On Tue, 04 Jun 1996 09:46:34 +0200, Thomas Diez wrote:
>Gabriel Ash in the quote below seems to read some causal story into
>Foucault: It seems to me that in such a reading, disciplinary techniques
>_cause_ better performance, e.g. This may be a misreading of Gabriel, but it
>brings me to a thought I am currently struggling with (although I know it's
>been discussed a thousand times before...) -
>
>Foucault seems to reject the concept of causality, as one can see from the
I agree that causality is one of those fuzzy concepts that we don't really know
what to do without and we don't really know how to do with. There some
unreflective ways in which causality is used by historiens and intellectual
historiens which seem to have antagonised F., and this refers mainly I think
to the construction of seemless narratives in which continuity with the past
is made necessary, like the causal link (of the top of my head) between
the rise of protestantism and the rise of experimental science. Or the even more
dubious causal link between the existence of a phenomenon and the the reaction
to that phenomenon (like madness and psychiatry). A good example of a history
that picked its cues from this critique is Moore's "the formation of the persecuting
society" which argues against the commonplace causal explanation of innumerable
past historiens that the persecution of heretics, Jews and lepers in the high middle
ages was the result of the latter's existence.
A special problem here is the reality of causation, the fact that one agrees
that causation is real (strictly speaking : dealt within the physical discourse) doesn't
affect the fictional status of a specific causal statement, which builds a narrative by
singling out a cause. It may be that F. at some time was playing with the idea that he
could do away with such a messy concept, but I think his main interest was to do away
with large causes playing in big narratives of continuity. Thus, small-scale causation
is less of a problem. A question remains weather a philosophical argument can be made
to the effect that difference in the scale of causation is qualitative and not just quantitive.
-------------
Gabriel Ash
Notre-Dame
-------------
>Gabriel Ash in the quote below seems to read some causal story into
>Foucault: It seems to me that in such a reading, disciplinary techniques
>_cause_ better performance, e.g. This may be a misreading of Gabriel, but it
>brings me to a thought I am currently struggling with (although I know it's
>been discussed a thousand times before...) -
>
>Foucault seems to reject the concept of causality, as one can see from the
I agree that causality is one of those fuzzy concepts that we don't really know
what to do without and we don't really know how to do with. There some
unreflective ways in which causality is used by historiens and intellectual
historiens which seem to have antagonised F., and this refers mainly I think
to the construction of seemless narratives in which continuity with the past
is made necessary, like the causal link (of the top of my head) between
the rise of protestantism and the rise of experimental science. Or the even more
dubious causal link between the existence of a phenomenon and the the reaction
to that phenomenon (like madness and psychiatry). A good example of a history
that picked its cues from this critique is Moore's "the formation of the persecuting
society" which argues against the commonplace causal explanation of innumerable
past historiens that the persecution of heretics, Jews and lepers in the high middle
ages was the result of the latter's existence.
A special problem here is the reality of causation, the fact that one agrees
that causation is real (strictly speaking : dealt within the physical discourse) doesn't
affect the fictional status of a specific causal statement, which builds a narrative by
singling out a cause. It may be that F. at some time was playing with the idea that he
could do away with such a messy concept, but I think his main interest was to do away
with large causes playing in big narratives of continuity. Thus, small-scale causation
is less of a problem. A question remains weather a philosophical argument can be made
to the effect that difference in the scale of causation is qualitative and not just quantitive.
-------------
Gabriel Ash
Notre-Dame
-------------