Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions, including punishment. 

In some ways, Foucault was the super high-grade intellectual fence-sitting analytical philosopher, the antithesis to our present prolific scribe fence-sitter and home-cooking scone-maker star, Annabel Crabb. 

This came from an article by Gus

https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30164

… Gus continued:

These days of decadent decrepitude from the top echelons of politics down to the sewers of adversarial questions and answers, glorified by many leaky-ink pen pushers, have buried the elevated thoughts of greater constructs, in which we should be playing social Mecanno with ingenuity and creativity, while knowing the planet better rather than trying to burn it down. Phew.

Thus, elevated social understandings have vanished — even the gods have been replaced by various App-ollos on little glowing machines that dictate what we do... And our deeper thoughts are incanted with our dick-pics published on "social media". 

Is it because democracy relies on the most common lowest denominator or have we dropped the intellectual ball as not to raise the bar, because mediocrity is easy?

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Gus (cartoonist since 1951) today: 

Now, people in power pay little notice of philosophers — especially those like Foucault. His rants mean nothing to the way the system is run — and has been run since eternam anyway. All Foucault does is explain how the flies fly in different directions in the glass jar, hitting the sides without knowing the transparent substance is there. The people in power manufacture and maintain the fly-cage using devious coercive means and powerful medias, including religious hubris. You are free as long as you stay inside.

Now some newish book has been exploring Foucault last (acid) trip, which was made on LSD and “changed everything”… D’oh…. It changes nothing — only Foucault’s mind… That’s it… I suppose that a few followers might get confused, but the public generalia had no idea what this is all about, AND IT DOES NOT MATTER. It’s a bit like the last episode of “Better Call Saul” (advertised ad nauseatum) which can be amusing or sad, but won’t change your social moire that has long been captured by the beast of illusions — even those about the law. So we are told:

In a 1978 interview with an Italian Communist Party journalist, Michel Foucault reiterated his sense that power was diffuse. Focusing on the supposed conventional structures of its deployment did not interest him. Duccio Trombadori challenged Foucault, asking if he was not backing away from the responsibility of politically challenging institutions, parties, and states imposing new disciplines and enforcing measures reverberating throughout the social order. Foucault was having none of it. The accumulation of capital, ideologies marshaled in its interests, and the authority of the state were, to Foucault, less momentous than what he considered broader and more pervasive practices central to the configuration of civil society. The late 1970s marked, for Foucault, a governance predicament. Everything Foucault thought about this crisis convinced him it was necessary to reevaluate much and widen debate. Foucault demanded the need to dispense with certain protocols of “struggle,” in which “acting out a ‘war’ against an ideological adversary” would be replaced with a supposedly better approach: one that acknowledged that those with whom one disagreed might simply be mistaken or, possibly, misunderstood.1

The interview with Trombadori anticipated a new and controversial study of Foucault in his last years, from 1975 to 1984. A collaborative effort by a pillar of Foucauldian governmentality studies, Mitchell Dean, and an edgy scholar of contemporary political life, Daniel Zamora, the somewhat mischievously mistitled The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution is an elaboration of where the influential French philosopher went intellectually after his 1978 interview and what took him there.2 Foucault, in these years, experimented a great deal. Shifting his intellectual focus to subjectivity and the self, Foucault reached a surprising, if tentative, rapprochement with neoliberal theorists of the capitalist marketplace. As the French philosopher consorted, metaphorically, with Milton Friedman, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was surveying the intellectual scene he influenced so profoundly before his death in 1984. The CIA concluded, “the New Right can point to kudos from Michel Foucault.”3 How Foucault, the left-wing activist and militant opponent of power’s dissemination, looked to neoliberalism for guidance in his quest for a left governmentality is the story of Dean and Zamora’s book. They are adamant that Foucault’s turn to subjectivity and the self, coupled with his openness to neoliberalism’s promise to extricate the state from its onerous, ineffective, and costly intrusions into individual lives, resulted in disastrous implications for the Left and its capacity to wage struggles in the current age of austerity.

Dean and Zamora see in Foucault’s turn toward the transformation of subjectivity a downplaying of the centrality of the state and a dismissal of class politics. Foucault’s method, in their view, privileges “limit-experiences,” such as might be achieved through mind-altering drugs, totalizing spiritually induced commitments, sadomasochism, and even brushes with, or actual, death. For Foucault, “the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and the ordeal [épreuve] of their possible transcendence.”4

Dean and Zamora add little to our knowledge of just what Foucault’s personal experimentation with LSD and other drugs, his time in the leather bars of San Francisco and New York, and his association of death with pleasure meant to him or how they reconfigured his thought. Those drawn to this book because of its title and possessing a primary interest in these issues are perhaps better served looking elsewhere. James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault goes into far more detail on such matters. Praised for addressing Foucault’s sexual life as a legitimate subject of inquiry, that book has also been pilloried for supposedly pathologizing certain practices, failing to acknowledge them as “techniques of resistance,” and portraying them luridly. Miller’s account, like that of Dean and Zamora, suggests that Foucault contributed to neoliberalism’s resurgence in France during the 1980s.5

Gus says:

Maybe. May be not…..

Neoliberalism did not need Foucault to become popular in France. It was already parachuted by the Anglo/Saxon hegemony on Europe through the fast food outlets and the incessant Hollywoodian products. Neoliberalism was based on the working class being bashed by bosses alla Thatcherite, eventually leading to some workers being able to climb up into the bourgeois chambers and becoming enamoured with some easy dosh — while others disappeared into the gig economy, as the hard working yaka had been exported to China. Everyone was becoming a consultant, a contractor — even an expert, if one was just cleaning toilets or sweeping the pavements from the blood of the last three revolutionaries left on the planet. Some workers became machines and many were replaced by machines. Fascism all Marinetti was (and still is) the subtext of neoliberalism (here or somewhere else — China understood this).

So, in the West, the proportion of first sector workers making things versus those of the third sector providing services changed. This placed the lowest paid into untold slavery with little way to express their plight or staying unionised as the media had also come to the money-making neoliberalism (media and money have always been in the same bed)… What is Neoliberalism? Neoliberalism is the fine art of selling something without having to make it in the first place. It’s mostly selling money to make money. It’s an expensive mirage in a grocery shop. 

This of course changed the landscape as we know. And the landscape is still described by “NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM” which underpins the American momentum to take over the world and people like Foucault can be humoured as little stepping stones to amuse a few sad bods, but they are not the inspiration of the caper.

If you don’t know, NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM is the second motto that adorns the American seal and dollar. This literally translate as “NEW ORDER OF THE AGES” which means “NEW ORDER OF THE TIMES WE LIVE IN” which means the “NEW WORLD ORDER FOR NOW AND CENTURIES TO COME”. This means the USA are your masters of order for life. We’ve already discussed this in Virgil’s legacy.

This World Order then developed into Sir Halford John Mackinder’s 1905 plan to conquer the planet by dividing it into "bite size"... With fluid adaptations of pathways on how to get there, the Anglo/Saxons shall rule the world.

Where to now? More deceit from the most deceitful country on Earth — the USA. More wars from the most warring country on the planet, the USA. More conquest from, and submission to, the US EMPIRE THAT WANTS TO OWN EVERYTHING — including you.

The Russians and the Chinese are not interested — and infuriate the Empire by acting as if the Empire did not matter…. Hence the BRIC association while the stupid Europeans can only dream of more “sanctions” against Russia (some more added today) — which don’t really hurt Russia but damage Europe, because that’s what being hypocritically moralistic about Putin's wars does to you. 

Led by the false US version of events in regard to Ukraine, the Europeans delude themselves like flies in a jar, suddenly frazzled by someone with a spoon tapping the sides.

Okay. First: Putin and Russia won’t loose the “war”. At this stage if the West wants to delude a moral victory for itself, it could recognise that “Putin lost the war by only taking over the Donbass region of Ukraine” and lost his momentum to ”take over Europe” (which was NEVER his intent). Within, say three to five years from now — which could be done now, but we’ve got too much pride in the West to do what's right on the spot — a security pact with Russia could be agreed upon. Same with China — because Russia and China won’t go away. We’re going to have to deal with Russia and China as if we were civilised citizens of the world, not as we do now, like boof-heads with aggression in our underpants because we are stupid.

This is where, we might have to do a Michel Foucault’s style acid trip to become more mellow. We don’t need to conquer the planet to be good and to share the future (which ain’t going to be too rosy for some people because of GLOBAL WARMING).

“NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM” will be replaced by “omnes communicantes mundi”.

AND JULIAN ASSANGE WILL BE FREE...... Fuck, the Americans are still moronic here.... Can't they become more civilised?

GL

Old rabid atheist with misplaced Foucauldian optimism....