Hi!
In order to see if I am understanding Foucault's _The Archaeology
of ideas_, allow me to try to summarize up to about Ch. 4:
Please tell me if I am missimg something important.
Foucault says that the common "unities" (things such as fields
of law, psychoanalysis), etc., all have gaps and interruptions in
their domains of objects.
Foucault is making an experimental suspension of the usual
structural categories in order to observe, from the outside, what
regularities he can find among diverse groups of statements. That
these statements are in different "unities" is no problem. Foucault
proposes "discursive formations" that show regularities in
regulationship that cut across categories of fields, cross from one
"unity" to another. It is not a relationship between structures, but
a recognition of common relationships between fields or unities.
The new method of analysis has no empirical basis (because that
would be too normative(?) and structural), but is rather a tentative
method for forming a new web of ideas not based upon the old system
of "unities" which Foucault finds filled with incompatible levels,
gaps, thresholds, limits, inconsistencies.
So, how's that?
Gloria
In order to see if I am understanding Foucault's _The Archaeology
of ideas_, allow me to try to summarize up to about Ch. 4:
Please tell me if I am missimg something important.
Foucault says that the common "unities" (things such as fields
of law, psychoanalysis), etc., all have gaps and interruptions in
their domains of objects.
Foucault is making an experimental suspension of the usual
structural categories in order to observe, from the outside, what
regularities he can find among diverse groups of statements. That
these statements are in different "unities" is no problem. Foucault
proposes "discursive formations" that show regularities in
regulationship that cut across categories of fields, cross from one
"unity" to another. It is not a relationship between structures, but
a recognition of common relationships between fields or unities.
The new method of analysis has no empirical basis (because that
would be too normative(?) and structural), but is rather a tentative
method for forming a new web of ideas not based upon the old system
of "unities" which Foucault finds filled with incompatible levels,
gaps, thresholds, limits, inconsistencies.
So, how's that?
Gloria