Michel Foucault, Counter-Conduct, and the Hemisphere Hypothesis

I don’t often take intellectual queues from rabid homosexuals who sodomize themselves to death. Heck, if I’m being honest, I involuntarily wince at the mere prospect of shaking such a guy’s (“Where’s it been?”) hand.

If Jeffrey Bernard’s “Low Life” column in The Spectator was a suicide note in weekly installments, Michel Foucault’s sodomy tourism of San Francisco was gay Russian Roulette. The bullet finally went off, and he died of AIDS in 1984. Even admirers suggest that the former Catholic altar boy may have had a death wish. He was probably a severe pedophile. If you’re shocked by that, you haven’t been reading your homosexuality briefings over the past 2,500 years from ancient Greece to today’s Afghanistan.

But there was something else in Foucault. He read and thought deeply, with a desire to break outside of a modernity that he found more stifling than that fat guy sitting on a prisoner’s head in Idiocracy.

He wrote about the Panopticon, a centralized power structure so effective and pervasive that it controls conduct without anyone's knowledge. He counseled resistance, calling it “counter-conduct.” Foucault’s international AIDS tour was counter-conduct: it broke against the power structure’s norms of sexuality.

Fortunately, there are milder forms of counter-conduct that don’t compromise your ability to sit down without flinching.

Counter-conduct is not simply a matter of breaking norms and societal conventions. Telling Uncle Fred that he’s a piece of s*** isn’t counter-conduct. Banging Lolita or urinating on the neighborhood playground slide isn’t counter-conduct. That’s just being an ass.

If you want to reject the centralized power structure, you need to reject what built it. Foucault’s Panopticon is a product of modernity, and modernity was built by the left hemisphere of our brains. We need to rebel against the left hemisphere.

The equation: kicking the left hemisphere in the neuro-groin = counter-conduct.

This makes counter-conduct easy. It’s everything that isn’t left-hemispheric, so if a thing isn’t driven by or produced by the desire for control—either at the individual level or showered like copropluvial ash from a faceless government official with his desk on the other side of Vesuvius—is counter-conduct. So if a disposition or activity isn’t driven or produced by manipulation, control, logic, competition, purpose, grasping, efficiency and other tools that allow our bodies to survive in this bizarre thing called “the world,” it’s probably a form of counter-conduct.

If you’re looking for a novel approach, here’s one: act like an old person. There have always been avaricious and lecherous old men like Tiberius, and there have always been nasty old women who make Ellen DeGeneres look like Melanie Wilkes, but for the most part, old people don’t have control of their bowels, much less control of their environment. They don’t have the energy and strength to do a lot of manipulating and controlling. If you mimic them, you might be on a good path. If you can do it while retaining control of your bowels, even better.

What do old people do? They take it easy. They golf and garden and shrug. They don’t sweat the small things. They can’t even see the small stuff, much less sweat ‘em.

It’s just a suggestion. If you’re not interested in feigning geezerhood, that’s fine. There are tons of other options. You can find samples here or . . .