For my cross-cultural class tonight, I had to read some stuff, namely this interview with Foucault about architecture and social interaction. There were a few statements that seemed universal and/or immediately applicable.
....there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groups.
Liberty is a practice... never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them.
There is in this hatred of the present or the immediate past a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical past.
One should not forget... it was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was, of course, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality...
We have to be aware of the power and danger of reason and the opiate that is history.
I'm anti-traditionalism, that idea of "the good ole days." It's like an old flame: the good memories are so much easier to remember. I think Dr. Phil, who was on Larry King last night, works on this sentiment: the common idea that their are easy solutions, often hidden in the past. Maybe I'm just attaching that idea to him.
I do know that Newt Gingrich and most other conservatives love this idea. They want that idea of a "return," which Foucault identifies as faulty. One of my students was reading a copy of Newt's book, so I asked him what he had to say. According to this student, NG claims that counterculture alienates American idealism.
I think most of us are well aware of the truth, which is the opposite of NG's theory. Counterculture began and exists--even in its most commercialized forms--as a new form of identification, one that lives outside traditionalism and NG's American idealism, which have alienated us.
....there always remain the possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groups.
Liberty is a practice... never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them.
There is in this hatred of the present or the immediate past a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical past.
One should not forget... it was on the basis of the flamboyant rationality of social Darwinism that racism was formulated, becoming one of the most enduring and powerful ingredients of Nazism. This was, of course, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality...
We have to be aware of the power and danger of reason and the opiate that is history.
I'm anti-traditionalism, that idea of "the good ole days." It's like an old flame: the good memories are so much easier to remember. I think Dr. Phil, who was on Larry King last night, works on this sentiment: the common idea that their are easy solutions, often hidden in the past. Maybe I'm just attaching that idea to him.
I do know that Newt Gingrich and most other conservatives love this idea. They want that idea of a "return," which Foucault identifies as faulty. One of my students was reading a copy of Newt's book, so I asked him what he had to say. According to this student, NG claims that counterculture alienates American idealism.
I think most of us are well aware of the truth, which is the opposite of NG's theory. Counterculture began and exists--even in its most commercialized forms--as a new form of identification, one that lives outside traditionalism and NG's American idealism, which have alienated us.