Date: Mon, 07 Sep 1998 17:45:32 +1200
From: Nesta <na.devine-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: Foucauldian examinations of The Market


Now, I am cautiously trying to avoid accusations of churlishness etc, 
but I want to know why there is an assumption that a mid-life change of 
career will bring about dialogue - or not, in the case of people who 
have apparently abandoned their former interests - 'burn'out' was the 
word, I think. Because it seems to me that the notion of 'dialogue' 
across the gap has a kind of dialectical underpinning, or perhaps the 
concept of the unity of knowledge - a very mediaeval view that in the 
end, all knowledge being the creation of one Being, it must have an 
internal logic. I would think that Foucault discussing the formation of 
disciplines rather suggests that they are constructs located in a time, 
place and culture, and therefore not open , necessarily to this kind of 
universality. It may be that there simply is no way that you can 
reconcile being a Presbyterian theologist with being a physicist. 
Perhaps. This might be an instance of Lyotard's 'differend'... 

Certainly if the connection is by way of analogy, I think it is very 
dubious, and yet it is common. The biologists' notion of evolution has 
been applied to economics, with in my opinion disastrous results, the 
notion of the individual has yet to be unravelled from Hobbes 
watchspring or whatever it was - analogy creates infinite work for 
genealogists.

Nesta