M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands, 1948, lithograph, 332 x 282 mm
It is, as is typical of Escher, a cool image, but it is just a picture. The fact that an image can't draw itself is what makes it cool. In reality, M. C. Escher created it in 1948 on the Gregorian Calendar, and prior to that, it didn't exist.
But this is not what happened. Instead, the absurd belief that a historically-contingent product is responsible for its own production has blossomed in the contemporary academy; a sure sign that we have left the shores of reason for the sunny seas of Secular Transcendence. Which means it is now time to look more closely at the second displacement: the replacement of reality with discourse.
Discourse and Reality
Discourse is a central term in Postmodern thinking, as it imagines the various domains of human experience into undifferentiated theoretical sludge that can then be manipulated by sophists for gain.
Foucault's rise to prominence correlated with an overall loosening of university admissions which may help explain how his simplistic thought-pictures gained such inexplicable influence.
While on the topic:
The bloat has an interesting pricing model with remarkable returns.
Discourse refers to all the ways that knowledge is produced and organized: semiotics and communication, social practice of every kind, all forms and expressions of consciousness (and unconscious), conceptions of nature, mechanisms of power and pressure, institutional frameworks, metaphysical ideas, etc. The reality, graphed above, that university has substantively changed as a real world experience over the last fifty years, but is still spoken of as if it were the same thing, is an example of reality being discursively constructed. The word "university" is no longer tethered to an external constant and can be reimagined to be whatever you want it to be.
It's all discourse. All the assumptions,
associations, beliefs, and meanings that make up the socially constructed
nature of reality, conceived together in webs of allied, ambivalent, and
oppositional patterns. Discourse essentially determines how we see the world,
because it constitutes the networks and filters through which we think.
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| Leonardo, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, pen and ink, 34.6 cm × 25.5 cm, Accademia, Venice |
As a concept, discourse is not without value, insofar as it calls attention to the unstated assumptions that inform our socio-cultural practices. The problem is that like the structuralists and poststructuralists before him, Foucault drifts into that seductive and dangerous brand of magical thinking that prioritizes mediation over the mediated, thus conferring ultimate power onto the critic.
To begin, discourse is not posited as a way that we interface with each other and the world, but as the sole means by which knowledge of any sort, or even thought itself, are possible. It is impossible to clearly define, since the means of defining it (language) is itself a subset of discourse, but this also allows Foucault to impute any properties to it that he desires. Essentially, he makes up an undifferentiated category for everything that humans can know or think, and then claims his commentary on his thought experiment offers meaningful insight into the complexity of human being-in-the-world. What is he actually commenting on, other than his own creation? In short, Foucault's imaginary category for everything is what provides Foucault's imaginary insight into everything, which is a textbook example of tautology. So there is pedagogical value here.
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Olena Shmahalo, Multiverse, 2014, Quanta Magazine
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One of these "insights" has the smell of structuralism; namely the contention that discourse does not represent, but actually produces our experience of the world. The Geneology is easy to follow:
Structuralist: meaning is autonomous and predicated on difference
Poststructuralist: since there is no possibility of meaning outside of language, meaning is produced by linguistic operations. Therefore language literally produces meaning.
Discourse: since discourse encompasses the possibilities of knowledge, the human experience of reality, which, according to Kant, is human reality, is produced by discursive operations.
Therefore discourse literally produces reality.
This is the moment of deception at the heart of the whole Postmodern house of cards:
The
“reasoning” is almost too absurd to parody. Because we can't know reality in
some perfect ontological sense and the world is mediated by sign systems,
discursive mediation transmogrifies into actual discursive production, and real things in the world are dismissed as mere discourse. This is where the culturally-suicidal notion that "nature" is a human production first became radically chic to the over-credentialed, under-educated scions of post-World War Two affluence.
The decline of the dollar, or Postmodern economics, from the creation of the Federal Reserve, and especially after the end of Bretton Woods, is a case study of what happens when something discursive (fiat currency) is substituted for an external measure of value.
At this point Foucault appeals to a sort of false consciousness, claiming that because discourse is what produces any sort of meaningful existence, it seems “normal” and "natural," though the actuality is quite different. Science, faith, culture, history - all things taken as stable and objective, or even timeless, are really just discourse, and the true reality is that discourse is itself made or produced by another poorly defined entity: Power.
For Foucault, power refers to the systems within society that set the criteria by which discourse establishes truth or knowledge. Discourse appears natural, in that it seems to precede structures of social control, when it is in fact a product of them.
The reality that discourse produces seems like the discovery of a natural order - Foucault focuses heavily on the medical and scientific institutions of early modern Europe - but it is merely a reiteration of the power structure that reinforces its control. He describes this in terms of "text," since discourse, or the total possibility of what can be thought, is continually written about and discussed in an endless torrent of commentary pouring out of mainstream media and publishing, academia, big social media companies, and so on. These commentaries, which pretend to offer insights into the nature of human reality, really just reinforce discursive assumptions and thereby legitimate the power structures that express themselves through discourse.
If we combine the pieces, we see that Foucault's categories actually form a self-generating cycle that is not without heuristic value:
The problem is that the terms are arbitrary and poorly designed. On what grounds does he differentiate between discourse, power, and commentary? How are the terms differentiated, and what makes them more accurate than other formations? Foucault pretends to observe or discover these categories rather then derive them in any logically systematic way, which means he legitimating them on the basis of his own authority. This might allow him to wave away the terminal errors in his system - discourse represents the conditions of knowledge, but commentary and power are somehow extra-discursive enough to be differentiated meaningfully - if his observations are verifiably accurate. Yet all this flimflam man offers is a crude concept diagram with impossibly broad, arbitrarily bounded neologisms that interact in the way he designed them to. In a series of texts. There isn't even a pretense of intellectual consistency, and even with the graphs at the outset of this post, the truly radical thing is that this body of work was taken seriously at all.
Hieronymus Bosch and workshop, The Conjurer, between 1496 and 1520, oil on panel, 53 x 65 cm, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Civic Museum
Confidence men have always sold the credulous the illusion of something for nothing. What is the difference between exchanging Foucault's simple and incoherent terms for existence, and a carnival huckster pretending a cheap parlor trick is magic? Surely academia hasn't become so shallow that a quirky coiffure, pretentious manner, and incoherent prose can stand in for intellectual substance...
Either the world is a discursive simulacrum of some sort, in which case everything is the fluid play of empty signifiers and Foucault's texts as much a discursive hiccup as everything else, or human experience is a mediation between a perceiving consciousness and an alien environment, however these are defined. If the former, imposing simplistic conceptual structures on an infinite web of flickering simulacra is a grotesque misrepresentation. If the latter, there must be a better account of how extra-discoursivity works, and the grounds upon which Foucault's catagories can claim greater epistemological legitimacy than the nature he seeks to abolish.
James Watt's steam engine, from La vapeur by Amédée Guillemin, pub. 1873 by Hachette, Paris
An example of the distorting effects of discourse as a mediator. The ancient Greeks understood steam power some sixteen centuries before Watt ushered in the Industrial Revolution with his machine. Yet at no point did Hero or his contemporaries consider the implications of attaching an axle or driveshaft to the spinning aeolipile, and therefore never began the process of refinements that culminated in Watt's design. Rather, it remained a novelty, until it was forgotten with the passing of time. Discursive differences between the Greeks and Scots, such as notions of progress and utility, explain how the discovery of steam power can go nowhere in one context, and transform the world in another.
What is not discursive, but is natural and timelessly consistent to both, are the laws of physics that enable heated water to drive a turbine. Discourse determines whether knowledge can be applied, not whether it exists.
The particular danger presented by Foucault's narcissistic confabulations is apparent in the way his master narrative differs from a poststructuralist like Derrida. For Derrida, everything is textually determined, which means any profession of meaning is just text pointing to other text and notions of legitimacy, or authority, are trace memories of accumulated error. Any new narrative is fundamentally the same as the old narrative, and the only hope for something more requires a metaphysical change of state impossible in a material world.
For Foucault, the meaning of texts is fixed, however illegitimately, by discourse, which takes over the function of knowledge and thought production. Unlike Derrida’ language, discourse is not unmotivated, but is shaped and directed through oblique processes by nebulous power structures that are somehow not themselves discourse, but are reinforced as discourse steers textual commentary through accepted channels. Derrida’s abolition of reality remains, but now with clear places for intervention and control.
Gu signifies the community of nations by language forms, but represents the unity of humanity with characters woven from human hair. Another fine visual metaphor for language as an socializing, identity-forming mediator between biological reality and the world.
An installation can combine materiality (the hair), arbitrary signifiers, and real space (the viewer is literally inside the representation) to visualize human reality in far more nuanced and sophisticated ways than the stilted texts of Postmodern theory. Derrida and Foucault can only "see" the sign systems, although Foucault acknowledges that something(s) is writing them.
Rather than saying the arbitrariness of discoursive signification renders meaning impossible, which is wrong, if internally logically consistent, Foucault substitutes new meanings and relations for the old ones with nothing approaching an explanation for his own hypocrisy. It is difficult to correctly state how brazen this hypocritical transposition is. According to this "reasoning," any traditional morality - good and bad, right and wrong - is just discourse designed to fix meaning to perpetuate an oppressive power structure. But the language of "oppression," especially as Foucault uses it throughout his work, carries a moral judgement within it. Of course, this is not an innocent error; the new meanings carry the same coercive authority as the earlier ones, only with The Philosopher's Name replacing the accumulated weight of the countless cumulative human histories that shaped our value systems.
This is where we hear the familiar, seductive song of secular transcendence: what you believed was fake, but Foucault offers the enlightening truths that dominance and oppression are the only real moral concerns, and that these can be exposed and countered through “discourse analysis.” This set of arcana confers magic power needed to somehow correctly distinguish power, the dominant discourses established by power, the other marginalized discursive realities, and the mechanisms by which these are excluded and oppressed by dominant or normative perspectives.
Hermes Trismegistus from Maier Symbola aurea mensae, Franckfurt, 1617.
Renaissance humanists believed that Hermes was an ancient sage with arcane textual knowledge so profound that it could alter reality with magic.
Renaissance humanists believed that Hermes was an ancient sage with arcane textual knowledge so profound that it could alter reality with magic.
It truly is magical thinking to believe Foucault's simple construct has comparable talismanic power.
Parody really is the only reply to a "system of thought" that holds:
Parody really is the only reply to a "system of thought" that holds:
Reality is a discursive construct:
Discourse produces reality by determining what can or can’t be known…
but…
William Blake, The Spirit of Plato, 1820, watercolor, over traces of black chalk, Morgan Library
Discursive constructs, untethered from reality, are whatever the philosopher dreams them to be.
...somehow “commentary” and “power” can be distinguished from “discourse,” and consciously manipulated, despite discourse forming the conditions by which thought is possible…
by…
John Tenniel, Alice meets Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, 1871
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.
...academics with the power to see through the discourse that determines what can be known and clearly identify marginalized discourses that can't be thought!
Randolph Caldecott, cover of The Great Panjandrum Himself, 1885
Any insight that this account of discourse might offer into the ordering of human affairs is overshadowed by the naked stupidity required to embrace a Foucauldian account of reality. Unless there is an ulterior motive.
The seeds of Postmodern “progressivism” were planted in the unholy marriage of Foucauldian notions of power and discourse and the dehumanizing, overtly dishonest culture critiques of the Frankfurt School and their fellow travelers. The idea that power reifies itself through the maintenance of a discursive false consciousness is easily harmonized with the cultural Marxist view of society is a false consciousness with structures of commodification and ownership masquerading as Natural Law. The latter group even differentiated their brand of critical theory from actual theory for its ability to reveal structures of oppression.
This is the world of secular transcendences where philosopher-kings pierce the veils of illusory consciousness and write books claiming our biological impulses are “wrong” because power shapes discourse, which controls commentary, which reinforces power, which Foucault or Marcuse can change. Or something.
More seriously, a simplistic fantasy about the general nature of experience has no capacity to mitigate personal subjective alienation. If it did, events like this would not be erasing the uniqueness of individual experience and jamming the full rainbow of human difference into an undifferentiated non-existent box to amplify the personal power of the "leaders". Then again, Marxism has always exploited the desperately unhappy with false moralities that are easily set aside once they have gained control. They even have a name for the damaged souls they use, then cast aside.
I think people who are unaware of these theoretical developments tend to lump the various figures associated with Postmodern thought into a single group, when the fact is, all they really share are rejections of the cultural and intellectual traditions of the West, and the implications of their positions differ in important ways. Returning to the comparison between Foucault's discourse analysis and Derrida's deconstruction will make this distinction clear. Deconstruction denies both external reference and fixity to semiotic systems, reducing each work to an imperfect expression of a subjectivity. The only trancendence is a negative one; the historically false assertion that sign systems predate the species that created them. Derrida would probably appreciate the irony that his theory of a textually-determined reality implodes on the sort of simple logical inversion that deconstruction was developed to expose. That aside, when taken to its extreme, this can lead only to anarchy and nihilism; there is no place to establish alternative meanings with any more authority than the old ones and remain consistent with deconstructive thought.
Claude Monet, San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, 1908-12, oil on canvas, 65.2 × 92.4 cm, National Museum Cardiff of Cardiff, Wales
In a way, deconstruction is akin to the experience of an Impressionist painting, where a general view gives the sense of a coherent picture, which dissolves into indeterminate traces of paint on close inspection. The meaning is a mental chimera that we project onto a collection of abstract markings. This comparison ignores the differences in how mimetic and textual signification activate the brain, but it is illustrative enough of the concept of illusory meaning founded on nothing.
In contrast, both Foucault and the cultural Marxists posit human experience as a meaningless discursive construct, but one that is created and can be shaped by forces conceived as extra-discursive. To a deconstructionist, all moralities collapse into piles of empty textual signifiers without possibility of change or resistance. Discourse analysis "deconstructs" traditional moral systems, but then looks to replace them with an alternative morality better suited to dyscivic sociopathy. Foucault is honest when he states that there is only power and oppression, and empowering oppressed discourses can only shift who falls in each category.
This may be the most difficult thing for many people to grasp: the promoters of critical discourse analysis do not see this as an intellectual parlor game that can be comfortably ignored in the "real world." These people see their theory as a guide to life, and their goal is to transform the real world in accordance with this vision. They mean it when they relabel moral choice or personal accountability false consciousness and systemic oppression:
Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from Los Caprichos ca. 1798 etching, aquatint drypoint and burin 21.5 x 15.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Goya captured the consequences of setting aside rationality, however imperfect that may be, over two hundred years ago.
Foucauldians and cultural Marxists actually desire to violently suppress what mediated agency and self-consciousness we humans do have. You can't argue with them logically because they know their positions are irrational. They just don't care. They will say and do anything - deny objective reality, contradict stated principles, betray institutions, shamelessly lie - to further their aims.
The the more quickly people wake up to the fact that these monsters don't "just want to live their lives like the rest of us," the more likely we are to survive this cultural contagion.
At the heart there is no morality. Only subjectivity and the will to power.
Given the length of this piece, I will stop at this point and take up some of the practical consequences of these developments in the next post. Postmodern discourse is important enough to cover thoroughly that I don't want to cut anything, so it makes sense to deal with Postmodern science on its own. Until then, if life seems difficult, remember:
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