Forget Foucault

Continuing last night's discussion and dissection of Forget Foucault Curious about the dominion of sexuality in a codified, instrumentalized society where the very concept of power finds its logical end, and consequently, its disappearance? Want to partake in understanding the sucker-punch that had Foucault and Deleuze on their heels?

You wlil find the text here: teddykw2.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jean-baudrillard-forget-foucault.pdf

Last left off around pages 36-40 attempting to clarify Baudrillard's demonstration that bodies under modern capitalism have themselves become primary processes in a "libidinal" economy, and thus find as their secret the principles of capital: "a fantastic extension of the jurisdiction governing private property, for assigning to each individual the management of a certain capital: psychic capital, libidinal capital, sexual capital, unconscious capital" (FF 40).

Now, continuing onward with the primitiveness of brute-force critique necessary to extrapolate value from such a pretentious, convoluted text

>This is what Foucault tells us (in spite of himself): nothing functions with repression (repression), everything functions with production; nothing functions with repression (refoulement), everything functions with liberation. But it is the same thing. Any form of liberation is fomented by repression: the liberation of productive forces is like that of desire; the liberation of bodies is like that of women's liberation, etc. There is no exception to the logic of liberation: any force or any liberated form of speech constitutes one more turn in the spiral of power. This is how "sexual liberation" accomplishes a miracle by uniting in the same revolutionary ideal the two major effects of repression, liberation and sexuality. (FF 40)

Other urls found in this thread:

home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/FoucaultHistorySex.pdf
rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/3464/3823
www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/coulter.htm
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I like all this but haven't Focualt, Delueze or Baudrillard where should I start?

Well, in relation to this specific text, I'd definitely read what it's responding to: home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/FoucaultHistorySex.pdf

rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/3464/3823

Relevant review

is this an anime?
>Baudrillard is always at his best when challenging an adversary. Forget Foucault is a case in point. The essence of his method is polemical (from "polemos," war) . His goal was not to engage his adversary in a dialogue, but to create a non-dialectical space in which adversaries are locked in a close fight that requires an immediate response-or death. "Challenge alone is without an end since it is indefinitely reversible. It is this reversibility which gives it its prodigious force" (FF, p. 56).

huh. i'm a big baudrillard fan but i'd never heard of this little book before. just that little paragraph you posted made me think of this quote from the first essay in transparency of evil:

>If I were asked to characterize the present state of affairs, I would describe it as ‘after the orgy’. The orgy in question was the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production, liberation of the forces of destruction, women’s liberation, children’s liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, liberation of art. The assumption of all models of representation, as of all models of anti-representation. This was a total orgy — an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as of the crisis of development. We have pursued every avenue in the production and effective overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies and satisfactions. Now everything has been liberated, the chips are down, and we find ourselves faced collectively with the big question: WHAT DO WE DO NOW THE ORGY IS OVER?

>Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation. We may pretend to carry on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void, because all the goals of liberation are already behind us, and because what haunts and obsesses us is being thus ahead of all the results — the very availability of all the signs, all the forms, all the desires that we had been pursuing. But what can we do? This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realign them, we can only ‘hyper-realize’ them through interminable simulation. We live amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference.

frankly, just from glancing at forget foucault, it seems quite a bit more obscure than the baudrillard i'm familiar with...maybe bc i'm not so familiar with foucault?

anyway, said quote seems to give some context to baudrillard's stance towards liberation: i.e. he's not buying it. "Any form of liberation is fomented by repression"

cont

so for baudrillard, liberation is the cultural equivalent of production. this isn't a particular novel view today but i'm guessing it was then because so many liberation movements were so closely aligned with radical political movements, i.e. anarchism, communism, hippieism, whatever all alternatives. flash forward about forty years and now your average feminist works at nike's hq in portland quietly pinching and zooming a vector file of the famed swoosh logo in adobe illustrator. needless to say, baudrillard saw where things were headed: liberation's embrace by capitalism because it widens the labor pool, drives down wages, and ironically decreases labor's bargaining power. the failure of identity politics

Does consumption exist anymore? It seems to me consumption is just the process of reproducing the means of production and relations of production. Any form of liberation will be consumption, and therfor only again really production.

bumb

Baudrillard becomes incomprehensible to me the second he makes the jump from the production of signs under early capitalism, to their "abstraction" under modern/industrial capitalism.

-- A sign is a faithful representation of its referent
-- A sign perverts and muddles a profound reality
-- A sign masks the absence of a profound reality
-- A sign is self-referential, hyperral with no relation to the real whatsoever

In medieval times, sumptuous clothing was faithful to its referent: significant of nobility. Under 19th century capitalism, fakes and mass reproduction made appendages, fakes, and clones possible, so that everyone could partake in the "lavishness" of high fashion.
What is Baudrillard's logical morphosis of this particular sign into hyperreality in the 20th/21st century? How can clothes be abstracted? Is he talking about meme customizable avatars on xbox live?

As for sexual liberation, there's inconsistency in the paragraph I posted: Baudrillard's thesis is precisely the disappearance of the very power that traditionally dominated sexuality and its numerous discourses, yet he calls its liberation (among any other force that can be liberates) as "one more turn in the spiral of power".

Could he be referring to the spiral of power and pleasure Foucault described in history of sexuality? No, that wouldn't make sense, Foucault was talking about the pleasure power feels in its domination, and the power pleasure-seeking subjects feel when they scandalize power (like sexualizing your doctor, therapist, or teacher).

So what is this "miracle" sexuality accomplishes, what are the " two major effects of repression, liberation and sexuality"?

>This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been.

Does this mean to say, it's time to go full hedonism in our libidinal economy of repetitive, simulated liberation? Replaying the scenarios meaning indulging in the fruits of those liberations ad infinitum?

French intellectual celebrity class ass wiping. Nothing out of the ordinary

>What is Baudrillard's logical morphosis of this particular sign into hyperreality in the 20th/21st century? How can clothes be abstracted? Is he talking about meme customizable avatars on xbox live?

What does high fashion or fashion mean nowdays, what does it represent. A smoking jacket made in China and sold by H&M or Zara. You don't wear a certain type of clothing because you are a certain type of person with some kind of socioeconomic status. You pick and choose what you want, you are the avatar on xbox live. The meaning of your clothes does not go beyond the clothes themselves anymore. At best they refer to a another sign, eg. brand.

This is why Deleuze talks about nomadism as a movement away from authority, rather than a response to it. To phrase the argument like this is to not engage with Deleuze

Man, being wrong about communism hurt French intellectuals badly. Just look at this bullshit. All this just so they didn't need to admit that the conservatives were right and the Soviet Union sucked.

How is nomadism any different from Foucault's and Deleuze's conception of diffuse, libidinal energy with its decentralized character and tendency toward liquidity, flow, and "liberation"?

if anything being wrong about Marxism makes these texts more salient

Even sub-cultures are defined by their clothing, they do not define their clothes. There is nothing at the center, just endless reference between signs.

so, furries are defined by their closet not their faggy fetish?

A good example of this is Veeky Forums at its most extreme. Endless self-centered circle jerk. They take inspiration from things, but they transform them to abstract sign. Look at terror-wave or such things.

>but they transform them to abstract sign.
what is abstract sign in this context. Clothing without a referent in reality?

Are they furries in any meaningful sense, if they do not wear the clothes. Think about furries, the image that immediately comes to mind is the costume or a picture of a antropomorphic animal, ie. a sign. The costume or the picture are a representation of a fake and abstract identity, a fursona; which many furries would consider more real than their actual identity.

For example. Inspiration threads contain pictures of military clothes. After a while a certain way of using them, or their fake representations eg. repro or military-inspired clothing, is codified in to a style. After that, form a people wearing this clothes only start to refer to other people doing the same, or the general codification of the style instead of the original inspiration.

The codification does not have to be explicit. The only referent of the combination of the clothes is the meaningless style.

>deconstructing focault
g-guys? maybe we have gone too far?

Here's something interesting,

>In fact, the whole analysis of power needs to be reconsidered. To have power or not, to take it or lose it, to incarnate it or to challenge it: if this were power, it would not even exist. Foucault tells us something else; power is something that functions; " ... power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" ( The History of Sexuality, p. 93). Neither central, nor unilateral, nor dominant, power is distributional; like a vector, it operates through relays and transmissions. Because it is an immanent, unlimited field of forces, we still do not understand what power runs into and against what it stumbles since it is expansion, pure magnetization. However, if power were this magnetic infiltration ad infinitum of the social field, it would long ago have ceased meeting with any resistance. Inversely, if it were the one-sidedness of an act of submission, as in the traditional "optic," it would long ago have been overthrown everywhere. It would have collapsed under the pressure of antagonistic forces. Yet this has never happened, apart from a few "historical" exceptions. For "materialist" thinking, this can only appear to be an internally insoluble problem: why don't "dominated" masses immediately overthrow power? Why fascism? Against this unilateral theory (but we understand why it survives, particularly among "revolutionaries" - they would really like power for themselves), against this native vision, but also against Foucault's functional vision in terms of relays and transmissions, we must say that power is something that is exchanged. Not in the economical sense, but in the sense that power is executed according to a reversible cycle of seduction, challenge, and ruse (neither axis nor indefinite relay, but a cycle). And if power cannot be exchanged in this sense, it simply disappears.
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>no, power seduces by that reversibility which haunts it, and upon which a minimal symbolic cycle is set up. Dominators and dominated exist no more than victims and executioners. (While exploiters and exploited do in fact exist, they are on different sides because there is no reversibility in production, which is precisely the point: nothing essential happens at that level.) With power there are no antagonistic positions: it is carried out according to a cycle of seduction.

Particularly the idea of power having a "reversibility" in the context of a cycle of exchange and "seduction" (understood here differently from seduction and desire?).

What is power exchanged for in this cycle? We know, thanks to Foucault and Deleuze, power has become decentralized and diffused into vectors of relations (no matter how infinitesimally small), but at what point does it become "reversable" or "exchangeable"?

From the IJBS: www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/coulter.htm

>"Baudrillard views power as reversibility and seduction waiting to take place. This is a crucial aspect of Baudrillard’s development of a strategy (theory as challenge) in the overall emergence of what will be his one great thought.

His point of departure with Foucault, is that power, like the simulated spatial perspective of Renaissance painting, is never really there.36 Power becomes a trap for Foucault similar to the way that many sociologists are trapped in their mistaking the ideology of consumption for consumption itself, or western Marxists are trapped within western Enlightenment rationality.37 Baudrillard describes power for Foucault as “something that functions ... distributional... it operates through relays and transmissions”. Reversing Foucault, Baudrillard understands power as “something that is exchanged” and in this process the cycle of reversibility, seduction, and challenge are at play.38 Baudrillard’s reversal allows him to push past Foucault"

Is it just me or does this not say ANYTHING about what seduction's relation to power is besides that it magically opposes production, and therefore "envelopes" power.

Okay so I just finished this shit. What a load of incomprehensible DRIVEL. It takes him 30 pages to say something that could he said in two sentences, except the necessary justifications and clarifications are completely lacking. Fuck that was a painful read

bump

Yeah

"It is high time to clear up a misunderstanding to which Foucault contributed: it is not in the prisons and places of oppressive supervision, but in the craft schools and academies of the Modern Age, along with the craftsmen's workshops and artists' studios that the main human orthopaedics of modernity is carried out - that is to say, the moulding of the young by the standards of the Christian-humanist discipline. The real aim of the departure to the age of arts and technologies was to train ever new generations of virtuosos."

-Sloterdijk, "You Must Change Your Life", p317


"In this context, they point out that Foucault's analysis of the 'microphysics of power' contains a dating error that, restricted to the methodological barriers of discourse analysis, he was no longer able to correct with its own methods. He directed questions at he eighteenth century that had been answered by the sixteenth; for this reason, almost all of Foucault's statements about modern biopower are impaired in decisive aspects by anachronisms and explanatory gaps."

-Sloterdijk, "You Must Change Your Life", p476