Foucault as terrorist

Foucault was probably a terrorist, foucaultblog can exclusively reveal. New compelling evidence by authoritative sources conclusively shows that because of his leftism, he “loved tyranny and terror.”

Yes, and furthermore “leftwing Western intellectuals and their new, highly unlikely anti-intellectual, anti-feminist allies – violent Muslim belligerents” means “that Western leftists and Muslim terrorists share a pathology, a morbid mental defect.”

While the writer admits that the thesis of Glazov’s book is not espoused by someone actually trained in psychiatry or even psychology this doesn’t stop her. (This after praising Paul Johnson’s notorious book Intellectuals and then admitting that he was later discredited when his private penchant for S&M was revealed. Hey, pick better examples if you want to be creditable!)

As for Foucault, of course, as we’ve always suspected:

In United in Hate, [Glazov] writes about Michel Foucault, for decades, one of the academy’s most revered and influential intellectual theorists. In doing so, he – in the tradition of Paul Johnson — describes Foucault’s ugly (and in many “respectable” liberal circles, unspeakable) demise. Glazov writes:

“For a person who had always been fascinated by death and its interconnections with sex, Foucault’s life came to an eerie ending when he died of AIDS in 1984,” having “embraced” the San Francisco bath house scene when its dangers were well known, and its inherent immorality –even before the AIDS era – should have been, in any case, self-evident.

“As we shall see later in this chapter,” Glazov continues, “many leftist homosexuals would follow this pattern of self-hate and a craving for death. This pathological behavior mirrors that of other leftist intellectuals supporting tyrannies that murder intellectuals” – Foucault, for instance, was a vocal admirer of Iran’s Khomeini.

The self-hating homo, the craving for death, the ignorant claims. No stereotypes there then.

There’s even an “analytics of blood”:

I think perhaps I didn’t know how much radical Muslims actually venerate actual human blood. In one scene, a Muslim terrorist actually laps the blood off the floor of his dead victim. It makes sense, of course, since the craving for the pure and sterilized earthly paradise is ultimately an outgrowth of the hatred of human beings and, therefore, the thirst for their blood. That’s why socialists and Islamists have their hands soaked in it.

In other news from the same commentator:

Rumors of Islamic terrorist training camps operating within the United States and Canada have been making the rounds ever since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A new film is re-focusing attention on the subject,

but woops!

authoritative proof of their existence – -at least in the numbers being claimed — can be difficult to acquire.

…

dozens of radical Muslim terrorist compounds currently exist across America, basing that claim upon a mysterious, untitled 2006 Regional Organized Crime Information Center report prepared for the Department of Justice marked “Dissemination Restricted to Law Enforcement. I attempted to acquire a copy of this document, through both the Department of Justice and the Christian Action Network, without success.”

But I’ll pass on unsubstantiated rumors anyway and then resurrect slurs not heard since the time of the Crusades? I thought the politics of fear was over?

Uh-oh, wingnut attack!!

David Frum, former speech writer for President Bush (and the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil”, not to mention ardent proponent of the Iraqi war) has been given a book by Foucault… and loves it!

The book he was given was as you might guess, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, which we have had cause to discuss on this blog already. And of course the reason he loves it is that he can use it to trash Foucault:

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault succumbed to a bizarre infatuation with the Iranian Islamic revolution…

Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling…

…a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene…

For Foucault, sexual pleasure was intimately bound to rituals of domination and outright acts of brutality…

[Foucault] decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation…

The mistake Foucault made about Khomeini is integral to Foucault’s own thinking – and calls into question much about Foucault’s own work…

The blogosphere and the MSM

One of the stories of the summer, for me anyway, has been the conflict between the blogosphere and the mainstream media (MSM). I wrote about this earlier, if a bit obliquely, with the central question of whether you can be partisan but not polemical.

There are many people around who advocate bi-partisanship, cooperation and lack of polemics. Certainly the preference for what might be called “problematizations not polemics” in the work of Foucault has often intrigued people. But I remain to be convinced that there is no role for hard advocacy that sets itself in opposition to some privileged mode of thought. What, if you need justification from Foucault, he called “counter-conducts.”

The example sine quo non of this is the blogosphere, or people-powered commentary and discussion. This rose to a peak last weekend with the YearlyKos convention in Chicago which was attacked before during and after (eg., by Bill O’Reilly) as being both a kind of dangerous hard-left group and a marginalized, ineffective bunch of nerds. In fact, it is neither, but rather a gathering together of advocates of progressive issues and Democratic party supporters (all the major Dem presidential candidates showed up and were interviewed).

There is a tradition in the blogosphere of opposition to the MSM, and in fact historically, that is one of the reasons for its rise: that the media was conservative, or mainstream at best, and did not properly report or do journalism on Democratic party candidates in the 2004 elections (which was when it really came to prominence, but starting with moveon.org which was founded to counter-act the attacks on Clinton when he was president).

Today some of the most ardent opponents of the MSM are still in the progressive blogosphere: people such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, and Eric Boehlert (author of Lapdogs, How the Press Rolled over for Bush).

Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer and got his start following the 2005 NYT revelation of the Bush administration warrantless wiretaps, but has been increasingly attacking political reporting in the MSM for being pro-Bush and displaying a lack of investigative initiative. But Greenwald is not above harshly criticizing the Dems, as for instance this weekend when they agreed to pass Bush’s revisions of the wiretapping law, FISA.

Greenwald’s favorite snark is that beltway media pundits think of themselves as Serious and others , such as dirty bloggers, as irrelevant. This is not an arbitrary insult, for it gets at the idea that there is a core of experts who are the only ones Serious and well-connected enough to pronounce on politics. This is where the clash with the bloggers comes in, for they are (in the eyes of the MSM):

1. Unqualified (no j-school)
2. Partisan

It is this second point they often harp on and which interests me here. Is being partisan automatically dismissible from the ranks of Serious political reporting and opinion?

Here’s Jay Carney, a leading writer at Time’s own blog, making that case:

What I meant about having a responsibility not to be labeled left or right is that our responsibility is to the truth — that we should write what we see, not what we want to see or wish to be true, and that, if we do so, attempts to label us as partisan will fail.

So for Carney, by being non-partisan, one can be truthful, and that partisanship excludes you from the truth. You can avoid being called partisan (the latter strategy has not really been borne out however. I would guess that both the left and the right believe large segments of the media are not in sympathy with their beliefs.) He goes on:

If we’re doing our jobs as political reporters, attempts to label us as left or right will fail because our stories will be grounded in solid reporting.

This just strikes me as ridiculous. It means that no story can be left or right or politically tinged, that everything finds its way in the middle. He’s talking about “our stories” plural being neither left nor right, but somehow equally balanced. Isn’t that rather like the “equal time” claim of creationists? Isn’t it rather like saying that all views are equally pertinent? What kind of relativism is that?

Here’s Jay Rosen, the respected journo prof at NYU:

It’s our responsibility not to be labeled left or right is a case of a political journalist blurting out a deep truth about his profession. Carney and Tumulty really do define their responsibility this way: to avoid what would get them labeled, especially by peers but also other onlookers— and of course potential critics. When you actually feel a responsibility like that it not only makes you timid; but you look for opportunities to demonstrate that you are independent, not “in the tank,” non-aligned, the professional skeptic. You are constantly proving your political innocence, which is a rhetorical—not an informational or truthtelling—task.

But in actual fact it’s worse than that, because in general, all voices are not heard equally. Here’s a forceful expression of why bloggers and MS should not play nice:

Because I believe American traditional media to be complicit in an illegal and immoral war and occupation of Iraq. They are unable and unwilling to expose the shredding of our Constitutional rights but quite concerned about Paris Hilton’s incarceration. They are entirely unbothered about their own absurd appearances at Correspondents Dinners rapping with Karl Rove, to my mind the architect of an American Presidency chock full of the worst American war criminals ever.

You can find many similar opinions, fuelled of course by the fact that Serious journalists in DC are all on record as saying let’s go to war with Iraq in videos and in print, to which net-savvy progressive bloggers can gleefully link time and time again (Atrios, to cite just one minor example, even invented a new term, the Friedman Unit or FU, to snark at Friedman in the NYT who is forever saying let’s give it just 6 more months every 6 months).

At YearlyKos, Greenwald and Carney were on a panel together and Greenwald lost no time in attacking the MSM. Mother Jones magazine liveblogged it as:

Take home point from Greenwald: Journalists think bloggers want them to become partisan. Actually, bloggers just want journalists to be adversarial and skeptical.

Thus we move profitably away from partisanship as blind partisanship, to the press having more of a politics of critique. I would say that that is a great summary and insight into precisely the main desire of bloggers regarding the MSM.

I’m not sure if or how this might advance our thinking on this, but I know that a politics of critique sounds better than both a wishy-washy bi-partisanship that is usually a cover for partisanship, and ideologically driven partisanship that is closed to debate.

As Foucault might have said:

[My approach] is “antistratgic”: be respectful when singularity rises up, and intransigent when power infringes on the universal.”

Ward Churchill fired

Re: polemics (see previous post), is anyone disturbed by this?

On being critical or polemics?

Recently I posted some remarks about whether it is possible to be partisan without being polemical, noting that Foucault preferred “problematizations, not polemics.”

Now there’s this essay considering polemics in more detail.

Partisanship, polemics and politics

X-posted at Long Sunday

Is it possible to be honestly partisan?

We hear a lot of talk these days about the need for bipartisanship (I’m thinking of statements coming out of Capitol Hill), and in light of the poll findings I posted yesterday about American’s distrust of political bias in the university, you might be justified in concluding that the source of the problem is partisanship.

Foucault famously observed that he preferred “problematizations, not polemics” and defined the former:

Problematization doesn’t mean representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 257.

So are problematizations and partisanship compatible? One might initially think not. Again from Foucault:

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as an anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat … and I must admit that I rather like what they mean (Foucault 1997, 113). Foucault, Michel (1997) ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.’ In Paul Rabinow (Ed.) The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol. I. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. 111–19.

This is, you might say, the antithesis of partisanship as a political position: left, right, center–all as necessary, all desirable so that one remains mobile and tactical, not strategic.

The polls showing the distrust of political bias in the classroom were themselves strongly split along political lines. Fully 73.3% of Republicans thought there was a problem, but only 6.7% of Democrats. But overall 40% of respondents thought that political bias–partisanship–was a “very serious” problem. Again this implies that having a position that leads one to be biased is a problem.

I wonder why this is, and I wonder if it is possible as I said above to be “honestly” (for want of a better word) partisan? In Europe for example, it is well-known that certain newspapers hew to a political position (liberal, conservative), whereas in the US the news media is supposed to be “fair and balanced” (but is not). The US news media of course is frequently criticized for not actively doing journalistic investigation of the powerful, instead being rather smitten by them (criticism most vigorously from bloggers and authors such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Eric Boehlert in his book Lapdogs: How the Press rolled Over for Bush).

Contemplating this one could argue that partisanship has become polemic, and if so, this leaves little room for the honest partisan, the person who believes something and tries to vigorously pursue it. This does not mean however, that we should conclude that partisanship should be divorced from politics. Partisanship could be divorced from bias however.

I would like to operate under and suggest a more expansive notion of “politics” than “partisanship as bias” with which it is frequently conflated. We often hear it said that we don’t want politics to enter into a decision, meaning bias. But if problematizations are the putting into play of the true and false and of constituting things as objects of thought, what other word might we want than politics? Politics–polis–is the art of deciding about where you live.

In this way I think that problematizations can be re-identified with partisanship. Partisan politics is the recognition of genuinely held positionalities which are neither polemics nor bias. I think this recovery of the meaning of politics is quite in line with the “continental” tradition of thought and of Foucault’s “putting into play of true and false.”

“Polemics”

In an 1984 interview with the anthropologist Paul Rabinow, Foucault discussed his distaste for the polemical form of argument.

Rabinow is now involved in a philosophy blog that often covers Foucault’s work.

ck at arbitrarymarks has some further reflections. Here’s a taste.