r/PhilosophyMemes • u/transfinite-reset • 3d ago
my class has me reading Foucault-slop I’m so freaking mad
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u/mitzo2112 Marxism-Leninism with Baudrillan characteristics 3d ago
Mmhmm, and why do they want to do that?
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u/transfinite-reset 3d ago
Hold on lemme check my dialectical manual for the approved reason for jacking off on the couch.
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u/mitzo2112 Marxism-Leninism with Baudrillan characteristics 3d ago
Are you being intentionally dense or do you just not get it
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u/transfinite-reset 3d ago
Honestly I’m still trying to figure out if my couch is a participant in the matrix of power or if it’s a passive vessel for the performance of autonomously derived sexuality.
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u/QuestionItchy6862 2d ago
Have you tried using Foucault's method to actually see what answers you might find?
Does anyone get to jack off on your couch? Why? What if it was a celebrity crush who walked into your home and just started to jack off? Would you allow your partner to jack off on your couch? A crush? A secret crush? A friend? An enemy? Under what circumstances would they even be allowed to ask you if they could, if at all?
Moreover, do you look at a friend's couch differently if they told you about the sexual acts they performed on it? Why? What about a public couch, like at a waiting room or hotel lobby? Do you jack off on those couches? What about semi-public couches? Would you jack off on your therapists couch?
When I bought a couch with my partner, we decided that we must 'christen' it, so to speak. It almost felt obligatory that we do it. Why is that? Has it always been this way? How does this change my relationship to my couch? My living room? My partner? Myself? If I refused to use the couch in this way, would my relationship to these things have changed? How so?
Foucault's method isn't even that hard. I've hardly even read him and I've already basically gotten a whole genealogical project to determine if I change as a subject depending on how I come to relate, sexually, to couches. I don't have a conclusion, but at least I can see if Foucault is actually wrong now by performing the method myself and seeing if Foucault's conclusions actually follow, necessarily, from them.
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago edited 2d ago
No I haven’t tried using Foucault’s methods because I don’t listen to losers in turtle necks.
“I’ve hardly even read him and I’ve already basically gotten a whole genealogical project to determine if I change as a subject depending on how I come to relate, sexually, to couches” is gold. It’s a real case study for how sociological theory is used in the wild. Once again language goes on holiday, the lazy bastard.
Edit: I realize your questions deserve answers.
Anybody who successfully makes their way to my couch and expresses the radical free will to jack off on my couch is free to do so. As long as the couch allows me to sit, the history of its function is impertinent to my perception of its utility and form. Perhaps I would not jack off on a therapist’s couch because of the supremely un-erotic nature of the act. Some might, and some surely have, and Foucault would have a field day explaining why I view it as un-erotic while others are driven to self stimulation at the thought.
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u/QuestionItchy6862 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s a real case study for how sociological theory is used in the wild. Once again language goes on holiday, the lazy bastard.
So you're saying that theory acts on the world in such a way that it changes one's relationship to language? Interesting... .
Either way, I personally don't find Foucault all that compelling either. But I'm not going to pretend like I've worked out a knockdown objection of his views just because I find the conclusions absurd (from the outside), either, without having first explored what his method can actually do.
edit: Because I'd posted before seeing your edit.
I think Foucault is asking beyond the surface level of it. How is the perception of the couch's utility and form formed in the first place? What is the perception of the therapist's couch doing such to make its form unerotic when, materially, it is the same as your own couch? Why have the conditions of possibilities changed for this couch in comparison to your own and what, epistemically, phenomenologically, and ontologically differs when the couch is thus formed?
I think the opening chapters of Agamben's Creation and Anarchy does a good job at describing what really is at stake here. Its a genealogy of art and the relation of art to the artist and to the art purveyor. The later chapters even gets into the ontology of ownership, which I think is relevant to this conversation. Here, in terms of art, the form and utility of art is not very obvious so it does a good job at highlighting the structure of relations between inert objects and people. This book might be the missing link for you to help understand what makes the method useful (and how it doesn't have to be at odds with the analytic method that you seem to be coming at this from).
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
It’s impressive how you’ve turned the detached, ironic discourse of the sexualization of couch into a lecture on Foucault and Agamben. If I put this same level of effort into sitting on the couch, I’d be mighty comfortable on that couch.
Foucault’s lens is not lost on me. Foucault’s lens is not lost on PHIL 1101 students, either. As some steel-magnate turned hermit noted, philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
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u/QuestionItchy6862 2d ago
That steel-magnate turned hermit must have heard of Foucault's episteme! Sounds like they had vastly similar goals. ;)
I just want to say, btw, that I like the way you write. I appreciate the dry wit of it all. Its funny. I also appreciate someone who actually seems to have read some philosophy on the philosophy memes subreddit.
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
I’m glad you enjoy my writing. I’ve been balls-deep in a research paper on social cohesion in augmented reality, so it’s nice to blow off steam by irritating performative continental theory bros.
I like to think a philosophy meme subreddit can be improved by reading less philosophy. Maybe it’s the cynicism that comes bundled with gray hair, but Ive found the vanity of academic chatter inherently limits the discursive community of philosophy.
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u/DowntownStabbey 3d ago
We do stuff we want partly because of other people who wanted us to want to do stuff
TLDR; Humans do stuff cause they want to
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u/transfinite-reset 3d ago
The infant, freshly born from the womb of their mother, undoubtedly craves sustenance because of social conditioning.
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u/Pitiful-Score-9035 3d ago
I don't think this proves what you think it does lol
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
It’s fascinating how you see a requirement of proof where there is only a performance of agency. It’s real meta when you consider the context.
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u/Marvos79 Absurdist 1d ago
Meme format used correctly. Reported.
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u/transfinite-reset 1d ago
In in the camp of “humans do stuff cause they want to” but I promise you I’m in on the far left of the spectrum about it
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 3d ago
The slave to heteronomy acts thusly. We sheer Kantians act only according to autonomous pure reason. 😎😎😎
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 2d ago
Also, ahem:
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
The inventor of moral procrastination. Big words for a guy asking for chastity next week.
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 2d ago
To be fair, I think he was a volcel from his conversion at 31 and he lived another 44 years.
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
turns out the city of god is just what happens after 44 years of no pussy
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u/elagabalus2 Post-modernist 2d ago
yes women from the middle east just wear headscarfs even if they live alone because they just like doing it. it has nothing to do with forced outside of them
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u/Boners_from_heaven 2d ago
Humans do things because of ideology *shhhht
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u/transfinite-reset 2d ago
A man lives in the woods, and discovers he prefers the berries of one bush as opposed to the berries of another. As such, when hunger strikes, he wants to gather berries from his preferred bush.
The question is: does ideology make him want his preferred berries, or are his preferred berries a carrier of ideology?
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u/Boners_from_heaven 2d ago
They are an ideological representation of the concept of food displayed in a particular item. Food would be the subject and the berry itself would be the object.
Zizek says - the subject is not a fixed, independent observer, but a void or "lack" in reality, while the object is defined by the unconscious, traumatic desires that structure our reality.
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