riceandweed on Nostr: “Hence it assumes a material figure defined within a narrower compass; it organises ...

“Hence it assumes a material figure defined within a narrower compass; it organises itself as the child's immediate environment, tending increasingly to become its basic framework for survival and growth. This leads to an effect of tightening, or at least intensification, of the elements and relations constituting the restricted family (the group of parents and children). It also leads to a certain inversion of axes: the conjugal bond no longer serves only, nor even perhaps primarily, to establish the junction of two lines of descent, but to organise the matrix of the new adult individual. No doubt it still serves to give rise to two lineages and hence produce a descent, but it serves also to produce-under the best possible conditions-a human being who will live to the state of adulthood. The new 'conjugality' lies rather in the link between parents and children. The family, seen as a narrow, localised pedagogical apparatus, consolidates itself within the interior of the great traditional family-as-alliance. And at the same time health, and principally the health of children, becomes one of the family's most demanding objectives.”- Power and Knowledge, Michel Foucault