Re: activity/reproduction/power

From: mary bryson (brys@unixg.ubc.ca)
Date: Wed Apr 26 2000 - 10:15:30 PDT

 Nate wrote:
<While I am a tad bit concerned about
Foucault's desire for objectivity - reasoning or discourse freed from the
question of who does it beneifit etc>

I am confused (as usual)....i read this a bunch of times, and it still
strikes me that Foucault precisely is the writer who, for me, asks the
question about "who benefits" better and louder than anyone else.... Where
does this come from Nate?

mary 

--
Dr. Mary Bryson, Associate Professor, Education, UBC
GenTech Project  http://www.shecan.com
Curriculum Vitae http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/cv.html

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
presents itself as an immense accumulation of "spectacles". Everything that
was directly lived has moved away into representation.
- Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle" c 1967

----------
>From: "Nate" <schmolze@students.wisc.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Subject: RE: activity/reproduction/power
>Date: Sat, Apr 22, 2000, 6:25 AM
>

> Diane,
>
> Positive relations is from M Foucault to contrast a notion of power as
> soverign or repression. At one point he states those things we characterize
> as soverign are merely byproducts. While I am a tad bit concerned about
> Foucault's desire for objectivity - reasoning or discourse freed from the
> question of who does it beneifit etc, I do think the notion of positive
> relations is a useful one.
>
> So, I would not read "positive" so much as in a binary of good and bad, but
> an attempt to analyze power utilized at various sites.  The way I used it
> was similar to practice or "lived experience" in that dominant Discourse
> does not merely repress but produce.
>
> In rereading your discussion of ideology I think it points toward the
> positive element of power as when you state,
>
> "we are discussing it in an ideological context of "academic meanings,"
> meaning that ideology is "out there" but not "in here" where we are
> practicing and reproducing the very structures that
> are relied upon for maintaining the kinds of shared dominance that makes
> ideology ideological in the first place - a paradox of activity, indeed."
>
> Nate
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
> Nate Schmolze
> http://www.geocities.com/nate_schmolze/
> schmolze@students.wisc.edu
>
>
> ****************************************************************************
> ****************
> "Overcoming the naturalistic concept of mental development calls for a
> radically new approach
> to the interrelation between child and society. We have been led to this
> conclusion by a
> special investigation of the historical emergence of role-playing. In
> contrast to the view
> that role playing is an eternal extra-historical phenomenon, we hypothesized
> that role playing emerged at a specific stage of social development, as the
> child's position in society changed
> in the course of history. role-playing is an activity that is social in
> origin and,
> consequently, social in content."
>
>                               D. B. El'konin
> ****************************************************************************
> ****************
>
>

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