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Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique. Entretien avec Michel Foucault. Diffusion le 11 juillet 1961 sur France III Nationa
I found this blog post, which comments on an early radio interview with Foucault, to be fascinating. It sheds light, for me anyway, on current events around our separation from the natural world and how we conceptualize "mental illness".
Let’s be real—it makes sense that people of color don’t trust white people.I mean… do we even trust us?I’ve heard it again and again in room
We’ve been told that it is. That our belonging is guaranteed. That we’re “normal.” That we’re “good people.” But whiteness—as a system, as a social construct—isn’t built to hold us with care.
It’s built to divide. To hoard. To exclude. So when we try to root our trust in it, things feel shaky. Because they are.
Whiteness tells us who to be, how to act, what to value—and yet it withholds any real roadmap for showing up with integrity in a multiracial world. We’re left unsteady.
But here’s the possibility I keep returning to—what if we learned to trust ourselves instead?
Not the version of us whiteness wants. But the version that’s curious. Brave. Grounded. The version that knows mistakes are part of learning, and that repair is always possible.
What if, instead of performing “goodness,” we committed to being honest?
What if we asked ourselves—who do I want to be in the face of injustice?
How do I want to show up for the people I love?
The theme that holds Bateson’s varied career together, and that makes him an apt symbol of the age, was the search to break out of modernity’s nature/culture, mind/matter, fact/value split, which he intuited as the source of cultural malaise. He viewed the ecological crisis as a “system in runaway” and unsolvable by the means that had produced it in the first place
Lillian Calles Barger, Bateson’s Great Refusal: A Reflection. a review of Anthony Chaney’s book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness
Our story begins in the century or so after 1492. The invasions of the Americas, financed by the era’s leading financiers, inaugurated an environment-making revolution unprecedented in its scale and speed. New frontiers of Cheap Nature, propelled and secured through a new logic of militarized accumulation, were rapidly deforested, refashioned as agro-export platforms, and subsequently transformed into biological wastelands. The condition, as with any class society, for this dramatic rupture – a geobiological watershed in planetary history – was the production of new, mobile and pacified forms of labor. For capitalism, this pivoted on new, coercive relations of work – some it paid, much of it not. This was the dawn of the Capitalocene – a capitalist world-ecology of power, profit and life. . . .
. . . a new ideological vocabulary took shape around three concepts: Man, Nature, and Civilization. All three are soaked in the “bloody discipline” of class formation, imperial violence, and capital accumulation. Man and Nature had very little to do with descriptions of human beings and the rest of nature. This binary was a logic of power and a lever of profit. From capitalism’s early centuries, most human beings were in fact excluded, culturally and institutionally, from Humanity and its “civilized institutions.” This included virtually all women, indigenous peoples, Africans, Slavs, Celts, Jews, even most peasants and workers! These humans were not merely excluded, however. They were relocated. To where? To the realm of Nature!
We may know the anatomy of the body down to the anatomy of atoms, and yet we love and instruct our children as whole persons. And we accept an obligation to help them to preserve their wholeness, which is to say their health. This is not an obligation that we can safely transfer to the subdivided and anatomizing medical industry, not even for the sake of cures. Cures, to industrial medicine, are marketable products extractable from bodies. To cure in this sense is not to heal. To heal is to make whole, and is not so ideologically definable or so technologically possible or so handily billable.
- Wendell Berry, The Melancholy of Anatomy
“Everything in material reality can be isolated and measured against these invented backgrounds, but the backgrounds don’t actually exist. They’re a convenient way for applied scientists to treat different parts and processes of the world as separate and independent. But they’re not. There is no backdrop against which reality happens. An object doesn’t sit anywhere absolute in space; its position is entirely a matter of its relation to every other object out there.“
- Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, p183
It sounds very abstract, but the modern world was really based on this idea that some group of humans were called “Society” but most humans go into this other box called “Nature” with a capital N. That’s very powerful. That didn’t come about just because there were scientists, cartographers or colonial rulers who decided it was a good idea, but because of a far-flung process that put together markets and industry, empire and new ways of seeing the world that go along with a broad conception of the Scientific Revolution. This idea of Nature and Society is very deeply rooted in other dualisms of the modern world: the capitalist and the worker, the West and the rest, men and women, white and black, civilization and barbarism. All of these other dualisms really find their taproots in the Nature/Society dualism.
Jason W. Moore, here
"Social justice and feminist culture are incredible positive forces that can transform the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Without social justice and the activist communities that form around it, I literally wouldn’t be alive today. But sometimes those same activist cultures can be unnecessarily exclusive – and worse, inaccessible and elitist. I even feel myself doing it sometimes: I roll my eyes when someone at a community meeting asks a “stupid question” about feminism. I snap unnecessarily when someone doesn’t know the latest politically correct terminology. I make assumptions about people who I perceive (usually wrongly) as either too young to know anything or too old to be down. Social justice is such a beautiful, powerful part of my life that I want – need – it to be open to those I care about, from my fifteen-year-old sister to my corporate lawyer friends to my racist grandparents. So here, for your reading pleasure, are nine ways I’m trying to make my activism more accessible to everyone."
This clear, no-nonsense article is the best thing I have seen on disinfecting social justice movements from the power relations and dividing practices that we are trying to avoid in the larger culture. C’mon people, lets walk our talk.
