Foucault uses "commentary" in "The order of things" and in several of
the interviews collected in "Foucault live".One point Foucault is
making in "The order of Things" is that most "history" is a commentary
on the past written from the perspective of the present. The history
of biology, for example, is written backward as a celebration of
Darwin's triumph over the darkness and confusion which reigned before.
The contribution of every pre-darwinian biologist is looked at from
the perspective of the question "Did this point to Darwin or in
another direction?". This makes everyone either pre-darwinian or
wrong. This is not a perspective which allows us to ask if what any
given person was saying made sense and was worth saying by the
standards not of our time but of theirs. If you think that history
ought to be a creation myth for our time commentary on the past is
fine. If you want to understand not the present but the past,
commentary is useless.
On the jump from beliefs to systems of belief, I can only ask you
two rhetorical questions. "Do you admitt to having a political
ideology and if so what does this mean to you" and the same question
only substituting "personality" for "political ideology". When I
admitt to having a political ideology what I mean is that if a
competant researcher where given my answers to several questions about
political issues she could make a better than chance guess about how I
might answer most other questions about political issues. When I
admitt to having a personality, what I mean is that observation of my
behavior in one context might allow this same researcher to make a
good guess as to how I might respond in some other superficially
unrelated context. For example, watching how I drive might give her a
clue as to how I might respond to some guy who bumps me in a bar and
accidently spills beer on my shirt. I admitt to having both a
personality and a political ideology and believe that I follow the
human rule in this rather than being the exception. A lot of research
is based on this idea, the idea that beliefs and therefor tendencies
of response are not random and unconnected but arranged in systems.
Some of this research is based on the further assumption that these
belief structures are layered: that some attitudes sit closer to the
individuals' core than others and that those that sit closer can, for
many practical purposes, be thought of as constraining those which are
less central. I personally prefer a model which labels those attitudes
which are most central as ideology. I think of ideology as the
cognitive aspect of personality: ideology is what a person can not
help believeing just given the kind of person he or she is. I take
this idea seriously enough to believe that a real change in ideology
always involves some kind of deep personal transformation. For
example, while I am not a christian, I take being "born again" as a
real psychological process involving creation of a new self based on
interpollation of a set of ideas about God and being in a personal
relationship with God. If the "born again" experience is real, these
ideas don't seem like "just attitudes" at all but like insights into
the nature of a timeless truth. I don't see being "born again" as a
positive thing but I do see it as a real transformation of the self.
Ideas matter. Ideas can and do change people. I don't typically find
the kind of self that results from being changed by Jesus very
interesting and I do not want to live in a world where christian
"insight" is "knowledge" that would allow one to construct a
commentary pathologizing anyone whose sense of self and the world is
not based on these "insights". We are in the middle of a culture war
here in these (barely) United States. This war is being fought out
between those who are willing to see America turned into a Christian
Republic in the same sense that Iran is an Islamic Republic and those
who feel the need, for whatever reason, to resist this. It is not a
simple matter of christian versus non-christian. Some christians are
actually part of the resistence. I do think beliefs, even beliefs
about things that superficially don't have much to do with each other,
are connected in ways that justify a reference to system. For example,
"Do you think that touching Monica Lewinsky's bobbies rises to the
level of an impeachable offense?" superficially has little content in
common with "God's will as revealed in the bible is law even for those
who do not believe." But I would be willing to bet that knowing how
the one was answered would give me a clue as to how the other would be
answered. I'd even go further and guess that, in a structural equation
model, the arrow ought to point from "God's Will" to "Monica's
Bobbies" rather than the other way around.
On grammar rules. I'm sorry you don't find that metaphor useful.
I do. As a child, I did not learn any grammar rules but I learned to
speak southern english, the english I heard around me. A well trained
linguist could, after listening to a tape of me speaking at age 10,
make a pretty good guess as to my origin both regional and in terms of
social class. She could do so by noticing the rules of grammar and
usage I obeyed. Noticing, for example, that I greatly preferred to
place the accent of a two syllable word on the first syllable, as in
saying PO! LICE rather than PO LICE!. I'm thinking of grammar as
descriptive rather than prescriptive. About this same time, I learned
to act about like most of the other kids. Most of this learning was
not about being explicitly taught rules either. But, a good Vygotskian
well versed in american cultural norms could have, after about a half
hour of interaction, placed the 10 year old I was regionally and
socially on the basis of observing the rules my interaction style
obeyed. The 10 year old I was would have had a harder time stating
these rules than the Vgotskian after that brief half hour. We learn to
be particular kinds of people just as we learn to speak a particular
dialect. We are, in most cases, taught neither grammar rules nor
ideology in any explicit fashion. We learn to be human and to speak by
watching and listening and it is usually the case that it is possible
to guess where we learned to be human and to speak on the basis of
noticing which rules "go without saying", which rules we follow
without even having to think about it. I would agree with you that
saying and doing is practice not belief. I would argue, however, that
both saying and doing are guided by beliefs so central as to "go
without saying". Making someone look at "what goes without saying"
can sometimes be as disorienting as asking a centiped "How do you know
which of those legs to move first?". You're also right in saying that
most people most of the time do not take that kind of question
seriously. The real fun, for me anyway, starts when I do. I love
Foucault not because he comes forward saying "I will tell you the
truth" but rather "Everything you think you know is wrong and I've got
a story to tell you which will prove it.".
Over and out, Good Buddy,
Tony Michael Roberts
ps. Prove to me that its PO LICE! and not PO! LICE and "there" not
"ther"! Let me add that I say "PO! LICE ride in squad cars." but "By
1850, desire had come to be PO LICED! by medicine rather than
religion." only because I first learned to use that word as a verb in
college.
---henry sholar <hwsholar@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:59:43 -0800 (PST) Tony Roberts
> <fdrtikol@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Great response! You're right. What matters more than belief is
> > practice. I still believe, however, that what "goes without saying"
> > underwrites such practices in exactly the way that grammar rules
> > underwrite and justify "correct usage" of a langauge. People of a
> > community can be relied upon to do the right thing (practices) from
> > the perspective of the community because a certain interpretation of
> > "the right thing", a certain sense of legitamite obligation and
proper
> > restraint, goes without saying for all "decent people", decent
people
> > being "us" from the perspective of the community. Knowing what the
> > right thing to do is and doing it is what being "decent people"
means
> > within any community
>
> well, hello levi-strauss, ain't seen you since savage mind.
>
> > I was trying to use the word "commentary" in Foucault's special
> > sense of that word. One question I was asking was "this is what I
> > think Foucault means by "commentary", does this make sense or am I
> > somehow misreading Foucault?" I choose the example of a minstral
show
> > put on by Duke and company trying to make it clear that by
commentary
> > I meant a story about a community which would not be seen as at all
> > fair or accurate from the point of view of that community. A story
> > which did not serve the interests of that community but only the
> > interests of those who reject the members of that community.
>
> such complications spell out a great more than just what you
subscribe
> (to). weaving this particular pattern in a vacuum gets you where?
> ressentiment against the dukes? i cna get that easier. a framework
of
> "what's going on"? well, i don't see it as helpful towards diagnosis.
>
> again, why stage a show about people who reject members of a
community?
>
> > I agree that flexibility is a pretty good measure of the health
of
> > a community. As Rokeach pointed out, a belief system serves two
broad
> > functions. One, it structurally couples the behavoir of the
individual
> > to reality. Two, it insulates the individual from aspects of reality
> > which are too threatening to cope with. Rokeach defined persons as
> > being relatively open minded or close minded depending on the degree
> > to which this second function interfered with the first function.
The
> > people whose belief systems operated more as a mechanism of denial
> > than as a mechanism of coping Rokeach labled as dogmatic. I would
have
> > no problem with the idea that some communities are healther than
> > others in the sense that the communities shared belief system has
more
> > to do with careing and coping than with denial. I would also expect
> > that the stories told about the other within a healthy community
would
> > have less to do with "commentary".
>
> I missed where "belief" became a "system" and why trhis is so
> definitive of a community. so much so that it appears to me that
> belief system is a rigid grammar you're still pushing that i think is
> wrong. if there are beliefs that strongly mold the community, i
think
> that many of them are convoluted, unarticulatable and mostly
> transparent to members of the community. even, shall we say, Amish
and
> othe cultic communities (ie, communities "based on faith")
>
>
> Commentary is precisely a story
> > about the other designed to deny validity to the others' perceptions
> > and experience. The members of a healthy community would probably
not
> > be threatened enough by the other to feel the need to construct pure
> > commentary. Their stories about the other would be more guided by
> > healthy curiosity and a desire to deal fairly than by denial. But, I
> > would still argue that any story told be "us" about "them" will have
> > some aspect of commentary in what I take to be Foucault's sense.
Even
> > a story about why gays should have rights told by an open minded
> > "straight but not narrow" academic will, I think, have an aspect of
> > commentary to the extent that it is a story about how "we"
(straights)
> > should threat them. I can tell you from my own experience in class
> > that it's very hard not to fall into commentary when discussing any
> > person different in a way that would make that person "them" rather
> > than "one of us" from the point of view of the typical student.
> > Thanks for responding,
> > Tony Michael Roberts
>
>
>
> objectification of the other is objectification of the other, and
i/we
> do it all the time because our culture is built on it. i am learning
> how to shrug and shudder and resist it (i hope). but i don't think
i'd
> take F's commentary this route.
>
> where, by the by, is F using the word?
>
> kindest regards,
> henry
>
>
==
"Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt and dance like no one is watching." Richard M. Nixon
"We are all Jews and we are all Germans." Michel Foucault
"The sympathy of the walnut for the human head that makes walnuts a cure for headaches and head wounds would be unknown except that the walnut looks like a brain." Michel Foucault
_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
the interviews collected in "Foucault live".One point Foucault is
making in "The order of Things" is that most "history" is a commentary
on the past written from the perspective of the present. The history
of biology, for example, is written backward as a celebration of
Darwin's triumph over the darkness and confusion which reigned before.
The contribution of every pre-darwinian biologist is looked at from
the perspective of the question "Did this point to Darwin or in
another direction?". This makes everyone either pre-darwinian or
wrong. This is not a perspective which allows us to ask if what any
given person was saying made sense and was worth saying by the
standards not of our time but of theirs. If you think that history
ought to be a creation myth for our time commentary on the past is
fine. If you want to understand not the present but the past,
commentary is useless.
On the jump from beliefs to systems of belief, I can only ask you
two rhetorical questions. "Do you admitt to having a political
ideology and if so what does this mean to you" and the same question
only substituting "personality" for "political ideology". When I
admitt to having a political ideology what I mean is that if a
competant researcher where given my answers to several questions about
political issues she could make a better than chance guess about how I
might answer most other questions about political issues. When I
admitt to having a personality, what I mean is that observation of my
behavior in one context might allow this same researcher to make a
good guess as to how I might respond in some other superficially
unrelated context. For example, watching how I drive might give her a
clue as to how I might respond to some guy who bumps me in a bar and
accidently spills beer on my shirt. I admitt to having both a
personality and a political ideology and believe that I follow the
human rule in this rather than being the exception. A lot of research
is based on this idea, the idea that beliefs and therefor tendencies
of response are not random and unconnected but arranged in systems.
Some of this research is based on the further assumption that these
belief structures are layered: that some attitudes sit closer to the
individuals' core than others and that those that sit closer can, for
many practical purposes, be thought of as constraining those which are
less central. I personally prefer a model which labels those attitudes
which are most central as ideology. I think of ideology as the
cognitive aspect of personality: ideology is what a person can not
help believeing just given the kind of person he or she is. I take
this idea seriously enough to believe that a real change in ideology
always involves some kind of deep personal transformation. For
example, while I am not a christian, I take being "born again" as a
real psychological process involving creation of a new self based on
interpollation of a set of ideas about God and being in a personal
relationship with God. If the "born again" experience is real, these
ideas don't seem like "just attitudes" at all but like insights into
the nature of a timeless truth. I don't see being "born again" as a
positive thing but I do see it as a real transformation of the self.
Ideas matter. Ideas can and do change people. I don't typically find
the kind of self that results from being changed by Jesus very
interesting and I do not want to live in a world where christian
"insight" is "knowledge" that would allow one to construct a
commentary pathologizing anyone whose sense of self and the world is
not based on these "insights". We are in the middle of a culture war
here in these (barely) United States. This war is being fought out
between those who are willing to see America turned into a Christian
Republic in the same sense that Iran is an Islamic Republic and those
who feel the need, for whatever reason, to resist this. It is not a
simple matter of christian versus non-christian. Some christians are
actually part of the resistence. I do think beliefs, even beliefs
about things that superficially don't have much to do with each other,
are connected in ways that justify a reference to system. For example,
"Do you think that touching Monica Lewinsky's bobbies rises to the
level of an impeachable offense?" superficially has little content in
common with "God's will as revealed in the bible is law even for those
who do not believe." But I would be willing to bet that knowing how
the one was answered would give me a clue as to how the other would be
answered. I'd even go further and guess that, in a structural equation
model, the arrow ought to point from "God's Will" to "Monica's
Bobbies" rather than the other way around.
On grammar rules. I'm sorry you don't find that metaphor useful.
I do. As a child, I did not learn any grammar rules but I learned to
speak southern english, the english I heard around me. A well trained
linguist could, after listening to a tape of me speaking at age 10,
make a pretty good guess as to my origin both regional and in terms of
social class. She could do so by noticing the rules of grammar and
usage I obeyed. Noticing, for example, that I greatly preferred to
place the accent of a two syllable word on the first syllable, as in
saying PO! LICE rather than PO LICE!. I'm thinking of grammar as
descriptive rather than prescriptive. About this same time, I learned
to act about like most of the other kids. Most of this learning was
not about being explicitly taught rules either. But, a good Vygotskian
well versed in american cultural norms could have, after about a half
hour of interaction, placed the 10 year old I was regionally and
socially on the basis of observing the rules my interaction style
obeyed. The 10 year old I was would have had a harder time stating
these rules than the Vgotskian after that brief half hour. We learn to
be particular kinds of people just as we learn to speak a particular
dialect. We are, in most cases, taught neither grammar rules nor
ideology in any explicit fashion. We learn to be human and to speak by
watching and listening and it is usually the case that it is possible
to guess where we learned to be human and to speak on the basis of
noticing which rules "go without saying", which rules we follow
without even having to think about it. I would agree with you that
saying and doing is practice not belief. I would argue, however, that
both saying and doing are guided by beliefs so central as to "go
without saying". Making someone look at "what goes without saying"
can sometimes be as disorienting as asking a centiped "How do you know
which of those legs to move first?". You're also right in saying that
most people most of the time do not take that kind of question
seriously. The real fun, for me anyway, starts when I do. I love
Foucault not because he comes forward saying "I will tell you the
truth" but rather "Everything you think you know is wrong and I've got
a story to tell you which will prove it.".
Over and out, Good Buddy,
Tony Michael Roberts
ps. Prove to me that its PO LICE! and not PO! LICE and "there" not
"ther"! Let me add that I say "PO! LICE ride in squad cars." but "By
1850, desire had come to be PO LICED! by medicine rather than
religion." only because I first learned to use that word as a verb in
college.
---henry sholar <hwsholar@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Jan 1999 10:59:43 -0800 (PST) Tony Roberts
> <fdrtikol@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Great response! You're right. What matters more than belief is
> > practice. I still believe, however, that what "goes without saying"
> > underwrites such practices in exactly the way that grammar rules
> > underwrite and justify "correct usage" of a langauge. People of a
> > community can be relied upon to do the right thing (practices) from
> > the perspective of the community because a certain interpretation of
> > "the right thing", a certain sense of legitamite obligation and
proper
> > restraint, goes without saying for all "decent people", decent
people
> > being "us" from the perspective of the community. Knowing what the
> > right thing to do is and doing it is what being "decent people"
means
> > within any community
>
> well, hello levi-strauss, ain't seen you since savage mind.
>
> > I was trying to use the word "commentary" in Foucault's special
> > sense of that word. One question I was asking was "this is what I
> > think Foucault means by "commentary", does this make sense or am I
> > somehow misreading Foucault?" I choose the example of a minstral
show
> > put on by Duke and company trying to make it clear that by
commentary
> > I meant a story about a community which would not be seen as at all
> > fair or accurate from the point of view of that community. A story
> > which did not serve the interests of that community but only the
> > interests of those who reject the members of that community.
>
> such complications spell out a great more than just what you
subscribe
> (to). weaving this particular pattern in a vacuum gets you where?
> ressentiment against the dukes? i cna get that easier. a framework
of
> "what's going on"? well, i don't see it as helpful towards diagnosis.
>
> again, why stage a show about people who reject members of a
community?
>
> > I agree that flexibility is a pretty good measure of the health
of
> > a community. As Rokeach pointed out, a belief system serves two
broad
> > functions. One, it structurally couples the behavoir of the
individual
> > to reality. Two, it insulates the individual from aspects of reality
> > which are too threatening to cope with. Rokeach defined persons as
> > being relatively open minded or close minded depending on the degree
> > to which this second function interfered with the first function.
The
> > people whose belief systems operated more as a mechanism of denial
> > than as a mechanism of coping Rokeach labled as dogmatic. I would
have
> > no problem with the idea that some communities are healther than
> > others in the sense that the communities shared belief system has
more
> > to do with careing and coping than with denial. I would also expect
> > that the stories told about the other within a healthy community
would
> > have less to do with "commentary".
>
> I missed where "belief" became a "system" and why trhis is so
> definitive of a community. so much so that it appears to me that
> belief system is a rigid grammar you're still pushing that i think is
> wrong. if there are beliefs that strongly mold the community, i
think
> that many of them are convoluted, unarticulatable and mostly
> transparent to members of the community. even, shall we say, Amish
and
> othe cultic communities (ie, communities "based on faith")
>
>
> Commentary is precisely a story
> > about the other designed to deny validity to the others' perceptions
> > and experience. The members of a healthy community would probably
not
> > be threatened enough by the other to feel the need to construct pure
> > commentary. Their stories about the other would be more guided by
> > healthy curiosity and a desire to deal fairly than by denial. But, I
> > would still argue that any story told be "us" about "them" will have
> > some aspect of commentary in what I take to be Foucault's sense.
Even
> > a story about why gays should have rights told by an open minded
> > "straight but not narrow" academic will, I think, have an aspect of
> > commentary to the extent that it is a story about how "we"
(straights)
> > should threat them. I can tell you from my own experience in class
> > that it's very hard not to fall into commentary when discussing any
> > person different in a way that would make that person "them" rather
> > than "one of us" from the point of view of the typical student.
> > Thanks for responding,
> > Tony Michael Roberts
>
>
>
> objectification of the other is objectification of the other, and
i/we
> do it all the time because our culture is built on it. i am learning
> how to shrug and shudder and resist it (i hope). but i don't think
i'd
> take F's commentary this route.
>
> where, by the by, is F using the word?
>
> kindest regards,
> henry
>
>
==
"Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt and dance like no one is watching." Richard M. Nixon
"We are all Jews and we are all Germans." Michel Foucault
"The sympathy of the walnut for the human head that makes walnuts a cure for headaches and head wounds would be unknown except that the walnut looks like a brain." Michel Foucault
_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com