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.