How does this differ from Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism (or the later variants of Pan Critical Rationalism)? Seems to me that the idea that there are no unquestionable authorities or axioms that can be used to justify truth and everything can be held up to critique is a much saner, and clearer version than some of the gobble-dy-gook in post modernism.
I don't know about Discipline and Punish specifically, but you can read Chomsky for a critique in general of Foucault, Lacan, etc In general I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible. Like I said, Popper's concept of critical rationalism predates Foucault and makes the argument far more straightforward and clearly.
Here's what Chomsky had to say, who can say it far better than I:
"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.
Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames. "
No one will deny that there are charlatans and poets posing as philosophers in the continental tradition. Tatterdemalion's post even prefaces with that. There are also straight up falsifiers and a endemic of p-value smudgers in the hard sciences. A good rebuttal to this Chomsky quote are the lovely debates he had with Foucault himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
There is a plethora of writings of substance in the continental tradition. Writings that we should not ignore. 'Discipline and Punish' is one of them. I recommend 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' by Adorno as your complement to Popper's writings.
On another note, I don't generally see the value in antagonisms between paradigms or presentation forms. I find value from the analytical perspective and from critical theory, and being able to dance both dances is illuminating. I don't think the empirical process can reveal the entirety of the human experience. Steadfastly stumping for one paradigm over the other is no more useful than being a vim/emacs zealot.
If Deleuze or Foucault don't grok for you, it doesn't mean the authors are _wrong_ or lying to readers to obtain mystic status. Just like someone not caring to study Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shouldn't write off the entirety of mathematics.
I don't find that a convincing analogy. A more convincing analogy would be something like the theoretical treatise put forward by Shinichi Mochizuki to solve the ABC conjecture. He invented entirely new fields of mathematics so obscure, that no one can really be able to fully evaluate his theory yet, and it resists simple explanation even by experts in the field, or Shinichi himself.
Peer review relies on peers being able to predictably understand the terminology in a clear manner without ambiguity. You get this in traditional Western philosophy, even as people define new terminology, that adorn axioms and logical rules to buttress its meaning. But if you invent an entirely new terminology that most people don't understand, which is hard for any two people to come away with the same meaning, I'd argue you have not put forward a theory, you've put forward ideas dressed up in technical jargon giving the aura of precision.
This isn't a C programmer refusing to learn Haskell. This is a C programmer refusing to learn Brainfuck or INTERCAL.
Yet no one doubts Brainfuck's Turing completeness, and it can be easily demonstrated to anyone with a passing familiarity with the langauge.
The post-structuralists, on the other hand, are trolls. They claim grandiose results that fail Chomsky's simple personal test, and similar personal tests of many others, myself included, who have a demonstrated capacity to understand ideas across many fields, including in my case epistemology with a knowing subject, which comes close to some important post-structuralist or post-modernist ideas regarding subjectivity.
But the "critical theoretic" political program is so important to post-modernist program they they deliberatly distort their accounts and ideas for the sake of goals that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and results in the whole body of their work being incoherent nonsense with a few gems embedded in it. There are well-meaning people who see the gems and argue passionately that the rest of the mass simply must be meaningful and important, and there are people who correctly observe the incoherence of the mass and miss the gems.
These two groups then spend a great deal of time fighting with each other, while those of us who have picked up the gems and moved on are ignored by all.
But it does render its usefulness or utility lower than a simpler construct which offers all of the same benefits, but with lower logical depth.
I'm not saying Foucault's wrong, I'm saying that there are other philosophers who have put forward similar ideas in a much more straightforward fashion without the Brainfuck.
Holding philosophy to the standard of utility brings a lot of assumptions to bear on your reading. Conciseness is a virtue that one can overindulge.
Many philosophers aren't concerned with providing readers with ideas in the system of efficient exchange of language and labor hours. For many in critical theory the project is the opposite: to show how the systems of exchange and efficiency dominate our meaning-making.
I don't find that argument convincing. Chomsky makes it clear that if he was interested in understanding something, in this case C, he would make an honest effort at finding the people and resources necessary to reach that goal.
Continental philosophy and postmodern thought fall reasonably within the domain of Chomsky's interests. If a man of his knowledge and reputation cannot parse the arguments being made then really what is the utility of those arguments.
It would be one thing if Chomsky was rejecting the arguments being made. Instead he is basically saying there is no argument.
As a side note, there is definitely a trend in certain French academic circles consisting of using a hard-to-digest style (needlessly complex sentence structures, semi-obscure words where a more common one would have been just as good or better) to express not particularly complex. I suspect that they have a running "most over-the-top sentence" [1] contest.
1: technically known in French as "phrase la plus ampoulée", which "over-the-top" doesn't really translate correctly
>I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible.
bingo. That pretty much describes Kant for me (or may be only Russian translation of him? Will let you know when/if i learn German). Just compare him with simple and practical Hegel or Nietzsche for example! :)
It's just the same in German. Kant maintains that his only aim is to express the subject matter as precise as possible, without regard of accessibility (as stated in the Prolegomena). Personally, I cannot decide whether that claim has merits or not.
