Insights:
(1) Style, Invitation, & Experience
***** from Foucault, _Remarks on Marx_
...[In writing a book] I aim at having an experience myself -- by passing through a determinate historical content -- an experience of what we are today, of what is not only our past but also our present. And I invite others to share the experience. That is, an experience of our modernity that might permit us to emerge from it transformed. Which means that at the conclusion of the book we can establish new relationships with what was at issue.... [Yoshie: For our purposes, we must substitute capitalism for 'modernity.']
...[What] is essential is not found in a series of historically verifiable proofs; it lies rather in the experience which the book permits us to have.... [Yoshie: For our purposes, we must rewrite: 'what is essential is not simply found in a series of historically verifiable proofs; it also lies in the experience which the book permits us to have.'] (33; 36)*****
(2) Foucault, "Las Meninas," _The Order of Things_
(3) Foucault, _The History of Sexuality_, Vol. 1
***** As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was cosubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized -- Westphal's famous article of 1870 on "contrary sexual sensation" can stand as its date of birth -- less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (43) *****
(4) Archeology & Genealogy
To be used only as necessary nominalist moments (as opposed to ends and premises) of inquiry and/or temporary rhetorical strategies.
Nonsense:
(1) Fetishization of the 'Defeat' & 'Betrayal'
***** from Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?" _Feminism/Postmodernism_ (NY: Routledge, 1990)
Perhaps this stress on resistance rather than transformation is due to Foucault's profound pessimism. Power appears to him as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to "annex" the counter-discourses that have developed. The dangers of going beyond resistance to power are nowhere more clearly stated than in Foucault's response to one interviewer who asked what might replace the present system. He responded that to even imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system. ...[H]e added that perhaps this is what happened in the Soviet Union, thus suggesting that Stalinism might be the most likely outcome of efforts at social transformation [See _Language, Counter-Memory, Practice_]. Foucault's insistence on simply resisting power is carried even further in his arguments that one must avoid claims to scientific knowledge. In particular, one should not claim Marxism as a science because to do so would invest it with the harmful effects of the power of science in modern culture [See _Power/Knowledge_]. (167-8) *****
(2) Metaphorical Orientalism
***** from Foucault, _The Order of Things_
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought -- _our_ thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography -- breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to take the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) _et cetera_, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking _that_. *****
***** from Foucault, "Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit," _Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984_
Foucault: They [Iranians] don't have the same regime of truth as ours, which, it has to be said, is very special, even if it has become almost universal. ...And in Iran it is largely modelled on a religion that has an exoteric form and an esoteric content. That is to say, everything that is said under the explicit form of the law also refers to another meaning. So not only is saying one thing that means another not a condemnable ambiguity, it is, on the contrary, a necessary and highly prized additional level of meaning. It's often the case that people say something that, at the factual level, isn't true, but which refers to another, deeper meaning, which cannot be assimilated in terms of precision and observation....
Foucault: What has given the Iranian movement its intensity has been a double register. On the one hand, a collective will that has been very strongly expressed politically and, on the other hand, the desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this double affirmation can only be based on traditions, institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism, nationalism, exclusiveness.... (223-224) *****
(3) _Epoche_ & Anti-Science:
***** from Foucault, "Two Lectures," _Power/Knowledge_
...it is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage struggle.... (84) *****
***** from Foucault, "Truth and Power," _Power/Knowledge_
The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. (118) *****
***** from Foucault, "On Power," _Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984_
P.B.: Doesn't science produce "truths" to which we submit?
Foucault: Of course. Indeed, truth is no doubt a form of power. And in saying that, I am only taking up one of the fundamental problems of Western philosophy when it poses these questions: Why, in fact, are we attached to the truth? Why the truth rather than lies? Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? And I think that, instead of trying to find out what truth, as opposed to error, is, it might be more interesting to take up the problem posed by Nietzsche: how is it that, in our societies, "the truth" has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall? (107) *****
***** from Peter Dews, _Logics of Disintegration_
Foucault's dilemma is evident: his theoretical premises render unavoidable the assumption that modes of experience, systems of meaning and objects of knowledge are entirely determined by 'rules of formation' or -- later -- by operations of power. Yet, in order to function as a political critique of these rules and regulations, Foucault's work must appeal to some form of meaning, experience or knowledge which is not so determined. The result -- as in Nietzsche -- is a perpetual oscillation....
...Fundamentally, as both Foucault's work of the sixties and his later use of Nietzsche would lead one to expect, the domination implied by knowledge does not reside in its instrumental value, or in the coercive institutions which form the precondition for its elaboration, but rather simply in the fact that it imposes an order on disorder, reduces non-identity to identity....
...There is one obvious difficulty which theories such as those of Foucault and Lyotard, which espouse a perspectivist account of truth, and -- furthermore -- attempt to ground a conception of political practice in this account, must confront: the problem of their own status and validity as theories.... (185-6; 213) *****
Yoshie