Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 05:47:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Anita Berber <fdrtikol-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Teaching psychology at CC if Foucault is right


The "knowledge" which is the subject matter of psychology will be that
which one must presume to know in order to justify the disciplinary
interventions which constitute the subject within our current regime
of power. This "knowledge" will consist of unproblematic descriptions
of an immutable human nature, a description of "man" in Foucault's
sense as worked out in "The Order of Things", to exactly the extent
that the process of normalization which is discipline has succeeded.
   Given this, how does one teach "psychology" at a Community College?
How does teaching "psychology" at a CC in America today differ from
teaching "race hygiene" in Germany in about 1935. In both cases, what
is being taught is what one must presume to know in order to threat
various catagories of person as those persons deserve. In both cases,
the discipline (academic) justifies the disciplinary society which
exists at that time. How, if at all, do the two cases differ? I teach
a class in about one half hour. What should I do today?    How should
I explain why, according to the DSM of today, a tendency to take
sexual satisfaction in being hurt or in hurting someone else is not
per se pathological in the absence of other indicators. How should I
explain this to a class made up mostly of bible thumping fundies?
Should I tell them that this changed with the DSM revision of 1993?
That before 93, laether folks where all perverts per se according to
the DSM just like according to them and their local learned clergy?
What should I tell them changed in 93?




="I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." Michel Foucault

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