Tag: Foucault

Through Drawring

/ Derek Mueller

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.

Lose and Lose and

/ Derek Mueller

Philadelphia Eagles (3-0) def. Detroit Lions (2-1), 30-13

But I didn’t watch much because, instead, I was piling word by carefully
chosen word through a summary of the last chapter from The Order of Things
for class tomorrow night. I’ll post it in the extended entry area since I
wouldn’t want to misrepresent this as aToo Orangey
academic blog exactly.  Not yet.  Plus, the summary is
terminologically hip-boots marshy; it gets by on borrowed terms, awkwardly
jumbled, squishy.  But it’ll do the trick, I think, and I was just so
Fouc-ing relieved to be at the end of The Order of Things that a bit of
disorderliness was due.  Seriously, though, I hope we will sort out whether
F.’s rhetoric as epistemic tags him as a sophist (au wisdom) or a skeptic
(au infinite regress)…or neither.  Both?

***

When I clicked on the slogan
generator this morning, it brought up "Too Orangey For Braddock
Essays."  A’right!  However, I’d never heard the slogan. 
Found it gets play in this fun advertisement (mpg,
4.2mb) for Kia-ora.  Is it orange soda?  

***

Eating baked potatoes for tonight’s meal when Andy
Rooney came on the tube.  I haven’t watched 60 Minutes in a long
time, and tonight, having caught only the end, it was 5 Minutes. 
The guru crabster was carrying on about disingenuous efforts to mobilize the
votary public.  Get out and vote campaigns, he grumbled, are a crock; they
stir disinterested, uninformed dummies, rustle the lethargic from civic
slumber….  Like-always Rooney.  Pure crust.  But then he
said, 

I’d be willing to bet that it’s the dumbest people among us who are least
likely to vote too, and that’s fine with me. I don’t want anyone dumber than I
am voting.

[…]

If you’re a new citizen, wait another four years until you understand
English well enough to know what the candidates are talking about before you
vote.

Way to go, CBS.  How completely asinine does it have to be before you
relieve his crotchety-ness from making a total, hateful fool of himself? 
At once I felt a tinge of pity because he’s so confused and a wave of
shock because he spoke in such unapologetic and  irrevocable seriousness to hundreds of thousands of viewers saying, insomanywords, that non-English speakers, despite U.S. citizenship, ought to learn English before voting.  

*** 

Continue reading →

Lines

/ Derek Mueller

Reading Foucault today, I got sloppy with the underlining and found I was
marking through whole lines of text.  Then I thought, well, that’s
okay.  Maybe it’s better to simply draw lines through the non-essential
bits. Tonight, just going to register a glimpse of my unconventional
reading/annotation method:

Everything would be manifest and immediately knowable if the
hermeneutics of resemblance and the semiology of signatures coincided
without the slightest parallax. But because the similitudes
that form the graphics of the world are one ‘cog’ out of
alignment with those that form its discourse, knowledge and the infinite labour
it involves find here the space that is proper to them: it is their task to
weave their ways across this distance, pursuing an endless zigzag
course from resemblance to what it resembles.

Under Ten Minutes

/ Derek Mueller

So if you had to do a ten minutes or less talk on Foucault and
rhetoric as epistemic and it had to push off from The Order of Things,
what would you be sure to mention?  Just curious.

Newer habit: fashionably tippling water from a Diet Pepsi bottle.  Can’t
believe the ugly habits that emerge from being stacked-up busy.  I call it Aqua
Pepsi–free refills at the hallway fountain.

Dodged an Eagleton-Williams one-two on C|culture|s in class this
evening.  RayWill–for good reason–got the hog’s share our attention, but
I left wondering whether Eagleton, in his coup de gras was joshing around
when he says, "It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put
[culture] back in its place."  Hedging, I say.  Er, or so I
said in hunk of my mini analysis paper.  Note for later:  bask in
Williams’ chunk on "The Structure of Feeling" just a bit more. A warm
feeling in there.

Tomorrow:  Office hours teeming with visiting students (What do you
want, exactly!?); Resnikoff’s NUC-MLC newsletter from 1969, Sondra Perl on
"The Composing Processes of the Unskilled College Writer," C. Wright
Mills, "Letter to the New Left," Jerry Farber and Louis Kampf, and
MaCrorie’s Uptaught; and touching up a few teaching details, as in what
next.

On "snooty
intellectual debate" (scroll to bottom): check out the letter to the ed
in today’s Post-Standard responding to new chancellor Nancy Cantor’s
invitation to the community for a visit to campus as part of the "Soul of
Syracuse" campaign.