Stuart,
I agree with most of what you said in your reply. I do think the
discontinuity/continuity issue is a complicated one. You say:
>I'm not sure I'd accept your characterisation of Foucault's lifework -
>to my mind it's the continuities that are the most interesting part of it,
>rather than the artifically (to my mind) named 'periods' of his work. This,
>of course, is similar to his refusal to be characterised as a 'thinker of
>discontinuity'... and i think there is a fairly characteristic approach (not
>a method, perhaps more a style) in his work throughout.
>
I agree that there is continuity in Foucault's work, as you say, a style
more than a systematically developed method seeking to clarify itself
totally in a cumulative development. What is difficult and problematic is
the conceptualisation of that style, of what takes place in it and why. What
interests me in this connection is Foucault's professed antipathy to
dialectics and the kind of continuity that entails (an anti-Hegelianism
expressed vehemently only in his early work perhaps), and if there is
continuity in Foucault's work (as is suggested by his "style") it is either
discontinuous or interruptive in a dialectical sense (and therefore true to
his expressed anti-dialectical statements) or somehow still dialectical to
some extent (and therefore problematic with regard to those statements). Its
unlikely that someone like Foucault, trained by the Hegel scholar Hyppolite,
had no idea about these (somewhat abstract philosophical) problems.
Nonetheless they rarely seem to enter into his "official" discourse,
especially from the 1970s onward, and are left unresolved because they are
perhaps unresolvable, which may have been an attempted strategy to confute
that spectre of Hegelianism that still haunts his thinking by directing
historical analyses towards transgression rather than the resolution of
contradictions.
What kind of continuity is encountered in a style? What kind of transitions
occur in this kind of thinking which is denoted by the performativity (and
therefore aesthetics) of a style? Can it be denied that despite the
continuity of a style there may nonetheless be some fairly significant
transitions, perhaps even mutations, within that style? What happens at
these moments and why? It seems to me that to give a sense of this would
require an additional performative that would not seek so much to synthesise
Foucault's style in some form of conceptual ordering, but to re-enact it
once more, though necessarily in a different way. But would the spectre of
dialectics be thereby laid to rest? In this regard, Foucualt's style and the
kind of experience it entails seems to be related to the problematic of
Bildung in German romanticism and idealism.
cheers
sebastian
I agree with most of what you said in your reply. I do think the
discontinuity/continuity issue is a complicated one. You say:
>I'm not sure I'd accept your characterisation of Foucault's lifework -
>to my mind it's the continuities that are the most interesting part of it,
>rather than the artifically (to my mind) named 'periods' of his work. This,
>of course, is similar to his refusal to be characterised as a 'thinker of
>discontinuity'... and i think there is a fairly characteristic approach (not
>a method, perhaps more a style) in his work throughout.
>
I agree that there is continuity in Foucault's work, as you say, a style
more than a systematically developed method seeking to clarify itself
totally in a cumulative development. What is difficult and problematic is
the conceptualisation of that style, of what takes place in it and why. What
interests me in this connection is Foucault's professed antipathy to
dialectics and the kind of continuity that entails (an anti-Hegelianism
expressed vehemently only in his early work perhaps), and if there is
continuity in Foucault's work (as is suggested by his "style") it is either
discontinuous or interruptive in a dialectical sense (and therefore true to
his expressed anti-dialectical statements) or somehow still dialectical to
some extent (and therefore problematic with regard to those statements). Its
unlikely that someone like Foucault, trained by the Hegel scholar Hyppolite,
had no idea about these (somewhat abstract philosophical) problems.
Nonetheless they rarely seem to enter into his "official" discourse,
especially from the 1970s onward, and are left unresolved because they are
perhaps unresolvable, which may have been an attempted strategy to confute
that spectre of Hegelianism that still haunts his thinking by directing
historical analyses towards transgression rather than the resolution of
contradictions.
What kind of continuity is encountered in a style? What kind of transitions
occur in this kind of thinking which is denoted by the performativity (and
therefore aesthetics) of a style? Can it be denied that despite the
continuity of a style there may nonetheless be some fairly significant
transitions, perhaps even mutations, within that style? What happens at
these moments and why? It seems to me that to give a sense of this would
require an additional performative that would not seek so much to synthesise
Foucault's style in some form of conceptual ordering, but to re-enact it
once more, though necessarily in a different way. But would the spectre of
dialectics be thereby laid to rest? In this regard, Foucualt's style and the
kind of experience it entails seems to be related to the problematic of
Bildung in German romanticism and idealism.
cheers
sebastian