Foucault's fuckwitted discontinuity

Wikipedia says- 

Discontinuity and continuity according to Michel Foucault reflect the flow of history

which is continuous and thus can't be reflected by 'discontinuity'. 

and the fact that some "things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterised, classified, and known in the same way" from one era to the next.

This is also the case within an era. Indeed a person, while speaking may herself jump between very different views of the same thing. 'Baby is an angel. OMG what is that little devil up to now! Spit it out! As I was saying, my baby is absolutely perfect. Would you mind looking after him while I pop down to the shops? He won't be any trouble.'

In developing the theory of archaeology of knowledge,

Archaeology produces knowledge by digging up stuff. Knowledge isn't something material, like soil, which can be dug up.  

Foucault was trying to analyse the fundamental codes which a culture uses to construct the episteme or configuration of knowledge

there is no such code. True, there may be a few scholars who seek to give a systematized account of what is currently known within a particular subject. But this can't be done for everything which is known. True, mathematical or scientific theories may be united on the basis of greater generality. The Bourbaki group, or Grothendieck for that matter, certainly thought so as did Physicists chasing a Grand Unified Theory. Sadly, it currently appears that though good enough 'univalent foundations' may be found, they won't be unique or 'complete'. In other words, this is a pragmatic matter. Either the thing 'pays its way' or it is useless. 

that determines the empirical orders and social practices of each particular historical era.

What would happen if such a 'code' were found. Then, it could be used to create a perfect replica of a different age.  This would be like a 'toy universe' in which counterfactual hypotheses could be tested. What if George Washington had been a cowardly man? Would the American Revolution still have succeeded? 

I suppose, if there were no entropy or else if the holographic principle actually obtains in our Universe, then no information is lost or dissipated and thus 'authentic' replicas can be created. But there are good reasons to believe that this can only be done after 'the end of mathematical Time'- if that is even possible. 

He adopted discontinuity as a positive working tool.

It is meaningless.  

Some of the discourse would be regular and continuous over time as knowledge steadily accumulates and society gradually establishes what will constitute truth or reason for the time being.

This isn't even true of 'buck-stopped', protocol bound, systems which is why nobody knows what the law is till the Supreme Court has had its say. But it is welcome to contradict itself.  

But, in a transition from one era to the next,

Which again is merely a matter of convention. The same historian may, in the same book, place a particular even in two different eras.  

there will be overlaps, breaks and discontinuities as society reconfigures the discourse to match the new environment.

This also happens when we are pissing and suddenly hear a scream. Was it the TV or has an intruder gotten into the house? Oh. It's the TV. Pissing resumes.  

The tool is given an expanded role in genealogy, the next phase of discourse analysis, where the intention is to grasp the total complexity of the use of power and the effects it produces.

There is a Mathematics genealogy project which is useful enough. But it doesn't help anybody grasp 'the total complexity' of anything. As for the 'use of power', we don't know who has it or what its effects will be. Nobody does.  

Foucault sees power as the means for constituting individuals’ identities and determining the limits of their autonomy.

But it is no such thing. When Hitler occupied France, he gained power over French people. But he did not constitute their identities. Sartre continued to have a dick. The Beaver continued to lack any such appendage which is why she wasn't allowed to vote. As for 'the limits of their autonomy', that was something a lot of French people decided for themselves by joining the Resistance.  

This reflects the symbiotic relationship between power (pouvoir) and knowledge (savoir).

There is no such relationship. Hitler had a lot of power. But he was pig ignorant.  

In his study of prisons and hospitals, he observed how the modern individual becomes both an object and subject of knowledge.

But everybody is already both. Your parents know your name. You know their names. OMG, this means Mummy and Daddy are secretly controlling me! It was they who prevented me doing my homework which is why I failed my exams. If I'm now a drunken bum, it is all their fault! Even though they are dead, their ghosts continue to force me to drink a couple of bottles of gin a day. 

Science emerges as a means of directing and shaping lives.

Parents and teachers and friends and employers have directed and shaped our lives. Technology, which is a product of Science, too may change the direction of our lives or materially enhance our quality of life. But Science did not emerge as a means to this end. Indeed, there were plenty of societies where there was no fucking Science and yet lives got directed and shaped. Perhaps Fuckwit confused Science with Religion.  

Hence, the modern conception of sexuality emerges from Christian codes of morality,

Nonsense! Sado-masochistic homosexuals existed even in non-Christian countries. Moreover such 'codes' differed even within countries or social classes. 

the science of psychology,

had nothing what so ever to do with Christianity 

the laws and enforcement strategies adopted by the police and judiciary,

ditto 

the way in which issues of sexuality are discussed in the public media,

ditto 

the education system, etc.

It wasn't till about 1904 that the French got the Church out of the Education business. Interestingly, England went in the reverse direction around that time.  

These are covert forms of domination (if not oppression), and their influence is to be found not only in what is said, but more importantly, in what is not said: in all the silences and lacunae, in all the discontinuities.

Foucault, because of his sexual preferences, was interested in 'domination'. He couldn't understand why those with power weren't torturing and raping everybody. Obviously, they must be doing this covertly. De Gaulle would often shove pineapples up the rectums of his Cabinet Ministers while the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, stood by laughing maniacally. Sadly, De Gaulle kept these activities of his 'covert' because he was a big fat meanie and didn't want Fuckwit to stroke himself off while watching such exhibitions.  

If one idea is discussed, then it is not discussed, whose interest is served by this change?

The Pope who is covertly shoving pineapples up everybody's bum. Why does nobody talk about this? 

In fairness, Foucault started babbling this paranoid shite back in 1972, when Maoism was still fashionable. He had been asked by the French magazine Esprit- 

Doesn't a thought which introduces constraint of the system and discontinuity in the history of the mind remove all basis for a progressive political intervention?

No. There were plenty of progressive political interventions going on at that time. Any type of System features constraints- economic, technological, etc. Thoughts don't matter very much. Everybody has lots of them.  

Does it not lead to the following dilemma:

- either the acceptance of the system,

even if it doesn't exist. I am content to know that invisible lesbian giraffes are controlling the world. They will ensure that I will be transported to the paradisal world of K-Pax just when the Moon crashes into the earth in 2028.  

- or the appeal to an uncontrolled event, to the irruption of exterior violence which alone is capable of upsetting the system. 

If only Chairman Mao would send the Red Army to liberate us from Capitalism and Liberalism and Democracy!

Foucault avoids the question because the truth is his Maoism was just a fad. He was shit at philosophy and was hoping to be taken seriously as a historian of ideas or something of that sort. Sadly he didn't know any history and was shit at thinking. Still, he created a bizarre ideolect which other crazy or very stupid people who wanted a PhD in useless shit could plagiarize.

 

I suppose the answer to this question might matter to stupid people hoping to get tenure teaching worthless shite as part of a credentialized Ponzi scheme. Thus, I might argue that Socioproctology is a branch of Medicine when applying for a job at a Medical College. Alternatively, I might describe it as a tool for higher Management if I have an Uncle who runs a Business Skool. 

For the victims of Grievance Studies, Foucauldian shite is useful because you can claim that 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Logic' should be treated on par with the work of Lotfi Zadeh. Incidentally, Zadeh was considered crazy or part of the 'counter culture' though he was a brilliant electrical engineer. Still, as an Azeri, he would be classed as Caucasians whereas I am as black as coal and thus DIE requires you to hire me. 

Anyone, while talking can given a unified account of whatever 'discourse' he claims to be contributing to. However, the thing is arbitrary. No 'canonical' unification is possible. Still, for any given purpose, it can be done well enough. 

However, not even a very clever mathematician can recover some of the thinking behind results which have come down to us- forget about those which have disappeared. 

So he wanted to do what was already being done. But the problem here is that a great mathematician's ideas about how his branch of the subject has developed is interesting in its own right. The same is true of a successful economist or general. But Foucault was shit at the one thing he had been taught- viz. Philosophy. He had learned anything else- even his grasp of basic French history was defective. Thus all he was doing was having a wank while wondering to himself in what covert manner the powerful were shoving pineapples up everybody's rectum. 

Foucault says he is looking for the 'rules of formation' for the concepts of a particular discourse. But no such rules exist, otherwise there would be an algorithmic way of cranking out all true propositions in that discourse. If this can't be done even for Peano arithmetic, how the fuck could it be done for Econ or Psychology which have far worse problems of impredicativity? 

Suppose Foucault had found the 'rule of formation' for his own discourse. Then he wouldn't have had to write so many stupid books. The reader would just learn the rule and, voila!, following the rule, he would generate a book by Foucault on any subject. 

In other words, Fuckwit thought if he were an omniscient God- or a Laplace given access to all information about every elementary particle- you would know when and why things happen and what that will lead to. Sadly, Grete Hermann had shown the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variables' theorem. True, it wasn't till the Bell inequality came out that this was noticed. Still, Foucault was sticking with a type of determinism which had been exploded. He didn't just 'die of ignorance' (as the AIDS awareness posters had it at that time) he was also hopelessly behind the times. 

Clinical medicine costs money. It isn't autonomous because it has to compete for paying customers or money from the Government. This does mean that some of its branches, at any given time, might be utterly shit. (There was a time when people thought Freudian 'nueroses', or homosexuality for that matter, were mental illnesses) However, there may also be 'alternative' remedies which are effective and which get incorporated into clinical practice. Still,  a person considered a quack in one country may be recognized as a medical doctor in another country. 

In my own case, it occurs to me that Socioproctology could be a valuable complement to allopathic medicine. Buy my books on Amazon. Left by the bedside, they are a cure for insomnia. Left in the toilet, and they relieve you of constipation. Do not, however, covertly shove them up Macron's rectum even if the Pope is there standing beside you, egging you on. Film the thing on your smartphone and upload it to Youtube. 

To be fair, Foucault wasn't saying that he himself had found a way to capture the algorithms by which different knowledge systems were generated. He wasn't even he knew a way to differentiate between say, ancient Greek thinking and medieval Chinese thinking. He was saying the 'epistemic'- i.e. what was classed as knowledge- of a period was infinite and could no satisfy Yoneda lemma- information about all interactions would not be enough to describe the system. In other words Foucault's category of the epistemic defies category theory.  This also means, there would be no way of discriminating sense from nonsense if you wrote about this field. 

For example, we may say, roughly speaking, 'in the age of Faith, if a mathematical model supported by empirical observation went against something written in Scripture it was deemed not to be knowledge but a dangerous delusion. In the age of Enlightenment, the opposite was the case'. No doubt, there are exceptions to this, but the thing is useful enough for some purposes. 

Foucault thinks otherwise. 

was not that of Marx.

All this is silly. The fact is the history of every subject was written in the same way- i.e. chronologically- by people who had read books on the history of various other things. True, there were fads and fashions in historiography and no history was unaffected by this. For example, with the rise of Grievance Studies, the history of Econ is rewritten to emphasize the misogyny or racism of various dead white dudes. But the same thing happens to the history of Math or Logic or Philosophy. 

As for 'thresholds', they are economic or political in nature. 'Discourses' need money or patronage to survive. The 'threshold' for linguistics had to do with Western colonization of large parts of the world. Monboddo and William James were Judges who interested themselves in indigenous American or Indian languages. At a later point, savants in Hanover, whose King was also King of England, could earn a bit of money teaching Sanskrit and Persian to young Englishmen hoping to make their fortune in the East. The seminar system was introduced for Sanskrit and this lead to a spate of research and the publication of many a learned tome. Incidentally, the great mathematician, Herman Grassmann took up Sanskrit and published a translation of the Rg Veda which attracted more attention in his life time. It is obvious that there is a similarity between his contribution to linguistics- by freeing language history from structure- and his work on linear algebra, creating the abstract idea of a vector space, which originated with his work on tides.

As for Ricardo and Malthus- they were responding to the great political question of their time. Marx failed to make any contribution to positive econ because he didn't know math and thus missed the Marginalist bus. But then the Germans had ignored Gossen and went down a foolish 'Institutionalist' path.

I suppose you could say that without riskless assets- e.g. consols- the 'Classical' episteme could not have been overcome because portfolio decisions were not seen to equalize marginal gain. Gossen sold insurance and maybe that's why, though German financial markets weren't well developed, he could be first out of the gate. 

Yet, there is a 'general stage of reason' in any given country at a given time provided there is a general system of education. Moreover, the best minds work in a number of different fields. True, some may be overlooked in their own life-time for the greatest achievement while being known to their contemporaries for work in another field. Don't forget Einstein's Nobel was for discovering the photoelectric effect. 

One can certainly say that a cow eating grass in the field displays a 'complex relationship of successive  displacement in time'. The thing may be true, but it isn't very informative. However Knowledge is not a cow. It has no complex relationships for the same reason that it can't come out of the closet as a Lesbian.

In mathematics unicity or uniqueness along with an existence theorem shows that there is an underlying structure. In other words, you are pointing at something which might exist or might be useful. If, however, you are babbling nonsense, you can say 'there is no unique or canonical way of representing or receiving what I say. I'm talking garbage. There is no rhyme or reason to it.'

Foucault claimed to have studied the things he wrote about. But he hadn't really. As a matter of fact, plenty of phantom thoughts and zombie ideologies reappear in different places and at different times. This isn't because some particular discourse has had a complex relationship- probably involving a strap-on- with other discourses. It is because, when things turn to shit, people do crazy shit. Alternatively, affluence can lead people to do crazy shit just for shits and giggles. This may involve reviving some long obsolete ideology or institution. Why? Well, presumably, if it worked once, maybe it can work again. The thing has Schelling focality and can solve a coordination, or discoordination, game.

Foucault wants to spatialize time. Sadly, doing so is destructive of Historiography. If everything could happen at once- i.e. there were no concurrency problems- there would be neither ergodicity or hysteresis. History would be empty. So would philosophy because all intensions would have well defined extensions. Also, to know one thing would be to know all things. There could be no 'dialectics' or categoricity (because everything would have the same infinite model).

I suppose if we could see thing 'sub specie aeternitatis' being would be becoming and transformation would be perdurance. But then we would be as Gods and, as Foucault reminds us, would be using our infinite power to shove pineapples up the rectums of everybody. 

The linguistic theory of the copula does not imply that two distinct things were distinct. There was no need to do so. In some languages, it is fine to speak of verb copula. In others it isn't. Descriptive linguistics is ideographic. Many civilizations have had advanced linguistic theories and some of those theories reappeared in modern linguistics. But, with Chomsky, the thing turned to shit. There is no fucking i-language. There is only e-language. Foucault represents the retarded 'episteme' of a period which had learned nothing from Godel and Tarski and which had an ignorant and unyielding faith in costless computing such that everything had substantive answers in some pseudo-mathematical space. It was an age of innocence where people expected talking computers to be piloting spaceships to Jupiter by the year 2001. 

Few would deny that many aspects of our lives have been transformed since the early Eighties, when Foucault died. But where were the discontinuities- save where regime change occurred? Academic disciplines can rise and fall in rigor and utility. There are fads and fashions. But there is a lot of continuity because professors have tenure and not all of them are merciful enough to die at a reasonable age. I suppose, if pure market forces operated, you might have seen a lot of actual transformation- stuff like Blockbusters disappearing from the High Street- in Academia.  But thanks to 'information asymmetry' (i.e. students not realizing they are getting screwed if they get sheepskins in shitty subjects) the Academy can be very slow to change because it is dependent on stupidity- which is never in short supply.

Grammar didn't matter very much though some comparative linguists found it useful and did make interesting discoveries. The 'theory of representation' is like the theory of shitting. We may have such a thing, but it is useless. Economics, like Biology, is game theoretic. Foucault hadn't noticed that the two had come together in the work of Haldane's great student. But there was no 'dependency'. Supervenience, maybe. Physics envy, definitely. But there was no dominance or dependency though it is true that the Sociology Dept. did sometimes covertly insert pineapples up the bums of the more elderly members of the Actuarial Science faculty. Still, what can you do. Sociologists we shall always have with us. Socioproctologists, sadly, are still denied their rightful place in Academic firmament.