[Xmca-l] Re: Foucault

[mike cole]

Kenneth Burke:

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others
have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, too
heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact,
the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that
no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone
before.
You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of
the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him;
another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to
either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on
the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is
interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with
the discussion
still vigorously in progress.”



On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 6:53 PM, White, Phillip <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>
wrote:

>
> as you write, Martin, yes, they had similar descriptions of their work
>
> "Foucault came to describe his work overall as a "historical ontology of
> ourselves." Certainly both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were philosophers on
> ontology, and of history."
>
> the difference is, i believe, that Foucault identified with those peoples
> who have been marginalized: prisoners, those deemed mentally ill, and
> homosexuals.  he said that his writings were autobiography.  and i've come
> to understand my own work as a way of autobiography.  i've begun to think
> of theory as a way of autobiography.
>
> i believe that i recognize a great deal of autobiography performed here on
> xmca - just as one sees autobiography performed at a cocktail party.
> (that's a great metaphor!)
>
> p
>
>


-- 

Development and Evolution are both ... "processes of construction and re-
construction in which heterogeneous resources are contingently but more or
less reliably reassembled for each life cycle." [Oyama, Griffiths, and
Gray, 2001]