Date: Fri, 07 Feb 1997 16:09:37 -0600 From: Don Van Duyse <donvanduyse-AT-earthlink.net> Subject: Using Foucault I’m curious about what the possible thresholds of archaeological and genealogical analysis tell us about using Foucault’s works as models of inquiry. Can one, for example, do a Foucauldian analysis when limited to a large group context---a tribe, a street gang, let’s say? To what extent are we confined to study situations involving relatively fixed systems for inscribing statements? In Archaeology of Knowledge it is suggested that the possibility exists of studying painting, itself, archaeologically, perhaps in the sense of describing painted “knowledges” (a much different approach, I think, than his take on Las Meninas). And then, of course, genealogical inquiry engages the analysis of power as a “heterogenous ensemble of effects,” effects no less implicated in non-verbal than verbal phenomena. But at what threshold does a “Foucauldian” analysis loose its (admittedly provisional, or tactical) grasp on effects one might correlate in an effort to engage questions of power/knowledge? Must one, for example, study a state-level society with a sufficient degree of institutional complexity and redundancy---and must the state have crossed a threshold of "managing populations"--- for such a genealogy to hang together? What do such thresholds tell us about using/misusing Foucault? Additional Questions: If “discourse” or “power” are not quasi-universal categories, but tentative foci that suggest their own (fuzzy, unfixed) limits, can one not imagine spaces or events that exceed such a “Foucauldian glance?” Is that sort of imagination, perhaps, not a strong component of the sort of inquiry in question? When one “does genealogy,” for example, is one also not “undoing genealogy?” In addition to an objective methodology, aren’t we also compelled to follow the sense of Foucault’s texts as self-questioning, self-disruptive art forms? To the extent one organizes “Foucault” into methodological boxes, doesn’t one loose the quality of literary performance that allows his works to hang together as such? Was Foucault’s statement, to Jana Sawicki, an injunction for us to be more “scientific” and methodologically focused, or an encouragement to reinvent ourselves through artful, genealogical engagements? Or both? If Foucault's writings present a paradigm shift, isn’t aesthetics or artistry a key dimension of that shift?
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