This discussion is beginning to jog my memory, and I’m re-arriving at that point where I put Foucault away in my mental closet a few years ago. Very interesting…
Claire said:
>> Foucault often commented that his work was a toolbox and that people
>> should take from his work what they found useful and expand those ideas
>> into various areas they personally found of interest or were able to take
>> action in. He also suggests that in general we plunder the 'cultural
>> inventions of mankind' for 'devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so
>> on' that can be helpful as tools for analysing and attempting to change
>> the current situation. ('On the genealogy of ethics" , in Essential works
>> 1, p. 261).
At the time, I did accost my supervisor with this problem, and I remember that my supervisor replied in a similar vein, i.e., to engage with Foucault’s writings from a specific vantage point, take what I found useful from Foucault.
To elaborate what my ‘problem’ was, I was at that time trying to reconcile, well, shall we call it ‘the school of postcolonial thinking’ (for want of a better name) with Foucault’s mode of historical analysis.
The basic postcolonial proposition is that the discursive formation of the ‘West’ was and is contingent upon the discursive formation of an ‘Other’. This Saidean thesis is actually really easy to disprove, because it’s a generalization. All you need in order to disprove a generalization is come up with one or two specific counter-examples and it’s done. However, I did at that time, concede to it. I basically accepted it and premised my work on it and went from there.
So I guess, in some respects, I was trying to find a way to practice ‘thinking’ which does not colonize and is not colonized. And initially, of course, it seemed that Foucault was perfect because as long as you’re dealing with specificities, claiming nothing but specificities, you’re safe. Whatever specific ‘thought’ that one comes up at any one particular time doesn’t colonize and is not the result of your brain being colonized. So I happily genealogized away my thinking time… until…
I encountered ‘What is Enlightenment’. At the risk of oversimplification, I believe that that article was about Foucault divulging his affiliation, and he basically did identify himself as a member of the western enlightened boy’s club. To borrow a semiotic term, he disclosed the code system of himself, his work, and in describing what that code system was, he didn’t mention Terayama Shuji, he didn’t drop any Brazilian names. He mentioned names like Baudelaire, Kant, etc. In my previous mail, I said that I was upset that he hadn’t claimed the universality of his work. Well, I was equally upset that he didn’t claim absolute specificity for himself. Because the implication then is that doing archaeology/genealogy is to attire oneself in the ‘thinking’ style of a western enlightened boy.
So I guess a good solution to this conundrum is, as Clare has already suggested, to seek out another reading of Foucault’s work in his other articles, and claim: ‘I’m engaged in the thinking practice that deals in specificities.’ That’s really reasonable. That’s the solution my supervisor suggested to me as well. We could even dress up the solution with words like stupidity, make out that it's some sort of liminal philosophizing. That would be a fun enterprise. It’s just… I’m not happy to do that. I can’t put it into words, but there’s a problem that I feel should be addressed, which, now that I'm thinking about it, has to do with... code systems, maybe?... how does one deal with the presence of that which is neither universal or specific in theory... something like that.
kaori
Claire said:
>> Foucault often commented that his work was a toolbox and that people
>> should take from his work what they found useful and expand those ideas
>> into various areas they personally found of interest or were able to take
>> action in. He also suggests that in general we plunder the 'cultural
>> inventions of mankind' for 'devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so
>> on' that can be helpful as tools for analysing and attempting to change
>> the current situation. ('On the genealogy of ethics" , in Essential works
>> 1, p. 261).
At the time, I did accost my supervisor with this problem, and I remember that my supervisor replied in a similar vein, i.e., to engage with Foucault’s writings from a specific vantage point, take what I found useful from Foucault.
To elaborate what my ‘problem’ was, I was at that time trying to reconcile, well, shall we call it ‘the school of postcolonial thinking’ (for want of a better name) with Foucault’s mode of historical analysis.
The basic postcolonial proposition is that the discursive formation of the ‘West’ was and is contingent upon the discursive formation of an ‘Other’. This Saidean thesis is actually really easy to disprove, because it’s a generalization. All you need in order to disprove a generalization is come up with one or two specific counter-examples and it’s done. However, I did at that time, concede to it. I basically accepted it and premised my work on it and went from there.
So I guess, in some respects, I was trying to find a way to practice ‘thinking’ which does not colonize and is not colonized. And initially, of course, it seemed that Foucault was perfect because as long as you’re dealing with specificities, claiming nothing but specificities, you’re safe. Whatever specific ‘thought’ that one comes up at any one particular time doesn’t colonize and is not the result of your brain being colonized. So I happily genealogized away my thinking time… until…
I encountered ‘What is Enlightenment’. At the risk of oversimplification, I believe that that article was about Foucault divulging his affiliation, and he basically did identify himself as a member of the western enlightened boy’s club. To borrow a semiotic term, he disclosed the code system of himself, his work, and in describing what that code system was, he didn’t mention Terayama Shuji, he didn’t drop any Brazilian names. He mentioned names like Baudelaire, Kant, etc. In my previous mail, I said that I was upset that he hadn’t claimed the universality of his work. Well, I was equally upset that he didn’t claim absolute specificity for himself. Because the implication then is that doing archaeology/genealogy is to attire oneself in the ‘thinking’ style of a western enlightened boy.
So I guess a good solution to this conundrum is, as Clare has already suggested, to seek out another reading of Foucault’s work in his other articles, and claim: ‘I’m engaged in the thinking practice that deals in specificities.’ That’s really reasonable. That’s the solution my supervisor suggested to me as well. We could even dress up the solution with words like stupidity, make out that it's some sort of liminal philosophizing. That would be a fun enterprise. It’s just… I’m not happy to do that. I can’t put it into words, but there’s a problem that I feel should be addressed, which, now that I'm thinking about it, has to do with... code systems, maybe?... how does one deal with the presence of that which is neither universal or specific in theory... something like that.
kaori