This is the first post of what we hope to be a term-long project in reading selected essays by Michel Foucault and posting our thoughts and observations online. In this context, "we" are a group of graduate students in history at UC Santa Cruz who needed a 2-credit term project and wanted to read more Foucault in a semi-organized way.
We'll be reading excerpts from Foucault's Power/Knowledge, at least one essay on Nietzsche, and perhaps a smattering of non-directly-Foucault-related stuff (including an exchange between A. Dirk Moses and Hayden White in the journal History and Theory in 2005.)
We'll get this thing going in earnest during the first week of 2007. See you then.
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3 comments:
Beautiful!
Idea: Paul Rabinow - edited a Foucault Reader - teaches anthro. at Berkeley and works on questions of governmentality. Very Brilliant. Might be someone to try to meet with.
When we jump back into the past and approach the historian’s way of thinking, we begin to imagine a past world – one that has some elements of continuity with our own, but also contains characteristics that are specific to time and dictated to by context. The act of creating knowledge through historical practice is an ideological question, a debate of maxims, one that many brilliant minds have thrust their opinions upon. Academic thinker Hayden White has suggested that the discipline of history be a practice of ethical reflection, a journey that points the direction toward improved humanity by explaining the nature of our want to victimize, dominate, and maliciously control. But should this always be our main goal as historians – or are there other ends that should be met, other avenues of analysis that we should be responsible to venture?
In my own work with Japanese American baseball players during the 1930’s and 40’s in the United States I have been confronted with the issue of “sportsmanship”. Past and present scholars have defined sportsmanship as an ideology built upon the precepts of fair play, justice, fairness, and loyalty. Thus, the concept of sportsmanship is surely one of ethics and for that I hope Hayden White is proud.
Sportsmanship is an issue of both morality and ethics – and as I research deeper and study further upon this matter I have been inclined to want to begin making judgments about how the ethics of sportsmanship has been taught, twisted, and misinterpreted. But before I get too ahead of myself and become convoluted and circuitous with my thoughts I would like to pose a few questions in regards to how I should approach my historical endeavors.
Should I seek to highlight those individuals, teams, and organizations that represent a true understanding of sportsmanship? Should I valorize the fairness, understanding, compassion, and bravery that it takes to be a good sportsman? What do you want Dirk Moses? What do you want White, Weber, and Nietzsche? Should I even be saying sportsmanship – or should I be saying sportspersonship?
I’ll tell you what I think great minds - I think that sportsmanship is the eternal link, the moral and ethical solution to the competitive commodification of modernity – it is the panacea to all human ills because it is the most tangible expedient of democracy. Sportsmanship is the truest cousin to democracy and it can be measured – and it will be measured. I will judge, analyze, interpret, and hammer down ethereal truths through the dialectic of sportsmanship. Why? Because I want to change the world and I yearn to be an ethical historian.
J-Logan
A response to Foucault is forthcoming.
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