12.5.11

Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self

The audio below presents the first in a series of three recorded lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture's conceptual development of individual subjectivity. Foucault gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the recordings:




Listen to Parts 4-7: Here

Original Source: Apolloxias

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks, more sublimation (cultivation of the self) and less nostalgia for the Sublime is always welcome.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/13/136240501/gary-shteyngart-a-love-story-in-a-sad-future

Michael- said...

no problem. the death of the subject? I don't think so.

but is it about sublimation or adaptation? or maybe both? I mean, is becoming a post-operational body-subject only about sublimation and/or introjection, or are we more reflexive?

I honestly don't know...

Anonymous said...

i don't see a difference between sublimation (never could get an answer on the freudian difference between acting out and acting) and adaptation unless one imagines the development of say new body-parts. without new disciplined ways of changing our styles of being together in the world all of the waxing philosophical (no matter how 'radical') is just a change in vocab and not a difference that makes a difference. in fact too much talk/theory is the kind of catharsis that can relieve the need to make actual changes just like the soap-opera dramas of gossip.

Michael- said...

"without new disciplined ways of changing our styles of being together in the world all of the waxing philosophical (no matter how 'radical') is just a change in vocab and not a difference that makes a difference. in fact too much talk/theory is the kind of catharsis that can relieve the need to make actual changes just like the soap-opera dramas of gossip."

I couldn't agree more. If we don't change our forms of life, our behaviors and relationships all the poetics in the world won't help. This is the core of my intense interest in "infrastructure".

Infrastructure, for me, is the combined functional affectivity of specific ecological, institutional (including the symbolic) and cognitive assemblages. I believe the term can be a bridging concept possible of generating hybrid action and knowledge between the seemingly separate domains of politics, ecology, psychology, architecture, community development and others.

I would support an approach that integrates (accepts, incorporates, balances?) the insights of various structuralisms (Levi-Straussian, Lacan and Marxian for example) and post-structuralisms (Foucault, Deleuze, etc.) – and beyond - with an intentional, participatory, empirical and pragmatic attention to the material-energetic conditions of life. Only a sufficiently complex materialism is rigorous enough to excavate structuralist thinking from the crypt of abstract theory.

The key issue, then, is how to develop or enact socio-ecological conditions demonstrably capable of cultivating healthier, creative and more sustainable modes of being and becoming.

Anonymous said...

I'm not so much for reviving as for creating, prototypical instead of archetypal, so how to think/act in the midst of particular contexts/webs, to be reflective practioners(check out Donald Schon)/participants. The hard part is not just figuring out better ways but bringing other along, having them invested. have you read any of John Shotter's work? he is a bit overly optimistic about communication but working along the right lines.
http://www.focusing.org/apm.htm#Online%20Papers

Related Posts with Thumbnails