Monday, January 18, 2021

how standard is my position on foucault?

i think i'm just solving the puzzle, really, and you should pick up the pieces and run with them.

while this accusation - that foucault was a burkean conservative in disguise - is not original on my behalf in the sense of me being the first person to make it (i've posted links to essays where others have developed the point in much further detail, in the past, i'll let you try to find them), it is a deduction i came to independently. so, i'm not the first person to put this together.

in fact, if you read foucault directly, he admits he's just inverting burke's hierarchy. but, all the psycho-babble he attaches to the inversion just fades away immediately on any kind of cursory analysis, and you're no longer left with this surface inversion. any kind of analysis of anything he argued at all just leaves the burkean hierarchy in tact.

....which is what people tend to see immediately, when they read it at first. the foucauldian theory has this whole mechanism built in where you have to dismantle people's ability to think critically and rationally before they're able to "understand" that theory, which is standard in any religious cult. but, in context, that's the religion - it's just burkeanism, through this bizarre set of irrational filters that you have to be carefully brainwashed into.

what most people on the left will say is something like "foucault was unusual" or "foucault didn't fit in" or "foucault was unusual for a leftist". the realization that one of these things is not like the others is widespread, but the truth of it is really right in front of your face, you just don't want to deal with it.

we'll eventually figure this out, and then what? like, what happens when the fake left finally comes to terms with the fact that they're actually a bunch of reactionary, burkean conservatives that have almost no intellectual connection to marx at all? i don't know...

i know marx would've hated him too, though.