On Wed, 20 Mar 1996, Thomas Diez wrote:
> Now, my problem, too, was with that middle ground which I found obscure.
> Jim's idea that culture might mean "folk knowledge" hear might solve the
> problem I have, which is that I have so far read Foucault as doing kind of a
> cultural study. In so far, I guess, I would name the practices in this
> "inbetween" as culture. Then again, it seems to me that they are intertwined
> with the so-called "folk knowledge". To put it differently: Can these three
> "areas" be separated? Aren't they all part of what I would call a broad
> cultural discourse?
To the extent F is looking at the actual writings of the
scientists he has chosen to discuss, he is doing work similar to that of
emperical scientists. He is not working with these texts on the level of
philosophical history or of the history of philosophy. He is interested
to separate out the PRINCIPLE (Sorry for this; I can neither highlight nor
italicize) according to which all of these scientific theories and
practices worked. This principle is what he would call the "etre brut de
l'order [order in its primary form]" or perhaps in Heideggerian terms,
the being of order. So, F's project, I think is not cultural in the way
that studies on the reception of Shakespeare's sonnets would be so. Nor
is it cultural solely in the way Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is. I
think F weds Nietzsche and Heidegger and just plain old good historical
scholarship in a new and interesting way. The result is something
philosophical, critical and historical. Critical insofar as it calls
attention to practices of the human sciences (this project was begun in
_Madness_); historical inasmuch as he looks to historical texts to
butress his arguments; and philosophical to the extent that he he looks
at the grounding of the human sciences.
(Please reply to this. This is my first time taking part in a
cyber reading group and I am finding that I feel very uncertain about
sending out to any number of strangers claims that I haven't really had
the time to feel very comfortable with. It's not that I'm talking out the
side of my neck, but certainly I have not thought this stuff over the way
I would before turning in a college paper, for example.)
> I have no problems with change here. In par.10 of the Preface to the German
> / English /... edition (the paragraph dealing with the problem of the
> subject) F., I guess, gives the hint of what distinguishes him from
> structuralism: that he is neither on the side of those privileging the
> subject nor on the side of those privileging structures (wherein the latter
> one, indeed, would pose serious problems of dealing theoretically with
> change), but instead looking for the rules which come into the play through
> the existence of discourses. Now if we take that middle space as the
> underlying order and say it's a discursive order, built up of discursive
> _practices_, it is in a stage of constant change, even if this change is
> coming in the form of reproduced continuity.
>
> Does this make any sense to anyone?
>
> Thomas
This seems right on to me, Thomas.
derrick
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