To recap:
We think and know in terms of discourse, but discourse only expresses power structures. Reality consists of commentary (text, media, institutions, etc.) that pretend to comment on nature but just reiterate discursive structures
What we think is reality is just projected power
The error is the common Postmodern deception of treating mediations as interchangeable with the things mediated - Baudrillard's entire inexplicable career is built on this bait-and-switch - in this case pretending that commentary and reality are the same. Unlike Derrida, who is at least logically consistent within his secular transcendence when he states that there can be no moving "outside" of a textually-constructed reality in texts, Foucault declares extradiscursive forces while denying extradiscursive "reality." But it becomes wackier still.
Whoever controls the networks controls the discourse. The oversimplified power/discourse/reality relationship is at least conceivable in these terms.
This installation represents a "discursive reality" in a pre-internet era. The nodes of control are even more obvious here.
According to Foucault there are somehow actually multiple discourses: the normative one projected by social power, and other marginalized, oppressed discourses that can somehow form coherent, identifiable identities despite having none of the power needed to create identity-forming discourses in the first place.
If we attempt to apply logic to Foucault's formulation, it seems that the only possible indicator of a marginal discourse would be exclusion from the standards of the normative one. Let's break it down.
Values and beliefs about “reality” are just discourse
pretending to be natural
Sophie Labelle, Girlhood and Womanhood Aren't Defined by Genitalia.
Those "excluded" in any way by "natural" standards such as science, ethics, etc. are really just oppressed by a power structure. They are expressions of marginalized discourses. The problem with lumping together all these "discursive" realities are obvious.
Despite lacking power, marginalized discourses pop into existence, like anti-matter inversions of the dominant discourse
Inversions of dominant narratives just springing up? This smells suspiciously familiar... almost Hegelian...
It is actually more Marxist, in the psychotic assumption that oppression is the only moral index and power the only social goal:
In this system, since the true level of reality is economic (who controls production) and all else a false consciousness to hide and legitimate this "truth", the only "morality" is oppression and the only value is power. Everything else that you value is secretly a tool of your oppression and must be destroyed to "free" you.
Cultural Marxists like the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci seem to have recognized that Marx's concept of economic relations was hopelessly naive, so they replaced the bourgeoisie/proletariat misconception of capitalism with more modern misconception of consumer culture.
William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, 1853-54, oil on canvas on wood, 125 x 60 cm, Keble College, Oxford
Authenticity is a term that gets used with little concern for precision in Marxist circles. The concerns over authenticity in an industrial society predate Marx; Critics like Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters like Hunt were decrying the effects of modernity on the nature of human experience in by the mid-nineteenth century. This picture expresses a unified vision of life, culture, and faith that has been continually undermined since the Industrial Revolution.
Marxists correctly identify the deleterious effects of mass culture, but then attack the grounded communal state that humanity was alienated from as a false consciousness. Their preferred alternative is a poorly defined People's Paradise that invariably involves camps...
The basic concept of reality consisting of ideological structures masking a power struggle with institutionalized oppression seems oddly familiar...
What Foucauldian discourse does is replace the oppressed social class of the Marxists with the full gamut of the contemporary oppression industry. Consequently, anyone defined as sick, mad, abnormal, deviant, a "loser" in any traditional way, is falsely accused of being "unnatural" by a dominant discourse whose concept of nature is just a smokescreen for naked power. They claim moral authority through this "oppression" that frees them of any responsibility for their circumstances, and justifies any extremes to force society to conform to their alienation or even pathology.
The solution to the obvious lack of a Marxist proletariat to gin up into murderous rage is "Intersectionality", an attempt to gather all the oppressed marginal discourses into one big discursive basket. The visual irony would be comic were it not so exploitative: all these different types of alienated people smashed into a single abstract construct with a well-defined mathematical meaning.
The Secular Transcendence at the heart of Postmodern discourse is a Trace of venom left over from its Marxist roots: that the natural is an illusion and only power determines morality. The oppressors do what they must to dominate, while the oppressed seek to turn the tables at all costs. There is no concept of honor or even compassion; any lie, any atrocity, can be justified in the pursuit of power. This is what well meaning people struggle to grasp until it is too late. The whole perverse politics of oppression was predicated on deception from the very outset. Consider the level of deceit rquired for a statement like Lyotard's definition of Postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" to retain currency today.
The only tragedy is that it didn't happen sooner. This psychotic coward was one of the century's most depraved individuals... then he met Stalin.
Ladies and gentlemen, the peoples' champions!
On one level, Foucault's true genius was branding; obviously there is a reality outside of discourse, or ideology, or commentary, or whatever Procrustean term for reality fits that particular theorist's dreams of power. The Obamaphones didn't discursively self-generate and the tasty snacks in the faculty lounge have to come from somewhere. But using portentous words like power and discourse to supplant moral responsibility allows academics who possess little real authority to posture as prophets of a new reality. How does this critical discourse nonsense play out in the corporatist pseudo-democracies of the West? Cultural traditions and biological realities are attacked "oppressive" discourse with vicious conspiracy theories like "the patriarchy". The notion that reality means nothing more than subjectivities battling for social, political, and ultimately totalitarian power is the root of all the distorting, corrupting sludge that Postmodernism has dropped on the culture of the West:
British Art History
John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvas, 132.1 × 197.5 cm, Manchester Art Gallery; Millie Brown vomits colored soy milk onto canvas as an "expression of raw human nature, that pushes boundaries mentally and physically to create work that has true beauty." Guess which one was replaced with a blank space "to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection."
The hatred for the West is palpable.
If reality is malleable then power is the only measure of "truth," and terms and concepts like "art" can be changed at will. Consider the pair of "works" above. They occupy the same cultural institution and carry the same name of "art," but what do they have in common? How can a single term capture the aspirations of both? Yet the term lingers, like a husk, to be reanimated by the perverse inversion of all that it stood for. This is a new discourse - the abased, ugly, and talentless - exerting power over the reality of the art world to transform "art" into a celebration of all that had been oppressed by false notions of natural beauty. Apparently raw human nature is now splattering chemically treated fluids on a cloth. See how that works?
This isn't a joke. "Philosopher" Julia Kristeva refers to "the Abject" as the bodily "feminine" elements - the skim on milk, fingernail parings, waste, cadavers, etc. - that are degraded and repressed by patriarchial language and culture, and must be "rehabilitated" in the name of liberation. Civilizational rituals like hygiene are recast as a fairy tale called the "loss of the Mother" that takes place when one's identity is formed in childhood. The "reasoning" behind this fantasy is an incoherent mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridian deconstruction, and various theories of discourse, but it has proven lucrative.
Note the familiar language of oppression.
Ashely Caferro, detail of Perverse Identities, 2006, video, mixed media, dimensions variable
Abject art brings this vision of debasement into the halls of culture. Could there be a stronger declaration of war against the idealistic traditions that built the museum?
The question to ask is who funds this abomination?
You won't like the answer.
In academia, quantitative and technical domains get dragged into the discursive swamp through various forms of “Sociology of Science,” and other largely non-quantitative cultural studies and "theory-based" disciplines. This means practitioners needn’t really understand mathematical logic, but can still claim the “expertise” to classify “Science” as another oppressive discourse. Remember, the “nature” probed by the scientific method is merely a fictional ideology or commentary on discourse that serves only power. There are at least two deceptions in the Postmodern conception of science that have transformed the concept into a corrupt inversion of its original identity, like the artistic example mentioned above. These are likely not unrelated.
1. Replace science as a method of empirical inquiry with "Science!" as magic word for unquestionable truth
Rivera, an avowed Marxist and friend of Trotsky used Nativity iconography visualizes the almost religious reverence that many people have for "Science" as a cultural institution, rather than a method of inquiry. Note the priestly quality of the white lab coats.
2. Since truth is just discourse, scientific "fact" expresses only power
Michael Mann's famous Hockey Stick graph used scanty data to "project" catastrophic consequences of atmospheric CO2 with a trend so terrifying it made people overlook the fate that all that CO2 in the ground originated in the atmosphere in the first place. Better historical data changed the prognosis a bit. Mann's frivolous lawsuits and subsequent behavior exhibit the sort of integrity one would expect from the author of such a graph.
Data cookers are especially disgusting intellectually, because they claim authority as objective
purveyors of empirical science, manipulate and massage the data for political
and personal reasons, then falsely accuse those noticing their chicanery
of being "anti-science." However, when an inference is proven
as empirically false as ABC's hysterical claim that New York City would be
underwater by 2015, it is scientifically wrong. Full stop. The only legitimate thing to do at
this point, according to the "scientific method," is head back to the drawing board and try and come up with a better
picture. But this isn’t what has happened, either in the media or “scientific
community.” Instead, each falsification of the hypothesis, each failed
prediction or exposure of data manipulation, only leads to changes in the narrative
that keep the public in a state of anxiety. Brushing aside the mounting
predictive failures allows you sustain the fear generated by the original bogus
projections, even as those projections collapse. A system where political,
financial, and institutional pressures placed narrative over experimentation
fits the Postmodern concept of science as a discursive construct. But it no longer resembles anything historically known as science.
We have left the realm of empirical, experimental science for disaster porn and wish fulfillment. It would be comical, where it not cripplingly costly.
It's all connected
It is not a coincidence that Hollywood sought to traumatize the public with ecological disaster porn at the same time global warming lies were being trumpeted from every media outlet. Their theory tells us what they are doing.
Power controls discourse to shape what we can think
Only this isn't reality; the processes of oppression and control that they describe is actually no more than their own power-seeking agenda. The next post will dig into fundamental ideas about knowledge, and why Postmodernism is utterly incomparable with empiricism or faith as means of understanding human existence.
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