File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2000/foucault.0010, message 17


Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 15:25:33 -0700
From: Dan Smith <dls216-AT-psu.edu>
Subject: re: Re: Abstract machines & Assemblages



Julio - You may find Deleuze's book on Foucault, entitled _Foucault_, 
helpful. Attend especially to where Deleuze talks about the Panopticon 
as a diagram, where I think it is fair to say that Deleuze thinks of the
diagram 
as an abstract machine. Moreover, Deleuze's discussion of prisoners, prisons,
and various discourses (in)directly related to prisons and bodies is an 
indirect discussion of assemblages (actualizations of the Panopticon 
abstract machine as forms of expression and forms of content).  
I'd provise some page numbers, but I don't have access to the book 
right now.

You may also want to check out Deleuze's "Desire and Pleasure"
essay in _Foucault and his Interlocutors_.

Caveat: remember, Deleuze has a way of getting at the heart of a thinker,
but he also reads to produce particular effects. Put crudely, 
I think Deleuze is simultaneously a brilliant and profoundly 
idiosyncratic reader of Foucault. That's a good thing in my book,
but that's my book. Good luck with your project.

Cheers,
Dan Smith

At 03:03 PM 10/12/00 -0500, you wrote: 
>
> Dear Dr. Matthew King, 
>
>         Thank you for responding to my inquiry regarding Foucault and
> "abstract machines" 
> and "assemblages." I will look into History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and
see if
> I can see a 
> parallel to Deleuze and Guattari. Thanks again. 
>
> All the best, 
>
> Julio Varela 



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