April 27, Sunday afternoon -- Reading Michel Foucault

At the Revolution Cafe on a rare San Francisco day when people were actually saying, it's too hot.

Reading Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, edited by Donald F. Bouchard.

This was another one of those conversations when I wished I had a pen and paper with me. I always feel uneasy when I can't write things down. The book, as he described it to me, I cannot do justice. My immediate reaction, which he confirmed, is that what the book offers is difficult to access. I was not feeling very smart at the moment. I had heat stroke--I hadn't been brave enough to leave the house without long underwear. The book's subject matter, as I understood it, had to do with rethinking a priori knowledge (that which is independent of experience) so that underlying structures, be they institutional or whatever, can be changed. When something is assumed, without realizing an assumption is being made, change cannot occur.

Some of his favorite books--Catch 22, by Joseph Heller; 1984, by George Orwell; Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut...or maybe not Slaughterhouse Five, he decided.

When he was a child he remembers reading the Encyclopedia Brown series, by Donald Sobol. He doesn't really remember the content of the books, but it seemed that, he reflected (and I hope I'm getting this right because I didn't write this down either), the world Encyclopedia Brown lived in was one in which you could identify a problem and, as an individual, apply reasoning skills and go out and solve it, that we have within ourselves what it takes to solve any problem, autonomously. Maybe this is why things are frustrating as adults, he reasoned, because the problem solving examples we were shown as children don't always apply to the world we actually live in. If we think we can accomplish things autonomously, we will not effect change.

What books would you go to in approaching problem solving in your life, today?