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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations.
Practical Philosophy
Experts say there is a long-term trend of shifting the cost of higher education from the public onto students and their families.
Sallie Mae said the lower maximum interest rates reflected the educational achievement and greater earnings potential of graduate students.
See, I don't think the loan rates are dropping because graduate degrees are suddenly worth more. I think every single piece of existing market evidence contradicts that idea. I think the loan rates are dropping because more and more graduate students are realizing what a scam graduate degrees are in many cases, and the quality of candidates is rapidly dropping as the private sector attracts more and more talented potential academics away from academia with such mind-blowing innovations as, you know, a salary and decent health care.
Graduate school is turning into exactly the same kind of bubble as housing was, but for a younger age group - the same age group that everyone was counting on to go into the marketplace and help pull the country up from its current recession. And more and more people are taking out undergraduate and graduate loans they'll never be able to repay.
The bubble is already bursting; the sound just hasn't reached us yet.
Indian Man Single-Handedly Plants Entire 1,360 Acre Forest! Read his AMAZING story: A little over 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav “Molai” Payeng began burying seeds along a barren sandbar near his birthplace in northern India’s Assam region to grow a refuge for wildlife. Not long after, he decided to dedicate his life to this endeavor, so he moved to the site where he could work full-time creating a lush new forest ecosystem. Incredibly, the spot today hosts a sprawling 1,360 acre of jungle that Payeng planted single-handedly. It all started way back in 1979 when floods washed a large number of snakes ashore on the sandbar. One day, after the waters had receded, Payeng , only 16 then, found the place dotted with the dead reptiles. That was the turning point of his life. “The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms. It was carnage. I alerted the forest department and asked them if they could grow trees there. They said nothing would grow there. Instead, they asked me to try growing bamboo. It was painful, but I did it. There was nobody to help me. Nobody was interested,” says Payeng, now 47. While it’s taken years for Payeng’s remarkable dedication to planting to receive some well-deserved recognition internationally, it didn’t take long for wildlife in the region to benefit from the manufactured forest. Demonstrating a keen understanding of ecological balance, Payeng even transplanted ants to his burgeoning ecosystem to bolster its natural harmony. Soon the shadeless sandbar was transformed into a self-functioning environment where a menagerie of creatures could dwell. The forest, called the Molai woods, now serves as a safe haven for numerous birds, deers, rhinos, tigers, and elephants — species increasingly at risk from habitat loss elsewhere. Despite the conspicuousness of Payeng’s project, Forestry officials in the region first learned of this new forest in 2008 — and since then they’ve come to recognize his efforts as truly remarkable, but perhaps not enough. “We’re amazed at Payeng,” says Assistant Conservator of Forests, Gunin Saikia. “He has been at it for 30 years. Had he been in any other country, he would have been made a hero.”
In foundations of special ed, my professor is having us describe how to brush your teeth. 1. Pick up tooth brush 2. Turn on water 3. Put brush underwater 4. Turn off water 5. Pick up toothpaste 6. Cap off toothpaste 7. Squeeze pea size of toothpaste onto bristles 8. Put cap back on toothpaste 9….
An odd parallel, but they have (all) students do the same thing in entry-level computer science. You have to tell the compiler exactly what you want it to do… Otherwise it’s “garbage in, garbage out.”
Yes, beginning algorithmic thinking.
I'm very fond of asking students very basic questions with often very obvious answers and watching the smart ones trying to find an obscure answer.
MENE MENE TEKEL UPRASIN
Coke Talk of the Day
Occupy Wall Street was a fucking mouse fart compared to the damage our generation could do to the system if every last one of us suddenly decided to stop making payments on our student loans.
I doubt it would take all that many conscientious defaulters to reach a tipping point — maybe a few hundred thousand — and the student debt bubble would burst. Credit scores would be meaningless. Ivory towers would crumble. The entire fucking economy would implode.
I dunno, it might be worth doing.
Learning in the Interval
It’s pretty simple, really. Hire a graduate student.
The majority of graduate students are either barely paid or not paid at all. The vast majority of them would be really, really happy to earn a little extra money on the side.
So here’s what you do. Locate the most prestigious university in driving distance from you; or, if you want to take private lessons over Skype and pay for them through PayPal, pick whatever the hell university you want.
Next, pick the department that seems to best overlap with your field of interest. Go to that department’s homepage on the Internet or, if they don’t have one, and find the e-mail address for the person whose job description is closest to “graduate administrator.” If you can’t find someone like that, send an e-mail to whatever address you can find.
Write a simple, short e-mail. Template: “Hello,
I am looking for a private tutor in the areas of _________ and _________. I was wondering if any of your department’s graduate students might be interested offering private lessons; I can offer up to $XX an hour. I would be grateful if you could forward this e-mail to your graduate student mailing list.
Sincerely, Your Name”
Every department has a graduate student mailing list, and most administrators are happy to pass such an e-mail along. And trust me when I say that you might seriously, seriously help out a starving graduate student in the process. This idea isn’t just for “independent adult study”; it’s an excellent way for undergraduates to decide if they want to go to grad school or not. If you’re an undergrad and you’re thinking of going to grad school, send a similar e-mail but instead of a tutor, ask if a graduate student would be willing to talk to you about their program or discipline if you buy them lunch. Trust me, it’s a much better way of going about things than spending thousands on grad school applications and THEN finding out it’s not quite for you.
There’s just one more piece of information you should know - remember the letters “ABD.” ABD stands for “all but dissertation.” It means, in effect, that that graduate student has already learned everything they’re going to learn at their department and they’ve probably started teaching students, they just haven’t finished writing their dissertation yet. Your best bet is to hire a grad student tutor who is ABD, not only because they’re furthest along in their program, but because they usually need the money the most.
In conclusion, whatever you want to learn, you can ALWAYS find someone to teach it to you. And just as importantly, you can almost always find a teacher that actually needs financial support. Win-win. Go e-mail some grad students.
FuckTheory Syllabi (tm) - Power/Movement/Territoriality
This is another example of the kind of course I'd be teaching if I had a classroom and some students. Note that by "selections" I mean anywhere from 1 paragraph to 30-40 pages; much of the work is based on close reading of individual passages and so the reading in total is probably less demanding than it looks. The course takes three difficult, abstract concepts and throws them in a blender to see what we can learn. We begin by taking for granted that all three concepts – power, movement, and territoriality – are abstract ones the expression of which requires representation. Our initial concept therefore will be the idea of symbolic economies – systems of representation which express an abstract quality in terms of a certain quantity or intensity. We will then explore the interrelation of these three concepts on two levels: the material or historical, the expression of these relations between entities in extension, and the conceptual or epistemological, the difficulties in representing, describing, and making assumptions about power, movement, and territoriality, separately and collectively. On both the material and the conceptual level we will touch on contemporaries issues in which the interrelation of these concepts is expressed. An important theoretical touchstone will be Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “historical bloc.” We will spend most of the semester mixing and matching concepts, following as our basic guideline Deleuze & Guattari’s dense and diverse opus Anti-Oedipus (1972). In an attempt to construct what Deleuze & Guattari call a “conceptual plane of immanence,” we will detour through the Enlightenment concept of the social contract, the contemporary philosophy of “just war,” the Marxist critique of political economy, the history of cartography, the birth of history, and the ethology of the tarantula. It will be an interesting adventure. Please come equipped with an open mind, a fondness for discussion, and a willingness to engage with a diverse array of difficult texts. Session 1: Introduction and Method • Foucault, “Preface” to Anti-Oedipus • Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (selections) • Foucault, “Method” from The History of Sexuality, vol. I • Deleuze & Guattari, “Introduction” from A Thousand Plateaus • De Landa, 1000 Years of Non-Linear History (selections) Session 2: The Connective Synthesis of Production • Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Ch. I • Deleuze, Foucault (selections) • Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (selections) • Nietzsche, posthumous aphorisms (selections from The Will to Power, ed. Kaufmann) Session 3: Symbolic Economies • Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Ch. I • Goux, Symbolic Economies (selections) • Jameson, Postmodernism (selections) • Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (selections) • Gramsci, Prison Notesbooks (selections) • Marx, “Preface” to the Critique of Political Economy Session 4: The Primitive Territorial Machine • Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Ch. II • Levi-Strauss, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” • Rubin, “The Traffic in Women” • Derrida, selections from Of Grammatology • Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (selections) Session 5: Mapping the Universe • Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (selections) • Kirk & Raven, The Fragements of the Pre-Socratics (selections) • Herodotus, Histories (selections) • Hesiod, Theogeny • Deleuze, “Gueroult’s General Method for Spinoza” • Deleuze, “The Fissures of Anaxagoras and the Local Fires of Heraclitus” Session 6: The Body Politic and the Three Domains • Pseudo-Dionysus, selections TBD • Augustine, City of God (selections) • Bernard of Clairvaux, selections TBD • Al Farabi, selections TBD • Marsilius of Padua, Defender of the Peace (selections) Session 7: The Individual and the Subject • Hegel, “Master-Slave Dialectic” from The Phenomenology of the Spirit • Kojeve, Commentary on Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” • Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Ch. II • De Landa, 1000 Years of Non-Linear History (selections) • Foucault, Discipline and Punish (selections) • Deleuze, Foucault (selections) Session 8: Power and the Social Contract • Deleuze, “Hume” • Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (selections) • Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus (selections) • Rousseau, Second Discourse, The Social Contract (selections) • Hobbes, Leviathan (selections) Session 9: Properties – Science and Citizenship • Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (selections) • Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity (selections) • Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (selections) • Spinoza, selected letters • Descartes, selected letters • Israel, Radical Enlightenment (selections) • Gramsci, selections on “intellectuals” from the Prison Notebooks • Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” Session 10: The Civilized Capitalist Machine • Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (selections) • Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka (selections) • Spivak, selections TBD • Jameson, Postmodernism (selections) Session 11: Queering the Machine • Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire • Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” • Foucault, The History of Sexuality (selections) • Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” (selections) • Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman Session 12: Ethology: Ethics, Ethos, Ecology • Deleuze, Practical Philosophy (selections) • Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (selections) • Grosz, Chaos, Territoriality, Art (selections) • Ibn Tuffayl, Hayy ibn Yaqqzan (selections) • The Biology of Spiders (selections) • The Tarantula Keeper’s Handbook (selections)
Grundrisse
If you’re the kind of person who thinks “Leninism” is still a thing, we’re not for you. If you’re the kind of person who thinks slogans are more important than actions, we’re not for you. If you’re the kind of person who thinks a revolution isn’t a revolution unless something’s burning, we’re not for you. If you’re the kind of person who works or studies at a top-tier American university but still has the gall to call themselves a ‘Marxist’ while sipping $4 lattes and typing on their Mac, not only are we not for you, but you should kill yourself ASAP and for fuck’s sake don’t talk to a single additional student before you do so.
The thing is, I’ve been screaming at the wind since I can first remember myself. I’ve been called ‘naive,’ ‘rebellious,’ ‘contrary,’ ‘stubborn,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘idealistic,’ ‘utopian,’ and ‘total fucking asshole,’ to name just a few choice epithets. I’ve been fighting, and fighting, and fighting for years, and it’s still the same fucking fight, against the same fucking enemies, with the same fucking retarded mansplaining ‘allies.’ I’m so fucking sick of fighting.
So the fighting is ending. I don’t want to fight anyone. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want to start a new thing, a new place, to speak a new language for a new community, and to do it all right in the heart of New York City. Because if there’s one thing New York City teaches us, it’s that individual, independent communities, linguistic, intellectual, or otherwise, are fully capable of thriving not just alongside the capitalist fabric of this beautiful city, but entirely within it.
So no, we’re not fighting the system. We’re outwitting the system. We’re hacking the system. We’re activating its own immune responses against it, like a retrovirus. We’re showing the system not only that we don’t give a fuck what they think, but that while they’re standing around telling us what we’re doing wrong, we’re outthinking, outteaching, and outwriting them, all while having an awesome time and laughing our fucking asses off and eating great food that we cooked ourselves, largely from local, organic, urban hydroponic produce. There won’t be Molotov cocktails. There won’t be barricades, tear gas, secret meetings, or code words. There DEFINITELY won’t be any time wasted arguing about whether we should describe ourselves as ‘Leninist’ or ‘Maoist.’ But there will be learning, laughing, and really comfortable furniture.
Does that sound like something you’d like to be a part of?
The Dictionary of Philosophy
Grundrisse
FuckTheory Syllabi (tm) Deleuze & Guattari: Anti-Oedipus Session 1: The Connective Synthesis of Production - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. I - Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. I - Deleuze, selections from Expressionism In Philosophy Session 2: The Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. I - Saussure, selections from Course In General Linguistics - Descartes, selections from Meditations - Aristotle, selections from Prior & Posterior Analytics, Topics - Hegel, the “Master-Slave Dialectic” from Phenomenology of the Spirit - Marx, “Preface” to Critique of Political Economy - Gramsci, selections from the Prison Notebooks on “historical bloc” and critique of Marx’s “base”/”superstructure” distinction. Session 3: The Conjunctive Synthesis of Consumption - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. I - Marx, selections from Capital - Jameson, selections from Postmodernism - Lyotard, selections from Libidinal Economy - Goux, selections from Symbolic Economies Session 4: Desiring-Machines - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. II - Freud, selections from Three Essays - Freud, “The Decline of the Oedipus Complex” - Freud, “Drives and Their Destinations.” - Freud, “Fetishism” - Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus” Session 5: Desire Beyond the Libido - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. II - Freud, “Femininity” - Lacan, selections from Seminar XX: Encore - Irigaray, selections from This Sex Which Is Not One Session 6: The Primitive Territorial Machine - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. III - Nietzsche, selections from The Genealogy of Morals - Levi-Strauss, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” - Rubin, “The Traffic In Women” - Derrida, selections from Of Grammatology - Grosz, selections from Chaos, Territoriality, Art Session 7: The Savage Barbarian Machine - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. III - Marx, selections from Capital - De Landa, selections from 1000 Years of Non-Linear History - Hobbes, selections from Leviathan - Foucault, selections from Discipline and Punish Session 8: The Civilized Capitalist Machine - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. III - Hocquenghem, selections from Homosexual Desire - Marx, selections from Capital - Jameson, selections from Postmodernism - Deleuze & Guattari, selections from Kafka Session 9: An Introduction to Schizoanalysis - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. IV - Guattari, selections from The Anti-Oedipus Papers - Materials on La Borde & the alternative psychiatry movement Session 10: Economies of Desire - Anti-Oedipus, Ch. IV - Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” - Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” - Hocquenghem, selections from Homosexual Desire Session 11: The Political Implications of Anti-Oedipus - Anti-Oedipus, passim - Political essays, interviews w/ D&G from Desert Islands - Extended discussion session Session 12: The Philosophical Implications of Anti-Oedipus - Anti-Oedipus, passim - Deleuze & Guattari, selections from A Thousand Plateaus - De Landa, selections from 1000 Years of Non-Linear History - Deleuze & Guattari, interviews from Two Regimes of Madness
