Time's Fool

       For years, I have limited my considerations of Foucault to his archaeology, studying almost exclusively The Order of Things . I've mostly ignored his sociology, as iconized for me by his focus on apparatuses of social functioning (disposatifs). Beginning to read about this (in The Essential Foucault ) I find myself considering them (disposatifs) to be basic cross-institutional arrangements for providing the functionalities required/allowed by modern societies --as almost a taken for granted sociological common sense view of how things work in modern societies, rather than just as self-consciously intended and arranged sets of social arrangements and thought flow systems.     I understand (perhaps prematurely) that Foucault focussed on the  self-consciously intended and arranged aspects and cases of apparatuses. ... I have also begun to read in his lectures on The Hermeneutics of The Subject .

There's a history to this. I'll be brief.   The social constructionists in general, in particular one of the originators of this approach, the sociologist, Erving Goffman, have revealed clearly what everybody already knew anyway, but hadn't seen it systematically as a major aspect of the processes of social stratification and the enforcement of existing stratification regimes. What was pointed out is the fact that how you talk about someone, how you talk to them, is a major means of exerting social control over them. Particularly, to insult a person is to demean them, to tell them that they are "less than" and to interactionally maneuver them into the position of subordinate to you. Insult a man and he's either got to fight back or accept the insult, accept a position in the interaction of less respect and less power than you who insults him. This is not a matter of “feeling insulted,” but a matter of self-defense in something like micro-class warfare. (That’s

 My natural mode of thought tends to be exploratory, comparative, aggregative perhaps, syncretic. After a fashion (in a way) I naturally assume something like a unitary pool of base --or ground-- subject-matters in/for human thinking. So diversity of thoughts reveals, stems from, diversity of perspectives. Coordinating several such diverse phrasings of "the same" subject matter would thus provide a fuller, a more "true" representation of that subject-matter.