Tuesday, January 29
Red Rock Eater Digest - notes and recommendations
You see this conflation, for example, in Foucault's talk about the
"production of subjects". The idea is that, by becoming a doctor
or a citizen or a psychiatric patient, you become inserted into an
all-encompassing social being -- a way of seeing, thinking, acting,
interacting, talking, writing, feeling, and so on. There is, to
be sure, some truth in this: to become a doctor is certainly to be
socialized to a significant degree into ways of thinking and acting
and so on. Much of this lies beyond individual consciousness: it
happens so complicatedly, and in so many different ways, and with
so much nonobvious structure, and with so many appeals to emotion
and reason, and with so much seclusion from the outside world, that
it is bound to change you. In fact, the very difficulty of becoming
a doctor is part of what causes it to change you so completely:
the skills require effort to master, and demands rain down upon
the emerging doctor from so many directions that great dedication is
required to integrate them all by slow degrees into a smooth everyday
performance.
