Security, Territory, Population

I just picked up and started reading a new book titled, Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population (2007), edited by Michel Senellart. These were lectures given by Michel Foucault at the College de France from 1977-1978, and it was recently translated into English. And it couldn't have come at a better time than right now as I'm writing my conclusion. It's "new" in the sense that it's now accessible to people like me, but "old" if you already spoke French.

I wish I had access to these lectures much earlier because it clarified so many questions I had in relation to my dissertation about major concepts like discipline, normalization, law, state, security, and population, all of which I've had trouble trying to reconcile as my project is in many ways a discussion about the relationship between cultural studies and political science. But reading through the first two lectures, I'm beginning to rethink the scope and substance of my argument, and, it is refining my argument ... at least, I hope so.

I'm doing more reading today and jotting lots of notes here and there. I'm writing my conclusion as I read, editing as I go, and clarifying the individual arguments in each chapter while thinking about the big one. It's like juggling several pins while walking on a tightrope 1,000 ft. in the air across a mile long chasm, and you have to hurry before the fire burns through before you fall to your perilous death.

Sounds like fun.

Back To Work

Kinda' back to work. Reading two anthologies at the moment. The first, Law in the Domains of Culture, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, and Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving Beyond Legal Realism, edited by Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon. Austin Sarat, by the way, the main guy on law, culture, and legal studies, and was the past president of the Law and Society Association. A pretty good discussion thus far on the nature and impact of interdisciplinary work in a rigid discipline like legal studies, but there are moments that made my eyebrow furl. The obvious one is their definition of interdisciplinarity, at least some parts of it is contradictory. On the one hand, it is clear that they are talking about the limits of legal methodology and the problem with defining "culture" as a legal concept. Hence, the use of literary, sociological, anthropological methods that have traditionally dealt with "culture" can be enormously useful as a legal method. On the other hand, there are moments when "culture" is used as a pedagogical tool in legal studies. For example, how I would use various episodes of The Wire to talk about practices of surveillance, containment, and policing. I'm just using these episodes as examples to illustrate theoretical concepts, but, as my partner often tells me, a media studies professor would talk about them in a totally different manner which, of course, furls her eyebrow whenever she reads how other disciplines use film and tv media as teaching tools as opposed to proper objects of analysis. So it's somewhat problematic, yet predictable, on how people think of interdisciplinary work in their respective fields. What I think thus far is that legal studies ought to write against the law, in similar ways that cultural studies write against culture.

More on this when I read further.