Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 10:01:37 -0500
From: Sheila LaFountain <slafoun-AT-emory.edu>
Subject: Re: Pinochet and disappeared (now nihilism)


kjrufo-AT-bellsouth.net wrote:
> Sheila LaFountain wrote:
> > ;-)))  I'm more interested for the moment in how your email (indirectly)
> > fosters pollution.
> Seriously?  My email a) uses electricity, which is currently fueled by burning finite

Okay but isn't it the paradigm of information technology that allows you
"trace" sources of responsibility and "figure out" outcomes?  I took D&P
and other of Foucault's work to be about the fact that this seems to be
how the techne of our age works. It provides the basis for our "feeling"
right or providing a "sense" that justice is in fact being done.  But
what would another paradign tell us instead?  To be sure we can pledge a
desire for social justice with  but sometimes it is difficult to tell
the difference between help, harm, justice, revenge, progress.  Some
might say that email is progress over lack of communication and using
trees for writing letters on paper products.  Perhaps email would keep
kids off the streets and out of drugs and killing one another.  Maybe
email would make them mad enough to go out and find the meany who wrote
the flame and teach him a thing or two.  Your suggestion that there are
sometimes unintended outcomes is a good point.

> 
> I guess that to me we are always in the middle, since the middle is as subjective a place in
> which to finf (define) oneself as is the outside.  Apart from that, I don't understand
> exactly what you're asking here...  If you're supposing that knowledge of potential
> consequences are ultimately unknowable, I imagine that almost everyone would agree.  I'm
> really just interested in opinions as to what to do from the standpoint of justice given our
> limitations and the elusive and often counterproductive ideal of social justice.  Are we to
> abandon notions of justice, dance around the historical object through redefinition, or
> plunge ahead nonetheless, knowing that we can't know the potential outcome?  Thoughts on
> that?
Do plunge ahead with the best of intentions.

> 
> > Is there someone who might give us a foucauldian analysis of what's
> > going on/been going on in chile by those people who've actually been
> > there and know something about what's going on?  That would be a very
> > interesting read.
> >
> 
> Indeed, though I fear the recent emails about the need for prolonged study make a prolonged
> analysis unlikely.
Perhaps but there are a number of excellent Foucauldians on this list
that would be glad to take good information coming out of the country
and spontaneously analyze it.. at least I think it's a good bet but you
just never know.

s