Michel Foucault

Foucault's Ideas (Dangerous and Otherwise):
A Meditation on Categorization

What is Foucault seeing? What are you seeing?

From ArtLex on Mythology

What happened to the minotaur over time? (What did Picasso see?)

Pablo Picasso (1881-1967), Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, from ArtLex Art Dictionary

Picasso, Minotaur with a Javelin and Woman Hostage, from Pablo Picasso Reproductions Art Oil Paintings

Picasso, Minotaur and His Wife, from Pablo Picasso Reproductions Art Oil Paintings

From Middlesex, pp. 107-108, pp. 430-432:

I want to take some time with this idea:
the power of words, the usefulness (for getting us out of the labyrinth?)
and destructiveness (in separating us from one another?) of categorization.

And I want us to start,
not with the Eugenides' text,
and not with Darwin's theory of common descent...

From Tree of Life Web Project

but with ourselves:

What categories do each of us occupy?
What words do we use to describe ourselves?
What words do others use to describe us?
How do the categories "inside" differ from those "without"?

GoPhila CultureFiles--Mutter Museum

Is our occupation of categories willing or unwilling? "Natural" or imposed?
What do those categories (say, "learner" and "teacher") signify to us?
What do they look and sound like to each of us?
What categories matter most to us,
when we discuss our own identities and those of others?
How might we self-organize into a taxonomy that makes sense of those identities?

For help, go to Taxonomy--Wikipedia
Taxonomy Lab: The "Nuts and Bolts" of Taxonomy and Classification
Bloom's Taxonomy: A Classification of Levels of Intellectual Behavior

The Wagner Free Institute of Science

So--split into groups of five to conduct this taxonomic exercise:
How many "kinds" do you constitute?
What are the grounds for your grouping?
(Identify any/all characteristics that seem important to you.)
Identify a table, or grid, or draw a tree...

From Does Biology Have Anything to Contribute to Thinking About Sex and Gender?

...that places you in relation to one another.
What matters in the categories you make?
How do you construct them?

So...what have we learned?
For starters: categorization can begin

• "platonically": from the "top-down"
  (with the catagories, into which we then put ourselves.
  But how many categories can each of us occupy simultaneously?
  If we were building a "science museum," how many rooms would feature you?)

• "aristotleally": from the bottom-up
  (with reports of what we observe about ourselves and ourselves,
  which we then sort into categories.
  But what is the causal relationship among the categories?
  And how much are the categories "inside" determined by those "outside"?)

And what does all this have to do with Herculine Barbin?

This idea--of the "administrative control" that
results from the ability to identify "kinds"--is the central argument of

which begins with a meditation on the constructedness of categories:

Preface to The Order of Things:
An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, by Michel Foucault
(translation of Les Mots et les choses

Is Herculine Barbin? Complicated? Inexpressibly so?
What were your initial impressions of this person?
Of the text which tells per story?
Of Foucault's commentary?
In what ways is this tale like/unlike that told in Middlesex?
Does it belong in Callie's family tree?
In the literary (or scientific?) geneology of Middlesex? How can you tell?

(See George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh, on this: we are programmed to see patterns.
As pattern-seeking/pattern-making creatures, we make smaller sets from large amounts of information and,
conversely, infer larger structures from whatever limited information is available.)

But what are the principles of our doing so?

For instance: what sort of story is Herculine Barbin? (catastrophic, continuous, tragic, comedic?)
In what kind of style, and from what sort of perspective
(omniscient, first person limited point of view?) is it told?