The group, as per our practice, began with questions:
- How should we construe the intersection of political ambition and philosophical love in the “Care of the Self”? (231)
- What is Foucault’s object? What is he looking at? How is he conceptualizing the self as an object of study? (224)
- How is he defining technologies? What is he omitting?
- How can Foucault’s discussion of writing practices inform how we look at writing today? Digital writing? (232)
- Tension between the technologies of power and technologies of the self? How do you distinguish between you are internalizing (224)
- Technologies of power as a means of knowing? Is objectivizing always bad? What is power? Is power bad? Always bad? (242) (A: no, they're not always bad).
- Why is Judaism omitted, in his discussion of Christianity?
- Formation of the subject at different historical moments. If (1)technologies of power as a method for controlling individuals and (2) technologies of the self are away to circumvent the technologies of power. How does one distinguish that they are not internalizing the domination, as described in Panopticism.
Discussion touched on the following points:
What is a technology? This remains perplexing. A practice, a technique, a strategy? Reflexive activities that humans use to construct themselves?
How do we distinguish, specifically between the third and fourth technological modalities, i.e. between technologies of power and technologies of the self? Granted that they are superimposed in our objects of study, how are they analytically seaprable? These four technologies never function separately. So, does it make sense to try to peel any of them away? Perhaps Foucault is making these distinctions simply for analytic purposes?
The third technology has an external agency, whereas the fourth one has internal agency.
Perhaps what Foucault is inferring in talking about the difference between 3&4 is the
same way he talks about resistance.
Three might be passive resistance and four might be active resistance.
He mentions Marx in reference to 1 & 3.
The bugbear of normativity was raised (of course it was--things are as they should be with the cgc!).
How are we defining normativity?
Perhaps we should separate Foucault’s normative statements in his interviews (which he often dismissed as merely his opinion) from his scholarly works which are less normatively ambitious. For Foucault so often actively resists making normative claims.
Finally, we discussed the Greeks. Ah, the Greeks.
He talks about writing as a method of “taking stock of oneself” which later in history
becomes more confessional.
We touched on the importance of the distinction between administrating oneself and judging oneself.
Is the practice of writing the practice of consolidating yourself?
This is a very helpful summary of our first meeting of the term, and provides a nice way to consolidate my own thoughts on the issues we touched on. Thanks for taking these things down!
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