> At 02:34 PM 7/28/2008, Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
>> Didn't MF analyze "power"?
>
>
> Questions like this and the references you've made to maybe getting a
> bad slant on Foucault from "Foucauldians" suggests you haven't read
> much of his stuff yourself. Is that the case?
Dennis, that was a rhetorical question.... But yes, I've read only v1 of History of Sexuality, the essay 'What is an author,' and a bunch of interviews, plus the bits and pieces I come across here. I never claimed to be a Foucault scholar.
>
>
>> For example, if you're examining, say, how madness or homosexuality
>> was defined by doctors or lawyers in a certain place and time and how
>> these definitions embedded themselves in discourse - how is that not
>> a history of medical culture or legal culture?
>
>
> Here's an answer from Foucault:
>
>> .. it is rather an enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis
>> knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order
>> knowledge is constituted... Such an enterprise is not so much a
>> history, in the traditional meaning of the word, as an "archaeology"
>> (Order, xxi-xxii).
I should probably quit while I'm behind here, but I think "the space of order in which knowledge is constituted" is quite a plausible definition of culture.
Seth