Tavistock staff and Foucault

Oh, I know what wiki says and much of it is word for word what you posted. Ideas presented in the same order, etc.

I suspect I was lecturing about postmodernism and it's probable effects on sport, sport history (a la Booth etc) way before you could spell it.

As I said, hubris! Not pretty.

It doesn’t “frame thoughts and expectations” - it’s diagnostic. It points to what happens when populations are no longer able to distinguish effectively between truth and lies, and suggests that when that process is complete, we won’t ever be able to free ourselves from the economic forces of capitalism. Basically in a nutshell it predicts Donald Trump!

I do get this ... kind of. I think, though, that many have used postmodernism rather badly and as a result, it has degenerated into a rather crude advocacy for relativism.

I certainly haven’t cut and pasted from Wikipedia - in fact the Wikipedia entry for postmodernism is extremely bad.

It doesn’t “frame thoughts and expectations” - it’s diagnostic. It points to what happens when populations are no longer able to distinguish effectively between truth and lies, and suggests that when that process is complete, we won’t ever be able to free ourselves from the economic forces of capitalism. Basically in a nutshell it predicts Donald Trump!

Start with Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition”; or even his “The Postmodern Explained to Children” - both should be easily found online.

Now do it without the c+p from Wikipedia!

What is it in real terms, in every day life, philosophy? What does it mean, how does it frame thoughts, explanations etc?

And again, I didn't say they were the same!

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

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, so that they are replaced by competing different narratives of “truth” that can’t b measured against each other. A major part of this is the proliferation of narratives and screen media representations, so that society’s increasing inability to distinguish between representation and reality makes it impossible for us anymore to see and understand how we are manipulated by powerful economic forces and interests that we increasingly can’t free ourselves from.

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.

Poststructuralism is something different.

The History of Sexuality is a three volume philosophical inquiry critiquing historical constructions of ideas of sexuality, and she’s taken an illustrative passage from the first few pages of the beginning of the introduction, that he’s using to critique historical ideas of sexuality, and claimed he’s advocating for it

It's also not difficult to read and understand and Vol 1 is really quite short.

No, they do have clear and distinct definitions, and they are not the same thing as each other

I didn't say they were the same.

Go on then. Explain post modernism without getting a crick in your neck!

And are we to take it then that his depradations were research rather than his own peccadilloes?

In a nutshell, her statements on Foucault are wrong because she misrepresents Foucault’s analysis of sexuality as advocating it instead of critiquing it.

The History of Sexuality is a three volume philosophical inquiry critiquing historical constructions of ideas of sexuality, and she’s taken an illustrative passage from the first few pages of the beginning of the introduction, that he’s using to critique historical ideas of sexuality, and claimed he’s advocating for it.

To start with, those articles completely misrepresent postmodernism, poststructuralism

To be fair it is nigh in impossible to define either of them without a certain amount of cognitive dissonance and reliance on people nodding along sagely.

To start with, those articles completely misrepresent postmodernism, poststructuralism and the works they are selectively quoting from. The actual trend of “queer theory” in the later twentieth century was completely at odds with current transgender ideology, which bears more resemblance to a religiose pseudoscience.

It is Foucault’s work that suggests that medical and psychological “diagnoses” can actually be produced by the very discourses that claim to “discover” them - a Foucauldian reading of gender ideology suggests that it doesn’t really exist in that form until discourses and institutions create it by naming and producing it. Much of Foucault’s work on law, psychiatry and the clinic completely undoes the idea of an inner “identity” that can form the basis of of identity politics.

The work on how social and institutional forces actually create conditions like “transgender” is the very opposite of what current gender ideology claims.

The Tavistock is a university and postgraduate-level academic and clinical institute, of which only part is clinical practice and which has multiple departments and clinics - GIDS being only one of these. It’s like a multidisciplinary university for several clinical and academic disciplines. Theoretical philosophy and psychiatry, and the history of these as social institutions, is a completely normal topic for seminars to focus on. The problems at GIDS seem to have been very different. Honestly, that Telegraph article is poorly understood scaremongering.

Honestly, the last thing anyone needs to worry about is Foucault. If you want to get angry at the treatment of children, there are plenty of other routes to focus on - and particularly the influence of US based politics on the transgender issue, transgender lobby groups, social media sites and lots of other ways that this is affecting the public sphere that have nothing to do with 1970s intellectual history.

Good, start with a quick summary of how her statements on Foucault are wrong. If you restrict it to the length of an abstract then I will definitely read it. I find having to write concisely for academic but non specialist audience really tests one's understanding of a topic. And if I find your position arguable then I will also read a longer piece.

Hubris.

Lots of it here!

Quite a few of us are academics.

Hectoring, that's another good word.

Hubris and hectoring.

Neither are well received, here or in real life.

I can certainly write an analysis of those pieces if you like? I’m not sure anyone on this thread would bother reading it, however!

Once we've passed your tests, may we please be allowed to comment? Would hat be OK? hmm

I tend to think that actually knowing something about a subject before spouting off on it is generally a good thing, yes!

I’m horrified by the scandals at GIDS, but on this thread posters are extremely ill-informed about both what the Tavistock is, and indeed the whole field.

sigh the reading comprehension on this thread is very limited. I certainly didn’t say you need to spend 20 years studying Foucault at any point - I actually said you should go and read him yourself rather than read opinion pieces. Try starting with the texts I recommended.

Case in point that posters on this thread clearly don’t actually read what is actually written as opposed to what they make up in their heads is there. If you get basic things wrong and misrepresent them because you haven’t read things properly, how do you think you are getting anything else right?

I say it again - read the actual work before you start claiming you know anything about it.