I was totally smitten with Michael Crabtree last night. (I know that is a bad word but dammit I was smitten.) That dude may be the best receiver at the college level I have ever seen. His effort on every play was unreal. He’s my Heisman vote hands down.

Gary Danielson is a turncoat and has become a Big Ten basher now that he has been relegated to the Southern Excuse Conference where they love to talk about how bad everybody else is.
He loves him some Urban.

Wo’Eagle!

I just wanted to say that I hate The Urban Meyer and Christ reincarnate Tebow more every week. When will it end.

Tommy Tuberville is toast. One of my best friends is an Auburn worshipper. I remind him of this website often:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~pcasteel/aubfamily.html

Turn up your volume before you click.

The only philosophy I am familiar with is the Ohio State offensive philosophy which at the moment would have Michel Focault pissed the fuck off.

Michigan is bowl ineligible… I never thought I’d see the day where it’d happen.

And they made 2008 Purdue look like 2000 Purdue. 522 yards of offense for Purdue. Defense is optional, I see.

Philosophy (principally matters of ontology and epistemology) was always a part time hobby of mine (among several other odd hobbies for a guy my age), and I found myself fascinated with the early work of Michel Foucault. Though I’m not sure if it was his primary task (to be honest, very few, if any, people are 100 percent of certain of any of Foucault’s ambitions in his writings), a lot of his early writings challenge our assumptions about human agency that we get from the Enlightenment metanarrative. I don’t have the time or energy to list all the nuances of the Enlightenment project, but the rise of faith in human reason, rationality, capacity to think objectively and human agency… basically the idea that we can and do enact meaningful change on the world around us because we, as conscious and essentially free beings, have that power to discern objectively real properties in the natural world around us. This type of thinking is pervasive in the world around us, and I’m sure there’s movies we’ve seen that document how a guy resorts to his power to reason and act in order to overcome obstacles in his path all the while remaining “true to himself”.

The problem, though, is that there are very little, if any, essential properties to the world around us and nothing remains objective. Rather than something that’s “out there” and can be “observed” or “known” in the objective or Humanist sense, truth is a function of discourses. Discourses — or the way we use language, corporeal institutions and institutionalized ways of approaching things (all mutually enabling) — control the production of knowledge. The substantively rational, free conscious man is a byproduct of the Enlightenment discourse. “Science”, or “scientific knowledge” is another output of the Enlightenment discourse. The underlying issue here is that what we have taken for granted as “true” or “self-evident” is actually linked to power. Knowledge is power; power stipulates knowledge. Per Foucault in the Truth and Power interview, “Truth is linked in circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it—a ‘regime’ of truth.” While power, naturally, has no essential properties, it remains a function of relations among people in society. In short, a bunch of smart philosophers — who we treat as geniuses — came up with it, discourses were constructed around it and it becomes the industry standard, if you will. The power Enlightenment theorists possessed enabled them to think in way that eventually influence the way we think and behave.

The problem that arises from this is that these discourses, especially the physical, social institutions devised around them, can have very real consequences on humans. Further, they’re not power-neutral. The famous example for Foucault (among others) comes from Madness and Civilization, where we learn the discourse of mental health uses the guise of “science” to differentiate sane and insane, the Reasoned and the mad, the normal and the abnormal. Those that are deemed to fall into the latter camp are institutionalized, often times for the rest of their lives. The issue here is that his behavior isn’t innocuous, rather a means to social order. It’s a means to controlling people by differentiating the normal and the deviant. Though early Foucault uses the example of the asylum, this argument has been extended by Foucault (and others) to the discourse of criminality and sexuality… that is: what behavior is acceptable and what behavior is deviant? Prisons, hospitals, schools, clinics, the military and more all operate approximate to this model.

These ideas about the nature of Enlightenment discourse do great damage to what the Enlightenment project deems to be natural or self-evident. Instead, our conceptions of ourself are not self-evident or natural, rather the byproduct of ways of thinking that we, as normal people, have little to no control over. These discourses constructed have real, tangible effects on us, and discipline us into certain ways of thinking. Rather than being rational, conscious human beings, we’re a political product of the discourses around us. We lose our total agency in light of these domineering discourses, and, in essence, become subjects to them in a manner not at all dissimilar from being a subject in the feudal sense. We, as humans, are subjects, political products of discourses, whose key to knowledge is more a function of its power.

I’m sure I’ve done some kind of violence to the arguments, and I’ve only read Power/Knowledge, Dicipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization. I have, but have yet to read, The History of Sexuality, though this book should be different because it’s late Foucault. Apparently late Foucault developed sympathy for the capacity for humans to have agency in light of these structures, because he developed the attitude that we can have agency by challenging a priori givens. I’m not quite there yet, both in terms of what I’ve read and how I approach the world around me.

And I can guaran-damn-tee you this is the only blog to make explicit references to Michel Foucault. It’s probably to be expected from a guy who blogs under the nom de plume of Giambattista Vico.

To be honest, my favorite song that TBBITL sadly never plays is “Beautiful Ohio”. The faster rendition that they have on the band’s website is impeccable. Oh, and about 100 years ago, TBDBITL had a song to the march El Capitan. I’d love to hear it brought back.

(Oh and the answer to the understanding of being is God — because the mindless physical particals are just that; mindless — but once we are given our g o d s p a r k, our particular physical particals are no longer mindless; and I assure you that I’m no unthinking religious fanatic; logic — scientific, deductive and inductive — demonstrates God’s existence. As an aside, my view is that all science should be specifically aimed a finding God and speaking with him, her, it, they… therein is the real question; what is God?)

See, this is what happens on a bye week; with no Buckeye football, we’re forced to contemplate God and the nature of the universe.

If you ask me the true crime is that OSU’s “across the field” has been all but forgotten, it was always my dad’s favourite fight song. It might be heard once a game maybe, snuck in somewhere in the third quarter. Best part: “Hit them hard and see how they fall, never let that team get the ball.” Chills everytime I hear it, also gotta love that it uses the word reverberating.

Vico, you receive full credit for “Wilt” because I heard it from you first.

oh, and JohnBoy, try as I might, I can’t take credit for coining “Wilt Chamberlain of Beer”. I believe that was Brian at MGoBlog responsible for introducing that term into my lexicon.