What's happening to my body?
"Firstly, you are wrong: the culture industry as domination is a myth. Everyone is different. Deal with it"
Enclosed was also a map detailing the steps in this prodigy's line of thinking:
The size of the fingers in relation to the map and the language of the letter meant one thing: this person had size, probably a penis over 6 inches and was using more than half of his brain. I called my mother, the psychologist, for further analysis:
Freudess: "Nice one. I mean, the "deal with it." It's classic. When I worked at Mayo there was celebrity after celebrity checking in, just one after the other, complaining that their lives were as bad as those with cancer. This is what they would say. They would check in and just holler at everyone about how bad their lives were. We gave them a test. It turned out they ranked their lives exactly as bad as our cancer patients. And you know why? Do you know why these people were so upset? Largess. This person has Largess."
Ben: "What does that mean, exactly?"
Freudess: "You don't want to know. You probably already do."
The rest of the e-mail was no better:
"even your brainwashed bebe buying,bar blonde chick IS UNIQUE, somewhere."
Momma does know best - this guy just get his kicks from putting others down,ruining people's lives, pretending he knows a lot about the world around him. Granted, this kid goes to Wash U so he must be pretty smart. But he should just stay in the books for the sake of others around him, for the rest of the human community. This reminds me of something:
"And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the "Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, "
Stay in your books......and away from the TV.
posted by Anonymous at 12:30 PM
1 Comments:
I greatly enjoyed the link to the Foucault seminar. I think Foucault might be a bit hasty in proclaiming the late 5th and early 4th centuries as the point of a "crisis" or "problematization" about parrhesia, at least in the political realm. It is true that in philosophy, the Athenian elite (and that includes Isocrates, the closest we get to a contemporary democratic spokesperson in the seminar) were putting forth new ideas about parrhesia, since they could not ideologically handle the idea of the ignorant masses enjoying equal rights of speech. Thus much of the Platonic corpus deals with the "political expert" who speaks for the good of the whole society, while the many, the hoi polloi, listen in obedience.
As a side note, Plato even has a degenerative history of Athens that is based precisely on parrhesia. In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger character says that Athens used to have an "ancestral constitution," under which the demos, or the mob, lived in a sort of "voluntary slavery" to the laws. However, when they learned to speak out and raise a ruckus in the theater, this "parrhesia" spread to everything else, including politics, and the social order was destroyed. There is a direct tie-in here with the assessment of democracy in Republic Book 8, which Foucault points out. Basically, in the elites' view, democratic parrhesia = ignorant license = loss of order = a bad polis. This was often merely a moral/aesthetic judgment rather than a hard political assessment. Foucault discusses the Old Oligarch, who admits that although Athens' constitution is "bad" because the "best do not rule," it is still immensely powerful and even stable.
But back to the "crisis of parrhesia." I would say that there was no such thing. Democrats had their own way of dealing with bad speakers or "babblers," the athuroglossoi. While it is true that anyone could get up and address the assembly, someone who was thought to speak ignorantly or perniciously towards the city could be rather brusquely shouted down. Also, despite what the elite philosophers say, common or low class people rarely made the large decisions. They might propose legislation at the small scale level, but the big work (i.e. war/peace, tax collection, readying troops, etc) was left to demagogues like Demosthenes and Aeschines. These men, despite being good democrats, understood the role of the elite speaker in guiding the multitude and the importance of the demos in being moderate and mostly silent. In other words, anyone could approach the rostrum, but there was a civic understanding that Demosthenes the well-educated aristocrat had more clout than Sosicles the hide tanner.
The greater point of Foucault's lecture, of course, is the matter of telling the truth, who is capable of telling that truth, the boundaries and rules for arriving at the truth, etc. But I think he neglects the fact that democratic Athens had such a system worked out pretty well without the aid of an Aristotelian treatise.
For the question of free speech in the modern society, I recommend everyone check out the ongoing debate(s) over Orhan Pamuk and David Irving. This is the link from aldaily:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAEDB.htm
But there is also good stuff at Wikipedia under David Irving, as well as this article about Holocaust denial legislation in England:
http://webjcli.ncl.ac.uk/1997/issue4/butler4.html
For those of us who have read Foucault and Fish, or for anyone who wonders about the limits of free speech principles, there are some salient points here. Happy Boxing Day.
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