[QatzelOk]

"They're building a new mega-mall near the old golf course."

"They're trying to get us into a new war."

"They're going to build a highway through our suburb."

They. They. They.

Not us.



What does it mean when people ascribe various social phenomena to "them?" Who exactly are "they?" And who are "we" as opposed to the people who build malls, highways, and wars?

I would suggest that when people say "they" are moving society in a particular direction, these people who use "they" don't feel like they have any influence or say in what gets built or done around them. Far from direct democracy, the "they"-user is saying that he is just a pawn of other people's plans whose only power is to observe and comment (to no effect) on the various whims of "them."

They are the slave masters. When you use the expression "they" in this way, you are admitting that you are nothing more than a slave to other people.

soundtrack

[One Degree]

"They're building a new mega-mall near the old golf course."

"They're trying to get us into a new war."

"They're going to build a highway through our suburb."

They. They. They.

Not us.



What does it mean when people ascribe various social phenomena to "them?" Who exactly are "they?" And who are "we" as opposed to the people who build malls, highways, and wars?

I would suggest that when people say "they" are moving society in a particular direction, these people who use "they" don't feel like they have any influence or say in what gets built or done around them. Far from direct democracy, the "they"-user is saying that he is just a pawn of other people's plans whose only power is to observe and comment (to no effect) on the various whims of "them."

They are the slave masters. When you use the expression "they" in this way, you are admitting that you are nothing more than a slave to other people.

soundtrack

What is wrong with admitting reality. Is it better to pretend we are not slaves?
Seriously, I think 'they' does not mean any such thing. It is simply referencing someone outside of the community as perceived by the speaker. If someone inside the 'accepted community' was performing the action, then 'they' would probably be given a name.

[QatzelOk]

What is wrong with admitting reality. Is it better to pretend we are not slaves?

The use of the generic pronoun "they" is a way of NOT SAYING "our slave masters," and is therefore a form of pretending.

Seriously, I think 'they' does not mean any such thing. It is simply referencing someone outside of the community as perceived by the speaker. If someone inside the 'accepted community' was performing the action, then 'they' would probably be given a name.

Not really. Sometimes that mall or highway or war is being made by someone who lives in your own town. But most working people don't feel like they have any say in how their environment is transformed or ruined.

The First Nations were much more democratic in this regard: all adults had a say in the making of wars, gardens or moving the community somewhere else. It's the Modern European settler who sacrifices his own happiness for the glory of empire, and one of the components of his happiness he sacrifices is his say in what gets done in his community.

In suburbia, the community has been entirely replaced by mass media - the master's voice. And here again, the slave in denial doesn't acknowledge the brainwashing role of his media consumption.

At least, admit that you're a brainwashed slave who has no control of your own destiny!

[anna]

We have pronouns for a reason. They make the process of language easier. Seems pretty simple.

Now if you were to say "The Left...."

[anna]

Whoops. Double post.

[QatzelOk]

We have pronouns for a reason. They make the process of language easier. Seems pretty simple.

Now if you were to say "The Left...."

Yes, so if you have no idea who builds malls, highways or wars, you can say "they" to indicate your profound ignorance.

I mean, we're only in the Middle Ages and have less disposable income per capita than Burkina Faso, so why would we know anything like who makes stuff or causes wars? Right?

[anna]

Yes, so if you have no idea who builds malls, highways or wars, you can say "they" to indicate your profound ignorance.

Why do you assume no one has any idea who builds malls, highways or cars?

Should every conversation be fraught with dark meaning? When is a highway just a highway?

I mean, we're only in the Middle Ages and have less disposable income per capita than Burkina Faso, so why would we know anything like who makes stuff or causes wars? Right?

Are you speaking for yourself, or for all of "they" who have no name?

[anarchist23]

To understand what "they" is, one has to understand what the "combine" represents in The One Who Flew Oer the Cuckoos Nest.

Combine = People in power that rule the whole system and do everything in their hands to maintain power: politicians, the police, businesses, corporations, etc; all the ones that are part of the highest layer of decisions.

[QatzelOk]

Yes, and the "Disciplinary Institutions" that Michel Foucault described (hospitals, prisons, schools, police, mental health, standards of normality, etc.) as being tools used to train humans the way that tugging a collar is used to train a dog... are in the hands of "them."

They don't care if any particular slave lives or dies. (A slave typically uses "they" to describe "unidentifiable powers that control our destiny."

They will destroy the entire Earth to hang onto their privilege for ten seconds longer.

They are psychologically ruined by their unnatural power to suppress others.

They use terrorism to pass horrible laws that steal from the poor to give to the rich.

[Wellsy]

Whilst I think there is is value in getting people to clarify certain words that can often seem vague, because it is certainly a valid question who are they?
But they also do intend to correspond to reality in some way, the struggle isn't over words but over reality.

This thread reminds me of an older thread in which someone posted this.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=140478

Q: The White Review — In the UK we often talk about the ‘right to protest’? Should protest be conceived of in a rights discourse?

A: David Graeber — I find the word ‘protest’ problematic. With ‘protest’ it sounds as though you’ve already lost. It’s as though it’s part of a game where the sides recognise each other in fixed positions. It becomes like the Foucauldian disciplinary game where both sides sort of constitute each other. In that sense, Foucault was right: resistance is almost required to have power. Which is why I like the concept of direct action. I think in a lot of ways we’ve been going backwards. I come from the US so I know what’s going on there better, where the right to protest, to dissent, to oppose the government is explicitly enshrined in the constitution, and yet flagrantly ignored.

R: Andrew Kliman — What Graeber chooses to ignore is the reason why the two sides constitute each other another. The reason is that the one side has indeed already lost.

Oppressors and the oppressed, exploiters and the exploited, capitalists and wage workers, do constitute each other. As Marx put it in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.” But this isn’t because workers freely choose to play a “game,” as if they were sitting down in front of a Monopoly board. Since they lack productive resources of their own, they must either become wage workers for capital or starve.

Why do they lack productive resources of their own? Because they’ve already lost. This is an elemental fact, not a psychological attitude. The expropriation of independent peasants’ land was what created the class of wage workers. And every day, they produce wealth under conditions that ensure that the wealth does not belong to them; every day they’ve “already lost.”

The same goes for oppressed peoples and nations. Black people in this country already lost the moment they were captured and put on slave ships. And thus we had a situation in which masters and slaves constituted each other, but not because the slaves freely opted into any game.

The fact that we’ve already lost doesn’t mean that we should give up. We may have lost the battle, but we haven’t yet lost the war.

We have to struggle despite having lost the battle, and in full recognition that we’ve lost the battle rather than by pretending that we can freely choose the terms of struggle and the conditions under which we struggle. As Marx put it in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.” I’ve always thought that this is a rather trivial observation, because it’s so obvious. I still think so, but I quote it here because Graeber rejects it and, as we shall see, his rejection of it is the key to his politics.

I'm not sure I'm that warm to Foucault on account that I currently have the impression that he is only concerned with language and relations within itself as independent from the real world. Perhaps hes for intepretative games but concerned that detached from the content of the world or not conscious of this being where the content of language is derived, that it ends up a sort of groundless perspective and even feeling of reality, detached from it.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htm

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/foucaul1.htm

Spoiler: show

Foucault introduces The Archaeology of Knowledge with:

"the questioning of the document. Of course, it is obvious enough that ever since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have given rise to questions; scholars have asked not only what these documents meant, but also whether they were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so, whether they were sincere or deliberately misleading, well informed or ignorant, authentic or tampered with. But each of these questions, and all this critical concern, pointed to one and the same end: the reconstitution, on the basis of what the documents say, and sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they emanate and which has now disappeared far behind them; the document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace. Now .. history ... has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it."

Thus Foucault makes exactly the same point as Mach in the new context, and requires that historians give up the, supposedly naive realist, presumption that the primary task is surmising what lies behind the trace, but must instead simply describe the traces themselves. "I have undertaken, then, to describe the relations between statements." - the opening words of Chapter Two. He continues by noting three consequences of this turn:

"[1] The problem now is to constitute series"; and "[2] discontinuity assumes a major role in the historical disciplines" and "[3] the theme and the possibility of a total history begin to disappear, and we see the emergence of something very different that might be called a general history. The project of a total history is one that seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilisation, the principle material or spiritual - of a society, the significance common to all the phenomena of a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion - what is called metaphorically the 'face' of a period. Such a project is linked to two or three hypotheses; - it is supposed that between all the events of a well-defined spatio-temporal area, between all the phenomena of which traces have been found, it must be possible to establish a system of homogeneous relations: a network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, relations of analogy that show how they symbolise one another, or how they all express one and the same central core; it is also supposed that one and the same form of historicity operates upon economic structures, social institutions and customs, the inertia of mental attitudes, technological practice, political behaviour, and subjects them all to the same type of transformation; lastly, it is supposed that history itself may be articulated into great units - stages or phases - which contain within themselves their own principle of cohesion. These are the postulates that are challenged by the new history when it speaks of series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relation."

Three things to note about this paragraph:

1. The deletion of the materiality of the traces renders them into total discontinuity and this total discontinuity is characteristic of Foucault's method; it also expresses the spirit of his times, with the rise of finite mathematics over analysis, the rise of digital technology over analogue electronics, the abandonment of macro-economics and the turn to micro-economics, and the universal egoism flowing from the "beginning of history" in the mid-1960s;

2. The critique of continuity is exclusively based on the structuralist conception of "system".

3. Although the focus on "general history", i.e. the entire culture, rejecting presupposed divisions, continues the project of the Frankfurt School which had its roots in Lukacs's and Korsch's attempts to reconstitute Marxism with its genuine Hegelian conceptions of totality, as a "post-structuralist", Foucault has completely missed this conception.
The danger here then is that the structuralism 's constitution of meaning by a system, albeit a closed and static system, will be taken to the point of extremity by the shattering of the totality into generalised egoism.

The concluding words of Chapter 3 make, I think, a fair summary of Foucault's project:

"To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion". ... "We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse - in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself. ... I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. 'Words and things' is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not - of no longer treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this more that we must reveal and describe."

Much of the philosophy and cultural criticism of our times is an exaggeration and a degeneration from this project, and some do better here and there, but I think a critique of what Foucault here expresses can suffice to deal with the Essence of what I understand by "post-modern theory". I would like to tackle this program at three levels:

. firstly, it is not an adequate method for the analysis of discourse, although it does make true and significant warnings against the kind of metaphysic which is characteristic of structuralism;
. secondly, it leads to a politics which does work which is essential preparation for liberation, but still fundamentally reinforces dominant forms of oppression, that is to say, it constitutes a form of progressive bourgeois ideology;
. thirdly, it is an ideological expression of its times.

...
The essential methodological error which is common to positivism, structuralism and post-structuralism is the inability to perceive the essence of processes and to understand and distinguish between Essence and the abstract quantitative reflection of the data of perception; the inability to work with true Notions rather than abstract universals. The struggle to identify Essence within Appearance is an interminable one and the tendency of any of us to operate uncritically with the static categories of yesterday inescapable. It is but the problem of living in a world which one must also reject. One must reject, but one must live.

[QatzelOk]

Whilst I think there is is value in getting people to clarify certain words that can often seem vague, because it is certainly a valid question who are they?
But they also do intend to correspond to reality in some way, the struggle isn't over words but over reality.

...

I'm not sure I'm that warm to Foucault on account that I currently have the impression that he is only concerned with language and relations within itself as independent from the real world. Perhaps hes for intepretative games but concerned that detached from the content of the world or not conscious of this being where the content of language is derived, that it ends up a sort of groundless perspective and even feeling of reality, detached from it.

While Foucault is famous for his words, both written and spoken, he also lead protests that shut down most of France in 1968, allied with unions and students.

Other than being a pioneer of what became "post-modernism," his warnings about the power and vacuity of some words was also a major provocation because, what is implied by his book Discipline and Punish and many of his lectures at College de France, is that THEY provide pleasant "words" to justify THEIR horribly anti-social and anti-human laws and institutions.

The manifs of 1968 were against the power of the anonymous "them" who are constantly scheming to enslave "us."