about selections from "Critical Essays on Michel Foucault"

This collection of essays opens with philosopher Gilles Deleuze rephrasing and re-articulating Foucault's concept of power. There is little new ground here, but the essay is a good opener. The first real bright spot in this collection is "Foucault's Oriental Subtext", in which Uta Liebman Schaub identifies Eastern influences in Foucault's work. Primarily she sees the obliteration of the self in the remedy to Western systems' ceaseless quest to isolate and peg the self, and to tie this knowable self to an identity, as described by Foucault.

The essay "Foucault's Art of Seeing" by John Rajchman opens with Foucault's startling idea that seeing--vision--"structures thought in advance". The visual representation of thought, of how people have seen their world and then accordingly made sense of it, is tied to their age, their time. So seeing yields different concepts and ways of thinking about a given subject. For example, in the classical age, people grouped plants by their character. Now scientists group them primarily by their surface traits.

Foucault took an interest in how concepts of visualization become embedded in institutional practices, and how ethical and moral judgements of things and people changed with those concepts. It is hard to imagine now that people asked different questions in the past; we tend to think we've always been "logical", that being logical is part of our nature. But being "logical" used to be a moral exercise.

Finally, Rajchman explains how, for Foucault and his philosophical-critical descendents, thinking is a dangerous act. I found this section of Rajchman's essay confusing; is it dangerous because it's always situated and political? because it's tied to moral and ethical consequences? because we, merely by thinking of things, may unknowingly reinforce or change ways of conceiving? Whatever the answer, the aim on the other side of that danger, what Foucault pursued, is a world that is not yet visible.

In "Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault's Post-Auschwitz Ethic", James W. Bernauer addresses Foucault's critics who charge the intellectual giant with advocating an amoral aestheticism. Bernauer begins his defense by recognizing Foucault's resistance to the scientifically-minded life style that presupposes we are knowable and, therefore, decipherable (and, as a consequence, subject to be judged against norms). He seemed to champion humans as sexual, primarily, and so he probed how sexuality came to be thought of as a moral experience. The modern age and its States conceive of citizens as life to be kept alive; Foucault conceived of man as desire.

That power that conceives of us as human souls in a life or death struggle categorizes us, marks our individuality, attaches us to an identity, subjectifies us, and imposes its truth on us. The sciences--the currently dominant producers and venue of true knowledge--"direct both the cognitive enterprise and the technologies for human self-relation". Foucault examined how people "became anxious about this or that," and urges us not to look so hard at what we hope to achieve, but rather what struggles we face.

Again, Foucault's ultimate goal was freedom. He knew there was no escaping knowledge-power-self relations for good, but he also thought that no "configuration" (of thought and power?) should be thought unchangeable.

about "The One: The Life and Music of James Brown" by RJ Smith

Through the ups and downs, James Brown commanded an audience. RJ Smith depicts this singular artist's flight out of poverty on the heels of Little Richard, his celebrity-identity bridging the civil rights movement and beyond, and his persistent stumble through the late-stage hard times.

Brown was born, barely, into extreme poverty, and grew up motherless, at the mercy of a hardscrabble father. His affinity for music and singing and his seemingly innate start quality got him followers and fellow musicians from early on. During the first half of his career, James Brown busted ass, working musicians into the tightest band alive, and wielding that band as his own, personal instrument. Year-round, he left it all on the stage.

For different, complicated reasons, some black celebrities' identities are tied to the politics of America's larger black community. Brown's did, but he was wildly inconsistent, veering from black power advocate to Nixon-endorsing spokesman. Brown was mixed up and he was his own man--a complicated soul who gave himself to the public.

Inexplicably--almost--after Brown turned 50 years old, he found himself with money problems, then, after more than half a lifetime working hard and sober, Brown started using PCP. Trouble chased him the rest of his life. Brown died in 2006, still troubled, still a star.


Note: In an afterword, RJ Smith reveals the small gang of thieves most responsible for Brown's financial ruin.

one of many things about Camus' "The Stranger"

(aka "The Outsider" or "L’Étranger")

Albert Camus' The Stranger begins with the main character, Meursault, attending to his mother's funeral. He resumes his life the day after the funeral, but quite soon kills a man in cold blood, apparently, and stands trial. It is not so much his murderous act, but rather his earlier callousness and inexplicable behavior after his mother's death that are used as evidence to convict him.

It's boilerplate to say Camus' The Stranger depicts a brand of existentialism. But even so, Meursault is not readily understood, though, oddly enough, he's completely relatable. Maybe this is because he also personifies another philosophy--one we all have but hate to admit to, a way of life that does not always seem conventionally noble: Pragmatism. 

The novella first casts pragmatism as universal, a view everyone adopts at one time or another.* Then, pragmatism, in all its beauty and brutishness, is contrasted with and convicted by lofty, often unrealistic ideals like nobility and justice.

Here are examples of how pragmatism is depicted as a quite ordinary mode of life, as universal: In accepting his mother's death, Meursault says, "The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak ... " (p. 2). When he arrives at the retirement home chapel, the caretaker is too busy to greet him right away; then, when he arrives, Meursault immediately asks to see mother's body, but the caretaker has already rested the lid on the coffin. When asked, Meursault declines to have the lid removed for viewing. Here, the "official seal" is already on, and he need not see the body for repeated closure. His not viewing the body is later deemed criminal. But, meanwhile, the warden denies the other retirement home residents access to much of the ceremony because death, he says, puts them "in a nervous state for two or three days. Which means, of course, extra work and worry for our staff" (p. 4). The whole sequence goes on like this, Meursault just going through motions and the staff joining him and cutting corners of their own. In this way pragmatism is first cast as universal--everyone seeks their own convenience much of the time.

When retold in the courtroom, it is Meursault's behavior, not everyone else's, that is reexamined--reexamined out of context. And behavior that was previously all too human is on second thought deemed inhumane.

* Pragmatism may be easily confused with, and, in a sense, interchangeable with selfishness.

Notes: 

• On the matter of mourning: Meursault doesn't give much sign of mourning for his mother. But the novel shows that mourning is usually centered on oneself rather than the deceased--you mourn your own loss, not the death of the other. For example, when an elderly woman cries at the wake, the caretaker explains, "She was devoted to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend in the world, and now she's all alone" (p. 12). This is the only person who cries throughout. Compare this scene to one later in the novella in which Meursault's neighbor loses his dog and suffers for it; on the suggestion that the pound might euthanize the mutt, the neighbor, Salamano, is quoted as saying, "'They won't really take him from me, will they, Monsieur Meursault? Surely they wouldn't do a thing like that. If they do, I don't know what will become of me'" (p. 50). Then, after Meursault and Salamano return to their respective rooms, we hear Meursault thinking, "Through the wall there came to me a little wheezing sound, and I guessed that he (Salamano) was weeping. For some reason, I don't know what, I began thinking of mother" (p. 50). And, on the astonishing final page, Meursault speaks again of this mourning, judging it so: "With death so near, Mother have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her" (p. 154). 

• The murder is still a bit of a mystery, though not entirely. 

A favorite line:

On leaving another neighbor's apartment drunk on wine:

After closing the door behind me I lingered for some moments on the landing. The whole building was quiet as the grave, a dank, dark smell rising from the well hole of the stairs. I could hear nothing but the blood throbbing in my ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it. Then the dog began to moan in old Salamano's room, and, through the sleep-bound house the little plaintive sound rose slowly, like a flower growing out of the silence and the darkness (p. 42).

about the film "The Master"

Who is the master? And who can live without serving a master?

In the 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell—a character brought into curdled life by the singular Joaquin Phoenix—drifts and crashes from one moment to the next, his troubled life being one corrosive improvisation. Quell is a haunted World War II vet with no aim beyond staying intoxicated and self-destructing.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as "The Cause." His critics charge that Dodd improvises his philosophy from moment to moment, that he is a fraud. But his followers see an enlightened, intense visionary.

Quell is tortured, intense, rough, gaunt, uneducated, drawn to poisons and pain; Dodd is composed, graceful, educated, well-dressed, plump, and drawn to the spotlight. When the film debuted, critics wondered, What, if anything, does the film say? say about our talk of freedom and our readiness to serve a master? about the inevitable disappointment that comes with looking up to someone? about faith? belief?

Maybe Dodd serves more than one master: he serves his audience's expectations, his wife, his vanity and ego. He is intrigued by Phoenix, drawn by his intensity and desperation. Each man is fed and inspired by the interest and attention of the other; each man is the other's project, and each can take the other to the next improvised step, wherever it may lead.

The Master is fantastic, unorthodox, beautiful, grimy, and searing.


Note:
The Master was written, directed, and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams.