Funny this conversation has become one of Foucault's ideas on experience. I
highly doubt Foucault would have wanted to his work to be interpreted
excessively through a lens of philosophy of experience or being. He
criticized and perhaps unfairly his book "The History of Madness" because he
felt it was too centered on "experience. However, to return to your debate,
I think Foucault wanted his ideas on experience to be interpreted more
through the lens of being subjects of discursive formation, power relations,
and, in the late work, the lens of subjectivization, how we become subject,
our practices of self versus social techniques of control.
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 2:51 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi <
critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Kevin Turner <kevin.turner@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >> Therefore, Foucault refused to impose "sexuality" onto Greeks and
> >> Romans, not speaking of the "Greco-Roman experience of sexuality" or
> >> things like that.
> >
> > True, but he does talk about the "Greco-Roman experience of
> > aphrodisia" or "the Christian experience of the 'flesh,' and he
> > talks about these as being the condition of possibility for
> > 'the formation and development of the experience of sexuality
> > from the eighteenth century onward.' The fact still remains that
> > he is not referring to subjective experience, but nor is he talking
> > about experience as a historical process (i.e. in Hegelian terms).
> > Rather, experience is a means of rendering certain historical
> > processes intelligible, and rendering them intelligibly by way of
> > a history of the relations that have obtained between subjectivity and
> truth.
>
> It would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of the term
> expérience in Foucault's works, identifying where and how often the
> term appears and analyzing how it is used. Such an analysis may help
> us better understand whether Foucault thought "being" was always
> already constituted as "experience" or "being" had historically come
> to be constituted as "experience." To my knowledge, though, Foucault
> never did any archeology of "experience" as such nor did he elevate
> the level of his critical elaboration of the term to that of, say,
> truth, power, knowledge, etc.
>
> >> "Sexuality," "madness," etc., or "economy," etc., may one day cease to
> >> exist, and we may consider under what historical conditions they will
> >> cease to be intelligible. But till then these historically
> >> constituted domains of practice will rule our social relations in ways
> >> that are not subject to conscious individual choice. As a matter of
> >> fact, even as we speak now, "sexuality," for instance, is likely to be
> >> becoming an intelligible experience for larger proportions of people
> >> in the world than before.
> >
> > but that does not mean that sexuality exists - it is not a pre-given
> > object (as Foucault says of madness: 'We can certainly say that
> > madness "does not exist," but this does not mean that it is nothing',
> > STP: 118), but is, as you say, an "historically
> > constituted domains of practices."
>
> Nothing is a pre-given object but that doesn't mean that what has come
> to be historically constituted doesn't exist in ways that objectively
> shape the lives of people nor is it "less real" than, say, DNA. It's
> not a matter of false consciousness that a correct understanding on
> the part of an individual can dispel. That I think is what we can
> take from Foucault as well as others who help us historicize.
>
> Yoshie
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
>
--
Chetan Vemuri
West Des Moines, IA
aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx
(515)-418-2771
"You say you want a Revolution! Well you know, we all want to change the
world"
highly doubt Foucault would have wanted to his work to be interpreted
excessively through a lens of philosophy of experience or being. He
criticized and perhaps unfairly his book "The History of Madness" because he
felt it was too centered on "experience. However, to return to your debate,
I think Foucault wanted his ideas on experience to be interpreted more
through the lens of being subjects of discursive formation, power relations,
and, in the late work, the lens of subjectivization, how we become subject,
our practices of self versus social techniques of control.
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 2:51 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi <
critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Kevin Turner <kevin.turner@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >> Therefore, Foucault refused to impose "sexuality" onto Greeks and
> >> Romans, not speaking of the "Greco-Roman experience of sexuality" or
> >> things like that.
> >
> > True, but he does talk about the "Greco-Roman experience of
> > aphrodisia" or "the Christian experience of the 'flesh,' and he
> > talks about these as being the condition of possibility for
> > 'the formation and development of the experience of sexuality
> > from the eighteenth century onward.' The fact still remains that
> > he is not referring to subjective experience, but nor is he talking
> > about experience as a historical process (i.e. in Hegelian terms).
> > Rather, experience is a means of rendering certain historical
> > processes intelligible, and rendering them intelligibly by way of
> > a history of the relations that have obtained between subjectivity and
> truth.
>
> It would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of the term
> expérience in Foucault's works, identifying where and how often the
> term appears and analyzing how it is used. Such an analysis may help
> us better understand whether Foucault thought "being" was always
> already constituted as "experience" or "being" had historically come
> to be constituted as "experience." To my knowledge, though, Foucault
> never did any archeology of "experience" as such nor did he elevate
> the level of his critical elaboration of the term to that of, say,
> truth, power, knowledge, etc.
>
> >> "Sexuality," "madness," etc., or "economy," etc., may one day cease to
> >> exist, and we may consider under what historical conditions they will
> >> cease to be intelligible. But till then these historically
> >> constituted domains of practice will rule our social relations in ways
> >> that are not subject to conscious individual choice. As a matter of
> >> fact, even as we speak now, "sexuality," for instance, is likely to be
> >> becoming an intelligible experience for larger proportions of people
> >> in the world than before.
> >
> > but that does not mean that sexuality exists - it is not a pre-given
> > object (as Foucault says of madness: 'We can certainly say that
> > madness "does not exist," but this does not mean that it is nothing',
> > STP: 118), but is, as you say, an "historically
> > constituted domains of practices."
>
> Nothing is a pre-given object but that doesn't mean that what has come
> to be historically constituted doesn't exist in ways that objectively
> shape the lives of people nor is it "less real" than, say, DNA. It's
> not a matter of false consciousness that a correct understanding on
> the part of an individual can dispel. That I think is what we can
> take from Foucault as well as others who help us historicize.
>
> Yoshie
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foucault-L mailing list
>
--
Chetan Vemuri
West Des Moines, IA
aryavartacnsrn@xxxxxxxxx
(515)-418-2771
"You say you want a Revolution! Well you know, we all want to change the
world"