Sun 17 Mar 2002 12:00
what is the time when just letting mind drift & focus where it goes, such as after talking with Asha-
jete  - yeta
mind considers possibilities.

post-postmodern

George Ritzer
Modern Sociological Theory
p 459
Ideas of Michel Foucault

playing piano

making something, not writing, not working on computer? - piano / key board - music for emotion, for dance. mp3/minidisc player like before.

make a piano?

what else could I do to broaden emotional range, create experience to look forward to--

yet is very self-determined (independent?)--not dependent on others for quality as are dance classes

tai chi video?

all of that is instrumental to my reading writing work? It seems that all I'm doing I'm doing to help me maintain motivation for my reading/writing/publishing work, as if I could maintain the constant motivation, that's all I'd do, because the culminating effect of it is clear, and it is dependent only on access to other's work, the internet, and computer, and self.

There are times when I have been dancing/with others/etc... windsurfing, when I know, this is what I'm living for, not the reading and writing.

And recently, I have made it clear to myself, that again, relationship interaction is a part of the culminating experience
but even that,

such an antithesis to what was revealed in radical feminism reading

the pleasure/challenge in these relationships is often only apparent after deprivation, not any further ahead of time. Like a maintenance dose. I know I should be spending time with people but as to how, why, or ?? I am not sure. They do broaden me like books and ideas-- but it is not always clear who will, how they will, who will the most.

And there is the routine pleasure, like with Carmen. a hug and a visit three days a week.

George Ritzer
Modern Sociological Theory
p 459
Ideas of Michel Foucault

Foucault has no sense of some deep, ultimate truth; there are simply ever more layers to be peeled away. There is a phenomenological influence, but Foucault rejects the idea of an autonomous, meaning-giving subject. There is a strong element of structuralism but no formal rule-governed model of behavior. Foucault adopts Nietzsche's interest in the relationship between power and knowledge.

Two ideas are at the core of Foucault's methodology--"achaeology of knowledge" (Foucault, 1966) and "geneology of power" (Foucault, 1969).

p460
Alan Sheridan (1980:48) contends that Foucault's archaeolgy of knowledge involves a search for "a set of rules that determine the conditions of posibility for all that can be said within the particular discourse at any given time."

archaeology is the search for the "general system of the formation and transformation of statements [into discursive formations]" (Dean, 1994:16). The search for such a "general system," or such "rules," as well as the focus on discourse--spoken and written "documents"--reflects the early influence of structuralism on Foucault's work.

Foucault does not seek to "understand" these documents as would a hermenueticist.

Foucault's archaeology "organises the document, divides it up, distributes it, orders, arranges it in levels, establishes series, distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not, discovers elements, defines unities, describes relations" (Dean, 1994:15). Discourse and the documents it produces are to be analyzed, described, and organized; they are irreducible and not subject to interpretation seeking some "deeper" level of understanding.

Foucault is interested in those discourses "that seek to rationalise or systematise themselves in relation to particular ways of 'saying the true'" (Dean,1994:32).

Archaeology is able to distance and detach itself from "the norms and criteria of validity of established sciences and disciplines in favour of the internal intelligibility of the ensembles so located, their conditions of emergence, existence, and transformation" (Dean, 1994:36).

o Is there a better way to work with these texts than typing in relevant parts?

The concern for "saying the truth" relates directly to Foucault's geneology of power, since, as Foucault comes to see it, knowledge and power are inextricably intertwined (Foucult is here heavily indebted to the philosoph of Nietzsche). Genealogy is "a way of linking historical contents into organised and ordered trajectories that are neither the simple unfolding of their origins no the necessary realisation of their ends. It is a way of analysing multiple, open-ended, heterogeneous trajectories of discourses, practices , and events, and of establishing their patterned relationships, without recourse to regims of truth that claim pseudo-natrualistic laes or global necessities" (Dean, 1994:35-36).

Genealogy is inherently critical, involving a "tireless interrogation of what is held to be given, necessary, natural or neutral" (Dean, 1994:20).

Genealogy is concerned with the relationship between knowlede and power within the human sceinces and their "practices concerned with the regulation of bodies, the government of conduct, and the formation of self" (Dean, 1994:154)

the conditions which hold at any one moment for the 'saying the true'.

Thus, "where archaeology had earlier addresed the rules of formation of discourse, the new critical and genealogical description addresses both the rarity of statements and the power of the affirmative" (Dean, 1994:33).

Archaelogy performs tasks that are necessary in order to do geneology. Archaeology involves empirical analyses of historical discourses, while genealogy undertakes a serial and critical analysis of these historical discourses and their relationship to issues of concern in the contemporary world.
p461
geneology is to be a "history of the present."
not an "unwitting projection of a strucutre of interpretation that arises from the historian's own experience or context onto aspects of the past under study" (Dean, 1994:21).

Foucault seeks to illuminate the present using "historical resources to reflect upon the contingency, singularity, interconnections, and potentialities of diverse trajectories of those elements which compose present social arrangements as experience" (Dean, 1994:21). Foucault is oriented to the critical use of history to make present possibilities intelligible.

IN his geneology of power, Foucault is concerned with how people govern themselves and others through the production of knowledge. Among other things, he sees knowledge generating power by constituting people as subjects and hten governing the subjects with the knowledge.

Foucault does not see a conspiracy by elite-- Foucault is more inclined to see structural relationships, especially between  knowledge and power, not conscious actors.

Foucault sees history lurching from one system of domination (based on knowledge) to another.

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