Preface to my transgression:
This is the first time I?ve read this essay. My comments are going to be
a bit raw. (And I confess, I did not keep up with the earlier exchanges
on this essay. Also, I havn?t read any entries that might been started
on the 17th yet. I?m just making an initial response to the essay.)
*****
In the essay ?Preface to Transgression? a concept of sexuality different
from that developed in History of sexuality, vol. 1., is elaborated. To
say that the sexuality referred to here is ?transhistorical? is
inaccurate, but here Foucault suggests a subversive figuration, an
opening for non-dialectical thought that, if peculiar to modernity,
resounds Greek tragedy and addresses itself to such philosophical
concerns as the death of God and the finite nature of human beings. (Of
course, this is all hitched to Bataille, but the terms of the discussion
suggest that the moment-space of transgression is paradigmatic for us
--to an overwhelming degree). One might read this as an ?Other
sexuality? yolked with, and therefore opening possibilities of
resistance to, the ?deployment of sexuality?---but that is a conflation
of what appear to be different approaches. So, what is this ?sexuality?
and how might it relate to the ?deployment of sexuality??
*****
An interesting focus of this essay is that it goes back to the term
?communication.? Obviously, we are not in a space in which an idea, held
in the mind of a speaker, is transmitted, via its natural medium, to the
mind of a listener; it seems to me that this circumstance, most acutely,
is what is meant here about the death of God. The particular dead God
is a classical one; he guaranteed that thought, if conscientiously
directed, would find purchase in truth, transcend contradictions,
realize, in sum, the aims of dialectic. Instead, it seems, we are urged
to explore a different paradigm of ?communication,? one that is fully
relativistic, that reckons order and entropy as tranposable figures when
equated to meaning or knowledge. If the ?Classical Gaze? is one that
sees only order, emanating and reflected in its God -like eye, modernity
(re)produces reflections on entropy as meaning, and unable to
recapitulate its vision as a God-like order, pops its socket, turns back
on itself, faces the entropy that is inherent in itself, not, of course,
to pose itself securely again as order over entropy, but, instead, to
reckon itself as mirroring --self-as-entropy, self-as-order, ad
infinitum. It is, then, this paradigm of communication-as-transivity,
of the decentered, infinitely reflected and fragmented subject, that
promises the repetition of transgression. Each line of order is
recognized as subject to entropy, and crossed by the transitive glance.
Communication is a lightning flash, it has no object, it is
differentiated in its occurrence, it is the eye turned upward in the
socket, caught in a voluminous darkness, in which the light of its gaze
dissipates and is reflected back upon it.
Does anyone know of any other places where Foucault talks about
communication in other than perfunctory, sociol-historical terms---other
than this essay, I mean?
*****
I wonder: How might the ?Foucault? in ?Preface to Transgression? rewrite
Stephen Hawking?s famous line ?Not only does God play dice, he sometimes
throws them where they can?t be seen.?
*****
Odd Question: Does anyone know of anything that?s been written on the
relationship of this image of the upturned eye in the film?s of Stanley
Kubrick?
This is the first time I?ve read this essay. My comments are going to be
a bit raw. (And I confess, I did not keep up with the earlier exchanges
on this essay. Also, I havn?t read any entries that might been started
on the 17th yet. I?m just making an initial response to the essay.)
*****
In the essay ?Preface to Transgression? a concept of sexuality different
from that developed in History of sexuality, vol. 1., is elaborated. To
say that the sexuality referred to here is ?transhistorical? is
inaccurate, but here Foucault suggests a subversive figuration, an
opening for non-dialectical thought that, if peculiar to modernity,
resounds Greek tragedy and addresses itself to such philosophical
concerns as the death of God and the finite nature of human beings. (Of
course, this is all hitched to Bataille, but the terms of the discussion
suggest that the moment-space of transgression is paradigmatic for us
--to an overwhelming degree). One might read this as an ?Other
sexuality? yolked with, and therefore opening possibilities of
resistance to, the ?deployment of sexuality?---but that is a conflation
of what appear to be different approaches. So, what is this ?sexuality?
and how might it relate to the ?deployment of sexuality??
*****
An interesting focus of this essay is that it goes back to the term
?communication.? Obviously, we are not in a space in which an idea, held
in the mind of a speaker, is transmitted, via its natural medium, to the
mind of a listener; it seems to me that this circumstance, most acutely,
is what is meant here about the death of God. The particular dead God
is a classical one; he guaranteed that thought, if conscientiously
directed, would find purchase in truth, transcend contradictions,
realize, in sum, the aims of dialectic. Instead, it seems, we are urged
to explore a different paradigm of ?communication,? one that is fully
relativistic, that reckons order and entropy as tranposable figures when
equated to meaning or knowledge. If the ?Classical Gaze? is one that
sees only order, emanating and reflected in its God -like eye, modernity
(re)produces reflections on entropy as meaning, and unable to
recapitulate its vision as a God-like order, pops its socket, turns back
on itself, faces the entropy that is inherent in itself, not, of course,
to pose itself securely again as order over entropy, but, instead, to
reckon itself as mirroring --self-as-entropy, self-as-order, ad
infinitum. It is, then, this paradigm of communication-as-transivity,
of the decentered, infinitely reflected and fragmented subject, that
promises the repetition of transgression. Each line of order is
recognized as subject to entropy, and crossed by the transitive glance.
Communication is a lightning flash, it has no object, it is
differentiated in its occurrence, it is the eye turned upward in the
socket, caught in a voluminous darkness, in which the light of its gaze
dissipates and is reflected back upon it.
Does anyone know of any other places where Foucault talks about
communication in other than perfunctory, sociol-historical terms---other
than this essay, I mean?
*****
I wonder: How might the ?Foucault? in ?Preface to Transgression? rewrite
Stephen Hawking?s famous line ?Not only does God play dice, he sometimes
throws them where they can?t be seen.?
*****
Odd Question: Does anyone know of anything that?s been written on the
relationship of this image of the upturned eye in the film?s of Stanley
Kubrick?