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Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the
same. ~Michel Foucault While the word
hermeneutics is meaningful, it is sometimes used in a pretentious way, to give
an impression of profundity. A well-known example is the Sokal Affair:
physicist Alan Sokal wrote a paper which was sentence-by-sentence complete
gibberish, to see if a postmodern cultural studies journal would "publish
an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it
flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The paper, entitled
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity” was accepted and published in the journal Social Text. The dark dungeon of pre-modernity has been
replaced with the bright modern prison. “…the worker's labor and the worker's
knowledge about his own labor, the technical improvements - the little
inventions and discoveries, the micro adaptations he's able to implement in the
course of his labor - are immediately recorded, thus extracted from his
practice, accumulated by the power exercised over him through supervision. In
this way, the worker's labor is gradually absorbed into a certain technical
knowledge of production which will enable a strengthening of control. So we see
how there forms a knowledge that's extracted from the individuals themselves
and derived from their own behavior.” ~Michel Foucault |
