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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Discipline and Punish was my first introduction to any of this kind of thought, and it was great. Highly recommended.

For me, coming to understand Foucault was like coming to understand metaprogramming. It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. It is so disappointing that there are people who think of themselves as "hackers" being dismissive of Foucault (and associated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari).

(This is not so much a response to you as my desire to wax more about Foucault.)

Agreed, strongly. D&G are my favorites, actually, as is Deleuze on his own.

I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right.

Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?

> he was right.

The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."

It mostly makes me smile. :)

> Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee

I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...

Do you mean that you're getting rusty?

;-)

> I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition;

Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.

Ignoring your pithy insult of Deleuze's work (which is not math), I did not mean to imply that Deleuze preceded Shannon but that my understanding of Deleuze's work maps well to my understanding of information theory. It was a rehash _for me_.

Difference and Repetition, specifically, is concerned with absolute bullshit explanations and generalizations of the mathematical concepts of the derivative and integral, so I think it's fair to call it bullshit math.

I would also say that there is a zero percent chance that someone could use what is there to develop a mathematical basis for information theory which could actually be used to do anything useful, like data compression or error correcting codes.

Note that I am not saying philosophy needs to be useful to justify itself. Far from it. I'm just strongly disagreeing with your assertions that Difference and Repetition has any relevance or relation to information theory whatsoever.

I found "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" to be a great antidote to the Neo-Reactionaries' take on the contemporary immanence of capital.

I'm extremely torn between "The Coming Insurrection"s call for drop-out politics and Marxist production reforms.

I like what you've said. Here's the connection I made between my technical knowledge and Foucault's school.

A C.S. professor of mine, when lecturing on semantics, i.e. the interpretation of texts, be they intended for computers or humans, remarked that "means" is a three-place relation:

  R(a,b,c) === a means b to c

That is, a tuple is in the relation if the text "a" means "b" to an interpreter "c".

Typically, the "c" part is left out. But introducing it allows one to model subjectivity and interpretation, which is one way to think about what the poststructuralist intellectuals were getting at.

This is a common technique in conceptual analysis. It reminds me of Castelfranchi's theory of trust. While trust was often modeled as a two place relation (X trusts Y) he turned it into a five place relation (X trusts Y for task T useful for goal G in context C).

Thank you so much for the pointer. I had not considered the connection of explicitly accounting for subjectivity in interpretation (for semantics) to (as in your example) the theories of agents and trust.

And I've got to say, really taking this in (the importance of subjectivity and context) can help in real-world situations as well.

> It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances.

I know nothing about Foucault, but considering the praise he's getting on this thread, there must be a heck of a lot more to it than this, right?

Well obviously you cannot sum up the work of any thinker in 1 sentence. But Foucault is actually more of an historian than a philosopher & he provides excellent histories of how many notions that we usually hold to be natural or inevitable are circumstantial and were constructed surprisingly recently, and how the construction of these notions corresponds to the activities of power in our society.

Also probably some portion of his work has been itself naturalized and will seem less novel now that we all live in a world where many people have read Foucault.

Yes, I would urge all people with great curiosity, observation skills and desire to experiment and improve to take part in reading philosophy.

I only caution people to be careful about rockstar-ifying any single philosopher or group thereof. The more you read, the more you learn the shape of philosophy. While any one philosopher might have a lot to say, it's really only the summary of them that makes it truly useful.

It's easy to have your mind blown by one revealing thought from a paragraph or a book, like watching a one-line program execute. It's when all of the thoughts are put together and exercised that philosophy acts like a well-architectured object being designed in a well-architected program running on a well-architected operating system running on well-architected hardware which was developed using a well-architected program running on a ...

And as this article points out, various groups of political interest in reframing any single philosopher's viewpoint.

D&P is good, but I'd suggest as a first read the first volume of the History of Sexuality. It's a more concise introduction to his thought on the role of power in formation of subjectivity, rather than as something that is top-down. I've seen too many beginners in Foucault get wrapped up in notions like the panopticon in D&P and miss more substantial elements of his thought.

I'd also recommend his essays such as "What is Enlightenment?" for beginners (online: http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault....). Even though it may require a few reads, it helps to consider his thought in relationship to thinkers like Kant (who heavily influence linguists such as Chomsky, and Chomsky's view of human nature), and perhaps more importantly it indicates the important role that he considers power to have in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.

Yeah, the History is a very common introduction too. And the first part of D&P can be... distracting, as one of your siblings mentions.

I also think you're right about What is Enlightenment?, which is a favorite too. You're right that it's important to situate him in history, which this does do well. But then requires that you read some Kant...

I also associate Foucault most strongly with Discipline and Punish.

But the reason, I confess, is the simply astonishing first pages of the book. For people who have not read it, I recommend it very highly as an example of forceful writing style: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html . (It's not for the squeamish, and not good while eating.)

Aha my private motive in recommending D&P is uncovered. I don't think it is possible to find a more memorable and convincing display of the radical shift in the conception of sovereignty than in the comparison of those two passages.

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