Hi All,
As Steve pointed out moderation of the list has changed and I'm the new
moderator, or un-moderator as the case may be. I've been on the list
since it started when spoon was still at world, but since my
participation has run hot and cold as my mood and the weather dictate I
figured an introduction was in order.
To begin with a bit of technical note I'd like to start working on a web
page for the list. At the moment the page consists of a link to the
archives, which consists of the messages that have been sent to the
list, as well as some papers. Well actually, at the monment there's only
one paper by Paul Patten in the archive, so if anyone has a paper that
they think would be of interest to the list and you'd like to add it to
the archive let me know and we'll get itin there. (For those
who don't know it the URL is http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons)
The only problem with making a page for the list is that I have no idea
what to do with it, and I am totally slack on cool images (ahh, but what
can I say, the glitz does seem to necessarily impinge on the web). So if
anyone has any ideas of what we should do with the page, or if you have
gif's or jpg's of Foucault, or of insane asylums or prisons, or something
that's only vaguely related though it looks cool, let me know. Also, if
you know of other pages that are relavant to the topic we can put links
on the page to them.
So much for the technical bit. What the hell's my deal with Foucault you
might ask, well acutally this is what I ask myself all the time and I'm
still not sure what the answer is. I first encountered Foucault in a
freshman Western Civ. class and at the time, since I didn't know any
better, I thought that this was quite normal and that Foucault was in
some way intrumental to the Western canon. Though such a notion is
becoming truer by the day, its nonetheless a fairly twisted place to
begin from. Maybe there was a certain resonance in Foucault that I
understood, or maybe it was the beauty of the prose and nothing more, but
for whatever reason once I read _Madness and Civilization_ I was
captivated. After that I started reading everything by Foucault that I
could get my hands on, and then I tried to fit Foucault within its
context so I started reading Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Canguilheim,
Nietzsche, Kant, etc. Basically I've worked my way backwards through the
tradition from Foucault to the Greeks. I guess the best way to put it
is that my gig with Foucault is more of an obsession than an interest.
Currently I'm finishing up my master's in philosophy and looking for a PhD
program. But I suspect that this is more mundane detail than anyone really
want't to know.
As for the archaealogical/geneological shift, I'm more interested in the
earlier work than the latter. In particular I can't seem to be able to
get away form _The Order of Things_, and I think this is due to the
fact that I just don't understand it. Everytime I read that damn book I
come away knowing with certainty exactly what it says, and yet when I
compare what I know to what I knew its apparent that I'm not talking
about the same thing at all. In any event, I was going to post this
earlier in response to Sylvia's question about the relation between
Foucault and phenomenology but I got bogged down because at first it
seemed like a fairly easy question to answer but then as I tried to write
it became apparent that I had once again fooled myself with fantasies of
easy answers and I wasn't quite sure how to proceed. So instead of
trying to offer anything significant let me offer what might be an
interesting concept: What if the term 'post-structuralist' is actually a
misnomer which somehow misses the point of what is actually a
post-phenomenological impetus which occures not only in Foucault, but in
Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Lyotard as well? There's at least an
interesting line to be followed within the history of the the critique of
subjectivity where the phenomenological subject begins to unfold from
itself. This line can be traced from Husserl, where subjectivity still
maintains a unity; to Levinas' bifurcation of subjectivity into the same
and the other; and then to Merleau-Ponty's slight declination of the
self/other pair from one another; and finally on to Foucault et al where
subjectivity gets fragmented to dofferent degrees, and with different
effects, according to an historic, machinic, and semiotic force. Anyway,
it might be a concept that's fun to play with.
There's probably a couple of other things I should add at this point, but
times running short so I'll leaveit at that for now.
Later
Flannon