In his particular interpretation of Homer's works, Alessandro Baricco states that Homer's main intention is to transmit his knowledge to his son, not by a serious treatise, but by the Greek heroes’ adventures. In Baricco's opinion, when Homer relates –orally, it is important to remember— the passage between the Cyclop Polyphemus and Ulysses, he is explaining how to take care of a flock of sheeps, how to produce milk and cheese, by the practices and objects. This an example of the importance of practical knowledge, a source of knowledge completely different from that stated later by classical philosophy.
Foucault writing
flows around objects and practices in the same way as his picture of
power: a concept not always negative, an idea never centered as
contemporary theories of identity. Foucault states there it is
impossible to study human beings as a science because everything is
unstable with people. This is the problem that remains in identity
-the subject in Foucaldian words-. The French philosophert claims
that it is impossible also to describe the self or the other.
However, there are the practices, the objects, the interaction of the
bodies with discipline and power that Foucault describes with his
writing. The meticulous description of practices and objects in
Foucault is in some ways a more powerful description of the subject
than Cartesian definitions of the self that one find in psychology
during modernity.
To begin with, in
Discipline and Punishment, Foucault points out that the
entering of the individual in the scientific discourse supposes a
registration and examination of the body which remembers Althusser's
interpellation because it seems a similar coercion of the human body
by authority figures. These techniques of surveillance and
examination are which describe the subject as a body interacting with
the power. That is a political anatomy (political economy of the
body, political technology of the body). Power processes subject our
bodies to be controlled, processes that constitute us as subjects.
For example, modern judges understand delinquents as a judgment of
the soul. This picture is a kind of social environment that includes
all of society because each one of us can be a surveyor of the
Panopticon or inside the Inspection House; all of us are in a system
in which power flows.
It seems clear that
most practices exposed in Governmentality and Foucauldian
conception of biopolitics are related to national identity and its
links with the political state. The study of these practices between
the state and the individuals in a collective issue could be very
useful to understand sociological processes and to produce historical
research. In addition, the important role developed by sciences,
especially social sciences, in biopolitics and in sovereignty, is
crucial to rethink the interaction between science and national
identity. This is the case, for instance, of the strategies developed
by power to identify citizens stated in Governmentality, or
the racist practices imposed by Nazis and socialism.
Although the
Cartesian tradition of human actions are produced by something that
occurs inside, Foucault's subject perspective is described only by
actions, without an inside (as in the case of the delinquent). This
perspective is very useful for social sciences. Perhaps this is a
weaker point in Foucault's concepts of identity, but it resolves the
instability of human beings. The practices that Foucault writes makes
possible our existing conceptions of ourselves and describe the
subject in the same way that Homer transmitted his knowledge.
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