Who Wrote It: An Overworked AI, or Foucault?

By FoucaultFan46

How’s it hanging, pops? Anyone else need a cold shower after that sex issue? Euuuugh. Why we as a society socially constructed this social construct of slamming our moist meatlets together as some sort of ultimate desideratum is beyond me. I tell you, any pleasure gained from it is countervailed by the realization that you could be doing literally anything else and it would be infinitely more wholesome, like heroin.

Speaking of social constructs, anyone heard of Foucault? Now there’s a cat who couldn’t be caught. Always a master of trolling, his inscrutable prose bedazzled and vajazzled academics, students, and radicals alike with his indefatigable skepticism towards truth-claims, laws, and institutions, dismissing them entirely as social constructs, and thus appendages to the central hegemonic power structure or something like that.* Idrc (I don’t really care) about that part, I just think he’s a funny little guy, with a very kissable bald head.

(*Of course, I’m reading it wrong. Everyone reads it wrong. The only people who read Foucault “right” just so happen to be the ones who agree with him. They’re also more than happy to “explain” him to you, so long as you’re willing to accept some gruesome motte and bailey tactics. But I digress…)

What was I talking about? Foucault! That’s right. As I said, he was a master of trolling. In fact, he trolled so hard the year Star Wars was released, that he and numerous other French intellectuals crafted and signed a petition to abrogate the standing age of consent laws in France, especially pertaining to teenage girls and sodomy with even younger boys! Rofl, bro. Epic fail. Rightoids coping and soyjak-ing hard about this one. Still, the man wasn’t all talk, if his colleague Guy Sorman is to be believed. Now, I’m an old-fashioned sort. I believe that whatever happens between a forty-something French “intellectual” and Tunisian boys as young as eight on the gravestones of a local cemetery is strictly private business, and has no impact whatsoever on the former’s worldview and philosophies. That’s just putting theory into practice, after all. And we all love some good theory, don’t we?

Speaking of which, why don’t we take a gander at some of the big F’s writing, his “greatest hits” so-to-speak. He is, after all, the most influential philosopher in the world by citation-count, and credited with the foundation of manifold academic disciplines. And let’s add just a little spice—a smattering of silliness—to this exercise: In addition to some of my favorite Foucault quotes, I will have OpenAI—the fancy new gadget everyone’s talking about (and to)—generate a couple of fake quotations, and you, the reader, will have to figure out which is which. (I would say you’d have to find the truth, but we both know that would make Mr. F roll in his grave.)

Without further ado, let’s play some Foucauldian Among Us:

“Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”

“If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.”

“The production of knowledge is always bound up with the exercise of power, and as such, it is always subject to the contingencies of historical and social context.”

“I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”

“The epistemic field is not a static entity, but rather a dynamic constellation of knowledge and power, which is constantly being reshaped and reconfigured by the social, political, and economic forces that shape our world.”

“We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.”

So, did you spot the sus impostors? Did any of them vent… your frustrations about power and society (and Tunisian children). What if I were to tell you that all of those quotes were real? They’re not, but it would be cool if they were. Perhaps the real truth is inaccessible to us.

In conclusion, Foucault’s bald head is very kissable.