On Thu, 20 Jun 1996, Joe Cronin wrote:
> I have a question for Michael Donnelly: I've read a few of
> your articles on Foucault, and recently re-read your article
> on Bio-power. You claim, in a nutshell (and please telll me
> if I'm off the mark) - that Foucault should've stuck to his
> nominalistic researches, and not gotten involved in general
> concerns. If that's a workable summary, my question is
> this: where did Foucault EVER conduct a "local" analysis?
> Whatr is a local analysis? Is it an analysis of a scientific
> practice? If so, we're already at a general level - the
> level at whcih a "practice" is carried out. He never
> concerned himself with the work, or thought, of one single
> author, or one single problem. Question two is this: in
> Remarks on Marx, Foucault responds to the question of
> nominalism by saying something to teh effect that "what
> could be more generla than a society's conception of
> madness, or the hegemony of reason..."(bad paraphrase) - the
> point is that he concerns himself with questions which are
> inherently social, and therefore inherently general. If
> one claims to be an empiricist, as Foucault does over and
> over again, than how can one ignore general phenomena, on
> the one hand, and the fact that many sciences have
> developed in the past two hundred years by developiong an
> understanding of societal generalities (such as the
> cocneption o f"population" as a general, theortical set of
> objects, in HS v.I)?
>
> --Joe Cronin
>
>
Dear Joe Cronin,
I think that we read Foucault differently. In any event I wasn't trying
to draw the distinction you make between "local" and "general" phenomena.
My point was this: Foucault's genealogical analyses are exemplary, but he
sometimes derived general conclusions which genealogy by its nature could
not support. Take Discipline and Punish as an example. Much of the text
treats the historical origins of the penitentiary--the genealogy cobbles
together elements out of which the penitentiaty was historically
constituted. But Foucault concludes the book looking forward to the
apparent consequences of this development, what he terms "carceral society."
Just how Foucault reached this conclusion, how he derived from the
panopticon "panopticism," is not clear. What is at issue is his claim,
for instance, that once developed in the penitentiary the "diagram" of
the panopticon then permeated society at large, as it were programming
the whole network of social relations that Foucault styled carceral society.
There is in sum a leap involved here. This is not what seems to follow
>from the patient, grey, documentary work of genealogy.
Michael Donnelly