Foucault & Farge, Disorderly Families, III. When Addressing the King

We began with questions

1. p. 254 - social history disrupts the linearity of history.  What is the temporality of the history of social practices?  How does it differ from the temporality of discourses?  What are the implications of these temporalities for periodization?

2. What is at stake in these different metaphors?  How do they produce different readings?
  - testify (p. 252) -- the letters test
  - illustrate (p. 253)
  - living site / space (p. 259)

3. p. 255 - the randomization of police procedures is brought into view; but what is evidence for this randomness.

4. Why don't they attend to the formatting of the letters?

5. Why do they see the letters, and their writers, as "insignificant" (p. 257)?  Or as "trivial" (p. 256)?  Or as small?  Why focus on what is scaled-down?

6. Why did they print the letters themselves?  Why print them alongside the analysis and the aggregation and sorting?  Why do we need the letters for the argument to work?
    -- What do they give us that we wouldn't otherwise have?

7. They claim the documents are not "raw" utterances (p. 256).

8. The question of the secret (p. 257).

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The history of social practices never as linear as the documents would have us believe (p. 254) - the documents seem to belie a linearity - but how? - by way of the contents of the documents themselves, or by way of a quantitative count?

Practices v. discourses (p. 254)
  - Distinguishing:
    - Practices as producing texts, lettres, discourses
    - Practices

Formats - what the format of the letters can't speak to, e.g. popular criticism of the king.

Question of the relationship between the letters and the introductory material. How would we reread this book as itself an archival document, a record of Foucault's-Farge's historiographical procedure?  How would one reread these original archival documents as a record of how Foucault & Farge worked and wrote?

The letters as excessive to their use value.  The aesthetic-experimental dimension of the book.

Why the focus on the insignificant and the trivial?  The history of what seems trivial.