On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:
> I don't find the concerns
> you spoke of either "vulgar" or "reactionary", and I probably share many
> of them; but for me personally Foucault is useful precisely because his
> thinking cuts into, so to speak, the flab of these concerns -- cuts into
> what I regard as muscle and reveals it as flab.
i'm afraid of misunderstanding this, or maybe not understanding enough
of it (an almost constant anxiety when i read foucault anyway so i guess
i knew what i was in for when i signed up) - when you say he reveals
muscle as flab, are you saying there is nothing but flab to begin with?
or are you saying that he makes the real, essential muscle easier to
make out w/o all that flab in the way? is it muscle/flab = essence/
construction? or just "flab, flab, everywhere (and not a drop to?)"
b/c i'd suggest that if there's no essence, no muscle, then muscle is
whatever one finds advantageous to call muscle - spivak's theoretically
impure and materially useful idea of "strategic essentializing".
"Foucault cuts into the flab of these concerns" - the chapter called
"the panopticon" would have been very difficult for me to read if
foucault hadn't obligingly introduced me to his material example -
bentham's panopticon. can you give me a material example of what you
mean by "these concerns"? in an earlier post i'd revealed some of
the forms of power i've been concerned with - business associations
in nyc chinatown. if i want to try to cut into (away? or clear thru
to the other side?) the flab of my concerns, then i'd like to hear
about how that has worked for someone else.
> "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."
my knee-jerk question: by who? by myself, by anybody, ok . . . then:
for what purpose? to pare down to the essence? or does that cutting
constitute the end as well as the means? if that's true, then as an
admitted materialist should i be worried about it being "purposeless"?
also: "knowledge is made" by each of us, within the individual as well
as the system, fine, but isn't some of the knowledge i confront left
over from the knowledge that was produced before i took part in the
process? by individuals, and by systems, whose legacy has been reified
for generations and thereby have accumulated another kind of power that
i cannot use, unless i join in its reification? or unless i
strategically, with specific material interests, try to cut through its
"flab/muscle" while for the moment ignoring my own?
> You say the issue of power is especially urgent to those with less power.
> I would question this; I would say it is most urgent to those who need
> to maintain power.
of course that's true too - i could agree with either view depending
on my strategy.
> Also, I would like to ask you: if power is something
> one has or doesn't have, and if you regard yourself as privileged and thus
> -- I assume -- not among those who are totally deprived of it, then why
> your interest in these questions?
this is maybe a little rigidly logical, so it's vulnerable to one of its
own premises - i never said "power is something one has or doesn't
have", or that anyone is "totally deprived of it". i deliberately
said "less power". i can understand how even that judgement could
be questioned, so i'll alter it further - "those with a different
kind of power or maybe even a different quantity". if you object
to the implied "have" of that, then i'll rephrase it yet again -
"those with less freedom to use power". who's free? ok ok ok -
"those who are especially unfree or unfree in a way that makes it
difficult to avoid drowning, even if that drowning is pathetically,
not at all tragically, in a sea of flab".
why my interest if i'm privileged? well, i mentioned one way
of justifying this in a previous post - i'm privileged in some ways
(academic, internet, the time and inclination to sit and decipher f.)
but i'm ethnically a minority, and i have associated and worked with
people involved in defending their material interests by engaging
in strategic critiques of, and alternative power-production against,
certain networks of power. i don't want to go into it again b/c
i expect at least some of the other readers of this list wouldn't
really be interested. but since you say you might share some of my
interests, i'd be happy to tell you more about em if you email me
offlist . . .
> Assuming that privilege is a good thing
> and that it also requires the presence of people who are less privileged,
> are you and I not all set? What are we seeking?
privilege is a wonderful thing. but it has its bad sides. it can
produce forms of alienation. and as it sits on power, it can also be
unstable - the imbalance that comes from inequality. what are we
seeking? well, in my taoist modes i tell myself i'm not seeking anything.
but that kind of extreme freedom can also cause extreme alienation.
so maybe i should i say, i'm seeking to negotiate a dynamic balance
between freedom and alienation? i'll have to think about that one.
what are you seeking? or have you already found the way? :>
> You say you wouldn't insist on the innocence of your perspective with
> respect to power. Why this word "innocence", which hints at a connection
> between power and guilt? Do you regard power as tainted with guilt?
> Is the ideal, then, that we should all be powerless?
maybe not guilt in the moral christian sense. maybe instead of
innocence i should have said "purity" or "freedom from power"?
should we all be powerless? well, in a certain sense, that's
very hard to imagine. but in the sense in which power owes
its existence to inequality, and the less inequality there is,
the less power there is, if we were all relatively powerless
as a group, then no one would be all that powerless individually.
> I cannot try to explain to you how foucault's discussion makes your concerns
> irrelevant or beside the point, because I don't see how it could do that --
> how can anything anybody thinks make _your_ concerns irrelevant?
sorry - if i overreacted, it was only b/c you had said "foucault is
not about" so-and-so. now i understand that you meant, "it could be
useful to read foucault in a way other than" so-and-so and i'm trying
my best to evaluate that usefulness for myself.
> I also
> cannot say what "criminality" or "science" mean to me -- they can mean so many
> different things, depending on the circumstances: on whether I happen to be
> a criminal, a victim of a crime, a juror, a witness, a claimant in an
> anti-pollution suit, a psychiatrist, a psychiatric patient, a laboratory
> worker, etc.
i never said there weren't other valid circumstances. what i was
trying to do was to ground the discussion in something material -
i mentioned _the bell curve_ as a material example of science-as-power
and in return for that gesture of coming out of the closet of the
abstract, i was asking for one example - not "the one examplar" -
in return, of your material interests, assuming from what you'd said
that your interests were more valid to you than "getting the goodies
of the present system" or however you put it.
malgosia this has been fun but also difficult and time-consuming for
me, so i'll have to say good-bye, at least for a day or two or three
or more . . .
peace.
sig http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891/pics.html
> I don't find the concerns
> you spoke of either "vulgar" or "reactionary", and I probably share many
> of them; but for me personally Foucault is useful precisely because his
> thinking cuts into, so to speak, the flab of these concerns -- cuts into
> what I regard as muscle and reveals it as flab.
i'm afraid of misunderstanding this, or maybe not understanding enough
of it (an almost constant anxiety when i read foucault anyway so i guess
i knew what i was in for when i signed up) - when you say he reveals
muscle as flab, are you saying there is nothing but flab to begin with?
or are you saying that he makes the real, essential muscle easier to
make out w/o all that flab in the way? is it muscle/flab = essence/
construction? or just "flab, flab, everywhere (and not a drop to?)"
b/c i'd suggest that if there's no essence, no muscle, then muscle is
whatever one finds advantageous to call muscle - spivak's theoretically
impure and materially useful idea of "strategic essentializing".
"Foucault cuts into the flab of these concerns" - the chapter called
"the panopticon" would have been very difficult for me to read if
foucault hadn't obligingly introduced me to his material example -
bentham's panopticon. can you give me a material example of what you
mean by "these concerns"? in an earlier post i'd revealed some of
the forms of power i've been concerned with - business associations
in nyc chinatown. if i want to try to cut into (away? or clear thru
to the other side?) the flab of my concerns, then i'd like to hear
about how that has worked for someone else.
> "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."
my knee-jerk question: by who? by myself, by anybody, ok . . . then:
for what purpose? to pare down to the essence? or does that cutting
constitute the end as well as the means? if that's true, then as an
admitted materialist should i be worried about it being "purposeless"?
also: "knowledge is made" by each of us, within the individual as well
as the system, fine, but isn't some of the knowledge i confront left
over from the knowledge that was produced before i took part in the
process? by individuals, and by systems, whose legacy has been reified
for generations and thereby have accumulated another kind of power that
i cannot use, unless i join in its reification? or unless i
strategically, with specific material interests, try to cut through its
"flab/muscle" while for the moment ignoring my own?
> You say the issue of power is especially urgent to those with less power.
> I would question this; I would say it is most urgent to those who need
> to maintain power.
of course that's true too - i could agree with either view depending
on my strategy.
> Also, I would like to ask you: if power is something
> one has or doesn't have, and if you regard yourself as privileged and thus
> -- I assume -- not among those who are totally deprived of it, then why
> your interest in these questions?
this is maybe a little rigidly logical, so it's vulnerable to one of its
own premises - i never said "power is something one has or doesn't
have", or that anyone is "totally deprived of it". i deliberately
said "less power". i can understand how even that judgement could
be questioned, so i'll alter it further - "those with a different
kind of power or maybe even a different quantity". if you object
to the implied "have" of that, then i'll rephrase it yet again -
"those with less freedom to use power". who's free? ok ok ok -
"those who are especially unfree or unfree in a way that makes it
difficult to avoid drowning, even if that drowning is pathetically,
not at all tragically, in a sea of flab".
why my interest if i'm privileged? well, i mentioned one way
of justifying this in a previous post - i'm privileged in some ways
(academic, internet, the time and inclination to sit and decipher f.)
but i'm ethnically a minority, and i have associated and worked with
people involved in defending their material interests by engaging
in strategic critiques of, and alternative power-production against,
certain networks of power. i don't want to go into it again b/c
i expect at least some of the other readers of this list wouldn't
really be interested. but since you say you might share some of my
interests, i'd be happy to tell you more about em if you email me
offlist . . .
> Assuming that privilege is a good thing
> and that it also requires the presence of people who are less privileged,
> are you and I not all set? What are we seeking?
privilege is a wonderful thing. but it has its bad sides. it can
produce forms of alienation. and as it sits on power, it can also be
unstable - the imbalance that comes from inequality. what are we
seeking? well, in my taoist modes i tell myself i'm not seeking anything.
but that kind of extreme freedom can also cause extreme alienation.
so maybe i should i say, i'm seeking to negotiate a dynamic balance
between freedom and alienation? i'll have to think about that one.
what are you seeking? or have you already found the way? :>
> You say you wouldn't insist on the innocence of your perspective with
> respect to power. Why this word "innocence", which hints at a connection
> between power and guilt? Do you regard power as tainted with guilt?
> Is the ideal, then, that we should all be powerless?
maybe not guilt in the moral christian sense. maybe instead of
innocence i should have said "purity" or "freedom from power"?
should we all be powerless? well, in a certain sense, that's
very hard to imagine. but in the sense in which power owes
its existence to inequality, and the less inequality there is,
the less power there is, if we were all relatively powerless
as a group, then no one would be all that powerless individually.
> I cannot try to explain to you how foucault's discussion makes your concerns
> irrelevant or beside the point, because I don't see how it could do that --
> how can anything anybody thinks make _your_ concerns irrelevant?
sorry - if i overreacted, it was only b/c you had said "foucault is
not about" so-and-so. now i understand that you meant, "it could be
useful to read foucault in a way other than" so-and-so and i'm trying
my best to evaluate that usefulness for myself.
> I also
> cannot say what "criminality" or "science" mean to me -- they can mean so many
> different things, depending on the circumstances: on whether I happen to be
> a criminal, a victim of a crime, a juror, a witness, a claimant in an
> anti-pollution suit, a psychiatrist, a psychiatric patient, a laboratory
> worker, etc.
i never said there weren't other valid circumstances. what i was
trying to do was to ground the discussion in something material -
i mentioned _the bell curve_ as a material example of science-as-power
and in return for that gesture of coming out of the closet of the
abstract, i was asking for one example - not "the one examplar" -
in return, of your material interests, assuming from what you'd said
that your interests were more valid to you than "getting the goodies
of the present system" or however you put it.
malgosia this has been fun but also difficult and time-consuming for
me, so i'll have to say good-bye, at least for a day or two or three
or more . . .
peace.
sig http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891/pics.html