Some of the best philosophical work of the 20sth century was done by a combination of two men: Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). I mention them together because I view their work as being similar, as being 'post-Hegelian with an edge to it', and as being 'deconstructionist' (as focusing on the 'anti-thesis' portion of the Hegelian triadic 'thesis', 'anti-thesis', 'synthesis' cycle).
Now the term 'deconstruction' is Derrida's (I added the 'ist' to make it 'deconstructionist' which Derrida wouldn't have liked -- he wanted to keep the term as a 'verb', not a 'noun', a 'process', not a 'structure'. I understand where he is coming from -- call it the 'Heraclitus/Korzybski-Hayakawa/Gestalt' influence of 'You can't step into the same river twice. -- Heraclitus; or 'Everything is subject to change.' -- Gestalt Therapy. I acknowledge this but I also note that it is very difficult to talk in English without using nouns -- you just have to be careful how you use nouns and not to turn 'crystalized nouns' into 'crystalized generalizations' and 'crystalized thinking' that fails to detect change in the normal life process of evolution and/or entropy/aging/disintegration).
Foucault emphasized the connection between power, knowledge, categorization, and good or bad things happening to you -- on the 'good side', acceptance, credibility, normalcy, money, even fame and idoltry; on the 'bad side', rejection, discrimination, marginalization, restraint, suppression, jail, mental institute, violence...
As I have written in previous essays, we live in an 'either/or' society and this is not always good because oftentimes both the 'either' and the 'or' contain elements of both 'good and bad', 'right and wrong', 'health and pathology'. This idea is also contained in Hegel's dialectic or triadic formula (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis). This is why we have 'left' and 'right' political philosophies, 'conservative' and 'liberal', 'Democrat' and 'Republican', 'capitalist' and 'socialist', 'orthodox' and 'alternative', 'modern' and 'post-modern', 'righteous' and 'rebellious', 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist... Health in biology, psychology, philosophy, economics, law, biology, religion, architecture, art, language...all usually entail 'working polar (or 'binary') opposite perspectives, philosophies, lifestyles, processes, phenomena...towards a position of 'homeostatic balance' or 'central stabilization' (if only for a passing length of time before something upsets the homeostatic balance and puts the Hegelian formula back in motion again).
Now here is the problem according to both Foucault and Derrida. 'Power groups' (people with money, fame, beauty, prestige positions, power positions, accreditations, degrees...) can distort and disrupt the natural Hegelian evolutionary process by 'freezing the dialectic interplay between the dialectic or binary opposites (polarities)'. This creates 'artifical or arbitrary icons' that are categorized as 'good', 'right', 'healthy' etc., spotlighted, pedestalized, thrown into centre stage, referred to as 'fact', 'knowledge', 'truth', all that is wonderful, etc...; and at the same time it also creates artifical or arbitrary 'shadows' -- discriminations, marginalizations, stereotyping, exclusions, stigmitization, victimization, violence, poverty, misery, restraint, jail, hospitalization, etc.
Now according to Foucault, this whole process of 'categorization' and, in bad cases, potential for stigmitization and ostracization can happen in a matter of minutes if not seconds through what he called 'The Gaze'. This, in my opinion, is one of the most fascinating -- and scarey -- philosophical concepts of the 20th century.
The Gaze as Foucault meant it was more or less a metaphor -- and/or a real facial component -- reflecting underlying judgment, diagnosis, reductionism, categorization, and in particular, negative categorization that includes all the previously mentioned stereotypes -- alienation, discrimination, stigmatization, ostracization, restraint, jail, institutionalization, unemployment, poverty, violence, war, torture, etc.
To be sure there are other types of 'gazes' -- romantic gazes, sexual gazes, affectionate gazes -- but none of these types of gazes are what Foucault had in mind by...'The Gaze'...
Now, personally speaking, I think one has as much to worry about in 'the non-Gaze' as one does in 'The Gaze' but both can be completely relevant to what we are talking about here, and to what Foucault was talking about. 'Context' is everything.
Some examples of The Gaze in history pulled from my own head in no particular order, and some more horrific than others: The Roman Catholics, Jews, and The Spanish Inquisition; Hitler and the Jews, Salem and the witchhunts; the orthodox Jews in Holland and Spinoza; the Greek politicians and Socrates; to other varying degrees of The Gaze depending again on context: doctor and patient; policeman and protester; the rich and the poor; Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats; blacks and whites; masters and slaves; insurgents and Americans; Americans and Talibans; Talibans and Americans; the Taliban and women; women and the Taliban; King Henry Vlll and his six wives; The Government of Canada and the Women's Movment in the 1920s; The Supreme Court of Canada and their decision in the famous 'Persons' Case (1928)...Oftentimes, The Gaze can be both ways but with one side holding significantly more power than the other, the discrimination, the injustices, the atrocities, the violence, tend to be blatantly one-sided and one-directional...
Fresh in the newspapers today, is a genocide I never knew about until I started exploring it on the internet tonight: The Armenian Genocide (anywhere from hundreds of thousand to 1.5 million Armenians starved or otherwise killed) at the hands mainly of the Young Turks (1915-1917) who were governing the Ottoman Empire at the time. Personally, I think it was another U.S. international blunder to bring up this genocide at this present time when an already very bad war in Iraq could become that much worse if the Turks decide to invade northern Iraq. However, in the context of this much smaller and less public forum, the genocide does much to emphasize an extension and application of Foucault's concept of The Gaze...
Young Turk memoirs show us very clearly how aware they were of the growing gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. Born in the traditional Muslim quarters they gazed in awe at the villas the Greek and Armenian industrialists built along newly laid-out avenues with tramways and streetlights. The contrast defined their loyalties… The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the “other” very much in religious terms… [T]he Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians. (Wikipedia, Armenian Genocide)
What these concepts by Derrida and Foucault show, as perfectly illustrated in the example above, is the inherent danger of any form of political, nationalist, religious, and/or ethnic extremism, the inherent danger of delving into 'either/or', 'Us' vs. 'Them' thinking in a way that is 'divisive', 'exclusive' and 'negatively categorical'. Two religious groups or racial groups or ethnic groups grow to dislike, even hate, each other but one group has significantly more power than the other. (The Armenian Christians were not allowed to carry guns whereas the Muslim Turks were). Atrocity, disaster, and mass tragedy ensues. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Are things really any different -- particulary in the Middle East -- today?
dgb, Oct. 17th, 2007.
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