Sigmund,
The questions you ask are immensely difficult, so I'm very likely to
utterly botch the job of trying to answer.
First of all, the relationship between my concrete concerns and Foucault's
work -- what Foucault, so to speak, _does_ for me -- is difficult to
articulate, because it is not the case that the concerns are some kind of
a relatively stable, separable entity and Foucault's ideas are in some
extraneous relationship to them, such as "helping" or "being applicable to".
Rather, my concerns -- i.e. what concerns me, what I am concerned by -- is
constantly changing, because the language in which I think is constantly
changing, and reading Foucault is one of the ingredients of this change.
But there are many other ingredients: for example, speaking itself, the act
of using words, changes my language.
Perhaps the thread of my concerns that is most relevant here is: how to find
a language that doesn't prevent me from thinking. You might say that this is
a methodological concern which cannot be more than a preliminary to dealing
with the _real_ concerns, but I find it so excruciatingly difficult that if
there are indeeed some "real" concerns to which this is only a preliminary,
I doubt that I'll ever get to them. In fact even the process whereby I am
identifying this as a concern is immensely difficult and already bangs
against the limits of what I am able to say.
I don't want to give you the impression that I am evading the question of
concreta, so here are some concreta: I am trained as an academic intellectual,
make my living working part-time in the software industry, and also do
a brand of theater loosely called "object theater". My quest for not
preventing myself from thinking is connected to trying to answer questions
of how to support myself and how to do art.
> when you say he reveals
> muscle as flab, are you saying there is nothing but flab to begin with?
> or are you saying that he makes the real, essential muscle easier to
> make out w/o all that flab in the way? is it muscle/flab = essence/
> construction? or just "flab, flab, everywhere (and not a drop to?)"
> b/c i'd suggest that if there's no essence, no muscle, then muscle is
> whatever one finds advantageous to call muscle - spivak's theoretically
> impure and materially useful idea of "strategic essentializing".
I would say, none of the above -- although I also want to say that I find
this idea of "strategic essentializing" quite excellent. Your questions
probably show that my flab/muscle metaphor has spent itself at the very
moment when it was made. Let me give you as an example the question of
how -- from an economic perspective -- to be an artist. I want to say
"art should be publically supported". But I think this is an example
of language that prevents one from thinking. What notions of "art",
"public" and "support" support and shape this discourse? And this "should",
what is it, where has it been and what relationships of production is it
involved in? The statement "art should be publically supported" gives one
a feeling of muscularity; it invites into itself, and wants to draw on,
the power of age-old linguistic institutions. But I think that what it
does is to simply reaffirm, within one's very thinking, the same old power
relations that bring us to the question to begin with.
>> "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."
> my knee-jerk question: by who? by myself, by anybody, ok . . . then:
> for what purpose? to pare down to the essence? or does that cutting
> constitute the end as well as the means?
In some sense, yes, it constitutes the end as well as the means, because
the distinction between "ends" and "means" is in itself dubious. Thinking
needs to be cutting, a constant cutting of itself. If it isn't, then, to
use a Heideggerian phrase, we haven't begun to think yet.
-m
The questions you ask are immensely difficult, so I'm very likely to
utterly botch the job of trying to answer.
First of all, the relationship between my concrete concerns and Foucault's
work -- what Foucault, so to speak, _does_ for me -- is difficult to
articulate, because it is not the case that the concerns are some kind of
a relatively stable, separable entity and Foucault's ideas are in some
extraneous relationship to them, such as "helping" or "being applicable to".
Rather, my concerns -- i.e. what concerns me, what I am concerned by -- is
constantly changing, because the language in which I think is constantly
changing, and reading Foucault is one of the ingredients of this change.
But there are many other ingredients: for example, speaking itself, the act
of using words, changes my language.
Perhaps the thread of my concerns that is most relevant here is: how to find
a language that doesn't prevent me from thinking. You might say that this is
a methodological concern which cannot be more than a preliminary to dealing
with the _real_ concerns, but I find it so excruciatingly difficult that if
there are indeeed some "real" concerns to which this is only a preliminary,
I doubt that I'll ever get to them. In fact even the process whereby I am
identifying this as a concern is immensely difficult and already bangs
against the limits of what I am able to say.
I don't want to give you the impression that I am evading the question of
concreta, so here are some concreta: I am trained as an academic intellectual,
make my living working part-time in the software industry, and also do
a brand of theater loosely called "object theater". My quest for not
preventing myself from thinking is connected to trying to answer questions
of how to support myself and how to do art.
> when you say he reveals
> muscle as flab, are you saying there is nothing but flab to begin with?
> or are you saying that he makes the real, essential muscle easier to
> make out w/o all that flab in the way? is it muscle/flab = essence/
> construction? or just "flab, flab, everywhere (and not a drop to?)"
> b/c i'd suggest that if there's no essence, no muscle, then muscle is
> whatever one finds advantageous to call muscle - spivak's theoretically
> impure and materially useful idea of "strategic essentializing".
I would say, none of the above -- although I also want to say that I find
this idea of "strategic essentializing" quite excellent. Your questions
probably show that my flab/muscle metaphor has spent itself at the very
moment when it was made. Let me give you as an example the question of
how -- from an economic perspective -- to be an artist. I want to say
"art should be publically supported". But I think this is an example
of language that prevents one from thinking. What notions of "art",
"public" and "support" support and shape this discourse? And this "should",
what is it, where has it been and what relationships of production is it
involved in? The statement "art should be publically supported" gives one
a feeling of muscularity; it invites into itself, and wants to draw on,
the power of age-old linguistic institutions. But I think that what it
does is to simply reaffirm, within one's very thinking, the same old power
relations that bring us to the question to begin with.
>> "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."
> my knee-jerk question: by who? by myself, by anybody, ok . . . then:
> for what purpose? to pare down to the essence? or does that cutting
> constitute the end as well as the means?
In some sense, yes, it constitutes the end as well as the means, because
the distinction between "ends" and "means" is in itself dubious. Thinking
needs to be cutting, a constant cutting of itself. If it isn't, then, to
use a Heideggerian phrase, we haven't begun to think yet.
-m