conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Foucault For Beginners about University, Victorian, Stanford with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author has taught literary theory, Victorian literature, and writing, at Stanford University, University of Colorado, and Harvard University. She is currently an independent author, and also an attorney. She lives with her husband and two cats in Concord, Massachusetts.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Foucault For Beginners
  First name is pronounced like the English girl's name, Michelle. Foucault is **foo** as in fooey, plus **co** as in coco-nut, coming down harder on the coconut.
  In one case physical force, in the other mental force, is exerted by a powerful minority who are thus able to impose their idea of the right, or the true, on the majority.
  When we're talking about knowledge of human beings, the social sciences, or, as Foucault calls them, "the human sciences," then the people deciding what is true (constructing Truth) are deciding matters that define humanity, and affect people in general. If they can get enough people to believe what they have decided, then that may be more important than some unknowable truth.
  How do some people get the rest of us to accept their ideas of who we are? That involves some power to create belief. And these same people who decide what is knowledge in the first place can easily claim to be the most knowledgeable—to know more about us than we do ourselves.
  But how does knowledge/power get its work done? Often knowledge/power and physical force are allied, as when a child is spanked to teach her a lesson. But primarily knowledge/power works through language. At a basic level, when a child learns to speak, she picks up the basic knowledge and rules of her culture at the same time.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But not enough is known about disease—too much is hidden from the eye. Suddenly there is a new focus:
  Medicine is more like **HARD SCIENCE** than the others, but it has always focused on humans. Opening up the corpses, Foucault maintained, gave medicine the opportunity to subject all of the Body to the scientific Gaze.
  Foucault starts **The Order of Things** by quoting a passage from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:
  This passage quotes " **a certain Chinese encyclopedia** " in which it is written that " **animals are divided into:** 
  This impossible collection of kinds of animals is so funny to us less because these kinds of animals are all that funny in themselves than because this ridiculous way of categorizing things violates all our sense of order, indeed of the order of things.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. End with the sentence '"'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There has also been some controversy surounding Foucault's involvement in sadomasochism. He enjoyed the leather-bar scene In San Francisco, where some clubs specialize in ritualized forms of sadomasochism known to the community simply as S/M.
  Foucault did not believe that involvement in S/M revealed deep subconscious tendencies towards cruelty and violence. Instead he saw S/M as a game, a way of playing and experimenting with the nature of power.
  S/M was about pleasure for Foucault, but pleasure and politics were never fully separable. This concept of play and transformation helps him solve the trap of being always inside power relations. Scientific discourse may have defined us in terms of our sexuality, and we may be unable to unthink these definitions, to step outside them. Our world may be a back ward we cannot escape. But that does not mean we are simply powerless.
  Large political parties and organizations for reform do more to stabilize power relations than to change them. Play, whether sexual or overtly political, challenges society's rules on a deeper and less predictable level, opening up greater possibilities of change.
  In 1971 Foucault reflected on the political turmoil of the '60a in terms that reflected his personal life, his politics, and his scholarly work, bringing all these strands together: "We must see our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tired of games and irony, it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put 'in play.' show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about. As far as I am concerned, that is what I try to do in my work."