I can read Hebrew... it's the writing my computer won't do.

Perhaps an example would be instructive (and I'll try and provide an example that doesn't relate to my dissertation, because 'ein hanachtom' and all that). Let's say we're trying to learn something about drug policy. The lawyer's question might be "how shall we construct and apply the law to prohibit drugs" or "how can we balance the defendants' rights and a drug free society in drug related criminal procedure?"

Now, the sociological, external, perhaps Marxist perspective on this, might be (and is in several studies): "Drugs aren't really the problem you claim it is. What in fact is being done is that you are using the legal rhetoric, which doesn't mean anything, to mask and guise a policy that is actually aimed at policing the underclass. See - you've criminalized heroin and marijuana and crack because you link them to ethnic minorities and the underclass, while barbiturates and sleeping pills, used by housewives, are not criminalized. The TRUTH is that both issues are merely lifestyle choices, while you proclaim them to be an enemy of the public".

Now, as you see, these two views are not compatible with each other. While doctrinal law takes the definition of drugs as a "national problem" or a "moral enemy", sociology completely discounts legal rhetoric and provides us with the alternative account of power.

What the Foucauldian approach does for us is that it goes beyond this gap. Foucault is not interested in saying what the "truth" is; in fact , he doesn't buy into a single, truthful story of what is going on. A Foucauldian way to look at these drug issues would be the following: "Let's look at the conditions, historically and epistemologically, that surrounded the criminalization of drugs. What in them allows us to look at drugs as a disease, and what allows us to see them as a personal choice? What was the status of medicine, chemistry, religion, economic policy at the time? How did this status of competing narratives about drugs bring about the emergence, and prevalence, of a certain way to see the problem? How did this way change over time? Was it always treated as an illness that needed to be therapeutically approached? Or as a moral fault? Or as an economic enterprise that needs to be abolished? Or contained (regulated)? And suppose at some point it was seen as an illness. How did that shape the policies involving drugs in hospitals? In prisons? In schools? How did that award power to therapeutic communities? What did it do to the status of police people versus the status of addiction experts and social workers? And (here's where we come to the part where power generates knowledge) how did the emergence of practices that treat drugs, say, as an illness, to the generation of more medical knowledge about the problem? How were the perceptions of the problems subsequently get refined, altered, modified, or abolished?

So here's one example of how this could be used. In my work, I use it to explain things about legal approaches toward disobedience (my case study involves the military justice system); others have used this framework to look at the emergence of phrenology (the study of people's skulls to determine criminality), to the Kennedy murders (how the commission made sense of Lee Harvey Oswald's life-story so as to provide a sufficient account of the murder), to the emergence of eugenics, to the J. Edgar Hoover crime policy in the early New Deal period, etc, etc.

The thing with Foucauldian thought (and perhaps that's what some people have difficulty with) is that it's not a theory that yields practical reform suggestions. If what one wants to do is see "how to implement an idea in real life", this is not the way to go. This can help understand patterns of knowledge creation and meaning making, but it's not something you go with to a committee. What Foucault was trying to do was to break free from the conventions about "what a problem is" and ask the question "how did it come to be that we started seeing this problem in this way". His hope for advocacy of civil rights was not part of his scholarship, but of his personal agenda; in an interview before his death, someone confronted him with the frustration experienced by the "disciplinarians" (social workers, doctors, lawyers, etc) at the inability to find an agenda for action. Foucault agreed that he was advocating no agenda as a scholar, except perhaps offering alternative ways to see problems and issues, rather than feeding you the "right" perception of them with a spoon. But apparently this did not make him a nihilist: a professor of mine who met Foucault in the mid-seventies and told him how despaired he was at reading Foucault before entering law school says that Foucault encouraged him to fight for what he thought was right and important, though not to accept anything as a given.

Whoa! Heavy conversation for a Monday evening. But feel free to ask whatever, and I'll try to clarify whatever isn't.

See, I *am* using Windows XP; and my Hebrew works fine everywhere, except when I fill in internet forms or post stuff on the Ayal.

do you get jibrish instead of hebrew? if so, the problem might be google toolbar or some other plugin or spyware in your browser.

Toda Raba! That's a pretty good website! I'll deal with this right after I return from my vacation in Amsterdam and Israel.
Back to Derrida...