I say, old chap, any chance you could pen the forward to M.Mist’s next book? The university has asked me to publish it.

Something along the lines of below, it doesn’t have to be too long.

Wow this is such a really deep thread. I wish I had the time to digest it more fully.

I could try to debate a little here, but I could offer no answer or solution because I have always found that veering away from the natural too much has only caused me problems.
At this stage of my life, what people think of me matters little. What I think of them is what matters most to me.
Some people don't give a crap about any structured bs. In fact, I think that most enjoy the unstructured a whole lot more, despite the risks.

Apart from morality, let's see how good your math is. Do you have your own personal risk vs. reward system?
If you don't. then you oughta work on one, because they will all play you. ALL of them. ...because they are simple humans. They all have an agenda.
Hardly anybody here really and truly wants to help you; they just want to keep stringing you along with their craphole state of being because they are too damned poo-scared to take a risk themselves.

When people judge me now, I just laugh and say "Have a look you, have a look me" you smacking moron. I always knew I would win.
The simple bottom line is that I judge. I don't subscribe to the "judge not" scenario. I judge you all, so you'd better be ready to be judged yourselves.

hawil wrote on Jan 30^th, 2014 at 5:03pm:

Nothing is wasted 

ImSpartacus2 wrote on Jan 30^th, 2014 at 11:30am:

a kind mind is a fine mind 

Karnal wrote on Jan 30^th, 2014 at 3:29pm:


Yes I've read Kuhn. A similar idea can be found in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and even as far back as Heraclitus. Although, I am hesitant to just reduce it all to "power struggles". Power exists of course in these paradigms shifts, but it ignores the content and ideas of these paradigms. Ideas can take on real meaning for people. The reduction to "power struggles" I believe was the post-structuralists way of attempting to refute the essentialist nature of ideas that proceeded the 1960s. 

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Jan 31^st, 2014 at 10:27am:


You're right. Most of those we call post-structuralists were reacting against Marxism and its view of progress - a preordained set of historical stages culminating in an ahistorical telos: the state's control of the means of production and the end of class struggle.

A reading of Niezsche shows that struggle is inherent in language, a point taken up by Habermas and the more linguistic Marxists.

It's a big mistake, I think, to read Marx literally. His thought evolved. More so than his more fundamentalist economic work, his writing on ideology has found a natural trajectory towards post-structuralism. The link between classical Marxism and post-structuralism is Marx's thought on ideology in the 1844 Manuscripts.

Foucault's History of Sexuality constantly returns to the idea of an economy of sex. The industrial revolution saw a new imperative to control and regulate sex - this was hardly a new idea (feminists, anarchists and libertarians had already posed this). But for Foucault, this shift found its source in the ideas of the Enlightenment and its aftermath: the 17th century role of the confessional, 18th century Quaker ideas on penal reform, 19th century medical discourses on hysteria and masturbation,  etc, etc, etc. Here we have a view of social/economic relations that is not economically reductionist, but relative to ideas and the history of Western thought: the hermeneutic relationship between knowledge and power.

For Foucault, borrowing from both Nietzsche AND Marxist thinkers like Althusser, sexuality is a form of ideology, and from this it is possible to conceive of entirely new forms of power - a much more nuanced and specific understanding of power to the Marxist idea of class struggle and the relationship between the state and its subjects.

For Foucault, such a form of power - the powers of the state and the law - of course exists, but only in a relationship with other forms of knowledge, including knowledge on human anatomy, psychiatry, populations, the economy - a form of power Foucault identified as emerging from the Enlightenment:biopower.

This new form of power is what differentiates Western thought from its more traditional counterparts, such as those found in Islamic societies. Put simply, we conceive of human life quite differently because we have different forms of power. Obviously, a political-economic system where human subjects are owned by the state (or the Crown) will operate completely differently to a system that disperses power between individuals.

Within biopower, however, the relationship of individuals is mediated by other forms of knowledge. The role of the church in controlling and managing populations has been taken up by medicine and the welfare state, and one of their main tasks is to manage bodies (and their desires) for the production line (and the consumer society).

However, this usurps the traditional Marxist role of history and the state. The telos of economic affairs, for Foucault, is not the state. In fact, in this way of thinking there can be no telos at all. Knowledge and power are interdependent. History is going nowhere. Truth "spirals" between knowledge and power - we evolve, we devolve, we repeat the same mistakes.

There is no march of history, there is no progress. History merely turns. To my mind, in many ways this is an almost pre-modern view of history - more Shakespearean than anything else, but without its roots in nature.

Which is no mistake. With the exception of Nietzsche, Foucault's heroes were pre-Socratic. Here, the powers of the gods only work within the city walls - or for devout post-structuralists - within language itself.

Karnal wrote on Jan 31^st, 2014 at 9:00am:

Ah,.. it's all good in the end- if it's not good it's not the end,... of course!