Forgive me for regressing to the _Order_of_Things. My time has
been dominated by evaluating research papers for the last couple weeks so
I haven't had time to read much here or write back. And, I should
probably asked further pardon, because I even want to go
back to the second and third chapters!
But I wanted to share this:
In chapter two, Foucault talks about the differences in the
attitude towards the sign in various centuries. After the 16th and early
seventeenth century, he says:
"the profound kinship of language with the world
was dissolved...This involved an immense reorganization of culture..."
beginning with the "Classical age that separates us from a culture in
which the signification of signs did not exist..but in which their
enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn and primitive being shone in an endless
dispersion" which was the culture of the 16th century.
"There is nothing now," he says, "that still recalls even
the memory of that being...except literature" which still manifests the
living being of language...by forming a counter-discourse; it has
become that which must be thought and which can never be thought
according to the theory of signification." Instead, he says, it must be
analyzed for ideas (meaning) or analyzed on the basis of that it is
(signified and signifies), using linguistic or psychoanalytic paradigms
(page 44 in my text).
But then in chapter three (after the lovely and amusing
exposition on the place of Don Quixote in sign history), he makes this much
more clear by saying some things about the imagination... "In this
limiting and conditional position (that without which and beyond which
one cannot know), resemblance is situated on the side of imagination, or
more exactly, it can be manifested only by virtue of imagination, and
imagination, in turn, can be exercised only with the aid of resemblance...
and neither of these requisites can dispense with the other...
"Now these two opposing stages (the first the negative one of the
disorder in nature and in our impressions; the other the positive one of
the power to reconstitute order out of those impressions) are united in
the idea of genesis...this genesis functioned exactly instead of and in
place of _Genesis_ itself."
This reminded me of what Stephen Knapp calls the "Coleridgean
interest in literature." Is Foucault thinking of that ambivalence that
seems to be the core of the post Renaissance interest in literature:
the desire to possess the power of the faith that is being left
behind without having to subscribe to some of its less scientifically
provable aspects or to seem to support its violent and/or restrictive
consequences? Coleridge seems to see literature as a medium between
fiction and literal belief; in fact this can be seen throughout the 18th
century, too. Catherine Gallagher has described much of that literature
as "epistemological leisure: a way, that is, of holding beliefs one know
to be false or can not admit one holds" without losing credibility as a
serious writer (or as an educated person, perhaps). Knapp points out that
part of this philosopical anomaly is in the "increasingly rigid
distinction between empirical perception and other forms of representation,"
which, I guess, is more or less what Foucault is saying here.
Well, I just thought it was an interesting expansion of what
Foucault was saying here... :)
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~engds/index.html
University of Missouri, Columbia (English Dept)
Offices:Tate Hall, Rm 6 or 16 (knock), or ZooMoo
Tu Th 1:30-3:30 or by appt. (882-3460 or 884-6902)
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The fundamental codes of a culture... establish for every one, from the very
first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which
he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the
scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why
order exists in general... and why this particular order has been
established and not some other. But between these two regions...a culture
...relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers...to discover that...
order exists. -Michel Foucault, preface of _The_Order_of_Things_.
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