Saturday, October 2, 2004

Through Drawring

I'm giving another 5-10 minute spiel on Foucault Monday evening (bc Barthes: canned).  This time, I've committed to map-charting the model(s) spelled out in the last chapter of TOOT.  I'm fairly satisfied with what I have so far, but a few cues in the last parts of the chapter still have me scratching my head.  I'm not sure how best to represent history as a concept that pre-existed the modern human sciences; I have no idea how to fold the strict ethnology-psychoanalysis model into the countersciences scheme I have here; and, I haven't decided what to do with the problem of linguistics--the grand dilemma of the whole book. 


"The domain of the modern episteme should be represented rather as a volume of space open in three dimensions" (346).

"In relation to biology, to economics, to the sciences of language, [the human sciences as configured] are not, therefore, lacking in exactitude and rigour; they are rather like sciences of duplication, in a 'meta-epistemological' position" (355).

"But when one follows the movement of psychoanalysis as it progresses, or when one traverses the epistemological space as whole, one sees that these figures are in fact--though imaginary no doubt to the myopic gaze--the very forms of finitude, as it is analyzed in modern thought" (375).

Please let me know if you see anything disastrously wrong with any of the models. My renderings are best guesses, and my expectation is that we'll process 'em into distortion through the group-fueled critique machine Monday night.  In case you think my day was a total waste (if this is all I have to show for it), I'll have you know I assembled a kitchen countertop island thing'mabob with wheels *and* watched a few minutes of SU's impressive win over the Rutgers Scarlet Knights *and* hanged a fresh clothes bar in Ph.'s closet.  The old bar just wouldn't bear his weight when he climbed for something way up on the top shelf--rather than asking for a hand--last night.  Like the modern episteme spelled out by Foucault, it all crashed, a structure-less rubble-heap of fabric and debris.