Mode – “Forms of criticism and inquiry” (29). Mode functions analytically and diagnostically (32). We understand the element/category of mode in terms of methodology but not narrowly so. (We also see it in terms of what Koopman and Matza in their piece call ‘analytic’). In genealogy the mode was “history of the present” (29), but now in the later work it involves both “making what was self-evident contingent” as well as “analyzing how it had been linked in complex ways with multiple historical processes, many of them recent” (31). This maps in some ways to what Koopman calls the distinction between fact/that (the fact that X is contingent) and composition/how (how X is contingently composed).
Object – Objects are that which one inquires into and offers critique of. Objects are that with which thought is concerned. In Foucault’s thought, object is a “type of rationality” (29) or a style of rationality (for example Bentham’s style of rationality) insofar as it is a “practice” (29). It is our understanding that practice and rationality are correlative. The object, then, is practices and their corollary rationalities. It is implicit, but not explicitly stated, that Foucault’s objects shifted from modern practices and rationalities to the practices and rationalities he found in antiquity.
A comment on Object and Mode. Object and Mode are corollary in interesting ways. Rabinow quotes Foucault: “Each one of my books is a way of dismantling an object, and of constructing a method of analysis towards this end” (Foucault 1981, 29). This suggests that objects gain privileged status in Foucault’s thought. The object is what determines mode of analysis. In Foucault’s late work we see a shifted object of analysis, and the above suggests that this leads to a shifted mode of analysis. This seems potentially problematic to us. The inquirer should take some cues from the object, but an inquirer who let their mode/analytic be dictated entirely by the object could only be an inquirer who is not sufficiently self-reflective. One must adopt some mode/analytic to be able to see an object at all.
Venue – Venue specifies the total atmosphere or milieu in which one undertakes one’s critical inquiries—this should be broadly interpreted to include not only geographic/territorial features but also presumably sociological, cultural, and aesthetic/stylistic features—“a scene or setting in which something takes place” (35). We perhaps prefer a definition emphasizing the sense in which a venue is a home for a certain kind of work or action, such that a venue is a locale which facilitates, incubates, and enables actions, such as the action of thought. Rabinow tracks a shift in venue, for Foucault, from Paris and the College de France where he had a “growing sense of feeling trapped and ground down” (34) to California and UC Berkeley. We found the discussion at this point very interesting, at least in part because Rabinow is here breaking new ground in a quasi-biographical sense. The existing literature on Foucault makes far too little of the everyday practices in which the French thinker was immersed. We find this a welcome innovation.
Form – Rabinow’s focus here is on Foucault’s shifting attention toward spirituality in his course lectures of the final three years. The driving question is, “What form would a philosophic practice that would be salvational?” (37). Rabinow’s claim is that Foucault increasingly came to answer this question in terms of a conception of spirituality, for example in saying that, “The cornerstone of his lengthy explorations of the rise and fall of the care of the self as an integral part of Western philosophic practice proved to turn on the concept of spirituality” (37). Spirituality, for Rabinow, is curative and critical and involves the spiritual practitioner in struggle. Spirituality is here doing a great deal of work. Some of us found this instructive and others found it provocative. This raised for the group general questions about how to make sense of Foucault’s ethical writings given that: a) there are at least five to seven important ethical concepts floating around in these writings, b) it seems incumbent upon us to pull out one (or maybe two) of these concepts and put it forward as the more general term under which the other more particular terms fit. It sounds to us like Rabinow is suggesting that “spirituality” is the general term that functions as the hinge around which these other concepts (e.g., care of the self, aesthetics of existence, etc.) fit. Other scholars emphasize other terms as the general rubric. Some other points of emphasis: care of the self, freedom (Oksala), resistance (Thompson), self-transformation (Koopman). Interestingly, Rabinow also emphasizes “self-transformation” toward the end of the piece (40).
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