The fictions of Foucault's scholarship
Andrew Scull
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html

Foucault’s research for Madness was largely completed while he was in intellectual exile in Sweden, at Uppsala. Perhaps that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much of his information. He had access to a wide range of medical texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – English, Dutch, French and German – as well as the writings of major philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. A number of the chapters that now appear for the first time in English make use of these primary sources to analyse older ideas about madness. One may object to or accept Foucault’s reconstructions, but these portions of his argument at least rest on readings of relevant source material. By contrast, much of his account of the internal workings and logic of the institutions of confinement, an account on which he lavishes attention, is drawn from their printed rules and regulations. But it would be deeply naive to assume that such documents bear close relationship to the realities of life in these places, or provide a reliable guide to their quotidian logic. There are, admittedly, references to a handful of archival sources, all of them French, which might have provided some check on these published documents, but such material is never systematically or even sensibly employed so as to examine possible differences between the ideal and the real. Nor are we given any sense of why these particular archives were chosen for examination, what criteria were employed to mine them for facts, how representative the examples Foucault provides might be. Of course, by the very ambitions they have set for themselves, comparative historians are often forced to rely to a substantial extent on the work of others, so perhaps this use of highly selective French material to represent the entire Western world should not be judged too harshly. But the secondary sources on which Foucault repeatedly relies for the most well-known portions of his text are so self-evidently dated and inadequate to the task, and his own reading of them so often singularly careless and inventive, that he must be taken to task.

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=573

If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned -- a political conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating, reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard's thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, "falling upwards" into the desert of the real.

Times Higher Education Supplement (London) March 16th 2007, p.14.

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0703/msg00024.html

For Baudrillard, the failure of modern sociology was not necessarily its faith in its ideal type, the perfect society or even its blindness concerning symbolic exchange. Rather, its breakdown was and is its powerlessness in the face of the demise of both semiotics and the material world. In other words, each significant move in Baudrillard's writings, indeed, every stride he made away from semiotics and materialism and towards an understanding of the symbolic order was a kind of resistance to our sign-dominated contemporary society. Yet he did not automatically contest postmodern social principles. Instead, he was prepared to challenge their symbolic presence and characteristics, to set his analytical sights on the forbidden features of enchantment and seduction, brutality and abrupt reversibility that lie at the core of contemporary consumption and expenditure. In this sense, Baudrillard's postmodern sociology continues to provide a much-needed critique of semiotic society. For what had been outlawed more or less in principle up until his arrival on the modern sociological scene was the fact that the age of restricted production and accumulation was over and that the era of limitless consumption and expenditure had begun.

A worthy pouring of boiling oil over one the great scoundrels of our time. Does anyone know when/how the man who wanted to prosecute Kissinger for war crimes became so incredibly messed up?

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/03/chris-hitchens-latest-blackout.php

How does Christopher Hitchens do it? Before the rest of us have had our morning coffee, the British-born savant has already polished off 5,000 breezy words for Vanity Fair, a polemic for the New Republic, a book review for the Atlantic, a Viagra confessional for Maxim, and a half-gallon of Scotch

Have guns (and helicopters), will travel
SCOTT TAYLOR

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070324.BKBLAC24/TPStory/Entertainment/Books

In defending Blackwater from lawsuits filed by the victims' families, its lawyers argue that the company should be immune from any liability since it is part of a "U.S. Total Force that includes contractors." Since these mercenaries are not subject to U.S. military law and have been granted immunity from prosecution in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they literally operate outside the law, with a licence to kill.