Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 17:34:01 +1100 (EST)
From: Jim Underwood <jim-AT-socs.uts.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: Reading Order of Things - prefaces


This is great guys, it's really getting clearer (sort of).

Darlene's quote from Shepherdson shows how radically disturbing reading 
Foucault can be.  Anyone can produce an argument which undermines others, 
but to (joyously?) undermine oneself at the same time, while building on 
strong philosophical tradition is really clever (and Socratic?).

Anyway, what that means to me is that I have to "bracket" the 
metaphysical question (as Joe suggests) because if I ask "is F cheating - 
is he falling back on some essential 'a priori' (hence my previous 
reference to Kant)?" the answer must always be yes - and he could reply 
"I told you so - I'm not producing yet another theory".  But then I can't 
read (and presumably he couldn't write) unless I'm coming from somewhere.
So when I read "order exists" I am inevitably drawn to thinking of 
permanent or objective existence although I "know" that the meaning of 
order is culturally dependent (at least in one culture - mine).  And so 
it goes round infinitely, and I am personally experiencing Foucault's 
point while I am reading "about" it.  Brilliant!

So when Derrick says "Cultures are in the business of ordering." 
immediately after saying "to characterize Chinese culture FROM a Western 
point of view", or when he says "the being of order whose function he 
conceives as ultimate arbiter", I can't help feeling someone (Derrick, 
Foucault, me, the language?) and is slipping absolute concepts back in. 
Maybe our current habits are so ingrained that we (I?) can't give up 
doing philosophy,or maybe Derrick is playing Foucauldian mindgames with 
me (or himself) or ...  and so it goes again.

So try this.  I (putting myself in F's place!!) realise that my current 
culture is on a cusp, in the process of changing into something 
completely different.  I can't know what it's going to be like until I 
get there (and then I won't know what the "old" me would have thought of 
it.  So maybe I can get clues from some previous change (eg 1790 
approx).  But if that change was so great, how can I uderstand what it 
was like before then.  It was all so strange.  But if I take several 
"disconnected disciplines" from that previous time, and try to experience 
their common strangeness I might get a clue to an underlying something, 
or at least be able to work out what of the underlying something of MY 
time was missing or different.  And in MY time we might call this 
underlying something "order".  Whether that's what THEY would have called 
we can never know.

But there's an extra problem.  I can't believe cultures are 
unidimensional.  If we are really unconscious of the "positive 
unconscious" then we can't see all these dimensions - we only see order 
(and man)  because it changed so dramatically last time.  It seems 
unlikely that the same dimension will be dominant this time.

Which brings me back to the "region mediane" which Thomas has clarified 
quite a bit.  I agree that for me "culture" covers the whole spectrum 
(which is one reason I get annoyed by F's apparent belief that the 
physical sciences are more "developed" than the social sciences).  Can 
these areas (ordinary knowledge vs philosophy) be separated? is this a 
typically "modern" practice?  But when, for whatever reason, we do try to 
separate a bit of experience out and theorise about it, we then might see 
in the misfit a hint of the positive unconscious, the order, poking 
through the cracks in the "surface culture".  "It is here that a culture, 
imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by 
its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them, causes 
them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate and 
invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders 
are not the only possible ones or the best ones;".  Seems rather like 
dreams?  (I never quite grasped the Freudian side of F before.)

(There seems to be something in here about power which could be 
interpreted in the light of later writings, but I'm not ready to do that 
yet.)

So where does that get us?  F seems to use this as a basis for allowing  
change, though he claims to be not interested in causes or history of 
ideas.  And (because the theory is self destructive) it can't be an 
explanation, because the whole analysis is from our time, and might not 
apply to THEN.  But of course it could apply to NOW.  So why does F keep 
going back to history (except in some of the interviews, which I'm not 
too clear about yet), rather than applying his theory to the current 
predicament.  Perhaps because it's something we can only do ourselves (as 
individuals, as a culture, as non-subjects, as ????).

Whew.

One little thing Derrick - you quote "l'etre brut de l'order" which is 
translated as "order in its primary state".  My French is very basic, but 
do you think the sense comes across - I feel I'm missing something.

And Bryan - I'm not a neoMarxist, so I don't quite see how a 
deterministic view of class would fit in.  The F model seems a bit too 
complex and messy to be simply an "effect" of socio-economic change (do 
all neoMarxists still see culture as "superstructure"?).  What if 
Foucault had chosen Marxism as one of his disciplines rather than natural 
history or grammar (yes, it is from the wrong era, but you get the 
idea).  In The Glass Bead Game Hesse says something like "You can build a 
bamboo grove in the world, but you can't build the world in a bamboo grove".
But which is which, Foucault or Marx, or neither.  Since I revel in the 
(apparent?) relativism of Foucault, I suspect there are Marxist 
interpretations of his work, I'm just not sure I'd understand them.  "You 
can believe anything you like, as long as you don't believe it's true."  
But I suspect a Marxist wouldn't be comfortable with that.  What do you 
think?

Well, I'd better start reading the next chapter.

Jim



______________________________________________________________________________
  Jim Underwood                         University of Technology, Sydney
  (jim-AT-socs.uts.edu.au)                 PO Box 123, BROADWAY
                                        N.S.W.      2007
  School of Computing Sciences          AUSTRALIA
______________________________________________________________________________


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