. Lots of photos.

But i haven’t seen a whole lot of ‘education’ or networking, myself. I aint marched in a decade or so though.

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PS — i sent that article to three of my leftist-radical-female friends.

Two liked it, one didnt.

So, there’s that.

This is tricky ground. Lots of views.

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Zooey wrote:

I don’t think the women’s march was any one thing. It wasn’t even confined to women’s issues. There were a lot of people marching who marched in solidarity with women, but were motivated by, and promoting, other issues such as LGBT, gay, environmental, and so on. It was a broad coalition of causes that united under the banner of women’s issues with which everyone is sympathetic.

Moreover, I will say that I never heard of a pussyhat website until now. None of the marchers I know ever mentioned it, and they certainly weren’t following any kind of instructions, or lead from a webpage. So I agree that part of the article is just facile. This was not Bernays-level manipulation by any stretch.

But I also don’t see any Stalin-level demands for purity in the piece. I see a (correct) observation that most of the marchers have failed to recognized the big picture, the one that extends to women’s rights beyond their own personal concerns. I think that’s just true. They were largely out there because of concern about the chauvinistic tone of Trump and his supporters, and because of concern about Planned Parenthood etc. That, broadly speaking, was the impetus. The writer points out that that is hardly a comprehensive approach to women’s issues.

Unfortunately, I think he is dismissive of the march for that reason, when another person might have pointed out that it was a big step in the right direction that people are standing up for themselves. We haven’t even been doing THAT much in this country. So standing up for self may be the first step. Standing up for others comes later in the growth of the movement.

I don’t, however, think that the march means much unless it is followed with constant pressure, and a concerted effort to dislodge as many politicians as possible with alternatives who are farther to the left politically. Because – let’s face it – the march in itself was close to pointless. Marches don’t do much of anything except provide catharsis. They have little, if any, impact on policy. Just a few days after the march, Trump nominates a regressive judge to the SC, and while the women are marching, he signs the Global Gag Rule. So…you know…

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I prettymuch agree with that. I mean, without going over each clause and doing a point by point, i prettymuch agree with that view.

One of the things I am in the process of learning or trying to learn is HOW to discuss Class issues with people who dont have class-consciousness,
as well as how to discuss Race/gender issues with Class-warriors (such as myself)

Its tricky ground. I’m still learning about where all the landmines are.

I’m getting better at seeing where writers are leaving stuff out and pounding the table too much about Class or Race or Gender, etc.

Its hard to converse constructively about how this system victimizes various groups. I think bell hooks like to use the umbrella term “domination”. Its a ‘dominator system’

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Billy_T wrote:

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WV,

I agree about the absence of class-consciousness. Big time. Your Wolff video deals with that indirectly. The Frankfurt School folks I’m reading about dealt with that directly.

The thing is, the author just didn’t need to make that point via a putdown of the women’s march. It actually makes zero sense to attack it from that angle. Shit. He should be applauding the activism, the passion, the enthusiasm for mass opposition to the status quo.

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Ok, but think about what you…just said: “I agree about the absence of class consciousness”.

Well, that was EXACTLY the writers whole entire point.

There is a great gaping galaxy-sized absence of it in this country. So why wouuld you think the March would be any different?

The Marchers were MAINLY lacking in ‘class consciousness’ — they were MAINLY Dems. Obama/Clinton Dems.

Now your second point — “the author didnt need to putdown the march” — well now you are talking STRATEGY. And yes, it may very well BE bad strategy to write that article that way. Sure. Thats a real concern. I’d have written it differently. But the main substantive POINT of it was that the marchers (men AND women) in this nation lack class consciousness. Wolff made exactly the same point he just didnt pick on anybody.

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Well, i agree with the Writer. Completely.

Sure, no doubt there were plenty of women like the one’s you describe. But the majority were like what he described, imho

There’s nothing to agree with, it’s a bad analysis.

I am always resistant to “haven’t kept up” old left types like that. You can usually recognize them by their stalinist drive for purity. There’s only one doctrine that counts kind of thing. Purists are to me an internal problem of the left. They’re like the old drunk uncles of left analysis.

IMHO, for one thing, if we don’t have alliance politics now we will have nothing.

But that’s just to address one impulse there in an essay like that. He could have made the same overly-homogenizing, outdated pop culture analysis dependent on questionable and superseded concepts (such as the millions duped by images schtick) without ALSO being insulting. If so I would have only political/analytic objections.

But on top of it, he was insulting.

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I think it was good analysis and it had nothing to do with ‘purity’.

I think he left a lot of things out but thats a different criticism.

If it had been ‘my’ article the last section would have been about alliances
and the groundwork that needs to be done.

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zn wrote:

Most women demonstrators who marched against Trump were no doubt well intentioned within their limited perspective.

I can’t count the number of women I know who were in that march. And none of them are restricted to the stereotypes this limited-minded guy wants to promote. And we’re talking some heavy-duty, real-thing leftists here, and I mean people who could reduce that insulting essay to rubble without working up a sweat. I am talking about people who would hold their own here and fit right in and add a lot, except they’re not Rams fans so I probably couldn’t get them to post here.

He actually thinks that the female millions involved in and/or sympathetic with that march are homogenously the same and were all equally susceptible to the same centralized manipulation, so for example everyone wore pussyhats because that was promoted by one place/person/entity that says some stuff a certain way on their website. Sorry but. That. Is. Just. Stupid. Generally speaking, if someone from the left has dismissive stereotypes of an entire category of person, they are not shining examples of progressive analysis.

As a rule any form of top-down analysis (ie. “everyone but me is a victim of this thing because they were led to it by a chosen few”), it’s not real analysis at all and certainly not leftist in any reasonable way.

Oh and btw women were smoking in the 1890s.

https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-abstract/CXXV/513/491/525369/Women-and-Smoking-since-1890?redirectedFrom=fulltext

When a small number of intellectual or leisured society women began smoking hand-made Egyptian or Turkish cigarettes in the 1890s it was associated with emancipation and the ‘new woman’.

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Well, i agree with the Writer. Completely.

Sure, no doubt there were plenty of women like the one’s you describe. But the majority were like what he described, imho. And the proof i offer is the last fifty years of elections. Women and Men vote over and over and over again for the Clintons or the Reagans or the Bushs or the Obamas. They do NOT vote for the leftist candidates. The leftist candidates always get under five percent of the vote. So where are these women you describe? How many are really out there? Not many. We are a small group, zn. A small group. I suspect you just happen to know a high percentage of that small group. I mean do you have any proof of anything or just the anecdotal stuff about knowing some leftist women who were at the march?

Most of those women (and men) were Clintonistas, zn. They just were. Just my opinion of course.

As to the meta-subject that keeps coming up — I do agree that we can all converse about Class And Gender And Race issues. They are all related.
I do think in this corporotacracy CLASS is the one that is understood the least and that is where most of the groundwork and education needs to be done.

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Still, the Hellmouth has opened, the blood-demons and vampire-squids
are upon us, and there is no hope. Have a nice day.

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How will that change the Rams draft this year, I wonder.

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I dunno, but we know they cant draft a Bust-LT in the first round this year. So there’s that.

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