Ooops: divakar was kind enough to tell me that I had maile only to him
personally not the the list. So here goes...
On Mon, May 20, 1996 3:11:23 PM, divakar goswami wrote:
>divakar:
I think that you are generally correct in asserting that F gives secondary
importance to marginal discourses/practices, or at least leaves them
theoretically underdeveloped in contrast to dominant (panoptic etc.)
There's always more hegemony than transgression in F (no?)
However, on DeCerteau, I guess my definition for critique is purely
scholastic: what do we have to "throw out" from F to accept DC's model.
The answer is: not much. We merely have to shift our focus to the specific
structure of spacial and temporal practices of resistance, which F never
really got around to.
DC wants to pay equal attention to "strategies" (the power practices of
institutions and functional arrangements which hold monopoly in setting the
terms of discourse and practice) and "tactics" (the power practices of hte
powerless, AS powerless practices....delinquent strategies of "poaching",
ripping off and so on). There may be an element of intentionality on the
side of the tactical practice of power, but the strategic is , I believe,
just as anonymous and diffuse as F's panopticon.
The strength of the book lies in its relation of spaciality and
panopiticism as a field of social control to an analysis of practices
understood as narrative and textual (there is some discussion of the
"scriptual apparatus of modern discipline"). He even referenced Derrida.
Thinking of panoptic spaces as texts, or as the materialization and spacial
inscription of stories and narratives, makes panopticism seem a little more
porous, more infiltrated with bits of resistance. These narratives are not
just "discourses", in Foucault's sense, which are strategic, but something
more "oral" and "delinquent", some narrative practice "ripped off" from the
hegemonic determinations of insitutional narrative - a tactical use of
power)
"haunted places are the only ones people can life in and this inverts the
schema of the Panopticon." (108)
(Laurie Stephan: to answer your question: I think DC is arguing for the
oral tradition against the insitutional discursive. )