Quick Note on Foucault

The Subject and Power in "Power" is a masterful, concise, and clear essay on the workings of power. It deals with the the situating, categorizing, naming, and isolation of the subject in order to normalize him.

From the Just comes the Unjust, in Arrogance

"You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right -- and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do."

-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, from Hidden Cities 5


This is the last city Marco Polo describes in Calvino's book, wrapping up the tour by explaining the virus that grows within what must inhabit the city: Justice. The call to order mankind makes beautiful monuments which elevate its stature and make ever more grand statements about its existence. But as Hidden Cities 4 describes, immediately before, nothing else may flower:

"The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living specieis existed to cast any doubts."

Foucault and Continuum

Foucault takes Merleau-Ponty's essential philosophical task as his own, making a beautiful treatise on academic work and literal self-consciousness in thought:

"Never to consent to being completely comfortable with one's own presuppositions. Never to let them fall preacefully asleep, but also never to believe that a new fact will suffice to overturn them; never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms, remembering that in order to give them the necessary mobility one must have a distant view, but also look at what is nearby and all around oneself. To be very mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored. The most fragile instant has its roots. In that lesson, there is a whole ethic of sleepless evidence that does not rule out, far from it, a rigorous economy of the True and the False; but that is not the whole story."

--Foucault, For an Ethic of Discomfort


In my studies of Foucault thus far (the never ending quest and digestion of his thought, the rotation and rearticulation of all points), this passage is one of the most meaningful in light of his work. At the beginning of the essay, he encounters the question asked in a German journal: "What is Enlightenment." Kant responds, but Foucault sees the question more important than the answer. For him, the question implies a sort of self-consciousness that manages to rupture the Enlightenment simply by calling it into question; there are no static periods of time, only fluid movements of thoughts and discourses which, when called into question, double back on themselves and analyze, reinterpret, and rearticulate towards a horizon of distance. The question is an important thing in life -- the self and the public or society -- because it asks for reexamination, and thus an understanding that we are located in an infinite continuum where our beliefs and practices constantly change around us. We must ground ourselves in the middle of the stream in order to understand its current.

Blogging / Bookwriting

While reading on sexuality I came across this quote, seemingly unrelated.

"I also reminded myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble ofr making books if they failed to teach the author something he had not known before, if they did not lead to unforeseen places, and if they did not disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and pleasure of the book is to be an experience."

--Foucault, Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two


Though blogging is not the same experience as writing a book, my project views the experience in much the same way. I am reaching for limbs of knowledge I've not yet encountered, and the processing of them is what is rewardingly transformative.

Rhizome metaphor

Rhizome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A rhizome is, in botany, a usually-underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. They are also referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks. A stolon is similar to a rhizome, but exists above ground, sprouting from an existing stem.
Many plants have rhizomes that serve to spread the plant by vegetative reproduction. Examples are asparagus, Lily of the valley and Sympodial Orchids. The spreading stems of ferns are also called rhizomes.
A tuber is a thickened part of a rhizome that has been enlarged for use as a storage organ. They are typically high in starch. An example is the common potato.

Herzog lecture

I saw Werner Herzog give a talk today at Amherst which was truly brilliant. He's such a charismatic fellow. He filled my head with thoughts and I hope I can get some of them down for processing and perhaps editing into a Div III of sorts.

Most potent: The way Herzog shifts the focuses of his movies and riffs off tangents which truly isolate the "reality" of his films. He showed a clip from The White Diamond, which I haven't seen, in which the camera moves from the scientist to the local man who is formally uneducated but really quite wise. For me, this sort of work goes to show the ways in which narratives can fragment themselves in search of what Herzog referred to as a "truth". He distinguished fact from truth, asserting that truth was something more profound and emphemeral than a solid fact. Information, particularly the new realms of information brought on by digitality, present ways in which tangential elements can form a more individualized space and what is actually taken from "an exploration" is quite unique. This is obviously related to my hypertext project from the collector. Perhaps I could use his films as a catalyst to re-explore some of the themes I was trying to articulate through hypertexts.



I'm in the midst of passing my Division II. I hope to be able to work out some of the groundwork for my Division III in this space.

From a recent meditation of Space, Knowledge, and Power

From Foucault's Space, Knowledge, and Power

Another interesting aspect of power that Foucault touches on in this section is the relationship of architecture, and more generally space or geography, to power. For him, infrastructure had a great effect on the way that society in the modern sense was molded; the development of railroads and later electricity definitively changed the ways that people interact within a space and, more broadly, feel about themselves as a nation. On a more microscopic level, the development of architecture was both liberating and confining depending on its usage: an enclosed square could be a very nice open public space while simultaneously being available for unending surveillance. Thus, there is a tension with individual’s interaction with space, and their tendencies within. This relates to Foucault’s important idea of the Panopticon and Panopticism, which draws the connections between action and surveillance. The element of knowledge and communication comes forth in both the micro and macro levels; accessibility and mobility increased, communication increased. This notion of infrastructure is even more interesting in light of more advanced technology that he didn’t live to see in an operable state. The internet in particular, with its ability to traverse the globe and glean information from millions of sources changes the way in which we interact with the world. A new power relation is formed in the way this accessibility and knowledge effect us, one where control is perhaps (optimistically) further relinquished in favor of the individual.
Conversely (and sticking with the internet tangent), the internet also allows greater surveillance in the sorts of information that is digitally transmitted. Take, for example, Google’s recent move into China under the pretense of government controlled censorship. Further, the inexplicable advertisements that seem to know exactly where you live and the sorts of products you consume, due to the advancement and manipulation of “cookies” embedded within folder in your hard drive.

Sleepiness

The problem with narrative which relies on sleep as its launchpad is that its rhythm and movement resemble sleep too much. I realize that this is the point, but also beside it. However, reading such work slows the mind, inducing it into a sleep which is both brilliant (for its catalyst and its self-realization) and unfortunate (because it closes the text and makes it inaccessible). I read books on memory and sleep in order to reveal worlds in web-outlines and periscopic views on individual moments. This is beautiful. But like a dream you never remember it all and feel as if you are doing an injustice to the author by only half-completing their book and half-forming your own memories about what was actually drawn from the page. Nonetheless, reading these sorts of books can still be enjoyable, if only because of the happiness of realizing what's going on between you and the piece.