Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... .

It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance

Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect us, and because it's hard for one voter to fix the problem. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter is very good on this subject. Most people (and voters) don't even know how many Senators their state has, or their terms, let alone why complex subjects like privacy are important. Based on Caplan's book, I think ignorance is a more reasonable explanation than a fear of being anti-authoritarian or an institutionalized mindset.

To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).

Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.

I know that's satisfying to some people. But it seems like not the useful insight given a state the clearly has asymetrically greater power than the populace?

To come back the original article, how the heck does "everything is power" illuminate a situation of Campus Security are using a fricken armored personnel carrier when their job is stopping underaged kids from drinking???

Is your assumption true? That is, leaving aside the fact that the police are ostensibly part of the populace, how would some police and a single APC pacify even a couple of blocks of citizens without the cooperation of those citizens?

Personally, and I realize that this is opinion, I do not believe your assumption is true, and as such is a pretty good example of why the ideas you are critiquing are useful- it is difficult to see the larger system of power described by the ability or inability to motivate people.

Assuming that the police have no restriction in the use of force, it would be very simple for them to pacify a rather large area with an APC and Police. All they have to do is kill a few people who are out of line, and the rest will cower.

No single or small group of citizens in the US really has the ability to stand up to even a single measly APC. The firepower required to stop one is beyond what anybody outside the US enforcement structure can realistically obtain. You may be able to limit its movement with well constructed roadblocks, but harming the vehicle or its passengers with an assortment of shotguns, handguns and IEDs is not reasonable to expect (given they were explicitly designed to withstand these threats).

This is one aspect of sort of complicity with power that's being discussed. Sometimes, people decide en masse that a certain way of life is worth dying for, so we know there are other responses to armed pacification.

Not that this is always a bad thing. It's pretty great that most of us obey the state's injunction to not wantonly kill each other.

But on the other hand I think it's more salient to understand that, say, the students shot down at Kent State were murdered and the general population of the country was on the side of the National Guard.... that's the kind of complicity that most people live under, the same complicity that believes people executed by police for non-compliance deserve their fates.

On one hand, it probably really is a good thing that we are generally aligned toward lawfulness, but at the same time it does make us complicit when the people charged with upholding that law use it towards criminal ends-- which is quite common in the US.

If you actually read the thread up your position on it, you'd know that you were equating an unwilling to challenge tanks rolling through your streets due a fear of getting shot with an approval of such tanks rolling through your streets.

It seems to me that intellectuals spouting this kind of nonsense wide-up complicit to power and not in a it's-OK-cause-everyone-is, kind of way.

Campus police don't "just kill a few people".

Further, what you call "cooperation" I think would largely would be a lack of organization. The ability to organize can grant immense power, and when people talk about the power of large crowds like this I think there's usually an unstated assumption of "if they were to spontaneously act in great--or at least adequate--coordination." I don't think it's fair to assess power in terms of something like a body count, and to ignore the power granted by organization.

Because that's not a credible threat. Nuclear weapons are antithetical to the goals of a government in conflict with it's own people.

I generally agree, but my larger point is that it isn't a good idea to assess power in terms of firepower.

No, it's not true. The state has vastly inferior power compared to the populace at large, at least in the U.S. However, the state is able to, in most cases, choose when and how it engages it's enemies so that it faces an inferior force on it's own terms.

The nation-state can be thought of as a superorganism, and this requires complex systems of feedback and control. We have resource inputs, which are processed via the churn of economic activity (this is analogous to cellular respiration). This activity sustains the citizens (cells) while also providing resources via taxes to the government (the executive control / brain / etc). The government, in turn, uses those resources to sustain itself and exert control over the body-state, as well as powering the police/military for internal and external defense (somewhat analogous to the immune system).

So this is all a very complicated machine, the nation-state feeding off resources and in turn providing for its own sustenance and protection. It is, as Hobbes noted, basically a giant form of life.

Of course, this idea can be taken much further (the NSA is essentially a somatosensory system) but I'll just leave it at that for now.

Deleuze's postscript... "metastable states coexisting in one and the same, like a universal system of deformation."

That's your counter-argument?

I don't think you can categorize a philosopher/historian in such crude terms. For one, this pressuposes that there's some "modern practice" of history, which makes it incompatible or difficult for practical reasons to use Foucault's theory anymore. That's not the case in the least -- modern academic discourse in such matters refers to Foucault all the time.

(And even if the comparison was apt, I'd still take SmallTalk over, say, Java that replaced it, any time of day).

>That's your counter-argument?

No, his counter-argument is a lucid essay, of which you extracted, out of context (and cut in half), a small, non characteristic, phrase that you find troubling. Might as well extract some oneliner from type theory full of heavy math notation to "prove" that Haskell is impossible to learn.

In fact, the paragraph the excerpt belongs to is crystal clear, wether you agree with it's contents or not.

What he says in that part is that in older societies (those based on disclipline), a person moved from one place of instilling discipline to the other (from school, to army service, to vocational education, to the factory, etc). In contrast to that, in modern societies, all those distinct places and stages have been merged (the school is also like a prison, the workplace is also like the army, etc).

And I really wish postmodernists would stop hiding behind the banner of "the humanities". Analytic philosophy, history, classics, religious studies, and art history are all capable of making meaningful and even true statements from time to time, and most of them can be made comprehensible to the typical person.

As for the humanities thing, yes, I agree. Just as physicists can make many clear statements that resonate with people who don't even know math, there are many aspects of the humanities that are accessible and clear to people who have never studied theory. Your disdain for higher level theory would also make it difficult for you to enjoy certain texts by people like Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, none of whom are "postmodernists".

I agree that there are lots of things that are worth understanding but can't be expressed in rigorously logical terms. Things like the subjective experience of falling in love or laughing at a joke or the value of behaving toward others with compassion. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

Every discipline has technical terminology. It always sounds weird to those who aren't involved.

Disclaimer: I'm moderately obsessed with Deleuze.

a) that fully rational voters instating representative politicians into power will result in good policies (that benefit voters)?

b) that it's possible for voters to become less ignorant and more rational on average, within the current system, in order to reach the outcome of a)?

But, there is a machine dedicated to disinformation. In the aftermath of Citizens United, we are seeing the rise of dark money to the point where billion dollar campaigns are imminent. Combine that with the consolidation of media, the fall of investigative journalism, and a 24 hour news cycle which has devolved news into infotainment, and it is little wonder that the populace is woefully ignorant. Actually, ignorant is too generous. They are actively misinformed, in that they think they know.

So, I would say no, the current system makes it all but impossible for voters to make rational choices, or even to identify what the real choices are.

The solution is bankruptcy, to be able to start over from scratch.

I believe it has more to do with the unfettered rise of the military-industrial complex (including banking/finance), which has siezed near complete control of our political machinery. We have become a corporate state, wherein politicians are fully purchasable and policy is made for a narrow set of interests vs. for the people.

If this is not changed, then these same powers will sieze control again after a bankruptcy reset.

USSR bankruptcy caused plenty of revolutions in the whole region.

People are calm and don't care - exactly like the article implies - till there are three missing meals. Hungry stomach makes them go to the streets and revolt. Not another news about the Government going crazy.

That critique is not even worthy of an answer -- it's basically a conservative "oh, all these new fangled lefty theorists have ruined our field" cry.

If someone were to write and (crucially) popularize a version that reads the way people explain Foucault, things would be different.

Foucault was French. French (and Europeans that are non British in general) do not write theory and history the way anglosaxons do. At least most of them doesn't. If you want to learn from them, you have to study their idioms. You cannot just point at it and say it's unquotable or alien (or, well, you can, but it's not fair).

It's like living all your life in C like languages, and being put off by functional programming and parentheses in LISP or Scheme. It's another way of doing things. If you had started with that, you'd find it perfectly normal. Since you didn't, it takes some time adjusting and absorbing the material and culture.

For me, a European, those are perfectly fine and understandable. And I also understand the use of metaphor and poetic language they often use to make a specific point. The anglosaxon idea for that is that you should write in a way that the local butcher or stock brocker can also understand -- which constraints you to only writing for issues that a stock brocker can fathom (or only handling extremely elaborate issues at that level of discourse).

To put it in programming terms, the anglosaxon way is like the C way -- they don't like "magic", unfamiliar notation, higher level code, and DSLs. And they feel that "worse is better". Which, I guess, makes the European way more LISPy.

I think the key difference here is that code actually has to compile, so no matter how clever your lispy magic gets it's still grounded by that reality. Foucault (and Barthes, Saussure et al) are unencumbered by the constraint of their prose actually having to be parseable by anyone. Their prose is better thought of as an artistic performance than a functional machine.

Nail on head. The relationship between the words of the above and reality is similar to the relationship between a painting of a landscape and the real landscape. It's not that the painting is not valuable in itself, but it would be a mistake to think that it says anything about how the landscape actually works

The label Anglo-Saxon is an absurd, racist simplification which undermines your argument. There is no coherent Anglo-Saxon way - except as it exists in the imagination of the French intelligentsia as a foil to their clearly more sophisticated approach. There is more to the world than is dreamt of in that philosophy of opposition of thoughtful Europe against shopkeeper Anglo-Saxons.

It's sad/funny because this is the same answer for every state.

Trick question. Every state has the same number of Senators - 2.

(In contrast to congressmen, where the number changes with population.)

(And yes, I can believe, unfortunately, that not every citizen knows this.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Senator

did we all forget that every state has a Senate as well?

> A state senator is a member of a state's Senate, the upper house in the bicameral legislature of 49 U.S. states, or a legislator in Nebraska's one house State Legislature.

I'd rather draw parallel to Ancient Rome and its citizens. As long as there were "Games" in town and bread for free nobody cared. Once the Rome was on fire they woke up. For some time.

The situation is hopeless. The only solution is when US runs out of money. Goes bankrupt. Which is quite possible. Once USD isn't the world currency, the country defaults. And then there is no money for wars, no money for swat teams in every little town, no money for surveillance. Those things will still be there but on much lesser scale.

The US has currently the biggest debt of any empire in the history of the world. Impossible to repay. Once the world currency status moves from USD to Yuan, the Government will try to use all that military/police power to "maintain order", the thing is the policemen and soldiers won't have money, there will be no gas even for military, etc. Exactly like USSR when it collapsed -- bankrupted by all the wars and stupid policies.

Why would it? The US dollar not being the world currency wouldn't drop the value of US industrial output, but it would (presuming that it dropped the value of the dollar due to reduced global demand for US dollars) reduce the value of US debt.

Which would be bad for entities with incomes or assets denominated in US dollars, but good for entities with debts denominated in US dollars, and neutral for entities whose income was dependent, say, on US output.

> The US has currently the biggest debt of any empire in the history of the world.

In absolute terms, maybe, but relative to the size of its economy, its not even the largest of countries in the world today.

> Impossible to repay.

This is neither true nor meaningful; as long as the debt can be serviced, it doesn't actually need to be repaid (and could, in fact, grow in absolute terms over time without limit without harm so long as output was growing apace.)

90% of all USD in circulation isn't even in the US borders. Isn't used for the needs of the US industry/economy. Thanks to this the FED can print, print, print into the oblivion, getting back just 10% of inflation it created, while the world gets the 90%. Ever heard the famous: “The dollar is our currency, but your problem” by John Connally, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, to a delegation of Europeans worried about exchange rate fluctuations?

Now the ponzie scheme grew (as they always have to) so it is not only Europeans, but also Arabs and Asians, but the days of the USD debt ponzie scheme are counted. There are just these many losers on the planet to buy into it.

Now, just imagine these additional USD coming from all over the world to the US. Hyperinflation?

And just a single simple event could cause that: Chinese tying their Yuan to gold. Who on Earth will want your t-bill backed by the most indebted government on the planet, when they can get it backed by gold and the biggest creditor government in the world?

>Which would be bad for entities with incomes or assets denominated in US dollars, but good for entities with debts denominated in US dollars, and neutral for entities whose income was dependent, say, on US output.

Right. Your debt would vanish. I think that's the only good thing from the hyper inflationary perspective. The debt is USD denominated, so yes, it makes sense. Again, from China perspective, a little price to pay to have world reserve currency instead of the US having it.

>This is neither true nor meaningful; as long as the debt can be serviced, it doesn't actually need to be repaid (and could, in fact, grow in absolute terms over time without limit without harm so long as output was growing apace.)

If we use the official government formula of calculating inflation from Ronald Reagan years we are at 10% today. We've been for at least 3 years now. And what is the return on the t-bill? Again, it might be true, that at least you know you'll be repaid even if it means you'll loose. But t-bills are in fact in a bubble territory now. What will you do when interest rates rise? If interest rates are at 7% we're talking about more than 50% of tax revenue going just to service the debt. Just to pay the premium. Over 50% of the tax revenue! And what if we have to have it at the levels from the beginning of 1980s? At 18% ? We won't even be able to service it. And in 1980s most of the debt was hold by the Americans. So the money was going back to the US economy. Currently most of the debt is held by foreigners. Can you imagine the impossibility of a political situation were over 50% of the tax revenue goes to foreigners in the middle of a financial crisis? And it is just at 7% interest rates. The FED effectively can't rise the rates. There is no way they can do it. You think this is acceptable like forever for t-bills holders?

This is not why the Roman empire collapsed. In fact the term "collapse" itself implies some weird sudden event, rather then a gradual evolution over the course of hundreds of years into the various entities which became the forerunners of nation-states today.

The Byzantine empire - east Rome - has no definitive end, for example.

Like UK -- it has declined from an Empire Status, but did not collapse. I agree - the same with Roman Empire.

There are numerous other civilizations (for instance, dynastic China) that have suffered decline rather than outright collapse. Rome was not one of them though; the entire Western Empire broke apart. It's just not a good example.

And yet, I agree, there are historians who will claim that The Holy Roman Empire had nothing to do with Roman Empire. Still it is debatable. There is no correct/incorrect here. For me the Holy Roman Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire.

https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf

The American right represented something totally different in the 1990s. So much so that when September 11th occurred, for a brief moment some speculated it could be right-wing terrorists.

The George W Bush administration through propaganda was able to transform those that had just years earlier been strongly anti-interventionist in to supporting interventionism. The same group that rallied for years on shrinking the government was suddenly applauding the addition of new federal agencies. The final term was capped off by a massive government redistribution of $1 trillion of wealth.

The exact same thing happened when Barack Obama was elected President. The left was so neutralized it appeared to have never existed.

Where to start? Target astro-turfing. Fake political organizations such as the elusive tea party and Barack Obama's Organizing For Action. These groups hijack causes for the purpose of gaining and holding political power. Voter mind share and physical effort are utilized as an engine that supports a fire hose of new laws and a highly profitable revolving door capitalism.

The reasons acquiescence seems an acceptable behavior are:

1. Most people are rarely inconvenienced by arbitrary overkill. It is persons deemed "undesirable" (appearance or manner) that are subjected to disportionate punishment on a routine basis that makes the overkill seem acceptable to them. It is often shocking to learn what people have been forced to endure.

2. There is a modern concept that the government is the only legitimate holder of the absolute monopoly of violence, which necessitates compliant "good" people, which should be helpless and defenseless. This also requires justifying one's business and unlimited access to search physical person, property and digital life, so as to have "nothing to hide." But it's only the fool that hands over the keys to their own destruction by persecution by a voluminous and arbitrary legal bureaucracy.

3. The majority and privileged agree by consent through silence to the ends that the police are "correctly flushing society" of those they deem "undesirable." In their view: "If that's you, too bad (overkill is legitimized, and you're not important so it doesn't matter what we do to you anyhow).

Which, depressingly, might be true. :P

Why, and how did we let this happen? Look no further : http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Holl...

'War-nography', islamophobia, narco-phobia... and the script goes on. When the masses believe that they are in danger, they will stand behind those in power for protection.

There's surprisingly little difference between Joseph Goebbels and Hollywood.

Even the most mainstream of Islamic voices tend to espouse positions on women's rights, sexual identity and tolerance which would be pilloried and decried if they came from our typical WASPy overlords.

Why is it that those movies attract capital?

This question has been posed long before Foucault. For instance in "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" written in 1552 and surprisingly contemporary.

Perhaps (which is still arguable). But that's not the case here, because we have both.

From the Patriot Act to the SWAT-ization of everyday police operations, and from the TSA to the massively increased legal overload (compared to 1960's laws and practices) and down to the rise of the huge (private) prison business and the constant wars, what more proof exactly do you need?

>People aren't afraid of surveillance because it has no impact on our lives. The government isn't actually misusing the data on a large scale.

They don't have to. It's enough for them to misuse those in a tiny scale to affect everybody's life. When the next Martin Luther King/Mother Jones/Rosa Parks/Harvey Milk/Aaron Swartz (and thousands of other, less known figures that fought for change) etc appears, they can crush him at will, and everybody will be poorer for it.

If you think the existing framework is flawed (and I would strongly agree), then definitely fight against it. Vote for people that support your view, and write to your representatives.

The fight against surveillance is essentially defeatist and fear mongering. It assumes the government will turn evil and it'll start trying to make your life miserable. It's all part of a collective psychosis. We think that it's an inevitability that one day the US will turn into an evil dystopian nazi regime.

"The fight against surveillance is essentially defeatist and fear mongering. It assumes the government will turn evil and it'll start trying to make your life miserable. It's all part of a collective psychosis. We think that it's an inevitability that one day the US will turn into an evil dystopian nazi regime."

I think that history disagrees with you. Have you ever heard the phrase: all that's required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing? People questioning the reach of government surveillance are good people doing something.

There is nothing inherently evil in surveillance. In and of itself it's a neutral thing. It's what you do with it that is evil or good.

First I'd say that I don't really see how the NAZIs gain power because of surveillance. Hitler didn't seize power because the SA had some intricate intelligence apparatus. Nor was it the case for the the fascists in Italy, nor Spain. I would argue it was for them simply a tool for the consolidation of power and their fight against subversion.

Just like - in la-la land - if the US government were to turn evil, they would use surveillance to oppress the people. But at that point it's "too-late". The oppression comes first, and then the surveillance to back it up.

"I think it's rather more that the history of states turning fascist..."

I think maybe the larger issues is that the "cyclicality" of history is really more about people seeing patterns where there are none (and historians justifying their jobs). Virtually all the examples we return too are from the beginning of the 20th century. Somehow because of how horrible WW2 was we feel that this may happen again if we aren't careful.

But in reality, history doesn't really "repeat itself" as the old says goes. The NAZI arose during a period of extreme nationalism. There is no reason to believe that this will necessarily happen again. For instance it didn't happen before the end of the 19th century since nationalism is a relatively new concept. And we don't for examples anticipate the return of communism, or disco.

I think at this point in our cultural evolution a return to tyranny is simply impossible. We have so much precedent of the success of democracy and our thinking on human rights has evolved to a point where this is simply unsustainable

to close with some data:

http://thediplomat.com/2013/02/13/5-ways-china-could-become-....

"Statistical analysis shows that authoritarian regimes become progressively more unstable (and democratic transitions more likely) once income rises above $1,000 (PPP) per capita. When per capita income goes above $4,000 (PPP), the likelihood of democratic transitions increases more dramatically. Few authoritarian regimes, unless they rule in oil-producing countries, can survive once per capita income hits more than $6,000 (PPP)."

No it is not. Being watched changes the behavior of the watched. Dissent is less, if the incentives are that way, that dissenting hurts your future choices.

There are so much studies showing the dangers of a society being watched and of watchers not controlled, fueled by legal powers.

Historically speaking it was the way you described, that oppression came first, surveillance followed as a means to an end. Securing the oppressing leaders.

So surveillance is a dangerous thing even without oppressive governments using the data. Just being watched is enough to undermine healthy democratic dissent.

It's a matter of the additional power granted to the government... in exchange for what? An insignificant decrease in the likelihood that I am killed by terrorists?

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

I think what you need to fight then is the absurd amount of laws on the books. I don't think we're close to the point you're describing. Sure cops overlook J-walking and driving 5 mph over the speed limit, but that's minor in the grand scheme of things. I think if the government found out ever law I'd broke... I'd probably have to pay a large amount of fines for all the stuff I've torrented, and maybe quite a few speeding tickets. But you've got to understand that if everyone that speeded and torrented was caught, the system of punishment would have to be completely different. The punishment - right or wrong - is scaled inversely to the chance that you will get caught. As an example: If they saw each time you went over 65 mph, you'd probably be dinged 5 bucks, not 100+.

In a sense it would make the system a lot more fair.

This is incorrect, surveillance (observation) is inherently participatory. It is not a neutral act.