On Tue, 11 Mar 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:
> John wrote:
>
> > On the history of the discussion: a member of the list said that
> > Foucault's claims about truth were self-erasing. The logic exercise that
> > resulted was an attempt to dispute the claim that F was involved in a
> > performative contradiction. I see nothing wrong or irrelevant about the
> > criticism of F or the attempt to respond to it.
>
> This is getting away from Foucault, but let's imagine that someone does
> say: there is no truth. On me, this sentence has a certain effect.
> It is like a grain of sand falling into an oyster's shell. Some of the
> effect has to do precisely with the fact that the sentence is on the edge
> of self-erasure; it is a provocation that almost consumes itself. But not
> completely, because there it is: the grain of sand in my shell.
>
> The "truth" of the sentence, I would say, lies precisely in this effect.
> Perhaps it is simply an example of a certain kind of transgression. In
> any case, it seems to me that neither an attack on this sentence on logical
> grounds nor its defence by constructing a logic hierarchy can establish
> a connection with how the sentence _functions_ -- if and when it does
> function. Because it is both true that the sentence is in some sense
> "illegitimate", and that this "illegitimacy" does not prevent it from
> _speaking_. But the latter is not because the sentence functions in
> some 2-nd order logic realm, but rather because its "true" function is not
> in the realm of logic.
>
>
> -m
>
malgosia,
If I may just bounce off your comment above to discuss a couple of issues,
not all of them raised by you?
Yes. I can definitely see how someone would legitimately and
"consequentially" experience the sentence like that. That's one reason why
I don't want to run away from it: precisely because of the consequences
concerning the *functioning* of truth you articulate so eloquently above.
I think that Foucault was very much participating in a debate concerning
the status of truth. In "Truth and Power",_FR_ pages 58-59, he says the
important thing is to understand historically how "effects of truth are
produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor
false." That is a controversial claim. People make controversial claims
partly to participate in a discussion--and I think that's what F is doing
here. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in _FR_, he argues that one of
the benefits of a genealogical analysis is that unlike other liberatory
strategies it does not require some sort of movement toward "truth" (the
truth of our human nature which has been repressed by some mean power)
(_FR_, 81). In "WIE," he says that rather than trying to liberate man in
his own being we should compel him to face the task of producing himself
(_FR_, 42). The supposed truth of our being and its liberation is
contrasted to a process of creation. In "The Ethic of the Care of the
Self" in _The Final Foucault_ he writes (and here I'm paraphrasing) that
it is indeed in the field of an obligation to truth that we can avoid
effects of domination linked to structures of truth or institutions
charged with truth: one example of this, F points out, would be the
ecology movement. We can escape the domination of truth, F continues, not
by playing a game that is a complete stranger to game of truth, but in
playing it otherwise or in playing another game, other trumps in the game
of truth (_FF_, p. 15).
The citations could go on for a long time. Foucault was not "a complete
stranger to the game of truth." I flatly do not understand it when someone
says that Foucault doesn't say anything about the kind of truth I'm
talking about (namely, the traditional conception of truth; the one F is
criticizing and bending) and that a discussion of it is irrelevant to
Foucault and that if you want to have such discussions you have to go
somewhere else because you're not going to find it in him.
I just think that's wrong.
That said, I would happily return to a discussion of the Transgression
essay.
The first lines read: "We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in
contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth
which has long been lingering in the shadows and hiding under various
disguises--until now, that is, when our positive awareness allows us to
decipher it so that it may at last emerge in the clear light of language.
Yet, never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural understanding
and never did it know a greater 'felicity of expression' than in the
Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin." ("Transgression" in
_language, counter-memory, practice_, p. 29.)
Now you can't blame me for this one! It's not my fault that in the first
sentence of the "Transgression" essay F brings in the issue of *truth*
and what we have usually believed about it as an introduction to an
attempt to transfer its functionings from transcendence to transgression!
Drink as many of those Wittgenstein daquiris as you want: it's still there
on the page!
--John
> John wrote:
>
> > On the history of the discussion: a member of the list said that
> > Foucault's claims about truth were self-erasing. The logic exercise that
> > resulted was an attempt to dispute the claim that F was involved in a
> > performative contradiction. I see nothing wrong or irrelevant about the
> > criticism of F or the attempt to respond to it.
>
> This is getting away from Foucault, but let's imagine that someone does
> say: there is no truth. On me, this sentence has a certain effect.
> It is like a grain of sand falling into an oyster's shell. Some of the
> effect has to do precisely with the fact that the sentence is on the edge
> of self-erasure; it is a provocation that almost consumes itself. But not
> completely, because there it is: the grain of sand in my shell.
>
> The "truth" of the sentence, I would say, lies precisely in this effect.
> Perhaps it is simply an example of a certain kind of transgression. In
> any case, it seems to me that neither an attack on this sentence on logical
> grounds nor its defence by constructing a logic hierarchy can establish
> a connection with how the sentence _functions_ -- if and when it does
> function. Because it is both true that the sentence is in some sense
> "illegitimate", and that this "illegitimacy" does not prevent it from
> _speaking_. But the latter is not because the sentence functions in
> some 2-nd order logic realm, but rather because its "true" function is not
> in the realm of logic.
>
>
> -m
>
malgosia,
If I may just bounce off your comment above to discuss a couple of issues,
not all of them raised by you?
Yes. I can definitely see how someone would legitimately and
"consequentially" experience the sentence like that. That's one reason why
I don't want to run away from it: precisely because of the consequences
concerning the *functioning* of truth you articulate so eloquently above.
I think that Foucault was very much participating in a debate concerning
the status of truth. In "Truth and Power",_FR_ pages 58-59, he says the
important thing is to understand historically how "effects of truth are
produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor
false." That is a controversial claim. People make controversial claims
partly to participate in a discussion--and I think that's what F is doing
here. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in _FR_, he argues that one of
the benefits of a genealogical analysis is that unlike other liberatory
strategies it does not require some sort of movement toward "truth" (the
truth of our human nature which has been repressed by some mean power)
(_FR_, 81). In "WIE," he says that rather than trying to liberate man in
his own being we should compel him to face the task of producing himself
(_FR_, 42). The supposed truth of our being and its liberation is
contrasted to a process of creation. In "The Ethic of the Care of the
Self" in _The Final Foucault_ he writes (and here I'm paraphrasing) that
it is indeed in the field of an obligation to truth that we can avoid
effects of domination linked to structures of truth or institutions
charged with truth: one example of this, F points out, would be the
ecology movement. We can escape the domination of truth, F continues, not
by playing a game that is a complete stranger to game of truth, but in
playing it otherwise or in playing another game, other trumps in the game
of truth (_FF_, p. 15).
The citations could go on for a long time. Foucault was not "a complete
stranger to the game of truth." I flatly do not understand it when someone
says that Foucault doesn't say anything about the kind of truth I'm
talking about (namely, the traditional conception of truth; the one F is
criticizing and bending) and that a discussion of it is irrelevant to
Foucault and that if you want to have such discussions you have to go
somewhere else because you're not going to find it in him.
I just think that's wrong.
That said, I would happily return to a discussion of the Transgression
essay.
The first lines read: "We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in
contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth
which has long been lingering in the shadows and hiding under various
disguises--until now, that is, when our positive awareness allows us to
decipher it so that it may at last emerge in the clear light of language.
Yet, never did sexuality enjoy a more immediately natural understanding
and never did it know a greater 'felicity of expression' than in the
Christian world of fallen bodies and of sin." ("Transgression" in
_language, counter-memory, practice_, p. 29.)
Now you can't blame me for this one! It's not my fault that in the first
sentence of the "Transgression" essay F brings in the issue of *truth*
and what we have usually believed about it as an introduction to an
attempt to transfer its functionings from transcendence to transgression!
Drink as many of those Wittgenstein daquiris as you want: it's still there
on the page!
--John