Tavistock staff and Foucault

Trying to tell me. Interesting choice of scold there. And it is your opinion. Not a fact. In my opinion, Butler does fall apart without Foucault.

I really don’t know what more to say - it’s not a scold; I’m explaining to you a fact (not an opinion) that you’ve got wrong about a theorist’s work. If you haven’t read the material, how on earth can you argue the point in the first place?

What do you base your opinions on, if you don’t know the facts about what Foucault’s and Butler’s work actually says, and haven’t read it?

I understand what you are saying. But it seems others misinterpret it this way. Perhaps Butler may be the answer? If her earlier work agrees with Foucault but now she is ignoring that to keep TRAS happy then the logic is Butler is pro gender, Butler agrees with Foucault so Foucault must be pro gender?

How do you see this linking with Queer theory? And what do you understand Queer theory to be?

There’s a bit in a recent interview with Butler where she says, basically, I argued that there was no essentialism to gender but trans activists have told me I was wrong and now I’ve accepted that I have much to learn from them. And bingo — dismisses almost the entire point of her (really quite slight and tendentious) work in Gender Trouble. Why she is happy with this I have no idea. 🤷‍♀️

But the entire point I’m trying to tell you OP is that contemporary ideas of “gender” used in gender ideology aren’t based on Foucault. In fact even Butler’s work on gender is actually antithetical to gender in that sense - her gender work is actually the exact opposite of “gender” in the way that it’s currently used by transgender activists.

Now, Butler seems to be happy to team up with any TRA going these days, and go along with stuff that her original work actually argued against, just to keep in with the trans in crowd. Don’t ask me why.

I don’t know how often I can say that current ideas of “gender” are not in fact based on Foucault (who in any case wrote on sexuality, not gender); that he isn’t in fact a queer theorist or a postmodernist; and that in any case “postmodernism” isn’t what those links seem to think it is either.

This discussion gets us nowhere, because you still want to believe, against any evidence from the actual work, that Foucault invented “gender”, when he just — didn’t.

And the email is but a window into what has to be much more of a story, as I've said. It's very unclear why someone would seemingly take it upon themselves to email out defending his reported actions and not his theory (if the theory is so unproblematic). Still no answers on that point.

I agree that there should be real concerns about safe-guarding at the Tavistock. David Bell and others have alerted us to the issues of practice there.

And I admit, I haven't clicked through to the links you've given ... I suspect - from other evidence - that there has been damage done by 'wokery.' We're living through this.

But I'd argue that it does feminists ** no good to simply condemn post-modernism & Foucault (who's a post-structuralist rather than pomo, but anyhoo ...). It makes us appear reactionary & ignorant; far better to know the material & point out how people using Foucault to justify cutting off young women's breasts have not read his work , and are the ignorant ones.

There's a lot in critical theory which offers feminism some really useful & important ways of thinking, and which can help us to dismantle "the masters's house" - as Audré Lorde put it.

** I think "proper" feminism is always 'gender critical' so I try to avoid using that term.

They then go on to promote Queer theory which we now understand from Nightscroller is not Foucault's bag. So does this suggest Tavistock clinicians also misunderstand Foucault? I would also be grateful if Nightscroller could give me her understanding of Queer theory?

@DomesticatedZombie - but none of his theory actually says anything like that, and staff at the Tavistock is not the same as the staff of GID

anything like what? I am trying, nightscrolling, but I find it hard to follow your arguments. I appreciate you are very well versed in the academic theory, but leaving that aside, I am finding your points hard to grasp.

@nightscrollingdoom
The Tavistock is more like a postgraduate clinical university with multiple departments and clinics in the trust - it isn’t just GIDS. To think it is just the GIDS clinic is a major misunderstanding of what the Tavistock is.

@MNadactyl
So why is taking it upon yourself to email others to defend Foucault, a good thing? Or a necessary thing?

Also there has to be more to this. The actions of whoever the Foucault Fan is, seem unlikely (though not impossible) to have sprung from nothing.

There's more to this story. Has to be.

@nightscrollingdoom
Christ, I’m just trying to explain something that has been misunderstood - no fandom required. It’s important to actually know what things are and what they mean!

I’m not emailing you either, I’m posting on a bloody message board!

My humble analysis:-
I think there have been a major misunderstanding by @nightscrollingdoom about @MNadactyl 's short post in this response. I take the op's post as questioning (reiterating as per the opening op) why a certain grouping of staff at the Tavistock took it upon themselves to circulate emails to other Tavistock employees with glowing profile/appreciation of Foucault. And, encouraging them to embrace queer theories. Op is like 'what's the story, morning glory?'

In short, the question remains as to the purpose of the flurry of activism by the Tavistock internal club/group. I don't think MNdactyl was referring to emails or message boards involving other posters on this thread. Unless, any poster is one of these activist Foucault groupies who was involved in trying to influence the Tavistock email recipients.

Am I right op?

@DomesticatedZombie - but none of his theory actually says anything like that, and staff at the Tavistock is not the same as the staff of GIDS.

This thread has actually given me a fantastic idea for a book though - so for that many thanks! Maybe it’s time for a new Lyotardian “Report on the Condition of Knowledge”….

And while I appreciate arguments separating art from the artist etc I find I am very wary about listening to arguments on sexuality from someone who allegedly abused 9 year old boys. Whether he was critiquing or advocating sexuality - how do we place faith in a teacher who has something so badly wrongly skewed?

Lastly, and I'm not trying to be pedantic, you did say 'the actual theory - which takes a decade or more of study to read and understand' - most people are not going to dedicate a decade to read and understand Foucault when we are concerned with the safety of children.

This is maybe where some of the tension in this conversation is coming from? Some of us are approaching it as theory, some are more concerned with pragmatic application.

I am but a mere undergrad and nowhere near as intelligent as the academics here, but I am deeeep into Foucault for my extended study and agree that whilst, as a person, he was problematic, the work is certainly more aligned with GC views than the trans ideology.

Particularly 'group think' and governmentality and the power/knowledge relation.

Also slightly baffled that somebody would start a thread to complain about an email that badly interpreted Foucault and then become confused when people discuss Foucault. What response were you expecting?!

Most “postmodern” philosophers were in fact warning of the state of the postmodern, and highly critical of it - which they saw as an impending nihilistic era of fake news, commodification and the death of authentic human experience in favour of simulations and commercial representations that made us all puppets to powerful capitalist interests.

I'd add two things
Small thing: Fredric Jameson links postmodernism explicitly with late capitalism. And not in a good way, (although Jameson himself might say he's working within pomo ... )

It’s the period of history when stable understandings of modern life and the “grand narratives” of church, nation state, liberal values etc. have fractured under the economic pressures of late capitalism

Bigger thing: various lines of scholarly enquiry across the first half of the 20th century converge in a fundamental questioning & interrogation of the Enlightenment grand narratives - grand narratives such as the primacy and [ideological] neutrality of reason.

I think the one grand narrative we're still stuck with is that of progress ...

Here's Dr Brunskell-Evans' website - I think there are links to various of her talks & interviews about Foucault. Foucault's work is a tough read (I remember hacking away at the Archaeology of Knowledge as a 2nd Year History student, back in the late 1970s, and finding it sooo frustrating & difficult!)

www.heather-brunskell-evans.co.uk/category/philosophy/

You’re coming across like you just want to pick a fight.

In fact Foucault’s work is actually far closer to a gender critical understanding of the trans phenomenon than anything else. A Foucauldian study of gender ideology would see it as a transient historical phenomenon produced by the medical establishment and social contagion, rather than the reverse.

Agree @nightwakingmoon - there's a really good Savage Minds podcast with Julian Vigo and Heather Brunskell-Evans on a feminist understanding of Foucault.

I do think that there's a separate question here about how we deal with artists, writers, philosophers etc fr the past, whose behaviour we now judge to be reprehensible. Marx was pretty awful to his wife; Picasso was pretty awful to every woman in his life ...

If we start winnowing out people of the past in this way then we're probably just left with William Godwin (an extraordinary man, Mary Wollstonecraft's partner).

Yes, there is an analytical, scholarly, careful conversation to have about links between Foucault's notion of a "heterotopia" and his pederasty/paedophilia. But rejecting out of hand possibly really interesting & liberating ideas because of the amorality of their thinker isn't that.

I don't like feeling like I need to excuse male sexually abusive behaviour. It's a horribly paradoxical situation to have to think in.

But as I say (a lot) to my students, thinking in this way isn't black and white. It's the shades of grey which are interesting & where we can prod and explore and investigate.

Claiming random shit on internet message boards and expecting that you can bend the truth just because you say it’s so, is, I’m afraid, pretty much a living definition of the postmodern

🤣

It’s more often the case that those who have used it as a form of diagnostic or thought experiment get misunderstood as being for it rather than critiquing it

To be fair, those misunderstanding it are (many) academics.

Claiming random shit on internet message boards and expecting that you can bend the truth just because you say it’s so, is, I’m afraid, pretty much a living definition of the postmodern.

Yes, though there aren’t many philosophers of any philosophical discipline who have actually advocated for relativism. It’s more often the case that those who have used it as a form of diagnostic or thought experiment get misunderstood as being for it rather than critiquing it. Postmodernism has its artistic styles as well, which, because they are often kitsch or ironic, get mistaken for some kind of advocacy for the postmodern. In fact much “postmodernism” in critical theory is unutterably bleak and terrifying, like a nihilist warning of the extremes of capitalist power. When Baudrillard writes about how the first gulf war has become a form of video game or power simulation for the West, he isn’t arguing that this is a good thing - far from it.