Mystory: Career Discourse

foucault: the beginning

Jan was right when he said Foucault was a difficult read. I spent the better part of this week huddled up in my office deciphering the pages. The only way I was really able to blog this week was to go through chapter by chapter and takes notes as I read along. Below is what I preened from the chapters. It is a little dirty, hard to understand, and lacking in the interpretation department, but it was all I could do to finish the prescribed reading with my brain still intact.

ch 1:

• Foucault's thought that each statement that draws about history is really boiled down to the spirit that lays underneath...a punctus-like realization that causes the reader to draw connections from earlier work, although two different people may make two different references. Although the punctus association is always drawn from the past and is always unstated in the actual written work. 'a voice as silent as breath' never mind that he wants to destroy this way of thinking.
• there are two ways of thinking according to Foucault: emotional and logical/physical. Logical is described in the before paragraph, physical is taking the document itself and only using the information listed...not inferring anything or making connections to any outside document but simply taking the document for what it states. Shallow and flat. It is simply scientific, like a research question that is just to be looked at quantitatively versus qualitatively.

ch. 2

• Two problems develop: "the first...concerns the indiscriminate use that I have made of the terms statement, event, and discourse; the second concerns the relations that may legitimately be described between the statements that have been left in their provisional, visible grouping." (p 31)

• Foucault makes 4 hypotheses to solve his problems, and each (for the record of frustration) he states, and then just as quickly disproves.

1. two statements relate if they refer to the same object (his example is madness which he quickly disproves by stating that madness doesn't always refer to the same topic throughout time)
   
2. Statements are written in the same style (example being of medicinal writing during the same time period using similar "vocabulary, same play of metaphor" (p 33) which is then disqualified because of the ever-growing list of qualifications of why something is written the way it is and again on the changes that occur throughout time).
   
3. Statements are aligned based on a "system of permanent and coherent concepts" aka: grammar. As quickly as this is explained it falls apart due to the changing face of grammar, you guessed it, through time.
   
4. This hypothesis is similar to number three, except the permanent concept is a "persistence of themes" (p35) (The example being economics). The fail is also similar to all the above mentioned ideas.

• Did Foucault actually accomplish anything in this chapter except to end exactly where he began, with nothing? At least he is showing that he is trying new ideas even if he discovers by the end that they all suck. That's right people, I just said Foucault and suck in the same paragraph (I guess you could say I'm seeing if you're with me....and if you are, just leave a comment and I'll bring you a cookie).

So chapter one is spent disqualifying the established way of categorizing statements. By chapter two Foucault has moved on to establishing his own theories of how to categorize statements. He picks what he believes will be easy topics (medicine, economics, grammar) to discern and discovers after mass failure that this task may be harder than originally perceived and that the only thing he can conclude is that all the statements are tied together by their dis-similarities.

ch. 3

• p 40-41 Foucault lays out and (a), (b) and (c) describing "rules of formation" using psychopathology as a chapter wide example.

1. (a) describes the "surfaces of emergence," basically stating that something can be grouped based on characteristics that are rejected from the understanding of the grouping (an example being a food is a fruit/vegetable because it does not come from an animal) I guess you could deem this guilty by disassociation/exclusion.
   
2. (b) "authorities of delimitation" that question who is the governing body or authority over said grouping.
   
3. (c) grids: how is the field typically divided?

• imagine that, Foucault found this analysis "inadequate" (42) and again wonders, "why this, not that?" He begins to make several "remarks and consequences" (p 43):

1. an object cannot preexist itself. "It exists under the positive conitions of a complex group of relations." (p 45
2. It cannot be described based on some conceptual notion, strictly physical ones.
3. From what I can understand, Foucault wants to use only first person information (or as he states it "discursive relations") instead of sources that are writing about a topic they themselves have not experienced.
4. "Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal to discourse" but nor are they external either.

As much as I struggled to understand chapter 2, I really could have just read the following on page 46, and it would have summed practically everything up:

Taking those group figures which, in an insistent but confused way, presented themselves as psychology, economics, grammar, medicine, we asked on what kind of unity they could be based: were they simply a reconstruction after the even, based on particular works, successive theories, notion and themes some of which had been abandoned, others maintained by tradition, and again others fated to fall into oblivion only to be revived at a later date? Were they simply a series of linked enterprises?

lame. Chapter 2 über simplified. (maybe I'm just bitter that I spend all that time wading through the chapter to see how much time I wasted..just saying)

ch. 4

• Returning to the example of medicine, Foucault lists more questions pertaining to the validity of the statements and arrives at yet another list of questions:

1. "Who is speaking?"
2. Where is said person speaking? Foucault goes on to describe that different physical locations determine the importance of what is being stated, ie: what implications are known about a hospital versus a research facility (which he refers to as a library)
3. Foucault questions the "perceptual positioning" of the speaker.

• All this leads to more questions, because these fail to single-handedly categorize the 19th century medical field.

ch. 5

• I highlighted stuff, but to be honest I'm not even sure what I highlighted means. (insert frustration here) so I'm just going to move on.

ch. 6

• more things to determine:

1. "Determine the possible points of diffraction of discourse." otherwise listed as another either/or senario. (p 65)
   
2. often the either/or that is included in the discourse is actually found outside the discourse itself. Enter the "economy of the discursive constellation." (p 66)
   
3. the ultimate determination of what is allowed (from the either/or) is determined by an outside authority.

ch. 7

The final chapter of section II is reflections of what he has found (again...I'm starting to feel like I'm reading a broken record) Can you tell that I'm slightly tired of this and that my brain is mush? Urgh. I'm off to go get something warm and calorie ridden. See y'all in class tonight.