Re: [12 or so]: useful and docile bodies

sam,

uhm, well, THIS time round (post) [rather last time] :) i wasnot trying to
be sly, so i wonder what/where you thought i was being so...

i agree as i try to recollect the drefuss/rabinow and foucault appendage,
that there WAS indeed this kind of totalizing to make the disjunct works
into oevre (sp?) [sign of a user of french theory, but not a phrancofile].
But, of course, that is the general tendency with all those foucault readers
and iintro-explain f. books that came out in the 80s, no? (serious question;
which has not organicized his texts into a "Work"?). [ps as we all know
this is very important thing to do, so as to get merit-raises, promotions,
better job offers, etc.]

to avoid directly your question there about expanding/adding on vs cleaning
the blackboard before each new book, as for me, I read the biggest shift
between vol. 1 and 2, which F. also sought enlarge with his prefatory
comments in V.2 .... ok, maybe not, just for fun lets see i can make a
suggestive or somewhat persuasive argument that vol. 2 "continues from" the
discourse on language and archeology: the focus on
problems/problematizations wwithin a discursive field of ethics/proper
individual action as the intersection between discourses and between
practices does seem to provide or imply an analytical method by which one
could do what is charted out in the discourse on language -- ie., it allows
one to look at the configuration of power relations in the realm of the
social and how they shape but also are shaped by discourses; I all of the
sudden am thinking of his specific essay at the end of I Pierre, in wwhich a
similar kind of nexus between discourse and practice is analytically
exploited, but there to point at less the social construction (technology
of) Self, than at the configuration of social relations/institutions and
their transformations that were going on at that historical moment. Thus,
to impose on f., he was being much more historical in I Pierre (and thus
attuned to "marxist" or historical sociological issues/debates) than being
"ethnographic" in the greek sexuality/ethics of self. when i say attuned to
"marxist" above, i mean that he is again doing an analysis of one of those
"secret underbellies" of the world historical transformations that are filed
under the general name of the rise of capitalism so as to mark/make a
different history than the various orthodox historical explanations available.

in madness and civil. there is something akin to the analytical strategy of
focussing on problematizations, but not in the same way --- somebody should
correct me/clarify here 'cause my reading of that text is not that strong.
Is it useful to say that the strategies are inversed? inversed in the sense
that in the archeological f. the discursive formation was presupposed as
existant (eg the "epistemes"), and the task was to identify its particular
"manifestations" in a series of author-text/discourses that had a sequential
relation to each other. Whereas in vol. 2 (cannot say anything about vol.3)
his focus first on the problems/problematizations do not presuppose the
existance of discursive formation but is what allows for for the postulation
of that disc. formation to become evident, knowable, identified, analyzed.
the discursive formation comes into existence "back then" and now for study
through the problematizations and thus is less a monolithic/paradigmatic
entity such as an "episteme" or whole horizon/mileu of a "cultural world"
than a portion of one such "cultural world."

so, if these comments have any useful insight then to return to your
question maybe not only expanding and adding on and starting over but also
inverting strategies of analysis?!?

hookay, gonna go enjoy the last rays of sunshine:)

quetzil.


>the question is, was Foucault adding on to his model in a sort of expanding
>exploration or was his erasing and beginning again each time. Are these
>three models comensurable? are they inextricable?
>
>I first intended to write this message asking you to explain how HSI was
>the continuation of the archealogical projects of his earlier works, but as
>I write I see that your point is quite well grounded. The spacial and
>regulative considerations established in D&P have largely dropped out, no?
>though sexuality is still a deployment, not a technique of the self as it
>will become in Vols II and III.
>
>Hmmm...
>
>sam
>



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