Foucault
Jason Christopher Romero
GOD
Rev. Farrago
You could ask barking lunchbox. He's the only one around here who I could
see being into that social deconstruction crap.
Rev dode
> Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
> GOD
Round here we pronounce it "Fuck all".
Dode
--
Change (pee) to p for mail
One-Winged-Kev
> Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
> GOD
I have one of his books ('cos it's 'bout sex), but I've not read it
('cos it's boring)
Roland Barthes is the man.
Joe Cosby
computer, typing feverishly;
thunder crashed, bla...@midway.uchicago.edu (Jason Christopher Romero)
laughed madly, then wrote:
>Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
>GOD
Absolutely. Foucault and Marshall MacLuhan.
There is a rigorous training course in becoming a subgenius involving
a complete survey and cross-reference of both their bodies of work and
the final phase of training before being awarded the prestigious
subgenius "learner's lacerations" (so-called) is a week-long test on
your knowledge of their work at the Subgenius Acadamy in Colorado.
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.home.mindspring.com
Here at Microsoft, drive head contention is more than just our promise to you.
It's a way of life.
Sig by Kookie Jar 5.98d http://go.to/generalfrenetics/
nikolai kingsley
> Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
no, but Umberto "Foucoult's Pendulum" Eco is.
nikolai
---
who, even though he didn't write that fuckin' story, is already known
in some circles as 'nikolai "that dolphin sex story" kingsley'
nikolai kingsley
> Roland Barthes is the man.
i'll bet William S Burroughs - even though he's DEAD - could kick Mr
Barthes' ass for him.
nikolai
---
working on his County Clerk impersonation
purple
Joe Cosby wrote:
> bla...@midway.uchicago.edu (Jason Christopher Romero) hunched over a
> computer, typing feverishly;
> thunder crashed, bla...@midway.uchicago.edu (Jason Christopher Romero)
> laughed madly, then wrote:
>
> >Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
> >
> >GOD
>
> Absolutely. Foucault and Marshall MacLuhan.
And here's the course material (from
http://www.mcluhaninstitute.org/baedeker/bobs_articles/lierary_aesthetic2.html):
[Baedeker | Bob's Articles
LITERARY/AESTHETIC
CLICHé-PROBES IN THE
AMERICAN
CLASSROOM-WITHOUT-WALLS
ACT 1 |
ACT 2 | ACT 3 | ACTS 4-6
ACT TWO
At this point it may serve as a relevant
hint to remind the lurker that McLuhan's
"doorstep" always already included
Baudrillard's concept of the "rule of the game" as
determinant in the pentadic situation. This
is shown in
chapter 24 of Marshall McLuhan,
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA:
The Extensions of Man, 1964,
where the topic "Games" is given the same
definition as "Media" - "the extensions of
man" - the only other occasion in the book.
This leads naturally to the work of Michel
Foucault. As a figure in the debate presented
by Lotringer, Foucault replays the concerns
in McLuhan's writings for the effects of
"visual space" during the
Gutenberg Galaxy (1500-1750) and their
internalization at the beginning of the
Marconi Galaxy (1850-1950).
"It is not a mode of language,
but a hollow that traverses like a
great movement all literary
languages." -
Michel Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE
(Interviews, 1966-84), 1989, p.22.
"My procedure at this moment is
of a regressive sort, I would say; I
try to assume a greater and
greater detachment in order to define
the historical conditions and
transformations of our knowledge." -
Ibid., p.79.
McLuhan's methodology focused on making an
inventory of these effects by providing a
mosaic of a wide range of activities and
notions in diverse fields during a large span of
time
(see the "Centennial Metaphor" section in
FROM CLICHÉ TO ARCHETYPE,
pp.35-41).
The following statements by Foucault
illustrate the parallels with McLuhan's approach:
"It's why I have tried to make,
obviously in a rather particular
style, the history not of thought
in general but of all that 'contains
thought' in a culture, of all in
which there is thought. For there is
thought in philosophy, but also
in a novel, in jurisprudence, in law, in
an administrative system, in a
prison." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.9.
"I wanted to do an historian's
work by showing the simultaneous
functioning of these discourses
and the transformations which
accounted for their visible
changes." -
Ibid., p.29.
"I wanted to displace it; to
analyze the discourses themselves, that
is, these discursive practices
that are intermediary between words
and things; these discursive
practices starting from which one can
define what are the things and
mark out the usage of words." -
Ibid., p.51.
(In this last quotation, Foucault seeks to
make the "interval" of the
discursive practices a transparent manifest
in the style of McLuhan and
Nevitt's writings.)
"By archeology I would like to
designate not exactly a discipline, but
a domain of research, which would
be the following:
In a society, different bodies of
learning, philosophical ideas,
everyday opinions, but also
institutions, commercial practices and
police activities, mores - all
refer to a certain implicit knowledge
(*savoir*) special to this
society. This knowledge is profoundly
different from the bodies of
learning that one can find in scientific
books, philosophical theories,
and religious justifications, but it is
what makes possible at a given
moment the appearance of a theory,
an opinion, a practice. Thus, in
order for the big centers of
internment to be opened at the
end of the 17th century, it was
necessary that a certain
knowledge of madness be opposed to
non-madness, of order to
disorder, and it's this knowledge (*savoir*)
that I wanted to investigate, as
the condition of possibility of
knowledge (*connaissance*), of
institutions, of practices." -
Ibid., pp.1-2.
Foucault substitutes *savoir* for McLuhan's
"ground" or "medium", and *connaissance*
for "figure" or "content". The effect of
their interplay Foucault designates as
*episteme*:
"When I speak of *episteme*, I
mean all those relationships which
existed between the various
sectors of science during a given epoch.
For example, I am thinking of the
fact that at a certain point
mathematics was used for research
in physics, while linguistics or, if
you will, semiology, the science
of signs, was used by biology (to deal
with genetic messages). Likewise
the theory of evolution was used
by, or served as a model for
historians, psychologists, and
sociologists of the 19th century.
All these phenomena of relationship
between the sciences or between
the various scientific sectors
constitute what I call the
*episteme* of an epoch. Thus for me
*episteme* has nothing to do with
the Kantian categories.... I simply
noted that the problem of order
(the problem, not the category), or
rather the need to introduce an
order among series of numbers,
human beings, or values, appears
simultaneously in many different
disciplines in the 17th century.
This involves a communication between
the diverse disciplines, and so
it was that someone who proposed, for
example, the creation of a
universal language in the 17th century
was quite close in terms of
procedure to someone who dealt with the
problem of how one could catalog
human beings. It's a question of
relationships and communication
among the various sciences. This is
what I call *episteme*, and it
has nothing to do with the Kantian
categories." -
Ibid., pp.75-76.
Like McLuhan
(see bottom half of p.31 in
Marshall McLuhan [with George
Thompson and Harley Parker],
COUNTERBLAST, 1969),
Foucault sees this episteme as a cultural
"unconscious":
"Very schematically, it consists
of trying to discover in the history
of science and of human knowledge
(*des connaissances et du savoir
humain*) something that would be
like its unconscious.... These laws
and determinations are what I
have tried to bring to light. I have
tried to unearth an autonomous
domain that would be the unconscious
of science, the unconscious of
knowledge (*savoir*), that would have
its own laws, just as the
individual human unconscious has its own laws
and determinations." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, pp.39-40.
"One can say with confidence that
we are not speaking of an
individual unconscious, in the
sense that psychoanalysis generally
understands that notion. Yet
neither is it a collective unconscious,
which would be a kind of
collection or reservoir of archetypes at the
disposition of everyone. The
'structural' unconscious is neither of
these things." -
Ibid., p.81.
"My problem is essentially the
definition of the implicit systems in
which we find ourselves
prisoners; what I would like to grasp is the
system of limits and exclusion
which we practice without knowing it; I
would like to make the cultural
unconscious apparent." -
Ibid., p.71.
Miming Belinda the Hen who found the letter
in the middenheap of Finnegans Wake,
Foucault plunders the "archive" of what
McLuhan designated as visual space to produce
an "archeology" of this unconscious:
"... it's the analysis of
discourse in its modality of *archive*." -
Ibid., p.25.
"This other thing I have called
therefore 'archeology'. And then,
retrospectively, it seemed to me
that chance has not been too bad a
guide: after all, this word
'archeology' can almost mean - and I hope
I will be forgiven for this -
description of the *archive*. I mean by
archive the set (*l'ensemble*) of
discourses actually pronounced; and
this set of discourses is
envisaged not only as a set of events which
would have taken place once and
for all and which would remain in
abeyance, in the limbo or
purgatory of history, but also as a set
that continues to function, to be
transformed through history, and to
provide the possibility of
appearing in other discourses." -
Ibid., p.45.
This form of pattern-recognition and
insight allows Foucault to intuit McLuhan's
tetrad:
"The 'archive' appears then as a
kind of great practice of discourse,
a practice which has its rules,
its conditions, its functioning and its
effects.
The problems posed by the
analysis of this practice are the
following:
a.What are the different
particular types of discursive practice
that one can find in a
given period?
b.What are the
relationships that one can establish between
these different
practices?
c.What relationships do
they have with non-discursive practices,
such as political,
social or economic practices?
d.What are the
transformations of which these practices are
susceptible? -
Ibid., pp.58-59.
"I'm not looking underneath
discourse for the thought of men, but
try to grasp discourse in its
manifest existence, as a practice that
obeys certain rules - of
formation, existence, co-existence - and
systems of functioning. It is
this practice, in its consistency and
almost in its materiality, that I
describe." -
Ibid., p.46.
"I have tried to do something
else, to show that in a discourse, as in
natural history, there were rules
of formation for objects (which are
not the rules of utilization of
words), rules of formation for concepts
(which are not the laws of
syntax), rules of formation for theories
(which are neither deductive nor
rhetorical rules). These are the
rules put into operation through
a discursive practice at a given
moment that explain why a certain
thing is seen (or omitted); why it
is envisaged under such an aspect
and analyzed at such a level; why
such a word is employed with such
a meaning and in such a sentence.
Consequently, the analysis
starting from things and the analysis
starting from words appear at
this moment as secondary in relation
to a prior analysis, which would
be the discursive analysis." -
Ibid., p.52.
"I tried to define the
transformations: to show the discoveries,
inventions, changes of
perspective and theoretical upheavals that
could occur starting from a
certain system of regularities." -
Ibid., p.54.
Knowing that the "materiality" of visual
space continues to circulate in the
contemporary mixed-media dance, Foucault,
like McLuhan, uses a Menippean strategy by
presenting the past ("visual space") as a
probe of the present:
"Placing himself at the exterior
of the text, he [the contemporary
critic] constitutes a new
exterior for it, writing texts out of texts."
-
Ibid., p.21.
"I try to show, based upon their
historical establishment and
formation, those systems which
are still ours today and within which
we are trapped. It is a question,
basically, of presenting a critique
of our own time, based upon
retrospective analyses." -
Ibid., p.64.
"My book is a pure and simple
'fiction': it's a novel, but it's not I
who invented it; it is the
relationship between our period and its
epistemological configuration and
this mass of statements." -
Ibid., p.20.
"My title THE ORDER OF THINGS was
perfectly ironic. No one saw
it clearly; doubtlessly because
there wasn't enough play in my text
for the irony to be sufficiently
visible." -
Ibid., p.51.
"I dream of the intellectual
destroyer of evidence and universalities,
the one who, in the inertias and
constraints of the present, locates
and marks the weak points, the
openings, the lines of power, who
incessantly displaces himself,
doesn't know exactly where he is
heading nor what he'll think
tomorrow because he is too attentive to
the present;..." -
Ibid., p.155.
Also, Foucault defines his strategy apropos
of the "game" quality of present-day
cultural generation and regeneration
(see the first ten lines at the top of
p.174 in THE MEDIUM AND THE
LIGHT, 1999):
"To make a truly unavoidable
challenge of the question: what can we
make work, what new game can we
invent?" -
Foucault, FOUCAULT LIVE, p.209.
And he presents this with an emphasis, like
McLuhan, on a fuller understanding of
"techne":
"The disadvantage of this word
*techne*, I realize, is its relation to
the word 'technology', which has
a very specific meaning. A very
narrow meaning is given to
'technology': one thinks of hard
technology, the technology of
wood, of fire, of electricity. Whereas
government is also a function of
technology: the government of
individuals, the government of
souls, the government of the self by
the self, the government of
families, the government of children, and
so on. I believe that if one
placed the history of architecture back
in this general history of
*techne*, in this wide sense of the word,
one would have a more interesting
guiding concept than by considering
opposition between the exact
sciences and the inexact ones." -
Ibid., pp.276-277
(see LETTERS OF MARSHALL McLUHAN, Selected
and edited by Matie
Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William
Toye, 1987, last paragraph on p.461
and first paragraph on p.541).
Other examples of their similar interests
and tentative conclusions about the effects
of the Gutenberg Galaxy:
a."Hence two problems.
Power - how does it work? Is it enough
that it imposes strong
prohibitions in order to function
effectively? And does
it always move from above to below and
from the center to the
periphery? -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.149
(see "From the time I came back from
Fordham I was studying the
corporate and political world, and paying
very little attention to media." -
LETTERS, p.505, and pp.4, 5, 15, 20, 60,
80, 129, 145, 182, 213, 217, 231,
255, 259, 263, and 268 in Marshall McLuhan
[with Barrington Nevitt],
TAKE TODAY: The Executive as Dropout,
1972).
b."Sex was, in Christian
societies, that which had to be
examined, watched over,
confessed and transformed into
discourse." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.138.
"In any case, what I
would like to study for my part,
are all of these
mechanisms in our society which invite,
incite and force us to
speak about sex." -
Ibid., p.139
(see "The theme of sex happens to be funny
at the moment because sex is
dead. Vietnam is *not* dead and, therefore,
it is not funny." - Marshall
McLuhan, letter to Playboy Magazine,
December, 1969 or January, 1970,
p.24. And see interview with McLuhan in
Miss Chatelaine Magazine,
September 3, 1974, pp.58-59, 82-87, 90-91).
c."I tried to pose another
problem: to discover the system of
thought, the form of
rationality, which since the end of the
18th century has
underlain the idea that the prison is in sum
the best means, one of
the most efficient and most rational,
to punish infractions
in a society." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.280
(see THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, 1967, p.61,
and McLUHAN, HOT &
COOL: a primer for the understanding of & a
critical symposium with a
rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald
Emanuel Stearn, 1967, p.300
[bottom third on p.290 of paperback], and
Marshall McLuhan, CULTURE IS
OUR BUSINESS, 1970, p.332).
d."What I tried to do was a
history of the relationships that
thought maintains with
the truth, the history of thought
insofar as it is
thought about the truth. All those who say
that for me the truth
doesn't exist are simple-minded." -
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.295.
"I have sought to
analyze how fields like madness,
sexuality and
delinquence could enter into a certain play
of the truth, and how
on the other hand, through this
insertion of human
practice and behavior into the play
of the truth, the
subject himself is effected." -
Ibid., p.310
(see bottom third of p.163 in FROM CLICHÉ
TO ARCHETYPE, and top of
p.388 and middle of p.492 in LETTERS).
e."In the first place, I
don't think there is actually a
sovereign, founding
subject, a universal form of subject that
one could find
everywhere. I am very sceptical and very
hostile toward this
conception of the subject. I think on the
contrary that the
subject is constituted through practices of
subjection, or, in a
more anonymous way, through practices of
liberation, of freedom,
as in Antiquity, starting of course from
a certain number of
rules, styles and conventions that are
found in the culture."
-
Foucault,
FOUCAULT LIVE, p.313.
"I would call
subjectivization the process through which
results the
constitution of a subject, or more exactly,
of a subjectivity which
is obviously only one of the given
possibilities of
organizing a consciousness of self." -
Ibid., p.330
(see p.458 in LETTERS, and Chapter One in
LAWS OF MEDIA).
Ignoring the technological causes of visual
space as proposed by McLuhan, ironically
Foucault still finds the same patterns of
cultural effects in his inventories.]
Bob Dobbs
Friday Jones
kingsley" <nik...@broadway.net.au> wrote:
>> Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
>
>
>no, but Umberto "Foucoult's Pendulum" Eco is.
>
>nikolai
Agreed! An excellent book, couldn't think of the author's name.
--
"I am going to jump into my grave laughing because the knowledge that I
have the deaths of millions of people on my conscience is a source of
extraordinary satisfaction to me."
-- Adolf Eichmann
Joe Cosby
typing feverishly;
thunder crashed, "nikolai kingsley" <nik...@broadway.net.au> laughed
madly, then wrote:
>
>> Roland Barthes is the man.
>
>
>
>i'll bet William S Burroughs - even though he's DEAD - could kick Mr
>Barthes' ass for him.
>
He's probably good and stiff by now, you could probably swing him by
his ankles and knock someone right out.
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.home.mindspring.com
"Brain Death For Bonzo," in radiant Alz-o-Vision!!!
- Hellpope Huey
Joe Cosby
typing feverishly;
thunder crashed, "nikolai kingsley" <nik...@broadway.net.au> laughed
madly, then wrote:
>
>> Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
>
>
>no, but Umberto "Foucoult's Pendulum" Eco is.
I'll second that. That book is great.
--
Joe Cosby
http://joecosby.home.mindspring.com
"Sister Agatha looked up from flat on her back, on
the mat, to see the five hundred pound, nude female sumo wrestler
descending on her, and she was forced to admit to herself that the
Pope had betrayed her."
iDRMRSR
Foucault if you can't take a joke!
[*]
-----
nikolai kingsley
> >> Roland Barthes is the man.
> >
> >i'll bet William S Burroughs - even though he's DEAD - could kick Mr
> >Barthes' ass for him.
> >
>
> He's probably good and stiff by now, you could probably swing him by
> his ankles and knock someone right out.
synchronicity! as i sit reading this, the video for Ministry's "Just One
Fix" is playing on Rage. complete with old Bill looking rather stiff.
nikolai
---
never trust a junkie
William Barwell
Jason Christopher Romero <bla...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>Someone told me Foucault is real popular amongst SubGenii. Is it true?
>
>GOD
>
Yes, but sensible SubGenii wait til the weekend to drop
a tab of Foucault.
Cheerful Charlie