Hi Bo, hopefully you can forgive me for making such a mess of my posts, I havent been receiving some messages so there has been something of a communication break down (which seems to me only fitting given the subject!).
You, on the other hand, could easily be forgiven for feeling like you have bitten off more than you could chew; for feeling that you were being devoured by what you only wanted to taste.
Here are a couple of passages from the Order of Things which, for me, help to establish the dominance of certain themes.
"On the
threshold of the Classical age, the sign ceases to be a form o f the world; and
it ceases to be bound to what it marks by the solid and secret bonds of
resemblance or affinity."
"Signs are
now set free from that teeming world throughout which the Renaissance had
distributed them."
"At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, …., thought ceases to move in the
element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but
rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one
does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a frequent habit,’
says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several
resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points
in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognised to be
true of only one of them’. The agae of resemblances is drawing to a close. It
is leaving nothing behind it but games. Games whose powers of enchantment grow
out of the new kniship between resemblance and illusion; the chimeras of
similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognised as chimeras; it is the
privilated age of trompe-l’ oeil painting, of the comic illusion, of the play
that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of
dreams and visions; if is the age of the deceiving senses; it is the age in
which the poetic dimension of langauge is defined by metaphor, simile, and
allegory."
"We already
find a crituqe of resemblance in Bacon. ..He shows [similitudes], shimmering
before our eyes, vanishing as one draws near, then re-corming again a moment
later, a little further off."
"Langauge
represents thought as thought represents itself."
"The
relation of the sign to the signified now resides in a space in which there is no
longer any intermediary figure to connect them."
--- On Sun, 8/3/09, Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] Critique of a short passage by Dreyfus & Rabinow regarding the Order of Things (michael bibby)
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Received: Sunday, 8 March, 2009, 8:31 AM
Thanks for the recommendations Michael, I just took out the "thought from outside and Michel Foucault as I imagine him" by Foucault and Blanchot, I will check out the other texts when I have a chance. Also don't read too much into the original paper, I left out a lot of context and important arguments. However I tried to include as much as I could in a response to my professor's response which I'll post here.
I
have walked myself into a topic much more complex than I had previously
imagined. Quite honestly I don’t know where to begin addressing these
issues. There’s a dense space of interactions between the two texts I
have tried hard to lay out in the past week but with great difficulty.
First I must say thank you for your response, it has opened up a field
of opaque relations I had previous been either unaware or consciously
ignorant of.
I
think it is best if I begin by describing why I started writing in the
first place. I began referring to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book as sort of
a guide for any confusion I may encounter while reading the Order of
Things. When I first came across the paragraph in Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics I had written about, it struck me as strange. In the
previous section D&R provided a straightforward summary of Madness
and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic, two of Foucault’s earlier
works. The summaries were clear, concise, and as far as I could see,
accurate. I referred back to the original works for each of the
passages D&R quoted. I should mention that at the time I have read
Madness and Civilization but only the very beginning of The Order of
Things. When I began reading the OT chapter in D&R’s book,
everything seemed like a direct translation of the original text except
for the page 19 paragraph. Dreyfus and Rabinow summarized this section
of OT without any quotations or further elaboration. In detail, I
failed to understand how D&R arrived at their interpretation of man
as artificer from the original text. I then read the entire
chapter of Representation in OT, however I was still confused in that
my interpretation was still vastly different from D&R’s. The most
striking feature was the lack of a description by D&R of the
epistemological shift. However in the page right before, on page 18 of
Beyond S&H, D&R clearly described how Foucault aimed to compare
the episteme of the Renaissance era to the episteme in the Classical
age. It seemed obvious D&R must have been aware the shift, but
their following description of the Classical man seemed to me vague and
irrelevant to Foucault’s original writing which culminated in their
strange explanation for the lack of a theory of signification.
After
reading your response, I immediately felt confused as to how you could
so easily understand D&R’s interpretation in line with my reading
of Foucault’s text. More over I didn’t understand how you could not see
such an obvious observation, to me, in that D&R’s descriptions were
poor. The night I had finished the paper I posted it on a Foucault
internet mailgroup I subscribe to in hope for additional comments. I
ended up corresponding with someone who had originally written to
advise me to turn down my aggressive tone. He then provided several
other valuable points. From them I began to see why such apparently
obvious elements are missed.
First
allow me to present to you some of my own assumptions. A philosophical
commentary in its most honest form, breaks down the original text to
basic terms first introduced in the text, then only if necessary, from
those basic terms the commentator substitutes similar terms more easily
understood by the reader, therefore allowing the reader to see more
clearly the premise, argument, and the logical structure of the
original author. A good commentator when substituting terms must make
clear the background from which he replaces the author’s term with a
more intelligible term to the reader. This process of substitution can
also be called, or is a large part of the modern practice of
hermeneutics. Dreyfus and Rabinow, up until page 19, had either used
Foucaultian terms or relatively simple foreign terms to the Foucault
reader, therefore I understood. In the paragraph I investigated, they
introduced a new term, the artificer, upon which they built their
argument to their interpretation of the lack of a theory of
signification. They of course, explained the meaning of the artificer.
It is here I have a problem. For reasons I won’t get into yet, it is a
confusing term and one which is defined poorly in the context of
Foucault’s original text.
I
admit although I felt something problematic within D&R’s paragraph
upon reading it, I did not examine my reaction as carefully as I should
have. Therefore I did not present the most important arguments, hoping
that they would be made apparent when I give my own interpretation of
Foucault’s chapter in contrast with D&R’s commentary. However this
method would only work if the reader already possesses a similar
background of Foucaultian knowledge, that of which of course presumes
that my understanding of Foucault is for the most part, accurate. For
someone such as yourself who is foreign to my presumptions, I should’ve
presented my arguments more clearly and also, provided more context. So
in short, I failed to demonstrate something which seemed obvious to me
because well, for two people to see the same obviousness of reason,
they would have to possess the same set of presumptions.
Now
back to the original problem, I am still in the process of clarifying
my own presumptions and ultimately making clear the implicit arguments.
I had originally viewed D&R’s work as a commentary to Foucault.
However when re-examining the preface of their work, which contained
their two main theses, I saw that they had intended to use
interpretation to arrive at two points; that which Foucault, though
once tempted by “structuralist vocabulary”, was never a structuralist,
and that the methods Foucault used to perform his investigations was
similar yet above hermeneutics, although yet again he was “sensitive to
its attractions.”
If
I was pressed to give a definition of Heideggerean hermeneutics,
because I believe it is certainly what Dreyfus has in mind when he uses
the term “hermeneutics”, I would say that it’s the method one uses to
interpret a text through the background of the interpreter, this
background includes the interpreter’s understanding of himself and of
the world around him.
Here
I encounter a problem. It has always been my belief that one of the
most fundamental features of phenomenology is it assumes by
investigating either the conscious structure a la Husserl or
ontological and pre-ontological understanding of the human subject, or
human being/dasein as in Heidegger, the practice of phenomenological
hermeneutics would discover, or at least obtain a ground for,
interpreting among other things, the knowledge which arises from human
beings. It would allow one to “correctly” read texts, and form social
theories. For example, Galileo was persecuted because man at that time
saw themselves as the center of the universe; therefore there was no
place for knowledge which suggested otherwise. However by taking such a
path, phenomenology clearly diverges from Foucault, and maybe even
Nietzsche, primarily in its undisputed attention to the subject, and
what follows, the implied relationship of the subject of man to the
knowledge he apparently created. I can think of no better quote to
describe this relationship than the phrase Nietzsche uses in Genealogy
of Morals, “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the
doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”
One of the most important points stressed by the archaeology of
Foucault is that, changes in episteme occur simultaneously. Leibniz and
Pascal began writing about probability at around the same time yet
completely unaware of each other. Subjects such as Descarte and
Arnaud/Port Royal are unimportant. Their writings, and contributions to
discourse are, but our conception of the author usually enforces the
illusion that a mutation in discourse begins in man. It should follow
then, that in an investigation of discursive change, the human subject
should only be given priority when necessary, and of course that is
precisely what Foucault did. Man did not become an object in his own
knowledge, therefore a transcendental double, until the Age of
Enlightenment, therefore it was not necessary to devote too much time
to describing man in the earlier chapters of OT. Most of the chapter of
Representation dealt with the conditions of the epistemological shift
and its effect on knowledge.
Returning to the D&R’s second thesis, I’ll quote it in its entirety here:
“We
argue that Foucault’s work during the seventies has been a sustained
and largely successful effort to develop a new method. This new method
combines a type of archaeological analysis which preserves the
distancing effect of structuralism, and an interpretive dimension which
develops the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always
situated and must understand the meaning of his cultural practice from
within them. Using this method Foucault is able to explain the logic
structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and also the apparent
validity of the hermeneutic counter-claim that the human sciences can
only legitimately proceed by understanding the deepest meaning of the
subject and his tradition. Using this new method, which we call
interpretive analytics, Foucault is able to show how in our culture
human beings have become the sort of objects and subjects structuralism
and hermeneutics discover and analyze.” (xii)
No
matter how I read it, it seems true enough to Foucault’s original
intentions as I understand them. Key point is that Foucault only aimed
to show the “logic”, and never aligned himself with either theory. In
fact I think it’s obvious that by tracing the logics of both social
theories, one would see that they are as equally constructed by
discourse as the theories which preceded them.
I
mentioned phenomenology, but still haven’t said why. If D&R’s
intentions are well-stated, then why did I have a problem in the first
place? As of now, I believe it is because they, or at least Dreyfus was
still heavily influenced by phenomenology when actually interpreting
Foucault. Sure enough they seemed to be more concerned with Foucault’s
investigation of the logic of hermeneutics than structuralism in their
reading of The Order of Things. I’ll quote D&R’s original passage
and topic of my draft here,
“In the Classical Age man was not the maker, the artificer-God-but as the locus of clarification, he was an artificer.
There was a world created by God, existing by itself. The role of man
was to clarify the order of the world. He did this, as we have seen, by
way of clear and certain ideas. The key was that the medium of
representation was reliable and transparent. The role of the thinker
was to give an artificial description of the order which was already
there. He did not create the world, nor ultimately, the
representations. He constructed an artificial language, a conventional
ordering of the signs. But it was not man who filled them with meaning.
This is what Foucault means when he says that there was no theory of
signification in the Classical Age. Man clarified but did not create;
he was not a transcendental source of signification. Hence if we were
to ask what was the special activity of the subject – the “I think” –
we would get the relatively trivial answer that it was the tendency to
attain clarity about concepts.” (19-20)
I’ve
come to realize, after much thought, that in my previous paper, I was
coming from a perspective completely different than D&R and one
which I thought was obvious but really should’ve given more context to.
D&R’s descriptions of man are what they interpret from Foucault as how the 17th century man viewed themselves. In other words, it is a description of how the 17th
century man interpreted his own being. It is a phenomenological
reading, not the archaeological reading Foucault had intended for the
reader. Foucault’s actual perspective was further away from that. He
showed that because knowledge had changed form, everything else
happened. To accurately translate the shift in episteme Foucault wrote,
D&R should’ve began by describing knowledge, then man. The role of
man in obtaining knowledge according to himself was of no concern to
Foucault, because it was only after Representation appeared, could
Descarte, Berkeley, Antoine Arnaud, Malebranche, Hume, and so on begin
write about idealism.
The
concept of the artificer man according to D&R, in a
phenomenological reading, would apply perfectly, however in an I guess
normal, non phenomenological reading, it would not make sense, as it
didn’t for me. The concept of Resemblance, which linked the signs of
the 16th century was indeed viewed by man as to have placed
by God upon the Earth, it was, according to man, not a relationship
found within discourse. However when looking at it from an
archaeological perspective, Resemblance was no doubt just another
theory of signification created by man, albeit more so from ancient
texts than empirical evidence. Therefore in an archaeological reading,
man was and has always been the locus of clarification, he had always
been an artificer of order, and knowledge had always been thought to
have come from God, up until recently that is. That was what I meant
when I said, “Dreyfus and Rabinow’s interpretation of the origin of the
knowledge of the sign is not only restricted to the Classical Age.”
In
the next sentence after the passage, D&R said, “Hence nature and
human nature are linked together. Human nature has a special role in
relation to nature that turns on the human activity of knowing. ‘In the
general arrangement of the Classical episteme, nature,
human nature, and their relations, are definite and predictable
functional moments’” (20) I think, as of right now at least, that the
quotation this interpretation gives was taken out of context, for
reasons I will not elaborate upon yet because I am still not sure.
Nonetheless I cannot help but feel that D&R could not rid
themselves of their phenomenological understanding of the subject. They
wanted to read Foucault’s 16th and 17th century
chapters as a chronology of the human subject of knowledge. They traced
and linked together Foucault’s descriptions of various philosophers
linked together by the same episteme as a history of how the man of
knowledge understood himself and the world. However again, it was not
what Foucault intended. I probably should have put this quote in my
draft, but I’ll do it here. In the "Foreword to the English edition" of
OT, Foucault explained,
"I should not like the effort I have
made in one direction to be taken as a rejection of any other possible
approach. Discourse in general, and scientific discourse in particular,
is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it
at different levels and with different methods. If there is one
approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it,
broadly, speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute
priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role
to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all
historicity - which, in short leads to a transcendental consciousness.
It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse
should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing
subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice." (OT XIV)
Now
another issue arises. It is one which deals with scholarship. An
ontological hermeneutical approach to the history of discourse is
certainly possible, though not recommended by Foucault. I mentioned
that I confused D&R’s work as a commentary at first, which it is
not, they had two theses to prove. So in that sense they were free to
interpret Foucault in any method they like. However as far I can tell,
to show how Foucault, whether intentionally or not, showed the origin
from which the validity of the logic of hermeneutics was founded upon,
does not require an actual hermeneutical reading of Foucault. Therefore
if you agree with me so far, then it can only follow that D&R
unintentionally drifted in and out of hermeneutical readings in their
argument. This is what I believe to be the source of my original
frustration with them.
If
my suspicions are correct, which I have doubts to, then I believe what
I have to say is of some value for reasons I mentioned in my original
paper, that D&R’s work is still seen as the exemplary guide to
Foucault for English speakers. My understanding of phenomenology
actually comes from reading Being and Time along with Dreyfus’s
commentary ironically. I have not finished the book of course but I do
plan to one day.
There
are some other issues I forgot to address. I said that D&R’s
misreading resulted in their misinterpretation of the lack of theory of
signification. In short it is because they, or rather they read
Foucault as saying that the lack of theory of signification was caused
by the belief that man did not fill signs with meaning, God did of
course. However Foucault actually wanted to show that the lack of a
theory of signification was an integral effect of the appearance of
representation because representation in itself is evident, there would
be no need for theory. So to look at it another way, D&R attributed
the cause to how man viewed themselves, Foucault described it as a
necessary effect of a discursive change. D&R focused man, Foucault
investigated knowledge, at least for the earlier parts of OT until man
became an object of his knowledge.
As
to your thoughts on how empiricism could be traced down to two path
with one being Berkeley relying on God and the other being Hume relying
on probability, I am not completely sure. I’m reading a book by Ian
Hacking who is a wonderful thinker and writer titled “The Emergence of
Probability” in which he investigate more closely the conditions for
probability without going too much into Foucault’s theories of
representation. I’d have to say so far I understand everyone from that
era as the same, probability was made possible among many factors, by
the changing conception of evidence. Before idealism the word
“probable” meant how likely a certain piece of discourse concurred with
texts of authority, so the word of others was actually placed above the
word of the self. After Idealism came about, the object of the
Cartesian Ego’s thought became the truest evidence; therefore evidence
came to mean evidence which arises from experience, and so on. And it
is, very roughly in that vein, I haven’t finished the book yet, that
probability was made possible. So in so far as I understand it,
probability and idealism cannot be separated. As to my reading that man
operated both with and without God, I’d have to say that I made the
mistake of trying to interpret from within the text just like D&R,
Foucault aimed to show that probability, empiricism, and idealism all
came from the same conditions. That’s what I believe right now without
the book in my hands.
One
last thing I have to mention is Power. Phenomenology in as far as I
know, excludes power, for power is an essential and basic will above
temporal ontological understanding. So from reading Nietzsche so far,
I’d have to say that many of his ideas are anti-phenomenological,
mainly in his disregard for the subject. Foucault though, is
undoubtedly Nietzschean. In the Order of Things, Foucault explicitly
states that he has not found and would not like others to postulate
reasons behind the discursive mutations or shifts in episteme. Later he
tried to create a theory for discursive change but failed. So then he
turned to Nietzsche and power. As it would have it his genealogy
theories were highly successful. In Foucaultian terms, archaeology
means historical study of knowledge or discourse and genealogy means
historical study of power and power relations.
I
have many questions still regarding mine and D&R’s reading, I am
compelled to read on and see if an example such as the passage I wrote
about appears anywhere else, in other words that a phenomenological
reading has led to error of interpretation. But because of the paper
that is due, I will change my focus to Nietzsche. I would like to know
if my understanding of phenomenology is acceptable, and of course your
thoughts on anything else regarding what I said. Thank you.
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You, on the other hand, could easily be forgiven for feeling like you have bitten off more than you could chew; for feeling that you were being devoured by what you only wanted to taste.
Here are a couple of passages from the Order of Things which, for me, help to establish the dominance of certain themes.
"On the
threshold of the Classical age, the sign ceases to be a form o f the world; and
it ceases to be bound to what it marks by the solid and secret bonds of
resemblance or affinity."
"Signs are
now set free from that teeming world throughout which the Renaissance had
distributed them."
"At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, …., thought ceases to move in the
element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but
rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one
does not examine the obscure region of confusions. ‘It is a frequent habit,’
says Descartes, in the first lines of his Regulae, ‘when we discover several
resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points
in which they are in reality different, that which we have recognised to be
true of only one of them’. The agae of resemblances is drawing to a close. It
is leaving nothing behind it but games. Games whose powers of enchantment grow
out of the new kniship between resemblance and illusion; the chimeras of
similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognised as chimeras; it is the
privilated age of trompe-l’ oeil painting, of the comic illusion, of the play
that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of
dreams and visions; if is the age of the deceiving senses; it is the age in
which the poetic dimension of langauge is defined by metaphor, simile, and
allegory."
"We already
find a crituqe of resemblance in Bacon. ..He shows [similitudes], shimmering
before our eyes, vanishing as one draws near, then re-corming again a moment
later, a little further off."
"Langauge
represents thought as thought represents itself."
"The
relation of the sign to the signified now resides in a space in which there is no
longer any intermediary figure to connect them."
--- On Sun, 8/3/09, Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Bo Yang <botrell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Foucault-L] Critique of a short passage by Dreyfus & Rabinow regarding the Order of Things (michael bibby)
To: foucault-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Received: Sunday, 8 March, 2009, 8:31 AM
Thanks for the recommendations Michael, I just took out the "thought from outside and Michel Foucault as I imagine him" by Foucault and Blanchot, I will check out the other texts when I have a chance. Also don't read too much into the original paper, I left out a lot of context and important arguments. However I tried to include as much as I could in a response to my professor's response which I'll post here.
I
have walked myself into a topic much more complex than I had previously
imagined. Quite honestly I don’t know where to begin addressing these
issues. There’s a dense space of interactions between the two texts I
have tried hard to lay out in the past week but with great difficulty.
First I must say thank you for your response, it has opened up a field
of opaque relations I had previous been either unaware or consciously
ignorant of.
I
think it is best if I begin by describing why I started writing in the
first place. I began referring to Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book as sort of
a guide for any confusion I may encounter while reading the Order of
Things. When I first came across the paragraph in Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics I had written about, it struck me as strange. In the
previous section D&R provided a straightforward summary of Madness
and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic, two of Foucault’s earlier
works. The summaries were clear, concise, and as far as I could see,
accurate. I referred back to the original works for each of the
passages D&R quoted. I should mention that at the time I have read
Madness and Civilization but only the very beginning of The Order of
Things. When I began reading the OT chapter in D&R’s book,
everything seemed like a direct translation of the original text except
for the page 19 paragraph. Dreyfus and Rabinow summarized this section
of OT without any quotations or further elaboration. In detail, I
failed to understand how D&R arrived at their interpretation of man
as artificer from the original text. I then read the entire
chapter of Representation in OT, however I was still confused in that
my interpretation was still vastly different from D&R’s. The most
striking feature was the lack of a description by D&R of the
epistemological shift. However in the page right before, on page 18 of
Beyond S&H, D&R clearly described how Foucault aimed to compare
the episteme of the Renaissance era to the episteme in the Classical
age. It seemed obvious D&R must have been aware the shift, but
their following description of the Classical man seemed to me vague and
irrelevant to Foucault’s original writing which culminated in their
strange explanation for the lack of a theory of signification.
After
reading your response, I immediately felt confused as to how you could
so easily understand D&R’s interpretation in line with my reading
of Foucault’s text. More over I didn’t understand how you could not see
such an obvious observation, to me, in that D&R’s descriptions were
poor. The night I had finished the paper I posted it on a Foucault
internet mailgroup I subscribe to in hope for additional comments. I
ended up corresponding with someone who had originally written to
advise me to turn down my aggressive tone. He then provided several
other valuable points. From them I began to see why such apparently
obvious elements are missed.
First
allow me to present to you some of my own assumptions. A philosophical
commentary in its most honest form, breaks down the original text to
basic terms first introduced in the text, then only if necessary, from
those basic terms the commentator substitutes similar terms more easily
understood by the reader, therefore allowing the reader to see more
clearly the premise, argument, and the logical structure of the
original author. A good commentator when substituting terms must make
clear the background from which he replaces the author’s term with a
more intelligible term to the reader. This process of substitution can
also be called, or is a large part of the modern practice of
hermeneutics. Dreyfus and Rabinow, up until page 19, had either used
Foucaultian terms or relatively simple foreign terms to the Foucault
reader, therefore I understood. In the paragraph I investigated, they
introduced a new term, the artificer, upon which they built their
argument to their interpretation of the lack of a theory of
signification. They of course, explained the meaning of the artificer.
It is here I have a problem. For reasons I won’t get into yet, it is a
confusing term and one which is defined poorly in the context of
Foucault’s original text.
I
admit although I felt something problematic within D&R’s paragraph
upon reading it, I did not examine my reaction as carefully as I should
have. Therefore I did not present the most important arguments, hoping
that they would be made apparent when I give my own interpretation of
Foucault’s chapter in contrast with D&R’s commentary. However this
method would only work if the reader already possesses a similar
background of Foucaultian knowledge, that of which of course presumes
that my understanding of Foucault is for the most part, accurate. For
someone such as yourself who is foreign to my presumptions, I should’ve
presented my arguments more clearly and also, provided more context. So
in short, I failed to demonstrate something which seemed obvious to me
because well, for two people to see the same obviousness of reason,
they would have to possess the same set of presumptions.
Now
back to the original problem, I am still in the process of clarifying
my own presumptions and ultimately making clear the implicit arguments.
I had originally viewed D&R’s work as a commentary to Foucault.
However when re-examining the preface of their work, which contained
their two main theses, I saw that they had intended to use
interpretation to arrive at two points; that which Foucault, though
once tempted by “structuralist vocabulary”, was never a structuralist,
and that the methods Foucault used to perform his investigations was
similar yet above hermeneutics, although yet again he was “sensitive to
its attractions.”
If
I was pressed to give a definition of Heideggerean hermeneutics,
because I believe it is certainly what Dreyfus has in mind when he uses
the term “hermeneutics”, I would say that it’s the method one uses to
interpret a text through the background of the interpreter, this
background includes the interpreter’s understanding of himself and of
the world around him.
Here
I encounter a problem. It has always been my belief that one of the
most fundamental features of phenomenology is it assumes by
investigating either the conscious structure a la Husserl or
ontological and pre-ontological understanding of the human subject, or
human being/dasein as in Heidegger, the practice of phenomenological
hermeneutics would discover, or at least obtain a ground for,
interpreting among other things, the knowledge which arises from human
beings. It would allow one to “correctly” read texts, and form social
theories. For example, Galileo was persecuted because man at that time
saw themselves as the center of the universe; therefore there was no
place for knowledge which suggested otherwise. However by taking such a
path, phenomenology clearly diverges from Foucault, and maybe even
Nietzsche, primarily in its undisputed attention to the subject, and
what follows, the implied relationship of the subject of man to the
knowledge he apparently created. I can think of no better quote to
describe this relationship than the phrase Nietzsche uses in Genealogy
of Morals, “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the
doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”
One of the most important points stressed by the archaeology of
Foucault is that, changes in episteme occur simultaneously. Leibniz and
Pascal began writing about probability at around the same time yet
completely unaware of each other. Subjects such as Descarte and
Arnaud/Port Royal are unimportant. Their writings, and contributions to
discourse are, but our conception of the author usually enforces the
illusion that a mutation in discourse begins in man. It should follow
then, that in an investigation of discursive change, the human subject
should only be given priority when necessary, and of course that is
precisely what Foucault did. Man did not become an object in his own
knowledge, therefore a transcendental double, until the Age of
Enlightenment, therefore it was not necessary to devote too much time
to describing man in the earlier chapters of OT. Most of the chapter of
Representation dealt with the conditions of the epistemological shift
and its effect on knowledge.
Returning to the D&R’s second thesis, I’ll quote it in its entirety here:
“We
argue that Foucault’s work during the seventies has been a sustained
and largely successful effort to develop a new method. This new method
combines a type of archaeological analysis which preserves the
distancing effect of structuralism, and an interpretive dimension which
develops the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always
situated and must understand the meaning of his cultural practice from
within them. Using this method Foucault is able to explain the logic
structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and also the apparent
validity of the hermeneutic counter-claim that the human sciences can
only legitimately proceed by understanding the deepest meaning of the
subject and his tradition. Using this new method, which we call
interpretive analytics, Foucault is able to show how in our culture
human beings have become the sort of objects and subjects structuralism
and hermeneutics discover and analyze.” (xii)
No
matter how I read it, it seems true enough to Foucault’s original
intentions as I understand them. Key point is that Foucault only aimed
to show the “logic”, and never aligned himself with either theory. In
fact I think it’s obvious that by tracing the logics of both social
theories, one would see that they are as equally constructed by
discourse as the theories which preceded them.
I
mentioned phenomenology, but still haven’t said why. If D&R’s
intentions are well-stated, then why did I have a problem in the first
place? As of now, I believe it is because they, or at least Dreyfus was
still heavily influenced by phenomenology when actually interpreting
Foucault. Sure enough they seemed to be more concerned with Foucault’s
investigation of the logic of hermeneutics than structuralism in their
reading of The Order of Things. I’ll quote D&R’s original passage
and topic of my draft here,
“In the Classical Age man was not the maker, the artificer-God-but as the locus of clarification, he was an artificer.
There was a world created by God, existing by itself. The role of man
was to clarify the order of the world. He did this, as we have seen, by
way of clear and certain ideas. The key was that the medium of
representation was reliable and transparent. The role of the thinker
was to give an artificial description of the order which was already
there. He did not create the world, nor ultimately, the
representations. He constructed an artificial language, a conventional
ordering of the signs. But it was not man who filled them with meaning.
This is what Foucault means when he says that there was no theory of
signification in the Classical Age. Man clarified but did not create;
he was not a transcendental source of signification. Hence if we were
to ask what was the special activity of the subject – the “I think” –
we would get the relatively trivial answer that it was the tendency to
attain clarity about concepts.” (19-20)
I’ve
come to realize, after much thought, that in my previous paper, I was
coming from a perspective completely different than D&R and one
which I thought was obvious but really should’ve given more context to.
D&R’s descriptions of man are what they interpret from Foucault as how the 17th century man viewed themselves. In other words, it is a description of how the 17th
century man interpreted his own being. It is a phenomenological
reading, not the archaeological reading Foucault had intended for the
reader. Foucault’s actual perspective was further away from that. He
showed that because knowledge had changed form, everything else
happened. To accurately translate the shift in episteme Foucault wrote,
D&R should’ve began by describing knowledge, then man. The role of
man in obtaining knowledge according to himself was of no concern to
Foucault, because it was only after Representation appeared, could
Descarte, Berkeley, Antoine Arnaud, Malebranche, Hume, and so on begin
write about idealism.
The
concept of the artificer man according to D&R, in a
phenomenological reading, would apply perfectly, however in an I guess
normal, non phenomenological reading, it would not make sense, as it
didn’t for me. The concept of Resemblance, which linked the signs of
the 16th century was indeed viewed by man as to have placed
by God upon the Earth, it was, according to man, not a relationship
found within discourse. However when looking at it from an
archaeological perspective, Resemblance was no doubt just another
theory of signification created by man, albeit more so from ancient
texts than empirical evidence. Therefore in an archaeological reading,
man was and has always been the locus of clarification, he had always
been an artificer of order, and knowledge had always been thought to
have come from God, up until recently that is. That was what I meant
when I said, “Dreyfus and Rabinow’s interpretation of the origin of the
knowledge of the sign is not only restricted to the Classical Age.”
In
the next sentence after the passage, D&R said, “Hence nature and
human nature are linked together. Human nature has a special role in
relation to nature that turns on the human activity of knowing. ‘In the
general arrangement of the Classical episteme, nature,
human nature, and their relations, are definite and predictable
functional moments’” (20) I think, as of right now at least, that the
quotation this interpretation gives was taken out of context, for
reasons I will not elaborate upon yet because I am still not sure.
Nonetheless I cannot help but feel that D&R could not rid
themselves of their phenomenological understanding of the subject. They
wanted to read Foucault’s 16th and 17th century
chapters as a chronology of the human subject of knowledge. They traced
and linked together Foucault’s descriptions of various philosophers
linked together by the same episteme as a history of how the man of
knowledge understood himself and the world. However again, it was not
what Foucault intended. I probably should have put this quote in my
draft, but I’ll do it here. In the "Foreword to the English edition" of
OT, Foucault explained,
"I should not like the effort I have
made in one direction to be taken as a rejection of any other possible
approach. Discourse in general, and scientific discourse in particular,
is so complex a reality that we not only can, but should, approach it
at different levels and with different methods. If there is one
approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it,
broadly, speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute
priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role
to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all
historicity - which, in short leads to a transcendental consciousness.
It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse
should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing
subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice." (OT XIV)
Now
another issue arises. It is one which deals with scholarship. An
ontological hermeneutical approach to the history of discourse is
certainly possible, though not recommended by Foucault. I mentioned
that I confused D&R’s work as a commentary at first, which it is
not, they had two theses to prove. So in that sense they were free to
interpret Foucault in any method they like. However as far I can tell,
to show how Foucault, whether intentionally or not, showed the origin
from which the validity of the logic of hermeneutics was founded upon,
does not require an actual hermeneutical reading of Foucault. Therefore
if you agree with me so far, then it can only follow that D&R
unintentionally drifted in and out of hermeneutical readings in their
argument. This is what I believe to be the source of my original
frustration with them.
If
my suspicions are correct, which I have doubts to, then I believe what
I have to say is of some value for reasons I mentioned in my original
paper, that D&R’s work is still seen as the exemplary guide to
Foucault for English speakers. My understanding of phenomenology
actually comes from reading Being and Time along with Dreyfus’s
commentary ironically. I have not finished the book of course but I do
plan to one day.
There
are some other issues I forgot to address. I said that D&R’s
misreading resulted in their misinterpretation of the lack of theory of
signification. In short it is because they, or rather they read
Foucault as saying that the lack of theory of signification was caused
by the belief that man did not fill signs with meaning, God did of
course. However Foucault actually wanted to show that the lack of a
theory of signification was an integral effect of the appearance of
representation because representation in itself is evident, there would
be no need for theory. So to look at it another way, D&R attributed
the cause to how man viewed themselves, Foucault described it as a
necessary effect of a discursive change. D&R focused man, Foucault
investigated knowledge, at least for the earlier parts of OT until man
became an object of his knowledge.
As
to your thoughts on how empiricism could be traced down to two path
with one being Berkeley relying on God and the other being Hume relying
on probability, I am not completely sure. I’m reading a book by Ian
Hacking who is a wonderful thinker and writer titled “The Emergence of
Probability” in which he investigate more closely the conditions for
probability without going too much into Foucault’s theories of
representation. I’d have to say so far I understand everyone from that
era as the same, probability was made possible among many factors, by
the changing conception of evidence. Before idealism the word
“probable” meant how likely a certain piece of discourse concurred with
texts of authority, so the word of others was actually placed above the
word of the self. After Idealism came about, the object of the
Cartesian Ego’s thought became the truest evidence; therefore evidence
came to mean evidence which arises from experience, and so on. And it
is, very roughly in that vein, I haven’t finished the book yet, that
probability was made possible. So in so far as I understand it,
probability and idealism cannot be separated. As to my reading that man
operated both with and without God, I’d have to say that I made the
mistake of trying to interpret from within the text just like D&R,
Foucault aimed to show that probability, empiricism, and idealism all
came from the same conditions. That’s what I believe right now without
the book in my hands.
One
last thing I have to mention is Power. Phenomenology in as far as I
know, excludes power, for power is an essential and basic will above
temporal ontological understanding. So from reading Nietzsche so far,
I’d have to say that many of his ideas are anti-phenomenological,
mainly in his disregard for the subject. Foucault though, is
undoubtedly Nietzschean. In the Order of Things, Foucault explicitly
states that he has not found and would not like others to postulate
reasons behind the discursive mutations or shifts in episteme. Later he
tried to create a theory for discursive change but failed. So then he
turned to Nietzsche and power. As it would have it his genealogy
theories were highly successful. In Foucaultian terms, archaeology
means historical study of knowledge or discourse and genealogy means
historical study of power and power relations.
I
have many questions still regarding mine and D&R’s reading, I am
compelled to read on and see if an example such as the passage I wrote
about appears anywhere else, in other words that a phenomenological
reading has led to error of interpretation. But because of the paper
that is due, I will change my focus to Nietzsche. I would like to know
if my understanding of phenomenology is acceptable, and of course your
thoughts on anything else regarding what I said. Thank you.
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