Week 8 Synthesis Question

Q3: This week's texts are concerned with the apparatuses, processes, and epistemes by which knowledge about man (and animal) is constituted. Foucault suggests that since the 19th-century, the subject, the mode of investigation, and the object of the human sciences are held apart by increasingly unstable borders: in the case of sociology, for instance, representation as the object of its study is also the conditions of its existence, collapsing the strict separation between the subject and the object of investigation. The texts also seem to suggest that apparatuses themselves, and not solely epistemological configurations, are productive of knowledge. What is the relation between the apparatus and the knowledge of man produced by the investigation? We find instructive Sekula's notion of the "truth-apparatus," here: it cannot simply be explained by recourse to the optical objectivity of the camera in this case, but rather is situated in a "larger ensemble." (16) How are the effects of the apparatuses of knowledge represented in the texts and in the films? Is there a way to reconcile the concern for "surfaces" that motivated the archival photography of criminals with the surgical technologies that penetrate the bodies of the animals in Primate? Would Foucault challenge this notion of a bodily target of the apparatuses of the human sciences? How could we put Muybridge's interest in the physical human form in conversation with Foucault's argument that the human sciences operate at the level of representations and the unconscious?

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